Education India Indian music music: drone gesture R. Murray Schafer silence Singing Imagination tamboura texture
by Warren
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Some Thoughts on the Drone
The drone lives at the center of Hindustani music, and yet I think its significance has rarely been stated completely. To say that it affirms or creates the tonality is to state the obvious; rather, think of the number of musical systems in the world in which the drone is implicit or only occasionally stated. Why then is the tamboura so essential in Hindustani music? In concerts, a singer often gestures to the tamboura players, indicating “more force, more volume!” — why?
R. Murray Schafer, that marvelously creative Canadian composer and educator, offers us a complementary pair of terms, gesture and texture. Hindustani melody is gesture refined and elaborated; gesture with fractal sub-gestures endlessly revealing themselves to careful listening. The complement to a gesture is a texture, where elements are sustained with enough consistency that they form a ground, a backdrop — a context within which isolated ideas can be heard and appreciated.
environment Politics: endangered species Obama Pika
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Month 2, Day 5: A Little Brown Furry Letter
Late at night; desperately looking for a subject for tomorrow’s letter, which lead me to RL Miller’s sad article about the failure of the Obama Administration to apply Endangered Species Protection to the American Pika, a cute little mountaintop rodent.
Whew. I found a theme, and it’s one I haven’t used before. Below the letter, you can watch a Pika video.
Dear President Obama,
Your administration has done a great many things on the interlocking issues of energy independence, climate change and environmental protection during your first year in office. The enhanced powers of the EPA will prove to be an important component of the struggle against devastating climate change, while your advocacy of new rail initiatives will do an enormous amount to change Americans’ habits of petroleum use.
But there is more to do, and there are some areas in which your Administration has been curiously and unfortunately negligent. One of these is your seeming unwillingness to expand the protection provided by the Endangered Species Act. While it is easy to propose ESA protection for the charismatic megafauna which appear on posters, tee-shirts and tote-bags, it is just as important to ensure that small animals like the American Pika are properly considered. During the first year of your administration, only two new animals have been granted protection under the ESA, compared with eight (at a similar point in the Bush administration) and seventy-three (one year into Clinton’s first term). This is not a record to be proud of.
While an endangered animal’s habitat can in some cases be preserved (thus saving the species), climate change creates a far greater impact on temperature-sensitive species like the Pika. Classifying the American Pika as an Endangered Species would be a demonstration that your administration is serious about reducing the effects of catastrophic climate change, not just on the human population, but on all elements of the web of life on Earth.
Biodiversity is nature’s way of not putting all Her genetic eggs in one basket. The fact that human habits of consumption and waste is rapidly destroying these intricate interrelationships is one of the great tragedies of the age. An environmentally conscious President needs to be attentive not just to those members of the planetary community who have human rights, but to the billions of others whose lives will be blighted and destroyed by climatic devastation.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cap and trade crime against our grandchildren
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Month 2, Day 4: The NYT Again…
A rec-listed post at Daily Kos led me to this article in the NYT. Here’s FishOutOfWater’s summary paragraph:
Democrats Jim Webb, Mary Landrieu, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln have built an alliance, the dirty dozen, with Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Sam Brownback, Bob Corker, and Jeff Sessions, to remove carbon caps and to give away huge sudsidies to the coal, nuclear, oil and gas industries.
I posted a long action diary at Kos; please go check it out if you haven’t already. But in addition to sending 50-60 faxes of an angry slogan in very large type (tomorrow’s plan), I wanted to fill my quota of erudition, and I wanted to spread a meme. I’ll need all the help I can get; please try and make this one go viral.
Defeating strong energy legislation is a crime against our grandchildren.
Here’s what I sent to the Times:
When so-called “moderate Democrats” in the Senate join Republicans in favor of passing an energy-only bill that ignores carbon emissions, their action deserves blunt language: it’s a crime against our grandchildren. With climatologists’ worst-case scenarios becoming more likely by the day, our elected representatives have chosen to fiddle while the planet starts to burn. There is no doubt who’s calling the tune: Big Oil and Big Coal.
Because the lag time between climate action and climate effect is several times longer than the elected term of a U.S. Senator, these “public servants” cannot find the courage to confront the deep pockets of the energy lobby. Who will have to cope with the effects of these Senators’ ignorant cupidity? Our grandchildren and theirs, living in a world made all but uninhabitable by the effects of catastrophic climate change. Good luck, kids. You’ll need it.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment: humor Roy Zimmerman
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Because Tom Lehrer Isn’t Performing Anymore…
We have Roy Zimmerman instead.
For which I am profoundly grateful.
Here’s “Creation Science.” He’s a heck of a guitarist, too.
environment Politics: Barack Obama delusional paranoia Republicans
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Month 2, Day 3: In The Wake Of The Crazy Comet
The Amazing Dkos/R2000 poll of self-identified Republicans came out today, and gosh-a-roonie! It certainly revealed a lot. If you haven’t read it, you owe yourself a few horrifying minutes. These are the people who control the Opposition Party in our government. They would be funny if this was a movie or a TV show, but because Republicans are making governance impossible, it’s essential that we take notice of them.
So I wrote to the President, who seems like he’s been getting a little mojo rising recently.
Dear President Obama,
By now you must have seen the results of the Research 2000/Daily Kos poll of self-identified Republicans. These statistics are horrifying and revealing. Sixty-three percent of Republicans believe you’re a socialist (although I suspect that less than one percent know what the word means). Thirty-nine percent think you should be impeached (although it’s unclear that you’ve committed an impeachable offense). A third think you’re a racist; half think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than you are. A quarter of self-identified Republicans think their states should secede from the Union. And on and on. As you correctly noted in your Q & A session with the House Republicans, they cannot compromise with you, even a little, because their base is so insanely paranoid that it will erupt at the slightest hint of collaboration with their enemy.
The Republicans represented in the R2000 poll are clutching their remote controls, desperately pushing buttons in the hope that somehow, somehow, somehow you’ll just go away. It’s easy to blame Fox News for a big part of this. But I think Fox is a symptom, not a cause. The larger problem is the erosion of the national attention span, which means that our ability to think carefully about long-term issues is essentially non-existent.
Global climate change is both a long-term and an extremely urgent issue; never has the threat to humanity’s continued survival been as serious as the routine reports of climatologists now reveal it to be. James Hansen’s “Venus” scenario is easy to dismiss as a worst-case example — until we stop to consider that almost every day the “worst-case” predictions of climate scientists turn out to be unrealistically optimistic.
The Research 2000 poll did not specifically ask its Republican respondents whether they believed the Earth was only 6000 years old, but given the other answers to related questions, it seems a safe bet that a sizable majority are Young Earth Creationists. Many are probably anxious for the Rapture, which I suppose qualifies them as pro-global-warming. How can you talk rationally about climate change to a group of people who are unable to conceptualize long spans of time, or who are eager for the Earth’s incineration?
While I applaud your adherence to an ideal of bi-partisanship, it is impossible to form agreements with an entire political demographic that is clearly delusionally paranoid. The delusional paranoids will think you’re out to get them even if you adopt the entire Republican platform. Why bother? Please, Mr. President! The time is now for you to get the Democratic majority in the Senate to pass your policy agenda through reconciliation. Healthcare, Jobs, Financial reform — all of these are essential. But my deepest area of concern is the terrible threat of climate change, for if we don’t get that one right, none of the rest will matter at all in the long run.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Business Faint Praise for the Faint of Heart Lindsey Graham
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Year 1, Month 2, Day 2: To Huckleberry Graham, The Distinguished Senator from South Carolina
I was looking for something else to do in today’s letter. It’s been getting tiring sending stuff out to the same media outlets and politicians, which is why I wound up writing Secretary Chu yesterday. This one goes out to the only Republican who has dared to say anything at all about climate change, Lindsey Graham. He’s pretty much an idiot in most other areas, but he’s taken quite a bit of heat from his tea-bagger constituents for daring to assert that climate change exists. He just issued a very tepid press release, so I used that as the theme for my letter, which falls into the category of Faint Praise for the Faint of Heart.
Dear Senator Graham,
As an outspoken Massachusetts liberal, I suspect that there are few areas where you and I would find agreement. But today I want to write in support of your willingness to buck the Republican Party’s denialist stance on global climate change. To deny that anthropogenic global warming exists is to embrace an anti-science agenda which will undercut America’s continued economic and technological advancement. To deny that global climate change poses a profound long-term threat to humanity as a whole is to ignore the words and projections of the scientists who have studied climatic phenomena in depth and who know more about the subject than anyone else. Make no mistake, denialism is a willful embrace of ignorance, and while ignorance sometimes makes for good politics, it always makes for bad policies.
By acknowledging the existence of global climate change, you have the potential to transform the debate from a “Democrats vs. Republicans” squabble to a genuine conversation between the informed and the ignorant.
In your press release of January 27, you state that, “The energy legislation that was passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is not strong enough to lead us to energy independence. The climate change legislation passed by the House of Representatives and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is too onerous on business and does not enjoy bipartisan support.” The first sentence is absolutely correct. The proposed legislation needs to be several orders of magnitude stronger in order to make a real difference in the area of energy independence. Your second sentence, however, does American business an injustice.
I firmly believe that American industries are second to none in their potential for innovation. To suggest that our business sector would be hindered by stringent climate-change legislation is a vote of no confidence in the ability of American industry to compete successfully under any conditions.
Let us not forget that global climate change poses the most severe existential threat that humanity has ever faced. We cannot afford to flunk this test, for it will only be given once; there are no opportunities for re-takes, and failure is fatal for all of us. Dr. James Hansen notes that the “worst-case” scenario involves uncontrolled melting of Arctic methane, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect which could move Earth’s temperatures well above the “uncomfortable” level and up to the “Venus” level.
In which case American business won’t have anybody left to buy its goods.
Granted, this is a “worst-case” scenario. But to anyone who’s been paying attention, it is a shocking reality that climatologists’ “worst-case” scenarios have been coming true as often as not over the past few years. We owe it to the future of our economy, our country and the world as a whole to get this one right.
We should be giving strong tax breaks for businesses which demonstrate genuine engagement in the struggle to reduce their carbon footprints; we should enforce strong tax penalties for businesses which ignore scientific reality in favor of short-term profit. And we must do a better job of educating the public. A strong Republican voice acknowledging the reality of global climate change and the importance of integrating scientific research into environmental and energy policy is a huge component of such public education, and I hope you will continue to tell both your colleagues and constituents the truth, regardless of its political implications for you.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
India Photoblogging: Benares, 1986
I was in Varanasi in early 1986, and I greatly enjoyed it. Here are a few random scenes and images from that trip. At another point I’ll put up the photos I took on the “Sunrise-on-the-Ganges” boat tour, which is an important tourist activity. These, however, are simply the things that happened when I pointed my Minolta and pressed the button. Remember, taking fascinating pictures is very easy in India.
Jazz music: genius thomas quasthoff
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Thomas Quasthoff
The extraordinary Thomas Quasthoff, singing improvisations on Miles Davis’ All Blues. One of the interesting things about this is that since he comes from a classical background (although he’s apparently loved and enjoyed jazz his whole life, which is pretty obvious from this performance), his handling of this piece has not a whiff of the “doing-a-standard-that’s-been-done-to-death-already” atmosphere which you sometimes find in the work of hipper-than-thou musicians who wouldn’t be caught dead singing something as hackneyed as, say, All Blues.
Or, for that matter, My Funny Valentine.
environment Politics: Department of Energy media scientific literacy Steven Chu
by Warren
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Year 1, Month 2, Day 1: Energy Secretary Chu
Go and read this post from DK Greenroots’ A Siegel, all about how Business Week practices gross deception on their readership with misleading reporting on climate-change issues. It made me pretty mad. Tomorrow’s letter may go to Business Week itself; tonight I wanted to write to them, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around all the facts in Siegel’s piece sufficiently to compose a letter that would make any sense.
So instead I thought I’d write to Energy Secretary Chu, and tell him that he and his Department would have to find some ways to edumacate the media about how to do accurate reporting.
I swear, if we could harness the Idiot Wind, all our problems would be solved.
This letter was pretty long and kind of sprawling. I was too tired to write concisely.
Dear Secretary Chu,
I write as a concerned citizen. I want my daughter to grow up in a world where the threat of environmental devastation on a planetary scale no longer hangs over humanity’s head.
I am not a climatologist, or even any kind of scientist. But I am scientifically literate to the point where it is obvious to me that the difficult truths of global climate change are constantly overwhelmed by corporate-funded denialism and misdirection. The steady rise of atmospheric CO2, the acidification of our oceans, and the newest and most troubling trend of melting Arctic methane all suggest that the most profound existential crisis humanity has ever faced is at hand — and is being resolutely ignored.
Obviously we need concrete and practical solutions, and equally obviously they have to pass political muster. I do not envy your job, for it is self-evident that you (as an administrator) have had to approve initiatives which you (as a scientist) know are foolish and almost certainly a waste of time. So-called “Clean Coal” is one such notion; the idea that capture and sequestration of carbon emissions from burning coal could ever be cost-effective is absurd.
What can you and your colleagues in the Department of Energy do to promote scientific literacy in the media? Perhaps you could announce a regular series of awards from the DoE for the highest-quality scientific reporting in print and broadcast areas — with a special “bottom-of-the-bucket” category to highlight the worst deceptions perpetrated on an uninformed public by our corporatized media establishment. Awards announcements could be made with great fanfare, providing positive reinforcement for journalists and media figures who actually make the effort to explain complex subjects without lapsing into caricature.
I recognize that this type of action would normally fall outside your purview as a working scientist. Alas, by accepting a Cabinet position in the Obama Administration, you have also accepted responsibility for making your department’s work make sense to the general population — a task which is all but impossible in today’s corrupt informational environment. You and your Department need to take the initiative strongly, and give the media what it needs: a circus. If you can give our ADD-affected punditocracy a better circus than that provided by corporate flacks, your message will have a chance of changing the minds of Americans.
Right now, with an increasing number of my compatriots believing that global climate change is illusory, it seems the voices funded by Big Oil and Big Coal are winning the battle. If the Venusian worst-case projections of Dr. James Hansen are accurate, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for the energy companies, for within a few centuries there won’t be a human customer base for them to lie to.
Good luck.
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
atheism Education: AUM cluelessness fundamentalist encounters
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Sometimes they do it to themselves.
Years ago I got a student referral from a colleague. J_____ called me and wanted to begin studying Indian music. I explained the scheduling and fee structure to him, and he seemed anxious to begin.
“But,” he then said, anxiously, “you’re not going to make me meditate or anything, are you?”
I assured him that I would be teaching music, not meditation.
He came and started lessons. As part of developing his voice production, I instructed him to sing the tonic Sa while moving his lips from a wide “AAAAAAA” slowly through all the intermediate vowel positions, listening to the sweep of the overtones as his lips moved from “OOOOOO” to “UUUUUUU” and finally closed on an “MMMMMMMM.” He enjoyed that and commented repeatedly how it seemed to help his singing voice gain resonance (true, dat).
J_____ was a pretty musical guy, and he started to make progress with the first raga we selected. He struck me as someone who craved the “exotic” quality of augmented seconds, so I started him on Raga Bhairav — always effective as an auditory icon of India. He learned some alap phrases and grasped basic sargams pretty rapidly; I taught him some rhythmic variations on a sargam composition and he internalized them quite well.
I said, “It seems to me you’re ready for a song, J______.” He replied, “Well, okay, but it can’t be anything Hindu.”
I said, “What?” He repeated himself, and asked, “Is the song you want to teach me a Hindu song?”
I replied, “Well, many of the songs of this tradition reflect Hindu themes in their lyrics. It’s kind of unavoidable. Why is it important to you to avoid a song with a Hindu theme?”
His answer? “Because Hinduism is an evil religion.”
Uh-huh. I asked him how he knew this, and he replied that the minister at his church told him so. Which is how I discovered that the guy who was taking raga lessons from me was in fact a hard-core fundamentalist nut-job. His minister had delivered a whole string of sermons on the eeeeeevil Hindus and their terrible idolatry and caste system and cow-worshiping and eight-armed gods and on and on and on. And J______ had swallowed the whole thing, hook, line and sinker.
Which was why he had wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to teach him meditation.
So we had a little conversation, and I suggested that maybe all religious traditions had some stuff in their closets they perhaps shouldn’t be too proud of, like the Inquisition. He was taken aback, and said, “Aren’t you a Christian?”
“No,” I said. “I’m an atheist.”
He left, rapidly. Three days later I got a call from him.
“Warren, this is J_____. I’m not going to be able to keep taking lessons from you, because, um, because, aaah, er, um, I…, I…., ummm, I, er, um…don’t have enough money to continue. But I want you to know that I’ve really enjoyed the lessons, and I’m going to continue to do the overtone exercise every day the way you showed me, because it seems to be really good for my voice.”
Which is how I got a gen-you-wine bible-thumpin’ intolerant ignorant fundie whackjob to spend a bit of time every day…saying “AAAAAOOOOOOOOUUUUUUMMMMM” over and over.
Bringin’ it all back OM.