Jerry,
Maybe a few of your followers would appreciate this – in North Central
Alberta – apparently where all, or at least some, dead limos are thought to
go.
Don
June 30, 2012 | Categories: REFER ART, QUOTES & NEWS OF THE WEIRD | 1 Comment »
A gas well in the foreground and other equipment along a county road near Meeker, Colo. In a region rich in natural resources, the boom is over.
MEEKER, Colo. — The news of a nationwide energy boom is almost too much for people in this town built atop a sea of oil shale and natural gas, where rusting tanks line the highways and ExxonMobil helped to finance the 4-H club’s new community center.
Elsewhere — seemingly everywhere else but here, locals say — an oil and gas stampede is transforming towns from the green hills of western Pennsylvania to the plains of North Dakota and eastern Colorado, bringing a flood of money, jobs and attendant environmental concerns.
But here, in a region rich in natural resources, where oil and gas jobs form the bedrock of the local economy, the boom has dried up. Energy jobs have flowed to Wyoming, Texas and Pennsylvania. Main Street businesses are struggling, and big new schools built to accommodate a surge of students from the last energy rush are now watching their enrollments dwindle.
“We’re sitting here dead,” said Shawn Bolton, a Republican county commissioner who runs a construction business serving oil and gas companies. Four years ago, he had 125 employees, most of them working here on the Western Slope of Colorado. Now, Mr. Bolton said, all but a handful of his 70 remaining employees are working out of state.
Accidents of geology and swings of the market lie at the root of their woes. Crude oil is less common here, but natural gas is abundant, locked deep in the sandstone. But while oil prices have stayed high even as the American economy stumbles along, natural gas prices are sagging near all-time lows, largely because of reduced demand and a surge in supplies unlocked by the spread of hydraulic fracturing techniques.
……………………..READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE………………………
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June 29, 2012 | Categories: ENVIRONMENT/SCIENCE | Leave A Comment »
Don Telesforo next to a bajo quinto, holding a jarana mixteca.
June 28, 2012
Almost 20 years ago, a young student at the National University of Mexico went in search of a very old instrument in the mountains of the southern state of Oaxaca. Today, he has become a leading force in the revival of the instrument called the bajo quinto and the music played on it.
Ruben Luengas was working on a research project at the National School of Music in Mexico City in 1995. He wanted to focus on the music of his hometown, in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, so he asked his 97-year-old grandmother to tell him about the music played at her wedding.
“She tells me it was played on violin and bajo. That’s what they played at the parties,” he says. “I imagined an upright bass, then I thought an electric bass, so I asked her if she could describe the bajo to me. I had no idea what she was talking about.”
The bajo quinto looks like an oversized acoustic guitar, with five courses of doubled steel strings. It’s played with a pick, with an emphasis on the bass strings. But Luengas did not know any of this.
He went to his professor, Guillermo Contreras, who invited him to his studio and showed him a collection of more than 15 bajo quintos from the states of Puebla, Morelos and Guerrero — but none from Oaxaca.
“He said to me, ‘This is the bajo quinto.’ I was speechless,” says Luengas. “I became captivated by the instrument. So I asked my teacher, ‘Where can I get one?’ And my teacher says, ‘You have to go find it and learn how to play it. It’s part of your tradition.’ And he gave me a whole lecture on it.”
Contreras, who’s still a professor and researcher at Mexico’s National School of Music, says the bajo quinto likely evolved from the Italian baroque guitar, called chitarra battente, brought to Mexico during the colonial period.
He didn’t say anything. He turned around and got a brand new instrument he just finished, for whoever needed it, and he said he was waiting for me.
- Ruben Luengas on meeting Don Telesforo
“Chitarra battente is very similar to the bajo quinto because it has five courses of strings — 10 strings in total — and metal strings,” says Contreras. “And the body is very similar — big body, large neck.”
…………………..READ MORE/LISTEN………………..
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June 28, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE, AUDIO INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS & VIDEO, MUSICA/TUNES | Leave A Comment »
Singer Marisol Hernandez (center) takes listeners from her grandfather’s burro cart to La Santa Cecilia’s Latin Grammy Award, on Olvera Street in Los Angeles.
June 22, 2012
Named for the patron saint of musicians, La Santa Cecilia has deep roots in the immigrant community of Los Angeles. Yet the band’s six members draw inspiration not only from their rich heritage, but also from their everyday lives growing up embedded in American culture.
During a short, recent trip to historic Olvera Street in downtown L.A. — “It’s a little street with little shops resembling any town in Mexico or Latin America” — singer Marisol Hernandez describes the hopes and dreams the city represents.
“We want La Santa Cecilia to grow,” Hernandez says. “We want to travel. We want to fulfill our dreams of playing music and also representing who we are. [We were] born here from immigrant parents. All of us kids who were brought here when we were young feel a real strong tie to where our parents came from, but [we also feel] a root, a tie and a love for the States, for being from the United States, and for having opportunities and taking advantage of that.”
…………………LISTEN…GREAT INTERVIEW!……………….
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June 24, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE, AUDIO INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS & VIDEO, MUSICA/TUNES | Leave A Comment »
June 24, 2012
Cassandra Wilson was once described by Time magazine as “America’s best singer.” Wilson was born in segregated Mississippi — also the birthplace of the blues — but she’s always been on a journey to explore other sounds and influences.
The latest stop on her journey is the new album Another Country, a collaboration with Italian-born guitarist Fabrizio Sotti. Wilson says that as a young girl, she was eager to learn the guitar and asked her father to teach her — but he refused.
“He said no — he wouldn’t teach me. He gave me a guitar and a Mel Bay book to learn the chords and teach myself,” Wilson tells NPR’s David Greene. “He did that because I had just finished seven years of piano lessons, and of course piano lessons were very restrictive. And he wanted me to develop a relationship with an instrument that was much more intimate, and a relationship that I initiated.
“It worked out well for me,” she says. “I still love the piano, but the guitar is my heart.”
……………LISTEN………………..
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June 24, 2012 | Categories: AUDIO INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS & VIDEO, MUSICA/TUNES | Leave A Comment »
In The Last Ride, Silas (Jesse James, right) is hired to drive Hank Williams (Henry Thomas) to his New Year’s gigs and must learn to stand up to the country singer’s hectoring behavior.
June 21, 2012
The Last Ride recounts the final days of country-music legend Hank Williams, but it’s strangely short on actual information about the singer. We only sparingly hear snippets of his music on the radio, and we learn almost nothing of his past. In fact, no one ever refers to the man by his proper name.
It’s an odd approach to a true-ish story about one of the most influential musicians of all time, a man who’s still a big enough draw to receive prime soundtrack placement on this year’s Moonrise Kingdom. The music biopic is a genre notorious for bombastic cradle-to-grave immortalization. But The Last Ride bets its stake on the perspective of someone who drifts only briefly into Williams’ story — a kid who doesn’t listen to music, doesn’t own a radio and has no clue who this drunk is.
But what actually happened to him on that journey? Not a whole lot, apparently. He drinks, meets with various “doctors,” drinks, gets into a bar fight and drinks some more. When he pulls his head up enough to reflect on hinted-at bygone poor career choices, he’s a down-home Nietzsche: “Not a damn bit of it matters for nothin’.”
None of this is a bad thing, necessarily. It may lack in information, but the script, by Howard Klausner and Dub Cornett, is often impressively subtle, as in a moment where Wells gazes broodingly at a couple of young boys drinking and smoking on the side of the road, about to begin their own needlessly painful life of vice.
Director Harry Thomason takes a bite-size rather than life-size approach, with long takes centered on the singer’s face. There are suggestions of Gus Van Sant’s minimalist almost-Kurt-Cobain chronicle Last Days. But the filmmakers shift their story from stately void-gazing toward more pedestrian themes about sticking up for yourself.
……………………..READ THE REVIEW/WATCH FILM CLIPS……………………………..
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June 22, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE | Leave A Comment »
Innovation is the name of the game these days — in business, in science and technology, even in art. We all want to get those big ideas, but most of us really have no idea what sets off those sparks of insight. Science can help! In the past few years, neuroscientists and psychologists have started to gain a better understanding of the creative process. Some triggers of innovation may be surprisingly simple. Here are five things that may well increase the odds of having an “Aha!” moment.
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June 22, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE, ENVIRONMENT/SCIENCE | Leave A Comment »
Hi Jerry.
A subtropical surge starts Saturday night and really gets going Sunday night into Monday.
But then it gets cut off starting Tuesday. Still the subtropical ridge is in the neighborhood so the season has begun.
Read Friday’s AFD for details.
Yes, CPC shows increased precip chances for southern AZ-NM. Lets hope its a good year. We need it….
Joe
Hi Jerry,
I am not sure of your geographical area of interest. The first two graphs are for your NW San Juan Mountain drainage. Other drainages look somewhat similar, though the San Juan River group has had better runoff earlier this season than on your (north) side of the San Juan ridge (see figure 3). Figures 4 and 5 are percent of normal and departure from normal precipitation for all of Colorado this year. Finally at the bottom are some monthly precipitation data for Ridgway and Silverton.
You can see that this year is very dry but is not as dry as 2002. In addition, 2002 was preceded by two dry seasons, so all fuels even large fuels (such as large conifer trees) were under drought stress. Also reservoirs in 2002 were lower than they are this year which raised irrigation/agricultural drought concerns.
Mojo
…………………………..READ THE REPORT ………………………….
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June 21, 2012 | Categories: ENVIRONMENT/SCIENCE, JEROME'S WEATHER & SNOW REPORT, PRESCOTTEERS | Leave A Comment »
Discussion for the Seasonal Drought Outlook
In the last 30 days across the Southwest, 1 to 2 inch precipitation deficits have mounted in central and southeastern New Mexico, western-, southern- and northeastern Colorado, and central sections of Utah. In contrast, 1 to 3 inch surpluses (very localized amounts of 4 to 5 inches) have been reported in an area just east of the Colorado foothills, between Denver and Limon, and up toward Fort Collins. This same area coincides well with the greatest concentration of severe weather reports. Late spring/early summer is the height of the damaging hail season in this region. Rainfall surpluses of comparable magnitudes also accumulated over northeast parts of New Mexico. Typical onset for the Southwest Summer Monsoon is in early July, with peak rainfall often occurring during August. Once the Monsoon becomes established, thunderstorms have the potential to bring local drought relief, but as is often the case, there is considerable uncertainty in the monsoon’s intensity and extent forecast.
Forecast confidence for the Southwest is low.
Widespread moderate to severe drought covers much of the remainder of the Southwestern U.S. While the Southwestern Monsoon can bring moisture throughout the Four Corners States, the summer is climatologically dry across the Great Basin, California, and the Northwest. CPC’s monthly and seasonal outlooks favor enhanced odds of below-median precipitation over the Northwest, and above-median precipitation over parts of Arizona and New Mexico.
Forecast confidence for the remainder of the West is high.
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LOOKS LIKE A TOSS-UP FORECAST FOR MONSOONAL FLOW… MAYBE, MAYBE NOT REACH SW COLORADO… J.R.
June 21, 2012 | Categories: ENVIRONMENT/SCIENCE, JEROME'S WEATHER & SNOW REPORT | 1 Comment »
This painting, in celebration of Dia de Los Muertos, is a tribute to José Guadalupe Posada, Mexican artist and print maker who’s work I find so inspiring. It’s also a tribute to Brazilian artist José Francisco Borges and José Cuervo, but in this case Patrón. Also to singer Lila Downs, Diégo Rivera and all the Latino artists who have moved me and added immense beauty to my life. Sombreros off to you.
June 21, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE | Leave A Comment »
June 8, 20
When I first visited “The Steins Collect” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in late April, I had wondered about the omission of Gertrude Stein’s collaboration with France’s pro-Nazi Vichy government. The exhibition, which travelled from San Francisco to Paris to New York, where it closed last Sunday, June 3rd, was just as much an account of the lives of Gertrude and Leo Stein, their art-collecting family and expat milieu, as it was a survey of their collected art work. Consequently, it seemed odd to leave out mention of Gertrude Stein’s closeness with Bernard Faÿ, a prominent Vichy figure. (Stein came to admire the Vichy head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain, so openly that she translated a set of his anti-Semitic speeches into English). As Janet Malcolm
wrote in The New Yorker, it was Faÿ who protected not only Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, during the war but also the art work that Stein collected. In fact, arguably the greatest intrigue in the history of the paintings is that they were nearly confiscated from the home of this Jewish-American lesbian couple—but finally saved. The influential Faÿ intervened, granting happy reprieve to the Picassos and Matisses.
Facing criticism from Alan Dershowitz, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, and New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, among others, the Met had agreed to add a few sentences to the text on the wall that would address Stein’s collaborationist activities, and said it would direct patrons to Barbara Will’s “Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma.” I wrote a post for Culture Desk commending the museum’s decision to tell a fuller story about Stein’s troubling wartime activity.
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June 20, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE | 1 Comment »
This photograph is included in an exhibition currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Photography In Mexico. (Border fence, near Naco, Ariz., 2010)
On a recent Sunday afternoon, Victoria Sambunaris is standing on a cliff overlooking the Rio Grande in Roma, Texas.
From her vantage point, she says, she can view children swimming in the river while their families sit at picnic tables and barbecue across the bank. Some of the children race on their Jet Skis, trying to keep up with U.S. border agents patrolling the river on pontoons.
This portion of the Rio Grande divides Roma from Ciudad Miguel Aleman in Mexico. It’s one of many border towns that straddle the U.S.-Mexico border, which spans nearly 2,000 miles — separating four U.S. and six Mexican states.
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Victoria Sambunaris/Yancey Richardson Gallery
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Victoria Sambunaris/Yancey Richardson Gallery
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Victoria Sambunaris/Yancey Richardson Gallery
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Victoria Sambunaris/Yancey Richardson Gallery
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Victoria Sambunaris/Yancey Richardson Gallery
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Victoria Sambunaris/Yancey Richardson Gallery
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Victoria Sambunaris/Yancey Richardson Gallery
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Victoria Sambunaris/Yancey Richardson Gallery
This is also one of many stops Sambunaris, a photographer, has made along the border this year. Over the course of eight months, the New York-based Sambunaris has journeyed west from Del Rio, Texas, to San Diego, documenting the landscape with a large-format, 5-by-7 field camera. She calls it her “Border Series.”
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June 20, 2012 | Categories: ARTICLES/NEWS, PHOTOS | Leave A Comment »
Shell says it hopes to never need to use its new 300-foot $100 million oil recovery ship named Nanuq for anything other than drills and training.
June 19, 2012
The federal government could soon give the final go-ahead for Royal Dutch Shell to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean. Shell has spent $4 billion since 2007 to prepare for this work, and is hoping to tap into vast new deposits of oil.
But the plan to drill exploratory wells is controversial — opposed by environmental groups and some indigenous people as well.
You can get a feel for this controversy by stepping aboard the Nanuq. Shell plunked down $100 million for this 300-foot-long, Arctic-class spill-response vessel. And unlike similar vessels that serve the oil industry in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s no foul-smelling black smoke coming out the stacks.
“They retrofitted this vessel with clean air technology just to keep those emissions down,” says Shell scientist Michael Macrander. “All of our vessels have been worked on to keep our emissions down.”
That’s not simply because Shell is big-hearted. The company’s plans to drill in the Arctic last year were thwarted when environmental groups successfully petitioned the EPA to reject the company’s original air-quality permits. Shell switched to low-sulfur fuel and installed particle scrubbers to meet the higher standard. So the fleet heading north is a lot cleaner than it would have been in 2011.
Air isn’t the only issue. Inupiat who live along the north coast of Alaska have been worried that oil exploration could scare away the whales they hunt. The company has taken steps to address those concerns.
“That goes all the way to agreements with the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission to shut down during critical periods while they are hunting,” Macrander says.
Shell says it will pull its drilling rig out of the Beaufort Sea for weeks during the summer whale hunt. And Macrander also notes that the Nanuq is painted blue and white because Inupiat told Shell that those colors are less likely to scare whales.
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June 19, 2012 | Categories: AUDIO INTERVIEWS, PODCASTS & VIDEO, ENVIRONMENT/SCIENCE | Leave A Comment »
FRIDAY THROUGH MONDAY...MODELS HINT THAT MONSOONAL MOISTURE SURGES
NORTHWARD THIS WEEKEND. THE TIMING OF THIS SURGE WILL BE DEPENDENT
ON THE LARGE SCALE AMPLIFICATION...AND THE POSITIONING BETWEEN THE
WEST COAST TROUGH AND CENTRAL CONUS SUBTROPICAL HIGH. THE GFS AND
ECMWF SHOW GOOD AGREEMENT AND THE INITIAL SURGE HITS UTAH FIRST
BEFORE FLOPPING INTO WRN COLORADO. BELIEVE THAT HIGH BASED TERRAIN
DRIVEN CONVECTION APPEARS FIRST AND POSSIBLY AS EARLY AS FRIDAY
AFTERNOON...BUT THE DEEPER SUBTROPICAL MOISTURE MAY NOT ARRIVE
UNTIL MONDAY (OR PERHAPS LATER). WITH RESPECT TO TEMPS...
AMPLIFICATION MEAN HOTTER TEMPERATURES WITH FRIDAY AND SATURDAY
BEING THE WARMEST DAYS THIS WEEK.
June 19, 2012 | Categories: ENVIRONMENT/SCIENCE, JEROME'S WEATHER & SNOW REPORT | Leave A Comment »
RIDING FOR DZI – Members of the Studio Velo cycling team, including dZi Foundation board member Bill Keller (second from right), will be riding for the Ridgway-based charity in France at the end of July. dZi president Jim Nowak (not pictured) says the corporate pro-am event, Les Trois Etapes, will traverse three of the most iconic stages of the Tour de France and raise $1.5 million for a dozen charities worldwide.
RIDGWAY – Jim Nowak was still vibrating a few days after his presentation in London.
The co-founder and president of Ridgway’s dZi Foundation had been invited to give his “Revitalize a Village” PowerPoint talk to a standing-room-only crowd of philanthropists, financiers and cycling aficionados – including major players with Lloyds of London, Eurosport television and 2008 Tour de France winner Carlos Sastre – on the 31st floor of a London office tower. The occasion was the “launch” of Les Trois Etapes, a new charity road-racing event coming up at the end of July.
Teams of amateur and professional riders will traverse three of the iconic mountain stages of the Tour de France, Nowak said, including the Alpe d’Huez, the Col du Galibier and the Col de la Madeleine. And in the process raise £1 million ($1.5 million) for a dozen charities worldwide, including dZi.
It’s rarefied fundraising air for what Nowak called “by far the smallest and most remote” charity on the list. (dZi partners with villagers in some of the most isolated regions of Nepal to improve basic infrastructure: water, toilets, schools and sustainable agriculture; other charities benefiting from Trois Etapes largesse include international heavyweights Right to Play and World Bicycle Relief.) Nowak, who had just been preparing to drywall a garage apartment behind his Ridgway home, a project he has been working on virtually alone for a couple of years, was still awed by the guest list, and by the possibilities.
………………………….READ THE ARTICLE…………………………
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June 19, 2012 | Categories: ARTICLES/NEWS, EVENTS | Leave A Comment »
WHY was I in a tent in northern Vermont? Much less a tent in the woods at a Buddhist meditation center, reading Sakyong Mipham’s “Turning the Mind Into an Ally” by the light from my smartphone?
If you really want to hear about it (to borrow a phrase from Holden Caulfield), I was on retreat. Perhaps I should say, I was in retreat, from a frenetic Manhattan life, hoping to find the balance and harmony that have formed the basis of the Buddhist tradition ever since Siddhartha Gautama discovered enlightenment around 2,500 years ago while sitting under a Bodhi tree in Northern India.
The fundamental insight of the Buddha (the Awakened One) is this: life consists of suffering, and suffering is caused by attachment to the self, which is in turn attached to the things of this world. Only by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of perpetual wanting can we be truly free.
Not that I am ready to renounce this world, or its things. “I am still expecting something exciting,” Edmund Wilson confided in his journal when he was in his mid-60s: “drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: an uninhibited exchange of ideas.” So do I. But I need a respite from those things, too.
Perhaps Buddhism speaks to our current mind-body obsession. Dr. Andrew Weil, in his new book, “Spontaneous Happiness,” establishes a relationship between Buddhist practice and “the developing integrative model of mental health.” This connection is well documented: at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, researchers found that Buddhist meditation practice can change the structure of our brains — which, we now know from numerous clinical studies, can change our physiology. The Mindful Awareness Research Center at U.C.L.A. is collecting data in the new field of “mindfulness-based cognitive therapy” that shows a positive correlation between the therapy and what a center co-director, Dr. Daniel Siegel, calls mindsight. He writes of developing an ability to focus on our internal world that “we can use to re-sculpt our neural pathways, stimulating the growth of areas that are crucial to mental health.”
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June 19, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE | Leave A Comment »
THIS IS THE NEW ORLEANS BAND THAT PLAYED FOR OUR WEDDING BASH. GAL HOLIDAY IS FANTASTIC!!
It’s a special Sunday night dance at The New Sherbino Theater with Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Revue! Founded in New Orleans, the band has recently been splitting their time between the west coast and the gulf coast, coming back to Colorado annually since their first visit in 2007.
“The Louisiana Hayride Lives! Swingabilly New Orleans style from a hot little combo fronted by honeyvoiced Holiday.” – offBeat Magazine
Sunday June 17 @ 7pm
The New Sherbino Theatre in Ridgway, CO
Only 5 bucks!
PLEASE SHARE THIS POST OR FACEBOOK EVENT LINK
For more on GAL HOLIDAY click HERE
June 16, 2012 | Categories: EVENTS | Leave A Comment »
Solo Climber Reaches New Heights
Alex Honnold in Oregon in 2010. Earlier this month, he climbed Mount Watkins, El Capitan and Half Dome, the three biggest rock faces in Yosemite, in about 19 hours.
By TIM NEVILL
As a professional rock climber who often scales cliffs with nothing to save him should he fall, Alex Honnold has encountered plenty of harrowing moments. But early this month Honnold, a 26-year-old from Sacramento, found himself high on a face in Yosemite National Park in a creepy situation.
Alex Honnold in Oregon in 2010. The triple is perhaps Yosemite’s most spectacular enchainment, or “link-up” in climber lingo, and only a handful of people in the world — if that many — are capable of doing it in a day.
Honnold was attempting something no one had done before: climb the three biggest rock faces in the California park in succession, alone, and in less than 24 hours. Dubbed the triple, the task would mean scaling the sheer walls of Mount Watkins, El Capitan and Half Dome for a total of about 7,000 vertical feet of rock. For all but about 500 feet of it, Honnold planned to climb with no ropes or safety equipment at all. One mistake and he could die.
“There is nothing in sports that compares to this,” said John Long, who in 1975 was the first to scale El Capitan in a day with his partners Billy Westbay and Jim Bridwell. (Most people need about five days). “The physical exertion alone is amazing.”
Yet about halfway up the 2,000-foot-high south face of Mount Watkins, the first of the three big walls, Honnold faced another problem. Hordes of wingless insects called silverfish poured down the rock in biblical proportions. There Honnold was, dangling by his fingertips, with inch-long arthropods wiggling into his ears, tickling his neck and probing his mouth with wispy antennae.
“It was heinous,” he said. “At any given point I had dozens of them on me. But what are you going to do?”
The swarm hardly slowed him. By the time Honnold reached safe ground, he had climbed the route in a blistering 2 hours 20 minutes, believed to be a record. Most parties need several days.
The encounter with the silverfish was the latest twist for Honnold, whose feats over the past few years have made him the country’s most renowned rock climber. He has been featured on 60 Minutes, pictured on the cover of National Geographic magazine, and now earns six figures a year from speaking engagements and sponsors like The North Face, La Sportiva and Black Diamond. Honnold has become the closest thing to a celebrity that American rock climbing offers, with fawning fans who rush in to take pictures and get autographs.
…………………READ ON……………..
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June 16, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE, ARTICLES/NEWS | Leave A Comment »
OAXACA, Mexico — The past casts a sharp shadow here, wherever you look. You see it on mountaintop plateaus, where the ruins of ancient pyramidal staircases and capital-I-shaped ball fields hint at mysterious rituals that disappeared over a millennium ago.
Organ pipe cactuses at the Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca.
Spiced grasshoppers at a market.
You see it during market days in nearby towns, whose traditions may be even older than those Zapotec ruins. Stalls with cheap contemporary kitsch — SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirts and bootleg Snow White baskets — are juxtaposed with culinary offerings from other centuries: crunchy grasshoppers laced with chili peppers, and mounds of black mole paste used for making spiced sauces.
You see it too in this town’s astonishing botanical garden of native plants, whose exotic cactuses and succulents are bounded by the walls of a 1500s Dominican monastery, the Spanish colonial structure shaping plangent counterpoint with indigenous flora.
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June 16, 2012 | Categories: ARTICLES/NEWS | Leave A Comment »
Discussion for the Seasonal Drought Outlook
Persistence is forecast for the ongoing drought areas of Colorado, while development likely for eastern Colorado where abnormal dryness is depicted on the U.S. Drought Monitor. These forecasts are based on very dry initial conditions, CPC’s June outlook favoring below median precipitation, and enhanced odds for above normal temperatures in the CPC June/June-August outlooks.
Forecast confidence for Colorado is moderate.
Severe to extreme drought is ongoing across southern Arizona and New Mexico. The Southwestern Monsoon onset typically occurs in July, with peak rainfall occurring during August. Monsoon thunderstorms have the potential to bring local drought relief, but there is quite a bit of uncertainty in the monsoon’s intensity and extent forecast. A lack of snow cover in the southern Rockies may promote an early development of the Southwestern heat low, which could bring monsoon rains as early as June, but some forecast tools indicate a below average monsoon signal, particularly in eastern locations. Even given an average monsoon, annual rainfall deficits are large across southern New Mexico and the Texas panhandle. Therefore, some improvement is forecast across the monsoon region of the Southwest, with a small area of improvement in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.
Forecast confidence for the Southwest is low.
Widespread moderate to severe drought covers much of the remainder of the Southwestern U.S., and a small area of moderate drought has developed in central Washington. While the Southwestern Monsoon can bring moisture throughout the Four Corners States, the summer is climatologically dry across the Great Basin, California, and the Northwest. The CPC 6-10 and 8-14 day outlooks both favor abnormal dryness across the Southwest, while the monthly and seasonal outlooks indicate enhanced odds for below median precipitation in the Northwest. Based on these forecasts, persistence is expected across the drought areas of the western U.S.
Forecast confidence for the remainder of the West is high.
Next Outlook issued: June 21, 2012
June 15, 2012 | Categories: ENVIRONMENT/SCIENCE, JEROME'S WEATHER & SNOW REPORT | Leave A Comment »
Woody Allen, center, in his new film, “To Rome With Love,”
“I WANTED nothing more than to be a foreign filmmaker,” Woody Allen said recently, “but of course I was from Brooklyn, which was not a foreign country. Through a happy accident I wound up being a foreign filmmaker because I couldn’t raise money any other way.
Continuing a cinematic tour of Europe on which Mr. Allen has spent the better part of a decade making movies in Britain (“Match Point,” “Scoop,” “Cassandra’s Dream” and “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”), Spain (“Vicky Cristina Barcelona”) and France (“Midnight in Paris,” which won him the Academy Award for original screenplay), this wandering writer-director landed in Italy for his new film, “
To Rome With Love.”
That film, which Sony Pictures Classics will release on June 22, is an ensemble comedy featuring Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Roberto Benigni and Mr. Allen himself among the Americans and Italians who get mixed up in a series of intertwining adventures and romances.
After toying with titles like “The Bop Decameron” and “Nero Fiddled,” Mr. Allen changed the film’s name to one that reflected not only his affection for Italy but also for that country’s proud tradition of cinema and maverick filmmakers who inspired him to make personal movies of his own.
As a teenager in New York, Mr. Allen, now 76, said in an interview by phone, “my group was hardly an intellectual group — it was a group of mugs.” But he added: “Italian movies were a great staple of our cultural diet. They were a tremendous influence in terms of showing us that one could make movies about mature subjects with profound themes.”
Mr. Allen spoke to Dave Itzkoff about four movies by Italian filmmakers that influenced him most profoundly. “They invented a method of telling a story and suddenly for us lesser mortals it becomes all right to tell a story that way,” Mr. Allen said. “We do our versions of them, never as shockingly innovative or brilliant as when the masters did them.”
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June 15, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE | Leave A Comment »
President Barack Obama on the cover of ‘Rolling Stone.’
We arrived at the White House on Easter Monday, the South Lawn overrun by children and their parents enjoying the annual Easter Egg Roll. This was the fourth time in the past four years that we had sat down for an extensive interview with Barack Obama, but the tenor and timing were markedly different than the previous conversations. This time he was focused on the campaign, his thinking dominated by the upcoming battle for a second term.
The president was more somber than in our past interviews – and less inclined to depart from the handful of themes he had been concentrating on in recent weeks. He avoided discussing Mitt Romney, even when asked a direct question, and focused primarily on the very real constraints he operates under as president, from the intransigence of Congress to the dilemma of America’s anti-drug laws. He also seemed intent on summing up the arguments he’ll soon be taking out on the campaign trail, making clear that he plans to run on his remarkable record of accomplishments: extending health insurance to 32 million Americans, staving off a major economic collapse, rescuing the auto industry, reforming student loans, ending discrimination against gay soldiers, pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, killing Osama bin Laden, and passing one of the largest middle-class tax cuts in history.
The hourlong discussion was the longest and most substantive interview the president has granted in over a year. When executive editor Eric Bates and I joined him in the Oval Office, he began by signaling his staff to push back his schedule. “Just call Secretary Clinton’s office and tell her we’re going to be about 10 minutes late,” he said.
………………………READ THE INTERVIEW………………………..
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June 15, 2012 | Categories: ART, FILM & POP CULTURE, ARTICLES/NEWS | Leave A Comment »
President Nixon addressed the nation on Aug. 8, 1974, to say that he would resign.
On June 17, 1972, when a security guard found five men in an office at the Watergate complex in Washington, he opened a door not just on a break-in by Nixon operatives at Democratic National Committee headquarters, but also on a network of presidential criminality and deceit that shocked the world.
There were slush funds and hush money, wiretaps and burglars, cover-ups and corruption, an “enemies list” and “dirty tricks.” These tactics were used in the name of national security to fight antiwar activists and attack political enemies.
After the Watergate scandal, there were calls for greater regulation of political fund-raising, stricter ethical codes, more aggressive news media and more independent prosecution of official misconduct, as well as scorn for government secrecy and surveillance. But have those notions survived the last four decades?
……………READ THE DISCUSSION………………..
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June 14, 2012 | Categories: ARTICLES/NEWS, VICIOUS RUMORS, LIES & EDITORIALS | Leave A Comment »
Jerry Roberts
