Queen Amaranthine

unfettered mind is buddhist podcast. are you buddhist? just curious.

Not as a religion, but in the philosophical sense, very much so. Mindfulness, recognizing the moment rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future, letting go, seeing life lessons in little things, etc. resonate with me deeply. Meditation is another matter--self-diagnosed ADD and "monkey mind" aren't too keen on it!

I like this a lot:

http://www.shambhalasun.com/

Love the NPR podcasts! I need to check out Unfettered Mind too.

If you're a grammar geek:

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/eachother-or-each-other.aspx

Heartbreaking!

"Jeff Tweedy has the voice Sir Paul wishes he had."

"Nels Cline is the session guitarist the Beatles should have had."

I've heard Wilco at Starbucks and Barnes & Noble.

Wilco is often played at Being There, a lovely little coffee house owned by a friend of mine!

The most surprising place I've heard Wilco is at Hy-Vee grocery store (any other rural Midwesterners here?!). For a long time Hy-Vee used to play alt music, you know, how grocery stores play background music. Wilco, Josh Rouse, the Shins, etc. Then one day Hy-Vee switched to bad 70s radio tunes (BTO--WTF?). Then it went to 80s pop and now some more recent stuff is mixed in, including Coldplay. (Sorry for the digression there).

VERY cool bit of history and it makes perfect sense in the song.

I first heard Wilco in April 2002, when my husband found YHF for me on Napster (I think it was). He said, "This sounds like something you'd like." He burned it onto a CD for me. He was right--it was something I liked. Rather, love! Funny, though, either my husband or napster didn't have the song order right, so to me even after eventually buying a legit copy, on YHF I think of "Kamera" as the first song and the whole thing is supposed to conclude with "Poor Places," not "Reservations."

First show: July 2002 in Minneapolis, at the Orpheum there. Pure magic!

Beautiful song & nice video!

I've just started reading this--the premise is wickedly dark humor, but at 600+ pages is wee bit too long for some readers.

I'd be curious what your committee decides on... Hope you will be able to post an update.

Still in the works.

Anyone read this? Any thoughts?

I missed this part of the thread. Ten Years?

 

LouieB

Yeah, we want something contemporary that might hook in a variety of readers, and the participant wish list includes some who don't read anything that's not on Facebook. The audience for these events is quite broad, and it's hard to find a book that will interest everyone. It's not to say that we can't or won't tie in some Joyce or Wilde though.

Thank you thank you to everyone who replied here! There's great stuff here to take to the committee.

I'm on a committee organizing book, movie, and other artsy events for the community later this year. Every year this project focuses on a different country--this year it's Ireland!

We need to pick a novel, preferably something fairly recent, within the past 10 years.

For movies, I thought of My Left Foot and The Commitments. Any others I ought to add to a wish list?

Celtic music and U2 come to mind of course. I'm so out of the loop regarding new music anymore, so if anyone can name must-hear Irish musicians or bands, that would be great.

Art? Photography? Theater? Architecture? Dance? Any ideas?

Thanks!

the most obvious type of music: Afro-Ciban or more accurately Afro-Caribbean. If you google these terms you will find a wealth of information on musical artists, many of whom are some of he most skilled jazz type musicians. The radio show "Mambo Express" features music of this type. Two of the more widely know early musicians are Mongo Santamaria and Machito. More broadly Afro Carribian includes one of my favorite artists named Eddie Palmieri and of course Tito Puente. Considering the influence this type of music has had on jazz and other pppular musics, I am surprised we all forgot about it on our first go around.

 

Don't forget the Buena Vista Social Club folks and the original ska musicians, the Skatalites. There is also dancehall music, steal drum, rock steady, etc. Only including reggae in this discussion was sort of short sighted. There is a very rich and varied musical history coming out of the myriad of islands in that part of the world.

 

LouieB

That is all perfect for what I need! Thanks!

such a time-eater

Yeah, it's almost as bad as this place. (I speak from past experience, several years ago in what seems like another life. I don't log in here nearly as often as I used to because of family time and increased job responsibilities, and after this post will probably fade back into relative obscurity.)

Seriously, though, I don't find Facebook all that exciting and log in maybe every couple of weeks is all. I don't find it intuitively user friendly, and it seems overwhelming. I have an account primarily to keep track of few friends I don't see often and keep up with a few entities of which I am a fan. The fact that it recommends friends for you who are friends of friends of friends of friends is too much social time for me.

On the other hand, people who "live" in it seem to get a lot out of it.

Best wishes! Conversation here is probably much more engaging than there.

Thanks so much for these titles and names, everyone! I'll start checking some of them out soon.

Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat

I'd forgotten about her--I read Breath Eyes Memory when it was first published and loved it, as emotional as it is.

I feel like a party crasher. . .again. Every year I make this kind of request for a project I'm part of, and this time I think it's been a full year since I've last posted here! My life is just incredibly busy. Anyway. . .

My topic this year: arts in the Caribbean! What movies from or about this region can you recommend? What literature from or about this region is a must-read? What type of music, or specific musicians, is worth hearing (Bob Marley of course, but who else?)? Art--painting, sculpture, etc.? Photography?

Thank you everyone! This gives me some good titles to add to my summer movie, reading, etc. list to prepare for this.

I post here so infrequently anymore that I feel like I'm crashing a party.... However, this is where I get some of the best recommendations for this work/community project!

Every year this project, for which I'm a committee member, studies a different country, and later this year it's Canada! What movies, literature, nonfiction, art, music, etc. do you know of by Canadians and/or about Canada? Do you know of any that deal specifically with Canadian life or issues?

Last year was Germany, and I loved the films VCers recommended, especially The Edukators and Goodbye, Lenin. I now count those as two of my favorite films.

Best wishes, Drew!!!

$3.89 here, or something like that. It seems to change a penny or so up and down at least once a day.

A few miles from my town is a new ethanol plant, and more are going up all the time. I like the alternative fuel progress that's being made, but in light of recent floods and the resulting sky-high corn prices, no doubt that's going to drive up ethanol prices soon... Ethanol is all over here, since I live in corn heartland. But is it going to just become more expensive and if it goes up in price, is going to not have the positive impact on this local economy it's expected to have? Is everyone going to just give up on it?

Can you help me? I'm looking for a website where you can listen to classical music--but not requiring Real Player. I had been using Essentialsofmusic.com, but I can't get it to open on this computer I'm using now. I'm particularly looking for Romantic era classical (Dvorak, Brahms, Smetana, etc.) And something not needing Real Player--something else please!

Thanks.

An interesting case. A woman of obvious talents, which she used for the worst cause ever. Some contrition on her part would have helped her some. Wagner, too, is complicated - one of the leading anti-Semites of his time, the only reason he wasn't a Nazi is that the Nazis hadn't been invented yet.

So, it's hard. One is tempted to let the talented of the hook for these things, but can one really overlook such darkness?

Disturbing as all this sounds, these actually would be interesting and on some level valuable to look at and talk about. Do we value the art because it's art or ignore it because of the artist's awful beliefs and messages? At what point do we detatch the artist from the art--or do we, or can we?

Thank you thank you everyone! Great titles and names here.

I'd forgotten about Metropolis--great film, and the special effects are surprisingly impressive for 1920-something.

I'm guessing this is similar to your Africa project from a few years ago?

Indeed it is! Every year we do a different region/country for students and the community. We did Russia & the Commonwealth of Independent States this year--one of the most interesting places we've done over the past...how many? years of this project, I think.

Of all my resources for artsy stuff, VC consistently gives me the best suggestions! Last year someone here recommended the movie Prisoner of the Mountains, which I highly recommend if anyone is looking for a film that shows absurdities of war. Platoon, Apocolypse Now and all those films are too much guys-in-camoflague to mean much to me, even though I get their points--but Prisoner really reached me on an emotional and intellectual level.

I'm looking for German literature (classic or contemporary), film, art, photography, music, or anything else artsty.

Does anyone have any good names or titles I should see/read/hear?

Drew!

I just happened to pop in here (a rare occasion anymore) tonight--I must have subconsciously remembered it's your birthday and wanted to say hi!

Love that pin! What 2-year-old would keep it on?