Check out Buck's post about CSN in Tucson

Crosby Stills and Nash in Concert

What a great experience to see CSN live after loving their music for so many years. Clickon the link above.

80 Million Monet

LONDON — A water lily painting by Claude Monet sold for more than $80 million Tuesday, breaking the auction record for the French impressionist artist, Christie's said.

"Le bassin aux nympheas," or "Water Lily Pond," which sold for $80,451,178, was part of a four-work collection of water lily paintings
that Monet put up for sale during his lifetime.

The four large-scale paintings of Monet's water lily garden were signed and dated by the artist in 1919. One of the other paintings is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, while another was sold at auction in 1992 for $12.1 million and is in a private collection. The final painting in the series was cut into two before World War II.

Shamanic Connections

Best Resources invites you to join Tom and Bobbi Best along with Peruvian mystic and shaman, Don Americo Yabar, in an exploration of the timeless world of Andean shamanism.

These adventures in consciousness with Don Americo are the continuation of a crucial exploration of the human spirit initiated by the elders of every tribe of humanity before the dawn of civilization. The legacy of this exploration is your inheritance from the ancestors. Doing 'The Work' with Tom and Americo offers you the means to mend the fabric of your life by reconnecting the luminous filament of your spirit with the eternal tapestry of the Great Mystery.

These mystic experiences are an immersion into the ancient wisdom that transcendence, mystic states and God are not the destinations of some grand journey of seeking. They are the vibrant point of being from which you begin the projection of the Spirit.

This is a picture of me with some Mollomarka Indian children playing which hand is the candy in. Notice the small band of musicians in th background. Picture taken at Salka Wasi*, Americo's ancestral home.

*the House of Undomesticated Energy

More at Salka Wind Home Page

Abraham Quotes

"By choosing better-feeling thoughts and by speaking more of what you do want and less of what you do not want, you will gently tune yourself to the vibrational frequency of your Broader Perspective. To see your world through the eyes of Source is truly the most spectacular view of life, for from that vibrational vantage point, you are in alignment with—and therefore in the process of attracting—only what you would consider to be the very best of your world."

Abraham's site.

What is Real, Really?

From an interesting article: Time Storms in the Matrix
Stephen Wagner at About.com has an article featuring a book by Jenny Randles titled Time Storms: Amazing Evidence for Time Warps, Space Rifts, and Time Travel. Here's one of the fascinating stories:

Putre, Chile, 1977 - At 3:50 a.m. on April 24, during army training exercises, a guard saw two fuzzy violet lights descending from the mountain and heading their way. At 4:15 a.m., Corporal Armando Valdez set out into the dark to investigate them. He returned 15 minutes later, but from the opposite direction in which he set out. He seemed to be in a kind of trance, muttering, "You do not know who we are or where we come from." Inexplicably, the corporal had several days growth of beard, and his watch had stopped at 4:15 - but showed a date of April 30!

Read more at the links above.

Free Opera in Brooklyn

A free concert is scheduled for tonight at Prospect Park starring opera's real life couple Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu.

From the article:

To accommodate what the Met officials said they hoped would be a crowd of 150,000, the concert has been planned for the Long Meadow in Prospect Park, which has twice the capacity of the Great Lawn in Central Park.

But the decision also means that for the first summer since the house’s outdoor concerts started, in 1967, the Met will not be heard in Central Park. That will probably not please the faithful who arrived with their blankets at 7 a.m. in front of the stage on the Great Lawn year after year. Nor will residents of the Bronx, Queens or Staten Island have a chance to hear the Met on their home turf.

Mr. Gelb said putting the concert in Prospect Park placed it closer to the city’s geographical center and sent a less elitist message than a lone concert in Manhattan would have. “It seemed like the more democratic choice to place it in Prospect Park,” Mr. Gelb said.

Read the article here. You can see videos at the New York Times' site of these two great performers also.

What? Eat waste and excrete petrol!!

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'

"What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made."

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.mosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

Read all at link above.

Musical Lineage

In piano studies here's my lineage: I, (born 1956) studied with John Suter, (born 1910). John Suter studied with Carl Hakes. Carl Hakes studied with Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler(born 1863). Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler studied with Theodor Leschetizky(born 1830). Teodor Leszetycki, (his true Polish name), studied with Carl Czerny, (born1791).

Czerny was born in Vienna to a family of Bohemian origins. He was taught piano by his father before taking lessons from Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Antonio Salieri, and Ludwig van Beethoven. He was a child prodigy, making his first appearance in public in 1800 playing a Mozart piano concerto. Later, he gave the Vienna premiere of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5 "Emperor" in 1812.

Hummel, born 1778, was taught and housed by Mozart, (born 1756) for two years free of charge and made his first concert appearance at the age of nine, at one of Mozart's concerts. Hummel's father then led him on a European tour, arriving in London, where he received instruction from Muzio Clementi and stayed for four years before returning to Vienna. In 1791, Joseph Haydn, who was in London at the same time as young Hummel, composed a sonata in A flat for Hummel, who played its premiere in the Hanover Square Rooms in Haydn's presence. When Hummel finished, Haydn reportedly thanked the young man and gave him a guinea.

Salieri was born the year Johann Sebastian Bach died, 1750. He was a teacher to many famous composers, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Carl Czerny, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Franz Liszt, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Ignaz Moscheles, Franz Schubert, and Franz Xaver Süssmayr. He also taught Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's younger son, Franz Xaver, some years after the death of Franz's illustrious father.

Beethoven was born in 1770. It is unclear as to when his birthdate was, but the family celebrated it on the 16th of December. In 1792, Beethoven moved to Vienna, where he studied for a time with Joseph Haydn: his hopes of studying with Mozart had been shattered by Mozart's death the previous year. Beethoven received additional instruction from Johann Georg Albrechtsberger (Vienna's pre-eminent counterpoint instructor) and Antonio Salieri. By 1793, Beethoven established a reputation in Vienna as a piano virtuoso.

So six "generations" from Beethoven seven from Mozart!!! A heritage that spans two hundred years from 1756 to 1956, although built on the music and the musicians prior to the 18th century of course.

Quotes

"The greater danger for most of us is not that
our aim is too high and we miss it,

but that it is too low

and we reach it."

Michelangelo

The Decline of the Art of Journalism

Journalism or the Press is considered the Fourth Estate. In the United States it can be seen as the fourth branch of government. Edmund Burke said after the French Revolution, looking up at the Press Gallery of the House of Commons, said, 'Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.'"

Although not so directly tied to music the effects of this art form non-the less effect us all. Perhaps the relationship is similar to pop music, music made for the money directed at the unknowing, the uneducated, compared to music with noble intent and significance. For instance rock music becoming a parody of its former self. IMHO

Read this: When a Little Dissent is too Much

"Barry Nolan's opinion of Bill O'Reilly spun him right out of his job," the ABC website reported late last month. "The fed-up TV newsman lost his anchor seat after protesting a decision by a New England media association to bestow its top journalism award on the Fox News Anchor.

The Comcast management thought that Nolan’s use of the First Amendment was unbecoming of an anchor.

Barry Nolan’s response: "I'm interested in telling everyone in the country to stand up and say something is wrong when something is wrong. We've been through an awful dark time in our history where there are a lot of people telling you to sit down and shut up. From Dick Cheney to Bill O'Reilly, I'm done with bullies."

Be true to your art, your ideals and to truth. Humanity needs it.

Rare but Real: People Who Feel, Taste and Hear Color

From an interesting article I found today:

Long dismissed as a product of overactive imaginations or a sign of mental illness, synesthesia has grudgingly come to be accepted by scientists in recent years as an actual phenomenon with a real neurological basis. Some researchers now believe it may yield valuable clues to how the brain is organized and how perception works.

"The study of synesthesia [has] encouraged people to rethink historical ideas that synesthesia was abnormal and an aberration," says Amy Ione, director of the Diatrope Institute, a California-based group interested in the arts and sciences.

The cause remains a mystery, however.

My piano teacher said he could see colors when he heard music and that certain keys, like the "key of C", had a certain color.