Bumping and spirituality, your sleeves, Youssou N'Dour, Haditha times three, boy-child and PERFORM
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I HAD MY FIRST FRENCH PRESS HOME-DONE HOME-BREWED COFFEE THIS MORNING. Yea France! I thought it would take dozens of times to get this right but it worked perfectly the first time. Of course it helped that I read the six-sentence directions twelve times, three or four times before bed last night and eight or nine times awake this morning in the kitchen. Damn! Life is great! The very hot water is poured over the grounds until it is within an inch of the top. The lid is pushed into place "until snug, depress the plunger 1/2 inch. Let steep for four minutes. Depress the plunger fully. Drink directly from the mug and enjoy." This was the best coffee I ever had. It helped that it was Trader Joe's Ultra-Roast Bay Blend. It's time for another one.
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I am listening to and watching Youssou N'Dour's Super Etoile Band live from Montreux 1989. It's hard to ever hear better players and more honest authentic music then this. There is also a bonus section with songs live from 1995 including the always-goose-bump-producing, "7 Seconds." (I should get into a detailed description/analysis of each song on this DVD as all of it is foolishly profound.)
How do goose bumps happen? Why do they happen? I have not Googled this question or Wikipedia'ed it but I know there are some songs that have given me goose bumps for decades, and this is one of them. For me, it often has to do with music theory and musicianship. According to my very non-scientific self, when they (musicianship/theory) get this profound, the body is forced to bump. If it doesn't bump, maybe one's life gets shortened. And maybe bumping is the most spiritual thing that can ever happen. Or so my scientific self speculates.
My life is so much better because of Youssou N'Dour and French pressed coffee.
Youssou N'Dour - one of God's best creations.
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ONE OF MY NEW PROJECTS is try to understand the meaning of musical style, sound, the relationship between then, their connectedness to melody, rhythm, harmony, structure, instrumentation and how to write about all of this so that judges, juries, lay people, experts in the field and others can undertsand this, all at the same time. I should finish by 3 PM so I can hike at 4 PM, don't you think? LOL
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SADLY, HAITHA IS NOW HADITHA TIMES THREE and our troops have been placed into no-win situations. We have to leave Iraq and apologize to millions of people. It is too late. We lost the war awhile ago, we should never have started a war (no one should ever start a war, let alone the country with the world's best constitution, geography and immigration policy of old), and have made things worse for millions of innocent Iraqis.
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I WOULD HATE FOR A SUNDAY TO GO BY WITHOUT snatching an opportunity to be CRITICAL OF THE TROIKA (the music industry, film industry and their boy-child, the U. S. Copyright Office).
Their normal day-to-day philosophy is to try to keep their antique out-of-touch business practices in practice, stop any new technologiies that jeopardize their outdated ways,
One of their new ploys is as dangerous as it gets. There are new technologies that will allow customers to enjoy music and visual in ways that they want - technology is making life more convenient and more powerful and the TROIKA views the empowement of fans as a threat that must be squahsed. So a-squashing the TROIKA will go. Rather than try to imagine the fans as people with lots of disposable money, they view their customers as criminals who want to do things that the TROIKA cannot control. If the TROIKA could, they would insist that anytime a fan THINKS about a song or film, they are charged for the thought as that thought, according to law (three of the copyright owner's six rights) , is performing the work, copying the work and making an unauthorized derivative of the work (the fan would be altering it or not reproducing it exactly and therefore making a derivative of the original work).
And speaking of PERFORM, one of their proposed evil deeds is called "The PERFORM Act." Of course it is a George Orwellian style acronym for a bill that will empower the corporations and hurt the average law abiding music and video fan. It is government against the people, just the way the TROIKA works.
Here are two very good sites about this and other TROIKA initiaitives.
http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2006/04/perform-act.html
http://www.eff.org/IP/digitalradio/
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Uh-oh. Napoleon Dynamite is on HBO. SO much for deep thinking about sound and style. I like your sleeves, they're real big.
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