Today I Strolled Chihuly's Forests of Glass !

Thank you de Young Museum ! They were so generous to bring us the chance to walk through more than 5 installations of hundreds of pieces of Chihuly's glass sculpture in distinctive styles, beautifully lit and styled. Utterly gorgeous!

More later.

Best Concert in Years: OMAR SOSA Afreecanos

It was one of those lifetime thrills-- Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, sunny weekend in June. I got to see OMAR SOCA and AFREECANOS do a couple of hours of their brilliant combination of wild Thelonius jazz, Cuban, Egyptian, Brazilian and other African rhythms.

It is a type of music I have yearned to hear. Combining all my favorites. I hadn't realized there was someone already doing it. Taking the free spirited Thelonius meets Coltrane piano of Sosa, weaving together all the others who also traverse jazz to tribal rhythms and melodies.

Luckily, the CD, OMAR SOSA Afreecanos is equally brilliant in a different way. Seeming to integrate Asian sounds into it-- I hear shades of Egypt and China.

SOSA had such fantastic modulation of each song-- from whisper soft moments to blazing and stomping staccato and around through melodic orchards. Gorgeous journeys.

Glowing Tribute Overdue for Robin-sama

I saw him live and adored the manner in which he presented different peoples. His characterizations of the Chinese, for example, evinced the admiration he held for aspects of their culture, and that love made his teasing that much more bitingly fabulous. We could laugh together via our also acknowledging our respect for those we see that have fallen. i.e. the Olympics material about the amazing PRC... And gee, even the bitter break-ups-- there's a loving intimacy revealed to us in mocking that state of being we have all endured at one time or another.

And I recognized some of the material in his May stand-up show at Cobb's in his presidential campaign routines in the film Man of the Year. Such precise slicing and dicing of political hypocrisy and contradictions.

And there's more and more to adore... He's just one of the best at doing tribes other than his own and I think it's the basic respect and love he mixes in there.

Concern Trolls

Many of my friends wouldn't recognize the term. But hey, on the FISA bill, here we are again. Knowing that the best way to clobber the Democrats is through dividing them on particular policy issues. The Dems have a big damn tent so they'll never all agree, so you can toss in statements cleaving to ideological purity that will tie them up in righteous arguments for days. Then you can pitch to the Repub holdouts and Indes that Hey, those Dems just don't know what they want. We're strong and solid. You'd better come with us... You can stir up and divide the Democrats through ideological games.

But I'm sorry, fellow Democrats, this is not new to me. Here we are again after our party has sold out on major fundamentals of the US constitution already. Not a big surprise. We have let the practice of "rendition" take place. Abu Ghraib happened. The President has not been impeached. This is hardly a horror, as a friend says. I'd say it is hardly a horror greater than those we have endured thus far-- one after the other.

Let's leave our beautiful candidate alone and irritate others about these policy details. There are hundreds of abrogations of the constitution and destructive privatization policies to pursue-- let's approach changing them through other means.

Here we are again. We cannot afford 4 more years of Cheney-inspired administration/ destruction. And they WILL try to steal it again by using multiple methods, so please don't call your fellow Democrats kooky when they ask you to pay attention to little dribs & drabs vote stealing.

We were lucky to have Veruschka

Veruschka! I was lucky to have her as a teen paging through Vogue... And Penelope Tree... And Marisa Berenson... We were lucky to have such exotic bohemian icons... And if you can picture her too, let's talk. Wasn't that fun? Where the fashions were as wild as wild could be-- challenging us to imagine frocks nearly as wild... Tokyo Teen TCK-- it was Vogue and Veruschka all the way...

So Dan, if you were accused of a crime,

On The Verdict on MSNBC tonight, Dan Abrams was talking self righteously against the lawyer who opposed the overturning of the prohibition of the death penalty for child rape. The lawyer had complained rather roughly that allowing the death penalty meant he'd have to grill the victims. Dan was self-righteously slamming his colleague for telling the truth.

So Dan, if you were accused of a crime, you wouldn't want your lawyer to do his utmost to prove your innocence? You wouldn't want him to grill your accusers and see who had put them up to it and seek out the actual perpetrators?

We don't want to expand the number of sentences of death that can't be undone for the small percentage of real human beings that are falsely convicted. You should be defending your fellow lawyers in this, Dan, not sneering at them for doing their best. Or even talking about it so boldly. Why not? He got us talking about how dangerous the ultimate penalty can be because it cannot be undone when exculpatory evidence comes to light four years later. No reshoots. So it's a wavy LOSE arrow for you on this issue tonight. Way too self righteous and Nancy Grace like.

The more fascinating angle to share your technical expertise with us on would have been-- my uncouth colleague has jabbered uncouthly about a complex problem-- leveling the ultimate penalty for emotionally disturbing crimes against children. The primary witnesses to those crimes have already been traumatized by the events themselves, and you are bringing them into a courtroom wherein their alleged assailant faces execution if their stories are proven correct. A responsible attorney cannot let their accusations go unchallenged.

But challenging that evidence further traumatizes the children, therefore, flexibility in penalties is a necessary tool to protect the maximum number of people. The judge who has seen thousands of cases can assess penalties and conditions that best serve all the parties directly involved. Delicate yet highly traumatic crimes require expert handling, not the bludgeon that is the death penalty mandated by an abstract authority.

I thought we had been gradually conducting lots of little Truth & Reconciliation sessions with the Innocence Project and DNA, freeing many who had been wrongly convicted after years of languishing in prison. Thought we had been working up to acknowledging the horror of having falsely imprisoned and even executed thousands of people so that we would want to never do that again.

But I thought habeus corpus would never die. And I thought we'd love our troops enough never to practice torture because it would surely rebound upon them. We also had seen our reputation for refraining from torture shorten many battles by inviting surrender sooner. They knew we'd hold them humanely until the war was over.

Ah well, sometimes those comic book graphics get to you and you go all melodramatic righteous, when you could explore more legal subtleties with those of us sticking it out to see how your hour progresses.

McCain may have Embraced Bush

But he didn't inhale.

Music in My Village? Ali Farka Touré

What music would be playing in my village square? Guitarists from Mali -- Ali Farka Touré, Habib Koite and others. I feel most at home when each instrument plays different yet complimentary rhythms and melodies. I like the languid pace of the Malian music as the hometown favorite. But I also love Latin rhythms, especially Cuban, mixed in with jazz.

I adore polyrhythmic music probably because Dad loved calypso and I grew up overseas and my brother loved music also. Chinese opera every Sunday in Taipei. Festival folk music at our local shrine in Tokyo. Family favorite was a Calypso Christmas. Brother learning blues guitar from the USA -- Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzie. Then Motown from the USA. Indian music in Hong Kong. Friend's dad from New Zealand had the fabulous jazz collection. Loved Coltrane in high school. Met Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton when they came through Hong Kong. British bands were big too. Then college and KJAZ on the radio from LA while I wrote my poetry. Then Burmese music on vacations home. Then back to Tokyo and Hiru no Minyo ethnic show on the radio, and friends of world music at Apsaras Café. And my dancer friends reintroduced Balinese music and Indian music. Then got to sing some blues with a band there. Unlucky Woman. Evil Gal's Daughter. Soul Man. Then those friends also started up a samba carnavale in Tokyo that went from a disco in those days and spilled out into the streets a few years after I left.

Was given a cassette of Hamza El Din and adored it. Memorized all the songs. Actually got to meet Hamza when he first visited Tokyo. When we met I said "Hamza-- that's the same name as my favorite musician, Hamza el Din." And it was indeed him. Quite a thrill. Very kind man. Stayed on in Japan to add the shamisen to his repertoire.

Also loved a cassette of Lamine Konte playing the kora.

Came to love African music after returning to the USA this time. Grabbed some Nigerian music by chance, Captain Ebeneezer Obey, and got to see him and his 10 guys at the Fillmore years ago. That was quite exciting. Liked them and Touré Kunda. Then saw a Malian film at the SF Intl Film Festival over 15 years ago and loved that music and sought it out.

Got to see Ali Farka Touré play in San Francisco and danced down in front with Flame.

How do I Love Thee, Jasbir Jassi ?

Most cinematic bhangra ever --AKH MASTANI by Jasbir Jassi. Listening to the tunes one can picture different segments of an Indian village movie--- paths, trees, sunniness... Jassi is a classically trained Punjabi singer who has brought tribal roots into modern pop music. Handsome fellow who also loves photography. His website is lovely but another Punjabi music site has more of his clips,, so I've linked that above. But they don't show my favorite album. He has lots of exciting songs, though, that treasure the village elements.