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Who's on vibes? Warren Wolf? Should I have heard of him? Anyway I thought I would look up McBride and see if he is gigging locally. It turns out that he is in Chicago next week with Sting, but that the rest of the spring/summer he is touring with Inside Straight -- but not in Chicago. Rats.

Futurama got to them first. And got them to rap over the Theme Song!

Believe it or not, I was somewhat randomly listening to pop music on my iPod and decided to play Castaways and Cutouts by the Decemberists. I like them but hardly have their songs memorized. "A Cautionary Tale" popped up, and I almost fell out of my chair. Anyway, this is certainly one of the more twisted songs one might play on Mother's Day (along with Pink Floyd's "Mother" I suppose). Happy Mother's Day, y'all. I don't want to mess with the lyric database, but I think it is actually "thirty dollars" not "dirty dollars."

I went to see the CSO last night. If I had known how it would turn out, I would have been better off staying at home. I've known for a long time that the seats get more uncomfortable the higher you go, but now the ones in the upper balcony are sheer agony for me to sit in (something about a slightly unusual angle and being a bit too low to the ground and being too narrow). So I will definitely keep this in mind before buying tickets in the future. If I recall, there are several levels above this (the super gallery?), and those are even more narrow and the stairs have a terrible pitch, but the seats might be higher off the ground. The conductor was Bernard Haitink. He is looking frail now. He was walking with a cane and sat in a chair to conduct (he did not do this last year, so if you are hoping to hear him conduct you might want to move that up on the agenda). The first piece was a short piece by Purcell, which was ok. The next was Britten's Illuminations sung by Ian Bostrich. I'm not a huge fan of this piece. I generally dislike classical song cycles or lieder or opera (or most jazz vocals for that matter). I suppose it comes down to disliking pieces where meaning is impinged upon by treating the voice as an instrument. Anyway, the problem this time was really with Ian Bostrich. He's got quite a career going on across the Atlantic. He certainly has the look of the Romantic poet, but then he spent half his time singing down at his feet (I guess because he looked cooler that way)! Sorry, we can barely hear you in the cheap seats. I was thoroughly disenchanted. Anyway, I had primarily gone for Shostakovich's Symphony 15. I was hoping that this would save the night. I've really enjoyed hearing some of his symphonies, but this wasn't one of them. Haitink took the middle movements at a truly glacial pace, and the symphony didn't benefit from it. It just seems too slight when really stretched out and you have to pay such close attention to each element. I was exhausted and basically bored when it finally ended. So it was kind of a bust all the way around, sorry to say.

As far as I can tell, if you do the most minimal of rewrites, you can even post WashPost and NYT stories. Maybe not. Maybe interviews are treated differently, though I've certain seen stories that appear to recycle another paper's interview. It's not a legal issue the newspapers have pushed so far, since the "wrong ruling" would basically shut them all out of a story once someone published a "scoop." Not as much of an issue now that virtually all cities are going to be one-paper (or no paper) towns before long.

Except that NYTimes already tried that and it went over like a lead zeppelin. Part of the problem is for basic news, google can grab it and make minor rewrites and post it. The "news" isn't something you can copyright. That's 85-90% of the market for newspapers. The number of people who actually care enough to read the columnists is small indeed, and most of the are the most networked people and if you can't get it free, they will simply grab it from Huffington Post or Daily Kos but not here any longer (now that we generally don't post full articles -- good call by the way since it just ruined flow). For newspapers, it really is the genie out of the bottle. People who bother to pay for Kindle subscriptions are basically the same people that put a dollar in the beggarman's cup. On top of everything, I actually grab tons of newspaper clippings from online sources since I occasionally use them (referenced properly) in academic articles. Well, there are too many restrictions on the Kindle content that I don't want to bother with it. Maybe someday they will pass DRMA III and force people to change their ways, but until then it will be free and much more convenient to go on-line. So I just don't see Kindle saving the newspaper/magazine industry.

Yeah, I've seen one or two on the train. I briefly thought about one, but the pricing was absolutely ridiculous. It wasn't so outrageous for books, but for newspapers and journals (particularly where this is already on-line for free). I don't think enough people are going to switch to Kindle and then agree to sign up for downloads of the NYT to make a difference.

I can't speak to your iPhone apps, but, assuming your music is on your computer, they would transfer to a new iPod. Though if you had a fatal hard drive error and lost your iPod, I think you are out of luck. Certainly one thing I like about emusic is how easy it is to download everything all over again. A bit off the subject, but I just found out that a guy I went to high school with and was reasonably good friends with (at the time) did a lot of the work for the operating system that drives the iPod.

It's a classic alright. Still frustrating that they don't have that killer instinct. How many times could they have put this one away? And Kirk better give Rose a car or something so that he didn't end up goat of the game. Back to Boston. We'll be seeing some of these players with oxygen masks in game 7, since they've used everything up.

A few items of interest regarding Charles Simic. He has a new (2008) collection called That Little Something. I enjoyed it. I thought the 1st and 3rd sections were strongest. The book in that funny phase when it is starting to get pulped and there are lots of very cheap copies at the on-line stores (the number of books you can get for a penny (plus shipping) nowadays is just astonishing). Also, BBC is doing a series on poet laureates. Not familiar with most of them, but this is a short segment featuring Simic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00k107b It will be available for about 5 more days.

The loss was super-frustrating (and sorry Rondo totally deserved a flagrant at the end of the game there), but you could say the same thing about the Celtics wrapping up the series. Except for game 3, these all have been nail biters. Pretty great basketball series, even though I think the Celtics will prevail. Sadly, poor coaching probably did cause the losses in games 2 and 5. Vinny is getting better, but he still has so much to learn.

Looks like he swallowed the Yellow Submarine, and it's backing up on him. Never thought of Freddie as a Blue (Note) Meanie.

Ok, just picked up a copy of #34 The Jazz Issue. Looks interesting. Perhaps of greatest interest is the backstory behind the LP Ululation. Can an album be a cult classic if almost no one has ever heard about it? This LP and a follow-up recorded John Lee Krasnow's compositions. Sounds like he was an amateur musician, but one who had some connections because he worked for Columbia. Not familiar with the other musicians on the sessions, though I've at least heard of Valery Ponomarev (tr). Anyway, the only thing that rescued this from oblivion is that it served as the soundtrack to a skateboard film called A Visual Sound. THe rest of the story is also intriguing, but I won't spoil it. Waxpoetics has decided to reissue Ululation on vinyl and digital download. I might download it to see if the album rates the fuss.

Most of the box sets are not a great deal, though the Basie Decca set was cheaper on yourmusic than anywhere else I had looked. Admittedly I wasn't a member of BMG so didn't look there.

A while since I read one and think I'm two behind, but the first 5 or six are excellent. Takes you to parts of the pre-War/WWII world you don't usually think about (e.g. the Balkans). 30 years ago these would have been ripe for BBC serialisation. Wait, who's on Furst?

Don't know about the Bulls. The fact that they didn't fold in game 4 shows they have a fair bit of heart. Real question is how much time off before game 5. Magic Johnson was saying that the Celtics starters might be so exhausted from the Double OT game that the youngsters may steal it away. His overall prediction was the Celtics, but if the Bulls do somehow beat the Celtics at home in game 5, they will take the series. Sounds about right to me. While the Bulls have been very inconsistent this year, this is already better than anyone expected, so there's a sense of being on the right track (after many wrong starts), unlike Detroit which is clearly on the decline. Agree they definitely need to shake the team up.

Not that familiar with Roney, but I do have Munchin' and Crunchin'. These are two CDs in the hard-bop vein that came out in the early '90s. For better and worse, they sound exactly like they could have been cut 30+ years before.

I thought this collection definitely had its moments, but felt that her novel The Namesake was almost a quantum leap above this in terms of the themes and characters. So if you like Interpreter, you will definitely like The Namesake. She has a new novel, which I haven't gotten yet, but will get around to fairly soon.

Well inspired by picking up Hitchcock's Masterpiece Collection, I went and tried to do some digging through his US releases. It appears as though you can get virtually all of his films with no overlap if you get: The Masterpiece Collection Signature Collection Premiere Collection Ultimate Hitchcock Collection (St. Clair) -- these are the public domain films and this appears to be the best of many competing editions There are a few that are not included in any of these, most notably Murder! and To Catch a Thief. I actually had little Hitchcock on DVD, a bit of overlap with the Masterpiece Collection and a bit with Signature Collection but that's it. My question is that early reviews of the Premiere Collection indicate the quality control was very, very low in the beginning and lots of people had to keep returning sets. The more recent comments may suggest this has been worked out. So I am wondering if anyone does have this set, and was it problem free or did you have to return several times? Thanks in advance. Eric

What a farce. Seriously. This decision is a complete joke. Somewhere Walt Disney is laughing his ass off. In this case, it ain't Disney, it's The Beatles. Everyone knew this was coming when The Beatles approached public domain. Anyone who thought otherwise was kidding themselves. Their recordings generate millions of dollars. Millions of dollars get politicians attention. Right, so copyright gets extended again -- almost completely because of Disney and the Beatles. The public would be so much better off if they just went ahead and put an infinite extension on those two monoliths (who do keep their works in print it must be said) so that the 95% or so of the uneconomical and ignored could go into PD as originally intended.

You mean New Tet? I've got that. Pretty nice. There's a piece where he explicitly draws on Verdi, and that's pretty cool. I was lucky enough to see him touring in support of this CD.

High Energy is already sold out at DG (didn't check other venues yet).

Great news, Sal! Now if some better gigs come along, maybe we can get Mark back too.

My wife and I are going to this at the end of May. I do wish it was a real Tap performance, but this should be fun.

Not you specifically, but these discussions almost always get into a deep rut. There is no question it is a catch-22 as far as whether US majors will continue to reissue music that can be legally "ripped off" overseas. However, I don't feel any major compunction against PD releases (particularly when I am overseas) for the reason that the ground rules at the time they were recorded was 50 year copyright (indeed it might only have been 35) and everyone made their recording decisions on the basis that they would have to recover costs within that window. As far as the artists, most of them aren't going to see money from reissues one way or the other because of the bad contracts they signed (although obviously Blue Note and Nessa are far better than most), so locking things up and never reissuing them seems abusive but in a different way from PD releases.