Adam

up - here's the old thread

up - Anyone buy any. I've only picked up Joe Bataan's "Riot!" It basically switches between doo wop numbers and salsa numbers. A bity more poppy than I would have liked, but not bad.

Yeah, the Eagles album passed Thriller 4 or 5 years ago. It just keeps selling, I guess.

up for Allegro's Hep sale this week (or was it last week?)

Heck, I turned 40 yesterday. 25 ain't nuthin'! Except your auto insurance rate goes down. And you begin to get interesting to talk to.

I've been wanting to hear Carson Robison and his Kansas City Jackrabbits for a while. I bought the first one from you, so I'm in for the discount as well. yee haw! Pay Pal here I come.

Murphy is not on the public radar, in the way that he was, but he is no shooting star. He has made loads of money, as have his films, in Shrek & Shrek 2, Dr. Doolittle, and the other family films. I think he just grew up.

Criterion is bringing out their redone versions of Playtime, Seven Samurai, and Amarcord this fall. Here's the link to Playtime: http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=112 Seven Samurai will become a big 3 disc edition: http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=2 I also read that they are redoing their 3 disc Brazil edition. It seems almost ridiculous.

I find that Virgin Megastore sales are pretty much always useless. Real discounts are for uninteresting titles. The normal discounts still leave them with prices higher than most places.

Which "this" - the fate of FMP, or the distribution of hat, or both?

It does seem reasonable but I have a problem with these two sentences: Its one thing to say that back-up copies may remain on the servers, but why should MySpace.com retain the rights? Does this mean the rights delineated above are retained? Then what is the point in saying that the license will terminate when the content is removed? Hmm, yeah, that is a bit more worrisome. I think it largely is there for the same reason. if some back-up exists somewhere, they don't want you suing them after you've removed it from their site. that seems straightforward. I'm sure My Space like other sites does regular back-ups of everything, and those back-ups might include information that has since been deleted. Who knows where those back-ups live? But I am sure My Space is doing it to cover their asses. I still don't see how it allows them to start selling or licensing your music or images to other people.

That sounds plausible, reasonable, and fair. But the wording seems to leave open some potentially unsavory loopholes, no? I'm sure it does, but it depends also on how clearly they define 'Services" elsewhere in the agreement, and whether trhat is truly limited to the My Space site. And of course one can still sue, no matter what agreement has been signed or clause has been agreed to.

Actually, I think Billy Bragg doth protest too much. First, it's a non-exclusive license, and second, it just gives My Space permission to show it on their services - meaning My Space. Basically this is a clause written by lawyers to prevent this potential event: a songwriter posts a song, and then sues My Space for having the song on My Space without a license. Absurd but certainly possible. It is saying that by posting the song you are giving My Space permission to have the song played from My Space. Without this clause, My Space theoretically would have to license and pay for every song that gets posted on their site - even if you are the creator and are posting it on your own site.

We had an old thread on this, but the search function is not working for me. We were discussing the poor state of remastering labels such as Tico and Fania. Anyway, here's the label's page: http://www.faniarecords.com/Fania/site/Home.aspx And here is the article in today's NY Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/arts/mus...e692023&ei=5070 The Return of Fania, the Record Company That Made Salsa Hot By JODY ROSEN Published: June 4, 2006 FANIA RECORDS, the legendary New York label that pioneered salsa, has often been called the Latin Motown. In its heyday, from the late 1960's through the 70's, Fania, like Motown, had a superstar-packed roster, a virtual monopoly on salsa's A-list: Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Hector Lavoe, Johnny Pacheco, Rubén Blades, Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, Bobby Valentin, Larry Harlow and other greats. Like Motown, Fania began as a humble cottage industry — its releases were once sold out of the trunk of a car on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx — and became a multimillion-dollar business that carried a bracing musical hybrid to the nation and the world. But the comparison soon breaks down. Today Motown looms gigantic in American cultural memory, a cornerstone of the 60's nostalgia industry, the subject of innumerable books and documentaries, its hits still ubiquitous on the airwaves decades after they made the charts. Fania, on the other hand, is recalled mostly by collectors and Latinos of a certain age. And where Motown's records have been endlessly reissued and anthologized, Fania's catalog languished for years, its master tapes moldering in a warehouse in Hudson, N.Y. Dozens of its most important recordings are out of print, and others were so shoddily transferred to CD — often directly from the original vinyl — as to be virtually unlistenable. Now, though, a Fania revival is stirring. Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez just finished shooting "El Cantante," a biopic about the short, tragic life of the singing star Hector Lavoe. More important, the music itself is at last being reissued properly, with informative liner notes (in Spanish and English) and shimmering remastered sound that conjures a bygone era: the funky tumult of Latin New York in the years of Vietnam, Watergate and Jimmy Carter. Emusica, the Miami company that purchased the Fania catalog last year in a deal worth several million dollars, recently released the first 30 of a planned 300 reissues. This bounty holds surprises even for longtime Fania aficionados and offers non-initiates a chance to catch up with some of the greatest music from one of pop's most fertile periods. "Fania is the catalog of salsa music, an unmatched body of recordings," said David Garcia, an assistant professor of music at the University of North Carolina and an expert on Latin music. Larry Harlow, the keyboardist and bandleader who produced and arranged many of Fania's classic records (his 1979 album "Yo Soy Latino" is among the first reissued Fania CD's), called the label's output "a chronological biography of the whole Latin music scene from the mid-60's through the early 80's." Fania, Mr. Harlow said, "is Latin music." The label was the brainchild of unlikely business partners: the Dominican flutist and bandleader Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American former New York City police officer turned lawyer who fell in love with Latin music during a brief stay in Cuba in the early 60's. In 1964, Mr. Masucci (who died in 1997) and Mr. Pacheco teamed up and began signing hot New York musicians, including Ray Barretto (who died in February at 76), a conga virtuoso and leader of one of the city's best dance bands, as well as younger bandleaders like Bobby Valentin and Mr. Harlow. By the late 60's the label's roster had swelled with young talent, and Fania would soon annex several smaller Latin labels. The roster included Willie Colón, a gifted trombonist and composer with eclectic musical tastes, and Hector Lavoe, a Puerto Rican singer with a luminous tenor voice. Together these musicians honed a new sound — a blend of bustling Afro-Cuban rhythms, big-band jazz, street-smart R&B and other styles — in a combustive atmosphere of collaboration and friendly rivalry. "It was a very competitive time," recalled Mr. Colón, who in recent years has become involved in New York City politics, running for public advocate in 2001 and serving as co-chairman of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's re-election campaign last year. "Within the label, there was a lot of competition. We were all trying to innovate and outdo each other." Those innovations are all over the first batch of Fania reissues. The music is built on a rock-solid Afro-Cuban base, on the clave beat and on the sensuous big-band stylings of Cuban son, with numerous other styles stirred into the mix, from mambo and rumba to Puerto Rican plena and bomba. But on early albums like "El Malo" (1967) by Mr. Colón, and classic 70's releases like "Rey del Bajo" by Mr. Valentin and "El Maestro" by Mr. Pacheco (both 1974), a sophisticated new style emerges, with son's 1-4-5 chord structures giving way to jazz chords and harmonies, complex arrangements and far more aggressive rhythm than is typical of Cuban music. Cold war geopolitics played a role in the development of that sound. The Cuban embargo cut off virtually all contact between the island and musicians based in the United States, and a distinctively New York style was incubated in the city's dozens of Latin nightclubs. The Fania reissues radiate big-city cosmopolitanism. The label was a melting pot, with a lineup that included black and white Latinos: Puerto Ricans (Mr. Valentin, Ismael Rivera, Pete Rodriguez), Dominicans (Mr. Pacheco), Panamanians (Mr. Blades), Cubans (Celia Cruz), native New Yorkers (Mr. Barretto, Mr. Colón), even gringos like Mr. Harlow, né Lawrence Kahn, whose keyboard skills earned him the nickname El Judio Maravilloso (the Marvelous Jew). Their music drew on bebop, soul, rock and other sounds of the polyglot metropolis, and the lyrics were steeped in grit and street reportage. "We were making city music, talking about, you know, city things — what's happening on the corner, stories about drugs, violence, looking for a job," Mr. Colón said. "The stuff that was coming from Cuba was more rural, you know, 'my grass shack' and all that. We were kind of doing an urban folklore." Mr. Colón in particular cultivated an image as a New York street tough, toying with gangster iconography and glowering on the covers of records like "El Malo" ("The Bad One"), whose artwork includes photos of his band performing in prisoners' uniforms. What really shines through on these remastered records is extraordinary musicianship. Albums like "Celia & Johnny" (1974), Mr. Pacheco's collaboration with Ms. Cruz, and Roberto Roena's "Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound 5" (1973) are the essence of classic salsa: tough, gleaming, unstoppable dance music, with brass fanfares braying over crackling syncopation from claves, timbales and congas. Jazz fans who have not caught up with salsa will be impressed by the virtuosity packed into tight pop song structures: Eddie Palmieri's cluster-chord-thick electric piano solo on the title track of his 1971 "progressive salsa" landmark "Vamonos Pa'l Monte," or Mr. Colón's blazing trombone improvisations on "El Malo." Most of these records are headlined, à la big-band jazz, by bandleader-instrumentalists. By the mid-1980's, with the arrival of a new style, salsa romántico, singers routinely got top billing. (In that period Fania dissolved amid a string of lawsuits involving royalties.) Fania's heroic sound was a singer's: the high, pure voice of Hector Lavoe, whose mastery of both velvety crooning and fierce, percussive vocal improvisation set the standard for all salseros who followed. On the remastered version of his 1975 solo album "La Voz," one hears the disarmingly boyish warmth of his voice, a yearning quality that fires both love ballads and up-tempo numbers like "Mi Gente" ("My People"), the Johnny Pacheco song that became Mr. Lavoe's anthem. The sweetness of Mr. Lavoe's singing belied his hard living and hard luck — battles with drug abuse, the murder of his son, suicide attempts and an AIDS-related death at 46 — and today, 13 years after his death, he remains salsa's tragic saint. (His cult, one suspects, will only grow when "El Cantante" hits theaters.) Fania will forever be defined by those hard-driving salsa records from the mid-70's, not least by the albums of its flagship band, the Fania All-Stars, which featured most of the label's biggest names. (Emusica is planning several Fania All-Star releases.) But the new reissues reveal the surprising breadth of Fania's catalog: it wasn't just a salsa label. The recordings include a remarkable album by the eccentric vocalist La Lupe, singing torchy boleros with string orchestra accompaniment; groove-oriented Latin jazz by the Cuban conga legend Mongo Santamaria; "Cuba y Puerto Rico Son," a superb 1966 collaboration between Tito Puente and a young Celia Cruz; and several very funky boogaloo and Latin soul releases from the middle and late 60's. The best of these is Joe Bataan's "Riot" (1968), whose cover photo of weapon-wielding Latin youth captures the growing militancy of the barrio in those turbulent years. One of the hallmarks of Fania's golden age is politics, the social-consciousness messages musicians brought to songs that had previously stuck to themes of romance and dancing. "It was revolution time," Mr. Harlow remembered. "It was Woodstock time. It was the Black Panthers. It was Vietnam. When Latin music got cut off from Cuba in the 1960's, New York musicians added that new kind of lyrical content. We would sing about love, we would sing about war, we would sing about protest." The pivotal figure was Rubén Blades, the singer-songwriter whose poetic lyrics carried forceful, often satirical messages about racism, social justice and cultural pride. "Siembra," Mr. Blades's 1978 collaboration with Mr. Colón, was a sweeping concept album with propulsive salsa tunes (and disco parodies) lampooning American materialism and calling for Latino unity, which for years stood as the top-selling Latin album of all time. Like nearly all Fania albums, "Siembra" was recorded in a Manhattan studio. Your local record store will probably shelve these CD's in the world music section with all the other non-Anglophone stuff, but salsa is homegrown American music, as much a part of the indigenous musical landscape as jazz or rock or hip-hop. At a moment when the country is convulsed by debate over the latest waves of Latin immigration, the Fania rereleases are reminders of the deep roots of Latinos here — the first Puerto Rican tradesmen arrived in New York in the 17th century — and of the profound role they have played in both shaping United States culture and exporting it back to points south. "Fania really led the way in spreading salsa throughout South America and the Caribbean," Professor Garcia said. Leading second- and third-generation salsa musicians have hailed from such places as Colombia and Venezuela, and it wasn't just Fania's music but also its messages that took root. The huge popularity throughout Latin America of politically trenchant albums like "Siembra," with its feisty calls for pan-Latin pride, is just one dramatic example of the ways that the Latin diaspora has spoken back to the homeland. Latin music has found a growing audience among gringos in the United States. But is the audience that embraced the Buena Vista Social Club's prerevolutionary Cuban son ready to discover some more Latin music, not nearly as genteel, from a lot closer to home? The sound should certainly be familiar to most American listeners. Fania's songwriters were inspired by American pop like Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," but the influence ran both ways: the sonic texture of Gaye's album, with its gently percolating congas, is audibly indebted to salsa. Fania's sound seeped into soul and classic rock, into Stevie Wonder and Curtis Mayfield, into Santana and even Led Zeppelin, whose album radio staple "Fool in the Rain" is a salsa pastiche. And no one who has lived in a city with a significant Latino population in the last four decades can have missed the festive music blasting from cars and open apartment windows on sultry summer evenings. To younger Latinos enamored of today's Fania equivalent, reggaetón, these old albums will doubtless sound old-fashioned. But music this rhythmically tough could never be dowdy. It's late-20th-century music ready to ignite 21st-century dance floors.

Jon Jang's father died in this dual airplane crash. The article is mostly about the crash and the response, but Jang is in there briefly discussing the effect on his family. An interesting story overall, and how it led to the modernization of air traffic control in the USA. It's a long feature story starting on page one of today's LA Times, with several photos. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ai...-home-headlines Crash Set a New Course The collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon 50 years ago led to an overhaul of the nation's antiquated air traffic control system. By Jennifer Oldham, Times Staff Writer June 3, 2006 On a day that would transform aviation history, fog hung over Los Angeles International Airport. But it did nothing to dampen the festive mood as passengers lined up eager to start their Fourth of July holiday. At one ticket counter, 64 checked in for Trans World Airlines Flight 2 to Kansas City, Mo. Next door, 53 registered for United Airlines' Chicago-bound Flight 718. The two sets of passengers probably saw each other as they walked breezily through the terminal and outside onto the tarmac, where they boarded the first-class-only flights on rolling staircases. At the top, flight attendants requested their names, took their hats, and pointed out smoking lounges and bathrooms with terry towels. The propeller-driven planes took off three minutes apart. The TWA Super Constellation, dubbed "Star of the Seine," flew northeast over the San Bernardino Mountains. United's flight plan took the DC-7, known as "Mainliner Vancouver," east over Palm Springs. Then they leveled off and flew on almost parallel tracks toward Arizona's Painted Desert, dodging scattered thunderstorms. No one knows if, as they approached the Grand Canyon, anyone aboard was aware that the two aircraft were creeping closer and closer together. It was 10:30 a.m. on June 30, 1956. At 21,000 feet, four miles above the world famous gorge, the DC-7, traveling at 469 feet-per-second, scraped over the Constellation, its left wing tip slicing through the Connie's fuselage and detaching its signature triple-fin tail. At 10:31 a.m., controllers received a radio transmission that was so garbled it would take weeks to decipher: "Salt Lake, United 718, ah, we're going in." The airliners plummeted into the desolate canyon 10 miles north of the Desert View outlook on the South Rim. The force of the impact drove parts of the Constellation 20 feet into the Precambrian granite, twisted silverware into the shape of pretzels, and fused a dime and a penny in a woman's change purse. All aboard both planes — 128 passengers and crew members — died. The spectacular midair collision was the worst commercial aviation accident at that point in the country's history. And for the flying public, it revealed a dangerously antiquated air traffic system. Advances in aircraft instrumentation after World War II allowed more pilots to fly in bad weather, even as bureaucrats struggled to figure out how to keep track of a burgeoning number of planes moving faster and carrying more passengers. At the dawn of the jet age, aviation experts had repeatedly warned lawmakers that a midair collision between two large, fully-loaded commercial aircraft was inevitable due to increasingly crowded skies and traffic control procedures that relied largely on radio communication rather than radar. After a plane left the airspace encircling a large city airport, radar tracking stopped; its crew was left to watch for other planes by looking out the windows. Aviation historians would later write that the effect of the Grand Canyon disaster was "as galvanic as if it had happened over Washington itself." Congress would allocate $810 million to buy navigation equipment and long-range radar, and begin a sweeping reorganization of the nation's fledgling aviation system. "The Federal Aviation Administration was created out of the ashes of that Grand Canyon crash," said Sid McGuirk, an associate professor of air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. As the aircraft burned in the canyon that morning where the roaring Colorado River met the sedate Little Colorado River, controllers radioed frantically in search of the two planes, neither of which had reported in. They wouldn't be found until dusk, when two brothers who operated an aviation sightseeing company, Palen and Henry Hudgin, flew over the wreckage in their tiny, fixed-wing craft. "When we saw the fuselage of the United plane it had not burned up yet, and was completely intact, including the pilot compartment," Henry Hudgin said in a recent interview with The Times, noting that the fuselage had become lodged in a 500-foot deep fissure on the side of a cliff. "We were both really surprised the next morning when we flew out there to see it was totally burned up." On July 1, federal investigators, TWA and United representatives, military units and hordes of reporters descended on the canyon. The rugged terrain "created the worst recovery conditions in the history of airline accidents," declared an article in the July 5, 1956, TWA employee newspaper, "Skyliner." Pilots made 76 trips into the gorge over the next 10 days in banana-shaped, twin-rotor helicopters. Years later, some recalled that dropping 7,000 feet from the rim to the river through turbulent, 120-degree air was more frightening than missions they later flew in Vietnam, said Dan Driskill, a Flagstaff, Ariz., paramedic who is writing a book about the crash. Meanwhile, climbers tried in vain to scale a 1,000-foot Redwall limestone cliff to reach the DC-7, which had rammed into a promontory on Chuar Butte halfway between the 6,394-foot mesa and the river. Wreckage was showered across the rocky slope and into the adjacent crevasse. Climbers didn't reach the United site until July 5, when they discovered a shelf above the wreck that was wide enough to support a helicopter. Boulder, Colo., climber Dave Lewis, then 20, was among the first to arrive. "I walked to the edge of the flat ground and I was suddenly staring at a steep gully packed with blackened wreckage and all surrounded by spectacular scenery," Lewis said in a recent interview. "It's indescribable if you've never seen a plane crash that burned. It's just chaos. How do you describe particular brands of chaos?" The TWA wreckage, about 1 1/2 miles south of the United site and 500 yards above the river on Temple Butte, was more accessible. For several days, investigators were reluctant to speculate about what caused the crash, until they found a mangled piece of the DC-7's left wing at the TWA site. Embedded in a tear on the wing was material from the Constellation's rear cabin ceiling. After collecting aircraft parts and hauling them out of the canyon, as well as tape recordings from air traffic control centers in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, investigators began piecing together what happened. At congressional hearings in Las Vegas a week after the collision, federal aviation officials testified that when the planes hit, the pilots were flying outside designated airways and several miles off course. A few minutes after TWA Flight 2 lifted off the LAX runway at 9:01 a.m., investigators said, Capt. Jack Gandy had asked for a change in altitude from 19,000 feet to 21,000 feet to avoid thunderstorms. Seeing on their radar that United Flight 718 was at 21,000 feet, Los Angeles controllers denied the request. A Salt Lake City controller radioed a colleague in Los Angeles "their courses cross and they are right together." After he was denied the altitude change, Gandy asked to fly 1,000 feet above the clouds. His request was granted, and he was told the United flight was in the area, but not its altitude. Gandy climbed to 21,000 feet. At the hearing, the Salt Lake controller testified he didn't warn the pilots about each other because they had left controlled airspace to fly more directly to their cross-country destinations and consequently he had no idea what routes they would follow. The public disclosure that so much of the nation's airspace was uncontrolled shocked a country confident after victories in two world wars and overtaken by Elvis mania, where efforts to build a federal highway system had dominated Congress' attention. At the time, editorial cartoons displayed newly signed highway bills next to airway plans covered with cobwebs. In early 1957, the Civil Aeronautics Board — a precursor to the National Transportation Safety Board — released a 25-page report that found the probable cause for the accident was that the "pilots did not see each other in time to avoid the collision." Investigators wrote: "It is not possible to determine why the pilots did not see each other." The evidence did suggest, they said, that "attempting to provide the passengers with a more scenic view of the Grand Canyon area" could have been a factor. The report emphasized that under air traffic rules at the time, the pilots had been required to separate themselves from other aircraft using a "see or be seen" principle. This was necessary because the nation lacked the controllers and equipment to track airplanes outside of designated routes. Since the 1930s, air traffic at high altitudes had been controlled by a rudimentary system based on radio communications. Pilots would periodically radio their heading, altitude and speed to their company's ground station, and the company would relay the information to air traffic controllers. The controllers would scribble the details for each flight on strips of paper and place them on a metal tray lined with horizontal slots. Each slot represented 1,000 feet of airspace — helping controllers visualize how to keep aircraft they could not see separated from one another. Aghast that the system was largely operated on such a primitive concept just two years before jets were set to make their long-awaited commercial debut, lawmakers ordered drastic upgrades. Many of the changes — including integrating the civil and military air traffic control systems, and ordering radar and other equipment to help controllers actually see each plane's location — had been proposed for years but failed to receive adequate funding. It took decades for federal officials to install enough equipment and build enough control centers to monitor all high-altitude traffic over the United States. By 1971, airspace above 18,000 feet was reserved for aircraft carrying transponders that were able to communicate a plane's flight number and location to radar installations on the ground. Word of the crash reached families of the victims slowly, as what began as a mystery of missing planes hardened into grim reality. Neil Davis' sister, Beth, 24, was one of two flight attendants on TWA Flight 2. When he learned of the crash, Davis drove all night from his home in Ogden, Utah, to TWA headquarters in Kansas City. Once there, George Levering, a TWA manager, told him: "There is no hope: everyone was killed. Your sister is gone." Beth Davis, one of five siblings in the tight-knit family from upstate New York, had been only a month away from leaving TWA to accept a Ford Foundation scholarship to study teaching at Cornell University in New York. "I went completely crazy," Davis recalled in a 1994 memoir he wrote about Beth. "I jumped up and ran out of the office and out of the building into the parking lot, not to my car or anywhere in particular, just away." In Washington, D.C., another Davis sister, Jayne Szaz, didn't realize Beth had been working on the Super Connie and was now missing until she received a call from another brother, Wayne. "I couldn't sleep I was so stunned," Szaz said. "When the morning came, I went home on the train — it took me nine hours to go from Washington to central New York state." After grieving with her parents and siblings over the death of the family's "emotional center" — Szaz took the first airplane ride of her life to attend a memorial for her sister in Flagstaff, where the remains of TWA Flight 2 passengers are buried. Some United passengers were laid to rest in a common grave at the Grand Canyon cemetery. The death of Whittier resident James Jang, a chemical engineer for Fluor Corp. also traveling on TWA Flight 2, sent his wife into a deep depression. She was hospitalized two years later in Belmont, Calif., where she received electric shock treatment. "My mother and my father got into an argument before he left," said Jon Jang, a San Francisco musician who was a little more than 2 years old when his father died. "She didn't want him to go. She never got over that — to leave in an argument." When he turned 39, Jon Jang requested letters from his dad's closest friends, who referred to him as "Jimmie," and described a disciplined, intelligent man whose "power of concentration was awesome." James Jang, a 5-foot, 2-inch former Boy Scout and amateur magician, also had a keen sense of humor: "On a dare, [he] asked a 6-foot blond at a nightclub to dance with him — she did," wrote his childhood friend Eddy Way. The accident hit TWA employees particularly hard. They lost 17 colleagues flying as both passengers and crew, including Tom Ashton, an industrial relations supervisor who had recently posed as one of the Andrews Sisters for a company skit. Also on board was Joe Kite, an assistant to the construction director, Kite's pregnant wife and his two daughters. When employees flipped their company calendars to July on the day after the accident, they found a picture of the Grand Canyon. ------------ Fifty years later, the crash still scars the Grand Canyon. Wreckage remains scattered on the near-vertical walls of Chuar and Temple buttes, the treacherous canyon so forbidding in 1956 that investigators stayed just long enough to collect the human remains and several aircraft parts. To prevent looting, the National Park Service closed the sites for 20 years. In 1976, park rangers asked the airlines to remove several large pieces, saying tourists "may consider the visible aircraft remains as blight on the natural scenic beauty of the Grand Canyon." Then they reopened the area. Even so, flash floods that follow summer monsoons continually unearth pieces of wreckage. By some accounts, 40% of the Super Connie remains, along with 85% of the DC-7. At the TWA site in 1990, hiker Mike McComb found a tan purse containing identification, a TWA schedule, a stamp book, a scarf and several sticks of gum. "It was kind of a time capsule," said McComb, a pilot who has made the strenuous 50-mile journey to the site several times and flies tourists over it daily. "As I approached the TWA site, there were little teardrops of melted aluminum that had splashed on the canyon," said Driskill, the Flagstaff paramedic, of a recent hike to Temple Butte. "Then I saw solid puddles of melted aluminum spilled down rocks. There were big chunks of aircraft aluminum — bigger than a person — buried under boulders." Family members remain similarly marked by that day. "The world should benefit in some way from the untimely loss of a worthy person; there should be a trade-off," Jayne Szaz wrote of her sister Beth. "But search as we might, we could find no such meaning in Beth's death." Szaz has painstakingly collected pictures of Davis and letters she wrote various family members and placed them in a three-ring binder. Included are slides Davis took during her three years at TWA. There are scenic spots in Germany and Italy, and a picture of the Grand Canyon, which Davis shot from an airplane window several months before her death. "Being the studious person that Beth was," her brother Neil wrote, "she had annotated almost every picture and slide…. On this particular one of the gaping canyon below, she had written: 'What a place to die!' " * (INFOBOX BELOW) Ill-fated flight paths A midair collision over the Grand Canyon in 1956 killed 128 people and sparked air traffic reforms. Controllers knew the planes would pass near each other, but the crash occurred when pilots veered off course, dodging storms and possibly trying to give passengers a better view of the canyon. Worst airline crashes over the U.S. Deaths Date Location Airline 273 May 25, 1979 Chicago American 265 Nov. 12, 2001 Belle Harbor, Queens, N.Y. American 230 July 17, 1996 Off East Moriches, N.Y. TWA 156 Aug. 16. 1987 Romulus, Mich. Northwest 135 Aug. 2, 1985 Dallas-Ft. Worth Delta 134 Dec. 16, 1960 Staten Island/Brooklyn, N.Y. United/TWA 132 Sept. 8, 1994 Aliquippa, Pa. USAir 128 June 30, 1956 Grand Canyon, Ariz. United/TWA Note: Does not include deliberate deaths in terrorist attack at World Trade Center. Sources: Air Disaster Volume 4, The Propeller Era; PlaneCrashInfo.com; Air Transport Assn.; ESRI; TeleAtlas; USGS

Not sure what thread to put this in, and it's dealing with shellac, not vinyl, but I thought I'd try here. I'm looking for a working 78 player in Southern California, ideally one from the 1930s or 1940s (certainly one that looks old-time) that I might film for an inset shot for the documentary that I'm doing on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music? Ideally for no money. I even have the 78s. Thanks! Please contact me directly by PM or the email below. Adam -- Adam Hyman Co-producer The Harry Smith Project amleon13@earthlink.net

Might be your best shot at playing with Braxton. Seriously, though, with 100 tubas there, I'm not sure if actually knowing how to play one would be necessary... Heck, I saw 100 guitarists at Disney Hall in March. Braxton is late to the game; Branca beat him to it.

I thought I had heard that Philly had left the United States. Guess this confirms it.

Hi all, Went to a show of "Found Footage" films at the UCLA Hammer Museum the other night. One film is worth seeking out, and probably isn't impossible to find. The link is no longer on the Hammer Museum webiste, but I'll cut & paste the description below. It was a Christian show broadcast on CBS, the pilot for a series that would investigate the three archtypical personalities of the Delinquent, the Hipster, and Square. It's not on iMdb. "Jazz is the music of your generation" says the host to the youth who are presumably watching. And the band, playing background throughout, and a featured full song at one point, is the Max Roach Quintet with Booker Little on trumpet, George Coleman on tenor, Ray Draper on tuba, and Art Davis on bass, well shot, in good sound. It's in the collection of Craig Baldwin in the Bay Area. Here's a link to the Other Cinema screening of it in 2001 - look at the 2/17 show. http://www.othercinema.com/spring2001.html Here's is the event from last week At the Hammer Museum > Thursday, May 25, 2006 > 7pm > Free! > Thrift Store Movies II > Hammer Museum > 10899 Wilshire Blvd > Westwood > > For the second year, The Hammer Museum and UCLA Department of Art welcome LA > Weekly art critic Doug Harvey and other archivists of found media presenting a > selection of films, videos, and slides rescued from the obscurity of thrift > stores, swap meets, and dumpsters. The evening includes > > ` a special version of Charles Phoenix’s God Bless Americana slideshow, > featuring estate sale vacation images from the fabulous bygone era of > 1950’s Southern California cultural ascendancy > > ` Noel Lawrence of San Francisco’s legendary Other Cinema presenting works > from his and Craig Baldwin’s archives including a post-apocalyptic 80’s > Christian rock video, as well as excerpts from their DVD releases of recovered > media. > > - A medley of hotdog related shorts including a discofied trip through an > Oscar Mayer wiener factory > > - Global A (Johannes and Lars Auvinen)’s presentation on the work of tragic > 60’s Canadian found footage (and soundtrack) collage filmmaker Arthur Lipsett > > - A continuous courtyard screening of Glenn Bach’s random recombinant > educational filmstrip collage “Gentle Words Open Iron Gates” > > - excerpts from recent and upcoming programs by the Coalition for Cinematic > Conservation and Preservation at the The Echo Park Film Center including 70’s > newscast footage of San Diego apartment fires (with live musical accompaniment > by the cult band Fireworks), vintage Asian and Indian music videos, and the > classic “ABC of Sex Education for Trainables”

My first CD was The Waterboy's - Fisherman's Blues. I thought I bought it in 86 or 87, but I just looked at it (still have it of course) and teh date on it is 88. I didn't own a CD player until late 89 or 90, but I bought that CD in 88 and transferred it to cassette using a friend's CD player. I do remember that a few other early ones were the Jimi Hendrix Live at Winterland shown earlier, Mano Negra - Puta's Fever; Les Negresses Vertes - Mlah.

That's the one I was thinking about, and obviously remembering incorrectly (as I don't own it).

Good, so finally a nice new remastering of these. And that 2 disc Brunswick set as well? That would be great!

What current CD issues cover any of this material?

Stone's biggest problem is that he is hamfisted. He's full of ideas, and I think often good ones for finding appropriate visual strategies for his topics. But then he doesn't know how or when to stop, and he just hammers you his his point. I think his cinematography is great, generally, but a lot of that credit also goes to Robert Richardson.

Don't they say this kind of thing about every one of their albums? I seem to remember Yield and the one that came after it being praised as "a return to form", etc etc. I still think the best album they did was MirrorBall! It's like the Rolling Stones. Every new album is somehow their "best in 25 years."