from JAMSBIO magazine

BRASS TRAX

Pathways to Unknown Worlds: 
The Afrofuturism of Sun Ra

By Rick Sawyer

It was more than just jazz for Sun Ra. The pianist and band leader created a total, collaborative artwork that comprised his music, his album covers and iconography, his band and its costumes, his record label, and even his public and private persona. In many substantial ways, Sun Ra was the embodiment of what came to be known as Afrofuturism, the mid-century wave of Afrocentric science fiction spectacles. For Sun Ra, it wasn’t a show. Doctor Funkenstein might have gone back to being George Clinton when the Mothership was packed up, but Sun Ra never stopped being Sun Ra.

The totality of Sun Ra’s art was recently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968 showed the breadth of Sun Ra’s iconography and even gave visitors a chance to see his storied band in action—offering a live performance of the surviving Arkestra members last May along with vintage video and photographs. The show, which had been curated by John Corbett, Anthony Elms and Terri Kapsalis for the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, consisted of album covers, stray instruments, videos, audio recording, and even corporate memos, each evincing Sun Ra’s total commitment to his aesthetic.

Sun Ra was born Sonny Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, but he wouldn’t let you believe that. He claimed that he came from Saturn, and he took his name from the Egyptian god of the sun. His story, a fusion of the ancient and the otherworldly, would take on a changing array of particulars throughout the years, but the core would remain the same. Sun Ra is not like us, he’s not human, but his music can save the world.

[ click to continue reading at JAMSBIO.com ]

from the LA Times

Enjoy the great outdoors and a fabulous meal with grilled soy skirt steak. (South Florida Sun-Sentinel/Mark Randall)

Garlicky grilled soy skirt steak

Servings: 4

Ingredients:
1 / 4 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
1 teaspoon minced peeled ginger root
3 garlic cloves, minced
1 tablespoon Hoisin sauce
1 / 2 to 1 teaspoon sriracha chili sauce or Thai chili garlic sauce, optional
Fresh-ground black pepper, to taste
Juice of 1 / 2 lime
1 (16- to 24-ounce) skirt steak

1. Preheat a gas or charcoal grill to medium-high heat.

[ click to continue with recipe at The LA Times ]

from The Onion

Film Adaptation Of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book

The Brothers Karamazov, a new film adaptation that concludes at the precise moment most readers give up on the classic Russian novel.

The 83-minute film, which is based on the first 142 or so pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s acclaimed work, has already garnered attention for its stunning climax, in which the end credits suddenly appear midway through Katerina’s tearful speech about an unpaid debt.

“We are very excited to be able to bring several chapters of this timeless masterpiece to the big screen,” Paramount CEO Brad Grey said of the movie, which was shot, on and off, for two years. “Anyone who’s ever tried to sit down and trudge through this incredible book is going to be absolutely blown away by the faithfulness of our film.”

“It’s all here,” Grey added. “The opening scene, that part a little bit later on where some big commotion is taking place but you’re not quite sure what it is, that monastery thing they all go to—everything, just as you half-remember it.”

[ click to continue reading at The Onion ]

from heartbeat berlin

James Frey in Tip Berlin

James Frey © Diane Vincent, Berlin Juni 2009

from The Guardian UK

Traces of cocaine found on up to 90% of dollar bills in American cities

by Ed Pilkington in New York

Photograph: Getty/Piet Mall

It’s an image much beloved of Hollywood directors: the head lowered over a mirror, a crisp greenback tightly rolled and inserted in a nostril, then applied at the other end to a line of white powder.

Researchers from the American Chemical Society in Washington have discovered that the practice of consuming cocaine through rolled up paper money is far more than just a cinematic cliché. They found that in big cities in the US, up to 90% of the notes tested positive for traces of the drug.

In Washington itself, the percentage of notes with cocaine residue reached 93%, a prevalence almost matched by other urban areas such as Boston, Detroit and Baltimore.

Any film directors hoping to be authentic in their portrayal of cocaine snorting should note that the researchers found that in the US the bills of choice of cocaine consumers were $5, $10, $20 and $50. Both the modest dollar note, and the more elusive $100 note appear to be rarely deployed as an aid to nasal intoxication.

[ click to read full article at The Guardian ]

from Rolling Stone

Remembering Michael Viner, The Man Who Recorded “Apache”

8/14/09, 1:35 pm EST

Michael Viner, the record producer whose 1973 recording of “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band is the cornerstone of hip-hop, died in Los Angeles on Saturday, August 8th, from cancer. He was 65.

Viner held a number of positions in the entertainment world. He was an executive for MGM Records in the 1970s, signing Debby Boone (whose “You Light Up My Life” was Number One for 10 weeks in 1977) and helping produce Sammy Davis Jr.’s “The Candy Man,” which topped the charts in 1972. He also produced the second Nixon inaugural ball in early 1973, a result of his association with Republican MGM head Mike Curb, lieutenant governor of California from 1979 to 1983. (Viner’s politics were more liberal; he’d worked as an aide for Robert Kennedy in the ’60s.) Later, Viner’s Dove imprint pioneered books-on-tape, and he later made a name publishing books based on tabloid scandal. Still, it’s the much-sampled Incredible Bongo Band recordings that stand as Viner’s lasting achievement.

Viner was born in 1944 and grew up in Washington, D.C. In 1970, as a joke, Viner released the infamous Best of Marcel Marceau — a live LP of a mime, consisting of two sides of silence concluded by audience applause.

[ click to continue reading at Rolling Stone ]

from the San Gabriel Valley Tribune

Suicidal man dumps cash on Glendora freeways

By Brian Day, Staff Writer

Posted: 08/16/2009 05:10:38 PM PDT

An emotionally disturbed man dumped cash out on two freeways in Glendora Sunday, prompting motorists to pull over and try to pick up the money from the roadway, authorities said.

The 56-year-old man, whose name was not released, then went to the Azusa Police Department where he told officials he wanted to commit suicide, Azusa police Lt. Steve Hunt said in a written statement.

The incident began about 11:50 a.m. when the man started throwing money out of his car on the westbound 210 Freeway between the 57 Freeway and Grand Avenue, California Highway Patrol Sgt. Kurt Stormes said.

Six or seven vehicles pulled over, and about 10 people ran into traffic lanes to grab up the cash, Stormes said.CHP officers recovered about $1,000 from the freeway, in 20-, 50- and 100-dollar bills, he added.

Officials ask that anyone who picked up some of the money to turn it into the Azusa Police Department so it can be returned to the man.

Police also cautioned motorists against trying to pick up money on the freeway.

Please do not stop on the freeway to look for money,” the police statement said. “Stopping on the freeway can be hazardous or even fatal.”

[ click to read full article at the SGV Tribune ]

courtesy of Hi-Grade Lenny the Puglistic Dopeman

from The Arizona Republic

Honey-Soy Beef Dippers

by Meghan Pembleton

1 pound flank steak
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup honey
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
Metal or wood grilling skewers

Cut beef crosswise about 1-inch thick and cut each slice into cubes. Place meat in a zip-top plastic bag. Add lemon juice, honey, soy sauce and oil. Seal bag and turn to coat meat. Refrigerate at least 30 minutes, up to overnight. (If using wood skewers, soak them in water while meat is marinating.) Heat grill to high.

[ click to continue with recipe at AZCentral.com ]

from Billboard Magazine

Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard, Jay Farrar Team Up For Kerouac Soundtrack

by Michael D. Ayers, N.Y.

In an ode to iconic author Jack Kerouac, alt-country veteran Jay Farrar has teamed up with Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard for a collaborative album entitled “One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur,” Billboard.com has learned.

The twelve song set is due October 20 via F-Stop/Atlantic and will serve as the soundtrack to the Kerouac documentary of the same title.  Farrar and Gibbard were approached by the filmmakers in 2007 about writing music for the film, which documents the events surrounding the author’s time spent in the Big Sur region of California.

Both musicians are long time Kerouac fans and according to Farrar, about 90% of the album’s lyrics draw directly from the Big Sur text, including the poem “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.”  The recordings came to fruition over the course of three years, with the initial session taking place in San Francisco during summer 2007.

[ click to continue reading at Billboard.com ]

from the NY Daily News

Drunk nude man wanders into wrong hotel room, scares woman into the bathroom and falls asleep

REUTERS

Thursday, August 13th 2009, 10:27 AM

WELLINGTON - An extremely drunk, naked man lost his way at a New Zealand hotel and ended up sleeping in the wrong room, forcing its female occupant to hide in the bathroom, local media reported.

“He was a bit surprised that there were two people in his room and he was butt naked,” Sergeant Steve Watt of Queenstown police told the Southland Times.

As the intruder slept, the startled woman took refuge in the bathroom as her husband summoned hotel staff.

The man, who could not remember whom he had been with nor what room he had been in, and had no clothes or wallet.

Police gave him a ride home clad in a hotel bathrobe, but let him off after the guests and hotel decided not to press charges.

“It was far too funny,” said Watt.

[ click to read at NYDailyNews.com ]

from Vanity Fair

Jimmy Page, Jack White, and The Edge Say Guitar Heroes Are Here to Stay

by Alan Light

Jack White, Jimmy Page, and The Edge in a publicity still from It Might Get Loud. Photo by Eric Lee, 2008, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The new documentary It Might Get Loud, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, is a love letter to the guitar. Director Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) managed to enlist possibly the most iconic guitar players of three generations—Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White—for what Page calls “an abstract, almost metaphysical” exploration of the instrument’s power. If the climactic “summit,” in which the trio gather at a soundstage to play together, inevitably falls short of the stratospheric expectations, the film does feature such priceless scenes as Page air-guitaring to a favorite Link Wray single, White hammering together a one-string “diddley bow” on his porch and making a joyful racket, and Edge demonstrating just how simple his playing is when the effects are all taken away.

[ click to continue reading at VanityFair.com ]

from Discover Magazine’s Bad Astronomy

Like the fist of an angry god

Deep in the outer realms of our solar system, well over a billion kilometers away, something bizarre happened at Saturn’s F ring.

I mean, seriously: what the hell happened here?

 This is one of the latest pictures returned from the remarkable human achievement that is the Cassini spacecraft, a probe the size of a school bus that has been orbiting the ringed planet since 2004. It’s returned one incredible picture after another, and lately — as Saturn’s orbit has brought it to a point where the rings are nearly edge-on to the Sun — things have gotten not only spectacular but also really weird.

[ click to continue reading at Bad Astronomy ]

Doing the first, and most likely, only public reading from my new book, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible -

Next Friday at the Amagansett Public Library at 7:00.
215 Main Street, Amagansett, NY.

The book doesn’t come out until next year and I won’t be touring.

- James Frey

from the LA Times

  (Chicago Tribune/Bill Hogan) 

Cucumber soup

There are numerous recipes for cucumber soups, some served hot, others chilled. This hot one has its roots in Guatemala and is adapted from “Healthy Latin Cooking” by Steven Raichlen.

Prep: 20 minutes
Cook: 10 minutes
Makes: 4 servings (7 cups)

[ click to continue recipe ]

from The Kansas City Star

Guitar legend Les Paul dies at age 94

By LUKE SHERIDAN

Associated Press Writer

Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor who changed the course of music with the electric guitar and multitrack recording and had a string of hits, many with wife Mary Ford, died on Thursday. He was 94.

According to Gibson Guitar, Paul died of complications from pneumonia at White Plains Hospital. His family and friends were by his side.

He had been hospitalized in February 2006 when he learned he won two Grammys for an album he released after his 90th birthday, “Les Paul & Friends: American Made, World Played.”

“I feel like a condemned building with a new flagpole on it,” he joked.

As an inventor, Paul helped bring about the rise of rock ‘n’ roll and multitrack recording, which enables artists to record different instruments at different times, sing harmony with themselves, and then carefully balance the “tracks” in the finished recording.

With Ford, his wife from 1949 to 1962, he earned 36 gold records and 11 No. 1 pop hits, including “Vaya Con Dios,” “How High the Moon,” “Nola” and “Lover.” Many of their songs used overdubbing techniques that Paul the inventor had helped develop.

[ click to continue reading at The Kansas City Star ]

via the Seemer

from the New York Times

 The 1959 Cadillac Cyclone

The poet Robert Lowell was heir to a New England literary tradition that included Herman Melville, a connoisseur of the metaphor and the metaphysics of finned creatures. In “For the Union Dead” in 1960, Lowell saw something sinister, even sinful, in the tailfin:

“….Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.”

[ click to read full article at the New York Times ]

[ click to view NY Times’ tailfin slideshow ]

A blonde woman was  speeding down the road in her little red sports car and was pulled  over by a woman police officer who was also a blonde.  The blonde cop asked to see the blonde driver’s driving  license.

She dug through her purse and was  getting progressively more agitated. ‘What does it look like?’ she  finally asked.  The policewoman replied, ‘It’s  square and it has your picture on it.’

The  driver finally found a square mirror in her purse, looked at it and handed it to the policewoman.  ‘Here it is,’ she  said.

The blonde officer looked at the mirror,  then handed it back saying, ‘OK, you can go.  I didn’t  realize you were a cop.’

from The Telegraph UK

Dogs as intelligent as two-year-old children

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

Intelligent border collies include Sampson, winner of Britain’s Most Talented Pet (Photo: John Robertson)

Researchers have found that dogs are capable of understanding up to 250 words and gestures, can count up to five and can perform simple mathematical calculations.
Using tests originally designed to demonstrate the development of language, pre-language and basic arithmetic in human children, the researchers were able to show that the average dog is far more intelligent than they are given credit for.

They have also compiled a list of the most intelligent and least intelligent breeds using information from obedience classes. Border collies and retrievers were rated among the most intelligent while hounds and terriers were the least bright.

The average dog is about as bright linguistically as a human two-year-old,” said Professor Stanley Coren, a leading expert on canine intelligence at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who has carried out the work.

[ click to read at the Telegraph ]

from Vos Iz Neias?

15 Cow Tongues Found Nailed to Trees in Prospect Park

Brooklyn, NY - Fifteen calf tongues were found nailed to trees in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park recently.

The bizarre sighting was made in Peninsula Meadow, just north of Prospect Lake.

The tongues, which appeared to come from a butcher shop, were hanging about six feet off the ground from 15 different trunks, park officials said.

Parks Department officials said it’s a mystery why the animal parts were hung, but animal tongues are sometimes used in cult or fringe religious rituals.

[ click to read at VosIzNeias.com ]

from Foreign Policy

A Whale of a Controversy

Japan’s dolphin-hunting industry gets skewered in The Cove, a just-released documentary by director Louie Psihoyos. But after this year’s setbacks at the International Whaling Commission’s annual meeting, dolphins aren’t the only marine mammals that are in trouble.

BY BRIAN FUNG | JULY 31, 2009

Blood on their hands: A demonstrator, covered in fake blood, lies on a Japanese flag as part of a 2008 antiwhaling protest outside Japan’s consulate in Melbourne. The first such movement began in 1977 with Save the Whales, which seeks to provide education about “marine mammals, their environment and their preservation.”

William West/AFP/Getty Images

[ click to view full slideshow at ForeignPolicy.com ]

from The Buffalo News

‘Wall Rockets’ at Albright-Knox celebrates artist Ed Ruscha

By Colin Dabkowski

NEWS ARTS WRITER

It was the dead of winter in 2006, and James Frey was in a bad way.

His best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” had recently come under fire in the national media for factual inaccuracies. He had just appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to defend his work, and Oprah, once a fervent Frey supporter, had torn the author into a billion little shreds.

It seemed that everywhere Frey looked –on blogs and talk shows, in newspapers and magazines –someone was gleefully waiting to vilify him.

Others of lesser conviction might have fled to the hills of New Hampshire or Vermont to become J. D. Salinger-esque recluses, never to set foot in the public spotlight again. But Frey was never much for convention. In his time of need, instead of seeking refuge in alcohol or drugs or even therapy, the embattled author turned to the art of Ed Ruscha.

“I’ve had odd professional experiences,” Frey said on a recent visit to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. And after the odd professional experience that was Frey’s messy evisceration on “Oprah,” Frey’s French publisher called to console him after what she called his “public stoning.” The phrase stuck in Frey’s mind.

“When all that stuff was happening, I don’t know why, I was like, ‘I’ve got to get Ed Ruscha to paint me a picture that says ‘Public Stoning,’” Frey said.

The painting Frey commissioned from Ruscha now hangs in the Albright-Knox as part of “Wall Rockets,” a sprawling tribute exhibition inspired by the work of the legendary California artist. It runs through Oct. 25.

[ click to continue reading at The Buffalo News ]

from The Daily Mail

Real-life Ram-bo: The sheep who abseiled down electricity cable after snagging his horn

By MAIL FOREIGN SERVICE

Help? The sheep dangles some 15feet above the ground, its horn caught in the live electrical wire

[click to continue reading at The Daily Mail ]

from M. Husain

from Lee Bailey’s EUR WEB

HERBIE HANCOCK JOINS L.A. PHILHARMONIC:

Jazz great named creative chair; begins two-year tenure in 2010.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has tapped Herbie Hancock as its new creative chair for jazz, a post that oversees jazz programming at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.

According to Variety, the Grammy winner is scheduled to begin a two-year tenure starting with the 2010 season. He will succeed Christian McBride, who has held the post since 2006.

[ click to read at eurweb.com ]