20.8.09

No Jewish Music in Top 50 World Music Albums!

Well the good people over at Amazon.com have a list of the best 100 world music albums of all time and I spot three Jewy ones in the bunch.

The kicker: none of them break into the top fifty!

Ofra Haza comes in at 61 Idan Raichel at 75 and Andy Statman at 93 (how is he world music btw? World Music being defined here as non-Western)

Where is Habreira Hatvit???? Shlomo Bar was world music before world music even existed folks! And what about Miguel Hurstein's magnificent Bustan Avraham?

One more thing - Fela with Ginger Baker as his best? Fela has five albums better than that one. Try Odoo - a full on masterpiece! The title track's double bass lines alone are sheer brilliance.

4.8.09

The Pull-Quote

Believer, Beware got this wonderful write up in Huffington Post while I was off in Israel drinking Yotvata's delicious chocolate milk.

"I hate anthologies -- all that stopping and starting, just as you get into a writer. I loved this one though because it reflects the theme of my own disjointed weird life. I grew up as a missionary kid, pastor's sidekick, God merchant, Religious Right leader, you name it. I long since escaped if not to sanity then to a little more happiness. So I sometimes read other people's books about religion and most are from the outside in. Take it from one who knows this wacky territory, Believer Beware is from the inside out.

Who can beat this opening to "Please Don't Feed the Prophet," a story by Daniel S. Brenner? "God is a sweater that you grew out of. God is an old book on Soviet politics lying in a thrift shop. God is a friend from college that you want to get rid of but can't. God is a souvenir."

Believer Beware is laugh out loud funny, touching, irreverent and yet, in deeper ways, pays religion the ultimate compliment: it's worthy of scrutiny, debate, hate, love and loathing and measuring up on a very personal scale of intimate first hand experience. You may divorce religion but as the writer's in this book demonstrate, you never sever the ties, you'll owe "alimony" for the rest of your life. So this is a book for anyone who knows two things: first, that for better or worse religion is important; second, that experiencing religion can be a harrowing passage into the darker side of human frailty and sometime into liberating (even sublime) hilarity."