Larry Kart

I don't agree that the fact of Goodspeak's occupation qualifies that as a "personal attack." If questioning others' choices is verboten, that closes down lots of opportunities for engagement/discussion. Assuming, as I do, that the passage in parentheses alludes to Paterno but essentially refers to Goodspeak -- because he is the one who teaches children (Paterno taught young men) -- it strikes me as a personal attack because of the phrase "somehow allowed," which implies that if Goodspeak holds the views that he does in this case (views with which I happen to disagree), then he ought not be allowed to teach children. To me that crosses over the line.

OK -- At Blue Train's request and for anyone who's interested, here is "the unnecessarily hostile, threatening and rude" PM (it was headed "Stop it") that I sent to Blue Train, "who was never even previously warned that he did anything wrong": 'Your personal attack on Goodspeak below (the part in parentheses) was way out of line: "Would anyone want their kid/grandchild, or even their worst enemies kid/grandchild having to depend on anyone (especially anyone who is somehow allowed to teach children and thus legally required to do so.) who thinks 48 hours to a week after being informed of a kid being fondled/sodomized, or anything sexual happened between a minor and adult?" Don't do anything like that again. It's a violation of forum rules.' Some admittedly testy back and forth between us followed, which I'd also be happy to print verbatim--- again, should anyone care. P.S. The reason I judged the part in parentheses to be a personal attack is that Goodspeak had mentioned several times on the thread that he himself was a schoolteacher who had reported several cases of sexual abuse during the course of his career.

My reference to Sanchez was mostly just an aside because she was in one of the two Malaby-led groups that Steve Reynolds heard that night. Other than that, though, based on the one Sanchez album I know, she seems to me (differences in instruments granted) a significantly "freer" player in the good sense than her former husband. As far as that goes, then, I guess I was just trying to nail my flag to the mast by indicating that if anything my mixed feelings about Malaby's own music were coming from (so to speak) the left rather than the right. I know -- who cares? But OTOH why not say so, especially when I imagine that some who don't care that much for Malaby might have as a key reference point, say, Eric Alexander?

I have deleted Captain Hate's recent posts on this thread.

Good news

exonerate 1: to relieve of a responsibility, obligation I think you need to chose a word other than "exonerate," one that means something like (should there be such a word) "I think he did a lot of good overall, in my view, but he probably didn't do all that he could have done in this grave situation." Pending further investigation, the dimensions of "probably didn't do all that he could have done" remain to be seen, but I don't see how Paterno can be relieved of responsibility or obligation here, which is what exonerate means.

But not the only one, given the eventual likely prosecution and possible conviction of high-level Penn State administrators involved in the coverup of Sandusky's deeds, that coverup (if real and proved in court) of course being a criminal act. And again, while Joe Pa almost certainly didn't mastermind that coverup, the protection and defense of his longstanding hegemony at Penn State was far from incidental to it. Yes -- these things are not yet proved in courts of law, and yes, there is a hue and cry afoot here, but it's hard to see that some hue and cry is not called for.

Rigby with two big NYC-area big bands (I prefer him in his own small groups, though):

Based on a fair amount of admittedly non-comprehensive experience with Malaby's music, I much prefer the playing of Sanchez, his former (IIRC) wife. (Her trio album from a while back with drummer Chad Taylor is something else.) Have trouble with Malaby's IMO too-readily "keening" tone. By and large, I like/trust timbral-emotional colorations only when they seem to arise from the music, not when they're applied like mustard or ketchup. A somewhat comparable saxophonist from the same general scene who I find a good deal more interesting than Malaby is Jason Rigby.

Oldish reissue of Moravec's 1960s Connoisseur Society Chopin recordings.

Really

What I didn't like was that Vandermark's arrangements, while not outright wrong-headed (except in one case, which I'll mention below) were not very imaginative and had that "revivalization" vibe. In no sense that I could detect did one have the feeling that this music inspired him to create much of anything (as Threadgill, for one. and Edward Wilkerson, for another, were inspired by their encounters with music from "the past" to create new vital new music that stepped off from that prior music. Rather, KV's apparent goal was to not besmirch what he was paying tribute to, but IMO, not to do much with it either. The one wrongheaded IMO exception was "Nonaah." KV was working with Roscoe's famous Willsau solo performance, issued on Nessa, where Roscoe faced a crowd that was hostile because they were expecting Braxton to be the performer that night. Aware of this hostility, Roscoe of course met it head on by playing the brief gist of the "Nonaah" theme over and over on alto with eventual increasing force for maybe five minutes or more -- an immensely long time experientially -- as the hostility to what he was doing mounted, then seemingly mutated into a blend of respect and curiosity (though the hostility clearly remained present as well) and then finally exploded into fascinated overwhelming approval as Roscoe, feeling that he had made his point, let his solo itself explode into cascades of fierce invention. So what KV did was have Mars Williams begin by playing Roscoe's opening figure at Willsau note for note -- a terribly unenviable task that Mars pulled off in one sense up to a point, . . . but what, musically or dramatically, was the point? That is, what Roscoe played at Willsau can't be separated from what the situation was at Willsau, and that was totally not the situation at Elastic, where a respectful audience was there to witness an act of "tribute." Further, Mars played Roscoe's figure for far less time than Roscoe did at Willsau, and without IIRC much of Roscoe's increase in vehemence (the latter again being a response to a daunting real-life situation, not something to be re-created note-for-note, even if that were possible for Williams). Thus the essential drama of the performance of "Npnaah" upon which this one was based was not present. To substitute for it, KV had other horns join Williams with semi-parallel but vigorously roughed-up (in terms of timbre) lines. Jeb Bishop was particularly good at this, as one would expect, but all this led to were "blowing" passages by several soloists and then IIRC a framing return to Roscoe's original Willsau figure. Nothing awful here, but why take the volcanic Willsau performance and turn it into this? Second problem -- and this may just be me because others feel strongly otherwise about his playing -- is that KV's solo contributions on clarinet (and I think a bit on bass clarinet, but no tenor) in the first half of the concert (I didn't stay for the second) were quite weak, almost as though he weren't moving nearly enough air through the instrument(s). Yes, I wouldn't necessarily want to get up on the stage and in terms of sheer instrumental power deal with the likes of a reedman like Davis Rempis or Nick Mazarrella, but still.... Finally -- and again this may be just me -- I was kind of bugged by KV's at once bashfully toe-digging and ego-rich announcements. Several times he spoke about what this "music of the '70s" meant to HIM, which is fair as far as it goes, but this soon edged into statements like "This is why I stayed in Chicago in 1992 instead of going back to the Boston area" (in which case, the implication was, not only KV's own history but also HISTORY in general would have been quite different), and at this point I'm thinking Mingus-like thoughts, a la "If Henry Threadgill were a gunslinger..." etc. Further in this vein, KV told a story about how in his callow days he went down to U. of Illinois for a Braxton workshop and played him a tape of some of his own stuff, to which Braxton reacted with great encouragement and enthusiasm, which gave KV the emotional boost that he needed at the time. But then KV added that he soon realized that Braxton being who he was, he reacted in much the same way to almost everything that hopeful young musicians played for him. A good story -- but while I may be misunderstanding something here, it seemed to me that KV told this story in such a way that Braxton's initial "validation" of KV's youthful efforts remained central, and that we too were meant to regard it as a genuine validation rather than one of those momentary life-giving jokes that life can play on us. But enough -- I've now earned my Boy Scout "grouch" badge several times over.

Especially because IIRC, at one point in the not too distant past (again IIRC), he had been regarded as a candidate to become Joe Pa's sucessor.

How? You think Joe Pa couldn't have known/didn't know that something along these lines was going on -- and going on for a good long time, well before he was senile, if in fact he finally was? Further, do you think that Penn State's perniciously isolated, don't mess with anyone or anything that has or has had to do with Joe Pa culture, without which Sandusky could hardly have flourished, was anything but Joe Pa's creation?

Right -- or rather "right."

Not so much, IMO. Also, the implicit "revivalization" of music that I'm old enough to have heard the first time around was kind of creepy. My "one for the history books" in the thread title was meant to be ironic.

What I hope a good novel about Sandusky would show is something I don't know except in an intuitive, guess-like manner -- what a man like this really thinks and feels. For one thing, I've heard a number of people say that his whole kid rescue foundation thing was just a coldblooded candy-like screen so he could troll for the kind of vulnerable kids whom he hoped to lure/coerce into becoming his sexual objects. I'd bet a good deal that instead for Sandusky and his ilk the helping and the coercion/seduction are all of a piece and/or chapters in single unfolding hotblooded fantasy. If so, I would further bet that there is, in effect, little or no cynicism or hypocrisy involved on Sandusky's part. Rather, in his head the "helping"/"rescuing" process and the coercive -- you should pardon the expression -- "intimacy" he experiences are inseparable from his point of view and serve to powerfully reinforce (to say the least) the fantasy"s coherence and "rightness." A final guess -- it's a would-be magical attempt to transform the profoundly coercive into -- again, please pardon the expression -- a form of "love."

A novel based on the Sandusky story might be quite something if it were done in the right way, whatever that might be. I'm thinking of Jonathan Littell's "The Furies," whose main character is an SS man who plays a key role in the Holocaust. For a good while I thought this was a book (and it's a massive one, too) that I would despise and ought to stay away from, but when I finally read it I found it fascinating and enlightening, though it was not without flaws IMO.

Yes.

how do you remember the correct spelling for the horse? Easy -- it's Secretariat

so to speak: 9:00PM at Elastic, 2830 N Milwaukee, 2nd Fl, 773.772.3616 ($12) Celebrating the Midwest School : The music of Anthony Braxton, Julius Hemphill, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill Ken Vandermark, Nick Mazzarella, Mars Williams, Dave Rempis, Josh Berman, Jeb Bishop, Jason Adasiewicz, Nate McBride, Tim Daisy All Vandermark arrangements. Pieces included Mitchell's "Nonaah," Braxton's "6C," Threadgill's "Untitled Tango," and Hemphill's "The Hard Blues." Some strong playing, especially from Rempis, Bishop, and Mazzarella; other than that my lips are sealed. If Chuck had been there, he might have had a heart attack.

What would you think about doing then? Catching King Oliver at the Lincoln Gardens. Jim -- What do you think of this one? http://www.peggylee.com/new/0512_leiberstoller.html Some of the songs are too neo-cabaret for my tastes but "A Little White Ship" is sublime, and scary too.

Also, I'm not going to say "f--- it." And I just had lunch.

It's both. Larry, in industry jargon this is what's referred to as an edge case: SS1 had his thread locked and was promptly referred to a thread in the political forum, which he cannot read, so all URLs to threads there appear as broken links to him (also to users who are not logged in). It also does not show up when that user does searches. An unusual occurrence, but one that someone who's taken it upon themselves to steward the site should be aware of beforehand. Let's recap: 1. You reacted with "some search you did there" even though SS1 claimed he did a search. Which means you didn't check to confirm that SS1 can't view the politics forum or were unaware that that's how the system behaves. Wrong. 2. Then when SoaW confirmed that that is indeed how the system behaves - that users who cannot see the politics forum also won't see any thread in that forum in a search - your response was: No. No no no. Posting duplicate threads is not "flinging crap at the walls" unless the user can easily see the other thread. If by "flinging crap" you mean that SS1 posted this thread and assumed Hans was the one who locked it, well...a) it's just a thread, so time to chillax, b) that assumption does not strike me as unreasonable, considering both that Hans appended the link sending SS1 to a thread he cannot see and that Hans was a moderator at one point. It is not SS1's responsibility to keep track of who is and is not an actual moderator at any given time. Unless you want to make that "The moderating team" link on the forum homepage extremely obvious by putting it in 20 point font and placing it above the fold rather than wedged in with a bunch of other rarely-noticed links at the bottom. Also, if Hans really really doesn't want to be mistaken for a moderator, maybe he shouldn't be making the kind of tidying-up post that we usually associate with moderators. I'm sure he thought he was just saving you some time by chiming in, but obviously that backfired in this case. 3. A pretty cavalier approach for a moderator to take. In general it's bad form to expect your users to assume the existence of stuff they can't see. Take the extra 30 seconds and make a post explaining it rather than dashing off a sarcastic response. 4. Leaving aside the question of whether SS1's post here constituted an "accusation", again, this claim has a built-in assumption that users should always be thinking about the possibility of there being stuff they can't see. Nope. I'm sorry that moderators feel badgered and unappreciated, but trumpeting one's own ignorance of edge cases and putting a large burden of the due diligence on users even when that extends to weird cases of stuff they can't see or verify...it's not a good way to administrate a site. FWIW, one little factual glitch in your account of what went down: as you can see from the thread (which is among the reasons why thread coherence might matter) I said "some search you did there" to SS1 before I was informed by fellow (but more experienced) moderator Son-of-a-Weizen that if SS1 had the politics/religion forum blocked, he couldn't search there. My problem there (lack of experience again) is that I myself don't have that thread blocked and therefore had never encountered that situation before. Now I know. Also, my "flinging crap at the walls" was not a reference to posting duplicate threads per se (I'd compare that to littering) but to the complaint that Hans had locked the thread, as though Hans were automatically a (or the) villain. As I said before, when Hans was a moderator, he was not the only moderator.

He sure plays beautifully here, and it's nice to see him do it: http://www.amazon.com/Stan-Getz-The-Last-Recording/dp/B000641Z86 Fine sound quality, too.