I bought this and this. It is the reason a man works overtime.
Tomorrow I turn 41. I can say it; I can see it in print; but I can't feel it. There is a complete disconnect between how old I am and how old I think I am. I still see myself as somewhere in my late 20s. Perhaps I am one of the lucky few. Perhaps I am just an embarrassment. (Although I don't go around in skate-punk gear. Never did. I'm only young on the inside.) We'll see how things look in a few more years.
Meanwhile there's a piece on Sonny Rollins in the New Yorker this week, so if I try very hard I can imagine that I am living at the time when I mostly wish I had been living. Except that the piece is written by Stanley Crouch, not Whitney Bailliett. It's nice to see someone so certain in their opinions; but it is also possible to be wrong. (Example from the accompanying online Q&A: Where does Sonny Rollins rank in the jazz pantheon? Answer: No 1. Well, no he doesn't, and anyway who can say? I'd put him in the top ten, for sure, but maybe not too high within that. But that sort of baldfaced and ridiculous no-correspondence-will-be-entered-into statement belongs in the world of the fanzine writer/blogger, not in the pages of the NYer. Let's hope his editors have done their job, but I suspect Crouch would have seemed more at home there during the Tina Brown Years.)
