propositions press

The bad thing about living in the Information Age is that I can never get to all the media waiting for me. Books go unread, podcasts are bookmarked but never listened to, the satellite TV DVR is full of nearly a hundred saved shows (everything from Top Chef to old Twilight Zones) and movies (Stolen Life, a documentary about Fred Hampton, Teahouse of the August Moon) that I hardly have the time to sample let alone exhaust. When we first moved to Madison, I pledged to increase my media consumption–I would finally have the time to watch all those movies I'd heard, read, even talked about, but never actually saw. We'd subscribe to the New York Times, get the three-disc Netflix service and the Gameday audio for all MLB contests. Add to this the decent offerings of the Madison Public Library and, needless to say, I'm swamped. I haven't upped my consumption much, but the backlog has certainly grown, perhaps logarithmically.

The other night I finally did get around to viewing a DVD that had been sitting on top of the TV for nearly two months. It was Tom Dowd: The Language of Music, and strangely enough the story of Tom Dowd resonated with my recent visits to Dreamtime. Like who knows how many millions of music fans, I first became curious about Dowd when I noticed that his name was on so many great records. What I didn't know was that Dowd was involved in the Manhattan Project as a young man, before he turned his attention to recording music. In the movie he mentions the secrecy, the surprise he experienced when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This immediately brought to mind my recent exposure to the story of Bern Porter, another Manhattan Project worker who later became an avant-garde poet and mail art innovator.

It was at Dreamtime that I was introduced to Porter's work, and Xexoxial Editions publishes a number of his books. According to mIEKAL aND, Porter and presumably other scientists and engineers were told by the government that their research was going into the development of forty-two peaceful, civilian uses for nuclear energy, in a campaign of detailed deception (these researchers were pretty smart; the lies had to be full). This is what he believed at the time of the bombs being dropped in Japan. He resigned almost immediately after the bombings, and moved headlong into experimental literary work. Dowd talked about the research and the deception, but didn't seem to have much of a problem with it. Perhaps that's to be expected; after all, he was only the age of an early undergraduate student at the time. But the experience nonetheless shaped him, and the documentary makes a point of identifying this formative time by including several clips of the Bikini Atoll test explosions. Dowd only left the research path when he was told after the war that all his research experience would count for nothing in college, and that he'd have to go through the regular coursework even though what he'd already done was more advanced. The comparison between Dowd and Porter left me wondering about other scientists-in-exile from their fields. I wonder especially about those from their generational cohort, and how many of them turned to art and cultural work instead, and how those military-industrial complex turncoats put their talents to creative alternative uses–which somehow contributed to the cultures of experimentation in living that places like Dreamtime continue.

Last Thursday I joined two associates for a tour of Chicago's Haymarket history, led by the knowledgeable Nicolas Lampert.  We began with a stop at Waldheim Cemetary, final resting place of Emma Goldman 

and the site of the monument to the Haymarket martyrs. The lefty gravemarkers, with wonderful inscriptions having to do with the long struggle for justice and dignity, are simply amazing. The collection of famous radicals keeping company in death and memory is a wonderful act of imagination that strengthens their claim on history from the other side of the grave. I love that Emma's marker is only a few steps away from her one-time rival associate, and later respected colleague,
Emma and Voltairine were both radicalized by the injustice suffered by the Haymarket martyrs, even though they went off in very different philosophical directions. Their markers offer themselves as evidence of Haymarket's role in the proliferation of anarchist thought and action, in a way rendering true August Spies's last words, "The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you throttle today!"

We ended the tour at the site of the incident, marked by a sculpture in what is now the West Loop. The new monument is not what you would call radical. Rather it serves to memorialize the histories of all involved, whether law enforcement or labor organizers. Blandness might therefore be expected. But in between Waldheim and the West Loop, we made a stop at the Chicago Police headquarters on South Michigan. There, near the building entry, stands the policeman's statue, which over the decades had been toppled at least three times. After years of assault by radicals, and years in storage, without a good place to put it, now it lives outdoors once again, but in the fully protected environs of the police parking lot. According to Nicolas, the current pedestal is about the same size as that of the original. Can you imagine toppling that? The first time it took a street car jumping the tracks and crashing it, and then decades later the Weathermen used bombs.

The MRCC itinerary called for an end-of-Drift strawberry pick and jam-making party. It was a wash-out; the strawberry fields weren't ready for trampling because of all the rain we've had over the last few weeks. On the other hand, the seasonal turns of fortune created a different opportunity, albeit one that all concerned would rather not see arise. We, the eleven traveling Continental Drift participants who arrived at Dreamtime, were asked to help with the post-flood clean up of a bookstore and post office in Viola, which is about a half hour from Dreamtime by car.

Five of us, Claire, Brian, Mike, Courtney, and I, were available to answer the call. We put in a good four hours of labor, including the moving of all the furniture from the post office to a safe and dry space in a building across the street. The Viola post office is small but there were enough pieces of heavy steel shelving, lockers, and assorted overbuilt tables and desks to make for a good workout. The post master was there to help and supervise, along with two volunteers from the local area. One was a mother with a small boy (who couldn't help much with the heavy lifting) from Viroqua and the other a local Amish fellow named Eli (with whom I moved a bear of a locker, full of stacked files). Together we moved the furniture, then pulled nails from the swollen floorboards, and finally cleaned and mopped. The post office was the priority, obviously, but the bookstore needed help, too.

The bookstore is called Driftless Books and Music and what a bookstore it is. If you're in the area, please check it out. While waiting for direction we had a few minutes to browse among the many fans turned to dry the wet floor. The offerings are quite substantial and full of surprises. One of the proprietors, Eddie Nix, said that about 2000 books were badly damaged and/or lost. But they've got holdings of well over 100,000.

Some books needed to be moved there, too, in order to make room for cleaning, but they weren't quite organized enough to make use of the five of us. That was just as well–the afternoon of lifting and carrying left my arms sore for a couple of days after. But it was a good, meaningful way to put in some Dreamtime labor. Getting to hear the story of how this massive trove of quality used books came to rest in Viola, on the Kickapoo flood plain, was a bonus.

We had wonderful evening and night of food, socializing, and discussion back at Dreamtime. For me, at least, being comfortably tired, especially after a few days of driving and sedentary living, helped facilitate the conversational part of my brain. On that level, the clean-up was just the same as the berry pick was hoped to be.

Well, this just freaks me out: the opening bars from the Mayfield/soul classic 'Curtis/Live!' accompanying the welcome page pic-crawl on the Robert Graham website! Yes, that Robert Graham. You know, of the shirts. A fashion empire put together by the same guy who helped Ralph Lauren design his ultra-WASPy Chaps line. Thank goodness the music clip fades out before Curtis gets to the 'spade and whitey' lyric! 

Even though in calendar terms we are nearing the end of the MRCC / Continental Drift, it feels like the mental processing and theorizing is just beginning. I think we could have easily added two or three days to the Drift in Madison, but the physical exhaustion is catching up to me and probably everybody else. A final stay at Dreamtime Village is the perfect way to wrap up the far-flung rural leg of the journey, and I am impressed that eleven Drifters are here for the upcoming day of reflection, talk, hanging out, cooking, working, and as Claire Pentecost put it, confabulation. Some of us may take a side trip back towards LaFarge to the Brown Family Land, but otherwise most of us are staying put. The eleven here at a remote site near the end of the ten days represents a very strong collective commitment to the MRCC / Drift. The overall number of people who took part in some active fashion, who for a day, an evening, or the whole ten days, as a host, a guide, or a fellow traveler, co-authored this adventure must be in the hundreds. The Radical Culture Corridor, indeed.

Unable to join for the days put together by the Urbana Four, I hitched my wagon to the Continental Drift Through the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor for a couple days in Chicago. The highlights were an AREA magazine release in Paseo Park, facilitating a discussion with the visiting Gerald Raunig at InCUBATE, then the next day a mind-blowing tour of the far, far South Side neighborhood of Riverdale conducted by the always inspiring Martha Boyd, and the weekend wrap-up with a screening of The Spook Who Sat By The Door with a long Q&A with the author and co-producer Sam Greenlee. In between the last two events people enjoyed a tasty potluck (not always the case with potlucks, ya know) at the Experimental Station, to which I contributed the 18-piece wing bucket from (where else) Harold's, where the bird is always fried to order.

I'm skipping out on the Milwaukee day because I have to work, but will rejoin sometime on the way to Elk Mound, Wisconsin. A few others are aiming join as the Drift comes back down around to Madison for next weekend. The ever-shifting nature of the traveling group is emerging as one of the beautiful dynamics. Because the combination of voices keeps changing, the conversations surrounding the various experiences are always a little bit different, and in fact may be the sort of productive discontinuity that keeps the Drift lively in ways that the sit-down seminar cannot.

The rural days will be a further test, because we really don't have a lot scheduled. The new information to be absorbed will be provided by the settings themselves. But then again, by the time we reach Elk Mound, especially for the folks who have been with the troupe all along, time and headspace for reflection might be much needed.

In Chicago lately there have been some good discussions about the utility and fate of the notion of 'post-black.' I heard a lot about the event from last Sunday, the Renaissance Society's Post-Black: There and Back Again panel, which is part of the excellent Black Is, Black Ain't show up now, but couldn't make it myself. I had things to do here in Madison, like cut the grass. Plus, I was still processing the Black Enough? discussion from last Thursday. That encounter was impressive for its diversity. It was bits of the Bronzeville/Hyde Park/South Shore artist/dealer/collector scene meeting the black art historians who teach at the white-dominated academies. It was Patric McCoy laying out his agenda as a collector who believes in the imperatives of cultural survival and Huey Copeland speaking of blackness as a sociohistorical construction. It was Kym Pinder reminding everybody how thin the art historical record is, when it comes to the African American artists of the earlier generations. There were a lot of local black artists on hand, plus for good measure a handful of social art activist types in the crowded room. Theaster Gates put the event together and took the floor several times. I thought the collective spirit struck a promising tenor, but I'm wondering how committed folk are to the conversation. Honestly and collectively mapping the contours of the black art world is going to take some focused effort over time, with key voices staying engaged. Only then will we fully realize the formal and political potential in black art. Kerry James's project at the Wexner from earlier this year reminds us that the formal and the political may be the same thing.

This text was originally published in the Journal of Radical Shimming, vol. 4

early notes on the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor

I am not the only cultural worker feeling this strong sense of regional identity, though others may have arrived at it through a different path.  There are many of us, and the conversations have begun.  We understand the countercultures of the upper midwest as live, deep, dispersed, and varied.  They capture our imaginations, and send us into dreams of what these places where we live and have lived might yet be.  But articulating this belonging through some kind of regional practice remains challenging and only partially modeled, especially when compared to the easy and accelerating flow of city-to-city cultural work.  The task involves resisting the many structures (business, educational, political) heavily invested in keeping cities connected to each other, and which through equal parts antagonism and neglect maintain separations between city and suburb, town and country.  An effect of city-to-city cultural production is one of flattening, of reducing variation and effacing particular, site-bound histories.  This we must also reject.  

On the positive side, we conceptualize our belonging by projecting back and forward, and learn to see ourselves in relation to others.  Projecting backward, we ponder the continuities and ruptures between ourselves and those who came before us in this region, beating their own paths to a world different from that which they were offered.  Hundreds of projects, groups, movements, businesses, neighborhoods, farms, bands, publications, radio shows, artists, explorers, naturalists, campaigns, authors, events, and spaces inspire us, from Aldo Leopold to the Detroit newspaper strike of ’95, from Gwendolyn Brooks to the Bolt Weevils, from P-9 to New Harmony, from Antler to Jane.  They gave to us work we seek to remember and comprehend, and, most importantly, which we continue, sometimes in radically different clothing.  But here in this place, the place we share, the upper midwest.  Considering these histories, rich with paradox, shortcoming, humor, militancy, creativity, and love, and ultimately liberatory, the question then becomes, how could we not be who we are, doing the kinds of work we do?

Projecting forward from this moment, we see the end of cheap energy, and the increasing costs of transportation, food production, health care, and fresh water.  All trends point toward the exhaustion of resources, and toward the wisdom of regionally sustainable lifeways.  And, as the critical source of hope, toward a world populated by people hungry for a different way.  In the face of powerful forces invested in the current arrangements, oblivious or neglectful of the catastrophic probabilities, cultural workers must help lay the ground work for an emergent society based on a different grade of wisdom, a different set of ethical priorities.  There exists a window of opportunity in the exploration and re-imagining of regional connections in this moment of global urban dominance, one we must seize by making the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor visible to itself.

Some of you know that I've been helping to coordinate an itinerary for this foray by a few art-activists into the 'regional,' an effort some of us are calling the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor. There are many dimensions to the MRCC, and it is an idea or set of ideas more than anything else. But here's a few of us who decided to make the idea an experiential thing. For ten days in June, we will be traveling, experiencing, learning, and soaking in this region we probably at one time thought we knew so well.

Food justice, food ecology, sustainability, and settler histories are all on the idea-agenda. Strawberries are on the material agenda. (But we need some rain!)

The provisional itinerary of open events follows below. I'll update it as details continue to get firmed up.

People taking up the planning for this and coming along for some or all of the ten days include our collaborators and colleagues Brett Bloom, Claire Pentecost, Nick Brown, Sarah Kanouse, Brian Holmes, and others. Think about joining up for an afternoon, a day, or a few days.

And what is the Continental Drift, anyways?

Continental Drift is an invitation to look at our collective existence on all the relevant scales: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental and the global.

Continental Drift is a mobile assemblage of people presenting their projects, observations, experiments, discoveries and questions, and producing value through social exchange.

Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor is a self-educating tour through our concrete world and its abstract representations, discovering distant lives in familiar situations, and embracing the interdependency that links what is usually treated as separate.

Continental Drift is intended for anyone seeking to locate global economies, pressures and possibilities in daily life and to reorient aesthetic invention in response to an ethics of equality.

Email me for specifics on where and when.

    CHAMPAIGN - URBANA
DAY 1: Wednesday, June 4
* The Audacity of Desperation-- making compromises in an inadequate  political system.
* Kevin Hamiliton: the university, technology and markets (biocomputing lab).
* Claire Pentecost and Brian Holmes: Introduction to Drift.

DAY 2: Thursday, June 5
* 10:30-12:00 PM – Talk with Lisa Bralts-Kelly, 910 S. Lynn St., Urbana. Bralts-Kelly, direc-
tor of Urbana’s farmers market and veteran food activist, will share her knowledge on regional food sustainability and challenges for local populations.
* 12:30 PM – Visit Tomahnous Farms, Mahomet. Carpool from 910 S. Lynn St.,
Urbana at 12:00 PM. The farm grows organic fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs and honey. Haynes, farmer and land use activist, will give a tour and discuss issues with losing farm land in this ‘suburb’ of Champaign.

* 7 PM:  Exhibition and potluck at 706 E. Fairlawn, Urbana. There will be projects about the re-
use of locally produced waste, imagined neighborhoods,
and things to take with you.  (www.letsremake.info/garage-
garden.html)

DAY 3: Friday, June 6
MORNING
* 10 AM–Fighting Toxicity, Douglass Branch Library, 504 E. Grove Street, Champaign. Ryan Griffis with members of CUCPJ: Racialized geography, toxic tour.

AFTERNOON
* Drift to Chicago/next stop with intermission at an Illinois State rest stop.
* 6:00 PM – Movies & discussion: Who controls our food? Our Daily Bread (1934)
& The World According to Monsanto (2008)
@ Mess Hall, 6932 N. Glenwood, Chicago.
Bring home- made bread to share. (www.messhall.org)

CHICAGO
DAY 4: Saturday, June 7
* Release Party for  AREA Chicago #6: City As Lab Saturday.
2pm-4pm
@ Paseo Prairie Garden, adjacent to the south exit of the Logan Square 'el' exit
This issue of AREA Chicago looks at Chicago as a policy laboratory in which experimental public policy in the areas of housing, labor and education are tested on the residents of Chicago.

* Gerald Raunig in dialogue.
7 pm
@ InCUBATE
2129 North Rockwell
Vienna-based philosopher visits Chicago for the first time, breaks down the latest in art/social action theory.

DAY 5: Sunday, June 8
* Tour the C/CURE-Raising Spirits! initiative with Martha Boyd in the Riverdale neighborhood.
1pm - 5pm, byo-picnic
meet @ Resource Center, 222 East 135th Pl.

The Raising Spirits! initiative is a local proposal for rebuilding healthy, self-sustaining human communities in the context of climate change and pervasive ecological and economic dysfunction. The project commits to creative problem-solving out of the challenges and opportunities in a particular community and place: in this case, Chicago's Riverdale community along the Little Calumet River - in our own lower 9th ward. Martha Boyd will describe the project and activities through the Chicago/Calumet Underground Railroad Effort (C/CURE) to link cultural and ecological tourism with community health and wealth. Environment, enterprise, history, policy, education, infrastructure -
and ultimately: survival.

Martha Boyd is Program Director of Angelic Organics Learning Center¹s Urban Initiative in Chicago.

* Screening of The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). Filmmaker and author Sam Greenlee in attendance!
7 pm
@ Backstory Cafe
6100 South Blackstone
potluck dinner

MILWAUKEE
DAY 6: Monday June 9
* Visit to Growing Power.
* Visit the Black Holocaust Museum.
* Visit the Brady Street Pharmacy.

WESTWARD
DAY 7: Tuesday, June 10
* Travel to Elk Mound the long way, arrive in the late afternoon.
* Noon break at Marl Lake, swimming.
* Evening meal and hang out with the Langbys and some friends/collaborators of theirs from progressive home schooling and local food networks.

DAY 8: Wed, June 11
* Walk a mile to the Langby's neighbors for a tour of their organic dairy farm (they are farmer members of CROPP).
* Help out around the garden. Evening explorations.

DAY 9: Thurs, June 12
* Travel to Viroqua/LaFarge/West Lima.
* See and traipse the Brown Family land.
* Tour the HQ of CROPP
3:30 PM
* Evening picnic and walk-through of Heavy Duty Acres, with Mike Koppa.
* Lodge/camp at Dreamtime Village.

DAY 10: Friday, June 13
* Work on trellis projects at Dreamtime.
* Evening Drift session: Articulating our Visions.

MADISON
DAY 11: Sat, June 14
* Travel to Madison, stop somewhere for U-pick strawberries.
* Strawberry jam making party at the home of Dan and Sarah, plus strawberry shortcake feed.

Oh, and that book I was looking for that I alluded to in a previous post? Here it is.

I had neither read nor seen this book in quite a few years. Probably a good quarter century. I opened the cover and the narrative voice came rushing back. Rediscovering the images was like unearthing a time capsule I myself had planted as a child. I'm sure these are experiences common to folks who take the trouble to materially touch a book they were obsessed with long ago and have not seen in years.

But for this particular book, the amazement factor only grew as I read the tale, because the story resonates in a very contemporary way.

To put it in present social art parlance, the story is about spatial justice. In short, two girls, one shy and one brave, plus an old lady who peddles cookies, together set up what we might today call a squat. The little house is unoccupied, after all. And all the prospective renters for whatever reason didn't work out. So they take it!

I won't spoil the ending (except to say, the shy girl steps up!), but will say this–if sometimes the real world worked like this, we'd all be better off.

Adding to the contemporary meaning, at least as a shadow figure, is the fact that the author, Eleanor Clymer, turns out to be the mother of Adam Clymer, the journalist made nationally famous for fifteen minutes when George W. Bush pointed him out to Dick Cheney from the podium as a 'major league asshole from the New York Times' and the mics picked up the insult.