Author Archives for Jay Babcock

[SUNDAY LECTURE] "I will speak to you now from the future."

Note: This piece was first published in Summer 1992 on the sesquicentennial of Columbus’ landing on North America in the Journal of the Society for Ecological Restoration.

DREAMING INDIGENOUS

One hundred years from now in a northern California valley

by Freeman House

Contact between whites and natives didn’t happen here in my part of North America until 150 years ago, which makes it easier to think like this. You can still see enough of the earlier patterns in the landscape to be able to guess at what it looked like then. Once contact did happen, however, it proceeded with unrelenting fury. Within a seven year period ending in 1862, the 10,000-year-old culture that had been so wonderfully adapted to this little tuck in the Coast Range was reduced to a few broken individuals hanging on locally and a handful more isolated from the source of their identity, bereft of home on the reservation a hundred miles away.

Life was pleasant for the whites, in a rough sort of way. For a hundred years or so, pleasant enough so that even now some cowboys look back on that time as the very peak of existence. It was the usual scene for the North American West: a few steers and dairy cows, some hogs for market, and an economic boom every 30 or 40 years to keep things interesting—and growing. The tanbark boom kept quite a few of the boys busy for a time. And even though the oil boom fizzled, it brought the aura and glamour of the great world into the valley for a while, and Petrolia got a hotel. Come the bust, as it always did, well, subsistence was not so bad, with salmon and venison steak to fall back on.

The really big boom, the one that makes you wonder if anyone will survive the bust, came as a windfall to the handful of large landowners. A whole slew of events, historical and technological, had conspired to make the ubiquitous Douglas-fir worth something, worth a lot, after decades of laying it down around the edges of the prairies and burning over it year after year to expand the pasture. Three quarters of the landscape was suddenly marketable after three generations of living well enough off the other one quarter.

It came out fast—90 percent of three quarters of 300 square miles of timber from some of the most erodible forest slopes in North America, all in the space of a single generation. No one paid any attention to what anyone else was doing. There was no awareness, really, that a whole watershed was being stripped of its climax vegetation all at once. For most of the years between 1950 and 1970, several mills were kept running ‘round the clock, and the trucks taking timber out of the valley were so numerous and frequent that their drivers had to agree on one route out and another one in. There was a lot of money; anyone could find a job who wanted one. The schoolteacher worked at the sawmill at night.

Two 100-year storms within a ten year period was bad luck, they said, coming at a time when so many acres of soil were exposed to the sky. But exposed they were, and a vast warm rain on top of an unusually heavy snowpack on the ridges sent thousands of tons of sediment into the creeks and then into the river. In one week in 1955, the structure of the river was altered completely, from a cold, stable, deeply channeled waterway enclosed and cooled by riparian vegetation to a shallow, braided stream with broad cobbled floodplains, warm in summer, flashy in winter. And then it happened again in 1964.

When the new homesteaders began to arrive in the early 1970s, all we knew was that the king salmon and the silver salmon were almost gone. A few of us tried to do something about it, and by 1981 had established a sort of volunteer cottage industry in salmon propagation. We learned quickly that the key to the restoration of wild populations was habitat, and we found ourselves creating jobs along with volunteer and educational programs in reforestation, in erosion control. One thing leads to another—now we hear ourselves talking landscape rehabilitation, watershed restoration planning, water quality monitoring,

We were only vaguely aware that we were engaged in something called environmental restoration, and it wasn’t until the Restoring the Earth conference in Berkeley in 1988 that we realized that we were part of a planet-wide movement. Even before that, however, we had become aware of some of the pitfalls of this new terrain of consciousness. Logging was still a part of the essential economy of our valley. It was happening on nowhere near the scale of the bad old days, and practices had improved considerably thanks to well-reasoned timber harvest rules established during the Jerry Brown administration, but ecological systems were still being disrupted in ways not clearly understood. As we became more skilled in repairing damaged areas, we became aware of the danger of becoming the source of cheap janitorial services for corporate industry and others that might be opening up new wounds even as we were attempting to heal the old ones. It was not enough to become expert in putting back together what had been torn apart. Unless we adopted the cause of local ecological reserves, unless we tried to educate ourselves against destructive land use practices and tried to prevent them when education failed, unless we helped establish new small-scale resource extraction industries rooted in the ethic of ecosystem health, we were in danger of becoming Roto-Rooter persons for a dysfunctional society. If we practiced environmental restoration out of the same short-term assumptions that had created the disturbances in the first place, where could we end but as apologists for new deserts? Even the Roto-Rooter man tells the homeowner to stop pouring bacon grease down the toilet!

We are now concerned with the cultural content of the next 150 years because our experience tells us we must be. A successful sustainable human culture is a semi-permeable membrane between nature and human society, with information flowing freely in both directions. Having put ourselves in the way of some of the physical data coming toward us from the natural world, we are given both the rationale and the imperative for our roles in social transformation. Having perceived the reciprocal relationship between natural systems and local cultures, we have little choice but to work to make the latter more adaptive, more indigenous.

* * *

In making my contribution to this collection of restorationists’ reflections on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing, I will allow myself two assumptions: that profound cultural shifts can happen suddenly and at any time; and that we are now in the midst of a pivotal era that offers us chances to abandon our more deadly economic practices, and begin to seek ways to adapt—and survive.

Because indigenous culture is always a response to locale, I will paint an imaginary picture of some aspects of life in our little valley 100 years from now. I will take a look at how a future might look if the insights available to one environmental restorationist were available to everyone. I will portray a future where timber, fish, and ranching are still the mainstays of economic life because I wish it to be that way; any other alternative seems less attractive. And for the treeplanter who is irritated by heady abstractions—who asks little more, after all, than for good work unfreighted with ambivalence—I will focus on some of the workaday themes of everyday life.

I will speak to you now from the future.
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A Poem from Edward Hirsch

Early Sunday Morning
by Edward Hirsch

I used to mock my father and his chums
for getting up early on Sunday morning
and drinking coffee at a local spot,
but now I’m one of those chumps.

No one cares about my old humiliations,
but they go on dragging through my sleep
like a string of empty tin cans rattling
behind an abandoned car.

It’s like this: just when you think
you have forgotten that red-haired girl
who left you stranded in a parking lot
forty years ago, you wake up

early enough to see her disappearing
around the corner of your dream
on someone else’s motorcycle,
roaring onto the highway at sunrise.

And so now I’m sitting in a dimly lit
café full of early- morning risers,
where the windows are covered with soot
and the coffee is warm and bitter.

First footage of uncontacted tribe in Brazil

This aerial footage showing one of the world’s last uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil was filmed by the BBC for their new series “Human Planet” and released via uncontactedtribes.org on February 4, 2011.

“Without proof they exist, the outside world won’t support them,” says José Carlos Morelos, whose job it is to monitor the endangered tribe’s land and protect it from invaders. “One image of them has more impact than a thousand reports.”

TEN THOUSAND YEARS

“I insist on sensuality. I guard my smoked pheasants, old guitars, and quiet as jealously as any miser guards gold. They can do far more to protect me from what we humans have become: insensate, insensitive, inhuman. For the millions of years of evolution that made us, the ability to fully sense food and sex was the foundation of our humanity and the core determinant of survival. For ten thousand years, those same pleasures have been reserved for a few of us. Complete indulgence of sensuality is rare, and, as a rule, the purview of the rich. For ten thousand years, Homo sapiens has been unable to take its humanity for granted. Those who would resist dehumanization do so by daily staking a claim to it, by self-consciously adopting an aestheticism our hunter-gatherer forebears practiced by simply living. With the advent of agriculture, those qualities that united us—in fact, quality itself—came to divide us. Civilization did indeed modify the human genome, but only slightly, around the edges. We remain at our genetic core largely what our hunter-gatherer history made us, which is to say, sensual beings. All of humanity at some level still requires the aesthetic. What was invented with civilization was the ability of some to deny sensuality to others.” —Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (North Point Press, 2004)

*TONIGHT* Tues. Mar 1, Silver Lake: Arthur presents ENDLESS BOOGIE & ARBOURETUM at The Satellite — $8

Arthur presents

THERE WILL BE ROCK

IN TWO EXCELLENT EAST COAST VARIETIES

* ENDLESS BOOGIE *

* ARBOURETUM *

Tue, March 1, 2011 8:00 PM
The Satellite
1717 Silverlake Blvd, Los Angeles
21 and Over

Advance tickets only $8.00

* DON’T THINK – BUY! *

Go here: http://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/26655

NEW MUSIC: Skull Defekts with Daniel Higgs

Download: “Fragrant Nimbus” – Skull Defekts (mp3, 14mb)

Stream: [audio:http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/06-Fragrant-Nimbus.mp3%5D

Six and a half this-just-in minutes off Peer Amid, a new album by Swedish band Skull Defekts, who now feature the sui generis tattooist-shaman-Lungfisher Daniel Higgs on vocals. It’s a brilliant album, and I wish we could share a different track—as good as this one is, it’s not quite representative of the album’s overall occultist Sonic Youth vibe—but here you go. Figure it out for yourself. Cover artwork by Frederik Söderberg.

Details on the band and how to obtain a copy of this album, which is out Feb. 22, here: http://www.thrilljockey.com/catalog/index.html?id=105205

John Payne on MAGMA and THE MARS VOLTA (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur No. 16 (April 2005)

(Hipped to this particular clip via Blastitude)

FREEDOM ROCK
John Payne on new albums by Magma and The Mars Volta

MAGMA
Kohntarkosz Anteria
(Seventh)

THE MARS VOLTA
Frances the Mute
(Virgin)

We all know the cliché about France, that it is incapable of producing Great Rock Music, a condition said to owe to the French language itself, which is said to be too soft and nuanced to make the properly heavy rock impact. So it’s ironic that in 1969 France gave birth to one of the heaviest bands the rock world has ever known, and simultaneously not a rock band at all.

Magma was formed in Paris by drummer Christian Vander, the stepson of French jazz pianist Maurice Vander. Christian had been playing jazz and pop professionally since his early teens—he received his first drum set from jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, who stole it from his drummer. Vander gathered players from all over the country who were dissatisfied with the typical French habit of slavishly copying American or British rock and jazz musicians. At the time, he says, “Everyone had flowers on their clothes, but I preferred to see flowers in the meadows.” Magma dressed in black.

A raven-haired, powerfully built man of swarthy hue and wolfish glare, Vander was and is of a darkly cosmological bent, and had an early fascination with Gurdjieff. Musically, John Coltrane was his god, and Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones made a big impact on Vander’s multilimbed, badass drum style. Not wishing to play jazz, exactly—he still considers it a specifically black American art form—for Magma Vander drew on the folkloric music of his Polish Gypsy forebears. The band’s signature sound evolved via chanting, guttural vocals and much use of repetitive motifs pumped out on multiple acoustic and electric pianos and horns, atop militaristically hefty bass and drums.

But Vander felt that the French tongue was too perfumey for this kind of hard music, and he disliked the sound of English as well. So he made up his own language, a vaguely Germanic, craggily mellifluous thing called Kobaïan, which came to him, he said, in his sleep. Meanwhile, Vander’s vision was grand, and apocalyptic: He developed a high-concept project for Magma, a nine-part opus that would tell the story of the Kobaïans, a race of humans who’d fled the degradation of life on Earth and settled on another planet, only to find they’d dragged Earth’s miseries along with them. The solution, of course, was annihilation. The opus was never completed; after the release of Part 4, Mëkanïk Destruktïw Kommandöh (1973), the plan seems to have been abandoned, though the group continued to sing in Kobaïan and a mixture of English, French and vocalese.

Vander’s arcane world-view—requiring concept albums, quasi-operatic vocals and a distinctly non-rock & roll harmonic/melodic language—was sneered at by American rock critics, naturally, ‘cause it sounded nothing like a bar band from New Jersey and totally neglected lyrical themes of sports, cars and pussy. Yet Vander’s trip was not that far removed from the eccentricities of critics’ fave Sun Ra, or, for that matter, John Coltrane. At its best, Magma’s music, in particular MDK and its 1974 follow-up, the eternally cryptic Köhntarkösz, defined a sound roughly intersecting progressive jazz, Bartók and heavy metal, related texturally to Mahavishnu Orchestra and Red-era King Crimson. Köhntarkösz concerns an exploration of an Egyptian tomb, its serpentine, mozaical structure redolent of incense, mold and fire.

Magma’s sound grew wicked, culminating in the 18-minute metal masterpiece “De Futura” from the album Üdü Wüdü, written by the band’s then-bassist Jannick Top, who was in the habit of tuning his bass down to C for an extra-resonant brutality. Vander’s music could not, however, sustain all that dark hubris, and over the years Magma became lighter, more vocal-oriented and lyrical, even. Band members for this technically demanding enterprise came and went; many of France’s best players, including violinist Didier Lockwood and bassist Bernard Paganotti, joined the ranks.
Vander himself has frequently been called, well, “the world’s greatest drummer” (it’s a prog-geek kind of thing to say, but there’s some validity to it in this case). A powerfully original and audacious maelstrom of controlled polyrhythmic fury, he’s a feral cross between Tony Williams, Billy Cobham, Rashied Ali and, of course, Elvin Jones. In recent years he’s formed two other bands, Offering and the Christian Vander Trio, to further explore his jazz roots, and has engaged Magma in varied instrumental frameworks, including performances with large choirs and a version of MDK sung by a children’s chorus. And Magma has inspired an actual genre in France and Japan, called Zeuhl Music, with several bands (Japan’s rough-hewn Ruins, France’s very scary Shub Niggurath, among many others) adapting the Magma model of folkloric chants, twinkling ostinatos and raging rhythm sections to their own forbidding ends.

Circa ’05, Magma is still at it. Vander revived the band in the early ‘90s – primarily, says his wife/manager/bandmate Stella Vander, because a new generation of Magma fanatics begged Christian to reform the unit and let them have a turn devoting themselves to the rigors required by this strange obsessive music. A couple of months ago Magma released their first album of new material in many years, K.A.—not entirely new, however, as it’s a reworking and augmenting of a one-hour epic from 1972 they had never recorded or performed live. Musically it’s the missing link between the Gypsy-metal-jazz chant & throb of MDK and the Emëntëht Rê (descending into the tombs) sound as heard on the more angular and spare Köhntarkösz. (Apparently Magma abandoned K.A. after Mike Oldfield stole several themes, including the famous Tubular Bells main motif, while living at Manor Studios when Magma came to record MDK. Or so Vander claims. Funny to ponder the possibility that it was Magma who in fact provided the seed money to launch the Virgin Records worldwide mega-behemoth…)

Longtime Magma fans and curious newcomers will find a lot to rave about on K.A. The studio band is the same lineup that toured the States in 1999, a young, lean and incredibly mean crew that doesn’t pussyfoot too reverently around the material and which boasts, significantly, a simply fantastic bass player named Philippe Bussonnet who is the equal in fierce inventiveness and true threatening heaviness of his forebears Jannick Top and Bernard Paganotti. It’s not heavy like “De Futura” was metal-band heavy, yet in the spectacularly disciplined interplay between the complexly polyrhythmic and odd-timed bass, Fender Rhodes, mesmerizing chants/vocals and, of course, just totally wicked drums, drums, drums, it’s got real magic—a kind of black magic—deep inside.

Check out http://www.seventhrecords.com for catalog ordering information.

* * *

Punk rock started in 1976. It’s almost 30 years later, and you know something? Some of us don’t want to pay our hard-earned bread to see a buncha yobbos in T-shirts drinking beer onstage and grinning like regular joes as they play the same three chords, in roughly the same progressions, as any beginning guitar player. Sometimes, we want a bit more. A bit more proficiency, a bit of ambition, some exploration. Maybe even some grandeur. POMP. Spectacle.

Perhaps it’s the Mars Volta (and their sillier corollary, The Darkness) who’ll bring that awestruck feeling back to the masses. Perhaps not—perhaps it really is too late to erect the wall again. But let’s just suppose…which is just what guitarist/composer Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez does on his band’s Frances the Mute, the new Mars Volta disc. It’s a concept album, about what exactly I couldn’t tell you, and I think the band likes it that way. Some of it supposedly concerns itself with AIDS—perfect metaphorical stuff for these guys, allowing for an extremely inconclusively worded multipart song cycle in five sections, spread out over what must be the full 74 minutes a CD can hold. They give their pieces names like “Cygnus . . . Vismund Cygnus” and “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore,” with sections entitled “Vade Mecum,” “Pour Another Icepick” and, need you ask, “Pisacis (Phra-Men-Ma).” Lyrically, unlike musically, it’s what’s between the lines that attempts to speak volumes.

Musically, though, it’s everything under the prog sun, times 50. It’s Yes. It’s Rush. Mahogany Rush, too. It’s Metallica. It’s Crimson. It’s Neu. Perhaps more than anything, it’s Pink Floyd circa Umma Gumma and Atom Heart Mother. It’s pretentious as hell, and clearly, that’s the precise, full-on point. On the surface you hear a lot of seriously impassioned, gonad-grabbing ’70s-rock wails, and very well sung, too, by Cedric Bixler Zavala. Interestingly, Zavala’s insistent caterwauling about a jillion tiny obscurities and moods and atmospheres and smells and prickly feelings and cobwebs and the moon and disease and so on doesn’t wear on you. That says something. Maybe it’s ‘cause he gives the impression that he’s telling a story, and ‘cause Rodriguez-Lopez’s music is so varied and surprising: metallic staccato juggernauts of drums/guitars/bass, liberally laced with ’70s Brit-jazz (Soft Machine) horns, violas, ‘trons and, significantly, huge portions of Mexican and Cuban musical shades and styles.

It’s when they let these Latin sections or dolorous prog-jazz weirdness sections go on for such a loooong time that you sense a kind of integrity and seriousness of purpose about the Mars Volta. What’s really interesting is that neither these extended non-typically-rocking passages or the inevitable returns to heavy-band machine gun carnage seem to blur interest. (That is, if you’re someone who actually likes to sit and listen to albums all the way through, like a lot of the original progressive rock records of the early ‘70s allowed for and encouraged.) To say that this music is “overplayed”—a common complaint about MV from critics who sealed their punk rock- and/or minimalism-inspired minds back in the ‘80s—is way beside the point; this is maximalism, and it’s supposed to dominate your body and mind, splatter your face, then melt back down in a big puddle, into which you can gaze and see a reflection of yourself . . . I’d argue that its proper reception will depend on how you much sleep you got, how much of the good stuff you imbibed/smoked, and – more importantly – how young you are. Because, technically speaking, it’s working with your levels of testosterone or ovum.

These rather amazing quagmires of sound were most fortunate to be crafted by an obsessive weirdo like Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez, someone who, like Christian Vander, is just consumed with his vision, and the moral of the story is that, actually, in rock, any kind of obsession is where it’s at, no matter the “pretension” of the outcome. Surely we’ve all realized by now that one never really says anything in “rock” music by holding back one’s real impulses; not holding back—and risking ridicule—that means being honest, just as “honest” as Bruce Springsteen.

Well, no need to defend it, I don’t think. But here’s another moral to the story: Without a doubt, a younger generation of musicians in recent years have radically upped the ante, as players, songwriters and real musical imaginers. The Mars Volta are 100 times the band that Metallica ever was, not just technically but in terms of artistic ambition. There is something undeniably thrilling about any group of young musicians who are so focused on what they’re doing, so fucking into it, and you’re hearing it and grasping that what they’ve accomplished has taken an enormous amount of work—discipline—and they’re carrying it out with precision and guts. That the Mars Volta play the fuck out of these well-constructed and amazingly shaded pieces is just plain inspiring.

You hear a lot of “serious” musicians going on about the importance of paying attention to the space between the notes. Fact is, some music depends a lot on cramming in every note you’ve ever heard, in a desperate, obsessive, mad rush. The Mars Volta, like other young musicians, shouldn’t worry too much about the space between notes. At this point, like Magma, they do what they do because, sounds like, it’s what they were put here on Earth to do. Which gives us the opportunity to say, “Whew. The fuck was that?”