bodhi tree swaying

I haven’t been blogging here recently. I’m just too busy with a variety of projects. I guess I should take some time out to mention some of them here.

In the meantime, here’s a lovely thing. Click on the squares to make music. I’ve no idea where this is from. I copied it from a Tumblr blog.

From time to time I like to share music, especially when it’s a combination of tracks that just happens to have been thrown together by my iPhone while driving. I hope you enjoy these.

This is the music my iPhone randomly selected for me while I was driving to Portsmouth and back the other day. It’s heavy on Over the Rhine and Amy Winehouse, but I can’t get enough of either of them anyway. It’s a very eclectic mix!

Here’s the track listing:

Dave Smith And The Country Rebels – White Lines
St. Germain – So Flute
Over The Rhine – Ohio
Alison Krauss – Down To The River To Pray
Amy Winehouse – He Can Only Hold Her
Lucinda Williams – Essence
This Mortal Coil – Another Day
Cocteau Twins – Pandora
Portishead – Nobody Loves Me
Over The Rhine – Nobody Number One
Coldplay – Shiver
Amy Winehouse – Intro/Stronger Than Me

PT Sullivan, a photographer I know from New Hampshire Media Maker meet-ups sent me a link to this video he worked on. It’s another “Empire State of Mind” mashup, but much, much better than the famous “Granite State of Mind” video.

I cried watching this. Partly it was sheer joy and partly it was just having the experience of dad-hood recognized.

Enjoy:

I liked what my iPhone randomly put together last night as I was driving home from teaching a meditation class.

8track plays them in random order, but here are the tracks.

Just Another High – Roxy Music
Just Friends – Amy Winehouse
Kakn – Gigi… See More
Kiss The Sky – Shawn Lee & The Ping Pong Orchestra
Knowing – Lucinda Williams
Lady Stardust – David Bowie
The Lake – Antony And The Johnsons
Land Of… – St. Germain
Last Nite – The Strokes
Last Walk Around Mirror Lake – Boom Bip
Lazy Calm – Cocteau Twins
le ciel dans une chambre – Carla Bruni

French pop music rightly has a reputation for being awful, but here’s some music in French that’s pretty good. Most of the artists aren’t French. Axelle Red is Belgian. Carli Bruni is Italian. Isabelle Boulay and Julie Dorion are Canadian. Bat For Lashes is a British band with a Pakistani singer. That leaves KYO, who are that rare thing — a French band that doesn’t totaly suck, Florent Pagny, who is one of those French singers who can’t decide whether he’s singing pop music or opera, and Francis Cabrel who is (in my humble opinion) absolutely brilliant.

Enjoy!

Last night I searched in iTunes for REM’s “Low” and up came a whole bunch of tracks with the characters “low” in the title. And I looked at the list of songs and thought it was a damn fine collection. I whittled out a couple that weren’t quite as awesome and I’d like, and here is the hand-carved, jewel-studded, lovingly polished essence.

I selected The Strokes’ “Is This It,” let iTunes’ Genius build a playlist of 25 tracks, picked my favorites, and ended up with this playlist. So it’s kind of half random, with a smidgen of discrimination, but of course it’s all based on stuff that’s on my computer, and since every song is hand-tooled it’s ultimately a very personal thing at root. Isn’t music always?

(Oops. Band of Horses was in my last mix too. Ah well, “Funeral” is a nice song).

Mostly mellow, which is what I like these days. We have (not necessarily in this order)

• Lonely Ghosts x O+S
• Killbot 2000 x Murder by Death
• Cherry-Coloured Funk x Cocteau Twins
• This Is How It Goes x Aimee Mann
• The Funeral x Band Of Horses
• Auf Achse x Franz Ferdinand
• Please Don’t Go x Barcelona
• The Move x Boom Bip

It’s been way too long since I posted a song list using 8tracks, but then I discovered that I can just drag an iTunes playlist to the 8tracks uploader icon and they’ll be uploaded automatically. And iTunes’ Genius playlists automate the selection of the music. This one was based on a Lucinda Williams track called “Knowing.”

In a letter to August Röckel on January 25, 1854, Richard Wagner wrote in regard to The Ring: “We must learn to die, and to die in the fullest sense of the word. The fear of the end is the source of all lovelessness…”

And I wrote a commentary on that quote on Wildmind.

I’ve tried listening to The Ring, but have never found it very satisfying. In theory, however, I find all the symbolism fascinating. I guess what I want is for Peter Jackson, that wonderful interpreter of the other famous Ring cycle, to turn it into a really compelling movie.

You really should check out this stunning slideshow from the BBC, highlighting photographs on the theme of “water.” Some are pure aestheticism

while others are more consciously addressing environmental and social issues such as human-induced drought in China.

And the music is very haunting.

From the article:

A major new global prize celebrating the work of both professional and amateur photographers has been awarded in Paris.

The Prix Pictet is the first competition of its type to focus on the global issue of ‘sustainability’ – and, this year in particular, on water.

The winner of 100,000 Swiss francs (£53,000) is the Canadian photographer Benoit Aquin.

Here – the head of the Prix Pictet jury, Francis Hodgson, shows off Aquin’s work and images from some of the 17 other photographers who made the shortlist.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Audio Slideshow: Photos compete for the Prix Pictet

A few days back I got around to playing on 8track.com, which is a site where you can upload a playlist of music and have it available for others to listen to.

My first attempt was all mellow stuff. We often have a nighttime ritual for Maia where we play a slideshow for her on my laptop with some mellow music in the background. This includes a lot of the music I play for her so she can wind down.

I’ll post something more raucous later on. Feel free to leave a comment about the music.