Drilling Down Documents: Natural Gas's Toxic Waste

Wells for extracting natural gas, like these in Colorado, are a growing source of energy but can also pose hazards.

Over the past nine months, The Times reviewed more than 30,000 pages of documents obtained through open records requests of state and federal agencies and by visiting various regional offices that oversee drilling in Pennsylvania. Some of the documents were leaked by state or federal officials. Here, the most significant documents are made available with annotations from The Times.
@'New York Times Interactive'

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Fracking Resource Guide 

Regulation Is Lax for Water From Gas Wells

..the relatively new drilling method — known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — carries significant environmental risks.

It involves injecting huge amounts of water, mixed with sand and chemicals, at high pressures to break up rock formations and release the gas.

With hydrofracking, a well can produce over a million gallons of wastewater that is often laced with highly corrosive salts, carcinogens like benzene and radioactive elements like radium, all of which can occur naturally thousands of feet underground. Other carcinogenic materials can be added to the wastewater by the chemicals used in the hydrofracking itself.

While the existence of the toxic wastes has been reported, thousands of internal documents obtained by The New York Times from the Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators and drillers show that the dangers to the environment and health are greater than previously understood.

The documents reveal that the wastewater, which is sometimes hauled to sewage plants not designed to treat it and then discharged into rivers that supply drinking water, contains radioactivity at levels higher than previously known, and far higher than the level that federal regulators say is safe for these treatment plants to handle.

Other documents and interviews show that many E.P.A. scientists are alarmed, warning that the drilling waste is a threat to drinking water in Pennsylvania. Their concern is based partly on a 2009 study, never made public, written by an E.P.A. consultant who concluded that some sewage treatment plants were incapable of removing certain drilling waste contaminants and were probably violating the law.

The Times also found never-reported studies by the E.P.A. and a confidential study by the drilling industry that all concluded that radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.

But the E.P.A. has not intervened....

 Fracking Resource Guide

Suboxone: Recovery or Another Addiction?

♪♫ Cameroon Baka Jam

David Eagleman and mysteries of the brain

'I want to be a magnet for tapes' (Eno on the founding of Obscure Records)

The name might be commercial coquetry, but Island Records are not promoting their new Obscure label as mass appeal music, though a price of £1.99 should encourage people to take a chance. With low recording costs, and minimal promotion, the flexible project of 10 to 12 records a year is not a major investment. The most amazing thing about the project is that a rock record company should be starting a series devoted to minority music at all. The next most amazing thing is that the idea came from one of their own recording artists, Brian Eno, late of Roxy Music.

I presented this idea to Island by saying that they ought to be working towards the kind of research and development situation that you find in larger industries. This idea is to launch a few things out of the mainstream and watch their progress very closely. Most record companies do the opposite; put out a lot of mainstream projects, and the most successful is pursued in a big way, and the others quickly dropped. In business terms, this isn't a very healthy situation. Multi-national industries exploit a lot of different things at once, so that if the market takes a sudden turn in a different direction, they've already got a number of mutations that can cope with it. So it did have a business rationale. The first five Obscure albums will have cost much less than a single rock album. An ordinary rock album costs about £10,000. These will have cost about £6,000. I think a company of this size should be able to afford this kind of experiment.

All the time I've been signed to Island, I've been very interested in their affairs. Most musicians aren't, and regard the record company as a kind of enemy, really. I don't regard it as that and always try to stimulate some kind of co-operation between us.

I only started the thing on the assumption that Island would market and distribute them. As it is, I do everything, including the accounts, the pressing, and making a finished art-work for the cover. So I present them with a finished record, in fact.

Eno first came to rock in 1968. But before that, his interest in music had been encouraged at art school by Tom Phillips. Phillips introduced him to the kind of experimental musicians whose background is often neither classical nor popular, which hints at the kind of territory Obscure records have so far explored:

My main reason for starting the venture was that I wanted to be in a position where I heard anything interesting that was going on. I wanted to be a magnet for tapes. Otherwise, it's a case of rooting through music history to find enough interesting pieces which can change sufficiently to justify a new recording. We're going to do a Cage percussion album well as those pieces we've already done, since a lot of his percussion music hasn't been recorded. Another interesting thing is to put older music through new recording techniques, not treating them as performances that happen to be in front of microphones, but making a record with a piece of music.

With the early stages, the first 12 albums or so, I want to give the impression that the label is capable of taking a very wide range of material. But I'm not interested in releasing records of young rock groups. The main decision is whether I like a piece or not. I think the borderline area between rock and experimental is a very interesting one. The present stance is: Whatever happens, I'm not going to use my intellect. The experimental stance is: 'Whatever happens, I'm only going to use my intellect.'...

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Adrian Jack @'Time Out' (March 15-18, 1975)

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Scar Art by He Duoling (何多苓)

He Duoling is one of China's preminent realist painters, best known for his Scar Art series done in the 1980s. Recently, He has been working on blending traditional Chinese culture with Western concepts and styles. His new solo exhibition will feature his best known works as well as his latest ones.
“I started painting at a very young age. People of my generation failed to determine our own destinies. But thanks to my mother, who contributed my painting to a children’s magazine, my works was published for the first time. This experience is the driving force behind my accomplishments,” he said.
He’s early oil paintings were done with fine brushes, featuring themes like Chairman Mao on Jinggang Mountain. He said he was also facinated by the bleakness in Andrew Wyeth's nostalgic realist works in the 80s, so he imitate Wyeth and became known for works like The Little Long-tail Pheasant, The Beautiful Crow and Reviving Spring Breeze...

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@'Urbanatomy'

The Sewing Machine Orchestra

Sewing machine orchestra is the first version of a performance created by Martin Messier. the basic sounds used in this performance consist entirely of the acoustic noises produced by 8 sewing machines, amplified by means of microcontacts and process by a computer.
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Bad Ass-Ange

Painting of leaking Julian Assange wins Bald Archy

Sex, Coffee and Rock & Roll

Cost Of Tax Cuts For America's Rich Exceeds Value Of Budget Cuts

(“Is your hair starting to fall out?” to a bald colleague)

Reuters fires bureau chief over online chatroom remark

REpost: Bob Ostertag and the Kronos Quartet - All The Rage (1993)

"Bob Ostertag's "All the Rage" turned the evening on its head with a devastating roar of gay anger.

Of recent concert pieces having to do with AIDS, "All the Rage" seems by far the most powerful example.
Mr. Ostertag's stern, purifying gaze has swept away the sentimentality and melodrama that have compromised more famous compositions in the genre."
- The New York Times

You can download this album for free from Bob Ostertag's website here.

Its sister album 'Burns Like Fire' here.

There is also live recording partly from the ICA in London, 'Voice of America' featuring Bob Ostertag, Fred Frith and Phil Minton here.

(A gig I actually attended back in 1981 where Phil was actually originally along just to watch the show but ended up performing due to equipment malfunction.)

"...A few months later Fred and I were in London for a concert. Moments before going on, my synthesizer was destroyed in a technical mishap. I was left with my cassette set-up and a contact mic I either kept between my teeth or used to amplify various toys. Fred had brought only a piece of wood with a few screws at either end and guitar strings strung between them. With my synthesizer still smoking, we hastily recruited Phil Minton out of his seat in the audience and without any time for discussion began the set that became Voice of America Part 2."

Bob has a blog at 'The Huffington Post' here.

Sandwell District begins “phase 3″ – with 2×12″ from improv legend and political activist Bob Ostertag

Aidan Moffat & Bill Wells - Glasgow Jubilee

Info

Andres Serrano's Piss Christ destroyed by Christian protesters

Piss Christ by Andres Serrano after it was attacked by Christian protesters in Avignon. Photograph: Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images

The controversial work Piss Christ by the New York photographer Andres Serrano has been destroyed at a gallery in France after weeks of protests.
The photograph, which shows a small crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's urine, outraged the US religious right in 1987, when it was first shown, with Serrano denounced in the Senate by the Republican Jesse Helms. It was later vandalised in Australia, and neo-Nazis ransacked a show by the artist in Sweden in 2007.
The work has previously been shown without incident in France, but for the past two weeks Catholic groups have campaigned against it, culminating in hundreds of people marching through Avignon on Saturday in protest.
Just after 11am on Sunday, four people in sunglasses entered the gallery where the exhibition was being held. One took a hammer from his sock and threatened security staff. A guard restrained one man but the remaining members of the group managed to smash an acrylic screen and slash the photograph with what police believe was a screwdriver or ice pick. They then destroyed another photograph, of nuns' hands in prayer.
Piss Christ is part of a series by Serrano showing religious objects submerged in fluid such as blood and milk. It was being shown in an exhibition to mark 10 years of the art dealer Yvon Lambert's personal collection in his 18th-century mansion.
Last week the gallery complained of "extremist harassment" by Christians who wanted the image banned. The archbishop of Vaucluse, Jean-Pierre Cattenoz, called the work "odious" and said he wanted "this trash" taken off the gallery walls. Saturday's street protest against the work gained the support of the far-right National Front, which has recently done well in local elections.
Lambert had complained he was being "persecuted" by religious extremists who had sent him tens of thousands of emails. He likened the atmosphere to a return to the middle ages. The gallery stepped up protection, putting Plexiglass in front of Piss Christ and assigning two gallery guards to stand in front of it.
The culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, condemned the vandalism as an attack on the fundamental freedoms of creation and expression. A police complaint has been filed by the gallery and the guards.
The gallery's director, Eric Mézil, says he will keep the exhibition open to the public with the destroyed work on show "so people can see what barbarians can do".
The I Believe in Miracles exhibition opened in December and will run until May.
Angelique Chrisafis @'The Guardian'

Fugn christians!!!

'We're not dumb'

Lou Reed, Maureen "Mo" Tucker, and Doug Yule reunited at The New York Public Library on December 8, 2009 to chat with "Rolling Stone" journalist David Fricke.