A slow food preamble

SFN: A slow food preamble | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist
Poet, essayist, novelist and “local-ist” Wendell Berry kicked off the final panel of the Slow Food Nation “Food for Thought” series on Saturday by reading a short statement describing the current food crisis.

For too long, humans have been spared, mainly by the cheapness of the fossil fuels, from the universal necessity of local adaptation.

It is ultimately an inescapable biological imperative that human land use economies should correspond as closely as possible to the ecological mosaic. To this, we no longer have even the illusion of a second choice.

The increasing cost of energy and the vulnerability of long distance transportation in an age of violence show the importance of local food and forest communities and the reasonable extent of local economic self-sufficiency everywhere.

Local… is the first layer, everything has to start there. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

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Yesterday’s performance near Denver

We played in Wheat Ridge near Denver yesterday evening. I used these in-ear monitors for the first time (they worked very well) we had a new FOH engineer filling in for Alan (he was excellent) and we played with Souhail Kaspar for the first time (smiles all around!)…

Now I am excited to let you know that we will come to California for three shows in September with a new quintet: OL, Jon Gagan, Stephen Duros plus Souhail Kaspar and Robby Rothschild on percussion.

The Losses That Come From Virtualizing

The Losses That Come From Virtualizing
Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common; products as diverse as cars and planes, pharmaceuticals and cellphones are almost entirely conceived, specified and designed on a computer screen. Typically, only when these creations are nearly ready for mass manufacturing are prototypes made — and often not by the people who designed them.

However, some engineers and designers are realizing that there are losses that come from virtualizing.

There have long been stories of students who design things on CAD that are impossible to manufacture, or that are 10 or 100 times too large, because virtualizing the design process divorces it from actual things.

As one designer I know put it, learning to draw teaches common sense; doing things on a computer doesn’t.
(Via Beyond the Beyond)

Under the influence of music…

Under the influence of music, our defence of self protective callousness is lowered, the reason weakens, the feelings are aroused and our actions become instinctive. At such moments impressions of truth are deep indeed. We see things for the first time or rather, things are carried alive into the heart through the eye, quite unawares. The face of a common flower, at the sound of the evening bell, and the “thusness”, of things, their coming into existence and passing out of existence at a single point of time, in a word, their “non existence’ is perceived without a thought of it.
– Blyth

Thanks Y.