Images of the Recession

Thousands of people at job fairs, construction cranes, closed factories, cul de sacs with no houses, foreclosed home-buying tours, unused freight containers, etc. What does this all mean? - that we are in a recession. Take a look at the photographs.

What kind of capitalism is this that images from times of down and out look identical to images from times of up and coming? These photographs look like they could have been taken at any point in the business cycle. Creative destruction? Accelerating change? The law of uneven development?

Reasons to Love Portland

I just got back from a great party in Portland, one of my favorite cities in the U.S.

• A light rail system connects Portland to the suburbs, something "environmental" Seattle barely has.
  

• We spent the night at a friend's house and found a copy of Portland's "Gay and Lesbian Yellow Pages" on the doorstep when we woke up.

• Rent is cheaper in Portland, at least on M.L.K.
  

• Portland is bicycle friendly, with bike paths an almost every big road.

• Carsharing is popular in Portland.

• There is a sense of community in Portland.

• Portlanders are happy and talk to neighbors.

• Portlanders are relaxed about fixing up their yards to look like golf courses, and instead find many other interesting uses for yards, like artwork and gardening.

• Whole time I was there I did not see one cop. As soon as I got back to Tacoma I saw five and one squad SUV in a matter of ten minutes.

• Parties in Portland attract some of the best musicians.
  

• Portland's innovative "urban growth boundary" prevents sprawl and keeps the city contained.

• According to Grist, Portland is the second-most green city in the world behind Reykjavik, Iceland.

• Portland has some of the largest city parks in the U.S.

• DIY crafting is a big thing in Portland.

• Portland is home to many interesting people, like Linus Torvalds (founder of Linux).

By contrast,

• I recently discovered Tacoma was listed on CNN as the top most stressful city in the United States.

Thinking About Obstacles in a Different Way

Some like yoga, others prefer tai chi or karate. Nothing gets my blood flowing like parkour.

Parkour is incredibly subversive. Its philosophical principles are linked to Situationist writings which view the urban landscape like a trap built by capitalism to shape our consciousness, making us prisoners to a routine life. The Situationists proclaimed there were original and useful ways of perceiving the landscape, and only a radical shift in "psychogeography" could help access our nativist urban psychology.

Parkour is also incredibly practical as a revolutionary tool. Jumping fences, getting away from the cops, dodging bullets: all these things are possible with a rigorous parkour training. It encourages physical fitness and ease of transition in all sorts of environments typically thought to be unsurmountable.

Today practiced parkour with handful of others in a park nearby. We jumped tables, walls, and other barriers. I began to think no obstacle was impossible to get by. We climbed trees, jumped from walls, and balanced on poles. A couple were running and side-flipping or back-flipping off obstacles. If only I were that agile. At this point my training has only begun.

This is essentially what parkour looks like.

More information on parkour here.

Toward Unitary Urbanism

There should be free parties in city parks every weekend.

I have anecdotal evidence supporting my thesis. The Decibel party in Seattle offered a free party in Volunteer Park as alternative to expensive parties downtown. Decibel was a 4-day party showcasing some of my favorite EDM artists - they spun minimal, dub, glitch, and all sorts of funky beats in between. (Look at the full list of all the artists.) Most of the artists played inside for a hefty fee (Carl Craig for $25 at the door), but a few of them played outside in parks absolutely for free.

Some local and West Coast Djs wanted to give Seattle a free show and that was excellent. Two from the Bay-Area (edIT and Boreta) played for free their West Coast "glitch" underground flavor. Here is a sample of their music:

I don't want to take the unitary urbanist thesis too far, but how can I resist? The status quo urbanism is a compartmentalized way to think about a city's surroundings, where "art" is detached from the rest of life. In that view, "art" is supposed to stay inside artist's lofts or inside museums. And increasingly, art is being pushed back into private spaces and out of public spaces. From this I suppose we can conclude that public art has negative aesthetic effect on some peoples' "indifference curves". These people, typically, we call "squares". Status quo urbanism is square urbanism.

It's unfortunate that square values have triumphed over unitary values in public discourse (in the City of Seattle and elsewhere). The Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle has seen an increase in art, dance, and "hip" scenes in recent years. But the squares are fighting back with socio-economic status and privilege as a way to limit everyone else's fun. In the unitary urbanist ideal, an urban environment is blended so much with work and play that you cannot tell where function ends and where play begins.

"A unitary urbanism — the synthesis we call for, incorporating arts and technologies — must be created in accordance with new values of life, values which we now need to distinguish and disseminate. . . . "

- Gil J Wolman “La plate-forme d’Alba” originally appeared in Potlatch: Information Bulletin of the Lettrist International #27 (Paris, 2 November 1956)

Dérive in Buenos Aires

Here is a video from Beunos Aires, Argentina that has been taking the web by storm. It shares close resemblance to the Situationist concept dérive, meaning to walk about almost aimlessly through a city in such a way that re-contextualizes its urban environments. I particularly like the video's time-lapse feel to it, the way the clouds drift over so quickly, while the stop-action motions in the scene are in reality moving quite slowly. This time-lapsed way of contextualizing the urban environment takes the Situationist ideas even further in such a way that surpasses the original, space-bound Situationism of Paris at the time - the 1960s.

But using the dimension of time to re-contextualize the city seemed to always rely on something else, like a camera, or a novel. If you read Eugene Ionesco's The Hermit, there is a particularly piquant moment when the protagonist, a hermit, re-contextualizes his Parisian urban environment by experiencing a strange flow of Paris's historical events. As if he were truly present during the French Revolution, when he is re-awakened, he walks around the city seeing it in a completely new and different way. This particularly Situationist theme of the novel, and partly of this video, is that history is always present in the spaces that we live.

Bellevue: A Citiy of Tomorrow

Bellevue is a Seattle bedroom community, a republican bastion on the East side of Lake Washington, and one of the more anti-human and unhappy cities in the Northwest region. Beyond the consumerist core of the city center, Bellevue Square, I start to notice fewer and fewer places for humans to walk, fewer and fewer places for humans to talk to one another, until eventually, there are no sidewalks at all and I am competing for space with the sport utility vehicles and tinted town cars.

Some time perhaps during the 1970s, urban-planners in general began a movement that has signaled the city center's destruction, disrupted and rejected any bohemian style of living in favor of taller buildings and more road space. Urban and suburban centers, the new message announced far and wide, were engines of wealth creation and the parading spectacle of the new urban lifestyle.

The aim of the Keynesian city-planner is to lubricate the city for the purpose of extracting credit and increasing the velocity at which money travels from one hand to another. The strategy is to extract wealth from residents and use this flow to attract and subsidize developers to build the city's common areas. The goal is to create a stock of residential bourgeoisie. The city center was to be totally economically liquid. How 'cities' - that is, the planners and council members of general purpose areas - ever got to be in this position as the vanguard for any 'municipality' is the same story as with any nation-state vanguard. I view them much like I would view any armed mafia, except these ones have flags.

Bellevue is ironically rated by Money Magazine as one of the 25 safest cities in America. Crime level equivocates with "safety" all too easily. In these inclement climates, a new architecture, a new planning, and entire areas dedicated to the attitude of anti-human politics were erected at the expense of the human population and their happiness. The cities dispel the homeless, the black and Latino, forbid loiterers and close their doors to the non-consumers. The new centers of city life have but one ultimate purpose, to mechanize the general population and influence the flow of consumption.

Further reading:
Hall, Peter Geoffrey. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Blackwell Publishing: Malden, MA: 2002.
Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in the Postmodern Age. Routledge. link.

Plan for Freedom in the New American City

It’s an ominous future if you think about Mexico City or Cairo, cities which are approaching 17 million habitants or more. But the infrastructures of these very old cities, especially Cairo, Bombay, Karachi or Jakarta, etc. are still the same as they were at the beginning of the 20th century in some districts. And the actual city policy is far from considering the new problems of urban areas and the pressures on urban areas. The cities are becoming a place of confrontation, a place where the collective memory disintegrates, a place of social ruptures, a place where frustration accumulates, where people backtrack to their individual level or to the level of a group what we fearfully call communitarianism which becomes more and more important in urban areas, and not only in rural areas as it was before.

Something I've observed from staying in Freiburg (on the right) is that a city which was leveled during WWII can subsequently be rebuilt with more care in its design than most American cities, even though Freiburg was under extreme pressure to rebuild immediately after the war ended. There is a problem of a new architecture, our problem is American urbanism. Cities have to create urban areas which are a discussion forum of different social classes, a place of common undertakings, a place of parting, a place of active and positive cohabitation instead of being places of panic, places which are divided into dangerous areas and areas of comfort, but of a comfort which is more and more troubled by menaces coming from the surrounding suburbs which are difficult to control as the urban concentrations press down more and more on the governments.

European cities, even if they are large, are so much smaller than American cities. As I walk through the small and narrow streets of Freiburg, I realize that big American cities which are spread out and distant make little sense. While European cities have suburbs, they are often smaller and more compact than the American boomburgs and exurbs.

Tacoma--A Photoblog

I'm going in search of cultural Tacoma, not banal and casual Tacoma, but the Tacoma of the grainy, absolute destiny of the waterways. In search of the deep Tacoma of mores and mentalities, and superficial he Tacoma of industrial waste, of motels and spongy surfaces. But to understand it you have to take to its walkways and waterways. You have to completely disappear in your own backyard. The aesthetics of the city is a kind of local aesthetics.


Deep down, Tacoma, with its space, its industrial refinement, its bluff of good conscience, even in the spaces which open it up to liveliness, is only a dead society. The fascinating thing is to travel through as if everyone around you were dead, and that this is the apocalyptic wasteland of the future. It's a society built around industrial plants, and the military industrial complex. It's a haven for strict beeworker types, and types who follow orders easily. The conscience of the city is loyal to its anti-nativist roots, whose motto is The City of Destiny, and whose goal is to triumph nature, oust the savages, and claim the land for one's own.


Tacoma has no history besides that. Unless one were to tell the story of the train, or the papermill, or the dome. But every White Man's city has a history like that. Perhaps Tacoma's history is a history of utility. Or utilities--the water and electric kind--for the use of the public. That makes sense,because Tacoma operates as a wide network of wires, pipes, and tubes. Her technology is outdated, and yet she insists she is on edge of development. A director at the courthouse tells me the new city motto is The Most Wired City, to attract new businesses, of course. Only a promiscuous city changes her subtitle to when the tastes of consumers change. Now she is Most Wired. (Journalists did not pick it up. A Google search shows Tacoma, America's #1 Wired City, but no top ratings come close to rating Tacoma number one.. Seattle comes close at number three.)

But Tacoma will always remain The Most Industrial City. The American gas plant, as seen in this photo, will forever be her emblem. Her motto is still, secretly, "Onward and Upward!"





No, Tacoma should not be beautified. She has a kind of natural beauty, like in this photograph, in which industrial waste and nature's preserve can live peaceably together, respecting one another's life-affirming and life-exterminating qualities. Like the Yin and the Yang, sludge and stickerbush learn to live and love one another in harmony. Pure industrial harmony.



There are no pedestrians here. No mimes, no walkers. The most enlivening thing in the city is the graffiti on the walls, that kind of underground explosion of the arts that knows no authority. It respects flavors of the faceless performances, the markup languages of self-proclaiming existence, of endlessly self-evident activities.




Warplanes pass overhead, silently at first, but then uproariously. The glass windows of every building and skyscraper shake when the bombers fly to the military complexes outside the city.

This is "downtown". The cars are larger here. I've counted six hummers in an hour, and the ads are more aggressive. This is wall-to-wall prostitution. The lighting is uninteresting, and the density of the concrete is accumulating to a crescendo effect. It's always like this the closer you get to the center of the cosmos. Yet Tacomans know their city isn't the center of cosmos. People aren't as smiley as in other cities: this is the city of commerce. All banks and businessmen. Mostly out-of-towners. Still, no one speaks. Everyone is cubicalized, even on the sidewalk.

Tag cloud: practical, unfashionable, cautious, powerful, deceitful, controlling, highly materialistic, limited in outlook, inhibited.






Every military industrial complex is a police state. At this window you can fantasize about one day being a police officer when you grow up.



Tacoma is completely asexual. Other cities are like women in highheels, or women with librarian's glasses. Tacoma is none of these femmes. She is young, flat, unimpressive. She is also barren, and yet also seductive. Seductive because she has so many secrets, stashed away in her highrise buildings, those ironic commerce centers which are all planning and no reflection.

Tacoma is not like the green-skirted woman in this picture. Tacoma is a manipulative beast, always pressuring, and always propagandizing to the residents. The banner tells onlookers to "Be a tourist in your own backyard!" And we're supposed to be tourists by spending wildly in her uninteresting shops and greedy suit-and-tie corners.

But why tour Tacoma? Why wander her streets and ascend her torrid hilltops? How interesting is it to cruise these local, familiar streets, fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard? Why feed scenery into a hungry one-eyed camera, eager to eat the world one monument at a time?





World Trade Center: flag's at half-staff because Jerry Falwell died that day.

Tacoma has never been a community. You can tell that by the spacey streets. As soon as you set foot in Tacoma, you feel the empty presence of reflective windows and tinted sunglasses, even when the sun is not shining. There is a heightened sense of privacy: the vertiginous glass facades reflecting each building to the others. The people come out of their stuffy glass monuments to get a cup of coffee down below. All around is Indian land, but where are all the whales, the canoes, the utopian dream of a hellenistic city on the edge of the Cascades? Tacoma, Tacoma!

Why do people live in Tacoma? There is no relationship between them. Except for an inner industriousness which results from the simple fact of living in an innercity suburb. It gives off a sensation of being at once in an innercity, but the ignorance that your city even has something "inner". This is what makes it a self-attracting universe, which there is no reason to leave. There is no human reason for being here--except for the fact that there are opportunities everywhere.

There aren't anymore sirens on Hilltop, the infamous "ghetto" area of Tacoma, than here than 6th avenue. The police history archives say that drive-by shootings were a daily phenomenon in the 80s, ranking Tacoma number three in the "Highest Murder Rate On the West Coast" list. That's how Tacoma learned that being a community was less conducive to crime. Once people began speaking to one another, crime rates fell significantly.


Point Defiance: a daughter and her mother run past me, reminding me of their sleek animalistic faces, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Perhaps. Tacoma is the nature preserve within the city. The military industrial complex is nearby. And graffiti crops up inside the nature preserve. What is it trying to say?





Captain Charles Wilkes said, with guns on either side of the sound, him and his men could defy the world, and thereupon called this place "Point Defiance".

Tacoma gets its name from a mispronounced Nisqually word, Tacobet, meaning Mother of the Waters. The White Man mispronounced and mistreated the people of Nisqually, eventually hanging their chief, Leschi, in 1858. A few years ago a historical court ruled “as a legal combatant of the Indian War… Leschi should not have been held accountable under law for the death of an enemy soldier,” thereby exonerating him of any wrongdoing. The Nisqually and Puyallup tribes revolted against the Medicine Creek Treaty that was imposed upon them, and then ignored by the settlers. It gave 2.5 million acres of land to the settlers, in exchange for reservations, cash payments, and native rights. That was all ignored in 1974. The original Nisqually reservation was rocky, and unacceptable to the Nisqually, who were riverside fishing people. The parts of the Nisqually River they used has since been stolen by Fort Lewis in 1907 and McChord Airforce Base in 1917.


The simple precinct of home is a prostitute for business. There are no children in Tacoma. Or rather, there are no children, yet everyone is a child in Tacoma.




The only person in Tacoma at the moment. He is humming the tune to the song by Grandmaster Flash. "I'm in a concrete jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under."American Culture, Environmentalism, Evolutionary Biology, Industrialization, Nativism, Sexuality, Urban Planning