Alas, all I can manage is sharing this tweet via @itsolossal. Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

In case you missed it last night, these long-exposure light stencils made on the streets of Vietnam are just fantastic bit.ly/zYEx2G—
Christopher Jobson (@itscolossal) January 27, 2012

I thought it would be interesting to post both the acoustic and the original electric versions here for comparison’s sake, but it took some time for me to decide in which order to post them. Ultimately, since one of the pleasures of hearing an acoustic version of an electric song that you know well is noticing the differences — how the instrument choices, playing technique, and in this case the vocal delivery are changed to suit the arrangement — I figured I’d start out with the original for the sake of anyone who isn’t familiar with the song.

There are two notable things about this video:

1. The story goes that Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer/songwriter Karen O wrote the song for her then-boyfriend Angus (Maps is an acronym for My Angus Please Stay), at a time when the relationship was on the verge of breaking up, and on the day they shot the video Angus was supposed to be there, he was three hours late, Karen went ahead with the performance, not knowing whether he’d show up or not, and the result is incredibly moving. It seems at the beginning that she has her eyes fixed on the back of the room, still hoping Angus would arrive, she tries to carry on but you can see it’s a struggle, holding on to the microphone as if it was a lifeline, and then, at around the 2:50 mark, she’s overcome and the tears are real. Just.Wow.
2. Musically, drummer Brian Chase’s syncopated beat is trance-inducing and he brings some awesome power to the crescendos; and guitarist Nick Zinner is frickin’ amazing, building an incredibly lush sound that makes you forget that it’s just him and that there’s no bass player.

And at last, the acoustic version, which doesn’t require nearly as much of an explanation. Nick Zinner plays a sweet-sounding Martin guitar, adapting the main power riff into a beautiful, gentle arpeggio, and Karen delivers a subdued, melancholic vocal, still full of sadness, but also a touch of resignation and even acceptance that Angus is never coming back.

Surreal and kinda psychedelic!

Drawings by Matt Leines – booo.ms/xoBbwF—
Jeff Hamada (@Booooooom) January 26, 2012

What, then, could be better than the two bands coming together…at least in part?!

Not much.

Well, until today, it was just one music geek’s dream, but this morning The Flaming Lips tweeted a video from their 2012 New Year’s Eve Freakout, wherein, joined by Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, they kick out a 17-minute long, brain-melting cover of The Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road nugget I Want You (She’s So Heavy).

Just be warned, this really will melt your brain, so make sure that there’s nothing important or particularly brain-dependent that you have to do when the 17 minutes is up.

RT @irreversibility This one is going to melt yer brain!! The Flaming Lips with Nels Cline – She So Heavy LIVE! youtu.be/B2QpIgWPMmE—
The Flaming Lips (@theflaminglips) January 25, 2012

Now, just in case you were left wanting more from the rest of Wilco, I thought it fitting to include another video released today, and while it won’t necessarily melt your brain, it certainly is it’s own kind of freaky, with the band appearing in a Popeye cartoon.

Via Pitchfork:

I heard a snippet of a piece on the public radio show Marketplace this morning, that appears to have been taken from an article in the Wall Street Journal, about how brown is the new green:

When consumers see brown they think green, say companies that sell products like paper towels, napkins and diapers.

Dunkin’ Brands Inc. and Target Corp.’s in-store cafes among other chains have made the switch from white to brown napkins. Next week, Cascades Tissue Group is trying what marketers long considered the unthinkable: brown toilet paper. It is pitching beige rolls, dubbing the product “Moka.”

Brown paper products are becoming an obvious way for consumers to show that they care about the environment. They assume the products are made with recycled materials or didn’t involve whitening chemicals.

Now, however, white paper can be made from 100% recycled fibers and whitened without the chemical chlorine, traditionally the primary complaint against it. Still, Cascades says dropping the extra step of bleaching reduces the environmental impact of Moka toilet paper by about 25% compared to their white recycled paper because of energy savings and other benefits…

So far so good. Nothing particularly bad here, right?

Well, this here is where the danger lies:

Even so, Dunkin’ Donuts decided to use recycled brown napkins about three years ago, in part because of what the color “symbolized,” says Scott Murphy, vice president of strategic manufacturing and supply for Dunkin’ Brands. Tests in a handful of restaurants showed the brown napkins made customers “feel like they were doing something good for the environment,” and matched the décor, he says.

Now, Dunkin’ Donuts still made a good decision. It’s great that they are using 100% recycled, non-bleached napkins! But the potentially exploitable thing is knowing what the brown in the brown napkins has come to “symbolize” and that it has the power to make customers “feel” a certain way.

The irony of all ironies in this story comes in the next paragraph:

At least one company adds brown pigments to non-chlorine bleached diapers to drive home the environmental message. The diapers need “visual differentiation,” says Louis Chapdelaine, product director of fibers at Seventh Generation Inc., a Burlington, Vt.- based company that specializes in eco-friendly household cleaning products and paper. It’s important “not so much that it’s brown, it’s that it’s not white,” he says. All diapers, if left undyed, would be the color of raw plastic or semi-translucent, he says.

What?!

Listen, it’s awesome that they aren’t using chlorine bleach to whiten their diapers. But these diapers stink, whether soiled or not, for their obvious attempt at Brownwashing. They could dye these diapers any color at all, so why brown? In fact, considering the unpleasant brown stuff that these diapers typically capture from the babies wearing them, you’d think that beige or brown would be the absolutely last color that Seventh Generation would choose, and this claim by their product director that this is simply a matter of providing “visual differentiation” really rings hollow. They even have a whole webpage dedicated to defending their brown-dyed diapers, though it, too, reads as nothing more than an elaborate rationalization.

Meanwhile, the folks at Babyworks.com and the Mothering Magazine online forum are none too pleased, and I have to say that I’m deeply disappointed in Seventh Generation, a company that has been an originator and a leader in the recycled and eco-friendly product marketplace. It could be that their products are still as eco-friendly as they always have been, but this brown dye thing and the excuses they make for it really has me questioning their integrity for the first time.

Sure, there are worse fish to fry, companies that have made no efforts to offer more renewable/sustainable products, and they won’t be earning a nod from me in my Celebrating Eco-Progress series anytime soon.

Let’s just hope that they don’t take after Seventh Generation and jump on the Brownwashing bandwagon too.

But the instance of The Argument that I remember most vividly took place sometime in the late 1980s, in our favorite pizzeria, Taverna Della Pizzeria in Spotswood, NJ, and it started when someone asserted the opinion that Bob Dylan, over the course of his long, illustrious career, should have leveraged his celebrity more to support important social causes; that he abandoned his activist roots and the legacy of his hero Woody Guthrie to be just another vain rock star celebrity.

This position was strenuously attacked by another from the group, who argued that it is actually oppressive to musicians, actors, dancers, painters, etc., to demand that they have any obligation to anything other than the pursuit of their art; that once you impose any “shoulds” on them you are interfering with the free flow of their creative expression.

Over the years, The Argument expanded beyond Dylan, to include pretty much every other form of celebrity, but when I read this morning that Dylan has authorized the use of his music for a just-released 4-CD set of covers, by 80 artists of 75 of his songs, with proceeds going to Amnesty International, memories of The Argument came rushing back, and I found myself jumping to Bob’s defense.

While it certainly is true that Dylan abruptly abandoned his activism roughly around the time he abandoned purist folk music in the mid 1960s, it is not at all accurate to argue that he abandoned it entirely or forever.

After his famed 1966 motorcycle accident, which I wrote about back in November, and which seemed to wake him up from an intoxicating celebrity binge, the first live appearance he made in twenty months was for a Woody Guthrie memorial concert, clear proof that he still valued the protest tradition. The photo I include here is from three years later, at the 1971 Concert For Bangladesh, later that year he recorded a song mourning the death of Black Panther George Jackson, and four years later he recorded the song Hurricane, a passionate defense of boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whom he felt was wrongly imprisoned on murder charges.

In the years since, Dylan has appeared at other benefit concerts, lent his songs to benefit albums, and now we have the Amnesty International collection, which will raise thousands and thousands of badly needed dollars for an essential civil rights advocacy organization.

As for the broader topic, whether or not celebrities have an obligation to use their fame for good, I’m inclined to see valid points from both sides of The Argument. The idea that they need to “give something back” is overly simplistic, and it really doesn’t work, as they’ve already given of themselves via the production of their work. Personally, I treasure the work of artists, much of which has meant so much to me over the years that I can’t imagine a world without it. These are true gifts, regardless of the financial rewards earned by their creators.

Additionally, I do believe that it’s important for creative freedom and development to not put artists into confining boxes, demanding specifics from them, but I do admire artists who do add their voices to worthy causes.

An epic tale of a hero who conquers his girlfriend's grandparents' Wi-Fi issues: mcsweeneys.net/articles/in-wh…—
Timothy McSweeney (@mcsweeneys) January 20, 2012

However funny, I think it’s important to have compassion for our elders, for whom the digital revolution has largely been a dizzying, nearly incomprehensible whirlwind.

This Upcycling installment comes via T.O.M.T. (aka The Other Man’s Treasures), and I can’t recommend highly enough taking the time to browse through their website for some fantastic furniture and lighting ideas.

I know I’ll be keeping an eye out for a vintage suitcase and some screw-on legs, as I browse the thrift stores that are increasingly becoming a resource for great upcycling ideas.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about the tremendous pride I experienced, when my then 13-year old son, Julian, took first place in the Men’s Intermediate Division at the annual Veni. Vidi. Ascendi. rock climbing competition at Western Washington University.

Julian continued climbing in the year since, facing the typical ups and downs, and since this is not a hardcore climbing blog and you, my readers, are not, for the most part, I assume, hardcore climbing enthusiasts, it really hasn’t made sense to chronicle here much of what has transpired. For rock climbing is essentially a practice of such small incremental progress, measured in cryptic rating systems that are completely meaningless to the layperson, and at the same time it’s more about achieving one’s personal best rather than beating the competition.

The News

BUT…then there are the occasional HUGE accomplishments, like when Julian qualified at the Regional Championships on December 10th to move on to Divisional Championships, and when this past weekend, at Divisionals he qualified to move on to the National Championships in Colorado Springs, CO the first weekend in March!

Woohoo!!!

The Irony

The Injury: Right after Regionals, Julian hurt the middle finger on both hands from overuse, he was told he needed to rest for 4 weeks, meaning no climbing at all, we’d just completed construction of a new, killer climbing wall in our garage and he’d qualified for Divisionals.

It was torture! Julian had to develop some serious discipline, with daily ice baths for his hands, and resisting the temptation to climb, with all his climbing buddies itching to get on the new wall.

I think the thing I’m most proud of is how well he stepped up to these challenges, which really enabled him to heal in time to train hard the week before Divisionals, and then, of course, enabled him to do as well as he did there.

The Money: Usually we think about success in terms of positive gains. There’s the sense of accomplishment we earn, the acknowledgment of the accomplishment from others that we receive, and some times there are even prizes or other awards.

In the case of Nationals, well, Julian’s accomplishment will be costing us a hefty chunk of change, for airfare, car rental, lodging, meals, competition registration, etc.

And yet, I give it all up gladly, that he might have this amazing experience, that he can see where his hard work and determination can take him when he sets his mind, his will, and his passion towards his goals.

Go Julian!!!