The Artificial Horizon

[Don Foley's pic from the Wired article]

I recently read this article in wired (via this post in postpolitics, which, in turn, I found through N.Z. Bear's ecosystem, which I was turned on to through my bud Jeremy's blog. Whew.).

It seems that building cities downwards is rapidly becoming cheaper than building them upwards. Gives new meaning to "sub-urban." Of course, Ken Yeang has been preaching this approach (with a much less quixotic bent) for years, most notably highlighted in the book Groundscrapers and Subscrapers.

Of course, you can also just look at the majority of highly concentrated, low cost building stock, like the tenement plain of the Lower East side, to see that this principle is already being applied. The "ground level" of any city is, after all, essentially arbitrary. We live in the age of the artificial horizon -- the real struggle is to make this new ground liveable.

Fuck TV Execs

TV babylon

Fuck TV Execs for making a calculated decision to never show people working on television. It gives an extremely distorted sense of what work is like -- work, which is the most social human activity, has no expressed relationship to TV, the finest medium of human communication. This is a maddeningly attenuated world.

Confidence, confidence, confidence, trick!

Ngyah! The c trick is weighing a little on me. This stage of the pushcart process is a bitch. Trying to break into a social network is hard under the best of conditions, trying to break into one and secure a valuable permit out of a limited supply is harder. Fuck the city government for making it so difficult!

So, as usual, the proffered answer of our cultural conditioning: confidence. Once you got it, so we are told, you can barrel through social uncertainty without a second thought. Just be confident!

Bullshit. That approach can only defer uncertainty and compress it into savage cataclysm, rending moments of punctuation to the general oblivion. Counterpose that to the philosophy of planning. This is what I have been working on this afternoon.

I was hoping to get out today and hit the pavement and try to make some contacts. Getting my face out on the street is half the challenge. From there it is just a matter of playing the spider-game: waiting, repairing the web, waiting, checking the strands for vibrations, and more waiting (sounds kinda like getting visitors to a website, don't it?). This is a process I understand, not perfectly perhaps, but as well as I can without more practice. So Just Do It! Right?

I don't think so. The general plan is there, but there is also a need for a specific plan. There is the plan for a day -- that's what tripped me up today. Last night we said: "OK, we'll wake up whenever, if we feel it we'll do it, and if it doesn't happen tomorrow, that's ok." This, in my experience, never gets it done (not during daylight hours, anyhow). Which is OK -- we've had a busy few days and we needed a today off. But we would have done better to plan today as a preparatory day. The way it worked out, there is uncertainty, and I sorta feel like I should have gone out today, but I know that it wasn't really possible, etc. Recriminations a-plenty. Lost time. Maybe I should re-name myself Tom Perdu.

An' I start to see myself feeling around for a little CONfidence.
Ah shit, this don' go anywhere good.
Gotta get outta that:
NOT A THROUGHWAY, SEEK ALTERNATIVE ROUTE.
Thanks for the tip, buddy.

So I pull myself together and start trying to remember about the plan. Where can I put myself into it? Stay calm. Breathe into the plan and make a little space for the present.

I decide (after consulting Molly) call back my dad and agree to go over for dinner. Good, get back into time. I call back my boss and agree to work on friday; this was a no-brainer -- I've already dedicated thurs-sun to working there.

I decide to trim my beard, get my hair under control. Important to look right for best contact (tonight and tomorrow). Molly suggests I might ware my contacts for the pushcart interviews (my glasses are tinted and can create unwanted distance). I'll try out wearing them today. I remember Zero Effect -- how important disguises are for following the traces: (if I remember right) "Blending in is easy. Simply look at how other people behave, and behave like them."

We'll take a walk before going over. We'll get food and enjoy the pleasant weather. By the time we leave, it'll be dark, and the rules change...

Molly gets into some work on the computer, and I sit down to blog...another crisis handled with style...until next time...

Pushcart -- Itching and Ready

cherry tree at Stuyvesant Park

Alright, I'm gathering myself for the beginning of attempt two of the pushcart initiative. Attempt one involved trying to get a permit to operate a pushcart in Tompkins Square Park, which meant going through the parks department.

After weeks of being treated like a nuisance and potential criminal by Park Manager Elaine Crowley, it became clear that she viewed vendors not as assets to the park, but as potentially dangerous adversaries. Moreover, she wanted me to vend by the dog run. As I prefer not to prepare food next to dogs, dust, or the powerful odor of shit, I asked about another location, first at the south-west corner of the park (on Avenue A and 7th). Elaine refused me, saying that I would "compete with other businesses." Oh. I asked about the south-east corner (Ave B and 7th), and I waited to hear back. After a few weeks I called, and she said she was "still talking it over with Finance." As I happened to also be in contact with "Finance," embodied in the person of one Nicole Claire, I knew her to be agreeable, even guardedly enthusiastic about my proposal. I told Crowley as much, and asked her if she would approve my proposal. She said she "had concerns," and would call me back.

Two weeks and no call. Time was getting short. After a location is approved, the permit is secured through a bidding process, and the bidding period was coming soon. I called her back. In our short conversation, she tersely informed me that "the landlords had concerns" and that she would not allow me to vend at that location. With only a few days to decide, I chose not to bid. End attempt one.

It should not, perhaps, come as a surprise that I came into conflict with the Tompkins' management. This is, after all, the same administration which, under the foul direction of Commissioner Henry Stern, imposed a nightly curfew on park activity, savagely quashed neighborhood resistance with a series of brutal police actions, and shut the park for two years for "improvements," and finally reopened it as a handfull of green areas penned-in by high fences which are mostly kept locked. Charming. This is what they made of Tompkins, a park which has the longest and richest history of radical public gatherings of any place in the city, from the Triangle Shirtwaist protests to the tent city of the 80s. It was such a vital and breathing part of the community that when the curfew was first imposed, it precipitated a riot.

Stern considers the new Tompkins the greatest success of his administration and a model for the "renewal" of city parks.

Also, he added the dog run. No wonder they wanted me to vend there, and only there. Also no wonder Elaine Crowley was so non-plussed by my inquiries about after-hours vending to the Avenue B bar/club crowd. They are shills for the landlords, and landlords prefer restaurants, who pay them rents. No doubt the landlords Crowley serves were none other than the infamous 7th Street Block Association who were so instrumental in lobbying Commissioner Stern and Mayor Dinkins to brutally alter the park.

cherry blossoms

Scab

As you may notice, I am somewhat angry about my treatment at the hands of the parks department. Not only am I angry, I am enraged. Molly and I talk often about the difference between anger and rage. Anger is directed, expressive, and social. Anger is the only appropriate reaction to injustice. Rage is wild, blunt, and isolating. Rage is a response to hurt, and serves only to keep people away while healing occurs.

Confusion between rage and anger is devastating. Scott, one of the bosses at my last job was a classic example of a personality ravaged by the acid bath of rage mixed with anger, or rancor. His head was shrunken to the size of his skull. When I first saw him, I thought "Who is this wraith?" He haunted the restaurant like an ill spirit, communicating with tiny brutish notes, spreading bad sentiment and underming the good relations of the rest of the staff. He once told me after some small misunderstanding that he wanted to punch me in the face. I had an insight into his condition last night. I realized that he felt that the world owed him a step-by-step instruction on exactly how to behave, and he held every bump in the road against whoever was closest at hand. Needless to say, he was single.

In order to sort out the relations between the various moments of hurt, rage, sadness and anger, Molly and I developed the metaphor of a wound. An open wound is like rage. When a wound is too wide and too deep for a scab to form it can stay open a long time. Molly had a roller-scating injury on the back of her shoulder like this when she was a preteen. It just oozed and oozed, soaking the bandages with pus. When she would take the bandage off, it wouldn't seem to have healed at all, but it was healing from underneath. This is like rage.

This was an important breakthrough for Molly; years ago, she was badly betrayed, and for a long time when she removed the bandages from her rage it seemed just as ugly as ever. During this time she often believed that she was ruined forever. But then, one day, the feeling ended; now she can understand why.

A scab forms over a wound and, as it dries, tightens, pulling the edges of the cut together. This is like sadness, the shrinking emotion. Sadness contracts down until the hurt is manageable.

Anger is like the itching of a wound that is nearly healed. It guides the production of the new flesh underneath the wound, the new part that can work. Anger guides us into a better future.

Long live anger, down with Crowley!

Monkeys for Neighbors

We're watching gorillas on the National Geographic Channel. They are cool. Very cool. They really know how to relax. They have a lot to teach us.

That is why Molly and I advocate what we call the Monkeys for Neighbors Program. We want to move monkeys (and apes) into urban areas and develop the relationship between monkeys and people. 'Cause there are a lot of things that we have that monkeys like too. Like hats. And cake.

Monkeys communicate very well with humans. But most humans (like the jerk featured in the program) are too busy feeling superior to pay attention.

Ecology is not a matter of leaving "nature" alone. We are part of nature too. Ecology is simply a way of paying attention to all forms of life and understanding their relations. Revolutionary ecology tries to use this understanding to do more than simply expand human influence non-destructively; we can actually innovate new and better, tighter forms of interrelation. Urban monkeys would be a swingin' good time.

Plan, decision, experiment

graves and city

3:15 PM, on the bus

Molly and I have been having an interesting series of discussions about decisions and planning.

They started almost a week ago when Molly asserted that a decision is made by an individual, but a plan is made collectively. This struck us as a stylish and bold phrasing, and we took to it immediately. Since then, we have come back to it a number of times in different conversations and taken it in a number of directions, all of which have strengthened our original apprehension of its usefulness as a principal.

Right away, we saw that it does away with the bogus rhetoric of "group decision-making," which is almost always a cover for a boss (or a teacher) thrusting some bullshit on you and trying to make you take it up as your own responsibility. This is good.

Secondly, it gives group planning free reign. So often, groups get bogged down when trying to flesh out a job because of squeamishness about being domineering. The basic contribution of the plan/decision difference is that a)y'all decided to come to the planning meeting; b)anyone can decide not to be part of the plan at any point. Decisions happen, putting planning out into the open maximizes the basis on which individuals can make their decisions.

During the nineties, a huge emphasis was put on the political content of decisions. Decisions have no political content. Yes or no is not politics. Politics is what happens when different people bring together their yesses and nos. Plans are politics. Socialists claim to struggle for a planned society, and yet rarely develop a plan of struggle. This is political infantilism.

These are our thoughts to date, as best as I can remember them.

sunset on Delancy

3:37

Experiment

Experiment is another word that has been becoming more important in the last few weeks. Experimentalism, and the scientific attitude which underlies it, has always been important to me, but I have largely used it as a weapon. By this I mean that I have used it to oppose habituation or rote learning, against predestination and assured outcomes. This is still very important to me, because nothing seems more bleak than a future which is already known.

Recently, however, I have been coming to value the positive organization of the experiment. In scientific experimentation, a theory is stated, the experiment is structured to test the theory, and results are collected. It has not been completely clear to me until recently how important the continuity between the first and third stages are to the validity and usefullness of the experiment.

At first, this seems contradictory: why attempt to predict the result of behaviours the aim of which is to produce unpredictable results? However, Without some statement of the predicted result and follow-up of actual results, it is impossible to know if the results were predictable or not. An experimental life is still a life filled with desire, even if that desire often turns towards the unknown.

By careful application of this technique, I have discovered that certain behaviors which I believed to be experimental were in fact not, were in fact the product of habit, and were leaving me with predictably unsatisfifying results. Once this became clear, certain difficulties which seemed intractable have become much easier to deal with.

Aha, another connection to zeropride "all doubt vanishes when it is tested against reality"? New advances in the method.

Semiployment

Part One in an ongoing series

In which is discussed the joy, and sorrow, of marginal employment...

That's the first take. We live in a city of the divided social life. Work and play/night and day/week and end. The terminal party. The terminal sewer. To go out just to work is a wan and grey world. To go out just to party is financially untenable. Work/party in the 9-5 (or 6 or 7) and 5/2 is impossible, produces terminal faults. My feet, knees, and hips started to go out from full-time kitchen work, and I would rather be moving around than sitting in an office. And there is no way I will go to the fucking gym or worse, get a career...

Back to the problem.
We are generally able to go out
only in the approved 5/2 ratio
of work to not-work.
or said another way,
we are alotted
2/7ths of a person's time.

/cut/
End Part One