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My impression is that almost all of Netflix's deals expire within a year, and then their streaming choices will get worse, so I don't think that's going to go over too well...

40 Acres & A Burro" by Arturo O'Farrill to go alongside recent acquistions of Ninety Miles by David Sanchez, Stefon Harris and Christian Scott (CD/DVD) and a download-only of Blueprints by Chicago Afro Latin Jazz Ensemble (saw CALJE last night at the Green Mill -- they were pretty good and a few songs were excellente!)

I guess my experience with brick and mortar is mixed. I do miss the days of the mid-sized shops that specialized in used CDs -- four or so around Lincoln Park/Lakeview. But then my experience at the Chicago shops that did not specialize in jazz and mixed new and used CDs (Dr. Wax and Reckless) has been decidedly mixed with clerks playing truly horrid music at ear-shattering volumes and being just general shits to deal with (making you wait 10 minutes before deigning to answer a 5 second question). Of course, not every clerk was this bad, but many were. Sadly, the store with the worst track record (in my opinion) -- Reckless -- is basically the sole survivor here in Chicago. In the jazz specialist category, I personally much prefer dealing with the folks at Dusty Groove than Jazz Record Mart. But if I wasn't trying to sell off physical product, I would probably never set foot in a brick and mortar again -- at least certainly not one that was primarily focused on rock/pop with a small jazz section.

Starting to sound like something I would order. Just when you think you're out, they drag you right back in...

Are they confiscating your library card? Well, I have lost (and had to replace) more than my share of books. But actually I am moving to Vancouver in just under two weeks.

I.B. Singer's Satan in Goray His first novel, set in 1649. Just starting Uzma Khan's The Geometry of God. Probably the last book I'll check out from the Chicago library.

I have Deep Dark Blue Centre (ever since Whatmusic (re)issued it on CD) and a few of his other works on download (eMusic had most of them at one point). Can't say that I studied them extensively (just more of a casual listener), but I did like what I heard, esp. DDBC. RIP.

You get the lowest priced advertised between the time you order and the official release. If a week or so after release, it drops another $10, you don't get that back. I ordered with Amazon.co.uk, though it looks like maybe I would have been a bit better off to go with Amazon.com...

While this may be the case for the major eBay users using Paypal, I do wonder about Amazon sellers. I've been reasonably successful selling CDs there, but only relative to the pittance you get from used CDs stores. In no more than 3 or 4 cases would I consider this activity to have generated any capital gains, as against dozens of transactions that were net losses, and I suspect if they start chasing around people essentially conducting garage sales on-line and then asking them to provide receipts for all these items will not prove very popular. Well, I am far below this $20,000 threshold, so I won't worry about it for the moment...

I should have noted "Berryman" is from Opening the Hand (1983), while this poem is from Merwin's 1988 collection The Rain in the Trees: Waking to the Rain The Night of my birthday I woke from a dream of harmony suddenly hearing an old man not my father I said but it was my father grasping my name as he fell on the stone steps outside just under the window in the rain I do not know how many times he may have called before I woke I was lying in my parents’ room in the empty house both of them dead that year and the rain was falling all around me the only sound Interestingly, this is on-line at something called the Merwin Conservancy: http://www.merwinconservancy.org/tag/waking-to-the-rain/ which seems to be a mix of nature conservancy, poet commune and on-line hang-out.

I think I had said I would include something of the newer poems out of Merwin's Migration, which I just picked up. This one is about John Berryman (author of the brilliant The Dream Songs) and apparently a bit of a mentor to Merwin. I don't know if the audio here still works (I couldn't get it to): Berryman on-line I won't quote the whole thing (you can follow the link for that), but I did like Berryman's advice to Merwin, which ends the poem:

Every now and then I forget this thread, and I'm the one who started it! I'll try to look up Dread. Sounds interesting if more than a little depressing. Anyway, these are the first two stanzas of W. H. Auden's Atlantis: The poem is much on my mind these days, since it ends this play called Strangers by Ninaz Khodaiji. I've set up a staged reading of Strangers next week in Chicago, and I had to go off and write to get official permission from Curtis Brown to include the entire poem as part of the performance. Which is a good example of why it is rarely worth including others' work as an element of your work. Too many hurdles in today's world, though the people at Curtis Brown were very reasonable.

I still think it is a terrible decision, and there is nothing that to suggest that when the US extends copyright again (which it surely will) the EU won't eventually go along. But being retroactive would have made it even more problematic.

No disrespect to anyone involved, but I really felt bait-and-switched at this year's festival. I really expected Randy Weston to be involved in most of Thurs. night's performance. Instead, there was a group of college students, then the Chicago Jazz Ensemble with their regular pianist. And it wasn't until the end of the concert that Randy Weston came on. He played a short solo number, then he and his group and the CJE played 3 numbers -- somewhere around 30-45 minutes. It was good, but I really was expecting more. I don't even know that I would say this qualified as a Randy Weston concert, given how the focus was on big band arrangements. Then tonight I had a number of other obligations, but I thought I would stop by and see David Sanchez with Stefon Harris. Well, this time, David started with his quartet and did a fine but not thrilling number that lasted about 15 minutes. Then he launched into Cultural Survival, but he still didn't bring out Stefon (I'm sure he could have learned the piece). I figured it would be another 10-15 minutes, and Stefon might get to sit in the last 20 minutes or so, but I simply had to leave at that point. So I was pretty disappointed, all in all. For me this year was a huge let down, and this probably is the last time I'll even be able to go. C'est la vie, I guess. Edit: Howard Reich certainly makes it sound like Stefon Harris was playing on Cultural Survival -- and he may have entered mid-way through, but he sure didn't start the piece. Just a little bit reminiscent of the critic phoning it in...

Respond to the call. A lovely set! Everyone is ON. I'm almost certain I will. Main issue is whether I go the dl route (much cheaper on Amazon and I am very tired of hauling plastic around the country) or get the booklet and photos that come with the physical product. If anyone has dl'ed it, let me know the bitrate. Thanks. \ For that matter, if this set is ever completely or partially available as MP3s, I might dl some of the bonus material, but the rest I already have.

You sound like a man trying hard to convince himself not to do something he'll regret later. But that he knows he'll do anyway. I have essentially everything, except for the bonus material on Disc 5, and there is no appeal at all for me for this set. Don't have to talk myself down or nothing. Now the Jazz at the Hollywood Bowl set on the other hand seems to be calling my name...

I am terrible, terrible with song names, even standards that I probably "should know." I was just in the airport late at night and they were playing some jazz, and I was having a lot of trouble placing it. Suddenly I realized it was indeed Monk, and one of the more famous ones -- possibly Crepuscule with Nellie or Rythm-a-Ning -- but I wasn't sure which. Very frustrating. Still, the music was nice and a lot better than standard airport fare.

And if you still haven't had enough Vivaldi, you can get this set: http://www.amazon.com/Vivaldi-Giardino-Armonico-Concertos-Chambre/dp/B000050G5M/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top Love this review:

It varies. If you are a high net-worth individual, you can essentially buy a Canadian passport for a $800K interest-free loan. Obviously, anyone in this category isn't that worried about health care access. Here is the starting point: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/index.asp The best option is to get a job offer in a skilled worker category*; second-best is to go through the skilled worker lottery. A somewhat roundabout way to do it is to get a 2-year Master's degree (or a PhD is better) in a Canadian university. Then in several (most?) provinces, you can apply to stay on. It is important to realize that immigration policy does vary a bit by province/territory and it may be easier to get into the more rural areas. * Within this, there are certain professional categories that are considered NAFTA-waiver categories and in these cases, the employer does not need to show they did a broad search and there were no Canadians qualified for the positions, which used to be a bit of a sticking point. This is essentially the reason I qualify...

In my experience many people who have little or no experience of jazz have heard of Miles Davis - he's a visual icon as well as a musical one. Coltrane may loom large amongst those familiar with jazz and was a name those of us outside the jazz world had heard of 40 years ago but I don't think he's nearly as well known today. ... I think the other issue is that I wouldn't say Coltrane has been done to death to quite the same extent as Miles. There was no absolutely complete box set (in a saxophone case, natch) a few months prior to this. I may be wrong, but aside from the original Impulse releases (nearly all of which are in print) and some compilations like the Impulse Story and best-ofs, this is the first time around for Impulse box sets for some of the material (the later albums). It is true that The Classic Quartet: Complete Impulse box set covered the earlier albums, making this more like the second go-around. But still this strikes me as different from the many, many remasterings and repackagings of the Davis Columbia material.

Yes, there is roughly a 3 month waiting period, but there is very cheap private insurance, as you say. I was thinking of the bigger picture. And indeed some procedures are not covered, nor is dental (in some provinces), so there is supplemental insurance.

Talk about a gift from the gods...

If you move there legally, i.e. through the immigration process. I'm just about to do that, though I am not moving primarily for the health care.

So I have been making pretty good progress in going through some books on my read-one-time-only-then-discard. However, for better or worse, I've just started Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh, and it may be one I end up keeping, totally defeating the purpose of the stack. Oh well. The opening is pretty strong, and I'm enjoying it. I have read The Best of Crank and a few others than were not particularly memorable. Somewhat inspired by the discussion of Levine becoming the Poet Laureate, I did pick up W.S. Merwin's Migration, which is a major expansion of his previous Selected Poems (around 200 pages longer and covers 6 or so collections that came out since Selected Poems). I saw it at Borders when lit. fic. was 25% off, but thought it too expensive. I was very surprised when it was still there at 50%, so I picked it up. There are certainly some good poems from the 80s and 90s (and maybe I will post one in the poetry thread) but in general he is working in a much longer form (2-3 page poems) that just seem off somehow and certainly not as meaningful/impacting as his shorter earlier poems. Well, I guess that's just the way it goes.

Ah yes, Hooked on Classics ... Which is probably just an ancestor to this LP: To be fair, one of my favorite LPs from my Dad's collection was some kind of reworked Scarlatti session -- not quite rock but certainly not an accurate period piece. It had these two serving wenches on the cover. It looked a fair bit like this "Love Scarlatti" LP but it was some other album. Wonder if I'll ever track that down.