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Outside of the class and the world music store, I was often enamored by many different veins of world music being performed on the streets and in the clubs of the European cities. I heard examples ranging from Bali throat singing to Italian traditional instrumental music to Turkish stringed instruments ensembles, but the most relevant performance I heard was a world music "crossover" ensemble featuring Klaus Winterstellar, called Didgegroove. The ensemble was able to put a world music twist on contemporary Western-style grooves using various African and Asian percussion instruments, a guitar, and the droning sound of the didgeridoo. This sound has become the greatest influence in the style that I am creating. This project will be performed by the University of Kentucky Mega-Sax quartet this fall, and could potentially be recorded on the next "UK Mega-Sax" release, directed by Professor Miles Osland. The previous two recordings by this ensemble have received Four Stars in the Downbeat jazz magazine, and this summer's release "Profound like Gumbo" has already received a Four Star review from allmusic.com. Alex Brooks I am here in Florence, Italy, to write a book. Or more precisely, I am here to imagine the book I need to write and then attempt to get it down on paper. You could say that I am living with this book. Even when I am not physically writing I am thinking about scenes or characters or sentences or words. I do not choose to do this; it just comes naturally to me. When I read a book I compare it to what I am working on. When something happens to me here I ask myself how it fits into my book. I joke with myself by saying that I am not traveling alone because my characters come with me. I am always asking myself how they would react to a situation, what would they think or do. To write about traveling, you must travel, in one way or another. To write about adventures you must have had adventures, and to write about dreams you must dream. So that is what I am doing. Traveling, adventuring, dreaming, and then writing about it all. My work here is very simple. First of all I write in a journal. I record things that happen every day, people I meet, conversations, things I see and do. I write about the books I am reading, about how I am feeling and about my emotions - all of this a mishmash of confused writing with no direction at all. Together with this I write down many memories and all kinds of dreams.
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But I have a definite goal in mind, a definite book with a definite set of characters and a story. I work writing these stories and characters, trying to figure out how I can make a book out of them and make sense of it all together. Besides this, I write about the problems I am having with writing. I write about my confusions and clarities, my difficulties and successes. My second major occupation here is reading. I read other traveling authors like Melville, St. Exuperey, and Moitessier. I read the mystic poetry of Rumi. These books take me traveling with them. I feel as if the writer were sitting next to me and telling me the story. I try to think about how they wrote, what they were doing and thinking about as they made their books. Thirdly, I do lots of living, perhaps the most important of all. I examine myself in my new surroundings and situations, examine my dreams. I stare a lot at the ocean or at mountains. I watch people, listen to them, and speak with them. I ride trains, catch buses, walk for hours through the different cities. Once, in Hungary, I was walking down a back street when I came upon a fenced in yard where a few men were sculpting huge pieces of rock. The yard was littered with large heads and arms, just scattered around randomly, and I just watched them for a while. I drink tea. I think about home and what I will do when I get home. These are not really adventures I am having; Melville would agree with me that most adventures are really nine parts hardship and unhappiness. It is just life. I will decide later which part of my life, real, dreamed, imagined, or made up, needs to be in a book. Charles Max Brown The Universe is rich in structure. In fact, the galaxies are arranged in a string-like, filamentary structure that can be statistically measured. Because galaxies form by drawing together all the mass in the surrounding space, there are large empty regions, voids, that should also have structure. We computationally defined voids as polygons whose vertices are galaxies and are applying this two dimensional construct to the Las Campanus Redshift Survey to determine the voids' distribution, their maximum size, and their eccentricity. This information is vital in the study of both the current and primordial Universe. |
