Happy halloween from darkblack

Don't mind the FOX News kids...Those crazy cutups are just digging on any old body.

Be safe ~ Have fun

;>)

A Splash Of Piety...

...Keeps it 'fresher than thou', and could provide new golden revenue streams for a struggling organization.

;>)

Soaring On The Wings Of Pigs

Some of my readers might remember a brief controversy in which I and others were involved over 3 years ago, an out-of-context sideshow that unfortunately hindered a broader discussion and may have contributed to a negative outcome in my opinion.
However, no need to rehash that here - For that, there is Google.

Yet for myself within that series of events, the motives were clear.

Joe Lieberman, putatively a Democrat in favor of civil rights for all stooped to blatant race-baiting when a threat to his reign was perceived.

In spite of the hoopla, those facts remain immutable, as do the unsavory optics of his spouse's involvement with pharmaceutical lobbyists concurrent with Lieberman's vote on pending legislation benefiting said industry.

A quick bit of revisited history - Connecticut Democrats rejected Lieberman as their senatorial candidate in favor of Ned Lamont in a fair vote, after which Lieberman went to Mel Sembler and the GOP to finance an independent run, an effort which was ultimately successful when state and federal Republicans threw their weight behind his candidacy over their own pick, Alan Schlesinger.

Since then he has, in cooperation with the highest levels of American government including the current occupant of the White House, playacted at smugly prudent comity while doing his level best to roadblock societal progress and stymie due investigative course on behalf of his corporate paymasters and conservative ideological soul mates.

It is becoming harder to escape the conclusion that he is wanted right where he is.

The question is: Qui bono...Exactly?

For A Fading Memory

Cactus, No Need To Worry, 1971.

Give Me The Bat, Rupert

All work and no play makes Glenn a dull boy.

bonus: Here's Becky

;>)

Sunday Overnight

Jimmy Heath, with Kenny Barron, Bob Cranshaw, Mtume, and Al "Tootie" Heath, Angel Man, 1972.



Dizzy Gillespie, James Moody, Gene Harris, Ray Brown, and Grady Tate, Ow!, 1985.



Artie Shaw, with Buddy Rich on traps, Traffic Jam, 1938.



The Graham Bond Organisation, Neighbour, Neighbour, 1965.

Happy 50th, Al.

...Can't a guy get some polka around here?

;>)

100,000 visits? Unpossible!

Let Sideshow Beck cut the cake, then...Mind your fingers.

;>)

All kibitzing aside, I would like to thank each and every one of my viewers and correspondents for enabling this trifling blog's journey over the last three years through the vast reaches of cyberspace. May peace be in your lives and love within your hearts.

your pal,

darkblack

Another penetrating insight from Rush Limbaugh

HuffPo:

CNN reporter Carol Costello ran a segment yesterday analyzing talk radio and its listeners. This analysis included shows and monologues from the king of conservative radio, Rush Limbaugh, and he was not pleased with the conclusions drawn by either Costello or the psychiatrist she consulted, which was that Limbaugh is a "bully." Limbaugh called Costello his "stalker" before suggesting she "go sit on a fire hydrant and improve your day."

Well, if anyone might know about such forms of 'daily improvement' it would surely be Rush Limbaugh, narcotics-assisted radio funnyman, doctor-shopping sex tourist...and now, noted curbside expert on 'tight end to wide receiver' conversions.

;>)

Lest We Forget

Ministry, Rio Grande Blood, 2006.

'He still has his supporters to ease the pain.'

A hello and hearty handshake to my visitors from Crooks & Liars, as facilitated by my pal Blue Gal.

;>)

Sunday Overnight

Eddie Lang, Prelude (composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff), 1927.



The great Anita O'Day, When Sunny Gets Blue, 1975.



Barney Kessel, The Shadow Of Your Smile, 1973.



The Dizzy Gillespie quartet (James Moody, Kenny Barron, Christopher Wesley White and Rudy Collins). And Then She Stopped, 1965.

F*cking Up

...You're the bad guy.

;>)

It's going to get harder to keep old chums afloat, I suspect.

CBC:

The North Pole will turn into an open sea during summer within a decade, according to data released Wednesday by a team of explorers who trekked through the Arctic for three months.

The Catlin Arctic Survey team, led by explorer Pen Hadow, measured the thickness of the ice as it sledged and hiked through the northern part of the Beaufort Sea earlier this year during a research project.

Their findings show that most of the ice in the region is first-year ice that is only around 1.8 metres deep and will melt next summer. The region has traditionally contained thicker multiyear ice, which does not melt as rapidly.

"With a larger part of the region now first-year ice, it is clearly more vulnerable," said Professor Peter Wadhams, part of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, which analyzed the data.

"The area is now more likely to become open water each summer, bringing forward the potential date when the summer sea ice will be completely gone."

Hat tip to my pal Blue Gal for the climate change blogswarm awareness - Baby needs new brake shoes.

;>)

Ask darkblack - 1 in a series of one

Regular readers, and perhaps even the mildly disinterested may have noted my apparent lack of candor regarding any personal details save the minorish - a policy that I adhere to not out of an overweening desire to cultivate an air of unearned mystery, but primarily for subjective security concerns due to the occasionally controversial nature of my artistic trifles...Unlikely, of course that knowing my real name, favorite breakfast cereal, preferences in leisure wear or similarly Tiger Beatish questions would stop the course of time, cure the heartbreak of teenage acne or garner me one more curious observer than my little blog could bear.

Perhaps this sort of situational paranoia is unwarranted - but given the climate of armed zanies unable to grasp the simple concept that killing what they do not approve of is not very nice, gossipy backbiters seeking to denigrate what they could never dream up or execute in a geological era dedicated to their piddly efforts exclusively, and all the colorful shades of agendas and surveillance in between...Well...

That said, I do enjoy interacting with my fellow travelers and creators. Most who operate within this format do as well, I presume...else, why indulge oneself by shouting into the vacuum?

Thus, if there is a reasonable inquiry regarding philosophies or works that has you flummoxed, perplexed, or otherwise excited in some deliciously tantalizing way, dear reader, then the comments section in this post is for you.

Overly personal questions might be gently ignored, but direct provocations will be crushed.

;>)

I Chased His Thoughts Like Birds

The Police, Secret Journey, 1981.

The Last Angry Tit

CNN:

(CNN) – Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is dismissing Democratic campaigns to paint him as the man steering the Republican Party, and media frenzies over his most controversial comments.

"The media didn't make me, and they can't break me," he said in a portion of an NBC interview that aired Monday.

Notwithstanding the somewhat salient fact that Mr. Limbaugh is the media, of course. But let's not dwell on such trifles.

Yes indeedy, we see those ruthless socialist bullies of the 5th column, er, estate ganging up on poor Rush every day - blithely excusing his foibles, ignoring his doctor-shopping sex junketing ways, promoting his racist 'I-got-mine-so-fuck-you-for-having-less-suckers' views via endless repetition, quoting his noxious thoughts on the issues of the day whilst prudently nodding affirmation, and generally maintaining the ability to state with great credence and gravitas exactly what type of corn was served on Rush's plate the night before...from the inside.

Nay, we would never be able to garner the impression from the obviously biased left-wing media gaggle that Rush Limbaugh wasn't a plucky, independent voice standing apart from such mendacious ways, with a hazily narcotic vision of America that isn't pasty jiggly white and obscenely wealthy as it stands forthrightly on the backs of the downtrodden in its shiny Ferragamo jackboots with the chic tassels.

No, no, a thousand times no.

;>)

Sunday Overnight

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, Lee Morgan, and Walter Davis Jr.), A Night In Tunisia, 1959.



The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Funky Aeco, 1980's.



Pharoah Sanders, Village Of The Pharoahs, Pt.1, 1973.



Ray Brown, with George Fludas on percussion, Black Orpheus, 2001.

You Win The Prize

Happy Birthday, If You Want It

In the morning after it rained

David Crosby and Graham Nash, Guinevere, 1970.

Peg, Oh My Heart

Will you forgive me for living?

Black Sabbath, After All (The Dead), 1992.

Get Thee Behind Me, Stoopids

Generally on these shores I avoid certain commentaries regarding the topic of faiths, as I have some readers who operate under Christian guidance yet retain the faculties of critical thinking and can cogently criticize the follies of the less enlightened among them better than I, mere heathen sinner.

I'm also ever mindful of the two topics guaranteed to start a bar brawl: politics and religion, and having provided more than enough of the former for the individual viewer to contend with, seek not another front on which to join the fray...as yet.

But this item, which has begat this, caught my eye and has compelled me to share a few thoughts.

One of the tenets of Christian fundamentalism (and similarly inclined sects of other religions with their sacred texts) is the belief that the Bible is the literal word of God...Not to be questioned, or subjected to interpretation but only to be honored above all and obeyed.

This is, and has been a somewhat artless ploy that permits the individual to fecklessly abdicate their responsibilities toward subjective free will and the rights of other sentient beings, while at the same time failing to accommodate the inconvenient truth that many human hands midwifed what we know in the modern world as the English-language Bible into being...Some prominent among them who, in spite of their piety and honorable intentions were charged with the spurious offense of heresy after crossing their regal employer and found themselves subsequently strangled to death and burned at the stake.
Modern ghostwriters of political 'autobiography', take note.

In spite of such a fractious creation, what we call the King James Version has remained with us to this day, with a revised 'New' version (having its own attendant critics) created in the 1970's.

And it would now seem that these versions are no longer sufficiently 'conservative' for some, in spite of the excruciating detail of near-prehistoric mores and horrendous penalties for deviance from same within.

Apparently these legions of faithful past and present who adhere to the narrow path and toil in penurious obscurity so that the Lord's word can be made available all suffer from the dreaded liberal bias. From the relevant Conservapedia entry:

Liberal bias has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations. There are three sources of errors in conveying biblical meaning:

* lack of precision in the original language, such as terms
underdeveloped to convey new concepts of Christianity
* lack of precision in modern language
* translation bias in converting the original language to the modern one.

Of these three sources of errors, the last introduces the largest error, and the biggest component of that error is liberal bias.
Large reductions in this error can be attained simply by retranslating the KJV into modern English.

I have long suspected a genetic link among a psychological triumvirate of pride, historical ignorance and a predilection toward so-called 'conservative' thought (in modern reality, a mollycoddling of fascist impulses masquerading as faux fiscal prudence and choleric intolerance of social non-conformity)...and at last I may have my objective proof.

Even a cursory study of the provenance of the KJV would indicate to those not utterly blinkered by their secular ideologies that this 'liberal bias' of which they speak is light years from the root cause, if indeed being a factor at all in any conveyance of Biblical meaning, for the simple fact that such a thing as 'liberal bias' didn't exist for the masses in the 17th century ( a time of royal-borns and peasants, not ACORNs and pundits) and was certainly not a strong consideration in the revised version of the 1970's, given the contemporaneous vagaries of Baptist and conservative Presbyterian thought.

So just whom is this - call it what it is, politically filtered revisionism being aimed at, with their 'updating words which have a change in meaning, such as "word", "peace", and "miracle"', their avowed dismissal of the Pericope Adulterae for its alleged 'liberal message against the death penalty', comparisons of 'economic parables with their full free-market meaning' and topsy-turvy garden of logical fallacies pretending to the definition of 'openmindedness'?

One can only speculate. But I'm certain that whatever other jingo-jangling occupies their downtime...they won't fail conservatism.

;>)

Jeremiah 14:14: 'Then the LORD said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart.'

Sunday Overnight

Louis Prima with Sam Butera and the Witnesses, Pennies From Heaven, 1957.



Lester Young, Johnny Guarnieri, Slam Stewart, and Sid Catlett, Just You, Just Me, 1943.



Steps (Mike Mainieri, Don Grolnick, Peter Erskine, Michael Brecker, Eddie Gomez), Pools, 1982.



Fats Navarro, Hank Jones, Ray Brown, and Shelly Manne, The Things We Did Last Summer, 1949.

All My Money's Spent But That's Alright

Cheap Trick, Clock Strikes Ten, 1977.

Fresh White Culture

And in honor of my hospital visit today...

'Time's running out, don't know where to hide'

;>)