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030s_JNC Grand Touring Kanto_Honda 1300 Coupe 9

Since the opening of the Yamate Tunnel, provided traffic is light of course, traversing Tokyo to join the out-going expressways has become a lot easier. In ten or fifteen minutes, you can join the Joban for a quick run out to Ibaraki and further.

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Needing a short break, we decided to make an early morning start, with a view to exploring some of south Ibaraki-ken. Home to the Tsukuba Raceway and a few lesser explored rural areas, we were sure to find some interesting stuff.

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After our initial journey on the Joban Expressway, we dropped off to some of the slower local roads to explore Ajigaura-cho. The road south, down the coast through Oarai, Hokota, and to Kasumigaura-ko.

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The slow diesel train from the rail terminus at Ajigaura was filled with local day trippers as it thrummed its way out of the old station on its slow journey south.

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Sleepy towns gave way to seaside fishing villages, and an old, near-abandoned fish processing plant on the sea.

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Of more interest to the Japanese car spotter, though, was a partially abandoned field of old machines in a varying states of decay. Here a Skyline Japan, an A60 Celica, and an early Honda 1300 Coupe languish.

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Nearby, a large Type-31 Nissan Cedric lies in a bed of overgrown grass.

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Stacked cars are a common feature in urban Japanese junkyards where space is at a premium, but out here with so much land it’s unclear why that’d be necessary. Nevertheless, we found a Daihatsu Midget sitting atop a sadly wasted Nissan Sunny Cab.

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Not too far away another Cedric, also in black, guards a pallet of gearboxes.

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The tall grass nearly obscured this colorful corner of small Hondas and a collection of random doors altogether.

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The third Cedric on site was off in the weeds.

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Another neck of the woods held a Prince Skyline with a caved roof, Datsun truck, Daihatsu Midget sans nosecone and other assorted kei vans.

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Behind the snout-less Daihatsu sat a rare Honda TN360 cab-over kei pickup, its large headlights keeping watch over the grounds.

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Usually collections like this will have a theme, like Nissan Fairlady Zs or kei cars. This was an eclectic collection of machines and though it’s sad to see their carcasses, it appears that the proprietor of this yard is selling their parts so that others may live.

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The paper in the windshield of this Honda Life Pickup has the contact details of owner if you need any parts.

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Outside the concrete mega-structures of major cities one can still find old school fish handling ponds on the shores of Lake Kasumigaura.

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Pressing onward, we came upon wide expanses of Ibaraki rice pending harvest.

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An Isuzu-built Hillman Minx with its matching long-expired studded snow-tire set.

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This local house in glorious 1970s “modern” style attracted us to stop and photograph. On closer inspection the garage next-door held an intriguing shape.

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After speaking with the owner Nasu-san, he was proud to show us his 1969 Daihatsu Campagno Berlina Spider.

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We had never seen one in burnt orange before. If it’s indeed a stock color, it was ahead of its time.

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Tucked behind some curtains in the display / office area of the owner’s garage, was the surprise of all surprises — a two-owner Honda S500. Nasu-san explained he had owned it for over forty years, but had stopped driving it, not because it had stopped, but merely because he thought he was too old to be seen driving about in it.

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Though non-standard in some areas, the overall car was in remarkable condition, including all trim pieces, running gear, and engine. Nasu-san was very amenable and, especially after seeing we also owned a Honda S-car, encouraged us to crawl all over it, to sit in it and pose for photographs, and I am sure if the battery was OK we could have started it for a quick drive around the area on his trade plates.

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The S500 is notable as Honda’s first production passenger car, introduced the popular dip-bumpered S600. With just over 1,300 units produced in its very short production run from 1963-64, the number remaining in drivable condition must be very small indeed. Even to those living in Japan, seeing an S500 outside a museum is a remarkable experience.

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With the sun setting over Tokyo Bay, we came home via the Tokyo Aqualine dreaming of barn-find S500s, again on sparsely populated roads, an encouragement to make more short excursions into the areas around Tokyo.

Skorj is a photographer living in Japan. See more of his work at Filmwasters.

This post is filed under: daihatsu, Grand Touring, honda, isuzu, nissan, Prince, toyota and
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20 Responses to GRAND TOURING: Kanto

  1. cesariojpn said:

    Where are the Pokemon?

  2. Beans said:

    Eye spy an orange mazda behind the white celica, any pics to confirm? 🙂

  3. chestercopperpot said:

    Great write up and photos! I really want a Type 31 Cedric now.

  4. Nigel said:

    I saw an MX41 in pic six, behind the old Honda.
    Once again Skorj you found some great old cars.

  5. Toyotageek said:

    I love these photo tours….. 😉

  6. The black CRX said:

    That Honda 1300 Coupe breaks my heart, but as always, an amazing journey. Thanks yet again, Skorj!

  7. Brandon said:

    I love these posts so much. Not only because of the awesome cars, but also for the neat photos of the countryside as well.

    • Skorj said:

      Thanks everyone. I try to show more than the usual cliche, and the stuff of real Japan, at least outside the cities, where there is always interesting stuff to find and explore.

  8. Thomas said:

    Oh, man, salvating over the Daihatsu and Honda s500. I’ve got just enough space in my garage for both, so PM me if you discover they are ever available for sale.

    • Skorj said:

      Well, the owner said he did not want to sell, but when I suggested a possible price for his S500, he asked for my keitai number and gave me his meishi. So I guess that would depend…

  9. Kevin said:

    Thanks for posting another adventure. Always a great read and photos. I really gotta plan a trip to Japan…

  10. Tyler said:

    Top notch adventuring. As much as I adore decay and rotting things, it’s kind of sad to see the rarer cars in such a state. Especially the S50 Skyline. Good to see the S500 in great condition.

  11. Iwakuni91 said:

    Back when gas was a buck fifty a gallon, my mom would take us on drives through the country just to “see what was there.” We would take turns calling out and spotting different makes and models. Even now I’ll take the long way home from work just to ride by a favorite car. Keep up the good work JNC.

  12. Parrot said:

    I’m with Toyotageek. Your travelogues are always highly anticipated and greatly enjoyed.

  13. I also love these photo tours, keep them coming! 😉

  14. César said:

    ¡¡¡Saludos desde Santiago de Chile!!!

    Nice images, and the cars are so beautiful…always i like the old cars form the 60’s and 70’s (y have a Chevy 78). In my city i see a nice Mitsubishi Sapporo the other day, and a pretty Celica ’75 GT.

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New Big Band Jazz Fest for 2010!

Fort Wayne Big Band Jazz Fest 2010While established jazz festivals are closing down one right after another it seems, it is a breath of fresh air when we here of a new jazz festival getting started!

The Fort Wayne Big Band Jazz Fest 2010 is just that! This one day festival will launch June 26th in Fort Wayne Indiana and will feature several regional big band performances throughout the day that will be FREE for the public as well as a festival all star band for the featured evening concert.

The Mark Van Cleave Jazz Orchestra is hosting the event and will certainly be present musically as well.

2010 Fort Wayne Big Band Jazz Fest

Allen County Public Library
900 Library Plaza
Fort Wayne, Indiana

How to Keep a Festival Afloat

Press Room at the Montreal Jazz Festival

A few days ago, Arnold Jay Smith reported on the music at the Montreal Jazz Festival. But now he looks behind the scenes, and tells us how a huge jazz festival stays afloat in the current economic crisis.

“So how do you like our new digs?” That replaced “bon jour” as a greeting by Andre Menard, co-founder and Artistic Director of the Montréal Jazz Festival. “I have been running around this place making sure of everything.” “Everything” included the new press floor in the “Canadian government’s anniversary present to us, an entire building, with a 60-year lease.”

The spacious 2nd floor of this former warehouse just off Place des Arts, the site of the festival is now Festival International de Jazz de Montréal permanent headquarters. There is a new nightclub on the ground floor, L’Astral, where jazz will be presented throughout the year, as well as a restaurant. The club replaces the Spectrum, the converted movie theatre that was torn down last winter. “We leased the [Spectrum] property for 25 years and we wanted to buy it and redevelop it. We spent three years and C$1.5 million to redevelop the Spectrum. We were supposed to be given first refusal, but we somehow got by-passed and lost it to another bidder,” Menard said. The lot is now a mound of rubble, an eyesore of a construction site, as the new owners have run into financial difficulties.

“The plan is to convert the entire street [a block along St. Catherine near Place des Arts] into multi-use living and entertainment, including another tower for Complex de Jardins,” he explained. “But that guy [who owns those properties] is pretty tough; he’s not giving in so fast. It’s all paid for so he’s in no hurry to sell.”

Finances were my main topic of conversation, what with the overcast economic atmosphere. The lead sponsors over the span of time I have been visiting FIJM –more than a decade—have gone the way of government banishment: tobacco (du Maurier cigarettes), alcohol (LaBatt Breweries), or, and finally, General Motors. “Alcan Rio Tinto is our second level sponsor so [we were looking] for a lead sponsor,” Menard explained. They later announced that TD (Toronto Dominion Bank) would be the replacement for GM. “Understand that, as this is the main cultural event in Canada, if we didn’t replace GM a lot of people would have been in trouble,” Menard said.

The FIJM not only set in motion a regular jazz presentation in Montréal, it also allowed clubs to open, music stores selling instruments, CDs and live performances to flourish and eventually encouraged others in Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver to support their own festivals. “[Losing FIJM] would certainly cause a serious economic gap,” Menard opined. FIJM is the largest in the world and encompasses about a half-mile square of streets closed to vehicular traffic in the center of town, much more this year if you include Stevie Wonder’s 200,000+ attendance record.

“We have been going through some changes, not only recent economic developments, but the government clamp downs on smoking and beer,” Menard said. When asked if this or any other festival can survive without corporate sponsorship, Menard shook his head vigorously. “Not at all,” he said. “We depend on sponsorship. We can always reduce its size, cut out the big acts. But we are not in the business of downsizing the festival. We strive to keep it the size it is. We can’t grow much in size either. We’ve matured to what we are. There are still corporations who want the identification with us. We have proved that we are a very good vehicle for branding.”

I asked specifically about JVC’s pulling out, a brand compatible with jazz festivals. “Perhaps [the JVC Festivals] just outlived its usefulness [for them] on some level,” Menard said. “After a while a sponsor may think that it is being taken for granted, that they go unnoticed by the public. These corporations do research and the have very precise measurements as to what is profitable and what is not. I can’t analyze it, as it is too far from my reality.”

Save for the vaunted Stevie Wonder Spectacular, attendance was unimpressive to these eyes probably due to regular rainfall for the entire first week. Menard said otherwise. He thought that the box offices were the same as last year. In the final analysis the official boilerplate press release stated that the goal of C$5.1 million was reached, and with “sales of tourist packages, sales at souvenir boutiques and food and beverage kiosks increased.” “Breaking even these days is a major accomplishment,” he quipped. Profits—the festival is a not-for profit—go into a contingency fund against disasters such as a complete rainout. “We have other disaster insurance, such as for the Stevie Wonder,” whom, he said, “did not cost as big dollars as you might expect.” Menard said that the press reports of C$1million for the show, “were not true. It cost us less that half that. It cost us the going rate for a medium size arena [concert], and [Wonder] gave us more. It was good night for us and good night for himself, as well.”

All the United States artists get paid in US$, what with the fluctuating exchange rate this year. “The magic of the festival is that we do two festivals at the same time, inside and out. Inside it’s rehearsed, sound-checked and the artists get to do full sets. Outdoors is more jamming. However, we can’t do it without all the different acts. When we began, even George Wein discouraged us. It was all fusion. Then Wynton [Marsalis] happened. Since then we have diversified and jazz has become more influential. How do we sell it? How do jazz musicians get paid? That’s another story.”

What does FIJM do for an encore? “Joni Mitchell,” Menard snapped back. She is, after all, Canadian.

Jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard dead at 70

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — Influential jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard has died in Los Angeles aged 70, his spokesman said.

Hubbard, who played alongside legendary figures such as John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Art Blakey and Herbie Hancock, passed away in a Sherman Oaks, California hospital following complications from a heart attack suffered last month.

The Grammy-winning musician was renowned for his "hard bop" trumpet style found on several albums during the 1960s, most notably Ornette Coleman's "Free Jazz" and Coltrane's "Ascension." His trumpet-playing can be found in over 300 albums.

"He played faster, longer, higher and with more energy than any other trumpeter of his era," said fellow musician David Weiss.

Born in Indianapolis in 1938, Hubbard rose to fame after moving to New York at the age of 20, where his trademark improvisations and compositions quickly gained attention.

His breakthrough record, 1961's "Ready for Freddie", was the first of several successful collaborations with saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

Hubbard, who won a Grammy in 1972 for his album "First Light," was honored with the National Endowment for the Arts' Jazz Masters Award in 2006.

His last record, "On the Real Side," came out in June.

All About Jazz in Cape May for 30th Festival

Jon FaddisERMA -- Jon Faddis headlined the Friday night, Nov. 7 opening concert of the 30th Cape May Jazz Festival at Lower Cape May Regional High School Auditorium. He was backed by Atlantic City's Ed Vezinho/Jim Ward Big Band.

The set list was heavy on tunes made famous by the late Maynard Ferguson. The festival is a tribute to Ferguson.

Faddis thrilled the audience by hitting amazingly high notes on his trumpet. He played seated as a member of the 16-piece big band for much of the set.

Faddis was mentored by Dizzy Gillespie and played with Lionel Hampton and became lead trumpeter for the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Big Band. He also toured with the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras and played on over 500 albums.

The Ed Vezinho/Jim Ward Big Band played a rousing version of Ferguson's hit "Birdland" featuring Demetrios Pappas on keyboards and Jack Hegyi on bass.

The jazz festival continues through Sunday afternoon.

Saturday night's headliner concert features Pieces of a Dream performing at 8 p.m. at the high school auditorium. Free shuttle bus service is provided from Cape May where jam sessions begin at noon.

Concha Buika comes to the London Jazz Festival

The flamenco singer Concha Buika has a lust for life that makes Amy Winehouse look staid.

Concha Buika

Once heard, never forgotten. Concha Buika’s voice is one of the most glorious sounds to have emerged on the international stage in the past couple of years. All sorts of metaphors come to mind: blood-red wine, the sharpened blade of a knife, a cry of pain in a darkened church. The language barrier is really no hindrance at all. When you listen to the Spanish singer, you know instantly that you are in the presence of a rare talent.

She has a chance to convert a new audience this month when she appears at the London Jazz Festival, a season that has cannily expanded its range to include everything from the dub pioneer Dennis Bovell to the Afrobeat showman Femi Kuti (Fela's son) and that quirky string band Carolina Chocolate Drops. With its core audience increasingly made up of thirtysomethings feeling their way into jazz’s core repertoire, the event has made a virtue out of venturing to the periphery.

Ironically, despite being hailed as the queen of flamenco fusion, Buika thinks of herself as a jazz singer. Names of great American artists of the past — Coltrane, Ella, Dinah Washington and Betty Carter — are scattered through her conversation. We even devote part of our interview, conducted on a hotel terrace with a serene view of the Lisbon skyline, to a discussion about the relatively obscure Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen. Buika is infatuated with his music.

There are lots of things she loves, in fact. This is a woman who exudes passion and fire, who bursts into volcanic roars of gap-toothed laughter every few minutes. You sense she crams a week’s living into every 24 hours. When she tries to find a way to describe how she approaches her vocation, she eventually opts for one of the oldest metaphors of them all: “Art is like — sorry for the expression — f***ing,” she says in heavily accented English. “When I sing to you, I want to be inside you. That’s what films do, that’s what literature does. That’s music.”

Buika’s background is every bit as colourful as her philosophy of life. Born in Palma de Mallorca, she was raised in a poor, all-white neighbourhood where gypsy music and flamenco were part of the soundtrack of the streets. Her father, a left-wing activist and writer from equatorial Africa, returned home when she was still a child, leaving his six offspring to be raised in a strongly matriarchal atmosphere. (Her left arm bears the names, tattooed in her tribal language, of her mother, grandmother, aunts, sisters and nieces. “My muses,” she explains.)

Singing was a natural part of daily existence; her mother had a love for the recordings of Charles Aznavour, Sinatra and Miles Davis. In a house full of friends and music, Buika learnt to play guitar, piano and bass. More recently, she has taken up the cello.

Her career began when one of her aunts, a singer, pulled out of a local engagement and asked her to take her place. In the years that followed, Buika led a footloose existence, recording dance singles, playing all sorts of gigs and, at one stage, relocating to London and — believe it or not — Slough. Eight years ago, she even went to Las Vegas, where she found a niche as a Tina Turner tribute singer.

The mother of a young son, she was once part of a bisexual ménage à trois. All in all, she makes Amy Winehouse seem almost staid.

In retrospect, she sees her wanderings as part of a quest: “My voice is older than me. She was waiting for me. I wasn’t ready before.” She begins to laugh again. “Thank God, after 36 years, I see myself in the mirror and I recognise myself. That’s success.”

Her career hit its stride when she was taken under the wing of the renowned producer and songwriter Javier Limon — best known for overseeing the hit album Lagrimas Negras, a collaboration between the elderly Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes and the charismatic flamenco singer known as El Cigala. Buika’s 2005 album Mi Niña Lola proved a runaway success, Limon providing an elegant, jazz-tinged backdrop for the singer’s mesmerising vocals. Think of Billie Holiday mixed with a hint of the 1980s pop star Sade, and the spirit of the buleria, and you have some idea of the album’s range. The follow-up release, Niña de Fuego — which features a striking nude photograph of Buika on the cover — is every bit as accomplished.

She seems unaffected by all the attention. Working with Limon, she says, involves none of the usual record-label compromises. When she was first making her way in the world, she got used to tucking her wages down the front of her dress. Not much seems to have changed since then. What matters, she says, is “living with an open heart”.

Not that she neglects the technical side. Studying the cello is part of a mission to push herself as hard as she can as an artist and songwriter. She has no time for vocalists who do not trouble themselves with theory: “They complain there is a machismo in the music world. Then you ask, do you know about harmony? No. Do you compose? No. Do you play an instrument? No. I love the freedom playing an instrument brings. Can you imagine if, any time you needed to write, you had to ask someone to come to your house with a pencil? You are in jail. You are enslaved to someone.”

Concha Buika plays the QEH, SE1, on November 20; 0871 663 2505, www.londonjazzfestival.org.uk

The 29th edition of the Montreal International Jazz
Festival breaks records

Montreal International Jazz FestivalMONTREAL — The 29th edition of the Montreal International Jazz Festival has established a number of records, organizers said Monday.

Despite a rain-filled opening weekend, the annual festival sold a record $4 million in food, beverages and other merchandise. For the first time, the jazz fest sold $6 million in tickets and average attendance to its shows hit 80 per cent.

Festival organizer Alain Simard has promised a number of special events for the 2009 instalment.

Simard says he hopes to lure Joni Mitchell, who hasn't played in Montreal in 40 years, out of retirement.

Marcus Belgrave Octet to perform at Festival of the Fork

Ornette Coleman

The Festival of the Forks is pleased to announce that the Marcus Belgrave Octetwith vocalist Joan Bow will be theSaturday night headliner on Saturday, September 20 at 8 p.m. at the Victory Park band shell.

Since 2001 Marcus Belgrave has led his Tribute to Louis Armstrong octet, appearing in thirty states, Canada andPuerto Rico and playing Armstrong's music in pops programs with the Detroit Symphony and other US orchestras.

As a soloist, Marcus continues to travel the US for appearances at jazz festivals, night clubs and concert hall performances. In January 2006 he was featured on three concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center's presentation Detroit: Motor City Jazz, later broadcast on National Public Radio.

In recognition of his outstanding artistry, vision, and life-long achievement in jazz education, Marcus Belgrave is the recipient of numerous honors including the Arts Midwest Jazz Master Award, the Michigan Governor's Arts Award, and the Louis Armstrong Award.

Pulitzer-winning Ornette Coleman performs at S.F. Jazz Festival

Ornette ColemanRAVE REVIEWS come a dime a dozen. Most artists can show off a big portfolio of glowing press clips — yet how many can say they've won a Pulitzer Prize?

One of the few, Ornette Coleman is set to perform once again as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival on Sunday at the Masonic Center in San Francisco.

It's been a mighty big year for the saxophone master — not only did he win the Pulitzer for his "Sound Grammar" CD but he also scored a Lifetime Achievement Grammy.

Coleman, however, is far from ready to just sit back and rest on his impressive laurels. His set at last month's Monterey Jazz Festival was one of the weekend's most adventuresome and fulfilling moments.

Showtime is 7 p.m. Tickets are $25-$80. The Nob Hill Masonic Center is at 1111 California St. Call 866-920-JAZZ or visit http://www.sfjazz.org.

Washington Bars US Artists from International Jazz Festival in Cuba

Cuban International Jazz FestivalHavana, September 7 (acn) Cuba's Culture Minister Abel Prieto announced on Thursday that the US blockade obstructs the participation of renowned American jazz players in the Varadero Jam Session International Jazz Festival that began on Thursday in the central province of Matanzas.

"I'm sure that many of them would have liked to participate in this event but the arbitrary laws of the Bush Administration obstruct these cultural ties," he said.

Prieto recalled that before George W. Bush took office many Cuban and US artists were able to exchange their experiences and art in different events, but all this has been cancelled, he noted.

The Cuban official participated, along with Tourism Minister Manuel Marrero and the President of the festival Maestro 'Chucho' Valdes, in the opening of the Jam Session event.

Renowned Cuban and foreign artists are participating in the Jam Session Festival, which is intended to take place every other year in Varadero, alternating with other jazz events such as the Jazz Plaza and the JoJazz.

Jam Session will run until next Sunday at the Plaza America Convention Center, the House of Music and other cultural and tourist centers in Varadero.

Cuban Jazz Festival to Showcase Renowned Musicians

Chucho ValdesThe Jam Session Jazz Festival, to be held next September 6-9 in the locality of Varadero, central Matanzas province, will count on the participation of renowned Cuban musicians headed by maestro Chucho Valdes.

The list of jazz players include Jose Luis Cortes, the Lopez Nussa brothers Ernan and Harold, Bobby and Robertico Carcasses, the Sexto Sentido band among others who won the JoJazz contest, as well as many international figures.

The Jam Session Festival, which was born as a cooperation project between the Cuban ministries of Culture and Tourism, expects to alternate with the biennial international event known as Jazz Plaza which is attended by prestigious Cuban and international Jazz figures.

Concerts will take place at the Plaza America Conventions Center, the Piano Bar, the Mambo Club, all in Varadero, plus the Cardenas and the Sauto movie theaters, in the central province.

Jam Session will offer the opportunity both for musicians and the public to enjoy and evaluate the best of Jazz, said experts with the Cuban Music Institute.

Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83

August 16, 2007

Max RoachMax Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today at his home in New York. He was 83.

His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be ill for several years.

As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.

Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the confines of jazz as that word is generally understood.

He led a “double quartet” consisting of his working group of trumpet, saxophone, bass and drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble consisting entirely of percussionists. He dueted with uncompromising avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by Sam Shepard and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists, gospel choirs and hip-hop performers.

Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: “You can’t write the same book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.”

He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop.

He was not the first drummer to play bebop — Kenny Clarke, 10 years his senior, is generally credited with that distinction — but he quickly established himself as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern jazz and the most influential.

In Mr. Roach’s hands, the drum kit became much more than a means of keeping time. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply as a supporting player.

Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song’s melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it, “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His approach “initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but quickly earned the respect of his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.

Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.”

In 1972, he became one of the first jazz musicians to teach full time at the college level when he was hired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Maxwell Roach was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in the small town of New Land, N.C., and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began studying piano at a neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up the drums a few years later.

Even before he graduated from Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz musicians knew his name. As a teenager he worked briefly with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.

By the middle 1940’s, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, working in the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years he had become equally ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949 and 1950.

He also found time to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an interview, but changed his mind after a teacher told him his technique
was incorrect. “The way he wanted me to play would have been fine if I’d been after a career in a symphony orchestra,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have worked on 52nd Street.”

Mr. Roach made the transition from sideman to leader in 1954, when he and the young trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group, which specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that came to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was short-lived.

In June 1956, at the height of the Brown-Roach quintet’s success, Brown was killed in an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the group’s pianist, and Powell’s wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader, Mr. Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking from which it took him years to emerge.

Nonetheless, he kept working. He honored his existing nightclub bookings with the two surviving members of his group, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the bassist George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and putting together a new quartet. By the end of the 50’s, seemingly recovered from his depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.

The personnel of Mr. Roach’s working group changed frequently over the next decade, but the level of artistry and innovation remained high. His sidemen included such important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist, making for a distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach’s drums were prominent.

Always among the most politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach had helped the bassist Charles Mingus establish one of the first musician-run record companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport Jazz Festival’s treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” which played variations on the theme of black people’s struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.

The album, which featured vocals by Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach’s frequent collaborator and, from 1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews: many critics praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical. Mr. Roach was undeterred.

“I will never again play anything that does not have social significance,” he told Down Beat magazine after the album’s release. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.”

“We Insist!” was not a commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach to broaden his scope as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with choreographers, filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on projects, including a stage version of “We Insist!”

As his range of activities expanded, his career as a bandleader became less of a priority. At the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand of small-group jazz began to diminish. By the time he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to seem an increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of the musician’s life.

Joining the academy did not mean turning his back entirely on performing. In the early ‘70s, Mr. Roach joined with seven fellow drummers to form M’Boom, an ensemble that achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use of xylophones, chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later in the decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members — the saxophonist Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater — would perform and record with him off and on for more than two decades.

He also participated in a number of unusual experiments. He appeared in concert in 1983 with a rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of break dancers. A year later, he composed music for an Off Broadway production
of three Sam Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie Award. In 1985, he took part in a multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the stage director George Ferencz.

Perhaps his most ambitious experiment in those years was the Max Roach Double Quartet, a combination of his quartet and the Uptown String Quartet. Jazz musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but rarely if ever in a setting like this, where the string players were an equal part of the ensemble and were given the opportunity to improvise. Reviewing a Double Quartet album in The Times in 1985, Robert Palmer wrote, “For the first time in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any saxophonist or drummer.”

This endeavor had personal as well as musical significance for Mr. Roach: the Uptown String Quartet’s founder and viola player was his daughter Maxine. She survives him, as do two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and two sons, Raoul and Darryl.

By the early ‘90s, Mr. Roach had reduced his teaching load and was again based in New York year-round, traveling to Amherst only for two residencies and a summer program each year. He was still touring with his quartet as recently as 2000, and he also remained active as a composer. In 2002 he wrote and performed the music for “How to Draw a Bunny,” a documentary about the artist Ray Johnson.

New Orleans still on trumpeter's mind

Terence BlanchardThe music on Terence Blanchard's new album strikes close to home for the New Orleans trumpeter -- it was inspired by Hurricane Katrina.

Blanchard's latest album, "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)," comes directly out of the plight of the post-hurricane Crescent City and is an outgrowth of Blanchard's work on Spike Lee's acclaimed HBO documentary "When the Levees Broke."

"We had all this material we couldn't use," in the film, says Blanchard, who was teaching at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles and got his wife and four children out of New Orleans just before the hurricane hit. The family has subsequently returned to the city.

"The record was reliving the whole thing for me in a lot of regards, of course. It put me back in that space, stories friends told me they endured. I'm not gonna lie to you; it was hard."

Despite the personal nature of the project, Blanchard says the members of his band helped considerably with the arrangements and orchestrations on the album.

© 2005-2009 JazzFestivalList.com

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Friday, April 07, 2006

Python Tutorial Wiki

Fredrik Lundh put the Python tutorial in a Wiki. One week later it he's seen 175 edits. It's probably the most important Python documentation project going. There haven't been 175 edits to the tutorial in the last five years.

For years, I maintained that Python's documentation tools were just fine. People suggested all sorts of new tools and gimmicks, and I thought that they didn't improve on what we already had. Sure, Latex is hard to format and the tools are a little cumbersome, but writing documentation is hard, so surely the tools aren't the issue. (See stop energy and space-program architecture discussions.)

I'm happy to see I was completely wrong. Removing barriers to entry is critical for this kind of collaboration. Every barrier turns away a few people until you're left with a few people who are committed but too busy to do anything. The Alternative Python Reference has exactly the right goals

Jay Parlar said...

I've been responsible for a lot of those edits (usename 'Baseline'). I've always just thought there was something very nice about wikis, especially for pages that people aren't really using *yet*.

It's nice to be able to make changes here and there to the tutorial, and know that there's some time for commentary and re-edits on them before they hit the "mainstream" (ie.

Hopefully we'll keep getting more people helping out (as there are some sections that need massive rewrites), and maybe build something that can use.

Oh, and full props to Fredrik for getting this going. If it had been anyone else, probably no one would have followed, but having one of the *bots behind the project helps get it noticed.

Connelly said...

Looks like it's no longer a wiki that "anyone can edit" on the EFFbot site.


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The Future of Reading

Via Newsweek:

It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or “For Dummies” guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can’t be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

“The book,” says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet commerce giant, “just turns out to be an incredible device.” Then he uncorks one of his trademark laughs.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally–he’s a big reader, and his wife is a novelist–he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. “Books are the last bastion of analog,” he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We’re in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world’s largest virtual store. “Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn’t.” Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0.


text:
human tendency

Fun Acronyms for Agile Software Development

By | Blog, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

Alphabet Soup

Many of people are familiar with the acronym WYSIWYG = What you see is what you get. It’s a great pneumonic device that describes the expectations people have, versus the product they get. As it turns out, there are a few other great acronyms that describe human behavior patterns in the world of software.

WILIWIK (pronounced “willy-wick”) = “What I like is what I know”. In a technology context, this could mean “I am going to use Java to build this widget. Java is the best. Granted, Java is all I know, but I am fully convinced it is the best, because I don’t like to try new things”. In a business context, this would refer to any general resistance to change: “We’ve always issued a cover sheet for the TPS reports. That’s the best way to do it. Implementing a new policy of optional cover sheets will never work in this company. I like the way I do my job, because it’s the way I’ve always done my job.”

IKIWISI  (pronounced “icky-wissy”) = “I’ll know it when I see it”. This refers to the human pattern of wanting something, but having a hard time pinning down the specifics. “I know I want a website that makes me look cool. I’m not quite sure what that means, but I’ll know it when I see it. So…when could you have that built for me?”

YAGNI  (pronounced “yag-nee”) = “You aren’t going to need it”. This is a response to the human tendency to want to support every possible scenario that might potentially happen. “We need to build that laptop out of rubber, in case it gets hit by lightning.” It sounds like a good idea during the due diligence phase of a project, but really, how often are you going to be typing feverishly outdoors, in the open rain, in a thunderstorm?

GEFN (prounounced, “gefen”) = “Good enough for now”. Similar to the previous phrase, this comment reminds us that we don’t need to build a Cadillac every time. “Yes, I know you want our toy website to have a video over happy children playing with the toy…for each and every product we sell. But the CEO thinks having only 1 video on the home page is good enough to start selling toys, not that Christmas is only a few weeks away.”

WIIFM  (pronounced “wif-im”) = “What’s in it for me.” This is a sort of snide articulation of the need to make the business case for any idea you suggest. Technologists fall in love with their ideas, but often fail to explain why it makes good business sense. “Yes, I know you *want* to rebuild the entire Facebook website using Java (because we’ve already established that it’s the best), but you need to help Zuckerberg understand “What’s in it for me”.

WGLL  (pronounced “wiggle”) = “What good looks like”. When a team starts a new project from scratch there are a lot of unknowns. What does a good team dynamic look like for us? What does a stable infrastructure look like for us? What does a good product look like for us? When you get a little daunted by all the unknowns, it can be comforting if the team reminds itself that we are still “wiggling” towards goodness.

WDLL (pronounced “widdle”) = “What Done Looks Like”. This is from Liza’s comment below. If you ask a team of 7 people whether a feature is “done”, you’ll get at least 7 different answers. Does that include testing? Does that include the Spanish language version? Does that include the data backup? Does that include rolling it out to the integration environment? Sometimes, to clarify the difference of interpretation, you have to hold up a specific example and say “this feature is what-done-looks-lie”.

WSTL (pronounced “whistle”) = “Who shouts the loudest”. This tends to be the most popular way of deciding which features we build first. An agile environment is one that engages in regular re-prioritization of features in a project or projects in a portfolio. Most managers like to thing they have a rigorous methodology for choosing which stakeholder requests are important, and which can wait. But in reality, humans succumb to pressure, and often the loudest stakeholder is the one who gets the attention, regardless of whether their requests make any sense.

GASP (pronounced “gasp”) = “Generally Accepted Scrum Practice”. From Ram’s comment below, this describes the group of agile techniques that are added to the Scrum framework to make it more effective in various contexts. For example, User Stories are not a part of Scrum, but are a generally accepted practice to use with Scrum.

WHAT ABOUT YOU? What acronyms have you come across that describe the transition from traditional to agile ways of working?


text:
About Adam Fox

Luxury department store buyer, fashion writer, and lover of all things gay, Jewish, and/or Israeli (unless those things include Fire Island, whitefish salad, or dealing with Bank Hapoalim)

Would You Rather Be Gay in Uganda or Israel?

By January 14, 2010

Until about a week ago, the last time anyone thought about Uganda was either (1) never or (2) to convey a generic far away place that you would never want to visit. It’s sort of like saying Timbuktu but sounds … Read More

Soap Operas Take It Up the Ass

By January 5, 2010

You know ratings are bad when it takes gay sex on daytime soaps to grab the attention of muumuu-clad, couch-ridden housewives in Iowa. But in a bid to shake things up and recapture its ever-waning audience, the four-decade old One … Read More

What’s a Gay Jewish (Party) Boy to Do On Christmas Eve?

By December 29, 2009

Yids of the faygele variety know there are better ways to pay tribute to history’s most famous Jewish carpenter than with an order of deep fried cat from Peking Palace. It ruins all those hours spent at the gym competing … Read More


text:
Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Fun WIth Layering Wednesday: Gray by Gray and Star

Happy Wednesday? I've got one more final left to take tomorrow and some end of semester work to finish this week and then I can breathe for like one minute haha. Next week I start more classes and the 2 baseball radio and webshows I co-host start up. Phew! But I do have a cool thing planned for this weekend - it looks like Mimi from Makeup Withdrawal and I may be meeting up for a nail polish playdate!

I've got another Fun With Layering Wednesday post for you today, using Sally Hansen - Gray by Gray from the Complete Salon Manicure line. In case you want to check it out on it's own and missed my post about it the other day, here is the link.

I used two coats of Revlon - Star overtop of Gray by Gray. I think the glitter in Star really works well with Gray by Gray, the colors work really nicely together. I'm not super into the random hex glitter in the polish, I need to figure out a way to make it a little more symmetrical or something next time I use it. The polish Star has special meaning for me though, a few months ago when one of my cats Starlight passed away, a really really sweet MUA-er sent me this polish to cheer me up. She included a poem and a little note with it too which was so wonderful. Do you have any polishes with special meanings to you like I do with Revlon - Star?

1 comment:

  1. Funny, I actually LIKE the random hex glitter! Looks great. :-)

    I do have a special polish. My dad passed away in November from cancer. In the last months of his life, he jokingly chose colors for me, my stepsis and my stepmom from an Avon catalog. For me, he chose "Jade," a seafoam/minty green. I call it Thunderbird Green, since it looks like a classic car color, and he was car enthusiast.


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This image was lost some time after publication.

This year, for the first time, any woman of childbearing age looking to work for the U.S. Antarctic Program has to take a pregnancy test. Testing positive means you won't get hired or will get sent home. Is that legal?

It's complicated.

About 3,000 people work in Antarctica through the USAP, which is managed by the National Science Foundation. The support staff hired by Raytheon, a private contractor make up the majority of the employees, working shifts that range from four to six months to one-year contracts.

This year, a memo went out from the NSF detailing a new policy that expanded on what would render you NPQ, or "not physically qualified." All women deemed of childbearing age would have to test negative for pregnancy before being hired. Here's the rationale:

Because clinics at U.S. stations are not equipped or staffed to provide adequate prenatal care, manage obstetric emergencies, or perform abortions, medical evacuation may be necessary. There are few transportation options during the isolated Antarctic winter. Consequently, pregnancy puts not only the mother and unborn child at risk but also the flight crews and other station personnel.

Acting on the recommendation of a medical review panel that met in May 2010, women applicants are now tested for pregnancy, one to two weeks before departing. If you refuse to be tested, you won't be hired. And if you get pregnant while there, according to the FAQ, "Contract employees would be considered contract complete, compensated for the work that has been done, and put on the first available flight." In the interim, "We'll do our best to manage the situation. Our clinics have limited capabilities and pregnancy poses a risk to the mother and unborn child. This risk also impacts all station personnel and flight crew. There are circumstances where a medevac is not possible no matter how dire the need."

But a tipster who has worked in the program in the past told us the policy has upset support staff, who know at least two women who were pregnant in Antarctica without known incident. She asked us whether it was legal for these employers, the NSF or its various contractors, to discriminate against women who were pregnant.

We checked in with Lenora Lapidus, director of the Women's Rights project at the ACLU. While pregnant women are a protected class under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, there are certain exceptions that fall under the clause, "Women who are pregnant or affected by pregnancy-related conditions must be treated in the same manner as other applicants or employees with similar abilities or limitations." In other words, if the NSF were found to be treating other people with different physical conditions or limitations — i.e., unable to care for them — then they couldn't be said to be discriminating against pregnant women.

We asked a representative for the NSF to clarify whether other medical conditions would be accommodated, and they wrote us, "Individuals cannot deploy if they do not meet the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) medical standards, which are set by an external panel of physicians familiar with the limited medical-care capabilities in Antarctica and the harsh and unpredictable environmental conditions encountered while working on that continent." The details of those medical standards remain vague.

"I have some questions about how exactly they do apply this to other medical conditions to ensure that pregnant women are not being treated differently from other individuals," said Lapidus. She also wondered what would happen if a woman chose to terminate her pregnancy if she tested positive before deployment, since the FAQ asks whether one can be retested and then doesn't answer that question. Also, "What happened to the people who have been pregnant there before? Did it actually pose risks and were they able to handle it?"

Historically, exploring the Antarctic frontier was a male-dominated activity — in 1968, Admiral James Reedy called it "the womanless white continent of peace." The first women who set foot there were the wives of explorers and whalers, and for decades women's applications were rejected. The U.S. station commander in 1959 said he thought his men wouldn't want women there. "I think the presence of women would wreck the illusion of the frontiersman — the illusion of being a hero." Another senior naval officer said, "There are no facilities for them down there. Every man who is down there is working to capacity on what is essential work. To ask them to turn around and build suitable accommodations for women when it is not strictly necessary would be asking too much of them." He was talking about bathrooms.

According to a blog post by a doctor deployed to Antarctica (since removed), no babies have been born on the U.S. base, though several have been born on the Chilean and Argentine stations. An Australian report on women's health in Antarctica quoted a doctor saying, "No one wants to become pregnant down there, no one wishes a baby to be born down there. I think it would just put that much bigger burden on the station and the station medical officer." Seven pregnancies have been recorded on that base between 1989 and 2006; the USAP declined to give its own figures.

Frequently Asked Questions About Winter-Over Pregnancy Screening [UPAP, pdf]


text: Who the hell brainstormed this insane piece of fuckery? Seriously. Someone greenlit this idea. Someone hired not one but three actors: A "mom," a "daughter," and a "Brit" for the voiceover. Someone found a bedroom location. Someone created a fake storybook. Someone chose the wardrobe, created the soft, "regular folks at bedtime" lighting scheme. Someone thinks Kate Middleton is a "young girl." Someone believes Kate and Prince William "decided" to get married "in front of the whole world," when it's fairly clear that they don't have a choice and didn't invite the global press outlets covering the nuptials. Someone wrote copy in which an innocent child asks of the royal wedding, "Will Matt, Meredith, Al and Ann be there?" Someone spent money on 30 seconds of utter nonsense. Someone is completely delusional.


text:
Rashida Jones is the daughter of two celebrities, Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton, but that doesn't mean her childhood was weird. Like the rest of us, Rashida had a friend who always pushed her to play dumb pranks. The only difference is that for her, the kid from down the block happened to be the King of Pop. In Playboy she remembers a typical play date with MJ:

"He was definitely a little bit of an alien, for sure, and when I was young, it felt as if he was my age, not 18 years older, but with just a little bit more pep ... Later, we'd go out on the town together. He always wore those surgical masks. Once, my sister, Michael, Emmanuel Lewis and I got in a car with Super Soakers and went by a movie theater and supersoaked the hell out of people waiting in line. They had no idea they'd just been supersoaked by the King of Pop."


text:
Jim Carrey Online
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Earth Girls Are Easy
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What's it about

Valerie Dale (Geena Davis) is mystified. A sweet young manicurist from California's San Fernando Valley, Valerie is engaged to marry Dr. Ted Gallagher, (Charles Rocket). But Ted suddenly seems preoccupied and distant -- and none too romantic.

Valerie decides to consult her best friend and boss, Candy Pink (Julie Brown), a propietor of the Curl Up & Dye beauty salon. Candy is a woman of the world who understands men and glamour and all the manner of mysterious things near and dear to the hearts of Valley Girls.

Candy's reaction is immediate: Ted's langor calls for drastic action. Valerie needs a total make over -- to become a Brand New Girl. Candy persuades val to forget her planned trip to the Nail Expo -- it's time to surprise Ted with a knockout new look!

What Candy and company don't know is that a brand new girl is just what Ted had in mind -- but he's singing his own version of the same song. Ted laments with his friends about the tempting females that dog his every step. Its clear that trouble is brewing for the innocent Valerie.

Later that evening, Val's transformation to glamour queen is complete; her stage is set with champagne and romantic music, and she's ready to spring out of the closet into Ted's arms as he walks into their house.

Earth Girls Are Easy

Unfortunately, he walks in with a voluptuous nurse, and Val lands in HER arms instead.

Val angrily throws Ted and his date out of the house and proceeds to demolish every reminder of Ted's presense in her life. Clothing, trophies, photos, records -- everything is trashed before Val washes away her temporary "glamour" and cries herself to sleep.

The next morning, Val lies by her swimming pool morosely, thinking about her about her broken engagement and wondering if life could get any worse. Her complications are only beginning.

High above the Earth, a spaceship from planet Jhazzala hovers. The ship's captain (Jeff Goldblum) sleeps while the other two crew members (Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans) tinker with a holographic video of Jhazzalan go-go dancers that won't play properly. It's clear they haven't seen women -- from any planet -- in a long time.

Suddenly their navigation receptors catch sight of Valerie in her backyard. The aliens go wild and begin to fight over access to the screen. During their skirmish the ship goes out of control, the captain wakes up, and the three space creatures futilely try to avert a crash-landing in Valerie's swimming pool.

Val is, of course, astonished, and then terrified. But the aliens are no less terrified. They are covered with fur, which amazes her; she is hairless, which amazes them. During their shakey introductions, Val accidently floods the spaceship, making it impossible for the aliens to leave.

Once her fear of the aliens abates, Val feels terrible about flooding their ship, and she invites them inside while she calls to have the pool drained. Woody (Michael McKeane), Vals spaced-out pool man, accepts a flimsy explanation about the spaceship being a pool float, and drains the pool.

Earth Girls Are Easy

At the same time, the aliens have a real adventure experiencing the contents of Val's house, which is already in a state of wild disarray.

Valerie's biggest problem is concealing the aliens until their ship dries out. Their coloful furriness makes that nearly impossible, but Val has an idea: she smuggles the trio into the Curl Up & Dye and convinces Candy to defoliate them. The results are astonishing -- three hunky human guys emerge!

The ever-enegetic Candy decides that she and Valerie should take these guys on a date -- after all, it's Saturday night. Zeebo, Wiploc, and Mac eagerly assent, and off they go on a musical tour of Valley life, seen through the eyes of three aliens from Jhazzala.

Needless to say, cultural hitches abound, but Zeebo and Wiploc do get to meet American girls and Mac and Valerie unwittingly fall in love. The two share a romantic night where Mac introduces Val to the JHazzalan "love touch," to ensure that she and Ted will re-unite and marry.

But the love touch doesn't work. Val breaks away from Ted and calls to the departing ship. Mac is the Mr. Right she's been looking for and wants to go to Jhazzala with him. As a astonished Ted, Woody the pool man, Candy, and nosy nieghbor Mrs. Merkin (June Ellis) looks on, Valerie climbs aboard and sails off to a new life and love in the stars.

"Earth Girls Are Easy," a Vestron pictures release, stars Geena Davis, Jim Carrey, Damon Wayans, and Jeff Goldblum. Directed by Julien Temple, the picture introduces Julie Brown and co-stars Michael McKeane, Charles Rocket, Larry Linville, Rick Overton, and Angelyne. Tony Garnett is the producer. Screenplay by Julie Broown, Charlie Coffey and Terrence McNally. Musical score by Nile Rodgers.

With thanks to Cotton

Production Companies De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
Earth Girls
Kestrel Films
Distributor Vestron Pictures Ltd.
Director Julien Temple
Writers Julie Brown
Charlie Coffey
Terrence E. McNally
Producer Tony Garnett
Associate Producer Terrence E. McNally
Composer Nile Rodgers
Cinematographer Oliver Stapleton
Editor Richard Halsey
Cast List Geena Davis
Jeff Goldblum
Jim Carrey
Damon Wayans
Julie Brown
Michael McKean
Charles Rocket
Larry Linville
Rick Overton
Diane Stilwell
June C. Ellis
Felix Montano
Rick Hurst
Leslie Morris
Lisa Fuller
Stacey Travis
Nicole Kramer
Wayne 'Crescendo' Ward
Tita Omeze
T.C. Diamond
Victor Garron
Steve Lundquist
Jory Husain
Jake Jundef
Susan Krebs
Lucy Lee Flippin
Gail Neely
Rob Large
Terrence E. McNally
April Giuffria
Cristy Dawson
Carol Infield Sender
Helen Infield Siff
Nedra Volz
Crystal Lujan
Ismael Aranjo Jr.
Kimberly Bond
Lisa Boyle
Myria Moore
Karen Owens
Sharon Owens
Larri Thomas
.....   Valerie
.....   Mac
.....   Wiploc
.....   Zeebo
.....   Candy
.....   Woody
.....   Ted
.....   Dr. Bob
.....   Dr. Rick
.....   Robin
.....   Mrs. Merkin
.....   Ramon
.....   Joe the Cop
.....   Mike the Cop
.....   Kikki
.....   Tammy
.....   Missy
.....   Demone
.....   Tanya
.....   Deca Dance Dancer
.....   Deca Dance Valet
.....   Body Factory Attendant
.....   Gas Girl
.....   Mini Mart Cashier
.....   Bryan
.....   Bryan's Mother
.....   Receptionist
.....   Head Nurse
.....   Boy in Body Cast
.....   Soap Opera Doctor
.....   Soap Opera Nurse
.....   Soap Opera Wife
.....   Amy
.....   Mamie
.....   Lana
.....   Mrs. Gurtzweiller
.....   Butch Girl
.....   Gardener
.....   Curl Up and Dye Dancer
.....   Curl Up and Dye Dancer
.....   Curl Up and Dye Dancer
.....   Curl Up and Dye Dancer
.....   Curl Up and Dye Dancer
.....   Curl Up and Dye Dancer

Movie Quotes

Wiploc: You have liplock for Wiploc?

Wiploc: You're tearing me apart!

An out-of-this-world, down-to-earth comedy adventure.

« Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Next »


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 Kancelaria JKS

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  • serving as local counsel in Poland
  • our team has strong links with foreign lawyers from
    the EU (Germany, Italy, France) and the US
Umowy gospodarcze

  • contracts drafting, with special regard
    to the construction business and FMCG
  • analysis and opinions on draft contracts,
    including tax-related issues
  • international and multiple-language
  • choice of law provisions in international
Postępowanie karne

  • defense in criminal cases,
    including criminal tax cases
  • representation of victims, subsidiary prosecutors
    and other parties in criminal cases
  • criminal tax issues analysis
Postępowanie karne

Tax expertise

  • tax planning
  • proceedings before tax authorities
  • representation in administrative courts proceedings
  • VAT refund proceedings

our team

JKS Adwokaci is a team of three experienced Partners, with the support of Associates and Of Counsel. Depending on the needs of your case, we regularly bring in paralegals and technical personnel. Together our team is able to master even the most complicated and challenging projects.

of counsel

  • First team photo

    Marta I. Jagła

    Advocate, a graduate of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (2005) and of the School of American Law, a joint program of Wrocław University and the Chicago-Kent College of Law (2012).

    Member of the Kraków Bar Chamber since 2007.

    Martha has several years
    of experience in legal practice having worked for numerous law offices
    in Krakow. She also worked
    as a in-house lawyer for the local supermarket chain, as well as for one of the biggest retail companies in the world. Martha has experience in drafting and analyzing contracts, primarily in the FMCG and construction industries. In addition, she has years of experience litigating family law cases.

    Marta speaks Polish and English.

    Michał P. Kaczmarzyk

    Advocate, a graduate of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (2005) and the School of American Law, a joint program of Wrocław University and the Chicago-Kent College of Law (2012).

    Member of the Kraków Bar Chamber since 2007.

    Michał concentrates his practice in civil litigation, with particular emphasis
    on commercial disputes in the construction industry. With prior experience as in- house counsel
    at a large construction company, Michał combines legal skills with
    a real-world business perspective.
    In addition, Michał has significant experience in cross-border litigation. On behalf of a European client which purchased a defective industrial machine, Michał led a team
    of international lawyers who filed
    a suit in the United States
    and obtained a favorable settlement in less than one year’s time. Within the EU, Michał has counseled international clients on matters involving property restitution, and has also advised cultural institutions and artists on commercial issues.

    Michał speaks Polish, English and French.

    Joanna D. Szpiega-Bzdoń

    Advocate, a graduate of Jagiellonian University in Kraków (2003), postgraduate Local Government Management studies at MISTiA (2005) and the 24th Course on Mediation at KSM(2005)

    Member of the Kraków Bar Chamber since 2008.

    Joanna built her career working for both public and private entities. She
    is a lecturer and has conductedmany in-house professional training sessions for NGOs. As a permanent mediator affiliated with the District Court in Kraków she has successfully mediated many civil, family and criminal cases. As a legal writer, Joanna has successfully focused attention on mob-related issues. She has also written on issues at the crossroads of criminology and labour law, particularly workplace violence and discrimination. Joanna
    received top honors in Kraków City Council essay contest, writing on "How To Effectively Prevent Domestic Violence–“NiebieskaKarta”(2004). She is experienced in international family law cases (Italy, France) and criminal proceedings.

    Joanna is a member of the Polish Kennel Club.

    Joanna speaks Polish and Italian.

  • Second team photo

    Richard H. Maurer

    Of Counsel, graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, DC (1993) and of the Juilliard School, New York, NY (1989).

    Admitted to practice law in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and before the Supreme Court of the United States. Before starting his own practice in 2011, Richard was elected Partner in a large law firm
    in Philadelphia. Richard has twenty years of litigation experience, ranging from the defense of product liability cases on behalf of Ford Motor Company, to defending shipyards and maritime contractors in personal injury and indemnity claims. Richard is also a published legal author,
    of works on Internet defamation and accessory liability. Richard is able
    to guide international clients through the procedural maze of US Courts, providing cost-effective ways
    to achieve favorable outcomes
    in a system where the quality
    of counsel is crucial to success.

    Richard speaks English and German.

We understand that success follows strategic growth.
Our team is open to discussions with all lawyers interested in growing
their practice through innovative cooperation.

We are ready to work with experienced lawyers,
from experts in their fields,
to new lawyers on the threshold of their career

Interested? Contact us at: kariera@jksadwokaci.pl

JKS Of Counsel, Richard Maurer, gets defense verdict in Philadelphia

+ more


text:
Assistant Professor - JRID47355

Submission Dates
Archive Date:
January 31, 2014
Deadline to Apply for Job:
January 31, 2014
Job Details
Job Category:
Faculty Positions (tenure and tenure-track)
Institution/Company Name:
Mount Allison University
Institution Classification/Type:
Small Academic
Submission Address for Resumes/CVs
Attention To:
Dr. David Fleming
Physics Department Head
Mount Allison University
Street Address Line 1:
62 York Street
Zip/Postal Code:
E4L 1E2
Contact Information For Inquiries About Job
Email Address for Inquiries:
Job Announcement Text:

The Physics Department at Mount Allison University invites applications for a tenure-track position, with primary responsibilities for teaching and research in the area of astronomy. Applicants must possess a Ph.D. in astronomy, astrophysics, or a closely related area, and have a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching and research. The successful candidate will teach courses in our undergraduate program in the areas of astronomy, astrophysics, and general physics. The successful candidate will have a rigorous research program capable of both attracting external funding and involving undergraduate students. Mount Allison University is a highly rated, primarily undergraduate institution with an active and diverse Physics Department. Mount Allison’s on-campus observatory offers opportunities for teaching, outreach, and some niche research. The ability to work in an observatory setting would be an asset. The appointment will be made at the rank of Assistant Professor and will commence on July 1, 2014, subject to budgetary approval. A complete application package will be submitted to Academic Jobs Online, The application will include a letter of application, curriculum vitae, statement of current and planned research, and statement of teaching interests and philosophy. Evidence of effective teaching is required. The application will include three letters of reference (uploaded directly by the referees themselves). The names and contact information for these three referees will be provided in the letter of application. Applications are due by January 31, 2014. For more information, please contact: Dr. David Fleming Physics Department Head Mount Allison University 62 York St. Sackville, New Brunswick E4L 1E2 Email: Mount Allison University welcomes diversity in the workplace and encourages applications from all qualified women and men, including aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities, and members of visible minorities. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents of Canada will be given priority. Canadian and permanent residents should indicate their citizenship status in their letter of application.

Included Benefits:

No benefits information has been provided by the employer.


text:
Senior Market Access Consultant - London

London, England
GBP45000 - GBP55000 per annum + negotiable
Apr 11, 2012
May 09, 2012
Amie Adams
Result Type
Position Type
Full Time

Senior Market Access Consultant - London - Pharmaceutical

A fantastic opportunity has arisen for a Market Access professional to join a global pharmaceutical services organisation based in London as a Senior Market Access Consultant.

This expanding, full range and highly successful company provide evidence based services and solutions to the life science industry in order to commercialise and develop their products in a wide variety of therapeutic areas including clinical, humanistic, economic outcomes and epidemiology.

As the Senior Market Access Consultant you will work with a team of writers on pharmaceutical market access projects including value dossiers/stories, literature reviews, analysis of landscapes and payer reports.

Key Responsibilities:

Act as project manager and provide leadership
Liaise regularly with clients and attend client meetings
Set deliverables
Liaise regularly with team members and review materials produced
Edit and perform quality assurance
Perform business development tasks

The role will require you to possess a relevant post graduate qualification, you must have a minimum of 5 years experience in a Market Access or Medical Writing role within a consultancy or agency environment and health economics or statistics knowledge would be highly advantageous. You should be an organised leader with excellent technical writing, project management and analytical skills and who is confident and comfortable in a client facing role.

This is an outstanding opportunity within a career driven and progressive organisation who offers excellent benefits including competitive salaries, a pension scheme, life assurance, private healthcare, private dental cover, income protection, performance based bonus schemes and a generous holiday entitlement.

Key Words - Consultancy, Pharmaceutical, Clinical, Medical Communications, Biotechnology, Life Science, Consultant, Market Access, Health Economics, HEOR, Medical Writer, Medical Writing, Evidence Based, Literature Review, London

For further information on the role or company please contact myself, Amie Adams at Paramount Recruitment on 0121 616 3473.
Paramount Recruitment Limited provides services as an agency and an employment business. We regularly have similar roles in this area. Please see our website for details or send your CV in to us to find out the latest opportunities.


text:
Johnny On The Spot Remodeling, Inc., (also known as JOTS) is a family owned and operated full service Home Repair and Remodeling contractor. Fully licensed, bonded and insured, Johnny is your #1 Contractor for home and commercial repairs. We offer many professional services for your home or commercial customers including but not limited to repairs, water damage, remodeling, hanging, finishing, all standard and custom hand textures, build outs, and new installs. Our team of professional craftsman are experts in the drywall trade, providing our customers with proven quality and cleanliness.

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Certified Residential Contractor

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Our Location–Johnny On The Spot Remodeling, Inc.

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Tel: 813.789.5715


text:
The playa in fall

fall playa 002 copyWe were traveling along Route 80, and for once, Reno seemed almost pretty, or at least the parts of it you see from the highway. In summer you can’t believe how ugly it is, the  big brown  hills of sun-blasted dirt.  But now you were noticing the scattered trees, leaves glowing bright yellow in the slanting noonday sun.

We had to be up in Reno for a couple of days, and we had the chance to squeeze in a side trip to the playa, and we took it. It seemed wrong never to have experienced the Black Rock Desert when there wasn’t a festival going on, and we were determined to rectify the situation.

Now the car is full of playa dust again, and it couldn’t smell sweeter.

Parts of the journey felt familiar. You felt the tightness in your stomach as you left the interstate at Wadsworth and headed out across the Indian land. There wouldn’t be any art or any music or any fire waiting for you at your destination, and all the amazing people weren’t going to be there, either, but it didn’t matter.  You felt the pull. It was just going to be you and the desert and the dust.

fall playa 001 copyBurning Man has always had a quality of aloneness to it. Yes, you are surrounded by 40,000 like-minded souls, and one of the reasons you go is to feel connection and community. But still, there are times when you are alone with yourself, and if you haven’t felt that sense of being a single, solitary person, even in the middle of that  huge party, maybe you haven’t gotten all there is to get at Burning Man. People come to escape the loneliness, but it finds them there, too. Moments, in between,  it finds you.

There were no black Nevada Highway Patrol cars lurking around, but still you slowed down in Nixon and Empire and then finally Gerlach.  Yellow highway signs reminded you to be cautious, because cattle might be crossing the road. This is an open range, after all.

But even  the spectacularly gorgeous fall day couldn’t make Gerlach seem anything but desolate. There was no crowd at the gas station, just the attendant, who was walking out in front of the pumps, hands plunged into the pockets of his denim overalls, and he was kicking pebbles as he shuffled along. It seemed an act of resignation. “This is what my life is,” he could be saying. “It’s lonesome and dull, and winter is coming on.”

It’s 55 degrees, not 105, and although the afternoon will warm up a bit, there’s a chill in the air.

fall playa 003 copyThe desert floor  looked different in the late fall. The surface seemed smoother and paler, like the salts from recent rains had risen to the surface. There was a delicate crust,  like a water truck had soaked the entire site, and everyone decided not to walk on it, just let it dry naturally. The crust is light and flaky and easily disturbed. Fragile.

And it made you wonder as you stood at the place where there had been flags and cones to guide you to Black Rock City. Did we really leave no trace?

It would appear so. Random tracks led off in all directions at the entrance to the desert, but these were from the random and occasional off-roaders who reclaim the desert after we’re gone. Everything looked clean and undisturbed.

But before you take any bows for conscientiousness and cleanliness, though, you’d want to hear from the Playa Restoration crew, which spent so many long weeks after the event making sure that things were left as we found them. (And as the JackRabbit Speaks has noted, Burning Man did pass the federal inspection standard of no more than a foot of MOOP for every acre surveyed.) I did my own little survey, out where I thought Center Camp had been. I walked maybe 30 yards in a rough circle, looking for anything that wasn’t native. I found two very small pieces of black plastic, and a tiny silver bauble that made me wonder what kind of costume it had fallen off of.
fall playa 004 copy
Out in the middle of the playa now, there was only silence. No wind, no dust, just silence. Things looked as they no doubt have looked for thousands of years. Peaceful. Timeless. Beautiful.

It made sense to head out across the playa, following slightly-worn tracks left by vehicles much better equipped for the desert than mine. There are signs at every desert entry warning that the playa becomes impassible when it is wet, and you should take those warnings seriously. But today the conditions were perfect; there had been rain to tamp everything down, and now it seemed fine to be barreling across the playa floor, out past where the perimeter fence would have been, hitting a fast-for-me but still pretty tame 60 mph, watching the huge dust plume stretching out behind.

I went to the base of the mountain you see to the southeast of Black Rock City and looked for the railroad crossing. I knew that’s where the Trego Hot Springs were, and I knew that the Frog Hot Springs were over there too.  As I crossed the railroad tracks, I noted the shotgun spray on the crossing sign and remembered again that yep, this is the wild West alright.

I never did find Trego, but I double-backed and found the Frog springs. There were plenty of signs of use: A wooden ladder descending into the first spring, and a fire pit, and a table, and a beat-up old stove that had seen plenty of fires.

The water was clear, warm and beafall playa 005 copyutiful. The nestling of trees surrounding the springs were turning gold, too, just like the ones outside Reno.

On my way out I noticed that someone had carved six-inch-high letters, deeply and seemingly angrily, into the permanently open wooden fence at the entrance to the springs. The letters spelled out  “homewrecker.”  I wondered about what had gone on there, who had hooked up with whom. But when I thought about the person who was blaming the hot springs for whatever had happened, I thought that the anger was misdirected. Whatever had happened didn’t have anything to do with the springs. My guess was that the situation was, as the health insurance people like to say, a pre-existing condition.

I tried to retrace my path across the desert, to go back exactly the way I had come in, but it was futile. There were too many random tracks, and it was easy to get waylaid. But there was plenty of light, and it was easy to figure out where I had to go.

By the time I finally reached the highway and headed back to Gerlach, the dust the car had raised had already settled. The desert was smooth and calm again.

Smooth and calm.  A good description of the overall mood. I’d had a couple of hours out there in the vastness, but now I wanted a couple of weeks.

fall playa 006 copy

About the author: John Curley

John Curley

John Curley (that's me) has been Burning since the relatively late date of 2004, and in 2008 I spent the better part of a month on the playa, documenting the building and burning of Black Rock City in words and pictures. I loved it, and I've been doing it ever since. I was a newspaper person In a previous life, and I spent many years at the San Francisco Chronicle. At the time I left, in 2007, I was the deputy managing editor in charge of Page One and the news sections of the paper. Since then, I've turned a passion for photography into a second career. I shoot for editorial, commercial and private clients, and I'm especially fond of shooting weddings. I'm also the editor at large of the Tasting Panel magazine, which is devoted to the beverage industry. I've also taught a bit, including two years at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and a year at San Francisco State University. I live on a (house)boat in Alameda, California.

17 Comments on “The playa in fall

  • Erick C. says:

    beautiful john! the desert always carries the spirit.

    Report comment

  • Dean says:

    This might stun you, but some of us don’t find tiny places “dull”, and don’t think the big brown hills of sunblasted dirt are “ugly”.

    Your milage may vary?

    Report comment

  • John Curley says:

    Hi Dean;

    I didn’t mean to equate “tiny” with “dull,” but I’m guessing my biases were revealed.

    As for the hills, well, you’re welcome to them. :)

    Thanks for taking the time to read, and to write. It’s much appreciated.

    Report comment

  • JV says:

    I’m with Dean; I think Reno’s natural surroundings are gorgeous. Like a moonscape.

    I’ve always wanted to make a trip to Black Rock Desert outside of Burning Man. Thanks for the post.

    Report comment

  • Andie Grace says:

    I’d like to go on record and state that I happen to find those particular hills rather beautiful too. Thanks for the post, John!

    Report comment

  • Will Chase says:

    to each his own, i reckon … i personally think those hills are durn pretty. and you’re right … there’s nothing quite like the playa in the off-season, that’s for sure. wonderful post john, thanks!

    Report comment

  • effin grea says:

    I think many of you may have focused in on the wrong message. If the only thing that you got out of this wonderful post (and a good idea) is that John hates brown hills and small towns then you should re-read the post and purchase your ticket as soon as possiable as you need a reminder that everyone has there own likes, dislikes, and sees beauty in differant places and things. i feel for me one of the many wonderful things about BM culture is that ( again for me) it is a culture of acceptance, tolerance, non judgemental, and NON Defensivness. I can’t wait to go home and be reminded of that for another year.( as some of you also need to be)

    Report comment

  • JV says:

    effin grea, you are a master of irony.

    Report comment

  • Rezl says:

    This was great, thanks for writing. :)

    Report comment

  • PelekitN says:

    Thank you for the lovely post and pictures. It’s always a journey returning to a place, smell or sensation of experience. In the end, it’s only the memory you keep with you…but the awareness you gain is priceless!

    Report comment

  • Lonestoner says:

    Good stuff!

    For me, the desolation of Gerlach and the Playa in the off season is what draws me back there time and time again. I find it oddly comforting, being in that place with few people and no cell phones, it helps me to press the “pause” button on on Life’s trials and tribulations.

    Report comment

  • Darleen Fay says:

    I have not actually had the opportunity to experience la playa, at any time, in the fall or to experience burning man, yet. I can’t wait to someday get that experience. I just recently found out about burningman…. wish I had the time to take to visit. Maybe someday!!!!!

    Report comment

  • lenny mu says:

    It happend!!!
    This year was my virgin burn.
    I absorbed the spirit and when I got home it simmered.

    Recently I joined an exercise group, but had to drop out because of back issues. I had paid for an extra session in advance.

    When they asked me if I wanted my money back or if I wanted to join a session in the spring…..IT happened…….

    I was back at Burning Man. I simply told them to use my money to help some one who could not afford to pay. No, they could not say who donated the money, donations for recognition are NOT gifts.

    Whoever you are benefiting, enjoy!!!

    Report comment

  • Brian S says:

    Nice work, John. Nice.

    Report comment

  • jason d says:

    thank you. a wonderful read.

    Report comment

  • Considering attempting Burning Man 2010 your post helped me more than much other information about the event itself, thanks John from Barcelona, Spain.

    Report comment

  • Gary Walker says:

    John, you wrote a beautiful piece about post- Burning Man. I have never been to the festival, nor did I even know about it. (I have been on a different planet, called Italy and France for the last 20 years.) Now I am the manager of a hotel in Mariposa, the western gateway to Yosemite.

    Last week, a Sonia from Marseilles visited the hotel, full of Burning Man tales. Such an enchantress! I felt compelled to write a poem about her, which follows. If the poem warrants merit, can anyone on this blog suggest an appropriate “home” for it among the tree of Burning Man web branches & leaves?

    Thanks in advance. –Gary

    Sonia and the Burning Man

    A Sonia, where comes an angel, fallen from on High,
    Materialized – SHAZAM! — before my registering Post
    In uniform of backpack and glimmering of Eye
    To query room and friendship at the Inn of the Host.

    She had come from the land of a Burning Man,
    She spun visions in words drawn from living Dream.
    In exchange I traced stars on a hill built in Sand
    Of constellations presaging all that she had Seen.

    Gifting, a Sonia sang to me Encore:
    Her mutant cars, as if from Mars, danced in a Faustian Past,
    Where casual sex and psychic drugs drew to a rocky Shore,
    Until I begged my inner crew to lash me to the Mast.

    That night I bid a Sonia self passage back to Sleep,
    That night I tossed restless in her turbulence of Plans.
    All stiff, alone, vexed to the bone by thoughts I should not Keep,
    That night, all through that night, lay waste a Burning Man.

    Mariposa, 2010-09-09, updated to 2010-09-13, a6

    SONIA (etymology):

    SIREN (a Sonia’s Faustian side):

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  • Comments are closed.


text:
Friday, November 08, 2002

As I mentioned to Terry at Worldcon, awhile ago (1995, I think) I
thought briefly about pitching a comic adaptation of Good Omens. I got
as far as getting these two pages done and then Other Things Came Up. I
have just got around to getting them posted on my web site, and thought
you might find them amusing.

Phil Foglio

And you can see what Phil did (beautifully inked by Matt Howarth) at I think it's lovely, although I'd always imagined Crowley in serpent form in that original scene...