May 31, 2012

Dhafer Youssef (oud) with Tigran Hamasyan (piano), Chris Jennings (double bass) and the uncanny Mark Guiliana (drums) playing Les Ombres Orientales, one of the many excellent tracks of Dhafer’s last album to date, Abu Nawas Rhapsody.

You can listen to the album version on Grooveshark.

Dhafer Youssef is one my two favorite oud players, the other being his tunisian compatriot Anouar Brahem.

Back in 2007, speaking about Byzance, another fantastic track on which Dhafer sides with guitarist Nguyên Lê and trumpeter Paolo Fresu I wrote: Featuring two of my favorite artists, Guitar player Nguyên Lê and Oud player Dhafer Youssef, it has something very special that I can’t define clearly in words, that “transcends” Music and gives me a ruch of amazing and very enjoyable emotions with its oriental, almost hypnotic, tone.

Enough words. I will let the Music speaks for itself.

May 28, 2012
"So in Europe the depressed economy has caused fiscal crises, in which private investors are no longer willing to lend to a number of countries. And the response to these fiscal crises–frantic, savage attempts to slash spending–has pushed unemployment all around Europe’s periphery to Great Depression levels, and seems at the time of writing to be pushing Europe back into outright recession."

Krugman, Paul. End This Depression Now! Page 18. W.W. Norton & Company.

May 27, 2012
"[…] If this is a terrible time to be young in America, with its 17 percent unemployment rate among those under twenty-five, it’s a nightmare in Italy, where the youth unemployment rate is 28 percent, in Ireland, where it’s 30 percent, and in Spain, where it’s 43 percent."

Krugman, Paul. End This Depression Now! Page 18. W.W. Norton & Company.

May 26, 2012
Fitness can have very positive effects on your health and on your body as this picture demonstrates. It was taken of a man before and after 1 day of bodybuilding. This is science. Absolute guarantee. No scam. No photoshopping. We might have leveraged a bit of time travel to have this man, before and after exercising on the same picture :-)

Well, OK, bodybuilding can make you a bit taller and curl your hair. And if you wonder why the skin is darker, wonder no more! Look at the sun surrounding the subject!

Fitness can have very positive effects on your health and on your body as this picture demonstrates. It was taken of a man before and after 1 day of bodybuilding. This is science. Absolute guarantee. No scam. No photoshopping. We might have leveraged a bit of time travel to have this man, before and after exercising on the same picture :-)

Well, OK, bodybuilding can make you a bit taller and curl your hair. And if you wonder why the skin is darker, wonder no more! Look at the sun surrounding the subject!

"Educating the young is crucial for the twenty-first century–so say all the politicians and pundits. Yet the ongoing slump, by creating a fiscal crisis for state and local governments, has led to the laying off of some 300,000 schoolteachers."

Krugman, Paul. End This Depression Now! Page 16. W.W. Norton & Company.

May 25, 2012
"

Amid all the excuses you hear for not taking action to end this depression, one refrain is repeated constantly by apologists for inaction: we need, they say, to focus on the long run, not the short run.

This is wrong on multiple levels, as we’ll see later in this book. Among other things, it involves an intellectual abdication, a refusal to accept responsibility for understating the current depression; it’s tempting and easy to wave all this unpleasantness away and talk airily about the long run, but that’s taking the lazy, cowardly way out. John Maynard Keynes was making exactly this point when he wrote one of his most famous passages: “This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the sea is flat again.”

Focusing only on the long run means ignoring the vast suffering the current depression is inflicting, the lives it is ruining irreparably as you read this. But that’s not all. Our short-run problems–if you can call a slump now in its fifth year “short-run”–are hurting our long-run prospects too, through multiple channels.

"

Krugman, Paul. End This Depression Now! Page 15. W.W. Norton & Company.

May 24, 2012

Pharoah Sanders is among my favorite, if not sacred, jazz artists. Ornette Coleman described him as probably the best tenor (sax) player in the world. Our Roots (Began in Africa) is the first track of Message from Home, a record released on Verve Records in 1996 as a CD and a LP (a French pressing, merci beaucoup!).

If you give all due care and respect to this amazing track, you’ll certainly get drawn to the superb percussions played by no less than Hamid Drake.

This track ended the May 22, 2012 JazzaFIP session, a top-notch jazz radio program which is available as a podcast.

Our roots began in Africa. Our roots began in Africa. Our roots…

"One more thing: there has been a sharp increase in the number of Americans aged between twenty-four and thirty-four living with their parents. This doesn’t represent a sudden rush of filial devotion; it represents a radical reduction of opportunities to leave the nest."

Krugman, Paul. End This Depression Now! Page 11. W.W. Norton & Company.

May 23, 2012

Jazz great Yusef Lateef playing Like It Is. This is the second track of The Blue Yusef Lateef issued on Atlantic Records in 1968. The strings quartet accompanying Mr. Lateef on this awesome piece of Music is conducted by William Fischer.

jazz. What else?

"Does being unemployed for a long time really erode work skills, and make you a poor hire? Does the fact that you were one of the long-term unemployed indicate that you were a loser in the first place? Maybe not, but many employers think it does, and for the worker that may be all that matters. Lose a job in this economy, and it’s very hard to find another; stay unemployed for long enough, and you will be considered unemployable."

Krugman, Paul. End This Depression Now! Page 10. W.W. Norton & Company.