First up is Marc Sabatella’s brief, elegant arrangement for string quartet, featuring Sandra Wong, Ben Blechman, Enion Pelta-Tiller, and James Bailey.1 Next up is this intriguing take from the Landscape Trio, whose personnel I am unable to obtain. This isn’t a straight video, but a take of Brilliant Corners featuring voice, vibes, and percussion is…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Glenn Reynolds now officially a cantankerous old fart
It seems like it was only yesterday that I was devoting a withering (so I hoped) footnote to some recent balderdash emitted by Glenn “Stay Off My Lawn, Negro” Reynolds, who’s now topped his previous balderdash by a very wide margin, a margin that, in fact, tends towards infinity. The gist of Glenn’s latest outburst…
Nick Gillespie’s journée de folie
A stopped clock is right twice a day. Nick Gillespie, Editor in Chief, Reason.com and Reason TV, is wrong once a year. This year, Nick’s journée de folie fell on May 23, when he came up with less than scintillating thumb-sucker, “This Used To Be a Helluva High-Trust Country, But Our Leaders Are Destroying That”….
Wall Street Journal editor in chief “reminds” reporters to be fair to Trump (but not, presumably, Clinton or Sanders)
Over at Politico, Joe Pompeo writes that Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerry Baker saw fit to “remind” his editors to be “fair” to Donald Trump. And indeed we should be fair to Donald. We shouldn’t forget that he rose to prominence by promising to build a “great wall” between the U.S. and Mexico…
President Obama calls for the end of nuclear weapons while spending $1 trillion on new ones
Speaking in Japan at the Hiroshima memorial, dedicated to the victims to the first use of atomic weaponry in world history, President Obama called for a “moral revolution” that would ultimately lead to the elimination of such weapons. According to a report filed in the New York Times by Gardiner Harris, the President said “We…
Hillary Clinton, so hard to luv
If you’ve been reading the latest on Hillary’s email account, and if you think she’s the only thing standing between us and President Donald Trump, you’re probably sighing as hard as I am. Being a Clinton supporter, however reluctant, means being stuck in an abusive relationship. How can anyone so heedless of anyone but herself…
Charles Murray, cutting to the chase
I have never written about Charles Murray without the most overt of sneers.1 Well, that has to change, because Charles, writing in the National Review, has just nailed the best right-wing take-down of Donald Trump I’ve ever read, “Why ‘Hillary is even worse’ doesn’t cut it”. Sample quotes: “In my view, Donald Trump is unfit…
The “Blob” lives! At the New York Times!
As I understand it, all the cool kids at the White House (whose number, according to Ben Rhodes, is limited to President Obama and, well, Ben Rhodes) like to call the blinkered, myopic terminally self-righteous American foreign policy establishment “the Blob.” That said, if you’re up for some seriously blinkered self-righteous myopia, you ought to…
Wheaton College Jazz Ensemble—“Pitter Panther Patter”
https://youtu.be/G3nL5wzpZd4 Gunnar Kuehl, bass and Nick Muzik, piano, perform this joint composition of Duke Ellington and bassist Jimmy Blanton, who, though he died at age 23, created the modern jazz bass. Ellington recorded several duets with Blanton, including this one and “Plucked Again”, shortly before Blanton’s death from tuberculosis. Blanton was near exact contemporary of…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Size matters to me. Perhaps you have similar tastes.” “I am, obviously, not one for half-way measures.” “I don’t like to come in second in anything.” “I can’t say I won’t break your heart, but I will keep you dry.” “It never rains on this parade.” “Stormy…