Free Republic

The jazz saxophonist worked closely with John Coltrane and was a pioneer of the avant-garde movement.Pharoah Sanders, the jazz saxophonist who worked closely with John Coltrane and was a pioneer of the avant-garde movement, has died. He was 81 years old. No one played the tenor saxophone quite like Pharoah Sanders. When he blew his horn, it was as if he was a dragon breathing fire. He played it so loudly and with such a fierce intensity that what came out of his horn was a startlingly eerie howl, like a hurricane crossed with a flame-thrower; a sound that...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpHgG4jILa0Most people don't get this stuff... Those that do, love it.

PENDERECKI - Symphony No. 2 ('Christmas Symphony')

FULL TITLE: 'I felt I was on trial for murdering the Beatles': Yoko says fans wrongly convicted her for 40 years Yoko Ono has told how being blamed for The Beatles’ split made her feel like she was on trial for murder. She said: ‘It feels like I was accused of something that I didn’t do, which was breaking up The Beatles. It’s like you’re accused of murder and you’re in prison and you can’t get out.’ Since the Fab Four broke up in 1970, Miss Ono has been blamed by many fans for their demise because she was in...

Everything! Till we meet again! :)

Nearly everyone cares—or says he cares—about art. After all, art ennobles the spirit, ­elevates the mind, and educates the emotions. Or does it? In fact, tremendous irony attends our culture’s continuing investment—emotional, financial, and social—in art. We behave as if art were something special, something important, something spiritually refreshing; but, when we canvas the roster of distinguished artists today, what we generally find is far from spiritual, and certainly far from refreshing. It is a curious situation. Traditionally, the goal of fine art was to make beautiful objects. The idea of beauty came with a lot of Platonic and Christian...

Woman artist gets death threats over gay Muslim photos Matthew Campbell THE Dutch were debating the limits of freedom of expression last week after an artist who photographed gay men wearing masks of the prophet Muhammad was forced into hiding and her work removed from a museum exhibit. Speaking on the telephone from an unspecified location in the Netherlands last week, the artist, an Iranian exile who goes by the pseudonym of Sooreh Hera, said she had been threatened with “execution”. She accused the director of the municipal museum in The Hague of cowardice for caving in to Muslim extremists....

TATTOOS We now have to work under the assumption that every American has a tattoo. Whether we are at a formal dinner, at a professional luncheon, at a sales conference or arguing before the Supreme Court, we have to assume that everyone in the room is fully tatted up — that under each suit, dress or blouse, there is at least a set of angel wings, a barbed wire armband, a Chinese character or maybe even a fully inked body suit. We have to assume that any casual anti-tattoo remark will cause offense, even to those we least suspect of...

HALBERSTADT, Germany (AFP) - A new chord was scheduled to sound in the world's slowest and longest lasting concert that is taking a total 639 years to perform. The abandoned Buchardi church in Halberstadt, eastern Germany, is the venue for a mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992). Entitled "organ2/ASLSP" (or "As SLow aS Possible"), the performance began on September 5, 2001 and is scheduled to last until 2639. The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding...

The coming economic crisis. Unemployment. Health care for the poor. The almost 1,500 dead soldiers. The almost 100,000 dead Iraqis. Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher. The Christian Conservative takeover of our nation. The missing 9 billion. The missing weapons of mass destruction. The impending invasion of Iran, and Syria. The total failure to protect us on 9-11.