I've listened to Scattering Stars Like Dust several more times, and have decided that it is a really, really good album. As is customary after discovering an artist whom I find agreeable, I have acquired more of his recordings: In the Mirror of the Sky with Ali Akbar Moradi and Night Silence Desert with Mohammad Reza Shajarian. I've also been listening to Hamza el Din [pictured], who was a famous oudist and preeminent Nubian musician. He died recently; only about a month ago. Believe it or not, it wasn't my first experience with Nubian music: I've had a crush on From Nubia To Cairo from Ali Hassan Kuban for quite some time now, who has updated the form and even allowed it to be influenced by Western music. Hamza el Din and Ali Hassan Kuban: the traditional and the modern of Nubian music.

I recently finished reading Blue Blood by the Harvard-educated Edward Conlon. It is a book about the first eight or so years of his career as a police officer in the south Bronx, mostly in Housing and Narcotics. Aside from an ample and tasty helping of the obligatory anecdotal narrative, the book covers a lot of history: Conlon family history as well as cultural and political history of both the NYPD and of New York itself. I was attracted to the book because of my perennial fascination and terrifying dread of inner-city decay, particularly in our greatest urban area. Along with the tales of political exasperation, and the depressing and draining segments (such as tours at the Fresh Kills landfill, sifting through debris from the World Trade Center) there were several screamingly funny parts. I particularly enjoyed the following passage:

We collared, and learned how to work an odd little cat-and-mouse OP for 175 Alex, handicapped as we were by uniforms and a marked car, available for jobs at any moment. The building had a back door, so we'd have to wait for someone to walk out in order to make a sneak attack on the dealers in the lobby. One night we had an inspiration to send someone in to open it up for us. We drove a few blocks away, to the prostitution strip down on Jackson Avenue, and made the acquaintance of two ladies named Melissa and Snake. Snake explained that her boyfriend lived in the building and that she couldn't go there, but Melissa figured that opening a door for five bucks would be the easiest money she made that night. But we waited in vain - Melissa went to the wrong building, and Snake marched straight to 175 Alex to warn the dealers.

"What's the world coming to, when you can't trust a whore named Snake?"