The Guzheng is a Chinese zither traditionally played by women. Originally it was used for vocal accompaniment, but it’s now often played solo. This piece is a traditional solo piece. Listen for the bluesiness of it, the bent notes and the pentatonic scale, which is shared between Chinese music and blues. Also, the guzheng player is using another technique commonly found in the blues: plucking two strings on the same note together and then flattening one to give a kind of mournful wail. For those of you with even more sensitive attention, you will also notice that the chord progression …
Thoreau’s Journal has become a daily must-read. Here he is on his failure to liberate friends in the woods: “How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden. I take my neighbor, an intellectual man, out into the woods and invite him to take a new and absolute view of things, to empty clean out his thoughts all institutions of men and start again; but he can�t do it, he sticks to his traditions and his crochets. He thinks that governments, colleges, newspapers, etc., …
From my recent collection of linkage: Just one story of what happens when Wal-Mart comes to town. Ireland’s History in Maps Joe Frank’s website and audio archive courtesy of the soon-to-be-blogging Raffi Aftandelian Ten Laws for the 21st century from Forbes, including Gilder’s Law: “The best business models, he said, waste the era’s cheapest resources in order to conserve the era’s most expensive resources.” In other words, use bandwidth to conserve people. Thanks to Rob (and others) the best article on change and fear I’ve read in years. Gallery of magnetism Sonny Rollins talks about his three year sabbatical in …
More follow ups keep coming in from the conference. Lyle Angus, the Health Director at Kitkatla sent me this picture of one of the community’s youths standing in front of the sunset Sunday night, after they returned to the community from Prince Rupert. Kitkatla is about 65 kilometres from Rupert. Lyle told me on the phone today that the community is planning a big celebration for the youth, to thank them for being such good ambassadors at the Inter Nation Forum and for showing the way to the policy makers and leaders, that the issue of youth suicide must transcend …
One of the communities that was involved in the Inter Nation youth forum last week was Gitga�at, more commonly known as Hartley Bay. The health director there, David Benton, is spearheading a number of small changes on big leverage points in that community. One of the real successes that Hartley Bay has experienced is with a program called Brighter Smiles that brings student doctors and dentists from the University of British Columbia to the community every month to learn about the culture and to provide some acute medical care. The program started with a desire to lessen the amount of …