"I’d been playing in a lot of bands, and often I’d feel like improvising not on the chords but on the melody or the rhythm or just the mood of a song."

"But I couldn’t. The other musicians didn’t know what I was doing, they got thrown off," said the great jazz bassist Charlie Haden, speaking about a time in the 1950s, before he found Ornette Coleman, who was having a similar problem with other musicians. Here's "The Shape of Jazz to Come," the first album they made together and one of 4 albums that made "1959 The Year that Changed Jazz."

Haden died yesterday, at the age of 76. 

ADDED: Let me embed that "Year That Changed Jazz" video. You'll see Haden, speaking beginning at 7:57, talking about Miles Davis (during the part about the first of the 4 albums, which is "Kind of Blue" ("It makes you feel life so deeply that you could almost cry")).



AND: Start the video at 28:05 to concentrate on the Ornette Coleman material and to hear Haden discuss his connection to Coleman. "This guy started to play — it was like the heavens opened up to me, because I saw and I heard something that I'd been feeling."

The last Ramone...

... Tommy Ramone, dead now, at 62.

Born Erdelyi Tamas in Budapest, Hungary, and known professionally as Tom or T. Erdelyi, Ramone played [drums] on the first three epoch-making Ramones albums....

Joey Ramone died of lymphoma in 2001; Dee Dee succumbed to a drug overdose in 2002; and Johnny expired from prostate cancer in 2004.

Tommy died of bile duct cancer. Here's a clip of Tommy Ramone from 2012, talking about NYC songs, including The Ramones' "Rockaway Beach" (which he does in acoustic form):



I'm playing that and Meade — from the next room — says: "Boring. Sounds like a guy just making up stuff on State Street."

Here's how it's supposed to sound.

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary. Excerpt:

“We started auditioning drummers, but they just couldn’t grasp the concept of the band — the speed and simplicity,” Mr. Erdelyi said in a 2011 interview with the website Noisecreep. “So I’d sit down and show them what we were looking for and the guys just finally said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ So I gave it a try and that’s when the sound of the band sort of solidified.”...

Official songwriting credits were shared by the full band. But Mr. Erdelyi was the primary author of several of the Ramones’ early classics, including “Blitzkrieg Bop,” which opens their first album with the chant “Hey ho, let’s go!” and features lyrics that boil teenage angst down to its most basic and kinetic:

What they want, I don’t know

They’re all revved up and ready to go

The place of secrecy within "Wisconsin's Tradition of Clean and Open Government."

If you're following the John Doe investigation in Wisconsin, you may be interested in this new development in the state court challenge to the investigation (there's also a federal court challenge):

A Waukesha County judge on Thursday issued an order allowing the state Government Accountability Board to black out parts of its response to a lawsuit filed against it by the conservative Wisconsin Club for Growth. The ruling means the public won't be able to fully analyze the election and ethics board's legal arguments as it defends itself against the suit.

With assistance from the accountability board, prosecutors looked into whether the club and other conservative groups violated campaign finance laws in helping [Governor Scott] Walker and other Republicans in the 2011 and 2012 recall elections. Prosecutors conducted the probe as a secret John Doe investigation in which targets and witnesses can be required to give testimony and produce documents but are barred from talking to the public about it....

The accountability board wants to keep its filing confidential because under state law board members and their staff can face criminal penalties if they disclose information about their investigations.

Meanwhile, in federal court, hundreds of pages of documents have been released. Thousands of pages remain secret.

The secrecy requirements, as I understand it, were devised to protect those who are under investigation, but I can see how those doing the investigation could exploit the requirement to shield their work from public scrutiny. With secrecy enforced by criminal sanctions, it's hard to fault the Board for demanding secrecy, but that's an absurd way to preserve "Wisconsin's Tradition of Clean and Open Government" — to quote the mission the Government Accountability Board proudly trumpets.

What the framers of the First Amendment had to say about hats.

On August 15, 1789, in the House of Representatives, the subject was "the right of the people peaceably to assemble and consult for their common good," which ultimately became "the right of the people peaceably to assemble," and Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist from Massachusetts, expressed concern about getting too specific in enumerating rights. The text had "freedom of speech," which already implies the right to assemble to exercise that right, and he rejected the assertion that it should be listed among the rights simply because it is a right:

[I]f the committee were governed by that general principle, they might have gone into a very lengthy enumeration of rights; they might have declared that a man should have a right to wear his hat if he pleased; that he might get up when he pleased, and go to bed when he thought proper; but he would ask the gentleman whether he thought it necessary to enter these trifles in a declaration of rights, in a Government where none of them were intended to be infringed.

"The old Professor-Peter-Peckinpah-all-purpose-anti-personnel-Peckinpah-pocket-pistol-under-the-toupee trick."

Do you remember all the old tricks?

I didn't ever remember that the "old [blank] trick" format as an old joke-making trick was an old "Get Smart" trick, but I got brought up to speed when I made an "old [blank] trick" joke just now. It had gone generic in my head, and I'm glad to drag it back to a proper know-your-meme level of consciousness.

"When chemotherapy left me too exhausted to even get out of bed, I would find myself picking up the Bible..."

"... if that’s what happened to be on my nightstand, and reading a favorite verse or two. But if there happened to be a copy of The Hunger Games there instead, a couple of chapters of that would also do the trick."

God is our strength, we read in Psalm 18, and as powerless as I felt during those agonizing months, I discovered courage in His wisdom when it was within arm’s reach, just as I did with Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and David Baldacci’s thriller Stone Cold.

Throughout my life, in fact, the Bible or some other reading material has been there when I needed it most. When I lost my job and worried about how I was going to scrape together next month’s rent in the middle of a brutal recession, I often relied on the Bible, A Tale Of Two Cities, In Cold Blood, The Audacity Of Hope, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Seabiscuit, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a pocket road atlas of the Great Lakes region, The Oxford Companion To Ships And The Sea, or Fodor’s Montréal And Québec City 2009....

"I care deeply about federal judicial transparency, I don’t see much of that and if I quit [blogging] there would be even less of it..."

"... and none of it from federal district judges. The implicit assumption of the thoughtful lawyer who wrote me is that mystery and mythology are better for the legal profession and the judiciary than transparency, particularly when the transparency revealed is raw. I profoundly disagree."

Writes Federal District Judge Richard Kopf, who has decided to reject the advice that he stop blogging.

We talked his contemplation of quitting here — which came, you may remember, after he blogged that the Supreme Court should "stfu" — and the new post links to that post of mine, which he characterized as "critical."

Why are they calling Obama "The Bear"? "Isn't Russia associated with the Bear?"

Asks LuAnn Zieman, commenting on the post "Bears, beer and horse heads: What exactly is going on with the leader of the free world?," which identifies "Bear" as a nickname for Obama that his "top staffers" are pushing as he roams about the nation doing campaign-style photo ops.

Why "Bear"? Zieman wonders whether the idea is intentionally to associate Obama with Russia: "Maybe this is his Putin moment because, after all, Putin's been making him look bad for quite awhile."

Russia is my association too, partly because this old Ronald Reagan ad is deeply lodged in my brain:



There's a bear in the woods....

Twitchy is irked by the "Bear" moniker.

And look, Obama talking about himself arrives at a meeting and says "The Bear is loose." Ridiculous, but before you anti-Obamites run with this, remember that Sarah Palin has long been calling herself a "Mama Grizzly" ("If you thought pit bulls were tough, you don't want to mess with mama grizzlies").

"A memorable name like Purple Haze or Maui Waui can resonate for decades."

"It can also make the difference in today's crowded field of expertly grown pot, where one high is often as good as another."

All marijuana is derived from two parent strains: indica, which is associated with a sleepy body high, and sativa, which is believed to make users more energetic. Hundreds of hybrids now exist, including Orenstein's Super Strawberry.

"If people associate a good experience with a particular strain, they'll talk about it and look for it by name," said Cy Scott, co-founder of Leafly.com, a directory of dispensaries and cannabis reviews."The more clever the name, the more interest."...

"Feels like I'm falling backwards even when I'm sitting still," read a Leafly user review of Charlie Sheen OG.

Imagine selling liquor based not on the flavor but on the particular feeling of intoxication you're supposed to get! It's quite absurd, but people are suggestible. One problem with this name-branding: You can't register a trademark.

The U.S. Trademark and Patent Office briefly allowed people to register cannabis in 2010 before abruptly halting the practice and saying it was a mistake.

More pressing to the industry than trademarking is the lack of laws that require labeling and testing of marijuana in California. That means no one can be certain whether they're actually buying a container of White Widow or Super Silver Haze — or if it's another strain entirely.

We need a specific brand of marijuana that erases your uncertainty about whether you are consuming a specific brand of marijuana... to go along with that sensation that your body is in motion even when you're just sitting around.

Publicly mocked obese, sleeping Yankee fan sues over the public mockery...

... and is publicly mocked for the lawsuit.

When is it better to laugh at yourself when you are laughed at and when is it better to stand your that's-not-funny ground and seek millions of dollars for your pain?

The filing of the lawsuit got me to watch the much-watched video clip, which I hadn't bothered with before. I'm surprised how gentle the ESPN announcers are. There's no conceivable basis for a lawsuit here.

By the way, the man, Andrew Rector, is a used car salesman. You'd think he'd have better skills at taking what seems to be bad and flipping it into the good. He's recognizable. He's famous now. Be the fat, sleeping baseball guy. It's branding. Now, you're the petulant, humorless, litigious guy.

Rector shut his business for a while after the embarrassing incident, telling staff at Auto World NYC to take the next few days off. He also gave away his season tickets to Yankee home games.

Pathetic.

ADDED: Wait. I had a Nixon theme going this morning....

Nixon: "Let me say something before we get off the gay thing. I don’t want my views misunderstood."

"I am the most tolerant person on that of anybody in this shop. They have a problem. They’re born that way. You know that. That’s all. I think they are."

Anyway, my point is, though, when I say they’re born that way, the tendency is there. [But] my point is that Boy Scout leaders, YMCA leaders, and others bring them in that direction, and teachers. And if you look over the history of societies, you will find, of course, that some of the highly intelligent people . . . Oscar Wilde, Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, were all homosexuals. Nero, of course, was, in a public way, in with a boy in Rome.

Haldeman: There’s a whole bunch of Roman emperors. . . .

Nixon: But the point is, look at that, once a society moves in that direction, the vitality goes out of that society. Now, isn’t that right, Henry?

"Bears, beer and horse heads: What exactly is going on with the leader of the free world?"

What exactly is going on with the leader of the free press? That's the first line of a Washington Post story that is the top item on the site's home page. Has WaPo turned against Obama? I'm going to guess no and that this article is actually supportive, but let's check it out:

On a single day this week in Denver, President Obama scarfed down pizza and drinks with strangers, shot pool with Colorado’s governor and shook hands with a guy on the street wearing a horse mask. His top staffers are promoting these stops on Twitter with the hashtag #TheBearIsLoose — a term one of Obama’s aides coined in 2008 when the candidate would defy his schedule....

So... this is easy: Obama is campaigning. It's what he does well, and he wants to be seen in a good light. He wants these photo ops to be used as WaPo mostly uses them: To revive old love and to make journalists decry gridlock in Washington.

But can the Obama-for-President routine play when we've got that children-crossing-the-border crisis? Obama is traveling about, doing political theater, and when he was questioned about his avoidance of the scene near the border, he said: "This is not theater." That is, it's a problem to be solved in a serious way, and that to visit the detention camps would be theater. He's right about that. It's not the kind of theater he wants. He's not denying that pizza-scarfing and horse-mask-guy greeting are theater. So the showman chooses what show to mount. 

The president... seems genuinely impatient with the limitations of his office.

We have limited government. Love it or don't serve in it, conlawprof.

He has started walking around D.C. for short stints, referring to himself in the third person as “the bear” as he walks across Lafayette Park or heads to a nearby Starbucks....

Maybe one morning he'll awaken before 4 a.m and wander down to the Lincoln Memorial to talk with the young people. His chief of staff might write in his diary "I am concerned about his condition" and call it "the weirdest day so far." The President might dictate notes to be shared with "anyone else who may have raised questions": "Even when I'm tired, I do not talk about nonsensical things," and talking with the young people was an effort "to lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in which they now wander."

I hope that (your) hatred of the [what's going on these days], which I could well understand, would not turn into a bitter hatred of our whole system, our country and everything that it stood for. I said that I know probably most of you think I'm an SOB. But I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.

Nah. That was Nixon. The young people don't think Obama's an SOB, and Obama has never had to entertain the slightest notion that the young people think he's an SOB.

At the Day-and-Night Café...

... you can hang around as long as you want.

At Althouse, "café" = open thread. And I'll take advantage of the openness to thank everyone who's shopped through my Amazon portal.

"Things you can do at #hobbylobby #keepyourrosariesoffmyovaries #prochoice."

Instagramming in-store activism protesting the Hobby Lobby decision:



More at "Crafty activists are trolling Hobby Lobby by rearranging in-store craft displays to spell ‘pro-choice’" in The Washington Post.

Shea’s fans — actress Wendi McLendon-Covey and columnist Dan Savage among them — have lauded the stunt as a clever, light-hearted way to draw attention to women’s health and the Hobby Lobby case. Her critics, meanwhile, have dismissed it as childish and misguided, less sticking it to “the man” and more inconveniencing a bunch of frazzled, innocent store employees....

In either case, what Shea terms a “protest” or a “prank” is almost indistinguishable from trolling — provoking annoyance and fury, merely to infuriate and annoy. That’s not a criticism, but it’s certainly an intriguing commentary on the state of political discourse these days. We have reached a point where the end-game, perhaps necessarily, isn’t to convert hearts and minds — it’s just to make some noise.

I'm torn. Making some noise = free speech. Yeah, speech doesn't necessarily persuade, but that's a good thing. I wouldn't say it's just noise. Speech is valuable precisely because it is not coercive. Sometimes we call speech "compelling," but it depends on what you say... and how you say it.

The form of expression matters. Here, the speaker appropriates the store's merchandise (and employee labor) as a medium. And the medium is (part of) the message. This prankery strikes me as sort of fun-loving, a way to vent frustration, but I'm distracted by 2 things:

1.  "Pro-choice" is the wrong word in the context where the business owners resisted being denied the choice about covering birth control and where that resistance is premised on their religion which they have the right to choose. Those who don't like the choices the business owners have made have the choice to shop elsewhere.

2. The pranksters are taunting those who have taken a strong stand based on religion. Are we really going to taunt people about religion? If you're inclined to say yes, do you really mean it, across the board for all religions, or is this a special willingness to taunt Christians? If it's special for Christians, why is that? Is it because you think it's okay to taunt what you think is the dominant group? If Christians like the ones your protesting against really were dominant, we shouldn't, in a democracy, end up with laws forcing them to do things against their conscience, so I'd say, the existence of the birth control mandate is evidence that they are not the dominant group, in which case, you're harassing a minority. Why would you do that? Is it that you feel safe picking on Christians?

ADDED: Have you ever moved merchandise around in a store as a way to make a political example? I'm trying to remember if I've ever done something like that. Moving books in a bookstore is the most common protest of this sort, like Code Pink's "Move Cheney's Book to the Crime Section of Bookstores!"

I'm seeing a list of 500 fun things to do at WalMart that I'm not going to link to. #1 is "Take shopping carts for the express purpose of filling them and stranding them at strategic locations." I didn't read the whole list, but it made me think of the "Shopping for Others" scene in the movie "Pecker."

What's the difference between a "structured" and an "unstructured" reality show?

These are new categories in the Emmys, and separate from competition reality shows like "Project Runway" and "The Amazing Race." A competition seems like the main reality show structure, but that's not the concept here. Reality competition is a third category.

The announcement of the nominations just came out, and I could not figure out, from reading those 2 sets of nominations, what "structured" and "unstructured" was supposed to mean. Here's WaPo's attempt to explain the distinction: Structured reality shows have "something of a routine, such as MTV’s 'Catfish,' Discovery’s 'MythBusters' and History’s 'Pawn Stars.'" And unstructured reality shows "are the ones that just follow wacky people around and see what happens: Think A&E’s 'Duck Dynasty,' E!’s 'Keeping Up With the Kardashians' and Bravo’s 'The Real Housewives of New York City.'"

Only one of the shows named in the preceding paragraph appears on the actual list of nominees, and that's "Mythbusters." I have no idea why.

"Moneyballing" relationships.

"[I]t's all about finding undervalued traits and assets in the dating market. And, just like with baseball, it starts with trying to ignore the superficial indices of value — attractiveness, wealth — in favor of hidden attributes with a stronger correlation to long-term relationship success."

With married couples... "liking declines at a rate of 3 percent a year, whereas lust declines at a rate of 8 percent per year," so the smarter, long-term investment is finding someone you genuinely like. Plus... studies also suggest that agreeable partners are in fact "better in bed" and less likely to cheat over the long haul.