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What crap. Here's a big difference ... Hillary Duff is, I believe, still under 18 and she's famous for making kid-friendly fare like "Lizzie McGuire" on one of the kid cable channels. Janet Jackson is an adult, well-known for her provocative approach to entertainment, who has sung in the past about enjoying S&M. A better comparison would have been 50 Cent tearing off, say, Britney Spears' top ... and does anyone really thing THAT would have raised any kind of racist "hue and cry"? Of course not!

Prestige Trio Sessions ...

Crosstown Traffic All Along the Watchtower Red House

An article by Brad Mehldau that WNMC (eric) posted in Jazz in Print has gotten me thinking ... does the fact that a given player writes his/her own stuff, as opposed to just playing someone else's, affect how you view a musician's ability to play? Does that make sense? Originally, I would have thought that being comfortable composing would have to make someone a better soloist, because soloing is kind of like composing on the fly. But the Mehldau piece added a curve I hadn't thought about: does thinking about a solo in "compositional" terms take away some of the instinctual, "hit you in the gut" feeling? I suppose, like everything else, it's subjective ... but I'm curious to read what others have to say/write. Thanks again for posting the original story, eric; I hope I didn't offend any kind of board etiquette by "borrowing" the topic.

I've not read that before ... fascinating. eric: I'm going to "borrow" the composer vs. blower thing for a misc. music post. It's something I've often thought on, and I think it would get more "play" in Misc. Music. Thanks in advance!

I think reading "White Noise" when it first came out made some of the difference for me ... a lot of it is, obviously, very subjective and I was really into what I call the "Vintage Contemporary" mode back then. In case it was before your time, Vintage was putting out trade paperbacks with edgy graphics, etc., and all having a kind of similar "feel" ... kind of like the BN "sound" ... I can remember Denis Johnson's "Angels," Steve Erickson stuff, the Barthelmes, Raymond Carver, etc. Anyway, I don't think Vintage published Delillo, but I always considered him part of that wave of at-the-time new writers I was reading in my early years out of college. I read Dellilo's more recent "Cosmopolis," and I have to admit it was a loser.

Actually, no ... not that there's anything wrong with that!

Actually, in many places this is still controversial. I'm not going to hunt things down on Google, but I'm sure we've all seen/heard stories about people being offended when mother's have the nerve to breastfeed in public. It's amazing how much focus is given to women's breasts in America, yet how frightened everyone seems to be when they actually see one! Does anyone know how this country is able to constitutionally ban showing a woman's breast on tv but not a man's?

JohnJ: Wasn't it Murakami who wrote "The Wind-up Bird Chronicles"? That was a pretty incredible book, I highly recommend it. If you're interested in Japanese authors/books, I can also point you toward Kenzaburo Oe's "Nip the Buds, Shoot the Children" about a group of kids trying to survive in post-WWII rural Japan, although it's not really a "war" book.

eric: so the "Reader's Manifesto" rears its ugly head ... Try as I might, I've never been able to get all the way through that. To be honest, that might have to do with the fact that I loved reading Delillo when I was younger and still consider "White Noise" to be fantastic. On the other hand, after being on this board for a couple of months, it was fascinating to revisit the manifesto because it parallels some of the discussions we have here regarding the value/quality of different types of jazz. Can you imagine posting a similar "Jazz Listener's Manifesto" here?!?!

Without knowing the context of the Marsalis quotes, it looks to me like he's speaking more about integrating the black experience into mainstream America. Look at this phrase: "Believe me, that's why the fact that it has not been addressed has resulted in our losing a large portion of our identity as Americans." My first thought on seeing something like this is that Marsalis meant "our" to mean "blacks." Marsalis strikes me as "conservative" in the sense that he thinks all jazz should be one thing, the thing he likes, end of story. He doesn't strike my as Bush conservative.

Thanks for the replies, guys ... I had kind of thought it was as you've explained, but I also thought there may have been something more, I don't know, objective to it. I mean, has anyone ever thought "Hey, I love the way Player X resolves that solo" and then met someone else who thought -- about the exact same piece -- "Oh no, here's Player X again, that damn guy just can't resolve his solos"? Also, is there anyone who purposely doesn't resolve things just to add disonance for aesthetic reasons? I haven't listened to too much "out" music, but is that what's going on there? (Again, I appreciate the music lessons!)

Serious question: what does it mean in layman's terms when someone says a solo has been "resolved" or brought to its "resolution"?

Ghost: Do happen to know where that little epigram or whatever at the beginning of "Appt." came from? I read the book years and years ago, and I still can't that out of my mind.

You know, it's funny this offends the NFL but having a team called the "Redskins" doesn't ...

If you can ever track down a copy, check out O'Hara's "Lovey Childs: A Philadelphians Story." People would find this pretty racy today ... He's pretty far out of vogue nowadays, but I really enjoy his work.

It's scary, yet typical ... it seems like sex/nudity = bad, hate/violence = good for too many Americans.

(1) My interpretation of Adorno, FWIW, is that, inevitable or not, the producers introducing their dreams to the consumers is a major problem for "culture" ... and that art should not so much seek to impress its dreams on people as that culture should be somehow constituted to allow the dreamers to challenge and dream for themselves. (2) This is exactly what I think happened with Adorno and jazz. (3) On the other hand, I feel very much the same way you do about Adorno essentially painting himself in a corner with his criticism. I find this to be a major problem w/a lot of the more modern "philosophers." They're able to present worldviews/critiques/whatever that seem very convincing, but then they refuse to apply that mode of criticism to their own work. Which makes sense for exactly the reason you mentioned: their works remove the very ground on which they're standing to make their points.

Regarding Marsalis/Crouch I'd refer to my previously post Adorno quote: "The dream industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people." I think the opinion of most Marsalis haters is that they are the customers and Marsalis/Crouch are the suppliers.

I'm not down on Adorno ... I think he was incredibly prescient. I also agree with that what Adorno was railing against was the commodification of culture. However, I think his choice of jazz as an example of an art/commodity was a poor one. Early jazz is not really my cup of tea, but I would strongly disagree that the stuff in the 30s-40s was just "pumped out" on an assembly line. Perhaps what motivated Ellington/Parker, etc., was, in fact, the "transformative" power of early jazz.

While doing some, uh, research on, um, "wardrobe malfunctions," I came across this titbit (couldn't resist). The context was a claim that the Super Bowl half-time show was the "most replayed moment" ever. "TiVo said it used its technology to measure audience behavior among 20,000 users during the Super Bowl. The exercise revealed a 180% spike in viewership at the time of the -- as Timberlake refers to it -- "wardrobe malfunction. ... This marks the third year that TiVo has released details of its second-by-second review of how Super Bowl viewers used their TiVo units. Not only did users pause and replay the infamous portion of the halftime show more than any moment during the game, but they also did the same for some commercials." Are there any TiVo users out there? I'm curious about whether their upfront in letting customers know they (TiVo) monitors their (customers') watching habits.

Boy, I sure didn't see this coming ...

From the Slate guy's review of Super Bowl ads ... "Pizza Hut introduces a new four-section pie (I believe it was termed the "Four-for-all") with Jessica Simpson and the Muppets. I have not much to say about this, except: Did you notice Miss Piggy's new haircut? It used to be curly and brassy (sort of a '70s Farrah Fawcett look), but now she's had it straightened, with bangs (more like a Sex and the City Kim Cattrall look). I think she had some work done, too." Emphasis mine!

Something weird happened to me over the weekend (weirder than normal, I mean) ... I was watching one of those "I love the 70s/80s" shows on VH1 and they had Kermit the Frog on as one of the snarky critics ... giving his comments about various pop culture, uh, icons, and that was strange enough, but then they had a clip from "The Muppets Movie" and had Kermit commenting on that, too ... my head almost exploded!

Just to get serious for a moment ... I'm usually on the fence about this kind of thing. On the one hand, it seems pretty tacky. On the other, if no one is forcing the groom to do this, who am I to be offended? Of course, that's w/o getting into an argument about whether he's somehow being "forced" into it because society marginalizes dwarves and he can't do anything else.