Jason Crane Posts
My friend Mara Ahmed sent me this today:
Rally to support restoration of judiciary and civil liberties in Pakistan
Date: Sunday November 18, 2007
Time: 2.00pm – 3.30pm
Place: Twelve Corners in Brighton
SOLIDARITY
PLEASE JOIN THE PAKISTANI AMERICAN COMMUNITY IN UPSTATE NEW YORK IN A DEMONSTRATION OF SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLE OF PAKISTAN IN THEIR STRUGGLE FOR THE RULE OF LAW.
WE WILL HOLD A DEMONSTRATION ON SUNDAY NOVEMBER 18 FROM 2:00 PM TO 3:30 PM AT TWELVE CORNERS IN BRIGHTON.
THE PUROPOSE OF THE DEMONSTRTATION IS TO EXPRESS OUR DESIRE TO PRESERVE THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE JUDICIARY AND TO RESTORE THE RULE OF LAW AND THE CONSTITUTION OF PAKISTAN .
IF YOU CHERISH FREEDOM, LIBERTY , CIVIL RIGHTS AND DEMOCARACY JOIN US TO SHOW OUR RESOLVE TO THE WORLD THAT WE WILL NO LONGER ACCEPT TRAMPLING OVER CIVIL LIBERTIES AND OVER JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE IN OUR HOME COUNTRY.
AS A SIGN OF UNITY WITH THE LAWYERS WHO ARE SPEARHEADING THE STRUGGLE IN PAKISTAN PLEASE WEAR BLACK AND WHITE WHEN YOU COME.
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THE JAZZ SESSION #32: TORD GUSTAVSEN: Jason Crane interviews pianist and composer Tord Gustavsen. His most recent recording, Being There (ECM, 2007), is part of a trilogy of records exploring the intimate territory traversed by the pianist and his trio. With bassist Harald Johnsen and drummer Jarle Vespestad, Gustavsen delves deeply into the rich musics of the world, filtering the results through a contemplative lens. Being There is an album that rewards repeated listening, and the interview makes it clear that a lot of thought and passion has gone into the music.
THE JAZZ SESSION #33: KATE MCGARRY: Jason Crane interviews vocalist Kate McGarry about her new album, The Target (Palmetto, 2007). It’s yet another stellar album in a career that has seen her working with everyone from Fred Hersch to Maria Schneider. On The Target, McGarry is joined by her husband Keith Ganz on guitar, Gary Versace on organ and piano, Reuben Rogers on bass and Greg Hutchinson on drums, along with guest appearances from saxophonist Donny McCaslin and Theo Bleckman on voice loops. On both American songbook classics and impressive new compositions, the band finds an organic chemistry that brings something new to the old tunes and makes the new tunes sound familiar.
Leave a CommentHere’s a video that was put together by the WGA to help explain why the writers are on strike. After you watch it, you’ll probably want to read this short Q&A at Mark Evanier’s site.
Leave a CommentSPOILER ALERT! If you’ve never read Don Quixote, be warned: This post will probably give away plot points.
A few minutes ago, I finished reading Don Quixote
Don Quixote by Jason Crane
All I knew about it before reading it was that it involved a crazy man who thinks he’s a knight and attacks windmills. In fact, I thought the entire book was about Don Quixote attacking various windmills. It’s one of those books that has entered the cultural consciousness even if most folks have never read it. Fess up, did you think, when you were a kid, that the book was called Donkey Hotee? I did, and I always assumed it was because he rode a donkey. Which, it turns out, he doesn’t.
Little did I know — and even less did I expect — what an amazing work it is. It’s beautiful, comical and tragic all at once. It’s a history lesson, a visionary look at the art of the novel, and a gripping story, too.
In many ways, Don Quixote reminded me of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a work so large and full of so much of the human experience that it’s amazing to consider one person having written it. How could Cervantes and Shakespeare fit so much into a single work? And who were these men that they themselves contained so much wisdom and insight, coupled with the literary talent to set it down in works that will live as long as language? It makes blogging look a bit ridiculous, for one thing. (Hamlet and the first book of Don Quixote were published almost simultaneously. The early 1600s must have been one heck of a time in which to live and read!)
While I was reading the book, I also picked up a few critical studies to read afterward, including Lectures on Don Quixote
The book seems on its face to be a comedy about a crazy man, but to me it was an indictment of a society that had forgotten its values and lost its honor. The duke and duchess who torment Don Quixote and Sancho throughout much of Book Two are villians, as far as I can tell. You’d have to be callous and sadistic to find their “jests” funny rather than cruel. However, my interpretation of the book is through my own cultural lens, and Cervantes may have been in favor of the purges of Jews and Moors that he describes, even though a modern reader can see his commentary as criticism.
In fact, Don Quixote and Sancho maintain their dignity throughout the book, and even if that dignity’s foundation can be called into question, they still come off as more honorable and worthwhile human beings than most of the major characters who try to trick or cure them.
To be continued…
Leave a CommentOh. My. Holy. God.
I’ve never actually read Dante’s Inferno, but I’m pretty sure I remember hearing that in it, Hell has nine levels. I think maybe Judas Iscariot is at the bottom, frozen in ice or something like that. According to British comedian Ben Elton, right below Judas is an editor from the British tabloid The Sun. Well, tonight I discovered who’s right below him, and this is what he looks like:
Today is Bernie’s fifth birthday. We had a party this afternoon at our house for the kids from the neighborhood plus a few of our good friends from nearby. It was a great party — games, ice cream cake, a pinata and more. Everybody had a great time and went away happy.
Then we went to Chuck E. Cheese’s for a party with three kids from Bernie’s class. And now I know where Dante got his ideas.
When I was a kid, Chuck E. Cheese’s was a video arcade with skeeball and a ball crawl. Now it’s like a torture scene from A Clockwork Orange. As soon as you walk in, a teenaged employee jams some hooks onto your eyelids to prevent you from blocking out the horrible fact that every surface in the place is either glowing, flashing or both.
Every object in the restaurant makes some sort of noise, from the games to the screeching children hopped up on soda and some of the worst pizza I’ve ever eaten. In fact, I may need to pause while writing this post so I can run and be physically sick.
When we lived in Tokyo, I often felt overwhelmed walking through the larger train stations or across busy intersections. The crush of people is like nothing you experience in any city in the United States, and I found it hard to process. Well, I’d rather run through the main shopping district in Shibuya wearing 3-D binoculars and listening to GWAR then spend one more minute of my life in a Chuck E. Cheese’s franchise.
Just finding Bernie’s three friends was a challenge. There were so many hip-high children in the place that it was next to impossible to gather the gang together, and completely impossible to keep track of them afterward, even with four of the five parents (including Jen and me) working every moment of the two — or was it 12? — hours to find them.
One tiny positive innovation is that everyone in a family gets the same infrared number stamped on his or her left hand at the entrance, meaning no child can leave without an adult who has the same number. So we were reasonably certain that none of the kids would turn up missing. We were less assured that none of them would turn up blubbering and bleeding from the eyes, clutching a token and murmuring “Insert coin to continue … Insert coin to continue…”
I think it was Woody Allen who used to tell the joke about “the food was terrible, and the portions were too small.” Well, as much as Chuck’s House of Horrors stunk on the face of it, it was made even worse by the absence of good video games. When I was a kid, there was Tron, Pac Man, Galaga, Defender, Star Wars, Q-bert, Donkey Kong, Mr. Rogers vs Chuck Norris, and many others. All those cool games are gone, replaced by car races featuring characters from Sponge Bob and NASCAR. (Not in the same game, which was too bad.) There were a few first-person shooters, but nothing good. And then about 8 million different ways to sucker you into exchanging money for prize tickets.
By the end of the evening, I was sobbing softly at our table, holding my security cupcake and wading through wrapping paper and Spider-Man-themed gifts. (We sent Spider-Man invitations to the kids, who otherwise know nothing about Bernie, so we got exclusively Spider-Man-themed gifts. Pretty hip, actually.)
I’ve shot my wad here. Let me just echo the words of the shortest Rolling Stone review ever published (for the first album by the band Chase):
“Flee.”
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Common-place is an online history magazine put out by the American Antiquarian Society and Florida State University. I find it consistently interesting and always worth reading. In this issue, I was struck by the article “Walking The Freedom Trail,” in which a historian and a group of American soldiers tour Boston with an eye toward improving counter-insurgency operations in Iraq by taking a lesson from the failed decisions made by the British during the Revolutionary War.
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Mark Evanier’s News From Me blog is a treasure for fans of classic movies and TV shows, comic books, old show biz memories, and good writing. Mark is a member of the WGA and he’s got some insightful and easily digestible thoughts about the WGA strike on his site. News From Me is a must-read for me and for several of my friends, and I encourage you to check it out.
Leave a CommentRochester in June means one thing to me — jazz. Every year, the Rochester International Jazz Festival brings tens of thousands of fans and hundreds of jazz artists to the Flower City for more than a week of music and fun. It also brings to light another problem that we face in downtown Rochester. Lack of parking.
To combat this difficulty, I usually ride my bike. This year, I went to get my bike from its place on the front porch to get it ready for riding, given that I hadn’t ridden it in months.
It wasn’t there. So I went to the back yard to look for it. I knew Jen had moved things off the porch to clean it. My bike wasn’t there, either.
I must have put it in the basement, I thought. Down into the dank basement I trudged, but no bike.
“Honey, where’s my bike?” I asked, starting to get a little panicked. Within minutes, the truth was evident. My bike was gone. Stolen from our backyard.
We didn’t have the money to replace the bike, so I called my folks and asked if they’d front the money. They agreed, and within a few days I was taking home a new Giant Sedona DX from Towners Bike Shop in Rochester. I rode it every day during the Jazz Fest, relishing the ease with which I navigated in and out of congested streets. I could always find a “parking space” and never needed to spend money on gas.
Then a funny thing happened. At the end of the week, I decided to keep riding. It was working out so well that it seemed foolish to get back in my SUV for my 1.5-mile commute to work. So I kept pedaling. It was a blast. I got from place to place quickly enough to suit me, and slowly enough to see the world. Combined with my new membership at the Y and my new exercise routine, I was getting thinner, stronger, healthier — and happier. Could two wheels make this much of a difference? Apparently so.
Pretty soon, I discovered a bike culture on the Web. With me, there are only two mental gears — apathy and obsession. Cycling quickly turned on the latter brain setting, and I was reading about bikes constantly. Then the Tour de France started, so I read about bicycle racing. Then I found out about Critical Mass, and rode my first CM. Within a few weeks, I was becoming a cyclist.
As with most of my obsessions, a blog soon followed. RocBike.com started as a way to catalog my experiences as a cycling newbie, but it quickly outgrew those limited expectations. I met Adam Durand at Critical Mass, and he quickly jumped on board as a contributor. So did Jack Bradigan Spula, a cyclist, activist and journalist whom I’d known for years. Julie White followed shortly thereafter, and Team RocBike was born.
As it turns out, Rochester has a good bicycle culture for a city that’s cold about 8 months of each year. People started visiting RocBike.com and telling their stories. When I biked around town in my goofy, black-and-white Walz cycling beanie, folks recognized me from the pictures on the site. It was fun, and I felt like part of something larger. Something that could change our city for the better.
Within a couple months, I owned three bikes. My Giant, plus two French-made Motobecane road bikes from the late 70s and early 80s. I started primarily riding the Motobecane Nomade as my commuter because of its light weight and maneuverability — at least compared to the Giant. It was the first time in my life that I’d ridden a bike with drop bars, but I quickly came to like the traditional racing posture, especially after seeing the movie Breaking Away, which has probably sucked a lot of people into bicycling.
Then I discovered the Xtracycle, an attachment that converts just about any bike into an SUB — a Sport Utility Bike. Thanks to my freelance writing for the Island Packet on Hilton Head Island, I was able to buy an Xtracycle. I converted my Giant in October and dubbed it “The Packet Boat” in honor of its funding source.
The Xtracycle has become my primary bike. In fact, both road bikes are in the basement at the moment. I commute with the Packet Boat, shop with it, take my older son to school with it. It’s an amazing piece of technology.
So here I am, five months after I started riding a bike again, and I’m knee-deep in the whole world of cycling. I’m healthier, fitter, happier and more in tune with the world around me. I know my city’s streets better than I did before. I’ve made new friends. I’m re-engaged in the environmental movement in a way I haven’t been for years. All because of a bicycle.
If that isn’t good technology, I don’t know what is.
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Our neighbors across the street gave us their old Hungry Hungry Hippos game a couple weeks ago. Yesterday, John ate one of the small balls that come with the game. It was about the size of a small marble.
Today, it was returned to us.
I don’t know about the hippos, but I’m sure not that hungry anymore.
Master drummer Max Roach died today at the age of 83. Here’s the story from the New York Times:
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For those few of you who are wondering why it’s been so long since I updated this site, I have an answer. I’m spending most of my time these days at two of my other sites:
So head to those and see what I’ve been up to!
Comments closedMy son Bernie sings his 2007 hit “If I Don’t Know What To Do” in glorious Dolby (TM) sound!
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