Burnin’

Now in it’s 17th year, The “Risky Biscuit Hayseed Hoot”™ hosted by Dondo Darue, is a mix of insurgent Americana: country, folk, bluegrass, singer-songwriter, rock, spoken word, humor, etc. The show airs Saturday mornings on 100.1 FM KTHX in Reno, Nevada; 95.3 FM KPND in Sandpoint, Idaho and on KTRT in the Methow Valley in North Central Washington state. Shows like the annual Ed Abbey Memorial are also available for download.

The “local crew” at Patagonia’s Reno distribution center writing on the company’s new blog says:

Wanna get some Ed in your head? Then sidle on up to the Hoot Hut and have a listen to this year’s Ed Abbey show, where you’ll find tasty instrumentals, a little blues, a little folk, a little outlaw country, and a generous helping of Mr. Abbey reading straight from classics such as “In Defense of the Redneck” and Desert Solitaire.

Abbey sounds clear as a bell in these recordings. And the supporting soundtrack with tunes by Shannon McNally, Robert Earl Keen, Michael Martin Murphey, John Prine, Chuck Brodsky, Marshall Tucker Band and many more is an outstanding compliment. My hat’s off to Dondo Darue.

Arnie Cooper spoke with award-winning investigative journalist Greg Palast recently for The Sun Magazine. The text is not online, but Palast makes some major assertions that I’d like to share. First he debunks the entire idea of peak oil. He says it’s a myth invented by Shell Oil in 1956 in order to keep oil prices high.

We’re not running out of crude, dude. We’ve got plenty. The question is “At what price?” At twenty dollars a barrel, we’re dead out. At a hundred dollars a barrel? We’ve got all the oil you want.

Cooper then asks him about the need to turn to alternative energy. Palast is for it, but says it’s important to get the argument right. He says the “we’re running out of oil” argument leads directly to nuclear, while sustaining artificially high oil prices.

We won’t get green technology by telling people we’re running out of oil. Oil went up to seventy-five bucks a barrel, and I did not see one solar panel go up in New York City. Not one. We have to stop pumping carbon-based fuels into the air, not because we’re running out of carbon-based fuels, but because carbon will kill us. And it makes us political hostages to bloodthirsty maniacs.

As for the mainstream environmental movement, Palast pulls no punches.

The environmentalists like to talk about “win-win” scenarios. You know: corporations can make money by going green. What a crock of shit. Forget it. If they could do that, they would’ve done it already. Environmentalist Amory Lovins, who’s made millions of dollars working for big corporations, goes around saying, “Everyone wins.” Well, if everyone wins, then how come the skies are black and people in China are dying of arsenic poisoning? It’s bullshit. The only way we can get anything done is by limiting consumption by law and through a national commitment to use less carbon-based fuel. Let’s stop goosing around and clean up the planet.

I like the challenges presented by Palast, but I’m not ready to say business won’t soon profit from green technologies. Ted Turner, for one, believes sustainable energy and other green businesses will deliver wealth akin to what we’re seeing today in communications technology. I agree with Turner, and I agree with Palast’s point that we need to create and enforce much tougher environmental laws. A problem this big needs multiple answers. No single approach will do.

New York Time Building by Khoi Vinh

Khoi Vinh is the Design Director for NYTimes.com. He started working in the paper’s new building this week. This is how he describes it:

The new Times building at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan’s midtown was designed by Renzo Piano, and whether it fits your taste or not, it’s hard to deny that it’s the most notable new skyscraper to rise on the island this decade.

From top to bottom, the new building is all metal and glass, like some kind of throwback to the early optimism of modernist impulses. But it feels not all anachronistic; rather, walking its hallways and staring out its windows, it’s almost brashly futuristic.

While this new structure looks and no doubt is impressive, I’m not a huge fan of tall buildings. I don’t mind gazing at them or pondering how they’re constucted, but I don’t want to work in one. For that I require a small, naturally lit, well ventilated space just steps from nature.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich is a fearless man and a true American patriot. True patriots fight to uphold The U.S. Constitution at all costs. I admire him. By the way, Dennis is running for President again. And while he likely won’t win the Democrat nomination, the more support he gets now the more progressive the Dem’s platform will be going into the general election.

On the eve of the season’s first Presidential debate tomorrow night in Oranegburg, SC, I thought I’d take a look at what really matters—the number of MySpace friends each candidate has to his or her name.

• Barack Obama has 142856 MySpace friends
• Hillary Clinton has 39946 MySpace friends
• John Edwards has 24749 MySpace friends
• Dennis Kucinich has 7690 MySpace friends
• Bill Richardson has 7409 MySpace friends
• Joe Biden has 4375 MySpace friends
• Chris Dodd has 3106 MySpace friends
• Mike Gravel has 694 MySpace friends

But hey, let’s not say that numbers are everything. What kind of friends do these politicians attract? That must count for something (not at the polls, of course). With this in mind, Edwards the Handsome looks good. He has Liz for Edwards [& a better America] in his corner, for instance. Liz is 16, attractive, likes good music and isn’t afraid to express her progressive values. One of the stickers on her MySpace page reads, “I’m Straight, Not Narrow.” Another reads, “Born Okay the First Time.” Liz is too young to vote, but she’s already an influencer. Maybe there’s hope for America yet.

For the past few years I’ve been saying in private how I think the nation is sliding towards fascism. I don’t like saying it, nor do I enjoy contemplating this thesis. It’s sickening to examine; yet if we are to remain free, we must have the resolve to do just that. So, I am heartened today to find Naomi Wolfe’s treatise on the subject, published by The Guardian (outside the U.S., of course).

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

Wolfe then goes on to list 10 steps, a “blueprint” she calls it, that leads a nation into fascism.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

She argues in detail that the Bush administration is engaged in ALL of these atrocities against our history and our people. We all need to judge for ourselves the merit of her claims. Personally, I feel that claims 4, 8, 9 and 10 are beyond reproach. And while I’m mad about all 10 points, number 8–control the press–is for me a particularly poignant issue. For instance, there is so little press coming out of Iraq. The only TV news organization with any credibility on the topic is Frontline on PBS, a program Newsday calls “Television’s last fully serious bastion of journalism.”

On Saturday night we had the opportunity to dine at Flagler Fish Company in Flagler Beach, just north of Daytona. The restaurant is a converted surf shop with an open kitchen. I noticed right off that they had organic wines and kind brews from Cali. Plus, I liked how they display their fish for retail, a move that reminds diners of the freshness factor.

If you’re having fish you simply choose your favorite type grilled, seared or steamed and then you pick a sauce—Sweet Thai Tomato Coconut, Salsa Verde, Hong Kong or Brown Butter Lemon Caper and Tartar.

The restaurant also has a cool tagline: Food To Knock Your Flops Off.

The Independent picked up on a growing environmental disaster story about the sudden and alarming disappearance of bees.

The implications of the spread are alarming. Most of the world’s crops depend on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein once said that if the bees disappeared, “man would have only four years of life left”.

No one knows why it is happening. Theories involving mites, pesticides, global warming and GM crops have been proposed, but all have drawbacks.

German research has long shown that bees’ behaviour changes near power lines.

Now a limited study at Landau University has found that bees refuse to return to their hives when mobile phones are placed nearby.

According to a New York Times story from February, honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts.

The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.

Researchers say the bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. Presumably they are dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

Yesterday afternoon, Darby picked up a handful of $.20 cents books from Habitat for Humanity’s discount store in downtown Bluffton. I’ve already ripped through the one that jumped out at me from the pile on the coffee table.

Tom Wolfe’s 1981 architecture essay in book form, From Bahaus to Our House, explains modernism in a smart but biting manner, a style he trademarked along with his white-suited public persona.

Let’s look at a small but telling passage about one of the founding fathers of the International Style.

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundemental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

After putting the book down this morning, I wondered if any criticism might exist on the series of tubes. Google in concert with The New York Times provided the answer, as one might expect. Once upon a time, I visited libraries with card catalogs and microfiche for this type of information. Not now. Now Paul Goldberger’s 26-year old review in the Times is but a few keystrokes away. Goldberger says Wolfe has “a great ear, but no eye,” dismissing the book as a serious contribution to architectural thought.

Mr. Wolfe’s agility continues to dazzle, more than fourteen years after his essays first began to appear in print. But dazzle is not history, or architectural criticism, or even social criticism, and it is certainly not an inquiry into the nature of the relationship between architecture and society.

Of course Mr. Wolfe isn’t really writing history; he is writing social criticism, as he always does. I think that he is finally not very interested in architecture, anyway. What interests him much more are society’s reactions to architecture. And there he makes some observations that, while as simplistic and selective as his history, are at least amusing.

Architecture is unique among the arts for its formidable practicality. The product of architecture–buildings–can be understood in the most mundane terms as places to house a family or a business. Theorists can also spend decades elaborating radical, sometimes incomprehensible ideas about the built environment. For instance, Wolfe goes to lengths in this book to expose the socialist underpinnings at the foundation of modern architecture (and the various failings of its proponents to live up to those ideals).

Wolfe gets to the heart of client-architect relationships during this era. He depicts modernists from the Corbu/Gropius/Mies Van Der Rohe schools as pompous artistes with no interest whatsoever in pleasing clients, nor the masses. The academy’s complicit role in all this is also explained with little delicacy.

photo courtesy of Flickr user, Suw Charman

Danah Boyd is a smart lady with fabulous hats. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Information (SIMS) at the University of California - Berkeley and a Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications. Her dissertation looks at how youth engage with networked publics like MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. She is interested in how the architectural differences between unmediated and mediated publics affect sociality, identity and culture. Ergo, the following riff on the myth of meritocracy and the unreality of reality TV is her intellectual sweet spot.

American individualism (and self-esteem education) have allowed us to uphold a myth of meritocracy. We sell young people the idea that anyone can succeed, anyone can be president. We ignore the fact that working class kids get working class jobs. This, of course, has been exacerbated in recent years. There used to be meaningful working class labor that young people were excited to be a part of. It was primarily masculine labor and it was rewarded through set hierarchies and unions helped maintain that structure. The unions crumpled in the 1980s and by the time the 1987 recession hit, there was a teenage wasteland No longer were young people being socialized into meaningful working class labor; the only path out was the “lottery” (aka becoming a famous rock star, athlete, etc.).

Since the late 80s, the lottery system has become more magnificent and corporatized. While there’s nothing meritocratic about reality TV or the Spice Girls, the myth of meritocracy remains. Over and over, working class kids tell me that they’re a better singer than anyone on American Idol and that this is why they’re going to get to be on the show. This makes me sigh. Do i burst their bubble by explaining that American Idol is another version of Jerry Springer where hegemonic society can mock wannabes? Or does their dream have value?

As for her rhetorical question at the end, I’m inclined to say all dreams are valuable. However, I don’t think Boyd is talking about dreams, nor even aspirations. She’s talking about delusions that are created by, and daily reinforced by, our media-centric culture.

There is a meritocracy in America. But it’s not sexy. “Success” takes hard work, plus discipline in school and later in the workforce. It requires decades of untold sacrifices, with no hope of wealth nor fame in one’s future. Instead, the struggle toward something like being the best history teacher, city planner, or bus driver one can be, leads to a greater civic good. And with any luck the inner satisfaction of a job well done.

But who is holding up these true American values today? Who is motivating youth to act on them? My hope is lots of great parents, aunts, uncles, coaches, teachers and other mentors who laregely go unheralded.