Charles Mingus, fiery temperament notwithstanding, is one of my favorite jazz musicians.

Take five... and experience it in your soul.

First up, Better Git it in your soul


Another famous hit from the same album (Ah um, an album every jazz music fan should own!)

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Another favorite of mine... Moanin'



Mingus in his New York loft, plays with his daughter, plays some piano and bass


Here he is playing a novel interpretation of Duke Ellington's 'Take the A train', with the great Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet


And last but not least... the first 10 minutes of Epitaph, his two hour long 'magnum opus' premiered by a 30-piece orchestra at the Alice Tully Hall in the Lincoln Center and produced by Mingus's widow, Sue Graham Mingus, at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after his death.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/international/2007/12/28/mme.queen.of.the.oranges.cnn

the most 300s the other day and like I wrote to you that record is held by Bradman (334 and 304) and Lara (400* and 375*).

Bradman could have been the sole holder of the record but like I was telling you on the phone, he was left stranded 299* in one test as the last man got run out for 0 when "in an attempt to keep the strike he tried a risky second run, and Australia's No. 11 Hugh "Pud" Thurlow - a fastish bowler from Queensland who was playing in his only Test - was run out by Syd Curnow's return to the wicketkeeper Jock Cameron."

Also, this 299* was in the middle of his amazing streak that began with the famous Ashes series of 1930. His streak leading up to the 299* reads: 8, 254, 334, 14, 232, 4, 25, 223, 152, 43, 226, 112, 2, 299* ...in tests against England, WI, and RSA.

Note that other than Bradman's own 334, there had been only 1 triple century then by the first-ever triple centurion, Andy Sandham, who had scored 325 when he was in his 40th year - a mega 10-hour innings at Kingston, Jamaica, when England piled up 849 off the West Indies bowling - in what was to be Sandham's last test!!

However, in the next inning after that great 299*, Bradman got a first-ball 0. That 0 came in the first inning of the (in)famous Bodyline series, where Douglas Jardine used questionable tactics to stop Bradman's flow of runs! Here's a report from wikipedia:

He withdrew from the first Test at Sydney amid rumours that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. Despite his absence, England bowled Bodyline (as it was now dubbed) and won an ill-tempered match in which Stan McCabe scored a famous century.

The public clamoured for the return of Bradman to defeat Bodyline: "he was the batsman who could conquer this cankerous bowling... "Bradmania", amounting almost to religious fervour, demanded his return". Included as a replacement for ALan Kippax, Bradman walked to the crease on the first day of the second Test at the MCG with the score at 2/67. A world record crowd of 63,993 provided a standing ovation that delayed play for several minutes.Anticipating the bouncer first ball, Bradman moved across to play the hook shot. The ball failed to rise and he dragged it onto his stumps, thus making a first-ball duck in a Test for the first time. The crowd fell into stunned silence as he walked off.

This was the low point of Bradman's illustrious career. Bradman had gone 11 innings without a century, the longest such spell of his career, prompting suggestions that Bodyline had eroded his confidence and altered his technique.

And then came another high-point... the 1934 return series to England to reclaim the Ashes...when Bradman surged back into form with 758 runs in the 5 tests, including his 2nd triple century followed by 244 in the next test (which was part of a long-held but now-overtaken record partnership with Ponsford of 451 runs for the 2nd wicket)

P.S. When he scored 334 (his highest score) at Leeds in 1930.... he scored 309 of those runs in one day!

11 Jul, 1930: Day 1 - Australia 1st innings 458/3 (DG Bradman 309*, SJ McCabe 12*)

These days, the entire team scores 300 runs in a day and we are amazed. Bradman scored a triple ton in one day (record still holds for most runs scored by a batsman on one day.) He was in prolific form in that series and scored 974 runs at an average of 139.14 in just 7 innings!

Don Bradman set the record for most runs in a Test series during the 1930 Ashes in England. He scored 974 runs in five Tests but actually batted only seven times, hitting two double-centuries and his career-best 334. In fact, that innings alone was nearly as much as Australia's second-highest runscorer, Bill Woodfull, managed in the entire series: 345 runs at an average of 57.50.

Its perhaps been done...but some day I'll write a book on Sir Donald Bradman. The man was amazing! Jo bhi batting record dekho..he's on the list! And this after 6 decades of cricket (he retired in 1948 ..so 60 years next year) and many amazing feats of batting since then! (Given the pace at which he played, one could be sure that he would have made an amazing ODI and T20 batsman!!)


A double century and a century in the same match -- would be a nice record* to boast about when he is 80! Gavaskar (124 and 220 at Port of Spain in his debut series) being the only Indian to do it so far. (Guess who else has that enviable record -- Ganguly's friend - Greg Chappell, who scored 247* and 133 against NZ in 1974 when Ganguly was < 2 years old).

this is one of the few batting records that the prolific Bradman does not have - he never scored a 200 and a 100 in the same match (though he scored 300+ runs in a single day!.

Also, Vishal: Bradman has test records of 2 300s (shared with lara) and a record 12 200s but in first-class cricket, no one comes close to his record: 37 200s and 7 300s!! And he has 117 100s in 338 innings, better than one every three innings. Nobody else has done better than one in five. Little wonder then that he is the fastest man to 100 first-class hundreds - in a mere 295 innings (next best Denis Compton in almost twice that many - 552 - innings!) and has the highest average in first-class crickets too -- 95.14 (no other player with 25,000 runs or more above 57) to go with his now-famous 99.94 average in tests.

Having finished Making Love, I am back to reading Toussaint's Television, which I had read just 6-8 pages of some weeks back. I really like the author's writing style and so will attempt to read two of his books back to back. A break after this book in early January, when I intend to concentrate on just one non-fiction book, which I need to read for some work-related stuff - To Cork or Not to Cork by George Taber.

Anyways, I barely restarted the novel and I arrive at yet another great paragraph. Amazing..at this rate, I might be transcribing the better part of the novel here! (This one is short too - at 164 pages.) Actually, fear not - I will try my level best to not type every great paragraph from the book. However, this paragraph is a great reflection of my feelings about the "sordid intoxication" that takes over a majority of living rooms around the world every evening and I am transcribing it here.

Sometime before, as if caught up in some sordid intoxication, I'd taken to turning on the TV in the evening and watching everything there was to see, my mind perfectly empty, never choosing any particular program, simply watching everything that came my way, the movement, the glimmering lights, the variety. At the time I didn't quite realize just what was happening to me, but looking back, I see that short-lived period of overindulgence as a classic forerunner of the radical decision that was to come, as if, to make a clean break, you first had to go through such a phase of excessive consumption. In the meantime, I spent hours every evening motionless before the screen, my gaze fixed, bathed in the ever-shifting light of the scene changes, gradually submerged by the flood of images illuminating my face, the long parade of images blindly addressed to everyone at once and no one in particular, each channel being only another strand in the vast web of electromagnetic waves daily crashing down over the world. Powerless to react, I nevertheless understood full well that I was debasing myself in these long sessions before the screen, unable to drop the remote, mechanically and frenetically changing channels in a quest for sordid and immediate pleasures, swept up in that vain inertia, that insatiable spiral, searching for ever more vileness, still more sadness.

and then a great paragraph that conveys well the relentless assault of TV on our lives. Why do we put ourselves through this? Why do we miss this when/if the TV ever goes off? What has mankind come to... letting the machines take over our lives or at the very least becoming so dependent on our TVs, our game-boys, our PSPs, our Xboxes, our mobile phones, our Blackberrys...and my own poison - this PC which I use to connect to this endless web of information - the internet.

Everywhere it is the same undifferentiated images, without margins or titles, without explanation, raw, incomprehensible, noisy and bright, ugly, sad, aggressive and jovial, syncopated, all equivalent, it was stereotypical American series, it was music videos, it was songs in English, it was game shows, it was documentaries, it was film scenes removed from their context, excerpted, it was excerpts, it was the snatch of song, it was lively, the audience clapping along in time, it was politicians sitting around a table, it was a roundtable, it was the circus, it was acrobatics, it was a game show, it was joy, unbelieving stunned laughter, hugs and tears, it was a near car being won live and in color, lips trembling with emotion, it was documentaries, it was World War II, it was a funeral march, it was columns of German prisoners trudging along a roadside, it was the liberation of the death camps, it was piles of bones on the ground, it was in all languages and on more than thirty-two channels, it was in German, it was mostly in German, everywhere it was violence and gunshots, it was bodies lying in the street, it was news, it was floods, it was football, it was game shows, it was a host with his papers before him, it was a spinning wheel that everyone in the studio was watching with heads raised, nine, it was nine, it was applause, it was commercials, it was variety shows, it was debates, it was animals, it was a man rowing in the studio, an athlete rowing and the hosts looking on with anxious expressions, sitting at a round table, a chronometer superimposed over the picture, it was images of war, the sound and framing oddly uneven , as if filmed on the fly, the picture shaking, the cameraman must have been running too, it was people running down a street and someone shooting at them, it was a woman falling, it was a woman who'd been hit, a woman of about fifty lying on the sidewalk, her slightly shabby gray coat gaping half open, her stocking torn, she'd been wounded in the thigh and was crying out, simply crying out, screaming simple cries of horror because her thigh had been ripped open, it was the cries of that woman in pain, she was calling for help, it wasn't fiction, two or three men came back and lifted her onto the curb, the shots were still coming, it was archival footage, it was news, it was commercials, it was new cars gently snaking along idyllic roads in the light of the setting sun, it was a rock concert, it was series, it was classical music, it was a special news bulletin, it was ski-jumping, the crouching skier pushing off down the ramp, serenely letting himself glide onto the jump and leaving the world behind, motionless in midair, he was flying, he was flying, it was magnificent, that frozen body bending forward, motionless and immutable in midair. It was over. It was over: I turned off the television and lay still on the couch.

Phew..The above description seems to be of European TV... a similar description of TV in the US would be even worse -- I am shuddering just recalling the inane nonsense on the local evening news, followed by the even more ridiculous Hollywood/celebrity gossip shows and game shows that I let into my house every evening after work (6-7.30pm) in the past few years!! And I didn't even get to an endless stream of sports-talk or the talking heads on CNN/Fox News etc! Oh...the calamities! Now you know why I do not get TV subscription! Why would I do that to myself?

Previous excerpts from the book: 1, 2, 3.

With the demise of Oscar Peterson last weekend and Dave Brubeck & Herbie Hancock not getting any younger, it is with great joy that I read this NPR piece about the pianist prodigy Matt Savage

...barely a teenager, yet he's already played with Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Clark Terry and Jimmy Heath. It's an unlikely start for a young man who, as a young child, was unable to tolerate noise, much less appreciate music.

..

At 15, Savage is promoting and performing following the release of his sixth studio album, Hot Ticket. His list of accomplishments includes being the youngest person to be signed as a Bosendorfer piano artist and the youngest performer to have played at New York's legendary jazz club, Blue Note. Savage has also won three consecutive ASCAP "Young Jazz Composer" awards.

You can also listen to an interview with the kid on NPR's All Things Considered in 2002. And below are five youtube videos of him playing the piano.

Martinis: one is too few, three is too many. But like women’s breasts, two is superbly right, says Christopher Hitchens, in his review of the book How's Your Drink? Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well by Eric Felten.

Reminds me...wasn't there a joke that god made man with 2 hands and women with 2 breasts for a reason...or something like that? And then there was that 3-breasted android in Total Recall that made Aaahnold say 'Makes me want to have 3 hands' ;)

Finished the novella, Making Love this morning. And this is how it all ends.

There was nothing left, just a crater smoking in the faint moonlight, and the feeling of having been at the origin of this infinitely small disaster.

The unraveling of a relationship.... an 'infinitely small disaster' indeed! But one that leaves you nauseated and empty.

A page before...this monster sentence:

Marie was there. It was not, properly speaking, a hallucination, because the scene took place outside of any visual representation, in a purely mental register, in a fleeting flash of consciousness, as if I were witnessing the scene all at once without developing any of its potential components (a lightning-swift arm, a figure fleeing and falling to the ground, awful smells of fumes and burning flesh, cries, and the sound of headlong flight across the parquet floor of the museum), a scene that remained in a way imprisoned in the matrix of indeterminancy of the infinite possibilities if art and life, but that, from simple eventuality - even in its worst form - could become a reality from one moment to the next. Marie, I said in a low voice, Marie. I was shaking slightly. I was afraid. I took a step foward. No one was there.

However, at 120 words, the above long sentence pales into insignificance before this one, earlier in the book!

We had continued on our way, still without speaking, and we hadn't yet left the bridge when - turning towards Marie, who was walking silently beside me in that icy drizzle of melted snow falling on the city, as I was getting ready to make a gesture toward her, to touch her arm or take her hand - I felt as though my head were wobbling, and dovetailing with this vertigo, the rumbling of an invisible train began to make everything tremble at its passage by noisily shaking the metal latticework of the bridge parapet that began to quiver from top to bottom next to me in the sprays of bluish sparks and flashes of fire I saw spurting suddenly from a switch box below that imploded on the spot in thick black smoke that began to boil up from the tracks where a train going full-tilt slammed on the brakes trying to stop, while, in the quick look around I took behind me on the footbridge amid the swaying lampposts, I saw passersby pitching as if on the bridge of a boat heaved up by an enormous wave, brief and violent, some of them losing their balance and struggling to stay on course by accelerating as though they were hurrying in pursuit of their umbrellas, others crouching down, most of them halting right where they were, seemingly petrified, paralyzed, shielding their hands with an arm, a briefcase, an attache case. And that was all, that was absolutely all. That was all there was. Barely thirty seconds, one minute later - after a moment fraught with panic and waiting when nothing else happened and nobody moved, everyone was looking at everyone else, still crouching among the briefcases lying here and there on the ground, still livid, damp with snow, ready to hunker down and protect themselves some more, expecting the worse, an immediate aftershock, perhaps a much stronger one (it was the second earthquake in a few hours, and it could start up again at any second, the threat was now a permanent one) -- people gradually stood up and walked away, the crowd on the footbridge disappeared, while an invisible dog barked far away in the grayish dawn.

Must be a record of sorts at 241 words! It is a art to write such long sentences with the right grammar and without losing the reader - even the diligent one - but this one, perhaps lost in translation, did seem to falter on both counts.
What was being said got lost to me somewhere along the way and I did not enjoy it as much as I usually do great long sentences in say, Ian McEwan novels.

Another great quote from the novella, Making Love, which I have about 20 pages left to read.

But breaking up, I was beginning to realize was more a state of being than an action, more a period of mourning than a death agony.

Oscar Peterson died last Sunday. Big loss to the jazz and music-loving world. :(

Mr. Peterson was one of the greatest virtuosos in jazz, with a piano technique that was always meticulous and ornate and sometimes overwhelming. But rather than expand the boundaries of jazz, he used his gifts in the service of moderation and reliability, gratifying his devoted audiences whether he was playing in a trio or solo or accompanying some of the most famous names of jazz. His technical accomplishments were always evident, almost transparently so. Even at his peak, there was very little tension in his playing.

Enjoy the wonderful music in a few videos below of Peterson playing the piano, thanks to youtube.





and last but not least - a piano 'duel' between two piano greats - Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock.

Dress changes color with your mood

Electronics firm Philips has designed a purportedly "emotion-sensitive dress," which monitors biophysical changes associated with different human emotions. Ingrid Bal from Philip's Design said: "You could programme the material so that it turned red if you were angry or stressed, or green when you're calm."

Wonder what happens when you are in a 'naughty' mood :)

A story to warm the cockles of your heart this holiday season...

With Diet, Exercise and Friendship, David Smith Loses 400 Pounds

Hopefully inspires some people to get off their sorry whining a--es and get into action to put their lives back on track in the new year. Easier said than done!

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” - Mahatma Gandhi (He oughta know something about will power! Everything he achieved, including shaking up an empire, was based on his 'indomitable will'.)

India's Modern Maharajahs

An exhibition by Indian photographer Prashant Panjiar focuses on kings from ancient Indian royal families known as maharajahs. Accompanying it is his book, King, Commoner, Citizen.

Speaking of maharajahs...

Sultan of Brunei's uber-rich lifestyle laid bare in court case

Long before Roman Abramovich was yachting around the Mediterranean, the Sultan of Brunei was the most celebrated globe-trotting billionaire, living a life of extravagant luxury. But now he has been forced to reveal the extent of his indulgences by supplying the Privy Council in London with details of his personal finances.

The revelations have come as a result of a bitter legal battle between the world's richest monarch and his "playboy prince" younger brother, Prince Jefri. The latest chapter in a decade-long feud concerns an accusation by the Sultan that his younger brother failed to pay all of a £3bn out-of-court settlement in 2000.

And speaking of rich people...this is a couple months old but worth a mention. Wow....what a life: Almost dead at 18 months but will soon be a millionaire soon at 25, thanks to the generosity of people from that incident when she was 18 months!

Baby Jessica waits to collect $1M fund
The 18-month old girl pulled from a backyard well two decades ago is now a young wife and mother -- one waiting to collect donations given to her during her ordeal that are expected to total $1 million or more.

The post title comes from here.

Loved these lines from Making Love by the French writer (I should actually call him an artist) Jean-Philippe Toussaint

It didn't matter who was wrong -- no one, probably. We loved each other, but we couldn't stand each other any more. There was this, now, in our love: even if we continued to do ourselves on the whole more good than harm, the little harm we did do ourselves had become unbearable.

Such is life, sometimes.

Note: Took the title of this post from this profile of the author:

With each new book, Toussaint has never moved away from a certain existential emptiness, through the restless and melancholic wanderings of his characters, haunted by details, by objects, by a sense of insignificance heightened to the point of anguish: the whole world reduced and confined to the few square metres of a bathroom, the epitome of a sanitised and empty place; or the whole world contained in an everyday object that has become deadly...

A string of posts here tonight all gleaned from articles I found at Boing-Boing - The Directory of Wonderful Things.

This one - Science is linguistic as well as numerical - is about a comment about a recent Scientific American article on gender bias in science and math and is one that makes me feel good!

Why? Because one way or the other, I can now truly claim that I am a scientist. Not just because I have a PhD and am in research & development (R&D) but because I love words, language and literature that complements my analytical mind.

Now if only I could get it to focus on one thing. Too many things to read, to little time to do anything myself....and this internet ain't helping! Time to log out and go read a book or something. Au revoir....until tomorrow!

I heard about this master photographer earlier today in the context of his latest book of photographs: Africa (Hardcover - Oct 31, 2007).

The celebrated Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado has recorded numerous major upheavals on the African continent, beginning in the mid-1970s -- wars of independence, civil wars, drought, famine, genocide. In "Africa" (Taschen: 336 pp., $59.99), more than 300 of his photographs, dating from 1974 to 2006, are beautifully reproduced. They are disturbing images -- a record of extreme human and natural violence -- and they are also heartbreaking, because the Africa of your childhood imagination is here too: the stupendous skies, the moss-laden forests, the gorillas on the flanks of a volcano, the migrating wildebeests, a solitary leopard drinking its fill in the Barab River valley. All of these photographs have an eerie immediacy you can get lost in. - LA Times review

Brazil's Sebastião Salgado's black and white work from the 1970s onwards has focused on developments in the Third World. It seems Salgado discovered photography while working as an economist for the World Bank. He is now one of the world's greatest photographers .

He has a # of books full of great photographs but to get a flavor look at

- First up... some pictures of Africa probably from the recent book via a Google-Image search.

- this series appearing in the Guardian over 8 years (2004-2012). Apparently, "he is seeking out places that are still as pristine as they were in primeval times, places that provide hope. First stop, the Galapagos Islands."

- this excerpt of images from his 2000 book "Migrations"

- and this great series in the NYT about land reform movement in his native Brazil.