The Grace of Inactivity

These past few weeks have seen me in limbo between Bellingham and Seattle as we scrambled to complete our video in daily marathon editing sessions. The video finally debuted on September 4th as Present In All That We Do (from the Baldwin quote about history). We have other prospective showings lined up in the coming months, but nothing to justify my lingering days in Bellingham extending any longer.

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Now I am in Seattle’s University District. Whereas Bellingham was a place whose history I could begin to understand, and maybe even began to grasp my own place in that history, given its small size as a city, I’m left floundering here, not knowing where to begin.

My father swears he once lived only a block or so away from where I do now, but he either can’t remember what his building looked like, or it has been torn down. Whether the building still stands or not, I think my father’s memory says something about this area: a young person’s presence here is fleeting, transient, leaving behind nothing to remember one by, and one leaves with nothing to remember about the place itself.

This is a place of impermanence, and so I’m thinking it will be a good introduction to the metropolis: no need for the knowledge of my neighborhood here. Instead I can concern myself with my new surroundings - find a job, get political. For now I’m left with nothing do but job hunt and generally laze, which explains the origins of this blog post, and the title too.

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I have also been reading.

A roundabout connection to the above: George Woodcock, author of Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, once taught at the University of Washington (so says the back of the book; his Wikipedia entry says nothing about it). His book appeared in 1962, and the era permeated throughout Woodcock’s book, both in the style it is written and in its general pessimism about the prospects of anarchism in general. The book is generally concerned with what happened in anarchism’s history, not why, and given its breadth - basically all the European countries are covered - perhaps that’s all a book like this can do. Woodcock was an English professor, and it shows - he seems to dedicate an entire chapter to Leo Tolstoy simply because he was a novelist, and Woodcock is always interjecting little asides about the literary quality of the anarchists’ writings.

Overall it was an interesting read, but nothing I would ever recommend to someone looking for an introduction to anarchism - his subjects are all one hundred years or so in the past, and he remains centered completely on the anarchist men of Europe. Perhaps the only new insight I take away from it is the historical failure of anarchists to organize as anarchists. The success of anarchism, in my eyes, demands participation in larger social movements, those not organized around an idea but a practice. Groups of anarchists are important to me, but only as a circle (a circle A!) to share ideas and insights, which we then carry into our struggles elsewhere.

I also recently completed Benevolent Assimiliation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 by Stuart Creighton Miller. Anna and I have plans to visit the Philippines in the next few years, so I’ve been looking to learn more about the history of the archipelago. I learned next to nothing about the Philippines in this book, though I learned a great deal about the early history of American imperialism overseas - often despite Miller’s soft-pedaling, moderate liberalism. The book is inordinately concerned with the debates, scandals and squabbles amongst the powerful - mostly US politicians and generals - during the early years of the US occupation of the country.

I generally couldn’t care less about the powerful, but several short - too short - passages in this book make the invaluable connection between US conquest of the North American continent, and imperialism overseas. A great many of the men sent to pacify Filipino revolutionaries had also been deeply involved in US campaigns against Native Americans, including the Wounded Knee massacre. The tactics of concentration camps, rape, and wholesale murder of Filipinos had been tried and tested on the American frontier.

One point that Miller does have the courage to make: the collective memory of the US is one of amnesia and eternal innocence, an innocence that insists we are always doing these things to help people. The justifications have always remained the same: bringing civilization and democracy to ungrateful savages. After reading a book like this, the historical trail leading from the US frontier, to the Philippines, to Vietnam, and eventually to Iraq become undeniable.

“…another person’s pain, a man’s physical prowess and prospects coming up hard against a padded, but no less cement, wall.”

Nearly 3 years since I originally wrote it, my rambling essay On the DL: Power, Politics and Sport has gone public in Habits of Waste: a Quarterly Review of Pop Culture, an 0n-line cultural crit journal on the brink of becoming a blog. Read it to discover what Ken Griffey, Jr., the Nazis, Theodor Adorno, the Superbowl, the Zapatistas, George W. Bush, and Michel Foucault all have in common - the answers may (or may not) surprise you! Great thanks to HoW co-editor Jeff Purdue for providing me with the outlet.

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Nearly two months since I’ve lasted posted something here, though I’ve posted several reviews and an interview elsewhere. What I feel I’m lacking here is that magic that gives all blogs their individual character - their blog-a-rhythms - an animating spirit that carries itself through each and every post. So two little posts on two small blogs have significance for me - Tram talking quality control, Scott calling it quits - asking, what is it all for, this blogging? For me, answers are still forthcoming.

Behind the Music

I’m like VHI - constantly behind the music. What I mean is, I still listen to the same music I did in junior high school. Music trudges ahead and I don’t. One obscure musical subculture I’ve stayed strangely allegiant to over the years is “breakcore.” It’s a catch-all phrase for mostly loud, fast, noisy, beat-centered electronic music that sampled a lot of punk in its early days (ala DJ Scud’s Jackboots & Birds, pictured above) but now gets more mileage out of abrasive Jamaican dancehall chants. Wikipedia says it “encourages speed, complexity, impact and maximum sonic density.” That’s good enough a definition for me.

I’m not like my friend David. Where I’m behind the music, seems like he’s always way ahead. Seems there isn’t a low-rent house party where he isn’t behind the beats - like the last party we were at, where the stereo skipped anytime someone tipped-toed near it and the bass sounded as hollow as a fist on a card board box. David once even had aspirations to be a DJ, even threw down a few thousand for some decks, but it was an ambition he quickly relinquished after observing one too many cheezy-ass white dudes spinning platters with one hand and holding a droopy half-rolled blunt in the other. He did not want to be one of those guys.

I once felt the way about breakcore David feels about DJs: for years, my love of the music was at war with the seemingly frat-like stupidity of breakcore culture (probably summed up best by the gratingly “ironic” album art of Bong-Ra, full of bikes, butts and bikinis). When artist Rachael Kozak started her all-female label Homewrecker Foundation years ago (now defunct), the sort of stupid shit that flared up on list-servs taught me a hard lesson about hard music: radical, boundary-pushing politics don’t necessarily follow from radical, boundary-pushing music.

My attitude towards the tunes changed some once I discovered DJ /rupture. Firstly, he spins mixes so tight, dropping disparate sources loud and clear. The seamless Gold Teeth Thief mix starts at side A with Missy Elliot getting her freak on and ends at side B with Paul Simon getting all somber; and the two tunes are essentially bridged by an hour of breakcore and revolutionary hiphop. His site says, “His dynamic live sets simultaneously partyrock and suggest complex political undertones.” Under or over, I’m a sucker for any tone that’s political.

Above all, /rupture a.ka. Jace Claxxon proved to me breakcore could be literate. His blog provides the theory behind the music, as disprate and dirty like the mixes he spins. Who else features an obit for Baudrillard, the tune of a Turkish bellydancer, and a radical modernist lit take on T-mobile mall kiosks (at least I think that’s what it is)? All in a matter of days, all with a playful poetic wit that puts my plain-speaking prose (and my shameful use of alliteration meant to compensate) to shame.

But you know what? I’m still behind in my music. /rupture rolled through both Seattle and Olympia last week and I didn’t even notice until two days after he was gone.

À propos de Bothell, Part Deux

A possible definition of suburb might be a city or town that has no identity of its own, whose sense of place exists primarily through its relationship with urban centers.

By this definition, Bothell is the quintessential suburb. Even the City’s advertising campaigns admit it. Anna was going through a Sunset magazine and came across this ad for Bothell that reads: “Seatlle? Canada? San Juans? Think Bothell.” Bothell, it seems, is only known through the places it is within proximity of.

If you take a moment to Explore Bothell, the site mentioned at the bottom of the ad, you might notice that of 7 the 19 “attractions” are at Country Village. CV is an old-timey antique mall where unpainted shingles and folksy atmosphere are supposed to take the place of true history. They mostly sell Americana meant to decorate the interiors of suburban homes, a pastiche of the pastoral to subdue suburban malaise… at least that’s my take on it.

For those of us who grew up in Bothell, this sort of ad isn’t worth more than a laugh; anyone who vacations in Bothell has been had, plain and simple. It’s hard enough living there. Yet, perhaps we laugh because the ad is also a painful reminder of what little character Bothell actually has, what little real sense of place our hometown can claim. In the Sunset ad, the word “hometown” is even put in quotation marks!

The new town motto seems to admit this too. Before, it was “Bothell - for a day or a lifetime.” Now, it is “Bothell - closer than you think, better than you know.” Is it just me, or does the new motto sound incredibly defensive? Unlike the previous motto, which defined Bothell in terms of time, this new slogan is directed outwards, at someone who would dare doubt Bothell’s worth.

At least it makes for a better combination with the common defacement of “Bothell” as “___hell.” Now it sounds seductive and transgressive: “hell - closer than you think, better than you know.” Unfortunately, Bothell proves the adage that hell isn’t exciting; like Simone Weil said of evil, it’s “gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Alas, Bothell and hell alike are essentially banal.

À propos de Bothell

I HAVE no life
I HAVE NO HOME
That sux
NO HOPE
GET A LIFE
- graffiti exchange on bus stop at Bothell Park & Ride, December 2005

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Bothell, for a day or a lifetime.
- former Bothell city motto

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“Bothell’s been displaced.” That’s what a friend of mine observed Saturday night, while we attended a birthday party. He was noting how so many of our friends had moved from Bothell - the suburb where we had all grown up. Many have moved about 15 miles southwest along the shore of Lake Washington to Seattle’s University District, where the party was at.

It’s true - Bothell has been displaced. Of all my friends from high school, not a single one lives in Bothell any longer, if not all in the U District. But I think this is because Bothell is permanently displaced. People live in Bothell - 30,150 people says the 2000 census - but they hardly spend their lives there with any sense of place. It’s the kind of place you want to be free of, really. Even my mother, whose lived in the town for nearly thirty years, talks of plans to move elsewhere someday. Only her church, I think, keeps my parents in town.

Bothell may be famous for a sequence in the film Hype! - a documentary about the Seattle Grunge scene that I’ve only been told about - in which a former Bothell resident recalls how he and his teenage buds would deface Bothell’s official city sign to read: “Welcome to ___hell, for a day or a lifetime.” It’s an apt slogan, but to me, Bothell will always be known more for displacement, not defacement.

New Objectives, New Cadres

“New Objectives, New Cadres” is a poem by Kenneth Rexroth that sticks it to Leninist vanguard politics. “Our objectives are not our confidantes,” he writes, which I take to mean our purposes can’t be secrets: best that they be out in the open so we can’t go back on our principles.

Well, call this “New Beginnings, New Blogs.” I’ve decided to start this blog to scratch an itch to share my thinking about all the shit I’m interested in - mostly radical politics, cinema, anarchy, anti-oppression, art, and all that. I write about this stuff elsewhere - namely Lucid Screening and my work’s blog - but needed someplace to strech my legs. This blog will only be on WordPress while I teach my self CSS/XHTML and also sorts of website stuff, which is probably among my more tangible goals in 2007.

The name of this blog is the English translation of the title of a film by French filmmakers Anne-Marie Mieville and Jean-Luc Godard called Ici et Ailleurs. On the simplest level, I just like the phrase. It’s a really, really simple way of outlining my politics. Between here and elsewhere lies solidarity. To struggle for a better world, I have to understand myself and my position in society - here - before I go thinking I’m gonna build a better society with others - elsewhere. And vice versa: I got to understand others’ positions in society - elsewhere - before I begin committing myself to my struggle at home - here. That works for race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, you name it. Really simple, maybe too simple. But things demand titles, don’t they?

I have to admit I haven’t actually seen the film. In his Histoire(s) du Cinema series, however, Godard says something about how the favorite films of the French New Wave generation were always the films they had never seen. By which I take to mean the films of their imagination were what mattered most, because these films fueled their Utopian ideals about the ability of the cinema to - more or less - save the world. That’s a good enough excuse for me; as an anarchist, that sort of Utopian approach is really appealing. I don’t want to save the world - and if anything, cinema sure as hell isn’t going to do it - but I love the sentiment. As they say, be realistic, demand the impossible.

Plus, Ici et Ailleurs is partly a film about Godard’s experience making a “documentary” for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a fascinating story on its own. He was commissioned to make the film in the early 1970s with his Maoist collective The Dziga Vertov Group. It was orginally to be called Victory and he completed most of the filming in Jordan documenting the training of Palestinian guerilla fighters. During his editting in Paris, however, the Jordanian government cracked down on the Palestinian militants, killing thousands of people - many of whom had been filmed by Godard - and making the planned “documentary” an impossible task. Years later, Godard returned to the footage with his partner Anne-Marie Mieville, and Victory became Ici et Ailleurs. Instead of a commercial for the PLO, it became a filmed essay discussing the ethics of political documentaries and political images, and the issues that are raised when a French militant wants to make a film about another peoples’ struggle.

All sorts of things to learn from that story. And that’s what this blog shit is all about, I suppose - learnin’. So let’s get to it!