Street Sweeper Social Club:




Mercedes Sosa



Hasta Siempre

SPAIN: NOBODY HAS TO KNOW

Nobody has to know
Girl we've fallen so in love
It was just a year ago
And you've kept it to yourself

Nobody has to know
Nobody has to know

Nobody has to know
Girl our love has grown so strong
Close the shades unplug the phone
How can our love be so wrong

Nobody has to know
Nobody has to know

Nobody has to know
Girl we've fallen so in love
It was just a year ago
And you've kept it to yourself

Nobody has to know
Nobody has to know

Time Will Break The World - The Silver Jews

The sun and the shutters and the sun shattered hair
The butler hesitates at the top of the stairs
A kitten from Great Britain sleeps behind the drapes
An old silver bowl filled with apples and grapes

It's so very cold in the mansion after sunset
The snow is blowing through the baseboard outlets
And I have no idea what drives you, mister
Tanning beds explode with rich women inside

All my poor, hungry children
All my poor, hungry children
All my poor, hungry children
Time will break the world
Time will break the world
Time will break the world

The snow falls down so beautiful and stupid
For the black silhoutte of Abraham Lincoln trees
The sky's low and grey like a Japanese table
And my horse's legs look like four brown shotguns

The icicles are dripping like the whole house is weeping
On an evil little car with gull-wing doors
And I have no idea what drives you, mister
But I've killed you in my mind so many times before

All my poor, hungry children
All my poor, hungry children
All my poor, hungry children
Time will break the world
Time will break the world
Time will break the world

The Three Acts I saw in Győr Last Weekend

Artem Chepkonakov



Omar Sosa Afreecanos Trio



Astillero

Dominic Lawson has more than a few realistic pokes at new Labour in Beware green jobs, the new sub-prime:

That remarkable prime ministerial pledge predated the recession; its motive was to demonstrate that Britain was “leading the world in the battle against climate change”. We aren’t, as a matter of fact; but under new Labour we have certainly led the world at claiming to do so. Mandelson expressed this almost satirically last week when he declared that “Britain has taken a world lead in setting ambitious targets for carbon reduction”.

As ever, new Labour confuses announcements and newspaper headlines with real action. Whenever it becomes obvious even to ministers that Britain will not meet its current carbon reduction target, they replace it with a yet tougher target, only with an extended deadline.

Listen to Uranus Bruyant:

...an overvitaminated version of a funk brass band, directly connected to James BROWN, Maceo PARKER, Georges CLINTON, an others such as DIRTY DOZEN Brass Band. The eight musicians spread an amazing groovy feeling throughout their original tracks, mixing jazz and funk, with powerful brass instruments and crazy beats.

A banjo, a tuba, a bass drum and a snare : the rhythm section turns you into dancing, you can't help it !

Two saxophones, a trumpet, a trombone : a line of blowers with various backgounds, who can put an audience on fire with their wild soli !

By all means, the new "must read" piece of lit comes from The Conqueror by Jan Kjaerstad which pulls you in from the first words and drags you immediately into another world. I read the first few pages excerpted on Amazon and when the excerpt ended, ordered the book. I can't wait to read the rest of it.



A proper analysis can be found at Three Percent. Tysend tak.

*****gotan project*****



*****Queen of Funk: Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings****
(merci, chez lubacov



*****

Hey how about another fat dollop of worthless government intrusive blundering cleverly masked in concerns for terrorism? Haven't had enough yet? Still hungry? Good, because it is now alleged that all travel plans and personal details will be traced by the Government.

In most cases the information will be expected to be provided 24 hours ahead of travel and will then be stored on a Government database for around ten years. The changes are being brought in as the Government tries to tighten border controls and increase protection against the threat of "international terrorism".

International terrorism indeed.

Like all those terrorists putting the wrong rubbish in their bins covered under the 2000 Terrorism Act?

Or all those Icelandic terrorists out there?

Could it be they are merely trying to track Satan?

The marks were similar to those in the original Devil's Footprints which have been shrouded in mystery for over 150 years when it was believed Devon was visited by the devil himself.

Legend has it that on February 8, 1855, a trail of hoof-like marks following straight lines appeared in the snow for more than 100 miles across South Devon.

Sunday Reads And Listens, etc.

“When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

somewhat fascinating study on how the crash will reshape America and some of the observations therein:

The historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has noted that in some respects, today’s crisis most closely resembles the “Long Depression,” which stretched, by one definition, from 1873 to 1896. It began as a banking crisis brought on by insolvent mortgages and complex financial instruments, and quickly spread to the real economy, leading to mass unemployment that reached 25 percent in New York.

During that crisis, rising industries like railroads, petroleum, and steel were consolidated, old ones failed, and the way was paved for a period of remarkable innovation and industrial growth. In 1870, New England mill towns like Lowell, Lawrence, Manchester, and Springfield were among the country’s most productive industrial cities, and America’s population overwhelmingly lived in the countryside. By 1900, the economic geography had been transformed from a patchwork of farm plots and small mercantile towns to a landscape increasingly dominated by giant factory cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo.

And, discussing the future, mobility and home ownership versus renting, flexibility and transience:

If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there. A recent study by Grace Wong, an economist at the Wharton School of Business, shows that, controlling for income and demographics, homeowners are no happier than renters, nor do they report lower levels of stress or higher levels of self-esteem.

And while homeownership has some social benefits—a higher level of civic engagement is one—it is costly to the economy. The economist Andrew Oswald has demonstrated that in both the United States and Europe, those places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work—if they can find it—that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.

As homeownership rates have risen, our society has become less nimble: in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans were nearly twice as likely to move in a given year as they are today. Last year fewer Americans moved, as a percentage of the population, than in any year since the Census Bureau started tracking address changes, in the late 1940s. This sort of creeping rigidity in the labor market is a bad sign for the economy, particularly in a time when businesses, industries, and regions are rising and falling quickly.

*****
Iva Bittova & Vladimir Vaclavek: "Sto let"



*****

My Top 4 Favourite Tee-Shirts From Tee-Shirt Hell:


For the Welsh?

For those who've had enough?

just so...wrong

honesty?

To where pretty much anywhere

******

More on British Scottish Drinking Habits

Maybe not. Whereas the French sip, Scotland, like the rest of Britain, gulps. A survey by Sweden’s National Institute of Public Health asked how often drinking sessions turned into binges (defined as one person drinking a whole bottle of wine or more). French men reported bingeing 9% of the time, Italians 13% and Germans 14%. For British men, 40% of drinking sessions turned into binges. Women were similarly ahead of their continental counterparts.

Bingeing is not unique to Britain: Nordic countries are almost as raucous, with Swedish men bingeing 33% of the time. But they don’t drink as much in total: annual consumption is less than six litres in Sweden. Britain’s special curse is to combine northern European drinking habits with southern European volumes.

Alma Apretada
Pablo Neruda

Hemos perdido incluso este crepúsculo. Nadie sierra nosotros esta
tarde tomados de la mano mientras que la noche azul cayó en el mundo.

He visto de mi ventana que la fiesta de la puesta del sol en la
montaña distante remata.

Un pedazo del sol se quemó a veces como una moneda en mi mano.

Le recordé con mi alma apretado en esa tristeza el míos que usted
sabe.

¿Dónde entonces estaba usted? ¿Quién estaba allí? ¿Decir qué?
¿Por qué el conjunto de amor vendrá en mí repentinamente cuando soy
triste y sentirle está ausente lejano?

El libro cayó eso cerrado siempre en el crepúsculo y mi suéter azul
rodados como un perro lastimado en mis pies.

Siempre, usted retrocede siempre con las tardes hacia el crepúsculo
que borra las estatuas.


*****

Tennessee's 'Little Houdini':

Mr. Gay's much-publicized prison-break in 2007 to reach his dying mama's side failed, but only after he led authorities on a five-state, five-day chase that ended with him being arrested driving the country singer Crystal Gayle's stolen tour bus in Florida. Now police around the flyspeck burgs of northern Tennessee are back on full alert after another audacious escape by Gay in Kennesaw, Ga., on Tuesday.

*****

Kids For Cash, is a particularly egregious story about judges accepting kickbacks from some detention centre owner to lock up juvees for profit:

Last month the judge involved, Mark Ciavarella, and the presiding judge of the juvenile court, Michael Conahan, pleaded guilty to having accepted $2.6m (£1.8m) from the co-owner and builder of a private detention centre where children aged from 10 to 17 were locked up.

The cases of up to 2,000 children put into custody by Ciavarella over the past seven years - including that of Transue - are now being reviewed in a billowing scandal dubbed "kids for cash". The alleged racket has raised questions about the cosy ties between the courts and private contractors, and about the harsh treatment meted out to adolescents.

Alerted by Laurene Transue, the Juvenile Law Centre in Wilkes-Barre began to uncover scores of cases in which teenagers had been summarily sent to custody by Ciavarella, dating as far back as 1999. One child was detained for stealing a $4 jar of nutmeg, another for throwing a sandal at her mother, a third aged 14 was held for six months for slapping a friend at school.

Half of all the children who came before Ciavarella had no legal representation, despite it being a right under state law. The Juvenile Law Centre has issued a class action against the two judges and other implicated parties in which it seeks compensation for more than 80 children who it claims were victims of injustice.

*****

Have to say, Todd Snider is one of the more interesting guitarists/singers/songwriters/storyteller I've heard in awhile:

Sunday Morning Music

Just a few videos to get the morning started, before the weekly reading of the papers, the heavy English breakfast, the long walks...

Bojan Z, pianist...



Vlatko Stefanovski and Miroslav Tadic, guitars...



Martha Galarraga, Hamilton de Holanda y Marcos Souzano au Triton



Omar Sosa Quartet

The Beat Goes On



***

Versus

*****

Good Ole Slavoj

while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process

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