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August 31, 2007
Migrating
Hi everyone... I'm up and running at a new blog: The Nowtopian. Haven't got anything interesting there yet, but I guess I'll move my blogging over there from now on... I haven't been able to import this site into the new one, and unless someone wants to help puzzle it out, I'll probably just let it go. This body of work is here for a while, and when and if it goes down, I have hard copy and electronic backups... sad to see it go, but it's like email and such. Once you've moved to a new software platform or machine, as often as not, you lose what you had before. As someone said to me recently, the Internet is an elaborate conspiracy to flush away all history before 1993!... not really, but I get the point. Anyway, look for future blogging at the new one rather than here.... Thanks for reading.
--cc
Posted by ccarlsson at 02:14 PM | Comments (1)
August 27, 2007
Tech help?
Hi all,
I've been notified that my long-time host, LiP magazine, is moving its website, and thus, it's time for me to find a new home for this blog. I have a place to host it, but not being super adept at this, I could use some technical help in installing Movable Type and then importing all the contents of this blog going back to late 2004... anyone out there got a little time and skill to help? thanks in advance.
--cc
Posted by ccarlsson at 05:25 PM | Comments (1)
August 20, 2007
Tortured Professionals
I was happy to hear on Democracy Now! this past Friday a lengthy discussion, not for the first time either, covering the reprehensible acquiescence of the American Psychological Association to allowing some of its members to participate in CIA and US military torture. Stephen Soldz was quite eloquent in attacking his professional association for their complicity in giving cover to the Bush atrocities, ostensibly because by being in the room while torture is inflicted, the professional psychologists are keeping it "safe and legal"!!
One of my favorite fissures in modern society, one that I have a lot of hope for as time goes on, is the Revolt of the Professionals (I have a whole section on this in my upcoming book). I've linked before to Jeff Schmidt's excellent book and website, and I want to recommend it again to anyone interested in analyzing the deeper structures of higher education and how they produce obedient thinkers and apolitical professionals. But this mini-uprising among professional psychologists is heartening given their association's unwillingness to follow the Medical Assn. and Psychiatric Assn. in repudiating torture and the coercive interrogations promulgated by the Bushites... I think we'll learn tomorrow whether or not the dissidents were able to carry a vote changing the policy of the association, but I'm not so hopeful about that. Thousands of psychologists were wandering around the area while a smattering of a hundred or at most two held their rally with the support of local San Franciscans and others from around the Bay Area.
Anyway, as we finally come to grips with the horror perpetrated in our name abroad and at home, often it depends on the professionals who blindly obey orders to take responsibility for refusing to carry out these policies and practices. This extends well beyond treatment of prisoners of war or convicted criminals in the prison system to include industrial designs that produces pollution or perpetuates global warming outcomes, facilitating the looting of public resources (our diminishing commons) for private gain, and so much more. So-called professionals are simply well-paid workers with a false sense of their own importance. In general they have as little control over the shape of their own lives as anyone else in this crazy society. But often they do play important roles in maintaining complex systems, giving their labor a key role in its potential to halt or at least slow down or cast light on activities that are wrecking human lives and the world.
Below the jump are photos from the rally, but here's a shot of my old pal Doug Minkler's poster/sign he brought to the protest (and check out his cool website for dozens of his great images--he's been addressing this larger issue of professional complicity for years):
Here's a few photos from the rally the dissident pyschologists held at Yerba Buena Gardens on Friday afternoon:
Here's Stephen Soldz addressing the crowd, followed by a couple of signs hanging behind him:
I haven't been blogging much lately. Busy reading, getting a class ready on Shaping San Francisco's History for New College, helping my sweetheart get ready for her Ph.D. defense (oh no! she's going to be a professional!), and whenever possible, getting out and about to see the city from new angles. My friend Lisa took me on the roof of Casa Loma at Fell and Fillmore where I took these shots of unusual angles and views:
Our sidewalks continue to provide one of the last reliably public canvasses for the free expression of public opinion, but it's a canvas that forces its users into strangely poetic forms of expression... came upon these two on Valencia on Saturday:
Finally, here are some distinctly un-tortured professionals, about 2 sheets to the wind in this shot, after dinner at Charanga to honor our pal Hugh (in the blue suit) who is getting married this weekend. We did not arrange to all wear hats, believe it or not, but somehow the spirit of 1947 got us all independently...
p.s. how is it that while there is an emerging ecological sensibility that is transforming so many aspects of daily life we still have to endure the Dept. of Highways (aka Caltrans) putting in landscaping that looks like it belongs around a fastfood joint? sheesh! They could really use a professional revolt among their landscape designers!
Posted by ccarlsson at 12:49 AM | Comments (1)
August 07, 2007
Bees and Bombs
Some personal news and photos below, but wanted to start out ruminating a bit on the recent coverage of the collapse of bee colonies. Elizabeth Kolbert writes about it in The New Yorker, which wasn't quite up to her climate change writing in terms of sharp clarity and getting through the mysteries to basic facts. Much better is an article in our wonderful local quarterly magazine, Terrain, which is published by the Berkeley Ecology Center. Terrain just gets better and better, and is becoming a real regional and political ecological magazine, which we sorely need in the Bay Area. Gina Covina does a great job of discussing the collapse of bee colonies as a precursor to a more generalized agricultural collapse, at least in terms of the absurd industrial structure of food production. Her insight is to suggest malnutrition as a key element in "colony collapse disorder," noting that the honeybees that are key to the pollination of all primary agricultural crops are shipped all over the country on trucks, and while stuck in boxes in transit are fed a strange solution of corn syrup and soy protein (both probably GMO, and the GMO crops contain insecticide-like genes!)... the bees that have been found in the collapsing colonies are usually beset with multiple ailments, infections and parasites, apparently suffering a general collapse of their immune systems. The main effort of USDA and agribusiness is to identify the virus or bug that is causing the problem, imagining that by eliminating the cause the system can be maintained. As a stopgap they are importing millions of bees from Australia. But as Covina eloquently argues, it's the system of agricultural production that is breaking down, for which the bees are merely the canary in the coal mine. (How little we are aware of! Did you know it takes ALL commercially rent-able bee colonies in the U.S. to pollinate the huge California almond crop every year?) Just as we are becoming aware of how bad diets dependent on corn and its derivatives are, wild bees are used to feeding on dozens of different nectars. Commercial beekeepers move their bees from monocrop to monocrop and feed them that ill-advised serum in transit... bad diets lead to bad lives! and dead bees!
So that's pretty worrisome, but I just finished John Robb's excellent "Brave New War," and started in on Mike Davis's recent "Buda's Wagon." I've had Robb's excellent blog listed in the right column here for a while. Brave New World is a great compilation, summary and extension of his ongoing work there. In a nutshell, he's arguing that the globalization and technological changes of the past decades have permanently weakened the nation-state and its ability to control its traditional responsibilities, especially war. The new generation of global guerrillas are faster, smarter, more innovative, and so small and inexpensive that the lumbering war machines of the state cannot keep up. He's writing from the point of view of wanting to alert U.S. war planners (originally) and then the population at large (now) to the coming breakdown of modern society that proliferating super-empowered individuals and groups can (and almost surely will) bring about. Since his book was published the inexpensive but hugely effective attacks on "systempunkts" have arrived in Mexico. He argues that the vulnerable and highly centralized energy and communications networks that we still depend on will be attacked eventually, and that the augmentation of the state's repressive capacities is not only not a help, but makes it worse. Davis's book details the history of the car bomb, starting with an anarchist bombing of Wall Street in 1920, and following it through the 20th century to its crazy expansion in the recent decades. Corresponding to Robb's analysis of the steady drop in cost to mount an attack, and the emergence of an open-source logic to armed dissent, the car bomb is the quintessential "poor man's airforce". Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City was a great example of how easy it is for anyone to bring down vulnerable targets.
So we should redouble our efforts to re-localize our energy, our food, our water. This is Robb's advice, to build on a platform logic to increase density and complexity of networks such that major attacks, which cannot be absolutely prevented by any means, can be absorbed with some resilience and flexibility.
Got my book off to AK Press last week and everyone seems relatively satisfied with it, so we're going forward to an April 08 pub date. Working on the cover and images, still awaiting more copy editing from my daughter who is busy moving from Montreal to NYC, but basically it's a big relief. Also finished the calendar for the Fall/Winter Talks and it's off to the printer too, as well as being online now.
Made my climb up to Twin Peaks on August 2, in a rare moment of less fog during the past few weeks. We've really been socked in for days on end. Here's my old familiar shot that I like to take and post, still sweating from the bike ride and hike up to the to of the southern peak, a howling wind pushing my hood into my face:
And on Friday night we had a great time at the SF Bay Guardian "Best of the Bay" party at the DeYoung, dancing our socks off to the wonderful tunes of Rupa and the April Fishes. They gave my bicycle history tours a made-up award, "Best Cruise Into the Past" in their Outdoor and Sports section (!). Here I am with Adriana and then Michael, just off the dance floor in front of a large format photo of some other big concert...
and lastly, I'm going to write a foreword to Russell's new stencil art book. He sent me a link to this cool stencil graffiti in Hamburg Germany.
Posted by ccarlsson at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)