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medjuck

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Hey, taking a quick break from listening to my Zeppelin remasters; yeah!

Some very inspired musicology popping into up this thread, I'll say that.

And jazz without academia would be where in 2014? (Since 1974 even?)

Also, Larry Kart, did you see Haskell Wexler "Medium Cool" at the time or thereabouts & did you notice the use of Mothers of Invention music therein?

Ashamed to say I never saw it. Will try to rectify that.

Didn't see it IIRC because I had more or less lived through the events the movie deals with -- not on the front lines, so to speak, but I was living and working in Chicago in 1968, and I never felt like I wanted or needed to have all that "interpreted" and/or dramatized for me. If anything, perhaps, I wanted to preserve the raw sense of confusion of that time, plus there was the fact that I was involved in something new, absorbing, and dramatic in my own little life -- having just switched from my first post-college job, as an editor at a textbook publishing firm, to working as assistant editor under Dan Morgenstern at Down Beat.

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Hey, taking a quick break from listening to my Zeppelin remasters; yeah!

Some very inspired musicology popping into up this thread, I'll say that.

And jazz without academia would be where in 2014? (Since 1974 even?)

Also, Larry Kart, did you see Haskell Wexler "Medium Cool" at the time or thereabouts & did you notice the use of Mothers of Invention music therein?

The Zappa music was one of the reasons the film didn't come out on home video for a long time. First Zappa and then his estate wouldn't license it.

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funny, the one time I met Flaherty he was totally non-communicative. Very self-directed, a little holier-than-thou, in an artistic sense. But that was in, maybe, the late '80s.

I said hello as he walking across street from a new Cafe and He said hello back and he asked me my name when it was apparent I was going to be one if the few at the gig. A little small talk and he says that I'm the type of guy that needs his new duo CD so he gives me a copy. If they had it out at the show I woulda bought it so I guess a few extra bucks on the jar would benefit these guys.

"I'm a painter as it's pretty obvious I'm not making it playing this but what else am I gonna do??"

Big smile. Warmhearted. I guess a few decades on people be changed a bit, Allen!!

Btw beautiful short unassuming set with the trio with the saxophonist exhibiting superb control and full range on both the alto and tenor.

A real romantic melodic player - played like he comes across when I met him 30 minutes earlier. All about the beauty of the sound of his horns.

Edited by Steve Reynolds
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The Zappa music was one of the reasons the film didn't come out on home video for a long time. First Zappa and then his estate wouldn't license it.

Medjuck, I didn't realize it; obviously they worked it out & Wexler was 1000% correct not to change it bc that sequence, visual & audio, is brilliant. Curiously, in the commentary to the Criterion, Wexler doesn't mention the hold up. (Unlike most commentary tracks, this one is v. worthwhile.)

LK, though, as you know, the film enfolds the Democratic Convention, it's about quite a bit more & some of its most interesting sequences are before and besides it. I don't know offhand if you were a Kennedy, McCarthy or Humphrey supporter in the spring of '68 (I was Bobby all the way, though I did like Gene also) but there's a great, great (chilling) Bobby scene leading into the Mothers of Invention music that you will-- but a lot of younger folk-- don't recognize. Of course a large % of the film's original viewers would have recognized it also.

Watch "Medium Cool" back to back with stunningly brilliant "Zabriskie Point" for fullest period effect.

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The Zappa music was one of the reasons the film didn't come out on home video for a long time. First Zappa and then his estate wouldn't license it.

Medjuck, I didn't realize it; obviously they worked it out & Wexler was 1000% correct not to change it bc that sequence, visual & audio, is brilliant. Curiously, in the commentary to the Criterion, Wexler doesn't mention the hold up. (Unlike most commentary tracks, this one is v. worthwhile.)

LK, though, as you know, the film enfolds the Democratic Convention, it's about quite a bit more & some of its most interesting sequences are before and besides it. I don't know offhand if you were a Kennedy, McCarthy or Humphrey supporter in the spring of '68 (I was Bobby all the way, though I did like Gene also) but there's a great, great (chilling) Bobby scene leading into the Mothers of Invention music that you will-- but a lot of younger folk-- don't recognize. Of course a large % of the film's original viewers would have recognized it also.

Watch "Medium Cool" back to back with stunningly brilliant "Zabriskie Point" for fullest period effect.

My view of some of this was affected a good deal at the time (or in the run-up to that time) because I knew some of the Free Speech Movement people at Berkeley fairly close up, and they gave me a stiff taste of how personally exploitive some of those people could be. I don't recall having a gut favorite candidate in '68 -- McCarthy seemed very appealing in all the ways so many found him to be, but I felt certain he couldn't win. Bobby did almost nothing for me -- while I could see his populist appeal, I thought he finally was about Bobby and the Kennedys and also was compromised by the thuggishness of his earlier days, which I thought he could revert to readily when pressed; Humphrey had been de-balled by LBJ, though I've heard goodish arguments recently from some on the Left that in terms of policies his likely road would have been the best to travel given what Nixon and then Reagan gave us.

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My feeling about Bobby is that 1) he was a genuinely changed man in his post-assassination mode; and 2) a lot of the alleged thuggishness was fictional; he was the only guy to stand up to the Hoffa crowd, and he also, along with JFK, stood up to the CIA and forced them to stop planning the assassination of Castro (because JFK was against assassination as a mode of political action, and he was negotiating with Castro for recognition of Cuba).

also, he was the first attorney general to move (very quietly, which is why he and JFK had a very lukewarm rep on Civil Rights) against Southern forces by mobilizaing the justice department to start law suits on behalf of rights violations in southern jurisdictions.

so much of what's been written about the Kennedy brothers is post-assassination character assassination; even JFK's womanizing is largely unsubstantiated and comes from questionable (CIA) sources; he was battling that agency and they slandered him back and continue to do so. Try to get documentation, for example, on the so-called Exxner affair; complete bullshit. And the supposed payment of $500,000 from mobsters to JFK for his campaign; JFK's father was a multi-multi-miillionaire; would JFK risk taking money from such sources with so much personal cash at his own disposal? all b.s.

Edited by AllenLowe
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My feeling about Bobby is that 1) he was a genuinely changed man in his post-assassination mode; and 2) a lot of the alleged thuggishness was fictional; he was the only guy to stand up to the Hoffa crowd, and he also, along with JFK, stood up to the CIA and forced them to stop planning the assassination of Castro (because JFK was against assassination as a mode of political action, and he was negotiating with Castro for recognition of Cuba).

also, he was the first attorney general to move (very quietly, which is why he and JFK had a very lukewarm rep on Civil Rights) against Southern forces by mobilizaing the justice department to start law suits on behalf of rights violations in southern jurisdictions.

so much of what's been written about the Kennedy brothers is post-assassination character assassination; even JFK's womanizing is largely unsubstantiated and comes from questionable (CIA) sources; he was battling that agency and they slandered him back and continue to do so. Try to get documentation, for example, on the so-called Exxner affair; complete bullshit. And the supposed payment of $500,000 from mobsters to JFK for his campaign; JFK's father was a multi-multi-miillionaire; would JFK risk taking money from such sources with so much personal cash at his own disposal? all b.s.

I'm thinking of Bobby's role as an admiring associate of Joe McCarthy and also of his key role a bit later on as part of the Kefauver Commission. In both cases, leaving aside if one can in McCarthy's case the ideological aspects, there was the basic approach to political-social problems (or "problems"), which might be described as an inseparable blend of investigation (or "investigation") and intimidation, even though there is (or so most of us would say) a vast disparity between Joe McCarthy's targets and those of Kefauver and his ilk (labor racketeers).

But, again, the typical means were typically under the table and behind the scenes. And one could talk about or argue about this in at least two ways 1) that for a long time in this country, given the nature and the means of the mostly extra-governmental powers-that-be, under the table and behind the scenes means are the only ones that might curtail or defeat those powers-that-be when they need to be curtailed or defeated, and 2) (and in this I'm influenced by Theodore Draper's vast book about the Iran-Contra affair, "A Very Thin Line") that the resort on the part of the government to means that are under the table and behind the scenes eventually becomes habitual and ever-growing and can disastrously infect virtually all policy-making with oligarchic strains and impulses. It seems to me that Bobby was a significant player on this swatch of our evolving political landscape, and that a Bobby as president ... well, I'm reminded of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz's response to Columbia studio head Harry Cohn's statement that he knew whether a picture was good or bad depending on whether or not his ass twitched while he was screening it. "Imagine," Mankiewicz said, "the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass."

***** Oops. I forget -- no politics on Organissimo anymore. Allen, if we want to talk about this further, I think it will have to be by e-mail.

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Flaherty is real nice. I hope to spend some time interviewing him this fall. His visual art is wonderful, too. Excellent player.

Though I know he hasn't always come across as such, especially to those who've struggled with/inadvertently encountered his moralizing verbiage, my experience with Charles Gayle has been that he's a super friendly guy, very humble and kind.

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Hey, taking a quick break from listening to my Zeppelin remasters; yeah!

Some very inspired musicology popping into up this thread, I'll say that.

And jazz without academia would be where in 2014? (Since 1974 even?)

Also, Larry Kart, did you see Haskell Wexler "Medium Cool" at the time or thereabouts & did you notice the use of Mothers of Invention music therein?

Just saw "Medium Cool" on DVD. Superb. And, contrary to what I had feared, it allowed me to preserve and even amplify the confusion I felt at the time ... and probably still feel in a good many ways. In fact, the film's emphasis on the media as filter and shaper is remarkably shrewd. And wouldn't you know it, I went on to become a journalist.

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P.S. In the scenes of "Medium Cool" where TV cameraman Robert Forster pursues a story about a cabdriver who turns in $10,000 that was left in envelope in his cab and then, when he visits the cab driver's apartment, encounters his black militant friends, the cab driver is played by jazz DJ and record producer Sid McCoy and two of the militants are Muhal Richard Abrams (very foxy) and John Jackson.

Again, quite a movie -- holds up like gangbusters. Somewhat related in feel to Antonini's "Blow-Up" but a good deal more intense.The accompanying documentary on the Blu-Ray version goes into detail about how the film was shot amidst the sometimes chaotic events of the 1968 Democratic Convention and its "police riot." In fact, given the significance of the theme of the media shaping the reality it allegedly interprets, director Haskell Wexler's own experience, and that of his cast and crew, in making the film is in effect a crucial story within the story.

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LK, glad you checked it & were impressed. I found my notes from re-watching re: Wexler, Bobby, Zappa. I agree with both you & Allen btw-- he could be callow, 'opportunistic' when young & there were hardbitten Bobby who came around during his imperfect-but-evolving time as Senator. Bobby was never entirely callow, however; he just didn't know but his instincts on race, for example, were good, cf. when he was law student of U of Virginia & refused to abide segregated etc. (I think this involved invitation to Ralph Bunche but may be mistaken.)

Remember Bobby sitting with Medgar Evers family at ME's Arlington funeral too.

Also, Peter Boyle's scene in "Medium Cool"... whoa.

YES on "The Blow Up" (did you know David Hemmings was one of Benjamin Brittens 'boys', cf. "The Turn of the Screw" in his case?) & the next step is "Zabriskie Point"-- a towering & much underrated masterpiece. (There are dozens upon dozens of shots as great as any still photography, painting etc).

This is correct (Pink Floyd) ending, MGM added the goofy Roy Orbison title track coda w/o MA's permission because, I believe, they were irked they were doing film and soundtrack album w/ no MGM artists.

anyway, here's the "Medium Cool" sequence I referred to earlier, timings from start of DVD.

24:48 to 25:34 = reenactment, from POV kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, of the moments before RFK assassination, with actual audio of conclusion of Bobby’s victory speech in background.

25:35 to 26:02 = montage of Washington D.C. car travel, set to the first verse of the Mothers of Invention “Oh No”* for-- we learn, following six seconds of silence— RFK state funeral.

* Oh no
I don't believe it
You say that you think you know
The meaning of love
You say love is all we need
You say
With your love you can change
All of the fools
All of the hate
I think you're probably
Out to lunch
Edited by MomsMobley
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Yes -- I knew about Hemmings and Britten. Here is Hemmings' take, as told to a fellow who wrote about a book about Britten and his boys:

"He was not only a father to me, but a friend – and you couldn't have had a better father or a better friend. [...] Everybody asks me whether or not he gave me one, whether or not it was a sexual relationship. The answer to that question, as I have often said, is: no, he did not. I have slept in his bed, yes, only because I was scared at night...and I have never ever, ever felt threatened by Ben at all because I was more heterosexual than Genghis Khan!"

Now I need to watch "Zabriskie Point" again. It's been a long time.

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most of the "nice guys" I've met have already been mentioned so i'll try not to repeat.

Toots Thielemans

George Duke

Harold Mabern

Benny Green

Brian Blade

Esperanza Spalding

Toshiko Akiyoshi

Monday Mitsuru

Johnathan Blake

Jaleel Shaw

John Clayton

Boris Koslov

Horace Silver

Walter Bishop, Jr.

Mickey Roker

Frank Foster

Claire Daly

Bill Henderson

Joe Williams

Gregory Porter

there are so many more but i'll add when I think of them. of course, I have to give a very big "AMEN" to Dave Brubeck, Clark Terry and James Moody!

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