A Longhouse Birdhouse

2012-01-28T08:23:00.004-05:00

EARTH ~

Saul Alinsky, community friend and skilled organizer, with book under arm,
on the streets of Chicago

Some say : Chicago + Saul Alinsky + Barack Obama = BAD.
Really?
Pipe down & read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky

organize!

2012-01-27T11:22:00.003-05:00

EARTH ~

Joe Hill, January 14, 1914 (age 34)

JOE HILLSTROM by WOODY GUTHRIE

On January Tenth Nineteen Fourteen
Two men fixed some masks of red handkerchiefs
Walked into the Temple and South Street Store
Laid Morrison and his son dead on the floor.
Before he died Merlin Morrison
Reached under his counter and pulled his gun
The fellows tried to run back out the door again
Morrison put a bullet in one of the men.
Just three days later you arrested me
At the Eselius home on Seventeenth South Street
Just because I've got a fresh bullet hole
You claim that I killed the Morrisons in their store.
I was courting a woman and had a fight with a man
He fired a pistol that lodged in me
Old Prosecutor Leatherwood can beat out his brains
But I'm not going to tell you this lady's name.
Take away these attorneys you picked for me
My own lawyer now I'm going to be
It's because I'm a union organizer in the copper mines
You've got me on your killing floor to die.
My labor friends sent Judge Hilton and Christensen
To prove I did not kill the Morrisons
But I cannot drag my lady's honor down
I can't tell where I got my gunshot wound.
It was in June you convicted me
You said I was guilty in the worst degree
I don't want your pardon, but an honest trial,
If I can't get a fair trial I will die.
President Wilson wired the Governor Spry
Saying please don't let Joe Hillstrom die
Several thousand letters and telegrams
Piled up on the governor's desk from workers hands.
The governor wired to Wilson, Nothing I can do,
The Pardon Board and Supreme Court, too,
Both did uphold the frame up trial
They all want to see me walk my last long mile.
The death watch is set, it's November Eighteenth,
My comrades are marching up and down the streets
Of all of the cities and the towns around
They can sing Joe Hillstrom never let them down.
The Nineteenth Day of November is here
A frosty old morning with winter in the air
Two telegrams that I got to send
To Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Bill Haywood.
It's a hundred miles to the Wyoming line
Could you arrange to have my body hauled
Past that old state line before you bury me at all
I just don't want to be found dead here in Utah.
Hey, Gurley Flynn, I wrote you a song
To the dove of peace. It's coming along.
I lived like a rebel, like a rebel I die.
Forget me. Organize these copper mines.
They march me now out to the baseball park
Tie me down in a chair, and the Doctor marks my heart
With a little white rag against this black robe
Goodbye Joe Hillstrom you done a pretty good job.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn joined the New York City local 179 of the I. W. W. in 1906 (at age 16) and soon became the foremost woman organizer in the I.W.W.. She subsequently joined the American Communist Party and was serving as an officer until her death in 1964. By Joe Hill's own admission, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the inspiration for his song "The Rebel Girl."

In May 1915, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn visited Joe Hill in jail for one hour; although this remained their only meeting, they corresponded frequently.
Just prior to his execution, Hill sent two telegrams to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn:

Composed new song last week, with music, dedicated to the 'Dove of Peace.' It's coming. And now, good-bye, Gurley dear, I have lived like a rebel and I shall die like a rebel.

Dear Friend Gurley:
I have been saying Goodbye so much now that it is becoming monotonous but I just cannot help to send you a few more lines because you have been more to me than a fellow worker. You have been an inspiration and when I composed the Rebel Girl you was right there and helped me all the time. As you furnished the idea I will now that I am gone give you all the credit for that song, and be sure to locate a few more Rebel Girls like yourself, because they are needed and needed badly.... With a warm handshake across the continent and a last fond Goodbye to all I remain
Yours as Ever
Joe Hill

~

William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, an organizer for the Western Federation of Miners, chaired the sessions at the founding convention of the I. W. W. (June 27, 1905) and soon became one of the most colorful and forceful labor leaders in American history. As general secretary, Haywood was instrumental in raising money for Hill's appeal for a new trial and in organizing the protest against Hill's execution.
On Nov 18, 1915, Joe Hill sent the following telegram to Bill Haywood:
Goodbye Bill: I die like a true rebel. Don't waste any time mourning -- organize!
It is a hundred miles from here to Wyoming. Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don't want to be found dead in Utah.
Joe Hill
Haywood sent the following farewell telegram:
Goodbye Joe: You will live long in the hearts of the working class. Your songs will be sung wherever the workers toil, urging them to organize.
W. D. Haywood

Joe Hill's body was transported to Chicago and cremated on Nov 26, 1915. His ashes (in accordance with his Last Will) were placed in envelopes and distributed to I. W. W. locals in every U.S. state but Utah, to South America, Europe, Asia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. On May 1, 1916, the ashes were released to the wind.

(as reprinted in Gibbs M. Smith, Labor Martyr Joe Hill, New York, NY, 1969)

2012-01-26T16:12:00.003-05:00

EARTH ~

Roadside SW

photo © bob arnold

2012-01-25T08:55:00.004-05:00

BIRTH ~

Joan Didion and Quintana Roo, 1966

CHAPTER 10

She was born in the first hour of the third day of March, 1966, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. We were told that we could adopt her late the afternoon of the same day, March third, when Blake Watson, the obstetrician who delivered her, called the house at Portuguese Bend in which we then lived, forty-some miles down the coast from Santa Monica. I was taking a shower and burst into tears when John came into the bathroom to report what Blake Watson had said. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s,” is what he had said. “I need to know if you want her.” The baby’s mother, he had said, was from Tucson. She had been staying with relatives in California for the birth of the baby. An hour later we stood outside the window of the nursery at St. John’s looking at an infant with fierce dark hair and rosebud features. The beads on her wrist spelled out not her name but “N.I.,” for “No Information,” which was the hospital’s response to any questions that might be asked about a baby being placed for adoption. One of the nurses had tied a pink ribbon in the fierce dark hair. “Not that baby,” John would repeat to her again and again in the years that followed, reenacting the nursery scene, the recommended “choice” narrative, the moment when, of all the babies in the nursery, we picked her. “Not that baby . . . that baby. The baby with the ribbon.”

“Do that baby,” she would repeat in return, a gift to us, an endorsement of our wisdom in opting to follow the recommended choice narrative. The choice narrative is no longer universally favored by professionals of child care, but it was in 1966. “Do it again. Do the baby with the ribbon.”

And later: “Do the part about Dr. Watson calling.” Blake Watson was already a folk figure in this recital.

And then: “Tell the part about the shower.”

Even the shower had become part of the recommended choice narrative.

March 3, 1966.

After we left St. John’s that night we stopped in Beverly Hills to tell John’s brother Nick and his wife, Lenny. Lenny offered to meet me at Saks in the morning to buy a layette. She was taking ice from a crystal bucket, making celebratory drinks. Making celebratory drinks was what we did in our family to mark any unusual, or for that matter any usual, occasion. In retrospect we all drank more than we needed to drink but this did not occur to any of us in 1966. Only when I read my fiction, in which someone was always downstairs making a drink and singing “Big Noise blew in from Winnetka,” did I realize how much we all drank and how little thought we gave to it. Lenny added more ice to my glass and took the crystal bucket to the kitchen for a refill. “Saks because if you spend eighty dollars they throw in the bassinet,” she added as she went.

I took the glass and put it down.

I had not considered the need for a bassinet.

I had not considered the need for a layette.

The baby with the fierce dark hair stayed that night and the next two in the nursery at St. John's and at some point during each of those nights I woke in the house at Portuguese Bend to the same chill, hearing the surf break on the rocks below, dreaming that I had forgotten her, left her asleep in a drawer, gone into town for dinner or a movie and made no provision for the infant who could even then be waking alone and hungry in the drawer in Portuguese Bend.

Dreaming in other words that I had failed.

Been given a baby and failed to keep her safe.

When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the “blessing” aspect.

We omit the instant of the sudden chill, the “wait-if,” the free fall into certain failure.

What if I fail to take care of this baby?

What if this baby fails to thrive, what if this baby fails to love me?

And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby?

from Blue Nights
Joan Didion
(Knopf 2011)

2012-01-24T23:45:00.010-05:00

REPUBLIC ~

President Barack Obama showed in his State of the Union speech tonight that he has the ability to be both the greater Democrat and greater Republican. Essentially nixing every Republican in the room, and most were sitting on their hands in childish defiance thinking not applauding sound and often conservative ideas was the proper response. It's amazing to watch what goodness applied by Obama, politicians on the Right just won't give back. It's schoolyard, it's petty, it's just the sort of leadership that will never work and is a sham. Only a gentleman like Obama would hold off reminding the seated group (both parties) they are the lowest of the low for public approval in our nation's history. Many of them should be yanked out of office as a bad warped board, bent nail, tapped out screw. With his dual carriage as a speaker in Democrat & Republican flair, President Obama emptied the room of dead souls and pretty much exposed what is running against him in the 2012 election: snake oil salesmen, fat cats, loud mouths, old fear and staged ideas. Plus a denial mean as war.

photo: doug mills, ny times

2012-01-24T13:43:00.008-05:00

COMMANDMENTS ~

Right about now, you need this:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

2012-01-24T07:03:00.005-05:00

EARTH ~

MT. EVEREST

After Mt. Everest, the Bronx

Jinpa Sherpa, Mount Everest guide and mini-mart worker.

By COREY KILGANNON

Published: January 20, 2012

The Particulars

NAME Jinpa Sherpa

AGE 38

WHERE HE’S FROM Khumjung, Nepal

WHAT HE IS Mount Everest climbing guide and gas station attendant

TELLING DETAIL The Buddhist monastery in his home village proudly displays a scalp that, according to local lore, belonged to a yeti that befriended a local monk centuries ago.

JINPA SHERPA is unfailingly cheerful and helpful as he rings up your gas and coffee and lottery ticket at the Gulf station mini-mart on Leggett Avenue in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx.

And if you want to scale Mount Everest, he can help you with that, too.

“They are very different jobs; I realize this,” said Mr. Sherpa, 38, who, as his name implies, belongs to that renowned ethnic group of hearty mountain people from eastern Nepal known for their excellence as guides on Mount Everest and other Himalayan peaks.

In the mountains, Mr. Sherpa can spend months trekking over glaciers and negotiating ice falls and treacherous crevasses at nosebleed heights. His duties include scrambling ahead up snowy slopes, lugging heavy packs, setting ropes and tents, and heating hot noodles for climbers.

In the Bronx, he is a Sherpa of a different sort: furnishing fast food and daily necessities to truck drivers, warehouse workers and mechanics who seek sustenance from this base camp in the middle of a gritty industrial area.

Mr. Sherpa tends the dozen dispensers at the coffee island, replenishes the pizza under the heat lamp and straightens the shelves and condiment bins — all with the same dedication and care he employs on the mountain when checking his clients’ oxygen tanks and lifelines.

His mountain climber’s neck scarf bears the Tibetan and Nepali flags, and in his right ear is a small gold earring shaped like an ice climber’s pickax. Then there are his good cheer and compact build, for which the Sherpas are known, and the stocky legs that seem made for climbing.

Mr. Sherpa is one of the mountaineering world’s elite guides. He can carry loads at altitudes upward of 20,000 feet without collapsing from lack of oxygen. He has trekked up Mount Everest a dozen times and has reached the summit five times, putting him in rare company. But between guide jobs in the spring and fall, he often travels to the United States to find temporary work.

“For me, it is a way to learn about Western culture, and also make a little money to send my son to school in Katmandu,” he said. “Some of this is the same stuff I do on the mountain.”

Mr. Sherpa stays with Sherpa friends in Queens, where they gather in restaurants in Jackson Heights and enjoy spicy meals and butter tea. He rides three subway trains each morning to the gas station, where he works weekdays from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Yes, he says, it is a long way from the top of the world to the bottom of the employment food chain, as the new guy working for meager wages. Customers and co-workers know nothing of his climbing career. Back in Nepal, Mr. Sherpa said, he earns about $4,000 to take climbers on a two-month trip up Mount Everest. Reaching the summit can bring a $1,000 tip.

Mr. Sherpa brought his climbing equipment to the United States and spent a few weeks ice climbing with friends in Massachusetts, and gave free climbing workshops. On weekends, he does a bit of climbing on the rocky outcroppings in Central Park, he said, standing near the Slurpee machine on Wednesday.

He walked outside near the gas pumps and flipped through photographs on his smartphone of himself at snowy heights. Mr. Sherpa grew up in Khumjung, a village roughly 12,000 feet above sea level and not far from Mount Everest. It is known for its mountain guides and its Buddhist monastery. Mr. Sherpa’s father, Mingming Tsering Sherpa, was a professional guide who also made a living by renting the family’s four yaks as transport. Mr. Sherpa attended a school financed by the Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation.

Mr. Sherpa began climbing Everest at age 12 with his father, but beginning in his late teens, he took eight years away from climbing to study to be a monk. He returned to climbing, which can be a spiritual pursuit itself, he said.

“When I’m climbing, my mind is very clear and happy — it’s like meditation,” he said. “You have to be focused enough to grab a tiny crack in the rock and trust it with your life, or drive your ax into the hardest spot in the ice.”

Mr. Sherpa, who has a five-year work visa, says that when the mountain finally wears out his legs and back, he will hang up his crampons, put the yaks out to pasture and, he hopes, become a full-time New Yorker. Now, however, he has an expedition booked for March, and the Sherpa of Hunts Point will go back to the Himalayas.

photo : Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

E-mail: character@nytimes.com

mteverest.com

2012-01-23T19:43:00.004-05:00

EARTH ~

The holiday tree, balsam, held its needles for three weeks in a cold room of the house (in the kitchen library where we keep it unheated through winter). The next two weeks we set the tree, with lights, out in the backyard, going strong. When the needles finally fall off the tough one, we'll then cut the tree up and burn it for warmth. For now it's a pretty warm light through the night.

photo © bob arnold

2012-01-22T09:15:00.003-05:00

EARTH ~

The day before the snowstorm that was sure to bury us now for good and begin a real winter, I set off on the woodlot trail with chalk in pocket and left behind some signposts, signatures, and friends.

next day ~ snow!

photo © bob arnold

A Hike Before Snowfall With Chalk In Hand
(cat on the trail behind me and true love)

2012-01-21T09:37:00.011-05:00

EARTH ~

Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press

Steve Wright of the Seminole County Fire Department, left, and D. M. Shaw of the State Department of Agriculture assessed the tree remains on Monday.

In Flash of Fire, Florida Loses Old Friend

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Published: January 20, 2012, new york times

LONGWOOD, Fla. — Back, way back, before King Tut was born and Alexander the Great roamed his empire, the Senator sprouted in a swamp here in central Florida, one of thousands of its kind.

The tree standing tall in 2004.

Florida State Archives, via Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

So on Monday, when word got out that the huge, 3,500-year-old bald cypress had burned and collapsed, people from the area who thought that nothing — not hurricanes, not loggers, not disease — could fell the Senator, sank into disbelief. In a state known for its sprawl and its zeal for pouring concrete, the Senator stood as a testament to nature and ancient history. It was one of the oldest trees in the country and, at 118 feet, one of the tallest east of the Mississippi.

“There is so little of this old history left,” said Lauren Wyckoff, 28, an environmental scientist and self-described tree hugger, who drove to Big Tree Park from nearby Orlando after work to pay her respects. “It’s not just some tree in your backyard. I mean, it’s 3,500 years old; I just picture everything it saw, everything it has been through.”

“I’m crying,” she said, with a laugh, as her eyes reddened. “When I first came here, I had no idea it would be as amazing as it was. No idea it would be as impactful.”

Investigators for the Division of Forestry are still trying to figure out how the tree burned down early Monday morning. Arson remains a possibility, although it had been initially discounted. Two other possible theories are being considered: the tree was struck by lightning long before Monday (maybe as long as two weeks) and slowly smoldered from the inside, or friction from the wind caused it to combust.

Around town, these last two theories were met with skepticism and a touch of derision. The Senator, which was the only tree in the small park to catch fire, was equipped with a lightning rod. And if the tree had been struck by lightning and smoldered for two weeks, residents said, somebody surely would have seen or smelled it. As for friction, that notion drew nothing but smirks.

“Of course, maybe a plane flew over and dropped an ember into the hole,” Rick Waters, 49, who runs Mel’s Family Diner in Sanford, a couple of miles from the tree’s resting place, said with a chuckle. “I think some moron started it, or threw a cigarette down. It’s sick to think somebody would destroy that.”

The revered tree wasn’t just old; it was huge. At nearly 18 feet in diameter, it was so large it would take a passel of children holding hands to surround it.

Named for Senator M. O. Overstreet, who donated the land to Seminole County to use as a park in 1927, the Senator has long been a landmark for Floridians. It survived the logging epidemic, which claimed many of the giant trees that once stood in the county. (The Senator may have been spared because it was hollow, a condition that occurred as the tree aged.) It endured centuries of nasty hurricanes, including one in 1925 that lopped off 40 feet from the top.

Back then, four decades before Disney World rose from swampland, the towering bald cypress was the star attraction in these parts. Visitors arrived on horse and buggy and then jumped from log to log to get a close-up glimpse of the tree.

“You could see it from pretty much everywhere around here” it was so tall, said Joseph R. Abel, the director of the Leisure Services Department in Seminole County.

Now children are brought here on field trips to gawk skyward and imagine what Florida was like back when it was nothing but forest and swamp and Indians were its only inhabitants. Families have always come to snap photos, and nature-lovers arrived on pilgrimages.

What remains now is a trunk, split in half, and a charred shard of wood that shoots 30 feet into the air. The remnants of the tree lie split, on their sides, black and sooty. Outside the gates of the park sits a little tribute of flowers with a sign reading “Rest in Peace Senator.” The park is closed for now as investigators determine what caused the fire.

But the new Florida had long been a too-quick walk away from the Senator. Traffic whizzes by in front of the park and fast-food joints sit right up the street. And though the tree was revered by some, competition from modern life had dwarfed its appeal a good while back.

There are not many awe-inspiring things left, Ms. Wyckoff said. “It was crazy, insane, you can’t imagine how large it was,” she said.

Yet only 40 feet from the Senator looms an understudy: Lady Liberty, now the park’s tallest cypress. It is 89 feet tall and not nearly as imposing, but in this time of transitory celebrity, its moment has arrived.

2012-01-20T16:34:00.019-05:00

EARTH ~

Etta James

(1938 ~ 2012 )

Ah, what a harsh week for R & B — to lose two master acts & lives days apart — Johnny Otis and Etta James, old friends, and that they now bunk bed the obituary file for the New York Times and The Guardian (U.K.) all we can say is let the music roll.

Everyone, including me, loves early Etta James on the Chess label, unbeatable. I'm choosing a song here from one of her last recordings, when she'd been to hell and back and was still creating gems of blues and soul and straight talk like no one else.

"Etta James was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles on Jan. 25, 1938. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, was 14 at the time; her father was long gone, and Ms. James never knew for sure who he was, although she recalled her mother telling her that he was the celebrated pool player Rudolf Wanderone, better known as Minnesota Fats. She was reared by foster parents and moved to San Francisco with her mother when she was 12."

Minnesota Fats

quote: ny times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/arts/music/etta-james-singer-dies-at-73.html?hp

2012-01-20T09:23:00.010-05:00

VERMONT SPEAK ~

We must stop this corporate takeover of American democracy

Unless we can reverse the supreme court's dreadful Citizens United decision, US politics will become a plutocrats' plaything

Bernie Sanders

David Koch and Charles G Koch: the US supreme court's Citizens United decision has enabled the industrialists to fund conservative groups to the tune of $200m already in this electoral cycle. Photograph: Getty

The corporate barbarians are through the gate of American democracy. Not satisfied with their all-pervasive influence on our culture, economy and legislative processes, they want more. They want it all.

Two years ago, the United States supreme court betrayed our Constitution and those who fought to ensure that its protections are enjoyed equally by all persons regardless of religion, race or gender by engaging in an unabashed power-grab on behalf of corporate America. In its now infamous decision in the Citizens United case, five justices declared that corporations must be treated as if they are actual people under the Constitution when it comes to spending money to influence our elections, allowing them for the first time to draw on the corporate checkbook – in any amount and at any time – to run ads explicitly for or against specific candidates.

What's next … a corporate right to vote?

Don't laugh. Just this month, the Republican National Committee filed an amicus brief in a US appeals court contending that the natural extension of the Citizens United rationale is that the century-old ban on corporate contributions directly to candidates and political parties is similarly unconstitutional. They want corporations to be able to sponsor candidates and parties directly while claiming with a straight face this would not result in any sort of corruption. And while, this month, they take no issue with corporations being subject to the existing contribution limits, anyone paying attention knows that eliminating such caps will be corporate America's next prize in its brazen ambition for absolute control over our elections.

The US Constitution has served us very well, but when the supreme court says, for purposes of the first amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company's bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, our democracy is in grave danger.

I am a proud sponsor of a number of bills that would respond to Citizens United and begin to get a handle on the problem. But something more needs to be done – something more fundamental and indisputable, something that cannot be turned on its head by a rightwing supreme court.

That is why I have introduced a resolution in the Senate (introduced by Representative Ted Deutch in the House) calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that says simply and straightforwardly what everyone – except five members of the United States supreme court – understands: corporations are not people with constitutional rights equal to flesh-and-blood human beings. Corporations are subject to regulation by the people. Corporations may not make campaign contributions – the law of the land for the last century – or dump unlimited sums of money into our elections. And Congress and states have broad power to regulate all election spending.

I did not introduce this lightly. In fact, I have never sought to amend the Constitution before. The US Constitution is an extraordinary document that, in my view, should not be amended often. In light of the supreme court's Citizens United decision, however, I see no alternative. The ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy. It has further tilted the balance of power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good.

At a time when corporations have more than $2tn in cash in their bank accounts, make record-breaking profits and swarm Washington with their lobbyists 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the highest court in the land to suggest that there is just not enough corporate "speech" in our system defies the bounds of reason and sanity. The ruling already has led to plans, for example, by industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch to steer more than $200m – potentially much more – to conservative groups ahead of election day 2012. Karl Rove has similar designs.

Does anybody really believe that that is what American democracy is supposed to be about?

I believe that the Citizens United decision will go down as one of the worst in our country's history – and one that demands an amendment to our Constitution in order to restore sovereign power to the people, as our nation's founders intended.

If we do not reverse it and the culture of corporate dominance over our elections that it has exacerbated, there will be no end to the impact that corporate interests have on our campaigns and our democracy.

Bernie Sanders

guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012

2012-01-19T14:05:00.028-05:00

EARTH ~

The great Johnny Otis holding his son, the equally great, Shuggie

“Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it’s all African-American music,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “The music isn’t just the notes, it’s the culture — the way Grandma cooked, the way Grandpa told stories, the way the kids walked and talked.”

~ Johnny Otis (1921-2012)

Johnny Otis Show - Willie And The Hand Jive by Various on Grooveshark

Johnny Otis, 'Godfather of Rhythm and Blues', Dies at 90

Johnny Otis, the musician, bandleader, songwriter, impresario, disc jockey and talent scout often called “the godfather of rhythm and blues,” died on Tuesday at his home in Altadena, Calif. He was 90.

His death was confirmed by his manager, Terry Gould.

Leading a band in the late 1940s that combined the high musical standards of big-band jazz with the raw urgency of gospel music and the blues, Mr. Otis played a key role in creating a new sound for a new audience of young urban blacks, a sound that within a few years would form the foundation of rock ’n’ roll.

With his uncanny ear for talent, he helped steer a long list of performers to stardom, among them Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Esther Phillips and Big Mama Thornton — whose hit recording of “Hound Dog,” made in 1952, four years before Elvis Presley’s, was produced by Mr. Otis and featured him on drums.

Ms. James spoke for many of her fellow performers when, at Mr. Otis’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, she referred to him as her “guru.” (He received similar honors from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation and the Blues Foundation.)

Mr. Otis’s contributions were not limited to music. He was also a political activist, a preacher, an artist, an author and even, late in life, an organic farmer. But music was always his first love, and it was in music that he left his most lasting mark.

Despite being a mover and shaker in the world of black music, Mr. Otis was not black, a fact that as far as he was concerned was simply an accident of birth. He was immersed in African-American culture from an early age and considered himself, he said, “black by persuasion.”

“Genetically, I’m pure Greek,” he told The San Jose Mercury News in 1994. “Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.”

As a musician — he played piano and vibraphone in addition to drums — Mr. Otis can be heard on Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love,” Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues” and other seminal rhythm-and-blues records, as well as jazz records by Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet. As a bandleader and occasional vocalist, he had a string of rhythm-and-blues hits in the early 1950s and a Top 10 pop hit in 1958 with his composition “Willie and the Hand Jive,” later covered by Eric Clapton and others. His many other compositions included “Every Beat of My Heart,” a Top 10 hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1961.

As a disc jockey (he was on the radio from the 1950s into the 21st century and also had his own Los Angeles television show from 1954 to 1961), he helped bring black vernacular music into the American mainstream.

Johnny Otis was born John Alexander Veliotes on Dec. 28, 1921, in Vallejo, Calif., the son of Greek immigrants who ran a grocery,. He grew up in a predominantly black area of Berkeley.

Mr. Otis began his career as a drummer in 1939. In 1945 he formed a 16-piece band and recorded his first hit, “Harlem Nocturne.”

As big bands fell out of fashion, Mr. Otis stripped the ensemble down to just a few horns and a rhythm section and stepped to the forefront of the emerging rhythm-and-blues scene. In 1948 he and a partner opened an R&B nightclub, the Barrelhouse, in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

From 1950 to 1952 Mr. Otis had 15 singles on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues Top 40, including “Double Crossing Blues,” which was No. 1 for nine weeks. On the strength of that success, he crisscrossed the country with his California Rhythm and Blues Caravan, featuring singers like Esther Phillips, billed as Little Esther — whom he had discovered at a talent contest at his nightclub — and Hank Ballard, who a decade later would record the original version of “The Twist,” the song that ushered in a national dance craze.

Around this same time Mr. Otis became a D.J. on the Los Angeles radio station KFOX. He was an immediate success, and soon had his own local television show as well. Beginning in the 1970s he was heard on Pacifica radio stations in California, where his weekly show remained until 2005.

Hundreds of Mr. Otis’s radio and television shows are archived at Indiana University. In addition, he is the subject of a coming documentary film, “Every Beat of My Heart: The Johnny Otis Story,” directed by Bruce Schmiechen, and a biography, “Midnight at the Barrelhouse,” written by George Lipsitz and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010.

While he never stopped making music as long as his health allowed, Mr. Otis focused much of his attention in the 1960s on politics and the civil rights movement. He ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Assembly and served on the staff of Mervyn M. Dymally, a Democratic assemblyman who later became a United States congressman and California’s first black lieutenant governor. Mr. Otis’s first book, “Listen to the Lambs” (1968), was largely a reflection on the political and social significance of the 1965 Watts riots.

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Otis branched out still further when he was ordained as a minister and opened the nondenominational Landmark Community Church in Los Angeles. While he acknowledged that some people attended just “to see what Reverend Hand Jive was talking about,” he took his position seriously and in his decade as pastor was actively involved in feeding the homeless and other charitable work.

In the early 1990s, he moved to the small northern California agricultural town of Sebastopol and became an organic farmer, a career detour that he said was motivated by his concern for the environment. For several years he made and sold his own brand of organic apple juice. The store he opened to sell the produce that he and his son Nick grew doubled as a nightclub where he and his band performed.

Later that decade Mr. Otis published three more books: “Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue” (1993), a memoir of his musical life; “Colors and Chords” (1995), a collection of his paintings, sculptures, wood carvings and cartoons (his interest in art had begun when he started sketching cartoons on his tour bus in the 1950s for the amusement of his band); and “Red Beans & Rice and Other Rock ’n’ Roll Recipes” (1997), a cookbook.

Mr. Otis continued to record and perform into the 21st century. His bands often included members of his family: his son John Jr., known as Shuggie, is a celebrated guitarist who played with him for many years, and another son, Nick, was his longtime drummer. Two of his grandsons, Lucky and Eric Otis, also played guitar with him. In addition to his sons, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, the former Phyllis Walker; two daughters, Janice and Laura Johnson; nine grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and a great-great-granddaughter.

Long after he was a force on the rhythm-and-blues charts, Mr. Otis was a familiar presence at blues and even jazz festivals. What people wanted to call his music, he said, was of no concern to him.

By IHSAN TAYLOR Published: January 19, 2012, Peter Keepnews contributed reporting, New York Times

2012-01-18T10:09:00.005-05:00

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Young family Susan, Bob & Carson dudded up once upon a time for a train ride.

In dome car
w/Carson eyes
riding the train
top winding the
hill curves of
dark woods
surrounding
CUMBERLAND
according
to the mural
lifted above
the town

Chapter 10

Mountain train ride.

A friend today goes to the railyards and keeps time with
the local town train as he did as a kid. Looks like a kid
when he talks about the trains, photographs he has
taken up in the hill-towns of the zoom surprise train
and its engine lamp appearing out of tunnels. He can
tell you if anything is different, a split second is off
schedule, and when looking at a newspaper photo-
graph of a wreck just yesterday at a Florida grade
crossing — a venue of big truck stuck on the tracks,
state police flagging madness, dispatch calls and sud-
denly everything is out of whack because they said the
train wasn't due but here comes trouble around the
bend blaring a horn that you better watch out and
seventy people will be hurt — my friend can point
into the accident stew and pick out one engine,
the truck body dragged three hundred yards, keeled over
baggage car, tilted sleeping coach, upright one-foot-
on-one-foot-off dining car and back at the RR crossing
the rest of the train in civil shape wondering: what in
the hell happened up ahead? My friend clips out
these photographs, fills a scrapbook. He and his wife
enjoy their train journeys in America, but more often
than not they now fly out and train home, or fly to
someplace with a train somewhere in the itinerary.
There are short train trips everywhere. We have taken
a few in Vermont, Massachusetts, New York State and
Colorado; the latter aboard the Durango and
Silverton Narrow-Gauge, when late October snow was
already steep across the mountains. You travel beside
the Animas River trickling as we go as easily this
tourist train, but nicely stuffed together out in the
open cars, bundled for the weather: teenagers, locals,
Europeans gasping and all of us red face weather
feeling magnificent as the train hairpins on cliffs
while negotiating a canyon passage. To think this goes
on every day for about half a year. I wonder if the
mountain blonde hair, braided, young woman who
appeared lesser dressed from one of the indoor coach
seats, to maybe join us wackos out here for a mo-
ment for the startling real view — is she part of the
train? — she wore a long dress that I have no memory
of because of two buttons plucked open at her neck
and an obvious pet iguana hugged her right there.
She told a few of us she had to go back inside because
the iguana was shivering. You just have to believe
how beautiful she was, and how normal this is, at least
at one time, in the mountain west. Going back inside
she missed entirely a forty-five mile journey reeking
of belched smoke and cinders from the time-worn
steam train painted classical black added to a model
of coaches laced in yellow trim over a forest green
splendid as the forests we coil through. You can take
a highway from Durango and meet your party on the
train in Silverton if you want to, or ride inside the
coaches if you like, but if I had a choice I'd want to
be outdoors on this canopy carriage stinking of rail-
road muss brightening your lungs looking down into
the Animas River, shortened from its original "Rio de
Las Animas Perdidas" — A River of Lost Souls — and
christ, aren't we! stepping down feeling rail-weary
onto the dirt streets of Silverton, ever mining town
jagged of agates along the gravel bars, so high up in
San Juan County there isn't one acre of farmland
anywhere to be found. We're so high up that when
Susan tries on a ring found in one of the nests of curio
shops, it won't budge. The amused silversmith
declares her fingers have thickened with the altitude
— buy it and it will fit better in Durango, and it did.
But get away from those shops, they are every-
where you go and how easily just to walk around the
back-skirts of Silverton: dog barks in one alley boarded up
fence high for privacy from neighbors and gawkers
and upwards the blue sky is everywhere. We found
the town library and we think there is a grade school
behind it by the swings and a playground scuffed out,
near a mountain side dropping to its back door with
a Christ figure up there — not too tall, both hands
palm open and appearing to look at anyone who looks
at him — but turning around we see he really looks
down into and blessing over the canyon trail. The
silver miners went into and came back home on this
trail. Today it is a sightseers' promenade over a skinny
old rail bed, but still a canyon. Where eagle flies,
snow blows, water flows, and so can you if you let it.
Now ten years later I talk with my friend about the
narrow gauge, a train he also rode and since four
hundred passengers can fit on the train just imagine
how many may join this thought — because you see,
and don't ask me why — the descent is just as
expressive and commanding as the ascent. A good
train ride always gets you coming and going.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)

photo peggy carey, courtesy © susan & bob arnold

2012-01-17T07:52:00.004-05:00

EARTH ~

Naomi Shihab Nye

Biography of an Armenian Schoolgirl

I have lived in the room of stone where voices become
bones buried under us long ago. Where you dig
for centuries uncovering the same sweet dust.

My hands dream crescent-shaped cakes,
trapped moons on a narrow veined earth.
All day I am studying my hands—I am giving them new things to hold.

Travel, I say. They become boats.
Go—the bird squirms to detach from the arm.
Across the courtyards, a radio rises up and explodes.

What is the history of Europe to us if we cannot choose our own husbands?
Yesterday my father met with the widower, the man with no hair.
How will I sleep with him, I who have never slept away from my mother?

Once I bought bread from the vendor with the humped back.
I carried it home singing, I thought the days had doors in them
that would swing open in front of me.

Now I copy the alphabets of three languages,
imagining the loops in my Arabic letters are eyes.
What you do when you are tired of what you see,

what happens to the gray body when it is laid in the earth,
these are the subjects which concern me. But they teach algebra.
They pull our hair back and examine our nails.

Every afternoon, predictable passage of sun across a wall.
I would fly out of here. Travel, I say.
I would go so far away my life would be a small thing behind me.

They teach physics, chemistry. I throw my book out the window,
watch the pages scatter like swings.
I stitch the professor's jacket to the back of his chair.

There is something else we were born for.
I almost remember it. While I write, a ghost writes on the same tablet,
achieves a different sum.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye
from Words Under the Words
(Far Corner Books, 1995)

photo: Bob Hate

2012-01-16T00:07:00.004-05:00

EARTH ~

between my fingers

three acorns

like buttons

painted

faces

&

their

colored

caps

quite

warm

photo © bob arnold

I painted these years ago and found again, as bright as ever

2012-01-15T00:10:00.004-05:00

KULCHUR ~

Mary De Rachewiltz, Ezra Pound's 86-year-old daughter, has gone to court to stop a neofascist organisation using her father's name.

Ezra Pound's Daughter Fights To Wrest The Renegade Poet's Legacy From Fascists

The 86-year-old Mary De Rachewiltz is taking on a band of Italian neofascists who are using her father's name.

The Italian castle where the poet Ezra Pound retreated in the 1950s to work on his epic poem The Cantos could scarcely be more remote, perched on a sheer rock outcrop against snowy peaks on the Austrian border.

More than half a century later, Pound's 86-year-old daughter still savours the isolation of Brunnenburg castle's lofty wood-panelled and book-lined rooms, where she reads the poem to visitors and mulls over her extraordinary upbringing by the renegade US poet.

But Mary De Rachewiltz's peace has been shattered by the murky world of Italian neofascist politics and the fallout from a bloody shooting spree through Florence's ancient piazzas that left two immigrants dead in December.

Angered by the decision of a rising fascist group called CasaPound to name itself after her father in honour of his support for dictator Benito Mussolini, De Rachewiltz is seeking through the courts to force the group to drop the name, and has accelerated her efforts after a CasaPound sympathiser shot dead two Senegalese street traders and wounded three others before turning the gun on himself.

"I was ashamed and hurt by the news," she told the Observer. "The fascists want to claim Pound, but they have nothing to do with Pound. They are a nuisance and there has to be something I can do to stop them."

Striding up the stone spiral staircase of the castle, De Rachewiltz heads for a corner study that commands breathtaking views up to rock faces and a piercing blue sky and down past the family vineyard to the valley far below.

An accomplished poet herself, De Rachewiltz has surrounded herself at Brunnenburg by Pound's possessions, including sculptures and old school books in which he drafted, in different coloured inks, sections of The Cantos, the historical work seen as one of the 20th century's major poems. She calls it "her bible".

De Rachewiltz's devotion to her charismatic father has never flagged, despite being given up for fostering at birth in 1925 to a peasant couple in South Tyrol by Pound and her mother, the US violinist Olga Rudge, who was the poet's mistress. Before her birth, Pound had settled in Italy with his wife after blazing a trail across the London poetry scene, en route to becoming a fixture on Paris's Left Bank, where he helped TS Eliot edit The Waste Land and mentored Ernest Hemingway, who tried to teach him to box.

In total contrast, De Rachewiltz's early upbringing revolved around bee-keeping and sheep herding, albeit broken up by trips to see her father and his mistress at the home they kept in Venice.

"The Tyrolean peasant is still ingrained in me," said De Rachewiltz, who recalls smashing a violin her elegant mother gave her. A tense relationship between Rudge and her dialect-speaking daughter ensued. "I think I was influenced by my foster parents, who probably envied 'the lady in the silk stockings' who would pick me up," she said.

With Pound she forged a strong bond as they roamed Venice together, visiting bookshops and taking the vaporetto waterbus out to swim at the Lido. Later, Pound would ask his daughter to translate the poem he had started, The Cantos, into Italian. "In 1943, at the height of the war, when I was back in South Tyrol for safekeeping, Pound made his way from Rome to make sure I was safe," De Rachewiltz recalls. During the visit he finally confessed to her that he had a wife in Rapallo on Italy's Ligurian coast. By that time Pound was a wanted man in the US after endorsing Mussolini's brand of fascism and making a string of radio broadcasts – which were riddled with antisemitic statements – to persuade America to stay out of the war.

Arrested in 1945 by American troops and kept in a cage for three weeks, where he showed signs of a mental breakdown, Pound was charged with treason and spent the next 12 years in a mental institute in the US.

De Rachewiltz has since fought a lifelong battle to separate Pound the poet from Pound the fascist and antisemite, which is why the emergence of CasaPound – now boasting 5,000 members – is so painful.

She rebuffs the suggestion that CasaPound's lionisation of him is no more than he deserves. "Pound just quoted what Mussolini said," she said. "This organisation is hiding behind Pound's name for intellectual cover," she added. "He made mistakes and we have to take the good part of him, just as he did with others. He fell into certain antisemitic clichés that were rampant in Europe and the US at the time."

Pound later told the American poet Allen Ginsburg that his worst mistake in life was his "stupid suburban antisemitic prejudice".

Released by the US government in 1958, Pound returned to Italy, where his daughter had married an Italian Egyptologist of Russian descent, Boris de Rachewiltz. They had purchased Brunnenburg, then in ruins. "It cost more to put in windows than to buy the castle," she recalls.

Pound moved to the castle to continue work on The Cantos, joined by his wife Dorothy, "who stayed in her room reading Henry James", recalls De Rachewiltz. But after years in an overheated mental institute, Pound was not fit for drafty castle life, and returned to Rapallo, where Olga cared for him until his death in 1972.

De Rachewiltz now sees that rivalry with her mother for Pound's affections clouded their relationship. "Anyone who met Pound loved him," she said. "When he wrote 'Pride, jealousy, and possessiveness/ 3 pains of hell', he was writing about all of us, including his wife. We all wanted him for ourselves. I re-read my mother's letters now and see how much she loved me."

Decades on, surrounded by her family, De Rachewiltz reads and writes, stopping for lunches of bread and cheese with a glass of red wine from her vines, followed by a cup of Earl Grey at four. TV soap operas are an occasional pleasure.

The CasaPound legal case, she insists, will not break up her routine. "I do not want to meet them," she said. "If he was here, Pound would say they need to go back to kindergarten."

Tom Kington, South Tyrol, Italy
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 14 January 2012

2012-01-14T23:59:00.003-05:00

EARTH ~

A Microsoft data center in Chicago. Such centers, which process vast amounts of data, have stringent requirements for reliability and security.

A WIRELESS ROAD AROUND DATA TRAFFIC JAMS

By ANNE EISENBERG

Published: January 14, 2012, The New York Times

THE vast data centers that process information for the Facebooks and Amazons of the Web work at a brisk clip. But even so, they can’t always keep up.

At Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., 60 GHz wireless links are atop server racks. The links are intended to speed data flow at crunch times.

During sudden bursts of activity, bottlenecks occur as traffic moves among dense clusters of servers. Typically, the servers are stacked one on top of another in rack after rack — and are connected by switches, routers and cables.

To better handle the congestion, researchers are testing a shortcut that doesn’t involve costly rewiring. They are experimenting with wireless links, mounted atop the server racks, to supply extra bandwidth for moving data along at crunch times.

Researchers in the field, as well as data center administrators, initially were skeptical about the idea of applying wireless technologies inside data centers, which have stringent requirements for reliability and security, says Victor Bahl, director of the mobile computing research center at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash. His group began trying the links to supplement wired systems three years ago.

“That skepticism is normal,” Dr. Bahl says. “Wireless links have always been considered flaky.”

Wireless performance, as anyone who has lost a cellphone connection can attest, can be affected by many things, from a door opening or a microwave oven starting to changes in the weather.

But a data center is a highly predictable environment, with controlled temperatures and infrequent movement of people and equipment. That minimizes fluctuations in the quality of wireless links. “You set up these racks of servers and walk away,” Dr. Bahl says. “The environment stays the same.”

The Microsoft team forged ahead with the project, building and testing a system with tiny directional antennas at the top of each rack to send and receive data. A central controller monitors traffic patterns, finds network bottlenecks, configures the antennas and turns on the wireless links when more bandwidth is required, says Daniel Halperin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, who worked on the project as an intern at Microsoft. Signals go out on a horizontal plane and are steered right or left. The design sped up traffic by at least 45 percent in 95 percent of the cases tested, Mr. Halperin says.

The wireless signal that the Microsoft group uses to carry multigigabits of data per second between racks isn’t the familiar Wi-Fi of coffee-shop hot spots. That type of signal spreads out over an entire room so that many people can open their laptops and go to work.

The wireless signal for the data centers is a narrow beam of extremely high-frequency radio waves in a part of the spectrum known as the 60 gigahertz band. The band is already used in home entertainment, replacing bulky cables that connect high-definition televisions to Blu-ray players, for example. Hardware for this bandwidth, which is available worldwide for unlicensed use, is likely to drop in cost as the band gains more use, Dr. Bahl says.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Heather Zheng, an associate professor in the computer science department, and colleagues are also designing multigigabit wireless links to augment wired data center networks. The links in the system can travel horizontally, but they can also leave one rack, bounce off a reflective ceiling at an angle, then move to another rack.

“When we bounce signals off the ceiling, we take advantage of much more bandwidth than we could if we restricted ourselves to a horizontal plane,” says Amin Vahdat, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who specializes in large-scale data center architecture and deployment and is working with Dr. Zheng on the project. Dr. Vahdat, who is on sabbatical leave from the university, is also a principal engineer at Google.

Craig Mathias, a principal at the Farpoint Group, an advisory firm specializing in wireless communications and mobile computing, agrees that the 60 GHz band is suitable for indoor, high-bandwidth use in information technology, but he maintains that wired systems are best for connecting servers.

The wired connections used in a data center are highly reliable, so “why introduce variability in a mission-critical situation?” he asks.

MARK THIELE, executive vice president for data center technology at Switch Communications, a Las Vegas builder and operator of data centers, says he thinks wireless technology offers a promising solution to congestion. “If it deals effectively with bottlenecks, a wireless connection could eliminate hundreds of thousands of dollars in required network connectivity,” he says.

Much work is still ahead. “You’ll have to prove its security,” he says, “and you’ll have to prove that 100 times out of 100 times” no information is lost.

photo: Richard Duval
E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

2012-01-14T00:05:00.006-05:00

SHABBOS ~

I THANK YOU THIS SHABBOS---------for Donald

I thank you this Shabbos for you have lifted your voice
and performed a small miracle.
Now, doors have slid open
that were willfully stuck shut.
Phone calls were made----letters were sent
processes started that had been ignored bogged down in ugly mud.
Your loud voice shifted our world a little bit on its axis
and that is no small feat.
You did this for love of me.
Others did other things:
sent cards asking God's blessing
a dozen blooming roses------an extra letter
an unexpected present.
And all these are good.
But your gift of anger and action
on my behalf
is most precious of all and I thank you
this golden Shabbos
in a distant part of the country
as I lay out the table performing the ritual clumsily
but with my whole heart,
blessing the fire------the wine and------the bread,
thinking of you with love —
for your voice----your words----your deep heart,
for what you put into effect
for love of me.

~ Enid Dame
from Where is the Woman?
Shivastan 2006

Enid Dame wrote this lovely small book of poems in California during July & August 2003. She died at New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn Christmas morning of the same year.

2012-01-13T12:05:00.004-05:00

BACK ROAD CHALKIES ~

Miles Davis

photo © bob arnold

2012-01-13T00:01:00.004-05:00

BUSINESS ~

The Two Steves Back in the Day
(Steve Wozniak & Steve Jobs)

"While the whole “who’s a genius” debate is, in general, fraught and unwinnable, since genius itself is always going to be ill-defined, in the case of Steve Jobs it is even more fraught and even more unwinnable. In part, this is because the tech world, where most of us reside simply by owning cell phones and using computers, is not unlike the sports world or the political world: it likes a good rivalry. If, years ago, it was Microsoft versus Apple, these days it’s Apple versus Android, with supporters of one platform calling supporters of the other platform names (“fanboys” is a popular slur) and disparaging their intelligence, among other things. Call Steve Jobs a genius and you’ll hear (loudly) from Apple detractors. Question his genius, and you’ll be roundly attacked by his claque. While there is something endearing about the passions stirred, they suggest the limitations of writing a book about a contemporary figure and making claims for his place among the great men and women in history. Even though Isaacson has written what appears to be a scrupulously fair chronicle of Jobs’s work life, he is in no better position than any of us to know where, in the annals of innovation, that life will end up.

The other reason nominating Jobs to genius status is complicated has to do with the collaborative nature of corporate invention and the muddiness of technological authorship. Jobs did not invent the personal computer—personal computers predate the Apple I, which he did not in any case design. He didn’t invent the graphical interface—the icons we click on when we’re using our computers, for example—that came from engineers at Xerox. He didn’t invent computer animation—he bought into a company that, almost as an afterthought, housed the most creative digital animation pioneers in the world. He didn’t invent the cell phone, or even the smart phone; the first ones in circulation came from IBM and then Nokia. He didn’t invent tablet computers; Alan Kay designed the Dynabook in the 1960s. He didn’t invent the portable MP3 music device; the Listen Up Player won the innovations award at the 1997 Consumer Electronics Show, four years before Jobs introduced the iPod.

What Jobs did instead was to see how each of these products could be made better, or more user-friendly, or more beautiful, or more useful, or more cutting-edge (quite literally: there is a popular YouTube video making the rounds that shows the sleek new MacBook Air being used to slice an apple). A few years ago, in a profile in Salon, Scott Rosenberg called Jobs a digital “auteur,” and that description seems just right.

The template for Jobs’s career was cast in 1975, months before he and his friends set up shop in his parents’ garage in Los Altos, California, near Palo Alto. Jobs, who had dropped out of Reed College and moved back home, was hanging around with his high school buddy Steve Wozniak. Wozniak, a shy, socially awkward engineer at Hewlett-Packard, was drawn to a group of phone hackers and do-it-yourself engineers who called themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. It was at a club meeting that Wozniak saw an Altair, the first personal computer built from a kit, and he had the insight that it might be possible to use a microprocessor to make a stand-alone desktop computer. “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head,” Isaacson quotes Wozniak as saying. “That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I.”

Then he built it, using scrounged-up parts, soldering them onto a motherboard at his desk at night after work, and writing the code that would link keyboard, disk drive, processor, and monitor. Months later he flipped the switch and it worked. “It was Sunday, June 29, 1975,” Isaacson writes, “a milestone for the personal computer. ‘It was the first time in history,” Wozniak later said, ‘anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.’”

Wozniak’s impulse was to give away his computer design for free. He subscribed to Homebrew’s hacker ethos of sharing, so this seemed the right thing to do. His friend Steve Jobs, however, instantly grasped the commercial possibilities of Wozniak’s creation, and after much cajoling, convinced Wozniak not to hand out blueprints of the computer’s architecture; he wanted them to market printed circuit boards instead. They got to work in the Jobses’ garage, assembling the boards by hand. As Wozniak recalls it, “It never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them in the air and sell a few.’” It was also Jobs who pushed his friend to sell the circuit boards with a steep mark-up—Wozniak wanted to sell them at cost—and Jobs’s idea to form a business partnership that would take over the ownership of Wozniak’s design and parlay it into a consumer product. Within a month, they were in the black. Jobs was twenty-two years old. He hadn’t invented the Apple computer, he had invented Apple Computer. In so doing, he set in motion a pattern that would be repeated throughout his career: seeing, with preternatural clarity, the commercial implications and value of someone else’s work."

from The New York Review of Books "Who Was Steve Jobs? by Sue Halpern

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/who-was-steve-jobs/

2012-01-12T22:51:00.007-05:00

EARTH ~

Protesters in front of the White House in September 2011 demonstrate against the Keystone XL pipeline.
Photograph: Pete Marovich/Corbis

OIL LOBBY'S FINANCIAL PRESSURE ON OBAMA

OVER KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE REVEALED

New analysis of oil industry contributions to members of Congress has revealed the level of the oil lobby's financial firepower that Barack Obama can expect to face in the November elections if he refuses to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Obama has until 21 February to make a decision on whether to approve the pipeline, under a compromise tax measure approved late last year. America's top oil lobbyist warned last week that the president would face "huge political consequences" if he did not sign off on the project to pump tar sands crude across the American heartland to refineries on the Texas coast.

The Canadian government is also on the offensive, with an attack this week on "jet-setting celebrities" opposed to tar sands pipelines. At the same time, TransCanada executives have embarked on a letter-writing campaign.

Now Maplight, an independent research group in Berkeley, California, that tracks the influence of money in politics, has conducted an analysis of oil industry contributions to members of Congress supporting the pipeline.

The study, which is due to be published on Wednesday, studied industry contributions to members of the House of Representatives which passed a bill last July that would have forced Obama to speed up approval of the Keystone project.

The analysis did not include the Senate, which did not pass the bill last July but where there is a strong push now from Republicans to get Obama to approve the pipeline.

Maplight found only two of the 118 members of the House of Representatives who list oil and gas industry among their top 10 campaign contributors opposed fast-tracking the pipeline. The two hold-outs were Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who headed the global warming committee that has since been disbanded by the Republican leadership in the house, and Charlie Bass, a New Hampshire Republican.

Only 10 of the 195 members of the House of Representatives who list the oil and gas industry among their top 20 contributors opposed the bill. In all, the oil and gas industry has given nearly $12m in direct contributions to members of Congress in the last two years, Maplight said.

Here's a look at some of the oil and gas industry's favourite members of Congress as compiled by Maplight – all members of the $100,000 club, and all supporters of a bill to push Obama to pass the pipeline – along with some of their recent statements on the Keystone tar sands project.

• From Steven Pearce, the New Mexico Republican, who heads the list, receiving $370,000 in direct contributions from the oil and gas industry in the two years from July 2009-July 2011. "It is time to put the political games aside," the congressman said on his website last month. "We must all work together to ensure the culmination of projects, such as the Keystone pipeline."

• Mike Pompeo, the Republican who represents the Wichita Kansas hometown of the oil billionaire Koch brothers, comes in number two on the list with $333,156 in industry contributions. Pompeo is also the main recipient of Koch political funds, according to another organisation tracking money and influence, Opensecrets.org.

• Bill Flores, a former oil company executive and a Republican from central Texas who received $266,184 in industry funds according to Maplight during the debate on the Keystone bill last July, has said: "If we do not tap this valuable resource, the Chinese or other countries will."

• Dan Boren, an Oklahoma Democrat who received $201,800, said the pipeline would create "tens of thousands of new jobs" – claims that have been debunked by economists.

And other proponents of the pipeline, from Texan Ted Poe to Louisianan Steve Scalise, have regularly disparaged opponents to the Keystone XL as "radical environmentalists who are against jobs".

Rank of Oil & Gas as a Contributing Interest Group

Name / Vote on HR 1938 [the act to "direct the president to expedite the consideration and approval of the construction and operation of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and for other purposes"] / Total contributions from oil lobby (1 July 1, 2009 – 30 June 30, 2011)

1 – Rep. Steven Pearce [Republican] / AYE / $370,020

2 – Rep. Mike Pompeo [R] / AYE / $333,156

3 – Rep. Bill Flores [R] / AYE / $266,184

4 – Rep. Cory Gardner [R] / AYE / $205,124

5 – Rep. Dan Boren [D] / AYE / $201,800

6 – Rep. John Sullivan [R] / AYE / $179,200

7 – Rep. Jeff Landry [R] / AYE / $176,050

8 – Rep. Tim Griffin [R] / AYE / $164,709

9 – Rep. James Lankford [R] / AYE / $156,760

10 – Rep. Rick Berg [R] / AYE / $151,561

11 – Rep. Michael Conaway [R] / AYE / $136,850

12 – Rep. Tim Murphy [R] / AYE / $133,700

13 – Rep. Dennis Rehberg [R] / AYE / $133,152

14 – Rep. Steve Scalise [R] / AYE / $125,335

15 – Rep. Francisco Canseco [R] / AYE / $121,767

16 – Rep. Pete Olson [R] – AYE – $106,400

17 – Rep. Tom Cole [R] / AYE / $103,400

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 January 2012 06.03 EST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/11/oil-lobby-money-obama-keystone

2012-01-11T12:53:00.004-05:00

EARTH ~

Julie Speed

artwork & essay: Julie Speed
fiction: A.M. Homes
essay: Elizabeth Ferrer
university of texas press

This is an exceptional showcase on Julie Speed in wide bound book done with the utmost care for color, sizing, variation and rich dimensions.

It's enough already the comparisons of Speed to Bosch and the Old Masters, though true, and better just to sit for hours with wide book in lap and simply immerse and enjoy.

I've slipped out of the book some of the pleasures and am showing them below.

I don't know what the A.M. Homes short story is doing in the book, but it seems a great loss of space for further work of Speed paintings, or even Speed written text reflecting further on her work, methods and background. Whatever she wishes to share, I believe we would all listen.

Born in Chicago, east coast raised, Speed quit art school early and headed for Texas — first Austin and later Marfa — where she seems to keep an open studio for working, learning, and the occasional wandering and curious guest.

war bride

hive

warflowers #4

adrift

the artist's hand

spilt milk

setting the world on fire

evil twin

snakebit

apple tree

off the rocks

ad referendum, variation ix (jellyfish)

learn more : juliespeed.com

2012-01-10T21:26:00.006-05:00

NEW HAMPSHIRE ~

good size boot

2012-01-10T06:29:00.004-05:00

ALBION ~

A letter of inquiry came in the other morning from Holland asking about one of the many old Liberation magazines we have for sale in the bookshop, being dedicated dreamers such as we are. The inquirer wasn't able to pay for the issue and costly shipping overseas but was wondering if he could pay us to prepare a scan for him of the front cover. The front cover was an old Kenneth Patchen drawing with his signature calligraphy, naturally one of a kind. It turns out the inquirer was Jim Forest, long time peace activist and Catholic Worker trouper amongst so many other things. Jim has written biographies of both Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. Was friends with the poet Robert Lax. And little did Jim know that he had been a silent teacher for me in my own young conscientious objector years against the Vietnam War. We were more than happy to send a nice size scan over to Holland, at no cost, and Jim has set it on his blog which you can link to below. There is never ever and never will be enough Kenneth Patchen. Just to date me. And I adore being out of date.

http://jimandnancyonpilgrimage.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-does-it-feel-to-be-70.html

Liberation magazine, September 1961

2012-01-09T12:02:00.004-05:00

INVALUABLE ~
( if a little gloomy )

Chris Hedges has ever been invaluable as an activist, writer of many books, war correspondent, speaker of truths. If you've got three hours to spare, do spare it with him here. I tucked in my viewing over two sessions. During the three hours of intense discussion and dialogue I just wish he had jumped up for a moment and danced a jig. Clapped his hands over his head. Shouted with joy his wife's name. This intellectual gloom & doom — even kings call in their court jester for a brief interlude.

2012-01-09T09:37:00.013-05:00

BACKWATERS ~

Happy Lobbyists, Unhappy Citizens

By THOMAS B. EDSALL

Few people were more elated at 2:20 a.m. Wednesday morning when Mitt Romney was declared the winner of the Republican caucuses in Iowa than a small group of lobbyists unknown outside of the Washington Beltway. All indications suggest that the New Hampshire primary this Tuesday will bring similar joy.

These 15 men are leaders of what might be called Romney’s K Street army. They are key players in the mobilization of Washington’s $3.5 billion lobbying industry in support of his candidacy. Romney, more than anyone else who is running, is the favorite of the capital’s influence-wielding establishment.

All 15 are active fundraisers for Romney. Patrick J. Durkin, who lobbies for Barclays, for example, raised $254,825, according to reports filed by the Romney campaign. Robert Grand, of the lobbying firm Barnes & Thornberg, raised $110,050; William Mark Simmons and David Beightol, both of the Dutko Group, raised $69,260 and $54,200 respectively; Wayne Berman and Drew Maloney, both in the Ogilvy Government Affairs firm, raised $101,600 and $56,750, respectively. The list goes on.

The presence of these and other prominent Washington players supporting the Romney campaign signals that the establishment, at least its Republican wing, has concluded that the former Massachusetts governor is a safe bet.

The open participation of lobbyists in the current campaign is one more element in the collapse of campaign-finance reform. Two waves of reform — the first in the post-Watergate era of the mid-1970s and the second culminating in 2002 with the passage of the McCain-Feingold act, which sought to end the use of “soft money” in campaigns — are essentially moot.

But these reforms have been gutted by Supreme Court decisions, especially the Jan. 21, 2010 decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and by a lax Federal Election Commission. Corporate donors, labor unions and individuals willing to write big checks are free to use their money to favor certain candidates. If they want to keep the contributions secret from public view, there are many opportunities for concealment.

In the current election, contributions that would not have been possible before Citizens United are flowing freely. In the first six months of 2011, for example, the Super PAC operating on Romney’s behalf, Restore Our Future, reported corporate contributions of $1 million each from Eli Publishing Inc. and F8 LLC, both based in Provo, Utah; $250,000 from The Villages of Lake Sumter, Inc. in The Villages, Fla.; and $100,000 from 2GIG Technologies in Lehi, Utah.

Members of Romney’s cadre of lobbyists contacted by The Times declined to speak on the record, but each one disavowed seeking any financial gain from Romney’s political success. Instead, they contended that they back Romney because they believe that he is the best candidate running. For lobbyists, few things are more attractive to prospective clients than having their guy in the White House.

The interests represented by these particular Romney supporters run the gamut of national and international corporate powerhouses.

A very abbreviated sampling includes much of the financial sector, including the Blackstone Group, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Visa, MasterCard, JPMorgan Chase, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the American Bankers Association, most of the pharmaceutical industry including Eli Lily & Co., Pfizer, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, and companies like Verizon, AT&T, Walmart, Coca-Cola and General Motors.

The ever-expanding role of lobbyists in politics is a major victory for corporate America. Overwhelmingly, the companies and trade associations that dominate top-dollar lobbyists’ clientele are seeking to protect their own legislated competitive advantages, including special tax breaks, favorable procurement rules and government regulations that prevent new challengers from entering the marketplace.

Republicans should be acutely aware of the dangers posed by the lobbying community. When insurgents led by Newt Gingrich took over the House after the 1994 election, they were determined to open markets, allow free enterprise to flourish and rid the legal and regulatory system of competitive favoritism.

In practice, just the opposite took place. Gingrich, and especially Tom DeLay, ceded enormous power to Washington lobbyists in what they called the K Street Project. Loyal lobbyists were rewarded with earmarks, leadership support for special amendments and the delegated authority to write legislative provisions.

Shortly before he became House whip in 1995, DeLay created Project Relief, a legislated moratorium on new regulations. He appointed Bruce Gates, a lobbyist for the National-American Wholesale Grocers’ Association, to run the project and Gordon Gooch, a petrochemical lobbyist, to write the first draft of the bill. The bill was then modified by Paul C. Smith, an automobile industry lobbyist, and by Peter Molinaro, a lobbyist for Union Carbide.

Romney is not the only Republican candidate with strong ties to the lobbying community. One of the K Street Project’s champions in the Senate was Rick Santorum, then a senator from Pennsylvania, now Romney’s strongest challenger for the Republican presidential nomination, at least right now. Santorum regularly met with lobbyists, helped formulate a pro-business agenda and sought jobs from them for Republican staffers. After he was defeated in 2006, Santorum went to work on K Street as a “strategic adviser” to industry organizations and lobbying groups, skirting the requirement that he register as a lobbyist, earning $1.3 million dollars in the 18 month period from Jan. 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011.

The processes set in motion by the K Street Project resulted in a pervasively corrupt Republican majority that was rejected in 2006.

President Obama, who has claimed to be mindful of the destructive power of the Washington-based special-interest community, backtracked this past year when he raised no objection to the decision of two former White House aides, Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney, to form a pro-Obama Super PAC, Priorities USA Action, which accepts unlimited contributions from unions and lobbyists.

Through the first half of 2011, Priorities USA Action raised a total of $3.2 million to support Obama’s reelection, most of which came from three donors: $2 million from Jeffrey Katzenberg, C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation; $500,000 from the Service Employees International Union; and $500,000 from Fred Eychaner, chairman of the Chicago-based Newsweb Corporation. These are the type of donations that the McCain-Feingold law sought to prohibit because of their size, in the case of the individual contributions, and because of the source, in the case of the money from the S.E.I.U.

Smaller donors to Priorities USA Action are even more interesting. In 2008, Obama made a highly publicized decision to refuse contributions from lobbyists, and that commitment remains for his own 2012 campaign operation. But not so for this Super PAC, which explicitly supports his candidacy. $5,000 donors include such registered lobbyists as Steve Elmendorf (Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), John M. Gonzalez (MasterCard, Deutsche Bank AG, and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association), Joel Johnson (Toyota, Ernst & Young, the American Bankers Association, the Corrections Corporation of America, Koch Industries), and David Castagnetti (the American Petroleum Institute).

Many of these lobbyists are decent and knowledgeable people, and much of what they do is essential to the warp and woof of governing. Collectively, however, lobbyists are transforming the political ethos in Washington. In the decade leading up to the financial collapse, 1998 to 2008, the finance, insurance and real estate industries spent a total of $5.18 billion to influence Congress and the White House, including $1.74 billion in campaign contributions and $3.44 billion on lobbying fees, according to an exhaustive study by the Consumer Education Foundation.

Every effort at reform immediately breeds exceptions that subvert the original concept. The past four decades of on-again, off-again reform demonstrate the continuing ingenuity of the private sector in finding ways to influence outcomes, no matter what roadblocks it encounters. When faced with reform, the men and women who use cash to control policy have created novel approaches to put their money in play.

These approaches have included unlimited and unregulated soft money contributions to political parties to avoid limitations under election laws enacted in 1974, and the inventive use of “advocacy” committees under section 527 of the tax code to evade McCain-Feingold restrictions, allowing George Soros on the left to give $23.7 million and Bob Perry on the right to give $8.1 million to try to tilt the election toward their favorite candidates.

In some cases reformers created rules to control the flow of money only to see special interests turn such rules to their advantage. The 1974 legislation gave legal sanction to political action committees, which corporations formerly shunned because of their unclear legal status. After 1974, corporations and trade associations, reassured that what they were doing was fully legal, set up PACs by the hundreds.

On Dec. 31, 1974, when the Federal Election Commission began counting PACs, there were 89 corporate PACs, 201 union PACs and 319 trade association PACs. By the start of 2009, the most recent count, there were 1,598 corporate PACs, 272 labor PACs and 995 trade association PACs.

The formal legalization of PACs effectively institutionalized and legitimized what amounts to a massive system of special-interest financing of federal campaigns. In 2008, PACs of all kinds gave a total of $412.8 million, up from $219.9 million in 1998, with 79 percent going to incumbent members of the House and Senate, 13 percent to challengers, and 8 percent invested in races for open seats.

With so much at stake in the legislative and regulatory process for corporations, unions and members of trade associations, these interests will not stand back from influencing elections or from pushing every lever to affect the outcome of policy debates.

There are idealists who believe that two recent developments raise the potential for reform. On the conservative side, the Tea Party movement is adamantly opposed to machinations inside the Beltway. On the liberal side, the Occupy Wall Street movement has similarly challenged the power of the ‘1 percent,’ a constituency heavily represented by the special-interest community, many of whom are themselves members of the 1 percent. In Washington, the consensus is that despite these movements, little will change.

The weaponry of the special-interest community has become increasingly powerful. Lobbyists not only have ever greater resources at their disposal, they are also armed with the sophisticated technology of influence — polls, television, focus groups, computerized data banks, micro-targeting, each of them important in itself, and devastating when deployed in effective combinations. The net result is that the power of the electorate relative to the power of the Washington establishment has inexorably declined.

Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics.”

ny times

2012-01-09T06:35:00.004-05:00

EARTH ~

One more qualification and inbred ceremony so you can rest assure you are receiving. . .zilch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/movies/documentarians-concerned-about-proposed-oscar-rule.html?hp

Movie screen at a closed down Drive-In theatre in Creston BC

2012-01-07T00:05:00.004-05:00

HURRICANE IRENE ALBUM ~

Found "I" stone erected by Bob right after Hurricane Irene along the river

The following photographs and films are of no great drama, yet of localized action at the height of Hurricane Irene and the flood, late August 2011. It turned all our lives around a few spins. Vantage point of the visuals are either north of Longhouse or south as the river flows. The river, in either direction, took out our road, and some parts of each film show this at work. "Lyle's bridge" is Lyle Howe, a neighbor, who should be proud his construction stood the test. This was his second bridge. The first, from some time back, was washed away, and if one looks carefully while traveling down the river, the metal stringers of his first bridge can still be seen on the east side of the river flank. Persistent buggers, even Irene didn't wash them off their resting spot.

Our island after the flood (all trees now bucked up, split and carried out by hand)

Irene takes our road (river in the background, road in the foreground)

Irene takes the road from Massachusetts to Vermont

Found sculpture after the flood. Artist: Irene.

Found on our road the day after the flood. Artist: a kind passerby

He who shows up at the right time

ONCE IN VERMONT FILMS:

Four short films by Bob Arnold showing at real time Hurricane Irene at work along the Green River in Vermont.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

photos & films © bob arnold

2012-01-06T11:58:00.013-05:00

EARTH ~

http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ncfob/stone_cold_beetle/

This just sent this morning from brother Ray DiPalma who keeps in touch with us from New York City (and his heart in upstate NY and Berkshire county Massachusetts). I say "brother" because this is the feeling I always have in communication with Ray, whether poetry, film noir, book loves between us, and the great outdoors of the out-of-doors and ever gifts around us. This stone car for a stonemason like myself is a dream come true. Lots of work and hand gathering and no ground disturbed and settled in magnificently with its environment. The persistence of the craftsman is a marvel. The headlamp rims, unique old bumpers (I lost a few!) and skilled touch of the flat stone for windows can make you smile and weep at once for its care. Certainly go to the link and read to your heart's content. I guess the vehicle is out in Ithaca, New York. Right now it's at play in my mind.

2012-01-05T00:00:00.008-05:00

AMERICAN TRAIN LETTERS ~

Berkshire hills hometown

Farmland is nothing
tractor-trailer or
highway and all the
slowpokes on it
— here's the train!

Chapter 4

So what is the first memory of the railroad? Tracks that bump the car with baby in mother's lap, railroad crossing gate slowly lowered down as bright important lights red wigwag-signal flashing midtown kids on bicycles waiting all morning or knowing when to show as the local freight train rolls through; always the friendly striped bib-overall worker on the tail end of the barn red caboose teaching us how to wave, how to look, how to look forward. It happened everyday, that train whistle call, like the noon whistle from the fire station, and even in school we would be jogged out over high windows third storey schoolroom, walls painted like the pale milky green laxative tablet seen in the top drawer of the teachers desk mixed with unsharpened pencils and how the mint-flavor scent over our schoolwork when she big breasted old leaned over our desks. Wasn't that the train whistle? — hey pay attention, but I am already gone...gone into the lumberyard family business find Slim the yard-boss who will show me a rake and where to go at the backlot of the stockyard planks from the west piled up in the neatest stacks I will ever see again in any lumberyard. The boss wanted to walk out and run his palm over the butt ends of the boards and feel nothing out of place, not one board into the dirt, stick them if need be to separate the widths under a vast shed, two stories high with a ramp to walk along in the upper tier this walking on planks to get to planks. A boy with a rake spends all morning here clearing up steel bands busted off lumber deliveries, just ten years old and maybe a stray cat to talk to, pigeons flying in short bursts out of the coal business tower next door beyond the chain link fence, over ramshackle landscape, nothing but the boy and lumber and the rest of the business so far away but many clever short-cuts to get back into, and absolutely unfindable hiding places — smooth cheek resting a moment on a full twelve inches of pine board — and upstairs a little more special cedar and redwood oh so long. How'd the cedar and redwood get here? — why, the railroad! Tracks spurred off from the main rail where the freight trains could be seen all summer working here watch them pass, sharp blue engine lines, heavy guttural getting the job done railway. Now and then down our own special track that drove into the lumberyard and ended in the lumberyard did we receive boxcars fresh oven hot lumber, planks stashed in there having to be unloaded by a boy like me with another boy, sticky resin hot can't breath when we are in there, give us a moment to gulp fresh air and watch our filthy t-shirts don't touch the blazing iron roof. We have three days of work to empty the car, fool around all you want but it better be ready; the boss has a slip on his desk that charges extra each day we hold a car. Unload the boards out of the boxcar and of course stack every stick neat for the boss's hand. On the third day, if we are ready, and the dream the first day is we will be sitting in the open boxcar door on that third day swinging our legs, lumber happy, as the railroad crew is seen hiking up the tracks from beyond the fence, two or three men in overalls and caps, roomy work gloves that look gallant because the men aren't wearing shirts, and like them we have done our work as we watch them approach, walking like bears sweeping the gate apart and ring-ding, ring-ding the backward descent of the mighty locomotive nearing to round up one or two fledgling boxcars back into the flock. We thought the lumberyard was big; the boxcar is something special, as on the second day of work in it and goofy at lunch we would climb the tall rusted ladders bolted to the sides and play like squirrels on the catwalk top, and of course thinking: if the boxcar was moving, we could still do this. We stand back from the dominant locomotive, dark visitor, and watch the bears coupling the two train parts together as it slowly eases out, and we are left to run down and close the gate lifting over the rails and stumbling boots in gravel ballast while wrapping thick chain and padlock around the posts still hearing, feeling this side of the whole town move this always present memory.

~ Bob Arnold, from American Train Letters
(Coyote Books, 1995)

photo © bob arnold

2012-01-04T10:25:00.004-05:00

EARTH ~

Habitat

photo © bob arnold

2012-01-04T00:16:00.005-05:00

SNOW SNOW SNOW ~

Kiichiro Sato/Associated Press

SNOW SITE LETS CHICAGO SEE IF PLOWS ARE REALLY IN A RUT

By MONICA DAVEY

Published: January 3, 2012, The New York Times

"In part," a city official said, "the idea to incorporate more technology into the city’s official answer to snow grew out of a blizzard that dumped more than 21 inches and essentially closed down the city in early February."

CHICAGO — The suspicions are as common here as snowflakes. Certain people, certain streets, certain neighborhoods seem to get their streets cleared of snow before the rest of the city — or so the whispering has always gone.

But this year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration will announce on Tuesday, Chicagoans may test their theories about clout on their computers. Using GPS technology, a new city Web site, ChicagoShovels.org, will provide a map of Chicago’s approximately 300 snowplows, making their way in real time through the neighborhoods. Anyone will have a clear view of who gets what first, and whether plows really sweep more rapidly beside the homes of the mayor, powerful aldermen — or even just the neighbor everyone hates.

“If that’s happening, you’ll see it,” Mr. Emanuel’s chief technology officer, John Tolva, said.

The snowplow tracker, which city officials expect to debunk the belief that routes are politically motivated, is but one element of a new computer package focused exclusively on snow — a fact of life in a city that prides itself on its stoic response to winter weather, but was clobbered last year by a blizzard that stranded scores of motorists on a thoroughfare along Lake Michigan.

In part, Mr. Tolva said, the idea to incorporate more technology into the city’s official answer to snow grew out of that blizzard, which dumped more than 21 inches and essentially closed down the city in early February. On their own, residents bonded over shoveling alleys, clearing sidewalks and even being trapped together on Lake Shore Drive, he said, so why not encourage all that bonding in advance online?

Among other elements of the new Web site: organization of a “Snow Corps,” which will match volunteers with mounds to shovel; winter-related computer applications to guide people when two inches of snow has fallen, alerting them to parking bans on city streets or, if it is too late, telling them where their car has been towed to; and an “adopt-a-sidewalk” program that will soon allow residents to share shoveling tools and claim shoveling responsibilities on a map.

It remains to be seen whether Chicagoans really wish to officially stake out shoveling responsibilities on sidewalks — even the ones right outside their homes. And ChicagoShovels.org offers no elegant computer solution to the age-old debate in this city: how to find a more dignified, efficient manner for claiming “dibs,” the long-established practice of placing chairs, cones, boxes or other junk to reserve a cleared parking space.

Still, Chicagoans will surely watch the snowplow tracker, which will share data the city was already collecting. The information is monitored in the city’s snow command center, where supervisors also track the slickness of bridges, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather maps and driving conditions captured by 1,000 cameras mounted around the city.

Oddly, though, in a winter season that some experts predicted would bring heavy snow, little has arrived so far. Like other cities in the Midwest, Chicago has spent millions of dollars less — $5.5 million less, in its case — because it needed tens of thousands of tons less road salt in December than it had the year before.

Thanks to superstition or history or both, no one here seemed willing to declare a trend. “I’m not calling this a mild winter yet,” Mr. Tolva said. And on Monday, Chicagoans awoke to snow.

ny times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/us/chicagoshovels-web-site-gives-lowdown-on-snow.html

2012-01-03T07:35:00.003-05:00

ONE OF A KIND ~

Henry Miller

a fabulous film made by Tom Schiller in the early 70s
which I always much enjoyed ~
the first time I watched the film Sweetheart
came into the room and saw who it was made by
and said she knew Tom Schiller, and in fact Henry Miller's
son Tony, they were all in high school together,
once upon a time
in young California

2012-01-01T23:55:00.004-05:00

MORE DREAMS ~

Patsy Cline

Sweet Dreams (Of You) by Patsy Cline on Grooveshark

unbelievably, she was gone by age 30. a private plane crash, and this after surviving two auto wrecks, one nearly fatal. the harsh climate of life on the road. like sam cooke, she'll be forever known for her brilliant vocals and interpretations beyond measure.

2012-01-01T23:35:00.004-05:00

DREAMS ~

Joe Brown

I'll See You In My Dreams by Joe Brown on Grooveshark

azeryouth.org

first heard this gem on the concert film for george harrison; later went to a store to hunt up some of his records the same time a legendary brooklyn cowboy was doing the same ~ the two of us, the lone proprietor, and a cowboy hat, were the only things moving in the place

2012-01-01T23:10:00.003-05:00

MY WORLD ~

Maria de Barros

Nha Primero Lar by Maria de Barros on Grooveshark

born in dakar, senegal, and raised in nouakchott and rhode island, this singer is somehow cape verdean to the bone, the land of her parents.

2012-01-01T22:45:00.003-05:00

AFRICA ~

Franco ( Luambo Makiadi )

Likambo Ya Ngana by Franco on Grooveshark

afropop.org

the sorcerer of the guitar, as he was known to millions, is a major figure in 20th c. congolese music; though he only toured the usa once near the end of his life. when he died (1938-1989) in a belgian clinic, his body was returned to his native zaire where the government declared four days of national mouring, and state radio played only franco's songs.

2012-01-01T22:30:00.004-05:00

LOVE IS PLEASIN' ~

Shirley Collins & Davy Graham

Love Is Pleasin' by Shirley Collins & Davy Graham on Grooveshark

a duo like never again

2012-01-01T22:00:00.004-05:00

WANDERER ~

Steve Young

Little Bird by Steve Young on Grooveshark

www.steveyoung.net

only a little bird who's been everywhere, sung with many, received little notice and yet kept on singing, could have written this song

2012-01-01T21:45:00.004-05:00

PREZ ~

Lester Young

Jump, Lester, Jump by Lester Young on Grooveshark

the unparalleled bridge builder of the tenor sax ~ gone to hard living by age 49
go thru the night

2012-01-01T21:37:00.004-05:00

RABBIT ~

Johnny Hodges

I Got It Bad (and That Ain´t Good) by Johnny Hodges on Grooveshark

in the big band era, with duke ellington, or solo, johnny hodges was one of the bridge builders on the alto saxophone

for dobree

2012-01-01T21:20:00.004-05:00

WHA' HAPPENED? ~

Randolph Scott

Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott by The Statler Brothers on Grooveshark

remember when you had good manners?
if you still have them, good for you!

2012-01-01T21:05:00.003-05:00

LAW ~

William Burroughs

Burroughs Called the Law by William S. Burroughs on Grooveshark

the master groveler putting the screws on a snitch

2012-01-01T20:27:00.006-05:00

GOOD NEWS ~

Otis Rush

Ain't That Good News by Otis Rush on Grooveshark

one of chicago's backbone bluesmakers ~ with sterling guitar & voice at once

2012-01-01T20:02:00.004-05:00

BUDDY ~

Buddy Guy

D.J. Play My Blues by Buddy Guy on Grooveshark

when clocked in, few touch buddy guy's many-storied blues

2012-01-01T19:41:00.004-05:00

GHOST RIDERS ~

Dick Dale at Surfer's Stomp, Palladium Hollywood

Ghost Riders In The Sky by Dick Dale on Grooveshark

photo : richarddowdy.com

dream concert: hendrix & dale playing a carousel turning concert stage
back to back!

2012-01-01T18:48:00.005-05:00

THIRD STONE ~

Jimi Hendrix

Third Stone From the Sun by Jimi Hendrix on Grooveshark

hendrix and manager chas chandler were sci-fi buffs ~
nice that someone kept the open mic playing

the greatest rock guitarist, ever, shows his sweeping marvelous

2012-01-01T17:25:00.004-05:00

CHORAL ~

Hildegard von Bingen "Work Gottes"

Hildegard: O Viriditas Digiti Dei by Sequentia on Grooveshark

"Hildegard of Bingen was a preacher at a time when canon law forbade women to preach, a named composer when most music was anonymous, a visionary, a theologian, a writer, an artist, a hagiographer, a prolific letter-writer and an early scientist, botanist, herbalist, physician and healer - she even invented her own coded language. This German Benedictine anchorite who lived in the twelfth century was in the fullest sense a polymath. Yet she was an enclosed nun, until mid-life her only contact with the outside world being through a single window."
saieditor.com

cultivating the cosmic tree

The Cosmic Egg

"woman may be made from man, but no man can be made without a woman". HVB

2012-01-01T16:31:00.003-05:00

LET ME GO ~

The Pogues

If I Should Fall From Grace With God by The Pogues on Grooveshark

If yr going to celebrate ~ you invite The Pogues

2012-01-01T16:00:00.005-05:00

GOIN' ~

Barbara Dane, Newport Folk Festival, 1965

Nine Hundred Miles by Barbara Dane on Grooveshark

photo : photography.si.edu

born in 1927, barbara dane, since high school, has sung at demonstrations for racial equality and economic justice around the world. there is no one quite like her in the blues & folk tradition.

2012-01-01T15:49:00.005-05:00

BE~BOP ~

Jack Kerouac reads with Steve Allen on piano
November 1959

Goofing At The Table by Jack Kerouac on Grooveshark

At Steve Allen's expense he (Kerouac) traveled in luxury via passenger train from the East Coast and stayed in California for ten days. With Steve Allen accompanying him on the piano, Jack read a beautiful passage from Visions of Cody. Since the producers wanted him to read from On the Road, he taped the sheet from Cody into the back of the Road book, and no one ever knew the difference.

~ Bill Morgan from Beat Atlas (City Lights)

2012-01-01T15:25:00.008-05:00

IN MY HEAD SWIRLING ~

Zip A Dee Doo Dah by Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans on Grooveshark

This song suddenly popped into my head today and put a skip into my step while outdoors doing chores. "The Blue Jeans" backup singers were famed Darlene Love and Fanita James, also of The Blossoms, and all strung through the mighty Phil Spector wall of sound.

2012-01-01T15:10:00.004-05:00

GOOD ADVICE ~

Annie Ross

Please Don\'t Talk About Me When I\'m Gone (from Nocturne For Vocalists EP) by Annie Ross on Grooveshark

there's no one in the jazz world like annie ross ~ an English jazz singer, chanteuse and actress, best known as a member of the trio
Lambert, Hendricks & Ross ~ she became a US citizen in 2001

2012-01-01T14:28:00.004-05:00

CANYON ~

Jessi Colter

The Canyon by Jessi Colter on Grooveshark

planetlyrics.com

once married to duane eddy, and long time singing companion & wife of Waylon Jennings and mother of musician Shooter Jennings, Jessi Colter has an everlasting singer's soul to true country music. Maybe her most recent album out of the ashes is her finest work ever.

2012-01-01T14:10:00.005-05:00

IN THE DARK ~

Allison Moore & Steve Earle

Send Down an Angel by Allison Moorer on Grooveshark

Moorer gave birth to the couples (with Steve Earle) first child, John Henry Earle, on April 5, 2010.

2012-01-01T13:30:00.005-05:00

AH ~

Lura

Bida Mariadu by Lura on Grooveshark

there are never enough cape verdean singers! ~ M'bem di fora (2006) is Lura's 4th album

2012-01-01T12:59:00.004-05:00

HORSE FLIES ~

The Horse Flies

Rub Alcohol Blues by Horseflies on Grooveshark

One of the finest films ever shot of backcountry New England — Where the Rivers Flow North — has The Horse Flies holding the helm of the music soundtrack.

2012-01-01T12:27:00.006-05:00

POOR BOY MEETS AN ANGEL ~

William Blake "The Angel"

Untitled by Chris Mills on Grooveshark

I get goose bumps on my arms with this song ~ a copy I once borrowed, don't own, and can find very little about. Maybe the best kind.

2012-01-01T11:58:00.004-05:00

NEW YEAR'S DAY ~

New Year's Day by U2 on Grooveshark

dance your heart out

2012-01-01T11:31:00.004-05:00

JACK OF HEARTS ~

Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

from Bob Dylan's 15th studio album Blood on the Tracks (1975) and return to Columbia Records after a few years gone to Asylum Records, not the best of moves. Another one of those albums found in most record collections. Dylan's son Jakob has said, "The songs are my parents talking."

2012-01-01T11:16:00.005-05:00

EVERGREEN ~

Barbra Streisand

Evergreen (Love Theme from A Star Is Born) [Love Theme from A Star Is B by Barbra Streisand on Grooveshark

like carole king, barbra streisand will turn 70 years old this year
140 million albums, and counting, sold worldwide

2012-01-01T10:49:00.005-05:00

BAD BOY ~

Carole King

He's A Bad Boy by Carole King on Grooveshark

King and her former husband Gerry Goffin wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists during the 1960s. Her chart-breaking album Tapestry (1971) was once owned by nearly everyone.

2012-01-01T10:21:00.005-05:00

EARTH ~

Virginia Rodrigues

uma história de ifá by Virginia Rodrigues on Grooveshark

a song that just rises up out of the warm high grasses

2012-01-01T09:59:00.004-05:00

RUM & COKE ~

Rum And Coca-Cola by The Andrews Sisters on Grooveshark

2012-01-01T09:30:00.004-05:00

MARAUDER ~

Kendra Smith

Bold Marauder by Kendra Smith on Grooveshark

a richard farina song

2012-01-01T09:02:00.004-05:00

MORNING DANCE ~

Carson Arnold

The musician, now age 26 and a drummer in four bands, home recorded this composition as a teenager, playing on a child's xylophone.

Morning Dance by Carson Arnold on Grooveshark

© carson arnold

2012-01-01T08:57:00.005-05:00

MIRROR ~

EARTH
HEART

bob arnold
new year!
2012

2012-01-01T01:45:00.004-05:00

HOUND DOG ~

Theodore Roosevelt Taylor (Hound Dog Taylor)

Let's Get Funky by Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers on Grooveshark

live late at night

2012-01-01T01:02:00.005-05:00

BALL & CHAIN ~

Mike Ness

Ball and Chain by Mike Ness on Grooveshark

fannelis.com

2012-01-01T00:54:00.004-05:00

PARDON ME ~

Andre Williams

Pardon Me (I've Got Someone To Kill) by Andre Williams on Grooveshark

theyaretheimitators.com

2012-01-01T00:38:00.004-05:00

PASSENGER ~

Iggy Pop

The Passenger by Iggy Pop on Grooveshark

backseat

2012-01-01T00:00:00.004-05:00

HUNTER ~

Hunter S. Thompson

On The Road To Las Vegas... by Hunter S. Thompson on Grooveshark

photo : lex patriates

2011-12-31T23:31:00.004-05:00

TO ANOTHER ~

John Coltrane

Lonnie's Lament by John Coltrane on Grooveshark

photo : francis wolff

2011-12-31T23:07:00.003-05:00

CITY ~

Al Brown

Ain t no love in the heart of the city by Al Brown on Grooveshark

2011-12-31T22:31:00.004-05:00

OVER ~

Elvis Presley meets Clara Ward in the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, 1964.

How I Got Over by Clara Ward & The Ward Singers on Grooveshark

sadly, both were hampered by ill health midway through life and passed away in their 40s.

2011-12-31T22:01:00.005-05:00

EARTH ~

Barred Owl

Barred Owl by Donald Kroodsma on Grooveshark

seancrane.com

birdsong by the season
donald kroodsma
(houghton mifflin)

2011-12-31T21:26:00.004-05:00

SUMMING UP ~

( Bantam 2005 )

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT AMERICA?

America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous? I mean, how could you fail to have a good time in a country like that? I could live literally anywhere in the world and do what I do, so, obviously, I live in America by choice - not for any patriotic or financial reasons necessarily, but because it's so interesting there. American may be the least boring country on earth, and this despite the fact that the dullards on the religious right and the dullards on the academic left (the two faces of yankee puritanism) seemed to be in competition to see who can do the most to promote compulsory homogenization and institutionalized mediocrity. It won't work. In America, the chronically wild, persistently haywire, strongly individualistic, surprisingly good-humored, flamboyant con-man hoopla is simply bigger than all of them. (1997)

NOTE: The preceding was written several years before the military-industrial complex first seized and then cemented total control of the US government, coup d'etat that would have failed without the active assistance of a rapidly growing population of fearful, non-thinking dupes: "true believers" dumbed down and almost comically manipulated by their media, their church, and their state. So be it. Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America's masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed. In the wake of the recent takeover, our prevailing national madness has been ratcheting steadily skyward: the pious semi-literates in the conservative camp tremble and crow, the educated martyrs in the progressive sector writhe and fume. It's a grand show, from a cosmic perspective, though enjoyment of the spectacle is blunted by the havoc being wreaked on nature and by the developmental abuse inflicted on children. We must bear in mind, however, that the central dynamic of our race has never been a conflict between good and evil but rather between enlightenment and ignorance. Ignorance makes the headlines, wins the medals, doles out the punishment, jingles the coin, yet in its clandestine cubbyholes (and occasionally on the public stage) enlightenment continues to quietly sparkle, its radiance outshining the entire disco ball of history. Its day may or may not come, but no matter. The world as it is! Life as it is! Enlightenment as its own reward.

~ TOM ROBBINS

first published in Anthem, Avon Books, 1997

watch yr step
you've lost a step

A Longhouse Birdhouse

(as reprinted in Gibbs M. Smith, Labor Martyr Joe Hill, New York, NY, 1969)

Published: January 20, 2012

In Flash of Fire, Florida Loses Old Friend

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Steven D. Barnes/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

Florida State Archives, via Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press

Johnny Otis Show - Willie And The Hand Jive by Various on Grooveshark

By IHSAN TAYLOR Published: January 19, 2012, Peter Keepnews contributed reporting, New York Times

A WIRELESS ROAD AROUND DATA TRAFFIC JAMS

By ANNE EISENBERG

Published: January 14, 2012, The New York Times

Rank of Oil & Gas as a Contributing Interest Group

Published: January 3, 2012, The New York Times