ghost of miles

I hear you--Bob Griese at QB (Indiana connection, a Hoosier who went to Purdue) and that running-back triple-threat of Larry Csonka, Mercury Morris, and Jim Kiick, Garo Yepremian at placekicker, Paul Warfield at WR, Nick Buoniconti leading a great defensive cast... great memories of watching those early/mid 70s teams.

The statistics as of this morning bear you out. U.S. deaths per million population: 212 Canada deaths per million population: 102 U.S. infections per million population: 3,672 Canada infections per million population: 1,610 U.S. tests per million population: 22,706 Canada tests per million population: 24,359 (Source: Worldometer Coronavirus tracking data) So, Canada has half as many deaths on average, half as many cases on average, and has tested slightly more of its population on average than the U.S. has.

Having just finished a rereading of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, and having spent a fair amount of time the past couple of days revisiting my longstanding interest in Kent State (today was the 50th anniversary), I decided to finally plunge into Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary. Watched all of episode 1 tonight and its accompanying extras and was greatly impressed with how the Burns team handled the century-long historical prelude to America’s involvement, as well as their presentation of the Vietnamese/North Vietnamese perspective. The only odd element was the way in which they kept dropping teaser-like remembrances of American soldiers from the mid to late 1960s into the middle of early-20th-century Vietnamese history—completely out of place and jarring, as if they didn’t quite trust an American television audience to sit through an opening 90-minute introduction to the series without occasionally interrupting it with coming-soon, the-Americans clips. I wish they’d left those out, because the story of what happened from the late 1850s to the late 1950s is so important and vital to understanding what happened in the 15 years that followed, and the brief out-of-nowhere American interludes kept throwing off the narrative rhythm they were otherwise establishing. Other than that, a strong opening episode... I’m going to try to watch one every night after work for the next few days. (Also started reading the first volume of the Library of America’s Reporting Vietnam set.) EDIT: just did a search and came across a review of the first episode on the Process history blog that cites the same issue that I found problematic: >>In many ways, The Vietnam War is two documentaries interwoven. One is a densely detailed and heavily narrated chronological history and the other is a series of oral histories about personal experiences of the war. Sometimes the two strands are intimately connected and enlarge our understanding of key moments; elsewhere, the personal accounts have little relationship to the historical issues under review. Nowhere are these two approaches more disjointed than in Episode 1. Every few minutes we jump from black-and-white archival images and accounts of French rule or the creation of South Vietnam under Ngo Dinh Diem in the mid-1950s to color footage of the U.S. war in the late 1960s and recent interviews with American veterans. Given the episode title of “Déjà vu,” we might have expected the interviewees to specify the ways U.S. intervention recapitulated the failures of the French or to recount how many Vietnamese came to view Americans as little different from the French (neocolonialists rather than old-fashioned colonialists). Instead, the American veterans speak about their own wartime experiences and the loss of comrades. It’s as if the filmmakers worried that viewers might get bored with the earlier history so they repeatedly previewed the main attraction.<<

I really appreciate where you are, Chris. And I have my own economic concerns as well—my job is stable for the moment, but the next 1-2 years are going to be a rocky ride even in the best-case scenarios. Our station went into this craziness in good fiscal shape, but I foresee just about all of our revenue tributaries taking significant hits, and soon. One of them is underwriting from local businesses like yours. And I think people here are more likely to find fault with the federal govt not so much out of partisanship in this instance, but because this is the kind of tsunami that requires the fed govt to be a primary leader across the board. And they’ve failed spectacularly, in part for the reasons that Jsngry points to. Anyway, hope you can ride this out without it taking too much of a toll on you at the personal level. It’s fucking hard, all of it. On another note, IHME just revised their model and doubled the # of projected deaths through August from what they were saying just a week ago. They now project 135,000 U.S. deaths by the beginning of August. That’s based in part on what’s happening at the state level with the lifting of restrictions, unaccompanied by the benchmarks and safeguards/policies that most health experts have said are necessary to prevent an exponential burst of new infections. It’s a lose-lose situation for sure.

3 Hospital Workers Gave Out Masks. Weeks Later, They All Were Dead.

Ending today's show with this one:

This past week’s Night Lights show focused on Duke Ellington’s weekly broadcasts to help sell war bonds for the U.S. government while World War II remained underway in the Pacific. It includes some little-known Ellington compositions and unusual arrangements, as well as several of Ellington’s promotional spots for war-bond sales and some news bulletins that occasionally broke into the broadcasts: “The Duke Is On The Air”: Duke Ellington’s Summer 1945 Treasury Shows

With this kind of idiocy afoot, I have little doubt that cases will continue to skyrocket. Via the New York Times: Wearing masks has become a flashpoint in the virus culture wars

More indications that the “widely-cited” IHME model, which on April 29 projected 72,000 U.S. deaths by August 4 (as of this moment we’re at 68,126) is all but irrelevant: U.S. could hit 100,000 deaths before end of May

U.S. reports deadliest day yet for coronavirus patients as states begin to reopen

Oops, my bad—though it’s also the bad of my sources, both Ben Ratliff’s 2008 NY Times obit for Butler and Butler’s Wiki entry, which each have him arriving at Blue Note in 1972. Since The Last Session was recorded in September 1971, I had assumed that precluded any Butler involvement. But... but... I read it on the Internets!

No, thinking more of Bruce Lundvall Columbia. Weirdly enough, Butler landed at Blue Note not long after Lee was killed. Maybe Lee would have been content to stay on that label as the 70s progressed... it is indeed all speculation. I can’t really see him hanging with a Strata East kinda route for very long, though, simply because of the economics of it. The Blue Note association seemingly gave him some level of subsistence (bare-bones as it most likely was) that he would have had a hard time sustaining IMO on Strata East. I don’t think Lee would have “sold out” in the way that Freddie Hubbard was perceived to have done in the late 70s (Super Blue and some other recordings to the contrary), but would have looked for the continuing relative security of a mainstream label relationship that didn’t attempt to constrain or redirect his musical intentions. So maybe that’s not CTI, though it’s intriguing to me to imagine what a Morgan CTI album might have sounded like. I also don’t know my Blue Note 1972-75 history as well as I should, but with Butler on board and the Mizzell brothers increasingly at the musical helm, would they have tried to push Lee in more of a Street Lady direction? I couldn’t really see him going for that. But it’s all my armchair-early50something-white guy conjecture circa 2020. OTOH what’s an Internet forum for anyway, fer crissake?

Gwynn was a joy to watch—both him and Rod Carew.

One of my favorite such plays—Greg Golson’s walkoff assist, I guess you’d call it, against the Rays in 2010: ... and, of course, this always-classic throw from Dave Parker in the 1979 ASG—one of two he made in this game. This one also required some deft handling and plate-blocking by Gary Carter: I believe there are *three* Bo Jackson assists in this highlights reel... enjoy! God, I miss baseball.

Revisiting some chapters in this book for an upcoming Night Lights show. Excellent work, if you haven’t already read it and are interested in the topic. Gioia spoke with quite a few musicians who are now gone.

Yep, this happened not far north of where I grew up in Indy. So stupid and sad and f’d up.

Listened all the way through it yesterday for the first time in many years and yeah, there’s an accumulating sense of murky drift that puts me in agreement with Jim that it might be better experienced in LP-side helpings. I think I like the Lighthouse sessions better. But I would have loved to have heard Lee refine what he was up to on the final studio album. It did seem to announce a clear break from the retread groove he’d gotten into on some of the later 60s Blue Note records. I mean, I *love* Lee... even hearing him in less-than-inspired form is still pleasing. Interesting to think about where he would have gone... what if he’d moved to CTI or Columbia later in the 70s? (That could have been good, bad, or both! )

For clarification (I’m sure I’ll be further clarified if necessary ), the violation in yesterday’s exchanges—following Jsngry’s scrubbing of the Michigan-protests comments-was another poster’s potshot at WHO and my response re Kool-Aid and “certain leaders/networks.” I agree with Brad that the topic in the world at large is riddled with politics, rightly or wrongly, which makes keeping it out of any discussion difficult. But dem’s de rules of the board. As I mentioned in the previous thread, I now have two friends (one in their late 50s, the other in their mid 60s) who came close to dying from the virus, but who ultimately survived. My aunt, who’s 85, has been diagnosed positive, but we haven’t gotten any updates in the past several days on how she’s doing. Another friend who’s almost the exact same age as me and his wife were diagnosed positive, but thankfully seem to have come through on the “milder case” side of things. On an events note, we had to cancel our summer Jazz In July concert series that the station and IU’s jazz department co-present. IU is essentially remaining shut down throughout the summer, with all classes remaining online only. We’re looking at possibly doing a “Swing In September” series instead, but I’d say even that seems in doubt at this point. IU’s president sent out an email this week saying that a normal fall semester is highly unlikely—at best we’ll probably have a hybrid of in-person and online instruction, and any events that take place will have to be radically restructured.

Maybe I missed it in my quick read of this article, but not sure why video replay is being nixed as part of MLB’s deal with umpires for a potential 2020 season: No video replay in MLB-umpires deal ... is it to help shorten the games? Oddly enough, iirc there was some talk early on about implementing robo-umps for any potential season so that the home plate umpire could stand further behind the catcher. But I haven’t seen mention of that lately. Anyway, kind of a drag from my perspective re video replay—I have NO nostalgia for the days of egregiously blown calls that couldn’t be overturned. But evidently it’s only temporary, and hell, at this point I’d watch MLB baseball even if they mandated the use of Wiffle balls and plastic bats. I’m jonesin’, man, I’m jonesin’!

Same reason? (Getting shut down because of posts drifting into the political?)