What Happens When They Hold An Election

And the bad guys win? I think tonight, Washington is getting a little "just desserts", now feeling what Europe felt on November 3rd, 2004. Terrorist-linked Hamas swept the parliamentary elections in the Palestinian Authority yesterday, shocking the Middle East and most of the world. Thomas Jefferson stated that "the people are right, even when they're wrong" and that is the case today concerning Palestine. The U.S. government can do nothing regarding this as this election appears to have been pulled off without a hitch. Hard liners in both Israel and the United States can not be happy with these results; however, any attempts at regime change further paint the Bushies as hypocrites regarding democracy. The damn concept only works for the United States but should not when U.S. interests are concerned. I'm loving this, as my students are learning the beginnings of U.S. imperialism. One student brought up an idea that I originally did not want to touch with a ten-foot pole since I work in a very conservative city; the student wanted make a connection with early-twentieth century imperialistic wars such as the Spanish-American War and the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. "I wasn't going to say it" was the first thought I had but instead, the students are posting on the class message board their beliefs on how a nation can fight a war for freedom and decmocracy without looking ironic.
President Bush today continued his smoke-and-mirrors job today, holding a press conference to continue to butcher reality and the true meaning of it. Continuing to press that the NSA's wiretapping and spying on Americans was A. legal, B. only on terrorists and C. perfectly within presidential powers though denied in FISA laws, Bush even found it difficult to answer questions lobbed over the plate by the White House Press Corps, the biggest group of spinless reporters gathered in a single room. The president skirted issues, denied others and essentially tried to twist language around enough to convince his voting base in Lincoln, Nebraska and the four people it takes to win rural Ohio that the executive branch did nothing wrong nor illegal though this whole spin campaign is not for convincing people that he did nothing wrong nor illegal. When even asked about how people are viewing the scandal involving Jack Abramoff, Bush claimed that just because he took a picture with the man, he has few ties and no link to Abramoff's lobbying illegalities. As he continues to define the issue as a matter of photographs, it's not the pictures he took but the one hundred grand from Abramoff that is the real issue. When Americans wake up to the fact that money buys politics and ruthless money has run the Republican Party for at least the last ten years, maybe they'll see just how the GOP isn't a party but the nation's largest interest group, serving religious, homophobic corporate businesses that appear to not have a need for the working people of this nation, laws or the diversity this place truly represents. Only if you're white, wealthy and looking to keep large corporations union-free, tax-free and law-free, then the GOP's for you.

Enough bitching. On a lighter note, I'm totally hooked on "Love Monkey", CBS's latest attempt at creating more "real" television viewing. Starring Tom Cavanaugh from NBC's failed "Ed", the show tells the story of a single record executive living in what appears to be Greenwhich Village and how his travails and troubles with women mirror his struggle to keep the record industry "real." As in Topeka real, and while the show appears to be nothing more than the dropping of song lyrics in dialogue with the guise of appearing witty and highbrow, I do enjoy the show. Partly due to Cavanaugh's charisma, partly because I love anything that shows off the city of Manhattan as a character of any movie or show. I know it's romantic and unrealistic, but I have had a love affair (more like a crush) on Manhattan for several years now. Chalk it up to my love of Woody Allen films, Law and Order or Simon and Garfunkel and Dylan, I wish I could travel to Manhattan once a season. While my wife and I and our unborn child visited two years ago and I had an incredible experience, I do dream of returning. There isn't another city on earth for me like NYC and as its history, its image and its streets and buildings appear, the place possesses a magical control over me. I may have the chance to return this June and would, knowing it would be the last time in many years being there, I'd like to be able to do all the lame, Hollywood-esque things people do when visiting; the Met, Central Park, the Heights, the Upper East Side, cruising through the Village and seeing a night of music at the Vanguard, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and listening for Sonny's ghost still playing on the GW and finally taking my picture sitting on the bench at Sutton Place, recreating the movie still from Allen's fantastic 1979 masterpiece. I'm a sucker for the romantic stuff and Manhattan is the big apple of my eye. Gag

So Long, We Hardly Knew Ye

I always knew it was coming, especially this season, but the official news that The West Wing is ending broke my heart. Here was the smartest show on television and yet no one was watching. Maybe they were too busy tivo-ing all of the other garbage that passes for t.v. shows today; maybe they were busy playing video games or text messaging. Maybe the show, like an ideal White House that serves a liberal, progressive administration is as fictional as the network's premise. Here was a show that showed both the majority and minority to be people with political goals and humanity still; today's politics won't ever see the president as a true renaissance man, one who sees that the chain is only as strong as the weakest link. Today's president and his majority party can only keep altering the politico-speak and rhetoric, the rules and methods of playing the game in order, God forbid, to keep anyone else participating in our blessed and failed "democracy." Today, we watch a Harry Truman and yet read on the front pages a Richard Nixon crossed with Napoleon; the television portrays a modern Thomas Jefferson and yet what we get is a cro-magnon King Saul; maybe I always wanted the fictional West Wing to outlive the real one; I guess I would have been happy with the show's cancellation if the results of last year's election were different; maybe I can only hope and pray that such a vacuous absence in the lives of WW viewers will reveal to them that, with the reminder that Martin Sheen is imaginary and George Bush is all-too-real that maybe we need to do something to keep the imaginary ruler from thinking he has too much real-life powers.

Fifteen Years Burning Down the Road...

My wife and I are experiencing hard times as we both find ourselves stretched to the limit. My wife has recently opened her own business and happens to be at the point in the life of it that requires hours and hours of dedication. Of course, like a relationship, a business needs blood, sweat, toil and tears and my wife has given each of the four. I think that she sees that all of her hard work is paying off in several ways; already she is making moves of opening a second business. This second business will be in our home town, which, even with the strain of opening a second location, means that she'll save over three hours of each day since she isn't commuting. Thoreau was right about the mass of men; today, countless millions of Americans lead lives of quiet desperation in absolute solitary confinement behind the wheels of their automobiles. I find my own personal hell in different ways but am amazed as my wife sacrifices so much of her own time daily in that damned Honda. Obivously this cuts into time that she can spend doing anything else, but our greatest struggle is balancing time with our young son. I can only imagine the stress and guilt my wife's experiencing as she knows she misses so much time with our son. He's the second major focus of our lives that is so central but difficult to balance. I wish I could spend every waking hour with my son and yet at times enjoy being able to go to work and not have to "parent" every minute with my boy. This semester of school, though, has allowed me more time with my son which helps my wife feel a bit better as she knows that our boy isn't in daycare but with her daddy. My son is an amazing reminder of how blessed my life is; I've said many times before and actually believe that the more I look at my son, the more I believe in God. My little boy makes me remake so much of my life and its direction and how I need to always keep his interests ahead of mine. Thankfully, my little boy has made me realize that my work, my chores, my free time and my own interests truly mean nothing compared to spending time with him that I'll never be able to recapture. At the risk of being completely cheesy, I bathed my son tonight and listened to Jim Croce and his signature song "Time In a Bottle" came on. That song alone makes one entirely understanding of his own mortality appreciate every breath, every hug, every splash, run around the table or "ELMO!!!!!!" the most valuable and rewarding experience of my life.

I completed my viewing of the Ken Burns' ten-disc Jazz dvd. On MLK day, I had a couple of hours to spare as my boy ran around the table and played with his toys. I threw in the last episode and as I remember from television five years ago, it truly was a disppointment. Where some of the previous episodes analyzed two to three years of pivotal jazz history, this last episode spent two years on more than forty years of some of the most valuable music of the twentieth century. Burns spent most of his time looking at personalities; the 1960s was John Coltrane and his demise; the early 70s was epitomized by the deaths of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as well as the absolute collapse of jazz as people knew it. Only the continuation of the art form by players such as Dexter Gordon kept the music alive and vital. This, obviously, is sheer bunk, as while the genre suffered greatly from the 70s and 80s as other forms of music flourished, jazz was busy evolving like rock and soul and disco. I am no expert on the genre, but jazz was evolving into a vibrant and eclectic movement of fusion; listening to Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock will show that bop and bebop were truly things of the past. Watermelon Man or anything by John McLaughlin was as dynamic as Clifford Brown's trumpet playing two decades previous. The inclusion of rock music and musicians took both genres and expanded their horizons; Carlos Santana's greatest moments on vinyl were either with or inspired by McLaughlin, Coltrane or other jazz greats. Joni Mitchell was smashing barriers and even Steely Dan was incorporating jazz-tinged sounds or instruments that had yet to be used by popular musicians. Maybe it took the raising of expectations of rock in the 70s to incorporate other styles of music or that the music had gained accessibility but jazz in the 70s had not died. It simply evolved so far from its original roots that it was hardly identifiable.
Burns, however, does what he does in all of his documentaries, which helps the viewer find her or his true north by digging up something or someone who has helped return people to the roots or origins of whatever it is Burns is writing about; in this case, the messiah, the leader into the promised land, happens to be Wynton Marsalis. This trumpter, even in his early twenties, is the savior of jazz because he chooses not to incorporate stylings even imagined in the 1950s. This young leader brings us back to the days of swing and its beatific glories; only the apostates surely enjoyed music from the Sixties or beyond and God forbid that even further new ground be broken. The savior is truly one that has helped us awaken in us a love for neoclassicism, and this documentary maker shows us that now, since we are returned to our roots, we shall bask in the glories of those who have shown us that as long as we find what lies behind us, we shall see what lies ahead. This is not history, this is myth. Burns spun similar stories in other documentaries, showing viewers that as we continue to urbanize, we move farther from our American roots planted by Lewis and Clark; the more business involves itself in professional sports, the further we move away from the true spirt of baseball and the more we advance technologically and grow more diverse, the farther we shall continue to abandon the better angels of our nature. This documentarian/mythmaker does nothing but tell us moderns that as we create our own history it is false history if it moves in a direction otherwise unseen, that the pathfinders are all gone and we are only to follow and not lead in our journeys through life. I'd love to see how depressed, how insipid one of Ken Burns' documentaries of the 1980s or even suburbia would be. Nothing to be hopeful for, no gods to have touched earth and then move on, no prophesy to fulfill. Burns succeeded in outlining the roots of a truly American art form and yet loses sight of the art when he chooses not to recognize just how it had adapted to its environment; jazz in the 1970s was not Artie Shaw nor any other bandleader of the swing era; what to do, then, for performers like Sonny Rollins, Monk, McCoy Tyner or Bobby Hutcherson but to keep at it and pray for a renaissance, or yet, the second coming.

Just For the Heck Of It

Just for the heck of it, I'd like to ask if there's anything that anyone would like me to post on. Totally pretentious even to think that anyone's reading this, but someone has to, right? Ask away!

Lots and Lots and Lots!!!

I know it's been a while and it seems that Chris Brown and I were in a competition to see would would blog last, so he has won, though we have lost as we haven't heard his voice in a while (hint, Chris, BLOG!!!) Over the course of the last couple of weeks, lots has gone on, and I'd like to keep up with it all myself.

Firstly, I saw the latest Woody Allen film, Match Point. An incredible film that made the audience gasp not just a single time as the main character's murderous actions have social, moral and psychological ramifications unintended. Allen's moral crux posed at the beginning of the film is seen to carry itself out in the story which left myself and my wife with a sickened feeling in our stomachs as we wrestled with the idea of justice and the question of the root of evil.

I've had the opportunity to be reading as I've found myself with less schoolwork now that I finally have a prep period this term. I'm cracking Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey after having completed James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain. The latest New Yorker has a wonderful little piece on a couple who enjoy visiting graveyards in New England and how doing so has affected what the writer wishes to inscribe on his own. The magazine's film reviews were brutal on several recent releases and was condescendingly polite to Woody, even, though Match Point is receiving rave reviews from a vast majority of critics (personally, I think it's Scarlet, who's just about the sexiest thing on screen for the first part of the film - Woody's inner Russ Meyer comes out a bit, but partly it fits the story, and I'm not just being a guy about this). As my brother and I were discussing this, he stated that often, the writers hold the rest of American society in such contempt as it continually fails to produce anything of artistic quality and continued with the line of the decade:
"it comes across that people of the New Yorker too often believe that not only do they think that their shit doesn't stick but that it also tastes good, too." I challenge anyone to top that one as I still laugh when I think about it.
Staying on my New York kick, my wife and I watched Barefoot In the Park last night as we were in the mood for some Neil Simon. I figured that she would like gazing at a young Robert Redford all night which would allow me to ogle a young and extremely hot Jane Fonda. Light-heartedly and ultimately disposable, it was nonetheless fun to watch comedic fare from the late 1960s to see what made people laugh. Check it out for the scene of the two shiny new Ford Mustangs towards the end. Tonight, more lighthearted fare, Children of a Lesser God - yeah, right!!!
Musically, I'm still obsessed with the mid-century saxophonists and their incredible sounds they created. Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Hank Mobley, Lester Young. I can go on and on and on...all of this is gearing me up for catching McCoy Tyner in just a couple of weeks as he hits Yoshi's with Ravi Coltrane (not a bad tenor player himself), Bobby Hutcherson and a couple of other players. We'll go and have a fantastic sushi dinner before the show and have a great time.

Lastly, if anyone's reading this and actually has made it thus far, I'd like some advice. I'm itching to take my wife to Mendocino for a weekend getaway and don't know where to start. My old favorite haunt has been sold and my favorite room has re-modeled and the rates doubled. I'm not naive that I won't find a decent place for anywhere under $100 but I'd like to either find the best bang for my buck or the most special place on earth. I can see why so many people would love to retire up there; two years ago I spent one of the weirdest but magical weekends of my life there. For another post if I haven't already reminisced about this, but I'd like to get "back to the garden". Speaking of as well, what is anyone's favorite Joni Mitchell album? I'm ready to dedicate an entire post to this amazing and beautiful woman's music.

Am I Early Or Late?

Look at that, my muse has called me! Two posts in a night!
Am I too early or too late to post some of the best music of the year (twelve days)? As I stated last week, the Susan Tedeschi release from last year is magical; she can sing like the blues is still vital and fresh. I love the record. And, I know that she's always better live than on record, if one can imagine that.
Secondly, a friend and colleague gave me two of Ryan Adams' releases from last year as well. Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, two different albums with the same intention: this young artist's love of older, better and more soulful music. Imagine the first album as Neil Young (not sloppy but Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere-era Neil) playing with the Grateful Dead a la 1972 after their return from Europe. In typical classic-style albums, it's way too long with too many similar-sounding songs and yet there aren't too many new artists that can compete with Ryan Adams. His Jacksonville album is more laid-back, reflective of his country roots that first put him on the music map. Gentle acoustic guitars, piercing steel pedal and songs of lost love, late nights and not too-lost memories. Check out all of these records. Whether they should be on the 2005 or 2006 lists, I'm not sure. Doesn't matter, anyway.

Where We Go From Here

I'm finding that January has put me off to a very weird and complicated start. I'm unfocussed with my job and a bit unhappy with some of the actions I'm seeing occur; I've been (and my family has been) ill for most of the month; my sister-in-law's (which made her my brother's as well) cat died at the unbelievable age of twenty-one, which I know is really hurting them; and I'm still not happy with what's going on with the government of my country. Of course there's absolutely no link between the funk I'm experiencing and the front pages but I'm seeing a disconnect on a national level and it's apparent that the country is out of touch with itself.
This week has unveiled the Senate hearings for Supreme Court-nominated Samuel Alito to speak his heart and mind to show his capablities as a Justice. What we've seen is the Democrats attempt to grasp at straws in their attempts of a character assassination and a nominee who is being so deliberately vague in order to not be pinned to his words in the future that I'm not sure that half of what Alito is saying can be believed even by himself. I would like to see the Senate panel ask the nominee to explain his judicial philosophies so that the public understands how a man has come to believe in a conservative jurisprudential mindset. I'd like to have heard that from "liberal" judges as well, not whether Alito's going to overturn Roe v. Wade (like there aren't eight other judges sitting on the bench?). As much of the hearings have been political grandstanding, the Senators are narrow mindedly keeping a terribly myopic view of their questioning of Alito and are failing to get to the heart of this judge's legal soul. Why does he interpret the Constitution, the law, common law, stare decisis as he does? Instead of talking, shut up and let the man speak; if he trips over himself then allow him to defend and protect himself but stop with the poor attempts at painting him into a corner that he justifiably does not need to escape from.
All the while, why haven't the Democrats (or the mainstream press, for that matter) continued to hone in on the Abramoff scandal? This is truly the big "payola" scandal of Congress and I am not naive enough to think that this has been the first and only time rubbing elbows has generated influence in Washington. However, any layman's first look at the political machine created by Jack, Tom DeLay and their ilk shows that this is truly an unprecedented attack on the American democratic system. I hope that people like George Will will finally shut up thinking that money (or as we call it in our home country "F**KING BRIBERY" is free speech. That argument is about as ridiculous as the Supreme Court's interpreting corporations as individuals needing protection under the 14th Amendment. As I continue to digress, campaign or political donations should be legal; I have and continue to support the causes I believe in. However, when people in high places who have direct and personal connections with the causes they donate, they have all too often the opportunity to dictate the direction of political winds. Political insider trading is how it appears and it needs to halt immediately. I don't care if every last Congressperson gets kicked out of Congress and an entire batch of green representatives run the ship; I'm sick and tired of seeing stalwart "honest" representatives run this place. We live in a second gilded age but unfortunately we don't have a Mark Twain when we need one.

On a much, much lighter note, I'll be picking up tickets to see McCoy Tyner at the end of the month and the Derek Trucks Band in both San Francisco and Sacramento in February. Two monster musicians that never fail to inspire and awe me.

Life Changes Fast

Life changes fast.
Life changes in an instant
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

So writes Joan Didion for the first time after discovering her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne, dead on the floor of their Manhattan apartment on December 30, 2003. Didion took nearly a year before she was able to place pen to paper in order to record her thoughts all the while she was struggling with the loss of her husband and the impending death of her daughter from a debilitating stroke. Didion's latest memoir captures the pain, the lucidity and the terrible clarity of one reeling from the death of a loved one.

Joan Didion changed my life, though she'll never know it. In the junior year of college, I enrolled in Dick Oglesby's History of California course in my Spring 1994 quarter. Oglesby loved assigning a vast amount of reading and his California course was no different. I loved his lectures and always read the assigned readings but was apprehensive about the text covering the "modern" era. That was until I opened the cover of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and skimmed the first chapter. A woman involved in the destruction of her family and her unhappiness situated in the culture of southern California seemed to hit me where no other book had before. Since that assigned reading, I have re-read that book probably four or five times in completion and several of its chapters countless times. Immediately I was attracted to Didion's logical and surgical analysis of life in the golden state during a time, not of a summer of love or of self-discovery but of a time in which she stated society had performed "an abortion on itself and [had] botched the job." Not the "Last Days of the Great State of California" and a satirical yet excising look into the contradictory and short-sided political goings-on of the Republican Party and conservative movement of the late 1960s and 1970s but a funeral elegy of the nation's state most likely to star in "American Beauty" with Kevin Spacey. "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" led to "The White Album" which led to her writings on 9/11 and the deceit of the federal government and the nation's foreign policy failures which then led to "Where I Was From" which was a memoir of her past that could have been the inverse of my family history: how one had arrived in California yet spent the remainder of one's life as far away as possible from it.
For Christmas, I gave myself Didion's latest book which I had not asked anyone else for but luckily found at Costco the day after. I devoured this latest book in just two and a half days as I could not leave Joan as her husband had. How anyone could live their life knowing the unthinkable about her/his spouse, the most painful and yet undeniable part of one's life and marriage and still remain sane and rational is proof of the resiliency of the human spirit. Joan Didion was not the first person to lose a spouse nor to deal with pain and grief. And yet, this author has captured the struggle of just how someone who understands life can easily deny or remove oneself from the everyday reality that death is real and permanent; it is practically miraculous that people are able to recover from the death of their closest friends and loved ones but in reality, loss and pain are the most sobering and real parts of life. Didion does not dwell on death but writes of acceptance and her ulitmate acknowledgement that at the drop of a hat, one's reality can fatally and fatefully change.

Listening to, bopping to, digging and ultimately missing those salt peanuts, John. Your music truly made me dizzy as a bird.

Good Fences?

Sentiment appears to be growing to build a fence cutting Texas off from Mexico in order to limit "illegal" immigration. Conservatives in the Lone Star State continue to see the immigration issue as one where "Americans" need to protect their borders from an onslaught of foreigners who come with their drugs, their babies and their potential to spread terrorism, though the last I remember, all threats of terrorism from foreign groups has come from within our borders or against U.S. institutions in other countries. This wall is truly reflective of overall U.S. foreign policy as well as an anxiety and reactionary fear that "America" is changing and becoming a non-white and non-Protestant country.
We're becoming like Israel, the U.S.'s largest off-shore military base (to paraphrase Noam Chomsky) in building a physical barrier to separate the United States with the people who come and provide basic low-paying and little-respected labor that seems to be much needed by the white upper classes in this nation. Growing numbers of Latino laborers are in the United States legally and illegally performing the jobs that whites refuse to do: farm labor, manufacturing, dish- and carwashing; child care providers are ever-increasingly Latino as well as the majority of workers in the service industry. White Americans are either moving up the socio-economic ladder and choosing other lines of work or choosing not to perform these jobs out of pride and feelings of racial superiority. The discussion of welfare reform and border closures can continue for eternity but the fact of the matter is that Americans (regardless of color) demand low-paying service jobs and are complacent with Latino workers filling those positions and the issue of legal status is moot. Living in the Bay Area of Northern California, this writer sees the demand for jobs filled and the recipients of such provided labor well-contented as many of my colleagues recommend their nannies and housekeepers to me. What provides needed food or clothing to such people provides a free hour or two from the kids for a date night, an opportunity to work out at the gym or the chance to head to Tahoe a couple of hours early knowing the house is spotless; it's stunning how the two worlds are so divergent in values and economic necessity. What exactly, other than the riling of the conservative base, would closing the border with a ten-foot wall actually serve? Suddenly, with the cutting off of immigration, "iron laws" would be ignored as the labor pool would dramatically be severed and recipients of such needed labor would see a massive increase in their childcare or housekeeping bills. A simple matter of labor supply and demand would kick in but with negative effects for citizens of the United States whose most valued goal is the cheap deals they're receiving.
This leads to another point when discussing the matter of immmigration: there is no such thing as an "illegal". While people may be in this country (10 million, which is, recognizably, an issue to seriously discuss and solve) illegally, there is no such thing as an illegal person. To hear some throw around such labels as "illegals" while those people, with valuable souls and identities as human beings denigrated (or defined) strictly for their citizenship status seen as second-class humans sickens me. We're not talking threats of terrorism, considering the President and the NSA seem to have the whole tracking-the-bad-guys-legally-or-not thing down and the "War on Drugs" merely being a matter of "fearing when white suburbanites smoke too much pot or do crank" and so we're talking about a matter of why people continue to risk their lives coming to this country. The U.S. (and not "America" by the way, as last I checked, Canada and Mexico are still found on this continent and God-know-how-many nations lie below Belize) still serves as a model nation for economic improvement and hope for so many that live in pre-industrial, poverty-stricken nations (and places that no proud U.S. citizen would expect in this country). Being reminded of that rocking social critic and poet Bruce Springsteen, whose music from the mid-90s rings truer now than when I first heard those songs, sings of people who risk everything in order to do nothing but provide more for their parents and children. "Across the Border", from The Ghost of Tom Joad, is most likely the elegaic story defining the immigrant experience in the United States. The Promised Land, a place he identified for the working class in the 1970s has now been in the late 1980s and 1990s the same goal for people of non-white and foreign status who still wish to do the same that we wish: give our families the best we can. Who doesn't wish that for their families? Why do people in the United States wish to deny the same opportunities to people whose ancestry happens to arbitrarily differ from those who came to this nation and for the same reasons a century ago?
I believe in the promised land...

Addendum

man, I'm listening to the new Susan Tedeschi album, Hope and Desire, and this just bumped one of my other discs to make the top ten of 2005. It's fantastic; I praised it upon its release way back in October after sampling it but I never picked it up. Imagine a vibe around Aretha/1970 with Bonnie Raitt on vocals. I still need to set up my new sound system to truly appreciate the production of this but even out of my tiny computer speakers, this is a dynamic album.
I go back to work tomorrow only hoping and praying for a smooth transition into the second semester. I will have a lighter course load to teach and so I'm looking forward to a time to really invest in students' lives without killing myself with so much work.
Tomorrow or the next day, whenever I can find time after my brother and his family fly home, I will post a top ten list of albums I picked up, regardless of release dates. I find that I'm buying albums released more than a half-century ago and that my tastes are changing in that all I want to listen to half the day are records put out during Depression-era history. I'm finding great music, a little solace and a great amount of history in listening to such old music but that out of duty I need to be listening to this because I can't truly appreciate Branford Marsalis or Susan Tedeschi without understanding Lester Young or Mahalia Jackson. Maybe by the time I'm seventy I'll have digested and appreciated all the music I need to in finally cracking all-modern bands.

I also need to produce some thoughts about Joan Didion's new book, The Year of Magical Thinking which I devoured in just two and a half days as well as some predictions for 2006.