Monday, January 17 (cont'd)

From: Jack Saunders
To: Bill Blackolive
Subj: Recent Letter

Dear Bill:

Thank you for the letter with the pre-production CD of Spencer Perskin's Magic Feather.

It wouldn't play. So I went on the Internet and ordered Shiva's Headband Classics Volume 1.

Now that you have a computer, you can read The Daily Bulletin online. If you can figure out how to print it out. Reading it on the computer monitor isn't friendly.

I was stationed in an Air Force Band with Bobby Bradford in 1957. Ornette Coleman called him "the greatest trumpet player alive," in LeRoi Jones's Blues People. Or maybe it was in A. B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business.

In the other one, Bobby is quoted as saying, "If a guy came in here carrying a Coke bottle, I wouldn't laugh until I heard him play it."

When they broke the band up, Bobby was transferred to Austin. I stayed in Waco. I had been reclassified. From Percussionist (76130L) to Air Operations Specialist (27130). In B-25 Operations.

Bobby got out and was going to the University of Texas, working as a porter in a bowling alley. He said the more he shucked and jived, the bigger tips he got. From the fraternity boys.

He said he once dreamed of having an lp out, having his picture on the cover of Downbeat, but now all he wanted was a big chicken dinner.

I spent a weekend with him and his wife in Austin.

The only time I was there.

It seemed nice. I know you were there.

Lars Eighner writes about it, Austin City Limits, Armadillo World Headquarters, Richard Linklater's Slacker.

I woke up one morning and the thought was in my head: "Reinvent cinema." Yeah, brush teeth, reinvent cinema. No this was just a film I've had in my mind for a long time and it was a challenge to try to make it work. I don't know. "Reinvent cinema." That's such a big concept. Maybe a subtler word would be renew. Like try to tell a different kind of story. I've always tried to do that in my own way, try to tell stories that haven't been told or try to go to places in your head that haven't been seen on film. Try to redefine what a film can be or is. That's all fair (http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Linklater_Rich_010112.html).

Last Night at the Alamo. That has an Austin feel. More than a San Antonio feel. Of course, I went through basic training in San Antonio.

Kim Henkel, over there in Port Aransas.

I dig you, Lionel.

Brenda liked Texas, too. They stomp their own snakes, she told me.

She taught a factory Installation, Operation, and Maintenance (IAM) course on a Mitel analog switch (PABX). It was cheaper to fly her to Dallas than to fly the technicians to Boca Raton, to the Mitel factory.

When IBM was looking to move, from Armonk, New York, to expand, as we say, the two highest SMSAs (Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area), in quality-of-life, were Boca Raton, Florida, where Brenda worked, and Austin, Texas.

IBM fucked them both up.

When people would ask Monk what his work was about, he'd say, "Listen to the records."

Read the books.

Ha ha, Root Doctor about Dodo Marmarosa.

I sent Buddy DeFranco, who lives in Panama City, a copy of Root Doctor, and a Dread Clampitt CD, and he did not reply, and he was mugged as a zoot-suiter by the sailors who beat the shit out of Dodo when they were playing together in Gene Krupa's band. Causing, some would say, Dodo's subsequent mental illness.

What's that all about?

Dodo practiced, to the end. As if he still had, or would have, a career.

Go, cat, go.

Jesus, Bill, does it get any better?

No, it gets worse.