I haven’t been following the Google Books lawsuit and settlement proposal too closely because I don’t often think of myself as a book author. Not in the sense that Google Books or the settlement will impact my livelihood. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that the settlement might impact my freedom. But a press release from the Software Freedom Law Center caught my eye:
Today SFLC filed a letter with the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York objecting to the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement. In the letter, filed on behalf of the FSF and author Karl Fogel, SFLC asks the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses.
I’m embarrassed to confess I had been thinking that this lawsuit (You are of course familiar with the lawsuit. Right?) was more academic than all that. I was thinking about what it means that Yahoo, Amazon and Google get to go sit in a darkened room somewhere (an expansive board room with a fine catered lunch, more likely) and rewrite copyright law all by themselves. I wasn’t thinking about freedom. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been kicking around the right way to announce a thing I announced to my colleagues a week ago. That thing being that I’m leaving Gotham Gazette. The reasons are both simple and complex, but the simplest is that the publication really, really needs someone to evaluate web analytics tools not someone to tackle the big, fun, challenging question of why New Yorkers aren’t more interested in public policy. Well, I think they do need the latter, but fundamental scarcity of resources means that the former is winning out.
These are good questions, though. The civic engagement ones, I mean. Is it because we think policy is impenetrable and our legislators are all bought? Is it because we don’t notice that land use decisions matter until developers are breaking ground on a sky rise across the street? That we think the game is won already? I’m not sure, but I think changing the way people think about local policy is a really interesting part of our project here. Read the rest of this entry »
Via consumerist, I landed on this list of things you should never charge from Marketplace. I keep thinking that I’m going to post something about how we’re using Wesabe and what I’m learning from looking at where our money goes.
A note about Wesabe: I like it for two good reasons. One, I can download statements manually from my bank(s) and upload them to Wesabe, which means that I’m not sharing any identifiable personal information with Wesabe (yes, I’m sure: qif files are human readable, there are no account numbers stored in there.) And two, I can download my tagged and edited transactions from Wesabe and tinker with them in OpenOffice. Actually, I haven’t worked out ways to do much with charts in OpenOffice, but I have fun trying.
I had written more here, but … I dunno. I think it was too stream of consciousness. Do you really want to know these things?
I had bad information folks, and I apologize for that. I have been following the investigation into Brad’s murder just closely enough that I was pretty shocked to learn that the local activist who the authorities are trying to pin the murder on had already been tried, found guilty and sentenced. He hasn’t, though.
I know that you, my dear readers, read to stay in touch with me, not to learn the news, but I still like to know what I’m talking about. I don’t post what I don’t know to be true, but in this case I wanted to get the word out about Monday’s protest so I just went with it.
There’s still a protest on Monday. It is still a joke to pin Brad’s murder on anyone but the two armed men who Brad filmed as they fired shots directly at him. But no one has been tried yet, let alone sentenced.
I wasn’t there, and no matter how many times I watch the footage I can’t know what really happened, but I’ve got no good reason to believe that the Mexican government has conducted a good faith investigation — that they honestly believe they’ve got the right guy.
Anyway. Here’s what I wrote last night:
This isn’t complete. Not at all, but I’ve been cooling my heels thinking that, sure, justice takes time, but it will be served. Instead, a bystander and an activist has been sentenced in the murder of Brad Will. Not only did he not do it, there’s footage of the men who did. Footage Brad shot as he was dying. I’ve been numb to this story for a really long time now. But in my numbness I was, honestly, believing that eventually we’d know more about why he was murdered. Instead, we know only that the bare minimum hint of justice is gone from this.
Friends,
Some of us have been talking on the phone about what to do about the sentencing of Juan Manuel Moreno, and we feel that something, no matter how large or small, urgently needs to happen to mark this travesty of justice.
A gathering at the Mexican Consulate of New York City (27 E.39th St.) at 4:00pm on Monday is going to happen. We are in the process of drafting a press release, are in contact with the Will family to ensure that we are on the same page as they are, and will be making more press calls tomorrow and Monday.
Other actions, and a broader strategy for pressuring the U.S. State Department are also under discussion, but we need to do something on Monday, and this seems the simplest, most direct route to take to generate some stories in the press.
Please come. The most important thing you can bring is yourself, your voice, and a friend.
We all know what happened here: a local activist- someone very much like you or me- was railroaded for the murder of our friend. It is outrageous. Action is the best antidote for despair.
Eventually: my promised report back on the Pirate Bay talk, which was great, and after which Mister Mux Tape explained that commercial software is, by its very nature, better than free and open source software and then asked me if I worked for the FSF when I called him on that bizarre and baseless assertion. I’m not even talking about Apache here. Or I am, but at the present moment, Open Office is better documented than the MS Office suite. And calc’s financial functions are just plain better. I didn’t point out that I don’t think that the Free Software Foundation really has the staff resources to travel the Eastern seaboard heckling speakers at community arts talks. I also didn’t point out that there are people in this world (no really, there are!) who hold opinions they aren’t paid to hold and expertise on subjects they are not professional lobbyists on behalf of.
Actually, I could kind of wrap that one up and repeat what we already know which is that the Bureau of Piracy is great, you should take a look at the links on the original post and (this is the part I hope you already know) that the real problem with the prosecution of the buccaneers is about free speech. Not about my right to swap music willy-nilly, copyright be damned (another thing I didn’t say to Mux Man: there is, I think, a big difference between software and music) but about whether a file sharing platform should be held accountable for the files shared over it. Particularly in a world where some musicians do want to make large files (their own) available free of charge and politically significant data sets can be a difficult thing to host on your own little server. Fundamentally, neither the laws nor the recording industry have kept up with the modern world and it is worth asking why that is really the fault of the Pirate Bureau.
In a story about a kid caught up in a sentencing scandal (judges taking kick-backs from private juvenile detention facility operators was never on my list of reasons private jails are wrong) I learned that parents pay some part ($110 bi-weekly, in this case) of the cost of a child’s detention. They just kind of slipped it into the story, listing these payments as one of the costs of this judicial corruption. So that was one: paying for your kid’s jail-house boarding.
And, a few weeks ago now, another one that I just can’t shake. An NPR piece about a peculiar NIH funding controversy–should venture capitalists be eligible to apply for funds earmarked for small businesses. This is the debate the story covers. What was apparently no type of noteworthy is that the NIH is funneling money to private business at all. Public funding supports private research? Do venture capitalists get involved in research that doesn’t come with the shining light of patents at the far end of the tunnel?
I didn’t know this. I maybe should have, but it never occurred to me that parents could be forced to pay for their children’s detention or that public funds would be used to support research the public will never own.
I got it wrong, they weren’t Indonesian, they were Nepalese Ghurkas. But a thing I know that you might not, about merchant ships and pirates, which is that there are pirates everywhere. Or at least that there are all kinds of known pirate waters and the coast of Somalia is one such known pirate water. So if you don’t know, now you know. There’s pirates in them thar seas, and ships full of wheat and sugar hire Nepalese Ghurka guards to pretect them from same. Go read the kid brother’s really-not-a-blog. Search for “pirate” — his not-a-blog doesn’t do permalinks.
Got a ticket this morning, and had to stand on a traffic island with Brooklyn Bridge-bound cars whizzing by while I waited for Officer Illegible to write me up.
Apparently, you aren’t actually allowed to ride a bike from the bike lane on the street to the bike lane on the bridge. Because you have to enter the crosswalk to do so. You’re supposed to wait until all the cars coming up Tillary get a green turn signal, and then cross their path to get to the bridge. Read the rest of this entry »
ABC NO RIO GALA & BENEFIT AUCTION
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 7 TO 10 PM
ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS
172 NORFOLK STREET
Hungry March Band will be performing along with Aurora Boob Realis, Boobie von Trapp and Jezebel Express, all MC’d by the most excellent Reverend Jen. ABC No Rio has an excellent collection of art that will be auctioned off on the 22nd as well, see the full list of contributing artists to inspire yourself. Bring a friend. Bring your wallet. Bring a lobster!
Join us for cocktails, buffet, burlesque performances, brilliant conversation and spirited bidding!
BENEFIT COMMITTEE
* Stanley Aronowitz, Julie Ault, Michael Bank, Melissa Bent, Phong Bui, Garrison Buxton, Alexander Campos, Paul Castrucci, Peter Cramer, Simon Critchley, Ray Cross, Harvey Epstein & Anita Elliot, Jim Fleming & Lewanne Jones, Barry Frier & Stefani Mar, Lia Gangitano, Carl George, Jonathan Greene, Dara Greenwald, Phil Hartman, C. Sean Horton, Cheryl Kaminsky, David Kiehl, Jane Kim, Allegra LaViola, Brooke Lehman, Jonathan LeVine, Josh MacPhee, Timothy Malyk, Mirabelle Marden, Carlo McCormick & Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Barbara Moore, Rebecca Moore, Margery Newman, Wendy Olsoff, Al Orensanz, Christian Parenti, Liutauras Psibilskis, Karen Ranucci & Michael Ratner, Neil Rosenstein, Alix Sloan, Jeff Stark, Sara Valentine, Jack Waters, and Martha Wilson.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES
* Reverend Jen
PERFORMANCE
* Hungry March Band
* Aurora Boob Realis
* Boobie von Trapp
* Jezebel Express
SPONSORS
* Asahi
* ALIAS
* Two Boots
* saké2me
* Honest Beverages
* The Donut Plant
Last night, we went with a bunch of Merry’s apprentices to see Danny Hoch’s new show in a high school auditorium in Bushwick. An auditorium decorated with murals that tell the story of the mankind on earth, in which very fair skinned naked people are blessed by a winged angel (“The Dawn of Civilization”) and then bestowed the flame (“The Gift of Fire”). And with fire the story ends.
Before I start, just so you know, I’m struggling with the fact that last year’s RAT was really inspiring and rejuvenating for me but without something to offer I can’t see myself going again.
So I saw a play finally. Some live theater. Saw it with a couple of teenagers (both named Hector) whose entire previous experience with live theater consisted of a trip to Lincoln Center to see the Nutcracker (shorter Hector) and “we saw this play once at school” (larger Hector). Read the rest of this entry »
Between work, @fakejohnmccain and @fakesarahpalin I so do not have time to be reading about GM Foods, but the kid brother says these are worth a looksee:
AB 541 could mean that farmers can’t be sued by Monsanto when GM seeds blow into their fields and end up in their harvest. No word on whether farmers can sue Monsanto for contamination. And, a District Court judge in San Francisco actually stood up to Monsanto.
So things aren’t all hopeless, even if we are looking down the nose of an anti-choice veep who is nonetheless proud of the choice her own daughter has made. Not the one to throw years of abstinence-only education down the tubes, mind you. A friend of mine was, recently, talking about her grandmother’s abortions (several, each in a regular old hospital) and how profoundly those compared with her mother’s abortion (for which she had to leave the country). At the risk of restating an obvious point, I’d love to be able to say that everyone should just leave Bristol and Levi alone to live their lives except that I would really like Commander of the Alaska National Guard Palin to go out on a limb and tell us all whether she has any new insights on the general effectiveness of abstinence-only education.
My Korean turnip pickles came out (Salt, garlic, onions, jalapeno, turnips and some beets for pinky goodness. That and a week of fermentation.) delightfully tart and garlicky. Madhur Jaffrey still kind of rocks.
So that is one thing. Another is that I need a ladies bike for the next few weeks since our smaller guest bike is in no shape to be taken to a shop and we managed to put off taking it in for far too long anyway.
And, I had a dream about a girl in a cage last night. Somewhere between finally seeing Persepolis this week and reading Reading Lolita in Tehran I shouldn’t be surprised. Both, though, have me thinking about revolution, faith and tyranny. I keep comparing it to a student production of A Bright Room Called Day that I saw with Adam a decade ago (which reminds me of the fact that somehow someone had convinced one of us who convinced the other that Tony Kushner is an african american woman and a heterosexual to boot, which was a source of incredible confusion and is also totally not true) and also of When the War Was Over. I need to get out into this sunny Saturday, so if you want to talk about the fall of Weimar, the Shah and Lon Nol or about a politically engaged middle class welcoming a revolution that will destroy them, about denial, about power, about faith and disbelief and unspeakable horrors you can find me at summer streets.
I think this means he can get on with his life, but there could be more too it. His lawyers did file a motion to dismiss all the charges against him in January. I’m assuming this is the ruling on that. To get the backstory, see the CAE Defense fund.
Artist and University of Buffalo Professor Steve Kurtz was cleared of charges for mail and wire fraud today in federal court. U.S. District Judge Richard Arcara ruled that criminal charges brought against him by federal prosecutors were insufficient on [their] face.
Kurtz’s College Street home in Buffalo, New York was raided by FBI agents wearing spacey-looking white biohazard suits only hours after his wife, Hope, died of a heart attack in May of 2004. Buffalo police
who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call alerted the FBI that they’d found bacteria cultures and other strange items in the house. Kurtz had obtained the cultures and other biological materials for use in his artwork that criticized the government’s food policies.
I realized on Monday that I don’t go to these panels at The Change You Want To See often enough. They’re usually really good conversations. I’m not sure if I can make it, but that shouldn’t stop you.
Please join us for two evenings dedicated to the G8 mobilizations in Germany (2007) and Japan (2008) by artists and organizers involved in the events.
The Change You Want To See Gallery
http://www.thechangeyouwanttosee.org
84 Havemeyer St, at Metropolitan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Monday, March 10th, 7:30pm
Act 1: Multimedia report-back and analysis from the June 2007 G8 mobilization in Heiligendamm by members of Not An Alternative and Hate The G8 Action Faction.
Act 2: Info-tour and screenings with representatives from No! G8 Action, a Japan-based network of anti-authoritarians and anarchists mobilizing towards the 2008 G8.
Tuesday, March 11th, 7:30pm
Act 3: Discussion and planning session with No! G8 Action, focused on the upcoming mobilization to be held in July at Lake Toya in Hokkaido, Japan. Read the rest of this entry »
First though … last night, WNYC was running a new segment on PS1′s show on the history of feminist art and I kept thinking I must not have missed a lot of breaking news while I was off in the woods. This morning, they’re still running the segment, except that this time I noticed they’re saying (maybe they haven’t been saying all along, but they did just say) that this is the first such retrospective, which reminded me, in the middle of trying to decide what to include in my response to the meme, of those years just after I’d moved to New York, when the world was a place that made me weak in the knees. Reminded me of visiting Dubin in DC where she’d just moved into a sublet that came with a copy of the Re/Search Volume 13 on Angry Women, which also made me weak in the knees. I was thinking, too, about how in those years I was always making babies cry and killing houseplants. Which secretly leads me back to realizing I’d like to go see the Wack! show, even though I know that I went to a pretty comprehensive retrospective of feminist performance art (okay, so it was mostly performance and a few other genres were excluded) which means this isn’t the very first such review.
Where is worth eating near the Natural History Museum?
Where can I find a really good bran muffin near City Hall?
Why isn’t anyone pointing out that the only contender who actually had a halfway interesting urban agenda might have been forced out of the race by a whole lot of rural primaries? DMI is rocking their urban issues meme and GG is about to come out with a story, subject of: same, and no one seems to be pointing out that talking about cities won’t get you anywhere in Iowa or New Hampshire or Wyoming. Nevada, South Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Maine: not so much with the density. Granted, I’m actually lying about Florida and Michigan a little bit. They’ve got real cities, and Florida ranks pretty high when you rank states by urbanness. Still, the early race is a rural race.
I always bought into the convoluted fairness of the Iowa caucuses, it made a little of sense to me in a “if you don’t think about it too much” kind of way, and since electoral politics have never really captured my heart, I stopped about there. While I was home, though, my mother (who is pretty much always right. really.) said something offhand and I realized that there probably is something to the argument that the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries give undo clout to the needs of a pretty small minority of the American population. And that one of the repercussions is that the candidates who want to talk about cities don’t get much traction.
So that is what I’m thinking this morning. I’ll confess that the three (bran muffin, MNH, presidents) are taking up near abouts equal space.
I’d love to watch this. Anyone in San Francisco (yeah, San Francisco) have Sundance? I’d love to watch this documentary about the Critical Art Ensemble and the ongoing and inexplicable persecution of Steve Kurtz.
Strange Culture Airs on Sundance Channel December 2007
STRANGE CULTURE, selected to open both the 2007 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival and the documentary section of the Berlin International Film Festival, is directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, and features Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, Chronicles of Narnia), Peter Coyote (E.T., Erin Brochovich), Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride, My Dinner with Andre); Original score by The Residents.
STRANGE CULTURE details the surreal nightmare of artist and University at Buffalo professor Dr. Steven Kurtz. Dr. Kurtz was illegally detained and accused by the U.S. government of “bioterrorism” in 2004 after police became suspicious of common science materials used in his internationally renowned art practice. He now awaits trial on charges of “mail fraud”—charges which carry the possibility of a 20-year jail term under the USA PATRIOT Act. Since the ongoing nature of the case prevents Dr. Kurtz from discussing its details, Hershman Leeson has enlisted actors to dramatize parts of the story, skillfully interweaving dialogue with news footage, animation, interviews, testimonials, and footage of Kurtz himself.
WATCH THE TRAILER:
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:
“Hershman Leeson is as interested in reinventing the doc form as she is in publicizing Kurtz’s case. The director not only breaks the fourth wall, she reduces it to plaster dust.” – Variety
“…alternatively teasing and terrifying… a near perfect alignment of subject and form.” – The New York Times
“Strange Culture is an important heads-up to what is going on in our country right now in the name of national security, and a brilliant statement on artistic freedom and the dangers it faces. This film should be seen, should be discussed and is an important document on our times.” – Film Threat
“Strange Culture is a veteran artist’s thoughtful, indignant response to PATRIOT Act America.” – indieWire
“…one of the most buzzed-about films at Sundance this year…”
– The Portland Mercury
“You don’t have to be paranoid for Strange Culture to scare the hell out of you.”
– Reuters
“…a brilliant and moving examination of fear and its manipulations.”
– The Nation
Bet you haven’t read about this one any place lately, and you can be sure that they won’t be spending a lot of time studying violent repression of organizers and activists.
I’m scrambling with a few projects today, but this passed the House last week (two weeks ago?) and it is currently headed to committee. Could be on the Senate floor next week.
Joseph I. Lieberman Chairman (ID) (CT)
Susan M. Collins Ranking Member (ME)
Carl Levin (MI)
Ted Stevens (AK)
Daniel K. Akaka (HI)
George V. Voinovich (OH)
Thomas R. Carper (DE)
Norm Coleman (MN)
Mark L. Pryor (AR)
Tom Coburn (OK)
Mary L. Landrieu (LA)
Pete V. Domenici (NM) Barack Obama (IL)
John Warner (VA)
Claire McCaskill (MO)
John E. Sununu (NH)
Jon Tester (MT)
Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007
AN ACT To prevent homegrown terrorism, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007′.
SEC. 2. PREVENTION OF VIOLENT RADICALIZATION AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM.
(a) In General- Title VIII of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 361 et seq.) is amended by adding at the end the following new subtitle:
‘Subtitle J–Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism
‘SEC. 899A. DEFINITIONS.
‘For purposes of this subtitle:
‘(1) COMMISSION- The term ‘Commission’ means the National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism established under section 899C.
‘(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term ‘violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.
‘(3) HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term ‘homegrown terrorism’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.
‘(4) IDEOLOGICALLY BASED VIOLENCE- The term ‘ideologically based violence’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.
No joke. “Coming up next? Studies have found that plastic may be bad for you!”
Where do they get this stuff? Am I really that far ahead of the curve on this? In other breaking news, Blackwater isn’t accountable and they’re siphoning immense amounts of money off of the federal coffers. Who knew?
Fucking everyone who was listening, is who.
Meanwhile, in a thing I half knew but chose not to think about (and speaking of plastics): nail salons are seriously toxic. In an unusual bit of interesting environmental and labor reporting, they’ve got a really disturbing tale of a class of eleven nail students, two pregnancies went terribly awry (one stillborn, one intensely deformed) and that was before school let out. So, ummm, no more cheap pedicures. It isn’t worth it and you really don’t want to be destroying other people’s lives just for cute toes. I might be swearing off of professional pedicures entirely–I’m not convinced that nail polish is particularly wholesome in any form.
Before I signed up with Constant Contact I asked around a bit. The consensus seemed to be that no one much cares for them and no one can really articulate what is so wrong with them.
One woman (alternative energy, DC. Her card is on my desk at work) said that you couldn’t slice and dice as much as she wanted. Fair enough. We send a lot of emails and didn’t really need to slice and dice that much. For what it is worth, it is pretty hard to slice and dice at all. She did have a point.
Now that we are thoroughly off of their platform, I thought that others might benefit from a brief run-down of why Constant Contact did not work out for us. For one thing, their customer service is for shit. There are all kinds of questions that they must know the answer to, some where deep down, but they will insist, insist, insist that there is no answer. For instance …
Their interface doesn’t work with Safari, for no good reason, and though they obviously are doing some browser sniffing they claim to be unable to provide any type of requirements or list of browsers that do work.
This is the catch: when you try to use Safari, you get a message saying that your browser won’t work with their software. It isn’t just that it doesn’t work, they’re doing browser sniffing and saying “Safari won’t work” explicitly. And they won’t tell you what they’re sniffing for. It is crazy making.
Safari incompatibility isn’t the end of the world except that our editor has something wrong with her Firefox installation (I haven’t looked at it beyond confirming that it sure doesn’t seem to work.) and I just don’t think it is so much to ask to get a list of known good browsers.
Their “compliance department” maintains a secret blacklist. Should you choose to link to someone who once wronged them, they’ll lock your account, not mention that your campaign was never sent, make you wait on hold for ten minutes and then tell you only that the linked URL is forbidden. Nothing else. No explanation of why it is forbidden, specifically. No apparent understanding of how unnerving it might be to have your account locked without warning.
And no, they can’t tell you who else is on the blacklist. You’ll just have to wait and see. At least one irreverent NYC newsweekly is on there, though.
After a fair amount of hemming and hawing, they did finally explain that the blacklist item we’d triggered was a former customer that had been using the system to spam people. You aren’t supposed to do that. Fair ’nuff. But all we did was link to them.
While we’re on the subject, their interface is for shit. You can figure that out for yourself when you do a trial, but it certainly makes the list of reasons to use just about anything else.
And the slicing and dicing? It is pretty bad. Say you have a subscriber and you want to figure out why he gets three of everything. You’d want to search your lists for a particular contact, right? Good luck.
Mir tipped me off to this newscast about some nice people who brought kites to poor suffering African children and made them smile. Nothing about the newscast was any more or less inane than most of the rest of the evening news, but since I did watch it, I’ve been really stuck on the fact that I don’t have the language or the figures at my finger tips to really tear it apart.
I don’t usually just go on and on about how I feel about the news of the day, but this one is giving me a headache. When I heard that Corzine was going to apologize for something. I assumed, naive little me, that he was going to wheel himself out of the hospital and say something like … “I was going more than 90 miles an hour, and I’m grateful that I didn’t maim anyone but myself. Being late for a press conference is never an emergency worthy of a siren. This was a gross abuse of my power as governor and it doesn’t matter that as a technical point it was legal for my driver to race the roads like a drunk teenager. It doesn’t matter that my driver felt this was a safe speed, it wasn’t a legal speed and we set legal speed limits because individual drivers aren’t a good judge of what is a safe speed. It wasn’t a safe speed, as we learned when it turned out we were going too fast to respond to an erratic driver on the road.”
He didn’t say that, though. He said he was sorry he’d not worn a seatbelt.
I’m visiting with my brother, who is peeved that some page Marissa made turns up at the top of Google’s search results for Oliver Hickman, while his own site doesn’t show up at all. That really is him on TV.com, too, but the rest are bogus. His site is #61 and no amount of peppering his pages with meta tags seems to help. And thus begins my efforts to bring sagacious to the masses.
While we’re on the subject of links and linking and google search results, you should also read up on the bruhaha over Alcatraz cruises. Last year the National Park Service re-bid the Alacatraz ferry service contract, turning over control to Hornblower Yachts who made all sorts of promises–their workers would get the same wages as Blue and Gold’s workers[1] did. Out of 55 mariners who’d been ferrying tourists to Alcatraz and back for decades, Hornblower only re-hired about 5. They’re renaging on promises to maintain wage levels and, well, you should boycott them.
It might seem like a measly fight–who cares about a couple of ferry boats–but the San Francisco docks were the epicenter of significant union fights in the 30s–fights that established fair workdays for a lot more than a small handful of us and the National Park Service shouldn’t be letting Hornblower off the hook so easily.
[1] did you catch the part about the “self serving pastiche of half truths and obfuscations”? Go read it again.
I was about to write to my mother, because I know she’ll actually think about my question and answer it (and because I think she knows the answer) but I figured that maybe one or two of my other three readers would have something to add, too.
One metaphor that I really like is about Monsanto and ADM vs centuries of agricultural knowledge and learning. Hundreds of years of agricultural stewardship and experimentation with crop hybridization and seed saving can be capped off in one fell swoop by ADM taking those successful seeds, making a hybrid and patenting that. Suddenly they own the patent, even though their contribution was a tiny step laid upon the work of generations. Add in the little things that slipped under everyone else’s radar like the Iraqi constitution’s explicit protection of GM seed patents and I can make a nice argument that they are stealing all the honey.
The Public Patent Foundation has some other good examples–drugs that many different scientists were actively working towards before Pfizer slipped in and grabbed a patent that would keep the rest off the market, but I’m looking for a few others examples of public knowledge being patented to allow a sole company to clign tight their already-large slice of the pie.
I’m also looking for good examples of software patents that could resonate with activists, if you want bonus points.
The Clothesline Show, Darkroom Folio Project, Cycle Craft: you can get your shopping done and cover most birthdays through March to boot.
The City Reliquary gift shop, which carries the Cycle Craft line of jewelery, also has very cool trinkets like actual schists of Manhattan Island and Statue of Liberty Sponges.
The Clothesline Show
a benefit art sale for ABC No Rio
Thursday December 14 and Friday December 15
7:00 – 10:00pm
This call for essays inspired me to look back at my own writing from South Africa and think about whether I should be writing something myself.
All extra interesting in the context of the sometimes exasperating debate over revolutionary tourism amongst the friends, here in NYC and now in Oaxaca, of Brad Will. Al Giordano had some sharp (venomous, even?) words on the list (which I’m not going to repost because it is a list and if they wanted the archives public they’d publish them) about the impact of activist arrogance (I’m so radical that you should make room for me right in the middle of the action) in Oaxaca. So I’ve been thinking a bit about solidarity and tourism and consumption.
I know I should know better than to be surprised by the State Department, but their Mexico Travel Announcement (not a full Travel Warning, for whatever that is worth) released yesterday is infuriating. To wit:
On October 27, 2006, an American citizen was shot and killed in Oaxaca City as a result of the violence and disorder caused by civil unrest in the city during the past several months. Several protest groups have engaged in increasingly violent demonstrations, sometimes resulting in violent reactions from other groups.
Rebeca Romero picks up that thread in the AP, explaining that according to the Oaxacan Atty General, Brad was shot at point-blank range, indicating the fatal shots came from nearby leftist protesters. No doubt she’s entirely correct, that the Attorney General did indeed say such a thing, but if she bothered to watch the video Brad was filming when he was shot, as Juan Gonzales did, she might have been able to interject a bit of reason into her article.
One, Brad was pretty clearly not shot at close range, unless his video was incredibly skillfully edited to make all the shots sound like they were coming from way down the road without losing that un-nerving “pop.”
Two, “sometimes resulting in violent reactions from other groups”? I’m used to seeing media twist a story up in rhetoric (when the federal police moved into the city center right after Brad’s death, the Times described them as “pushing back protestors,” right alongside photographs of mangled piles of people being knocked down by water canons) but this is absurd (and it isn’t the media, I know.)
Once upon a time, I went through a phase of making up names for people. Omri, who no one ever seemed to notice, was “Ahm Here” (it was bizarre, he went through an invisible stage, Omri did). Brad was “Hide Your Food” because he was pretty much guaranteed to help himself to whatever you were eating, whether or not you meant to share it. He always said thanks, but sometimes that isn’t enough–I know a few people were actively angry with him, sometimes he presumed his way into potlucks where he had no place (and had brought no food), or just ate shit that wasn’t for him (snacks, say, set out for folks who were helping get a mailing together, were totally fair game even if he had no intention of helping with the mailing).
Somehow, he managed to be everywhere (whether or not there was food). In garden struggles and the fight to save no Rio, he’d always turn out and put in a lot of himself. You knew you could count on him, and he rarely got sucked into interpersonal bs. After the verdict in the Amadou Diallo trial, the day I famously talked Taliah and Ellen into riding past the protests with me (since all hope of us winning anything but DFL in that year’s monster track was pretty much moot), I heard someone yell my name as I was being arrested and looked up to see Brad, a half a block away, raising his fist and smiling at me. I was confused as hell and really upset in that moment (and Brad would tease me about it for years, how upset I looked, even from a half block away) but also really amused because Brad obviously thought I was being arrested for taking some kind of stand, for laying my body down in front of the machine. Actually, Ellen and I were arrested (and held overnight, Ellen for almost 36 hours) for riding the wrong way on Fifth avenue. We hadn’t done anything especially brave, and I hadn’t even been properly at the protest.
I don’t know whether or not I’m relieved that I never did figure out how to get sound out of Flash and Skype at the same time on my Ubuntu Thinkpad (anyone? anyone? Sound cards are infuriating) so that I can’t watch the Telemundo Coverage. The last footage that he shot is inaccessible for different reasons, nothing seems to want open the .mov file. I watched it on YouTube last night, his last footage. I don’t know if it just isn’t public or what, but I can’t seem to find it right now.
The thing that is eating me, the thing I was going to try to write this morning, wasn’t about Brad breathing fire in the middle of Times Square or hiding his seed collection in the back of my closet after I left him in my apartment for a week. I don’t even remember if I ever grew the squash he left, I probably did. Brad told me a great story about pirate gardens, that stuck with me until I went out trying to find anyone (anyone) besides Brad who’d ever heard of such a thing. But it wasn’t about that either.
It was about Oaxaca and politics and organizing and the fact that I still don’t understand what is going on in Oaxaca. The Times writes of a besieged tourist city, as though the city belonged to the tourists, and not the citizens of the state of Oaxaca who have been massing on the Zócalo for months. I’ve been putting together a story in my own head, about how the barricades were built in Oaxaca, how a teachers’ strike — something that by all accounts has been for years a standard stage in the biannual contract negotiations — turned into the revolutionary moment that Brad saw. Saturday, I wasn’t sure I knew that demanding federal intervention in Oaxaca made any sense at all. Do we expect that the federales are going to swoop in and offer the protesters shields? Oust the governor themselves? C’mon. We expected what did happen Sunday: that they’d bash through barricades and push back activists (or was that pummel activists to a pulp? push sounds so gentle), the Mexican army would cut the power to the Zocalo and the APPO radio station, and clear the streets of protesters? By some accounts another Mexican is already dead in Oaxaca, though the PFP says it isn’t so (you want the original spanish?, okay).
PS, this title is from the transcript of Brad’s last video. The translations vary as much as the transcriptions.
I finally watched The Meatrix. It is pretty good, smart in that “sums it up” sort of way that is so hard to do. It being factory farming. The True Majority Oreo animation is another good one, this time about budget allocation. Phillip hipped me to Gap Minder for some very smart animations that illustrate UNDP data about distribution of wealth.
I’d love to see more smart animations that make sense of complicated political issues (yup, using the lazy web again, I am.) but also, I was reminded of a fairly obvious thing. I get most of my produce and eggs from a single farmer in New York state. I buy my milk at the greenmarket, also from a small farmer not far from NYC. When I buy meat (which I don’t do often), I get it via the Clinton Hill CSA. I pay a bit of a premium for local, sustainable food, most of which is organic. I think it is worth it, not because organic produce is better for you than conventional produce but because organic produce and produce that doesn’t travel thousands and thousands of miles to get to my door is better for the air I breathe and the rivers I’d really like to swim in. The thing I was reminded of, watching the Meatrix, is that while I do pay more than I would at the local Associated for my parsley and nectarines and turkey sausage, I don’t pay that much more. And so I wonder, where do all the savings go? If it is so much more efficient to raise swine on a diet of antibiotics in hermetically sealed warehouses, why isn’t beef at the Pioneer substantially cheaper than land and labor intensive CSA meat? Seriously:
Or, is Pathmark totally lying about “regularly priced at” prices? (not inconcievable, I know). Where is the money going? Secretly, I realized halfway through writing this that meat is one thing that is pretty cheap. Frighteningly cheap when you think about it, at your average grocery store. Of course Pathmark never, ever, actually sells top round for $5.49 a pound. It is always on special. Top Round at the Associated this week is $2.49. I even went downstairs and fished a circular from the Pioneer out of the recycling bin: top round, $1.99 a pound. So I retract my previous position. Factory farmed meat is much cheaper.
And still I ask you, who else is using graphics to tell a hard to tell story really, really well?
I haven’t had much to say about the war in Lebanon. I’m not even sure it is a “war”. It is, obviously, but for some reason (maybe because the US media doesn’t say “war”) I don’t think of “war.” I think of conflict. Trouble. Violence. But war? War is a different beast. Conflict is “in” a place. War is either “in” a place or “on” a place and so if reporters talk about a war they have to decide whether it is “in” or “on” and maybe “violence” is just so much easier to work with. Ziad calls it a war. A distinct and new war. So war. In addition to not following the issue closely to begin with, I’ve been distracted by impatiently hoping to hear from my friend Ziad, dj and maker of great mix tapes. Every email means he’s still basically okay, he has power and a phone line. I have a hard time separating Ziad from the war, a hard time understanding the political context of the war without thinking about one person living within it. The second to last email from Ziad (the most recent was about his radio show, ferried out of Beirut on CD to bring Lebanese bands to German radio) was an invitation to participate in a sticker and storytelling project, I love Beirut. Here is the full skinny, starting with an overview of the project, to be read first. Followed by the stickers themselves, in metric and imperial measurements: single sticker, metric; single sticker, inches; sheet of 3 stickers on letter paper; sheet of 3 stickers on A4.
I’m almost at a loss. I’d be lying if I said I love Beirut. Beirut overwhelmed me. It was a city full of the scars of war, the high rise Marriot (Hilton?) downtown was a towering shell, a constant reminder that the civil war wasn’t so far in the past. Rumor has it that the matresses for the brand new hotel were delivered, but never distributed to the rooms before the civil war brokeout. They are supposedly still stacked on the loading dock. All the reconstruction, the massive development along the green line, it seemed foolhardy, a massive investment in a place where war still seemed too near. I felt like poeple were committed to pretending that nothing had ever been wrong. I remember walking past a mansion on a corner in Beirut, maybe a fifth of the building had been blown away, leaving this cut away view into the two or three floors of the house. There were men sitting comfortably around a card table in the overgrown front yard while a woman snapped sheets in the air, making a bed in a bedroom open to the air, paint peeling and a chandelier hanging by a thread. They were squatters, I assumed, living in someone else’s luxury, but it all looked so effortless. There isn’t a moral to that story, just a bit of story about a place that I knew right away I’d never truly understand.
I like the stickers, though. So I’m passing them on. I might not ever figure out how to say anything intelligible about the war.
I know I should be expressing shock horror and outrage, but honestly? I would really like a little RFID tag rattling around in my downtube someplace, and possibly tucked away inside the case of my Thinkpad. $20/month might be pushing it, especially if that price is per chip, but I’d almost pay it.
As an aside, the article poses another interesting question about the potential for chips in workplaces, monitoring workers. Aside aside, it might be an improvement over the current USPS system which requires postal carriers to scan a bar code sticker at various set points along their routes, thus tracking their routes. Apparently the locations of these scanners are hard to keep track of, and so our local carrier has taken to scrawling “Scam Point” in magic marker on the outside of buildings containing such as bar code. Leaving aside the spelling issue, I’d love a solution that encouraged USPS carriers to keep their Sharpies capped. Back to my original aside, though, the article poses this food for thought: “Initially, the front line will be in the workplace. How will union leaders value workers’ rights with human tracking as a bargaining chip in contract negotiations?” which is positively fascinating becaues it assumes that union leaders are the ones out there valuing workers rights. I’m not saying they aren’t, but considering that less than 10% of the private workforce is unionized, at least in the US, it is going to take more than just union leaders to protect workers rights. Mostly, I am always bewildered by liberals who act like the Unions will save us as though the AFL-CIO had anything like the power they had in the 70s. Part of this little Orwellian dystopia that we are slip-sliding towards includes some strange doublespeak about how unions are looking out for us, and never ever mentions that we’ve collectively allowed our legislators to eviscerate workers rights and the power of most labor unions in the process.
And, PS, Yessss. I do realize that a dose of basic f*ing manners would go along way at the USPS. There is some middle ground between writing all over someone’s front door and implanting chips in mail carriers. I was being facetious, okay?
Elana asked me to write about the Critical Mass ruling on the DMI Blog but I don’t really have the words.
There is a language for this stuff, for talking about anarchy and political repression. A language I don’t have much practice in. The lawsuit (and the ruling) don’t have much to do with bikes or sustainable transportation or traffic or any of that. It is about free speech and freedom of association.
In a parallel universe, one where all stereotypes about cops (they live in Jersey and Long Isand with above ground pools and don’t really understand why we all feel compelled to live in this godforsaken place that they’re sworn to protect) are just truths, the NYPD spends a lot of time fretting about anarchists. They don’t really know what the word means, anarchy, but they know it is somehow contrary to neatly edged lawns and obedient school children who do their homework and divide neatly by gender for afterschool ballet and baseball. Figure skating, or jazz dance if they are going to be unique. Maybe karate for the boys who insist on standing out. So over there, in that parallel universe, all you have to do is whisper your code words and the courts, which of course are sworn to uphold all things neatly edged and fertilized, will wink and say “oh? You say they are anarchists? Well. We know just what to do with them.” The radicals are thrown in the clink, foaming of mouth and wild of eye.
I am not sure whether this fits under “to do” or just art and activism, but here it is. These are things I am thinking about lately, questions about what is art and why it matters what is (and isn’t) art.
I’ll confess that I had forgotten about Steve Kurtz. I haven’t heard a peep out of the Critical Art Ensemble in a while, but word is that Kurtz has been released from pre-trial supervision–meaning that since he was released from jail after his arrest in May 2004, he has been under court supervision–subject to random searches of his home and random drug tests.
Imagine for a moment that someone you care very deeply for (perhaps your wife of 20 years?) were to die suddenly and altogether unexpectedly. Imagine you called an ambulance. Imagine the paramedics came and noticed a project you’d been working on. A science kit, something you were tinkering with. A microscope and some petri dishes. And your whole life changed. Read the rest of this entry »
DocumentCloud Demo at Poynter Institute New Tools Seminar - Scott starts at 00:38:00 and I kick in at 00:42 or so. If you want to cut to the chase, you can skip over Butch's chat by clicking around on the timeline until you find the sweet spot.
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