Larry Kart

Sorry. This is Vol. 2: http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Fats-Wall...8427&sr=1-5

Velveeta, Velveeta, what makes your big head so hard.

Picked these up these well-filled gems the other day -- radio transcriptions from 1935 and 1939 (solo and by a fine and somewhat different edition of his band -- John Smith in for Al Casey on guitar, and tasty trumpeter Bugs Hamilton taking over from Herman Autrey) plus a radio broadcast with George Jessel, a 1936 remote broadcast, and two 1939 private recordings made in London). Some of the most delightful Waller I know -- and I've heard a lot. Most of it is in fine sound (Jerry Valburn/Jack Towers remastering), and Dan Morgenstern's detailed notes are a joy. A few multiple versions reveal that Fats changed things up a good deal every time, even on pieces such as "Honeysuckle Rose," which he played thousands of times -- and what a great vocal improviser, too. And his sense of time! What might it have been like if he and Lester Young had recorded together. I know -- there's Basie, whose chief model was Fats, but the driving, rock-solid sense of swing that Waller builds up on many of these tracks would have been perfect for Pres, and vice versa. Released in 1990 and 1991, these Stash CDs are OOP but available used from sellers at Amazon at reasonable prices: http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Fats-Wall...6936&sr=1-3 http://www.amazon.com/Definitive-Fats-Wall...6936&sr=1-3

But Jim, Flip Wilson founded the Church of What's Happening Now almost 40 years ago.

That's not what Allen said. He said: "...I do believe that my understanding of the sounds she heard is closer than that of Wynton or Stanley." (My emphasis)

Neither I nor Allen, I believe, is saying "more authentic," not at all -- just different in flavor, as you say, and also perhaps different in recipes/ingredients and cooking methods. And those differences are potentially interesting. Also, minstrelsy and clowning are not necessarily the same thing.

And once it was 1898, almost 1899.

Sure, but I think that part of Allen's point (if not the gist of it) was that when Armstrong was becoming Armstrong, in the early to mid-1920s, the lay of the land in regard to blues strains and strains of minstrelsy in the music was significantly different than it is now, and if one knows what the lay of that land was (insofar as we can know it), Armstrong's undeniable use of blues material seems to have been from a minstrelsy perspective. This, of course, does not mean that Armstrong was what used to be thought of as a minstrel show performer; not at all. Rather, that the game-like, shape-shifting of minstrelsy (its gift for amplification and projection) was, Allen and others feel, what can be heard in how Armstrong handled blues material, and that is not what one hears in, to follow Allen's apt example, someone like Tommy Johnson. To emphasize again, Tommy Johnson and guys like Tommy Johnson matter in this not only because of the nature of what they were doing but also what they were doing then was pretty much being done then -- music like theirs was consensually/communally regraded as the blues (were not just talking about record companies here), and Armstrong was part of the community that was well aware of that strain of American vernacular music, felt its power, but (as Allen feels) then went on to, in Armstrong's case, "handle" it in effect. Armstrong, as is well known and can be heard, also felt and "handled" a fair amount of the Italian opera vibe that was readily available in New Orleans, but one wouldn't say that when he did this he was a Puccini or a Caruso musician. P.S. I can't put my hands on it right now, but one of the most fascinating pocket examples of the musical "lay of the land" back then is a CD of Gus Cannon and His Jug Stompers material from 1927 -- Cannon born in Mississippi in 1883. From piece to piece, things shift from strains that are pretty clearly blues-like, minstrel-like, even what what would come to be called "old-timey" country (this is the band that gave us "Walk Right In")-- all this being played and sung by pretty much the same group of musicians with frequently tremendous zest and flair. But however satisfying/charming the blues-like pieces are, there is a definite sense of minstrelsy-like handling and presentation to them vis-vis-a-vis the kind of direct dramatic involvement one gets from Tommy Johnson or Charley Patton -- this also being evident in how the Cannon band can shift so readily and convincingly into other stylistic modes. Now I'm not saying that Tommy Johnson or Charley Patton didn't know and couldn't have played the crap out of some mountain fiddle tunes if they'd wanted to, or that the "direct dramatic involvement" of their own material involved no amount of dramatization of their part, but you probably get the picture. And I'm certainly not saying that Cannon's Jug Stompers were in the same place as Armstrong, if only because the latter was, musically and otherwise, a kind of unleashed, unstoppable,immensely sophisticated thunderbolt, while Cannon and his colleagues had little room for "development" in themselves; they were great in their time and place, and that was about it. Finally, Jim, not every attempt to sift and quantify is at bottom (as I sometimes feel you've come to think) an attempt to control and dismiss what has been running free and should be left to be that way. Take a look, for instance, at Lawrence Gushee's "Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band" (Oxford U. Press, 2005), to see what real jazz scholarship at work can be like and, more to the point, how it involves sifting through all sorts of contemporary, often fragmentary evidence and partial highly colored latter-day testimony, reminscences, and perspectives with a rather jaw-dropping blend of love and scrupulousness -- all of which can leave us with (as is the case with Gushee's book) something very close to a near-living-and-breathing woolly mammoth; the Creole Band (which included Feddie Keppard, Jimmy Noone, bassist Bill Johnson et al.) of course being tremendously important to the history of jazz -- touring the country as a fairly major vaudeville act from 1914 to 1918, it had a vast influence, even though the band left behind not a single recording.

Sam Most should be heard -- his Xanadu albums as a leader and sideman in particular. Reasonable people may disagree on Most's music -- I sometimes disagree with myself about it -- but he sure does swing and is never boring.

That Julie London clip! Now that's some lady.

Cross-posted from the "Jazz/Indie Rock" thread on "Miscellaneous Music" because if you haven't been following that thread etc.: Went to hear Josh Berman and Matt Schneider last night; unfortunately, Schneider had severely broken a leg in several places several weeks ago while skate-boarding (these are the problems when you've got a scene full of younger musicians) and couldn't make it. Waited around for Berman's set and was richly rewarded. Josh, when he saw me, jokingly said something like "Oh, no, we're going to play 'free' tonight" -- meaning that his normal bands are less this way, that there would be more chances of error or outright failure this way, and therefore I shouldn't be there to witness it, also that (as it turned it) these four particular guys (Josh, Keefe Jackson, Jason Roebke, Marc Riordan) had never played as a group, though they'd all played before with each other, along with others, in some cases many times -- Keefe is Josh's most frequent musical partner. Josh, BTW, was my door to this scene. Met him around 2000 or so when he was working at the JRM and became bemused by how much stuff he'd listened to at his young age (then mid-to-late 20s). Almost nothing could come up that he hadn't heard and had knowledgable things to say about -- and I've got an almost 40-year head start on him. I knew he played the trumpet (later the cornet), had studied with Brad Goode and a CSO player-teacher, but I'd never heard him play. Then he mentioned that he had an upcoming gig with a quartet (altoist Aram Shelton, drummer Dave Williams, bassist Brian Dibblee) at a an Uptown coffee house. I felt I had to go but wondered what I'd say if I thought they weren't very good -- though I did know Williams and Dibblee from their work in some fairly straightahead settings, and they certainly could play. In any case, that band was openly Ornettish -- playing actual Ornette tunes and originals in that vein -- and while Shelton clearly was the further along player, what Josh was doing was very interesting. His key models, as he would freely admit, were this unlikely trio: Don Cherry, Ruby Braff, and Tony Fruscella. He loved the lower register and ... I was going to say "bent" notes but -- and this taste has persisted over time and become much more under control and less decorative -- they're more like "shaped" or "cupped" notes, in that what's involved is mostly not an outright change in pitch but a flowing change in timbre within the note, this usually achieved without the use of mute, plunger, etc. and to the point where the change in timbre is almost where one might say the "melody" is, or that the actual melody and this auxiliary and at times almost contrapuntal melody of timbral shifts coexist. On the other hand, at that point, Josh's phrases tended to be fairly short and "abstract" -- in both cases, though they fit the style of the music they were playing, one wondered whether it was also that he HAD to play that way. Over time, the latter probably proved to be the case; after he bought a lovely cornet, which fit what was he was going for like magic, and began to practice a good deal harder, I think, and play in public more frequently, the phrases began to link up and his overall command of the instrument became unquestionable -- in terms of facility and range, in particular. Now I'd been around a good bit during the early days of the AACM, later been a big fan of the Hal Russell Ensemble, but after Hal's death my contact with the local avant-gardish scene had kind of withered away, as perhaps the scene itself had to some degree -- I can't say for sure because I was kind of elsewhere, in part because in the late '80s I left my newspaper reviewing gig and became an editor in the paper's Books section, eventually the editor of that section, which was a very demanding, time-consuming job (but great fun). When the whole Vandermark thing began and was up and running for a while, I went to some of his things and realized right off that I wasn't, and probably never would be, a fan -- though clearly some of the guys he was working with (e.g. trombonist Jeb Bishop, reedman Dave Rempis) were impressive players. The whole Tortoise, et al. alt-rock thing, and the Chicago Underground Duo/Trio thing I came to know only from recordings -- Rob Mazurek I think was just about to leave town, if he hadn't already left, when I began to go out to hear a lot things, but I have heard a fair amount of Jeff Parker in-person since then and some Chad Taylor (who also left town). So after hearing Josh's quartet at that coffee house in 2000 or 2001 (I have a privately pressed CD that band made and am holding it for ransom), I began to go to all sorts of things in that seemingly ever-widening circle of youngish players (terrific players have flowed in from other cities and regions with regularity and generally have stayed) and became aware that this was a scene the likes of which I hadn't witnessed since, again, the vintage days of the AACM. Terry Martin BTW has jokingly/tartly referred to these players as the New Austin High Gang, implying that their relationship to the music of the vintage AACM is analogous to the relationship between the original Austin High Gang and King Oliver-Louis Armstrong, both in terms of race and influence. This I feel, and Terry now I think mostly agrees, is an amusing line but not really accurate -- there is knowledge of and fondness for the vintage AACM here, of course, and contact with the current AACM, but these players collectively come from a whole lot of other places as well; I hear, for one, at times a whole lot of wisely and utterly assimilated Morton Feldman, an understanding of exactly what Feldman meant when he said to Stockhausen that his (i.e. Feldman's) "secret" was that "I don't push the sounds around." (Stockhausen's plaintive response, according to Morty was, "Not even a little bit?") Getting back to last night's music -- it was free in that it was not pre-planned, but given that, the goal was not to determinedly stay "free" or "out" (if you will) at all times but to allow whatever form-making impulses that were or might be present to emerge -- passages of fairly straight swinging "time" were possible, as well as the feeling that a collective "tune with changes" feeling had been arrived at for a while. (I should add that the one constant on this scene is that everyone in every group that's any good tries to think and act "compositionally." The actual sounds that result can be stylistically quite diverse, but it's such an important, constant thing that it almost takes its absence where you expect it to be to remind you of how rich that constant compositional feel is and how much it matters. For instance, a very talented, fairly well-known, mid-40ish rhythm section player settled in the area a few years ago; he began to play on the scene a lot, but his approach was pretty clearly "I am the virtuoso," which he pretty much was. To my mind, he stuck out like a sore thumb at first, as gifted as he was, but over time he got the "compositional" thing, which was weird in a way because he came from a scene in another major city where one had thought that was in the air too --but no, or not nearly as much. Keefe Jackson (originally from Arkansas) got to me the first time I heard him, maybe back in 2002, when he was regarded by some local mavens as a second-line or even a third-line figure who probably would just stay there. I thought he had some problems in terms of sound -- he just didn't seem to make the horn vibrate as much I thought he should (this was out of then-prevailing temperamental diffidence, I believe, rather than lack of ability) -- but what I think of as his gifts as a shape-maker and his unquenchable in-the-momentness (in both respects he reminds me of "Sound"-vintage Kalaparusha/Maurice McIntyre) -- convinced me that he had great promise and was damn good right then. As it happens, Keefe's sound last night on both tenor and bass clarinet was as rich as I've think I've ever heard from him; he filled the room with overtones without the least sense of strain, and Elastic is a fairly "dry" space. Also, his rapport with Josh, and Josh's with him, is just ... I was going to say "uncanny," but I've heard it often enough that I can't say that; how about "canny"? Roebke's stylistic flexibility and spontaneity within whatever might be going on is pretty amazing; in Mike Reed's People, Places and Things, for example, he plays some of the hardest-walking time this side of the late George Tucker; here he can lay out for considerable stretches, thinking about where and how to come in, and then just surprise the crap out of you by how he swoops in what he decides to do once he lands. Also, he's got such a lovely, big sound, with a lot of useful "pluck" to it. Drummer Marc Riordan is one of the scene's many emigrees, from the Boston area, and he just fascinates me with the essentially cool, contained, crisp aptness of everything he does -- and I've heard him in lots of settings, from straightahead cooking things, to a neo-Bill Evans trio, to free, to my son's singer-songwriter band Medium Sized Rabbit, which is not that far from Sam Prekop territory. Riordan (who's also one heck of a piano player) sounds like himself, but I think I can hear in him a fondness for Tony Williams, Roy Haynes (the crispness), and Joe Chambers -- Chambers' sort of compositional "cool" in particular. One odd thing is that while I don't often like to look at anyone while they're playing -- in part because I hear better with my eyes closed, in part because it can be distracting when you think you're seeing one thing and are hearing another -- Riordan, more than any modern drummer I can think of, makes no move that doesn't correspond precisely to what you hear. In part that's because he's not a big person and doesn't have long arms, thus he stays quite centered and physically economical amid his kit. I imagine that Baby Dodds also might have had that "what you see is just what you get" quality. By contrast, the marvelous Frank Rosaly may be the most "what you see may not be at all what you hear" drummer I've ever encountered -- and Frank is marvelous. So that's a bit of what last night was like, with some context thrown in.

Wonderful soulful player, great guy. I know and like all the things mentioned above. My intro was his playing on Douglas's "Moving Portraits" and the Blue Note album that Bill Stewart led (don't recall the title) -- had to hear more and haven't been disappointed yet.

Went to hear Josh Berman and Matt Schneider last night; unfortunately, Schneider had severely broken a leg in several places several weeks ago while skate-boarding (these are the problems when you've got a scene full of younger musicians) and couldn't make it. Waited around for Berman's set and was richly rewarded. Josh, when he saw me, jokingly said something like, "Oh, no, we're going to play 'free' tonight" -- meaning that his normal bands are less this way, that there would be more chances of error or outright failure this way, and therefore I shouldn't be there to witness it, also that (as it turned it) these four particular guys (, Josh, Keefe Jackson, Jason Roebke, Marc Riordan) had never played as a group, though they'd all played before with each other, along with others, in some cases many times -- Keefe is Josh's most frequent musical partner. Josh, BTW, was my door to this scene. Met him around 2000 or so when he was working at the JRM and became bemused by how much stuff he'd listened to at his young age (then mid-to-late 20s). Almost nothing could come up that he hadn't heard and had knowledgable things to say about -- and I've got an almost 40-year head start on him. I knew he played the trumpet (later the cornet), had studied with Brad Goode and a CSO player-teacher, but I'd never heard him play. Then he mentioned that he had an upcoming gig with a quartet (altoist Aram Shelton, drummer Dave Williams, bassist Brian Dibblee) at a an Uptown coffee house. I felt I had to go but wondered what I'd say if I thought they weren't very good -- though I did know Williams and Dibblee from their work in some fairly straightahead settings, and they certainly could play. In any case, that band was openly Ornettish -- playing actual Ornette tunes and originals in that vein -- and while Shelton clearly was the further along player, what Josh was doing was very interesting. His key models, as he would freely admit, were this unlikely trio: Don Cherry, Ruby Braff, and Tony Fruscella. He loved the lower register and ... I was going to say "bent" notes but -- and this taste has persisted over time and become much more under control and less decorative -- they're more like "shaped" or "cupped" notes, in that what's involved is mostly not an outright change in pitch but a flowing change in timbre within the note, this usually achieved without the use of mute, plunger, etc. and to the point where the change in timbre is almost where one might say the "melody" is, or that the actual melody and this auxiliary and times almost contrapuntal melody of timbral shifts coexist. On the other hand, at this point, Josh's phrases tended to be fairly short and "abstract" -- in both cases, though they fit the style of the music they were playing, one wondered whether it was also that he HAD to play that way. Over time, the latter probably proved to be the case; after he bought a lovely cornet, which fit what was he was going for like magic, and began to practice a good deal harder, I think, and play in public more frequently, the phrases began to link up and his overall command of the instrument became unquestionable -- in terms of facility and range, in particular. Now I'd been around a good bit during the early days of the AACM, later been a big fan of the Hal Russell Ensemble, but after Hal's death my contact with the local avant-gardish scene had kind of withered away, as perhaps the scene itself had to some degree -- I can't say for sure because I was kind of elsewhere, in part because in the late '80s I left my newspaper reviewing gig and became an editor in the paper's Books section, eventually the editor of that section, which was a very demanding, time-consuming job (but great fun). When the whole Vandermark thing began and was up and running for a while, I went to some of his things and realized right off that I wasn't, and probably never would be, a fan -- though clearly some of the guys he was working with (e.g. trombonist Jeb Bishop, reedman Dave Rempis) were impressive players. The whole Tortoise, et al. alt-rock thing, and the Chicago Underground Duo/Trio thing I came to know only from recordings -- Rob Mazurek I think was just about to leave town, if he hadn't already left, when I began to go out to hear a lot things, but I have heard a fair amount of Jeff Parker in-person since then and some Chad Taylor (who also left town). So after hearing Josh's quartet at that coffee house in 2000 or 2001 (I have a privately pressed CD that band made and am holding it for ransom), I began to go to all sorts of things in that seemingly ever-widening circle of youngish players (terrific players have flowed in from other cities and regions with regularity and generally have stayed) and became aware that this was a scene the likes of which I hadn't witnessed since, again, the vintage days of the AACM. Terry Martin BTW has jokingly/tartly referred to these players as the New Austin High Gang, implying that their relationship to the music of the vintage AACM is analogous to the relationship between the original Austin High Gang and King Oliver-Louis Armstrong, both in terms of race and influence. This I feel, and Terry now I think mostly agrees, is an amusing line but not really accurate -- there is knowledge of and fondness for the vintage AACM here, of course, and contact with the current AACM, but these players collectively come from a whole lot of other places as well; I hear, for one, at times a whole lot of wisely and utterly assimilated Morton Feldman, an understanding of exactly what Feldman meant when he said to Stockhausen that his (i.e. Feldman's) "secret" was that "I don't push the sounds around." (Stockhausen's plaintive response, according to Morty was, "Not even a little bit?") Getting back to last night's music -- it was free in that it was not pre-planned, but given that, the goal was not to determinedly stay "free" or "out" (if you will) at all times but to allow whatever form-making impulses that were or might be present to emerge -- passages of fairly straight swinging "time" were possible, as well as the feeling that a collective "tune with changes" feeling had been arrived at for a while. (I should add that the one constant on this scene is that everyone in every group that's any good tries to think and act "compositionally." The actual sounds that result can be stylistically quite diverse, but it's such an important, constant thing that it almost takes its absence where you expect it to be to remind you of how rich that constant compositional feel is it is and how much it matters. For instance, a very talented, fairly well-known, mid-40ish rhythm section player settled in the area a few years ago; he began to play on the scene a lot, but his approach was pretty clearly "I am the virtuoso," which he pretty much was. To my mind, he stuck out like a sore thumb at first, as gifted as he was, but over time he got the "compositional" thing, which was weird in a way because he came from a scene in another major city where one had thought that was in the air too --but no, or not nearly as much. Keefe Jackson (originally from Arkansas) got to me the first time I heard him, maybe back in 2002, when he was regarded by some local mavens as a second-line or even a third-line figure who probably would just stay there. I thought he had some problems in terms of sound -- he just didn't seem to make the horn vibrate as much I thought he should (this was out of then-prevailing temperamental diffidence , I believe, rather than lack of ability) -- but what I think of as his gifts as a shape-maker and his unquenchable in-the-momentness (in both respects he reminds me of "Sound"-vintage Kalaparusha/Maurice McIntyre) -- convinced me that he had great promise and was damn good right then. As it happens, Keefe's sound last night on both tenor and bass clarinet was as rich as I've think I've ever heard from him; he filled the room with overtones without the least sense of strain, and Elastic is a fairly "dry" space. Also, his rapport with Josh, and Josh's with him, is just ... I was going to say "uncanny," but I've heard it often enough that I can't say that; how about "canny"? Roebke's stylistic flexibility and spontaneity within whatever might be going on is pretty amazing; in Mike Reed's People, Places and Things, for example he plays some of the hardest-walking time this side of the late George Tucker; here he can lay out for considerable stretches, thinking about where and how to come in, and then just surprise the crap out of you by how he swoops in what he decides to do once he lands. Also, he's got such a lovely, big sound, with a lot of useful "pluck" to it. Drummer Marc Riordan is one of the scene's many emigrees, from the Boston area, and he just fascinates me with the essentially cool, contained, crisp aptness of everything he does -- and I've heard him in lots of settings, from straightahead cooking things, to a neo-Bill Evans trio, to free, to my son's singer-songwriter band Medium Sized Rabbit, which is not that far from Sam Prekop territory. Riordan (who's also one heck of a piano player) sounds like himself, but I think I can hear in him a fondness for Tony Williams, Roy Haynes (the crispness), and Joe Chambers -- Chambers' sort of compositional "cool" in particular. One odd thing is that while I don't often like to look at anyone while they're playing -- in part because I hear better with my eyes closed, in part because it can be distracting when you think you're seeing one thing and are hearing another -- Riordan, more than any modern drummer I can think of, makes no move that doesn't correspond precisely to what you hear. In part that's because he's not a big person and doesn't have long arms, thus he stays quite centered and physically economical amid his kit. I imagine that Baby Dodds also might have had that "what you see is just what you get" quality. By contrast, the marvelous Frank Rosaly may be the most "what you see may not be at all what you hear" drummer I've ever encountered -- and Frank is marvelous. So that's a bit of what last night was like, with some context thrown in. BTW, if anyone thinks this ought to be in another slot, like "Recommendations" or "Live Shows," tell me and I'll think about moving it.

My favorite SUV is the Ford Global Destroyer. Actually, I once was at a stoplight when a Lincoln Navigator pulled up behind while I wasn't looking, and when I checked my rearview mirror I thought the sky had been blotted out.

I'm going to try to be more conscientious and file some reports. If things go according to plan, I'll be catching guitarist Matt Schneider (solo set, I think), and cornetist Josh Berman's quartet (Keefe Jackson, reeds; Jason Roebke, bass; Marc Riordan, drums) tonight.

Couldn't be put any more clearly than that.

Well, I'm 66, and since maybe 2001, the music I choose to go out and listen to (usually at least once a week, sometimes much more than that) is mostly the stuff that the younger Chicago-area musicians are playing -- often avant-gardish to some degree I'd say, but typically not in ways that would leave many here scratching their heads. I know, why haven't I been writing/reporting here all the time about what I've been hearing? I have done that some times, but I think I don't more often because most of the people I'd be writing about are people who also are to some degree friends (and not only friends but also, because of the gap in age, almost sons and daughters), and I don't want to be writing about my friends in public anymore, for a whole lot of reasons -- some of which I understand, some of which I don't. Maybe I'll get past that, though, whatever "that" is.

The letter writer's point is that we typically don't think (granting the Big 3's stupidities) about the fact that the Big 3's chief competitors are based in countries where there is universal health care; thus their competitors' employee health care costs don't end up on those companies' bottom lines. Yes, in the short term (which may be the only term that matters for the Big 3's survival) Jim's "Subtract my living expenses & I'd have a lot more money in the bank as well, so what does that prove, really? A more salient question might be this - how much revenue would they need now to maintain those health care costs & still remain profitable?" makes sense. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't wonder why Japan, Germany, France, and a lot of other countries have universal health care, and we don't. Those countries can afford it, and we can't? Also, I've heard "That's not how we do it here" stories like Jim A's before and tended to discount them because I assumed that union-busting might be at work. When it comes from Jim A., though, by way of his father, I have no doubts that the problems lie on both sides. I'm trying to think of my own direct working experiences, particularly in the newspaper business. Yes, there were drones and even some sabotuers around, but the degree to which you could count on almost everyone to do whatever it took to make things work was very high -- so much so that you almost didn't think about it. In part that had to do with the fact that some of us had our actual names attached to what we were doing, but it was essentially esprit de corps. You knew that the person next to you probably was darned good, and you wouldn't dream of letting him or her down if you could help it. On the other hand, this didn't mean that we regarded the highest higher ups there with awe or even deference, because we were in a position to know, often enough, when they were clothed and when they were pants-less. Rather, bonds of loyalty, team-identity, whatever, extended sideways and only as far up as it made sense for them to go -- and at one time that was far enough.

Perhaps it's a point that's been made before here, but look at this third letter to the editor (Betsey Britton's) in today's NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/l20detroit.html I also recall reading recently that if you subtracted worker's health care costs from GM's bottom line, the company would be profitable right now, even as screwed up as its other policies are.

Indeed, but the appearance of "formula" through "codification" is not one of them, nor is the appearance of "cliche" in the eyes of certain beholders of these formulae. Dig? I'm not sure. If you think you're playing back to me something that I said, I don't recall saying anything like that.

Gotcha.

You are speaking for yourself, & I for me. Actually, again, for me, verbal languages are a cheapening of the non-verbal languages (including music). These cheaper versions are certainly utilitarian and not without their own potential artfulness, but they inevitably give us a limited dimensionality that the non-verbal languages take over and run with as a matter of course. Would I be happier in a world where nobody spoke or wrote "words", but communicated only through sight, gesture, touch, scent, and "non-verbal" sounds? To automatically assume yes might be a little too "Romantic", but to automatically assume no might bespeak to a cynicism rooted in a lack of imagination, or maybe just an inability to conceive of the abstract actually becoming/being specific, that the perceieved "limitation" is in fact mine. "music is not quite a language in the way that verbal languages are". well. a sequoia is not quite a tree in the way that a bonsai is either. Let us not attempt to see justify the ultimately small scope of the verbal by using the strengths of its limitations to pretend that those strengths carry the day outside of their own immediate realm. Because they do not. When it comes to fully conveying the infinite fullness of life, verbal languages are ultimately verylimited languages. Just to be clear -- I'm not saying that music and other non-verbal languages are lesser languages than verbal languages, not at all; they're just different in some key respects. As for the "smaller," "very limited" scope of the verbal, I like your phrase the "strengths of its limitations," which gets right down to what I'm talking about, but think you underrate the reach of those strengths. If what can be said and understood in words is logically less than the infinite fullness of life -- because the universe includes all words and many more things besides -- I've yet to see that there's any conflict or contest, or even fundamental lack of contact, between the verbal and the non-verbal. Yes, there's the Tower of Babel, but the cosmic "all" really likes verbal language, I think, or at least finds it and our use of it to be touching/amusing; otherwise we wouldn't be allowed to proceed as we do.

Are we agreed that it's spam, rather than spaciness? If it's the former, I'll delete the thread.

Surely language doesn't exist UNTIL it's codified. MG Not sure I agree with that... Surely (and don't call me "Shirley") the truth lies somewhere in between -- that is, if we're talking about literal (spoken, then in most cases written-down) verbal languages. The most "expressive" (in itself) sound or series of would-be communicative sounds doesn't really work until others get and agree that that sound or series of sounds means whatever it means or is supposed to mean. In particular, such codification means that, say, what "take my chair" indicates doesn't depend that heavily on my "performance" of "take my chair." Now, if you're talking analogously, and want to bring into the tent other non-verbal languages, like music, their "languageness" is a good deal looser and different than that of verbal languages. We are, at least in my experience, prepared to deal with pleasure and interest with large swatches of music whose principles of order we don't readily detect. Nor is the language of any music that I'm aware of -- even the simplest, most direct, and most familiar -- as enclosed by the "this means that" process as is the case with verbal languages. Musical sounds can always be taken as "just sounds," while the sounds that make up words can always be understood as words, which accumulate into discourse, unless one consciously or inadvertently disguises those sounds, or one is not engaging in discourse (i.e. words are being used but one has no intent to shape them into sentences), or the auditor doesn't know the language. I'm reminded BTW of the brutal running battle in language affairs between prescriptivists (that would be, among others, people who write usage guides and who say that there are right and wrong ways to use the language), and descriptivists (that would be most professional linguists, who say that there are no right and wrong usages, only usages -- e.g. "Descriptive grammar has nothing to do with telling people what they should say." "Languages are self-regulating systems that can be left to take care of themselves"). A wise man on the prescriptive side notes that no descriptivist linguist writes or publicly speaks other than in some version of standard English (or whatever language the linguist is using). Fascinating discussion. How does one account for the less codified uses of language? I'm thinking of poetry, for instance, which can be studied intensively to extract its precise meaning. Or scat? Or how about primal screaming? (late-period Coltrane?). Or even the howling emanating from one of the 100 best vocalists of all time at rock 'n' roll concerts? The rules of language don't strictly apply, yet communication is achieved. I guess I'm trying to sharpen the point that while rules and "codification" of languages are necessary, it's also necessary to break those rules. The English language itself, is a constantly evolving thing, is it not? The rules, in other words, are constantly changing. I would say that there two kinds of "broken" rules (though I don't like the term "rules" because it quite rightly puts so many peoples' backs up). If a broken rule (how about habit or formula?) is broken because someone has in effect proposed a new habit or formula that then is felt by the community (such as it is) to be coherent and useful, nothing really was broken, just changed. On the other hand, some people say that it's "necessary to break the rules" because they like to/need to break things, as in "destroy" them. And there is, I believe, such a thing as negative creation -- where, when the time is right, the outright destruction of a whole bunch of artistic habits that does nothing but destroy those habits is just what is needed, even though nothing comes from it other than the fact of bare, cleared ground. As for poetry, I don't see where it's a less codified way of using language for any poet who's any good. It's just that every good poet is more likely to be using a "code" that's a good more personal than the codes that are being used by, say, good expository writers. The work of most good poets is more codified (as in "highly worked in a personal manner"), especially in terms of rhythm and sound, than the work of most expository writers; the nature of the medium (it's closeness to song, its tendency to communicate things that don't, or don't yet, fall within the bounds of rational discourse, etc.) seems to demand that.

Some important points made here, I think: "Advantages of Corporate Bankruptcy Shrink": http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/business...ptcy&st=nyt