new yorker style

History is important. Here are the first paragraphs of the 3 main features in the Feb. 3, 2014 issue of The New Yorker:

1. In 1994, Harry Huang and his wife, Zhang Li, were running Lily Burger, a tiny backpacker restaurant on the banks of the Jen River, in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province.

2. In May of 1990, several hundred physicians gathered in a conference hall at an Atlanta hotel, as uniformed guards stood at the door.

3. In the spring of 2000, Reed Hastings, the C.E.O. of Netflix, hired a private plane and flew from San Jose to Dallas for a summit meeting with Blockbuster, the video-rental giant that had seventy-seven hundred stores worldwide handling mostly VCR tapes.

John Cage, futurist

We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use.

My idea was that if they wanted to fight (human nature and all that), they should do it in the Antarctic, rest of us gambling on daily outcome: proceeds for world welfare.

Society's changing. Relevant information's hard to come by. Soon it'll be everywhere, unnoticed.

War will not be group conflict: it'll be murder, pure and simple, individually conceived.

Treat redwoods, for instance, as entitles that have at least a chance to win.

Fusion of credit card with passport.

Effect of videophone on travel? That we'll stay home, settling like gods for impressions we'll give of being everywhere at once.

Everywhere where economics and politics obtain (everywhere?), policy is dog eat dog.

The truth is that everything causes everything else.

Heaven's no longer paved with gold (changes in church architecture). Heaven's a motel.

Utopia? Self-knowledge. Some will make it, with or without LSD. The others? Pray for acts of God, crises, power failures, no water to drink.

--from Diary: How to improve the world (you will only make matters worse) 1965

The question is not: How much are you going to get out of it? Nor is it: How much are you going to put into it? But rather: How immediately are you going to say Yes to no matter what unpredictability, even when what happens seems to have no relation to what one thought was one's commitment?

--from Lecture on Commitment, 1961

I like a country where it's nobody's damn business ...

I like a country where it's nobody's damn business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where we do not have to stuff the chimney against listening ears and where what we say does not go into the FBI files along with a note from S-17 that I may have another wife in California. I like a country where no college-trained flatfeet collect memoranda about us and ask judicial protection for them, a country where when someone makes statements about us to officials he can be held to account. We had that kind of country only a little while ago and I'm for getting it back. It was a lot less scared than the one we've got now. It slept sound no matter how many people joined communist reading circles and it put common scolds to the ducking stool.

That's Bernard de Voto from "Due Notice to the FBI," in Harper's Magazine, October 1949. Fighting surveillance six and a half decades ago. Swap in contemporary references and it's strikingly fresh.

scenic superficial garage resort cornutopia

1067 PacificPeople
COLLECTIVE (hands-on, cooking, cornutopia)
SCENIC SUPERFICIAL GARAGE RESORT ADDS A STATION

October 10  - October 12, 2013
@ 5:30pm - 9:30pm (Meal at 7:30pm)
Thursday:  Sonoran-Desert Post-Apocalyptic Tortillas
Friday: Campfire Corn Soup with Cornbread
Saturday:  Monte Verità Polenta Bar

The people can choose to be in an active or passive state to be part of the meal preparation or drop in for the eating.



The Scenic Superficial Garage Resort becomes a 3-day gathering and social sculpture, it invites friends, artists and guests to practice, to witness, to move, to share, to eat, to relax and to converse. How food can become a conscious collective act of embodiment and a form of artistic practice with aesthetic and critical perspective in our time?  During COLLECTIVE, Swiss Gastronomy Advisor Martina Haenggi will offer her hands-on cooking expertise while Nancye creates the fire ritual and Andrea offers singular movement exploration using fingertips to scroll, to zoom, to get closer to the COLLECTIVE landscape, a linkage between gazing and touching, a physical contact. We encourage you to spend some time to experience COLLECTIVE  in all its facets and if time permits come for all 3 days to experience the full cornutopia.

Join us at 1067 Pacific Street, Brooklyn, http://goo.gl/ugOcy.
Bring currency and/or raw food products to support the collective meal.
RSVP at andrea@amdat.org.
Onward to COLLECTIVE :)
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1067 PacificPeople
Twitter: @1067PacificPeop

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ABOUT: 1067 PacificPeople Installation/Performance research field work SCENIC SUPERFICIAL GARAGE RESORT gets built on:
“The desire to be touched by something. Untouched. Desert. Landscape Touched. Altered. Human interference. Desertification. Desire expresses movement. Movement expresses Desire. Movement includes the missing. The failed communication. Desire to express the failed communication. Desire to Produce Affections and Sensations to address the uneasy sense of dislocation and detachment that hangs in the air.”

Ø Signs of affection in the urban desert landscapes
Ø An act of enclosure, erasure and devotion derived, in part, from artist Andrea Haenggi’s participation in the mobile desert performance Shuttle, (http://www.performingmobilities.net) moving through the desert of the American South West with eight other artists in a Chevy Van with its fleeting ecological diverse desert landscape and social temporality and her studio research into aesthetic, political, cultural and environmental of the deserts beauty, control, wilderness, death.
Ø An investigation into the “experience economy”.
Ø Finding new forms of somatic dance/art/theater served hotdrylow
Ø Looking for diversities in creative practices and disciplines

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http://www.andreahaenggi.net
http://stealthofnations.blogspot.com

news from the planet Oops

The imaginary political cosmology of Aurelianus Götze, courtesy of J. Rodolfo Wilcock:

Each planet in the solar system has a task. Our planet—which Götze christened Oops—was “entrusted with the duty of ensuring universal justice.”

“This also explains why it is impossible among us.”

necessary reading: a 55-year-old book of the moment

Sometimes a decades-old text speaks directly to how we live right now.

Rodolfo Walsh’s Operation Massacre, which dates from 1957 and is now available in English (translated by Daniella Gitlin and published by Seven Stories Press), is one of those books.

On the surface, it’s the story of a state-sanctioned murder that took place June 9-10, 1956 in Buenos Aires—the botched police assassination of a dozen innocent men, five of whom died, in the early days of Argentina’s Dirty War.

It’s also the story of how Walsh, a journalist and mystery writer who spent his free time playing chess in coffee shops, got the story (working with reporter Enriqueta Muñiz)—using fake names, carrying a gun, going underground to avoid government retribution. And of his growing awareness that he could not retreat “back to chess and the fantasy literature I read, back to the detective stories I write, back to the ‘serious’ novel I plan to draft in the next few years, back to the other things that I do to earn a living and that I call journalism, even though that’s not what it is.”

Operation Massacre is also a story of how to take a stand when events call for taking a stand. “I will not ask what your politics are,” Walsh wrote in a passage that might inspire people attempting to battle the awful Egyptian military crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood or President Obama's insane build-up of the surveillance state. “That is how I respond to cowards and to those who are weak of spirit when they ask me why I—someone who considers himself a man of the Left—am collaborating journalistically with men and publications of the Right. I reply: because they dare to take the risk, and right now there is no hierarchy that I recognize or accept as being more noble than that of civil courage.” Yet he frankly acknowledged that if the party championed by his publishers was in power, he would never have been able to start his work. “Under Peronism I would not have been able to publish a book like this or the news articles that preceded it, or to even attempt to investigate police killings that were also taking place at the time. That’s the little we have gained.”

When he published a second edition, seven years after his remarkable account first appeared, Walsh suggested that the book had largely failed: it had brought the facts forward, but had in all other ways been defeated. “In 1957 I boasted: ‘This case is in process, and will continue to be for as long as is necessary, months or even years.’ I would like to retract that flawed statement. This case is no longer in process, it is barely a piece of history; this case is dead.”

He also acknowledged that those seven years had not made him more courageous. “There is yet another failure. When I wrote this story, I was thirty years old. I had been a journalist for ten years. Suddenly I felt I understood that everything I had done before had nothing to do with a certain notion of journalism that had been taking shape in my mind, and this—investigating at all costs, gathering testimony of what is most hidden and most painful—this did.” Despite this self-realization, he recognized the extent of his own failure: “I am rereading the story that you all have read. There are entire sentences that bother me, I get annoyed thinking about how much better it would be if I wrote it now.” But, he added in italics, “Would I write it now?”

On March 24, 1977, two decades after he published Operation Massacre, Walsh sent an “Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta” to the major newspapers and foreign correspondents in Buenos Aires. In it, he documented how the government had used “the rack, the drill, skinning alive, and the saw of the medieval Inquisition … alongside the picana [a metal prod used to administer electric shock, often to the genitals] and waterboarding, the blowtorch of today.” In a passage that has contemporary resonance given the recent actions of United States forces and contractors in Iraq and Guantanamo, Walsh wrote, “You have arrived at a form of absolute, metaphysical torture unbounded by time: the original goal of obtaining information has been lost in the disturbed minds of those inflicting the torture. Instead, they have ceded to the impulse to pommel human substance to the point of breaking it and making it lose its dignity, which the executioner has lost, and which you yourselves have lost.” He sent this testimony, he wrote, “with no hope of being heard, with the certainty of being persecuted, but faithful to the commitment I made a long time ago to bear witness during difficult times.”

The letter was not published at the time, but it must have reached someone important. The day after he dropped it in the mailbox, a military squadron surrounded and shot Walsh on a Buenos Aires street and hauled his body away. He became one of the statistics he wrote about.

In the decades of the Dirty War, the Argentine military killed perhaps 30,000 people—making the murders chronicled in Operation Massacre, as well as Walsh’s own, seem small. But Walsh stood up to a government that proclaimed, on a monument in downtown Buenos Aires, “El Silencio es Salud”—“Silence is Health.” His book remains as necessary today as it was when he risked his life to do the reporting. “I hope,” Walsh wrote, “I am not criticized for believing in a book—even if it does happen to be written by me—when there are so many more people believing in machine guns.”

more troubling than the NSA?

The surveillance state now goes beyond issues of national security. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is funneling questionably obtained wiretaps, intercepts, and telephone records to police departments around the country, Reuters reports. According to a former federal judge, the program "sounds like they are phonying up investigations" -- and it's potentially worse than National Security Agency surveillance because it doesn't involve issues of terrorism or national security.

Despite that, Reuters reports, much of the program is classified. For instance, the documents obtained by the news agency are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive", a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

The DEA unit that runs the program is named the Special Operations Division, or SOD, and it includes representatives from the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

Sod off, of course, is British slang for "fuck off." And that's exactly what I want to say to the DEA and the NSA and all of the Obama Administration's security apparatus.

fragile freedom

Contrary to the mythology, the Supreme Court's record of protecting the press is very weak when it comes to reporting military secrets.

1. Wikileaks, The Guardian and Glenn Greenwald could potentially be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917. Here’s the relevant text of 18 USC § 798 - Disclosure of classified information -- Whoever … publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or … to the detriment of the United States any classified information … concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government … Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both....The term "communication intelligence" means all procedures and methods used in the interception of communications and the obtaining of information from such communications by other than the intended recipients.
2. The Pentagon Papers case, while a victory against prior restraint of publication, was not a sweeping endorsement of a free press. Indeed, five of the nine justices (Chief Justice Burger and Justices Harlan and Blackmun, who all sided with the government and wanted to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers, plus Justices Stewart and White, who voted against prior restraint) mentioned explicitly that the government could prosecute the newspapers under the Espionage Act after publication. Justice Brennan—normally a friend of a fully free press—was also shaky, writing that our judgments in the present cases may not be taken to indicate the propriety, in the future, of issuing temporary stays and restraining orders to block the publication of material sought to be suppressed by the Government. Similarly, Justice Marshall, another generally progressive force on the court, concurred on very narrow grounds, and seemed to suggest that the government had a strong argument that newspapers could be prosecuted for publishing certain secrets. Only Justices Black and Douglas stood firm against any attempt to muzzle the press. (full text of concurrences and dissents here)
3. Daniel Ellsberg and fellow defendant Anthony Russo were not acquitted of the Espionage Act charges against them. Rather, the government’s case collapsed into a mistrial after it was revealed that the Watergate plumbers E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had broken into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office seeking salacious stuff to embarrass the leakers.

Our freedom to know what our government is doing in the name of safety and security is, it seems, quite limited. And the ability of whistleblowers to reveal it is incredibly fragile. I am a patriotic American, but all this stuff makes me feel like burning the flag.