div class="center"div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/18/ca/0009ca18.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/18/ca/0009ca18_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_641560"//a/div/divbr/ div class="center"bSteely Dan - Gaucho [SHM-CD]/bbr/ EAC | Flac-Cue | 258mb Rar'dbr/ iScans Included/i/divbr/ Gaucho essentially replicates the smooth jazz-pop of Aja, but with none of that record's dark, seductive romance or elegant aura. Instead, it's meticulous and exacting; each performance has been rehearsed so many times that it no longer has any emotional resonance.

Thirty years ago today, nearly a thousand adults and children lost their lives in Jonestown, Guyana. The settlement was also known as "Peoples Temple Agricultural Project", and was formed by followers of the Reverend Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. Today, some refer to the mass deaths as suicide, others murder. We still don't really know all the facts of what happened -- autopsies were botched, records and forensic evidence were mis-handled, and many of the US government's documents remain classified, out of reach of FOIA requests. But we understand that most of the people who died on November 18, 1978 drank fruit-flavored Flavor-Aid laced with a variety of intoxicants and poisons: Valium, chloral hydrate, and cyanide. The victims included hundreds of children. Many of the corpses had wounds indicating that they received cyanide injections. Jones' followers had moved from their Northern California base to the South American jungle the year before. The promise: they'd build a utopian, agrarian, interracial community in Guyana, a welcoming nation with a Socialist goverment at the time. Jonestown was to be free from racism, sexism, and ageism, and founded on communist principles. Jones told his followers to think of him as a living incarnation of Jesus Christ, and God. In the past 30 years, many documentaries, books, and written reports have been produced about Jones, Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. I'll be blogging pointers to some of them today. I want to start with the one I've returned to again and again -- a radio documentary from 1981 that for me, also defines the lasting power of what radio journalism can achieve. "Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown," was co-written by my NPR colleague Noah Adams. Here's a snip from the original introduction on npr.org: In the months preceding the tragedy, Jim Jones and his People’s Temple followers recorded their tho ughts, their problems and their aspirations. The hundreds of hours of audio tape form the basis of [this] NPR documentary (...) written by James Reston, Jr and Noah Adams, and produced by Deborah Amos. It was based on the tapes Reston acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, and won most major broadcast awards including the Dupont Col umbia Award, the National Headliner Award and the Prix Italia. Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown recaptures the final months for the People’s Temple cult. After problems arose for the group in San Francisco, they moved to the South American jungle during the 1970's. In 1978, reports of an increasingly hostile and controlling atmosphere by Jones led to a Congressional fact-finding mission into the cult. As the group, led by Rep. Leo J. Ryan (D-Calif.), was preparing to leave they were ambushed. Ryan, three American journalists and a Peoples Temple defector were killed. A dozen other people were injured. The incident was just hours prior to the deaths of the cult members. Here's the web page for Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown, with audio links. Here is the direct *.ram link for the complete 90 minute program (requires Real Audio). The website for this related NPR feature, produced in 2003, also includes 3 direct audio urls for "Father Cares," broken into 45 minute chunks (requires Real Audio or Windows Media Player). Another powerful, related NPR piece: Noah Adams talks with Deborah Layton, author of Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple. Here is more on producer Deborah Amos. Here is James Reston's website. You may also want to obtain a copy of Reston's book, for which this radio work was, in part, preparatory research: Our Father, Who Art In Hell. I stayed up all night last Saturday listening to Father Cares in entirety. I really hope you listen to it, too -- it's amazing. It captures the souls of those who died, and those who survived, with a sense of lasting respect and sorrow....br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=c44e9f1943ed9ebc1c618bd30ebdc567"img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=c44e9f1943ed9ebc1c618bd30ebdc567" border="0" //a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=c44e9f1943ed9ebc1c618bd30ebdc567" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

div class="image"a href="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/big_show.php?/avaxhome/18/c5/0009c518.jpeg" target="_blank"img src="http://pixhost.ws/avaxhome/18/c5/0009c518_medium.jpeg" id="external_img_640280"//a/divbr/ div class="center"bBoston Camerata, Joel Cohen - Tristan et Iseult/bbr/ EAC FLAC cue | Booklet | 365 MB | Medieval br/ iErato ECD 75528 (1987)/i/divbr/ br/ div class="center"JOEL COHEN, BOSTON CAMERATA / 26. TRISTAN ISEULTbr/ Une légende du Moyen-Age en musique et en poésie/divbr/ br/ table class="quote"trtd class="quote_left"#8220;/tdtd class="quote_center"Since the great recordings of Clemencic and, more recently, of Sequentia, such a beautiful immersion into the poetic mysteries of the Middle Ages has not been heard. These original fragments of the Tristan legend bring intense happiness...the vocal passages are so beautiful (and the late Henri Ledroit sings with such purety) that this recording is to be recommended without reservation to all those who are enamoured of the Tristan story and the courtly Middle Ages. br/ bdiv class="right"(iCentre Presse/i)/div/bbr/ br/ The instruments...sound forth with fullness, brilliance, and flair. Their melodic approach is subtle and precise. Remarkably intelligent nuances, never mannered, lend a delightful savor to the music, bathed with a feeling of medieval mysticism. Certain instrumental passages, some of them heart-rending (flute solos that evoke Japanese music) awaken a multitude of poetic images of the sort found in medieval illuminations. The singers are admirable; each note sounds with passion and taste, each phrase is fully realised...Ledroit suggests the impenetrable mystery of the Tristan legend, Anne Azema recreates with fresh energy the adored Lady of the troubadors...Everything is bathed in light, seductive, full of life...a feast! and the perfect harmony among singers and instrumentalists allows us to appreciate to the fullest this strange, magical medieval universe. In short, everything has come together to make this disc, magnificently recorded (the only defect is a small amount of tape hiss) a cornerstone of any medieval record collection. br/ bbr/ div class="right"(iRepertoire du Compact, Paris/i)/div/bbr/ /tdtd class="quote_right"#8221;/td/tr/table