Hey, Bo Diddley

If Chuck Berry is rock and roll's storyteller/comic, and Little Richard its acrobat/ecstatic, then Bo Diddley was its eccentric folklorist. His music was like an anthopology class with a wicked backbeat: instantly recognizeable as something you have heard before, somewhere (on a playground, probably) -- but reconfigured and revitalized in a unique, addictive way.

It's common now to say that punk was invented to get back to the spirit of early rock and roll (after the combined "excesses" (not my term) of disco and, uh, Led Zeppelin). Maybe that's true, but in any case it's worth pointing out that, even in the context of early rock and roll, BD was "punk." For him, the guitar was a kind of drum (in fact, if you're feeling ambitious, perhaps you could argue that he presaged not only the punks but the modern-day percussive guitarists like Kaki King). The result was stripped-down, drone-based, fluid music that succeeded on the strength of its pulse -- though the occasional punctuation of weird effects didn't hurt any.

Okay, I'll just say it: in the end I always felt Bo Diddley was aesthetically closer to the master bluesman John Lee Hooker than he was to any of his fellow rockers. (Maybe that's why he fit in so well at the Long Beach Blues festival when I saw him there back in the 90s.)

And by the way, "Mr. Diddley" (as the NYT so politely calls him) also has the distinction of being the first rocker to hire female guitarists -- perhaps the best-known being Peggy Jones, aka "Lady Bo" (who worked with him primarily between 1956 and 1962, and appears on all of his classic recordings from this period, including "Hey, Bo Diddley", "Mona", "The Story of Bo Diddley", and "Road Runner") and Norma-Jean Wofford, aka "the Duchess" (who appears in the clip above, and was in the band until 1966). Given the "testicular fortitude" that is often associated with rock and roll, this openness to having a "chick in the band" (prominently) is a not insignificant detail of the man's biography.

* * * * *

Here are a few (a very few) of the other rock/pop tunes that use the so-called "Bo Diddley Beat," the rhythm of which is helpfully transcribed in DJA's tribute.

Need more evidence of the man's influence? Here are the Strangeloves doing "I Want Candy" in 1965 (with a surprise appearance from Sammy Davis Jr. at the end):



(That's an insipid imitation, I know.)

Of course, at some point it can be hard to follow the trajectories of artistic influence / overlap. Here, the inimitable Dr. John demonstrates a contemporaneous instance of the "BD beat" (i.e., Sugar Boy Crawford's "Jock-a-Mo" -- aka "IKO IKO" -- originally released in 1954):



Sometimes stuff is just in the air, ya know?

Anyway: rest in peace (and thank you), Ellas McDaniel.

My hero

Robert Wexler kicked major ass today in Florida.

Here, at about 7.5 minutes in, Harold Ickes gets his comeuppance:



Here, at about 1.5 minutes in, Alice Huffman gets her comeuppance.



It. Is. Time. To. Move. On.

Friday Muxtape no. 5

This one.

1. Chicago Pro Musica: Paul Bowles, "Music for a Farce" (1)

Classical, farcical trumpet: what's not to like? From the author of The Sheltering Sky. I wonder what kind of blogger he would've been.

2. Tadd Dameron: "Fontainbleau"

For a while, this was a template for me.

3. Todd Rundgren: "Love in Action"

If you can sit through the verses, it's a great tune.

4. Acme Rocket Quartet: "Sleep Waltz"

Pleasantly eerie: like Davis, CA (the band's hometown). And the best band name ever. (And that's the last time I'll ever use that grammatical construction.)

5. Johnny Kidd and the Pirates: "Doctor Feelgood"

This ain't Arethra's "Doctor Feelgood" (same title, different tune), but it's still pretty good.

6. Baby Gramps: "Bahama Mama"

I've never heard a voice that so perfectly matches its beard.

7. André Canniere Group: "Accelerated Decrepitude"

See how spoiled I am? AC is another one of the many uber-talented folks who have played with the IJG. Thanks, André!

8. Bruce Springsteen: "Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street"

A bootleg recording from Springsteen's eccentric wacko (i.e., "good") phase.

9. Katell Keineg: "One Hell of a Life"

For Harvey Korman, and also because my daughter has started asking me to explain the concept of death. (Oh shit, how am I gonna do that?)

10. John Lee Hooker: "Onions"

Onions from John Lee Hooker are better than ice cream from Jack Johnson.

11. Erkin Koray: "Hele Yar"

Some call him the Turkish Jimi Hendrix. Huh?

12. The Edsels: "Who Put the Bop in the Bop Shoo Bop Shoo Bop."

Okay, I'll admit it. It was me. I put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop. Can we just drop it now?

And here's last week's.

Now to sleep.

RIP Harvey Korman

My earliest distinct televisual memories are not of Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers or even Warner Brothers cartoons, but the Carol Burnett Show. Yes, I am old enough to have seen the last few seasons when they originally aired. And some thirty years later, I have to say that most of that stuff just doesn't get old.

Given my proclivity for colorful language, and my concern for maintaining a certain level of "cool" cred on this blog, perhaps the foregoing assertion comes as a bit of a surprise to you. After all, Carol Burnett and the troupe did "family entertainment" (yuck!) -- and thus, compared to, say, Lenny Bruce (another hero of mine), they were in fairly tame territory. Certainly they didn't get too far into the "satire as a weapon of social critique" thing that I love so much.

But the way I see it, Burnett was "family entertainment" in a vaudevillian sense. Hers was, essentially, a comedy show for grownups that also happened to appeal to kids. Most "family entertainment" today takes the opposite approach: it is, essentially, kids' entertainment that throws an occasional (usually pathetic) bone to grown-ups. (Dreamworks, I'm looking at you.) Burnett could count on drawing the kids because she never really got into anything terribly controversial (or topical) -- instead, sketch after sketch was about social interaction in a more abstracted and (dare I say it?) "timeless" sense. Sort of like the Marx Brothers. Or Shakespeare.

Harvey Korman was, of course, an essential ingredient in Burnett's comic stew. He was the show's John Cleese -- no one in the cast was better at lampooning bombastic authority. Actually, perhaps the best evidence of Korman's talent in this regard came via a different context, when he played the sputtering bureaucrat Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles (another one of my many favorite films).

But there were other things about Korman's role in TCBS that would make a big impression on me. My favorite (inevitable) moment on any given episode was when the actors or the material would become so silly that the dramatic illusion (they're actors: they're on stage and they can't laugh at what they're doing) could not withstand the pressure. Korman was usually the first to crack (by cracking up), and while perhaps most acting coaches would frown upon such a thing as "unprofessional," to me that was always the high point (and maybe the point) of the show. It meant that the humor had become so important that Korman could no longer control himself -- and what could be funnier and more honest than that? (Needless to say, I would later be drawn to the sort of music that allowed for precisely the same possibility that things could bubble over at any moment.)

Anyway, what you have in the clip above is classic Korman -- physical comedy par excellence, an exquisite portrayal of pomposity (somehow simultaneously suggesting the humility of the actor himself), a hint of Korman's talent for ensemble work, and, toward the end, a brilliant example of the man's skill as an improviser: taking a "mistake" and turning it into an unanticipated moment of hilarity.

The bawdy

Maybe I'm just a little, uh, behind, but I have only recently discovered the This is YourAss Online "network" (or whatever it is).

Now I know that

Emails from YourAss are like a breath of fresh air to your friends and loved ones.

I suppose the possibilities here are, uh, endless.

(Can I really be posting this? Yeah, I guess I can.)

Undeniable

Ezra Klein cites a portion of Obama's Wesleyan commencement address (which I here re-cite for those of you who don't read Ezra Klein):

Each of you will have the chance to make your own discovery in the years to come. And I say “chance” because you won’t have to take it. There’s no community service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care. You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and chase only after the big house and the nice suits and all the other things that our money culture says you should by. You can choose to narrow your concerns and live your life in a way that tries to keep your story separate from America’s.

But I hope you don’t. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate, though you do have that obligation. Not because you have a debt to all those who helped you get here, though you do have that debt.

It’s because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role you’ll play in writing the next great chapter in America’s story.

[...]

You know, Ted Kennedy often tells a story about the fifth anniversary celebration of the Peace Corps. He was there, and he asked one of the young Americans why he had chosen to volunteer. And the man replied, “Because it was the first time someone asked me to do something for my country.”

I don’t know how many of you have been asked that question, but after today, you have no excuses. I am asking you.

When was the last time a politician asked you to grow up and give a damn?

Do you think John McCain wants you to grow up and give a damn?

Unconscionable

There is dirty politics, and there is scumbag politics.

I've been laying off the politically argumentative posts, but I feel a rant coming on...

Friday Muxtape, no. 4

How I wish I had the time to fully annotate this week's muxtape. (Or any of them so far, actually.)

Ah well. Here's the best I can do:

1. Oliver Nelson: "The Artist's Rightful Place" (from The Kennedy Dream). The concept here -- audio clips of JFK layered over Oliver Nelson compositions for big band -- seems "quintessentially Sixties," in the worst sense. But then you have to remember that Oliver Nelson really had to go out of his way to make a bad record. Featuring Phil Woods, Hank Jones, George Duvivier, Grady Tate, and others. (Is the current relevance of the Kennedy reference too obvious? So sue me -- I'm a sucker for historical moments.)

2. Frank Zappa: "The Big Squeeze." Released posthumously on The Lost Episodes, this is Zappa's music for a Luden's Cough Drop Commercial (recorded, incidentally, in the same year as the Nelson record just referenced -- 1967). It features the "snorking" of Dick Barber.

(Wait -- Zappa wrote a jingle?!)

3. Alice Coltrane: "Sri Rama Ohnedaruth." So we've gone from strictly commercial to sweeping and spiritual -- it's that juxtaposition thing again. (The album: Lord of Lords.)

4. Ensemble Ambrosius: "The Idiot Bastard Son" (from The Zappa Album). FZ cover, done with baroque instruments by a group of Finns -- giving an oddly monkish, medieval flavor to one of the maestro's more, uh, hopeless tunes.

5. Mike Richardson (as 100% Polyester): "FAILURE." You've heard me talk about Mike before. He plays trombone in the Industrial Jazz Group, among many other bands. But he also does a bevy of solo projects, and this is one of them. Interesting tidbit: we share the same birthday -- which may or may not explain why I consider him a kindred spirit.

6. Joe Jackson: "Invisible Man." Though I found his foray into swing nearly insufferable, I really like Joe Jackson. His Heaven and Hell, in fact, is a favorite of mine. This is from his latest, Rain.

7. Joanna Newsom: "The Book of Right-On." Talk about niche-casting. I don't think I can listen to any of Newsom's albums from start to finish -- but I think she's awesome nonetheless.

8. MUS: "La Vida." From Spain, they are.

9. Raymond Scott: "IBM MT/St: The Paperwork Explosion." You know Raymond Scott, even if you think you don't -- he's the guy who wrote the "Powerhouse" theme that was used to great effect in many Warner Brothers cartoons. Scott was also a great musical inventor... and maker of commercial music. This is a thing he did for IBM, as compiled on Manhattan Research, Inc.. (Just be glad I didn't include his jingle for Sprite.)

(Wait -- Raymond Scott wrote a jingle?!)

10. Don Byron: "The Penguin." The other side of Raymond Scott -- this actually happens to be one of my favorite tunes (note the parallel between "The Penguin" and "The Frog"). A version by the great Don Byron, from the under-rated Bug Music.

11. Veda Hille: "Lucklucky." Veda and I share the same natal year (1968) -- which may or may not explain why I consider her a kindred spirit.

12. American Standards: "My Bathroom is a Private Kind of Place." From a supremely odd album called "Product Music," featuring nothing but this sort of post-WWII commercial pablum... which is hilarious as all get-out lo these many years later, though I'm sure it wasn't too funny at the time. (Just be glad I didn't include "The Frito Twist.")

Holy cow -- I just googled the Product Music album, and discovered the existence of a thing called the industrial musical: "a musical performed internally for the employees or shareholders of a business, to create a feeling of being part of a team, and/or to educate and motivate the management and salespeople to improve sales and profit. It can be used to train staff in regards to public relations, advertising, marketing or corporate image."

Shudder.

Art & Commerce

Here's a fascinating piece in Rolling Stone about how, in the face of a music economy that is clearly in flux, many artists have been turning to licensing to pick up the slack created by declining CD sales.

And here's the bit that is sticking with me: the piece (by Fred Goodman) cites a slew of bands who have successfully positioned their music for use in commercials (with the implication that there are many more that have gone uncited). Thus we get Spoon shilling for Jaguar, Allison Krauss / Robert Plant for JC Penny, Wilco for Volkswagen, They Might Be Giants for Dunkin' Donuts, The Shins for McDonald's, and so on.

What's surprising about this is not that it happens, but that the idea of getting up in arms about it, from an ethical perspective, seems, at this historical moment, almost passé. (This is perhaps especially remarkable in the context of a genre that can be as -- forgive me -- precious as indie rock sometimes is.)

Obviously, the absence of outrage here is in direct contrast to the kind of "music for music's sake" ethic articulated by Mr. Young in the above video -- for a tune that was, as I recall, a somewhat big deal when it came out in the late eighties. At that point, there was a sense of shame about rockers who "went commercial" (and it was probably related to what I would call the "Milli Vanilli backlash" -- the hand-wringing that accompanied the suspicion that any given musical performance was not entirely "authentic").

In contrast, here's the one fleeting moment of soul-searching in the Goodman piece:

Of Montreal have appeared in a commercial for T-Mobile, composed music for Subway and licensed their tunes for Outback Steakhouse and Nasdaq ads. "When I first started Of Montreal, I probably would have been hesitant to do a commercial for Outback," says the band's songwriter, Kevin Barnes. "In the indie world, there's a holdover from the punk movement that any commercial endeavor will taint your art. But if you care about the band, you won't begrudge us a living."

Of course not. It's a good point. I can no more begrudge a songwriter who makes a quick buck selling a tune to T-Mobile than I can get annoyed at one of my own players when he or she has to take a single gig with Christina Aguilera because it pays much more than a tour with the IJG. That's the nature of the beast.

So I'm not so naive as to throw my hands up in shock at this sort of thing. I know full well the economic pressures involved in day-to-day survival for anyone making a living from music. And I know that, as long as there has been an economically-driven power structure in western society, musicians have had to negotiate with and (often) kowtow to it, in weird and sometimes humiliating ways.

But I also think it's important (artistically and psychically) to nurture the impulse to fight back against these realities. I spent ten years of my life in Los Angeles, and while there I watched talented friends make their way into the commercial music scene, which, dare I say, can impose a few pressures of its own. Those who had the wrong sensibility (even the slightest insecurity, perhaps) found the experience withering. So I'll be curious to see, ten years from now, how many of the above bands come out the other side in one piece, with a consistent handle on their own artistic vision.

I guess what I'm saying is that, when it comes down to it, I'm not exactly sure this "turn your oeuvre into jingles" thing is my favorite aspect of the emerging post-big-label music industry.

(What's that, you ask? Have I ever considering licensing IJG stuff for commercials? You bet your sweet ass I have.)

More karma

Got another review for ya -- this time from Doug Ramsey, of the very well-known jazz blog, Rifftides.

In a way, the highest praise may be when someone gives you a clearly favorable review in spite of certain things he or she might not dig about your work.

So I think this is a great writeup, and I'm honored by it.

The gloss is more entertaining

If, like me, you are simultaneously sick of / addicted to the nonsense that passes for primary coverage at this late stage in the game (Pat Buchanan, will you please go away), you might find a bit of respite over at Wonkette, home to the most irreverent, spontaneous, and hilarious primary liveblogging (is that a genre?) I have ever read.

Did I mention that it's irreverent? Do not indulge if you are a delicate flower.

Whoops

Looks like my cello-playing got a little out of control.

Thankfully no one was hurt.

(Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to make this stupid joke.)

Yes, we did

I'm not generally a "rally" guy, even when it comes to a phenomenal candidate like Obama. But when our adopted campaign worker got us some "VIP" tickets to today's Portland extravaganza (with opening act, the Decemberists), something compelled us to go check it out.

("VIP," we later learned, merely refers to the difference between being sorta far away from the candidate and being extremely far away from the candidate.)

Turns out this was the biggest rally the campaign has had -- 75,000 people is the estimate -- and there was more than a little of what I could only call "historical electricity" in the air. Here's how the Washington Post described the scene:

The sea of heads stretches for half a mile along the grassy embankment, while others watch from kayaks and power boats bobbing on the Willamette River. More hug the rails of the steel bridge that stretches across the water and crowds are even watching from jetties on the opposite shore.

The weather cooperated with the underlying theme of "change" -- shifting in recent days from a dismal cool cloudiness to full-on summer heat.

Daphne and I tried to snap pics from every phase of the three or so hours that we spent on the waterfront. They follow below, in chronological order, and are pretty much self-explanatory. (Click any pic to enlarge.)

Everything old is new again (part 2) / Friday Muxtape no. 3

When I'm not composing or touring or bandleading, I love watching technology obsolesce and re-emerge. Our gadgets rarely disappear entirely: through processes of fascination and fetishization, the trappings of dead or dying technologies are usually rescued and put to new (albeit sometimes entirely superficial and / or merely psychologically satisfying) uses.

Kevin Kelly is right: we love our machines.

Exhibit A:

Get a rotary dial on your iPhone.

I actually don't understand the appeal of this -- I used to get my fingers stuck in rotary dials all the time, and I always thought they were a royal pain in the ass... though I kind of liked the way they sounded during the dialing process.

Exhibit B:

The "Grungelizer" plug-in for Cubase.



It makes things sound... old.

(I'm not even going to say anything about the digital simulacra of fully functioning "dials," because that is pretty much standard with any audio recording software or plug-in.)

Exhibit C:

"Below the fold." Check it out: strictly speaking, there is no "fold" on a computer screen. This is a term from another dying technology: printing.

Exhibit D:

Muxtape.

I have tons and tons of cassette tapes stowed away in boxes in the basement. Why don't I just chuck 'em? I don't know.

Here's what I do understand: when riffing on the cultural idea of "the mix," it's only natural that Muxtape would define itself visually by referring back to the first commercially-available medium for the practice of making mixes.



* * * * *

It's interesting when a new technology cuts down on the work involved in making art. In the face of this sort of thing, there's a risk that the stuff that already exists, which was created without the benefit of that technology, may come to seem more "obsolete" or "quaint" than it actually is. Someone outside the history of a given practice -- audio editing, say -- can mistakenly focus on how "easy" it is, now.

What is an artist born at the wrong time to do? Sometimes it's just a matter of figuring out ways to put new technologies to even newer uses -- uses other than the ones which they were specifically designed for. Note that the phonograph itself was originally conceived (by Edison, anyway) as a dictation machine, not as a device for disseminating recorded music (how's that for ironic: what became one of the greatest emblems of leisure was originally intended for use in a fucking office).

So what about computers: the context for most creativity in the twenty-first century (so far)? Sometimes I think that the light-show you can get from an iTunes or Windows Media Player "visualizer", for instance, would be seen as "art" if it weren't so easily available. Maybe that's what makes the following video, by Dennis Liu, so damned fascinating: it takes the mundane processes of the personal computer -- processes which would have been amazing twenty years ago, but which now seem hackneyed (to me, anyway) -- and uses them to entirely different (and new) aesthetic purposes (and very effectively, I might add):



Cool.

* * * * *

And now today's mix:

1. Masaro Sato: "The Plan to Incinerate the H-Man." From a movie I've never seen but would like to.

2.. Lavender Diamond: "Rise in the Springtime." The excessive sweetness of this band (what else would you expect, with a lead singer named "Becky"?) is much more endearing live. Anyway, it was a hot day today, so I thought of this tune.

3. Deep Zen Pill With Brother Bam Shock: "Power." John Oswald. Plunderphonics. A double-album of mashups par excellence -- done without the aid of digital technology, as I recall. This one poaches from Zeppelin and a preacher.

4. Colin Stetson: "Groundswell." A lot with a little.

5. Them: "Friday's Child." Van Morrison was in a band called Them -- before he was the Van Morrison.

6. Chico Hamilton: "In a Mellotone." You east coasters will hate this, I know.

7. Barbara Lynn: "Heartbreaking Years." Old school that never really got its due. Tight horns, eh?

8. Carla Bley and Paul Haines: "Why." Linda Ronstadt on vocals. Remember when pop singers actually wanted to expand their horizons?

9. Harry Nilsson: "Turn On Your Radio." The opening guitar bit gets me every time.

10. The Sylvers: "Love Over Mind." My wife laughs at me for liking this band. You can too. Circa the disco era, or something.

11. Tinhorn Justice: "White Crow (Mike Rowe)." One of the many nice things about leading a band as big as the IJG is that you get to meet a lot of great players. I'm gonna be featuring the projects of IJG members in this and future muxtapes (instead of always just featuring IJG tracks) -- just so you get a sense of the sort of talent I'm fortunate enough to be able to share the stage with whenever we go out on tour. This week: trombonist Ian Carroll's [not "Carr" -- that's what I get for writing this post in the wee hours of the morning - ed.] band Tin Horn Justice, with Cory Beers on drums and percussion, Tony Digennaro on guitar, James Berry on electric accordion, and Ian on electric trombone. Recorded live at CalArts, recently.

12. Kenyon Hopkins / Creed Taylor: "No Smoking." There's so much going on in this little play -- a satire of the sexual norms of the mid-twentieth century, a commentary on scientific hubris, a quirky example of easy listening music. It's that perfect combination of weird and mainstream that actually used to be possible -- the sort of thing that would never slip through the cracks at a serious label today. From an album called Panic: Son of Shock.

I guess it's karma

Just learned of the latest LEEF review, by Brad Glanden (published yesterday in AAJ). Not gonna quote the whole thing here, but there are some bits that are turning my face various shades of I'm-not-worthy-red. Among them:

It's difficult to fathom a universe where someone would not enjoy listening to LEEF.

Durkin could be writing great pop-rock if only he had a narrower instrumental imagination.

”The Job Song” will offer laughs to anyone who has pursued an artistic career against the financial advice of parents, teachers, and -- Satan? The moral is that doing what one loves yields rewards far greater than monetary ones; the song proves its own thesis beautifully [...]

Durkin is the Conan O'Brien of jazz, joking about the band's alleged lack of appeal when so much evidence exists to the contrary [...]

So this seems a fitting rebuttal to my ornery and totally uncalled for outburst about a single bad review (from a guy who was probably just trying to do his best, and who probably had no idea his quickly-dashed-off words were going to be responded to with such precious hand-wringing).

What's to complain about when clearly there are some folks who are into what we're doing?

Another 2.0 note

So, yeah, I recently joined Twitter. As if my life isn't already cluttered with too much web-stuff.

Here's my Twitter page.

I'm not totally sold on the value of this site yet, but I will say it's entertaining. Who knows, perhaps Twitter will bring back the aphorism? (It's a dying art form, you know.)

In grad school, I used to ask my students to avoid using fancy language to say something that could be said simply. You know -- don't say "in my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that" when you can just say "I think."

So in some ways I get Twitter, and I appreciate the challenge it offers (say something useful in 140 characters or less) -- even if only as an exercise. Nuanced discussions are impossible (or at least inconvenient) in this context, but that's okay, because I suspect they can start there. (And I think Twitter's often-cited proclivity for generating gibberish could also be useful -- perhaps as a way of publicly clearing out the "brain roof chatter" and trying to get to something more pithy.)

According to some, Twitter could become the go-to site for fast news (assuming you're following relevant sources, of course). Here's how that facet of it played out with yesterday's earthquake in China.

Yup yup

It's true, it's all true.

Everything old is new again

Do you remember browsing through the back pages of your comic books and finding ads for a whole host of weird and wacky items, most of which seemed to be too good to be true?

Do you remember ordering some of these items, only to discover that, indeed, they were too good to be true?

I sure do. In my callow youth I was suckered into purchasing an "exploding matchbook" that was so awkwardly-constructed that the gag usually gave itself away before I could "fool" anyone with it. I think that was the beginning of my lifelong distrust of advertising.

Anyway, most of these doo-dads are now available here. All of the hilariously cheesy artwork seems to have been preserved. (The only thing that seems to be missing are the Sea Monkeys.)

Via Mostly Ghostly.

Friday Muxtape, no. 2

Before I get into the music: a moment of silence for Eddy Arnold -- the kick-off artist on last week's muxtape (which you can still get here -- I'll be switching off on my two muxtape sites every other week). Arnold was one of (if not the) best-selling country artist of all time, and he passed away yesterday, just shy of 90 years old. RIP.

Anyway, here's some of what's been tickling my ears this week:

1. Prokofiev: "Romeo and Juliet."

2. Roger Daltrey & the LSO: "I'm Free." (This one is for Alex, by the way. Back when I was in school, "I'm Free" was the tune I always sang to myself the minute I had finished with my last final of the semester.)

3. The Challengers: "Lanky Bones." (Did I ever tell you that I love surf rock? No?! Well, let me tell you now: I love surf rock.)

4. Willie Brown: "Future Blues."

5. Charles Wright and the 103rd Watts Street Rhythm Band: "65 Bars and a Taste of Soul."

6. Industrial Jazz Group: "Skeeter Goes Legit." (The obligatory shameless self-promo track. This one is from our first album, Hardcore.)

7. Charming Hostess: "Two Boys."

8. Manhattan Brothers: "Marie."

9. LEMUR GuitarBot: "Emergencybot." (That's right. It's a guitar-playing robot -- from the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, of course.)

10. John Vanderslice: "White Dove." (Here's where the mix starts getting all rocky and poppy and stuff. Sorry.)

11. CPeX: "Vindegij Mijn Gat." (CPeX: not the "Center for Planning Excellence," but "The Clement Peerens Explosition.") According to Sven at And the Ass Saw the Angel, "The Clement Peerens Explosition started as a joke by the men who made a hilarious radio comedy show, Het leugenpaleis, on Studio Brussel." Sounds like my kind of project.)

12. Badfinger: "Baby Blue." (These days I seem to enjoy the bands that ripped off the Beatles more than I enjoy the Beatles themselves. How's that for irony?)

And there you go.

What William Blake wrought

More thoughts on my petulant outburst later (and thanks to everyone who weighed in).

In the meantime, I hope what follows here will be accepted (by the Clinton campaign) in the spirit in which it is offered (a spirit of gentle ribbing and healing levity, I swear):



It's over, folks. Let's kiss and make up, and set our sights on November.

(BTW, we've had an Obama campaign worker living with us for a few weeks now, gearing up for the Oregon primary -- which, it turns out, may become the "official" finish line for this thing. Man, I thought I worked hard -- this lady hardly sleeps. It's quite impressive, and it backs up the refrain that has been coming up in Obama speeches of late -- that this campaign is not about him, but a movement of people who are truly committed to taking the country in a new direction. Halle-fucking-lujah.)

Say it ain't so

(Photo: "Art Shock" by eliazar.)

Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news.

The good news:

The IJG tune "PDX LIX LAX" made it to the second round of judging at the fan-driven site Garageband.com. That's farther than any of our tunes have gotten on GB previously -- and with any luck, "PDX" is not finished yet. Cool!

The bad news:

Today we got the following review from a Garageband user (who shall remain nameless).

This is a bad joke -- right?

This is great for circus clowns or grade 'B' comedians. Can you play all of these notes again in the same sequence? Pretty good musicians but very poor composing on this piece. The discordant sections do not belong. The rest might due [sic] for a Disney soundtrack.

This fella also had the good sense to give "PDX" a "Stupidest Song I've Ever Heard" award.

Hot diggity!

I'm not going for a petulant frenzy here, I swear. Mostly I think the review is funny.

Okay, maybe it did piss me off just a wee little bit at first (I'm only human). But, honestly... mostly I think it's funny. What other response can I have?

One of the many interesting conversations I had with Evan Francis on the way down to LA from Oakland last March (pre-tour) was on the subject of the surprise we both feel when we come across people who are shocked by musical "noise" or "atonality" or "dissonance" (not that those are all strictly identical). It's easy for fools like us, who dabble in such things all the time, to forget that our choice to do so can actually still be "radical" or "offensive" to some people.

And maybe that's not as big a deal as it initially seems. I mean, it's all well and good for me to roll my eyes every time I hear the sort of smooth-jazz-and-funk-derived stuff that is kicking our ass on Garageband right now. But honestly, where would I (or folks like me) be without that consonant norm to buck up against? Of course, that works both ways. How else can insistently sweet stuff make "sense" (even to its most avid fans) except in the context of a sound-world that is constantly threatening to descend into harmonic strangeness?

So maybe I owe this reviewer a big thank you, because he got me thinking about one of my dear old favorite issues: perception.

For me, art is an expectations game. There's plenty of music I enjoy (and / or love) because it more or less fulfills a certain expectation -- it's like satisfying a craving for hummus. I've eaten hummus before, I know what it tastes like, and sometimes I just want to replicate that taste experience. There are subtle variations in the formula -- different brands, different flavors. But once you know what hummus tastes like, the pleasure of eating it doesn't come from surprise, per se.

Two other things. First: I only want so much hummus. And second: I can remember how much I enjoyed the first hummus I ever tasted.

In other words (dropping the food metaphor now), what really drives my listening, what keeps me constantly hunting down new bands and artists and composers, is not necessarily a desire to find more variations of the stuff I already know I like (that's more of a nice fringe benefit), but to re-experience the kind of astonishment I felt the first time I heard, say, "Struttin' With Some Barbecue." Astonishment, for me, is a weird combination of surprise, disorientation, and potential-for-growth, and it accompanies the discovery of something I don't immediately recognize, and something I don't immediately understand (I try not to confuse not understanding something with not liking it). It's easy to forget that astonishment is psychically important (the human nervous system ceases to perceive phenomena that do not change), and that love and astonishment are not the same thing.

Maybe true astonishment happens less and less as you get older, and maybe the quest for it is an idealistic pipe-dream. But for me, it's still the aesthetic bottom line. It's the thing to shoot for as an artist.

And, for what it's worth, your chances of being astonishing are probably inversely related to how reliably you can play "all of these notes again in the same sequence."

(Whoops! I said I wasn't going to be petulant, didn't I? Sorry.)

I've been Turing'd!

Sorta?

Whee!

Friday Muxtape, no. 1

Gonna try and start a regular thing here...

This weekend's Muxtape.

Or, a short compendium of some of the things I've been listening to this week.

(There's no accounting for taste, right?)

Anyway, the tracks, for better or worse, and in no particular order:

1. Eddy Arnold: "Cattle Call"

2. Regina Music Box: "Ein Madchen oder Weibchen"

3. Deerhoof: "Apple Bomb"

4. Do Make Say Think: "Auberge Le Moutin Noir"

5. April Stevens: "Teach Me Tiger"

6. Industrial Jazz Group: "Should I Play in the Industrial Jazz Group or in Christina Aguilera's Band?"

7. The Beau Brummels: "Turn Around"

8. Erik Satie: "Sonatine Bureaucratique"

9. Syd Barrett: "Octopus"

10. Ruth White: "Lover's Wine"

11. Malignon Music Box: "Una voce poco fa"

12. Al Jolson / Cab Calloway: "I Love to Sing-a"

Ca va?

Maybe for the next one I'll manage to add commentary... or some actual jazz!

Every time I think I'm finally convinced that the world is going to hell in a handbasket...

...my little girl discovers a rainbow.



See it? Ya gotta look close.

Almost music

I've been keeping this a secret for a while, but I recently decided to learn how to play the cello. And how cool is this: the good people at the Berliner Philharmoniker are now providing free online lessons!

Below are the results of my first week of practice (apologies for the un-centered quality of the first half of this video):



What can I say? Those German music teachers are pretty strict. In case you couldn't read it, here's the text of my evaluation:

Almost music. You are holding the Cello with the right side up. And you don't try to blow into it. The rest will be a breeze. Follow your musical instincts. And try again.

Does that mean Camille Saint-Saëns won?

(Thanks to Music Is Not for Insects for the link.)

Whazza widget?

[UPDATE: I sorta hate the way this widget clings to the right side of the main blog column -- but I don't seem to be able to do anything about it. Hmmm... I bet it looks better in a reader.]




Wow. This intersection of music-on-the-web and social networking is expanding like a motherfucker.

We all know that the Internet is not analogous to TV (or a series of billboards). It's a set of environments. But it's also a marketplace. For musicians, MySpace and Facebook were only the beginning (actually, MP3.com was the beginning, but in web time, that's ancient history). There are now oodles and scads of these "social music sites," or Music 2.0 sites, or whatever you want to call 'em -- here's one list, and it's certainly not complete or definitive. All are competing to be the (or at least a significant) place for web denizens to "hang out," share music, interact with other fans (or other musicians), etc.

Here are a few of the ones I've been fiddling with lately:

IJG on Last.fm
IJG on purevolume.com
IJG on Amazing Tunes
IJG on mTraks
IJG on Virb

Some of these are kind of cool. Some are more "eh." Most are pretty easy to use. But all beg an important question: at this (still very early) point in the emergence of a digital music economy, is the most sensible game plan to disperse your work into as many of these new listening environments as is humanly possible?

Consider this (cryptic?) comment from Bruce Warila:

...the number of [online] places digital music consumers hang out already challenges your ability to REACH listeners; this challenge is also part of the solution (hint).

I think most artists have gotten over the paranoia that accompanies the act of giving away mp3s (then again, maybe not). But does that mean we go whole hog in the other direction, and just carpet-bomb the web with free music (as if it isn't already a jungle out there)? Such a strategy requires a significant time investment, after all. Who knows how long any of these sites are going to be around? Maybe it's better just to wait and see which of 'em grow legs...

On the other hand, if you do decide to disperse widely, how do you do it, exactly? Does it make more sense to simply replicate your Site A (e.g., MySpace) content onto Site B (e.g., Last.fm), and then Site C, and then... ad infinitum? Or is it better to vary things from site to site (i.e., different blogs, different freebie tracks, different videos)?

Certainly it's a hassle to have to maintain separate fan communities (if you're lucky enough to have them spring up) in different virtual locations. Plus, you don't want to make your fans work harder than necessary to follow you -- in this increasingly digitized world, many people are hungry for convenience just as much as they're hungry for new music (usually more). Doesn't it make sense to have everyone "gather" in one central place (whatever that place happens to be)?

Of course, what's convenient for one person (someone who loves MySpace will find your MySpace page convenient) is a pain in the ass for someone else (what about all the people who hate MySpace?). Let's face it: the indie musician's reality is that most of the time you are reaching out to other people instead of having them come to you -- a fact that argues for the widest dispersal possible. Additionally, why not "reward" early adopters of a given fledgling 2.0 site -- make 'em feel special somehow (while taking advantage of a potential big-fish-in-a-small-pond situation)? Besides, given the basic multi-tasking dynamic that I think accompanies most web browsing, I suspect there is an added value to keeping your fans constantly engaged -- even if that means asking them to travel to a new site once in a while.

I personally have no idea what's the best move here. In music as in life, things are typically much more complicated than they seem. But, as you know, I'm open to experimentation.

* * * * *

As I was saying...

So far, my favorite of the new music sites is ReverbNation. I found it through Steve Lawson, who, like Warila, has this whole Music 2.0 thing far more in the bag than me. (Would that make these guys Mu2Gurus? I'm assuming so, since neologisms seem to be the name of the game.)

Anyway, taking my cue (i.e., blatantly stealing this idea) from Steve (whose music you should check out, by the by), I'm gonna go ahead and offer the above "widget" player of our music as it is being cataloged over at RN. I've included samples from nearly every album; so, unlike our MySpace page, this playlist makes for a sort of "IJG greatest hits" experience -- if you can imagine such a thing -- and a nice documentation of how much the group has evolved over the last eight years.

I've been exploring this site for a few weeks now. Even before reading the current post, you may have noticed our little blog-sized Industrial Jazz Group ReverbNation player off to the right there (those of you who use a feed reader will have to click over to the blog to see what I mean). That little player, however, doesn't include the "fan exclusives," which the above widget, like our ReverbNation page itself, does. The musicians among you might appreciate the fact that "fan exclusives" are "special" tracks that people can access only in exchange for a mailing list sign-up. (After my recent bitching about bread, it is worth pointing out that "mailing list development" is one area I'm trying to focus on.)

For the moment, I have included an old tune of mine, "Bajaja," as one of the "fan exclusive" tracks on Reverb Nation. It's an out-take from the Industrial Jazz a Go Go! sessions, featuring Joe Berardi on drums, Aaron Kohen on bass, Cory Wright on bari, Damon Zick on soprano and tenor, Jason Mears on alto, Kris Tiner and Phil Rodriguez on trumpet, and Shaunte Palmer on bone. Blast-from-the-past alert... this was recorded in 2004. In style and mood, it's a far cry from all the YouTube videos I've been posting. And for the moment, ReverbNation is the only place you can get it.

We'll see what happens. Feel free to let me know what you think.

How to wear earbuds

Found this helpful illustration (c/o thedodgyguy) over at a forum addressing one of the primary challenges of new listening technology: how to keep earbuds from falling out.

Deus ex machina

Those wacky Honda robots sure have been bitten by the music bug in a big way. You've seen them dancing...



...playing the trumpet...



... and playing the violin.



So I guess it was only a matter of time before one of them got to conduct a symphony orchestra.

And so's your mother

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Crazy She Calls Me

Censorship by definition -- You can't do that, it isn't Jazz -- has been the bane of innovative musicians from James P. Johnson to Anthony Braxton. But few can have suffered from its effects quite so comprehensively as Jimmy Giuffre.

Graham Lock, qtd. by Ted Gioia in West Coast Jazz



Rest in peace to a man who helped set the template for the modern composer / improviser / musician who unapologetically, beautifully, and with utmost integrity does his or her own thing.

Thanks, Jimmy.

Ugly details

This becomes even more annoying in the cold hard light of sobriety.

A depressing possibility, from Ezra Klein:

I've yet to hear a plausible scenario in which Clinton wins the superdelegates. Just about every serious path to the presidency requires Obama to utterly implode, to be rendered non-competitive for the nomination. In that scenario, the fact that Clinton remained in the race might make her a likelier nominee than Gore, but her continued campaigning doesn't have much of an impact. What she is doing by a mounting a basically hopeless but still quite furious campaign is exposing Obama's weaknesses. McCain's folks might have suspected that they target states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Florida, but now they have a precinct-by-precinct map of where he underperforms, ready narratives to activate in their negative campaigning (they don't have to grope around to create a line of attack), and a media that's now convinced of his vulnerabilities.

A spot-on complaint from Hunter, at Daily (and nightly) Kos:

Listening to Clinton campaign surrogates on television, before the PA votes ever started to trickle in, was truly painful. Suddenly one state was the only state that mattered. All those other states were merely prelude: if Clinton could eke out a victory in this state, trailing in the delegate count would no longer be significant, and it would be a brand new race, and Obama would be on the ropes, and Clinton would suddenly win a billion dollars, a pony, and the moon; attention must be paid. It is not enough for Obama to simply be winning the nomination according to the rules laid out in advance: no, he must win the "right" way, according to the Clinton campaign and surrogates, or it doesn't count. He has to win the "right" states. And he has to win primaries, not caucuses. And he has to "close the deal", shutting Clinton out of remaining wins entirely, or it proves something ominous (the fact that Clinton has not been able to "close the deal" against him, and is instead trailing him badly and irreparably, barring superdelegate do-over, somehow does not count against her own merits.) And he not only has to win the "popular vote", but he has to win that, too, the right way, which is to say by counting only certain states and not counting others. And he has to win small towns, not just big population centers, because winning big population centers is elitist. Except that if he wins small towns in the West and Midwest, that doesn't count, because it's more important to win the big population centers. And all of this somehow proves that Clinton is a better candidate against McCain than Obama is, even though the polls to date have consistently shown Obama is a better candidate against McCain than Clinton is.

[...]

More irritating is that the negative attacks presented are, well, stupid, and seem increasingly to be predicated on the notion that voters, the press, the pundits, and we political hangers-on are all idiots seeking to cling to the most shallow of accusations. The press and the pundits? OK, I'll give you that one. The rest of us, however, weren't born yesterday.

An explanation from Sara Smith at Wonkette:

This morning, millions of sad, youthful Obama voters are waking up and wondering what the hell happened in Pennsylvania. Here's the scoop, little ones: Pennsylvania's elderly are so old that they make John McCain look young, and they're so numerous that you'd think they were still capable of reproduction. In fact, the only state with more elderly residents is Florida, and at least those old people moved there. They want to be in Florida. Meanwhile, old people in Pennsylvania resemble the humble sea cucumber: sessile, rooted, a prisoner of the very earth that nourishes them. Naturally, these people vote for Hillary Clinton.

Dick Morris, former Clinton advisor and current Clinton foe, puts it this way:

"Pennsylvania Democrats, in other words, suffer from future shock. They welcome old, established ways and embrace dynasties happily because they are so familiar. (Look at the Bob Caseys - dad was governor, the son is senator.) [...] But don't expect the open primaries of Indiana and North Carolina to behave like Pennsylvania's geriatrics. Both states are younger, especially North Carolina, and independents can vote in each primary. (North Carolina is where a lot of the young people who fled Pennsylvania winters and job losses ended up)."

Poor, poor Pennsylvania. Even when it wins, it loses. We look forward to youthful, vibrant Indiana and North Carolina finding a new and different reason to avoid voting for Obama.

Well, that last one made me laugh, anyway. Thanks, Sara!

Early AM addenda

DrumsnWhistles: Not this time.

And lo and behold, she's right. Minutes after finishing her post (with its predictions about the media response), I found this on the AP.

Related (in a stream-of-consciousness way): a few months back, I happened to believe Oregon wasn't going to matter much in this primary process.

Now it appears things might be otherwise.

You don't need me to tell you this, but what the hell: Oregonians, please be sure you've registered to vote.

Cuz you know:

UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.

(You know the source, right?)

Oh, bloody hell

Screw Mellencamp. The above should've been the theme song in Indiana tonight. "Torn all apart / All in the name of democracy," indeed.

I actually spent the evening at an Obama fundraiser here in Portland. Watched the election coverage on the big screen, amidst good beer, decent music, interesting people, and lovely, heavy rain. And I still had a shitty time. (MSNBC and CNN are even more surreal in a public context like that.)

While at Aura, I spent some time holed up in my own head (as is my wont at such gatherings), attempting to understand the turn of events from the point of view of a Clinton supporter. I have to keep remembering: to them, I'm the idiot who just doesn't get it. To them, I'm the one who is being lulled into blind faith.

Funny, that. Especially given that I've never been comfortable with "movements." And that I'm not a particularly religious person. And that I have a hard time with ritual. And that, like Noam Chomsky, I'm not "a joiner."

But I can get past all these (admittedly paranoid) tendencies, and still be compelled by the idea of a government that is (finally) transparent and accountable. And by a political style that eschews bullshit. And by a sense of openness to reason, and rationality, and the sort of intelligent coalition-building that we are going to need to, well, survive.

And I don't see those things in Clinton. At all.

Though some might disagree, I side with Publius on this: it's a political Bataan Death March we're engaged in here. It doesn't bode well. We need to end it, and soon.

Just when you thought it couldn't get dumber

This might not have time to evolve into another pseudo-story before Tuesday, but here's the latest taste of idjit from our ever-more idiotic press corps.

Item:

Democrat Barack Obama, who often argues that John McCain is the same as President Bush, said Sunday that the Republican presidential candidate would be an improvement over Bush's eight-year reign.

"You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain. And all three of us would be better than George Bush," Obama said.

This via the AP.

The headline? "Obama says McCain would be better president than Bush."

Thing is, a cup of 3-day old moldy lime jello would be a better president than Bush.

So what the fuck is the story here?

Does anybody really think Barack Obama wants you to vote for John McCain?

Why yes, of course someone does. According to the same story, HRC quickly responded:

"We need a nominee who will take on John McCain, not cheer on John McCain."

Oh, that's rich.

UPDATE.

Maybe we're in luck: it looks like this story was more or less DOA.

RIP Bebe Barron

Making good "electronic music" is a bit like writing good iambic pentamenter: it seems like it would be the easiest thing in the world... until you actually try it. (I speak from experience.)

Bebe Barron only made it look easy. The shining example of this, of course: with her husband Louis Barron, she was the co-composer (in itself quite an accomplishment -- I mean, a functional marriage is hard enough to come by, let alone a functional husband-and-wife creative team) of the soundtrack (er, "electronic tonalities") of one of my absolute favorite films of all time: Forbidden Planet.



I'm no expert on "electronic music," but it's pretty obvious that the process of making it back in the forties and fifties was light years away from what it is today. Back then, folks like the Barrons were, first, creating new textures from scratch (in the Barrons' case, they built their own circuits). Not to belabor this point, but that meant that they could not simply go down to the local Guitar Center and buy the appropriate synth module for the scene they were scoring. (A world without Guitar Center? Hard to believe, I know.)

Once the sounds were created and recorded on tape, they had to be organized compositionally, a painstaking process that involved comparatively rudimentary cut-and-splice techniques (apparently, this was Bebe's job). Again, the difficulty here is something that has to be experienced directly (or at least seen on YouTube) to be appreciated:



Clearly, with the advent of digital cut-and-paste technologies in recent years, this sort of thing has become much, much easier (the single edit in the preceding video, which took around four minutes, can now be done in a few seconds). But one wonders if the digital methods of cut-and-paste would have evolved so efficiently had it not been for the pioneers who spent most of their lives doing it the hard way in order to demonstrate what the possibilities were.

Wikipedia:

The 1948 book Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, by mathematician Norbert Wiener from MIT played an important role in the development of the Barrons' composition. The science of cybernetics proposes that certain natural laws of behavior apply to both animals and more complex electronic machines.

By following the equations presented in the book, Louis was able to build electronic circuits which he manipulated to generate sounds. Most of the tonalities were generated with a circuit called a ring modulator. The sounds and patterns that came out of the circuits were unique and unpredictable because they were actually overloading the circuits until they burned out to create the sounds. The Barrons could never recreate the same sounds again, though they later tried very hard to recreate their 'ID' sound from Forbidden Planet. Because of the unforeseen life span of the circuitry, the Barrons made a habit of recording everything.

Barry Schrader:

The music for Forbidden Planet is truly a landmark in electro-acoustic music. This was the first commercial film to use only electronic music, and the score for the movie displays an attitude towards film scoring that was different from anything that had happened before. In Forbidden Planet, while there are themes for characters and events in the film, as was traditional in the scoring of that day, the themes are composed and perceived as gestalts, rather than as melodies in traditional movie music. Even more important is the fact that the scoring of Forbidden Planet breaks down the traditional line between music and sound effects since the Barrons' electronic material is used for both. This not only creates a new type of unity in the film sound world, but also allows for a continuum between these two areas that the Barrons exploit in various ways. At some points it's actually impossible to say whether or not what you're hearing is music, sound effect, or both. In doing this, they foreshadowed by decades the now common role of the sound designer in modern film and video.

Music, various artists

I just uploaded my first "muxtape" here.

Of course I had to sneak in a few IJG tunes, given that I'm in promotional mode. Apologies in advance.

But there's a lot of other (and better) stuff there too. F'r'instance: a truly stunning version of Reid Anderson's "Silence is the Question," featuring Andrew D'Angelo on alto. And two short pieces from what may be my new favorite band: Shibusa Shirazu (thanks to Tatsuya Nakatani for hipping me to these guys). And let's not forget the "Leaping Nuns' Chorus," by Dudley Moore (yes, the very same), from the seminal sixties film Bedazzled...

In other words, a veritable potpourri. Or whatever.

Muxtape has a very simple, responsive interface -- if only all music sharing sites could be this way.

Enjoy! Or whatever.

* * * * *

In other news, it is currently snowing in Portland. A week or two ago, it felt like summer had arrived.

Huh?

I want one of those

Those of you who have been enjoying my half-baked attempts at filmmaking really ought to get a gander at this bitchen video for IJG member Kris Tiner's group, Empty Cage Quartet (which also features IJG alum Jason Mears). This, my friends, is how it is done:



The filmmaker is Tony Datillo, and the tune is Kris's. A match made in heaven, methinks.

Be sure to stick around all the way until the end for a totally incongruous (and thus delicious) audio clip of Mikey J.

Atlas flagged

Digby points to something I also noticed on Tom Hull's website last night, and which was initially noted by Paul Krugman (the quote is from Bloomberg News):

Ayn Rand's novels of headstrong entrepreneurs' battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged'' would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

Shudder.

Digby adds some context (for those of you who have been fortunate enough to escape Ms. Rand's, uh, "oeuvre"):

Corporations, which have very good reasons to train young people into an ethos that extols the alleged virtues of heroic captains of industry and their lonely fight to retain freedom in the face of left wing collectivism, should not be buying academic curriculum of any kind. The very idea of academic freedom is that the academics decide what to teach, not the government or the community or especially some company who wants to promulgate a puerile political philosophy designed to make people believe that selfishness is a virtue. That it's in the form of a very bad romance novel makes it even worse. (To those romance novel aficionados out there, please note that I said "bad" romance novel. It's not a slam at the whole genre.)

True, true.

Unfortunately, as Jennifer Washburn pointed out in a great book a few years back, this intersection of money and academia is by no means a new phenomenon.

Still, Ayn fucking Rand? What's next: music appreciation courses in which Rush is required listening? (That was a joke, Rush fans.)