from the home office in capistrano beach, california...last week had me pretty preoccupied between total music saturation, preparations for transcontinental vacationing and transatlantic job interviewing, now, midway though my vacation week i can offer the following snippets of observation. (all times PDT. the sunday-tuesday ones were either in emails to mark or commentboxes to jessica.)
[sunday 5:30 pm]
supershuttle came a-calling at 5am sharp. i'd slept thru my alarm and numerous phonecalls by the supershuttle guy: in my dream the phone was ringing and it was somebody from a video store or something and i did not want to talk to them so i just let the phone ring. lucky for me supershuttle guy didn't just give up and drive off. you'd be surprised how busy natl airport is at 5:15 am on a sunday. needless to say until i could get some breakfast and coffee into me on the dallas layover, i was not a happy camper.
[monday 1:42 pm]
cloudy this morning but the haze has burned off! gonna have a late lunch now and walk the length of the beach as seems fit. and yr right it's freakin chilly at night!
[monday 11 pm]
man wish y'all cd be here, you and all my friends. i mean i know it's no big deal for you and lorraine to go to the beach, now. i've not been to "the beach" since 1999. it's tres bon: fire, surf, heat, chilliness, drinks etc...
[tuesday 10:40 am]
the families have gone off on separate day trips today: my sister and nephews to disneyland, their cousins to the san diego zoo. so i'm holding down the fort, cleaning up the place a bit, doing some laundry, having leisurely breakfasts, checking emails and airfare to london on the patio overlooking the surf. indeed cloudy and chilly today, think i even felt a few light raindrops. will it burn off? or does it most of the time?
thinking i'll probably catch the OCTA bus to san clemente this afternoon, there's a used bookstore and a few thrift shops there, mebbe find myself a little late lunch spot...
driving around w/my sister yesterday late afternoon to and fro a target store in/around laguna hills and laguna niguel -- everything is freakin brand spankin new around here. even the 7-11s look freshly scrubbed. and all the residential property is up on these lovely hills. like, there's hills everywhere, and all the hills have these lovely residential properties on them: no residences anywhere else, nothing on the lovely hills but lovely residences...
[tuesday 5:40 pm]
sounds like i left the east coast at about exactly the right time. not a drop of rain here in capistrano beach california. (well not true: i think i felt a few around 11 am today.) mornings have been cool and overcast but the clouds have typically been burning off by 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and then things heat up quite nicely into the low eighties and stay that way until a gorgeous sunset moves in, by which time we're about ready for a beach bonfire that makes it continue to feel like daytime warmth even while away from the fire a sweatshirt is usually in order.
[wednesday 4 pm]
san clemente was strange, not much to it really. a few restaurants, none too extravagent looking. bookstores and thrift stores offering nothing to really speak of. surf shops and surf board shops. an unused parks. a pocket of light industry: janatorial and restaurant supply company, a sandal factory. guy sleeping in a pickup truck camper. a woman eating in her car. the OCTA bus made no stops along the PCH between the major intersection a mile away and the san clemente train station 5 miles in the other direction (antithetical the DC buses which stop every block.)
fancy dinner tonight at the montage, laguna beach.
[thursday 12.40 pm]
dinner at the loft, montage resort and spa's casual gourmet restaurant, was quite something. (rooms there start at $420/night). bill and lisa and i shared everything. our three starters were: 1) pan-seared maine diver sea scallops and sherry glazed pork belly garnished with a sweet cream corn and, curiously enough, a few pieces of popcorn; 2) carpaccio of ahi tuna, garnished with coconut curd and lime jelly, and a caper-cilantro salad; and 3) vanilla butter-braised lobster served with cured lemon and ricotta agnolotti in a citrus sauce. the scallops and the tuna were in a close tie for my favorites, but since i'm not generally inclined to go for raw fish i'll give the tuna the edge, it was a really wonderful surprise to me. the lobster was not bad, hardly, it's just the citrus flavor, mild as i was, sort of dominated and i never caught too much vanilla.we shared two salads: 1) a shaved braeburn apples and celery heart salad with rocket greens, goat cheese and golden raisin emulsion, and 2) a salad of summer melon and peppercress with crispy prosciutto, muscat grapes and chili infused honey. #1 was tasty, celery dominated but it was all a little too saturdated with what was i guess the golden raisin emulsion, sweet but rather indistinct. #2 won hands down in my book: a variation on the old melon and prosciutto favorite, the chili-infused honey gave this all a subtle but powerful sweet-hot.
for the entrees we could not pass over this signature dish: 28-day dry-aged coffee-crusted new york strip, served with fourme d'ambert cheese (close to a blue) and wild arugula and a bourbon-caramel garnish. yes it was as awesome as it sounds. two of those please, and we also threw into the mix a crispy meditteranean loup de mer (a mild whitefish i'd never heard of before but was quite tasty) served with maitaki mushrooms and mint and garnished with a sun-dried grape puree, which was also quite a surprise and went quickly. desserts included a chocolte and meyer lemon sampler platter, something that they called "candied toast" that even our waiter had never tasted or served to anyone, it turned out to be like a hunk of briche that had been soaked ot infused with a mild chocolae of some kind, served over a kind of pistachio butter and beneath a dollop of guiness (yes, the irish stout) ice cream. by far though the show-stealer dessert was the pineapple upside-down cake: take your classic 1950s brown-sugar-soaked dole pineapple rings and betty crocker yellowcake mix, tasty as it is, and now ramp it up by about fifty degrees of decadence (and for brown sugar substitute butterscotch) is really all i can say. trust me.
but by far the most stunning thing to hit my stereo upon returning from NYC has been 
tapscott's recordings are horribly underserved by the compact disc market right now. 
i did make a point of being back in time for Kidd Jordan (tnr sax), Joel Futterman (pno), William Parker (bs), and Alvin Fielder (dr) -- and quite a whorl of sound produced by this band as one can imagine. futterman particularly impressed me: i have him on a leader date for a german label that featured jimmy lyons in one of his last performances. futterman is a figure who literally looms large behind the piano (he must be six foot four) and pounds away to create a wonderful ringing din. in fact i've never seen a pianist's hands move so perpendicularly to the keys (and parallel to the run of the keyboard) before: he literally swept his arms sideways along the keyboard. jordan's tenor playing was certainly fiery but a little to unvarying for my taste: he'd hit a certain height in the upper register and stay there, go back down, back up and stay there, etc. 
for sixteen years, so minimal verbal is needed between these guys. nevertheless, there was a sense of unpredictability to the whole performance: ware picked numbers, cued soloists, stopped and started in places and ways that certainly had me constantly guessing and seemed even to have the band guessing too. i have to say that i was not moved to the degree that i was upon first hearing the DSWQ at the visionfestival three years ago, but it was still a command performance. every time he picks up the horn and puts it to his mouth you know you are in the presence of the higher powers. shipp and parker took an amazing duet, and ware gave brown an extended drum solo with no recap. "mikuro's blues" from 
Rob Brown Quartet -- Rob Brown (alto sax), Craig Taborn (pno), William Parker (bs), Gerald Cleaver (dr). brown is one of my fave altos on the scene and he's been busy in the studios, especially for the portuguese clean feed label, on which i've fallen behind and so was eager to hear what he's been up to. this is a formidable group, so much so that brown may have 
actually upstaged himself in putting it together. his compositions were to my ears some of the best of the festival: a medium groove 5/4 piece, a medium-fast out-of-tempo rising disjointed melody, and a slower darker broding kind of piece with just enough brightness coming through the cracks. while the whole band certainly rose to the occasion, taborn really impressed. i've seen him before, in a trio with susie ibarra and jennifer choi at the sackler gallery at the very least, but here he really excelled -- great speed and power, cross-handed work, inside the piano stumming and plucking, and just a touch of electronics to color the proceedings.
Billy Bang Quintet: Billy Bang (vln), James Zollar (trpt), Andrew Bemkey (pno), Todd Nicholson (bs), Newman Taylor Baker (dr) -- i've seen billy bang on a number of occasions and he's always a joy to watch, but this set was also outstanding. it never struck me as expicitly before (thought perhaps it has subconsciously and i never noticed it) how much bang's recent melodies have an oriental inflection, coming as they do out of his vietnam experience. but quite literally these pizzicato melodies sound very much like they could be coming off a japanese koto-type string instrument. thus no matter how much they may go to and exceeed the outer reaches of the changes, bang's performances always have a strong grounding in melody and derive much of their appeal from this. zollar is a great discovery for me, possessed as he is of a remarkably big brassy tone, and bemkey's lyricism reminded me very much of mccoy tyner's in places.
Slammin' The Infinite: Steve Swell (tmb), Sabir Mateen (rds), Matthew Heyner (bs), Klaus Kugel (dr), John Blum (pno) -- this is a band with which i had limited prior familiarty, mateen being the only player i knew and who again immediately rose to the occasion and cut through with some blistering playing. i found swell's playing very competant but did not stand out very much for me, clearly a lot of energy going into the playing all the same. blum and heyner made an interesting team: both younger guys both posessed of serious chops, the former nearly flailing away as he attacked the keys and the latter going at the fretboard with both hands like some heavy metal band (the long black hair adding to this image i suppose). blum i thought was perhaps the most inexperienced in terms of his comping cutting too much into the soloist from time to time, as if he's still learning how to show off his chops but and still give enough room and deference to the soloist. most 
impressive of all in this group perhaps tho was kugel (far right), clearly a very european drummer poised perhaps midway between the speed and color of lovens and the power of nilssen-love. i noticed most of all the lightness and quickness of his cymbal work and incredible hand speed. total economy of motion as well, every bit of energy being directed into the music.
Roscoe Mitchell Quartet: Roscoe Mitchell (rds), Corey Wilkes (trpt), Harrison Bankhead (bs), Vincent Davis (dr) -- you know, there's simply no one else who even approaches the area mitchell continues to explore. as if to say, sit back new yawkers and lemme show y'all how we do it in chiCAHHHgo! and it's not just the incredibly broad tonal range he possesses on soprano and alto or his ability to "deconstruct" melody, to take a line and splinter it into any number of directions. and of course the circular breathing technique he has mastered allows him to do this (splinter and graft) simultaneously for as long as he seemingly wishes. add to all this his fellow players: bankhead, again like billy bang the other night able at once to evoke a roots-music sound that makes his instrument sound like something from another african or asian culture and then also at the same time show a remarkable western virtuosity; davis, so powerful a drummer that his kit literally would not stay on the floor, so frequently did he have to stop playing one drum in order to bring it back closer to him; and wilkes, now let's just say a couple of things here. the generosity, first of all, of mitchell putting a 
young player and student up there on stage as an equal. and secondly, wilkes has the chops to step into that equal footing and, dare i say, upstage the master? i mean, i was thinking the other day about extended brass technique (relative to lewis and dixon) and thinking, since no one's done it to my knowledge before, it must not be possible to circular breathe on a brass instrument. no sooner do i think this than wilkes goes and does it. and what else does he do? he pulls a kirk. that's right, he plays two trumptets (or rather, a trumpet and flugelhorn) simultaneously. trust me, wilkes is going places.
faculties for By Any Means: Charles Gayle (tnr sax), William Parker (bs), Rashied Ali (dr). earlier in the evening kevin and i say gayle and i spoke to him for a minute, asked if he was going to play tenor or piano or a little bit of both or wait till he got on stage to decide, and he said "no, no tenor!" apparently he switched to alto two years or so, i asked him why and he said something like the tenor had gotten "too hot" and he needed to put it down and try something else for a change. indeed, with gayle's reputation as the most ferocious tenor on the block -- one that belies his very sweet and personable demeanor -- i could not imagine what he was going to do on alto unless it would literally melt or crumble away in his hands. well, this trio turned in perhaps the most moving performance of the festival. a lot of the biting and barking fire that gayle used to put into the tenor is still there on the alto, but i think the fact that it's a smaller horn has forced him to find or rediscover, believe it or not, a lyricism. the second of three pieces, a ballad, was so profoundly filled with the cries of human spirit, the kind that only coleman evokes on "lonely woman" and dolphy evokes on "god bless the child." that and also just to watch the two other masters, parker and ali, was worth the price of the whole weekend.
Grachan Moncur III Quartet w/special guests -- this was an absolute treat. three tunes in the set: a medium-slow loping groove of a tune co-authored by moncur and the late great jackie mclean, and then two covers of classic material from the miles davis quintets, "footprints" from miles smiles and (at the audience's urgings for more music) "so what" from kind of blue. the first tune just simmered and smouldered along, with noriko kamo's monk-like comping and soloing on piano interplaying marvelously with moncur and khan jamal's vibes. moncur was the epitome of class and restraint (golf shirt and cap to boot). jamal's fierce swing countered his seemingly stoic demeanor and appearance (shaven head and face), with only some mic trouble on the high end of his vibraphone marring this performance. byard lancaster did not make it unfortunately, but a guitarist whose name i did not catch filled in with remarkably clean and dexterous lines. rhythm section -- calvin hill (b), richard pearson (dr) -- grooved and swung hard but with, again, a kind of classic restraint. this set woulda sat comfortably at blues alley or birdland, or on a blue note record. moncur seemed to have embouchure trouble on the last piece, and the group as a whole seemed to have a hard time knowing how to end the pieces, the flipside of this of course being that they coulda played all night. and none of us woulda minded one bit.
Warren Smith Ensemble -- i've seen smith before, at sangha cafe in takoma park with bill cole i think, and this six piece gave him a chance to air his own compositions. personnel changes here too, all of which i did not catch, but you had andrew lamb (tenor sax), roy campbell (trpt), jaribu shahid (b), one guy playing french horn and another playing a bass trombone (never seen or heard one of these, looks like a regular trombone except the part behind the player's left shoulder doubles back on itself the same way the top of a bari sax does). two pieces in this set, the first being rather restrained free-tempo piece that never really got off the ground for me (seemed to be a lot of talking b/w band members during, stuff they maybe coulda worked out in advance?), but the second piece was quite something: "a gift from william" [parker]. seems smith has been babysitting a balafon at william's request (taking up too much space in his and patricia's place), so he wrote a piece featuring the balafon (african xylophone with wood keys and gourd resonators). smith stated the melody on balafon to open and close, the band (particularly campbell and lamb) building to a great crescendo groove.
Sam Rivers Trio -- again, this man is 82 years old. true, his tenor playing is not quite as fiery as it was say, i dunno, 30 years ago. but he's still spry and wry and full of invention. this is his working trio (also rhythm section of the rivbea orchestra), and a nimble and fleet rhythm section this is. they took opportunities to flex their muscle on other instruments as well -- doug mathews (bass, bass clarinet) and anthony cole (percussion, tenor sax, piano) -- like their leader, i mean, who else in the whole of modern jazz has been such a virtuoso on such different instruments (tenor, soprano, flute and piano) as rivers? tho i kinda wasn't paying full attention during their reed trio (sorry, this is after 4 straight hours of live music), well cole plays a mean piano, like rivers turning in a masterful ballad performance on piano. 
but coming back for the last set of the night was quite something: Bill Dixon (trpt), George Lewis (tmb, elec) + Videosonic Projections. lewis of course has been the leading american pioneer of extended trombone technique now for probably 30 years (too bad he couldn't have share the stage with his british counterpart paul rutherford!) and likewise dixon who having formed the ny contemporary five with tchicai and shepp and then played on the cecil taylor blue notes has continued charting his own way into extended trumpet technique but probably getting even less recognition than lewis (which is to say not much). though dimming the stage lights and having no rhythm instruments to keep things moving made this a difficult performance to attend to at the end of the night -- actually had this been the 8pm show and the coltrane tribute band the late show, that woulda totally worked -- nevertheless this was utterly fascinating stuff. not only can these guys coax every bleep, blurp, dooweeet thhhhwip and brwawwwp out of their respective horns, but filter it all through various live electronic processing 
and you have an amazing palette from which to work. particularly, dixon's half-lip low tones evoke for me the 12-foot steel trumptets of tibetan buddhist monks, while his breathy thwips when caught in a delay loop could easily make the rhythm track for an piece of electronica dance music. there was a video projection as well as some found speech loops interspersed but they never really integrated into the performance for me. and like i said it was all a bit static for 11pm -- fun to think of what bassist and drummer you could add to make this a killer quartet -- but in terms of extended brass technique this stuff was primo. (like it makes no sense to me amplify and process a saxophone for example but makes complete sense to me for a brass instrument.)
this summer marks 30 years since my parents, sister and i took our 22-1/2-foot dodge jamboree motorhome (something like the one depicted except ours had a dark brown stripe) on a 7-1/2-week trip across the country: from cleveland straight to saint louis to visit my cousins (on dad's side of the family) and then through the middle of the country to and into the southwest, all the way up the west coast from los angeles to seattle, through idaho to montana, wyoming, and then all the way back through the midwest along I-90. (i seem to recall we managed to buy gas at times for around 50 cents a gallon.)
quotes and links follow, but the upshot is:
an average middle-class, white-collar austrian family is depicted in a typical day from three successive years. the last day, though, is anything but typical. problem is, they lead incredibly boring, mundane lives. they don't really live: they do stuff. feet go out of bed and into slippers, teeth get brushed, meals are prepared and eaten unceremoniously, work and school are attended. and so on the day of the third year we are shown, the family carries out their decision to put an end to it all -- for good. they sell the car, withdraw all their money from the bank, tell inquirers that they are emigrating to australia (hence the film's title), write a note to the in-laws, prepare one last meal and proceed to destroy all of their possessions before swallowing poison.
i guess part of why i changed my feelings about the film is how the facticity makes it all literal while fictionality makes it too ironic? i'm not altogether sure how strongly i would recommend the film because it is rather painstaking -- unlike the majesterial deliberateness of bela tarr in "the werckmeister harmonies," "the seventh continent" borders on studied tedium. (in this sense it's closer to "the brown bunny" but without the blowjob.) but nevertheless i'll certainly check out the other two films in haneke's "glaciation trilogy" ("benny's video" and "71 fragments of a chronology of chance," also released on DVD from kino last month). there's also an 
contrary to my previous indication, there will be no post on "rightwing apologetic, part two" focusing on the defenses of the indefensible statements by the author of such books as 
better yet, go straight to the 
also at the american prospect is a four-part essay by john halpin and ruy teixeira one "The Politics of Definition," touted as "a path-breaking and challenging new study on how progressives and Democrats can close the 'identity gap.'" i was not too taken with teixeira's co-authored 
so when i found a copy of 
the inimitable george f. will published a rather bizarre 