Featuring: John Scofield, John Medeski, Billy Martin, Bill Laswell, Eric Krasno, Neal Evans, Marco Benevento, Joe Russo, Antibalas, Sex Mob, DJ Logic, John Ellis, Michael Blake, Vijay Iyer, Tommy Hamilton, Kevin Kendrick.
This will be a great night of music. All proceeds will go towards Scotty Hard.

Downtown NYC luminaries unite for one astonishing benefit concert at the Highline Ballroom in New York City on Wednesday, March 19 , 2008 , coming to the aid of beloved record producer Scott Harding and the Scotty Hard Trust.
At 3am on Friday, February 15, music producer Scott Harding was a victim of a car crash in which he was a passenger of a car service, returning home from a late night mixing session. The cab he was riding in was broadsided by a stolen car; the impact crushed Harding’s T5 vertebrae, leaving him partially paralyzed. Scott Harding’s condition is serious and like many dedicated musicians he is without health insurance and is facing very large medical and legal fees.

More information here.

self-loathing troll, Charlotte Allen
We’re shocked the Washington Post even ran this drivel.

What is it about us women? Why do we always fall for the hysterical, the superficial and the gooily sentimental? Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list. At the top of the paperback nonfiction chart and pitched to an exclusively female readership is Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love.” …
I swear no man watches “Grey’s Anatomy” unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of “The Friday Night Knitting Club.” No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat…
So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim

Men do lots of dumb shit too, Ms. Allen. They watch sports, read FHM, and start preemptive wars. We concede that you’re an idiot, Charlotte, but we won’t blame that on your gender. Did we mention you look like a troll who lives beneath a bridge?

We all know Nicholson’s a little, well, off kilter, but did he really think an endorsement video featuring the Joker and the sociopaths from The Shining and A Few Good Men was gonna help?

In case you missed it, Whitehead has a hilarious article in the Times about the hype surrounding Brooklyn writers. Here’s a taste: [thanks Jeff]

As you may have heard, all the writers are in Brooklyn these days. It’s the place to be. You’re simply not a writer if you don’t live here. Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? People are coming in from all over. In fact, the physical act of moving your possessions from Manhattan to Brooklyn is now the equivalent of a two-year M.F.A. program. When you get to the other side, they hand you three Moleskine notebooks and a copy of “Blogging for Dummies.” You’re good to go.
I have a hard time understanding all the hype. I dig it here and all, but it’s just a place. It does not have magical properties. In interviews, I get asked a lot, “What’s it like to write in Brooklyn?” I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it’s like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it’s like writing in Manhattan, but there aren’t as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It’s like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French. What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.” “I built my desk out of wooden planks taken from the authentic rubble of Ebbets Field. Have I mentioned how I still haven’t forgiven the Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles?” READ IT ALL