Slower than Molasses in January

After nearly two years of gestation (procrastination), I'm finally putting all of our photos from Europe on the web in an organized fashion. Oh no, they're not all there for you to see, but at least I've started. Eventually I'll also be posting all of our photos since Europe, too.

We are posting to our Flickr site: J.M.K. See what you think.

I won't tell you how long I worked to get things just right. (I tend to obsess about organizational tasks like this. I often forget to eat when I'm working.) And it's probably not perfected yet. But I'm pretty happy with what I've worked out.

I'm posting photos in chronological order. The best way to start looking at them is to treat the albums on the left hand side as a menu. The top few albums will be the menu choices. For now, click on the top album (A Year in Europe), and then the structure should be clear to you. Flickr doesn't allow things to be set up exactly like I want them, but I've tweaked things to get an approximation.

I'd love to have your comments and suggestions. Let me know how easily you were able to use the site.

New Neil Young

The ever-enigmatic Neil Young has a new "broadside" album available for free listen on the front page of his website: NeilYoung.com. The songs, written and recorded in the last month, comprise his response to the Iraq war, and the music's delivery (free web stream, then digital download, and finally a CD) is a result of his impatience with the slow music industry.

Read the NY Times article below, or watch this video of a recent interview with Neil, for more information. But first go to his website, so you have something to listen to while you read.

Neil Young's 'Living With War' Shows He Doesn't Like It
New York Times
April 28, 2006
By Jon Pareles

Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, "Living With War" (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four weeks ago and as of Friday can be heard in its entirety free on his Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and on satellite radio networks.

Mr. Young half-jokingly describes "Living With War" as his "metal folk protest" album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; "History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe," he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a sound that harks back to Young albums like "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Ragged Glory."

Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists "Don't need no more lies," longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.

In a song whose title alone has already brought him the fury of right-wing blogs, he urges, "Let's Impeach the President." It ends with Mr. Young shouting, "Flip, flop," amid contradictory sound bites of President Bush. But Mr. Young insists the album is nonpartisan.

"If you impeach Bush, you're doing a huge favor for the Republicans," he argued, speaking by telephone from California. "They can run again with some pride."

Mr. Young is a Canadian citizen. But having lived in the United States since the 1960's, he sings as if he were an American. The title song of "Living With War" quotes "The Star-Spangled Banner," and the album ends with the choir singing "America the Beautiful."

The album's release is a high-tech, globe-spanning update of a topical song tradition that's much older than recordings: the broadside, a songwriter's rapid response to events of the day. "They had these songs that everybody knew the melodies to," Mr. Young said. "They'd just write new words, and the minstrels would be traveling around spreading the word. Music spreads like wildfire when you do it that way."

On Tuesday a higher-quality version will be for sale as a download from online music stores, and a CD will be in stores next week as soon as it can be manufactured and shipped. Eventually a DVD will be released with video of the recording sessions, which took place March 29 to April 6. Many of the songs on the album were first takes, recorded immediately after Mr. Young taught them to the band. On March 31 he wrote three songs: "Let's Impeach the President" before breakfast, "Looking for a Leader" after he recorded "Let's Impeach the President" and "Roger and Out" the same evening.

Mr. Young's Web site will have a more elaborate presentation, available free. It will include a page designed like a cable-news broadcast, complete with visuals (including recording-session scenes), ticker and logo: LWW (for "Living With War") rather than CNN. "Even if it turns out that we can't sell it with the news in it, we won't sell it, we'll just stream it," he said. "We don't have to sell it. We can still get it out there. This has nothing to do with money as far as I'm concerned."

Mr. Young wants the album heard as a whole. The online streams play through from beginning to end; until the CD is ready, the downloadable copies will be available only as a bundle of the full album. "That first impression is so important," he said. "Instead of just going to 'Let's Impeach the President,' people will have to absorb the whole thing. To understand the songs, you need to understand where the whole album's coming from. It protects my right as an artist to have the work presented the way I created it."

Mr. Young has always been impatient with the time lag between writing a song and getting it to the world. When four student protesters were shot dead at Kent State University in 1970, he wrote "Ohio," recorded it with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and released it two and a half weeks later by sending acetates — preliminary pressings — to radio stations. (He will be on tour this summer as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in what's billed as the Freedom of Speech Tour.)

After 9/11 Mr. Young wrote "Let's Roll," a song about the passengers who brought down a hijacked plane in Pennsylvania, and released it free online. "Now we have the Internet," he said. "It doesn't sound as good, but it's much faster, and it gets around the world. That's huge, that's as big as we get."

The songs on "Living With War" are straightforward and single-minded, setting aside the allusive, enigmatic quality of Mr. Young's rock classics. "These are all ideas we've heard before," he said. "There's nothing new in there. I just connected the dots."

The protest song, rocked-up slightly from its folky 1960's form, has been making a comeback during the Iraq war, from arena bands like Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones and Green Day to indie-rockers like Bright Eyes and blues-rockers like Keb' Mo' and Robert Cray. Bruce Springsteen's latest album is a tribute to the protest-song mentor Pete Seeger, although it features old folk songs rather than Mr. Seeger's topical material.

"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Mr. Young said. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal wave. This is just the tip of it."

Mr. Young said that he made "Living With War" not with a plan, but on an impulse. "I don't know what actually did it," he said. "It happened really fast, faster than I think I've ever experienced. There was just a kind of a wave."

As in the 60's, protest songs risk self-righteousness and preaching only to the converted. Only the most generalized ones outlast the interest in whatever headlines inspired them. There's not a lot of mystery to the songs on "Living With War"; they make their points as forthrightly as possible. Yet in the Internet era information — not just songs but blogs, videos, photos, drawings, e-mail jottings — is in the paradoxical position of being published worldwide and perhaps archived forever, but also being impulsive and ephemeral. A song for the Internet doesn't have to be one for the ages. Like an old broadside, it just has to get around for its moment, for right now. "Living With War" — irate, passionate, tuneful, thoughtful and obstinate — is definitely worth a click.

Drug Policy

This is a very interesting report on a new Mexican drug policy likely to be put into law. On the face of it, I agree with the intentions of the law. Only time will tell how it actually affects small time drug users and big time drug distributors.

Mexico Votes to Decriminalize Some Drugs
AP
April 29, 2006
9:06 a.m. ET

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexicans would be allowed to possess small amounts of cocaine, heroin, even ecstasy for their personal use under a bill approved by lawmakers that some worry could prove to be a lure to young Americans.

The bill now only needs President Vicente Fox's signature to become law and that does not appear to be an obstacle. His office said that decriminalizing drugs will free up police to focus on major dealers.

''This law gives police and prosecutors better legal tools to combat drug crimes that do so much damage to our youth and children,'' said Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar.

The Senate approved the bill Friday in the final hours of its closing session. Mexico's lower house had already endorsed the legislation.

The measure appeared to surprise U.S. officials. State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus said the department was trying to get ''more information'' about it. One U.S. diplomat, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said ''we're still studying the legislation, but any effort to decriminalize illegal drugs would not be helpful.''

Some worried the law would increase drug addiction in Mexico and cause problems with the United States. Millions of American youths visit Mexico's beach resorts and border towns each year.

''A lot of Americans already come here to buy medications they can't get up there ... Just imagine, with heroin,'' said Ulisis Bon, a drug treatment expert in Tijuana, where heroin use is rampant.

In off-the-record chats and through their communications with U.S. officials, Mexican officials tried to depict the drug bill as a simple clarification of existing laws. But the changes are clear.

Currently, Mexican law leaves open the possibility of dropping charges against people caught with drugs if they can prove they are drug addicts and if an expert certifies they were caught with ''the quantity necessary for personal use.''

The new bill drops the ''addict'' requirement, allows ''consumers'' to have drugs, and sets out specific allowable quantities, which do not appear in the current law.

Those quantities are sometimes eye-popping: Mexicans would be allowed to posses 2.2 pounds of peyote, the button-sized hallucinogenic cactus used in some Indian religious ceremonies.

Police would no longer bother with possession of up to 25 milligrams of heroin, 5 grams of marijuana (about one-fifth of an ounce, or about four joints), or 0.5 grams of cocaine -- the equivalent of about 4 ''lines,'' or half the standard street-sale quantity.

The law lays out allowable quantities for a large array of other drugs, including LSD, MDA, MDMA (ecstasy, about two pills' worth), and amphetamines.

However the bill stiffens penalties for trafficking and possession of drugs -- even small quantities -- by government employees or near schools, and maintains criminal penalties for drug sales.

Sales of all those drugs would remain illegal under the proposed law, unlike in the Netherlands, where the sale of marijuana for medical use is legal and it can be bought with a prescription in pharmacies.

And while Dutch authorities look the other way regarding the open sale of cannabis in designated coffee shops -- something Mexican police seem unlikely to do -- the Dutch have zero tolerance for heroin and cocaine.

Sen. Miguel Angel Navarro of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party argued against the bill. ''This authorizes the consumption of opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine, and a variety of drugs that can only be bought illicitly.''

Roman Catholic Bishop Jose Guadalupe Martin Rabago, president of the Mexican Council of Bishops, also expressed concern.

''It's not by legalizing the possession or use of drugs that drug trafficking is going to be combatted,'' the bishop told reporters, ''and that's why the government should be cautious about implementing this measure.''

The law comes at a time of heightened tensions over a U.S. proposal for immigration reform, including legalization of many of America's estimated 11 million undocumented migrants.

A demonstration by thousands of Mexican workers Friday to promote union solidarity turned into a protest against America's vast influence on the nation's economy, with many protesters saying they will take part in a boycott of U.S. products next week. The proposed boycott is timed to coincide with Monday's "Day Without Immigrants" protest in the U.S., aimed at pushing Congress to approve the immigration reform.

Ethan Nadelmann, director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, said Mexico's bill removed ''a huge opportunity for low-level police corruption.'' Mexican police often release people detained for minor drug possession, in exchange for bribes.

Punta Gorda

When I was younger, I didn't shy away from traveling-related escapades. I've also owned my share of vehicles (10) and had a few adventures both in and with them. (Remind me to tell you about rebuilding the VW engine in the living room of the Arkansas drug dealer.) But since returning from Germany, I've become downright stodgy. So next week I'm off on another adventurous trip.

On Tuesday, at 6:45 am, I'm flying out of Wichita, bound for Ft. Myers, Florida. I will be picked up at the airport by Ann Kelly and her family, and driven to her house in Punta Gorda, Florida. Earlier this week I bought Ann's car through Cars.com, and I'm flying down to pick it up and drive it 1,600 miles home! Yes, I'll be doing this alone.

I'm buying a 1984 Mercedes-Benz 190D. It's a diesel version of the smallest Mercedes model from that era. There's currently an eBay auction underway for a car nearly identical to mine. I haven't actually seen the car I'm buying, not even a photo, but I'm told it's green with tan leather interior. This should be what it looks like.

I never imagined I would buy a Mercedes. But I recently undertook a search to find a car with some specific characteristics, and this car came up as the best match. I decided that I wanted to get a car that I can convert to run on vegetable oil. If you're not familiar with the concept, look at the Wikipedia, Greasel and Greasecar websites. All diesel engines can run on vegetable oil, with a tiny bit of modification. In fact, Rudolf Diesel intended for his engine to run on peanut oil. I plan to buy a conversion kit from Greasel.

Where does the vegetable oil come from? The primary source of vegetable oil used for fuel is the restaurant industry. Since they must pay to dispose of their waste oil, they are usually glad to have someone take it for free. The waste oil must be filtered before using it in a diesel engine, but the total cost for filters and fuel expenses generally runs about $.19 per gallon. Not bad, especially in a car that gets 40 mpg!

Mercedes diesels from the 1980s routinely last 500,000 miles or more. They are considered one of the most reliable engines ever built. There are fanatics out there who have more than a million miles on their Mercedes! The car I'm buying currently has 110,000 miles, all of them driven by a little old lady named Ann. She put 4,500 miles on the car . . . in the last 5 years! Now her kids have taken her license away, because of her age, so she has to sell her car. And I'm the lucky buyer. I could only have dreamed of getting a single-owner, senior-citizen-driven, low-mileage, Florida car! Since Mercedes cars are such a status icon, their owners usually take very good care of them. Ann and her 190D are no exception. (How can I possibly know this, you ask, since I haven't even seen a photo? Well, I had a mechanic from Punta Gorda do an inspection and give me a full report.)

Barring unforeseen disaster, I'll be puttering out of Punta Gorda sometime on Tuesday afternoon, headed for Kansas. I'll let you know how it goes.

Lizard coup d'état

These folks are pathetic! Twenty-two days without a single word. They obviously need some management to get their keyboards clacking again. So I'm taking over this listing ship; we'll have things righted in no time.

And from now on there's a new policy-meme: no blogging = no blogger. That's right, Mr. Zimmer, Mr. Medalize, Dr. Ezra & Ms. Lizardé, another stint of bloggy silence and you will be silenced. Don't think I won't kick your ass off this Meme!

Which brings me to another thing. What's with your language? We need some color around here! And write something personal for once. This isn't a book club. You've all been slacking off lately.

I'll be a good dictator and start off by following my own rules. (That doesn't mean I can't change them or ignore if I want to.) But right now I'll tell you what I'm up to next week.

Low @ The Record Bar

Last night I was privileged to take in one of the best shows I have ever heard! Low performed at The Record Bar in Kansas City, and we drove three hours to join them.

The room was good, the crowd of about 75 people was attentive and responsive, and the music was excellent. After cancelling the end of their tour for The Great Destroyer last year due to mental health issues, Low came back with all of the complexity and creativity I could hope for. They seem to be backing off of their recent pop exploration a bit and revisiting the dissonance and tension they've been mining for the last few albums. They also reached way back to 1994 for a rendition of Lazy off of their very first album, I Could Live in Hope. They played a couple other old songs that I think were on EPs, three or four from Trust, a bunch from The Great Destroyer, and then they threw in a few new songs for good measure.

I think the highlights of the night for me were a frighteningly gripping performance of On the Edge Of, and then a fun second encore with strobe lights and a deafening version of When I Go Deaf. Alan seemed much more relaxed and willing to improvise than I've seen before. He repeatedly tiptoed the line between artful distortion and out of control feedback, always pulling back from the edge to burst back into recognizable song just in time. Previous shows have always appeared quite scripted, and Alan commented a few years ago that he doesn't know how to solo. I think he's breaking out, and I don't think I was the only one to enjoy the experience.

If you get a chance to see them yet this tour, it's worth your money. I think they're currently at the top of their game. Speaking from experience with mental illness, no one knows how long it will last.