02006-03-27 | Uncategorized
Click opera – Ubiquity is the abyss
Music is a good thing. Of course it is. I’m a musician, I’ve dedicated my life to it, and I know few better things. Music can be sacred, mysterious, otherworldly, intimate, moving, extraordinary. But, increasingly, music is the opposite of those things. It’s profane, banal, public, shared, irritating, ordinary and ubiquitous. It’s in every restaurant and every cafe and every car and every office and on every computer and on every website. It’s in each ear, snaking in on a thin white wire. You listen to music all day, every day. Time without music is downtime. It’s the triumph of music! Or is it? Maybe ubiquity signals quite the opposite; music’s defeat. For music, ubiquity is the abyss.
I have thought about this many times. What was it like when any bright color could send a person into a different state of mind, because in their daily life they encountered mainly muted earth-tones. What was it like when the sound of a musician playing his instrument made everyone in a village drop what they were doing to run and listen? When everything sacred becomes profane and banal, does it mean that nothing is sacred – or does perception simply shift. Maybe it is how we become more sophisticated. We hear ubiquitous music and quickly determine whether it is banal and irritating or mysterious, intimate or extraordinary. When music is everywhere, music with more depth and mystery has to be created in order to move us.
Restaurants like to create an atmosphere by playing music over speakers. It is a quick fix designed to take attention away from other problems. I generally do not enjoy music in restaurants. To me it feels like bringing dinner to a concert. It is equally disturbing. That said, it seems to become harder and harder to find restaurants where the music is played softly and even harder to find restaurants without music altogether.
02006-03-27 | Uncategorized
MEMRI TV
Arab-American Psychiatrist Wafa Sultan: There is No Clash of Civilizations but a Clash between the Mentality of the Middle Ages and That of the 21st Century.
(Via c4chaos – formerly known as coolmel)
02006-03-27 | Uncategorized
Faster melting of polar ice dampens future of Shore – baltimoresun.com
Scientists underestimated rise in sea level, studies say.
Polar ice sheets are melting faster than most authorities realize and could eventually submerge coastal communities worldwide, according to a pair of studies released today. Researchers from the University of Arizona and the National Center for Atmospheric Researchers noted that sea levels rose 20 feet during a warming period 129,000 years ago – and said the waters could rise just as high sometime after 2100 if global temperatures continue to climb. Maryland would be hit harder than most areas, with the Eastern Shore particularly vulnerable, said J. Court Stevenson, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences at Horn Point, who was not involved in the studies published today.
‘We’re talking about our grandchildren having to face this,’ he said.
I read that 22% of Americans are certain that the world will end within 50 years with the second coming of Christ. Another 22% are not certain, but think that this scenario is very likely. If those numbers are correct we are looking at 44% of Americans not really caring whether these shores will be under water by the end of the century.
If, on the other hand, you feel like I do that we should always aim to leave this world in a better condition that we found it in, we have our work cut out for us.
Thanks Salma
02006-03-26 | Uncategorized
TricycleBlog
Buddhism’s alleged an-iconism, much proclaimed during the Prophet Muhammad cartoon frenzy, took another hit last week, when a truly iconoclastic Buddhist in Thailand took a hammer to one of the country’s most beloved shrines. Before twenty-seven-year-old Thanakorn Pakdeepol could completely demolish the revered statue of Brahma in Bangkok’s Erawan Shrine, a mob seized him and beat him to death.
A Buddhist shrine with a statue of Brahma? A Buddhist lynchmob? Click on title link to read more.
02006-03-26 | Uncategorized
The Vortext
Along with gunpowder, clocks, and noodles, the Chinese are said to have invented paper. As is the case with many similar generalizations, a great deal of truth actually stands behind that notion: while the Mediterranean world was still drawing on papyrus and etching with styluses on wax tablets and the Incas were conveying messages with knotted ropes, the Chinese had a fifteen-hundred-year head start writing on the cheap and versatile medium of paper—and even printing on it.
Less than an hour southwest of Hangzhou, fifteen minutes shy of the city of Fuyang, an organization still produces paper the same way it has been made for millennia in the region just south of the Yangtze River, and prints hand-bound books of ancient texts on it in the traditional manner.
