Christmas gift suggestions:
To your enemy, forgiveness.
To an opponent, tolerance.
To a friend, your heart.
To a customer, service.
To all, charity.
To every child, a good example.
To yourself, respect.
-Oren Arnold
In a recent essay at www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20156-an-open-letter-to-you, William Rivers Pitt expresses an extreme helplessness at some recent events in the news which are representative of some of the major problems in modern American society.
The Democratic politician who smashes all the worldly belongings of people who live on the street because he hates homeless people; the video game based upon the Sandy Hook tragedy which was banned post-haste while nothing was done about the causes of the initial tragedy; and the young, 99 percent-er who died of a treatable ailment because of the inability to get health insurance.
Details can be pursued through the hyperlink above.
There's not much to add. And I certainly could not add anything that would be as eloquent as what Mr. Pitt has composed. I do feel the need to quote this particular portion though:
". . . I hope it is not a hollow room, a hollow country, a hollow soul I speak to, because these three stories happen all the time, and every day. This is where you live, and this is who you are. If you have a conscience, it makes you feel dirty in your heart.
We are responsible for this. We are all part of this thing that is dismantling our basic humanity brick by brick.
Fifteen minutes of glory
Maybe less
What I wouldn't give for the
chance
To confess
All my intimate secrets
All my hopes and my desires
I don't care just how valid
You think that they are
They've been mine for a long long time
And I'm not ashamed of them
Shut up Joe
How
do you really know
What's going down
How can you tell if there's a
problem somewhere
To be found
We all need to gather round
To help
everybody else to see
That running your mouth aloud
Makes it that much
more difficult
For you and me
And our integrity
Went
to work at the factory
At fourteen
Thought I'd finish my schooling
Sometime in between
Drunken weekends and futile street fights
And the
visits to my best girl
But the time slipped away
I've got bills here
to pay
I've got small ones depending on me
My vision is limited
Shut up Joe
How
do you really know
What's going down
How can you tell if there's a
problem somewhere
To be found
We all need to gather round
To help
everybody else to see
That running your mouth aloud
Makes it that much
more difficult
For you and me
And our integrity
All my life I've known
I'd want to say
Something to my
Fellow man today
Couldn't let the facts
Get in the way.
We
weren't that well acquainted
Never were
An occasional run-in
We
preferred
There's one thing that we both believe in
Heard it over
and over again
It was something about
All the fondness we felt
How
the heart can't miss what's not around
If the mind doesn't value it
Shut up Joe
How
do you really know
What's going down
How can you tell if there's a
problem somewhere
To be found
We all need to gather round
To help
everybody else to see
That running your mouth aloud
Makes it that much
more difficult
For you and me
And our integrity
In his seven-decade career, Dave Brubeck was an artistic and a commercial success, a pianist and composer who expanded the musical landscape and who crossed other borders as one of the world's foremost ambassadors of jazz.
He had an inventive style that brought international music into the jazz mainstream, but he was more than a musical innovator: He was an American original.
Mr. Brubeck died Wednesday at a hospital in Norwalk, Conn., one day before his 92nd birthday. His manager, Russell Gloyd, said Mr. Brubeck was on his way to a regular checkup with his cardiologist when his heart gave out.
Considered one of the greatest figures of a distinctively American art form, Mr. Brubeck was a modest man who left a monumental legacy. His 1959 recording "Time Out," with its infectious hit "Take Five," became the first jazz album to sell 1 million copies. He toured once-forbidden countries in the Middle East and in the old Soviet empire and was honored by presidents and foreign dignitaries.
He wrote hundreds of tunes, including the oft-recorded "In Your Own Sweet Way" and "The Duke." His quartet, featuring alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, was one of the most popular jazz groups in history, and he kept up a busy performing schedule into his 90th year.
He also composed ambitious classical and choral works, released nearly 100 albums and remained a charismatic and indefatigable performer into old age. In December 2010, the month Mr. Brubeck turned 90, his quartet won the readers' poll of DownBeat magazine as the best group in jazz, 57 years after he first won the poll.
A bespectacled cowboy who grew up on a remote California ranch, Mr. Brubeck was known for his complex rhythmic patterns, which he said were inspired by riding his horse and listening to its syncopated hoofbeats striking the ground.
He studied in the 1940s with the experimental French composer Darius Milhaud, who encouraged his interest in jazz. Mr. Brubeck was among the first jazz musicians to make wide use of polytonality, or playing in more than one musical key at a time. He was also an early advocate of "world music," adopting exotic sounds that he heard in his worldwide travels.
After forming his quartet in California in the early 1950s, he sought to branch out from the dank nightclubs of San Francisco and Los Angeles. His wife, Iola, suggested the quartet perform on college campuses, which produced a nationwide sensation, with record sales to match.
"We reached them musically," he told The New York Times in 1967. "We had no singers, no beards, no jokes. All we presented was music."
With their curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses, Desmond and Mr. Brubeck looked like professorial brothers and were unlikely jazz stars. The two had an instant musical bond and could anticipate each other's bandstand improvisations, as Desmond's ethereal, upper-register saxophone soared above Mr. Brubeck's driving keyboard attack.
With the release of "Time Out" in 1959, Mr. Brubeck had the first jazz album to sell more than 1 million copies. It reached No. 2 on the pop charts, and its eternally catchy signature tune, "Take Five," became a surprise hit.
The tune, written by Desmond but heavily arranged by Mr. Brubeck, built a memorable melody over a complex rhythm in the unusual time signature of 5/4. "Take Five" became a staple of his concerts and helped make the Dave Brubeck Quartet the most popular jazz group of the 1950s and '60s.
"Every once in a while," jazz historian and critic Ted Gioia wrote in an email exchange with The Washington Post, "jazz is blessed by one of those great figures who can do it all. They give us a body of work that is full of musical riches ... but the music also can appeal to the average listener. Dave Brubeck is one of those figures."
"Cool jazz"
Mr. Brubeck's position in musical history has often been debated. He was born the same year as Charlie Parker, the tortured genius of the bebop movement who brought a new rhythmic and harmonic sophistication to jazz in the 1940s, but Mr. Brubeck was never a true bebopper. He defied the raffish image of the jazz musician by being a clean-living family man who lived with his wife and six children.
He was considered a seminal force in the West Coast's understated "Cool Jazz" school of the 1950s, but he disdained the "Cool Jazz" label and preferred to forge an original musical path.
After early struggles, he was reportedly earning more than $100,000 a year by 1954, the year he became the second jazz musician to be featured on the cover of Time magazine (after Louis Armstrong in 1949).
Some musicians and critics resented his success, and others questioned his prominence in a form of music that was created primarily by black musicians.
But Mr. Brubeck was an outspoken advocate of racial harmony and often used his music as a platform for cross-cultural understanding. He once canceled 23 of 25 concerts in the South when local officials would not allow his African-American bass player, Eugene Wright, to appear with the rest of the group.
On a tour in the Netherlands in the 1950s, African-American pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith was asked, in Mr. Brubeck's presence, "Isn't it true that no white man can play jazz?"
Smith gestured toward Mr. Brubeck and said to the reporter, "I'd like you to meet my son."
In 1958, Mr. Brubeck and his quartet undertook an international tour for the State Department, spreading the improvisatory spirit of jazz to Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and Sri Lanka, among other countries. In Poland, they were among the first U.S. jazz musicians to perform behind the Iron Curtain.
In each new country, Mr. Brubeck mingled with musicians, absorbing local rhythms and melodies. Long before the term "world music" gained currency, he was writing compositions that borrowed elements he had heard in Mexico, Japan, Turkey, India, Afghanistan and other countries.
Cowboy childhood
David Warren Brubeck was born Dec. 6, 1920, in Concord, Calif. He and his family lived on a 45,000-acre ranch near Ione.
His father was a champion rodeo roper and his mother was a conservatory-trained pianist who had studied in London with concert star Dame Myra Hess. She gave her three sons a surprisingly advanced musical education, and his two older brothers, Henry and Howard, became music teachers and composers.
Because of early eyesight problems, Mr. Brubeck always had difficulty reading musical notation. He compensated by learning to improvise and to play by ear, which served him well in jazz.
At the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., he had planned to study veterinary medicine. But a zoology professor saw how much time he spent in the music department and suggested he change majors.
A dean called him a disgrace but allowed him to graduate after a professor pleaded on his behalf, calling him a budding genius.
In college, Mr. Brubeck proposed on his first date with Iola Whitlock, and the two were married in 1942.
During World War II, Mr. Brubeck was pulled from the ranks of an infantry unit by an Army colonel, who asked him to start a jazz band to entertain troops on the front lines.
After the war, he did graduate work at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., with Milhaud and wrote and performed avant-garde jazz.
Drummer Joe Morello joined Mr. Brubeck and Desmond in 1956, followed by Wright in 1958, forming a group that recorded dozens of records and found international acclaim. The quartet had a huge following until it split up in 1967.
Besides his wife, of Wilton, Conn., survivors include his four sons and a daughter.
In the early 1980s, Mr. Brubeck formed a new quartet, with which he toured until shortly before his death.
In 1996, he won a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement, and he was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2009.
What
do YOU think?
http://www.rayjozwiak.com/guestbook.html
You can NOW download
your
very own copy of Ray Jozwiak's
newest release:
AMBIENCE & WINE
Where's the cheer
That I should feel
Inside my heart
This time of year
While all the
Televisions
Newspapers
And billboards
Count the shopping days
For me
It appears
To me that
I'm the only one
Who doesn't see
The fine and natural
Attraction to what seems
Part race
Part obstacle course
I believe
Long ago I leaned that we
Celebrate this season
Anniversary of the birth
Of someone named Jesus
Through the years
How my perception of it all
Has gone awry
When so much
Manufactured hype
And pressurized requirements
Make it all seem a lie
How I wish
Since it's the
Time of year that
Dreams can come alive
That you and I
See one November when
Without the retail forecasting
Some peace on earth
Goodwill to all arrives
CHEER(from
Black, & White Then Back due April 2013)
(from http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/17/romney-my-job-is-not-to-worry-about-those-people/)
". . . Let’s set aside the question of whether this is what Mitt Romney really believes deep down in his heart. Maybe this is what he thinks. Or maybe he just thought it was a good line to buck up jittery donors. What we can say is that the last part is wrong. There is no fair accounting in which 47 percent of Americans take no “personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Take this simple breakdown from the Tax Policy Center of what households paid in taxes in 2011:
— 53.6 percent of households pay the federal income tax. Presumably Romney is okay with these folks.
— 28.3 percent of households pay no federal income tax, but they do pay the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare. That means they don’t need Mitt Romney to convince them to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” They already have jobs.
Most of the households in this group don’t pay any federal income tax because they qualify for enough deductions that their income tax liability has shrunk to zero. See this Tax Policy Center report for more, which gives an example of “a couple with two children earning less than $26,400. They get an $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700, and that takes their liability to zero.” Indeed, it’s worth noting that many of these deductions and credits were part of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, which Romney wants to extend.
— 10.3 percent of households pay no federal income tax because they’re retired and elderly. Many retirees aren’t taxed on their Social Security benefits, which they earned by paying into the system over many years. If Mitt Romney secretly thinks that these households are all irresponsible freeloaders, he has a weird way of showing it, as he keeps insisting that he doesn’t want to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits for those over the age of 65.
— That leaves 6.9 percent of households which are non-elderly and have incomes less than $20,000 per year and aren’t paying the payroll tax. These poorer households pay neither income taxes nor payroll taxes. Perhaps Romney thinks that they should all pay more in federal taxes. It’s hard to say. But this is also a much smaller fraction of Americans.
Meanwhile, just as a reminder, the vast majority of Americans still pay state and local taxes — in fact, these taxes tend to be more regressive. When you add up all the different types of taxes, most income groups in the United States tend to pay an amount that’s roughly commensurate with their share of the national income. . ."
What
do YOU think?
http://www.rayjozwiak.com/guestbook.html
You can NOW download
your
very own copy of Ray Jozwiak's
newest release:
AMBIENCE & WINE
