The world is a silly-ass place. India and Pakistan are gathering their troops on their mutual borders. They are being encouraged by US interests. Oh how glorious will the next World War be! Finally, our military Power Elite will get to maybe use nuclear weapons again! Their fingers are crossed. Plus they are currently testing weapons using the Israeli Army that is finally doing something about those scumbag dog-like Arabs cluttering up the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Army represents the army of the Chosen People. Hamas continues to lob homemade hand-grenade-like missiles over into Israel--actually onto territory that used to belong to Palestine. Israel knows all about the final solution--it's been used all throughout world history when one race of people decide they want to wipe the earth clean of another race of people. The great butchers of history are like Attila, like Tamerlane, like the Turks seeking a final solution for their Christian Armenian problem during Ottoman Empire days, and of course our own Hairy Ass Truman and his final solution for the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--or how about G.W. Bush? Wouldn't you consider him a butcher? So I didn't mention Adolf Hitler. I'm just trying to show you that he didn't invent the final solution. Zyclone B and throwing Jews into ovens weren't really Hitler's ideas--he was too busy designing the Volkswagen bug--though hating Jews was a passion that boiled heartily in his, some say, half-Jewish chest. Hitler, however, is no more heartless than Unka Dick and Georgie Porgie and General Petraus and Robert Gates--show no mercy in war has always been a theme behind the true believers in their particular races and the religions built up in legendary proportions to keep a particular race sparkling with desires for emulation. Sorry. I'm beginning to sound like thegrowlingwolf--I'm just as furiously antipolitician and Power Elite as he is--I was a Sociology major at New York University, Class of '75--when I was a kid and loved basketball, I idolized the NYU Violets--and New York University has always been political as well as literary. But, hey, now I'm just a proprietor of an Upstate New York deer jerky business who wiles away his time looking for ironies among the piles of leftover news, info, facts, and fictions.
--First off, did you know that most of our wind-generating machines are made in Viet Nam by a Dutch company?--you know, those superwindmills that one day are going to clutter up our fields and seasides and near-shore seas and lakes and farm lands and our mountaintops when like we went wild for fossil fuels we're going to go wild for windpower--at least that oil crook T. Boone Pickens is already going wild for windmill farms around the bare prairies of his Pampa, Texas, home.
Windmills in the middle of Lake Erie--help building up the economies of the Netherlands and Viet Nam--tacky, aren't they?
--thegrowlingwolf mentioned yesterday that Mrs. Noam Chomsky had died. That got me to checking in the obits for those others who died who weren't like Paul Newman, Sid Pollack, Odetta, Harold Pinter--the recent ones--but in case you've forgotten, here's a list of some others who died this year: Arthur C. Clarke; Paul Scofield; BO DIDDLEY; Mary Meader--she took aerial photographs of South America back in the 1930s; WM F BUCKLEY!!!; Cachao--he invented the mambo; Richard Widmark; Dith Pran; Albert Hoffmann--the discoverer of LSD--he lived to be 101; Yves St. Laurent; Johnny Podres--the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers's pitcher who beat the Yankees in the 7th game of the only World Series the BROOKLYN Dodgers ever won; Jim McKay--one of the worst sportscasters ever--Brian Mussberger has taken his place; Cyd Charisse; Jesse Helms; Jimmy Slide; Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Jerry Wexler; William Claxton--he said, "Photography is Jazz for the eyes"; Killer Kowalski; David Foster Wallace--wrote Infinite Jest; Levi Stubbs--of the Four Tops; Dave McKenna--one of the great tried-and-true jazz pianists; and last but not least, Bettie Page, a fifties "pinup" queen of the horny male (boy and man) masturbatory society of the day. Missed some others, like the Wham-O guy, two of the Kingston Trio, and Earle Hagen, the dude who wrote the "Andy Griffin Show" theme song, but I caught most of them--at least the ones I kind of enjoyed.
--Sorry, Helen Highman-Klein-LaCloos, but I couldn't resist putting this afore yere eyes:
Daddy's Little Girl |
| by Punkin |
| If I had my life to do over, I'd have chosen you to be my dad once more. Even if it meant losing you again, It's worth all the tears in the world. You were my sunshine when skies were gray. I loved you and honored you; You took all my tears away. I was happy to be with you, Proud to be your little girl. Sometimes we would argue, But to me you meant the world. Your love was always pure; You treated me as your own. Your time seemed all too short and I feel so alone. What can I take from this? My heart is completely crushed. But nothing loved is ever lost - And you are loved so much. |
--I mean, come on, you have got to find a lot of humor in Punkin's stupid poem! Daddy's dead and Punkin says she'd pick Daddy again if she had it to do over again--wow, Love Me, Daddy! But I thought a jot of a death poem would be appropriate following a tittle about who died this year.
--Having breakfast at the Grinding Gears Truck Stop in Lake Flaccid--out by the gun range--I heard to my great surprise on the GG's house radio--tuned to WIMP, 890 AM radio in Lake Flaccid--Casey Kasem--and he was doing his "America's Top 40" rock 'n roll show--and I was shocked--who'd'a thought old Casey was even still alive, much less an 80-year-old dude doing a rock 'n roll Top Forty show.
Casey Kasem--looking like death warmed over. Still rockin' 'n rollin'.
--thegrowlingwolf revealed his love of teevee "monkey shows" and seeing his ancestry in monkey faces--but he didn't show any monkey faces to prove his pagan-evolutionist point. Check out this monkey face. I think it proves the Wolf Man's jest.
Come on, you Creationists, explain that face to us heathen evolutionists.
--From the world of nanotechnology comes maybe some miracles that will outdo Jesus by several country miles--though turning water into wine is a tough miracle to top:
an international nanotech collaboration of American and Korean scientists, funded by the Korean government, has developed multifunctional gold-coated nanowires that are designed to swim through the blood stream and attach to cancerous cells via antibodies against the cancer cells. Exposure to an electromagnetic field should heat the nanowires and destroy the cancerous cells while sparing nearby normal cells.
Nanotechnology is amazing stuff--very difficult to understand like the String Theory, but it could possibly revolutionize all aspects of our lives.
barabasmunn-dayne
for The Daily Growler
_____________________________________________________
Tribute from thegrowlingwolf
I just learned today that saxophonist Johnny Griffin died in July of this year--yes, I got curious after reading Barabas Munn-Dayne's jots and tittles today all about folks dying in 2008--and I found Johnny's obit on The Boston Globe's Website. Johnny Griffin was a fascinating jazz saxophonist in the style of Sonny Stitt and the great Prez. Griffin was a master of the complicated line and the stringing together of complicated lines into a ferocious but cool unleashing of notes and improvisational brilliance. To play with Little Johnny Griffin meant you'd better be at the top of your game in terms of chops, keepin' up, keepin' the beat swift and fluid. I saw Johnny only once. Before I moved to New York City, Johnny had joined the expatriate jazz guys and had moved to Europe, working out of Paris. He came to the U.S. once a year and played at the Village Vanguard--and that's where I saw him--and he was backed by a WOW band, Ray Bynum on bass and Ronnie Matthews, an overlooked jazz great, on piano, and Kenny Washington on drums. They grooved hot and heavy for a solid hour--especially solid on "Groovin' High" and Monk's "Bright Mississippi"--Little Johnny Griffin has passed on and left his music still playing behind.
Here's Johnny Griffin's NYTimes obit in July 2008:
Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of his generation yet who spent most of his career in Europe, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived there for 24 years.
Johnny Griffin at the Blue Note in New York in 1997.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Miriam, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert on Monday in Hyères, France.
Mr. Griffin’s modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players. And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. [Bullshit]
In the early 1960s, embittered by the critical acceptance of free jazz, he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. Feeling that the American marketplace had no use for him (at a time when he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Europe, where he became a celebrated jazz elder.
“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything anymore,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”
Indeed, Mr. Griffin’s work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.
Johnny Griffin was born in Chicago on April 24, 1928, and grew up on the South Side. He attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the famed high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, whose other students included the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.
Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: at age 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14 he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the blues guitarist and singer T-Bone Walker. At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, where he switched from alto to tenor. From then until 1951 he was based in New York City but mostly on the road.
By 1947 he was touring with the rhythm-and-blues band of the trumpeter Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan, with whom he made the first recordings for the Atlantic label. He entered the United States Army in 1951; stationed in Hawaii, he played in an Army band.
Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became forces in jazz. He heard them both with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945 and, having first internalized the more balladlike saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, became entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of bebop, as the new music of Parker and Gillespie was known. In general his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.
Beyond the 1960s his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.
In the late 1940s he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his Army service he went back to Chicago, where he worked with Monk for the first time, a job that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet in New York in 1958. In 1967 he toured Europe with a Monk octet. [Johnny Griffin is the saxophonist on Monk's Live at the Five Spot album on Riverside--with the great Abdul Malik on bass--"In Walked Bud" is one of the greatest jazz tracks ever recorded--and it's live--and Little Johnny Griffin takes one of the hottest solos ever!]
Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint in 1957. The following year he began recording a series of albums as a leader for the Riverside label. On “Way Out!,” “The Little Giant” and other Riverside albums, his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles for testing a musician’s mettle.
A few years later he hooked up with Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, with whom he made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to find them either thrilling or filled with too many notes. The Griffin-Davis combination was a popular one, and the two men would sporadically reunite through the ’70s and ’80s. [Eddie "Cleanhead" Vincent had first made Lockjaw Davis a star--Lockjaw was one of the dude's who was in the Minton's House Band that Monk was the pianist in back in the early 1940s--Charlie Christian was the guitarist in that band--and Prez and all the sax cats used to go up to Minton's and "Blow the blues away" into the early morning hours--"breakfast jams" were the thing in those golden days of jazz]
Mr. Griffin left the United States in 1963, settling in Paris and recording mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates, like the drummer Kenny Clarke [trumpeters Bill Coleman and Benny Bailey were expatriates, too; so were Eddie "Freedom Jazz Dance" Harris, Bud Powell, and Sidney Bechet], and sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, the Netherlands. He moved to the Côte d’Azur with his second wife, Miriam, in 1980, and then in 1984 to Availles-Limouzine, near Poitiers in midwestern France, where he lived thereafter.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Griffin’s survivors include four children: his daughters Jo-Onna and Ingrid and a son, John Arnold Griffin, all of the New York City area, and another daughter, Cynthia Griffin of Bordeaux, France.
Mr. Griffin stayed true to the small-group bebop ideal with his American quartet, including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington. The record he made with this group for the Antilles label in 1991, “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.
Every April for many years, Mr. Griffin returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase. During those visits he usually also spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York, before returning home to his quiet house in the country.
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