propositions press... 2.0

system limits, here we come

Our plane landed right on time. This is notable because we arrived in the New Years Day snowstorm of 2014, in the early evening darkness with more storming to follow—it would go on, more or less, for another two days, followed by the “polar vortex” cold snap. The runway was covered with snow, with snow-clearing machinery everywhere. We’d come in on a 13 ½ hour flight from Shanghai, tired and facing a long drive from O’Hare to Madison. The tollway hadn’t yet been plowed and flakes kept coming down. It was more than two hours on 1-90 to the state line.

The next morning I found out that ours was one of the few flights to have been unaffected by the weather. For many it got worse. My father visited his brother in Connecticut and was scheduled for a return flight to Chicago the day after our return. But the storm had moved east, even as a related cell continued to snow out O’Hare. He ended up having his seat re-booked and then canceled three days in a row, and finally caught flights home late into the sixth night. In the cliché resurrected for the season, I read in the news about other holiday travelers stranded and frustrated. In the end something like 18000 flights were canceled over those days, according to FlightView.com, as quoted by the New York Times.

For a comparatively routine weather snarl, my father’s was the longest delay I’d ever heard of. I mean, yes, there were several weather events rolled into one extended episode that covered a large part of the continent, but it wasn’t an extreme, historic weather disaster. It wasn’t Sandy or Katrina in scope, or a record snowfall. So why were the delays so bad?

The airline people told him that even as weather cleared, they couldn’t get their aircraft to where it was needed fast enough. Fuller flights and fewer routes to begin with means there is no extra flight time for scheduling mishaps, no room for work-arounds. My Compass collaborator Rozalinda Borcila might describe it as a system with no fat, no buffer, no room for improved efficiency, no slack to be taken up when needed. 

With weather chaos likely to become more frequent in the coming years and decades, and the costs of operations only rising, the reliability of air travel may be maxed out already. What if this is the case? What might it mean for this particular human civilization to have reached another of its limits? Or, if disruptions of weather or other rising instabilities incrementally erode predictability and recovery times, perhaps the consumer flier faces a declining standard of experience? What if passengers end up having to deal with, say, chances of serious delays one out of every three or four times they fly? Or get slammed with the random two or three day flight freeze every few years? 

If the air travel system is at capacity in terms of routes and seats, that explains why the only area for growing profits are in service upgrades and ever harsher fees. In a simple supply and demand dynamic, the increased prices for the same or worse experience will level off the growth at some point. For a critical mass of consumers, the cost won’t be worth the good.

Since air travel depends on a hugely inefficient combustion of hydrocarbons, as a contributor to the global carbon emissions equation, a limit on air travel is not a bad thing at all. The sooner it is reached the better. In terms of climate justice and rolling back emissions trends in the place where the consumption occurs, finally here is a First World Problem that some on the rest of the planet might care about—or a market limit that will actually help slow the acceleration of emissions (an acceleration that is fated, given the growth in air travel in China).

I suppose we will have the essentially inflated self-regard among the First World populace to thank. After all, nobody I know wishes to take unnecessary risks in flying—any safety related delay generally gets a pass, despite all the grumbling. I sure don’t mind. People value their lives to the degree that nobody pushes for less safety regulation in flying, not even the most extreme anti-government nutjobs. The spectacle that is every major aviation disaster dovetails nicely with the psychology of narrow self-interest, resulting in a horror experienced in individual imaginations far past that of other modern day traumas, enough to shore up any debate about air travel safety in favor of higher standards and true regulation.

So there seems to be a limit that will not be crossed.

But the other pressures that render air travel necessary and desirable continue to build. As people move around for economic and career opportunities more families will be more spread apart, even more couples. Also, the time demands that come with any line of competitive work will not lessen. So distance and time, compressed so effectively by air travel, will remain obstacles to the in-person experience that cannot be replaced by even the most secure and sophisticated teleconferencing.

So at what point will this tension break? How will the pressure be relieved? The problem is that there is no definitive breaking point. Every instance of weather-induced flight chaos will be perceived as singular, due partly to media atomisation of any given event, and partly to the individually subjective experience through which these events are processed. As one possible future, the cumulative result will be a further concentration of routes between population centers and the steady pruning of minor spoke routes. The net effect would be to consolidate travel along major corridors, to the point of leaving towns once served directly in an imposed intermodality, under which travelers will have to endure lengthy ground transport to the nearest large airports. 

As activists who work towards building broad-based movements, we need to create models for activist cooperation that anticipate these emerging geographies of mobility. While some of us may be privileged enough to experience these pathways of air travel as consumer participants, even as persons who may not travel them either by choice or necessity we must understand the possibilities created for expanded identifications with constituencies that will be linked across not only space, but very particular places defined by emergent or re-emphasized corridors.

Climate chaos will bring people together, but only in very specific relationships of place, and only if we see beyond the re-territorializations wrought by adaptive capital and avail ourselves of the new and reiterated openings produced.

 

 

tales of pain from a winter's amble

Nighttime is the right time, says the neighborhood Great Horned Owl with the hoo hoo hoo call. On still, cold nights its call travels quickly through the air, with a clarity only possible when the air is dense, the trees bare, and human traffic at its nightly ebb. The owl seems at once near and far. Distances collapse. Winter ether renders live sound an expansion of itself, an aesthetic of season, weather, and time of day. 

For me the most spook-inducing sounds are to be found on frozen Lake Mendota. On nights with no breeze to whistle, the energy of ice more than a foot thick bowing according to the push and pull of late winter temperatures fills the aural void. Echo-ey pops and deep groans traveling along fissures supply moonlit ice strolls an abstract soundscape, without meaning, except that you are walking on this ice that is momentarily contained in an unbelievable tension.

Tonight I’m not worried about that, ice creaks and all. This time my stroll is interrupted by an intruder from within. Specifically, a toenail grown just long enough to irritate. The sharp corner of the nail (always trim toenails straight across, I was told growing up) digs painfully into the soft side of its neighboring digit with each push off the right foot. Each step is a wince. We have high quality of life expectations here in Madison, so this is a real downer.

Then I thought about Andy Murray. I watched him a couple weeks earlier in the Australian Open final. The cameras caught him changing socks between sets. His toes were taped, having blistered in a five-set match against Roger Federer only about forty-eight hours earlier. Ouch. I thought about my daughter, whose first injury as a dancer was a hurt toe at camp last summer. I thought about my own foot rot episode from when I was younger, on a long canoe trip. Once it set in it consistently worsened, going in a few days from nusiance to a jaw-clenching torture.

But the end of that trip was in sight. What is more, I was at an age when the pain provided a focus, lifted clouds of teenage confusion, and actually felt good because that. Enjoying acute pain is a young person’s sport.

Then I thought about my grandmother. And then my other grandmother. And my great aunts. They knew about pain around the toes, and for them there was no end in sight. They had small feet, the kind that come from binding. They were members of the last generation of women, already elderly in my childhood, to experience the binding; their daughters were not put through it. When I read mention of the foot binding process, it is usually described as a breaking of the arch. But the toenails also were sometimes left to grow, curled into their own flesh, after horrible pain to be finally crushed as well, or for the lucky, to be simply pulled out. Imagining the actual experience generations of Chinese women went through, “bound feet” seems too cozy an expression. It is one of those terms that sounds better than what the practice is in fact. Kind of like “extraordinary rendition.”

I wonder, did my grandmothers, as the lively girls they must have been, at times relish the pain? Men serving hard prison time speak of going into endurance mode, taking episodes of dissociation for the sake of mental survival. Sentenced to an indefinite duration of pain and permanent hobbling, a prison of their bodies, their families and social values, girls with small feet must have mastered the whole spectrum of coping psychology, including the mentality of the young athlete or disciple who learns to put pain into a box. But then to live with the new reality of small feet, small steps, and an eternally unsteady walk—what extremes of feeling or better yet unfeeling are necessary to manage the daily realities of such a fate? I will never know.

What I am complaining about, again? That toenail, the clipping of which I can already envision, only minutes away.

The irritation now respectfully ranks strictly at the low end on the pain spectrum signs you see at the clinic. Corrected in my thinking, the sensation feels more like a prompt than a sting, a reminder to me of the willingly and unwillingly experienced pains of the past and present world, even from within my own family history. It is a reminder that those considerable smarts and unfathomable sorrows have essentially no association with what small troubles I contend with. A toenail tonight only highlights the fact that in this mild life I am living I am mostly brutalized with music and other external forms of beauty—as long as oneself keeps from getting too cocky over thin ice. 

Finally, I realize that this is no pain-free zone in the world of our local owl, either. On the contrary, if the owl gets its way tonight some creature will feel all the wrenching unpleasantness of a full assault, to its limit, beyond which lies only numbness and shock–the anaesthetic, those short moments of a living death. In Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey wrote about the dread of the rabbit, surrounded by the voice of its hunter. My beauty is some other creature's pain, just as my grandmothers' pain was somebody else's beauty.

 

china drift: professors yang and wen meet the young generation at homeshop, beijing

Some of us diasporic Chinese who “return” to China sometimes have family and kin obligations that other visitors do not. Even though I am two generations removed from the mainland, this is still the case for me, depending on where I go in China. Sometimes it is a pain, and sometimes it is a pleasure. On this trip my primary obligation was more than a pleasure, it was a real blessing.

The Wang clan has had a long and close family friendship with a man named Yang Xianrang. He is a friend to my father’s side, with a very close history over three generations dating back to the days of my grandparents in the intimate circles of the Chinese minority in Korea. Professor Yang went to study in Beijing as a teenager, in 1944, tested into the Central Academy of Fine Arts for university, and went on to a long career as a faculty artist and then a dean at that school. He visited my family on his first trip to America and stayed with us for nearly a month, around 1981 or so, and that’s when I met him as a kid. He spent those days painting in our basement, and both I and my parents have works of his from that time hanging in our homes today. Shortly before he retired from CAFA, my mother and I visited him in the winter of 1992 in Beijing, my first time to the mainland. After retiring, he joined one of his children in the United States, first in Philadelphia and then in Houston. After sixteen years, he returned to Beijing for the twilight of his career. In the year 2011 he is eighty-one years old. On this trip, making it a point to visit Uncle Yang was a priority. But this is the Drift, so why not fold him in, somehow?

He trained as an oil painter, spent many years working in water colors, and then turned to traditional ink and brush painting. But his widest renown was earned as a woodcut print artist. He produced a number of the iconic graphic images from the revolutionary period, including works such as these. Being Central Academy professor for so many years, Professor Yang also has the satisfaction of having taught a number of artists and scholars who later went on to international prominence, including artist/printmaker Xu Bing and art historian/curator Wu Hung.     
  

We invited Professor Yang to HomeShop for an informal conversation, which turned out to be a cross generational encounter the likes of which I’ve never really heard of, much less experienced. HomeShop promoted the event up and down Bei'ertiao Hutong in the old-fashioned way, with posters.  Professor Yang brought along a friend of his, Professor Wen, an oil painter who was one of his early students but is now also retired from the Central Academy. Professor Yang spoke of his period as a woodcut artist, the whys and hows of his woodcut activity. He told of how his image of Zhou Enlai became a popularly disseminated image that broke through to the mass level, with ordinary people buying mass reproductions of it. Together they described their work and careers, showed examples from catalogues they brought, and took questions. They shared their perspectives on the art market boom in China, the influences of European art traditions, and their reflections on having had such traditional training. They took some questions about art education, how CAFA has changed. Professor Wen in particular expressed suspicions about the art market. He told a great story about how he had sold works to a Japanese collector who then asked him to sign the works. He acceded. But then the collector asked him to alter and then sign a canvas painted by another artist. Professor Wen found the request appalling, refused and broke off the relationship. 

Michael and Elaine took a turn explaining to the two elders the activities of HomeShop. Running through the various functions of the space (residency, design, translation, food work, etc) seemed to confuse them. But there ended up being two significant areas of connection and understanding. One was revealed when the younger generations expressed their skepticism about the turbo-speculative art market, their distaste for the vacuousness of meaningless monumentalism, and their sincere desire for serving a public and community. There are of course substantive and irreconcilable differences in the particulars of practice having to do with the innumerable changes in the world over the last sixty years, but some of us felt that a shared spirit could be found.

The other connection came with the final encounter of the morning, in which we showed these two old-school masters the large poster produced by the Beehive Collective, The True Cost of Coal. Sarah Lewison had the brilliant idea of bringing a cache of these with us to China, the land of dirty coal, and here one was unrolled to great effect. Professors Yang and Wen could see that in addition to the digital and social media of our contemporary world, there remains a special place reserved for handworked media—and specifically pencil drawing and illustrative figure drawing—in our toolkits. They were extremely impressed and greatly heartened by the quality, the detail, and the social responsibility evident in this work.

Photos by Claire. 

Professor Yang inspecting the True Cost of Coal poster.

Elaine Wing-Ah Ho, Professor Wen, Professor Yang, and me.

remembering W, with love

Some people speak these days about a growing nostalgia for George W. Bush, the man and his years in the White House. More than any of the right wing hysteria directed at President Obama, this turn towards the maudlin demonstrates the range of feelings in play in our hyper-partisan age. No emotion no matter how cheaply sentimental is below being claimed by a perpetually aggrieved right wing as long as it rewrites history to properly support the ruling class.  

When it comes to the matter of George W. Bush and his blood-soaked legacy of violence, lies, and ruin, if I'm not appreciating the truths of our pop culture prophets like Big Boi, then I'm recalling the hatred. Lest one take this for a gratuitous negativity on my part, let me make it clear. As Hunter S. Thompson once said of Nixon, the hatred for George W. Bush has brought our family together. I hate him. My mother-in-law despises the man. My father loathes all that W has done and said. We share this, and it is a good thing. We understand each other. 

It was not always this way. See the image below. My parents were once proud donors to the conservative movement. We are now on the same page. Thanks to George W. Bush and the hatred he called forth, there is more love in my family.