« December 2007 | Main | February 2008 »
January 26, 2008
Cautiously Rising!
OK, I'm up and running! Well... I'm up, I'm moving around, the agony seems to have subsided. A cortisone shot 9 days ago made it less painful right away but I still had limited mobility. After 5 days I started to feel better upright, and actually made dinner myself! Now I can walk and I'm even starting to sit a little on a big ball... so I'm excited! I consulted with a surgeon this past Wednesday and we concluded that I might need surgery but should wait another 3-4 weeks and see if I don't get a lot better without it... and I am already a lot better than I was on Wednesday! Yay!
On Wednesday, Adriana drove me to Crissy Field to celebrate my slowly recovering body. Here are some photos from there to celebrate:
I've been tracking the dunes since the whole "restoration" project started years ago. Here's a couple of shots of the apparently quite healthy dune ecology with the GG Bridge looming behind it:
Once you're down there at the northern edge of the city it rarely takes long before some huge container ship trundles by, loaded down with hundreds of containers filled with more junk. The developing economic collapse has been one of the entertaining aspects of my laid-up period, so seeing this ship steaming under the bridge seemed weirdly ironic.
Laying down for most of 6 weeks made it too easy to watch TV. Saw a ton of movies and have been quite the dedicated Warriors basketball fan. They are certainly one of the most entertaining teams in the NBA these days. The incessant car ads drive me crazy, of course, but I have laughed out loud at all the weird drug commercials on tv now. Half the ad involves this ominous voice-over warning of all the horrible side effects that might ensue if you take the product, including such appetizing details as diarrhea, sores, swollen or puffy skin, etc. etc.... and then there's that enticing warning with the sex drugs: if you have a hard-on for more than 4 hours call a doctor!.... shee-it, 4 hours?!? what a drag that must be!...
Anyway, I don't just watch TV all the time. I managed to cruise through a couple of novels in the past week: Doris Lessing's The Cleft (strange alternate origin story) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (poignant story of man and boy struggling through nuclear winterized landscape of cannibalism and total destruction... haunting and grim, but a great read)...
Working on a big tour for Nowtopia, starting at Penn State Univ. on April 29, then Frederick MD, Wash DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NYC (Brecht Forum May 9, VoxPop in Brooklyn May 13, Bluestockings May 14, CUNY May 15), then hopefully Amherst MA May 16, Boston May 17 and 18, Providence RI May 19 or 20... a trip to Rome and Milan through the rest of May (hopefully), and then from mid-June a two week jaunt through the Pacific Northwest: Eugene, Portland, Olympia, Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria....not much of the latter confirmed yet, but I'm trying... will post more later on all this as it firms up...
Posted by ccarlsson at 06:04 PM | Comments (1)
January 14, 2008
Wasting Away reading about Waste
yeah, still on my back after a whole fuckin' month! After feeling like I'd actually regressed I finally broke down and got an MRI... the news was as bad as we'd feared. A huge bulging L5 disc poking into my spine. Here's the picture!
Yuck! So it's no wonder that basic chiropractry, massage, and acucpuncture cannot address this. In a couple of days I'm going to visit a specialist who gives epidurals to cases like this, a cortisone shot that will shrink the swelling and hopefully allow me to start some kind of physical therapy regime. Another friend has offered to give me a house call to start on a restorative yoga program, which I'm looking forward to, but so far, can't do a thing! Can barely walk or stand more than a few minutes at a time.
Anyway, between the injury and the percocet I'm a dull guy, not much to report even though I've been reading and thinking and being a sports fan... Francesca took my camera on a bike ride to San Bruno Mountain and came back with some nice shots, so I can pretend that I was out enjoying the nice post-storm weather last weekend:
This second photo is a handy segue to the topic of my reading today: waste! The shorline near the bay is made up of San Francisco's garbage (it's what was once Brisbane lagoon, just south of Candlestick point), dumped there for about 50 years in the 20th century before it became illegal (it was always insane!) to dump in the bay. Our waste is something we have a lot of trouble talking or thinking about but in two articles it gets a good in-depth treatment.
John Seabrook writes about "American Scrap" in the Jan. 14, 08 issue of The New Yorker. He examines the history of the scrap metal industry in particular and how it's kind of a barometer of economic "health". When the price of scrap metal goes up it means there's a lot of activity, and conversely when it goes down things are tanking. But what I liked most about the piece is his account of some of the young modernizers who have entered the business after its gradual monopolization during the long 20th century. Now there are upstarts who are using new technologies of crushing and sorting, along with empty containers going back to China cheaply, to ship all the accumulating ruins of de-industrialized America over there... It's apparently quite a profitable business.
My interest is more from the point of view of imagining a time not far in the future when we'll be much more localized in much of our economic lives, and our ability to make new uses of the detritus of modern life will determine how comfortable our material lives can be. As it happens, steel is always with us. It doesn't really decay and repeated uses don't degrade its strength. As long as it can be extracted from previous uses, it can be melted down and re-used. So we don't have to fear a collapse of available resources, as much as a lack of imagination about how to reconfigure our lives so we can make use with what we have. The technologies developed by these scrap metal entrepreneurs gives me an odd hope, even though it's highly energy dependent and requires a great deal of fossil-fueled heavy equipment, I can imagine that it may be put to radically different uses by a radically different society.
But no matter how differently our society evolves, we're all still going to be taking a shit most days. And processing this endless river of shit is the topic of "Wasteland: A journey through the American cloaca" by Frederick Kaufman in Harpers Feb. 08. I recall that one of Mike Davis's recent books, either the Planet of Slums or the Monster at the Door claimed that about 2/3 of the world population steps out of its front door into its own shit. A rather unpleasant thought, to say the least! But how we think about shit is pretty absurd, especially the dire fear of contact with it. I like the Kaufman piece cuz he quickly runs through a number of historical references all the way back to pre-Roman and Roman times, showing how revered shit was. A lot of alchemists and other kinds of imaginative characters in pre-industrial history made good use of human feces for various purposes, and for the longest time it was naturally used to fertilize fields, as it still is after much processing and manipulation by the major urban, industrial processes used by contemporary cities. Seems pretty darn obvious that we ought to be thinking systemically about all the inputs and outputs of our daily lives, in ways we just haven't been in the habit of doing. Instead modern life has evolved along unsustainable lines that all too often look kind of like this picture taken from San Bruno Mountain north towards our illustrious Cow Palace:
Imagine instead a series of horticultural corridors that make use of the normal byproducts of our organic selves, returning directly to the soil our shit, our water, the rains, the leftovers of our food growing and consumption, etc. It is completely obvious that such a transition is in order, but it is still treated as the wacky ruminations of freaks and crazies... alas. (Another article worth checking out in that same Feb. 08 Harpers is on the manufacturing of financial bubbles in the recent era, looking at the dotcom and housing bubbles and predicting that the next one will be alternative energy and infrastructure rebuilding!) The crazies are the ones who think we can keep on keepin' on without profoundly radical change... and my favorite proponent of radical change these days is my daughter! Here she is as my sign-off today...
Posted by ccarlsson at 04:55 PM | Comments (2)
January 06, 2008
New Year, Old Back
Happy New Year to everyone... hard to believe it's 2008! I'm still pretty laid up with my bum back and the worst sciatica I've ever had. Huge thanks to my sweetie Adriana who has been taking care of me the whole 3+ weeks; thanks to Dr. Rupa for a painkiller prescription; thanks to everyone for sending me good thoughts and visiting and hanging out... My recovery is underway, but surprisingly slow. I keep thinking I should be OK by now, but I'm still in a considerable amount of pain when not on drugs, and my leg continues to be numb nearly all the time. Walking has gotten better, and I have managed to sit for almost a couple of minutes a few times in the past few days. So I'm starting to regain some normal functioning, sort of, but still no bicycling, and walking uphill is really painful. I got a car ride up to the top of Bernal Heights the other day, and walked a short distance to get a photo of San Francisco's new Middle Finger:
For about 10 minutes I felt stiff and sore and not too great, but still, I was up and walking! That's when Adri took this photo:
But just a few minutes later, as we walked back to the car, I was overcome again and had to lay down on the bench:
It's really a gut check to be so damaged as I've been. Staying patient is hard enough, but feeling like maybe I'll never regain my former normal mobility is scary. I think I will, and the chiropractor thinks I'll be much better in another couple of weeks, but it's hard to believe right now. It's such a drag to not be able to go out on my own and ride across town, or take a long walk...
I guess when you're in a physical funk, a mental funk comes along with it. The circus of the presidential primaries managed to poke into my consciousness briefly, kind of similar to my interest in sports. I really am amazed (again, for the ??th time) at how many people are all worked up about Obama, or Edwards, or any of them... I watched a bit of the New Hampshire debate last night and couldn't have been less inspired. I vaguely remember once 32 years ago getting all hopeful about Jimmy Carter and a New South and some kind of move beyond the imperial barbarity of normal American politics... didn't happen then, and it sure ain't gonna happen with any politicians running for office now. Different strains of populist rhetoric notwithstanding, they are all creatures of the same politics and priorities as the folks they're ostensibly running to replace. Obama's taking cues from Brzezinski for chrissakes! Clinton is obviously the same ol', and Edwards is talking anti-corporate but he was careful to qualify it that there were "good corporations in the U.S., like Costco, or AT&T"!!! Is that the same AT&T who is clamoring for legal immunity from having rolled over for Bush's illegal wirtaps? The same AT&T who is busily re-monopolizing telecommunications? Jeeeeez!
Time seems to have slowed down in a strange way. You'd think that being prone most of the time would have enhanced my ability to write, read, think, get some of my projects moving... but actually everything is moving quite slowly. I did finish Nowtopia, and it's off with AK Press for a last round of proofing. But the Shaping SF wiki is mired in details, and thus still not open to the public. The further effort to get funding for a Drupal version is still in limbo (hopefully not for much longer). I am going to try to make it to CounterPULSE this Wednesday for the first Talk of 08, on "Class and Power in Queer San Francisco" which I'm sure will be a stimulating discussion. The week after, Jan. 16, we resume the Art & Politics series with muralist and painter Andrew Schoultz. I'm going to be really bummed if I can't attend these events.
I have a big article to write for Antipode, a geography journal, based on Nowtopia. I'm also busy making plans for a book tour in April and May, and maybe another one combined with some speaking gigs in the fall. I hope it all comes together! With the completion of the book I hope I can kickstart the conversation I always want to have about work. We'll see...
OK, as you can see I'm not up to my usual musings. I have watched a lot of mediocre films, a great number of basketball and hockey games (go Warriors and Sharks!), and have been reading (but not as much as I think I should have by now!) (check out John Robb's USA Inc., a short piece prognosticating a total privatization of the government in the next 15 years)... I'm almost finished with The Darker Nations (it's very good) and have resumed Adam Hochschild's "Bury the Chains" which is also a great history... Fiction hasn't been grabbing me much lately. Started Doris Lessings' The Cleft, but it's not that great yet...
So, I still hope to get back to a more engaging blogging rhythm. I have tentatively agreed with Ramsey Kanaan to move the blog over to a new online journal he's launching, so when that gets more solid, I'll post a notice here. We may do parallel publishing so the pieces appear in both places simultaneously... Anyway, thanks for your interest and your patience. Let's hope I'm out and about again soon.
Posted by ccarlsson at 03:12 PM | Comments (2)