Thursday, March 15, 2007

Every Lightsaber Battle Must Advance the Story

That’s the by God honest American grassroots values open wide baby bird mama’s got a big fat nightcrawler truth. The fo shizzle drizzle viscous meniscus snakes on a plane hibiscus 360 turn-around Mozilla vs. Megalon great mother of all bombs fact. The pantssplitting herniated ulcerous growth globular tenth planet pustule cut-and-run axiom of all evil.

If you don’t believe me, you can hear it along with lots of other mantras at The Mantra Trailer. Scroll down to where you see it as only the second installment of the many accumulating mantras.

If you still don't believe me, check out the Big Shed Audio podcast interview with artist Sherri Wood, creator of The Mantra Trailer. (Sherri is also fiber artist who makes improvisational and passage quilts, and work that playfully explores the feminine ideal.)

And if you still don't believe me, you can hear it at the end of this interview with Sherri on WUNC's The State of Things.

If you still harbor some shred of doubt that every lightsaber battle must advance the story, hear it as it was incorporated into a piece about the MacDowell Art Colony by Art Silverman for NPR. On that page, click “Listen” at the top. Or read it. But it’s better to listen.

Why take it that far?

Because every mutherfucking lightsaber battle must advance the mutherfucking story, that’s why.

Continue . . .

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

At the Contra Dance, Don’t Be a Sandinista

You’re trying to understand what the caller just said. “Hay?” Some tall sweaty guy with a band about his brow slaps his own shoulder and points sternly. Ah, you see that you should pass him on that side, thank you very much. He’s a coder by day, moved up in the world because he can find the no-frills cheap solutions, the quickest way out, get in the car, we have to go. You were just now headed there, your arms full of stuffed animals and little trucks you absolutely have to take with you on a long trip, that you just spent too long looking for under the bed and in the rec room, and the car door has been opened for you, but you’re not moving fast enough for Dad and he shoves you from behind and says, “Now look up the line.”

Confused, you look at him instead. What’s the line, and which way is “up”? He doesn’t understand that you've memorized about 130 moves of a silver level American ballroom syllabus. You know “diagonal wall,” “diagonal center,” “counter body movement,” “outside partner,” “backing line of dance.” You don’t need to take this from him.

He has broken rhythm, left his partner waiting, to point the way for you ‘cause apparently you look like you need it. “Look up the line.” Oh yes, he meant, look for the next partner because she’s coming and are you ready for her?

They have said to look into your partner’s eyes to keep from getting dizzy. She’s smiling, she’s looking into yours. You try it, and the world behind her head whirls in your peripheral vision, makes your eyeballs ache, and you must look away. Don’t they know, you look to distant spots, hold your vision on them before snapping to the next one. Don’t look at your partner, she’ll make you sick.

You know how to back-spot-turn in one beat, get your partner around and you’re finished, waiting for the others to catch up for the remaining 3 beats. But here they’re all skipping around each other faster still and more leisurely, swinging by linked elbows, looking into each other’s eyes, and arriving at the right time. It’s wrong, and they’re happy.

Here come the next eyes, a pair you had spied across the room earlier, smiling at someone else you presumed was her boyfriend. Now she’s inches away, smiling at you. Can you trust those eyes and let the world whirl where it may?

Continue . . .

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Après les Dorks

I said to Friend "X" the other day, maybe it’s just me, but my feeling on indy rock bands is that they draw the wrong inspiration from Led Zeppelin. They got the part about burdensome accents on the beats, distortion, and dull repetition, and missed the part about burdensome accents off the beats, fluid bluesy technique, distinctive melody, and singing your ass off.

Friend "X" confirmed: It is just me.

Spurred by a need to reassess, I took my judgmental ass and Housemate "D" over to Dorkfest 2 last Saturday night for a sampling of the current scene. It turned out to be a like old home week for us longtime Durham folks. Rockin’ Robin was in the parking lot, just leaving, heading over to some new club across from the Durham County Health Department with one of those trade union names (“Local 306,” or “Formula 409,” or whatever) where, she said, one of the two bands in town worth hearing was playing. (The other was Bombadil playing at Dorkfest later in the night, and she would be back for that. All I could do was roll my eyes at the Tolkien reference. What a bunch of dorks.)

Inside,Clang Quartet was wearing his hood, warming up with his noise making electronics and his metal contraptions. A former student of mine was videotaping him, and we spoke briefly. Student "C" said he was making a documentary about Clang. I thought this was interesting, since part of my reason for coming that night was because I had seen another documentary about Clang years ago, Armor of God. I could not imagine what more could be done in a new documentary about Clang, but I kept my council. Student "C" is taking classes to become an underwater welder, one of the highest paying, and the most dangerous, professions. After 5 years of that work, he says, he can retire and start making movies. What another dork.

I ran into Friend "B" whom I normally only see when out-of-towners are visiting. He remarked, “You’re here, and it’s not even a wedding!” He turned to his friend and said of me, “You know that house I keep talking about being ‘The House?’ Well, he still lives there.” I introduced Housemate "D," and Friend "B" said to him, “what number are you? Number 37?” I had to explain to Housemate "D" that I recently had made a list by rooms of the names of all the housemates I had had in this current house. The number of housemates at that time was about 34. So really, by now, Housemate "D" would be higher than 37. Seems like there’s always somebody deciding to leave.

After Clang, another band took to the stage, played a warm-up song, and asked the audience if their levels were okay. I was reminded of a recent weekend when I worked on a low-budget movie, and the director kept asking the collective crew, loudly, during setups, if we thought the script was okay. We remained bent to our tasks and did not answer her. Finally the director of photography said, “Aw, don’t ask them.” That’s right. We’re just here for the yuks. You don’t want to know what we think. At Dorkfest 2 that night, most of us were wearing ear plugs. Any band could have cut back the volume a little, saved a little energy, sent less money to terrorism. But no. Like the Mackie mixer manuals say, “they always want it turned up.”

Idiom Savant fell up in there, wryly representin’. I’ll never forget the time when we were at Tift Merritt and she encouraged the audience to be less tame. I find it hard to "let go" in any respect when urged to do so, so I looked to Idiom, who was standing next to me, for guidance. He shrugged and muttered, “I’m doing the best I can. I’m slouching.”

Archer Pelican, who took the picture to promote Dorkfest, did a bait and switch on us. He did not show up. It’s like, he took the picture, sent us all there, then went somewhere else, like maybe the park or the lake or something, which was extra-tranquil that night ‘cause we were at Dorkfest.

Véronique Diabolique did it’s best to understand our American concept of “dork.” Normally these are the folks that put the “thick” in “gothic,” but this night, they were chillin’ with relatively minimal makeup. They’ll give us the goth again in their own time, but that night, there was no need to prove anything. Or maybe there is a crack in their otherwise eternal aura of mourning for their missing family members. I’ve always marveled at how these remaining members of the Diabolique family, when they decided to channel their sense loss and become a goth band, knew exactly what to do. They didn’t just smear on the eye shadow and feign sickness to stay home from school. Each became something very specific: Angry Goth (Solange), Voldo-Him Goth (Jean-Luc), Mime Goth (Didier), and Gallery Owner Goth (Dominique). It’s like, they put on the makeup and found themselves.

After Véronique's set, a woman came up to where Idiom, myself, and some other friends were standing. She said she was doing a documentary on Véronique Diabolique, and could we offer comments?

Another documentarian! Or should I say, "dork-umentarian," since, after a little probing, she revealed that she used to earn a living doing henna tattoos at Renaissance Faires. Nowadays she is a protégé of another former student of mine who teaches audio documentary work at the Center for Documentary Studies. Idiom and I also know the director of the Center. Having established our back-channel ties to her superiors, we were ready to entertain her questions.

I said that it was interesting that Véronique had appeared without much makeup, like John Mellencamp without his “Cougar.” Idiom said that they were the Citizen Kane of French goth bands. We talked about how all this gothism could be traced back to the legendary Halloween parties that Jean-Luc had held when he lived at the house that I have continued to live in, with 37+ others. Nowadays, I said, the partying is up to the grad student housemates who just get a keg, strap on a mask, and call it “art.”

The documentarian asked if Véronique had started back in our house, and we said no, back in those days, it was a band with the name that was really just a sound, "Blll." But another band alive and very well today, Trailer Bride, did give one of their first performances in our basement and pretty much cleared the place out. One audience member, the future wife of Jean-Luc, felt compelled to stay and listen, just because it seemed like someone should. Nowadays though, it is Trailer Bride who is gracefully tolerating us and our banal adoration.

And remember the time when Jean-Luc had the rubber suit for dressing up as The Crow at parties? He discovered the trick to removing the suit after it had become bound to one's own skin by a monolayer of sweat accumulated over a night of techo-dancing: get in the shower, peel back a top edge of rubber, and let the water fill the suit. Then you can step out of it.

Idiom said that French is the universal language of rock and roll, and we agreed that French is just like English but with the distortion turned up. Turn it up farther, and you get to German, farther still and you get to Arabic.

I was moved to tell a story about one time when I tried to speak French. I was walking down a sidewalk in Marrakech with a savvy traveling companion, and this white woman walking in front of us dropped her scrunchie without realizing it. We got to the scrunchie and I picked it up and thought maybe I should be helpful in this strange land, you know, cause I was so often the one needing help. So I opened my mouth to call to her, and had to think real fast, what should I say?

“Mademoiselle,” I said, and she paused for a moment, probably asking herself if she had really heard what she thought she heard, this word spoken so ineptly, in this country where anyone can be understood in his own native language. She turned, and I could not bring myself to say any more. I just held the scrunchie out to her, and she took it. My companion remarked at what an American accent I had, and I said, “What the fuck kind of accent am I supposed to have?”

The documentarian stood there with her recorder pointed at me, expecting my point to follow. Outside, dork clouds were gathering; a flock was coming to fill the trees with its screeching.

“What a nice story that was,” Idiom said.

I said I had thought, a moment ago, that it was going somewhere.

“I always like the scrunchie story,” he said.

"It was cobblestone that it had fallen on,” I offered, weakly.

“Well okay then,” he said.

Dorkiness had come back home to roost.

Continue . . .

Armor and Clang

I wanted badly to see Clang Quartet live, because I had loved the documentary about him, Armor of God, by Brett Ingram and Jim Haverkamp. Armor starts with a shot of Clang’s only member, Scotty Elliot, banging on his cymbals on the floor, while his voice-over says something to the effect of, “I was never one of those people who could pay attention in school.” (It’s been a while since I saw this movie, so I forget exactly what he said.) I remember the documentary going on to juxtapose his voiced-over philosophies on life with footage of his ridiculous act, banging and rattling things and running sounds through electronic processors and what-have-you to make it all come out in a distorted mush. At one point, his voice-over talks about the armor of God being something you only need to wear on your front, because a person of true faith never needs to turn his back on his enemy. While he is saying this, he is seen wearing a metal mask with a cluster of bells in the space where the mask’s eyes and nose would be, thus invoking the idea of S&M paraphernalia which also plug the senses, suppress individuality, force a person to exist through the act alone. (The Armor website linked above has a link to streaming video of the armor of God scene.)

Performing live though, he gave no voice-over, and we just had the noise. It can be hard to relate what he is doing to the sounds coming from his equipment. He used a large vest-like thing with lots of jangly metal on it, but it did not seem to create a level of noise commensurate with its appearance. Indeed, Clang goes to a lot of trouble to do strange things with found objects, drawing a cello bow across one fin on this vest, or pulling a slinky out to it’s extent and pumping it into a standing wave, but such actions do not alter his wash of sound enough to give me a strong sense of cause and effect. This is like life, I think -- it is the question of why must we go so far, so often, and achieve so little. Or like art, wherein one asks, why is a person driven to do that? But these deeper meanings can easily be lost in the storm surge of sounds pounding at the brain. There is not a trace of irony in Elliot’s act. He is in a trance-like state -- he does seem to be in a prayer frenzy, as if speaking in tongues. I would prefer a little humor, or conceptual counterpoint, as his presentation in the documentary did provide. But then, that would be changing his act.

For an act consisting of a single, noisy, hooded guy who does use self-effacement to counteract his self-obsession, check out the Torch Marauder. I love that name. Who would think of using the word “marauder” anyway? It’s like someone who would maraud, but with a torch. Like the townspeople at the end of the original Frankenstein who marauded the barn and torched it, see.

Continue . . .

Saturday, March 3, 2007

Scum of the Earth

Readers of this blog are familiar with my interest in algae as a source of biofuel. A past entry, Love of Diesel, tells of the advantages I see in algae: it does not compete with food crops for land; it can grow in salty or waste water and thus not compete with the rest of us for freshwater; it produces far more oil per plant mass than other crops used for alternative fuels (soybeans, corn, rapeseed, sunflowers); it grows continuously and quickly year round.

But, as a friend of mine once said, if it were easy to grow mass quantities of algae, someone would already be doing it.

The most recent comprehensive study of algae as a source of fuel that I have found is the Department of Energy’s Aquatic Species Program summarized in a report dated 1998. While I am not a scientist and I do not grasp the details of this report, it seems that it presents algae as a possibility for energy, but much research remains to be done to make it feasible.

Japan’s Research Institute of Innovative Technologies for the Earth has also done extensive research on this matter, but also did not kick off a mad scramble to develop algae farms.

Meanwhile, in the United States, it seems that, when talking about growing fuel in plants, everyone is talking about ethanol from corn. To a large extent, this is probably because we already have lots of corn growing, and a corn lobby with much influence in the government. As another friend said once, we have no algae lobby. Not only is the corn lobby steering our thinking away from algae, it is steering it away from a land crop that is better than corn for producing ethanol, which is sugarcane. According to this Christian Science Monitor article, ethanol from sugarcane, like they have in Brazil, is 8 times more efficient to produce than ethanol from corn, but high tariffs in our country prevent importation of a fuel that would compete with corn ethanol.

Some folks also want to mess around with hydrogen fuel, but if you ask me, this is a lot farther off than biofuels. At least diesel engines exist, and are commonplace, for crying out loud. And diesel gas pumps and distribution also exist. There are no hydrogen cars in common use, no hydrogen gas pumps whatsoever.

And then, regarding the issue of combating global warming by using vegetable fuels, you have folks like Jonah Goldberg who, on NPR last week, said that the United States should not take steps in this generation to mitigate global warming, because no matter what we do in this country, China and India will surge forward with their own fossil fuel consumption and offset any progress we make. Furthermore, he says, future generations will be better able to deal with global warming anyway, because technology will be more advanced then.

Huh? So we should do nothing now? That would prevent us from knowing more in future generations. Doing something now will ensure that technology is more advanced then. And we should do something before we become desperate, either because of scarcity of fossil fuel, or because of extreme effects of global warming.

But suppose algae is just too low-class for any policy maker or lobbyist to support. Corn is noble, upright; algae is slimy and grows where you don't dare swim. Could there possibly be anyone in the private sector who wants to put some money into this thing, continue the research, maybe with the help of venture capitalists? After all, it's not the craziest idea to come down the pipe in the past 10 years.

Green Fuels Technologies, founded by MIT scientist Isaac Berzin, has been experimenting with using algae to clean up smokestack emissions from power plants. The algae would help power plants meet stiffening environmental standards, and would also provide biodiesel or ethanol fuel for the power plant to use or sell. A press release from December 2006 states that Green Fuels has already joined with Arizona Public Service, that state’s largest electric utility, and produced the first transportation grade biofuel from this process. Another press release, from January 2007, states that Green Fuels is joining with a German research institute to further investigate opportunities for using algae in industry. These press releases can be accessed on the right side of the Green Fuels homepage linked above. Their industrial applications page clearly speaks to industry’s pocket books, stressing that a power plant stands a chance of deriving great benefit from algae with no major re-engineering of the plant.

This MSNBC article has a picture of the algae in tubes at the Arizona power plant, looking all beautiful and bright green like crème de menthe. In the article, a scientist who worked on the Japanese algae research project says that many problems with algae farming have not been resolved yet, and he does not have high hopes for this project. Well, we will see. In 2008, Green Fuels and Arizona Public Service expect to be producing biofuel with their algae. We wish them luck.

Here is some more action. An oil drilling company, PetroSun Inc., has a subsidiary, Algae Biofuels Inc., which has met with officials in Alabama to discuss building algae farms along the Gulf Coast there. Plans are described in this Yahoo News article, wherein this encouraging quote appears:

Independent studies have demonstrated that algae is capable of producing 30 times more oil per acre than the current crops now utilized for the production of biofuels. The algae biomass material could also supply annually up to 100,000 pounds of animal feed per acre with a 50% protein content.


Again, we will see how it goes. Who knows what could happen if algae fuel could compete with other fuels on the open market and become a significant alternative energy source.

Continue . . .