LORDS OF CHAOS: THE MOVIE

It was only a matter of time.



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PATAGONIA

I've always loved Patagonia for their hiking boots and outdoor gear. For those of you with a curious and active eye towards environmental issues here is yet another reason to love them.

OFFICIAL PATAGONIA SITE

HEAVENLY PUSS

ROADHOUSE BLUES

So I am reposting this...i wrote it back in March 08' when I heard that Swayze had fallen ill. He hung on strong for a long time but I am sorry to hear that Patrick Swayze has died at the age of 57. Nothing much will change in my life now that he is gone...Roadhouse is the most aired on television movie of all time (somewhere around 35-40 time a year) and I know that watching it every time I see it on won't change either. I will clear my schedule.



I’m not sure why. I just can’t figure it out. And I’m referring to myself and not the entire worlds fascination with celebrity and please don’t think I have a fascination with celebrity but I am human and I do hold a certain guilty curiosity when the new issue of US Weekly comes to a friends house (never mine…hell no I don’t subscribe). Although the Britney Spears and the Paris Hiltons that haunt the pages of those rags make me sick, make my cynical view on humanity and society grow with every flash washed photo snapped of them, I still, every month find myself scanning the pages looking at them strutting, sluttin’ and whatever else it is they do. Moving on to my point…
When Heath Ledger died a few months ago I found myself for a brief moment left with an empty feeling like something great was coming to an end and something on a large scale. Perhaps bigger then we all can imagine. I never met the man and I don’t know much about him other than I liked his “10 Things I Hate About You” picture (and a few others and I just can’t wait to see him as The Joker) and that I never had it in me to watch more than a few seconds (the worst few) of “Broke Back Mountain”. So why did I feel that empty feeling? Well this rant isn’t about Heath Ledger so I won’t go into it but it has something to do with the unmistakable connection we as humans have with each other no matter how fucked up things are in the state of affairs in the world. No matter how much I fear getting my head chopped off by the terrorists. No matter how much I hate the assholes that live next door to me for staying up all night screaming and yelling like white trash, junkies. Moving on to my point…
This isn’t about celebrities dying or insane fanatics writing eulogies and lighting candles outside these dead stars apartments and fasting out of spite to somehow get even with the higher powers above for taking their precious and only reason for living away from them.
No this is about something bigger than that. This is about something Jim Morrison sang about back in 69’ and there where a ton of things he sang about that weigh big today but for all intents and purposes for the here and now we’ll just hang on one thing.
When I found out a few weeks ago that Bodi…um…Dalton…shit…Patrick Swayze had Pancreatic Cancer I found myself with that same sinking, lonely feeling I got when I heard the news about Heath. Why? I don’t know him. So why do I care? Must be that unwavering human connection we all share right? Well yes but something else (besides compassion). He was Dalton. He was Bodi. He was good times I had when those movies he was in played for the first time in theaters and every time since on the television (and yes I had the disease too…the one that doesn’t let you change the channel to anything else when Roadhouse is on or Point Break for that matter…your kid could be uttering it’s first words and if Dalton was yanking that guys Adam’s apple from his throat you could care less…video tape it honey!!!!!).
These are long gone days. Days when things where fun still. Before things got so uptight. Dare I mention September 11th here? Because that’s where I was when the fun stopped and everyday since it’s just been getting bleaker. Beers just don’t seem as fun and innocent and I know it’s that I’m getting older but still I maintain an eternal young at heart momentum that keeps me young and virile but with a sharp eye on the future and I want it. I want the change. I embrace it but still why does the fun have to stop? Well maybe it doesn’t (for most it does…call it ingrained) but it’s hard to be the only guy on the boat wearing the party hat.
I can see those days…smoke filled bar, neon splashing on dirty walls. Heavy, live blues jamming from a small stage tucked in the corner. The smell is sour and pleasant and filled with all the things we love to hate. A beer bottle goes flying across the room and an all out, bar brawl breaks out. Chicks in bad mini-skirts and fuchsia tube tops slink around bearing their big boobs and some guy walks out of there with a broken leg, nose, rib (or two) and worst of all a badly busted ego which will fester into a nasty case of cold revenge leaving an innocent farmers house burning, a honest working, car dealers dealership pummeled by Bigfoot’s massive monster truck tires and some poor, old, long, grey haired bouncer with a knife stuck in his chest…shit…
It won’t but the point is there was a time where we could dream. When the good ol’ times evoked by a movie or a song fueled long nights hanging out, going out, drinking and not feeling the pressure of high and getting higher gas prices.
And then it gets worse. Last week Jeff Healy dies and another huge chunk of that good ol’ time falls off and disappears forever. For me it’s a hard hit. Again I didn’t know Jeff and really I’m not afraid of dying or the whole mortality thing so it wasn’t a reminder for me that we all die eventually…no it was more. It was sign of things to come. A reminder of just how bad it’s getting out there. Of just how UN-fun it’s becoming. Now I know I’m a dreamer but I keep my feet on the ground for the most part even though I prefer the view from up in the clouds but that doesn’t mean I can’t see this for what it is. I sound like a fanatic myself going on about Roadhouse…some really cheesy, 80’s, action flick and although that may be the case I’m not lighting any candles near Jeff Healy’s gravestone and I’m not praying for Patrick Swayze (only because I don’t pray but my heart goes out to him…that human connection thing again at play here). I just see these dark days ahead and want the old, sunny ones back. And Jeff Healy dying just pounds it harder in stone that they ain’t coming. Patrick Swayze not being immortal like the characters he plays in his movies seem to be, etch it deeper that no matter how hard you try you just can’t relive what’s been lived already and these hard times getting’ harder just beckon me to stop trying.
…the futures uncertain and the end is always near.
Yeah this is the case. Yes The Great Depression v.2 is on the horizon…yes this is true but…what good would it do to throw in the towel now? So I ask you…what would Dalton do? I know what he wouldn’t do. So despite the nastiness around the corner I feel obligated to continue the fight for the champions of fun.
…the futures uncertain and the end is always near.
In these dark days of woe when all the heroes are gone, when it’s all Indians and no chiefs, when a beer at the local dive just ain’t as fun as it was not too long ago and if it kills me trying I will be the only one (if I have to be) standing with a beer in my hand when the last rays of the sun beam down on this wonderful world. If I have to name my first born Dalton to keep the moral up then so be it.
…the futures uncertain and the end is always near.
Until then I will play Jeff Healy loud and proud. I’ll watch Roadhouse even when it’s on USA and cut to shit by the hacks at the censorship boards. And I will always remind the guy sitting next to me that, “were going to the roadhouse, gonna have a real good-time.”

JAWS IN REAL TIME

READ MORE...By the pricking of my thumbs...

It's a bit early but I can feel it welling up inside of me. That magical time of autumn fire. The first cool touch moving slowly through the town. The softening and gradual burning fever of color in every tree. A faint flush in the hills and the color of lions in the fields. Welcome Autumn. Farewell Summer (I will cherish the last of your days).

BLACK METAL BARBIES

Black Metal Barbies was photographed by Antonella Arismendi for D-Mode magazine, October ‘08.

DOOMRIDERS - DARKNESS COMES ALIVE

New album comes out September 29th. Thomas Hooper did the amazing artwork for the album.


DOOMRIDERS INFO

HOOPER'S ELECTRIC

JUSTIN BARTLETT - NEW SITE IS UP!!!

VBERKVLT

A Tiger Swallowtail

They’re Greeeaaaat!!! Not great just different, not prize in the box
but they follow a path, seemingly and what’s greeeaaaat! About it is
you can imagine that it’s pre-determined or just dream and upon doing
you can. When she was younger we would walk, so small (jumping)
in huge puddles, ever so little and the Black Willows would say “get
out of our way”, pushing us out of the way, into ditches on dirt roads.
Over by the brook, green Gabbro rivulets, the Spicebush fellas where
smoking and would ask us if we wanted one. I would say “no” often
never sometimes she would say “yes” and we would walk on.
Sassafras and Hornbeam, they were blue-blooded as could be and
could most definitely be found hanging around, on top, casting lines,
chummed up good or under, smoking or swilling or (they had been
ostracized from town and every hop house from here to Valley Over),
the Wayward South Docks. There, sloops-o-war, schooners and ketch,
a corvette, dotted all about but we never went, only hear about it
(made plans to one day, together maybe pack a picnic, hold hands she
said). Back in the Bend beyond the briar, after school she would graze
my hand with hers and Joe-pye, who had the measels, would point and
sing songs about me sitting in trees, K-I-S-S-I-N-G (ing) and other
such things. Father Clover stopped us on occasion and would fancy
our imaginations with our, one-day-stories-of-woo, young love. That
was spring and now in autumn fire, she in Mexico walks down to the
shore and puddling with the others she drinks from there and me, she
forgot. There she wears all black usually but sometimes with little
polka-dots maybe paisley and often twall. She mimics someone she
doesn’t know, who dresses in all black and on one occasion I went to
visit her in Pipevine but only admired her from across the street in a
tavern dimly lit. Summer got to be burdensome and muggy, the town
wasn’t the same without her. And neither was I. Poplar Jacobs died
that year (Lung Cancer, smoked a whole bunch) and Old “Ironweed”
Smith came down with some Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever thing.
Susan, from the church she was walking home one lazy night and
caught the brunt of a bourbon scourge, the back end of Hornbeam’s ax
handle. She has black eyes now. May be permanent but what is in
this town. Not her and she was Greeeaaaat!!! Come back. Come
spring she might come back but not in black though in yellow and in
paisley, plaid, seersucker, dots, all of it vibrant, alive like spring ought
to be. For now I will wait by the brook, not smoke tobacco but skip
stones.

July06

GHOST FISHING

Reuters - Tuesday May 5, 2009 - by Alister Doyle

Lost or abandoned nets in the oceans can keep on "ghost fishing" for years in a growing threat to marine stocks, a U.N. report said Wednesday.

About 640,000 tonnes of discarded fishing gear gets added to the oceans yearly, or 10 percent of the world total of marine debris, according to the study by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and U.N. Environment Program (UNEP).

Fishing gear "will continue to accumulate and the impacts on marine ecosystems will continue to get worse if the international community doesn't take effective steps to deal with the problem of marine debris as a whole," Ichiro Nomura, an FAO assistant director-general, said in a statement.

The study recommended measures such as cash incentives for fishing fleets to bring broken nets to port, better mapping of subsea hazards to avoid losses or new designs such as nets that dissolve if left in the water too long.

Nets sometimes snap in storms, get snagged on coral reefs or can get entangled in other fishing gear.

They can then start what the report termed "ghost fishing" -- pointlessly ensnaring fish or creatures such as turtles, seabirds or whales for years or even decades.

The report did not estimate overall damage to the oceans or economic losses to fishing fleets from gear littering seabeds from the South China Sea to the Mediterranean.

"It's very difficult to estimate the impact," said David Osborn, coordinator of UNEP's Global Program of Action on land-based sources of marine pollution.

"But we know that it's affecting fish take and it also represents a problem in terms of navigational hazards, like by fouling propellers," he told Reuters.

A 1992 ban on drift nets helped curb some problems, the study said. But gill nets, anchored to the seabed, can form a vertical wall between 600 metres and 10,000 metres (2,000 and 33,000 ft) long and can start ghost fishing if they break loose.

In Chesapeake Bay in the United States, an estimated 150,000 crab traps are lost every year of an estimated 500,000 deployed.

UNEP chief Achim Steiner said discarded gear was one of many threats to the seas along with over-fishing or acidification from greenhouse gases. He said all were damaging "ghosts in the marine environment machine."

Among recommendations, the report said fishing crews could be paid to report losses of nets or bring damaged gear to port. Marking nets could help identify offenders and track reasons for accidents.

New technologies can help. In some countries pots and traps have a biodegradable top that dissolves if it is in the water too long. Some nets for catching fish are designed to let turtles swim out.

DEAD WEATHER - TREAT ME LIKE YOUR MOTHER

CRICKETS ARE GETTING COLD

It wasn't a few days ago I was sitting out in my backyard, the sun had long gone down and a funny thing was happening. It was completely silent. I couldn't help but think of that movie "Arachnophobia". Did a horde of deadly spiders make it into my town from some Venezuela jungle and wipe out every living thing? Was I next? Well I rushed to the phone and dialed the University Entomology department and asked for the head guy in charge...he was on expedition...none of this is true except the part where i was listening to a dead silence in my backyard at night a few days ago. It was strange. Usually the metallic chattering of the summer canopy had started in full chorus. I wondered. Two nights ago i noticed...BOOM!! The orchestra had begun and summer had finally dug in.

Dolbear's Law states the relationship between the air temperature and the rate at which Snowy Tree Crickets, Oecanthus fultoni, chirp. It was formulated by Amos Dolbear and published in 1897 in an article called "The Cricke tas a Thermometer". Dolbear expressed the relationship in his formula which provides a way to estimate the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit from the number of chirps per minute.

Subsequently the following article just appeared in The New York Times":

It is very likely that the silence was related to cool summer nights, said Gary W. Felton, a professor of entomology and the head of the department at Pennsylvania State University. The situation has probably changed with recent warmer weather, he said.

“I don’t know what the temperatures have been like in the Philadelphia area, but in State College it has been a very cool summer, abnormally so,” Dr. Felton said. “Two weeks ago, I commented that we usually have a lot of tree frogs at night, but I had heard nothing. But now they are doing quite well. I suspect that is also temperature-related.”

In frogs and crickets, Dr. Felton said, the development period depends on temperature. “And there has been nothing sprayed on a wide basis that I know of,” he said, “so the most likely explanation is simply a cool summer.”

Cricket metabolism and chirping speed vary with ambient temperature, and the speed also varies by species. The snowy tree cricket is so dependable that a formula called Dolbear’s Law (after the physicist A. E. Dolbear, who reported his studies in 1897) provides a temperature gauge: count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and add 40 for the temperature in Fahrenheit.

SQUEAKY GETS OUT

FLOW

OFFICIAL SITE

DUKE RILEY...Those About to Die Salute You

This guy is amazing.

HIS SITE

READ ARTICLE ABOUT HIS LATEST PROJECT HAPPENING Thursday, August 13, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm, 2009


Duke Riley has always been interested in the space where water meets land within the urban landscape and is known for art work that is an idiosyncratic mix of performance art, sailor’s craft and historical re-enactment. Upon QMA’s invitation for an artist residency, Riley’s life-long fascination with the culture and topography of waterfronts, and proclivity for margins - of society, history, etc. - were immediately focused on the decommissioned World’s Fair Ice Rink adjacent to the museum. The sight of the vast oval arena, a sea of refrigeration tubing and white sand, brought an instant association with ancient Roman coliseums that were flooded to stage violent naval battles or Naumachia for the delight of spectators in the Empire’s effort to distract the masses from societal collapse by indulging them with free bread and extravagant spectacle.

TOOL SHRINE

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SAVE OUR OCEANS

Nine shark bite victims pose in front of the US Capitol Wednesday. The group joined advocates in pushing for the Shark Conservation Act of 2009 (S. 850/H.R. 81), which would strengthen the ban on shark finning in US waters and encourage shark conservation programs around the world. READ ARTICLE

Also sign these petitions to join the fight for our beloved oceans.

Petition to Palau: Stop Senate Bill 8-44 that opens up shark fishing

Petition to the Maldives for banning shark fishing

Petition: Remove shark nets in South Africa

MOMENT OF SILENCE...NOW!!!!!

.a small piece of me is gone now.

READ MORE...RAY BRADBURY

So this is an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's, "Just This Side Of Byzantium" which is the intro to his book "Dandelion Wine". I read this thing a million years ago and just bought it again. I plan on reading it as a farewell to summer. I had never read "Byzantium" before and upon doing so last night I was amazed, inspired...!!!...so many things. Bradbury does that to you. If you're a writer this piece will get to you. It will stir the lagoon of ideas and vision. Enlighten the senses of creativity. If you're a reader or a fan it will likely do the same. It will certainly flush the memory with a swift current and when the wave recedes you'll have wonderful images of the past to revel in.

"So from the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows..."

READ IT HEREJust This Side Of Byzantium

NATURE DEFICIT DISORDER

This is an interesting point made in an interesting article.

How to Lick a Slug

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: August 1, 2009

MOUNT HOOD, Ore.

While backpacking here with my 11-year-old daughter, I kept thinking of something tragic: so few kids these days know what happens when you lick a big yellow banana slug.

My daughter and I were recuperating in a (banana slug-infested) wilderness from a surfeit of civilization. On our second day on the Pacific Crest Trail, we were exhausted after nearly 20 miles of hiking, our feet ached, and ravenous mosquitoes were persecuting us. Dusk was falling, but no formal campsite was within miles.

So we set out a groundsheet and our sleeping bags on the soft grass of a ridge, so that the winds would blow the mosquitoes away. Our dog looked aghast (“Ugh, where’s my bed?!”), but sulkily curled up beside us. As far as we could tell, there was no other hiker within a half-day’s journey in any direction.

We debated whether to put up our light tarp to protect us from rain. “No need,” I advised my daughter patronizingly. “There’s zero chance it’ll rain. And it’ll be more fun to be able to look up at shooting stars.”

It was, until we awoke at 4 a.m. to a freezing drizzle.

The rain not only punctured the doctrine of Paternal Infallibility but also offered one of nature’s dazzlingly important lessons in perspective, reminding us that we’re just tenants — and ones without much sway.

Such time in the wilderness is part of our family’s summer ritual, a time to hit the “reset” switch and escape deadlines and BlackBerrys. We spend the time fretting instead about blisters, river crossings and rain, and the experiences offer us lessons on inner peace and life’s meaning — cheap and effective therapy, without the couch.

All this comes to mind because for most of us in the industrialized world, nature is a rarer and rarer part of our lives. Children for 1,000 generations grew up exploring fields, itching with poison oak and discovering the hard way what a wasp nest looks like. That’s no longer true.

Paul, a fourth grader in San Diego, put it this way: “I like to play indoors better, ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” Paul was quoted in a thoughtful book by Richard Louv, “Last Child in the Woods,” that argued that baby boomers “may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water.”

Only 2 percent of American households now live on farms, compared with 40 percent in 1900. Suburban childhood that once meant catching snakes in fields now means sanitized video play dates scheduled a week in advance. One study of three generations of 9-year-olds found that by 1990 the radius from the house in which they were allowed to roam freely was only one-ninth as great as it had been in 1970.

A British study found that children could more easily identify Japanese cartoon characters like Pikachu, Metapod and Wigglytuff than they could native animals and plants, like otter, oak and beetle.

Mr. Louv calls this “nature deficit disorder,” and he links it to increases in depression, obesity and attention deficit disorder. I don’t know about all that, although his book does cite a study indicating that watching fish lowers blood pressure significantly. (That’s how to cut health costs: hand out goldfish instead of heart medicine!)

One problem may be that the American environmental movement has focused so much on preserving nature that it has neglected to do enough to preserve a constituency for nature. It’s important not only to save forests, but also to promote camping, hiking, bouldering and white-water rafting so that people care about saving those forests.

One sign of trouble: the number of visits to America’s national parks has been slipping for more than a decade. Likewise, Europe and Canada have both done an excellent job of building networks of long-distance hiking trails, while the U.S. has trouble maintaining the trails it has.

One of our family’s annual backpacks is the 40-mile Timberline Trail circuit around Mount Hood, crossing snowfields and dazzling alpine fields of flowers. In years when we’re particularly addled, we hike it as many as three times. But a washout almost three years ago left part of this gorgeous trail — completed in the 1930s — officially closed, and unofficially rather difficult to get by. Here’s a spectacular trail that was built in the last depression, and we can’t even sustain it.

So let’s protect nature, yes, but let’s also maintain trails, restore the Forest Service and support programs that get young people rained on in the woods. Let’s acknowledge that getting kids awed by nature is as important as getting them reading.
Oh, and the slug? Time was, most kids knew that if you licked the underside of a banana slug, your tongue went numb. Better that than have them numb their senses staying cooped up inside. 

SKOT OLSEN

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SEA HAG

The more I think about it the more I realize I've been obsessed with this wench of the fathoms for a long time...I guess ever since I was introduced to the concept from watching old Popeye cartoons. Over the years she has resurfaced here and there (check out Burning Witch track from Towers record) and like most things involving the ocean to me I have embraced it like one would embrace the last floating piece of wreckage in a shipwreck...you hold it really close but still an uneasy feeling looms on the surface. And like the ocean she is mysterious. Stuff of legend.

Read More about The Sea Hag

GRACIOUS WILLIAM

This post is a bit late but better that than never!!!! I've been a huuuge fan of William Elliott Whitmore for a few years now. Understand I love music...can't go a day without discovering someone new...call it addiction if you will but I love music and all kinds of it. My absolute favorites are typically on opposite ends of the musical spectrum (Sisters of Mercy-Tool)...I mean the ones that really, really get in and stay there. The ones that you take everywhere and forever. It ebbs and flows and your tastes come and go and you sometimes rediscovery a band you loved a million years ago and love them all over again...that's the nature of the whole damn thing. This is one guy that has never gone with the tides for me. It's my nature to take this sound with me. It's my nature to take his words to heart.

Finally got to see him live in NYC on July 14th at City Wine. Humble and Gracious is an understatement. Funny and friendly. One hell of a rebel and musician. Fucking loved every note, every word.

CHECK OUT HIS WEBSITE

WILLIAM ADOLPHE BOUGUEREAU

Dante and Virgil in Hell circa 1850...click for larger view please

HOPE SANDROW - SHINNECOCK

A friend of mine sent me this link to The New York Times piece on Hope Sandrow. She is an artist and photographer that lives in Shinnecock HIlls, NY. Her pics are really amazing and her vision unique. Her SITE is a little cryptic but it is still interesting...take the time an browse.

Watch this slide show (link below) from The New York Times. She says something cool about raising her chicken which are all sorts of strange breeds. The part I loved was that she plants flowers and grasses that look like these chickens to fool the hawks on the prowl up above.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/15/garden/20090716-chickens-slideshow/index.html