Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, About the Film, 'BLUE NOTE RECORDS: BEYOND THE NOTES explores the unique vision behind the iconic jazz record label. Through rare archival footage, current recording sessions and conversations with Blue Note artists, the film reveals a powerful mission and illuminates the vital connections between jazz and hip hop. One of the most important record labels in the history of jazz — and, by extension, that of American music — Blue Note Records has been home to such groundbreaking artists as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bud Powell and Art Blakey, as well as present-day luminaries like Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire and Norah Jones. Founded in New York in 1939 by German Jewish refugees Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the history of Blue Note Records goes beyond the landmark recordings, encompassing the pursuit of musical freedom, the conflict between art and commerce and the idea of music as a transformative and revolutionary force.' back

Edwina Preston, Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting ‘the full catastrophe of life’, ' Letters did not count [as writing]. A woman might write letters while sitting by her father’s sick-bed. She could write them by the fire while the men talked without disturbing them. The strange thing is, I thought, turning over the pages of Dorothy’s letters, what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene. — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own' back

Lagrangian - Wikipedia, Lagrangian - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Lagrangian, L, of a dynamical system is a function that summarizes the dynamics of the system. It is named after Joseph Louis Lagrange. The concept of a Lagrangian was originally introduced in a reformulation of classical mechanics by Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton known as Lagrangian mechanics. In classical mechanics, the Lagrangian is defined as the kinetic energy, T, of the system minus its potential energy, V. In symbols, L = T - V. ' back

Living (2022 film) - Wikipedia, Living (2022 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Living is a 2022 British drama film directed by Oliver Hermanus from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, adapted from the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru directed by Akira Kurosawa, which in turn was inspired by the 1886 Russian novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy. Set in 1953 London, it depicts a bureaucrat in the county Public Works department (played by Bill Nighy) facing a fatal illness. Living had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival on 21 January 2022, and was released in the United Kingdom on 4 November 2022, by Lionsgate. . . ..' back

Matt Fitzpatrick, With AUKUS, Australia has wedded itself to a risky US policy on China – and turned a deaf ear to the region, ' In announcing the AUKUS submarine deal in the US this week, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese emphasised it was aimed at allowing nations in the region to “act in their sovereign interests free from coercion” and would “promote security by investing in our relationships across our region”. . . . The deal confirms two things that nations in the region have long suspected. First, Australia is incapable of imagining an Asia-Pacific region that is not militarily dominated by the United States. In addition, the deal suggests we are still politically attached to the United Kingdom – the post-Brexit ghost of a past British empire once again looking east of the Suez Canal towards Asia and the Pacific. Read more: The AUKUS pact, born in secrecy, will have huge implications for Australia and the region The second is that, despite the window dressing, Australia’s deafness to regional misgivings has not improved since the change to a Labor government.' ' back

Michelle Grattan, Former treasury head Ken Henry says we need ‘big bang’ tax reform rather than incremental change, back

Miryam Naddaf, Gigantic map of fly brain is a first for a complex animal, ' Scientists have generated the first complete map of the brain of a small insect, including all of its neurons and connecting synapses. The research, published on 9 March in Science1, provides a brain-wiring diagram known as the connectome of a complex animal for the first time — the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The map shows all 3,016 neurons and 548,000 synapses tightly packed in a young Drosophila’s brain, which is smaller than a poppy seed. The map is a milestone in understanding how the brain processes the flow of sensory information and translates it into action. “Now we have a reference brain,” says Marta Zlatic, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, and co-author of the paper. “We can look at what happens to connectivity in models of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and of any degenerative disease".' back

Norah Jones, Greatest Hits: Full Album 2021, back

Patrck Gathara, How an LGBTQ court ruling sent Kenya into a moral panic, ' . . . It is important to note, as upheld by both the High Court and the Supreme Court, and contrary to the assertions of some, that the arcane text of these laws does not actually criminalise homosexuality or homosexual relationships or even homosexual orientation. Rather it sanctions certain undisclosed sexual acts deemed to be “against the order of nature” regardless of the sexual orientation of the person committing them. Under the same laws, for example, heterosexual couples could be conceivably prosecuted for practising oral or anal sex. However, the laws are almost exclusively used to target gay people. . . . ' back

Tamlyn Avery, Jean Toomer’s Cane at 100: the ‘everlasting song’ that defined the Harlem Renaissance, ' Renowned for its experimental style and provocative depictions of 20th century US race relations, Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) remains the great enigma of African American literary modernism. The novel interweaves the stories of multiple characters’ lives in southern and northern communities during the post-slavery “Jim Crow” era. It both reflected and was the product of the extraordinary cultural transformations that occurred as millions of African Americans migrated from the deep south to northern cities such as New York, an exodus later called the Great Migration. Cane would play a crucial role in shaping the artistic ethos of the Harlem Renaissance (c.1919–1936), the cultural revolution that resulted from that south-to-north traffic.' back

Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 2, 3, Does God exist?, 'I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . ' back

Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, lit. 'that which moves without being moved' or prime mover (Latin: primum movens) is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause (or first uncaused cause) or "mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek: Λ) of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. He equates this concept also with the active intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the unmoved mover in the Quinque viae. ' back

William Shakespeare (1608), King Lear act I, scene 4, 302: Serpent's tooth, ' LEAR: How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child.' back