When I visited England in the late 80's, and [white, British] people warned me that Notting Hill was kind of sketchy and I probably didn't want to go around there, was this a totally-not-at-all-coded way of not-at-all-racists telling me that there were black people there? Or just a nice, upper-middle-class bourgie inability to deal with the sort of ( Read more... )

Here is a tune for your enjoyment, a Scottish song in Dorian mode which I didn't know until Friday, when I heard it for the first time at a coffee shop session, and went to look it up (a process slightly complicated by that I mis-heard the name as "Erin Boat" rather than "Arran Boat" and tried to google it that way ( Read more... )