THE SHOW SO FAR

Are you autistic? do you have ADD? Some of my readers have been requesting this Guardian link. (you know who you are… after this test, you’ll know even more!) The on-line test can be quite revealing.

I’ve been hanging out with our friend Nancy Kates who finished a film this year called Brother Outsider – the life of Bayard Rustin. This is a brilliant film documenting Rustin, the openly gay African-american activist and advisor to Martin Luther King, who was more or less written out of history. Nancy and I spent quality time playing with baby chicks and watching Chris Marker’s 1992 conceptualist film The Last Bolshevik. Marker is basically the closest thing you can get to a ‘blog filmmaker.’ The film is a beautiful reminiscence on the dead Russian filmmaker, Alexandreovich Medvedkin and his role in the Agit Prop trains that once traveled across Russia filming the proletariat, processing the films in special mobile darkrooms and screening them back to the very people that were in them. Agit prop trains were so advanced and (anasynchrostic) for the premodern historical moment (circa 1918) in which they were used, that I still can’t quite wrap my head around them. Dziga Vertov was heavily involved in these Agit Prop trains also and kinetic montages of trains featured prominently in his films.

Working for the past few days on my ‘Means of Production’ project, I found the first order of business was to cut the outrageously long grass with my kama. Shortly after starting I was approached by two Chinese women who were animatedly talking in Cantonese and pantomiming the kama’s cutting motion. I realized that they wanted to show me something. One lady spoke a little English and indicated to me that I was doing it incorrectly. She indicated that her 79 year old friend would show me how it is done. Apparently the 79 year old had spent her girlhood cutting grass for cooking fuel in the mountains of Guangdong Province and then went on to raise six children. What followed was a remarkable demonstration of ergonomic efficiency and she soon had a large area of grass cleared; the ‘swish swish’ of the kama punctuted by her cackling laughter and chortling expletives. The next day the pair gave a similar demonstation to the members of the Environmental Youth Alliance with whom I had been working, again laughing away as they showed us their mastery of a deceptively simple skill.
Later the MONOLITH arrived- a 5000 lb block of granite inscribed with the words “Means of Production”, a reference to Marx’s concept and our intention to furnish the raw materials needed for a degree of self sufficiency by planting an urban forest.

The dominant sensation I am dealing with these days is one of informational vertigo. As an avowed pattern sniffer, I am increasingly having trouble shutting out the data chatter and opening my mind to the big picture. But maybe that’s the point. On the one hand we have the epidemic phenomenon of constant partial attention. News floods in from the web, satellite TV, piles of newspapers, magazines etc. The phone rings constantly. Correspondence needs to be answered, bills need to be paid on-line. But how does one maintain balance? Filtration is the key, but already that is differentiating the continnuum. The ‘deep pattern’ is created through integration. The neural equivalent of the ‘smart mob’ organizational strategy, (which incidently is the one bright spot in the search for replacements for heirarchical organizational forms.) The constant chatter of cable network news contributes to what the venerable Walter Benjamin called ‘The State of Emergency’, which basically functions as a form of fascist social control. Pausing and reflecting have become a lost art and we are in fact encouraged not to do so because when we start to put together the many tiny sound bytes of our perceptions, we might not like what we see. Hence, my interest in deep time. In the nineteen eighties, I embarked upon a rather (arguably) Pyrrhic hobby of propagating slow growing desert plants from seed. Some of these have taken seemingly forever to reach any size, and need to be given long dormant periods, or they will turn into a rotten pulp. Throughout the wars, epidemics and climate change these little nubs of UWTB (see 5/22/2003 )inexorably add on infinitessmally small layers of growth, occasionally gracing us with an ephemeral flower. One of my favorites is the bizarre, Euphorbia obesa, a spherical little xerophyte from the baking shale rubble of the South African Karoo region. They are flowering now on my window sill, males and females on seperate baseball-shaped plants. In the absence of South African desert insects, they need to be hand pollinated with a little sable water-colour brush. I have managed to collect their sparse seeds and have propagated them into more little plants. Many of these plants are extremely endangered in the wild but have been saved from extermination because of the efforts of extreme ‘otaku’ horticulturalists. It’s something anyone with a window sill and an interest in ‘deep time’ can do.

Whales are alleged to think in “deep time”

Species jumping is one of the scenarios being postulated for the spread of Mad Cow disease into Canada. Reuters points out that deer and elk, which commonly come into contact with cattle herds, are increasingly stricken by a disease similar to mad cow called chronic wasting disease spread though the proliferation of game farms. The existence of this disease in Alberta has led some to wonder whether it could have jumped to domestic cattle although scientists’ have failed in their own attempts to achieve that transmission.
David Theodoropoulus, an inveterate conservation biologist and ‘otaku’ ethnobotanist, seed merchant has written an amazing book entitled “Invasion Biology: Critique of A Pseudoscience” in which he very eloquently takes on the basic ecological notion that ‘exotic’ species are destroying the planet’s ecosystems. We’ve all heard of the deleterious effects of the rabbits in Australia and introduced goats and pigs eating the giant tortoise’s eggs on the Galapagos, but Theodoropoulos, argues that the real damage is caused by the destruction of habitat by humans which allows the exotics to do damage. He shows that in many cases exotic organisms like zebra mussels and eucalyptus actually act to increase local biodiversity. I was sure that I would disagree with this seemingly heretical premise but he makes a very convincing arguement in this book. People have always been moving plants and animals around and many of the trees that are now classed as exotic to North America were quite common here before glaciation such as Gingko biloba, Metasequoia etc. Theodoropoulus critiques ‘biological nativism’ as a kind of eco-fascism which became prevalent during Nazi Germany as a form of ecological ethnic cleansing, citing Robert Jay Lifton , (author of the seminal “Nazi Doctors”)

The BBC series Correspondent broadcast an amazing documentary called WAR SPIN (rebroadcast on CBC TV’s ‘The Passionate Eye), which reveals the orchestrated PR fakery behind the ‘rescue’ of Jessica Lynch. It turns out that the Iraqi doctors at the unguarded hospital to which Lynch had been brought had donated their own blood to Ms. Lynch and tried to bring her back to the US side, but the driver of the ambulance had been shot by American soldiers, nearly killing Lynch as well.
On the SARS front, yesterday’s New York Times reports that the virus was found in wild animals being sold for food in Guangdong’s Province’s markets, notably the Masked palm civet. A number of the earliest SARS cases involved food handlers in these markets, where threatened and endangered species are frequently sold for human consumption. If this connection can be corroborated, it will be one more disease, like the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus- HIV link, where viruses jump to human hosts during the consumption of endangered wildlife in biodiversity hotspots.
Wildlife markets are particularly hard on turtles (my favorite) animals, with several species facing extinction because of their exploitation for traditional medicine, the pet trade and the gourmet food market. While the eradication of turtles may not rank in the forefront of the present global ‘state of emergency’ for most people, it seems a shame that these remarkable creatures, which predate even the dinosaurs, are getting wiped off the map. Jim Hubbard’s 1999 film ‘The turtle hunter’ (shown at the 2001 Margaret Mead film festival) was achingly beautiful. Originally shot in 1961, this B & W film documents the life of tell the story of Otis Terrell Overland, who made his living stalking the giant alligator snapping turtle in the swamps and bayous of Mississippi. The alligator snapper is the largest freshwater turtle on earth and is now threatened with extinction.

As we hurtle towards the consumation of superpower hegemony and ‘total information awareness’, what continues to keep me going is what Kurt Vonnegut’s refers to in his 1959 (the year of my birth) (Sirens of Titan) as the principle of the ‘Universal Will to Become’ (UWTB).
Nothing can extinguish it.
Vonnegut powered his Martian space craft with it .
Trees have it, SARS viruses have it, mad cow prions have it. We can feed on it if we want to.
I guess this is the ‘flow’ principle that I am so fascinated by. It’s easy to see UWTB all around us coursing through growing plants. This energy when it courses through living systems is preserved as flow form. Wood grain for example, maps UWTB in its flow patterns, so even a dead piece of plywood shows (fossil) UWTB. I spent the day planting big ropy rhizomes of Phyllostachys nuda and Phyllostachys rubromarginata bamboos, each studded with nacsent subterranean growth shoots, epicentres of UWTB. Powered by UTWB, these buds can shoot up into 2 inch thick culms that will grow from 0 to 20 ft. high in a month And yet there is nothing there now but some onion- like layers of cells and a whole lot of photsynthetic intent. Left to its own devices UWTB will prevail.
The burning question of course is that of nanotech. Will our own artifacts exhibit UWTB? and morph into the dreaded ‘gray goo’ that Neal Stephenson posits in The Diamond Age? Computer viruses certainly have shown this tendency. If this happens, (and the ‘blue goo’ police nanobots don’t prevail), it could be curtains for the DNA based ecosphere (global ecophagy). UWTB will still prevail though, even in a techno-ecology. Life forms or sim life forms are only conduits through which UWTB expresses itself.
this just in from my friend laura:
Cockroaches to have Buddhist funeral
Thailand is preparing to cremate more than 1,000 giant cockroaches – and then hold a traditional Buddhist funeral to appease their owners. (I love those giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches, they definitely have UWTB!)
20 years ago in my installation ‘Posthuman Culture’, I populated a model city with their more common relatives- Periplanata americana- and gave them a photosynthetic ‘algae ocean’ to provide food and oxygen. I was trying to figure out how things would look when cockroaches finally replaced us. They exceeded expectations, breeding rampantly and eventually broke out of their sealed chambers and infested the Ontario College of Art.
Vonnegut also writes:
“It took us that long to realize that a purpose of
human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love
whoever is around to be loved.”

Ailanthus altissima trees erupting out of a building
in New York City, showing UWTB

I spent the last day and a half hauling ass between Cortez Island and Saltspring Island to pick up a load of rare bamboos, which will form part of the basis of my self replicating art material supply system called ‘Means of Production’. I hung out with the local ‘bambuseros’ Doug Box and Naren Karter who supplied me with some botanical marvels.
Of note is the exquisite and rare Phyllostachys aureasulcata harbin which has culms that have a peculiar inner glow. Fargesia dracocephala, or Dragon’s head bamboo is native to the mountains of China at elevations of over 6,000 ft. The Fargesias are lovely weepsters that form part of the basic sustenance of the nearly extinct giant panda. Bamboo growers are deep ‘otaku’ in my experience. The characteristics distinguishing the many varieties can be very subtle and minute, such as the fuzzyness of the shoots or the number of hairs on a leaf. Taxonomic wrangling is commonplace and the scientific names are always being changed. The American Bamboo Society is a good place to go for further information on these fascinating plants.

Bambusa oldhamii near Hilo Hawaii, (Akaka Falls)

I just spent an interesting day at the “MEDIA THAT MATTERS” conference, listening to John Stauber of PR WATCH where I learned some interesting stuff. There are over 700,000 PR firms in the US constituting a 30-40 billion dollar a year industry There are more PR people than journalists in the US and the gap is widening. Over 40 % of what is called news, actually originates from the PR industry.
Stauber explained the “corporate grassroots” movement that has been implemented by the US PR industry. This top down politicking by corporations, managed by the PR divisions, forces the corporation’s lower echelons to mobilize politically against anything deemed to be against the corporate interest. This is how the insurance corporations and pharmaceutical companies killed health care reform in the US. It has the seemingness of democracy because the people coming out against an issue are local, albeit well-briefed.
The formula for PR/Propaganda management that is now the corporate mantra is:
HAZARD + OUTRAGE = RISK
Stauber explained how PR firms deliberately concentrate on managing the outrage of a situation, (not the hazard) by sowing confusion into the media about issues. The perception management is of course tightly monitored by frequent polling.
His books – “Trust us We’re Experts” and “Toxic Sludge is good for you” are worth a read.
Stauber imagined some new models for empowering activists in their organizing campaigns. For example in the case of the environment, he said that “food and water” (or rather the purity thereof) are issues that are useful rallying points. Even the right, doesn’t want to be poisoned.
“Evil can only exist when good people do nothing”
-Gandhi

I guess we are what we eat. May 3rd’s Globe and Mail ran a story about how vegetables from California are contaminated with a rocket fuel component which has leached into the irrigation water from weapons facilities. The contaminant, (perchlorate) was found in iceberg lettuces irrigated with water from the Colorado river, (see May 4th’s post re: this) Perchlorate impairs the ability of the thyroid to produce the hormones needed for proper fetal and infant brain development. There are concerns that high childhood exposure to perchlorate could lead to lower IQ scores, mental retardation and motor-skills deficits. So there it is. . . The military industrial complex is actually making us stupid. Somehow it doesn’t come as much of a surprise.