12.29.06
Even the tone-deaf finally understand they’ve hit a wrong note
Seems like Olmert is hearing the response to his wholesale appeasement of the bad guys.
12.28.06
The Horn of Africa tonight
Steve Schippert at Threatswatch has the details on Ethiopia’s nice, clean, resolute roll throug Somailia to the outskirts of Mogadishu. Unfortunately, as he notes, the miles of exposed beach on the Arab Gulf side probably make any kind of decisive turn of events short-lived. Still, it’s cool to see some clear-eyed folks bust a move. Alas, our State Department isn’t so clear-eyed. They want all parties involved to sit down and make nicey-nice.
12.27.06
The real question
Mrs. Q and I were conversing with a friend last night who remarked that she felt a lot of gratitude here at the end of 2006, as her personal life and career were in a mode of steady improvement. Mrs. Q and I said that each of us were having similar experiences. It has been a good year – new magazines to write for, some really dedicated new guitar students, new musical associations for performing, this blog and my new all-purpose website, and now, the novel.
I hesitated before offering a qualifying comment, but then I went ahead and made it. I said that it feels kind of funny to have my personal life on the uptick against a backdrop of a world the prospects for which ain’t too promising.
Mrs. Q and our friend teamed up to counter with the optimistic view that the world’s future is the sum total if all the individual choices made by humankind for either bleakness or possibility.
The more I thought about this little exchange, the more it struck me as a microcosm of the big, basic spiritual question facing us more squarely than ever – namely, does evil have an intrinsic existence?
After years of adhering to spiritual models that posited that this is actually a perfect universe and that the problem lies in our misperception of it, I’ve change my mind. I’ve cast my lot, broadly at least, with the two-forces-vying-for-this-realm camp. Darkness breathes down our necks. That’s our real choice: Will it prevail?
Iran is going to get a nuke soon. Just so that really sinks into your brain, let me repeat it. Iran is going to get a nuke soon. North Korea has several nukes now. The array of Islamic terrorist organizations – some Sunni, some Shiite, gathers like ants or cockroaches in failed and failing states to plot catastrophic attacks wherever they can stage them. Recently elected Latin American socialists like Chavez and Morales are keen to align themselves with forces that hate the Untied States.
And the part that saddens and digusts me is that the West – Europe, Israel, and, apparently even my beloved United States of America, still doesn’t grasp the gravity of the moment. We think we have plenty of time. We think we can squeak past this juncture without having to experience any real nastiness. Well, if that’s the case, somebody among our cadre of bureaucrats and diplomats in their neatly pressed suits and dresses had better come up with something effective pronto. It’s gotta be something with more pizzazz than any of the sanctions or talks or frameworks that they’ve tried to date.
What’s the likelihood that we’ll avoid seeing something heart-stoppingly ugly – something that sends civilization reeling – in the near future? I think one’s answer to that says a lot about one’s take on the nature of this created realm.
Gerald Ford, R.I.P.
His presidency was kind of a hiccup between a very weird presidency (Nixon’s) and a very bad one (Carter’s). He was a thoroughly decent man and a credit to the field of politics.
12.26.06
Death of the West – today’s installment
Little Green Footballs, the place to go for so many important scoops, has two harbingers of our demise: Olmert, having already said he’d free a bunch of Palestinian terrorists (without demanding that Hamas cough up that kidnapped soldier from last summer) and cut loose a bunch of aid money to the Pals, now says he’s gonna dismantle checkpoints. Also, the head of the Anglicans demonstrates how to cloak animosity toward Israel in the vernacular of moral equivalence.
From Tel Aviv to Canterbury, we don’t know which end is up anymore.
This is our culture
Teri O’Brien rips a narcissistic boomer couple a new one. Money line: “Excuse me, we’re trying to have a civilization here.”
12.25.06
Christmas Eve eats
Here’s what I offered those gathered at the Beecue domicile: mini-tortillas topped with crab meat, diced onion, jalapeno pepper slices, co-jack cheese, and a dollop of guacamole, grilled polenta rounds topped with pesto, slices of mozzarella, and sundried tomatoes, and sesame seed-encrusted teriyaki wings.
James Brown, R.I.P.
He was the Godfather of Soul (as well as Mr. Dynamite and The Hardest-working Man in Show Business), but he doesn’t fit into any category. He was signed to the Cincinnati-based King label at the height of its R&B prominence, in the mid-50s. “Please Please Please” by the Famous Flames became a hit about the same time as “Honky Tonk” by Bill Doggett and “Fever” by Little Willie John. But Brown really impressed himself onto the national consciousness starting in the mid-60s, by which time he was King’s lone remaining cash cow. He came from the same southern background and gospel roots as the 60s soul stars associated with one school or another (Memphis, Muscle Shoals, Motown, Chicago) and toured the same chitlin circuit, but he was his own man. Maybe it was that tightly-wound squeal or the introduction of funk bass into his arrangements or that intricate footwork, but there was no mistaking him for anyone else. Something about him was too transcendant for him to be deemed anything but an overarching monarch of that great American art form called soul music.
12.23.06
The no-snow blues
I know exactly why my – well, let’s call it Christmas mood rather than Christmas spirit – is all goofed up so far this year. Not that first flake of white since Thanksgiving. That ain’t right.
The older I get, the more I kind of kick myself for thinking much about my Christmas mood, whether I’m deriving the full flavor of the records I play, whether I’ve bought enough gifts, partied with friends enough, and, most importantly, whether the weather seems sufficiently Christmas-y. After all, I grow yearly in my grasp of this holiday’s significance, right? I understand the profundity of the Creator interjecting himself into Creation in order to redeem it from its unholy slide toward oblivion, right?
Well, that’s the plan. Still, it’s just too weird to not have the first crystal. How superficial of me.
Or maybe the sparkle and magic of Christmas’s secular delights are the natural by-products of the underlying awe felt by anyone inclined to ponder the wonder of Jesus to any degree.
It helps me feel like a deep grown-up to think so.
12.18.06
Ahmet Ertegun, R.I.P.
He died after a fall at a Rolling Stones concert in NYC December 14. He was 83.
He and his brother Nesuhi were the sons of the Turkish ambassador to the U.S in the early 1940s. The younger Erteguns had moved in cosmpolitan circles in Eurpoean capitals throughout their father’s diplomatic career, and already had developed a love of black American music by the time they arrived in Washington. Soon they were sponsoring Sunday afternoon jam sessions at the Turkish embassy.
In 1947, Ahmet Ertegun founded Atlantic Records with Herb Abramson. They originally ran all operations out of Ertegun’s suite at the Jefferson Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Atlantic started as a black-music label – jump blues, jazz and doo-wop. Billboard reporter Jerry Wexler was brought on board as a partner in 1952.
The label was home to Ruth Brown, Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters, Ray Charles, LaVerne Baker, The Coasters, and Ivory Joe Hunter. Ertegun revived the career of 30s Kansas City blues shouter Big Joe Turner and made him one of the pioneers of r&b in the 50s. (By the way, Wexler had coined the term “rhythm & blues” while at Billboard in 1949.)
Atlantic kept building its jazz roster as well, signing Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Mose Allison and others. The label pioneered soul in the early 60s by signing Solomon Burke, and also becoming the national distributor for the Memphis labels Stax and Volt.
Ertegun was a snappy dresser, had a suave demeanor, and was known as a first-rate practical joker, who played some memorable pranks on fellow label owners, such as Leonard Chess and Lew Chudd of Imperial Records.
In the late 60s, Ertegun began signing British rock acts such as Cream and Led Zeppelin.
He was a giant of American culture. We don’t have his kind among us any more, as far as I can tell.
12.17.06
Hope I’m home in time to see this
Wonder if Ahmadinejad will have a response.
And it’s gonna be on CBS, of all places.
The latest in World War III – a roundup
1.) Fatah forces took over two Palestinian government ministries, further raising the ire of Hamas.
2.) Six-way talks over North Korea’s nukes have reconvened, with NK insisting it be treated as a nuclear power, demanding the lifting of sanctions, and demanding aid.
3.) 28 Red Crescent workers were kidnapped from their Baghdad office by what AP is calling “gunmen in Iraqi uniforms.”
4.) Iran threatens “painful revenge” for any country on record as being on board with UN Security Council sanctions over its nuke program.
12.16.06
Confirmed: BQ is alive – breathing on his own and ambulatory
Posting has been scant lately, as you know. I’ve been paying bills – book signings, magazine assignments, private-function gigs, rehearsals.
A real cool gig came up last Saturday. At 3:30 in the afternoon, I got a call from a guy who said the music for his corporate function to be held that evening at 6:30 had bailed. He was in a real pinch. He asked what I did. I told him I was a jazz guitarist and that, yes, I was available to at least play solo. I said, “But let me make a call or two and see if I can put together something a little bigger.” I enlisted violinist Carolyn Dutton, my frequent collaborator, and we did the gig. Hour and fifteen minutes, very nice bucks (and free eats and bar offerings).
The books signings are a gas. I’m selling lots of copies that folks are disseminating as Christmas presents.
I have to finish my next Republic column (on the evolution of my sense of the meaning of Christmas over the years) before the weekend is over. Then I should be able to get back to more frequent observations on the human parade.
12.08.06
Jeane Kirkpatrick, R.I.P.
Another towering figure in the cause of human liberty has passed. She first came to wider attention than scholarly circles with her essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards” in the November 1979 issue of Commentary. During her career, most of it spent at the American Enterprise Institute except when she was the US ambassador to the UN during the Reagan years (where she was the finest one we’ve had until the unfortunately-departing John Bolton), she coined phrases that only grow in relevance, such as “San Francisco Democrats” and “blame America first.”
I met her twice – once in 1987 at the annual get-together of The Committee for the Free World at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, and once at Wabash College (my alma mater) where she reconvened her UN team for a symposium. (That, by the way, was where I first became aware of Alan Keyes.)
Armando Valladares, the former Cuban political prisoner who wrote the harrowing book Against All Hope, made a beeline for Dr. Kirkpatrick upon his release from the Cuban prison system and his entry into the United States in the early 1980s to thank her profusely for her role in his freedom and in making the world aware of the evil of Castro’s regime.
A giant. A hero. A beacon of moral clarity.
12.06.06
Just one aspect of its stunning awfulness
Little Green Footballs looks at the Israel-specific recommendations in the ISG report.
12.05.06
Jackbooted totalitarians posing as finger-wagging do-gooder health advocates
I knew it was going to come to this. Not at all surprised that the locale was Bloomberg’s NYC.
