More Lessons From The Mostar Mash

ACTUALLY WRITTEN 02:00, 06-06-03
pjdillon@attglobal.net
These late night files have got to end!
Funny how three pints of Bintang and a glass of Chardonay will turn yer average, mild mannered typist into some sort of wordsmith in waiting… this is the way it use to be, light buzz, free association time… lets see where we end up tonight.
The voyage of discovery continues today with new music files, and continuing tale of the Grinch and his music box.
As the casual reader will be aware, I’m losing a small part of myself with the departure from the archipela-nation of my best man Sasa, he of the Yogyakarta, joint tattoo session of two weeks ago. I’m not gonna gloom and doom about that ‘cause there’s always tomorrow or tomorrow for that. Mentioned here only in the context of how sometimes the learning only comes when it gets to be late in the day and transit is bad and maybe you’re gonna have to leave early and you don’t really know for sure when you throw “See ya later” over your shoulder just how long “later” might turn out to be…
And so here’s the word. I’m sitting propped up in bed (alone, on account of my sweety being off in East Java doing the family thing for a couple of days) accompanied by the whirling of the AC and Dexter Gordon’s smooth-as-bubur ayam sax on the deck, and it is all very fine.
What do you learn from someone’s music collection? Better yet, what do you learn about your own constricted airs when thrown a stash of new music, of names you know but have never really listened to?
I wouldn’t be lingering amidst these silky airs this evening had Sasa not dropped off about 15 kgs of CDs to be blended and mulched and scored into my hard-drive and turned into a usable, ‘groovable playlist for Friday’s big “goin’ ‘way” party (more on that later: ed). See, ‘cause even though we’ve covered a lot of ground over a couple dozen long evenings, I had no idea of my man Sasa's musical tastes extended to so many variably variable terrains.
I’m looking at platters worth of Ella James and Shostakovich, Aretha and Vivaldi, oblique African jazz rhythms and Eric Clapton. Al DiMeola and Fiddler On The Roof. Leonard Bernstein and Leonard Cohen. And many sleeves-worth of Croatian pickings, running from urban Mostar electro-trance to military drinking songs, and other esoteric eccentricities.
I’ve been entertaining him with White Zombie, Zappa and BB King, for four years, unaware of the bass-line that’s been running through my buddy’s personal soundtrack all this time. And so, I’m learning again. Right now it's Dexter Gordon (a name I knew but never consciously heard), and the many others I’ve been sampling, tasting, and saving to my laptop these past few days.
So this is what Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond were up to at Carnegie Hall back in the fall of ’63? Sweetness!
……… and so the battle goes on. News and views: New York Times this morning announced both editor and ME are leaving after the whole scandal with the Jayson Wazzisname, the golden boy, the poster-child for in-house affirmative action (he’s black) who cooked half of the stories he wrote since October of last year. Another journo living real in a post-modern world. Gimme substance abuse and gimme Beltway snipers baby, and I’m good to go.
Always curious about the moral judgments passed at these moments. This young fellow deserved to get caned, no doubt. Bitch slapped? Oh yeah.
Funny thing though. Most of the people my age I know who’ve been operating at the international levels of the business say that while I was banging away in obscurity in Western Canada for so many years, they’ve been witnessing the gradual decay in the quality of international journalism, accuracy sacrificed for access, some sort of objective truth lost to higher in-house political ambitions (something I’ve seen personally, reporters torque-ing up stories from Indonesia because it is safe to do so and it moves your byline from inside Page 14 ). These friends with the majors are almost uniformly appalled by the extent to which their colleagues lie, cheat and bullshit their way through assignments.
Spoke with one friend who’s a “Face” with one of the networks recently who identified three on-air journalists most competent news consumers are familiar with that he said were notorious for filing stories that were not only not accurate, but were complete figments of their imagination. When pressed, he came up with specific examples. And, we’re not talking about the bald-faced lies Geraldo filed from Tora Bora, but more recent stories from Southeast and Central Asia that had no basis in fact.
More on this I’m sure in later editions. For now though the blood is starting to chill, Dexter’s mellowing me out and I’m gonna crash.