Wynton Swing Quote

I'm reading "Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life" by Wynton Marsalis and Carl Vigeland right now. Thought I would share a poignant quote:

"Swing is all a question of how long you can maintain an equilibrium with other musicians. Anyone can do it for one measure. But two or three minutes, or ten, that's a different story. You have to adjust to what everyone else plays whether you like it or not. Don't judge it or fight it. Work with it. Because the music is not gonna stop for you to get your head right."

Cultural Studies - Crafting Fictional Personas With the Language of Facebook - NYTimes.com

Excellent, or should I say EXXXXCCCCELLLLLLLLENNNNT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, article

Cultural Studies - Crafting Fictional Personas With the Language of Facebook - NYTimes.com

Favorite quotes:

"Being “friends” on Facebook is more of a fantasy or imitation or shadow of friendship than the traditional real thing. Friendship on Facebook bears about the same relation to friendship in life, as being run over by a car in a cartoon resembles being run over by a car in life. Facebook is friendship minus the one on one conversation, minus the moment alone at a party in a corner with someone (note to ninth graders: chat and messages don’t count); Facebook is the chatter of a big party, the performance of public cleverness, the facades and fronts and personas carefully crafted, the one honed line, the esprit de l’escalier; in short, the edited version."

"Somewhere in the gap between status posting and the person in their room at night is life itself. So fiction is the right response, the right commentary, the right point to be making about who we are in these dangerously consuming media, in these easy addictive nano-connections."

The mention in the article about a girl spending 6 hours a day on Facebook partly illustrates why I chose to quit the omnipresent social networking site. While I didn't allow the site to consume my time to quite that degree, I can attest to its addictiveness. I believe, from my personal experience and from my observation of others, that FB creates a significant distraction which not only takes time away from one's schedule - already so busy with school/work and other obligations - but also creates a delusional and inherently unsatisfying perception of one's own social life. By subscribing to a medium through which people easily can and do convince themselves of friendships that don't really exist, and which lures people to routinely and sometimes obsessively concern themselves with people not present in their routine environments, we distort our assessment of the multitude and richness of our interpersonal relationships, leading to a laziness or even an unawareness for the degree of need for pursuing real life relationships with the people in our current environment.

jojo mayer / nerve

A couple new EPs by one of my favorite drummers:

jojo mayer / nerve

YouTube - Live Performance on "U-Tunes"

A gig I did with the lovely and talented singer/songwriter Kailey Billings and Russell "basstastic" Klein:

YouTube - Live Performance on "U-Tunes"

One Of The Better Things I've Seen In A Long Time

Thank You Bill Cosby




Cheers!

Merry Christmas!

Huge Drumspot: My Top Five

My top five drummers - enjoy!

Jojo Mayer with Depart:



Ari Hoenig - The Painter (in two parts):





Tony Williams with Miles:



Elvin Jones tearin' it up:



Danny Carey hittin' it hard:

Seriously?

"Obama wants to spend much of the stimulus on transportation infrastructure and schools. Fine, but lots of schools and airports seem to me to have been refurbished more recently and more generously than military bases I've visited." - William Kristol

This just makes me angry - complaining that we shouldn't be spending money on education but rather should be spending it on the military? Are you fucking kidding me?

Also the article seems to suggest that small government is an ideal we should give up just because it's not politically expedient for people running for office. In other words, we shouldn't work towards it because it's hard. I can't believe what I'm reading.

I may sound a little hypocritical in this post, but let me explain. I disagree that we need to pour money into the military and not into schools and infrastructure. Overall, I wish the size of government would decrease but at any size I think government money should be spent on the right things - this is why I voted for Obama even though in principle I am an economic conservative. In further response to Kristol's complaint about the state of military bases, I say eliminate some of the one's we unneccesarily keep over seas and use the money saved to improve the conditions in the ones we need; because do we honestly need to have troops in Germany still? No. Probably the only statement in Kristol's article that I agree with is the parenthetical suggestion that government probably wouldn't shrink with either party anyways, another reason I feel justified in voting Obama. If Ron Paul had had a chance, I would have voted for him in a second but such is not the case.

Here's the whole article.

Great Article from Friedman

My favorite line: "This money can't just go to patch up our jalopies."

The whole article here


Cheers!

Interesting Post From The Freakonomics Blog

You can find it here

I hope I hear more about this; whether it works or doesn't work and why.


Cheers!

Homosexuality/gay marriage/prop. 8 and the Black Community

A very insightful and interesting article from the New York Times here. I especially like the constructive advice at the end of the article.


Cheers!

Farm Subsidies

From the Washington Post:

Obama Goes After Farm Subsidies

In a speech just concluded announcing two more economy appointees -- CBO chief Peter Orszag to the Office of Management and Budget and Robert Nabors (House Approp. Comm.) to be his deputy -- President-elect Obama gave an example of one piece of wasteful government spending: farm subsidies.

Obama cited a GAO report out yesterday that said from 2003 to 2006, "millionaire farmers" got $49 million in farm subsidies despite earning more than the $2.5 million cutoff in annual income.

"If it's true," Obama said, "it's a prime example of waste."

With the announcement, Obama joins a long and largely defeated line of presidents and officials who've tried to kill farm subsidies, a perk as deeply ingrained in a nation built on the Jeffersonian Agricultural Ideal as any other.

Subsidies have been constructed and preserved by powerful Midwest lawmakers and are very difficult to pry loose.

To the president-elect, we say: Good luck with that. Let us know how it works out for you.

Orszag, Obama said, "doesn't need a map to tell him where the bodies are buried in the federal budget."

One place to start digging is the Nation's Breadbasket. The president-elect may be wise to be on the lookout for a Combine Army motoring to Washington to preserve the subsidies.

The Post's Dan Morgan, Gilbert Gaul and Sarah Cohen did a terrific series on farm subsidies in 2006. Here's where you can read it.

Good and Godspeed I say!

Cheers

Some Videos For Fun

Poetry!

Taylor Mali:


Billy Collins:

Great Web Find

While I don't really have time to read through many different news sources every day, I do like to vary where I get my news (although I sometimes fall into the habit of just clicking on the NYT website and possibly scanning through Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish). I'm always interested to add new bookmarks to my Firefox with various perspectives and slants. I found something called source watch that, among other things (it being a wikilike encyclopedia site), lists news sources according to their political slants - conservative, or liberal. It also provides what looks like an interesting article on the nature of propaganda which you can find the link to if you scroll down on either of the aforementioned linked pages.

Cheers!