Old Ex Cathedra

Dyske Suematsu has an article in his blog on why Americans don’t like jazz that is, to say the least, provocative. His thesis (which I’ll only gloss over, go read it) is that we’re living in such a visual age that pure music leaves us with nothing to grab hold of — we’re constantly uncomfortable with instrumental music, like we’re wondering what to do with our hands.

I was given a very precious gift: the ability to recognize a song from its chords. Well, actually I gave myself that gift as I struggled to learn how to improvise over chord changes. It was sort of a side effect. If I come in in the middle of a jazz performance I listen for a while and then the lightbulb lights: oh! that’s “How High The Moon” (or whatever). There’s absolutely nothing unusual about that, except that it simply doesn’t occur to most folks to do it!

I’ve told the story before about having a friend over and playing Bill Holman’s arrangement of “Cherokee” for him. (It’s on Stan Kenton’s Contemporary Concepts album, and there’s a sound clip on its page at Amazon). That arrangement is unusual in that it starts right off with an improvisation, and never gets around to stating the melody. My friend, an excellent musician, simply couldn’t get that it was “Cherokee”. Was that because he was somehow lacking in musical ability? Not at all. It had never occurred to him to think of a song as a pattern of chords.

But there’s no reason at all why he (or anyone else) couldn’t think of a song that way, once someone had suggested the idea. A couple of months ago, we were talking in the car and Kelly and Robert were asking me about what jazz players do. They stayed interested enough that after we got home they sat through my playing a bunch of examples and showing them how to recognize a very simple song form: the 12-bar blues. After a little bit, they picked it up, and I think it stuck with them. And once you’ve got the 12-bar blues down, you just add songs. In fact, just knowing the 12-bar blues and “I Got Rhythm” can get you through a substantial portion of bebop.

And think of the enjoyment you can have from just recognizing that very basic thing in a song! In fact, if you couldn’t do that, I don’t know why you’d stay around for a jazz performance. You’d never know where they were in the song! Do you suppose people are sitting through jazz performances right now, hoping that if they sit there long enough, they’ll figure out the magic key that will unlock the mystery for them?

Maybe those of us who’ve spent the time to pick this stuff up need to pass it on to our friends, to introduce them to chord structures of songs and time signatures and other basics we take for granted. If Americans don’t like jazz because they can’t find a place to get a grip on it, then maybe we need to show them the handholds.

(when told about the time scheduled for a recording session) Nine o’clock in the morning? My guys don’t even start to vomit until ten! — Woody Herman

I could mine these for weeks, but they’re way too much fun. Here’s Photo Matt’s collection of jazz quotes.

Saturday morning I come down and I start downloading pr0n and w4rez (well, actually music, but I’m trying to keep up my image as a living-on-the-edge kind of guy) and I notice that things are sloooooooow. Running about 300Kbps, which if I had dial-up would be miraculous, but I’ve got Charter’s gold plan which regularly goes well over 1Mbps here and usually maxes out the news pipe from Easynews.

So Saturday night, after it doesn’t get better by itself, I call Charter and find out that there are supposedly two cable modems on my line, which there aren’t. And after shuttling me to another office, they promise to take the second mysterious modem off, and that should solve my problems.

So this morning I call up Charter again and this time the guy allegedly takes off the second modem himself (yup, that’s right, they didn’t do it over the weekend when they said they would), and he puts me through a series of calisthenics which do no good, and he eventually gives up and promises to have one of our local people call me at 6PM tonight and set up an appointment to come over and check it out.

Now it might be that our local conservatives, who all think I’m some kind of commie for saying that our beloved President is a miserable failure, got together and sicced Ashcroft on me and they started wiretapping me Friday night, but what I really suspect is going on is that the guy I talked to today (Rod) only thought he switched off that second modem. I think the second modem is a symptom, not a cause. I think what happened is that somebody switched me off of my gold service line by mistake Friday night and connected me to a line that was already being used by somebody.

We’ll see if this is right, and how long it takes Charter to figure it out.

Update: 6:00 has come and gone. So has 7:00. Not a word from Charter, and it’s still slow as molasses.

Update:I went on Charter’s chat support and Donald M laid his hands upon my connection (which excited me in a rather disturbing way) and healed my Internet. My Internet is whole. Send your love offerings, as usual, to Rev. Bob, who knows exactly what to do with them (it’s a rather special ministry of the Rev’s, involving fallen ladies).

The big name in information architecture and visualization is Edward Tufte. But perhaps the guy with the most going on is Julis Schorzman, whose Assemble Me blog is full of brilliant stuff. Go see it. [RSS Feed] (actually Atom)

In this month’s Wired magazine:

More evidence something’s going on: Chevrolet just relaunched with a table-less CSS design, and some of the inner pages don’t look nearly as good in MSIE as they do in the newer browsers.

Anybody who says they saw this coming is Bushing.

That’s the rallying chant of Billionaires For Bush. They’re planning a croquet match in Central Park during the convention. Do you suppose Bloomberg will call in an air strike on them?

Thanks to Greg Palast, we discover that the Republicans have caught on to our sinister plot to have prostitutes with AIDS seduce Republicans, to give phony directions to little old ladies, to throw pies, and to release swarms of mice!

And, floating around the net, here’s the schedule for the Republican convention:

They who would trade essential CPU cycles to gain a little temporary security deserve neither CPU cycles nor security. — B3nj4m1n Fr4nx0rlin

Actually, Stephen Willams, on Slashdot.

I talked a while back about downloading your del.icio.us bookmarks and saving them as XML. As I promised in that article, here’s that XML file, converted on the fly to HTML. If you’d like to do it too, there’s instructions on the bottom of the page.

Doing it on the fly requires a web server with PHP 4 or above with XSLT support enabled (e.g., Sablotron). If your web host doesn’t have that, you can still generate an HTML file; you just can’t generate it on the fly. Here’s an article on using MSXML or Xalan to run XSL Transforms.

This XSL script is about as brain-dead simple as I could make it. If you’d like to get fancier, here’s a great set of XSLT questions and answers with lots of examples to get you started.

The rest of the world views the USA the way Silicon Valley views Microsoft. Except with tanks. — Brad Templeton

He goes on to say, “(While I say this to get a laugh, there is much truth in it. The smug leader, the realization that most insiders are not trying to do evil even if the organization is feared, the fact that we all buy tons of stuff from them and give them economic power while distrusting them at the same time. How their whims can sink us, like, as [Pierre] Trudeau said, sleeping next to an elephant.)”

Only in the UK would there be a sheets and towels store called The White Company.

I’ve been using these for ages, and I just realized I never brought them up here: Really Slick Screensavers for Windows and Linux.

They take advantage of some of the features of OpenGL to do beautiful particle-based and attractor-repulsor systems.

One of my favorite Opera features is that you can choose what application to use to View Source. I’ve got vim selected, of course. Thanks to Iconio, I’ve now got vim selected in MSIE as well. Get it here — free, like in beer. I found out about it in their very civilized email newsletter, which is one of the very few I get that doesn’t scream at me. I’d downloaded their colorpic tool, and though I use pixie more, I kept it around.

I also use their magnifier which I like a lot better than the Windows magnifier. I have to admit, I’m fascinated by the caliper so I may actually be dropping some money there.

The Fat Junkie’s contribution to civilization will probably boil down to a few nasty phrases and portmanteau words, among them “feminazis”. Which is what makes this picture from ALAS so delicious.

There they are, right in front of that Nazi flag: two real, live white supremacist women wearing T-shirts that say “ANTI-FEMINIST”. Well! That certainly poses a dilemma for our merely-conservative antifeminists, doesn’t it? Should Phyllis Schlaffly and her fans welcome these new volunteers into their organization? I think they should, but that’s because I want to see what happens when those two show up at the country club for the next Eagle Forum luncheon.

Back home. I answered a knock on the door to find a bright young kid letter carrier completely soaked and bearing a package from Patrick (unsoaked, she must have been shielding it with her body). Inside were the MP3s that had survived the holocaust of my hard drive crash because I’d saved them off on CDRs. Patrick had borrowed them a couple of Christmases ago and sort of mumbled something when I asked about their welfare.

As a packrat myself, I know exactly what happened. He’s moving, and he finally found them. Thank you, Patrick! I’m listening to Hoops McCann right now, admiring the Monk and Coltrane and Bird and Mingus, and I’m getting ready to rendezvous once again with the Mothership. The complete oeuvre of P-Funk has returned to the Rectory!

If you try to keep up with /., but find yourself getting increasingly frustrated with the dopey comments from people who didn’t RTFA and the jokes that were funny once, a long, long time ago, you may be looking for alterslash, Jonathan Hedley’s unofficial SlashDot digest.

All the articles (not quite real-time, but a pretty good update rate), plus all the high-rated comments, signal to noise graphs (so you can tell if it’s still worth heading to /. and chiming in yourself), and two RSS (actually RDF) feeds: regular and extended, so you can use your feed reader to keep up to date.

Life is cruel. But just in case it’s not quite cruel enough, here’s papernapkin. Meet somebody and they ask you for your email? Here’s what to do.

Wired News will no longer capitalize “Internet”, “Web”, or “Net”. I will now capitalize “pie”, “bamboo”, and “sphere”. — hao2lian

The notorious (or perhaps wonderful) MPEG.

Chopin, Szymanowski, Penderecki, Marie Sklodowska Curie, Mikolaj Kopernik (Copernicus), Stanislaw Lem, Joseph Conrad — names that light up the sky in musical and scientific and literary accomplishment. But some years ago Polish jokes were all the rage, and from then on, if you were from Poland, you double-checked your arithmetic and spelling.

People who call themselves “Christians” have managed, by the tireless efforts of the dimmest and loudest of their number, to get stuck with the reputation of not being the sharpest knives in the drawer. Now in real life they aren’t any dumber than anybody else (which is plenty dumb, but still). In the procession of human stultitude they may not even be pulling their own weight, but they do have that rep, so you’d think somebody would have checked this out.

Nope. The Christian Web-Masters‘ site doesn’t validate.