Posted by panch from ? (204.120.48.3) on Wednesday, June 26, 2002 at 10:14PM :
Late, great jazz horn player and drug addict and stool pidgeon and all around hated man who ratted on his friends, hurt everyone he ever met...drugged himself to death and poverty...but made some of the sweetest music.
Mat Damon did a song in his style in the film "The Talented Mr. Ripley". The guy was trully a great talent...though a lousy human being.
In this country they could give a damn. They don't require their artists to be anything else except good artists. There is sympathy and understanding for what a person't Muse sometimes will do to him or her in order to harness that energy and squeeze and beat it out of you...no one likes exposing their raw nerves...sometimes you have to do that if what you want to say...what you can't help saying, is going to mean anything to people who can't live that kind of life themselves...but who would die too if someone didn't do it for them...and let them feel it even from a distance, for a brief moment.
If Chet baker had been Assyrian no one would play him...they would call him a degenerate, a drug addict, a crook, a crimminal, a pervert and they would take great pride in shunning him for a "good boy" who sings "nice" and is well loved and respected by his priest and in the community.
And that's why we're where WE are..and why we have to run to countries where their values AREN'T like ours so we can find a meaningful life for ourselves and be a little free...even to set up our own mini-dictatorships. If we made an Assyria, it would be a Fascist State...but clean.
-- panch
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