Heh...

The FSU/Florida game is crazy entertaining and spirited, with morons on both sides acting out.

It's all on the line now. End of the 3rd.

Good lawd, the Floridians are unruly.

Ole' Miss. on the verge of knocking Miss. State out of it.  Cool.


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Memory

Roy Hargrove and his band were in Portland playing a gig at one of the bigger venues in town back in the '90s. But everyone knew the real shit was happening at Seafood Mama's, a jazz club on 21st Ave.

A storm had moved in and the entire neighborhood lost power just as Hargrove brought his players in for some after-hours cutting.

I was there--I lived around the corner--and a few others were in play for some late cocktails and jazz.

We lit candles.  Young Hargrove, who was just coming into his worldly place, played his horn.  His electric bass player thumped out lines without amplification.

The snare-and-cymbals kit his drummer brought in sounded fine.

What they produced by candlelight in a big storm was truly remarkable.  Intimacy might be the best word for it.

That cold, stormy night in Portland many years ago in an after-hours venue is one of my favorite memories of a glorious time.


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Stuffed and Ready

I certainly had a good holiday. Hope you did as well.

This is going to be--what else?--a long day of college football gazing as the regular season closes out before the conference championships happen next weekend.

I'm ready for all the big matchups, not the least of which is the OSU vs. Oregon game from Corvallis this evening.

Before then, I want to glimpse some of the others; notably, tOSU vs. Michigan and FSU vs. Florida games, which are like the local rivalry inasmuch as you can toss records out the window.  These types of contests are always closer in the end than the on-paper-talent would indicate they should be, often going to the wire.

Bizarre things have and can happen, and with my Ducks playing for a spot in the inaugural CFP, I'll be on the edge of my seat.  I'm personally on upset alert.

I'm focused.  I wonder if my alma mater will be?

On a superstitious note, I don't like it that people are already talking up next weekend's Arizona and Oregon championship game in Santa Clara.

The Ducks have too much hard work scheduled for this evening to be thinking about that.  It could be that UCLA fell into that trap yesterday, losing to Stanford.

All the talk leading up to that game was about how UCLA might win out and slip into the playoff. Stanford, a rugged team, had another notion.

The talent is too equal around the conference to expect anything to come easily.

All that stated, I expect Oregon to be focused, having learned the perils of not being as such in the recent past--too many times, in fact.

After that, it's a matter of which way the ball bounces.


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Happy Thanksgiving Everybody

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Terence Connery

Terence Connery: "Autumnal Inequities"

"I went to mail my rent check...I walked through a bike path of fake nature..."


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On the Varieties of Violence

Barack Obama, the obsequious errand boy for the financial and corporate plutocrats who own the U.S. government, made a pathetic appearance on national television to try to persuade the “natives” to remain peaceful in response to the non-indictment of the Ferguson killer-cop. His inane comments extolling the value of non-violence and the rule of law seemed strangely incongruent with the militaristic rhetoric and policies of his administration over the last few years.

Yet, Obama’s positions on law and violence are not as contradictory as they might appear when these positions are resituated within the context of imperial logic and the framework of power. Legitimate violence is always determined by history’s dominant powers and employed as a weapon to maintain and extend that dominance. Over the last five hundred years Europe emerged from the backwaters of history and cultural backwardness to predominance as a result of genocide and land theft in the Americas, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and colonial/capitalist development. The violent establishment of capitalism, racism, and heteropatriarchy enabled the West to impose its definitions of legitimacy, including “legitimate” violence.

An essay by Ajamu Baraka.


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Mark Lanegan

Happy birthday to Mark Lanegan (Nov. 25, 1964 to present), U.S. rock star who co-founded Screaming Trees, helping usher in Seattle "grunge," circa 1984.

If you're in Europe this winter catch him at one of these venues from January through March.

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Essay of the Day

To white America, in the main, police are the folks who help get our cats out of the tree, or who take us on ride-arounds to show us how gosh-darned exciting it is to be a cop. We experience police most often as helpful, as protectors of our lives and property. But that is not the black experience by and large; and black people know this, however much we don’t. The history of law enforcement in America, with regard to black folks, has been one of unremitting oppression. That is neither hyperbole nor opinion, but incontrovertible fact. From slave patrols to overseers to the Black Codes to lynching, it is a fact. From dozens of white-on-black riots that marked the first half of the twentieth century (in which cops participated actively) to Watts to Rodney King to Abner Louima to Amadou Diallo to the railroading of the Central Park 5, it is a fact. From the New Orleans Police Department’s killings of Adolph Archie to Henry Glover to the Danziger Bridge shootings there in the wake of Katrina to stop-and-frisk in places like New York, it’s a fact. And the fact that white people don’t know this history, have never been required to learn it, and can be considered even remotely informed citizens without knowing it, explains a lot about what’s wrong with America. Black people have to learn everything about white people just to stay alive. They especially and quite obviously have to know what scares us, what triggers the reptilian part of our brains and convinces us that they intend to do us harm. Meanwhile, we need know nothing whatsoever about them. We don’t have to know their history, their experiences, their hopes and dreams, or their fears. And we can go right on being oblivious to all that without consequence. It won’t be on the test, so to speak.

The rest of an important essay by Tim Wise.


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Dinner

Tonight!

Beef chorizo over rice.  I buy the prepared roll.  Heat it and eat it.

It's a bad habit, but oh so tasty...


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Buckley

Happy birthday to William F. Buckley, writer, journalist, celebrity and the last quasi-sensible conservative (Nov. 24, 1925-Feb. 27, 2008).

He was a dickhead with a snake-like tongue, but he flicked it with style.

An institutionalized racist in a racist society, he finally came to admire MLK: 

In the late 1960s, Buckley disagreed strenuously with segregationist George Wallace, who ran in Democratic primaries (1964 and 1972) and made an independent run for president in 1968. Buckley later said it was a mistake for National Review to have opposed the civil rights legislation of 1964–65. He later grew to admire Martin Luther King, Jr. and supported creation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day national holiday for him. During the 1950s, Buckley had worked to remove anti-Semitism from the conservative movement and barred holders of those views from working for National Review.


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Stroszek

Anxious to get to this tonight after the Ducks' basketball game vs. Michigan.

It's is one of the few Herzog movies I haven't seen.  Stumbled into it at the library today.

Herzog is a god to me.  Speaking of which, Aguirre, the Wrath of God is one of my favorite movies of all time.

What a great pleasure!  When I watch a good movie or read something exhilarating in the evening I have pleasant dreams and feel like I've accomplished something from my day.

A meaningless delusion, but what the heck?


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Average Joe

Happy birthday to Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter of Hungarian/American lineage (Nov. 23, 1944--present).






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Van the Man

Like all art, rock music is an assertion that defies objective knowledge. In a single performance, a singer, guitarist, or any musician can make you believe in the spontaneous generation of the original rock ‘n’ roll, “regardless,” as Marcus writes, “of any rumors that something vaguely similar might have happened before.” This is what the aesthetic philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto meant when he wrote, in his book After the End of Art, that “there really is, in history, no such thing as having done something before.” (I dare you to disagree after blasting Lauper’s “Money Changes Everything” at high volume.) Marcus argues that context is fundamental to the understanding of history as what happened, what might have happened, and what may yet happen.

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Harvard/Yale

The elites play a big game today in advance of joining the neoliberal mobsters who rule the world. Right now their fathers are in charge. Their proxy Obama, whose kids aren't old enough for college yet, is taking Harvard.  Kerry has Yale, though he had to settle for Boston College for his law degree because he was a lousy undergraduate student.  Of the two, Kerry is richer, having been born into the upper class and later marrying into a prominent ketchup family. Today, the entire focus of the elites is to get more people in the Middle East and Africa to serve Heinz with their falafel and chambo.


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Force of Nature

Most of the time I'm lazy about laundry, put it off forever.

But you cannot fight the force of nature when it is sending you a message.  I woke up this morning wide-eyed.  There was nothing to do but put two loads in.

It was quiet down there, just me and those wonderful machines.

Almost peaceful.

I'm ready to watch the SEC teams take on their tough out-of-conference competition today. Nothing is quite as pleasing as watching Alabama beat up on another over-matched directional school.

Oregon and Colorado, you say?

Hey, at least it's a conference game.  And Colorado is no Western Carolina.


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