Brownian Motion

The New York Times Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By April 22, 2007 Film In Search of the Man Who May Have Created Jazz By MICHAEL CIEPLY New Orleans NO one is really sure what this city’s first “cornet king,” Charles (Buddy) Bolden, sounded like 100 years ago, much less what made him tick. The lore says a single wax recording of Bolden’s namesake ensemble was demolished with the old shed in which it was stored in the early 1960s. What is probably the most reliable rendering of his trademark tune, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” came from Jelly Roll Morton, who had heard it performed and put it on a record years after the master’s death. But even the song’s own lyrics warn against trusting too much. “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,” runs the remarkably tentative opening line. Yet this elusive character, who some aficionados say invented jazz before lapsing into ultimately fatal insanity before the age of 30, has been coming into focus in recent weeks as a troupe of seasoned filmmakers and impassioned amateurs struggle to capture Bolden and his world in not one but two, related, movies. Eccentric in concept, ambitious in scope and not cheap — backers put the cost at more than $10 million — the twin pictures will probably stretch the limit of what independent film can do by the time they are seen on festival or commercial screens next year. Dan Pritzker — a billionaire’s son best known as founder of and guitarist for the off-center soul-rock band Sonia Dada, and an important investor in the project as well as its director — has never made a movie. Yet that neophyte status has not kept him from attracting an impressive group of actors and behind-the- camera talent, including members of the Marsalis clan, to tell the story of a man Pritzker likens to “a shaman who flipped on the lights.” The first picture, currently titled “Bolden,” is a musical biography with Anthony Mackie (“We Are Marshall”) in the lead role and Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”) and Jackie Earle Haley (an Oscar nominee this year for “Little Children”) among the supporting cast. The second is an hourlong silent film called “The Great Observer,” in which a young boy named Louis, recalling Bolden’s more celebrated successor Louis Armstrong, dreams of playing the horn while becoming entangled with the denizens of New Orleans’s red-light district, played by a company of ballerinas. The films, which have no distributor yet, are meant to make their debuts in tandem. If all goes according to Mr. Pritzker’s plan, the second will play over a live performance by Wynton Marsalis, who is executive producer of the movies and has written original music that is meant to evoke the man Armstrong, Morton, Kid Ory, Sidney Bechet and other early jazzmen described as both influence and shadowy myth. “There’s a fine line between guts and stupidity,” Mr. Pritzker said of his project last month. At the time, he was simmering in the spring heat with 100 mostly local players on a shoot that will end on locations and sets in Wilmington, N.C. The day’s work took the group to the Carrollton cemetery in an Uptown neighborhood, where a row of small frame houses had been painted blue-gray and modestly changed to stand in for the city of Bolden’s late-19th-century youth. “This is a city that lives its history but doesn’t always know it,” explained Mr. Mackie, 28, who grew up here before leaving to attend arts school in North Carolina and then the Juilliard School. In character as Buddy Bolden, the actor wore a heavy blue band uniform with red piping and spent much of the day sweating through a scene in which notes from his horn jump the expected musical tracks at the end of a funeral, triggering a boisterous exit parade. In and out of the clouds, the sun has only slightly annoyed the director of photography, Vilmos Zsigmond, a film veteran (“The Black Dahlia,” “The Witches of Eastwick”) who suggested that weathermen should be as competent to predict cloudy and bright as cinematographers are to deal with uncertain light. As things settled on the bright side, Mr. Pritzker mulled a replay of the funeral parade on the video monitor, then set up another take, this time with Mr. Marsalis’s music blaring from a loudspeaker. Arms started swinging. Handkerchiefs waved. Sun umbrellas pumped in time as locals picked up the Bolden spirit. “If this music doesn’t make you move around, something’s wrong,” said Mr. Pritzker, 47, speaking later over lunch in his cramped trailer. With long, dark, gray-flecked hair, he wore jeans and green clogs and showed obvious discomfort only when the subject turned to the settling of a family dispute over the Pritzker financial empire, himself among the contentious heirs. “We’re all done with that; relationships are all back together,” Mr. Pritzker said of the wrangle, which had been simmering even before his father, Jay, died in 1999. Among other things, its resolution left Dan free (and with enough money) to pursue a notion that had dogged him since 1995, when a radio executive in Boulder, Colo., happened to ask if he had ever heard about Buddy Bolden and the birth of jazz. “That he impacted my life so deeply and I didn’t know who he was, that was unbelievable to me,” said Mr. Pritzker, a professional musician who considers himself a connoisseur of American music. He was to find that hard facts about Bolden are in short supply. That he was born to a working-class family in 1877 is firmly established. By the testimony of others who played with or around him, Bolden was among the first to break through accepted musical forms, pushing his group into the raucous improvisational style that would become known as jazz. In the first decade of the 20th century, he ruled the musical roost in New Orleans. By 1907, however, dementia, probably induced or assisted by alcohol, left him unable to function. That year he was committed to an insane asylum in Jackson, La., where he played his cornet only rarely with ensembles made up of patients, and where he remained until his death in 1931. Lacking the factual base for conventional biography on the order of “Ray,” about Ray Charles, or “Walk the Line,” about Johnny Cash, Mr. Pritzker and his collaborators — including the writers Derick and Steven Martini (who have written for the television series “South Beach”) — have chosen to develop the myth. Their telling imagines Bolden, in the last year of his life, hearing a radio broadcast in which Armstrong, who became the public face of New Orleans jazz, paid tribute to the music’s supposed birth with Bolden. That vision, in fact, may be only slightly exaggerated. “If you look at oral histories from the musicians, they all basically talk about Bolden when they talk about where jazz came from,” said Bruce Raeburn, curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. According to Mr. Raeburn, those who heard Bolden agreed, first, that he was loud, and, second, that his music opened the door to improvisation. “His combination of charisma and playing style is what put it over,” he said. (Donald M. Marquis, whose “In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz” was first published in 1978, remained cautious enough about claims that Bolden invented jazz to include in a 2005 edition an epilogue noting that his text made no such assertion, and that the book’s title had not been his preferred choice.) More surprising than Mr. Pritzker’s quest is its contagious quality. The New Orleans-born Mr. Marsalis became involved after a query from Mr. Pritzker’s producer, Jonathan Cornick, a production veteran whose credits range from studio films like “Super Mario Brothers” to independent features like David Mamet’s “State and Main.” Both Ellis Marsalis, the family patriarch, and Delfeayo, Wynton’s brother, have also contributed to the film. The Marsalis presence may eventually bestow event status on the relatively small films if, as Mr. Pritzker envisions, they play at a major festival or at Lincoln Center, with Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of the center’s jazz program, leading a live musical performance in time with the silent picture. Mr. Marsalis said that such a performance was possible but that he had no firm plan at this point. Mr. Pritzker said that idea was inspired about seven years ago by a similar show, during which a symphony in Chicago performed behind Charlie Chaplin’s “City Lights.” The experience, he said, was “jaw-dropping.” Mr. Pierce, who plays an important role as a music and events promoter in the movie, has a more than professional connection to the project, as a longtime friend of the Marsalis family and an alumnus of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, which has been the spawning ground for local performers, including Mr. Mackie. “We live culture,” said Mr. Pierce, one of several Louisiana natives who talked of the attempt to recapture Bolden with near missionary fervor. Speaking by phone from Baltimore, where he is in production on the HBO series “The Wire,” he said he found it exhilarating to plumb his hometown’s musical heritage “at a time when we’re kind of questioning American aesthetic values.” Extending that enthusiasm to a film audience that has never really warmed to jazz biography (movies like Clint Eastwood’s “Bird” haven’t performed that well at the box office) will be tough. Yet Wynton Marsalis is hopeful. “The world is always ready for everything,” he said. “All you have to do is play music with passion and feeling, and people will connect.” For Mr. Pritzker, perhaps the greater risk lies in going public with a figure many aficionados may have preferred as a more private image. Mr. Marsalis, for instance, has expressed reservations, the director said, about his tendency to lift the street player Bolden to the realm of the mythic, ballerinas and all. “I don’t want to demystify him,” Mr. Pritzker said. “I think it’s where it should be.” Peter Sorel, SMPSP Anthony Mackie, center, as the cornetist Charles (Buddy) Bolden during the filming of “Bolden.” In the background, Ellis Marsalis plays a clarinetist; the film’s director, Dan Pritzker, is at right.

Son Seals Sonny Cohn When Sunny Gets Blue

Turkey In the Straw Straw Man Straw Dogs

Yes, and who knows?--it may even be true.

Herbie Nichols Herbie Hancock John Holmes John Clellon Holmes Shirley Horn Tubby the Tuba

Sam Noto Mr. Moto Toto

April 19, 2007, 8:52 pm A Colossus Mistake In H Block at Bletchley Park, the historic code-breaking facility 50 miles from London, visitors can view a rebuilt working model of a Colossus, one of the first electronic digital computers, built during World War II to decrypt Nazi codes. If only they hadn’t waited 60 years to put it back together — there might still be a British Empire. And Silicon Valley might be in some bog outside of Bletchley Park. During World War II, there were two major Allied efforts — one British and one American — to build electronic computers. The United States needed artillery-firing tables for their big-gun battleships. Until then, the word “computers” referred to people, mostly young women, who slowly fed error-filled information into number crunching machines. One such operation, at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, was used to solve differential equations involving speed, wind, distance, etc., to improve accuracy. Over at the University of Pennsylvania, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, with help from the U.S. Army, were working on the design of the ENIAC, an electronic and programmable computer, to help automate and speed that task, and fire those human computers. The contract to build it was signed in 1943, but it was still being developed as the war dragged on. In the meantime, most artillery shells fired during the war simply missed. The British had more pressing needs. They knew the Nazis were sending messages to troops and to U-boat submarines in code, using a code generating machine called Enigma. The Enigma had actually been used by Germany and other European countries since the 1920s. The Poles developed a model that successfully cracked the Enigma code in 1932. But by 1939, the Nazi’s had learned to change the critical key every day instead of every month. As Poland fell, the Poles smuggled their model, known as the Bomba, to the British, who set up a top-secret effort, ULTRA, at Hut 8 in Bletchley Park to decrypt the Enigma messages. Even with the help of the Polish Bomba it would take several days by hand to determine each day’s key. Alan Turing, who conceptualized programmable computers at Princeton, was brought to Bletchley Park to design a machine called the Bombe out of electromechanical relays to automate this decryption task. Bombe was delivered in March of 1940 and by December of 1944, there were 192 Bombe machines, more calculator than computer, decrypting code. The Germans, by the way, also had a computer effort, led by Konrad Zuse, which was eventually destroyed by Allied bombing. Hitler and his high command then developed a tougher code to communicate, named Lorenz (the Brits called it Tunny). An extra letter in its key made it much tougher to crack — it could take weeks to decipher the key instead of a day. In March of 1943, the brains at Hut 8 developed a programmable machine out of vacuum tubes to speed up breaking the Lorenz code. It was named Heath Robinson, after the British Rube Goldberg, as it was more of a contraption than a computer and didn’t help much. Tommy Flowers and later Alan Coombs of, get this, the British Post Office, improved on the Robinson and by December of 1943, their aptly named room-sized Colossus computer was breaking the Lorenz code (or other codes as it was reprogrammable) in hours instead of weeks. The Colossus was the first real programmable computer; with 1500 vacuum tubes, it could read messages at 5000 characters per second and do 100 calculations at a time, all searching for patterns. The Colossus played a crucial role in D-Day. By understanding where the Germans had the bulk of their troops, the Allies could decide which beaches to storm and what misinformation to spread to keep the landings a surprise. The ENIAC, on the other hand, was no help in the shelling of German positions on D-Day. How do I know this? It wasn’t done yet. It wouldn’t be operational until February of 1946, fully two years after the British Colossus, and well after the war was over. So why, one has to ask, is the computer industry so uniquely American? Why is the U.S. a superpower and the British lapdogs instead of bulldogs? At least in part, blame the Russians. Or British paranoia. After VE day, the Cold War started immediately. The British were scared to death of Russian spies stealing the plans for the Colossus, of which 10 had been built. So they got rid of them. Yup, destroyed them — took an axe to the machines and lit a match to the plans. All the Bombes were destroyed, too. Can you believe it? Apparently, British Intelligence kept two Colossus machines for their own use (training Secret Agents 001 through 006, perhaps?). But these final two were destroyed the 1960s. It didn’t matter. Secrecy or paranoia, the general public didn’t learn about the Colossus machines until the 1970s. Now you know why there is no Sir Bill Gatesford, Duke of Bits. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the ENIAC was finally done and the War Department didn’t burn it. Instead, on February 16, 1946, it put out a press release and then held the first computer conference to explain how the ENIAC worked. Talk about open source! Every major corporation and university sent representatives, each of whom came back home and declared, “I gotta build me one of them things!” And there you have it. The computer was born at Bletchley Park but the computer industry was born in the good old U.S. of A. Innovation ran rampant. In rapidly changing businesses, secrecy is not always the best policy. Silicon Valley popped up to supply cheap transistors for this uniquely domestic industry. Software grew. Today, companies make billions doing the same searches the Colossus “search engine” pioneered. The military even got their payback, eventually computer-guiding bombs via global positioning satellite coordinates instead of artillery firing tables. A trillion dollar press release! Poor England. Technology today is a multi-trillion business dominated by American companies, thanks to simple British paranoia. Their century-long lead as an industrial power evaporated with nothing to replace it. A truly Colossus mistake! Let’s hope paranoia is not constraining the United States in the next wave of technology or potential wealth creation: offshoring, F.D.A. approvals, nuclear energy, stem cell research, bandwidth auctions, Area 51?

This is interesting. An Image’s Ties to a Dark Movie | 8:07 PM ET Inspiration for Cho's Images?A self-shot photo of Mr. Cho, above, and a still from the Web site of the movie ‘Oldboy.’ (Photos: NBC News, top; Tartan Films) The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004. The poses in the two images are similar, and the plot of the movie, “Oldboy,” seems dark enough to merit at least some further study. Following is The Times’s plot summary: The film centers on a seemingly ordinary businessman, Dae-su (the terrific Choi Min-sik), who, after being mysteriously imprisoned, goes on an extensive, exhausting rampage, seeking answers and all manner of bloody revenge. In a Times review, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film’s “body count and sadistic violence” mostly appealed to “cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome.” A Virginia Tech professor, Paul Harrill, alerted us of the similarity between images in the hope that it would shed some light on what led Mr. Cho to kill 32 on Monday before turning the gun on himself. Here is the NYT review of the film. The New York Times March 25, 2005 MOVIE REVIEW | 'OLDBOY' The Violence (and the Seafood) Is More Than Raw By MANOHLA DARGIS One question, perhaps the question, is this: what does art have to do with a guy eating a live octopus, and then hammering a couple of (human) heads? The guy in question, the one doing the gobbling and hammering, is Oh Dae-su, the central character in the frenzied Korean thriller "Oldboy." The latest in pulp-fiction cool, "Oldboy" was directed by Park Chanwook, whose films, including the very fine "Joint Security Area" and the repugnant "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," have won him admirers in rarefied circles, including the Cannes Film Festival, where last year "Oldboy" took second prize. Given the body count and sadistic violence in "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance" and "Oldboy," it's no surprise that Mr. Park's largest fan base may be those cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome. After going on a raucous drunk, an ordinary businessman, Dae-su (the terrific Choi Min-sik, who also starred in Im Kwon-taek's "Chihwaseon"), is mysteriously abducted to a private prison. There, with a television set and a painting of a leering Jesus-like figure for company, Dae-su keeps body and mind together (if barely), mostly by working out and chipping away at his prison walls. Eventually, he's released, whereupon he meets a kindly, predictably beautiful sushi waitress, Mido (Gang Hye-jung), gobbles down that poor octopus and proves that he wields a mean hammer. In time, he comes face to face with his anonymous tormenter, a smoothie with a smile named Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), who gives him five days - or else! - to learn why he was imprisoned. A master of composition, Mr. Park makes some of the snazziest-looking pulp fiction going. He has an impeccable if unoriginal visual style, indebted both to the usual masters (Hitchcock, Kubrick, with a nod at Buñuel) and especially to David Fincher, whose pop nihilism and dedication to the plasticity of the medium hang heavily over this film. That generally makes "Oldboy" entertaining to watch - notwithstanding the scene in which Dae-su eats a live animal - which is a good thing, because there is not much to think about here, outside of the choreographed mayhem. The screenplay, which the director helped write, is the least of the film's attractions; certainly the puerile, big-bang finish, which flashes the story back to high school and a teenage "slut," suggests that Mr. Park knows the adolescent mindset of his target audience all too well. "Oldboy" is a good if trivial genre movie, no more, no less. There's no denying that Mr. Park is some kind of virtuoso, but so what? So was the last guy who directed a Gap commercial. Cinematic virtuosity for its own sake, particularly as expressed through cinematography - in loop-the-loop camera work and, increasingly, in computer-assisted ornamentation - is a modern plague that threatens to bury us in shiny, meaningless movies. Historically speaking, the most interesting thing about "Oldboy" is that like so much "product" now coming out of Hollywood, it is a B movie tricked out as an A movie. Once, a film like this, predicated on extreme violence and staying within the prison house of genre rather than transcending it, would have been shot on cardboard sets with two-bit talent. It would have had its premiere in Times Square. The fact that "Oldboy" is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it's all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys. (At this point, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the head of the jury at Cannes last year was none other than Quentin Tarantino.) In this world, aesthetic and moral judgments - much less philosophical and political inquiries - are rejected in favor of a vague taxonomy of cool that principally involves ever more florid spectacles of violence. As in, "Wow, he's hammering those dudes with a knife stuck in his back - cool!" Or, "He's about to drop that guy and his dog from the roof - way cool!" Kiss-kiss, bang-bang, yawn-yawn. We are a long way from Pasolini and Peckinpah. "Oldboy" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes wall-to-wall extreme sadistic violence, a little sex and partial nudity. 'Oldboy' Opens today in Manhattan. Directed by Park Chanwook; written (in Korean, with English subtitles) by Hwang Jo-yun, Lim Joon-hyung and Mr. Park, based on a story by Tsuchiya Garon and Minegishi Nobuaki; director of photography, Jung Jung-hoon; edited by Kim Sang-bum; music by Cho Young-wuk; production designer, Yoo Seong-hee; produced by Kim Dong-joo; released by Tartan Films. Running time: 118 minutes. This film is rated R. WITH: Choi Min-sik (Oh Dae-su), Yoo Ji-tae (Lee Woo-jin) and Gang Hye-jung (Mido). Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

She played an opera singer opposite Groucho, Harpo, and Chico in A Night at the Opera. That makes her immortal.

No more so than Floridians. Dan, sometimes it's best to shut the fuck up.

Kitchen Maid Minute Maid Made in China

I just read that he was an English major, and that his creative writing was so disturbing that he was encouraged to seek counseling. Can't imagine counseling could have made a difference.

Peter Cook Dudley Moore E.L. Wisty E.L Doctorow Joseph Lamb Sherri Lewis

Not only awful, but highly incorrect as others have already pointed out. Name another civilized country where you or I can purchase an assault weapon for our private use. ...he had two handguns. They still could have been assault weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_assault_weapons_ban

Not only awful, but highly incorrect as others have already pointed out. Name another civilized country where you or I can purchase an assault weapon for our private use. Who needs an assault weapon to kill somebody? If the guy had his mind set on it as much as he obviously did, he would have found a way to carry out his plan no matter what kind of weapons he would have had to resort to. C'mon, BM. How ironic yet appropriate that his screen name can be shortened to "BM". Oh Dan, you do make the cleverest observations.

Not only awful, but highly incorrect as others have already pointed out. Name another civilized country where you or I can purchase an assault weapon for our private use. Who needs an assault weapon to kill somebody? If the guy had his mind set on it as much as he obviously did, he would have found a way to carry out his plan no matter what kind of weapons he would have had to resort to. C'mon, BM. At one point he lined people up and shot them all down, execution style. You can't do that with a bolt action rifle.

Not only awful, but highly incorrect as others have already pointed out. Name another civilized country where you or I can purchase an assault weapon for our private use.

Only in America.

http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...095&hl=goat and !!!! http://www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php...375&hl=goat

Mark Twain Samuel Clemens Justin Kaplan

Dinah Maria Craik Railroad Bill George Mortimer Pullman

I get tired of seeing this framed as a "free speech" issue. If I had a radio platform with an audience base in the millions, and I one day singled you out on my program as a pretend-gourmet and a weekend child molester, would you airily dismiss this slander as a case of me exercising my right of free speech? I doubt it. You'd look for an attorney. You'd see what recourse you had in the law. You'd try to hurt me, free speech be damned.

Wrong. As loath as I am to defend Snoop, this is what he actually said: Looks like a distinction without much of a difference. I think that what Eric said is an accurate representation of Mr. Dogg's statement.

A frightening precedent, though, if you'd care to include any left-leaning talk show hosts... Does the same rule apply if they "cross the line" as well? I'd hate to see public discourse (not Free Speach!) stiffled out of fear. Show me a left wing comment as vile as Limbaugh's recent characterization of Michael J. Fox. So you're one of those "free speech so long as i agree with it" types, huh? You may think it's a simple matter of free speech, but calling a basketball team of college women "nappy headed hoes" is pointless, despicable, unfunny, and cruel. It is also, in my opinion, slanderous, and I hope Imus gets his ass sued. Quite the liberal at heart Alexander and Ray back up their liberal, for free speech viewpoints, you seem to want to force people off the air that have viewpoints that don't jibe with yours. I guess you are a big fan of Jesse and Al, eh???? Sharpton's actions and comments lead to the deaths of several Jewish people, yet he is still on the radio. a few examples.... 1991: A Hasidic Jewish driver in Brooklyn's Crown Heights section accidentally kills Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old black child, and antisemitic riots erupt. Sharpton races to pour gasoline on the fire. At Gavin's funeral he rails against the "diamond merchants" -- code for Jews -- with "the blood of innocent babies" on their hands. He mobilizes hundreds of demonstrators to march through the Jewish neighborhood, chanting, "No justice, no peace." A rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, is surrounded by a mob shouting "Kill the Jews!" and stabbed to death. 1995: When the United House of Prayer, a large black landlord in Harlem, raises the rent on Freddy's Fashion Mart, Freddy's white Jewish owner is forced to raise the rent on his subtenant, a black-owned music store. A landlord-tenant dispute ensues; Sharpton uses it to incite racial hatred. "We will not stand by," he warns malignantly, "and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business." Sharpton's National Action Network sets up picket lines; customers going into Freddy's are spat on and cursed as "traitors" and "Uncle Toms." Some protesters shout, "Burn down the Jew store!" and simulate striking a match. "We're going to see that this cracker suffers," says Sharpton's colleague Morris Powell. On Dec. 8, one of the protesters bursts into Freddy's, shoots four employees point-blank, then sets the store on fire. Seven employees die in the inferno. http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2411 Brownian Motion, I am sure we will see you calling for Sharpton's removal from the air.... I know this is going to strain the processing function of your walnut-sized brain, but because I'm no fan of Imus it does not follow that I admire Sharpton. You might have elicited this information from me before you jumped to conclusions and posted all this crap, though I've noticed you rarely miss an opportunity to dump on black people and muslims, no matter how irrelevant your observations might be.