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May 31, 2008
Critical Mass in Rome (part one)
Just as incredible as you might imagine… maybe more so… Wild bikes, warm people, a sweet scene late in the ride when a woman sat on her boyfriend’s handlebars facing him, with her arms wrapped tightly around him in a loving embrace, her head buried on his shoulder, while he pedaled along in the ride. Riding through Rome, through thousands of years of history at every turn, is simply incommensurable! Nothing like it…
In just a few days in Rome I have been so welcomed, and so warmly embraced, it’s almost embarrassing, but in fact it has been the thrill of a lifetime! I have more than 50 new friends, and I’m sure there are at least several thousand more whom I will meet eventually. Rome could be a second home, without doubt.
Critical Mass is an unusual prism through which to experience a city. For one thing, it’s always unique in each place it happens, but on the other hand, it’s a eerily familiar experience. Well, I’ll take it from the top, knowing that I have already forgotten way more than I can remember and write down here. I headed out at 5:30 on Friday to find a small group gathering at a nearby “ciclofficina” (the local DIY bikeshops, of which there were four, but as of yesterday at the Ciemmona a fifth one announced itself) but in the dense streets of Monti here in the center of Rome, I could not find them. Luckily I was loaned a cellphone so I made a call, simultaneous to Ilaria calling to see where the hell I was, and she found me a few minutes later. There were already a group of about a dozen Spaniards there, including one fellow from Mexico, and Rebecca with her ferret in her front basket (she later that night danced to pulsing funk and Motown with the sweet animal draped around her shoulders!). The rest of our entourage soon pulled out and 30 of us or so headed towards the gathering point at Piramide. Here’s Ilaria with her sound system in tow.
At Piramide about 1000 cyclists assembled (this was the local, smaller “normal” ride on Friday night), including a bunch of us internationalistas who had already made it to Rome for the Big One to follow on Saturday. Piero, whom I’d met the night before at the ciclofficina Don Quixote at SNIA (more on SNIA in the next post), was in fine form, juggling with a bunch of friends, and a vehicle called “Ciclo Ludo Muzga Bus” decked out in several drums, getting everyone dancing a bit as we enjoyed the late sun streaming over the Pyramid (stolen from Egypt by the Romans more than 2000 years ago and rebuilt here).
One of the many new friends I met here is Giorgia and she came in a spring dress with a blue parasol and a small box on the back of her bike overflowing with fresh cherries, and this sign attached, “For a Rome clean, fresh, sane & secure, free of petroleum and its victims… Pedal in Rome”.
I ran around taking photos of t-shirts (I was also gifted with several to add to my ever expanding collection!) and these older fender stickers to capture the something of the creativity that Critical Mass keeps displaying:
The inventiveness that produces strange hybridized Tallbikes and Longbikes was on full display too. Here are several of the more interesting ones I came upon during the day. Giuso is on this one. He is one of my favorite people of all time! I met him when I came to Rome the first time in 2002 or 03, and they had just started the ciclofficina at SNIA. He’s a very charismatic and smart man, who is in the middle of many initiatives that I would characterize as Nowtopian… for one, he’s an awesome chef and last time when in Rome I ate a meal he prepared while we talked about him wanting to start a Food Not Bombs chapter. I asked him about it this time and he talked about the problems of finding people who would dedicate themselves enough to maintain the continuity, but how they do have several food-related initiatives going on, including a Grupo Acquisitivo (like a CSA) in which they are able to ask the farmers to grow specific things to be ready at specific times of the year. I shot a video of him yesterday at SNIA explaining the amazing history of the place which I hope to post to YouTube for inclusion in a later post. While we were talking during this ride he told me about a new(er) ciclofficina called Lavanderia, which is in a former asylum, and that now there are “crazy” people there working on fixing up bikes for the sane!
Yes there are a half dozen or more of my yellow signs floating around here, always fun for me to come upon one!
This is Piero, who was juggling at the beginning and clowning throughout!
The last one is the tallest, and on it sits Olivier whom I met last night after the “big one”—he turns out to have just gotten out of jail after a sentence of 4 months for trying to give yogurt to French President Sarkozy, a story that I will try to understand better, but apparently it is as simple and preposterous as that.
Here is Betsy from Lyon (I may have gotten her name wrong) and a fellow from Mexico City via Madrid whose name escapes me:
Finally, here are a bunch of photos of the Friday, May 30 Critical Mass in Rome. Afterwards we ended in a Centro Sociale called Acrobax, a former dog-racing track in the southwest of Rome amidst freeways and factories, where we were served a fantastic 3-course dinner for 8 euros, followed by a few hours of sweaty dancing to some talented DJ’s who know how to lay down the funk and keep the booties shakin’! (though it was too dark and I was too drunk to take any photos)
And after a long night of cycling and partying, we headed home, back through the center of the city only to find that the Italian Army had occupied the place, thousands of troops mustering for a middle-of-the-night rehearsal of their big military parade tomorrow, June 2, a big holiday here. So about 20 of us went cycling by thousands of troops and suddenly a particular regiment started waving and cheering at us! Later, Paolo told me he had a equally surreal experience: the military band was playing some well-known Italian song and he and the folks he was cycling home with stopped and danced with the soldiers for a few minutes... hmmmm.... maybe there IS something you can do with the military after all! Anyway, I snapped this dark shot of troops coming in on the bus:
The Big One is next (I already rode in it, but trying to keep the stories separate!)...
Posted by ccarlsson at 11:54 PM | Comments (5)
May 30, 2008
Great Night at Flexi (and beyond)
I had a fantastic night at Flexi Libreria last night. Somewhere between 50 and 80 people jammed in to the beautiful new space, which takes its name from the increasing precarity that its founders, all research and technical workers during their "day jobs," face. Francesca, Andrea, and all the folks I met there were so hospitable and gave me an incredible welcome and a fantastic venue to present Nowtopia. It's hard for me to judge, since I'm presenting, but as in Milan, it seemed to really resonate for the folks who came, and the discussion that followed went in interesting directions, about organization, subcultural exclusion, technology, human nature, work and ecology, a side moment on my ideological influences and the state of EarthFirst!, Peter Berg, and ecological politics in general in the U.S. It was the best night I've had on the tour yet. Special thanks to Rotafixa and Andrea for making this happen, and doing the simultaneous translation. Here are some photos of the place, the crowd before the Talk, and some shots during the Talk (I admit this is a bit of a scrapbook/journal for me at these moments, but hey, it is after all MY blog! Apologies if you're only interested in deep thoughts, which only pop up here intermittently at best!).
Rotafixa introduces the evening:
Andrea translates:
The audience was split into two wings, one facing and one on the side:
After we ended around 10:30 or later, Rotafixa led a posse down the street to do some guerrilla gardening with plants he'd been collecting for a few days:
He'd made up some lovely little signs that say "Rebellious Flowers" and here you can see how it looked in the light of day today:
I also had a very encouraging meeting with another publisher today, DeriveApprodi, who said they'll prepare a proposal that includes translating the entire book and a modest advance. Yay! And I love their list, and would be really glad to be on it. There are still some even larger publishers that friends are approaching, so I will come back to SF and see what develops and what works best.
After that great evening, Rotafixa took me again on a blistering trip in the lingering rain across Rome to a ciclofficina I visited last time I was in Rome, SNIA. I left my camera behind but hope to return and get some photos before I go. The place is more beautiful than ever, full of insane bicycle constructions (the Rube Goldberg-inspired bike-symbol-painting "vehicle" is a site to behold!) and fantastic people, including Giuso, who I was delighted to meet again, and Adam and Maryann from a DIY bikeshop in London's projects. Tonight is Critical Mass, the local variety, and begins three days of mass bike riding...
In the afternoon yesterday the sun came out for a few hours and I took a walk, wandering around, and came upon some lovely sights--it's impossible NOT to while in Rome if you're willing to follow your nose... Here's a hieroglyphic column topped by some kind of Catholic statuary, but quite a fascinating piece of media in its own right:
It's in the plaza in front of a massive church, San Giovanni in Laterno, in which I took a couple of photos, one to capture its grandeur (it is very impressive) and one because I just didn't realize that 20-foot marble saints might be depicted reading a book of all things!
I just liked this view because it captures the astonishingly common experience here of wandering around and crisscrossing ancient walls and structures that are still in common use.
OK, too many bicycling pictures will come in the next entries... you've been warned!
Posted by ccarlsson at 06:49 AM | Comments (5)
May 29, 2008
Just another tourist in Rome?
I arrived in Rome 24 hours ago and already it's been a great visit. Tonight I'll be presenting Nowtopia at a local bookshop, just a short distance from where I'm staying, quite close to the Cavour Metro station. Being in the heart of the city is super lucky, and just amazingly beautiful. My host, Paolo B. and his family, have a gorgeous 2-story apartment in via Urbana, and I am writing this sitting on their terrace overlooking the bustling street below. Here's the street-level view from a half block down the street:
The terrace is L-shaped with two wings:
Paolo has a garden on the roof, where that spiral staircase heads, and after tonight's event he plans to take a bunch of us and some plants he's collected and start a guerrilla garden nearby. Last night he took me hurtling through the streets on a super-comfy one-speed with coaster brakes (he's building great frames in his basement workshop), first to a picnic of bicyclists, and then to Pigneto neighborhood where we hung out on a street full of life in teeming outside bars. Public life and street life in Italy, for all the laments I've been hearing, is still vastly better than anything in the U.S.
Anyway, in the short time I've been here I managed to get a long walk in, down to the Tiber River, weaving among some of the sights here in Rome. Lest you doubt me, here's the picture that proves that I'm both a tourist, and that I am above tourists!
(Actually there were a bunch of other tourists near me, also "above" tourists...) I took a bunch of touristic photos, impossible to resist on landing in Rome and having time to wander around. Here's Circo Massimo with some beautiful ruins behind it up the hill:
Here's a batch along the river, focusing on the beautiful bridges:
After cycling around the city last night with some "power cyclists" and finding it easy and exhilarating to ride in their wake (and manage to keep up!), it's amazing to think how much harder it is to ride during the day, especially as a lone cyclist, here in Rome. The traffic is dense and crazy, the roads are confusing and full of tram tracks, and the bike lanes that I found (like the one below on the Palatino bridge) are empty because there are so few cyclists compared to the cars and scooters.
The scooter is ubiquitous here and incredibly noisy and irritating. Not as bad as I remember Naples a few years ago, but plenty bad enough. Then, not only is one assaulted continuously by bullying scooter riders, as I turned a corner in the center, I came upon this enormous billboard, which somehow captured something essential about the self-presentation of Italian culture (bombastically, artifically sexy, in love with machines and fashion, shiny new baubles, shiny impossible bodies, and an omnipresent visual pollution to combat all the incredibly history and beauty of their country):
Luckily I'm here with a lot more engagement than mere tourism. And the friends I've come to meet have been busy plastering the billboards with their own advertising, getting ready for three days of Critical Mass rides. I spent most of the day reading and sleeping since it was raining off and on, but now it's 4 in the afternoon and skies have cleared and the sun is out. Weather reports say it will hold through the weekend, so it's looking GREAT for the Big CM or ciemmona as they say in Italian...
Posted by ccarlsson at 06:35 AM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2008
On to Rome
Had a really great visit to Milan, spending three days wandering around the center of the city and its parks, mostly with my good friend Giovanni M., but also having a chance to catch up with Pesce, Alex F., and even got a couple of fun hours hanging with a new friend, a Norwegian third generation radical peasant named Gunn. She and I are separated by a lot of years but we found a common language around our mutual interest in radical politics, mental health, the web of life, and more.
I had a fruitful meeting with old publishing friends who are interested in an abridged version of Nowtopia, but there are still some more options to consider before I commit finally to that plan. Between them, and many of the people I met and stories I heard, the striking thing here in Italy after about a week is how far the institutional left has fallen. The big communist union is still a force, but after the recent election that returned Berlusconi to power, all the smaller parties of left and right that stayed out of the big parties of center-left and “center-right” failed to gain enough votes to return to parliament. Thus, as Giovanni said with equal parts amazement and satisfaction about those former perpetual politicians, “they’ll have to get a job!” It’s also likely that the demise of representation for many of these smaller parties will mean their disappearance in the next year or two from the streets since there will be no state money to keep their newspapers printing or their offices rented. In a way it seems curiously analogous to the U.S. where representative democracy is a hollowed out phenomenon that essentially pits competing advertising campaigns against each other in lieu of any meaningful political debate. The imminent demise of the institutional left here matches the long decline of the unions and the increasingly chimerical nature of political parties in the U.S.
All this is to say that it’s a lot easier to find space when there aren’t major institutional players and their preponderant ideologies crushing all attempts to reinvent politics or rethink old assumptions. It also means that resources will be a lot scarcer and the kinds of DIY efforts that I write about in Nowtopia might become more crucial and foundational to future political action. Pretty speculative at this point, but I noticed in talks with various friends that Nowtopian thinking is quite welcome here, and generated some real excitement among people who are struggling with this new political landscape. Not to say that I’m offering a formulaic approach, or that people’s responses to me or my book indicate anything at all about deeper trends or bigger political questions, since it’s ridiculous to claim such importance. But it has been satisfying and very exciting at moments to feel like I’ve hit a vein and might be providing some timely information and analysis.
Of course I had my camera with me as I wandered around, and took some tourist photos which I share here. Giovanni and I walked and laughed and discussed for hours, much to our mutual delight. Part of the time we were in the big park surrounding Milan’s old castle.
What is this odd statue? A monument to WWI soldiers? A premonition of flyer saucers arriving? We had to laugh, even while I kind of liked it… a short distance away we found this tiny amphitheater in which metal chairs have been embedded. It’s apparently used most of the time for drumming circles, but we found it a good stopping point as our discussions continued unabated.
I’m always tracking bicycles and bike infrastructure. Lots of bicycles in Milan, even though it’s a very unfriendly urban landscape for bicycling. Not as many scooters or motorcycles as in Rome or Naples, but cars are everywhere, and take over sidewalks to double park in most neighborhoods I walked through. The metro is great, the surface trams and buses are also pretty wonderful compared to anything in the U.S. And there is a glimmer of hope that eventually Milan will accommodate bicycles in a more comprehensive manner. There is certainly an active bicycling subculture here, with four ciclofficina’s (“cycle offices” or DIY bikeshops), and a strong, regular Critical Mass. Here are a couple of shots of the minuscule bike lanes I came upon, neither going more than a fraction of a block, but at least being the kind of proper separated sidepath that I think is the key to a radical increase in urban cycling.
Not far from the outdoor bike lane photo is this lost corner of central Milan, where ancient locks still stand, apparently designed by Leonardo da Vinci, but straddling a canal that has been long buried beneath cement. It’s a great spot for parties according to Giovanni.
We also visited the main art museum, which is chock full of the same repetitive catholic paintings, bleeding saints and crucified christs. It was relentless. But every so often one would discover something quite different, something rather prosaic and human. Then I’d just light up. Here’s one of my favorites, which reminded me of an article I read a while ago, I think it was in the New Yorker, about a botanical investigator who uses old paintings to track down remnant orchards and lost strains of various cultivated edible foods.
The building itself is beautiful, both an art school and a museum. This is the courtyard, pretty typical of a lot of Italian buildings built in centuries past.
On my last night in Milan I accompanied Giovanni to a meeting on the immigration situation here. It's very bad. Immigrants are routinely put in camps called "lagers" and are confronted with endless bureaucratic Catch-22's to find work or become normalized as citizens... not so very different than in the U.S. But here in Italy, as in other parts of Europe, the deeply embedded racism has gone unchallenged for so many centuries that even the allies of the Roma (gypsies) and other immigrants seem to reproduce it in various ways. We sat in this meeting for about 2 hours, in which four different men gave lengthy speeches (I don't understand much Italian, but got snippets here and there; Giovanni was disgusted because the speakers were saying all the obvious basic facts about immigration and the condition of the Roma in the camps, as though the well-informed audience knew nothing... very typical of leftist organizers--these were Trots--who always find a way to condescend to the "masses," whomever they might be at the moment). Finally after the four men spoke the two female speakers were introduced. The first one represented an immigration service NGO and she reproduced some stereotypical assumptions by claiming that the historically nomadic Roma just wanted to settle down in normal houses with normal jobs, a bit of a reach according to Giovanni. After she went on for a while with altogether too much basic information from a social service point of view, a famous actress Deanna Pavlovich (a Serbian) spoke, and finally we had an orator! Again, I could not understand her words too well, but she was obviously moved and moving, and brought a passion to her talk that was light years separated from the rest of the "militants."
Here's a shot of the audience trying to pay attention earlier in the proceedings:
I'm sure it's great that 150 people show up for a mass meeting to discuss the issues, given the rightward shift of Italian politics, the rising tide of scapegoating against immigrants here (a mini-riot between police and Chinese happened some time ago, I heard). But the Italian style, which is also the leftist style, of talking AT people rather than people talking WITH each other, assures a repeat of tired dynamics that don't really change much.
I'm writing these last words from Rome, where I arrived yesterday afternoon, and already have had an amazing visit. My host Paolo took me off to a bicycle picnic late last night, and it was such a thrill to be blasting through the streets of Rome on a very comfy one-speed with coaster brakes. Once again, like Manhattan, bicycling in this chaos is somehow liberating and definitely exhilarating!
Much more to come from Rome!
Posted by ccarlsson at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)
May 24, 2008
Nowtopia in Milan
Been here since Thursday morning and today was the main day since I spoke publicly about Nowtopia today. It was a very fun day in spite of being rainy and gray. It started with going to meet with Zoe, Alex's partner and mother of 6-year-old Selma (sooo charming!).
She took me to Casa Morigi, a splendid old squatted place near the Castle in central Milan where she and her pals video-interviewed me for a documentary they're working on...
Zoe and Maresa and Cesca (he gave me a very cool 2005 CM poster!) did the two-camera shoot. Zoe cracked me up cuz she asks questions like I do, with a lengthy paragraph setting the stage before each question. She had a British lover years ago and speaks very good English. She is one of the creative brains behind Serpica Naro, a fake (meta) brand name that is designed to satirize and critique the fashion industry (which is a heavy presence here in Milan).
After Serpica Naro, many people asked where the Serpica items could be purchased. A rather glamorous fascination with respect to the operation itself, but which also proved a desire to exit from the serial, from the anxiety of being universally branded, to reappropriate a more personal style, more ethical and "clean", without necessarily stuffing oneself in fair-trade jute sacks.
There is a downloadable pdf at their website link above, and I highly recommend giving it a read. It turns out that not only have they staged an elaborate hoax fashion show and been protested by their own comrades, they also are involved in DIY clothes-making like the Trunk shows around San Francisco, though with considerably more political acumen about what's going on around them.
Here's Zoe in front of the big needle and thread sculpture at Cardona station where we met this morning:
Then we all went to Crochetta, another squat with a tiny crafts and fresh produce market in its courtyard (it was a rainy day, so not so many people showed up); we hoped to meet Blu (play the video at blublu.org, amazing graffiti/muralist) who was going to be painting today but he never showed up and eventually we left, back to Zoe and Alex's place, where I scored my much-desired posters of EuroMayDay 07 and 08 and a few other schwag-like goodies... Here's Zoe and Maresa, plus the two Norwegians Gunn and Fem, checking out the plant exchange table at Crochetta:
A full page interview with me appeared in today's Il Manifesto, plus a plug for this evening's event at Torchiera, a squatted social center, which went really well, considering the halting nature of presenting the Talk with interruptions for translation every two sentences or so... but the audience seemed very appreciative (about 40+)... i had a lot of good chats with folks afterwards, so it's clear that a great number of folks understood the English quite well...
This is the front gate area of Torchiera.
Here's Alex Foti in front of Torchiera:
I did an interview with him a couple of years ago and he interviewed me too... He did a good job of personalizing and adapting my talk tonight, while he was simultaneously translating it... an exhausting job but he carried off well by all accounts.
Here's a partial shot of the crowd, indoors unfortunately due to the bad weather...
Been having good talks with Giovanni too, who is sharp and critical and not easy to jump on any bandwagons... actually to a fault, since he's always the outsider now, and is basically wanting to get the hell out of Italy and go live in India or somewhere else where his computer skills can sustain him without being tortured by the descent of Italian culture into a somnambulistic nightmare under the clownish Berlusconi... I can understand!...
He was saying, hopefully, that Nowtopia will stir up some interesting conversations here, since it's basically injecting Operaismo into a bunch of California cultural movements... which is one way of looking at it! An Italian way, I'd have to say... but then it's also been clear to me that I'm using some ideas that were more developed in the Italian political milieu than in the U.S. (e.g. class composition) and presenting them in the U.S. is always to be throwing in something completely unknown... The reception I got from Zoe and Alex and the Serpica Naro folks was so enthusiastic that I really felt like maybe Nowtopia will find its best audience here in Italy... I guess that's part of why I came over.
Here's the apartment where Zoe and Alex live, near the Bovisa station:
and here's a graffiti on the wall opposite their door:
And lastly, for all the stencil art fans out there, and you know who you are (!), here's an image that was amidst a great number of posters and graffiti etchings near Porta Ticinese:
I don't know anything about the artist or the meaning, but it seemed another commentary on the fashion industry around here. People in Milan tend to dress very fashionably, it's true... which makes me feel like a somewhat out-of-place dumpling, but that's just how fashion works, isn't it?
Posted by ccarlsson at 03:35 PM | Comments (1)
May 20, 2008
A Black Turtle Crossed My Path!
Yep, probably good luck too. I was pedaling through the Cape Cod National seashore's charming paved bike way, first undulating through dunes and scrub forest and then into a deep, gorgeous beech forest, and suddenly we screeched to halt to avoid this noble resident:
Given my recent musings on the Tortoise and the Super Hero (manifesto-like writings to follow), this seemed portentous. In fact, the day at Cape Cod was beautiful and a welcome respite from four straight nights of speaking publicly. (more photos below) The New England leg of the tour wasn't quite as "successful" as New York City or the mid-Atlantic. I had good conversations in 3 out of 4 stops up here, but the turnout was notably less than previously. In Amherst, at one of the best bookstores I've seen in a long time, Food for Thought Books, a crowd a bit under 20 was attentive and provided a stimulating conversation afterwards too. A couple of skeptics raised the temperature a bit, which I enjoyed enormously, especially a woman who accused me of "pitching a lifestyle" which is far from the case. In fact, she provided me with the perfect foil to launch on my ongoing campaign against subcultural exclusivity, but as a new friend Hannah noted in Boston two nights later, my tour consists of the same kinds of small anarchist infoshops and lefty bookstores that tend to remain isolated from the rest of the population.... ouch! but true in its own way. Then again, part of my take on all this is that what I'm arguing is so different than most anarchists or lefties have tended to, that it's a challenge and a break even for so-called predictable audiences. I wonder if I could attract any sizable audiences at mainstream stops anyway; the two Symposium Bookstores, both pretty "mainstream" in spite of their owners and employees, both failed to attract anyone to hear my presentation.
Here's the crowd at Food for Thought in Amherst and a shot of it from the outside too:
At Symposium Books in Boston, on Kenmore Square across from Barnes & Noble, around the corner from Fenway Park (where thousands of anxious Sox fans were headed, streaming past the front door of the bookstore) only one person showed up so I gave my talk to him and the two folks who worked there. They were pretty engaged with it, so it ended up being a fun evening in spite of no audience really. I really liked David and Emily who worked there, and the store is full of fantastic discounted books so I didn't feel too bad. I figured everyone would come the next night to Lucy Parsons, the overtly lefty bookshop in Boston. We stayed with good friends Monty and Shelley and enjoyed George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici coming over for a presumed planning meeting for a resuscitated Midnight Notes (their 30th anniversary is approaching) during Saturday afternoon. Then they came to the evening's talk, but once again, only about 11 people showed up. I'd have to say that either the publicity was abysmal (the event was listed in various papers and online lists, so that doesn't seem to be the case), the logical youthful audience was mostly taken up with finals, or there just isn't that much interest in that area. Perhaps the book sounds too new-age or something?... Anyway, I did the talk at Lucy Parsons and you can see George and Silvia sitting on the right side of the couch (next to Becky Sutton, looking over her shoulder away from the camera, who was one of my best editors and came in from a farm in upstate NY to see the show), Monty behind them a bit. I felt happy that they didn't beat the hell out of me afterwards, in fact they were all pretty enthused. Silvia especially seemed likely to pick me apart, given her awesome work in Caliban and the Witch and lifelong radical thinking, but she was very enthusiastic, much to my happiness.
We had a day off before going to Providence to hit the next Symposium Books, and once we got there, again there was only one person in the store to attend. So this time I cancelled and we headed back to New York, even though as we gathered ourselves to leave a half hour after the starting time, three other people straggled in... too late! off we went... but the day was great, after spending the night in Provincetown (Gay Mecca on the east coast) we rented bikes on a amazingly crisp sunny spring Monday morning and rode around for two hours. Here's a few photos:
There were a few steep hills, but nothing like San Francisco. Still, I had a blast whipping around some tight turns and in and out of the dunes...
It was great having Adriana along on this leg of the trip... here she is bombing along in Cape Cod:
Earlier, at Amherst, we stayed with Ted White and his family, Katie, Beckett and Eve. Ted is an old friend, prominently featured in the bike chapter but also elsewhere in Nowtopia, and is a serious Nowtopian stalwart! He took us on bikes to visit a land-trust farm he's co-prez of, North Amherst Community Farm, where we came upon a mobile chicken coop with some gorgeous Rhode Island Reds...
After lovely visits and some worthy book flogging, we're back in NYC until tomorrow, when I leave for Italy and Adriana returns to SF. I'm very excited since on Saturday in Milano I'll be riding with a bunch of the zany Critical Massers there to a place called Torchiera Cottage and giving the Talk to them, simultaneously translated...
next blog from the other side of the Atlantic...
Posted by ccarlsson at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)
May 16, 2008
Big Applishness
New York is an overwhelming and wonderful place. Spent the past 9 days there before heading up here to New England where I'm writing from now. Most of the time I was in Brooklyn, but had some moments bombing around Manhattan too... near our digs in Bed-Stuy I kept passing this closed establishment, but it sure had an enticing name!
Over in Manhattan for a lunch meeting, we found ourselves staring up at this lovely iconic view:
To get there, we went back and forth across the Williamsburg Bridge at least 20 times in the past week. I love that ride! I kept bumping over various graffiti images, but this one I finally stopped to puzzle over. I think it says "memories of the past, design for the future" but it's a bit hard to be sure:
While walking around searching for produce for a big dinner Francesca threw us this past Tuesday, we came up on this awesome community garden at Bedford and Clifton Place in Brooklyn. Adriana wandered in and struck up a conversation with William, a 60-something black man who proudly walked us around the garden showing us all the different things starting to grow, how they were going to put in a new patio, their rain-catchment system, and just shared the lovely vibe of a mid-May spring evening, gardeners and neighbors puttering all about us as we wandered the immaculate corner:
This is their rain harvesting tank, gathering the rains from the apartment roof adjacent to the garden. They drain it during the winter to avoid freezing, but now it's up and running again, and providing most of the water the garden uses.
Strawberries are emerging in one beautiful plot:
So it was a wonderful visit to NYC. Had four fun events, full of stimulating conversation and interesting exchanges. The last night at Bluestockings drew about 35-40 folks and they sold out of Nowtopia, so I'm happy to report I'm selling out all over the place!... but the best part, night after night, has been the intelligent responses, the skepticism in some cases, the earnest enthusiasm in others. All most welcome, and most gratifying!
Posted by ccarlsson at 07:21 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2008
Folding Bikes and Falling Phone Booths
Sitting in VoxPop in Brooklyn, listening to interesting live sound collage of Nader and Seth, friends of Francesca's from Montreal, sound loops of weird old politician speeches with live guitar and emotional voice-overs... quite quirky and fun... Did my reading earlier to an enthusiastic crowd here, around 20 people in this small space, like many of my venues, but good comments and questions make it SO worthwhile!.... anyway, the tour goes on, having found a tone and style that seems to be leaving something hopeful and encouraging behind as I go on from place to place... still Bluestockings ahead here in NYC before New England and Italy...
During this period in NY it's Bike Month (now embraced by the city to the chagrin of some local cyclists) which is a direct descendant of BikeSummer, invented in SF in 1999 and a fun month-long festival of bicycling that migrated around to many cities. Not sure if anyone is taking it up this year or if perhaps it has died out. Here in NY though there is a full month of rides and fun. One I caught, serendipitously, was the FoldUp! ride (taking its name from Times Up! and the theme, folding bikes). As usual, social rides like these are just hugely fun. Oddly we had to go single file for long stretches, even though the ride had grown to 105 bikes, bigger than any of the last four years. We went down the West Side Parkway all the way to Battery Park, then looped back to go over the Brooklyn Bridge and right back on the Manhattan Bridge. So it was a lovely day, I had some interesting conversations with an urban planner who commutes in from 92nd to the foot of Manhattan every day, a few recreational riders, a Brazilian, the ride leader, and some other Times Up! pals that I've known now for a few years.
At the end of the ride at East 23rd St. Stuyvesant Cove park, we gathered to see demos of folding and unfolding different brands, while all the Bromptons quickly assembled themselves into this funny row:
I got to take a test ride on this remarkable ride, the Strida.
It was fun to look around and see a mini-Critical Mass of folding bikes tooling around town all afternoon...
On Sunday we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to have a quick look the Gustave Courbet show and the Poussin show too (too much for one day, but heck, we're tourists and don't have another chance). We both liked the Courbet better, with his amazing paintings of naked women, portraits of his cohort of radical writers, musicians and artists, etc. One picture of a woman's spread legs called "The Origin of the World" was clearly quite a scandalous image in its time (mid 1850s) but is qutie tame in the x-rated era... Poussin was painting a lot earlier, the 17th century, and his landscapes are quite interesting for the way he escaped his time to render accurate images of nature, integrated with human culture. A couple of his were really memorable, esp. the one with a dead body in the foreground near a river, wrapped by a python, while regular life continues in various other parts of the painting.
After that we hurried across town to Broadway to catch "Passing Strange," a rock opera of sorts, a coming of age story that has some really hilarious moments, some real profundity, and a fair number of awkwardly embarrassing moments. All in all we enjoyed it a lot, especially the well-chosen cast, the deep perceptions into youthful existential angst and the intelligent denouement in which the obsessive focus on art is critiqued as somehow a reification of real life. Here I am just after the show in front of the marquee:
Of course I'm seeing all my old friends here, as usual, so on Monday I went in the storm to Manhattan to catch up with my high school chemistry lab partner, Karen. I emerged from the subway at 2nd Ave and Houston right next to the Liz Christy garden, one of the original community gardens back in the 1970s. Took these photos:
On the way up 2nd Ave I came upon this odd image:
The end of the line for public phones? Certainly a lot harder to find them in this cell-phone saturated era. Odd to see it just collapsed into the sidewalk though...
Anyway, today it's NYC back to its full spring glory. Had a spectacular walk with Donald Nicholson-Smith through Prospect Park at midday, and now grabbing a chance to blog from Gorilla cafe on 5th and Baltic in Park Slope. One more day in NY, then northward...
Posted by ccarlsson at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2008
Hurtling around NY
Having a lovely time in New York, as always. I really love this city! I brought my folding bike (and guess what? They're having a Folding Bike ride tomorrow at 2 pm leaving from W. 23rd St., a 10 mile jaunt thru Manhattan and Brooklyn) and I've been loving how it handles and that I can bomb through traffic with such New York-native ease... I think I'm wired for this kind of urban chaos, and being able to weave through impossible traffic, avoid impediments (esp. pedestrians, who are impressively aggressive here), crazy drivers, etc., barely pausing at red lights (drivers actually expect bikes to run lights in front them and they often pause for you...!) It's made me think about the ongoing efforts in SF and everywhere to improve conditions for bicycling and of course I still support that... but somewhere in my mischievous core I actually prefer the utter madness of Manhattan and the total freedom to hurtle and roam anywhere and everywhere, all rules and safety considerations be damned (except to not get hit, of course!)... anyhoo, it's already been a great visit and still almost a week to go.
I rode from Francesca's front door in Bed-Stuy to Columbia University on Wednesday, took exactly one hour, riding as fast as i could all out the whole way, mostly up the West Side Parkway, but suffering the imbecility of clogged bike lanes on 6th Ave and 8th Ave first (commonly blocked by police cars shopping for lunch or delivery trucks). It's about 13-15 miles I think. Here I am on arrival at the front of Columbia (and here's the podcast of my talk there):
On the way back to Brooklyn, I rode through Central Park, which was spectacular, but I'd also had a more leisurely time in the park the day before. Here's a shot of the amazing spring weather on the Great Meadow:
Naturally I'm visiting friends and some of them are interviewees in Nowtopia, so I've gathered some images that fit the tour. Mark Leger is one of my oldest friends and I rode all the way from Columbia back to outer Bushwick in Brooklyn to see him, and have him give me a tour of nearly a dozen community gardens in his near vicinity. Here are a few shots:
This is an informal garden by a friend of his who used to have a sprawling garden filling the entire cul-de-sac where this tiny triangle sits next to... but he got evicted by the city some time ago and this is what's left. Mark says he's an amazing gardener. Several of the gardens we walked by are locked and more or less out of commission. Aberdeen is kind of like that, though the woman across the street (both garden and her house are adjacent to Evergreen cemetery) has a proprietary hold on the place...
Hull Community Garden is a typical one, about to come back to life after a dormant winter:
A fairly large triangular lot is being brought to life now, across the street from a row of odd little churches occupying the ground floor of typical Brooklyn brownstones. Opposite this triangular lot (which once had housing too, but was demolished in the 1970s) lives Jerry, who we met while visiting, and he gave us a tour of the narrow end of the lot where he's planted many beautiful flowers.
The neighborhood where Mark lives is still far from gentrified, though there are indications that it might be beginning. But there are stronger indications that it's not:
On the day before this garden tour of Bushwick, I went to the new home of Times Up! at the Hub, where George Bliss has his pedicab business and a repair shop. I finally met George and we didn't really get to have a full-blown conversation, though there were some interesting sparks flying as he passionately denounced local bike groups for alienating regular bicyclists and not taking on Mayor Bloomberg as he thought they should... I encouraged him to write his manifesto! Here's the outside of the Hub near the Hudson river:
Times Up! just opened up the basement at ABC No Rio to be a place for bike repairs and skill sharing. Here's the outside of the infamous social space, and a shot of the class being held when I met Bill DiPaolo outside:
I hung out on Rivington Street with Bill, and met Colin (he writes for the New York Times, apparently well, on bike issues) and Ariane, who is launching an ambitious sustainable ecology program (132 hours of training) later this year... here they are, and then a shot up the street towards the spectacular sunset that looked better in person but anyway...
Today it's pouring rain, but I have to go out and find pillows for my daughter, who has only one tired old one... then it's on to the Brecht Forum tonight, with an after party that many friends are supposed to join... should be quite a fun time... more later!
Posted by ccarlsson at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)
May 05, 2008
Nowtopia is for Tortoises!
I had a really good visit to Philadelphia and now I've landed with my daughter in New York for the next 9 days. At Wooden Shoe Books in Philly yesterday, on a spectacularly nice spring afternoon (I never would have gone indoors to hear someone speak!) a little over 20 people turned up to jam into the small space and hear my rap. I am happy that I'll have help in keeping track of questions in the next couple of weeks because as much as I love how great the feedback and questions and comments have been, I just cannot remember much of it after it's over. But it was really gratifying at Wooden Shoe yesterday.
One thing I do remember is another person asking me about how to get from here to there, or how to kind of leap over the gap between the small-ish activities I'm describing and the big changes the Nowtopian analysis implies. Of course I don't have a convincing answer for that. It actually flies in the face of my sense of history. I spoke to it at each of my stops and I was pondering this a bit on the train ride from Philly today. If I'm anywhere near right that there's something new cooking at the base of society, and it might someday recognize itself as movement for the emancipation of all of us from the stupidity of economic logic and a life of pointless, self-defeating work, then it's not something that will happen quickly.
I use the received idea of 'revolution' as a foil, since it's an idea that generally connotes something quick and dramatic, even cataclysmic, in which suddenly life is completely different. I really don't believe in such a vision, which strikes me as fundamentally religious. I can imagine revolutionary moments where authorities fall for one reason or another, but if we haven't been on the path for a good length of time, building trusting relationships and solid communities that can self-manage the complexities of daily life in an open and democratic fashion, it's most likely that some version of how we live now will re-emerge soon after. The Tortoise approach means we accept that we have to take slow, ponderous, deliberate steps more or less all the time, to get where we're going, which is a radically different life in all its nuance and detail. It takes radical patience, the calling card of the (politicized) Tortoise...
Anyway, here are a few photos of Philadelphia:
Ben Franklin's hat brim on his statue on City Hall used to be the limit of highrises in Philadelphia when I lived in the nearby suburb of Drexel Hill in 1974 (I made the ignominious contribution to local "culture" of helping to open waldenbooks at two new malls, Springfield and Granite Run)... obviously it isn't anymore!
In Nowtopia's gardening chapter I talk about Philadelphia Green and its support from the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society, so I was tickled to see this mural. And then on my way out of town I passed the second one. Both are weirdly garish and not my favorite in terms of artistic style, but since they are contributing to the culture that I'm writing about, here they are:
Another local institution that helped inspire me to write the outlaw bicycling chapter is the Bike Church on the Univ. of Penn campus. Here's the sign for it, but I didn't get to visit this time.
Of course I have to show the Wooden Shoe sign, followed by my gracious hosts, Alexis and Jon with their 1-year-old baby Sonya. Alexis set up an event for me at A-Space since her bookshop, Bindlestiff, isn't really big enough to handle an author reading. I had been in the same A-Space some years ago when I passed through on the Critical Mass book tour, so it was fun to visit it again. A nice crowd of about 20 people came and though they didn't buy books, they did engage with me and the material with intelligence and good will.
They live in an area to the west and south of the Penn Univ. campus, so it's at the edge of a zone of gentrification. Turns out Alexis is part of a larger group of folks who purchased (for as little as $4000) about 20 different buildings in the area, and now they're faced with the drama of regularizing their collective ownership. At least all the participants who are still around understand that the buildings belong to the "movement" and not to the individuals whose names are on the deeds... but you can imagine a bad story developing from that down the road... Anyway, near this part of West Philly, which had a lot of squatters some years ago, there is some really desperately poor areas with ramshackle houses and severe poverty. Riding my bike through one such neighborhood I found a place Alexis suggested I check out: Bartram Gardens. Apparently Mr. Bartram was one of colonial America's first botanical scientists, with his brother, and had a farm along the Schuykill River where they collected and propagated specimens of a wide variety of plants. Some things they planted are no longer extant where they were collected, so the garden is something of a mini-bioreserve, next to some harsh housing projects in West Philly... here's a couple of photos I took after sneaking in after closing time...
Talk about your tortoise-like approach to science! The old botanical collectors of the British Empire were quite methodical, but definitely took the time they had to take to build up their collections, plundering the world's patrimony, now reduced to "intellectual property" in many circles in order to facilitate the marketization of biological information... but that's a whole different idea of the tortoise and not really what I'm getting at by using the expression to describe Nowtopian efforts... still, the Bartrams were early gardeners and as such, important contributors to the still evolving prospects of a serious move to urban agriculture in the near future...
Posted by ccarlsson at 08:58 PM | Comments (1)
May 03, 2008
Nowtopian moments in Dystopian America
I'm in Philadelphia, having given a Nowtopia talk at A-Space today, and tomorrow I'll be at Wooden Shoe. Last night in Baltimore I spoke at Red Emma's. I really like Baltimore! It was fun to walk in to Red Emma's and feel such a cozy, welcoming space. The audience wasn't huge last night, about 23 or so, but very intelligent, and full of great questions. In fact, all the audiences so far have been quite attentive and responsive, really rewarding me for showing up. Here's a shot of Red Emma's:
Some years ago I came to Baltimore on the Critical Mass book tour and spoke at Black Planet, a now defunct space, and some of the refugees from that helped form Red Emma's, which is in the city center on Mt. Vernon Hill. The collective seems rather large, 15+ people (?), and all of the folks I met were really smart, engaging, and warm. Such a pleasure to visit a place like this and receive such great hospitality. I even got to stay at a gorgeous old apartment that one of the collective members lives in, overlooking Washington Plaza from huge windows and a lovely balcony.
Getting to Baltimore from DC earlier in the day, I went on a circuitous route. I picked a spot on Chesapeake Bay, more or less at random, which I could get to enroute. Gibson Island called me, a tiny peninsula jutting out very slightly from the coast, not too far to the southeast of the city proper. I thought I might find a boardwalk or a few small restaurants overlooking a some fishing boats, or a beach. Instead I came up to this:
"Can I take a picture just over there beyond the gate please?" I asked the guard. "No" he snarled, "stay behind the bar."
"What is this place?"
"Gibson Island is owned by a private corporation." [end of discussion]... hmmmm, I wondered. What goes on out there? CIA plotting? NSA snooping? Extraordinary rendition training? James Bond? On my way back from Gibson Island I detoured again, to Pinehurst Beach, a private shoreline park for residents only, that I brazenly violated.
Not much to it though. Grayish water and hazy skies, bay bridges in the distance, Gibson Island a non-entity. Heading to Baltimore, I drove past the local high school again and noticed this time its name: Cecil B. Rhodes High School... sheesh! Does a pretty black city like Baltimore really have a nearby white community with a high school named after a pre-eminent British Imperialist whose name once hung on Zimbabwe as Rhodesia?.... apparently.
Anyway, I took a bit of a walk around Baltimore, and did not get to see the church that Red Emma's gang has made its second home (room for 600+ for shows or whatever), but I did see this odd 30s structure:
But that it were!... life that is... monumental... well... isn't it? Sometimes...
I was actually walking a dozen blocks to see this place:
Gabby was a woman in Red Emma's whom I met soon after arriving, an energetic Mexicana who just oozed bike activism. She invited me to see the place she's involved with, and as we talked about it, I realized it was a perfect example of the Nowtopian DIY bike shops I talk about in the book and during my talks... maybe that's why I felt so welcome and at ease. But in fact, Baltimore had an incredible vibe, a real sense of competency, radical activism, and a kind of rare complementarity among the many people I met that made me feel like the city is a real epicenter for the kinds of initiatives I'm talking about. In fact, as I was driving away this morning I went north through the city and saw some pretty bombed out stretches. Amidst one such stretch on North Avenue, I came upon these folks gardening amidst the ruins:
My audiences have been querying me about lots of things. I love how not-taken-for-granted my argument is. I get a lot of enthusiasm and respect, but I was asked today, e.g., why there can't be a combination of Nowtopian organizing WITH more typical kinds, like unions of workers, or neighborhood groups, and of course, I don't see them as exclusive, but imperfectly compatible, depending on hierarchies, budgets, purposes, etc. In general I've been able to shift the question/answer dynamic to add on various points that I hadn't entirely realized were important to me to stress. For one, I want pleasure and affirmative conviviality to be a real foundation from which we can face the challenge of attracting people to join us who don't already share our values and interests. I'm on a rampage against guilt and admonition! I've also been emphasizing the creative engagement with the technosphere, the dead-end of work and the bifurcated life we live. Ultimately I've been really urging people to see their common predicament and to let go a bit of their particular and unique position in the multiple overlapping hierarchies in which we're all enmeshed to see that commonality. I hope that it's clear that I want to provoke and unleash the political subjectivity and historic agency that lies in the vast majority of people, whatever their race, gender, or age, and yes, that means straight white folks who are not poor too... that's a hard one for a lot of (white) people, oddly enough...
Another notable fact is that I haven't been selling a lot of books overall. The past two readings have sold 3 books or maybe 5, altogether... not so hot. I was doing a lot better earlier. I hope it picks up tomorrow at Wooden Shoe and later in NYC...
more to come.
Posted by ccarlsson at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
May 02, 2008
Layering History
On my way down from Penn State to Frederick, Maryland a couple of days ago I had extra time and took the opportunity to pass through the Antietem battlefield (Civil War) and then to pay my respects to the birthplace of the U.S. military-industrial complex at Harper's Ferry. It sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenendoah Rivers, close to the place where West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland all come together, and not far from Pennsylvania either. It is beautiful springtime here in the east, a bit chilly some days, but mostly warming up rapidly, dogwood and azaleas in full bloom everywhere. Here's a photo of a small row of trees on the campus of Pleasant Valley elementary school not far from Harper's Ferry. I've seen incredible numbers of these trees in bloom everywhere, open road and in suburbs...
Before I got to Harper's Ferry, the first site of a U.S. arsenal (founded at the suggestion of George Washington), the place where they made the rifles and hardware that accompanied Lewis & Clark on their epic journey through across the continent in 1803, I passed quickly through the Antietem battlefield. It's set on grassy rolling hills and is littered with signage put up by the then-aptly named War Department in 1896 as part of an effort to establish an outdoor classroom of war knowledge. I was a big Civil War freak when I was a child, so it still resonates a bit for me, though nowhere near as strongly as it did in my youth. I climbed a stone tower, also built in the 1890s, and took this photo down what was known as "Bloody Lane"... in the three-day battle in September 1862, this stretch was fought over with great intensity, leading to the trench between the two fences being filled with bodies.
A later exhibit established by the National Park service is called "I Hate Cannons" and quotes a battlefield surgeon who had to handle the thousands of casualties caused by frontal charges into the maws of full firing artillery.
It's all quite bucolic these days, but I can still imagine the screams and horror, perhaps not as vividly as if I had lived through that kind of barbarism, but somehow I can transport myself to the mud and mosquitoes and exhausting, bitter combat that dragged on for three more years after this abortive effort to surge northward by the Confederate Army. Interesting to visit both Antietem and Harper's Ferry and finally see the real geography of the areas, and see how close it was to DC, the role of the Chesapeake & Ohio canal, the Potomac River as the key "road" in early times, its confluence with the Shenandoah River and that famous valley, etc.
The Potomac River, running quite high due to heavy rains recently.
this is me at the tip of Harper's Ferry, where the two rivers converge.
That's Harper's Ferry, the historic town, now a national historic park, rather kitschy but also interesting.
I love ruins like these, of an old pulp mill on the Shenandoah Canal running alongside the River of the same name, just on the outskirts of Harper's Ferry.
At Harper's Ferry I had to check out John Brown's museum, and see the place where he was captured, now restored after being in four other locations in the years between 1859 and now. Here's his stark portraits. I highly recommend Russell Banks' book "The Cloudsplitter" for a gripping historical novel approach to Brown's story.
After a nice touristic afternoon I made my way into Frederick, where I had my first official stop of the book tour (the night before, at Penn State, I spoke to the Centre Region Bicycle Coalition, but not really a Nowtopia event)... The friends in this area had hoped to have me at Shepherdstown, W.Virginia, but due to some squabble with neighbors there, they moved it to the Mudd Puddle Coffee Shop in Frederick. I was met by Gary, a charming young man, who gave me a lovely tour of the town, a city with its own long history, but best known recently for being the home of the latest incarnation of the military-industrial complex: Fort Detrick, home to biowarfare research, and the apparent source of the anthrax spores that helped terrorize the population just after 9/11....
Like so many places around the U.S. the town is gentrifying. It has been a bedroom community for Washington DC for a good while, and the downtown is fairly prosperous. Gary took me across this little park-like area; the bridge in the background is actually painted and signs direct visitors to the "bridge mural"... probably a better use of the waterway than a lot of other possibilities (culverted underground comes to mind), but clearly also being used as a stimulus for real estate development.
The 25+ folks who came to my reading were mostly very young, very impressive, and palpably moving together towards some kinds of radical initiatives. They were planning to contest the I-69 road building plan on the next day. I enjoyed the presentation a lot, thought the questions and discussion quite rich. The Talk last night in Washington DC on Mayday was a bit disappointing... only about 13 people came and I didn't feel the same kind of hopefulness and connection that I did after the Frederick evening. So it goes. Can't hit well every night, and it was very kind of the folks at the Brian McKenzie Infoshop to host me at the last minute, after the Dead Poets and Busboy venue fell through due to weird misunderstanding... Tonight I'm off to Baltimore's Red Emma bookshop and very much looking forward to meeting the folks there. The weekend I'll be in Philadelphia, speaking at two locations, both during mid-afternoon Saturday and Sunday. Check info at Bindlestiff Books or Wooden Shoe if you're in Philly... then it's on to New York!
Posted by ccarlsson at 09:31 AM | Comments (1)