I link below to The Guardian's superb obituary.
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I was saddened to learn of Andrew Hill's death this weekend. Ever since I discovered his intensely original music, his recordings have been touchstones for me, including the brilliant Passing Ships, a record that was actually held back by Blue Note for 35 years as "unreleasable."
This morning, I got out of bed and made a pot of coffee. The coffee always tastes best when I make it. While the coffee brewed, I drew the white curtains and opened the old windows, smiled at the sunshine and said hello to the cool morning breeze. Soon, I would sit down on my orange couch with a cup of delicious coffee and turn on the computer. I was working from home.
Ah, working from home.
It's not all it's cracked up to be, really. There's always something: a UPS shipment gone awry, a writer who's having a bad day, a pigeon who decides to fly into your…
My admiration for Roger Ebert, which was already immense, just increased. Ebert, who has been battling cancer of the salivary gland, was advised not to attend his own film festival because paparazzi might take "unflattering" photographs of him. His response? "Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. As a journalist I can take it as well as dish it out."
Business Week's Pallavi Gogoi offers a fascinating analysis of how Wal-Mart's decision to offer a sub-$1000 42" plasma TV last Christmas ruined the holiday for the entire retail electronics industry.
Hidden deep within the article is this seemingly innocuous sentence: "By most accounts, Wal-Mart had little to lose by dropping the price on the Panasonic TVs because it sold out its inventory nearly instantly." Translation: By limiting its per store on-hand inventory, Wal-Mart took a small hit while causing the entire industry to melt down. Granted, the retail chains made the classic…
"The Interpreter" in The New Yorker, about Dan Everett's work on the Pirah, has generated a lot of discussion on the Interwebs. The MIT linguists, who subscribe to the Chomskyan universal grammar theory, fired back. Now, Vera da Silva Sinha and Chris Sinha, two anthropologists who have done fieldwork with another Amazonian community and who have visited the Pirah, chime in.
It is said that academic fights are so nasty because the stakes are so low, but this one, while spirited, strikes me as fascinating and reasonably civil. Of course, I don't have a dog in this fight.
Via…
Turns out that it's because it's too noisy during the daytime for mating calls to be heard. Modern life has us all staying up later. Except for those of a certain class, of course.
Joshua Kosman suggests the NYP give up its search for a music director and run the Philharmonic on the "wiki model."
In an article titled, "This Boot Was Made for Jazzin'," found in our April 2007 issue, Thomas Conrad tells us that today's most important European jazz musicians are coming from Italy. It was in that article that I was introduced to the young wonders, saxophonist Francesco Cafiso (18), and pianists, Giovanni Guidi (22) and Alessandro Lanzoni (15). These young men live within a musical landscape nurtured by guys like Gianni Basso (75) and Renato Sellani (81), who, according to Conrad, are "sounding better than ever." I'm not quite sure why, but it thrills me to know that such…