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December 24, 2007
The View from my Bed
Yeah, hard to believe, but this sciatica is keeping me down. I'm on Day 12 of mostly lying prone in one place or another. My folks are setting up a mattress near the xmas tree in their living room where I'll be eating my holiday dinner later today. Blessed with a couple of nice dinner party experiences, both of which accommodated my horizontalism... Adriana has been simply angelic, revealing herself as a great chef, and enormously patient in the role of Florence Nightingale to my role as simply patient, the injured one. Now she's sniffling with a bad cold, so we're laughing about our mutual incapacitation...
Anyway, good time to catch up on reading (as if I will ever finish reading the books I already own!), and like this typing I'm doing right now, I find I can do my "normal" work pretty easily too, laptop in lap... I went next door last week to a small party that included what was labeled a "heart circle," wherein any of the 15 people in attendance could take the floor for as long as they wanted and speak to anything that mattered to them. It was a cozy and intimate evening and a lot of emotions flowed, personal sagas were touched upon, memories and hopes and fears were shared. I'm glad I went, but as often happens to me in such situations, I found myself slightly revolting against the extremely personal and quasi-narcissistic focus of most of the comments. Instead, I wanted to contextualize the commentaries in the bigger picture, the end of 2007, the beginning of the 21st century, the incomprehensibly enormous moment in world history that we're living through, mostly unconsciously.
I've been reading some books that encourage this longer view. In particular, the sense of collapse that I touched on in my last blog post, whether the climate change that is threatening fresh water and food production, energy and resource wars, the slowly unfolding international financial crisis that is far from finished and may land us in this century's first Great Depression, the diminishing power of the U.S. over its own fate--a degradation made much more rapid by the Bush years... all this and more. I see it as part of a moment in history when the old paradigms are giving way, and the new ones are far from clear. It's much more complicated than the demise of U.S. empire and its replacement by China, or by a new multilateral world order, even if those latter developments are part of what we can perceive. There's also the demise of nation-states after the furious and passionate and urgent rise and spread of nationalism in the late 20th century.
The book Illicit by Moises Naim is an important contribution to this new look at what's happening all around us. In the midst of the credit crisis, which is a symptom of how much the "financial creativity" (as The Economist likes to call it) of the past two decades has created unprecedented amounts of purely fictitious capital, then hidden it in convoluted "instruments" and now no one knows who is holding what in terms of real assets and liabilities, Naim's book details how black markets have swelled, now rivalling many official industries, and making economic statistics increasingly meaningless. The ways people are integrated in their everyday lives into drug dealing, sex work, copyright violations, gray market analogues of brand-name commodities, and much more, indicate the permanence and centrality of the many economic activities that are moralistically dismissed as "illegal." Naim edits Foreign Affairs and is close to traditional liberal thinking, preferring to let markets do what they do and to remove pointless moral crusades from public policy. It's quite compelling though, to realize how many governments in the world are fully compromised and corrupted by the huge flows of capital moving around, and that within those flows there are no clearcut ways to distinguish legal from illegal, or clean from dirty money.
I've had this argument with various friends for years. People want to do good, find work that they care about and feels meaningful, and then on the flipside, hold variously disapproving attitudes towards how other people get their money, laying moral judgements on supposedly bad work, whether for corporations, or dealing pot, or doing sensual massage. I've never understood this, since to me, the problem is in selling my time rather than in the specific work. I can imagine doing lots of different kinds of work, and I don't mind doing lots of things, but whatever I do for money, pretty quickly starts to feel like some kind of prostitution. When I'm working for money, I'm doing someone else's bidding, not my own. Of course I'm lucky since most of my days and hours are spent doing my own (unpaid) bidding, and even though I don't mind my paid work much, I can't deny that something essential of myself is lost during those hours that I toil for pay...
In this respect, I find arguments like Naim's refreshing. That if we were sensible, we would remove the legal prohibitions on drugs and treat them as medical problems. We would open and regulate the trade in many things, following the logic of "harm reduction" rather than prohibition. When it comes to the international trade in banned exotic species, or human organs, or what have you, the opening of borders via globalization and the spread of high technologies has made such trade much easier. The legitimacy of international efforts to control human smuggling (and the re-emergence of slavery), organ theft, or endangered species harvesting would be greatly enhanced if the counterproductive efforts to control drugs and bootleg DVDs were abandoned... And at the root we have to abandon the pretension that most of us are clean and doing good while bad people are dirty and doing bad. We're all in the same system, and all relationships surrounding transactions and money tend to reproduce themselves in similar ways, and with them, reproduce similar kinds of personalities and behaviors.
I'm also reading a couple of books that fill in the 20th century story that precedes this time quite well. Overthrow by Steven Kinzer is a very readable account of the many times the U.S. has overthrown governments in other countries since it started such heinous and unforgivable empire-building with the seizure of the Hawaiian Islands in 1893. The fraudulent taking of the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico under the guise of the Spanish-American War followed soon after (1898), then the overt interventions in Nicaragua, Colombia (to create the breakaway "country" of Panama), Honduras (on behalf of United Fruit), Guatemala, Iran, etc. It's a great read if you don't know the history of U.S. criminality when it comes to the long 20th century of international intrigue. Kinzer goes through Vietnam and Chile before bringing it up to 2003 and the sacking of Iraq, and after all that, you see how utterly typical and normal this stupid war is, following over 100 years of well-established patterns. In fact, the story could have been usefully started a bit earlier, with the fraudulent declaration of war on Mexico in 1846 which led to the seizure of California and the southwest from Mexico...
The rise of the 3rd World is itself a story of political and diplomatic imagination, not to mention complicated national stories of colonialism and its overthrow. In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad lays out a fantastically detailed look at the process all over what we often call the "global south." I haven't read very far in this book yet, but it's really fascinating. I did see a companion piece by Prashad on CounterPunch a few days ago, where he describes the Ghadar movement and its founding in San Francisco in 1912, and the complicated history of 3rd World anti-colonial radicalism that flourished before WWI, and then percolated through many forms until emerging in India and elsewhere in the latter part of the 20th century.
On a lighter note I made it through Akiba, the latest from p.m. in Zurich, the guy who wrote bolo'bolo years ago. I enjoyed it, though I have to say it wasn't a quick read for me. As a piece of fiction, and utopian fiction at that, it bobs and weaves through a lot of explanations, and the story seems to stall again and again as you are confronted with complicated philosophical and political questions to mull over. In our last Processed World we published a short story by p.m. called No Nonsense, and I could see some continuity between that and Akiba. One of the author's strengths, and one of his major concerns, is to come to grips with a proper sense of sustainability, which he tends to regulate by BTUs or some kind of measuring of basic energy units, which should be allocated very equally among everyone. In No Nonsense this is taken to its logical extreme.
In Akiba it is bypassed by a marvelous world called Limboland, a place where everyone goes when they die, but when you get there you realize that there is no life nor death, everything is but a grand simulation by a master computer. Somehow the driving force of history in Akiba is for characters from Limboland to go into the infinite worlds and encourage "mortal" beings to work towards the manufacture of the totalizing computer which will then be able to simulate the entirety of everything. But the obvious conundrum is to wonder why this would be important or interesting since the very existence of everything already proves that there's a master computer somewhere producing this amazing simulation... in some ways it's a tongue-in-cheek look at Spectacular Society, in other ways it's p.m.'s chance to air out many of his own inspiring and wacky and romantic visions of utopian life. The book's main characters, once in Limboland, get to sample a wide variety of imaginative, ornate, detailed places and experiences, all of which are wonderful contributions to the long history of utopian literature. But I have to admit that I bogged down a lot of times and did not find the story propelling me along, as I generally prefer when it comes to fiction. My curiosity and previous experience with the author and his works made me see it through, and I'm glad I did.
Well, happy holidaze everyone! 2008 is surely going to be fraught with surprises--let's hope we can carry on with our lives in the months to come, finding new ways to challenge the wreckage being wrought by the madmen (and women) who can't stop the runaway train they set in motion!
Posted by ccarlsson at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2007
Physical collapses! The Planet and Me!
Yup, that's me, bedridden as of two days ago, with an unbelievably painful sciatica. So I'm eating at the trough, here enjoying a Pad Thai and glass of wine brought over by good friends last night. Being stuck in bed has allowed me to put the laptop on my lap (of all places!) and finish the last pass through Nowtopia, and catch up on lots of net surfing.
Last weekend I went to Atlanta with Adriana to visit some old friends of hers. I can't say I fell in love with Atlanta, which is about as unlovable an urban space as I can remember visiting. Still, we managed to make it an interesting 3 days. I read an article on Tomgram a couple of weeks ago, about the remarkably severe drought in the southeast. But as you can see in his piece, there are severe droughts going on in many places around the world, and we're having a lot of trouble as human society wrapping our heads around the unfolding collapse of modern life. I cite and quote another article below that is even more thorough at collecting the signals of irreversible physical collapse globally, but first let me show some pictures of Atlanta. Here's a shot of their Olympic-inspired Centennial Park, right in downtown beneath the looming CNN world HQ (where we also took the tour, an 8-story descent through the CNN universe of 24/7 infotainment).
Apparently this brown lawn and the dry fountains around the park are symptoms of the severe drought. The governor of Georgia recently held a rally to pray for rain, which our hosts held in reasonable contempt, since there's been very little practical preparation for coping with the water crisis. I recommend the Englehart piece cited above because he returns repeatedly to the basic question: what happens if the water runs out? No one wants to think about that. In some ways our entire global climate change crisis is similar, insofar as we just can't imagine life as we know it changing in significant ways, and yet it's clear that water and agricultural productivity are both in serious jeopardy in the coming years. I'll come back to this below...
Here I am showing our gracious Atlanta hosts the cover of my forthcoming book "Nowtopia" with the DIY bikeshop Sopo Bicycle Co-op in the background:
And a couple of other images of the place. We went there because I wanted to show Rachel Spiewak the manuscript since I quoted her several times in the book...
We saw as much as we could of what Atlanta offers to visitors: CNN as I mentioned, but we also went to the MLK National Park, the Oakland cemetery (where a good bit of real estate is taken up with Confederate soldiers), the Cyclorama in Grant Park (a 9-ton circular panorama painting of the Battle of Atlanta in 1864, painted in the 1880s and originally planned as a campaign device for some guy running for Vice President in 1884...it's also narrated to lament the "lost cause" of southern independence!), and lastly we went to the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead, the neighborhood that we were told was where trendy young people went to party... it turns out to be an anti-neighborhood, more of a financial district with a laughable 3-block long bike lane amidst glass box highrises. Here's a shot of it:
We liked much better the walk from the MLK train stop to the Cyclorama which took us past the cemetery and the quaint (but freeway bisected) neighborhood of Grant Park. Here's some shots of the cemetery and a lovely old house with a curving porch that really caught our eye... interesting to think of a world without air conditioning in which one survived muggy hot weather by passing time on breeze-enabled porches....
Here's downtown in the distance behind the western entry to Oakland cemetery:
Confederate Dead:
Across the street from the Oakland cemetery, diners sit on the roof during unseasonably balmy 75-degree weather on December 8:
The MLK National Park is a wonderful exercise in hagiography, but in spite of the deification efforts, manages to include some compelling history among the exhibits in the museum, especially the video clips of civil rights movement confrontations. Here's my sunset shot of the tomb of MLK and his wife, Coretta, which I guess passes as some kind of barely secular version of the tombs you find in European churches of wealthy church benefactors and former bishops:
I watched people in the train where they have TVs on every car running some kind of canned for-the-commuter news, weather and sports cycle, and they mostly tuned out except when the weather prognosis came on and heads snapped to, only to shake in disappointment when more sun and heat was predicted. It wasn't clear that folks have really figured out how dire the water situation is there, but maybe their interest in weather reports indicated a basic awareness. I watched and heard a lot of intense cellphone conversations and text message sessions, more than I've ever seen around here.
Anyway, we had a nice visit to Atlanta, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you have some ulterior motive for going there.
Ross Gelbspan has an essay on Grist.org "Beyond the Point of No Return," (which I noticed at CommonDreams.org while surfing the net yesterday while laying on my back all day). The essay is a refreshingly honest look at the facts of climate change, how irreversible the trends are, how the political agendas that he himself has proposed over the past two decades, and those of the most visionary environmentalists are simply no longer adequate responses to what's actually already happening. He still offers up a kind of global New Deal public works crash-rebuilding program as a way to knit together a new global commons around our best efforts to cope, but to say the least, it's very daunting. Here are his concluding paragraphs:
The key to our survival as a civil species during an era of profound natural upheaval lies in an enhanced sense of community. If we maintain the fiction that we can thrive as isolated individuals, we will find ourselves at the same emotional dead end as the current crop of survivalists: an existence marked by defensiveness, mistrust, suspicion, and fear.As nature washes away our resources, overwhelms our infrastructures, and splinters our political alignments, our survival will depend increasingly on our willingness to join together as a global community. As the former Argentine climate negotiator, Raul Estrada-Oyuela, said, "We are all adrift in the same boat -- and there's no way half the boat is going to sink."
To keep ourselves afloat, we need to change the economic and political structures that determine how we behave. In this case, we need to elevate the ethic of cooperation over the deeply ingrained reflex of competition. We need to elevate our biological similarities over our geographical differences. We need, in the face of this oncoming onslaught, to reorganize our social structures to reflect our most humane collective aspirations.
There is no body of expertise -- no authoritative answers -- for this one. We are crossing a threshold into uncharted territory. And since there is no precedent to guide us, we are left with only our own hearts to consult, whatever courage we can muster, our instinctive dedication to a human future -- and the intellectual integrity to look reality in the eye.
He's done a good job of looking at reality in the eye. I am always interested in the bigger picture of ecology and politics. My earliest activism was in the 1970s anti-nuclear movement, and then I canvassed for Citizens for A Better Environment in 1978 (now it's called Commmunities for a B.E.). I found it easy to get people interested in the issues at that time, but it was already clear that a certain overload and numbness was setting in. The doom-and-gloom chicken-little fear-mongering style of presenting environmental knowledge is really self-defeating, but it's difficult to get people to pay attention to new information without somehow establishing that it is either going to make them happier or richer, or do them some kind of wrong. The latter is easier of course, when it comes to ecological problems.
I'll conclude by posting this videoclip of some music stars singing against the refunding of nuclear power. Hard to believe, but then again, not THAT suprising, but the ecocidal dinosaurs who pass as our legislative representatives in the U.S. congress seem determined to subsidize the nuclear power industry, ostensibly because it's "cleaner" than coal or oil!... sheesh, how fuckin' stupid are people to fall for that one??
Picked up this video clip from (Narco News editor) Al Giordano's new outlet, The Field, where he is covering the upcoming primaries. (I have to admit, I don't understand why what happens in these primaries is particularly interesting, beyond the usual kind of interest that any competition can arouse...like a bowling championship, or TV poker tournaments)...
Posted by ccarlsson at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2007
Grounding by Rolling
Just can't seem to get to blogging these days. But a few quick items to mention. Last Friday's Critical Mass, falling after Thanksgiving weekend for a change, was a spirited good one, with a second consecutive month going down Lombard Street (!), a lot of high energy, and I was happy to be a part of it. Here's a couple of shots of the ride after we had been all over downtown, Fisherman's Wharf, North Beach, Russian Hill, both tunnels, and here we are buzzing through the xmas shoppers on Stockton Street.
Part of what made it such a gratifying ride was the reappearance of some cool xerocracy. I got flyered for three related activities: one to join in to the organizing for a direct action campaign against the war corresponding to the upcoming 5th anniversary in March (takedirectaction@riseup.net). Another to join a bicycle contingent to protest the xtian Right that is coming to SF again on Sat. Jan. 19 in their 4th annual "walk for life" wherein they bus in 10,000 fundies to taunt liberal San Francisco. More info here. And lastly there was an invite to a ride on Dec. 15 with artist Amber Hasselbring, who is trying to create a Mission Greenbelt, consisting of a continuous sidewalk garden from Dolores Park at 19th and Dolores to Franklin Square at 17th and Bryant. More info here.
Also, Mona Caron was in Sao Paolo, Brazil, for Critical Mass down there. Some lovely images of the ride and a small mural she painted during it are here. And the 17 km route through Sao Paolo is shown here.
My Thanksgiving was spent, as I have for the past 9 years, at Saratoga Springs with about 100 great friends. I'm not posting any of the dozens of photos that various friends took, nor did I make a video of semi-naked men dancing while doing dishes this year (you can still find that on Youtoob from last year though). But here's a nice image of the box canyon in which all the fun happens, taken from the eastern ridge above the resort.
I am in the midst of an insanely busy period. Happily I'll soon be finished with teaching at New College (especially since they bounced their last paycheck to me, and still owe me more than half of the measly $2400 I was supposed to be paid for this semester). Turns out that teaching takes a lot more time and thought than I really want to dedicate to that. I'm glad to have tried that experiment, but I don't think I'll be hurrying to get any further teaching gigs any time soon.
I'm aalllmooosst finished with Nowtopia. Hope to get that wrapped up and sent over to AK Press in a week or so. And I'm working on several overlapping aspects of Shaping San Francisco's big push into next year's 10th anniversary--the wiki, the proposal to the future SF Museum, a fundraising campaign to finally get a small part-time paid staff in place to work on it (as well as maintaining the Talks, producing radio shows from them, giving bike tours), and.... there are TONS of items in the pipeline piled up over the past few years.
I woke up to a rainy day today and am having one of those monthly "blue mornings" that tend to correspond to low pressure systems, too much work to do, and the occasional collapse of inspiration. So I thought I'd write an entry in the blog to recapture some joie de vivre!... thanks for your tolerance...
Another overextension I'm having to back away from was last weekend's brief participation in the Counter Narrative Society's art project called "Hunting the Now/Cazando el Momento", which in turn was part of the Southern Exposure Gallery/Intersection for the Arts mini-festival called Grounded?... Mabel Negrete is the main creative force for the Counter Narrative Society and I contributed some historical items for the "treasure hunt" she and Fiona Glas made up. On Saturday we tabled at 14th and Valencia and handed out the guides to the hunt... here I sit with Mabel...
There were about a dozen different interventions going on at the same time on Saturday. Another one was on the roof of 716 Valencia where Kari Orvik was taking portraits of people against the backdrop of the Women's Building where Rigoberta Menchu's face will be obscured when a 5-story condo gets built on the corner of 18th and Valencia next door. Here's a couple of shots I took on the roof...
In this second shot you can see the huge "middle finger" in the distance next to the Bay Bridge. The city, in spite of all claims of real estate crisis and financial collapse, is still building at a frenzied pace. Along Valencia, as Kari Orvik's project emphasized, there are seven new luxury condominium projects in the pipeline, three of them on the 700 block alone. (You can contact the opposition at savevalencia@gmail.com.) The shape of the city, the people who live here, all are being rapidly shifted with remarkably little participation by the existing residents. Planners have ok'ed a half dozen monster towers on Rincon Hill, and the rush to push through luxury condos all over the Mission has apparently been driven by a community planning process that should soon get the endorsement of the Board of Supervisors, and will establish a moratorium on these neighborhood-busting developments.
It's hard to keep track of all these things as you go about your everyday life in San Francisco. There's remarkably little news provided in daily papers or tv or radio. There's a bit in neighborhood monthly newspapers, but most people don't follow these stories unless they live right next door. So the isolation and balkanization of San Franciscans continues to be a factor in the sale of the city to monied interests, both old and new.
Part of my personal regime here is to cycle across the city regularly. One of my typical rides takes me to the top of Twin Peaks, and lately it's been shrouded in fog as often as not. So here's a couple of shots to conclude today's somber rant, both taken in the fog a couple of weeks ago...
Posted by ccarlsson at 11:55 AM | Comments (1)