==pla|\|ing lakes==

Sunday, November 28, 2004

More music news: John Cale has a new album out, Hobo Sapiens

The album page is his official EMI page and has shockwave samples of each track for dialup and broadband. It's built around samples.

Nice to see you back John. Heard he was tired of rock/pop music a few years ago, maybe in his autobiography What's Welsh for Zen (short review), which I highly recommend. Though I suspect there's much more to be written about one of the most influential and innovative artists in music.

There's also a new bio of Cale by Tim Mitchell, Sedition and Alchemy: A Biography of John Cale, which I haven't read yet.

This blog's name is from lyrics on his classic Paris 1919 album, which I paid an extravagant $10 for on import LP back in '73, after hearing it on Michael Tearson's great overnight show on WMMR in Philly. Apparently he's still in Philly and still DJing, which is nice to hear.

9:29 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Give yourself the gift of sanity this holiday season: scale it back on all levels so you don't go crazy or kill yourself

Expectations about holiday events, often based on the unrealistic portrayals of healthy, affluent families from television and advertisements, can fuel anxieties during the season.

"Each individual needs to think about how realistic this is," said Taylor. "When people try to live up to that and it's not realistic, people become anxious and try to numb their feelings with alcohol or substance abuse. This can lead to domestic violence."

Seasonal pressures come from a wide range of other sources. Financial obligations mount as holiday spending runs amok, final exams and grade reports put students and parents on edge, and increased demands on time and energy can sap the strength from the most resilient party-goer.

So take it easy amd don't forget to check out William Hung at the Hollywood Christmas parade.

8:20 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, November 27, 2004

Encouraging review of imminent (and according to the artist, final) Harold Budd album Avalon Sutra

It's a 2-disc set, the second an Akira Rabelais remix of the track "As Long As I Can Hold My Breath", which closes the first disc.

Rabelais has a new disc out on David Sylvian's Samadhisound label too -- recombining field recordings of traditional Icelandic accapella lament songs.

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"If you're cramming more and more power in a small space, what you're making is a small bomb"

Cell phones just explode. It happens.

Repophones are always intense.

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"When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them," he told attendees. "Federal courts have no army or navy. The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We're not saying they can't do that. At the end of the day, we're saying the court can't enforce its opinions."

Indiana "dominionist" and House Representative John Hostetler quoted by the valuable Theocracy Watch site on their update page

Cool. I can think of a lot of court decisions I'd like to just ignore.

The radicalism of these "Christians" will come back to haunt them, just like it did the 60s rebels they so disdain.

1:44 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, November 20, 2004

"My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker"

RE/SEARCH has a new book of Jim Ballard quotes

Some people have suggested that mental illness is a kind of adaptation to the sort of circumstances that will arise in the future. As we move towards a more and more psychotic landscape, the psychotic traits are signs of a kind of Darwinian adaptation.

10:20 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, November 13, 2004

The Mexican government is lauded in this piece for making their biggest conservation purchase ever; but the roster of the Nature Conservancy Board of Governors (see pdf link here) -- which put up more than half the purchase price -- makes you wonder if anti-Fed/anti-"environmental mafia" hypercapitalist property rights wonks aren't onto something despite the sometimes self-serving motives of landowners and the superheated and often delusional rhetoric of their screeds

People like the vice-chairman of NASDAQ, the vice-president of Con Agra and the CEO of Georgia-Pacific Paper just might have something else in mind than protecting the environment.

The Nature Conservancy receives its seed money to buy land from many of our country's largest corporations. By giving TNC grant money and outright gifts those companies hope to cloak themselves in a green veil. It quickly became apparent to TNC's President McCormick that begging for dollars the old fashioned way, with phone solicitors and junk mail, was not the most cost efficient way of doing business. So, McCormick went after corporations. "It's just a greater return," he says.

This author obtained records from 1994 through 1999 to see what companies, groups or foundations gave money to TNC. The biggest contributor by far was the David & Lucile Packard Foundation who gave TNC grants on 34 occasions totaling over $45 million between 1996 and 1999. The John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation gave money 18 times. General Motors donated nearly five million dollars and more than 100 trucks. Canon U.S.A. contributed $10.3 million in cash and equipment.

Some readers were appalled to read in this publication a few months back that The Nature Conservancy was involved in developing up-scale homes for sale on the coast of Virginia. TNC is also involved in oil production and receives oil royalties. In fact, TNC has gone to the well quite often. From 1994 through 1999 the following oil companies contributed land, mineral rights or money to TNC: Amoco Foundation four times, Texaco Foundation five times, Arco Foundation five times, Mobil Foundation four times, Phillips Petroleum Foundation 10 times, Chevron Foundation 13 times, Unocal Foundation and Exxon Mobil one time each.

The Georgia-Pacific Foundation and Weyerhaeuser Company Foundation, both businesses built on what environmentalists prefer to call "resource extraction," were also major donors.

More recent donations to TNC include those of the Doris Duke Foundation, Wolf Creek Charitable Foundation and the Morgridge Family Foundation who all gave between $10-20 million to TNC's Campaign for Conservation. Five to ten million dollar donors for the same campaign included the Paul G. Allen Forest Protection Foundation, the Mary Flagler Chary Charitable Trust, Central & South West Corporation and the George S. & Delores Dore Eccles Foundation. Charities and corporations donating $1 million or more include the Ahmanson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Georgia Pacific Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Victoria Foundation and the William Penn Foundation.

The Nature Conservancy's business model of extracting large sums of cash from companies and then using the money to buy up conservation easements, is brilliant and quite effective. But doesn't it seem ironic that this nation's businesses, the product of free enterprise and private property rights, are financing the potential lock-up of vast areas of this country? Is this what our founding fathers had in mind?

Land owners and ranchers who might be considering donating development rights or a conservation easement on their land to the TNC, believing it will be protected forever, might want to consider The Nature Conservancy's seemingly unquenchable thirst for land, money and power. Who's to say what the TNC will do with your land in 10, 50 or even or even 100 years from now if they need the cash? [link]

Audio of NPR report on the Tallgrass Prairie preserve linked on this page.

See this is one of the reasons I let go of my political blog, charging the canvas: trying to get to the bottom of things was becoming like grabbing ice cubes out of a furnace. The places you have to go, the rhetoric you need to cut through, the whole Alice on a Sleigh Ride to Hell got to be too exhausting.

Still can't resist sometimes though...




1:58 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Surreal park in Ljubljana, Slovenia [via Zippy, thanks to David Kurtz for the image]



1:03 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Movie gangsters try last ditch effort to put over disposable DVDs with indy Noel release

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Friday, November 12, 2004

Can you say "paper trail"?

Peter Coyote's letter on what you have to believe to think Bush won the election legally [xymphora]

Or media censorship?

9:13 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Thursday, November 11, 2004

The darkness takes her

Historian and author of The Rape of Nanking Iris Chang has apparently killed herself

I always knew it was a fine book and meant to read it, but if you know anything about the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in 1937 China, you know how depressing a read it would be. Things are intense enough these days. But Chang's book was a landmark about events little known outside China, and an impassioned plea for reparations.

I guess she passed one too many windows.

R.I.P. Ms Chang.

8:30 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Sunday, November 07, 2004

The CyberTimes Navigator from the New York Times

A decent reference guide.

2:12 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

American Way of Death file

For as little as $1500 you can have your or your loved ones' cremains interred in an underwater column, part of an elaborate, baroque city beneath the waves

The project is aimed squarely at America's Baby Boomers, a 76 million-strong group who, in the delicate language of the funeral industry, "have finally come of age for death-care purposes".

Mr Levine was inspired by a report that between six and seven million cremation urns sit on American mantelpieces, in cupboards, or in attics and garages.

He believed that relatives would welcome a more creative final resting place.

[...]

AfterLife Services, will also encourage relatives to don scuba gear and pay their respects at the watery graves.

[...]

Mr Levine hopes that maintenance costs will be low. The concrete used will be twice normal strength to withstand the most violent seas. In any case, some of the columns will be deliberately snapped off at the base to suggest a city in glorious ruin.

The small print, however, warns clients that they will have no redress if the columns are toppled by "acts of God or man".

Somewhere, Jessica Mitford is rolling on the floor laughing.

12:32 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

A belated R.I.P. John Mack

If the name doesn't ring a bell, he was a Pulitzer prize-winning biographer and professor of psychiatry at Harvard who was pilloried for writing about alien abductions.

Chances are, his "intellectually questionable" interest in the spiritual experience and the nature of reality will be what he's remembered for by future generations.

Asked what his message would be if he could broadcast to the world, he replied, "I would be humbled", but offered the following prescription: "Wake up, find your way, whether it is with prayer or psychedelics or abductions or shamanic journeys or talking with gurus or seeing movies like The Matrix and The Truman Show, whatever it is, find your way to break out of the program, the commercial materialist program."

12:09 AM - [Link] - Comments ()

Saturday, November 06, 2004

Some good movies I've seen recently

The Return (Vozvrashcheniye)
Arlington Road
Conspiracy (2001)
Secret Honor
Early Summer
Noises Off!
The Scent of Green Papaya
Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy - Working With Time
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

1:55 PM - [Link] - Comments ()

Could it be?

Looks like the postdrought is over.

I'll post stuff soon.

1:13 PM - [Link] - Comments ()