Basically, an orchestra is composed of different instruments that blend harmoniously together to create an enchanting music. There are different classifications of musical instruments that are used in the modern orchestra. These are the woodwinds, the brass, the percussion, the keyboards and the strings. These classifications are further subdivided into different instruments.

The woodwinds is composed of the piccolo, bassoons, contrabassoon, flutes, oboes, English horn, clarinets in B-flat, and bass clarinets in E-flat. The brass classification includes French Horns in F, tuba, trumpets in B-flat, Euphonium, and trombones. The keyboards are the celesta and piano. The strings are violins I & II, cellos, violas, and double basses. Lastly, the percussion instruments include the snare drum, bass drum and tenor drum. It also includes the timpani, cymbals, tam-tam, tambourine, xylophone, and triangle.

Take the case of Oakville chamber orchestra. You can find that there is a hierarchy between the instruments. In every group, there is a recognized leader that usually plays the solo. The principal first violin is usually considered as the leader of the orchestra. The only one that is higher than the violin is the conductor himself.

In the low brass section, it is the principal trombone that is considered as the leader. However, for the entire brass section, it is the principal trumpet. The principal oboe is for the woodwind section. With the different instrument groups, there are also those that are considered as the co-principals. This hierarchy between the instruments at the Oakville chamber orchestra actually provide for a great musical effect.

Most modern orchestras of today are led by the conductor and usually play Oakville classical music. You would be amazed at how the music that they create touches your heart and soul.

In addition to being a state capital city and county seat, the 117 square mile plot of real estate known as Little Rock, Arkansas is also home to nearly 200,000 residents, the entire metropolitan area enjoying a population of over 840,000, making it the state’s most populated city.

What makes up today’s Little Rock, Arkansas real estate had humble beginnings. For several millennia prior to the arrival of the Europeans on the land, it was occupied by Native Americans of several different tribes. It wasn’t until 1541 when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto came through that the takeover by Europe began.

A small rock formation was used by explorers and settlers as a landmark throughout Little Rock’s early settlement history. In fact, a French explorer even gave the formation the name of “La Petite Roche,” which is where the city derives its name.

The Arkansas territory was formed in 1819. Little Rock was named its capital in 1821.

Things to Do in Little Rock

For the night owl, the River Market District, located downtown, has an eclectic mix of bars, music and dance clubs, many of which offer live music. Many of the clubs are within walking distance of each other, making it easy to find the genre of music or scene that you are looking for.

For the more classically inclined, Ballet Arkansas is the state’s only professional ballet company while the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra puts on concerts nine months each year.

During the day, the River Market District includes a nostalgic bazaar-style market hall, while from April to October a farmer’s market is open. The Willow Springs Water Park is a popular attraction, but also has historical significance as one of the nation’s first water theme parks built in 1928.

Little Rock also houses Arkansas’ only zoo and the American Taekwondo Association (ATA) headquarters. Each year, the World Taekwondo Championships are held there.

Notable Residents

Music is an important part of Little Rock’s night life. As such, the city has produced some notable musicians including the band Evanescence, scat singer Richard Boone, Christian metal band Living Sacrifice, Green Day backup guitarist Jason White, and Jazz musicians Art Porter, Sr. and Jr.

Other well-known residents include General Douglas McArthur, Gil Gerard (actor who played Buck Rogers during the 1979-1981 television series), General Wesley Clark, as well as several famous athletes from sports such as basketball, football, and boxing.

So it could be said that Little Rock, Arkansas real estate is a great place to visit, and perhaps even a better place to live.

So how can you tell me you’re lonely, and say for you that the sun don’t shine?
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London
I’ll show you something to make you change your mind

Ralph McTell

Never did words ring so true as these! Think London and the first thing that comes to your mind is vivacity, euphoria and restlessness spilling from every corner. A city where heritage and cosmopolitan culture coexist peacefully, London attracts visitors for the sheer pleasure of being here. It boasts of something for everyone, just as every great city does. You find museums and galleries with appreciating glances on one side while Buckingham Palace or the Big Ben or Trafalgar Square on the other side need no introduction. And if you are in the mood for catching some celebrities, nothing gets better than a quick visit to the Madame Tussauds. Party hoppers can rely on an eclectic array of Clubs and DJ Bars while the connoisseurs find respite in the haven of a cultural dose of arts, music and theatre. Socialites hail it as Paradise and in their words “Spontaneous celebrations are what we look for and what better than the events in London?” Calling London a world in itself would not sound exaggerating!

A city as vibrant as this has events lined up for every occasion and even without one! London events have a charm of their own. The fine mix of exuberance and exotic ideas has lured thousands for centuries and continues to do so with equal vigor. Wine tasting and Dinner parties feature in the list of London social events that tantalize the senses. The Beer Festival at the same time depicts that London is not about intellectuals alone. Having fun is just another excuse here!

In a city as popular as this, networking is a must for obvious reasons. London Networking Events shed light on Financial Freedom, HR Matters to name a few while The London EASY summit and India Business Forum talk about the changing world. Oh yes! London is indeed a place to mix business with pleasure. Sound’s too good to be true?

As talked about before, art and exhibitions hold the centre of attraction for tourists in London . A Rembrandt or a Renaissance masterpiece has admirers swooning over it as does modern art and neo-revolutions. London art events are a must attendance. And can music be far behind? London music events boast of a spectrum of indelible impressions. Vivaldi and Rihanna exist in harmony here. Yes, London takes pride in hosting events for a multifaceted target audience. Westlife fans have as much a ball in listening to mellifluous notes, as do the fans of the BBC or London Symphony Orchestra. Now that is what you call a city for all music!

The fashion conscious people of London have always remained just that. The latest style that adorns a Londoner is expression of freedom and aristocracy. Studios and boutiques illuminate places as the London Fashion events have a plethora of events in the form of fashion shows, photograph exhibitions and Fashion films. If you want to don the latest in being chic, you surely need to head to one of these places.

Charity events and Entrepreneurs Events in London speak about the humanitarian side of the city. The care with which the city reaches out to one and all is nothing short of great. An eventful city as this must feature in your travel plans. And trust us to guide you to the best places!

That is why Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said “When a man is tired of London , he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Thailand is wondrous, an amazingly different place when it comes to culture, tradition, customs and history. But, while on the outlook it may seem very different to a western traveler, there are many modern aspects in the country too. Bangkok is among the most visited destinations in the world and the reason for this is its wide variety of things to do and places to see. One such crowd-drawing event that’s been taking place for a decade now is the Bangkok International Festival of Dance and Music.

The Bangkok International Festival of Dance and Music is a breathtakingly beautiful collection of performances. Over 800 special artistic performers are flown in from several countries and these countries include Russia, Italy, Netherlands, France and Spain. In conjunction with Thai artistic performances, the festival puts on a spectacular gala of ballet, opera, jazz, modern dance, symphony orchestra and pop music for everyone to enjoy. The Bangkok International Festival of Dance and Music is hosted annually by Thailand’s Cultural Center.

The concept for this festival arose from a dire need to put Thailand in the world’s cultural destinations map and also as a way to reintroduce culture into Bangkok, which was rapidly becoming modernized. There was no cultural aspects in the big city’s entertainment and daily life, so the steps were taken to introduce the first Bangkok International Festival of Dance and Music in 1999. The festival was dedicated to His Majesty King Bhumibol as an honor on his 6th cycle birthday.

From its inception, the Bangkok International Festival of Dance and Music has been a huge success, drawing acclaimed international performers and a massive local and tourist crowd each year. The festival is held between September and October of each year, and the venue and ticket prices vary annually. Tickets are available through Thailand’s Cultural Center.

If you are planning on visiting Thailand for the festival or a vacation, consider Bangkok serviced apartments for your accommodation. Bangkok hotel accommodation can be expensive, especially during events and the tourist season, so Bangkok serviced apartments can provide you with great accommodation, facilities and services for less than half the cost you would pay for a major hotel.

Perhaps it’s because there’s a close cultural connection between great music and smoky bars. Anyone who knows anything about jazz knows that its truly legendary improvisers – Coltrane, Bird, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie – cut their teeth playing in bars so smoky that it’s a good thing everybody was too busy improvising to need sheet music.

Or maybe it’s because both cigars and music are contemplative pleasures. A casual smoker can get a quick tobacco-fix from a cheap cigarette, just as a casual music listener can enjoy the background hum of pop songs on the car radio. But to really enjoy a great performance, or a good tobacco, sitting still and paying attention are necessary.

In any case, music and cigar smoking seem to belong together, and some of the most famous musicians are (or were) cigar devotees – just as, it turns out, one of the most famous of cigar devotees is also a musician. Avo Uvezian, the maker of Avo cigars, is also a respected classical and jazz pianist, a Julliard graduate, and even the one-time official pianist of the Shah of Iran. After a successful musical career based first in his native Middle East, and then in the contiguous United States, Uvezian moved in the 1980s to Puerto Rico, where he opened a restaurant and bar and dabbled in cigarmaking. After customers at his Puerto Rico restaurant told him how much they enjoyed some cigars he’d had rolled himself, from a blend of tobaccos he hand-picked, he opened his own Dominican Republic-based cigar factory, working with noted cigar maker Hendrik Kelner. Now his company makes three million cigars a year, and Uvezian himself still makes music – his first CD, Legacy, was released in 2004.

For another example, consider the great trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, who smokes, by his own estimation, four or five cigars a day. Music allowed the Cuban-born Sandoval to rise to fame in his native Cuba – and to defect from that country in 1990, during a long stint playing concerts in Europe (he now lives in Florida). Sandoval has played the horn for Lionel Hampton and Dizzy Gillespie, Gloria Estefan and Johnny Mathis, Michel Legrand and Frank Sinatra. His technically flawless playing has resulted in his being the kind of musician whose work is often known by people who couldn’t name him – he is brought in as a session musician by some of the world’s finest and best-known (see above), and he often scores movie soundtracks. As his work with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Leningrad Philharmonic prove, he’s even proved able to handle the rigors of classical music as well as jazz – sometimes doing both in the same concert.

The cigar-music connection is especially strong in Cuba, known as one of the world’s cigar capitals. Both cigars and music are staples of island life (the cigar remains one of the island’s most prominent exports), and the strength of both in Cuban culture depends partly on the nimble and intelligent blending of elements from everywhere – wrappers and fillers from different parts of Latin America, rhythms and melodies from the African coast, South America, US pop, Western European classical, etc. In other words, Cuban cigarmaking and Cuban music have both survived, and flourished, by mixing and melding.

For generations, cigar rollers were entertained by the sound of paid musicians or by music from the radio. (This tradition continues even now in the Dominican Republic, where workers at the Arturo Fuente factory, among other places, are treated to the work of performing musicians.) With this tradition in place, it’s no wonder that some of Cuba’s music legends got their start as cigar-factory entertainers; and since tobacco smoking has been a part of Latin American life far longer than it has in some other places – Columbus’s sailors noted it being smoked in what is now modern Cuba in the year 1493, so there’s many more centuries of lore to draw on its psychological and emotional associations are deeper and richer, providing better material for songwriters to mine. Thus famous Cuban songwriter Beny More, himself a former entertainer for the cigar-factory workers, touches on the song in a number of his classic compositions.

Founded in 1836, Houston is the largest city of State of Texas and fourth largest in all of USA with an estimated population of 2.2 million. The greater rel=”external nofollow” target=”_blank” href=”http://www.gethoustononline.com”>Houston, that includes Sugarland and Bay Town, is the 6th largest metroplex in USA with a total population of 5.6 million. Houston is also the seat of Harris county which is one of the largest counties in USA in terms of land size. Houston climate is considered subtropical with temperatures commonly seen in the 90s during summer months.

Houston is considered the energy capital of the world because of the presence of large number of oil & gas companies including ExxonMobile, Chevron and Shell North America. The city faced considerable economic hardships during the oil crisis of 1973 and the economic crisis in 1987. In the decades of the 1990s the city administration decided to diversify the city economy by reducing its reliance on oil & gas sector. Since then the Houston economy has acquired a broad economic base with presence of retail, health care, energy, aeronautics and manufacturing companies. Houston has the proud distinction of home to more Fortune 500 companies behind New York. The Port of Houston ranks first in the United States in international waterborne tonnage handled and second in total cargo tonnage handled. The city has a multicultural population with a large and growing international community.

Houston Theater District is located downtown and is home to nine major performing arts organizations and six performance halls. It is the second-largest concentration of theater seats in a downtown area in the United States. Houston has a permanent, professional, resident companies in all major performing arts disciplines: opera (Houston Grand Opera), ballet (Houston Ballet), music (Houston Symphony Orchestra), and theater (The Alley Theatre). Houston attracts many touring Broadway acts, concerts, shows, and exhibitions for a variety of interests. Houston is home to the largest and longest running annual Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, held over 20 days from late February to early March. Another large celebration is the annual night-time Houston Pride Parade, held at the end of June. Houston holds the Bayou City Art Festival, which is considered to be one of the top five art festivals in the United States.

The Museum District has many popular cultural institutions and exhibits, which attract more than 7 million visitors a year. Notable facilities located in the district include The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Natural Science, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Houston Zoo. One of the major attractions of Houston City is Space Center Houston which is the official visitors’ center of NASA’s Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. Here one will find many interactive exhibits including moon rocks, a shuttle simulator, and presentations about the history of NASA’s manned space flight program.

I have found http://www.getHoustonOnline.com to be a good source for information on airport, parking, hotels and rent a car.

Some parents who feel that they want to give their child every opportunity in life will think about enlisting their offspring in a course of guitar or piano lessons at an early age. This article will look at some of the questions raised on the subject of a child’s guitar lessons. Firstly there is the burning question of whether a parent’s wishes of a “good education” for their child should totally overrule the child’s natural predisposition towards play.

Giving a child guitar lessons is a great way to introduce him to the joys of music. At the same time it is a bonding experience for the family because a child does not learn the guitar in isolation. The main thing that should be guiding you and your child towards guitar lessons is your child’s enthusiasm. There are generations of adults who wince when they think of their enforced piano lessons under the eye of a grim and unforgiving teacher.

As for the question of what at what age a child can learn the guitar, many people think that three- or four-years-old is around the time to start. This fits in with the Suzuki method which has been a successful piano teaching method for many years. At what age a child SHOULD begin learning guitar is up to your gut feeling on the issue. Maybe you would even like to try teaching your child yourself. In that case start them off on simple songs or nursery rhymes perhaps focusing on the D G and A7 chords. You will need to be meticulous about keeping your child’s guitar in tune.

For a very young child guitar lessons will involve games and activities designed to help with ear training and physical coordination. The younger the child is the more the parent will need to be involved in guitar practice time. If you feel that you are unwilling or not confident of your abilities in this area then leave the guitar lessons till your child is around seven years old.

No matter how enlightened we feel that we are as parents our own preferences and prejudices will come into play when we think about a choice of instrument for our children. If you wanted to have guitar lessons when you were a child but never got the chance, then it is natural for you to want to see your child take guitar lessons. If you think that maybe you are imposing your own needs onto your child then have another think about what your child wants (if anything) in music lessons.

If your child expresses interest in a the guitar of his own volition, fine. Maybe that is your decision made for you, but you will probably find that there are opportunities in your town to take your child to check out some musical instruments close up. If you have a local brass band or symphony orchestra then take your child to recitals. Let your child take a look at guitars in a music store. If he expresses interest in electric guitars or steel string acoustics you will need to explain that he should start off on a nylon string acoustic till the tips of his fingers get toughened up.

Remember when popular bands had to be flown out of town just to record at some multi-million dollar recording facility built on several acres of land? They had rooms large enough to record an entire symphony orchestra and had great sounding natural reverb and room response.

Most of those studios today have either closed down or downsized because of the home studio revolution. All across the globe, people are starting to realize that they could make high quality recordings in the comfort of their own homes, provided they invest enough time in the gear, software and technical know-how.

Recording is still an art that has to be learned and perfected, which is why there are big studios and commercial project studios that exist to this day. For the musician or recording enthusiast, there’s no better way to get your feet wet in the recording industry by applying for an apprenticeship at the commercial studios downtown. But what if you’re just a casual/hobby musician who doesn’t want to become a fulltime engineer? Perhaps setting up a small home studio is for you!

Equipment for your home studio

Running your own studio for you and your friends to work material on is perhaps one of the greatest satisfactions a musician can ever have. Apart from not having to pay the rent and electricity for a commercial facility, you can record from the comfort of your own home with a minimum of gear whose cost now runs a fraction of what it used to even a few years ago.

You can turn your bedroom or living room into a home studio, provided that you don’t mind spending countless hours making music in it. Aside from the computer that you’ll be using, you’ll need a hardware interface to get sound into your computer, as well as a microphone, some speaker monitors, and your recording software.

These are choices that you can research on your own over on the internet, as the home studio has become rather ubiquitous in recent years thanks in no small part to the proliferation of very powerful recording suites and software synthesizers. Even computer hardware related to recording has dropped in prices as more and more companies are gearing a portion of their product line to the bustling home studio market.

Sound insulation for your home studio

Of course, you can’t get the top dollar room sound commercial studios offer, but you can get a decent sounding room (i.e. not as horrible as you think) by investing a good amount in buying sound insulation and acoustic treatment products. These products generally fall into three categories, namely absorbers, diffusers and reflectors. These treatment materials all help in creating an acoustically neutral environment for you to work your music in.

These products can be found all over the internet, with a minimum package of absorbers and bass traps costing a little under a thousand dollars. It is arguable that spending a sizeable amount to treat your room for sonic neutrality will be even more beneficial than buying a single piece of expensive recording equipment because no matter what happens, your environment will always influence what you are hearing, and as such if you listen to your recordings in a poorly treated environment (in a bathroom, for example), you’re less likely to get an accurate and good sounding mix.

I stand, you sit.  I speak, you listen.  I could also sing.  In fact, my seventh-grade daughter, Kaiyuh, sings in her school choir.  My wife and I attended a choir concert in which 6th, 7th and 8th grade vocalists and musicians performed on stage for about two hours.  We sat in the audience and listened.  The vocalists stood, like I am now, and performed.  Part of their performance required using their voices in unusual ways.  They had to exert physical force to hit high and low notes out of the range of ordinary speech.  They also had to exert mental force to remember timing and pitch through several different songs.  As I watched my daughter and her classmates perform, I also noticed that the back of the stage was walled in by acoustical panels that bent toward the audience at the top.  The entire setting was focused on human activity.  There was no room and no call for any other species or its activities to be present.  The entire event was anthropocentric.

Having noted the anthropocentrism, I then began to look more closely at the bodies.  They all dressed in the same way.  They wore white shirts or blouses, black pants or skirts and black shoes.  The girls had little make-up and their hair was pulled back and tied tightly in buns or ponytails behind their heads.  Their dress clearly signaled that the attention of the viewers and the performers should not be on bodies but on sounds, words and their meanings.  The singers were physically standardized units of vocal production.  The vocalists all stood in approximately the same way.  Their bodies were straight, their shoulders were down and slightly forward and their heads were slightly down and forward.  This physical position maximized the openness of the chest to the strenuous inhalations and exhalations of breath necessary to sing loudly and clearly.  Indeed, apart from chests and jaws, the bodies were quite still, almost frozen in place.  There was no foot tapping, no swinging or swaying, and no dancing.  The bodies were frozen and the voices were forced.

Images of black church choirs appeared brightly before my mind’s eye.  I saw in the church choirs how the bodies swayed and stamped the rhythms as the voices rose higher and stronger to Jesus and God.  But in the church there were also those who sat and listened and those who stood and performed.  Where, I asked myself, had this come from—this gesture that simultaneously freezes and forces?  How have we come to freeze the body and force the mind?

An illustrative answer to this question appears in the history of Western music from the Gregorian chant to the symphony orchestra and the rock concert.  Why did Western music begin in such a quiet mode and develop into such loudness?  Of course we can thank the technology of sound amplification for some of the change.  Gregorian chanters did not have Dolby or Bose.  They did not have electricity to power microphones, speakers and amplifiers.  But the difference in volume seems to signify more than the presence or absence of technological assistance.  It also signifies the presence and absence of God.

During the Middle Ages, religion centered around two physical structures—the church or cathedral and the monastery.  Both buildings were places in which people could communicate with God.  God was not far away and could be reached by whispered prayer, prayers spoken in ordinary volume and by the subdued chants of singers.  As European humanity opened its mind and loosened its tongue, God began to move farther away.  By the 17th century, after the revolutionary work of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, God was a decreasing necessity in the physical universe.  He had become added value because he had moved further away from human reach.  In 1687, Newton’s Principia showed that the human mind can decode the structure of nature into manipulable symbols that allow precise prediction of physical events.  As the human mind ascended, God’s mind retreated.  It seems natural and logical to follow this trend through the development of physical science and empirical philosophy until, in the 18th century, musicians felt compelled to cry out to God with the loud voices of symphonic music. 

By our own time, we hear many different kinds of extremely loud music.  Why must it be so loud?  Because the ear of the signified is so far away.  As the Baroque composers cried out to a distant and receding God, so do the popular singers cry out to a distant love.  What really is the difference in acoustical structure between the lyrics—Love me, Jesus, love me, and Love me, honey, love me?  The distance between the one who wants love and the one who can give love is so great that tremendous volume is necessary to cross the space between them.

Crying out for the love of God in Christianity, however, has more serious implications than the wailings of pop stars.  The religious person in search of their God seeks not only love but also the ultimate assurance that he or she will survive death and enjoy eternal life as an immaterial soul.  This search for assurance is a search for divine insurance against the uncertainty of human life.  The religious person seeks certainty about the meaningfulness of birth and the survival of individuality after death.  The religious person seeks security.

The primary fear to be assuaged by religious security is the fear of death.  The fear of death is fod—f-o-d.   Fod sounds and is spelled like the English words “nod” and “cod.”  But “fod” is spelled with an “f.”  From here on, the fear of death is fod.  Fod seems to be part of the body’s autonomic physiological system.  It is like the body’s reaction to food poisoning.  You do not have to tell your body to vomit.  Throwing up bad food is not the result of a conscious calculation.  It is a physiological reaction to something that threatens the body.  Fod is also like the reaction of the immune system to the presence of pathogens.  You do not have to tell the specialized cells to form and attack the intruder.  They form and attack as a reaction of the system in defense of its own life.  In this sense, fod is natural, normal, raw and elemental.  It signifies the desire of life to maintain itself indefinitely. 

But indefinitely is not eternally.  The idea that a living thing can transcend, in whole or in part, the mortal boundaries of its livingness to persist in some different state forever is an addition.  This addition reflects an idea of surplus that overcomes, in its eternal form, all kinds of natural lack or deficiency.  This addition also provides the transcendent justification for the myriad rituals of everyday life in and by which we dampen fear, amplify hope and attempt to secure immortal existence or eternal life.  Religion, however, has not been the only effort to provide such security.

In the history of humanity, there have been four efforts to provide humans with security about the unknown before birth and the unknown after death.  These four are myth, philosophy, religion and science.  When I map these four across linear time, I see a rhythm.  It begins in the hunting and gathering period that preceded agriculture in human life.  Agriculture brought new security and satisfaction.  The displacements of nomadism and of famine were significantly decreased by the reliability of cultivated crops and domesticated animals.  Then, in about 1000 BC, travel, trade and communication between different groups of people brought very different worldviews into contact and collision.  Insecurity and dissatisfaction increased as traditional worldviews had to reckon with their own non-universality.  Philosophy appeared, as did all of the monotheisms, during the next 1500 years, which includes the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.  In this context, security about life after death increased for many people due to their adherence to monotheistic religious practices and doctrines that reestablished universality on a ground that freely mixed rationalism with mystery.  That world of security, called the Dark Ages in the West, unraveled with new thinking, contact, discoveries and inventions that led to the period of insecurity in which we all now live, the modern age with its emendation in post-modernism. 

A long wave of security and insecurity undulates through changes in human socioeconomic systems.  These systems deploy many forces that have brought, ritualization of fod—thanatophobia—in everyday life.  This oscillation begins with the development of the human species as a biological organism and ends with the end of the same species. The logic and rhythm of the wave forces are ours to deal with and to understand.  However, short of a massive, dramatic change in our biological structure, we will always be somewhere in, on and within the long wave oscillation of security and insecurity.

Like looking through a hall of mirrors, we can see through four thousand years of human civilization.  We can recode all of it as aimed at one thing—securing human life, existence and reproduction.  All of it has aimed at one goal—understanding where we come from and where we’re going.  All of it has functioned with binary logic that has ended up in the same conundrum: a unity in which there is no principle of differentiation. Binary logic, or, the logic of identity and contradiction, assumes difference for its functioning.  Without difference, the logic of identity and contradiction dissolves into incoherence.  The assumption of logic echoes the assumption of physics: without positive and negative charges, there would be no matter or energy.  Yet, like logic, physics cannot explain the origin of charge, that is, the origin of difference in the fundamental structure of the physical universe.  In fact, none of the major mental structures of the last four thousand years can explain the origin of difference.  Binary logic has reached its ultimate limit in myth, philosophy, religion and science. Something new must come for human beings to move on from where we have arrived after four thousand years of trying to understand ourselves and nature with binary logic.

To approach the new, we need to be able to free ourselves from the old.  Toward this end, I would like to suggest a thought experiment.  It has several steps:

Empty language of traditional reference and meaning

Empty language of regional reference and meaning

Empty language of local reference and meaning

Empty language of familial reference and meaning

Humans continue to live

But language does not secure thought or perception

Humans continue to act, produce and consume

But language does not cohere relationships

Consequences:

1.     Written language appears as more secure and more reliable.

2.     Spoken language appears as art, entertainment and manipulation

3.     Boundary problems multiply in all areas of human verbal activity

Consequences of the consequences:

1.     Individuals and groups increasingly diverge from traditional norms.

2.     Divergence includes attempts to regain past security as well as attempts to discover new forms of security.  For example, religious traditionalism thrives alongside scientific inquiry, philosophical speculation, and artistic and social experimentation.

This thought experiment synopsizes the change in human culture from the archaic periods in Europe and Asia to the appearance of axial religions, all of which posited an invisible, scarce reality as the ultimate source of human security, safety and happiness.  The traditional ability of human beings to be satisfied with life in the natural world had disappeared to such an extent that only the idea of and belief in life in an eternal, unnatural world brought satisfaction.  However, polytheism was unsatisfactory because it relied too heavily on connections of deities to the natural world.  What the human spirit needed was a way to disconnect entirely from the world of nature.  All of the axial religions and philosophies presented ideas of scarcity that were mutually exclusive and designed to secure individuals in conditions that were independent of natural time and space.  Natural and social scarcities came to signify the scarcity of human satisfaction and security.  Natural and social surpluses came to signify the abundance of satisfaction and security available in the unnatural, trans-social world of theological immortality.

Consequence of the consequences of the consequences:

Capitalism, driven, underwritten and protected by monotheistic theologies and religions, is the socioeconomic consequence.  It is an economy of surplus and scarcity that regards the natural world as totally useless except for its potential to be transformed into products that promote some aspect of human security, pleasure, happiness, health or well-being.  Capitalism is the application of the religions of scarcity to economics.  On behalf of an idea of human security divorced from the natural world, such as life in a totally mechanized space station, capitalism is destroying life and the possibility of life on earth by destroying the basic life support systems of the biosphere, such as air, land and water.

A brief history of the ego illustrates the ancient fluctuation that preceded the appearance of monotheistic capitalism.  Linguists specializing in the history of ancient Greek have speculated about the origin of the first person, singular, nominative pronoun, egwge, which became the Latin, ego, which in turn has become the English, ego.  One possibility is that, based on its usages in the oldest written layers of ancient Greek, this word represented a gesture.  The gesture can be imagined as follows.  People in a group are speaking with one another.  At some point, a part of the conversation includes one person exclusive of the others; for example, one person may have caught a fish on a day when no one else did.  The word, egwge, accompanied a manual gesture that pointed toward the body of that one person who had caught the fish.  In context, egwge singled out one body without disengaging that body from either the past group activity or the present conversation.  In the ensuing years, the ancient Western ego passed through writers such as Homer, Hesiod, Heracleitos, Empedocles and Parmenides. 

By the time of Plato, the Western ego was afloat in a sea of cultural differences that continually required some kind of self-affirmation, or, egocentered assertion, in order to gain and maintain security in social interaction.  As the sea of cultural fluctuations became stormier and stormier over the next few centuries, more and more people sought refuge away from not only the traditional insecurities of natural processes, such as earthquakes, floods, droughts and famines, but also the increasingly confusing and disturbing social processes of cultural mixing.  The axial religions and philosophies, featuring dualisms that universally contrasted a this world condition with a that, or, otherworld, condition, appeared and have flourished to this day.

Indeed, haven’t we been here before?  By “we” I mean human consciousness.  By “here” I mean in this phase of world-order.  By “before” I mean a passage in the linearization of human experience known as history. We have, as naturally and repeatedly as the body produces antibodies, produced our own lenses through which to diminish fod.  We have alternately, rhythmically, forcefully captured our need for security in mental lenses.  First came myth with polytheism; then came philosophy with sophistry and the beginnings of natural science and mathematics; after those came religion with exclusive monotheisms that preached absolute dualisms; next came science with technology.  Each lens has completely satisfied some people’s longing for secure answers to the questions of the origin and end of existence and especially of human existence.  But each lens has become a layer of human consciousness.  Now the layer of science and technology seems to be morphing into another layer of fundamentalist religiosity. 

This morphing has thrown modernism and post-modernism into strong relief in contemporary intellectual life.  We may easily understand modernism and post-modernism as oscillations in the long wave of security and insecurity.  The seeds of both isms were sown at the beginning of the age of European exploration, when Europeans suddenly began showing up on the shores, on the lands and in the faces of people who had not known that Europeans even existed.  This was the beginning of the decrease in transitions in global human life.  The rise of the middle class, who made their money from their own efforts in trade and manufacturing, and without the ceremony, the mediations or the transitions of monarchy, aristocracy, nobility or papacy, further powered the decrease in transitions.  Now, in 2006, generations of human beings have been raised on the visual media of photography, cinema and television in which scene changes require that the viewers make the transitions in their own minds. 

Modernism reacted to the decrease in transitions by decrying fragmentation and inventing compensatory forms, such as the novel, in which the author could create an alternate reality that was whole, complete and smooth.  However, more contemporary people have tried to join and accept fragmentation rather than beat or reject it.  More and more humans travel from one physical location to another in such a short time that they move from one culture, language, religion and ecosystem with only flight time as transition.  More and more humans watch visual media, such as television and movies, which decrease transitions in order to increase speed of delivery and quantity of content.  Post-modernism makes the absence of transitions a virtue and an aspect of art and life.  Both isms, modernism and post-modernism, express human beings trying to cope with changes in the basic structures of human existence upon which security and insecurity depend.  Both isms are oscillations in the long wave of security and insecurity.

Myth, philosophy, religion and science have all tried to give absolutely reliable meaning to human thought and language and, through thought and language, to human life.  As the security, stability and reliability of the referents of language have varied, so has the meaningfulness of human life.  The more security there has been the more meaning, the less security the less meaning and the greater search for meaning.

In this process, philosophy has made the fatal assumption that meaning is ultimately comprehensible by language.  Language is a function of only part of the brain.  The brain is one small organ in a much larger body.  How could the expression of one part of one organ comprehend the meaning of the entire organism?  Impossible.  Just as only a small part of the physical universe is accessible to the brain through vision, so only a small part of the semantic universe is comprehensible to the brain through language.

Is a personal conclusion from this reflection possible?  I think it is.  First, I note what I do not conclude.  I do not conclude, as have so many monotheistic religions, that the ultimate goal of human life should be to leave life entirely.  If the experience of the void shows that god and the devil are one, that all saviors are one, that all religions mask the same reality, that all experiences, states and conditions are transient, transitory and without enduring substance or consequence, that is, to put it briefly in Buddhist terms, that nirvana and samsara are one, then what possible difference can it make whether I am alive, dead or in any other condition?

In other words—there are always other words, aren’t there?  There are always other words because human beings are so diverse and the human mind is so productive.  But other words are, after all, only words.  So, other words are not my conclusion.  No, all of the teachings of the monotheistic religions, the philosophies, the myths and the sciences are a more recent wisdom.  There is an older wisdom.  It is accessible through language but it is not language.  It is silently signified by the entire enterprise of semiotics that endeavors to articulate the significations of our experience. 

In this connection, I remember a video of a dancing African tribe.  The dancing was taking place on a wide, flat, red dirt plaza in the middle of the village.  The villagers, men and women, girls and boys, were dressed in bright red cloths that wrapped, turned and furled around their shining, coffee and chocolate colored bodies.  Everyone danced in a huge circle.  Everyone had a part in the song; some dancers played instruments that they carried; other participants stood close to the outside of the circle, playing instruments and singing and swaying their bodies.  The only observer was the person taking the video.  Otherwise, there were no observers.  No observers!  Everyone danced, sang or played an instrument.  There was no stage, performance or separation of human activity from nature.  The earth was beneath their feet and the sky was above their heads.  There was nothing to signify a distant subject or an observed object.  There was no dualism.  The sounds, gestures and motions of the dance were as natural as wind in trees or water over rocks or animals running across the plains. 

For the analytical subject, this dance signifies the ancient wisdom.  It is the participation of the human body in a cosmos whose dimensions are continually opening and closing in, through and around us.  But that which is continually opening and closing in, through and around us, continually makes a difference in how we think and feel about the world.  What, then, is the nature of this difference that participation not only makes but also inscribes in every aspect of our conscious experience?

If all theology is correct, that everything began in one god that was absolutely pure, single and the same as itself…if astrophysics is correct that the entire universe began in a singularity that was pure and altogether of the same kind of energy…if Buddhism is correct that ultimately there is only the void of which nothing can be predicated…if mysticism is correct that all is one and one is all…THEN, I am still faced with the same unanswered questions.  What is difference?  What is the origin of difference? 

I understand that the human mind can be stilled to quiescence that can be intensified through stages of samadhi to the point at which there is no experiencer, experiencing and experienced.  But that is only the human mind.  What about electrons and protons?  Where does charge come from?  Can electrons and protons be stilled to quiescence so that there is no difference in charge?   If so, would not that be the end of all matter?

This reflection carries our thought to the end of the combined logic of the last four thousand years of human civilization.  Each dimension of that combined logic, whether it is myth, philosophy, religion, science or mysticism, leads to the same limit.  There is no way, using any branch of that logic, to account for the existence of difference.  Every branch of traditional human logic leads to a unity that is prior to any difference.  There is no principle of differentiation, no power of being or making difference, either inside or outside that unity.  Therefore, no branch of traditional human logic can account for the existence of difference.

The entire teeter-totter of civilization balances on one axis: security and insecurity.  But, this is an axis of feeling, not of need.  People feel insecure even when their physical needs are satisfied.  The 9/11 attack on the US made a nation of people most of whom have no problem satisfying their physical needs feel extremely insecure.  Traditionally, invasion or the threat of invasion is a major source of human insecurity.  Connected to this human threat is the threat that has persisted from myths of evil demons to images of hostile extraterrestrial beings or invasion from outside the human realm.  This type of extra-human invasion also appears as the evil principle of many religions, such as Satan in Christianity. 

The idea of Satan places human beings between the possibility of evil and eternal suffering and good and eternal bliss.  This placement not only promotes insecurity, it also promotes constant dissatisfaction with oneself and others.  One never knows, in the terms of monotheistic religious doctrines, how god is going to go—for the person or against them.  One never knows which act, large or small, might tip the balance toward an eternity baking in hell or an eternity basking in heaven.  One never outgrows or overcomes fod. 

This insecurity of fod can also be seen as an engine of another characteristic of Western European, North American and increasingly global fundamentalist consciousness: speed.  If the devil pursues you from behind, and the last judgment looms ahead, then one way to end the anxiety that surrounds the insecurity of not knowing future eternal fate is to speed up the process and get the apocalypse and the last judgment over and done with.  The impatience with moral lapses that is historically embedded in all kinds of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and the certainty with which apocalyptic groups have regularly foretold the certain end of the world together exemplify this distortion of time around psychological conditions of insecurity that are driven by religious beliefs.  The movement away from drugs like opium and peyote, which take people through long and sometimes very slow illusory passages, toward drugs like crack cocaine and methamphetamine also coincides with this attempt to compress natural time into religiously based chronology.

Question:  What’s the rush?

Answer:  Eternal life.

The entire project of Western intellectuality has been the attempt to tie the human mind to permanence.  There are the immortal gods and goddesses who have always lived on Mt. Olympus.  There is the first principle—water, air, love, flux, the one, the atom—which has always existed and from which everything has come.  There is the one god, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, who is eternal and from which everything has and always will come.  There are the modern philosophers, from Descartes to Kant, Nietzsche, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Sartres and Derrida, trying to find the seat and source of certainty, and the subject that can judge truth and falsity, certainty and uncertainty, good and evil and meaningfulness and meaninglessness.  Of course the philosophers do not agree.  The only truth they have found is the conflict among their divergent points of view.  There also is the unified field theory of the physical sciences that, including the Big Bang, explains the permanent structure of the physical universe and of all forms of matter and energy in it including human beings.  The entire project of Eastern intellectuality has been similar.  There are the immortal gods and goddesses; there is nirvana; there is moksha; there is satori; there is the endless and all-creative yin and yang. 

Everywhere that human beings have looked up from the moment of providing food, water and shelter, there have arisen thinkers who have tried to tie the human mind to permanence.  Why?  To relieve insecurity.  The long wave of security and insecurity is the logic and rhythm of forces.  The logic and rhythm are in the forces.  There is no place to stand, no place to ride, other than in and on the wave.  Security signifies identity with permanence.  Insecurity signifies difference from permanence.  The struggle to achieve permanence is the struggle to eliminate difference.  But no struggle can exist without difference; all struggle assumes, needs and requires the existence of difference.  Difference persists in the struggle for permanence as well as in the search for meaning.  If difference persists then is not difference the permanence we seek?  If difference surrounds every dry ground of unity like oceans, lakes or rivers surround islands, then isn’t difference the permanence we seek?  If so, then we may see birth as the falling away and death as the uniting, birth as the moment of difference and death as the moment of identity, life as the locus of insecurity and death as the focus of security.

In conclusion, there is no necessary conclusion to this reflection.  We have not followed a deduction from premises.  We have not pursued an hypothesis through experimentation.  Nor have we engaged in symbolic interpretation guided by idealistic or moralistic principles.  Rather, this verbal process has participated in the power of semiotics to look through, to make transparent, the everyday life of human beings.  Such looking through ends only as a phase when the transparentizing attention turns elsewhere.

Freeze the body, force the mind.  Freezing the body signifies fear of the body, fear that it is going to die, fear of its mortality.  Forcing the mind, through voice, emotion and mental exertion, signifies the hope that a human being can leave the body, leave nature, and reach an immortal state.  These fears and hopes have been thoroughly ritualized in human social practices.  They represent, all together, an enormous effort to give human beings final release from thanatophobia, from fod.  This effort naturally raises a certain type of question:

If death is so terrifying, why do we keep having children?

If birth is so natural and beautiful, why isn’t death also so natural and beautiful?

If birth is to be treasured and sought, why is not death to be treasured and sought?

Is there any difference in beauty between a sunrise and a sunset?

Thank you

Promoting a state versus promoting a product requires different mindsets. In the first case, a state encompasses many facets – downtown, historical attractions, museums, demographics, environmental initiatives, industrial zones and many other topics that would interest visitors.

In the second case, promoting a product imposes a narrower focus. You feature the product – how it’s manufactured, how it can benefit users and sellers’ payment options. Since selling a product is more concentrated, the target audience is defined and sales objectives are more clearly established.

Promoting a state is a more complex activity, whether or not it’s for the public sector (city governments) or private sector (travel agencies or tour organizers).

State or product – different approaches, different outcomes. Both, however, share a common thread. For any type of online promotion or advertising to work, search engine optimization must be the guiding principle.

SEO for state of New York

Why is it important for New York-based companies and organizations to use SEO strategies?

Reason: to attract the correct target audience so that web site operators and owners can pull in substantial traffic. To pull in substantial traffic, the web site must look professional, comply with search engine requirements (look and feel), offer quality content, and encourage repeat visits or convert visits into points of sale.

If the city government, for instance, wants to promote the best spots to visit in downtown Manhattan, its web site must zero in on the downtown core by using keywords that are frequently used by people when looking up New York. The following elements therefore must be featured with relevant information (this is not a comprehensive list):

Statue of Liberty

Central Park

United Nations

Soho

Metropolitan Museum of New York

Cornell University, Vassar and NYU

Wall Street

New York Subway

Chinatown

The boroughs (Brookly, Long Island, Bronx, etc)

Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

And many other spots that a first-time visitor would be curious about. You’ve heard the phrase “content is king” hundreds of times. An excellent SEO strategy for a web site promoting New York would be to provide useful information that not only fulfills the tourism need, but also covers history, operating hours, and even testimonials.

What do people want to know when they’re planning a trip to the Big Apple? Hotels and restaurants obviously. An SEO expert would probably contact a few major hotels and ask about reciprocal links.

Take a restaurant entrepreneur in Manhattan who does brisk business. If he averages about US$50,000 a week from walk-in customers, imagine how much more his restaurant could make if he had a web site that ranked well with the search engines. This means his retaurant would make it to the first two pages of say Google or Yahoo every time a surfer types “New York restaurants” or “places to eat in Manhattan” on the search engine box. This is proof that his SEO provider knew what keywords to target and used a number of ways to attract visitor traffic.

In addition to foot traffic to their physical locations, businesses in New York could increase business by also establishing an online presence powered by good SEO practices.

The present economic crisis and fierce competition make SEO indispensable. Business people are not the only ones who benefit. Here are some individuals/groups/organizations that could use SEO to their advantage:

Investment brokers

Doctors

Psychologists

Antique collectors

Hobbyists

Symphony orchestras

Student credit unions

Environmental lobbyists

Restaurateurs

Spa operators

Massage clinics

Fashion consultants

Tour operators

Insurance companies

Real estate agents

Pet supplies store

Chambers of commerce

As you can see from the list, there’s a New York SEO package for everyone!