Thursday, March 09, 2006:

Asha Bhosle & Kronos Quartet -- Dum Maro Dum (Take Another Toke)

Asha Bhosle & Kronos Quartet -- Dum Maro Dum (Take Another Toke)
There are things I like and feel mostly unqualified to talk about. This is one of them.

This track is originally from the film Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, which is apparently about the hippie culture in India at the time. It's the first track on You've Stolen My Heart, a collaboration between Kronos Quartet and Asha Bhosle which features Asha Bhosle, in her 70s, re-recording songs from earlier in her career (sometimes decades earlier) composed by R.D. Burman.

Apparently there was some controversy around Bhosle's re-recordings (here and in other CDs), as she changed sometimes the melodies. If anything, that makes me more interested in the originals, not less, because I think the ones here are all great. There's something about the texture of these songs that appeals to me a great deal, and Bhosle's voice is in fantastic shape for her age; if I didn't know otherwise I'd have guessed she was 30 or so. To me the entire album sounds great, and it's refreshing to find an album so solid that I'd be happy posting any track at all off it.

The liner notes tell me that "Dum Maro Dum (Take Another Toke)" features two violins, a viola, a Farfisa organ, a cello, an Indian trap set, a tambourine, a madal, finger cymbals, breath, and--the instrument I'm guessing sounds almost most like it might not belong, but which somehow does--a pipa.
[You've Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman's Bollywood]
[wikipedia article about Asha Bhosle]

...

Found at boingboing: Radiohead's "Just" reimagined as a party-hopping song with animated graffiti interacting with its environment--a Lego castle broken up, turned into a terraformed space colony.

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And here's this video of a skateboarding dog, which for some reason makes me giddy with happiness. (link found at metafilter, though I've had a time trying to find the thread again.)

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"Look, if you want to stop theft, you can't think like a security guard, you've got to think like a thief. Same thing with terrorism. You want to stop terrorism, you've got to think like a terrorist."
He did not mean, as the Bush administration seems to think, that we ought to adopt the methods or the morality of the terrorists -- embracing indiscriminate killing, abandoning the rule of law and dismissing the Geneva Conventions as a "quaint" luxury we can no longer afford. He meant getting inside their heads and imagining how and why and what they're thinking.

Slacktivist has an interesting post and discussion on the nature of storytelling and the systemic forces against empathy inherent in conservative/free market capitalist ideology. This is the second on that theme, with the earlier post as interesting but saddled with train wreck of a discussion.

... There's a small movement afoot pushing for Bush's impeachment, and I guess it's a sign of my compromised ethics that I don't think it's worth it. I wonder if, hundreds of years ago, anyone seriously imagined a situation where the entire Cabinet isn't worth a shit. At any rate: Congress doesn't even have enough courage, integrity, and tenacity to vote down the PATRIOT Act, much less to do things up right, which would go like so:
Impeach Bush, swear in Cheny
Impeach Cheney, swear in Hastert
Impeach Hastert, swear in Stevens
Impeach Stevens, swear in Rice
Impeach Rice, swear in Snow
Impeach Snow, swear in Rumsfeld
Impeach Rumsfeld, swear in Gonzales
Impeach Gonzales, swear in Norton....

Personally I think that Congress would probably, at best, get as far as impeaching Bush, leaving us with a President who radiates evil more clearly than Hannibal Lecter. The satirist at the back of my mind keeps suggesting that maybe the hunting accident wasn't even an accident--maybe Whittington let it slip that his Ayn Rand shrine had gotten a bit dusty--or maybe he made the mistake of calling the Civil War justified, and preferable to letting market forces put an end to slavery....

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Comments:
oooh, that's a sweet track. makes me curious about the album. i usually don't click on the amazon links, but ...

I'm glad you like it, lorezsky.

I don't know much about Asha's career, really, though I've liked everything I've heard. I was hoping someone would jump in with some pointers....

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