Music and book links

A strong white-out greeted me this morning – a light snow covering and thick mist. One of the nice things about a nomadic life (at the moment the less exotic sort of having one’s books and music spread over 3 Romanian properties) is (re)discovery. The Bucharest flat is tiny and needs therefore the occasional transfer of books, paintings and other artefacts to the other 2 places. This week I took some CDs and came across a CD I had forgotten about - The Finnish composer Arvo Paerto’s Fratres played by the Orchestra of Flanders. It’s a stunning bit of minimalism for strings, wind and percussion. You can hear a rather inferior version of a cello section played by Columbia University Orchestra here. With the greater space I have in the mountain house, I’m able to use speakers to link up with the incredible number of internet musical channels – listed here. But my favourite is BBC World’s “Through the Night” programme which gives 6 hours’ daily listening available for a full week – with a written programme! When you hear a beautiful piece on the radio, it is very annoying to miss the brief identification you (sometimes) get at the end (particularly if it’s in a foreign language!). So top marks to the BBC!

I promised to mention a couple of googlebooks each entry. First David Korten’s latest book – Agenda for a new Economy - from Phantom Wealth to Real Wealthwhich continues his sterling effort in the last 2 decades to sketch out a better way. He is someone who practised mainstream economic consultancy – and then saw the error of his ways (see Prologue from page 11 of one of his first books). Such reformed gangsters make better analysts of the “mafia” system which is modern professionalism.
The second book is by the Swede, Erik Ringmar, whom I mentioned recently and is now a Professor at a Taiwan University - Surviving Capitalism; how we learned to live with the market and remained almost human. Apart from the clarity and iconoclastic tone, the book is distinctive in giving us a historical “take” on neo-liberalism.
The painting is Romanian - Theodor Pallady