Yearly Archives for 2008

'Psychiatric mortality' of the wars…

Post-War Suicides May Exceed Combat Deaths, U.S. Says

By Avram Goldstein

May 5 (Bloomberg) — The number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care, the U.S. government’s top psychiatric researcher said.

Community mental health centers, hobbled by financial limits, haven’t provided enough scientifically sound care, especially in rural areas, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He briefed reporters today at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in Washington.

Insel echoed a Rand Corporation study published last month that found about 20 percent of returning U.S. soldiers have post- raumatic stress disorder or depression, and only half of them receive treatment. About 1.6 million U.S. troops have fought in the two wars since October 2001, the report said. About 4,560 soldiers had died in the conflicts as of today, the Defense Department reported on its Web site.

Based on those figures and established suicide rates for similar patients who commonly develop substance abuse and other complications of post-traumatic stress disorder, “it’s quite possible that the suicides and psychiatric mortality of this war could trump the combat deaths,” Insel said.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, known as PTSD, is the failure to cope after a major shock, such as an auto accident, a rape or combat, Insel said. PTSD may remain dormant for months or years before it surfaces, and in about 10 percent of cases people never recover, he said.

“We don’t yet know how to predict who is going to be the person to be most concerned about,” Insel said.

The Pentagon didn’t dispute Insel’s remark.

“The department takes the issue of suicide very seriously, and one suicide is too many,” said spokeswoman Cynthia Smith in an e-mail.

The department has expanded efforts to encourage soldiers and veterans not to feel stigmatized if they seek mental health treatment, Smith said.

Soldiers who’d been exposed to combat trauma were the most likely to suffer from depression or PTSD, the Rand report said. About 53 percent of soldiers with those conditions sought treatment during the past year. Half of those who got care were judged by Rand researchers to have received inadequate treatment.

Failure to adequately treat the mental and neurological problems of returning soldiers can cause a chain of negative events in the lives of affected veterans, the researchers said. About 300,000 soldiers suffer from depression or PTSD, the report said.

Researchers aren’t sure whether it’s appropriate to treat such patients with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of medications that include Prozac, and other anti- depressants, Insel said. His institute is examining that question and novel treatments for PTSD, including using so-called virtual reality technology.

The psychiatric association reported last week that a survey of 191 military members and their spouses found 32 percent said their duty hurt their mental health, and six in 10 believed seeking treatment would damage their careers.

More than 15,000 psychiatrists are attending the professional group’s meeting.

HANON REZNIKOV, REST IN PEACE

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May 5, 2008 email from the Living Theatre:

“Dear Friends:

“Hanon Reznikov, Judith Malina’s husband and the co-director of The Living Theatre since Julian Beck’s death in 1985, passed away last night. He suffered a stroke a little more than two weeks ago, followed this week by pneumonia.

“To send cards or notes of condolence to Judith, please email to
contact at livingtheatre dot org”

The Living Theatre’s Mission
To call into question
who we are to each other in the social environment of the theater,
to undo the knots
that lead to misery,
to spread ourselves
across the public’s table
like platters at a banquet,
to set ourselves in motion
like a vortex that pulls the
spectator into action,
to fire the body’s secret engines,
to pass through the prism
and come out a rainbow,
to insist that what happens in the jails matters,
to cry “Not in my name!”
at the hour of execution,
to move from the theater to the street and from the street to the theater.
This is what The Living Theatre does today.
It is what it has always done

Reasons To Be Cheerful: The Life and Work of Barney Bubbles

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“He was so good I couldn’t have really competed with him.”
Sir Peter Blake

Reasons To Be Cheerful is a celebration of the life and work of one of the greatest designers of recent times: Barney Bubbles.

Bubbles—real name Colin Fulcher—was a giant of graphic design whose prodigious output is revered by musicians, artists, fellow designers and music and pop culture fans.

Reasons To Be Cheerful is published November 2008 to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the artist’s death. Author Paul Gorman is also curating a companion exhibition with Sir Paul Smith.

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Space Ritual by Hawkwind (1973).

Barney Bubbles’ body of work included early posters for the Rolling Stones, brand and product design for Sir Terence Conran, psychedelic art with poster maestro Stanley Mouse, layouts for underground magazines OZ and Friends and collaborations with many bands and performers, from counter-culture collective Hawkwind to new wave stars Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Nick Lowe, Graham Parker, The Damned and Billy Bragg.

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left: Doremi Fasol Latido by Hawkwind (1972).
right: Ian Dury & the Blockheads logo design (late 70s).

Bubbles links the colourful underground optimism of the 60s to the sardonic and manipulative art which accompanied punk’s explosion from 1976 onwards, and influenced a generation of design talent including Neville Brody, Malcolm Garrett and Peter Saville.

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Music For Pleasure by The Damned (1977).

The lavishly illustrated Reasons To Be Cheerful will contain hundreds of images and many full-colour plates.

About the Author
Paul Gorman is a popular culture historian and author of The Look: Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion, and the top ten bestselling Straight with Boy George.

Arthur presents Cinefamily's "FOLK AMERICANA" music film series Thursdays in May and June

http://www.cinefamily.org/calendar/thursday.html#may

FOLK AMERICANA / Music Thursdays in May & June at 8pm
Folk songs are everybody’s songs, music learned firsthand from family and friends, and passed on person to person and from generation to generation. In these songs are the oral history of America, our traditions, our feelings, our sufferings and joys. We are thankful that there were devoted songcatchers who saw the significance and beauty of this music, who not only recorded the sounds, but also the sights, of last remaining echoes of this untouched authenticity. These filmmakers and musicologists understood and appreciated that long before we worshipped false American Idols, we listened to the root and heard the trees singing songs of the sea.

Presented by Arthur Magazine

Thursday, May 8, 8pm: Alan Lomax: Songhunter
“I thought of Alan as a Minotaur — half man, half supernatural — who defied life as we know it.” – Bill Ferris, friend of Alan Lomax

Known as the “song hunter”, Alan Lomax was one of the world’s most prolific and well-known musicologists and folklorists. He is most famous for his recordings from the deep South in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s at penitentiaries, plantations and farms of the Mississippi Delta. He also traveled extensively throughout the U.S., Caribbean, Europe, and North Africa capturing live field performances, and helped to establish the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song. Tonight, we celebrate Lomax’s career by showing a Dutch documentary on his career, as well as selections from his own incredible film archive, including footage of the New Lost City Ramblers at Carnegie Hall, Willie Dixon, Howling Wolf, and more.
Dir. Rogier Kappers, 2004, digital presentation, 93 min.
Tickets – $10

Thursday, May 15 – 8pm: The Old, Weird America: Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music
Imagine a world without rock and roll, or without that obsessive breed of cultural anthropology that favors the margins over the center. That’s the world you’d get without Harry Smith. No one better anticipated the sea change of the ’60s and its post-revolutionary landscape than this son of Theosophists, experimental filmmaker, Native American ethnographer, alchemical evangelist, speed freak, town crier and collector extraordinaire. His three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music, with its archive of “blues singers, hillbilly musicians and gospel chanters,” in the words of Greil Marcus (whose Old Weird America lends its title), launched Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and the folk revival of the early ‘60s, just for starters. This loving portrait by Rani Singh, Smith’s one-time assistant and co-curator of his archives, blends biography with concert footage of Beck, Elvis Costello, Lou Reed, Nick Cave and other musical archaeologists performing songs from the Anthology, to capture the life of one of America’s secular saints.
Dir. Rani Singh, 2006, DigiBeta, 90 min.
Tickets – $10

Thursday, May 22 – 8pm: John Cohen Films
John Cohen, founding member of the ‘50s folk troupe the New Lost City Ramblers, started making films in order to bring together the two disciplines he was heavily active in: music and photography. His first film, The High Lonesome Sound, is a love letter to Appalachia and features the amazing banjo picker Roscoe Holcomb as the anchor for this gem of cultural anthropology. Next, The End of an Old Song brings us to North Carolina, and demonstrates the power of old English ballads sung with gusto while soused in a saloon. Sara and Maybelle is a rare filmed performance of the two titular members of the Carter Family, Musical Holdouts is an expansive survey of American musical subcultures that steadfastly refuse to be blanded by mainstream consciousness, and Post Industrial Fiddle explores the importance of music-making in the life of a pulp mill worker in rural Maine. All deceptively simple, but profound stuff.
Dir. John Cohen, 1962-82, various formats, 120 min.
Tickets – $10

Thursday, May 29 – 8pm: Hootenanny Hoot
Far away from the smoky boho coffee klatches of New York, wild college kids of the early ‘60s had their own fun singing and dancing down by the river in bikinis and short shorts at hootenannies, big jam sessions with great musicians. These were taken so seriously that B-movie mogul Sam Katzman (Rock Around The Clock) capitalized on the phenomenon with Hootennany Hoot. In it, two randy Madison Ave. ad men travel up the Hudson River Valley in search of fresh faces and become betwitched by the Hoot. The frivolity is fun and goes down easy, but the reasons not to miss HH are the key performances: Johnny cash sings “Frankie and Johnny” from out of the back seat of his car, Judy Henske (“Queen of the Beatniks”) taps the root and awakens the beast within for “Wade In The Water”, and suggestive ballads by Joe and Eddie hint at how the times would be a-changin’.
Dir. Gene Nelson, 1963, 16mm, 91 min.
Tickets – $10

Thursday, June 5 – 8pm: Folk Shorts by Les Blank
We present three folk film classics by Les Blank, who’s spent nearly 50 years documenting on film the tastes, sounds and rituals of both regional America and points abroad. His singular freewheeling viewpoint of celebrating “simple, loving people of the Earth” has garnered him countless awards, including AFI’s Maya Deren Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achivement in 1990. The Blues Accordin’ To Lightnin’ Hopkins is a loving portrait of blues legend Hopkins, serving a heaping helping of live performances at both a community barbeque in his hometown of Centerville, Texas, and an all-black rodeo. The Sun’s Gonna Shine is a brief lyrical recreation of Hopkins’ decision at age eight to stop chopping cotton and start singing for a living, and Sprout Wings And Fly is a poignant tribute to Appalachian fiddler Tommy Jarrell, whose unpretentious folk wisdom is interlaced with family scenes and reminiscences, plus plenty of old-time music.
Dir. Les Blank, 1969-83, 35mm, 80 min.
Tickets – $10

Thursday June 12, 8pm – Bound for Glory
Hal Ashby’s epic, simple and understated biopic of Woody Guthrie, detailing his exodus from the Midwest to California, is a masterpiece of ‘70s cinema, not only for its depiction of Guthrie’s music, but also for its portrayal of Dust Bowl despair. The story of a small-town farmer seeking prosperity in the West, Guthrie instead finds himself an able-bodied singer-songwriter. His lyrics and songs speak to the unspoken truths of the wage-slave poor working in the fields struggling against wealthy landowners. Inspired by Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory won two Oscars for Haskell Wexler’s cinematography (the film was the first ever to utilize the Steadicam) and for Leonard Rosenman’s music. David Carradine’s performance is uncompromising as he breathes life into Woody’s songs and the late Ronny Cox (Ozark Bule) as Woody’s trusted union confidant deserves mention.
Dir. Hal Ashby, 1976, 35mm, 147 min.
Tickets – $10

Thursday June 19, 8pm: Festival, shown with The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival
Two from documentarian Murray Lerner, best known today for his work in music films. First up is Festival, Lerner’s priceless document of the whole Newport festival scene from ’63-’65. Alongside clips of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Donovan are many performances by veteran blues musicians of the day like Howlin’ Wolf and Son House, who received at the festival their first exposure to white audiences outside of their respective home bases. Next is The Other Side of the Mirror, a deeper examination of Dylan’s performances at the Newport Folk Festival from that same period, 1963-65. Early on, Dylan captured the imagination of the Newport crowds, but his infamous ’65 appearance in which he “went electric” earned him the wrath of some of the more vocal members of the crowd, and he left the stage after three songs. The Other Side presents footage from this incident, as well as great renditions of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Like A Rolling Stone.”
Festival Dir. Murray Lerner, 1967, 35mm, 95 min
The Other Side Of The Mirror Dir. Murray Lerner, 2007, 35mm, 83 min.
Tickets – $10

Thursday June 26, 8pm: Celebration at Big Sur
In 1971, everyone did it. And they did it for love. Filmed at the legendary West Coast philosophical retreat The Esalen Institute (which gave birth to EST and which counted Henry Miller as a regular guest), the very rarely screened Celebration at Big Sur is a terrific document of this formerly annual concert, featuring the sounds of CSNY, Joan Baez and her sister Mimi Farina, Dorothy Morrison, John Sebastian and Joni Mitchell, all performing on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Like Woodstock, the Celebration was a free festival that had major quirks, which in turn made for great filmic moments. Highlights include Steven Stills getting into a fight with a heckler, experimental Jordan Belson-like bits during Joni’s piano playing, and David Crosby skinny-dipping with Carl Gottlieb (the film’s producer and the co-writer of Jaws) in the infamous Esalen baths while chanting up a storm. Purify yourself at the sea of madness!
Dirs. Baird Bryant & Johanna Demetrakas, 1971, 35mm, 82 min.
Tickets – $10

COMMUNICATING WITH PLANTS

“Applied Magic(k)” – a column by the Center for Tactical Magic

from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008

THE ROOTS OF CULTURE

“What kind of times are they, when talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence about so many horrors?” —Bertolt Brecht (To Those Born Later)

Most people have an appreciation for plants and make an effort to occasionally hike among them, repose in their shade or even co-habitate with them. And while it’s safe to say that we recognize plants’ value and usefulness, it’s also a fair assessment to state that the plant kingdom is frequently taken for granted. When we’re not trampling it, cutting it down, or eating it, we’re usually ignoring it altogether.

Perhaps that’s why the vast majority of modern people who encounter the idea of human/plant communication—or “psychobotany,” as we prefer to call it—find it strange. But it’s equally strange that this viewpoint has become normalized. After all, anthropologists largely agree that people have been attempting communication with the plant kingdom for as long as there have been plants and people. So why is it considered “abnormal” to attempt communication with plants today? And what can we hope to accomplish by entering into such a conversation in the first place?

From engendered grudges and evolutionary angst to theological quibbles and accusations of entrapment, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden has certainly been fertile ground for all sorts of controversy. But surely there’s an upside. At the very least the Bible has given us a glimpse of Utopia: proto-hippies living blissfully in a magic garden. In one corner of paradise they receive vitality from the Tree of Life; in another they gain consciousness of self after sampling the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.

Continue reading →

SKATEBOARDING AS A MIND-BODY PRACTICE: Greg Shewchuk’s new Arthur column debuts (Arthur, 2008)

“Advanced Standing” by Greg Shewchuk

Illustration by Joseph Remnant

from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008

Anyone who claims to know what skateboarding is “all about” is full of shit. To define it as sport, art, science, transportation, play, culture, lifestyle, or anything else is to minimize the unlimited potential within the form. Skateboarding is inherently meaningless. Its lack of meaning is what allows it to be such a progressive and influential experience.

The origin of skateboarding cannot be localized to any single point. The skateboard was never invented; it was discovered by children across America simultaneously as apple-crate scooters of the 1940s and 50s were broken down and converted into the legendary 2×4″ with roller-skate trucks. Thus, the skateboard has no intention behind it: no inventor, no purpose, no ownership, no goal, no rules. Nothing in the creation or design of the skateboard assumes any meaning or value. It is a perfectly uninhibited vehicle of action-oriented possibility.

As the skateboard was refined with technical advancements (urethane wheels, slight changes in board and truck design) and influenced by surf culture and technique, it evolved and attracted the daredevils and visionaries who crafted the form as we recognize it today. The terrain of streets and sidewalks led to ramps and pools and drainpipes, and eventually begat massive concrete skateparks. Journalists and photographers and filmmakers developed a symbiotic relationship with the athletes, documenting the physical forms and commenting on the culture and surrounding artworks and personalities.

The masters of the form, the leaders and great events of skateboard history, the varied terrain and infrastructure: all of this has been documented and pored over by an appreciating audience. And yet, for all of the journalism and vicarious entertainment that surrounds skateboarding, there’s never really been a deeper examination of the form— specifically the subtle internal and energetic processes—of skateboarding itself.

The technique of actually riding on a skateboard is not that different than standing still. The skateboard is a vehicle, with wheels and axles and a platform to stand upon, but there is no drivetrain. A skateboard moves by the kinetic energy of being pushed, or by taking advantage of its potential energy positioned at the top of a hill or transitional wall. Once the skateboard is up to speed, the majority of the techniques start and end with simply riding along—standing still on the platform of the skateboard, while the world rolls beneath one’s feet, occasionally in excess of 40 miles an hour. In this standing position, the skateboard and rider may cover larger distances, they may roll up and down steep inclines, they may ride up circular transitions above and beyond the vertical axis, they may launch into the air and cover great distances through empty space before returning to solid ground. The skateboarder, more than anything, must shift his or her weight and stance to accommodate these changes in trajectory. The technical aspects of contemporary trick performance include a lot of board flipping and body spinning and sideways sliding and shifting and grinding, but the foundation of riding a skateboard in a casual, two-footed stance remains.
The standing skateboarder experiences dramatic changes in acceleration and frame of reference. Dropping into a ramp or bowl sets the rider off on a path of varying degrees of linear and radial acceleration. Physics students are aware that radial acceleration—the way a skateboarder will circumnavigate a bowled transition, or a planet will orbit a star— results in acceleration towards the center of the curve. This curious feature of Newtonian physics segues neatly into Einstein’s theory of relativity, involving acceleration along the curvature of space-time. Einstein postulated a geometric interpretation of the “force” of gravity, and this revelation completely changed the way we view and understand our world.

This means that the skateboarder, in his ongoing dance with gravity and acceleration, can use the fine instrument of the central nervous system to examine the most dramatic and fundamental forces in the universe. This movement affects physiological change, in the form of blood flow and oxygenation and chemical release and so on, but also affects awareness and psychological change. Finding the center in these dramatic curves, attaining balance in the midst of this tremendous spiraling movement, is as much an internal discipline as an external one.

Over the past ten years I have considered skateboarding in the light of two disciplines which are often grouped together as “mind-body” practices, Taiji (also Taijiquan, T’ai Chi) and Yoga (specifically Hatha Yoga). While the comparisons have been made before, a deeper investigation is overdue. Taiji and Yoga are physical practices with corresponding philosophies that have endured for literally thousands of years, drawing from the sophisticated and profoundly spiritual cultures that spawned them: Taiji evolved with Chinese Taoism, and Yoga evolved with Indian Hinduism and Buddhism. A greatly simplified explanation of their intention is to prepare the human participant for the discipline of deep meditation.

Taiji and Yoga use the body-mind correlation to enhance and actualize the understanding and expression of spiritual connectedness. In Yoga, the intention is to “yoke” or unite with the divine through mental refinement and physical alignment in the flow of universal energy. The intention of Taiji is to follow the way—the Tao—by “uniting heaven and earth”, balancing the opposing forces of the universe internally and externally. The famous “yin yang” symbol is actually called the Taiji—it means supreme ultimate, and is intended to suggest that the universe in its true state is in perfect balance.

Considering skateboarding as a mind-body activity and relating it to Yoga and Taiji can allow insight into the less than obvious internal processes at work. It is not sheer athleticism—strength, endurance, etc.—that make a good skateboarder; a good skateboarder must be a master of balance, focus, perseverance, creative ingenuity, and fear management. It takes heart and vision (and a good sense of humor) to ride a skateboard, not muscle. Cultivation of the heart and vision are among the primary intentions of a traditional mind-body activity, and they do not involve a painstaking enhancement of the ego, but quite the opposite. Skateboarders have as much to learn about the physical aspects of their craft from these ancient disciplines as they do about the internal, mental, and spiritual aspects.

Regardless of whether these systems are studied or adopted by skateboarders, the point is that there is an opening here for some higher purpose. When you are skateboarding, any goals or obligations are self-created. The intention of your skateboard practice is up to you. For someone who has been skating for 20 or 30 years, the reasons for skateboarding have probably changed greatly. What begins as sport, art, play, a job, etc. can become an opportunity to merge a physically balanced form with open-minded spiritual potential. This can take place by studying Yoga or Taiji, or by incorporating another religious philosophy (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Zen Buddhism, and so on) into the mix. It is certainly not necessary, but the choice is yours.

Whatever you choose, you will not be alone on your path. In 50 years skateboarding has developed into a worldwide culture with millions of participants, growing and evolving at the speed of life, and every flavor of humanity and human achievement is accounted for. This progressive, diverse living community is more available to spiritual development than perhaps any other group of people in the history of the world. In America, where freedom of such pursuit is a constitutional right, we have a unique opportunity to follow our own path and uncover personal insight into the deepest workings of the universe, a balanced experience that might as well take place while standing on a wooden plank with trucks and urethane wheels.

I don’t want to try and define skateboarding, nor do I want to attach any extra importance to it. Its meaninglessness is its ultimate value, and any rewards are up to the invididual to discern. That said, the internal processes of skateboarding are available for anyone at any level to explore—but to do so you will have to see beyond the obvious, and you are well-advised to take a cue from some ancient wisdom. Skateboarding goes deep, and it can be about a lot more than fame or success or being cool; it can quickly transcend any imaginary differences between human souls. Skateboarding is a real, life-long spiritual trip, a profound relationship with a higher power. Skateboarding will require you to open up to the unknown, and confront it without fear or judgment. Then you may bear witness to the freedom within the form.

Greg Shewchuk is the director of the Land of Plenty Skateboard Foundation. www.thelandofplenty.org

Greensburg, Kansas: "A modern survival guide for rural America"

Kansas Town’s Green Dreams Could Save Its Future

by Frank Morris
NPR – All Things Considered

December 27, 2007 · Greensburg, a tiny town on the vast, flat prairie of western Kansas, is at the center of a grand experiment. In May, a tornado obliterated nearly every house, tree and business.

The twister — among the strongest on record — killed 10 people and displaced almost 1,400 residents. The community had been in steep decline before the storm, but city leaders quickly saw opportunity in the disaster. Perhaps they could revive Greensburg and sustain it for generations to come by making it the greenest town in America.

Less than two days after the tornado, as huge machines began to tear into the wreckage of his hometown, School Superintendent Darren Hedrick managed to put a brave face on.

“Towns are about people, they’re not about buildings. And it’s a huge opportunity to rebuild — not just rebuild it the way it was but maybe rebuild it a little bit better than it was,” Hedrick said.

Though buildings, books and records were gone, Hedrick pledged to open school on time in the fall.

He did.

First-graders recently celebrated the end of an odd semester. Classes were held in small, white trailers lined up a quarter-mile from where most of the students now live. Their teacher, Laura Proser, says winter break marks a welcome milestone.

“We just got our stoplight yesterday, and everybody’s excited about that,” Proser said.

Townhomes are beginning to rise from the ragged tree trunks, weeds and ruins off Main Street. They mark a radical departure from traditional low-income housing, according to Duncan Prahl, who is from Pennsylvania and on contract with the National Renewable Energy Labs.

The townhomes are “LEED gold certified,” Prahl said. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The rating is based on a system which rewards energy savings. Prahl said gold certification means these places will be almost twice as efficient as they used to be.

Building to this standard for working-class families is unusual, Prahl said.

“A lot of what’s happening in Greensburg is some of the first in the country,” Prahl said.

Danny Wallach began rallying the effort to make the city more energy efficient just days after the tornado hit.

“I mean, it literally struck me, green — Greensburg — and at the time, I wasn’t aware of just how perfect the timing in the national green movement was,” Wallach said. Wallach heads Greensburg Greentown, a nonprofit group leading the push for environmental sustainability in Greensburg.

Leaders in the environmental movement have embraced the plan. The Discovery Channel is filming a show here, called Greensburg Eco-town, and green architects are working overtime.

Wallach says residents here embraced environmental sustainability as good old-fashioned thrift and independence.

“They really get it, and they say ‘OK, it’s not this crazy tree-hugger agenda.’ It’s common sense, and it’s what these people are really about,” Wallach said.

About 43 miles from Greensburg is a new wind farm in Spearville, Kan.

Lynn Billman of the Department of Energy believes that the force of nature that obliterated Greensburg could play a major role in sustaining its attempt to recover.

One of the turbines on the wind farm would be plenty to power Greensburg most days. Billman says the area also has great solar and geothermal potential. Even manure from nearby feedlots could be tapped for energy.

As the city weighs options for generating its own energy, it’s also getting serious about saving it. Greensburg City Council resolved that all new city buildings should meet the very highest environmental standard — LEED platinum.

City manager Steve Hewitt says the town will come back stronger than ever. Before the tornado, Greensburg was shedding 2 percent of its population every year. Those who left for college rarely returned to stay. It was death by a thousand cuts.

Now, Hewitt is thinking big: office space for new businesses, the high school and an art center are all being designed LEED platinum, a move he hopes will boost Greensburg’s appeal.

“Maybe it’s a little crazy. There’s only 14 platinum buildings in the country. When it’s all said and done, I’d like four or five here in Greensburg,” Hewitt said.

An energy company has announced plans to build a biodiesel plant in Greensburg. Google is considering building a wind-powered data center here. Several other companies are watching closely. Meanwhile, 100 new homes are going up, all of them more efficient than those they replaced.

About 200 Greensburg residents — one-third of the town’s current population — recently congregated in the new school gym to talk over the progress.

Robert Kilgore said he and his wife are rebuilding their home with extra insulation, better windows and hot water on demand.

“To be successful, we just have to do it,” Kilgore said.

But there’s a lot of uncertainty. FEMA will cover 75 percent of the cost of restoring city buildings to their pre-storm level. Other federal and state grants will help cover most of the rest of that cost.

But city leaders aren’t talking about restoring things to their old level.

Resident Ed Stauth fears a big tax hike.

“My wife says, ‘Oh don’t be negative,’ but doggone it, I look at it from the financial part of it. I’m all for everything for Greensburg, but everything’s got its price. There’s no freebies,” Stauth said.

Despite its murky future, Greensburg has already done something few small towns can: inspire its youth.

“Before the tornado, I was not going to come back. I was going to go to college, and who knows where. This community was dying. Now I’m definitely coming back, and I know a good majority of my friends are,” said 15-year-old Levi Schmidt.

For all the optimism here though, nobody thinks that reviving Greensburg is going to be easy.

School superintendent Hedrick remains optimistic, though perhaps a bit more circumspect now.

“A lot of little towns are dying a slow death,” Hedrick said. “We had a fork put in us pretty hard. We have to find a way to resurrect, and we hope we’re making good decisions to do that.”

As Greensburg tries to leverage environmentalism to rebuild and sustain itself in the wake of near total destruction, it just may unwittingly be writing a modern survival guide for rural America.

WHERE THE SIGNAL DECAYS: Erik Davis on the spiritual difference between digital and analog television (Arthur, May 2008)

“Tube Toss” by Erik Davis

from Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008

Last month I ditched my old 17-inch Sanyo TV and bought a big flat acronym—a Samsung LNT2653H LCD HDTV to be precise. My main motivation was visual hedonism. Though I don’t watch a ton of movies, I am something of a cineaste, having gone to college in the days when a decent sized campus like ours might boast a dozen film societies. Until recently, I fed my Janus jones in repertory cinemas, while at home I watched lighter fare—B movies or anime or leeched HBO shows. But rep cinemas are dying, even in a deeply mediated town like San Francisco, and I am simply not willing to squint any longer at letter boxed DVDs. I wanted a screen with an aspect ratio, if not a size, worthy of The Man From Laramie or Kagemusha. And so I entered the cacophonous purgatory of Best Buy to check out the wares.

I’ve always found TV shops kind of disturbing. It’s something about having all the machines simultaneously replicating the same program, like a flickering clone farm. But what really spooked me out this time was an immense split screen that was designed to demonstrate some Samsung feature called Auto Motion Plus 120Hz. On deck was the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, a product that will also get you thinking about clones. On the right, you had the “normal” image, which looked like a somewhat tinny and pointilistic film—HDTV’s reasonable digital echo of the silver screen. But the Auto Motion Plussed image on the left was so lifelike and three-dimensional that it destroyed any sense of film at all. It was as if the screen was no longer an enchanted mirror, but a telepresence window onto a Hollywood sound stage where an overpaid babe in a costume was stumbling around with some dumb props hoping the CG guys would make it all make sense.

In his much-reproduced essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1936, Walter Benjamin saw cinema as the paradigm of a new kind of technological media that would undermine the traditional “aura” of art, the semi-sacred quality of being that once infused individual works of creative genius. Looking at Keira Knightly’s makeup flake into the empty air of Auto Motion Plus, it was suddenly clear to me that we still have some aura left to lose: the analog aura of film itself, an aura that has a great deal to do with the complex chemical processes which give certain film stocks and eras an unmistakable timbre. This is the sunset of cinema, folks, a blazing analog dusk, and it is giving way to a digital night that is full of data and noise and still can’t really get the blacks right.

Then all the screens around me started throwing footballs in unison, and it started to make sense. The future screen, the future TV, is not about cinema but about simulating presence, a carnal ultrafidelity that’s good for sports, and reality TV, and porn. I must have had low blood sugar or something—box stores do this to me—but a vague apocalyptic dread descended upon me, as I imagined these home theaters invading millions of homes and literally sucking the life out of them, like phantasmic vampires, or digitally remastered portraits of Dorian Grey. Screens that grow more lifelike in exact proportion to the ontological exhaustion of the world outside, a world flattened and set groaning under the weight of us, our distractions, our hunger for figments. A verse from the book of Ezekiel welled up from the depths: “Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, the Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth.”

That said, as long as we are stuck in our chambers we might as well get some good imagery on the wall, which is why I shook myself out of my apocalyptic fugue and continued to shop. But what to buy? If I were a rich guy with a big house I’d definitely buy one of the big LCD HDTVS with Auto Motion Plus (for the…sports). But I share a small apartment with a lovely lady who doesn’t really watch or want a television at all, and who certainly does not want one lording over our wood-paneled living room with all the warmth and grace of an MRI machine. So I bought a 26-inch LCD with good stereo sound to keep in the office. That night I emailed the Pilkdown Man in London, and mentioned the TV’s “unfortunately small” size. “Wow,” he wrote back, “we’ve entered a world where a 26″ telly is small.” I felt like an idiot.

We are not a cable household, which means that when we watch TV, we watch it the old fashioned way: by sucking analog signals from the sky with a cheap V-shaped antenna stuck on top of the set. Though this method may strike you as Paleolithic, old school aerials are still the signal suckage method of choice for roughly 20 million American households. These include folks who can’t be bothered, people who can’t afford cable or satellite, and cranks like us who don’t want all that shit lurking just one remote away, ready to strike. Whoever we are, a great sword of Damocles now hangs in the airwaves over our heads, or rather, over our sets. Because as of February 17, 2009, the FCC has proclaimed that the entire analog broadcasting system, known as NTSC, will be permanently retired to make way for all-digital television. Without digital tuners, our old analog TVs are nothing more than monitors.

The United States is by no means paving the way here. Some European countries have already left analog behind, and pretty much everybody is signed up to make the switchover. The main reason for the change, of course, is money: manufacturers get to sell new-fangled sets, TV stations have the possibility of creating a number of new revenue streams, and the government gets to auction those tasty, wall-penetrating frequencies previously occupied by NTSC. One of the first things the government will do with that cash is to turn some of it over to local artists, pirate radio crews, and media activists who are being empowered to create innovative noncommercial programming and micobroadcast it over the freed-up channels—which after all are a public resource, like the national parks—to help prepare local communities for the imminent collapse of postmodern America.

JUST KIDDING! Actually, some of that auction money—up to a billion and a half dollars—will be used to cover the cost of a conversion program that will allow owners of analog TVs to continue to use their rigs. If you want to, your household can call up the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (Orwell anyone?) and demand up to two $40 coupons for digital-to-analog converter boxes to extend the life of your tube. Of course, the government stands to earn much more from auctioning off the spectrum, and their pals will do quite well selling the converters, so don’t feel like we’ve gone socialist or anything.

For the rest of us, broadcasters are promising a new magical world of digital television, because, after all, digital is “better.” Because my Samsung picks up both NTSC and digital signals, I can tell you that the quality of a strong digital transmission is definitely richer. But as usual, digital is not a standard but a sword that can be wielded with widely varying degrees of finesse. In order to make more money, broadcasters can choose to compress their digital channels in order to pack more services into the available bandwidth—including, possibly, other stations that would be sent over the same digital channel. The more you compress, the more lame artifacts are destined to spooge up your screen. If you already use the Internet to liberate movies and TV shows from the evil grip of copyright holders, you will know what I mean: the splotchy walls, the stuttered time-slips, the eruptions of Cubist ectoplasm.

The spiritual difference between digital and analog, it seems, is clearest where the signal decays. A weak analog signal is often bathed in snow, and its fuzzy “ghosts” can not only be tolerable and even charming, but can still be reasonably enjoyed way out in the boonies. Millions of earthlings have had ecstatic TV experiences watching World Cup matches on 13 inch TVs with crap reception. The relative smoothness of analog noise makes it simply easier for the mechanism to receive signals and for our eyes to make sense out of faces in the clouds. Ghosts like it, because ghosts like organic things. Digital signals, on the other hand, decay with neither grace nor charm. Instead, as the signal weakens, it swiftly passes over what is known as the “digital cliff”: a sharp, jarring plunge into jagged visual noise followed by zippo.

Cathode ray tubes are strange devices: evacuated glass teardrops outfitted with what amounts to a ray gun, blasting electrons at an array of glowing phosphors that, in color TVs anyway, look like psychedelic Op-Art. Sending phantasms invisibly through the air to dance across the surface of these crystal balls has always been a somewhat necromantic act. But if we are going to talk of analog ghosts, we need to talk of analog corpses: the millions of old school TVs that are now being sacrificed to the landfill lords of forced obsolescence. Plenty of people will get their hands on converters, of course, but plenty more will just toss out their CRTs and dive, like me, ever deeper into the digital wave. The guy who runs Electronic Recyclers, one of the largest e-waste recyclers in America, thinks that roughly 80 million analog sets will get tossed out over the next year or two. According to a back-of-the-envelope calculation, that’s just under a million and a half tons of TV—a mass that surpasses the weight of the Twin Towers. And that’s not to mention the amount of lead oxide in the glass. Let’s just say I hope outfits like Electronic Recycler are ready to get their hands dirty.

I just left my Sanyo on the street one night and it was gone by morning. In San Francisco, the street still giveth and taketh away. But a relic of the boob tube remains. Because we don’t have cable, we still need to use an antenna to pick up the terrestrial digital broadcast signals. So there sits my home theater: a sleek, if modestly-sized Samsung LNT2653H, looking like the monolith from 2001 laid on its side, topped by a pair of bent aluminum rabbit ears, duct-taped to the back of the set, flashing its peace sign at the principalities of the air.

ERIK DAVIS is a writer, fingerpicker and speaker who lives in San Francisco. His last book was The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. Nearly all of his published articles can be found on his website, techgnosis.com, where he regularly posts on music, religion, technology and other abiding mysteries.