What does green mean? – Page 102

August 3, 2009

Friday Reading on Monday

Is taking a picture of yourself everyday for a year a worthy project? Depends on a couple of things, of course, and one’s ability to determine what those things are.

What if one of those days was today? What’s the picture of… alive or dead? This is beginning to sound all motivational Monday so I’ll spare you and present instead a bit of the great rock critic, Lester Bangs. If you can’t feel it from this, put the camera down and call the doctor on yourself.

A Reasonable guide to Horrible Noise
by Lester Bangs

Christgau calls it “skronk.” I have always opted for the more obvious “horrible noise.” Guitars and human voices are primary vectors, though just about every other musical instrument has been employed over the years, as well as smashed crockery (e.g, first Pere Ubu album, “Sentimental Journey”), scraped garbage-can lids and bongolated oil drums (early Stooges), not to mention phono cartridges, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, etc. (John Cage, Variations II). You probably can’t stand it, but this stuff has its adherents (like me) and esthetic (if you want to call it that).

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation. And one could, if so inclined, take it even further than that: in his essential book The Tuning of the World, under the heading “Sacred Noise and Secular Silence,” composer R. Murray Schafer reports that during the Middle Ages to which we are after all now returning “a certain type of noise, which we may now call Sacred Noise, was not only absent from the lists of proscripted sounds which societies from time to time drew up, but was, in fact, quite deliberately invoked as a break from the tedium of tranquillity.” Or, as Han Shan also did once advise one of his Zen acolytes at Kyoto in lieu of canewhipping the whelp, “If you’re feeling uptight and truly would prefer to sail into the mystic, just chuglug two quarts of coffee and throw on side one of the first Clash album (Eng. edition) at ten, full treble, no bass.” Any more koans you need answered, refer ’em to Wild Man Fischer.

The point of all this, of course, is that hideous racket is liberating: to “go with the flow,” as Jerry Brown put it in his book Thoughts (City Lights, 1975), is always a wiser course of action than planting oneself directly in the path of the Seventh Avenue express, itself best portrayed on record by “Sister Ray” and the first New York dolls album. I am also firmly convinced that one reason for the popularity of rap music, like disco and punk before it, is that it’s so utterly annoying to those of use whose cup of blare it isn’t; more than once its fans have walked up to a doorless telephone booth I was occupying, set their mammoth radios down on the sidewalk five inches from my feet, and stood there smiling at me. They didn’t want to use the phone, but I find it hard to begrudge them such gleeful rudeness; how could I, after walking all over the city with my also highly audible cassette player emitting free jazz, Metal Machine Music, PiL’s “Theme,” Miles Davis’s “Rated X” and Iannis Xenakis’s Electro-Acoustic Music, part one of which the composer described as sound paintings of the bombing of Greece? So fair is fair, even given the differences in taste.

Which also extends into questions of set and setting. Once I was eating lunch with two friends near St. Mark’s Place, and a familiar sound started coming out of the jukebox. It took me a few seconds to recognize it, but that voice was unmistakable: “Hey,” I said, “it’s Lydia and the Jerks doing ‘Orphans’!” One friend laughed: “Well folks, enjoy your meals!” But she hadn’t noticed it until I’d brought it to her attention, and in context it didn’t sound all that more yakkety than the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” which immediately preceded it. Then of course there is the whole question of Muzak and whether digestion really is improved by the theme from Dr. Zhivago. Or whether heavy metal and punk are essentially the same sound, or disco and punk equally oppressive. but then, when Patti Smith reviewed in Creem back in ’75, she said she liked it precisely because it was oppressive, with which I at least partially concur. Everybody has their little peculiarities, as evidenced by the fact that some people actually like to listen to the radio! So perhaps I can best bear witness to my own by listing a few of the Gehennas of wretched squawl which have made me most aware that I am alive over the years:

The Stooges, “L.A. Blues,” Fun house (Elektra): After assaulting us for half an hour with six songs
including the bulleted-boar tenor sax of Steve Mackay, the Ann Arbor visionaries let the whole thing explode and melt all over itself in this arrhythmic 1970 offering, replete with igneous feedback blankets, Mackay blowing his brains out and disappearing forever, and the man called Pop mewling, snarling, sighing, and licking his paws.

The Germs, “Forming” / “Live” (What? single): It was all downhill for Darby and Co. after this 1978
debut. They could not yet play the rather standard-issue Ramonesclone headbangisms of their album, so they had to toddle along a guitar and rhythm track that sounded like Malt-o-Meal being trailed from dining room to TV set, while Darb puled burble whose chorus you could tell he had reached whenever he repeated the words “Pull my trigger / I’m bigger than…”

A Taste of DNA (American Clave EP, 1981): The lead instrument in the new, improved DNA is neither Arto Lindsay’s slamming and scrapings of the electric twelve-string guitar he never plays chords on nor his laconically imploding epiglottis. It is Tim Wright’s bass, which ain’t even bereft of melody. and Ikue Mori cuts Sonny Murray in my book. Sure wish Ayler was alive to play with these folks (don’t laugh; Ornette almost played on “Radio Ethiopia”) – he played “skronk” (the word sounds like something straight from his bell) if anybody ever did.

The Sounds of the Junkyard (Folkways): Recorded live, of course, and quite a bit more soothing than you would expect, though with titles like “Burning Out an Old Car” you know it can’t miss.

Yoko Ono, “Don’t worry Kyoko, Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow” (flip of John’s “Cold Turkey” single, and side two of Live Peace in Toronto LP, Apple, 1969-70): Interesting not only for John’s churning blues-unto-feedback guitar riff and how far ahead of her time Yoko was vocally(though dig Patty Waters’s “Black Is the Color” on ESP-Disk in early sixties) but for lyrical correspondence with Lydia Lunch’s “Orphan’s,” featured on Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (Migraine EP, 1980): If, as Christgau says, “Arto is the king of skronk,” then Lydia’s slide guitar work certainly qualifies her as queen. guys in my sixth-grade neighborhood used to entertain themselves by tying the head of a cat to one hot-rod fender and its tail to another and driving the cars apart slowly, which sounded a lot like part of this. Unless it’s for Catholic-school beatings by nuns, nostalgia doesn’t account for Lydia’s passionate “Baby Doll” wailing. If you only want to try one, make it this – nothing more deathly shrill has ever been recorded.

Jad Fair, The Zombies of Mora-Tau (Armageddon EP, 1980): Jad is half of 1/2 Japanese, and with his brother David made a 1/2 J. three record set that I still haven’t been able to listen to all the way through. A previous EP containing such highlights as “School of Love” was great, but this might even be better for the way Jad integrates atonal air-raid guitar with sub-Jonathan Richman white-burba-infantilismus vocals that as they natter tunelessly onward actually tell little stories (“And I said, ‘Dr. Frankenstein, you must die,’ and I shot him” and you hear the gun KABLOOIE!). This may be a whole new songwriting genre, or at least one terminal of the Lou Reed “I walked to the chair / Then I sat in it” school of lyrics.

Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music (RCA 1975): Don’t see this around much anymore, but it sure caused a ruckus when he sprang it on Transformer / Sally Can’t Dance rocky horror fans: a two-record, hour-long set of shrieking feedback run through various pieces of high-tech equipment. Sounded great in midwestern suburbs, but kinda unnecessary in NYC.

Blue Cheer, Vincebus Eruptum (Philips, 1968): These guys may well have been the first heavy metal band, but what counts here is not whether Leigh Stephens birthed that macho grunt before Mark Farmer (both stole it from Hendrix) but that Stephen’s sub-sub-sub-sub-Hendrix guitar overdubs stumbled around each other so ineptly they verged on a truly bracing atonality.

The Mars EP (Infidelity, 1980): With Teenage Jesus, DNA, and the Contortions, this group was
featured on the watershed No New York LP (You mean you don’t own a copy? What are you, sick or something?). But for my money this piece of beyond-lyrics, often beyond-discernible-instrumentation psychotic noise is their absolute masterpiece – despite John Gavanti, their version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which I have never been able to listen to all the way through. This is not “industrial” but human music, and so what if said humans sound like they’re in a bad way? You are too. As it grinds and grieves and grovels, you cannot deny that they certainly plow what they sow. best cut: “Scorn.” Best rumor: Somebody dropped the original tapes, produced by Arto Lindsay, in water. And accidentally, at that.

-Village Voice, 30 September – 6 October 1981

July 31, 2009June 9, 2023

Untoward Digression into the Politics

As though a more graceful straying was at all an option. This little tidbit stuck out in an argument on the optimal number of Americans, which sounds loaded enough, but then:

Without more of a focus on the implications of immigration policy for population, there could be 600 million Americans by 2100, he writes. Depending on whom you talk to, that is a boon or a disaster. Mr. Chamie notes that the relatively enormous thirst for energy, food and other resources from Americans, when compared with that of the average world citizen, gives outsize importance to issues like global warming and to American trends.

Emphasis mine. Isn’t that the whole point of green, cloaking our climbdown in euphemism as though we want to curb our appetites for resources and are not doing it because of shame or peak stupid related to the “while supplies last” ironicality? Next up, discovered deep in the programmer sub-species of the Amazonian Huarani, startling new emoticons for “shrug.”

Then, just for kicks and speaking of idiotic discussions, extend the logical implications of the resistance to big-government takeovers to firefighting:

Yet if we had to have the “conversation” about the firefighting industry today, we’d have socialism-phobic South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint on the TV every chance he could get saying things like, “Do you want a government bureaucrat between you and the safety of your home?”

Rep. John Boehner of Ohio would hold press conferences and ask, “Do you want your firefighting to be like going to the DMV? Do you want Uncle Sam to come breaking down your door every time some Washington fat cat says there’s a fire?”

Oh the pain. via.

And then there’s the sedition network. It’s becoming increasingly difficult, if you were so inclined, to argue that Fox News was not created to destroy the Republican Party, and hence the two-party system. I guess we should always wonder whether we are and could be sufficiently virtuous to resist what seems like help but is actually designed to quicken our demise. Oh, maybe that’s what… Rrrgh. Hate. Lessons.

July 30, 2009

Encoding the Model of the Object

Whether that object be of desire… of derision… of worship… of my affection… of a preposition. Staying with the quantum mechanics meme (and why shouldn’t we?), there comes the matter of no small consequence surrounding the, what’s the scientific term… uh, bizarro quantum world condition by which, even if you already have all of the possible information that is allowed to be known about a certain activity or event, you can still only talk about the probability of the event happening. Same for coin flips as a nanoscale bridge.

Quantum mechanics operates in a bizarro world that includes superposition, where atoms can maintain more than one state at a time. Matter can also become entangled so that it remains connected across vast distances — a ghostly phenomenon dubbed “spooky action at a distance” by Albert Einstein.

So, yes, the model of the object, a Hamiltonian; no, not that one. This one:

The energy conservation (quantum) law written with the operator H as the Schrödinger equation is fundamental in quantum mechanics and is perhaps the most utilized, mathematical computation device in quantum mechanics of systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom. There is also, however, the alternative approach in the Heisenberg picture, or formulation, in which the observable and other operators are time-dependent whereas the state vectors are time-independent, which reverses the time dependences betwen operators and state vectors from the more popular Schrödinger formulation.

It’s the thing, in other words. That says whether you’re talking about an electron or a bicycle. The first piece of information you need is the Hamiltonian of an object.

Ah, the rush of knowing… feels the same even when it’s about all you don’t know.

Now… there is an implication to the above, and I won’t say what it is, that is completely deterministic about the future. Do I already know what that is? Maybe. But since time is merely one factor among many, there’s really no rush.

July 29, 2009

Intrinsic Angular Momentum

IAM, or spin, in other words. If we could capture the power of the earth’s magnetic power on itself, what would we plug it into? The conundrum would be similar, if not perfectly analogous, to attempting the transformation of hype into literal energy. There is something blocking the association – a physical law or two, sure, but also an imaginary plane of separation dividing these possibilities.

And I’m not talking here just about Newtonian physics not working at the quantum dimension. After all, do we not admit that our abilities to entertain magical possibility are powerful? Sustainable, cheap green energy that does not displace our devotion to modern convenience, for example; or the elimination of a seemingly necessary level of waste, for another. Do these imply mutual exclusivity? And if they don’t, what’s the problem, then?

One aspect might be stopping some of what we’re doing as a form of doing something about a problem. Conservation has its naysayers, but alone or teamed with constructive counter steps, substantial benefits cannot be denied. The cessation in consuming fast food as means to healthier living, for example; we would want to continue eating but may well choose tastier options that do not require industrial-scale agriculture in order to exist. A better example might be deforestation – stopping it as a means to reducing carbon emissions. Here we have the opportunity for greater carbon sequestration via the presence of more carbon cycling mechanisms (trees), coupled with the reduction in ghg emissions themselves by actually cutting down and hauling away less trees. Double dip in each column, if you want. But it’s not a ‘something for nothing’ proposition. Not a magical bullet, as they say. Just an initiative

known as the Carbon Benefits Project, was launched today by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Agroforestry Centre, along with a range of other key partners. The project is being funded by the Global Environment Facility.

Under the United Nation’s climate convention and its Kyoto Protocol, developed countries can offset some of their greenhouse gas emissions by paying developing economies for implementing clean and renewable energy projects such as wind, solar and geothermal power.

In December 2009, at the crucial UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, nations may decide to also pay to tropically-forested countries for maintaining standing forests under a scheme known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD).

This is because up to 20 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions linked with climate change is coming from deforestation—more than from cars, trucks, planes and ships combined.

I’ll stipulate how dangerously close this line of thinking may be to not making art as a conceptual form of art making if it can also be noted for the record that not cutting down trees is a viable form of tree-having.

July 28, 2009

Re-organizing the Work Week

Get creative about it – but instead of being all soi this or avant that, say you’re doing it to save money. If you can’t teleport or telecommute, and I can’t do either, why not break the forty hours down into four days instead of five? The state of Utah tried it and… oh my metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions:

the state redefined the workday for more than 17,000 of its employees last August. For those workplaces, there’s no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday’s midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million.

…

An interim report released by the Utah state government in February projected a drop of at least 6,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually from Friday building shutdowns. If reductions in greenhouse gases from commuting are included, the state would check the generation of at least 12,000 metric tons of CO2—the equivalent of taking about 2,300 cars off the road for one year.

Wha? You mean you can just do that? What will the neighbors think? What will my father say? What will you do with that extra day off EVERY week? What time do you have to get up? That’s right – now the real trouble begins.

July 27, 2009

Warrior-Philosophers and the Nitrogen Cycle

What does Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations have to do with hypoxia zones in the Gulf of Mexico? As pointed out, if one out-sized work by a grand personage were seen as rather ordinary prescriptions for decent conduct and otherwise commonsensical, might other directives of a seemingly radical nature take their place among the more banal measures of merely astute management? So it may seem.

The United Nations recently approved the broad application of the first agricultural methodology, or biological approach, for Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The UN’s announcement coincides with the USDA’s analysis report that shows the economic benefits to agriculture from the U.S. cap-and-trade legislation.

The agricultural methodology, which will be used to design projects that eliminate the use of synthetic nitrogen on legumes like soybeans and cowpeas, was developed by Amson Technology LC, a greenhouse-gas-reduction and sustainability consulting firm, Becker Underwood Inc., a leading developer of bio-agronomic and specialty products and Perspectives GmbH, a Point Carbon company, a high-quality greenhouse gas reduction market solutions provider.

…

In the U.S., a sustainable agriculture survey conducted by Rabobank shows that nearly 70 percent of the U.S. farmers and ranchers have taken steps toward implementing sustainable agricultural practices, and dairy farmers are striving to cut 25 percent annual GHG emissions related to the production of fluid milk by 2020.

Whether via legislation, grass-roots activism or market economics, many of the more exotic-seeming solutions to the way we lay waste to the natural environment are nothing of the kind. Problems of excess can be managed with sensible long-term projections about production and the pollution horizons that will result; scaling one down until it bears a manageable relationship to the other (sustainable or better). In other words, what we need divided by what we know. In what other world would these types of reasonable management practices seem radical?

Marcus Aurelious was hailed, even at the time, as a philospher-emporer, as if that was an unusual combination. The mixed message of our age is the mythology of ‘economies of scale’, as if one can transcend the other. We’ve got no business in that business. Industrial agriculture should be seen as the grotesque distortion, not our attempts to correct it.

July 24, 2009

Appearance as Illusion

Over the course of working on a piece about a Swedish film director from the 70’s, I’ve been writing and thinking about the various forms of erotica, as proffered on film in this instance. On the wings of this spilling over into conversations with known associates, a friend passed this on to me. Though it’s talking about art, aren’t we always?

The connection between pornography and prostitution is witnessed by etymology. The effect of pornographic fantasy is to ‘commodify’ the object of desire, and to replace love and its vestigial sacraments with the law of the market. This is the final disenchantment of the human world. When sex becomes a commodity, the most important sanctuary of human ideals becomes a market, and value is reduced to price. That is what has happened in the last few decades, and it is the root fact of post-modern culture.

…

Sentimentality, like fantasy, is at war with reality. It consumes our finite emotional energies in self-regarding ways and numbs us to the world of other people. It atrophies our sympathies, by guiding them into worn and easy channels, and so destroys not only our ability to feel, but also our ability to bring help where help is needed and to take risks on behalf of higher things. It may seem to project and endorse a vision of those higher things, to take on itself some of the ennobling function which is the imagination’s proper task. But the appearance is an illusion. The object of sentimental emotion is in fact dragged down by the feeling which makes use of it, made grubby and tawdry in the game of emotional exchange. Sentimentality is another form of profanation. While pornography puts our lowest appetites on sale, sentimentality trades in love and virtue. But the effect is the same -to deprive these higher things of all reality, either by cynically denying them, or by making them insubstantial, dream-like, adrift in a never-never land where no human being can dwell. In the great works of imagination, by contrast, we are invited to enter a higher realm, in which real human motives and real human sentiments find their resolution and redemption. This higher realm is not a fantasy-product: it is not the surrogate object of base and existing desires. It is the true object of feelings which it itself engenders, and whereby it cleanses and sanctifies our lives.

It’s not long, so you should read the whole thing. Thanks, ac.

July 23, 2009

Dow Climbs on News of Harvard Professor’s Detention

Be sure and watch for signals of a stock market recovery in order to be ready to attribute or discount the effect to your favorite pet cause. Try it with a friend!

Seriously, it would be just as irresponsible to say that the market is up because we’re seriously considering tackling healthcare reform. Or, we’re saving the financial system via recapitalization through profit-taking. Wait a minute… that’s ugly because it’s TRUE. Which is something altogether different. A guy getting arrested breaking into his own house? That’s a rejected plot line on Lost. Not nearly unbelievable enough.

Some things we’d rather see, while for others we might do anything in exchange for the power to look away. Taken together or separately, what would any of these developments mean? They’re actually worth going into on their own merits, but that might unfold too slowly and allow us to miss the forest when the trees are SO pretty.

Meanwhile… Electricite de France and an American solar panel company are building the largest solar manufacturing plant in France.

EDF Energies Nouvelles (EDF EN) and First Solar, Inc. (Nasdaq: FSLR) today announced a venture to build France’s largest solar panel manufacturing plant. With an initial annual capacity of more than 100MWp, the plant will produce solar panels made with First Solar’s advanced, thin-film photovoltaic technology. This new venture will support the recently announced goal of the French government to become a leader in sustainable energy technologies including solar electricity. At full production, projected for the second half of 2011, the plant will employ more than 300 people.

Under the terms of the arrangement, First Solar will build and operate the plant in France. The plant represents an expected investment of more than €90 million. The initial annualized capacity of the plant is expected to exceed 100MWp, making it the largest manufacturing facility for solar panels in France. EDF Energies Nouvelles has agreed to finance half of the capital expense and plant start-up costs and will benefit from the plant’s entire output for the first 10 years. First Solar and EDF EN intend to announce their decision on the site location within the next few months.

%^&$%+#@*!

July 22, 2009

Solar Eclipse

As seen from Yinchuan. Newscom/SIPA photo, via TPM

The Path of Totality

At sunrise on July 22, 2009, (the evening of July 21 PDT), the moon’s umbra—the cone-shaped part of the moon’s shadow—will fall on India’s Gulf of Khambhat. The shadow will sweep across Asia and the South Pacific before leaving the earth near the Marshall Islands about 3½ hours later. The path of totality will cover a distance of approximately 9,500 miles (15,200 km). The maximum duration of totality is an exceptionally long 6 minutes and 39 seconds, which will come while the shadow is over the Pacific.

Talk about your open source entertainment.