". . . parades. . . are a lot of work to rehearse, don’t do anything for morale, and are expensive in terms both of time and preparation. . . . (an) expensive parade reminds me less of our French allies and more of the old Soviet Union “Who has the biggest missile?” extravaganzas, or the truly creepy North Korean jitterbug marching style galas, with the even creepier “young leader,” Kim Jung Un, urging his nation of sycophants on in wildly over-the-top applause, which has a clap-hard-or-die feel to it. . . The last time we did a big parade like this was several decades ago and it cost over $10 million. Some estimates have the cost of a big one today topping $20 million, which would include moving all the tanks, missiles, jets, helicopters and military bands to Washington. . . Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has correctly stopped handing out little “challenge coins” from his office — symbolic tokens that officers in our armed forces give to troops. As he told me, they don’t contribute to readiness or combat capability. . . I’d recommend we apply the same logic to this kind of parade. . .
For the men and women who have to put in the time planning, rehearsing, creating a security plan (a parade would be an extraordinarily juicy target for the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, by the way), setting up the stands, cleaning up, taking down the stands, and getting all their gear back home would, frankly, not be having a lot of fun. This would no doubt fall on a holiday weekend (Memorial Day, Fourth of July or Veteran’s Day, of course) so there goes their hoped-for and much deserved weekend break. . . We know that we have the best-funded, most war-experienced, highest morale military in the world. . . it is a fact. We don’t need a puffy parade to show the world we can fight. . . I’d prefer to see our Department of Defense. . . focus on planning for war, pushing the VA to improve, funding military families with good medical and childcare benefits, and honoring our fallen with ceremonies as they are laid to rest. Those are the best ways we can honor them. . ."
(from wikipedia.com)
". . . The area's recorded history begins with the arrival of French explorers, missionaries and fur traders in the late 17th century and their interaction with the local Potawatomi Indians. There were small settlements and a U.S. Army fort, but the soldiers and settlers were all driven off in 1812. The modern city was incorporated in 1837 by Northern businessmen and grew rapidly from real estate speculation and the realization that it had a commanding position in the emerging inland transportation network, based on lake traffic and railroads, controlling access from the Great Lakes into the Mississippi River basin. Despite a fire in 1871 that destroyed the central business district, the city grew exponentially, becoming the nation's rail center and the dominant Midwestern center for manufacturing, commerce, finance, higher education, religion, broadcasting, sports, jazz, and high culture. . . "
Mother Chi
live home recording (October 2015) by Ray Jozwiak
OHO's "Ocean City Ditty," the CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak. Please Visit http://www.ohomusic.com
My latest solo offering, Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak, featuring original, instrumental piano music is now available at - Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak
(To Access all Ray Jozwiak - Gonzo Piano music you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/RayJozwiak)
(from http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/paris-magazine-attack/charlie-hebdo-shooting-12-killed-muhammad-cartoons-magazine-paris-n281266)
". . . Twelve people were killed Wednesday when masked gunmen armed with AK-47s attacked the offices of a French satirical news magazine which has published cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. . . One of the magazine's editors, Gerard Biard, told France Inter radio: "I don't understand how people can attack a newspaper with heavy weapons. A newspaper is not a weapon of war." Hollande added that several other attacks had been thwarted in France "in recent weeks." "No barbaric act will ever extinguish the freedom of the press," Hollande said in a tweet. "We are a united country." . . ."
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . -John Adams Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. . . The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government. -Thomas Jefferson Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates. -Benjamin Franklin
OHO's "Ocean City Ditty," the CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak. Please Visit http://www.ohomusic.com
My latest solo offering, Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak, featuring original, instrumental piano music will be released April 7, 2014 Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak
(To Access all Ray Jozwiak - Gonzo Piano music you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/RayJozwiak)
(from https://www.facebook.com/ohomusic?hc_location=timeline)
". . . Bruce Kovacs at The Bratt Studio layin' down some classic(al) riffage on Ray's "Unique" and "Slough of Despond," scheduled to be on the forthcoming OHO album, "Male Pattern Radness." Been a fan of the French Horn in rock since hearing John Entwhistle blow his horn on The Who's '67 classic, "Pictures of Lily." . . . "
Slough of Despond
[9/24/2014 Bratt Studio Recording (by Gentleman, scholar, musician and recording technician extraordinaire, Bill Pratt)
by OHO - Jay Graboski, David Reeve and Ray Jozwiak and guest artist Bruce Kovacs on French Horn]
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
(from wikipedia.com)
During the period that the song was recorded, in 1967, Kit Lambert, the band's first "real" manager, according to Townshend, mixed the song. He filmed the band recording the song, showing the four bandmates performing, with Keith Moon being recruited for the high notes in the song (even though Pete Townshend can be heard telling Keith he "keeps jumping on John's part", however, other live video footage shows John Entwistle, the band's bassist harmonizing and playing the French Horn. Daltrey has said the French horn solo was an attempt to emulate a World War I klaxon warning siren, as the Lily girl was a World War I-era pinup.
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
The eighteenth century is the Age of Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment popularizes the ideas developed during the Age of Reason.
The Enlightenment is basically the view or belief that modern science and our
understanding of the social world derived from modern science can help us to
improve the living conditions on this planet. War, poverty, and injustice
are not God-given punishments for our sinfulness but bad management.
Oppressive governments can be reformed or overthrown. Social inequality
can be alleviated and, maybe, overcome. Disease is not to be accepted
stoically but to be fought with new medicines. Poverty can be reduced
through the productivity of new inventions and technologies. Ignorance can
be overcome through universal public education. Human societies are
perfectible if only we have the will and use our scientific knowledge to plan
and socially engineer for a better future. There is no limit to what human
reason and ingenuity can achieve. The French Enlightenment thinkers are known as the
philosophes. They are not really philosophers but what we would today call
journalists or popularizers. One of the great achievements of the philosophes was the
publication of the Encyclopédie. All those who contributed articles are
known as the Encyclopedists. Philosophes and encyclopedists are often used
as interchangeable terms when describing the French Enlightenment.
Opponents of the French government's plans to legalize same-sex marriage
and adoption took to the streets of Paris in January. With an estimated
350,000 marchers, the demonstration was considered one of the largest in
years. The French government took note, but vowed go ahead with
its plans for the law anyway.
France now joins Britain in taking a major legislative
step in recent weeks toward allowing gay marriage and adoption — making
them the largest European countries to do so. The Netherlands, Belgium,
Norway and Spain, as well as Argentina, Canada and South Africa have
authorized gay marriage, along with nine U.S. states and the District of
Columbia.
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AMBIENCE & WINE
Baltimore has certainly enjoyed its
share of eccentric eateries over the years, but perhaps none
so endearing—certainly none so enduring—as Martick’s Restaurant
Français. Patrons had to ring a bell to gain admittance to the dimly lit
and eclectically furnished dining room, where mismatched silver and
china topped the tables and a multifarious array of works by local
artists graced the walls. It was funky and shabby and utterly unlike
anywhere else.
The restaurant’s inimitable founder and chef, Morris Martick, died
Dec. 16 of lung cancer at the age of 88, having literally spent his life
there. He was born in the building—214 W. Mulberry St.—and grew up
working with his parents, two brothers, and two sisters in various
enterprises operated there by the Martick family: a grocery store and
then a speakeasy during the Prohibition years. (Rumor has it a gin still
remains in the building’s basement.)
Martick’s own first incarnation of the family business was running a
bar/jazz nightclub during the 1960s. By all accounts, it was an island
of Bohemian refuge in an otherwise conservative city. Painter Raoul
Middleman used to hang out there, and Martick gave him his first
show—hanging his paintings above the bar. “This was when segregation
laws were still in effect,” Middleman recalls. “And I had a friend I
really wanted to have see this show, my first show, but he was black,
and it was against the law for him to enter the bar. But Morris just
said, ‘Bring him on in.’ He could’ve gotten in a lot of trouble for
doing that. He thought segregation laws were stupid and he lived by his
beliefs. I always respected him for that.”
Former Martick’s employee Steve Pampinelli says Martick used to
recount how Billie Holiday once sang there in the nightclub days. “It
was actually against the law of segregation, but he would let black
folks in anyway,” Pampinelli says. “So when Billie Holiday sang there,
she was actually there as a patron. When people realized she was there
everyone got really excited and asked if she would sing, and of course
she did.”
“Morris really only left Baltimore twice in his whole life,” recalls
Scotty Stevenson, who worked at Martick’s from 1977 through the mid-’80s
and off and on for several years after that. “He was gone briefly
during WWII while he was in the Air Force—he was in Alaska, according to
him because ‘That was where they sent all the fuck-ups.’ But then he
came back and took care of his mother until she died in 1959, and ran
the jazz club until, he said, he got tired of the drunks and the
musicians. So he closed down in 1967 and went bumming around France for a
couple years really learning how to cook. He had always liked to cook,
he was a natural at it, but that was when he really educated himself in
formal technique. Then when he came back, he fixed the place up and
reopened as a French restaurant.”
That was in 1970, when Martick’s Restaurant Français had two dining
rooms on two floors, a maitre’d, tuxedoed waiters, and a genuine French
chef from Paris. According to Alex Martick, who survives his brother at
the age of 83, “I don’t know where he found that chef, but the man was a
goddamn drunk. He’d call downstairs for bottles of brandy, supposedly
to cook with, but he’d be drinking it himself. Then when he was good and
drunk he’d come after my brother.”
Stevenson recalls hearing the tale as follows: “One night the chef
came after Morris with a knife, and that was that. Morris was left with a
French restaurant but no French chef, and that was when he started
running the kitchen himself. Then the monkey suits and the maitre’d
evaporated, and it all became the artists and the musicians.”
It was a natural evolution, Stevenson explains, because “almost
everything in that restaurant Morris had done himself anyway—the stained
glass, the painted tile, the albino rattlesnake skin wallpaper. He was
an artist himself, he drew and painted, so he was always at home with
artists and musicians.”
Anna Oldfield, who put herself through college working in Martick’s
kitchen from 1985 until 1991, says, “Nobody worked harder than Morris
himself. He was simply always there, cooking and doing anything that
needed to be done. So anyone who worked for him got into that same zone,
that you just did everything necessary to make it work. That 75 people
were going to come in and somehow, in this little kitchen at the top of
these impossibly steep stairs in this crazy little house with a bunch of
crazy people, you were somehow going to get it together and make these
amazing French meals.
“The way it worked was inexplicable, but transformative for the
people who worked there—the ones that stayed, anyway,” continues
Oldfield, who went on to get her doctorate and now teaches at Coastal
Carolina University in South Carolina. “I was there for five years, and
in that time at least 50 people came in who had been hired and they’d
run screaming their first night. Literally run out the door in the
middle of their shift.”
“I always thought there was a little roulette wheel running in
Morris’ head, and when he met you the ball either landed on ‘family’ and
he treated you like family, or ‘intruder’ and he would chase you away,”
Stevenson says. “It makes sense because everything in that building was
his childhood—if you were banging the pots in the kitchen he’d yell at
you, ‘Stop hitting the pots!’ which is exactly what his mother had
yelled at him. Anything he yelled at you had been yelled at him
growing up.”
“Morris was challenging and irritable and he yelled at everybody all
the time. But you could yell right back,” says Katie Brennan, who began
her Martick’s career in 1985, at the age of 16—and began a friendship
with Martick himself that carried through the next 26 years.
“We’d get these Culinary Institute kids who’d be like, Oh I’m
gonna work at Martick’s and be a chef apprentice, and the first
question he’d always ask them is, ‘How long do you cook this piece of
fish?’” Brennan recalls. “And they’d start this analysis of what kind it
was and how thick and blah blah, and Morris would just shout, ‘Till
it’s done, damn it, till it’s done!’”
Martick was famous for his pâté, profiteroles, and, above all else,
bouillabaisse. “That bouillabaisse took literally days to make,”
Oldfield recalls. “You’d have to bone the fish and make the stock in all
these stages, sometimes boiling, sometimes barely simmering it, and add
all these different things at just the right times. It was a kind of
cooking that hardly anyone does anymore, because it takes so long and is
based entirely on instinct. He was such a master of that, and he never
used a recipe. He always improvised, which is why if you went there
twice and got the same dish, it would not be exactly the same.”
Jeff Smith, the Baltimore-born chef-owner of Chameleon Cafe in
Lauraville, worked briefly in Martick’s kitchen. “Even in a short time, I
learned a lot working there,” Smith says. “He definitely did things
differently from anywhere else I had ever worked.”
The brutal working conditions at Martick’s were famous among
employees—Brennan and Oldfield both recall a thermometer in the kitchen
that routinely pegged out at its top reading of 115 degrees F—and over
the years there were many tales of Martick working in his underpants, if
he bothered wearing them at all. “I worked there with a guy who had
been with Martick on and off over the years,” Smith recalls, “who told
me that Morris would be in the shower—his bathroom was between the front
and back kitchens—and customers would come in, and Martick would just
step out of the shower, put an apron on, and start cooking, his wrinkly
old ass hanging out while he was cooking this amazing food. I never saw
it with my own two eyes, but this was the legend.”
After a heyday running from its 1970 opening to the mid-’80s,
Martick’s Restaurant Français began to slowly fade from its original
eminence. Stevenson says that the opening of Harborplace in 1982 drew
diners downtown, away from Martick’s, as did the subsequent opening on
nearby North Charles Street of Louie’s Bookstore Cafe by Jimmy Rouse,
who had waited tables at Martick’s. “Louie’s drew a lot of clientele
away from Martick’s, but Morris never held a grudge,” Stevenson says.
“He would actually go and eat there almost every night. He used to sit
there at the bar, telling Jimmy everything he was doing wrong.”
“What I took from him was to not be scared of being unique,” Smith
says. “The way he just did things the way he wanted and didn’t care what
anybody else thought. The guy just had a lot of guts, and held out to
the end. I know what it’s like when it’s slow in your restaurant. It’s
scary and hard to come to work, day after day when it’s slow like that,
and he did it for years. I have a lot of respect for him.”
Martick ran his eponymous restaurant for 35 years, closing to the
public in 2008. He remained there, living in the building where he was
born, and carrying on the friendships he’d made over eight decades of
life, many of them at the center of Baltimore’s creative circles. “There
are so many people in Baltimore whose early networks and friendships
were made by working at Martick’s over the years,” Stevenson says. In
his later years, according to Brennan, Martick kept busy going to the
movies and Pimlico race track. As late as 2010, according to Pampinelli,
he was still “running a business hauling people’s trash out of their
basements or helping them move house. We’d make a few extra bucks
hauling stuff to the city dump in that board truck of his.”
In October, however, he collapsed while walking down Howard Street
and was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. “It went pretty quickly
there, at the end,” Brennan says. “A lot of people didn’t even realize
he was sick. I didn’t know literally until the night before he died. I
got [to the hospital] just in time. I got to give him a hug and a kiss
and tuck him in when he fell asleep.”
Memorial plans are still tentative, but Alex Martick says that a
celebration of his brother’s life is in the works for January. In a
Facebook tribute to Martick, amid a plethora of reminiscences both
affectionate and profane, Oldfield wrote:
I am overwhelmed with a combination of terrible sadness and
memories that range from ridiculous to hilarious to truly tender. We
were so very very very lucky to know Morris, he was like a planet that
made an alternate gravity where people like us could thrive. He defied
every law of physics [and] lousy boring stuff that people are supposed
to do and I’ll bet y’all don’t know how close you were to having that
walkin [refrigerator] fall in on your heads when you were having dinner.
. . . Now that we’re all 50 or whatever we can maybe start to
appreciate his absolute refusal to give in to all the thousands of
things that drag people into those small compromises that destroy your
soul. Morris never gave up. I’m only just beginning to get everything
that he was saying to me all that time
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(from http://www.beekmanwine.com/prevtopab.htm) A new study by original “French Paradox” researcher Serge Renaud offers more evidence that moderate wine consumption is associated with a significant reduction in all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease and cancer among men. The findings (Epidemiology, March, 1998) were based on a large cohort study [JM - cohort studies are epidemiological studies that use individuals having a statistical element in common, such as race, gender, age, etc., as opposed to a random selection of individuals. As such, the results cannot always be projected to the population as a whole.] of middle aged men in eastern France. Daily, moderate drinkers who consumed mostly wine were compared to non-drinkers and heavy drinkers.
Renaud and colleagues from the University of Bordeaux found that moderate wine consumption (2-3 glasses a day) was associated with a 30% reduction in the death rate from all causes; a 35% percent reduction in death rates from cardiovascular disease; and an 18-24% reduction in death rates from cancer. “The results of the present study,” the researchers write, “appear to confirm the speculation that the so-called French Paradox is due, at least in part, to the regular consumption of wine. [JM - The French Paradox, of 60 minutes fame, is the observation that, although the French and Americans have similar high fat diets, the French have a much lower incidence of cardiovascular disease. Speculation was that this is due to the protective effects of wine consumption, since the French drink much more wine than we do. Of course, there are many other possible explanations.]
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