Vogtle

Georgia Power Co. announced today that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing.  The first new U.S. nuclear reactor to be built in decades is now in commercial operation and reliably sending electricity to the grid. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts, Unit 3 can power a half million homes and businesses. In addition to the 2.7 million customers of Georgia Power, a number of other utilities in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are also receiving the electricity.

Full disclosure: the computer on which this blog is composed gets its electricity from Georgia Power.

A fourth reactor is also nearing completion at the Vogtle site. The NRC said fuel could be loaded into Unit 4 before the end of September and is scheduled to enter commercial operation by March. This would bring the additional output at Plant Vogtle up to 2,200 megawatts.

Plant Vogtle is important because nuclear power is one option to alleviate climate change by generating electricity without burning natural gas, coal, or oil. 

But construction of Units 3 and 4 is seven years past schedule and $17 billion over budget. The total cost to build the expansion is nearly $35 billion, including 3.7 billion that Japan’s Toshiba Corp., which then owned Westinghouse, paid in 2017 just to walk away from a guarantee to build the reactors at a fixed price after overruns forced Westinghouse into bankruptcy.

In Georgia, almost every electric customer (including your humble narrator) will pay for Vogtle. We customers are expected to pay more than $926 apiece as part of an ongoing finance charge, and public service commissioners have approved a monthly rate increase of more than $4 a month for residential customers as soon as Unit 3 began generating power. That could hit bills in August, two months after residential customers saw a $16-a-month increase to pay for higher fuel costs.

Longtime opponents of the plant note that power generated from solar and wind would have been cheaper. For 35 billion dollars, we got 2.2 gW of nuclear power. For that same price today, we could get around 12 gW of solar energy, plus battery storage. To be fair, that wasn't apparent back in the 2000s when building the new reactors was first planned, and frankly the sharp drop in solar prices has surprised everyone. Opponents also say letting Georgia Power charge customers to pay for their mistakes and mismanagement will unfairly bolster the utility’s profits.  

Any reduction in fossil fuel dependence is good news and makes for a better world. Unfortunately, this project's mismanagement and cost overruns probably means large nuclear plants won't be attempted again in the United States anytime soon.

Picture Post

Ludonarrative Dissonance

At this point, the Gaming Desk are almost beside themselves wanting to finish their catalog of games completed this year. Alert readers will recall that after finishing A Plague Tale: Innocence and A Plague Tale: Requiem (neither of which I much liked), I completed God of War (2018), which I did like, although I still haven't played its sequel, God of War: Ragnarök, yet, as it's still not available on PC. 

But before playing God of War, I played the first two games of the most recent Tomb Raider trilogy, Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider.   They were both fun and more than adequate, diverting entertainment for my amusement. Not great literature or master works of art by any maans, but a competent rebooting of the classic games.  Lara Croft was reimagined as an adventurer and extreme sport enthusiast, and desexualized from the busty cartoonish character from the 90s games.  

It was from the first game, Tomb Raider (2013) that I learned the term ludonarrative dissonance.  The game is the Lara Craft origin story, and opens with Lara as a graduate student on a field expedition with her professor and other archeology students to a Pacific Island. Through some conversations and flashbacks, her character is depicted as a wealthy party girl, more interested in nightclubs and boys than research and science.  There is no hint of any kind of martial arts training or e-sport enthusiasm.  She's just a spoiled British heiress on a steamship to complete her college degree, but when her crew are inevitably shipwrecked and ambushed, suddenly she is able to pick up an AK-47 and quite adeptly take out a small squadron of hardened mercenaries. Then she can later scale vertiginous cliffs with only a pickaxe and swing from cliff face to cliff face with only a rope and death-defying aerial leaps. 

Still, the dialog continues that she's only a university student suddenly thrown in over her head, but the gameplay shows her to be a hardened and cold-blooded killer capable of taking on entire platoons of pirates and religious zealots.  The game designer Clint Hocking coined the term "ludonarrative dissonance" in 2007 to describe the conflict between a video game's narrative told through the non-interactive elements and the narrative told through the gameplay. "Ludonarrative" refers to the intersection in a video game of ludic elements (gameplay) and narrative elements. 

To be honest, I don't know if I would have done it differently if I were the game designer.  The game would have been quite dull if at the first confrontation, Lara just threw up her hands, surrendered, and waited for her estate to come pay her ransom.

In the second game, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Lara Croft has accepted her new role as an epic adventuress. The vast majority of the game takes place in Siberia, and the extreme weather and challenging terrain made the survival aspects of the game feel urgent and credible. People often use the term "immersion" to describe the goal of a video game. One long scene in the game takes place in a huge abandoned sawmill, and after the game, immersion made me feel like I had actually experienced that setting.  I've been to that mill, even if only virtually. 

I had already played the third and final installment of the trilogy, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and while playing the first two back to back was enjoyable, I didn't feel compelled to replay the game.

The original, 1996 Tomb Raider was probably the first video game I ever played. I think I purchased the DVDs for the game at Best Buy sometime in '97.  So it was oddly satisfying to me to revisit the franchise, see a less sexist, more realistic version of Lara, and observe the arc of her character from its origin story to the socially aware denouement of the finale. It turns out that robbing the cultural and spiritual treasures of other societies isn't the most ethical way to make a living.                

Thank God It's Friday!

"TGIF," said the man who hasn't worked in over four years now.  For me, life has been one big long weekend that's lasted for over 1,500 days now.  

I've been living the dream for so long now I'm not even worried about that tropical depression on the coast of Georgia right now.

I'm not worried about the scorching heat broiling the planet and setting records for like the 10th straight year now and what all that bodes for the climate future.

I'm not worried about my recent illness (still recovering) and what that means about my personal long-term health and senility.

I'm not worried about my country's, if not the world's, increasing acceptance of authoritarianism and fascism.

Nope. None of that matters.  I'm not worried.  It's the weekend and time to par-tee! 

I, Shokai

I, Shokai, being of sound mind and body, do hereby declare on this Fifth Day of Light, 2023, that the first movement of Part 3: Bathypelagic of the composition Hadal Zone by the Lithuanian composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė is hereby my official theme music, and that this composition scored for bass clarinet, tuba, violoncello, contrabass, piano and electronics be played as I enter any room outside of my own home. I make no claim as to ownership or copyright of the composition, all of which rightfully go to Žibuoklė Martinaitytė as its composer (See? I said I was of sound mind and body.)   

Scorsese, and the Fourth Day of Light

So I went to the doctor today as a follow-up to my ER visit last week for a UTI.

"What're you got your period?," the doctor asked so I knocked his fucking skull in with a bedpan.

Okay, that's not really the way it went down.  Not at all. They don't have bedpans in doctor's offices anymore.

Also, Doc agreed that what I had suffered from was better described as a bladder infection than a UTI, and that it was a pretty nasty one at that.

Every day I feel better than the day before as I go through my antibiotic regime. Only lingering effect now is some remaining abdominal muscle soreness.

Doc was concerned about how high my blood pressure was when I was admitted to the ER, but granted that it was likely a stressful evening for me and probably not indicative of my resting BP. However, it was still pretty high this afternoon, and he asked me to go to a pharmacy, buy a home blood-pressure monitor, and take daily readings every morning for the next two weeks. He wants me to share the results with him when I'm done.

"Yeah, excellent, fine," I agreed, so I dropped $125 on a home BPM that was supposed to be Bluetooth compatible, but it seems that the manufacturer's software isn't caught up with the current version of iOS yet, so I'm going to have to record the readings manually as if it were a machine worth half its cost.      

On the good news front, both of those tropical disturbances in the Western Atlantic dissipated last evening without developing into hurricanes. The one off the coast of Africa is still out there, but it's still way too early to tell what it's going to do, if anything. And a forecast for those 100°+ temperatures recently plaguing much of the West and Southwest to finally migrate to Georgia was downgraded to "only" the high 90s, but we can deal with that here.  It's Atlanta, it's late July - we're used to high 90s. 

Here They Come

The Third Day of Light. My 69th birthday. Tropical disturbances in this year of record-setting heat are already aligning for the chance to become a hurricane. 

Each of these storms currently has less than a 40% chance of forming a hurricane, but don't underestimate their determination. The one furthest north - the one just east of the Bahamas - is probably on the wrong side of the Gulf Stream and even if it does form into a hurricane, the current will probably deflect it from the North American shore and redirect it toward the frigid North Atlantic.  

That other one to the south - the one just north of Venezuela - has me more worried. It will probably drift westward into the Carribean where the warm waters will allow it to strengthen into a hurricane. From there, it may continue west into Central America, or drift north across Cuba and into the Gulf of Mexico. That's the most dangerous of all situations (at least for me), as once in the Gulf it will almost assuredly strike the United States - the only question is will it land in Texas, Florida, or the Gulf Coast.  The latter has the greatest likelihood of continuing on to Atlanta.        

The third disturbance off the coast of Africa could do anything - it might just peter out on its own, it might form a hurricane but get turned away by the Gulf Stream, or it might sneak past that barrier and strike somewhere in North America.  

My health continues to improve but I'm still not 100% yet. Doctor's appointment tomorrow.  I'm taking it day by day.  

Today, the Second Day of Light, is the last day of the 69th year of my life. Tomorrow marks my 69th birthday and the first day of the 70th year of my life. 

I'm still recovering from my medical situation of last Friday.  Yesterday was marked by muscle aches and pains. All day, I felt like someone had beaten me with a two-by-four, or like I had done the most intense weight-lifting workout of my entire life.  Coughing would make my side and stomach muscles ache, and I had a tickle in the back of my throat all day.  Getting up from sitting was a painful ordeal.

Today is better but still not without pain. But today is a day of sleep.  I got up at 8:00 am, and almost immediately took a nap.  Then another one later in the morning just before lunch.  I just got up from another nap at 3:00 pm. I don't want to take another nap because that would probably mean I won't be able to sleep tonight, but I can't guarantee how long I'll stay awake and lucid.

I have another appointment with a doctor on Wednesday, a follow-up to make sure my antibiotic regiment is working.

Last Friday, before checking myself into the ER, I really felt like I was going to die. Am I ready to die? Perhaps, but not on that day and not in that particularly painful way.    

Annals of Medicine

It's not even over yet, but I've already spent 24 of the worst hours of my life this weekend. It started with me attempting to cook and ended up with me in the Emergency Room.

I thought I had to be the worst cook in the world, but forensic analysis indicates that I'm just bad, but not necessarily the worst.

It all started around 8:00 pm on Thursday night when I set out to make some dinner.  I opened the fridge and suddenly realized that I was supposed to have gone grocery shopping that day.  There was very little in there to eat other than some ground beef three days past its Sell By date. 

But no worries, I thought.  I can make a casserole.  I browned the meat and intended to simmer it in some pasta sauce.  But it turns out I was out of that, too, so I decided to improvise and make it a Mexican Casserole by simmering the beef in canned chillis and peppers along with some enchilada sauce. After an hour, I poured the mixture over some egg noodles, covered it with grated cheese and baked it all for 30 minutes.

It tasted awful.  The spice balance was off - the dish tasted neither Mexican nor American. But it was still "food," I reasoned, so I ate a plate of my concoction with the intention of food shopping the next day. I cleaned the dishes and around 10:00 pm sat down at the computer to play a video game. 

But before too long, my posture felt extremely uncomfortable.  My spine hurt, as if I had been sitting in the chair wrong or something.  I got up to go flop on the sofa and as I did I realized my whole body was starting to ache.

But worse, when I stood up, I got hit by an intense wave of nausea. I ran to the bathroom expecting to get rid of that casserole experiment in my stomach, but nothing came up - just some painful dry retching, but no actual vomit. 

I can't understate how violent the retching was.  My whole body would convulse and I would involuntarily shout ("Grahhhk!"). It felt like my entire digestive system was trying to turn itself inside-out and I scared the shit out of the cats. But that damn casserole would just sit there in my stomach, and it felt like a brick. It was physically painful, and no amount of retching or induced vomiting could get it to move.  

I found that if I laid on my back, the nausea would subside (at least until I got back up again). But even lying flat on my back, the muscle aches and pains made me miserable. This continued until about 2:00 am, when I finally decided that if I was just going to lay on my back, I might as well go to bed.  

The muscle pain and the sensation of that brick in my stomach kept me from sleeping, and I just laid there all night.  Eventually, I would decide that I was over the nausea, but if I stood back up to use the bathroom, it would return and I'd be back to the dry retching again.  

The long night seemed to last forever.  I may not have slept but as the sun started to come up, I slipped into some weird lucid dreams, indicating that I was at the very least not fully conscious. I stayed in bed late, not getting up until after 10:00 am, a good 12 hours after eating that damn casserole. The nausea immediately returned, and I realized that this was all more than merely "eating something disagreeable."

But I was exhausted from the sleepless night and all that retching.  Plus, with that cursed casserole still in my stomach, I hadn't eaten anything since lunch the day before.  I was a wreck and spent most of the day Friday laying on my back, trying to no avail to find a comfortable position on the sofa, the loveseat, the futon, and the bed.  

Finally, by the afternoon, I was able to stand up without the nausea returning, and I thought I might at last be finally getting out of woods, so to speak. I hadn't eaten anything for 24 hours at that point but I didn't feel hungry because that brick in my stomach made me feel full. But the pain in my stomach was now starting to feel like hunger pangs, so I attempted to eat some cereal.

It came back up again before I even got through the bowl.

I wasn't getting any better, and with no sleep and no nutrition, my body couldn't do much to heal itself.  In fact, not to sound overly dramatic, I really felt like I was dying.  I was no better 18 hours after eating the casserole, and many of the symptoms were if anything only getting worse. I didn't want to die a slow and painful death starving alone in my own home, so I drove to the Emergency Room at the nearest hospital, arriving around 4:30 pm.

If you know anything about me and how adverse I am to seeing doctors and falling into the hands of Big Pharma, you'll know how desperate I was in deciding to go to the ER. 

I won't subject you to the long tedious story of waiting in the ER on a Friday afternoon and into the evening, but I will say that after an initial, entry-level exam, it took over 5 hours before I finally saw a doctor.  They gave me bunches of blood tests, a CT scan, and a saline solution IV drip with some antibiotics.         

At 1:30 Saturday morning, the doctor finally gave me my diagnosis - my condition had nothing to do with food poisoning, tainted beef, or anything else I ate.  The CT scan showed no obstruction or mass in my digestive system. The bloodwork showed that I had, of all things, a urinary-track infection (I didn't even know men got UTIs), and what I felt as a brick in the pit of my stomach was actually an infected and enlarged bladder. The antibiotics they had given me were already starting to make me feel better, and the doctor prescribed me a regimen of home antibiotics for further treatment.

When I finally got back home at 2:30 am, I ate a bowl of soup (which is probably what I should have had for dinner on Thursday night). It stayed down.  I went to bed and slept for some 10 hours. On Saturday, I was able to finally finish a bowl of cereal. I filled the prescription and finally did some long-overdue food shopping, and last night I even ate a bit of baked chicken and mac-and-cheese.

I'm still not 100%.  Today, on this Day of Light, I still have some muscle pain, the kind that sometimes comes with a flu, and occasionally feel like I may be running a fever, although in this heat wave, it's hard to tell if I'm hot or if it's the whole world that's hot.  But at least I'm on the road to recovery and no longer feel like I'm dying anymore.

Central Palace Music

Today is Saturday, July 22. Day of the Heavy Sight. Time for another long-form drone by the redoubtable Catherine Christer Hennix.  This piece, Central Palace Music, was recorded in 1976 but not released until 2016. 

Upon her return to Sweden from New York in 1971, Hennix enlisted her brother, Peter Hennix, and friend Hans Isgren to form a live-electronic ensemble, The Deontic Miracle, which Hennix herself has called “the most rejected band ever formed in Sweden.”  The only live performances by The Deontic Miracle were at the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art during an 8-day festival in March 1976. Catherine and Peter both played amplified Renaissance oboes, with Catherine also providing live electronics and sine wave generators and Hans Isgren on an amplified sarangi (a traditional South Asian stringed instrument). 

Fortunately, the performance was recorded and while it literally went decades without being released, in 2016 the Important Records label finally released 100 Model Subjects for Hegikan Roku, consisting of one extended track, Central Palace Music.  Then in 2019, Blank Forms released Selections From 100 Models of Hegikan Roku containing two additional tracks from the Stockholm performance, each about 40 minutes long, titled Music of Auspicious Clouds and Waves of the Blue Sea. At long last, we can finally get an idea of just what went down on those chilly nights in Stockholm.  

Anyway, Saturday morning. . . let your awareness and consciousness expand into the upcoming week with this drone from nearly 50 years ago. 

The God of War

Sometimes, The Gaming Desk wonders why they post these updates at all. The Gaming Desk has even less of a clue why others might read these updates, but then looking at the web statistics and view counts, The Gaming Desk realizes that no one, in fact, actually reads these. So there's that.

And after that inauspicious intro, let me say that after finally completing the two Plague Tale games (Innocence and Requiem), I started playing God of War.  The 2018 game is the sequel to 2010's God of War III and the eighth installment in the God of War series. I hadn't played any of the previous games because I used to be an adult, but I didn't find it all that difficult to figure out the back story, although I'm sure I missed some nuances.

The game was challenging although not so difficult that it became annoying or a chore.  The challenge was that in combat, you actually had to time and select your fighting moves - both offensive and defensive - against your antagonist. Which is to say that unlike some other games, you didn't simply mash the left mouse to "strike," but have to select the appropriate weapon based on the enemy, use one or more of a combination of strikes (e.g., "Q + LM," "E + LM," or even "Q + E + LM"), and then time that move to strike when your foe is most vulnerable, like right after one of their strikes. You have to similarly employ one of several defensive moves based on the situation. The fights became a sort of puzzle in themselves - what combination of moves are required for this particular beast? You would lose at least once before you won, and then die and respawn to fight again.  In combination with some beautiful scenery and ominous settings, a fairly complex story line, and interesting characters, it made for a pretty good game - much more enjoyable than those Plague Tale episodes. 

The game follows Kratos, the titular God of War, who, after exiling himself from his blood-soaked past on Mount Olympus, hangs up his weapons forever in the Norse realm of Midgard. When his beloved wife dies, Kratos sets off on a dangerous journey with his estranged son Atreus to spread her ashes from the highest peak — his wife’s final wish. The journey turns out to be an epic quest, which tests the bonds between father and son and forces Kratos to battle gods and monsters for the fate of the world. 

Full disclosure: I finished the game - the storyline and side missions - but didn't complete 100% of the content. Toward the end of the game, there are a series of battles against eight or so separate Valkyries, supernatural warrioresses with incredible strength. In each battle, the Valkyrie would initially kill me within seconds of first encounter before I could figure out some weakness or vulnerability, and then maybe - maybe - I would last 60 seconds or so before dying. By the time I finally figured out how to defeat one, I felt a real sense of satisfaction but whatever lesson I learned from one fight was completely useless in the next, as each Valkyrie had a different style of fighting, different weapons, and different vulnerabilities. And each one was stronger and tougher than the next.

Except for one initial Valkyrie, the fights are fortunately optional and not required to complete the game.  As I recall, I finally beat five or six of them, but the last couple of fights were so difficult and frustrating that they weren't "fun" anymore.  And then I saw online that after you beat the eighth and final Valkyrie, you had to fight the final Queen Valkyrie, and that fight was so challenging that it made the ones against the other Valkyries look like fights against random NPCs. I had absolutely no appetite for that particular experience and didn't feel any regret when I moved on to the next game.  I kept God of War loaded on my computer for a while just in case I ever got the urge to drop back in and try my hand at those final Valkyries again, but that desire never arose. After I had finally moved on to the second or third subsequent games, I deleted GoW from my hard drive without any regret, but still say that overall, I enjoyed the game very much.      

A sequel - God of War - Ragnarök - was released on Play Station but isn't available yet on PC and isn't expected to be available for another year or so. I expect to play it when it finally is released, but don't mind the breather and rest period between games.   I also heard that Amazon Prime has ordered a television series based on the game, but between the writers' strike and the actors' strike, it might be quite a while before we see anything (if at all).  

The Devil's Staircase

Today is Wednesday, the 19th day of July and the 200th day of 2023.  The Day of the Temple, according to the Universal Solar Calendar. On this day in 1969, Ted Kennedy crashed his car into a tidal pond on Chappaquiddick Island, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.  Now, 54 years later, his nephew is running around claiming the covid virus was "ethnically targeted" to spare Jews.

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti composed a cycle of 18 études for solo piano between 1985 and 2001. Etude No. 13, also known as L'escalier du Diable (The Devil's Staircase), has a reputation as one of the most challenging pieces to play on piano.  The composition features an ascending chromatic scale that moves up and down the keyboard, requiring the player to cross hands multiple times, and even bang the keyboard with a closed fist, before resolving into an impression of ringing bells.

I bring Ligeti up because a challenge I encountered earlier this year while playing a video game reminded me of The Devil's Staircase. It's been a while since we've heard from the Gaming Desk here.  Almost seven months. Preoccupation with Big Ears and righteous indignation over Cop City - not to mention a six-week hiatus from blogging - distracted me from giving the Gaming Desk a forum.  But it didn't prevent me from gaming, though.

Last the Gaming Desk posted, I had just started playing A Plague Tale: Innocence. I initially liked the game - the game-world was beautifully rendered and the storyline was different and original.  But soon the wonky mechanics got to me - if you don't complete a mission exactly as the developers intended, your character dies. It's trial-and-error until you can play through "correctly" without dying and they give you precious few clues on how they intend for you to play. Tedious.

Still, the game had enough going for it that when I was through, I went on and played the sequel, A Plague Tale: Requiem.  It was even worse than the original, though, as if they doubled down on everything bad about the first game but also dumbed down the story and made the characters even more annoying.  Still, I soldiered through, if only to complete the game for the sake of completion. I took very little pleasure in it.  

At my age, I'm still good at figuring out puzzles in games and I have the patience to complete the grinding necessary to acquire the gear that some games require.  But my reflexes aren't what they used to be, and I'm not so good at games that require lightning-fast reflexes for Quick Time Events.  The Plague Tale games have lots of QTEs.           

One odd mission in particular frustrated me. Your character, Amicia, is in the basement of a tower, and suddenly has to run up a long spiral staircase to escape from a horde of carnivorous rats nipping at her heels.  But no matter what I did, my Amicia would drift to the right-hand side of the staircase, toward the wall, and the contact with that wall, however brief, would be enough to slow her down and allow the rats to kill her. I'd do it over and over again with the same result. Starting from the far-left side of the staircase didn't improve things, and the micro-second it took to make a slight left-hand correction to her trajectory would be enough for the rats to catch up. I couldn't escape no matter how many times I tried. I even reset the game's Difficulty setting to "Easy," but that didn't help.  The rats won every time.

I searched online to see if others had this problem and how they resolved it, but found nothing.  Online playthroughs showed Amicia running up the stairs with no problem. If you look hard enough, you can usually find hints or suggestions online on how to solve almost any conceivable gaming problem, but it seemed that no one else in the world was having my problem.

Of course, I closed the game and restarted, and of course, I rebooted my PC to see if that would help ("when all else fails, turn it off and then back on again"). I even used the Epic game launcher to check the integrity of the game files.  No help.

I finally went for a Hail Mary solution, and uninstalled the game from my PC, and then reloaded it.  Fortunately, my system "remembered" where I was in the game and I didn't have to start over from scratch - it probably would have crushed my spirit to play the whole game through again just to get to that part and see if my solution had worked.  

But to my joy and my amazement, it did - Amicia ran right up that Devil's Staircase away from the rats without interference from the tower wall, just like in all the YouTube videos I had watched.  I don't know why my original download was bugged, but the second installation seemed to work just fine.

I was pretty proud of myself for solving my problem, but unfortunately, the fix didn't make me enjoy  the game more.  In fact, it made me even less patient and more irritable about the whole thing.  But at least I managed not to rage quit on The Devil's Staircase.             

The historic, unprecedented, and unrelenting heat wave which has gripped most of the planet continues for some reason to spare the State of Georgia.

Sure, it's hot out, but it's mid-July in freaking Georgia, for Christ sakes. It's Georgia mid-summer hot, which is to say humid and in the mid-90s, or to put it another way, seasonably hot.  We've had far hotter summers than this one, at least so far.

Death Valley, California had temperatures forecasted as high as 131° F last weekend, which would have topped the previous record of 130° set in 2021.  But temperatures peaked at "only" 128° on Sunday, and relatively cooler temperatures (122-125°) are forecast for this week.

At Persian Gulf International Airport on Iran’s southwestern coast, the heat index - how hot it really feels outside based on both temperature and humidity - hit a record 152° degrees at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday. 

So it's hot right now - the dire predictions of climate scientists seem subdued at this point in time.  Georgia has largely been spared so far, but I feel strange saying that, as if just merely acknowledging it might somehow jinx the climate system and cause us to suffer the same heat as almost everywhere else. Cloud cover - both afternoon thunderstorms and haze from humidity and Canadian wildfires - has somewhat tampered the effects of the Sun here, but the slightest little deviation in the Jet Stream might change all that and plunge us into the same hellscape as the rest of the planet.  

But the trees around me are acting like we're in tornado alley.  Last Thursday night at around 11:30, a major limb fell from a neighborhood tree and partially blocked my road.  Last night, at around 10:15, another major limb fell from a different tree and took the power lines down with it.  Mine and about four other houses were without electricity (i.e., lights, air conditioning, and internet) for about three hours before the power company got service restored. I'm actually pretty impressed by the response of Georgia Power - they were on site within 15 minutes of the downfall and worked diligently until the power was back on.

But I have no idea why limbs are falling at night when there's little to no wind, no rain, and not even extreme heat or drought.  As if I didn't have enough trouble sleeping at night, now I have to worry that  at any moment on any evening, a tree might drop a ton or two of timber onto my house.

Art

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates said, "It’s a kind of devastating fact. Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral. The only thing that is quasi-permanent would be a book or work of art or photographs or something. Anything you create that transcends time is in some ways more real than the actual reality of your life."

Oates' words echo the infamous closing lines of The Diamond Sutra, "So you should view this fleeting world -- a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."

I would never dream of getting in an argument with Joyce Carol Oates (correction: I would never dream of winning an argument with Joyce Carol Oates), but I would say even art is fleeting and ephemeral.  How many books, now long out of print, are forgotten and lost to the mists of time?  How many stories first told around neolithic campfires are still around today? Photographs fade, negatives disintegrate, and even digital copies are eventually forgotten and no longer seem relevant. And music disappears almost as rapidly as it is performed - the First Movement of a symphony has already been forgotten by the audience as the orchestra starts the finale.

But Oates did qualify art as "quasi-permanent." The pyramids still stand and we can still marvel at the beauty of Egyptian paintings and sculpture, but we have long ago forgotten the context of the art and kid ourseleves if we think we know what the Egyptians were trying to say. Today, we supply our own modern meaning and virtues to the creations.  So was the "art" created 4,000 years ago or is it created today in the minds of the modern beholders? Whitman pointed out that the poetry is not in the words written by the poets but in the minds of the reader - the poem is in you, the poetry is you.

I admit though, despite my minor misgivings, that I agree with Oates (and with the Buddha) - life, existence, and all that we know and experience is fleeting and ephemeral, and it is foolish to attach any  meaning or significance to it.

C. C. Hennix

It's Sunday, July 16. Day of the Horns, according to Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar. Time to stretch out with a long-form raga as we transition from one week to the next.

As you will hear, Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis is far from your typical raga. It's more of a modal drone with Eastern accents, and was written by the incredible Catherine Christer Hennix in 2014. Hennix contributes vocals, as does Amirtha Kidambi (who performed with avant-jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson in Code Girl) and Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer. 

Intended to reveal the blues’ origins in eastern musical traditions, Blues Alif Lam Mim in the Mode of Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis has its roots in Hennix’ Illuminatory Sound Environments, a concept developed in 1978 by "anti-artist" Henry Flynt on the basis of Hennix’ own The Electric Harpsichord. As Hennix explains, 

“Rag Infinity/Rag Cosmosis presents fragments of 'raga-like’ frequency constellations following distinct cycles and permuting their order, creating a simultaneity of ‘multi-universes.’ When two such ‘universes’ come in proximity of each other and begin unfolding simultaneously along distinct cycles, there is a kaleidoscopic exfoliation of frequencies as one universe is becoming two, but not separated—the effect of cosmosis is entrained, binding two or more frequency universes into proximity where their modal properties interact and blend, creating in the process entirely new microtonal constellations in an omnidirectional simultaneous cosmic order with phenomenologically ‘transfinite’ Poincaré cycles (cyclic returns to initial conditions).”

Did I mention that in addition to making music with Henry Flynt, La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, Arthur Russell, and others, she studied bio-chemistry and then linguistics in Sweden before settling on mathematical logic and philosophy? That she served as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at SUNY New Paltz and as a visiting Professor of Logic at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory?  That she co-authored a paper (Beware of the Gödel-Wette Paradox) in 2001 with Russian mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin, for which she was given the Centenary Prize Fellow Award by the Clay Mathematics Institute?

Last I heard, Hennix resides in Istanbul, pursuing studies in classical Arabic and Turkish music, although she might be anywhere now.

Your Homework Assignment

Okay, I can't do all of your work for you. You also have to participate, and as of now you have a homework assignment - watch the films Stalker (1979) and Annihilation (2018). Both are on the major streaming services right now, so you have no excuse not to start watching as soon as you finish reading this brief post.

They're basically the same story told two very different ways, so you can watch them in either order. It makes some sense to watch Stalker, the earlier film, first, followed by Annihilation. But Stalker is more of an "art" film than the latter, and it's easier to understand and follow Stalker if you're already familiar with Annihilation.  

Minor, minor spoilers ahead, but both films involve an extraterrestrial presence that comes to Earth and resides in a secured area sealed off from the rest of humanity by the military (the "Zone" in Stalker and the "Shimmer" in Annihilation).  Both films follow a small group of explorers who enter thee forbidden zone - three men in Stalker and five women in Annihilation.  Both films have ambiguous endings leaving the viewer to decide what ultimately happened in the Zone/the Shimmer.  I'll say no more.

Go watch the films.  You can thank me later. 

 

Another One Down

And now trees are falling for no apparent reason whatsoever.  No storm, no winds, no rain, but around 11:30 last night a major limb coprising the top half of a large tree suddenly decided it was time to meet the street. Fortunately, the power lines are on the opposite side of the road, so we didn't lose power (and air conditioning). A kind neighbor moved some of the branches on the right-hand side of the street so cars can get by.

The dangerous heat wave that has affected hundreds of millions in the U.S. is set to intensify, especially in the West. Currently, more than 100 million people are under heat warnings as the extreme temperatures spread to California and other areas. Texas, Florida and Arizona are still navigating extreme heat and  Death Valley could reach the hottest recorded temperature ever on Planet Earth.

At least six people were rescued as parts of Mississippi are experiencing flooding after intense rain, impacting roads, homes, and businesses. Cleanup efforts are still underway in Vermont after historic flooding, and at.least one Vermont man died after drowning in his home.

As hot as it is, 90% of the heat trapped by CO₂ and other greenhouse gases is transferred to the ocean. Water off South Florida is currently over 90° F and scientists are already seeing signs of coral bleaching off Central and South America. Particularly concerning is how early in the summer we are seeing these high ocean temperatures. If the extreme heat persists, it could have dire consequences for coral reefs and hence the entire aquatic ecosystem.

 

Live from the Bathypelagic

Well, holy fucking shit, as the kids today like to say.  The Lithuanian contemporary music ensemble Synaesthesis just released Hadal Zone, an hour-long piece written by NY-based composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. Hadal Zone was written for electronics and low-range instruments (tuba, bass clarinet, contrabass, cello, piano). The low frequencies and the resulting overtones are a metaphor for descending into the depths of the ocean.  For example, the Bathypelagic Zone extends from 3,300 to 13,000 feet below the surface.

After nearly a month of listening to sunny Brazilian samba by the tropicalistas and their heirs, this music is about as polar opposite as you can get.  

The recording can be purchased directly from Cantaloupe Records or from Bandcamp.  

Logic

 

"(Tommy Tuberville) believes that God is causing climate change, even though he doesn't believe there is climate change going on, although he does believe that China burning coal is contributing to climate change, but the US burning coal is not. Because there is no climate change. Unless God is doing it. Which God probably isn't. Maybe.” -Teresa Hanapin

No matter where we live, we’re all being affected by climate change; and the more carbon we produce, the worse it will get. Last week, the earth experienced its hottest day on record and it didn’t just happen once or even twice. For four straight days in a row, from July 3 through July 6, the global average daily temperature was higher than anything humans have ever previously recorded.

Unfortunately, the record-breaking temperatures are the result of only 1% of the heat trapped inside the climate system by all the carbon we emit. The vast majority of that heat is going into the ocean, which is also reaching record high temperatures these days. The North Atlantic Ocean reached its highest temperatures last month in over 170 years of record-keeping, surpassing the average by as much as 5° C. With a naturally occurring El Niño event expected on top of the long-term warming trend this year, scientists are worried about the speed of the changes we’re seeing in the world’s oceans.

Heavy rains in southwestern Japan have washed away homes, flooded hospitals and cut off power and water to hundreds of households. In the United States, about 56.7 million people - 17 percent of the mainland population - live in areas expected to have dangerous levels of heat. A high-pressure dome parked over the Southwest is elevating temperatures from Florida to California, and Texas, where the heat wave has already led to at least 13 deaths, continues to experience weeks of extreme heat over 100° F.  Ironically, it's wind and solar power that are keeping the power grid running. 

According to a recent study out of Northwestern University, the ground between the City of Chicago has warmed by an average of 5.6° F since the mid-20th century.  All that heat, which comes mostly from basements and other underground structures, has caused the layers of sand, clay and rock beneath some buildings to subside or swell by several millimeters over the decades, enough to worsen cracks and defects in walls and foundations.

Across the Northeast, deadly floods have inundated towns from New Tork State to Quebec. After days of heavy rain drove rivers across the region to some of their highest levels on record, streets in Vermont's capital city of Montpelier are underwater today as rescuers try to reach people stranded in remote mountain towns. But some people couldn’t be reached by boat and authorities say that helicopters are trying to airlift some stranded residents from dangerous floodwaters

Meanwhile, hail storms across the U.S. in the month of June have 2023 poised to be the costliest severe-weather year on record. These storms aren't getting more frequent, as far as scientists can tell, but climate change may be making hail stones bigger. Large hail stones associated with the latest round of storms damaged crops and homes and injured more than 100 concert-goers at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheater last week.

In Canada, Fort Good Hope in the Northwest Territories hit a record-breaking 99° F last week, the hottest temperature ever recorded that far north in Canada.  Nearly two months of coast-to-coast wildfires in Canada have already burned an area nearly equal to the size of Virginia, and smoke from many of these wildfires continues to pollute the skies across the U.S. The only good news in all of this is that the heavy rains in Quebec has brought some relief to the wildfires. 

So This Happened Right Before the Covids Hits

Here's Brazilian musician Sessa performing Grandeza at KEXP back on February 6, 2020. Sessa’s songs are sung in Portuguese, accompanied solely by a female backing choir and Afro-Brazilian percussion. 

The New Yorker described Sessa as “a songwriter cut from Veloso’s mold and blessed with a flair for the intimate, the enigmatic, and the licentious.” 

Camelias from the Freeman Plantation of Carlos Leblon

Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso on Brazilian television, August 20, 2015. Friends since childhood, both musicians were 73 years old at the time of this set, and the performance and associated world tour was in celebration of the 50th anniversary of their first recording.

Other than (arguably) Bob Dylan or (separately) Neil Young, I can't think of a North American musician who's enjoyed a 50-year career of writing and performing quality music for nearly as long, and both Gil and Veloso are approaching their 60th year of music and still going strong.  

As Camélias do Quilombo do Leblon was the first song they wrote together since 1993. I don't speak Portuguese and can't interpret the lyrics, but the title can be roughly translated to "Camelias from the Freeman Plantation of Carlos Leblon."

I Will Die for This

Tropicalia was a time (the 1970s) and a place (Brazil) and not a style or genre. But the spirit of Tropicalia can still be heard today in the music of Ricardo Dias Gomes.

I know very little about Gomes other than he's from a musical family (both his father and grandfather were Brazilian musicians). He played bass on a trio of critically-acclaimed albums released by Tropicalia legend Caetano Veloso in the late 2000s - Cê (2006), Zii and Zie (2009) and Abraçaço (2012). Gomes moved to Lisbon in 2018 where he recorded the album Aa, which featured Moreno Veloso and guitarist Arto Lindsay. Morrerei Por Isso ("I Will Die for This") is from his recent (2023) album Muito Sol, recorded between New York, Lisbon and Rio, and features Shahzad Ismaily ("your favorite musicians’ favorite musician," according to a recent article in the NY Times).

Even a casual listen to Muito Sol ("Very Sunny") distinguishes it from the sounds of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, but the experimental and searching spirit of Tropicalia, combined with its roots in samba, is apparent throughout the album. Muito Sol is available on Bandcamp and the usual streaming services.

Our planet just experienced the warmest June ever recorded with deadly heat waves in Texas, Mexico and India. In the North Atlantic, ocean temperatures were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in May than they typically are at that time of year. Around Antarctica, sea ice levels have plunged to record lows.

The heat shows no signs of letting up. The New York Times reported that on Monday, July 3, global average temperatures reached 62.6° F (17° C), the hottest day ever recorded. But that record was shattered the following day, Tuesday, July 4, when global average temperatures rose to a new high of 62.9° F. Tuesday was the hottest day Earth has experienced since at least 1940, when records began, and very likely before that.

And then on Wednesday, temperatures tied the 62.9° F record, ensuring that the 7-day week ending on Wednesday was the hottest ever recorded.

The overall warming of the planet is well within the realm of what scientists had projected would happen as humans continued to pump heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. 

It's been hot here in Georgia, but seasonably so, with daily highs generally in the low 90s, not unusual for July. The humidity makes it more uncomfortable, but also saves us from still higher temperatures - afternoon thunderstorms cool us off and their associated cloud cover keep the sun from warming us even further.  

One More Post About Tom Zé

I didn't mean for this blog or even this series of posts to be about Tom Ze exclusively, but that's the thing about rabbit holes - you never know where they will lead. I don't speak Portuguese and I have no idea what's being said in this video, but I understand everything - which is to say, I understand nothing. 

The man could make music from anything.

If nothing else, this video is worth watching just for H.J. Koellreutter's eyebrows at around the 8:00-minute mark.

Happy Interdependence Day!

An old tradition revived and continued.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Tom Zé, Continued

Following up yesterday's post about Brazilian music legend Tom Zé, here's a mini-documentary about him by David Byrne's record label Luaka Bop.  Words aren't really necessary because the video really explains things quite succinctly. 

Words aren't necessary, but maybe some music is.  Aquarama is an Italian band formed in 2017.  Here they are covering two tracks, Toc and Ma, from Zé's 1975 album, Estudando do Samba. The fidelity to the source material is amazing, down to the use of an old mechanical typewriter to capture a specific beat in Toc.

This music still lives!  As a point of reference, here's Tom Zé himself performing Toc in 2013, and even he didn't use the typewriter from the studio recording in his live version, although the brilliant drummer,  Rogério Bastos, performs a most unusual - and most Zé - solo.

Tropicalia

Music, as you know, has always been very important to me and since I've retired I've enjoyed a very rich and rewarding experience of diving deep into music on an almost daily basis. Even though I rarely (meaning almost never) go to live shows any more, I get just as much satisfaction by exploring an artist's or a genre's catalog while browsing through Spotify, Bandcamp and YouTube.  

I went through a period of exploring minimalism (Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, etc.), Blue Note soul jazz (Stanley Turrentine, Freddy Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Les McCann, etc.), vintage reggae (Gregory Isaacs, Althea & Donna, Ranking Trevor, Lee Perry & the Upsetters, etc.), Australian improvisers (The Necks, Oren Ambarchi, etc.), and the 20th Century lesbian composers (Pauline Oliveros, Ione, Annea Lockwood, Ruth Anderson, etc.).

For the past month or so, I've been listening almost exclusively to Brazilian music, particularly the tropicalia movement of the 1970s.  My gateway to this music was probably David Byrne's Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropica anthology back in the 1990s.  I enjoyed that record immensely and played it in heavy rotation well into the 2000s. My interest in the genre was maintained by Seu Jorge's Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs for the soundtrack of the 2004 Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.  But it wasn't until June 2023 that I did a deep dive into the catalog of the artists represented on these records.

The effort was wonderfully rewarding. The music is so lively and sunny and life affirming that it's like having pure, unadulterated sunshine shot straight up your ass with a flashlight.  This music makes me happy. It makes me laugh. It makes me want to dance and it makes me want to play it over and over again.

Tropicalia isn't a genre of music - it was actually a protest movement by various young Brazilian rock and samba practitioners against the military regime that ruled Brazil in the 1970s. The tropicalists merged Brazilian samba with psychedelic rock, jazz, and the avant garde and anything else they could find, creating an extremely diverse range of sounds and styles.  I can't post a "typical" tropicalia song because such a thing doesn't exist - it would take at least a dozen tracks (or a complete listening to Byrne's Brazil Classics) to get any idea of the breadth of the music. 

Gilberto Gil is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the movement, although he would probably modestly point to his friend Caetano Veloso as the title holder. But I understand that David Byrne was inspired to start documenting the tropicalia movement when he stumbled across a copy of the Tom Zé album Estudando o Samba ("Studies in Samba" or literally "Studying the Samba"). My June 2023 deep dive back into tropicalia started when Four Tet (Kieren Hebden) posted Tom Zé's instrumental Toc from Estudando on his 2,000-song Spotify playlist.  So instead of posting my favorite Gilberto Gil track (as if there were one single track that stood out above all of his other incredible work), here's Ogodô, Ano 2000 by Tom Zé, not a track from Estudando but from Brazil Classics, Vol. 5: The Hips of Tradition, his "comeback" album produced by David Byrne.

Tom Zé is a consummate trickster, the Loki in the pantheon of tropicalia gods, and it's a fool's task to try and "explain" him, but Ogodô is Xango Agodô, a god or spirit in the Brazilian Umbanda religion. The polytheistic religion was created when African slaves brought their traditional beliefs to Brazil and mixed them with Catholicism, much as later Brazilian tropicalists mixed traditional Brazilian samba with various contemporary styles. The lyrics are mostly just an invocation of the name "Ogodô" over and over again, followed by some nonsense syllables mimicking the sounds of the instruments - "talac-tac-tac-TAC - tambourine" and "toloc-knock-knock-KNOCK - agogô" (a Brazilian percussion instrument). The bridge is sung in Portuguese and then repeated in heavily accented English: "The science in her trance will make the sign of (the) cross and we will light bonfires to appreciate the electric bulb."

Make of that what you will. Here's a recent, stripped-down, unplugged version of Ogodô. I'm convinced that the Brazilians do indeed have access to the Fountain of Youth - Zé is 55 in the performance up above, and here he is in 2020 at the age of 84, remarkably spry and good-natured despite uncooperative pants and a recalcitrant mike stand.

In closing, I just want to reemphasize that there is no common sound or style to tropicalia other than a percussive trace of samba, but you'll never get that out from Brazilain musicians - samba is in their very DNA. Each song from the movement is as unique in its own way as Ogodô is from almost everything else. I'll have to post more of these songs in the future to do justice to the diversity of the music.

Four Years

As my man William S. Burroughs once said (The Western Lands), “People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.”

As hard as it is for me to believe, today is the four-year anniversary of my retirement. My last day as a productive, income-earning citizen was June 30, 2019 - since July 1 of that year, I've been either a non-productive leech living off entitlements while contributing nothing to society at large, as Republicans would say, or finally free at last, as I would say.   

The four years passed in the blinking of an eye. There was a global pandemic that shut down much of the world in successive waves, or spikes, of infection, killing millions across the globe, and dominated 12 to 18 months of those four years. Then in late October 2020, while the covids were still ravaging the world, a tree fell onto my house during Hurricane Zeta causing catastrophic damage, and home repairs, contractors, insurance negotiations, and other headaches dominated the next 12 months. 

Parts of me never fully recovered from those twin disasters of 2020, and I'm still living in partial seclusion, and nervously eye the remaining trees on my property every time a storm is forecast.  I just took down two more trees last month, the third and fourth since the Zeta incident, but there are still many tons of timber way too high up over my head.

But je ne regrette rien - I'm glad I retired when I did and wouldn't have wanted it any other way.  I'm glad I didn't have to make difficult choices about risking an early return to the workplace during the pandemic just to make a living. I don't miss commuting and working 10-hour days only to enrich the owners of the companies for which I worked. I'm perfectly comfortable being the eccentric old man living all alone in the brick house up on the hill.

I left the working world not because I was so financially secure that it made no sense to continue to work but because I was desperately unhappy in my career and realized that this life was my one and only shot at existence. If I wasn't enjoying this singular chance at existance then I should change it - there's no point in suffering one's way to the grave if it's possible to change things.       

In other news, despite public protests, including over 12 hours of impassioned testimony, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve Cop City, and the powers that be wasted no time clear-cutting some 85 acres of forest land before the inevitable lawsuits and voter referenda halt construction. Last night, someone set a dozen police motorcycles on fire on the site.  A luta continua.