THE CAT’S PAWS

My son Dylan composes music on Garage Band, and he’s getting more and more a grasp of phrasing. Chord progressions are coming along, too. These both come with experience, ear, and just plain age maturity.

Impressive is his range of variety. He can do ’standing brass funk/dance’ a la Earth Wind and Fire and has weighed in mighty impressively on Arab upbeat, a la some of the Six Degrees collection that some of you may be lucky enough to know. It seems he remembered that stuff when I’d play it in the car when he was, oh, six? Talk about tough as- progression! He reached for that very tough “beat-ed’, very special, ‘drums in front’ groove..and nails it. It’s just amazing. (more…)

This is a big day. My granddaughter is a WHOLE YEAR OLD!! It doesn’t get much bigger than that, folks.

Penelope has been living very far away with her mom and dad who are starting things off right.

Penelope’s beautiful. She’s the third fairest of them all, yes, and though she’s appealed her bronze medal award, it’s decisive and indesputable. She’s remains fairest of them all.

Her mom, who SURE looked alot like Penelope once upon a time, is the second-most fairest of them all.

Renae, of course, clinches the gold. Here’s a couple of pics to pick out your favorite one.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PENELOPE!

The Nusseibeh book I finished last week profoundly affected me because there was so much in it I didn’t know. I’ll not talk about it more, though; see the review I gave it, along with the information on how to find it at the library or bookstore.

This is a quickie post on the Suhla, which relates to honor, which by coincidence (or entirely by uncoincidence) strangely replicates the code of tribes in the American Colonies’ Six Nations tribes as well as nearly all the others that once governed themselves until whites imprinted their system onto them. (more…)

Mr Tatum goes back to the days when artists, particularly up-and-coming-during-Depression African-American artists, weren’t known by discographies like we benchmark musicians nowdays. Sure, we relish recordings so they can grab us, but we don’t need to identify any one piece of work they accomplish. He’s not a composer–he’d be categorized as a ‘jazz interpretive musician’ today, and he never needed to be. His music’s absolutely fantastic, though, as he lightly plows through tough refrains and opposite left/right hand timings. His collegues Charlie Parker, Fats Waller (Tatum’s hero and mentor) and a bit later on, Thelonious Monk were fond of saying he blew everybody away. If he were still around, Art would simply tell you he got rather turned on by getting it right, and Tatum’s music tells the rest. (more…)

Apologies are exactly that: apologies. An apology is ‘a written or spoken expression of one’s regret, remorse, or sorrow for having insulted, failed, injured, or wronged another’, if the gigantic unabridged dictionary is to be non-apologetically trusted. Monty Python, with NO spoof or laughter intended, used it often in skits; the phrase ‘apology’ refers to that which defends, justifies, or clarifies an unintended harm’s origin point of view. That’s a bit obsolete as a literary term, and LONG gone in American dialect fashion, but if the giver’s lucky and knows his way around the sheer act of contrition toward another person, he just may be lucky and strike both meanings–the easy-to-say-or-write gesture of ‘I’m sorry’ PLUS the explanatory basis behind it all in one shot.

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Far be it for me to always seeming to be taking the opposite side of things—this book doesn’t because it’s balanced at the critical points—Once Upon a Country is a very revealing depiction of Middle Eastern drama that’s never NOT dramatically unfolded since 1948. It’s not very flattering to either side. At the same time, though, the societal landscape has stayed serene…when members are not being exiled, pushed back, or otherwise punished. (more…)