Samuel Rutledge dot com

Carsie Blanton

Samuel — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:18:56 +0000

Carsie is a singer/songwriter who used to live here in Eugene. She’s moved east and seems to tour back that way. I used to love seeing her play, and would love to see a return for a West Coast mini tour. Click the button to invite Carsie back to the left coast to show us her chops.

Upcoming Events by Eventful

What I’m Up To

Samuel — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:21:36 +0000

It’s been crazy busy lately, getting used to the new job (I’m a Case Manager), getting the harvest in, and cleaning up the house a little. Bit by bit this place is becoming the place I want to live forever. We’ll get there yet.

Tonight I’m going to the Jackalope to see my brother in law Layne play drums with Brett Estep . If you’re not doing anything else, come check it out.

In the meantime, check out the wicked feature I just added; a box in the sidebar that tells you what music I’m listening to on iTunes. Now, even when I’m neglecting the blog in terms of posting items, you can at least see what I’m up to musically. Disclaimer; there is no accounting for taste.

It’s been a while

Samuel — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:59:20 +0000

Once again I’ve fallen down on posting. I’ve been working extra hard as a new Board year for the Growers’ Market kicks into gear, working on my garden (see my wife’s site, with whom I share space on the internet, for a garden journal), and watching my son grow up. He’s 20 months old, and is extremely pretentious. He’s learning his letters, wants to read poetry with me (Robert Frost, T.S. Elliot, Pablo Neruda, and Saul Williams are his favorites), and generally understands the world better than his mother and I do. I’m not sure what to do with him, and I worry that if he doesn’t slow down he’s going to miss some of the important details that toddlers at this stage learn. On the other hand, I’m trying my hardest to remember that he knows what’s best for himself, and that he’ll be just fine. Taylor was a very early reader, and I was a very early talker. He seems to have picked up both from us, and that’s the way it goes for him.

We’re deep in the swing of getting the garden ready, planting and tilling and pushing earth. I built Arthur a sandbox in the back yard (it needs sand, but otherwise it’s ready to go). We have nine chickens, one a full on pullet and the rest emerging from chickhood into a sort of creepy dinosaur looking transitional phase. We inherited a very nice coop from some friends who were no longer using it, and have fenced in a nice big corner of our yard to be a chicken run. Big Chicken is already living outdoors, and the littles are living in a big watering trough in our laundry room. I’m ready for them to grow up and head outside, but it’ll be a while yet.

My father in law and his wife will be in town for the whole summer, out from the East coast, and we’re getting ready for a great summer of Grandparent time, festivals (Country Fair is less than two months away!), and harvesting. I’m hoping to have a pig roast, something we did last summer, and to brew up a batch of Lambic (which won’t be ready to drink for two years. Awesome).

I did some (not much) volunteering for Oregon’s primary, which took place last week. Our commitments to the food co-op continue to keep us busy, and our country fair meeting and planning is kicking into gear.

In terms of brewing, I’ve done two batches since I last posted and I may at some point share the recipes/techniques used here. For now, I’m going to let it be and go back to work.

Saychi! Oak Barrel Kombucha

Samuel — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:06:48 +0000

For the past several months I’ve been getting into Kombucha, a cultured tea drink that comes from China and other points East. I’ve tried my hand at making my own (and still need to do some work at balancing enough sugar for a good ferment and not so much to create a sweet drink). I’ve also tried several brands.

Last week I discovered an amazing Kombucha. It’s made by a local company called Saychi! It’s fermented and aged in Oak Barrels. They do a good job of not adding too much of the fruit and other flavors, so the sour tea flavor comes through. Their ginger flavor has a lot of spice, which I think is nice.

They don’t seem to have a website, or else I’d link them here. But if you’re in the Eugene area I’d highly recommend looking them up. Their products are certainly available at the SeQuential Biofuels station in South Eugene and at the Kiva.

Exestintial Crisis

Samuel — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 03:46:21 +0000

I am having a personal crisis. It has to do with ideology. This is an often bandied and ne’er well defined word. At a basic level, it seems that ideology is the set of ideas that guides a person’s decisions making. In that sense I think that ideology is important. How, without it, are we to know what decisions to make? One could argue that pure scientific management and ‘rationalism’ is the best way to make decisions, but even that is ideological; choosing scientific knowledge (rather than something like emotional experience or religious conviction, both of which are also valid) as the proper basis for decision making is itself an ideological decision. In addition, Science is not free from ideological bias. Scientists, like all of us, see the world through biased lenses, colored by a lifetime of experience, exposure to deep stereotypes, and all manner of cultural predispositions. Even if these biases don’t affect the outcome of research, they shape the questions scientists ask and the way those questions are framed. Ideology, then, is inescapable. It is also necessary. Without having some preexisting notion of what ideas will guide decision making, how are we to begin to make decisions? There is nowhere to stand without ideology, no way to make value judgments, no way to avoid a kind of relativism that leads to arbitrariness. The problem, as I see it, is not ideology. It’s dogma. That, I would say, is when we persist in ideological beliefs despite ample evidence that we are wrong. The problem, in other words, is not being able to change ones’ mind on the big questions.

In this sense, actually, my crisis is about a lack of ideology rather than an excess. My crisis is selfishly existential (which I think is totally appropriate, given that I am at the moment perched in the mouth Plato’s cave, and about to dive out into the real world). I’m feeling paralyzed by the idea that my actions have long lasting, unpredictable consequences for which I have to be responsible. I am feeling paralyzed because even seemingly obvious choices are cast into doubt in this light. An example will be helpful.

By devising programs to help the poor, you can ameliorate the effects of poverty on some people. You can even probably come up with fiendishly clever ways to invite and welcome a heretofore left out segment of the population into the economy and society in a way that is productive and feels good for everybody. These are all good things, and things that I can see myself doing. These programs also have some unknown consequences for the macro structure of society. I think you would agree that our particular form of corporate capitalism is fairly exploitative by design, that the system itself creates a great deal of suffering. Does ameliorating the suffering of the poor provide a sheen of legitimacy to this system? Is it not possible that by helping with the short term and small scale suffering of individual people, one can unintentionally protect an economic order that causes that suffering in the first place? Is is possible that by helping some people in one place, you create more suffering in another place? I think these things are distinctly possible. What’s more, if the poor didn’t have a social safety net it seems possible that they would organize to change the system.

I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily the case – only that it is possible. The problem is, I have no idea. With no way to predict the future consequences of my actions, how can I begin to act? Ethically, I think one has to take responsibility for the consequences of what they do even if those consequences weren’t predictable. On the one hand, by joining the system and helping people with their problems, or by trying to change the system from within to make it less exploitative by a matter of degrees, it is possible that I end up using my life energy to contribute to the very survival of that system, which will stay exploitative on it’s basic level. On the other hand, by staying outside the system and trying to organize for change on a systemic level, I may be engaging in a hopeless pursuit and wasting a lot of effort on a project that ultimately comes to bear no fruit. Or even worse, somehow as if by magic a small group of committed people are able to agitate for radical systemic change and it turns out that we were wrong. The revolution could cause more suffering than it alleviates, but not having the revolution could cause more suffering than it alleviates. This is a sticky place to be in.

Lutfisk

Samuel — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 01:27:05 +0000

I went to Wikipedia to find out what Lutefisk is, you know, made of (fish and lye, it turns out) and found one of my favorite pieces of political trivia to date. I actually looked it up, and it’s true. The section of the Wisconsin statutes quoted here is under the ‘definitions’ section. The second 2 is a heading for specific exemptions. The (f) section simply reads; ‘Lutefisk.’ Too good to be true. This is better than the Tommy Thompson ale tax story.

“The Wisconsin Employees’ right to know law regarding toxic substances specifically exempts Lutefisk (Wisc. Stat. 101.58(2)(j)(2)(f))” [From Wikipedia article on Lutefisk]

The Barenaked Ladies Are Me(n)

Samuel — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:53:23 +0000

I’ve been a fan of the Barenaked Ladies for a very long time. I have an Aunt and Uncle in Canada who sent me their 1994 album “Maybe You Should Drive” before they began to hit it big in the United States. I was thirteen at the time, the biggest geek in the world, and I wasn’t the least bit interested in contemporary music. But, I gave it a listen, and grew to love it. There is an honest in The Barenaked Ladies’ lyrics, and a playfulness in their songwriting, that touches me. They lack the pretension of so many modern ‘artists’. They’re just some guys in a band. I like that about them, and they have a place close to my heart because they opened the door to a whole world of modern music for me that I had been closed to in my childhood.

Knowing this background you won’t be surprised to hear that when I heard on NPR that the ladies had a new record out, I was thrilled. And, par for the course for them, BNL has bucked a lot of trends. Part of the album has just been released in physical form in the US, but several digital versions have been available online for some time. There are actually two albums that they released, Barenaked Ladies Are Me and Barenaked Ladies are Men, both of which are available as downloads in either MP3 or FLAC formats from the earlier link. They’ve also released a USB Thumb Drive with both albums and a bonus live disk. What’s even better is that none of the releases contain any sort of DRM technologies. You can send songs to your friends, burn them onto disks, put them onto digital music players, and do pretty much whatever you want with them to your heart’s content. I purchased the deluxe download edition of the album for eighteen bucks because, strange but true, they made it easy to steal and I wanted to support that.

But enough with the geeky. What about the music. BNL’s first few records, Gordon and Maybe You Should Drive, were largely acoustic, and produced with a light touch. The guitars, keyboards, and vocals spoke for themselves and for the most part went unaugmented. Starting with Born on a Pirate Ship, as they began to garner more commercial success in the US markets, BNL’s records began to take on more of the character of overproduced pop albums. Electronic filters, strange noises, and other stupid studio parlor tricks became more and more common. Nonetheless, the quality of their songwriting and musicianship shone through and there were gems on each of the groups hit records.

These new albums, which are self produced after a break from their record company, are a breath of fresh air. Once again, their songs are abundant with extremely well written guitar and banjo riffs. Their harmonies are plush. Their lyrics are somehow at once poignant and irreverent. There are moments on the album that could believably be sold as lost recordings from BNL’s early years, but these records are by no means a regression. They have also moved forward, experimenting with new instruments as well as subject matter.

The (very funny) song Fun and Gamespokes sad fun at the stupidity of George W. Bush’s war on Terror. The lyrics

“Our bill of rights will be rejected/and all the blame will be deflected/the forests will be unprotected/the nation’s poor will be neglected/creation myth is resurrected/the new salute is genuflected/the Gallup poll will be respected/a gallows pole will be erected/and all this will go undetected”

are sung over New Orleans style frenetic Jazz building into a frenzy in the bridge. It’s truly scathing.

All in all, I think Are Me(n) might grow to be my favorite BNL album so far, which is saying a lot considering the important spot Maybe You Should Drive occupies in my heart. My only problem is that there’s too much to wrap my brain around. The two albums total twenty seven tracks, all of which are going to need listening to before they find that familiar comfortable place where favorite music lives. Whether or not it lands in my personal top spot, this is a wonderful album which I recommend heartily.

Welcome

Samuel — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 20:56:19 +0000

Welcome to my Blog. Right now, it’s in ‘development’ (I’m trying to figure out what the hell to do with it, and in the meantime wasting myself on trifling design issues). Soon, I’ll have it more worked out and get back to you.