The Quiet Revolutionary (for J.G.)

a postscript to the excerpt I posted here about Jimmy Giuffre:

Our longest run of work was a European tour of close to three weeks; I think the approval we found there caused the music to advance considerably. Shortly after our return to New York, we began a residency in a coffee house on Bleecker Street, playing for whatever money was collected at the door. We disbanded on a night we each made 35 cents.

--Steve Swallow, in the liner notes of the CD reissue of Free Fall.

Why Bother

Michael Pollan, in "The Green Issue" of the NYT Magazine:

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant. Since the cheap-energy mind translates everything into money, its proxy, it prefers to put its faith in market-based solutions — carbon taxes and pollution-trading schemes. If we could just get the incentives right, it believes, the economy will properly value everything that matters and nudge our self-interest down the proper channels. The best we can hope for is a greener version of the old invisible hand. Visible hands it has no use for. *** Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it’s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren’t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. *** The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards.

He suggests we should grow "some — even just a little" of our own food.

Anyone know where I can get a pizza tree?

ps - Pollan's "Unhappy Meals" (now expanded into a book) is a must-read; more here.

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
--Cree Indian Proverb