atheism Education environment Personal: philosophy timescale
by Warren
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Eight Thoughts About Timescale
I’m not sanguine about our ability to solve the climate crisis — and it’s not because the monolithic forces of global capitalism won’t let us (although they’re not helping). It’s not because we’re too greedy and acquisitive (although we are). It’s not because things have progressed too far already for us to stop them (although they have).
It’s because we humans aren’t very good at thinking in different timescales. We’re basically monkeys, and we have monkey minds. Our species-wide ADD started out as a feature, but in our present situation, it’s a bug.
1. Timescale and Our Fate
The words are frightening: fix atmospheric CO2, or in a century rising seas will wipe out coastal cities all over the world. Deal with methane release, or in a couple of hundred years the planet will be Venusized. If we completely stop adding carbon to the atmosphere, it will take the planet several thousand years to recover.
Big time spans, no?
humor India Personal: hippies sociology Tribhuwan Kapur
by Warren
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A Few Words About Hippies and India
Anyone who’s spent time in India knows the phenomenon of the hippie. Hippie participation in Indian music started thanks to George Harrison and Ravi Shankar; while many professional Hindustani musicians earn healthy teaching fees from these questing souls, most of them regard “hippies” with a justifiably skeptical eye.
About ten years ago, members of the USENET newsgroup for Indian classical music (rec.music.indian.classical) engaged in a lengthy and vociferous discussion of “hippies in ICM.” As a former hippie and a full-time professional Hindustani musician, I was in a unique position to clarify matters, and I assembled a post which, it was agreed, shed some light on the matter. I thought I’d share it with you, only slightly revised.
Education music Personal: Bamidele Ousamarea instrument-making Lou Harrison
by Warren
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Summoning The Future — Making Your Own Instruments
Making an instrument is one of music’s greatest joys. Indeed, to make an instrument is in some strong sense to summon the future. …. Almost no pleasure is to be compared with the first tones, tests and perfections of an instrument one has just made. Nor are all instruments invented and over with, so to speak. The world is rich with models — but innumerable forms, tones and powers await their summons from the mind and hand. Make an instrument — you will learn more in this way than you can imagine.
Lou Harrison’s Music Primer (quoted in Banek & Scoville, “Sound Designs”).
I remember reading somewhere that a natural ecosystem that had taken thousands of years to develop can be destroyed in ten minutes by a guy driving a bulldozer. That seems true enough; horrifying and depressing, but true. All evolution’s gradual work, building a wonderfully complex interdependent structure — turned into undifferentiated rubble in less time than it takes to read a blog post (yeah, I know, mine run on the long side, but anyway).
Think about ecosystems as analogies for the ways human beings relate to one another. Traditional societies are rich in ritual frameworks, cross-generational relationships, nuanced interactions with the natural world and shared cultural narratives — another “wonderfully complex interdependent structure” that can be trashed appallingly quickly by the bulldozer of Western consumer culture.
Singing enabled individuals to create and express certain aspects of self, it established and sustained a feeling of euphoria characteristic of ceremonies, and it related the present to the powerful and transformative past. The Suya would sing because through song they could both re-establish the good and beautiful in the world and also relate themselves to it.
Anthony Seeger — “Why Suya Sing,” p. 128
If we are to reclaim our humanity, we’ll need to sing. We’ll need to make music ourselves rather than buying it from someone else.
And one of the most meaningful ways to get started with that process is to make an instrument. Or two. Or three.
Jazz music Personal: Robert Rutman Sun Ra
by Warren
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Hanging Out With The Man From Saturn
Several people have asked me to tell the story of my encounters with Sun Ra.
Over a span of about six or seven years, I caught Sun Ra and his Arkestra in Boston at least eleven times. While that’s not a lot by Deadhead standards, it’s probably more than I’ve seen any other musician live, with the exception of the great khyal singer Bhimsen Joshi.
To an alienated, jazz-obsessed teenager in Boston’s western suburbs, the knowledge that there was a bandleading madman who claimed to be from outer space was incredibly welcome. My high school library maintained subscriptions to a wide variety of periodicals — the usual suspects (Time, Newsweek, Life), some slightly more unconventional choices (The New Yorker, Ms.), and a few that were pretty bizarre. Of these last, there were three that made a huge impression on me: The Village Voice (where I first read about conceptual art, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman), Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (where I first heard of Cornelius Cardew, Christo, Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier), and Downbeat (where I kept up to date on all the latest jazz happenings, and where I first learned of the existence of Sun Ra).
Education Personal: family John Senders Personal
by Warren
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It’s My Father’s 90th Birthday!
Happy Birthday, Dad!
When I was a kid he came home from work with a 16mm projector and a reel of film. “We’re going to watch a movie,” he said.
After dinner he threaded the projector. It was film of him, carrying out an experiment on the quantification of difficulty — while driving a car down Route 128.
When people asked me or my brother what my father did for a living, it was not an easy thing to explain.
It still isn’t.
We’re off to a family get-together with a lot of people celebrating at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. It should be fun.