Twitter

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Why do smart people write such stupid tweets? Give them 140 characters and suddenly they’re back in junior high. Must be that irony thing.  It’s a shame though….it’s such an amazing technology. You learn how to reduce an essay down to a vivid sentence or two…till you  have nothing but the pure essence of what it is you are thinking. A thousand or ten thousand words laid out in 140 characters, and then sent out to hundreds or thousands of people who will understand exactly what it is you are trying to say in the instant it takes them to read the thing.  Wow.
 
But so few people seem to realize this. You’d think a writer, especially, would pick up on this. Instead they make wise ass comments and make themselves look like snide little assholes. I guess  maybe the potential is beyond the current generations using it, really…they can’t get themselves to think in Twitter. Instead they use it just like they text. If you could sext on Twitter it’d be full of naked pictures, and that’s all.

Funny that something as incredibly basic and user friendly as Twitter is a technology that is beyond the evolution of the human mind..so far. Give it twenty years, though. Twitter and all the future mondo-twitters will be used to transmit the most profound ideas and visceral emotions in ways that perhaps 99% of us can’t even imagine–hell, can’t even conceive of–now.

I’m not saying Twitter will replace novels,essays or blogging. But it might become just as significant as al of those. No one would ever have believed that those little Edison shoot ’em ups would ever become as profound as anything done on the stage, that those early jazz cylinders would ever become A Love Supreme, or a few symbols scratched on a mud tablet along the Euphrates River would ever become the zillions of books available on Amazon.  It takes a generation at least even begin to imagine the potential for that. Wish I could be there to see it. But being born to early, I probably am not even equipped to imagine it. Hardwired in the past, I am. Neuroplasticity has it’s limits. Sigh……….

Mark Zuckerberg

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Hockey games, unlike football or baseball or basketball or anything actually popular, have the best commercials. Not sure why, but if you wanna see funny weird commercials, sit through a hockey game. I love those commercials. And while I haven’t seen a He’s totally weirding out the Great One or a Soaked up Philly like sponge in a while, some come close. Anyway, I see those commercials and I think how I wish I could write commercials. That would be my dream gig. My dream gig dream gig even. The ultimate gig. I love commercials. I study the damn things. The way I write is very heavily influenced by commercials, the funny ones. (It was also heavily influenced by really well written sitcoms and French economic historian Fernand Braudel, but nevermind.) Oh well, let me dream if I want to, as Willy de Ville used to say. He’s dead now. All those New Yorkers keep dying. You wonder what the hell they were doing wrong. Well, I know what they were doing wrong, but we’d be getting off topic. Besides, none of you are reading any of this by now because this is Facebook [I wrote this on Facebook] and no one gets past the first sentence or two. It’s kind of like Twitter with baby pictures. In fact, this whole piece could have been done as a series of smiley face variations. Happy, sad, confused, surprised, angry, frustrated. Maybe even the one that giggles. Then I’d drop in the cow or that sheep because I have no idea how a cow or a sheep qualifies as an emoticon, or what they mean. Unless they pictographically represent a cow and a sheep. Then they’ll become ideograms that represent the concept of cows or sheep, then a phoneme which will represent the sound of anything that sounds like the word that represents the concept of sheep, and then into a morpheme which…well, forget it, that’ll be centuries from now, all knowledge will be reduced to some sonic spinny ring things and you can make love to Yvette Mimieux all you want. Maybe even get her to act.

If I got off topic, I apologize.

I have to stop writing essays on Facebook. I never mean to. I try to write only a sentence or two but look what happens. Now I’ll hit post and Mark Zuckerberg will own the thing, the way he owns all those pictures of big bosomed Facebook friends who find themselves in ads for untrustworthy home loan companies. Well, he can have this essay, tuck it into a christmas card, and fuck himself.

Ray Bradbury

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A couple years before Ray Bradbury died he made an appearance at a book store in Glendale called Mystery and Imagination, one of those places devoted to science fiction and fantasy and science fiction and fantasy fans. The place was packed, every nook and cranny. It was a thoroughly enjoyable event, there were things to eat and wine to drink and weirdos to talk to and cool books everywhere. Ray was his usual incorrigible self, up there in years but still Ray. My wife was thrilled. She’s seen him several times, but Ray was old now, and weak, and wheelchair bound, and you got the feeling that we wouldn’t be seeing him again.

The LA Times had sent a hip young blogger out to the thing. He dashed off a few quick sentences tearing Ray Bradbury apart, making him look like a doddering old fool, hinting at senility. He also took one of those National Inquirer style pics that somehow puts a celebrity in the worst light possible. It was not one of the finer moments of the Los Angeles Times.

Nor of Reason magazine, whose online edition featured a blogger snidely railing against Ray Bradbury, tearing him to shreds, based solely on the account written by the LA Times blogger. That was enough for me and I hit the roof and fired off an email. The guy had the decency to post it in his next blog, which surprised the hell out of me.  Though if I hadn’t been writing for the LA Weekly at the time, I doubt he would have bothered.

Anyway, this is what I wrote:

I was at that Ray Bradbury event. My wife’s a fan, I tagged along. It was in a wonderful old fashioned used book store, and was a very charming party full of long winded reminiscences and toasts, and to be honest anything Ray said I have heard him say before. Nothing was new.  Not a damn thing. He’s been bitching about machines for his entire career (he wrote everything on a manual typewriter). He’s always hated being called a science fiction writer. His government views have changed little. The moon stuff is not surprising…we’ve fallen decades behind schedule on that one compared to what was expected in the sixties, and he’s frustrated not to have witnessed a mars landing. Hard to blame the man on that one. And even his plural internet is perfectly valid unless one pretends that all the intranets, some of them truly vast,  are not actually internets…and of course Google is working on its own internet–not intranet–as we speak. He’s hip enough to know that.

And that pic the Times used was not the beaming, laughing old gent who I watched on Sunday.

Alas, that badly written and edited blog entry in the LA Times has now become part of his legacy.  The man is being trashed all over the web–like you have done–based strictly upon that little story. There’s no turning back now.  He’ll be dead soon enough, and that bullshit story will long survive him, and will become him to many people.  After all, they saw it on the internet, it has to be true.  

Thx much….

Brick

Ray Bradbury died a year or so later and all this was forgotten. I imagine the L.A. Times blogger now brags about the time he met Ray Bradbury, and I’m sure the guy in Reason forgot all about excoriating Ray Bradbury as a “Luddite old fart”.

The problem with bloggers is they think they are important.  But really, we are not. It’s just a zillion people typing a zillion zillion words onto the internet. It’s not like writing a novel. It’s not even like writing an essay. It’s barely writing at all. It’s more like the drunk guy at a cocktail party who won’t shut up.

Loretta Young

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We were watching old Loretta Young flicks on TCM, one after the other, all these ancient pre-Code things where she was so gorgeous and lithe and could wear a gown that clung to her in ways that must have run the most perverse thoughts through Victorian censors’ minds till they quivered and dreamed and ordered whole scenes cut for the good of humanity. A friend called, I mentioned Loretta Young and he mentioned that her kid–the real kid, not the one she is invariably stuck with in every one of these movies–was in Moby Grape. One of the non-crazy members. He talked about seeing Moby Grape many times on the Strip when he was a kid, 18 years old or so, coming over the hill and seeing all these wonderful bands from here or San Francisco or England and dropping mindfuck LSD. I went back to watching Loretta–she was playing piano now, and Louis Calhern was such a cad–and I slipped under a blanket, had a beer, and drifted off, waking with a start ten minutes ago, at 5:30 in the morning, when the pigs need slopping and reality needs facing and I gave my Mayer piece one last look, cleaned up some typos, and changed Jon Mayer’s first to Jon Mayer’s face like it was supposed to be and even considered adding a period but didn’t but this sentence here certainly needs one now.

Off to bed.

Critics

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Until I up and quit, I had the misfortune of being a jazz critic for years. Which meant I had to meet a lot of other critics of all kinds. Turns out critics are pretty boring people, for the most part. I mean dullsville. They can’t tell jokes. They don’t get jokes. They sit around all serious because, I dunno, critics are supposed to sit around all serious. Now there were some flagrant exceptions, but not many. And of all the different kinds of critics I met, I thought that movie critics had the stuffedest shirts. In a world of pompous asses, their asses had pomp to a unique degree. I mean I think all critics are secretly wanting to be Addison DeWitt in All About Eve,  it’s just that critics of the cinema have that George Sanders shtick down, man. The motherfuckers can groove on it, baby. Easier than I ever could. Plus they get to use all kinds of big words and if they’re Peter Travers and love every movie ever made they get to see their name in big gnarly letters on all the ads and even in commercials which is almost like being in a movie and their mothers must have been so proud. I know mine would have been.

But man, the cats just ain’t funny. Critics think some boring little movie is witty, while some funny shit goes right over their heads. But then such is the price of smartassery…the squares just don’t get it. And while those squares ain’t the only voters in the Oscar academy or whatever it is, these critics have a big impact because people know how much influence they have (unlike a jazz critic….)  and give them respect which kinda pervades everything. The whole academy culture. Like the grotesqueries of Inside The Actors Studio, that James whatshisname grovelling before the mighty like a Byzantine eunuch and fuck, this has nothing to do with my point at all and now I just trashed that guy for nothing and is that show still even on? I remember Paul Newman playing a mean blues on a nearby piano and Dennis Hopper saying dude that was not a fake joint and Jack Lemmon saying his favorite swear word ever was ratbeep motherbeeper which made me feel good as that was my favorite swearword ever and  it made me wonder what the eunuch’s deal was getting stars to talk dirty which reminds me of the gorgeous icy blonde I worked the daytime gig with who would beg me to use eff words and the like at work and she would giggle excitedly as the air tuned blue. But to undigress, I suspect film critics’ deadly seriousness kinda bleeds all over the whole industry and soon if it’s funny, well, it can’t be that good. At least not good enough.

But as the Good Lord sez, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. Or as my wife sez, normal people, don’t ya just hate ‘em?, kinda quoting Harry Dean Stanton in Repo Man, one of the great funnier than living fuck movies back then. I would say and no Christians either!, and we’d giggle, stoned, and wander about the hills of Silver Lake getting lost, driving past homes the long dead famous once partied in and stopping to neck in the darkness and coming up for air to gaze upon the vastness of LA, sparkling like a zillion diamonds all the way to the sea. It was a beautiful ugly city then, the dead piled up in the streets, neighborhoods rotted away, everyone hated everyone. It was wonderful.  We partied like mad, went to clubs, formed bands and made ungodly noise. Mistakes were made—I took on a dozen cops once, they beat the shit out of me. I wouldn’t take on a dozen cops now. I’m old and respectable and a critic. Well, was a critic. Critics know better. Though certainly no better than you or you or you or even you, who played on the fucking record or made the fucking movie or wrote the fucking book or cooked the fucking food or fucked the fucking fuck (the porno critics, ya know). Life is lived by others, we just don’t get the jokes.

Roy Haynes

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(an email from 2006)

Saw Roy Haynes last nite (4/6/06) at Catalina’s. Absolutely first rate jazz. Jaleel Shaw is a killer alto, some Jackie McLean edge to his tone. He also did a long drawn-out blues on his soprano that seemed to have the spirits of both Lucky Thompson and a down in the dumps Pee Wee Russell floating over the stage. The piano player was great, though his name utterly escapes me now (some reporter I’d make…)…there was a phenomenal “Green Chimneys” and while Haynes, bassist Dan Sullivan and Shaw played the introductory figure straight, the kid on piano did it in some kind of counterpoint that made the Monk even more Monk. And Haynes…man, that cat is 80 years old and plays literally better than most half his age. I mean that, literally. He was perfect.  Drums can be godhead, and man, this reached it. He’s also funny as hell, strutting around out front playing his pair of sticks into the mic, a one man Rat Pack killing the room with wisecracks and heckling, demanding and getting a white bacardi with a dash of soda, on ice, with a slice of lime. Looking maybe sixty, a really fit, lithe sixty at that. Good genes.

Dig this one. He’s there through Sunday. I am definitely gonna reprise this experience myself.

(and this is from a Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, 2007)

Last time  brought his quartet into the Catalina Bar and Grill, every set was a sensation. The jazz was intense, be bop and hard bop and post bop and assorted off the wall takes. Alto player Jaleel Shaw burned in the spotlight, looking and sounding a lot like the horn players Haynes played with back in the day.  And Haynes himself—his drums chops were so on, his patter so warm, his jokes and jibes and stories so damn entertaining you could not believe the man was 81 years old.  Anyone over fifty in the audience felt old in comparison. Haynes has played with towering figures of jazz history—Prez and Bird and Monk and Trane and Getz and Miles among—but Haynes himself is not just history. Not yet. The guy still dominates a room from behind that kit, driving his young quartet to make killer jazz music. Between solos he takes a breather now and then, goofing with the crowd, but then he is 82 now. If you are a jazz fan you must see Roy Haynes once before you die, because apparently he never will.   (2007)

(And this too is excerpted from my LA Weekly column, 2009)

Roy Haynes is eighty three. Of course, that’s in Roy years…he’s about forty three in regular people years. How else can you explain this legendary octogenarian’s energy? This cat plays his ass off…but even more impressive, he makes the kids in his Fountain of Youth band play their asses off. If you’re looking for labels, the music they play is hard bop and post bop—which means that it’s equal parts hard grooving, wild soloing, and non-retro edgy—with plenty of space for the band to cook. Alto player Jaleel Shaw’s sound is NYC hard, so that even his gorgeous ballad passages have a diamond edge (think Jackie McLean). And Haynes demands and gets maximum dynamics out of pianist Martin Bejerano and just the right notes from bassist David Wong. And readers leery of paying big bucks for nostalgia, with dear old cats who ain’t what they used to be, should listen to Whereas, Roy’s live release from 2006. You’ll think you’re hearing tracks from the sixties but that was Roy Haynes, eighty one years young.

So it utterly mystifies all us here at the L.A. Weekly jazz bureau why the hell the house ain’t packed to the rafters when Roy Haynes is in town. As illustrated in his A Life In Time cd/dvd box set (on Dreyfus), Roy Haynes is a living, breathing, playing, still creative history of post-war jazz. Not only has he led some great sessions, but the man played with Monk (take Mysterioso) and subbing for Elvin Jones in Trane’s quintet (check out the bombs he’s dropping on “My Favorite Things” on Newport ‘63) and with Monk with Trane (At the Five Spot) and, oh man, Lester Young and Charlie Parker and Bud Powell and Fats Navarro and Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy (Out There) and Sarah Vaughan and everybody else (including last month with Phish; and see if you can find the clip of him with the Allman Brothers on “Afro Blue”). He’s all over the record collection of yours, tucked away in the credits and bashing and skittering and k-kicking, brushing and hinting, placing stunning rhythm intricacies here and perfect empty spaces there, driving and swinging and bloozing and dancing across that kit…. A pure be bop drummer. And live he spins stories and cracks wise and is a first rate showman. You really have to see Roy Haynes.

I love this shot.

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I love this shot. Phone cameras have rendered photography so artless (the way blogging has sucked the art out of writing) that when I see a well rendered shot I’m taken aback. I think the ease of the technology is the problem…it’s so quick, and so cheap, no one hesitates even a second to consider if something is worth photographing, or even to set it up right. Why bother? You can take a zillion shots and some are bound to be OK. OK…that’s the standard for photography now. It looks OK. And the technology is so piss poor, I am constantly amazed at how even the most lovely women are rendered plain by the phone camera..facial features flattened, shading lost, lighting a glare. And the most lovely scenes look like rejected stills on the cutting room floor.

As for blogs. Everybody blogs. Everybody. The first thing that pops into someone heads is poured into a blog and posted. There are no second drafts, and the concept of an editor is perfectly medieval.

Digital technology has made everything possible, alas it has made everything possible.

(After posting this essay I found out the photographer goes by the splendid name of El Imagenero. You can find much more of his work on his sites here and here, not to mention on Flikr and Instagram. Well worth a long luxuriant look or two.)

“It’s All About the Music”, photo by El Imagenero, taken at the Typhoon Restaurant this past summer (2012). He used a Nikon. That is the brilliant saxophonist Benn Clatworthy in the background with Aguabella Nuestra Era. In the foreground are charts (well, copies of the charts) from the late great Francisco Aguabella’s own book.

No Future

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There were three or four new hires in the department one day, geeky little types happy as hell to be working. We were in the kitchenette, a couple of us, and one of them wandered in, a kinda smarmy little hipster with a plaid shirt opened to reveal a hip tee shirt. I asked what the shirt said. It was a picture of English bobbies—you know, cops—in riot gear running through the street chasing people. I knew the picture, it’s an iconic photo from the Brixton riots in 1977. It was also the cover of the first Clash album. Above this picture the shirt had the caption “England’s Dreaming”. It was obvious the kid had no idea what it meant, it just looked cool and would make him look baaaaad the first day in the office.

But I knew what it meant. “Yeah, ‘Englands Dreaming’…the line from ‘God Save the Queen’, you know, the Sex Pistols tune. You know the Sex Pistols?” Surprised, he nodded yeah, but looked kinda confused, this big geezer in business outfit talking about the Sex Pistols of all things. I filled my coffee cup. “That was our song , man” I said, and casually recited “Because when there’s no future/ how can there be sin/ we’re the flowers in the dustbin/ we’re the poison in the human machine/ we’re the future/ your future/ God save the queen/ we mean it man/There is no future/ and England’s dreaming”.

He stared, flabbergasted, then scurried off as fast as he could. I started laughing.

(2009)

God Save the Queen (1977)

King Tut

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So according to the eight zillion stories about it on Google this morning, King Tut was weird, fell down a lot and had excessively feminine features. Therefore he was epileptic. Voila. Just like that.
 
OK, I’ll give them the weird and falling down a lot. But why the excessively feminine? It’s never he was weird and fell down a lot and was a gnarly dude or he was weird and fell down a lot and was hung like a horse or was strong as an ox or was John Wayne. It’s gotta be something vaguely gay. People think wow, there’s Brick the epileptic guy. I hear he has seizures and wears women’s underwear.
 
I have never worn women’s underwear.
 
I don’t know if the same could be said for King Tut, however.  Or John Wayne, for that matter. Though he was not epileptic. So I don’t know what his excuse would be. 

There was also a big story about Neil Young making the rounds on Google, an interview to plug a new book or something. The story mentions his epilepsy (and why he finally stopped drinking and smoking dope because of it, but never mind.) Now, Neil Young is weird. That’s a given. And no doubt he’s fallen a lot, from seizures, or from being too stoned to stand, or by being tripped by Stephen Stills for being such a creep. That’s a given too. But I’ve been staring and staring at this picture…
 
 
…and I can’t see anything remotely feminine in it. He’s a little too clean shaven, yes, but maybe he just has a good razor. Otherwise, though, he’s as macho as they come in a demented, drug addled epileptic rock’n’roll visionary kinda way. If he’s wearing women’s underwear you can’t tell, nor could you blame it on seizures. It’d be a lifestyle choice, or maybe they just feel good.
 
Which brings us back to King Tut.
 
OK, it doesn’t. It just brings us to the end of this ridiculous essay.
 
 
 
(That beautiful shot of Neil Young  is by Graeme Mitchell for The New York Times.)
 
 
 

punk rock bbq

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(email that wound up on Liquid Kitty website, 2004)

H ey y’all: Very cool gig happening Sunday afternoon [that is, back in 2004] at the Liquid Kitty in Santa freaking Monica. Ex-Cruel Frederick plays about a dozen varied reeds in the CD Sextet, btw, for you Noize and free jazz freaks, while Chuck answers your questions on the more arcane aspects of biology. And also a rare appearance by FishCamp, who play in the old skool Pedro stylee. And Backbiter are now two thirds married but I have no idea if that has changed their sound (it hasn’t). Meet Don Bolles and ask him about his chapeau. (But be wary of Dave Jones, punk rock sociologist). And Saccharine Trust are either playing all of Pagan Icons or Surviving You Always, I can’t remember which, and their rhythm section will draw carloads of those crazy Cal Arts chicks. These things are a lot of fun. Free hot dogs. Weirdly colored martinis. Cheap beer. Clean air. Martin Sheen and a busload of homeless people. Whole herds of Hummers passing by. That male cat smell of Club 88 wafting nostalgically up Pico. And the party’ll be loose and casual and they keep the music industry types away with a can of Raid and a bunch of Shell No-Pest Strips.

OK, maybe you thought a punk rock BBQ meant Rancid. I’m sorry. Dave Childs lied. It’s punk because all the bald guys used to have mohawks where now there’s pate. It’s punk because of all the old people and buses. And all the fuckin’ pent up shit. And getting arrested the other night at Blackies for playing punk rock music. Calling them nuisance in publics or something like that. We’re from Frisco. I don’t have any ones. You always beat on guys smaller than you? Somebody give him a fleabath. Quick. Brick