Luke Judge

Comment Subscribe Subscribe

Sustainable is a buzzword nowadays. It’s a word that the industrial world can use to bring in new customers. Whether it’s a green living expo, a sustainable garden that needs little water because it uses native plants, or making and wearing sustainable clothing, the latest sustainable Earth Day celebration in Sacramento that attracts the attention of social scientists, including anthropologists as well as anyone else, is the idea of swapping your clothes. Is industry putting a new spin on products by using the word, ‘sustainability’ or ‘green?’

Next week, Sacramento also celebrations a Green Expo at Cal Expo on April 24th, Earth Day, from 10 am to 7 pm and on April 25 from 10 am to 6 pm. See,  Sacramento Green Expo: Home.  The Expo features riveting keynote speakers, hands-on demonstrations, the latest in solar energy, natural pet products, hybrid cars, tasty organic goodies, contests, and hundreds of quality products and services including: food & beverage, apparel, home & garden, eco-travel & transportation, and health & beauty.

The Sacramento Green Expo is designed to bring together businesses, civic and non-profit organizations that are helping make the green lifestyle accessible, affordable, and convenient. So what do you think? Is the words ‘green’ or ‘sustainability’ new buzz words that industry is putting on products to revitalize business with cleaner living?

What’s the sustainability movement all about in Sacramento? Cleaning up the air pollution, recycling clothing, making your own products and foods, or keeping less throwaway items out of landfills? Basically what can you do for Earth Day? One idea is to swap ‘sustainable’ items with your neighbors, co-workers, family, and friends.

Guess what anthropologists, environmentalists, and sustainability enthusiasts use to wrap gifts? Re-usable scarves instead of paper. Instead of wasting wrapping paper, although a lot of paper is recycled, try giving a gift the way many indigenous people around the world give gifts, wrapped in reusable scarves.

You also can make gift wrapping collages from old magazines or maps. If you collect wrapping paper from gifts given to you, it can be recycled, and the bows can be used over again. The sustainability idea for Earth day is to keep all those bows and paper out of landfills.

For starters, you can attend a local swap meet in Sacramento where you exchange one sustainable item for another. For example, try the Swap-asana on April 24th from 3 to 5 pm. How it works in Sacramento is to bring one fashion item of women’s clothing and accessories to a place or home and swap what you bring similar to pot luck for something else another person brings.

It’s one inexpensive way to throw a swap fashions party in your home or yard for celebrating Earth Day. The idea is to bring sustainable, plant-based clothing so you can swap it for another person’s sustainable clothing for Earth Day. It would be great if what you brought is new, or at least professionally cleaned and not stained or wrinkled.

One example, in Sacramento for Earth Day, is to visit locally the business called All Yoga at 2405 21st Street in Sacramento. According to the April 18, 2010 Sacramento Bee article by Leigh Grogan, “Make every day Earth Day – wear it – Sacramento Living,” All Yoga is organizing a “Swap-asana,” from 3:00 to 5:00 pm Saturday, April 24, 2010, at the studio. Five dollars is the entrance fee. What you have to do is to bring one fashion item to swap consisting of women’s clothes and accessories. See the article,  It’s All Yoga – Sacramento Yoga Studio.

You can leave with as much pieces as you want, according to the Sacramento Bee article. Any proceeds and unclaimed items are going to be donated to Women Escaping a Violent Environment (WEAVE). If you’re looking for women’s clothing to buy that’s sustainable and ‘green’ for Earth Day in Sacramento, H&M has started its first fully sustainable clothing line called “The Garden Collection.” It uses organic cotton and linen, and recycled polyester. Check out the 80 items it has priced under $60.

Spring Swap-Asana is an Earth Day celebration in Sacramento. It’s about economic sustainability. You can get new or used clothing by bringing an article of clothing to swap. Women’s clothes and accessories only.

Also, on April 24th, 2010, you can make something new to wear out of a tee shirt. It’s the  All Yoga T-Shirt Re-Use Contest. What can you make? For a $5 entry fee to get a shirt (from the studio), you can re-craft it into something else also for Earth day. The contest will be held on April 24th at the Swap-Asana.

Swappers will judge, and the re-use winner will get a Monthly Unlimited class pass. The Earth Day event found its inspiration with Yogi Julie who made a reusable bag out of one of the business’s tee shirt (T-shirt). Check at the desk to see her crafty work.

Also for Earth day, you might want to check out the site for the H&M organic beauty line. Organic clothes and beauty products are being offered by H&M.

The Garden Collection is the new H&M spring clothing line made from all organic and recycled materials. According to a press release from the company, all of the pieces in The Garden Collection are made of sustainable materials including organic cotton and linen grown without using hazardous chemicals, recycled polyester made from PET bottles or textile waste and tencel, a renewable material with little environmental impact.

The clothes are cute, fashionable spring items. There are floral print shirts and dresses, oversized t-shirts, airy tunics, shorts and ruffle tops and dresses. There also organic accessories including scarves, bags and ballet flats. The colours range from vibrant reds and blues to nude. Prices range from $15 for a shirt to $60 for a jacket. Look for The Garden Collection in stores.

If you are not able to afford to buy clothing for Earth Day, make your own and swap what you make for something your neighbors, friends, or relatives make for Earth Day. How you can start is to plan an Earth Day swap meet in your own home or as a block party.

Here’s how to start it. Talk to neighbors on your block and ask them to set out tables in front of their homes on their lawns or even in their backyards. Have each neighbor put out a sustainable garment or accessory item, either women’s or men’s clothing that they can make or buy.

New items preferred, or gently used items that are thoroughly cleaned, ironed, and stored in something to protect the clothing from bird droppings and insects, such as the type of bag garment cleaners put over your clothing when you have it cleaned. Each neighbor can bring a sustainable fashion item that’s ‘green’ and swap it for something of similar value.

If you can’t plan a block party, you can have an Earth Day Swap party in your own home. The idea is to bring a ‘green’ sustainable item of some type with a theme–women’s clothing, indoor gardening, accessories, children’s clothing, men’s clothing, books on sustainability, or some Earth-Day themed item that’s safe, clean, and appropriate.

Just invite people in to swap, for example members of your club, friends from work or school, or relatives. Better yet, talk to your neighbors about planning an Earth Day event for one block in your neighborhood or your apartment complex.

For senior living complexes, Earth Day might also be celebrated by recording the life story highlights of older adults on video and giving out copies of the DVDs with the individual’s half-hour life story experience recorded in an interview, where one person interviews another with a list of questions prepared in advance so the person being interviewed can think of what the answers would be. The person would be told how to make or obtain more copies for various relatives.

The idea on Earth Day of launching eco-benefit swap meets is to celebrate it by swapping canned food items or jars of sustainable foods, for example new jars of organic almond butter, hemp butter, mango butter, or any other new food item you purchase in a health food store or organic foods market. You swap your jar of almond butter, for example, for another person’s can of organic chia seeds. The requirement would be that the food be new, sealed, and not expired, perhaps bought in a health food store, and safe to eat.

The same goes for a loaf of bread, a packaged food item, or even a pair of shoes. You might swap, for example a pair of Naya brand shoes that uses chrome-free, vegetable-tanned leathers and sustainable bamboo heels for another person’s re-usable scarves that can be used to wrap gifts. Or you might swap a bottle of aromatherapy lavender, for example that you buy at a health food store, for another person’s rose essential oil or “acai-based cosmetics.”

Make sure that the item is new, sealed, and not expired. One example is Kiehl’s Acai toning mist. Did you know 100 percent of the net proceeds from sales will benefit the Rainforest Alliance? Acai toning mist is sold at Kiehl’s stores as well as Nordstroms in Sacramento. Or take a look at Naya’s collection of sustainable shoes at Nordstrom or at the Shoes.com site.

The idea is to throw a swap party for Earth Day, either in your home, as a block party for neighbors, or in a community center or social hall from your house of worship. Earth Day can be celebrated with swapping new health foods or wearable items that represent sustainability.  The idea is to get together with people for Earth Day to do something other than just observe the entertainment. That’s way taking action might focus on throwing a sustainability items swap party in your area.

weaving earth day celebration, sustainable earth

Series of video talks from the 3rd Organic Beekeeping Conference. As I’ve yet to watch any of the others I can only vouch for the Sam Comfort talk, which was inspirational.

1. Video of Sam Comfort (of Anarchy Apiaries) singing some bee and bug songs: vimeo.com/10159341

2. A Hard Row to Hoe: Getting on the Treatment Free Treadmill: vimeo.com/10196856Dean Stiglitz

3. The Microbial Environment Inside the Bee Hive: vimeo.com/10206408Laurie Ramona Herboldsheimer discusses some of the little known (or understood) aspects of microbes in the hive.

4. Sam Comfort Talk: vimeo.com/10207692Sam discusses his personal history in commercial beekeeping and his radical new approach to the old ways.

5. James Fearnly: Propolis: vimeo.com/10210573James speaks authoritatively about propolis, propolis in history, and about his research and company.

6. USDA Organic Standards: Arthur Harvey and Stan Hildebrand: vimeo.com/10211570Two organic inspectors discuss a USDA Organic Standard.

7. HD Slow Motion Bees: vimeo.com/10212227

beekeeping bee hive, free treadmill, hildebrand, new approach, stiglitz

Composer: Bear McCreary
Label: La La Land
Suggested Retail Price: $15.98
Grade: B+

What a wonderfully long, strange ride it’s been for Bear McCreary and the crew of the Battlestar Galactica. Having gotten his wings as a protégé of Elmer Bernstein and an assistant to Richard Gibbs, McCreary came to the fore as a musical co-pilot for Gibbs on GALACTICA’s 2003 miniseries. It was an in-your-face revision that turned Glenn Larson’s enjoyable camp show into a brooding, ultra-realistic, meta-political program that probably wouldn’t have shorn its sci-fi trappings if could have. The oh-so-serious tone stripped away the STAR WARS- majesty of Stu Phillips’ original music into bare bones percussion and stunningly anachronistic bagpipes for the new anti-music millennia, a sound that didn’t seem to really play anything but the series’ overwhelming darkness.

Yet over the course of a five-year journey that finally landed them on the “real” Earth, BSG screwed the outright naysayers, not to mention scoffers like myself, to become one of the television’s best series. It packed a spellbinding dramatic gravitas that went far beyond anything that could be called Syfy, let alone a reboot. Ditto McCreary work, which swiftly revealed the method to its madness, filling its seemingly boring skeleton with an amazingly gutsy approach to scoring space opera. The percussion may have continued to steer this ship, but it was fleshed out with rock guitar, strikingly good themes, haunting vocals, and yes, even a traditional orchestra. And it turned out all along that those ethnic instruments were there to create a sense of colonies flung together, something that just might be the series’ most important tonal element.

As critical and cult success has shown, there’s no better way to capitalize on a show’s success then by spinning it off into stand-alone TV movies, let alone milking its dead corpse for a sour aftertaste. RAZOR served as an intriguing way to keep GALACTICA’s interest afloat during the show’s stop-and-start airings, and THE PLAN a pretty incomprehensibly awful way to get some mileage out of the show months after it had ended. In any case though, there’s no denying the thoughtfulness, and quality of McCreary’s work for both TV movies, which now get a combo release on La La Land, a label that continues to terrifically present all music BSG.

Beginning with Raya Yarbrough’s haunting vocals and McCreary’s guitar thrashing out THE PLAN’s “Apocalypse Theme,” the CD segues into the kind of percussive, ethnically transfixing melodies that have made the show’s music so impressive, finding world music as its own beautifully haunted form of otherworldliness. In fact, you’d probably have to think back to Toto’s DUNE soundtrack to hear a similarly meditative mélange like this. Barely hitting any of the actions of a psychotically militaristic spaceship, or trying to decipher The Cylons machinations, McCreary’s work is all about mood, frequently tense and often psychedelic, yet always melodic. In fact, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to tell where RAZOR and THE PLAN’s music finished, and started, given the thematic cohesiveness of McCreary’s vision for a series where nearly every episode had its own motif- let alone melodies that tied the whole trek together. And here McCreary proves it by seamlessly sequencing between the two soundtracks to make this CD one long-running headtrip, though there is a definitely noticeable, and nicely sporting tip of the hat to Phillip’s original theme for “Husker in Combat.”

Complementing the melodically hypnotic flow of THE PLAN and RAZOR is a live version of THE PLAN’s “Apocalypse Theme,” where adoring throngs cheer, “So say we al!” before being treated to the raw, reverberating strings, drums and guitars of McCreary’s band. For whether he’s strumming, pounding, thrashing or ethereally floating about, THE PLAN / RAZOR goes out by proving McCreary’s work are far more of a conceptual rock opera than a space one. Except instead of a double album, it’s gone on for dozens of episodes and numerous CD soundtracks. It’s a jam session that could just as well be taking place in a mythical fantasy kingdom or on the hills of Ireland. Such is the timeless, TV-less impact of McCreary’s work, a saga of his musical growth that gets a particularly nice coda here.

Since the Galactica has gone into the sun, and the fate of its prequel CAPRICA is definitely more dicey than GALACTICA’s was at the start (despite McCreary’s yeoman, and very different musical approach to the show), the composer is definitely smart enough to look for other venues while keeping very busy on TV with shows like EUREKA and THE HUMAN TARGET. And while he’s more than deserving of an AVATAR-type big screen break, videogames should more than temporarily suffice given his impressive work on DARK VOID.

For this CAPCOM alien invasion take on THE ROCKETEER, it’s all about heroic orchestrations and mean-ass percussion. And the popcorn crowd that might find McCreary’s GALACTICA work just a bit subtle will doubtlessly appreciate the composer’s steroid take on his ethnic-beat sound, not to mention a fully unchained use of the orchestra. McCreary runs with the possibilities of an 80-piece symphony and a musical budget that could take care of a whole season of BSG, delivering a thematically epic score that would befit any summer sci-fi lollapalooza. With throttling drums and exotic winds getting across the darkest Africa setting of its space nasties’ incursion, McCreary delivers one rousing adventure run after the other as his patriotic sounding, high-flying hero blasts the BEM’s back to their own dimension.

Further complementing VOID’s thematic throwback feel is McCreary’s use of the Ondes Martenot, a Theremin-like electric instrument that his mentor Bernstein used in such scores as HEAVY METAL and GHOSTBUSTERS. And there’s no doubt that Elmer would be proud of how well McCreary integrates the sound into his orchestra, paying tribute to Elmer’s great fantasy scores while also making DARK VOID sound very much like his own uniquely percussive voice. Throughout VOID, McCreary does an effective balancing act between the two styles. Screeching guitar chords and electric violins that are very much from Commander Adama’s universe mesh with a symphonically nostalgic throwback to the days when two-fisted heroes wore rockets on their backs. So if you’re looking for the proof that the walls have come tumbling down in the difference of what music’s being done for the movie theater and your console, then McCreary blows any doubts with DARK VOID. If the Battlestar had gone for this kind of firepower in the first place, the Cylons wouldn’t have had a chance. But then, we might be poorer for the brilliantly innovative understatement that’s helped put McCreary on your PS3.

So say we bye with Bear to GALACTICA here

spinning dead corpse, richard gibbs, rock guitar