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This is one of many depressing things about the U.S. -- that because of a very poorly worded Second Amendment, there is no hope for meaningful gun control -- the Supreme Court recently evicerated any hope of handgun bans and just this week a Federal Appeals Court struck down the last state to prohibit "concealed carry," so citizens can go about freely with the guns all over the place (except some federal lands and government buildings). You might be able to sneak in some "sensible" gun control laws, like banning semi-automatics, but it is pretty unlikely in this political climate. So despite some agonized columns in the New York Times and Washington Post, I don't think you'll hear too much from gun control advocates. The battle has been completely lost.

I think there was some discussion (in the Guardian?) that the limits that other EU countries place on the discounting allowed by on-line retailers may help prop up brick and mortar stores. Or I may just be imagining/mis-remembering that.

So sorry to hear that. Really hope he gets better soon.

I'm pretty sure Jim Carroll namedrops jazz musicians in The Basketball Diaries, to show how hip he was even as a teenager, but I'll have to go back and check.

Finally done with a lot of books that didn't do much for me, I can read a few more purely entertaining books. I decided on the theme of road trip, so I am reading Faulkner's The Reivers. A little bit down the road, I will reread Handling Sin by Michael Malone (and while I don't know this, I certainly suspect that Malone was inspired at least a bit by The Reivers). Then Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie and Greene's Travels with My Aunt. Faulkner can certainly be quite funny when you get past some of the "difficult," even baroque passages. The Reivers has a bit of the convoluted writing of his mid-career novels, but is generally a simpler read. Faulkner's ear for dialect is amazing, and when you read all the back-and-forth in the bordello kitchen for instance, it is flat-out hilarious. I am really enjoying it. I was wondering why it hadn't been made into a movie, and apparently it was (in 1969 with Steve McQueen). I wonder how much they had to tone it down back then. Anyway, I guess I'll see about scoring a copy, since it eventually did make it to DVD. (As far as I know, no one has made Handling Sin into a movie. Apparently, Malone actually delivered a script to some studio but it never went anywhere.)

I know that the later recordings on Telarc are not in the same league as the classic quartet (what could be?), but I am fond of Night Shift and will dig it out to play tonight (naturally). In the meantime, am listening to the Carnegie Hall Concert and probably Brubeck Plays Brubeck later today.

He was a bit of an entry point for me (in my dad's LP collection) and I'm still a fan. By the time I started seeing live jazz, it was basically too late for me to see him in any kind of intimate setting (well, maybe he played smaller rooms in New York), but I managed to see him probably 5 or 6 times in concert halls or at Ravinia. To have had that energy at his age -- and to keep promoting young musicians at his gigs -- is remarkable. RIP

I saw this line-up in Chicago. They were pretty great. I particularly liked there was some respectful back-and-forth, not just the Ex comping behind Getatchew.

I've heard good things about Danny, and will grab it from the library soon. Maybe I'll even skim it myself...

Interesting point, and one that kind of raises some provocative questions about children's literature. As you said, kids certainly have an id - I'm sure I engaged in this kind of silly demonization of random adults as a little kid out of some trivial slight on their part. Is children's literature supposed to foster growth and not just hold a maybe-approving mirror up to a kid's darker side? And is the fact that Dahl usually doesn't do this one of the reasons his stories are so beloved by many kids? I think there is a place for it (not everything has to have an uplifting moral), but for me, childhood books that one might return to at a later point probably ought to contain more than just revenge fantasies. I can envision reading James or Charlie as an adult and enjoying some aspects of the books, but for roughly 3/4 of his books (esp. the shorter ones) I find them pretty empty. I was shocked at how threadbare and frankly boring The Fantastic Mr. Fox was (hadn't read that as a child).

In the end Amazon did not come through for me (kept cancelling the order, though it looks like some are finally in stock from resellers), and I just selected a few here and there to pick up, and went to the library for the rest of the set now that my son is reading at this level. Maybe it is just as well. No question Dahl has a wicked humor, and I think understood children's darker moments well (really tapped into their id, I guess), but sometimes he seems to take a bog-standard farmer or grandmother and turn them into this horrible figure, at which point anything awful can be done to them and the reader is supposed to cheer. I actually found The Fantastic Mr. Fox quite appalling on that score (as well as being a boring book). There are certainly elements of this wanton cruelty in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and James & the Giant Peach, but there are other more positive lessons to be learned as well (not just -- don't be an awful person or you'll be given bad medicine and shrink down into nothing). Having spent a bit more time with his ouevre, I have to say only about 1/4 of it seems elevated above this really basic wish-fulfillment/revenge-fantasy level. Kind of a disappointment really...

One batch more from Leo Records (near mint) $7 Simon Nabatov-Han Bennink Chat Room (Leo) $8 Ivo Perelman-Louis Sclavis The Ventriloquist (Leo) ($14 for both) These two are somewhat limited and are not part of the big Dec. sale at Leo Records. Pretty interesting, and I particularly like The Ventriloquist, but I have no space left on the shelves... I won't be in Seattle this weekend, but probably last week of December.

Looking forward to it. I put in an order at DG, and they still had a few in stock. Probably have it in a week or so...

PM sent on Messiaen.

This is still available with small price drop. I have the Jelly Roll Morton JSP set for $15. Newly listed: $50 (plus shipping) Albert Ayler Holy Ghost box -- CDs are mostly in VG condition. All inserts are in near-mint condition. I noted a small surface spot on one of the CDs. I can go into more detail if interested. $8 Divine Sarah Vaughan (Columbia) 2 CDs Inspired by the Leo sale, I am offering the following (all are near-mint). I can't match their prices, but the shipping would be lower on per CD basis. $6 Alati, Iselasi, Radaele, Scianjino I am surprised ... $6 Joelle Leandre/William Parker - Live at Dunois $6 Glenn Hall/Roswell Rudd The Roswell Incident $5 The Remote Viewers Stranded Depots $6 Simon Nabatov Nature Morte $10 Moye-Tchicai-Geerken The African Tapes (2 CDs) Finally I have the OOP Stan Kenton Mosaic set for offer. The CDs are near mint. I would prefer a trade for any of the following in-print sets: Woody Herman Columbia Coleman Hawkins Charles Mingus I'll entertain other offers or selling the set outright. PM me. There is a moderate chance I will be in Seattle this upcoming weekend, which would probably cut down on shipping for either the Ayler set or the Kenton set (if selling outright). Thanks for looking!

Hmm. Maybe have to move a bit faster on this than I wanted to. I guess it is nearly the holidays ...

Really disappointed in the last 100 or so pages of Mill on the Floss. I particularly disliked the actual ending. It seemed like it was heading to a downbeat but "organically consistent" ending, i.e. one that made sense given what had happened before. The actual ending is almost totally random and stupid. I am totally showing my age, but one of the newsmagazines (probably Time) ran little inserts on how to improve one's writing as well as reading comprehension. I think there was Bill Cosby discussing speed reading and so on. Anyway, some comic writer decided to give some advice and said that endings were easy: Everyone got run over by a bus. And if you wanted to change it up a bit, you could use Everyone was run over by a truck. That's kind of how I felt at the end of this novel -- I honestly feel cheated -- it's such a long book for such a terrible payoff. All that said, there is one semi-brilliant passage in the novel, which I will copy out gratis to spare you from making my mistake.

Yes, I have this under the title - Just in Case You Forgot How Bad He Really Was (32 Jazz)

I see the widget from Firefox, but not from my really outdated IE browser at work.

Close to wrapping up The Mill on the Floss. My initial impression still holds -- a novel that you sort of admire but don't actually enjoy that much. Tom is still such an insufferable prat, and the father is, to his dying day, a man determined to make the wrong choice from what life has to offer him. I just want it to be over at this point. I happened to grab the graphic novel version of J.B. Priestly's An Inspector Calls (with the full text, they declare proudly). Boy, am I glad that I read this in this format, rather than paying to watch it on stage. For me, time has done it no favors. The speeches are so over the top. Look, look at the uncaring industrialist. Step right this way to see the selfish children of the rich. Look at the charity society woman who has no "soul." And so on. G.B. Shaw and Brecht can sometimes pull off the trick of writing politicial or politicized speech without seeming like they are pulling pages out of a sociology textbook, but Priestly sure can't. And then the "twist" or rather double-twist at the end is, to me, an infuriating cheat straight out of the pages of G.K. Chesterton, maybe copped directly from The Man Who Was Thursday. I certainly know people who love the Father Brown stories, but I found them unbearable (atheists who kill simply to make The Church look bad, I mean really). I'll be steering clear away from this in the future and probably all of Priestly's work.

Well, that would be really creepy, as he was on the revamped Dallas just this past summer... I guess it was renewed and wonder how much footage with him is still in the can, so to speak.

I think several artists/CDs from Leo Records would fit the bill. I might start with Snakish by Wadada Leo Smith.

Toronto 75

Thanks.

Now I am a little confused. Is this material on the Riverside Monk box, or is it not included because it came out on Milestone? I can't check at the moment, since the booklet is packed away. Thanks.