Polar bears

Earlier this year, Newsweek had a good article about the difficult future faced by polar bears, which I have mentioned in a post about penguins and another about gorillas ... but hey.. polar bears are cute enough to deserve their own post! :)

Well.. an opportunity presents itself with this report today of polar bears swimming in open water.

Ten polar bears, an unusually large number, were seen swimming in open water off the northern coast of Alaska recently, some heading for shore and some heading toward the retreating ice in the Chukchi Sea, two U.S. government officials confirmed on Friday.

..

Polar bear sightings in open water were infrequent until about 2004, Miller said, but rising temperatures have melted much of the ice platform on which they live and hunt for seals. In May, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne put the U.S. polar bear population under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, primarily because of the loss of its sea ice habitat.

"It's not unusual for bears to be swimming," Miller said, "but depending on their condition and how much time they're spending in the water, this could be problematic. It's going to cost them more energy to swim through water than travel on land."

In addition, more bears have been sighted on land in July and August than in the past - a possible result of the retreating of the sea ice. But "it's not a clear-cut situation," Miller said, noting that most bears captured by biologists this spring on the ice in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas have been in good condition. So have several bears caught on land this month.

Polar bears in open water may or may not be a bad thing in and by itself but there is no doubt that the Arctic ice shelf and the Antarctic ice melting away is not a good thing.

Also these news report in the last two days:

In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and a 28.5sqkm chunk of ice breaking off a glacier.

Two of Greenland's largest glaciers lost more ice to global warming over the past month, US researchers said today. Glaciologists at the Byrd Polar Research Centre at Ohio State University observed the break-ups by monitoring daily NASA satellites images as well as time-lapse photography from cameras monitoring Greenland's glaciers.

And so it goes...

An echo of the spheres

Cleansing the undertaking this evening, so to speak, with the amazing voice of Salif Keita (interview) The track's called Folon. (This version has subtitles translating the words too, though I would rather just listen to the voice, even without understanding what he is saying.)




Next is Cape Verde's Cesaria Evora - the Queen of mornas - singing Mar de Canal.




And last but not least, one group that I hope to see live some day - Tinariwen, playing here with Carlos Santana!



Lots of music from Africa on idamawatu's channel on youtube.
--
Music cleanses the understanding; inspires it, and lifts it into a realm which it would not reach if it were left to itself. ~Henry Ward Beecher

There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron

http://www.jazz.com/jazz-blog/2008/1/29/remembering-bill-evans

War - what is it good for?

Unlike with Greek and Roman history, I know which book I need to get to read about the American Civil War - Shelby Foote's 3 volume set The Civil War: A Narrative; considered by most to be the definitive book on the subject. Some day I hope to get the time and drive to read it but in the meantime, I really enjoyed an interview with the author on Book TV on CSPAN2 yesterday. This was a re-run of an old interview from 2001 and was part of "In-Depth" - Book TV's three hour live call-in program where they interviewed Shelby Foote at his house in Memphis, TN sitting in the very room and at his desk where he had been writing since 1966.

You can watch the entire program here.

Flipping channels during one of the innumerable ad breaks on NBC during the prime-time Olympic broadcast, I arrived at Book TV at around 9-9.15pm and never went back till the program was done at 11pm. I know almost nothing of the different wars and battlefields of the Civil War and yet for almost two hours, I was suckered into listening to Shelby Foote and his answers to calls from various people around the US. Bob Costas, baton-dropping American sprinters, and NBC's Olympic coverage be damned... I had to get my fix of history for the day! ;)

I love reading history but almost never war history. So, it was surprising to me that I was so struck by the interview. Perhaps it was because the narrative and discussion presented the human face of war. Also, there was something very captivating about Shelby Foote's cadence and style of talking. Maybe it was the Southern accent and his way of talking, which others have referred to as a "drawl so mellifluous that one critic called it "molasses over hominy"". Shelby Foote himself had this to say about the Southern voice at the end of the above interview, albeit not regarding his voice but in response to an email about his wife's lovely voice:

People always talk about Southern voices - the Mississippi delta and Memphis voices. It all comes out of having had what we call colored nurses when we were growing up. We get this from the blacks. That's where it all comes from. Practically everything we got - at some point in my life -- by the time I was twenty-one years old, I realized that every morsel of food I had ever eaten, every piece of fabric I had ever had on my back, ever hour of education, came out of black labor. It was all that when I was growing up. There was a woman who raised me. ... meant more to me than my mother or my aunts and uncles put together. It's all the black experience. I go down to the Delta today and it just breaks my heart to see it. It's like the place isn't there any more because all the blacks have left. That's was the Delta was. I was raised in a black society, really. They were not running it but they were doing it.

Coming back to the topic of war: While it is always good to read about history, the reasons why things transpired as they did, the follies and the heroism of people, I fear that a reasonable section of people are intrigued not by the human side of these wars but by the guns used, the planes, the patriotic feel-good sense that comes from being on the 'good' (and winning) side, and so on. I have never understood such fascination with wars - especially WWI and WWII, which, if the number of coffee table books I have seen on the subject are anything to go by, seem to be really popular. Lately of course, the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War have been popular in the US because of a number of good books on the wars and the people involved in them. And then there are any number of fine books on the Vietnam war, though sometimes I wonder if any lessons were learned at all from that disaster. Or to quote another Southerner (Mark Twain), "History does not repeat itself but it does rhyme a lot."
-

War, huh, yeah
What is it good for
Absolutely nothing
Uh-huh
- War, Edwin Starr

Pictures on silence

Date: 8-21-2008
Time: 12.50pm, EST.
Location: my car
Radio Station: WHRB
The song: "I'm so lonesome i could cry" by Bill Frisell (guitar), Ron Carter (bass), Paul Motian (drums). (You can listen to it through Rhapsody.)

For just a few minutes, there was nothing else but me, the music, and a little bee I sighted buzzing around a solitary white flower nodding along in the wind. Now I know what Berthold Auerbach meant when he said: Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

And Longfellow said it more poetically (though this was not night, for a few minutes, the infectious cares did steal away.)

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done

-
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

Pain, Love, and Freedom

Having just listened to Jim Morrison, I ran into a few quotes by him, which I thought I'd add to my blog.

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.”

That's what real love amounts to- letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending- performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act.”

“Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.”

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on and individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you.”

Rock on!

From Indian classical music to something completely different. Rock music by Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison! (Yeah... just listening to various kinds of music on youtube this afternoon!)

First up, Hendrix - this should tell you why they deify him like they do! See him play the Star Spangled Banner on guitar at Woodstock (August 1969)



Also:

Voodoo Chile also from Woodstock (there's also another longer version.)

Purple Haze, live in Atlanta, 1970

Foxy Lady - 1968

and here some rare footage of him jamming with the Stones!

Top class stuff...even though I usually am more a fan of the blues guitarists who influenced him -- B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Elmore James, Howling Wolf, etc.

Here's one video of Santana, also from Woodstock and a link to an amazing piece by Santana with Clapton (who, as we know IS God.)



And just one video from The Doors - Light My Fire, my favorite of their many classics. (Though many may remember this rendering of the song, when Jim ticked off Ed Sullivan by not replacing the word "higher" with something ....er less innocuous!)



Enjoy! Enough music for now, though I am not done. I'm going to go get ready for some classical music tonight - a free concert, thanks to the City of Boston, featuring the Orchestre Symphonique des Jeunes de Strasbourg.