I was sitting in Panera Bread last night, fumbling around with proxies in an attempt to get around their ham-fisted network filtering. Now they’re blocking an art gallery’s website for ‘nudism’. The site does, indeed, feature photos of paintings and sculptures featuring people without clothes on, but I’d hardly classify this as ‘nudity’, much less ‘nudism’. I didn’t have time to check whether they block the National Gallery Of Art, but I’d bet the answer is no: even the people at SonicWALL would see that that’s silly.

They’re also blocking Cory Doctorow, for reasons that are an utter mystery to me.

As I was saying, I was sitting there trying to make use of the network at a blazing 100 kpbs or so — did I mention that the network was also slow? — when in my distraction the over-loud piped-in music caught my attention, and held on. It was bad, noodley jazz without any real genius or even feeling behind it.

I could not help thinking of how this stuff must be produced: I imagine that someone, somewhere, locks a bunch of musicians in a room with horns (it’s heavy on horns, the better to cut through the Panera background noise) and dope, turns on a tape recorder, and goes away for a few days. When the someone comes back he duplicates the tape and sends it off to people who need jazz in bulk. It’s sold by the yard.

We used to joke that Dressel’s Pub, in St. Louis, always played the World’s Longest Jazz Album, because it never ended and it seemed, at least, to never repeat: but at least that peculiar album contains recognizable and good music.

Anyway, I present for your listening enjoyment two snatches of jazz by the ton, as recorded last night at Panera. You can download the file here, or listen to it in the embedded Quicktime thingy that will appear below if your computer supports Quicktime. It’s kind of quiet, and there’s a lot of background noise, but this is how Bulk Jazz is meant to be, er, enjoyed.