Artist Carnival

Goodnight and Good Luck

2013-05-20T08:29:00.001-07:00

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This will be the last daily post for Artist Carnival for now. I started this blog six months ago and every week day I would write and post a short essay of a few hundred to a thousand words.

I have always indulged in the fantasy of writing a book or two but was constantly intimidated by the volume work. At least the daily effort of keeping the blog going showed me that I had the discipline to do it.

In the past I have written a volume of narrative poetry, several short stories and a dozen or so movie screen plays. Surprisingly most screen plays are made up of empty space. On average a hundred page script will only have 20,000 words.

It's been fun. The blog has been read by thousands and I have received hundreds of responses, suggestions and links. I plan to keep things going and post things from time to time but right now other there are other projects I need to devote my time to.

One of the most common question I got was "who the hell are you?" Having a semi common name confuses the issue and I had no idea how many other people shared this name. It might be easier to say who I'm not than who I am. I'm not the Brian James who was the basketball coach for the Philadelphia 76ers. I never owned a tailor shop in Denver or lived in LA. Though I've been on the radio I'm not the Brian James that did all that voice over work for every other franchised FM station across the Mid-West. He had a wonderful booming voice and when I say things like "you're listening to power 99" -I sound more like Don Pardo or that used car salesman who would sell you rolling wreck with a 120 month payment plan.

Let me see, who else am I not. There was one fellow named Brian James who lived in and around Phillipsburg NJ. From what I gather he was a real hell raiser -and I'm not him. And there was that graphic artist in New York City, well you can guess I'm not him either.

I think my favorite instance of mistaken identity was when I was asked if I was Brian James for the punk rock group The Damn. My friends who have known still find that one funny.

So for now I'll use Edward R. Murrow's sign off "goodnight and good luck".

Time -as a persistent illusion

2013-05-17T08:09:00.004-07:00

In one writers group I read an unpublished story titled the Gods Of Time. It was a science fiction story on the outside but really a philosophic examination of time. Time is like God, an omnipresent force that gives shape to the whole universe and is still total mystery.

Once I heard a BBC interview / lecture with Sir Martin Rees on gravity and the search for a possible particle that carries the force of gravity. One thing in the interview that seemed perplexing was when he said that time as an element interfered with his search for the graviton.

It has been long understood how gravity and time have an inverse relationship in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. Time slows down in gravitational fields. The equations in General Relativity keep on working if you were traveling greater than the speed of light if you have either negative time of negative gravity -but not both together.

In one theory about the crush of matter inside a black hole came the question if time still existed? Does infinite gravity obliterate time? The theory had the interesting conjecture that in the singularity of the black hole everything gets crushed down to the two elemental particles of the universe gravity and time. Both particles would be at the very smallest size dictated by the Plank Constant. The two particles are slightly asymmetrical and if they were physical spaces we could see, one would have 12 dimensional sides the other 14. This initial asymmetry is what divides matter from energy and limits super-symmetry, there are subatomic particles that do not have symmetrical partners.

From these two particles everything else in the universe is a fractal expression of different combinations of the two. The free movement of single particles is what we experience as gravity and time. When these particles link together in strands they become the carrier particles for energy and if they form a "buckyball" or Buckminsterfullerene shape they become matter.

In another theory of dimensional gravity, similar to the idea of Time-Space, each graviton is actually like a cell of space that expands or shrinks dependant on the gravitational field it is in. That the real measure of distance in the universe is the number cells, the size of each cell is effected by the gradational field it is in. What we see as the vacuum of space is really a sea of free gravitons (each a distinct and undividable space). The speed of light in a vacuum is a photon passing a set number of gravitons per second. When a photon is in a gravitational field that's more tightly packed with gravitons then light bends and travels a greater distance.

Time on the scale of human lives or how we perceive the passing of time is like a multilevel thought experiment that has no answer because there are so many contradictions involved. Science Fiction writers have long played with the paradoxes of time travel. Traveling forward in time at a slower rate that the rest of the world is possible but traveling backwards in time is still an unlikely maybe.

As another writer I meet once said since the universe is expanding outward from the Big Bang then time is really the location of how far out from the Big Bang we are at any given moment. Time travel backwards is probably impossible because to travel back in time would mean you would have to reverse the whole expansion of the universe to get back to the location of the past. That thought doesn't eliminate parallel universes but that a whole other idea.

So in the expansion of the universe each of our lives take up a limited space as animated chemicals. The atoms that make us up where always here and will go on after we no longer conscious entities.

Suddenly I'm in the mood to write a little Sc-fi today.

June Weddings

2013-05-15T22:14:00.002-07:00

February is always sold as a time for lovers because of Valentine's Day. And why not? This far north of the equator it's still wintery cold and February is that dreary mix of frost and mud. So a box of chocolates, a funny greeting card and a little time with someone you love is a good diversion from the realities of the season.

Sooner or later comes the crucial issue in any relationship -where is this whole thing going? I was listening one couple talk about their upcoming marriage, a traditional marriage in June. This isn't universal but at least for many European and European influenced cultures June is the ideal month to get married in.

Getting married in June goes back to the days of Ancient Rome. The month June itself is named after Jupiter's wife Juno, she herself the goddess of marriage and childbirth. For some reason the month of May was dedicated to the unhappy dead. What a concept that is, I'm sure if the dead could talk to us few of them would be happy about the situation. Still May was not the month to get married in if you could help it.

The tradition of the June wedding carried on into medieval times. June is usually a slow time on the farm. All the heavy work of plowing and planting is done. It's easy to estimate the future yield, providing nothing bad happens between June and harvest time. June can be a short rest and a time of celebration. One of the most raucous yearly celebrations was the feast day of Saint Audrey on June 23rd. There would usually be fair with plenty of drinking and entertainment. It was said that there were so many drinks in her honor the slurred toast "to Audrey" became the root of the word tawdry.

All the full moons of the year had a name; there is wolf moon, the hunter moon and the harvest moon. The first full moon after the summer solstice was known as "the honey moon".

The whole idea of romantic love in historic terms is relatively new. Most marriages were just as much a business transaction as it was anything else. Up until the mid 1800s it was pretty common for first cousins to marry, it was a way of keeping property in the family. Many royal families of Europe had generations of cousins marrying each other.

Daughters were both the property and responsibility of the father or male head of household. Another concept that went back to Ancient Rome. In the Roman Empire a father had absolute legal power over his family which also included putting his child to death, if the father deemed it necessary. So it was required the father give the bride away at the ceremony.

If the bride came with a substantial dowry then there would be a possibility of kidnapping. To prevent that the groom would call upon his right hand man -like in a good right handed punch. That right hand man, the best man, was there to help protect the bride -even if that meant doing it by sword point.

Over the ages weddings have become so much more civilized than that though I can remember one that ended in both families fist fighting in the parking lot of the reception hall. The meaning of marriage has changed but it can still be an emotional event.

I like weddings and receptions. Since I'm pretty relaxed as a public speaker I have been asked to say a few words in the past. I have two standard speeches. One is a drawn out and very vulgar story with the moral that a man can make a marriage successful if he is able to handle humiliation gracefully. That story is saved for the bachelor party.

The other speech is suitable for all ages and starts off with the question what's one think you shouldn't really talk about at a wedding? The past, it's certainly tacky to bring up old history, especially the bride or the groom's. But talking about the past violates the very spirit of marriage which should be all about the future. Where two single people stop looking backwards and merge their fortunes together as a new entity, as a married couple.

So good luck for all those couples who plan to formalize their futures together. No matter how much changes in the world the basics remain the same but they will cost you.

Key Average Wedding Statistics

Wedding Spend (excluding honeymoon): $26,984
Most Expensive Area to Get Married (excluding honeymoon): NYC (Manhattan), $70,030
Least Expensive Area to Get Married (excluding honeymoon): Utah, $13,214
Wedding Dress Spend: $1,099
Percentage of Destination Weddings: 24%
Bride’s Age: 29
Groom’s Age: 31
Number of Guests: 141
Average Wedding Spend (on a per guest basis): $194
Number of Bridesmaids: 4
Number of Groomsmen: 4
Length of Engagement: 14 months
Most Popular Engagement Month: December (16%)
Most Popular Wedding Month: June (15%)
Most Popular Wedding Color: White/Ivory (43%)

2010 Average Wedding Budget Breakdown

Overall Wedding (excluding honeymoon): $26,984
Ceremony Site: $1,393
Reception Venue: $12,124
Reception Band: $3,081
Reception DJ: $900
Photographer: $2,320
Videographer: $1,463
Wedding Gown: $1,099
Florist/Décor: $1,988
Invitations: $351
Wedding Cake: $540
Ceremony Musicians: $503
Catering (cost per head): $61
Wedding Day Transportation: $667
Favors: $222
Rehearsal Dinner: $1,127
Engagement Ring: $5,392

Figures based on respondents who hired a professional vendor for the service.

Top 20 Most Expensive Wedding Areas

1. NYC (Manhattan): $70,730
2. NY (Long Island, Hudson Valley and NYC Outer Boroughs): $51,811, $45,695, $44,718
3. Northern/Central NJ and Southern NJ: $49,347, $36,694
4. Rhode Island: $41,169
5. Philadelphia, PA: $36,294
6. Santa Barbara/Ventura, CA, and Los Angeles, CA: $36,233, $33,745
7. Boston, MA: $35,458
8. Chicago, IL: $35,389
9. Connecticut: $35,197
10. Southern Florida (Miami, Fort Lauderdale and surrounding areas): $33,810

11. Washington, DC, Northern Virginia and Suburban Maryland: $33,727
12. Orange County/Inland Empire, CA, and San Diego, CA: $31,954, $30,687
13. San Francisco Bay Area, CA, and California/Nevada (Sacramento, Tahoe and Reno): $31,173, $26,567
14. Baltimore, MD: $30,073
15. Houston, TX: $29,129
16. Pittsburgh, PA: $28,408
17. Dallas, TX: $27,823
18. Vermont: $27,333
19. Hawaii: $26,722
20. Austin/San Antonio, TX: $26,329

A few favorite songs for the reception

Music You Might Not Have Heard

2013-05-15T08:44:00.002-07:00

Since the pop music industry is both highly competitive and equally insecure; it makes the investors skittish. Music producers are always in search of the next big thing but if one bad choice can be very expensive. The safest thing is watch for the up and coming break through performer and then book and record everyone else who sounds just like them. Frank Zappa's song Cocaine Thinking comes to mind.

Putting money on the safest bets makes for a good business model but often it stifles creativity and in the past promoted some of the most bland and pedestrian performers. The breakthrough of the Punk / New Wave movement was a direct reaction to the less than exciting lightweight mix of music from the mid-1970s. This was a period where the record companies were in control of a multi-billion dollar industry and the producers were more important than the performers. It was a serious question when people asked back then "was Rock & Roll dead?

Punk / New Wave was refreshing because it got back to the idea that music can be an act of personal expression instead of studio wizardry. Learn a few cords on the guitar, work up the nerve to get up on stage and bang out a song. What it might lack in refinement it will make up in raw emotions. Of course every wave crests and recedes back into the ocean it came from. Punk / New Wave gave back to music makers the idea that innovation still had value, recording artist who were comfortable in the studio began to create with a different sensibility and inspiration.

The recording industry had many excesses but it wasn't all bad. One thing it was able to do was make some music a mass experience. There is a body music that know around the world and it is almost like an international language. It is something that people from very different background can share in common. There's nothing quite like talking to a man from Indonesia about Sinatra, or being asked by a guy from Austria if I ever saw Bruce Springsteen at the Stone Pony because I grew up relatively close to Asbury Park, or listening to a women from the Ukraine recount her childhood and why the Beatles were so important to her.

When an industry becomes the promoter of world culture it also becomes the gate keeper. Twenty years ago it was uncommon to be considered a real audiophile if you had a couple of thousand records, which is about half the storage space on the average mp-3 player. The computer and internet have bypassed the gate keepers but taken away the communal experience of music.

A music promoter I knew in New Jersey, Kyle, once compare music to alcohol. He felt you should avoid drinking alone as well as listening to music by yourself. These days most people listen to music at their desk or while exercising but rarely as a group activity. Music has become for many a sonic wallpaper, something to cover over the silence with -or even a sonic barrier to keep you occupied instead of interacting with other people.

The enthusiasm for music feels like it's fading. The big concert stage is even more dominated by a smaller handful of acts and many thousands of others can't find a venue. There is so much good music out there and the public doesn't seem to know where to look. The radio DJ is becoming a thing of the past and social networks are more atomized and even alienating. Ten years ago bands used TV shows and even commercials for exposure and now that doesn't even work as broadcast TV captures a smaller and smaller audience.

I hope that people fight back or at least prevent American Idol from becoming the only default venue for introducing new national acts.

As a side note today is Brian Eno's birthday. he is one of the most well known in his category of experimental musicians and record producers. He has a career that spans over five decades starting with rock band Roxy Music, his creation of Ambient Music and his computer programs of Generative Music. His best known work was with Bowie on his Heroes Album. Most people know the song Heroes but very few have heard the whole album, it might be an acquired taste though it's Bowie's singularly most artistic effort.

Most of Brian Eno's music is minimalistic with a mix of electronic and new wave elements. Often his music has been used as movie scores, one of the best examples is the documentary The Atomic Cafe (1982). A few years ago Peter Jackson had Brian Eno write the score for the movie The Lovely Bones (2009).

A person like Eno is mostly known as a influence for other performers, which means he's deeply appreciated by other creative people but not a commercial success. Usually I find those people the most interesting and it use to be fun hanging out with a real audiophile that had a few special records from people who were so good they should have been famous but weren't. Sometimes it was bad luck, bad timing or just management. It's fun to enjoy music for no other reason than you like it, though it's a shame someone who deserve fame and fortune didn't get it.

As an influential performer it fun to see who Brian Eno worked with or who tipped their hat to him.

Summer Reading

2013-05-14T09:21:00.004-07:00

This summer I plan to read. It use to be a regular ritual of every summer to pick a book or a group of books in a theme. This summer might be Moby Dick. In doing some past research I read a few chapters and like it. The book is 135 chapters long but it's more like 135 short stories all around the theme of whaling. Being a slow reader 2-4 short chapters a night will carry me through the whole summer.

Of course the monster of all literary rambles is James Joyce's Ulysses. Like all of James Joyce's works it's twisty and complicated -and at least for me easier to understand when someone else reads it aloud than reading it myself. It's a rare person who can honestly say they have read it from cover to cover. As luck should have it I person know one man who has read Ulysses several times. Chris isn't one of those overly educated culture snobs, he writes very accessible articles for an online jazz magazine. Though he might someday teach a college level class on the book.

Some of the most influential events of my life came from reading. When I was fifteen I spent some of my summer spare time reading Brave New World. Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 as a group. Each book complement each other with a distinctly different vision of a possible dystopia.

Being so impressed with these three authors I went on to read some of their other books. Aldous Huxley's books would later teach me about the wide spectrum of perception. Ray Bradbury would expand my sense of what's possible through fantasy fiction. Most of all George Orwell would have the biggest influence on me. 1984 is Orwell's most popular book , it's one of his most entertaining but I began to appreciate his other books more.

At the end of 1984 is a short essay on the origins and development of Newspeak the official language of Oceania and the English Socialist Party (Ingsoc) . On the surface of it, it seems like a dry little essay that sounds perfectly plausible. It was reading in between the lines where you can see the real power of language. The written word gives every reader the opportunity to commune with every writer and jump over the barriers of time and space (and Orwell demonstrated how Newspeak was a way of destroying that portal of communication).

It would be years later that I would read Orwell's three most personal books the Road To Wigan Pier, Down And Out In London And Paris and Homage To Catalonia. The Road To Wigan Pier is maybe Orwell's most underrated book but all three together make a powerful statement on a man who lived his beliefs and didn't practice some armchair intellectual pontification of how the world should be. Orwell was a lifelong socialist but also he was a razor sharp critic of socialism's failings. Somewhere he comes to the conclusion that every ideology is incomplete and the biggest enemy of any political movement is itself and the extremists in its own ranks.

One summer I was involves with the major renovation of a huge high school building in the suburbs of New York City. I don't want to mention the exact location but there was a hideous building made entirely of concrete. It was a heat sink and by 10 am every morning the building was hotter inside than it was outside. By late afternoon the temperature difference was a good twenty degrees. At night when the streets cooled off the building radiated heat like a warm body until well past midnight.

Because it was a school building there was a strict deadline to get the job done on time. The contractor had workers around the clock on site. My job was involved with contract compliance and inspections, that meant there were long hours with little to do. The only advantage of being there was the school library. That summer I read The Grapes Of Wrath by Steinbeck, The Ground Was Our Table by Steve Allen and How To Talk Dirty And Influence People by Lenny Bruce.

The Grapes Of Wrath is a well known classic but The Ground Was Their Table by Steve Allen was a surprise. Steve Allen was comedian and talk show host but before he became famous he travel and labored with migrate farm workers. The book is warm and funny with a deep social awareness.

Even more surprising was Lenny Bruce's book. Lenny Bruce is remembered for the stand-up comedian that said "dirty words". That's not really true. All the comedians of that time had an after mid-night route filled with off color jokes and all the four lettered words people regularly used -or at least wanted to use. What got Lenny Bruce in trouble was his willingness to make fun of powerful people. Those very same people had Lenny Bruce arrested over and over again on obscenity charges until he was so tied up in court he couldn't make a living.

There is an agricultural connection with How To Talk Dirty And Influence People. In one of the chapters Lenny Bruce reminisces of when he was a young man and was taken in by an elderly farm couple. I don't want to spoil it for you but you may never look at farm fresh or organic eggs the same way after reading that part.

Another summer I spend a good portion of my free time reading Phillip K Dick novels. He's one of the best science fiction writers of all time. In the last thirty years about a dozen of his books have been made into movies but the average person still has no idea who he was. Unfortunately Phillip K Dick died just before Hollywood discovered the rick body of work the man created and it was ironic because Phillip K Dick wrote very unconventional stories that were opposite of the Hollywood mentality. If you saw The Blade Runner, Total Recall, The Minority Report or A Scanner Darkly then you saw some of Phillip K Dick's stories that have been adapted for the movies.

So that summer I read A Man In A High Castle (arguably one of the best sci-fi or mainstream novel ever written), The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch and Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep was the story behind the movie The Blade Runner. The story in the book and the movie are the same but the attitude and styles couldn't be more divergent. One is an action adventure story, the other a very cerebral detective story that isn't searching for a fugitive but instead tries to find out what is the essence of the human soul.

Well so much for light beach novels. There is no right or wrong in choosing what to read. I just personally like making an adventure of it. Though people seem to be reading less, this maybe the golden age of literature. So much is easily available and so much is online or a simple download away. Like sports, a good book can be a shared experience that opens up a world of tangents and conversations.

Happy reading.

What We Really Enjoy

2013-05-13T05:06:00.001-07:00

There was a tee shirt that said "the only things we technically enjoy is serotonin and dopamine".

On the molecular level of brain chemistry this pretty much true. It's not important what we think we like, in the end all of our sensations of pleasure get reduced to these two chemicals.

I had a teacher who was a big advocate for meditation. He believed that all intoxicating drugs just mimic other body chemicals like the way morphine mimics some endorphins. Through meditation, fasting and exercise the body can be coaxed into producing an array of endorphins. So that every experience that could be induced by drugs could also be induced by meditation or other disciplines, or as he would say every high is already in our heads.

There has been some past research that relaxing in a float tank not only produces endorphins but those endorphins can relieve pain and inflammation.

There was one study on how beta-endorphins produced during pregnancy are similar to cannabiniods like THC. After pregnancy the level of these beta-endorphins drop off and could be behind postpartum depression.

Naturally swallowing a pill or getting medicated is a lot easier than meditation. Though pharmacological means the body can be flooded with chemicals that fit desired receptors in the brain. The whole basis for addiction is the inability to maintain any feeling of pleasure without excessive outside stimulation. It's not only drugs but also behaviors that can be addictive. Even when these behaviors become self destructive they still will be repeated over and over because this is the only way that person can get that spike of dopamine that everyone experiences as pleasure.

The neural science behind addiction is still discovering new insights . We may never break all the secrets into what it means to be a conscience being. That might not be an entirely bad, some mystery life in life keeps the whole experience interesting.

The social cost of addictions are staggering. Often seen as a symptom of a sick society instead of a problem of sick individuals. Bob Dylan might have been right "that everybody wants to get stoned" but it an endless debate if a society that helps its members find a meaningful place in the community isn't better off than a society that criminalizes addictions or places the entire responsibility on the individual.

America has always been conflicted with how to deal with addictions. The general public is terrified over the behavior of desperate addicts and criminal drug lords but it tends to forget the first drive-by shooting was from a Stuz Bearcat sports car with a Thompson sub-machine gun.

America's experiment in the prohibition of alcohol was a mixed defeat. Most people upheld the law and didn't buy illegal alcohol or drink. Some of the family income that didn't go to demon rum ended up fueling the economy of the roaring 20s. That money was used for other consumer goods, or was saved in the bank and even directly invested in stocks and bonds. The bad side was the sizeable minority that continued to drink spent most of their money on booze supplied by organized crime. The gangsters made so much money (estimated up to 3 billion a year in 1920 dollars) they were able to diversify into other criminal activities and buy off entire police forces. The corruption and violence were two major factors that changed public opinion. The prohibition was worse than the problem.

Trying to correct the problems of addiction with prohibition never seem to successful. England had toyed with prohibition during the Gin Craze of the first half of the 1700's. William of Orange from the Dutch royal family was then King during the reign of William and Mary. William of Orange bought to England two things, the Dutch banking system that established the Bank of England and gin -which was to become the national drink. Gin is relatively easy to make, in its simplest form it is grain alcohol, water and the flavoring juniper berries. It does not have to be aged in a barrel like whiskey and it doesn't take the same skill as a well crafted beer to make. When gin was allowed to be made and sold in England without a license, the country became awash in the stuff. There was gin everywhere and everyone could afford it.

Like the crack epidemic, crime spun out of control as alcoholics try to maintain their access to gin by thievery. The nation was scandalized as parents would starve and abuse their children just to get money for gin.

It was almost a full century after William of Orange promoted gin in England that the drink was fully regulated like other distilled spirits. By then the very early stirrings of a temperance movement was started in England that would cross over into the American Colonies where a few of generations later Maine and Vermont became the first dry states in the 1850s. For the next sixty years the American Temperance movement pushed forward an agenda that lead to the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.

The Roaring Twenties left its legacy. That decade moved faster than previous times. The music was faster in the Jazz Age. Bootleggers made their stock cars faster to outrun government agents which was the roots of the sport of stock car racing. Even the Art Deco designs that started in the 1920's made things look even when they were standing still.

I use to work with somebody that did drug and alcohol counseling. In that circle was the question of "what is your drug?" or "what do "jones" for?" Those broad questions of what motivates, overpowers, or spikes your dopamine levels. There is a basic human need for pleasure but addiction becomes a perversion of that need. When the mind is unable to find pleasure on its own all kinds of addictions can step in. Though the tragedy is they don't lead to pleasure, they only temporarily satisfy the craving.

Art is filled with stories of the dark romance of addictions. The poetry in the sting of the needle and stigmata marks of suffering and longing. The quest for satisfaction and the inevitable disappointment. This is the cycle that propels so much drama. Like in Ancient Greek myths where the hero descends to the edge of Hades, even if they should come back they don't return unchanged by the experience.

On a Grand Scale

2013-05-10T08:33:00.002-07:00

Architecture is art on a grand scale, the canvas can be an entire cityscape. Growing up in New. Growing up in New Jersey it was easy to see some of the best views of Manhattan. The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and the twin towers of The World Trade Center all stood tall among their neighborhoods of giant skyscrapers.

If you look at the profile of Manhattan you'll see the concentration of all the tallest buildings in and around the financial district in lower Manhattan and in Mid-Town. Surprisingly this is not a economic consideration but had to do with the bedrock under the buildings. As a general rule of thumb for every 10-12 stories a building is tall the foundation has to be at least extra story deep into the ground. An 80 story building will have a foundation of 6-8 stories deep. Very tall buildings need to be implanted into solid rock.

The rest of New York City can be a real mix of buildings and land that has been in continuous use for generations but repurposed every 10 or 20 years. The United Nations Building is a striking example of post World War 2 Modern International design that was built on top of the old stockyards that once brought in live animals to feed the city. Today you would never believe the area was a neighborhood of abattoirs, butchers and renderers.

At one time Manhattan was an island of factories, the Hong Kong of the late 1800s. Immigrants were drawn to New York City because of all the industrial jobs. The city started off with one of the best natural harbors in the world. By the 1830s raw materials could come in as far as the Mid-West by the Great Lakes, though the Erie Canal and then down the Hudson. After the Civil War railroads brought in more stuff to be converted into manufactured goods. Large parts of Tribeca and Chelsea were devoted to industry often with huge concrete buildings that had a separate factory on each floor, today many of those surviving buildings have been repurposed into highly coveted loft apartments and artist spaces.

To supply those former factories there was an elevated freight railroad. It was a branch line that was a mile and a half long from Gansevoort St to West 34th Street. It was built in 1934 and was closed in 1980 only to be left to rot because no one saw a purpose for it and there was no money to tear it down. Space being at a premium in the city occasionally some hardy soul would climb up on to the tracks, though they were trespassing the word got out that this was really a neat place.

In 1999 two local residents, Joshua David and Robert Hammond started the non-profit Friends Of The High Line. They envisioned the old elevated tracks turned into a strip of greenspace above the traffic and street congestion. It would be similar to the Promenade Plantee in Paris, a city park that was originally a decommissioned rail line.

New York City is fortunate to be a city filled with philanthropic celebrities, actually for a time Joshua David and Robert Hammond became celebrities themselves as they help raise the millions of dollars needed to develop the first phase of the park. It might sound like a huge sum of money but other cities like Chicago, St Louis and Philadelphia are also looking into converting their abandoned elevated freight lines into linear public parks. Not only does it improve the neighborhood but it's cheaper and less distributive than demolition.

This is the type of clever thinking that any city can really use. It makes the city more livable, promotes development, creates an attraction that brings people in and it saves money over the cost of otherwise removing an eyesore.

2013 HIGH LINE SPRING BENEFIT

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Tuesday, May 14, 2013 - 11:30am

2013 High Line Spring Benefit

Join us for the Friends of the High Line annual Spring Benefit!

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Honoring
Robert Hammond
John Blondel
CSX Transportation
Ethan Hawke

Hudson River Park’s Pier 57
Cocktails at 6:30 PM, dinner to follow.

Your support will ensure that the High Line remains an extraordinary experience in the coming year and that the park is poised for even greater success in the future, as we begin work on the High Line at the Rail Yards, the third and final section of this landmark public park.

This year, Friends of the High Line is pleased to be honoring Co-Founder Robert Hammond, who will conclude a decade and a half of unwavering dedication to the High Line when he steps down as Executive Director of Friends of the High Line at the end of the year; High Line Board Member John Blondel, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, who has passionately championed the High Line for more than a decade and is now playing an integral role in the work to complete our vision for the High Line; CSX Transportation, which generously donated the entire historic High Line structure to the City of New York; and renowned actor, writer, and director Ethan Hawke, a long-time Chelsea resident who joined us in our earliest efforts to save and secure the High Line.

The vibrancy and energy of High Line supporters are what make this party so special. We hope you’ll join us and reserve your tickets or table now!

PURCHASE TICKETS

Tickets start at $1,500. For details and more information about tickets, tables, or to make a contribution, contact Alicia Salmon,alicia.salmon@thehighline.org or (212) 206-9922.

$1,500 is way out of my price range, though I'm told in New York that much money really isn't that much at all. But I did want to repost their information. If you live in New York or you want to see something like this happen in your town then you could contact Friends Of The High Line and learn from their success.

To create the future you want, you have to seize today and support the things you feel are right.

The Future In The Rearview Mirror

2013-05-09T09:24:00.003-07:00

I have to write quickly today because I have a lot of driving to do, which is also what I want to write about. Now I like driving but more and more people feel the opposite way. How many hours a week do you spend behind the wheel of a car?

Commuter and travel trains have always tried to sell customers on the idea than they can be productive or just choose to rest and relax on the ride to work or vacation. If you're old enough you might remember the advertising tag line "Amtrak, leave the driving to us".

The great day of railroads have come and gone. By the 1960's most railroads had given up on passenger service because there was no money it. In Europe they were able to maintain their rail lines because a smaller portion of their citizens own a car and part of the gasoline taxes go to directly subsidize to keeping the rail lines viable. As a past friend once joked about American railroads "if they could ever find a way of delivering a nuclear weapon by train, the railroads would suddenly be awash in money".

Trains do have the big advantage in moving non perishable bulk freight. And that's what the owners of the big rail lines wish to deal with, even if there was a sudden surge in passenger demand the federally organized Amtrak is pretty much prohibited from expanding their services.

Since the 1950's there has been the futuristic dream of the electronically controlled highway. That on every interstate highway the driver would have the option of turning on his car's autopilot and the vehicle could operate safe and autonomously. In the late 1960's there was a proposed program for the highways around Detroit that never got funded.

About 40 years later the Department of Defense revisit the idea. They wanted battle hardened military supply trucks and they discovered the most vulnerable part of the truck was the driver. Eliminate the driver and you can devote more armor to critical mechanical parts. The truck could be more streamline, weigh less and fewer soldiers would be at risk. Halliburton was doubly interested because they had to pay truck drivers up to and over six figures to supply US Army bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. The robot driver or autonomously controlled vehicle found a military purpose and therefore funding.

On the civilian side of things was Google with their robotic car. They secretly tested it for over 100,000 miles before announcing to the world that it works. One of the dreams of middle class America was just in view. A form of transportation that can be as convenient as a car, relaxing as a train and cheaper than hiring a chauffeur.

Of course any step forward comes with the possibilities of unforeseen circumstances. Like all the fuel saving measures that were developed in the 1970s and 1980s to battle the high price of gasoline. Conservation worked, gasoline prices stabilized and then started to slip when inflation was considered. People felt free to drive more when they could get 25-30 per gallon instead 12-15. And people did drive more, taking on longer commutes to work or skipping Main Street to shop at regional big box stores. The congestion on many American roads is partly due to the success of past conservation, as you can see there's plenty of gasoline for everyone right now.

So what does it mean for the average person if cars and trucks are robotically controlled? It could be interesting in court if components fail or aren't properly maintained. I'm sure the manufacturer will do everything possible to minimize their legal liabilities. What I would worry about is what to do with a million out of work truck drivers.

In the early 1980s the Federal Government continued to deregulate the trucking industry as an attempt to break the powerful Teamsters Union. Suddenly there was a flood of independent truck drivers, entrepreneurs and people willing to haul freight for less. A brother to a former classmate of mine worked a route from New York to Miami and back. The only way to make a profit was to run the truck almost 24 hours a day. Him and another driver took shifts, one drove and the other was in the back sleeping. It was grueling work and some called it a sweatshop on wheels.

With a robot behind the wheel so much of that messy human element can be eliminated. There is no need to worry about the safety and comfort of a driver once he is gone. I have seen a set of plans for a robotic tractor trailer truck. It's smaller and lighter because there is no living quarters behind the cab. The shape of the tractor portion is much more aerodynamic. Today a tractor trailer truck can get 6 miles to a gallon of diesel with the robotic set up fuel economy can go up to 8 miles per gallon. That might not sound like a lot but on that New York to Miami route , three times a week; the owner of the truck will save at least $35,000 in fuel costs. The savings and economic advantages of a robotic truck are overwhelming. Maybe today's truck drivers will be like the men who once worked the canals, gone and almost forgotten -except in a few old folk songs.

I have been very concern about the development in robots. Their growth in numbers and abilities is growing at an exponential rate. About ten years ago DARPA hosted a contest for a robotic vehicles to see if they could finish a 20 mile course out in the deserts of Southern California -the first time none of the contestants came close to finishing. Today there are already automated trucks working in the remote open pit mines of Northern Canada.

Soon that same technology will be ready for public roads -and it will have a great effect on the society at large. It's not the first time machines have replaced people but when this happens maybe everyone else might see how vulnerable they really are.

Maybe even a bigger question will come up when a whole new class of robotic weapons arrive. The science fiction idea of robots killing people is only a step away. Then we are all vulnerable. When a robot kills a person, who is responsible? Is disconnecting a robot enough justice to satisfy a grieving family?

The Trek for Schlock

2013-05-08T09:00:00.001-07:00

Watch out for Trekies, they are all around us. Most the Trekies I know are like Freemasons. They don't stand out in public but they all know each other or have small subtle ways of secretly communicating their interests in the Space Federation and the possible events of the 24th century.

The excitement in the Star Fleet community is at a peak. The next Star Trek is coming out and the debate continues on, is J J Abrams messing up the franchise with the new timeline or reinventing the story the way it should have been from the beginning.

Star Trek always had a hopeful vibe, it starts off in a future where humanity hasn't destroyed the planet and colonists are settling far off planets that sometimes look like the back lot of Paramount Studios. It wasn't a post apocalyptic universe nor was it a utopia -it was the kind of future that looked okay, a place you would really want to go to. And the women in short skirts and go-go boots didn't hurt either.

I remember the original TV series and quickly found out that I was practically the only person in my class that like it. It was on NBC channel 4 from New York at 10 pm. By the third season it was switched to Fridays and I thought that was an improvement which shows you how young I was back then. Nobody but kids in middle school or babysitters watched TV on a Friday night.

By 1969 the show was cancelled and it was seen as such a failure the studios were willing to sell Gene Rodenberry all the rights back to him for $150,000. Sad for Gene that he couldn't raise the money but maybe he didn't think it was a wise investment either. Star Trek would have faded away like Captain Video except the old episodes went into syndication and became a staple every small unaffiliated TV station that couldn't afford to produce its own content. About ten years later Star Trek was a cult favorite among college too stone to do their homework. A network of Star Trek conventions became a second income for ex-Star Trek actors and even fodder for Saturday Night Live routines. That's when you know you made it, when they make fun of you on SNL or in SNL's case the public knows who or what you are just by the initials.

Leonard Nimoy born in Boston at the beginning of the Great Depression may have always wanted to be an actor though his parents tried to persuade him to pursue a more stable career or even learn how to play the accordion for Bar Mitzvahs and weddings. Like all success stories as well as most cautionary tales, Leonard Nimoy followed his dreams. His first feature movie was the title role in Kid Monk Baroni in 1952. A schlocky B film about a young boxer saving up his money to get plastic surgery. Years later Nimoy would look back at that film and say it was the kind of movie could make "unknowns out of celebrities".

He would for the next 14 years pay his dues in dozens of small parts in B movies and on TV. In the slurry of character actors that Hollywood attracted, Nimoy had walk-on roles with William Shatner and DeForest Kelly in other TV shows before Star Trek. I believe Nimoy's day job was being a high school science teacher and he was only paid $350 per episode of Star Trek.

I think every actor in Star Trek got trapped in the gravity of the phenomena the show created later on. Everyone had a post Star Trek career but it took years if not decades to finally get out from under the shadow of what made them first famous. Even when Nimoy was a guest star on Fringe people had to comment how much he was like Spock.

Leonard Nimoy wrote his book I Am Not Spock but came back to play the role he was so type casted into when the Star Trek movies went into production. It wasn't that other movie roles weren't coming but the Star Trek movies finally paid him and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise some real money with residual rights afterwards.

Though William Shatner is known for his spacey and bombastic recordings. Nimoy was involved with a dozen albums of his own. If anything when Leonard Nimoy wasn't being Spock, he had a more quiet life as a writer, poet and photographer.

I have to admit that I shamelessly mock his recorded poetry about whales on college radio. It was a an easy target because it was so over the top sincere -and for that I now apologize for.

In all I'm grateful for the character of Spock. Like all space aliens in science fiction, his strangeness or other worldliness is a mirror to reflect back at us what it means to be human. In Spock's case no matter how logical we want to be, human beings just have to break out laughing for no reason at all -or do something stupid and futile or else we'll go nuts. That contrast between the cool rational Vulcan mind set and the messy human condition has been the fount of serious discussions as well as million jokes. Let's face it, Spock doing anything out of charter is potentially funny.

Here's to Star Trek ! The TV show that inspired the cell phone and the big screen TV. Almost fifty years after the first broadcast the Star Trek universe is still growing. Come to think of it the 50th anniversary will be in 2016. I only wonder will it eclipse the presidential election?

Oh What The Hell

2013-05-07T09:00:00.003-07:00

When I was a kid I read a travel journey of a man visiting Europe. It was written in the 1930's and he was there to see all the sites. There was one short chapter on his trip to Hell. Of course you think of that Hell, the classical pit of fire and brimstone where Satan lives but instead it was pretty little village in Norway -which today makes a great deal of money from tourists that want to take pictures of the local road signs or say they been to hell and back. It's a lot like what tourist do in Intercourse Pennsylvania.

There are gravesites over 50,000 years old where the occupant was loving buried with personal possessions. A few of the dead were made up with a rouge of red clay to cover over the pallor of death but since these people left no written records it's impossible to say what their thoughts were on an afterlife. Though it's safe to assume they were loved.

It isn't until you get the written word a little over 5,000 years ago that you find clay tablets in cuneiform. If you believe that human nature is constant then it comes as no surprise these earliest written records are mostly about death and taxes. There are deeds, wills, tax receipts as well as the roles of gods in this world and in a spiritual other world where the gods live and the dead go.

Somewhere in the human consciousness came the problem of a person's legacy living long after they have died. A hunter gather culture is pretty much a equalitarian society with few material possessions and where the memories of pass members faded away in a couple of generations. With civilization you have a growing accumulation of property and a hierarchy of administrators to control everything.

When people realized they can amass enough wealth that can last many generations they start building monuments to themselves and thinking about immortality. We might not know much about the people who built the pyramids but we still fascinated with the Pharaohs they were built for. The political state would have a state religion and it was ruled by Gods that were very much like the kings and rulers here on Earth.

Civilization magnified the differences between the haves and the have nots. Power and a life of luxury where available to the ambitious which usually meant whoever was the most brutish nasty bastard around. The common people cried out for justice and religion accommodated them with the idea of divine justice. That sometime after we are all dead a god will judge us all, so a righteous slave might go to heaven and mean cruel ruler sent straight to hell. You can see where this kind of thinking is great for social control and makes the average person hesitate before trying kill off the local despot.

Oddly Hell has become more appearing over time. Maybe because people take it less seriously or maybe because all the people that sure to get into heaven aren't necessarily the people we really want to spend eternity with.

In Milton's Paradise Lost we get some of Christianity's most enduring images of Hell. Sometimes it is amusing to listen to some people totally confuse and mix up passages from the epic poem and the King James Bible -both were written in that iambic pentameter Shakespearian English.

Milton suffered the wrath of Puritanical England, they accused Milton of being much too sympathetic to Satan. Literary scholars will kind of agree because Satan does have all the best lines. Let's face it good is good but evil is can be so complex and interesting. One reason why the Puritans, sort of the Taliban of Renaissance England, tried to keep the theaters closed and have all books of fiction burned or banned.

Of all the mythological Hells the Greeks had about the best one. It wasn't so much about torment and torture but it was a mildly gloomy place where most souls got to contemplate their wasted lives. Eventually that evolved into a three part underworld where the evil were segregated out, the true heroes of life where given an island of the blessed and the rest of us where sent to the Fields of Asphodel.

Hades was first the name of the god that rules the underworld but the god was slowly renamed Pluto and Hades became the place. Pluto, from the word for wealth Plouton, was kind of a euphemism because things like gold came from the ground and underworld and was a way of saying he's gone off to a better place.

Greek ideas had tremendous influence in the ancient world around the Mediterranean Sea and into the modern world. One of the best examples comes from the writings of Philo Judaeus or Philo of Alexandria. He lived at the same time as Jesus and he was a Jewish scholar that tried to harmonize Greek and Jewish philosophy. Modern Christian teachers either avoid or discount Philo's influence on the early church. There are at least a few who believe Judus of Iscariot was the symbolic representation of Philo.

The Jewish community never really accepted the idea of an afterlife which some historians feel was just another thing that set Jews apart from other people and made them an easy targets for attack. One of my friends mused that it has to be difficult to see your neighbors prosper even though they pray to different god and don't live in fear of a heaven and hell beyond this life. That might be too close the truth for other people to handle. Can you imagine anything worse than living on your hands and knees all your life and finding no reward at the end? Accept maybe living on your hands and knees -and the only way to quite the doubt in your mind is to kill your ungodly neighbors who are having too much of a good time in the here and now.

Yes that does sound like hell to me.

Awesomisum

2013-05-06T10:07:00.002-07:00

It's been said a good weekend makes Monday even more of a drag.

I want to go into a little lecture about the changing nature of Main Street but I really shouldn't or at least I should keep it short. Towns and small cities that have lost their industrial base are learning to adapt by becoming centers of live entertainment. I could go on but that would make this posting too much like a Monday morning.

Fifty years from now I can see a huge re-vitalization of cities in America but until then the towns and cities that learn how to entertain people will survive and those that don't will become sinkholes of poverty and a dumping ground for every social service.

Here again I champion the arts and any other social activity that bring people physically together as a salvation for the post industrial town. Luckily the suburbs are still excruciatingly placid places on the weekends and even a 100 inch TV is no replacement for real human contact.

One of the local towns that knows how to entertain is Phoenixville. From April to October they have an event almost every weekend. The first Friday of every month they close down their central commercial district to motor vehicles and make it a pedestrian mall. The restaurants and taverns that are normal packed on the weekends are overflowing on a First Friday. I considered myself very lucky to have found a parking space within half a mile of the event.

I've been told that Phoenixville draws about 60,000 customers a weekend and an addition 20,000 - 30,000 people when there is an event. This is in a town of only 16,000 people with a central commercial district that's only four blocks long. Being a believer in the power of statistics in the last 10 years the population is up over 10% and the assessed value of properties up 20%.

Even flea markets have learned that entertainment is a cost effective value added extra to bring in customers. One of the best regional flea markets is Jake's on Route 100 just outside of Bally. It a nice flea market because the tables are reasonably priced and there's a mix of professional vendors as well as people who have just clean out the basement. Jake's hosts monthly events that boost the crowds by 25% or more.

Last Saturday they had their Guitar Show hosting over two dozen local instrument makers.

Saturday night in Pottstown the Pottstown Classic Car Club hosted their monthly car show. The main street in Pottstown is High Street. It is broad and straight -and as one person said was originally designed for parades. Pottstown itself is one of those post industrial towns looking for a new identity.

Once Pottstown was one of the premier cruising capitals of the Northeast. As a continuation of the custom car and hot rod culture the monthly car show draws 3-4 thousand people to see up to 500 one of a kind automobiles on display.

As the car show was ending the empty bank building on Hanover Street opened for a one night only art exhibition. Pottstown native and pop art guru, James Enders hosted it. Guest artist Will Ursprung, just back from a show in Savannah GA, also had works on display. It was fun to see the gearheads and culture mavens mix.

Sunday it was off to Lancaster PA. They had their Artwalk, something hosted on the first weekend of the month. For complete information you can go to lancasterartwalk.org .

Lancaster is another small post industrial city that until recently was in a slow spiral downward into poverty and decay. Now Lancaster is that hip destination in the middle of Amish country -and if anything the culture in town is very different than the plain and simple of their Amish neighbors.

The Artwalk is not a structured event but it is easily an all day event. Lancaster is a good starting point for a vacation. One day to take in the city, the next for the Amish countryside, with Philadelphia, Valley Forge and the Gettysburg battlefield each about 90 minutes away.

Maybe one of the best things this weekend was the gallery show at the Phoenix Village Art Center at 207 Bridge Street. Two people I knew had art on display and it was more a party than an art exhibition. It was too crowded to take any decent pictures.

In the back several of my friend congregated at an empty table. At the other end of the table was a young boy, Zaffron, who was drawing up a storm. In a dozen or so pictures he told the whole story of his dragon adventures. For an eight year old kid he has more talent than a few art school graduates I've meet.

Zaffron and my son Evan were comparing drawings. Evan was working on his cartoon character King Raccoon. Zaffon's parents are nearby and we're all in this free flowing conversation about almost anything under the sun though we keep coming back to Zaffron's dragons. Zaffron's mom was born and raised in Phoenixville but his dad is from the Netherlands. I had to ask the father what kept him here in Pennsylvania? He gestured towards his wife.

"So you're saying your wife is better than Amsterdam" I said. The man reached over to his wife, held her hand and said "that's exactly right".

In that gallery was this electric feeling that the world is awesome. Like Zaffron's drawing of two dragons arguing what to do over a man they found, the world was filled with wonder and adventure.

Now I can't expect the world to share my tastes or appreciate everything that I like -but I hope for a little bit of awesomeness in everybody's day and at least a day or two every week where you can wander and explore.

Everyday should have something awesome in it. Awesome should be a human right. Awesomisum should be next worldwide philosophical movement -who could be against it except people who want the world to be duller, grayer and boring.

The Roller Coaster of Change

2013-05-03T09:10:00.002-07:00

Once when hiking I was in with a group people that were very serious about enjoying nature. They knew all the different plants, the call of the birds and all the little intricacies that made up the natural environment.

The trail was on a ridge. It was originally a deer trail and existed long before people lived in the area. Unlike predators that have both eyes focused forward for binocular vision, deer have their eyes set almost 180 degrees apart. Being on top of a ridge let the deer use his extended peripheral vision to his fullest advantage.

It was also pointed out that on one side of the ridge was the watershed of the Delaware river and on the other side Susquehanna and Chesapeake watershed. It was only the difference of a few feet that separated which way the rain would run off and find its way back to the ocean. It was an odd to think about how so many inconspicuous things can have a major influence on the end results.

The first downloadable song I heard and the first video clip I ever saw was over twenty five years ago. The video clip was a two minute snippet of The Three Stooges and the song might have been something by Paul McCartney. Neither seemed to be much of a threat to the world at large.

These days I can't help but to have this feeling that the world is on the edge of a ridge. Or maybe it more like being at the top of a roller coaster. The cars have been slowly cranked up to the peak and we're looking over the edge a split second before the cars come racing down the track.

Computers have changed the world but like Moore's Law that predicts the exponential rate of growth for computing capabilities, I feel like there should be a parallel equation for social change. Maybe because human logic is either fuzzier or less well understood, that equation could seem more like a sub-branch chaos theory trying to predict the future.

Of course people have always indulged in some willful ignorance whenever anyone suggests that social should be regulated or that something as nebulous as happiness should be valued over profits. As long as there is a Gold Rush mentality out there the predominate mindset is to get what you can now and not worry about the long term costs. Like the words of a poem that questions success:

Oh America, America

Why do your dreams taste like rot gut whiskey?

Strong heady stuff that leaves you hung-over

and screaming the next morning "Oh God what have I done?"

Some of this same angst was felt during the Industrial Revolution. The first steam engines were hailed as marvelous things but when the steam engine became a common fixture and started to change huge swaths of English society people began to rebel. Secret groups of unemployed and displaced workers would come at night to smash up the steam engines that did their work. These acts of industrial sabotage were attributed to Ned Ludd or Captain Swing. You might have heard of the term Luddites, once they were what groups like Anonymous are today.

Thinking about it, employee driven industrial sabotage has continued to stick around. There was one engineering firm that I temporally worked at. The owner of the company was a real hands-on bully. Because the company was a virtual monopoly in some of the services it provided it was never hurt by its piss poor management and high turnover rate. The company did have a "breakage" problem where critical pieces of equipment were often inoperable because some small key part was lost or broken.

In the end the Luddites didn't stop the Industrial Revolution. People adapted to the change and if they didn't embrace it at least accepted it. Back to that day hiking on the trail. All of the hikers felt the industrial world was dangerously consuming the planet but they all drove to the trail head in their own personal automobiles. And here I am looking worriedly at the electronic future while I'm posting on a blog.

I can't imagine the human need to be with other people will ever disappear or be supplanted by anything electronic. Of course I could be wrong. Human beings have a need for food but look at what most people eat these days. The vast majority of food available to the average person is industrially produced crap of marginal nutritional value. It is no coincidence that as mega industrial food corporations take over the population becomes obese and sick with illnesses like diabetes and heart disease.

Look in your local supermarket. Is there more shelf space devoted to sugary soft drinks than fresh fruit? Are there more pounds of frozen French fries for sale than potatoes? How many isles in your supermarket are nothing more than chips, snacks, ice cream or other junk foods?

After you take a critical look at your supermarket look at your computer. Check your search history, keep a log of how many hours a week you're looking a at screen. Add it all up, TV, YouTube, emails, texting , video games and whatever else you do. Then ask -am I lonely? -am I bored? -am I just wasting my time?

This weekend as a small act of social rebellion host a vinyl party. Old vinyl records are becoming retro cool and on the bottom of some party invitations I'm seeing more and more, BYOV -bring your own vinyl. And you just can't beat the fun going through a stack of records to find that one special gem or looking at the cover art and wondering -what were they thinking?

I'll leave you with a few of the stranger album covers I have found -and then wish you all a great weekend.

Also like to mention this Saturday, May 4th, is World Naked Gardening Day.

So back to those album covers-

Le Reve

2013-05-02T11:18:00.001-07:00

There are several people who follow this blog and know me personally. A few sent me emails about May Day and questioned my political view points. Like most people I'm not solely right or left but depending on the issue and how it effects me -I can go either way and be very conservative on one topic and very progressive on another.

Most artists seem to lean to the left, not because it's fashionable but because as a group they are pretty poorly paid. Art as a commodity is difficult to put a value on. Beauty is subjective, craftsmanship is irrelevant and so much of the value of art is wrapped up in the provenance.

Picasso's painting Le Reve is an iconic image. Picasso was world famous for his painting Guernica and he could sell Le Reve for $7,000 in 1941 to the Ganz family of New York City. After the death of the Ganzes in 1997 it was sold at Christie's Auction House for a surprising 48.4 million dollars. As an investment that's quite a return but what buyers wanted was the prestige and history that comes with ownership of a "celebrity" object.

Art in this price category isn't really art anymore but it becomes a tool of asset management. So in 2001 an investment manager sell the painting to Steve Wynn for an estimated 60 million dollars In 2006 Steve Wynn, then maybe Las Vegas's most successful casino owner agrees to sell Le Reve for 139 million. At a news conference Steve Wynn, who is legally blind with retinitis pigmentosa and known for his broad hand gestures when speaking, poked his finger through the painting.

You would have thought that would have ruined the painting -but you would be wrong. It supposedly cost $90,000 to lovely repair it. There were all kinds of legal acrobatics to collect insurance money for the "lost value". In the end there was no lost value, Steve Wynn putting his finger through the canvas only added another page to the painting's history and it sold early this year for 155 million.

The average artist doesn't have these kinds of problems. Artist once they sell their works usually have no claim to any future value. Even when a artist can sell his works for what seems like big money, the gallery owner takes 40% off the top, the government then takes what's owed Caesar and in the end if you divide the residual money into the hours it took to produce the work... well rarely that comes to a livable wage. Until you're famous and most likely dead, art is hard low paying work.

Low pay isn't always the worse thing about a difficult job or line of work. I have worked for some of the nicest employers and didn't feel cheated because I knew I could make more money working for less pleasant people.

Working with somebody you don't like sucks -but working for somebody you don't like is unbearable. My more capitalistic friends will tell me every boss has a financial incentive to be the best employer possible but my life experiences tell me otherwise.

To employ another person, or even commission a work of art, is a dance of power. There are plenty of people when you give them a little power their inner childhood bully comes out. It is not logical from the view point of an Ayn Rand ideology but who ever said people are really logical or Ayn Rand actually reflected reality.

I think one of the best parables that diagrams the worker boss relationship is from the Simpsons. Specifically season 3, episode 11, "Burns Kerkaufen der Kraftwerk" or Burns Sold the Powerplant.

In short Mr Burns sells the nuclear power plant to a German company. The German company pays an overly generous amount of money and Mr Burns becomes even richer, so rich he decides to retire.

Here the plot splits, the Germans try to fix the plant and bring it up to their standards -which is an uphill battle all the way because of years of corner cutting and poor management.

At the same time Mr Burns goes through an existential crisis. Who is he, if he has no one to boss around? It's humiliating find out that no one is afraid of him because he no longer controls the jobs and livelihoods of the people of Springfield.

The German owners by now realize they are in over their heads and sell the nuclear power plant back to Mr Burns at a huge loss. Mr Burns has returned and is ready to mess with the lives of his employees -he is happy.

The story is both sad and funny -because it is true. Power has a caustic corrupting effect.

It's why so many workers are ready to protest and they seem angry and willing to fight. It's not just for more pay, it's also the issue of respect. That people who come to work every day to make money for the company should be able to take a fair share of it back to live off of, raise a family and have enough free time to have a life outside of work -a life of their own.

May Day started off as a fight for the eight hour workday. Some of my friends are on call 24 / 7 because their company gave them a smartphone. Others still work forced overtime. The trend over the last ten years has been to work harder for less money -and all those record corporate profits have not yet trickled down to anyone making an hourly wage.

May Day

2013-05-01T09:37:00.003-07:00

Once upon a time when Europe had not yet been Christianized, May Day was a time for celebration. It is one of the cross quarter days halfway between the spring equinox and summer solstice. For most places above 45 north latitude this is the real beginning of idyllic spring weather perfect for the Roman festival of Flora or the Gallic holiday of Beltane.

It's sad to see how the old Pagan culture has been papered over. I have a few born again Pagan friends upstate that promise this weekend to celebrate May Day in the traditional raucous fashion. Odd how the one Pagan custom of dancing around the Maypole still continues on, I have even seen Christian churches host them, though you don't need to be a classically trained Freudian psychologist to see the phallic symbolism.

May Day is also the international day of labor in at least 80 industrial nations -except of course for the United States. It looks like an another example of "American Exceptionalism" like how the world uses the metric system and we still stick to inches, feet, yards and miles but the history is a little more complicated than that. The May Day / Labor Day holiday is not a communist invention but started right here in the United States.

In the 1880s one of the first labor organizations was The Knights of Labor. They pushed for the standard 8 hour work day. Of course the factory owners were not amused. What became known as the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, May 4th 1886 was one of those defining moments in history.

When the police advanced on a peaceful protest rally a homemade bomb was thrown into ranks of the advancing officers. One officer was killed on the spot, a Mathias Degan, and eight others wounded.

The police opened fire. It is still up to dispute how many people were killed or wounded, particularly the number of police shot by what we call friendly fire. The trail afterwards of seven defendants was just as confusing. The bomber was never discovered and brought to trial.

International Labor Organizations adopted the May 1st date to commemorate both the massacre and the establishment of the eight hour work day. President Grover Cleveland and others wanted sweep the Haymarket massacre under the rug. Of course most students in this country aren't taught that. American History is usually left to the meaningless trivia like Grover Cleveland was the only person to be elected president in two non consecutive terms. The real history, most of all the labor unrest and the beginning of labor unions in America can be best ignored.

By 1894 the first Monday in September became the Federal holiday, Labor Day, in the United States as the May 1st holiday has a life of its own in the rest of the world. I have heard some people, mostly business owners, say how having the summer season start with Memorial Day and end with Labor Day is good for the economy. From their viewpoint what's good for business is what's good for the country. Though it does diminish the importance of the two holidays and the reasons why they even exist.

In this modern world we can easily lose the meaning of old holidays, past traditions and our history. The public square isn't really a place anymore and people spend less time doing anything that isn't work, shopping or vegetating in front of a screen.

Slowly the past and the future fade away and we only have now. Not the now of pleasant meditation when being fully aware of your environment. No, it's the kind of now where everything is either an emergency or an escape.

Think about that as the eight hour work day disappears. Think about it when your smart phone rings at the dinner table and you have to take that call. You hope your family understands but it's work related and jobs are so hard to keep.

Oh... one small bit of trivia. In the beginning of the 20th century there where a few very conservative groups that wanted to make May 1st "Law and Order Day".

Concrete Thinking

2013-04-30T07:01:00.003-07:00

In the movie "The Third Man" ; Orson Wells plays the devilish character of Harry Lime. Harry delivers one of those classic lines where he says "Italy for 30 years had war, terror and murder under the Borgias but in that time produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance; Switzerland had 500 years of peace and democracy -and produce the cuckoo clock."

That quote has me thinking of the cruelty and decadence of the Roman Empire. One of the more showy structures of those times was the Coliseum in Rome, thought in every major city in the empire was a similar but small copy of the original. The games in the Colosseum were spectacles of terror and murder and yet the building itself is a marvelous example of design and engineering.

The Colosseum could seat over 50,000 people but it could be emptied safely in as little as twenty minutes. Under the arena were trap doors so Gladiators and wild animals could make a dramatic entrance or their dead bodies de discreetly removed. The arena could be flooded and small manned ships could be used for mock sea battles. The Coloseum was one of the last Roman building this large to be built solely out of stone. They used a soft limestone that was very similar to concrete.

The Romans became the masters of concrete. Buildings after the Colosseum were made with poured concrete with a veneer of marble or other decorative stone added on. It was the beginning of a building boom as the imperial city of Rome became the home of over a million people. I just wonder was concrete a product born from the depravity of emperors like Caligula or the boredom of the Pax Romana.

The Romans had a formula for concrete that harden under water. They found mixing horse hair in the concrete kept it from cracking and using animal blood instead of water made a finished product that stood up to frost.

Long after the fall of Rome Medieval masons mastered the art of stone cutting to make arches and vaulted ceiling that Roman builders made cheaper and quicker out of concrete. The Romans were so adept with working with concrete the Pantheon still holds the world record for the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome.

It wasn't until the mid 1800's with the use of steel reinforcing bars (rebar) that concrete enters a whole new world of architectural use. Today concrete is so ubiquitous it's difficult to think of the modern world without it but we hardly every think of it either. And when we do think of it, it's rarely flattering.

The plain homeliness of the material was been worked into an architectural school of aesthetics known as Brutalism. It could be best described as the idea of making something so ugly that it becomes beautiful. It's sort of like the idea behind camp, where a movie or play is so bad it actually becomes entertaining. What works for entertainment didn't work for architecture. Brutalism never really caught on and the few buildings that were constructed in that style got torn down at first opportunity.

There are so few examples of Brutalism left that the Historic Preservation Review Board in the District of Columbia felt any remaining buildings must be protected. One of those examples is the Third Church of Christ, Scientist -at 910, 16th Street in Washington DC. The Christian Scientist congregation wanted a distinct presence in the nation's capital, they hired an avant guarde architect and ended up with a squat bunker that most people didn't even realize was a church. The building was hard to heat and cool, expensive to maintain and as the congregation shrunk in size it was too large for their needs. Historic preservationists had blocked any attempt to demolish or renovate the building.

The city had turned the church's request for a demolition permit in 2008. The church filed a lawsuit to finally get permission to demolish the church in 2009. The details of the court case were interesting because it pitted the desire for Historic Preservation against both property and religious rights.

As much as I support historic preservation, I have to admit it's not only an ugly building but not everything can be saved. Any community needs hold on its past but it also needs permission to move forward and create new history as well.

Concrete gets no respect, it is seen as that cold gray material synonymous with all that is wrong with urban development. It doesn't have to be that way. One beloved concrete building is the Henry Mercer mansion, also known as Fonthill in Doylestown PA. Finished in 1910 the whimsical 44 room home is now a museum filled with the oddest and most eclectic collection of handcrafted "stuff". It difficult to describe but well worth visiting in a very community centric town.

As the world population grows towards 9 billion and the majority of those people will live in cities, concrete will be even more important to construct all the new infrastructure that another 2 billion people will need in the next 50 years.

Concrete as a building material is changing to fit the times. There are now trans-lucent concretes that let light pass through. Some mixes can be made so thin because they are strong and flexible instead of brittle. For demonstration purposes engineering students have built canoes out of the stuff.

The one type of concrete that really looks promising is a porous concrete to be used for roads and driveways. Being that it's light in color means it does absorb as much radiant heat from the sun during the day. That might not seem like much to think about until you realize over 1 % of the planet is paved over in asphalt. I've been told In the United States an area the size of the state of Oklahoma is paved. Think of a parking lot from hell if it all was combined in one spot. Think of how much climate changing energy is absorbed and stored in that black top.

The real ecological advantage to porous concrete is rain water can pass through the pavement. Instead of running off and flooding homes and rivers after a heavy storm, the rain would only soak the ground under the road. More of the land can be used as a sponge, as it once did before the land was developed.

Part of the idea of living well is being creative with the materials you have on hand. If your focus is solely on short term profits then asphalt still works just fine. Very soon the calculus of future development will change because the idea of long term viability will start to have an obvious economic advantage.

GMOs, Malthus and Haber

2013-04-29T09:54:00.003-07:00

While at a local cafe there was a conversation a couple of tables over. The peoples at that table where talking about filming a documentary movie about genetically modifies organisms. The owner of the cafe knew I had some experience in film production so he introduced us to each other.

The woman who was the leader of the group was an ardent supporter of organic farming. Like all idealists she had a lot more enthusiasm and rhetoric than solid facts. It is not easy thing for people who disagree with each other to maintain a civil conversation. The internet is nice because you can back up facts but people still see what they want see.

I am not for the wide spread use of genetically modified organisms without careful scrutiny, testing and cautious regulations. But GMOs are only a logical extension of modern farming. I had to agree with the other party that today's farming techniques are not sustainable but I had to totally disagree that the answer is small scale organic farming. It is kind of scary if you think about the future where both alternatives are possible catastrophes.

Farming even with all the equipment is still labor intensive. Take away that fossil fuel driven tractor and replace it with a team of horses and you'll find that plowing 50 acres is about the most a family farm can handle -and the maintenance and care for a team of horses is a lot more than the tractor that can replace them. The economics of farming changes real fast if you can only plow 50 acres a season. Those economics also change for the whole society as well as for the farm family. Any civilization is only able to develop in proportion to its supply of surplus food.

It not uncommon to have a romantic image of farming partly because so few of us ever worked on a farm. The people who are making their movie about GMOs tried to segregate out "natural" from "unnatural" farming. It's probably more accurate to separate very intensive farming from less intensive farming because the whole idea of farming itself is unnatural.

When small tribes of hunter gathers became farmers they had to carve up the land, plant segregate fields of single plants, kill pests and selectively breed plants and animals for human needs -making most these plants and animals unable to return to the wild. Once people started to farm they had a chance at a regular supply and surplus of food. Once you had a surplus of food to trade other people could devote their whole day at crafts like weaving and pottery, that diversified talents and made civilization possible.

In the Middle East and around the Mediterranean Sea here are a number of ancient ruins. Many are cities that were abandoned when the farmland around them stopped being productive. Sometimes the soil was exhausted, sometimes there was salt intrusion from continuous irrigation, sometimes the local climate changed -but once the crop yields began to decline the city also declined.

Europe was once on the verge of mass famine. In the late 1700's a British scholar named Thomas Malthus pointed out how the population of Europe was growing much faster that the continent's ability to grow food. He predicted a population crash and his writings started a very pessimistic and conservative school of thought known as Malthusian Theory. What Malthus didn't see was the first wave of the Green Revolution that came out of the Industrial Revolution.

New farm machines made farmers more productive. Steam ships not only ferried away millions of peasant farmers to new lands but also brought back food from all around the world. The Irish Potato famine was a terrible cautionary tale of depending on a monoculture crop but other varieties of potatoes in central Europe didn't succumb to the blight and feed many millions more than wheat or barely could have. The introduction of the potato in northern Europe actually ended the seasonal re-occurrence of scurvy every late winter - early spring.

Even with all the improvements in farming, where farmers could more intensely exploit the land like never before, it was not enough. The production of food in Europe in the 1800's was only marginally out pacing the growth in population. By the end of the century there was a renewed interest in Malthus. The problem was the fertility of the land is based on the amount of nitrogen in the soil. Most food and cash crops take nitrogen out of the soil. Returning nitrogen back to the soil by crop rotation and spreading manure on the land both had limits. And that's when we get to Fritz Haber, maybe one of the saddest figures in modern history.

Fritz Haber was chemist and a fervent German patriot. In 1918 he won the Noble Prize for synthesizing ammonia. This made ammonia nitrate fertilizer possible. With ammonia nitrate fertilizer the land could be cheaply over dosed with nitrogen. Crop yields jumped and less land had to be left fallow, so there could be more land in continuous production. Again Europe was saved from famine by technology.

But there was a dark side to this seemingly happy ending. Ammonia-nitrate compounds are the basis of high explosives. Prior to Fritz Haber the only way to make high explosives was to use naturally occurring nitrates that were mostly mined in northern Chile. Germany and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire had no access to the world's nitrate deposits and would not have be able to fight a long war unless they could synthetically produce them at home.

This was only half of the story of Fritz Haber. He not only developed the fertilizer that made farmers more productive he also develop several very effective pesticides. These pesticides were seen as miracles of progress.

When World War 1 started Fritz Haber used his knowledge of pesticides to prefect poison gas as a weapon of warfare. The man who save Europe was also instrumental in tearing it apart and became known as the father of chemical warfare. To this day his mathematical equation between the concentration of the poison and the exposure time is still known as the Haber Rule.

The Kaiser awarded Fritz Haber with the rank of Captain. Haber was proud of his work and defended it. He felt poison gas was no more inhuman that all the other ways troops were killed in battle, that death was death by whatever means it was inflicted.

Fritz Haber was born into a Jewish family. As an adult he converted to Lutheranism. When the Nazi party rose to power Fritz Haber was shocked to find out that he was no longer seen as a German patriot, that he was no longer even a German citizen.

In 1934 Fritz Haber left Germany to escape the persecution. He prepared to start a new life in Palestine, what is today Israel. He died of heart attack and maybe even a broken heart in Basel Switzerland.

Of all of the bitter ironies history still had one more left. Most of Fritz Haber's family was unable to escape from Nazi Germany. In the 1920's, after World War 1, Haber kept on working as a scientist, particularly with insecticides. One of the insecticides he created was the cyanide formulation of Zyklon A and that was the precursor to Zyklon B -the gas used in the death camps.

Somehow, somewhere, I think this Faustian Bargain parallels the story of GMOs. That progress has benefits but there's always a price to pay later -and the price isn't always obviously linked to the product.

The Price of Progress

2013-04-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

There are some people who you see almost every day but they can still surprise you when they open their mouths to speak. It could be the mildly inane, a sublime non sequitur or comment that leaves "your brain hanging upside down".

I like that expression, it comes from a Ramones song commemorating a bit of bad history. In 1985 to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of World War 2 in Europe Ronald Reagan placed a wreath at Kolmeshohe Cemetery which was a German military cemetery. Critics pointed out that some of the dead there were members of the Waffen SS -truly the most fanatical portion of the Nazi war machine.

Reagan being Reagan refused to back down even when over 80 Republican Congressmen asked him to change his plans. Be it stubborn pride or a real lack of understand history what should have been a display of US - German unity turned into a public relations debacle. The whole event left everyone's brain hanging upside down long before WTF was popular.

Back to yesterday, Harrison is somebody I see regularly several time a week. Not far from my home and visible for many miles is the Limerick Nuclear Power Plant. Harrison stares off at the 300 foot tall cooling towers and says "you know today is Superman's 75th birthday and tomorrow is the 27th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident -where the hell was Superman on April 26th 1986?"

It felt it a little strange reminding Harrison that Superman is fiction but he assured me that he wasn't losing his grip on reality and that asking the question as a metaphor. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl didn't happen by itself and there were actions both before and after the accident that shaped the final outcome.

The real Supermen where the 28 Soviet firemen who when on the roof so they could fight the fire after the explosion. They had to realize fighting the fire would mean certain death from radiation poisoning, they also knew if they didn't fight the fire millions of people could be sicken and brought to an early death.

It's difficult not to be overwhelmed by that kind of courage.

The whole concept of a "superman" is a mainstay of mythology, comic books, fantasy fiction, philosophy and propaganda . And yes, supermen are also in art. Art is the mirror that can get to reflect everything else that goes on in the world.

So far there have been three major nuclear accidents; the Mile Island meltdown on March 28th 1979, Chernobyl and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster on March 11th 2011. There have been at least 30 other serious events since 1952.

The long term promise of nuclear energy being "safe, clean, too cheap to meter" has never come to pass. Potentially nuclear energy can be cheaper if you only compare the price of the day to day production of kilowatts. If you have to add in the projected cost of dealing with the nuclear waste the price goes up. Since the current projections are only a WAG (a wild ass guess) and the real costs could easily outstrip the more convention ways to produce electricity.

As bad as nuclear energy might become, keep in mind there is no free lunch. Every way of producing energy has an environmental cost. Most of our electricity is produced by burning coal -to make steam -to turn turbines. Coal is filled with all kinds of impurities -like mercury. Even the cleanest smokestack using the best "clean coal" technology still spews out a mist of mercury that eventually gets in our water and food.

But coal's biggest threat is environmentalists but instead other capitalists who are fracking cheaper natural gas. But here again fracking has it environmental costs and many of those costs are going to be long term and not fully apparent until someday after the drilling companies have left.

Pennsylvania is one of the epicenters of the fracking boom. Pennsylvania was twice the home of earlier energy booms in the 1800's. The state had the nation's first commercial oil field in the far northwest corner. And Pennsylvania is dotted with both active and abandon coal mines. Many of the abandoned coal mines and oil wells are over a century old and they still leak all kinds of toxic pollutants into the environment. The state government of Pennsylvania (which here really means the taxpayers in this case) spends millions of dollars every year to clean up or at least reduce the damage left behind. They may have to spend millions more for many years to come to pay for the cheap energy of a former generation.

Art is one way ordinary people can voice their resentment over the bad decisions of powerful people and institutions. Art can be a powerful tool of protest. Governments have always be fearful of artists because they can create an image that becomes a lightning rod for change. It's difficult to argue with an image but on some level it can quickly make a truth apparent. A work of art can make a point better than a thousand, or even ten thousand well thought out words

Now the rich and the powerful often prove themselves to be real Philistines when it comes to art but they do have the tools of propaganda and advertising. They can try to make nuclear power look environmentally friendly by saying "no greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere when they make power" but that's the kind of truth that used to mask the real environmental harm they create.

The overall cleanest way to produce energy is with renewable resources. Solar and wind energy are still discouraged because the powers behind short term profits are more politically active than the people who would benefit from the long term results.

Last week someone was attempting to shout me down on my view points over solar energy. Their claim was solar energy was still too expensive, too idealistic, too impractical to work. It's funny how many critics demand that solar energy has to compete economically to be considered viable -and yet coal, oil, gas and nuclear energy all get billions in government subsidies that renewable energies could never even hope to receive.

I thought about this. I thought of how expensive a nuclear accident at the nearby Limerick power plant would be. Though I was assured an accident could never happen here.

Satirically I thought how there's never been a meltdown of solar panels. Then I had to ask the other party if Limerick had a special security team and tactical plan to protect the plant against terrorism?

Immediately I was told "of course they did, it would criminal negligent if they didn't".

I thought about why those rods of uranium had to be protected by armed guards and then had to ask "do you think terrorists will every come here to steal solar panels?"

I felt a little Harrison asking that question but the other party understood exactly what I meant. Like Ronald Reagan at Bitburg, right or wrong -his heels were dug in. He would not concede that the world would be a safer place with more solar panels and less nuclear power plants.

The New Frontier

2013-04-25T10:32:00.002-07:00

My two sons often joke with me, when I talk about a creative idea they laugh and say "that's so 20th century". Sometimes they see make things by hand and wonder -what's with that? More than once they have asked why am I "electronically Amish" ?

We really are on the edge of a new frontier. Or maybe it is better said that we are looking over a cliff that separates the past from the future. There is nothing new about computers and all the wonderful things that they can do -just that now (particularly in this recession) we are seeing some of the fruits of the digital revolution.

One reporter at the local paper posted a list the ten worse jobs in America. Lumberjack was either 8 or 9 on the list because it was so dangerous. Statistically a lumberjack had a much higher chance of being hurt or killed than soldier in a combat zone. The number one worse job was newspaper reporter and it was ironic that he posted it on Facebook.

Once one third of a newspaper's revenues were from classified ads. Services like E-Bay and Craigslist have wiped out that income stream. With less money coming in reporters have been laid off or been asked to work harder for less money. As the quality of journalism has slipped and the twit & blogosphere has become the second by second unfiltered news source. The readership of newspapers is into a downward spiral.

The great die off of newspapers has already begun but in another five years the collapse is predicted to be catastrophic. National newspapers like the NY Times and USA Today will actually pick up readership but every other paper down the food chain will be at risk of closing or becoming smaller niche publication (like focusing solely on sports or lifestyles). There will be no need or better said there will be no money for serious news reporting except maybe for a couple flagship papers. Maybe we won't always have the Daily Planet.

The digital revolution can be seen on Main Street too. Book stores and record shops have disappeared, even local radio stations can no longer compete with online entertainment. One band shared with me how last summer they did over a two dozen radio interviews promoting their music . During that same time their MySpace account gave them double the exposure, lead to several gigs and was a lot less time and trouble than being on the air.

The digital revolution is only an acceleration of what's been happening over the last two centuries. New ways of manufacturing and disrupting things have provided golden opportunities to grow and expand for some and bankruptcy for everyone else. It was one of the subthemes in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol, though these days the market cycles have reduced from years to what seems like almost a few nanoseconds.

Change is not always obvious. Back in the 1950's Hollywood felt threaten by the emergence of TV. Movie producers started to make big spectacular films the TV couldn't afford to make and later started to make exploitation films with adult content that TV station couldn't broadcast. In the end TV didn't kill off Hollywood but it did kill off vaudeville.

Up until the 1950's vaudeville was alive and well. On stage performers would do a variety show in one town, pack up and do the same show 50 miles down the road. You could develop an act and for entire year go from theater to theater across the country. It wasn't the easiest way to make a living but thousands of actors, singers, comedians, musicians and other entertainers got by on the vaudeville circuit.

Finally when almost everyone owned a TV, any joke, song or novelty act could get immediate national exposure -but once it was broadcasted it had a very limit shelf life. It made some stars into superstars but it left a lot talent begging for a venue to perform in.

During Ronald Reagan's first term he said he wanted to make the American labor market like Hollywood. I think most people misinterpreted what he meant, Hollywood was seen as a glamorous industrial town where talented and competitive people rise to the top.

Once upon a time Ronald Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild. It was a labor union for actors. It was unique a labor union where 1% was paid generous amounts of money for their work, 9% were B film and charter actors that could make a respectable living -and the remaining 90% where unemployed except for the occasional bit part or extra role.

The world wide web and the new global market has made the world into Hollywood. Computers have made companies more efficient, all kinds of companies can make more money using less people. In the past employees were able to capture some of that gain in productivity as higher wages. But because there have been so many workers displaced and companies have access to labor markets all around the planet, any disgruntled worker can be replaced as easily as downloading a book on a Kindle.

This is one reason why paychecks have stagnated over the last ten years and the unemployment rate has stayed so high during this current recession. An economy is the circulation of money and right now the volume that once went to the middle class continues to be reduced. Think of this way if workers paychecks continue to stay flat and eventually lose ground to inflation, then they have less disposable income. People cut back on their spending, they sign up for Netflix instead of going to the movies. Where I live two local movie theaters have closed down, 3 of the remaining 5 say they are on shaky ground. Twenty more people here are unemployed and Netflix stock has gone up.

As average people feel more insecure about their financial future. the local business owners on Main Street are even more rattled. It is harder and harder for them to find goods and services to sell that can't be found online for less.

As frightening as the new economies of scale are, what's worse is poisonous idea that everything should be free. I like being creative but I also have bills to pay. Some of my musician friends have dropped out of the business because so many more promoters and venue owners expect them to perform for the exposure.

The next wave of digital revolution is coming as 3D printers could compete with and replace the craftsman. Anything that can be photographed and scanned could be reproduced in plastic in a 3D printer.

This is an older wood carving I did. I'm told it could very easily be scanned and reproduced by the hundreds, the thousands and even larger numbers. The final product could be modified to mimic different grain patterns, make it look older or that it was carved out of tropical hardwoods instead of molded out of plastic. The production costs are cheap -and unless I copyright the image and pay a lawyer to protect it, it could be stolen and used without my permission or any hope of compensation.

The future is just over that cliff. No one said life is easy but at best it looks like a very hard landing on the other side.

War and Peace -the anniversary of General Order #100

2013-04-24T09:10:00.001-07:00

In literature and history nothing sets the stage or frames the drama of life like a war. Real wars bare very little resemblance to how they get depicted . There is the boredom, the fear and real ugliness of violent death that never gets translated into books like War And Peace or Gone With The Wind.

I was at the local book store and found a book about the American Civil War. It's a book of lists and statistics. That might sound dry but in the numbers are the facts and figures that tell the real story of war. That the average soldier was much more likely to die of disease than the battlefield and even with all the improvements in rifles and artillery it was the sword and bayonet that were still the most effective weapons.

Gettysburg is only a short drive away and this part of Pennsylvania is a mecca for Civil War re-enactors. The time period costumes, large formations of uniformed men preparing for battle and the dedication to get every detail right are all part of the spectacle -though they really can't show the true filth and squalor of a military encampment, tents full of men dying of dysentery or the hand to hand combat that most battles and skirmishes degraded into.

Europe took a great deal of interest in the American Civil War. England and France both depended on Southern cotton for their mills. Many European intellectuals felt a democracy was too unstable to endure without a king or royal family in executive control. The industrialists of Europe favored the aristocratic South but the working masses they employed were for the Union and supported the abolition of slavery.

Like all wars, governments will spare no expense to kill its enemies. Historians will dispute the final figures for the Civil War because of the sketchy records from the South but a common total is a little over 7 billion dollars, that's billions in 1860 dollars. The United Sates government had only spent 15 million for the Louisiana Purchase, 7.2 million for Alaska and 50 million to build the first transcontinental railroad.

Even today war remains an expensive endeavor. Every soldier serving in Afghanistan is a million dollar proposition. Most of that expense is in the cost of sending food, water and material to soldiers out in extremely remote regions.

Europeans also looked at the American Civil War as the beginning of modern warfare. Railroads and the telegraph sped-up troop movements and battlefield communications by a factor of ten over what was available only a generation earlier. Industrial production and technology became the determining factors in achieving victory.

It's been said the only thing that separated the trench warfare of World War 1 and the Civil War was the machine gun. The Gatling Gun almost made it to the battlefield and lost in the footnotes of history is the Gatling Gun's predecessor known as the Coffee Mill Gun.

It got its name because it did look like a coffee mill and was worked by a big hand crank on the side. Some soldiers first mistook it for a sausage grinder though in a metaphorical way it was. The gun was sold with the sales pitch of an "army in a box" with a firing rate of 120 rounds a minute, not that incredibly impressive by today's standards but in the 1860's the muskets that both armies use at the start of the war could fire only 4 to 5 rounds a minute at best.

In the spring of 1862 Lincoln urged his Generals to use the new weapon but they couldn't see the immediate benefit of it. A few amateur historians have wondered how the whole war would have changed if a dozen of these guns where in the right place at several key battles.

The American Civil not only brought industrial technology to the forefront it also was the first modern war with a written legal code of conduct. On April 24tth 1863 the Union Army issued General Orders #100. In total it was 157 articles on how exactly Federal Troops were to handle Confederate prisoners, civilians and guerilla fighters.

General Orders #100 was predominately the work of Francis Lieber. Lieber a Prussian immigrant and scholar of international law had three sons at the time, one who fought for the Confederacy and the other two for the Union.

There was no other document like this in any other country anywhere in the world. It was the foundation for international military law today. It was also a counter current to the ideas of industrial warfare and total war , where war can have rules and the carnage be limited -at least when it has no military value.

So on this day a 150 years ago as war was being made so much more efficient and deadly, Francis Lieber was also trying to make it more civilized. Still war keeps expanding it's horizons, sometimes in ways that look utterly ridiculous until you remind yourself that all that effort went into something that was meant to kill another human being.

Art is Art -or is it not?

2013-04-23T08:37:00.003-07:00

It seemed it was once a lot easier to say what is art. Art was not democratic, it was something rich patrons paid skilled craftsmen to create for them. Kings and Clerics decided was or wasn't art.

One example of the power of the patron was from an art exhibition in New York City. All of the paintings were from the Spanish Colonial era and made in the vast territories of what was then New Spain. The majority of the images were larger than life-size portraits of powerful men but one room was exclusively religious art.

The exhibitor keep the religious painting behind glass not because the painting were fragile but because they were toxic. These paintings were dazzling brilliant objects heavily accented in gold leaf and mercury pigments. The story goes they were all made by murderers. That convicts were given a choice between execution or making art, with the full understanding that working with mercury will slowly kill you within the next 4 to 8 years. Of course there was the promise of redemption thru repentance.

As ordinary people gained access to art, to both experience it and create it, the boundaries of art expanded outward and the definition of art became fuzzy. In 1916 the Dada art movement began. Some people might argue that Dada isn't so much an art movement but an attempt to deconstruct art and break down any of the final boundaries that separate art form everyday life. The argument is any work that alters, highlights or changes in the context of any object or experience for aesthetic purposes is then art. I feel most arguments about art go good with wine.

The Dadaists are most identified with one of the earliest pieces done by Marcel Duchamp, The Fountain. The once humble urinal that was signed R. Mutt and probably put on display as a practical joke became one of the landmark pieces of 20th century art.

As one artist said "art is anything that gets you thinking, talking and sharing the experience". Today The Fountain can be seen in several museums around the world because Marcel Duchamp had eleven authorized reproductions made from 1950 - 1964. And yes they are each insured for millions of dollars each and no it is not appreciated if you try to use the urinal for its original purpose -several performance artist in the past tried and these days you'll just be arrested disorderly conduct and such. It's kind of funny being the idea behind The Fountain was to "de-deify" the artist, it started as a piece of anti-art that became fine art.

You have to be very secure about yourself to be an artist or even have strong opinions about art. But speaking of urinals I salvaged one from a demolition site and gave it to James Enders, a pop artist in Pottstown PA. He plans to fill it with ice and use it as a beer cooler at his next gallery opening. It will be called "The Oasis".

The question of art is difficult because so much of art is about context instead of substance. If I showed a child's drawing of butterfly you might say it's cute. If I told you it was the last act of a child who died from a long chronic illness, suddenly that same picture has tremendous emotional impact. Then again if told you it was an early Picasso, your first thought might be how much money is it worth?

Context both frames and pollutes our ideas of beauty and meaning. One time in a writers group , one of the members told this story about a movie screen play he wrote. The screen play had won a prize in one of the larger sponsored writing contests. The writer was invited to an awards dinner in Los Angles to receive his prize and so he went. It was very nice dinner and representatives form a Hollywood studio asked to meet with him the next day. The Writer was ecstatic, finally recognition and maybe success.

The meeting didn't go as he expected. There were half a dozen people from the studio, they all read a copy of the screen play. They all seemed to have liked it but it was hard to tell because no one said anything particularly positive or negative about the story. Instead each made some bland non-committed statement and then asked the others what do they think? This went on for over an hour, maybe even two hours. In that room full of movie executives none of these people seem to be comfortable saying what they thought or was sure of what people would like to see in a movie. No one wanted to take a risk but that might say much more about the movie industry than art.

Without some of the old conventions to fall back on people feel adrift when they look at art that challenges them. In some ways it's oppressing (or at least intimidating) instead of liberating. It like taking chickens that have been raised in a factory henhouse and leaving them outside in the barnyard. The chickens begin to get edgy and can't wait to get back in the henhouse.

Last weekend I went an art show that just opened at a small local gallery, Studio B in Boyertown PA. The theme of the show is Happy Little Trees. It's juried show and most if not all of the artists are successful professionals.

There was another art show that I went to. I'm not going supply any background information. Here are a few examples of what I saw. Are they better than the show at Studio B ? What do you think?

So do you still need context -or are you are you secure enough in your own sense of aesthetics to say what you like or don't like. Is it art or is it not?

A Modest Proposal on Earth Day

2013-04-22T09:00:00.001-07:00

My friend Tom, also known as Tom The Collector of Everything, is a collector of people as well as objects. You never know who might meet at one of his parties. Not that the guests are celebrities but you'll find a wide range of backgrounds and opinions. One person who I didn't directly know but knew through a network of mutual acquaintances openly declared that global warming or climate change was hoax.

Now he wasn't all angry rhetoric and bumper wisdom, he brought up several good points. Though these points where from a minority science and research community; and a few were based on very weak or misinterpreted information, he still stuck to his guns. He didn't expect that I had any knowledge on the subject or that push back with countering facts and studies that could be found in professional journals or online.

In the end we agreed to disagree. I left him with one parting thought, "that the Earth's check engine light is on, don't you think we should at least stop what we're doing and see if there really is a problem". That analogy struck home with him because I knew he just finished building a 500 plus horsepower hot rod / project car. He always wanted a car like this since he was 16 and twenty years later he finally got it. The idea of $10 a gallon gasoline, further pollution controls and additional regulations just totally irritated this guy who is honest, hard working and felt he earned the car of his dreams.

One of the failures of modern environmental movement is the feeling that to be environmentally conscious is to trade down to a "lesser" lifestyle. It's all about sacrifice and rarely about personal benefits.

Pollution is generally is in a way to off load some of the costs of making a product. In economy class you have the widget, a manufacturer of widgets might want to expand his market and discourage competition by lowering the price of his product by 10%. So not to eat into profits it makes economical sense to just dump the waste. The benefit is everybody gets cheaper widgets as profits go up.

Unfortunately if you live close to the widget factory and it's your land, water and air that gets polluted -then that's not so good. The people close to the factory bear the cost of making a cheaper widget. Their health could be compromised, their property could decrease in value , their homes could be made unlivable.

With soon to be nine billion people there really aren't any places left where a factory can pollute without effecting a large population of people.

Factories can pollute in big and obvious ways but we all pollute in small but dramatically huge ways when added up cumulatively. Something as simple as the roof over our heads has big environmental consequences. The rain that runs off our roofs helps flood local rivers and in more developed areas does not get as much of a chance to soak into the ground.

Most every roof is an example of wasted potential. The New York Times printed an article on June 16th 2011 on a study and survey done in New York City. From the air the roofs of the city were mapped. They discovered there where tens of thousands of acres of flat and low pitched roofs suitable for solar panels. If these roofs had solar panels 49% of the city's peak demand for electricity could be met. That means on the hottest summer days when every air conditioner was on, half of that electricity could be produced in the city and not have to come from a power grid that extents all the way to northern Quebec. It also means that the electrical supply would be more reliable with a larger margin of excess supply. The possibility of brown outs and black outs could be eliminated.

New York City is a special case because the price electricity is about double the national average. It would make immediate economic sense to do it and do it now.

The energy industry, particularly those companies producing fossil fuels dread ideas like this. As one bit of trivia, the very first day Ronald Reagan was in office he issued an executive order to remove the solar panels off the top of the White House.

Once I spoke an engineer who was planning to build for himself an "electric garage". It would have 1,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof, a power converter, charger and batteries to be used to charge up his plug-in hybrid car. He estimated that he could do 90% of his driving on solar power without buying gasoline. Over eight years the garage should pay for itself, even if the price of gasoline does not go up. Oh another bit of trivia, GM owns a 30% share of Toyota and GM blocked Toyota from offering a factory installed plug-in option on their hybrid cars sold in America, though it was a very popular option in Japan right from the beginning.

While we are talking about trivia Germany and Denmark are the world's leaders in solar power. Both countries are not known for their sunny weather above the 50 parallel of north latitude. One reason they produce so much of their electricity with solar and wind energy is government leadership. By law the utility companies have to pay for the excess energy a homeowner puts back into the power grid -just like here in America. The big difference in Germany is the utilities have to pay a price that's very close to the retail price per kilowatt. In the United States the utility companies only have to pay the wholesale price. You can see the average person in Germany has real economic incentive to go green.

For this Earth Day I'd like to make a modest proposal -a roof tax. It would be a tax on every square foot of roof space. I know "tax" is such a dirty word but it doesn't have to be. Because just about everybody can make themselves exempt from this tax by having a "green roof".

1. You can install sod roof or have a water collection system that goes to cistern for the slow release of rain water.

A green roof can go any where in the country or the city.

2. You can install solar panels on part of the roof and as long as you produce an minimum of 2 watts per square foot average over the entire roof.

New solar shingles can covert sun light into electricity without changing the look of your home

3. Or you can install a wind turbine on the roof or on the property, again with same minimum of 2 watts per square foot average.

If the tax was announced today you would have five years to install one of these three options or even a combination of these three.

This might sound to some like Hippy-Dippy tree hugging nonsense but Wal-Mart, that company not really known as a champion of the environment, is already installing solar panels on the big flat roofs of their stores. The roofs of their stores and warehouses already produce 50 megawatts of electricity. That's one less power plant that needs to built.

A tax like this might not benefit or be loved by big oil and gas but it will make money for others and maybe just make things a little better here on Earth.

Mr Donut

2013-04-19T06:16:00.002-07:00

One of those curiously sideshows of globalization is how many things that started off as an American institution and then branched off into international stage and there changed for the local market and even became a bigger success far from home. I was listening to one world traveler talk about Japan. Japan is fascinating because it is this mix of worldly cosmopolitanism and oddly one of a kind provincial culture. I guess that happens when you get a physically isolated population that is 97% homogenous.

In Japan one of the most popular places to get a good cup of Java is at the Mr. Coffee chain. Mr. Coffee? The same franchised chain that once flourished in America. The last time I saw a Mr. Coffee was in Millville NJ. Millville was once a factory town where glass industry helped support everything else. When glass manufacturing moved the town fell on hard times.

The Mr. Coffee in Millville was nothing like the ones in Japan. The chain that has all but disappeared in its home country has like this glamour secret life half a world away. In Japan Mr. Coffee is clean, bright and hip. Where you get a quality cup of hot fresh coffee with a whipped cream rose floating on top -and that flower buds and opens from the heat of coffee. Of course there are the donuts and something unheard of in Japan, the waitress refills your cup for no extra charge. They see Mr. Coffee as being so American.

In Russia they still love McDonalds. The first fast food franchise to jump in to the market behind the long gone Iron Curtain. It was hit from the start. A meal with meat and potatoes and no sour attitude. Soviet restaurants where known for being dreary places of mediocre food and serving staff so rude that they even intimidated Parisians.

The Golden Arches are everywhere and one economist had an index comparing the local price of a Big Mac to the hourly wage of the average worker. It was a way to show the health of a local economy with probably the world's most consistent and available commodity. I believe there are McDonalds in over 180 countries including India -but there they use chopped lamb in place of the whole beef burger.

For the last 15 years McDonalds has made more money overseas than in their original home market

Woolworths was the Five and Dime thrift store that could be found on every Main Street. The chain was slow to move to the suburbs and shopping malls back in the 1950's and 1960's. But decades after they disappeared in America they remained popular in Australia. Down there everyone shopped at Woolly's .

Last year I was sent a picture of a supermarket in Africa. It was a surreal sight to see this brand new building and parking lot standing alone in the middle of the vast savanna. It was Shoprite, a regional chain that is barely holding its own in the very competitive northeast states of America, but is very successful in South Africa and Botswana.

In China, a nation of tea drinkers, Starbucks have made the same kind of rapid market penetration. Maybe too fast for its own good. Like here in America, the novelty of a new Starbucks has long worn off and no one is excited to see another one open. Starbuck's profile in China reached a high point when a franchise opened at the entrance of Beijing's Forbidden City.

It shouldn't be much of a shock to see old companies find new homes in the world market. It's a form evolution, though the process and end results sometimes makes me smile.

Homer Simpson realized after examining world religions that almost everybody likes chicken. That maybe we can all get along and talk about our problems over a chicken a dinner.

Service organizations like the Moose Club are popular in England. The Kiwanis Club, the Rotary Club and Toastmasters not only have chapters throughout the world but now have their largest chapters in Asia and Europe.

Soccer may only become marginally accepted in America as American Football may never find a serious audience in Europe but Baseball, the once quintessential American game continues to become a world game. I'm told Little League Baseball is the elite sport in countries like France, Germany and Greece. Even Turkey kids are playing organized baseball.

In a way it's like seeing Hollywood actors doing TV commercials in Japan. Or seeing Japanese celebrate Christmas. It has nothing to do the religious holiday. It is a commercial re-interpretation of the images that America once broadcasted out to the world and now is being echoed back.

It's something familiar but different. It's the message of liberal democracy, crass commercialism and pop culture that has been remade into something relevant for everybody else.

Flocking Destiny

2013-04-18T09:22:00.001-07:00

The secondary and back roads in Pennsylvania are narrow. I'm told that's because the state will provide money for local communities to build the roads but the money for the shoulders and curbing has to come from the town. Still when I saw this picture I had to pull over and stop, though it was a little nerve racking to watch traffic speed by.

This was the last plastic pink flamingo left. The new home owner told me earlier the whole front yard was covered them. It was a gift (or practical joke) from one friend to another, something to celebrate his buddy's purchase of his first home.

Last Tuesday night the Pottstown Artist Guild had a field trip to the work shop and studio of Bob Ingram. His home and shop are in Nantmeal Village, a small clump of mostly of 200 year old fieldstone farmhouses that does show up on all the maps. The joke was didn't M Night Shyamalan film the movie The Village here? Actually the movie set location was less than 20 miles away.

We had tour of the house, work shop and studio. The house is a century old frame building that was long neglected before it was artfully restored. The barn that became the workshop and studio was equally derelict. Mr. Ingram had an earlier career in industrial design and fine furniture making. Him and his wife were ready to take on this challenge.

Just a small home for the road or a chance at simple uncluttered living

I like to work with my hands and have been a carpenter, made some crude furniture and did several wood carving over the years. It's difficult to describe the wave of envy I felt. I couldn't stop imaging what I can do with a shop like this.

These days Bob Ingram still makes some furniture but has branched off into lighting and found object art.

After the tour we had time to talk. Mr. Ingram had owned his own design company. It had a dozen or so employees, it was profitable and growing. But at some point the business felt like a trap. The skill sets of an artist and business owner have a lot in common but they also seem to have equally as much that's mutually exclusive of each other.

He sold the business, invested his money and was able to retire early so he can solely focus on his art work. His life story didn't sound like bragging or a sacrifice. He attributed his success just as much to luck as to hard work, which was refreshing to hear. I think it was Mark Twain who said the myth of the self made man is like the myth of the self laid egg.

There was a further discussion on how our time on earth is short and that a person needs to follow the path in life they are drawn to. How it's difficult to create art unless your life is really part of that art. The idea that you create to live a full life and not just to earn a paycheck.

Don't get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect for people who work hard, often in difficult jobs. But if your only motivation is the money and not family, pride of workmanship or some other higher purpose; then money alone is empty reward.

Compared to his past Bob Ingram lives a more financially modest life but it could be argued he's very rich because he has the luxury to be in control of his destiny -at least as much as anyone can be.

Trashland

2013-04-17T09:54:00.002-07:00

Last weekend one of my compatriots, Harrison, was talking about how the United Nations was planning on granting statehood recognition to the giant garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. That sounded kind of silly and I couldn't find any collaborating news stories or articles. Harrison insisted I keep looking.

Harrison been known to have his "Emily Litella" moments. Just in case you're not old school Emily Litella was a character Gilda Radnor played on the original Saturday Night Live. Emily would do impassioned editorials on things she misheard, such as confusing endangered species with endangered feces. Before she could finish her editorial she would be corrected and then cut short her little speech with an embarrassed "never mind". Harrison refuses to concede but that's okay because the more I keep looking into the great garbage patch the more I'm really surprised by it.

Ocean currents move in a circular track. Like a hurricane when an ocean current spins in a complete circle it also creates a calm center. One of such area most people might have heard of is The Sargasso Sea. It's in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. As the Gulf Stream moves North and East and then flow turns South to become part of the Canary Current and the moves West to complete the cycle as the North Equatorial current. This complete circuit is known as gyre. In the middle of the above mentioned gyre is the Sargasso Sea, a million square miles of calm water and seaweed.

The Portuguese explorers named the area in the 15th century. Sailors of that time didn't have a complete understanding of ocean currents and some tried take a shortcut straight across the ocean. It was a shorter distance in miles but they would have gotten home faster if they stayed in Gulf Stream and taken the longer way back.

The Sargasso Sea became a place to stay away from had traditionally been linked with apprehension and mystery. It understandable in the age of sailing ships how you want to avoid anyplace that doesn't have wind or currents. Over the centuries poems, books and movies have fictionalized the Sargasso Sea as a dreary graveyard of lost ships and even lost continents.

All the oceans of the world have gyres. In the center of each one is an eye of calm water where floating object can accumulate and stay trapped. In the Pacific Ocean there is area larger than Texas that covered in floating trash. You might ask how something like this could develop unnoticed? Like the Sargasso Sea there are large parts of the oceans that most ships avoid. There are no trade winds, no favorable currents or commercially viable fisheries to harvest. This happened out of sight and only recently has the public become aware because the problem is now so large.

In the Great Trash Patch of the Pacific, Greenpeace estimates there is 6 kilos of plastic trash for every 1 kilo of plankton. You might not think much of plankton but is the foundation of the ocean food chain and it coverts more carbon dioxide back into free oxygen than all the plants on land.

The increase of world trade, especially between United States and the Pacific Rim nations have added to the trash at sea. Also as more people want to enjoy the luxury of living along the water, more trash gets accidently washed away. The tsunami that struck Japan in 2011 washed countless tons of man mad objects out to sea and lots of it continues to wash up on the shores of North America. One of the more unbelievable objects was a motorcycle found on the beach in the Northwest United States. Through the serial number it was traced back to its former owner in Japan.

There are about a dozen greater Trash Patches in the oceans (yes also including the Sargasso Sea). It's believed that millions of sea birds and hundreds of thousands of marine mammals are killed every year from eating bits of floating plastic or getting entangled in plastic packaging. The overall health of the oceans could be in jeopardy because there is that much junk in the water but right now it's mostly in isolated places where few people go.

I always like irony. It's difficult for me to go day to day without little irony in it, like it was a dietary supplement. Probably the most common object found in the flotsam of the great trash patches is plastic water bottles. As if bottled water was stupid enough, where people pay a premium price for a product that's usually no better than your average tap water; the stupidity gets compounded. The disposable plastic bottles are a tremendous biohazard because they tend to be difficult to recycle so they end up packing the landfills or floating out to sea. One of the great deceptions is that everything that goes into a recycling bin actually gets recycled. The best way to reduce your environmental impact isn't recycling but reducing the amount of garbage you produce in the first place.

That does change the fact on the ground, or better said the fact on the water, that there is a patch of floating garbage bigger than Texas, maybe even twice the size of the Lone Star State and worldwide if all the garbage patches where put together they might cover an area the size of India.

In a past posting I mentioned the micro nation of Sealand. An old gunnery platform off the coast of England originally built in international waters and the current owner claims as a sovereign nation. Recently that inspired a group of rich libertarians want to form a "nation" of anchored ship in international waters to have a totally free capitalistic state. Something like the idea behind Andrew Ryan's city of Rapture in the game Bioshock .

Another group that turning their attention to the sea is a group of activists backed by The Netherlands Architecture Fund. Instead of creating a haven for cyber gambling and off shore banking, they want to build a floating city that will harvest and recycle the great trash patches. To turn an environmental mess into a green paradise.

One of the plans envisions a floating island that would eventually grow to size of Hawaii. It would be agriculturally self sufficient and be own nation state. (And who knows, this might have been what Harrison had half heard something about).

It sounds outlandish or at least an idea for Kevin Costner if he ever makes a sequel to the movie Waterworld. These new ideas of floating nation states are not covered under current laws of the sea -so maybe the United Nations is working on developing new laws for a new age ahead.

Right now The Netherlands Architecture Fund is supposedly looking for engineers and scientists to start work on the project. One idea is a robotic boat that works like a pool skimmer collecting the raw materials and clean the ocean. Maybe someday in the not too distant future we'll look forward to a vacation on Recycle Island.

The Odyssey

2013-04-16T10:26:00.001-07:00

A hero, a story, his name is unimportant

for the arch of his journey follows the same curve

that the Gods and nature dictates

still we listen, for the hero's story is everyone's tale.

I pray my Muse will kindly guide me

my capricious mistress, forever shoe shopping.

Shoe shopping? Like what is with that?

No greater mystery in all the universe

than a woman's fascination with footwear.

But whoa, I digress and my words meander

from the tales of brave Ulysses

the man who sacked the holy citadel of Troy

and who's exploits across the wine dark seas

on that long journey away and back home again

is the story I come to share with you.

II.

The sea rises, swells and sways

the ship's prow points up

-and falls away

On the restless waters, crest capped with foam

the crew keeps singing

we're going home, we're going home.

And Ulysses suffers from the worst earworm ever

he would gladly dash his head against the rocks

just to be free of their monotonous tune

but with a sigh of resignation, Ulysses knows their inspiration.

Yes, they are going home, back home from the war.

Combat can bring some to sainthood

in between haunted dreams they find the warrior's calm

and know they need not prove anything to anyone -ever again

though anger management is impractical at best

as chaos whirls all around on the bloody battlefield

where the chance of random death runs high

and hero's names are lost to time if his other comrades fall.

No longer at war Ulysses swore to all the Gods

he would do his best, never to harm a living soul.

Except maybe to bitch slap that Agamemnon once

righteously smack down the king responsible

for so many wasted years and lives

for choosing war first, instead of last

then , maybe then, Ulysses felt he could find

the real peace that comes after the armistice.

Yes peace, illusive peace,

though he would settle for peace and quite

desperate for anything to stop the crew from singing.

In dark humor Ulysses calculated if sacrificing one

would be worth avoiding a migraine later.

III.

Eight days and many leagues later

the sea and wind seem unfamiliar, odd and strange.

Ulysses had commanded under pain of death

no one asks again -"are we there yet?"

An island appeared where there should have been none

Brygos the helmsman cried out-"let's stop

land ashore and ask for directions".

Ulysses was thunder struck and then thundered out

"Directions? Directions? Do you not trust me?

As your leader and captain of this ship?"

The crew's silence spoke volumes

Ulysses relented, "suit yourselves" grumbled.

IV.

The beach sand was soft and fine, the sun warm

and it made Ulysses drowsy with nostalgia

besides he wanted no part of the argument brewing

that was developing like a summer storm

between the head strong factions of the crew.

Ulysses only crave a nap and he was so willing

to slumber as other tried to decisively choose

which way they would go -up or down the beach

possibly split up or stay as a group, Ulysses didn't care .

If the crew did not trust in his command

then they could muddle though their own decisions.

Sleep can be so kind.

Awake in the dark of night and unsure of how long he slept

waves of apprehension synchronized themselves

to the continuous pulse of surf on the beach.

The crew should have been back by now

and Ulysses began to regret his vacation from command.

"Like children" he mumbled as he strapped a sword to his side.

In moon light he tracked the footprints until to his horror

he found where the struggle had occurred

and the victor was a giant that dragged in the sand

not a net full of fish but the entire crew of his ship.

Like a shepherd to his flock or even a father to his children

rescue wasn't a question of "if" only a problem of how.

The footprints, three cubits in length, where easy to follow

but soon logic began to sap his courage

a footprint of three cubits meant a height of over twenty

as giants go, this would be a big one.

As Helios's shield rose just a sliver

as the first rays of dawn cleave sky and land

from high ground Ulysses could spy down

on the shabby hovel, the dismal cave entrance

with littered filth scatter in every direction

this was where the footprints ended, the home of his enemy.

It stank of smoke and of rotting death

but most of all of sheep -both fleece and offal.

At two hundred paces back from the cave

Ulysses gagged from the stench of the manure .

In the darkness of the cavern came a clamor

that built to a rumble of a terrible noise

to broadcast the emergence into full light

the giant, the giant with only one natural eye

perfectly centered there in his face

one vicious, malicious and hideous eye.

So fearful a face, Ulysses forgot

he was facing a foe six times his height.

The giant, the Cyclopes, not fully awake

comically stumbled like a tottering child.

Now seemed the best moment to launch an attack

Ulysses drew in a deep breath of resolve

and drew from the sheath a sharpen blade

there was no further delay, fate turns on moment.

Ulysses screamed his savage war cry

racing down from the high ground

sword over head, screaming, screaming

loud enough to shake the walls of Troy

fearsome enough to make men wet themselves

the Cyclopes was caught totally by surprise

but fate is whimsical and fate is cruel.

Ulysses step in some muck

as slippery as grease and as thick as gruel

and the warrior lost his footing, tumbled and fell

only to roll to the feet of the Cyclopes

The irony and humiliation so obvious

you didn't need two eyes to see it

the Cyclopes roared with laughter

and in one swift motion scooped up Ulysses

as if he was stray kitten caught by the scuff of the neck.

Brave Ulysses, mighty and respected commander of men

right there and then, helpless and held high in the air

at the mercy of a monster with a cold nasty stare.

The Cyclopes laughed again and said in superior tone

"I've been expecting you, let me show you my home"

and into gloom of the cave, the Cyclopes carried our hero.

VI.

The Cyclopes' grotto was groaty dank place

what it lacked in light it made up in putrid orders

this would have been a fair final punishment
for souls too wicked for Hades to keep.
By the dim flicker of lamps burning sheep fat

Ulysses could see something in the play of shadows

but it was more a feeling, like a blind man touching

and by touch and feel he might surmise and suspect

the reality of the world around him.

Into a huge holding pen Ulysses was thrown

and what was scary, he knew he wasn't alone

The eyes take a little time to make the best of faint light

but there in the pen, mixed in with some sheep

was the rest of his crew, shocked and grief stricken.

Quick as he could Ulysses took count

there was Periscus. Brygos and Damon the fair

next, Dionysios the apply named drunkard

Gallus, Hermon and in the darkness he heard Homer

then Medus, Acamus, Tiro and ..... before he could say

the names of the missing, Gallus spoke up

"they are now gone, taken for dinner".

Those words were a hammer blow

that nailed the truth of the circumstances deep.

At a leisurely pace the Cyclopes ambled over

drinking a large amphora of wine, that was small in his hands.

The sun by then probably had just cleared the horizon

and honest men barely started their day of labor

but the Cyclopes already had the drowsy intoxicated look

of the pugnacious drunk filled with bluster and violence.

His gaze was straightforward, right at Ulysses

and after long loud belch he began.

"The Gods can do anything -can't they?

and you drunk on virtue

here to save your friends

-they said you would come,

pull them out of this fine mess

in one epic act of heart and mettle.

But you didn't think you'd end up with them.

Maybe now you're hoping the Goods will save you

Maybe the Gods can't do everything".

Then he vomited up some sour old wine

and bits of his last meal of sheep and of men

recognizable parts of men that Ulysses once knew.

The Cyclopse amused with his own musings

concluded his speech with closing loud belch

and tried to drain the amphora of its last lonely dregs.

The empty clay jar yielded nothing

and the Cyclopes took that as provocation

as he smashed it against the wall

with such force shards rained everywhere.

If the Cyclopes was the height of six men

and the volume of a score or more

the lout could drink more wine than a fleet

of sailors returned to port, after months out on the waves.

Drunkenness is a two act play

a stumbling comedy that progresses into tragedy

and the pending tragedy was about to take stage.

The Cyclopes opened the pen door part way

reach in with a clumsy grab, Ulysses's crew knew the drill.

They clung to corners and push the sheep forward

but the Cyclopes had marginally sufficient wits

to tell which was which and who was who.

"You'll not fool me again this morning".

And that's when the giant's hand found Dionysios

once one was trapped in the grip

the tactics switched, defense turned to offense

-to attack the arm pulling away their fellow crewman.

It was a desperate effort, filled with feral fury

and totally futile as the Cyclopes flicked them off like fleas.

When the door slammed shut, Dionysios was beyond help

the bars of the pen that held the others in

might as well be a divide as wide as the River Styx.

Dionysios loved his wine and song

and with a drink or two was a friend to all

he did not screech in terror but faced fate audaciously

spitting in his tormentor's eye and cursing brazenly

loud, bold and vulgar, helpless but not afraid.

In a single swift move the Cyclopes snapped in two

a man, a man that was better than most

and ate him in a few ferrous bites.

If hearts are broken over calamity and murder

they are also inflamed to rage over cutting remarks.

As the Cyclopes licked his fingers dripping with blood

he curtly said "delicious, very much like kidneys but

instead of the tang of urine" then paused for dramatic effect

"It was the tang wine vinegar" he then smacked his lips.

Even among harden veterans of war

those who already intimate with senseless slaughter

never before did their blood boil hotter.

Before a single word was spoken

before the Cyclopes staggered to bed, to sleep off breakfast

before another moment passed

Ulysses swore the next act of this play

would be revenge, penned by his very own hand.

VII.

It was not a time for recriminations

it was not a time to say I told you so

The men Ulysses had, had to be braded together

had to joined in lockstep and rank

formed in the line of a Phalanx

they already had a reason to fight

they were all in , to kill the Cyclopes.

The walls of the pen were a mesh of large logs

separated by very small spaces, too small

for even a boy to crawl through.

Inside the pen where only the sheep and the men

and the filth they both create together.

Not much else, truly not much else at all

On the floor, just outside of their stockade wall

there laid, several sharp shards of hard fired clay

This morning's amphoras where of a fine vintage wine

and the ceramic vessels made sturdy and strong.

Damon the fair, lanky and thin reached through the bars

and dragged back in a few pieces sharp and long.

They then had weapons, though not to be ungrateful

they were not very good ones, a sharp edge here or there

does not make a sword or spear.

"Not sword or spear but maybe a tool" Gallus said

"A tool, a tool, to build a mightier device of death"

Gallus, the ship's carpenter began to explain.

Out the minds of many come the best ideas

Ulysses took these treads, he the master at the loom

brought them together into a woven pattern

and discovered they had maybe one chance

where before they really had none.

From their prison walls they found one loose log

long and straight and not that thick around

it was their first stroke of good fortune

the first time the dice had rolled in their favor.

As loose as the log was, it remained only potential

the task at hand took the total effort of all

to the point of exhaustion until the log came free.

Then the work, with the shards of broken pottery

the cold blooded and calculating craftsmanship

of turning ordinary objects into weapons.

The men worked in the quiet determination

fueled by fear and furious rage.

The missing log didn't create much of a gap

it was fitted in between two massive posts

the vacant space, two to three hands wide

far too small for a grown man to pass through

but Damon was a youth not fully filled out

his body was like the spindly spear shaft .

From Damon's mind his thought took voice

"I think I can, I'm sure I can, slip through that breach"

This add an extra dimension to the battle plan

if Damon could get out and open the pen

they could kill the Cyclopes as he sleeps.

The weapon they fashioned was a sharpen stick

that they planned to jam right into his eye.

Any man of war knows the advantage goes

to the side that attacks in an ambush.

There was no way to tell time except by a guess

and they guessed it was almost mid day

for this plan the tide was leaving, they had to hurry

as though they were in a race with Mercury.

VIII.

With the slick and the slime of the disgusting ooze

that lined walls and the floors of their prison

Damon's thin body was slathered thick

until he was as slippery as a frog in pond.

Once in place Damon squeezed part way through

then the others pushed firmly, gently

so not to crack or break the poor boy's ribs.

Halfway in, he was tightly trapped

unable to move or breath, in a gasp he said

"there's no turning back, push without mercy"

and they did, without any regard to Damon's ribs.

There was the smallest movement, the tiniest shift

and in an instant Damon popped out the other side

tumbled to the floor and wheezed for a lungful of air.

Damon smiled in self satisfaction then shared his private joke

"Look close a miracle, you see a man born again".

He was in pain but could stand and walk

Ulysses and his crew thanked the Gods

once again the dice rolled in their favor

but any gambler is aware that luck is limited

and good fortune only visits briefly.

As Damon was prepared to unlock the latch

the Cyclopes awoke hungover and wrathful.

Survival gives men wings when they need them

Damon ran to the nearest sheltered corner

taking the defensive tactics of a kitchen mouse

using his relatively small size to his advantage.

There was cursing and clatter, and almost comedy

as Damon evaded capture and death.

The men cheered Damon on as he darted about

from refuge to refuge though out the cave.

Finally the Cyclopes on hands and knees, was reaching

stretching his arm behind the firewood for Damon

the young man was just barely out of touch.

The Cyclops's back was turned away from the pen

his prostrated position was only an arm's length away.

In a stealthy command of hand gestures

Ulysses signal his men to each take their place

to lift up their weapon like a battering ram

to aim the point out through the best open space

and on a quiet count of three, they ram the spike home

In one forceful thrust together

they ripped the Cyclopes a new one.

Skewered from the stern, impaled through and through

the point emerged from the base of the neck

in a froth of choking, gurgling blood.

The dying monster looked back, his single sad eye

with an expression of pathos and pain

but the captive men had little sympathy to spare.

"Now you know firsthand" said Ulysses said

"Murder like war, so much more difficult

when the tide turns and the other side wins".

Those who have never been in combat

falsely believe that mortal wounds often kill quickly.

When end is so certain, Death seems to takes its time

and strolls over at a leisurely pace to collect next soul.

With justified caution Damon emerged

opened the pen and set everyone free.

And before the light left the eye of the Cyclopes

before darkness and oblivion came to him

Ulysses marched men past the fallen enemy

so the giant's last memory, here on this Earth

where of the faces of the men who defeated him.

IX.

Back to the ship, back to the journey home

The island faded into the horizon and was gone.

Tiro spoke in boastful moment of hindsight

"We should have waited to stick him in the eye".

In a practical and pragmatic insight Pericus replied

"You take your opportunities whenever you can".

But it was Homer that was troubled

"What will the world say Greek men?

That we can only by win by sticking the enemy from behind".

Ulysses laughed " It's more important to survive the day

and worry latter what history might say".

"But what will history say ?" Homer frowned.

"Whatever we want it to, because the Cyclopes isn't talking"

And Ulysses gave Homer that look

that said all that's worth saying has already been said.

But Homer could not leave well enough alone and mused on

"Isn't this a story worth telling?

And if we do tell it, shouldn't be true?

Can any story be valid, if the truth isn't whole?"

Ulysses scratched his beard and the rest of the men leaned in to hear

"The truth is nothing more than a bolt of cloth

people tailor it all the time -to fit their needs

As wool is wool, truth is truth

no matter how you cut it".

"I'm not so sure" said Homer

"But would you mind if I wrote down our exploits?"

"Not at all Homer, suit yourself"

and Ulysses and the crew laughed

as the ship sallied on but no one knew where.