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On Pete Robbins
My preview of Pete Robbins’s sILENT Z, at Cornelia Street Cafe Dec. 17, in this week’s Time Out New York.
Efforts deserving support
~ Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez and her brave comrades have managed, despite open intimidation by the regime, to institute a clandestine bloggers’ “knowledge workshop.” Says Sánchez: “We ended up finding the cracks between the fingers of the censors, between which the fine sand of information and knowledge has managed to slip through.” Sean Penn, writing prominently for The Nation,
On Revive Da Live
My take on the intriguing jazz-multigenre concert initiative Revive Da Live, online at Jazz Times (and forthcoming in the next print edition).
On McCoy Tyner
I’m happy to announce my debut as a preview and feature writer for Time Out New York. First up: McCoy Tyner, starting Tuesday, Dec. 9 at the Blue Note.
A pair of pairs
Jim McAuley, The Ultimate Frog (Drip Audio, 2008) Chris Gestrin, After the City Has Gone: Quiet (Songlines, 2007) These two double-disc releases share a lot in terms of mood, timbre, game plan. They’re worlds you can get lost in; time well-spent. McAuley, a West Coast acoustic guitar improviser, goes some way toward reconciling the arid experimental sound of Derek Bailey with
Ayers’s two cents
About as unconvincing as it gets. Under the guise of soul-searching, Ayers offers an exercise in self-flattery. He and his comrades in the Weather Underground, we’re to believe, were idealists, exquisitely concerned with the value of human life. No mention, of course, that they subscribed to an authoritarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism, and had outright contempt for the principles of liberal democracy.
Hate in Hebron
Eamonn McDonagh and Gene are right: the Arab-hating Jewish settlers of Hebron are scum. But when Gene asks, “Will it take the death of a soldier or policeman at the hand of a settler before the government cracks down?”, he ought to recall that the settlers’ movement has the murder of an Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, on its hands.
Khalidi’s two cents
Rashid Khalidi, disgracefully maligned by the McCain-Palin campaign two months ago, has his turn at bat, talking with Akiva Eldar of Haaretz.