Eric Dolphy – Out To Lunch (1964)

RIP Bobby Hutcherson.

"Unlike most Blue Note covers, which tended to be abstract geometrics or portraiture, Out To Lunch actually shares a joke. The clock in the store window announcing ‘will be back’ has seven hands. The Reid Miles photograph is bathed in indigo, creating one of the most iconic cover images ever produced." -- Greg Simmons at All About Jazz.

thought dream 010909

Coltrane playing "The Damned Don't Cry,"
1961
Africa / Brass.
It could be midnight
from the sound of that double bass,
but it's not.
It's just morning on a bus
headed nowhere. The horn section
tragic and mournful.
Booker Little
(dead at 23)
on trumpet, calling out
to some dark or vanished god.
I'm still waking up.
Trying to make sense of the
hollowness that has become my life.
The routine much heavier
than I expected. The air
crushing downward
upon the shoulders.
Eric Dolphy
(dead at 36)
orchestrating.
One of the reeds
in that cloudy response
from the darkness.
Some people fight in wars
and die
or become heroes (momentary).
Some people save lives
for a living. Nothing
in the catalog
about a respectable job,
face-painted emptiness,
the dry mouth,
the slow, stunned silence.
It's too dull
to even grieve or shed a tear.

No-Good Blogging Elves

I hired a bunch of undocumented elves to keep up my blog over the holidays, and I see that nothing has been done here.

Or: La Reina and I were abducted while watching re-runs of The X-Files. David Duchovny was on the mother-ship, and he turned out to be the leader of the replicants! We just escaped a few days ago, and I've been listening to Eric Dolphy for 72-hours straight, trying to get my head back on straight. Literally. They seem to have done some experiments, and my head was tilted at a weird angle, so that it was really hard to blog.

Or: I ate too much Lasagna on Christmas Day and fell into a deep, deep sleep from which I've just awoken. (As a matter of fact, the Christmas tree is still up and gleefully lit, and I'm listening to the Sinatra Christmas Album.)

(That's really scary, isn't it?)

Or: The New York Jets playoff loss to the New England Fascist Baby-Killing Grandmother-Hating Un-American Culturally-Backwards Fur-Wearing SUV-Driving Britney-Spears-Loving "Patriots" upset me so much that I've been unable to blog.

Or: The troop surge has depressed me so much that I can hardly lift my fingers to tap in a few lines on my blog, knowing all efforts to try and stop the madness are useless. (Even so, contact your congresspeople and tell them how you feel.)

(About the troop surge, I mean, not how you feel about life in general.)

Or: My New Year's Resolution to not blog unless I had something really inspired and unique to say was going hunky-dora until a few minutes ago, when it all fell apart in a desperate urge to use the phrase "hunky-dora," which, BTW, goes back to at least the 1860s, when it was used a lot in New York newspapers of the day. (Along with the phrase "deadheads," which, at that time, referred to people who weaseled their way into concerts and shows without paying, i.e., the media.)

Or: The precarious balance between my incredible laziness and my sick but powerful need for attention was out of whack for a while. But I'm okay now.

Hope everyone had a great holiday season.

Maybe in 2007, I'll even come up with something worthwhile to blog about!






















Gratuitous and totally unnecessary photograph of Brigitte Bardot.