My latest article for The Island Packet newspaper on Hilton Head Island, SC, is about singer Rebecca Kilgore and pianist John Sheridan. Read the article.
Leave a CommentJason Crane Posts
THE JAZZ SESSION #52: MARILYN CRISPELL. Jason Crane interviews pianist Marilyn Crispell about her album of solo piano pieces, Vignettes (ECM, 2008). Crispell made an early name for herself with Anthony Braxton, and she’s since amassed an impressive list of recordings that include composed and freely improvised pieces. In this interview, Crispell talks about the nature of improvisation, the particular challenges of solo playing, and the joys of Woodstock, NY.
Listen to the show at thejazzsession.com.
Leave a CommentApril is National Poetry Month, and Craig Wilson writes in USA Today that he’s found a new understanding and enjoyment of (some) poetry:
The charms of poetry have long been lost on me. Other than the odd Robert Frost offering —Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, for instance — most poems leave me perplexed. And not pleasantly so.
Did I sleep through that class in college? Or am I just a philistine? Probably both. I will embarrass myself further and confess I’m fond of poems that rhyme. Or at least kind of rhyme. At least make sense.
Then again I like my song lyrics to make sense. Is that too much to ask?
So I was going through a stack of books on my desk the other day and came across Poem in Your Pocket, a new book from Abrams Image. Makes sense. April is National Poetry Month.
I’m glad that Wilson was able to push past his initial misgivings and find some value in poetry. I don’t think you need to “get” poetry. I just think it’s worth giving it a try.
(Thanks to Harriet for the link.)
Look, I know the guy’s a centrist, OK? I know he’s not the Messiah. But I’m still quite disappointed:
In a stunning defense of President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, President Barack Obama has broadened the government’s legal argument for immunizing his Administration and government agencies from lawsuits surrounding the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping efforts.
In fact, a close read of a government filing last Friday reveals that the Obama Administration has gone beyond any previous legal claims put forth by former President Bush.
Responding to a lawsuit filed by a civil liberties group, the Justice Department argued that the government was protected by “sovereign immunity” from lawsuits because of a little-noticed clause in the Patriot Act. The government’s legal filing can be read here (PDF).
For the first time, the Obama Administration’s brief contends that government agencies cannot be sued for wiretapping American citizens even if there was intentional violation of U.S. law. They maintain that the government can only be sued if the wiretaps involve “willful disclosure” — a higher legal bar.
The text above is from an article by Raw Story’s John Byrne.
I didn’t expect Obama to do the right thing on the war(s), or to be some great progressive leader. But I did expect him to at least break with the Bush administration when it came to respecting the basic tenets of the Constituion and U.S. law. Apparently that faith was misplaced. Sad.
By the way, if you want to help the Electronic Frontier Foundation do its good work in this and other cases, visit their Web site and toss them some money.
Leave a CommentI don’t know enough about the interviewer in this video to say anything, but James rises above the interview setting to give some pithy, witty and probably fairly useful thoughts about writing poetry:
Now that you’ve seen the video, you might enjoy what Norton editor Robert Weil has to say about Clive James’ poetry collection, Opal Sunset: Selected Poems, 1958-2008
“Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I am now quite obsessed with Robert Burns.
The other day I spent my lunch break sitting in a cemetery in Ravena, NY, reading aloud from A Night Out with Robert Burns: The Greatest Poems
I’m also reading Robert Crawford’s new biography of Burns, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography
I’ve long been a fan of Old Blind Dogs, the Scottish traditional band. For a while, their lead singer was Jim Malcolm, a wonderful interpreter of the songs of Robert Burns. I just picked up one of his solo recordings, which I highly recommend. It includes his interpretation of “Tam O’ Shanter.”
Just today, I downloaded Eddi Reader’s album of Burns music, Sings The Songs Of Robert Burns:
Oh my. Oh my, oh my. What a voice. What an orchestral accompaniment. What a gorgeous album. Burns fan or not, you need this one in your collection.
I recently discovered the blog Via Negativa. The author, Dave Bonta, wrote an interesting piece yesterday about using technology in the writing of poems. Specifically, Bonta talks about moving from pen and paper to a typewriter to a computer, and the effect this has had on his system of revisions. Here’s an excerpt:
I almost never print anything out anymore, which I regret every time the power goes out and I realize that virtually my entire corpus of poetry is inaccessible to me. But it does save enormously on paper, not to mention file cabinet space. I confess that I almost never save different versions (does it still make sense to call them drafts?) as I go along. My friend Todd Davis once told me that he learned the hard way never to over-write old versions with new ones, after an incident in which he only realized after he’d mailed a poem off to a magazine that the previous draft had in fact been superior. Fortunately, he had happened to email that version to his father, so he was able to recover it, but ever since, he said, he’s been very disciplined about saving each significant version as a separate file. I could definitely stand to become more organized about a great many things, but since I’ve never shared his experience of missing an earlier, discarded draft, I doubt I’ll be adopting this particular practice.
This resonated with me. I carry a little notebook with me when I’m out and about so that I can jot down ideas or write poems. The poems written in this notebook have a clear trail of revisions, crossouts and word insertions. But just like Bonta, I don’t save different versions of poems when I write them on the computer. And I think I probably should. I’ve already had the experience of wanting to go back to an earlier version of a poem, and I’ve only been able to do that when it was a piece I originally wrote in a notebook. I think I’ll start saving separate versions. Of course, that means coming up with some sort of naming and filing convention.
My initial idea is to save each poem in a folder with the same name as the poem, and then to use a YYMMDD_poem_title naming convention.
Technorati Tags: poetry, technology, word processing
2 CommentsMy latest article for the Island Packet newspaper is a short biographical sketch of Bucky Pizzarelli. The posted piece is significantly shortened, but you’ll get the idea.
Dan Wilcox, host of the Third Thursday open mic at the Social Justice Center (33 Central Ave, Albany), recaps last week’s reading.
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My son John tries out the new Linux laptop
I’ve been using my new Pangolin Performance laptop from System76 for a couple weeks now, and I’m impressed. It came with Ubuntu Linux installed, and all the hardware just works.
It’s true that Ubuntu is slightly less “out of the box” ready than the average Mac or PC, but only slightly. I had it out of the box and was checking e-mail and Web sites within minutes, and I was watching a DVD within half an hour, after downloading a few things. Installing new software is a snap. And it’s all free and open source, which feels great.
I’ve been a Mac user since Macs came into being in 1984, and I was a little nervous about taking a step this big. For example, my PDA is an iPod Touch, and I’ve been using Apple’s MobileMe cloud service to sync my contacts and calendars between my home computer, my work PC and my iPod. As it turns out, the completely free NuevaSync service does the exact same thing, except it use Google Calendars as its platform. I already use Google Reader, Picasa and GMail (for some purposes), so it was a snap to decide to export my calendars from iCal and import them into Google Calendar. I set up a free NuevaSync account, which took about 25 seconds, and then posted on my Linux laptop using the Google Calendar program (which is Prism-based, whatever that means). All I know is that the event instantly appeared on my iPod. But would it work the other way? Yup. I posted an event on my iPod, refreshed the Google Calendar, and there it was, immediately.
I’ve already been using the open source audio editor Audacity to produce The Jazz Session on my Mac, so I don’t even have to change software. Jen’s been using the new laptop, too, and she’s quite comfortable with it.
All in all, I think we’re ready to say goodbye to PCs or Macs and hello to the world of open source software. Wow.
UPDATE: A big “Huzzah!” goes out to my good friend Kevin Baird, who showed me the way to open source. It was Kevin who recommended Ubuntu, and he’s been slowly and steadily open-source-ifying me for years now, starting with Ogg Vorbis back in the day. Thanks,man!
3 Comments(Note: Jen and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary today. I wrote this for a previous anniversary.)
The Menagerie
For Jennifer
I remember the menagerie –
red ants, cockroaches,
a dog that stole underwear.
Horned toad burying himself –
at least, we assumed it was a “him†–
under the bush beside the screen door.
Lime-green geckos clinging to
sun-warmed stucco, cooling
in the desert evening.
Blue plastic bowls with the name of
our furry practice child.
I remember the meeting –
front-row seats at a round table
just across the dance floor from the band.
Hesitantly approaching two women
and knowing instantly.
Suddenly the sets were twice as long
and the breaks twice as short.
I’d hurry to put down my saxophone
and continue the conversation.
I remember the desert –
long hike with fast-beating heart.
Brilliant moonlight washing over the hills,
air warm enough for shorts
even in the middle of the night.
The swelling drone of bees as they
awoke to the Sonoran sunrise.
A horizon so distant that we could watch
the sun pour onto the land like thick honey
filling the mountains’ bowl.
I remember the restaurant –
heart in my throat,
ring in my hand,
one knee on the hard tile floor.
You said “yes†and applause drifted over
to our table.
I remember the train –
exhausted after semi-circumnavigating the world.
Comatose kitten in a plastic box and
tired smiles as the train pulled away from Narita
and headed toward Tokyo, then north.
No jobs, no place to live.
All the world before us.
I remember the trees –
white cherry blossoms flowering
outside the second-floor window.
Early morning sounds of
baseball
from the sunken field below.
Waking at night as the house shook and
deciding there was trouble just as
the tremor stopped.
I remember our son –
watching in awe as life emerged
to the strains of Nat “King†Cole,
the same sounds that joined us together
in the desert now welcoming our newest bond.
Walking down the hall where the
others waited and bursting into tears.
“It’s a boy.â€
Crying again with worry in those
first harrowing hours.
The same emotions repeated three years later.
Mostly, I remember you.
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Melissa Harris-Lacewell and James Perry co-authored this piece for The Nation. Here’s an excerpt:
Leave a CommentWhen New Orleans flooded in August 2005, the Democratic Party was a shambles, locked out of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. For nearly a decade the Democrats played defense against a Republican onslaught initiated by Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America. After September 11, Democrats had joined with Republicans in giving President Bush unprecedented executive authority, thereby helping to erode civil liberties at home and authorize ill-advised aggression overseas. In 2004 Democrats were keenly aware that a solid majority of Americans believed it was unpatriotic to protest the Iraq War. So instead of articulating a clear alternative to Bush’s militarism, they nominated John Kerry on the strength of his record as a solider. Even so, they found it impossible to outmaneuver the existing commander in chief.
In August 2005 the Democratic Party had no clear leader, no identifiable platform, no winning national coalition and little political courage.
Then the force of Hurricane Katrina devastated the inadequate levees surrounding New Orleans. Americans watched as the city flooded, the power went out, and food and water became scarce. They watched as emergency shelters became centers of disease, starvation, agony and death. The nation watched in horror, but no mass evacuation began and Air Force One did not land. As the crisis wore on, the public became increasingly confused by and angry about the lack of coordinated response to alleviate human suffering and evacuate trapped citizens. As the waters rose, President Bush’s approval sank.