Notes from the Underground--“Juizy Blazz Shake-Up: Drink the Music and Dance”

Notes from the Underground
By Pi Kielty
July 18, 2009

“Juizy Blazz Shake-Up: Drink the Music and Dance”

It was a night like a harvest autumn, but mid-July. The summer was strange, and we all were estranged yet familiar with it. This night gathering, guided by the arc of Venus through broken, moving clouds, at dusk, moments before the Valley fireworks down the town, drew the Valley’s Underground and Topground together at den Haus for a Wannigan Days, Want-it-Again party. The Juizy Blazz Shake-Up mainlined the performance, the extra extravaganza of the annual summer party. The sky stayed partly half–half-clouds settling cold dampness and half-clear to see the starlighters in the black beveled sky. It was strange weather fitting for a strange summer.

The mixed intro revealed on a sudden that Juizy wasn’t choosey, but they chose fun. If the music was an ambrosia that feeds the feeling, then the dancing brought intoxicant nectar to the body as the band shook, around, down and upbound over the river’s olympian edge to its own temptation’s heaven.

Nothing hard to conjugate the notes, even for such untuned beat as in my demi-muse, Juizy Blazz oozed a hard beat, a thumping cord, a blast-off sax, and better than extra pretty special good organic board-keys. Juizy played the classic’s classic, “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” with a tittle tattle curiosity that beckons some to follow the Mad Hatter in a boogie down the rabbit hole, onto a Wonderland dance floor.

Happy behooves flavor, flavor multiplied by echo, echo in motion, motion in touch, and touch in soul–good spirits, some, out that night, waving in a warm cheery cherry sunshine on a humid sweaty fall night that July. The familiar things felt out of place in strange summer chill. But we all inured ourselves to ignore the sight of Undergrounders, so we remained anonymous even among our own, as milled with the Topground peoples.

Round and pound, a bar of rhythm, Rock & Roll lives in the St. Croix Valley!! The feat of shuffling feet and flaying hands, bouncing heads and a heart-hope on a looped and hooped moment in term, there seems a thousand people on the point of a superstar’s pin. “Gee-Willickers!! Mother F#$%%$, EVEN, its so crowded that soon I must make my Pi-exit!!” Yet, things were funner with a crowd, a happy unconcerned crowd, dancing loud, for dance was allowed, anytime there’s room to move in the room. “Blazz it, anyway!” There was still a great glow in a room with three hundred of one’s closest strangers. “My freaking god, its so warm, too.” Thick as fog, the people, a steamy fog, there sits and stands. But warmth, even damp, was power and energy. Outside to catch a cool breath underneath the starry sky flitting atwixt the partly-half of one sky beside another, my time near there would end. There was a band break inside as the Juizy Blazz rested and reset. “Don’t worry little Valley world. It’s late, but they’ll be back, on stage, to play you the night exhausted and flamed by languid spirits from a bottle.”

“Having Me Some Fun Tonight”? It was a refrained reminder to all to just enjoy the time, the moment in the term of life. The people shook all the more, harder, faster, longer–“Dance and don’t worry.” There’s “No Particular Place to Go,” only home at some point, even in the Underground. Juizy Blazz Shake-Up rocks, in old town and first new-school. “You were in the house when it tumbled down, weren’t you?” The brave in den Haus; such colorful people in it. The last call was called, and all called out for another dance. “One song for all you all!!” The doors would have shortly locked, but I traveled out. “Be happy people, people. Goodnight.”

Review of: Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America

Review of: Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Thomas L. Friedman, in Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution And How It Can Renew America, provides solutions for a planet Earth that cannot accommodate growing populations, and economic expectations of modern development, in the midst of massive climate change. For the last century, economic engines have been fueled by oil, gas, and coal–fossil-fuels which produce carbon emissions. Scientist, to their best estimation, believe that carbon emissions have caused the phenomenon of carbon particulates in the atmosphere creating “the greenhouse effect.” Hence why the world needs to consider alternatives to fossil-fuel based energy.

Because of these “greenhouses gases,” the earth’s eco-system is hampered in regulating the normal cooling and warming cycles. It is a fact, regardless of any opinion in denial, that climate change is occurring. Recorded and accurate climate data over almost 250 to 300 years proves it. Recorded hydro-logical data, taken from ice cores samples in Antarctica, extend back 100-200,000 years, providing stronger evidence that something is amiss. As for the “greenhouse effect,” strong evidence exists that carbon particulates play a major role in the cause of climate change. However, a lot is not known about the interplay of the factors and causes.

Regardless of any believers in the fanatic fringe on either side of the debate, the best climate models and the world’s most advanced super computers simply have no reliable methodology, data, or historical record to prove one way or another how the carbon particulates and/or other unknown facts will result in the effects. There are simply too many variables at play, and the majority of variables, simply cannot as of yet be expressed in reliable numbers, numbers being the language of science. Climate change IS happening, however. How it will turn out is at best an educated hypothesis. The best guess might be somewhere in between the poles of debate.

Something will radically change. Nonetheless, even without all the data we need,, assumptions can be made; for example, we have the technology to make some significant impact in reducing carbon emissions; such change would increase the conservation of energy and its better application; energy (since the invention of fire) is required to feed, clothe, and shelter people, and to employ them in the very basic survival functions of production and distribution; and finally, efficient energy systems of production, transfer and use are a net savings on investments over the long-term.

Friedman, who authored The World Is Flat, asserts in Hot, Flat and Crowded that the many of communication, design, production/assemly, and transportation revolutions of the last 20 years of globalized connection can be used to create a “green economy.” The goal of such a “green revolution,” as he states it, is to create an intricate mix of the communications, production/assembly, and transportation ideas in a public and private market of incentives and disincentives to create “negative carbon footprints;” i.e. green economies with maximum efficiency and less use of fossil-fuels.

Whether it is electric cars run by batteries that sell their excess idled power, or better building design and assembly to utilize maximum natural light and solar cooling and heating systems, ,many of his allegories exist in small-scale experiments or in genesis form in places around the world. The technology exists. These depend on a wide-spread use of micro-chip monitoring and control to maximize efficiency and rebuilding America’s entire electrical generation, transfer, and application grids, which are now grossly inefficient. If America seizes the moment and leads the world down this path of green economic renewal, it will provide unlimited strategic political-economic and socio-cultural advantages. But, the author warns, if another country (e.g. China) or other countries (e.g. China, India and Japan) take the lead, America would hit terminal decline as a world power.

There is more logic to go “green” than even Friedman might recognize. Even without climate change pushing an initiative for “green” technologies, green is more efficient in the use of resources. Whether water, food, goods or oil, more efficiency is ultimately more profitable. A nation using less energy to do more increases economic power. Economic power is the basis for any political power or moral ascendancy in the local community or the community of nations. At its ultimate, economic power and political power translate into military power, and if one nation has the moral will to use that power for good or ill, the United States of America needs to serve its own interests in that regard.

It might take the US’s entire yearly economic output (our GDP, or gross domestic product) every year over the course of a decade to transfer the industrial-era capital infrastructure and investment into a “green” society. But not doing so is unacceptable. One just might think of better individual, market and community education and initiatives beyond those suggested in Hot, Flat and Crowded. The world is shrinking in the globalized order. The population is rising. Things are changing, politically and economically, socially and culturally. Not enough resources or energy exist to allow every nation to achieve a middle class status with just fossil fuels. Nature might kill us if nations try the old way. However, America is poised with the skill and tech-base to do it. Better us, than anyone else!!