India Indian music music vocalists
by Warren
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It’s Been A While Since I Posted…
…Mallikarjun Mansur’s ecstatic singing.
Here’s a late concert recording of two personal favorites, Raga Bihari (“Ye ho neend na aaye”) and Raga Paraj (“Ankhiyaa mori laagi”). I simply cannot get enough of the ceaseless flow of Mansur’s imagination.
environment: corporate irresponsibility Natural Gas Richard Muller
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 3: Vernacular, As Opposed To Classical, Gas)
The Welland Tribune (Ontario) runs an Op-Ed by David Suzuki, summing up the state of the situation, with special reference to Mr. Muller:
Most North Americans know that human-caused global warming is real, even if political leaders don’t always reflect or act on that knowledge.
According to a recent poll, only 2% of Canadians reject the overwhelming scientific evidence that Earth is warming at alarming rates — a figure that may seem surprising given the volume of nonsense deniers (many of them funded by the fossil fuel industry) spread through letters to the editor, blogs, radio call-ins and website comments.
Polling indicates more deniers live in the U.S., but they still make up just 15% of that population.
It’s getting harder to ignore the evidence: record high worldwide temperatures; increasing extreme weather events; devastating droughts, floods, and wildfires; animal and plant species turning up where they’ve never been found before; record ice loss in the Arctic and Greenland; melting glaciers …
The trends are exactly as climate scientists predicted.
Meanwhile, one of the few “skeptic” climate scientists, Richard Muller, recently reversed his thinking.
Muller and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, studied climate data dating back to 1753, then looked at possible causes of the unusual warming observed since the mid-1950s. (Ironically, the study was funded in part by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, founded by climate change skeptics with heavy interests in the fossil fuel industry.)
Their conclusion? It’s not the sun. It’s not volcanoes. The most likely cause is humans spewing massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, mainly by burning fossil fuels. This isn’t news to most climate scientists.
Muller is a little disingenuous, methinks. Sent August 28:
While it’s true that erstwhile climate-change “skeptic” Richard Muller recently reversed his position on the existence and causes of global warming, it’s worth pointing out that Dr. Muller has only caught up with the state of climate science as of, say, 1990. After releasing the final version of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature report in which he acknowledged that those worried climatologists have had it right all along, Muller segued effortlessly into advocacy of natural gas, which he asserts is a cleaner alternative to oil and coal.
Well, maybe. Oil and coal were “cheap” until we began taking into account all the externalities associated with these fuels, like their long-term public health and environmental impacts (to say nothing of all the expensive wars they seem to require). Natural gas is only cheap if we ignore the fact that it demands both a massive industrial effort for the drilling process along with huge investments in infrastructure for pipelines and other delivery mechanisms — to say nothing of the devastating consequences of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) as a means of extraction.
Muller’s “conversion” is certainly welcome news. But we need to be skeptical about the impact of his corporate affiliations on his public utterances. Natural gas is the planetary equivalent of a nicotine patch — a slightly less smelly way to deliver the same poisons. Ultimately, the only way to reduce our greenhouse emissions is to burn less fossil fuel — and that is something we shouldn’t be delaying for another minute.
Warren Senders
India Indian music music vocalists: genius
by Warren
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It’s Agra Gharana Time!
Latafat Hussain Khan sings a drut khayal in Patdeepki:
environment: economics sustainability
by Warren
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 2: Your Lovin’ Give Me Such A Thrill…
The Eugene, Oregon Register Guard features an article by one Jan Spencer, who seems to get it, whatever “it” is:
An article in the Aug. 6 Register-Guard described a study for Eugene’s Climate and Energy Action Plan. The study focused on climate change, but many of the findings reveal public perceptions about economics and lifestyle that extend far beyond that issue. These findings can be helpful for crafting a community plan to mitigate climate change and many additional social and environmental concerns.
Study findings include:
A solid majority of people in Eugene believe climate change is human-caused and poses a catastrophic risk.
Many consider a healthy environment to be more important than a growing economy.
A majority in Eugene believe typical American lifestyles place far too much emphasis on buying and consuming.
Well said. Sent August 27:
When Jan Spencer notes that a significant number of citizens find “a healthy environment to be more important than a growing economy,” she puts her finger on one of a fundamental truth about humanity’s presence on Earth: we live on a finite planet. We may briefly delude ourselves that infinite economic growth is both possible and desirable, but the inherent unsustainability of a continuously metastasizing economy becomes obvious when we take into account the collateral costs which are usually omitted from the equation. To take the most substantial examples, fossil fuel energy is only cheap because we don’t consider its environmental, public health, and geopolitical costs. Once these become part of the picture, it’s obvious that our current energy economy is self-destructing before our eyes.
Economic sustainability, by definition, builds on a conception of the common good over the long term. If our species is to survive in the post-climate-change Anthropocene Era, we must change our thinking to reflect this. Continuous weight gain is healthy for an infant, but not for an adult; when our economy was in its fledgling stages, all that growth was excellent. Now? Not so much.
The threats posed by climate change and environmental destruction (both epiphenomena of our attempts to maintain a continuously growing economy) tend to confirm Edward Abbey’s prescient comment that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Warren Senders
Jazz music Personal Politics: genius improvisation
by Warren
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Charlie Haden Sounds Like A Rain Forest
It was my fifteenth birthday, and my parents knew I was a budding jazz fan. They got me a wondrous thing: a six-lp set billed as The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. And it was great. I started at the beginning and worked my way through Scott Joplin and Robert Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Roy Eldridge, Billie Holiday…it was incredible.
And after taking a breath I listened to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk (one entire lp side!), Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor…
And the last side had three pieces by Ornette Coleman and one by John Coltrane.
I put it on the player. Here’s what I heard:
Ornette Coleman’s Quartet plays “Lonely Woman”
It started with a melancholic strumming, a giant bass sitar, cushioned in cymbal shimmer. What the hell?
I’d never heard anything so lovely.
And that, dear ones, was my introduction to Charlie Haden’s bass playing.
The early Ornette Coleman Quartet, circa 1961.
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The first few paragraphs of Charlie Haden’s bio, from his website:
Time Magazine has hailed jazz legend Charlie Haden as “one of the most restless, gifted, and intrepid players in all of jazz.” Haden’s career which has spanned more than fifty years has encompassed such genres as free jazz, Portuguese fado and vintage country such as his recent cd Rambling Boy (Decca) not to mention a consistently revolving roster of sidemen and bandleaders that reads like a list from some imaginary jazz hall of fame.
As an original member of the ground-breaking Ornette Coleman Quartet that turned the jazz world on its head the late 1950’s, Haden revolutionized the harmonic concept of bass playing in jazz. “His ability to create serendipitous harmonies by improvising melodic responses to Coleman’s free-form solos (rather than sticking to predetermined harmonies) was both radical and mesmerizing. His virtuosity lies…in an incredible ability to make the double bass ‘sound out’. Haden cultivates the instrument’s gravity as no one else in jazz. He is a master of simplicity which is one of the most difficult things to achieve.” (Author Joachim Berendt in The Jazz Book) Haden played a vital role in this revolutionary new approach, evolving a way of playing that sometimes complemented the soloist and sometimes moved independently. In this respect, as did bassists Jimmy Blanton and Charles Mingus, Haden helped liberate the bassist from a strictly accompanying role to becoming a more direct participant in group improvisation.
And just as important as his historic role in the evolution of jazz bass playing is his sound. No bass player anywhere has as big a sound as Charlie Haden, and his presence on a recording is always unmistakable (and a guarantee of quality — the man has, as far as I can tell, never played on a bad record).
environment: denialists droughts extreme weather media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 9, Day 1: Nice Try, Though.
The Long Beach Press-Telegram has a writer named Paul Silva, who’s trying to be funny:
The world is getting hotter and I have the scientific proof.
This weekend is supposed to be cooler than the previous three weeks of broiling temperatures, but don’t let that resurgent marine layer fool you.
Global warming is real, and I don’t need temperature charts, drought-stricken plains or pictures of polar bears swimming in search of ice to tell me that.
I know the world is in meltdown because of three simple harbingers of heat we can’t beat.
Sign No. 1: My tennis-ball obsessed dog has started to quit on me.
Normally, Louie, the younger of my two Labradors, will retrieve a tennis ball as long as I am willing to throw it. When I sit on my couch watching TV, he drops the ball in my lap over and over again until I relent and take him outside to play.
To Louie, tennis balls are the point of living. They are his bliss and his chi. I do not know what this dog would have done with himself before tennis was invented. Maybe he would have fetched pine cones or small furry animals, but he would have fetched something.
During the heat wave, though, he actually reached his level of tennis ball tolerance. After about 10 minutes, he would go for the ball only if I threw it right at his mouth. If it bounced a few feet from him, he would look at me, tongue hanging out, as if to say, “Maybe I have really overestimated this whole tennis ball thing.”
I’m just a f**king killjoy, I suppose. Sent August 26:
Paul Silva’s humorous perspective on climate change offers an inadvertent demonstration of the fact that there’s remarkably little to laugh about when it comes to the rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect. It’s not just hotter beach sands and rapidly tiring Labs, but droughts, storms, wildfires and bizarre forms of extreme weather, like the record-setting hot rain earlier this month in Needles, California. With food prices set to spike this fall, and well over a million acres of the United States currently on fire, it’s pretty clear that global climate change isn’t really a gold mine for humorists.
That only one in five Americans feels any sense of responsibility for our greenhouse emissions and the slow-motion disaster they’ve helped create is a sad commentary on a complaisant media that has eschewed thoughtful coverage of science in favor of scandals and titillation. But Mr. Silva’s got a point: as the crisis deepens in the coming years, we’ll need all the laughs we can get.
Warren Senders