Queer Visions of Freedom

Odeo Channel Claim Code

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:36:03 -0500

My Odeo Channel (odeo/337f29069744ebb0)

9 Grub Splash Images

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 05:03:35 -0500

Below are 9 GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) splash images freely shared and a brief explanation of how I got GRUB configured to display them. (I dual boot Ubuntu Edgy Eft and Windows Vista.)

Buddha	Face	Daisy

Skull	Space	Mandalas

Vase	Grass	Klimt

(image sources: TheMattrix, pscott, Metzgermeister, t_graye, stewie, firinel, e-things, Slayer)

A Brief GRUB Splash How To

a) Find gzipped, 640x480, 14 color only, xpm images (like the ones above).
b) Put the images in /boot/grub/splashimages/.
c) Rename the image you wish to use to 'splash.xpm.gz'.
d) Make a link to /boot/grub/splashimages/splash.xpm.gz and put it in /boot/grub/.
e) Open /boot/grub/menu.lst and below the 'Pretty colours' section add a third line as below:

# Pretty colours
# color cyan/blue white/blue
splashimage=(hd0,1)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

(The hd0,1 refers to hard drive 1 partition 2 where my Ubuntu file system is installed. You'll need to change those numbers if yours differs.)

f) That's it. Restart to see the new eye candy. For more in depth explanations: GNU GRUB Splash Image Howto, GRUB splash Image Information or Grub Splash.

If you liked these images, you might also like 8 Beryl Skydomes 4096x1024.

Larry Kramer: We Must Not Accept Crumbs

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:13:40 -0500

(Remarks on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of ACT UP given at the NYC Gay Community Center on March 13th, 2007 with Rodger McFarlane, Eric Sawyer, Jim Eigo, Peter Staley, Troy Masters, Mark Harrington, David Webster, Jeremy Waldron, and Hannah Arendt contributing.)

We Are Not Crumbs;
We Must Not Accept Crumbs

By Larry Kramer

One day AIDS came along. It happened fast. Almost every man I was friendly with died. Eric still talks about his first boyfriend, 180 pounds, 28 years old, former college athlete, who became a 119 pound bag of bones covered in purple splotches in months. Many of us will always have memories like this that we can never escape.

Out of this came ACT UP. We grew to have chapters and affinity groups and spin-offs and affiliations all over the world. Hundreds of men and women once met weekly in New York City alone. Every single treatment against HIV is out there because of activists who forced these drugs out of the system, out of the labs, out of the pharmaceutical companies, out of the government, into the world. It is an achievement unlike any other in the history of the world. All gay men and women must let ourselves feel colossally proud of such an achievement. Hundreds of millions of people will be healthier because of us. Would that they could be grateful to us for saving their lives.

So many people have forgotten, or never knew what it was like. We must never let anyone forget that no one, and I mean no one, wanted to help dying faggots. Sen. Edward Kennedy described it in 2006 as "the appalling indifference to the suffering of so many." Ronald Reagan had made it very clear that he was "irrevocably opposed" to anything to do with homosexuality. It would be seven years into his reign before he even said the word "AIDS" out loud, by which time almost every gay man in the entire world who'd had sex with another man had been exposed to the virus. During this entire time his government issued not one single health warning, not one single word of caution. Who cares if a faggot dies. I believe that Ronald Reagan is responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler. This is not hyperbole. This is fact.

These are just a few of the things ACT UP did to make the world pay attention: We invaded the offices of drug companies and scientific laboratories and chained ourselves to the desks of those in charge. We chained ourselves to the trucks trying to deliver a drug company's products. We liberally poured buckets of fake blood in public places. We closed the tunnels and bridges of New York and San Francisco. Our Catholic kids stormed St. Patrick's at Sunday Mass and spit out Cardinal O'Connor's host. We tossed the ashes from dead bodies from their urns on to the White House lawn. We draped a gigantic condom over Jesse Helms' house. We infiltrated the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for the first time in its history so we could confetti the place with flyers urging the brokers to "SELL WELLCOME." We boarded ourselves up inside Burroughs-Wellcome, (now named GlaxoSmithKline), which owns AZT, in Research Triangle so they had to blast us out. We had regular demonstrations, Die-Ins we called them, at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, at City Halls, at the White House, in the halls of Congress, at government buildings everywhere, starting with our first demonstration on Wall Street, where crowds of us lay flat on the ground with our arms crossed over our chests or holding cardboard tombstones until the cops had to cart us away by the vans-full. We had massive demonstrations at the FDA and the NIH. There was no important meeting anywhere that we did not invade, interrupt, and infiltrate. We threatened Bristol-Myers that if they did not distribute it immediately we would manufacture it ourselves and distribute a promising drug some San Francisco activists had stolen from its Canadian factory and had duplicated. (The drug, now known as Videx, was released. Ironically Videx was discovered at Yale, where I went to school and with whom I am still engaged in annoyingly delicious activist battles to shape them up; they too are a stubborn lot.) We utterly destroyed a Hoffmann-LaRoche luncheon when they delayed a decent drug's release. And always, we went after the New York Times for their shockingly, tragically, inept reporting of this plague. We plastered this city with tens of thousands of stickers reading, "Gina Kolata of the New York Times is the worst AIDS reporter in America." We picketed the Fifth Avenue home of the publisher of the Times, one Arthur Sulzberger. We picketed everywhere. You name a gross impediment and we picketed there, from our historic 24-hour round the clock for seven days and nights picket of Sloan Kettering to another hateful murderer, our closeted mayor, Edward I. Koch. 3000 of us picketed that monster at City Hall. And, always we protested against our ignoble presidents: Reagan. We actually booed him at a huge AmFAR benefit in Washington. He was not amused. And Bush. 2500 of us actually tracked him down at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, which did not know what had hit it. And Clinton. I cannot tell you what a disappointment he was for us. He was such a bullshitter, as I fear his wife to be. And Bush again. The newest and most evil emperor in the fullest most repellant plumage. We can no longer summon those kinds of numbers to go after him.

A lot of us got arrested a lot of times. A lot of us. A lot of us. We kept our lawyer members busy. It actually was a wonderful feeling being locked up behind bars in cells with the brothers and sisters you have fought with side by side for what you fervently believe is right.

Slowly we were noticed and even more slowly we were listened to.

Along this journey some of our members taught themselves so much about our illness and the science of it and the politics of it and the bureaucracy of it that we soon knew more than anyone else did. We got ourselves into meetings with drug company scientists who could not believe our people weren't doctors. I took a group to a meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom I had called our chief murderer in publications across the land. Dr. Fauci was and still is the government's chief AIDS person, the Director of Infectious Diseases at NIH. We were able to show him how inferior all his plans and ideas under consideration were compared to the ones that we had figured out in minute detail. We told him what they should be doing and were not doing. We showed him how he and all his staff of doctors and scientists and researchers and statisticians did not understand this patient population and that we did. By then we had located our own doctors and scientists and researchers and statisticians to talk to, some of them even joining us. When our ideas were tried, they worked. We were consistently right. Our "chief murderer" Dr. Fauci became our hero when he opened the doors at NIH and let us in, an historic moment and an historic gesture. Soon we were on the very committees we had picketed, and soon we were making the most important decisions for treating our own bodies. We redesigned the whole system of clinical trials that is in use to this day for every major illness. And of course, we got those drugs out. And the FDA approval for a new drug that once took an average of 7-12 years can now be had in less than one. ACT UP did all this. My children--you must forgive me for coming to think of them as that--most of whom are dead. You must have some idea what it is like when your children die. Most of them did not live to enjoy the benefits of their courage. They were courageous because they knew they might die. They could and were willing to fight because they felt they soon would die and there was nothing to lose, and maybe everything to gain.

And of course funeral after funeral after funeral. We made funerals into an art form, too, just as our demonstrations, our street theater, our graphics, many of which are now in museums and art galleries, were all art forms as well. God, we were so creative as we were dying.

It is important to celebrate. But it is hard to do so when so many of us aren't here. At least that is the way for me. I know we are twenty years old. It seems impossible to me that it has been so many years. I remember much of it as if it were yesterday. It is difficult to celebrate when one has such potent, painful tragic memories. We held so many of each other in our arms. One never forgets love like that. Make no mistake, AIDS was and is a terrible tragedy that need not have escalated into a worldwide plague. There were 41 cases when I started. There are some 75 million now. It takes a lot of help from a lot of enemies to rack up a tally like that.

Rodger McFarlane made this list of ACT UP's achievements: accelerated approval of investigational new drugs; expanded compassionate use of experimental drugs and new applications of existing drugs; mathematical alternatives to the deadly double-blind-placebo-controlled studies of old; rigorous statistical methods for community-based research models; accelerated and expanded research in basic immunology, virology, and pharmacology; public exposure of and procedural remedies to sweetheart practices between the NIH and FDA on one hand and pharmaceutical companies on the other (now, with our own decline, unfortunately out of control again); institutionalized consumer oversight and political scrutiny of FDA approvals for all drug classes and for vast NIH appropriations for research in every disease; state drug assistance programs; and vastly expanded consumer oversight of insurance and Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement formularies. Each of these reforms profoundly benefits the health and survival of hundreds of millions of people far, far beyond AIDS and will do so for generations to come.

To this I might add that out of ACT UP came Needle Exchange and Housing Works and AID for AIDS and The AIDS Treatment Data Network and the Global AIDS Action Committee and HealthGAP and TAG, too, the Treatment Action Group.

Perhaps you did not know we did all this. As we know, historians do not include gay anything in their histories. Gays are never included in the history of anything.

Beryl Skydomes 4096x1024

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 02:58:16 -0500

UPDATE: Also see 10 GRUB Splash Images and HowTo here on QVF.

My frequent trips to the Ubuntu forums often bring me in contact with posts about the visual wonder that is the Beryl desktop manager. I decided to take the plunge and see if my experience lived up to all the hype. In short, it has. I now find working with a regular desktop window manager limiting. Though I love the Gnome desktop environment, 3D desktops are so freeing it's difficult to go back to anything less.

See for yourself!
(hat tip: BastionPL)

Installing XGL + Beryl on Ubuntu Edgy Eft with an ATI card is relatively easy once you get the fglrx video driver working properly (that can be the tricky part). By the way, I use Trevino's Beryl SVN repository. However, when I tried to enable the ANIMATED SKYDOME feature in Beryl-Manager under Desktop / Desktop Cube / Skydome, I had trouble. Browsing the Beryl forums led me to the realization that I needed to use a PNG image with a specific resolution ratio. I'm still at a loss as to the specifics beyond that but I have found a formula which works for me on my laptop with a screen resolution of 1280x800. The formula: a PNG image at a resolution of 4096x1024. That's it.

FYI: I'm on a Dell Inspiron e1505 with the Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo processor/s, an ATI Radeon Mobile X1300 video card with a 15.4" TrueLife Wide Screen. I dual boot WindowsXP (soon Vista) and Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

And now, for your skydoming pleasure, I have created eight 4096x1024 PNG images for you to use freely. A few of them would work well on a dual screen set up (big desktop) as well. Download them and try them out. I bet you'll fall in love with at least one. Enjoy and please leave a comment of thanks if you use them or if you have any questions. ~Seamus7

1. Mystery Mountain

2. Cloudy Moon

3. Bucolic Beauty (hat tip: KoL, StudioTwentyEight, stock.xchange)

6. Mind Buddha

The Iraq Disgrace and the Coming Spin

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:59:03 -0500

I didn't vote for Bush. Twice. Yet when the Iraq occupation began, I had naively thought that it might be a good thing. Not so much for the USA but rather for the Iraqi people and the Mid-East in general. I thought that if a Secular Democracy arose it would provide a positive example in that religiously insane region. I also believed and still do that Nuclear Proliferation is an immense long-term threat to our planet that must be taken with the greatest seriousness. I think many people don't fathom the implications of nuclear technology post Cold War. I fear the Cold War was just a mild sampling of what is to come. But let me get back to Bush. I always recoiled when I heard him speak. It is important that the most powerful person in the world be incredibly intelligent and, just as importantly, incredibly rational. Bush is neither. He's rich and connected. That's all. Unfortunately, by invoking the Jesus word, he was able to hypnotize the conservative Christian element in this country into believing he would not only be Commander in Chief but also Minister in Chief. But as others have so rightly pointed out, conservative Christians seem to be easily manipulated and intoxicated by power and authority. Quickly it became apparent that Bush and his minions were incompetent and arrogant. It became apparent that many Americans have a childish view of the world and an overly mythologized view of our military. Mainstream corporate media seems to have only encouraged this broadly speaking, especially the popular Fox News Channel which can easily be described as nothing less than a Republican Propaganda Machine. Scary. And so, every week, I read and watch and shake my head as the Pentagon releases the names of another dozen or so young men and women blown to smithereens or horrifically maimed. Simply shameful, despicable, immoral. Denials and wishful thinking aside, most have died for nothing. Nothing. And yet, the ridiculous excuse making continues. We hear some saying things like "fight them there so we don't fight them here" or "send more troops" or "freedom isn't free" or "the media only shows the bad" or "defeatists". While Iraq has become a great gift to Al-Qaeda's worldwide recruiting efforts, it is well known that most of the violence in Iraq is committed by Iraqis unaffiliated with Jihad. As Iraq is in chaos, beyond Civil War, sending more troops can only suppress the conflicts in that country. And more troops will only give the Insurgents/Resistance more targets for sniping. We are, after all, foreigners occupying their country. As for freedom, Iraqis created a constitution and voted. They, like other countries in the Mid-East, are electing people who are at odds with American interests. Hmmmm. So Democracy isn't always the answer to complicated conflicts between warring religiously hysterical irrational ethnic groups unleashed by a power vacuum resulting from a lack of planning and leadership on the part of the Bush Administration and the silenced, fired or cowed military leaders under Rumsfeld. Furthermore, the death of American soldiers in Iraq does not secure my freedom or yours one iota. And at this point, it's not securing that of the Iraqis. Ironically, the death of so many American soldiers likely has only made it more difficult for Bush and the NeoCons to stop the madness. How can they live with themselves if they can't spin this failed pre-emptive war as a success on some level? And until they figure out how to spin a success out of what is obviously not, they will continue to allow the young soldiers to die of yet more IED's, snipers and inadequate armor. Rick Santorum ended his arrogant Senate career by lambasting the media for reporting that people die in war and for choosing to make horrific mass suicide bombings more newsworthy than a few schools getting new desks or a fresh coat of paint. Give me a break. Only the Rush Limbaugh set buy into that kind of irresponsible thinking. The job of journalism is to report the truth, to report what the government will not report, to expose reality. Sadly, many people prefer childlike simplistic world views which make no room for reality or facts. The truth is, the suffering and dying in Iraq is likely underreported. And to all those who call my assessment defeatist, I can only counter that anything less than full admission of defeat and failure in Iraq when assessing the way forward is deluded irresponsible insanity. It is a kind of insane denial like that of a father who insists his family not flee from their home as it's being fully engulfed in flames but rather remain and fight it. There comes a point when the flames are too hot, too close, a point when to remain would be irresponsible, insane. Our government with the consent of a large portion of its citizenry, consented to invade Iraq. In essence, like Colin Powell warned: we broke it; it's our mess to clean up. But that is too simple. What we have unleashed or uncovered or allowed to spiral out of control is now so bad that we are seemingly powerless bystanders. Unfortunately, most of those bystanders are American soldiers truly literally caught in the cross fire. What Bush has ignited in the Mid-East may be unstoppable now. He may have opened Pandora's Box there so to speak. And if it proves true, as it seems to be, that we are no longer able to affect any sort of positive change over there including containing a wider regional conflict, we must remove ourselves and let that region explode. Not a single additional soldier should die for what has become and has been frequently described as one of the most catastrophic blunders in the history of American foreign policy. To all those who voted for Bush and especially to those who voted for Bush twice the word fool clearly comes to mind. So, we await the coming "victory" spin that Bush and the NeoCons are now frantically testing out on Fox. They will have their "victory" of course but it will be even less meaningful than was their "mission accomplished".

Atheists Come Out! Stop Tip-Toeing Around as Agnostics

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:54:13 -0500

While we cannot absolutely disprove the existence of Unicorns, Gnomes, Mermaids, Zeus, Aphrodite, Santa, The Tooth Fairy, The Boogey Man, etc. and must remain technically Agnostic about them, it is okay to proclaim oneself an Atheist when discussing such things. Most people do so easily. Thus, it is intellectually okay to proclaim one's Atheism when it comes to any of the popular supernatural beliefs of today. Just do it.

Proclaiming one's Atheism is a statement about the importance of evidence in your thinking. We should not appease those who believe in the supernatural by being wishy-washy and identifying only as Agnostic if we would easily identify as Atheists about Mermaids, Unicorns and Talking Dogs.

Would you do the same if the Supernatural Set were to begin insisting that the world is flat based on an ancient text? Would you appease them by not insisting on evidence and reality in such matters? Would you appease them by calling yourself an Agnostic despite the overwhelming evidence?

It is irresponsible to tolerate nonsense especially in front of children. Naturalism (Atheism, Zoology, Geology, etc.) is to SuperNaturalism (Heaven, Gods, Curses, Withcraft, Hell) as the scientifically trained Medical Doctor is to the superstition based Witch Doctor. In both sets, one is easily and obviously discredited by the truthfulness (or lack thereof) of the information it gives us about reality. They ought not ever be equated.

God Beings are imaginary. Prayer is superstition like horseshoes or finger crossing. The Bible is repulsive, medieval, barbaric. Faith in the supernatural is bizarre and indefensible. An Afterlife is nothing more than wishful thinking. Sorry.

The Universe, just as we know it with our senses and with our technology, is more than enough for me. Its infinite awesome mystery, beauty and depth easily renders feeble and puny the various mythologies of man.

(Written in response to "Atheist groups are on the rise" from The Sun-Sentinel of South Florida.)

Useful Web Tools and Services (Web 2.0)

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 03:50:34 -0500

The web is changing quickly. Really quickly. Only recently, a diverse range of stable user-friendly free web tools and services came online. Many of these tools and services allow for social collaboration on a mass scale unlike anything seen previously in human history. Others allow the individual to store a lifetime's worth of information online, thus making it accessible from any internet connected computer to anyone, anytool and anyservice the individual gives access. Some people call this phenomenon 'Web 2.0'.

Below are ten web tools and services (in no particular order) I find really useful:

StumbleUpon: Start truly power surfing the web using this simple browser toolbar (IE and Firefox) in collaboration with a worldwide online community of fellow surfers.
Wanna see how StumbleUpon works?

del.icio.us: Start keeping all of your bookmarks online. This way, they're much easier to manage and accessible from any computer. A vast community of bookmarkers gives del.icio.us a powerful collaborative aspect, allowing you to monitor what's popular. Another great tool for power surfers.
Wanna see what people recently bookmarked with del.icio.us?

Writely: Create, store and share documents all online. Google bought Writely not too long ago but opened registration to the public just a few days ago. This is a great place to keep and work with important documents. (Tip: to upload up to 10 documents at once, email them to Writely as attachments!)
Wanna take a tour of Writely?

flickr: Stop crowding your hard drive and upload all your photos and all future photos to flickr - an online photo storage and sharing community. You get 20MB of online storage free per month.
Wanna explore interesting photos on flickr?

Snipshot: This online photo editing tool saves me a lot of time. When I just want to save an image with only minor alterations, Snipshot is a much better choice than Photoshop. Why? I don't need to leave my browser.
Wanna give the Snipshot bookmarklet a try?

meebo: Log into all of the major instant messaging services (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, etc.) simultaneously and from one browser window. All of your chat buddies from each service are unified onto one list. And with meebo you can now uninstall all of those individual chat clients from your computer!
Wanna see who's using meebo?

popurls: This is the queen of Web 2.0 aggregators. (Who the king is I dunno.) On its one page you will find the current top links from each of several ... wait for it .... popular urls. And its simple slick presentation makes it very useful indeed.

Stickam: It calls itself an all in one multimedia communication tool. It is. Upload your personal photos, audio and video. Hook up your webcam. Embed the Stickam player in your blog. Voila. Your broadcasting.
Wanna see who's live via Stickam right now?

Wayfaring: Create personalized maps and share them. Favorite cafes. Travelog. Celebrity sightings. Map them all.
Wanna see what others are mapping on Wayfaring?

Rollyo: Roll your own search engines. Really. Create a customized search roll for each of your interests or use those created by others.
Wanna see some search rolls created by celebrities on Rollyo?

There are many others. Any recommendations?

Do We Need Religion to Make Good Decisions?

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 19:50:53 -0500

No. We don't need religion to make good decisions. And by religion, I mean that which differentiates it from other community organizations:

• belief in the supernatural and the superstitious (a god being, prayer, miracles) and
• faith in the infallibility of ancient texts or the authority of the priestly class (bible, koran, pope, preacher, etc.).

Decision making ought to be based on the best facts that one can surmise. Since we know that ancient texts are often filled with barbaric cruel immoral contradictory stories (see the Bible) written by a multitude of men for a multitude of ancient cultures, they cannot be the best source of wisdom when deciding things today.

These facts ought to based on reality or as close an approximation to reality that is currently available. The Scientific Method (and its handmaiden: Technology) is the best tool we have for investigating reality. With science, we separate fact from wishful thinking (an afterlife, angels, psychic power). With science, we separate fact from superstition (prayer, ghosts, curses, hell).

Reality ought to be based on evidence. Evidence is the foundation of science. And evidence ought to be the foundation for good decisions. Not supernatural beliefs, not superstitions, not faith in ancient texts, not adherence to dogma, not anything non-reality based.

Therefore, the best decision making from the minute (or individual) to the grand (or governmental) ought to be based on facts, based on reality, based on evidence.

And most people already live their lives in this way. People insist their transportation, medicine, food, buildings and utilities meet strict scientific standards. People insist their professionals: doctors, lawyers, engineers, technicians, and mechanics are trained according to strict scientific standards.

(fade in scary music) Less and less, the purveyors of the supernatural - the priestly class - influence the day to day decisions of humanity. And that is good. Otherwise, a return to the Dark Ages awaits! (swell music) Wha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!! (fade out)

(The preceding was my comment in resonse to a post at Newsvine.com.)

*Obviously, I'm an Atheist (naturalist, humanist, rationalist). I used to call myself an Agnostic until I thought about it. I can't definitively prove that Unicorns don't exist but I'm a Unicorn Atheist nonetheless. With that in mind, I've since dropped the wishy-washy Agnostic label when it comes to omnipotent omniscient magical God Beings in the sky and now Atheist easily and confidently rolls off my lips whenever anyone asks.

Pema Chodron: Loving-Kindness

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 04:17:16 -0500

Pema Chodron is an American Buddhist nun and author whose teachings and writings on meditation have helped make Buddhism accessible to a broad Western audience. I have a couple of her books and admire her immensely. This last week she interviewed with Bill Moyers for his PBS special Faith & Reason. The first few paragraphs from her beautiful book The Wisdom of No Escape follow:

"There's a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. you can see this even in insects and animals and birds. All of us are the same.

A much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passioante, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is, how we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is. If we're committed to comfort at any cost, as soon as we come up against the least edge of pain, we're going to run; we'll never know what's beyond that particular barrier or wall or fearful thing.

When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are. ... But loving-kindness --- maitri --- toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That's the ground, that's what we study, that's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest."

Podcast 11: Brokeback Mountain Soundtrack

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:04:33 -0500

In this broadcast, I've assembled selections from the award winning Brokeback Mountain Soundtrack. Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla's evocative theme opens and closes this playlist. In between you'll hear music from Rufus Wainwright, Roger Miller, Bob Dylan, Teddy Thompson and Bernie Taupin with performances by Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris.

Download QVF Podcast Eleven (mp3) or
Subscribe to the QVF Podcast Feed (iTunes, MyYahoo, Odeo, etc.).

My Odeo Channel (odeo/337f29069744ebb0)

Podcast 10: Jerome Kern's All The Things You Are

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 00:12:14 -0500

In this broadcast, we'll be exploring a few variations on the Jerome Kern standard All The Things You Are. First, Sarah Vaughan uses her sultry voice to lay out the basics for us. Then, you'll hear the sax of Sonny Rollins, the trumpet of Chet Baker and the piano of Keith Jarrett. Can you identify the other perfomers? Who's the guitarist after Sarah and whose magnificent orchestra concludes this playlist?

Download QVF Podcast Ten (mp3) or
Subscribe to the QVF Podcast Feed (iTunes, MyYahoo, Odeo, etc.).

Podcast 9: Cal Tjader and Al Di Meola

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 22:59:17 -0500

In this broadcast, Latin Jazz is our theme. First up, three selections from Cal Tjader's album Soul Sauce: Guachi Guaro, Cuando Cuando Que Sera and Afro Blue. Next, a brilliant performance by guitarist Al Di Meola entitled Mediterranean Sundance. Then, the British Jazz Fusion group Acoustic Alchemy gives us the beautiful The Wind of Change.

Download QVF Podcast Nine (mp3) or
Subscribe to the QVF Podcast Feed (iTunes, MyYahoo, Odeo, etc.).

A Clearing in the Forest

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 22:31:09 -0500

A Clearing in the Forest by seamus.seven, originally uploaded 29th November, 2006

Infinite Beauty

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 21:19:08 -0500

Infinite Beauty by seamus.seven, originally uploaded 30th November, 2006

Podcast 8: A Little Night Music

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 19:23:44 -0500

In this broadcast, I present for your listening pleasure a few choice highlights from Sondheim's A Little Night Music. Selections include Now, Remember, You Must Meet My Wife, The Sun Won't Set and of course Send In The Clowns. The recording is from the Royal National Theatre's revival starring Judy Dench.

Download QVF Podcast Eight (mp3) or
Subscribe to the QVF Podcast Feed (iTunes, MyYahoo, Odeo, etc.).

Wild Flowers in Clermont

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 03:36:03 -0500

Wild Flowers by seamus.seven, originally uploaded 23rd July, 2006