A Change in the Wind

CA Fish and Game proposes regs to save sea bass species

Here's my story from the Santa-Barbara Independent. I thought the quote below was the memorable from the hearing, from one of the agency's commissioners at the hearing, about the dangers of fishing aggregations of spawning fish. Fishing massed groups of spawning fish can mislead anglers into unwittingly devastating a fish population in real trouble, a phenomenon scientists call "hyperstability": 

Michael Sutton, one of two California state Fish and Game Commissioners at the meeting, called for a consideration of a seasonal closure during spawning season to allow the two species to repopulate. “Fishing spawning aggregations is a really dangerous practice,” he said. “If a seasonal closure would alleviate that, we need to consider that. A seasonal closure would have a significant impact on the industry, but so would a ban of fishing these species for several years.”

No one else at the hearing backed Sutton's idea, as far as I could tell, though it appears to be the idea that most likely to allow the beloved barred sand bass to repopulate. Here's a Fish and Game chart of where the barred sand bass are caught off the SoCal coast: "hotspots" (spawning grounds) in red:

Multi, Extremely, and Totally Drug-Resistant TB: TDR-TB

Sometimes change is easier to hear in language than it is to contextualize in reality.

My meager understanding of tuberculosis cannot be expected to grade the seriousness of the news that several new strains of the disease have been found in populations in India and Iran.

This sounds alarming, but after all, medical researchers have tricks up there sleeve as well. This may represent less a threat to you and me than simply the fact that this disease, once slated for eradication, seems to have slipped our medical net.

Yet even the experts at Chest magazine used precisely that word -- alarming -- to describe this development. . 

What am I talking about?

Totally Drug-Resistant TB (TDR-TB)

From The Times of India:

MUMBAI: Tuberculosis, which kills around 1,000 people a day in India, has acquired a deadlier edge. A new entity-ominously called Totally Drug-Resistant TB (TDR-TB )-has been isolated in the fluid samples of 12 TB patients in the past three months alone at Hinduja Hospital at Mahim . The hospital's laboratory has been certified by the World Health Organization (WHO) to test TB patients for drug resistance.

While Iran first reported TDRTB cases three years ago, India seems to be only the second country to report this deadly form of the disease. TDR-TB is the result of the latest mutation of the bacilli after Multi-Drug-Resistant TB (MDR-TB ) and Extremely Drug-Resistant TB (XDR-TB ) were diagnozed earlier.

This frank twist in our language occured because milder new variants on this old disease had already taken their places in the lexicon, complete with acronyms; such as the strain resistant to multiple drug therapies, (MDR-TB) and the strain extremely resistant (XDR-TB).

This new strain, TDR-TB, even Cipro can't kill. 

According to a WHO study from Iran:

The isolation of TDR strains from MDR-TB patients from different regional countries is alarming and underlines the possible dissemination of such strains in Asian countries. 

30% of those known known to have contracted this new form of TB in the study conducted in Tehran are immigrants from Afghanistan. 

Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria

Take Shelter -- the birds are falling (again)

2012 opens with news of blackbirds falling dead from the sky in Arkansas -- again. 

Thousands of dead blackbirds rained down on a town in central Arkansas last New Year's Eve after revelers set off fireworks that spooked them from their roost, and officials were reporting a similar occurrence Saturday as 2012 approached.

Police in Beebe said dozens of blackbirds had fallen dead, prompting officers to ban residents from shooting fireworks Saturday night. It wasn't immediately clear if fireworks were again to blame, but authorities weren't taking a chance.

Officer John Weeks said the first reports of "birds on the streets" came around 7 p.m. as residents celebrated the year's end with fireworks in their neighborhoods.

"We started shutting down fireworks," he said. "We're working on cleaning up the birds now."

Such was an image in two films this year, both contemplating environmental disaster. (Without the fireworks, admittedly.) The first being Melancholia, where blackbirds fall from the sky, and people plenty of good reasons to look to the heavens, as they contemplate the end.

By contrast, 2011 also featured a beautifully understated dramatic examination of oncoming disaster, called Take Shelter. In this movie a devoted father, plagued by delusional nightmares of a storm the likes of which has never been seen in Ohio, turns his life upside down. He alienates his brother, frightens his wife, and loses his job -- all in the attempt to save his family. 

Despite being devastated by blackbirds falling from the sky, he wonders if he's going crazy. 

Describing what motivated him to make this film, the writer/director Jeff Nichols said:

I wrote TAKE SHELTER because I believed there was a feeling out in the world that was palpable. It was an anxiety that was very real in my life, and I had the notion it was very real in the lives of other Americans as well as other people around the world. This film was a way for me to talk about that fear and that anxiety. I hope there is an answer to this feeling by the end of the film. I believe there is, and it's the reason that this wonderful group of people came together to help me make TAKE SHELTER.

Yes, there is a palpable sense of disaster about to descend -- no? For better or worse. Perhaps we're all wrong, but the fear is there, among us. 

Leave aside the much-reported record twelve billion-dollar climactic disasters of the U.S. in 2011. You can hear in the rhetoric of Ron Paul and his followers, remarked on by leading conservative Ross Douthat. You can  read it in frightened Tea Party economic analysis. You can hear it in the serious music of today, such as Holocene, by Bon Iver, and in A.O. Scott's superb encapsulation of the film's central drama:

Is Curtis mad, or is he prescient? You can debate this question when the movie is over — the brilliant final scene invites as much — but you are unlikely to find a comfortable answer. The real question is what difference it makes...in “Take Shelter,” [Nichols] has made a perfect allegory for a panicky time. There is no shortage of delusion and paranoia out there in the world. There is also a lot to be afraid of.

Once our culture located God in the skies; now we wonder if we can trust Him -- or them. 

What really happened to the developer: Chekhov

The New Yorker's great theater critic, John Lahr, hasn't been writing enough. Then on Dec. 12 the magazine doesn't put the compressed grace of his review of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" on line, and further goes on in the truncated "abstract" it does post to mangle Lahr's dramatic wisdom.

It's criminal! But no matter -- here's the gist.

Lahr begins with the obliviousness of the central character [played by Dianne Wiest, in the image]

When a character tells Madame Ranevskaya (the vulnerable and resolate Dianne Wiest), who is as sensationally blind to her predicament as she is to herself, that he saw "a very funny show at the theater last night,": she snaps..."People shouldn't be going to plays. They should be looking at themselves. Lives are so gray...gray, and you talk about things that don't matter."

This, of course, is a perfect description of the play we're watching. 

Which raises the question -- what are we watching? 

...as the actors enter Santo Losquano's elegant circular arena, where canvas is spread on the floor as in a circus ring, spotlights isolate a toy train, a hobbyhorse, and a minaiature table and chairs. Madame Ranevskaya and her entourage recall their former bliss on their soon-to-be-lost estate ("Happiness and I would wake up together," she says) while sitting on the miniature furniture, like giants in a child's universe. 

Chekhov began the play in a nursery for a reason: the adults before us are unwilling to take responsibility for the lives they are lamenting; they are infantile and unformed. "I feel young. As a child," Charlotta (Roberta Maxwell), the governess, says, adding, "Where I'm from, who I am -- not a clue." Cluelessness is the essence of Chekhov's comedy. 

What are these alleged grown-ups missing? Something does matter...the issue of the enormous natural estate that no longer can support these feckless nobles and their serfs must be faced. 

The cherry orchard must be saved -- or not. 

"The Cherry Orchard"...was Chekhov's last and most Expressionistic play. (Less than six months after its debut, in January 1904, he died, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four.) Chekhov insisted to the play's first director and star, Konstantin Stanislavsky, that "The Cherry Orchard" was "not a drama, but a comedy, in places even a farce." 

In other words, this will be in part about the question of the fate of the orchard -- which could easily turn melodramatic -- but it will also be about the larger question, which is us, our foolishness.

The playwright will examine us, like the doctor he was, "interrogate" us, as the academic phrase goes, and mock us at times. It's not just an environmental question, but an existential one.

What will be our relationship with our land, our property, and, ultimately, our planet?

The pushy but compassionate Lopakhin (John Turturro), who grew up on the estate as a peasant and is now himself a landowner, has a sound suggestion: in order to liquidate their debts and keep their property, which otherwise will be auctioned off, Madame Ranevskaya and Gayev must cut down their enormous cherry orchard, divide up the land, and tease it out in small parcels, on which summer cottages can be built. "It's all just so vulgar," Madame Ranevskaya says.

After days of coaxing the family to take action, Lopakhin implores Gayev, "Tell me what you want me to do!" "About what?" Gayev says. He and his sister cannot see what's right under their noses. 

Lopakhin, who represents the new economic order, on the other hand, recognizes an opportunity and, finally, buys the estate himself. (Turturro does a fine, high-stepping boot-tapping cakewalk around the stage in celebration of this social and financial coup.) 

What could go wrong for this winner? 

Lopakhin, however, is blinkered in matters of the heart. In a superb, devastating scene with Madame Ranveskaya's daughter Varya (the excellent Juliet Rylance), who wants to marry him, Lopakhin lets love pass him by. 

It's a moment out of John Cage. The most devastating line in the play is the one not spoken.

The nobility cannot see one "thing that matters;" the developer cannot see another. 

Two roads diverged in a wood: Robert Frost

Louis B. Jones pens a great essay on Robert Frost, which thankfully The Threepenny Review puts on-line. 

Here are two gems from it, set together: 

It seldom occurs to me, frankly, to contemplate any of the thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird; nor could I recite from memory more than a few lines of “Four Quartets,” poems which on the Truth-Beauty Meter (or the Ambition Meter) must score up there near the Tao Te Ching and the Sermon on the Mount. I wonder if, in the dark times of my life, or the merely dim times, I’ve gotten more of real consolation and upbringing from Frost. Frost’s having been acquainted with the night; his temptation to pause a little too long in the dark, cold, futile woods; his letting a boughful of snow dump over his head and not worsen but improve his dreadful day; or just his thinking it’s important that a newborn calf “totters” when its mother licks it—all these homely considerations have come to rescue me often, in the real life I lead while my hand is on the hoe-handle or the steering wheel, my eye on the oncoming road, my ear attentive to NPR or just the valley winds. Moreover, in almost every Frost poem, there’s somewhere the encounter with darkness, darkness deepened and worsened, perversely, by putting on light versification’s frock.

Then into Frost's most famous poem: 

Frost used to speak with mockery of himself as “that poet of stone walls, birches, and belilaced cellar holes,” with a sarcasm licensed by the open secret of his career: that most of his work is about the terrors, death and meaninglessness and solitary inarticulacy. The temptation to linger which is offered by cold dark woods is not a lightsome one, it’s rather a desolate one. And anybody who will simply read the twenty lines about choosing the road less traveled will see that it’s not a boast of the poet’s own nonconformity, nor any kind of endorsement of nonconformity—not at all. It’s an admission that no existential decision of ours really ever makes any “difference.”

But even if said ironically, how can "I took the one less traveled by/and that has made all the difference" be dismissed? The music transcends the philosophy. 

Why we shouldn't like writer's houses

From a marvelous piece by April Bernard in the NYRB (only partially available on-line, I should add):

Here’s what I hate about writers’ houses: the basic mistakes. The idea that art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.

Once long ago someone took me to visit Shakespeare’s house in Stratford. I couldn’t go inside; it felt like snooping, it felt like preening, as if we could own a piece of him for ourselves. As far as I know, the only way to claim our real inheritance from Shakespeare is by reading and studying and memorizing—and, if we are lucky, by acting—his words.

All true. but it's still hard to resist the word made flesh. 

Wordworth's house in Cambria, England. 

Horror in Happy Valley: The Jerry Sandusky Movie

The scene: a nice little college town, where everyone is happy and peppy and civic minded, and really loves the football team. Someone from Colorado or someplace, transfers into town for a new job and … starts noticing things. It turns out that the town patriarch (Paterno) isn’t even the ruler…

Something Else is…

A comment from Rod Dreher's ever-interesting blog at The American Conservative. 

Bank Transfer Day: The Insta-Protest Pays Off

From The Daily Beast, the best story I've seen on the remarkably successful Bank Transfer Day action, which went from an idea to billions of dollars in accounts transferred in a matter of weeks: 

Kristen Christian was feeling more than a little fed up with the county’s big banks when a month ago today she logged on to Facebook to share an idea with friends:  withdraw your money from the likes of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, and instead open an account with a credit union.  She even chose a deadline for taking action: this Saturday, Nov. 5.

“Together we can ensure that these banking institutions will always remember the 5th of November,” Christian, then a 27-year-old art-gallery owner living in Los Angeles, wrote on Facebook. “If we shift our funds from the for-profit banking institutions in favor of not-for-profit credit unions before this date, we will send a clear message that conscious consumers won’t support companies with unethical business practices.”

[edit] 

More than a few people seem to agree. The Credit Union National Association, a D.C.-based advocacy group, recently surveyed 5,000 credit unions across the country. The vast majority reported a surge in membership and a surge in deposits. The association estimated that credit unions across the country have picked up at least 650,000 new customers over the past month and collectively added $4.5 billion in savings accounts, whether from new members or from existing members shifting funds.

It's an amazing start for a protest action, fueled by pent-up resentment at ginormous banks who see fit to charge their customers pretty much whatever they wish.

Ted Rall finds the humor in that:

But it's so so true! Why do we tolerate the self-serving of huge financial institutions? When we would scoff at an ordinary citizen who took the same stand? What are we -- masochists? 

Prediction fulfilled: Keystone probably delayed indefinitely

As predicted a couple of days ago: Obama administration "considering a move" to delay decision on the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The hope, apparent in this Los Angeles Times story, is that the pipeline proves too controversial to survive a transparent vetting. 

From Neela Banerjee's story, which should make the front page. 

"The tar sands are awful and they need to stay in the ground," said Courtney Hight, 32, a former Obama organizer and former staff member for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "Building the pipeline is not the way to break free from oil."

Hight was joined by several thousand peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park, just north of the White House.

Aretha Franklin's song "Respect" played over loudspeakers, and demonstrators, including a farmer from Kansas and townspeople from Nebraska, walked onto streets east and west of the White House and completed the encirclement just south of it.

The permit process for the $7-billion pipeline has already taken more than three years.

Further delays could make the pipeline financially unfeasible for TransCanada and the companies that plan to ship crude through it. The oil industry has argued that if Keystone XL does not get a permit, TransCanada and its clients would develop the oil sands anyway and ship the crude west in a pipeline to the Pacific Coast. But environmentalists contend that there is far too much local resistance in Canada for that to occur.

"My guess is, if there is a delay, it could very well kill the pipeline of its own weight," said John H. Adams, founding director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, at Sunday's rally.

From a photo feed of the protesters surrounding the White House today, an inspiring young activist refusing to accept the tar sands pipeline disaster. 

Glee: Best TV show ever? A neuroscientific perspective

About ten years ago, while pursuing a story on the roots of depression, I tracked down the great scientist Jaak Panksepp, originator of the field of affective -- that is, emotional -- neuroscience, and he kindly let me interview him over the phone for half an hour. 

Panksepp has spent years studying the physiology of emotion in the brain, from autism to sleep, but his central breakthrough, in the early 1970's, was his focus on physiological similarity in the brain between opiates and brain-created (endogenous) chemicals linked to friendship and love.

In an interview, he explained: 

Our guiding central idea was that there was a remarkable family resemblance between social bonding and narcotic addiction--from the initial attachment-dependence phase to the eventual tolerance-withdrawal phases. 

I was interested in the connection between music, its apparent power to confront depression; and, possibly, to induce it. And, if possible, to further look at the curious fact that so many great musicians (Billie Holliday, Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Charlie Parker, to name a few) were opiate addicts. 

Does listening to sad songs help us overcome depression, or help us wallow in it?

And what about a band like Nirvana, who uses the raw, roaring power of punk rock to drive depression back, with the likes of Stay Away? 

In his long and dazzling career, Panksepp has weighed in on my topics, but a sad twist in his own life led him to an interest in music, specifically, in music that has the power to bring on chills. 

Panksepp lost his beloved daughter, a teenager, who was killed in a crash with a drunk driver. He struggled to cope with her death, but discovered over time that certain songs would bring her back to his mind. Specifically, Whitney Houston's version of I Will Always Love You. 

[Panksepp] argues that chills may emerge from brain dynamics associated with the perception of social loss, specifically with separation calls. Separation calls are cries by young animals that inform parents of the whereabouts of offspring that have become lost. The “coldness” of chills may provide increased motivation for social reunion in the parents. So certain kinds of sad and bittersweet music may achieve its beauty and its chilling effect through a symbolic rendition of the separation call.

In our discussion, Panksepp forcefully argued that the power of this kind of music, the way we know it is working on us at an endogenous opiate level, are those chills. That "Dionysian response," he said, is the sign of art at its most powerful. Art that makes us want to go crazy. 

Watching Glee a week ago, I felt chills during this:

The fact that the joyful, unashamed, deliciously gay Darren Criss sings the song (It's Not Unusual) Tom Jones made famous only adds to the universality of the scene, and helps drive the crowd wild. 

Never before in my life has a taped television show sent chills up my spine, and I've been watching TV in America for fifty years, give or take.

That's why, personally, I think Glee may well be the best television show ever.

But wait, there's more! Variety critic David Benedict argues cogently that musicals have been disrespected by critics and the Academy because they focus on dramatizations of happiness.

Specifically, the happiness of love, which is what they do best -- better than any other medium. 

Complaining that musicals are not “realistic” (as if, for example, action pictures are) completely misses the point, although it is one that, of all people, tractor-driving farmer Judy Garland asks in Summer Stock. Bewildered by performers who are going to “put the show on right here” in her barn, she asks Gene Kelly to explain. In the wings of the makeshift stage he says, “If the boy tells the girl that he loves her, he doesn’t just say it: he sings it.” To which, reasonably enough, she responds, “Why doesn’t he just say it?” The number that follows makes his and the wider point. It is not that musicals cannot work through narrative, it is that they choose a richer, more expressively full-blooded route consciously abandoning realism for idealistic fantasy.

Add to this, the fact that the 21st century may well prove to be the century where we expect media experiences to be repeatable, and musicals -- which can be played again and again, like songs, without dimunition, indeed, with augmentation -- and it's no surprise that Glee, surely the most replayable show on TV, is a sensation. 

I wonder if they'll ever take on Smells Like Teen Spirit.