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Question: Has anyone ever been saved from an airline crash by using a seat cushion as a flotation device? I ask you. Has this ever happened? I feel like the answer is no. And yet, the entire airline ritual all revolves around the magical seat cushion. I wonder this constantly on planes but never feel quite resolved about it. Every time I think I have an answer, it slips through my fingers. I mean, lets just say that the answer is no. Then that would mean that the entire opening ceremony of any plane flight is in fact an enormous psycholgoic performance that is geared towards producing calm in the passengers. This performance may actually occurr more times per day than the sacrement. But if it is just a trick to make passengers feel comfortable, why belabor the point? I mean they even have notes on the back of your serving tray indicating where the cushion is.

And also, does this ritual actually make passengers feel comfortable? Does a person on a plane think to themselves, “well, I’m ok, because if something were to go wrong, the plane would land in a nearby body of water and then I could grab this cushion below my seat and float to safety.” Maybe. But it might also produce the opposite reaction which is, ‘this is ridiculous. These guys are in the midst of some strange performance art piece of lies!” Have you ever noticed that even if the plane isn’t going anywhere near a substantial body of water, they still do the dance. I mean can a plane land on the Mississipi river? Where does the cushion come into play in Kansas?

If someone knows the answer to this quandry, can you please tell me. I am at a loss and well, I’m tired of just passively accepting this new genre of airline safety performance art.

It is no surprise that Eraserhead’s cental festivity is Thanksgiving. The family, as a source of horror, has been a staple of surbversive film for post-war America. Gathering around the table, making painful small talk, complimenting beet salad and digesting in harmony has been a source of unfettered anxiety for at least fifty years. But as I reflect on my last few Thanksgivings, I realize that as opposed to horror, the Thanksgiving of the 21st century is almost a mystery. Often the operating question on the minds of the potato eating hoardes is not, “Why am I related to these people?” but more appropriately, “who are these people?” Thanksgiving is now a mystery as we find ourselves in the midst of an inertia called family that is rapidly losing its historic relevance.

I spend Thanksgiving dinner with Mira’s mother’s side of the family in Connecticut this last Thursday. The grandparents were there, the mother, the aunt, the sister, the cousin, and two new second husbands. Mira’s family reminded me of my own except hers actually saw each other more than once a year. I recall hearing Mira’s grandmother say, “what is normal? who can say what is normal?” It was a classic conversation about how strange their family is. I could easily imagine the same being said over tables across America. Every family asking itself if its family was an aberattion, while at the same time settling on the fact that family was family. What I realized is that ‘normal’ has often been decided exactly by the family. That the family has often been the arbiter of normality (such that this arbitration of the status quo was of course the butt of mockery for the baby boomers). But the family that was once the source of horror now looks quite different. Not only because divorce has become commonplace, but also because many family’s don’t spend much time together. Family is strange because often the family doesn’t feel like family anymore. It’s not weird that mom married a new guy, but that you really have no idea who these other folks at the table are. The thought that family is thicker than blood makes the family blood run cold.

Things feel strange when the cultural practices we participate in stop losing their meaning. My family lives all over the country. This Christmas I am supposed to go to Phoenix to see my grandparents and the rest of my mother’s side of the family: the Kirns. Now, when I was a kid we would see each other far more regularly. We would drive to Idaho and all the cousins and aunts and uncles would be there. It was family. But at some point all that stopped. Maybe it was my parents divorce but also the bind between all the aunts and uncles somewhat wore off. We haven’t all been together in over ten years. I imagine this situation is not specific to my family. The way work is organized people travel more. Geographic distance makes it hard for families to see each other. This lack of proximity makes personal affinities more complicated. Family becomes family in name only but the social cohesion that accompanies family (the time spent together, the internal struggles) is unavailable.

So, I imagine that this Christmas I will sit around a big table and someone is going to say “Normal? what is normal?” and everyone will laugh with their anxiety assuaged, because as quirky as our family is, we are family nonetheless. And while everyone looks down at their plate of steamed vegetables, I will think, “who are these people?”

So, a while back in 2001 when I was just out of grad school and convinced that I would be going to the Whitney Independent Study Program, I went on an interview with Ron Clark (who runs the Whitney ISP). During the interview I got into a discussion that turned slightly into an argument over trickle down Marxism. Now, I often blame this discussion for my not getting in, but to be quite fair there are plenty of reasonable reasons why I wasn’t accepted to that program. I had heard that Ron liked strong headed argumentative types and enjoyed a good discussion so I thought I would just put my thoughts about the Whitney program to the test. This blog is not a gripe session about the Whitney program but does use them as a compelling example of a particular form that Marxism has taken (particularly throughout the 80s and 90s).

I was arguing that folks like the October magazine crowd had used Marxist theory as a way to remove themselves from any reasonably legigle populist discussion. And… that the art that they held up as their best examples, resonated poorly for most art enthusiasts (expert and amateur alike). The question was about reception and possibly being suspicious of the comfortable niche that Marxist, feminist, post-colonial discourse (of their brand) had carved out for itself removed from questions of responsibility to a larger audience. In many regards, at the time, I thought of their rhetorical techniques akin to Reagonomics where the fruits of their thoughts were supposed to somehow trickle into popular thought via the structures of power already in place. It seemed to me that the stilted language developed through postmodern theory had served the role of enconsing a highly specialized academic sub-group that had no real radical revolutionary perspectives whatsoever, and yet, were managing to monopolize Marxist discourse in the art community.

Then something happened today that made me think of things another way. So I was looking at some proposals from a graduate intern student for potential exhibitions here. One of the shows was a bit more pretty. And one was a little more conceptual with some politics thrown in. One of the folks looking at the work described the more political/conceptual practice as more hipster/insider. I was suprised at this easy description. Political practice is an insider methodology? Beauty was a people’s project? That is: the question of beauty felt more populist and the political work felt more insider. This is a crass oversimplification of their feelings, but it is exactly what got me thinking. This stance that more intellectually driven, conceptual practice is an ‘insider’ methodology while beauty is populist goes directly against the teachings that I am familiar with. In my world, beauty is often a practice held up by the bourgoise to remove themselves from the embarrasing political realities of their status quo and exploitative positions. While political work, in theory, tries to address these concerns.

In this reversal, I think I hear the rumblings of much of the major populist rhetoric expounded by Karl Rove and co. The thing is: as opposed to being dismissive, I think there are kernals of truth in this. I think that there might actually be something populist about beauty and there might be something absolutely corrupt in stilted political language. My gripes with the Whitney ISP and the October crowd are based on similar anxieties. Where I sense that the rhetoric of activist practice is used as social capital against any form of revolutionary practice. That is to say: not only is much of the Marxist tradition in the arts simply ineffective, it is, in fact, purposefully deployed against any radical potential in the arts. It would be no surprise that this form of ineffective, bourgois, uber pretensious “theory” has had some results in completely turning people off the potentials of political practice baring anything close to meaningful.

Yet, it also poses dilemnas about the alternatives. Beauty, in itself, is not going to do us much good. Nor is holding onto some ardent anti-intellectualism. But there must be methods for being more discerning. How much of the intellectual tradition that we participate in has more to with the carving out a corner of the discursive market and how much is capable of concrete radical change? How do we go about tearing these two apart? To what degree do our own politics have more to do with subjectivity and social capital (and the markets of subjectivity) than any form of radical social change practice?

I raised these questions in an entirely different manner at Messhall in Chicago. I wasn’t articulating myself well at the time. I think Claire Pentecoste was saying, “But we must carve out our subjectivities. That is what we do.” I didn’t reply appropriately at the time, but the real question for me is not against creating subjectities, but the part where we delude ourselves about the intended goals of our own identities. When we spout marxist theory and end up praising completely unreadable conceptual work that only shows in Linz, what exactly are we up to? When our ideas seem to disconnect us rather than connect us to the potential of radical politics, what are we up to? Hmmm… it’s these questions that are on my mind, and I feel like they play themselves in the quest for meaning that haunts political processes today.

I often find the boundary separating science and art somewhat arbitrary and useless. I often can be found haphazardly dismissing either term as useless and then go into some rant about the need for a new language. And while, I will still retain this stance, I had an interesting interaction with an artist who is doing a show at MASS MoCA. His name is Carsten Holler and he is a soft spoken german who is absolutely invested in his practice. He loves espresso and apparently has several aviaries tucked away at his home

He was telling me how he often sits on panel discussions regarding the merger of science and art and he finds it a bit annoying. As an artist with a PhD in the biological sciences, he is not unfamiliar with scientific methodology. And in fact, he appreciates it greatly. But he often thinks that art allows one to say multiple things at once and that in science, you benefit from saying one. I enjoyed that distinction greatly as its switches the languages of both forms of inquiry towards one of tools. That is, they are both a set of different tools used to gain different results. It allows us to get art out of the question of taste, because we are still invested in the question of ‘findings’ but it doesn’t absolutely shove art into the terrain of some myopic utilitarianism. These distinctions can easily be applied to art and activism as well. The need to move between constructive ambiguity and the need to speak specifically about something. I think that arty things tend to embrace ambiguity in its ability to speak on multiple levels and to also elude language. I suspect that is why, for many people, the idea of didactism is antithetical to art. But of course, one who only loves ambiguity, has already let go of the desire to act against a system of repression. I think. Well, that may not actually be true. I wonder if there is a tactics of complete ambiguity. I bet there are many and I bet I would find 95% of them highly suspect.

I think this terrain between art and science, art and activism is a useful one to move through and articulate. I say this because I know that these false dichotomies (particularly when they are subject to folk’s careers and ontologies) ends up shaping our culture greatly. A more activated language that speaks to the production of meaning and empowerment, could provide a handy resource for a younger generation that find themselves caught between the utility of science and the hopeless luxury of art. That we are talking about developing an infrastructure of meaning production. These terms are useful because ultimately we must produce a politics that addresses the overwhelming power of media and information to produce subjectivities. It is this ability of spectacle that has overwhelmingly undermined a global sense of democracy. In order to construct a new language around a hands-on democratic project, we must be able to articulate the power of meaning production and the ills of coercive meaning domination (spectacle). ok yes, that was a rant.

Now, the thought on science and art is often one where I think I could do something a little more radical in my shows at the museum. I suspect that it would be quite useful for folks to read a cohesive straightforward treatise on why the work at MASS MoCA isn’t simply science. That it is in the work’s desire to say multiple things and their ability to engage the viewer in this process, that it differentiates itself from a scientific method. But speaking basically on the subject would do great things.. It could allow a visitor to apprecate meaning as multiple, participatory and vast. It could also make the art experience removed from the language of taste and to that of content.

So, I was on this panel this weekend and I was terribly concerned that this time, in fact, I was just going to bomb. I have been running around from panel to panel every weekend and I think they are slowly taking a toll on me. And unlike last year, where I gave the same presentation on the Interventionists each time, this year, I seem to be grasping at new subjects. So, I am always debuting a new series of hackneyed ideas and they often come out fairly garbled. I know that most people on here that have seen me do any of these recently, would have seen my utterly worst presentation in Chicago. The only redeeming thing about the Chicago presentation is that the ideas presented are on the top of my list of urgency (the talk was on building infrastructures of resonance and the growth of a culture of commodified subjectivities and how that effects the increasingly scene-like art/activist community).  So, I guess, the level of urgency in my Chicago talk would balance it’s utter lack of organization.

But this last talk I gave was on my upcoming show at MASS MoCA, Ahistoric Occassion. Nice title I think. Kind of fun. Maybe annoyingly self-congratulatory (word play often comes off as self satisfied) but the word play is productive. It works. Anyway, the talk forced me to clarify some of the ideas at work in the show and also, publicly, witness some of its shortcomings. But isn’t it interesting that if one is capable of enduring the embarrassment that accompanies oneself thinking out loud in public, one also gains the invaluable insights that magically appear when anxiety is mixed with neurons firing. I learned some things about the show. And one of the most important ideas I would like to lay out now.

The idea came about because we were reflecting on the performance by an artist named Pia Lindman (and organizor of the panel). Dressed in a gray suit she enacted drawings taken from images from the New York Times of people grieving. Almost appearing as a mime, she would star at a pad of paper on an easel and position her body to capture the gestures exactly. Removed from their context, these poses were a bit bizarre, disconcerting and somewhat bland. They seemed to lose a lot of their umph and that was the point. But as I watched, it got me thinking how important the body was in trying to recapture these images. How these images had moved from bodies to mediation through the media, to a pad of paper and back into Pia’s body.

When we are on the panel, Pia asked why it is that this re-enactment is so important for people, particularly in relation to the work of Jeremy Deller who I had presented earlier. I then realized how much the idea of Guy Debord’s spectacle had to do with this. And how, the idea of spectacle particularly influenced performance today. The reaction to a mediated culture is an emphasis on meaning placed in the body. Thus you get all kinds of political rads groups emphasizing the role of personal interaction and embodied practice. And the manner in which folks attempt to recoup the meaning of historic events by placing their bodies literally in the role of history seems palpable and bizarre. I was imagining a world where the news of the day was told in elaborate performances of people enacting the different players. Where the movement of one’s body allowed one to better remember the past. This is the wild idea. What are the influences that spectacle has had on historical re-enactment?

There is a thing called muscle memory right. Can the muscles remember the civil war?

The lens of spectacle,  and mediation, as it applies to collective memory and forms of memory that attempt to sidestep Benjamin’s art in the age of mechanical reproduction (in the hands of capital). This performativity as it applies to events that we personally do not have a connection to, is interesting and definitely a new idea for me. One that I need to chew on. 

I’m in a fed up mood. I mean that in the most pleasurably drunk in the middle of the night way, but nonetheless, I’m fed up my dear friends. It is not such a bad idea to think historically about ones one situation nor is it a bad idea, particularly when one holds such smart and delightful friends as I (and you), to consider oneself as more than a bit part on history’s stage. My friends, we are called upon to enact our part on our limited time here! yes, action is called for.

But what type of action?

Oh, for gods sake it’s more simple than that. Action of any kinds will do for now. Calisthenics on a social level will do. First of all, lets make it a plan to do things that mean something to us and to aggressively confront power on a personal level. I mean if everyone one of us bumped into rich people in one week, if we just snuck out of our homes and let the air out of the tires out of some irresponsible shmuck’s car, well, we would be at the very least activating our own personal form of historic calisthenics. We must be aggresive. AGGRESSIVE! And unapologetic. Just irresonsibly flex your social muscle, it’s happening against a world you believe in every day.

Then there is this other thing:

what does it mean to act historically? I really am down on it all. Why did shit get so bad after Bush? It’s so strange isn’t it? You would have thought that would have been the last gasp but in fact, it was a refreshing breath for the asthmatic right wing. you could feel them catching their breath and hitting their stride as you crouched under your theory books. God, what a mess.

I know I sound marginally mad. I kind of am. I am admittedly frustrated. I had a young graduate student talk to me about where the movement in the US is today. I had to just look at her blankly and think: “You tell me!” Fuck if I know.

I always feel like we are just not accelerated to the new techniques that must be acquired to resist the culture industry. All creativity must come under question. I was on a panel this last weekend, and I was positing that maybe, just maybe, the growth of creativity was a bad thing. That under the new culture of the service industry, we are all absolutely narcissistic and delusional enough to think that our own creativity is enough to make us valuable in the fight for progressive somethingorother. But in fact, our own creativity is a result of bulshitt market capitalism taking us for a ride. Want a ride? think of a new invaluable idea! god, what we really just need is a form of daily practice that makes us confront a not-so-complicated world of dominating power.

We overvalue our ideas and don’t simply just get to it, and kick the shit out of the rich. I mean, why call it capitalism? Isn’t feudalism a resonable model? Just a few daily visits to the owners of our individual towns might do far more than regular posts, wouldn’t you say?

Lets make things tangible. Lets hold them in our hands. Lets seduce them They are people. They are lost. Lets take their breath away.

I am probably not up to the task of this post for it invovles a deeply involved murder mystery. A mystery, I might add, that is still at its height. I got tipped off to this situation by one of those annoying bulletins that you quickly disregard. This one read, “Girl killed by man she met on myspace”. I read that thinking, “god, the shit people you like send you.” But I was curious. So I checked out the link to find…. that it was kind of true. I never really assesed whether the 17 year old victim, Taylor Behl, actually met her alleged murderer, 38 year old amateur goth skateboarder Ben Fawley on myspace, but it was a bonafied internet murder.

Now, I am not one that typically is drawn in by this sensationalist macabre trash, but I am in now. I’m deep. At this point, I may be one of the leading experts on the case in my opinion. Here is the thing with this murder. Many of the key witnesses involved were all these internet folks who posted incessently on live journal and myspace. As such, a lot of clues are all over the net. So, you can actually go to their live journal pages and read up until the point of Taylor Behl’s disappearance. It’s an entirely new form of Hercule Poirot!

I can not go into all the sordid details, but this story is amazing. This guy, Ben Fawley, is such the epitome of internet goth. Question: are a majority of internet folks goth in some manner? Is goth the default internet identity? Anyhow, he has a variety of screen names many of which contain the word skulz. He collects skulls by the way. Hooray. He’s also an amateur photographer! of course! and skateboarder! huh! This all takes place in Richmond Virginia I might add. Did I also add that this Laura Palmer-like 17 year old girl’s screen name was tiabliaj which is jailbait spelled backwards.. woe!

Her young innocence fades in the face of the porn infested juvenalia that is myspace. Well, here are some good sites:

http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/forensics/taylor_behl/

here is a great one where you see Ben Fawley looking like Johnny Depp

http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/forensics/taylor_behl/6.html

here is Ben Fawley’s livejournal page

http://www.livejournal.com/users/skulz67/

here is Taylor Behl’s myspace link

http://www.myspace.com/doowop

There are a ton more and if anyone starts fishing around in this let me know. See, what this really is about in my opinion, is that a threshold has been crossed. It’s one of these moments where you realize yet another strange world is opening up. Like the moment you noticed cell phones were growing, or the moment that the impact of email really hit you, or the moment where you understood the soviet union had just disappeared… now, what is this moment… it’s the moment where you realize that increasingly people’s lives are recorded on the net (particularly in the younger,up to their ears in livejournal folks) and that we can start playing detective with these pieces. Hypertext was always a sort of wierd unrealized literary endeavor, but now we have hypercrime. you can click from one piece of evidence to the next. There is even this annoying dude named Steve Huff who fancies himself the sherlock holmes of the internet sleuth variety. he does get a lot of info, but he’s not very good. i suspect any of you could do a better job. get on the case! tell me how it goes!

I’m feeling pleasurably morbid these days. It’s the rain for sure, but what a blessing it is. I’m not depressed in the slightest. I’m just enjoying a season change where the pungent smell of leaves feels like the backdrop to a film noir sensibility. I finally saw Werner Herzog’s Grizzlyman last night and I am just blown away. I sure loved it. Hearing Herzog’s overblown, dead-serious voice over in relation to this California-style ex-alchoholic ecological maniac was too precious. The juxtaposition of a Dostoyeviskian perspective and the Red Hot Chili Peppers tickled me pink. I think I related to both characters.

The story, in a nutshell, is about this guy, oh what is his name, Timothy Tredwell. A somewhat effeminate nature enthusiast who takes it upon himself to save the Grizzly Bears of northern Alaska. It’s a noble task that Herzog is set to implode. Herzog found all this footage after Tredwell met his fateful end about a year or so ago. Tredwell and his girlfriend were inevitably eaten by the thing that Tredwell loved (I think the girlfriend was just on the worst date of her life). Tredwell is a tragic figure who sets out on a DIY nature film of the most unthought out kind. It’s basically amateur nature film. He names his bears (Saturn, Chocky, Matilda), attempts to teach us things, goes to teach the children (always be wary of ex alchoholics that direly want to save children) and eventually gains a modicum of notoriety after ten years (he appears on David Letterman at some point). Herzog loves exposing how canned the whole thing is. What really struck me in the films was the manner in which Tredwell increasingly finds his inspiration in his absolute antipathy for humanity. His love for bears is fueled in large part for his hatred of the "civilized" world. This sense of animosity and then supposed animal empathy are definitely factors evident in Becoming Animal. It’s something I relate to quite well. Herzog will often say enigmatic nihilisms like, "I differ with Tredwell on this point. While he sees a world of compassion, I see a world of chaos, death and murder." I mean, I had to love that. Where have all the nihilist nature voice overs gone? And of course, Herzog loves Tredwell. This bleach blond ex-actor surfer gone native is the epitome of a postmodern de-centered ball of self-destruction. Tredwell is Herzog’s agonized core of dissolution. There is this great moment, where we are apparently looking at some of the last video shot of the bear that killed the couple. As the camera closes up on the bear, Herzog says something like, "Tredwell saw a world of caring and compassion in the eyes of this bear. When I look into these eyes, I see the uncaring world of nature whose only feeling is a bored sense of hunger." Woe!

So, right, I work as a curator and as such, I often fall under the delusion that that is what I should spend much of my time thinking about. I am under just that delusion right now. But in this particular blog, I would like to rant a bit about the rampant myopia in my chosen field.

I have come to learn that there are certain pragmatic necessities in putting exhibitions together that exclude some work that I truly enjoy. For example, I am typically partial to more participatory event based projects, but here at MASS MoCA, those don’t go over well because we have to keep things going for over seven months. We just don’t have the resources to hold seven month events. But that does not mean that this work isn’t important.

Yet, there are tons of examples of cultural projects that MASS MoCA can not do that I completely adore. As someone who came out of Chicago where produced numerous hybrid, event based cultural projects emerged, I am sypmathetic to this format. What cracks me up is that in the ‘curatorial’ field, so many curators really think the perview of art begins and ends in exhibition space related work. And they also convince themselves that this is the most important work going on. It’s just such a joke. A modicum of humility would serve the curatorial field well.

I swear it also has to do with the fact that NYC is, in fact, one of the most formally conservative art places in the world. While there are supposedly thousands of artists operating there, the formats people choose to participate in are often exhibition space related. Even the folks who resent this model will often be found lamenting the fact that people "all around the world" are only producing exhibition friendly work. NYC is not the entire world but folks in NYC often confuse their city for the world. That wouldn’t be so bad if the more interesting practices going on in the world were readily available in NYC, but they aren’t.

This probably ties back to my previous blog about theory vs action, but whatev.

It also makes me so cranky and stupified at the total lack of ambition on behalf of critics in the art world. So much of it rings as some sort of hobby writing. They just kind of meander about without a pulse trying to find some quip to throw in. But none of it feels like there are any stakes involved (because there isn’t for them). But it’s so baffling. If curators actually engaged work with the intention of producing a critical culture, that some of that good ol’ fashioned avant-gardist tendency could flare up, then we could see some real ass-kicking. Then the problem of beauty vs aesthetics wouldn’t get in the way, because we are more importantly participating in a robust cultural movement to institute a radical democracy.

I guess the real trick is not the work itself so much as the communities of resistance that people choose or don’t choose to participate in. The tenor of the field transforms dramatically when folks are actively participating in a movement against global capital and control. And I realize that many of the folks that I can’t stand in my field have never even remotely participated in such a thing. That is, their perspective on radical politics comes from a profound haze of the world-as-hobby approach. I think it is a rare art world person indeed who actually understands that some socially relevant work ACTUALLY has the intention of changing the course of history. Such an attitude strikes our hobbyists as bizarrely naive as opposed to in-line with the course of history. I can see it in their eyes. Their insulated world has never touched anything remotely engaged with a revolutionary practice. And this massive haze of subjectivity is a structural barrier to getting shit done.

Hmmmm… that’s interesting. How to get through their cloudy heads? You might say, "who cares about them? move on!" Well, I used to think like that. But there are lots of them. And, they tend to have their hands on the steering wheels of power. Re-inventing everything can be tiresome and time-wasting for our limited radical resources. No, the radical community must take the reigns from them as well as produce critical counter structures. This is the only way.

So, I was sadly unable to attend this big ol’ seminar with Brian Holmes a few weeks ago because I was cruising around Europe with Mira. Now that sounds pretty pretentious but in fact, all I am saying is that I was sad to not be able to attend the talks. Anyway, I had to participate via conversations with friends that had attended and cobble together what I could of them.

My pal Daniel was fairly exuberant over the entire thing. He is a big fan of Brian’s writings (as am I) and found him consistently on point. Josh, I believe, got typically frustrated with the lack of utility put into place over the course of the weekend. It’s a common concern of his, but one of which I have great sympathy. I am used to these theory get-togethers and often, the rallying cry of stop thinking and start doing inevitably rears its head. It’s what happens. However, the more you go to, the more clear it is that talking is just easier than doing.

I am not convinced that theory gets one much closer to changing things. That effective political action can, in fact, occurr with a far more myopic insight into neoliberal capitalism. There was also talk of how the Chicago model is so different from the NYC model. That the Chicagoans are more ‘on the ground’ in their practice and NYC (albeit very influenced by the Whitney ISP) are more theory heavy. Now, these oversimplifications can be divisive but it’s a useful question to raise. I really feel that a sincere dedication to on the ground action must go hand in hand with any self-described political get together.

Even interrogating myself, I know that I could ramble for hours over the new face of capital. However, when it comes to effective models for social change, my litany runs dry. It’s a much more confounding question and one where a collective level of discussion could prove fruitful. I suspect this is the direction the DSLR/CPI folks want to take with the on-road whistle stop tour. Discussing effective models for aesthetic social action. That feels reasonably satisfying.

I am fairly eager to start connecting the circuits between all the folks we know. Only in so much as producing an infrastructure that can be useful in terms of co-ordinated social action. I have long lost the love for any type of convenient Deleuzian critique of co-ordinated action. I say convenient, because I have never seen that argument used in any way other than to extend ones personal ambitions and not sociall effectiveness.

In general, I am just interested in co-ordinating things enough to put action into high gear. You can just feel that co-ordinated social action resonates so much more deeply than any theoretical article. You can just feel the effectiveness ringing in your bones.