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Today's Stories November 7 / 9, 2008 Jean Bricmont November 6, 2008 Frank J. Menetrez John Chuckman P. Sainath Joshua Frank Edna Canetti John Ross Norman Solomon Fawzia Afzal-Khan Robert Weissman Harvey Wasserman Website of the Day
November 5, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Chuck Spinney Ishmael Reed Chris Floyd Binoy Kampmark Michael Donnelly David Macaray Peter Morici Manuel Garcia, Jr. William Willers Website of the Day November 4, 2008 Kathleen Christison James Ridgeway Winslow T. Wheeler Mike Whitney Conn Hallinan Holly M. Barker Ashley Smith Andy Worthington Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Doug Lummis Carlos Fierro Website of the Day November 3, 2008 Patrick Cockburn John Kennedy O'Hara Peter Montague Steve Conn Andrew Gebhardt Ron Jacobs Ralph Nader Niranjan Ramakrishnan Uri Avnery Dave Lindorff Fred Gardner DC Larson David Michael Green Val Strange Tuli Kupferberg / Website of the Day
October 31 , 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Douglas Valentine Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Dr. Ignacy Nowopolski Alan Maass William P. O’Connor Patrick Irelan Brian Cloughley Mats Svensson Binoy Kampmark Steve Conn Alan Farago Morton Skorodin Robert Bryce Wajahat Ali David Yearsley Dennis Loo Pam Martens Stephen Martin Richard Rhames Ramzy Baroud Missy Beattie Howard Lisnoff Richard Neville Saul Landau / Kim Nicolini Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 30, 2008 Cockburn / St. Clair Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Glen Ford Stanley Heller William Loren Katz Joshua Frank James McEnteer Felice Pace Jonathan Cook Reza Fiyouzat Website of the Day
October 29, 2008 Arno J. Mayer Eric Toussaint Matt Gonzalez Steven Conn Jonathan Cook Patrick Bond Ramzi Kysia Douglas Valentine Stephen Martin Margaret Dooley-Sammuli Amee Chew Website of the Day
October 28, 2008 James G. Abourezk Andy Worthington Gary Leupp Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whitney Gregory V. Button Ralph Nader P. Sainath Martha Rosenberg Charles R. Larson Website of the Day October 27, 2008 Michael Hudson Barbara Rose Johnston John Dinges Mike Whitney Mary Lynn Cramer Greenspan's Higher Power Alan Farago David Michael Green Andy Worthington George Wuerthner Niranjan Ramakrishnan Website of the Day October 24 / 26, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Ishmael Reed Mike Whitney Don Santina Scott Boehm Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Binoy Kampmark Linn Washington Jr. Nicole Colson Bernard Chazelle Brian Jones Christopher Brauchli Benjamin Dangl Val Strange Steve Early David Macaray Allison Kilkenny Richard Rhames Jim Bell Kris De Welde Barry Clemson Adam Engel Mark Scaramella Tuli Kupferberg Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend October 23, 2008 Allan J. Lichtman Todd Chretien John Ross Peter Morici Mats Svensson Marlene Martin Robert Jensen / Margaret Kimberley Deepak Tripathi David Morris Website of the Day October 22, 2008 Brian Cloughley Heather Gray Jeff Birkenstein Ralph Nader DC Larson David Swanson Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth Larry Everest Robert Fantina Martha Rosenberg Stephen Martin Website of the Day October 21, 2008 Vijay Prashad Paul Craig Roberts Corey D. B. Walker Steve Breyman Eric Toussaint Wajahat Ali Robert Weitzel Brendan Cooney Dave Lindorff Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing Patrick B. Barr Omar Barghouti Website of the Day October 20, 2008 Michael Hudson Anthony DiMaggio Tariq Ali Uri Avnery Bill Quigley Ben Rosenfeld David Michael Green William S. Lind Chris Genovali Stephen Martin Howard Lisnoff David Yearsley Website of the Day October 17 / 19, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Pam Martens Paul Craig Roberts Mike Whtney Michael D. Yates Suzanne Smith Carl Boggs Ralph Nader Fidel Castro Dave Marsh Saul Landau Jo Guldi Kevin Zeese Larry Everest Steve Early David Macaray Ben Terrall Missy Beattie Don Monkerud Helen Redmond Dan Bacher Wajahat Ali Farzana Versey Vladimir Frolov Kim Nicolini Poets Basement Website of the Day
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Weekend Edition The Musical PatriotWhere Late the Sweet Birds SangBy DAVID YEARSLEY There is no substitute for live musical performance. It is not only that the human ear is still, and will probably always be, far more sophisticated and sensitive than the best microphones. Experiencing music delivered by living beings is always about much more than mere sound. As yet, no digital medium can even approximate stage presence. Here’s betting that Silicon Valley engineers will never master the metaphysical. Real performance is not just to be marveled at in the concert hall, however. The natural world teaches us the lesson of the live far more forcefully. There is so much more to the Northern Cardinal’s song than the confidence of its fanfare opening and the seduction of its sliding second theme. The pitches and complex cadence of the bird’s music are richer and more powerful when performed at the top of a locust snag above a humid gorge with the rolling New York hills emerging from the dawn horizon! And what would the cardinal’s song be without its bright red plumage, its black face, its fat beak, and flexing crest? A recording of a bird’s song, however beautiful as abstracted music, is as much about the absence of the performer as it is about the beauty of the melody. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York is the most famous center for the study of birds and has the world’s largest collection of birdsong. Though birdsong has long fascinated musicians, Oliver Messiaen was the most assiduous student of avian sound. Birdsong is an essential symbolic and mystical feature of Messiaen’s oeuvre. An active transcriber in the field in his beret and holding a clipboard, Messiaen transcribed the songs taken up in his Oiseaux exotiques of 1956 not from nature, but from a set of six 78 rpm records put out in 1942 by Cornell. When he came to Cornell in the 1980s for a series of concerts, he spent all the time he could at the Lab investigating its archive of birdsong, then still consisting of analog recordings. It is not just the thousands of species represented in the lab’s catalog that astonish, but the range of individual performers and performances. There are 401 different recordings available on-line through the lab’s website of the Northern Cardinal. Although obvious as soon as one steps back and looks at the range of human speech and song, the individual variations to be heard within the unity that is a bird species’ language are inspiring. When a bird goes extinct so does a vast array of unique performances and the possibility of future individual expressions of a song. Eight-hundred pound bronzes don’t sing, nor do extinct species. At last night’s opening of a remarkable exhibition of the latest work of sculptor Todd McGrain, five human-scale bronzes of vanished birds huddled in the stone and glass entrance hall of the Cornell Lab’s new building. The dark warmth of their forms blunted the brittle, slightly muted light cast from above. Within earshot of the world’s greatest archive of birdsong, the silence of these five figures was overwhelming. For his Lost Bird Project, McGrain has chosen four North American species and one of the North Atlantic and lower Arctic: the Passenger Pigeon, the Labrador Duck, the Heath Hen (an extinct subspecies of the Greater Prairie-Chicken), the Carolina Parakeet, and the Great Auk. As far as I could find out, The Cornell Lab has no recordings of any of their voices. No aural trace of them remains. The most famous of these birds, and the one whose extinction counts as the most infamous, was the Passenger Pigeon. “No mere bird, he was a biological storm,” wrote Aldo Leopold in his 1947 On a Monument to the Pigeon. Leopold’s is the most beautiful account of a bird and its demise:
The Passenger Pigeon once made up nearly half of the land-bird population of the North America, its numbers estimated to be between three and five billion; pigeons eclipsed the sun for hours as they migrated at sixty miles per hour. The species was the most sociable on earth, the size of its flocks second only to those of the desert locust. Such social cohesiveness coupled with the rapacity of the Europeans wiped out the species with horrible speed. Its cheap meat fed slavery and industrialization. The last wild bird was shot in 1914; the final pair lived in the Cincinnati Zoo, where the final survivor, Martha, died in 1918. Europeans marveled at the near-deafening noise from the seemingly endless nesting colonies of pigeons. Only written accounts survive of the species’ vocal array, but these were done with of captive birds. Once taken from the wild, pigeons never mated. Thus their erotic vocalization—that most important discourse of any language, verbal or otherwise—was never “scientifically” described. McGrain’s seven-foot tall Passenger is Pigeon is as colorless as it is mute. There is as little suggestion of its brilliant feathers as there is of its lost songs. Rather than perched on its circular base, the bird emerges from it. Wings cleaving to one side of that base and extending down to the floor, the body rises almost vertically, the beak pointed obliquely upward. Unmoving, the sculpture is nonetheless full of a energy, as if the bird is about to stretch or contemplates flight or looks up at a flock of his kind already flying in masses above. Like Pygmalion’s Galatea the statue seems on the verge of lifeBut extinction is the final cessation of motion: one sees that in the stuffed specimens in the Lab’s nearby display cases. In McGrain’s sculpture the absence of these birds’ most distinctive characteristics—their color and voice—are made all the more painful by the bronzes’ smooth, black surface and elegiac form. This is monumental sculpture in both senses: large and memorial, as much about presence is about loss. One paradoxically confronts the unretrievable. Of all the five sculptures in the Cornell Lab exhibition the Passenger Pigeon reminded me most of Constantin Brancusi’s birds. The Guggenheim’s Bird in Space from the 1930s abstracts the idea of flight from a winging bird. There is something of the great modernist’s slender, oblong shape in all of McGrain’s birds, but especially the pigeon. McGrain has found a compelling balance between sensuous contour and figural detail. Whereas Brancusi uses brilliantly polished brass to help convey the lightness of flight, McGrain brings his birds down to earth, and ultimately to death, with a bronze darkened to smooth perfection by grinding and the addition of four layers of patina: a first coat of brown, blue, then black, then blue again. McGrain’s sculptures are richly waxed so that their onyx skin gleams in the indoor lightning. The contours and folds of the bronze will one day glint in the sun, when his Lost Bird Project finds funding to place each sculpture in the location where each species was last seen in the wild: from nearby Elmira, New York, in the case of the Labrador Duck, to Eldey Island off the coast of Iceland for the Great Auk . Without the hint of the feathers’ texture or color, McGrain’s bronzes begin Brancusi’s process of abstraction, or, put another way reverse it, moving from the ideal part way towards real, from the destroyed to the made. They are symbolic without being denuded of life; these shapes are not the generic, though highly useful, forms of birders’ field guides. If only by their nobility, each sculpture seems to embody both an individual and an absolute. The most colorful and songful of the quintet of birds sculpted by McGrain was the Carolina Parakeet, The only parrot species native to eastern North America, its range once extended from the Ohio Valley to the Gulf of Mexico. It too was a social bird, and once swathes of its territory were converted to agriculture, it was shot as a nuisance because of its reliance on those new crops cultivated on its habitat. The birds’ extravagant plumage attracted not only mates but the lethal fancy of fashion designers and their numberless customers. There have been no confirmed sightings of the birds in more than sixty years. The last captive parakeet died in 1918 in that same Cincinnati zoo where the Passenger Pigeons had gone extinct four years earlier. Although there are no recordings of the Carolina Parakeet’s vocal repertoire, the great nineteenth and early twentieth-century ornithologist Charles Johnson Maynard noted that they were among the greatest of dining conversationalists: “While feeding, the Parakeets are not absolutely noisy but will keep up a low continuous chattering among themselves, as if conversing in a social manner. These notes are continued while the birds are assuming all kinds of positions, now reaching for some tempting morsel while they hang head downward, or climbing with great ability from twig to twig. All of these feats are done without interrupting the flow of gossip.” Where McGrain’s Passenger Pigeon, like his Great Auk, is vertical in orientation, his Carolina Parakeet is horizontal, its beak tucked backward into its neck, its long slender tail extending straight out as it descends gradually towards the floor. The shadow of a claw is visible on the plinth on which it roosts. There is no intimation of a branch or of the natural world. The bird has withdrawn from its vanished conversation partners and its vanished world into itself. Perhaps it is grooming or sleeping. The behavior reflected by the form is irrelevant: in its posture of obliviousness it recedes towards oblivion, even while it is massively and gracefully before us. Maynard also noted the uncanny way in which large flocks of exuberant Carolina Parakeets “endeavor to excel the other in producing the most discordant yells when in the air” but then, on landing would suddenly become uncannily quiet: “So great had been the din but a second before that the comparative stillness is quite bewildering.” Bewildering is the inward turning silence of these timeless and peerless bronzes. Cornell Labor of Ornithology Lost Bird Project at: David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu
New in the Print Edition of CounterPunch For his 20-year stretch as Fed chairman, they all fawned on him – presidents, Congress, the press. Only a handful of left economists said he was pushing the economy over the cliff. Now Greenspan admits it in a humiliating confession. As the world’s financial structure tumbles in ruins, guess what? “I found a flaw in the model… To the extent that I figure out where it happened and why, I will change my views.” Read Frederick Claremont’s savage assessment of the fool who has plunged millions into misery. Also in our new issue: Bill Hatch on the story of one foreclosure; Kristian Williams on police torture in Chicago. Only in CounterPunch newsletter! Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great presents. Order CounterPunch By Email For Only $35 a Year !
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New in the CP Print Edition! For his 20-year stretch as Fed chairman, they all fawned on him – presidents, Congress, the press. Only a handful of left economists said he was pushing the economy over the cliff. Now Greenspan admits it in a humiliating confession. As the world’s financial structure tumbles in ruins, guess what? “I found a flaw in the model… To the extent that I figure out where it happened and why, I will change my views.” Read Frederick Claremont’s savage assessment of the fool who has plunged millions into misery. Also in our new issue: Bill Hatch on the story of one foreclosure; and Kristian Williams on police torture in Chicago. Only in CounterPunch newsletter! Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Waiting for Lightning
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