Ironically We Humans Have Become that Sublime Force
I've been playing with a hydrophone (from Iceland!) to record tug boats and cargo ships at the Middle Harbor of the Port of Oakland. Just putting that out there, in case you'd like to do some experimenting like Marc Weidenbaum did with the recordings.
*** We're less than two weeks out from the Real Future Fair at the Oakland Museum of California. Get you some tickets. I'll let you play with my hydrophone in the koi pond.***
1. A fascinating, awesome feature about the genre of "natural" nature sounds.
"Now, Teibel’s concept—the soothing sounds of nature, or at least a synthesized facsimile of it—is quaint, the wallpaper of therapy waiting rooms and spa foyers. At the time, it was entirely new. Here was something you could hear but weren’t necessarily supposed to listen to. It wasn’t a sound effect, but it wasn’t music, either. And while it professed to contain the ocean, it had none of the purity or taxonomic specificity you’d expect from a field recording (never mind Teibel’s contention that the ocean could use a little work). Here was nature not as it is, but as we hope it’ll be, the lullaby of waves without the sand in our trunks."
"'Ordinarily we will send up one day’s worth of activities,' Wright says. 'If the scientists want to do something, we explain to them what it’s going to cost. The cost may be ‘You want to drive over here, but we can’t drive straight over there. We’re going to have to go over here and then over there and come up from behind . . . and it’s going to take five days. Are you willing to spend five days to get to that place?’'"
3. Don't sleep on the shamans, even in a country filled with technological and economic marvels.
"The emergence of Choi as a powerful figure in Korean politics shines a light on the continuing influence of cults and mysticism in the country. While Christianity and Buddhism are officially the two biggest religions, Choi’s religious universe is a syncretic one, mixing the two religions with many shades of magical shamanism, or Muism. The roughly 20,000 Korean shamans—a mostly female group formally acknowledged by the authorities which also has its own union, known as Kyongsing, or “belief”—are believed to be able to bridge this world and that of the spirits, a power that seems to have ensnared Park."
4. A sort of digital time capsule from President Obama's 2008 victory.
"I wanted to create something to look at a couple years from now to remember the election and hopefully present a good representation of what both sides of America were feeling on that day as evidenced by the response in the press and on the blogs. I didn’t capture everything, though I’ve certainly tried. I want to consume all of this information, have it put on a microchip in my brain. Until that’s possible, I just read a lot. I don’t know how many of these links will work in a year or 5 years, (when this doc might be helpful to show younger people who may not have ever remembered having a president who isn’t black), but here’s what I’ve got. At the bottom is a list of all the sites I used and the domains that helped."
5. Deep Time in the Anthropocene.
"Deep time represents a certain displacement of the human and the divine from the story of creation. Yet in the Anthropocene, ironically we humans have become that sublime force, the agents of a fearful something that is greater than ourselves. A single mine in Canada’s tar sands region moves 30 billion tons of sediment annually, double the quantity moved by all the worlds’ rivers combined. The weight of the fresh water we have redistributed has slowed the Earth’s rotation. The mass extinction of plant and animal species is unlikely to recover for 10 million years."
On Fusion: I argue that Facebook should buy Twitter. It's the only solution.
1. pitchfork.com 2. caranddriver.com 3. qz.com 4. unlikelywords.com 5. aeon.co
Ironically We Humans Have Become that Sublime Force