visual spectrum: Nipponflex TLR

31Dec11

Sometime in 1990 or 1991 my friend Jason Love loaned me his Nipponflex TLR camera, a Japanese knockoff of the famous Rolleiflex TLR.  I shot two or three rolls of film on this camera (all Kodak) and developed them in Jason’s backyard darkroom, which is still the most sophisticated household darkroom that I’ve run across.  I wasn’t very good at spooling the film onto the developing reel and I ended up destroying a fair portion of the film that I shot, but luckily some of it survived.  These shots are just about all that remain of my two months or so with the Nipponflex, a camera that’s so rare that it barely even shows up on internet searches.  Should you ever have the good fortune to stumble across one, I recommend loading it up with film and taking it for a spin.

(All scans are of black and white negatives scanned in color mode.)

Filed under: photography   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: 6x6, medium format, Nipponflex, Rolleiflex knockoff, ruined negatives, scanned negatives, TLR

oh, the holidays

29Dec11

oh, the holidays, originally uploaded by troutfactory.

Filed under: drinking, funs, personal, scraps and bones, sweet story of Trout Monroe   |  1 Comment
Tags: Christmas, crazy fun, drinking glasses, drinking goggles, novelty glasses, presents, the holidays, wine glasses

infinite mortal: an interview with Andy Diaz Hope

29Nov11

Andy Diaz Hope’s work has taken the form of large-sized portraits of hungover friends constructed out of thousands of gelatine capsules; glittering chandeliers made up of medical supplies and Swarovski crystal; enormous mythologically-styled Jacquard tapestries that feature images of Skylab, the tree of life, and Kurt Friedrich Gödel; and cabinets and mirrored geometric shapes that feature reflective interior spaces that are, in effect, experienced as larger than the physical objects that contain them.  2011, an installation produced collaboratively with his partner Laurel Roth, is being featured at the Schroeder Romero & Shredder Gallery in New York until January 7th, 2012.

Trane: You entered Stanford as an engineering student, planning to get a PhD in physics, but ended up instead graduating with a collaborative degree from the Art and Engineering departments. Can you say something about the evolution of your interests and why you chose to move from an investigation of pure physics to a life of conducting experiments in the borderlands where art and science meet? Are there any particular events, people, or inspirations that led to this switch?

Andy: I was raised by scientists and artists. My Mom and brother and I moved in with my grandparents when I was 5, so my grandparents became my 2nd and 3rd parents. My grandfather had his PhD in Applied Physics and was brilliant at it and my grandmother had a degree in Chemistry and was a painter. My mom was a painter and mathematician. My dad, who was mostly absent, had a PhD in Geology and had become a wanderer and eventually homesteader in Nevada. My grandfather taught me through his actions that the world was knowable, that if you put your mind to it and weren’t afraid to try, you could figure out how most things work and then fix them. He was doing cutting-edge radar research during the week and fixing the washing machine on the weekends. It was all interesting to him. Physics was the most defined path as I grew up and I had an aptitude for it. It satisfied my curiosity to know how things worked and to solve tangible problems. As I pursued it into college it became more abstract and theoretical and it lost some of its appeal. At the same time, I found the Joint Program in Design — a collaborative major between Stanford’s Engineering and Art departments — and began to explore the workshops at Stanford. I don’t think that being an artist was ever a path I could even see when I was still in school. It was slowly revealed to me as my chosen paths lost their luster and I continued to wander.

Trane: Two of your recent projects — Infinite Mortal and Future Darwinist — deal with questions of what it means for humanity as a species to fundamentally alter the basic conditions of biological existence through technological means. There are several aspects of both works that are really interesting, but my questions are mainly going to concentrate on Infinite Mortal, which is your most recent work. I was wondering if you could answer two questions about Infinite Mortal: 1) Could you discuss the significance of the mirror-surfaced geometric sculptures — some of them seeming almost like stalactites — that dot the exhibit? There are some startling differences in material composition between some of these, and at least a few have interiors that can be accessed as well. What’s the role of these sculptures in terms of the thematic of mortality that informs your show? 2) Infinite Mortal and Future Darwinist both include amazing tapestries that were designed in collaboration with your partner Laurel Roth, and woven in Belgium on a computer-controlled jacquard loom. Could you talk about some of the elements that occur in Allegory of the Infinite Mortal, the tapestry on view as part of the Infinite Mortal project? I can see a tortoise, which is perhaps a reference to Darwin and the Galapagos Islands, and I can also see the mathematician Goedel, as well as Skylab and what look to be some sort of angelic creatures — perhaps the Seraphim, or the more obscure Ophanim. I’m not asking for an explanatory key here, of course, but what are some of the core ideas that are circulating here?

Andy: I created sculptures in which you can see through portals in the concrete, finite, vaguely geological exteriors into seemingly infinite fields on the inside. In some ways that is in reference to the attempt of finite, mortal, corporeal man to understand and experience the infinite — whether in space and time or spirit. Mineral and crystal formations act as a metaphor for evolution — both of the body and conceptual thinking about the infinite — in that both form according to specific patterns but uniquely in response to their exact and immediate environment. The interiors of the pieces create meditative mandalas with the hope that it will spark the viewer to contemplate for a moment the bigger questions of life that we tend to push to the back of our minds until we are convalescing in our Lazy Boys. The kernel of each of those pieces is a humorous list of the ways one might attain immortality — burning in hell for instance — or common stories of what happens when we die — going towards the light. The topics are so broad and indefinable that it helps to impose an arbitrary structure from which to begin exploring.

The Allegory of the Infinite Mortal, which Laurel Roth and I collaborated on, shows a model tableau representing human contemplation of the infinite. It is not so much about infinity or immortality as it is about the scientific and philosophical structures mankind has used throughout history to explore the concepts of infinity and immortality and our place therein. We studied and used imagery from both the scientific and religious fields, often merging the two to create one story — Skylab as Icharus, the Burj Khalifa as the Tower of Babel, binary code falling across the sky from a demon’s open mouth as his jaws return all created things back into undifferentiated matter. Many of the characters in the tapestry represent multiple thought trains. The tortoise, for instance, can be seen to represent Zeno’s Paradox as well as early creation myths — “turtles all the way down.”

Trane:  You have a currently running show in New York called 2011 that’s a collaborative work with Laurel. Could you say something about it, as well as any other projects you might currently be working on?

Andy: The show title — 2011 — humorously references the ambiguous time in our history between the 2001/2010 movies which hint at possible salvation for humanity and the birth of new worlds, and 2012 with the predictions that it will bring about the end of the world. It is in this in-between time that our show takes place. Below is the description we wrote for the show.

The show uses the tableau of a grotto to explore the odyssey and definition of humankind. This grotto was conceptualized with an eye to the longstanding relationship of humankind to caves and the millennia of slow processes that created them even before modern man started his own development towards the present. Grottos are different than caves, though they allude to them. A grotto is a mix of the sacred and the profane – by definition it is artificial to some degree, a man-made enclosure representing the inner world of humankind and intended to mimic an idealized and mythologized underworld. They are spaces meant for relaxation, contemplation, mythology, and sometimes worship. We interpret what our senses perceive, like fire-cast flickering images on cave walls (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave), and use those perceptions to try to locate our place in the larger world. By it’s artificial nature the grotto hints at the limitations of our own human perceptions to perceive infinity and objective reality, while simultaneously paying homage to the attempt to do.

In the center of the gallery lies Andy Diaz Hope’s Infinite Mortal – a large militaristic asteroid that has crashed to earth (or is hurtling away from it, depending on your place in time) bringing with it the illusion of encapsulating the infinite within its matte-black shell. In an alcove towards the back of the gallery is a large collaborative piece, The Reflection Engine, which takes the form of a walnut wardrobe who’s exterior is elaborately carved with symbols of the unknown and the unknowable, the inside of which is mirrored like a crystal geode in which you can sit, door closed, and surround yourself with self-reflections in an ever expanding infinity. The Allegory of the Infinite Mortal, also a collaborative piece, is a woven jacquard tapestry depicting the intellectual structures humankind uses to try to understand the infinite. Laurel Roth’s pair of battling peacocks, titled Beauty and assembled out of fake fingernails, barrettes, and costume jewelry, encourage examination of rules of attraction and competition as part of mating and natural selection.

In a facetted gallery cavern hang multifaceted white and mirror sculptures of both futuristic and primitive aesthetics from Diaz Hope’s Infinite Mortal series, reflecting infinite loops of light and video in sculptures based on geological formations. Juxtaposed among these crystal formations, Roth’s carved wood and cast brass primate skulls highlight the evolutionary changes that brought about the numinous transformation into modern humankind. Carved wooden skulls and bones of animals that evolved alongside of us, first hunted and then eventually domesticated, bred, and controlled by humans for use as food are displayed near these offshoots of our own evolutionary path.

All of the work is intended to question what it means to be human on this evolutionary path through time.

Next year we’ll be working as Fellows with the De Young Museum of San Francisco, with a focus on the development and creation of our third tapestry, the final one for this triptych, all of which are based loosely on foundation storylines of conflict in literature.

Filed under: art, culture, exhibit   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: 2011, Andy Diaz Hope, art, contemporary art, exhibit, Future Darwinist, Infinite Mortal, infinity, installation, interview, Laurel Roth, mirrors, science and art

leaving Swan’s Island

28Nov11

On my last full day on Swan’s Island, a bald eagle — bouncing in flight against the crisp coastal winds — floated in the sky outside of my window while I drank my morning coffee. Later, I walked down to the mud flats and picked about 15 good-sized clams which were cooked up later as part of a farewell supper with my friend, Barbara.

As autumn has moved into winter and the arc of the sun has gotten lower in the sky, all of the seas around the island have begun to glitter. Every day the surface of the sea flashes with the most brilliant silver-white light, a kind of crazy reflectivity that almost seems to float — like the flashing skin of a school of anchovies — above the surface of the water.

And it’s in this season that I packed my things, drove onto the ferry, and left the island behind, heading slowly back to California, and ultimately Japan.

The Japanese poet Kiyoko Ogawa wrote this wonderful tanka for me on the occasion of leaving the island and beginning my travels again:
 
（アメリカの若い友へ）

白鳥の島から西部をめざす君「on the road」の人生とこそ見ゆ
（はくちょうのしまからせいぶをめざすきみ on the roadのじんせいとこそみゆ）
 

for a young American friend

Your life seems to be
                  always on the road,
already leaving the swan island
               to head for the West,
place of your temporary rest.

Filed under: personal, poetry, sweet story of Trout Monroe, the sad   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: glitter, Kiyoko Ogawa, leaving, Maine, on the road, poetry, sparkle, Swan's Island, tanka, travel, winter light

a walk at Irish Point

28Nov11

One of my last walks on Swan’s Island involved a trek out to Irish Point, a spit of forest-topped granite that juts out between a beautiful rocky cove on one side, and the long crescent of a sandy beach on the other.  This area is called Irish Point because early in the island’s history there was a group of Irish laborers — woodcutters, I believe — who made their encampment here.   The granite boulders that are piled up at the end of the point are almost sculptural in form, and one set of boulders formed what looked almost like a tiny amphitheater.

As my walking partner K. and I navigated the beaches we stumbled across the usual detritus — lobster buoys and random bits of Styrofoam and rope — as well as plenty of crab hats (the upper portion of empty crab shells) and lobster mittens (detached lobster claws that have made their way to the shore unattended).  Later, as we made our way to West Point to look for the remains of a hotel that was built somewhere in the area in the 1800s (nothing but a pit now, apparently), we stumbled across a line of raccoon prints that crisscrossed the sandy beach.

The spruce forest lining the shore of West Point was full of trees that had been blown over, sometimes in pairs or groups of three.  The soil in this area can be pretty shallow so the trees blow over easily in high winds, their roots gnarling up into the air like strange feet.  The particular stretch of spruce forest that we walked through was covered with a carpet of sphagnum moss that was so deep and soft that it would have been easy to lie down in it and take a nap.  Forget about memory foam — I want a sphagnum mattress.

We never did find the foundation of the hotel, but in the middle of the forest, near a green stream, we came across an ancient hand-dug well that was lined with rounded granite stones, the mysterious trace of former inhabitants.  It was surrounded by a mossy lip, and filled with dark black water.

Autumn must be the season for reflection on Swan’s Island.  Walking back from the beach, we passed pool after pool of water, filled with fallen leaves and reflecting the sky.

Filed under: nature, sweet story of Trout Monroe, travel   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: granite, Irish Point, Maine, reflecting pool, sphagnum moss, spruce forest, Swan's Island, walking, well

inhabitable forest: an interview with Barbara Andrus

19Nov11

Barbara Andrus, who is based in both New York and Maine, makes installations from found natural materials — particularly forest-foraged wood — that erupt into space like thickets of dream shapes.  These shapes are both familiar — spheres formed by branches, teepees and huts made of found wood — and alien at the same time, the autochthonic twisting of natural form calling into question our relationship with shapes that might otherwise appear in the register of geometric purity or safe domesticity.  These are shapes that want to be inhabited, but that also resist this impulse with a textural wildness and replete excessiveness that is its own sort of mind, almost as if a set of perfect platonic forms were to be injected with the ceaseless wriggling of a beautiful school of eels.

I’ve been lucky enough to become friends with Barbara since I started staying on Swan’s Island, where she comes to harvest materials and collect ideas.  I don’t know much about Barbara’s working processes, but I imagine her walking through the forest with the two smartest dogs in the world while carrying a Japanese handsaw and watching for those shapes and textures that stand out in their necessary and unique beauty.

Barbara Andrus’s work is currently featured as part of the Sticks and Stones exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery, which runs until January 6, 2012.

Trane: I was wondering if you might spend a little bit of time discussing the process involved in making your work.  To what extent do you start with an idea and then seek out the material realize that idea, and to what extent do you let the materials themselves inform the projects?

Barbara: My process is fairly in my head, a lot of looking at the space on offer and building various pieces in my mind. Usually I need to see the space a couple of times and even so there is some chemistry of understanding the space that only happens when I’ve actually unloaded  materials  and started to be in the space. While I like your idea of always walking with a Japanese saw, usually the two activities are separate. While collecting, having located the trees to cut, I do edit the branches I choose to use and the choice of a tree is based on branch quality and interest. At different times, I’ve been interested in different kinds of trees. Now I work with maples, beeches, basket willow, striped maple and holly.

For the past few years I worked on this big cycle of ongoing characters in search of the next sculpture. The first iteration was a group of branch disks covered with gauzy fabric, heavily sewn over and around the twigs and branches. They were suspended from branch frames and formed a walking pathway. Next the sewing encompassed the frames as well. This next piece, with sewn side out, referred to an igloo. As I finished this work, I started to think about inverting the piece. An exhibit opportunity about turning nature inside out provided the venue. Briefly I excerpted and illuminated elements of the piece and installed it for artfair at Hotel 30/30. The last act of this series involved turning the sculpture into a carousel book. The book didn’t turn but the viewer walked through the pages of the book.

In the last three large installations, the form of the work is a spiral, derived from the form of a whelk shell; the shape alludes to a pilgrimage walk, and the viewer is invited into large spiraling spaces.

Trane: Paul Klee kept a notebook in which he recorded natural forms and textures in order to use them as basic components in his artwork later on.  Recently you showed me a jar of milkweed ‘wishes’ (the light, flowery puffs that float milkweed seeds through the air) that you’ve been collecting, and they were just about the softest thing that I’ve ever felt.  What are some of your favorite natural textures/materials, and what draws you to these particularly?

In the jars you saw were three kinds of seed-mobilizing fluffs: milkweed, scotch thistle and coltsfoot. Each fall for the last five or six years, I’ve collected milkweed silk. I am drawn to side eddies of how the world doesn’t work. The world (built) is so based on straight lines and right angles, so perpendicular. So the line qualities in trees and their twigs and branches made me so happy. Very little straightness. Next I thought about softness. Much of the modern world is not soft. Not lusciously natural: it’s fake, it’s rubber, shiny, plastic, new, hard and maybe even nasty. So when I started investigating milkweed — it was aaahhhh, this is wonderful stuff. And the dismantling of the seed pods (well I should be tired and done with this) but it’s still mesmerizing. The pods are gorgeous when closed, and then as they dry they arch around and open.

The sculptures contain the silk and allow it to move internally. I’ve started to make milkweed agitators.

Trane: A lot of your pieces take the form of houses or dwellings of some sort, and yet the prickly nature of the branches that you use to construct them pushes against the kind of complaisant domestic feeling that might usually be associated with such shapes.  In a way, it reminds me of a show that I saw at the Itami City Museum of Art that featured the work of Atsuhiko Misawa, who sculpts  life-sized animals from wood.  For this particular show he constructed a very typical-looking house from scrap wood that was painted white as a container for a rearing polar bear statue.  There was something wonderfully comedic in this juxtaposition of domestic and wild, but your work as well seems to work with this contrast, though to entirely different effect.  Could you say something about the role that the notions of ‘dwelling’ and domus — or other shapes that figure prominently, such as spheres — play in your work?

Inhabiting Sculpture. Inhabitable Space. I think a lot about this. I have lived in and around my installations and they are prickly — I think of the spaces as creating a temporary, unusual kind of space that visitors can inhabit briefly and hopefully carry out of the exhibit inside their memories.

Trane: Anything else you’d like to add?  Do you have any favorite stories regarding any of your previous exhibits?  Scandalous tidbits?  Humorous anecdotes?

Living in Manhattan has meant a life partially spent on the subway. This frustrated me so I decided to make work that I could make on the subway. This created some interesting situations. There was a period of time after 9/11 when people were excruciatingly polite to each other. If I was working on something, someone was apt to say “Excuse me please, but what are you making?” I think also when you are making something in a situation wherein most everyone isn’t making something, people like to watch and again one gets the very careful “What are you doing?” I had a project crocheting pink and green monofilament. I was making webs. Many subway questions. My favorite time was when I had made a knitting nancy out of a small cedar log and I was knitting a large wool tube. As I worked I saw an elegant tourist man watching from the end of the car.  As he exited the train he whipped around one last time for a last look. I realized the tool did have a kind of weapons-grade look to it but I was just knitting.

There was a whole series of funny adventures when I had a studio in an elevator building. I made this one really big thing that just would not fit into the elevator. When it was included in an exhibit, naturally I didn’t figure this out until the last possible minute. So three or four of us were staggering down six flights of stairs carrying the piece — palanquin style — on two-by-fours. We encountered a very drunk man coming up the stairs. He could not be dissuaded from adjuncting himself to the process. Fortunately after a flight or so he fell and attrited himself from the process.

Lastly there was an unseasonably warm spring day when we had an entire rental truck full of 16’ branch bundles to unload on upper Newbury street in Boston and we had to dive in and thru this river of oblivious pedestrian traffic all day long.

The last memory was of burning the aforementioned huge wood piece one phenomenally cold New Year’s Eve. It had been doused with accelerant and these huge firemen handled me a shovel and I ran back and forth shoveling coals into the piece until it caught and burned spectacularly.

Filed under: art, culture, design, exhibit   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Barbara Andrus, inhabitation, installation, natural materials, nature art, sculptural spaces, sculpture

noah’s ballast

15Nov11

A few weeks ago, my walking partner K. and I hiked up to Noah’s Ballast, a field of granite boulders that sits between Goose Pond and Red Point on Swan’s Island.  The interesting thing about this field of granite boulders is that the boulders are made up of a type of granite not found on the island — hence the genesis of the name.  It turns out that this particular field of granite, which sits alone in the middle of the forest, is actually glacial moraine, the residue of a former ice age.

Noah’s Ballast is an impressive spot — it reminds me a bit of Ringing Rocks in Pennsylvania, though without the ringing — but I think I like the hike up from Red Point road even more.  The path is marked out by small cairns, mostly made up of three-stone piles, that mark the way.  It’s remarkable how much a simple structure like a cairn calls attention to itself as an object constructed by human hands; it takes the smallest amount of shaping to make things want to stick in the eye and mind.  The path climbs up the mountain through bogs, a series of granite ledges topped with bonsai-sized pines, and a thick spruce forest carpeted with soft needles.

In order to get the most out of the walk it’s important to pay attention to the micro details.  There’s sphagnum moss everywhere on the island, but this hike was the first time for me to see large patches of bright pink-red moss growing at the edge of the bog.  Investigating under and around, like Thoreau so often does, I found a few wild cranberries; the one I ate tasted exactly like I imagined it would — sour and crisp, and bitterly refreshing.  Here’s what Thoreau writes about spring cranberries in Wild Fruits:

We require just so much acid as the cranberries afford in the spring.  No tarts that I ever tasted at any table possessed such a refreshing, cheering, encouraging acid that literally put the heart in you and set you on edge for this world’s experiences, bracing the spirit, as the cranberries I have plucked in the meadows in the spring.  They cut the winter’s phlegm, and now you can swallow another year of this world without other sauce.

Later, amid the granite boulders at the Ballast, we found huge colonies of an incredible lichen that looked very much like the crystalline entity from the Next Generation.  Thoreau surely would have read this as evidence of his theory that, contra Goethe’s claim that the leaf form is the primary shape in nature, it’s the crystal form that’s at the base of all things.

Filed under: eating, literature, nature, personal, sweet story of Trout Monroe   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: bog, boulders, cranberries, glacial moraine, granite, hiking, Maine, Noah's Ballast, sphagnum moss, Swan's Island, Thoreau, Wild Fruits

capital, it fails us now

01Nov11

“Capital, it fails us now / one day all will be living on credit.” These lyrics, from the great agit-punk band the Gang of Four, never seemed more appropriate.  It seems that just about every advanced industrial state in the world is heavily in debt and on the verge of collapse while the citizenry in most of these countries is becoming increasingly outspoken about the dwindling prospects available to them, the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else that seems to be increasing in just about every country, an international housing crisis, and the bailout of financial institutions that seem to have no stake at all in the social welfare of the very people who are financing their failure.  The anger at the 1% has taken the form of riots in London, organized street protests and general strikes in Greece, and the Occupy movement that is spreading from city to city in the United States.

And it’s no wonder that people are angry: Goldman Sachs reports quarterly losses even though it has set aside 10 billion dollars to pay for bonuses, compensation, and benefits.  Around 18 percent of Americans reported that they didn’t have enough money to buy food at all times last year.  Of the 55 million American families with mortgages, one in five are underwater; meanwhile, it is estimated that home supply will exceed demand by four to six million homes during the next six years, meaning there’s no chance that the houses of those with underwater mortgages will regain their value.  In 1961 the extremely rich paid around 42 percent of their income in taxes (after loopholes), while in 2008 they paid around 18 percent.  Since 2005, Hispanics have experienced a 66 percent drop in wealth, black households a 53 percent drop, and white households a 16 percent drop.  Conservative estimates are that foreclosures have reduced California property values by $650 billion, while Californians with underwater mortgages are overpaying banks by $20 billion a year.  Since the turn of the millennium, U.S. multinationals have fired 2.9 million workers in the United States, and hired 2.4 million workers abroad.  Taking inflation into account, wages for those Americans without college degrees (around 70% of the American population) have been in decline for almost 40 years.  One in six Americans lives in poverty, which is the highest level for 50 years.  The richest one percent of Americans get almost 25% of the nation’s income, and they control about 40% of national wealth.  A typical middle-class family has lost 23% of its wealth since the recession began, while a typical upper-class family has lost only about 12% of its wealth due to the fact that the wealthy are able to better shield themselves during times of financial and economic crisis.

Ajay Kapur, Niall Macleod, and Narendra Singh have coined a term for the type of economy that we’re living with now: a plutonomy.  A “plutonomy” is an economy in which growth is powered by the wealthy and consumed by the wealthy, leaving everyone else to the side.  The Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties were both economic plutonomies, as is the Great Recession that we’re living through now.  Though businesses have about six trillion dollars available to them to invest as capital, almost none of this is being invested in socially productive enterprises (such as businesses that actually make things) because greater profits are available through playing the financial markets.  This keeps wealth circulating among the richest, with no trickledown effect for the rest of us.

There’s been a lot of talk about austerity and belt tightening, but as far as government funds are concerned this is a fetish of the right, and an absolutely crazy thing to do during a financial downturn.  There are almost no professional economists who believe that the austerity measures demanded by the far right of the Republican party will do anything but hurt the US economy, and even economists on the right are likely to call for austerity measures to kick in after the current slump is over, rather than during this time of crisis.  There is almost no economic evidence to suggest that austerity measures will create jobs and help to bring the US out of the current economic slump.  Real solutions demand permanent job creation in this country and a redistribution of wealth — via a return to higher levels of taxation on the wealthy and corporations — to those enterprises that produce genuine social goods rather than sketchy financial derivatives. During the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties there was a progressive slogan that stated that “Wealth is the manure of society.”  Just like manure, you’ve got to spread the wealth around if you want the garden to grow.

Money is a tool that was created to serve human needs, not to be worshiped or fetishized like the golden bull.  When money stops serving our purposes, it’s time to stop worshiping money and instead get to work sketching out what our real needs and desires as a society are, and how to go about making them true.

The final words here are from Shelley’s great poem Queen Mab.  It’s time to ask ourselves whether it’s the plutonomy of Mab that we want, or a democratically equitable society where we all have a chance and a voice.

From Queen Mab:

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power,
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold;
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings,
And with blind feelings reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery;
But in the temple of their hireling hearts
Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn
All earthly things but virtue . . .

p.s. Sources for this post include stories from The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and APM’s Marketplace.

(The image above is by Eric Drooker and can be found at gstrike.org.)

Filed under: economy, poetry, politics, society   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: austerity, economic crisis, failure of capitalism, Occupy movement, Occupy Wall Street, plutonomy, Queen Mab, state of the U.S. economy, the 99%

the occupation in iraq

01Nov11

Earlier this month, without much fanfare, President Obama announced that the remaining combat troops in Iraq would return home by the end of the year.  The fact that there are no victory celebrations in the streets speaks volumes about the ambivalent nature of public opinion toward what has been one of America’s longest wars.  No matter what a person’s personal views about the Iraq war might be, it’s impossible not to register how much this war has cost.  The latest issue of the The Nation gives a concise catalog of these costs: the deaths of more than 4,400 Americans with some 30,000 more wounded; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis either killed or wounded and millions displaced; an enduring antipathy toward the U.S. generated by the images of tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib; direct costs of $800 billion and indirect costs, as calculated by economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz; of between four and six trillion dollars.  The costs of the war have seen a pre-war Treasury surplus transformed into the enormous deficit that haunts us today.

Before the beginning of the war, and just after the war started, I joined a series of anti-war protests because I believed then — and I believe even more now — that going to war in Iraq was fundamentally the wrong thing to do.  As the war in Iraq quietly winds down, with almost no public acknowledgment whatsoever, I thought I would post this series of photos from the anti-war protests that occurred in the San Francisco Bay Area at the beginning of the war as a reminder of how divisive the war was at the start, and how much public opposition there was — including a single day of worldwide protest that registered as the largest single act of protest ever, with an estimated 10 million people involved.

As the war winds down there’s an especially vicious after effect that will greatly affect returning US veterans: though the unemployment rate is unconscionably high for everyone in the US right now, the unemployment rate is even higher for US veterans.  It’s a horrible irony that the cost of the war, at least partly responsible for the inability of the US government to deal with the economic crisis at home, is going to result in the return of veterans — many who have sacrificed both economic and family stability — to a very financially unwelcoming home front.

The end of this war opens up a chance back here, a chance to rebuild this broken country and work on making it a place where veterans can be welcomed with open arms, where there are decent jobs available for all, where everyone who is sick or hungry or needs a roof over their head can find what they need, and where we can start relating to each other as citizens again, not in any way subject to the frights of war.

Filed under: politics, society   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: anti-war protests, end of the war, Iraq War, returning veterans, the costs of war

occupy oakland

01Nov11

Tuesday’s violent early-morning dispersal of the Occupy Oakland encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza doesn’t come as much of a surprise, even if the reason for the raid given by Oakland’s acting chief of police — that there was a worry about sanitary conditions at the encampment — was surprising enough for Peter Sagal of NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! to facetiously enquire if the chief cleans his dirty toilet by tossing in a few flash grenades.  The way in which the Occupy Oakland camp was broken up was unnecessary, uncivic, and contravenes the Oakland Police Department’s own regulations concerning the use of “less-lethal” projectiles.  The Oakland Police Department, in conjunction with other local police departments, fired tear gas canisters, bean-bag rounds, and — by most accounts — rubber bullets at unarmed protestors, including protestors in wheelchairs.  Perhaps most disturbing of all is the hospitalization of Scott Olsen, a veteran of the Iraq war, with a serious head injury, sustained while non-violently confronting the line of police as they were approaching to break up the encampment.

The reason that the actions of the Oakland Police Department aren’t too much of a surprise in this case is that they have, as the saying goes, “prior” when it comes to the use of excessive force against non-violent protestors.  The current rulebook concerning the use of “less-lethal” munitions that the Oakland Police Department is supposed to abide by was drawn up after a 2003 attack on a non-violent anti-war protest at the Oakland docks that I participated in.  This unprovoked attack — including the use of wooden dowels and rubber bullets at close range against unarmed and unresisting protestors — resulted in settlements and court costs of somewhere in the ballpark of two million dollars.

Clearly the early-morning raid on the Occupy Oakland camp was an attempt to avoid public scrutiny.  As anybody who’s ever lived in Oakland knows (I lived in downtown Oakland for seven years) the downtown area is primarily a civic and business center and it tends to clear out at night.  The residents of Oakland — including a high percentage of elected officials and government employees — tend to be extremely sympathetic to social justice issues and it’s doubtful if the police could have executed a daylight eviction without a great deal of public opposition involved.  The stealth involved in this act is symptomatic of the increasing disconnect between the political, corporate, and financial classes that hold the levers of power and the voices of a deeply concerned citizenry that can’t seem to get any kind of proper hearing for what are clearly very real and legitimate grievances: the stultifying pressures of damagingly high levels of unemployment; a serious lack of decent, full-time positions for those who are lucky enough to find work; a healthcare system that is insanely out of whack; skyrocketing education costs; and a mortgage crisis that, after it all plays out, will have seen millions of people lose their homes.  The reason for this disconnect seems fairly clear — about 50% of the members of Congress are millionaires while only about 1% of the US population fits into this category — and this surely plays into the historically low approval rating of 13% that the public holds toward our elected representatives.

The real issue here is why these relatively minor acts of non-violent civic unrest and civil disobedience on the part of those who clearly have real concerns to voice — concerns that resonate with the majority of the U.S. population — are being met with violence rather than care.  The issues that the Occupy Wall Street movement is dealing with are not fringe issues, but are in fact the central issues that are going to occupy American society — and probably European society as well — for at least the next decade.   I already know where I stand — people over profits, and cooperation over corporations.

Filed under: economy, politics, society   |  2 Comments
Tags: "less-lethal" munitions, Oakland Police Department use of "less-lethal" munitions, Occupy movement, Occupy Oakland, police violence, protest