DC people, get your asses out to this. Seriously, the 92 bus stops about 4 times on 18th street (including a stop right across from Asylum). No excuses.
Rally at the Anacostia Public Library
Thursday, August 31, 2006
5:00pm to 7:30pm
Did you know that the Anacostia Library has been
shuttered since December 2004? Did you realize that
the Mayor and the City Council have never found it a
priority to make sure interim services are in place to
continue to serve the needs of this neighborhood?
Does this make you angry because you recognize the
important role libraries can play in a community?
TWO YEARS IS TOO LONG!!
Come on out to rally for the immediate reopening of
Anacostia Library and bring your friends and
children...
* Keynote speakers
* Children's activities and reading-time
* Food and beverages will be served
* Open mic for ALL - step up to the podium and speak!
WHERE:
Anacostia Public Library
1800 Good Hope Road, SE (18th & Good Hope)
(the 92 bus stops directly in front of the library)
WHEN:
Thursday, August, 31, 5:00 to 7:30pm
**
VOLUNTEER
We are looking for organizing assistance as well. Can
you help spread the word by email, flyer? Can you help
read books to kids or do you have a car? Contact >>
Robin Diener, 202-387-8030,
rdiener@savedclibraries.org
Monday, August 28, 2006
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Between the Ones and Zeros
From Overheard in New York:
Girl #1: Anarchists are so dumb.
Girl #2: Yeah, totally.
Girl #1: I mean, just 'cause you hate the government doesn't mean you have to dress badly.
--Williamsburg
The word for today, kids, is impermanence.
As pertains this author, its significance is not so much (at the moment) anchored to physical, material phenomena. Instead, it figures in the arising and passing of thoughts, concepts, emotions, perceptions, and desires.
The Dharma has traditionally described it in terms of the fluid coming and going of the mind; the distraction, continual return from which constitutes the art of meditation. It is the quality of phenomena for which there is no stable agent or source, and the coming and going that characterize it are inevitable whether we hasten them or not.
It's also precisely what Derrida was describing in his assertion that language is not primarily communicative, but representative; in that the majority of our application of lanugage occurs in the form of internal monologue (in thought), where we are simply representing already known information to ourselves (in perhaps new ways). Given that language is an externally crafted and imposed set of constraints with enormous productive capacity in and of itself, its potential to speak through us and surreptitiously mold representations in which we fancy ourselves the sole author is likely impossible to entirely quantify (See also Foucault's What is an Author?). That being the case, the meanings we invest in representations that may never even be uttered are by their very nature instable, fluid, and impermanent. They will arise and pass without us so much as breathing.
Which seems to leave communication rather loaded. By communication, I mean the transmission of new or novel information from one point to another (say... from one person to another). What happens when we make those passing little flashes of emotion, intuition, perception, and desire audibly manifest? Foucault had a few ideas about this, as well -- some of which seem to illustrate the ways in which that practice invests otherwise essentially impermanent and instable phenomena with an artificial stability or lasting meaning; wedding and thus investing the speaker with said meanings, instability notwithstanding... Investing the speaker with an assumed responsibility for the durability of said meanings (a daunting and futile charge, to be sure).
Impermanence, as it interests me at the moment, is the precise description of what I've always found so volatile about communication (again, I'm invoking a specific definition, here). Since my adolescence, I've been utterly terrified of assuming that aforementioned responsibility, and given the rather physical and material demonstrations of impermanence that have characterized recent years of my life, my aversion to giving audible words to what I think I know has only increased. Thus, I find myself more and more inhabiting ambiguities, honoring the instability of my own thoughts, emotions, intuitions, perceptions and desires.
Quantitatively, their specific representations will pass, and there's certainly some refuge to be found in that. Qualitatively... The jury's still out, and it's not clear they're ever going to return a verdict. The passing of something may be no more than its evolution, growth, and bloom. It need not be merely be as simple or narrow as entropy. The change, the becoming that constitutes impermanence can hold enormous promise.
So, in waiting out the swirling storm of impermanence, in waiting for the passing of (specifically) one's desires (and the perceptions that undergird them), at what point does one cease to live? By that I mean, in refusing that responsibility for the durability of my intuitions, emotions, desires; in refusing to even give them words or sound... At what point does that awareness of impermanence merely become a form of self-imposed paralysis? Exactly where does one locate the border between a measured and thoughtful practice of observation, and merely being too cowardly to roll the dice?
I'm fairly sure you're reading this, and I'm fairly sure you know who you are. Thanks for routinely making me smile, for (perhaps unwittingly) making me a bit more at ease with myself over the last few months. If I leave it at that, it's not out of fear of the impermanence of my own desires, but rather a desire to honor and respect the impermanence of yours.
At least I hope so.
Girl #1: Anarchists are so dumb.
Girl #2: Yeah, totally.
Girl #1: I mean, just 'cause you hate the government doesn't mean you have to dress badly.
--Williamsburg
The word for today, kids, is impermanence.
As pertains this author, its significance is not so much (at the moment) anchored to physical, material phenomena. Instead, it figures in the arising and passing of thoughts, concepts, emotions, perceptions, and desires.
The Dharma has traditionally described it in terms of the fluid coming and going of the mind; the distraction, continual return from which constitutes the art of meditation. It is the quality of phenomena for which there is no stable agent or source, and the coming and going that characterize it are inevitable whether we hasten them or not.
It's also precisely what Derrida was describing in his assertion that language is not primarily communicative, but representative; in that the majority of our application of lanugage occurs in the form of internal monologue (in thought), where we are simply representing already known information to ourselves (in perhaps new ways). Given that language is an externally crafted and imposed set of constraints with enormous productive capacity in and of itself, its potential to speak through us and surreptitiously mold representations in which we fancy ourselves the sole author is likely impossible to entirely quantify (See also Foucault's What is an Author?). That being the case, the meanings we invest in representations that may never even be uttered are by their very nature instable, fluid, and impermanent. They will arise and pass without us so much as breathing.
Which seems to leave communication rather loaded. By communication, I mean the transmission of new or novel information from one point to another (say... from one person to another). What happens when we make those passing little flashes of emotion, intuition, perception, and desire audibly manifest? Foucault had a few ideas about this, as well -- some of which seem to illustrate the ways in which that practice invests otherwise essentially impermanent and instable phenomena with an artificial stability or lasting meaning; wedding and thus investing the speaker with said meanings, instability notwithstanding... Investing the speaker with an assumed responsibility for the durability of said meanings (a daunting and futile charge, to be sure).
Impermanence, as it interests me at the moment, is the precise description of what I've always found so volatile about communication (again, I'm invoking a specific definition, here). Since my adolescence, I've been utterly terrified of assuming that aforementioned responsibility, and given the rather physical and material demonstrations of impermanence that have characterized recent years of my life, my aversion to giving audible words to what I think I know has only increased. Thus, I find myself more and more inhabiting ambiguities, honoring the instability of my own thoughts, emotions, intuitions, perceptions and desires.
Quantitatively, their specific representations will pass, and there's certainly some refuge to be found in that. Qualitatively... The jury's still out, and it's not clear they're ever going to return a verdict. The passing of something may be no more than its evolution, growth, and bloom. It need not be merely be as simple or narrow as entropy. The change, the becoming that constitutes impermanence can hold enormous promise.
So, in waiting out the swirling storm of impermanence, in waiting for the passing of (specifically) one's desires (and the perceptions that undergird them), at what point does one cease to live? By that I mean, in refusing that responsibility for the durability of my intuitions, emotions, desires; in refusing to even give them words or sound... At what point does that awareness of impermanence merely become a form of self-imposed paralysis? Exactly where does one locate the border between a measured and thoughtful practice of observation, and merely being too cowardly to roll the dice?
I'm fairly sure you're reading this, and I'm fairly sure you know who you are. Thanks for routinely making me smile, for (perhaps unwittingly) making me a bit more at ease with myself over the last few months. If I leave it at that, it's not out of fear of the impermanence of my own desires, but rather a desire to honor and respect the impermanence of yours.
At least I hope so.
Friday, August 18, 2006
"Re-interpreting" apartheid
This made me throw up in my mouth, a little.
Oh, and by the way, if anyone's interested in taking me to see Built to Spill at the 9:30 when I get back, it's just days before I enter the final year of my 20's. Jess Hall, I'm looking in your direction.
Over and out.
Oh, and by the way, if anyone's interested in taking me to see Built to Spill at the 9:30 when I get back, it's just days before I enter the final year of my 20's. Jess Hall, I'm looking in your direction.
Over and out.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Murray Bookchin, 1921-2006
Murray,
I'm honestly at a bit of a loss as to what to say, here. Our interactions were few, and left me feeling as though you'd resigned yourself to whittling away the last of your years as a bitter old curmudgeon. It always put me in an odd position; you were so preoccupied with establishing your legacy that you probably never knew that you'd blown my mind years before.
I stand by my position from our last argument, by the way. Whatever brought about your disillusionment, anarchism is not antithetical to organization, and I'm honestly still a little embarrassed that (having written all you had) you couldn't do better than parroting the most cliche caricature in the book. Rumor has it that, in your final book, you went through all the adjectives you'd used in The Spanish Anarchists, and replaced them with the worst insults you could think up. Well done, I guess.
Hopefully, your legacy will reflect your less bitter moments. Either way, there really isn't anyone stepping up to fill your shoes.
Last summer, I said my final goodbye to the Institute. It was really fucking hard. A school house where I'd studied under some of the most insightful, understated people I've ever met, and gathered for weekly community meetings where I internalized that we can actually do this shit. A bathhouse where I'd traced the body of a lover I no longer hear from, and the adjacent woods where we spent our first moments alone. A kitchen that taught me more than I could've imagined about empathetic joy, learning how to know and appreciate the people working next to me. A wood-frame barn I helped raise and plaster, the only sustainably-built structure I've ever laid my hands on. The pond in which we drowned a host of inhibitions, and the library that provided the inspiration for my own. All gone. Never to return.
It was empty that last morning. Ben was serving as groundskeeper since the programs had been canceled, and had offered us the opportunity to sleep there rather than the floor of the anarchist labor hall in Barre. I couldn't escape the thought that when we pulled out of the parking lot, it would never come back. This place that represented probably the most intense moments of healing and redemption that I've ever known would never come back. This place that represented the possibility of so many things, this place where I'd watched people organically draw out each other's best selves would never come back. This place that gave breath to the possibility of an integrated radical intellectual life would never come back. There was definitely something in me that felt if I just didn't leave, it wouldn't have to end. And while I don't often cry over much of anything, I felt that tense, burning in my gut and temples that would otherwise set the process in motion.
Murray, I didn't know you well. And you kinda pissed me off that last time I was at your place. I'd actually brought a copy of The Ecology of Freedom with me, to have you sign for me, but by the time you'd finished talking, I was so put off by your bitterness and your badly veiled, desperate insecurity that I didn't bother. It was miserable. I didn't even feel guilty when Brooke gave me shit afterward, for putting my head down on my arms and nearly falling asleep. You were a shell of whoever produced the work that still routinely speaks through me, that guy was nowhere to be found.
And now all possibility of catching a glimpse of him is gone. Never to return.
And I'm having a really hard time absorbing that, brother. Mostly, I'm aware of how your passion and steadfastness spoke through the Institute, and what that's written on me. And I'm really fucking sorry I never fully realized it, or thanked you for it. I'm really sorry you left us without hearing me say it, Murray. It was a beautiful and sorely understated gift to us all, and it saved my fucking life. You deserve far more for that than your 85 years could've probably afforded. And I'm sorry I never told you that.
Safe travels.
"To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.” - M. B.
I'm honestly at a bit of a loss as to what to say, here. Our interactions were few, and left me feeling as though you'd resigned yourself to whittling away the last of your years as a bitter old curmudgeon. It always put me in an odd position; you were so preoccupied with establishing your legacy that you probably never knew that you'd blown my mind years before.
I stand by my position from our last argument, by the way. Whatever brought about your disillusionment, anarchism is not antithetical to organization, and I'm honestly still a little embarrassed that (having written all you had) you couldn't do better than parroting the most cliche caricature in the book. Rumor has it that, in your final book, you went through all the adjectives you'd used in The Spanish Anarchists, and replaced them with the worst insults you could think up. Well done, I guess.
Hopefully, your legacy will reflect your less bitter moments. Either way, there really isn't anyone stepping up to fill your shoes.
Last summer, I said my final goodbye to the Institute. It was really fucking hard. A school house where I'd studied under some of the most insightful, understated people I've ever met, and gathered for weekly community meetings where I internalized that we can actually do this shit. A bathhouse where I'd traced the body of a lover I no longer hear from, and the adjacent woods where we spent our first moments alone. A kitchen that taught me more than I could've imagined about empathetic joy, learning how to know and appreciate the people working next to me. A wood-frame barn I helped raise and plaster, the only sustainably-built structure I've ever laid my hands on. The pond in which we drowned a host of inhibitions, and the library that provided the inspiration for my own. All gone. Never to return.
It was empty that last morning. Ben was serving as groundskeeper since the programs had been canceled, and had offered us the opportunity to sleep there rather than the floor of the anarchist labor hall in Barre. I couldn't escape the thought that when we pulled out of the parking lot, it would never come back. This place that represented probably the most intense moments of healing and redemption that I've ever known would never come back. This place that represented the possibility of so many things, this place where I'd watched people organically draw out each other's best selves would never come back. This place that gave breath to the possibility of an integrated radical intellectual life would never come back. There was definitely something in me that felt if I just didn't leave, it wouldn't have to end. And while I don't often cry over much of anything, I felt that tense, burning in my gut and temples that would otherwise set the process in motion.
Murray, I didn't know you well. And you kinda pissed me off that last time I was at your place. I'd actually brought a copy of The Ecology of Freedom with me, to have you sign for me, but by the time you'd finished talking, I was so put off by your bitterness and your badly veiled, desperate insecurity that I didn't bother. It was miserable. I didn't even feel guilty when Brooke gave me shit afterward, for putting my head down on my arms and nearly falling asleep. You were a shell of whoever produced the work that still routinely speaks through me, that guy was nowhere to be found.
And now all possibility of catching a glimpse of him is gone. Never to return.
And I'm having a really hard time absorbing that, brother. Mostly, I'm aware of how your passion and steadfastness spoke through the Institute, and what that's written on me. And I'm really fucking sorry I never fully realized it, or thanked you for it. I'm really sorry you left us without hearing me say it, Murray. It was a beautiful and sorely understated gift to us all, and it saved my fucking life. You deserve far more for that than your 85 years could've probably afforded. And I'm sorry I never told you that.
Safe travels.
"To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.” - M. B.
Friday, August 11, 2006
The Bridges of Washington County
Another installment for Mr. Sommers (or anyone interested in images)...
This is my buddy, Poopers. He and I are chillin' on Barre Street this weekend, while his daddy's out of town. You might notice that his ears are sort of blunted. Years ago, Poopers decided he was done with living at home. Problem is, he lives in Vermont. And during the winter, it ain't warm here. He came home with the tips of his ears frostbitten, they later broke off. Any of you had your earlobes freeze off? Didn't think so. Poopers is a straight up gangsta.
I'm officially whittling away 4hr shifts at Montpelier's Black Sheep Books, come by and see me. This is of course like putting a smackhead behind the counter at a pharmacy.
Amen.
High of 69F today. I'm rockin jeans and a zipup hoodie, early afternoon. Holy crap.
This is my buddy, Poopers. He and I are chillin' on Barre Street this weekend, while his daddy's out of town. You might notice that his ears are sort of blunted. Years ago, Poopers decided he was done with living at home. Problem is, he lives in Vermont. And during the winter, it ain't warm here. He came home with the tips of his ears frostbitten, they later broke off. Any of you had your earlobes freeze off? Didn't think so. Poopers is a straight up gangsta.
I'm officially whittling away 4hr shifts at Montpelier's Black Sheep Books, come by and see me. This is of course like putting a smackhead behind the counter at a pharmacy.
Amen.
High of 69F today. I'm rockin jeans and a zipup hoodie, early afternoon. Holy crap.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Vertigo, anyone?
I left my flat, I left my friends.
I left my job, it was bound to be this way.
And as I leave the ground, I start to think about
Everything you made me say.
Oh, things will never be the same again.
-R. Kellerman
Does anyone remember the final scene of The Neverending Story? It's actually the only part of the movie I've seen, to tell the truth. I must've been like 8, maybe younger. Yeah I know, I know. You're already ripping your hair out, screaming, "You've never seen that movie?!! What?! C'mon!" Go ahead, get it out of your system. At that age, I think was farming out a proper working class mullet, tearing up the neighborhood on a BMX with a card in the spokes and DIY cardboard vanity plate that said "BADASS", with my older cousin's metalhead boyfriend schooling me on the genius of Slayer. So, yeah. I didn't have time for typical kid shit. Deal with it.
Increasingly, I find that scene peeking out in the back of my mind; the sort of paradox of having nothing but this grain of sand left; this sole sacred remnant, upon which wishes are made toward -- not a resurrection -- but an entirely new totality. I'm quite aware of how dramatic that sounds, so keep it in your pants (I'm going somewhere with this).
Truth is, my place of residence is fairly stable; it's not going anywhere, and the rent isn't going up any time soon (nor is anything about living there prohibitive enough for me to keep an eye on the For Rent ads in Ward One). I'm more or less entirely in the driver's seat, vis a vis my economic mobility; I'm self-employed, in a line of work in which each incremental increase in actual work volume inheres an exponential increase in income. No one's really standing in my way, waving employee evals or updated (and invariably expanded) job descriptions. Mayor Williams has taken advantage of the lack of accountability that comes with a final term to structurally outfit the city on a fast track toward ethnic cleansing, and well... making the city uninhabitable for families; which (while appalling and catastrophic for anyone with a pulse) inevitably means a massive influx of high-income, childless residents... Many of whom have dogs, and jobs that will require them to hire the likes of yours truly to walk them.
So, when the question of "what next?" comes up, it's never really guided by any looming imperative to overcome this or that limitation or obstacle, or some externally-imposed frame of reference; it's almost entirely a question with few boundaries, of a wholly creative character. What can you dream up, guy?
Well, great, right?
To some extent, yes. Seager and I launching this worker-run dogwalking agency is one manifestation of that. There are a few legal and administrative hoops we have to jump through, and similar guardrails we have to loosely adhere to. But beyond that, the creative landscape is pretty broad. Writing bylaws for the agency actually means thinking structurally about how to make a collectively-owned and operated enterprise function as more than an abstraction or speculation. It's an extraordinary privilege to be in that position; making something ideal manifest. It's a process of routinely saying "Can we do that? Yeah, we can do that." Despite being bound up in largely mundane details, it's still a radical departure from virtually any decisionmaking scenario I've ever been a part of; where my mere desires are the determining factor of a given decision. It's difficult to even convey, in text.
Otherwise, it's fucking terrifying. Maybe not the business itself, but the parameters in which that takes place. Flawed as the structure of my past life might've been, it was familiar, and at least seemed intuitively reparable/salvagable much of the time. I've considered the possibility that I'm averse to taking more ownership of my own decisions, and I don't really think that quite describes it. In fact, I can say for a fact that my emotional health has improved considerably (in my work, activist projects, and spiritual life) due entirely to the increased independence and ownership I now enjoy.
Nearest I can tell, what I can't seem to adjust to is that I can utter the words "Things will never be the same again.", and feel the full weight of what's irrecoverable in all of this; feel the wholesale departure at work. Things I woke up to each day that were simply given, things that served some navigational function in my life... gone, never to return. Whatever is to emerge in their stead must be created from scratch. There seems even no real recourse to merely aspiring to prefabricated markers. It's a matter of wishing on the last remnant I seem to constitute, cultivating something altogether other and likely thus far unimagined.
And that prospect strikes me, some days, as nothing short of herculean.
Attempting to trick chaos into
Something beautiful. It's what I live for.
It's magic. Magic.
-Waxwing
I left my job, it was bound to be this way.
And as I leave the ground, I start to think about
Everything you made me say.
Oh, things will never be the same again.
-R. Kellerman
Does anyone remember the final scene of The Neverending Story? It's actually the only part of the movie I've seen, to tell the truth. I must've been like 8, maybe younger. Yeah I know, I know. You're already ripping your hair out, screaming, "You've never seen that movie?!! What?! C'mon!" Go ahead, get it out of your system. At that age, I think was farming out a proper working class mullet, tearing up the neighborhood on a BMX with a card in the spokes and DIY cardboard vanity plate that said "BADASS", with my older cousin's metalhead boyfriend schooling me on the genius of Slayer. So, yeah. I didn't have time for typical kid shit. Deal with it.
Increasingly, I find that scene peeking out in the back of my mind; the sort of paradox of having nothing but this grain of sand left; this sole sacred remnant, upon which wishes are made toward -- not a resurrection -- but an entirely new totality. I'm quite aware of how dramatic that sounds, so keep it in your pants (I'm going somewhere with this).
Truth is, my place of residence is fairly stable; it's not going anywhere, and the rent isn't going up any time soon (nor is anything about living there prohibitive enough for me to keep an eye on the For Rent ads in Ward One). I'm more or less entirely in the driver's seat, vis a vis my economic mobility; I'm self-employed, in a line of work in which each incremental increase in actual work volume inheres an exponential increase in income. No one's really standing in my way, waving employee evals or updated (and invariably expanded) job descriptions. Mayor Williams has taken advantage of the lack of accountability that comes with a final term to structurally outfit the city on a fast track toward ethnic cleansing, and well... making the city uninhabitable for families; which (while appalling and catastrophic for anyone with a pulse) inevitably means a massive influx of high-income, childless residents... Many of whom have dogs, and jobs that will require them to hire the likes of yours truly to walk them.
So, when the question of "what next?" comes up, it's never really guided by any looming imperative to overcome this or that limitation or obstacle, or some externally-imposed frame of reference; it's almost entirely a question with few boundaries, of a wholly creative character. What can you dream up, guy?
Well, great, right?
To some extent, yes. Seager and I launching this worker-run dogwalking agency is one manifestation of that. There are a few legal and administrative hoops we have to jump through, and similar guardrails we have to loosely adhere to. But beyond that, the creative landscape is pretty broad. Writing bylaws for the agency actually means thinking structurally about how to make a collectively-owned and operated enterprise function as more than an abstraction or speculation. It's an extraordinary privilege to be in that position; making something ideal manifest. It's a process of routinely saying "Can we do that? Yeah, we can do that." Despite being bound up in largely mundane details, it's still a radical departure from virtually any decisionmaking scenario I've ever been a part of; where my mere desires are the determining factor of a given decision. It's difficult to even convey, in text.
Otherwise, it's fucking terrifying. Maybe not the business itself, but the parameters in which that takes place. Flawed as the structure of my past life might've been, it was familiar, and at least seemed intuitively reparable/salvagable much of the time. I've considered the possibility that I'm averse to taking more ownership of my own decisions, and I don't really think that quite describes it. In fact, I can say for a fact that my emotional health has improved considerably (in my work, activist projects, and spiritual life) due entirely to the increased independence and ownership I now enjoy.
Nearest I can tell, what I can't seem to adjust to is that I can utter the words "Things will never be the same again.", and feel the full weight of what's irrecoverable in all of this; feel the wholesale departure at work. Things I woke up to each day that were simply given, things that served some navigational function in my life... gone, never to return. Whatever is to emerge in their stead must be created from scratch. There seems even no real recourse to merely aspiring to prefabricated markers. It's a matter of wishing on the last remnant I seem to constitute, cultivating something altogether other and likely thus far unimagined.
And that prospect strikes me, some days, as nothing short of herculean.
Attempting to trick chaos into
Something beautiful. It's what I live for.
It's magic. Magic.
-Waxwing
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
I'd like to dedicate this one to the man with three Chrome bags...
So, Sommers asked for lots of photos. Here's the first batch.
This is the condo I'm living in for the next two months. There are five of us there (one for each bedroom), and our nextdoor neighbor ran the Vermont leg of Bush's last presidental campaign. I smell a prank war... Or a steel-cage death match.
This is the view from the back of the place, hinted at in the first photo.
Where the magic happens.
Light, summer reading.
Sore as I found myself this morning, I gathered I couldn't possibly fare better crawling the Main Street hill, so I opted to walk into town. On foot, the route involves a brief shimmy through the woods, and a stroll through a rather old graveyard.
Don't hurt yourself, Scott.
This is the condo I'm living in for the next two months. There are five of us there (one for each bedroom), and our nextdoor neighbor ran the Vermont leg of Bush's last presidental campaign. I smell a prank war... Or a steel-cage death match.
This is the view from the back of the place, hinted at in the first photo.
Where the magic happens.
Light, summer reading.Sore as I found myself this morning, I gathered I couldn't possibly fare better crawling the Main Street hill, so I opted to walk into town. On foot, the route involves a brief shimmy through the woods, and a stroll through a rather old graveyard.
Don't hurt yourself, Scott.
Out of the oven, and into... A mild high of low 70's
Prologue
I wish I could say that I started my trip to Montpelier in keeping with the sort of pacific theme I'd staked out for the trip as a whole. United Airlines had other ideas.
If you've checked in for a flight recently, you've noticed the little ushers they pay to stand around and point out the obvious to you. Well, those overpaid twits watched me stand in the check-in line for well over 40 minutes, with an obvious bike box sitting in my little push cart. I was the only person in the entire line with an oversized item, I had to have stood out like a sore thumb. I still haven't figured out why, but they waited until I was the next passenger to be called to the counter to tell me that I couldn't check something that big at that counter, and that I'd instead have to haul it around to the backside of the ticketing area, to "counter number 7."
Counter number 7 was, in fact, designated for international flights. And the queueing area was absolutely empty. So, I strolled up and explained my situation to the guy working there, only to have him A] Tell me he was baffled as to why they wouldn't check me in at the previous counter and B] That I had just missed the 45min cutoff for checking bags. In other words, I couldn't get on the flight, unless I just ditched my luggage. The next flight? FIVE FUCKING HOURS LATER. Not having any other options, I resigned myself to it and told him to go ahead and move me to the next flight, to which he responded "Oh, and they did tell you about the $85 fee for checking the bike, right?". I was ready to go fucking postal. No shit. "So, what you're telling me is that, not only do I have to hang out in this abysmal airport for the next five hours, but I have to pay you people for the coveted privilege of wasting those 5 hours of my life, at a rate of nearly $20 per hour?".
"Um, yes. I'm really sorry, sir."
One would think that given their fuckup, they'd have waived that fee. Of course not. That's ok. I'm a master of polemic at this point, and I've got two whole months to do nothing but craft the most pointed, fire-breathing letter to United's customer relations department. In fact, I'm almost positive that's precisely what the Langdon Street Cafe set out to create a space for, when they opened.
The Crawl
The following morning, I woke up at something like 8am, which is more or less standard for me at home. Of course, at home, my life moves at an altogether other speed, and often functions best when I'm up and at it early. At that hour, KCRW's webcast is still runnning the morning news programs from the BBC, and it's an ideal time to tend to mundane little tasks around the house and read the news before work obligations begin to kick in. Here, there are virtually no work obligations. In fact, there's really no schedule to speak of. And I'd begun to figure out that if I don't pace myself here, I'm going to find myself nickle and diming my money away on shit I don't need, in order to entertain myself.
So, back to sleep I went. Around 11am, I woke back up, and figured it a more reasonable time to begin my day. After chatting with one of my new "housemates", and showering, I took a deep breath and committed myself to the steep crawl down into the center of town.
Now, at home, hills rarely factor into my daily plotting as a significant prohibition or consideration. For the year before I moved to Capitol Hill, I'd crawl down 16th just about every day. The day before I left DC, I spun my way from northern Bethesda all the way down to the east end of Capitol Hill. I'd like to think I'm alright with these things. Well folks, yesterday, on the outskirts of Montpelier, VT... I just might've met my match (Gucci BMX chain notwithstanding).
For those uninitiated, bikes built up with a fixed gear don't coast. Ever. Moreover, the majority of the braking process involves resisting the forward motion of the pedals (imagine stopping a unicycle). Short of a front brake, the entirety of the process of controlling speed works this way, and relies entirely on the rider bidding sheer muscular strength against such forces as (oh...) gravity, to regulate speed.
Well, the Main Street hill into downtown Montpelier nearly killed me, kids. It's essentially a mile-long downward crawl, and when I say downward crawl, I don't mean Connecticut Ave., or even Mass. Ave. This shit is not a joke. Imagine crawling down Cleveland Ave. for a full mile, with no space to retreat from cars.
I'm quite proud to say that I fared alright up to the point at which the hill pulls a tight 180 at its steepest point. This leaves one heading into a straightaway decline with more momentum than anyone would really want to have. Traversing is off the table, unless one wants to tango with oncoming cars. About ten yards out of the turn, I realized that -- fight as I may -- (before reaching a flatter area, anyway) I was not going to make the bike go any slower, and at the same time, I was moving too fast to swing off the road to a less trafficked neighborhood street (a la runaway truck ramps). Skidding at this speed would've likely pulled my right cleat out of the clip; a possibility so disastrous I won't even get into it. Skipping probably risked the same, and even had it not, would've required wiggle room for keeping control that this one-lane scenario wasn't about to afford me. I'm sterilizing the description considerably, by the way. My inner monologue was more like "My fate is officially in the hands of some higher power."
Now, granted... Any seasoned commuting cyclist will tell you that probably 40% of what they wager on is a knowledge of the roads they're traveling. You can relax a bit in otherwise demanding stretches, if you know that conditions ahead will put control back squarely in your camp. I knew nothing of this commute, really. Unfortunately, I didn't really have any option but to dive straight in, as it's the only way into town. And my ignorance of the route probably contributed significantly too the danger in which I found myself.
Fighting (quite literally) with every muscle I could coax into the enterprise, I pulled the bike decidedly back into control as the incline eased up some. By the time I passed the Middle School, I was golden. I was also pretty sure that I was doing backflips inside my own skin, and it took 20 minutes of spinning around downtown to get my nerves under control. By the time I clipped out in front of the co-op, my quads and calves were spasming like I was suffering from some sort of dystrophy, and my arms felt like they were on fire, all the way up through my deltoids.
As the sun set last night, I tightened my shoes, flipped on the blinky, and began the climb back home. Having done the crawl in, I knew well what I was up against, and I'm pleasantly surprised to report that I only walked about 100 yards of it (mostly that goddamn 180), and pulled it through to home -- even when the sky opened up on me in the home stretch. Of course, I woke up this morning feeling like someone had cut my calves, thighs, and ass cheeks open and inserted scuba weights before sewing them back up. Just stepping over the edge of the tub, to get into the shower, was a fairly painful undertaking.
A morning lap session at the pool adjacent to the condo, and a front brake seem to be in order, should I like to ease my way into the demands of my daily routine, here.
I wish I could say that I started my trip to Montpelier in keeping with the sort of pacific theme I'd staked out for the trip as a whole. United Airlines had other ideas.
If you've checked in for a flight recently, you've noticed the little ushers they pay to stand around and point out the obvious to you. Well, those overpaid twits watched me stand in the check-in line for well over 40 minutes, with an obvious bike box sitting in my little push cart. I was the only person in the entire line with an oversized item, I had to have stood out like a sore thumb. I still haven't figured out why, but they waited until I was the next passenger to be called to the counter to tell me that I couldn't check something that big at that counter, and that I'd instead have to haul it around to the backside of the ticketing area, to "counter number 7."
Counter number 7 was, in fact, designated for international flights. And the queueing area was absolutely empty. So, I strolled up and explained my situation to the guy working there, only to have him A] Tell me he was baffled as to why they wouldn't check me in at the previous counter and B] That I had just missed the 45min cutoff for checking bags. In other words, I couldn't get on the flight, unless I just ditched my luggage. The next flight? FIVE FUCKING HOURS LATER. Not having any other options, I resigned myself to it and told him to go ahead and move me to the next flight, to which he responded "Oh, and they did tell you about the $85 fee for checking the bike, right?". I was ready to go fucking postal. No shit. "So, what you're telling me is that, not only do I have to hang out in this abysmal airport for the next five hours, but I have to pay you people for the coveted privilege of wasting those 5 hours of my life, at a rate of nearly $20 per hour?".
"Um, yes. I'm really sorry, sir."
One would think that given their fuckup, they'd have waived that fee. Of course not. That's ok. I'm a master of polemic at this point, and I've got two whole months to do nothing but craft the most pointed, fire-breathing letter to United's customer relations department. In fact, I'm almost positive that's precisely what the Langdon Street Cafe set out to create a space for, when they opened.
The Crawl
The following morning, I woke up at something like 8am, which is more or less standard for me at home. Of course, at home, my life moves at an altogether other speed, and often functions best when I'm up and at it early. At that hour, KCRW's webcast is still runnning the morning news programs from the BBC, and it's an ideal time to tend to mundane little tasks around the house and read the news before work obligations begin to kick in. Here, there are virtually no work obligations. In fact, there's really no schedule to speak of. And I'd begun to figure out that if I don't pace myself here, I'm going to find myself nickle and diming my money away on shit I don't need, in order to entertain myself.
So, back to sleep I went. Around 11am, I woke back up, and figured it a more reasonable time to begin my day. After chatting with one of my new "housemates", and showering, I took a deep breath and committed myself to the steep crawl down into the center of town.
Now, at home, hills rarely factor into my daily plotting as a significant prohibition or consideration. For the year before I moved to Capitol Hill, I'd crawl down 16th just about every day. The day before I left DC, I spun my way from northern Bethesda all the way down to the east end of Capitol Hill. I'd like to think I'm alright with these things. Well folks, yesterday, on the outskirts of Montpelier, VT... I just might've met my match (Gucci BMX chain notwithstanding).
For those uninitiated, bikes built up with a fixed gear don't coast. Ever. Moreover, the majority of the braking process involves resisting the forward motion of the pedals (imagine stopping a unicycle). Short of a front brake, the entirety of the process of controlling speed works this way, and relies entirely on the rider bidding sheer muscular strength against such forces as (oh...) gravity, to regulate speed.
Well, the Main Street hill into downtown Montpelier nearly killed me, kids. It's essentially a mile-long downward crawl, and when I say downward crawl, I don't mean Connecticut Ave., or even Mass. Ave. This shit is not a joke. Imagine crawling down Cleveland Ave. for a full mile, with no space to retreat from cars.
I'm quite proud to say that I fared alright up to the point at which the hill pulls a tight 180 at its steepest point. This leaves one heading into a straightaway decline with more momentum than anyone would really want to have. Traversing is off the table, unless one wants to tango with oncoming cars. About ten yards out of the turn, I realized that -- fight as I may -- (before reaching a flatter area, anyway) I was not going to make the bike go any slower, and at the same time, I was moving too fast to swing off the road to a less trafficked neighborhood street (a la runaway truck ramps). Skidding at this speed would've likely pulled my right cleat out of the clip; a possibility so disastrous I won't even get into it. Skipping probably risked the same, and even had it not, would've required wiggle room for keeping control that this one-lane scenario wasn't about to afford me. I'm sterilizing the description considerably, by the way. My inner monologue was more like "My fate is officially in the hands of some higher power."
Now, granted... Any seasoned commuting cyclist will tell you that probably 40% of what they wager on is a knowledge of the roads they're traveling. You can relax a bit in otherwise demanding stretches, if you know that conditions ahead will put control back squarely in your camp. I knew nothing of this commute, really. Unfortunately, I didn't really have any option but to dive straight in, as it's the only way into town. And my ignorance of the route probably contributed significantly too the danger in which I found myself.
Fighting (quite literally) with every muscle I could coax into the enterprise, I pulled the bike decidedly back into control as the incline eased up some. By the time I passed the Middle School, I was golden. I was also pretty sure that I was doing backflips inside my own skin, and it took 20 minutes of spinning around downtown to get my nerves under control. By the time I clipped out in front of the co-op, my quads and calves were spasming like I was suffering from some sort of dystrophy, and my arms felt like they were on fire, all the way up through my deltoids.
As the sun set last night, I tightened my shoes, flipped on the blinky, and began the climb back home. Having done the crawl in, I knew well what I was up against, and I'm pleasantly surprised to report that I only walked about 100 yards of it (mostly that goddamn 180), and pulled it through to home -- even when the sky opened up on me in the home stretch. Of course, I woke up this morning feeling like someone had cut my calves, thighs, and ass cheeks open and inserted scuba weights before sewing them back up. Just stepping over the edge of the tub, to get into the shower, was a fairly painful undertaking.
A morning lap session at the pool adjacent to the condo, and a front brake seem to be in order, should I like to ease my way into the demands of my daily routine, here.
How we roll, in the District.
When Bassam's not busy reassuring me that ass-fucking is, indeed, still funny... He's mucking up the cutting floor for the Rev.
And when Noura's got a few moments free from her full-time gig sticking it to The Man... She's telling Bill O'Reilly to take a flying fuck.
And when Noura's got a few moments free from her full-time gig sticking it to The Man... She's telling Bill O'Reilly to take a flying fuck.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Ghosting.
We can go and walk in the morning.We don't need streetlights, just a new start.
Not paralyzed by appearances, with big ideas
And just way too smart to walk around
On the surface, when there's an ocean
Just beneath its blue-green smile.
-R. Votolato
There was a time when I was perpetually gone or going. If I were back from a tour, I was booking flights for the next. A significant portion of my internal rhythm was regulated by passing through airports, almost to the point of dependence. Newark. Los Angeles. Honolulu. Seattle-Tacoma. Minneapolis. Atlanta. Buenos Aires. Gothenburg. Copenhagen. Zurich. London. Frankfurt. Hamburg. Tel Aviv. Stockholm. Bologna. None of which accounts for the now countless jaunts across this country that I made by ground. There were times I'd come home from a month abroad, only to get up the next day and get in a van, or onto yet another plane to skip town for another month, or six weeks, or two months.
Learning to sleep in vans, venues, and terminal gates, I allowed the notion of home as a place that implies stable responsibilities or a command of my attention to slip away, buried by boarding calls and passing cars. It wasn't that I disliked my life enough to neglect or abandon it. Probably more realistically, there were demons with which I was locked in a death-match waiting game. The Whisper, as Cassie called it, and its handful of architects. Their only advantage was their crippling gaze, and the cowardice of knowing onlookers. My only advantage was the fact that the Earth happens to be round, and one can only cast a gaze so far. Short of counting on less cowardly onlookers (or lovers), the Atlantic was usually of sufficient width to dull the blow.
In hindsight, it's just as likely that some part of me was putting off writing certain final chapters, by way of absence. No amount of humility, patience or devotion was going to keep that book from closing; life tends to get in the way of whether or not such things matter (and sorry to ruin the story for you kids, but your peers will exact precisely zero to safeguard or reward such sentiments in the interests of a more reasonable set of possibilities for us all). One embraces and honors such things for the sake of cringing a little less at the sight of one's own reflection, and should count on little more.
Ultimately, the ink simply ran out. There was no real climax, no resolution, no conclusion. I'd slowed down enough to appreciate what awaited me when I'd run my course with life as transit. And in the face of routinely watching my most challenging and spiritually demanding moments evaporate into thin air, I simply ran out of things to say (or at least the energy to say them)... and then quietly closed the door on what little I'd left of home, behind me.
The irony, of course, is that eclipsing the last vestiges of "home" had no geographic implications. I'd cultivated a material framework firmly grounded in the District, and for that matter, (despite years spent spilling across the Western Hemisphere and beyond) knew very little else. My relationship with home became not unlike a relationship with a lover suffering from severe memory loss; spinning through my daily commutes, I could still navigate the city's contours like tracing over details of a familiar body... But whatever had once fired within that shell was nowhere to be found. Remaining present meant committing to learning about this new person inhabiting that body.
Committing to some other geography was more time than I was really willing to give of my remaining 60 or so years, and the last time she cast her lot with performing rather cheap mourning rituals over my departure (to an audience all too invested in the mythology sustained by these widely publicized bits of theater), I forfeit my affection for the city that, until recently, she'd only ever reluctantly called home. One cannot be what one was. And I'd already been that guy, ceding some portion of a history I'd yet to see handled honestly or responsibly (to staggering effect).
A tension has emerged since, which now dominates my inner monologue; one in which I'm failing to decide whether the nearly two years that have followed should be characterized by this shell of material pursuits with which I've busied myself (presumably in preparation for the day something will catch and the gears will stop spinning aimlessly), or whether this is - in fact - who I am. My hostility toward metaphysics being what it is, I'm not wed to the idea that there's anything significantly profound to be mined from my day to day trajectory. Maybe there isn't any compelling justification or inspiration for getting up and passing each day. Maybe it's just something that happens, irrespective of larger narratives. And just as well, maybe not.
It occurred to me at some point that I have perhaps been seduced by yet another waiting game - one in which I continue to get up each day, continue to fulfill responsibilities and commitments, continue to safeguard my material and emotional stability... But only in waiting, betraying any fidelity to movement with L'Altra of motion. Not entirely unlike the hours whittled away in Newark. And Los Angeles. And Honolulu. And Seattle-Tacoma. And Minneapolis. And Atlanta. And Buenos Aires. And Gothenburg. And Copenhagen. And Zurich. And London. And Frankfurt. And Hamburg. And Tel Aviv. And Stockholm. And Bologna.
So, I've left. Again. Trading in lucrative self-employment and a two-storey apartment for a modest basement room in a hilltop condo, and a keen lack of routines with which to bury the passing of the present. Invariably, I'll return, but I needed to wrest myself from the inertia of rising and resting, a stranger to what emerges between the two.The waiting game can kiss my ass.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Watching the Landlord Get Hauled off in Cuffs
After the bike action Friday, I'd sort of allowed myself to exhale. Two actions in one week. It seemed reasonable that I could now focus on the pile of scattered tasks I needed knock out before heading to Vermont. My mom's birthday is Friday, and I still need to get that in order. The insurance settlement still looms. My kitten needs to be spayed before I leave. I have IAS work I need to get wrapped up. It wouldn't hurt to clean the house top to bottom before turning it over to Seager. There's an NCOR meeting Wednesday. I've been trying to catch up with friends one last time. The bike has to be broken down and boxed for the flight, and I need to pack.
But then Israel decided to bomb an apartment complex, killing over 50 people (well over half, children), using US-supplied weapons (duh). Well, that did it. Every task I'd committed to went out the fucking window. Thanks, guys.
And so it went. Sunday evening was a blur of piecing together a press release, until I closed the laptop at 1am, bleery-eyed. Monday morning would see the beginning of an escalatory campaign of direct action and civil disobedience here in the District, to complement the already unfolding series of community forums and evening vigils. Despite working on 24hrs notice, much to my surprise, we made something happen; something that felt like a reasonable approximation of what we'd set out to do.
Sitting in in the little courtyard outside the GWU Hospital, I watched Bassam hand the phone to Mark. "It's the cops, they want to know what we're doing." The conversation seemed pretty standard. There are actions like this every day in the District, and it's part of the routine for certain police agencies. To some extent, they're expected to allow these sorts of things to unfold with little drama, to keep up appearances about the elasticity of american democracy and yadda yadda. Of course, anyone who's ever substantively tested said elasticity has likely enjoyed the lecture one gets from US Marshalls in Central Holding -- the one where they point out the lack of cameras in the facility, noting "We don't do that PC shit, here." This however, wasn't to be anything dramatic, merely the hint that there were bodies prepared to fall on the gears if this shit didn't let up quick. I watched, as Mark jotted down the name of the voice on the other end... Agent Smith. Winking at Bassam, I whispered (to Mark), "Ask him if I should take the red pill, or the blue pill." Mark merely waved us off to keep our laughing from bleeding into the conversation. Bassam then began handing out mouth-freshening gum, saying that any randy cellmates might be a little genlter "if you smell nice."
DC's finest vegan establishment sits half a block off of the infamous K Street - our version of Wall Street, and the corridor whose namesake became a euphemism for the unholy trinity of Neo-Cons, Ambramoff, and the backdoor deals the fundamentalist rightwing of the midwest and southeast would rather not know about... Much of which seems to be steadily unraveling (mostly at the feet of Tom Delay), though the mainstream press has seemingly moved on to some extent. As I pocketed my change from breakfast, I turned to hear Bassam speaking in Arabic and waving his left hand around at a white guy from a film team, who'd come to document the action. "I'm converting him, so that we have the full spectrum." I squinted, to indicate my confusion. "We've got a Jew, a Christian, two Shia, and we needed a Sunni. So, I converted him." Still laughing, the cameraman asked, "Don't I need to say There is no god but Allah in Arabic or something?" Bassam shrugged it off. "Nah, it's cool."
Then he got serious for a sec. "Guys, no joke. I know I say a lot of shit, and you're going to hear this and blow it off, Bassam's joking around again - but I'm not kidding right now: I'm ready for whatever today - arrest, beatings, torture, prison rape. It's all good. But I swear to you, if there are any dogs, I will scream like a little girl. No kidding around. I'll lose it." A few years ago, I hosted a meeting at my old house in Mt. Pleasant. Bassam was taking notes on a laptop when my cat nonchalantly strolled in to see what everyone was up to. Abruptly, everything stopped as Bassam clapped the laptop shut against his chest, shot his chair out from behind him, and backed into a corner asking, "What is that?! Is that a cat?!!" I was floored. Rami was on the verge of rupturing an organ, tears streaming down his face, laughing on the other side of the room. I've never asked how or why, but the guy seriously loses his shit over domesticated animals. I feel blessed to have witnessed it firsthand, actually.
The crowd outside the State Department swelled slowly but surely, mostly Arab press mingling with activists and community folks, getting interviews here and there. Some journalists showed up as activists, a gesture I've only rarely encountered otherwise. The heat was insane. I worried that little kids who'd shown up might be in some real danger, but they never really seemed to slow down. Rami's kid was all over the place, and even (quite boldly, for a 3 year old) raced past a cop to hug his father as he stood blocking the entrance. By 1pm, the cops rather unceremoniously flex-cuffed the four who'd been blocking the driveway at the main entrance, and walked them to a waiting paddy wagon. By that time, rather pointed and passionate calls had been cast through a megaphone, mainstream press was circling the crowd, and despite the pulverizing heat, a significant number of onlookers had gathered -- tourists and lunching staffers alike.
The mechanics of actions has kinda dulled on me in the way the rote tasks of a job do for most people. There are aspects of the process in which I feel creatively engaged, and there's a real elation in seeing that through. But at the end of the day, their significance is usually eclipsed by the relationships I've had the privilege of building, the teaching moments that have passed between myself and others, and manner in which our most human qualities (namely our humor) consistently refuse to stand down for some stoic, soulless, vapid notion of what struggle looks or feels like. What goes down in the interstices is ultimately what sustains this sort of thing. Even if there's no tangible "success" to speak of on this or any other horizon, if I'm going to go down... Goddammit, I'm going down with my people, the people who've made me matter. More importantly, the people who've made me laugh.
But then Israel decided to bomb an apartment complex, killing over 50 people (well over half, children), using US-supplied weapons (duh). Well, that did it. Every task I'd committed to went out the fucking window. Thanks, guys.
And so it went. Sunday evening was a blur of piecing together a press release, until I closed the laptop at 1am, bleery-eyed. Monday morning would see the beginning of an escalatory campaign of direct action and civil disobedience here in the District, to complement the already unfolding series of community forums and evening vigils. Despite working on 24hrs notice, much to my surprise, we made something happen; something that felt like a reasonable approximation of what we'd set out to do.
Sitting in in the little courtyard outside the GWU Hospital, I watched Bassam hand the phone to Mark. "It's the cops, they want to know what we're doing." The conversation seemed pretty standard. There are actions like this every day in the District, and it's part of the routine for certain police agencies. To some extent, they're expected to allow these sorts of things to unfold with little drama, to keep up appearances about the elasticity of american democracy and yadda yadda. Of course, anyone who's ever substantively tested said elasticity has likely enjoyed the lecture one gets from US Marshalls in Central Holding -- the one where they point out the lack of cameras in the facility, noting "We don't do that PC shit, here." This however, wasn't to be anything dramatic, merely the hint that there were bodies prepared to fall on the gears if this shit didn't let up quick. I watched, as Mark jotted down the name of the voice on the other end... Agent Smith. Winking at Bassam, I whispered (to Mark), "Ask him if I should take the red pill, or the blue pill." Mark merely waved us off to keep our laughing from bleeding into the conversation. Bassam then began handing out mouth-freshening gum, saying that any randy cellmates might be a little genlter "if you smell nice."
DC's finest vegan establishment sits half a block off of the infamous K Street - our version of Wall Street, and the corridor whose namesake became a euphemism for the unholy trinity of Neo-Cons, Ambramoff, and the backdoor deals the fundamentalist rightwing of the midwest and southeast would rather not know about... Much of which seems to be steadily unraveling (mostly at the feet of Tom Delay), though the mainstream press has seemingly moved on to some extent. As I pocketed my change from breakfast, I turned to hear Bassam speaking in Arabic and waving his left hand around at a white guy from a film team, who'd come to document the action. "I'm converting him, so that we have the full spectrum." I squinted, to indicate my confusion. "We've got a Jew, a Christian, two Shia, and we needed a Sunni. So, I converted him." Still laughing, the cameraman asked, "Don't I need to say There is no god but Allah in Arabic or something?" Bassam shrugged it off. "Nah, it's cool."
Then he got serious for a sec. "Guys, no joke. I know I say a lot of shit, and you're going to hear this and blow it off, Bassam's joking around again - but I'm not kidding right now: I'm ready for whatever today - arrest, beatings, torture, prison rape. It's all good. But I swear to you, if there are any dogs, I will scream like a little girl. No kidding around. I'll lose it." A few years ago, I hosted a meeting at my old house in Mt. Pleasant. Bassam was taking notes on a laptop when my cat nonchalantly strolled in to see what everyone was up to. Abruptly, everything stopped as Bassam clapped the laptop shut against his chest, shot his chair out from behind him, and backed into a corner asking, "What is that?! Is that a cat?!!" I was floored. Rami was on the verge of rupturing an organ, tears streaming down his face, laughing on the other side of the room. I've never asked how or why, but the guy seriously loses his shit over domesticated animals. I feel blessed to have witnessed it firsthand, actually.
The crowd outside the State Department swelled slowly but surely, mostly Arab press mingling with activists and community folks, getting interviews here and there. Some journalists showed up as activists, a gesture I've only rarely encountered otherwise. The heat was insane. I worried that little kids who'd shown up might be in some real danger, but they never really seemed to slow down. Rami's kid was all over the place, and even (quite boldly, for a 3 year old) raced past a cop to hug his father as he stood blocking the entrance. By 1pm, the cops rather unceremoniously flex-cuffed the four who'd been blocking the driveway at the main entrance, and walked them to a waiting paddy wagon. By that time, rather pointed and passionate calls had been cast through a megaphone, mainstream press was circling the crowd, and despite the pulverizing heat, a significant number of onlookers had gathered -- tourists and lunching staffers alike.
The mechanics of actions has kinda dulled on me in the way the rote tasks of a job do for most people. There are aspects of the process in which I feel creatively engaged, and there's a real elation in seeing that through. But at the end of the day, their significance is usually eclipsed by the relationships I've had the privilege of building, the teaching moments that have passed between myself and others, and manner in which our most human qualities (namely our humor) consistently refuse to stand down for some stoic, soulless, vapid notion of what struggle looks or feels like. What goes down in the interstices is ultimately what sustains this sort of thing. Even if there's no tangible "success" to speak of on this or any other horizon, if I'm going to go down... Goddammit, I'm going down with my people, the people who've made me matter. More importantly, the people who've made me laugh.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Derrida, on signifier and the signified in "Self-Defense"
Note: Some of what's below is an account of events a week past. I had trouble uploading photos for a day or so, and thereafter I was tied up with things of the non-blog variety. Apologies for the lag.
So, following the collision and police report last Tuesday (the physical aftermath of which has been photo-documented in the previous post), Seager and I headed up to Bethesda to hit up the only Army surplus store we know of in the area. He wanted a pair of shorts he hadn't cut from pants, and I needed a pair of black Dickies to round out my "funeral" getup for the procession we'd organized to the Israeli Embassy. Mark had duct-taped a gauze wrap around my entire lower abdomen and back, to close off the glass wounds and keep me from bleeding into my clothes any further, as I was absolutely not going to let some ass-hat motorist keep me out of the game.
We parked the car he'd borrowed from his uncle near the convergence point for the procession, and changed into our dress clothes on the sidewalk (partly obscured by the car doors). Unifored Secret Service rolled by, but surprisingly didn't think anything of the barefoot white kid with no pants, opposite the UDC tennis courts. Seager opted to suit up in the rear of the vehicle, and managed to lock himself in. He waited no longer than my opening his door to fart audibly. I later pondered the potential guffaw I'd foregone by not promptly shutting him back in.
By the time we'd walked two blocks, Seager noticed I'd bled a solid red horizontal line into the lower part of my shirt. Apparently, the guaze and bandaging had reached capacity. When we grabbed our coffin, I had him let me take the front, to obscure the stain. I could overhear Lauren commenting to him that she was so proud I'd "finally become a woman."
The procession was incredible (I highly recommend viewing the video footage at the link above). Dizzyingly diverse turnout, beautiful imagery, vividly confrontational to all observers without being threatening, and virtually bulletproof from the usual racist characterizations lobbed at any gathering with a significant number of Arabs. Of all the action ideas I've ever pulled out of my ass in a 5-minute strategy meeting, this was by far the most seamless and powerful -- almost entirely due to legwork and outreach that I had exactly zero to do with. People really stepped up and made shit happen in a way I'm not sure I've experienced in prior organizing.
The media hade a field day with it, as well (international media especially). The Washington Post ran a particularly sympathetic piece, and the reliably borderline-fascist, looney Washington Times even ran something (somewhat less helpful). My friend Noura even wound up invited to duke it out on the O'Reilly Factor, accepted the invitation, and by at least one account handed O'Reilly his ass.
By the end, my shirt, slacks, and boxer briefs were saturated with blood, and I found my way to the ER, where I was told (were it not for the staff being absolutely slammed) I'd have been checked in as a "trauma." I'd walked in holding my wadded-up dress shirt against my lower back to stop the bleeding, and combined with my hunched-over hobble, I seemed to have given the the security guard the impression that I was experiencing some sort of sodomy-related injury. Inspired, I text-messaged Seager from my little ER room, saying: My undies look like a buggering gone wrong. To which he wrote back: Or very, very right.
And thus concluded yet another installment of the Seager-Stephens Ethically Questionable Humor Show, rounding out an otherwise less-than-comical day.
The next morning, I had my bike examined for damage. My front wheel was done for, the fork on my Kogswell was done for, and I wound up spending a good day or two scrambling to get a bike pieced together that I could use for the protest ride to the Israeli Embassy that I'd talked everyone into doing for Friday. Elliott (being his usual angel of a self) got me squared away just in time. The KHS frame was rebuilt, with a new substitute front wheel, and I joined the 20 or so folks who congregated in Dupont Circle at the tail end of rush hour.
In years past, I was fairly regular in Critical Mass rides, and quite enjoyed them. But in recent years, the rides had become less diverse, and more and more grew to resemble a circus sideshow of folks who -- were it not for them discovering the shallow refuge of a rather narrow "anarchism" -- would've likely gone straight to the carnie temp agency. The authentication of a given lifestyle aesthetic had taken the reins and displaced what of the activity could be translated into something broadly legible. It felt less like an opportunity to communicate something, and more a means of further marginalizing an already relatively marginal trend along with its perfectly reasonable demands/politics.
This ride, while not being a Critical Mass itself, was populated largely by really smart, sophisticated, and genuinely sweet folks. It's always one thing to feel some intellectual resonance with someone. It's another to collaboratively set bodies in motion and tangibly make something manifest; to create movement from that resonance; without jettisoning ethical and intellectual rigor in favor of a lifestyle clubhouse. For months, I've been conversing with a number of the folks who turned out, discussing political geography, behaviors that give space to difference, commitments that become our lives rather than dulling critical examination. Those conversations, while heartening, were still merely conversations. Pedaling up Connecticut Ave., I felt like we'd begun to put our bodies into making that critical space physical.
So, following the collision and police report last Tuesday (the physical aftermath of which has been photo-documented in the previous post), Seager and I headed up to Bethesda to hit up the only Army surplus store we know of in the area. He wanted a pair of shorts he hadn't cut from pants, and I needed a pair of black Dickies to round out my "funeral" getup for the procession we'd organized to the Israeli Embassy. Mark had duct-taped a gauze wrap around my entire lower abdomen and back, to close off the glass wounds and keep me from bleeding into my clothes any further, as I was absolutely not going to let some ass-hat motorist keep me out of the game.
We parked the car he'd borrowed from his uncle near the convergence point for the procession, and changed into our dress clothes on the sidewalk (partly obscured by the car doors). Unifored Secret Service rolled by, but surprisingly didn't think anything of the barefoot white kid with no pants, opposite the UDC tennis courts. Seager opted to suit up in the rear of the vehicle, and managed to lock himself in. He waited no longer than my opening his door to fart audibly. I later pondered the potential guffaw I'd foregone by not promptly shutting him back in.
By the time we'd walked two blocks, Seager noticed I'd bled a solid red horizontal line into the lower part of my shirt. Apparently, the guaze and bandaging had reached capacity. When we grabbed our coffin, I had him let me take the front, to obscure the stain. I could overhear Lauren commenting to him that she was so proud I'd "finally become a woman."
The procession was incredible (I highly recommend viewing the video footage at the link above). Dizzyingly diverse turnout, beautiful imagery, vividly confrontational to all observers without being threatening, and virtually bulletproof from the usual racist characterizations lobbed at any gathering with a significant number of Arabs. Of all the action ideas I've ever pulled out of my ass in a 5-minute strategy meeting, this was by far the most seamless and powerful -- almost entirely due to legwork and outreach that I had exactly zero to do with. People really stepped up and made shit happen in a way I'm not sure I've experienced in prior organizing.
The media hade a field day with it, as well (international media especially). The Washington Post ran a particularly sympathetic piece, and the reliably borderline-fascist, looney Washington Times even ran something (somewhat less helpful). My friend Noura even wound up invited to duke it out on the O'Reilly Factor, accepted the invitation, and by at least one account handed O'Reilly his ass.
By the end, my shirt, slacks, and boxer briefs were saturated with blood, and I found my way to the ER, where I was told (were it not for the staff being absolutely slammed) I'd have been checked in as a "trauma." I'd walked in holding my wadded-up dress shirt against my lower back to stop the bleeding, and combined with my hunched-over hobble, I seemed to have given the the security guard the impression that I was experiencing some sort of sodomy-related injury. Inspired, I text-messaged Seager from my little ER room, saying: My undies look like a buggering gone wrong. To which he wrote back: Or very, very right.
And thus concluded yet another installment of the Seager-Stephens Ethically Questionable Humor Show, rounding out an otherwise less-than-comical day.
The next morning, I had my bike examined for damage. My front wheel was done for, the fork on my Kogswell was done for, and I wound up spending a good day or two scrambling to get a bike pieced together that I could use for the protest ride to the Israeli Embassy that I'd talked everyone into doing for Friday. Elliott (being his usual angel of a self) got me squared away just in time. The KHS frame was rebuilt, with a new substitute front wheel, and I joined the 20 or so folks who congregated in Dupont Circle at the tail end of rush hour.
In years past, I was fairly regular in Critical Mass rides, and quite enjoyed them. But in recent years, the rides had become less diverse, and more and more grew to resemble a circus sideshow of folks who -- were it not for them discovering the shallow refuge of a rather narrow "anarchism" -- would've likely gone straight to the carnie temp agency. The authentication of a given lifestyle aesthetic had taken the reins and displaced what of the activity could be translated into something broadly legible. It felt less like an opportunity to communicate something, and more a means of further marginalizing an already relatively marginal trend along with its perfectly reasonable demands/politics.
This ride, while not being a Critical Mass itself, was populated largely by really smart, sophisticated, and genuinely sweet folks. It's always one thing to feel some intellectual resonance with someone. It's another to collaboratively set bodies in motion and tangibly make something manifest; to create movement from that resonance; without jettisoning ethical and intellectual rigor in favor of a lifestyle clubhouse. For months, I've been conversing with a number of the folks who turned out, discussing political geography, behaviors that give space to difference, commitments that become our lives rather than dulling critical examination. Those conversations, while heartening, were still merely conversations. Pedaling up Connecticut Ave., I felt like we'd begun to put our bodies into making that critical space physical.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
For those keeping count...
So, many of you know that in mid-May, my love of books and bikes collided at 8th and Pennsylvania SE, sending me over the bars of my bike, bringing the rear of the bike with me... Leaving me with a fractured collar bone and some rather dramatic road rash and tissue damage around my hip.
Many of you also know that about 6 weeks later, after being back on my bike for about a week, a van to my left turned right within 10ft. of signaling, leaving me no place to go. I pushed off its sidedoor and then tucked and rolled. The verdict: A sprained wrist, and some really nasty road rash on my knees and right shoulder (along with 30min of mild amnesia).
And now...
At the intersection of 3rd and E St. NE Tuesday, an oncoming car made a left turn in front of me, with no signal. I was kinda doomed from the outset. I yanked the bike right, to turn with her and avoid her, but to no avail. Within a split second, I knew we were going to meet. So, I opted to throw the fattiest, least vulnerable piece of myself at the car and hope for the best.
When my lower back met the rear of the passenger side, the window immediately blasted out from behind me, reversing my trajectory somewhat, and rolling me with the bike off the back foot or so of the car, into the street.
Within the next hour, the cops showed up and took a report, my front tire burst from the tension of a bent rim (my stem ripped out as soon as the bike made contact with the ground), a client of mine walked the 6 blocks from her office to clean out the cuts in my lower back, I bled a solid red into the white material that Dickies puts on the inside of the waistband of its work shorts, and I caught a ride home with my bike in tow.
The cop told me the police report would be available Friday. By 8am Wednesday, personal injury lawyers in the area had read it, determined it to be a slam dunk, and were lighting up my cell phone (I still haven't seen it). There's more to the story, but it'll have to come later.
Many of you also know that about 6 weeks later, after being back on my bike for about a week, a van to my left turned right within 10ft. of signaling, leaving me no place to go. I pushed off its sidedoor and then tucked and rolled. The verdict: A sprained wrist, and some really nasty road rash on my knees and right shoulder (along with 30min of mild amnesia).
And now...
At the intersection of 3rd and E St. NE Tuesday, an oncoming car made a left turn in front of me, with no signal. I was kinda doomed from the outset. I yanked the bike right, to turn with her and avoid her, but to no avail. Within a split second, I knew we were going to meet. So, I opted to throw the fattiest, least vulnerable piece of myself at the car and hope for the best.
When my lower back met the rear of the passenger side, the window immediately blasted out from behind me, reversing my trajectory somewhat, and rolling me with the bike off the back foot or so of the car, into the street.
Within the next hour, the cops showed up and took a report, my front tire burst from the tension of a bent rim (my stem ripped out as soon as the bike made contact with the ground), a client of mine walked the 6 blocks from her office to clean out the cuts in my lower back, I bled a solid red into the white material that Dickies puts on the inside of the waistband of its work shorts, and I caught a ride home with my bike in tow.
The cop told me the police report would be available Friday. By 8am Wednesday, personal injury lawyers in the area had read it, determined it to be a slam dunk, and were lighting up my cell phone (I still haven't seen it). There's more to the story, but it'll have to come later.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Taking Refuge, Pt. 1
As a practicioner of the Dharma (Buddhism being a term assigned from the outside; one that has left me cringing more and more, the longer I spend reflecting on the practice), one generally takes on a few basic, routine practices. One, of course, is meditation; an element to which I'll return in the next entry. Another is what is called taking refuge. There are three refuges: The Buddha, The Dharma, and The Sangha. It all sounds a lot more metaphysically loaded than it really is, ultimately, and nearest I can tell, in keeping with other spiritual traditions, many have fixated on the most shallow aspects of these concepts, toward equally shallow ends.
Fortunately, there is quite an anti-authoritarian thread running through the Dharma. The historical Buddha (a regular guy who actually lived, and actually died - from eating bad pork, no less - just like you or I) seems to have given a number of sermons in which he challenged his listeners and monks not to adopt any belief or any practice merely at his recommendation. An individual's ability to empirically weigh evidence and directly experience any given "truth" was integral to the tradition, pretty much from the get-go. The Buddha often referred to the Dharma as a raft; a raft serving the exclusive function of getting one from one side of a river to the other. If said raft does not adequately serve that purpose, it should be abandoned. It's no different for the Dharma. On his deathbed, the Buddha refused to appoint a successor, and encouraged his followers to be "a light unto [themselves]."
In that spirit, I've been grappling some, as of late, with what taking refuge in the Sangha means (for me). The Sangha refered (initially) to the community of monks and nuns in a given community; taking refuge therein presumably meant seeking spiritual guidance, empathy, compassion, etc. from engaged community (in the form of a monastic order). Clearly, the laity has taken some creative license with that over the years, and rightly so. As one columnist noted in the latest issue of Tricycle (in a column challenging the Dharma's default to monogamy in sexual relationships), it makes little sense for any of us to be heeding sexual prescriptions from monastic adherents whose sexual experience is limited or non-existent (at best).
But it doesn't really change that there is something to the notion that great insights, growth, challenge, and comfort are to be found in community. There is something to be said for what we earn from humbling ourselves in the presence of those we trust, and accepting that we may not know exactly what to do, or how to resolve this or that; accepting that we're desperate, fallible... even mortal. Or maybe just that the world is bigger than any one of us. There's something to that.
The attacks on Lebanon have been an internal nightmare for me. When I came back from the West Bank three years ago, I staggered in the helplessness that consumed me during my stay for some months. And it wasn't really something I could even describe, much less talk about, with friends. A few of my Palestinian friends were acquainted enough with the trajectory one observes in the Territories that I could kinda exhale in conversations with them, but something about that felt inappropriate at times; given their own trauma, their own families, etc. what obligation did they have to burden themselves with this white boy's realization that history had swallowed him and everything that (up to his arrival in Tel Aviv) had kept him hopeful?
Edward Said's 1993 Reith Lectures on the BBC provide an unlikely analogy for the mechanisms by which I've perhaps coped with the knowledge I cannot undo:
The exile... exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting, nor fully disemcumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another.
It seems quite clear that a mere example (The Buddha) and a personal practice (The Dharma) are, on their own, woefully inadequate in the face of exile - be that exile literal, or manifest in finding oneself permanently cut off from the stability of one's assumptions and/or naivete. Going it alone (regardless of examples or practices) is woefully inadequate when it's quite possible there are no answers, no solutions (to speak nothing of easy answers). Right now, some half a million people are internally displaced in Lebanon. Hundreds are already dead. And the weapons that made it all possible were financed, manufactured, and provided on my dime. Sure, we've all acknowledged that, in the abstract. It's another sport entirely to know exactly what that looks like, and exactly what it means when the US Ambassador to the UN goes on record with the same colonialist, apartheid logic that animated virtually every Israeli you ever met; the logic that crushed you, silenced you, and terrified you every time you encountered it three years ago.
So... Rami, Zein, Noura, Jake, Jamilah, Jeff, Mark, Ehmad, Matt, Mary Kate...Thanks for allowing me some refuge in being able to struggle alongside you. And to Hugh, thanks for having the heart to speak of struggling with the "unconscionable", and giving that space in your practice alongside the immanent struggles of your loved ones.
Between waking and finding my way to meditation in Woodley Park this morning, I found my way to the west side of Capitol Hill, hoping to greet John Bolton before his appearance on Fox News, to confront him for stopping just shy of publicly declaring that brown bodies don't matter. We didn't meet, but the voices of a handful of sane people reverberated off the facade of the Fox News building during his visit. Stay tuned.
For those interested, Anthony Shadid's reporting (in The Washington Post) from Lebanon has been a real bright spot in mainstream news coverage. His most recent pieces are below.
No Haven in a City Paralyzed by Dread
Residents of Besieged City Feel 'Just Left Here to Die'
TYRE, Lebanon, July 20 -- The warning came...
Road Through a Landscape of Death
I also highly recommend bookmarking, and keeping up with Electronic Lebanon.
Fortunately, there is quite an anti-authoritarian thread running through the Dharma. The historical Buddha (a regular guy who actually lived, and actually died - from eating bad pork, no less - just like you or I) seems to have given a number of sermons in which he challenged his listeners and monks not to adopt any belief or any practice merely at his recommendation. An individual's ability to empirically weigh evidence and directly experience any given "truth" was integral to the tradition, pretty much from the get-go. The Buddha often referred to the Dharma as a raft; a raft serving the exclusive function of getting one from one side of a river to the other. If said raft does not adequately serve that purpose, it should be abandoned. It's no different for the Dharma. On his deathbed, the Buddha refused to appoint a successor, and encouraged his followers to be "a light unto [themselves]."
In that spirit, I've been grappling some, as of late, with what taking refuge in the Sangha means (for me). The Sangha refered (initially) to the community of monks and nuns in a given community; taking refuge therein presumably meant seeking spiritual guidance, empathy, compassion, etc. from engaged community (in the form of a monastic order). Clearly, the laity has taken some creative license with that over the years, and rightly so. As one columnist noted in the latest issue of Tricycle (in a column challenging the Dharma's default to monogamy in sexual relationships), it makes little sense for any of us to be heeding sexual prescriptions from monastic adherents whose sexual experience is limited or non-existent (at best).
But it doesn't really change that there is something to the notion that great insights, growth, challenge, and comfort are to be found in community. There is something to be said for what we earn from humbling ourselves in the presence of those we trust, and accepting that we may not know exactly what to do, or how to resolve this or that; accepting that we're desperate, fallible... even mortal. Or maybe just that the world is bigger than any one of us. There's something to that.
The attacks on Lebanon have been an internal nightmare for me. When I came back from the West Bank three years ago, I staggered in the helplessness that consumed me during my stay for some months. And it wasn't really something I could even describe, much less talk about, with friends. A few of my Palestinian friends were acquainted enough with the trajectory one observes in the Territories that I could kinda exhale in conversations with them, but something about that felt inappropriate at times; given their own trauma, their own families, etc. what obligation did they have to burden themselves with this white boy's realization that history had swallowed him and everything that (up to his arrival in Tel Aviv) had kept him hopeful?
Edward Said's 1993 Reith Lectures on the BBC provide an unlikely analogy for the mechanisms by which I've perhaps coped with the knowledge I cannot undo:
The exile... exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting, nor fully disemcumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another.
It seems quite clear that a mere example (The Buddha) and a personal practice (The Dharma) are, on their own, woefully inadequate in the face of exile - be that exile literal, or manifest in finding oneself permanently cut off from the stability of one's assumptions and/or naivete. Going it alone (regardless of examples or practices) is woefully inadequate when it's quite possible there are no answers, no solutions (to speak nothing of easy answers). Right now, some half a million people are internally displaced in Lebanon. Hundreds are already dead. And the weapons that made it all possible were financed, manufactured, and provided on my dime. Sure, we've all acknowledged that, in the abstract. It's another sport entirely to know exactly what that looks like, and exactly what it means when the US Ambassador to the UN goes on record with the same colonialist, apartheid logic that animated virtually every Israeli you ever met; the logic that crushed you, silenced you, and terrified you every time you encountered it three years ago.
So... Rami, Zein, Noura, Jake, Jamilah, Jeff, Mark, Ehmad, Matt, Mary Kate...Thanks for allowing me some refuge in being able to struggle alongside you. And to Hugh, thanks for having the heart to speak of struggling with the "unconscionable", and giving that space in your practice alongside the immanent struggles of your loved ones.
Between waking and finding my way to meditation in Woodley Park this morning, I found my way to the west side of Capitol Hill, hoping to greet John Bolton before his appearance on Fox News, to confront him for stopping just shy of publicly declaring that brown bodies don't matter. We didn't meet, but the voices of a handful of sane people reverberated off the facade of the Fox News building during his visit. Stay tuned.
For those interested, Anthony Shadid's reporting (in The Washington Post) from Lebanon has been a real bright spot in mainstream news coverage. His most recent pieces are below.
No Haven in a City Paralyzed by Dread
Residents of Besieged City Feel 'Just Left Here to Die'
TYRE, Lebanon, July 20 -- The warning came...
Road Through a Landscape of Death
I also highly recommend bookmarking, and keeping up with Electronic Lebanon.
Monday, July 17, 2006
You're not the chosen one. I'm not the chosen one. We don't need anyone. Let's not choose anyone.
So, before I headed up to Boston, I cracked open SoulSeek for the first time in a few months, and trolled around looking for a couple records. Shockingly, I came across more than a few users holding the new Cursive album, Happy Hollow. And yeah, I totally downloaded it, even though it's got a street date of August 22nd.
And I gotta say, I was a fan of the band before, but HOLY FUCKING SHIT this record is good. As I noted to a few friends, someone kept Mike Mogis sober for the production of this record, cause he seems to have actually figured out how to make a band sound tight, for once. Much of what he's touched as a producer is the sort of thing you hear and think, "This probably sounds incredible....live.", but this sounds fucking flawless, and is helped along considerably by the band finding their way out of attempting to continously mine bad judgment and emotional paralysis for the sake of "art"; instead going straight for the jugular with classical American small-town fundamentalism. Meanwhile, there's a sarcasm and lightheartedness to it that even go so far as to produce (dare I say) dancey moments.
I rarely get excited about music anymore, unless someone I know personally is involved. But this record made me want to listen to music more often, and made me want to give a shit about what's being produced these days. Let's see if it lasts.
In other news... after flipping my KHS frame and bouncing it off the side of a van (both requiring ER visits, both within six weeks of each other), I opted to hang it up and rebuild the Kogswell frame, until ol' trusty can be confirmed as true, blasted, and re-painted. And by the looks of the Kogswell site, I might have in my posession a now quite limited frame; looks as though they've discontinued their single-speed/reverse-dropout model. Hm.
Anyhoo, I built it up with most of the components I'd built onto the KHS, plus a fucking fierce Connex BMX chain. Actually, it's two chains (for which I dropped a grand total of $120), due to BMX chains being sized for the shorter chaindrive of an actual BMX bike. As you can see below, this thing is freakin' apocalypse-proof.
This weekend, I'll be trading out the Bianchi Pista drops for a set of Nitto time trial bars, and shortly thereafter upgrading my rear tire to match the front. Ultimately, I'd like to build up a different wheelset for this bike, with a front brake for a lever I got years ago that mounts into the end of proper time trial bars. When they were still making this frame, Kogswell (for some reason entirely in conflict with commonsense aesthetics and weight considerations) brazed every conceiveable mount onto it. Front and rear rack mounts, two water bottle mounts, lugs, mounts for running a rear brake cable through the top-tube, etc. It's a lot of dead weight that makes for a less-than-ideal commuter. But it'd make for a perfect hauling bike -- getting gear to demos, getting a dish to a potluck intact, possibly even getting one of the cats to the vet.
For now, the idea is to have a sturdy, powerful, and reliable ride for my forthcoming two month working "vacay" in Montpelier, VT. I've secured a room in a 3BR "luxury condo" with several other anarchists, on the outer edge of the town, allegedly at the top of quite a hill. So, with less than three weeks to go, it seemed time to start getting shit together, rather than have my ride falling apart or blowing a chain while crawling down into town one morning.
Speaking of bike dorkdom, I've spent part of my weekend reading Travis Hugh Culley's The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power. Initially, I found it a bit silly and pretensious, but after the first chapter or so, I fell in love with it. I highly recommend it, even to folks who aren't particularly privy to courier culture, or even bike culture. It's a quite accessible and catchy read, and has a roundabout way of touching on some fairly serious subjects (both political and existential). I generally don't pick up stuff like this, but I'm glad I did. I'd frankly like to shake the guy's hand, and thank him.
In closing, there's a demo outside the White House tomorrow afternoon, regarding Israel's recent insistence on bombing half its neighbors into the Stone Age, over an explicitly military action, for which they've now sacrificed probably 150 civillian lives. Any of you local yokels are cordially invited to join us. We'll be meeting afterward, to begin strategizing further action around this, and it's fair to say that the DC Palestine-Solidarity community has stirred from its slumber over all this - a community I would argue has a great deal to offer folks interested in engaging, community-based, direct action, organizing with diverse folks who boast (gasp!) reasonable social skills and a healthy sense of humor. It's perhaps sad that it took this insanity to stir us all out of a dormant year or two, but it's not like you were doing anything exciting with your summer anyway [wink].
Nighty-night.
And I gotta say, I was a fan of the band before, but HOLY FUCKING SHIT this record is good. As I noted to a few friends, someone kept Mike Mogis sober for the production of this record, cause he seems to have actually figured out how to make a band sound tight, for once. Much of what he's touched as a producer is the sort of thing you hear and think, "This probably sounds incredible....live.", but this sounds fucking flawless, and is helped along considerably by the band finding their way out of attempting to continously mine bad judgment and emotional paralysis for the sake of "art"; instead going straight for the jugular with classical American small-town fundamentalism. Meanwhile, there's a sarcasm and lightheartedness to it that even go so far as to produce (dare I say) dancey moments.
I rarely get excited about music anymore, unless someone I know personally is involved. But this record made me want to listen to music more often, and made me want to give a shit about what's being produced these days. Let's see if it lasts.
In other news... after flipping my KHS frame and bouncing it off the side of a van (both requiring ER visits, both within six weeks of each other), I opted to hang it up and rebuild the Kogswell frame, until ol' trusty can be confirmed as true, blasted, and re-painted. And by the looks of the Kogswell site, I might have in my posession a now quite limited frame; looks as though they've discontinued their single-speed/reverse-dropout model. Hm.
Anyhoo, I built it up with most of the components I'd built onto the KHS, plus a fucking fierce Connex BMX chain. Actually, it's two chains (for which I dropped a grand total of $120), due to BMX chains being sized for the shorter chaindrive of an actual BMX bike. As you can see below, this thing is freakin' apocalypse-proof.
This weekend, I'll be trading out the Bianchi Pista drops for a set of Nitto time trial bars, and shortly thereafter upgrading my rear tire to match the front. Ultimately, I'd like to build up a different wheelset for this bike, with a front brake for a lever I got years ago that mounts into the end of proper time trial bars. When they were still making this frame, Kogswell (for some reason entirely in conflict with commonsense aesthetics and weight considerations) brazed every conceiveable mount onto it. Front and rear rack mounts, two water bottle mounts, lugs, mounts for running a rear brake cable through the top-tube, etc. It's a lot of dead weight that makes for a less-than-ideal commuter. But it'd make for a perfect hauling bike -- getting gear to demos, getting a dish to a potluck intact, possibly even getting one of the cats to the vet.
For now, the idea is to have a sturdy, powerful, and reliable ride for my forthcoming two month working "vacay" in Montpelier, VT. I've secured a room in a 3BR "luxury condo" with several other anarchists, on the outer edge of the town, allegedly at the top of quite a hill. So, with less than three weeks to go, it seemed time to start getting shit together, rather than have my ride falling apart or blowing a chain while crawling down into town one morning.
Speaking of bike dorkdom, I've spent part of my weekend reading Travis Hugh Culley's The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power. Initially, I found it a bit silly and pretensious, but after the first chapter or so, I fell in love with it. I highly recommend it, even to folks who aren't particularly privy to courier culture, or even bike culture. It's a quite accessible and catchy read, and has a roundabout way of touching on some fairly serious subjects (both political and existential). I generally don't pick up stuff like this, but I'm glad I did. I'd frankly like to shake the guy's hand, and thank him.
In closing, there's a demo outside the White House tomorrow afternoon, regarding Israel's recent insistence on bombing half its neighbors into the Stone Age, over an explicitly military action, for which they've now sacrificed probably 150 civillian lives. Any of you local yokels are cordially invited to join us. We'll be meeting afterward, to begin strategizing further action around this, and it's fair to say that the DC Palestine-Solidarity community has stirred from its slumber over all this - a community I would argue has a great deal to offer folks interested in engaging, community-based, direct action, organizing with diverse folks who boast (gasp!) reasonable social skills and a healthy sense of humor. It's perhaps sad that it took this insanity to stir us all out of a dormant year or two, but it's not like you were doing anything exciting with your summer anyway [wink].
Nighty-night.
OK, so no belly laughs, but...
I did in fact attend the Why the Green Scare is the new Red Scare workshop in Providence. And while the speakers took up way too much time (in some cases saying very little of substantial use), thus displacing any time for Q&A... I did approach two of them afterward, to (as the kids say) "chat." One of them was a woman I'd seen present at Renewing the Anarchist Tradition last year, on a panel examining how communities (particularly communities of resistance) can exact and maintain accountability for transgressions of one shade or another. Her area of focus was how (in some cases staggering) patriarchal behavior and sexual assault have been grappled with in eco-defense communities, so it wasn't all that surprising to find her speaking on State repression of eco-defense activists, and having met before made being candid about the racially-loaded issues drawn into relief by the mere existence of a "Green Scare" discourse that much easier.
The other fella I spoke with was actually quite serious about our collective obligation to support those struggling against State repression of Muslims and Arabs (and for that matter, communites of color generally). So, again, being candid about things was quite easy. And the conversation that followed was (in my view) quite productive.
Ultimately, as the first gal put it, their position is that whether or not the anarchist community dropped the ball when it came to dealing with State repression of Muslims and Arabs in the wake of 9/11, repression of eco-defense activists is targetting their community and they can't not support and defend those people. Fine, fair enough. So, they're conscious of what's drawn into relief by invoking the spectre of McCarthyism, but feel compelled to nonetheless. Granted. The problem is: If one acknowledges that there is some semblance of shared experience between these communities given their respective relationships to the US government, and if one can also acknowledge that it is likely that Muslims and Arabs have faced far more pervasive and vicious tactics at the hands of the State... Why is it that these panels, this discussion, and the proverbial talking heads of this discourse are almost exclusively white? Is the assumption that lawyers supporting Guantanamo detainees, Arab professors, or a host of others on the shit end of the post-9/11 world order couldn't possibly have any perspective whatsoever useful to the eco-defense community? On one hand, I suppose there's an answer to that question that isn't totally ethically compromised. On the other hand, the possibility of said answer or not, the discourse as it currently exists and plays out lines right up with the tried and true tendency of (white) anarchists to work from the tacit assumption that ours is the only game in town.
So, here's the big shocker for the weekend: Yours truly as a bridge-builder (no shit).
Apparently, there was some hope among these folks of setting up a panel for this year's RAT, and the aforementioned "chat" resulted in my being asked if I would be willing to speak on said panel regarding the relationships that need to be built between communities facing State repression. Of course, the last thing any such panel needs is one more paleface motor-mouth. So, I declined, and instead offered to pass along the names of folks working on post-9/11 civil liberties cases, who might offer fresh perspective to current conversations in eco-defense communities. This could be a really kickass development... except that anyone who's been to RAT would likely agree that it's hardly the audience that needs to hear this shit. Eco-defense activists don't tend to scramble for gatherings of those biased toward the intellectual, and the demographic that does tends to be a few steps ahead of the larger anarchist community on these sorts of questions. It would however be really kickass to have such a panel at next year's National Conference on Organized Resistance (which is now nortorious for drawing every shade of leftist anti-intellectual, some of whom fancy themselves eco-defenders). Perahps such a panel at RAT could be a worthwhile test-run. We'll see. Either way, I'd be game to help make it happen.
The other fella I spoke with was actually quite serious about our collective obligation to support those struggling against State repression of Muslims and Arabs (and for that matter, communites of color generally). So, again, being candid about things was quite easy. And the conversation that followed was (in my view) quite productive.
Ultimately, as the first gal put it, their position is that whether or not the anarchist community dropped the ball when it came to dealing with State repression of Muslims and Arabs in the wake of 9/11, repression of eco-defense activists is targetting their community and they can't not support and defend those people. Fine, fair enough. So, they're conscious of what's drawn into relief by invoking the spectre of McCarthyism, but feel compelled to nonetheless. Granted. The problem is: If one acknowledges that there is some semblance of shared experience between these communities given their respective relationships to the US government, and if one can also acknowledge that it is likely that Muslims and Arabs have faced far more pervasive and vicious tactics at the hands of the State... Why is it that these panels, this discussion, and the proverbial talking heads of this discourse are almost exclusively white? Is the assumption that lawyers supporting Guantanamo detainees, Arab professors, or a host of others on the shit end of the post-9/11 world order couldn't possibly have any perspective whatsoever useful to the eco-defense community? On one hand, I suppose there's an answer to that question that isn't totally ethically compromised. On the other hand, the possibility of said answer or not, the discourse as it currently exists and plays out lines right up with the tried and true tendency of (white) anarchists to work from the tacit assumption that ours is the only game in town.
So, here's the big shocker for the weekend: Yours truly as a bridge-builder (no shit).
Apparently, there was some hope among these folks of setting up a panel for this year's RAT, and the aforementioned "chat" resulted in my being asked if I would be willing to speak on said panel regarding the relationships that need to be built between communities facing State repression. Of course, the last thing any such panel needs is one more paleface motor-mouth. So, I declined, and instead offered to pass along the names of folks working on post-9/11 civil liberties cases, who might offer fresh perspective to current conversations in eco-defense communities. This could be a really kickass development... except that anyone who's been to RAT would likely agree that it's hardly the audience that needs to hear this shit. Eco-defense activists don't tend to scramble for gatherings of those biased toward the intellectual, and the demographic that does tends to be a few steps ahead of the larger anarchist community on these sorts of questions. It would however be really kickass to have such a panel at next year's National Conference on Organized Resistance (which is now nortorious for drawing every shade of leftist anti-intellectual, some of whom fancy themselves eco-defenders). Perahps such a panel at RAT could be a worthwhile test-run. We'll see. Either way, I'd be game to help make it happen.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Perk #3,406 of Being Self-Employed
Early last week, I was tapped to support a group of Canadians from various indigenous tribes in coordinating an action at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Alberta was one of the featured regions, and (counterintuitive as one might think, given current popular discourse) they opted to make oil exploration a major theme of the region's "cultural contributions" (sarcasm should be noted). A report on the action can be read here.
Nothing particularly dramatic went into the action itself. Given the ethnic makeup of the group, we had no "arrestables" involved, and only about 48hrs of planning time to speak of. However, pretty much from the time people began boarding their flights from their respective cities, it was clear the industry had caught wind of what was taking shape, and had (in some cases) alerted US Customs, etc. A random phone call to the main indigenous organizer was traced to Corporate Risk International, and another organizer was asked point blank whether or not she would be "protesting the Alberta Days", at Passport Control. All that shit about the petroleum industry tripping over itself to phase out oil... Yeah, forget it. They're holding on for their lives.
Perhaps most instructive was the way in which mainstream NGO's like Oil Change totally sidelined, manipulated, and abandoned indigenous groups on this issue. It sort of brought home for me exactly what Left Turn folks have been taking to task in conversations around the NGO Industrial Complex, and both myself and the other local brought in on this action were left speechless by how brazen and indifferent our "allies" had proven themselves. Well done.
Alas, I'm nearly out the door to catch a flight up to Boston to attend the Providence Anarchist Bookfair and the summer board meeting for the IAS.
Tune in next week to hear the "Why the Green Scare is the New Red Scare" workshop's response, when I ask them how they missed the Brown Scare (you know... those planes that hit the towers, our little Dachau on the Caribbean, Sami Al-Arian, the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, summary Muslim detentions in the US, etc). Sure to provide a belly laugh or two.
Toodles.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Flemglobbin'
Best Compliment I've Ever Received: "Yeah, I pretty much decided I was going to sleep with you after seeing your library."
Unfortunately, it resulted in a cold.
Unfortunately, it resulted in a cold.
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
I'm learning to trust you enough to take from you. You can trust me, too.
A few small miracles from the last 24hrs:
*Sitting across from Sommers during dinner, and being witness to the moment at which he began processing that the woman he has settled into this year really went out of her way to help him earlier in the day, and that it was ok to accept that help; or rather, that he was worth that such that she might've taken some joy in being that support.
*Watching a woman who abruptly lost her father just weeks ago, prancing about on her roof, lighting fireworks, and answering with a confident "Oh, nothing really." when I asked what was new in her life.
*Acquiring The End of the Peace Process (Said), Representations of the Intellectual (also by Said), and The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3: Power -- all for a whopping total of about $12.
*Slipping on the wet porch stairs of a client's house, re-spraining my wrist.
*Discovering that I feel irreparably useless to a particular local organization. My orientation to it is such that I must've hoped that one or more of my skillsets would be necessary in one or more projects initiated by other members. However, of the few (nearest I can tell, one) projects that have actually evolved beyond mere discussion, I've had very little to offer. As I walked away from the meeting tonight, I thought to myself: Maybe the problem is that you're not taking any initiative; just waiting to offer support to those that do. Of course, it then dawned on me that this was absolutely consistent with my deathgrip on my own safety. If I forumlate or initiate some undertaking, I'm culpable, and bound to whatever (in my mind, always abusive) response that may inspire. If I confine myself to meeting the needs of those who accept those risks, I'm helpful. I haven't yet decided whether it's a commentary on my own cynicism, or that of the sea in which I swim.
Oh, how you are as petty as the post punk kids you pity.
And how you swear by the myth that you're not beautiful.
- Kind of Like Spitting
*Sitting across from Sommers during dinner, and being witness to the moment at which he began processing that the woman he has settled into this year really went out of her way to help him earlier in the day, and that it was ok to accept that help; or rather, that he was worth that such that she might've taken some joy in being that support.
*Watching a woman who abruptly lost her father just weeks ago, prancing about on her roof, lighting fireworks, and answering with a confident "Oh, nothing really." when I asked what was new in her life.
*Acquiring The End of the Peace Process (Said), Representations of the Intellectual (also by Said), and The Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3: Power -- all for a whopping total of about $12.
*Slipping on the wet porch stairs of a client's house, re-spraining my wrist.
*Discovering that I feel irreparably useless to a particular local organization. My orientation to it is such that I must've hoped that one or more of my skillsets would be necessary in one or more projects initiated by other members. However, of the few (nearest I can tell, one) projects that have actually evolved beyond mere discussion, I've had very little to offer. As I walked away from the meeting tonight, I thought to myself: Maybe the problem is that you're not taking any initiative; just waiting to offer support to those that do. Of course, it then dawned on me that this was absolutely consistent with my deathgrip on my own safety. If I forumlate or initiate some undertaking, I'm culpable, and bound to whatever (in my mind, always abusive) response that may inspire. If I confine myself to meeting the needs of those who accept those risks, I'm helpful. I haven't yet decided whether it's a commentary on my own cynicism, or that of the sea in which I swim.
Oh, how you are as petty as the post punk kids you pity.
And how you swear by the myth that you're not beautiful.
- Kind of Like Spitting
Monday, July 03, 2006
Bakunin: Pitcher or Catcher?
Reprinted from an email I sent to a group of friends and academics last week...
This demonstrates, perhaps, the heights of dorkdom I conquer, up late reading.
While George Woodcock's chapter on Bakunin (in Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements -- a fabulous text, by the way) begins with giving explicit exception to "the sexual" when discussing The Big Guy's enormous appetites... It does go on to say the following (in reference to Bakunin's relationship with Sergio Nachayev):
"The fascination that Nachayev wielded over Bakunin reminds one of other disastrous relationships between men of widely differing ages: Rimbaud and Verlaine, or Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde. There certainly seems to have been a touch of submerged homosexuality; indeed, it is hard to find any other explanation for the temporary submissiveness of the usually autocratic Bakunin to this sinister youth."
BOOYAAAA! Gay as a picnic basket. I rest my case. Anthony Masters's biography tapdances around it, while depicting a life straight out of Brokeback (replete with Bakunin's final years spent in the guest room of a house he shared with his wife, her live-in lover, and the 3 kids the latters' extracurricular activities produced), and Paul Avrich's Anarchist Portraits more or less has our oh-so-bearish "asexual" Uncle Micky pouring out his heart-wrenching disillusionment in letters with Nachayev; signing off with what could fairly be referred to as the late 1800's version of "I wish I knew how to quit you." Look it up for yourself.
That is all. Good night.
:::cue disco music outro:::
This demonstrates, perhaps, the heights of dorkdom I conquer, up late reading.
While George Woodcock's chapter on Bakunin (in Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements -- a fabulous text, by the way) begins with giving explicit exception to "the sexual" when discussing The Big Guy's enormous appetites... It does go on to say the following (in reference to Bakunin's relationship with Sergio Nachayev):
"The fascination that Nachayev wielded over Bakunin reminds one of other disastrous relationships between men of widely differing ages: Rimbaud and Verlaine, or Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde. There certainly seems to have been a touch of submerged homosexuality; indeed, it is hard to find any other explanation for the temporary submissiveness of the usually autocratic Bakunin to this sinister youth."
BOOYAAAA! Gay as a picnic basket. I rest my case. Anthony Masters's biography tapdances around it, while depicting a life straight out of Brokeback (replete with Bakunin's final years spent in the guest room of a house he shared with his wife, her live-in lover, and the 3 kids the latters' extracurricular activities produced), and Paul Avrich's Anarchist Portraits more or less has our oh-so-bearish "asexual" Uncle Micky pouring out his heart-wrenching disillusionment in letters with Nachayev; signing off with what could fairly be referred to as the late 1800's version of "I wish I knew how to quit you." Look it up for yourself.
That is all. Good night.
:::cue disco music outro:::
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