DAZED & CONFUSED

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RAMBLIN' JACK REVISITED

'Later it was a long happy dream of the back yard in Phebe Avenue and Jack Elliott the Singin Cowboy has made a record which is selling a million copies and we're all together in the happy yard, a new house there, at one point there are three thin mattresses on the floor of a cold hut and happily I pick mine out (narrower but thicker) leaving no other choice to the other two guys, Jack & Someone — All forgotten by now, afternoon, saved so I could write "more completely" and this is the sad result.

My mind, the Mind, is too Vast to keep up with.'

Jack Kerouac - Book of Dreams.

[Source: www.ramblinjack.com]

[Above: Jack sketched this on a napkin during our interview. It is to precisely indicate where he went with Jack Kerouac and a girlfriend to see a show at the Cherry Lane Theatre, off Bleeker Street in New York. one time. 'Where they helt hands' he writes.
Notice the compass]

      Hear this interview with Ramblin' Jack on the Audio Generalist

Here is the original Telegraph article using quotes from the interview

Woody, Bob and Me

Who taught Bob Dylan to sing like Woody Guthrie? Ramblin' Jack Elliott.

John May met him

The Telegraph 19 February 2005

Ramblin' Jack Elliott cuts an unmistakeable figure. In the London hotel lobby, he's sporting cowboy boots and hat, check jacket and shirt, bandana and little wire-frame glasses. At 73, he may be feeling less spry than in younger years ("Winter has me feeling like a dead body. Bring on the undertaker," he says) but his eyes twinkle and the songs and stories flow as of old. On Monday, Elliott received a lifetime achievement award at Radio 2's Folk Awards and tomorrow he begins a short UK tour. The world is finally catching up with this most legendary and elusive of cowboy poets.

Last year's best-selling Bob Dylan autobiography, the artful and elliptical Chronicles, recounted how, while a teenager in Minneapolis, Dylan first discovered Woody Guthrie ("It was like the land parted"). Shortly afterwards, he met Ramblin' Jack, who had got there first. He already had Guthrie's style down to a tee, was leaner and meaner, and was beginning to take his music beyond pure mimicry. "I was cast into a sudden hell," wrote Dylan.

The tale of Guthrie the father and his spiritual sons is worthy of a Steinbeck novel. It's the story of two Jewish boys, Elliott Adnopoz and Bob Zimmerman, both from stable, middle-class backgrounds, who changed their names to Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan and left home in pursuit of the roots and spirit of American music – and who met for the first time at Guthrie's bedside.

As a child, Elliott was fascinated by cowboys. In his teens, he ran away from home and joined a rodeo for three months, where he met a rodeo clown named Brahma Rodgers who gave him his first exposure to cowboy and hillbilly music.

Suitably inspired, and having heard his first Woody Guthrie record, Elliott tracked down his hero to 3520 Mermaid Avenue, Coney Island, only to discover that Guthrie was in the hospital, having almost died of acute appendicitis. Bedridden and medicated, Guthrie was not in the best state to receive anyone, says Elliott's biographer Hank Reineke, "much less a strange 19-year-old kid with an unfamiliar face topped off with a cowboy hat and carrying a guitar case".

Elliott ended up moving into the Guthrie family house and began a five-year apprenticeship and friendship: "We'd get up every day about five in the morning. His son Arlo would wake me by throwing toys at me. We'd feed the kids breakfast and Woody would make a fairly tall glass of whisky and soda and I got to drinking some, too. We would play music, tell stories and drink until it was about 12 o'clock, when he would start to get these dizzy spells and he'd lie down and take a nap."

In 1955, Elliott took off to Europe with his new wife June, spending six years there as a "guitar bum" before returning to New York, in January 1961. He immediately went to see Guthrie at Greystone Hospital in New Jersey, where he was to lie incapacitated with Huntington's chorea, the hereditary disease that had killed his mother, until his death in October 1967.

In a spooky echo of his own first meeting with Guthrie, Elliott found that Guthrie already had a visitor: "a kid wearing a funny hat. I thought he was strange, but really interesting – good-looking in an odd sort of way, with a peach-fuzz beard." It was the 19-year-old Bob Dylan. He had arrived, Jack said later, "right on schedule".

Didn't he find that eerie?

"It's fantastic. It's like a movie. That's the way they want it in the movies. Supposedly doesn't happen that way in real life."

Does he remember that moment?

"Bob was there visiting Woody with this great aura of a young man who was full of respect and admiration for this very sad, tragic, pathetic man. Woody was really beginning to show the effects of his disease, to the point where he could barely play the guitar any more. He could still walk and talk, but his speech was very garbled. He was in this horrible place that was like a mental hospital.

"After an hour, we took a bus over to East Orange, New Jersey, and on the way over Bob said [cue Elliott's killer Dylan voice]: `Been listening to some of yer records. I got all six of yer records, Jack. I like yer singing and I like yer style.' He was very shy and muttered and mumbled, which he still does. He perfected the art of mumbling.

"I thought his guitar style was really interesting. It was awfully rough but very good and I could tell by his angle of attack, his attitude and the way he sang that he was going to be great. Other people could see he was imitating me but I couldn't see it at first. I was imitating Woody, and I was helping Bob to learn how to do it."

Jack and Bob hung out for a year or two, even living on the same floor of the same hotel along with rodeo cowboy Peter La Farge for a time. "We were best of friends and I could go on and on about the good times we had at the Gaslight and Gerde's Folk City [Greenwich Village clubs], where the crowds were always rude, noisy and inattentive."

Inevitably, their paths and careers diverged. Jack lost contact when Dylan moved to Woodstock, but in 1975, Dylan invited Jack on the anarchic first leg of The Rolling Thunder Review tour, only to effectively drop him from the second tour of bigger stadiums the following year.

But Jack's affection for Dylan remains undimmed and the spirit of Guthrie lives on in them both. "I thought he paid me a very nice compliment in the book and a lot of other people too," says Elliott. "He sent me a birthday telegram when I was 70, which I got at a party at my manager Roy Roger's house. It said: 'Happy Birthday Jack. This Land Is Your Land. Bob.' It's plagiarism – but who cares."

Read the story behind the interview here

Tom Waits talking about hanging and recording with Ramblin' Jack Elliott

NEW ORLEANS/ALAN TOUSSAINT

Above: A beautiful message and a splendid signature
on the title page of the booklet from the 'Our New Orleans' CD.

Meeting Allen Toussaint at the Brighton Dome last Friday was a rare privilege - particularly post-Katrina. He and the other musicians seemed charged by the tragedy that has hit the Crescent City. 'It was a baptism more than a curse', says Toussaint. We are happy to be able to broadcast our conversation at the Audio Generalist.

Listen up to these two great records: 'Our New Orleans', a benefit album featuring some of the city's greatest artists, and 'The River in Reverse', a brilliant collaboration between Toussaint and Elvis Costello. T & C are touring the album throughout Europe next month. I'm booked in for the Tower of London show.

NEW ORLEANS PRESERVATION BAND

Here is the New Orleans Presservation Band in action at Brighton Dome on 15th June 2007.

Above 5 of the 7: From left: Ben Jaffe (sousaphone); Shannon Powell (drums);John Brunious (trumpet/vocals); Walter Payton (bass); Rickie Monie (Piano)

Left: Ben Jaffe parades through the audience.

Photos: John May

Preservation Hall is on 726 St Peter's Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It was originally built in 1750 as a private residence and has since housed many businesses including a bar during the Civil War and, more recently, as an art gallery, when the owner Larry Bornestein began to hold informal jazz sessions.

Allan Jaffe was a tuba player and main organiser of these events and in 1961 took over the running of the Hall with his wife Sandra. They envisaged it as a sanctuary for original New Orledans jazz - and so it has remained to this day.

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band was also formed at this time and have been playing in various forms ever since. They currently play about 200 dates a year. For periods, there were several bands touring under that name at the same time. Most of the original band members played with pioneer New Orleans musicians Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong.

Ben Jaffe is the son of the founders and John Brunious's father composed many of the songs that the band still plays today.

Hurricane Katrina did not damage Preservation Hall physically. Its stone walls and thick wooden shutters were designed to survive such winds. But their business has suffered due to the downturn in tourism post-Katrina and the band personally have fared less well.
Brunious and Rickie Monie lost their homes. Brunious escaped the city but ending up on the floor of the New Orleans convention centre for four days - 'hungry, thirsty and in constant fear of being attacked by marauding youths', according to an Associated Press report.

You can take a virtual tour of Preservation Hall and find out more about the Band here

AUDIO GENERALIST NEW: JON SAVAGE

Your exclusive chance to listen to a interview with writer Jon Savage on his new book 'Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945, published by Chatto & Windus. This major new work by the author of the fabulous 'England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock' (1991) is throughly investigated in this exclusive recording.

Listen to it here


'Teenage' has been widely reviewed. The best of all of these, to my mind, is 'The Young and the Restless' by Camille Paglia in the New York Times (May 6,2007).











(Above): Jon Savage at the office of Chatto & Windus on June 1st 2007 [Photo/John May]; (Right) Photobooth portrait Spring 1977

Two interesting interviews with Jon Savage appeared in 3:AM Magazine, both conducted by the magazine's Editor-in-Chief Andrew Gallix. The first dates from 2002 and is entitled 'London's Outrage'; the second from May 2007 - 'Juvenilia and Other Delinquences.'

Jon has sold a large quantity of his punk material to the Liverpool John Moores University, who have created the 'England's Dreaming Punk Archive.'

AUDIO GENERALIST NEW: JULIEN TEMPLE

(Below): Julien Temple doing a Q&A session at the Duke of York's in Brighton, May 2007. (Right): Julien Temple in central London, June 1982. Original photo by Adrian Boot.

The Audio Generalist is proud to present an exclusive interview with Julien Temple, director of 'Strummer' the new feature-length documentary on dear Joe. You can hear it here.






[From the detailed research for the interview I would single out these two pieces as being of particular note:
'Joe Strummer: the film' by Stephen Dalton (The Times May 12, 2007). The strapline reads: 'Julien Temple's life uncannily reflected Joe Strummer's. No wonder he has filmed the biography.'
The immaculate punk' by Alexis Petridis (The Guardian, 10 May 2007)

Julien and I had not seen each other since 1982, when I interviewed him for Time Out magazine about his recently cancelled project 'Teenage', made for Granada with Jon Savage and Peter York. (I was, I believe, one of the few outsiders to see it). 'Three big egos in one small video box' is his comment on the episode 25 years later. Here is the original Time Out piece.

CULTURAL CURRENCIES

(Time Out June 11-17, 1982)

At the age of 28 Julian Temple has already made some 30 promotional videos; he has also directed two feature-length films, the Sex Pistols, 'The Great Rock and Roll Swindle' and 'The Secret Policeman's Other Ball'. A graduate of the National Film School and of the somewhat less institutionalised Malcolm McLaren Charm School, Temple is popularly regarded as being in direct contact with the Zeitgeist of modern youth, and was centrally involved in the production of 'Teenage', a TV series on teenage culture made for Granada that has since been shelved.

Temple regards the development of teenage culture since the war as 'an incredibly illuminating window on the historical process in Britain', but ironically believes that teenage, having become obsessed with the trappings of style over content, has ceased to be relevant as a social phenomenon. In other words: Teen­age Is Dead.

'The Sex Pistols were the first people to say that in 1976,' says Temple. 'That's where it comes from. The Sex Pistols said there was no future. Teenage has been very identified as an idea with pop music. I think the whole frontal assault on the Sex Pistols on the notion that that idea is timeless and can go on for ever was the key thing in everyone's development.

'If you went to the Club For Heroes you see 49-year-olds still des­perately trying to be teenagers. If you visit your uncle you see little kids aged four desperately identi­fying with Adam Ant. The kind of spectrum that exists now just makes total nonsense of the defined idea that the years 13 to 19 are anything very special.

'The other thing that rams it home now is the economic situation. In market terms, the people who have money to spend are older people who spend it on their young kids or themselves. The teenage thing has been isolated and age groups either side are actually con­suming more.

'Kids did begin to have a certain spending power in the late 1950s but have now lost it. It's been interest­ing researching the programme, how many of the parents of the kids to­day — who were involved in the first wave of teenage culture in Eng­land — were saying how much better off they were as kids in terms of having a good time, having money to spend and things to do, than the kids of today.'

Temple believes that teenage cul­ture is also linked 'with the absence of a defined left-wing political tradition that is exciting to young people'. This differentiates Britain strongly from countries like Italy and France. Furthermore, over the last 25 years teenage culture has become less and less rebellious: 'The act.of being a Teddy Boy in 1953 was a heroic one compared with being a Nazi SS Guard in 1982.'

The fact that youth today has no understanding of its place in this cultural tradition is what concerns Temple most: 'If they don't under­stand that it's all been done before, that it's the endless recycling and re-exhumation of old ideas, then they won't reject it.'

This rejection, he feels, is impor­tant if youth and its culture are to progress into the modern age. But Temple's version of events not only differs from the official view, it sub­verts it. It is not widely realised to what extent there is an official his­tory of youth, passed down by rote from one writer to another, from one paper to another, endlessly repeated and enshrined, repackaged and resold, and in which large vested interests are at stake.

Temple says: 'It's like a litany. It's based on the received biblical theory of rock & roll that has emphasised the music and icons of guys with guitars for 25 years. It's amazing how it's gone on that long.

'The whole idea of what we were doing (in the TV series) was to re­write that history from the perspec­tive of the thing now being over. Hindsight is a very useful perspective that hasn't really existed until now.

'What is killing any really new development in music is this old car­cass of pretension and art, with NME theorists like barnacles all over the thing. They need to be cut off and music just needs to be like any other creative function in society. You dance to it and enjoy it but you don't have to read Paul Morley's ideas about it anymore.

'The notion of teenage now is a notion of controlling people, packaging people into a loop. It's like joining the army almost. You're fed in, you go round in a loop and every three years the rockabilly style comes up. It's just endlessly repeating itself and stopping people seeing beyond this stupid little whirligig.'

While many of today's pop figureheads have adopted a much more practical modus operandi than that of their predecessors, Temple believes that there's still a disturbing level of pretension in the manner in which they present themselves to the public.

'I didn't like the New Romantic style of music, thinking or videos. They all seemed to go hand in hand. "Let's run up to the attic and get out the dressing-up trunk." Every Ultravox mini-thing was more pre­tentious than the last one and further away from any kind of meaningful statement. It's very pre­dictable in its decadence.

'I just think there's something a bit cleaner and healthier in the kind of one-finger synthesizer music that has replaced it, the Depeche Mode thing or the Human League. It actually seems one step nearer to the end to me, because anyone can do it.

'If you dial a push-button phone you can play your own tune. If you add up your royalties, you're actually writing your next song on your melodic calculator. Very ter­minal exercise but it's fun and less pretentious.'

See previous post: NME: The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Music
This was the first major piece on the first Sex Pistols film, published in late 1979.

THE DEATH OF THE CASSETTE?

News that Curry's - an English chain store business - is to stop stocking cassette tapes has triggered off a global emotional reaction. For many of us tapes hold a particular fascination. Tapes allowed us to copy music, to record our own music, to carry music around. It was key bit of kit that has served musicians well. Cheap and small, it encouraged a DIY appoach to sound. Personally I'm hanging onto my Sharp beatbox and my shoeboxes of tapes. Remember the death of vinyl, widely proclaimed. Now new bands are realeasing on vinyl, old material is being released on heavy-duty top quality vinyl (you can't beat the sound). Analog or MP3. No contest. Sampling an analog wave and then compressing it will inevitably kill the spirit of the sound. Think about it.

The compact cassette

Not long left for cassette tapes
The cassette is facing erasure. Some 40 years after global cassette production began in earnest, sales are in terminal decline.From its creation in the 1960s through to its peak of popularity in the 1980s, the cassette has been a part of music culture for 40 years. But industry experts believe it does not have long left, at least in the West.

Downloads sound the end of cassettes by Joe Best

Why we should mourn the death of the music cassette by Ray Connolly

Currys to cease stocking cassettes:Mix-tape romance wiped out by MP3s and teledildonics by Lewis Page

Currys stops stocking another analogue product: End of the reel for the cassette tape by Amy-Mae Elliott

The end of the reel for cassette tapes by Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Correspondent

End of the reel for cassettes? by James Sturcke

Finally: How to transfer cassette tape to computer

PETER GABRIEL: DIGITAL PAST AND PRESENT

Almost 15 years seperate Peter Gabriel's launch of WE7 his new internet-based music download system from his first multimedia CD-Rom Xplora-1, the subject of an interview I did with him for The Independent (see below)

In 'How artists can earn in a won't pay world' for The Times, he writes eloquently and convincingly about what he sees as the future of music and the music industry, and the thinking that has gone into WE7. I have signed up as a musician (one of the categories). This is the e-mail I received:

The idea behind We7 is to create an opportunity for new bands to reach more potential fans and more importantly get paid for each download.The business model is simple; Fans Get Free Music - Artists Get Paid – Advertisers get Heard. As you have joined us at the very beginning the final commercial models are still being defined but in principle we expect to be able to get between 10-50p per download track from advertisers from which we pay 8% Mechanical fees to the PRS, 2% Bandwidth costs and then share the remainder 50/50 between us and you. However, your music will face the Tastemaker challenge and the We7 community will have the eventual decision on what bands/artists get generically published and hence make money.We have just gone live with our early demo site, ahead of creating our social network site to be launched in the early summer. By then we will have more automated mechanisms for you to download music and Meta data to be published.We will also have a community site widget that you will be able to add to Social Network sites, your own sites or your fans sites and every track downloaded will have a potential payment.

I'll be checking it out!

The revenge of the talking head

CD-Rom: one day all records will be made this way. And Peter Gabriel is already off the mark with Xplora 1. John May talks to him

[The Independent. 9 December 1993]

Peter Gabriel is at it again, transmuting himself into another medium, exploring yet another technical frontier. Fifteen year ago he began thinking of himself as an experience designer. Now it’s be­ginning to come into focus. The possible pretentiousness of that title is offset by his work in progress: the theme park ride, the multimedia CD-Rom disc and the Future Park in Barcelona.

We are drinking tea in a peaceful dining room in one of the creamy stone houses that make up his Real World complex in Box, set in the Wiltshire vales. Gabriel has grown a small moustache and beard around his month and chin. He wears an oversize patterned shirt and speaks softly.

"My dad came up with the first fibre-optic wired cable TV system in the world, with an Italian. It was for Rediffusion in this country, Had a prototype in Hastings. 1 grew up listening to him trying to cham­pion home shopping, pay-TV, electronic democracy. This was his battle, for this wondrous means of communication."

The main topic of our conversation is the new Real World product: one of the first interactive multime­dia CD-Rom discs issued by a major musician/artist. (Todd Rundgren is the other front-runner.)

In a year’s time that won't need explanation but right now this is what it is and what you get. CD-Rom discs look like compact discs, but they hold a vast amount of data, not just words but also video, stills and animation, all which are linked together in something that multimedia designers call, delightfully, an "entity model". You view them on your computer or on one of the new multiplayers linked to your television, like Phillips CD-I.

The disc divides into four sections: ‘US’, ‘Real World’, ‘Behind the Scenes’ and ‘Personal File’. Each of them are represented by an icon you can activate. Inside ‘US’ is all the artwork from the album, much of it animated, plus video clips and music. ‘Real World’ allows you to examine and listen to the entire Real World catalogue; to investigate and play some of the instruments used; to visit the Real World studios and see work in progress. You can remix one of Gabriel’s tracks by moving the levels on an on-screen mixer.

‘Behind the Scenes’ offers a map of the Womad concert site which you can explore. ‘Personal File’ is a suitcase full of Gabriel’s past, including his family photo album (click on the photos and they come alive as super-8 home movies and his Eternal Passport (open it by clicking on the cover and you bsee his animated passport photo endlessly cycle from baby to old man to skull and back). Gabrfiel is your guide on the side to all this, perched angelically as a little talking icon in the top corner of the screen.

Compared with a number of other multimedia discs, it’s fair to say that this one sets a very high standard. What is particularly pleasing is the design and colours. The use of natural textures for the background screen, like the sky and water, is extremely restful on the eye. There are lots of little tricks (a dinosaur wanders unexpectedly across the top of the screen) and care and attention to detail are obvious at every level. Only Apple users will be able to sample its delights at present but PC versions will follow.

The disc, called Xplora-1 (like a Martian space probe) contains, we are told, 100 minutes of video, more than 30 minutes of au­dio, over 100 full-colour photographic images and the equivalent of a book’s worth of text – 600 megabytes of data.

The project, which from conception to birth occupied 40 people for at least a year, originated with Steve Nelson of the appropriately named Brilliant Media, a San Francisco-based multimedia company. Gabriel, one of the life’s natural multimedia men, took to it instantly.

"I ended up, fortuitously, at an AT&T planning conference [in 1986]. I got onto this thing called Global Business Network who advise corporations on their future. They throw in odd people - like they had an anthropologist looking at the design for Nissan cars. They were talking about laying the in­formation highways using fibre optics. My opinion was that, if you put it down, the traffic will come.

His techno-frontier attitude goes down well in the US: "People believe its possible over there. They get excited, they support it, run with it and hope some of the magic will rub off on them. Here we sit back like a bunch of cynics.”

He recognises that his new project is just scratching the surface of a whole new medium and his Real World multimedia company is now aiming to have a dozen projects up and running within the next year.

"The role of the artist is changing in a sense that there's always been a linear route through a work of art before, and now we are providing an environment which may contain a linear route, but which is also a playground for people to go off and explore for themselves. So you can produce a finished piece of work and also collage kits. People may explore your forest or they may take your tree and put them in a dome.

“In the same way that we have a dictionary in our heads which provides with the tools for our communication though language, our kids or their kids will grow up with some kind of multimedia hieroglyphic capability.”

Interactive multimedia will, Gabriel believes, “fine a huge place in the markets the same as videos did”. And maybe he should know - he was in the forefront of that development too.
“What is possible is affected very much by what is believed to be possible," he says. Peter Gabriel, experience designer, is just warming up for the next Big Show.

FOOTNOTES:

According to Peter Gabriel's Wikipedia entry, Xplora-1 can no longer be played on modern PCs, due to changes to their operating systems.

The Barcelona Future Park, a collaboration with Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson never got off the ground.

Peter Gabriel's Home Page

DEATH OF URBAN TREES

Congrats to The Guardian for publishing an excellent G2 cover feature by Patrick Barkham raising serious alarm about the situation of urban trees. According to Barkham, an inquiry by the GLA will report next month on what it calls the "chainsaw massacre" of the capital's seven million trees.

Trees are battered by lorries, underminded by utility companies, threatened by new development and by health and safety legislation that make home owners and councils alike nervous about any mature tree that just might shed a limb at the wrong time. The insurance industry is blamed for making subsidence such a big peril in home owner's minds and both parties find it easiest to blame street trees.

This is a story that I know well enough, having spent five years editing Tree News magazine, during which time we must have had hundreds of desperate people calling on us to try and help them stop their favourite local tree (or trees) being cut down for no good reason. Such was the level of concern that we realised this was a national issue of great importance and covered the subject intensely. We also got directly involved in several major campaigns - winning some, losing others.

Campaigning to save a tree is a desperate and emotionally charged business; you wake up in the middle of the night, exhausted, wondering how much longer you can keep up the fight, and knowing that you are now responsible for whether the tree lives or dies.

You can still find the article I did on Network Rail, who were carrying out a nationwide cull
of mature trees near the tracks in order to deal with the 'leaves on the line' issue. Churchyards have had their trees demiated despite the guidance laid down by the Church of England which encourages their preservation of God's little acre. Everywhere it seems, our treescape is being damaged at the same time that we are all being encouraged to plant new trees. But its the older ones that we need to look after.

Successive governments have been very slow to recognise the problem and the existing tree campaigning groups are not set up to really tackle the problem either - because they don't have the resources or the inclination. The Ancient Tree Forum will help if they can to bolster a local campaign if the tree falls inside their remit and their site gives some useful background information.

But most tree issues are fought by lone and local campaigners for whom, at present, there is no proper advice and back-up to support their efforts. In my view it really needs a new web-based organisation who can both monitor the scale of the problem and provide the legal and media advice necessary for a successful outcome.

Sometimes trees do have to be removed because they genuinely do pose a danger but far too many are disappearing because of the percieved rather than real threat they pose. Councils would do well to check the legal precedents: as long as it can be demonstrated that a tree has been under active management, the council is legally protected if branch drop should crush a car or hurt a child.

In many councils, the care of trees is a minor issue. The Tree Officers are often trying to manage a huge area with limited resources and trees are a minor consideration when it comes to planning matters.

We urgently need to maintain our urban trees which add such value to urban life. All political parties should give this issue a much higher priority. By all means pour money into tree-planting schemes (and aftercare) but maintaining our mature trees is of equal if not greater importance.



'Urban Eden' lobby group fights to save CMK's trees (Milton Keynes Citizen 4 April 2007)
Planners blazing a trail for expansion are taking out city centre trees like a hurricane through a pine forest, according to critics. New lobby group Urban Eden is claiming something in the order of 4,000 trees in Central Milton Keynes alone are endangered through schemes to overhaul boulevards and make them more bus friendly. Many had already gone. Its mapping of the alleged devastation, supplied exclusively to the Citizen, makes a tally of more than 1,300 trees already axed, 750 with planning permission for felling, some 2,200 at "strong potential risk" and a further 280 in town squares at "serious risk".

'Those who walk under trees are at risk from these terrorising inspectors.' Simon Jenkins. (The Guardian November 17, 2006)

Farewell to the leafy suburb (The Telegraph. 23/10/2004). Insurance companies pay out millions every year to settle subsidence claims. What they want, increasingly, is to cut the prime offenders down to size. Bad news for trees, says Sarah Lonsdale

SEE ALSO:
'Why Tianeman Square could go from red to green' (The Guardian).
[See architect's concept (right)]

'A plan takes root: City to plant more than 100,000 trees' (Boston Globe)

SPACE BUBBLE

Have just been exploring the NASA photo archives. More delights to come.

'Even bubbles are more interesting in space. Here, a water bubble floats freely on the International Space Station, showing an image of Expedition 10 Commander Leroy Chiao. Chiao's picture is upside down because light is refracted, or bent, as it passes from one medium to another -- in this case, air to water. The same effect produces rainbows when light passes through raindrops in the air.'

Credit: NASA

GREENING THE IT INDUSTRY

Interesting benchmarks this week on the state of play of the greening of the IT industry.

According to ‘Industry must clean up its act’ by Sarah Arnott and Tom Young, Computing (03 May 2007), the IT industry contributes two per cent of all damaging carbon emissions putting the industry on a par with the aviation sector, according to the analyst Gartner. The two per cent figure includes both computer usage and the energy used to design, manufacture and distribute products and is considered a conservative estimate. But experts say IT also has more potential for speedy improvement than industries such as transport and manufacturing.

This week also Steve Jobs, stung by various criticisms about Apple’s environment policies, published a comprehensive rebuttal to criticisms of his company. See: ‘A Greener Apple.’ Jobs was responding to the Greenpeace's 'Green My Apple' campaign that had been lobbying the company to change their ways.

In September 2006, Greenpeace published a "Guide to Greener Electronics," rating fourteen consumer electronics vendors and issued a press release that specifically called attention to Apple and assigned the company a failing grade. Not everyone agreed with its findings.

See: 'Top Secret: Greenpeace Report Misleading and Incompetent' on the blog Roughly Drafted. See also 'More Secrets: The Scandal of Green Computing' and Myth 2: Greenpeace Toxic Apple Panic

Greenpeace had earlier published a report "Cutting Edge Contamination — A Study of Environmental Pollution During the Manufacture of Electronic Products" (8 February 2007), which highlights environmental contamination resulting from the manufacture of electronic equipment such as computers.

According to an analysis by Gartner, ‘Greenpeace Report a Wake-Up Call for the IT Industry’ by Simon Mingay (13 February 2007): ‘The IT industry will increasingly face investigations from environmental pressure groups, specifically related to chemical contamination, greenhouse gas emissions (mostly related to power consumption throughout a product's life cycle, including manufacture and distribution) and "profligate" use of nonrenewable resources. Investors will also want proof of the industry's environmental credentials.’

He concludes: ‘We believe there will be dramatic changes in 2007 and 2008 in enterprises' attitudes toward the environmental impact of IT (especially outside the U.S.), which will be reflected in buying criteria. The catalyst for these changes will be concerns about climate change.’

2 Jan 2007: The EC Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE Directive) came into force in the UK. It aims to minimise the impact of electrical and electronic goods on the environment, by increasing re-use and recycling and reducing the amount of WEEE going to landfill. It seeks to achieve this by making producers responsible for financing the collection, treatment, and recovery of waste electrical equipment, and by obliging distributors to allow consumers to return their waste equipment free of charge.

24 August 2006, Computing launched a Green Computing Charter to help to reduce IT operating costs and benefit the environment

VANITY FAIR GOES GREEN

A lot of people are confused by Vanity Fair - as in where on earth is it coming from? As a long-time regular reader I would say it is celebrity-drenched and focused - sometimes sickeningly so - but this is combined with some of the best investigative journalism around, funded to the max. Its an odd mixture but it works for me, although generally the magazine is not quite as sharp as it used to be. It does have an exemplary record for challenging George Bush and has consistently exposed major issues to do with Iraq and the War on Terror. It makes virtually all UK magazines look rather paltry and underfed, rather limited and timid, by comparison.

This second annual Green Issue is, by any standards, a winner. Get up to date with some key global issues - there are hours of important reading here and all are backed up with lots of links and further research on their excellent website. A thorough and important job. I thought it was worth examining in detail.

Right from the off: the cover is a photomontage. Leo was photographed by Annie Liebovitz on a glacier in Iceland; the bear (named Knut and born in captivity) in Berlin Zoo.

[Worth checking out the latest Canadian controversy, documented in this story in the Christian Science Monitor, which challenges whether polar bears are as endangered as is being made out by WWF, who claim that because of global warming, the bears could be extinct by the turn of the century]

(This 240pp-glossy mag obviously generates its own carbon footprint. They explain inside that they worked with The CarbonNeutral Company to 'offset' that. Of course, the whole concept of 'offsetting' is a thorny one).

Leonardo Dicaprio is following Al Gore's lead and has directed and produced a documentary 'The Eleventh Hour' that that will have its premiere at this year's Cannes Film Festival.


James Wolcott weighs into Rush Limbaugh - one of the world's foremost global warming scoffers. Wolcott is a style king with a sting like a viper, a pair of teeth like a wolverine and a knack for incendiary phrase-making. He wades into Limbaugh, shreds any credibility he might have, and paws over the entrails. Rush, he says: 'has injected millions of semi-vacant American skulls with a cream filling of complacency that has helped thrust this country into the forefront of backward leadership.'

In 'A Convenient Untruth', Michael Shnayerson does the same effective job - in a more restrained and forensic manner - on Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organisation that was given more than $2m by ExxonMobil (1998-2005); during this same period, ExxonMobil spent a reported $16m in total, funding climate change studies at some three dozen institutes. VF trailer the story: ' For the obligatory "opposing" view on climate change, the media often turn to Myron Ebell, policy analyst, sound-bite artist and oil-industry mouthpiece. While mainstream experts see global warming as a major crisis, the hotter it gets, the better Ebell likes it.' This piece effectively shreds and exposes Ebell's tarnished position.

'The Rise of Big Water' by Charles C. Mann is a genuinely disturbing piece on the state of the world's freshwater and how a small number of companies are taking over the ownership of municipal water systems around the globe. The world's top three water companies are all European -Veolia, Suez and Thames Water (now owned by a consortium headed by Macquarie, Australia's biggest investment). According to the UN, by 2000, governments in 93 nations had begun to privatise their drinking-water and wastewater service. Mann reports first-hand from China where the situation is already looking desperate. This issue is going to hit us a long time before global warming; as it is, one person out of every three on the planet lacks reliable access to fresh water.

'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Throne' by Michael Shnayerson claims that Prince Charles is now an environmental hero. This obviously plays in America but not over here. Nuff said.

'An Eco-System of One's Own' by Alex Shyoumatoff 'explores the global impact of the average American routine. Sidebars highlight four seminal climate-change reports and looks at Food Labelling.

'Jungle Law' by William Langewiesche: 'In a forsaken little town in the Ecuadorian Amazon, an overgrown oil camp called Lago Agrio, the giant Chevron Corporation has been maneuvered into a makeshift courtroom and is being sued to answer for conditions in 1,700 miles of rain forest said by environmentalists to be one of the world's most contaminated industrial sites.' [The piece runs over 17 pages !! Can you imagine a British magazine doing that!]

In a complementary piece - 'The Gasping Forest' - Alex Shoumatoff spends four weeks travelling across the Amazon, from the Andes to the Atlantic coast, and discovers that a combination of global warming and deforestation are dehydrating the Amazon basin. There always have been drought periods in the past but there used to be time for the forest to recover. Now the droughts are coming hard and fast. Noone is sure exactly where the tipping point is but one computer model has the Amazon completing the transformation to savanna by 2080.

Finally 'Quiet Thunder', by Michael Shnayerson profiles Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of PayPal, the man with a NASA contract for the next space shuttle, who is now funding the first new major car company for America for decades, in Silicon Valley. They are building the world's first high-performance electric sports car - the $92,000 Tesla - which can go from 0 to 60 in four seconds. It runs on lithium ion batteries and takes 3.5 hours for a complete recharge. The company is aiming to scale up its operations and be a producing a$30,000 mass-market car by 2010. Musk believes this is the beginning of the end of the internal combustion engine.

See: VF: The Green Issue

"Mitigation of Climate Change", the third volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, will be launched in Bangkok tomorrow. It will claim that there is now 90% certainty (up from 66% from the last 2001 report) that it is "very likely" that human are the cause of climate change.

'What the report's authors (some 600 scientists) are absolutely certain of is that the world's climate is changing in a very significant way and will continue to do so in the forseaable future.' [Adam Spangler/Vanity Fair]

VONNEGUT RIP

KURT VONNEGUT (1922-2007)


A Roy Knipe illustration, first published in 'An Index of Possibilities' (Wildwood House. 1974)
to accompany an extract from an interview he did with Playboy magazine, in which he talks about going to see the last moon shot. He said: 'It's a tremendous space fuck, and there's some kind of conspiracy to suppress that fact.' The original of the illustration was bought by his wife Jill Krementz as a present for Vonnegut. [Thanks to Roy for giving us permission to use it]

Last Friday, Mark Vonnegut, a paedatrician named by his father after Mark Twain, delivered the speech his father had planned to give at Butler University in Indianapolis as part of The Year of Vonnegut celebrations, consisting of a wide range of events including readings and forums intended to encourage people to visit libraries. The last sentence olf the speech was: "I thank you for your attention, and I‘m outta here." Mayor Bart Peterson presented Vonnegut‘s widow, Jill Krementz, a proclamation designating April 27th as Kurt Vonnegut Day in Indianapolis. Vonnegut's affluent German-American ancestors played a key role in the city‘s early development, and his paternal grandfather was a prominent architect who designed several Indianapolis landmarks.

Obituary: New York Times

Works by Kurt Vonnegut:Player Piano (1951), The Sirens of Titan (1959), Canary in a Cat House (1961), Mother Night (1961), Cat's Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965), Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Happy Birthday, Wanda June [play] (1971), Between Time and Timbuktu [TV script] (1972), Breakfast of Champions (1973), Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974), Slapstick (1976), Jailbird (1979), Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage [essays] (1981), Deadeye Dick (1982), Galapagos (1985), Bluebeard (1987), Hocus Pocus (1990), Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s [essays] (1991), Timequake (1997), A Man Without a Country [essays] (2005).

See: Wikipedia and The Vonnegut Web

Audio interviews: Wired for Books and Kurt Vonnegut Judges Modern Society

You Tube videos

Kurt Vonnegut: Me, Myself and I: An edited version of the interview he gave to 'The Paris Review'.

57 LAST SATURDAY

NEW CULTURE: THE RETURN OF THE 7-INCH SINGLE

NEW CULTURE: MONOCLE MAGAZINE

This is a rare bird, purchased at Lewes station newsagents: a genuinely original and almost eccentric magazine/journal both in format, style, design and intention. The brainchild of the splendidly named Tyler Brûlé (surely the invention of a master chef or Tom Wolfe), there is obviously a lot of money behind it: HQ in central London, bureaux in Tokyo, New York and Zurich. There is an impressive and tres sophistique website, sponsored by Rolex. Here can be found the concepts and history underpinning Monocle. 'We believe its time, ' they say, 'for a new, global, European-based media brand.'

The sections of the magazine, they describe as follows: Affairs A global mix of reportage, essays and interviews with the forces shaping geopolitics; Business Devoted to identifying opportunities and inspiring the reader; Culture With a tight group of opinionated columnists, reviewers and interviewers, it devlivers the best in film, television, music media and art; Design Bypassing hype, design is dedicated to unearthing emerging and establishing talent; Edits Bite-sized and thought provoking, Edits are vital life improvements curated in a fast-paced well-researched collection.

I love the language -breezy with a twist, written by men in aeroplanes, alternately gazing into the cool blue screen of their HD laptops and looking down on the European landscape below, eager to spot new opportunities, new excitements. Constantly arriving at foreign cities for swift meets with men who are designing the future.

The quirks of the magazine (Issue 3) are as follows: 1) the cover story 'Pedal Politics: A global Survey of bicycle culture and commerce' is composed of a number of pieces scattered throughout the magazine which you have to search for. The page signage doesn't take you from one to the other, and there are a bewildering number of cute little icons and logos to confuse things further. 2) Most of the 178 main pages of the mag are printed on a feely matt paper, except for pp163-178 which are on a glossier paper. This whole section is an account of a flight made from Tehran to Caracas, an eccentric route initiated as a gesture of contact between the leaders of the two countries concerned, who got on well together it says. This story sets you up well but never really catches fire. The photos are bland. 3) Separately bound into the magazine is a 24pp manga comic - 'Kita Koga' (Story and art by Takanori Yasaka) which one reads, in Japanese; the back cover is the front, the story reads from top right to bottom left. Great idea but the contents is a bit weak.

I scanned every page of Monocle and read a high percentage of it. I also made notes of things that I learnt: 1) Gronigen is the World Cycling City - it has 150,000 residents and 300,000 bikes. 2) There were 500m cyclists in China until a decade ago but bike ownership has fallen 25% in the last five years; car ownership increased 20% last year alone to 22m 3) The highest car ownership in the world is in Liechtenstein (718 per 1,000 head of population) whilst Nigeria, oen of the world's largest oil-producingt nations has only 2 per 1,000. New Zealanders only take 2% of their journeys by bus and 1% by rail. Car ownership there is 655 per 1,000. 4) Less than 4% of the world's air traffic is in Africa but one-third of the world's air disasters happen there. 5) There is a sushi boom in Moscow 6) At the biggest ice cream trade fair in the world, they were selling cuttlefish ice cream and gorgonzola ice cream with prune sauce. 7) TOTO build the world's most intelligent toilet - The Washlet - which will, amongst other things, wash your bottom and even blowdry it to the sound of music. 8) The world's largest bicycle firm is Giant in Taiwan, run by 73-year old Mr Lin, whose dream it is to make Taiwan a cycling island 9) The best bikes in the world are made in the Nordic countries and Japan. 10) There is a good-looking music shop in New York called Other Music and a great mag shop in Lisbon called Tema.

Monocle feels good, is easy to read, entertaining and fresh. Worth £5.00. Issue 4 is out in a few days.

[Footnote: I bought a great magazine in Lisbon once, a special issue of 'American Photographer' on Cartier-Bresson, which helped keep me together during a flight through a thunderstorm on our way to Orly.]

BEAT BOOKS 2

Following on from my post about the discovery a rare signed copy of a book by beat poet Jack Micheline in a Lewes second-hand bookshop ( see
Jack Micheline: Beat Writer), the Beat Library was further enhanced by the gift of two great books, purchased in a second-hand bookshop in Castlemaine, in Victoria's Gold Rush region by friend and poet Lin Heyworth. [For new poem by her, see end of this post]



The Ginsberg book by ex-Fug Ed Sanders (published by the Overlook Press in Woodstock) in 2000) is a book-length poetic narrative (in Ginsberg's style), recounting the poet's life and times. Sanders writes: 'The life of Allen Ginsberg was very complicated, so 'The Poetry & Life of Allen Ginsberg' is really a kind of pathway through the Forest Ginsberg.'

It really is a wonderful book, and ideal prelude to reading the two major biographies - 'Ginsberg' by Barry Miles and 'Dharma Lion' by Michael Schumacher - and engaging with the poetry itself. A truly remarkable man. Sanders has also produced '1968: A History in Verse' and one volume of 'America: A History in Verse' which I shall report back on.

See Previous Post: My article on Ginsberg - A Prophet on the Electric Networks - based on the interview I did with him in Miles' flat in London on April 25th 1985.

The copy of Book of Dreams is a 1973 seventh printing of the City Lights edition first published in 1961. It features a wonderfully atmospheric cover photo by the legendary photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank.

[Kerouac wrote an introductory essay for Frank's wonderful book of black and white photography 'The Americans.' This was originally published in 1959 by Robert Delpire in Paris and Grove Press in New York. There was a 1968 Museum of Modern Art edition published by Aperture Press, which is in the Beat Library alongside the more recent reprint from Cornerhouse Publications in Manchester (1993)]

It was while Jack was working in North Carolina at the Rocky Mount Textile Mill that he began the dream notebooks that form this book. They were typed up when he was living with his mother (Memere) in Richmond Hill. Jack saw his dreams as another extension of spontaneous writing, almost automatic writing.

He wrote: 'The style of a person half awake from sleep and ripping it out in pencil by the bed, yes pencil, what a job! bleary eyes, insaned mind bemused and mystified by sleep, details that pop out even as you write them you don't know what they mean, till you wake up, have coffee, look at it, and see the logic of dreams in dream language itself, see?' (JK to Al Aronowitz in the New York Post (10.3.59)

Barry Miles devotes a couple of pages (pp 236-237) of his excellent Kerouac bio ('Jack Kerouac: King of The Beats' [Virgin Books. 2002]) to discussing 'Book of Dreams' and warning against snap judgments, quoting Freud as to the dangers of analysing dreams without knowing the context in which the dreams occured. The book contains many of the characters from his novels in bizarre situations, such characters all being based on people he knows with nom de plumes. Thus the real-life Neal Cassady appears in 'On the Road' as Dean Moriarty and in this book as Cody Pomeray.

In Kerouac's own foreword he writes '...the fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together shall we say in one unspoken Union and also proves that the world is really transcendental...'

*

The Moolort Plains: Victoria Australia 2007

And the sky opens up
Domes out egg blue
Into the delicate horizon
Possessed by an egg.

And the clouds rear
And buckle on its edge
And make no inroads

The spare and bony land
Beneath unfurls its map
A landscape barely written on
All scribbled over with spindly trees

And the heat beats in on the plains

The great grey stone slabbed ruins
Stand square and hollow eyed
In the face of - nothing

Once I saw a harvest moon
Rise over these hushed plains
To create its own comic universe
In denial of the living

The blank empty enormity of it all
reeled beneath

Lin Heyworth

Previous Posting: A Journalist's Death of Socrates by Lin Heyworth