I'll be in town to visit a quickly failing grandmother and see/support/get support/deal with family.

Ok, "if" it is, then. Gimme a phone call at least. It'll be my birthday, after all.

will do. insent.

I´m in Berlin (whee!) and won´t be home until the end of May, msbelle, but I can send you copies of my mix, Anne´s, Alicia´s, and meara´s when I get back.

awesome! Thanks guys.

From the Daily News: Rockers pour out 'Spinal Tap' stories. In this instance Ozzy is at least as good as top-notch Stones. I'm tempted to use the midget line as my new tag. Of course I'd need to decide whether to use Ozzy's line, the midget's comment, or both. Hmmm... maybe I'll just skip it.

Go with the midget's comment.

Thanks for that, Joe. Those are great stories.

Those are great stories.

The midget's reply, had it been on The Osbournes, would have been the greatest moment in television history. (Btw, I did change my tagline. It's from the great Why I Hate Saturn by Kyle Baker.)

Hey, Corwood, the stopped clock is right again:

Pitchfork haters, rejoice: You have a new champion. Comedian David Cross, of "Arrested Development" and "Mr. Show" fame, brutalized the online publication in its own digital pages yesterday with a list of the "Top Ten CDs That I Just Made Up (and accompanying made-up review excerpts) to listen to while skimming through some of the overwrought reviews on Pitchforkmedia.com." Cross' list is petulant and sloppy... but it's also hilarious. His parodies of the Pitchfork style are dead on (I particularly like the line "Let its volcanic rapture overwhelm you like a 19th century hand-woven blanket made of human hair might have done back in the days when they enjoyed such things").

Had this been posted just one day earlier I probably would have had the delightfully meta moment of walking past David Cross while reading a printout of the article. As it was I just thought, "Hey, David Cross! I like him but have nothing to say to him. I hope he didn't notice me ogling the woman he's with."

And in other news, almost half of my LITG sidebar concerning jazz albums that go in and out of print is available from emusic: Arthur Blythe's Focus (pick hit: "Night Song"), Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity ("Ghosts: First Version"), Charles Mingus' Town Hall Concert ("Praying With Eric," a.k.a., "Meditations on Integration," recorded shortly before Eric Dolphy's too, too early death) and Thelonious Monk's eponymous Prestige album, (no pick hit -- download the whole thing, although I will completely disagree with the emusic review: I love "Bye-Ya".)

ETA: Almost forgot, here's Gary Giddins on Arthur Blythe. I had a couple of his albums, but this article is how I learned about Focus.

I dug the heck out of that David Cross list, although I'm certainly guilty of hyperbolic language about music, too.

I don't have any Blythe, but I have all three of those other albums. In fact, I was listening to the Monk yesterday (Isn't that one attributed to the Thelonious Monk Trio instead of ol' TSM himself?). It was one fo the first Monk albums I ever got my hands on, lo these many years ago. And yeah, the version of "Bye-Ya" on that one is great, too, as are the other tracks.