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BLANKETS FOR GLACIERS


Tuesday, May 10, 2005 Posted: 10:43 AM EDT (1443 GMT)
GEMSSTOCK, Switzerland (Reuters) — Alarmed by the retreat of its Alpine glacier, a Swiss ski resort on Tuesday wrapped part of the shrinking ice-cap in a giant blanket in a bid to reduce the summer melt.

If successful, officials at the Gemsstock resort above Andermatt in central Switzerland expect the example to be followed elsewhere in the Alps, where scientists say glaciers are under threat from global warming.

“We think it will become common practice to cover parts of the glaciers,” Urs Elmiger, a board member of Andermatt Gotthard Sportbahnen, the cable car operator behind the project, told Reuters.

A thin protective layer of artificial textiles, including polyester, was laid over an area of 3-4,000 square meters (yards). The fleece-like material, hard to distinguish with the naked eye from snow, will reflect the rays of the sun.

The 100,000 Swiss franc ($83,000) blanket will protect one of the main glacier access ramps, which has to be rebuilt each autumn at the start of the ski season to cover a yawning 20-meter gap opened up by the ice melt.

“It needs a lot of work, energy and money to rebuild. And one day, if the melt increases, the cost of rebuilding the ramp will be very, very high,” said Elmiger.

But scientists stressed that while such defensive actions could prove valuable in selected spots, such as access areas or cable car installations, they were not a solution to the overall problem of the vanishing ice fields worldwide.

“It may be useful very locally, but it would be totally unfeasible — economically and ecologically — to cover completely even a small glacier,” said geography professor Wilfried Haeberli of the University of Zurich.

The Alpine glaciers — also in Austria, France and Italy — are losing one percent of their mass every year and, even supposing no acceleration in that rate, will have all but disappeared by the end of the century.

More hot, dry summers like that of 2003 in Europe, when the loss speeded to five percent, could cut the life expectancy to no more than 50 years, Haeberli added.

“We estimate that by the end of the 21st century, with a medium-type climate scenario, about five percent of what existed in the 1970s will have survived,” he told Reuters.

For Martin Hiller, spokesman on climate change for environmentalist group WWF International, who was on hand to witness the Alpine experiment, the move was positive but offered no real answer to ice loss.

“The solution is to switch to clean energy, we need to cut down on harmful pollutants, such as CO2 (carbon dioxide),” he said.

The Hippie Papers

The Hippie Papers
Ecstatic Living
by Thad and Rita Ashby

This is a condensed version of “First in a Series: Your Ecstatic Home.” This is art. Division of Interior Decoration.

In the daytime, we want a tree?top house that admits all possible light so the walls and the floor move slowly in motion, in harmony with what we know of the structure of atomic physics. Everything is flowing, breathing; Heraclites is our philosopher for reality. The house should always be changing, the light should always be dazzling.

Then for our nighttime hours, we want another kind of room in the house, one that is the very opposite of the tree?tops, in the greenhouse. We want a WOMB. Tim Leary has some womb rooms at Millbrook; there is an Indian cloth on the ceiling and the walls, Indian rugs on the floor, and an altar and pillows spread around. The purpose of the womb room is exactly opposite from the purpose of the tree?top room; one opens out into the air and light, and the other is a return to the womb of the universe.

Everything in it should be soft If you drape cloths along the wall and on the ceiling, and turn on an electric fan or an air conditioning blower the walls tend to undulate with the air. If you have a stroboscopic light or any little revolving light, you can create the effect of the walls flowing, of their consisting of liquid.

Everyone should invest in a little electric motor of this kind that revolves things from the ceiling. Then you can take a large tin can and puncture it with holes and cause it to revolve around a light bulb and it shines little bits of starlight all over the room.

In addition to the little electric motor for throwing lights and shadows around the room we might also have a little revolving stage of the kind you see in jewelry store windows. I’m suggesting something anyone can build. It would consist of a little revolving stage, covered with bits of mirror. You usually see them with wrist watches on them in a jewelry store window. Cover this with any visionary object. For a list of visionary objects, you can read Huxley’s The Doors of Perception or Heaven and Hell.

We can create jewels without a very heavy investment. It can be costume jewelry, or it can be little bits of plastic. Put them on this revolving stage, and then surround the little stage with a black cloth that would drape down in a circle around the stage so that you can’t see it. Cut holes in the cloth at about eye level for a chair, and insert a teleidoscope in the hole. Sit in a circle around this thing. You can’t see what’s in there. You can’t see the jewels and bits of junk, except through the teleidoscope.

Live in this kind of room at night and then in the daytime live in a kind of greenhouse with lots of plants surrounding you and lots of just natural funky, earthy smells, and lots of light coming in flickering and dazzling everything. It will change your life!

We want to emphasize everything that’s organic in this room. We want to have lots of animals and lots of anything that lives. You can meditate more easily on a flower or a gold fish, I think, than you can a statue of the Buddha.

If we think of reality as hard, as the generation of our parents think of reality, then we’ll build hard wall houses. When we think of reality as flowing, as dynamic, as growing, then we begin to build houses that are more like flowers, more like buds. Imagine, for example, the absolute ecstasy of living inside a big orange flower about a block wide. We’d ride around on large, trained butterflies.

The image of the world, that organic unity, is something we can achieve in our house or in a simple little room. These things that I’m talking about don’t cost anything. To put them into practice, all you need in mind to start with is a visionary experience. We can reproduce it with twenty?five cents worth of metal foil and a dollar’s worth of colored ribbons and maybe five dollars worth of lights and light cords. We’d begin with a pile of junk and we’d end with a reproduction of the universe.

If each of us would change his own house, it would gradually change the entire moral tone of bur country. We would begin to think of the earth as a visionary garden. We would become caretakers of the trees and ‘the animals, and the flowers. We would think of ourselves as creatures in a garden who are all being grown for some great, great cosmic enjoyment.

If everyone built such a home, with a treehouse room for daylight, and a womb?like room for the night, it would effect the same kind of transformation in our society as it does in the Buddhist countries where they tend to make their decisions slowly and refer everything to, say, the Hour of the Tea Ceremony, or the Hour of Meditation. You ask them a direct question and ask them for an immediate decision; they give you an indirect answer and postpone the decision until they’ve gone into their little private temple and thought about it from every angle. When they come up with an answer it’s usually something very subtle, and something that transcends the conflict of opposites.

The Oracle of Southern California (Los Angeles)
October, 1967

People need to know how important acid is.

California Dreaming: A True Story of Computers, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll – New York Times
May 7, 2005
By ANDREW LEONARD

WHAT THE DORMOUSE SAID
How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
By John Markoff
Illustrated. 310 pp. Viking. $25.95.

Engineers can be so cute. In the early 1960’s, Myron Stolaroff, an employee of the tape recorder manufacturer Ampex, decided to prove the value of consuming LSD. So he set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study and went about his project in classic methodical fashion.

Test subjects – almost all engineers – were given a series of doses under constant observation and expected to take careful notes on their own experience. A survey of the first 153 volunteers revealed that “83 percent of those who had taken LSD found that they had lasting benefits from the experience.” (Other results: increase in ability to love, 78 percent; increased self-esteem, 71 percent.) Such precision might seem antithetical to the fuzzy let-it-all-hang-outness of the psychedelic experience. But John Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times who covers technology, makes a convincing case that for the swarming ubergeeks assembling in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960’s, approaching drugs as they might any other potentially helpful tool or device – from a soldering iron to a computer chip – was only natural. The goals were broad in the 60’s: the world would be remade, the natural order of things reconfigured, human potential amplified to infinity. Anything that could help was to be cherished, studied and improved.

It is no accident, then, that the same patch of land on the peninsula south of San Francisco that gave birth to the Grateful Dead was also the site of groundbreaking research leading the way to the personal computer. That the two cultural impulses were linked – positively – is a provocative thesis.

Revisionist histories of the 60’s often make an attempt to separate the “excess” of the era from the politics. In this view, all those acid-gobbling, pot-smoking, tie-dyed renegades were a distraction from the real work of stopping the Vietnam War and achieving social justice. But Mr. Markoff makes a surprisingly sympathetic case that it was all of a piece: the drugs, the antiauthoritarianism, the messianic belief that computing power should be spread throughout the land.

“It is not a coincidence,” he writes, “that, during the 60’s and early 70’s, at the height of the protest against the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement and widespread experimentation with psychedelic drugs, personal computing emerged from a handful of government- and corporate-funded laboratories, as well as from the work of a small group of hobbyists who were desperate to get their hands on computers they could personally control and decide to what uses they should be put.”

Judging by the record presented in “What the Dormouse Said,” it is indisputable that many of the engineers and programmers who contributed to the birth of personal computing were fans of LSD, draft resisters, commune sympathizers and, to put it bluntly, long-haired hippie freaks.

This makes entertaining reading. Many accounts of the birth of personal computing have been written, but this is the first close look at the drug habits of the earliest pioneers. “What the Dormouse Said” may not reach the level of the classics of computing history, Tracy Kidder’s “Soul of a New Machine” and Steven Levy’s “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.” But there is still plenty of fun between its covers.

A central character – and one of the early volunteers at Stolaroff’s foundation – is Douglas Engelbart, a man worthy of his own book. His team at the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute was the first to demonstrate the potential of the computing future. The research demonstration that he conducted for a packed auditorium in San Francisco in 1968 is still talked about in Silicon Valley with the reverence of those who might have witnessed Jehovah handing Moses the Ten Commandments. The mouse, man! Engelbart gave us the mouse! But Mr. Engelbart’s story is not a happy one. He saw further ahead than most, but had a difficult time articulating his vision. He became heavily involved with Werner Erhard’s human potential movement, EST, and his laboratory ultimately ended up losing both its way and its government financing. Many of his researchers went on to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where the first personal computer, the famous Alto, was invented, while he lapsed into semi-obscurity. As a metaphor for the 60’s, which exploded with promise and ended in disarray, he’s just about perfect.

Looking back at the 60’s from the jaundiced perspective of the early 21st century, it’s easy to wonder what was really accomplished, outside of the enduring split of the nation into two irreconcilable ideological camps. Sure, there was the civil rights campaign, women’s liberation, environmentalism and a movement that eventually brought a war to heel, but the era is as likely to be ridiculed in modern memory as to be revered. But what happens if we add the birth of personal computing to the counterculture’s list of achievements? Does that change the equation?

The answer depends on how one rates the personal computer as consciousness-enhancing device. Remember, after all, what the dormouse did say, in the stentorian full-throttle voice of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick: “Feed your head!”

By choosing that as his title, Mr. Markoff makes clear his belief that computers, like psychedelic drugs, are tools for mind expansion, for revelation and personal discovery. And to anyone who has experienced a drug-induced epiphany, there may indeed be a cosmic hyperlink there: fire up your laptop, connect wirelessly to the Internet, search for your dreams with Google: the power and the glory of the computing universe that exists now was a sci-fi fantasy not very long ago, and yes, it does pulsate with a destabilizing, revelatory psychic power. Cool!

But wasn’t the goal of those 60’s experimenters to make the world a better place? One has to wonder – and this is a question Mr. Markoff doesn’t really address – whether the personal computer achieved that goal. Or has it only allowed all of us, heroes and villains alike, to be more productive as the world stays exactly the same?

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.

COURTESY DAVID REEVES!

First report

Cream reunites

Influential British 1960s band Cream reunited for a concert on Monday – 36 years after the group split.

Guitarist Eric Clapton joined drummer Ginger Baker and bass player Jack Bruce for a series of performances at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

The band last played together in 1993 when they were inducted into the US Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

All four performances sold in less than two hours, with tickets changing hands for more than £500 on eBay. Agencies had been offering tickets for the concerts for up to £1,700, and standing tickets at the top of hall were advertised for £350.

Many fans had flown over from the USA to witness the reunion, which Clapton, 60, is said to have agreed to because of the failing health of the other former members of the band.

Bass player Bruce, 61, has had a liver transplant, and drummer Baker, 65, is said to suffer from arthritis.

Although the band were only together for less than three years, they recorded three albums which sold more than 35 million copies. Singles included Crossroads and Born Under a Bad Sign, I Feel Free and Strange Brew.

On Monday the band received a standing ovation after coming on stage unannounced and launching into I’m So Glad. After three songs, Clapton told the crowd: “Thanks for waiting all those years!”

He added: “We’ll probably play everything we know – we’ll play as long as we can.”

Their set included all their most famous songs, including Crossroads, Spoonful and White Room. The encore was Sunshine of Your Love – their biggest hit single.

Before joining Cream, Clapton had previously been with the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

Cream formed in 1966 but split acrimoniously in 1969.

Clapton, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, went on to form Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominoes – with whom he recorded Layla – before carving out a successful solo career.

Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker both went on to play with numerous other bands, as well as recording with each other.

Summer of Love exhibit this summer at Tate Liverpool

Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era
27 MayÔø?Ôø?Ôø?25 September 2005

Summer of Love is a ground-breaking exhibition which reveals the unprecedented exchanges between contemporary art, popular culture, civil unrest and the moral upheaval during the 1960s and early 70s. The art and culture of the psychedelic period constitutes one of the most exciting but also much neglected phenomena of the twentieth-century. Moving beyond a purely nostalgic reception, Summer of Love attempts to uncover this forgotten and repressed aesthetic that continues to exert an increasingly powerful influence on many contemporary artists. The exhibition reconstructs the original creative and utopian potential of psychedelic art and locates it within the wider cultural and political context of the 1960s and early 70s, presenting it as an international phenomenon with works from the UK, United States, Europe and Japan. It demonstrates how artists were deeply entrenched in popular culture, influenced by the mind-altering effect of drugs and participated in counter-cultural activities. The inclusion of psychedelic art created by major figures such as Andy Warhol and Yayoi Kusama illustrates the critical role of psychedelia within the contemporary aesthetic discourse, providing a complex and more comprehensive picture of the art and culture of the 1960s.

The psychedelic aesthetic manifested itself in all aspects of cultural production, ranging from art, music and film to architecture, graphic design and fashion. Summer of Love presents a rich selection of over 150 important posters, album covers and underground magazines, in particular from the San Francisco and London scenes. The exhibition includes paintings, photographs and sculptures by, amongst others, Isaac Abrams, Richard Avedon, Lynda Benglis, Harold Cohen, Richard Hamilton, Robert Indiana (his celebrated Love signs), Richard Lindner and John McCracken. Numerous long-neglected artists are represented with rarely seen or specially reconstructed works and installations. Major environments include Mati KlarweinÔø?s New Aleph Sanctuary 1963-71, which brings together many of his motifs (which he also used in his designs for Santana album covers) in a spectacular installation. Vernon PantonÔø?s colourful and amorphous furniture landscape tell of utopian visions of liberated and relaxed living.Ôø?Ôø?Ôø?

A special emphasis is placed on environments as well as film, video and multimedia installations, replicating the total experience of psychedelic light shows and music performances. Andy Warhol appropriated the use of light shows and film and slide projection for the Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Velvet Underground. Major film installations include a room with multiple projections of the Boyle FamilyÔø?s films, first used in light shows for the psychedelic band The Soft Machine and a liquid crystal projection by Gustav Metzger. The medium of film is integrated into the exhibition through large-scale projections and an accompanying film programme with underground, experimental and mainstream films. Films presented in the exhibition include works by Lawrence Jordan, Stan Vanderbeek, Andy Warhol, James Whitney, Jud Yalkut and Nam June Paik.

The emergence and flowering of psychedelic art coincided with one of the most revolutionary and tumultuous periods of the twentieth century. The art in the exhibition is contextualised through a wealth of documentary material, highlighting the events, people and places in four centres of countercultural activity: San Francisco, New York, London and Liverpool. The sections include photographs, films of concerts, light shows and places such as the UFO nightclub in London and the Human Be-In in San Francisco, featuring Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary. The underground press, emerging during the 1960s as an instrument of alternative communication and democratisation, is represented through Oz magazine, International Times, East Village Other and The San Francisco Oracle and many other publications and documents. Providing an intriguing picture of a period in fundamental moral and political upheaval, they are also testament to an extraordinary burst of creativity and revolution in design and printing techniques.

Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era will tour to the Kunsthalle Schirn Frankfurt from 2 November 2005 Ôø? 12 February 2006.

A strikingly designed and fully illustrated catalogue examining art, posters, film and music will be available alongside the Summer of Love Reader, published by Liverpool University Press, which is an in-depth authorative look at the underground movements.Ôø?