Listen to this. (from the site)

The present disc commences with Rabih Abou-Khalil’s Arabian Waltz, a sexy, poly-rhythmic piece that gives the Ensemble’s string players, including a Persian kamancheh spike fiddle and a plucked Chinese pipa, plus a Japanese shakuhachi flute, a vigorous workout.

Next is the Night of the Flying Horses. Composed by Osvaldo Golijov, the three movements are redolent of Eastern European and Roma (Gypsy) themes and feature the shakuhachi and sheng, a Chinese mouth organ.

Hai-Hai Huang’s Galloping Horses is a merrily witty sonic picture of Mongolian wild steeds on the move, with solos for pipa and double bass. Track four, the muscularly atonal, impressionistic Song of Eight Unruly Tipsy Poets, was composed by Chinese-born Zhou Long, who is now based in the USA.

Kayhan Kalhor is a renowned exponent of the kamancheh and a noted composer. His The Silent City, scored for strings and percussion, is an elegy for the town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan, which was destroyed in 1988.

Shristi, a work by famed tabla (Indian tuned drum) master Sandeep Das, depicts the Hindu god Shiva Nataraj and his drum in the act of creating the universe.

On the world premiere of Ambush From Ten Sides, a Chinese traditional melody is arranged by Li Cang Sang and China Magpie into six sweepingly cinematic visions of war and its aftermath.

The album concludes with Vocussion, a Silk Road audience favorite in which the five Ensemble members who created it explode into vocal percussion effects.

Gerda Taro

Images from the first major exhibition of Gerda Taro's work at the International Center for Photography. Ms. Taro was seen by many as the first woman known to photograph a battle from the front lines and to die covering a war.

What I want for Christmas. I may not get world peace -- based on justice, but any of these DVDs will make me happy.

Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.

— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979

 

To feel so much pain, and yet to give out so much light -- what better defines a saint, I say?

With the unearthing of her letters, there's a lot of discussion of why she did not feel the presence of God for the longest time, with discussions ranging from philosophical to theological, to psychological.

What about the merely practical? Try living your life in a slum, in all its misery, constant violence, filth, opportunism and hopelessness. Would your being not absorb all that and feel emptiness and pain?

Burnout, like some activists I know.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html