All

if you dont listen to classical music, start!

If you have not heard this stunning peice of music i recomend that you go buy a CD right now:

iv just completed the prelude from my first collection of peices called “fairy suite” check it out on my M page:

http://myimn.com/profile/bemtevi

so yesterday i had my african drumming recital. it was a great experience and as anyone who was there will tell u it changed everybodies “life forever”… haha, well thats what every student said at least. on another more important note, the question of the day:

How do you overcome writers (or whatever it is that you do) block?

“Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleure sur la ville”

-Paul Verlaine

does any one have any favorite lines or poems theyd like to share?

is anyone really better off when people spend their lives trying to find new ways to prove other people wrong?

lol i wonder what i wrote to earn this

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just for neone who didnt know

im in florida for the holidays

for the sake of posting

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

as if not enough bloggers were saying that…

Juba

All Faith is false, all Faith is true:

Truth is the shattered mirror strown

In myriad bits; while each believes

His little bit the whole to own.

-Haji Abdu El-Yezdi (Richard Burton)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn1snjEtk54

i have added 4 new CDs to my collection:

Livro by Caetano Veloso

The soundtrack to the Sound of Music

Sean Kingston

Collected by Massive Attack

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-fFyymsbnA&mode=related&search=

The term Candomblé is a combination of two words from the Central African Kikongo language: Ka and ndonbé, together meaning “custom of the black people.” The drums play an essential and dominant role in Candomblé ceremonies. The master drummer plays the rum, which improvises intricate variations. The rumpi and lé play relatively unchanging patterns as they repeat one steady rhythm. The master drummer or alabê (Yoruba alá agbè) always has overall control of the ceremony, so it is important that drummers never go into a trance.”

-Gerard Taylor (Capoeira: The Jogo de Angola from Luanda to Cyberspace)

I highly recomend this book to anyone who finds african culture interesting.

this is one of the praying mantis’ i keep.

heres a quick deviation from volume 1 of capoeira to a short storie from volume 2.

“…the argument over the blow, said to be illegal, angered people who’d bet against Mestre Bimba. One of them, Mr. Lúcio de Tal, nicknamed Barra Preta, was so furious about the “injustice” (and the money he’d lost) that he organized an ambush at Engenho  Velho by the Ladeira da Vila América. Mestre Bimba was returningfrom a liason with a local beauty late one dark night in the area of the Ciriaco Candomblé house when he was attacked by seven me, including Mr. Lúcio (carrying a gun, and no less than six police officers armed with sabers. He dumped Lúcio into a garbage container after disarming him, and knocked all the soldiers senseless. According to Angelo Decâni, Mestre Bimba cooly collected the various weapons and hopped on his streetcar, without dropping the straw hat he’d had under his arm.”

-Gerard Taylor (Capoeira: The jogo de angola from luanda to cyberspace Vol. 2)

Translating the heading: “The ship turned over, in the depths of the sea there is treasure.”

This traditional folkloric capoeira song is an apt metaphorical lyric to represent Kongolese religious ideas that have been described by T.J. Desch Obi. He explains that the counter-clockwise roda, or elola, was essential to central African cosmology, which “linked human combat to the interplay of spiritual forces from across the kalunga, or the threshold between the lands of the living and the dead.”

Kalunga in Central Africa, in N’Bunda language, meant the sea. The word also means rivers and the kingdom of the ancestors. In Kongolese cosmology, the counter-clockwise circle represents a solar cycle. If a cross were drawn within the circle, the horizontal east-to-west line is the kalunga. The kalunga divides the material world from the spirit world or afterlife. East represented birth, north was the peak of strength, west was death at the intersection with the kalunga line, and regeneration came at the southern extreme of the cross.”

-Gerard Taylor (Capoeira: The Jogo de Angola from Luanda to Cyberspace)

more will come tomorrow on this theory

well it apears my praying mantis left me an egg sac! im excited. i know this isnt the best photo, but itll have to do.

heres a video from about two days ago of me playing keys with a band at my streets block party.

Find more videos like this on M

heres some of the capoeira from brasil day:

here is some of the pagode (paw-gO-djee) from yesterday, the capoeria is coming up tomorrow i think.

today i hung out at brasil day. this cultural festival was held at the la brea tar pits from 12-6, sorry i hadnt informed you earlier, i have been kinda consumed with school, i have two tests on monday and a bunch of preformance peices coming up, yikes! anyways… brazil day was awesome! there was pagode, a style of street samba that developed in rio de janeiro, there was forró, a style of dance and music that derrived from baião, and capoeira, the famous brazilian martial art. i also picked up one of these:

  a tamborim.

they are really fun to play. expect videos today or tomorrow of some of the cool preformances at brasil day.

Bem-te-vi

natalie and I are now engaged

so today, in about three hours, im leaving with my girlfriends family to idaho for a family reunion of some sort. it should be fun. wish me a good trip, keep tuned, ill be posting pictures soon i hope.

Michael

here are two videos of tupac songs i really admire:

Bem-te-vi

if u go to my M page : http://myimn.com/profile/bemtevi i will be posting more dramatic chipmunk variations as well as the original show it was from.

Half moon

i miss atabaques

so on saturday i went to this thingy called amtgard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtgard) basically a bunch of people dress up as fantasy characters, u know, wizards, knights, bards, assasins etc. and hit each other with foam swords it was fun heres a vid from it:

so i guess yesterday i sorta got my liscence. im not all that excited lol… i havent even driven since then. on a lighter note do u like turtles?:

today was my beautiful girlfriends, natalie clark, birthday, or rather yesterday was. i love her so much, thank you so much god for putting her in my life. here is one of the vids i took of her party:

Generic Idealistic College Activist Group
Type:
Common Interest - Beliefs & Causes
Description:
There are a lot of bad things in the world: AIDS, poverty, famine, Republicans. We, the bright-eyed bushy tailed college students of America, will be the ones to fix them!!!! We realize that the problems of which we speak are infinitely more complicated than our Introductory Sociology reading syllabi could ever have anticipated, and that scores and scores of the world’s leading “progressive” thinkers have tried and failed to use other pipe-dream solutions to make the world a better place (as we define it). But never you mind!!! We’re college students. We know things. Who needs real-world experience and common sense when we have petitions, bumper stickers, and Noam Chomsky?

The mission of this group is nothing less than revolutionary, and the ideas expressed in it are fresh and innovative! The mission includes:

1. Social justice, social tolerance, social freedom, social rights, social society, and social studies

2. Universal education, universal healthcare, universal health insurance, universal housing, universal employment, and universal happiness!!

3. An end to war, poverty, hunger, AIDS, hate, discrimination, genocide, famine, disease, intolerance, racism, sexism, classism, nationalism, heterosexism, religionism, ethno-centrism, socio-eco-classo-sexo-nationalism, unilateralism, quadrilateralism, pollution, inequality, terrorism, crime, bad weather, anger, fear, sadness, heartache, death, fatigue, general human disatisfaction, disagreement, uncertainty, meanness, pain, and inconvenience!!

4. Peace in the Middle East!! This can be a reality, people. Jimmy Carter has a book about it, and the suicide bombers WILL sit down and read it!!

5. A return to international law and the United Nations!! Specifically, we’d like global peace and prosperity, and the UN is the only conceivable way to achieve it!!

6. More foreign aid!! We’ve given billions to third world nations already, but for some reason, the citizens of those nations never see it (because we’re not giving enough!). Thankfully, however, the leaders of those countries have reminded us that we need to send more - and it is our duty to do so, and their right to our money!!

7. Fair and free elections in Disputed Northeastern Congo Section 17-B

8. Free Mumia (we’re not sure what he did but according to various Web sites which we’re predisposed to agree with anyway, he’s innocent!)

9. A more equitable and just distribution of the wealth!! We have to make free market capitalism work by shackling it with suffocating and arbitrary laws, regulations, activist judges, centralized state control and ownership of all means of production, and think tank policy papers

10. Gay rights, women’s rights, black rights, workers’ rights, disability rights, immigrant rights, foreigners’ rights, intergalactic aliens’ rights, atheist rights, poor people’s rights, homeless rights, and one-armed Alaskan battery dealers’ rights

11. Fairness, equality, love, peace, and brother/sister/non-gender-specific-hood, forever and ever, non-religion-specific Amen!!

We are the world, be the change you wish to see, and other motivational slogans!!

After a four-decade effort, the national bird is thought to be adequately rebounding.
By Margot Roosevelt, Times Staff Writer
June 28, 2007

The American bald eagle, revered and reviled over more than two centuries, today will be officially declared safe from extinction in the lower 48 states. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which led a four-decade effort to resuscitate the national bird, is taking it off the Endangered Species list.

The majestic raptor had declined from half a million nesting pairs at the time of European settlement to 417 in 1963. By last year, it had rebounded to 9,789 pairs, and an estimated 11,040 today. In California, where bald eagles have been reintroduced to the Channel Islands and elsewhere, more than 200 pairs are breeding.

“It is an astounding recovery,” said Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based advocacy group. “It attests to a dramatic change in the American environmental ethic.”

Nonetheless, it has been a roller-coaster flight. In 1782, the Continental Congress made the bald eagle the national emblem, with its image on the Great Seal of the United States, clutching arrows and an olive branch.

But as the U.S. population grew, ranchers and farmers came to view bald eagles as nuisance predators, despite the fact that the bird is mostly a fish-eater. They were routinely shot and driven from their nesting grounds by logging, farming and homebuilding. By the 1950s, the spread of the pesticide DDT, which thins the eagle’s eggshells, had led to a catastrophic decline.

The comeback began with a 1972 ban on DDT and stringent protections under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Since then, tens of millions of dollars have been spent on eagle recovery efforts by federal, state, and nonprofit groups. In 1995, the bald eagle was reclassified from “endangered” to the less-severe “threatened” status.

Alaska’s bald eagles, which number 25,000, are not endangered. Hawaii has none.

“It wasn’t just money,” said David Garcelon, president of the Arcata, Calif.-based Institute for Wildlife Studies. “People put huge amounts of effort into it. It would have been pretty sad to see our national symbol blink out.”

Such an effort took place on the Channel Islands, where scientists began to reintroduce bald eagles in 1980. But the birds were unable to reproduce after consuming fish contaminated by DDT, which had been discharged off the Palos Verdes Peninsula by Montrose Chemical Co. in the 1950s and ’60s. Their eggshells were so thin that nesting birds would crush them.

So Garcelon began helicoptering into the nests, dangling from a 100-foot cable, rescuing the fragile eggs and substituting them with fake ones. The eggs were incubated in a lab, and chicks were returned to the nest as soon as they hatched.

Today, more than 40 eagles live on the islands, soaring with their 7-foot wing spans over passing sailboats. And in the last two years, six chicks hatched naturally on Santa Cruz and Santa Catalina islands � the first time in more than half a century.

Although controversy over the Endangered Species Act has focused on less charismatic wildlife, such as snail darters and delta smelt, eagles have run into headwinds too. Last year, a federal judge halted a plan to build a condominium complex at Big Bear Lake where 14 bald eagles make a seasonal home. And the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation, a property-rights advocacy group, is threatening to challenge new rules that would prevent a Minnesota retiree from subdividing his land because of the presence of bald eagles.

The move to delist of the bald eagle was first announced by President Clinton in 1999. But the delisting was delayed until now because states where the eagle was not recovering as quickly objected strenuously to removing protections. The distribution of nesting pairs remains uneven, ranging from a high of 1,312 in Minnesota to only a single pair each in Vermont, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia.

In Arizona, the nation’s fastest growing state, conservationists filed suit in January to prevent the delisting of its desert-nesting bald eagles. And Tuesday, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano wrote U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne opposing the removal, saying that Indian tribes, which use eagle feathers in religious ceremonies, were not adequately consulted.

Nationally, scientists have expressed fears that eagle populations could crash if restrictions on building in habitat are lifted.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says it will continue to monitor nesting populations. And this month, under a 1940 law, now called the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, the agency adopted rules forbidding landowners from interfering with eagles’ “normal breeding, feeding or sheltering behavior.”

The purpose, according to the agency, is to “ensure an almost seamless transition” from the Endangered Species Act to the eagle act.

Given those new rules, a Pacific Legal Foundation spokesman contended, the eagle’s “departure from the Endangered Species list [is] more symbolic than substantive.”

Nonetheless, Bush administration officials were planning a gala celebration at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, inviting the public to “witness history as the Secretary of the Interior makes an important announcement about the bald eagle.” Environmentalists were also hailing the eagle’s recovery as “one of the greatest wildlife success stories” in history, as the National Wildlife Federation’s John Kostyack put it.

At the same time, conservation groups have been warning of new obstacles ahead for other species.

They point to regulations being prepared by the administration that would curtail efforts to reintroduce species in areas where they are already extinct and to expand the government’s ability to deny citizens’ and scientists’ petitions to list new species.

Currently, 1,326 species in the U.S. are officially listed as endangered or threatened, but scientists have identified thousands of others that might merit inclusion. And global warming is threatening more extinctions, they say.

“We hope the administration doesn’t mar this moment by trying to gut the Endangered Species Act,” said Susan Holmes, a lobbyist for Earthjustice, a San Francisco based nonprofit group. “The best salute we can give to the bald eagle … is to keep our most popular wildlife protection law effective for generations to come.”

today im going to post 5 of my favorite engrish photos (expect plenty more). for those of you not familiar with the concept of engrish check out engrish.com. hope you enjoy!

be sure to click the thumbnail and read them.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In a famous article in 1995, Watanabe, Sakamoto and Wakita described an experiment which showed that pigeons can be trained to discriminate between paintings by Picasso and Monet.
The birds were first trained on a limited set of paintings: when the shown painting was a Picasso, the pigeon was able to obtain food by repeated pecking; when it was a Monet, pecking had no effect. After a while, the pigeons would only peck when shown Picasso paintings. They were then able to generalize, and correctly discriminate between paintings of the two painters not previously shown, and even between cubist and impressionist paintings (cubism and impressionism being the two stylistic schools Picasso and Monet belong to). When the Monet paintings were shown upside down, the pigeons were not able to properly categorize anymore; showing the cubist works upside down did not have such an effect.
In 1995, the authors won the humorous Ig Nobel Prize in psychology for this work.
In a later paper, Watanabe showed that if pigeons and human college students undergo the same training, their performance in distinguishing between Van Gogh and Chagall paintings is comparable.
Similar experiments had shown earlier that pigeons can be trained to distinguish between photos showing human beings and those that do not, and between photos showing trees and those that do not, among many other examples.
In all these cases, discrimination is quite easy for humans, even though the classes are so complex that no simple distinguishing algorithm or rule can be specified. It has therefore been argued that pigeons are able to form “concepts” or “categories” similar to humans, but that interpretation is controversial. Nevertheless, the experiments remain important and often cited examples in cognitive science.

The European Commission have just announced an agreement whereby
English
will be the official language of the EU rather than German, which was
the
other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty’s
government
conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has
accepted
a 5-year phase in plan that would be known as “EuroEnglish”:

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”– Sertainly this will
make
the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in
favor
of the “k”. This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1
less
letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the
troublesome
“ph” wil be replaced with the “f”. This will make words like
“fotograf”
20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expected
to
reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments
will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always been a
deterent
to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the
silent
“e”’s in the language is disgraceful, and they should go away.

By the 4th yar peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th”
with
“z” and “w” with “v”. During ze fifz yar, ze unesesary “o” kan be
dropd
from vords kontaining “ou” and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to
ozer
kombinations of leters. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl
riten
styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it
ezi
tu understand ech ozer.

ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!

sadly this is not a philosophical discourse of any sort. but i hope you enjoy it none the less:

What Is Love?

in a world where the innocent are almost completly overrun by the evil and corrupt the good must band together and fight. each bringing to the table their own unique gifts but channeled together in to a force none can withstand.
will you join me?

“M�

http://myimn.com

“A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.”

so now with my juries finished (i think i did well :D) i have only one last performance, tonight 7:30-9 at K300 on PCC. I, along with my piano partner Wei, will be performing the ballet from petite suite by debussy on piano. it should be great. i will be video taping it so expect a video soon. well better get to practicing.
Half Moon

Well tomorrow is my piano jury. im pretty nervous, but im sure ill do fine.
i watched a movie today. “City of god” its about a boy who grows up in the slums of rio de janeiro. its an amazing movie, but very difficult to watch. it is most definatly for a mature audience.
i cant wait till im done with school…
Half Moon

This is Stacey, shes coming into town today for a conference, we went to insight together, itll be fun seeing her again. welcome back stacey!
Michael

so today i had my final performance for my piano performance class. i played “mazurka Op. 17 No. 4″ by F. Chopin. i didnt do as well as i had hoped, but not as bad as it could have been. i think most of my mistakes were caused by the fact the i didnt try out that piano before i played. i had no idea how the keys would feel, how sensitive the pedal was, how the piano and room sounded, etc. some of the comments i got were “the pedal was blurry” and “the left had didnt have enough dynamics” and “tuck in your shirt”. i hope itll be all polished by juries.
i also went to a marimba performance today. i was walking into school when i saw robin, my latin percusion sub. he asked me if i wanted to come so i said sure. well, it was absolutely amazing. i talked to the girl who performed after and she was really cool and nice (not to mention and amazing marimbist). if you are not familiar with this instrument, i advise you to check out her site:
http://www.takadanaoko.com
listen to some of the samples she has there. my next performances are friday and saturday im pretty nervous. wish me luck!
Half Moon

in a world where the innocent are almost completly overrun by the evil and corrupt the good must band together and fight. each bringing to the table their own unique gifts but channeled together in to a force none can withstand.
will you join me?

“M”

http://myimn.com

to anyone who is interested in this, i have just posted a forum on my “M” page. go add your two cents.
Instructions:
1) follow this URL: http://myimn.com/forum/topic/show?id=609359%3ATopic%3A5223
2) If you dont have an “M” account, get one
4) Watch Video
5) Comment

all oppinions welcome.
i have also included a copy of the 99 names of allah

Michael

I had a performance tonight for my guitar ensemble class, ill be posting the video soon.
Jouba

if anyone can beat question 49 let me know thats where im stuck

The Vision Test

Your results:
You are Sayid Jarrah

Sayid Jarrah 80% Sun Kwon 70% Claire Littleton 64% Mr. Eko 60% Charlie Pace 56% Michael Dawson 48% Hugo “Hurley” Reyes 46% John Locke 45% Shannon Rutherford 40% Boone Carlyle 40% Jin-Soo Kwon 35% Kate Austen 35% James “Sawyer” Ford 29% Ana-Lucia Cortez 28% Dr. Jack Shephard 28% Walt Lloyd 16%

You can take electronic devices apart and see how to fix them. You are good at problem solving and at interrogating people.

Click here to take the Lost Personality Quiz

ok so im finally going to let you guys in. i have recently finished writing a peice called (joue des rabeaux[game of the fairies]) a kinda rough raft midi of it is on My Myspace go check it out, let me know what you think!
Half Moon

so anyone who has dipped their ears into my itunes and asked me what i like will know that i love this artist Richard bona. (see:http://www.bonatology.com his official website for more info). this video is an example of the magic he makes.

Half Moon

WOOHOO!!!!! internet has finally arrived in my room!!!!! i am soooo overjoyed. i cant wait to really post
Michael

This from a classical guitar concert i went to a while back.

Michael

so my latest interest has become break dancing, or the more correct term breaking or b-boying. heres a basic step learn it so when i come we can break!

IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?

So, here’s how it works:

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool!

Opening Credits:
One Year, Six Months (Yellowcard)

Waking Up:
Soul Mate (Michael Franks [LOL!!!!])

First Day At School:
Pra Iluminar (Leila Pinheiro)

Falling In Love:
Awake (Mungal & Nitin Sahwey[Asian Groove])

Fight Song:
Canto Alla Vita (Josh Groban)

Breaking Up:
Demain (Les Nubians)

Prom:
Pluie D’elle (Gabriel Yacoub)

Life:
Rendez-Vous Paris (Les Nubians)

Mental Breakdown:
Blue Monk (Giovanni Hidalgo)

Driving:
Dennis Steals The Embryo (John Williams [Jurassic Park])

Flashback:
Lá Vem a Baiana (Rosa Passos)

Getting Back Together:
In Love With The 80’s (Pink Tux To The Prom) (Reliant K)

Wedding:
Danse Macabre (Camile Saint-Saens)

Birth of Child:
Windy (Pokemon 2- The Power Within)

Final Battle:
Billy the Kid: 2. Street in a Frontier Town (Aaron Copeland)

Death Scene:
The Brides (Wojciech Kilar [Bram Stoker’s Drakula])

Funeral Song:
Dichotomy (Michel Camilo)

Remembrance Song:
Painless (Mae)

End Credits:
Great Romances Of The 20th Century (Taking Back Sunday)

ok i dont know who the heck is scoring my movie but they suck oh man, im horribly embarrased by some of the music ull see, but otherwise im ok cuz its probably mostly artists you guys dont know if you do this test comment the post link i would enjoy reading it.
Michael

Tomorrow i have to perform a scale.
easy enough right? iv been playing piano for 5 years more or less, iv played a lot of scales.
my teacher didnt specify a scale, she said any scale you want, and rhythm you want as long as it is recognizably a scale.
heres the catch, i have to play it with some sort of emotion that people will get.
now, for a class, for me that is a terifying prospect, i have to give myself emotionally to this class. what if they dont get the emotion i get? do i get an “F”? im simply terrified.

i have chosen a d dorian scale. that will rise in intensity for two octaves at which point the right hand will glisando back down to the lowest D on the piano. im hoping to give the impression of something close to hope. or some emotion like that… whew, breath!
Michael

this morning i had my first latin percussion techniques class. very fun we learned a basic conga rythm and some of the history of afro cuban music. we breached on a few other subjects like middle eastern, african and afro brazilian percusion. it was a good class but my hands hurt. what is your favorite musical tradition?

well yesterday was my first day of college. scary stuff i had to audition to guitar ensemble and piano ensemble. well actually i havent auditioned for piano yet. im planning on playing the minute waltz by chopin. i just made it by a hair into the guitar ensemble class but the teacher recommended as well classical guitar 1. i think ill take that as well. im kinda nervous but otherwise my first two classes were great. cool people my teachers seem knowledgable and nice. and all my classmates seem cool. hows school coming along with u guys?
Michael