I initially wondered whether this was from the evening in Somerville, MA (a few miles from my house!) in 2007. I remember reading about it but did not manage to get there. Not so.. Joe's pub is in NYC. The Somerville event was at Johnny D's in Davis Square.

If there is a God, he must be having a good time listening to Ali Farka Toure. For now, here on earth, THIS is heaven! (Thank you, Thank you, Thank you...to Vieux's bassist Eric Herman's activism-minded Modiba Productions, who produce Vieux's records, for putting this online!)



I cannot imagine how amazing it must be to listen to his father live.... missed that chance now :(... but I HAVE to see Vieux live next time he is in the Boston area! Or maybe I'll just see him whenever I get to the Desert Festival, huh? ;)

And here is Vieux playing "Bullet the Blue Sky" by U2



and one last short clip for now... from the Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures, Ireland in August 2007.



Previous post about Vieux here.

Take note, US performers^.. one can have good ...no...great music too, in addition to a good dance routine!




That's the very beautiful voiced Mali singer, Rokia Traore. Unlike Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate, she is not from a griot but is from the Bamana ethnic group - traditionally not allowed to perform as musicians. Thank god people like her and Salif Keita (also of royal heritage, traced back to the founder of the Mali Empire, Sundiata Keita) have been able to fight these old customs and bring their beautiful voices to the world.

^ Some of them - don't need to name names, do I? - can hardly be called performers. Drugged-out tramps maybe but calling them musicians would be an insult of the musicians of the world! If music is not the priority but shaking you hips and flaunting your body is ...(nothing wrong with latter..but that's not a music video, its called soft-porn at best; and depending on which performer it is - ugliness.) ... then sorry.. that does not qualify as music in my mind. This here....is music!

Thanks to youtube and the internet revolution, here I am...listening to these beautiful voices from around the globe this Saturday morning. Here's more. Beautiful music. Amazing voice.





I had heard Rokia before but another Mali diva that I read about and heard just now is Oumou Sangare. You can listen to her songs through World Circuit but here are a few videos through youtube.

First up - a live performance of Oumou Sangare featuring Ali Farka Toure at the Festival in the Desert in 2003.*



And there is more.... including the first video below where she sings with the very talented Alicia Keyes (one really good US singer, who has a good voice AND has made it big in the US.)





Some of my earlier posts about music from West Africa, in particular Mali: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5..


* Some day before I die I hope to be at the Festival in the desert in Mali! Next time someone says go to Timbaktu, I'll gladly take them up on it ;) (The festival is held in Essakane, approximately 65 kilometers north of the city of Timbuktu.)

In trying to find these links, google came up with links to some travel agents offering packages to the festival. Unbelievable how expensive it is! I guess with popularity comes price!

The 2008 festival just got over (Jan 10-12) but thanks to the Guardian newspaper, some free mp3s from the 2008 event.
Bassekou Kouyate, the ngoni wizard of Mali
Khaira Arby performs
Vieux Farka Touré performs
Tamikrist
Unknown Tuaregs singing around the campfire

Also, you can see pictures & some videos of the 2007 edition of this great festival.

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/a-longer-spot-check-on-global-warming/


Everyone's Gone Nuts: The exaggerated threat of food allergies

..courtesy, Dailymotion.com! Enjoy, like I did tonight...whilst following the 3rd days play of this exciting cricket match!

Big brain theory, indeed!

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

Dang.. I knew I was insignificant but a "momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy"! :)

There is more oddball speculation in this theory...

The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Read the details at the article, if interested. Makes for some fascinating sci-fi-ish leaps of imagination for sure but who said life is simple. Jokes aside, even Einstein's relativity theories sound sci-fi-ish to me and those are pretty well proven! These theories are still evolving and could well be proven wrong by someone else down the road or maybe we are really fluctuations!

Elmore Leonard has advice for writers.. no point excerpting anything - just go read it.

I found it at a post by Amit Varma, who found it at a post at Prufocks page. Amit had also blogged earlier (I thought I had too but cannot find the post!) about VS Naipaul’s Advice To Writers and Eight Rules For Writing Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut.

Also: Top 10 bookshops from around the world, from the Guardian; also via Prufocks page.

My question is doesn't wealth bring you better access to good health care and education. Aren't these confounded effects? Interactions, anyone!

A study pulled together from sources and surveys found that good health care and education are as important as wealth to modern happiness

A mere 20 people in the experiment but interesting results nonetheless, supported by MRI mapping of the reactions in the brain. (Amazing that a prestigious journal like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will accept a study with 20 people. Statistically its hardly enough to give you separation of the means.)

Apparently, raising the price really does make the wine taste better.

At least that seems to be the result of a taste test. The part of the brain that reacts to a pleasant experience responded more strongly to pricey wines than cheap ones — even when tasters were given the same vintage in disguise.

Antonio Rangel and colleagues at California Institute of Technology thought the perception that higher price means higher quality could influence people, so they decided to test the idea.

They asked 20 people to sample wine while undergoing functional MRIs of their brain activity. The subjects were told they were tasting five different Cabernet Sauvignons sold at different prices.

However, there were actually only three wines sampled, two being offered twice, marked with different prices. A $90 wine was provided marked with its real price and again marked $10, while another was presented at its real price of $5 and also marked $45.

The testers' brains showed more pleasure at the higher price than the lower one, even for the same wine, Rangel reports in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He added that wine professionals would probably be able to differentiate the better wine — "one would hope."

"Our results suggest that the brain might compute experienced pleasantness in a much more sophisticated manner that involves integrating the actual sensory properties of the substance being consumed with the expectations about how good it should be," the researchers reported.

Next step: pain.

Rangel wants to see if people perceive pain differently, depending on their expectations. He hopes to administer mild electric shocks to subjects and measure their reaction when told a shock was going to be stronger or weaker. "We are trying to understand how the brain encodes experiences and what variables can manipulate this," he said. "It helps us understand what it means to be human."

Been seeing a few different TED talks tonight... this one by neuroscientist, Vilayanur Ramachandran (VR) is fascinating.

(It) explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

I had previously blogged about VR's research, which I had learned about while watching Secrets of the Mind, an episode of PBS's great science program Nova.

The new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help...

Nancy Friedman blogged in October 2006 about

http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2006/10/word_of_the_wee_1.html

Word of the Week: Pizzled

Pizzled: A combination of "puzzled" and "pissed off." Coined by psychiatrist Edward Hallowell in his book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD (whew!) to describe how you feel "when you're eating with somebody and their phone rings and they answer it." Evidently he hadn't researched the traditional meaning of "pizzle," which has been around since 1523.

Great talk by Chilean author Isabel Allende at TED....added January 09, 2008

hilarious, witty, intelligent, sad, ..... full of life. love wit passion humor ..



Many ...

An interesting article in NYT today on the Moral Instinct by Steven Pinker, whose many erudite books continue to remain on my to-read list! In fact, I saw at the book store today that he has a new book in 2007 - The Stuff of Thought. So, that makes it 5 books by Pinker that I need to read some day!*

Anyways, in today's NYT article, Pinker asks: Who's the most admirable person? Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, or Norman Borlaug.

Norman who, you ask? That was my reaction too! Norman Borlaug is the most admirable, says Pinker...for he is the "father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, (and) has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history."

But, as Pinker explains, we are..

... turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks.

And so it is Teresa and then maybe Gates (not the Microsoft CEO Gates, who people hate but the philanthropic Gates, who through his foundation is working towards "bringing innovations in health and learning to the global community") who come to mind as good people who have done or are doing a lot for mankind whereas...

...Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

Borlaug is one of five people in history to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Shameful that I had never even heard his name before today!

Anyways, go read the article in its entirety. Fascinating stuff.

* Update: Realized I had mentioned his latest book in an earlier post...but this was when he was still writing it and the book was not published. However, worth repeating here is the link I had then provided to a talk by Pinker at the TED conference in 2005, in which he previewed his soon to be released book. The book looks at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. He questions the very nature of our thoughts -- the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others.

I have read only one Haruki Murakami's novel - Sputnik Sweetheart - and none of his other famous ones (1, 2, 3). However, recently I quite enjoyed his short stories in After the quake, although I read only about half the stories before I had to return the book to the library. I knew he had another collection of short stories in the 1990s -The Elephant Vanishes - but did not know till this evening* that a third collection of stories was translated to English and published late last year - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of 24 short stories that per this reviewer at amazon.com are...

.... "quintessentially Murakami: understated tales of love, longing, and loss from the slightly eccentric to the downright surreal--and yet so surreal as to ring true, convincingly grasping life's little mysteries and synchronicities in a deadpan, matter-of-fact manner. Genres blend and identities blur, reality and illusion overlap and interplay, all amidst the familiar psychological furniture of our contemporary consumerist planet with its internationally hodgepodge culture. The occasional dash of postmodern irony only accentuates these unsettling explorations of the human condition, and yet for all that each tale is enjoyable and highly entertaining to read. Almost deceptively so."

Sounds deliciously appealing. Will have to check it out! (In fact, he also has another novel in 2007 - After Dark. Hmm...prolific AND good. An not-so-common occurrence.)

* I spent about an hour and a half in a book-store today and was overwhelmed by how many good books - new and old - there are to read. There were hundreds of authors and books but four authors whose work I have enjoyed in the past spring to mind. Perusing through the books, I realized that Coetzee has a new book (Dairy of a bad year), Gordimer has a new collection of short stories (Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories), Phillip Roth has another book (Exit Ghost), and McEwan had a new one last year which is on my to-read list (On Chesil Beach), not to mention older books by all four authors that I still have to read.

Phew...so much to read, so little time. And considering there is so much to read of what other people do, when will *I* do something? Phew...so much to read, so little time. And considering there is so much to read of what other people do, when will *I* do something? Should I even try to write something...there are thousands and thousands of books published already --- so much time and effort probably went into it.... what good will it do if somehow I even write something worthy of being published! Not that I even know if I can write! Have written nothing - not even a nice review, let alone a short story or an article, to date!

Phew...enough with this blogging and surfing, advise some... but if only I had the discipline! My average for the month was typically 25-35 posts in 2007, until I hit a record high of 73 in December. January is following the same trend! 42 posts in 12 days of January, 10 just today! What a waste of my time though, especially since hardly anyone even reads my blog! What am I writing this for? For posterity? What will I think about all this time 10 years from now? Wasted time? Invested time?

Actually, last night I read an interesting post by the Great Bong (he won the Best Indian Blog award in 2006; following Amit Varma's win of the inaugural award in 2005), where he has an interesting conversation (imagined of course) on his 30th birthday with his 20-year old self. So, what would a 45 year old me think of the time spent online blogging and surfing through the 30s? What does this 30-something me think of all the time spent/invested in various activities in my 20s? Did something concrete come out of it all? Is there any kind of lasting legacy? Does it matter? Especially, if I enjoyed it at the time... despite a nagging feeling that I was not doing all that I could be doing and becoming all that I could be.

And what is it I want to be anyways? And what good are all these questions, if I have no answers and even if I have answers, I do not act on them? And where do these questions come from? Is mid-30s the time for an existential mid-life crisis?

Ok.. enough rambling. It is almost 9pm this Saturday evening and I am going to go read one of the many books I have checked out from the library. Stop blogging for now! At least for tonight before I succumb to temptation again tomorrow morning! (Hope its not again later tonight!) Who was that guy who said: Internet, thy name is temptation! ;)

P.S. Haah! An idea just struck me. Maybe 350-400 years from today, they'll glorify my ruminations and collection as a treasure-trove of information! Just like Pepys. :)

Love-Lines An exploration of human desires, using words and pictures.

We Feel Fine: An exploration of human emotion, in six movements.

Both websites are the work of Jonathan Harris, who in his work combines "elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art, and storytelling to design systems to explore and explain the human world."

-
Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit. - Frank Borman

Two snippets of news from the Good magazine that tell you how interconnected we all have become ...how flat the world is! Anyone thinking of such ideas 15-20 years back would be thought of as a kook! ;)

The helpdesk's long been outsourced, medical insurance paperwork, financial analysis and tutoring for kids have been outsourced....even surrogate motherhood has been outsourced... so why not singing telegrams! :)

A singing telegram from India, delivered via phone call. Just pick a song and TajTunes will give your friend/enemy/special someone a call and sing to them. They have a few songs to choose from, including a Happy Birthday song, a Congratulations song and one just to say "What's Up?" They're only $5; we're already looking forward to a long, fruitful relationship with this service.

Though there is one 'outsourcing' idea the Dutch thought of before someone outsource it to India :)

You can pay a Dutch company to spray paint messages on the Palestinian side of the infamous wall. It costs 30 Euro, but it's a helluva lot more memorable than a post-it. It's a rebellious sort of interconnectivity.

Hmmm.. what other great idea can you think of to outsource?