Friday, February 18, 2005

M. Ward - Transistor Radio

M. Ward
Transistor Radio [Merge, 2005]




Ah, the joy of an unexpected nostalgia...

M. Ward seems to delight in the sense of historical presence that frequently gets evoked in our daily lives. The re-experience of a childhood memory when passing a certain smell, of decades-old adventures cloaked in rhyme and available only with the help of that most abruptly sensual of librarians. Bluegrass, country, and nostalgia-pop sentiments made Ward's last record an indie hit. On his new release Transistor Radio, he continues to sing like a teen sensation from the days of 78s, but his presentation does not attempt the forced sentimentalism typical of pop music.

"One Life Away" invites an image of a wooden console radio sitting at the back of a dusty theatre, a crooner then in his prime singing about hazy September love. "Four Hours In Washington", a neo-jukejoint stomper akin to a Tom Waits parody of the same, invokes the hot summers and political turbulance of the early 60s with a puff of (Cuban) cigar smoke. Each song is executed with a bravado in terms of both instrumentation and performance that saves the record from being a sentimental pastiche.

MP3: M. Ward - Hi-Fi

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

do the reactions of lobsters rule the fate of mankind?

The Associated Press ran an article this past week which made me question the role of its journalistic practise. Not that skepticism was ever in question, but hey, phrases get turned sometimes. Without doing any research other than this one source, we the readers are supposed to agree with them that lobsters feel no pain. This otherwise important ethical question is now made simple: of course they can’t as their brains are too small. No other opinions are given; neither are other scientific communities consulted. Most other judgements are suppressed by the complete lack of comparative data.

If we are going to make the decision we should at least have a few questions asked. The lobster might express pain in a different manner than we expect. Then again, it might not. We aren’t all vegetarian, but inflicting suffering should not be a decision that is made lightly.

There’s a great book by JM Coetzee called The Lives of Animals. He raises new questions without necessarily providing easily consumable answers. The point is not the absoluteness of such decisions, but rather the impulse to reflection and debate.As the AP likes to frequently point out to us, debate should be HOT!! with a capital !

Just for fun, here's the totality of it:


Section Front • Section Front

E-mail This StoryE-mail This Story Printable VersionPrintable Version

Hot Debate: Do Lobsters Feel Pain?

PORTLAND, Maine, Feb. 14, 2005

Workin' It With Chef Trotter

A lobsterman off the coast of Maine measures his catch. (Photo: AP)

"This is exactly like the tobacco industry claiming that smoking doesn't cause cancer,"
Karin Robertson, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals


(AP) A new study out of Norway concludes that it's unlikely lobsters feel pain, stirring up a long-simmering debate over whether the valuable seafood suffers when it's being cooked.

Animal activists for years have claimed that lobsters feel excruciating agony when they are cooked, and that dropping one in a pot of boiling water is tantamount to torture.

The study, which was funded by the Norwegian government and written by a scientist at the University of Oslo, suggests that lobsters and other invertebrates probably don't suffer even if lobsters do tend to thrash in boiling water.

"Lobsters and crabs have some capacity of learning, but it is unlikely that they can feel pain," the study concluded.

The 39-page report was aimed at determining if invertebrates should be subject to animal welfare legislation as Norway revises its animal welfare law. The report looked at invertebrate groups such as insects, crustaceans, worms and mollusks and summarized the scientific literature dealing with feelings and pain among those creatures without backbones.

It concluded that most invertebrates — including lobsters, crabs, worms, snails, slugs and clams — probably don't have the capacity to feel pain.

Lobster biologists in Maine have maintained for years that the lobster's primitive nervous system and underdeveloped brain are similar to that of an insect. While lobsters react to different stimuli, such as boiling water, the reactions are escape mechanisms, not a conscious response or an indication of pain, they say.

The Norwegian report backs up a study in the early 1990s at the University of Maine and reinforces what people in the lobster industry have always contended, said Bob Bayer, executive director of the Lobster Institute, a research and education organization in Orono.

"We've maintained all along that the lobster doesn't have the ability to process pain," Bayer said.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights organization based in Norfolk, Va., has made lobster pain part of its Fish Empathy Project, putting out stickers and pamphlets with slogans like, "Being Boiled Hurts. Let Lobsters Live."

PETA regularly demonstrates at the Maine Lobster Festival in Rockland, and 10 years ago placed a full-page ad in a Rockland newspaper featuring an open letter from actress Mary Tyler Moore urging festival-goers to forego lobster.

"If we had to drop live pigs or chickens into scalding water, chances are that few of us would eat them. Why should it be any different for lobsters?" the ad read.

PETA's Karin Robertson called the Norwegian study biased, saying the government doesn't want to hurt the country's fishing industry.

"This is exactly like the tobacco industry claiming that smoking doesn't cause cancer," she said.

Robertson said many scientists believe lobsters do indeed feel pain. For instance, a zoologist with The Humane Society of the United States made a written declaration that lobsters can feel pain after a chef dismembered and sauteed a live lobster to prepare a Lobster Fra Diavolo dish on NBC's "Today" show in 1994.

But Mike Loughlin, who studied the boiling of lobsters when he was a University of Maine graduate student, said lobsters simply lack the brain capacity to feel pain.

"It's a semantic thing: No brain, no pain," said Loughlin, who now works as a biologist at the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission.

It's debatable whether the debate will ever be resolved.

The Norwegian study, even while saying it's unlikely that crustaceans feel pain, also cautioned that more research is needed because there is a scarcity of scientific knowledge on the subject.

Whether lobsters feel pain or not, many consumers will always hesitate at placing lobsters in boiling pots of water.

New Englanders may feel comfortable cooking their lobsters, but people outside the region often feel uneasy about boiling a live creature, said Kristen Millar, executive director of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council. "Consumers don't generally greet and meet an animal before they eat it," she said.

©MMV, The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

when is it time for a change? how about now

Remember all that talk in the 1980s and 90s which surrounded the environmental problems which we would all be facing in the 21st century? You know: rising sea levels thanks to the melting of arctic glacial ice, rapid and extreme shifts from desert to ice-age temperatures, increasing hurricane and high-wind activity? Thinking they were all just cries of lunacy from that weirdo geography teacher from the tenth grade, by and large we ignored climate change (inaccurately called Global Warming back then) in favour of business as usual. No skies are falling, we said as over the 1990s we began to get addicted to SUVs and other equally stupid ways to accelerate climate change. It was the head in the sand approach, and it failed miserably.

Let me make this perfectly clear: WAKE THE FUCK UP AND LOOK AROUND RIGHT NOW. Notice that our seasons have been radically altered from the four traditional ones that we grew up with. You might also notice how animal populations have reacted: birds have altered their migration patterns, fish have moved to different waters, and flying insects which normally stay dormant over the winter now have altered life cycles. I think the problem with the way we were taught environmental issues way back then was that all the discussions involved what was going to happen in the future. In retrospect, this was entirely the wrong tack. It allowed many people to ignore data that was presented to them, disregarding it like the nonsense from a religious pamphleteer.

The new mantra is this: climate change is happening now, not in a few decades, not next year. Right the hell this second. Just as it was happening all throughout our recent history when we were talking about future calamities. If you add to climate change, you are making that difference now, not in the distant future which you might not be alive to experience. This sense of immanence can be seen in fact as the hope of the environmental project, as only by focussing on the now can we stand to make change in the hearts and minds of the world.

So here’s a current example, some data to be reconciled if you like. According to the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, due to glacial melting there has been a rise of 25mm in ocean levels since 1960. 2002 had the highest level of glacial melt ever recorded. Now, I am not a scientist and 25mm might not sound like much, but when you multiply that by the surface area of the oceans involved, you end up with quite a bit of extra water cycling around the planet. Where might that water go, you ask? For starters, you might have noticed that it has been raining a lot these days. Today (January 13th), it is currently 14 degrees and raining steadily. You might also want to look around, as heavy rains have recently washed out massive parts of Costa Rica, Panama, Ohio, and California (re: the famously fatal landslide of a few weeks ago, which occurred after nearly 21 days of continuous rain).

Key to this understanding is the awareness of one’s place in the world. I mean by this the knowledge of how one’s life impacts the globe. I predict the 21st century to be one of absolute self-awareness, as we will increasingly find ourselves without the luxury of the 20th century gameplan of “seemingly unlimited resources causing a comfortable ignorance”. There are a few programs online which can calculate what is known as an “ecological footprint”, which details the amount of emissions leading to climate change that are produced by your lifestyle. The point is not for you to be weighed people down with the doomed news of the inevitable decline of the world. Instead, use this information to begin altering your life to suit the sustainability of the earth. It is not evilness which pollutes the earth, but rather lifestyles to which we have become accustomed and do not seek to challenge on a daily basis.

The public needs to made aware that environmentalism is not a punitive process, for the simple reason that we will all be punished together for our environmental crimes; we are all guilty. Environmentalists are well aware that humans by their very existence will make an impact on the earth. The point of the environmental project is to try to move such impacts from the “negative” column to the “positive” one. Take using public transport as an example. Owning a car today brings an annual cost of ownership of about $5000 to an individual, plus $20,000 on average for the car itself. Buying a yearly Go Transit pass (with HSR included) between Hamilton and Toronto costs $3216. Positives: less cash, less pollution, plus you can read while travelling, and sometimes you get to meet the cast of Train 48. If you work in the city you live, it’s even cheaper to travel (a yearly bus pass is $780 in my city, while bikes cost pennies a day to operate and give you another positive: exercise).

The most obvious positive that consumers can notice is a reduction in their energy bills. By installing energy efficient lightbulbs (low-volt halogen, fluorescent) in all your fixtures, can reduce lighting energy use by 70%. The US Department of Energy estimates that current lighting systems account for 25% of electrical demand, of which 5% represents the electricity required to cool or remove the waste heat generated by those old lights. There’s also a landfill issue here, as energy efficient lights tend to last 10-25 times as long as incandescent bulbs (thus making your $5 bulb even more of a wise purchase over its $1 grandfather). If Canada were serious about Kyoto, it could ban outright the manufacture and sale of old-style lightbulbs and subsidize the purchase of energy efficient ones so that we can get rid of all the shitty technologies that consumers have normalized.

There’s a big reason that many scientists are studying climate change, principally that we will be increasingly unable to cope with the change in ecosystems that we have ourselves fostered. Life is a rather fragile thing when viewed in terms of individual species. Just because the earth can survive without us, we should not begin to think that we can survive without it.

ucsusa.org – Union of Concerned Scientists
safeclimate.net/calculator/ – calculate your ecological footprint
changingtheclimate.org – play a new game, the Big Game SUV Hunt!
arctic.noaa.gov/detect/index.shtml – arctic change, according to the NOAA

go rant! go!!

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Shuttle358 - Chessa

Shuttle 358
Chessa [12k, 2004]




Dan Abrams has two previous releases on 12k and a couple on Mille Plateaux. Chessa is closer in spirit to the MP releases than the warm, organic melodicism of either Frame or Optimal.lp. While a similar aural strategy is deployed, Chelsea has several tracks which are far less linear than his previous work. "Ash" opens the album with a warm and gradual swell, as the soundfiled begins to open more minute frequencies over several minutes. This track sounds very much like the laptop equivalent of an orchestra practising Debussy in a field full of insect life. "Marche" attempts a sound that is very akin to the Brian Eno / Harold Budd collaborations of the early 1980s.

Most of the pieces are compositionally dependent on variations of drone, but several tracks stand out for their textural beauty and complexity. "Melt" has a vague eastern feel, with a "plucked" melodic line and a Phil Niblock-esque slow-transformation-through-stasis sound field. The liquid yet viscous, almost rubbery, bassline of "Logical" is simultaneously a playfull engagement with a future-pop sensibility as well as a nostalgic harkening to the sounds of 1970s analog futurism. Abrams seems to operate best in such hybrid spaces, where reference and reflection coexist and provide entry to new aesthetic experiences. The album's closer "Scrapbook" is the only track on Chessa which foregrounds a more or less traditional rhythmic pattern, as acoustic guitar, violins, and synth drone all mesh nicely over a slightly distorted synth beat. This remnant of the "clicks n cuts" sound made infamous in 2000 provokes an ironic comment from Abrams: is all musical experience insufferably linked to listener nostalgia? At the very least, a possible answer can be found in the opportunities for personal reflection and sensory immersion that Chessa provides.

MP3: Shuttle358 - Scrapbook