Your stature's one I want to memorize–
OK…I'm in love with both of these people.
A fascinating lecture from the former Secretary of Labor…before The Fall From Grace. This is, admittedly, long. But well worth the time.
Apparently a security camera caught security guards confronting a gay couple after they kissed on the LDS plaza in Salt Lake City, Utah, on July 9, 2009. YouTube processed this file at double speed and shows a group of Mormon goons in suits arguing with Matt Aune and Derek Jones before handcuffing them. Charges against Aune and Jones have since been dropped.
Didgeridoo…
a danceable world journey
Dreamtime,
Etherean Music, Inc. 2000
Reviewed by Bo Young
I admit to a fascination with “World Music.” I still think of myself as a drummer, even though I haven’t sat in a drummer’s circle or played around a sanctuary bonfire with my djembe in a decade. And to this day, if Ladysmith Black Mambazo is playing anywhere, I’m there. Alas, occasionally this music can be more anthropological than danceable.
So it was particularly “attention grabbing” when I was listening to the inimitable Steve Post on WNYC-FM one Sunday morning and he played a didgeridoo piece. There is, of course, something viscerally primal about the deep buzz of the Down Under wind instrument; something between a nature buzz and the chanting of Buddhist monks. The sound is at once primitive, but also other-worldly, of some very earthy place and of deep space and time, too.
The music Post was playing is from a modern group called Dreamtime. Dreamtime has a collection of music available on iTunes or Amazon that I am able to locate: Didgeridoo (Etherean Music, Inc. 2000).
The music combines traditional didgeridoo playing (I’m sure I hear the familiar ringing baritone of a djembe in there) with modern instrumentation and contemporary electronic, as well as interviews and additional liner note information about Australia's aborigines along with indigenous chants.
And while the cut Cave Dance is almost a field recording in its earthy simplicity — just the whir of the didgeridoo and homemade rhythms — the aptly titled Tribal Techno matches the lead instrument to a mixture of organic and electronic percussion. This kind of cultural and musical blending isn't new, and Didgeridoo doesn't take the concept in any direction that so-called World Music hasn't gone before. But it's a nice package, very listenable and earnest in its intention to explore the aboriginal' culture and music. Between tracks of pulsating didgeridoo rhythms and percussion, voices of tribal elders and sounds of wildlife from Australia's Outback, Dreamtime’s Didgeridoo combines to form a world music journey you can move to.
Bo Young is White Crane’s publisher. He lives in New York City.
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Our friend, White Crane contributor, and author of Stonewall: The Riot That Sparked The Gay Revolution, David Carter sends this…
Dear Friends, The first rough cut of the full-length PBS film on the Stonewall Riots — now one and a half hours long
— is close to being assembled and we are looking for era maps of Greenwich Village to use in the film.
I will make inquiries at the usual and obvious archives and collections, but we all know that one can't assume that one will find the best such map in any one collection … and that any friend who either lived in New York at the time or has moved here since and who loves the Village might have a much better map than even New York's most famous archives might own: so if any of you happen to own a map that was made in the late 1960s or early 1970s of Greenwich Village, especially one that is detailed or features the area around the Stonewall Inn, and you would be happy to share it with the world in an American Experience documentary … please let me know. The filmmakers are on deadline for submission of the rough cut to a film festival and need a PDF of such a map ASAP … they'd like to receive the PDF this coming week if possible.
If you have a map that they can use and can help, please contact David at History69@aol.com or the editors at White Crane at editors@gaywisdom.org
With all the resources at our disposal, it would be a great waste for us not to send them to the State of Maine to defeat an attempt to repeal the marriage equality legislation this November.
The most important thing to do is to donate money and to donate it now. Don't wait until the last minute to give. Give it now. Consider this: The election in Maine is three months away. What if 100,000 of us make a commitment to give $10 a month for those three months? That would give them three million dollars by election day which is a lot of money in Maine!
If, somehow, you could afford $20 a month ($5 a week!) it would mean six million dollars. That's one less latte a week. That's less than one tank of gas over the next three months! How exciting it would be if the blogger community, straight-allied and LGBT, mount a campaign to "Remember Maine" and attempt to reach that goal. Don't wait to be invited to the ball, donate now without being asked.
Thanks to our friend Robert Croonquist:
For the past month or so, the legislators in New York State have been behaving, well, to say rather badly would be to put it mildly. But there are some heroes in the state capital. And Senator Tom Duane is one of them. He may not have the oratory skills of our president. But his passion is clear: