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072008 Weekly reminder of the jazz show coming up: Jazz at the Bungalow, Saturday August 2nd, 7-10 We're talking about two of the best players on the west coast here (hear!), so don't miss it. Invite your friends and family! BYOB. This is all ages. There will be a raffle for CDs and chapbooks. *PoeminProgress* The Skies Meant Everything When I was 17 one summer *ErosAromatics* This week I made another attempt at Love & Sanity (Eros No. 600). This time I put cognac absolute (distilled from wine lees) and pine-needle absolute in the base, and bergamot (which smells absolutely nothing like Earl Gray tea, said to be flavored with bergamot), tangerine (most of the citrus notes are pressed from the skins of the fruits), and tagetes (commonly known as marigold, tagetes is, in traditional French perfumery, supposed to balance citrus notes) essential oils in the top, in addition to numerous others in each category, making for a total of 18 essences altogether. Recently I corresponded with a fellow who originally inspired me to take on natural perfume; he says he's moved back to synths because naturals lack enough odor intensity. There was also talk this week on the natural-perfumers list about longevity. It is my experience that the more essences one adds to a perfume, the more robust and lasting it becomes. With 18 essences, one weaves a dense fabric of scent; it is a fun challenge to balance the parts in a brew so complex. I've opened up a few bottles that I haven't in some months. One I made based on cocoa and pink-lotus absolutes is quite nice, as far as edible scents go. It's cocoa with a whole bunch of craziness hiding underneath. Another I guess I am calling Erato is my first attempt at a perfume with immortelle (as you may remember, immortelle absolute is a most difficult ingredient; it's quite like harder, stickier molasses). This has a long way to go as a tribute to that awesome ingredient (which smells to me like maple candy without the sweetness), but it's not a total failure. I also made a batch of lavender incense. This is the first where I made my own recipe, based on another that I tried successfully. Also, I tried a new way of making the "cones:" I rolled the dough flat and cut it into wafers. The idea (borrowed from a small-time but professional incense maker named Katlyn) is that one takes the dried wafers and sticks the end in a bowl of sand, with the burning part sticking out. Radical idea. She makes the wafers in a triangular shape, but I have a feeling rectangular wafers will burn just as well. I'll know in a few days. If I could sell rectangular incense wafers it would be a boon both to the production and also to the shipping processes. Another possibility is, instead of making thin wafers, to make thick triangles (1/2 inch thick) which could stand up on their own. The problem here is getting the "cake" a consistent thickness. I need to mull this over some more. *Fiction* Last week I finished reading Caleb Carr's The Angel of Darkness, a very long book; I kept reading on the cover that it was a great court-room drama, and I thought, "What are they talking about?"--one doesn't even get to the court-room part until about page 550. There is not a wasted page in the lot, and the story keeps you intrigued and grinning, and agreeing with me that: Caleb Carr rocks! This book is even better than The Alienist. Being a native New Yorker (as am I), Carr really knows more than enough details about The City to bring this tale to life and then some. The reader is very pleased to join the team once again for an even more complex and ultimately disturbing investigation. It's all here: laughs, love, action, in spades. Little Stevie Taggert falls in love (the girl, unfortunately, dies). Stevie's friends, like Hickie the Hun and others, add a great lightness to the tale. Cyrus Montrose beats the crap out of a gang member named Ding Dong. The presence of a soft-spoken, very sweet, and very effective Philippino pygmy assassin satisfies many desires and fantasies of the American spirit. Sara Howard, Mr Moore, and Dr Kreizler are of course along for the ride. And a wild ride it is, from the seedy depths of old Greenwich Village to the peaceful rolling hills of upstate New York to what was then the fanciest casino in the country in Saratoga. After a gripping courtroom episode, which gives the reader a taste of the ways US law was changing at the time, and the murder of several dear friends, Teddy Roosevelt and the US Navy are called in for a "military police" action on New York's lower west side waterfront, an action in which Roosevelt himself plays a very hands-on part. Carr spins the tale amid all sorts of poignant threads, threads which, while apropos of the period the book's set in, are as relevant today as they were then. I would only be happy if every book I read had the depth and detail this one does. *Quotations* The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain. --George McGovern No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots. --Barbara Ehrenreich The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy. --David Hume Patriotism is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit. --Emma Goldman "My country, right or wrong" is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying "My mother, drunk or sober." --GK Chesterton A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. --Edward Abbey Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. --Oscar Wilde Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy. --GB Shaw I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him. --Abraham Lincoln To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. --George Santayana *Music* Citizen Mix: Thunder Sky July 2008 1. 1234, Feist "I need a woman "Now I've had enough "I've wasted half my life with a guitar and a song. *Politics* By Matt Frei for BBC News, Washington: "What all the above politicians--with the possible exception of Bill Clinton--have in common is that they relish (or pretend to relish) making fun of themselves. Towards the end of her campaign, Hillary was practically doing stand-up. President Bush partially built his re-election strategy on sending up his mangling of the English language, becoming the first successful candidate in US history to turn inarticulacy and poor grades into an electoral asset.... "If politics is a minefield, then satire, self-deprecating jokes and irony are its minesweepers and detonation teams. The extraordinary fuss over the front cover of this week's New Yorker magazine, which shows Barack Obama dressed in traditional Muslim garb, his wife Michelle looking like a cross between a Colombian Farc guerrilla and Jimi Hendrix, and an American flag burning in the Oval Office fireplace, illustrates the perils of Obama humour for the hallowed guild of comedians and for the candidate. "Firstly, if you have to explain a joke ad nauseam, as the editor of The New Yorker David Remnick and his supporters have been forced to do, then it probably was not very funny in the first place. In fact, most people seemed to have missed the joke. The magazine was not making fun of Senator Obama; it was ridiculing the people who think he might be a Muslim, who believe that a fist bump is the terrorists' version of a high-five and who are convinced that if Mr Obama refuses to willingly wear a flag pin he might as well put a match to the Stars and Stripes. In other words, the New Yorker was making fun of those "bitter", poor white people who "cling" to guns and religion that Mr Obama referred to in a speech in April. "And as we now know, that fragile, thin-skinned group of voters is off limits. "He's a Red Neck. Don't hurt his feelings!" In fact the only safe rule is to stick to telling jokes about your own ethnic, religious, gender, salary, allergy group. Don't go off-piste. Ever. Although The New Yorker cover did not touch overtly on Mr Obama's African-American origins, any hint of racial stereotyping is, of course, an absolute no-go area. Can you imagine if last week's comments about Obama's "nuts" had been made by a white man? There would have been demands for his scalp. He would have been forced to resign, go into hiding, while being compared to the lynch mobs of the darkest days of racial hatred. "As it happened, Jesse Jackson was merely ridiculed for being crass and tasteless. I believe his comments were so absurd that they actually cried out for a quick-witted, perhaps even gently crude response from Mr Obama himself. Yes--forgive me, readers--but this was an opportunity missed for a candidate who needs to remind voters that he is more than just the rhetorical embodiment of nouns like Hope and Change. Barack Obama used to be funny. Who can forget his comment about smoking and inhaling dope: "Of course I inhaled. I thought that was the point!"" *PoeminProgress* All Things All good things must come Peace, love, and ATOM jazz 071308 You really owe it to yourselves to check out the latest Jazz at the Bungalow recording. I'm serious when I say we're talking about world-class stuff here, impeccably arranged by Don Corey and consummately performed by the whole band (Flatland, Don, Tim, Willie, Tom): http://citizenproductions.com/music/062908.html *Grammar&Punctuation* A semicolon (;) is used to separate sentences from sentences. Often folks ERRONEOUSLY use commas to separate ideas, but if a given thought has a subject and verb and predicate, it should be its own sentence, separated by periods or semicolons. For example: The problem was I just didn't care; I didn't have enough oomph left in me. There are two complete, independent sentences on either side of that semicolon; but these are related notions, so you might like to mash them together a bit. A semicolon is your best pal. Now without all the necessary parts of a sentence, without a subject for example, it's a different story: The problem is I just didn't care, didn't have enough oomph left in me. I tend to overuse semicolons, but at least I know it. I wouldn't use one if it were incorrect to do so; it's just that I overuse them. *PoeminProgress* We're All Prostitutes In Taiwan, beggars are prostitutes. *Quotations* Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. --Thoreau Two things awe me most: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me. --Kant It is curious--curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare. --Twain There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. --Wilde A man's moral worth is not measured by what his religious beliefs are but rather by what emotional impulses he has received from Nature during his lifetime. --Einstein The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness. --Aquinas It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral. --Bacon One becomes moral as soon as one is unhappy. --Proust Be these people either Conservatives or Socialists, Yellows or Reds, the most important thing is--and that is the point I want to stress--that all of them are right in the plain and moral sense of the word. --Karel Capek Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. --Ayn Rand *Philosophy* Recently I had the chance to talk with a professor of philosophy, Randall, husband of my new friend Melissa. I warned him that I consider myself an armchair philosopher (as Marx was an armchair anthropologist) and presented an idea I've had stewing since my college days (and my studies of moral philosophy): that a new entropy criterion for moral considerability must replace the sentience criterion which has been the standard since Jeremy Bentham replaced the old intelligence criterion of which Descartes was a big champion. We've agreed all this time: it is not how intelligent a being is that determines ethical treatment of it but whether or not it can feel pain and suffer. Even this latter criterion is faulty, as evidenced by the barnacle conundrum (the male has a rudimentary nervous system and so likely feels no pain while the female has a highly developed nervous system and so likely does feel pain--the idea of protecting only the female of the species while letting all harm befall the male is nonsensical enough that we must throw out the sentience criterion too, altogether). What, instead of suffering, can tie all animate matter together in an ethical "complete circle?" I wondered. Randall, after patiently listening to me, explained that today we (philosophers) are more likely to look at each situation alone in order to determine the morally appropriate response. Ad hoc? I asked. He said it might look ad hoc but in fact, if we are truly moral beings, there is a common moral thread which will naturally define our ethical calculations. I must say I found this bit of knowledge a great relief--I no longer feel some amorphous burden to prove some vague moral conviction. I'm finally free! *MyJourney* [A story of creative nonfiction] And so, bit by bit, A-Lian and I began a covert, platonic friendship. I showed up every few days (after I'd saved up enough cash; my students all paid me in cash) and we went up to a room. Slowly she began to trust me, to let me in. The second time we "hung out," A-Lian got the idea that she needed to make certain sexual sounds so that those listening on the other side of the door would think we were doing what we were supposed to be doing. We must have made quite a sight. We took turns; she'd go "ooh, aah" and I'd say "yes, more!" and we'd go on like that for a couple of minutes. We both agreed your average man in a whorehouse wouldn't last more than a couple of minutes at most. Sometimes we'd do it one more time; mostly we'd spend the rest of the time talking. As I got to know her better, I grew more and more convinced she was the most beautiful woman I'd ever known. And she had no idea, a shining gem hidden away amid the trash of the terrible patriarchal Chinese world. I tried to think up ways we could sneak out together somewhere. I really did fancy myself some kind of a valiant savior. A-Lian always giggled when I made absurdly chivalrous comments and overtures; her giggles mad me want to do it as much as possible; just to hear what sounded like joy coming from that precious body made my day, my week, my month, every time. And every time I egged her on about meeting me some place secret after everyone was asleep she calmly explained that I had no idea what I was dealing with. I brazenly insisted that I did know, and that we had mafias like Taiwanese mafias in America. In fact, we have nothing like Taiwanese mafias anywhere on the American radar. Taiwanese gangs were so ruthless and merciless that no one who haunted the South China Sea, not the Hong-Kong Triads, not the Philippinos, not the pirates off of Hainan Island, had what it took to make any kind of an inroad into the Republic of China. We read about those unfortunate ones who tried sometimes in the papers; torn to shreds by machetes, run through meat grinders, shot dead entering a temple, not pretty stuff. In fact I realized I was personally acquainted with a fair number of gang members. I sometimes drank with them at various beer joints. When we were all shit-faced, they would frequently go on about how they would protect me if anything happened. So it was a great surprise when, as I was leaving A-Lian after one of my thrice-weekly visits, I ran into a particular mafia man I knew quite well. His entire body was covered in a giant dragon tattoo; he'd showed me as much one drunken night. I knew him as Hsiao Long, which means Little Dragon. Little Dragon was enthusiastic to say the least when it became clear that I was a regular of one of his girls. The idea made me sick to my stomach. But I smiled and tried to leave as quickly as possible, giving a sign to A-Lian that I would be back for her soon. As I walked out to my Vespa, I was thinking about the fact that Little Dragon was a man I most sincerely did not want to fuck with. I started to think my valiant savior days were going to be short lived. *Science* As G8 leaders discuss how to tackle the problems facing the world's poor with food prices skyrocketing, please bear in mind that BIOFUELS are a big part of the problem. Whether its ethanol made from sugar cain, sugar beets, or corn, fuel made from material which otherwise would be used for food, or for compost or mulch, or hemp-seed oil (the most highly nutritious oil out there, perfect balance of omega fatty acids), it's nutrition taken away directly from the suffering food markets of the peasants of the world, the vast majority of humanity. What about bio-diesel made from spent frying oil? The problem with diesel engines is that they are infamously dirtier than their spark-engine counterparts. So while bio-diesel may reduce our reliance on foreign oil, it's much worse for the air (and with diesel engines, there's little one can do to control emissions). Bio-diesel=bad news for all our lungs. The answer before we get all electric cars that we can use like "regular" cars is hybrids (which are 100% like regular cars) for the interim, which are categorized as Ultra-low Emissions Vehicles (ULEVs). You could wrap your mouth around the exhaust pipe and probably wouldn't even get a headache (you might burn your lips if you did it for too long). But as we emerge from the Oil Age, it's important for us all to keep in mind that we MUST be moving toward ZERO COMBUSTION. And in this new Electric Age, batteries will be our best friends. Battery technology, which has suffered from no R&D in the Oil Age, is THE thing that's preventing electric cars from doing what we need them to do. As I've always said, ever since I owned and operated exclusively an all-electric car for a year, if we can put a man on the moon.... But why are we moving from the Oil Age; is oil running out? No. This is one of the biggest misunderstandings out there. There is no chance we could run out of oil; it will become so expensive to extract from the earth that it won't be worth it first. So if oil isn't running out, why are we moving away from oil? Because we are moving away from BURNING. The atmosphere is overloaded with pollutants from all the burning we've done, particularly over the last hundred years. Global warming is due to combustion. So you can see that bio-diesel doesn't answer any of our problems: it's worse in terms of global-warming pollution, which is our main concern; it may reduce dependence on oil, but there's no chance of running out of oil anyway, so that's not much of a benefit (it is a benefit only in political terms). Again, in the Zero-Combustion Age, electric cars are our only answer. And the really hard part there is making electricity without burning anything. If we get power for electric cars from coal-fired power plants, we will not be moving in the right direction. There are, thankfully, many ways to make electricity without burning anything; from zinc-air batteries, to wind generators, to solar concentrator arrays powering closed anular pistons, to solar panels (last I checked it was still unclear whether or not solar panels do ever in fact produce more electricity than it takes to make them in the first place), to my own personal favorite, micro-hydro generators, ingenuity and common sense are all that's needed to arrive at the technologies which will power the next epoch in the history of humanity. *Nonfiction* From The Art of Perfumery and the Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants... by GW Septimus Piesse (1857): "By way of personal adornment, few practices are of more ancient origin than that of painting the face, dying the hair, and blackening the eyebrows and eyelashes. It is a practice universal among the women of the higher and middle classes of Egypt, and very common among those of the lower orders, to blacken the edge of the eyelids, both above and below the eye, with a black powder which they term 'kohhl.' The kohhl is applied with a small probe of wood, ivory, or silver, tapering towards the end, but blunt. This is moistened sometimes with rosewater, then dipped in the powder and drawn along the edges of the eyelids. It is thought to give a very soft expression to the eye, the size of which, in appearance, it enlarges.... "A singular custom is observable both among Moorish and Arab females--that of ornamenting the face between the eyes with clusters of bluish spots, or other small devices and which, being stained, become permanent. The chin is also spotted in a similar manner, and a narrow blue line extends from the point of it, and is continued down the neck. The eyelashes, eyebrows, and also the tips and extremities of the eyelids, are colored black. The soles, and sometimes other parts, of the feet as high as the ankles, the palms of the hands, and the nails, are dyed with a yellowish-red, with the leaves of a plant called henna (lawsonia inermis), the leaf of which somewhat resembles the myrtle, and is dried for the purposes above mentioned. "The back of the hand is also often colored and ornamented in this way with different devices. On holidays, they paint their cheeks of a red-brick color, a narrow red line being also drawn down the temples. From Chandler's 'Travels in Greece:' For coloring the lashes and sockets of the eye they throw incense or gum labdanum on some coals of fire, intercept the smoke which ascends with a plate, and collect the soot. This I saw applied. A girl, sitting cross-legged as usual on a sofa, and closing one of her eyes, took the two lashes between the forefinger and thumb of her left hand, pulled them forward, and then, thrusting in at the external corner a sort of bodkin or probe which had been immersed in the soot, and withdrawing it, the particles previously adhering to the probe remained within the eyelashes." *PoemsinProgress* I Think of Bess Each time I find myself Rufus and I Go Flirting "Where we going next," Rufus asked. Peace, love, and ATOM jazz 070608 Jazz at the Bungalow was a big success. Flatland sounded great, there was a good turnout, and I got a good recording (see the link below). Don and I are now talking about doing a more formal recording, to be released on CD. Don says he likes the energy of a live show so we'll experiment with how to get the best recording in a live context; Don also says he doesn't want to tell the band, so that they'll think it's just another gig. A jazz-band leader true to his forebears! Recently I've started thinking that the right choice for me might be to find some real estate where I can have all three legs of my life in one place: a storefront, lab and office space, and living space. That's a tall order, but there's so much on Alberta just waiting to be used! With a storefront on Alberta, I could have jazz shows on last Thursday again. Which would bring in traffic for the perfume and poetry. Win win. *ErosAromatics* The deodorant "cream" I made based on glycerine and water with baking soda and cornstarch worked partly. One bottle was just right; the other two were too loose. It definitely works, but I prefer the one based on shortening. The most recent attempt is a little odd in the application; they both are really. The water/glycerine one is overly watery; the shortening one is overly greasy (a problem a quick wash of the hands easily fixes). My next attempt will be for a real white cream/lotion deodorant; I just need to find the right recipe. Once I arrive at a few top-notch formulations, it's a matter of getting materials, bottles, labels, etc. to a "contract formulator" who makes products to my specifications in a 100% sterile environment. I have yet to choose a particular formulator; I'll need my first infusion of capital before that step happens. Still a ways off. *Music* The latest Flatland show rocked! Check out the recording at: http://citizenproductions.com/music/062908.html This week my downloads renewed on eMusic so I got 50 new tunes. One album I'm liking a fair amount is Rewind! 5 from Ubiquity Records; as with the other Rewinds, this takes a number of great older songs and has a number of bands do retro-sounding modern covers. It all works and boogies along whether one knows the songs or not. While Fleetwood Mac's Dreams and Led Zeppelin's No Quarter may be familiar to most, others like Frank Zappa's Dirty Love and Sting's Be Still My Beating Heart may be less so. Good stuff, funky, retro, in the pocket, beginning to end. Another set of covers by various artists, this one of Earth Wind & Fire, on the Stax/Fatasy label (Interpretations: Celebrating the Music of Earth Wind & Fire), with artists like Chaka Khan, Angie Stone, Lalah Hathaway, and Meshell Ndegeocello representing a couple of generations, is another winner. And another on which the songs may be lost to a generation of thoroughly milktoast listeners (and by that I mean, of course, white people; I don't know about you, but in my house as a boy, The Beatles and Cat Stevens were big, Earth Wind & Fire unheard of). The grooves here are heavy, modern, post hip-hop, fresh, tasty, right from the get go with Chaka Khan's Shining Star. Slammin! I've been trying to enjoy two records I downloaded, one by Matt Nathanson, one by Matt Wertz, but so far I don't find myself liking them all that much. I'd say I like Wertz more, but of that I'm not even certain. Wertz does tend to have a hyper, funky underpinning to his music, which I like, whereas Nathanson, new to me, is more straight-ahead whiny country-rock. Wertz has the potential to be really good one day. When he grows up. On the subject of whiny country-rock, I also downloaded Austin City Limits live 2003 sampler. It's got some OK music, along with some awful music. The stuff I like most is from artist's I already liked, Abra Moore and Martin Sexton, but some of the other tracks from the likes of REM, Steve Winwood, and Robert Randolph and the Family Band aren't half bad. I have a couple of Austin City Limits live records that are great, including Abra Moore and Andrew Bird. A person might find some decent things to listen to from this production company. *PoeminProgress* What Our Kids Become How is it that any given child *Nonfiction* From Perfume: Joy Obsession Scandal Sin, A Cultural History of Fragrance from 1750 to the Present by Richard Stamelman (2006): "Obviously, to be perceived as an odor, perfume is in no need of translation into another medium or language, especially for those people whose sense of smell is as keenly and artistically developed as visual and poetic faculties are in other gifted people. But having such a keen sense of smell is rare in human beings today because the ability to perceive odors has progressively declined over the ages ever since hominid quadrupeds began to stand and move on two feet and ever since humans decided to cocoon themselves in deodorized and sanitized environments. "Moreover, the hostility toward smell as reflected in the writings of idealist philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Simmel--all of whom associated smell with a certain degree of animalism and baseness--and the elevation of vision as the queen of the senses, the sensual faculty par excellence for thought and intelligence, have had a deleterious effect on odor and perfume. To see or envision the concept of a fragrance has become essential to perfume representation, as writers, artists, musicians, designers, and advertisers have attempted to describe, narrate, paint, sing, and, in general, imagine the sensuality, or exoticism, or intoxication of fragrance. "Moreover, the language of perfume designation is notable for its ambiguity and subjectivity, if not for its incomprehensibility, to all but a few experts. How, for example, does a nonspecialist distinguish between a green floral and its cousin, an aldehydic floral scent, or tell the difference between a fresh, or a woody, or floral-animalic-chypre fragrance? And how does one find the exact words to describe the difference between these aromas? A good part of the problem can be traced to a question of vocabulary, to the absence of exact words to describe smell (and even taste, for that matter). "We talk about odors, whiffs, scents, perfumes, fragrances, aromas, emanations, incenses, bouquets, vapors, breaths, exhalations, effluvia, effulgence, stenches, and miasmas; but beyond those words, which have come down to us from antiquity, the signifying power of language is limited. Moreover, one of the "discontents" of civilization, as Freud discovered, is that we must be taught disgust; infants are unaware of the difference between "good" and "bad" odors. In general, therefore, the descriptive language of smell lacks complexity and richness; often, our use of terms to designate odors is overwhelmingly impressionistic; the realities to which these terms refer remain vague, if not unknown." *Quotations* Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. The writer grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. --Hemingway Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal. --Jean-Paul Sartre Forever is composed of nows. --Emily Dickinson Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity. --Sean O'Casey To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour. --William Blake A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. --Kafka The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of subconscious from which it rises. --Freud One of the unfortunate things about our education system is that we do not teach students how to avail themselves of their subconscious capabilities. --Bill Lear The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones. --Sheikh Yamani If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age. --Jacques Barzun *Politics* By Matt Frei for the BBC: "America's famed love affair with the car is spending more and more time at marriage counselling. The price of petrol, fears about global warming--yes, even in America, more and more people are afraid that the planet might explode--the daily misery of traffic jams, parking tickets and speed cameras have all become passion killers. The love affair is really a drawn-out marriage clinging to its vows, beset by a throbbing midlife crisis. It is high time we reflected on how much influence the marriage has had. "On the canvass of America's vast landscape, the combination of the motorcar and cheap oil have done nothing less than shape the physical appearance of the country and the way we live our lives. From 12-lane highways, drive-in fast-food joints, strip malls and the rash of exurbs, to obesity, audio books and handless mobile phones, the car has perhaps done more than any other inanimate object to shape our environment. By the time of his or her death, the average adult in America will have spent several years of his or her life in a car. "And the residents of Houston, Texas, spend considerably more time driving than the average American. I was there for two days this week to host a BBC World debate on the future of oil. It was the perfect place to confront some of the crude truths about crude and its most famous by-product, the motorcar. Houston would probably not even exist without the car. The city of 2.8 million people--in the next few years it is set to overtake Chicago as America's third largest city--is really a rosetta of suburbs and exurbs stretching between downtown and the airport. "Downtown is a cluster of skyscrapers. The dreaming corporate spires of Big Oil, a dozen high-rise car parks--in other cities the space might have been used for department stores or cinemas--and an alarming number of high-rise jails next to high-rise courthouses. Here, the only people walking on the street are the homeless. Most people stay in their cars or in their offices with the air conditioning turned down to arctic levels. The population darts from furnace heat to freezing cold. Not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of people seem to be suffering from snivelling colds in the middle of summer. Houston is not so much a city but a climatic disaster masquerading as one. "Even before global warming, the place was hot--and if it had not been for the black gold of Texas, not many people would have bothered to live here. But Bill White, the affable mayor of Houston who used to be Bill Clinton's deputy energy secretary, knows that oil wealth cannot be relied upon indefinitely, so he has tried to wean the city off its addiction to crude and turn it into the energy capital of the world. There are 3000 energy companies here, and although most of them make their money from oil, they are also investing in wind, water and solar power. The parking meters downtown are powered by individual solar panels. And the mayor, who has been re-elected three times, including once with an eye-popping 91% of the vote, has built an electric tram in the city's historic district. When I looked, the carriages were mainly empty. But at least these are small steps in the right direction. "The debate took place in the splendid columned hall of the Corinthian building, a former bank now used for lavish weddings. We had persuaded the head of Shell America, the head of Nissan America, Mayor White and two prominent energy gurus to debate the future of crude and, everyone was in agreement: we are addicted to oil. The addiction has become too costly for our pockets, our planet and security. Even the oil man agreed that his company Shell Oil might be called something different ten years from now. "It is not that oil is running out--this we also established is a fallacy. But we do not need it to run out for us to change our ways. As Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi Oil Minister, said in 1973 during the first oil shock: "The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones." The question is, can we all come to the table at the same time to bring about real change? Will the car-makers produce a mass-consumption electric vehicle with efficient batteries that people want to buy? The man from Nissan told me that such a vehicle will be on sale in the US by 2010. We will be recharging our car batteries much as we recharge our phone batteries. "Will governments provide the right legislation to encourage new industries or are we just going to carry on drilling? Will the oil companies use more of their profits to invest in alternative energy? And most importantly, will we the addicts, the consumers, go along with it? This must be a revolution driven from below. Unlike in 1973, today's oil shock is not caused by the suppliers but by the consumers. In America, on average, almost every citizen owns a vehicle. In China, it is a tenth of the population. If the Chinese want to drive like us in the future, using the same fuel, we really will despair. In fact it simply will not be an option. "The Chinese know this, which is why they are leapfrogging us in the development of alternative energy sources. They simply have no choice. As gas creeps above $4.50 (£2.25) a gallon, it is easy to blame Big Oil for our big headaches. But although the oil companies are making a mint, they at least provide a counterweight to the really BIG Oil companies in Opec, like Saudi Aramco, which is 20 times the size of Shell. Arguably the worst thing that could happen to us now is that oil goes back to $15 (£7.50) a barrel. It would make us feel richer but it could rekindle our love affair with the car and its combustion engine, deferring more pain to the future. The car--powered by cheap petrol--has been the love of our lives. It is time to find another lover." *PoeminProgress* How Far We've Come When I sit in the middle of my house Peace, love, and ATOM jazz |