US Hawks Hang Gliding Association

JoeF wrote:Cooperative/interactive learning system for logic instruction
US 5868575 A
Filed: May 20, 1996

jango.com with spaces and indentation added wrote:

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Rick Masters is a solo guitarist, songwriter and filmmaker from California, primarily recognized for his two films: Aoli, Comet Clones & Pod People (1982 - US Gray Prize) and Hydrogen Hawaii (2001 - Tely Award). Although his musical focus tends toward film soundtracks, he was moved to release the album Man Shall Follow in April of 2013 to warn of the impending environmental catastrophe facing humanity.

At the age of 19, Rick Masters attended Ventura Jr. College in the months following the devastating blow-out of a Union Oil drilling rig off the Santa Barbara coast, which remains California’s worst environmental disaster to date. Forever polarized by the despoiled, once pristine beaches and the astronomical death toll of wildlife, he published his apocalyptic “Rain Poem 1981” in the college newspaper to mark the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970). Set in a grim and hopeless future where storms of acid rain rake the Earth, ending all life, the lone protagonist recalls warning his children about the deadly rain. “How could I tell them once that I had tried to stop the rape of skies but somehow failed along the line? And they were doomed to sit and watch as misty drops kissed blades of grass that slowly yellowed, bent and died…”

In 1976, Masters heard of a theory blaming refrigeration chemicals for the destruction of the Earth’s vital ozone layer and attended the first International Conference on Problems Related to the Stratosphere in Logan, Utah, where he was stunned by the delaying tactics of the chemical lobby. Soon after, Masters penned another long poem about environmental catastrophe, “Return of the Warrior.” Here the protagonist leaves the last remaining outpost of starving humanity and makes an epic trek to the Pacific Ocean to drown himself in the sea he had once loved.

    “You know that I’ve lost everything I’ve ever loved. It’s true,” he says to the dead ocean.
    “But what I’ve lost is nothing, when I see what we’ve done to you.

    For nothing lives and nothing flies beneath this hellish light.
    I can’t believe we let it come to this without a fight…

    I raise my arms in hopeless rage. I curse the cities of the dead.
    I wade into the ancient sea, for the last whale’s song had said

    ‘Man shall follow me.’ And so we did…”

In 1986, Masters merged the two poems into one and set them to music in a marathon 16-minute vocal performance. But it was not until the triple-meltdown of the nuclear power plants in Fukushima, Japan, and growing reports of raw methane bubbling up from the permafrost bordering the melting Arctic sea that the reclusive Masters was moved to finally release “Man Shall Follow” in April of 2013 on an album of the same name. Gary Richardson, Executive Director of Idaho’s nuclear watchdog, the Snake River Alliance, describes the song as “an eerie prophesy of a not far distant future. …his ghostly voice and lyrics create an Edgar Allen Poe-like journey and vision carried on the stream of rhythm and melody created by Masters’ unique 12-string guitar, and occasionally synthesized accompaniment.”

On the album, three instrumental tracks accompany “Man Shall Follow.” The first, “The 900” (9:35), is an ode to the one thousand paraglider pilots who have died since 2002. Masters, a pioneering cross country hang glider pilot who made a name for himself as president of the international Cross Country Pilots Association in the early 1980s, became infamously outspoken on the Internet over what he felt was a monumental and totally unnecessary waste of lives due to the flawed capabilities of today’s gliding parachutes. The second track, “Infinite Journey” (10:02), showcases Masters’ self-taught and self-described “trampoline” technique of finger percussion, “delay riding” and guitar synth coloring, which leads some to believe they are listening to a group of musicians rather than a solo performance. The third instrumental, “Nest of Angels” (9:10), was the soundtrack for Masters’ 2005 promotional video for the spectacular sustainable mansion, Angels Nest, in Taos, New Mexico.

Part of the article's impact seems to be the flow of Volmer Jensen; such flow indicates a continual hang gliding river ... 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s ...