I’m fascinated by the creative process because it’s so important to…to everything. It can’t be analyzed. It just is. Here’s a Ted Hughes poem (via 3 Quarks) followed by an interview with Hughes where he explains where this dark poem came from.
How this poem came to life:
I was going to write about churches that have been revamped because I like the idea of a secular community meeting area. I’ve always liked the idea of spending Sundays afternoons sitting in a place with inspiring architecture with people from the neighbourhood, listening to an invited speaker (a la Ted) and sipping on a beer or a glass of wine. Sounds nice? But then I thought it would be a boring post. Just check out the churches (h/t: Spacing Montreal).
Then I tried working on a post I’ve been working on for a while about how, although some alternative medicine can be helpful, most of it is a crock. But the topic is so big and complex and I want to get it right so I find it daunting and, therefore, hard to work on. So I left it for another day.
Then I found this at Starts With a Bang:
Dr. Dre: Oh yeah, that’s in the works. An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it The Planets. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. (from an interview with Vibe).
That is definitely cooler than reimagining churches or potentially lethal alternative cures. This idea has Dre walking in some pretty big shoes. In the early 20th century, British composer Holst wrote a seven part suite about the planets (seven because he didn’t include earth and Pluto hadn’t been invented yet) where, according to Wikipedia, “each movement of the suite is named after a planet of the Solar System and its corresponding astrological character as defined by Holst.” But the idea is even older than that; the ancient Greeks believed that the motion of the planets was a kind of non-audible music. Even Johannes Kepler, one of the great minds behind the scientific revolution, found musical harmonics in the motions of the planets. According to Kepler, the Earth’s orbit sang E-F-E. More recently, you can poke around youtube and find videos of the what the radiation planets like Saturn and Jupiter would sound like if it was audible.
Somehow, I think that Dr. Dre will not disappoint.
Not much time today but here’s something to think about. Stewart Brand, who used to be a poster boy of environmentalism, now espouses a different kind of pragmatic environmentalism that supports nuclear power and genetically engineered food. Techonomy has a quick description of his beliefs:
According to Brand, environmentalism has a “legacy resistance” to nuclear power, and to transgenic crops or GMOs. In other words, the resistance isn’t really based on strong evidence of dangers, so much as an instinctive distrust of certain types of meddling with “nature.”
I agree with this wholeheartedly, the bottom line has to be positive outcomes, whether it be human or environmental health and not what makes us feel good inside (although “feeling good inside” has to also be factored into the outcome). But, as many of my blog posts can attest to, it’s often difficult to trust these large corporations to use these technologies responsibility. Particularly when I read something like this. Brain Goldman, the host of CBC’s White Coat Black Art, discusses a paper that found that 85% of the pharmacological studies funded by drug companies have positive results whereas only 50% of studies funded by government have positive results. Suspicious?
How can the average person expect to have the time to do the research to decide which corporations or industries we can trust and which we can’t? It’s impossible. It’s much easier to assume that anything that benefits a corporation is at the cost of the consumer. It might be a good rule of thumb, but some important technologies can slip through the cracks if people don’t realize that there are always exceptions.
Here’s Stewart’s Brand recent TED talk:
Christopher Hitchens is a passionate man. He is passionate about his philosophy, politics, anti-theism and defense of reason. And like all passionate people, he likes to smoke and drink whiskey. As much as his stinging wit and satire got the best of other people with which he disagreed, scotch and cigarettes are trying to get the best of him. Earlier this year he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer forcing him to stop his book tour in support of his memoirs, Hitch 22, in order to undergo treatment. An event he announced in a terse but elegant fashion:
I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me.
But no matter what you think of his views about politics or religion, you have to admire a man who can write like this when faced with his own possible demise (from his column in Vanity Fair, h/t:Why Evolution is True):
In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?
Here’s another excerpt where Hitchens is talking about going from, “the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady”:
The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example, an official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your neck. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.
(I strongly suggest reading it in its entirety here)
My thoughts continue to be with you Hitch. Here is Hitchens on Q with Jian Gomeshi. He lit quite the flame under CBC listeners who voiced both their admiration and disgust on the Q comment boards:
The amount of meat you should eat is tough topic to cover because it’s impossible to say anything from either side of the debate (pro-meat or pro-vegetarian) without sounding preachy. In order to get over this, I always remind myself that just because someone is preachy (or even because someone is a hypocrite) doesn’t mean they’re necessarily wrong. How someone says something doesn’t necessarily tell you whether what they’re saying is right or not.
I’ve been on all sides of the issue. I was brought up eating meat on a regular basis twice a day (for lunch and dinner). For a short period (less than a year) I was a vegetarian but that died when I was in Panama eating chickens that were ethically raised (although I have to admit, I did eat some chickens that I didn’t know how they were raised). Then I sort lay the issue aside for a while I was enthralled of other issues. Now I’m sort of a middle of the roader on this issue although whether that’s because of diplomacy, pragmatism or an undeniable penchant for meat now and again, I’m not sure. I avoid meat when I can, eat it when I can’t (e.g. when someone’s made it for dinner) and, from time to time, I’ll order it at the restaurant.
The bottom line is that, though there’s a lot of information out there, the amount of meat you eat is a personal preference. But it shouldn’t be based on, “what you’ve always done before.” Here are some great resources on the issue that aren’t just extremists yelling in your ear. These are all people who have thought a lot about what they think about the issue of eating meat:
Have your meat and eat it too: Part 1, Part2 and Part 3 – A great three part series on CBC’s Ideas that comes at this issue from all sides. There’s a great diversity of opinion in here.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This is Michael Pollan’s most famous book which compares food from industrial, pastoral and foraging agriculture. Pollan always has a great mix of anecdote, narrative and evidence that both educates and entertains. His haiku-like mantra–eat food, not too much, mostly plants–is my food philosophy of choice. Here’s Pollan promoting his most recent book if you prefer him in video form.
Singer, The Way We Eat (interview). and Singer, Ethics in an Age of Darwin(interview). Peter Singer is an icon of the vegetarian movement and he’s thought his vegetarianism through more thouroughly than anyone else has thought through what they eat. His argument for vegetarianism in these interviews is one that I’ve never heard anywhere else before: using the ethics of Darwin.
And lastly, an interview with the makers of Food Inc., a recent documentary about the American food industry.
Watch the full episode. See more NOW on PBS.
After a weekend of going to Osheaga and seeing pretty much the best band of all-time get pelted by beer, I’m pretty exhausted. That and the fact that we’re getting some pretty sweet thunderstorms in Montreal tonight is a good reason to show you this. A three tenths of a second of lightning stretched out to a minute and a half at 9,000 frames per second (h/t Greg Laden):
Today at a coffee break, a friend of mine got me excited by telling me today was the day Marty McFly traveled to in Back to the Future II. I couldn’t believe how much time had flown. I remember watching that movie and wishing so hard that I had a hover board. I knew it was going to happen, I just knew it (still do). I’d get back at my nemesis just like Marty got back at Biff. Screw you Biff. Screw you. Anyway, after a bit of research, I found out it wasn’t today at all. At all. Someone photoshopped July 5, 2010 on the Delorean. It’s supposed to be October 21, 2015. Thank the Gods, I say. Five more years ’till hoverboards, revenge on nemesi and other great futuristic things that I thought we, as a society, would have by now.
If anyone is curious on a cynical explanation of the Flux Capacitor check here. It’s pretty hilarious. If you want to make your own and travel through time and space, click………here! And in the news of all-things-flux, check out the band, yes, Flux Capacitor. They have a song called Drop It Like It’s Hotter and they seem to only play in Pennsylvania.
Below is the edited dashboard.
Wait, this post is supposed to be about power laces. Here’s the Back To The Future clip with them:
and here are the less sleak (but still impressive) now versions. We’ve got five years to improve on these bad boys. I’m asking for these for Xmas 2015, and I don’t want to be disappointed.
Arcade Fire put up a million dollars for Haiti <– At the Festival d’Ete de Quebec, Arcade Fire announced that they will match donations to Kanpe, a Montreal-based NGO working on rebuilding Haiti, dollar for dollar up to one million dollars. You can donate $5 by texting “STAND” to 30333. I don’t know much about Kanpe but they’ve worked with Partners in Health which is not too shabby. C’mon, $5=$10.
“J’commence le countdown pese ca clutch” <– I found this on Said the Gramaphone, a music blog that comes out with two weird reviews (a la Peters’ Pick) every day or two. He finds some diamonds now and again but this one–I’m not sure what to call this one. It’s a cover of Space Oddity by Lucien Midnight–but in Quebecois French. Things like, “planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,” get translated to, “la planet terre est bleue que c’est tu veux que ca me calisse.” Or, “tell my wife I love her very much,” turns into, “dites a ma blonde que je l’aimais en ostie.”
Photoshop of Horrors <– As if they weren’t screw ups enough. A week or so ago, BP posted photos to their site that were obviously poorly photoshopped. Wired decided to get their readers to show BP how it’s done. Check out all the photos here.
I was listening to an interview with George Dawes Green yesterday on NPR when he said something I’ve noticed without ever really being conscious of it. The time one person can speak uninterrupted in a conversation is getting shorter. Talking specifically about New York City, he said that people have too much ego and/or testosterone to let anyone else speak for more than 12 or 13 seconds. Think about the last time you were hanging out in a bar or at a dinner party, how often can one person tell a story that lasts five or more minutes. I tested this (unscientifically, of course) at lunch yesterday when, at the picnic table next to me, I noticed that the stories people were telling each other were, at most four or five sentences long (and incredibly stupid).
The natural reaction is to blame Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and everything else old people don’t understand. I’m sure all those things play a part but I also think that the art of storytelling is being lost. People just don’t have ability to tell good stories anymore. It happens to me at least once a day a where someone tries to tell me an story that’s longer than the social norm and they bungle it completely by including too much detail where it wasn’t needed or by completely foregoing any sort or flow or rhythm to their story.
If you’re looking to rekindle your ability to tell stories or just want to listen to a good one, I’d suggest checking out George Dawes Green’s website/podcast/live event called The Moth. The name comes from Green’s inspiration: a moth circling the kitchen lamp while people told stories when he was a kid.
At the Aspen Environment Forum 2010, a moderator of one of the panels stated that British kids could more easily identify Japanese cars than native plants and animals (h/t: Tomorrow’s Table). On one hand, given that cars move fast and do exciting things while plants just sit there, that’s not surprising at all. It also helps that cars have their names written on the back so, in a way, it’s like a flashcard game. Plants can be extremely difficult to identify. Of course, there are many plants that are easy to identify, but I’ve been in the forest with expert botanists who’ll admit that some plants are difficult, if not impossible to tell apart without DNA analysis. All this to say, it’s no wonder kids know their cars better than they know their plants and animals.
I do find it surprising in the sense that it’s a sign of how disconnected and isolated we’re becoming with respect to the natural world. Knowing the names of plants and animals is only one way out of many to be connected to the natural world, but the fact that most people (I’m extending the conjecture to everyone now, not just kids) could identify more kinds of cars than plants says something about which way we’re headed. Pamela Ronald, of Tomorrow’s Table, wonders:
Can we draw a link with this disconnect and the loss of biodiversity at an unprecedented rate? By 2050, the majority of our citizens will consist of the young people where that disconnect is most profound.
Would those responsible for destruction of entire species think twice if they knew the names of some of the species they were affecting? Would the CEO of BP invest more money in blowout prevention if he knew a bit more about marine biology? I’m not convinced but it’s definitely something worth thinking about.
Bonus points if you can name both cars and the plants in the photo above. I’ll be impressed if anyone can do both. I definitely couldn’t do the cars if I didn’t already know what they were.
