propositions press... 2.0

a pause in the action matters

Sara Daleiden alerted me to the opening of Monument, a solo show by lauren woods at University Art Museum at Cal State University Long Beach. A brewing controversy peppered the air, having to do with the dismissal of Kimberli Meyer, the director of the museum, less than a week before the opening. At the end of a 40-minute gallery talk, the artist made a dramatic gesture in solidarity with Meyer, whom she considers a primary collaborator for this project. It was totally worth witnessing. It is not everyday that an artist declares a just-unveiled interactive installation “paused” and walks out of her own opening. 

The controversy has been reported on Hyperallergic, ArtNews, and Dallas News with good pictures. Meyer is appealing the termination.

The show is excellent. This is the best artistic treatment of the BLM movement and BLM urgency I’ve yet seen. This is in comparison to Hank Willis Thomas’s Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, and Lauren Halsey’s recent installation for Made in L.A., among others, so I offer it as high praise.

 

 

 

The artist shortly before speaking.

 

Lauren Halsey, Detail, The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project (2018). Photo credit to Colony Little. 

The centerpiece of the show is an arrangement of 25 turntables on pedestals, each loaded with a vinyl pressing of audio documents relating to police killings of African American people. It is true, I am a sucker for vinyl and turntables. But I would say that this installation well exceeded that basic favoritism of mine. On top of the impressive visual display, there is the sound. It makes for haunting listening for anyone with ears connected to the least bit of heart. woods played an excerpt from the cop killing of Philando Castile, one of the most egregious human rights violations caught on a phone in recent memory. The voice of Diamond Reynolds, Castile’s girlfriend and a passenger in the car at the time of the shooting, filled the hall. I’d heard that recording before and just like the first time, it brought to surface a physical response. It was hard to settle my agitation; some in the gallery shed tears.   

One of 25 unmarked turntables with unmarked records in Monument by lauren woods

Two side galleries also contained displays, all of them rendering primary documents from incidents of police murder into objects for aesthetic consideration–aesthetic in the sense that Susan Buck-Morss uses the word, i.e. in opposition to the unfeelingness of shock and the everyday anaesthetics of capitalism. woods gives us a enlarged graphic reproductions of the coroner’s diagram marking the sixteen bullet holes riddling the body of young Laquan MacDonald, from head to thigh. She presents printed transcripts from the incidents beautifully stored in metal boxes on tables measured to lengths matching distances specified in case law justifying police fear of “suspects”–which is to say, of course, just about any African American person engaged in just about any activity. Together with the central installation, the show is an emotional wringer, a work of collected trauma that undoubtedly tested the resolve of the artist, and an indictment of a national shame. 

Detail of graphic appropriated from coroner's report on Laquan MacDonald.

Transcript from dialogue of Diamond Reynolds and officers Yanez and Kauser, moments after Yanez shot Philando Castile.

I also read the Hyperallergic account on the quashing of the proposed feature whereby audio would be broadcast outside the museum. I didn’t miss it. I think the artist is already successfully walking a fine line. Organizing documents of traumatic racist violence and re-presenting them in ways that create physical and mental space for absorbing them anew, and in ways that put the discrete incidents in relation to each other, is the strength of the show. And to do it all with such attention to detail is quite admirable and, I would say, a big service to the ongoing need for careful political analysis—a need, just like careful art making, that runs counter to the immediacies of crises. Putting the audio out in the public air for unsuspecting passersby…ah, I am not sure that would perform the same service. As I am imagining it, that would more likely fall into a recursive strategy, i.e. taking a traumatic document and calling it art without a lot of evident organization. Even if there were thought and labor put into the editing, sequencing, etc. (which there might not have been, given the suggestion that the audio was to have been directly channeled from the turntables as played randomly by gallery goers), but that part of the work wouldn’t be readily available for interpretation—in contrast to the gallery arrangement of turntables, wherein the arrangement decisions are very evident, as an essential part of the work, as much as the raw documentation. A broadcast of the audio—again, only as I am imagining it—might smack more of Christoph Büchel’s proposed treatment of the prototyped border security walls: display them as is, and justify it as art for reasons of historical preservation, but make no accomodation for the mixed messages upon reception. This is a long way of saying, no matter the administration’s meddling with the artist’s intentions, as a viewer I did not miss anything for the absence of the outdoor audio. The show was plenty powerful without it.

In the reporting about the controversy, in many places it has been said that Meyer’s declared agenda was to address white supremacy and the museum’s role in both upholding and dismantling it. I hate to be critical at this moment of personal upheaval, but if those reports are accurate, then I must say, I find politics reduced to stances against white supremacy disheartening. I have many reasons for this, chief among them, an analytical lens of white supremacy simply leaves out too many other factors. This is not to flatten all regressive vectors into equivalent forces, but it is to say that they are all intertwined. Race or class or gender–to speak only of the Holy Trinity of Difference–make for primary antagonisms in different situations, and reinforce (or contradict) each other in different ways, both at micro and broad, historical scales; this is something we all know. A reduction to any one, particularly that of race, in my estimation and experience often clouds political intent with distractions like virtue-signaling and conversation-halting moralism. Let’s just say that, like Asad Haider lays out in Mistaken Identity, I find more of value in the late phase Amiri Baraka than in the current Frank Wilderson. Guilt-mongering by calling out white privilege is a pseudo-politics. That said, let me emphasize that I have no way to judge Meyer’s politics except as has been reported; I will grant her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she has a complex and nuanced analysis of power that is not being told. Facilitating a project like Monument certainly speaks well of her courage as a curator.  

The firing, by appearances at least, falls into the over-determined pattern of tone-deaf administrations that create mediagenic controversies while ostensibly seeking to avoid them. If the administration wishes for everything “to be centered around art,” as quoted in the Hyperallergic article, then maybe those decision makers ought to liberate the art from such bone-headed interventions as firing the director days before a major opening. 

The exhibition remains paused; the audio has gone silent for the time being. I can only hope that the museum and university resolve the disputed firing so that more people will be able to fully experience this important work. Our growth in political thinking–and feeling–to match the ongoing crisis in police violence, extremist racism, and rising violence in general, depends on shows like this one.

a retreat report

A few years ago I participated in an eight-day “social justice leadership training” retreat offered by the Rockwood Institute, divided into two sessions over two long weekends a couple months apart. Though there were the expected trust games, ice-breakers, and listening exercises I was familiar with from years earlier, the training centered Rockwood’s own techniques and lingo. A noteworthy moment came at the very end, just before the gathering broke. Our trainers left us with a word of parting advice. Be careful about your re-entry, we were told. For some people it can be easy to return to their organizations and spout Rockwood methods and terms. For those who have not been through the training, it may sound peculiar or even cultish. This was a good piece of wisdom.

crescent moon and joshua tree at dusk 

I heard it again four years later, this time from the Against The Stream instructors upon completion of an eight-day meditation course held at the Joshua Tree Retreat Center. As is the ATS style, the advice came in plain speak: upon returning to regular life be cautious about what you share because, really, nobody cares. This is the problem with having experienced something profound or transformative, even in a minor way. One wants to share something about it, partly to help oneself process what they went through and partly because it is simply good news. But taking up oxygen with one’s conversion tale risks turning it into an unwelcome voice of recruitment and proselytization. In other words, just another ego trip.

Offering this report goes against advice. Nevertheless, I feel a responsibility to document my experience for those who fund the program. After all, I was on scholarship. The Hemera Foundation, at least, will care. At a deeper level, putting reflections into writing is a way to acknowledge that analysis and meditation are complementary, not mutually exclusive.¹ Finally, perhaps this reflection will reach somebody with the curiosity that I had, people who for whatever reasons of their own are considering paths involving Buddhism and contemplative practice.

Let me describe the course in outline and structure. Since I am but a novice, and on top of that working from memory, I am sure there will be inaccuracies in description. Also, since ATS is somewhat ecumenical in its evolving school of Buddhism (one of my attractions to it), I may mash up concepts originating from different schools of thought. I welcome corrections and suggestions, and beg forgiveness in advance for distortions and omissions.

I think of the course as having been structured in two ways, internally and externally. Internally, there is the structuring of behavior and thought through the adherence to the precepts of “right practice” so as to form sangha, an association of practitioners for the duration of the course. In combination, the dual structure enabled us to open ourselves to insight meditation as it has been traditionally practiced over the centuries. The precepts include a slate of renunciations. They went as follows:

No killing.

No stealing.

No intoxicants.

No sexual activity.

No impure thoughts—envy, lust, hatred.

Noble silence: no speech, no social media, no reading, minimal writing.

Committing to these precepts—to the point of treading softly to avoid killing insects—released oneself from toxic behaviors and mentalities. Without any of the harm or confusion caused by such simple acts as talking, eating meat, or allowing oneself to fantasize sexually—much less giving in to the cacoethes—a mental structure remained through which a fullness of mind could be cultivated.

The external structure was the daily schedule. The course divided days into repeated sessions of sitting or walking meditation broken only by meals, morning instruction, and evening dharma lectures. Meals were taken in silence. We were each also assigned a camp job, kitchen work and cleaning, mostly. There was an afternoon optional qi gong session for people who needed some low impact body work. These too were performed in silence. Students took shared rooms in either the dorm or the villas. Some paid extra for single occupancy and another contingent saved money by camping. Waking bells were tolled at 6 AM with our morning sitting session beginning at 6:30. Twice over the week, participants were broken into small group meetings with an instructor for verbal check-ins. These 45-minute respites from total silence were either a welcome break or an interruption of the flow. For myself, I appreciated them. They were a chance to momentarily detach from the detachment, to reorient my focus according to a verbal description of my psychological state.

The ATS retreat was not as strict as others I’ve read about. Although spare and monastic in routine, ATS, with its School of the Dharma Punx identity, draws people who are anti-authoritarian by nature; I felt at home among the rule breakers. Also, with over a hundred retreat students, there seemed at all times a few people quietly accomodating themselves according to their own limits. It helped that the only mandatory sessions were the morning instruction and dharma talk.

I found the sitting and walking to require such concentration that for several afternoons I skipped a session in favor of a nap. And once, in favor of a swim. Perhaps thanks to this self-regulation, I never fell victim to the struggle that some novices feel while meditating, that of fighting torpor and drowse. I lost count of how many sittings I performed over the week. It was between thirty and thirty-five. With such intensive practice one is bound to “get somewhere” even if sitting still. Especially, as I learned, if sitting still.

The most meaningful renunciation for me was that imposed by noble silence. Being an artist and writer, there is constant pressure to produce work, to “say something.” With a professional world that bleeds heavily into social media, there is very little space for measured speech, much less silence. Renouncing speech and social interaction immediately cleared space, as is the intended effect with all the renunciations. That space was just as quickly filled by my inner thoughts. Dialogues with myself crowded out inner silence. After several days of practice I learned to return to breath quickly enough to calm the inner noise. It was finally during sitting sessions on the last day that I realized an extended inner silence. Ah, mindfulness—for many years, I realized, I had known no such thing.

Unlike scripted religious services that deliver social but constrained experiences, this course opens doors, doors some of us novices did not even know were there. But little is said about what is inside, only that what one finds is oneself, whatever that is. Or is not, in the event that one goes down the path of confronting emptiness.² Given our extremely individuated lives in contemporary society, a retreat like this one will be experienced differently for everybody. I expect to experience a future retreat differently yet again, as circumstances both personal and global will have changed between now and then. An important thing to note is, even though I got “better” at meditating every day, my struggles and insights did not occur in linear progression.

To close I present my random notes, jotted either during the retreat or shortly after.

• For best sitting, hips above knees. Repeat, hips above knees.
• Though Joshua Tree was surely much quieter back at the time of Gram Parsons’ demise, it remains a mystical place. Even with the eighteen-wheelers barreling down Twentynine Palms Highway within earshot, the magic is sometimes overwhelming. The nightly howling of the coyotes is a perfect balance of desperation and exuberance. The joshua trees themselves exude a frozen kineticism.
• The emphasis on renunciations says something about who participates and why. Many of my fellow practitioners seemed to be on a path of recovery. They are the ones who have gone over the edge and lived to tell about it. Or they would, were it not for Noble Silence.
• Sitting in a chair for meditation, as opposed to the floor, does not produce second-class mindfulness.
• Instructor and founder of ATS Noah Levine seemed to put special attention to the hindrance that is lust. This spoke to the relative nearness many of us had to chemical abstinence as compared to celibacy, particularly in a situation of mixed company.
• The easiest way to ruin a sun drenched Lloyd Wright/Frank Lloyd Wright desert masterpiece is to install vertical blinds.
• Back jacks and retreat centers go together like peanut butter and jelly.
• The t-shirts sported by students made visible an unspoken renunciation, no music. They also painted a picture of the subcultures feeding the growing ATS scene: Neurosis, Sleep, New York Dolls, Bad Brains, Megadeth. The award for Band Seen On Most T-shirts goes to the good old Grateful Dead.

carpool gang upon the return from Joshua Tree to LAX

I post this report with a profound sense of gratitude. Special thanks go to the Hemera Foundation for its visionary Tending Space Fellowship.

*

NOTES

1. Paul Williams notes that though many, particularly from the West, tend to assume a separation between meditation and analysis, “Analysis, investigation of the way things really are, is an activity forming the principal ingredient of insight meditation (vipasyana), which leads to the different degrees of prajna.” Williams, p. 72.

2. According to the instructors, the concept of annata typically popularized in its Zen form as no-self is a misreading of the original teaching. The lesson is not that there is no self, but rather that the true self is not that which we commonly perceive. Only through deep and prolonged practice is the true self, connected to things both eternal and impermanent, encountered.

from off the counterculture book shelf

In advance of this workshop I have been revisiting “counterculture” both as a general category of phenomenon and as that historically-specific wave in post-WWII United States which in extended form dates roughly from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. Now that we are living through the 50th anniversary decade of the 1960s, it is a good time to ask: What does counterculture mean? Where does it reside, if anywhere? And what about the Counterculture—what is a proper perspective that history from the year 2016, as every week seems to bring the death of another figure from those frequently recalled decades?

Revisiting this history led me to read Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, two titles from the countercultural lit canon I never read. Taking them consecutively had the effect of marking the beginning and end stages of the period, The Dharma Bums having been published in 1958 and relating stories from the middle Fifties, and Dog Soldiers published in 1974 and set in that time.

The Dharma Bums fictionalizes the adventures of a protagonist based on the author and his friends in real life. Kerouac captures the travels, personalities, and Buddhist explorations of a set of friends making discoveries against the backdrop of an American society dependent for order on a suffocating quiescence. But outside the narrow social norms of the times, the limits were unknown and the paths to freedom seem laughably available compared to the crowded and surveilled planet of today. Backcountry camping trips were easy treks into solitude, freight-hopping was a method of free transport, and gender politics were largely unarticulated. For white guys, it was a time of freedom. To me at age 47 the language reads as amusing and innocent, the story of young men living in a of fraternity of poets. As in most of Kerouac’s writings, the cast of characters is based on the real people who collectively earned renown as the Beat Generation.

The Dharma Bums features Japhy Ryder, a character sketched from the real guy Gary Snyder. Kerouac’s descriptions of Ryder’s outdoorsy ways read like a pre-history of what is now a billion-dollar outdoor rec industry. Ryder’s campcraft cooking of dehydrated foods are new to narrator Ray Smith, who describes them in a way that makes a reader hungry despite having eaten many a tasteless wilderness meal. In Ryder’s duck down sleeping bag, yab yum exercises, and a score other details, one can see the roots of modern hippie-dom, the “granola” subcultures of love and self-absorbtion that long ago took root in towns like Madison, where I live.

(For people just putting together the worlds of the Beat writers, this is a useful key to Kerouac’s characters. As well, there are many interesting essays and articles out there now about the Beats as seen through the lens of gender, including this one that brings attention to Natalie Jackson, who, along with Elise Cowen, ended up two of the known casualties of a world not ready for them.)


Dog Soldiers presents an entirely different vibe. The adventure related is no spiritual journey but rather a desperation trip fueled by drug duplicity and the opportunism of those countercultural freeks surviving the jaded post-Sixties mood. The story takes place on the downside of the high water mark, in a landscape of burned out, once-idealistic characters—types that Stone knew well from time spent in the Bay Area psychedelic scene of the mid and late Sixties. But here the drugs are numbing opioids, heroin and dilaudid, not happy face marijuana and LSD. In little more than fifteen years the California of Japhy Ryder’s mountain hikes, meditation practice, and cabin parties has turned into the sleazy California world of black market hustlers and amoral perverts, none to be trusted. Ray Hicks, the smuggler on the run, practices no Paramita of Dana; his only concern is offloading a package of heroin for a decent price, a stash that he never paid for.

Unlike in Kerouac’s world, Stone offers up fully sketched women characters in key roles, for example, Marge, a woman on the run with Hicks but chasing her own dragon all the while. Depressingly, the women in the story are about as wasted and desperate as the men. The purity of Ryder’s forests are from a different age; this tale ends with an outlaw run across the desert and a paroxysm of violence, a surrealistically described episode that reads as a fitting end to not only that particular drug deal but maybe the promise of the Counterculture as a whole. So we have on the front end the blissful, worry-free days of The Dharma Bums—the segregated South and Cold War propaganda notwithstanding—and on the far side of the arc, the cyncism and drug-hazed dread of Dog Soldiers, a paranoid hangover of late Nixonian meanness and blown optimism.

Interestingly, a transpacific element shapes the plotlines of both books. For Kerouac, it is the impending departure of Ryder to Japan, a turn in the story based on Gary Snyder winning a fellowship to study there (which led to his living in Japan for ten years). For Stone, it is the opening scenes, where his protagonist Converse, a burned out war journalist-turned-junk smuggler, makes his exit from Vietnam (Stone himself had been a correspondent assigned to report on the war). Considered in this way, both novels read as evidence of countercultural links to East and Southeast Asia—strands of proof that the US was heavily involved in Pacific Rim exchanges of all kinds over most of the twentieth century. Combining sites of an Other attractive to white Americans (zen!) and theaters of imperial overreach and colonial violence under one vast geocultural region called Asia, of course does little to sort out the particulars. And yet, most Asian Americans can trace in their family narratives the too-heavy footprint of the American empire—my family included.

Whether in reference to the Euro-attraction to “Eastern spirituality” or the antiwar analysis regarding the South Vietnamese client state, Asian Americans may have a critical view on the Counterculture’s understanding of things Asian. But Asian Americans must take care—a good number of us (again, my family stands as an example) come from lineages aligned with the reactionary sides of the conflicts that drove our families into diaspora—anti-Communists, particularly. The lack of a political consensus within Asian America and the historical culpability of respective camps creates a complication that raises the stakes. Laying a claim to countercultural legacies precisely because we may have a view of it beginning, as Ronald Takaki might say, from a different shore, seems like an important opening to follow. I am looking for cracks to widen, points from which the contradictions frozen by ideology and historical circumstance might be de-stabilized, through a strategic irreverance of ethnic references and a diasporic tramp philosophy. Let’s see where this goes.

reflections on the dry pool that is LA

What are they going to do about the water?

We had a great time in LA. It was a straight family production, our summer vacation, and thanks to some lucky online booking, we made it weirdly hip rich in style. In advance the social media brain returned me with a long list of recommended taquerias, city hikes, art places, beach tips, and cultural happenings. We got our samplings of perfectly ripe avocado on everything, great Korean BBQ and chicken wings, soul food on Crenshaw, moles and campechana, greasy breakfasts and fresh squeezed juices, and a couple of In-N-Out burgers. (Not the Midwest.) I saw a delicious show of 18th century French drawings and a Minor White survey at the Getty, the Watts Towers, and a brilliant Sam Durant installation at LACMA. We got our star spotting done with no effort (BJ Novak in the hotel lobby! John Mayer waiting for the elevator!). We were in the Valley for two days and then in Koreatown for six more—long enough to soak in an atmosphere. We made two trips to the beach, including for an evening stroll complete with surf rock at dusk. 

Over the course of the week there were a few times when the three of us said to each other, gawd, we could live out here. But then I'd think, what are they going to do about the water?

Some scientists who have studied tree rings and sediment cores say decade-long droughts have occurred regularly over the last couple of millenia, and that the twentieth century was by comparison a mildly wet period. Especially as exacerbated by human-caused warming, the current three-year drought is possibly the beginning of an extended dry cycle. Which aligns strangely with what I saw. There is no evident panic and drought seems to have become normal, at least in urban Cali, which uses only 9% of the stat’s total water supplies (as compared to 41% for agriculture). I spotted a couple of small lawns being watered and the traditional unbelievably many swimming pools. There were no conservation measures in the hotel that I could see. At ground level the drought was only visible through the newsmedia, same as when I am at home. Without spectacles like wildfires engulfing mansions, long term catastrophes are not easy to see up close.

What are we going to do about the water? Because their water problems are our water problems.

We who live in the land of freshwater aplenty, where I generally do not need to think about how much water I consume on a personal basis beyond turning off the tap while I brush my teeth—what is our role in all this? The question presupposes a stake because, for one thing, even living between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River does not guarantee access to water. This has been made clear by the controversies and political struggles in Detroit, where shut-offs of water service have left thousands of people dry and thirsty though they live within what was once one of the country’s great municipal water systems, in a city on the banks of a river that channels water from three Great Lakes towards the Atlantic. Closer to home, the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha has made the first claim on Great Lakes water after the signing of the Great Lakes Compact, with access not guaranteed. Thus, water access in our time is a universal concern even where the supplies are abundant. For another, the western states drought will drive up the costs of living, growing food, and manufacturing in California and elsewhere. Though the reclamation nut fantasies of diverting Great Lakes water across the high West are impossible for many reasons, what is likely to happen is that years of drought will force people to relocate to water-rich regions, or remove California from the list of destinations for would-be migrants. The Great Lakes region will probably grow in population as more and more places around the world experience dire water shortages, perhaps reversing the multi-decade trend of depopulation. Attempted land and water grabs will probably follow.

Who can say how things will play out if meaningful numbers of people move into a region that’s been deindustrialized but is stuck with the political institutions of the mid-twentieth century? What resistant political cultures new arrivals bring with them—and with what cultures of resistance we who are already here welcome them—will help determine our shared path.

companies and towns

“The company town, that is the next logical step.”

Said an old friend of mine in between chomps of his mixed seafood salad—bosses’ fare for a man expressing discontent from the point of view of labor. Such is life in the Political Age of the 99%. Even the well-fed are fed up. We were sitting at the counter of the Tadich Grill early on a Friday night in early June, in San Francisco’s financial district. This was a treat for me—the food, the city, and now getting to hear a first hand report from a pal who works deep within a major tech player. For him the treat was for the first time in months leaving work for a dinner engagement before eight o’clock. He had bolted the office at five o’clock not just to work around my evening departure flight, but because he had already resigned himself to going in the next day, Saturday, and most likely some on Sunday for good measure.

When I asked if he was always that swamped with work, he basically offered that he was swamped with evaluations. No annual performance evaluations in fast-moving Silicon Valley—no, those old-fashioned ways are for east coast brokerage firms and midwestern insurance companies. In an application of many a start-up guru’s wisdom, this internet behemoth (long beyond its legendary start-up days) subjected its many hundreds of heavy-lifting engineers to the pressure of the quarterly evaluation. At his salary level and with his skills, my friend learned to be paranoid constantly, to assume that any negatives on an evaluation would open the door for a younger, cheaper, and more recently graduated worker to be brought in. He’d been there for three years and it is time to move up or move on, else face stagnation, which in his field means a sour fate indeed: contract work for life.

What about the work itself? To see your brainpower and problem-solving going into web architecture relied on by hundreds of thousands people all around the world, that must be satisfying, no? No. First of all, his team’s assignments come down from above, which means that his input on the strategic level is very limited. When the assignments come, they come with pressure—everything needs to be done yesterday. But the assignments are cancelled and completely reformulated with equally short notice. Imagine sprinting for a finish line as hard as you can in one direction, all the while knowing that the race may be halted at any time, and that the whole team will be redirected toward a completely different finish line and expected to sprint toward it with no break. Second, this breakneck pace and unceasing work, backed by the pressure of quarterly reviews in which upper management grades on a curve, ie no matter one’s empirical performance, half the team is reviewed negatively—what is it all for? For this particular web-empire’s sports news portal. Can you say, Who the fuck cares?

Before he goes into his serious venting, my pal hands me a selection of varietal chocolates courtesy of the company. This is his summary of the conditions there—a beautiful campus, free high-quality, mostly organic breakfast, lunch, and dinner, free big-name weekly entertainment (bands, authors, up-close celebrity appearances), yoga and premium workout facilities, and little treats thrown at them all the time, like these chocolates, which ironically advertise themselves as being free of slave labor. Why even go home when the goodies are at work? Oh, to sleep, change clothes, and check the junk mail. Sleeping pods are the next amenity, if the Valley ever runs out of single twenty-somethings with CS degrees who don’t mind pulling all-nighters. My friend is wrong. It’s not the company town, it’s the company life.

*

“You see, Madison is a company town.”

Those are the words of our local radical historian Allen Ruff, spoken at the Fighting Forward session on the Aftermath of the Wisconsin Uprising. He was speaking of the University as “the company” and he is correct. Like the company towns that dotted the Rust Belt in its industrial heydey, Madison is also home to many spin-offs, suppliers, and copycats of the main company. The business of the University is research and education. The spin-offs are the start-ups and tech companies, the creative industries, the hospitals and clinics, and the whole range of knowledge-work institutions that call Dane County their home. The support industries include the coffeeshops, the 24-hour gyms, and the locavore restaurants. The sizable body of non-UW state employees who reside in Madison also fall into the category of workers in related industries.

Like the company towns of a generation ago, this town’s company is under growing pressure from new forces of competition, internal decay, and the rigidity of its fixed investments. The superficial trend is toward a company that does more with less, an abstraction of efficiency that tells nothing of the real costs of the University’s responses to the pressure it receives. Those responses include the generation-long trend of steep tuition increases—a development that shuts out academically qualified would-be students and practically indentures others—and the making of a precarious body of workers, first among them the graduate students who teach many of the courses and almost all of the discussion sections. Moreover, a small but increasing number of slots once offered to Wisconsinites and other Americans are now being taken by the cash-paying wealthy from around the world, especially China.

The unfolding crisis is most apparent in the secondary institutions, the ones that suffer some variety of the same ills but surf on far less accumulated fat and prestige than does the University. And as in Janesville, Saginaw, Benton Harbor, or any other twentieth-century company town, here the gap between decay and reterritorialization is wide enough to accommodate the establishment of a substantial class of human beings, what Ruff calls (quoting Chomsky) the superfluous population, that is, people who are neither consumers nor producers. For them, another industry serves, employing guards, police, surveillance hardware, probation officers, and social workers.

Near the end of the session a fellow in the audience, one of only two (from what I could see) persons of color in the room, asked a question about the achievement gap in Madison. He posed it as a query concerning the connection between race-correlated high school achievement in Madison and, as he said, the University’s annual “importation” into the city of thousands of white students. In attempting to make sense of his own words, the man mentioned the factoid of Madison’s achievement gap being most wide at the upper income levels, thereby implying that controlled for income, racism stands as the most plausible explanation of the operating gap between black and white students. Then he called attention to our segregated geographies, citing Owl Creek as an example of the spatial margins of race in Madison. Calling attention to racism in the context of a political discussion of the Uprising through highlighting the specific marginalizations suffered by black and brown people in our city was a welcome intervention, though his synthesis remained incomplete.

In response and as a closing remark Allen spoke of the color line, of its primacy as a line of separation keeping the full power of the left from being realized. The simplicity of the statement only hints at the complexities for of course there has always been more than a single, static color line, and color lines stretch unevenly across geographical space. Allen himself applied a spatialized racial analysis in the post-recall analysis he wrote for The Progressive. He convincingly argued then that Scott Walker and the WI GOP leadership forged a winning statewide coalition by successfully bridging the divide between rich and poor, suburban and rural, through appeals to a white electorate.

How to apply this analysis to progressive, enlightened Madison is the question. Thinking of the University as a company that, like all dominant employers, manages its labor in accordance with the interests of the institution (whether for-profit or not) may be helpful. Though not capitalist by nature, for the last decade at least the University has been turned strongly toward a corporate and privatized agenda, and now largely defines and negotiates its interests in reaction to an aggressively anti-intellectual, anti-educational conservative regime. Given that, and the consequent rollback of the University’s once active redistributive agenda, what is the connection between the University and the worsening racial/spatial politics of Madison?  

*

It is a little over a month later and I am back in the Bay Area. My, how four weeks can change everything.

My plane touched down only a couple hundred yards from the burned out hulk of Asiana Airlines flight 214. I could see the investigators on the ground studying the wreckage.

A broad contingent of inmates in California prisons are on hunger strike.

 

BART workers are observing a shakey truce with management but may strike again at any time.    

And my friend? He indeed has moved on. Interview and negotiation turned into an offer; he is about take to the treadmill at yet another Silicon Valley pioneer-turned-corporate-giant, by my count his sixth company in a career fourteen years old. I'm crashing at his Palo Alto pad while he's out east visiting family. His vacations only come between jobs–the companies take the rest.

 

l.a. report

I am just returned from a very short trip to Los Angeles. The excuse for the trip was having the chance to present a paper about The Journey West at the College Art Association’s annual conference. In the weeks leading up to the trip I found myself in conversations with art friends that went one of two ways. Either they would say, “Are you going to CAA? Let’s get together.” Or else it would be something along the lines of “I can’t believe all these people go to CAA. It is so lame.”

I have never fully understood the gripes about CAA. It is true that CAA excludes participation because of its registration fees, and that the format is not very imaginative. But what do people expect? The conference for any professional organization costs a lot to stage, and CAA's registration fees are much more affordable than that of organizations in many other fields. And while colleges and universities range from semi-accessible to elite and exclusive, they are not exactly the same as corporations or government institutions. They are knowledge and education factories, and as such offer a space for protected intellectual activity on a limited but real and substantive basis. As a vehicle for serious discourse and the sharing of ideas, I find CAA much more palatable than, say, the add-on symposia or discussion events that seem to be attaching themselves to all the commercial art fairs.

I have been to CAA eight times. Some of my friends think that is a lot. I first started going because for about three years after I finished my degree program, I had no functional intellectual community. I would save for the trip and that would be my big travel expenditure for the year. From the beginning I always worked in visits to family and friends, too. The conference alone was never enough to fully justify a trip, especially without free couches to sleep on.

Then I found my community of artists and researchers. I stopped going to CAA for about five or six years, except for once when I had a chance to present for the first time (and visit a friend I had not seen in years). Then I attended again in 2011, playing the role of editor and coordinator of the annual newsletter of the Radical Art Caucus, for the first of two years. I have gotten something out of RAC and CAA. I figured it was time to give back, in a capacity appropriately minor to my life as an adjunct professor.

This year I was at the conference for only a couple of hours besides the time of our presentation, plus a little time for shopping at the conference book fair afterward. My Columbia College colleague Annika Marie gave a great lecture on Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons. Our session was organized incredibly well by fellow Madisonite Laurie Beth Clark, we received good feedback, and the whole presentation exercise was valuable in advancing our understanding of The Journey West. A highlight of the conference was seeing the work of my Madison brothers, Lewis Koch and Patrick JB Flynn on display. Lewis’s book marked down to a clearance price.
Yup, that is cheap. I left it for somebody else; I already have a copy. Patrick got the design gig for the new Baffler. Very sweet to see it being pushed.
I got the newsletter put together, this time with a poem by mrcc resident poet Matthias Regan as the featured art content. But I did not even have a chance to see the hard copies in action at the conference.

So that was CAA. 

More interesting was speaking about the Wisconsin Uprising on Friday night at the Public School in Chinatown. The attendance was almost as good as that for our CAA session (about eighteen), but in a much better space with a non-academic audience. As an autonomous educational entity, it was impressive–something we who are trying to keep the Madison Autonomous University alive can aspire to. As a social space, it was lovely. As a community, it was supportive and welcoming. I am a fan, and it was a privilege to have the floor there for an evening. And I must say, the interest in the Wisconsin political situation was enthusiastic.

I stayed with my friend Ava. She was one of the original Mess Hall keyholders. For the past year and half she has been working as a project manager of a large real estate development called Atwater Crossing, or ATX. The last time I was in LA was in October of 2010. Ava was just about to start on the job then, and drove me around the complex. There were only something like five or ten tenants then. Now there are something like forty. Nearly all of them are creative industry or arts-related concerns. She took me there again this time, to scope out the buzzing restaurant scene. It reminded me of large developments in China—creative industry and design-oriented businesses taking root in clusters, but here it was with more substance and breadth. The interactive media companies are there, but so are theater companies. Crafty artist’s studios are there, but so is Pomegranate Pictures, who make videos for System of a Down. You won’t find that in China. 

ATX is very impressive, all the more so for Ava having managed it all without hardly any staff until about a week ago.

Before heading out to catch my overnight return flight Ava and her boyfriend treated me to an excellent departure dinner at Lou, on Vine. The restaurant had an outline map of the US on one wall, with handwritten names and arrows pointing to their sources. They had probably twenty or twenty-five different suppliers named from across the country. Well, well, well. The state outside California with the most suppliers named was Wisconsin, with four. And that is where I was headed. Home, sweet cheesy home, where all the battles are currently raging. Including about Wisconsin farmers supplying not upscale wine bars in LA, but the neighbors of the farmers. In about six hours time, I landed in Milwaukee. Back in the midwest, home of the emerging locavore economy and KillerSpin (in airports).