I am listening to the Duo for Violin and 'Cello by an American named Edward Toner Cone. Most people leave the apostrophe off 'cello, but it really is a violincello, isn't it? I'm never sure of myself when it comes to 'cellos. Cone is just another in my searches for an advancer of American classical music--or American cultural music, what the hell, it's this dude's conception of the music coming out of his head. It's not bad, but, sorry, Ed, it doesn't make me wanna get up and dance or turn romantic either; I don't know; it simply makes me think of a thousand other classical pieces! Wow, what a condemnation. A dear friend of mine, a drummer, and a good one, too, a guy who knows jazz about as well as anybody I've ever known or read, handed me a cassette one time and told me he'd appreciate my opinion of it. When he asked me if I'd listened to it and I said yes he eagerly asked me how I liked it. I said "I'd already heard it before." He was humiliated. "What the F does that mean?" I said, "That means I've already heard this done...by its originators, like Miles Davis...." "What?" "I mean it sounds like somebody trying to copycat exactly how the old Miles Davis Quintet used to sound; or I've heard it done by Al Cohn and Zoot Sims maybe; dig? My question back at you is, where is the music within you're blood and not in your memory?" What an asshole I am.
Freedom Tower
I went to the Freedom Tower site and read some of the articles and comments posted there. One article really pissed me off--and especially the comments about it. The article refered to a battleship, the USS New York (why not "New York City"?), that was built in Louisiana out of scrap from the WTC, the 9/11 leftovers. Can you believe that? First of all, does that mean the Pentagon got all the scrap iron that came off that horrible site? One of the guys in Louisiana who worked on the ship said "They'd knock us down and now we was gonna knock them back down with this heah boat." Such assinine reasoning forced me to chisle an epistle in the stone of the Freedom Tower site's comment section. Last I looked, they were still checking my comment for "moderation." Hot damn. I was moderately assholy! That Freedom Tower is such a joke to me. A cartoon being drawn in order to pull a wool over our eyes so we can't see the truth of all of this, 9/11, Katrina, the War in Iraq, the Saudi involvement, the Israeli involvement, on and on and on and on. Idiots lead us. The rich are all egomaniacal idiots.
Another Cone
Now a piece by Mr. Toner Cone entitled New Weather, the poems of one Paul Muldoon (a top of the mornin' to ya, Paul, me lad!) of whom I had never heard, just as I had never heard of Toner Cone before I bought this CD (I collect American music):
Hedgehog
The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret
With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, "Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.
"We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions."
The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.
We forget the god
Under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
Will a god trust in the world.
Paul Muldoon
from Selected Poems, 1968-1986
Live Long and Prosper
CHICAGO — Motorola Inc. said Friday that it would cut 3,500 jobs and take other steps to reduce costs after misjudgments on pricing and sales forecasts for its high-end phones contributed to its least profitable quarter since 2004.
The move came as the world's No. 2 cellphone maker reported a 48% decline in fourth-quarter earnings, to $624 million, on a steep drop in profitability in the handset business.
Chief Executive Ed Zander announced the cuts at an analysts' meeting in New York, saying Motorola could save about $400 million over two years by eliminating 5% of its workforce.
Facing stiffer competition from its rivals' new products, Motorola aggressively cut prices of its phones during the quarter, especially in emerging markets, to gain market share at the expense of profit margins.
The decision to shed jobs comes after Motorola's recent $3.9-billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies Inc., a maker of bar code scanners and hand-held computers, had increased the Schaumburg, Ill.-based company's workforce to 70,000 from about 67,000. The cuts are to be spread across the company globally and completed in the first half of 2007.
From the Associated Press, 1/21/07
Gore Vidal in Cuba
He told the media that he “worried about the collapse of the Republic. We have lost habeas corpus and the Constitution that we inherited from England 700 years ago. Suddenly, we were robbed of it. The current regime has done it, and the legal bases of our Republic have gone with it, and as I am one of the historians of that Republic, I am not happy.”
How did he see Cuban reality as opposed to what the US government reported? “They never told us why we should hate the Cubans. I think Kennedy and his compatriots were motivated [in their aggressive anti-Castro policies] by vanity.” He said, “My friend John F. Kennedy was running for president,” (1960) and he foolishly allowed the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion to take place. “Vanity has played a large role in the relationship,” he added, referring to the terrorist war aged by the brothers Kennedy against Cuba after the April 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco.
Vidal paused and jumped backward in time. “When we invaded Cuba [in 1898] it was only a pretext to start the war against Spain and end up taking the Philippines, as we did in the end.” The Cuban reporters taped and wrote. “I hate to say it,” Vidal continued with a smile, “but you were just a step for the United States to reach Asia, although we always had our eyes on the Caribbean.”
From Counterpoint, by Saul Landau
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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