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I had hoped to follow my Meat is Murder (on the planet) post with an addendum: that I looked forward to giving my first vote as an American citizen to Dennis Kucinich. The connection? Kucinich is a vegetarian, and I’d love to see someone in the White House who could raise the same kind of issues regarding our excessive meat production/consumption, as did Mark Bittman in the NYTimes last Sunday.

But that’s not to be. Kucinich, always an outsider and in almost every regard the most progressive of Democrat candidates, dropped out of the race last Thursday. Yesterday, so too did John Edwards, who has always come across to me as a good, good man and who I wish had won the Party nomination four years ago instead of John Kerry. I still get to have my first vote next week in the New York Primary as a registered Democrat, but in a forerunner of the Presidential race to come, it’s down to two candidates: Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Such are the vagaries of American politics. The system always looks so great: anyone can run for almost anything, and almost anyone does. But when it comes time to punch the ballot/click the computer screen, most of the country is faced with a relatively stark choice. I can see how the Primary “season” arguably works in our favor a little like a good Marathon: it steadily eliminates the winnows, and it allows the long-distance runners to find their rhythm and pace, clarify their vision, prove their mettle – and in the end, ideally, the best man or woman wins. But still I wish I had more choices for next Tuesday.

However, every cloud has a silver lining. Yesterday, “former New York Mayor” Rudy Giuliani also dropped out of the Presidential race. It’s difficult for me to believe that any Republican candidate will make a good President, so I won’t try and go for a false positive; all I can say is that it’s hard to imagine anyone would have made a worse President. We’re all better off without him.

Neil Young’s “Looking for a Leader” is proving more and more prescient.

Among the many people I could not find while researching my Keith Moon biography, back in those pre-Internet days when we had to rely on personal contacts and heavy phone directories, was John Mears. John was Keith’s north London neighbor in the late 60s/early 70s; his parents went into business with Keith at the Crown & Cushion hotel in Chipping Norton, and John became Keith Moon’s “driver” in 1970. He was a brave man to do so: the previous driver, Neil Boland, had died under the wheels of Keith’s car.

Mears survived to tell some tales, in a series of e-mails to Who collector Joe Giorgianni. These recollections are posted on Joe’s Who web site, here. They’ve been on line for a while, but Joe got back in touch with me last week after the Final 24 Keith Moon episode, and knowing how many Moon fans visit this site, it makes sense for me to pass along the link. In between the appalling spelling (Warder Street!) are some classic Moon anecdotes – though it’s a little disturbing to see how rapidly, in Mears’ eyes, Keith appears to have bounced back from the death of Neil Boland.

The line-up for the fourth Hunter Mountain Jam was announced yesterday, and after I got over the déjà vu – it’s now a given that Government Mule close out both nights, and weren’t Spearhead, and Medeski, Scofield, Martin and Wood on last year’s bill too? – I got quite excited. The line-up includes the best of what we have to offer locally from across the generations, including veteran Levon Helm and newcomers the Felice Brothers, and at least a couple of current buzz acts: Galactic and Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings. Throw in the Drive By Truckers and Citizen Cope and it’s not a bad line-up, at least not if you live within a half-hour drive. (Besides, nobody says you have to watch every one of the great unwashed jam bands who make up the rest of the bill.) Tickets go on sale this Friday. The betting that it will rain through the event for at least the fourth year in a row starts now.

The New York Times published a lengthy piece in its Week In Review section this Sunday, on a subject most people wish to ignore: the cost of meat. Having been a vegetarian for almost twenty-five years, I long ago grew tired of selling other people on the practice. I recognize that no one likes being preached to – especially over dinner. And hey, some of my best friends are carnivores; in fact, in the area I now call home, some of them even kill their own dinner.

So it’s refreshing when somebody else – in this case Mark Bittman, who the Times stresses is NOT a vegetarian – can lay out some of the argument for me, and for a wider audience at large. Enthusiastic meat consumers often judge vegetarians as big softies who are simply too nice to animals, and to an extent, they’re right: we do include the morality of meat eating as one of our objections (while recognizing that it’s hard to live a guilt-free existence). But that’s not to ignore the other two key issues, which are harder to argue with: personal health and, especially, the global environment. Mark Bittman’s front page feature helps demonstrate why these two issues are just as important. Here are some of his key facts and figures:

The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050,

Americans eat about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius.

Livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. (Yet) about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

This feed lot in California can accomodate up to 100,000 heads of cattle. An 1,100 ound beef cow can produce up to 14.6 tons of manure a year.

In Iowa alone, hog factories and farms produce more than 50 million tons of excrement annually.

We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources .

An accompanying graphic shows that a meal made up of 1 cup broccoli, I cup eggplant, 4 oz caulifower and 8 oz rice uses one-sixteenth the amount of fossil fuel energy as six ounces of beef.

The full article is available online. Please take time to read it through and consider to what extent your dietary habits are contributing to our planet’s imbalance.

And have a great week….

The Keith Moon Final 24 re-enactment/documentary, shown on the Biography Channel Wednesday night, was much better than I feared. I was especially relieved that the producers got hold of and interviewed Annette Walter-Lax, Keith’s girlfriend at the time of his death and the last person to be seen alive with him. At the time they came upstate to interview me, they hadn’t yet found her, and I worried that I was being asked to quote her words; as it turned out, we ended up offering almost identical accounts of Keith’s last day(s).

Essentially, it was all the Usual Suspects on camera – Dougal, Barney, Wiggy, Alice Cooper, Larry Smith – plus Kenney Jones and Annie Nightingale and, for the first time ever on camera, Keith’s daughter Mandy, whose input was excellent. Personally, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know about Keith’s life and death, and I cringed at the re-enactments: I promise, people will be welcoming Mike Myers to play Keith Moon after they see this! But, leaving aside any inherent comments on tabloid TV, it was a faithful, honest, and, I would like to believe, accurate telling of Keith’s life and death. Plus, they focused on his drumming and its legacy, which is really the most important thing. Props.

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The Village Voice Annual Pazz and Jop poll, the biggest in the States and a useful opportunity to see what’s currently twisting the American music critics’ melons, was published this week, and there were no surprises. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver was the number one album; Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” the number one single. I voted for both, as I did for a few of the other top 10 albums: Kala by M.I.A., Neon Bible by Arcade Fire and Magic by Bruce Springsteen. I take a slightly perverse pride that I can always place albums in my top 10 that nobody else seems to have noticed (Felice Brothers and Youth Group), and a few that were only barely noticed (Carbon/Silicon, Busdriver, Underworld). I was a little less delighted to see that the electronic voting system allocated some of my singles votes to completely the wrong records. As it turns out, these were for songs nobody else voted for, so it was a slightly moot point, but it certainly demonstrates the fallibility of electronic voting – even in an open format. Those mistakes have now been corrected, for what it’s worth.

You can view the complete list of Top Albums and Singles online. You can read the accompanying essays, should that turn you on. Or you can just view individual writers’ ballots (mine is here), click on their choice of albums and singles and see who else voted for the same records. Trainspotters be warned: you may spend the rest of your day doing this.
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Two quotes from the current Mojo, one of which made me smile, the other that made me laugh out loud.

“I honestly feel we’re like a very good first division football team. We had a couple of good seasons in the Premiership but we couldn’t take the pressure and we plummeted down. That’s where we find ourselves. And believe me, it’s not so bad.”

Billy Duffy’s analogy of the Cult’s position is quite lovely. I may never think so badly of them again. As opposed to Muff Winwood’s comment about Adam and the Ants:

“If they’d have stayed together they could have been as big as The Who. Seriously.”

Seriously, I want to know what Winwood’s stuffing his pipe with these days.
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Finally, a quick nod to four other albums that have made it onto the CD player this week (yes, labels still sometimes send us CDs): District Line by Bob Mould, Made In The Dark by Hot Chip, Dracula Spectacular by MGMT and Morning Tide by Little Ones. New Year is always such a great time for new music. And a special thanks to BMG and its publicists for sending me not one but two copies of the new Kenny G album. If anyone wants both, just holler.