February 28, 2007

• 

  Californians
   
   
  So as not to be outdone by all the
  redneck,
   hillbilly, and Texan jokes,
   somebody had to come up
  with this, you know you’re
   from
  California if:
   
   1. Your coworker has 8 body piercings and none are
   visible.
   
   2. You make over $300,000 and still can’t afford a
   house.
   
   3. You take a bus and are shocked at two people
   carrying on a
   conversation in English.
   
  4. Your child’s
  3rd-grade teacher has purple hair, a
   nose ring, and is
   named
  Flower.
   
   5. You can’t remember . . is pot illegal?
   
   6. You’ve been to a baby shower that has two mothers
   and a
  sperm donor.
   
   7. You have a very strong opinion about where
  your
   coffee beans are
   grown, and you can taste the difference
  between
   Sumatran and Ethiopian.
   
   8. You can’t remember .
  . . is pot illegal?
   
   9. A really great parking space can totally
  move you
   to tears.
   
   10. Gas costs $1.00 per gallon more
  than anywhere
   else in the
  U.S.
   
   11.
  Unlike back home, the guy at 8:30
  am at
   Starbucks
  wearing a baseball
   cap and sunglasses who looks like George
  Clooney
   really IS George
   Clooney.
   
   12. Your car
  insurance costs as much as your house
   payment.
   
   13. You
  can’t remember . . .is pot illegal?
   
   14. It’s barely sprinkling
  rain and there’s a report
   on every news
   station: “STORM
  WATCH.”
   
   15. You pass an elementary school playground and
  the
   children are all
   busy with their cells or pagers.
   
   16. It’s barely sprinkling rain outside, so you
   leave for work
  an hour
   early to avoid all the weather-related accidents.
   
   17. HEY!!!! Is pot illegal????
   
   18 Both you AND your
  dog have therapists, psychics,
   personal trainers
   and cosmetic
  surgeons.
   
   19. The Terminator is your governor.
   
   20. If you drive illegally, they take your driver’s
   license. If
  you’re
   here illegally, they want to give you one. 

  

  Nothing needs to be fixed

  “Tolerance does not . . . do anything, embrace anyone,
  champion any issue. It wipes the notes off the score of life and replaces them
  with one long bar of rest. It does not attack error, it does not champion truth,
  it does not hate evil, it does not love good.”

  – Walter Farrell

  As we understand it, the spiritual journey is not about
  becoming perfect. Its about acceptance, releasing judgment, and embracing
  everything in wholeness.

  This is a great challenge for our personality. Weve grown
  up comparing ourselves to others, always judging how were better and worse than
  those around us. And many of us are very good at finding fault with ourselves.

  If we release judgment, then nothing needs to be fixed —
  including you. Explore inviting your soul to help you accept all that is and
  experience a whole new way of living.

  “Wherever you are is always the right place. There is never a
  need to fix anything, to hitch up the bootstraps of the soul and start at some
  higher place. Start right where you are.”

  – Julia Cameron

  

  

  Catch my drift?  I am thinking Spring; February is one of the worst months
  here in the snow world.  We have some sun today, only to glare off of the 9″ of newer snow
  we have, with more expected to come!  I am envisioning purple and pink and blue and yellow-
  every color flower and tree in the spectrum-it makes me happy.

  Now, onto some music!

  Rise
  Anoushka Shankar
  
  2005

  Daughter of famed Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar, Anoushka
  Shankar is totally her own creature, as adept on the synthesizer as she is on
  her father’s instrument. For her third album, the Grammy-nominated Rise,
  the London-born, California-raised Shankar freely explores a vast area of
  sounds, incorporating Indian electronica styles as well as the more meditational
  fusions of artists such as Deva Premal. Shankar moves freely from style to
  style, staying true to the mystical spirit that is at the core of Eastern
  devotional music with a Western jazz sensibility (she is, after all, the
  half-sister of Norah Jones).

  What’s astonishing is the free interplay of
  musicians and ideas for an album coming from the daughter of one of the
  brightest lights in Indian music of the past century. Check the furious
  bol vocals from tabla players Bikram Gosh and Tanmoy Bose on “Red Sun,”
  for example. The bol vocal is when the drummer vocalizes sounds to
  duplicate the furious tempo of his drum work; here it is times two, as each
  drummer lets loose with furious bol vocals over pounding rhythms and
  crashing cymbals, while Shankar hangs back. In a way, this album recalls jazz
  albums where the big name on the cover is the ringleader, the one who chooses
  who does what on what track, then lets everyone cut loose on their own,
  supervising and playing their part, but conceding to a sense of group dynamics
  over the chance to show off. When one thinks of the countless global chill-out
  tracks credited to male artists that feature guest female vocals, it’s lovely to
  hear Shankar, a woman, using ! almost all male vocalists!

  For all
  that though, the tracks that really come alive and give Shankar the chance to
  shine are the instrumentals, as on “Voice of the Moon,” wherein a lyrical first
  half of sitar and gentle tablas gives way to a rousing thunderous charge, with
  strings, drums, and sitar going into classic raga formation. For the awesome
  “Naked,” Shankar boldly stretches out on the sitar, slowing things down with
  just the treated sounds of her instrument, dreamy, languid, like a coil of
  perfumed incense smoke in the light of an electric dawn coming through red
  velvet curtains. With pianos and cellos in the mix, it’s clear Shankar is freely
  incorporating not just the mystic rigors of her father’s legacy but whatever and
  wherever the mood takes her. From a true artist we should expect no less.
  

  	Listen to all sound clips from this CD
  “Naked” “Red Sun” “Voice of the Moon”

  Buy this CD

  I love you!!

  

  • 12:36 pm
  • 27 Comments