Category Archives: culture

This past weekend the Ojai Poetry Festival featured the great American poet Gary Snyder, who read to a large crowd of listeners mostly from work written this century, especially his 2004 book of haibun called "Danger on Peaks." (Haibun, we learned, is a mix of prose and haiku: Japanese professor Nobuyaki Yuasa has described itContinue reading “Gary Snyder: James Lovelock’s Arguments for Nuclear Power “Demented””

Is it too late for a 2006 music retrospective? Let’s hope not.

I agree with Matt Singer: in popular music, 2006 was a year of nothing much. Unfortunately so, and unlike 2005, which was spectacular. Nonetheless, last year had its moments.

I will list the three that come to my mind, and move on to the bigger questions.

For Best Cover…Is It Like Today, by Eliza Gilkyson. I can’t give you a sample, because she hasn’t posted one on her site, but this brilliant folkie remakes a song by the keyboards band known as World Party to huge effect (and something of a hit on alt-Internet stations such as Radio Paradise).  If you try it (via iTunes) and don’t like it, I’ll repay you myself. The haunting chorus:

How could it come to his?/I’m really worried about living/How could it come to this?/Yeah, I really want to know about this…

For Best Warning…The Eraser, by Thom Yorke. For more, please see Global Warming: #2 on the Pop Charts.

For Best New Discovery: I See Hawks in L.A. This band has a lot of good songs, but start with the eponymous song that made them semi-famous, in L.A. at least, which blends SoCal country into the apocalypse with rare style. A key stanza:

One more day on the 605/What if this place got buried alive/The biggest quake the world’s ever seen/Let the snakes take over again…

But before we go on to the grand prize winner, we must ask the obvious question. Is there such a thing as environmental music, or nature music? If so, what is its character?

Is it music that echoes the sounds of nature? Is it music that binds us to nature? Or is it music that reminds of the worth of the planet, and warns us of what we have to lose?

All these definitions can apply, and we heard examples of each this past year, especially the warnings (see above). But I will follow Beethoven’s example, in his description of the famous Pastoral Symphony, and say that it is "a matter more of feeling than of painting in sounds."   

This method describes perfectly the best environmental music of last year, which I think was John Adams’ The Dharma at Big Sur. (Listen to a sample, and read Adams’ notes about it here.)

Although written in 2003, for the inauguration of the Disney Hall in Los Angeles, it was first made available on a recording in the fall of 2006.

More importantly, this is Adams’ hommage to Jack Kerouac and the Beats, and also to their Buddhist love for Big Sur. It’s wordless, driven by an electric violin, and blends a harsh beauty with a great freedom, like a turkey buzzard soaring in an ocean breeze. 

Listen for a moment, and if you’ve been to Big Sur, I think you’ll see what the Beats saw; a nature beyond owning. The wind flowing in over the steep hills, the fog gathering on the ocean’s horizon, the bird in flight. Drift off for a moment, and maybe you’ll be back there, perhaps with a friend or lover, watching the birds’ endless swoop and dive and rise…endless change and perfect stillness in one body…

Here’s my review of this year’s Ojai Playwrights Conference. (Please ignore the little typos: Sometimes these things happen on a tight deadline.) The line that haunts me from that weekend: "Maybe the truth ain’t what you see in front of you but a dream down the road."

Well, that’s the theory, anyhow, to be found in this book I reviewed for the VCReporter called Crunchy Cons. Interestingly, I interviewed the likable author, young former National Review writer Rod Dreher, but about a third of the way through the session, he abruptly stopped answering questions (via email) and stopped responding to further contacts.Continue reading “Here Come the Right-Wing Hippies”

Maybe the most encouraging book I’ve read this year is by a young conservative columnist named Rod Dreher. It’s called Crunchy Cons and in this book he argues, to put it in a nutshell, that so-called conservatives who choose efficiency and profit over livable cities, good honest food, beauty, and the health of the planet,Continue reading “A Test of Our Character”

George Orwell is a great writer, period, and if you ask yours truly, his greatness comes through in "l984" not  just in the prescience of his thought, but in the passion of Winston and Julia. Surely they are the sexiest of all couples in political literature. I do wonder why on earth he changed hisContinue reading “Happy Birthday, George”

Not everything is about climate, believe it or not. Here’s a preview of this weekend’s Ojai Music Festival, which promises to be spectacular, especially Osvaldo Golijov’s Ayre.