Nowtopian

Nearing the half-century mark I coincidentally find myself reading articles and books that are really pushing my ruminations towards a wider narrative on time itself. As in, it waits for no one, but also as in how narrow our collective focus and attention span is in this strange moment in history.

Rebecca Solnit has written a lot about slowing down and noticing things and in the Jan-Feb issue of Orion magazine (her piece is only in the print version, unfortunately) she has a nice column on the slow-motion demise of the WTO, framed against our fairy-tale expectations of monsters being vanquished quickly and dramatically by heroes. She mentions time-lapse photography of plant growth as an example of the wrong kind of teaching, not because it’s not useful to see a plant’s growth cycle in a minute, but because of how it contributes to compressing our attention spans and raising our expecations of quick resolutions to things that take longer than what we expect or want. By contrast, we are NOT taught to see things in their real time, which might be a season in the case of a plant, or a generation in terms of an eco-niche, or multiple lifetimes in the case of historic periods or great social movements.

The WTO’s unravelling is one of the big untold stories of this era, but there’s a very good overview of the retreat from globalization that the WTO story is just a part of by eminent critic Walden Bello cross-published in Asia Times and Counterpunch. The glib assumption that the monocultural March of Regress as shaped by Wal-Mart, Disney, et al, will just keep going is one trumpeted by the mainstream media incessantly, but weirdly shared by many critics and radicals too. For all his gloomy naysaying and overly ardent embrace of peak oil as a causative historic event, James Kunstler is still a useful read to remind us of how out of kilter things are, and how obviously unsustainable the last half century’s burst of suburbanization has been. His year-end look back and forward was an interesting read, as is his piece in the aforementioned Orion magazine, “Making Other Arrangements,” about the necessity of reorienting our lives to a logic not based on endless supplies of cheap oil. The comment he makes in both pieces that really jumped out for me has to do with the crappy construction of suburbia, all made from chipboard and vinyl, not likely to last more than a generation or more. This is the much-vaunted “housing boom” that has sustained the increasingly hollowed-out U.S. economy for the past 15 years. Not only is it crappy housing that will fall apart after a few bad storms or floods, but it’s usually built on our rapidly diminishing arable lands, turning what was once prime agricultural fields into endless miles of tacky, alienating, short-term sprawl.

Continue reading Timely reading on Time

Happy New Year! It’s gotta be better than 06, which was a complicated and multi-layered year, but in basic ways didn’t win any awards from me. I said goodbye to my daughter last night, sending her back to the East and to finish college in Montreal… the hardest part of parenting is saying goodbye to your kid, no matter how enthusiastic you are about their independent life (and I’m very enthusiastic!). When she leaves I feel a terrible sorrow… it’s tempered by the grand time we just had, and knowing we’ll be travelling together in a few months, but the empty spot she leaves behind is profound… alas.

I titled this entry Noir even though the sweet relationship I have with Francesca is about as diametrically opposite of noir as one can imagine. I know Noir generally refers to the alienated individual living a meaningless and often brutally short life. Pointless death lurks nearby, dehumanization and instrumentalized exploitation are the norm in society… I’m using it differently here, to point to a longer tradition of artistic rebukes made by portraying barbaric and degraded human conditions in horrific detail…

On Tuesday we headed up to Sacramento to see the remarkable Irving Norman show “Dark Metropolis.” Here’s a link to his huge tryptich called “The Human Condition” with tons of mouse-over details to check out. Ironically, or appropriately, we spent almost 6 hours in the car going back and forth, for about 1.5 hours of actual enjoyment of the show. Some of his paintings deal with traffic jams, like this one from 1953 called The Bridge, obviously on the Golden Gate Bridge. He apparently used to drive onto local bridges at rush hour in the early 1950s to see up close what people were experiencing on those new-fangled commute corridors. A lot of his work portrays densely packed humans in slum towers, buses, night clubs, urban maelstroms, etc. Remarkably, each individual is unique, every window and vehicle houses a story of its own, sometimes hundreds in a given painting.

The Bridge, 1953, copyright Irving Norman…

His real focus is the human condition, plagued by industrialism, war and urban hell in many variations. He fought with the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and his Goya-esque depictions of war machines and the writhing results of modern war are really gripping. The show closes on January 7 (the Crocker Museum is housed in a huge old mansion near downtown, an impressive place to see in its own right) and I really recommend making the trip up there. You can avoid the stupidity of sitting on I-80 with thousands of others in their cars by taking the Capital Corridor Amtrak train.

Seeing Norman’s remarkable show fit nicely with a book of Pieter Bruegel the Elder that I was browsing during xmas at my parents’ house. Here’s a couple of images from the 1500s.

Continue reading Gettin’ all Noir on ya!