Topic: mo C Blues

[Mr.OMuck]

Here's a little something I knocked off the other evening while thinking about my Dec. 2nd workshop called Messin' 'round in C at The Jalopy Theatre in recently aquatic Redhook Brooklyn. I intend to disgorge most of what I know in the key of C...which is most of what I know ;~) Tha..thats a joke son ..a joke I say!...

[joe paul]

Nice. Pity I can't be in Brooklyn that weekend, it's a long bus ride from here in France.

[lindy]

Nice, your teacher done good . . .

We've been waiting for a Muckster report, or song, about the night the Great Storm Flooded the IRT, and to tell us how the Jalopy fared--we noticed several mentions of Red Hook in the news.

Please inform.

L

[Pan]

As Arnold Schoenberg said, there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major! 

Cheers

Pan

Edited to add: keeping my fingers crossed for Jalopy!

[Johnm]

That's really nice, Phil!  Lots of ingredients.
All best,
Johnm

[blueshome]

I enjoyed that!

[Mr.OMuck]

Lindy, thanks for asking about my beleaguered city. What everyone should glean from this and really try to absorb is that the wolf is now very literally at the door. Where predictions about the sea rising and the flooding of coastal cities has usually been presented as happening in the far off si-fi future, it has in fact just happened.
There can be no more sensible debate about global warming nor in fact in my opinion do we have the time to engage in it. Now that the results are indisputably here, almost certainly a direct result of half of Greenland melting away this past summer, the world will have to shift focus towards preventing further disaster.
Holland and Venice should serve as helpful instructive examples. Suffice it to say that the devastation is unimaginable. While the waters have for the most part receded the coming months and years will see hundreds if not thousands of buildings declared unfit for human habitation. This in the city with one of the most pressured housing markets on earth. And I'm not just talking about one family homes either, I'm talking about whole apartment buildings whose foundations suffered irremediable damage.
It is the absolutely perfect moment for our re elected president to take a page from FDR's playbook and reinstitute the CCC (Civilian Conservation Core) and get working on things like sea walls and new housing. There are pictures of Redhook that I commented on after posting on facebook that look exactly like San Marco's in Venice when flooded. Jalopy became a nerve center in organizing volunteer efforts and Geoff the owner personally rescued a couple of people trapped in a basement and proceeded to help pump out basements for folks. Lynette manned the fort providong free food and drink to anyone who needed it. How lucky am I that these two chose to leave their native Chicago and grace us New Yorkers with their great club and their presence?

Redhook aside from housing Jalopy is the home of many  artists many of whom saw all or most of their life's work destroyed, as did artists in Greenpoint as well. Chelsea the Gallery district of Manhattan was similarly hard hit and almost every gallery basement where the majority of artist's work is stored were flooded.
The reason that there were no bodies floating in the streets as in New Orleans during Katrina was that there was an aggressive evacuation program in effect. Had that not been the case and had the weather predictions not been so accurate, many thousands would have drowned. No one's coming right out and saying that this was worse than Katrina, but it had the potential to be much worse.

[lindy]

Thanks for the report, O'M. I grew up in Staten Island, not far away from where that poor woman lost her two children in a surge of surf.

Amazing how we lack the political will to address a warming planet. Having Sandy hit the World's Greatest City has one positive aspect: it is also the world's mass media center. Despite all the media coverage of Katrina, I'm still not sure if Katrina had the same effect on our thinking about global warming as Sandy because of where the two storms hit. Hard to say, likely cumulative.

But I do share this with my friends, for no other reason than for context:

The official death toll for Sandy is 90-100.
For Katrina it was just over 1,800.
For Nargis, a cyclone that hit Burma in 2008, it was 140,000 according to the UN, a lot more according to others. But barely a blip in most US newspapers.

Thanks for the stories about the owners of the Jalopy, clearly they're exceptional people, and deserving of our support if they hold a fundraiser.

L

[Mr.OMuck]

140,000? My god.........

[slideaway]

high water evrywhere.. love you work MM! stay safe!

[dj]

...my beleaguered city.

Not to hijack this post, but O'Muck's city, or at least large parts of it, are still very much beleaguered.  I live 90 miles North of New York City, in an area that was by an accident of geography spared the worst of Sandy's winds and, thanks to an atypical western jog in the storm's path, missed almost all the rain.  What brings home the magnitude of what happened in coastal areas of New York and New Jersey is that today, two weeks after the storm hit, I can look out my windows and see three neighbors' houses where friends or family are staying who can't return to their homes because of destructive flooding or lack of electricity, and a fourth house where the family member just got to return home this weekend.

I'm glad to hear that you're ok, O'Muck.     

[blueshome]

Thanks for the perspective, these things put our own stuff into place.