A seriously spry Dizzy Gillespie, leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center in 1982. Posted by “Furldman.”
Author: Alan Vanneman
Flying to see your son’s baseball game in a $12.5 million state helicopter? Priceless
Combative lardbutt Chris Christie, New Jersey’s teacher hatin’ governor, may have plunged his ample ass in some hot water by taking a government chopper to watch his son play baseball. Christie split during the fifth inning, apparently to meet with some big-shot Republicans from Iowa who want him to run for President. The New Jersey…
Michael W. Davis—Thelonious Monk’s “Let’s Cool One”
https://youtu.be/5CCRbwZdOGI Michael posting himself as “artvandalaye1,” George Constanza’s architect alter ego. For some reason, Michael doesn’t credit his fellow musicians, at least not so that I can find them.
Antonin Scalia: ~peyote = foreskins forever?
Over at the Daily Beast, Adam Winkler has a nice column slicing and dicing, as it were, the prospects of the prospective San Francisco ban of involuntary circumcisions, should the city pass the ban and should the constitutionality of the ban end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Strikingly, the proposed ban contains no exceptions…
Henry Kissinger: An unnecessary evil
Henry Kissinger has added yet another sin to his already grievous record, in the form of a fat tome, ponderously titled On China.* Because there is no way that I’m going to put another penny in Dr. K’s pocket, I’ll quote extensively from Michiko Kakutani’s review in the Times. Kakutani calls the book” fascinating, shrewd…
New at Bright Lights: Archer!
A brief blurt of praise for the ligne claire charms of TV’s Archer over at Bright Lights. Yeah, I was lazy this quarter. So sue me. Whole thing, NSFW as always, here.
J.J. Johnson, Sonny Stitt, & Howard McGhee—Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time”
Three of Charlie’s children try to show the old man they can run with the big boys. Sorry about the ads but this is some serious footage. There doesn’t seem to be any information about the rhythm section. I probably should be able to recognize them, but I can’t. Posted by zemry.
Jive at Five? Nu-uh. Jive around the clock!
Just to update a few stories: Last week I wrote about serial liar John Brennan, U.S. deputy national security advisor, whose fabulous account of the Navy SEALs raid on Osama’s compound proved to be not only fabulous but fabricated. President Obama and others hastened to add “context,” which, as Slate scribe William Saletan ably explains…
And you thought your parents were weird!
Janny Scott’s book, A Singular Woman The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother is out, and the reviews are in—two of them, at least, from Jacob Weisberg at Slate and Ian Buruma at the New York Review of Books. Both reviews, while not entirely inaccurate, dance gracelessly around the obvious fact that our president’s mom…
The silence of the Post
Have you heard about the big controversy in New York? I mean, the decision of the board of trustees of City University of New York not to grant an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, because he isn’t pro-Israel enough to suit their tastes? The controversy, and the backlash—the board says it’s reconsidering—has been huge….