September 2010

How We Lived on It (25) – Dreams of Kirina (Baaba Maal)

September 18, 2010

Beginning in Santa Monica, California in 2005, “Playing for Change is a movement to connect the world through music.” Through 2009 it has produced 34 videos from locations around the world. Here, the great Senegalese musician Baaba Maal performs in Kirina, Mali. The idea for this project arose from a common belief that music has [...]

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Stephen Hawking’s New Clothes?

September 17, 2010

It’s a superficial bore when people take strikingly deviant positions on a subject for the obvious purpose of being controversial, suggesting some intellectual flare, and drawing attention. That is not my impression of Philip Ball in Prospect, in his The Hawking Delusion. And it is, on the other hand, always a refreshment to read someone [...]

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The Truth About Cuba in 928 Words

September 17, 2010

I am reproducing below yesterday’s complete post about Cuba by Jeffrey Goldberg, who has been posting excerpts of his recent interview with Fidel Castro. It is the essential statement on Cuba. No additional detail or further personal anecdote would enhance the already perfect balance of its vision. There is no better example than Cuba of [...]

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Ship of Fools 1

September 16, 2010

One of the questions of the Normblog profile, of which I was the subject a little while back is What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? I responded like a blogger. The excesses of the international Left that are in part responsive to the [...]

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Change Has Come

September 15, 2010

The projected two days became two and a half, but change is no longer coming to the sad red earth – it’s come. His Holy Blogmaster tolerated all of my definite confusion and vague certainty in conception and design, and my several “Hey, I’ve got another great idea”s when it seemed the end was in [...]

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Eating Poetry (XXII) – my cold mad feary father

September 11, 2010

The conclusion of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as Anna Livia Plurabelle, the lady of the river, returns in her flow to the sea… I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad [...]

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Myths and Ironies

September 10, 2010

Time magazine, as a recent commenter at its website recently put forth, is quickly becoming the National Enquirer (Or would it be the Star? Knowledgeable readers please advise.) of purportedly legitimate news organizationS. This week on Time we had the cheap, inflammatory cover, and cover story, “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.” Two weeks earlier [...]

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Change Is Coming

September 10, 2010

to the sad red earth. Next week, the blog will be undergoing a significant upgrade, rendering the site more muted in its redness and vast in its earthiness, and producing no effect whatsoever on its sadness. It will also have more bells and whistles, because blogger, musical in his tastes if not in his talents, [...]

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History Forgotten, Remembered

September 9, 2010

We forget a lot. It is natural. It is also, at times, convenient. Here is a fascinating and inspiring bit of history, on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, of how Jews in Palestine, in wishing to practice their religion, were treated by the occupying British because of the Arab intolerance of Jews. In a [...]

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Storylines

September 8, 2010

Maureen Doallas, the Columbus, Magellan, and Vasco da Gama of bloggers, always discovering new worlds in this one while navigating the idea-swept oceans of the Web, leads us to another: Debut of Australian Indigenous Art Website A new Website showcasing Indigenous artists from urban Australia has debuted: Storylines. A joint effort by The University of [...]

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James Joyce – 16 April: Portait of the Artist as a Young Man

September 8, 2010

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Ancestors and Descendants: Ancient Southwestern America at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

September 8, 2010

If you are in, or in reach of, New Orleans this fall and share this blog’s interest in Native America, be sure to catch this exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art. A little known American Indian archive is currently on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) until October 24, 2010.  [...]

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Jazz Is: 10 – Throw It Away

September 8, 2010

We lost Abbey Lincoln a few weeks ago. Pagamaestro has put together this lovely photo collage in memoriam, and this song is so appropriate to sending her off. The musical arrangement and performance are so fine and Lincoln’s vocal just stunning. Lincoln imbues her very wise lyric with experience and passion,and maybe a bit of [...]

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Counter Thinking in the Israeli Palestinian Conflict

September 7, 2010

In the contemporary field of education, few concepts are more heavily promoted than that of what is called critical thinking. Very simply, thinking that analyzes itself, that habitually questions suppositions and established intellectual foundations –  the warrants on which we base our claims about the world – is critical thinking. Revisionist histories arise from critical [...]

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All Israel, All the Time

September 7, 2010

Sometimes it can seem that way. All from The Guardian. First, Iran‘s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, today launched an angry attack on “doomed” US-brokered Middle East peace talks and urged the Palestinians to continue armed resistance to Israel. Ahmadinejad used the annual al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day rally in Tehran to scorn the Obama administration’s efforts in launching [...]

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eight cuts on the sad red earth

September 6, 2010

The other day I offered the happy report that the sad red earth has been short listed for the Christoper Al-Aswad Prize. Today, Dan Holloway’s eight cuts, administrator of the prize, is highlighting the sad red earth on the eight cuts blog, part of a month long introduction of the finalists before the announcement of [...]

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How We Lived on It (24) – Russia in Color, a Century Ago

September 4, 2010

I wrote yesterday of being called home from Budapest, on the way to visit the shtetl in which my father was born, because of my father’s illness, from which he soon died. Two months later, in October 2005, Julia and I completed that journey to Orinin, in the historic Podolia region of Ukraine, the Jewish [...]

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The Hidden World of Girls – Brave Heart Women’s Society

September 4, 2010

From The Hidden World of Girls website: A NEW KITCHEN SISTERS RADIO SERIES ON NPR THE KITCHEN SISTERS are launching a new NPR multimedia series exploring the hidden world of girls. Stories of coming of age, rituals and rites of passage, secret identities—of women who crossed a line, blazed a trail, changed the tide. This [...]

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Go to the Theater this Sunday

September 3, 2010

Last Sunday on the sad red earth saw the thirteenth and concluding installment of the film noir Double Down. (You can catch up with DD here. Man murders his rich identical twin, assumes the twin’s identity, and pursues the same woman, a detective, as a lover – what’s not to like?) Beginning this weekend, the [...]

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In Defense of the PC

September 3, 2010

Turns out it wasn’t the PC or some software conflict, or even the modem as we thought after five hours of work yesterday, but defective cable and connections. Mac schmac. I’m computing, baby! Share Tweet Subscribe to comments on this post Email

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The Closing of the Conservative Mind

September 3, 2010

Mix one incompetent president and two ill-considered, poorly planned and waged wars together with rapacious economic policy and deficit spending, add institutional decline and structural budgetary problems, spice with dilemmas that require long-term thinking in a society shaped toward short-term demand, top with with ugly, ignorant, demagogic cultural warfare opposed by ideological platitudes, and serve [...]

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