(WRIGHT RIFF)

Because it bears repeating,

and regarding the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, civilian population centers in a country ready to surrender,

and regarding the billowing plumes of black smoke spilling out from the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California and into the lungs of the largely poor, black, and immigrant population there,

and regarding the US president who still takes cash from the nuclear industry, and thinks that hydrofracking should be exempt from clean air and water standards, and that BP and Shell and ExxonMobil and the rest should drill for oil, right there, offshore, in the fucking sea,

and regarding the drone aircraft that killed another ten men (and who knows how many women?) in Yemen earlier this week, ten men whose crime was their age, their gender, and the audacity to live where they live, making them "militants" (against whom? for what reason? in what war?),

and regarding the laying of the Keystone XL Pipeline across North America, from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, cutting like a dull, rusty knife through aquifers and mountains, wetlands and woodlands, prairies and farms, cutting through lands where genocide has taken place, cutting to line the pockets of a few men, the moral and biological descendents of those who committed the genocide,

and regarding the sending of spacecraft (military, scientific, commercial) through the atmosphere and into outerspace, the only atmosphere we have, our protection on this planet, the atmosphere that NASA must share with every species, and most of us never asked NASA to put us all at risk so that a camera could snoop around Mars anyway,

and regarding the white men who won't examine their fear and hatred, who lash out with violence against any "othered" individual or group, men like that white supremacist piece of garbage who brought his hatred to a Sikh temple in Wisconsin last weekend, putting to predictable work his years of training and indoctrination by the US military,

and regarding the asshole president who speaks of "soul-searching" after such a predictable bloodbath, while maintaining a kill list, the right to kill anyone, anywhere, for any reason, while defending war, defending apartheid, promoting the idea that remote-controlled aircraft armed with missiles and bombs, and covering the globe make anyone safer, and turning his back, like a fucking coward, on climate science, on American racism, on class warfare,

and regarding the murder of Marvin Wilson by the state of Texas a few days ago, a man who was so easy to kill, with an injection of poison into his bloodstream, and so difficult for people to defend, with his black skin, and his mental disability, which the racist, backward state compared in its murderous legal reasoning, its own intellectual deficiency, to a fictional character in the Steinbeck story Of Mice and Men,

and regarding the fact that at no time in history have so many people been imprisoned as there are, now, in the United States, and they are so disproportionally drawn from poor, black, and latino communities, and this is neither brave, nor free, nor secure, but unmitigated evil,

and regarding the hateful mass of people, who call themselves Christians, but whose charity amounts to eating the cooked flesh of industrially tortured chickens rather than countenancing the notion that their very neighbors might love who and how they wish to love, without fear,

and regarding the channeling of stolen wealth toward corporate stooge politicians amidst a backdrop of school closings, teacher layoffs, home foreclosures, and the absence of mental health resources to those pushed to the edge of despair by this shithouse culture,

but mostly because the degree to which the following sounds wrong to you reveals the degree to which you need to hear it again, to turn it around in your thoughts, to realize not everyone has it as good and easy as you,

god damn America.

Hell No We Ain't Alright

Hurricane Irene made me think about Hurricane Katrina. I imagine I'm not alone in this. It made me wonder: how have things changed? How have they stayed the same? How have they improved? How have they gotten worse?

Have a listen to the three great tracks below - by Mos Def, Public Enemy, and the Legendary K.O. - made in the aftermath of Katrina. Check the lyrics. These are songs that gave voice to widespread anger and outrage over the Bush Administration's non-response to the tragedy that befell New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005. But they also speak, powerfully and timelessly, to backward national priorities, institutional racism, poverty, police brutality, anti-war sentiment, and other pressing issues that continue to receive scant attention in the post-Bush era.

Intelligent people (but few in positions of power or influence) wrote and spoke insightfully at the time about Katrina's extreme strength and destructiveness as symptoms of climate change. Six years later Hurricane Irene is a manifestation of the same. Though disaster preparedness may have improved, the discussion about climate change has been largely left out of the vocabulary of those who govern and report.

Hurricane Irene coincided with a weeks-long mass mobilization of environmental groups in front of the White House. Hundreds of people from around the US are lining up to be arrested (over 500 arrests as of this writing) to raise awareness of the Keystone XL, a proposed pipeline that will carry highly toxic oil from the Alberta tar sands (an environmental catastrophe in and of itself) in Canada, through fragile ecosystems in the US, to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico for global export. The State Department has signed off on the project and it is up to Obama to make the final decision of whether or not the Keystone XL is in the national interest. Climate scientists and environmentalists have declared loudly and clearly that the mining of the tar sands is an enormous "carbon bomb" and is absolutely counter to the urgent need to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Obama, remember, has signed deepwater drilling permits in the wake of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. His administration stacked a seven-member advisory panel on gas hydrofracking with insiders from the energy industry. He is a recipient of large campaign contributions from the nuclear industry, and a zealous supporter of it.

It is certainly curious. One could see the racism, hatred and deceit of George Bush and his administration unmasked, not only in the whole of his years-long, bloody war on terror, but also in moments like the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Since he entered office Obama has been cultivating his own hatred and deceit, with his bloated war on terror, his ever-expanding drone bombing programs, and horrifically malfeasant energy projects. His refusal to deal honestly with climate change and his willingness to sign off on one environmental disaster after another begs the question: is there anyone he doesn't hate?







(Post script: have a look at this article from the New York Times, about the devastation from Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene to communities in Upstate New York and Vermont. It is also typical of the reporting I listened to on NPR over the weekend: devoid of any mention of climate change. It's like reporting "bombs dropped on houses" but failing to mention who dropped the bombs. Oh but I guess they do that too.)

Thoreau Day

Yesterday, July 12, was Henry David Thoreau's birthday. I celebrated. I consider Thoreau a hero and a constant source of inspiration. His were practiced examples of how one might live in accordance with their values.

Some people have asked me, if I don't celebrate Thanksgiving, or American Independence Day (July 4th), or religious holidays, what do I celebrate? I think Thoreau's life and work are worthy of celebration.

So I invited twenty friends over, we grilled up some hamburgers, got wasted and lit off a mess of fireworks. I'm kidding of course. I took a walk at Treman State Park, not far from home, by myself. It was a hot, dry day but at five in the afternoon, and in the occasional shade of the woods, the weather was pleasant enough. From the lower park I walked along the Gorge Trail until it split and then I took the Rim Trail to the upper park. From there I took the South Trail back down to the lower park. It's a well marked loop, paved in some places, popular. Some mildly strenuous moments if you're not accustomed to walking uphill. Something like five miles total. It took me a bit under two hours.

The woods around were alive with chipmunks and squirrels busy chasing each other and fussing about in the trees. I did not catch sight of a single bird. I have walked this trail many times, in many seasons, and always see newts and salamanders but this time not one. Mosquitoes and flies were out, and I have been on walks where they drive me nearly to a panic, but they weren't so abundant now. I saw one frog, after an hour or so of walking, and it made me very happy. I see and hear very few of those, though I think they should be plentiful here and in this season.

I saw no fish in Enfield Creek, in the pools that punctuate the falls. On my last walk here I saw many, but they were all dead. I saw no sign of raccoons, or skunks, or foxes, coyotes, deer, yet the roadsides everywhere here are littered with their fresh or rotting corpses. No prints of bear paws in the dirt tracks.

There's so much here I cannot name: trees and plants, soil and erosion patterns, what flowers when. I didn't take the kind of walk that I imagine Thoreau would have taken: slow, deliberate, carefully observing details and relationships. I walk fast, each step a step away from roads and computers, governments and corporations, self-promotion and other peoples' news. Like HDT, I imagine, I spend time in nature to assuage the loneliness and isolation of the contemporary urban (and virtual) environment. Walking alone on a narrow track in the woods (no phone, of course, and no money jangling in my pocket) I feel the opposite of alone. I feel utterly connected, to myself, to my surroundings, to time.

The contemporary urban and virtual environment encroaches on this, and hideously so. I wonder what it would be like if HDT took this walk with me. He would surely point out numerous, wondrous things that I miss. This gorge, its waterfalls, its trees, the way the flora changes, sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically as I walk from one glacially formed ridge to another, has much to marvel at. But I hear HDT asking -- or maybe it's the voice of myself as a child, 25 years ago -- "where did everything go?" Fellow mammals are busy dying under the wheels of fuel efficient automobiles, pines disappear as invasive insect species lay siege to them, the water, ever more toxic, chokes the fish, the sky above is littered with airplanes and satellites.

Thoreau spent his 44 years observing and reflecting on the world around him. He called bullshit on the way civilized people treat each other, the way money and property perverts them, the racism and warmongering of politicians. He has inspired generation after generation of environmentalists, civil rights activists, people clamoring for self-determination, people struggling against war. What a hero. What a thing to celebrate.

Less Mellow, More Harsh

I never do this, but I am posting an addendum to my previous piece "Harshing Your Mellow". I am posting this for anyone who considers my position to be somehow pessimistic (the epithets have started to flow in) or feels that small victories should be celebrated to help urge others on.

Friend:

Though I often agree with the formulation of Antonio Gramsci: "I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will" I don't think the label pessimist is appropriate in this case. You call my opinions pessimistic because I am not cracking open champagne over the New York State Senate's vote in favor of an 11-month moratorium on new hydrofracking drilling permits. For you, this is a victory.

I think writing what I wrote--because someone, somewhere, may be comforted knowing there are others who see through the smoke & mirrors--is actually an act of optimism. Humankind is better than the shit we are in. It is civilization that is fucked. Witness cultures that are tens of thousands of years old interacting & surviving. I have great "faith" in humanity. Pessimist is a lazy epithet that I get over & over from people who hold me & my convictions at arm's-length, who are quicker to identify with our young culture (industrial civilization) than our ancient species. They mistake comfort for love.

Imagine, friend, that instead of soil & water & air we are discussing a person, perhaps you, perhaps your child. And instead of multinational drilling & extraction corporations we are discussing a serial rapist that you, or your child, is in some sort of relationship with.

The abuse has happened, is happening now & will continue to happen. We want it to stop, so we take our case to a judge, who rules that it must stop temporarily to study the ill effects the abuse has on you, or your child. It must stop IF a second & third judge agree. The second judge will consider this matter in a month's time. Meanwhile you, or your child, continue to be abused by this monster rapist. If the second judge rules in favor of temporarily halting the abuse (again: to study its ill effects!) a third judge will consider the matter. If the third judge agrees with the first & second judges (this could be months from now, meanwhile you, or your child, are being violated by this monster) you will have a legal respite until May. It is now August. You might have rape to look forward to in late spring.

But there will be loopholes. "Exploratory" abuse will continue. "Conventional" abuse will continue. You have friends in other states, where the laws are different, who continue to suffer from completely legal abusive relationships. The laws do not protect the victims, you see, they protect the abuser.

Drilling leases are still being signed. The abuse continues. I cannot & will not celebrate a sham victory that allows something that I love--in this case the soil & water & air--to continue to be abused. It is twisted pessimism to think so small as to celebrate, now, to think that this slap in the face is a sign of hope. Such thinking is why we're in this mess in the first place: we too often celebrate sham victories & fail to fight for substance. People around here are still drunk from celebrating Obama's campaign victory (to take one of my least favorite examples). So drunk, they fail to notice the torture chambers are still active (those are not screams of delight, friend), the bombs continue to drop (those are not celebratory fireworks), the prisons are overflowing, the deceit compounds.

If you or I were involved in a genuine struggle to prevent these multinational corporations from turning our planet into toxic swiss cheese, we would not stop to celebrate now. (I am reminded of what Bob Marley said when he chose to perform two days after being shot: "The people who are making this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I?") As I wrote yesterday, this possible moratorium, this sham victory, is written into the script for us. We decide if we want to change the script. All we have to do is wake up to the abuse that continues around us, call it what it is, & stop it.

There is so much to do & we have the power to do it. What could be more optimistic than that?

The Aesthetics of Ecocide

[From TAGMAG 05 (March 2008), a publication of <>TAG in The Hague. Cross posted here and here.]

For most of the past 200,000 years, since Homo sapiens sapiens evolved in Africa, all humans lived in sustainable relationships with their landbase. They fed and were fed by the organisms with which they shared diverse environments and prospered as a species, eventually inhabiting many regions of the world. They brought with them their capacity for language, tool-making, complex organization, aesthetics.

Around 13,000 years ago some human populations began to develop the earliest attributes of civilization. A very few notable river cultures in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia (and later in North and South America) established year-round human settlements, later to evolve into cities, city-states, and empires. Instead of moving to sources of food, water, and shelter, they brought these things to single locations, sparking the first large-scale, human-instigated deforestations, desertifications, water pollution, and disease, as well as early instances of animal extinctions, genetic engineering, genocide.

These settled cultures were the exception to the overwhelming majority of other human cultures, spread out around the globe, which remained in states of sustainable interdependence with the natural world. Wherever these non-civilized cultures have been met by the civilized, they have either been absorbed or eradicated. I am not romanticizing. This is historical fact. There are very few non-civilized human cultures left. Present-day hunter-gatherers are the only examples of humanity not serving a death sentence to its own ecology.

Fact: civilization is on a mass-murderous rampage that is destroying its home and everything in it. It’s called ecocide, from the Greek oikos, meaning ‘house’, and the Latin cidium, meaning ‘to kill’. Civilized humanity is killing its own house. Your house. My house. Everybody’s house. Or if you prefer: your mother, my mother, everybody’s mother.

Those of us concerned about global environmental collapse wonder if there is any meaningful thing that the civilized can do to prevent the destruction of our species and most other species. Some people have dedicated their lives to issues such as wildlife and rainforest preservation. Others, for a variety of reasons, have come onboard recently with technological innovations. One American politician made a highly popular powerpoint presentation.

But is any of this effective? Is it meaningful? Can civilized humanity do anything more effective to stop environmental meltdown than cease to exist? Not humanity, but civilized humanity. Sorry if you’ve grown attached to civilization, but if we want to stop being ecocidal we are going to have to give up either civilization or our lives. If we hang on to civilization for as long as we can (perhaps a few more decades, perhaps, before it collapses under its own weight), we not only guarantee our own destruction, but the destruction of everyone and everything we love.

The good news is that the only thing you have to do to save your home, save your mother, save everything you love, is give up civilization. And that’s how it goes. While this is not particularly controversial if one looks at the environmental indicators, my guess is that many readers will resist agreeing. The inability many of us have imagining life without civilization is a sad comment on how attached we are to our mass-murderous ways. The violence has become more important than life itself. We identify more with consuming the planet than being an animal in it. Crazy, huh?

Take an hour or two and think deeply about this. Appraise civilization, as one of many distinct human cultures. Can we really be so deluded by our own participation in the killing as to think that what civilization is doing to the planet can continue without leading to utter disaster?

And let’s be clear: civilization is not some benign cultural phenomenon that makes art, trades corn for wool and builds cities, with millenia of ecocide and genocide an inadvertant and regretted side effect of its otherwise good works to prolong life expectancies, invent haute cuisine and turn out mind-numbingly stupid sitcoms. Civilization thrives on the subjegation of everything around it. It is insatiable. History tells us that its appetite is infinite. Common sense tells us that our world is not.

British physicist Stephen Hawking apparently agrees with me. In April 2007 he stated that, due to the threats of “global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers...the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space”, essentially claiming that humanity’s only chance for continued survival is to leave this planet. Hawking then got in a jet and floated around in zero gravity for a few seconds. A leading thinker of our civilization considers our home to be like so many mass-produced, excrement-smeared baby diapers in a landfill: disposable.

Heartbreaking, especially if you love this planet.

Is Hawking right? Consider what our species requires to survive: clean air and clean water, to begin with. An atmosphere that neither chokes nor cooks nor freezes us. We need to interact with other species—those we eat, those that eat us and help dispose of our waste, those that shelter us. We need diversity, the diversity of our genes and that of the things we eat. But do we need better, cleverer products? Do we need monumental architecture?

Our water is utterly poisoned. National Geographic has recently reported that on this planet, 71 percent of which is covered with water, none of it is pristine. None of it is untouched by civilization. There are growing dead zones—massive areas where no marine life can exist—in the oceans. Civilization is killing rivers daily: dumping toxins into them, damming them (yes, and even for ‘clean’ hydro-electric power), eradicating the forests that once lined them and brought precious nutrients to them. Whole lakes have caught fire or disappeared. Rains have been composed of acid. Glaciers are melting because it is the right of the civilized to eat beef and drive an automobile.

Civilization has succeeded in killing water. And even where there is clean drinking water, the civilized increasingly prefer the bottled variety, the production of which does violence against our planet in its water- and oil-guzzling production, bottling, transportation, and disposal. (We can leave aside, for now, the violence that marketing it does to our intellect.)

And our air is filthy. Conduct a little experiment: go into the woods, or the mountains, somewhere far away. Take a deep breath. The degree to which you enjoy taking that breath and it makes you feel good is the clearest possible indication of how unclean the air is that you breath every day. The air that you breathe is the air of the civilized. It is filthy, filled with poison, and it makes you sick and unhappy. This is an objective fact: refer to your experiment in the woods for proof.

Humans are a hardy and adaptable species. Although civilized humans have almost completed the elimination of all non-civilized human cultures (those still living in balance with their ecosystems), the rest of us will outlast many other species. But our survival depends on our interaction with other species. While in our civilized wisdom we turn our back on these interactions, our actions continue to raise the planet’s temperature and cook vital amphibian, bird, insect, and plant species. Our own demise is thereby precipitated.

What will happen if we fail to respect the integrity of genes, when some inevitable disease strikes a staple in our monocrop agriculture? It is happening now with bananas and with bees. Yes, and what will fish-lovers do when, as is widely and uncontroversially predicted, edible fish species disappear altogether within the next few decades?

May I vent? I am bored to tears by the faulty and false solutions parading as the new hope for our civilization. While I respect recent efforts to alleviate the most obvious hurts of ecocide, I sometimes wonder if failing to recognize and name the real problem isn’t making it worse. Civilization will not fix civilization. A brilliant scientist is telling you to fly into outer space if you want your children to survive. One assumes that only the civilized get a ticket on the Great Airlift of the Future, and hunter-gatherers be damned. Hello?

Listen: there is no hope for civilization. Civilization is not redeemable. Civilization will not be reformed. It—we—will continue to consume what we can, and destroy what we cannot, until there is nothing left. Unless, of course, it is stopped, it is ended, it itself is subjected to the same sort of violent and systematic program of eradication that it has subjected everything in its path to for the last several millenia. Or, more likely, it collapses under its own weight. Either way, as it has hurt for millenia, it will hurt when it goes, kicking and screaming. Feel it now?

Yes, yes, there is no hope. And that may well be a good thing. Without relying on hope, that is, without externalizing the problem, our problem, we have nothing to wait for but our own good actions. What would it take for us to demolish all of our reasons for not acting against ecocide? How can we smash our false hopes for the baby steps we occassionally take against the juggernaut of civilization? We will all feel stronger when we stop playing victims to our own crimes.

The excellent and uncompromising radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen, whose flawlessly argued and highly recommended work Endgame inspired much of this article, often asks his readers to consider what they love and what they are capable and willing to do to protect and preserve it. He writes:

“One of the good things about everything being so fucked up—about the culture being so ubiquitously destructive—is that no matter where you look—no matter what your gifts, no matter where your heart lies—there’s good and desperately important work to be done.”

So do it. Figure it out and do it. It is beyond the scope of this article to instruct anyone as to how, just to recommend we all take our minds out of the gutter of civilization and find a way. Not just this year, while it is fashionable. (Jensen has noted that for the last few decades environmental issues have returned to the headlines approximately every seven years. But the rainforests still get eaten up.) Not just until all of our automobiles run on pseudo-solutions like bio-fuel. But as a matter of course and a way of life.

Yes, and I’m typing all of this into my laptop, produced by one of the most environmentally offensive and aggressively marketed corporations in the industry. And yes, I type at 35,000 feet, as I cross the Atlantic Ocean. And yes, it is the eighth time I have crossed it in the last six months. We can discuss carbon footprints, alternative energy sources, the phoney greening of polluting industries. Or we can be honest.

Or we can talk aesthetics. Lost as I am myself in the delusions of civilization, I came up one afternoon with the name of the <>TAG exhibition, ecoAesthetics, as though the aesthetics of ecology ought to be of concern. Aesthetics? I live in The Netherlands, a country where the utterly arrogant concept of eco-aesthetics has been writ large on the landscape, even by the idea of ‘landscape’: there is hardly any ‘eco’ left here, just aesthetics, the entirety of the envirnment controlled—‘stewarded’, the policy writers of George W. Bush’s government would say—for centuries by the civilized, presumably because the civilized think they know better. I find it hard to do better than 200,000 years of survival through ice ages, floods, and volcanoes, but what do I know?

Here I sit in an airplane, cooking the atmosphere around me and strangling the environment below, playing the good soldier in civilization’s war against the planet Earth. And reformulating what has been said about the mass-murderous culture that prosecuted a more commonly agreed ‘war of aggression’ in the last century: at least the planes run on time.

Decay, Destruction and Waste

Note: written for the program book of the fourth edition of new music festival Dag in de Branding. Also appears at the <>TAG website.

Decay, destruction, and waste. I could be writing a history of the decline and fall of an ancient empire. Or a modern empire. Or the much more devastating and long-lived empire of Civilization. But I’m not: I’m describing the twelve hours of new music that make up the fourth edition of the Dag in de Branding Festival.

If you’re inclined to see this red thread of explicit decadence as just so much doom and gloom, I invite you to look more carefully. Albert Camus, a hero of mine who worked in times not unlike our own---times that were and are unfortunately “interesting”---wrote that the greatest art speaks to the time in which it is created. That is exactly what the events in this program do.

This is not doom and gloom. It is an absolutely essential state of the Arts at this interesting moment. Indeed at any moment. I have written elsewhere that artists are the sensory organs of the culture. We are its eyes, its ears, its mouths and its hands. If our works of art fail to recognize the decay, destruction, and waste, then our eyes, ears, and mouths are shut, and our hands are bound. How encouraging then, in these seemingly senseless times, that (some) artists haven’t lost their senses. To rephrase yet another observation of Monsieur Camus, art may dispute reality, but it does not hide from it.

How so? At the start of the program we are brought face to face with the reality of decay in the abstract in Bill Morrison’s film to Michael Gordon’s extraordinary symphony Decasia wherein ancient filmstock is seen suffering the ravages of time. But the work masterfully disputes this reality by preserving the decay itself, turning the visible death of a beloved artifact of industrial civilization into a thing of aesthetic beauty. An underlying question of this work, at least for me, is whether to mourn or celebrate the decay of a culture that has paid for its wonderful creativity with unspeakable environmental devastation.

Or this: the destruction referenced in Bob Ostertag’s music to the Living Cinema project Special Forces is the real destruction that the world silently (and to its great shame) witnessed in Lebanon last summer. Ostertag is never one to hide from the reality of destruction, having earlier brought his Yugoslavia Suite to the Balkans, post-Nato, and Special Forces to Beirut. Yet, I think, he disputes this reality, constantly, by using these works as opportunities for beginning dialogues on the themes he treats. Ostertag disputes the reality of the destruction his work reflects with uncompromising dedication to social justice through and beyond his music.

Or this: Egon Kracht and the Troupe bring us the Faust story as a rock opera (with a nod to Frank Zappa) in The Seduction of Harry Faust. In this updated version, guess how God, Mephisto, and Faust are portrayed? As a media tycoon, his marketing expert son, and a loser they destroy by bringing him into their world, of course. This is right on target for our uber-consumerist, narcissistic, and celebrity-infatuated culture (though I must say, sadly, that satire and reality are more often than not one and the same thing these days).

Or this: Boxing Pushkin, ostensibly about the life of the famous Russian author, consciously throws the audience into the role of spectator. Meanwhile the very definition of freedom, as embodied by Pushkin, seems to be at stake. While this work is perhaps the least overtly connected to our red thread, even a cursory glance at the synopsis (and the battles over Pushkin’s legacy) calls to mind the violence one witnesses done to language to legitimize this or that regime.

Or this: “Waste equals food” write the authors of Cradle to Cradle, a remarkable book that examines natural life cycles and nutrient flows as paradigms for how to reinvent industrial design in environmentally sane and ethically responsible ways. I mention it here in connection with Wasted, the mini-festival of decayed, destroyed, and degraded sounds-turned-breakbeats (and more) hosted by Jason Forrest and Pure. This gathering feeds its audience-participants with energy, exuberance, and catharsis mined from some of the darkest reaches of our culture. What is wasted here and what is eaten, I will not say, nor will I venture to put into words what reality is under dispute.

* * *

“Create dangerously” urged Albert Camus toward the end of his life. The American civil rights and social justice leader Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the world is in dire need of creative extremists.” Both were destroyed early by two of the more nefarious designs of Civilization: the automobile and the gun. What a waste.

We may not have asked for this red thread---I mean the red thread of decay, destruction, and waste running through the lives of humans and non-humans, through our values and wound tightly around our planet---but it is what we have and what we are. To present a program of new music revolving around aspects of the decay, destruction, and waste of our culture, our Industrial Civilization, from material to social decay, from self-destruction to the destruction of our neighbors, from the wasting of our planetary environment to the wasting of our youth---to present works that reflect this historical moment is not necessarily to celebrate it, but to recognize it.

It is to come to our senses as listeners, as artists, as social beings.

It is to know who we are, what we are, and what we must do. It is to be awake, alive, and up to the task.

Doom and gloom? If art should be uplifting, and if the world is in fact in dire need of creative extremists, what could be more uplifting than that?

Frog with Implanted Webserver

I just returned from the opening night of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in Rotterdam. I am not happy.

The first work visitors are confronted with is something called Experiments with Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver. Here is the official description of the work:

Garnet Hertz has implanted a miniature webserver in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container of mineral oil, an inert liquid that does not conduct electricity. The frog is viewable on the Internet, and on the computer monitor across the room, through a webcam placed on the wall of the gallery. Through an Ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani's original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal. Experiments in Galvanism is both a reference to the origins of electricity, one of the earliest new media, and, through Galvani's discovery that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue, a nod to what many theorists and practitioners consider to be the new new media: bio(tech) art.

Let me translate for those readers not accustomed to the morally vacuous language of the wine-soaked art world:

Asshole takes the corpse of a frog---amphibian corposes are easy to come by in these days of human-instigated global warming, toxified water, and poisoned air---sticks some motors in its legs and wires in the gallery, and invites visitors to participate in his shit-brained glorification of an artistically bad, technologically backward, and morally repugnant idea.

(Hey, you don't think it's morally repugnant to use a frog's corpse? How about we use your grandmother's corpse instead? Put her in a clear glass container of mineral oil and click the mouse to make her legs kick. Sorry: if you don't get what's wrong I don't know if I can explain it to you.)

The single redeeming factor in the inclusion of this otherwise utterly useless, horrendously uncreative and straight up tasteless attempt at "art" in the DEAF exhibition is that at the very least it alone demonstrated (brazenly, arrogantly, proudly, shamelessly) something inherent in everything else on display: the absolute affrontery to the natural world necessary to be a good and cooperative "media artist" in this trash heap of a culture.

Your little art goes beep and lights flash and another sixty or so Iraqi children succumb to some strange form of cancer to make it happen. Safely tucked in here at the end of history you make a witty installation with RFID (radio frequency identification) technology---my, what big subsidies you have!---while brown people somewhere else are forced to show their ID cards at (American, British, Israeli, whatever) gunpoint to get to the other side of town.

Besides leaving, there was nothing I wanted to do---as an experiment, of course---so much as shut down the electricity on some of these artists. For good.

Now is as fine a time as any to let you know that I'm just about through reading volume one of Derrick Jensen's heartbreaking call to action Endgame. Jensen---whose earlier work A Language Older Than Words was, until now, perhaps the single most important book I have ever read---is turning my bad attitude even worse.

And yet: You. Must. Read this book. Start here.

Back to cutting off the electricity. I wonder what these "media artists" or "electronic artists" or whatever would do if there were no electricity to juice their little gadgets and installations (and fucking "bio(tech) art"). So much of it---and this is a conclusion Jensen would quickly make if he bothered to dally in the minutiae of this ultimately inconsequential and wine-soaked world---so much of it simply legitimizes and glorifies harmful technologies, often without any meaningful content to at least somewhat call out the culture's persistent violence.

Guess what the theme of DEAF 07 is? Ready for this? Interact Or Die!

Now I suppose this could be understood a number of ways. For example, it could be a call to all of us to start interacting with each other in meaningful ways. After all, it is the absence of our own nurturing of community that allows governments and corporations to set the agenda and limits of human interaction. Or "interact or die" might be a warning that we fail to recognize the fact of interdependence in the natural world we (should) inhabit at the risk of spiritual and ultimately literal death.

But since the natural world was so completely absent in this exhibition (with one or two minor exceptions: a video with leaf cutter ants carrying little national flags instead of leaves, for example) I have to assume that what we were invited to interact with was the unnatural world of these works. The field for interaction is the field defined by these uncreative creations, mobilizing under the banner of the unusually explicit "interact or die" theme to do further violence to lingering memories of the Planet Earth (where once upon a time frogs ate mosquitos, not ethernet impulses, and lived on the banks of rivers, not clear glass containers of mineral oil).

I do realize that I might be alienating myself from the few friends in the art scene here who even bothered to read this far. I know some of this may be unpopular with my computer-programming, electronic musician colleagues. And sure: part of my work exists within the realm of electronic art, insofar as it uses electricity and electronics. (I'm even using electricity and electronics now to fire off this mediated communique.) This is not a fact in which I rejoice, but an issue with which I wrestle constantly.

But this isn't about me. I don't stick ethernet cables in corpses.