Shaking Up Madison Avenue

Miles Copeland, who helped launch a new era in marketing and entertainment thinking when he paired Sting and Jaguar in a wildly successful 2000 TV advertising campaign selling cars and music, is now building a multimedia franchise around two troupes of professional belly dancers.

From AdAge, thanks to mermaid59 in bellydancing

To me this is good news as my New York friends who are involved in the art are still suffering from the backlash from 9/11. I am happy to see that this may be less true elsewhere, less effected by those acts of terrorism, where a smaller proportion of the population feels a visceral loyalty to Israel and passionate loathing of everything Arab.

Rembetica

"As the army retreated back to Greece it brought with them the surviving Greek population of Asia Minor. By 1922 there were two million refugees in the country. These were Greeks who had never lived in Greece. They had come from the fertile lands of Anatolia but were now forced to live in a small mountainous country that could not support them, or in refugee settlements in Pireaus and Thessaloniki. It was in the cafes and hash dens near these settlements that what we know as Rembetika began.

"Imagine yourself as a refugee. In Asia Minor you may have had a business, a nice home, money, friends, family. But in the slums of Athens all you had was whatever you could carry with you out of Turkey, and your shattered dreams. You went from being in the middle class to being underground in a foreign country that did not particularly want you. Rembetika was the music of these outcasts. The lyrics reflected their surroundings, poverty, pain, drug addiction, police oppression, prison, unrequited love, betrayal and hashish. It was the Greek urban blues."

Click the link for more -- with music!!!

Lind Channels Wilhelm II

"Ja, genau," the Kaiser replied. "I guess you haven’t spent enough time at court to really understand these things. As Bismarck said to me just yesterday, al Qaeda and George Bush need each other."

Payday and the Boss Left Early

So how bad can it be?

Well, I still have to go home to a pretty much unmitigated disaster.

Went out to cash my check and stopped at Stern's (African) Music and picked up a couple of CDs to cheer me up. Majnoun, by the Schäl Sick Brass Band, on Network, is having just that effect. It is a Cologne group led by a Bavarian with a an Iranian vocalist and an Indian percussionist, which is just about eclectic enough for me - and wait, is this an African rap number?

Yes, I do like this.

Now, if only my house would fix itself.