transmissions from a compromised antenna

From the upcoming issue of the Fifth Estate:

On November 3, 2006, anti-war protester and Chicago art-rock videographer/archivist Malachi Ritscher self-immolated as a demonstration of opposition to the American wars.  Near a sign that said, “Thou Shalt Not Kill—As Ye Sow So Shall Ye Reap,” and in front of a steel sculpture called “The Flame of Millenium,” Malachi, draped in an American flag, set himself on fire while his camera filmed his death.  His actions received relatively little media coverage, despite (or because of) the poignant immensity of their meaning.

Such an amazing story and I had never heard it.

I just read this piece by Walden Bello, senior analyst at Global South, in the New York Indypendent yesterday. I'll mention in passing that I specifically avoided disturbing news stories while on my writing retreat in Florida. So for almost three months I didn't read any stuff like this. And then, a jump head-first into ice water. Bello is one of the people that comes out of the global justice movement whose politics I most admire and trust. So to see him making this argument is disturbing.

 

Essentially, the logic here is that Asian economic growth has led to deepening inequality, but rising consumer power even among the poor created a situation in which political confrontation did not swing out of control. But now, with a weakening consumer base around the world, workers in Asia, especially China, Indonesia, and South Korea, are being laid off by the tens of millions:

In China, about 20 million workers have lost their jobs in the last few months, many of them heading back to the countryside, where they will find little work. The authorities are rightly worried that what they label "mass group incidents," which have been increasing in the last decade, might spin out of control. With the safety valve of foreign demand for Indonesian and Filipino workers shut off, hundreds of thousands of workers are returning home to few jobs and dying farms. Suffering is likely to be accompanied by rising protest, as it already has in Vietnam, where strikes are spreading like wildfire. Korea, with its tradition of militant labor and peasant protest, is a ticking time bomb. Indeed, East Asia may be entering a period of radical protest and social revolution that went out of style when export-oriented industrialization became the fashion three decades ago.

All of this will reverberate here, of course. We may be in for the ride of our lives.

Yes, I participated in this disease-like meme. Cross-posted from Facebook. Probably I'm missing a lot of important stuff in here, but these were a few of the signposts:


( Check the list... )

It's always a shame to loose action scenes, but I'm afraid the current story is tighter without this gnostic-tinged shark-fighting scene.
( Look below to fold to read it. )

Words written for current novel: 46,000.

Things started spinning out of a control a little bit today, and some things happened that I didn't expect. Normally that makes me happy because I say "Oh, the characters are acting on their own and not as little puppets of the author. Badass!" I think that's generally the right reaction when that happens. But today it raised some dangerous questions and caused me to go back and revise a big section of outline. The thing is, of course, that when characters' actions veer away from the outline, sometimes it feels like the strings of the puppet have been cut and other times it feels like deeper strings have been revealed. The new master isn't the conscious mind of the author, in other words, but some subterranean psychological operator. In this case, it happened in a kind of literal way.

Well, perhaps I should put it down until Monday. Some other shocking things took place personally so it may just be the wrong time to keep barreling through with it.

 

You might never realize, if you were not trying to record the audio to a story of about eleven thousand words that takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to read even without mistakes (and oh boy are there plenty!) how constantly dogs are barking in a place like, say, St. Petersburg, Florida. If you want an idea, well, check out next week's story on podcastle. Or, I'm not sure if it's going up next week. But if you listen carefully to the one I recorded, you occasionally hear dogs barking.

That reminds me of this story about a guy named Carl Weismann who was out recording bird songs for Danish State Radio. On every tape, he found himself chopping out the barking dogs. (Hmm, is that because stupid dogs are always barking, Carl?). Anyway, at the end he had this bowl of tape fragments big enough to be make-believe chips at a big party. So he started checking the pitch of each bark. Soon he found that he could arrange the individual barks to form a song. And thus, the immortal barking dogs "Pop Goes the Weasel" was born. Click here to hear them sing what appears to be "Reading and Writing and 'Rythmatic."

I would do that. But I'd have the dogs sing "Tainted Love" and the St. Pete dogs don't really sing on key.
 

My SF detective story "The Ugly Cops" is now up at Semaphore Magazine. Download the current issue to read it. This one describes a world in which riots get so out of control that the state resorts to dosing everybody with a drug that makes them afraid of cops. Scary material, yes, but can you figure out whodunnit?

After one of my periodic moaning sessions about the lack of collective housing in New York City, my friend Xristl sent me a link to an interesting piece in the NY Times about Brooklyn Cohousing, a group that's working to build a community-focused apartment building in Brooklyn. Here's a link to the group's own site. I was really happy to see that this group builds real consensus instead of relying on majority-rules voting. That makes me believe they've thought deeply about what they want their community to look like.

Anyway, the usual complaint about consensus making, in which the group discusses the problem until a solution amenable to everyone is found, is that it's too time-consuming. And one would imagine that this would be even worse in New York City, a place famous for the way everyone hustles around and where "time is money."

But check out this passage from the Times article:

Ken Levenson, the architect who designed Carlton Mews and who has been hired to redesign the interior space, said that he was apprehensive about the consensus process. “But it’s actually turned out to be less time-consuming than working with developers,” he said. “It’s counterintuitive, but when a decision is made here, it’s really made. They can only speak to me as a group, but whenyou work with developers, any one of the partners can call you every day with another idea.”

So it looks like having a group of people who work together to come to a decision might actually be more efficient than a model of confused authoritarianism, where different executives at a developer keep switching around or disagreeing with one another. It's nice to see that in print.
 

Thanks to Mars for sending this story my way. I guess as states all across the union make insane cuts to all kinds of services, we're going to see more surreal examples of the sometimes sleazy techniques used by the people who still have to teach, drive buses, or otherwise provide the services in order to keep the rusty old machine clunking along.

One thought that occurs to me... I wonder if this teacher, Tom Farber, concocted this scheme in part because he knew it would draw media attention to the dearth of funding for teaching supplies. You could easily organize a massive letter-writing campaign and not pick up as much coverage as this will get. We're coming into a time where media jiujitsu is the skill that's in demand. It's hard to teach, can be used for nasty purposes as well as nice ones, and you never know who's going to emerge as a talent in that field.

Just started reading Roberto Bolano's sprawling novel _2666_ about a week ago, and I can hardly think about anything else. So far, I'm still on "The Part About the Critics," and I am truly inspired at the author's ability to make the conference-going antics of four literature scholars more gripping than any of the random crime novels I was reading recently. I liked the book from the first word, but when an otherwise ordinary paragraph started with the line, "The city, like all cities, was endless," I nearly swooned.

Go read it.

My street in Brooklyn is at the crossroads of three major trucking routes through Brooklyn. This street has also always been a popular place to do illegal or paralegal stuff. The reasons for that are open to debate but being in the shadow of the bridge certainly has something to do with it. That tends to drive away some of the families that would speak out on other streets, and there are no large apartment buildings, either—at least, not yet...

Anyway, for these and other reasons, a particular corner half a block from me has become the place to stand around looking for work if you're an immigrant from Guatemala or the Bahamas. Groups of guys have been looking for work in this location since, I'd say, about 2004. When I was briefly employed as a floor refinisher around that time, our crew actually picked up a couple of guys from that very corner. They were great workers and much more concerned about looking clean than we were: They brought a clean set of brightly colored athletic clothes in a duffel bag and changed into them as soon as work was over.

So from time to time I see some cops over there talking to these guys. And I always wonder what they are telling them. Sometimes they're writing a ticket, sometimes just talking. So, yesterday morning I was walking by and I saw a short, fat police officer with a shaved head addressing them. He had these guys—all of them black or latino—sit down in a row on the steps of a large municipal building, then he started marching up and down in front of this assembly, pivoting his arms from the shoulder as he gave a little speech to them.

Wanting to overhear what was being said, I slowed my walk to a stroll as I passed. "I don't want to see you guys in a big group," he said. "You can be in little groups of three and four. Then we can look the other way. But you can't get too bunched up. I don't want to see a group of twenty people standing on the corner."

So that's the policy... I guess. I could tell the cop sympathized with the immigrants, who desperately want to work. And I wonder who it is who would complain if there was a larger group. Are they trying to keep pictures out of the press or just trying to "maintain order"? With the foreclosure crisis spiraling out of control the way it is, we may see a couple of Lehman Brothers traders joining them soon!

As long as our friends on Wall Street were raking it in, we all got lectured by the government itself about how government interference in markets is evil and wrong. This argument was used to push through large-scale deregulation that allowed all sorts of risky investment practices and led directly to the foreclosure crisis and then to what you see now happening on Wall Street. Now that they're losing, all of sudden Government interference is good, especially when it comes in the form of a $700 billion buyout with public money of financial junk they can't sell on the market. And, as a bonus, they also get bizarre language that makes the Secretary of the Treasury above judicial review. Glenn Greenwald described the situation very well here:

What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism -- where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We've retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.

But don't just shake your head and rage at the screen. People are coming together to rally against the bailout all over the country today. Visit this site to find the one closest to you. If you're in New York, look for me at Bowling Green.

-jt

Note the second paragraph from this AP article on the Lehman Brothers crash:

In an effort to calm the markets, Lehman pre-announced third-quarter results on Wednesday. In an affidavit filed with the bankruptcy court, Lehman Chief Financial Officer Ian Lowitt said that action "did little to quell the rumors in the markets and the concerns about the viability of the company." He said the uncertainty made it impossible for Lehman to continue.

Employees emerging from Lehman's headquarters near the heart of Times Square Sunday night carried boxes, tote bags and duffel bags, rolling suitcases, framed artwork and spare umbrellas.

...scary.

-jt

Really meditating on the repetitive cycles that seem to undergird everything in life today, prodded by my realization this morning that my bike was stolen last night.

In a sense, I have no one to blame but myself. This metal post outside my house has been leaning at an angle since some drunk-ass person gave it a firm nudge a few days ago. Yet I locked to it anyway. A roommate actually came into my room and told me to go take it off the post because it was leaning over so far that he thought someone might be able to steal it. "You know how people are around here," he said. And I do. Yet I was too lazy to go outside and take take of it. I went to sleep at midnight.

When I woke up the bike was the first thing on my mind. I put on some shoes and went outside. I found the post lying on the ground next to the shattered remains of the concrete that once held it in place. The bike was gone. A chunk of concrete larger than my fist still clung to the south end of the pole, so the bike thief must have had to work to get the U-lock around that. But get it around, they did. Now I'm back in the market for a cheap bike on Bedford Avenue, in all likelihood stolen from someone else! And the wheel keeps spinning 'round.

In other news, I really wish I could attend Arse Electronica, a three-day festival investigating the intersections between science fiction, technology, and sexuality. So up my alley.... It's when I check out stuff like that that I yearn for my San Francisco days.

-jt

If you haven't checked out the new ad comparing Barack Obama to a wolf stalking Sarah Palin, you can watch it here. Interestingly, the attacks on Palin that the ad points out were found "completely false" had no connection whatsoever to Barack Obama. But no matter, run it the words anyway with Obama's face in the background, then cut to a pack of wolves running through the forest, presumably getting ready to burst in through the window and ravage Governor Palin. This is some intensely racist and foul stuff we're seeing right now. I don't know if you can fight this sort of thing in today's United States by taking the high ground...

-jt

I strongly recommend that you check out this article about the various shady tactics Republican operatives are using to limit the voter turnout of various Democratic-leaning groups, including blacks, latinos, the poor in general, the elderly, and so on. Another piece, published in the New York Review of Books, covers similar territory from a more analytical position.

Of the many disturbing trends I've been watching over the past few weeks, this one is the scariest. It's a very direct attack on democracy that really shows the current Republican Party's true colors.

But it also opens a window for participation in the election for people like me, who are too critical of Obama to actually stump for him, yet who feel at the same time that a McCain victory would be a nightmare on a scale almost too wide to imagine. I've contacted a few people working on this issue about the possibility of volunteering doing registration work or other activities to combat voter disenfranchisement. I'll post here if I find any actions that are reasonably easy to get involved with.

-jt

I think this is funny. At least unbelievably bogus politics can still make us laugh.

-jt

Hi All,

Sorry for the long gap between posts. I've been really busy. I have a new article up at the Gotham Gazette that looks at how the city's high real estate prices make it difficult to get new schools built, and how some elected officials are attempting to convince developers to help pick up the tab.

Comments appreciated as always.

-jt

Hey All,

Rachel was only up here for a couple of days but we kicked out some jams... Xris and her and I all agreed that the new Experiment Haywire tracks sound really good. In my opinion, they sound better than anything I've made with her before. More psychedelic and slightly prettier than Annihilation Chic but also still really hard and aggressive. Hopefully we're gonna take a little more time with these and make sure they're done right.

After having written music for many of the songs on "Annihilation Chic," the newest full-length release by Experiment Haywire, I keep wondering what they're doing with me and Rachel's babies. I'm especially curious about the songs "Occult Casualty" and "Mean Enough Hot Enough," which I rank among my best work in music. Although I'm still not sure if they're getting any dance-floor time, I have seen a couple of reviews. There's one by the "post-industrial" Web magazine Heathen Harvest, which suggests  DJs bust out the Mean Enough. Another review at Regen points out a few flaws in the album but also calls it "simple, loud, irreverent, and danceable." I can't really ask for much more.

In other news, Haywire's in town this week and there will be more songs coming soon...