Just a note to loyal readers, this site may go out over the weekend while I move things around behind the scenes.

And sorry for not posting more/interesting stuff. I've been slammed with work. I've seen a few movies though, and at the least I'll tell you what I thought of them real soon.

Ta!

After 7 months of living out of a bag preceeded by 18 months of living as a crazed political workaholic who left most of his crap in a locker in lower Manhattan preceeded by 2 years of being an artsy bum and computer nerd in Brooklyn, I find my wardrobe is running a little thin. As it looks like things are ramping up in the "professional" arena, I'm going to have (at the very least) to go out and get something I can wear to one of those meetings where there's a big table and a majority of the other people are wearing suits (though maybe not ties).

This means at a minimum I'm in the market for shoes, slacks, a dressy shirt and probably a jacket. Or something that's equivalently responsible-looking. That's one outfit, but as I hate (hate) shopping for clothes, my thinking is that this might be the time to do a more or less total overhaul. Like a band-aid: one motion; right off!

Some staples like 517s, wife-beaters, boxer briefs are unlikely to go out the window, but basically everything else is up for grabs. For the professional stuff, I'd rather not get something standard. Not only do I find most businesswear to be spiritually crushing, I also have an active economic interest in preserving my image of creativity, eccentricity and rebelliousness. In a word, I need to retain some style.

However, what that style is... that's an open question. My friend Molly Keough had some interesting shirts to which she had sewn bits of fabric that made a graph of average worker's wages vs. CEO compensation 40 years ago and today. I've also seen some cool stuff done with stencils and silkscreens. I'm into the whole DIY ethic, but I'm also not the most crafty at these things, might rather want to support someone trying to make a living.

So. Any suggestions?

Boing Boing: Katrina: a cameraman's journal in NOLA, part 3

Very much worth reading. Via Jacob Appelbaum.

I don't really have any fresh insights on this date, even with the Katrina paralell. So here's a repost from two years ago, still one of the better things I've written. It's obviously not completely how I feel, but it still hits. Cheers and rememberences, and here's hoping New Orleans comes back as strong as NYC.

The Inevitable Reflection (repost)

It's Monday, September 9th 2002, and I am very very sad; very heavy in the heart. I see the country I call home heading in directions that I cannot follow, and I feel as if our leaders are using 3,000 ghosts to blackmail me into going along for the ride. Heavy 9-11 memorial coverage has begun in every media outlet, and although my original idea was to steer clear of commenting on this sort of thing, I've found the overall atmosphere too aggravating to stay mum.

I'm going to make a horrible admission of guilt, but I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. On September 11th 2001, when the towers had just fallen, when I was riding my bicycle down an empty 5th avenue wondering how I would make it home, there was a moment in which I felt a strange surge of hope for the future. I optimistically imagined that everyone had been evacuated, that there would be only a few casualties, and somewhere in my heart, thinking of everything represented by the twin towers I thought, "well, they had it coming."

Today even writing these words makes me nervous. They don't sound especially patriotic, and this is a time in which people have been told to watch what they say. I'm not kidding around here or trying to take a cheap shot at Ari Fletcher. There's fear in the air. I'm scared to talk to people, scared to speak to anyone other than my friends about the brewing war with Iraq because of what they might think about my lack of chauvinistic national pride. I'm scared to exercise my rights.

Before I get too far into that, let me try to clear my name. In spite of all its faults and shortcomings, I love this country. I love the idea of it far more than the reality, just as a child will love his perfect mother more than his annoying younger brother, but I nevertheless love them both. And as one of the great metaphysical pinnacles of the American Idea, I love New York City.

The World Trade Center embodied many of the marvelous characteristics of this nation and this city that make them both such wonderful, exciting places: enterprise, diversity, technology, devotion, a brash, dashing can-do attitude. These are the things that make this country sing and hum.

But as is to be expected of any great institution, the towers also embodied a lot of things I don't especially like: greed, excess, exploitation, hegemony, corruption. Shopping malls in the basement and board rooms on the top, the whole place pulsed with careless money and the stink it brings wherever it goes.

In the days following the attacks, in spite of the fear and uncertainty, I felt an encridible lightness. Not only was Something Happening, it seemed like it might even be Something Good. It seemed that the negative elements had been exorcised from my town, and most of the positives left intact.

Individuals were waking up to their gross material excess and rediscovering the virtue of charity. Packed onto subway cars, fearful of anthrax, New Yorkers were speaking to each other freely, reaching out across divides of race, class and culture. Communities were banding together for their own collective good, to survive, to grieve, to rebuild and to prosper again. I don't know what it was like elsewhere, places removed from the direct disruption, places where the President's message to keep on shopping was perhaps remotely practical, but here in New York City people were connecting in the face of adversity, and it was incredible.

All that changed very quickly when the focus became war. Though defense is necessary for any nation, war is very rarely in the interests of the people. As it became clear that war would be the outcome of these attacks the consensus became forced, the feeling of lighness evaporated, the sense of city-wide community broke down and in my perception the healing process was stalled.

From the beginning the frame was set: these attacks were an act of war despite the fact that no nation-state claimed responsibility. What should have been considered the most dreadful and heinous of criminal acts, what should have been the impetus for multilateral action in creating an international legal framework to deal with these threats, what should have been the chance to bring the world together in condemnation of violence and support for peace became an excuse to drop bombs on human beings.

And now I see this memorial coverage, the victimized families coming forward to tell and re-tell their stories, the pundants sounding off their views, the footage before deemed too shocking to air finding its way to light, and it makes me sick. Sick to remember, sick to relive, sick to witness such enormous pain, to empathize with the fear and loss, but even more sick because I feel manipulated through all of it. I sense the machinery working behind the scenes that brings these flickering ghosts to life in my living room and my guts turn sour. The feeling of manipulation grows, and despite my best efforts to resist it, catalyzing cynicism creeps in, turning my sickness to rage. I watch helpless as everything that I loathe about this country, this city and this situation parades in front of me, and I'm forced by sheer emotional arm twisting to endorse it with my silence.

I watch politicians inoculating the populace with war fever just in time for the election season. I watch trillion-dollar lawsuits spring to life like the demons of greed that they are. I watch victims avoid dealing with death and am dragged along into their pathos, numbed by the overwhelming sadness they continue to exude, and I want it all to stop. It's the year that everything changed and nothing has changed at all. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and we'll jolly well have a real war again soon, plenty of coverage for the 6-o-clock news.

I can't help but think that a raw wound has a lot more use to those in power than a healed one, and while I don't believe that there's some vast conspiracy with malicious intent to keep the American people in a constant state of worry and fear, I do believe that's something the media does. I don't believe that Bush, Cheney and Co. are really evil people, but I do believe in the seductive power of subconscious desire, the human ability to rationalize. I certainly don't trust these people to do the right thing. They don't represent my interests or share my view of the world. They're not doing what I would do, and I don't believe in the end that they know better than me.

And that's where my bundle of sickness, sadness, fear, disgust, love and anger finally becomes unbearable. I feel alone with it. I adamantly disagree with every institution spouting the party line, every sentimental memorial broadcast, every mealy-mouthed patriotic speech. It's manipulative and it's disrespectful. On the other hand, I don't buy into the real paranoid whacko conspiracy theory bullshit either, so I'm basically on my own with my views. I don't see anyone with any real power saying anything I can really get behind, and that's almost enough to break me, the feeling that I am an island of rational dissent in a sea of insanity.

Except I know I'm not. I can't be. Statistically speaking, there must be others like me who feel similar to the way I do. I don't know if it's what you'd call a "silent majority" but I know a lot of other freethinking, intelligent, rational Americans are staying out of this for fear of sounding disloyal to their nation. If you're one of these, I encourage you to break your silence, expose your viewpoint, take the risk, because shutting your trap in the name of patriotism is no service to your country. We need trustworthy leaders with clear views, transparent motives and ethical opinions, but given the state of politics in this country that's not likely to happen any time soon. The best we can do is try with all our might to hold whoever we've got to that standard.

Hey, just to forestall anyone making any effort on my behalf, I believe I've found some gainful employment for the time being. It seems the world of CivicSpace and the broader Drupal community is booming. Looks like being in on the ground floor is paying dividends. And you thought sweat-equity was for suckers.

In other news, I've been watching the HBO TV series Deadwood on DVD, which is proving to be another fine example of how the telenovela form is finally breaking into the US market. It's a good show. I tried it out mainly because my man Frank recommended it a while back and because it popped up in my mother's netflix. I got the first disc off there and ended up getting the second two last night at Blockbuster because I wanted to keep the story rolling. That's a mark of a good drama.

I'm planning on absorbing a lot of media while I'm here in Oregon. That will include some books, a lot of back issues of Harpers, the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. After being on the road all summer I feel the need to swim in the waters of other people's creativity for a while. It helps me recharge my batteries.

Over at the participatory culture foundation they have a link to a very arresting video montage of news coverage from the Gulf Coast.

I was out of the world when the shit hit the fan. We knew Sunday night that Katrina was headed directly for New Orleans, and everyone knew that meant things would get ugly. Hell, not six weeks ago I was standing on the levee myself. But Monday morning as we packed up to head out to Burning Man, the word was that things were alright, that the Mississippi remained contained, that there was a great deal of damage as you would expect from a hurricane, but that the worst case scenario had not come to pass.

It wasn't until Thursday night when I hitched a ride on a woman's tandem out in Black Rock City that I heard different. The lady who gave me a lift had been reading the news, told me the worst of it, the sensational stuff, the evil. It hung over things like a cloud. Red Cross donation barrels showed up, as well as a whole camp devoted to finding out what happened, where loved ones were, how to help, etc. But the bandwidth there is thin. It's hard to get much of a sense of what was actually happening other than that it was truly awful.

When I got back connected, it turned out that while really bad shit clearly went down, some of the horror stories (child rape, etc) may have been exaggerated rumors. That's a blessing. While the whole dimension of what's been going on is rather spiritually crushing, it's nice to know that some of the most vile tales may have been just tales. It's als nice to hear about acts of bravery and good that were not as widely published. It's nice to hear that for the sake of my faith in humanity.

I found this post from Billmon to be chock full of material:

What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Those are good things to hear. On the darker side, the Old South seems to have reared its ugly head. This catastrophe has inevitable racial overtones. My Aunt lives (lived) there, but she got out. She has a car. Those who were stuck were the poor, those without options. Many of the poor and option-less in New Orleans are black. Things got pretty fucked up when they tried to leave on foot. Also, some of the reporting on "looting" versus "scavenging" has been downright shameful. The Onion, sadly, captures the gist of it:

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African­Americans "looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses." "I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I'd managed to find," said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. "Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers." Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.

However, a great deal of the reporting has been really amazing, especially by recent standards. I understand and believe in the essential need for a vibrant, free and inquisitive Press to make our country work. This has been uncomfortable position lately because the Press has really dropped the ball over the past several years, surrendering its role as independent fact-finder, trusted arbiter of public truth, and becoming more and more marginalized, a mealy-mouthed referee/participant in a series of "he said/she said" spinfeists. But the magnitude of the gap between reality and spin in the wake of Katrina seems to have delivered a bracing jolt to the infotainment industry. Brains have been zapped, spirits awakened. Seeing Shep Smith (who I've heretofore observed to be a smarmy jackass) talking back to Boss O'Reilly on FoxNews is really something. Rumor has it the specter of Real Journalism stalks the streets of America again.

This is important, I think. In addition to the reminders of racism and racial inequity, one of the things this disaster clearly showed was what happens when government prioritizes perception and public-relations over performance, when politics trumps governance. It leads to bad service, to needless death, and then it's met with ass-covering and "information management." As Josh Marshall put it:

Take a moment to note what's happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn't get key aid on the scene last week is coming in in force now and taking as one of its key missions cutting public information about what's happening in the city.

The lesson some others (e.g. Boss O'Reilly) draw from Katrina is that the Government is good for nothing. "It's every man for himself," in other words. This is their ideology, but it isn't true, or right, or even Christian for that matter. It's the kind of thinking that can only really survive in an ivory tower, television studio, gated community or other kind of vaccum. O'Reilly can rant about personal responsibility, but he looks like a mean, ugly, out of touch old man when the next cut goes to Geraldo (that perennial cowboy of our newsmedia) weeping openly and holding up a stranded child. What kind of monster would say such things. The gap between idea and reality reveals the naked lunch of smug conservative ideology, exposes the heartless nature of a mindset that evolves out of pronounced privilege but sees the world as an idealized "level playing field" without need of regulation, oversight or capital improvement.

While it's true that our government hasn't been good for very much lately other than keeping our civilization limping along, the fact is that it is good for something. At lot of things, really. Many of the problems we face as a generation, a nation, a species, can only be dealt with through massively conjoint action; a lot of people working together to make shit happen. That's what Government is supposed to be for, usually to facilitate but in some cases also to lead. The only way we know how to organize action among millions (even one day billions) of people with any kind of accountability is through some sort of Democratic State or another.

And that's really what it's all about, you know? It's a very tricky thing too, because massive collective action (war, constructing an interstate highway system, educating millions of children) creates innumerable positions of seductively corrupting power, from the Commander in Chief on down to local Hefes doling out contracts or setting curriculum on the ground. There are very pressing questions about how to keep the system honest.

Here in the US we have an oppositional solution to that question. It's a good idea on paper. Competition is a great driver for fitness. After all, it (evolution, natural selection) is how how we (human beings) got to be here; hard to knock that. The idea applied to government is to set things up to make use of competition between candidates and parties to drive the best ideas and individuals to the top, cut away what isn't working, and put the kibosh on what's hurting asap. Elections hold public officials accountable, but they are also meant to advance our understanding of ourselves, of our direction, of the shared aspects of our lives.

The problem is that we've evolved a political system in which the nature of this competition has very little to do with real-world performance in Governing. It's political maneuvering over public service. The competition is over money, political machines, media coverage. The fight produces the best of breed in messaging and spin, larger and larger fanatical "base" followings, fitness to mingle within the power elite. These are not good capacities to have evolved when disaster strikes. The skills are unuseful. Failure occurs. Death and chaos follow.

Will we learn and evolve as a nation? Maybe. The upside (and downside) of all this is that the power to discover and implement real solutions lies almost exclusively in the hands of we the people. The change we need and seek will not emerge from the establishment; not without significant pressure at the very least. Unfortunately, "we the people" aren't really much of anything at this point. We're not well organized. We don't have a good way of working together to figure things out. As we keep hearing, we're a divided nation. We're also fat on cheetos, sated with easy money at usurious interest rates, pacified and isolated by a culture of consumption and celebrity.

That's the downside. The upside is that we're slowly but surely making our way into a new era of social organization. And there's hope in that. The way in which information moves has always been at the heart of how a civilization operates, and in the next ten to twenty years we're likely to see some rather large changes in how American life works as our myriad organizations, economies, governments and communities assimilate the new possibilities and adapt to the new environment. Better times could be, but no one is going to do it for us.

Crises precipitate change. I had hoped for a great leap forward after witnessing 9/11 and the aftermath up close and personal. I saw it in New York City, a better possible future, but the national response (let by President Bush) quickly took that step forward and dragged it several paces back. Perhaps the Gulf Coast will be different. Things fell apart on the ground, but perhaps the nation will really rally. The magnitude of ineptness and death in this whole episode demand positive long-term outcomes. Time will tell, but there's a distinct possibility that the scale of both the devastation and dereliction of duty may refocus our national attention on things that matter, may actually lead through to some kind of change for the better. As regular citizens, each of us owe that to the dead and displaced. We owe it to our families and to our neighbors. We even owe it to ourselves.

Hey everyone.

Well, the road trip has ended, and I think for the time being we want to preserve the specificity of that space, meaning I don't feel like I should clutter it up with all my personal stuff. But personal stuff demands self-expression! And so for the moment I return to publishing here.

I'm back in my hometown of Eugene, flowering blossom of Oregon that it is. This afternoon I saw my mother off at the train station, from which she makes her way to PDX, LA, and then F-R-A-N-C-E! We're all very excited and proud. It's been a dream of her's for a while.

The upshot is that I have the old house to myself. It's a good thing for me. At the end of the trip things started to get a little too compressed for my taste, and having some time and space to myself is going to be key. I have big big big ideas as always (which I will be writing about at some length here) and I also need some time to rest and digest.

I'm also dead broke and in dire need of gainful employment and quick cash. If you've got work that I can invoice you through paypal for, let me know.

This post is pure RSS feed whoring. I know my XML gets picked up by a few folks, and I just wanted to let everyone know that Vagabender's first podcast is online. We're pretty happy with it and are going to try and do one every couple weeks from here on out.

Peace out, you aggregating demons.

We're getting set to get on the road tomorrow. All my posting for the next two to three months will be on VAGABENDER. Posting will probably come in bursts as we write/photo/record on the road and then upload in quantity when we hit some wifi. That's why I recommed signing up for our mailing list. We'll send short updates every week or so when we've got new content, and we might send some location-specific stuff (e.g. "We're coming to Austin! Where should we go?") as well. It'll all be in good faith.

Anyway, my battery's a-wastin and the truck should be just about done having its exhaust system replaced. Catch us if you can!

I'm headed to catch the bus up to NorCal. Won't have net access for a spell. Next time you hear from me, it's probably going to be announcing the initiation of VAGABENDER.

Color me excited.