Smart Energy

KJ and I recently visited southern California. We spent a day in the Mojave Desert, my old stomping grounds, and shot this video in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s unusual to see water in the desert, much less a big puddle of it like we saw at Barker Dam. And below that, an amazing site: hundreds and hundreds of wind turbines down near the intersection of highways 62 and 10.

Just a few beauty shots from the orchard tour last week.

Here’s a slick and quick take on the banjo classic.

I’ve been a fan of Africa’s rich musical cultures for many years, so was stoked to bump into Afropop a year or two ago. The organization produces radio programming and runs a damn cool web site chock full of interesting stuff, including reviews of CDs and concert info.

Afropop was started by, among others, Banning Eyre, who wrote In Griot Time, a book I read a few months ago. Eyre is also the author of a guitar atlas of Africa, part of a series of atlases collected in two volumes. I have both and have spent many an hour noodling my way through the incredible diversity of music they contain, and reading about all the different scales and techniques employed by players around the world. Volume one covers Africa, Brazil, India (Sanjay Mishra is the author here, a guitarist I discovered by reading this book and whom I’ve come to admire for his lovely playing and deeply textured compositions), Italy, Japan and the Middle East. Volume two covers Celtic styles (renewing my admiration of Pierre Bensusan), China, Cuba, Flamenco, Jamaica, and Russia.

The Afropop crew made this short video recently, asking the question, What is Afropop? Considering the vast influence African musics have had on American ones, I’m surprised at the paucity of answers. Afropop — isn’t that another name for the blues? Samba? Rumba? Cuban and Brazilian music? It’s none of those and all of them and more.

Doug Stanhope: Voice of America – ABORTION IS GREEN.

Well, duh.

via YouTube – Doug Stanhope: Voice of America – ABORTION IS GREEN.

In the mid-western American sky, Wednesday, April 14th. Courtesy KWWL in Iowa. Fast-forward to :28:

There’s more info on National Geographic.

Another fantastic video from the Playing for Change folks.

I produced and edited this project for work. It took about three months to get to this 3-minute video, in part because I needed to travel to various locations in the state to conduct the interviews and then cull through some 20 hours of raw footage to find just the right sound bites. In any case, I’m fairly happy with it, though some of the shots and some of the sound are less than perfect. I do think the editing is fine and it tells a great story: the importance of science to a premium wine industry and, correspondingly, the key to the science is an outstanding education.