PALIMPSEST

Gore Vidal, 1925-2012

Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: August 1, 2012 

There's your headline in yesterday's NY Times. Read the whole story. Vidal was a terrific writer and a wonderful lively character and he will be missed.

fuel to the fire

Thanks, Susan!

CHICKEN LITTLE, HERE

Forget all the other noise passing as news:

The Premier pretends to care about the environment. The Premier has one setting - Snarl. She loves a fight, a contest, running for office or an arm-wrestle. She wouldn't know a pipeline if she fell over it. Worse, she shows her basic values. You want us to carry the risk of this thing? Give us more loot.

It's OK. We have only a few more months of this lack of leadership and vision and then we can start slogging the next guy.

NBC's Olympic coverage is late, pre-empted by the web and xenophobic in the extreme? Try the genius  over at CTV. Last night they spent three or four hours trumpeting a great tennis match between Canadian Raonic and French star, Tsonga. How many times did the granite Brian Williams - clearly the most boring sportscaster in history - tell us that a real treat was on the way?

When the coverage finally arrived - a 3-setter that ended 25-23 in the third for Tsonga - what we lucky souls got to see was a 90 second summary. Thanks, boys. Super coverage.

So forget all that.

There was only one real story and it stretched over at least two days and this was it:

Blackout cuts power to 670 million Indians

This is the future, kids.

 This story, which I expect to see repeated in one form or another on a regular basis coming from every place on earth that may still have the power with which to transmit the tale, is where we are heading.

Between air conditioning, the internet and the colossal inability of governments to do almost anything right, I believe we can predict meltdowns of so-called basic services of this magnitude to appear with frightening regularity.

Canada is a bubble.

We live in an amazing paradise. No mortar shells, no banks run by Bob and his cousin, Neil, an apparent abundance of space and natural resources and governments that may be stupid and annoying, but are not shooting or arresting citizens by the carload for their thoughts or opinions.

How long can it last?

I have no idea.

But I am not placing any bets.

THE WHOLE STORY

The liner notes below are all about the video that follows. Most lovers of jazz could not tell you how many times they have listened to this album. If you don't know it, here it is. So many You Tube pieces are small tastes; this is the whole matzoh ball. Savor it and save it.

Mile Davis - Kind Of Blue Full Album Concert Full HD Kind of Blue is a studio album by American jazz musician Miles Davis, released August 17, 1959, on Columbia Records in the United States. High Quality Sound Audio FLAC Which Preserve Quality of Original Uncompressed Audio Sound Recording sessions for the album took place at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City on March 2 and April 22, 1959. The sessions featured Davis's ensemble sextet, which consisted of pianist Bill Evans (Wynton Kelly on one track), drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers, and saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley.

After the entry of Bill Evans into his sextet, Davis followed up on the modal experimentations of Milestones (1958) and 1958 Miles (1958) by basing the album entirely on modality, in contrast to his earlier work with the hard bop style of jazz. Though precise figures have been disputed, Kind of Blue has been described by many music writers not only as Davis's best-selling album, but as the best-selling jazz record of all time. On October 7, 2008, it was certified quadruple platinum in sales by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It has been regarded by many critics as the greatest jazz album of all time and Davis's masterpiece.

The album's influence on music, including jazz, rock, and classical music, has led music writers to acknowledge it as one of the most influential albums ever made. In 2002, it was one of fifty recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry. In 2003, the album was ranked number 12 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Accolades

Kind of Blue has been cited by writers and music critics as the greatest jazz album of all time and has been ranked at or near the top of numerous "best album" lists in disparate genres. In 2002, Kind of Blue was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.In selecting the album as number 12 on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, Rolling Stone magazine stated "This painterly masterpiece is one of the most important, influential and popular albums in jazz". On December 16, 2009, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Kind of Blue and "reaffirming jazz as a national treasure". It is included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, described by reviewer Seth Jacobson as "a genre-defining moment in twentieth-century music, period."

Track listing
All songs written and composed by Miles Davis except where noted (see content section for more information). Only six complete takes of the five songs on the album exist:.
No. Title Length
1. "So What" 9:22
2. "Freddie Freeloader" 9:46
3. "Blue in Green" (Miles Davis and Bill Evans) 5:37
4. "All Blues" 11:33
5. "Flamenco Sketches" (Miles Davis and Bill Evans) 9:26
Reissue bonus track
No. Title Length
6. "Flamenco Sketches (Alternate take)" 9:32
Tracks 1, 2 and 3 (side one on the original vinyl release) recorded March 2, 1959; tracks 4 and 5 (side two) recorded April 22, 1959. All tracks recorded at Columbia 30th Street Studio, New York City.
Personnel

Musicians
Miles Davis -- trumpet, band leader
Julian "Cannonball" Adderley -- alto saxophone, except on "Blue in Green"
Paul Chambers -- double bass
Jimmy Cobb -- drums
John Coltrane -- tenor saxophone
Bill Evans -- piano (except "Freddie Freeloader"), liner notes
Wynton Kelly -- piano on "Freddie Freeloader"

MILES DAVIS - KIND OF BLUE (Full Album)

A Little Russian Night Musik

THE UNIVERSAL TONGUES - MUSIC/DANCE

THE GNUS

1. "If the legislative assembly were a public company, it would be delisted."

The Auditor-General's scathing report on the Provincial Legislature's utter inability to keep records of spending tax dollars is more than embarrassing. It's infuriating. 

One of the favorite past times of legislators, politicians and bureaucrats is telling non-profit charities that they must be more responsible and keep better books. In short, they are regularly demanding that people involved on a daily basis with the poor, the addicted, the underprivileged and the dis-empowered should also be CPA's in their spare time - like such front line workers have spare time.

In spite of challenging work loads, most charitable organizations do a great job of accounting for the way they spend money.

Now let's see what the kettle-calling-everybody-else-black can do about cleaning up their own arrogant mess.

2. Why is Post Media, the parent company of most Canadian dailies, spending its dwindling resources having columnist Christie Blatchford hanging out for ages in a Winnipeg courtroom?

The case is about as tabloid sleazorama as they get. A Manitoba judge and her husband may or may not have propositioned a man into three way sex.

YAWN.

Christie Blatchford is a very good writer.

This piece of trash non-story could have been covered by a Winnipeg Free Press intern.

There are no bigger issues in the Canadian fabric these days?

And they wonder why the old business model is collapsing?

Decisions to go on for days on such trivia and gossip like this don't help.

LANGARA GOLF CONDOS? KITS JERICHO SEAWALL, YES!

WOMEN, THE MEDIA & POLITICS

FRIEND VICTOR ON GUNS, GANGSTERS & GOMMORAH

The Colorado massacre, in one of those bleak coincidences, occurred during the same week as the anniversary of the murder of 77 people in Norway. It occurred a week after the shooting of 22 people in Toronto.

These examples, and others, show that crazy, evil people bent on murder, will find the means to do it. Ask the parents of the Jewish kids who died in Belarus last week.

The gun availability in America is of course ludicrous but it has willing, non-american participants. The gun of choice for ghetto gangstas in America is the Glock, a product of Austria. It has been celebrated in the songs of numerous rappers. Lee Oswald used an Italian assault rifle. France was the major supplier of Iraq's nuclear program. Europeans preach peace and sell death.

These events usually result in a having the same bromides trotted out such as the root cause being poverty. Norway has the world's richest economy on a per capita basis. It still produces mass murderers. The shoot out in Toronto did, admittedly, occur at a street party in a government housing project. But organizers of the party bought $1500 worth of cognac to distribute on the sidewalk. Poor in Toronto is upper middle class in Somalia.

What is most worrisome about America is that the lines of hatred are deeply an indelibly drawn. Vast segments in both the Democrat and Republican camps loathe the other side. It is not a friendly policy difference for these folks as it was in the 1950's. It is hatred. It is like Northern Ireland circa 1970. It will not get better. Add to that the class hatreds, racial hatreds, religious hatreds, generational hatreds. It is a pile of tinder awaiting a careless match.

By all means restrict the guns. The hoards of haters will find other ways. Obama recently bragged about hacking Iran's defence computers using Israeli technology. He didn't say much when the New York Times revealed that China had hacked Pentagon computers. On almost a monthly basis, some hacker brings down operating systems in millions of computers.

How long will it be before some embittered computer hacker will over-ride hospital computer systems, changing drug doses to poison and shutting down breathing apparatus? How long before traffic control systems are locked in red lights by mendacious hackers just for the fun of it? Far-fetched. I hope so.I know better.

You cannot have a country that is a cocktail of hatred and technology without the unspeakable happening.

KILLING POLICY

Forget the Movie Massacre Madman.

The world is filled with major league nut jobs lurking in the bushes.

That's not the point.

The point is this:

In the last 60 days, this fellow bought from local shops four guns and 6000 rounds of ammunition, including a drum magazine that fires a bullet every second.

The villain is public policy in America.

We understand the position of the NRA. Cleverly and consistently misreading the Second Amendment, Yankee gun supporters believe in their hearts that they must have the right to own guns, lest they be imprisoned by a totalitarian government.

OK. We get it. Citizens must have the ability to protect themselves from the Official Protectors. Gotcha.

But, tell me this.

When someone walks into a local store and buys automatic weapons and 6,000 rounds of ammo with some loads that will fire with every heart beat, to what party is he heading? A revolution? An uprising? An insurgency?

What is a civilized person in a civilized neighbourhood up to exactly when this is his idea of shopping?

How can a body politic allow the neighbourhood slurpy vendor to dispense this kind of savage fire power like it's Tuscan Chicken Sandwich to go?

No politician in "the greatest country in the world, blah, blah, blah" has to date and to my knowledge had the unarmed courage to stand up to the NRA and its fellow travelers and say, "Enough. We will have guns, but there are some that will not be available and we won't be able to buy Uzi's on the internet."

I look forward to such a day, but I am not holding my breath.

One More Massacre

Posted by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker

The murders—it dignifies them to call them a “tragedy”—in Aurora, Colorado, have hit us all hard, though the grief of the friends and families of the victims is unimaginable. Still, it hits home, or someplace worse than home, for any parent who (as I did, as so many did) had a kid at one of the many midnight screenings of the new Batman movie last night, they having gone to see it the moment it opened. Once again, as so often before, the unthinkable news is disassembled, piece by piece, into its heartbreaking parts. After the Virginia Tech shooting, the horrifying detail, as I wrote at the time, was that the cell phones were still ringing in the pockets of the dead children as their parents tried to call them. In Colorado, you can’t expunge the knowledge of the sudden turn from pleasure to horror that those children experienced. As the smoke bomb went off, some of the kids inside apparently thought that it was a special effect, part of the fun, until they began to see “people holding themselves.” According to the Aurora police, the suspect, James Holmes, who is twenty-four, was carrying both a rifle and a handgun. The bullets were fired so freely that they penetrated the wall separating one movie theatre in a multiplex to devastate people in the next one.

The truth is made worse by the reality that no one—really no one—anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life. That includes the President, whose consoling message managed to avoid the issue of why these killings take place. Of course, we don’t know, and perhaps never will, what exactly “made him” do what he did; but we know how he did it. Those who fight for the right of every madman and every criminal to have as many people-killing weapons as they want share moral responsibility for what happened last night—as they will when it happens again. And it will happen again.

The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country—Canada, Norway, Britain—has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do—as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue. Does anyone even remember any longer last July’s gun massacre, those birthday-party killings in Texas, when an estranged husband murdered his wife and most of her family, leaving six dead?

But nothing changes: the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in The New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed. For all the good work the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence tries to do, nothing changes. On the last episode of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom,” Jeff Daniels’s character, in a scene set shortly before the Gabrielle Giffords gun massacre, was thought to display political courage by showing, accurately enough, that it’s a lie to say that Barack Obama is in any way in favor of gun control. This was said in Obama’s defense.

Only in America. Every country has, along with its core civilities and traditions, some kind of inner madness, a belief so irrational that even death and destruction cannot alter it. In Europe not long ago it was the belief that “honor” of the nation was so important that any insult to it had to be avenged by millions of lives. In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers. The argument has gotten dully repetitive: How does one argue with someone convinced that the routine massacre of our children is the price we must pay for our freedom to have guns, or rather to have guns that make us feel free? You can only shake your head and maybe cry a little. “Gun Crazy” is the title of one the best films about the American romance with violence. And gun-crazy we remain.

The horror is touched, inflected, by the way that the killings now intertwine with the everyday details of our lives. The killings will go on; the cell phones in the pockets of dead children will continue to ring; and now parents can be a little frightened every time their kids go to a midnight screening of a movie designed to show them what stylized fun violence can be, in the hands of the right American moviemaker. Of course, there have been shootings at school, too. We’re a nation of special effects.

Photograph by Barry Gutierrez/AP Photo.

A LITTLE NEWS FROM THE STREET

A friend, who is a keen observer of the passing parade, emailed this gem the other night.

I talked to a Vancouver cop the other day. I asked whether they ever had to attend at the junkie condo complex at 16th and Dunbar. The cop replied " Every day".

The cop went on to explain that almost all of the calls were about resident addicts going "batshit" because they have mental health issues.

Remember that Larry Campbell and Sam Sullivan, neither of whom have any credentials as clinicians, assured us that people with dual diagnosis ( i.e addiction plus a mental illness) would be cured by giving them a nice place to live.

I can think of a few addicts who had a nice place to live. Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain etc.etc.

Why does the DSM ( dumb shit media) in this town never, ever follow this up?

The case of the S & M Mountie raises some very deep and important issues.

What part of anyone's life is private?

What are your personal sex life and choices to do with me?

Why did JFK and countless Presidents before him have many mistresses without the knowing press exposing them, while no modern President could possibly escape public attention for "wandering?"

Must police, athletes, entertainers, celebrities, teachers, politicians (who are, after all, law makers) and judges hold to a higher standard than labourers or ornithologists?

There may or may not be ready answers to these and similar questions and there may or may not be a broad general principal available in such inquiries.

But in this specific instance, I think the lines are reasonably clear.

The fact that Cpl. Brown enjoys torture sex scenes in his private life is not only no concern of mine, but please, sir, don't bore me with your war stories. I have no interest. And you have the right to engage in any sexual practices that are consensual and do not result in injury or death.

BUT.

1. Putting yourself "out there" on video is just flat stupid. It could also be interpreted as the height of narcissism and ego or a pathetic cry for help. Whatever it might be, it's shamefully idiotic. Which alone gives one pause to consider how much I want this fellow charged with protecting me.

2. The officer was somehow in the mix of the earliest part of the investigation into the horrendous Pickton murders of women. So, let me see if I understand this, because it's starting to feel like a case for Lisbeth Salander of Dragon Tattoo fame. A police officer who gets his sexual pleasures from torturing or pretending to torture and slice up women is somehow on the scene and knowledgeable about the worst torturer of women in local history. Now, we can be really worried.

Our Provincial Justice Minister, Shirley Bond, has weighed in on these events:

S&M Mountie won't be asked to quit

 But Bond disappointed by officer's actions

 

Excuse me?

 

No one deserves to lose his or her job without due process, but I am hearing no noises off that this officer is being thoroughly investigated. Yes, there is some inquiry, but what is it?

If this man's personal behaviour has not sullied an already much battered force, what heinous actions would it take?

If ever transparency was called for it is now.

Worse...so much about the Pickton case has refused to come to light. 

Will we ever learn which upstanding citizens were regular guests at the party?

THE OPEN ROAD

There are many things to admire about Maui and to enjoy while there.

At the top of the list is that all beaches and beach access are public.

There are countless private and gorgeous homes and dozens of fabulous, pricey resorts, all hugging the seashore.

But all people, including Canadian visitors of less modest means, staying in relatively affordable condos for a week or two can have their morning and evening walks along the open ocean front or swim or body surf in any of the local waters.

This may not be the case along all American coast lines; I have no idea.

But it is a refreshingly democratic notion and one that I think most of us cherish.

Which brings us to this headline:

Point Grey Road seawall proposal draws mixed reaction

Some residents worry about environmental degradation, but others say a public walkway would reduce traffic congestion

This notion should be a no-brainer.

Of course, we should be able to walk and bicycle along the shore from Kits Beach to Jericho and beyond. Duh?

Any opposition is only about greed and status.

Next!

Now, let's see what of what stuff Vancouver City Council and Parks Board are made?

MORE JOY - WHO SAYS ROMANCE IS DEAD?

A Word of Explanation

The Vancouver Province has pulled from its website the animation (shown below) created by its editorial cartoonist, Dan Murphy, that satirizes Enbridge's massive ad campaign in support of its Northern Gateway pipeline.

In the original ad, Enbridge claims that the pipeline is "a path to our future," while families and fish frolic in sylvan settings to placid music. In the parody, a fictional official comments with increasing distress as the ad is repeatedly interrupted with giant oil splotches.

Wayne Moriarty, The Province's Editor-in-Chief, says the animation was removed at the request of Enbridge "because it contains copyrighted material." He admits that use of the material might be protected under fair use laws, but says the newspaper chose not to pursue the matter. He points out that The Province has run editorials critical of the pipeline, and insists that the decision to pull the satire has nothing to do with the $5 million campaign, which is running in his paper and The Vancouver Sun (both of which are owned by The Pacific Newspaper Group), among many other media outlets.

Moriarty denies a rumour that Murphy has been fired because of the cartoon. Murphy was not available for comment.

ENBRIDGE SPOOF

MORE JOY! What is even more remarkable is this is Moscow and a 1929 Irving Berlin song made famous by Fred Astaire...Again, look at the faces and the children...from my friend Walt in Amersham, England.