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Not true. No one has to ACCEPT anything. I have no intention of watching or paying any attention to the reboot. The new Bond series is dead to me.

Well, it is pretty clear from the plot of CR that this was an early Bond, sort of learning the ropes, and it was a prequel to the other movies. I think Ebert has been fair enough to some movies ripped from the comics (Batman, Ironman, Hellboy I think) but on the whole he doesn't have a lot of use for the comic book medium. It's a personal thing, but I have 0 interest in a rebooted Bond and I refuse to watch any of them. That's not the Bond I grew up with and enjoy, and I would rather not see any more rather than see a gritty Bond.

Oh, I'm sure they're selling. Probably will also be a common item in the pawn shops in the not so distant future. Not sure about that. Pawn shops only take things with some resale value. I'm a big Obama fan, but his face is going to be everywhere on everything for such a long time that I can't see anyone wanting one of these coins after the first initial rush.

As it turns out, that was the only story in the collection I enjoyed. Oh well. I am trying to clear out my shelves (and will be giving away books soon for just the price of postage, so keep an eye peeled). This generally means I will read things with a high probability of disappointing me, since I read the books I am fairly sure I will enjoy right away. Currently am mostly through Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. It's an interesting way of getting transported into the world of Jacob Riis, and is certainly a corrective to Horatio Alger, though Crane goes too far the other way in coming up with hideous lumpen-proletariat figures. I do like his Civil War stories better, and though "A Mystery of Heroism" was not bad. Also, the library finally came up with a copy of "Oscar Wao," so that will be the next thing I read.

Believe me, this is nothing new. Togo and a few other islands made a regular habit of issuing Elvis stamps and the like. We have the decency to issue our tacky Elvis stamps 10 years after the person dies. I think what is different is the cheesy ads from the back pages of magazines (collectible thimbles, plates, coins, etc.) have spread to the cable TV, and it is annoying as it is a bit harder to switch off (we don't TiVo or anything). Interesting point is that in the UK, the Daily Mail runs weird collectible stuff about the Royals in the first few pages. The only one of these that just turned my stomach was the 9-11 Collectible silver plated 10 dollar bill or something (oh that's right it was $20 -- 9 + 11 = 20 -- clever). That was grossly offensive. I don't really have a problem with the Obama coins. It is tacky, but I've got three Obama t-shirts and will probably get the Obama DVD that the Sun-Times is putting out. So I don't feel I am that much better than the coin collectors; I just have slightly better taste.

This set, called Waiting for a Miracle, is on eMusic. It's a good place to start for a sampling of Cockburn, but avoid it if you hate compilations. Another interesting note is that most of his early albums were remastered a bit with new tracks tacked onto the end. Emusic has these versions. I doubt the remastering will shine through at mp3 quality , but the extra tracks may be new to some fans.

I was wondering about that, though I have to say if the impressive thing is that Klook is playing everything with brushes, then flips them around and plays the ends, is that really any "better" than just playing with regular sticks? Well, if anyone has a chance to listen to the album, they can weigh in.

I don't have that many of his albums per se, but I have two greatest hits CDs (including a somewhat rarer 2 CD set that was primarily for the Canadian market). My favorite songs are Coldest Night of the Year, Lovers in a Dangerous Time, Night Train and Last Night of the World. Probably run through his folder on my iPod 2-3 times a month (along with Suzanne Vega).

This isn't the most profound question, but is it possible for a drummer using only brushes to sound like he has regular drum sticks? I was listening to Seeds by the Sahib Shihab Qunitet, and the liner notes writer says that Klook is using brushes on the entire LP. Well, that's not what my ears are telling me (esp. on the final track), but I've been wrong before. Nice album either way.

The Melting Pot and Other Subversive Stories by Lynne Schwartz Not as good as I had hoped. The one where this down-on-their-luck family crashes the CBS studio in Manhattan and ends up living in "The Jeffersons" stage set was not particularly clever or "subversive." On the other hand "What I Did for Love" is a good bittersweet (70% bitter, 30% sweet) story. The best story in the collection so far.

Right. Made it to the swimming pool again last night. Am aiming for twice a week and see how it goes. The doctor said he would check again about the stationary bike in six weeks, so fingers crossed.

Well, given that the US is turning a new leaf, I figure I might as well start. I will try for a set of reasonable resolutions. For instance, I will not resolve to be more patient with people. That isn't going to happen. I may, however, be able to be more patient with my children when they interrupt me when I am working on the home computer. Most of the time it isn't really that important. So this is probably not "achievable" but I can try to remind myself of the bigger picture before getting cross with them. It's my most important resolution. Second, to paraphrase something written about Nelson Algren, he was an A+ beginner of projects and a D+ finisher of them. I'm probably more like an A beginner and a B-/C+ finisher, but I want to improve that. The first is to say no to more extra projects, and indeed I did turn down two offers to work on conference papers. Related to this is re-prioritizing and sticking to things more. My two main goals for 2009 are to finish a play I've started and to finish two chapters for a book (there actually is interest from an academic publisher but they wanted to see these sample chapters). Third, I need to get back in better shape. I'm really hindered in that I have a nagging foot injury that rules out jogging and even stationary biking. But the doctor recently cleared me to swim, so I did that last Tues. and plan to go again tonight. We'll see how well this goes. There are other things I want to happen in 2009, and I am working on them, but they aren't really resolutions per se, so I'll just skip over them for now. Anyone else want to start early?

The Eiffel Tower isn't useless architecture. It is used as a radio/television broadcasting attennae, covering metropolitan Paris (the same is true of the CN Tower in Toronto and presumably Seattle's Space Needle).

Well, the only way to find out is to contact him. I would be awfully surprised if the university expected Chambers to be exclusive, i.e. no one could arrange for lessons on the side, so long as unversity students had the first bite of the apple, as it were.

I have trouble seeing this, mostly because people have simply refused to pay for on-line content with a handful of exceptions. Far more troubling is that advertisements make up the vast majority of newspaper revenue (not subscribers). And to date, the revenue from on-line advertising is puny in comparison to the revenues these papers are used to getting from advertisers. And whole categories of advertising are migrating to craigslist where it is essentially free. I just don't think there is going to be some sudden sea change where the advertising revenue springs back to pre-internet levels, so I don't see how papers are ever going to be hire again in significant numbers. And this goes back to the sea change in people -- people just do not pay for stuff on-line and feel they have a right to free content, and the younger generation (Gen Y/Z) is even worse than Gen X. It's very hard to see how the genie will go back in the bottle for an awful lot of content-based industries, newspapers included.

Not sure if this should go here or elsewhere. Anyway, after listening to some Bud Powell on BN and Verve, I decided to break out Dexter's Our Man in Paris. So the story goes that Dexter had a handful of original tunes that he was going to record, assuming that Kenny Drew was the pianist, but they switched to standards when Powell filled in. Was there any word on whether Dexter eventually got around to recording his compositions (and what they were)? Enquiring minds want to know. One Flight Up seems to be the follow-up album with Drew on piano, but the original LP at any rate doesn't have any Gordon compositions. I suppose they might well have turned up on Steeplechase if at all.

Some musing on a couple of poets. I have a list of books that caught my eye from the Guardian books section (I don't read through this as much now that I only get it electronically) and slowly have been working my way through. Anyway, one of them was a book of poetry by Tobias Hill: Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow. He has a good eye for detail and generally writes on urban themes, which I appreciate. At the same time, I look at his first two books of poetry and see a fair bit of repetition and some lazy writing. I see a poet whose early work was not dissimilar to my early work. But he has gotten some major breaks (and is almost the flavour of the month as far as UK poets go) -- but of course he also worked in the trenches to make his own luck to a certain extent. What I find interesting and perhaps heartening is that there is a significant improvement from his first collections to Nocturne. The central poem is a 12-part invocation to London (one for each month) that I think is quite good. I never wanted the life of an interrant poet, but I do occasionally wonder how well I would have written if I had really tried to make a career of it. (And sometimes the big breaks don't lead anywhere. I had a friend in college who won the Hopwood award for short stories four years running -- basically unheard of -- but as far as I can tell, he has vanished off the grid.) Ultimately, taste is so subjective, particularly with regards to poetry. I think there is slightly more agreement over what makes a good or bad novel (though still not a lot of agreement). This leads me to Louise Gluck. She just came through Chicago and was reading her new work from a forthcoming collection. So this is definitely hot off the presses. But I was not interested in the subject matter (small town life from her childhood), and the writing was so plain that it was essentially as if she were reading prose poem after prose poem. This might be a case where the poems work better on the page than read aloud. I decided to check out some of her books anyway. I am pretty sure that a long time ago I read her The Wild Iris, which won the Pulitzer, and I wasn't that gripped with it. I'm reading it again and still don't see what the big deal is. On the other hand, I'm finding her collection Meadowlands very good and am not sure what I think about The Seven Ages. She's a poet who consciously tries to have a different theme for each collection. I connect with some and not others.

Well, the more I looked into it, the less interested I was. As with so many of these things, there is DRM up the wazoo. The wireless features, which do seem pretty cool, are quite hackable, so that needs to be upgraded. Given that the newspapers give away their content on-line, I still can't believe that Amazon is charging for this, and is probably the #1 reason I'm not too interested. They've even gotten their hands on the Guttenberg Project books, converted them over and are charging for these public domain books. There are only two things (not remotely on the horizon) that would bring me to adopt this technology. 1) if there was a trade-in for academic books, so I would hand over a copy of some obscure text and get the Kindle download in exchange and 2) if they linked up with JSTOR and some of the other academic journal sites and had reasonable ($20 or less/month) fees rather than $2/article which is generally what Amazon tries to charge for such things. I don't think Amazon would make a profit under these conditions, but I'm certainly not interested in the thing as it is currently priced. It is a big disappointment to my wife, but better now than finding out on Xmas and having that spoiled.

So has anyone gotten one of these things (Amazon's new super digital reader)? I was sitting next to someone on a train and she was looking at one. It didn't look that bad (compared to other electronic readers) but I also still didn't think I would want to try to read an entire book on one. Anyway, I happened to mention this to my wife, and she got such a strange look on her face. So of course she had ordered me one for Xmas... In the spirit of trying not to be a complete jerk, I went and looked at some of the other features, and they are cool. I still doubt I would sit down and read a book, but I will at least give the other features a spin. Now what I won't be doing is trying to read it on the train, partly because on CTA you rarely get a seat and I just don't want to risk it being stolen. I do seem to spend half of my life trying to keep up with news sites (which somewhat undercuts my complaint about reading stuff off a screen). And the idea that Amazon takes care of the wireless charges and presumably setting up the subscription to some of these papers is appealing. Oops - I just looked more closely and saw that none of these papers are free. $14/month for the NY Times and $10 for the Tribune, whereas they are free on the internet. And you even pay a little for the blogs (though there are serious complaints about them not updating on time). If Kindle completely replaced the internet for me (which of course it wouldn't), well this pricing might not be unreasonable, as Amazon would just lose too much otherwise. But for me it doesn't make any sense. I think I'll probably ask her to send it back, since I simply can't see making enough use out of it. But I thought I would see if anyone else had some experience with it.

This kind of reminds me of the "Are you a fraud?" thread on the Washington Post, though this could be read as a more positive question, i.e. "Will you leave a legacy?" I had the fortune (and misfortunate) of working on a few interesting and very innovative projects early in my career. They tangentially are used to support transportation planning in NYC (esp. getting federal funding), so indirectly, I have affected millions of people. But it has all been downhill from there, in terms of impact and innovation. And I've never been willing to settle, so have been progressively more unhappy with work with each passing year. I generally have an article or two per year appear in professional journals. I think for a lot of people, that would be plenty, but I just feel I could contribute more. I've been working on making the move into academics, and simultaneously working on a book. I can't really envision finding the time I need to work on the book while working as a full-time consultant. And as work has gotten more and more rote, I have been drawn (like a moth) back to the university. Where I get into trouble is having a lot of unfinished creative projects on the side. As Art Shay wrote about Nelson Algren - he was a first rate starter of projects and a very mediocre finisher of them. I have been able to finish a number of poems and have sent them around. I also have a couple of chapters of a novel done, and a couple of scenes from a play. All things considered, I will probably try to finish the play first, while I am still in Chicago (if I get this academic job, I will be moving). In fact, I think I'll go off and work on that a bit this afternoon. Ciao.

That's probably true. A lot of idiots have been buying second holiday-homes and buy-to-lets and leveraging themselves into the stratosphere. They will be well and truly shafted over the next few years. Someone was pointing out that on a per capita basis, the UK has already spent and/or committed considerably more than the US on bailouts. Iceland aside, the UK is probably the most exposed of Western European countries and has the least diversified economy to try to pull through this crisis. What I don't understand is with all the general unhappiness of following the US's lead (on everything) and how poorly this has worked out for them is that one of the political parties hasn't reinvented itself as an anti-US party. I think it would do quite well. The problem is that the natural party would be Labour, and its leaders continue to orient themselves towards the US and away from Europe.

I have been on a fiction jag, after slogging through some academic books on urbanization (some were good to be fair). I read Murakami's After Dark. I can see why it got lukewarm reviews. It is about two sisters, one of whom does nothing at all for the entire book, and could easily have been omitted. Except for the fact that nearly all of Murakami's books seem to contain dualisms and switch back and forth between times, narrators, characters, etc. The other thing is that of the Murakami I have read, it sort of peters out and there is no real resolution. This one was an exagerrated version of that with 3 or 4 threads left hanging. I still enjoyed the half about the active sister (and her budding friendship/romance with a trombone player!), but it certainly isn't top-rank Murakami for sure. Then I read Kramer's A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space. This came out in the mid 1980s under Vintage Contemporary, as part of a push to mainstream literary (as opposed to easy reading) fiction. Some of the other well-known books in this imprint are A Visit from the Footbinder and Clea and Zeus Divorce. Well, I finally got around to reading this one. This is sort of a fable about soldiers waiting for war, as well as about family secrets (and incest), but I just didn't care for it. It was too flat. Too many people acted in ways that were completely unbelievable. Generally not much happens until 30 pages towards the end, but then they pull short of any real resolution. I would probably have liked it more 10 years ago. Finally, I read Jesse Bell's Samedi the Deafness. This got raves in several book review circles. I was more like, meh. There are certainly echoes of Kafka, but only a handful of reviewers have picked up that the entire book is a riff on G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. I really dislike Chesterton, as I think he is a religious prig. So I didn't like the source material, and I generally am not that impressed by books that are that open about their source material. So really I only liked one-half book of the last three books I've read. It looks like I will be reading Oscar Wao pretty soon (borrowing this one from the library), and I hope this is the one to break the streak.

I don't know if the Cowboy Junkies are still active, but they were big in the early 1990s and played very restrained, etheral music. Maybe even a forerunner of mumblecore. But then live, they turned it up 11 notches. (I saw them opening for Bruce Hornesby). They weren't the loudest I've ever seen by far, but perhaps the largest gap in volume between recorded and live. I loved the live show, and if they put a fraction of that energy into their recordings, I would probably have them all.

Saw the first set on Sat. of Organissimo at Andy's. I talked to Larry Kart and briefly to Rachel and the guys in the band. It was a great set including -- Stomp Your Feet, Bleecker, Senor Buffet and ending with Groovadelphia. Glad to finally see the guys in person. Hopefully they'll make it out to Chicago more. Andy's is not known for serious jazz listening (compared to Green Mill for instance) but the guys really had the crowd in their hands.

I saw Camper Van Beethoven in Ann Arbor on their last tour before the break-up. This was probably 1989. My ears were ringing for a couple of hours after the concert, and that rarely happens to me. David Bowie in 2001 ? was also very loud, and the bass was boosted. I enjoyed both concerts but they were certainly loud.