Kevin Quail has recorded with Charles McPherson, Andy Simpkins,
Carl Leukaufe, Mike Wofford, Bob Dogan and The Doug Lawrence Orchestra
Great custom made award winning furniture from a friend of mine at David Marr Designs
Buy my CD at Kevin Quail Quartet
Why do they hate us? One word- Oprah. Remembering Your Spirit? Hey, Oprah, how about Remembering Your Diet? And would she just come out of the closet already? I think that Stedman is already in the Guiness Book of World Records as having the planet's longest career as a beard. And yeah, the new guy on that show- the Dog Whisperer- are people really this freaking stupid? If they believe the guy can talk to their dogs, they're probably not much smarter than the dogs. These are the same type of people who can watch "Extra!!" without wanting to kill themselves because this crap is on television.
Speaking of Oprah, how about that guy, Dr. Phil, she has on all the time? Never before have I seen someone use all his knowledge and intuition to demonstrate such a complete grasp of the obvious.
Michael Bolton Swings Sinatra? Why would I listen to that when I can just listen to Sinatra? Go get a copy of Sinatra's "Only The Lonely" before considering listening to Bolton slaughter anything Frank put voice to. And Rod Stewart singing standards? Close your eyes and he sounds like an old woman.
There's this sax player, uhh... let's call him Peter Ballin. He's on a gig with, ohhh... let me pull a name out of a hat here- Don Kagen- the kind of a gig where Kagen and his wife who sings both have their yarmulkes on onstage- and at the bar, Kagen's wife comes up and tells him how "we don't drink on our gigs." (She has a glass of brandy in her hand at the time.) So Peter says "What's that?" And she comes up with "Oh,that's just to make my voice sound better." So he, of course retorts, raising his glass, "This is just to make your voice sound better."
A comparison of the jazz scenes in New York and Chicago can best be illustrated by
the difference between the Sunday crossword puzzle in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, or by the phrase "Too many local heros."
I saw a young rapper interviewed on television the other day. In a three minute interview, he must have said "know what I'm sayin" 15 times. In fact, it was every other phrase out of his mouth. This is a person who's supposed art deals exclusively with language yet he appeared to be almost illiterate. Rap music is by far the greatest pop culture scam ever perpetrated on the American people- that's right, even bigger than Elvis. It isn't the message that offends me but rather the lack of any discernible talent. There have been so many African American geniuses in the field of jazz- Charlie Parker, Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Art Tatum, Sonny Rollins, Lee Morgan- the list goes on and on. These are artists who worked their entire lives to perfect their craft and are guilty only of creative brilliance. They were, in fact, some of the earliest civil rights activists.
Shame on the recording industry for promoting this current travesty called "rap music", the title of which is an oxymoron. What's the next step down the de-evolutionary ladder after rap music? I know- how about a bunch of men running around on stage grunting and crapping into adult diapers? Recently, Eminem cancelled a tour due to exhaustion. Yeah, he was spent from trying to find a word that rhymes with orange. I suppose it's just so true what H. L. Mencken once said: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
An infomercial for some convection oven called the Flav-O-Wave begins "You're about to be introduced to the greatest thing that's happened to cooking food since the invention of fire."
Yeah, right. The INVENTION of fire.
In the liner notes for "Pure Desmond", saxaphonist Paul Desmond was asked, ""What accounts for the melancholy in your playing?""
He replied "Well, probably the fact that I wasn't playing better."
MISTAKES I'VE MADE- Shortly after I met my almost future third ex-wife, Chicago Shambala Center member Catherine Harding, Jerry Garcia died. I still remember standing in my kitchen with a bass player friend, watching her sobbing and throwing herself around on the futon when she found out. She was in her 40s at the time. Later, which means YES, I didn't dump her right then so there was a later, she said to me "My brother and I are so close, I'm surprised we never had sex." I imagine she's moved to Kentucky by now or perhaps Philadelphia- it is, after all, the City of Brotherly Love. That so-called relationship finally ended when I accompanied her to Shambala Day, a yearly celebration of the Bhuddist sect she belonged to. For some reason, this group of nutjobs warbled together on a ditty entitled "Goodbye To Nova Scotia" which somehow had a tenuous connection to their religious cult. After that I went with this meglomaniacal actress (I know, that's redundant), Sarah Underwood, for awhile. One time,she was in a play that had full-frontal male nudity. She thought I might bring my 15-year-old daughter to the play so she could meet her. Good one, genius. Geez, I wish she would get famous already so I could brag about when I used to sleep with her. She would probably just end up getting spit out of the bottom of the porn industry if she wasn't already too old. But I'm not bitter.
J. C. Watts recently retired from his job as the only African American Republican in Congress. His father was often quoted as saying, "A black man voting for the Republicans makes about as much sense as a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders."
It's the 21st Century. If you are one of those idiots still hunting animals for sport, why not
contact the Israelis and hunt eighty year old Nazis instead? It has to be a little more challenging-at least they have opposable thumbs and can shoot back.
Note to the men of the Muslim world- quit marrying your cousins and get some pants.
True story- A woman filed a lawsuit against a 900 number because she got carpal-tunnel syndrome from masturbating so much. I'm still waiting for Hustler, in reference to their pictorials, to use the headline "Weapons Of Mass Turbation."
I have to say something about these charlatan psychics like John Edwards and James Van Praagh. First of all, there are millions of dead people. Yet somehow these idiots claim to be able to precisely zero in on messages from specific dead relatives of people over the phone. So let me get this straight- these hucksters play a game of 20 questions with their simple-minded believers and when they get it wrong they say the message didn't come through clearly? So they can guess right but can never actually be wrong? They never seem to go back more than one or two generations so I guess it's just your immediate
family that is hovering around you waiting for these shady spiritualists to contact them about their tumors or heart attacks. They never have anything important to say like, for example, "Hey, Hamid, go ahead and blow yourself up but there won't be 72 virgins waiting for you, just a sadistic imp with a hot poker he repeatedly shoves into your eye socket for all eternity." Think about it- would people who actually had such a power try to make money off it with psychic cruises to the Greek Isles and such? This just proves what Frank Zappa said: Hydrogen isn't the most plentiful element in the universe- it's stupidity.
A newscaster on Fox actually said that dolphins trained by the Navy to detect mines had "joined the coalition of the willing". I think the smartest dolphin ever would have trouble with the concept of "raise your flipper if you want to go to Iraq."
Ghallager- what's that about? Is it humor for the inbred? He has all the sophistication of an obese carny with foot odor.
Take your pick- God, lucky rabbit's foot- it's all the same.
The Catholic Church has a new initiative in place for priests' relations with the faithful- it's called Leave No Child's Behind. And what kind of a normal man is anti-abortion? Like it's not hard enough to get laid.
If Dostoevsky were alive today, and had to drive behind people on their cellphones, he would write a sequel to one of his earlier works entitled "The Idiots."
Hey, if you are ever thinking about killing yourself, use a shotgun. Put a canvas behind your head before you blow it off. In this culture, your relatives could sell the result on Ebay and be set for life.
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Five Great Books About Modern Times
Perfectly Legal, by Pulitzer Prize winning author David Cay Johnston
(subtitle- The Covert Campaign To Rig Our Tax System To Benefit The Super Rich- And Cheat Everybody Else)
"David Cay Johnston demonstrates with clear, cool and motivating prose how the very rich need only to pay their tax lawyers to make you pay for their massive illicit wealth-individual and corporate- which is impovershing our country's necessities and swelling its deficits. This is a book that will either shame us or prod us into taking back our tax system as if fairness, productivity, and authentic patriotism matter."
Ralph Nader
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What's The Matter WIth Kansas?: How Conservatives Won The Heart of America by Thomas Frank
The New Yorker
Kansas, once home to farmers who marched against "money power," is now solidly Republican. In Frank's scathing and high-spirited polemic, this fact is not just "the mystery of Kansas" but "the mystery of America." Dismissing much of the received punditry about the red-blue divide, Frank argues that the problem is the "systematic erasure of the economic" from discussions of class and its replacement with a notion of "authenticity," whereby "there is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer." The leaders of this backlash, by focusing on cultural issues in which victory is probably impossible (abortion, "filth" on TV), feed their base's sense of grievance, abetted, Frank believes, by a "criminally stupid" Democratic strategy of triangulation. Liberals do not need to know more about nascar; they need to talk more about money and class.
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies by James Bamford
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford revealed the existence of the NSA, the largest, most secretive, and best-financed intelligence organization in the world. In Body of Secrets, he took readers inside the ultrasecret agency, charting its deeds and misdeeds from its founding in 1952 to the end of the twentieth century. Now Bamford applies his relentless investigative drive and unparalleled access to intelligence sources to produce a headline-making book about the most pressing issues of the present day.
From the mishandling of the pre-9/11 threat to the unproven claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Bamford argues that the Bush administration has co-opted the intelligence community for its own political ends, and at the expense of American security. Bamford makes the case that the Bush administration's Middle East policy decisions, from overthrowing Saddam to ignoring the situation of the Palestinians, are driven by long-held beliefs and goals of an elite group of conservatives inside and outside of government.
A Pretext for War homes in on the systematic weakness that led the intelligence community to ignore or misinterpret evidence of the impending terrorist attacks of 9/11—a failure rooted in the refusal to acknowledge the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States. Compounding the errors, the Bush administration's immediate response to 9/11 was to call for an attack on Iraq, and it subsequently invented justifications for the preemptive war that has ultimately left the United States more vulnerable to terrorism.
A Pretext for War is an unprecedented, utterly convincing exposé of the most secretive administration in history.
China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World by Ted C. Fishman
Kirkus Reviews
Will China soon own the world? Perhaps. "The opportunities now in China are too big to miss," writes business journalist Fishman in his timely look at the Pacific Rim's most powerful economic tiger. The national economy is expanding at annual rates (officially, 9.5 percent) that seem scarcely imaginable and scarcely sustainable. The impetus behind that growth is simple, the author notes: With a population of somewhere between 1.3 and 1.5 billion, the number of new businesses launched in the last generation exceeds 120 million, while the number of workers who have left the countryside to work in the cities exceeds the entire US workforce. China's growth is without equal in modern history, Fishman argues, and it has disturbing implications for workers in the US and Europe. China is not only capturing more and more of the world's market share in consumer goods, it's making increasing inroads into the more significant trade in "the infinite number and variety of components that make up everything else that is made," from gaskets to bolts to computer chips. Yet another great economic engine is small business; hundreds of millions of small concerns are on hand in China to provide whatever the market is calling for-never mind that those goods are so often cheap and of low quality. (Where, after all, would WalMart be without China?) Fishman is a little alarmed by China's growth, but also ready to comfort readers with the prospect of ever-falling prices thanks to its abundant low-wage labor pool. He is more alarmed, however, at a seeming codependency that is emerging, in which Americans buy Chinese goods with money that is in essence on loan from China. "The United States," he warns, "cannot take on ever-bigger debt and amass huge trade deficits indefinitely."A thought-provoking and accessible forecast of strange times to come.
Imperial Life In The Emerald City:Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
“Extraordinary . . . Indispensable . . . Full of jaw-dropping tales of the myriad large and small ways in which Bremer and his team poured fuel into the lethal cauldron that is today’s Iraq . . . [Chandrasekaran ] has a keen eye for the small detail that illuminates larger truths . . . [he] documents the way that an avalanche of unjustifiable mistakes transforms a difficult mission into an impossible one . . . Chandrasekaran does not set out to score partisan points or unveil large geopolitical lessons; he is, essentially, a reporter telling readers what he saw. Yet it is impossible to read his book without thinking about the larger implications of the story he tells.”
-Moisés Naím, The Washington Post Book World
“Mr. Chandrasekaran’s book, while nonfiction, is as chilling an indictment of America’s tragic cultural myopia as Graham Greene’s prescient 1955 novel of the American debacle in Indochina, “The Quiet American.”
-Frank Rich, The New York Times Op-Ed
“Chandrasekaran’s detail-rich reporting and firsthand, candid narrative is what sets his contribution apart [from other books about the Iraq war] and bolsters his withering assessment . . . Using nearly two years of reporting in the country for the Washington Post and an impeccable eye for the tragic and outrageous, Chandrasekaran unveils the occupation authority compound as a Middle East Oz, grossly out of touch with the harsh realities of the real Iraq . . . The book is an eye-opening tour of ineptitude, misdirection and perils of democracy-building”
-Andrew Metz, Newsday
“With acuity and a fine sense of the absurd, the author peels back the roof to reveal an ant heap of arrogance, ineptitude, and hayseed provincialism”
-Amanda Heller, Boston Globe
“A devastating indictment of the post-invasion failures of the Bush administration.”
- Jay Freeman, Booklist
“In Imperial Life in the Emerald City [Chandrasekaran] draws a vividly detailed portrait of the Green Zone and the Coalition Provisional Authority (which ran Iraq’s government from April 2003 to June 2004) that becomes a metaphor for the administration’s larger failings in Iraq . . . His book gives the reader a visceral–sometimes sickening–picture of how the administration and its handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq, showing how decisions made in that period contributed to a burgeoning insurgency and growing ethnic and religious strife . . . The picture Mr. Chandrasekaran draws in these pages often reads like something out of Catch-22 or from MASH.”
- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“This is a devastating account of the American occupation of Iraq. It shows how Americans arrived in Iraq full of big plans (and/or lucrative contracts) to help the country become more like the United States, but wound up living an isolated existence while the lives of Iraqis deteriorated around them. No other book has described so well what Iraq looked like and felt like in the aftermath of the invasion.”
–James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans
“Rajiv Chandrasekaran has not given us “another Iraq book.” He has given us a riveting tale of American misadventure. . . . He shows us American idealism and voyeurism, as well as the deadly results of American hubris. And by giving us the first full picture from inside the Green Zone, he depicts a mission doomed to failure before it had even been launched.”
–Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
“This is a dazzling, important, and entertaining work of reportage about the American civilians who tried to remake Iraq, and about the strange, isolated city-state in Baghdad where they failed. Every American who wants to understand how and why things went so badly wrong in Iraq should read this book.”
–Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars
“This amazing book pulls back the curtains of deception and reveals in stunning fashion what really went on inside the Emerald City in the crucial year after the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Chandrasekaran’s reporting is vivid and relentless as he documents the mix of idealism, confidence, energy, hubris, political miscalculation, cultural blindness, and fantastical thinking of those who came to save Iraq yet made a difficult situation worse.”
–David Maraniss, author of They Marched Into Sunlight
“An extraordinarily vivid and compelling anatomy of a fiasco. Imperial Life in the Emerald City is an indispensable saga of how the American liberation of Iraq turned to chaos, calamity, and civil war. Chandrasekaran takes us inside Baghdad’s Green Zone as no one else has.”
–Rick Atkinson, author of The Long Gray Line
Read Excerpt Here