05.31.07
Posted in Jazz Guitar at 1:18 pm by Administrator
I get a weekly newsletter in my e-mail from a guitar educator named Chis Stranding. Along with occasional charts and exercises and thoughtful, helpful essays on subjects like how to structure your practice time, he provides links to discussions threads on various topics. One from today on the subject of making a living playing jazz is very good. People from small towns and big cities all over the world contributed their experiences and insights.
Some common things that kept coming up:
- the importance of networking
- the value of the Internet
- the way teaching fits nicely as an adjacent income stream
- the question of whether to seek work in other genres, even schlocky ones
All things I think about pretty much daily. I think even enthusiastic listeners, or practioners of other art forms, will find this a stimulating discussion thread.
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Posted in Free-market Economics at 12:44 am by Administrator
I think I accidentally deleted a comment in the thread underneath a recent post in which a lively discussion about the free market was happening.
Sorry about that. I’ll try my best to summarize what I think the poster was saying. He was asserting that government has a role in keeping good-paying jobs from going overseas and keeping health care “affordable” – and, actually, if I understood him correctly, keeping it part of the benefits package that private profit-making enterprises offer those who come to work for them.
Did I get that right? Please correct me if I’ve misstated anything or left any key elements out.
Here’s how I address the foregoing: If the market expresses no demand for a given good or service, then there is no money to pay for it. To put it concretely, if a sevice postion at an electronics company, for example, is more profitably filled in an offshore location, then that’s where that function should be performed. Otherwise, the company in question is creating an artificial set of economic circumstances that will have to be addressed (paid for) with resources from somewhere else. That often comes down to taxes, daddy.
Same with health care. No one going to work for the truck-assembly plant down the interstate or the little hippy-dippy coffee house next to the university campus is entitled to have that employer pay for anything health-care related, from prescriptions to routine checkups to major surgery. The market will decide which businesses thrive and which ones don’t. If a health-insurance plan is important enough to enough people in the overall scheme of things – and here we must consider individuals’ career goals, life circumstances and level of ambition – those businesses offering that will attract lots of quality applicants and enjoy assured longevity.
To the poster who wanted to add another comment to that other thread, I would say this: go back and review your Hayek. When you get the state involved in the workings of the marketplace in the name of “fairness,” the worst rise to the top.
Ask the people of Cuba and North Korea.
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Posted in Afghanistan, Culture, Culture war heroes, National Security, North Korea, Politics, Russia, Uncategorized at 12:24 am by Administrator
Finally, BN has somebody to enthuse about, rather than make excuses for their shortcomings. (Okay, Fred got on board with McCain-Feingold, but as far as I know that’s the goofiest move he’s ever made.)
We’ve got the real deal here. An utterly human, personable, seasoned, brilliant, principled, articulate and unafraid statesman.
In descending order, if it can’t be him, BN gets stoked by -
- Romney
- Giuliani
-Hunter
-Brownback
The things you gotta ask yourself are:
- who is realistically electable, and
- who can make mincemeat out of the H-word creature in a debate and show her for the socialist phony she is.
These people qualify in descending order on the first count, but any of them could handle the second requirement. One, though, could do it grandly, in a way that would have all Americans with intelligence and integrity levels above the level of slugs leaping out of their armchairs and pumping their fists into the air.
The number one fan of the man from Tennessee!
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05.30.07
Posted in Free-market Economics at 1:05 pm by Administrator
I’m always on the lookout for succinct, lucid explanations of the beauty of the free market. John Stossel provides one today in his Townhall column, “The Double Thank-You Moment.”
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05.29.07
Posted in Culture, Culture war heroes, Real American Music, latin america at 7:34 pm by Administrator
Isn’t it interesting that last night’s booing of Miss USA at the Miss World pageant in Mexico City comes at the same time as the illegal-alien debate in this country is reaching fever pitch?
What’s with a significant enough swath of the Mexican public expressing rancor toward its neighbor to make that the newsworthy thing about the night? What’s their beef? Are any of them related to any of the twelve-plus million illegal aliens here in the United States? Surely their problem is not with the bucks being sent back home.
I doubt if all of them are some kind of reconquista / La Raza types, but the odor I get wafting off their antics is of the type that, in concentrated form, manifests itself that way.
Resentment of the Yanqui gringo is one of the great exercises in human childishness over the last century. If ever a country had everything it needed to be rockin’ the world economically, it’s Mexico. Natural resources out the wazoo. A large population. But between corruption and statism, it’s never revved up its economic engine, and consequently its citizens scramble across the border, laws – and interest in the foundational principles that have made the United States great - be damned.
There’s no doubt that an array of sociocultural forces in the world see the United States as arrogant and rapacious. It’s not because that’s the case. It’s because we approach them assuming they’re ready for prime time, up to speed with stuff like political freedom, equality for women, contract law, property rights, and an industrious spirit, and it’s utterly foreign to them.
Seal the borders and make anybody who wants to stay here beyond a vacation-length visit prove they respect the underpinnings of our greatness.
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05.28.07
Posted in High C at the Sunset Terrace, Jazz Guitar at 9:27 pm by Administrator
I’ll be doing a combination book-signing and solo gig at the Fig Tree Gallery and Coffee House in the charming hamlet of Helmsburg, Indiana, in a fertile valley in northern Brown County, about halfway between Bean Blossom and Lake Lemon, on Sunday, June 10, at 1 PM. Counting on the BN faithful to put the word out to all those who like some cultural enrichment with their dark roast and balmy breezes. (I think they may have iced tea, too.)
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Posted in North Korea, latin america at 9:15 pm by Administrator
Here’s what the buddy of Jimmy Carter, Cindy Sheehan, Danny Glover and Harry Belafonte is up to. Bye, bye to Venezuela’s oldest commercial television station (1953). Hello, state-run TV.
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Posted in Culture, World War III at 3:15 pm by Administrator
Iowahawk and Jim Treacher engage in a most imaginative back-and-forth about how to make The View watchable, and on daytime TV in general.
I get little glimpses of this sludge when I’m on the treadmill at the gym, and I’d sure welcome any of the ideas they put forth on their discussion thread.
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Posted in Congress at 2:17 pm by Administrator
I didn’t have a good feeling about the whole idea of direct talks with Iran about Iraqi security. Iran has some kind of proposal for a three-way someting or other and our people are going to bring it back to Washington for study. Obviously, the glaring reasons why we ought to have misgivings about it are Iran’s full-speed ahead nuke program, as well as the official government line that the time has come to envision a world without America or Israel. But more specific to the situation at hand is the remark from Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki that this happy-happy three-way, everybody-on-the-same-page-regarding-Iraqi-security stuff can only move forward if “Washington confess[es] its failed policy and show[s] a determination to changing the policy.”
This bunch emits the same foul odor as the party in the six-party talks over North Korea’s nukes that insists we drop our “hostile attitude.” (That would be North Korea, for those of you who get your news from Entertainment Tonight.)
But our State Department – and I guess W and the people up at that level – think there’s some kind of merit to doing these little dances.
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Posted in Culture war heroes, Human freedom at 1:57 pm by Administrator
I’m not too keen on the-real-importance-of-this-holiday-type pieces, or those of the remember-the-really-important-things-in-life variety. Most of them, frankly, are forgettable at best and usually a little corn-laced.
So my recommendation of this Peter Collier column on Memorial Day in the Wall Street Journal is strong.
Bear in mind Peter Collier spent the 1960s – the era of the Vietnam conflict, which takes up several paragraphs of his column – as the editor of the radical New Left magazine Ramparts, and did not grow out of his snot-nosed anti-Americanism until the 1980s.
It can’t be said often enough that the most special thing about the United States of America is that is was the first nation-state to be founded upon an idea, and that that idea was the primacy of human freedom. Hopefully most Americans are still on board with the foregoing. I may be less hopeful about this second truism: a proper understanding of the spiritual nature of our universe entails an uncompromised resolve to fight whenever necessary to preserve that freedom. And a proper understanding of the term “love” requires us to take a moment today to thank – and be willing to get a little choked up about it – those who “gave their tomorrows.”
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05.27.07
Posted in Religion & Spirituality at 2:13 pm by Administrator
Doug Giles’ Townhall column today addresses something I ponder a fair amount – the necessity for a spiritual foundation of virtue. His thrust is a taking-to-task of the modern atheist who claims to pride himself on a highly moral code of behavior. He refers the reader to Frederich Nietzche, and commends the German philospher on at least having the forthrightness to say that, since he didn’t believe in God, he wasn’t going to bother himself with clean living.
Giles is a Christian through-and-through and he makes a cogent case for a distinctly Christian reason to proceed through life in an ethical and loving manner, but one could really extend his most basic point to religion in general. The precepts found in the Sermons of the Buddha and the Bhagavad Gita compel one to live in a virtuous manner. (I generally don’t mention the Koran in discussions of this type – mainly because I haven’t read it in its entirity, but also because you don’t need to be a genius to see that its presence on the world stage is, shall we say, problematic at present.) It’s a stretch, but you could even include the woo-woo types in this, since they at least have some model of God, even if they give it cheesy names like “source energy.”
No, it’s the pure no-God-whatsoever types that have Giles – and me – bugged here. As Giles says, it’s as if they want to cherry-pick the worldview of the believer for the stuff that makes surface sense without too much rigorous reflection (or owning up to historical realities, like the lives and teachings of Moses, Jesus and Paul).
I know that there are some thinkers I admire a great deal – Christopher Hitchens, Heather Macdonald, John Derbyshire – who say they can’t sign on to the God thing, but I’ve never yet read anything by them that constiutes a convincing case for some other way of arriving at their worldviews. Not saying it’s not there. I’ll read more in their ruminations on this and see what I come up with. Just saying, so far I’m not convinced.
Anyway, Giles makes his point with his customary blend or red-meat Christian humor and scholarly back-up. Recommended Sunday-morning reflection for starting another week in the realm of visible creation.
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05.25.07
Posted in Blogosphere, North Korea at 4:25 pm by Administrator
Go here and make yourself look at every page. Also read about the guy who was found suspended from the ceiling at the Bagdhad safe house.
This isn’t civil-war stuff. It’s not one side in a general Sunni – Shiite conflict in Iraq. It’s al-Qaeda. The bunch that, we now know from declassified intelligence, was instructed by Osama bin-Laden to turn Iraq into a staging area for attacks on the West.
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05.22.07
Posted in Music at 2:57 am by Administrator
Renowned event and publicity photographer Stephanie Bishop has chosen a solo rendition of “How High the Moon” I did for a demo CD three years ago as the theme music one encounters upon stopping by her website. She’s heard a fair amount of my stuff. I don’t know what touched her about this particular recording. A classic example of how, once you offer something up to the universe, you are the least qualified to say how it’s going to have an impact.
BTW, she’s the one who did the photo that graces the homepage of my main website. It’s the photo that appears on my business cards and in most other promotional places.
Thanks a gazillion, Steph! Love the website!
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05.20.07
Posted in Religion & Spirituality at 4:06 pm by Administrator
It’s Sunday morning, a good time to begin the week with some quality theological reflection. For that I give you this post by Francis W. Porretto at Eternity Road on a subject I ponder a fair amount – the nature of judgement and divine justice. He offers a long quote by Thomas Baldwin Thayer that elucidates a number of things about this vexing matter for me.
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05.17.07
Posted in Afghanistan, Real American Music at 5:44 pm by Administrator
The immigration bill that passed the House and is about to do likewise in the Senate is a kiss of death for -
- the Republicans in 2008, as a critical mass of its base stays away from the polls in disgust
- the notion of law and order
- our national sovereigny
- the survival of the West, ultimately.
We can now see what happens to those afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome in its late stages: Their ravaged souls emit a foul odor that is strangely attractive to Freedom Haters, who then swarm around them and devour them.
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Posted in Culture at 5:27 pm by Administrator
In poking around the Net, I came across a blog that looks like it hasn’t been updated for a while but is nonetheless quite interesting. I wonder where the blogger went.
In two posts, he traces the sociocultural and economic history of Bloomington, Indiana, home to the main campus of IU, over the last forty-plus years. Having lived some of that myself, I enjoyed his depictions of the hippies hanging out on Kirkwood Avenue and in People’s Park and Dunn Meadow. He also debunks the notion perpetuated by the movie Breaking Away that there was some kind of “cutters” vs. students vibe.
Heady days, those, and they bring back memories for a lot of folks. About ten years ago, I wrote a piece for a now-defunct Bloomington magazine called BC on the history of Bloomington record lables. I still hear from people who run across it on the Web and tell me they recall the old Barbecue and Redbud labels and Jack Gilfoy’s recording studio, where Caroline Peyton and Bob Lucas cut those great albums. (Mellencamp’s first album was largely recorded there as well.)
Part One is here. In Part Two, he gives a rather bleak assessment of how things have unfolded subsequently. It’s the same story as one finds in communities such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, Madison, Wisconsin, Ithica, New York, and Berkeley, California. It seemed like such fun at the time, but it led to these isolated little worlds unto themselves that operate by rules that could never work for America generally.
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05.16.07
Posted in Food at 8:17 pm by Administrator
Avocado-grapefruit salad
Mushroom risotto
Roasted asparagus
Grilled salmon with dill cream sauce
Phyllo cups filled with marscarpone and topped with mint and strawberry slices and dusted with shaved dark chocolate
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05.15.07
Posted in Congress at 3:13 pm by Administrator
The AP gave this story this headline: “Iranian Lawmakers Seek U.S. Friendship.” Well, now, that sounds like a dramatic turnaround, doesn’t it? Pretty historic stuff, eh? Well, the friendship they’re after is with the U.S. Congress. No doubt they’re taking their cue from San Fran Nan’s little Logan Act-violating trip to Syria. If you get to the last stinkin’ paragraph in the article, you find this quote – from a ‘reformist’ Iranian legislator: “We are seeking to form this friendship committee to undermine anti-Iranian policies of the Bush administration.”
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05.12.07
Posted in Culture at 12:28 am by Administrator
I haven’t reported on what I gleaned from that arts-marketing conference last weekend.
There were some really savvy presenters who had the goods on Gen Y. They’d pored over the study results and told us that Gen Y is at home with technology like no prior wave of humanity. It’s also more mobile, places a higher priority on quality of life than maximizing its security, harbors a reluctance to sign onto that with which it’s presented, and is comfortable with aesthetic experiences that engage several senses at once.
The two main questions before those assembled were how to get this bunch into the symphony hall, gallery and playhouse, and how to get young professionals (this is a demographic with its own acronym; they’re YPs) onto boards of arts organizations.
There were some useful ideas on both counts and I can even take some of those back to my board and look at how to apply them.
The bigger question, though, is what distinction there is between “the arts” and popular culture. There’s always been “folk” forms of expression in music, dance, visual art and literature, as distinguished from what could be called “formal” art, sometimes referred to as higbrow. Throughout history, these parallel tracks of creative endeavor mirrored the distinction between those who found some way to devote their lives to the study and refinement of their forms of expression, and those who had more right-brain ways of keeping roofs over their heads, but sought an outlet for the natural human desire to create. This latter way art showed up in human life – the “folk track,” if you will – was arguably the more communal of the two. Tribal ceremonies, church singing, gypsy campfires and the like.
Once technology made possible an entertainment industry the products of which could be passively consumed in people’s homes, and certainly once the rock & roll ethos overwhelmed the rest of that industry – what we used to call “show business,” it seems that simplicity came to reign. People wanted the outpourings of the culture’s producers of expression to provide something that wasn’t so engaging that they couldn’t still devote a significant portion of their attention to other forms of amusement or their ambitions. In case you’re wondering, yes, I’m talking about dumbing down.
So we may fill the symphony hall closer to capacity by having a break-dancing demonstration going on out front before the orchestra concert, but the fact remains that that is the deciding factor. Take the break dancer away, and you’re back to wondering how to rev up the box office.
How did “the arts” come to be an isolated thread in the fabric of modern life, a fragile shoot that must be tended and protected from the stiff breezes of commerce, public policy and ever-more-dizzying gusts of personal stimulation? Why isn’t the making of refined, intriguing, rich and deeply flavorful art a perfectly familiar aspect of our daily comings and goings?
I think the really substantive answers to the questions raised at the conference involved asking these questions along with taking surveys to determine how often people of a certain age group and income level go out on the town.
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