This article is packed full of answers to important questions I hadn’t thought to ask. It’s about the all-out disaster we in the US have got on our hands because of parking, a disaster so far-reaching I don’t think I can really do it justice with a summary. It’s the intersection of two of the biggest contributers to the mess* we’re in — architecture and transportation.
I sometimes get overwhelmed when I read things like this, because it’s so seductive to think there’s something to blame this all on. Oh, it’s the cars! Oh, wait, but it’s also all of manufacturing. And oh, shit, don’t forget agriculture. And oh yeah, architecture too. And city planning. And the legal system. And electricity, and design across the board. Oh shit, and our culture. And the patriarchy. And white supremacy! Can’t forget white supremacy. Oh yeah, and imperialism. And, oh, greed. And fundamentalism. And…
It’s like when you first realize, oh shit, the oil industry is a big corrupt mess, and that’s how I power my car which pollutes and–oh my God. Oil is petroleum. So it’s not just the gas in my car, it’s the plastic my car is made of, and the plastic I’ve used to build my entire life, everything I own, and the packaging of everything I buy.
* - Mess meaning mess. The global industrial capitalist white supremacist patriarchy of global warming, war, hunger, poverty, oppression, and on and on and on.
It pains me deeply to intentionally expose any readers to a product of the Fox News corporation, but, uh, it seems as though no other mainstream news source has provided video coverage of this story.
To recap: a young girl dropped a piece of cake at school during a birthday celebration, and a security guard called her “nappy-headed” and broke her arm for not cleaning it up well enough. She was expelled, arrested, and charged with assault and littering. The students who captured the incident on film with their cell phones were also arrested and, when she protested the abuse of her daughter, the girl’s mother was arrested too.
Via Oh No a WoC PhD, contact the school and make sure they know that this display of institutionalized racial violence is unacceptable and deserving of punishment.
Hey everybody, what’s the relationship between my body and climate change?
They’re both things that now-blocked commenter Michael Hesseltine would like to control! But can’t!
Mr. Hesseltine just decided to defend his ignorant denial of climate change by calling me rude, sexist names, so I just wanted to put a PSA out there to any other misogynists who might be reading today. I don’t know what your pastor told you, but your hatred of women will offer no protection from storms, droughts, famine, nor even disease. Sorry guys. Global warming may be a product of the global capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy, but it will take no sides.
CBS’ new reality show is about what happens when 40 kids between the ages of 8 and 15 are dumped in a ghost town in New Mexico to “try to fix their forefathers’ mistakes and build a new town that works,” with no direction from anyone but the producers of the show, who are of course completely indoctrinated into the cults of capitalism, class, and consumerism.
The first task assigned the kids?
In the very first episode, the children were directed to form four armies for color war. And they did. They were told that victory would determine their class status. And it did. In a scenario Karl Marx couldn’t have made up, the winners of the war were dubbed “upper class,” the runners-up were labeled “merchants,” then “cooks,” and finally “laborers.”
The little capitalists were allowed to use their very unequal paychecks for very unequal chores to pay for goodies at the town store. The producers did everything but deny the lower income children their health coverage.
I hope these kids grow up to be anti-capitalist revolutionaries. I really do.
Before it premiered, “Kid Nation” itself was charged with endangering the children by violating child labor laws and even child abuse laws. Indeed, the consent form that the parents signed is as creepy as the ones you don’t read before you go into surgery. Even creepier was the scene when two homesick children cried and not one adult had the impulse to drop a camera and offer comfort.
Nevertheless, the real trouble in Bonanza is not that the cast of mini-survivors was exposed to “serious bodily injury, illness or death.” It’s that the children urged to build a better town (read “world”) than their forefathers were manipulated into the copycat media culture.
So, I just returned from seeing The Sensuous Woman, a show organized by the always wonderful and hilarious Margaret Cho. The line-up was impressive, and I was happy to see some old favorites and also make some new ones. And I had my first live experience with burlesque performance. It was a night of laughs and nipple tassles, and by the end I actually had a cramp in my side from laughing so hard and was also fighting back tears (it was so overwhelming). Let me just say this about that: I saw more of Margaret Cho than I ever dreamed I would, and I watched Kelly (the internet rock star of Shoes and Let Me Borrow That Top fame) sing along to a Spanish garage band version of Shoes. No, I don’t even know what that means either, and I was there. And, dammit, this ridiculous song is stuck in my head-
Yes, he was one of the performers. And after all of that, I paid a small visit to the NY neo-futurists who managed to pull off 30 plays in 60 minutes.
All of which is to say that the inside of my head right now looks a lot like the last few scenes of this new Kelly video where everything escalates into total chaos.
There are some poets and books of poems I recommend incessantly to everyone, including (and sometimes especially) people who don’t usually read poetry. I often put down collections of poems with the conviction that they would be enjoyable far outside the too-narrow segment of the population who pick up such books on their own.
I don’t know that I would say that about The Seven Ages, though it is a lovely book. I’ve read very little of Louise Gluck’s work, so I can’t contextualize it, but I don’t think I’d recommend this particular volume to folks who don’t like poetry in general.
Folks who do like poetry should definitely pick it up, though. She muses about a lot of standard topics — human existence and the passage of time and childhood and love — in a distinctive way, alternately making broad statements about the nature of reality and zeroing in on vivid, intimate details (like poets tend to do). A prime example, this the last stanza of “Radium”:
Time was passing. Time was carrying us
faster and faster toward the door of the laboratory,
and then beyond the door into the abyss, the darkness.
My mother stirred the soup. The onions,
by a miracle, became part of the potatoes. (19)
That’s the book at it’s best, I think. And there is a lot of it.
She lost me in some places, though — that’s why I wouldn’t suggest it to everybody. All of it is well-written, of course, but I found some of it dry. It’s worth it to mull through the blander parts for the sweet spots, but only if you’re into that kind of thing.
From Boing Boing, take a look at The Micropolitan Museum of Microscopic Art Forms, which is pretty much what it sounds like: galleries of images of incredibly beautiful things that are incredibly small, including tiny animals and sections of plants. There are tons of them, and they’re stunning. It’s just about my new favorite place on the internet. I spent a long time trying to pick which few to show you here, there are so many gorgeous ones. And, bonus, they’re all arranged into exhibitions with clever alliterative names.
This is one kind of water flea:
And these are radiolaria, single-celled aquatic animals:
And this is Red Algae:
The fact that everyone of these lovely forms is something wandering around out there naturally just blows my mind. The world is really an incredibly beautiful place. Things like this make me glad to be here.
As I was just telling Emily, I think that once the icecaps go (which will be soon) we should collectively mark the beginning of a new era of human existence. I think we should all acknowledge that the Common Era (Ano Domini, if you prefer) will have come to a close and begin counting time again.
I propose we call the new era the Post-Glacial Period. Any other suggestions?
