24 Hours in A Dog's Life

One minute you are just contemplating the universe - watching the sunset. The next thing you know you have stuck your nose in someone else's business and your whole existence is thrown for a loop.... (20 were taken out at home via pliers, the rest were done at the vet's - another 20 inside the mouth - OUCH!)

Les Cheneaux Community Library

When I am up north, most days I can be found at the library in the early afternoon. It is a great place for me to hook up (they have WIFI) and spend two or three hours doing the part of my work that needs to be done online. Working this way helps me to organize the things I don't do online.... I always make a list before I leave the house - because you don't just "run to the store" up here. So my daily sojourn may also include the grocery store, post office, hardware or pharmacy. I know at least once a week I will probably have to drive to the Soo or to St. Ignace - which is a longer trip. If I need something exotic, like, say - looseleaf binder dividers - or page protectors.....

The plumber told me that the early spring has been dry - but they have made up for it since I arrived. Solid days of rain, lots of wind. The barn next door has partially blown over. The road is flooded going towards Hessel - and lots of trees down. Walking through the wind is exhilarating. I am so grateful to my family that they give me this time up here - it is a real gift.

Last night I finished Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking. She wrote it the year after her husband of forty years had passed. I had heard about this book through a family member after John's dad died. Someone had sent her a quote from the book that she then passed on to all of us about mourning, "...the death of a parent [..] despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free our memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections."

She then differentiates between this and grief - which she defines as having no distance - and having the obility to obliterate the dailiness of life. The book is a powerful read.

Trout Lilies

Trout Lilies
Originally uploaded by SpringChick.

Pixagogo - Blue Note: Over 1000 great jazz album covers

I wonder how many of my sibs could go to this site and pick out the records that sat on the bookshelves in the family room of our house. My dad was a lover of the cool school - and there were plenty of those guys represented in his collection. In the fifties - long before it was popular or even thought of by most folks - he had a small record player installed under the dashboard of his Plymouth Fury. His in-home system included a big stereo in the basement (on his workbench) and wires to speakers all over the house. He wasn't a handy sort of guy. This was a labor of love - and a mess. But it worked. Even though he could only play one record at a time, and my mother would yell for him to "turn it down" constantly, we knew what the cool school was.....

The "COOL SCHOOL"
by Ed Enright

The heat and urgency of bebop began to relax with the development of Cool Jazz. Starting in the late 1940s and early '50s, musicians began to develop a less frantic, smoother approach toward improvising modeled after the light, dry playing of swing-era tenorist Lester Young. The result was a laid-back and even-keeled sound bearing a facade of emotionally detached "coolness."

Trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the first bebop players to "cool it," emerged as the greatest innovator of the genre. His Birth Of The Cool nonet recordings of 1949-'50 are the epitome of Cool Jazz lyricism and understatement. Other notable instrumentalists of the Cool school include trumpeter Chet Baker, pianists George Shearing, John Lewis, Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano, vibraphonist Milt Jackson and saxophonists Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Zoot Sims and Paul Desmond.

Arrangers, too, contributed significantly to the Cool Jazz movement, most notably Tadd Dameron, Claude Thornihill, Gil Evans and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Their compositions focused on instrumental colors and slower-moving, more suspended harmony, which created an illusion of spaciousness. Dissonance played some part in the music as well, but in a softened, muted way. Cool Jazz allowed room for slightly larger ensembles; nonets and tentets were more common than during the lean-and-mean bebop years. Some arrangers experimented with altered instrumentation, including conical brass like french horn and tuba.

Jazz players making their livings in the recording studios of Los Angeles picked up on the Cool Jazz movement in the 1950s. Largely influenced by the Miles Davis nonet, these L.A.-based players developed what's now known as West Coast Jazz.

Like Cool Jazz, West Coast Jazz was much more subdued than the frantic bebop that preceded it. Most West Coast Jazz was scored out in great detail, and it often sounded a bit European with its use of contrapuntal lines. However, the music left wide-open spaces for long, linear solo improvisations.

While West Coast Jazz was played mostly in recording studios, clubs like the Lighthouse on Hermosa Beach and the Haig in Los Angeles often presented top players of the genre, which included trumpeter Shorty Rogers, saxophonists Art Pepper and Bud Shank, drummer Shelly Manne and clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre.

Thank You Stephen Colbert

White House Correspondents Dinner:

Colbert attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. "This administration is soaring, not sinking," he said. "If anything, they are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg"

Click the link and watch the entire thing.