http://www.ulsterpublishing.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=454286
His new CD is great. His story is a great triumph over adversity.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
Where To Send Aid To Burma By Alan Senauke
An Imperfect Storm
Once again, our hearts go out to the people of Burma.
Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy Delta of Burma (Myanmar) on Friday, May 2 with winds that reached 135 miles per hour, and a 12-foot storm surge that has left vast areas of the delta completely submerged. As of today, the official death toll has reached 25,000, but with dozens of towns and villages underwater, and countless coastal Burmese unaccounted for, the numbers will certainly go much higher. The storm moved up the delta, devastating Rangoon itself, with thousands of buildings destroyed. Shari Villarosa, the charge d'affaires of the US embassy in Myanmar, said: "The information that we're receiving indicates that there may well be over 100,000 deaths in the delta area.” Five regions — Yangon, Ayeyarwady, Bago Divisions and Mon and Kayin States have been officially designated as disaster areas.
The scope of this disaster cannot yet be measured, and it comes just a week before Burma’s military junta, SPDC, plans to hold a referendum on a new constitution that would consolidate the generals’ illegitimate hold on power for the foreseeable future. The amount of energy and expense the junta has spent over these last months suppressing opposition to a forced referendum, hunting down and imprisoning dissidents, stands in sharp contrast to their failure to give timely warning to the delta’s population — when the likely path of the storm was evident to meteorologists all across South Asia. It stands in contrast to the government’s slow and deadly response to the storm itself, and to the obstacles it places to the receipt and distribution of disaster relief funds and materiel.
And yet the vote goes on, with a minor concession postponing the referendum in the flood zone until May 24. So we see the terrible possibility of disaster settled upon disaster — an imperfect storm of suffering.
Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the new Clear View Project encourage the wider Buddhist community to respond in the following ways.
1. Offer humanitarian aid now to those directly affected by Cyclone Nargis. Emergency relief efforts can be directed towards BPF’s affiliate, the Foundation for the People of Burma (FPB), which already has some funds in Burma, and has the resources and connections in country that assure proper distribution and use of your generous gifts.
Foundation for the People of Burma
225 Bush Street, Suite 590
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone: (415) 217-7015
Fax: (415) 477-2787
www.foundationburma.org
Email: info@foundationburma.org
2. Write or email the Myanmar Embassy, expressing your compassionate concern for the Burmese people in this natural disaster, in hopes that the government of Myanmar will wholeheartedly devote all its considerable military and civilian resources to rescue those trapped in the path of the cyclone; will allow the free flow of international relief aid; and will indefinitely postpone the constitutional referendum until such a time as there can be a full and open vote — internationally monitored by respected parties acceptable to all sides.
The Honorable Ambassador U Linn Myaing
Embassy of the Union of Myanmar
2300 S Street NW, Washington D.C. – 20008
info@mewashingtondc.com
— Hozan Alan Senauke
for Clear View Project
& Buddhist Peace Fellowship
5.9.08
Once again, our hearts go out to the people of Burma.
Cyclone Nargis struck the Irrawaddy Delta of Burma (Myanmar) on Friday, May 2 with winds that reached 135 miles per hour, and a 12-foot storm surge that has left vast areas of the delta completely submerged. As of today, the official death toll has reached 25,000, but with dozens of towns and villages underwater, and countless coastal Burmese unaccounted for, the numbers will certainly go much higher. The storm moved up the delta, devastating Rangoon itself, with thousands of buildings destroyed. Shari Villarosa, the charge d'affaires of the US embassy in Myanmar, said: "The information that we're receiving indicates that there may well be over 100,000 deaths in the delta area.” Five regions — Yangon, Ayeyarwady, Bago Divisions and Mon and Kayin States have been officially designated as disaster areas.
The scope of this disaster cannot yet be measured, and it comes just a week before Burma’s military junta, SPDC, plans to hold a referendum on a new constitution that would consolidate the generals’ illegitimate hold on power for the foreseeable future. The amount of energy and expense the junta has spent over these last months suppressing opposition to a forced referendum, hunting down and imprisoning dissidents, stands in sharp contrast to their failure to give timely warning to the delta’s population — when the likely path of the storm was evident to meteorologists all across South Asia. It stands in contrast to the government’s slow and deadly response to the storm itself, and to the obstacles it places to the receipt and distribution of disaster relief funds and materiel.
And yet the vote goes on, with a minor concession postponing the referendum in the flood zone until May 24. So we see the terrible possibility of disaster settled upon disaster — an imperfect storm of suffering.
Buddhist Peace Fellowship and the new Clear View Project encourage the wider Buddhist community to respond in the following ways.
1. Offer humanitarian aid now to those directly affected by Cyclone Nargis. Emergency relief efforts can be directed towards BPF’s affiliate, the Foundation for the People of Burma (FPB), which already has some funds in Burma, and has the resources and connections in country that assure proper distribution and use of your generous gifts.
Foundation for the People of Burma
225 Bush Street, Suite 590
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone: (415) 217-7015
Fax: (415) 477-2787
www.foundationburma.org
Email: info@foundationburma.org
2. Write or email the Myanmar Embassy, expressing your compassionate concern for the Burmese people in this natural disaster, in hopes that the government of Myanmar will wholeheartedly devote all its considerable military and civilian resources to rescue those trapped in the path of the cyclone; will allow the free flow of international relief aid; and will indefinitely postpone the constitutional referendum until such a time as there can be a full and open vote — internationally monitored by respected parties acceptable to all sides.
The Honorable Ambassador U Linn Myaing
Embassy of the Union of Myanmar
2300 S Street NW, Washington D.C. – 20008
info@mewashingtondc.com
— Hozan Alan Senauke
for Clear View Project
& Buddhist Peace Fellowship
5.9.08
Monday, May 05, 2008
Bill Moyers On Rev. Wright
Thoughtful article from Bill Moyers as usual.
Thanks again to Bob T. for sending it too me.
Rev. Wright
By BILL MOYERS
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: “Who’s telling the truth over there?”
“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.”
That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright.
In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. More than 2000 people have written me about him, and their opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American-hating radical,” one of my viewers wrote. Another called him a “nut case.”
Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist.
Many black preachers I’ve known—scholarly, smart, and gentle in person—uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course, I’ve known many white preachers like that, too. But where I grew up in the south, before the Civil Rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.
I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed: “We, the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Conner, and Jesse Helms.
Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances since my interview. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle – forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy.
Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. public health service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.
Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide for yourself, but at least it helps me to understand the why of them.
In this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media – the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help – people who, for their own reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.
Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court Justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.
Which means it is all about race, isn’t it?
Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We’re often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this – this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes.
Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, “beware the terrible simplifiers.”
Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
Now Available!How the Press Led the US into War
Buy End Times Now!
New From CounterPunch Books
The Secret Language of the Crossroads:HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANGBy Daniel Cassidy
WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD!
Click Here to Buy!
Cassidy on TourClick Here for Dates & Venues
"The Case Against Israel"Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz
Click Here to Buy!
Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal
Click Here to Order!
Grand Theft PentagonHow They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism
The Occupationby Patrick Cockburn
Humanitarian ImperialismBy Jean Bricmont
CITY BEAUTIFULBy Tennessee Reed
Thanks again to Bob T. for sending it too me.
Rev. Wright
By BILL MOYERS
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: “Who’s telling the truth over there?”
“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.”
That’s how people see Jeremiah Wright.
In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. More than 2000 people have written me about him, and their opinions vary widely. Some sting: “Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American-hating radical,” one of my viewers wrote. Another called him a “nut case.”
Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some rational explanation for Wright’s transition from reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I’m not a psychologist.
Many black preachers I’ve known—scholarly, smart, and gentle in person—uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course, I’ve known many white preachers like that, too. But where I grew up in the south, before the Civil Rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed.
I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great-great grandfather had been but three-fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed: “We, the people.” Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Conner, and Jesse Helms.
Even so, the anger of black preachers I’ve known and heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic. That’s not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances since my interview. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle – forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy.
Hardly anyone took the “chickens come home to roost” remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright’s absurd charge that the United States deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. public health service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.
Does this excuse Wright’s anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You’ll have to decide for yourself, but at least it helps me to understand the why of them.
In this multimedia age the pulpit isn’t only available on Sunday mornings. There’s round the clock media – the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help – people who, for their own reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn’t running for president with the man in the pew who was.
Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee’s delusions or thinks AIDS is God’s punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court Justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God’s judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass. Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren’t.
Which means it is all about race, isn’t it?
Wright’s offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn’t fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone’s neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We’re often exposed to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I’ve never seen anything like this – this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our eyes.
Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, “beware the terrible simplifiers.”
Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
Now Available!How the Press Led the US into War
Buy End Times Now!
New From CounterPunch Books
The Secret Language of the Crossroads:HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANGBy Daniel Cassidy
WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD!
Click Here to Buy!
Cassidy on TourClick Here for Dates & Venues
"The Case Against Israel"Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz
Click Here to Buy!
Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal
Click Here to Order!
Grand Theft PentagonHow They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism
The Occupationby Patrick Cockburn
Humanitarian ImperialismBy Jean Bricmont
CITY BEAUTIFULBy Tennessee Reed
Friday, May 02, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
May Day Strike Led By Longshoremen's Union
http://maydayilwu.googlepages.com/
Great news for those who see blue collar workers as an important component of a progressive coaltion.
Great news for those who see blue collar workers as an important component of a progressive coaltion.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Joshua Bell In The Train Station
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
If you don't know the Bach piece that he's playing, please do so as soon as you can.
If you don't know the Bach piece that he's playing, please do so as soon as you can.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Cheney On Democracy
RICHARD CHENEY ON DEMOCRACY MARTHA RADDATZ: ABC NEWS - Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives. RICHARD CHENEY (with smirk): So? RADDATZ: So. . . You don't care what the American people think? CHENEY: No, I think you can't be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.
This is how Cheney spells : deMOCKracy.
This is what he is really saying about public opinion: "Fluc You Nation."
This is how Cheney spells : deMOCKracy.
This is what he is really saying about public opinion: "Fluc You Nation."
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Gerry Tenney and The Lost Tribe in Concert
Where: McGraths Irish Pub , 1539 Lincoln Ave. in Alameda Ca.
Date and Time: Friday March 28 8:00 P. M.
Cost: $5.00 ( Such A Deal)
Link to Mcgrath's . http://www.mcgrathspub.com/
Gerry Tenney and the Lost Tribe have been playing in the Bay Area off and on for over 20 years. Based mostly around Gerry’s song writting , the band offers a fresh selection of songs and tunes played and sang only the way that a group of friends and talented musicians can do. The mix of folk, bluegrass, acoustic country, a little rock and roll and klezmer, create a refreshing look at Gerry’s vision and version of that style of music Americana Among the current members are ,Gerry on guitar and mandolin, David Laub on bass, Leslie Tenney on vocals, Suzy Thompson on fiddle and vocals, and Harry Yaglijian on mandolin, guitar and vocals.Emery Barter will join us on the dobro and Neil Linden, my old bandmate from Woodstock N.Y. is on banjo. With plenty of guest musicians, this will be a special night of music.
Date and Time: Friday March 28 8:00 P. M.
Cost: $5.00 ( Such A Deal)
Link to Mcgrath's . http://www.mcgrathspub.com/
Gerry Tenney and the Lost Tribe have been playing in the Bay Area off and on for over 20 years. Based mostly around Gerry’s song writting , the band offers a fresh selection of songs and tunes played and sang only the way that a group of friends and talented musicians can do. The mix of folk, bluegrass, acoustic country, a little rock and roll and klezmer, create a refreshing look at Gerry’s vision and version of that style of music Americana Among the current members are ,Gerry on guitar and mandolin, David Laub on bass, Leslie Tenney on vocals, Suzy Thompson on fiddle and vocals, and Harry Yaglijian on mandolin, guitar and vocals.Emery Barter will join us on the dobro and Neil Linden, my old bandmate from Woodstock N.Y. is on banjo. With plenty of guest musicians, this will be a special night of music.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Feta Cheese
If you like feta cheese, and have access to various kinds of feta cheese, try the French. It's a little more expensive, but its the smoothest and the taste is just wonderful. Let me know what you think.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Artie Traum
I had a chance to see and play a few songs with Artie on his west coast visit. Below are some of his thoughts on the current state of the music business.
Check out his website and his music.
http://www.artietraum.com/
If you're in the music business, you're aware that the old business model (record, press CDs and sell product) is essentially over. The big labels are in big trouble, but they're coming back with new ways to squeeze cash out of the system. The latest they've come up with is an experiment with free downloads paid for by advertising. Media sites like Salon.com have a similar model: watch an ad and get free content. I have mixed feelings about this. First, advertisers may use their clout to decide who gets included in the mix. Second, I believe this new system may squeeze "indies" as the major labels try to control the market. Those of us who are struggling to maintain small record companies are facing rising costs and diminished opportunities. Still, musicians and artists have always been resourceful. Hard times sometimes make us all work a little more creatively to find a path to success.It's no secret that the corporate world has started devouring itself in a mad frenzy of layoffs, buyouts and an unseemly squeezing of the middle (and poorer) classes. Greed and corruption have hit a tipping point. Is there a limit to how many fees, interest rate increases and price hikes can be levied? Rather than address the fundamental issues of why and how our society is falling apart, the media is fixated on distractions. Even some of the in-depth sites, like Huffington Post, are now simply grabbing the same feeds that everyone else gets. CNN and MSNBC and Fox spend hours analyzing election polls. This numbing parade of numbers tells us nothing.In the 1976 Sidney Lumet film "Network," Peter Finch (playing a network news anchor) reaches a personal tipping point. He goes on air and shouts, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." This mantra is picked up around the country and people start shouting "I'm mad as hell... " Clearly, a lot of people are feeling this way as we enter the campaign of 2008. Still, I remain optimistic. Perhaps it's that I grew up listening to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie singing about the Great Depression and bitter struggles of miners, lumberjacks and factory workers. They never gave up a certain pioneering spirit and abiding belief that justice would, in the end, prevail. Studs Terkel wrote, "I've always felt that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."See you down the road,Artie. NEW VIDEO! Here's a link to my song Halifax, which I performed at the Fairfield Theatre. Halifax. It tells how Acadians were driven from Canada in 1755, an early example of ethnic cleansing in colonial-era North America. Beausoleil was an Acadian resistance fighter who waged a guerrilla war against the British near Halifax. He did not prevent thousands of Acadians from being loaded on boats and sent to Virginia, French Guiana and Louisiana. I learned much of this story from Michael Doucet, the irrepressible fiddler and Cajun scholar behind the band Beausoleil. I've been drawn to Cajun culture and history since I worked with Michael Doucet on the CD "Chez Les Cajuns" several years ago. Perhaps the Acadian exile reminds me of Jewish history and how our ancestors were driven from lands they cherished -over and over- in the past. I believe a good song shouldn't need a long introduction but sometimes a little history expands what songwriters must compress into a handful of short verses. I tried to convey the emotion, despair and excitement of those sad years in the mid-18th Century.
Check out his website and his music.
http://www.artietraum.com/
If you're in the music business, you're aware that the old business model (record, press CDs and sell product) is essentially over. The big labels are in big trouble, but they're coming back with new ways to squeeze cash out of the system. The latest they've come up with is an experiment with free downloads paid for by advertising. Media sites like Salon.com have a similar model: watch an ad and get free content. I have mixed feelings about this. First, advertisers may use their clout to decide who gets included in the mix. Second, I believe this new system may squeeze "indies" as the major labels try to control the market. Those of us who are struggling to maintain small record companies are facing rising costs and diminished opportunities. Still, musicians and artists have always been resourceful. Hard times sometimes make us all work a little more creatively to find a path to success.It's no secret that the corporate world has started devouring itself in a mad frenzy of layoffs, buyouts and an unseemly squeezing of the middle (and poorer) classes. Greed and corruption have hit a tipping point. Is there a limit to how many fees, interest rate increases and price hikes can be levied? Rather than address the fundamental issues of why and how our society is falling apart, the media is fixated on distractions. Even some of the in-depth sites, like Huffington Post, are now simply grabbing the same feeds that everyone else gets. CNN and MSNBC and Fox spend hours analyzing election polls. This numbing parade of numbers tells us nothing.In the 1976 Sidney Lumet film "Network," Peter Finch (playing a network news anchor) reaches a personal tipping point. He goes on air and shouts, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." This mantra is picked up around the country and people start shouting "I'm mad as hell... " Clearly, a lot of people are feeling this way as we enter the campaign of 2008. Still, I remain optimistic. Perhaps it's that I grew up listening to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie singing about the Great Depression and bitter struggles of miners, lumberjacks and factory workers. They never gave up a certain pioneering spirit and abiding belief that justice would, in the end, prevail. Studs Terkel wrote, "I've always felt that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."See you down the road,Artie. NEW VIDEO! Here's a link to my song Halifax, which I performed at the Fairfield Theatre. Halifax. It tells how Acadians were driven from Canada in 1755, an early example of ethnic cleansing in colonial-era North America. Beausoleil was an Acadian resistance fighter who waged a guerrilla war against the British near Halifax. He did not prevent thousands of Acadians from being loaded on boats and sent to Virginia, French Guiana and Louisiana. I learned much of this story from Michael Doucet, the irrepressible fiddler and Cajun scholar behind the band Beausoleil. I've been drawn to Cajun culture and history since I worked with Michael Doucet on the CD "Chez Les Cajuns" several years ago. Perhaps the Acadian exile reminds me of Jewish history and how our ancestors were driven from lands they cherished -over and over- in the past. I believe a good song shouldn't need a long introduction but sometimes a little history expands what songwriters must compress into a handful of short verses. I tried to convey the emotion, despair and excitement of those sad years in the mid-18th Century.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Great Obama Video
http://pol.moveon.org/endorse-o-thon/video.html?id=12030-1699880-5soASt&t=967
He's not my ideal candidate, but clearly the best of the narrowed down field.
There's a certain intangible charisma there, and an ability to stir people for change in the right direction. We on the left should not let our criticisms of him stop us for voting and working for him. The defeat of facist Republicanism is much more important than anything else. It goes without saying that we should not do this blindly and furthermore take this opportunity to promote and encourage more progressive, anti-war, anti-corporate etc. positions.
He's not my ideal candidate, but clearly the best of the narrowed down field.
There's a certain intangible charisma there, and an ability to stir people for change in the right direction. We on the left should not let our criticisms of him stop us for voting and working for him. The defeat of facist Republicanism is much more important than anything else. It goes without saying that we should not do this blindly and furthermore take this opportunity to promote and encourage more progressive, anti-war, anti-corporate etc. positions.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Israeli Conductor Barenboim Takes Palestinian Citizenship
Click: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/944235.html
Worth reading the reader responses too.
A brave and bold step towards peace and understanding.
Worth reading the reader responses too.
A brave and bold step towards peace and understanding.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Schmaltz
Schmaltz, Chicken Fat, Used To Make High Yield Biodiesel Fuel By U Of Arkansas Engineers.Cooks everywhere have long used schmaltz, the Yiddish word for chicken fat, as the basis for chicken soup, a tasty power dish reputed to cure the common cold, but soon drivers might find themselves cooking, so to speak with schmaltz as fuel in their gas tank. Researchers say they have found a way of converting schmaltz to turn it into high-yield biodiesel fuel for vehicles.To read the full article, see:http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7009509960
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Yiddish Beatles
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=6vAMgbGEDTY
This is me with California Klezmer /The Lost Tribe, doing A Hard Day's Night,A Schvereh Togedikeh Nahkt, synched up to the Beatles on YouTube.
Translation by Gerry Tenney and Khane Yakhness
This is me with California Klezmer /The Lost Tribe, doing A Hard Day's Night,A Schvereh Togedikeh Nahkt, synched up to the Beatles on YouTube.
Translation by Gerry Tenney and Khane Yakhness
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
