Top Court Once Again Degrades Free Speech In The Service Of Buying Elections

Campaign spending has long been a slippery slope, and finding a balance between private and public interests and wealthy benefactors and nickel-dime contributors has been difficult. But the goal — trying to mitigate the impact of big bucks on election campaigns — has been a worthy one. And one that the Roberts Supreme Court has once again determined to be less worthy than allowing corporations and others with deep pockets to inordinately influence if not outright buy elections.

Coming on the heels of the Citizens United ruling in which a narrow (and of course conservative) majority of justices astonishingly conferred free speech rights on the Fortune 500′s finest when it came to unbridled campaign contributions, the same five justices this week struck down the Arizona Clean Elections Act, a 1998 ballot initiative that gave public money to candidates who agreed to limit their personal spending to $500, participate in at least one debate, and return unspent money.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts banged a by-now familiar drum, declaring that “Laws like Arizona’s matching funds provision that inhibit robust and wide-open political debate without sufficient justification cannot stand.”

For good measure, Justice Samuel Alito called the law “an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises” free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, and none of the majority justices were swayed by Justice Elena Kagan’s view that “What the law does — all the law does — is fund more speech.”

Like Citizens United, the decision was an astonishing leap of legal logic when viewed in an historic context but not unexpected from a court that has been slavishly pro-big business while chipping away at the rights of mere individuals. Several other states have similar laws and you can expect them to also die painful deaths as the court marches toward its eventual goal, which is undermine any form of public financing that fetters big business and fat cats.

Two Hundred Seventeen Thousand Big Ones

MORE HERE.

When Did America Become Rome?

There has been a fascinating discussion going on over at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish concerning when America became Rome. That is, when did it forswear faith in its leaders and morality for greed and decadence.

The comparison, of course, is somewhat precious as well as a time-worn cliche, but it works well enough for the purposes of trying to figure out why we are going to hell in a hand basket.

The reasons that I enunciated in a post titled "Why The American Dream Is Dead" included the usual suspects: The abandonment of our elderly and its poor, imprisoning millions of citizens for the most trivial of offenses, suffocating the middle class, an enormously powerful corporatocracy, government by paralysis, and ignorance of our own history. In another post titled "We Have The World's Finest Universities, Why Then Is America Such A Mess?", I agreed with 19th century journalist-historian Henry Adams that going to a university is "time wasted" and that self-education through life experiences, friendships and reading are ultimately more important. How else to explain the fact that America boasts the best higher education system anywhere but itself is so screwed up?

These, I suppose, are symptoms and the question is still begged of when American became Rome.

A favorite of Andrew's readers is when the American people, or at least a shockingly large number of them, accepted the notion that John McCain believed that Sarah Palin was qualified to be president should he be elected and something happened to him. It either did not register -- or matter -- that Palin was unqualified to be president because of an appalling ignorance, the Christianist bilge she spouted, and was a serial liar to boot, attributes that have not diminished one iota as she casts her beady eyes on the presidency three years on.

Alas, the McCain-Palin metaphor does not work. That nadir in our political history occurred in 2008, well after America's downward drift had accelerated. Besides which, no single event -- whether in Rome or in America -- can be attributed as turning points.

That so noted, if you put a gun to my head and forced me to name a single event my nominee would be when Bill Clinton swore on national television in 1998 that he "never had sex with that woman . . . Monica Lewinsky." Beyond setting off a fierce debate on whether blowjobs are in fact sex, Clinton in one fell swoop undermined the credibility of the presidency as not even Richard Nixon had been able. The Oval Office has never been the same.

* * * * *

So much for faith in leaders, and so on to morality. Which is to say greed trumping morality and its little brother ethics.

Like Rome, there have been merchants of greed in America since its founding. Think robber barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and more recently Ken Lay of Enron. But on the cusp of the new millennium the number of greed merchants and even institutions built on greed (think of investment banks) are staggering in number and, lest we need a reminder of their power to inflict enormous harm, their responsibility for the Bush Recession and its lingering effects.

But it took a recent New York Times op-ed piece by UCLA prof John McCumber to point me to where the decline and fall of Rome and the decline and fall of America probably intersected. This was the early Cold War years when the nation's best and brightest, including RAND Corporation analysts and other brainiacs, sought to understand the inner workings of American individualism with mathematical models first used to understand voting behavior as part of a government-funded effort to push back against the Communist and socialist collectivism then very much in vogue.

America, of course, once accorded unique rights and freedoms to individuals. Putting aside for a moment the fact that the Roberts Supreme Court is chipping away at those rights and freedoms while deciding that corporations are individuals who are to be accorded the rights and freedoms the Founders granted true individuals, McCumber says the overall conclusion of the studies into what makes individualism tick was that the choice inherent in individualism begets, in philosopher G.F.W. Hegel's terms, a clear and compelling imperative to increase ones wealth and power.

He notes that individualism comes in several flavors. There is the selfish individualism that Tocqueville attributed to post-Colonial America and the expressive individualism of touchy feelys like Emerson and Whitman, while after World War II a third variant emerged defining individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one's preferences, a wave that was helped along by the novels of another Rand (Ayn).

Like kudzu weed, this so-called rational choice philosophy -- what McCumber refers to as "a point-for-point antidote to the collective dialectics of Marxism" -- gradually insinuated itself into university curricula and then out into the real world of business and government. A consequence was that morality and ethics took a hike, something that was oft noted when Wall Street drove the economy into the toilet in 2008 but of course was quickly forgotten.

* * * * *

Hey, I'm inherently suspicious of any explanation for the decline of America that is framed in absolutist terms and includes catchphrases like selfish individualism, but absent a more cogent explanation it works well enough for me.

This leaves a big question unanswered: Can America avoid Rome's fate? Absent a very close encounter with a meteor or doomsday preacher Harold Camping finally getting it right, it's hard to see how.

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

UMBRELLAS
(Naples, 1964)
By Bruno Barby/Magnum Pictures

F. Gilman Spencer (1925-2011)

The call came in May 1981. I had been out of the newspaper business for three years and was earning an honest living as a carpenter, but the economy was crapping out and the Philadelphia Daily News needed a night city editor.

Several days later Gladys Fisher, the editor-in-chief's secretary, led me into the office of F. Gilman Spencer III on the 7th floor of a building that the feisty tabloid Daily News shared with the button-down Inquirer. There behind a modern oak desk slouched an Ichabod Crane-like figure who seemed to be seven feet tall.

He was wearing an Oxford cloth shirt open at the collar, necktie slung over his right shoulder, with pin-striped suit pants and tassel loafers. His head and torso were cosseted by a leather swivel executive's chair bent back at such an angle that it seemed on the verge of tipping over, while his long legs and big feet covered much of the desk. A cigarette -- an unfiltered Camel, if I recall correctly, hung from his lips as he chatted on the phone and gestured me to sit in a captain's chair with a two-foot-high stack of newspapers on it.

Gil hired me on the spot and without formality. We spent the rest of the hour chatting about baseball and other stuff having little to do with newspapering, but mostly about horse racing and Rufus Primus, a thoroughbred nag he owned that had distinguished himself by finishing last in every race he ran before being mercifully put out to pasture.

Our discussion was interrupted twice by wastepaper can fires ignited because of Gil's incurable habit of emptying his ashtray -- the brass base of an old lamp, really -- with not quite extinguished butts. Each time there was a flare-up, Gladys, whom Gil kept on despite her advanced dotage, ran screaming into his office with a pitcher of water, which she would dump in the can.

* * * * *

I had a pretty good run of bosses at the newspapers where I worked over a 32-year career. I disliked only one, whom I concluded was afraid of me, or perhaps jealous of the long shadow that I cast in a newsroom where she was deeply unpopular.

But Gil was the best of my bosses, the ultimate hands-off boss, and a real piece of work, to boot.

I never heard him raise his voice or chew anyone out. He protected us from the publisher and the chicanery of the owners. If in his judgment you made a mistake you might not find out until months later when he would insinuate his view into a conversation over oysters at Old Original Bookbinders in so subtle a way that it wasn't until later that you'd realize your screw-up.

We were absolutely and utterly loyal to Gil and he to us. You just wanted to do your best for him and we did, earning him a couple of Pulitzer Prizes on top of the one he had won himself years earlier for taking on a corrupt New Jersey political machine. We also won him a slew of other awards that earned the Daily News a reputation as a street-smart newspaper with brass balls and an intimate relationship with its readers that was the envy of other papers who never seemed to grasp that journalists are not god-like figures sent to Earth to chronicle the fate of the planet.

"He insisted that the paper not take itself too seriously but that it be a serious newspaper," is how a colleague put it.

When the Philadelphia Phillies won their first World Series in October 1981, Gil chain-smoked his way around the newsroom soliciting ideas for the all-important page one headline. None of them worked. Then the bell in the elevator lobby rang and the midnight-to-8 custodian ambled off with broom, mop and trashcan in hand. Gil raced over to the guy and asked him what he thought the headline should be.

WE WIN! shouted the front page the next day.

Gil left the Daily News in 1984 to run tabloids in New York City and Denver and earned a reputation for pulling struggling newspapers back from the brink. Ensconced as editor of the New York Daily News, he reveled in that city's tabloid wars, and when Long Island-based Newsday launched a New York edition, he famously dismissed the competitor as "a tabloid in a tutu."

Gil was a mentor who brought out the best in me as well as being a friend who helped teach me the quiet power of humility. He died yesterday morning at New York University Hospital after doctors were unable beat a persistent infection that had followed a bout of pneumonia.

New York Daily News file photo

Why Have Our Dear American Golden Retrievers Become Cancer Time Bombs?

(This week alone Kiko's House received two more emails from
people whose Golden Retrievers had died much too young.
Portions of this post were first published in 2006.)

It's not hard to see why Golden Retrievers are among the most popular breeds in the U.S. year in and year out. They're cuddly cute as puppies and beautiful as adults. They're great around kids, energetic, intelligent, intensely loyal and easy to train. In fact, they often train their owners.

But American golden retrievers are also are ticking time bombs. An extraordinary six of every 10 Goldens succumb to cancer well before living to the once typical 12- to 16-year life expectancy. The mortality rate for other dog breeds, as well as for humans, is three in 10.

While any dog that has lived beyond its normal reproductive years is at increased risk for cancer and Goldens are not alone compared to other breeds in this regard, anecdotal evidence suggests that an inordinate number of Goldens are dying before they reach middle age.

The outlines of the Golden epidemic have been clear for over 10 years, but organizations like the Golden Retriever Club of America (GRCA), while on the one hand funding studies on and supporting research into the cancers, have done little or nothing to rein in greedy member breeders who play God in knowingly selling interbred, cancer-prone puppies to unsuspecting buyers who end up heartbroken.

Their rationale, in so many words, is that it's not their job.

The GRCA has gone so far as to recommend that owners give their Goldens a regular regimen of a drug that has been shown to inhibit cancers, which is not unlike a car manufacturer recommending that drivers wear crash helmets when using vehicles that it knows cause an inordinate number of fatal accidents.

Meanwhile, it would seem to stand to reason that if breeders only bred Goldens whose parents were long-lived, progress could be made against the epidemic.

Alas, many breeders seem to be in the business only for the money and have little interest in improving the breed. No surprise there. Purebred Golden pups can fetch upwards of $2,500 and the alternative to selling dogs with shortened life expectancies is to stop selling them. Period.

And while the canine genome has been successfully sequenced, the fine print of the genetics of Goldens and their cancers is still not understood well enough to hold out hope for Goldens less vulnerable to cancer in the foreseeable future.

* * * * *

I know of the Golden Retriever cancer epidemic all too well. I have lived with and been acquainted with a dozen or so goldens over the years. I have midwifed their births, taken them to the vets, helped breed them and cradled them in my arms as they drew their last breaths.

It's hard to name favorites, but Ruffie (Medford Ben's Ruffles was the snooty name on her pedigree papers) would have to be at the top of my list.

Ruffie was special from the time she opened her tiny eyes. While she played with her litter mates, there was an unpuppy-like serenity about her which grew deeper as she matured. She in turn seemed to impart a Zen-like quality on her own offspring, who included Cody, the companion of a good friend, and a sweetheart by the name of Luna.

But despite careful attention to their diets, plenty of exercise, regular visits to a terrific vet and the love and devotion of their owners, Ruffie departed this world well before her time, a victim of lymphoma (cancer of the lymphatic system) at age five, while Luna died at age three, also of lymphoma. Cody, meanwhile, lived to the relatively ripe old age of 11 before succumbing to hemangiosarcoma (cancer of the blood).

While hemangiosarcoma and lymphoma are the leading killers of Goldens, the breed also is at increased risk for osteosarcoma (cancer of the bones) and immune system diseases -- primarily allergies and hypothyroidism -- that can comprise their ability to destroy abnormal cells before they can cause cancer.

In fact, it may be that the first litter of founder dog Goldens -- a cross between a registered Tweed Water Spaniel and unregistered yellow flat-coated retriever bred in 1865 by a Scottish land baron who was seeking a superior sporting dog -- carried genes that have led to widespread immune system dysfunction in the breed.

All purebred dogs are technically interbred, but as Rhonda Hovan, an Ohio breeder and health and genetics writer puts it, Goldens may have a very similar inherited "germ line" that put them at greater risk.

"One gets cancer, another becomes hypothyroid, another gets lots of hot spots, and another has food allergies -- but the underlying genes that put them at risk for cancer and which are passed on to the next generation, may be very similar," Hovan explains.

This situation is further complicated because cancers usually don't appear until after a Golden is no longer bred but has passed on its genes to multiple puppies.

* * * * *

There is little that Golden owners can do to detect cancers in their dogs and they often are too advanced to treat when discovered, although there have been strides in treating the cancers with Palladia, the first FDA-approved cancer drug for dogs, as well as some of the same chemotherapy drugs used in humans.

Such treatments can be quite expensive, $26,000 in the instance of one owner who managed to prolong her Golden's life by only a few months, while some pet health insurance policies have cancer riders that do not cover hereditary conditions.

There are some early warning signs. These include lumps or masses on or under the skin, vomiting, diarrhea, lethargy, difficulty in breathing and changes in eating habits, but many Goldens seem fine one minute and are deathly ill or dead the next.

Hovan had a Golden who had hiked 8,000 miles by her side and died of hemangiosarcoma.

"As experienced as I am," Hovan said, "I didn't know until 12 hours before she passed away."

As with humans, lifestyle can make a difference. Studies show that dogs that are lean and fit have a lower risk of cancer, as well as other health problems, but there is no evidence that exotic diets make a difference.

Not much of a defense in the face of an unrelenting epidemic without end.

SOURCES

"Pedigree Dogs Exposed," a BBC One documentary first aired on August 19, 2008; "When Cancer Comes With a Pedigree" by Melinda Beck, The Wall Street Journal (May 4, 2010); Winning Cancer Fight: No Longer Automatic Death Verdict Thanks To Advances" by Amy Sacks, New York Daily News (November 14, 2009); "Understanding Cancer In Golden Retrievers" by Rhonda Hovan; Email interview by the author with Hovan.

Cartoon du Jour

Joe Pett/Louisville (Ky.) Courier Journal

Brian Haw (1949-2011)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

FIELD OF DREAMS
By Wink

The Confession Of The Century?

Perhaps no one knows when O.J. Simpson hit bottom -- probably not even The Juice himself -- but it probably occurred sometime in the run-up to the 1995 slaying deaths of his wife and Ron Goldman, which I concluded as a journalist who covered the story nonstop from murders to acquittal were a consequence of a cocaine-fueled binge, a fit of jealousy, or most likely both.

In any event, it is sadly obvious that Simpson, whose good looks have faded at age 64, has been bottom crawling since then. I will leave it to greater minds to do the moral calculus on whether his October 2008 conviction of armed robbery and kidnapping in Las Vegas 13 years to the day of his acquittal and a jail sentence of nine years somehow makes up for him getting off in 1995.

My own view is that life -- and death -- don't work that way, besides which Simpson seems incapable of being chastened no matter how hard he looked once looked for "the real killers" and how much time he does.

That reality helps lend the air of unreality to his apparent forthcoming confession to the murders to Ophrah Winfrey, an "event" that sadly diminishes the cred of the former daytime television queen. Oprah, whose new OWN cable network is struggling to attract viewers, has stoked the pre-confession hype by claiming that she had a dream that O.J. had confessed to her. Horse hockey. Oprah wants to use O.J. to help put her network on the ratings map -- but only on the condition that he promise to use the opportunity to say he killed Nicole and Goldman.

The confession, if it is indeed made, will come with a hefty qualifier:

O.J. claims that he killed his ex-wife and her friend in self defense, an allegation that is easily rebutted should the case -- heaven forbid -- be reopened because he has been widely quoted by intimates as having acknowledged that Nicole snubbed him when he interrupted a meal she was having at a restaurant with her children, went home, worked himself into a rage and then went to her condo in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. There is no evidence to his claim, nor was it alleged at the 1995 trial, that Nicole was wielding a large knife when she opened the front door.

At the 1995 proceeding, dubbed the Trial of the Century, nine of the 12 jurors were black, while reactions to the verdict broke down along racial lines with most African Americans unconvinced of Simpson's guilt and most whites convinced that the case against him was solid. My own view is that O.J. was as guilty as sin but justice was done in its own messy way because the prosecution did not prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

There was irony in O.J.'s contention that blacks were intentionally eliminated from the all-white Las Vegas jury.

This is because in a society that judges a person by the color of their skin, O.J. had something that few well-known black Americans can claim: He was so accomplished and at one time was so popular that, in advertising agency parlance, he was "race neutral." Ditto for Oprah.

That is to say that when most people looked at O.J. they saw not a black man who happened to have overcome a disadvantaged childhood in a broken home, but a handsome and gifted athlete who had found fame and fortune by parlaying outstanding college and professional football careers into a successful career off the field selling everything from men's footwear to rental cars, and later as a not-bad Hollywood actor. Who just happened to be black.

Two years after the murder trial, the Brown and Goldman families were awarded $33 million in compensatory and punitive damages in a civil trial that to O.J. seemed like a big joke.

He had bottom crawled to Florida after the murder trial where liberal bankruptcy laws shielded him from many of his creditors, and aside from an occasional dust-up on a golf course or nightclub, run-ins with cable companies for pirating their signals and other petty offenses, as well as his off again, on again "fictional" account of the murders, he was mercifully out of the news if not out of trouble until 2006 when Fox News announced that Judith Reagan had interviewed him for over four hours and had gotten him to confess on camera.

After harsh criticism, that bastion of cable news probity announced that it would not air the interview, while its parent company cancelled its deal to publish If I Did It, a Reagan-authored follow-up book. Like others before and after her, Reagan would regret insinuating herself into O.J.'s orbit. She was fired from one of the highest-profile jobs in publishing.

Then came the Las Vegas incident. And now the Confession of the Century.

Celebrating An Interstate State Of Mind

Kiko's House at White Sands, New Mexico, May 1976

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2006)

While most of my friends -- the sane ones, anyway -- were buying houses and raising families in the 1970s, I was seeing the U.S.A. in a Volkswagen bus that I had customized to be a comfy home away from home.

I had globetrotted in previous years and realized after my return stateside that I knew more about the Far East than East L.A., so I embarked on a year-on, year-off, year-on exploration of the contiguous 48 states. I had seen Hawaii and Alaska traveling to and from Japan, and except for Kentucky and Montana, ended up driving through the other 46 states courtesy of the interstate highway system, which celebrated its 55th anniversary this week.

The system was the brainchild of President Eisenhower, who believed that the U.S. needed a first-class national road system for military transportation like the German Autobahn in the event of war with the Soviet Union.

That war was never fought, of course, but the system -- officially known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways -- kept growing and today includes 47,000 miles of highway, 14,750 interchanges, 55,500 bridges and 104 tunnels. But no traffic lights.

The interstate's impact on America, as well as my peripatetic travels, was profound.

From the interstates grew suburbs, service stations, motels and strip malls, not to mention the recreation vehicle boom and O.J. Simpson low-speed police chase.

There also have been downsides.

It could mean a death sentence for a rural burg if the interstate passed it by, most famously the necklace of towns along legendary Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles. The highways also were nearly a fatal blow for America's decrepit passenger rail system. Gridlock entered the nation's vocabulary and stayed, while all of those service stations, motels and strip malls are not exactly eye candy.

And more recently, the interstates and the lengthy commutes they have encouraged have become a bane and a pain in the face of soaring gasoline prices.

All that said, I have many fond memories of my travels on America's interstates and the highways and byways and interesting places and people that the interstates took me to.

Here are a few:

* Waking in a sleeping bag at the edge of a pasture off of I-80 near Rock Springs, Wyoming and drowsily realizing that I was being watched -- by 10 or so curious wild horses that had surrounded my van.

* Sitting out a torrential downpour in the Florida Everglades near I-75 where I watched an embarrassed hawk get blown from a fence post in gale force winds and then flap back up onto its roost.

* Cresting the last hill on I-80 on a beautiful August morning and seeing the sun-draped vistas of Oakland and San Francisco emerge as Seals & Croft's "Summer Breeze" came on the radio.

* Standing next to my van on a corner in Winslow, Arizona off of I-40 as Jackson Browne crooned the lyrics "I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and such a fine sight to see . . . " on the tape player.

* Sitting in a San Francisco Muni bus a few blocks from I-280 that had stopped for pedestrians crossing Broadway at Columbus Avenue as I read a passage from Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums in which Cody Pomeray was crossing Broadway at Columbus Avenue.

* Driving around a bend on a mountain pass off of I-25 in southeastern Colorado and coming upon a herd of real cattle being driven to their summer grazing range by real cowboys on real horses -- and a Honda ATV.

* Sitting at the same spot for five and a half hours in a blizzard on I-95 in Chester, Pennsylvania and thanking my lucky stars that I had started my drive with a full fuel tank.

* Having the driver's side mirror on my van sheared off by a low flying crow part way down a long downhill run on I-84 near the Idaho-Oregon state line, finally breaking to a stop and walking a half mile back uphill where the only sign of the bird were scattered feathers. I couldn't find the mirror.

* Breaking down on I-40 outside of Nashville, Tennessee and coasting off the highway, through an interchange and into the parking lot of an auto parts store where I swapped out a bum spark plug and was on the road again in less than an hour.

* Leaving I-90 and driving into a South Dakota hamlet (whose name I have forgotten) with an unpaved main street a but a single business, a cafe where I had the most delicious apple pie a la mode ever. The check, with a cup of coffee and refills, came to 50 cents.

* Picking up a hitchhiking teen and his border collie on I-80 at State Line, Nevada who told me a couple of hundred miles later than he was running away from home. I stopped for gas at Winnemucca and told him to call home. He did and we arranged for he and his dog to be picked up by his mother at the local sheriff's office.

* Hurtling down I-25 in New Mexico and aware that I could see a car-free 10 miles or so ahead, stepping on the gas and briefly hitting 100 miles an hour.

* Stopping for the night off of I-81 near Woodstock, New York where the temperature hit 35 degrees F below zero.

* Leaving I-25 and driving into Rifle, Colorado as the temperature hit 120 degrees F and not long after finding an exquisite waterfall tucked into a small canyon where I brought my body temperature down to below 98.6 degrees F.

* Having a lady toll collector on I-70 near Lawrence, Kansas proposition me as I paid her. I declined.

* Sprinting 3,250 miles from Oregon to Delaware on various interstates in 36 hours with stops only for gas and bathroom breaks.

* Seeing a lightning strike raise an enormous cloud of sand a mere quarter mile or so away as I crossed the Bonneville Salt Flats on I-80 in Utah.

* Binoculars in hand, watching a magnificent condor alight in the top branches of a Ponderosa pine above I-5 near Santa Clarita in Southern California.

* Spacing out in the intense heat later the same day and leaving my wallet atop a vending machine at a gas station off of I-5 near Coalinga in Central California, driving 100 miles before realizing what I had done, backtracking and recovering the wallet.

* Going on a slow-motion, dawn-to-dusk trip down an unpaved, deeply rutted and totally unmarked road from I-80 in Wyoming into northwestern Colorado and seeing no sign of human habitation for the entire 80-mile trip. As well as one of the most beautiful sunsets in my memory.

And finally:

* Being waved off of I-10 west of Yuma, Arizona by a California Highway Patrol officer because of dangerously high desert winds. I spent the evening at a roadhouse with a bar with embedded silver dollars and a honky-tonk jukebox to die for taking turns buying rounds of beers, swapping stories and dancing with a delightful group of strangers that included truckers, bikers and vacationing retirees.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

THE BIG PICTURE
Composite image by Dennis di Cicco & Sean Walker

Happy Summer Solstice 2011

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

COLISEUM
(El Jem, Tunisia)
By Jann Arthus-Bertrand

What Is War Good For? That Depends On The Political Party In Pow-Pow-Power

OH FOR THE GOOD OLD DAYS!

The Republican Party has long been the party of war, and one has to go all the way back to Herbert Hoover, a committed pacifist, to find a Republican president who was not a hawk. Dwight Eisenhower gets a slide both because he inherited the Korean conflict and probably understood the horrors of war better than any president since George Washington.

So it is no surprise that war fits comfortably with the contemporary Republican embrace of American exceptionalism, neocon saber rattling trumping diplomacy, and rewarding rapacious defense contractors for their profit-making death machines and lavish campaign contributions.

So recent statements from House Majority Leader John Boehner, among other Republican bigs, questioning President Obama's embrace of the NATO-led mission against Moammar Quadaffi in Libya, as well as more muted criticism of the war in Afghanistan might appear to be a break with the party's bloody past.

It is not, of course, and is merely yet another manifestation of criticizing everything that Obama says and does.

As painful as the thought is, consider what the Republican response would be if John "One Hundred Year War" McCain had been elected president. Lock-step support for any military mission anywhere anytime for any reason.

That, of course, was the case during the Bush interregnum, and the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history: The wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place, a conflict that has taken 4,400 American lives and was so expensive that in tandem with tax cuts for the rich drained the federal treasury and was an underlying cause of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

ON THE OTHER HAND

The come-lately views of Boehner over the war thing are balancing acts. This as noted is because these guys aren't against war in principle, only against wars that Obama is for.

Nevertheless, an argument can be made that the president's decision to commit the U.S. to a major role in Libya is troubling because he has all but ignored the War Powers Act while embracing the dubious legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, a law enacted in the legislative frenzy after the 9/11 attacks

Never mind that there would not have been a peep out of Republicans had Bush or McCain done the same thing.

No less troubling is the CIA's involvement in strikes against terrorists in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere, but here Obama again has used the legal cover AUFT to argue, again with dubious legality, that the CIA can be considered a military force when it suits the president.

There is an arrogance about this that does not become Obama and is sadly reminiscent of his predecessor and his predecessor's vice president and defense secretary.

HE WILL BE MISSED

When Robert Gates retires at the end of the month, he will have been the fourth longest serving secretary of defense. And without question the most competent of the modern era. (Ironically, Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, who were the longest serving, were among the worst.)

Appointed by President Bush after the unceremonious departure of Rumsfeld in December 2006, Gates has not been afraid to ax big shots, including the secretary of the Army and Army surgeon general over the Walter Reed Army Hospital Scandal, and the secretary of the Air Force and Air Force chief of staff over misshipments of nuclear weapons.

Gates became the first defense secretary to serve under two presidents when he was reappointed by Obama. He formed a formidable relationship with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton (Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had marginalized Colin Powell and then Condoleeza Rice), presided over an enormous shift back toward conventional warfare from the slavish embrace of immensely expensive weapons system, backed Don't Ask Don't Tell and lifted the ban on women serving on submarines.

In a parting shot this month, Gates spoke a truth that has been evident for years: NATO hasn't pulled its weight practically from its inception in 1949 and the U.S. is tired of carrying the load, including three quarters of the cost of funding it.

And in a recent interview he acknowledged that the human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had made him far more wary about unleashing the might of the American armed forces.

"When I took this job, the United States was fighting two very difficult, very costly wars," Gates told The New York Times. "And it has seemed to me: Let’s get this business wrapped up before we go looking for more opportunities."

On Our Liberal & Socialist Military

If Republicans understood what was going on behind the scenes with the U.S. military they'd probably blow a gasket.

As Nicholas Kristof notes, the armed forces are downright liberal and socialist, which is to say that in many respects they represent the antithesis of contemporary Republicanism.

First of all, they are a huge melting pot that draws soldiers, sailors and airmen from diverse backgrounds, whereas the Republican Party is white, white, white.

They invest in the best education and job training, whereas the Republican Party never misses an opportunity to try to cut or eliminate federal funding for both.

They have a first-class health-care system, whereas the Republican Party has relentlessly sought to eliminate the modest strides toward health-care reform enacted on Obama's watch.

They have superb child care and early childhood education for the working parents that so many soldiers, sailors and airmen are, whereas the Republican Party would do away with federal funding for both if it had its way.

Finally, they have pay equity. While CEOs of large corporations make about 300 times as much as their lowliest workers make, senior generals and admirals earn only about 10 times what the lower enlisted ranks make, whereas the Republican Party takes the yawning income inequity in the civilian workforce about as seriously as global warming.

Don't you think that it's about time that the Republicans tried to start dismantling all of this?

Cartoon du Jour

Signe Wilkinson/Philadelphia Daily News

'War, Only Friend To The Undertaker'

WAR

By Edwin Starr

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again, y'all

War, huh, good God
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

Ohhh, war, I despise
Because it means destruction
Of innocent lives

War means tears
To thousands of mothers eyes
When their sons go to fight
And lose their lives

I said, war, huh
Good God, y'all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again

War, whoa, Lord
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

War, it ain't nothing
But a heartbreaker
War, friend only to the undertaker
Ooooh, war
It's an enemy to all mankind
The point of war blows my mind
War has caused unrest
Within the younger generation
Induction then destruction
Who wants to die
Aaaaah, war-huh
Good God y'all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it, say it, say it
War, huh
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again y'all
War, huh, good God
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

War, it ain't nothing but a heartbreaker
War, it's got one friend
That's the undertaker
Ooooh, war, has shattered
Many a young mans dreams
Made him disabled, bitter and mean
Life is much to short and precious
To spend fighting wars these days
War can't give life
It can only take it away

Ooooh, war, huh
Good God y'all
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Say it again

War, whoa, Lord
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

War, it ain't nothing but a heartbreaker
War, friend only to the undertaker
Peace, love and understanding
Tell me, is there no place for them today
They say we must fight to keep our freedom
But Lord knows there's got to be a better way

Ooooooh, war, huh
Good God y'all
What is it good for
You tell me
Say it, say it, say it, say it

War, huh
Good God y'all
What is it good for
Stand up and shout it
Nothing

Clarence Clemons (1942-2011)

MORE HERE.

Kiko's House Is On The Road Again

We'll be back Monday with our usual assortment
of crap and corruption. And Happy Fathers Day
to all the daddyos out there.

Cyd Charisse: An Appreciation

With Kelly (top) in Singin' in the Rain and Astaire in Bandwagon
(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2008)

Let's get the physical stuff out of the way first: Cyd Charisse had the finest legs in Hollywood, was the greatest dancer – and unquestionably the most sensuous -- to ever grace the silver screen in a skirt and was every bit as good as the great Fred Astaire and the almost as great Gene Kelly.

Given those attributes, the fact that Charisse could hold her own as an actress put her in rarified territory, and if there was a downside to her career it was that she was relegated to more conventional rolls when the era of the great screen musicals ended in the 1950s.

Oh, and she was married to the same man for nearly 60 years, a notable length for Tinseltown.

* * * * *

Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas, in 1922 by her own account (or 1921, according to others) to a homemaker mother and jeweler father. Her nickname was "Sid" for how a younger sibling tried to say “Sis," later changed by the ever inventive MGM publicity machine to "Cyd" to give her an air of mystery.

Sid/Cyd was a sickly girl who started dancing lessons at age 6 at the suggestion of her father to build up her strength after a bout with polio left her with a slight atrophy on her right side. During a family vacation in Los Angeles when she was 12, her parents enrolled her in ballet classes at a school in Hollywood, where one of her teachers was Nico Charisse.

At 14 she auditioned for and studied ballet in Los Angeles with Adolph Bolm and Bronislava Nijinska, and subsequently danced in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for Colonel W. de Basil under the stage names Celia Siderova and later Maria Istromena because everyone in the troupe was required to take a Russian-sounding name. It was while touring in Europe that she again met Nico Charisse. They eloped in Paris in 1939 and divorced in 1947.

The Ballet Russes broke up at the outbreak of World War II and Charisse, who was to keep her husband’s name, returned to Los Angeles, where David Lichine offered her a dancing role in Gregory Ratoff's Something to Shout About (1943). This brought her to the attention of choreographer Robert Alton, who had also discovered Gene Kelly, and soon signed with MGM, where she became the resident ballet dancer.

Charisse is, of course, principally celebrated for her on-screen pairings with Fred Astaire and Kelly.

Her lithe body, gorgeous looks and simmering sensuality -- as well as having extraordinary chops because of her Russian ballet training -- contrasted starkly with the usual Hollywood dancers, who film historian Larry Billman wrote were "typically cute and fluffy."

She first appeared with Astaire in a brief routine in Ziegfeld Follies (1946) and then in her first lead role in The Band Wagon (1953).

Astaire plays a fading Hollywood song-and-dance man hoping to make a comeback on Broadway in The Band Wagon. He finds himself cast in a show opposite Charisse, who plays a snooty ballerina. The couple do not see eye-to-eye until they take a nighttime carriage ride through Central Park and wind up embracing to the strains of "Dancing in the Dark," which invariably sends chills up my spine whenever I see it. The movie also contains the equally famous "The Girl Hunt Ballet" in which Charisse plays a vamp to Astaire’s private-eye stage character.

In 1957, she rejoined Astaire in the film version of Silk Stockings, a musical remake of 1939's Ninotchka, with Charisse taking Greta Garbo's role.

It was Debbie Reynolds' lack of training as a dancer that led Kelly to choose Charisse to partner him in the celebrated "Broadway Melody" ballet finale (top photo) from the steamy Singin' in the Rain (1952). She also co-starred with him in Brigadoon (1954) and again took the lead female role alongside him in his penultimate MGM musical It's Always Fair Weather (1956).

In her autobiography, Charisse reflected on her experience:

"As one of the handful of girls who worked with both of those dance geniuses, I think I can give an honest comparison. In my opinion, Kelly is the more inventive choreographer of the two. Astaire, with Hermes Pan's help, creates fabulous numbers — for himself and his partner. But Kelly can create an entire number for somebody else . . . I think, however, that Astaire's coordination is better than Kelly's . . . his sense of rhythm is uncanny. Kelly, on the other hand, is the stronger of the two. When he lifts you, he lifts you! . . .

"To sum it up, I'd say they were the two greatest dancing personalities who were ever on screen. But it's like comparing apples and oranges. They're both delicious."

Looking back on her work with Kelly and Astaire during a 2002 interview, Charisse said that her husband always knew whom she had been dancing with: "If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch."

For his part, Astaire called Charisse "beautiful dynamite." while New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote that she was "the only dancer who could make a pirouette look sexy."

MGM claimed that it had a $5 million insurance policy on her legs, earning her mention in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Most Valuable Legs," but Charisse later revealed that was another invention of the MGM publicity machine.

After the decline of the Hollywood musical in the late 1950s, Charisse retired from dancing but continued to appear in film and TV productions through the 1990s. She made cameo appearances in Blue Mercedes's "I Want To Be Your Property" (1987) and Janet Jackson's "Alright" (1990) music videos, and made an exercise video for senior citizens.

Charisse was married to Tony Martin, a singer and nightclub entertainer with whom she danced in nightclubs and on television, from 1948 until her death. The marriage lasted almost 60 years, a notable length among Hollywood marriages, matched in 2008 amongst living American actors by only Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, who also married in 1948.

She had two sons, Nico "Nicky" Charisse from her first marriage, and Tony Martin, Jr. from her second.

Charisse was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after suffering an apparent heart attack. She died three years ago today at age 86.

Photos from (top) MGM via Photofest and The Associated Press

Cartoon du Jour

Glenn McCoy/Universal Press Syndicate

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

MILKY WAY OVER MAUI BEACH
By Wally Pacholka

The Joys Of Working With Your Hands

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2009)

One of the best decisions that I ever made was to take a deep breath after 10 years in the newspaper business, some of it spent covering big stories in exotic locales, and ponder my future. The upshot was that I quit the business to learn something that I had long yearned to do -- be a carpenter.

I ended up apprenticing to a fine carpenter nearly 10 years my junior and over the next two years learned how to build houses (and some rather pricey ones at that) from the foundations up, including doing hand-cut cedar shake shingle roofs, interior trim and other finish work, installing skylights so that they never would leak, and some of the other more complex aspects of the nail-bending trade.

More or less contemporaneous with my second career was the decision to move to a farm where I pitched in with the milking, planting, harvesting and other chores.

While I had felt out of balance, I did not realize how cattywampus my chi (Chinese for life force) was until I had spent a few months away from rush-hour traffic, fluorescent lights, typewriters and the occasional word-processor screen. (Widespread use of computers was a few years off and the Internet well over the horizon.)

The housing market collapsed in the first months of the Reagan presidency and I went back to the newspaper business for good, but never again did I feel as out of balance as I had. This is because I made sure that I leavened my day-job loaf with hiking, gardening, cutting wood and swimming -- lots of swimming. The joys of working with my hands was a wonderful lesson that was easy to learn and impossible to forget.

If there was a downside, it is that when I would come home from an especially exhausting day of handwork I seldom felt like doing anything other than eating, drinking and screwing. But I eventually learned to balance those primal urges and resumed book reading and writing in a journal.

Hey, if you've spent your life sitting on your keister, it's never too late to trade in your executive desk chair or Barcalounger for dirty fingernails even if it's only some of the time.

Image by Asbestos

Cartoon du Jour

Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate

Carl Gardner (1928-2011)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

YELLOW WELLIES
By Vidar

Charlie 'Bird' Parker: An Appreciation

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MAY 2010)

It is unlikely that anyone in the pantheon of jazz greats has been idolized more and heard and appreciated less than Charlie "Bird" Parker, the mercurial alto saxophone genius and bebop trailblazer.

There are several reasons for this strange dichotomy: Although Parker already was attracting attention in his mid teens, his career lasted barely 20 years. His relatively small number of studio recordings sound primitive by today's standards, there is little live footage of him playing compared to say John Coltrane or Miles Davis, and the expectations Parker raised among fans attracted to him well after his death were sometimes dashed by a sound that can seem old-fashioned to modern ears.

I myself was afflicted by that feeling until my own ear matured to the point where I finally understood what an extraordinary if troubled force Parker was as well as the enormous extent to which he influenced succeeding generations of sax and other jazz players.

* * * * *

Black jazzmen were not extensively interviewed in the Forties and Fifties, which helps explain why there is so much confusion concerning the childhood of Charlie Parker, who often was referred to as Charles Christopher Parker Jr. although neither his birth certificate or gravestone bear a middle name.

Born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1920 to a homemaker and an evangelist preacher with a wandering eye and fondness for drink, this only child was playing sax by the age of 11 or 12. Some people claim that baritone sax was Parker's first instrument, but that seems unlikely because a child that age would barely be able to hold yet alone play such a behemoth. Some people also claim that he inherited his talent from a piano-playing father, but Parker insisted that Charlie Sr., whom he deeply resented for abandoning he and his mother, didn't play an instrument. At age 14, Parker joined his school's band using a rented instrument. Again the historic record is vague with some people saying that he was terrible and others asserting that his genius showed through from the outset. What is known is that he was growing up too fast for his own good.

He dropped out of school a year later, got married and threw himself into the vibrant jazz community across the river in Kansas City, Missouri, a scene fueled by alcohol, benzedrine and marijuana. His first jam session was a disaster because, as he later explained, he only knew how to play "Honeysuckle Rose" and the first eight bars of "Lazy River," became hopelessly lost when the other musicians launched into "Body and Soul," and was hooted off the stage at the Hi-Hat Club.

Parker did what any dedicated jazzman would do. He wood-shedded, practicing for long hours every day. He began to develop a personal style that had elements of what became bebop, which is characterized by a blazingly fast tempo and improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure and melody.

His first big break came in 1938 when he joined a territory band led by pianist Jay McShann.

But Parker was dogged by a morphine addiction developed while he was hospitalized after a car crash in 1936 that would lead to a lifetime of on-again, off-again heroin use. He also developed another habit -- borrowing money or pawning his sax or borrowing a horn from a friend and pawning it. An acquaintance recalled that at age 18 Parker already looked like a man twice that age.

It would be only a matter of time before Parker moved to New York City, probably the only place where he would be able to attain his goals, and in 1939 he abandoned his wife and their young son, as had his father before him, pawned his sax and headed east.

The year is significant because that was when tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins dramatically reappeared after five years in Europe and recorded a cover of "Body and Soul" that heralded the bebop era.

Parker landed a $9 a week job as a dishwasher at a Harlem restaurant where Art Tatum, a pianist who was to have an enormous influence on him, played. He intermittently rejoined McShann's band and then beginning in 1942 played with Earl Hines for a year. It was here that he met trumpet great and fellow bebopper Dizzy Gillespie.

Gillespie introduced Parker to a group of young musicians and he jammed at after-hours clubs in Harlem with Gillespie, pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke and guitarist Charlie Christian, among other avant-garde iconoclasts who were shaking the jazz world to its core.

Parker says that his breakthrough as a soloist came one night in 1939 when he was jamming on "Cherokee" with guitarist William "Biddy" Fleet and hit upon a method that, as he later explained, enabled him to play "what I had been hearing in my head for some time" by pushing the harmonic envelope through extended chords on the higher intervals of a song's harmonies.

Some jazz historians consider this session to be the birth of bebop, but it is no such thing. As with most new forms in the history of jazz, several pioneers were breaking through simultaneously, and in this case that included Hawkins and Gillespie, although Parker was unquestionably the major catalyst.

As one Parker biographer put it, "Dizzy was training for the marathon and Charlie was the man on the flying trapeze."

There are virtually no recordings of the early years of bebop because of a Musician's Union ban on all commercial recordings from 1942 to 1944 that was part of an ultimately successful struggle to get royalties from record sales for out-of-work musicians.

It wasn't until 1945 that Parker's collaborations with Gillespie and others gained widespread attention and a growing appeal to jazzmen.

The most famous of these collaborations was a November 1945 recording date for the Savoy label that has been called the greatest jazz session ever. Among the tracks recorded were Parker's masterpiece "Ko-Ko," which was based on the chords of "Cherokee," became his signature song and should not be confused with Duke Ellington's "Ko-Ko."

"Everything had a musical significance for him," said double bassist Gene Ramey of Parker's increasingly sophisticated soloing. "He'd hear dogs barking, for instance, and he would say it was a conversation -- and if he was blowing his horn he would have something to play that would portray that to us. When we were riding in a car between jobs we might pass down a country lane and see the trees and some leaves, and he'd have a sound for that. And maybe some girl would walk past on the dance floor while he was playing, and something she might have would give him an idea for something to play on his solo."

But some older musicians, whom beboppers derisively referred to as"moldy figs," weren't buying the new sound. Or perhaps realized that they would never be able to keep up with Parker. A critic for the then decidedly retrograde Down Beat magazine panned "Ko-Ko," writing that " . . . he's far off form -- a bad reed and inexcusable fluffs do not add up to good jazz."

Five years later, Down Beat would name Parker as best alto sax player for the first and not the last time.

* * * * *

The Parker-Gillespie ensemble embarked on a trip to Los Angeles at the end of 1945. The gig was a flop, primarily because West coast audiences were not ready for bebop even if West Coast musicians were. Most of the group returned to New York, but Parker cashed in his return ticket to buy heroin.

Miles Davis, as usual, was more blunt: "In Los Angeles, [Parker] was just another broke, weird, drunken nigger playing some strange music. Los Angeles is a city built on celebrating stars and Bird didn't look like no star."

When Parker couldn't score heroin he drank heavily and one night wandered into the lobby of his hotel naked, prompting the manager to lock him in his room where he passed out with a lit cigarette in his hand, setting his mattress afire. Parker was not just out of orbit, he was out of circulation after being arrested and committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital for six months.

Initially clean and healthy (and his syphilis cured) after being released from Camarillo, Parker did some of his best playing and recording.

Much of it was with his so-called "classic" quartet, which included trumpeter Davis, double bassist Tommy Potter and drummer Max Roach, and occasionally a fifth member, pianist John Lewis. Savoy and Dial recording sessions included a series of slower tempo performances of songs from the so-called American Songbook, including "Bird of Paradise" (based on "All the Things You Are") and "Embraceable You."

Parker's career turned another corner in 1949 when he made good on a longstanding desire to perform with a string section, as well as exercise his classical muse (and love of the innovative classical composer Igor Stravinsky) playing what came to be known as Third Stream music, which incorporated jazz and classical elements with backing strings.

His improvisations during these sessions -- a rare period when he was more or less drug free and sober -- were more distilled and his tone softer and more economical than on his small-group recordings. His lines are gorgeous, and the Bird With Strings album (remastered and reissued as Charlie Parker With Strings) is a personal favorite.

Inevitably, some fans thought Parker had sold out by pandering to popular tastes just as the jazz world was falling under his spell. Many sax players blatantly intimidated Parker, prompting hard bop bass player Charles Mingus to write "Gunslinging Bird" (meaning "If Charlie Parker were a gunslinger, there would be a whole lot of dead copycats").

* * * * *

By 1953, Parker was again fully under the thumb of heroin but often was playing brilliantly.

"After Bird got high, he just played his ass off," is how Davis put it, and Parker can be credited -- which is to say blamed -- for prompting too many young players, most prominently Davis himself, to follow in his footsteps after they concluded that his brilliance was because of his drug use. Unfortunately or otherwise, there is truth to that.

One of the best performances of his career occurred that year at Massey Hall in Toronto where he played with Gillespie, Mingus, Bud Powell and Roach. Parker had yet again pawned his sax and played a Grafton plastic sax that Gillespie had found for him. Jazz at Massey Hall, the resulting album recorded live by Mingus, lists Parker as "Charlie Chan" for contractual reasons.

* * * * *

Like much about Parker, the derivation of his nickname "Yardbird," which usually was shortened to "Bird," is not entirely clear.

Most people agree that it was a reference to his "Yardbird Suite," while Parker himself suggested that it was a reference to a chicken intended for the pot. The lone holdout was Gillespie, who always referred to Parker as "Yard."

Parker married twice and had a 13-year relationship with common-law wife Chan Richardson Parker, but when he developed pneumonia in March 1955 he turned to friend and jazz patron Nica de Koenigswater, confiding that "I've been dead for four years . . . I'm just a husk." Parker and Chan loved each other deeply, but he had become so volatile and so dependent on alcohol and drugs that she had gone into hiding with her children.

Parker died on March 12, 1955 in De Koenigswater's Stanhope Hotel suite in New York City. The immediate cause of death was pneumonia, but he also had severe ulcers, advanced cirrhosis and had attempted suicide at least once. Although Parker was only 34, the coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated him to be 53.

The two unquestionable giants of jazz are trumpeter Louis Armstrong, whose rapid-fire playing caught Parker's attention at an early age and he tried to emulate before finding his own groove, and Duke Ellington, who must be considered the greatest American composer in any genre.

"What he did was enormous," said Ellington of Parker. "You hear his music everywhere now . . . But people talk too much about the man -- the people who don't know him -- when the important thing was his music."

In the end, Charlie Parker's remarkable gifts escape easy analysis. They seem to have little to do with the influences of other artists and even less to do with his upbringing. For me, they remain immense but inexplicable. And will forever remain that way.

PHOTOGRAPHS (From top to bottom): Jay McShane; Biddy Fleet; C0leman Hawkins (1939); Parker and Gene Ramey in Kansas City (1940); Parker (1945), Parker (ca. 1945), Parker and Miles Davis (ca. 1947); Igor Stravinsky; Parker (1949); Parker at Birdland, New York City (1951); Parker and Dizzy Gillespie (1951); Parker (1952); Parker with Chan Robertson Parker and daughter Kim (ca. 1953).