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Jazzabration!
This clip, with Stephen Colbert ragging John Zorn and showing his own “Hiphopketball: A Jazzabration,” made me laugh. Now, I like John Zorn. I have a bunch of his albums, and besides my brother-in-law...
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Frankenstein
Phil Ford A couple of days ago Squashed, of the fine music blogs Bricolage Fantasy and Motel De Moka, wrote the following comment to my “Hippist” post of last week: If it is a habit, how can it be hip?...
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Make an avant-garde jazz noise here
Phil Ford Last summer spent a day in New York with my friend John, and we wanted to see something of the city. Mostly we walked around south of 14th street rather than seeing sights; sights, we agreed,...
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Institutional bacon
Phil Ford Biking in to work this morning before sunrise, zipping past frat houses just beginning to stir, I catch a whiff of something that catches me a sledgehammer blow of reminiscence and nostalgia...
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Hello, or Thinking of Nico
Ryan Dohoney Greetings. I, like Michael, am new around these parts. Phil kindly asked me to contribute to Dial M on occasion and it’s a pleasure to be a more active part of a blog I’ve come to love. So...
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The moving soundscape meditation
Phil Ford Lyle Sanford just added a wonderful quote from Daniel Goleman’s Vital Lies, Simple Truths to my last post: The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because...
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Fast and Loose
There is, it has long seemed to me, a taboo of politesse. We curse various cultural phenomena, such as corporatism (in its pop-culture incarnations, such as will shortly become evident), cultural...
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Near-life experience
Happy new year! This is how I partied on New Year’s Eve: Crashed out at 9:30 pm with my dog.* Not exactly Andrew WK. Man, Andrew WK. I could write a blog post about that guy: a pop metal Andy Kaufman...
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The Alter-Destiny
Ron Regé, “Sun Ra.” So I’ve been saying that the Cold War never ended. In the last of my four installments on this theme, I finally got to my point: it’s not the Cold War that has continued in some...
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Sadness
[written in LA, posted several days later] I’m in Los Angeles right now. I got a grant from IU’s invaluable New Frontiers program to go to the Getty Research Institute for a couple of weeks and do...
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