Altered States

I've recently succumbed to a vague impulse to see again, after a gap of 27 years, the film Altered States.

As a younger man, I found the film entertaining, if rather overblown and somewhat pretentious.

And I suppose all of that still applies. But this time around the film, I've realized, makes some fairly compelling claims on its viewers, and despite Ken Russell's (as ever) hoary, heavy-handed direction, Altered States feels in some ways credible, somehow authentic. I've read some of the old reviews of the film, and the fairly thorough Wiki entry, and was pleased to find that renegade scientist John C. Lilly approved of the film. In fact, Lilly alleges that screenplay writer Paddy Chayefsky may have seen the galleys for Lilly's book The Scientist, which describes very similar events surrounding Lilly's own isolation tank experiments. Lilly is, characteristically, high-minded about the whole affair.

At any rate, I do recommend seeing Altered States (the Mexican magic mushroom scenes alone are worth the price of a DVD rental), and anyone can read more about the film here.

Drive In Saturday, 4.5.2008

Pulp/"This is Hardcore"

The Fall/"Totally Wired"

Motorhead/"Iron Fist"

Mick Jagger and Ry Cooder/"Memo from Turner"

Dusty Springfield/"Son of a Preacher Man"

Plasmatics and Tom Snyder

The hardcore punk movement in the 80s reached one of its cultural high points when Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics were on TV. It was a grand scandal, and so popular they were back on TV for sweeps week. With her spreading shaving cream all over her chest, being angry and rebellious, with mohawks to rival the best in Trafalgar Square, with her blowing up a car on stage--TV couldn't resist and neither could I. From my post-adolescent-male-point-of-view it was a theatre of pain and suffering, with boobs! What's not to like? At least that's how it was back in the day. These days I appreciate the best of punk for its raw accomplishments in tweeking the hegemony from within its own capitalist system, infecting even as it's held to the margins of the radio dial and cultural landscape.

There's one aspect of punk (such as hardcore punk music like the Plasmatics, FEAR, Germs, Circle Jerks, Dead Kennedys) that is as alive for me now as it was when I was first discovering it in the late seventies and into the eighties, and that is the humor, the ironic deadpan hilarity of this work. In this clip we can hear the band opening with a count "One, Two, Fuck You." It's not the kind of humor you'll read in the New Yorker, but it's funny anyway. I like to think about how Kafka's K would react, sitting in the audience at a Plasmatics show, feigning disgust and disinterest but mesmerized by the sexualized rebellion against the system. Either he would forget himself and dance upon his chair, get some shaving cream on his hands, or he would cower in guilty shame for having liked it. Either way, he would not leave the theatre. He certainly would not be as comfortable as that badass Tom Snyder, who had lots of great punks on his show.

Radio On

Chris Petit's post-punk film Radio On uses its soundtrack to propel the narrative in ways that are evocative and memorable. For example, a long tracking shot at the film's beginning explores the nondescript, dimly lit apartment of protagonist Robert's brother, who has committed suicide in the bath. The camera finally comes to rest on a radio at the foot of the tub, on which David Bowie's "Heroes/Heldon" plays at high volume. Those familiar with "Heroes" will recognize the dialectic in operation here: the romantic, desperate bravado of the song's lyrics and delivery in relation to the context of the suicide itself.

Later, Bowie's tune "Always Crashing in the Same Car" (a tribute to J.G. Ballard's novel Crash) plays while Robert cruises past a seemingly endless array of identical high-rise condominiums. The song ends strategically as Robert leaves this ultramodern, over-lit realm (the same high-rises can be seen, incidentally, on the cover of The Jam's LP This is the Modern World) to descend into the grim depths of nighttime Bristol, the site of his brother's suicide.

Finally, towards the film's end, as Robert succumbs to his own disaffected despair he leaves his car in an abandoned quarry while Kraftwerk's static-laden Radioactivity blares on the car's tapedeck.

But still, the film ends on a high note as Robert catches a train, fleeing this overdetermined and alienating landscape. This is an idyllic, panoramic scene (shot from overhead) of the station bordered to one side by the sea and on the other by the English hills, and I always imagine it with Kraftwerk's "Airwaves" thrumming urgently and lyrically (surely their most plaintive melody) along in the background, the low key vocals intoning simply, again and again:
"When airwaves swing
Distant voices sing."

Damnation

I've recently seen a film by director Bela Tarr--Damnation. While I appreciated the film's decadant cynicism, and its sense of defeated existentialism, the thing I found most remarkable was a camera technique Tarr uses in virtually every scene of the film. It seems that always, when two figures are framed in a dramatic scene, Tarr pulls the camera back to pan across their surroundings. This forces the viewer to always regard the characters and their dilemmas in a larger, social dimension. No act, it seems, can be seen outside of its historical context (for Tarr here it's Hungarian society collapsing under the weight of Soviet occupation) It's a simple yet elegant technique--one I'll take with me.

A good introduction to Tarr's major films can be found here.

Spreading Peace and Democracy through the World

This image is from a painting by San Diego artist Craig Marshall.

Ubu Roi

Alfred Jarry, a French writer known mainly as the creator of UBU ROI (1896), a kind of parody of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Jarry was a forerunner of the Theatre of Absurd (see Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello, Genet and others), writing his works in a Surrealistic style, and inventing a pseudoscience or "science of imaginary solutions" which he called pataphysique. Jarry once stated: "Laughter is born out of the discovery of the contradictory." Jarry's other works include stories, novels, and poems.

De ceux qu'ont transis les espérances charnelles
Égrenant la vertèbre en les sépulcres froids
Pour celui qui honnit le dôme de nos droits
La sarcelle grise ahurit au grand soleil
L'ivoire courbé pair au front bas des taureaux. (from 'Pastorale')

Alfred Jarry was born in Laval, Mayenne, into a well-to-do farmer and craftsman family. He was the second child of Anselme Jarry and his wife Caroline, née Quernest. Jarry was educated in the schools of Saint-Brieuc and Rennes. At the age of 18 he moved to Paris to live on a small family inheritance, and pursue his studies at the Lycée Henri IV. At the age of 15 he had written Ubu Roi in collaboration with a classmate at the Lycée of Rennes, to ridicule a pompous mathematics teacher. The play was originally presented with marionettes. In 1896 Aurélien Lugné-Poë produced it in Paris, where the performance caused a riot. The coarseness of the language and anarchistic tones were too much for the audience. It shocked even W.B. Yeats, who attended its opening night. Jarry also wrote two sequels to Ubu, UBU ENCHAÎNE (1900), which was acted for the first time at the Paris Exposition of 1937, and UBU COCU, published posthumously in 1944.

Ubu Roi was first presented on December 10, 1896 at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre. The title character, cowardly Père Ubu is egged on by his wife to murder the royal family. He becomes the king of Poland and establishes a reign of terror. (PEASANTS. Mercy, Lord Ubu, have pity on us. We are poor, simple people. PA UBU. I couldn't care less.) Eventually he is defeated by the Tsar and forced into exile to France with Mother Ubu. The events take place in a crazy never-never land, tempo is rapid, and principal characters move through the story like some monstrous puppets on an attack on existing moral and aesthetic values. - In addition to satirizing bourgeois values, Jarry sneers at traditional drama, among others Shakespeare's Macbeth in scene in which Mère and Père Ubu plot to assassinate the King of Poland.

After military service Jarry devoted himself to literature. He frequented the literary salons and began to write. His early works include LES MINUTES DE SABLE MÉMORIAL (1894), a collection of prose and verse. Henri Rousseau, a minor inspector in the toll service and the first of the so-called naive painters, painted Jarry's portrait which was hung in the Salon des Indépendants. L'AMOUR ABSOLU (1899) was a novel, more obscure than anything he had written. H.G. Wells's novel The Time Machine inspired Jarry to write the speculative essay 'How to Construct a Time Machine' (1900). LE SURÂLE (1902, The Supermale) was Jarry's last novel. "The act of love is of no importance, since it can be performed indefinitely," states Jarry in the beginning of the book. The hero of the erotic fantasy is a superman who wins a bicycle race against a six-man team, he has sex 82 times with a women, and experiences the final climax with an amorous machine.

"Yet it is high time we perceive the remarkably clear line that connects the impish figure of Alfred Jarry in 1896, calmly saying merde (shit) to bourgeois culture, with Albert Camus, the impassioned humanist who wanted to bring all the black sheep back into the fold." (Maurice Nadeau in The History of Surrealism, 1968)
After his fortune was soon spent, and Jarry lapsed into a chaotic, Bohemian life. "We won't have destroyed anything unless we destroy the ruins too," was his program. Though a midget, his presence was huge. Jarry had taste for absinthe, he lived in a bizarre apartment where each store had been cut horizontally in half to make double the original number of floors. André Gide put Jarry into an episode of his novel The Counterfeiters. In 1926 Gide wrote: "Everything in Jarry, that strange humbug, smelled of affectation - his face whited with flour, his mechanical speech without intonation, the syllables evenly spaced, and the words made up or distorted."

Until his death at the age of thirty-four, Jarry was a familiar figure stalking the streets of Paris with his green umbrella, symbol in King Ubu of middle-class power, and wearing the cyclist's garb and carrying two pistols. From Ubu he also adopted the gestures of his creation, spoke in high falsetto like Ubu, and always employed the royal "we." Jarry healt was undermined by poverty and alcohol. He died in alcoholism and tuberculosis in Paris, on November 1, 1907. In 1911 appeared a volume of Jarry's essays but it was not until the 1920s, when the value of his work was widely recognized.

Jarry's writings had a profound influence on the surrealist and Dada movements. His absurd humor appealed to André Breton (1896-1966) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who stated that the Dada spirit was the "non-conformist spirit of every century that has existed since man is man". Jarry's influence on modern science fiction is seen is J.G. Ballard's The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as a Downhill Motor Race (1967), which echoes Jarry's themes from his essay Commentair pour servir à la construction pratique de la machine à explorer le temps.

Pataphysics mixed science, science fiction, technology and art. Jarry defined it as the science of imaginary solutions, "which will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one." The 'science' was later taken up and developed by other French novelists such as Boris Vian, George Perec and Raymond Queneau...

Read the full post here

MY PILLOW IS THE THRESHOLD

is a song off the Silver Jews new LP "Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea". It won't be released till August 2008 but thanks to illegal file sharing I've procured a copy. If the internet police are reading this: I promise to buy the vinyl the week it's released.

This song seems to be in defense of the sleepy intellectual who the rest of the world sees as a lazy parasite yet who might just be some sort of sage dragging important ideas from the other side into reality. I especially dig the "throw my thoughts like tomahawks" and "what looks like sleep is really hot pursuit" lines.


I take decaf coffee
Two sugars and one cream
I don’t see the use in staying up just to watch tv

I unplug all the neon
Turn the ringer off the phone
Throw my thoughts like tomahawks
Into this world which I disown

Because the pillow that I dream on
is the threshold of a kingdom
is the threshold of a world where I’m with you

it’s a dark and snowy secret
and it has to do with heaven
and what looks like sleep is really hot pursuit

I hold your picture in my mind
It makes me warm when I am cold
Gets me up and it makes me walk
It makes me question what I’m told

Somewhere in a foggy atlas
Lookout mountain lookout sea
First life takes time then time takes life
Now the next moves up to me

Because the pillow that I dream on
Leads to some fantastic glory
It’s the threshold of a world I can’t ignore

Like time unspooled from heaven
did you find me sleeping in your doorway
now I’m here for good
I won’t leave you anymore


David Berman is an American poet, cartoonist, and singer-songwriter best known for his work with indie-rock band the Silver Jews.

Here's a short video clip by artist Jeremy Blake, a recent suicide plagued by an obsession that Scientologists were out to destroy his career, with Berman reading poetry over it.

It's called Sodium Fox

STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE

This dead on blog reads like a "how to manual" for dealing with honkys of the North American subspecies.

SILENCE/JANDEK/SONTAG

The Houston, Texas musician Jandek has self-released one or more albums of discordant howling freak folk songs every year since 1978 without granting any interviews to the public.



It wasn't until 2004 that he performed live, unannounced at an obscure folk festival in Scotland. Attendant music geek jaws hit the floor as the recognition slowly set in that the gaunt nearly albino man in black playing on stage matched the likeness of the figure that would sometimes appear on Jandek album covers. The organizers of the festival never claimed to have had any dealings with anyone called Jandek, only "a representative of Corwood Industries" the record label whose sole artist is Jandek and is presumably run single handedly by the individual behind the music.

Below, Susan Sontag has some intelligent things to say on the subject:

"Rimbaud has gone to Abyssinia to make his fortune in the slave trade. Wittgenstein, after a period as a village school-teacher, has chosen menial work as a hospital orderly. Duchamp has turned to chess. Accompanying these exemplary renunciations of a vocation, each man has declared that he regards his previous achievements in poetry, philosophy, or art as trifling, of no importance. 
But the choice of permanent silence doesn't negate their work. On the contrary, it imparts retroactively an added power and authority to what was broken off—disavowal of the work becoming a new source of its validity, a certificate of unchallengeable seriousness. That seriousness consists in not regarding art (or philosophy practiced as an art form: Wittgenstein) as something whose seriousness lasts forever, an 'end,' a permanent vehicle for spiritual ambition. The truly serious attitude is one that regards art as a 'means' to something that can perhaps be achieved only by abandoning art; judged more impatiently, art is a false way or (the word of the Dada artist Jacques Vaché) a stupidity. 
Though no longer a confession, art is more than ever a deliverance, an exercise in asceticism. Through it, the artist becomes purified—of himself and, eventually, of his art. The artist (if not art itself) is still engaged in a progress toward 'the good.' But whereas formerly the artist's good was mastery of and fulfillment in his art, now the highest good for the artist is to reach the point where those goals of excellence become insignificant to him, emotionally and ethically, and he is more satisfied by being silent than by finding a voice in art. Silence in this sense, as termination, proposes a mood of ultimacy antithetical to the mood informing the self-conscious artist's traditional serious use of silence (beautifully described by Valéry and Rilke): as a zone of meditation, preparation for spiritual ripening, an ordeal that ends in gaining the right to speak.
So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the 'new' and/or the 'esoteric.' Silence is the artist's ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work." — Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, The Aesthetics of Silence 

CASTRO RESIGNS

the implications are endless...
i will comment on this further @ a later time...

but given his age & health condition, it was meant to happen sometime..

what are some of your thoughts?



bbc
ny times
npr

Saturday Night, 2.9.08

Bikini Kill/Rebel Girl


Magazine/Touch & Go


Captain Beefheart/Electricity


YMO/Taiso

ROYAL TRUX

Royal Trux were a couple of junkies in love who initiated the underground record label Drag City Records with their first LP "Twin Infinities": a double disc album of surrealistic rock 'n roll that mutated The Rolling Stone's aesthetic into something inspiring again. Jennifer Herrema was bizzaro world Mick Jagger while Neil Hagerty was Keith Richards and they consistently produced radical rock albums that were twisted by dadaist impulses into art you could put in a jukebox at the local dive bar. When she returned to heroin usage upon the death of her father they divorced and split into two new bands: RTX and The Howling Hex.

A new video from RTX and some old Royal Trux footage was recently unearthed on youtube.

I dig Jennifer Herrema's triple layered animalistic banshee howls on this song. It's sort of amazing how If you listen closely you'll find every word intelligible.


Royal Trux briefly signed to a major label in the 1990's for a three album deal. They fulfilled their contract, took the $ and built their own recording studio in the Virginian countryside to work from the underground henceforth. It's interesting to watch the couple interact while shilling.

us troops vs. iraqi teens

guess who won?

the sinister tone of the " narrator " 

is disturbing & obviously forced... but fitting..

PUNX IN THE BEERLIGHT

Modern day poet, songwriter David Berman who records records under the the title Silver Jews wrote this song which was eventually made into a video assembled from various footage from the Planet of the Apes films. I'll tell you it's brilliant right now just in case your senses are slow. Toulouse Lautrec!

I'm sort of embarrassed by the effect it has on my emotionality (lump in throat, etc.). So of course I had to drop it off here, dear readers (harhar)



Lyrics:

Silver Jews, The - Punks In The Beerlight

Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor?
Just in case I feel the need to puke.
If we'd known what it'd take to get here,
Would we have chosen to?

So you wanna build an altar on a summer night,
You wanna smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch.
Aintcha heard the news? Adam and Eve were Jews.
And I always loved you to the max.

I love you to the max (x3)

(Cassie) If it gets really really bad, if it ever gets really really bad...

(David) Let's not kid ourselves. It gets really really bad.

Punks in the beerlight, burnouts in love.
Punks in the beerlight, Toulouse-Lautrec.
Punks in the beerlight, two burnouts in love.
I always loved you to the max
I love you to the max (x5)
I love you to the...

Max!

Renegade Science: Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 – November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms.[1] He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.[2]

He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having gone astray or as having succumbed to mental illness. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychoanalytic establishment.[3]

Reich, of Jewish descent and a communist, was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. He fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's,[4] the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA.[5] He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.[6]

Read the rest of the Wiki entry here.

Those interested in Reich might visit the Wilhelm Reich Museum homepage, here.

Drive In Saturday, 1.12.2008

Kraftwerk/Trans Europe Express


PIL/Public Image


Eddie Kendricks/Girl, You Need a Change of Mind


Stars of the Lid/Sky to Earth to Sky


Blur/The Universal

cat's paw

The Cat's Paw Nebula


This week's theme: Whose what? (animal edition)

cat's paw (cats paw) noun

1. Someone used as a tool by another.

2. A kind of knot used to connect a rope to an object.

3. A breeze that ruffles the surface of the water over a small area.

[The first sense of the term comes from the fable in which a monkey uses a cat to pull roasting chestnuts from a fire. The monkey gobbles up all the nuts while the cat is left with a burnt paw. See Edwin Landseer's
1824 painting Cat's Paw: http://museumsyndicate.com/item.php?item=2992

The second sense refers to the supposed resemblance of such a knot to a cat's paw: http://images.google.com/images?q=cat's+paw+knot

The origin of the third sense is unknown.]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus: http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=cat's-paw

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

"Prime Minister Tony Blair was reprimanded in the British parliament for
his willingness to be the cat's paw of the U.S."
Craig R. Eisendrath and Melvin A. Goodman; Shoot First, Talk Later;
USA Today (Washington, DC); Jul 1, 2004.



The above was sent to me via the email service A Word a Day (the third meaning of the term cat's paw is quite nice and is one I'd never heard before). Anyone, I believe, can subscribe for free for this service here:
http://wordsmith.org/awad/subscriber.html

Once one subscribes one is sent a word a day and it's definition, organized under a weekly theme. I recommend it highly.

David Simon Replies

Image from The Wire.

In an to us somewhat interesting and perhaps useful exchange, David Simon (creator of the HBO series "The Wire"), has resonded in the comments thread to a post by liberal commentator Matt Yglesias, blogger for The Atlantic. Yglesias takes exception to "The Wire" on ideological grounds; Simon's reply is here excerpted:

"Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won't agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now -- and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory) -- well, perhaps they're playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.

Does that mean The Wire is without humanist affection for its characters? Or that it doesn't admire characters who act in a selfless or benign fashion? Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters.

All that said, I am the product of a C-average GPA and a general studies degree from a state university and thirteen years of careful reporting about one rustbelt city. Hell do I know. Maybe my head is up my ass.

If The Wire is too pessimistic about the future of the American empire -- and I've read my Toynbee and Chomsky, so I actually think a darker vision could be credibly argued -- no one will be more pleased than me as I am, well, American."

The post can be found here.

Endemic Surveillance Society

Privacy International has issued its year-end national privacy ranking for 2007. The US is classified (along with China, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia and the UK) as an endemic surveillance society--the worst ranking posssible. The full report can be viewed here.

Renegade Science: Carl Sagan

The Aracibo Radar Telescope, Costa Rica

Last night was the 11th anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan. He was seemingly everywhere during the '70's and '80's, a popular media figure, affable and engaging. Even when stricken with cancer he continued his work of putting a human face on scientific endeavours, particularly space exploration. His novel "Contact" was adapted for a film starring Jodie Foster, with a remarkable ending sequence depicting the First Contact with an extra-terrestrial species in profoundly personal terms.

While no renegade in the strict sense of the other scientists in this series of posts, it is important to remember Sagan's early contributions to global warming theory, and perhaps more importantly, his sense of priorities: science, for Sagan, was never an end in itself, but rather a means to understand and appreciate the mysteries of nature.

The following is a tribute excerpted from the Carl Sagan site, found here:

"His thesis included his discovery of the surprisingly high temperature of Venus and his correct explanation that it was caused by a runaway greenhouse effect. Early on he began to wonder what would happen if our own moderate greenhouse effect here on Earth were to intensify as it had on Venus. He became one of the first scientists to sound the alarm on global warming and other forms of inadvertent climate modification, including the potential consequences of a major nuclear war which he named "nuclear winter."

It was nearly fifty years ago that Carl began his life-long research on the origin of life and the search for life and intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos. Back then, research on the latter subject was effectively a form of professional suicide. The scientific community viewed it as a subject beneath its dignity. Only a handful of courageous scientists, Carl among them, dared to jeopardize their careers by doing such research. Today as the numbers of newly discovered extra-solar planets steadily mount, the field of astrobiology flourishes.

Even earlier, the notebooks he filled in his teens were suffused with a passion for the values of science and democracy. He viewed the error-correcting mechanisms built into both the methodology of science and into our constitution as being on a par with the domestication of fire, the invention of agriculture and writing; among the most precious innovations ever devised by our species.

In this society dependent on science and technology, he thought that it was critically important for science to learn to communicate its insights, values and methods to everyone. At a time when "reputable" scientists rarely if ever ventured before the public, he was willing to risk his career for that also. One such effort, his 1980 "Cosmos" television series, has now been seen by a billion people worldwide. Parts of it will be broadcast in North America at 8pm EST on Christmas Day on the Discovery Science Channel. On Tuesday evenings at 9pm EST, starting January 8, 2008 the whole series will begin to run again. "Cosmos'" enduring world-wide appeal is another testament to his prophetic vision.

He believed that science must always remain scrupulously faithful to the most rigorous possible methodological standards but that we shouldn't shrink from the spiritual implications of its insights. He dreamed of a civilization rooted in our dawning understanding of nature, where skepticism and wonder went hand in hand. He didn't want to humiliate or demean the believer. He was always ready to communicate."

Renegade Science: Loren Eiseley

2007 marks the centennial of the birth of anthropologist and ecologist Loren Eiseley, who's popular writings helped to inspire the environmental movement. The following poem is from his collection "The Lost Notebooks of Loren Eiseley."

AGAINST CITIES

I have envied the hawk's breast
enduring the great heaven;
all wild wings and the stubbornness of rock yielding
no foothold but to eagles.
The serenity of stars over chaos
is worthy remembrance
and the peace of an old planet
forgetting the troubled footsteps of men...
I have envied
even, at times,
the stony security of a snail
locked in his narrow house.

But I have pondered and not understood
earth that endures spoiled cities
in preference to white deserts and the stars.

Renegade Science: John Lilly

ACCOUNTS OF DOLPHIN RESEARCH IN 1957 "If one works with a bottlenose dolphin day in and day out for many hours, days and weeks, one is struck with the fact that one's current basic assumptions and even one's current expectations determine within certain limits the results attained with a particular animal at that particular time. This effect, of course, is quite commonly found with one's peers in the human species.

"This working hypothesis of an advanced capability raised our index of suspicion and in turn sensitized our minds and methods to new sources of information. It was this subtle preparation of the mental climate which allowed us in 1957 to listen to some rather queer noises that the dolphin was producing in the laboratory and to review them very carefully on the tapes. Because the possibility of a very large brain capacity and because of musings about the possible areas of achievement already realized in this species, but as yet undiscovered by us, our minds began to open.

"This opening of our minds was a subtle and yet painful process. We began to have feelings which l believe are best described by the word 'weirdness.' The feeling was that we were up against the edge of a vast uncharted region in which we were about to embark with a good deal of mistrust in the appropriateness of our own equipment. The feeling of weirdness came on us as the sounds of this small whale seemed more and more to be forming words in our own language. We felt we were in the presence of Something, or Someone who was on the other side of a transparent barrier which up to this point we hadn't even seen. The dim outlines of a Someone began to appear. We began to look at this whale's body with newly opened eyes and began to think in terms of its possible 'mental processes,' rather than in terms of the classical view of a conditionable, instinctually functioning 'animal.' We began to apologize to one another for slips off the tongue in which we would call dolphins 'persons' and in which we began to use their names as if they were persons. This seemed to be as much of a way of grasping at straws of security in a rough sea of the unknown, as of committing the sin of Science of Anthropomorphizing. If these 'animals' have 'higher mental processes,' then they in turn must be thinking of us as very peculiar (even stupid} beings indeed.''

An account of the mimicry phenomena with Elvar and other dolphins:

"The repeatedly painful and humbling part of this experience that we as human beings had felt that man is at the top: we are alone; yet here is an 'animal' which was entering into that which was peculiarly human; i.e., human speech. At no matter how primitive a level he was entering into it, he was taking Step 1.

"To convey to you our sense of wonder and yet the sense of the uncomfortable necessity of continuously reorganizing our basic assumpltions is difficult. We gambled on Elvar's taking the first step and he did. (We haven't done as well with his delphinese language.) He impressed us with the fact that he took the first step to repair a gap of at least 30,000,000 years in a few weeks. He may be skipping some of the belabored efforts of the human race for the last 40,000 years to achieve our present degree oi articulate speech among ourselves. Maybe he is not skipping Maybe he is just beginning what Homo sapiens went through 40,000 years ago. And he first did it when and only when we believed he could do it and somehow demonstrated: our belief ta him."

"These experiences illustrate the thesis that one can protect one's self by maintaining one's ignorance by belittling disturbing experiences? Or one can newly recapture sensitivity and be openminded (even painfully so) and discover new facts. Discovery, in my experience, requires disillusionment first, as well as later. One must be shaken in one's basic beliefs before the discovery can penetrate one's mind sufficiently above threshold to be detected A certain willingness to face censure, to be a maverick? To question one's beliefs, to revise them, is obviously necessary. But what is not obvious is how to prepare one's own mind to receive the transmissions from the far side of the protective transparent wall separating each of us from the dark gulf of the unknown Maybe we must realize that we are still babies in the universe taking steps never before taken. Sometimes we reach out from our aloneness for someone else who may or may not exist. But at least we reach out, and it is gratifying to see our dolphins reach also, however primitively. They reach toward those of us who are willing to reach toward them. It may be that some day not toa far distant we both can draw to an end the 'long loneliness,' as Loren Eiseley called it."

from John Lilly's homepage

Renegade Science: John Lovelock

Photo from Greenpeace via BLDG BLOG

The following is excerpted from what I thought was a rather fascinating Rolling Stone profile of of controversial environmental scientist James Lovelock, who argues that climate change is now irreversible:

Lovelock's cottage in the woods is a world away from South London, where he grew up with coal soot in his lungs, coughing and pale and working-class. His mother was an early feminist; his father grew up so desperately hungry that he spent six months in prison when he was fourteen for poaching a rabbit from a local squire’s estate. Shortly after Lovelock was born, his parents passed him off to his grandmother to raise. "They were too poor and too busy to raise a child," he explains. In school, he was a lousy student, mildly dyslexic, more interested in pranks than homework. But he loved books, especially the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

To escape the grime of urban life, Lovelock's father often took him on long walks in the countryside, where he caught trout by hand from the streams and gorged on blueberries. The freedom and romance Lovelock felt on these jaunts had a transformative effect on him. "It's where I first saw the face of Gaia," he says now.

By the time Lovelock hit puberty, he knew he wanted to be a scientist. His first love was physics. But his dyslexia made complex math difficult, so he opted instead for chemistry, enrolling at the University of London. A year later, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Lovelock converted to Quakerism and soon became a conscientious objector. In his written statement, he explained why he refused to fight: "War is evil."

Lovelock took a job at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, where one of his first assignments was to develop new ways to stop the spread of infectious diseases. He spent months in underground bomb shelters studying how viruses are transmitted -- and shagging nurses in first-aid stations while Nazi bombs fell overhead. "It was a hard, desperate time," he says. "But it was exciting! It's terribly ironic, but war does make one feel alive."

...Lovelock's colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, struggled to design instruments to test for life on the Martian surface. Lovelock, as usual, took a different approach. Instead of using a probe to dig up soil and look for bacteria, he thought, why not analyze the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere? If life were present, he reasoned, the organisms would be obliged to use up raw materials in the atmosphere (such as oxygen) and dump waste products (like methane), just as life on Earth does. Even if the materials consumed and discharged were different, the chemical imbalance would be relatively simple to detect. Sure enough, when Lovelock and his colleagues finally got an analysis of Mars, they discovered that the atmosphere was close to chemical equilibrium -- suggesting that there had been no life on the planet.

But if life creates the atmosphere, Lovelock reasoned, it must also, in some sense, be regulating it. He knew, for example, that the sun is now about twenty-five percent hotter than when life began. What was modulating the surface temperature of the Earth, keeping it hospitable? Life itself, Lovelock concluded. When the Earth heats up, plants draw down levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases; as it cools, the levels of those gases rise, warming the planet. Thus, the idea of the Earth as superorganism was born.

The idea was not entirely new: Leonardo da Vinci believed pretty much the same thing in the sixteenth century. But Lovelock was the first to assemble all the existing thinking into a new vision of the planet. He soon quit NASA and moved back to England, where his neighbor William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, suggested that he name his theory after Gaia, to capture the popular imagination. When established scientific journals refused to touch his ideas, Lovelock put out a book called Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. "The Gaia hypothesis," he wrote, "is for those who like to walk or simply stand and stare, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears and to speculate about the consequences of our own presence here." Gaia, he added, offers an alternative to the "depressing picture of our planet as a demented spaceship, forever traveling driverless and purposeless around an inner circle of the sun."

Hippies loved it. Darwinists didn't. Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, dismissed Lovelock's book as "pop-ecology literature." British biologist John Maynard Smith went further, calling Gaia "an evil religion." In their view, Lovelock's concept flew in the face of evolutionary logic: If the Earth is an organism, and organisms evolve by natural selection, then that implies that somehow the Earth out-competed other planets. How is that possible? They were also troubled by Lovelock's suggestion that life creates the condition for life, which seems to suggest a predetermined purpose. In the minds of many of his peers, Lovelock was dancing very close to God...

Veronica

For a short time during the early 1940s, Lake was considered one of the most reliable box office draws in Hollywood and was also known for her onscreen pairings with actor Alan Ladd. At first, the couple was teamed together merely out of physical necessity: Alan Ladd was just 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m) tall and the only actress then on the Paramount lot short enough to pair with him was Lake, who stood just 4 feet 11½ inches (1.51 m). They made four films together.

A stray lock of her shoulder-length blonde hair during a publicity photo shoot led to her iconic peekaboo hairstyle, which hid one eye, and was widely imitated. During World War II, she changed her trademark image to encourage women working in war industry factories to adopt more practical, safer hairstyles.

Although widely popular with the public, Lake had a complex personality and acquired a reputation for being difficult to work with. Eddie Bracken, her co-star in Star Spangled Rhythm was quoted as saying "[s]he was known as 'The Bitch' and she deserved the title." In that movie, Lake took part in a song lampooning her hair style, "A Sweater, A Sarong and a Peekaboo Bang", performed with Dorothy Lamour and Paulette Goddard, although some of Lake's vocals were dubbed.

Lake's career stumbled with her unsympathetic role as Nazi sympathizer Dora Bruckman in 1944's The Hour Before the Dawn. During filming, she tripped on a lighting cable and her second child, William, was born prematurely on July 8, 1943, dying a week later from uremic poisoning. By the end of 1943, her first marriage ended in divorce. Meanwhile, scathing reviews of The Hour Before Dawn included criticism of her unconvincing German accent, which was said to have interfered disastrously with her acting.

Nevertheless, Lake was making $4,500 per week under her contract with Paramount when she married director André de Toth in 1944. Their son, her third child, André Michael de Toth III, was born October 25, 1945. Lake is said to have begun drinking more heavily during this period and people began refusing to work with her. Paramount cast Lake in a string of mostly forgotten films. A notable exception was The Blue Dahlia (1946) in which she again co-starred with Alan Ladd (who reportedly was also less than fond of her). During filming, author Raymond Chandler referred to her as "Moronica Lake". Paramount decided not to renew her contract in 1948.

Her fourth child, Diana de Toth, was born October 16, 1948. Lake was also sued by her mother for support payments that year. After a single film for 20th Century Fox, her career collapsed. By the end of 1952, she had appeared in one last film (Stronghold, which she later described as "a dog"), filed for bankruptcy, and divorced de Toth. The IRS seized the remainder of her assets for unpaid taxes. Lake resorted to television and stage work, and in 1955, married songwriter Joseph A. McCarthy.

After breaking her ankle in 1959, Lake was unable to continue working as an actress. She and McCarthy divorced, and she drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct.

A reporter found her working as a barmaid at the all women's Martha Washington Hotel in Manhattan. At first, Veronica claimed that she was a guest at the hotel and covering for a friend. Soon afterward, she admitted that she was employed at the bar. The reporter's widely distributed story led to some television and stage appearances. In 1966, she had a brief stint as a TV hostess in Baltimore, Maryland, along with a largely ignored film role in Footsteps in the Snow.

Her physical and mental health declined steadily and by the late 1960s Lake was in Hollywood, Florida, apparently immobilized by paranoia (which included claims she was being stalked by the FBI).

She published her autobiography Veronica amid much publicity and positive reviews. With the proceeds, Lake co-produced and starred in her last film, Flesh Feast (1970), a very low budget horror movie with a Nazi-myth storyline.

She then moved to the UK, where she had a short-lived marriage with "English sea captain" Robert Carleton-Munro before returning to the U.S. in 1973, having filed for divorce. Lake was immediately hospitalized and although she is said to have made a cheerful and positive impression on the nurses who cared for her, she was apparently estranged from her three surviving children. She had no guests or visitors and was destitute again.

Lake was 53 when she died of hepatitis and acute renal failure (complications of her alcoholism) near Burlington, Vermont. Her ashes were scattered off the Virgin Islands. In 2004, some of Lake's ashes were reportedly found in a New York antique store.

Lake has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6918 Hollywood Boulevard for her contributions to the motion picture industry.

Quote
"I wasn't a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie."

Via Wiki.

The military copies art, again

In 1999 Australian performance artist Stelarc demonstrated modified bodily agency through his invention of the Exoskeleton, a mechanical hydraulic and electronic extension of his body, which changed the nature of his mobility and in various experiments, expanded the ability of his individual digits on his hands to grasp finer and smaller things through mini digits on the tips of each.

I'm not sure how long this video will be available, but CNN has a video report on a Utah company, Sarcos, which is manufacturing exoskeletons for military use, and the report is chock full of unqualified fascination and celebration for the developments. In the absence of Stelarc's uncanny emphases on the distortion of the human element in such hybrids, this report on Sarcos seems like a commercial for ED-209, the fictional robotic law enforcement robot that went awry with murderous malfunction in the film Robocop. Anyway, check out this link to the hyped-up next generation military technology for robotic hybrids for military use. No mention of cost, or the effect on the human operator over time, but something tells me a day spent in the exoskeleton leaves the operator somehow changed.

Here's Stelarc demonstrating his Exoskeleton in 1999. Keep in mind that he typically drives the legs and other attachments with voluntary muscles from unrelated places in his body. For example, his third hand, which he performs with often, is driven by abdominal and leg muscles, not by his arm or hand muscles.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are a well-known husband-and-wife team of detective writers from Sweden. As a team they planned and wrote a series of ten novels (police procedurals) about the exploits of detectives from the homicide section of the Stockholm police department. They also wrote novels separately. For the Martin Beck series, they plotted and researched each book together, and then wrote alternate chapters.

From the beginning, the pair planned the series as a sequence of ten novels, collectively titled The Story of a Crime. The novels revolve around a team of police investigators, led by Martin Beck.

Roseanna (Roseanna, 1965)
The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (Mannen som gick upp i rök, 1966)
The Man on the Balcony (Mannen på balkongen, 1967)
The Laughing Policeman (Den skrattande polisen, 1968) (Edgar Award, Best Novel, 1971)
The Fire Engine That Disappeared (Brandbilen som försvann, 1969)
Murder at the Savoy (Polis, polis, potatismos!, 1970)
The Abominable Man (Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle, 1971)
The Locked Room (Det slutna rummet, 1972)
Cop Killer (Polismördaren, 1974)
The Terrorists (Terroristerna, 1975)

Per Wahlöö described their goals for the series as to "use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideologically pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type."

The series is noteworthy for how the lives of its characters change over the books. Beck gets divorced, Kollberg quits the force, a third detective gets killed. The leitmotif of the series, written from the authors' clearly defined socialist viewpoint, is to indicate how Sweden, as a country which champions social democracy, nevertheless has the same problems of inequality and crime as other capitalist countries. The political events of the times often play a significant role as backdrop for the plots, such as the Greek dictatorship, the Vietnam War, and so on. Because the authors intended the books as a critique of capitalist society, all the titles in the original edition were given the subtitle "report of a crime"; on purpose an ambiguous phrase.

The final novel of the series,The Terrorists, was not finished when Per Wahlöö passed away in June 1975, so Maj Sjöwall had to finish it alone. During Wahlöö's illness, which eventually led to his death, he sat up writing day and night in order to finish the book before it was too late.

The above is lifted from the rather uninspiring Wiki entry here. The grand finale of the series is memorable: Beck and his paramour, at home playing Scrabble, as Beck spells out, for the final line of The Terrorists,
"M-A-R-X."

Surveillance Camera Players

"At around 11 pm on Tuesday 10 December 1996, six members of the Surveillance Camera Players (Michael, Katie, Bill, Susan, Lisa, and Orrin) performed most of Art Toad's special adaption of Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi in front of a surveillance camera in Manhattan's Union Square subway station. At the same time, three other SCPers (Grrrt, Michelle and John), as well as several on-lookers, watched the play on one of the station's closed-circuit television monitors. Unfortunately, the SCP were unable to secure a video camera, and so the performance went undocumented.

Though the play contains only nine short scenes in Monsieur Toad's version, the Players were not able to perform it completely on that day -- which was the 100th anniversary of the very first public performance of Ubu the King -- because, at the conclusion of Scene Seven, they were asked to stop and to move along by two utterly humorless New York City policemen, who just did not care that Scene Eight was the one in which the Bear (Orrin with a funny hat) fights with and is killed by Ubu's Man.

Surveillance cameras, though obviously designed to monitor and relay what they "see," are not allowed by law to monitor and relay what they "hear." (Conversations are "truly private" or "more private" than visual appearance and behavior in the eyes of the law.) And so any performance by the Surveillance Camera Players has to be a silent one. By rendering -- reducing might be a better word -- all of the dialogue in Ubu the King to a few expressions that would be clearly visible if printed on hand-held cards designed to look like the speech bubbles in comic strips, M. Toad succeeded in creating a script that could be used by the SCPers. But no "violence" was done to Jarry's play, which is already filled with comic-strip moments in which two-dimensional elements take the place of three-dimensional ones (e.g., the stage direction that the Russian Army should be a single actor carrying a name-tag about his or her neck that says, "The Russian Army").

The SCPers who performed the night of 10 December carried with them bags stuffed with all the costumes, name-tags and printed speech balloons that they would need to play their roles (two or three per person). All of these props were either scavenged or created during the two work sessions that the Players held in advance of the actual performance, which was, incidentally, their very first. Unfortunately, there was no dress rehearsal, and so the first and only performance of the play took too long (long enough to draw the attention of the cops). None of the props were lost during or after the performance, so the play can be staged again at any time.

Perhaps needless to say, King Ubu himself -- or, rather, the SCPer who played him and was dressed in a tunic bearing a huge spiral on his big, fat belly and a green cone on his pear-shaped head -- walked the streets of Manhattan for hours before his appearance in front of the camera, the subway riding public of New York City, and the NYPD. In full attire, he attended a rather pointless talk given by Peter Lamborn Wilson, and made a comment during the discussion session afterward. Ubu even stopped to have dinner at the restaurant in Greenwich Village called the Paris Commune, at which he was recognized and toasted in his native French."

The above is from the Surveillance Camera Players homepage, via Ballardian.

JEFFREY LEWIS: VOICE OF A GENERATION (of pussies)

It's hard not to identify with this song. It is sincere, intelligent, and original while capturing the zeitgeist all at the same time...but even still...I'd rather listen to N. Young's Barstool Blues...

Here's the guy who rapes him in the song:

About the Weather

photo via www.stormchasers.au.com

"The weather is variable
so are you;
but I can't do a thing
about the weather."
Howard Devoto/"About the Weather"

This post is a request for contributions to an informal, "alternative" biblography of non-fiction and fiction titles addressing nature/ecology/the environment.

Please post your recommendations (with notes if you'd like) in the comments, and I'll ammend this post as needed.

Just off the top of my head, I'm going to start with these titles:

The Burning World/J.G. Ballard
Ballard's vision (in slow motion) of a global drought, published in the early '60's.

The New Organic Grower/Eliot Coleman
The very well-written "bible" of organic farming; one could literally start their own farm based on the information here.

Typhoon/Josheph Conrad
A novella portraying the sea as implacable Other; do we really know nature differently today?

The Lives of Animals/J.M. Coetzee
An exploration of the ethical questions surrounding vegetarianism, with the emphasis on animal cruelty.

Stones of the Sky/Pablo Neruda
His final volume, written while he was dying of cancer, consists of these thirty love songs to the Earth. This book has stayed with me, over the years, in a way that few others have.

La Rabbia

Writer John Berger is nearly 80 years old. He doesn’t have time to waste, and in his new collection, Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, nothing is wasted. So when on page 85 Berger directs us to Pasolini’s obscure documentary montage La Rabbia (Rage), we follow…


"La Rabbia, I would say, is a film inspired by a fierce sense of endurance, not anger. Pasolini looks at what is happening in the world with unflinching lucidity. (There are angels drawn by Rembrandt who have the same gaze.) And he does so because reality is all we have to love. There’s nothing else.

His dismissal of the hypocrisies, half-truths and pretences of the greedy and powerful is total because they breed and foster ignorance, which is a form of blindness towards reality. Also because they shit on memory, including the memory of language itself, which is our first heritage.

Yet the reality he loved could not be simply endorsed, for at that moment it represented a too deep historical disappointment. The ancient hopes which flowered and opened out in 1945, after the defeat of Fascism, had been betrayed.
The USSR had invaded Hungary. France had begun its cowardly war against Algeria. The coming to independence of the former African colonies was a macabre charade. Lumumba had been liquidated by the puppets of the CIA. Neo-capitalism was already planning its global take-over.

Yet despite this, what had been bequeathed was far too precious and too tough to abandon, the ubiquitous demands of reality were impossible to ignore. The demand in the way a shawl was worn. In a young man’s face. In a street full of people demanding less injustice. In the laughter of their expectations and the recklessness of their jokes. From this came his rage of endurance."


At time when our media/political establishment is engaged in equivocations regarding the practice of waterboarding, it follows that narratives which mystify the fundamental injustices of the current, global dispensation (which are, as any Palestinian schoolchild can tell us social, political, economic and historical in nature) must be held to account, for we, like Berger, have no time to waste; we have only time for family and friends, for the for the children that suffer in innocence, for the poor, for the dispossessed, for animals harvested for food cruelly and wastefully, and for narratives that, in however small a way, resist the dominant culture. Many might disagree, but my feeling is that cinema (and fiction), at this historical juncture, must count for something.

I wonder whether we might still engage the films that matter, films like The Passenger, like La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, like Radio On, like Lombardi’s Ojos Que No Ven, like Chris Marker’s Le Jette, like anything by Bresson, like Roeg’s Walkabout, in terms that abide, rather than mystify.

The Cat-Raphael

Gottfried Mind/"Katzen"

In the course of (Gottfried Mind's) narrow, indoors life, he had worked himself into an almost paternal relation with domestic animals, especially with cats. While he sat painting, a cat might generally be seen sitting on his back or on his shoulder; many times he kept, for hours, the most awkward postures, that he might not disturb it. Frequently there was a second cat sitting by him on the table, watching how the work went on; sometimes a kitten or two lay in his lap under the table. Frogs (in bottle) floated beside his easel; and with all these creatures he kept up a most playful, loving style of conversation; though, often enough, any human beings about him, or such even as came to see him, were growled or grunted at in no social fashion.

His chief diligence and most careful elegance he brought to work in the painting of his beloved cats. He had both the art to seize the general nature of this animal and to reflect the specific character of each. The sycophantic look full of falseness, the dainty movements of the kittens, several of which are sometimes painted sporting round their dam—all this, in the most multifarious postures, turns, groups, sports, and quarrels, is depicted with a true observance to nature.

On Sundays and winter nights, Mind, by way of pastime, used, out of dried, wild chestnuts, to carve little cats, bears, and other beasts, and this with so much art that these little dainty toys were shortly in no less request than his drawings. It is a pity that insects, such as frequently exist in the interior of chestnuts, have already destroyed so many of these carvings.

At the Barengraben (bear-yard) in Bern, where a few live bears are always to be seen, Mind passed many a happy hour. The moment he made his appearance, the bears hastened towards him with friendly grumbling, stationed themselves on their hind feet, and received, impartially, each a piece of bread or an apple out of his pocket. For this reason, bears, next to cats, were a favourite subject of his art; and he reckoned himself, not unjustly, better able to delineate these animals than even celebrated painters have been. Moreover, next to his intercourse with living cats and bears, Mind's greatest joy was in looking at objects of art, especially copper-plates, in which, too, animal figures gave him most satisfaction.

from a Wikipedia article on 18th century autistic savant artist Gottfried Mind, who was known as the Cat-Raphael.

Earthquakes, Cars and Architecture

Stephen Wiltshire


Wiltshire's "Times Square" (Oil on Canvas)


Stephen Wiltshire MBE, (born April 24, 1974) is an accomplished architectural artist who has been diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder. Stephen's interests are: earthquakes, cars, and architecture, in that order.

Stephen Wiltshire was born in London, England, to West Indian parents. He was mute and at the age of three was diagnosed as an autistic. The same year his father died in a motorcycle accident. At the age of four, Stephen was sent to Queensmill School in London where he expressed interest in drawing. He began to communicate through his drawings. At the age of 8, he began to draw imaginary post-earthquake cityscapes and cars.

Teacher Chris Marris began to encourage his drawing and with his aid Wiltshire also slowly learned to speak at the age of 9.

At the age of ten, Wiltshire drew a series of pictures he called a "London Alphabet", a sequence of drawings of London landmarks, one for each letter.

When Wiltshire was part of a BBC programme The Foolish Wise Ones in 1987, viewers phoned in, expressing interest to buy his work. A collection of his works, named Drawings, was published that year.

Wiltshire has become a popular artist. He can look at a target once and then draw a very accurate and very detailed picture of it. He once drew the whole of central London after a helicopter trip above it. He can also make imaginary scenes like St. Paul's Cathedral surrounded by flames.

In 2003, there was a major retrospective in the Orleans House gallery in Twickenham, London.

Stephen's work has since been the subject of many TV documentaries; neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about him in the chapter "Prodigies", in his book An Anthropologist on Mars.

His books include Drawings (1987), Cities (1989), Floating Cities (1991), and Stephen Wiltshire's American Dream (1993). His third book - Floating Cities (Michael Joseph, 1991) - was number one on the Sunday Times bestseller list.

In May 2005 Stephen produced his longest ever panoramic memory drawing of Tokyo[1] on a 10 meter long canvas within 7 days following a short helicopter ride over the city. Since then he has drawn Rome[2], Hong Kong[3] and Frankfurt[4] on giant canvasses.

In 2006, Stephen Wiltshire was awarded an MBE for services to art[5].

In September 2006 Stephen opened his permanent gallery in the Royal Opera Arcade[6], Pall Mall, London. He resides there two days a week working on commissions, chats to visitors or just draws for fun.

article via Wikipedia

The Clearing of the Northwest Passage

photo via BLDG BLOG

Faithfully supported by the Bush administration, corporations like Shell Oil were expediting plans to prospect and develop Alaska's continental shelf, littering the Beaufort Sea with drilling ships and wells, supply ships and barges, airplane and helicopter racket, blasted-out harbors, ice-fortified steel piers, and hundreds of miles of pipe—not only an immense increase in contamination and disturbance but an incalculably risky project that threatened to overwhelm the adaptive capacity of the indigenous sea hunters and an entire precious ecosystem already seriously under stress from Arctic warming.[2]

Environmentalists are quite aware that despite society's desperate need for clean energies, carbon fuels will drive the world economy for years to come, and political pressures for ocean drilling may be insurmountable. But the risks of ecological disaster from irreparable accidents such as oil spills in Arctic seas are truly enormous, which is why critics feel so strongly that the oil industry's ambitions are premature at best and at worst reckless. In addition to severe operating and maintenance difficulties in fierce Arctic conditions—never satisfactorily tamed even on land—any offshore drilling operation would have to deal with freezing ocean storms and shifting ice and four bitter months of winter darkness.

When one considers the more than four thousand spills--over one a day--recorded by the oil industry in its land operations in the last decade, and keeping in mind that offshore hazards are far greater, the inevitable accidents seem certain to accumulate into an ongoing and permanent calamity. A black effluvia of crude petroleum and drilling mud and chemical pollutants would spread inshore, suffocating plankton and invertebrates and bottom-dwelling fish and poisoning great stretches of Arctic coast with a viscous excrescence. The same toxic mixture will blacken the drifting ice, fouling the pristine habitat of Arctic birds, the Pacific walrus, four species of seals, and the beleaguered polar bear, while contaminating the migratory corridors of the white beluga and endangered bowhead whales—all this defilement made much worse by the grim fact that no technology has ever been developed for cleaning up spilled oil in icy waters. Even in spills in temperate waters, such as the Exxon Valdez disaster, only an average of less than 15 percent is ever removed.

via the NYRB, read the rest here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's Get High, Together

James Chance/"I Can't Stand Myself"


David Bowie/"Stay"


Super Furry Animals/"Slow Life"


Mouse on Mars/Mycologics


My Bloody Valentine/"Soon"