« Fake Numbers and Real Limits | Main | Layering History »
April 30, 2008
Dancing in the Streets!
Before taking off on this lengthy tour, I had a couple of experiences back in San Francisco that underscore why I live there, and that deserve to be more widely known. Firstly, Deep has been staging “Flash Dances” for the past two years, about 10 or more times now. I absolutely LOVE these. The sound system starts pumping at a pre-arranged time and 50-100 people start boogeying in a public spot, sometimes a corner or a plaza or a park. The one on April 19 was at 24th Street BART plaza and it produced its usual euphoria and magic, luring in dozens of passersby, connecting alienated drug dealers and middle-aged Latino men to a mixed-race crowd of 20- and 30-somethings, all shaking their booties to a bunch of funk and pop standards going back 30 years. The chance to dance in a crowd of strangers with such a high degree of trust and good will is just an unmatchable experience. I can’t stop smiling and laughing as I cut it loose, swirling around with friends and strangers alike…
Then, a week later, on Sunday April 27, a collective birthday party was thrown by Rupa (of the April Fishes) along with Mona, LisaRuth, and a bunch of others… the magical treat followed a brunch on her doorstep near 25th and Castro when Brass Menazeri started playing their fantastic blend of Balkan standards and speedy dance tunes, with a full brass complement to go with a couple of really great drummers, keeping the beat throughout. We boogied down 24th street past Mona’s new mural, up Church past a previous one and down into Dolores Park where it was wall-to-wall sunbathers and convivialists… what a day!
Here's Rupa discovering herself and the April Fishes in Mona's new mural on 24th Street:
A couple more shots of the party in Dolores Park and on the streets:
It was also LisaRuth Elliott's birthday, my great collaborator on Shaping San Francisco, and here we are having a dance break:
Later that night CounterPULSE had its 3rd birthday MayDay celebration, with its best-ever performance night (super well organized and produced by the ever-improving staff) led by Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s awesome riff on censorship and immigration and much more as The Mexorcist!
April 29, first day on the road, Penn State University
Flying to Washington DC and then a small propeller hop to State College, Pennsylvania at nearly midnight, it was a long day of flying but it ended comfortably when my Penn State sponsoring professor met me at the airport and the car rental was ready to go too. Weird to see a lot of soldiers in camouflage in Washington DC airport. I guess it must be a transshipment hub for soldiers coming and going from the mess in Iraq… was reminded again, seeing them, how many casualties we don’t see yet, but will be with us for the rest of our lives. If you’ve ever been bugged by a panhandling alcoholic or drug addict, get ready for a whole new generation, since that is the fate awaiting many of “our” “brave” boys and girls who have put themselves in harm’s way. Now that I’m hanging around on this northern-edge-of-the-bible-belt college, mostly famous for its perennially successful football team, seeing ROTC uniforms and feeling the conformist vibe of a placid U.S. college where nearly everyone is firmly fixed on the fantasy of a well-paying job in corporate America, I am torn between feeling aggravated by the overwhelming conformity of the situation, or conversely, a kind of urgent desire to grab everyone by the shoulder and shake them, urging them to see how much their horizons have been shrunken by this sorry moment in history, to loudly proclaim how much better life can be than THIS!
Well, I got my chance to do a little shoulder shaking in the International Relations class I was flown here to speak to. We started by watching the first 11 minutes of Ted White’s “We Are Traffic!” (thanks for putting that on google-video Ted!) and then I just launched on Critical Mass stories, history of mass bike rides, rubber slavery, and Nowtopian themes about class and wage-slavery… The 40 or so students seemed quite attentive, even if the majority were silent throughout. A mix of about 10 students got off some good questions and made for a lively exchange as the class proceeded. Alan Stoekl, the prof, said he was very happy with it, so I guess I fulfilled my mission.
My own historical amnesia came to mind as I strolled around the campus past buildings made possible by the beneficence of such luminaries as Charles Schwab (not because of the stock brokerage fortune, but from the one that preceded it in armaments and heavy industry as Bethlehem Steel) and Carnegie (also a steel baron). Apparently this part of Pennsylvania had a 19th century heyday as a big iron and steel-making region (hence the bitter remnants of the "traditional" white working class clinging to guns and religion). The technology of the era required vast quantities of wood to be converted into charcoal to fire the open-hearth furnaces, so the vast forests of northern Appalachia were denuded to feed the gaping maws of early industrialization around here. I'll get a better look at this as I drive south through Altoona and into West Virginia and Maryland later this afternoon. Penn State is littered with plaques bragging about their former professors (the first ever professor in "American literature" in the 1890s; the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of deuterium or heavy water, etc.), so if you pay attention you can start to unpack a history of this university as a bastion of American Empire. A campus street called Eisenhower turns out to be named after not the ex-prez but a cousin or brother named Morty (?)... how to turn on the federal spigot? Appoint a president's relative as university president... these days the school is for all intents and purposes a private university, but it started as a public agricultural and engineering institution. (all this is based on a very cursory visit and chats with Alan Stoekl, my kind host.) During a brief bicycle tour of the campus we paused at the Calorimeter, a closed 19th century brick building in which an early Penn State hero invented a way to measure the output of cattle relative to the inputs of grain and water... wished I could have crawled around among the mysterious old technology inside that small building, but it seems to have been closed since its last open house in 2002.
At five o'clock my host Alan and I went to see Amory Lovins speak on campus. Lovins has his Rocky Mountain Institute, and applies a systems-based almost permacultural logic to industrial design. He was speaking to an audience of almost 1000 engineers and faculty, so he stayed pretty focused on practical nuts and bolts of better design, debunking the stupidity of industrial designs of housing, autos, planes, and much more, suggesting that he and his team have come up with countless better alternatives, which I can hardly argue with. But he's completely myopic when it comes to the politics of it. He actually argued that all his great new ways of making the technologies of daily life, with their drastic reduction fo energy and water use, could (and WILL) be done in the next 30-40 years by private corporations FOR PROFIT (his emphasis)... I just consider him delusional at best. In fact, he's been promoting these sensible alternative design concepts since the 1970s, and especially through his co-authored book "Natural Capitalism" that I wrote about last year on this blog. And he cittes a few examples of companies that are beginning to pursue some of his suggestions and measuring their economics in his terms. But obviously the dominant logic of the system is against making the kind of systemic changes promoted by the Institute. The externalities remain external to the lunatics running the asylum we find ourselves in... I could go on, and maybe I will another time, but I was both totally impressed and completely dismayed by Lovins, as I have been on several previous occasions.
After that lecture, back on campus, I was hosted by a meeting of the Centre Region Bicycle Coalition, and a spirited discussion of Critical Mass and various Nowtopian themes made my visit to the middle of Pennsylvania a memorable one. Interestingly, several of the folks I met at this meeting had also been at the Lovins' talk, and they all enjoyed the juxtaposition and felt that I had brought an important addition and augmentation to what Lovins had been talking about... in a basic way his ideas need mine, and vice versa... But I understand that, I'm not sure he does!
Anyway, I'm going to upload this now. I have a video uploading to yootoob and I'll add that later. I also have two more nights of the tour to blog about already, and more to come... but later.
Posted by ccarlsson at April 30, 2008 06:50 AM