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Marmaduke Dando’s back… if you help!

Marmaduke Dando is a good friend and a great musician. He is recording a new album, and he’s crowdfunding it because, well, this is 2013 and that’s how great, quirky musicians make second albums.

His first album, Heathcliffian Surly, is a damn fine piece of work. It became the soundtrack to the Dark Mountain festival for many people, and… well, it encapsulates a very particular, peculiar and splendid aesthetic, a Brechtian series of fables. It’s a beautiful album to listen to, but it’s got layers and crosscurrents where Marmaduke’s vision of the world, informed by his own deep musing on our collective plight and shame, and his equally remarkable and spontaneous reaction to it. I always thought of him as a potential English Tom Waits, to be honest.

In that spirit, I haven’t shown the beautiful, professional Odessa video in this blog post, but the much rougher and sharper “The Last Drink.”

I have no idea what the new album will be like, but I was willing to pay in advance to find out! Go and help a unique voice be heard!

In other news, Lucas Gonzalez has published…

The OODA-SCIM guide for managing pandemic flu (and other systemic risks.)

Lucas Gonzalez has produced a new emergency management toolkit: the fully professionalized, fact-checked, ready for government use Official Version, including damn near everything we discovered in my own rough-and-ready work on pandemic flu and simple critical infrastructure maps (SCIM), as well as years of professional epidemiological experience from the good doctor. Lucas has taken fundamental models, including John Boyd’s OODA loop and SCIM, and produced a detailed 80 page manual which covers the current state of the art science and epidemiology of pandemic flu and everything we currently know about decentralized management of infrastructure in a time of national crisis. I think Lucas’s work will find applications far outside of flu, and I encourage you to download a copy, pass it around to people who think about risk, and think about potential applications of these models to things like currency crises. This is the good stuff, and I hope many, many people will find it useful. There’s a 5 page intro here as well as versions of all these documents in English and Spanish.

Graeber’s Debt gave Occupy an analysis. iPermie gives Occupy a plan.
iPermie is Bob Waldrop’s magnum opus, a Lord Of The Rings length, unbelievably comprehensive (TOC) guide to permaculture, social transformation and personal resilience for ordinary-extraordinary citizens of the 21st century.

It is, frankly, the most impressive writing effort I’ve ever seen, in terms of assembling a comprehensive practical guide to the technologies and mindsets of resilience. It has the breadth of a book with 20 authors, and the coherence and vision of a single mind. It is, frankly, a work of genius.

iPermie is two bucks – $1.99 – and available in just about every electronic form known to man. You could buy five and give them to friends, and still call your copy a bargain.

I was privileged to write the foreword to the book – I hope you’ll take a moment to read it, and dip into the huge free sample in that document.

This is great. Pass it on.

And finally, an extremely rare #FF from me
Stirling Newberry is a man who should need no introduction, but probably does. He’s popped up here and there in history, trying to get Wesley Clark to run for president, or unpicking the world’s economic and political woes. I’ve occasionally been hanging out on twitter with Stirling, and shared Marginal Revolution’s revelatory reaction to his insight.

Get to know Stirling’s work.

Consider the multidimensional nature of two pieces Stirling produced in response to Aaron Swartz’s suicide: a blog post discussing the political/economic forces behind Aaron Swartz death, and a musical composition, this requiem.

I don’t know quite what to say about talent like that, but let’s hope he stays pointed in a good direction, and gets where he’s going.

I’m lucky to know these people. I’m glad to be able to pass on that privilege.