Well, I'm off to France tomorrow. Wish me luck! I'll be back after the Fourth of July. Au revoir!
EPA says toxic sludge is good for fish
The Army Corps of Engineers' dumping of toxic sludge into the Potomac River protects fish by forcing them to flee the polluted area and escape fishermen, according to an internal Environmental Protection Agency document.(Shakes head in disbelief.)The document says it is not a "ridiculous possibility" that a discharge "actually protects the fish in that they are not inclined to bite (and get eaten by humans) but they go ahead with their upstream movement and egg laying."
Happy Fête de la Musique!
Every year at the summer solstice, amateur and professional musicians of every imaginable persuasion take to the streets, parks and public squares to celebrate France's Fête de la Musique. Hospitals, museums, bars, restaurants also serve as venues for jazz, global techno, salsa, classical and world music.Apparently, there is music everywhere. Everyone goes out and makes some kind of music or gets their groove on. Word.Launched in 1982 by then socialist Minister of Culture Jack Lang, the French fête is by far, the most symbolic manifestation of the inextricable link between the arts and politics in France. Furthermore, the French population expects the state to provide and fund culture as they expect the state to provide and fund adequate health care. Since its inception in the French Republic, National Music Day has spread to and is celebrated in ninety-five countries. (Source)
And the American version: National Music Day.
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"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
--Red Auerbach
"Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite."
--Thomas Carlyle
"Without music, life is a journey through a desert."
--Pat Conroy
"I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music."
--Billy Joel
"If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing."
--Zimbabwe Proverb
"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music."
--Aldous Huxley
"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together."
--Anais Nin
"Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent."
--Victor Hugo
"Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything."
-- Plato
"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosphy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents."
-- Ludwig van Beethoven
Ok, so no wonder I wasn't getting any comments anymore. They were broken! Duh.. Ok. Should be all better now. I missed you guys. I felt all alone in the void. :)
Class is in session with Tom Middleton of Global Communications and The Jedi Knights fame. I recommend watching the video too if your bandwidth can take it.
Global Communications' album "76:14" is still one of my favorite albums of all time, and it was a major moment in my musical career opening up for Tom Middleton at a Cloudwatch event in Baltimore. (I was told he made a very favorable comment on my set!)
Thanks to Alan for the link.
Ok, we need to lighten things up around here a bit. How's this: Arafat and Ariel Sharon best friends gallery.
I caught historian Howard Zinn on WBUR's "On Point" radio show last night. It was a fascinating listen. If you support the United States' "War on Terror", or even if you don't, I recommend listening to what this man has to say. And, they don't go easy on him. He faces some tough questions and handles them beautifully. I wish I could speak and argue a point on the spot with such clarity and eloquence.
(Jump to the 6:40 mark to get right down to it.)
Lots of interesting links in today's Red Rock Eater Digest.
The Best Jazz Player You've Never Heard
But in the end, Mr. Turner's music may have been too rigorous for Warner Brothers and he isn't the sort who might turn his music around to sell records. There was some disconnection between artist and label. An album, "Ballad Session," conceived by Warner Brothers as a corrective to the notion that Mr. Turner was all intellect, ended up becoming a collection of candlelight jazz standards like "Skylark" and "All or Nothing at All." Mr. Turner had originally wanted to record an album of "slow music," as he called it — pieces from all over the map, including original tunes and works by Olivier Messaien and Aphex Twin.Whoa. I need to check this guy out.
Oh, very cool! "MEETUP helps groups of people with shared interests to meetup in local cafes (and other places) around the world."
The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde
US invasion proposal shocks MPs
The Dutch parliament was shocked by a US legislative proposal giving an official green light to a US invasion of the Netherlands should it be deemed necessary to free US citizens from the International Criminal Court in The Hague.Oh man.. I am SO going to get beat up when I go to France later this month. Maybe I'll pretend to be Canadian.
Some thoughts on the music industry from David Bowie:
I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way. The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.My emphasis. (Source)Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen.
Also, Facing the Music
Hemingway had rock-star status (and even impersonators). Steinbeck was Springsteen. Salinger was Kurt Cobain. Dorothy Parker was Courtney Love. James Jones was David Crosby. Mailer was Eminem. This is to say -- and I understand how hard this is to appreciate -- that novelists were iconic for much of the first half of the last century. They set the cultural agenda. They made lots of money. They lived large (and self-medicated). They were the generational voice. For a long time, anybody with any creative ambition wanted to write the Great American Novel.But starting in the fifties, and then gaining incredible force in the sixties, rock-and-roll performers eclipsed authors as cultural stars. Rock and roll took over fiction's job as the chronicler and romanticizer of American life (that rock and roll became much bigger than fiction relates, I'd argue, more to scalability and distribution than to relative influence), and the music business replaced the book business as the engine of popular culture.
Now, though, another reversal, of similar commercial and metaphysical magnitude, is taking place. Not, of course, that the book business is becoming rock and roll, but that the music industry is becoming, in size and profit margins and stature, the book business.
The other day, there was an advertisement in my fortune cookie! Grrr...
WWW Site of Japanese Mom's Home Cooking
My mother, Yasuko-san, was born and grew up in Takaoka, Toyama, Japan. She is good at old home cooking - simmered vegetables etc. and also like to entertain some friends at dinner.This is the best cooking site ever! I love the illustrations. And, the recipes look very simple and tasty. I haven't cooked anything from it yet, but I plan on it.There are good water, rice and fish in Toyama, because they are blessed with nature, both of sea and mountain.Most of her dish are old Japanese home made cooking to use so good local material.
"Yasuko-san's Home Cooking" carry such a Yasuko-san's many recipes that I listen and write. There are that inherit from her mother, Kimi-san, and also that get from her many experience. Taste a Yasuko-san's world at your leisure!
On NPR's "Fresh Air" last Friday, I heard a facinating interview with Michael Pollan, author of the book "The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World". His discussion of the Marijuana plant is particularly interesting. You can listen to it here.
Some tools for understanding and detecting Media and Political Bias, from The Rhetorica Network.
The music page is back... with a brand new untitled piece. Check it out.
While, in the past, companies have created fake citizens' groups to campaign in favour of trashing forests or polluting rivers, now they create fake citizens. Messages purporting to come from disinterested punters are planted on listservers at critical moments, disseminating misleading information in the hope of recruiting real people to the cause. Detective work by the campaigner Jonathan Matthews and the freelance journalist Andy Rowell shows how a PR firm contracted to the biotech company Monsanto appears to have played a crucial but invisible role in shaping scientific discourse.Evil. Evil. Evil.
Ok.. All better now. Thanks to Mike and Beth for their kind tech support.