Jazz music Personal: Robert Rutman Sun Ra
by Warren
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Hanging Out With The Man From Saturn
Several people have asked me to tell the story of my encounters with Sun Ra.
Over a span of about six or seven years, I caught Sun Ra and his Arkestra in Boston at least eleven times. While that’s not a lot by Deadhead standards, it’s probably more than I’ve seen any other musician live, with the exception of the great khyal singer Bhimsen Joshi.
To an alienated, jazz-obsessed teenager in Boston’s western suburbs, the knowledge that there was a bandleading madman who claimed to be from outer space was incredibly welcome. My high school library maintained subscriptions to a wide variety of periodicals — the usual suspects (Time, Newsweek, Life), some slightly more unconventional choices (The New Yorker, Ms.), and a few that were pretty bizarre. Of these last, there were three that made a huge impression on me: The Village Voice (where I first read about conceptual art, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman), Source: Music of the Avant-Garde (where I first heard of Cornelius Cardew, Christo, Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier), and Downbeat (where I kept up to date on all the latest jazz happenings, and where I first learned of the existence of Sun Ra).
environment: Boston Globe China
by Warren
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Month 3, Day 12: Boston Global Warming Warning
No shortage of material these days. I thought it was time to find something in our hometown paper, and sure enough, there was an article (originally from the AP) on China’s admonitions that the United States needs to be doing more about climate change than wringing its hands and capitulating to the Chamber of Commerce and Massey Coal.
It is a sad commentary on the dysfunctionality of our political system that the United States is now being rebuked by China on climate change issues. Over the past few years, the Chinese government has recognized the immediacy and profound danger posed by the climate crisis; while they’re still burning way too much coal and oil, it’s indisputable that China is leading the world in developing energy sources that won’t add CO2 to our atmosphere. And where is the USA? Locked in a cycle of denial, with Republican senators and Fox commentators opining that an anomalous snowfall in Washington invalidates thousands of peer-reviewed scientific reports (which, by the way, predict such weather events). If ninety-seven out of a hundred oncologists diagnosed cancer, you’d be wise to start treatment immediately. When ninety-seven percent of climatologists state the facts of anthropogenic global warming, they should be rewarded and heeded, not mocked and ignored.
Warren Senders