10 posts tagged “mrcc”
I love the novel V. I really should reread it since it has been a million years. But part of the opening I remember pretty clearly. Benny Profane, 'a schlemiehl and human yo-yo,' moves up and down Manhattan by subway. Well, I'm with Benny. The last few days I've moved between my poles of Madison and Chicago so frequently, the yo-yo effect is being felt.
Notes and questions that have arisen as a result of this spike in drive time, having to do with the drive itself, which is, on my normal one round trip a week schedule, usually a two and a half hour experience I'm trying to escape:
1) For most relaxing driving, leave either end at around 10:30 at night. It seems the freeways and tollways are usually wide open then, but the overnight construction hasn't gotten rolling fully yet.
2) Driving into Chicago on Sunday at midnight gives you a taste of the quiet, lonely highways of years past. You still almost always see headlights on the interstate, but the cars are very widely spaced. Everybody's got their own section of road.
3) I wonder what the story is with that powerline that's going up right now, running along the southern easement of the I-90 tollway from about, I think, Schaumburg to out past Hoffman Estates. Anybody know what I'm talking about?
4) People have not been speeding, not like in years past. I wonder if the recession has something to do with the seemingly fewer speed limit scofflaws on the roads.
5) It's hard to beat a really good radio show. But still, why do people listen to Bill Cunningham?
6) Chrysler's Belvidere Assembly plant has been idle for weeks now. Driving by, one cannot help wonder if it will ever return to activity, or if we've just witnessed the end. Or rather, the beginning of another mouldering, disused midwestern factory.
7) Mike Wolf sent me a scan of a drawing he did recently. Now I'm imagining this satellite covering the midwest, making visible and maybe keeping track of all the ant-like movements of us humans on the ground. So I would be that one ant you sometimes notice that for no apparent reason to us seems to move between two places, back and forth. Yeah, that's me, and Mike's Satellite of Love floats above.
Nick Brown sent me the email below:
This is a pretty fascinating story -- steel from India shipped to
Illinois to construct a pipeline that will transport (tar sand) oil
from Alberta to Oklahoma -- with all sorts of MRCC reverberations.
"Pipe From India Incenses Illinois Town"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/business/economy/16pipe.html
I'm just finishing a text in which I make reference to the murder of Vincent Chin. Having grown up then and there as an Asian American person, what I can say is that the anti-Japanese sentiment running through industrial Michigan in the early 1980s was really quite awful. The rising might of Japan's auto industry, and all their faceless, tireless, inscrutable Japanese workers, were implicitly and explicity blamed for car company and autoworker troubles. And it was only the newest iteration of an anti-Japanese racism that apparently had been in place since WWII. I say that because there were more than a few times in grade school that some white kid would taunt me with 'we bombed you!!' - remarks meant to hurt, apparently. The kids who knew something about ethnic relations would say 'hey, don't you guys [meaning the Chinese] HATE the Japanese?' - as if that was the really cool thing about being Chinese. Pretty negative, if not quite hateful in itself!
Anyway, the story linked to above gives no indication of any such xenophobia regarding the Indian workers and people. Instead, it's the American planners, contractors, and legislators, on the one hand, and the cheating foreign export governments, on the other, who are blamed. We've made progress, if only because Americans have now grown accustomed to the fact that we are, in essence, a multiethnic, multiracial society. That, and there's no use in getting down on Indian steel workers when your small town wouldn't have any health providers were it not for the Indian doctors who came to work there.
But there is no indication of concern or curiosity, either. A good next step might be, when making a similar discovery of imported product that could have been made right here, to think first of the Indian workers, and what their situation is. What are their grievances? They must have some, right? American workers might do better if there were some better understanding of their counterparts who are working for the companies and countries that are undercutting American industry. At least then there might present some opportunity to push for changes on those issues that hurt both, in some coordinated fashion.
A few of us artist activists gathered for a couple days in Iowa City, to discuss building on the MRCC activity we organized last June. We took a nice break from the yakking and plotting for an awfully timely tour the Herbert Hoover Museum, which is just a few miles from where we were staying.
There were many basic facts about Hoover that I had not known previously. For example, the fact that he was a mining engineer by training, and that he'd made his personal fortune through his work as a young engineer in the far reaches of the mining industries, including in the Australian outback and then at the Kaiping Coal Mines near Tangshan in China. I'd always assumed that Hoover's namesake public works project–the Hoover Dam–was the result of an ego coupled with the economic necessity of a Depression-era employment program, simply. But Hoover's background in and commitment to the extractive industries helped me make better sense of it. According to the display info at the museum, the dam construction was not all that different from maniacal methods employed by, say, the builders of the recent Three Gorges dam, and maybe even worse: five thousand workers, going at it 24 hours a day, in the middle of the desert.
Was not the art, even though I took in a couple of worthy shows (one at the Drawing Center and one at the Asia Society). It was not the talk I gave, though it was excellent to spread the word and story of the MRCC/Drift. It was not the socializing, even though that was an essential recharge, as always.
It was inspiring to see my friend Libya doing her theater work in NYC, and to compare notes about politics and everything after not having seen each other for several years, but even that is not what I'm remembering as the high point.
No, the triumph of this trip was the excursion with Red76 to Flushing, and more to the point, the discovery of some amazing Chinese food. Much better than what's available in Manhattan's Chinatown. We're talking hand-pulled noodles and northern style jiaozi. Yum!
And you know you're in a marketplace of Chinese consumers when you come across these displays of high-tech toilets!
Yes, the MRCC/Drift book is finished. Except now I think it should have been titled a A Call To [F]Arms, considering the rad elements of Sam Greenlee and Gerald Raunig. Yes, food and revolution. But whatever. That is not the only criticism I have of the book, of course. On the design tip, Mike Koppa emailed me comments before I saw the thing, noting that the gutter is too tight. Absolutely, I agree with that. The margins could be chopped by a quarter inch, at least.
You can buy it from me for, oh, ten bucks or so, or order it from Mike, or download the pdf for free.
Then there is the writing. Mine is not first rate, that's for sure. The C/CURE item is way too short, and captures nothing of how amazing our afternoon spent on the far, far south side of Chicago was. And then there are the omissions: no mentions at all of Gerald Raunig, InCUBATE, the AREA release event, not much on Mess Hall, nothing on Kevin Hamilton, Brett and Bonnie's Garage & Garden space, and probably other things I'm forgetting.
But who cares. It's still great–even more so when you consider it went from an idea in conversation to a real object in less than three months as a side project! (Recall that Downtime at the Experimental Station took about two years to reach fruition.) Compared with most of the quick-and-dirty publications that come out of the critical/social art scene, this one is anything but cheap looking. And some of the texts are fabulous. Sarah Kanouse's introduction is beautiful. Claire Pentecost's reflections are (as usual) insightful, self-critical, and expansive. Sarah Holm's devout and grace-filled dairy-chore narrative may be the single least expected text I've ever encountered in a publication coming out of a critical art effort. Finally, mIEKAL aND's avant-theory maps the outer limits of intellectual analysis, and proves that the work of poets is absolutely and vitally necessary if we are ever to crack the logocentrism of our linguistic prisons. And oh my god is his text fun to read.
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.
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.
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.
