Happy birthday Keith Richards, king of the underground

Keith Richards has an unusual problem for a memoirist: a too dramatic life:

The temptation for most memoirists is to beef up, at times even to make up, life; for Richards, who has lived one of the most eventful and excessive lives ever, the point is to tamp it down. His is an odd book for many reasons, among them its refusal to impute any meaning to the structure of experience, beyond its basic contingency. The book tells no “story,” presents no overwrought “themes,” proposes no shape to life beyond the amorphous ooze of passing time. Thus the hilariously nonchalant title, which, shorn of the expected first-person possessive, would suggest that Richards’s life is more or less the one we all experience.

At one time or another, everyone rides in a red Cadillac with the Ronettes out to Jones Beach, then wakes up on Ronnie Spector’s mother’s living room floor in Spanish Harlem, to a plate of bacon and eggs. We’ve all had the major licks of “Satisfaction” come to us in a dream, then adjourned to the pool to write the lyrics with Mick Jagger. This is the kind of thing that happens. Uschi Obermaier, the German leftist supermodel, chews off your earring in a Japanese-style hotel in Rotterdam, leaving you with a “permanent malformation” on your right earlobe. The prime minister of Canada’s wife turns up in your hotel room, looking eager to party. That’s life. Or,Life.

From a great review of Richards' memoir, Life, by poet Dan Chiasson in the NYRB. Which he really likes! Typical with Keith: Take him for granted, despite his fame, his known brilliance as a writer of songs, his greatness as a player. As his old pal and bassist Bill Wyman said, in the doc Crossfire Hurricane on HBO a month ago, the Stones' have an unusual sound for a reason. 

Most bands follow the drummer. When we got together, something happened, something magical. Every band followed the drummer. We don't follow Charlie, we follow Keith. So the drums are barely slightly behind Keith. Just a fraction, you know. I tend to play ahead. It's got a sort of a wobble. And it's dangerous, because it can all fall apart at any second.  

Think you can hear that in some of the songs: the near-chaos that resolves into a chord in "Tumbling Dice"; the yelling back and forth in "Get Off My Cloud," and harrowing violence in "Sympathy for the Devil." And too, the unexpectedly sweet ballads, such as "Wild Horses," which the band was glimpsed finishing in the studio in the famous doc "Gimme Shelter."  

The image of Richards, though, is what stays with you: head back, eyes closed, sloppily lip-synching to Jagger’s vocals. Keith had written the song as a lullaby for Marlon, his son, according to Jim Dickinson. Jagger got his hands on it and made it a love song, probably addressed to Marianne Faithful. It is hard to know whether Keith is synching his own lyrics, which Jagger changed, or is simply too high to sing along. But it is an unforgettable image, the image of a band beholding its own complex chemistry, even as they are beheld by the Maysles’ camera. That moment seems to me the peak of the Stones’ career. From there, as Richards puts it, things went “from the sublime to the ridiculous.”

Hard to disagree. Here's a photo from that era, l971, with Mick, Keith, and Gram: 

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Happy birthday, Keith. Many happy returns of the day. 

An emerging environmental/minority climate coalition?

In the Nation, Mark Hertsgaard outlines the possibility of an emerging majority coalition composed of minority and environmental voters:

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"Just as Latinos overwhelmingly supported Obama over Romney, they also—along with African-Americans, Asian-Americans and youth of all races—demonstrate the highest levels of support for action against climate change and air pollution, according to extensive polling data. 

In one sense, this should come as no surprise. Minorities are more likely to live in areas burdened by extreme pollution, and young people are the ones fated to spend the rest of their lives coping with worsening climate change. Of the 6 million people living within three miles of America’s coal-fired power plants, 39 percent are minorities, according to a report by the NAACP, “Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People.” 

Nevertheless, the notion that Latinos, blacks and Asian-Americans are the nation’s most fervent greens contradicts the stereotype of environmentalists as white, upper-middle-class Prius drivers."

It's true that minority voters were crucial in derailing a multi-million dollar attempt by fossil fuel interests to overturn California's AB 32 in 2010, and it's true that minority voters are much greener than the cliche allows — in California!

Still, to snark at Bill McKibben for concentrating on college audiences in his divestment campaign — questionable. After all, college students were the first to support a divestiture from South Africa campaign in the l980's, despite the fact they were more white than other possible constituencies. 

But Hertsgaard's central point remains, and you can see it  in Sierra magazine, which these days is aggressively young and color-blind. Smart! 

What’s a few more degrees? Ask the frogs (denier edition)

At the Los Angeles Times, cartoonist/editorialist David Horsey is alarmed about warming: 

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The climate cnews about 2050 is not good, even for the future of pasta. Though adaptation efforts in agriculture are underway, even in poor countries like Vietnam. 

As for frogs, a story by Cheri Carlson in the Star focuses on efforts to move eggs from red-legged frogs to suitable stream beds in Ventura County. I worked on a story like this six months ago, but wasn't able to bring it home — as Carlson wrote, it's really not clear why the red-legged frog is in trouble here, and that's what I was trying to figure out. 

Speaking of heartbreaking: For the child…and the wind

From a collection of poems about the end of the world, in the inevitable New York Times: 

LEAVE A MESSAGE

When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the
privacy of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held
by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call.

From Bob Hickok.

Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz: The Pope

Via man around town Krist Novoselic, formerly of Nirvana, the new Popemobile: 

Mercedes-Benz; The Pope,jpg

And yes, that's Pope Benedict XVI with his new Mercedes (and its chief exec).  

(For those curious about Paul McCartney filling in for Kurt Cobain at a Nirvana reunion for the Sandy benefit fund-raiser, here it is, via Slate. It's not Nirvana, but yes, McCartney can still rock.) 

Breath is God’s intent to keep us living: Mary Karr

The inimitable Mary Karr, author of the spectacular Liar's Club and Cherry, among other excoriatingly beautiful works, is known as a memorist, but deserves to be as well-known as her poetry. She has a clutch of good ones in this month's Poetry magazine (wonderfully laid out and free on-line, as always). 

This one is about the great Phil Jackson, Lakers' coach back in the days when they were pretty good — well, sort of.

It's about him, a friend of  hers apparently, and lots of other things too, including reasons to live.

To wit (in a Q&A): 

Q: …at the end of the poem you write: “Breath is God’s intent to keep us living. He was the self I’d come in // wanting to kill, and I left him there.” Can you talk a little bit about these lines, about breath and God?

A:     "Our autonomic nervous system breathes for most of us, and a priest friend told me once, when I asked him how I was supposed to know God’s will for me, that I should see what is. If you’re breathing, just presume you’re supposed to be alive and start looking around for some way to make yourself useful.

Mary-karrIf you’re suicidal, your mind is actually the keenest threat to your survival. Yet depressed people still listen intensely to their minds even though said minds NEVER have anything good to say. Think of it, you try to employ the diseased organ to cure itself! If someone outside your body were shouting those awful things you say to yourself  in such times, you’d plug your ears and sing lalalala. You have to stop that mind or die.

A simple meditation practice I started twenty-three years ago involves counting my breaths one to ten over and over. Pure hell at first. I evolved through various practices — some Christian and Ignatian spiritual practices taught to me by a Franciscan nun and a few Jesuits along the way. I came back to breath last year. For me God is in the moment, and I tend to do everything I can to avoid being in such a stalled, unproductive place as the present. The ego has to stop inventing its reality and notice what’s actually going on, which process kills it (the ego) a little if you’re lucky."

Killing the ego to live: Only a poet could bring us this news so succintly.

How to politely correct a climate denier: Justin Gillis

Justin Gillis, who has taken over the lead reporting duties on climate change from Andrew Revkin at the New York Times, might want to consider tightrope walking in his next life.

Consider his exquisitely nuanced recapitulation of an on-line controversy involving a climate change denier named Alec Rawls, who dismisses the entire upcoming fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the basis of a single ambiguous sentence. 

Mr. Rawls found this to be a “game-changing” acknowledgement that,
yes, earthly climate must be influenced by cosmic rays. Indeed, in his manifesto
leaking the document, he called this sentence “an astounding bit of
honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise
and the main conclusion of the full report, revealing the fundamental
dishonesty of the whole.”

Well.

Looking at the full report, I
have to wonder if Mr. Rawls just stopped reading when he got to that
sentence. Because what follows is a lengthy discussion of the science to
date regarding cosmic rays and climate, one that points out the
intriguing results suggesting a possible connection, but also points out
that many of those studies cannot be reproduced by other scientists,
that many of the supposed correlations are weak, and so forth.

The Flying Wallendas couldn't walk that line any better. 

Terrifying geoengineering ideas: Ray Pierrehumbert at AGU

At his much-lauded (and deservedly so) AGU lecture on Successful Predictions (of global warming, a brief history) the delightfully witty Ray Pierrehumbert was asked about the feasibility of geo-engineering. His answer deserves quoting in full, in a text-searchable form:

I see lots of [geo-engineering ideas] that are feasible, but they all terrify me. (Except for schemes for taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, which some people refer to as geo-engineering. Those I find relatively benign, because they put the climate back in the state it was in before we started messing with it.) The feasible geo-engineering schemes that scare me are the crazy ideas to make artificial volcanoes and put sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere.

The reason I think they are barking mad is that you have to assume that we will continue influencing the climate for 10,000 years. You have to renew the aerosols every two years or so. So you're assuming that somehow society will stay together for the next 10,000 years to jam up these aerosols longer than there have been human civilizations, practically. And if you ever stop, than the aerosols go away in a couple of years and you're hit with the full force of global warming…unfortunately, I think the sulphate aerosol injection schemes are probably economically feasible. You don't have to inject too much up there, but it puts the world in a state I call Damocles World. It's like [living in a world forever under] the Sword of Damocles.

A quick fix for global warming: Replace kerosene lamps

A new study out of UC Berkeley finds that simply replacing kerosene lamps, used by approx one billion people around the world, could substantially reduce black carbon, a tremendously effective heating agent in the atmosphere. From the press release:

"7 to 9 percent of the kerosene in wick lamps — used for light in 250-300 million households without electricity — is converted to black carbon when burned. In comparison, only half of 1 percent of the emissions from burning wood is converted to black carbon.

Factoring in the new study results leads to a twentyfold increase in estimates of black carbon emissions from kerosene-fueled lighting. The previous estimates come from established databases used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others. One kilogram of black carbon, a byproduct of incomplete combustion, produces as much warming in a month as 700 kilograms of carbon dioxide does over 100 years, the authors said."

Kerosenelamp

“There are no magic bullets that will solve all of our greenhouse gas problems, but replacing kerosene lamps is low-hanging fruit, and we don’t have many examples of that in the climate world,” said study co-author Kirk Smith, professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and director of the Global Health and Environment Program. “There are many inexpensive, cleaner alternatives to kerosene lamps that are available now, and few if any barriers to switching to them.”

"Smith pointed to lanterns with light-emitting diodes that can be powered by solar cells or even advanced cookstoves that generate electricity from the heat produced. Such technology, said Smith, is already available in developing countries."

Global warming is a wicked problem. This means we must take especially seriously any partial solution that doesn't make the big problem worse. Prof Ramanathan of UCSD has been pioneering similar research into black carbon on the Indian subcontinent, and thinks its atmospheric heating is underestimated not just by IPCC models, but by satellite sensors too.