maren

OUCH! Brilliant deduction!

Covina karaoke-bar-tendress vs. Icelandic popstar?

Thanks for the tip, Chris.

I've taped this segment but haven't watched it yet. I spoke to a friend who has really liked the first three episodes of the series and is a big Charles Burnett fan and he thought the Burnett episode was a disaster too. I'm almost afraid to watch it now.... Well, as with the other episodes, it has great archival footage and seems to let those performances run more completely. For me, it was worth watching just to see Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Also, Bessie Smith, Elizabeth Cotten, that Son House clip again, and the actual voice of W.C. Handy reminiscing about his first job in Memphis... Footage of chain gangs working while work songs (probably Lomax recording?) played... This was all amazing. The dramatized story -- well, it was often stilted, contrived, even cringeworthy -- but then (probably with the help of some wine) it just started to feel like a whole lot of stuff on TV ambiently when my son was young, and I just kind of accepted it on some "after-school-special" level aimed at a "family" audience and let myself get riveted by the good parts. One moment of the "movie" that got to me showed the young boy standing on his uncle's country porch by himself, idly twanging the loose wires on the porch screen door -- I had a lot of those moments as a kid -- now that I'm grown up, I would call them "stoned" and it usually takes some assistance (aforementioned drink, for instance) to get there -- but now I'm remembering how easily a sound, an angle of the sunlight, or being in a strange place would put me there as a kid -- I defer to other's judgments about the Burnett piece as a whole, but three or four moments are really going to stay with me as saying something subtle and profound about music, inspiration, high-ness, how to reclaim happiness and spirit and hope through making your body make music: Sister Rosetta Tharpe ("I hear music in the air above my head, and I know there's a heaven up there" -- it was so mystical, joyous, sweet, physical, with personal delight, totally nonpreachy, the polar opposite of bombast), the kid on the porch, the work gang/work song, and a guitar player whose name I won't know until I can afford a new TV! (mine is going blurry and I can't read small titles -- guess the blurriness wasn't a bad effect to add to stilted screenplay though!)

Does this mean that only chicks can play them??!! No cats or dudes allowed?

Congratulations!

AHEM! Where's the winky-face?

Given this situation, I would take my business elsewhere, and proceed coolly and with caution. Just write out the facts to the "Better Business Bureau" or whatever it's called in your neck of the woods. Cancel the order with the guy immediately by phone AND in writing, and state that it was inappropriate for him to come to your home. Just cool it with the guy. An apology from such a weird person won't mean much, and I wouldn't ask for it. Either he's a dotty guy (old?) -- or he's trying to scam somebody (his parents or uncle?) (to replace what he himself has taken from the till?). (Or worse, as couw hinted -- like that psycho-photo-shop-guy/Robin Williams movie.) Whatever... what he did seems quite abnormal, so you would only be entering deeper into an abnormal world by trying to get a decent response (IMHO).

I would definitely report this to a manager, directly. I would no longer deal at all with the guy who came to your door. At BEST, very bad judgment on his part. At less-than-best, seems really fishy to me.

FYI -- an online chat with Charles Burnett about his "Blues" episode starts in about 10 minutes (noon eastern time) at http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/z...blues102203.htm

these days: + even though the "moisture shave" doesn't have "legs" in its brand name! Used to use (similar to Mrs. Jazzmoose's?) but too hard for me to keep track of separate handle and cartridges! In looking for pix, I found THIS SITE, complete with instructions on how to macho-ize the sharp, smooth and cheap Gillette Daisy!

Just kidding you, Conn500 -- I guess I've discovered that my "hanging with the guys" encounters a hang-up at the bathroom door! This is my preference these days, along with As one reviewer says on THIS PAGE"The blades are sharp enough so you only have to go over your skin one time and the hair is removed. The long, sleek pink handle makes it easy to use even in the shower, because of the texturing you don’t lose your grip!" Additional comments on MEN'S shaving thread!

Well, I must say, the shaving thread is the one I've felt MOST excluded from!!! Even more than the "what do you read in the bathroom" (though that was a close call!!).

I think it's more the case that these modern guys (and not-so-modern: Beatles, Rolling Stones, Cream, ad infinitum) NEED GREAT MATERIAL! Like TV advertising needs Willie Dixon's songs to sell things! These are great songs -- better in the original, IMHO -- but when I was a kid and heard "I'm So Glad" on the radio, I loved it. At the time, however, I just assumed it was "a Cream song." I'm so glad to learn that Skip James actually made some money off the Cream version -- but I don't think it's necessarily the case that ALL these "covers" are done to glorify and illuminate the originals! These songs are a gold mine for perfomers (and record labels) -- especially if their composers/lyricists have no financial rights to them. [in Marc Ribot's case, the songs of Arsenio Rodriguez have provided his band (Los Cubanos Postizos) with a lot of gigs over the past few years -- and I think Ribot is the first to admit it: that he's the beneficiary of the songwriting genius of Rodriguez, not that the work needed Marc Ribot to shine a light on it.] About this series: sorry I missed last night's (Wim Wenders). About Scorsese's: loved the archival footage, felt frustated when the music was cut short to be used as an intro to a talking head!, felt the segment as a whole was kind of shapeless, felt at least an hour could be devoted to a documentary "A/B-ing" various African and African-American musics, but in this case I was again frustated by the brevity of the examples used, and by seeming to present Ali Farka Toure as playing music that was a PROGENITOR of the blues when he is so well-known as a SYNTHESIST thoroughly influenced by John Lee Hooker.

Total non-sequitur: Catesta, your avatar is mouthwatering, maybe even "DOPE A LICIOUS"

Althea Gibson, First Black Player to Win Wimbledon and U.S. Titles, Dies at 76 By Robert McG. Thomas Jr. -- New York Times, 9/29/03 Althea Gibson, the first black player to win Wimbledon and the United States national tennis championship and a pre-eminent figure in women's tennis, died yesterday in East Orange, N.J. She was 76. Gibson, who had been in poor health for many years, died at East Orange General Hospital, where she was treated for an infection and respiratory illness, said Dr. Duane J. Dyson, its senior vice president for medical affairs. Althea Gibson emerged in the tennis world of the 1950's as a most unlikely queen of the lawns of Wimbledon and Forest Hills. In 1950 she became the first black to compete in the United States nationals. She won 56 tournaments, including five Grand Slam singles titles — the United States nationals and Wimbledon twice, in 1957 and 1958, and the French championship in 1956. What made that especially remarkable was her background as a rough-hewn product of Harlem, a chronic truant and an eighth-grade dropout. She had grown up far removed from the two genteel worlds of tennis: the white country club set and the network of black doctors, lawyers and other professionals who pursued tennis on private courts of their own. Gibson owed much of her success to that very network of black tennis enthusiasts and to a geographic coincidence. Althea Gibson, born in a sharecropper's shack in Silver, S.C., on Aug. 25, 1927, was brought to New York by her parents when she was a few months old. By chance, the family moved into an apartment on a West 143rd Street block between Lenox and Seventh Avenues that was a designated play street. When the volunteers from the Police Athletic League closed the block to traffic and set up their recreation equipment, the spot they chose to mark off as a paddle tennis court was right in front of the Gibsons' front stoop. A natural athlete who excelled in virtually every sport she tried, Gibson took up paddle tennis at 9 and won a citywide championship when she was 12. In 1941 Buddy Walker, a Harlem bandleader and part-time P.A.L. supervisor, bought her two rackets and introduced her to friends at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club, a predominantly black club that played on courts on 149th Street just a few blocks away but a world removed from the neighborhood she had known. Gibson was coached there by Fred Johnson, the one-armed club pro, and taken up by the club's members, who taught her some more important lessons. As she put it in her 1958 autobiography, "I Always Wanted to Be Somebody," the club attracted "the highest class" of Harlem residents, people, she noted, who "had rigid ideas about what was socially acceptable." Those ideas were alien to her own experience. "I'm ashamed to say," she wrote, "that I was still living pretty wild." Gibson would come home late (sometimes the next day) and her father, a garage attendant, would beat her. But Gibson saw her father as merely a stern disciplinarian, not abusive. Gibson made a lifelong friendship when she approached her idol, the boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson, in a bowling alley. Sympathetic to her dream of a career in music, he bought her a saxophone. Finally, to escape her father's wrath, she sought refuge in a Catholic home for girls and eventually received a welfare grant to get her own apartment while she worked at menial jobs. But it was tennis that gripped her interest. In 1942 she won her first tournament, the New York State girls' championship, sponsored by the American Tennis Association, which had been organized in 1916 by black players as an alternative to the United States Lawn Tennis Association. In 1946, when she lost in the final of her first A.T.A. women's championship, she caught the eye of two men who changed her life and altered the course of tennis, Hubert A. Eaton of Wilmington, N.C., and R. Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Va. These men, both physicians and leaders of a cadre of black enthusiasts determined to crack the racial barriers of mainstream tennis, saw Gibson's potential and became her sponsors. They arranged for Gibson to live with Eaton and his wife during the school year, practicing on his court and attending high school, and to spend the summer traveling on the A.T.A. circuit with Johnson, who later performed a similar service for Arthur Ashe. She was 19 when she started at Wilmington Industrial High School, but finished in three years, graduating 10th in her class, and enrolled as a scholarship student at Florida A&M, receiving a degree at 25. She also flourished on the court, winning the first of her 10 straight A.T.A. national championships in 1947. In 1949, a year after Dr. Benjamin Weir had become the first black to play in a United States Lawn Tennis Association title event — the 1948 National Indoor Championships — Gibson took her first steps beyond the world of the black tennis circuit, making it to the semifinals of the Eastern Indoor Championships and then to the semifinals of the national championships. The next step proved harder. Even after she had won the 1950 Eastern Indoor Championship and a clamor had begun to let her play in the National Grass Court Championships at Forest Hills, the precursor of the United States Open, the powers of tennis seemed to close ranks to keep her out. To qualify for an invitation to the 1950 nationals, she was required to first make a name for herself at one of the major preliminary grass-court events. But no invitations were forthcoming. Alice Marble, a former champion, rallied support for Gibson. "If tennis is a game for ladies and gentlemen," she wrote in a letter to American Lawn Tennis magazine, "it's time we acted a little more like gentlepeople and less like sanctimonious hypocrites." Finally, Gibson received an invitation to the Eastern Grass Court Championships at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange, N.J. She made it only as far as the second round, but that was enough to win a bid to Forest Hills. On Aug. 28, 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in major league baseball, Gibson became the first black player to compete in the national tennis championship. Taking her place on a remote court at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, she dispatched Barbara Knapp of England, 6-2, 6-2. The next day, she faced the Wimbledon champion, Louise Brough. After losing the first set, 6-1, Gibson took the second, 6-3, then fell behind by 3-0 in the third before beginning a surge that brought repeated roars from 2,000 hardy spectators who ignored the first peals of thunder and flashes of lightning of a gathering storm. Gibson took a lead of 7-6 and was on the verge of victory over her visibly spent opponent. But the rains came, the match was suspended, and when it resumed the next day, Brough won three straight games to win the match. The 5-foot-10 1/2 Gibson gained the attention of the tennis public. A powerful if inconsistent player, the lean and muscular young woman had a dominating serve, and her long, graceful reach often stunned opponents. Over the next half-dozen years, Gibson became a fixture on the tennis circuit, playing Wimbledon for the first time in 1951 and earning a ranking as high as No. 7 in the United States. But Gibson became so disenchanted with her failure to break through to the top that she considered abandoning tennis and entering the Army. In the fall of 1955, the State Department selected her for a goodwill tennis tour of Asia and the Far East, and the experience inspired her game. In 1956 she won 16 of her first 18 tournaments, including the French championship at Roland Garros, her first title at a Grand Slam event. But once again victory in the singles championships eluded her at Wimbledon and Forest Hills, although she had been favored to win both. Gibson did team with Angela Buxton to win the Wimbledon doubles in 1956. She won in doubles again in 1957, with Darlene Hard, and in 1958, with Maria Bueno. After losing to Shirley Fry of the United States in the singles final of the Australian Open in 1957, she did not lose another match all year. Passing up the clay court distraction of the French championship to concentrate on tuning up on grass courts in England, she again entered Wimbledon as the favorite and defeated Hard in the final. "At last," she said, "at last," as she accepted the trophy from Queen Elizabeth II. She later wrote in her autobiography: "Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, N.C." Upon returning home, Gibson was given a ticker-tape parade up Broadway, a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria and a celebration on West 143rd Street. She told friends and supporters, "This victory belongs to you," but she chaffed at efforts to make her a symbol of black achievement. When a reporter asked if she was proud to be compared to Jackie Robinson as an outstanding representative of her race, Gibson replied: "No. I don't consider myself to be a representative of my people. I am thinking of me and nobody else." Having won Wimbledon, Gibson rolled through the national championship at Forest Hills. In the final, she defeated Brough, who had eliminated her in her first national seven years before. After being named the outstanding female athlete of the year in a poll of Associated Press sports editors, Gibson repeated her Wimbledon and Forest Hills singles victories in 1958, and was named the outstanding female athlete again. Then, under pressure from her family to make some money from her talent, she announced her retirement from amateur tennis. At a time when the professional game was little more than a sideshow, she had little trouble winning the pro title and went on an exhibition tour with the Harlem Globetrotters, playing tennis at halftime. In the early 1960's she became the first black player to compete on the women's golf tour, but she never won a tournament. Gibson, who was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame at Newport, R.I., later held various athletic posts in New Jersey state government. A resident of East Orange, she had served as its recreation director. Gibson was married twice, to William Darben and Sidney Llewellyn. She had no children. When another black woman, Zina Garrison, made it to the Wimbledon final in 1990 before losing to Martina Navratilova, Gibson was there to cheer her on, but she soon receded from the limelight once again with health and financial problems. "It was truly an inspiration for me to watch her overcome adversity," Billie Jean King, who was 13 when she first say Gibson play, told The Associated Press yesterday. "Her road to success was a challenging one, but I never saw her back down."

And write them off on your taxes as professional development??!! Congratulations!

Me neither.

Hope you all don't mind a slight side-tracking here -- this is all very interesting! I totally second what Ralphie Boy says about maple (slippery!) vs. rosewood, although my experience is entirely with bass guitar. Rosewood neck on a Vox Panther versus maple neck on a G&L (kind of Leo Fender's own knockoff of a Fender Precision) -- both 4-string. The other difference between these two necks on my basses is that the maple is definitely lacquered/varnished, whereas the rosewood seems to have a rubbed oil finish (if any at all). Seems like this would account for the difference in absorbing perspiration -- the rosewood is unsealed and remains porous. Maybe the maple needs to be varnished to keep the grain from rising in response to perspiration, environmental humidity? Anyway, with these basses the difference in tone is really noticeable: rosewood warmer with "sweet spots" that resonate differently on certain notes (don't notice "dead spots"), maple brighter and entirely even resonance on all tones. (The Vox is much smaller and lighter, can't get an ULTRAbass sound on the E string -- but the rosewood neck seems to compensate for the lack of heft in a lot of ways). Anyway Red -- very nice of you! hope your brother enjoys his present. And thanks AB for the lowdown on all the Telecasters, and Joe G for that guitar info site.

This was such a sweet story! (I was going to post it last night when that Brasilian interruption happened.) I think all the jazz musicians were RELAXING at the reception! I admit, "Madonna" gave me pause, but -- we don't know what DJ Froosh was DOING with those sides, do we??!! As for the IMANI WINDS (the "classical quintet") -- they're all fantastic players, and I know at least three of them have played in jazz contexts as well (and the quintet toured with Steve Coleman) -- they're young, and it's not easy earning your keep as a jazz oboist, bassoonist or French horn player!

I became a Peggy Lee fan at the age of 4. Seriously. This character (Peggy wrote and sang her song) had MUCH more soul and substance than "Lady"!

I saw that too -- reminded me of some kind of mafia protection racket! Anyway, PHEW!!! I'm awfully happy to see you back up today!