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Testimonials 2018-03-28T18:09:01+00:00
Our Customers Love Us. Our Team delivers outstanding, customized solutions in the critical power market at competitive prices while meeting demanding schedules. Mesa Technical Associates has built a reputation in critical power and battery back-up power by delivering excellent value to our customers and helping them improve their bottom line.

Ranked Number 1 Turf Vendor for Engineering Services

Customer Testimonial From Major U.S. Wireless Carrier:

“Mesa is our largest Turf Vendor for large scale, turn-key DC power projects at major Mobile Switch and Regen sites. Mesa consistently achieves the highest rating among all Turf Vendors in the U.S., as scored by our Network Engineering Team for installation quality, on-time completion, detailed engineering packages, logistics, and cost effectiveness. They are our #1 choice vendor for critical power systems.”
Network Planner IV - Building Space and Power, Major U.S. Wireless Carrier

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Grade for Installation Services:

What Our Customers Love About Us

  • Budget-Conscious Solutions
  • Customized to Fit Your Business
  • Brand-Agnostic Procurement: We Choose the Products that Suit Your Need
  • Excellent Engineering Capabilities
  • Best-in-Class Installation Teams
  • EPA Certified Battery Recycling with Documentation


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Kill Devil Hill - Kill Devil Hill 2012

Vinnie Appice, drummer of Black Sabbath fame come out again with a new project. Team up with Pantera bassist Rex Brown, Mark Zavon previously in W.A.S.P. and singer Dewey Bragg. This semi supergroup status put out quite excellent self title debut album, Kill Devil Hill.

The genre in this album is a combination of groove metal, grunge, and perhaps nil recognized Black Sabbath sounds. First song War Machine is fresh groove metal feel with a sleek and grunge vocal instead of growling. Other song with very original song writing is Voodoo Doll and a heavy groovy Rise from the Shadows. It's good to see bass line get more highlight here as many song are focus in lower frequency pleasure. We're Are Gonna Die is the example here. Strange is however more hard rock and show nice guitar work put in front. Beside Mysterious Ways which is a ballad, all other tracks are showing pleasure hearing groove metal. The singer perform really well I think, give in a grunge feel and handle the low pitch nicely.

If you like fresh grunge mix with groove metal here is the correct album. If you also missed Pantera you might expect some Dimebag tribute in Mark Zavon riff. Not a bad output for this all forty aged guys.

Metal Harem class: ******* 7 stars out of 10

Kill Devil Hill 2012
buy it here

01. War Machine
02. Hangman
03. Voodoo Doll
04. Gates Of Hell
05. Rise From The Shadows
06. We're All Gonna Die
07. Strange
08. Time & Time Again
09. Old Man
10. Mysterious Ways
11. Up In Flames
12. Revenge

Dewey Bragg - vocals
Mark Zavon - guitar
Rex Brown - bass
Vinny Appice - drums

Produced by Warren Riker.

dark theme cover album art for Kill Devil Hill

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Georgia Court of Appeals Finds in Favor of Aprio, LLP in Precedent Setting Ruling

Staff Report From Metro Atlanta CEO

Thursday, July 5th, 2018

The Georgia Court of Appeals has held that the Protocol for Broker Recruiting (the "Broker Protocol") does not prohibit financial service firms from enforcing notice of termination provisions in a precedent-setting case between Aprio, LLP, a full-service CPA-led business advisory firm, and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney. Notice of termination provisions require employees to give notice of their resignations prior to terminating their employment, in employment agreements (also known as "garden leave" provisions). The Court's decision has widespread and important implications for the financial services industry.

"Our first priority is to protect our employees and our clients," said Richard Kopelman, managing partner and CEO of Aprio, LLP. "Morgan Stanley's actions directly and negatively impacted the financial health and well-being of not only of our firm but also, more importantly, our employees. We are pleased that the ruling from the Georgia Court of Appeals will allow us, as well as other firms across the country, to operate with greater peace of mind that our business will not be disrupted."

On April 4, 2014, four of Aprio's financial advisors abruptly resigned and immediately transitioned to Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, the largest wirehouse in the country by assets under management, along with Aprio's chief compliance officer and all of the firm's wealth management division junior advisors, support, and administrative staff. However, those four financial advisors had employment agreements requiring them to provide advance notice prior to resigning.

Aprio sued the advisors for breaching their employment agreements and later added Morgan Stanley Smith Barney as a party, alleging tortious interference with Aprio's contractual relationships and unfair competition due to the raiding of the wealth management division. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney took the position the Protocol precluded enforcement of notice of termination provisions.

In HA&W Capital Partners, LLC et al. v. Bhandari, et al., the Georgia Court of Appeals roundly rejected that argument. As the Court concluded, advance notice of resignation provisions are "reasonable to allow the employer to prepare for an orderly transition …," and are not "restrictive covenants" comparable to non-solicitation provisions, and can be enforced by employers through suits for monetary damages. The Court also held being a signatory to the Broker Protocol does not change that result.

The Broker Protocol was established in 2004 by Smith Barney (n/k/a Morgan Stanley), Merrill Lynch and UBS to create rules governing how brokers move from one signatory firm to another. The Protocol's key language is this:

If departing registered representatives and their new firm follow this protocol, neither the departing [registered representative ("RR")] nor the firm that he or she joins would have any monetary or other liability to the firm that the RR left by reason of taking [certain client information] or the solicitation of the clients serviced by the RR at his or her prior firm; provided, however, that this protocol does not bar or otherwise affect the ability of the prior firm to bring an action against the new firm for "raiding."


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Ishin the First LNG-fueled Tugboat Owned from MOL

On September 28, the TOKYO-Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Ltd. announced the launching of the tugboat named Ishin, named after the MOL’s technology development project ‘Ishin Next – MOL Smart Ship Project’.

The vessel built at Kanagawa Dockyard Co., Ltd. is expected to be delivered in February 2019 after the completion of outfitting work, will be the first LNG-fueled tugboat serving Osaka Bay starting in April.

Vessel Specs

In addition, Ishin’s excellent environmental performance – including an estimated 25% reduction of CO2 emissions in comparison to tugs that run on ‘A’ fuel oil has earned the top rating of four stars from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism’s energy-saving rating scheme for Japan’s coastal ships.

The scheme aims to “visualize” energy savings and the effects of CO2 reduction in the vessel planning and design stages and objectively evaluate ships’ energy-saving and CO2 reduction performance to foster the development of coastal ships that offer greater energy saving and CO2 reduction.

First LNG-fueled tugboat

The vessel is touted as the first LNG-fueled tugboat owned by MOL and is powered by Yanmar Co., Ltd’s latest two dual-fuel commercial marine engines 6EY26DF with the ability to use both ‘A’ fuel oil and LNG.

It will be the first LNG-fueled tugboat in Japan conforming to the International Code of Safety for Ships using Gases or other Low-flashpoint Fuels (IGF Code), aimed at ensuring the safety of LNG-fueled vessels.

The code regulates safety requirements for vessels that run on gas and low-flashpoint fuels, that took effect on January 1, 2017. It is also Japan’s first LNG-fueled tugboat with a removable LNG fuel tank mounted on the exposed deck at the stern of the ship. This enhances convenience in bunkering, maintenance, and inspection.

Environmental friendly

Ishin will be operated by Nihon Tug-Boat Co., Ltd. and LNG fuel will be supplied by Osaka Gas Co., Ltd. using a truck-to-ship system. MOL and Osaka Gas will establish an LNG fuel supply system for vessels in Sakai Senboku Port, which will be the first in Osaka Bay.

MOL takes a proactive stance in promoting the spread of LNG fuel to meet the needs of customers and society alike to reduce the environmental impact of vessel operation. Through the operation of Ishin, which has an excellent balance of high-speed sailing and environmental performance, the company looks forward to spurring the development of LNG fuel supply systems in Japan and overseas.

Outline of Ishin

Gross tonnage: 250 tons
Length: 43.6m
Breadth: 9.20m
Draft: 3.15m
Speed: 16.0 knots or higher
Main engine: Two Yanmar 6EY26DF dual-fuel commercial marine engine

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Friday, 21 March 2014

Learning how to solve word problems in Maths

My reflection:

I found this problem a bit tricky because it's a word problem and I'm learning to read a word problem and organising my thinking. I also learned to use a grid. I liked to use it because it helped me to add the pocket money each week.

Monday, 3 March 2014

My bio poem

Adventurous, happy, creative, smart
Who loves bikes, reading, maths, playtime
Resident of Pakuranga
Who needs a family and friends
Who gives good effort, goodness, friendship
Who fears death, poison, fire, angriness

Who would like to see the Great Wall of China


text:
July 21, 2010The International Herald Trombone: A Tribute to Mike Zwerin, 1930-201

For decades Mike Zwerin was the significant American in Paris for a floating readership of world travelers and settled expats, ready with the word about music, delivered in an idiom of cosmopolitan verbal swing on the back page of the International Herald Tribune four or so times a month. In the days before the web he was the fastest friend an American could make abroad. Even if you weren’t a fan of jazz — Zwerin’s principal but far from only music — he was one of the pleasures of taking to the air and landing someplace different.He died in Paris in the early hours of April 2, 2010, six weeks short of what would have been his 80th birthday. One French newspaper had a keen eye for detail and remembered him as the guy sitting in the back of every dark jazz club in the City of Light, handsome well into his 70s, unlined face and assertive jaw beneath the trademark black fedora, and not a listener to take lightly: the only jazz critic — which he wasn’t, really — to have played with the likes of Miles Davis, John Lewis, Max Roach, Thad Jones, Elvin Jones, Eric Dolphy, Richard Davis and Connie Kay without sounding out of his league.

In print he always referred to himself as a trombonist, but in the 27 years that he’d been my friend and sometimes bandmate, I’d never heard him play a note on that piece of plumbing. The bass trumpet accepts a trombone mouthpiece and its tubing has a narrower gauge that bars it from the trombone’s ultimate capacity for blast. You achieve its notes, in the trumpet manner, by means of three valves. It’s an elegant instrument, with perhaps a tad too much weight forward on the hands, and it’s surprising that more musicians haven’t taken to it. Mike Zwerin made it very much his own.

Zwerin was the first jazz writer for The Village Voice, beginning in 1964; the Voice hasn’t bothered to note his passing with a word of any kind.
As for the American newspapers, they managed a few rote obituaries evincing no sense of his contribution to the world of music. Even the Trib didn’t say much, and The Village Voice, whose first jazz writer he was, beginning in 1964 — the Voice ticked along for nine years without taking notice of its village music until Zwerin walked into its shop on Sheridan Square and asked them, ‘How about it?’ — hasn’t bothered to note his passing with a word of any kind.

Mike was a part of my education. I started reading him in the Voice in the middle ’60s when I was a kid learning my way into the music. I also heard some of his music at the time, especially the album he made of Kurt Weill’s theatre songs with an all-star sextet out of John Lewis’s Orchestra USA — a significant recording of the period that needs to be re-reissued. But I didn’t meet Mike Zwerin until 1987 in Paris, when we were both of an age, he in his late 50s, me just over 40, at which one doesn’t make friends as quickly as one used to.

I was passing through on my way back to the States after a year spent farther east. Peter Giron, a South Bronx/New Jersey transplant to the 11th arrondissement and an old friend, was teaching bass at Alan Silva’s avant-garde jazz school, and one night he played a club with Silva’s big band, the Celestrial Communication Orchestra (was the name an esoteric idea? a misspelling? maybe just a goof?). I was surprised to learn that Mike was playing in it: Silva’s anything-goes music didn’t seem his style. I introduced myself as an old reader of his and as someone who had also written about jazz for a time, and played drums, a little. Mike endeared himself to me right off by pulling out a silver hip flask and offering me a pull of Irish whiskey. He told me he’d lain off playing for too long and was trying to get back to it, and that Silva’s band was an undemanding venue in which he could get his chops together.

I’d been reading him in the Trib during my travels, and if he’d laid off the music it didn’t show in his writing, which had great time, natural syncopation, was wise around the edges and swung beautifully. Not to mention that Paris was a nice hop from the Village and the column seemed like a dream gig.

There was something else that linked us. It came up in conversation that back in New York his aged mother was entering the veils of Alzheimer’s, and that soon he’d have responsibilities . . . As it happened, I was traveling after caring for my parents in Brooklyn during the years of their last illnesses, the cruelest part of which was my mother’s frequently angry dementia. I didn’t make much of it the night of Silva’s gig, but before leaving town I made a point of phoning Mike and saying there was something I wanted to talk with him about. He sounded puzzled, but said OK. The usual thing in Paris is to meet in a café but he said I might as well drop by the apartment.

It was a pleasant ground-floor rear flat with a pair of barn-sized wooden doors open on a potted bamboo plantation greening the view of a lot of other people’s rear windows, and we talked for two or three hours during which our friendship put down roots. He told me that his chief regret was that he had always divided himself, first between music and his father’s steel business, then between music and writing when, he’d always felt, if he’d been able to commit himself wholly to music he might have been a significant musician, possibly a major cat on his horn. From what I knew of his playing this was not an impossible dream. I talked about how I’d wanted to live in Paris since my first visit as a kid in 1966, only life had intervened, and how though I wasn’t in his league musically I was on-and-off about the drums and wished I were playing more too.

All this was the conventional materia prima of friendship-formation, a kind easily lost track of in the thickening weave of time and social habit; but I think Mike was touched that I wanted to talk with him about his mother.

Soon enough he was back and forth to New York and mercifully his mother didn’t take as long to go as mine had, and didn’t travel as horrible a path. I stayed on in Brooklyn out of habit but eventually Mike outfoxed my inertia by finding me a cheap sublet on the quiet end of the Île St. Louis — you can’t say no to that — and that’s when I got to know him better, and his wife Martine, who was in her 40s, and their teenage son Ben, over the next couple of years and onward.

Hoping for a more permanent move than turned out to be the case, I’d brought my drums to Paris and Mike and I and Peter Giron put together a trio that rehearsed a lot, played some surprisingly good music but — I’m stymied, can’t quite figure why — never played a single gig.

Early on I borrowed a copy of Mike’s autobiographical Close Enough for Jazz (1983), which began with some of the earliest material he’d contributed to the Voice, his classic account of life on the road with Claude Thornhill, and with a Maynard Ferguson big band in which some of his mates were Don Ellis, Joe Farrell, Jaki Byard, Charles Greenlee and Frankie Dunlop. It was high-note Maynard’s blasting band, but those were players to conjure with. Mike’s writing was nicely judged for an opening gambit in the trade.

He didn’t write like a beatnik or a scholar, or like Norman Mailer, but kept to an intelligent conversational tone, hip but not obtrusively so: casual and inclusive, ready to let you into the inside info he had come across, but never showy or condescending about it. You learned about trombone care and keeping, how to get through a tour with only three hotel check-ins per week. You watched Claude Thornhill’s sad, distracted decline and found out what to call things on the road: Tired Hollow, Stacked Junction, New York City City. The prose fell agreeably on the ear without being ostentatiously musical, and Mike was a keen observer of human nature, especially when it had a horn in its hands. The indelible portrait is that of his roommate in the Thornhill band, pseudonymously “Squirms" in the book, a “road rat with bleary eyes and a green complexion … laying low from the day.… If the gin people had added vitamins to their product he would not have eaten at all…. His idea of a meal was one Drake’s Cake." Or cough syrup chased with pills. Zwerin then adds, “[H]is fierce and dependable lead trumpet playing was a miracle," and goes on to explain what it means to be a lead trumpeter and the daunting set of attributes the role requires.

No other jazz writer could have painted the picture.

Squirms was dead before the book saw print.

Mike kept to an intelligent conversational tone, hip but not obtrusively so: casual and inclusive, ready to let you into the inside info he had come across, but never showy or condescending about it.
Close Enough also related the episode that, sure enough, was retold early in every one of his obituaries: how at the age of 19 Mike was hired by Miles Davis to play trombone at the only live dates the legendary Birth of the Cool nonet would ever perform. Mike was standing at the bar at Minton’s up in Harlem after playing in a jam session led by Art Blakey, a drummer who would blast you off the stand if you didn’t have the stuff, when Miles approached this college student on leave from the University of Miami and told him he had nice time for a white guy and asked him would he play the gig. J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding split the trombone duties on the canonical recordings, but one of the very few 19-year-old white kids with the cheek to jam uptown with Blakey would play that music live for the people at the Royal Roost — a date that is now available on CD (The Complete Birth of the Cool).

In comparison to his later style, Mike’s solo on Denzil Best’s “Move" sounds crowded and notey — this was the bebop era after all, and although this was supposed to be the beginning of cool jazz no one had told Max Roach, who was pushing the rhythm pretty hard at the ballsy, nervous teenager in the spotlight. But even so, Mike Zwerin sounds recognizably, if embryonically, like Mike Zwerin.

That trio with him and Peter Giron. We rehearsed it first in hired studios and, later, down the plank steps from his apartment in the damp basement chamber in which he wrote. The music was pretty good, so what was the problem gigwise? Was it that Peter had too many teaching commitments and sometimes canceled on short notice, or because Mike expressed irritation quickly and anything Peter perceived as a slight could smolder in him for months? Was my playing unready? Then there was the matter of Mike’s embouchure, ruined by French dentists and partly repaired by a Swiss one. Some nights his chops turned up, other nights they stepped on their shoelaces at the door.

I loved playing with Mike. Even when his chops were off and he couldn’t execute his ideas cleanly, he had beautiful time — which in a jazz musician means not metronomic regularity but a living, breathing quality that has less to do with rubato than with making room for other musicians to build their own homes in. Playing with Mike improved my own playing on the spot.

On his part, Mike enjoyed playing with us and wanted to get the band going, but obviously it was a long way down from Miles, Dolphy and Elvin Jones — he used to gig with Elvin all the time back in New York.

Mike told me that one good trick was to be influenced by people who played instruments other than yours, and from Lester Young and Chet Baker he’d derived an unhurried legato style of statement: he didn’t run changes and didn’t play licks and at his best shared a quality with Miles Davis of seeming to pursue a line of melodic thought that happened to concur with the sequence of chord changes as if by happy accident.

Mike looked upon Peter, with his perfect pitch, uncanny ears and deeply learned sense of harmony, as his last chance to get back in the game, and after I left Paris for good they finally played a couple of duo gigs in a tiny club in the Marais, but that was all.

On the other hand, sometimes Mike would get a call from big-name musicians passing through Paris — Eric Clapton, Sting, the Mingus Big Band — and he’d play in the horn section for a concert or two. The usual Paris trombone hire would have been Glenn Ferris, a friend of Mike’s and a player he admired, and since the people who called him for these gigs were beyond needing publicity from him, the hires must have been a friendly gesture, a nod of appreciation, the fellow-feeling of a community of spirit.

The columns Mike wrote for the Trib at the time were very finely done. Naturally he had his off weeks, when the supply of musicians passing through Paris did not especially engage him or he had to cover yet another jazz festival, but his mastery of the 800-word form was a treat to read. He seldom analyzed solos, but when, say, tenorist Joe Henderson put out some especially well-received records and won a few awards, Mike pointed out that the main change for Henderson would be more floor space around his hotel bed when he was on the road. When Dexter Gordon died, Mike wrote that Dexter had never taken himself for more than he was and had made no enemies in the world except for a handful of customs inspectors. The fact that musicians knew that Mike understood their lives got him better quotes than other writers — for Chrissake he got along with Miles Davis and Bob Dylan.

The pieces read breezily and appeared to have been written off the top, but I know how hard he worked to achieve the effect, paring things down to their essence and discarding secondary perceptions, stale modifiers, vulgar intensifiers — he’d stuck a warning sign about them on his subterranean plaster wall — and anything resembling b.s. What he hadn’t learned about editing from Hemingway he picked up from Miles, and although he was well schooled in the classical verities and techniques of jazz he was anything but a purist about the music. Miles’s funk, even Miles’s comeback funk, was more than all right with him, and so was a lot of Euro-jazz even if it lacked edge and swing, and in a period during which Paris had been declared the world capital of music Mike was ideally placed to register the richness of the scene in his column. When the proclamation was passed to Brooklyn, he wasn’t fazed at all.

If the musician in him regretted the self-division, he had made the writing life work pretty well, it seemed to me. Of course he had a few problems besides success in Paris, a fine family and variable chops. He dabbled in a heroin habit, though compared to people I’ve known he used extremely small amounts and only snorted it, never shot up, much less mainlined. In the years I got to know him, pathology had begun to outweigh pleasure and it seemed to me that he used just enough to mess himself up and, eventually, his marriage.

In part it was a generational aftermath. In part it was because he hadn’t wrecked his life with drugs in the heyday of his youth and then gone all baptist on the subject.

One of the first stories he told on himself as we were getting to know each other was about a day in New York when the undivided life was the coolest possible prospect and it lay open before him, as one night he was a young man walking from his father’s steel company through the electric midtown neon nightfall carrying his horn to Birdland, where he and Maynard were about to open opposite Count Basie, and man, he told me, I felt so hip.

Yeah, I know, but wouldn’t you?

One afternoon in the Village not too many years later, he would remark to the former Richard Alpert (heir to railroad money, renamed Baba Ram Dass), after the guru had tried and failed to soothe Mike’s anxieties about his carved-up life by referring him to God and then, perhaps in compensation, had complimented him on being such a hipster: “Hip," Mike said, breaking open a bright ambiguous slash of grin I would get to know well, “may no longer be hip."

Pressure drop. Mike had an instinct for it, finely honed.

Mike’s tenure at the Voice included a few paid vacations in slicks like Esquire and Playboy, a State Department tour of the Soviet Union with an Earl Hines band, and a largely vanished trio record with Bob Pozar and Jimmy Garrison I’d like to hear again. As a writer he unconfined himself from jazz when he felt like it. One piece started as a meditation on Jim Morrison and what it meant to be a male sex symbol in the ’60s, continued with an account of a Doors concert at which a lot of people got busted, and finished with Mike in one jail cell watching Morrison throwing up in the cell next door. It was, um, memorable, but it may not have felt like enough to write about.

His father was gone and the steel company disposed of, a marriage was ending, and when the Voice asked him if he’d like to be its European editor it couldn’t have been hard — although he devoted a chapter to the decision in Close Enough in which hanging out at Elaine’s looms large among what he’d miss if he left — to see a life of hip rootless cosmopolitanism waving from across the water; and Mike always had an eye on the exit. He moved to London in 1969. As a reader, I missed his regular jazz input, and the European desk crumbled after a couple of years, but he found his way to some stories richly characteristic of the time. The standout had to be the one from Tangiers, where he alone was able to get to Timothy Leary, then a fugitive from American justice but under a virtual house arrest commanded by Eldridge Cleaver, himself on the lam — those were the days, my friend. Mike was the toast of the town and the trade for that one, but if he was running for scoopmeister he’d need a few more hard-news hits, and they really weren’t on his bat.

The move to France had been inevitable. France had Paris in it, not only a prettier lady than London but a better jazz town, and as an American-in-Paris you could turn yourself into a fresh variation on a well-known theme, make use of its good chord changes and natural rhythm. There were places to play and places to publish, and if Mike didn’t spend the principle there was some steel-company interest to cushion him over the gaps. And in one office he passed through, manuscript in hand and at least the aura of his horn under this arm, there was a very smart and pretty French Jewish girl named Martine Halphen.

And France wasn’t only Paris. There could be an idyllic life with a woman you loved, on almost no money and sometimes no glass in the windows, down in the Vaucluse, and since Mike had fathered daughters in the States there could be a son now, a sweet kid from the first note: Ben.

There were writing gigs, film sort-of gigs, dope was surprisingly easy to come by in the boonies, and he could not avoid discovering the extraordinary pianist Michel Petrucciani performing locally in a band with his brothers. Mike set up and played bass trumpet on Petrucciani’s first record. He published books about drug addiction, the nature of small forgotten nations persisting beneath the jigsaw of the regulation maps, and a history, anecdotal rather than authoritative, of jazz under the Nazis.

Inevitably Paris beckoned, or merely asserted its gravity, and Mike’s stint at the Trib began in 1977, a few trial pieces at first, then a regular column, four or so times a month, most often showcased in a box commanding the back page. Mike rode his beat through reams of unsyncopated copy, the setup seeming to flaunt his freedom in a world otherwise composed of working squares. As he told it, most of the Trib’s editorial staff had no idea what he was doing in the paper and made what trouble they could for him — cutting the good stuff, repunctuating phrasing that should have been left alone, inserting unnecessary explanations in, yes, square brackets. But the formidable John Vinocur liked jazz and the way Mike wrote about it, and since Vinocur was the captain of the ship the column stayed where it was and Mike’s sense of line came through more or less intact.

So: Paris, family, a profession, man about town, a series of better apartments until they bought the one with the big back doors and Martine planted the privacy palisade of green bamboo.

So: where’s the inside-straight jazz novel? Or the big overarching book revealing the jazz story that snuck right past the music’s responsible chroniclers and scholars?

In one of his gentler self-characterizations, Mike wrote, “Mike is a misfit, addicted to margins, a dreamer, something of a jerk, innocent in the ways of the world." It seems to me that halfway through the sentence Mike went out to lunch at a place where only he, or perhaps Martine, would recognize him.

When I borrowed that copy of Close Enough for Jazz 20 years ago in Paris I was so taken with Mike’s charm and the way he carried himself that I managed to read the book without noticing what an anguished tale it told. When one chapter called “The Critic Blues" — a blues I’d sung myself — began, “I’m a frustrated sneeze, a pimple that won’t pop, an orgasm that won’t come," I thought it was ironic confetti tossed into the air at a party the author was enjoying just fine, thanks. I thought I was a pretty sharp reader at the time, but although I noticed an odd authorial tendency to pull a scene to pieces before it had been lifted into place, I didn’t see how torn up Mike felt himself to be. I read some other book than the one actually in my hands. His pieces in the Trib week after week were so carefree, and I was only 40-what.

His last book, and second autobiographical attempt, The Parisian Jazz Chronicles, published in 2005, is the book we — and by “we" I emphatically include its author — were waiting for. The form is anecdotal and original: Mike took a handful of his favorite Trib columns and opened them up like big band charts to accommodate solos about life, work, old age, late loneliness, the worth of art, the pit of drug addiction, the getting of wisdom, and ended it with a stylishly nouvelle vague celebration of the whole shebang, featuring fireworks, the Eiffel Tower, young lovers kissing and the generations turning, as seen by his well-aged eye.

He’s sarcastic about the uplift-aspect in the book’s Preface: “Our heartwarming story is about Mike’s heroic, uphill, ultimately victorious battle for sobriety and fulfillment. It’s kind of like a screenplay." But his achievement, and the amount of experience and perception swept up in the book’s narrative arc, is neither the work of a minor writer nor a dilettantish summary of an unattended time on earth. The life in its pages seems to overflow the margins rather than hide in them, this time out. The author’s wit is as keen as ever, his eye accurate and unsparing when it needs to be — when it comes to the truly hard things Mike does not even slightly flinch — while his technical command and startling economy of means are a lesson in how to tell a tale without faking any of it. Don’t let the first couple of pages fool you: This is the real thing.

And, oh yes, it’s also an enjoyable series of professional set pieces about Miles, Dylan, Dexter, Wayne Shorter, Melvin van Peebles and a few more of the usual suspects. (Also some unexpected guests: the Kenny G piece is a comic tour de force in which Mike used not one word of his own, only handed the saxophonist a length of rope and recorded the result; he apologizes for the stunt in a short introduction but, wisely, lets it stand.) I don’t know another book like it, and although it will be nice, one day, to have a fat anthology of his best newspaper and magazine pieces, The Parisian Jazz Chronicles — Mike wanted to call it International Herald Trombone but Yale University Press was the publisher — will always be sitting on the summit of his work, grinning the completed version of that old bright dagger grin and nodding yes.

Not long after Mike left us I heard a half-hour’s worth of Paul Motian on Leonard Lopate’s WNYC radio talk show. Motian was born a year after Mike, in 1931, and he talked the way jazz musicians hardly ever do anymore. When Lopate mentioned, in the customary shocked tone, the people who talked their way through Bill Evans’s classic recorded 1961 live sets at the Village Vanguard when Evans, bassist Scott La Faro and Motian at the drums were revolutionizing the jazz trio, Motian responded with something along the lines of, “Yeah, it was great, everyone was talking and drinking and not paying attention to us, so we could just play, you know? These days at the Vanguard they tell everyone to be quiet and turn their phones off, and they just sit there looking at you, and, damn, it’s hard." (Branford Marsalis made the same point to me in conversation, but he presented it as one salient of an overall thesis about what is wrong with jazz today.)

He went on for half an hour like that, only better — relaxed, intelligent, funny, unpredictable, without pretensions or b.s. — and I thought: right, here’s something that’s purely Paul Motian but it also belongs to his and Mike’s generation; something that will go out of the world in its original form as they do. FDR is in it, and being in your teens during the War, and being wised-up in the American 1950s of post-bop, easy money and the bomb. It was hard to believe that Ornette Coleman had turned 80 in March, and Sonny Rollins would hit that mark in late August, and Cecil Taylor, it can’t be, was already 81 . . . Was the sound of surprise as surprising as it used to be? Or was the surprise of another kind entirely: postmodern, mix ‘n’ match, less visionary, more combinational, situational, and what if, really, it had always been thus? Who’s to know?

I wondered who, now that Mike was off the scene, would understand the special skill and glory of great lead trumpeters from way back to now and tell us all about it. Yes, we’ll hear it from someone at Lincoln Center, I know; but I thought more generally about the things that go out of the world when a generation passes, this time with Mike Zwerin as the case in point.
The week after Radio Motian I went down to the Jazz Standard to hear the Mingus Big Band and talk with Sue Mingus about our friend Mike and — yeah, now — everyone’s friend Charles. It chanced to be lead trumpeter Earl Gardner’s birthday and after the first set they broke out the cakes and candles and the band played and the audience sang, and what I remembered was how tight Mike and Earl Gardner were — how when Mike and I would drop down to visit the band there were especially big hellos and hugs between him and Earl. And I wondered who, now that Mike was off the scene, would understand the special skill and glory of great lead trumpeters from way back to now and tell us all about it. Yes, we’ll hear it from someone at Lincoln Center, I know; but I thought more generally about the things that go out of the world when a generation passes, this time with Mike Zwerin as the case in point.

As the songs says: he was a friend of mine. Paris and New York, staying on and passing through, with and without Martine. I crashed at that backdoor bamboo apartment when Mike was there and when he wasn’t, and once or twice I even got laid there, and now and then we pissed each other off, once he complained that I was drinking too much of the whiskey I’d brought him (hey, I was having an allergic cat-reaction and wanted to breathe); and how after I left Paris my drums and cymbals stayed in his basement for years until the place had to be rebuilt and they went to Giron’s place; and we talked about Bird, Bach, Miles, Trane, Elvin — we both loved Elvin Jones and agreed that for the sake of jazz he ought to be immortal — Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Elmore, Stone, Mingus, Monk, Marsalises, love, life, age, death, good times and bad, food and wine and coffee, drugs — the almost certainly unpublishable piece Mike never wrote about how what was wrong with jazz these days was that not enough young musicians were doing drugs — opera, piano sonatas, women we’d loved, taste in general, and writing (which I liked to do long and he liked to do short), the price of bread, where to get the best couscous this year, the hip chord changes he wrote for “Eleanor Rigby" (especially the bridge), what a bitch it is to play “Chelsea Bridge," why I didn’t feel like playing fours, and OK, sure, I can play brushes on that, and why Peter cancelled again; and how Martine was his closest friend even after the breakup and it wasn’t a problem anymore that he was in love with his wife, and how everyone knew to treat Ben like a full adult by the time he was 15, you didn’t have to explain things to him, and now that he was grown up what a remarkable guy he was and such a melodic bassist besides . . . Then the last year, the blood disease, weekly platelet transfusions, Martine on call and exhausted, the barely avoided amputation of Mike’s foot, the falls, bruises, the tiredness, the sleep and no sleep, lags of memory, morphine and no morphine, the last book he might try to write if he had the energy and time, which, face it, seemed unlikely and my hands don’t work right . . . Also that he wasn’t anguished or in pain, that ashes to ashes was all right with him, and that, really, to his surprise, no idea how it happened, maybe just the years, you learn something somehow, reconcile yourself to all kinds of loss and that one too . . . Don’t know if I can explain it to you, it isn’t even loss really, and always remember, the holes in your Swiss cheese might be someone else’s Swiss cheese, insecurity is the fountain of youth, and life isn’t everything.

April 05, 2007Great Music Quotes

"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages
> them."
> Richard Strauss >

> "Hell is full of musical amateurs."
> George Bernard Shaw
> > "We never play anything the same way once."
> Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians
> "Someone who knows how to play the accordion, and
> doesn't."
> Al Cohn's definition of a gentleman
> > "The only tune they play in 4/4 is 'Take Five!'"
> (unknown-talking about the Don Ellis band)
> "If I could play like Wynton, I
> wouldn't play like Wynton.
> Chet Baker
> > "I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my
> swimming pool than play Bach and starve."
> Xavier Cugat
> > "I am not handsome, but when women hear me play,
> they come crawling to my feet."
> Niccoló Paganini
> >
> "Critics can't even make music by rubbing their
> back legs together."
> Mel Brooks
> "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
> Mark Twain
> "God tells me how the music should sound, but
> you stand in the way."
> Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player
> "When she started to play, Steinway himself came
> down personally and rubbed his name off the piano."
> Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller
> >
> "In opera, there is always too much singing."
> Claude Debussy

February 25, 2007BORING!!! BORING!!!

MARIO LAGO, a friend who lives in Milan, sent me the following commentary.

Last Friday I went to hear Billy Cobham with his jazz/fusion group at the
Blue Note. Huge noise volume, a cascade of beats and continuos fill-ins, a
bit like a locomotive, (Billy has huge energy and lots of 'prespiration' )
was rendered on two base drums, 5 toms, 5 cymbals etc etc plus all of the five pieces played were rythmically nearly identical and impossible to remember or discern: Frankly cannot be called Jazz..

Unfortunately this also happens often in most of the various summer festivals
which the organisers try to promote as a Jazz Festival to the innocent and
naive (not to say ignorant) general public. The music played is usually without swing, lasting endless number of choruses with no end in sight: Final result BORING!!! Boring!!!

October 13, 2006THE BALLAD OF VALERY PONOMAREV: Or... It's Their Way Or It's Their Way

I met Valery Ponomarev in Moscow in 1967 when I was on tour for the US State Department with Earl Fatha Hines, and he was, like 20. He could play Lee Morgan solos note for note - unusual for a soviet citizen. “Holy sheeit!" said the band, with hipster lucidity. Then he comes to NY ten years later and, ain't God great, ends up playing with Art Blakey.

Lately Valery has been in the news. Here's a story about him I picked up from the internet.

by roysol

(Front Paged at MLW)

Let me tell you a story...it won't take very long...about how far the Bushist doctrine of fear and power has spread.
How far, how deeply and how dangerously it has spread.

Security people at Charles DeGaulle airport broke the arm of the internationally famous jazz trumpet player Valery Ponomarev last week...an American citizen for over 30 years...because he argued with the gate people at an Air India flight to New York when they demanded that he gate check his trumpet rather than bring it onto the plane. A trumpet that:

A-Fits with no problem whatsoever in the overheads.

B-Had been properly tagged as carry-on baggage before he got to the gate.

Read on.

Now you must know that musicians try very hard to get their instruments onto planes whenever they can do so. Baggage handlers are notorious for breaking things, and a broken instrument is painful in any number of ways. So is a lost or misrouted instrument. It's not like you can just pick up another one before the gig and play at your usual level of competence. Even if you are lucky enough to FIND one, every instrument has its own quirks and personality, and most professional musicians own instruments that are not easily replaceable. Older instruments or ones that were custom built or modified to their specifications. And since 9/11 and the whole Homeland Security/Terrorism scare-scam, if you DO carefully pack an instrument in a special ape-proof flight case and allow it to be checked as baggage, the minimum wagers that are doing "security" work in the baggage department are often capable of opening the case, taking the instrument out to see if it's a bomb (Duh...a trumpet or violin REALLY looks bomb-like on an X-ray machine.) repacking it backwards and upside down and then forgetting to close the latches.

I have SEEN this happen.

So Valery... 63 years old, maybe 5' 5" tall, 140 lbs... pitched a bitch at the gate when some pissed-off functionary at a loading gate decided to pull rank on him. They called security and four (as he so colorfully put it to me today when he told me the story) "giant asshole cops" took him someplace where there were no witnesses, tried to forcibly take his trumpet away and when he would not let go of it with his right hand, pulled his left arm behind his back and broke it.

And people sniff and moan when the word "fascism" is used to describe what is happening in America and in much of Western Europe as well.

Vaslery did not try to fight these people. As he related today (I wish I could reproduce his great Russan accent) "I grew up in Soviet Union under Stalin and Khruschev. I know enough not to try to hit a cop. Let alone four of them. Big, stupid motherfuckers." (Here he stands on tiptoe and raises his remaining functioning hand as high in the air as he can.) "They were THS BIG!!! FOUR of them!!! I am not THAT stupid."

And indeed he is not.

Here is a man who grew up in Russia when playing "jazz" was almost an act of open rebellion and got so good that Art Blakey hired him to join the Jazz Messengers in the late '60s. And if you do not know how serious THAT was...Blakey was possibly the only equal to Miles Davis in terms of hearing and hiring the best of the best in the post-bop era.

Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter...that level.

The BEST of the best.

So here we have this INSATIABLY positive little Russian guy, authentically playing in an idiom that had its genesis in the riot-torn black ghettos of America during the Civil Rights era. Moving to New York, getting his citizenship, re-starting a life here...a true "American" success story, when there really was such a thing. Now seriously crippled...they had to operate because it was a complex break...and unable to even HOLD a trumpet, because George fucking Bush and his handlers have decided that they are the deciders and we are their subjects.

I just thought I would bring this general "fascism" discussion down to a more personal level. This can happen to ANY of us who do not totally surrender on any level whatsoever to the madness of these people.

It's their way or it's their way.

June 22, 2006Don't Count Sheep

The days start getting shorter today, always a big day on my scale of small horrors. It's all downhill from here. Of course, it's always downhill from everywhere. That's the lay of the land. Why does that not depress me?
Actually, I know why. I'm stoned, and I've been listening to Steely Dan, Sonny Rollins, and Count Basie. When you can't sleep, don't count sheep Count Basie.

June 12, 2006"Let's Start A Magazine"

by ee cummings

"let's start a magazine, to hell with literature, we want something redblooded, lousy with pure, reeking with stark, and fearlessly obscene, but really clean, get what I mean, let's not spoil it, let's make it serious, something authentic and delirious, you know something genuine like a mark, in a toilet, graced with guts and gutted, with grace, squeeze your nuts and open your face."

May 25, 2006Review of “The Parisian Jazz Chronicles” by Nick Catalano on Allabout jazz.com

Mike Zwerin gave up his status as CEO of a steel company to play jazz trombone, winding up in Europe eventually earning his living as the jazz writer for the International Herald Tribune. His book The Parisian Jazz Chronicles (Yale University Press, 2005) offers unique glimpses into the lives of such luminaries as Miles Davis, Chet Baker, Wayne Shorter and Dexter Gordon. Actually, Zwerin has chosen to write his “improvisational memoir" in a manner which interfuses his own life in Europe (he recounts love affairs, substance episodes, and expatriate alienation) with chapters in the careers of his interviewees. His writing style contains abrupt segues and changes (he describes these as “interludes, modulations, codas...") from planned outlines to improvisatory notes in a sort of journalistic stream-of-consciousness. It represents a writing adventure that many who plod along with their have-to-do-it-to-make-a-living newspaper writing would love to try.

Zwerin began at the “Trib" in 1979 and was able to trace the development of European jazz innovators like Michel Petrucciani and Burhan Ocal. He reviewed them and many others in the context of festivals at Siena, Viennes, Agadir as well larger ones like Nice and Montreux (better known to Americans) and recorded their accomplishments. The sum total of his experiences leads him to recognize that jazz, long ago, evolved into a world music or “musica franca"- a development that has been largely ignored by his colleagues of the press here in the U.S.A.

Jazz has always had an enormous following of knowledgeable fans all over Europe. Actually, the French wish they had invented the music and often claim that they established it, through their critics, as a true art form. There is much truth in this latter statement. As far back as the early 20’s, French writers were hailing the music’s praises and extolling Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins and others with insight that eluded many early American critics. It is in this context that Mike Zwerin’s book is so valuable. He is the best kind of commentator—a successful musician in his own right—and his comments are uttered in an adventurous style which should delight even readers who aren’t jazz aficionados.

March 31, 2006Don't Blink

I wrote the following while sitting in the gentle April sun on the terrace of the Café Flore in downtown Saint-Germain des Pres. Not really, I just wanted to fuck with your head.

A friend of mine who fucked Daryl Hannah told me that she had a perfect ass. I always imagined that she had small tits - not that there's anything wrong with it. I like tits of any size, except when they are made of plastic. If it were possible to transplant Daryl Hannah's ass on Yasmeen, my opthomologist, she'd be perfect. But that's not necessary. When you have a bright face and a sexy bearing like Yasmeen, a fat ass is not a liability. A sight for sore eyes, she resembles an intelligent Dominique Sanda, if that makes any sense. I once fucked Dominique Sanda, though neither one of us was really there. In any case, I fell in love with Yasmeen when she was looking me in the eye, and she said, in English: "Don't blink."

After the eye exam, I couldn't see very well because of all the gooey drops in my eyes. so instead of reading Tolstoy, I watched a tennis match. Eyes were on my mind. Anastasia Myskina the Russian tennis player has eyes like two cunts. They suck you in. When she plays tennis, she gives the impression of trying to seduce her opponent rather than competing. While Maria Sharapova, on the other side of the net, is 100% will. She needs to dominate, to overpower. At the age of 18, her eyes are already like two $ signs. She doesn't blink.

March 30, 2006Incendiary Comments

People discuss Bob Dylan's lyrics and his singing and what's wrong or right with his bands, but nobody ever seems to talk about just how good his time is. This may sound incendiary, but let me suggest that next time you listen you forget about the words, and listen to how he places his notes. The music, not the poetry. He sounds like a soulful horn player. He has an absolutely consistant groove, and he always swings. Has any jazzman thought about playing instrumental versions of Bob Dylan songs? And just when is Dylan going to win the Nobel Prize for literature he so richly deserves?

The left-wing Catholic philosopher Simone Weil, a convert from Judaism, and the role-model of my first wife Norma, who was in love with doom, once wrote: "Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty."

She also wrote: "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."

William Pfaff, one of the few interesting columnists remaining in the International Herald Trombone, wrote the following on Thursday, March 30, 2006:

"The [Capitalist} system in the advanced countries has been rejigged since the 1960s to take wealth from the workers, and from the funding of government, and transfer it to stockholders and corporate executives.

"While that may seem an incendiary comment, it seems to me a simple factual observation."

While this is not exactly news, who says the press no longer prints the truth?

March 18, 2006Paul Haines: Not Making What Is Laughingly Called Sense.

Jo Hayward Haines, the widow of my late very special friend the poet, critic, and teacher Paul Haines, who wrote the libretto for Carla Bley's "Elevator Over The Hill," has asked people for their recollections of this "complex, funny, contradictory man." Here are mine.

I first met Paul Haines - it was either the very late 40s or the very early 50s - in Coconut Grove in Miami, where he was living, obviously really happy about it, on Bird Road.

I was majoring in sailing at the U of Miami, and I had just married a woman named Norma, who had three sisters. The older two were already heavily into jazz and drugs. Them was the good old days. Norma’s youngest sister Rosemary, who played basketball, was constantly being nagged by the “hipper" members of the family about going out with all of those dumb football players. I’ll never forget the proud look on Rosemary’s face when she introduced Paul to us. Her first hipster. She later married Don Martin, the cartoonist. (Eventually, when Rosemary found out she had cancer, she said: “Well at least I won’t have to floss any more.")

When I remember Paul’s face back in those days, the word that comes to mind is clean. It was mostly just being young – we were all around 20, clean, open, stoned, whatever. But mostly, Paul seemed to be more dedicated to curiosity than the rest of us. Dedicated to not making what is laughingly called sense, if that makes any sense.

After Norma left me, I spent the winter of 57/58 in Paris, “finding myself." I drove my Citroen 2 CV, that classic sardine can of a car held together by rubber bands, down to Nice to hang out with Barney Wilen, and I drove back north through the French Alps so I could stop off and see Paul, who was studying at, if I remember right, the University of Grenoble. I played in some sort of a local jam session and somehow or other I still have a photo of that with Paul listening carefully – boy, he knew how to listen - at a table.

We drove on to Paris together, and it was then that we became close. It was then that I started to learn about how to blow words – I would not become a professional writer until ten years later – how to stretch and bend them. I had read my share of Dostoevsky, and James, and so on, but before that the only thing I really thought about was bebop. I started to take words a lot more seriously after that trip.

Paul’s highly developed senses of irony, ambiguity, and silliness harmonized with my own ditto in a way I’d never experienced with anybody else – except, let me hasten to add, with Norma. I was made what I am verbally, whatever the fuck that means, by Paul Haines, with some help from Bob Dylan, John Cage, and Lenny Bruce.

I pride myself on being marginal. A plague on all your houses. Paul taught me to choose my words more carefully. I guess you could say that he taught me how to communicate with the people who were in the same margin as me. Which is nothing to sneeze at, although, thanks to Paul, I later had to crumple a whole lot of drafts learning how to communicate with ordinary people - but that’s another story.

No it’s not. Paul did not often compromise verbally, something I’ve always admired him for. Self-censorship did not seem to occur to him. If you didn’t understand him it was your fault. He always seemed to be slightly askew. He had a sideways take on life, and I suspect that he must have paid a high price for it.

The last time I saw him was on the “Elevator Over The Hill" tour with Carla Bley. I forget the year, around the millennium sometime in some provincial place, at a festival in Brittany, or Normandy, maybe - Le Mans or Reims perhaps. There were a lot of people around; producers, locals, fans, French musicians, an entire big band doing sound-checks and interviews and stuff, and although Paul was very much a part of, even central to the event, I remember him as being somehow out of focus.

Although I considered him one of my closest friends, I had not seen him in decades. For someone who was so important to me, I spent precious little precious time with Paul. You should know that I am of the impression that I make a better impression when I am not around, so it is possible that it was I who was was out of focus, and that I was just seeing a reflection of my own alienation in somebody with whom I identified so strongly.

But Paul was even more alienated than me (that’s a compliment, I think). He was on a planet of his own. On his planet, people spoke in free verse, and they were of good heart and open ears.

March 12, 2006Bob Dylan on new songs

"The world don't need any more songs. They've got enough. They've got way too many. As a matter of fact, if nobody wrote any songs from this day on, the world ain't gonna suffer from it. Noibody cares. There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probably, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. There's enough songs. Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story"

Bob Dylan, interviewed by Paul Zollo in "Songwriters on Songwriting"

February 06, 2006Anthems for People Who Don't Like Anthems

La Marseillaise, Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli
America The Beautiful, Jaco Pastorius
The Star Spangled Banner, Jimi Hendrix
Imagine, John Lennon
I’m Black and I’m Proud, James Brown
L'Internationale, Jean-Jacques Milteau
My Way, the Sex Pistols
Precious Lord, sung and recited by James Baldwin (with Bob Stewart, tuba)
Chimes of Freedom, Bruce Springsteen
Get Up Stand Up, Bob Marley
Let It be, The Beatles
Respect, Aretha Franklin

February 01, 2006Interview on Bloomberg News

Jazz Critic Zwerin Remembers Miles, Chet and `Cool': Interview
2005-12-04 21:10 (New York)

(Farah Nayeri is a reporter for Bloomberg News. The views
expressed are her own.)

By Farah Nayeri

Dec. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Mike Zwerin got his first break jamming
with Miles Davis a half-century ago. Miles has been with him ever
The Paris-based jazz critic (for Bloomberg News and The
International Herald Tribune), also a trombonist, has just released
an entertaining mix of flashbacks, ``The Parisian Jazz Chronicles''
(Yale University Press, 214 pages, $26). In it, his life story is
interlaced with that of the legends he encountered: Dexter Gordon,
Chet Baker, Bob Dylan, Wayne Shorter -- and Miles, the man
``everything comes back to.''
Zwerin, 75, looked back on his life last week in a telephone
conversation with Bloomberg's Farah Nayeri.

Nayeri: Why is your book called an improvisational memoir?
Zwerin: It's always been my ambition to create my own form, not
just copy other forms.
The publishers came up with that term ... It's not really
improvised, because I wrote about 85 drafts. I rewrite myself all
the time.
Nayeri: Why did you not do music all your life?
Zwerin: I never got enough of a name to have my own band and
play with it all the time. That's partly because I wasn't practicing
enough, because I was writing and reading. I had split myself, which
is great. Eclecticism.
On the other hand, if you don't really concentrate on music 100
percent of the time, you're never going to be what you could be.
Music is a tyrant. I was just not ready to submit to that tyrant. I
didn't like to practice.

Meeting Miles

Nayeri: In the book, you don't describe your very first
encounter with Miles Davis.
Zwerin: I've told that in previous books.
Nayeri: Please tell it again.
Zwerin: When I was 18, I was living with my parents in Forest
Hills, the place where they used to play tennis, in Queens, in New
York City. I used to take my horn, drive their car into Manhattan
and sit in. Sometimes I went to strip clubs in Brooklyn. This one
time, I went to Harlem, to 117th Street, a club called Minton's
where bebop was supposedly born. (Thelonious) Monk played there very
early in his career, so did Charlie Parker.
The night I went, there was Art Blakey. He was going through
his Muslim phase, so he was known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina. And he
was a fearful cat. He didn't like white people, and he was strong,
and he had muscles, and he was the best drummer around, and he knew

Dumb or Courageous?

I don't know where I got the courage; I was either dumb or
courageous. I walked in with my horn and asked him if I could play.
He said sure, and he couldn't have been sweeter. He was nicer than
his reputation, that's for damn sure. A lot of those guys were. So
was Miles.
When I was packing up my horn, I saw that Miles had been at the
bar. I hadn't seen him before. He walked over to me and said would I
like to come to a rehearsal tomorrow. We were, you better know it,
cool. And I said okay, sure. He had just played with Charlie Parker.
Miles was 22, four years older than me, and this was his first
band. So I knew who he was, but the world didn't know who he was.
This was his first time as a leader. When I came to rehearsal, it
was the band called Birth of the Cool. Much later, he told me, ``I
like your sound,'' which was the biggest compliment I ever got.

Soundtrack of Life

Nayeri: Why do you say everything always goes back to Miles?
Zwerin: Miles has made the soundtrack of the movie of my life.
When I hear his early records with Charlie Parker, that's my teenage
years. ``Tutu'' was my old age. That's the urban music of our time.
Nayeri: Beyond his music, you often go back to what he said.
Zwerin: Sure. His mystique. He was an amazing guy. He's the guy
who told (John) Coltrane to take the saxophone out of his mouth. He
couldn't stand him playing these long solos. Miles said ``Please,
man, can't you play shorter solos?'' And Coltrane said, ``I try, but
I can't seem to figure out how to end it, I keep going!'' So Miles
said, ``Why don't you try taking the saxophone out of your mouth?''
That's getting to the heart.

I feel somehow very close to Miles, and when I interviewed (the
drummer) Tony Williams and he said ``I haven't been the same since
Miles died,'' I thought, neither have I. He was somebody who I
didn't really know. I wasn't a friend of his. But he was really
important to me.
Didn't the drugs in my book shock you?
Nayeri: They did initially, but then I thought, whatever.
Zwerin: Nobody really cares anymore. It is in the past tense. I
decided I would say what I think. I'm 75, and if I don't say it now,
gosh, goddarn, heck.
Nayeri: You thought it would wash because of your age?
Zwerin: I was having my say, and part of my say was the drug
thing. It's in the past tense, part of my life. I'm not the first
one to have that experience, or, unfortunately, the last one. That
was part of the ethic of what I thought was being hip, which is
really stupid.
When you're that age you're immortal.

Classic Junkie

Nayeri: Tell me about Chet and his importance to you.
Zwerin: He wasn't all that important.
Nayeri: Why not?
Zwerin: On a good night -- and there weren't enough of them --
towards the end of his life, in his 50s, Chet was playing jazz as
well as anybody has ever played it. It's not a popular thing to say
to Wynton Marsalis. I told him once, and he looked at me as if I was
Chet was the classic junkie. He lasted longer than anybody. He
hit the age of 60.
Nayeri: He was sad.
Zwerin: Except in a way he wasn't. He liked being a junkie. He
never got tired of it. He was like a kid who found the candy jar and
just kept raiding it.
Plus he could play really well. The trouble is, he made so many
records that most of them were bad. You'd give him $2,000 and he'd
make a record. A lot of those records are bad. When you find the
good ones, it's really exciting.

Age Brings Peace

Nayeri: Do you still play?
Zwerin: I've started playing again. A friend of mine has a
little club and he asked me. I played a couple of times. I play bass
trumpet, cousin to the trombone.
Nayeri: You sound pretty happy, on the whole.
Zwerin: I'm in very good shape.
Nayeri: Why is that?
Zwerin: It's the cliche: You do get some peace with age. For
one thing, I'm not worried about chasing women. I look a lot, I'm a
real voyeur, but I don't need women anymore. I don't mean it
personally. I never knew how to handle women, relate to them. They
were always a mystery to me.
Also, I understand stuff that I didn't understand before. There
is no reason to get depressed about stuff, because it's just
inevitable. That's what I've come to realize: Dust unto dust is OK.
Nayeri: Do you have more books in you?
Zwerin: I am thinking now of another one. I don't know. I hope
so. Right now, I'm only writing an article every two weeks. It's not
enough. What do I do in the week in between?

January 29, 2006Botox Vs Steroids

I had a thought today, looking at pictures of Oprah Winfrey and Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, in the papers. Both are obviously botoxed, or worse. That’s fine. Nobody minds that. But if athletes are fined for taking steroids, shouldn’t public personalities be fined for their artificially young faces? Or should we just accept the realities of cutting edge technologies?

January 28, 2006Review in The Guardian

The Parisian Jazz Chronicles by Mike Zwerin (Yale, £15.95)

My heart sank when I saw that this was subtitled "An Improvisational Memoir", since in such cases "improvisational" is usually code for tedious stream-of-consciousness reminiscence. But Zwerin, an American trombonist and music critic long resident in Paris, pulls it off superbly, riffing in blue and hot moods, and generally clambering around the staves of his pages like someone for whom the only possible description is a "hep cat". Even his decision to refer to himself in the third person - "Mike" (or sometimes his drug-fuelled alter ego, "Johnny Staccato") - works, probably because he loves also to mock himself.

It also works because Zwerin has such great stories to tell about the giants he met: Dexter Gordon growling at a French policeman who has dared to touch his hat; Bob Dylan in a café confessing to no sense of self; Count Basie deconstructing the inverview scenario, and numerous apparitions by Miles Davis ("everything comes back to Miles"), with whom Zwerin played, and who is the book's guardian angel. There is also a mischievously satirical profile of slush-pop saxist Kenny G, written entirely in the victim's own words. Nice.

by Steven Poole


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Bianco Carrara Marble

Bianco Carrara Marble is a classic with medium variations in shades of gray and white. It is available in tiles and recommended for countertops, walls, and flooring. Bianco Carrara Marble is characteristically homogenous, with a white to grey ground color, shining grains and smoky grey veins, which run thought the stone rather unregularly. The different quality of this marble depends on its ground colour; basically, we distinguish between these two marble types: C (lighter ground colour) and (darker ground colour). This material brightens gradually when the marble is losing the water that sore in its pores.

Room Scene

Primary Color(s): White
Other Industry Names(AKA): Bianco Venato Gioia,
Stone Type: Marble
Country: Italy
Quarry Location: carrara
Available Finished: Polished
Variations: Low

Bianco Carrara SLAB
2cm Bianco Carrara Gangsaw Slab

Technical SpecificationsMetricASTM
Water Absorption0.115%C97
Bulk Density2711 kg/m3C97
Compression Strength1334/kg cm2C170
Abrasion Resistance, HardnessC241
Bulk Density2704 kg/m3

Bianco Carrara is quarried from a bedrock quarry in Carrara, Italy and is one of the many white marbles produced in this area. However, period of time because of the harsh condition of snow and ice, Bianco Carrara is the least expensive of the white marbles coming from this region. Bianco Venatino is another white marble from this region. It slightly higher price point. Small pin holes are common in Bianco Carrara, as well as within other white marble that are produced in the surrounding area. It is also a softer stone, and may be susceptible to scratching or abrasion. The tile and slab com from different layer in the quarry. Therefore, it is important to note that if both are being used in a project, it is recommended to verify the colors prior to purchase and installation. There will be noticeable variations in colors and movement between pieces. Therefore, it is important and recommended that a range of this product be viewed before finalizing a purchase. Due to the qualities of the stone, the slabs are book-matched; meaning slabs one and slab two will be cut and polished to create a mirror image of each other. These are then kept in sequence. which allows for a consistent flow in patter. As a natural Stone Product, It is recommended that it be sealed to extend its longevity.

“Carrara marble has been used since the time of Ancient Rome. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the marble quarries were monitored by the Cybo and Malaspina families who ruled over Massa and Carrara. The family created the Office of Marble in 1564 to regulate the marble mining industry. The city of Massa, in particular, saw much of its plan redesigned (new roads, plazas, intersections, pavings) in order to make it worthy of an Italian country’s capital. Following the extinction of the Cybo-Malaspina family, the state was ruled by the House of Austria and management of the mines rested with them. The Basilica of Massa is built entirely of Carrara marble and the old Ducal Palace of Massa was used to showcase the precious stone.
By the end of the 19th century, Carrara had become a cradle of anarchism in Italy, in particular among the quarry workers. According to a New York Times article of 1894, workers in the marble quarries were among the most neglected labourers in Italy. Many of them were ex-convicts or fugitives from justice. The work at the quarries was so tough and arduous that almost any aspirant worker with sufficient muscle and endurance was employed, regardless of their background.
The quarry workers and stone carvers had radical beliefs that set them apart from others. Anarchism and general radicalism became part of the heritage of the stone carvers. Many violent revolutionists who had been expelled from Belgium and Switzerland went to Carrara in 1885 and founded the first anarchist group in Italy. In Carrara, the anarchist Galileo Palla remarked, “even the stones are anarchists.” The quarry workers were the main protagonists of the Lunigiana revolt in January 1894.

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Red Alicante marble

Red Alicante marble from Spain has a reddish background with white veins. It is available in both tiles and slabs and recommended for interior use in both residential and commercial property applications including floors, walls and countertops. Red Alicante is a red marble color limestone material, fine-grained that show white veins irregulary scattered. Our stones products are of the highest quality, consistency and beauty selection makes Red Alicante one of the best stone suitable for all kind of ornamental projects. Red Alicante marble admits any suface finish and it can be delivered in different formats.

Room Scene

Primary Color(s) : Red
Other Industry Names(AKA) : Rojo Alicante, Rose Alicante
Stone Type : Marble
Country : Spain
Quarry Location: Novelda
Available Finishes: Tumbled, Polished
Variations: High

Red Alicante Marble TILE

60X60X2cm Red Alicante Polished Tiles
60X30X2cm Red Alicante Polished Tiles

Red Alicante SLAB

2cm Red Alicante Gangsaw Slab
3cm Red Alicante Gangsaw Slab

Technical SpecificationsMetricTest type (Dry/wet)ASTM
Absorption by Weight, %0.27N/AC97-02
Bulk Specific Gravity2660 kg/m3N/AC97-02
Compression Strength (MPa)208DryC170-06
Compression Strength (MPa)184WetC170-06
Modulus of Rupture (MPa)10.30DryC99-87
Modulus of Rupture (MPa)10.2WetC99-87
Flexural Strength psi, (MPa)8.0DryC880-06
Flexural Strength psi, (MPa)7.9WetC880-06

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Dog Bite Lawyer Las Vegas

In the event that you or a loved ones have been bitten by a dog, you might at first think it isn't very serious. It looks like a small break in the skin. Perhaps you first told your dog's owner which you're fine, you definitely don't need to find a Dr. But , the sting area becomes red and appears bloated. You should seek attention but are you making a huge deal? How could Friendly Fido have caused any real? Harm? He is such a little thing. Be mindful! Dog wounds can be very tricky. A small little break from the skin may actually turn into a life-threatening illness or involve muscle or limb damage you're unaware of at first.

Favorable Fido may act candy and pose no danger to anybody whatsoever. So says that your neighbor. But then, out of the blue, he piece you without any provocation. You were on your own property. Are you aware that the normal cost of a sting claim is near $25,000? In fact, almost a third of the liability claims instances homeowner's insurance companies see are seeing someone who has been index bitten by a dog. The truth is that bite settlement maintains total up to $300 million yearly in the United States.

In case you or a family member is a victim of an assault by a puppy, first off, seek immediate medical attention. No matter how little the wound, you undergo treatment as soon as possible. After a proper medical evaluation, you will know more certainly in case you need to potentially file internet a bite case. Don't be afraid to seek the aid of an experienced dog attack lawyer. You will more than likely need assistance to determine whether you ought to file a sting guard against the pet owner's homeowner's insurance coverage. Part of what a skilled dog bite lawyer is going to do will be to assess your individual situation, examine the incident as well as the injuries involved and help determine how to reach a favorable settlement for your benefit.

It's quite common to believe that you can not be in a position to afford to hire a dog bite attorney to help you with your claim, however that might not always be accurate. Broadly speaking, many dog bite lawyers take cases like these at a contingency fee basis. You do right here not pay anything upfront, however, also the lawyer receives her or his fee out of the proceeds from your settlement. The dog bite attorney will first meet with you and review the situation and the law included. This is only 1 reason to retain an experienced dog bite attorney with the knowledge of the law and the expertise in managing insurance companies which will bring about the ideal dog bite settlement for you.

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2015 Dodge Charger R/T|Looking For A Used Car At An Affordable Price| Discerning Drivers Will Appreciate The 2015 Dodge Charger! A Great Car And A Great Value! This 4 Door|5 Passenger Sedan Still Has Less Than 10|000 Miles! Dodge Prioritized Practicality|Efficiency|And Style By Including: An Automatic Dimming Rear-View Mirror|Heated Seats|And Much More. We Pride Ourselves In The Quality That We Offer On All Of Our Vehicles. Please Don't Hesitate To Give Us A Call.|Miles: 8145Color: B5 Blue Pearl|Stock #7040195T|Vin: 2C3cdxctxfh915060|

Year:  2015
Miles:  5 000 - 9999
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Fuel: Gasoline
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Thus Spoke Dante - Mind And Muscle

super buff guy posingby: Dante E. Battista
Thus Spoke Dante

From one man to another, the cause of action differs – One, roused to motion by vision, one riled to action by insecurity. Science and art colliding —a muscular structure, form and function entangled, or as it is often…. estranged. Beneath the sinew—bones of intent, and from this we see either wisdom sought or perversion gained.

And so I love Bodybuilding.

Science and Art

Hammers not wielded for nothing, man acts with purpose. The hammer of science, we wield to cure — and often the destruction of one thing is the rebirth of another. A parasite now dead, a host now healed, diseases progress, and so do we seek to impede their spread and crush their hold.

Science, as often we see it in our modern day, is used to cure. But may it also be wielded to construct. Not merely to heal, but to progress.

One smears paints on a canvas in a manner no different than a beast soiling the ground with its excrement, then calls this “art.” The “tortured soul” (how trite this is), never seeking an out, but rather he now revels in this. Much is told by one’s choice of art — lucid and uplifting or Bacchanalia sleeping with the scatological. A difference there is, between the two. A difference there is, between the love of either.

Just as with this notion that the artist has to defy societal expectations, so too does the bodybuilder seek extremes so as to defy such social limitation. Health and vigor no longer the aim, a monstrosity born. A soul coming out of its skin to show itself, just as like a painter exposing himself through his work. What is, could be otherwise, and what is not, otherwise, for a reason is. Always the choice revealing. The hammer wielded in such one way and by another wielded in such a way apart, by this the artist reflected upon. Finality’s naked end segregates the sound from the diseased.

Science explores and then defines the world around us, and that world within us. Art explores and then defines a perception. How this understanding’s applied to the body then defines the artist.

Form and Function

Such is the state of the blind—action that not only precedes thought but rather, at times, acting totally apart from it. Ten stories high a building—each floor, as it stands, bearing relation to that which stands above it, and that which holds habitat below. A foundation in place whose spine all that is built must obey.

To what end a man seeks his build, we also see his understanding — A body constructed only for vanity, or that which as also performs and exceeds?? A cripple, at moments, it seems some endeavor to become. A body that has no object of health in mind, no semblance of unity in its join. Flesh piled upon previous layers of flesh, barely to move, only to stand.

Two bodies of equal size and equal states of leanness — By this, do we call them equals? Look deeper, beneath the superficial. One achieved his given state by use of drugs alone, another by means of diet, cardiovascular training, and drugs. Now tell me, is a separation of terms and conditions present? The lack of bodyfat cannot, in itself, sing the praise of “healthy.” One so lean with a heart so weak is still to be foul with corruption. Such is the relation of means and ends.

One form, and another, may appear to be similar, but the paths that led the pursuit to its conclusion determines the function.

I love, and I abhor. A physical state of supremacy, through which he, who inherits this façade, excels against Nature’s storm — that I love. Physical abominations whose facades superficially convey health but whose bitter inner-workings accommodate disease — that I detest. Ornaments that adorn a foundationally sound structure bless the edifice with grace; Ornaments—bricks of flesh—held without mortar, are soon to sing destruction.

In Extremis

“Never can I pursue in quiet / that which holds my soul in thrall / never rest at peace contented / and I storm without cease.” -Karl Marx

Striations running with veins, instead of lacerations streaming with blood. Rage, that drives the pursuit to progress, just as hunger drove the desire to hunt. Genuflected at the alter of suicide, to stare down the ego’s ember. Is this wick so short that the candle can’t be relit.

The “reckless burden of existence”, at times so overwhelming, one thrust of the knife to end it, or a new thrust, to extirpate bitter perception. Pierce now with the latter.

Apart from numerous activities by which one must rely on others—by expectation, by trust—Bodybuilding asks for only the unwavering devotion of one. Nothing is expected of you beyond that which you expect of yourself—and, nothing will you expect of others as you’re the only participant in this act. No one can betray you here and to no one can you kiss with the lips of Judas.

Not only future gratification—a goal whose resolution comes with Time’s passing—but enthrallment now. Irrespective of present physical composition, the voracious hunger for validation is met instantaneously, the rush of endorphins displacing torment’s venom. What was once a constant destructive fixation can now flourish into a repetitive act of progression. By the clock’s arm, another round dealt, no longer to imbibe torment’s intoxicating disquiet but now to make stronger the body and stronger still, the spirit.

De Profundis

A song so beautiful that even the most base among us can’t refuse. A ceremony of like souls. And, by this, do we seek companionship. One does not love those who they despise and those who they may despise betray images of his conjure. “Art—music, paintings, poetry and prose, as by this an artist portrays himself—his vision. Adored by those that see this vision the same, loathed by he who sees otherwise.

This song, imagine, so serene and graceful that every melody simultaneously washes away any cluster of scars just as it also conveys every hope that you have ever imagined. Those failing to arrest this grace, you abhor, as almost by this act do they despise beauty itself.

A haphazard cluster of muscles, sewn to the façade, barely able to move. Such is today’s “Bodybuilding”. Such is that which I detest. Form, now the infidel wife betraying Function, so that foreign sperm can spawn their bastard progeny. And to this some aspire. No different than shit smeared on canvas. Not apart from a lover’s serenade sung by a throat gargling razors. And to this some aspire.

From the depths, a choir sings the mellifluous, or the banshees sound the mock.

Libertine in Lust

By ancestries binds does the wretch seek his “roots.” Not by that which lies in his control, but by that which holds beyond, does he find his “pride.” Such are the roots of a racist. Individuality—pride and shame—tossed to the toil of past. And these roots are not that of hatred (hatred and the intolerance of a soul’s ancestral garment), as often times “racism” is defined. No, racism is the inability to define oneself and others outside of their lineage.

One cannot rightfully “pride” themselves in that which lies outside their control. Wherever you choose to plant yourself is where your roots truly lie.

Rituals are hand-me-down garments with holes. Fortifying oneself via the process of critical thinking, or Life’s boots collecting muck after blindly marching through the mire — a difference there is indeed. In this process of physical progression, one can either hold steadfast to antiquated notions, or one can change tracks when the greater path greets the train. One clings irrespective of the truth, one lets go in pursuit of the new.

So afraid are some of thinking, of being alone, that they beseech themselves never to question whatever “group” or philosophy they now join. And this rings true also in Bodybuilding. The lonely are no longer alone when they follow a given system of thought, however wrong, however illogical. And by that they are forever bound—the group “identity.” Not to question, never to think, but only to accept— much like ancestral garment that adorns the beast that, never to reason, stands now fettered.

“Bodybuilding is our religion”—take this at face value, for that it is. As such, this pursuit can be guided by the mind, the individual, to the extent they choose to think—or it can be guided by blind conformity or by bitter rebellion. A whore, whose filthy body any man can touch, providing that he pays a price, is no different than one whose only motivation is to merely please or defy another. They hold nothing pristine. “One has to be freaky in order to defy society’s limitations”—no different than saying “I offer sex for money to spite my parents.”

…to Revelation

Logic’s spine, binding form to function with the hammer of science guided by the rational mind, From various options, a path is chosen, and by this the bond of individuality and progression such is the synthesis of science and art;. So far apart is this vision from the actuality, that now do I realize that it’s a potential, and ideal, not an actual – existant in this world, that I love. And as Bodybuilding is very much the individual pursuit, thus do I realize that the beast that bears this burden lies outside my concern.

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Mine Mill Local 598 - Unifor
  President's Corner
  Editorial Page
  Yearly Meetings
  Union Elections
  Community Based Organizing
  Worker's Memorial Day
  Pensioner's Page
  Contact Us
  CAW Charter
  Unifor Newsletters
  Campground Services
  Mining Watch
Unit Chair
Gates St. Louis - 705-695-4564
Bargaining Committee/Stewards
Cliff McCollam - 705-693-2825
Health & Safety Representatives
Gates St. Louis - 705-695-4564
Newsletter from Unifor - 2018-05-22
Last week, Chris Parks circulated a letter regarding Unifor "refusing" to meet with the company to discuss Brinks' desire to allow current employees to convert to the Defined Contribution (DC) pension plan. His description of the DC plan in a very positive light is certainly up for debate.
Newsletter - April 2017
As we continue to slowly make progress with regards to working conditions at the branch, there are still many challenges to overcome. Trucks are continuously at the shop getting repaired and it seems no progress is getting done, they are simply too old and have too many issues (it's a losing battle).
Newsletter - January 2017
As of recently, Labour Canada has ruled that the "all off model" was unsafe. If this decision is held, it will make a significant impact in the direction that the company was going. This decision would also affect the way other armoured car companies operate.
Newsletter - December 2016
As another winter season is beginning, let's be extra cautious with the surroundings of our environment. Pay attention to possible slippery areas, let management know if salt or sand is needed.
Newsletter - May 2016
Not much new to report. The first aid supplies are being replaced in the trucks along with proper fire extinguishers installed. There are new posters displayed, most of which are related to health & safety. You will also find the minutes of our health & safety meetings. Please take time to read them.
Newsletter - April 2016
On March 11th, 2016 during our quarterly meeting, we had a presentation given to us by Joel Carr, National Representative with Health & Safety and the Environment.
Newsletter - February 2016
Our Local, "Mine, Mill & Smelter Worker's Union" is celebrating its 100th year anniversary. Please join me in celebrating at different events throughout the year. These events will be posted in the Branch so you can plan in advance.
Newsletter - January 2016
As we begin a New Year, I look forward to seeing continued improvement in all areas. Continue to bring any of your concerns forward so we can address them in a timely manner. Our everyday working environment can be challenging and stressful on the best of days, so let's not add to that by bringing a negative attitude to the workplace.
Newsletter - October 2015
As of most of you are aware, we have recently acquired a substantial amount of work. The new work is mainly money room work but it has and will impact every aspect of our operation her in Sudbury.
Newsletter - March 2015
In the last newsletter, I wrote about companies tightening their belts and reducing their required days of service. Well……that didn't take long to prove as Money Mart just reduced their days of service from five days to three days. Unfortunately, I believe this trend will only continue.
Newsletter - February 2015
2014 has passed and for me, personally, it was a bad year. Even though the Branch has been rebuilt, we continue to feel the fall-out effects with regards to our trucks that were replaced. The trucks that were given to us are for the most part in poor condition however we will continue our efforts to bring them up to acceptable standards.
Newsletter - October 2014
As of recently, the companies solution to our concerns regarding safe use of the fire damaged trucks has been to ship them back and for us to acquire trucks from other branches. To my knowledge, only one of our trucks will be used by other branches where as the other one will be taken off the road pending proper cleaning.
Newsletter - September 2014
In August, during my vacation period, I took advantage of the opportunity to attend the "Health & Welfare Conference" at our Education Centre in Port Elgin. The Conference provided workshops such as Intro to Worker's Compensation, Investigating Workplace Accidents and Challenges in the Workplace, and others related to Health & Safety.
Union calls for regulatory overhaul in wake of armoured car shooting
The head of the union representing 2,000 workers in the armoured car industry across Canada says a series of recent robberies — including one that ended in a fatal shooting over the weekend in Longueuil — should serve as a wake-up call to the federal government.
Newsletter - February 2014 - Part 2
As we wait for the decision on the company's appeal of the Canada Labour decision, we are concentrating our efforts to have our industry regulated. The Union hopes to meet with our MP’s, Glenn Thibeault, Claude Gravel and France Gelinas to ask for their support in our drive to have the industry regulated.
Newsletter - February 2014 - Part 1
The recent workplace fire tragedy has devastated most of us, but luckily no one was hurt. Our daily routines have been changed and we will continue to face challenges for as long as it takes to rebuild our Branch. I encourage people to be patient and understanding as this slow process continues.
Newsletter - December 2013
As we continue moving forward and dealing with the new attitude or stance that the company is taking, it is important now, more than ever, that we stay united. We must consolidate our efforts to ensure that the company follows the collective agreement and continue to exercise our right to a safe work environment.
Ratification Vote - August 9th, 2013
A ratification vote meeting will be held at 6:00p.m. on Friday, August 9th at the Mine Mill Union Office Board Room.
Press Release - Tentative Agreement Reached - July 30th, 2013
Mine Mill Local 598/CAW have reached a tentative agreement with Brinks Canada. A ratification vote meeting will be held at 6:00p.m. on Friday, August 9th.
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And we’re off.

It’s already been a week since we said goodbye our 2005 square foot home, donating about 80% of our worldly possessions to go along with it. 80% of everything we’ve acquired in our adult lives – and some that we’ve been hanging on to for even longer than that. Scott said goodbye to his first car in this transition (a 1962 Mercury Meteor he bought at 15) and I let go of the idea that I had to be wildly wealthy or enviably successful to enjoy my life. We all have stuff we hang on to.

The emotional pain of extreme downsizing is real.

I’ve thought of 180 profound ways to start this story off, but profundity and perfection are exactly the type of thing that will keep me from ever writing at all, so here we go. Chronicling this experience is something I need to do so that I never forget how hard it was to get here, the pain of choosing courage over comfort, and drastically taking back control of our lives from the flow of more is better, and bigger is best. The pain of extreme downsizing is real; having to examine the things you’ve purchased, consider hanging on to many of them strictly because of their cost, and eventually face the waste of not only your money but the most valuable, completely non-renewable resource you have: time.

All that stuff costs time. Like, a lot of time. Hours to clean and work to house ALL THESE THINGS. And all the while you’re paying for the privilege of its burden.

So we packed the remaining 20% of our stuff into this pod (and a 5×5 storage unit while we build our tiny house) but there’s no question we’re going to have to double down on this initial downsize before we can comfortably live in our mortgage-free 350 square foot abode-to-be.

I mean, I’m not as pretentious as I sound – I don’t Actually DO any of those things.

It’s been said that the greatest benefit you’ll ever get from a material purchase is the moment you buy it. It’s literally all downhill from there until even the most beloved item becomes something unpleasant you have to “deal with” – clean, sell, donate, store, what have you – negating the joy out of having acquired it in the first place. What if you never bought that item. Or what if you only bought half of those items. What if you put that cash in an envelope and eventually took a trip to Hawaii? Or Pompeii? Or The Valley of the Kings? Just…what if?

I mean, I’m not as pretentious as I sound – I don’t DO any of those things. I spend my money the second I get it, and I spend it on crap that absolutely no one truly needs. And, well, as a compulsive shopper in one of the most expensive cities in the world, something had to change. Instead, we’re changing everything. Our lifestyle is getting a complete overhaul from our careers to our financial habits, to our city. Scott and I found ourselves unemployed at the same moment in time and decided to jump.

Stay tuned as we figure out how to land.