"If Arcade Fire’s ragtag debut, Funeral, found its ecstatic force by celebrating the elusive comforts of community (hence four songs with the word neighborhood in the title), and 2007’s aggrieved, galvanizing Neon Bible powered forth in opposition to the hollow sparkle of church, state, and celebrity, then the harder, denser The Suburbs burns on behalf of the belief that modern culture is missing its heart — and to give up the search is to send one’s soul to oblivion.
Or, in Suburbs speak, to the Sprawl, where everything is connected but nothing ever touches."
Spin’s review of the new Arcade Fire album “The Suburbs.” I’m pretty sure this is my most anticipated album of the year. I hope hope hope that they keep pumping out incredible albums.
Where everything is connected but nothing ever touches. That’s it.
This is infuriating. Bureaucratic measures being taken to stop local farmers from meeting a growing demand for real food.
What’s behind all these raids? They seem to stem from increasing concern at both the state and federal level about the spread of private food groups that have sprung up around the country in recent years — food clubs and buying groups to provide specialized local products that are generally unavailable in groceries, like grass-fed meats, pastured eggs, fermented foods, and, in some cases, raw dairy products. Because they are private and limited to consumers who sign up for membership, these groups generally avoid obtaining retail and public health licenses required of retailers that sell to the general public.
In late 2008 and early 2009, the representatives of state agriculture agencies in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois met via phone conferences with representatives of the FDA to map a plan for targeting raw-milk buying clubs in the Midwest. The meetings came to light after Max Kane, the owner of a Wisconsin buying club who was subpoenaed by Wisconsin authorities for the names of his customers and suppliers, obtained email accounts of the sessions via a Freedom of Information request to Wisconsin’s Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection department. (Kane has since been prosecuted by Wisconsin authorities for contempt of court for failing to give up the names; his case is under appeal after he was found guilty last December.)
Later in the article we see this about how well our judicial system protects our rights as citizens:
While the U.S. Constitution’s fourth amendment suggests judges should exercise tight controls over search warrants (“no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause…”), Kennedy observes, “I haven’t seen an agency turned down yet” over the last four years in requests for search warrants connected with raw milk and other food production and distribution.
The article goes on to list 5 steps that can be taken to prepare for a raid, since the targets cannot resist them outright.
Michael Kimmelman has a great essay in the NYT about the current show at the National Gallery in London called “Close Examinations: Fakes, Mistakes, and Discoveries” about art sleuthing and the science of finding out whether a work is genuine or not. At first glance, he says, the exhibit almost seems too academic, but look closer and you’ll see:
It’s one of those gems, which, amid the hard science, stumbles onto squishier truths about what we are really looking for when we look at art. Out to instruct us in the chemistry of painting, it ends up suggesting how elusive art remains despite all the gadgets that we devise to master it.
Along the way it riffs on the mistaken-identity theme: a picture given in good faith by the City of Nuremberg to Charles I in 1636 as a work by Dürer that’s proved to be a copy; a copy of a Veronese that, after grime is removed, emerges as the genuine article. And there are forgeries, art’s whodunits, pandering to our basest instinct for knocking experts off pedestals. People love fakes because fakes play into the populist suspicion that much art is really just a scam, a suspicion encouraged by the fancy names wrongly attached to and insane prices often paid for the stuff.
Read it all the way to the end. Great essay.
One of the few things I agree on with the existing tea parties is that the Republicans and Democrats have made themselves hopeless hostages of political money and bargained away their legitimacy. In line with my general belief that American life must downscale or die, I’m not wholly persuaded that federalism can survive in any case - but assuming it will lumber on for a while anyway, the two major parties cannot retain their monopoly on power. Indeed, it is in the natural order of things that this country must periodically endure a realignment of political ideas and political power. This tends to occur during moments of cultural convulsion, and that is exactly the moment we are in as the sun sets on the fossil fuel based industrial extravaganza and we enter a crisis of intense resource austerity.
-James Howard Kunstler “My Tea Party”
