I am a huge music slut, so much of what I'll post about will be music-related. Here's my first offering in that vein:

Top 5 Jazz Artists

5. John Coltrane
4. Dave Brubeck
3. Charles Mingus
2. Django Reinhardt
1. Miles Davis

I'm not a Jazz expert by any means, but in the past few years my appreciation for it has greatly expanded. It all started with Miles Davis (it actually all started with the movie Swing Kids), and I doubt he will ever be displaced from my number one spot. Now I love The Grateful Dead, but they were more about the message and the experience. I love the Beatles, but I still think they're pretty overrated. I love The Velvet Underground, but they burned brightly and also shortly. And I love Bob Dylan to an unhealthy degree, and I think that for a short time in the sixties he transcended the title "musician", but besides those inspired few years his musicianship is really just standard 'above average'. So I would label Miles as the greatest pure musician of the 20th century. His duration, his variance, and his skill outmatched pretty much everyone.


Top 5 Blues Artists

5. Charley Patton
4. Robert Johnson
3. Lucille Bogan
2. Blind Willie Johnson
1. Mississippi John Hurt

I don't claim to be a great Blues expert, either, but I am a Blues purist. As soon as Blues became a genre of music rather than a way of life, I feel that the entire enterprise lost its impact. The reason the music was so powerful was because many or most of the artists were blind men living on the streets for whom music was their only way of staying alive or they were nomads whose chief way of living was going from bar to bar or they were dirt poor sharecroppers who escaped from the grind of life through their music. They didn't choose to be Blues musicians; their lives and their music gave birth to the Blues as we know it.

I was in my non-violence class yesterday. It's co-taught by a man named Sydney Burris and a Tibetan monk named Geshe Dorjee. Geshe is the highest rank amongst Buddhist monks. It takes about twenty years of trials and education to achieve, and Geshe Dorjee is the only Geshe in America to hold a regular position at a University. At the beginning of class yesterday they dropped a bombshell: His Holiness the Dalai Lama has agreed to come to my school (the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, AR). He'll be here May 11th, 2011, in our basketball arena which seats 18000+ but will no doubt sell out, and I don't care if I have to camp out for a week, I'm going to get a ticket. I never ever thought I would get to see the Dalai Lama in person. It's taken three years of work from Burris, Dorjee, and many others (and it will take another year of preparation). This was truly monumental news. I can't properly describe the atmosphere of the classroom when we were told, or the feeling I was left with afterward. I was floating, I was already affected by the mere news of his coming. It was incredible.

Today I was cleaning

and I found a piece of paper where I had written a list terms that had caught my interest while in class. There are several such pieces of paper floating about. People, works, movements, etc. Shit that came up in passing during lecture. Some I already knew a little about (Bayard Rustin, Anabaptists, Vinoba Bhave, etc), some I knew nothing about (Vaclav Havel, Jayaprakash Narayan, etc); but about each I wanted to learn more. Right now I'm going to transcribe the list here so that I can recycle the piece of paper, and later on I'll go back and write a little bit about each thing. So...

Vaclav Havel
A.J. Muste
James Farmer
Bayard Rustin
Trappist Monks
Thomas Merton
Origen
Tertullian
Rene McGraw
Ronald Neihbur
Vinoba Bhave
Jayaprakash Narayan
Fred Hampton
William Langland
John Gower
The Gospel of Matthew
The Sermon on the Mount
Bodhisattvacharyavatara
"Moral Man and Immoral Society"
"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"
"Piers Plowman"
"The Lover's Confession"
Islamic Monasticism
The Schleitheim Confession
Anabaptism

Hello

This is my first post. Isn't it pretty?

This blog will be the receptacle of any and all stray thoughts or top ten lists, but serious issues will also pop up from time to time. The most common will probably be religion, violence and non-violence, feminism, primates, philosophy, and history.

I hope I get a reader or two, and I hope they enjoy what they read.

This is a blog I wrote when I was a teenager, just in case you want to get to know me a little better. I haven't touched it in almost five years, which just makes me feel ridiculously old.