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May 30, 2005

Otherizing in Northern California

Spent the bulk of the long weekend at a bucolic bit of land west of the Mendocino town of Willits. The denizens call it “Witness Peak” and there is a spectacular small volcanic peak right in its midsts, along with a variety of rolling poison-oak covered hills, beautiful buildings built over the past decades, and a pile of good friends. Getting there is a bit of an ordeal, a 3.5 hour drive at full speed, rather longer with friends who like to stop a lot and take a more meandering pace.

One of our pauses came in the misnamed “Old Downtown” of the new ex-urb of Windsor. I knew Windsor back in the 1970s when I went to Sonoma State and lived for a while in Forestville, working at the Books Inc. in Coddingtown in Santa Rosa. Loretta, my then-manager, had a place in Windsor, and I don't recall there being anything like a center or a real town... just a crossroads with a gas station and a minimart, surrounded by an indeterminate number of ranch houses and farms.

Now Windsor's “Old Downtown” is like Disney's Celebration in Florida, a few dense blocks of fake old buildings full of condos and chainstores, faux antique lamp posts and an immaculate, orderly, antiseptic anti-hominess that must reassure someone that the chaos and uncertainty of urban life have been permanently barred from entry. It seems that WhiteLand is the overriding goal of such exurbs, even when a smattering of upscale BUPpies and Asian professionals sometimes give ethnic cover to the larger social agenda of segregation. We couldn't help but wonder, as we clutched our gourmet caffeinated beverages and sped out of there as fast as we could, what will the first political demonstration there look like? When will it happen? What will it be about? Most of the answers I can quickly conjure up aren't very inspiring...

I so rarely go to the exurbs, let alone the suburbs (which are decaying as I write, soon to be the new slums of the 21st century, as the frightened keep moving further out and the bored move back in to the urban core). Passing through a place like Windsor reminds me about my separation from what passes as 'normal' America, confronting me with my own version of “Otherizing.”

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And now back to our irregularly scheduled blogging...

Hugh D'andrade did a great job of addressing this larger chasm between 'us' and 'them' in his article in The Political Edge called “Interrupting the Monologue”. Going from the Mission District to any exurb is to immediately face this; to properly digest it is to at least pause long enough to notice that the rhetoric of radical change is not obvious nor particularly resonant in such a place. Which might make us stop and think about how our ideas connect to people who are making quite different choices, usually motivated by substantially different ideas of what being alive feels like, what the range of dangers and challenges is that we face as humans, and so on.

With alarming frequency, people attracted to radical change aren't really interesting in finding out what people think and do, but merely who they are. And judging all these human books by their covers, we make up our (often smug) minds about the relative stupidity or venality of these others. I know that the preponderant reality of such judgementalness and racism in the United States is that semi-automatic fear and intolerance that greets people of color when they venture into the ever-larger segregated regions. Nevertheless, I am deeply frustrated and offended by the corresponding racism that is being reinforced unconsciously by a fair number of activists engaged in promoting an agenda of 'confronting white supremacy' in ALL spheres of life.

This is a big topic, and one that deserves careful thought and argument. So I won't claim to make my whole argument in this blog entry, and I don't expect anyone on any side of this ongoing cultural discussion to have the last word. But the symmetry between a blindly racist culture and an obsessive and judgemental subculture of opposition is striking. The framing of the discussion with terms such as 'privilege' is particularly disheartening if we take seriously the notion that revolutionary change depends on the active participation of the majority of society. If the starting point to be accepted as politically relevant and involved is to publicly renounce your supposed 'privileges' (as opposed to, say, being a resolute opponent of institutional bigotry, social exploitation, toxic poisoning of whole communities, etc.) isn't it obvious that an awful lot of people aren't going to join in (unless they have a personality that is comfortable with cult-like self-renunciation)?

It belies a certain psychological immaturity to frame radicalization this way. All white people are not privileged because they're white! If they are treated with respect by police when stopped that is not a privilege (though it is clearly a surprise!), but it is a right being denied others who are not treated the same. If they can walk in to a business and be treated courteously (so they'll spend money there in the crucial cycle of exploitation that commodity society depends on), that is not a privilege, but it is a right being denied others who are not treated the same. “Access” is not available to everyone, whether it's access to college, to a TV or radio talk show, the basic goods of consumer society, or even just food and shelter. Inequality of access is a symptom of a hierarchical society that produces nothing as well as it produces divisions and separations.

Affirmative action programs claim to ameliorate the problem of access. But these programs were created to halt the civil rights demands that were pushing into every sphere of life, demanding a real egalitarianism, one which threatened to up-end the logic of capitalist society. Affirmative action promised equal access, but really served to limit political and social demands in a way to reinforce the underlying (false) logic of meritocracy, of personal responsibility for success. The counterattack on quotas and set-asides was a completely predictable outcome of accepting the logic of this tepid reform in place of a more thorough-going restructuring of society.

Anyway, this topic is long and tangled. I wanted to use this entry to broaden the topic a bit from the usual black-and-white focus that it assumes so easily. I finished two books this weekend that did a bit of helpful juijitsu on my own frames of reference. First, Donna Haraway's pocket-sized “Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness” (Prickly Paradigm Press: Chicago, 2003), and second, Mike Davis's “Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City”(Verso, 2000). I hope no one will take offense that a thread of this discussion is about to be the relationship between humans and dogs. It is not an analogue or a substitute for the problematic relations between white and black America. But it is a way of sidestepping our own predictable and somewhat automatic thoughts and responses, turning our attention to a different kind of relationship that doesn't usually get an historical or political look, and at least in my case, is a good place to examine fixed ideas.

Davis's book about Latino inmigration and urban transformation is an important update to our sense of who lives in the cities and what are the real dynamics of populations, municipal governance, entitlements, competition and cooperation. Though Davis is direct in his call for a black-Latino alliance, one that works through rank-and-file trade unionism, his book also uncovers some of the more difficult problems facing these two large communities as they confront the inequalities and injustice of the larger society but find themselves increasingly pitted against one another in a zero-sum (non)game of urban survival. (I'm not going to review his book further than that, but I do recommend it as an important corrective to the rear-view mirror urban politics that still predominates in the U.S.)

Haraway's manifesto confronts my own deeply held prejudice against dogs. I have been allergic all my life, which might have to do with the fact that I was bitten in the face at age 3 by an aging and grumpy dog that was about the same height as me, but I have grown to resent the infantilization of pets in general and dogs in particular (that I've witnessed all too many times). I can respect someone loving their dog and having an intense relationship with it, but I just hate the mislogic of treating a dog like a child, or presuming it has a 'right' to be brought in to any space open to the public, as though it were a human with equal rights. Haraway probably agrees with me about that, and her ornery, thoughtful independence is why I really enjoyed her manifesto. She doesn't cater to the American pet owner at all, but tries to take a much deeper and longer look at the historically specific relationships between dogs and humans over the long haul.

The paradigmatic story has it that

“Man took the (free) wolf and made the (servant) dog and so made civilization possible. Mongrelized Hegel and Freud in the kennel? Let the dog stand for all domestic plant and animal species, subjected to human intent in stories of escalating progress or destruction, according to taste. Deep ecologists love to believe these stories in order to hate them in the name of Wilderness before the Fall into Culture, just as humanists believe them in order to fend off biological encroachments on culture.
“These conventional accounts have been thoroughly reworked in recent years... I like these metaplasmic, remodeled versions that give dogs (and other species) the first moves in domestication and then choreograph an unending dance of distributed and heterogenous agencies... I think the newer stories have a better chance of being true, and they certainly have a better chance of teaching us to pay attention to significant otherness as something other than a reflection of one's intentions.”

Haraway's book ranges across many philosophical points. In contemplating 'significant otherness' she comes down solidly in favor of specificity and against broad generalizations, a basic approach that I would like to promote for discussions of racism, too. Haraway, in her pursuit of understanding her own relationship to her dogs, jumps into the cyberworld of dog trainers and lovers and finds some smart people who help shape her argument. And it's Haraway's easy move from the specifics of her topic to the gnarlier areas where these ideas pop up by themselves that makes the Companion Species Manifesto so useful. Vicki Hearne, a famous companion animal trainer and language philosopher (died 2001), gives Haraway an opening to go deeper.

“Communication across irreducible difference is what matters [among companion species]. Situated partial connection is what matters; the resultant dogs and humans emerge together in that game of cat's cradle. Respect is the name of the game... Just who is at home [in the animals trainers work with] must permanently be in question. The recognition that one cannot know the other or the self, but must ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship, is the key. That is so for all true lovers, of whatever species... I believe that all ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation. We are not one, and being depends on getting on together... [Hearne's] resistance to literalist anthropomorphism and her commitment to signficant otherness-in-connection fuels her arguments against animal rights discourse... She is against the abstract scales of comparison of mental functions or consciousness that rank organisms in a modernist great chain of being and assign privileges or guardianship accordingly. She is after specifity.

“The outrageous equating of the killing of the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, with the butchers of the animal-industrial complex... or the equating of the practices of human slavery with the domestication of animals make no sense in Hearne's framework. Atrocities, as well as precious achievements, deserve their own potent languages and ethical responses, including the assignment of priority in practice. Situated emergence of more livable worlds depends on that differentiated sensibility.”

This passage does a nice job of confronting indirectly the philosophical retardedness that plagues so many people attracted to a political practice that consists mostly of veganism or guilt-tripping people over consumption. The easy application of complex historical narratives to the issue of the day (much like people bandying about the term 'fascism', though it is clearly more applicable than it was 20-30 years ago) makes the speaker sound uninformed, if not stupid. Historical amnesia and a cultural antipathy to any but romantic and nostalgic ideas of the past cripple us every day. Haraway's eloquent plea for historical specificity in relations between species is one part of her analysis that I DO think applies much more broadly. And she can only make that argument because she's spent so much time excavating real histories, examining the loaded ways language and philosophy shape inquiries, but coming out the other side firmly in favor of rigorous and uncompromising investigation, paying attention, giving respect, and learning to learn.

Here's a last quote from Haraway to whet your appetite for more of this intellectually very fun and stimulating pamphlet:

“The introduction, from blasted peasant-shepherd economies, of Basque Pyrenean mountain dogs, who were nurtured in the purebred dog fancy, onto the ranches of the US west to protect Anglo ranchers' xenobiological cattle and sheep on the grasslands habitat (where few native grasses survive) of buffalo once hunted by Plains Indians riding Spanish horses—along with the study of contemporary reservation Navajo sheep-herding cultures deriving from Spanish conquest and missionization—ought to offer enough historical irony for any companion species manifesto. But there is more. Two efforts to bring back extirpated predator species rehabilitated from the status of vermin to natural wildlife and tourist attraction, one in the Pyrenean mountains and one in the national parks of the American west, will lead us further into the web.”

And further she goes. By the end, I could almost imagine having a relationship with an animal again (I grew up with 3 cats and always feel a psychic affinity with cats when I meet them, which they usually reciprocate in allergy-inducing ways!). But I'll leave it to Haraway to stimulate your own desires:

"When I stroke my landmate's sensuous Great Pyrenees, Willem, I also touch relocated Canadian gray wolves, upscale Slovakian bears, and international restoration ecology, as well as dog shows and multinational pastoral economies. Along with the whole dog, we need the whole legacy, which is, afer all, what makes the whole companion species possible... Inhabiting that legacy without the pose of innocence, we might hope for the creative grace of play."

Posted by ccarlsson at 03:19 PM | Comments (0)

Critical Mass May 2005

We had our usual splendid ride, probably 1,000 to 1,500 participants, rode south on Steuart into the Embarcadero and did an inefficient but entertaining wrap-around of the baseball stadium, avoiding the dense foot traffic in front of the stadium by taking the shoreline promenade.

Squeezing along the shoreline around Willie Mays Field, May 2005.

It was a bottleneck and it probably lost us a few dozen riders since whoever was at the front didn't remember to stop and let us regroup for a long time. Going up 3rd Street I heard there was a minor scuffle between a big ol' SUV and some cyclists, but I didn't see anything myself. But the ride made its way back and forth north and south for an hour or more, crossing Market several times before finally heading west up the city's artery, past the still unfinished Octavia Boulevard/Freeway offramp project, and all the way to the Castro. Some circling and bike lifting at Castro and Market was soon abandoned and down we rode to 18th, past Dolores Park and back to Valencia.

When they headed back northward I came upon Danny and we called it a night and headed off to a delicious dinner at Cafe Gratitude. Live food and lively friends... their tables are too big though, so as the roar of the diners rises, the intimacy required for conversation is impaired by the broad tables. All their dishes are named silly things like “I am happy” or “I am grateful” or “I am ecstatic” so there's always an odd exchange with the waitperson (who this time actually introduced herself and asked our names with handshakes all around!) when ordering. They do amazing things with nuts, nut pastes, fresh vegetables, etc. My favorite thing of the evening was an exquisite cherry cheese cake made of who knows what kind of combo of cashew mousse, fresh cherries, nutty crust, etc. Cafe Gratitude ought to be on everyone's short list of places to try in this town, especially if you're of the vegetarian or vegan persuasion (which I am categorically NOT!).

I had several people come up to me saying they'd seen me in the latest Critical Mass documentary “Still We Ride” from NYC. Sounds like a good piece, but haven't seen it yet myself. The shit continues to hit the fan in New York with the police having taken the law into their own hands in spite of attempts to rein them in by a federal judge. And our pals in Rome staged an “Interplanetary Critical Mass” this weekend, following their usual rambunctious ride through Rome on Friday night past. Not sure how many bicyclists from Venus and Mars made it, but I suppose they'd at least have a clear idea of where Rome is, given its long relationship to those noble planets.

Posted by ccarlsson at 03:16 PM | Comments (1)

May 22, 2005

Communities, old and new

May 21, 1979 was the White Night Riot in San Francisco, the one-night insurrection that erupted after Dan White got a light sentence for murdering Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. It was an important night in my life, and now I'm doing a book design for Kevin Mullen's new collection of police stories; turns out it was an important night for him too. It was dubbed “Mullen's Retreat” when he ordered the enraged police to withdraw from Castro and 18th in the early morning hours of May 22, a remarkable decision in retrospect. It wrecked his police career and led him to become a local historian after nearly three decades in the SFPD... the basic humanity of some police is an important fissure that radicals too often overlook in their understandable rush to condemn those who carry out the violence of the state... a topic for further rumination in the future. Anyway, happy birthdays on this May 21 too, to ex-mother-in-law Julie and old friend Glenn B...

Today the Bike Kitchen (at 19th and Florida in the Mission Market) celebrated its 2nd anniversary with a wild party featuring the Cyclecide gang and their zany pedal-powered ferris wheel and spinning four-seat ride, plus countless amazing chopper bikes, homemade marvels, and all the other remarkable creative output of the local bike scenesters... I'm slowly working on my new book, and one of the chapters will be on the “underground bike scene” and this was a quintessential moment in its continuing evolution. This subculture, rarely overtly political and certainly not today (really Cyclecide is never political, preferring the closeted subversion of 'fun'), is nevertheless an important manifestation of larger dynamic that I think goes on all the time in our lives. People take their time and their technological know-how OUT of the market, out of any kind of buying-and-selling dynamic, and share it freely and cooperatively. In so doing, an authentic community is forged, something that is slowly emerging from the already collapsing status quo. These zany bicyclists are comprised of people who just enjoy hanging out together, building and experimenting with bicycles, welding, pedal motion, etc. Some of them may be political in various ways, but the community discovering itself in the free space created around bicycles and experimenting with bike technology is fraught with political meaning and potential regardless of the self-consciousness of its participants.

Crucially, in an era characterized by massive atomization and social breakdown, in which communities at work or in neighborhoods have been dislocated and displaced in one of the most thoroughgoing capitalist restructurings of daily life in modern history, we can now see ordinary folks (in this case, mostly pretty young) beginning to reassemble themselves in new ways, on new bases. Who are these people? Well, in a basic sense they are the working class. They all have to work to live, and though many survive through a variety of marginal gigs in the service sector, increasingly their experience is a normal and unavoidable one, economically speaking. But generally they don't identify with their jobs as anything but temporary stops on their way to something else. Instead, their sense of selves, their engagement with the pleasure of living, the place they find community and connections, is precisely NOT at work or in the apartment next door, but rather through these curious new communities. (I'm posting a mini-gallery at the bottom of this.)

Another kind of community shaped the event I attended this evening. The Precita Eyes Mural Project had its annual awards dinner and celebration at the Precita Valley Community Center, a small, venerable old hall that has been serving the micro-neighborhood between the Mission and Bernal Heights since 1922. In this very same center, Susan Cervantes and her family and friends founded the now well-known Precita Eyes Mural Project 15 years ago. Mona was given an award for her amazing Church Street mural (“Market Street Railway Mural” officially) and I got to tag along.

It was a sweet event, and I want to credit Cervantes and her family for so convincingly bringing so many people together in a real spirit of (ugh) community. It was a beautifully diverse crowd, equal parts Mission latino, African-American and white, all ages from quite elderly to infants. Unlike the youthful, self-selecting subculture of the bicyclists (who do attract people outside of just white and young, but not as much) the public mural subculture has systematically cultivated people from all ethnicities, classes and ages and the fruit was borne at this dinner party. In a way, it felt like the community one experiences at your child's school... in fact, due to some less articulate speakers and the high tolerance shown by the supportive audience, it REALLY felt like that a few times. But the emotions were palpable as people spoke to the power of doing murals, of involving children, of connecting to the community and enhancing its sense of self through public art, and so on.

I suppose I liked it because I live here and I knew enough of the folks in the room to feel a part of the community. But I couldn't help but feel too that this is why people sometimes find San Francisco painfully provincial. We're very self-satisfied and self-referential too often, and the kind of easy adulation that we tend to bestow upon our works mostly underscores how far we are from the aesthetic, artistic, and intellectual challenges that are common currency in world capitals from NYC to London to Milan to Paris (not to mention Mumbai, Djakarta, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo or Shanghai!)... not that I could list those challenges off the top of my head. I just know there is a lot more rigorous work out there, and that people aren't so easily satisfied. The last artist of the evening, Sante Huckaby, obliquely made this point when he lectured the kids in the audience about the fact that mural painting is real work, not just fun, and that they should take it seriously and really study and learn to paint and do the work well.

It's an interesting dilemma for people attracted to public art and popular participatory processes. How do you bring in new people, reinforce their positive contributions, but still strive for a more rigorous and critical engagement? Is the art created by total amateurs and first-time daubers really worthy, or should we demand more? Especially if it's going to be on public walls for years to come, shouldn't we want the most interesting, most talented painters to have first rights? Doesn't a fetish for participation actually interfere with good art? What about a more thoroughgoing process that creates a series of steps that people can go through before they are encouraged to paint public murals? I think that's what they've tried to create at Precita Eyes, a kind of popular educational system for public mural painting. A lot of the murals that have come from the people around Precita Eyes are beautiful and well-liked. But they've also, perhaps inadvertantly, reinforced a certain leftish school of bombastic, primary color-dominated iconic murals that have perhaps run their course, aesthetically as well as politically? I suppose we'll see in the coming years what kinds of new styles and meanings are communicated on our local walls—plus we'll see what comes from elsewhere. At least there's a local community engaged in this form of expression.

Here's a small gallery of photos from the Bike Kitchen today:

Ferris wheel and four-seat whirligig, both pedal-powered.

Jay Broemmel's amazing Golden Gate Bridge bike.

The Chopper Cabra, scariest fire-spitting bike I've ever seen!

People riding around on their odd assortment of homemade bikes.

Here's a classic chopper, forktastic!

The "Huffy Toss"

Posted by ccarlsson at 12:07 AM | Comments (2)

May 15, 2005

Thanks Billmon!!

Under the title "Things We'd Like to See" the inestimable billmon has given us a wonder... you can get a large version of this from his website, but this is too good not to put it everywhere...

Defendants in the dock at the Anglo-American War Crimes Trial of 2010, held at The Hague under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court....

and it goes on from there... don't miss it! It's one of the best in a long time.

Posted by ccarlsson at 11:21 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2005

Anarchism.... when?

Following yesterday's rather rambling movie commentaries doubling as quick notes on rewriting the history of the 'Sixties' and collective experiments in general...

This past Saturday a bunch of us headed down to good ol' UC Santa Cruz for a one-day conference on "Anarchism Now". The speakers were very interesting, and unlike my usual distaste for conferences, I actually enjoyed this one. There were four speakers in the morning session and four in the afternoon, and about an hour and a half to "discuss" following all the 20-minute talks. The discussions left a lot to be desired, mostly because everyone (including me) talked past each other, just blurting out what each of us wanted to communicate, but with very little back and forth or sticking to any particular topic or thread that came earlier.

Partly this was due to the wide range of ideas covered by the speakers (Iain Boal, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Eddie Yuen, John Holloway, Arif Dirlik, Barry Pateman, Carwil James, Roger White) and partly it was due to the fact that we were about 100 people in a room trying to say something meaningful about that elusive and frustrating category called 'anarchism'; or in several cases, trying NOT to, preferring instead to address the practical behaviors and ideas that get labeled 'anarchist,' regardless of self-identification.

I can't say that the discussion got very far. A number of Green Anarchy/anti-civilization types were in the audience, but remained largely mute except to call for some vague principled actions. But as Iain said at the outset, these days north American anarchy's theory is anti-intellectualism and its practice is action. Roger White was the last speaker of the day and coming from grassroots organizing around the incarcerating state in Oakland, he was one of the only voices all day to refer to actual gnarly problems (bullets flying, people wanting to be protected from violence) that self-styled anarchists largely ignore. Much of the discussion fell into the trap of "us" (we who know) vs. "them" (the rest of America, so dumb, so deluded, so ignorant, so unwilling to engage critically, etc.). Plenty of folks tried to bridge that gap by acknowledging that we aren't really so different, but the preponderant feeling in the room was of insiders with special knowledge.

Maybe that's the legacy of the aforementioned 'sixties': this sense that some of us are connected to a trajectory, to a set of ideas and experiences that continues to inform our hopes and activities. I met Crystal there, a guy who once lived in the Urban Stonehenge collective on Potrero Hill (my apartment on Folsom was made available to me by the previous residents, also once members of the Urban Stonehenge collective) and remembered me from Processed World days of yore. In fact, San Francisco is rich with collectives, co-ops, and the hundreds of people who have gone through them, and still adhere to basic principles of mutual aid and self-reliance.

But as the conference made clear, whatever comfort zones we may have created for ourselves over these decades don't matter much to people living in free-fire zones of urban hell. There is no anarchist organization, and those small groups that do exist spend an inordinate amount of time checking each other's ideas and behaviors for 'correctness' (usually vis-a-vis consumption, e.g. veganism, used clothing, recycling, etc., or with respect to consciousness, e.g. about race, gender, patriarchy, and so on).

Open collectives often attract people who are lonely, lost, and in need of serious emotional engagement. But is it the role of political groups to satisfy people's unmet emotional needs? Apparently. I think that's one of the major reasons why promising radical grouplets rarely get out of their own small worlds and into the larger world. So much energy gets spent processing in meetings that it's difficult to move on to new initiatives in the big outside world. As Roger White commented to my point about the problems of excluding unwanted hangers-on, we don't even have any organization, let alone processes or criteria by which to exclude people!

When you think of the anarchist critique of police and the state, and the overwhelming problems of urban violence and broken communities, you might think this is a ripe territory for anarchist organizing, creating networks of mutual aid and self-defense against the police AND the barbaric criminals terrorizing many neighborhoods. But young anarchists are more interested in the safe stance of opposing "civilization" or "technology" or some other abstraction. In fact, the Anarchism Now conference really devolved into increasingly abstract and empty rhetoric as the day wore on. John Holloway was eloquent in his urgent appeal for revolution, and all the speakers made useful contributions to historicizing our moment, to reframing questions, and to digging deeper into the past and present of radical thinking. But at the end of the day, we were 100 people in a room on the beautiful UCSC campus, and the sense of disconnectedness was probably stronger at the end than it had been at the beginning.

I wish we'd been able to engage in a more polemical exchange instead of stepping so lightly around each other and avoiding the topics that many of us knew going in were extremely contentious. But we weren't all in one organization, and none of us was ready to assume much by way of accountability to each other or to any larger definitions. Perhaps if this was an ongoing effort we'd be able to start making those assumptions in practice, and we'd have our huge arguments and maybe we'd even get to the point where enough of us would agree to go forward with a practical agenda, a declared idea of a world radically better than this one.

How would anyone not already 'in the know' want to join together with this current if we cannot even articulate how much better life will be when our ideas are put into practice? It's such a basic question and so far removed from contemporary radical discourse.

Posted by ccarlsson at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2005

"Following Sean" and "Mouth to Mouth"

Two films I saw at the SF Int'l Film Festival spoke to each other in an odd and serendipitous way. Together, they contribute to the ongoing effort to define and rewrite the Sixties, or at least to shape our understanding of cultural currents that we usually associate with that historical period.

One film, "Mouth to Mouth," is made by a Canadian/British director Alison Murray (exec. produced by Atom Egoyan, whose films I've mostly liked quite well), and tells the story of a young alienated teenage girl who gets recruited into SPARK (Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge). The beginning seemed hopeful when a handsome shirtless blond guy hands our heroine a small flyer inviting her to learn more about SPARK. Soon thereafter she stumbles upon the group as it demonstrates how to save a person who is overdosing, including giving a quick dose of Naloxene (? can't remember the exact drug, but I know that folks involved with Needle Exchange here in SF use it too) to resuscitate a comatose person.

But following this portrayal of the first encounter with a radical communal group things quickly go sour, though our protagonist doesn't withdraw in disgust as we might expect her to. The real "leader" of the group, another shirtless guy named Harry (one of the most bizarre aspects of this film is the absurdly unrealistic portrayal of Harry and the other guy NEVER wearing a shirt at any time, regardless of circumstance or weather or anything!), grabs her bag and empties it out on the street, and claims all her personal possessions for the collective. Soon we seem him alternately inspiring and browbeating the former junkies and even his own associates in the collective (one of whom is a street medic, and the only woman of color in the group).

Sherry, our heroine, becomes integrated into the group, which is becoming more and more like Synanon than anything else. A subplot has her mother tracking her down, and eventually joining the cult herself.

We laughed on the way out that this movie is practically designed to innoculate the viewer against anything collective. If it's a collective, it must really be an authoritarian cult. In that sense, it is a straightforward attack on the possibility of breaking free of this society, reinforcing the larger right-wing discourse of the past decades that argues the "sixties" were just a childish diversion, hopelessly trying to create false alternatives, that when really examined are actually authoritarian nightmares.

Synanon and other cults that grew from the counterculture were in fact authoritarian nightmares. In "Mouth to Mouth" the members are coerced into groupthink, their heads are shaved when they've achieved full abandonment of their selves to the group (as determined by Harry, their faultless leader), they are threatened, punished, cajoled, coerced, and generally made to feel small and stupid unless they stick to the consensus as defined by Harry and reinforced by his acolytes.

Sherry eventually breaks free when her best friend, and the other most rebellious girl in the bunch, is killed by Harry's punishment system. Her mother stays behind with the cult though. The film is an extended polemic against alternatives and for bourgeois society, which is of course made to seem reasonable, sane and just by comparison. But of course there is no portrayal of the countless interesting collective alternatives, plenty of which have survived the past half century, and which offer a much more complex and difficult to dismiss saga of trying to make something radically different. Perhaps it is not the responsibility of this movie to adequately address that (it's just a story, after all), but given the larger anti-collective, anti-cooperative discourse that pooh-poohs anything but capitalism and markets, this movie finds itself as a propaganda piece.

The other film that addressed the "sixties" in a more intelligent fashion is called "Following Sean". In it, the filmmaker Ralph Arlyck revisits Sean, a kid he filmed in 1966 at age 4 when he was living in the same Haight-Ashbury apartment building. When his original film came out it won a lot of awards and played a lot of festivals. It scandalized many with 4-year-old Sean's matter-of-fact recounting of smoking pot, scenes of him running around among all the hippies on Haight Street, telling about speed freaks in his house, etc.

This film gives us a few looks at the original movie, but is really an extended reminiscence and comparison of two ways of living--two families, the filmmaker's and Sean's, have parallel but radically different stories. Arlyck spends a huge amount of time on himself and his life and his family, recounting what happened after he shot the original Sean film, and we meet his French wife back in 1969 and today, his grown sons, his now elderly parents, and so on. It's really a bit much. But juxtaposed to this is a series of profiles of Sean today, his marrying a Russian emigre, his dropout father's integrity but hopelessly flakey existence, his radical commie grandparents (from his mother's side), and his sister and mother. What we end up with is a human portrait, self-indulgent to be sure, but one of a family of passionately engaged people (Sean's) as observed by Arlyck, whose own family always stays a bit aloof, "dabbling" in Communism back in the 30s, matched in the 60s by Arlyck as a confused, alienated and insecure observer of the tumult surrounding him in the Haight-Ashbury, a place he soon left for the comfort of a leafy New York suburb where he remained ever since.

I liked "Following Sean" better than any of the people I saw it with. They were mostly very irritated by how self-indulgent the filmmaker is, and how dominant his self-centered story was. But I thought it worked pretty well, especially because it is juxtaposed to Sean's and his family's story. By the end I was ruminating on how heavy we take things and how fast history flows by, and how little impact any of us really have as we try so hard to shape events and circumstances.

Sean is probably more political than we saw in the movie (Arlyck is apolitical in that typical upper-middle-class New York way); his Russian wife leaves him before the film ends because I bet she was dissatisfied that he wasn't more ambitious. He was trying to go to law school at one point, which seemed oddly unnecessary, and he abandons that by the end of the film too, probably because the climbing Russian wife wasn't driving him on anymore. But the film doesn't really tell us that, I'm just guessing. Sean's father, the same one who let him run wild as a 4 year old in 1966 in the Haight, is a dignified old hippie living in the Sierra foothills now. He has no assets and no pension and his story throws into our face the problem for a whole generation of people who haven't taken seriously the need to provide security for themselves, who probably thought the revolution was coming and they didn't need to worry about old age. Or maybe they thought their community would take care of them, but then over the past thirty years, the communities that people thought they'd created have mostly disintegrated. Oops. In a way it's another backhanded attack on the idealism and hopefulness of the movements that we call the 'Sixties'. See, you shoulda got a real job with a pension... now look at you! But Sean says his father's ideas are right, even if he hasn't really lived up to them, in what I thought was a very poignant and interesting testimony. Sean becomes a union eletrician during the film and afterwards we were told by the editor that he had become a union electrician teacher and was doing well.

His deceased grandfather, Archie Brown, a well-known local Communist Party leader, would probably be proud of him, even if he had a hard time processing the fact that his descendents weren't party members and weren't even particularly engaged in political organizing. In fact, political organizing as carried out by the old CP has disappeared for now. If it makes a comeback it'll be under a new banner, and that'd be a good thing. The tired old CP is gone for good... and we can't regret that!

Posted by ccarlsson at 06:02 PM | Comments (1)

May 01, 2005

Happy May Day!

Today is May Day and tonight is the Grand Opening of our new CounterPULSE space at 1310 Mission Street. I hope all you thousands of readers will make it down there and join us for a great party. Doors at 7, show at 8, $10-20 donation requested at the door but no one turned away for lack of funds, or an unwillingness to pay! I'll be briefly reprising Peter Linebaugh's lovely essay "The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day".

To the history of May Day there is a Green side and there is a Red side.

Under the rainbow, our methodology must be colorful. Green is a relationship to the earth and what grows therefrom. Red is a relationship to other people and the blood spilt there among. Green designates life with only necessary labor; Red designates death with surplus labor. Green is natural appropriation; Red is social expropriation. Green is husbandry and nurturance; Red is proletarianization and prostitution. Green is useful activity; Red is useless toil. Green is creation of desire; Red is class struggle. May Day is both.

Posted by ccarlsson at 11:44 AM | Comments (1)

SF Int'l Film Festival!

I am crazy for International Film Festivals and every year I buy a bunch of tix for the SF fest. This year I have about 16 movies! It's the only time you can see great films, both narrative and documentary, from places like Iran, Argentina, Indonesia, Brazil, Korea, etc. Here's some capsule reviews of some of my faves so far (only half way through):

Lucia Morat's narrative "Almost Brothers" is an incredibly interesting movie. It is set mostly in prison (she herself was a political prisoner during the Brazilian military dictatorship) but goes back and forth in time between the 50s, 60s, 70s and now. It revolves around two characters, one black and one white, who first meet as small children when their fathers connect (the white guy's dad is a musicologist, the black guy's dad is an awesome samba composer who never makes an album). The white guy grows up to be a leftist militant who is imprisoned by the dictatorship. In jail he meets his childhood friend who was imprisoned for some petty crime. A political process unfolds in which the political prisoners integrate the 'common' criminals into their "collective", set down rules of behavior and solidarity and create some real space in jail for themselves.

The story is interspersed with a contemporary scene in which the former political prisoner is now a parliamentarian visiting his old 'friend', now a big-time criminal gang leader, still in jail, but running his boys from a mobile phone in his cell (is that why it's a cellphone?), ordering executions and managing drug and weapons buys from inside. The contemporary story becomes increasingly understandable as the flashbacks reveal how the prison culture evolved as more 'common' criminals arrived and the political prisoners, trying to resist the descent into a darwinian struggle for survival, segregate themselves (which turns out to be an oblique reinforcement of the basic racism of Brazilian criminal 'justice').

It's a fascinating, powerful film, brilliantly scripted, acted and directed, and works too as a larger metaphor about the world today. How are self-conceived rational, political people going to influence the course of events dominated by Might is Right and insane levels of armed violence, drugs, brain damage, racism, and philosophical retardation? No easy answers...

Fernando Solanas's new film "Memoria del Saqueo" (replaced in English with "A Social Genocide") is a long two hours on the looting of Argentina. Where Naomi Klein's "The Take" presents a story about workers trying to cooperativize their abandoned factories in the wake of the looting, Solanas painstakingly dissects the decades-long history of the destruction of Argentina by neoliberalism. He names names, he shows the continuity of the policies as promoted by the IMF/World Bank and its obedient servants in Argentina, most prominently Carlos Menem, but really the entire political and business class, including the media. It's impossible to see this film and not see the stark parallels with the current wholesale looting of the U.S. The plunder of the former USSR also leapt to mind again and again, as oligarchs and their political hacks grabbed everything for their personal benefit, leaving behind a rusting, looted, decrepit infrastructure that will take years to repair and rebuild.

Leonard Retel Helmrich, a Dutch filmmaker, gets inside the dilemma of many so-called 'third world' peoples living in the sprawling slums of the new megacities, in this case, villagers eeking out a living in Jakarta Indonesia. Should they stay or should they go (back to their former village life)? Turns out neither choice amounts to one easy to embrace, a cogent and honest portrayal of a resilient humanity in the face of desperation and despair. And his cinematography is really stunning. This film, "Shape of the Moon", is worth seeing for the story but it's really exciting to see for the cinematography.

Nikolaj Arcel's "King's Game" is a Danish political thriller, and a very enjoyable movie. It's tightly scripted, taut, well acted, and has a nice twist at the end. It's the story of a political struggle in a centrist party that's about to win the election, and airs the dirty laundry of Danish politics and bourgeois parliamentary politics more generally.

Werner Herzog's "The White Diamond" is another amazingly beautifully shot film, this one on HD. It's about a small airship that allows quiet examination of rainforest canopies, but actually it's about the strange man who builds the ship and some of the characters they find in Guyana where they make the movie. And finally, it's about Herzog's peculiar sensibilities, mixing pathos, ego, nature, science, and technology in ways that only he does. I loved it.

Raymond Depardon's "Profiles Farmers: Daily Life" is also a beautiful film. It focuses on the disappearing culture and economy of the farmers of the middle ranges of the southern French mountains. He's trying to capture the life of a vanishing breed of small farmer before it's gone and this film does a great job of introducing us to a range of personalities and dramas, including the overarching reality that a lot of these farms are being bought as vacation homes and the land is increasingly laying fallow. Subsidies, technology, markets, the decay of families, and much more... this film is part two of three, being shot over a ten year period. I didn't see part one, but would like to, and I'm really curious about part three, scheduled for 2008.

"Three Times Two" is a Cuban assemblage of three different directors, and I frankly thought it was awful. Other friends who were there didn't dislike it as much as I did, but it was terribly sappy, overly sentimental, and just didn't hold my interest (especially awful was Lester Hamlet's "Lila" segment, entirely musical, entirely pathetic!).

Posted by ccarlsson at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

BIcycle Traffic

I got a ticket about 5 weeks ago for running a red light northbound on Valencia at 14th, one of the safest and most obvious place to maintain one's momentum and go through an empty intersection. I stopped a half block later to talk to a friend, and lo and behold a squad car pulled over and treated me like I'd done something wrong, wrote me a ticket after lecturing me and refusing to let me say anything about the ethic of cycling, traffic patterns, etc. It's a whopping $370 ticket!

So of course I'm going to court on July 1 to contest it. I'll let you know what happens.

But it's an interesting question, one that I've addressed before in print, but it's coming up again. I'm speaking at the Grizzly Peaks Cycling Club on May 18 about Critical Mass and I'm sure the law-abiding riders of that group will be very disapproving of my ideas on this. I run red lights and stop signs all day every day. It's quite safe. I mentally have to stop at every intersection whether the light is green or red. Cars often run intersections and if I'm not paying attention I will be killed. That's a huge motivation to preserve one's safety. Additionally, I have a personal standard that I won't run a light or cut through traffic if it forces an oncoming motorist to swerve or brake suddenly. That's just basic safety and courtesy.

I was pondering this the other night as I barreled down Shotwell, a small residential street full of 4-way stops. I rolled through one after another, timing each one so the cross traffic would experience me as if I were just taking my turn. This is very easy to do on such a street, and it's why Shotwell is the preferred northerly route through the Mission for a lot of cyclists these days. People called out to me about my cool handlebars (big ape-hangers) and it was a beautiful dusk as I rush to make my Film Festival movie. At 21st cars and bicyclists went through on three of four directions in a beautiful self-choreographed ballet. All of us had to calculate and hesitate to make it work for each other and we all did it organically and effortlessly.

One of my main motivations for running red lights when I do is to get into that clear, open road on the other side of the light before cars do so I can get ahead of the smog and potential right-turning traffic and make myself more visible. In other words, running red lights is OFTEN a safety move for me. And of course we all know the roads are not engineered for bicycling but for throughput of cars. The recent addition of painted stripes for bike lanes is a slight improvement over what came before, but still a long way from a real infrastructural transformation that would make cycling an equal user on the road. Nevertheless we are treated by the law as vehicles and are expected to act like a car, coming to full stops at stop signs and lights regardless of conditions. Luckily this is rarely enforced, so of course it's particularly galling when some bored cops decide to slap a $370 fine on you for doing what comes natural and is generally understood as an acceptable and perfectly safe way to use the city's thoroughfares.

Maybe this is the Golden Era of scofflaw bicycling. That's what one guy wrote in response to a 1996 survey we did at Critical Mass here. As bicycling traffic increases, traffic laws and signage and lights will likely become more of a safety issue for us, regardless of cars. Case in point is an article Bill Doub sent me from Boulder Colorado's Daily Camera, in which Beth Bennett talks about sustaining a terrible injury on Boulder's famous bike paths when another cyclist swerved carelessly into her. Turns out there is no law enforcement of traffic rules on the Boulder bike paths. Ms. Bennett cannot get any help from the courts or police in her attempt to hold the offending cyclist culpable.

Now I'm not particularly sympathetic to using the courts or police in this way. But I can imagine pretty easily my frustration at getting badly hurt by another cyclist who drunkenly or stupidly runs into me by not paying adequate attention. Laws and traffic rules seem unimportant compared to the simple necessity of behaving thoughtfully and courteously. Which inadvertantly loops us back to the previous post on the April Critical Mass here wherein a scuffle broke out due to absurd and pointless belligerance by cyclists and stopped motorists.

People, people, people... can't we all just get along? Obviously not. But when it comes to traffic and road rage and courtesy and empathy, it seems like our problems can only be solved by working harder at creating and spreading an ethical community, a way of behaving and respecting each other, watching out for all of our safety and comfort. The law is a silly and arbitrary mechanism, largely irrelevant to this. The culture we make together on the streets takes a real effort, and it's one well worth making. We oughtn't ignore stupid behavior, whether in daily life or at CM or wherever it erupts. Call it when you see it. Conversely, bicyclists should not be penalized for ignoring irrelevant laws meant to curb dangerous behavior in 2000-lb. metal boxes.

Amend the laws to conform to behavior: stop signs and red lights are yield signs to bicyclists (this was done in Montana, I believe). No one will be made less safe by such an amendment and it will properly reward cycling in the city for its greater efficiency, safety and pleasure.

Posted by ccarlsson at 10:50 AM | Comments (1)

Critical Mass April 05

We had another really lovely Critical Mass here on Friday night. I think we may have reached 2,000 riders, but at least 1,500. It was huge! We went south for a change, along the waterfront, wrapped around the ballpark and across the venerable 3rd Street bridge into the eerily emerging city-state of Mission Bay and its fortress-like biotech UC campus. Not much going on there on Friday night though, but the balmy weather and beautiful early evening light underscored how nice the new public park waterfront and campus panhandle will be in a few years.

The worst incident of the night erupted towards the end of our meandering towards 3rd Street when a few blue-collar guys were stopped by an idiot on a bicycle who appointed himself Czar of Stopping Oncoming Traffic. I rode past as one of the workers was yelling, "Hey I'm tired and I just want to go home!" while one of his pals gave a firm shove to a bicyclist, hurling him to the ground. I heard later it turned into a full-fledged melee of fisticuffs... glad I wasn't around for it!

But that's the deal with Critical Mass. It's what you make it. If you don't like stuff going on, you have to intervene and make it different. I've done that plenty of times, but I--like many of my friends who have been part of this for years--am pretty tired of newbies (the next generation, for better AND worse!) who don't quite 'get' the culture (or maybe they're just the logical descendents of the always lurking Testosterone Brigade) and repeatedly ride into oncoming traffic when there's absolutely no need to do it.

Predictably it loses whatever friendly vibes may have been possible by the mutual drive-by and turns into a macho and pointless confrontation. But that was only a tiny part of the evening. We carried on along the 3rd St. light rail line, still being built, premonitory ghosts of gentrification to come dancing in the shadows of the old warehouses and victorians of Dogpatch, until we turned west on Cesar Chavez. We took the bike bridge AND the underpass with our thousand-strong gang, and by the time we emerged into the Mission, families were pouring out to greet us, little kids grinning with wide-eyed amazement and joy, whole clans of Latino and African-American families waving and laughing from their balconies on the new Hope VI housing projects. It was one of those magic moments when all the self-ghettoizing and ostensible irrelevance of bicycling and Critical Mass vanish in the exchange of laughs and waves, everyone joined together in that elusive taste of a real urbanity, a city life shared and worth sharing.

The ride continued up to Guerrero where we took the new bike lane, along with the rest of the street, and rode out through the San Jose cut for the first time ever, before turning back on Arlington and riding back north, bobbing over to Church and I took off at 24th, having had a typically fantastic Critical Mass experience. Lots of good conversations, old and new friends, the usual... but as I lamented with Iain Boal along the way, if only we could figure out a way of taking this kind of experience and energy into other spheres of life!

Posted by ccarlsson at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)