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, '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.

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

BACK ROAD CHALKIES ~

Miles Davis

photo © bob arnold

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/

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

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

NEW HAMPSHIRE ~

good size boot

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

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.

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