Here's the idea behind the PEEPOO bag: a ton of people across the world don't have access to bathrooms; they poop in the street and then people get sick and everything just goes town the tubes (err, doesn't go down the tubes). The PEEPOO BAG is a solution -- do your duty in the bag, then the bag does its duty:
The Peepoo bag is a long thin bag (14 x 38 cm) with a guaze liner, and
coated on the inside by a thin film of Urea. Urea is the most common
fertiliser in the world and is a non-hazardous chemical. When the urea
comes into contact with faeces or urine, an enzymatic breakdown takes
place into ammonia and carbonate, driven by enzymes which are naturally
occurring in faeces. As the urea is broken down, the pH value of the
material increases and hygienisation begins. Waste born pathogens
(viruses, bacteria and parasites) are killed over a period of a couple
hours to a few weeks.
Our girl, Ebony Bones killin it with Passion Pit in this new MTV video crushed together from a bunch of videos submitted by her fans. Seems like everyone is on video mashups these days. Reminds me of food culture / organic style -- as we pay more attention to the ingredients, we open up new dimensions to stretch the cuisine (and music) into different zones. The "final product" becomes a phase: where's the sauce? where's the source?
You know, I think the world ending is teaching us a good lesson. People are more willing to work together and encourage change and that’s really special. A recent post on Treehugger.com amplifies this power-to-the-people wonder.
Word has it, coal-fired power is the king of all carbon emissions and folks weren’t taking kindly to the 200 plus coal plants in the good old’ U.S. of A. Now some government officials are jumping on the clean air bandwagon, like our very own Powershift advocate, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The combined efforts have staled or closed 98 coal-fired power plants since 2007.
As great as it is to start alleviating carbon emissions and other externalities, there are consequences to consider. The Treehugger article states “With further legal challenges ahead and the regulation of CO2 imminent, 2009 may very well witness the end of new coal-fired power plants in the United States.” Last I checked coal plants have employees too. Creating environmental alternatives and creating sustainable environmental alternatives are two different methods. Closing down hundreds of plants in this rocky job market is not sustainable unless there are options for employees. What choices do the coal plant employees have? Do they have severance or other ways to survive the recession? Are there vocational programs available for them to learn the technicalities of alternative energy methods?
Not to be a Debbi Downer but these are questions we must ask before jumping to make decisions. Otherwise, it is another quick-fix American style plan. I tip my hat to the individuals fighting for this cause but we must fully consider the consequences of all our actions, not matter how beneficial they may seem at the time.
We have a few new bloggers in our midst (and I'm not talking about the lyre bird video'd above). That video was just sent in from Kelly Mahoney -- author, futurist, and soon-to-be Green Owl blogger. Kelly picks up on stuff like the lyre bird all the time -- extensions of technology and humanity into and out of nature. Not to get all Marshall McLuhan on things, but here's another tip: "Geological History 1000-1700" from Manuel De Landa's book, A Thousand Years Of Nonlinear History.
We live
in a world populated by structures - a complex mixture of geological,
biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but
accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history. Immersed
as we are in this mixture, we cannot help but interact in a variety of
ways with the other historical constructions that surround us, and in
these interactions we generate novel combinations, some of which
possess emergent properties. In
turn, these synergistic combinations, whether of human origin or not,
become raw material for further mixtures. This is how the population of
structures inhabiting our planet has acquired rich variety, as the
entry of novel materials into the mix triggers wild proliferation of
new forms. In the
organic world, for instance, soft tissue (gels and aerosols, muscle and
nerve) reigned supreme until 500 million years ago. At that point, some
of the conglomerations of fleshy matter that made up life,
underwent a sudden MINERALIZATION, and a new material for constructing
living creatures emerged: bone. It
is almost as if the mineral world that had served as a substratum for
the emergence of biological creatures was reasserting itself,
confirming that geology, far from having been left behind as a
primitive stage of the earth’s evolution co-existed with the soft
gelationousnew comers. Primitive bone, a stiff,
calcified central rod that would later become the vertebral column,
made new forms of movement control possible among animals, freeing them
from many constraints and literally setting them into motion to conquer
every available niche in the air, in water, and on land. And
yet, while bone allowed the complexification of the animal phylum to
which we, as vertebrates, belong, it never forgot its mineral origins:
it is the living material that most readily crosses the threshold back
into the world of rocks. For that reason, much of the geological record
is written with fossil bone. The
human endoskeleton was one of the many products of that ancient
mineralization. Yet that is not the only geological infiltration that
the human species has undergone. About
eight thousand years ago, human populations began mineralizing again
when they developed an urban exoskeleton: bricks of sun dried clay
became building materials for their homes. This exoskeleton served a
purpose similar to its internal counterpart: to control the movement of
human flesh in and out of a town’s walls. The
urban exoskeleton also regulated the motion of many other things:
luxury objects, news, and food, for example. In particular, the weekly
markets that have always existed at the heart of most cities and towns
constituted veritable motors, periodically concentrating people and
goods from near and far away regions and then setting them into motion
again, along a variety of trade circuits.
The winds of change are picking up. According to a recent article in Planet Green, over 50% of Americans now have access to alternative energy sources. When I first read that article, I thought, 50%, hmmm, that's not enough. But on a second thought, I had an epiphany: 50% of Americans with the possibility of alternative energy -- that's huge! Something we could only have imagined a few years ago. Here we are at Green Owl, running a sustainable label, writing about clean energy, planning solar music concerts, scheming up ideas for recycled vinyl and working with an insane network of like-minded innovators. Damn, it is good to be green.
Our friends in Violens who we gave props to on our first release, The Green Owl Comp: A Benefit for Energy Action have a new video. Um it's pretty sweet.
Your attention please: My name is Max. I'm a West Coast affiliate of Green Owl and I will be posting music for you on a regular-type basis. You will know you are enjoying my selections when you see the words TO THE MAXX in the title of the post. I am told that this is called "branding." I keep my own blog parked yonder. And without further ado... my first post:
John Southworth is a Canadian singer-songwriter about to liberate his sixth record, Mama Tevatron. His music has been described by one of my favorite filmmakers, Guy Maddin, as such: “Wonderful, sylvan, sprightly, uber-bolangaire, peculiar and smart.” I googled "bolangaire" and am unfortunately no closer to discerning its meaning. I did, however, learn that "sylvan" means woodsy. So not all is lost.
The track is "Trust The Voice of Love" and it's not just a good song, but good advice.
Mama Tevatron is being released by Sud de Valeur and there's more info on Southworth here.
We didn't know what to expect when Logic (producer for Wyclef Jean) invited us to his studio to interview the underground Florida / Haiti sensation, Haitian Fresh. Behind Fresh's ruthless swagger, there's more ruthless swagger. Thanks to Fresh and Logic for the interview. We can't wait for the album to drop on Sak Pase. In the meantime...
Jabba the Hut's love triplets? Your arteries after years of meat? Dick Cheney's heart? No, but close. This is a sewage pipe connected to toilets, sinks and tubs. Not pretty, right? Even more of a reason to be a vegetarian; this is grease that has built up from dumb asses pouring their carnivorous cooking down the drain.
Once these bad boys are clogged to the point of no return, they will need either tax money or out yo’ pocket funds for maintenance (either way you’ll feel like Al Bundy). So just avoid pouring grease down draining systems (or tampons, condoms, cotton balls, and food scraps for that matter).
My lovely grandma Dossy kept her grease in a tin can under the sink and tossed it, this is a recommended method (she’d also use it on my mom, ants and uncles ashy asses. Let’s just say it works far better than the peanut butter trick with dogs). So let’s run through it again gang, to save money and the earth, don’t pollute drainage pipes with grease! Let’s make it all hakuna matata in this bitch people.
Kropilak is a young Slovakian photographer who measures the modern age with pictures -- technology, transit, advertising, pollution. The photos are unassailably now -- no hint of retro or futurism here. This is what life is like: streams of transportation, terror + beauty in factories, office culture, parking lots. I'm looking at his pictures and trying to hear them: the emptiness of brightly lit concrete, a Brad Mehldau album about airports, certain moments of Radiohead when time freezes.
More photos here. Thanks to Patricio Zambrano-Barragan for the tip.
Before reading any further, go to the aM Laboratory and get nasty with their "simple sinewave synthesizer" (pictured in color above). When I started on that synth last night, I filled in the squares, making ridiculous Brian Eno jams. Later on, what really got me going was when I started erasing the squares. . .
“Don't play what's there, play what's not there.” That's how Miles said it, but I was just talking to my friend, Stuart, and he was saying the same thing.
Stuart is Stuart Bogie and he plays sax with Antibalas and TV on the Radio. It was with Dave Sitek from TV on the
Radio, Stuart said, that he learned most about determining the course of a song by what you remove from the
mixture, not what you add.
Here's how it sounds in With a Girl Like You, a song Stuart
co-produced with Dave for Dark Was the Night.
