www.liweiart.com
(Via Ektopia)

I am sad to let you know that Dad passed away this morning at around five o’clock. I unfortunately missed him just by a few hours. They had checked on him around midnight and he was ok and in no pain, by the next round in the morning he had passed away in his sleep.

In Santa Fe around 1991. Photo by Eric Swanson.
Winking - that photo always makes me smile.

His eyes were so blue.
One of my favorite pics of dad is in the “Opium”-CD booklet, but I can’t find that on my computer.

Every year there comes a day in Spring when the trees in town suddenly look green. It may be that more leaves opened this morning or maybe that the leaves just unfurled a little more, but today was that day.

Brought my Negra1 and the Viscarra strat to Jon’s studio before going to breakfast with him. After breakfast I played some guitar on a 9+ minute remix of “This Spring Release 10,000 Butterfies” he decided to make. Lush and trippy… to be experienced in our ListeningLounge next month sometime.

Ottmar Liebert + Luna Negra: Touring Schedule

Nine Inch Nails Releases Free Album In High Definition Audio [Totally Free]
Nine Inch Nails’ latest album—The Slip—is 100% free, no payment required in any case, not even when you download the whooping 1.2GB version—which includes high definition WAVE 24/96 files (better-than-CD-quality 24bit 96kHz audio.) You can also choose from high-quality MP3s, FLAC lossless and M4A lossless. Note to record labels: drop dead.
(Via Gizmodo)

Yeah, might work for an act that can fill large venues… he’ll make the money on ticket sales and merchandise. Won’t work for the rest of us and I am sick of hearing this: Note to record labels: drop dead. That is ignorant and stupid.

Read this:
FreeDOM, not free, is the future of business.

External microphone for N95: the final word (we hope) » shelbinator.com

I mentioned before how handy it would be to be able to connect an external microphone to the N95. It appears somebody found the necessary adapters at RadioShack.

i went fishing with my family when i was five
Thanks Y.

Check out Copenhagenize or Copenhagen Cycle Chic, where I found the above vid.

Related:
Walking Bike

Mission Bicycle

TED | Talks | Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight (video)
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Moving, beautiful, deep. You should watch it!

This morning it was very cold. Went to Upaya to return something I had borrowed.

At noon I went back to Upaya because Roshi invited me to lunch and it was nice to catch up with friends. After lunch I noticed the sun lighting up the Buddha in the window:

Left to pick up my Negra1 (DeVoe 2002) from Keith Vizcarra, who installed his V-Pegs for me. Now I will sit down to play that guitar and this evening I am expecting Rahim, who is coming by.

Newsvine - Land of the Freeware: Making and receiving free phone calls via any computer or internet-enabled device with GrandCentral
Land of the Freeware: Making and receiving free phone calls via any computer or internet-enabled device with GrandCentral

Works like a charm. Installed the Nokia and Gizmo apps on my Nokia n95 and opened an account with Gizmo. Now I can initiate and receive calls via GrandCentral. It’s a beautiful thing. Calls sound better than they do via T-Mobil…

Continue reading for the full instructions

The Scent of Light
The scent of light, he barks. What the hell is that?

Lawrence Russell is writing bite-sized fiction, flash-fiction or micro-fiction he calls it. Little stories that take you to different places. Some of them were inspired by the music and titles of my upcoming album. I am hoping he keeps going and that maybe he can RSS-enable the page so that every time he writes another mini-story we can go on a little detour from whatever we are doing and let him take us on a short trip, a window that briefly opens… and closes again…

How We’re Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take — New York Magazine
You Walk Wrong. It took 4 million years of evolution to perfect the human foot. But we’re wrecking it with every step we take.

Read on and check out the great images.

Barefooters

Good to know…

Vibram Five Fingers - and my new favorite

On my feet

Vivo Barefoot from Terra Plana

Related

Frightening
“So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.”
(Via Vedana)

Subscribe to Ottmar Liebert’s Announcements

We migrated our mailing list to different software. You can use above link to add your email address to the data base. If you received the most recent mailing last week, you are already covered. If you want to change the email address we have for you, or add a new one, please use the same form. I am aiming to send out an announcement about every 4-6 weeks.

I sent the newsletter to our list less than a week ago and already the first spam is arriving to the unique address I used. So many bot-infested PCs out there…

A Fabled Iraqi Instrument Thrives in Exile - New York Times
BAGHDAD — Dhia Jabbar hides his oud in a sack when he walks down the street in his Baghdad neighborhood.

He used to teach students in the back room of a photo shop, where the sound could not be heard. But last week, militia gunmen invaded the store, destroying one of his instruments and ordering him to stop teaching. He had dreamed of a performing career, but now he has lost hope… “Iraq is dead,” he says.

Seven thousand miles away, Rahim AlHaj, who fled Iraq in 1991, carries his oud without a second thought through the streets of Albuquerque, where he now lives. In New York, Washington and other cities, he plays for audiences of hundreds. An album he recorded was recently nominated for a Grammy Award.

The two musicians are bound by their passion for the oud, a pear-shaped instrument whose roots run deep in Iraq’s history. Some say that in its music lies the country’s soul.

Both men trained at the same prestigious conservatory in Baghdad. Both have a deep love for traditional Iraqi melodies.

Continue reading…
Thanks Stevo.

You can find Rahim’s latest album “Home Again” in our ListeningLounge.

steve1 comments:
This would make an absolutely fantastic documentary using the oud as the centerpiece of the story

Maybe like The Red Violin? The guitar owes its existence to the oud arriving in Spain with Zyriab, although Wikipedia thinks that it has more to do with the Sitar (India) or Sihtar (Persia) - Link. My feeling is that the guitar is a hybrid that evolved Out > Lute > Guitar, maybe via the Vihuela or the Chitarra Italiana. Neither the oud nor the lute are as loud as the guitar and both are heavier, so the guitar could have simply a development to make the instrument louder and lighter. But yes, a film about the oud would be very interesting because it would also touch on cultural history, i.e. how much the Arabic culture has shaped ours.