Pink Fire Pointer Augustus 2012

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... we, men, have always loved women. Sometimes more that we should've.
     And, to be honest, women have always been the best motivation for us to succeed in life. It is genetically encrypted in our DNA, that we need to get beautiful women to "love" us. It is the way of life.
     I am starting a new blog, about relations wth the opposite sex, because that is a really important chapter in our lifes, so it needs our full attention.
     Leave a coment bellow about what the firs post should be about. I know you have lots of questions, so fire away!
     Also, according to the title of this post, I am leaving you a link to the downloads section, where you can find free the most important software that you can use to beat roulette, which used along with the safest system, is in my oppinion unbeatable.
     After you solve the part about money, you can begin to think about what really interests you, and that is living a FULL LIFE:
 CHEERS!
 

Down With Jazz! Bejayzuz!



It’s not that long ago that Ireland was to all intents and purposes a Theocracy, not unlike present day Iran. In a similar way to the contemporary Iranian state, right up to at least the 1960s, the country was under the thumb of a cabal of clerics who interfered with every aspect of the state and whose number one concern was the wielding of their own power.  They interfered in every aspect of Irish life and left a legacy of brutality and child abuse (such as in their schools and Reformatories), which Irish people are still having to deal with today. But disgusting as the institution of the Catholic Church was,  (and often still is), occasionally the behavior of some of the dimmer members of that church, through the stupidity of their actions, gave us a badly needed laugh at the Church’s expense. One such dimwit was Father Peter Conefrey.

Conefrey was the founding member and leading light of the ‘Anti-Jazz League’ in the 1930s – a movement he hoped would rid Holy Catholic Ireland of the corrupting effect of jazz. Coneferey was convinced that jazz (although what he thought of as jazz would certainly not be recognised as such by any jazz fan or musician), was destroying the morals of the young people with its unholy rhythms and lewd dancing. He managed to lead a march against jazz through a tiny town in Ireland and through his contacts get questions asked in parliament about why Irish music was getting displaced on the radio by this sinful jazz music. But under the thumb of the clergy though Irish politicians may have been, this was too ludicrous for even the most devout Irish politician and the movement fizzled out relatively quickly. There’s a fascinating documentary on it here

This coming weekend I'll be taking part in a festival called 'Down With Jazz' which humorously takes the anti-jazz movement as its theme, but has in fact the opposite intention of the idiotic Father Conefrey, in that it is celebrating Irish jazz.




Over three days sixteen bands will show the variety and quality of the music produced here in Ireland by the local musicians and it should be a great festival since there's never been a higher standard of jazz music being played in ireland than there is now.

I think it's fair to say that in western Europe, Ireland's jazz scene is the one that is least known outside of its own borders. Every other scene in western Europe - the French, Italian, German, and various Scandinavian scenes for example - all would be known through various famous practitioners who have gained international reputations and are well known everywhere. Musicians such as Enrico Rava, Martial Solal, Jan Garbarek, and John Taylor are known internationally and through them people know there is a scene in the countries in which they live. Ireland would not be known in the same way in the jazz world, and truth be told, up to recently, while there were some great musicians here, there wasn't enough of them to constitute a 'scene'

Jazz had a slow start in Ireland - there were jazz influenced jazz bands in the 40s and 50s, but the first real jazz musicians began to appear at the end of the 50s and into the 60s with players such as the pianist Noel Kelehan and the drummer John Wadham, both of whom were world class. There were other players around the scene who were good also, but the real breakthrough came with the appearance of Louis Stewart, the great guitarist who was the first domiciled Irish musician to get international attention. Before that the bassist Rick Laird had played with musicians such as Sonny Rollins and Wes Montgomery as part of the house rhythm section in Ronnie Scott's Club in London, and later went on the play with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Due to his Mahavishnu stint and appearances on various 'Jazz Icons' DVDs, he remains Ireland's most famous jazz musician. However Louis Stewart broke the mould in that he was the first Irish jazz musician, living in Ireland whose work was recognised internationally and he performed with Benny Goodman and a host of other great musicians during his career. A phenomenal guitarist, he inspired a generation of Irish players (including me), and made them believe that this music could be played at the highest level by Irish jazz musicians.



My peers and contemporaries, who came up in the 80s, included some really great musicians, many of whom were determined to expand their horizons beyond Ireland, some by moving abroad, some by studying abroad, and all of whom were very interested in current trends in jazz. Many of us were interested in developments beyond the customary hard bop style of the Dublin jazz scene and the result of that was a broadening of stylistic approaches in the Irish scene and the founding of something that every other European country had - a jazz school.

It took a lot of time to get the full time courses going there, but when they did the school had a real impact on the development of the music in Ireland and aspiring jazz musicians now had access to the same training and information as their European and American counterparts, as well as getting to sit in classes with many visiting musicians of renown. All of this, with the addition of the rise, development and ultimate boom (and now bust!) of the Irish economy had an explosive effect on the jazz scene here. With the coming of serious money into the economy more musicians started to land up on irish shores and this is turn enriched the scene further. Recordings were made, tours undertaken and organisations such as the Improvised Music Company, (the promoters of this weekend's event), created imaginative events and programming.

And this weekend will show the variety and quality of what's currently on offer in Irish jazz at the moment - everything from electronic-infused improvisation to traditional jazz, from through-composed large scale compositions to standards, from duos to big bands. The Irish jazz scene has come of age and the festival is a great showcase for the many great musicians and bands now playing here.

Here's Phisqa, a group that is an exemplar of what effect the influx of overseas musicians has had - led by a Peruvian drummer, it features a South African saxophonist, an Italian guitarist, a Venezuelan pianist and an Irish bassist



More traditional fare will be on display too and I'm really looking forward to playing some standards with the truly world class saxophonist Michael Buckley




I'll also be playing a set with 3G - a family affair that features my brother Conor on drums and my son Chris on guitar.




Things have really changed for jazz in Ireland and hopefully this (sold out), festival will help to make more people aware of the musical riches the scene currently contains. As they might  say in Ireland, regarding this weekend's doings - 'if Father Conferey was alive today he'd turn in his grave.....'

Common Sense

I returned to Moab yesterday, camping out in the heat last night.

The Peace Corps reunion in San Diego went really well.  My Peace Corps friend, Stephanie, drove me there from Colorado, and, of course, it was splendid getting to know her better.  We were both so happy we overcame our reluctance to go. It was the first I'd seen most those folks in 23 years, since we were in Ecuador together.  I was actually really surprised to see how little everybody had changed.  Joe Griffith (I think voted the "sexiest" in Peace Corps training), who had disappointed his fellow female volunteers (and some male :-)  by marrying an Ecuadorian, pretty much organized the whole event.  His Ecuadorean wife and sister-in-law even cooked up a gourmet Ecuadorean feast for us, which brought back a flood of magical memories.

On returning to Moab, I got to spend time with Carolyn and her new boyfriend, Thembe, who had dropped into the area for a couple weeks.  They then brought me to Fruita, Colorado, to visit my parents.

In Fruita, I discovered a group of new friends (Kyle and Jeanine, Ken and Rachelle, Cullen and Veronica), and a rad, artsy center they'd created, called Cavalcade.  They wanted to jam in Cullen's woodshop (he also makes harps and guitars), and I figured I'd join these refined musicians with my rookie guitar skills.  There were a bunch of woodsaws hanging up, and somebody jokingly asked if anybody played the saw.  I said, "yes," and sawed some tunes with them.  They convinced me to stay longer and play saw in Cavalcade's variety show with Kyle Harvey.   

Meanwhile, I've been reading a book my Missoula friend, Kate, gave me, "The Spell of the Sensuous", by David Abram. At first I'd thought it was just another nice nature book.  The title kind of throws you.  But it is utterly profound, with revolutionary ideas.  Maybe if it had a different title, and not classified as a nature book, it might be more well known, in fact revolutionary, to scientific, as well as theological and philosophical, thinking.  It's helping me crystallize ideas developing for decades in me.  I hope to write them out sometime.  Meanwhile, here's some musings it inspires in me:

COMMON SENSE

All physical reality is sensual.
All physical reality is known only by the senses.

The senses are the prophets, the seers, the sent,
bearing witness to Unchanging Consciousness.

To repress the sensual is to deny physical reality,
To deny the sensual is to deny compassion,
to deny the Word in the flesh,
Consciousness in the flesh.

Paradoxically, to repress the sensual is to be a slave to the sensual,
to express and share the sensual is to be served by the sensual.
To express and share passion is compassion.
How?

Passion is sense.
Shared sense is common sense.
Common sense is common passion.
Common passion is compassion.

Senses hidden, senses not shared,
Passion hidden, passion not shared
are our slaveholders,
are our destruction.

Compassion is Omni-pre-sence
Omnipresence is God in everyone,
One Consciousness in everyone.
Compassion is Common Sense.

All physical things are sensed.
To share all things is to commonly sense.
To share everything is common sense!
Common sense is concensus.

To think we own anything
is to deny common passion,
to deny common sense,
is to deny omni-pre-sence!

To breathe is to share,
air common to all.
To breathe is to be alive.
To breathe is to sense.
To breathe is to make sense.

To breathe is common sense!
To breathe is to respire, inspire,
be filled with the Spirit,
To realize all life
literally is One Breath,
One Spirit,
Whole Spirit,
Wholly Spirit,
Holy Spirit.

Can you possess air?
can you own breath for later? 

To deny this common sense
is to deny Omni-pre-sense.

Possession means possessed.
Possessed means not free.
Not free means bought and sold.
Only slaves and prostitutes
can be bought and sold,
Slaves to our senses,
because we repress our senses.

Free means priceless.

Free Market is an oxymoron!
Free literally means free!

Market is price institution.
Price institution is pros-titution.
Prostitution is commerce.
Commerce is common market.
Common market opposes common sense.
Common sense is com-passion.
Common sense is consensus.

(In Hebrew, commerce is canaan.
All the world has become Canaan).

Mammon is delusion.
Delusion is idolatry,
mistaking illusion for reality.
Compassion is reality.
Reality is omnipresent.
Omnipre-sence is common sense.

Either love Mammon
and hate Reality
or vise versa.
It 's impossible to love both.
Can you simultaneously love
both the Prostitute of Babylon
(Queen of Commerce)
and the New Jerusalem
(Queen of Grace, of Gratis)?

If life cannot share
how can it be life?
To buy and sell life is to deny life.
Every particle in the Universe is life.
Universe means omnipresence.

To not share is to reject all the Universe,
to repress your own senses,
to not sense the senses of others,
to reject compassion,
to not make sense,
to reject common sense.

Compassion is the Spirit
breath, sense,
Spirit confessing the Word in the flesh,
beyond words.
Any spirit that does not share
denies the Word made flesh.
Because any spirit that does not share
is in a lung that does not breath,
not speaking the Word beyond words.

Common Breath
Common Sense

I said in my heart, 
"Concerning the condition of the descendants of Adam, 
God tests them, 
that they may see that they themselves are animals."
For what happens to the descendants of Adam 
also happens to animals; 
one thing befalls them: 
as one dies, so dies the other. 
Surely, they all have One Spirit*.
Adam has no advantage over animals, 
for all is emptiness.
All go to one place: 
all are from the dust, 
and all return to dust.
(The Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:17-20)

*Hebrew, Ruach, meaning Spirt or Breath.

  


Just some R-rows

    Hello, fellow gamblers!
   
    I know, it has been a while since I've written, but let's not forget this summer was, and still is, HOT, so it would be a capital sin to miss out all the fun.

    After these weak apologies, let's get back to what we all want: MONEY. And by "all" I mean us, gamblers, and you people who read my blog to learn about online gambling. I sometimes look back into the past, when I was just 13-14 years old and I was collecting pre-paid public phone cards. My wildest dream back then was to have a load of them. So many that I could swim in them. I was also competing with this friend of mine who has the most phone cards. Remember: It was my biggest aspiration, and my first goal in life. 

    But time passed and my collection was getting bigger and bigger. In just a few months, I had the biggest card collection in the block. Suddenly, I didn't wanted it anymore. I still have it, and I will never give up on it ... but it was getting pretty old, pretty fast, so I've decided that I didn't want it anymore. 

    Now why did I bring up this story, which may or may not be interesting? Because since I was 16 or so, my biggest dream, my most burning desire was to have a bank account so full of money, that I could buy ANYTHING in this "toys"-filled world that I would ever desire. I wanted so badly to make money (not just some money...but all the money I ever wanted, and quickly) that I was even willing to pay people to "help" me. You probably know what happened next... I was helping them make loads of money, and me lose even the little I've had. 

    Then I've started to study. I would read anything that I lay my hands on, and has the potential to help me in my way. After a while I've made the connection. Between the race I was in when collecting phone cards, and the race I was in when "collecting" money. I've realised that it is not the money I really want. When I was little, it wasn't about the priceless phone cards... It was all about me showing my friends that I can get more than them. If you come to think of it, maybe it's the same for you two. You're not all that into the money.. It's the attention, the pleasure, the comfort that money can bring us! That is what it's all about. And it is all in our heads. You (and the people arround you, because you allowed them to) have impregnated in your brain, with golden capital letters, that if you don't have money you don't get to have the nice girl that you are attracted by, you can't have success in life and you will not live your life fully. 

    If something changed in you right now, please share with others bellow.

Stefano Bollani


I first became aware of Stefano Bollani on an Enrico Rava recording on ECM about 5 years ago, and I remember listening to the intro to the first piece, hearing the piano comping, and saying to myself 'who's that playing piano!?' It's a mark of Bollani's brilliance that he can make you stop short just by the way he's comping. After listening to his playing on that recording I checked out lots of his stuff and and I discovered a brilliant pianist and musician, with a complete command of colour and sonority aligned with gift for melody and a great time feel. Combine this with an extraordinary gift for improvisation and you have a recipe for the complete jazz musican - but........

In his recordings I also discovered what I can only describe as a mixed bag. Mixed in that I never really heard a recording in which, from start to finish, Bollani played in the sublime way that he can. Inevitably on every recording, he would play something that made me shake my head in admiration of the brilliance and depth of his playing. But, for my taste it would never sustain itself over the whole recording. There would always be one or two tracks in which Bollani would indulge in his penchant for humour, and this, for my money anyway, would detract from the whole and make the totality of the CD a less satisfying experience than if he had left those tracks out.

Having said that, I'm all for humour in music - I think jazz musicians these days are far too po-faced and far too prone to believing that the only deep emotions, or the only cool ones, are the ones where we're feeling angry, sad, intense, or pensive. But of course in life we also display happiness in our daily lives, and there's no reason why we should willfully omit happiness from the range of emotions we choose to display in our music - I've written about this before.

And Bollani does this humorous thing brilliantly - it's never cheap or puerile. He's genuinely playful and has the imagination and technique to bring off something like this rendition of 'Maple Leaf Rag' in which he inserts all kinds of 'stumbling' effects, phrase stretches and sly modulations to create a very funny and witty version of this hoary old chestnut





It's typical of Bollani that while the piece seems to be sloppily played, it's only possible to do something like this if you have a phenomenal command of the instrument. The same is true on this constantly modulating version of 'Tico Tico'





But while I enjoy the humour and wittiness of these performances, I always felt that they never really sat with the other pieces on the Bollani albums that I checked out - they were like jokes, albeit very good ones, being made at an inopportune time - jokes which gatecrashed a very sublime atmosphere and somehow diminished the overall impact of the music.

But then I saw Bollani play live last year, in a solo performance in France, and there it all made sense. Within the live context, the humorous flourishes seemed no longer out of place, but completely at one with the skittishness of Bollani's personality and the fecundity of his creative imagination. The guy who played a sublime version of 'Blame It On My Youth', was clearly the same guy who, for an encore, created an extraordinary collage of themes from suggestions shouted from the audience - yes the encore was a schtick, but was so creatively done and executed with such obvious enjoyment, that it seemed all of a piece with what had gone before.





And this year I saw him again, this time in the company of the unique Brazilian mandolinist Hamilton De Holanda, and again the reconciliation of both sides of Bollani's personality was even clearer. Playing Brazilian music in duo, all of his lyricism, technique, light-heartedness, rhythmic strengths and harmonic palette was on display and put at the service of the music. This was technically difficult music, but those uninitiated into the arcana of music technique would never have known it, such was the effortlessness and sheer joy in music making that was on display. Here they are from a concert last year, playing Piazzola's darkly lyical 'Oblivion'





Seeing performances like this has resulted in my previous reservations being completely overcome, and for my money, Stefano Bollani is one of of the finest jazz pianists in the world today - he really has so much to offer. While he's very well known in Europe, his profile is nothing like it should be in the US, though recent duets with Chick Corea might possibly change that a little. However, if the predictability and  typical herd instincts shown by the recent Downbeat Critic's poll is anything to go by I wouldn't hold my breath while I'm waiting.........