Rainy Day Diary

From trance-dance rhythms to prayerful stillness, Unspoken dissolves boundaries of musical genre, melding indigenous chants and rhythms with visionary compositions that quiet the mind and set the body dancing. Beginning with Sieber’s pulsing, ambient cello and vocals in ‘Opening’, a current of multi-layered sound carries the listener seamlessly from the contemplative depths of ‘Benediction’, through the rushing torrent of percussion, flute, bass, vocals and cello in ‘The River Between’ to Ulali’s primal cries at the close of ‘Night Song’. In the center of the journey, Benjy Wertheimer’s esraj and Jami’s electric cello weave an lush interior world that gives birth to the irresistible grooves of the two worldbeat dance tracks, ‘Broken Open’ and ‘Unspoken,’ which fuse Native American chanting with layers upon layers of exotic instrumentation. The CD closes with the heart-opening track, ‘Returning,’ set in a quartet of cellos with guitars, percussion and organ.

My words: simply evocatively gorgeous… I especially like the second one - ‘Benediction.’ It is entitled ‘Unspoken’ yet it says so much, with no words…. 

Knowing nothing of the Tsarnaevs’ motives, and little about Chechens, the American media tore into Wikipedia and came back with stereotypes. The Tsarnaevs were stripped of their 21st century American life and became symbols of a distant land, forever frozen in time. Journalist Eliza Shapiro proclaimed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “named after a brutal warlord”, despite the fact that Tamerlan, or Timur, is an ordinary first name in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her claim is equivalent to saying a child named Nicholas must be named in honour of ruthless Russian tsar Nicholas I - an irony apparently lost on New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who made a similar denouncement on Twitter (to his credit, Kristof quickly retracted the comment).

Other journalists found literary allusions, or rather, illusions. “They were playing the nihilists Arkady and Bazarov in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons ,” explained scholar Juan Cole, citing an 1862 Russian novel to explain the motives of a criminal whose Twitter account was full of American rap lyrics. One does not recall such use of literary devices to ascertain the motives of less exotic perpetrators, but who knows? Perhaps some ambitious analyst is plumbing the works of Faulkner to shed light on that Mississippi Elvis impersonator who tried to send ricin to Obama.

—The wrong kind of Caucasian - Opinion - Al Jazeera English (via talkingknots)

Ok, this fool apparently did not read Turgenev, Bazarov is a scientist that is obsessed with bettering human kind by dedicating his life to medical research, he is a nihilist in the sense that he is not religious and rejects the old society… (via determinatenegation)

Huh, not totally sure what is being implied here but thought provoking nonetheless.

(via determinatenegation)

A short film about optical illusions. It’s also a film about experience and memory and how humans come to beliefs.

Illusions (part one)

The first of eight. Written and Directed by Samm Hodges Produced by Phinehas Hodges Director of Photography: Brad Knull Animation by Samm Hodges and Lenny…