Tuesday in Santa Fe

late spring . early spring thoughts
It’s wrong to think happiness will come right away.  It’s something you (we) create, not something you wait for.
– Ozu Yasujiro’s, Late Spring

(Via neo bohemia)

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Marc Benioff Gets It
Marc Benioff:
The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.

(Via Daring Fireball)

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The stunning pictures of sleeping insects covered in early morning dew | Mail Online

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Here is a noise that drove me crazy a while ago.

It’s that noise between the notes. But we checked and… it’s just another buzz on my guitar. She has a whole bunch of different buzzes and noises now. She’s about eight years old, and I suppose she needs new frets. Or, you might say she has gained a whole bunch of character. There is one particlar noise that sounds like a telephone ringing in the distance. Very interesting.
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Adam asked about Blanca versus Negra guitars a while ago. He mentioned that he wants to buy a guitar in Spain. I haven’t seen a Spanish guitar that was of better quality then guitars by top American luthiers, but I can understand the allure of a Spanish Flamenco guitar. I recommend that you buy the guitar that feels best in your hands, that plays best, regardless of the wood. The sound properties of Blanca versus Negra are not as important as how the guitar plays. I also noticed that luthiers in Spain seem to keep the best guitars in the back of the shop, away from the hands of casual visitors. You’ll have to ask to see those or show the luthier that you can play – and then he will bring out the good stuff.

Monday in Santa Fe

Dezeen: 111 Navy Chair by Emeco
Aluminium furniture brand Emeco will launch a new version of its iconic Navy Chair in Milan next month, made of recycled plastic Coca-Cola bottles.

I love Emeco and use their chair on stage. The aluminium chairs are also 90% recycled and carry a warranty of 150 years.
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iPhone app for bikers:

Chainvetica
… a simple app for analyzing the tooth count of your chain-ring and cog to calculate the gear inches for your said bike. basically sums up just how hard it’s going to be to turn over the cranks of your custom fixed gear. also calculates what a typical average 90rpm pedal pushing would top you out at speed wise for the gear configuration you have.
(Via app.itize.us)

Find it here.
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Austraian designer Marc Newson designed a beautiful hour-glass. You can find more info at Ikepod by Marc Newson. I love this renewed interest in the old ways: calligraphy, the hourglass with its beautiful visualization of time, bicycles (((which a Chinese historian claims to be a 2,500 year old Chinese invention…))). I think there is great value in this. It acts to balance the digital age.

You can download the image here – I am using it as the wallpaper on my iPhone.
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Check out this beautiful post on new bohemia, in response to my challenge from last Thursday.
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Back to the studio. I want to finish all of the mixes this week.

Saturday in Santa Fe

Lights glowing under the table. My studio sync clock, an old but sturdy and reliable Aardvark.

…guarded by a spider..
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Speaking of spiders: How to trap spiders in a corner. Nice!
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Matt sent me this link. Beautiful night photography of Annapurna in Nepal.

Annapurna Moonrise: Night Photography at Base Camp
What is above knows what is below,
but what is below does not know what is above.
One climbs, one sees.
One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.

— René Daumal

I like how that poem speaks about mountaineering, but could easily refer to meditation practice.
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Incredible Pompidou-Metz Art Museum Rises in France | Inhabitat
Construction is nearly complete on Centre Pompidou-Metz, an incredible new extension of the original Centre Pompidou modern art museum in Paris. Designed by architects Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines, the elegantly sloping structure takes inspiration from the technical properties of Chinese hats and bridges. The building is topped with a curvaceous roof that does a remarkable job of shielding it from the elements while opening up an expansive volume of space dedicated to the arts.

I saw a model of this building at an architectural exhibit in Santa Fe’s Art Museum on the plaza about a month ago. I love Shigeru Bans work.
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Copying the American lifestyle a bit too much?

BBC News – China faces ‘diabetes epidemic’, research suggests
China faces a diabetes epidemic, with almost one in 10 adults having the disease while most cases remain undiagnosed, researchers have said.

Tests showed diabetes was more endemic than previously thought, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

The figures suggest China has some 90 million diabetics, far more than India

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Current reading:

I am reading The Winter Thief, Jenny White’s third novel starring Kamil Pasha in Istanbul in the late 19th century, and Europe’s Promise, which SD is reading and recommended to me.

Europe’s Promise | Steven Hill
Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age.

A quiet revolution has been occurring in post-World War II Europe. A world power has emerged across the Atlantic that is recrafting the rules for how a modern society should provide economic security, environmental sustainability, and global stability. For a decade Steven Hill traveled widely to understand this uniquely European way of life. In Europe’s Promise, he explains Europe’s bold new vision.

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Now that’s a timelapse!

YouTube – BBC Life – Plants (On Location) in HD
David Attenborough explaining the challenges they had to face filming plants.

I pre-ordered the DVD from amazon. The version narrated by Attenborough, naturally.
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James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change | Environment | The Guardian
Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

Hm, agreed.

Friday in Santa Fe

The annual Spring winds have started. They lent my day in studio Oto-Mare a dramatic backdrop. The sky kept changing from sunshine to clouds, from Santa Fe’s dazzling light to darkness and back, and there was a certain smell in the air. I guess I would call it a storm smell, although the weather sites are switching back and forth on whether there will be a lot of wind tonight or even another snowstorm. Life on a mountain. Our weather is unpredictable.

The studio looks darker than usual, because I close the four skylights when I am mixing and mastering an album. The shafts of the skylights can trap low frequencies and diminish the accuracy of what I hear. With a long pole I can close doors located at the bottom of the light-shafts.

I worked on CD mixes (16/44.1 with my usual compression – the same I have used since “La Semana”) and HD mixes (24/88.2 and no compression). My day ended up longer than expected, but I enjoyed it.

Today I spent nine hours in the studio. Most of the time I don’t sit on the Aeron chair you can see on the left.

Instead I sit on a stool I bought about ten or twelve years ago at MoMA. Its height can be adjusted and the bottom looks like this:

The chair forces me to keep both feet on the floor and sit straight, because otherwise it will wobble.

While I am running off mixes I have time to do other things. Some of the songs on the new album are more than seven minutes long. So, instead of sitting in front of the console the whole time, I’ll walk around, play air-guitar, dance like an idiot, or today I did pushups. I did a hundred and discovered that pushups are less of a strain on my wrist if I do them Bruce Lee style – on my fingertips. Did half of them in this way and my wrists didn’t creak once.

The release date of the album will probably be sometime in the second half of June, but, if all goes well, we may have CDs for sale on tour in May. They won’t be in stores until the 22nd or 29th of June though.

Thursday in Santa Fe

More mixing. Gave Jon a CD of the current mixes. After listening he called and liked them, which was nice because I had started down a path where I wasn’t sure it was working.
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From the always interesting Future Perfect, a lovely photo depicting Water Poetry. How about that Y.!! Some Spring water-calligraphy?
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Excellent app. Shows any tour dates of the artists in my iTunes folder or all performances around Santa Fe. Besides being available for Windows and Mac they also have iPhone and Android versions. The iPhone app works very well.

iConcertCal
iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It supports searches in the US, Canada, and the UK, includes direct links to purchase tickets, and is available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

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This may be THE most important issue we are facing IMHO. What we do now, or don’t do, will totally change the way our children and our grand-children will live. And by WE I mean everyone on this orbiting biosphere. The economy or health-insurance, everything pales against this issue:

Repower America
Dear Senator:
“We call on Congress to stand up to polluters and ignite a clean energy revolution by passing comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation this year.”

also see:

PNNL: News – Even soil feels the heat
Twenty years of field studies reveal that as the Earth has gotten warmer, plants and microbes in the soil have given off more carbon dioxide. So-called soil respiration has increased about one-tenth of 1 percent per year since 1989, according to an analysis of past studies in today’s issue of Nature.

The scientists also calculated the total amount of carbon dioxide flowing from soils, which is about 10-15 percent higher than previous measurements. That number — about 98 petagrams of carbon a year (or 98 billion metric tons) — will help scientists build a better overall model of how carbon in its many forms cycles throughout the Earth. Understanding soil respiration is central to understanding how the global carbon cycle affects climate.

There is this article in Wired Mag:

As Temperature Rises, Earth Breathes Faster — and Maybe Harder | Wired Science | Wired.com
As planetary temperatures rise, Earth’s soils release steadily larger amounts of carbon dioxide, according to massive data crunching from hundreds of soil respiration studies published since 1989.

The critical question is whether soils release more CO2 because faster-growing plants pump more in, or if soils release CO2 that would have stayed in the ground at lower temperatures.

If the latter, the fresh influx of CO2 could produce a self-reinforcing cycle, producing higher temperatures that cause even more CO2 to be released.

Water, the oil of the 21st Century (((just ask Nestle and Coca-Cola!!))):

U.N.: Foul water a mass killer
Contaminated and polluted water now kills more people than all forms of violence including wars, according to a United Nations report released Monday that calls for turning unsanitary wastewater into an environmentally safe economic resource.
(Via CNN.com – World)

This should produce some interesting genetic variations:

Chemical From Plastic Water Bottles Found Throughout Oceans
A research team finds the endocrine-system disruptor bisphenol-A (BPA) at 20 ocean sites around the world. The work reveals the reality of “a new global ocean contamination for long into the future.”
(Via Wired News)

Inspired by Road Warrior. That’s a future I can do without. Have you noticed that we have more dire future predictions that happy ones? We should create more positive ones.

Your Post-Apocalyptic Future: Container Trucks Recycled Into Mobile Homes [Architecture]
ether the trucks were transporting oil, milk or some other sort of liquid, designer Aristide Antonas has conjured up a world where we would recycle the containers into apartments. The gallery below shows a post-apocalyptic world where we remain mobile.
(Via Gizmodo)

Artistic recycling:

ECO ART: Trashed Beer Cans Become Butterflies in Flight
When you take a close look at a beer can, you may notice that they have a really nice arc to them. Artist Paul Villinski has taken that same arc and turned it into butterflies in flight.  Rescuing crushed beer cans from the streets of New York City, Williams carefully cuts each can and creates a marvelous fluttering array. He states that similar to the life of a butterfly, his process is representative of a cultural conversion all its own exploring “themes of transformation and recovery through metamorphosis.”
(Via Inhabitat)

Climate Change Art:

Climate-Based Art
erheggen, who calls Holland his home, installed the first in a series of four sculptures, which will all be placed in geographic areas undergoing severe climate changes (pictured above). Concerned that “climate change brings about cultural change,” the pure iron sculpture represents a dogsled driver from the local Inuit community. A feed allows for remote viewing of the initial sculpture, located on an iceberg in Greenland, online from cool(E)motiontm until it eventually disappears into the sea. Following that, the artwork will be left to biodegrade or saved by the team, depending on if it’s possible to recover without damaging the aquatic environment.
(Via Cool Hunting)

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I’ll leave you with this:

What is your first thought?
A) Pretty!
B) Not!
C) MySpace!
D) This expresses Spring better than any poem by Basho!
E) If I could only have that on a t-shirt