Christiern

Perhaps it should have been... "Holy Toledo! God is in the house!"

Good post, Mnytime. As for the prevailing calm, I thik it is--in good measure--due to "berigan" easing up. That, in turn, has removed some of the initiative that propelled Johnny E. Enjoy it while it lasts--it is undoubtedly the calm before the storm!

Perhaps he will come back when and if his mind matures.

me neither, am I missing something? No And I can't think of a single W. Marsalis release that doesn't apply to. For every recording he made that is "good" there are tons of recordings by other trumpet players that are infinitely better.

I did not vote in this poll, because I could not in good conscience tag any of the listed albums as a "favorite." Although I have found some of Wynton's recordings to be ok, none has really captured my imagination, and most have reminded me of my childhood, when we had ersatz chocolate, tea, etc. in war-ravaged Europe. It looks like the real thing, but....

Dan, of all the things you have done on this board, this iss the meanest! If ever multiple selection was called for... BTW, I chose the derailed Big Train, but I could have gone down the line.

Well, there's Hazel Scott (she boogied with Adam Clayton Powell) and, in England, there was Winifred Atwell.

Mark, I have received several of those. They appear to be from someone familiar, but the program that generates them dips into one's e-mail and extracts a name. There was one from my agent, actually an old e-mail she had sent to someone else last year--the attachment was a file with an unrelated name. Another one appeared to be from George Avakian--it had an attached file called "autopsy." Neither was sent by the identified senders, nor did I open the attachments. Since I use a Mac, they might not have worked as intended, but I wasn't taking any chances.

But Heaney isn't even posting to this board, Mark

Thanks Paul, The funny thing is that I never asked that this guy's alleged "satire" be removed--I think B3er did that on his own accord, which is how it should be. Even when I might have legitimate reason for suggesting a post's deletion (and the post in question is not such a case, IMO), it is not something I do. BTW, B3er once pointed out that a thread I started could be considered a frivolous flame--he wanted to close it off. I completely agreed with him and asked that he delete it rather than lock it. He did--case closed.

I had to drop out of school at 14 (moving to different countries and not knowing the languages there--at first), but I wish I had more formal education. Still it is amazing how much one can learn outside of a classroom if one really wants to.

Here is the incredible NY Observer interview... Jayson Blair Talks: "So Jayson Blair Could Live, The Journalist Had to Die" by Sridhar Pappu "That was my favorite," Jayson Blair said. It was the morning of Monday, May 19, and the disgraced former New York Times reporter was curled in a butterfly chair in his sparsely furnished Brooklyn apartment. He was eating a bagel and talking about one of his many fabricated stories, his March 27 account, datelined Palestine, W.Va., of Pvt. Jessica Lynch's family's reaction to their daughter's liberation in Iraq. Mr. Blair hadn't gone to Palestine, W.Va. He'd filed from Brooklyn, N.Y. As he'd done before, he cobbled facts and details from other places and made some parts up. He wrote how Private Lynch's father had "choked up as he stood on the porch here overlooking the tobacco fields and cattle pastures." That was a lie. In The Times' lengthy May 11 account of Mr. Blair's long trail of deception, it reported that "the porch overlooks no such thing." Mr. Blair found this funny. "The description was just so far off from reality," he said. "The way they described it in The Times story--someone read a portion of it for me. I just couldn't stop laughing." He laughed again. It was now two weeks since Mr. Blair had been exposed and resigned from The Times. In that period he'd become a journalistic pariah, entered and exited a rehabilitation clinic, and wound up on the cover of Newsweek, smoking a cigarette. His actions stained The New York Times, turned his former newsroom upside down and called into question the future of his ex-boss, executive editor Howell Raines. The Times' publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., had called his deception "a low point" in the paper's 152-year history. But other than a couple of brief statements here and there, Mr. Blair hadn't talked publicly about what happened. Everyone still wanted to know: Why had he done it? Why had a promising 27-year-old reporter with a career in high gear at the most respected news organization in the world thrown it all away in a pathological binge of dishonesty? Theories, of course, abounded. He was too young. He'd been pushed too far. He was a drunk; he was a drug addict; he was depressed. These theories were all partially true, he said. "I was young at The New York Times," said Mr. Blair. "I under a lot of pressure. I was black at The New York Times, which is something that hurts you as much as it helps you. I certainly have health problems, which probably led to me having to kill Jayson Blair, the journalist. I was either going to kill myself or I was going to kill the journalist persona." He stayed with that concept. "So Jayson Blair the human being could live," he said, "Jayson Blair the journalist had to die." He looked O.K., for a beat-up man of 27. He was unshaven, with a ragged beard, and he wore a V-neck sweater, a white T-shirt and rumpled khakis. His sleep-deprived college-senior look seemed to fit the environment, a dusty living room with bookshelves that offered remembrances of his past life: The Best Newspaper Writing anthologies from 2000 and 2002; books by Times reporters Rick Bragg and Fox Butterfield; My Soul Is Rested, the oral history of the civil-rights movement written by Howell Raines. On the window sill stood a Dr. Seuss book called Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? with his NYPD press pass wrapped around it. ("That's a nice detail," he later said, noting the Dr. Seuss title.) A few feet away sat Zuza Glowacka--the tall, blond, 23-year-old Polish-born former clerk at The New York Times who'd emerged as a kind of mysterious attaché to Mr. Blair. "We're really, really, really good friends," Ms. Glowacka said, when asked to characterize her relationship with Mr. Blair. She made Mr. Blair happy, that was clear. They were close and they finished each other's sentences, talked about traveling together and seemed to relish their renegade status, kind of like a 43rd Street version of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. They'd wanted to leave The Times, Mr. Blair said. They talked about it even before everything blew up. "She wanted to go write," he said. "I wanted to do other things." But it was hard to imagine Mr. Blair wanting to do anything else. He was one of those rare people who seemed preordained to be a journalist, a reporter suffused with a kinetic combination of charm, drive and ambition that compelled his co-workers, even in the wake of his scandal, to describe him as "talented." He'd come out of the University of Maryland--he never graduated, however--and a Boston Globe internship; then arrived, in 1998, at 23, at The New York Times. He was an intern first, then an intermediate reporter, and then, in 2001, a full reporter with all the privileges. Through his rise, he made mistakes, a lot of them. Most, he said, were the result of the usual forces: bad information from the police, deadline pressure. And yet Mr. Blair felt that he deserved to keep on climbing. He grew frustrated with the metro grind, and admitted he became a problem in the newsroom. He claimed he was assigned to "idiot" editors and, as a result, "began to act out." He started being frequently absent and unavailable, he said, in a "misguided attempt to punish them." But there was something else. Mr. Blair was abusing alcohol and doing drugs--cocaine, to be specific. Those started becoming a much bigger impediment than his anger about his editors. The drugs impacted his work. He referred to one of the bigger corrections made to his work--a 277-word note that appeared following his account of a post-Sept. 11 rock concert. "I was drunk on assignment," Mr. Blair said. Colleagues noticed him falling apart. Mr. Blair did not hide his torment well. In January 2002, he checked himself into the Realization Center, a clinic in Manhattan, where he spent six hours a day for two weeks. "Drugs and alcohol were definitely a part of my self-medication," he said. He characterized himself as a "former total cokehead." But he said he didn't know what drove him to it. "Is the problem the substance you pick up, or do you pick up the substance because of the environment you're in?" Mr. Blair asked. "Was I too young? For a newspaper reporter's job at a great newspaper, maybe not. Was I too young for a snake pit like that? Maybe." And he said there were other factors. "Anyone who tells you that my race didn't play a role in my career at The New York Times is lying to you," Mr. Blair said. "Both racial preferences and racism played a role. And I would argue that they didn't balance each other out. Racism had much more of an impact." Mr. Blair had many opinions about racism at The New York Times. For one thing, he said, "there are senior managers at The New York Times who want African-American reporters to succeed, and there are hundreds of white junior managers who resent that and don't." And he also said: "There are a lot of people who are not racist. But there are a lot who are. I have anecdotes upon anecdotes upon anecdotes that I'm not going to share. A book full of anecdotes." But as far as the theory that Mr. Blair got away with what he did due to the fact that he was an affirmative-action hire, Mr. Blair disagreed with that. He disagreed that he was an example of someone who'd been brought aboard without earning it, coddled more than he should have been, and that this--his pack of lies--was the product. That assertion made Mr. Blair angry. Being black at The Times "hurts you as much as it helps you," he said. It infuriated him that he was being compared to Stephen Glass, the white, ex-New Republic fraud who has just published a novel, The Fabulist, about his own nonfiction fictions. Because in his tortured, roller-coaster mind, you could call him a liar, but you could not call him unworthy. "I don't understand why I am the bumbling affirmative-action hire when Stephen Glass is this brilliant whiz kid, when from my perspective--and I know I shouldn't be saying this--I fooled some of the most brilliant people in journalism," he said. "He [Glass] is so brilliant, and yet somehow I'm an affirmative-action hire. They're all so smart, but I was sitting right under their nose fooling them." Mr. Blair continued: "If they're all so brilliant and I'm such an affirmative-action hire, how come they didn't catch me?" They did catch him, finally. Assigned to visit the mother of a missing U.S. servicewoman in Texas, he had not gone to Texas at all. Instead, for his April 26 Times account, he lifted details from an April 18 San Antonio Express-News story by Macarena Hernandez--a former Times intern Mr. Blair once knew. While "writing" the piece, Mr. Blair said he experienced "numb, blank" thoughts like "I don't want to be getting on a plane for The New York Times"and "How long would it take them to catch me?" But the serious deception had begun much earlier, when Mr. Blair was tapped as one of the eight reporters sent to Washington, D.C., to cover the Maryland sniper shootings. There, he broke news prodigiously, and controversially, most notably in an Oct. 30 story in which he wrote that U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiagio had interrupted the interrogation of the sniper suspect John Muhammad at the behest of the White House. Then in another piece on Dec. 22, in which he wrote that DNA evidence had ruled out Mr. Muhammad as the primary shooter. The validity of both pieces came under scrutiny and repudiation immediately afterward. Currently, the U.S. Attorney's office has launched a fraud inquiry against Mr. Blair. Mr. Blair said he stuck to the truth of his initial sniper coverage, the interrogation story in particular. "It's true that five people told me it," Mr. Blair said. "I got that scoop, some other scoops. Just good stuff. But at some point, the allure of proving myself to The New York Times wore off. And I was back to where I was before: angry." None of his deceptions, he said, was planned. Nor, he said, was he conscious of what was going on while it was happening. He said that before January 2003, which he deemed his "last run at The Times," he fudged things "maybe less than five times." A lifted Washington Post quote came to mind here. Maybe some Associated Press stuff. A story on the Ku Klux Klan written during his internship at the Globe. "I will argue that no one will find in my career anything like between January and March and January and April of this year," Mr. Blair said. "It's simply not there." The Times disagrees. According to its own May 11 investigation, by November 2002, Mr. Blair was "fabricating quotations and scenes, undetected." But in 2003, he would file stories from places he never was--from Bethesda, Md., and Cleveland, Ohio, from West Virginia and Texas. It was pathological. Had Mr. Blair wanted to get caught? "God knows, after the [Texas] story ran and before the first call came in, I knew," he said. "It became much clearer to me. At that point I didn't even know I was going to get caught, because I really did not want to be there. I really didn't." From the day the scandal over his reporting broke, Mr. Blair's career has been intertwined with those of two men at The Times: executive editor Howell Raines, and his managing editor, Gerald Boyd. Various news accounts have suggested that Mr. Raines and Mr. Boyd used their power to protect Mr. Blair, ignoring the advice of subordinate editors who cautioned them against promoting the young reporter. Race has been injected into this allegation, too. Mr. Boyd is an African-American, and Mr. Raines addressed his own role at a May 14 meeting of the Times staff, saying that "you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama with those convictions, gave him one chance too many?. When I look into my heart for the truth of the matter, the answer is yes." "Howell and Gerald have certainly had their problems," Mr. Blair said. "But using me against them is kind of unfair. Because what I'm a symbol of is what's wrong with The New York Times--and what's been wrong with The New York Times for a long time." Mr. Blair called characterizations of himself as a Howell Raines favorite "kind of funny." Though his status rose when Mr. Raines became executive editor in September 2001, Mr. Blair said he felt more at ease during the tenure of his predecessor, Joseph Lelyveld. "I identify much more with the old guard than I do the new guard," he said. Still, he had empathy for his ex-boss. "Generally, I felt like Howell did what he had to do," Mr. Blair said. "I feel bad for the situation he?s in. But I think a lot of it is by his own hand. He is a good man. He is well-intentioned. "Maybe it'll make him a little mature," he said. He broke out into laughter, stomping his foot on the ground. "That's coming from me!" Mr. Blair said that as his errors and newsroom problems piled up, he received no special treatment from Mr. Raines, and especially not from Mr. Boyd. He said that Mr. Boyd--whom he nominated as journalist of the year for the National Association of Black Journalists in 2001--was actually his "antagonist." He said Mr. Boyd tried to block his summer 2002 move to the sports department after everyone else had signed off on it. Then, he said, Mr. Boyd questioned his promotion to the national desk. "I don't particularly like Gerald," Mr. Blair said. "To suggest he was my mentor is not a fair characterization; it's an assumption based on race that's silly. And I don't like him! How did Gerald become my mentor?" Mr. Blair was asked if Mr. Boyd had ever protected him, as people at The Times had suggested. "Bullshit!" Mr. Blair said, raising his voice. "Protected my ass. I spent days in the smoking room. Days of my life in the smoking room, complaining about how I wasn't protected. Protected by whom? Was it Gerald, who was constantly trying to block me at every turn? Was it Howell, who didn't know me? Was it Lelyveld, who didn't care? Was it Bill Keller [the former managing editor], who didn't give a shit? Which one was it? Was it Soma [soma Golden Behr, an assistant managing editor], who only cares about pretty Jewish girls at The New York Times? Which one was protecting me? Mike Oreskes? Who? Al Siegal, who doesn't speak to people?" A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine Mathis, said the paper would have no comment on Mr. Blair's remarks. "We're not going to do any interviews regarding the Jayson Blair interview," she said. Mr. Blair did give measured praise to metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman, the person who repeatedly questioned Mr. Blair's reporting and accuracy and his moves within the paper. Mr. Blair called Mr. Landman an "honest, honorable, misguided man." "He wants to believe that we live in a meritocracy simply because he follows a meritocracy," Mr. Blair said. "He is unwilling to believe that there are people who work under him who are racist. And because he can't make that compensation or that judgment, his actions, for an honorable man, come widely off the mark. Hewas among the people who helped save my life?but I also recognize him for what he is, and he's misguided. He's convinced that because Jon Landman doesn't think race is a factor in anything, that the editors who work for him do not use race. "I don't want to go into the specifics of alleging X, Y or Z, but it's not just in my regard," Mr. Blair continued. "It's every black reporter, except for a handful that are protected." Informed of Mr. Blair's comments, Mr. Landman said: "For him to call these people racist is extraordinary. These were the same people who tried to save his life when he was as destructive as anyone I've ever seen in the newsroom." Following days of meetings with Times executives the week of April 27, Mr. Blair resigned on May 1. Ms. Glowacka, who said she had been unaware of Mr. Blair's misdeeds and had been lied to even as the higher-ups were interrogating him, said she received a call from Mr. Boyd telling her to "leave and be with him, look after him." "After that, I was his baby-sitter, his suicide watcher," Ms. Glowacka said. "Whatever it was." She said she later quit after it became apparent that, given the kind of attention she'd received and the false rumors surrounding her, (Ms. Glowacka, whose parents were friends of Mr. Raines' wife, was recommended by Mr. Raines for her job, but said she and Mr. Blair did not exploit that relationship) she'd no longer be comfortable back at the paper. That day, Mr. Blair said he returned to the Realization Center, where he was told that he needed to check himself into some sort of hospital. He chose Silver Hill in New Canaan, Conn., he said, where at last he?d admitted to others the extent of his misdeeds. He stayed six days, Mr. Blair said, adding that his leaving wasn't against medical advice. He hadn't slipped back into drugs, he said, and received "meds" for the first time. The doctor, he said, told him he wasn't having a psychological episode. They told him to stay on the medication and keep away from the press. This is Mr. Blair's new life: going to therapy three times a week. Refuting some claims, confirming others. (In a conversation, Thomas Blair, Jayson's father, backed up his son's claims at The Times that [Thomas Blair] had worked for NASA in the early 1980's and had had a cousin on Illinois' death row.) Mr. Blair said he also planned to write a book. He knew such a prospect angered his former colleagues, who felt he would be cashing in on a betrayal. And he resented the paper's internal investigation. "My reaction to the Times story? I definitely feel sad for my role in the problems they're having now, and what it's done to my former colleagues--but I felt they did it to themselves. The Times did it to itself by writing a story that tried to put the blame on one man's shoulders without examining how the institution would allow that to happen. On its face, a story like that's not credible, and everyone's naturally jumped on it. "As much as I feel guilt for my role in it, I don't feel bad for The Times' position. I need time to cool my anger, and they need time to cool their anger, too," Mr. Blair said. "Most of them are also upset that I'm planning on writing, because they think I need to focus on myself. The only way I can do that is if they start paying my bills for me." But Mr. Blair said he'd already begun to write. He saw his story as "a cautionary tale for anyone in a job who's self-destructing right now." He called the writing process "very therapeutic." "For the first time, I?m writing down the series of lies, and it's made me realize: I did do this," Mr. Blair said. Believe it or not, Mr. Blair added, his life was better. "It's hard in a lot of ways, but I think about where I would be now," he said. He meant if he hadn't gotten caught. He nodded to Ms. Glowacka. "She would be sitting behind some desk not writing, and I would be pretending to be traveling across the country, really getting depressed in my apartment. "It's got to be better," Mr. Blair said, slouched in the butterfly chair. "It's going to work out for me." He got up. On the nearby coffee table was a copy of A Million Little Pieces, the memoir by the self-rehabilitated drug addict, James Frey. Sticking from it was a business card, which he took out. It said: JAYSON BLAIR, Reporter. Then: The New York Times. Jayson Blair looked at it. "This is my new bookmark," he said.

From today's NY Observer Guess you might say that there's a whole lot of ju$tification going on... The Blair Pitch Project by Joe Hagan On the afternoon of Monday, May 19, book agent David Vigliano was busy buffing up a five-page proposal to circulate to Hollywood executives: the story of Jayson Blair, a troubled black journalist whose overweening ambition, fueled by the politics of race and inflamed by substance abuse, led him to lie and mislead the public in story after story, singeing the reputation of the hallowed New York Times--quite a tale! "We'll probably do something in Hollywood first and hone the book proposal over the next few days," explained Mr. Vigliano. The book proposal will consist of the same five pages he's showing to movie executives, along with a sample chapter that will "showcase Jayson's writing talents at more length," Mr. Vigliano said. Book publishers will be hearing from him shortly, he said: "I think we will be getting the proposal out in a week or 10 days and expect to make a deal within a week after that." The proposal, portions of which were obtained by The Observer, focuses almost exclusively on Mr. Blair's experience of and views on the spiky complexities of race, both in the Times newsroom and in the professional world in general. "Why is not simple," Mr. Blair begins. "I want the chance to articulate the reasons for my downfall, not to excuse myself or to cast myself as a victim, but as a cautionary tale." If Mr. Blair's instincts as a journalist are shaky, his skills as a self-promoter appear to be solid: On Monday, he issued a statement to CNN that said, "I hope to have the opportunity to write and share my story so that it can help others to heal." Mr. Vigliano, meanwhile, is working hard--and fast--to turn the 27-year-old into Jayson Blair Inc. It's a story that he believes could be worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in film and book royalties. But unlike Mr. Blair's career-suicide doppelgänger, Stephen Glass--who has said he spent five years in therapy before publishing a work of fiction about his fabrications in The New Republic,the former Times reporter isn't waiting around to get his head straight. He's diving right in, not slowed down at all by the gummy ethical issues involved in exploiting his own bad behavior for personal profit. The memoir that Mr. Blair wants to write will either justify his actions or further damn them. Above all, the proposal claims, the book will have something to teach others: "I want to offer my experience as a lesson," Mr. Blair writes, "for the precipice from which I plunged is one on which many young, ambitious, well-educated and accomplished African Americans and other "minorities" teeter, though most, of course, do manage to pull back from the brink. That precipice overhangs America's racial divide; and the winds sucking us down into the chasm (cultural isolation, professional mistrust, and the external and internal imperatives to succeed, at all costs, to name a few) can be too strong for the troubled and unprepared--as I was--to withstand. "Today," ends that section of the proposal, "even at the most liberal, well-intentioned of institutions, race is still terra incognita, where the young and conflicted, like me, can all too easily lose compass." Just a few days after Mr. Blair's compass sent him out the front door of The Times, which was on May 1, he returned a call from Mr. Vigliano--whom he'd met while shopping a book on the Washington, D.C., sniper case last fall--to talk about a book deal. "At some point, after I heard what had happened at The Times," said Mr. Vigliano, "I called him and said I was thinking of him and if he wanted to talk or needed help with anything, to give me a call. Then he called me." Mr. Vigliano said he couldn't recall the exact date, but "a few days" after Mr. Blair's dismissal, the former reporter paid a visit to Mr. Vigliano's office on Broadway in Soho. He declined to describe Mr. Blair's emotional state at the time--that would be material for the book, he explained--but he did say that "I obviously wouldn't be dealing with somebody who was unstable." Some time after that, Mr. Blair wrote the proposal, to which the agent made "minor edits," according to Mr. Vigliano. Mr. Vigliano said he had plans for Mr. Blair's book to be much bigger than a tell-all about journalistic sins, or even an inside look at the dysfunctional world of Howell Raines' Times. "Clearly, there are issues of race here that transcend The New York Times," said Mr. Vigliano. The paper of record, he said, "is just one institution that?s really a surrogate for many, many other institutions in America. It will also deal with issues of substance abuse. Clearly, he had psychological issues that he's going to talk about." One possibility is that Mr. Blair will write something similar to James Frey's self-eviscerating addiction confessional, A Million Little Pieces, which, The Observer has learned, Mr. Blair is currently reading. But his agent suggested that Mr. Blair's memoir might resemble Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, by Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall, who bootstrapped his way from prison to a position as a journalist. "It probably has some elements of the Jill Nelson book, too," said Mr. Vigliano, referring to Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience, another memoir by a black Post reporter, because it will make "elements of the stiff, snobby book-publishing community uncomfortable." But, he added, "it's a huge, huge story, and it's far, far bigger, in my mind, than any of those books, because it's the cover of Newsweek, it's the cover of New York, and maybe, paradoxically, you've got an enormously gifted writer." Mr. Blair gives a taste of his own authentic experience in his proposal. At one point, he recalls the racism he confronted on a daily basis as the "only black reporter on any of the New York newspapers covering crime": "I was tired of listening to the other reporters joke about victims like the five children who were raped by a man in the Bronx," he writes, "or how black-on-black violence was just making the city safer for everyone." Already, speculation in the New York Post has suggested the possibility of a six- or seven-figure advance for a book by Mr. Blair. Those figures, Mr. Vigliano said, "don't seem unreasonable to me. It's a huge, huge story. I've talked to Jayson and I've seen the richness of this story. It's a very deep and very textured and layered story, and he's a gifted writer--and no, those figures don't seem unreasonable at all, by any means." While Mr. Blair's story will be defined largely in the context of race, that doesn't mean the former reporter won't be trying to put forth his version of what went down at The Times. In particular, Mr. Blair comments frankly in the proposal on Jonathan Landman, the editor who oversaw the metropolitan desk where Mr. Blair was assigned. Of the now-famous e-mail that Mr. Landman sent to colleagues saying that Mr. Blair had to be stopped from reporting for The Times, Mr. Blair writes in his proposal that "it was actually in the context of whether I should be writing during a two-week break I took for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Months later he would send me an e-mail offering his unqualified support for my improvements." Mr. Blair goes on to write that while Mr. Landman "is no hero in this story," he calls him "an honorable and honest man." However, he asserts that Mr. Landman's "neo-conservative views have been some of the most difficult things for any minority reporter at the Times to handle." Reached for comment, Mr. Landman told The Observer, "I sent a lot of e-mails. There was never unqualified support. Never, ever. But there was progress." As for Mr. Blair's characterization of him as "honest," Mr. Landman responded, "To be called "honest" by Jayson Blair. there's something to treasure." That Mr. Blair should try to profit from telling his story is not really a surprise, of course. Nowadays, public indignation is practically a cash crop in American culture. And in journalism alone, the examples of post-fuckup money-making are plenty: from The Washington Post's Janet Cooke, whose faked 1981 Pulitzer Prize?winning story about a young drug addict eventually netted her $380,000 with Columbia TriStar Pictures, to Michael Finkel, the Times Magazine reporter whose profile of an African teenager named Youssouf Male turned out to be a composite of a number of subjects, who sold his tell-all memoir to HarperCollins for a reported $300,000. Mr. Glass' novelization of his fictional nonfiction exploits, The Fabulist, which went for a sum in the low six figures, has attracted equal parts awe and disgust. His publisher, Simon & Schuster, has been criticized for rewarding Mr. Glass' wrongdoing (although few have leveled similar charges at Mr. Glass' agent, Lynn Nesbitt of Janklow & Nesbitt). In any case, Mr. Vigliano shrugged off the ethical issues of making money off journalistic transgressions. "As far as ethical choices," said Mr. Vigliano, "I don't have a problem repping a guy who made up a few stories and embarrassed The New York Times. He lost his job, and he's been the object of intense scrutiny. He did wrong, he obviously admitted it and paid the price, and I don't feel like it's any huge ... he's not eating babies, you know?" Whether Mr. Blair's future output is the stuff of best-sellers and blockbuster films remains to be seen. But already, editors at major publishing houses are skeptical. "I am wholly uninterested," said Jonathan Karp, the vice president and editorial director at Random House, echoing the sentiment of a number of editors contacted by The Observer. "It's a boring story that everybody already knows. I think the public will be completely satiated by the coverage in other newspapers, and to revisit it in the form of a book is unlikely." Still, he conceded: "Far more boring stories by less interesting people have probably sold over the years." Mr. Vigliano, who has been an agent since 1986, said he specializes in highly commercial works. Known for his aggressive hustling of clients, he's not averse to representing controversial material that other agents wouldn't touch, according to publishing executives. Last year he represented the estate of Kurt Cobain, selling Journals, his personal diaries, for $4 million to Riverhead Books. Among his other clients are Britney Spears and Jerry B. Jenkins of the Left Behind series. He said he even repped the Pope on a book, The Rosary Hour: The Private Prayers of Pope John Paul II. Mr. Vigliano originally made contact with Mr. Blair while the reporter covered the Washington, D.C., sniper murders in the fall of 2002. At the time, Mr. Blair was hoping to sell a book that explored his complex emotions while following Lee Malvo, the black 18-year-old sniper, with whom he said that he felt a racial affinity. At the time, however, Mr. Vigliano had a conflict of interest and couldn't cement a partnership. "I couldn't represent him because I was repping Chief Moose," said Mr. Vigliano, referring to Charles A. Moose, the Montgomery County police chief who is currently suing the county for the right to profit from a book deal based on the case. But the reporter and the agent stayed in contact. "I continued to stay in touch with him because I liked him," said Mr. Vigliano, who said that Mr. Blair's coverage of the sniper case would still play into the current proposals, although only "peripherally." But Mr. Vigliano will have to contend with a number of hurdles to get Mr. Blair's story sold. For one, Mr. Blair?s believability as a nonfiction writer is undoubtedly a hard sell. "One of the main reasons I wouldn't be interested in this book is that the author has a major credibility problem," said Will Schwalbe, the editor in chief of Hyperion. "This author has forfeited the right, for the time being, to claim any kind of credibility in a nonfiction work." "His nonfiction is so untrustworthy, you'd have a hard time believing his fiction," said David Hirshey, the vice president and executive editor at HarperCollins who acquired Mr. Finkel's book. "You'd have to suspend disbelief past any known human level." Mr. Hirshey said the difference between his author and Mr. Blair was that "Finkel admits he made a colossal mistake, but it is only one mistake and not a pattern of deception and betrayal." Even Mr. Blair's racial angle, which appears to lend him an air of intrinsic credibility, smells foul to some people. "This guy was more of a con man than he was a Negro," observed Stanley Crouch, the author and Daily News columnist. "His ethnicity is being more emphasized, but he's a high-level con man. The first thing the con man has to do is figure out the mark. Howell Raines and The New York Times constitute the mark." Still, said Mr. Crouch, "This guy might have a story that might be very interesting, for people who are interested in that kind of story. He might do very well." Mr. Vigliano, for his part, defended his client's right to write a memoir. "He's not going out and reporting on a story," he argued. "If he was going out and reporting on something that needed to be fact-checked, that had reporting at its core, then there would be issues of credibility." Mr. Vigliano also said that suggestions that proceeds from a Blair book would be garnished under the Son of Sam laws--which stipulate that the perpetrator of a crime can't profit from it, and that any proceeds must go to the victim--were ludicrous because, he said, "Who is the victim that would have to recoup money in Jayson Blair's case, The New York Times?" Stephen Glass' publisher, Simon & Schuster, sought to distance itself from Mr. Blair's proposed project. David Rosenthal, the publisher, said the speed with which Mr. Blair was grabbing for a book deal was troubling to him. "It does appear a bit complicated and unseemly," said Mr. Rosenthal. He defended Mr. Glass' novel, saying it wasn't "somebody trying to do something off the headlines. It was never intended that way. I think the Blair situation has colored people's feelings about Glass, there's no question. Although I do think the similarities are extremely superficial at best." Mr. Rosenthal said he wouldn't even consider Mr. Blair's book. And he questioned Mr. Blair's ability to write with gravity about race. "I know of no great track record of [Mr. Blair] writing on race," he said. "It seems more convenient than thoughtful, perhaps." Not everyone was unsympathetic to Mr. Blair. Eamon Dolan, editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, said he figured that Mr. Blair had few other recourses. After all, the man needs an income, he said. "It seems to me that publishing is almost the last refuge for this type of scoundrel," he said. "What else is he going to do? He's not going to be able to get a job in periodical publishing, he's not going to J-school. He can write a book! He could conceivably have this long afterlife as a book writer. Look at Mark Fuhrman. He writes true crime; he has two or three best-selling books." Even so, Mr. Dolan made his own feelings about a Blair memoir clear. "I have a strong, visceral reaction," he said. "I have a strong, visceral disinterest."

I know, Chuck--I acted hastily, and there is no turning back with these polls. BTW, Lonnie's later guitar work was cliché-ridden and not even a reflection of his earlier performances.

Y'all should give a listen to Lonnie Johnson with Duke's band and the Armstrong Hot Five. I also recommend listening to Grimes' work with Tatum.

I know it's unfair to have Louis with this crowd, so I left him out.

A few of the earlier guys.

Pardon my lateness, but I didn't want to join this discussion haphazardly. Thank you, RT, for starting this thread, which is probably the most substantive of all the threads here (and at our other hangs). I am glad to see that no one is making light of the subject. Here is a bit of my background, as it relates to this subject--I'll try to be brief, but I can't promise: Afterthought: Damn! I just looked at my rambling. I didn't mean to be that verbose. Rooster Ties, I hope you don't mind, but you asked for it! There's always that scroll button. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I was born in Iceland, the country of my father's birth. My mother was Danish, and I was raised in both countries. I don't recall seeing a black person until I reached my teens, which is really odd when one considers that I spent close to three years (from age 10 to 13) living in Forest Hills, NY. We made occasional trips to Manhattan, so I must have seen some black people,but it didn't register. That, too, is odd, for I often heard my Danish grandfather speak of black people, always in a positive way. When my posture was bad, he would tell me to "straighten up, walk like an African." My grandfather went to sea when he was 12, so he had traveled widely and met a diversity of people. At one point, when my mother was 9 or 10, the whole family moved from Copenhagen to St. Thomas and, from there, to Santo Domingo, so my mother went to school with black children. I mention all this, because I think their healthy attitude had a lot to do with how I look at race relations. A few years back, as I went through a pile of old family documents, I came across a letter written to my mother by my grandmother in 1937. I was six years old, and my grandmother was taking care of me for the summer. In the letter, she wrote, "Gunnar (my middle name) is doing fine, he spends his days on the floor with his gramophone, wishing he was a Negro." I do recall seeing a lot of pictures of black kids, and wanting to look like them! BTW, the records I was playing were not jazz--that interest developed many years later. When I was in my teens, attending commercial art school in Copenhagen, I happened across a Bessie Smith recording on the Danish radio. I could not understand aa word of what she sang, but there was something so compelling about her voice and delivery that I had to look into it. This, to be brief (ha!), sparked my interest in jazz. Back then, in the post-war years, only three black people lived in all of Denmark, an aging schoolteacher who had migrated from St. Thomas, and two brothers who lived in Jutland Danish. I never saw any of them while living in Denmark, but one of the brothers, John Tchicai, became a friend of mine when we met in New York, almost 20 years later. As I was drawn into jazz, I began to meet black people, all of whom were performers: Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday. Roy Eldridge, Ella, and others. Then I decided that I had to immigrate to the U.S., and the easiest way to do that was to apply for a visa from Iceland (I had dual citizenship). Iceland was all-white, even more so than Denmark, but I landed a job with U.S. Armed Forces Radio & TV Service at Keflavík Air Base. As a civilian, I was issued an ID badge, of which there were two kinds: blue for non-Americans, green for Americans. Mine was blue, but the mistakenly issued a green one to my wife, who was Danish. The badges became a lesson in American bigotry, which stood me in good stead as I took up residence here. My show (I played jazz and pop) was quite popular with the military (we had Army, Navy and Air Force on the base) and civilian population of the base. I was the station's only civilian, and it never occurred to listeners that I was not American. I received an abundance of calls and letters in response to my shows, and never a nasty one among them. However, when I was seen around the base, wearing my blue badge, attitudes changed. There were several instances when I was called "fish head" or "mojack," two derogatory names for Icelanders. One evening, when my wife and I were having a drink in the Civilian Club (her green badge gained us entry), an American woman took her aside in the ladies' room. "What on earth made you marry one of them, dear?," she asked. One New Year's Eve, we were guests at a party in the BOQs (Bachelor Officer's Quarters) when a highly inebriated bird colonel, who obviously had seen me with my badge, told me that fish heads didn't belong at this party! He was overheard by some other officers, who threw him out. Of course, unlike black people, I could simply remove the badge and look like any other white American, but the experience gave me a good sense of what it feels like to be senselessly discriminated against. At this point, I was not relating the badge color discrimination to its racial equivalent--that would come later, when I moved to the U.S. That was in 1957, I arrived in NYC with $75 (the minimum amount an immigrant was required to have) and not a clue as to what I was going to do. I soon found my way to a little Times Square bar called The Copper Rail, it was an unusual establishment because it was an uptown (i.e. Harlem) bar in the heart of downtown, a place that offered twofers, collard greens, pig's feet, etc., and its patrons were predominantly black. It was common to see Coleman Hawkins whispering in the phone booth, and one could always count on there being an all-star lineup at the bar. Roy Eldridge, whom I had met in Copenhagen, advised me to hang out there, adding, "we'll take care of you." They did, I felt very good in that company, and I learned much as I asked my naïve questions and stared wide-eyed at the likes of Jo Jones, Pee Wee Russell, J.C. Higginbotham, Taps Miller, Gene Krupam and Red Allen. But hanging out with these performers was only a preliminary course; unbelievably naïve, I still saw racial differences as a visual thing. That would change when I took my last ten dollars to Greyhound and asked if it would get me to another big city. "Three bucks will get you to Philly," the guy said, so I soon found myself on a bus. Again to be brief, it turned out to be the right move, for I was hired as a producer/writer at the city's largest station (WCAU) within a few days. A year later, that led to a disc jockey job on WHAT, an all-jazz station that in itself was a lesson in racism. WHAT AM and FM was owned by a woman who insisted on being called "Miss B" (her name was Dolly Banks), and she was the first bona fide racist I knew. The AM was all black (gospel and r&b), the FM was all jazz; no blacks were allowed to appear on the FM, no whites on the AM, and she had a black and a white dog named "AM" and "FM." She referred to black people (including her own employees) as "them," and when an insurance company complained that their commercials were attracting "too many Negroes," she called a meeting and told us to stop playing recordings by "coloreds." We talked her out of it. At WHAT, I was the only white employee who got to know the FM djs and socialize with them. I was so shocked by the racial division I was witnessing, that I occasionally put all records aside and lectured my listeners. A guy named Bill always complained when I played what he called "Uncle Tom" or "Mickey Mouse" music; he was referring to vintage jazz like early Ellington. Hot Fives, Bessie. I was amazed that he seemed unable to recognize the artistry that to me was so evident on those sides, and later, when I met Bill Cosby, I was even more perplexed. At WHAT I soon discovered that Cosby was not alone--many black people were made uncomfortable by sounds that reflected a time of lynchings and other unspeakable acts of discrimination against them. This inspired me to make the occasional pause for a lecture. I explained how highly jazz and blues was regarded in Europe, what pride I would have in this music if I were black, etc. I was rewarded with wonderful letters and calls, many from black people who said that I had made them listen to the music from another perspective. One caller, Bertha Waters, became a life-long friend, as did her husband, Lester, and six children. Bertha represents the next step in my education. She and Lester knew very few white people--he worked with them at the Signal Corps, but, as so often happens, an integrated working environment does not carry into non-office hours. Anyway, Bertha and I soon realized that our friendship was also a learning experience for both. I introduced the Waters to other white people, they brought me into their family circle. The funny thing is that we did not have to dwell much on race in our conversations--that part of the learning process was seamless and effortless, mostly a matter of experience rather than explanation. We did, however, make deliberate attempts to educate others. When Bertha and Lester moved to a bigger house--still in a all-black neighborhood--they threw a housewarming party. Their new neighbors had watched carefully as they moved in, so we decided to give them a little show. The house has a back garden, where much of the party activity took place. A Jewish friend of mine and I suggested to Bertha that we pretend to be her servants, summoned to the garden by her hand claps. We had already seen the neighbors hanging out of their windows, straining for a look. The white servants performance so shocked them that they never spoke to the Waters. The lady next door even had a wall erected between the properties, and broken glass was embedded at the top! There were also puzzled stares when I took the kids with me to buy a Christmas tree, etc. Our Jewish friend, Lenny, worked for a big, all-white insurance company in center city. He was tired of his coworkers constantly bringing out a wallet full of family pictures, which everybody had to look at. One day, he borrowed a bunch of photos from Bertha and Lester, and the next time a co-worker decided to display the family photos, Lenny pulled out his wallet for all to see. "This is my cousin Sarah and her husband, this is my mom, this is..." as he held up the pictures of black people and pointed to them with pride, his co-workers all but went into shock. Lenny could pull of this sort of thing with a straight face. I wish I had been there. I was there when the insurance company had its annual company dinner and dance. It was held in the ballroom of one of the large downtown hotels and Lenny was put in charge of entertainment . We both thought this would be a great opportunity for a demonstration, so I called Elmer Snowden (Duke's first bandleader boss) and asked him to get together an all-black band (which he did, with Beryl Booker at the piano). This all-white company didn't have a single non-white guest at this big affair, but we changed that, for Bertha and Lester were with us, and I told Elmer (who was in on this) to play long selections whenever Bertha or Lester were on the dance floor. He did, and I always remember that wink in his eyes as I danced with Bertha and one of my white lady friends swirled around with Lester. It has been an amazing experience, all of that, and now I will end this overly long narrative with one final story, something that happened in 1963, when I became a U.S. citizen. I was living in NYC by that time, so it took place here. One has to show up with two witnesses, people who have known you and seen you regularly for the past five years, so Bertha and Lester came in from Philly. The room was full of citizens to be, and their witnesses, One by one, we were called to step forward and stand before the judge with our witnesses. When I, flanked by Bertha and Lester, heeded the call, the judge looked at us and asked, "Where are your witnesses?" Ellison's Invisible Man was based on a very real perception. Sixty-seven years have passed since I sat on the floor, winding up the portable gramophone to hear Victor Sylvester's ballroom orchestra play "A Chapel in the Moonlight," and harboring strange desires of racial makeovers. The years have consumed much of my naïvité, but I will forever be grateful to my family for the subtle way in which they opened my mind. I think it is extremely important that we show the folly of hatred?racial or otherwise?to children at an early age. Today, I have very few white friends, most of whom are business acquaintances, but I did not plan it that way, it's just how things worked out. I think part of it is due to my interest in black music, which brought me into contact with so many great, warm and wonderful people, but, apart from the music, I quickly developed a genuine affinity for black people. I know it sounds banal, but I found my black friends to be very forthcoming and down-to-earth. I could relax in the company of my black friends and their friends more readily than I could with white Americans I met--there often seemed to be a veneer of pretention about them (I was probably traveling in the wrong white circles). Throughout the past forty-five years, my black friends have been there for me--they have fed me, enlightened me, housed me, and given me encouragement when none was to be found elsewhere. I feel deeply honored to have been accepted by so many for whom I have the utmost respect. I think making a resolute effort to understand another race of people may be a mistake; it is something that should happen almost by default, it is something that happens the right way when people see each other as people. I think a person should not get to know someone of another race in any way that differs from how they would get to know someone of their own race. Sure, there are inevitably cultural differences, but so are there when, say, a French person gets to know a Norwegian. The biggest difference, as I see it, is the history--the decades of animosity, fear, and mistrust that kept whites and blacks apart--once that has been overcome, once the stigmas have been removed, it's really just a matter of living and letting live, of seeing people for what they are. Some will be wonderful, others will be less so.

About the only thing I share with Wynton Marsalis is a birth date--October 18.

Dan, keep slammin' when you feel the need! I can take it, but let's try to disagree in an adult manner... ....for the sake of the kids, of course.

Divx was a system backed by Circuit City. DVDs were encoded so that they could only be played on special equipment and with a phone-connected subscription serviced that charged for each playing. It was a dumb, obviously unmarketable idea that deserved to to die.

I hope this fails, just like Divx did.

Christiern is the actual (old Danish) spelling of my first namee. It combines Christ (funny, because I am an Atheist) with iron (iern or jern, in Danish). My last name, had my father followed Icelandic custom, would have been Þórðarsson, taking his first name, Þórður and adding "son." Instead, he dropped an "s" from his own surname, Albertsson, and registered the cropped result as a family name. As you may have figured out, in Iceland--where I was born--a person's surname is the father's first name with either "son" or "dóttir" added. Thus there really are no family names, and everybody is listed in the phone book by their first name.

All three, actually, but mostly state and city. Even so, Federal cutbacks have a domino effect. The sad reality is that, despite campaign promises and subsequent assurances, a lot of children are being left behind.

Mr Christiern always advances an Ultra Liberal position, yet with this particular example of censorship he is silent. I do not want to place Mr Christiern in a position of hypocrisy therefore I expect that Mr Christiern will want to inform B3er that my thread of April 10 about Mr Christiern should be unlocked and that any further satirical items about Mr Christiern should not be censored. Anything less by Mr Christiern would be inconsistent in the light of his Ultra Liberalism. What an infantile reaction.I agree with connoisseur's take on this, but B3er can do as he wishes with his board. It is not up to me or anyone else to tell him what to do--we all have the option of taking our pixels elsewwhere. Gee's attempt at satire was, IMO, innocuous and, as we see, eminently forgettable. I shall now proceed to forget it again.