Recent Posts
-
Silicon Valley: A Living History
May 6, 2024
-
And Yet, We Go On
April 22, 2024
-
It IS Happening Here
February 16, 2024
-
General Ludd to General Intellect
January 11, 2024
-
Temporal and Geographic Edges
December 26, 2023
-
The Root of All Evil
October 13, 2023
-
Post-Pandemic Melancholia . . . Same As It Ever Was?
September 3, 2023
-
Chronicle of Deaths Foretold
June 24, 2023
-
Reparations is the Least We Should Do
May 11, 2023
-
We Are Not Alone
April 9, 2023
|
Yeah, hard to believe, but this sciatica is keeping me down. I’m on Day 12 of mostly lying prone in one place or another. My folks are setting up a mattress near the xmas tree in their living room where I’ll be eating my holiday dinner later today. Blessed with a couple of nice dinner party experiences, both of which accommodated my horizontalism… Adriana has been simply angelic, revealing herself as a great chef, and enormously patient in the role of Florence Nightingale to my role as simply patient, the injured one. Now she’s sniffling with a bad cold, so we’re laughing about our mutual incapacitation…
Anyway, good time to catch up on reading (as if I will ever finish reading the books I already own!), and like this typing I’m doing right now, I find I can do my “normal” work pretty easily too, laptop in lap… I went next door last week to a small party that included what was labeled a “heart circle,” wherein any of the 15 people in attendance could take the floor for as long as they wanted and speak to anything that mattered to them. It was a cozy and intimate evening and a lot of emotions flowed, personal sagas were touched upon, memories and hopes and fears were shared. I’m glad I went, but as often happens to me in such situations, I found myself slightly revolting against the extremely personal and quasi-narcissistic focus of most of the comments. Instead, I wanted to contextualize the commentaries in the bigger picture, the end of 2007, the beginning of the 21st century, the incomprehensibly enormous moment in world history that we’re living through, mostly unconsciously.
I’ve been reading some books that encourage this longer view. In particular, the sense of collapse that I touched on in my last blog post, whether the climate change that is threatening fresh water and food production, energy and resource wars, the slowly unfolding international financial crisis that is far from finished and may land us in this century’s first Great Depression, the diminishing power of the U.S. over its own fate–a degradation made much more rapid by the Bush years… all this and more. I see it as part of a moment in history when the old paradigms are giving way, and the new ones are far from clear. It’s much more complicated than the demise of U.S. empire and its replacement by China, or by a new multilateral world order, even if those latter developments are part of what we can perceive. There’s also the demise of nation-states after the furious and passionate and urgent rise and spread of nationalism in the late 20th century.
Continue reading The View from my Bed
Yup, that’s me, bedridden as of two days ago, with an unbelievably painful sciatica. So I’m eating at the trough, here enjoying a Pad Thai and glass of wine brought over by good friends last night. Being stuck in bed has allowed me to put the laptop on my lap (of all places!) and finish the last pass through Nowtopia, and catch up on lots of net surfing.
Last weekend I went to Atlanta with Adriana to visit some old friends of hers. I can’t say I fell in love with Atlanta, which is about as unlovable an urban space as I can remember visiting. Still, we managed to make it an interesting 3 days. I read an article on Tomgram a couple of weeks ago, about the remarkably severe drought in the southeast. But as you can see in his piece, there are severe droughts going on in many places around the world, and we’re having a lot of trouble as human society wrapping our heads around the unfolding collapse of modern life. I cite and quote another article below that is even more thorough at collecting the signals of irreversible physical collapse globally, but first let me show some pictures of Atlanta. Here’s a shot of their Olympic-inspired Centennial Park, right in downtown beneath the looming CNN world HQ (where we also took the tour, an 8-story descent through the CNN universe of 24/7 infotainment).
Apparently this brown lawn and the dry fountains around the park are symptoms of the severe drought. The governor of Georgia recently held a rally to pray for rain, which our hosts held in reasonable contempt, since there’s been very little practical preparation for coping with the water crisis. I recommend the Englehart piece cited above because he returns repeatedly to the basic question: what happens if the water runs out? No one wants to think about that. In some ways our entire global climate change crisis is similar, insofar as we just can’t imagine life as we know it changing in significant ways, and yet it’s clear that water and agricultural productivity are both in serious jeopardy in the coming years. I’ll come back to this below…
Continue reading Physical collapses! The Planet and Me!
Just can’t seem to get to blogging these days. But a few quick items to mention. Last Friday’s Critical Mass, falling after Thanksgiving weekend for a change, was a spirited good one, with a second consecutive month going down Lombard Street (!), a lot of high energy, and I was happy to be a part of it. Here’s a couple of shots of the ride after we had been all over downtown, Fisherman’s Wharf, North Beach, Russian Hill, both tunnels, and here we are buzzing through the xmas shoppers on Stockton Street.
Part of what made it such a gratifying ride was the reappearance of some cool xerocracy. I got flyered for three related activities: one to join in to the organizing for a direct action campaign against the war corresponding to the upcoming 5th anniversary in March (takedirectaction@riseup.net). Another to join a bicycle contingent to protest the xtian Right that is coming to SF again on Sat. Jan. 19 in their 4th annual “walk for life” wherein they bus in 10,000 fundies to taunt liberal San Francisco. More info here. And lastly there was an invite to a ride on Dec. 15 with artist Amber Hasselbring, who is trying to create a Mission Greenbelt, consisting of a continuous sidewalk garden from Dolores Park at 19th and Dolores to Franklin Square at 17th and Bryant. More info here.
Also, Mona Caron was in Sao Paolo, Brazil, for Critical Mass down there. Some lovely images of the ride and a small mural she painted during it are here. And the 17 km route through Sao Paolo is shown here.
My Thanksgiving was spent, as I have for the past 9 years, at Saratoga Springs with about 100 great friends. I’m not posting any of the dozens of photos that various friends took, nor did I make a video of semi-naked men dancing while doing dishes this year (you can still find that on Youtoob from last year though). But here’s a nice image of the box canyon in which all the fun happens, taken from the eastern ridge above the resort.
I am in the midst of an insanely busy period. Happily I’ll soon be finished with teaching at New College (especially since they bounced their last paycheck to me, and still owe me more than half of the measly $2400 I was supposed to be paid for this semester). Turns out that teaching takes a lot more time and thought than I really want to dedicate to that. I’m glad to have tried that experiment, but I don’t think I’ll be hurrying to get any further teaching gigs any time soon.
I’m aalllmooosst finished with Nowtopia. Hope to get that wrapped up and sent over to AK Press in a week or so. And I’m working on several overlapping aspects of Shaping San Francisco‘s big push into next year’s 10th anniversary–the wiki, the proposal to the future SF Museum, a fundraising campaign to finally get a small part-time paid staff in place to work on it (as well as maintaining the Talks, producing radio shows from them, giving bike tours), and…. there are TONS of items in the pipeline piled up over the past few years.
Continue reading Grounding by Rolling
|
|
