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Boulez & Deren in a day
It’s not everywhere you can go hear the Pierre Boulez masterpiece Le Marteau sans Maître for free, so I seized the chance and headed to the Swarthmore campus last night for an on-the-edge performance by Orchestra 2001 under the direction of James Freeman. The reading was poised and elegant, but there were moments in the faster passages when the ensemble
On Bill Frisell
My review of the Bill Frisell/Jamaaladeen Tacuma double bill at Rutgers-Camden, in today’s Inquirer.
The dark side of … Mercury
Pictures are in from NASA’s Messenger probe to the planet Mercury. The thing is 800 degrees in the sun, -300 in the shade. Cozy.
The week on disc (11)
In case you missed the last one…Larry Koonse, What’s in the Box? (Jazz Compass): Tremendous yet underrated guitarist from Los Angeles, playing the music of Jimmy Wyble. David Rogers Sextet, The World Is Not Your Home (Jumbie): African-inspired jazz from a little-known saxophone modernist, featuring monsters Craig Taborn and Gerald Cleaver, plus the noted classical composer Derek Bermel, my old
Hitchens on Huckabee
Something to take note of post-MLK Day: Mike Huckabee recently said this in support of South Carolina’s right to fly the Confederate battle flag over the statehouse: You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with
Tiger strike
Thanks to the rise of the amazing and unclassifiable rapper-singer M.I.A., whose father is a senior figure in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), there’s been an unusual amount of talk about this Sri Lankan separatist group in the western music press in recent years. One of the smartest discussions was offered by Robert Christgau in the Village Voice
Zizek’s follies
Finally saw “Children of Men,” the acclaimed 2006 film by Alfonso Cuarón, starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. It’s set in Britain in the year 2027, a time of global societal collapse; illegal immigrants are herded into cages and camps and the human race has fallen infertile. For the first half-hour this felt didactic and heavy-handed, but in time a
Political bits, bytes
~ Seems clear enough that the Clintonistas, not the Obamites, are playing dirty politics at this stage. BET founder Robert L. Johnson, one of the most cynical operators around, has lined up behind Clinton and touched off a firestorm with comments that seemed inteded to smear Obama. Johnson’s unsavory record as a propagandist for Social Security privatization, estate tax repeal