[NewMusic] Ecto-touring

[Travis Johns]

as the token eco-hippy of the lot, eh, i should probably weigh in.

1.) there is NOTHING eco-friendly about touring. - let's face it -
everything you do, from the driving to the food to the power used in
the hall while you play is somehow or another sucking resources.
granted, yeah, we all have a smaller footprint than say any major
label touring jackass (especially the eco-whiners like jack johnson or
moby) who has to cart their shit on multi semis and whose presence
alone for one evening will generate probably a short ton of waste just
from the plastic beer bottles, uneaten hot dogs, festival swag,
etcetc. ...but unless you be walking from village to village with a
hand-carved pan flute, you're still contributing.

2.) there is NOTHING eco-friendly about music. - my bass = wood cut
from a virgin forest, loaded onto a large truck, shipped to a large
industrial factory, run through a large, power consuming assembly line
and coated with toxic, plastic-based pigments to make it a nice, shiny
color. Then the electronics, consisting of various metals mined from
the earth and shipped great distances are added and finally its placed
in a shipping container and loaded onto a boat (btw, there are no fuel
quality restrictions placed on intl shipping vessels, so that means
that cargo ships burn the cheapest, dirtiest sludge that passes for
oil and ergo end up being one of the biggest fucking polluters on this
planet - why we do nothing about this pickle, mi no se... oh right,
cheap foreign products...), shipped across the ocean and then driven
to some store to be purchased with the expectation that every time the
instrument is played, it'll be plugged into the wall, sucking juice
from the grid. My laptop's even worse - just remember kids, outside of
the carbon footprint involved, most electronics are assembled using
close-to slave labor, in close contact with such substances as mercury
and cadmium day in and day out - with the full on knowledge that if
enough employees complain they'll either be replaced, or the company
will simply pick up and relocate to another country with even less
labor and environmental concerns. I hate to say it, but with the
exception of maybe Damon's ergo basses and a couple other fancy
one-offs, our instruments are all, erm, not so eco-friendly in their
creation, etcetc. compound this notion with the carbon-addled woes of
our previous caveat and yeah, our profession is pretty eco-damned. And
yes, its true that we're better than some and worse than others, but
shit, its still the same damn crime - which brings me to our last, and
final point of the day.

3.) there is NOTHING eco-friendly about humanity. - Self-explanatory.
Somehow in the past 100 years, we've managed to adopt a lifestyle that
is so far removed from an ideal, harmonious existence that we once
shared with with our little spacerock that unfortunately, short of
some sort of en masse utopian enlightenment on the part of about 6
billion people all coming together at once to make this world a better
place, the only way we might ever be able go return to "equalization,"
if you will, is probably gonna be due to some sort of mass die-off
caused by any number of apocalyptic scenarios continually looming on
the horizon. sucks to that ass-mar, ja?

so uhm, yah, there you have it. amazing thought to ponder over yr
early morning coffee, right?

btw, how y'all doing?

On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 4:10 AM, Brady Sharp <bradysharp at gmail.com> wrote:
> *... and I thought one of THESE would have been better for Ecto-touring...
>
>  http://tinyurl.com/6k2ryo*
>
>  Brady
>
>
>
>  On Sat, May 3, 2008 at 2:55 AM, jacob felix heule <jfheule at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > i don't know if this actually explains anything, but...
>  > http://flickr.com/photos/74578389@N00/2456673835/in/set-72157604831982021/
>  >
>  > On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:37 PM, Alee Karim <alee at tentacle.net> wrote:
>  > >  Jacob, how DID you fit everything in your car?!
>  >
>  > --
>  > http://heule.us & http://myspace.com/jacobfelix
>  > http://ettrick.org & http://myspace.com/ettrick
>  > _______________________________________________
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>  > NewMusic at music.mills.edu
>  > http://music.mills.edu/mailman/listinfo/newmusic
>  >
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