« June 2008 | Main | August 2008 »
July 29, 2008
KulturKampf or Preparation?
I'm finding my email box filling every day with links to interesting Nowtopian initiatives, events, ways of framing things. Not much of it is totally new, but given the context of our rushing moment in history, and reframing it as aspects of an emergent Nowtopia, I'm enjoying it all...
First off, I rode in San Francisco's Critical Mass again, after my longest ever hiatus, 3 months (missed April, Rome in May, Vancouver in June)... It was kind of small after the huge rides in Italy and Canada, but by the time we got rolling it was probably the usual 1000-1500 or so. Funny to arrive at PeeWee Herman Plaza and find only about 100-200 people at a few minutes before six... Anyway, here's a couple of shots of the ride, one in Mission Bay, the other much later on Polk Street. Whoever got in front of this ride did a masterful job of twisting and turning through San Francisco's charming geography, and took us for the first time ever on a wraparound and through the Mission Bay area, still heavily under construction, the blot of suburbia being implanted in the midst of landfill and long-forgotten railroad corruption...
As far as I could tell, the SF ride was its usual bucolic experience for most, a lot of good cheer along the way, much support from bystanders and most motorists, a few contentious moments, but nothing to write about. At least five different sound systems pumping tunes into the ride, so that made for a fairly noisy experience too...
Meanwhile, in New York, the dogged cyclists have kept Critical Mass alive in spite of really intense efforts to stop it. As it passed through Times Square a 22-year-old rookie cop (who turns out to be third generation) demonstrated his personal rage towards cyclists with this remarkable, unprovoked attack:
It's been my argument for years now that the Culture War in the U.S. shows up at Critical Mass from time to time, primarily when police take it personally and attack cyclists for having created a convivial, pleasure-oriented experience that rejects the ball-and-chain of car-gas-debt... the cops are personally offended and decide it is their duty to mete out punishment, in a classically patriarchal way, though at least you can say that this pudgy cop had enough "integrity" to attack someone nearly his own size for a change (unlike past examples where cops took it out on diminutive females)... Anyway, it seems that the cop has been taken off the streets and may even be charged, an amazing turn of events in NY if it happens (the cops have been blatantly breaking the law in NYC since Aug. 2004, stealing locked bicycles, arresting people for breaking nonexistent laws, enforcing fantasy regulations, etc.)...
There was also some kind of melee in Seattle this past Critical Mass, when a motorist drove into a crowd of cyclists. Interesting to see how (typically) out of whack the initial news reports are when compared to eyewitness accounts.
Other Nowtopian items: The Greywater Guerrillas got a decent feature on them in the East Bay Express, and are at the forefront of taking direct action against the dumb anti-ecological building codes that prevail at this point. Three women pedaled from Washington to Montreal searching for local gardening and food initiatives and found a lot! This paralleled my own sense from travelling around on my tour these past months... the more you look the more you find! They've got a blog on it too, of course! Very heartening...
And on the food front, there's a great deal of blather about how the rise of biofuels has caused the world food crisis. I have been arguing that of course there's an effect, but to attribute the world food crisis to biofuels is to miss the obvious point that the world agribusiness system is designed to produce scarcity and hunger! Bolstering this view is a nice short essay by my pal George Caffentzis in the new issue of Turbulence which I first encountered last summer at Rostock's anti-G8 protest and is now up to their 4th number. Congrats to them, and lucky us! Check it out!
Going along with my developing theme of Nowtopia vs. Apocalypse, I just read Dmitry Orlov's "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects"... I found this nice review at Piedmont Biofuels site, with which I largely concur. Orlov's take is refreshingly unblinkered as he takes apart a lot of the complacency that underlies the fragility of American daily life. There are a number of points where he is just hilarious. I liked this one especially where he metaphorically describes the end of the Cold War in terms markedly different than the endless triumphalist chorus we are subjected to in the U.S.:
"If a contest goes on for an extended period of time--in the case of the superpower contest, over three decades--it would appear safe to conclude that the contestants had been evenly matched. But we will probably never know for certain why the Soviet fighter chose to take a dive in the fourth round, because that certainly did not look like a proper knock-out. It is also hard to understand why the American fighter concluded his little victory jig by kneeing himself in the teeth, or why he is now draped unconscious over the ropes and getting pummeled by some junior featherweights from the stands. And why is the Soviet fighter now seated back in his corner, laughing? It is never easy to give up the title of World Superpower Champion, espeically when it is not being challenged, but this is ridiculous! What sort of sporting event is this anyway? Bring back the schoolgirl and the kangaroo!"
Orlov's book is a quick read, short and to (many) points. He excoriates the U.S.'s educational system really well too:
"... the goal of the American higher education system is not to educate....The American higher education system succeeds brilliantly at one thing: producing a subservient graduate who has no choice but to join the labor force on the terms dictated by her future corporate masters. Along with accepting the burden of educational debt, the graduate makes a number of key concessions: that financial success is more important than doing what you want; that having a career is mroe important than family life; and, perhaps most importantly, that failure is not an option. The newly graduated dentist cannot afford to realize that rotten teeth really freak her out and that she should perhaps do some volunteer work unrelated to dentistry. The need to repay the guaranteed student loans means that she must drill those teeth, whether she wants to or not, while heavily medicated if necessary."
Anyway, it occurred to me some years ago that the parallels between the USSR and USA were pretty striking, and it's great fun to read a book that really drives the point home, with the advantage of having lived in both societies, and seen up close the collapse of the Soviet economy. As it turns out, Orlov's analysis indicates that the Russians were/are better able to handle the dislocations than Americans will ever be, thanks to essentially free housing, reliable unmarketized energy, kitchen gardens, and public health care, plus a general stability to neighbors and co-workers. With all that the Russians were able to maintain a certain level of their normal lives even when things broke down more generally. Contrast to the U.S., where folks are thrown out of their homes easily for nonpayment of rent or mortgage, there are no meaningful options for public transit in huge swaths of the country, people are completely dependent on petroleum-based agriculture and just-in-time retail outlets, all of which can decay very rapidly in the absence of affordable oil.
So get ready! And interestingly, a lot of the Nowtopian projects I've been referring to are great examples of people taking pre-emptive action to meet their needs outside of the dysfunctional markets and industrial systems that inculcate such dependency among everyone else... hmmmm...
Posted by ccarlsson at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)
July 24, 2008
History Past and Present
On the Chinatown Labor History tour (part of Laborfest) Charlie Chin, the artist in residence at the Chinese Historical Society, gave an incredibly well composed and articulate walking tour. He didn't cover labor so much as the whole history of Chinese in the U.S. up to the present. One of many tidbits I learned is that these weird bricks sticking out of various buildings (this photo is of the Donaldina Cameron bldg., the old baptist church on Sacramento Street) around town were originally melted in the 1700 degree Fahrenheit firestorm of 1906 and were scavenged and used again in the rebuilding. He had a funny name for the them, but I forget what it was. Here's a couple more images from the tour, a panel of the mural on Stockton highlighting the role of Chinese labor in building the Transcontinental Railroad, Charlie Chin addressing the tour, and a view of one of the first buildings rebuilt in Chinatown after the 1906 quake and fire, this one by a guy who was half Chinese, half Indian from Mendocino. Local merchants put up a mighty fight to keep their property and stay where Chinatown is today, since the local elite made a big effort to remove the Chinese to Hunter's Point, then a Chinese shrimping village. An odd twist of history is that with the new T light rail line on 3rd Street, and its eventual connection to underground stations beneath Chinatown, the settling of Chinese immigrants in Bayview/Hunter's Point is once again accelerating.
Lots of reading lately, all too much of it online... How few hours I've spent sitting with a good book in the past few months? less than 10, not counting the reading I do every night... which just climaxed last night with the completion of the 3rd volume of the amazing series by Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch, Day Watch, and Twilight Watch.
"Of all the cafes and restaurants that Assol was crammed with, the only one working was the cafe in the supermarket. A very nice cafe, on the second-floor mezzanine, above the checkouts with an excellent view of the entire hall of the supermarket. It had to be a good place to drink a nice of cup of coffee, mapping out your route for a pleasant stroll as you bought the groceries--doing your "shopping": that terribe word, that monstrous Anglicism that has eaten its way into the Russian language, like a tick boring into its helpless prey."
That kind of aside--which is not the main concern of these fascinating novels about "Others", magicians and werewolves, witches and vampires, Dark Ones and Light Ones in a timeless battle of good and evil, presided over by the Inquisition--points to the deeper sensibilities that the metaphorical novels cut to: a fascinating critical engagement with the actual dilemmas facing modern life. It's all couched in a sometimes hilarious confrontation of police-like bureaucracies, who mostly duke it out in a tightly regulated choreography in spaces invisible to the rest of us "normal" humans, but they all, whether Dark or Light, depend on human energy to feed their extraordinary powers. How they manage their moral choices as individual agents of the Night Watch (Light Others patrolling the bad behavior of Dark Others) or the Day Watch (Dark Others patrolling the bad behavior of Light Others), is the driving theme of the trilogy. I absolutely loved all three books (thanks to Giovanni for recommending them to me!)...
They're set in Russia, and Russia is still very much at the center of world history here at the dawn of the 21st century. In fact, I still favor Asia Times for my daily news these days, with its numerous intelligent analysts, examining politics in China, India, SE Asia, Russia, the Great Game, the Middle East, and more. They reprint stuff from Tom Englehardt pretty often too, and sometimes stuff from Counterpunch. Here's a recent post at Asia Times that I thought very helpful:
Debt capitalism Self Destructs Henry CK Liu is a monetarist I think. He offers in this piece a very long analysis of how the world economy got into the pickle it's in now. If you want to understand how the last few decades ponzi schemes and smoke and mirrors are coming unravelled (in ways that some traditional economists have been insisting it would all along, contrary to the Young Turks of New Financial Instruments), this is a good place to start, though it does take some effort to plow through it all...
Our National Water Policy… Oh, Wait, We Don't Have One If you're thinking about the basics these days, and you can't get much more basic than water, this article is a great summary of the efforts by biologists, hydrologists and other concerned scientists to revamp the U.S. approach to water management, going back to Truman's presidency in the early 1950s, and all the way to the present. What a disaster! It's REALLY hard to imagine turning this around and applying the enormous resources of the Federal gov't. to a coherent approach to watersheds, bioregions, etc. But interestingly, that's precisely the approach/argument of thousands of people that have been organizing under the radar going back to the 1970s. Nowtopia addresses this somewhat obliquely, but anyway, this permacultural approach to water policies is LOOOOONNNGGG overdue, and will soon emerge as a key political vector from which to launch a more thorough-going transformation of how we think about politics, governance, and daily life.
Resilient Community: Technological Acceleration This is John Robb at Global Guerrillas in one of his succinct summary posts (most are kind of like that), laying out a quick overview of why it's possible (certainly not guaranteed) that we can emerge from this chaotic period of history far more decentralized, technologically sophisticated in ways that make ecological sense, and with a heightened engagement with a profoundly democratic everyday life. Still quite odd to me that this guy who is very much in a different ideological camp keeps sync-ing up with my Nowtopian arguments so well! Does it mean my own arguments are really reactionary? I'm sure some folks think so... but I tend to think it speaks more to the fact that the old political boundaries and categories we received from the past 2-3 centuries have really become useless now. People have to band together where they are and do what they can, and as Robb's been pointing out, that's quite a lot... when I talk to people about staying "radically patient" and doing what they can, I'm trying to help people accept that they can only do what they can do (which is not to say that everyone is doing everything they CAN do!)...
Economic Realities Are Killing Our Era of Fantasy Politics A piece that started in Rolling Stone and I found via Alternet, once again pointing out the obvious, that the working class (known in these kinds of articles as the "middle class") is getting hammered, living standards are plunging, and the super rich are raking it in at everyone else's expense. Class war, but wildly one-sided, and in constant denial about itself. More facts and figures in this piece, but nothing you haven't seen popping up in the MSM pretty steadily over the past few years.
Archdruid: Dreams of a Better World My pal Danny turned me on to this very intelligent rejoinder to the gloom-and-doom radicals who think the collapse of modern civilization is going to somehow leave us in a better place than we are now. This guy is more of a philosopher/spiritualist than I could ever be, and he couches a lot of his discussion in terms of myth, but he starts out with a bang and puts the anti-Enlightenment folks in the dumb religious basket where they belong. I especially appreciated his pointed assertion that anyone who thinks they'll have a better life when the water stops running and the electricity goes off for good is just deluding themselves. That loops us back to the Resilient Communities argument Robb makes...
Anyway, on top of all this I'm keeping up with Harper's, The New Yorker, Orion, and a few other pubs, plus putting in scads of hours again to Shaping San Francisco (whipping the wiki version into presentable shape between now and Oct. 1 rollout), pitching a new book idea to City Lights, approaching a few other projects, planning a short-ish visit to Toronto and NYC and Troy NY in September, and and and and...
Some random photos to top off this scattered entry... first, walking on Howard near 6th the other day I caught this clear image of the slowly slumping Victorian next to one of our new Lawyer Loft condos. Which will fall first?
After the 1906 quake there were 20,000 shacks built to house the refugees. Some dozens of them still dot the local hills but are usually hidden behind modern facades, or incorporated into newer buildings. I've walked by 21st and Collingwood dozens of times in the past few years but the other day this building jumped out at me as a likely shack-within-a-modern-house:
Lastly, the Corwin Community Garden is a real gem, tucked in between a bunch of ugly 1960s buildings on a lot from Corwin on the west to Eagle on the East, in upper Eureka Valley. The garden was planted in 1995, a generation after the neighbors blocked bulldozers and eventually got the land incorporated into an early open space purchase. The garden is full of local native flowers and trees, and a smattering of compatible species from other parts of the west. Here's a look at the Buckeyes which are growing larger every year, and are flourishing in this patch that has attracted over 100 different butterfly and bird species over the years. Check it out!
Posted by ccarlsson at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
July 12, 2008
Strange Loops
LaborFest is happening again, and it's better than ever. Pretty ironic, given the amazing shift in San Francisco's population... In a Chronicle article about the exodus of the "middle class" from San Francisco they printed these numbers:
From 2002 to 2006, the number of households making up to $49,000 per year dropped by 7.4 percent, those earning between $50,000 and $99,999 declined by 4.4 percent, and those bringing home between $100,000 and $149,999 fell by 3.9 percent, according to Census Bureau estimates. In polar opposition, the number of households making between $150,000 and $199,999 surged 52.2 percent and those earning more than $200,000 climbed 40.1 percent.
The growing interest that the vibrant LaborFest would indicate is a bit hard to explain. But I'm enjoying it a lot, regardless. I caught a quirky "performance" of the 1901 waterfront strike at Hyde Street Pier this afternoon. Actors played strikers and owners arguing in public with one another, with a bourgeois woman wandering through the crowd denouncing the strikers, and a confused worker asking bystanders what they thought as she tried to figure out who to support. It was very staged, so I'm not sure anyone was actually challenged to think differently, but it did catch something of the personal confrontation that class conflict used to consist more of.
It's spooky though, imagining how the current demographic shift will show up in local politics in coming years. This fall will be telling, I suppose, as there are 7 of 11 seats up for new candidates on the Board of Supervisors. But no compelling reason to support anyone that I've heard of yet... maybe some readers will pitch one or other emerging candidacies...
I saw a great new Ken Loach film "It's a Free World" after conducting my twice-annual Labor History bike tour on July 5. The Laborfest program is chock-full of interesting events and I recommend checking it out. I'm going to a Chinatown Labor History walk tomorrow morning at 10, and there're some May 68 films tomorrow night. Earlier today, also part of LaborFest, I caught a few New Deal films at the Library, which has its own 3-floor exhibit on the New Deal right now. Interesting juxtaposition of New Deal propaganda, putting America to work etc., to the actual work going on across the street in front of City Hall. A new Potemkin Victory Garden has been installed by Slow Food Nation and a bunch of friends:
During the past week I've been lurking around (and helping a bit) the Victory Garden being installed across from City Hall. It's sponsored by Slow Food Nation, the upcoming national convention/party of Slow Food folks in the U.S. (it's an important international movement of course). I spoke about Victory Gardens during my Nowtopia tour, and continue to pump the idea of urban food forests as a more sensible use of our remaining public commons (all that land stupidly covered in asphalt). So I'm very enthusiastic about the temporary Victory Garden in Civic Center, and hope we can shoehorn the enthusiasm it's generating into a more concerted effort for transforming public lands throughout the city. It was a curious juxtaposition though, to see all these folks essentially creating a public works program from below, and then watching films of the massive public works programs pushed from the top during the 1930s. Here's a victory garden photo gallery:
It started on July 6 and 7 with black plastic and pouring soil into these circles of straw... not meant to last too long, clearly!
By July 10 things were shaping up further.
This is Kelsey (?), John Bela of REBAR, and Amy Franceschini of Future Farmers/Victory Gardens, the folks who are kind of the central committee on this garden effort.
Today, July 13, was planting day, and for the 150 or so who registered to plant, it was a day with schwag and work and food. I squeezed in on my personal connections, but only to take photos... here's some of my faves:
A lot of folks who are the backbone of local gardening, farming and restoration were fully engaged. A few employees of the Presidio Trust were working the past couple of days. This is Jason and Antonio from Alemany Farm with an unidentified friend:
Home in San Francisco again, my life resumed its frenzied pulsing, so much to do, so many friends to reconnect with, impossible to keep up with everyone and all the possibilities...
I went to Modern Times last night to catch my friend Adrienne Pine presenting her new book "Working Hard, Drinking Hard" about crime, alcoholism and gendered social relations in Honduras. She's a great speaker and managed to turn a very somber account of mass murder and social decomposition into a charming talk that made us laugh a lot. She's a very capable speaker, having been a California Nurse organizer for a while before moving on to her current gig as an anthropology prof at American Univ. in Cairo. She made a compelling analysis of the Honduran situation, following the death squads set up or tolerated by then U.S. ambassador John Negroponte back in the 1980s, the rise of the gangs that overlapped with life here in the U.S., and the recomposition of economic life around the re-gendering of production in the maquiladoras (young women get the jobs, young men have no job prospects). The large surplus of young unemployed men has been the target of the police killings, and it happens to overlap still with "youth delinquency" here in San Francisco, as the city is now cooperating with the Feds to deport young drug dealers back to their home countries (some Hondurans are in this story, though not specified as such in the article).
Anyway, given the ongoing expansion of the global production chains, the endless replacement of industrial (usually male) labor with young women who are burned through as fast as possible, and the rise of kleptocratic states, mcMafia's etc., Adrienne's work is spot-on. She'll be presenting again this coming Friday at AK Press warehouse in Oakland.
I've been trying to catch up with my piles of magazines that rolled in during my 2 month absence. A recent New Yorker had its own curious juxtaposition: The latest from Seymour Hersh on the preparations for invading/bombing Iran, presumably to eventually gain control over oil reserves throughout the Middle East. Right after that article Elizabeth Kolbert, who has been doing some great reporting on Climate Change, wrote a fascinating piece about the island of Samsø in Denmark managing to become an energy exporter in the past ten years. A guy made it is his personal project to convince the 4300 residents of the island to get excited about conserving and becoming energy independent, then even to the point of exporting energy back to the national grid. I love the piece because it shows how eminently possible such a drastic transformation is, but also because my great-great grandfather, Jakob Snedker Wohnsen (1841-1912) was harbor-master at Kolby Kaas, Samsø, in the late 19th century. So it's nice to know that my ancestral stomping grounds are a step or two ahead of the curve on the climate crisis, y'know?
Posted by ccarlsson at 07:07 PM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2008
A Belated Conclusion to the Tour
Been home over a week now, and fully immersed in projects that had built up in my absence (two book design jobs, two periodicals), and haven't had much time to come up for air... But the Nowtopia tour ended in Victoria, a town that didn't really thrill me. I'd heard a lot about it in terms of its quaintness, its "Britishness", etc., but overall it was just a small town in Northwestern N. America, big yards, quiet streets, typical modern shopping district to attract tourism, etc. We had a great host in Peter and his family, and he was also our host for the reading at Camas Infoshop, a recently opened anarchist-inspired bookshop on Quadra Street.
We tooled around town a bit too, and came upon this elderly woman's front yard. She was smiling to us from her window as we photographed her signage. The first one is in regard to the Winter Olympics coming in 2010 and some recent regulatory changes, the second is self-evident I hope!
Thanks to a good article written in the local Monday Magazine, we had a decent audience of about 20+ folks. The conversation after the readings turned to our recurrent theme in the northwest: End of Civilization, armed self-defense, that sort of thing... another old draft dodger refugee, now in his 60s (I was told he was an old Trot), argued that it "wasn't time yet" to pick up weapons, vs. a young punk queer anarchist covered in tattoos who urgently insisted that we had to prepare immediately. He also was a fan of Derek Jensen's End Game, which he assured me is much more sophisticated than the Original Sin orientation of John Zerzan... he also insisted that Jensen is not misanthropic and that he is very enthused about First Nations peoples... just not too fond of anyone who is a product of our current world!... hmmm...
Prior to the big Critical Mass in Vancouver, Russell and I had been cruising around town, hunting for our respective interests, Nowtopian initiatives and stencil art. We came upon this charming community garden called "Means of Production":
This was on St. Catharine's and 6th, and just a short half block away another beautiful garden appeared:
On our tour before Critical Mass we followed our local bike boulevard again, and I shot a few pics of it. It's called Mosaic and you can see that they've decorated the traffic calming circles appropriately:
We made our way towards Stanley Park for a ride around the perimeter. Vancouver has implemented some bike improvements, like most places we visited. Here's a bike box in the heart of downtown:
And here's a view of riding along the Stanley Park perimeter, a world-class bicycling experience:
I met Amy's father Tom who was a member of the braintrust of the Work Less Party, and we saw posters all over town for a big party they were having the day after we left. Sadly, I never got to have further discussions with them, though I imagine we'd find a lot in common. But do check out their website, which starts right off with some entertaining music and a good video... an interesting approach to a website too, to go immediately to a pointed video without expecting the user to figure it out themselves...
Anyway, our last stop in Victoria was a good ending. After our readings we went in search of food and drink and eventually came upon a very lively samba crew playing in the middle of town:
The iconic building of Victoria is the provincial legislature:
We took the ferry away the next day, crossing back to the U.S. to Port Angeles on the Olympic peninsula. It was a pretty sunset ride, but we were torn apart by the sanctimonious border police, whose dog decided our car smelled of marijuana... we had nothing of course, and had to sit for an hour while they went painstakingly through all our luggage and the car itself. What an absurdity! At every stop on both sides of the border, nearly everyone we met was smoking and sharing pot, but in this odd little border crossing the officers were obsessed in carrying our their petty drug war... sigh. Anyway, I took a few final photos on the boat trip:
and now I'm home... at last!
Posted by ccarlsson at 10:33 AM | Comments (2)