My good friend and colleague Yigal Schleifer has a piece on page 1 of the Monitor about Roj TV, the Kurdish TV station broadcasting from Denmark.
Michael Totten has a great post about crossing from Iraqi Kurdistan back into Turkey by car. Brings back memories. We also had to avoid a driver’s scheme to smuggle cigarettes. And it seems that we encountered the same Turkish soldier from Melbourne, Australia. Totten’s post also reminded me of something I forgot to mention in my series — no ATMs
My friend Tad Hendrickson has a piece in the May 2006 Jazz Times about major jazz labels signing more and more non-jazz acts. He quotes Ron Goldstein of the Verve Music Group as follows: It’s not that we want to be out of the jazz business. It’s just that there is nothing that is coming along that is exciting. There
From opposite sides of the political spectrum, here and here. (Hat tips: David Bloom and The Plank, respectively.)
Go here to read about this new initiative of the democratic left. I’ve signed and sent a brief statement, although I think there’s little to add to this bit by Harry of Harry’s Place: If once the question was are you with the Hungarian or Czech revolutionaries or the Soviet tanks which crush them – now it is about being,
I play acoustic guitar on two tracks (“Wake Up,” “Cupid”) from a really nice album by singer-songwriter Nicholas Naylor-Leyland. It’s called Chocolate Tiger: The End of an Error, and it’s available here.
For those interested in reading my Jazz Times column on Tarik Shah, the jazz bassist accused of conspiring to aid al-Qaeda, you can access it here [pdf]. In the time since I filed the piece, it has come to light that Shah’s trial will not begin until October, and that he will remain in solitary confinement until then. Although I
In this earlier post, I touched on Kurdish nationalism. But I haven’t really weighed in on the issue of “Greater Kurdistan,” i.e., the idea of sovereignty for a Kurdish nation straddling parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. In short, it’s not going to happen. And it seems to me that the violent and authoritarian outlook of the Kurdistan Workers