Chris Marker, writer, photographer, filmmaker and time-traveler created the post-nuclear-war photo-novel-film “La Jetée,” an inventive melange of image and sound, politics and philosophy.
Author: The Outpost
Extreme Weather Disasters: Last Call at Club Fossil Fuel – By Mark Reynolds
Extreme weather events, drought, wildfire, torrential rains, tornadoes, hurricanes, attributable to human-caused global warming, are costing society and insurers bilions of dollars worldwide. Mark Reynolds from Citizens Climate Lobby argues it is time for a carbon fee and dividend to even the market for fossil fuels and encourage clean renewable energy alternatives.
Jack Kerouac’s Lowell Blues: Cast-off Boots of Time
Jack Kerouac wrote in 1950: “I wish to evoke that indescribable sad music of the night in America–for reasons which are never deeper than the music. Bop only begins to express that American music. It is the actual inner sound of a country.”
William S. Burroughs – Commissioner of Literary Addictions
Burroughs wanted to free people from the slavery of addiction, whether to heroin or money or sex. “The Garden of Earthly Delights” was his shorthand for the diseased saturnalia of American affluence. From his earliest writings Burroughs foresaw a time when human beings, drenched in orgasmic “freedom,” would be reduced to their bodies, their minds completely manipulated by advertising and mass media.
Harry Partch: Genesis of a Musical Outsider
Composer, dishwasher, hobo, fruit picker, sailor, microtonal theorist, instrument builder, writer, visual artist, philosopher, musicologist, iconoclast teacher Harry Partch was one of the first 20th Century composers to work with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments that he built himself, tuned in 11-limit (43-tone) just intonation.
Creators of the Cool: Miles Davis and Gil Evans
The collaboration of trumpeter Miles Davis with Gil Evans’ orchestral arrangement and composition elevated “the new thing,” freeing modern jazz from big-band swing with lyrical-literary French horns and tuba and Davis taking up the flugelhorn.
Fukushima Radiation Hitting the Streets of LA and Beyond – Dr. Mark Sircus
Right after Chernobyl blew its top, Edward Teller said on the ABC Evening News in late April 1986, “The chances of a real calamity at a nuclear power station are infinitesimally small. But should it happen, the consequences are impossible to imagine.” Now after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, radiation continues to spread across the Pacific to North America with unimaginable consequences.