It only took about fifteen years to get there, but Extreme Justice is getting props it never got when it was first out.

So, the other week Colgate Max Fresh (with mini breath strips) began a pretty major ad campaign in DC Comics.

It's a three-page ad spread (which couldn't have been too cheap).

The first page is a comic strip about a date (and the big kiss at the end, aided mightily by Colgate Max Fresh, which has mini breath strips, donchaknow). The strip is fair enough - pretty standard fare.

But then there is a double-page spread where they celebrate DC's 75th Anniversary, specifically "75 years of the hero getting the girl" (that is on one half of the two-page spread).

Now you might very easily take some issue with the latent sexism there, but we'll leave that alone for a moment and take a look at the other half of the double-page spread, where they show a kiss from DC Comics history.

The first week....

Okay, fair enough, Superman and Lois Lane - pretty darn iconic (and hey, it's Frank Quitely, so that's awesome in and of itself).

This past week?

Oh yeah, you know it! Extreme Justice, baby!!!

I suppose Colgate wanted some ethnic diversity, and it's not like DC (or Marvel for that matter) really has all that many covers featuring a black character kissing someone, but still, Extreme Justice?

Hilarious.

It's especially amusing considering Amazing Man has been dead for, what, fourteen years (basically the instant Extreme Justice ended)? And Maxima's been dead for close to ten.

Charlie Parker lived hard, played hard, died young. Now an uncanny sculpture of him in his last months has resurfaced. Richard Williams on a story of jazz, art and devotion

The last time Julie Macdonald saw Charlie Parker, he was catching a flight home from Los Angeles to New York for the funeral of his three-year-old daughter, Pree, who had died in hospital in the early hours of 6 March, 1954 after a long illness. Two nights earlier, Parker had been fired, for the second time in a week, by the owner of the Tiffany Club in Hollywood after behaving erratically and arguing with the management. He was staying at the Pasadena home of Macdonald, a sculptor, when he received the news of Pree's death.

His immediate reaction, in Macdonald's recollection, was to drink heavily and send a series of increasingly desperate telegrams to his wife, Chan. The fourth and last read: MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD. I KNOW IT. I WILL BE THERE AS QUICK AS I CAN. IT IS VERY NICE TO BE OUT HERE. PEOPLE HAVE BEEN VERY NICE TO ME OUT HERE. I AM COMING IN RIGHT AWAY TAKE IT EASY. LET ME BE THE FIRST ONE TO APPROACH YOU. I AM YOUR HUSBAND. SINCERELY, CHARLIE PARKER. Then he poured a bottle of scotch down the toilet, gave away his remaining supply of heroin, and Macdonald drove him to the airport.

Some time later, Macdonald began work on a sculpture of Parker's head, for which she had been making preparatory sketches during his visits. Then 28 (five years younger than Parker), she was the daughter of an impressionist painter and had studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in LA. She had met Parker during one of his earlier visits to California, probably in 1952. It seems likely that they were a part of a gathering of artists, intellectuals and scenemakers who met at the Altadena ranch of the Turkish-born painter and sculptor Jirayr Zorthian in July that year, a short drive from Macdonald's home. Zorthian's guests had indulged in a collective striptease while Parker played; a surviving home recording of the event reveals the sound of the saxophonist – apparently fully clothed, despite voluble entreaties – playing Embraceable You, the Gershwin ballad emerging above the noises of ribaldry. At any rate, Parker and Macdonald became close friends and enjoyed long conversations as she took him to art shows around Los Angeles.

After leaving to bury his child that Sunday morning in 1954, Parker would never return to California. He had only 12 months left to live, a year in which he and Chan attempted without success to create a quieter life for their family outside the city; in which his drinking worsened; in which he almost succeeded in killing himself by swallowing iodine; in which he committed himself to the psychiatric ward at New York's Bellevue hospital; and in which he made his last recordings and played his final gigs, before dying of an accumulation of symptoms while watching television in the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. Within days his followers were scrawling "Bird Lives!" on Manhattan walls.

Stravinsky and a heroin habit

When William Dickson, a retired architect living in Edinburgh, got in touch last month to tell me that he was the owner of a stone head of Charlie Parker, I knew exactly what he was talking about. It had to be Macdonald's carving, which appeared on the cover of Down Beat magazine in 1965, an issue that commemorated the 10th anniversary of the saxophonist's death. That black-and-white photograph had showed the head to be a work of great distinction, capturing the contradictory elements of Parker's character. Macdonald carved a face which could be that of a child or an old man, simultaneously illuminated by innocence and exuding wisdom. Once seen, even in a reproduction, it was not easily forgotten. And here it was, 5,000 miles and 55 years from its point of origin, with a back-story that demanded to be told.

A few years after Parker's death, in a brief memoir of their relationship, Macdonald wrote warmly of his "ability to perceive" and of an intellect which, although untrained, was "prodigious". "He listened to Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Bartók; looked at art from Egyptian sculpture to Picasso with the same intensity; and he remembered! Bird's memory was uncanny. With that combination of perception and memory he translated experience through his horn. He caught the pulse of our times, the pressure, confusion and complexity, and more: sadness, sweetness and love."

That complexity is distilled in her rendering of Parker's head. Carved out of pale, lightly striated sandstone from a nearby Pasadena quarry, it is a little less than twice life-size, weighs 275lb, and is pinned to a cube of polished black granite. Its individual features – the sightless eyes, the shapely nose, the slightly pursed mouth, the neat ears – are finely executed. The back of the head, covered with carefully worked hair, is distended like that of a newborn baby. It bears a striking resemblance both to an Egyptian head of the 15th dynasty, which Macdonald had showed Parker, and to the carvings made by the Yoruba people of West Africa between the 14th and 16th century, currently on show at the British Museum.

Parker was capable of extremes of behaviour and appearance. Emerging from a midwestern background of no particular distinction, he became the second of jazz's great instrumental soloists (after Louis Armstrong) to change the way music was played, engendering a cult which endures more than half a century after his death, continually refuelled by what the American critic Gary Giddins called "the relentless energy, the uncorrupted humanity of his music".

A man of vast and undiscriminating physical appetites, Parker could quote from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and planned to study composition with Edgard Varèse. Unreliable in every aspect of his life except the quality of his playing, he attempted to dissuade younger musicians from copying his heroin habit, but succeeded only in fostering a generation of imitators who thought that living the way he did would help them play like him, too – before discovering that no one could do that. The physician who signed his death certificate estimated his age to be between 50 and 60 (he was 34).

From LA to Edinburgh

Macdonald made at least one other sculpture of Parker, a full-length figure carved from lignum vitae, a dark hardwood. On 1 March, 1955, two weeks before his death, she wrote to jazz critic and historian Marshall Stearns mentioning a possible sale of the wood figure and offering to have it transported for viewing to the New York studio of the blind pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano. "I trust the price mentioned did not discourage you," she wrote, adding a poignant postscript: "I would naturally be happy beyond words for Bird to see the carving if at all possible." According to Peter Ind, the British bass player who lived in New York in the 1950s, studying and playing with Tristano, the piece remained in the East 32nd Street studio for some time, given "pride of place".

The stone head remained in Macdonald's keeping until 1961, by which time the wood figure had passed into the possession of Robert Reisner, a New Yorker who had promoted Parker during the last phase of the saxophonist's life. Reisner was compiling stories for a book titled Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker, and Macdonald was among his contributors. When she indicated an interest in selling the stone head, Reisner put her in touch with another jazz fan, a wealthy Californian named George E Geisler. "It turned out," Geisler later remembered, "that she had a chance to get a good deal on a Ferrari, and could use the money." The piece remained in Geisler's ownership for four decades.

Macdonald went on to create around 400 other works, including many pieces based on animal figures. Her stone rendering of The Three Graces was installed outside the Downtown YMCA in LA, and she exhibited at the Pasadena Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum, and the LA County Museum of Art. She married twice and had two children; but by the end of the 1970s she was heavily addicted to cocaine and died of cancer in 1982, aged 55.

When Geisler began to disperse his possessions in 2000, Macdonald's stone head was sold to one of the world's leading experts on Parker memorabilia. From there it passed into the hands of Dickson, who had returned to his native Edinburgh after retiring from his London practice several years earlier. Now 67, Dickson works as a photographer, surrounded by his own sizeable collection of material – records, concert posters, books, night-club handbills – from jazz's post-war era, with Macdonald's majestically resonant work as its centrepiece.

Never shown to the public, the head has been seen only three times in photographic reproductions since it took shape: first in 1962 as an illustration in Reisner's book, then on the cover of Down Beat, and finally in Esquire's World of Jazz book in 1975. Dickson believes it deserves to be seen by a wider public but is uncertain of its appeal and value to institutions – or, indeed, what sort of institution would guarantee it an appropriate setting.

Meanwhile, it sits in the unlikely surroundings of an Edinburgh studio, radiating its subject's unique charisma, a direct physical link with one of modern music's most remarkable figures.

• Jazz
• Sculpture

Richard Williamsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Creative professional. Hear that much? If that's how this all-too-structured world views you, you just might be due a new rig -- particularly if you're thinking of stepping into 4K territory. Digital Storm is offering up a rather unique solution in its Davinci, which opts for a 3.33GHz Core i7-980X Extreme Edition (yeah, that new Intel chip) instead of a more traditional Xeon. You'll still get an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 (768MB) GPU, 12GB of DDR3 memory, Windows 7 Processional and one of the nicer liquid cooling systems that we've seen, which may or may not be enough to sneak a little Crysis in between edits. Too bad the base price base rings up at $4,995, but look, that next indie film you're producing is totally hitting it big.

Digital Storm's Davinci workstation gets down with Core i7-980X, Quadro graphics originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Almost every day a new person, someone I have never met or corresponded with, writes me an email in response to my blogs or one of my books. I do my best to answer such writers if the tone and spirit of their correspondence is gracious and invites a thoughtful reply. The only exception is when person simply wants to trash me personally and or attacks my work in a way that offers me no real room for cordial conversation. In such a case I will usually provide a short answer that expresses my inability to respond to such a letter since there is no room for dialog and mutual respect. I desire dialog and mutual respect and always offer the same back wherever I can.

Harshly negative responses once deeply troubled me. I still struggle with this kind of criticism. It leaves me feeling fragile and defenseless. It is humiliating. I was too sensitive while I was a pastor, and I have had a hard time dealing with the same kind of thing over the last nineteen years as the president of ACT3 and as a published author. Everyone who teaches and writes invites criticism. I expect it. What I did not but have finally come to expect sadly, is the angry person who simply wants to tell me off or makes a “case” for why my life and ministry is a disaster. I recall the late Vance Havner saying that every minister needed “the heart of a saint and the hide of a rhinoceros.” I am quite sure I have neither in abundance but I will press on praying for them both till my numbered days are finished.

A few days ago I receive a very interesting email regarding my posts last year on the late Keith Green. While I never knew Keith I loved him and feel he was, as I said at the time, the “real deal.” He made more than a few mistakes but they were made because he was young and filled with real zeal. Such zeal frightens folks, but some people need to be frightened now and then. Lethargy grips far too many of God’s people, and the church will never be bold and obedient until the prophets are heard. Keith was a prophetic voice. But he was more, as I noted in my articles. My “new” friend wrote the following to me (slightly edited by me):

I have to admit that I had not heard of you until recently. For this I am sorry. I just came upon a couple of articles you have on your blog site about [the late] Keith Green. I thought these were wonderful. I'm 49 years of age and was raised in the heart of the Jesus Movement at Maranatha Church in Portland, Oregon. Maranatha Church, along with Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, were probably the first two Jesus Movement "mother" churches of the late 1960's. I was there as a child among all those converted hippies. This experience gave me a broad context that some who have only heard about these events—but who weren’t actually there—or some who have since seen [the more recent] copies of real revival, do not have. I later bumped into Keith Green hearing him for the first time at Jesus Northwest. I'm thinking this was around 1977. This was amazing stuff. But like you I was concerned all along the way—deeply concerned to the point of considering writing him a letter but figured he'd not have gotten it—a big mistake I now realize. I remember seeing how strident he was at a concert that I attended in Vancouver, Washington. He was right on with what he said but when he apologized in the last article that came out before his death it was as if Keith had finally figured out grace. "I'm sorry if I blew you away with my lack of love,” he wrote. I loved that humility. It was like a glow came over him—and then I saw what I had seen at Maranatha—zeal with love; with so much more love than zeal. To get rid of the darkness we can rail against it or we can turn on the light!!

I still love Keith Green. His music seems so different than his teachings, or at least the words that I recall—his music isn't angry. Thank you for publicly calling Keith Green's former teachings into question—it's a very good thing to hear. I am sure that it is going to be hard for some people to hear this message since many never saw the zeal with love that I got to see at Maranatha—it was either a dry church or the passion of Keith Green for so many people in that context.

Rev. Armstrong I really do appreciate your writing. It was fun to read what you said. I want to thank you for your measured and balanced approach to Keith Green. It is so sad that he wasn't able to live to be a fully grown-up Christian. I wonder, along with you, what would have happened if he had lived and matured. I suspect that he would have been a very sweet man who taught the love of Jesus and more or less ignored the condemnation of those who at one time he had said were playing church. After all what's the point eventually? It seems to me that it is much better to be an example of balance and to be [more] like Jesus in the world. One former Foursquare pastor told me one of the greatest things I've ever heard as a Christian: "The most releasing day was when I found out I wasn't the Holy Spirit." I love that thought so much—I imagine Keith Green would have really figured that out too had he lived a little longer.

After I received this letter I wrote the author and asked permission to print an edited and anonymous version of his words to me. He wrote back another thoughtful and engaging letter. This reflects something of the breadth of readership on this site. It is a breadth I intentionally cultivate and desire. I welcome readers like my friend. Here is what he wrote in his second letter:

Thank you also for taking the time to write to me after I wrote to you. [You may use my thoughts anonymously.] One thing happened at the Keith Green Vancouver, Washington, concert that a friend of mine remembers but I don't is that apparently Keith got down on his knees during the concert, raised his arms to the heaven and proclaimed "Oh praise IT.” This was his commentary on the "I Found It" public relations campaign [directed by Campus Crusade for Christ across America] going on at that time. That was so funny [also insightful and courageous] but I've never heard it mentioned by anyone. A friend told me this story and said he was there with a friend whose father was on the national "I Found It" board. He said this guy wasn't amused!! That incident sums up Keith Green and his biting commentary on the times. He was really unvarnished.

Thank also for telling me about your site(s) and your new book. My vision has been to [move in the direction of] so much of what you are doing in your speaking and writing. I'm not sure when or exactly how those doors will open but I hope I'm ready when/if they do. It's exciting to talk to you and hear and see what you are doing. I'm one of those odd Christians who is a Democrat [something like] the teacher and author Tony Campolo but I am sometimes saddened by what I hear, not necessarily from him but from the other people on the Christian Left [who are evangelicals] . . . I wish they would build bridges with the Christian Right. The hard thing for the Right I think is that they just don’t know the difference—they just don't understand compassion in a [real] works kind of way and I believe we can teach them by being sweet to them. I think bridges can be built. My dad was a pioneer in migrant-rights worker movement back in the 1950's and then worked in the War on Poverty thus I feel so blessed to have seen what can be done to change people's lives by such action— something I think my friends on the Christian Left are trying to do—but honestly I don't quite understand either extreme among Christian evangelicals. I think of something that shocked me when I really realized it. At the end of the age, when we stand before the Lord, he is not going to ask "How many people did you lead to me?" This was shocking to me as a born again guy who has always been taught that bringing people to the Lord was the critical thing, which I do still believe. But Christ is going to ask us about our involvement in social justice. I was hungry and you fed me. It's such a shocking difference in spiritual priorities from what I usually hear in church. This is rather weird isn't it?
 
Thanks again. It's really fun to meet a new person who is insightful and is looking to teach and lead Christians into thinking and to balance. If there's anything I can do to help you let me know. I look forward to seeing more of your work and thoughts in your writings.

I hope this is the beginning of a relationship even if it is only via the Internet. This is not a virtual friendship any more than Christians who exchanged letters in centuries past, and never met face-to-face, had real friendships for the kingdom of God. I welcome my new friend into the circle of those who know and love me. I need his insights and his prayers. I need your insight and prayer too if I am to do a better job in my work for the whole church.

Publication Date: 2010 Mar 19 PMID: 20299592Authors: Stark, C. P. - Barbour, J. R. - Hayakawa, Y. S. - Hattanji, T. - Hovius, N. - Chen, H. - Lin, C. W. - Horng, M. J. - Xu, K. Q. - Fukahata, Y.Journal: ScienceClimate controls landscape evolution, but quantitative signatures of climatic drivers have yet to be found in topography on a broad scale. Here we describe how a topographic signature of typhoon rainfall is recorded in the meandering of incising mountain rivers in the western North Pacific. Spatially averaged river sinuosity generated from digital elevation data peaks in the typhoon-dominated subtropics, where extreme rainfall and flood events are common, and decreases toward the equatorial tropics and mid-latitudes, where such extremes are rare. Once climatic trends are removed, the primary control on sinuosity is rock weakness. Our results indicate that the weakness of bedrock channel walls and their weakening by heavy rainfall together modulate rates of meander propagation and sinuosity development in incising rivers.post to: CiteULike

Publication Date: 2010 Mar 19 PMID: 20299591Authors: Walther, C. - Scalari, G. - Amanti, M. I. - Beck, M. - Faist, J.Journal: ScienceLasers based on microcavities are extremely attractive for their compactness, low power dissipation, and potential for ultrafast modulation speed. We describe an ultrasmall laser based on a subwavelength electronic inductor-capacitor (LC) resonant circuit that allows for extreme confinement of the electric field. This electrically injected laser operates at a frequency of 1.5 terahertz, and the mode volume is strongly subwavelength. The design concept of the LC resonator can be extended from the terahertz range to higher frequencies and also applied to detectors and modulators.post to: CiteULike

Yes, this is quite belated. I’ll explain why in a subsequent post.

linux.conf.au this year was in Wellington, New Zealand. It just keeps getting better! It’s always great meeting people you otherwise only know online. I was especially impressed by the OLPC NZ team.

Immediately following linux.conf.au, I jumped on a plane to Christchurch to embark on a week-long tour of the South Island. Long story short, it was the time of my life! I made some amazing friends. I also saw and did incredible things, including:

• awe-inspiring views of glaciers, glacially-formed landscapes, turquoise-coloured rivers and lakes, beautiful skies and more
• helihike: a helicopter trip onto a glacier, then hiking on it
• a night on a boat on Milford Sound, probably the most beautiful place on Earth
• every extreme activity I could get my hands on, including:
  • three bungy jumps (thrillogy combo): Kawarau Bridge (43 metres), Nevis (134m) and Ledge (47m)
  • two swings: two of the scariest jump styles — Backwards and Gimp Boy Goes to Hollywood
  • a 15,000ft skydive
  • the Triple Challenge: a Shotover jet boat ride, followed by a helicopter transfer to rafting on the Shotover river
    
  • a wilderness safari along the Dart River, including walks through forests and a scenic jet boat ride

I have most of my photos online now:

• 2010-01-24 New Zealand holiday, Day 1, pt 1
• 2010-01-24 New Zealand Holiday, Day 1, pt 2
• 2010-01-25 New Zealand Holiday, Day 2, pt 1
• 2010-01-25 New Zealand Holiday, Day 2, pt 2
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 1
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 2
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 3
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 1
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 2
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 3

I think what surprised me most was how adventurous I can be when I’m not in my ‘natural habitat’. I’m not normally a thrillseeker at all, but in NZ I made the decision to take a holiday from myself as well as from work and home. I even made a concerted effort to not touch computers at all. My phone was offline for most of the trip (I was using it as a camera). I never thought that being cut-off could feel so liberating.

©2010 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.

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