Today.

Keith makes her case in an oddly well-researched yet intimate voice, that pauses mid polemic to call out to her reader: ‘Can you believe this shit?” And frankly, the tactic is called for. Because what she’s saying is BIG.

Along with the rest of the world, I’ve been the recipient and the victim of several nutrition ‘turnings’. I was interested enough in Nutrition to become a professional, not that it has much meaning anymore.  Everything I was taught was wrong. I might as well be Woody Allen in ‘Sleeper’. The complexity of studying human nutrition plus the political/economic stakes involved mean that there are very rarely any clear answers. Plus (to paraphrase Dr. House) Everybody Eats. So a stinkin’ credential doesn’t buy you much credibility.  Very early on in my career I fled from anything clinical since that involves an attempt to change something more personal than religion. It usually just doesn’t happen.

Diet for a Small Planet  was the rallying cry in the late 70′s. It sparked my interest in the field. The entire premise is eviscerated by Keith. Toast. And the Dietary Guidelines for Americans  and the infernally misguided USDA meal patterns that it engendered.  All bunk. We’ve killed diabetics and made our citizens obese. We have much to answer for. We’ve been victimized by a pervasive like-produces-like fallacy. The enemy all along has not been FAT.  It’s SUGAR.

I realized this the day I read Gary Taubes’ NYT article. I remember I stopped reading and (much as Keith urges her vegan readers to do), made some bacon and eggs.  Not that  I’ve never successfully been a vegetarian of any stripe. I didn’t have the willpower or the (blind?) moral certitude that Keith had during her 20 years as a vegan. Keith says she destroyed her own health with low protein, high carb. I was just getting fat. A low carb approach, has worked well for me. I don’t go on hypoglycemic binges anymore. I can control my weight. My lipid panels are good enough that doctors notice. I’m far, so very far from the Dietetic Party Line.

Keith systematically provides arguments against every path to Vegetarianism:

Moral Vegetarians: basically life happens because of death and even plants communicate and try to defend themselves. There is no such thing as life without killing.

Political Vegetarians: Agriculture is been destroying our health and our planet since its beginning. Devil Annual Grains make both us and animals fat. Cows need to eat grass (because we can’t) and we need to eat cows. Big Corn makes Big Oil look benign. We’re using up our ‘fossil soil’ as fast as fossil fuels and we’re on the path to worldwide starvation.

Nutritional Vegetarians: (see above)  Another account of the Ancel Keys studies and how they don’t hold up. The mythical CHD scare.  And the scariest devil in a book of devils: lectins, which Keith makes sound like gut-busting alien parasites.

Altogether a very disturbing, provocative book that I think needs to be widely read and discussed. Whether this book’s dismal predictions come to pass or there is another nutritional ‘turning’ in the future remains to be seen.

Not such a big secret I guess, that I usually structure my playlists chronologically, starting with a baroque “bouquet”, then slowly moving into the more romantic or operatic.  Where music is concerned, well classical music anyway, I prefer the omnivore approach. I love it all. I resist preferring any particular era of music to another.  I think it’s my strength as a ‘curator’. I can’t tell a diminished fifth from a doughnut, but I respond to certain music and I try to play only music that sets off that ‘gut’ vibe.

What I like in music is a good sentence.  A good piece of music, as in writing, has structure. It’s got plot: a beginning, middle and end. And just as in writing, the phrase or the sentence is where the rubber meets the road.

So this is my unschooled music theory — I like to listen to the sentences in music. I love the well articulated musical thought.  Chopin’s got ‘em – I swear I can almost hear the words.  OK, I’ve even tried to graph them out and write words to his sentences, but they would be long ones.  Mahler now, (this post WAS going to get to Mahler) he keeps starting sentences and then changing them midstream.  It can be frustrating to hear some glimmer of a beautiful thought and before it’s developed, he’s taken another turn. Was Mahler a bit ADD, musically?

If this idea/metaphor has merit, I might apply this analysis to some more composers.

Wandering around near my home I found this wonderful scripted boat ride.. It takes you around and over a mountain through a series of fantastically scripted docks. The water rises to the level of the next dock — the beautifully textured mossed over gates open and the boat glides through. You have to have the Map open to appreciate it.   You can wait for the boat on the dock here: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Lakeville/132/42/22

]]> http://idylld.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/amazing-boat-ride/feed/ 1 idylld boat 2 boat 1 http://idylld.wordpress.com/2011/06/27/460/ http://idylld.wordpress.com/2011/06/27/460/#comments Mon, 27 Jun 2011 03:11:08 +0000 idylld http://idylld.wordpress.com/?p=460 ]]> WWI began, says Micheal S. Neiberg, because ” a select group of perhaps a dozen men willed it or stumbled incompetently around a situation that they thought they could control until it was too late.”

The problem with getting older is that I’m getting that feeling more and more and I didn’t open up that box of pictures. My mind is becoming that box of images in itself.

(Image credit: http://bit.ly/jRRwx8

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Laurel%20Arts%20Isle/148/79/301

Delibes – Coppelia – Variations on a Slav Theme
Delibes- Coppelia – Waltz
Strauss – The Blue Danube
Handel – Trio Suite in G  (two movements)
Scarlatti-Piano Sonata in D K491
Scriabin-Piano Sonata #1 in F
Mozart-Overture-Don Giovanni
Donizetti-Lucia Di Lammermoor-”Chi mi frena in tal momento” (sextet)
Puccini-Turandot-”Ho una casa nell Honan”
Tavener “Many Years” (choral)
Vaughn Williams “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”
Tchaikovsky-Eugene Onegin-Polonaise
Tchaikovsky-The Seasons-December
Hurst, Adam-The Secret
Schubert-An Die Musik (lieder)
Puccini-Gianni Schicchi – “Oh! Mio babbino caro”

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Laurel%20Arts%20Isle/148/79/301

Bach – Cantata #78 – BWV 78  ‘Jesu, Der Du Meine..”
Bach – Brandenburg Concerto #3 in G
Schubert – Impromptu no. 3 in Gb
Offenbach – Tales of Hoffman – “Belle nuit…” (Barcarolle)
Vivaldi – Four Seasons – Winter
Boccherini -String Quartet in E-major – Minuet
Puccini – La Boheme – Musetta’s Waltz
Saint-Saens – Organ Symphony #6 (“Babe”)
Verdi – Don Carlo – Act 2 Duet “Dio..”
Beethoven – Fidelio – O Welche Lust (chorus)
Mahler – Symphony #5 – Adagietto
Bach – Cello Suite #1
Debussy – The Girl with the Flaxen Hair
Satie – Gymnopdie
Glass – Opening

It is a lot of work managing your identity. Especially when they multiply on you. Whoever ‘you’ is. The fact is that even the flesh and blood version has a serious problem with identity that philosophers have struggled with for millennia. Who is the ‘you’ which is not your mind or your body? Who are all the voices within each human being who sequentially take the wheel and drive all the others offstage? And then come these digital versions.

A friend of mine reminds me that all science fiction must be an extrapolation of our past and present. We cannot create from nothing. The base clay of our avatar is not value-free. Everything in SL is a projection of the human mind and has a context, history and aesthetic. I guess that’s what makes it infinitely interesting, even when painful or ugly.  And this is why if Proust were alive today, he’d be living in Second Life.