nota bene: this pix was sent to me by a sister blogger. I believe it was taken by Ann Althouse in New York

There’s a guy in virtually every organization who is a pop-off, and David Hackworth fit that description perfectly.

But unlike most pop-offs, this man – the most highly decorated soldier in American military history – was reliably on target. So much so that his career ended with the threat of a court martial because of his scathing criticism of the Vietnam War, but his legacy as an eccentric but fearless and brilliant officer and motivator of soldiers has lived on.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House, here for a contrarian view of Hackworth by James Joyner at Outside the Beltway, and here for A Baker’s Dozen of Best Books on Vietnam.

Pretty much my entire blogging career has been spent as a student at Carleton College. But I’m graduating next year, and I have to go elsewhere. I spent much of this year applying to a variety of law and graduate programs, and today I made my final decision. Next year, I will be attending law school at the University of Chicago.

Play an Ella ballad with a cat in the room, and the animal will invariably go up to the speaker, lie down and purr. – GEOFFREY FIDELMAN

Like many teenagers, I went my own way when it came to the music my parents played, so I was not particularly moved by their fondness for Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz vocalists.

But as I grew older and my musical horizons expanded, I kept bumping into Lady Ella, mostly as I devoured Duke Ellington albums, and it wasn’t too long before I was smitten by this singer with a mountain spring water purity of voice, a three-octave range and extraordinary interpretive powers.

My father especially loved Ella and her “My Man” was his favorite:

It’s cost me a lot
But there’s one thing that I’ve got,
It’s my man.
Cold and wet, tired you bet
But all that I soon forget,
With my man.

He and my mother finally got to see Ella perform live, and in honor of his birthday she dusted off “My Man” and sang it for him. It was to be his last birthday.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

My apologies for this being non-political. Today we took a trip which we knew had been coming for some time, but was made none the easier from knowing it. Our oldest dog, Kenya, (shown here in happier times with a number of her toys and gifts at Christmas) was diagnosed with cancer of the bladder last fall. She was put on an aggressive treatment schedule of Peroxicam and some low level pain relievers to reduce the size of the tumor, give her relief from discomfort, and give her a few more good months with her family. Our goal was to spoil her as much as possible and give her enough time to have one more good springtime to go lay in the sun on our back deck, soaking up the heat, which is what she always seemed to enjoy most in her later years. In this, at least, we were successful. She was sixteen years old.

Sometimes, when I try to describe the loss of a pet as being similar to losing a child, people will scoff harshly and tell me that the two are nothing alike. I would beg to differ.

When I first met my wife, Georg-Karen, we were both volunteering at a Humane Society animal shelter in Upstate New York. During a frustrating period of time when I kept asking Georg out on a date and (in what was doubtless a demonstration of her good sense) she kept turning me down, it was also when we first met Kenya. The dog had been found by animal control, abandoned at around two years of age and wandering near a rural stretch of highway. When brought to the shelter she suffered from worms and a urinary tract infection, both of which she was treated for. As bad luck would have it, she showed up during a period of time when the shelter was struck by a wave of canine diseases which devastated the facility and shut down all intake and output for a couple of weeks. The dog, already ill, was hit in turn by a respiratory infection followed by canine distemper and, finally, parvo.

For those not familiar with the disease, Parvo is almost universally fatal to dogs not belonging to families rich enough to have 24/7 care and IV liquid infusions. It dehydrates the dogs until they just waste away. However, it does have a predictable, if long, course that it runs and eventually goes away. Sadly, this usually takes far longer than the dog lives. My beloved lady spent all of her time for weeks doing nothing but going to work and then staying at the shelter until bed time. While caring for the many dogs in quarantine (most all of whom, sadly, were lost) Georg would go and sit in the dog’s pen, cradling her head in her lap and picking up handfuls of water to hold to her lips to try to get some liquid into her system. It was during this period that, in one of her occasional fits of morgue humor, she named the dog Kenya. This was not out of love for any particular African nation, but as a short version of “Can ya survive?”

(I fear this will run a bit long, so you’ll need to click through for the rest of the story.)
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Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
–Ovid, 43 BC - 17 AD

Every once in awhile, I look out on the world and marvel at where we are. The pace of technological improvement, and humankind’s ability to adapt to it, is nothing short of amazing. My roommates are all science majors, and sometimes I grill them to explain to me how these things works. But I’m on Spring Break now, and they’re not around. Which means I return to my default position of simple wonder.

We can send streaming pictures — whole movies — around the world in minutes, without anything connecting the source and the recipient. We can speak to people instantaneously across the world on our cell-phones. We can transmit pictures and sound over wavelengths and have them heard worldwide.

Do you realize that, prior to the 19th century, it’s likely that no human being in history had ever traveled faster than 60 miles per hour (and lived to tell the tale, at least)? Today, we not only do it as a matter of course, but people as young as teenagers control highly complex machines that dance around each other at break neck speeds. An interstate highway lane change must look like a high-wire act to a medieval man or woman, but we do it without batting an eye.

Similarly, human adaption to flight has been remarkable. The Wright Brothers’ glider first went off in 1900. By World War II — less than 50 years later — passenger air service was already well established. We went from flight being impossible, to flight being a normal part of our travel options, in the space of a single lifetime.

And the innovations keep coming — in medicine, in telecommunications, in mathematics, in physics, in everything. But I’ll tell you what: we could not have a single new technological invention ever again, and our lives would still rock. Most of the big problems in the world are not ones of technology. They’re about distribution, or morality, or diplomacy. It’s not that we don’t know how to treat AIDS — we just can’t get the medicine to the right people. It’s not that we don’t know how to irrigate farmland, we just don’t have the resources to get it to the poorest regions of the world. But the technology — that’s all there.

And that’s amazing.

Like a lot of college kids who came of age in the Sixties, reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was a rite of passage for me, one that occurred a few days into my freshman year when my considerably more sophisticated dormitory roommate loaned me his dog-eared copy.

I caught the Kerouac bug so bad that I went on to read virtually everything he wrote after tracking down a last few obscure titles in the early 1970s, when I was traveling the Far East, at a wonderful bookstore on the Ginza in Tokyo that specialized in those orange-spined Penguin paperback editions. And like the movable feast of characters that populated Kerouac’s real and fictional lives, I spent much of the 1970s on the road, an odyssey that took me to 49 of the 50 American states. (Sorry, Montana, I’ll drop by someday.)

The good news from this literary experience is that I can confirm — as if I needed to tell the bibliophiles among you — that Kerouac is deserving of the mantle of trailblazing Beat Generation writer. He has exerted an enormous influence on many writers, myself included, as well as Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan, and musicians like as Bob Dylan and Tom Waits.

The bad news is that I was to read only two more Kerouac books — The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels — that gripped me as On the Road had, and most of the rest of what Kerouac wrote is second rate or worse. Maybe that’s just me because most critics are somewhat kinder.

Kerouac had many of the ingredients that make up the tortured artistic soul, including a difficult lifelong relationship with his mother, deep sensitivity and low self esteem, ambivalence about spirituality, ambiguous sexuality, unhappy in love and a profound addiction — in his case alcohol. That is obvious from the body of Kerouac’s work, some 25 or so novels and other books in all, but does not explain why his prolific but relatively short life produced a mere handful of books that arguably are worth reading today.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

I’m not a superstitious guy by nature, but how can I not help but believe that there was a Curse of the Grateful Dead Keyboardists?

Four of the Dead’s six keyboard players died of causes other than stage fright: Vince Welnick, a 2006 suicide; Keith Godchaux, a heroin addict who died in a 1980 car crash; Brent Mydland, who succumbed to a drug overdose in 1990, and Ronald “Pigpen” McKernan, whose liver packed in 35 years ago today at the tender age of 27.

McKernan was on board from the beginning, a member of all of the Grateful Dead’s precursor bands and the titular lead singer for eight or so years as the ensemble moved beyond its folk and bluegrass roots and coalesced around psychedelic drugs and the extended riffing for which it became legendary.

McKernan had a rough, often off-key voice and was a mediocre piano and organ player, but he packed more soul and attitude into the Dead than the rest of the band put together. And while he was the roughest-edged player in this eclectic menagerie he was nevertheless the gentle soul who brought the band and their rapt fans back to earth from their cosmic voyage at night’s end.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.

I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.

A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling “Stop!”

It had all the earmarks of a CIA operation; the bomb killed everybody in the room except the intended target!

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.

Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

I think [George]Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology — with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress. And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge.

Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.

All adventure is now reactionary.

I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.

It would have been a damned shame if Tennessee Williams couldn’t write, because I can’t think of any man of letters whose family and friends provided so much rich material.

Williams, who was a gifted playwright and a not bad short story writer, drew long and hard from the deep well of tormented and eccentric souls who populated his life from childhood on and appear in various guises in his best known works, including The Glass Menagerie (1945), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and The Night of the Iguana (1961).

Then there is A Streetcar Named Desire (1948), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was a Broadway hit with Marlon Brando, who played the immortal Stanley Kowalski, and Kim Hunter, Jessica Tandy and Karl Malden. Two years later, Streetcar was remade more or less intact for the big screen with Vivian Leigh replacing Tandy.

I don’t think I was ever in the same place (which is to say probably a restaurant or bar) with Williams, although our paths might have crossed in Key West in the 1970s without me realizing it.

My appreciation for him was based solely on the movie versions of Cat, Iguana and Streetcar until I began working with scholars who visit the rare book and manuscript library where I work. They come to study our fine collection of Williams typescripts, most of them heavily annotated by the man himself, who was notorious for repeatedly rewriting big chunks of his plays, in the case of Streetcar right up to the night of its Broadway opening.

These typescripts are extraordinary windows into his creative mind.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

Hattip to George Nemeth at Brewed Fresh Daily.

“Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes.” – LEARNED HAND

Billings Learned Hand is probably the most influential American judge you never heard of.

Hand served for many years as chief judge of and the intellectual engine for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District in Manhattan. A philosophical pragmatist, his landmark rulings on free speech, tax law and economics are widely considered to be among the formative statements of contract and tort law.

Born in Albany, New York, 136 years ago today, Hand studied philosophy at Harvard College under William James and George Santayana, among other gurus, before receiving a degree from Harvard Law.

Hand was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by President William Howard Taft in 1909 and was promoted to the Second Circuit by President Calvin Coolidge in 1924, where he served for the rest of his life.

His 52 years as a federal judge is a record, and although he never was appointed to the Supreme Court, he is widely considered to have been a greater jurist than all but a few justices.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

Is there a more beautiful song than Hoagie Carmichael’s “Stardust”? For me there is not. The hauntingly beautiful melody is a special part of the soundtrack of my life, from my humming it as I tried to fall asleep as a child on a hot summer night through to my 30s when my appreciation for the Great American Songbook blossomed to the present when I marvel at how it just sounds — and feels — better and better as it weaves itself through my mind and memories.

“Stardust” is one of the most recorded songs of all time. The melody (although not the lyrics) was written by Hoagland Howard “Hoagy” Carmichael.

At first glance, it seems appropriate to say that Carmichael, who died at age 82 some 26 years ago today, was an unlikely virtuoso because most of his greatest work came not in a great artistic center like New York or Paris but on the campus of Indiana State University in Bloomington. But that denies a couple of things: This college town was a racial and cultural crossroads thanks to all of the touring musicians. And given that Carmichael was self taught, he would have written great music anywhere.

As it is, Carmichael is considered the most talented, sophisticated and deeply jazz-oriented of the many writers composing pop songs in the first half of the 20th century.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

There is no more emotionally evocative musical instrument for me than the violin and no more emotionally evocative violinist than Stéphane Grappelli.

The French jazz virtuoso is best known as co-founder of the Quintette du Hot Club de France, the first and most famous of the string jazz bands, with guitarist Django Reinhardt, but his most outstanding and rewarding work came later during a long career as a soloist.

The self-taught Grappelli had a distinctive style that mixed tender lyricism, seemingly effortless swinging and hard-edged riffing with extraordinary harmonics. I was fortunate to see him perform in 1976 when he was 68 years old but played like he was a young man. He performed until shortly before his death 10 years ago this week at the ripe old age of 89.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

The classic 1971 live version of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” the Allman Brothers’ wonderful mini symphony within a ballad, opens with a gently swinging Dickey Betts guitar solo evocative of a smoke-filled jazz club late at night.

As Betts slowly tricks out the song’s primary theme, he is joined by the creamy signature slide sound of Duane Allman’s guitar. Allman at first plays behind Betts but they soon join in unison as the tempo picks up and gallops into a quasi-Latin beat . Betts takes a solo, then Duane’s brother Greg does a turn on organ as Betts and Duane play rhythm figures behind him.

Then it is Duane’s turn to solo: A rephrasing of the theme that builds to a high-pitched scream with Berry Oakley laying down a thunderous counterpoint on bass. Duane backs down and then climbs again, reaching an even more furious peak that begs comparison to a John Coltrane saxophone solo. He backs down again as Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson, the drummer-percussionist duo, take a brief turn. The full band then comes in and blazes to a thunderous climax.

The seminal recording of this instrumental clocks in at barely 13 minutes on the Live at Fillmore East album. But because of its wonderful mood and time signature shifts it seems much longer even after repeated listenings over the years, and each and every time I am reminded what an extraordinary ensemble the Allman Brothers were (and are) and what an extraordinary musician Duane Allman was.

There may have been better slide guitar players technically than Allman, but none had his improvisational abilities.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

The great American composer Aaron Copland probably did more than anyone to liberate classical music from its European roots.

As a classically-trained composer, Copland’s embrace of popular music was not unprecedented, but the way that he integrated folk music and jazz into his compositions certainly was. No matter how often I hear his Pulitzer Prize-winning scores from Agnes DeMille’s “Rodeo” (1942) and Martha Graham’s “Appalachian Spring” (1944), let alone see these ballets performed with orchestra, they seem as innovative as when they were first played and retain an extraordinary freshness.

Please click here to read the rest of this appreciation at Kiko’s House.