“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
–Dwight David Eisenhower, 34th president, born on this day.
New textbook.
This only for the new (L1) students. My students who started with me in the Summer semester (then L1, now L2) get to stick with the old book.
It’s hard to imagine the realm of modern standup comedy without the influence of Lenny Bruce. Before Lenny, all standup was basically a sequence of setup-and-punchline jokes, vaudeville Jimmy Durante style. Lenny was the first cat who was able to really string his act together in a conversationalistic, flowing style. He told tales and gave opinions about things like race, politics, religion, and he pulled no punches.
His style was oft likened to bebop.
He was in trouble with the law numerous times for obscenity and drug abuse, and eventually died on the john due to OD.
Here is the toast of the century, but I am no huge fan.
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Kung Fu is for twerps. These monks have lasers.
Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian woman, wins the Nobel peace prize. Apparently, she is not very well known in her own country.
And another thing: those fizzy pills–you know, Brausetabletten–do not go well with buttermilk. In fact, they don’t even dissolve in buttermilk. Perhaps it is because of the acidity.
I’m going to see Jello Biafra speak tonight at the newly relocated Titty Twister.
Sweet. What is hipness? If you have to ask… well, you didn’t. It was a rhetorical question. But here’s a quote from the hip manual:
It must be borne in mind at all times that Hip is not just a language but an attitude — indeed, a whole culture unto itself. If some of the definitions in the dictionary seem inadequate or puzzling to you please remember that the true hipster has the Taoists aversion to pinning down the changing world. To define something completely is to embalm it intellectually.
Who’s the Lonliest? The Lonliest monk?
That would be Thelonious Monk. Thelonious Sphere Monk.
Composer, Pianist,
The High Priest of Bop.
Exiled to his own Kingdom, New York.
A giant man, The Dancing Bearking,
He never came to you,
You were summoned.
He comped too Badass for Miles,
Had to send Trane away,
When Nelly was sick,
The Duchess helped out.
He stood up for Bop Wizard Powell
So the Man snaked his Union Card.
A king without a sword,
A kingdom without a king.
Monk, born today in 1917, is without question one of the most unique as well as significant American composers of the 20th century. His compositions were earthy yet complex, capricious and sometimes dark, and are like staggering postcards with pictures of ballet-dancing hippos sent from far across the ocean of a vast, lateral intelligence.
I mean, the man was bad. He could blow like no one else. His crawling and crabbling lines. The paw prints in the dirt, the pondering hoverance. A drunken giant climbing down that biggass beanstalk. Single-cell organisms. Yo Mama so fat, she jump in the air and get stuck.
And legend has it that once he secretly demonstrated to another musician that he could burn it down just like Bud and then said “Don’t tell no one.”
Studying comp in school, Monk tole me to write music that has not yet been written; that’s hard to do with regularity. Turn on that radio and you know what I mean.
One thing I found amusing during my stateside stay was the current AOL commercial. You’ll notice a shot of a computer screen with “favorite” websites listed on it, one of them being whitehouse.org. Go look.