JSngry

Well, yeah. It's essentially a record of a practice session. Invaluable documentation, not without significant "educational value" for those so inclined, but not something you would (or should) want to return to for repeated "listening pleasure", if you know what I mean. I think the negative reviews are more based on the premise that this was gioing to be (or should have been) a solo concert of Sonny playing tunes. That would have been great, but that's not what happened. Whether or not it should have is an altogether different argument that whether or not what it actually ended up being is lacking in value/merit/whatever.

I finally found a Monday Michiru album about which I can say that - Delicious Poison. It's a really, really good album of "retro" 70's-style funk a la Rufus, but for me it lacks that magic that the other Michiru sides I've heard have. A few songs hit the zone, and make no mistake it's very good, but on the whole, this album is "pleasant" rather than magic. And magic those other albums do indeed have. I've particularly been obsessing over a cut on Optimista called "Oasis" that's just freakin' nuts. It's sorta like what Zawinul & Shorter might've come up with in WR's prime if they had been 20 years younger (but with the same skills) and had been interested in creating pop music (I can hear the snickering from Whiethall already ). The chords are ultra hip, with some totally out-of-left field shifts in key centers; the melody's irresistible, totally "pop", which means that it sticks in your mind and tickles it relentlessly, yet it is a melody, emminently singable/hummable; the arrangement is fully sophiticated, with horn parts that only somebody with a jazzmind would think to create on a pop song; and the groove is strong - it doesn't beat you into submission, it seduces you by bypassing any and all "centers of resistance" and going straight to your nerve centers. It's a truly giddy experience, this song is, a source of one of the more undefinable musical pleasure I've had in quite a while. So yeah, Monday Michiru ain't flawless, nor am I so blinded by her beauty that I can't tell the merely pleasant from the truly great. But lordylordylordy, when she's great, she's damn great.

Yeah, I'm really starting to get sick (and tired!) of stuff getting dissed simply because of what it is. Not for how well is is or isn't what it is, but simply because it is what it is. Such presumptiveness to presume that there is only one (or just a few) ways to be "great" or "beautiful" or (even) "hip"! It's a big freakin' world, ya'know, and there's probably more beauty and happiness in it than we realize (a lot of it on the "small" side, sure, but a lot of smalls can add up to one big, if you let it...), simply because we're more concerned with trying to get appreciation than with showing it. That's a dead end street as far as I'm concerned, and it's really something I've been examining within myself lately. Easier said than done, I know, but that's just the way that shit goes...

External hard drive. I'm seeing the need now, and not just for backup.

If three wiseguys show up, I'd be leary of any lumberjacking going on nearby...

main-ee-AIR-ee? Commercial, yes, but tasty commercial. I think I prefer his "commercial" prodction work (like Carly simon's Torch and "fusion" playing (Steps Ahead in particular) to his "straight ahead" playing. If you find your voice, go where it leads you no matter what, dig?

Yeah, S&F has made a beliver out of me and LTB both. It was damn comfortable new (it's one of those "pillowtop" jobs, which I highly recommend) , and it still is damn comfortable. We used to have to replace mattresses every 5-7 years or so, but this bad boy looks like it's in it for the long haul. Gotta love that.

My file system is NTFS, and I run routine cleanup/maitainance (other than Defrag). CHKDSK found & fixed some probles, but not this big'un. Nor did a system restore. But I did try to re-run my latest ZA Pro upgrade (yeah, I save'em for a while), not the most recent one, but the one before that, and it failed. Couldn't connect to the True Vector Service, it said. This kinda is in line with the failure of ZAP to initialize on bootup. It keeps trying, but it just don't get there. Finally you gotta click Cancel to get it to stop trying. Now, if my ZAP is fundamentally f-ed up, would its failure to initialize somehow interfere with the comlpetion of the .ini routine(s?) and create a morass of performance problems, eith through memory conflicts or through not everything "settling in" like it should? i don't know what I'm talking about, really, jsut thinking out loud. But could it? I know, uninstall, reinstall and find out. I just wanna know how good r long of a shot that is before I go there. No matter, I'm down for an external this weekend. Charlie recommends Iomega. Any strong dissent about that one? Really appreciate y'all's help, btw. "Community" in a very real sense. Much props to the crew.

Last i heard, BMG owned 'em. Take it from there, if that's still the case. Good luck!

Well, she was there, wasn't she? And I'd not take the lack of contemporaneous, specific quotes as an indicator of anything, really. After all, where would you find them? One thing that Deveaux does an excellent job of illuminating is how driven that Dizzy was as a businessman. And what kind of a businessman would make a quote such as you're looking for about his "product" when doing so would surely be commercial suicide. The truth, I believe, is in-between. Namely, that African-American be-boppers were operating with a conscious intent of making a social statement, and that it was recieved as such at the time by those with ears to hear it. I can't believe that everybody's drawing these conlusions andtelling their stories purely after the fact. But otoh, I also believe that apart from that angle, this was still music (difficult music at that), and that race was only part of the whole deal. White musicians were there almost from the beginning, and they were there because they could play the music once it had germenated to the point where it was the province of more than just a handful of innovators. You don't necessarily have to share (or even know about) the vision behind the message to participate in the dissemenation of the message once it's begun to be codified. If we can think of music as "words", or "stories", then surely we can agree that the exact same words and stories can have different layers of meanings, all (many, anyway) valid in their own right. That's one of the keys of great art, I think - it has not one meaning, but many coexistening within.

Yeah, they venerate him as a Saint, I believe. Don't know if "Saints" are by definition "above Man" or just really incredible humans. If it's the former, I'd have reservations, but if it's the latter, I don't know if I could mount a convincing counter-argument.

I've still got almost 3 gb free.

Stearns & Foster King Size. It says "Knightsbridge", but I don't know if that a model or what. Supposedly built to last through damn near anything, and coming up on 10 yrs, it has. Beds and shoes are two things where you don't want to skimp on quality in order to save some bucks.

Ah yes, the Defrag issue. I can't use the Windows Defrag Utility since there's less than 20% free HD space. Seems bad, I know, but I've had no real issues until now. Any ideas? NP - CHKDSK

XP, SPII. Been relatively trouble free over the years. (I know, I'm settling... ) Right now, i just want to get the thing booting at normal speed before I try a System Restore.

Thanks, Claude! Lemme go see if I can get that sucker to boot up enough to run chkdsk.

What, is Monk getting some skull skull?

Well, not really charanga, since I think there's only one violinist. "Evocative of charanga" would be more accurate. Mike, why didn't you bust me about this?

They don't really "worship" Coltrane, as I understand it. They just use him as a focal point/example to point the way towards something else. Christianity should've taken that tact...

Suddenly (and I do mean suddenly), my PC takes like 15+ minutes to load Windows upon booting, and is slower (and I do mea slower) than hell once it does. Plus, the firewall (ZA Pro) never loads - it keeps sending out "Stand by, ZAP is initializing", etc messages. On top of that, Outlook no longer connects w/my email server. It keeps asking me for my password and doesn't recognize it when I give it. A few days ago, I noticed that IE was acting kinda weird sometimes, w/windows going from active to inactive (but still on display) for no apparent reason. Norton, AdAware, & Spybot all come up empty as far as viruses, worms, etc. Anybody have any ideas as to what might be goingon and/or how to do a diagnostic? The Dell 3-yr warranty expired last year, and talking to their tech support has gotten to be such a crapshoot taht if I'm going to pay, I'm calling Geek Squad or r somebody local for an on-site. Besides the HD getting ready to blow, could this also be a case of a memory module going bad? Or maybe a bad moues/keyboard wire jacking with the system performance here? I'm just thinking out loud, really don't ahve a clue. Now, if the HD is still functional but slower than hell, waht's the best way to get a backup done before it crashes (igf it' going to)? buy an external and transfer everything over, or just burn data onto CDrs? I've got all my origianl system/software install discs. An finally, if th damn thing goes before I can get a backup done, how does data recovery work? Charlie ssays that it's best to have the DR software on the HD before it goes, but what good does it do to have software on a HD thatain't working no more? Makes no sense to me, but hey... It's not like there's not another machine in the house. There is. I'm on it now, and I can check my email thru webmail (same password as Outlook rejects), and it works. But w/o my address book, I can't remember shit. Plus there's all the bookmarks that I don't have access to. I can'remember all that shit, that's why I bookmarked it in the first place! Anyhoo...any ideas would be most welcome. As always, thanks in advance.

Way Out Willie Lance Rentzel Ray Wetzel

Geez, it's really a bitch for some of you guys to joyfully affirm life, ain't it...

Yeah, that download doesn't do too much for me either. Why that's the one being offered, I don't know. But there's a lot more to what she does than that one song...

I dunno, green usually works just fine...

Foster Grant Ray Ban Man Ray