The Internet is not as exciting as it used to be….I don’t want to blog anymore….
Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice
27 May 2011 1 Comment
in Art
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice. 1871. Oil on canvas. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK.
Frank Sinatra: A Rare Documentary from 1965
26 May 2011 1 Comment
in Documentary
From: brainpickings.org
by Maria Popova
What the evolution of popular music has to do with turbulent love and fostering the art of patience.
I am a big lover of jazz, and have always had a soft spot for Frank Sinatra. (My first iBook, the first computer on which I had iTunes, was promptly named Francis by my college housemates because all I played on it was Sinatra.) Though some may say he diluted “true jazz” and turned it into musical pop candy, there’s something to be said for his incredible talent and charisma, which broadened the audience for music in a way few artists have single-handedly managed in the history of contemporary music. Known by many names — Frankie, Francis, Ol’ Blue Eyes, The Chairman of the Board, The Voice — and often revered as the most popular and enduring singer of the 20th century, he borrowed from jazz, swing, pop, big band and more to weave together a style that was distinctly his own.
In 1965, CBS News spent six months with Sinatra, exploring what it is exactly that made him so special, getting unprecedented access to both his recording career and his private life. The resulting documentary was broadcast on November 16, 1965, and now, thanks to YouTube, we have access to this rare footage, in which Sinatra talks about everything from his childhood in Hoboken to his legendary love affairs to the cultural role of the entertainer across time.
I would like to be remembered as a man who brought an innovation to popular singing. I would like to be remembered as a man who had a wonderful time living his life, and who had good friends, fine family, and I don’t think I could ask for anything more than that, actually.” ~ Frank Sinatra
I’ve always admired people who are gentle and who have great patience and, apparently, what I’ve done without knowing is I’ve aped these people and begun to follow that kind of line.” ~ Frank Sinatra
For another intimate look at Sinatra’s relentlessly fascinating life and career, you won’t go wrong with The Sinatra Treasures: Intimate Photos, Mementos, and Music from the Sinatra Family Collection — a stunning and loving homage to the iconic singer by Sinatra family archivist Charles Pignone, full of over 200 black-and-white and color photographs alongside reproductions of rare memorabilia like radio scripts, telegrams and letters, piano scores and more, as well as a bounty of thoughtful, witty and true to character quotes from The Voice himself.
Free open Yale course: Listening to Music
25 May 2011 Leave a comment
in Learn Something, Music
From: oyc.yale.edu
The file below contains all of the course pages from this course and may be downloaded for offline use. The file is offered in .zip format; you must have access to a suitable decompression application to unzip the contents before use. After decompressing the file, please click “start.html” to launch.
[ download all course pages ] – size 3.2 MB – file type application/zip
Course Media:
Due to copyright restrictions, this course is not available on iTunes U.
To download individual media files from the course, please click the links in the Class Sessions section below. Apple QuickTime 7.2 or higher is required to view the videos, while the mp3 files will play in any mp3-compatible device/player.
“Everything is Perfect. Love Everyone. Hate No One.”
22 May 2011 Leave a comment
in Something
From: realitysandwich.com
This week Evolver Editions/North Atlantic Books is releasing the e-book edition of Jose Arguelles’ final book, Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness. The paperback edition will be available in September.
When I learned that Jose Arguelles had died an image came into my mind of a move on a chess board — the L-shaped move the knight makes in two directions at the same time, leaping over pieces and seeming to land out of nowhere. To me, Jose had leaped into another dimension, a shock but no surprise. “He will now be assisting us from the other side of the veil,” were the words that accompanied the news from Australia from his partner, Stephanie South. The specifics of his death were simple. On March 23 (Red Spectral Moon), “He slipped away in complete peace after a short illness.”
Among his last public communications were lectures to two conferences in 2010, one in Germany and one in Kazakhstan, that he had planned to attend in person but instead chose to do so via videotape. In each case he described his decision to withdraw from public appearances until after December 21, 2012, and delve more deeply into meditation. He explained to the participants, “I saw that my responsibility was to continue to go within to cultivate higher states of mind, states of mind that will approximate the noosphere, that would activate my capacity for telepathy.” He had recently toured regions of shocking poverty in Kenya and India and I heard in his tone of voice in these announcements a heartbreaking world-weariness with the physical state of our planet with its wars, poverty, pollution and political polarization.
Jose Arguelles, whose spiritual name was Valum Votan, spent the last 24 years thoroughly enmeshed in the world, traveling, speaking, teaching, writing, networking and activating. He was a man possessed by his mission and unflagging in his dedication to it. He wrote prolifically, leaving behind a catalogue of books describing a new science, the science of the fourth dimension of time, along with artwork and illustrations that will entrance scholars far into the future. He was paving the way to a new reality with cosmic stepping-stones that caught the eyes of seekers in every country who were ripe for a modern times round of metaphysical revelation. The cornerstone of his work was his amplification of the mathematical codes embedded in the Mayan Calendar, information anchored in a consciousness achieved during deep states of meditation. The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology, the book he wrote in 1987 to accompany the message of the Harmonic Convergence, boldly stated that the Mayans were “intergalactic navigators” who came to this planet to correct our notion of time. This interpretation was enough to set him apart from all conventional academic and anthropological views on the Maya. From this point forward, his following and his future lay well outside the establishment.
I Am Not And You Can Too…Jake Lions
20 May 2011 2 Comments
in Music
From: musicformaniacs.blogspot.com
Vermont’s Jake Lions Band have very nicely offered up to us a free album of lots of short (except for one 8 minute track), silly bits of electro-Dada. The non-instrumentals sport absurd lyrics sometimes sung in Chipmunk/cartoon-ish vocals. Like Zoogz Rift or Big Poo Generator, Lions and Co. mix smart, complex music with goofiness, thereby keeping pretentiousness at bay.
Check out lots more of his stuff HERE.
Jake Lions Band – I Am Not And You Can Too
Posted by Mr Fab
Cher sings about Ringo…
19 May 2011 3 Comments
in Music
halfhearteddude.com <—Check out all the songs here.
Bonnie Jo Mason (Cher) – Ringo, I Love You (1964).mp3
Another future star recording Beatles-related material under a different name was Cher, who in 1964 sought to buy into the Zeitgeist by declaring her love for the drummer. Before her brief stint as Bonnie Jo Mason, Cherilyn Sarkasian sang backing vocals on classics such as The Ronettes’ Be My Baby, The Chiffons’ Da Doo Ron Ron and the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling – and it was the producer of those songs, Phil Spector, who co-wrote and produced Ringo, I Love You. Then she recorded as plain Cherilyn (a song called Dream Baby which your faithful correspondent recently featured on the Star Maker Machine blog) and in a duo as Cleo to Sonny Bono’s Caesar. Within just over a year of releasing Ringo, I Love You, Sonny and Cher were stars. The Ringo anthem was backed with an instrumental titled Beatles Blues, a deliberately bad song placed to deter DJs from ignoring the A-side, as they often did. The ploy backfired: apparently radio DJs were thrown by Bonnie Jo’s deep voice and refused to play what they thought was a gay declaration of affection for the Beatles drummer.
Alice 