Machine City
or Green Ecology, Red Ecology
red_city
"Machines and other improvements must serve to ease the work of all and not to enable a few to grow rich at the expense of millions and tens of millions of people."
V.I. Lenin
Go, city, go!
Forget the car-free city/ I want a city that writhes under my feet
Forget the garden city/ Make mine electric treacle
More trees, but also
more concrete,
more wires.
More air,
more light,
more music,
more noise.
Don't make an enemy of the future.
Only reactionary horse-gut
bellowers
and avowed catastrophists think
this back-to-simpler times
shit is really in the cards
and then you got the twinkle-toe
losers who
stay up nites
drawing ponies
and feeling abused.
Don't peddle your
dweeb dreams here...
Foot culture and car culture don't contradict
and you're a thumb-headed fool
if you think you are going to
turn around the juggernaut of public roads and private vehicles
with a nifty drawing
and a sense of entitlement.
Pedestrians in the city can't afford to wait for you to catch up
to get a more livable environment.
--------------------------
Points to consider:
1) Transportation
So much of the work of the
city is transportation, and it can be
easier (remember unki Vlad).
And P.S. -- that includes trucks, and lots of them!
We also need more
and better people-movers,
bike paths and moving walkways above the streets.
Hells bells, raise the whole walking city
one floor up and leave the ground to
vehicular transportation
entirely. And how about some city-run
car rental, while we're at it?
2) Fresh air.
Plants are a vital part of the
machine city.
Ever heard of bio-engineering?
Let's make some plants
that can scrub the air
like ajax, and
suff so much fuckin
oxygen in the city air
you
come
in your pants
every time you take a breath!
Plants are such sophisticated
chemical filters, we'd
be mad to try to replicate
them with ducts, but we got
to make this shit
iron tuff,
so we can't necessarily
leave it up to ungilded
nature...
3) Heating/Cooling
Air-conditioning is awesome,
but give me a break --
individual units that cool
the interior by pumping heat
out the window?
Let's get geothermal.
The ground 50 feet below
the surface runs a pretty
constant
55 degrees F,
(maybe a little
deeper on this
hot little island...)
Let's pump air conditioning
into the streets!
Only the fools will
stay indoors in the summer
if cooling is a public
resource (and btw, fountains
and water are great
coolers -- evaporation
is a cooling process).
4) Rooftop city.
The rooftops
are an ecological
miracle
waiting to happen,
and a public
resource of enormous magnitude.
I'm not talking about
roof-gardens, either ---
that's just a
suburban
lawn, and small
potatoes.
Let's build another
Central Park
on top of the
tenement plain
of the Lower East Side....
5) Commerce
don't make environmentalism
a moral high-hat
commerce is the life-blood
of the poor, too, so
no fainting spells.
Get vendors in the parks!
add second-story stores,
fuk add em on the roof-parks
if there's enuf biz!
Don't give me your
wilting lilly routine...
------------------
Anything is possible
but we gotta
find the prolitariat
and see what they need.
They're the ones
who can get it done --
we get some
neighborhood strikes going
and something might
actually
happen.
Posted by Sam on
07:31 AM
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Comments (3)
Bill Hinton, R.I.P.
He was a giant, and he died last Saturday. He was one the few Americans to spend time in revolutionary China, and the record of his experiences, set down in the book Fanshen, is an invaluable resource.
You can read his story here. There is also a link (on the left) to a neat talk he gave at his 80th birthday celebration, about his struggle to get his notes for Fanshen back from the U.S. government during the McCarthy era.
I had the honor of seeing Bill Hinton speak in '97, at the 30th anniversary commemoration of the Cultural Revolution set up by the China Study Group.
He was way freakin' cool -- may he rest in peace while his memory continues to inflame our hopes for a better world.
Posted by Sam on
09:42 PM
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Comments (1)
Baghdad & Cancun
Baghdad Burning: A "Girl Blog from Iraq" discussing "war, politics and occupation" --- I just read two entries and I'm knocked on my ass. This chick shows more understanding of the Iraqi situation in a few paragraphs than you can wring out of a whole day of TV watching. Check it out!
I've been in Cancun enjoying the mixed pleasures of total leisure, thus the no posting. I'm working on some stuff but notes are a little sparse -- so much has happened over the past two weeks. Suffice it to say that one major plank is looking to the rank-and-file soldiers to guide us on the future of Iraq. I dunno, more to follow...
Link via BelowStreetLevel. Check it out for more Iraqi blog links...
Posted by Sam on
03:58 AM
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Comments (3)
