110809

Tonight I’m having a dinner party for my 40th birthday. I’m a little distracted and preoccupied, so this installment will be brief.

*Peace*

This week a Facebook friend emailed me about my saying I’m trapped but I’m at peace. I am definitely trapped–my inability to walk or do most anything for myself is _not a choice_, therefore it follows that I am trapped. But this lady seemed to think that I couldn’t feel simultaneously trapped and at peace. But I can and do. Why am I at peace? Because I do not fight anymore, my body, my condition, my person. I am not waging war on MS; I am waging peace, so with each new symptom that comes up, I learn what I have to do to accommodate it. I don’t fight it as many do–and I am better off by miles because of it. Please, please don’t ask me to do things I know I can’t do safely–I am at peace because I don’t struggle with myself. That certainly doesn’t mean I’m happy all the time, quite the opposite, but by not waging a war I could never win, I am at peace.

Think about how incontrovertible this is:

Peace will only come by not fighting.

How can you have peace if you’re fighting? You can’t. And believe me, it’s true what they say: to wage peace takes a great deal more courage, strength, and sheer gumption than it will ever take simply to wage war.

*Symptoms*

An odd heading. But I’ve realized that my needing to spread myself ultra-thin is not just indicative of who I am; it’s all symptomatic of the MS as well. I cannot do one thing. I always bring at least four areas to whatever it is I’m working on. I cannot imagine living any other way. Here’s a short list of the subjects I know a good deal about:

engineering, alternative fuels, electric and hybrid cars, sustainable agriculture, mini farming, organic gardening, basic construction, alternative homes, renewable energy installation and maintenance, physics, calculus, moral philosophy, environmental science, geography, transportation systems planning, land-use law, civic planning, film production, photography, graphic design, poetry, spoken word, playwriting, natural perfume, jazz music (as a player and aficionado, and especially contemporary jazz), being a radio DJ, being a producer of shows and concerts, Mandarin Chinese (fluent), Chinese culture, Nepali language and culture, Spanish, French, Latin, being an ESL teacher, etc.

It’s a tad frightening to think of all that stuff in my head! And more! None of these is a passing fancy. I’ve spent most of my life devoted to these subjects, and there’s no sign of my interest letting up any time soon.

*Poetry*

Here is another piece which helped to determine my writing identity. Written in 1943, it ushered in the office life of modern America:

Dolor
Teddy Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper-weight,
All the misery of manila folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplication of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dripping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate gray standard faces.

*Maine*

When I left New York in 1992, I moved to family land in Maine with a new girlfriend. The only structure on the land at the time was the old barn; the fact this woman came with me, to live in a barn, having only known me a few weeks is a miracle. I guess I used to have a certain charm, a charm which has long since left me completely, judging by the many women who have said, “No thanks,” over the past 10 years. We had a hell of a time up there, alone in the woods, putting up a cabin, making love everywhere. God it feels good to remember! I have known love and lust, and if they never return, I made the most of them while I could. Here’s an old letter poem I wrote to Nicole:

Dear Nicole

I picked up one of my oldest books the other day
and I found a note from you in the back saying,
“I hope when you find this note one day
that you are thinking of me fondly.”
In an instant I remembered what it was like
to be just beginning, and so, unstoppable.
When we walked together into cafes and shops
and dance halls, folks used to turn and look.
I always felt like we carried The Great Middle Path
with us wherever we went. We were about
to discover, at any moment, every drop
of what had gone missing from all our lives.
We ate only the things that would help us
live forever. And I was straight for months,
months at a time. I remember what it was like
to be straight once, lucid, mindful. I remember
what it was like to not care about
not having enough hours in the day
to thoroughly live. But I do care now;
I am desperately rushed and cannot spare
a minute because too much time has already
been spent in the clouds. I used to think
I had extra senses, was just waiting to take my place,
finally, beside the North Star and the symbol
of the next epoch. But, you know what?
I haven’t remembered a single one of my dreams
in years. I’m fairly certain now it’s all in
black and white, though. I sleep and
I eat in black and white, and I can see the edges
of the universe from where I stand, no more
mysteries. I still carry that one December
in my head when you finally stopped me
in the aisle. We used to pass each other
almost every afternoon, and then, one day, that
was it, one simple, “Hey. What’s up?” was
all it took. We dropped everything a few weeks
later, piled what we couldn’t let go of into that
station wagon we borrowed, fled the city without
asking questions, drove slowly north into the last
winter storm. The snow was thick, and we pulled over
at one point for lack of clear vision. I felt
like Noah with the howling outside,
ice instead of rain, books and changes on the inside
instead of ducks and cattle. We were
thrown together. We were not ready. We were
like two young strangers must have been
in the old country, thrown together one day,
aiming for a hillside they could plant on.
We were strangers thrown together.
We were not ready. Most of all,
I remember our designs and visions. I remember
digging holes for posts to hold our floor, milking
enough stones out of the meadow to build
a whole new world. I remember sleeping
on a single mattress inside the little cabin
we put up. Being tightly knit like that,
but still alone together, just wasn’t enough,
was it? We were still ignoring some deep thirst,
weren’t we, Nic, the sort of thirst a person
just can’t shake these days? I laid down next to you,
listened to you breathe, listened to the wind
in the trees, and I thirsted. Thirsted for some answers,
longed for some old roads and some
new ways of living without having
to die so fast. Have you found a way to quench
your thirst? Have you found any water clean enough
to drink yet? I guess I’m writing mostly to tell you
I’m working on a book. Look for it. It will be
real and even larger than life. I am in it, of course,
and my part is that of a deliverer. No longer
like Noah, less like a simple vehicle,
now even more like a deliverer, like Moses. I am,
in fact, most like the sea that Moses parted,
divided down the middle, both sides
heaving and waiting to converge again.
There will be just enough time for
public flight through me back to the old country.
When we reach what used to shallow on the other side
of the sea bed, it will really be deep. Beyond
the banks of the sea, once the waters behind us
have met again, there will not be paths.
We will walk straight out into the expanses
we come upon nevertheless, will tangle ourselves
in the undergrowth. We will sit down peacefully
at the end of the day, and not go anywhere
again, and live forever at last.
If you can’t quite find the people and the places
you were looking for way back when, then
look for this book I’m promising you, and
come along for the ride. It will really be fine,
I’m sure. Until then, be sure to quench
your thirst as if you mean it, and be sure to live
as if your kids will never die.
All my love, Adam

God how convoluted! I was just at the beginning, of a world of learning, of immersing myself in the globe, of learning how to love. It brings me to tears to read this and remember the incurable idealist and romantic I used to be. I ask myself, “Where did it all go wrong?” I can really only think of one answer: the west coast. Good riddance.

*Quotations*

Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
–Oscar Wilde

Perfume is a veil that reveals the soul.
Perfume is the fanfare of our individuality sounding differently to everyone who listens.
Perfume is a signpost to our true selves–a different journey for the brave to travel.
Perfume is the weather of our inner world bringing life to a personal landscape.
–Christopher Brosius

Life is no “brief candle” for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
–GB Shaw

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.
–Thomas Gray

A revolutionary poem reminds you where and when and how you are living and might live; it is a wick of desire.
–Adrienne Rich

When we are born, we’re born with a matchbook. The question is: how do we use it? Burn, baby, burn, brightly. You’ve got so much to give.
–Sonya Kitchell

The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn.
–David Russell

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
–Kenji Miyazawa

Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail.
–Alfred Whitney Griswold

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.
–Malcolm Bradbury

Peace love and ATOM jazz

110109

I would like to call your attention to a great word: heuristic (hyoo’ristik). The only person I’ve ever seen use this word with regularity is Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his seminal book, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, a book which, despite the efforts by many to disparage it, still reigns supreme and unarguable in this area. Heuristic, adjective: enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves. GR always used it to talk about “A ha!” realizations. When a light bulb goes off and suddenly you understand a whole chain of events, that realization is heuristic.

*Herrings*

Here is reprinted one of five red herrings I mentioned last week. It bears repetition because it is so counter-intuitive, and so many people have it all wrong in their minds:

This one is obviously quite important to me now that I’m living where I belong, in the big city. When I left I had this foolish idea that one’s ecological footprint (I didn’t have a name for it then; my travels and studies have served me well) is smaller in the country than in the city. Total crap! Everything about cities makes it so that its denizens have a very small footprint compared to most: mass transit, many people living together in large buildings, being able to walk everywhere, etc. It’s not even a close contest. Cities will always win, hands down, even if you only consider one thing: in cities the vast majority of people rarely, if ever, use a car. One of my idols, David Korten, reformed World-Bank economist, took note of this non-intuitive fact in his great book When Corporations Rule the World; I mention this agreement just by way of pointing out _I am not crazy_.

*Perfume*

Lord’s Jester is officially an S Corporation in New York. Now comes the beginning of a life of bookkeeping.

The perfume we made a while back, Daphne, with 22 notes, a chypre, is working quite well. To my nose, the tonka is still a tad strong, but it’s definitely a working recipe. A little more tweaking is needed. Several people have asked me over the years, so I feel I need to emphasize this fact: all of my perfume recipes are totally original to me. They’re not based on, similar to, or inspired by anyone else’s recipes. I have arrived at my recipes after years of hard work, of trying, failing, and learning. It irks me when someone asks, “Where do the recipes come from?” What! You actually think I would ever be happy using someone else’s work? Please do not insult me so.

A recent entry on Lord’s Jester blog, written by Jean Baptiste, my stand-in and ghost writer:

Mr Gottschalk and I have agreed to share writing duties for this journal (or “blog” or whatever you people call it). I’ve heard him call me his “ghost writer,” which, I must say, I really don’t take kindly to; must you really rub it in, sir? In any event, I’ve agreed to lend my expertise to his new commercial enterprise because he and his group are dedicated to the art of perfumery as it was practiced in days long gone, with truly precious, unadulterated botanical ingredients (some animal ingredients too, of the same high caliber; it is not possible to make a great perfume without a touch of the animalic). Gottschalk and his people have a deep understanding of the alchemical nature of the art, and they understand that masters of perfumery often add ingredients which, in and of themselves, are objectionable; a master knows how to balance and tame all the disparate elements of a perfume. The result must always be greater than just the sum of its parts.

This bunch, I know, is devoted to the art in its original form, with nothing the earth itself cannot provide, no chemicals, no fakery. They are so dedicated because they feel, justly, wronged by purveyors of synthetic perfume who do everything they can to keep the truth from the public: starting about 90 years ago, all perfume, ALL OF IT!, switched from real essences and extracts to chemicals made in a laboratory. They draw pictures, pyramids, supposedly depicting the notes in perfumes, but it’s all cheap synthetic garbage, and many of the notes they mention are not in fact found anywhere in the real world. Watermelon? No such thing. Cucumber? We’ve been trying for hundreds and hundreds of years and we still cannot create cucumber essential oil. Amber? Fossilized amber has no smell; vanilla, labdanum, and benzoin combine to make a smell we think of as amber.

I want to be clear about something: I am not advising Lord’s Jester because I think their perfumer has a great nose; in fact I think Gottschalk has a rather unrefined olfactory sense. The man can’t even tell the difference between Atlas cedar and Virginia cedar! Or Tasmanian compared to Australian boronia? The subtleties are completely lost on this one. No, I’ve decided to help him because despite this failing, and much to my amazement, he has already produced some world-class natural perfumes. And he just won’t quit (despite my best counsel). If you simply stay at something long enough, remain confident that you will prevail, stick to your guns as far as what allowed and what’s not, well, eventually the greatness will come. Once I teach them a bit more of what I know, I’m certain Lord’s Jester will offer perfumes even I would say are great. And I’m a tough individual to please!

*Poetry*

Another piece which has been at the front of my mind with every poem I’ve written follows. Note that starting with the line, “An old man, he lay down,” the poem alternates between two threads, one about the Buddha, one about the sunrise. The remarkable thing is that one can read it beginning to end and be moved, without ever being aware of the two threads; it’s miraculous the way the two threads reflect and reinforce each other. Poetic virtuosity. From her book House of Light (1990):

The Buddha’s Last Instruction
Mary Oliver

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal–a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he had thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire–
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

*Poem*

What’s in a Crush

It’s come to my attention
that numerous women
had crushes on me
in high school.
Almost universally
they say, “Oh, you looked
so confident and sure of
yourself I couldn’t bring
myself to say Hello.”
Oh my, ladies,
if you only knew how shy
I was then, and still am,
you almost certainly
would’ve seen how openly
any romantic overtures
would have been received.
Instead, there was only
one woman I had the courage
to talk to all through
high school.
What followed was a grand
affair, but I’ve remained
so shy I’m almost paralyzed.
In combination with being
unable to do for myself at all,
it makes for a 40-year-old
divorcée who is stuck
at home all day
lamenting all the pretty
women who might’ve
been his, all the choices
he could’ve made but didn’t,
remembering the terrible
choice he did make for
a wife. If I had known,
if my young, awkward self
could’ve seen women
looking at me with desire,
if I had been aware that
I wasn’t just a pudgy kid
who didn’t fit in anywhere,
my life would certainly
have turned out better.
But I am still lost.
I am still without love.
I am lamenting
all the wrong choices.

*Slam*

My first exposure to slam poetry was at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the East Village in the late ’80s or early ’90s. Back then I was a wannabe; I can’t even stand to be in the same room with my “poetry” from when I first started. I found myself in Seattle in 1994 (arrived Thanksgiving Day 1993) and found there was a slam at a place called the Emerald Diner, hosted by Dave Meinert and another fellow with a patch over his eye whose name I can’t remember. The poets at the Emerald Diner would be my people for the next couple of years, until I moved to Bellingham to finish college. They were a motley crew, and I say that with all the love in my heart. Poets are always “just raunchy enough, just Tin-Pan Alley enough” (as Joe Henry says) to hold my attention. I met up with other groups of poets, Bellingham and Portland, and they were generally excellent to me (with a couple of notable, individual exceptions).

At the old Seattle Slam, Meinert started every show saying, “Remember: the best poet always loses.” And that was the point of slam in its original incarnations: it was meant to be a ploy to get folks actually to show up for poetry performances; the idea was that there would be a bunch of crap, but then people would be exposed to good stuff too. There were always featured readers and special guests, who brought the good stuff. Getting people out of their skins for a bunch of hoopla surrounding a competition is a no-brainer; witness the popularity of competitions of every sort on television. Competition is a “lowest common denominator” which can bring folks out and ultimately together.

When I lived in Bellingham I founded, produced, and hosted the Bellingham Slam for six months. That show was extremely popular, and was an extravaganza which folks came in droves to witness (200 people on Monday nights once a month; in Bellingham? Wow!): an open mic to start things off, then a featured performer of some kind (I was friends with all manner of artists in the Pacific Northwest), then jazz music (a trio featuring my good friend Christopher Woitach, an amazing player; at first we tried to do it as an “open jam,” before the open slam, but the musicians rebelled after the first show I think, and the slot became just a time for really excellent jazz), and an open slam to end the night. I got a bunch of business owners to donate various goods and services, and the proceeds from the door provided cash prizes too.

That was an epic period of my life; I became a mover and a shaker in Bellingham (if you’re thinking, “So what?” you’re right to), and when I was host of that show I finally got up the courage to introduce myself to my ex-wife, whom I’d eyed with envy a half dozen times on campus (if you’re thinking, “A lot of good it did you,” you’re right to). Not long after came the end, a most emphatic one, to my life with slam. Hosting a very popular slam, I thought it would be good for me to go the national slam, which that year was in Austin Texas. I was supposed to stay for five days; I left after two and a half–what I saw there disgusted me. I had assumed that everyone knew “the best poet always lost,” so this would be “the good stuff” that the featured readers had always brought.

I couldn’t have been more wrong! My first day there I discovered that what was, invariably, winning was the low-brow, button-pushing drivel that I so hated, which I thought everyone else despised too. Oh, I was mad. There was supposed to be a three-minute limit to every poem, but I immediately decided that when I got up to the mic I would perform my longest pieces, just as a big “Fuck you!” to the trash I was witnessing. I did so well that even after they’d deducted for the three or four minutes I’d gone over, I still did respectably. Oh, but done, done, DONE!, was I with slam “poetry” for once and for all. I am a spoken-word artist with many fans, but I will not ever touch slam again (just like I will not ever step foot on the west coast again).

*Quotations*

In an age of explosive development in the realm of medical technology, it is unnerving to find that the discoveries of Salk, Sabin, and even Pasteur remain irrelevant to much of humanity.
–Paul Farmer

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.
–Emily Dickinson

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
–Oscar Wilde

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
–Einstein

In all things it is better to hope than to despair.
–Goethe

Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
–Arundhati Roy

We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.
–Obama

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
–Dale Carnegie

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.
–Don Quixote

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that that fulfillment will come is quite possibly one of the most powerful “magic skills” that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition.
–Elizabeth Gilbert

*Music*

“There’s only one constant
in this whole world
and that’s nothing ever
stays the same.
Some day my life will be over
and no one will remember my name.
That’s all right ’cause
what’s in a name,
and who needs another one
to memorize anyway.
Make no fuss over my grave.
Just plant something pretty
and call it a day.”
–Eilen Jewell

Peace love and ATOM jazz

102509

Lord’s Jester now has its own blog, Lord’s Jester blog. Jean Baptiste and I will share writing duties.
_____

Interesting tid bit: Van Morrisson’s famous song Brown Eyed Girl was originally titled Brown Skinned Girl. The suits in the 60s wouldn’t have it for a minute.

*Perfume*

The liquid version of Selene may well be one of the best perfumes I’ve made yet. It’s robust and tenacious, but powdery and unimposing. It’s salient notes are orris, orris-violet, and clary sage, though it has 16 notes all together. A revamped version of Phoebe, my osmanthus perfume, is almost perfect. The osmanthus is still a little strong, but it’s becoming harder to decipher. Another try or two and she’ll be good to go. Also, this week we made my first eau de cologne; exactly 5% aromatics in 140-proof alcohol. I’ve never made an EdC before; we used the recipe for Ares, which I love but which most everyone says is just too strong. It’s still quite robust but I’m hoping watering it down will make it more approachable.

This week I said to my assistant that I wanted to focus on perfecting recipes I already have, to the exclusion of starting new experiments. Terrible idea! There are hundreds if not thousands of botanical materials commonly used in natural perfume; I’ve had some success so far, but I still have a long way to go. There are far too many combinations I have yet to try; while I have a very good perfume imagination, and oodles of smells catalogued in my brain, there’s still a lot of grunt work to be done. For example, do oppoponax and cognac (from wine lees) really complement each other as well as I imagine? Innumerable experiments along those lines are still needed.

This week there’s been an ongoing discussion on the NP-email list about terminology and natural perfume. Some out there think the whole thing is bunk because even distillation is unnatural. All the processes used to extract the odoriferous principle from plants, distillation, expression, enfleurage, maceration, as far as I’m concerned are perfectly natural. One doesn’t need a lab or lab equipment to do these things; in fact, I think they are most commonly done outside. When you get into altering that odoriferous principle, creating “isolates,” removing acids, removing color, that’s when you get into unnatural processes.

How about organic? As most of you know, I’m all about organic, having studied in depth the dangers of chemical agriculture in college. Believe me, if there were any way to make real, professional perfume with all certified-organic materials, I’d be there. But the artistic imperative to me is to make fantastic perfume with _natural_ materials instead of fragrance chemicals. At the moment, one cannot make a certified-organic professional perfume; there are too many essential ingredients which cannot be found organic. The people out there who don’t understand how complex perfumery is, how much training one needs (even if it’s auto-didacticism), think all you need is to slap a few nice smelling materials together to make perfume. Not!

There is a number of ingredients which I’ve learned over the past four or five years is absolutely essential to fine perfume, ingredients which cannot be found certified organic, things like ambrette, costus, rose, jasmine, and juniper, to name a very few. Those out there who are taking a marketing angle which tells them organic is hot are doing harm to the renaissance of natural perfume. My own conviction is that natural perfume should not be so different from mainstream perfume that it seems like a different animal. When a person combines aromatics with no knowledge of how professional perfume is made, it gives us who are dedicated to the art as it was before 1921 (the year Chanel No. 5 was released, the first perfume based on synthetics) a bad name. People have the mistaken impression they’ve smelled natural perfume before when in fact what they’ve smelled hardly even counts as aromatherapeutic.

The worst part is this: one can make a perfume with fragrance chemicals, synthetics, and still call the perfume organic; this is because fragrance chemicals are not pesticides (though in many cases they are poisonous and could well be used as pesticides). Isn’t that a mind bender? People make perfume with chemicals, then call it organic and vegan. No one stops to wonder if certified-organic perfume can have fragrance chemicals in it or not. It can and does. If you run into perfume which calls itself organic but doesn’t say anything about being natural, turn and run. Perfumery is a complex art which takes years of training to suss out; those who do not jump through hoops learning about it are only distorting reality for those of us who take perfume ultra seriously.

*Poetry*

In the next few installments I will highlight three poems which have deeply influenced my poetry–I mean to say they’ve influenced, one way or another, every word of poetry I’ve ever written: Why I am Not a Painter by Frank O’Hara, The Buddha’s Last Instruction by Mary Oliver, and Dolor by Teddy Roethke. O’Hara was curator for MoMA so he was friends with many great painters; he wrote poetry in his spare time.

Why I am Not a Painter
Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter. I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink,” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have sardines in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s sardines.”
All that’s left is just
letters. “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems; I call
it Oranges. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called Sardines.

*Herrings*

These are bright red:

1. This one is obviously quite important to me now that I’m living where I belong, in the big city. When I left I had this foolish idea that one’s ecological footprint (I didn’t have a name for it then; my travels and studies have served me well) is smaller in the country than in the city. Total crap! Everything about cities makes it so that its denizens have a very small footprint compared to most: mass transit, many people living together in large buildings, being able to walk everywhere, etc. It’s not even a close contest. Cities will always win, hands down, even if you only consider one thing: in cities the vast majority of people rarely, if ever, use a car. One of my idols, David Korten, reformed World-Bank economist, took note of this non-intuitive fact in his great book When Corporations Rule the World; I mention this agreement just by way of pointing out _I am not crazy_.

2. Plastic isn’t piling up in landfills–it’s paper. Paper! Paper fills up more than 75% of landfills; if you doubt me, look up the work of an archaeologist named Rathje. Rathje’s work has revolutionized waste disposal. From his work we now know that _nothing_ decays if there’s no air and water involved. When he did his first excavation on a landfill, he chose Fresh Kills which serves New York. All his colleagues thought he was crazy; his mentor said, “You won’t find anything. Everyone knows decay happens in landfills.” Not! Rathje dug all the way to the bottom of the Fresh-Kills pile; way down there, among many other things, he found a newspaper 100% in tact, from the 1890s! He sent it to his mentor. Now plastic in the ocean is a bad thing, and the overuse of disposable plastic bottles is disgusting. Know that manufacturing and recycling paper is at least as toxic as making plastic.

3. My studies in college taught me an awful lot, but one of the most important things is this: huge organic farms are every bit as bad for the environment as huge chemical farms. It’s true that conventional farmers have the highest rates of cancer of all occupations; but as far as the soil, water, wildlife, etc., monstrous organic farms are just as culpable as conventional. To be truly of benefit, organic farms must be small, and must emphasize hand tools whenever possible; one example is that manual approaches to controlling pests instead of “organic” chemicals should be utilized. But everyone who cares about the future and our children must know this: organic foods are absolutely essential to our well being. Most important are organic fatty foods; pesticides concentrate readily in fat, so don’t touch peanuts, or dairy products, or meat, unless it’s certified organic. Soon enough, agribusiness will have to loosen its strangle hold on America; then researchers will surely discover that agricultural chemicals (did you know they first started using them after WWII when the DoD had huge stockpiles left over of chemical weapons; what a horrendous idea to use them on our farms) have a causal relationship with countless diseases, illnesses, and deaths.

4. I hate nuclear. But I have to agree with Dr James Lovelock (author of the seminal Gaia Hypothesis): the only way we’ll have any chance of making it through the next 50 or 100 years is if we adopt nuclear power. If we don’t, the voracious appetites of the developed world, and the developing world whom we’ve just convinced to adopt our lifestyles, will lead to massive energy wars. Sure there is highly toxic waste from nuclear, but there is from all non-renewable sources of energy. We’ll have nuclear fusion soon, and for now the nuclear waste can be buried in the center of the earth. Renewable energy will never make it. This doesn’t detract from the fact that all our lives must one day be renewable; we need something in the meantime. Climate change is from cars and coal-power plants; nuclear is the best interim choice.

5. Solar panels are definitely not the way of the future. It takes far too long for them to recoup the energy it took to make them in the first place. Additionally, it takes high-end labs to make solar panels. We will need low-tech solutions, solutions that anyone anywhere can put into action. The future will be made up of cottage industries in battery production, wind-generator production, electric-motor production, micro-hydro generator production, and straw-bale homes (the energy efficiency of straw-bale structures is second to none). Our futures must be renewable, but solar panels must not make up very much of that future; they’re too inefficient.

*Poem*

Portland,

You are not so kind and warm
as I thought at first.
Now that I am on
the other side of the world
it occurs to me that
it’s quite a miracle
you persevere. How can you
continue all skin deep?
Don’t you sense
that you’ve got no soul?
Suddenly it occurs to me
that you are just like
all the women I found myself
tangled up with out west,
the undeniable appearances
of kindness and altruism
but really selfish to the core,
speaking kindly in public
but utterly disinterested
and cantankerous behind
closed doors,
promising love but failing.
I am happier and happier
with each minute more
that passes away from your
cold grasp. Here’s to
never seeing you again.
None of my love, Adam

*Quotations*

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.
–AJ Liebling

It’s hard to argue against cynics–they always sound smarter than optimists because they have so much evidence on their side.
–Molly Ivins

Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
–David Wolf

The forest is asking to offer its eco-system service to each and every one of us. The potential of the forest is not yet recognized.
–Chief Almir

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean.
But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.
–Mother Theresa

Man is a creature whose evolutionary environment has been the open air.
His nerves, muscles, and senses have developed across three million
years in intimate contiguity with natural earth, crude stone, live wood,
wind and rain. Now this creature is suddenly–on the geologic scale,
instantaneously–shifted to an unnatural environment of metal and glass,
plastic and plywood, to which his psychic substrata lack all
compatibility. The wonder is not that we have so much mental instability
but so little. Add to this the weird noises, electrical pleasures,
bizarre colors, synthetic foods, abstract entertainments! We should
congratulate ourselves on our durability.
–Jack Vance

Society does not need more electronic gadgets, microwave-based communication systems, high-tech entertainment devices, faster computers, and fancier software. We need to anoint each other with fragrances that promote emotional openness, quiet the mind, build inner strength, overcome isolation, enhance intimacy, and support truthful communication. We need noble aphrodisiacs of sandalwood, jasmine, and lotus that help men transform pathological lust into passionate love, and help women transform their fear and hatred of men’s violence, aggression, and stupidity into nourishing powerful sensuality. When peaceful cities are blessed with myriad sweet floral scents, when healthy forests are filled with balsamic coniferous perfumes, when farms are enveloped in the earthy aromas of healthy soil and robust crops, when homes are infused with temple essences that bring joy and tranquility, we will understand why the ancients taught that plants were gifts from heaven.
–David Crow

If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.
–Sartre

I had sticking power, which is just as important as literary talent. I just got on with the work. And I think there are such things as writing animals. I simply have to write.
–Doris Lessing

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
–Augusten Burroughs

*Music*

I think this is one of the best mixes I’ve made in some time. Great music on here:

Aromatic Journey #1 10.09

1. Kathleen, David Gray with Jolie Holland
2. Sweet Rose, Eilen Jewell
3. Headsoak, Andrew Bird
4. Stitched Up, Herbie Hancock with John Mayer
5. Burn Brightly, Sonya Kitchell
6. Minnow and the Trout, A Fine Frenzy/Alison Sudol
7. Easy Street (latin), Josh Rouse
8. Rain Roll In, Eilen Jewell
9. Jesus etc., Wilco (with Andrew Bird)
10. Nemesis, David Gray
11. Waiting to Talk, Andrew Bird
12. A Song for You (Leon Russell), Herbie Hancock with Christina Aguilera
13. Almost Lover, Alison Sudol
14. Water, Sonya Kitchell
15. Valencia, Josh Rouse
16. Nowhere in No Time, Eilen Jewell
17. How Indiscrete, Andrew Bird
18. Transformation, David Gray

Peace love and ATOM jazz

101809

Fresh Direct is a grocery-delivery service which is the key to a decent life for me here in The City. As most of you know, shopping (of all kinds) is a most-unattainable effort for me now; having someone else shop for me is too expensive and I never get exactly what I want. With Fresh Direct (Unlimited Delivery Pass for $10 per month) delivery is free for every order, and I can choose _exactly_ what I want.

*Poem*

Tall Paul

I knew a fellow when I was 17.
Tall Paul we called him.
He was one of those guys
I hoped some day to be as cool as.
Later in life, when we were in our
early twenties, I met Paul
for a beer. We were talking
about what we’d been reading.
Paul said he was into Truman Capote.
Ignoramus that I was then
(and maybe still am),
I thought he was talking about
Al Capone. “You mean the guy
with the vault?” I asked.
I will never forget the look
on Paul’s face. No, he explained,
he meant the writer. He eyed me
suspiciously, not yet convinced
I wasn’t pulling his leg.
Here he’d taken me for a literate
person. I wasn’t, not nearly so much
as I made out. And in this way, I have
blundered my way through my life,
hopeless, helpless, just barely
making enough sense for folks
to believe I’m compos mentis.
Bullshitting is my game.
The truth is I’ve lied to
everyone I ever met, aggrandizing
my life to some extent or other,
augmenting my experiences
as necessary, making myself out
to be whatever person was needed.
I lied on every job application
I ever filled out, and I filled
out hundreds. The fact that I
couldn’t have told you
the difference between
Al Capone and Truman Capote
was just one outward sign of
the blind ignorance which once
hid precariously beneath
the surface of my skin.
Still, the ignorance is there,
though in not nearly the over-
abundance it used to be, and
still, I blunder my way, proudly,
head held high, hoping no one
figures out what a fool I am.
If bullshitting is an art,
then I have taken the art
to heights it never knew
it could reach. I’ve always been
an artist. If, in some
absurd universe, I had to choose
just one art, I have little doubt
it would be bullshit.

*Engineering*

As hybrids and other “alternative” vehicles begin to be sold in earnest, I’m hearing a whole lot of hogwash; as hybrids are the key to transport in the interim, widespread misunderstanding of them is a serious problem. Having driven an all-electric car for a year, and having owned and loved two hybrids over the last eight years, I would like to offer a few important points:

1) In one TV ad, an actress declares, “It actually doesn’t feel like you’re driving a hybrid.” What?! As if you have loads of experience with hybrids? Did you assume it would be like driving a golf cart? In fact hybrids/electric cars have 100% of their available torque at stall, whereas combustion-engine cars have exactly 0%. In fact, one can burn rubber much more easily in a hybrid or electric than a regular car. It’s all because of the electric motor.

2) Know that an “eco” button on a hybrid just makes it automatically shut off at stop lights. “Eco” mode sets the electric motor in action–and that doesn’t mean you have less power! At lower RPMs in fact you have much more. When my father first drove my hybrid it took him a few minutes to get used to it; he was screeching and yanking our heads back and finally he said, “Wow, this thing is hot!”

3) When you hear GM talking about “100 years of engineering excellence,” know that they’re lying. Internal-combustion-engine (ICE) cars are in fact not 100-years worth of better. There is oil-car industry collusion which has kept MPGs at the minimum. We’ve been able to make cars that get 75 MPG for many years. GM released the EV-1 years ago that was the nicest electric car ever made, but they did _everything_ they could to stamp it out quickly (ever heard of it?). Their main interest is in maximizing oil profitability, during the waning of the Age of Oil, as gas steadily becomes too expensive even to get at.

The first car ever to get a speeding ticket in New York was an electric car in the 1890s. Imagine if we’d spent that last 100 years doing R&D on electrics, instead of the cash cows that are ICEs; we’d have electric cars by now which could circumnavigate the globe twice on a single charge. As I’ve said before, where we get electricity from makes all the difference; if it comes from coal-power plants, there is no gain over what we have now.

*MS*

Don’t know the original author but this essay has circulated widely. Those who care will please pay attention; every bit of this is my life. As much as I wish it weren’t so, these are the cards I’ve been dealt:

Open letter to those without MS

“Having MS means many things change, and a lot of them are invisible. Unlike AIDS and Cancer, most people do not understand even a little about MS and its effects, and of those that think they know, many are actually misinformed. In the spirit of informing those who wish to understand, these are the things that I would like you to understand about me before you judge me:

“Please understand that being sick doesn’t mean I’m not still a human being. I have to spend most of my day sitting on my arse, and if you visit I probably don’t seem like much fun to be with, but I’m still me stuck inside this body. I still worry about stuff and work and my family and friends, and most of the time I’d still like to hear you talk about yours too.
_____

“Please understand the difference between “happy” and “healthy”. When you’ve got the flu you probably feel miserable with it, but I’ve been sick for years. I can’t be miserable all the time, in fact I work hard at not being miserable. So if you’re talking to me and I sound happy, it means I’m happy. That’s all. It doesn’t mean that I’m not in a lot of pain, or extremely tired, or that I’m getting better, or any of those things. Please, don’t say, “Oh, you’re sounding better!”. I am not sounding better, I am sounding happy. If you want to comment on that, you’re welcome.
_____

“Please understand that being able to stand up for five minutes, doesn’t necessarily mean that I can stand up for ten minutes, or an hour. With a lot of diseases you’re either paralyzed, or you can move. With this one it gets more confusing.
_____

“Please repeat the above paragraph substituting, “sitting up”, “walking”, “thinking”, “being sociable” and so on … it applies to everything. That’s what this kind of illness does to you.
_____

“Please understand that MS is variable. It’s quite possible (for me, it’s common) that one day I am able to walk to the park and back, while the next day I’ll have trouble getting to the kitchen. Please don’t attack me when I’m ill by saying, “But you did it before!” if you want me to do something then ask if I can. In a similar vein, I may need to cancel an invitation at the last minute, if this happens please do not take it personally.
_____

“Please understand that “getting out and doing things” does not make me feel better, and can often make me seriously worse. MS may cause secondary depression (wouldn’t you get depressed if you were stuck inside for ages on end!?) but it is not created by depression. Telling me that I need some fresh air and exercise is not appreciated and not correct–don’t you think that if I could possibly do it that I would?
_____

“Please understand that if I say I have to sit down/pee/lie down/take these pills now, that I do have to do it right now–it can’t be put off or forgotten just because I’m out for the day (or whatever). MS does not forgive.
______

“If you want to suggest a cure to me, DON’T. It’s not because I don’t appreciate the thought, and it’s not because I don’t want to get well. It’s because I have had almost every single one of my friends suggest one at one point or another. At first I tried them all, but then I realized that I was using up so much energy trying things that I was making myself sicker, not better. If there was something that cured, or even helped, all people with MS then we’d know about it. This is not a drug-company conspiracy, there is worldwide networking (both on and off the Internet) between people with MS, if something worked we would KNOW.
_____

“If after reading that, you still want to suggest a cure, then do it, preferably in writing, but don’t expect me to rush out and try it. If I haven’t had it suggested before, I’ll take what you said and discuss it with my doctor. He’s open to new suggestions and is a great guy, and he takes what I say seriously.
_____

“In many ways I depend on you–people who are not sick–I need you to visit me when I am too sick to go out, I need you to shop for me, I need you to cook and clean for me, I need you to take me the the doctors, sometimes I need you to support me so I can walk to the bathroom without falling over.

“I need you on a different level too: you’re my link to the outside world, if you don’t set up my recliner in the lounge-room I can’t watch TV and if you don’t bring home a newspaper I can’t read it. If you don’t come to visit me then I won’t get to see you. And, as much as it’s possible, I need you to understand me.”

Not Done Living

*Prose*

My Ex

I realized that you never saw my troubles. MS, as it is for most, was completely invisible to you. I thought that by telling you about my numb feet, about the debilitating vertigo, about the impossibility of crowds, I thought as my wife you might understand and sympathize. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. You said to me once, “It’s not like you’re dying.” Do you know how much that hurt? Do you know there isn’t a day that passes that I don’t wish I were dying (more than we all are)? Do you know how much more awful it is to watch your body steadily disintegrate, until you can’t do anything for yourself, until you can’t remember why it is you keep pressing on, until you can’t do anything that would make you feel like a whole person? Of course you don’t, and you never had the courage to wonder what my life was like. Within two years of your deserting me, I got to a point where I can only barely walk a half a block; as I have a heavy disease-burden I knew this would be the case. Now walking is only the tip of the iceberg of my disability. If you’d had the courage to say no before we started, I wouldn’t have this massive, gaping hole in the middle of my life. I can’t work anymore, can’t go to poetry readings alone, can only just barely make it to the coffee shop on the corner, so I wonder if you can tell me how I’m supposed to meet women now? I’m trapped at home with an ailing heart and a faulty body. I wonder if you knew when you left that you would be the last woman I ever loved.

*Quotations*

If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
–Elmore Leonard

I who know the smallness of my voice and the tiny stink of all our journalistic voices repeated wonder if any words of mine could matter much.
–Stark Young

When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why so many people are poor they call me a communist.
–Dom Helder Câmara

In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch enemy sorrow, one can
remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is
unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in
big things and happy in small ways.
–Edith Wharton

Personal disintegration remains always an imminent danger.
–Christopher Lasch

When one’s character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.
–Twain

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.
–Freud

Just carrying a ruler with you in your pocket should be forbidden, at least on a moral basis. The ruler is the symbol of the new illiteracy. The ruler is the symptom of the new disease, disintegration of our civilisation.
–Friedensreich Hundertwasser

The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul’s death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.
–Henry Miller

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
–Paul Auster

*Music*

I downloaded three albums this week: David Gray’s latest Draw the Line, Eilen Jewell’s latest Sea of Tears, and an earlier Andrew-Bird album The Swimming Hour. I have never heard a David-Gray record I didn’t like, but Draw the Line is a real winner. If you’re a fan, this record hits all the right notes. It’s not quite as stellar as White Ladder but it’s excellent, with numerous deep hits. Favorite tracks are Fugitive, Nemesis, Kathleen (featuring Jolie Holland), and Transformation, but this is certainly a recording that’s easy to listen to from beginning to end. Evocative, intelligent, and lovelorn.

Sea of Love is another winner. Both it and also the above record offer the listener exactly what she or he would want. Ms Jewell’s bag is americana-rock/alt-country. As such, the guitar playing on every track is dynamite. Favorite songs are Rain Roll In, Sweet Rose, Shakin’ All Over, and Nowhere in No Time. “I’m just passing through; don’t pay it no mind. I’ll be nowhere in no time.” The only one I don’t like is I’m Gonna Dress in Black. Another success from one of my favorite artists.

Andrew Bird’s Swimming Hour is fascinating. It shows an artist still experimenting with sonic possibilities. It is not quite of the caliber of Armchair Apocrypha or Noble Beast; on those records, Bird had discovered his latter-day musical identity. Swimming Hour is a great portrait of a musician on his way to becoming what he is today. It’s very straight-up rock n roll, but as with Gray’s music in general, Bird (a violinist) shows himself unafraid of any and all sorts of instrumentation. Favorite tracks are Headsoak and How Indiscrete. Whereas the first two albums listed here are predictable in a very satisfying way, Swimming Hour is all over the map, from an artist still discovering himself.
_____

Lyrics to The Minnow and the Trout by A Fine Frenzy/Alison Sudol. “What we’re made of was all the same once” is a really stand-out lyric:

“‘Help me out,’ said the minnow to the trout.
‘I was lost and found myself swimming in your mouth.
Help me chief.
I’ve got to plans for you and me.
I swear upon this riverbed
I’ll help you feel young again.’
Not your every day circumstance,
hummingbird taking coffee with the ants.

“Please, I know that we’re different.
We were one cell in the sea in the beginning,
and what we’re made of was all the same once.
We’re not that different after all.

“‘Help me out,’ said the eagle to the dove.
‘I’ve fallen from my nest so high above.
Help me fly.
I am too afraid try.
Now saddled with a fear of heights
I’m praying you can set me right.’
Not your everyday circumstance,
elephant sharing peanuts with the rats.

“Please, I know that we’re different.
We were one cell in the sea in the beginning,
and what we’re made of was all the same once.
We’re not that different after all.”

Peace love and ATOM jazz

101109

After more than a year scouring eBay, patiently waiting, I finally found another one of those beautiful vintage tie racks I lost when I moved to my last abode in Portland. It cost me $7 but I would easily have paid $100 or more. It’s the finest single piece of gentleman’s kit I’ve ever come across.

*Grammar*

Please avoid use of an unqualified “so.” It is imprecise to say for example:

I am _so_ happy for you.

Yuck. A person is always so happy, so angry, so tired, etc., that something else is also true, something which should be named. For example:

I am so happy for you I could cry.

The bus driver was so tired he kept veering off the road.

She said she’s so angry she’s going to shoot somebody.

In some cases “so” is an integral part of a colloquial phrase; for example, “I’m so there.” Nothing to be done; that phrase is part of our lexicon.

It can be insidious and sometimes uncontrollable, but know that it’s generally awful. “I’m so happy you can come” is nearly gibberish; what you will always mean to say is, “I’m very happy you can come.” There is always a better way to coin a phrase than with the flaccid “so.” Try these:

I’m elated you can join us. [Instead of "I'm so happy...."]

I could eat a horse. [Why muck up your sentiment with excess verbiage like "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." ? Simple is always best.]

That was a riveting show. [Instead of "That was so good." One can be ornate with everyday language without excess; one should be so. The effort makes the world a more colorful place in which to live. Would that we all had others in mind when we thought to open our mouths.]

*Perfume*

This week I went to a place for embroidery; my plan is to offer an embroidered handkerchief with each bottle of perfume. The bottles will not have spray tops, so one can either apply the perfume with the included handkerchief or use the included small roll-on bottle. But the handkerchiefs I had found are too lightweight; the automated embroidery-machine work looked terrible. I will either have to find handkerchiefs with more heft, for cheap, or I’ll have to find a seamstress who’s willing to turn out a hundred at a time. For now I will include plain handkerchiefs, but embroidered ones I think will add a really elegant, and old-world, touch to Lord’s Jester packages.

On the business tip, I filed initial papers to incorporate in New York state. Soon it will be Lord’s Jester Inc. I thought the right thing to do was to get an LLC; I have Eros Aromatics LLC in Florida. Because of trademark problems, I abandoned efforts to trademark that name. It turns out that New York has strict laws about “publication” when you form an LLC; you have to publish notice in two major newspapers for six weeks. That would cost an arm and a leg, so an S Corp is what I made; I’m not totally clear on it, but a regular C Corp pays taxes twice (on the way out and the way in, I think) whereas and S Corp pays only once. The difference from an LLC is that I will have to have board meetings and officers; since I’m President, Secretary, and Treasurer, I’ll have to keep minutes and all that for all meetings I have with myself on corporate business.

I’ve decided Anthea is just too sharp, though it has plenty of fans. On the next try I will cut way down on the jasmine–it’s a jasmine perfume so there will still be a lot, just less. I am finding it hard sometimes, as I do in all the arts, to know when to say enough’s enough. It’s not perfect yet, and I can’t sign off on it until it is. Additionally, Pop gave me very positive reviews of the revamped Helios, now with significantly more orange (pressed orange, orange distilled from orange juice, bergamot) and a tad less patchouli. This is now a working recipe, and may be one of the ones I submit to the Guild (to gain the title Professional Perfumer).

We also made my first really successful immortelle perfume, called Chronos. In fact, it does smell a fair bit like Annick Goutal’s Sables, the quintessential immortelle perfume (synthetic), though that was not my intention. It’s almost right, but I think it needs some brighter stuff in the heart (immortelle is fairly dark). Not sure yet what extract will bring the _right_ brightness (I might try ylang ylang, though I don’t think of it as bright; it could be the right foil for the consonance of the rest of the composition). And we made a liquid version of Selene; the solid version of it is what I passed Level I of Mandy Aftel’s course with (fair to say she raved about it). The liquid version is fleshed out; the solid has 12 essences, and the liquid 16.

We made a revamped version of Phoebe, my tribute to osmanthus; I’ve decided to work past what I consider heavy-handed scents (which I favored when I first started), and to work with each recipe until it is, even for a perfumer, mostly inexplicable. I want anyone who smells my perfumes to smell something simultaneously familiar, enjoyable, and mysterious. Phoebe is too obvious for me now, though I’m sure most people (non-perfumers) would have no clue that osmanthus is its main constituent. Still, I don’t want _anyone_ to smell my compositions and think, “Oh, well, I know what that is.” Another old one that’s heavy handed is Daphne (used to be Keeper, my chypre), and that one is heavy on tonka bean. In all cases, this sort of “problem” is easy to fix.

*Poem*

Solidarity of the Shattered

One summer I went with
my late friend Nick
to his parents’
summer place
in Connecticut.
In New London,
not far away,
there was a guitar store;
Nick and I spent
many hours in there
dreaming of the great
guitar players we might
one day be.
Through the various
contortions of fate,
guitar greatness was
not in the cards
for either of us.
It reassures me
to remember that
while he was
still with us
Nick and I dreamed
together our innocent
(but doomed)
visions of fame and
fortune and greatness.
Neither one of us
really got a fair shake
this go round and
for that, the ghost
of my old friend and I
will always share
a certain solidarity
of the shattered.

*Teachers*

The best jazz-improv lesson I ever received was from my friend Christopher Woitach, written in pencil in an old spiral-bound notebook. This is a set of ideas to bear in mind, and choose from, when improvising:

Motivic development (Motif, idea, short phrase, “lick”)

1. Silence
2. Repetition
3. Sequence–same idea, different notes
4. Augmentation–longer note values
5. Diminution–shorter note values
6. Retrograde
7. Inversion
8. Call/response (Q&A)
9. Noise/articulation
10. Fragments
11. Rhythmic displacement

That silence is first on the list is extremely telling. Miles Davis once said that a piece of art isn’t finished until everything is taken out that doesn’t need to be there; silences, like empty space in design or painting, often say more than noise/clutter. All of these points offer the experienced improviser a great palette to use. The trick is learning to use it on the fly, to engrain it deeply in one’s consciousness.

*Rainshadow*

At the end of my year with an electric car, I became an intern with Rainshadow Solar on Orcas Island. (There is a “rainshadow” which causes less rain to fall on the San Juan Islands than falls on the mainland.) This was yet another element in my grand schemes: the electric car, residential solar (I did the internship as an independent study), agriculture, etc.; I was engrossed in an investigation into the meaning of Sustainable Development, so I set out to experience all the alternatives I could find to the mainstream, suicidal way of life. I had a great time, but I feel badly for Rainshadow’s founder, John Mottl, whom I worked with every weekend for several months; I was a really bad intern, and I blame that on the fact I was about a year from being diagnosed with MS (most of my life was just plain difficult and I had no idea why).

Mr Mottl had himself a fine occupation: from his home base on Orcas, he travelled by boat to various wealthy homes on the San Juans, especially the ones with no ferry service, to maintain and install different kinds of renewable-energy systems. I learned a great deal about what works, what’s a pain in the butt, and what simply can’t be relied on. We worked on systems with solar arrays, wind generators (windmills), micro-hydro systems, etc. Through my work with Rainshadow, I became particularly enamored of mico-hydro and wind generators, but mainly micro-hydro. The problem with wind is that if your location is no good (not enough wind) there’s absolutely nothing you can do. Solar panels take far too long to recoup the energy it took to make them in the first place (some maintain that you never can get all of it back).

You can generate limitless energy with micro-hydro, and the generator itself is tiny and takes practically nothing to fabricate. Some would say the problem here is the same as it is for wind: logistics. All you need is a trickle, but there has to be a good “head,” the difference between the height of the intake pipe and the output pipe (at the generator). If the head is good, what was a trickle at the top of a hill where the intake is becomes a powerful stream of water at the bottom where the generator is. Mottl showed me one example which generated _too much_ energy for its household–and it was from a tiny intake pipe atop a tall hill. I have an idea for micro-hydro in cities which I think is a really good one and I wish I could find a way of getting the idea across to the right people:

Every major metropolis has an extensive network of storm drains, one plentiful source of water already beneath the surface of the earth; buildings with basements (very common in cities), for another source, could cycle water up and down the building just for power. The idea with the storm drains would be to direct the water to generators deeper down, for good head; likewise with building “energy water:” in most cases the height from the top of a building to the basement gives you plenty of head. Setting up tens of thousands of small generators tied to storm drains or building water systems would easily, and at relatively low cost, be a massive source of clean energy. End the era of burning coal! Push for outside-the-box thinking when it comes to energy production.

*Quotations*

You feel, in New York City, the energy coming up out of the sidewalks, you know that you are in the midst of something tremendous, and if something tremendous hasn’t yet happened, it’s just about to happen.
–Brendan Gill
[Damn straight]

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.
–Denis Diderot
[I feel this in my bones; the latter part of the statement caused much trouble in college.]

If you write a story today, and you get up tomorrow and start another story, all the expertise that you put into the first story doesn’t transfer over automatically to the second story. You’re always starting at the bottom of the mountain. So you’re always becoming a writer. You’re never really arriving.
–Edward P Jones
[I have long felt this ever becoming never arriving.]

Memory believes before knowing remembers.
–Faulkener
[Anyone care to explain this to me?]

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising everytime we fall.
–Confucius
[When we've been told we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes we can.--Obama]

Although the conclusion may appear at first startling, it will be difficult to deny the probability, that every particle of earth forming the bed from which the turf in old pasture land springs, has passed through the intestines of worms.
–Charles Darwin
[Worms must be acknowledged as the real farmers on any farm.]

We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.
–William Glasser
[I only see a need for survival, love, and fun, but love most of all--with it the rest of the world falls away.]

Every poem, every work of art, everything that is well done, well made, well said, generously given, adds to our chances of survival.
–Philip Booth
[Nicely put.]

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
–CS Lewis
[Endowing survival with higher value is a most under-appreciated effort.]

Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.
–Eliza Tabor
[That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.]

Peace love and ATOM jazz

101109

After more than a year scouring eBay, patiently waiting, I finally found another one of those beautiful vintage tie racks I lost when I moved to my last abode in Portland. It cost me $7 but I would easily have paid $100 or more. It’s the finest single piece of gentleman’s kit I’ve ever come across.

*Grammar*

Please avoid use of an unqualified “so.” It is imprecise to say for example:

I am _so_ happy for you.

Yuck. A person is always so happy, so angry, so tired, etc., that something else is also true, something which should be named. For example:

I am so happy for you I could cry.

The bus driver was so tired he kept veering off the road.

She said she’s so angry she’s going to shoot somebody.

In some cases “so” is an integral part of a colloquial phrase; for example, “I’m so there.” Nothing to be done; that phrase is part of our lexicon.

It can be insidious and sometimes uncontrollable, but know that it’s generally awful. “I’m so happy you can come” is nearly gibberish; what you will always mean to say is, “I’m very happy you can come.” There is always a better way to coin a phrase than with the flaccid “so.” Try these:

I’m elated you can join us. [Instead of "I'm so happy...."]

I could eat a horse. [Why muck up your sentiment with excess verbiage like "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." ? Simple is always best.]

That was a riveting show. [Instead of "That was so good." One can be ornate with everyday language without excess; one should be so. The effort makes the world a more colorful place in which to live. Would that we all had others in mind when we thought to open our mouths.]

*Perfume*

This week I went to a place for embroidery; my plan is to offer an embroidered handkerchief with each bottle of perfume. The bottles will not have spray tops, so one can either apply the perfume with the included handkerchief or use the included small roll-on bottle. But the handkerchiefs I had found are too lightweight; the automated embroidery-machine work looked terrible. I will either have to find handkerchiefs with more heft, for cheap, or I’ll have to find a seamstress who’s willing to turn out a hundred at a time. For now I will include plain handkerchiefs, but embroidered ones I think will add a really elegant, and old-world, touch to Lord’s Jester packages.

On the business tip, I filed initial papers to incorporate in New York state. Soon it will be Lord’s Jester Inc. I thought the right thing to do was to get an LLC; I have Eros Aromatics LLC in Florida. Because of trademark problems, I abandoned efforts to trademark that name. It turns out that New York has strict laws about “publication” when you form an LLC; you have to publish notice in two major newspapers for six weeks. That would cost an arm and a leg, so an S Corp is what I made; I’m not totally clear on it, but a regular C Corp pays taxes twice (on the way out and the way in, I think) whereas and S Corp pays only once. The difference from an LLC is that I will have to have board meetings and officers; since I’m President, Secretary, and Treasurer, I’ll have to keep minutes and all that for all meetings I have with myself on corporate business.

I’ve decided Anthea is just too sharp, though it has plenty of fans. On the next try I will cut way down on the jasmine–it’s a jasmine perfume so there will still be a lot, just less. I am finding it hard sometimes, as I do in all the arts, to know when to say enough’s enough. It’s not perfect yet, and I can’t sign off on it until it is. Additionally, Pop gave me very positive reviews of the revamped Helios, now with significantly more orange (pressed orange, orange distilled from orange juice, bergamot) and a tad less patchouli. This is now a working recipe, and may be one of the ones I submit to the Guild (to gain the title Professional Perfumer).

We also made my first really successful immortelle perfume, called Chronos. In fact, it does smell a fair bit like Annick Goutal’s Sables, the quintessential immortelle perfume (synthetic), though that was not my intention. It’s almost right, but I think it needs some brighter stuff in the heart (immortelle is fairly dark). Not sure yet what extract will bring the _right_ brightness (I might try ylang ylang, though I don’t think of it as bright; it could be the right foil for the consonance of the rest of the composition). And we made a liquid version of Selene; the solid version of it is what I passed Level I of Mandy Aftel’s course with (fair to say she raved about it). The liquid version is fleshed out; the solid has 12 essences, and the liquid 16.

We made a revamped version of Phoebe, my tribute to osmanthus; I’ve decided to work past what I consider heavy-handed scents (which I favored when I first started), and to work with each recipe until it is, even for a perfumer, mostly inexplicable. I want anyone who smells my perfumes to smell something simultaneously familiar, enjoyable, and mysterious. Phoebe is too obvious for me now, though I’m sure most people (non-perfumers) would have no clue that osmanthus is its main constituent. Still, I don’t want _anyone_ to smell my compositions and think, “Oh, well, I know what that is.” Another old one that’s heavy handed is Daphne (used to be Keeper, my chypre), and that one is heavy on tonka bean. In all cases, this sort of “problem” is easy to fix.

*Poem*

Solidarity of the Shattered

One summer I went with
my late friend Nick
to his parents’
summer place
in Connecticut.
In New London,
not far away,
there was a guitar store;
Nick and I spent
many hours in there
dreaming of the great
guitar players we might
one day be.
Through the various
contortions of fate,
guitar greatness was
not in the cards
for either of us.
It reassures me
to remember that
while he was
still with us
Nick and I dreamed
together our innocent
(but doomed)
visions of fame and
fortune and greatness.
Neither one of us
really got a fair shake
this go round and
for that, the ghost
of my old friend and I
will always share
a certain solidarity
of the shattered.

*Teachers*

The best jazz-improv lesson I ever received was from my friend Christopher Woitach, written in pencil in an old spiral-bound notebook. This is a set of ideas to bear in mind, and choose from, when improvising:

Motivic development (Motif, idea, short phrase, “lick”)

1. Silence
2. Repetition
3. Sequence–same idea, different notes
4. Augmentation–longer note values
5. Diminution–shorter note values
6. Retrograde
7. Inversion
8. Call/response (Q&A)
9. Noise/articulation
10. Fragments
11. Rhythmic displacement

That silence is first on the list is extremely telling. Miles Davis once said that a piece of art isn’t finished until everything is taken out that doesn’t need to be there; silences, like empty space in design or painting, often say more than noise/clutter. All of these points offer the experienced improviser a great palette to use. The trick is learning to use it on the fly, to engrain it deeply in one’s consciousness.

*Rainshadow*

At the end of my year with an electric car, I became an intern with Rainshadow Solar on Orcas Island. (There is a “rainshadow” which causes less rain to fall on the San Juan Islands than falls on the mainland.) This was yet another element in my grand schemes: the electric car, residential solar (I did the internship as an independent study), agriculture, etc.; I was engrossed in an investigation into the meaning of Sustainable Development, so I set out to experience all the alternatives I could find to the mainstream, suicidal way of life. I had a great time, but I feel badly for Rainshadow’s founder, John Mottl, whom I worked with every weekend for several months; I was a really bad intern, and I blame that on the fact I was about a year from being diagnosed with MS (most of my life was just plain difficult and I had no idea why).

Mr Mottl had himself a fine occupation: from his home base on Orcas, he travelled by boat to various wealthy homes on the San Juans, especially the ones with no ferry service, to maintain and install different kinds of renewable-energy systems. I learned a great deal about what works, what’s a pain in the butt, and what simply can’t be relied on. We worked on systems with solar arrays, wind generators (windmills), micro-hydro systems, etc. Through my work with Rainshadow, I became particularly enamored of mico-hydro and wind generators, but mainly micro-hydro. The problem with wind is that if your location is no good (not enough wind) there’s absolutely nothing you can do. Solar panels take far too long to recoup the energy it took to make them in the first place (some maintain that you never can get all of it back).

You can generate limitless energy with micro-hydro, and the generator itself is tiny and takes practically nothing to fabricate. Some would say the problem here is the same as it is for wind: logistics. All you need is a trickle, but there has to be a good “head,” the difference between the height of the intake pipe and the output pipe (at the generator). If the head is good, what was a trickle at the top of a hill where the intake is becomes a powerful stream of water at the bottom where the generator is. Mottl showed me one example which generated _too much_ energy for its household–and it was from a tiny intake pipe atop a tall hill. I have an idea for micro-hydro in cities which I think is a really good one and I wish I could find a way of getting the idea across to the right people:

Every major metropolis has an extensive network of storm drains, one plentiful source of water already beneath the surface of the earth; buildings with basements (very common in cities), for another source, could cycle water up and down the building just for power. The idea with the storm drains would be to direct the water to generators deeper down, for good head; likewise with building “energy water:” in most cases the height from the top of a building to the basement gives you plenty of head. Setting up tens of thousands of small generators tied to storm drains or building water systems would easily, and at relatively low cost, be a massive source of clean energy. End the era of burning coal! Push for outside-the-box thinking when it comes to energy production.

*Quotations*

You feel, in New York City, the energy coming up out of the sidewalks, you know that you are in the midst of something tremendous, and if something tremendous hasn’t yet happened, it’s just about to happen.
–Brendan Gill
[Damn straight]

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.
–Denis Diderot
[I feel this in my bones; the latter part of the statement caused much trouble in college.]

If you write a story today, and you get up tomorrow and start another story, all the expertise that you put into the first story doesn’t transfer over automatically to the second story. You’re always starting at the bottom of the mountain. So you’re always becoming a writer. You’re never really arriving.
–Edward P Jones
[I have long felt this ever becoming never arriving.]

Memory believes before knowing remembers.
–Faulkener
[Anyone care to explain this to me?]

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising everytime we fall.
–Confucius
[When we've been told we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes we can.--Obama]

Although the conclusion may appear at first startling, it will be difficult to deny the probability, that every particle of earth forming the bed from which the turf in old pasture land springs, has passed through the intestines of worms.
–Charles Darwin
[Worms must be acknowledged as the real farmers on any farm.]

We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom, and fun.
–William Glasser
[I only see a need for survival, love, and fun, but love most of all--with it the rest of the world falls away.]

Every poem, every work of art, everything that is well done, well made, well said, generously given, adds to our chances of survival.
–Philip Booth
[Nicely put.]

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
–CS Lewis
[Endowing survival with higher value is a most under-appreciated effort.]

Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.
–Eliza Tabor
[That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.]

Peace love and ATOM jazz

100409

The hubris reflected in IBM’s new slogan “let’s build a better world” is simply staggering. The world has wisdom that we mortals know not of. The idea that she needs _our_ help is preposterous. What she needs is for us to back off, stop messing with her finely tuned systems. The problem is _not_ that our world isn’t smart enough; the problem is that we overwhelm it with our short-sighted selfishness. What we need is a brand new set of rules as to what’s okay and what’s not. Methinks we will have those new rules forced upon us any day; in truth they finally are being, out of sheer desperation now.

*Food*

Most of my adult life I spent in food-service and grocery. Here’s a partial list of experiences:

1. The first real job I had (more than selling greeting cards in our apartment complex), when I was 15 or 16, was as a cook and clerk at an empanada place in Tampa. They liked me in part because I speak Spanish. I learned the basics of cooking (for large groups) and the basics of what being a shopkeeper is about. (I remember writing this on the chalkboard the day I left: Sin amor en el sueño, nunca se puede realizará, a Grateful Dead quote, without love in the dream it will never come true. Hippie!)

2. On my first trip to the west coast, I got two jobs that completely paid my way (though I must admit my life was a whole lot simpler back then). The first was as a dishwasher at a place called the Continental Garden on Shattuck in Berkeley. Breakfast/lunch place with lines around the corner on weekends. The owner, Roman, was a hard-ass Swiss guy who taught me the rest of what I needed to know about working with a small group in tight quarters.

3. Next, I got one of the best jobs I ever had, as a cocktail waiter at Yoshi’s, the main jazz club serving San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley. Great job: I had to serve drinks for the first ten minutes of every set; then I got to sit back and enjoy the show. Saw some of the best jazz I’ve ever seen there.

4. Back in NYC, a good friend got me a job as a bus boy at a fancy hotel in Manhattan, just above a famous restaurant called Bellini’s. The famous drink, a Bellini, is named for it. From money I earned at this job, I paid my way for an exchange-type trip to Nepal.

5. I worked for a short time at one of the first fancy breweries to open in Manhattan. I think it was called Zip City. They hired me because I had been a home-brewer. It was fancy and I hated working there. At this job, I first realized I did not have the temperament to be a waiter.

6. I worked for a couple of years at what was then the only health-food store in the East Village, Prana Foods. I worked with a bunch of radicals and it was here that I found my essential radical self, neo-Luddite, antiestablishment, anti-city. I also began my life as a baker, which persisted for many years.

[I realize the dates are somewhat confused in my memory.]

7. I worked for a short time as a bar-back at a meat market on 23rd Street called Live Bait. I was still a kid, and so wasn’t prepared for the untamed lasciviousness of the place. One night as I was re-stocking beer, one of the drunk ladies at the bar called me over; she said, “I was just wondering, can you tell me, what does your dick look like?” I had friend call in to say I would not be returning not long after that.

8. I got a job as a chef at the Lookout Inn in Brooklin, Maine. My girlfriend and I were working on putting up a cabin, and we were fanatical vegans, so it’s a miracale I even showed up for this gig. It worked, but at the time, I hated cooking meat. It was a fancy restaurant, so I had to prepare fancy things like filet mignon, grilled duck, and had to bake baguettes for every meal.

9. The first job I got on the west-coast, on my second trip west, was at a place called the 24-Carrot Cafe, another breakfast place. I had just come from Maine, where my girlfriend and I were die-hard vegans. I immediately found Seattle to be very vegan friendly. I ended up quitting after less than two weeks because I couldn’t stand cooking meat anymore, but the owner had hired me simply because I was a New Yorker.

10. Then I got a job at a teahouse called the Teahouse Kuanyin. I did a respectable job there, in part because I knew all about tea from living in Taiwan. I never once made it on time though; I blame that on the fact that I had to take two buses to get there–and mass transit in Seattle is awful. Here I also met a woman whom I was to fall deeply in love with after I saw her in my first class at Seattle Central Community College.

11. Not long after that, I got a job as a shopkeeper at Puget Consumers Co-op, the largest food co-op in the country, a real coup for a new comer. It was in West Seattle, so again it took two lengthy bus rides to get there; I did finally buy a lemon of a truck soon after. I had to quit this job because of a lower-back injury. I see now that this was the beginning of MS in my life; it is more common than not for MS’ers to have a history of lower back trouble.

12. The final food-world job I had was at the Alberta Co-op in Portland. They always treated me with respect, and this was after my diagnosis, so it was a real risk taking me on. I could never even begin to do the shopkeeping part of that job now. They also let me be their graphic designer, which I enjoyed. I tried to steer them in the right direction, toward eco friendly designs, recycled paper, soy ink, etc. (it is possible to create designs with, for example, one color jobs in which ink doesn’t cover much of the paper) but on visits to the store before I left Oregon, was greatly disappointed that they reverted to their old amateurish, non eco friendly, chintzy graphics material. I tried.

*Japan*

While I was busy being a degenerate in Hong Kong (sleeping late, smoking hash, eating black-market Indian food twice a day, etc.), I happened to meet a photographer who agreed to make me a set of head-shots, which I planned to use on my soon-to-be trip to Japan. Little did I know my main source of income in Japan was to be all-request busking (I had yet to meet my mentor in this area, an Australian fellow named Jerry that befriended me in Tokyo). While I didn’t do much, what little modeling I did in Tokyo was for me highly memorable:

1. Best of all was the time I got to be on Japanese television. In the far east (Hong Kong included), they often need white people for non-speaking TV roles. The deal was that for a day of “work,” you got like $40, cash, and got a good lunch. I know guys (in Tokyo and HK) who survived solely on this TV-extra work; lunch was obviously an important part of the deal. In the show I appeared in, I played an anonymous white jogger.

2. Once, an agency I had just started working for called me in for a special opportunity: the owner of the agency was to accompany me herself to an interview for a special photo shoot; I think it might have been for a perfume. The gist of it was that we ended up, the three of us, myself, my agent, and the rep looking for “talent,” sitting in a small office with all eyes (all four) on me as I tried to look as “mean” and “evil” as I could. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

3. The final straw in my Japanese modeling life, the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, was the day I showed up to try out for a men’s deodorant commercial. The lot of the other white guys there was more abhorrent to me than nearly any other I’d met; they were completely ignorant to every aspect of the Japanese world around them–worse yet, they were proud of that ignorance. I decided before the day was through a) that I would do as bad a job as I possibly could so that I could be certain they wouldn’t call me back, and b) that I would never again mix with model types in Japan. And I never did.

*Quotations*

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.
–Wallace Stevens

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
–ee cummings

Electronic aids, particularly domestic computers, will help the inner migration, the opting out of reality. Reality is no longer going to be the stuff out there, but the stuff inside your head. It’s going to be commercial and nasty at the same time.
–JG Ballard

All the problems we face in the United States today can be traced to an unenlightened immigration policy on the part of the American Indian.
–Pat Paulsen

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.
–James Madison

I came to the conclusion that while there may be an immigration problem, it isn’t really a serious problem. The really serious problem is assimilation.
–Samuel P Huntington

No matter what other nations may say about the United States, immigration is still the sincerest form of flattery.
–Clayton Cramer

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.
–Erica Jong

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrations and revolutionists.
–FDR

DULLARD, n. A member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life. The Dullards came in with Adam, and being both numerous and sturdy have overrun the habitable world. The secret of their power is their insensibility to blows; tickle them with a bludgeon and they laugh with a platitude. The Dullards came originally from Boeotia, whence they were driven by stress of starvation, their dullness having blighted the crops. For some centuries they infested Philistia, and many of them are called Philistines to this day. In the turbulent times of the Crusades they withdrew thence and gradually overspread all Europe, occupying most of the high places in politics, art, literature, science and theology. Since a detachment of Dullards came over with the Pilgrims in the _Mayflower_ and made a favorable report of the country, their increase by birth, immigration, and conversion has been rapid and steady. According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians. The intellectual centre of the race is somewhere about Peoria, Illinois, but the New England Dullard is the most shockingly moral.
–Ambrose Pierce

*Climate*

By Dr Cecelia Tacoli for the BBC:

“Search the internet for “migration” and “climate change” and you will find repeated warnings of a crisis in the making; of hundreds of millions of people on the move, of countries straining to cope with the pressure on their borders, and of national security under threat. But these fears are based on many misconceptions about the duration, destination and composition of migrant flows. There is a real risk that alarmism will divert attention from real problems, resulting in policies that fail to protect the most vulnerable people. The longer it takes people to realise this, the bigger the true problems will become.

“Firstly, the numbers of people likely to be moving have been exaggerated. Secondly, the notion commonly expressed in rich countries–that large numbers of poor people from across the planet will attempt to migrate there permanently–is clearly wrong. Yes, hundreds of millions of people live in places that are highly vulnerable to climate change. They face extreme weather conditions such as droughts and floods, or they live in low-lying coastal areas that are threatened by rising sea levels. Their lives and livelihoods are threatened in new and significant ways. But this does not mean they will all migrate.

“The poorest and most vulnerable people will often find it impossible to move, as they lack the necessary funds and social support. Those who can migrate will be more likely to make short-term, short-distance movements than permanent long-term ones. Overall, long-distance international migration will be the least likely option. What can we learn from the past? In northern Mali, the drought of 1983-5 affected local migration patterns, with an increase in temporary and short-distance movement and a decrease in long-term, intercontinental movement. Similarly, recent research in Burkina Faso suggests that a decrease in rainfall increases temporary rural-rural migration.

“On the other hand, migration to urban centres and to other nations, which entails higher costs, is more likely to take place after normal rainfall periods. It is influenced by migrants’ education, the existence of social networks and access to transport and road networks. In all cases, migrants make substantial contributions to the livelihoods of their relatives and communities, by sending money, information and goods back home. A surprisingly large proportion of the income of rural people in Africa, Asia and Latin America comes from non-farm activities, and much of it as migrants’ remittances. With climate change making farming more difficult, the need for these resources will increase.

“Unfortunately, most governments and international agencies tend to see migration as a problem that needs to be controlled instead of a key part of the solution. In doing so, they are missing opportunities to develop policies that can increase people’s resilience to climate change. Policymakers must radically alter their views of migration, and see it as a vital adaptation to climate change rather than as an unwanted consequence or a failure to adapt.

“This means that poorer nations need to prepare for climate change at home by building up infrastructure and basic services in small towns located in rural areas that could become destination hubs for local migrants. Options include policies that promote access to non-farm jobs in small rural towns and a more decentralised distribution of economic opportunities. To do so, they should first of all focus on increasing the capacity of local governments and institutions in small towns to support local economic development, provide basic services and regulate equitable access to natural resources.

“Richer countries, meanwhile, need to stop panicking about a mass influx of migrants that is unlikely to happen and instead focus on helping the poorer countries to face climate change. As the richer countries have emitted most of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, they have a duty to address the problem. This means providing poorer nations with financial support to help them adapt to climate change, which can either reduce the need for migration or enable it to proceed in a way that is sound and sustainable. It also means taking drastic domestic action to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases that are causing climate change in the first place.

“People are talking about migration as if it were something new, but people have always used their mobility as a means to protect themselves and escape from poverty. The problem is not that people want to move, but that many of the most vulnerable people do not have the resources or livelihood options that will enable them to do so in a way that maintains their security. Ironically, the failure to recognise the role of voluntary migration in adapting to climate change contributes to crisis-driven movements that inevitably increase the vulnerability of those forced to leave their homes and assets as they flee conflict and disaster. It is worth remembering that supporting migrants can ultimately help reduce the numbers of refugees.”

Peace love and ATOM jazz

092709

Obama’s climate-change speech to the UN was spot on. As always, his main point was: none of us can do this alone. We will only be able to meet the climate-change challenge by working together, rich and poor, developed and developing, skeptics and ecologists. The speech on nuclear de-proliferation was really top notch as well. (And as Letterman quipped, “Isn’t it great to have a president who knows how to pronounce nuclear?”) Having seen Obama speak on a variety of grave topics now, I can say that I believe in him and his administration even more than I did before the election–and that’s saying a hell of a lot.
____

I posted a video this week on Facebook about “a day in the life” of MS kind of thing, meant for the lay person and MS’er alike. The response was very positive, so much so that this will become a new, regular outlet for me.

*Perfume*

Last week my assistant and I made a second try of the solid perfume I made for Pop, revamped, now called Helios. This is the first time I’ve made a solid perfume with 16 essences. The most I’d used before in a solid (which I will, for business purposes, call concretes de parfum) was 12 (I commonly use 18 or more essences in alcohol perfumes). Really the recipe was working all right; I wanted there to be more of an orange character, so I beefed up the top, adding orange essence oil (distilled from orange juice instead of pressed from the skins) and plenty of bergamot. The results are promising. I’ll know more clearly in another week or so.

Also, this week we made a new perfume, Chronos. I happened to pick up an old bottle of something I made when I first got immortelle diluted and ready to use in perfume. The top section of this old one was all wrong, too sharp. But I noticed it had incredible longevity–it lasted more than 24 hours, and even made it through a shower and was still redolent! That’s really impressive for a natural perfume. I looked at the recipe and realized it was likely that the combination of orris and benzoin gave it unbelievable tenacity. So I kept the base the same, added to the heart, and changed the top completely. I have high hopes for this brew. I will let you know how it turns out.

We also made a revamped version of Anthea, my tribute to jasmine. It is already adored by a number of people but it still seems too sharp to me. Jasmine can be sharp when not tamed. I attempted to rein in the jasmine with clary sage and rose. Time will tell whether or not it worked, but my initial sense is that it did. Maybe just a bit more tweaking, but then again maybe not. In all arts I often have trouble getting myself to say enough is enough. In perfume, I find I’m growing more astute, knowing with precision what needs to change, how much, or if it just plain ain’t broke. This art is all about patience, and trial and error.

Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about packaging. I’ve found the right bottles (one 5ml, one 10ml) with black screw caps. Spray caps cost twice as much as the bottles themselves! So I will do several things, partly inspired by Serge Lutens: I will include an embroidered handkerchief for each customer (so they can apply perfume, from the screw-cap bottle, as in days of old; one cool thing about this is after you’ve rubbed in perfume where you want it, you can put the scented kerchief in you purse, suit pocket, or briefcase, or even a drawer; natural perfume lasts much longer on fabric or paper than on skin). I will also include in each box (found 100%-PC-recycled-fiber boxes): a printed description of the perfume(s), a tiny, glass spray bottle and a small, glass roll-on bottle, for additional options in application.

*Words*

The Global-Village Idiot

Hi. I’m a moron.
I mean to say I’m an oxymoron.
What I mean to point out
is that I’m a bright progressive person
who delights in the possibility
that the federal government will in fact
fall to pieces one happy day.
I’m a jazz lover who feels that 99.9% of jazz
is worse than obsolete–
it’s 2010, people; there’s no reason
to continue being stuck in the past.
You should do yourself a favor and listen
to some of the miraculously hip jazz
made in the last 20 years.
Think about it: even just considering
population growth, there _must_ be
more great jazz players on the planet now
than ever before.
But what do I know? I’m a fool.
I’m a blues singer who doesn’t sing the blues.
I’m a health-food nut who eats mostly frozen food.
Sometimes I can love only as much
as I can be angry. Sometimes I can be angry
only as much as I can cry.
I cry with no one to hear
and I sing the blues without uttering a sound.
I happen to believe that the very idea
of an omnipotent designer/creator is
worse than ludicrous.
But I still believe in God’s love,
and I want to know where exactly, succinctly,
is the contradiction in that?
God knows I know there are at least
two or three in there somewhere.
I feel blessed and wickedly wronged
at the same time. I might feel blessed
exactly because I feel so wronged,
as if there’s some entitlement program
which awaits me in hell, a program
just for those, like me, who are
eternally confused by the ways
of our race, who double over with sorrow
as they feel the weight of the world,
and who can’t stop asking, “Why?”
seldom with the wisdom of a prayer
or the grace of any angel.
Look at me now, sitting here in front of you
whining about eternal confusion
and the weight of the world,
about prayers and angels.
Best stand clear: any second I’ll be talking
about souls. I mean really.
What would I know from a soul?
I must be some kind of a moron.

*Disability*

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my life with an able body. First and foremost is traveling around the world with a backpack; I could never do that now. (I might be able to travel, with lots of planning and pre-organization, but certainly not with a backpack, and not with the impetuousness I did before.) Also, I’ve been watching sports again. It’s exhilarating to watch world-class athletes doing things I can’t even dream of anymore. A brief history of my life in sports:

1. I was never much of an athlete but in my early days I excelled at one thing: playing second base in baseball. Unfortunately, my little-league coach’s son (in Florida) also played second base, so even though I was better than him, I rarely got to start. It felt great to hear parents screaming when I was taken out of a game for no good reason. I moved back to New York; I was so busy trying to fit in, and nervous, that I failed to make the St Bernard’s baseball team. I remember at try-outs, the coach, Mr Warnock, said, “Well, you stand up there like a batter [my father had taught me well] but nothing happens.” To this day I’m bitter about that: maybe if Warnock had believed in me a little and given me a chance, I would have succeeded. That’s pretty much the story of my life.

2. At boarding school (Milton Academy) I played lacrosse and football (before I was kicked out). I was an offensive and defensive lineman in football. Man, did I have fun. My best moments were on offense: often my sole job was to swing out and deck a defender on the wing. Poor guys saw me coming but didn’t expect that I would be able to lay them flat with one blow. Few things in life I have found to be as satisfying.

3. For some reason, one high-school moment sticks out in my mind: after returning to New York from Milton, I started going out with a girl who was _the_ major love of my young life (more than a few months). Her family had a house in the Hamptons. It’s a very small memory but it means the world to me: one day I was playing a game of soccer and we had to leave; there was a large hedge between the soccer field and the car, a hedge taller than I was. I was full of adrenaline from the soccer game; I ran and leapt over the hedge, perfectly, cleanly. Even my girlfriend’s mother was impressed. It makes me smile to remember that once I was able to leap over tall hedges in a single bound.

*Health*

Please watch this important and sardonic humorous piece about health insurance, featuring Jon Hamm, Will Ferrell, and others:

Will Ferrel etc on the real victims of health

*Taiwan*

[The next day was unbearably hot and we came to terms with the wreckage: the whole center of town was flooded and wouldn't be cleared for days if not weeks; the damage was incalculable. I went to look at my apartment and what I saw was life changing: the river had risen to above the first floor--in other words every single one of my possessions on this earth had been soaked and forever sullied by river mud; an entire wardrobe gone, my most dear photos turned into a pile of undecipherable sludge, all of the little trinkets I'd collected in Taiwan ruined. My motorcycle, fully flooded like everything else, was the only thing I was able to salvage The apartment was a stinking mess so there was no way I could sleep there--I hadn't even gotten to enjoy it for a single day! Back to the top of the hill I returned....]

And the final nail in the coffin of my time in Taiwan was this: on that tremendously hot day, as I sat around in my shorts, chit-chatting with the Australian/Dutch woman, she took it all the wrong way, a way which would prove to be dangerous for me. Her husband had been out all day, attending to some business or other, and our host was gone somewhere too, so it was just the girl and I, alone together, in the wake of a storm, in someone else’s house. We talked about all manner of things, where we each grew up, what sort of schools we’d been to (I was barely a high-school graduate at the time)…and our love lives. I thought nothing of it at the time, but it turns out this woman was delusional and imagined things into our day together which weren’t possibly true.

One of the things we’d discussed, in what I thought was our perfectly innocent conversation, was the fact that she’d only ever been with one man, her husband. Looking back now I realize I couldn’t possibly, as a teenager, have understood just how stultifying that fact was for her. Craving her life as a young woman back, I see now. I found out later that when she got home the next morning, she “confessed” to her husband that we had had a romantic day and were planning to run away together! Pure and total delusion. This was the first time I learned that another person’s delusions can really screw up your life (I’ve learned the same lesson over and over again). I wasn’t even attracted to this girl, let alone ready to elope with her.

I too decided I had to face the music the next morning, and went back to my flooded apartment to see if there was something, anything, I could salvage. I had no luck, except as mentioned with the motorcycle. As I was standing there wondering how I would ever rid myself of this catastrophe, the phone rang; phone lines were working again by then. It was my friend Adam, one of the eight white folks in this little town of Hualien. We all knew each other of course. Adam sounded very worried about something.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You tell me,” he said.

“Well, my apartment’s a bust. The only thing I could salvage was the bike–”

“No, I mean about yesterday.”

“What about yesterday?”

“You and what’s-her-name?”

“Me and who?”

“That Australian girl, dammit! Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

“I have no idea what the fuck you’re going on about!”

“None?”

“None!”

“Well, she seems to think you two had quite the magical day together yesterday.”

“Quite the magic–what?!”

“Look, I don’t care to know the details. Just, I think it’s important you leave town right away.”

“Leave town? My life’s a wreck. Why should I go now?”

“Like I said, I don’t even _want_ to know what happened. But you have to know that crazy Kiwi told me he would shoot you on sight. And I don’t think they really have the rule of law down there, where he comes from.”

“This is crazy. Leave or die?”

“I’d say you better catch the next train for Taipei.”

“This is nuts.”

“It is what it is, man. You gotta look out for number one.”

I did catch the train that night, bound for Hong Kong (and finally Tokyo) via Taipei. I didn’t have a single swatch of clothing to my name, but for the shirt on my back. The one thing I did have plenty of was money. So I faced: a verifiable threat from a mafia-backed school, the messy aftermath of the typhoon, and yet another threat on my life from an unforeseen, unforeseeable source. With absolutely nothing to keep me, my only choice was to catch the next outbound train, never again to return to the beautiful little town of Hualien, on the east coast of Taiwan, majestically nestled between mountains and the open Pacific ocean. I saw Adam not long after, who had gotten the real deal by then, in Hong Kong. He told me I had saved that couple’s marriage by leaving. Ever the fall guy/sucker I will be.

*Peace*

“I think in many ways it is the most important campaign since 1933, mostly because of the problems which press upon the United States, and the opportunities which will be presented to us in the 1960s. The opportunity must be seized, through the judgment of the President, and the vigor of the executive, and the cooperation of the Congress. Through these I think we can make the greatest possible difference.

“How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.”
–JFK in 1961 talking to students about his plans for the Peace Corps

*Music*

One diva everyone should hear is Angie Stone. She’s an English hip-hop artist that’s got style, a memorable voice, and a deep, funky sensibility. My favorite records are Mahogany Soul and Stone Love. Dig it!

Also, for the record, Prince’s best album is Dirty Mind from 1980. Let Stephen Thomas Erlewine (AMG) tell it:

“Neither For You nor Prince was adequate preparation for the full-blown masterpiece of Prince’s third album, Dirty Mind. Recorded in his home studio, with Prince playing nearly every instrument, Dirty Mind is a stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock. Where other pop musicians suggested sex in lewd double-entendres, Prince left nothing to hide–before its release, no other rock or funk record was ever quite as explicit as Dirty Mind, with its gleeful tales of oral sex, threesomes, and even incest. Certainly, it opened the doors for countless sexually explicit albums, but to reduce its impact to mere profanity is too reductive–the music of Dirty Mind is as shocking as its graphic language, bending styles and breaking rules with little regard for fixed genres. Basing the album on a harder, rock-oriented beat more than before, Prince tries everything–there’s pure new wave pop (“When You Were Mine”), soulful crooning (“Gotta Broken Heart Again”), robotic funk (“Dirty Mind”), rock & roll (“Sister”), sultry funk (“Head,” “Do It All Night”), and relentless dance jams (“Uptown,” “Partyup”), all in the space of half an hour. It’s a breathtaking, visionary album, and its fusion of synthesizers, rock rhythms, and funk set the style for much of the urban soul and funk of the early ’80s.”

*Quotations*

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems. To desire to write poems that endure–we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it.
–Donald Hall

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
–F SCott Fitzgerald

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one.
–William Faulkener

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
–HG Wells

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
–Emerson

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
–Samuel Johnson

He who cannot lie does not know what the truth is.
–Nietzsche

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
–Churchill

A man’s private thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always.
–Mark Twain

A man who will not lie to a woman has very little consideration for her feelings.
–Olin Miller

Peace love and ATOM jazz

092009

I started taking a new drug called 4AP (fampridine) a couple of weeks ago. It is not yet approved (in its current form) by the FDA for treatment of MS so, while it’s legal, there’s only one compounding pharmacy that makes it. My first visit to my physical therapist after I’d started on it (having been on it for a week), his wig was flipped. I went from having balance equivalent to that of a typical 90-year-old to having the balance of someone about 50. Moreover, I went from being able to walk less than 4000 feet in half an hour (extrapolated from six minutes of walking) to being able to walk almost 6000 feet in that amount of time. All in one week! This bodes very well for the future–I’m not even up to the full dose yet. I will keep you all apprised.
_____

Last week I went to the birthday party for an old high school friend I haven’t seen in at least 18 years. At the party were other high-school acquaintances I haven’t seen in more than 20 years. What a life-affirming experience. We all look different (in most cases exactly as I would’ve pictured 20 years down the line would look like), but we’re all so essentially the same inside as to be instantly recognizable. Some of us have fallen in a couple of decades, most of us have seen some shit, and all of us have fundamentally altered perceptions of what this breath is all about.

*EVs*

About the time that I moved to Bellingham WA to finish college, my father sold that beautiful piece of land in Maine, on which my girlfriend and I had built a cabin. I had just been realizing I had to give up on the homestead idea so the news came at a good time. I had also decided I no longer wanted to drive a gasoline-powered car, and had spent some time with the Seattle EV (electric vehicle) group. I knew of a nice Fiat that had been converted to electric by a father-son navy electrical-engineer duo. The owner had tried it for a few years and was ready to move on. I had money from the cabin and so was ready to take it off his hands. Sweet ride! It had LEDs on the dash which showed you the relative strength of each battery.

The one thing it didn’t have was a heater–really not a good thing in northern-most Washington state. Whereas heat in an ICE (internal combustion engine) car comes from the engine itself, in an electric car heat must be produced by taxing the batteries, which cuts heavily down on the distance you can drive (the heater took more power than driving). Additionally, lead-acid batteries do not hold a charge very well in cold weather. This combined to make for a very tough year. I had resolved to retire my gas burner and use the EV exclusively. When I first started I knew next to nothing about motors, engines, or cars in general. After taking a course of study (five engineering classes) at the Vehicle Research Institute (one of the premier schools of its kind in the country)) I was a veritable wiz with cars.

I wish I’d foreseen the “year with” trend which is so hot right now (year with Julia Child, year with minimum-wage jobs, etc.) because my year driving an EV exclusively would have made a hell of a story. There was a very steep learning curve. First off, at the Seattle EV club, we had changed the car from eight 12-volt batteries to 10. No one had told me that this meant the car now had to be charged on a 220-volt circuit instead of a regular household 110; I guess they assumed I knew. At the beginning I didn’t even know the difference between an engine (ICE) and a motor (electric). With the help of a friendly Seattle EV buff, I finally hooked a charge cable to my 220-volt stove socket (with a splitter), and ran it out the window to the car.

There were numerous other problems, some of which I was able to fix, some I never did. As winter came on I realized I needed a heater that would work with my new 120-volt battery stack (instead of the old 96 volts). That was small hurdle. Then I discovered that the motor mounts were coming loose; actually, a Seattle EV-club member who lived on Camano Island, the closest member to Bellingham, figured it out, and we devised a simple but sturdy brace that held the motor in place. Then one night as I was driving through town, the simple piece which connected the transmission with the drivetrain broke. Because the car was a Fiat, parts were not easy to come by. I finally got my hands on the replacement part, but the car never did work right again. I could never again get it in reverse; I always had to park on an incline or hill so that I’d be able to get out.

Major lesson learned: all cars are bad. Even electric cars need their electricity from somewhere, and invariably, in this day and age, most of that electricity comes from coal power plants. A net advantage of zero. The most important thing to consider as far as cars go is emissions. With all-electric, you’ve got the emissions from the power plant (it is not possible to generate enough electricity for motive power from a single solar-panel array). Nowadays you can get Ultra Low Emissions Vehicles (ULEVs) and even Partial Zero Emissions Vehicles; in all cases those are hybrids, and hybrids are without doubt the best bet for everyone between now and the 100% electric-vehicle world (with no coal plants!) all of us EV idealists are banking on. Maybe not in my lifetime, but some day.

*Cities*

When I fled New York in 1992 or ‘93, I had the very foolish notion that living in a city was in some way less eco friendly than living in the country–it took me nearly 20 years to realize just how wrong I was! One of my idols, David Korten, reformed World-Bank economist and author of the scathing When Corporations Rule the World (among others), took note of this “red herring” in his aforementioned book. Just as with the idea that plastic is bad and paper is good, the idea that city living has more of an environmental footprint than country living is patent hogwash: Paper is what fills up more than 75% of landfills and does not biodegrade under normal circumstances; if you consider the gas you have to burn in your single-occupancy vehicle just to get anywhere in the country the eco cards are stacked against you. Cities have mass transit in which many people occupy a single vehicle.

Add to that the fact that in the country, people all live in separate single-family homes (whereas in cities people live together generally, all under one roof, with one boiler for a whole building), and you’re quickly into “no doubt about it” territory. One of the salient features of contemporary city planning is that the goal in general is to work against sprawl by building _up_ instead of out. Here again cities are way ahead of the game from the get-go: big cities are all about building upwards not outwards, with New York City being the premier example; we _can’t_ build outwards. Those places where strip-mall sprawl is the norm, and where there is poor mass transit, are not in fact true cities. Therefore, for example, Tampa Florida doesn’t count, nor does Seattle Washington. In both places, and similar ones, a car is absolutely essential, and there alone you’ve got one big environmental boondoggle.

*Peace*

Please watch the following video:

Nonviolent peacekeeping

Nonviolent peacekeeping is the way of the future.

*Quirky*

Also look at this kooky video by a guy named Hawksley Workman (crazy name, I assume it’s a pseudonym). I’d say this is understated and sublime:

Hey Hey Hey (You Little Beauties)

*Rights*

From The Writer’s Almanac:

“Margaret Sanger was born into a working-class Irish family. Her mother died when she was 50, after 18 pregnancies. Margaret went to New York City, became a nurse, got married, and gave birth to three kids. As a nurse, she worked in the maternity ward on the Lower East Side, and many of her patients were poor, some of them living on the streets. They seemed old to her by the time they were 35, and many of them ended up in the hospital from self-induced abortions, which often killed them. Margaret nursed one mother back to health after she gave herself an abortion, and heard the woman beg the doctor for some protection against another pregnancy; the doctor told the woman to make her husband sleep outside. That woman died six months later, after a botched abortion, and Margaret Sanger gave up nursing, convinced that she needed to work for a more systematic change.

“At the time, contraceptives were illegal in the United States, and it was illegal even to send information about contraception through the U.S. Postal Service. The information and products were out there, but a privilege only of the wealthy, who knew how to work the system. Margaret Sanger wrote a series of articles called “What Every Girl Should Know,” and published a radical newspaper, Woman Rebel, with information about contraception. In 1914, she was indicted for sending information about birth control through the mail. She fled to Europe, where she observed birth control clinics, and eventually came back to face charges. But after her five-year-old daughter died of pneumonia, the sympathetic public was on her side, and the charges were dropped.

“But Sanger kept going. In 1916, she and her sister, who was also a nurse, opened a birth control clinic in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, modeled after the clinics that Sanger had seen in Holland. Neighborhood residents, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants, flocked to the clinic for information. Nine days later, the police closed it down and arrested Sanger, her sister, and the clinic’s interpreter. Sanger went to prison and her sister went on a hunger strike. The publicity worked: Soon birth control became a matter of public discourse. In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which in 1946 became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. And she funded research to create a contraceptive pill. She died at age 87, a few months after the landmark Supreme Court decision Griswold vs. Connecticut finally made birth control legal for married couples.”

It’s astonishing to think that in this nation, where there is _supposed_ to be no mixing of church and state, there was a time when even birth control–family planning!–was illegal. Horrifying. And incredibly short sighted.

*Quotations*

Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that.
–Norman Borlaug

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not bring it forth, what you do not have within you will kill you.
–Jodi Picoult

What people forget is that Shakespeare was a restless entertainer. When he played the Elizabethan stage, he was basically dealing with an audience of 3,000 drunken punters who were selling pigs and geese in the stalls. He played to everyone from the street sweeper to the Queen of England. And his style was to have stand-up comedy one moment, a song, and then the highest tragedy right next to it. He was a rambunctious, sexy, violent, entertaining storyteller.
–Baz Luhrmann

I am only a public entertainer who understands his time.
–Picasso

The worst thing a writer can do is to think. The best thing to do is to react, which includes thinking but doesn’t let it act as an impediment or a censor. When you read something, you think something–write that down. That’s what I’m always trying to do.
–Alberto Álvaro Ríos

Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now.
–PT Barnum

Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.
–Julia Child

Media, the plural of mediocrity.
–Jimmy Breslin

Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint you can on it.
–Danny Kaye

If I can go from burglar for the government to talk show host, you can go from entertainer to congressman.
–G Gordon Liddy

Peace love and ATOM jazz

091309

My mother is spitting mad about something and I’m sure she’d appreciate my taking note of it here: the (lowbrow) debate (which isn’t a debate) we’ve all been embroiled in the past few months is _not_ about health care! Unfortunate but true. What we’ve been arguing about is health-_insurance_ reform and nothing else.

*Enlightenment*

A couple of weeks ago I posted a status update on Facebook in which I noted: if enlightenment must come by way of shedding all attachments in this world then it must follow that those with children can never attain enlightenment. I know for certain that if I ever had kids I would never be able to shed attachment to them. I got many varied responses; one woman who lives, works, and studies in China sent me a private message. She said that indeed in all her studies of Buddhism and meditation, her teachers had constantly remarked about this insurmountable obstacle for adults with children. I realized that this is one reason that in many (if not most/all?) traditions, holy men are celibate.

*Mini-farming*

I’ve been an avid gardener in my time. When I left New York in 1992, I was already a radical back-to-the-lander; John Jeavons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Can Imagine was at the forefront of my schemes, as were the various writings of a man who is my foremost idol, Scott Nearing, grandfather of the Back-to-the-Land movement which took hold across the country in the 1960s. I’d been studying Home Power magazine for months and was determined to live “off the grid.” I had become a radical on many levels. I was working at a health-food store in the East Village and one day I was spewing my new local-independence, anti-city, neo-Luddite convictions when a co-worker said, “If you hate it so much why don’t you leave?” I left for Maine within a week.

Somehow I convinced a girl I’d met only a couple of weeks before to join me. My plan was for us to set up a self-sufficient homestead on family land, a beautiful spot right on Blue Hill Bay, mid-coast Maine. The furthest we got was to build a cabin (we lived in the old barn while we were there) and to plant a garden, using Jeavons’ Biointensive methods. Jeavons calls his method “mini farming” and it is indeed that, focused on growing complete diets (including grains, legumes, tubers, etc.) for all people, on this increasingly crowded planet, with less and less arable land each and every year–Jeavons is spot on to point to the contrary curves of increasing population on the one hand and decreasing amounts of land from which to feed the people on the other as an alarming fact of 21st-century life. Here follows a partial list of my gardening/mini-farming experiences:

1. Through my first adult-life garden in Maine I learned a great deal about the difference between books, theories, and their application to the real world, to seeds, and actual garden beds, and crop yields.

2. My girlfriend and I drove to Seattle at the end of 1993. My plan was to continue on for a return trip to Taiwan, to earn money for the homestead, for solar panels, and a water pump, and a wood-burning stove. I instantly became enchanted with Seattle, broke up with my girl (again, that one was the very last good relationship I ever had with a woman), and decided to stay. My homestead plans met their demise, but not my passion for gardening. I had one great garden in Seattle, at a large community garden on the north side of town. I’m usually a quick study, and gardening was no different.

Other gardeners were genuinely amazed at what I was able to produce on my one small plot, a dozen types of vegetables, lots of potatoes, and the gem of the lot, a large stand of sweet corn. All of it planted unconventionally closely together, all of it growing healthy and strong. Subsequently, I got a job at Puget Consumer’s Co-op (a real prize for a newcomer) and no longer had time for the garden; then I started college at Seattle Central Community College, and was preoccupied with school for most of the following five years.

3. Luckily, in my upper division studies at Western Washington University, I was easily able to incorporate agricultural studies into my (complicated!) self-designed major, which was actually like minors in five or six different areas, microeconomics, physics, moral philosophy, engineering, agriculture, etc. To accomplish this feat I had to convince three PhDs in my fields (a doctor of economics, one of resource assessment and analysis, one of physics) that my chosen classes were all on target (in the name of Sustainable Development) and that my (10-page) reasoning for my courses of study was sound. In nearly killing me, that massive undertaking made me stronger and more resilient.

At the beginning, after I first moved to Bellingham (with which I had a terrible relationship from the day I arrived to the day I left), I lived about six miles outside of town, in a beautiful apartment overlooking Bellingham Bay. There I was able to have a very large garden, and to continue my own experiments with mini-farming. Increasingly I became dedicated to growing all of my own food. One winter, I survived solely on potatoes I had grown myself the summer before (if you eat enough of them, you can get plenty of calories and nutrients from potatoes, assuming they’re _grown on healthy soil_).

4. After a couple of seasons, a small group of us got a grant from Fairhaven College to go to Willits California for a weekend workshop with John Jeavons himself. At the workshop, folks were very impressed with my detailed knowledge of the subject, especially Jeavons and his staff. Jeavons and I continued correspondence for several years afterwards (he even published an article I wrote for Whatcom Watch in his own newsletter). [On that trip, I also met a Franciscan monk who veritably changed my life, and who is the subject of the fifth poem I ever had published, Monks Follow Me.]

Around the same time I got to be a Teacher’s Assistant for the Agroecology class at Huxley College of Environmental Science. The teacher, one of my three main mentors, the PhD in resource assessment, really believed in me and what I knew. She left me in charge of marking up and commenting on student papers and exams, even the graduate students; she did not mind it one bit when I was stern (some would say harsh) in my assessments. Lord, did I ever have fun calling graduate students on their bullshit. I ended up dropping out for a year, so immense was my workload, and never had a garden again in Washington state.

5. After I’d moved to Portland and lived through my marriage fiasco, I eventually found an assistant who agreed to have a garden with me, across the road from my last abode in Portland (another community garden). Really, I called all the shots and watched as she did all the work. Ours was the shining star of the whole garden. By this time, I had become quite adept, not even needing to consult books anymore for tips on planting methods, plant spacing, or companion planting. Every crop we grew flourished beyond all reason (I’m convinced we had angels like they have at Findhorn); people were particularly amazed by our robust broccoli, interplanted with companion flowers. It did make a nice show.

And that was the last garden I will likely ever have.

*Poem*

This is from 1996, though it seems like yesterday:

Monks Follow Me

regularly, give me plain looks that insist across
the silent distance between us, “You know what
you need to do. You know.” Especially on
those days when I find it particularly difficult
to be nice and when I feel particularly bad for
not being nice very much of the time–those
are the sort of days that signing up at the local
abbey hangs over my head like a devoted
cloud, fully realized, unrelenting. Recently I met
a Brother Timothy in Willits. Brother Timothy
had a constant frog in his throat, and when he
spoke I knew some of the things he had seen
in his day without having to ask. He talked
about the other monks with an extremely
judgmental tone. The ones he liked he said
were “hot” monks. To a Franciscan, that meant
they must have damn near lived on air. To be
hot you had to have been eating out of
dumpsters since ‘64, had to have been wearing
and washing the same one set of clothes since
two weeks after the day you lost your last job,
had to stand up fast after eight hours straight
of praying and prostrating in front of the altar
and cry, “More, more! Give me more! I want
more burdens to shed. Give me another
chance!” Brother Timothy told me in one of his
heated asides that They (with a capital ‘T’)
had given it to Judi Bari, had finally forced on her
a slow and painful death, not just because
she loved the trees so much and was willing
to fight for them, but because she was a woman
who loved the trees. This was a terribly rich
and dangerous combination. “Don’t be too rich,”
he warned, “And above all, don’t think They
don’t know what riches really are. In the end,
They have no choice but to lash out and grab
hold of whatever They can in Their final, frantic
efforts to fill in the massive holes Their money
carved out of Their hearts.”

*DJ*

One of the best years I had out west was the year I was an on-air programer (DJ) for KMHD, the main jazz station serving Portland OR. I had taken a class earlier taught by the head of the station; I had to drop out, but I guess he liked what he heard. Out of the blue I was called in by the personnel manager to do an audition tape; actually it turned out to be three tapes (for one try). He explained that if I didn’t pass muster, I would have to wait and try again later. The whole KMHD crew listened to my tapes and I was accepted to be on-air. The first couple of months, I was filling in for people with regular shows who couldn’t make it on a particular day; I was on call. Finally I was offered my own spot, prime time, 2-6pm Mondays. What followed was a fairly magical time; I got to call all the shots and play anything I wanted.

Now being a DJ I must tell you is anything but glamorous. Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent alone in a detached, insulated room and you never get a chance to meet your listeners. On top of which, KMHD is a public-radio station so the gig was volunteer. I had a great time while I was there; I called my show “Post ‘69″ and I featured “the best jazz from the last 35 years” (this was 2005 obviously). It was my conviction then as it still is that the best jazz ever made has been made recently; I aimed to prove that fact on my show. Mostly, those few brave souls who called in raved about how good the show was, saying they’d never heard such great jazz on KMHD (there was the occasional little old lady calling in to wonder what happened to Ella Fitzgerald).

The very vitality which made the show excellent was also my undoing for various reasons: after about ten months, the disparity between the amount of time I spent preparing for each show (a _lot_) and my lack of pay became more than I could handle. By that time, there was at least one old-time DJ gunning for me. I had heard that he objected to a track I played once by Dave “Fuze” Fiuczynski; looking back now, I have to admit that was a pretty outrageous track to play during business hours on a Monday (Fuze is a guitarist and he’s all about rock-jazz with an emphasis on the hard-core rock). Still my listeners expected me to push the boundaries, and I most certainly did.

One day I played Cassandra Wilson singing Crazy, a really stand-out track in her inimitable folk-jazz style. As always, when I introduced it I mentioned who wrote the song: Willie Nelson. Within 20 seconds the phone rang; it was that same old-time DJ out to get me. He clearly didn’t get it that my understanding and immersion in jazz was much more complete than his own; maybe he did and that’s what made him feel threatened. He was just dying to find anything he could to find fault with. He said, “Adam, really. That’s Patsy Cline,” as if _I_ were the idiot. I said, “I don’t know what you do on your show but on mine I mention who _wrote_ a song, not who made it famous.” Never mind that Ms Wilson’s rendition is so good I know there were countless people who were nothing less than thankful I was playing it.

This fellow was, among volunteer programmers, a heavy weight. The fact that he would have seen the death of my show, and been happy, eventually became more than I could bear. I had my last show not long after his call. When I announced my retirement on air, the phone was ringing off the hook; that felt great. Folks called to say things like: “You _can’t_ stop. You only just started,” and, “Oh crap! I guess I’ll have to get used to Mondays with Ella and Louis again,” and, “What does that mean, you’re stopping? Will the show go on?” It was not a happy parting but it was one that had to happen. I’m happy I did it while I still could; it would be next to impossible for me to do anything like that now.

*Quotations*

They financial crises are all different, but they have one fundamental source: the unquenchable capability of human beings when confronted with long periods of prosperity to presume that it will continue.
–Alan Greenspan
[BLOW HARD! Of course his deregulation had nothing to do with it.]

The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece. No other task is of any consequence.
–Cyril Connolly
[Explains why I'm perennially daunted.]

Homo sapiens are a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.
–Stephen Jay Gould
[I feel less probable even than all this, and not all that fortunate.]

Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
–Mary Oliver
[Am i no longer young?]

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.
–DH Lawrence
["Say it hot" !!!]

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
–Oscar Wilde

Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
–Hebbel

If there is no passion in your life, then have you really lived? Find your passion, whatever it may be. Become it, and let it become you and you will find great things happen for you, to you and because of you.
–T Alan Armstrong

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chase down your passion like it’s the last bus of the night.
–Glade Byron Addams

*Music*

In the installment before last I mentioned some of my favorite music from Me’shell Ndegéocello and I forgot to mention one of the most important of her recordings: Peace Beyond Passion. Dig it. Tracks like Leviticus: Faggot are sure to win you over.

Peace love and ATOM jazz