All posts by Indy

>Music that matters: ASS

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I went to a great show with Earth yesterday (old interview here), who did much better than last time I saw them. Check out a clip from the Hamburg show here, the band playing a new song tentatively entitled Elocution Butchery or something like that… (thanks to Prof. mugabe for getting the title right!)
Having seen them now I’ll be able to check out the mad man Eugene S. Robinson at the Roadburn festival instead.

However, the photos and videos here are courtesy of ASS (Andreas Söderström Solo). He, along with two friends, did an awesome show as well. Very minimalistic (yet majestic), hypnotic, dark, melancholic folk that’s got to be heard.
Listen and learn. More info at Headspin Recordings.

>Fernando Pessoa: Happiness does belong to him

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What’s given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it’s given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn’t with him or with me, because it isn’t with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, published for the first time 50 years after his death. Pessoa died in 1935.

>Fernando Pessoa: Apocalyptic feeling

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Since every step I took in life brought me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That’s how badly life terrifies and tortures me.
To make a decision, to finalize something, to emerge from the realm of doubt and obscurity – these are things that seem to me like catastrophes or universal cataclysms.
Life, as I know it, is cataclysms and apocalypses. With each passing day I feel that much more incompetent even to trace gestures or to conceive myself in clearly real situations.
With each passing day the presence of others – which my soul always receives like a rude surprise – becomes more painful and distressing. To talk with people makes my skin crawl. If they show an interest in me, I run. If they look at me, I shudder.
I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, published for the first time 50 years after his death. Pessoa died in 1935.

>Financial crisis ’caused by white men with blue eyes’

>Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva: “This is a crisis that was caused by people, white with blue eyes. And before the crisis they looked as if they knew everything about economics. Once again the great part of the poor in the world that were still not yet [getting] their share of development that was caused by globalisation, they were the first ones to suffer. Since I am not acquainted with any black bankers, I can only say that this part of humanity that is the major victim of the world crisis, these people should pay for the crisis? I cannot accept that. If the G20 becomes a meeting just to set another meeting, we’ll be discredited and the crisis can deepen.”
The Independent

Let’s say a president said “XXX was caused by black people”. Whoa! Hello race war!
To me this isn’t about race or the colour of the skin. It’s about power and extreme capitalist ideology, and yes, the crisis is the fault of Western bankers and Western politicians – but the traits of greed, corruption and ignorance are definitely colour blind.

One of the comments to the article concludes: “Politicians created the bloody regulatory environment, banks abused it and foreign governments of the developing World milked it.”

And the worst is yet to come…




>90% of humanity vanished

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Click the image to enlarge
The yellow parts are uninhabitable desert.
The brown parts are uninhabitable due to
floods, drought or extreme weather.

If the planet warms by 4 °C – as it might by 2099 – it will change beyond all recognition, says Gaia Vince in an article in New Scientist. The article closes with the quote of Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen: “I would like to be optimistic that we’ll survive, but I’ve got no good reason to be. In order to be safe, we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70 per cent by 2015. We are currently putting in 3 per cent more each year.”

Reducing emissions by 70 per cent in six years? That will never happen. Never. Mankind is simply too dumb.
People will definitely be forced to migrate in order to survive. It will require “a wholesale relocation of the world’s population according to the geography of resources”, meaning moving people where the water is. In the northern hemisphere they’ll end up in Scandinavia, Siberia and Canada. In the southern hemisphere, “Patagonia, Tasmania and the far north of Australia, New Zealand and perhaps newly ice-free parts of the western Antarctic coast”.
Like a friend of mine just said: “Soon you’ll be begging us to let you move to Sweden”…

You might also want to read A survey of the the sea: Troubled waters, a series of nine articles in The Economist. Start with the first one, Troubled waters, and read on.
“It is clear, in any event, that man must change his ways. Humans could afford to treat the sea as an infinite resource when they were relatively few in number, capable of only rather inefficient exploitation of the vasty deep and without as yet a taste for fossil fuels. A world of 6.7 billion souls, set to become 9 billion by 2050, can no longer do so. The possibility of widespread catastrophe is simply too great.”

To the death!