Do you play or are you going to learn to play for Myles?

I’m playing now, yeah.

How are the lessons going?

You know the lessons, I’ve been touring so much and traveling so much, I haven’t been able to jump back into the lessons so much but I play every day.

Does it sound good?

Yeah, it’s a work in progress, I’ll tell you that much.  It don’t sound good to me but I’m not going to play in the movie.  I just have to play so I’m comfortable with it.  We have all of Miles archival music. I’d never try to play it personally.

Do you know who’s going to surround you in the Miles Davis…?

No, I don’t know yet.  We’re just putting it together now and just writing the start of the script now.

I’ve heard about 2 projects. One about Toussaint…

Nope.

No, ok. And the one about (inaudible) Leonard?

No.  Bad IMDB info.

Can you give us an update on Darfur now that you’ve mentioned it?  You’re very active.  What’s the situation now and what needs to be done?

Well, it’s hasn’t changed that much for the people on the ground, I mean, it’s still over 2 million people displaced in camps on the Chad/Sudan border and there’s still attacks by the Jonjueed and the government is obfuscating and saying it’s not true and the numbers there’s been a thousand people killed and we know it’s 200,000 shy of the real number.  The US made a unilateral move as we’re want to do in my opinion a very big mistake to try to impose sanctions and certain asset freezes and name a couple of other people on the list of those who’d be potentially tried as war criminals but none of the upper level people have been targeted and we didn’t work with the UN security council so once again we stepped out on our own to try and I don’t know what be the flag bearer of all that is right and just and I think it’s a mistake.

Do you think its PR or dumb pig headedness?

I think it’s both. I think its PR and this entrenched ideal that our leadership has that the best way to solve problems is by our self and we don’t need anyone else to tell us what to do or jump on board.  Either the world comes together or we attempt to get the world to stand up and say genocide will not stand. We cannot as human beings that are on this rock, move forward if this is happening or we just say you know what as long as it doesn’t happen here, as long as it doesn’t affect our bottom line then it’s cool.  And I think that is what the prevailing attitude is unfortunately and so we’re continuing to do what we can from our position you know, is to continue to push and raise awareness and you know George and Brad and Matt and Jerry Weintraub and myself started a foundation Not On Our Watch and raised about $9 million so far and given about $450,000 to Oxfam and given money to the NGO’s that are on the ground but that really is a blip on the radar. The more important thing to do is work with the leaders in other countries. The middle powers, the super powers and to come together and work through the system to get people back to the table and back talking because we can’t have peace until you can protect people.

How can your audience, the people who follow you, how can they get involved somehow?

They can educate themselves and that’s easy to do.  You can go online and go to IRC.org and find out.  You can go to Google, Earth and click Darfur and it will show you a map of the villages that have been burned, you know what I mean.  First find out what is going on and then when people ask me what they can do, I ask them what can you do?  Take stock in what you have.  You guys are in this unique position because you all have the power of the pen and the power of the article and you can talk to a great number of people.  But people who are involved in church groups and in school groups and whatever civically you do in your community, all of those things help to raise the din and raise the level of noise and get our leaders doing what we want them to do.  In this country we have a great process coming up called the elections and these debates are coming up and we’ve worked really hard to interject that question into the debates and make sure all of these people who either have been to the region or at least talked about it. We have Brownbatt, Clinton, McCain, Obama, Gov. Richardson, Senator Biden, they’ve all been to the area or talked about it or seen it.  We want to hear how they’re going to make it a part of their platform and what they plan to do about it.  We have the Olympics coming up in 2008. The Chinese are sponsoring it and their motto is One World, One Dream but they buy 60% of the oil from Sudan so you can argue that they’re underwriting a great portion of that genocide so there’s places to throw the light and there’s places to push and we just think we’re at a period of time where we haven’t been before.  A number of these watershed moments are up so we want people to help push on those.

I think many companies are divesting. How is that working?

That’s another one.  The Sudan divesting is working very well.  We have I think 9 states in this country that are divesting and many more with the legislation on their ballots.  I think Texas just came over, I mean we have Daimler/Chrysler divested. Big companies are pulling out and if that continues to snowball that will have an effect on the calculations of the government.  But we have to do more.  We have to support the international criminal core, we have to share information with them so they can indict people that have really been the architects of this, not some low level lieutenants and you know foot soldiers and people who it’s not really going to change the calculations of the GOS. 

You also mentioned pre-strike, are you concerned or optimistic about how things are going to work out on that front?

Pre-strike?  Oh, whatever.  What’s going to happen is going to happen.  Everyone always gets all atwitter before it happens and the last time nothing happened.  We’ll see.  I hope that cooler heads prevail because nobody wins when that goes down, you know. If you remember when it happened here, I don’t know if you were here, but when it happened here about 20 years ago it was amazing to see all the businesses that got hurt by it.  Not just ones that you’d imagine casting in the business. I mean, dry cleaners and restaurants and sandwiches shops and the city just grinded to a halt.  There’s some real issues that need to be dealt with but hopefully we can deal with those fast and get back to it. 

20 years ago I just remember watching TV and everyone was on strike.

That’s right. 

You were out there with a picket?

Traitor.

Have you ever wanted anything as bad as Petey wanted that job?

You know, happiness and health for my kids. 

Have you ever had to just go in and…

Get it?

Demand it.

You know, no.  I’ve been knock wood pretty fortunate to you know, be able to get the things I’ve wanted but hopefully if I ever come up against that I’m going to have the hoodspa that….don’t take no for an answer.

Are you a master of Go?

I’m not a master of hell, no I’m not a master of Go.  I love the game though.

What’s your strategy though real quick?  What would be yours?

You know, I played Go with somebody who was not ranked but he was a really good Go player and it was a really unorthodox method.  It was just attacking which doesn’t really work unless the person responds to it which he did.  It really made that parable about the best swordsman not being afraid of the 2^nd best swordsman but the worst because he’s unpredictable.  That really works. Somebody has no idea what the hell you’re doing, you can win.