At a time when books, like records, are becoming endangered objects, it’s nice to see people push things to the other extreme. Lloyd and Lenore Dickman of Princeton, Wisconsin are doing just that–the couple warehouses over one million titles in 12 not exactly retail buildings on their farm. Their bookstore is open on Saturday’s and by appointment or happenstance.
[via The Obvious?]
As any reader of Natural Capitalism knows, there’s money to be made in sustainability.
Governing.com points out that one direction for budding green workers is to join the staff of a city government.
Fayetteville’s mayor, Dan Coody, is one of 805 mayors nationally who have signed pledges to slash their cities’ greenhouse gas emissions in line with targets set in the Kyoto Protocol. Those mayors have lapped up international praise for leading on climate change where Washington lagged. But the truth is, they are just now getting down to figuring out what exactly they have agreed to. What does it really mean to reduce a city’s carbon footprint?
About three dozen cities now have sustainability directors, and there are more whose job titles reflect either the broader fight against climate change or the somewhat narrower quest for energy efficiency. The idea is to have one person — or in Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and other big cities, entire staffs — dedicated to squeezing greenhouse gas emissions out of the way government does business, and to serve as both a liaison and a beacon to businesses and citizens who want to limit their own carbon output.
Chris Corrigan of Bowen Island, British Columbia, makes a great point about the world becoming large again (and what our response might be).
When airline travel becomes prohibitive and fuel costs make transporting goods too expensive, the world will begin to unshrink, find its real size again. And in that moment, I had a strong image of the world uncrumpling and in the folds and cracks, new local creativity, food, sustenance, culture and life will unfold.
It makes sense to take a stand for a place now. To have a place where you can contribute to the local resources and the local life.
Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan is offering “A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century” in six parts on the firm’s blog.
Here’s one paragraph from the initial entry:
Publishers – and, importantly, authors – will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks. We will need to understand that parts of books reference parts of other books and that now the network of meaning can be woven together digitally in a very real way, between content published and hosted by entirely separate entities. Perhaps most radically, we will have to consider whether a primary focus on text is enough in a world of multimedia mash-ups. In other words, publishers will need to think entirely differently about the very nature of the book and, in parallel, about how to market and sell those ‘books’ in the context of a wired world. Crucially, we will need to work out how we can add value as publishers within a circular, networked environment.
From a business perspective, I don’t disagree with Lloyd. But from a book lover’s perspective, I still want a physical book to read, one with lots of ideas expressed in words.
Yellow journalism is a pejorative reference to journalism that features scandal-mongering, sensationalism, or other unethical or unprofessional practices by news media organizations or journalists.
The term originated during the Gilded Age with the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well.
Personally, I don’t identify with the term in today’s media environment. Of course, we’re going to be sensational today. Anything less runs the risk of being utterly ignored. Instead of calling Lindsay’s arrest “yellow journalism,” we might call it participatory journalism.
[via MobLogic.TV]
The New York Times sent a travel writer to Midlake’s hometown, Denton, Texas. The writer found more than Midlake.
At last count, more than 100 bands were polishing their sound in the city’s dive bars, rooftop spaces and fraternity basements. Even the local record store, a converted opera house called Recycled, has a section devoted to Denton bands. The bin dividers read like a Lollapalooza T-shirt: Lift to Experience, Centro-matic, Jetscreamer, Vortexas, Robert Gomez, Stanton Meadowdale, Mom, Mandarin, and Matthew and the Arrogant Sea, to name just a few.
Not bad for a college town of 110,000, prompting more than a few music industry insiders to call Denton the next Austin.
“There’s this combination of artistic fervor and small town naiveté said David Sims, a music columnist for The Dallas Observer. “Artists here don’t know they’re not supposed to be Bob Dylan so when they start a band, they shoot for the moon.”
The more I hear about this place, the more I want to hop on a plane to Dallas and experience it first hand. When I do go, I hope Dan’s Silver Leaf is in full swing.
The hub of Denton’s unplugged music scene is now Dan’s Silver Leaf, a colorful dive bar in a former radiator repair shop decorated with Texas longhorn skulls. On a breezy Saturday night last March, the bar was packed with 20-somethings with straggly beards, ponytails and vintage T-shirts. They sat in stone silence as Sarah Jaffe, a 22-year-old transplant from Dallas, belted out a heartfelt ballad reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah.” Local music watchers were already calling her the town’s next Norah Jones.
“People get kind of jaded because we literally have some of the best musicians in the world play here,” said Dan Mojica, the club’s silver-haired owner, who was holding court at his usual spot at the backyard bar. “We’ve set the standard so high that locals are expecting that all the time.”
MP3 Offering: “The Man in Me” by Matthew and the Arrogant Sea
Now that Barack Obama is the Democrat Party’s “presumtive nominee”, it’s time to address the real roadblocks he’s going to face in the general election.
According to The Washington Post, (and my own observations) racial hatred is still commonplace in America.
For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed — and unreported — this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!”
Documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, the daughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said she, too, came across “a lot of racism” when campaigning for Obama in Pennsylvania. One Pittsburgh union organizer told her he would not vote for Obama because he is black, and a white voter, she said, offered this frank reason for not backing Obama: “White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people.”
Naturally, Obama campaign officials say such incidents are isolated, that the experience of most volunteers and staffers has been overwhelmingly positive. But let’s be brutally honest, we all know people at work, at church or in our families who harbor racist views.
Once the Republican hate machine starts running commercials that paint Obama and his wife as radical, uppity blacks, moderates are going to move toward McCain and in all likelihood those moderates in working class states like Pennsylvania and Ohio will deliver the White House to the Grand Old Party, once again. I’d like to be wrong, but that’s how I see it unfolding.
I came across Robert “Wolfman” Belfour earlier this week and I love his story. He grew up in North Mississippi’s hill country, so blues is in his soul, but he never had a music career until he started playing on the streets in Memphis.
His father died when Belfour was 13, and his music was relegated to what little free time he had, as his energy went to helping his mother provide for the family. In 1959, he married Noreen Norman and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he would work in construction for the next 35 years.
In the 1980s Belfour began playing on Beale Street and in 1994 he had eight songs featured on the compilation album, The Spirit Lives On, Deep South Country Blues and Spirituals in the 1990s. This led him to Fat Possum Records and his first album What’s Wrong With You, which was released in 2000 when Belfour was 60.
His 2003 release Pushin’ My Luck is now in my listening rotation (it’s available on iTunes). Here’s track two from that record, “Breaking My Heart,” courtesy of the label.
See Belfour perform “Done Got Old” on YouTube.
I think he’ll be to Rome
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature. -Shakespeare
Our local power provider, Palmetto Electric Co-op, is offering the community a chance to learn more about majestic raptors in our midst.
For years electric transmission towers have served as nesting homes for the migratory Osprey. As you drive across the Intracoastal Waterway to Hilton Head Island, you can spot the Ospreys congregating on the towers during the spring and summer months. Another tower—in Palmetto Electric’s own backyard—has also served as home to Osprey since 1988.
Each spring our feathered friends return to reside high atop the communications tower that overlooks Palmetto Electric’s Hilton Head Island operations center. This year new residents have taken over the nest and are settling in for the summer. Join Palmetto Electric in our second Osprey season as we get a bird’s-eye view thanks to a Web camera mounted nearby.
Osprey, commonly known as a “seahawk,” live to be 20 or more years old. They mate for life and migrate to South America and back every year. Their diet is 99% fish.
Click here for Palmetto’s Osprey Blog. Or here to hear the Osprey’s call.
I took note of Adam Carroll’s music recently, after Hayes Carll mentioned the San Carlos singer-songwriter.
Carroll has a new record coming out this month. It can be downloaded in advance of it’s release at Lone Star Music. Lone Star also offers an interview with Carroll where even more leads to new musicians are given–this time to Fred Eaglesmith, Scott Nolan, Mark Jungers and Roger Marin.
Q. Your new record, Old Town Rock & Roll, is your first one without Lloyd Maines producing. Were you looking for a new sound?
A. I’ve been doing some touring with some Canadian friends that I met through Hayes Carll by way of the Fred Eaglesmith crowd two of which are Roger Marin and Scott Nolan.
Scott is one of those guys I’ve been lucky enough to get to know over the past year or so- He writes great songs one of which is called “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” which is on the new Hayes record.
We were playing at Roger Marin’s festival up in Canada and we started talking about doing a record together. The idea was really exciting to me because Scott is very dynamic and engaging as a person and performer and I just had a feeling that we could do a great record. When I got back home i was so looking forward to the chance to work with Scott that I finished a bunch of half written songs that I had lying around plus a few new ones and we went to Mark Jungers’ house and started recording. I had written a lot of songs over at Mark’s and I knew that it would be the perfect place to record, (it’s) really laid back, comfortable and creative.
We all treated my record as an experiment that we could walk away from if it didn’t work but I think we all knew right away that it was going to be good.
Nolan wrote “Bad Livers and Broken Hearts,” which appears on Hayes Carll’s new album.
The circle is unbroken…
[MP3 Offering] “Oklahoma Gypsy Shuffler” off Old Town Rock and Roll by Adam Carroll.