The High Road

I was streaming a New York radio station (WFUV) earlier today and they played Cracker's 1992 song Teen Angst (What the World Needs Now). I hadn't heard it or even thought about that song in years, but it sounded great and brought back memories.  I cranked it up and sang along.

I'm not a big nostalgia fan of 90s music, although I know many who are. Don't let your mind go to the opposite extreme - I don't hate 90s music. I just don't post Facebook memes saying the 90s were the best decade in music ever, and my Spotify playlists aren't exclusively songs from those years. 

As someone who came of age in the '60s, I don't really understand it. Teen Angst was recorded 32 years ago, but I can assure you that no one in 1968 was listening to music from 32 years earlier (1936). "Squares," people totally out of it and completely uncool, were listening to music from the '50s - doo wop, surf, Elvis, and crooners. Music from a mere 10 years earlier. If you were listening to music from the 1930s back in the '60s, you were either a) a contrarian, b) an accordion owner, or c) Robert Crumb.

But today, I know many people in their 30s and 40s who absolutely swear by 90s music, and are relatively uninterested in anything post-Y2K. 

Personally, I think every decade had some great music as well as a lot of commercial shlock. Some decades just had more of one or the other than other decades.  To me, the greatest decade in popular music was probably the years between 2005 and 2015.

I  always felt that split-decades - measuring 10-year intervals between years ending in -5, made more sense.  The music of 1968 had more in common with the music of 1973 than the year 1963, even though both '63 and '68 were literally "the '60s."  The roots of a lot of '80s New Wave and post-punk can be heard in the late '70s. Similarly, the music of 2013 sounds more like the music of 2008 than it does that of 2018.              

From time to time, what composer Anthony Braxton calls "restructuralists" turn up in music and change everything - they alter the structure of music. The early '60s British Invasion bands were restructuralists and music was forever different after them than before. The punk bands of the mid- to late '70s were restructuralists - there's music before CBGBs and then there's music after CBGBs. 

But the reason that music from the 1990s still sounds relevant 35-odd years later is because there haven't been any restructuralists in popular music in the intervening years. Various musicians and bands, what Braxton calls "the stylists," have expanded on various styles of popular music and cycled through various modes and fashions, but no one's come forward and turned everything on its head and made the music prior to them sound irrelevant. There have been restructuralists in other genres - mid-60s John Coltrane in jazz, for example. Arguably, metal has had several restructuralists, but their impact has been limited to that specific genre. But there have been no resructuralists in pop/rock music since the punk rockers.

I feel we're due for something soon - we're right on the cusp of the next big thing. The pop divas are having their moment right now, but they sound more like swan songs than the torch that will carry things  forward. I have no idea what the next thing will sound like after the next restructuralists, but I guarantee you'll know it as soon as you hear it.

Day of the Field

We tend to imagine the worst and cause ourselves to suffer anticipating what we think might happen. But more often than not, things weren't as bad as we thought they'd be.

I had an appointment with a urologist today, a referral from my GP. I'm at an age when I was convinced he would recommend removing my prostate, and I was all set to tell him that was a line we weren't going to cross - if my prostate is what ultimately kills me, then so be it. I'm not going to live forever, but at least I'll know what my cause of death would be.

If he argued, I would demand a second opinion from a different urologist. I went in girded for battle.

As it turned out, surgery never came up in the conversation. I didn't even have to suffer the humiliation of a finger-up-the-butt prostate exam. We talked about my symptoms, reviewed my meds, and took some blood. The doctor took me off Flo-Max and put me on Cialis. Boner city, here we come!

I was in and out again in a half hour, and the ordeal was far, far less than I had imagined. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so, as Hamlet said. All that worrying, all that anxiety for nothing. Of course, it will get worse and someday I'll even die, but for now it's all pissing anywhere I want to and pharmaceutically enhanced erections.     

Day of the Frontier

Happy Earth Day, or as the Universal Solar Calendar calls it, Day of the Frontier. For some inexplicable reason I still don't fully understand, on the original Earth Day in 1970 I was invited to sail on Pete Seeger's Hudson River sloop, Clearwater. If I recall correctly, we only sailed a short distance - barely left the dock - but we were allowed to participate in some "experiments" (mostly sampling and testing river water) and listened to a few speeches and lectures by Clearwater crew (I think Seeger himself was down in D.C. that day). Did it have an effect on me? I can't say, but I did eventually settle into a career of environmental consulting, and either personally collected or directed literally thousands of water samples.

My formative experience was probably a year earlier, though, when three friends and I took a cross-country camping trip from New York to Texas, and then back along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Hiking in forests almost every day, swimming in the Mississippi, catching turtles and lizards and snakes. We watched the first moon landing from a bayou campsite in Louisiana on a small battery-powered, b&w tv. Maybe telling my teachers about that experience got me nominated for the Clearwater trip the next year, but I don't know - I was just a kid. Things happen and you don't ask why.

In related news, the NY Times reports that last year, global levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide rose to 419 parts per million, the highest annual average yet recorded and around 50 percent more than before the Industrial Revolution (1750). In addition to carbon dioxide, the levels of other potent greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide are also on the rise, which further contribute to warming. 

Also, EPA recently allocated over $125 million from Biden’s Investing in America agenda for Georgia drinking water and clean-water infrastructure upgrades. One of the priorities will be to remove lead pipes from drinking water distribution systems. The EPA has also allocated $1.5 million to Dalton, Georgia's public utilities to conduct pilot projects to test the effectiveness of various PFAS removal and destruction technologies.

The Listening Path

Everybody looks at the media in this time period as if their political positions, their dynamics, their focuses, are normal and natural. . . In fact, nothing is separate from how it's interpreted; there's no such thing as an existential event. As soon as you interpret something, you're interpreting it with respect to your values and, as you know, everyone is walking around with different values. But this is not manifested on the TV news or in the university system, where so many sectors are denied access; we're just getting one value system from these places, and it's not healthy - for Africans, Asians and Europeans, for women and men.

            - Anthony Braxton, from Forces in Motion (1988)      

The Whispering Legions

Happy 420! It's the 111th day of 2024 - 111 backwards is still 111 and 4/20/2024 backwards is still 4/20/2024. Strange, huh? It's The Whispering Legions in the Universal Solar Calendar. It's also Adolf Hitler's birthday (1889) - so much for any hippy-dippy, good vibrations, 420 feel-good vibes.

Congress finally broke a months-long stalemate today and approved an aid package to Ukraine to continue their first against Russia's invasion, but not until after discrediting America's credibility as a reliable defense partner (We'll help defend you until a minority faction in our legislature decides it's not to their political advantage to continue").

The other night, I finally finished playing the Guardians of the Universe game. I didn't like it, and if anything it got worse with time. I could go over all the specific things I didn't like about the game but doing that would just be reliving the experience and I don't want to reopen that wound. Let's just say it was repetitious and unimaginative, and near-constant combat and battles made it feel more like an arcade game where you paid a quarter to just shoot, shoot, shoot for two minutes than a modern video game. I stuck with it out of sheer stubbornness and a competitive nature that didn't want to quit a game that I knew I could beat. But as soon as I finished, I uninstalled the game off of my computer - I'm never doing that shit again!

I'll breathe for a few days before starting my next game.

Day of the Overseer

Day of the Overseer.  If this isn't the most appropriate time to discuss the Jonathan Nolan Fallout television series, then what is? 

As you've undoubtedly heard, Nolan and Lisa Joy, the people behind the HBO series Westworld, have produced a new series for Prime Video based on the Fallout video game franchise.  As I pointed out the other day, according to our Steam statistics, we've played 1,094 hours of Fallout 4, 346 hours of Fallout 76, 199 hours of Fallout - New Vegas, and 117 hours of Fallout 3. That's 1,756 total hours in the Fallout universe, or 73 full 24-hour days. 

From what I've read, Nolan is a gamer and enjoys the Fallout series. From what I've seen, I know this to be true. The series is a love letter to the games, a Valentine to the franchise. The fidelity of the sets to the games' environment is amazing, down to little details the casual fan might not notice but the obsessive fan will pick up on.  There are, for example, power armor repair stations at the appropriate spots - Red Rocket gas stations, of course - that are never used, discussed or explained in the dialogue, but there they are. 

The dialog is witty, the plot is original but feels like it's straight from the games, and the action balances over-the-top comic-book gore with cartoonish invincibility. On so many levels, the show is just pitch-perfect and I commend Nolan and Joy for their effort.

But then there's always the certain breed of noxious fanboy that will never be satisfied. It's one thing to pay attention to details and it's another to obsess over those details to the point where you miss the forest not for the trees but for the twigs and berries - the tiniest, most minute of details. Some fans feel that a faux historical timeline visible in a classroom in one scene has a date that contradicts the canonical sequence of events in the games. From there, paranoid conspiracy theories have evolved that the showrunners are trying to "retcon" the games' lore so that the events in the game Fallout - New Vegas are no longer canon.

Sure, that must be it. The fully grown adults who've produced, written and directed dozens of first-rate movies and shows hate your favorite game so much that they spent years and literally millions of dollars to produce a rich and lavish television series just so that obsessive-compulsive gaming geeks have to give that game up as "canon."

"I hate this," someone wrote on Reddit. "They're literally just shitting all over the entire franchise and everything I love, and there's nothing we can do about it.  It makes me so angry I want to do something, but I don't know what I can do to stop them."

What I saw as a loving Valentine he saw as an enormous dump on the franchise.

I've read patient explanations from fans on line and from the show-runners themselves reconciling the dates in question and assuring everyone that, yes, New Vegas is still "canon." But even if thee were minor discrepancies between the games and the show, so what? It's just a video game and a sci-fi serial. Relax and take a breath.  It's just an entertainment, it's supposed to be fun. Why so serious? There are big problems in the real world - take some of that anger and focus it on climate change, genocide in Gaza, or discrimination of any sort. Don't take it out on the artists providing you with an entertaining expansion of your favorite game.    

Anyway, ignore the static and if you have access to Amazon Video and 10 or so hours to spare, watch this show, okey-doke?  It's a fun ride.

The Inlet The Reddening

Officer: Sir, are you okay?

Me: Mmmpff

Officer: Are you hurt?

Me: No. I'm okay.

Officer: Are you sure? Are you all there? What day is it today?

Me: The Inlet The Reddening

Officer: What? What day is it?

Me: The Inlet The Reddening

Officer: Sir, Do. You. Know. What. Day. It. Is?

Me: The Inlet The Reddening

Officer: (thinking the old man is delusional) Sir, I'm asking you what today's date is?

Me: I go by the Universal Solar Calendar and today is  The Inlet The Reddening. You probably call it April 18 in your calendar.

Officer: (thinking the man is a crackhead or something) Huh? Are you on something? What are you on?

Me: Right now, I'm on my ass, sitting by the side of the road.

Officer: (speaking into his police radio) Hello, dispatch? We got a possible 10-50 here. Requesting social worker and a shrink. Over.

Okay, that conversation most definitely did not happen. A work of fiction, totally made up. But seriously, I don't know what old Angus MacLise was thinking. It's one thing to name a day Day of the Lemur or Day of the Whale or Day of the Sparrow. First, Second, and Third Twelve are also all acceptable. But The Inlet The Reddening? How does that even remotely sound like a day? I mean it's lovely and poetic and all, but c'mon, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue as a date, does it?

I suppose I should be grateful that this imaginary confrontation didn't happen on a May 24, when I would have had to answer the officer, "Shutup and Changeover."   

Cryptic Tailgate of the Mourners

Metal fatigue is a euphemism. The same vibrations express sympathy or illness depending on their target. At night the broken glass looks like a field of stars. Seen from the towers, the tail lights of a car cruising for prostitutes can spell out short words, like L-U-V.

- Notes, actually the first "fiction," for track 1 of Jon Hassell's 1990 LP, City: Works of Fiction   

The name for today reminded me of this passage from almost 35 years ago.  I had been a big fan of Hassell's ever since I heard his Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics with Brian Eno back in 1980. In Boston, I used to listen to Possible Musics with girlfriend Mary Ellen in our Comm Ave. apartment. I put the record on one afternoon while we were smoking marijuana in the living room with our friends Rich and Annie, The conversation trailed off and we all sat in silence, lost together in the music, until Annie realized that for some reason a rash had broken out all over the neck and arms. Weird. 

A decade later, I still loved Hassell's sound. I was living in Pittsburgh in 1993, and copied the passage above in a fax to a co-worker in Albany, N.Y. This was just before the widespread availability of email.  I had to send him some reports, data, and other work documents, and my options then were U.S. mail, Federal Express, or fax.  I chose the latter, and copied Hassell's short fiction to make the transmittal cover interesting. I think there might have been a cartoon or something, too. Dressing up my cover sheets with odd marginalia was kind of my "thing" back in the early 90s. This was still the age of fanzines and photocopy art.

Anyway, an administrative assistant intercepted the fax - lifted it off the machine and instead of taking it to the co-worker, reported me to Human Resources for sending "inappropriate" interoffice messages about prostitution. She claimed she felt sexually harassed by having to read my text. I protested that it wasn't addressed to her to read, and besides, the content and tone of the fiction was far from harassing. Still, I got reprimanded, but I could tell my supervisor's heart wasn't into it. He knew the complaint was lame bullshit, but he had to follow through and do what Human Resources had decreed.

A year later, I transferred (voluntarily) out of the Pittsburgh office and back to Atlanta, and away from that toxic administrative assistant and lame supervisor.

Old men have a million stories, and every comment heard and passage read dredges up a million memories. 

Day of the Sparrow

"The day was forecast hot and muggy, but its A.M. was still fresh. Red-winged blackbirds rasped in the reeds. Blue herons squawked in for gawky landings at Shorter Point, across Sherritt Cove, from which rose wraiths of mist. Resting her feet on a footstool and a clipboard on her belly, Kath gave the next half-hour to another sort of exercise: First-Level Improvisations from a drill book . . . 

A wise old owl sat in an oak.

The more he saw, the less he spoke,

The less he spoke, the more he heard. . .  

Let's emulate that wise old bird."

- John Barth, from The Tidewater Tales, pg. 36 (although the final line of the quatrain doesn't appear until page 542). 

The Zen of Barth, or the Zen of tidewater wisdom.   

Day of the Whale

The first batch of potential jurors has been sworn in on the hush-money, election-interference trial of twice-impeached, multiply indicated, one-term ex-president Donald Trump. Since the jury's been sworn in, the trial has officially started.and Trump can add to his list of accolades that he's also the first US president, former or present, to stand criminal trial.

This trial will be nothing if not entertaining. Among the characters will be a porn actress, a pugnacious "fixer" who's been convicted of perjury, and the publisher of the National Enquirer, or as Trump once put it, "only the best people."

Day of the Lemur

I always knew WWIII was coming and I've accepted that fact since at least the late 1960s. I just never thought it would be caused by a corrupt Israeli president willing to do anything, including initiating Armageddon, to avoid being held accountable for his corruption, and an American president so stuck in 20th Century retail politics as he seeks reelection that he feels compelled to back and support Israel no matte what, even as they march the world off the edge of a cliff. 

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a "Doh!" 

The Spirals of Elsewhere

Today, April 13 by your calendar, is The Spirals of Elsewhere according to the Universal Solar Calendar. The name sound like it could be a Sun Ra song title or the name of a Pete Namlook album. 

On Wednesday, April 10 (Day of the Boar), the U.S. EPA established national limits in drinking water for six types of so-called "forever chemicals." Two types of the chemicals, commonly used in nonstick or stain-resistant products such as food packaging and firefighting foam, won’t be allowed to exceed 4 parts per trillion (ppt) in public drinking water under the new rule. Three additional chemicals will be restricted to 10 ppt. 

The "forever chemicals" are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a group of man-made chemicals that include PFOA and PFOS as well as GenX, a newer generation of chemicals created as a replacement for PFOA. Since the 1940s, PFAS have been manufactured and used in a variety of industries around the globe, such as nonstick or stain-resistant food packaging and firefighting foam. Both PFOA and PFOS are very persistent in the environment and in the human body, meaning they don’t break down and they can accumulate over time (hence, "forever chemicals"). 

Manufacture of PFOA and PFOS began in the 1940s, but the substances have been largely phased out of U.S. chemical and product manufacturing in the mid-2000s. They have mostly been replaced by newer types of chemicals within the same class, however, the older chemicals still persist in the environment.

There is evidence that exposure to PFAS can lead to adverse human-health effects. One of the biggest health concerns associated with PFOA is an increased risk of kidney cancer. Exposure to high levels of PFOS has also been associated with an increased risk of liver cancer. GenX chemicals have been shown in animal studies to damage the liver, kidneys and immune system, as well as liver and pancreatic tumors. The EPA estimates that the new limits will prevent thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of serious illnesses. 

The Safe Drinking Water Act was established to protect the quality of drinking water in the United States. Wednesday's rule established legally enforceable Maximum Contaminant Levels and health-based, nonenforceable MCL Goals for six PFAS.

The EPA’s 4 ppt limit reflects the lowest levels of PFOA and PFOS that laboratories can reasonably detect and public water systems can effectively treat. But, according to the EPA, water systems should aim to totally eliminate the chemicals, because there are no safe levels of exposure. The EPA also set a limit for mixtures of GenX chemicals PFNA, PFHxS, and PFBS. Public water systems will have to use an equation developed by the EPA to determine whether the cumulative concentrations of the chemicals exceed the agency’s threshold. 

Regulatory standards for PFAS in drinking water have already been established in eleven states. Unfortunately, those 11 states don't include my home state of Georgia. The EPA estimated that 6% to 10% of the country’s public water systems - 4,100 to 6,700 systems in total - will need to make changes to meet the new federal limits.

Public water systems that don’t currently monitor for PFAS will have three years to start. If they detect PFAS at levels above the EPA limits, they will have two more years to purchase and install new technologies to reduce PFAS in their drinking water. The most common way to remove PFAS from water is through an activated carbon filter; other options include reverse osmosis or ion exchange resins. But even once water is treated for PFAS, it can take between two to eight years for the amount in our bodies to decrease by half, so it may take many years for substantial decreases in our exposure to occur.

In September 2022, the first proposed rulemaking relative to PFOA and PFOS designated them as hazardous substances under CERCLA (commonly known as "Superfund"). EPA additionally issued a notice of proposed rulemaking seeking public input on whether to designate other PFAS as hazardous substances under CERCLA.  This proposed rulemaking was open for comment through June 2023. After reviewing the public comments on the proposed rule, EPA made the limits official on Wednesday.

The implications of EPA’s rule are far-reaching and will not be limited to public water systems. An estimated 66,000 public water systems will be subject to this rule with compliance costs expected to range from $772 million to $1.2 billion annually. The drinking-water limits are a significant next step in the regulation of PFAS in the environment and likely are the first in a series of standards as EPA continues its push to regulate and reduce exposure to PFAS.

In addition to the requirements on public water systems, the new rule will require PFOA and PFOS to be considered at the cleanup of Superfund sites. This could potentially include the addition of new potentially responsible parties to existing Superfund sites and new sites added to the Superfund National Priorities List based on PFAS contamination, as well as the possible reopening of previously closed sites under the five-year review process. The rule will also trigger the release-reporting requirement under both CERCLA and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act. 

Litigation will likely increase as additional cost-recovery and contribution claims are filed. Some public water systems have already sued companies that manufacture or previously manufactured PFAS, aiming to hold them accountable for the costs of testing and treating for PFAS. One such lawsuit resulted in a $1.18 billion settlement last year for 300 drinking water providers nationwide. Another lawsuit awarded $10.5 billion to $12.5 billion, depending on the level of contamination found, to public water systems across the country through 2036.

The addition of PFOA/PFOS and other PFAS as CERCLA hazardous substances poses several challenges, including the following:

• Limited testing methods and lab capacity
• Lag in development of remediation/treatment methods
• Absence of clear guidance for disposal/destruction of PFAS remediation wastes
• Environmental justice considerations for disposal/destruction sites

I would like to note that these same concerns were and will be present any time a new substance is added to the CERCLA list of hazardous substances.

Industry groups such as the American Chemistry Council argue that the new regulation isn't based on sound science or realistic economic data. The ACC argues that EPA has relied on an assessment of potential health effects that is fundamentally flawed; overstated the non-cancer risks associated with PFOA and PFOS exposure; failed to demonstrate that the benefits of the proposal justify the costs; and significantly underestimated the costs of complying with the proposed standard and the number of systems that will be impacted.

Assessments of health risks associated with exposures to chemicals are extremely complex and complicated studies, and disagreements will always be found among experts, consultants, and advocates looking for reasons to discredit the results. However, EPA risk assessments are peer-reviewed and subject to public review and comments, and a consensus is reached on controversial aspects and findings. While all may not agree on every aspect of each study, a majority does, despite the concerns by industry groups trying to discredit the results.

Virtually all health risk assessment overstate the cancer and non-cancer risks by design. As we're dealing with human health in these assessments, and the studies they rely on are based on limited populations and carry inherent uncertainties, the only prudent approach is to overestimate the identified risk, usually by a factor of 10. To reduce the risk to the lowest possible level would leave the public vulnerable to risks only revealed by subsequent studies, or expose the most sensitive receptors (young children, the elderly, etc.) to concentrations tolerable only to the healthy.

The challenge to prove cost-benefit demonstrations seems moot when dealing with potential deaths. While it could be argued that, say, $1M is too much to pay to avoid $100k in additional health-care costs, is it too much to pay to avoid deaths? Your death? Your child's? What is the bottom-line, profit/loss price of a human life?  

I have no doubt that if a Trump administration, or any Republican administration for that matter, comes into office in the next few years, these and other environmental regulations will be taken off the books and voided in short order. The country and our drinking water will be that much less safe, as businesses avoid costs of compliance and litigation. That's one trade-off I don't want to see.