Hipster Neighborhoods

On a whim many days ago I took The Hipster Handbook (New York: Anchor Books, 2003) off my bookshelf, and have been reading it off and on ever since. Page 93 lists the "Indigenous Zones of the Hipster in the United States and Canada." The title isn't quite accurate as "indigenous" implies that hipsters always have been living in these neighborhoods. I took the liberty of alphabetizing the cities' names, and providing links and comments. This is the 1997 Utne Reader list of the fifteen hippest neigborhoods in North America, from which the Hipster list is apparently adapted.

• Atlanta--Little Five Points and Cabbagetown
• Austin--Clarksville
• Baltimore--Mt. Vernon and Fells Point
• Boston--Davis Square
• Brooklyn--Williamsburg (the most famous hipster neighborhood)
• Chicago--Wicker Park
• Cleveland--Coventry and Tremont
• Detroit--Hamtranck
• Knoxville--Fort Sanders
• Los Angeles--Silverlake
• Manhattan--Lower East Side
• Miami Beach--Lincoln Road
• Milwaukee--Riverwest
• Minneapolis--Whittier
• Montreal--The Plateau
• New Orleans--Lower Garden District
• Philadelphia--Old City
• Richmond--The Fan
• San Francisco--Inner Mission
• Seattle--Belltown
• Toronto--College and Clinton
• Vancouver--Commercial Drive
• Washington, D.C.--The U District

Broadsheets Not So Broad

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003621758

7 August update: Ann Althouse opines:

It feels like the first step toward the seemingly inevitable day when there will be no paper version. You know I still feel bad about the downsizing of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. What great fashion magazines these were back in the 1970s when they were huge and you could see what was in the photographs. [And I remember the oversized issues of Interview when I was a subscriber in the early '90s--P.Z.] What's the point of getting fabulous models and clothes and lighting and poses for a Newsweek-sized format?But the effect of shrinking the NYT is almost nothing... until you get to the editorial page. I can't shake the feeling that the editors are encroaching on the letter writers.

Bob Grumman and Foetry

This is a link to a collection of Bob Grumman's reviews of poetry zines and websites in Small Press Review. http://www.geocities.com/Comprepoetica/spr-stuff/index.html

29 July update: I just found Foetry is defunct, hence this post's title change.

I'll be going through my previous posts and update what needs updating.

31 July update: Jeffers Studies is devoted to Robinson Jeffers.

On Translation and World Literature

This article in New York on some of the best books yet to be translated into English has piqued my interest in world literature. I haven't heard of any of the eleven authors. Except for a Francophone Egyptian writer, Africa has been entirely overlooked, despite outstanding work from Somalia to Senegal and from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Oceania is totally off the map, and Asia is represented only by South Korea's Jo Kyung-ran and Israel's (technically part of Asia) Gabriela Avigur-Rotem. This list of novelists includes Tayeb Salih (Sudan) and Mario Benedetti (Uruguay) ("He is not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he is considered one of Latin America's most important living writers."--Wikipedia)


A Guardian blog post about literary translation points out that "Only three per cent of books published in the UK every year are originally written in another language." (Of course, the situation is comparable in America as this chart about comparative literature indicates.) The Guardian goes on to say:

Language is identity. Across the whole world, millions of people live their whole lives in a mental space that only marginally involves English. Yet these people are not intellectual cripples. Far from it. They can often communicate internationally using English, and still have a reserve of their own - their mother tongue.

At the London Book Fair we were treated to soothing words that told us that it was quite normal that only three per cent of books published in Britain are translations. At the Leipzig Book Fair a few days later, a Ukrainian intellectual spoke about the state of his culture. Yuri Andrukhovych has written one of the few Ukrainian postmodernist novels to have been translated into English - Perverzion, translated by Michael Naydan - but he is also a blunt purveyor of home truths when it comes
to central and eastern Europe. At Leipzig, Andrukhovych suggested that Ukrainians should be afforded visa-free travel to western Europe. But are they being afforded such travel into the minds of British readers?

We do, in Britain, have a number of publishers, such as Serpents' Tail, Harvill-Secker, Arc, Peter Owen, Hesperus, [not to be confused with the music group--P.Z.] Portobello and several others that promote translations of literature. But as British
television does not have a high-prestige books programme, such as the German Literarisches Quartett with the colourful Marcel Reich-Ranicki or the French Apostrophes with Bernard Pivot, British readers never get to know that there are more than a very few non-English books worth reading.

Britain is lagging behind. I fear that the fog may not be so much in the Channel, cutting off the continentals from Britain, but in the minds of those British publishers, editors and journalists that continue to take an introverted view of "world" literature, where only that written in English counts as "real".

-------
17 July update: Brave New Words is a blog on translation, Words Without Borders concerns world literature, and Parnassus: Poetry in Review marked its thirtieth anniversary in March with a 600-page International Poetries Issue.

Prince

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=468409&in_page_id=1773

Happy Bastille Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_14

Using the Voice You Have

http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=126062

On the Fourth of July

"There is one day of the year when America should receive nothing but praise. That's July Fourth. On all other occasions, those who wish the United States well will vigorously distinguish the good from the bad, and especially from the BAD."

--Paul Fussell, BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America (New York: Summit Books, 1991)

Upcoming Works by Kunstler

Grove's Morgan Entrekin has signed The Geography of Nowhere author James Howard Kunstler to two more books, including a follow-up to his bestselling The Long Emergency and an eco-novel titled The World Made by Hand. The world rights deal was brokered by Adam Chromy at Artists and Artisans....

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6304910.html

The Daily Grunt (if I have anything to say)
July 2, 2007

Announcing my next book: World Made By Hand. A novel of the Long Emergency set in upstate New York in the not distant future.To be published by The Atlantic Monthly Press March 2008 .

"Thuggo and Sluggo"

Like many of Kunstler's posts, this is worth reproducing in full. To supplement this column, I'll add links, comments, and pictures.

July 2, 2007

Thuggo and Sluggo

As someone who spends a fair amount of time in airports, I marvel at the way my fellow citizens present themselves in public. I see middle-aged women who appear to have left home in their pajamas. But it's the costume and demeanor of American young men especially that raises interesting questions about who we have become.

The fashion and body language of male youth in 2007 comes from three sources: prison, the nursery, and the pimpmobile. It's an old story now that many conventions of gangster fashion come out of the jail experience, where they take away your belt and shoelaces so you won't hang yourself. Apparently, at some point in US history, they stopped giving the belts and shoelaces back on release, and it became stylish to wear your trousers falling down below the top of your underpants (or butt crack as the case may be). Jail being a kind of accreditation device these days, the message may be: I passed the entrance exam.

Less obvious is the contribution of the nursery. Pants that are ambiguously neither long or short, worn with XX-large T shirts, tend to make grown men look like babies. Babies have short legs and large torsos compared to grown men. They also make big awkward gestures and touch their sex organs a lot. Add a sideways hat [at left, from Beauty Tips for Ministers, an interesting blog I've just found--P.Z.] and unlaced sneakers and you have the complete kindergarten rig. Why a 20-year-old male would want to look five years old is another interesting question, but it may have a lot to do with the developmental failures of boys raised in households without fathers. They simply don't know how to be men. They only know how to behave like five year old boys. They even give themselves nursery school nicknames. But they are men, and what could be more menacing than the paradox of a child bent on homicide.

Tattoos used to be pretty much the sole fashion statement of merchant seamen or people who have served in the armed forces (or people who live in jungles). Now they are common among career girls. The tattooed guys I see down at the gym are ordinary young men who work in cubicles. Tattoos on sailors used to celebrate places they had been or people they had loved. The tattoos I see now are meant to convey fierce and barbaric statements of superhuman power: look at me, I'm a Power Ranger! It's understandable that someone who spends most of his waking hours in a cubicle wearing a telephone headset in order to swindle old people out of their savings might fantasize about rising above all that. But the tragic thing, of course, is that getting tattooed is not quite the same as accomplishing something with your life. In the end, you're just another loser with a grandiose and ridiculous tattoo.

The pimp connection is too obvious to belabor -- meant to mock normal executive attire while signifying an existence of total leisure and the enjoyment of unearned riches. The trouble is that the worship of unearned riches -- based on the belief that it truly is possible to get something for nothing -- has now become normal at all levels in American life. Everybody from the lowest whoremonger on Hollywood Boulevard to the Wall Street hedge fund managers believes in unearned riches plucked from "suckers." The catch is that men who live by this code almost always come to a bad end. They get their throats cut with razors, or go to prison, or manage to lose all their unearned riches (and the investments of many strangers, too).

The portrait of the young American male in 2007, therefore, is of an impotent, infantalized being lost in grandiose fantasies of power and importance. It's a picture of men without real confidence, and no idea how to achieve it, who wish to project a transcendently ferocious image complete with odds-and-ends of manner taken from comic books and movies based on comic books, in order to be taken seriously.

The rest of the world must tremble to contemplate the picture we present. The Nazi soldiers of 1944 were glamour boys compared to the riff-raff that American young men have become. As for those who actually do make it into the army, you wonder how they appear to the locals overseas -- they're probably taken seriously as exactly what the present themselves to be: manifestly evil beings who really need to be blown up. Back home, I look around at the thugs and sluggos at my gym, and I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the same country they live in.

---------

This is known as "a pimp cup." This goblet, or "gobleet," as it's (mis)spelled in the photo's URL, has a retail price of $45. IcedOutGear's price is $19.99.

Heed this caveat: "These cups are made of plastic and you should not drink out of them."

Our New Obsession

http://808dramafans.proboards21.com/index.cgi?board=kbfdonair&action=display&thread=1175153114

More later.

5 July update: More here.

Big Island Chronicle

Hunter Bishop reports that Tiffany Edwards, formerly of West Hawaii Today, now has her own website, Big Island Chronicle.

You Make the Call

But it's the lacrosse players who look like Gregory Peck.

--Human Events columnist

Nomadic Furniture

Building your own furniture is the next DIY craze, proclaims New York magazine in its 21 May 2007 Home Design issue. A copy of this book is featured on page 83, just below a picture of a papier-mache ("the next taxidermy") antelope head by Farfelus Farfadets.

See also Swapatorium and Micasas.

Inside the Nixon Archives

Here

Plain cardboard boxes with odds and ends from the Nixon White House, including gifts given to the president — both priceless and worthless. "The gemstones in here are pink sapphires, which are very rare," Drews, a museum specialist, told CBS News correspondent Richard Schlesinger. On the other hand, "this is just an ordinary beach rock that a donor found on the beach and they thought it looked like Richard Nixon." Congress ordered all this stuff held here while all sorts of legal issues were settled. More than 30 years later, almost all of it will find a permanent home at the Nixon Library.

TV Tripe

http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese367.html

The problem with television is that when the people on it are telling you one thing, they are not telling you a lot of other things.

Television is what I call a linear medium. It streams information at you one batch at a time. In contrast, a newspaper is a horizontal medium. It presents you with a variety of information in its daily package, spread out so you can pick and choose what you wish to read.

Last week, when television cable news was obsessing over the Paris Hilton non-story, it was, of course, depriving viewers of news about much more important topics, such as the goings-on in Congress, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the economy, the environment and the energy crisis. It's hard to think of anything that is not more important than a silly heiress doing her time for violating the terms of her probation. [See Project Censored--P.Z.]

Then, to compound their sin of shallow-minded celebrity worship, some of the cable news people tried to blame it on Miss Hilton. That is obscenely stupid. The young woman goes places, but she has no power over the media, no way to manipulate them, no way to set their agenda. No celebrity commands the thundering herd of paparazzi and certainly does not make assignments for cable news shows.

I once got so disgusted with the pseudo-news on the cable channels than I canceled the service. Alas, I missed the old movies and the baseball games, so I've had it reconnected. Cable news is now worse than it ever was. The amount of factual information you can glean from watching cable news 24 hours a day wouldn't fill a 3-by-5 card.

Most of what passes for cable news is really television talk shows. Some of them interview print journalists, a dead giveaway to the fact that they do virtually no original reporting on their own. They don't seem to have many reporters. They have on-camera talent, people who stand in front of the camera and tell you in 30 seconds something the government has said. They are mouthpieces for the government.

Watch, for example, something that happens in the morning and note how little the announcers know about it. Then watch that evening and note how little they still know about it. In other words, they do virtually no reporting.

The other sin they commit is mixing trivia with the thin gruel they serve as news. If they get video of a police chase, a random murder, a flash flood, a warehouse fire or a monkey that sleeps with a dog, it goes on the air. Clearly they believe their only duty is to amuse you. [See Neil Postman--P.Z.]

The trouble is, self-government doesn't work if the people are idiots. It doesn't work if you don't know what you need to know while your brain is cluttered up with trivia, tripe and non-sense. Unless you are a parent or a friend of a celebrity, there is zero need to know anything about the person.

Americans desperately need to read more, and to watch and listen less. The Founding Fathers played a dirty trick on people when they gave them a free society. You can coast in a dictatorship, but in a free society you have to work hard to stay informed so that you can make the right decisions at election time.

Newspapers have their faults, but if they vanish in the sea of functional illiteracy, it won't be long before the last semblance of a free society disappears along with them.

June 19, 2007
----
As for myself, I don't bother daily with The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, Countdown, Glenn Beck, and all the rest. I'll be posting on my media diet and how it's changed.

World Without Oil?

asks this article from The Independent.

Scientists have criticised a major review of the world's remaining oil reserves, warning that the end of oil is coming sooner than governments and oil companies are prepared to admit.
BP's Statistical Review of World Energy, published yesterday, appears to show that the world still has enough "proven" reserves to provide 40 years of consumption at current rates. The assessment, based on officially reported figures, has once again pushed back the estimate of when the world will run dry.

However, scientists led by the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, say that global production of oil is set to peak in the next four years before entering a steepening decline which will have massive consequences for the world economy and the way that we live our lives.
According to "peak oil" theory our consumption of oil will catch, then outstrip our discovery of new reserves and we will begin to deplete known reserves.

Colin Campbell, the head of the depletion centre, said: "It's quite a simple theory and one that any beer drinker understands. The glass starts full and ends empty and the faster you drink it the quicker it's gone."

Dr Campbell, is a former chief geologist and vice-president at a string of oil majors including BP, Shell, Fina, Exxon and ChevronTexaco. He explains that the peak of regular oil - the cheap and easy to extract stuff - has already come and gone in 2005. Even when you factor in the more difficult to extract heavy oil, deep sea reserves, polar regions and liquid taken from gas, the peak will come as soon as 2011, he says. ...

And I just found this peak-oil blog: http://www.longemergency.blogspot.com/

Found/Collage Poetry

http://collagepoetchicago.blogspot.com/ and http://irasciblepoet.blogspot.com/

Great Music Videos

(An asterisk indicates songs without formal music videos.)

• Adeva, "Respect" (from Adeva!, 1989)
• Animotion, "Room to Move" (from the soundtrack of My Stepmother is an Alien. The movie was released in December 1988 and the soundtrack, in early 1989.)
• Aretha Franklin, "Someday We'll All Be Free" *(from the Malcolm X soundtrack, 1992). Co-written by Donny Hathaway and Ed Howard, the song originally appeared on Hathaway's album Extension of a Man (1973).
• Army of Lovers, "Crucified" (from Massive Luxury Overdose, 1991)
• Busta Rhymes feat. Q-Tip, "Ill Vibe"* (J Dilla remix, 1996)
• Chamillionaire feat. Slick Rick, "Hip Hop Police/Evening News" (from Ultimate Victory, 2007)
• Jane Child, "Welcome to the Real World" (from Jane Child, 1989)
• Color Me Badd, "I Adore Mi Amor" (from C.M.B., 1991)
• "Daphne Aguilera," "Naughty Baby Did a No-No"
• The Darkness, "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" (from Permission to Land, 2003)
• Deon Estus, "Heaven Help Me" (from Spell, 1988). Estus is a longtime bassist and background singer for Wham! and George Michael. Michael sings background here.
• Detroit Grand Pubahs, "Big Onion" (from Galactic Ass Creatures from Uranus, 2004). Directed by Peter Franco, this video has received only 925 views! People don't know.
• DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, "Parents Just Don't Understand" (from He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, 1988)
• DMX, "Party Up (Up in Here)" (from ...And Then There Was X, 1999)
• Dr. Dre, "Been There, Done That" * (Chopped and Screwed Remix by DJ Khop)
• D.R.S. [Dirty Rotten Soundrels], "Gangsta Lean" (from Gangsta Lean, 1993)
• George Michael, "Shoot the Dog" (from the UK version of Patience, 2002)
• Gino Vannelli, "Living Inside Myself" (from Nightwalker, 1980). As I remarked in a 28 May post (which I now have deleted), Gino's awesome voice is matched with an awesome coif. It looks like a peruke.
• Gladys Knight, "License to Kill" (from the License to Kill soundtrack, 1989)
• Guns N Roses, "Estranged" (from Use Your Illusion II, 1991). Released in late 1991, the Use Your Illusion double album spun off videos over two years. Appearing in the fall of 1993, "Estranged" was the last video from UYI.
• Helium, "XXX" (from the Pirate Prude EP, 1994)
• Jamiroquai, "Runaway" (from High Times: Singles 1992-2006, 2006)
• Jamiroquai, "Virtual Insanity" (from Travelling Without Moving, 1996)
• Jamiroquai, "Seven Days in Sunny June" (from Dynamite, 2005)
• Luba, "The Best Is Yet to Come" (from 60 Minutes With...Luba, 1987 and the 9 1/2 Weeks soundtrack, 1986)
• 
  M.C. Hawking, "What We Need More of is Science" (from A Brief History of Rhyme, 2004)
  
  Martika, "Toy Soldiers" (from Martika, 1988). The video was released in the summer of 1989.
• Mint Condition, "U Send Me Swingin'" (from From the Mint Factory, 1993)
• Lee Ritenour, "Is It You" (from Rit, 1981)
• Living Colour, "Cult of Personality" (from Vivid, 1988)
• Madonna, "Like a Prayer" (from Like a Prayer, 1989)
• 
  Negativland, "Gimme The Mermaid" (from Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, 1995
  Pizzicato 5, "Twiggy Twiggy/Twiggy vs. James Bond" (from This Year's Girl, 1991, re-release, 2000 and Five by Five EP, 1994)
• Prince, "Batdance" (from Batman [soundtrack], 1989)
• Psychic TV, "Catalan" (from Force the Hand of Chance, 1982, enhanced re-release, 1995)
• Rachel Stevens, "I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)" (from Come and Get It, 2005)
• Ratt, "Body Talk" (from Dancing Undercover, 1986). Also featured in the movie The Golden Child (1986)
• Salt N Pepa, "Ain't Nothin' But a She Thing" (from eponymous CD single, 1995)
• Siouxsie & the Banshees, "Peek-a-Boo" (from Peepshow, 1988)
• Squarepusher, "Come on My Selector" (from the Big Loada EP, 1997 [U.K.], 1998 [U.S.]) (D: Chris Cuningham). Strong J-horror atmosphere.
• Stephanie Mills, "Home" (from Home, 1989). Mills reworks her breakthrough song from The Wiz, in which she starred as Dorothy during its initial Broadway run in 1975.
• Stevie Wonder, "Summer Soft" * (from Songs in the Key of Life, 1976). As
  voodooman123 says, "I just discovered this song and now I play it practically every day." Or at least several times in a row.
• Terror Squad, "Take Me Home" (from True Story, 2004) (D: Raul Conde). Samples the Brenda Russell-penned "If Only for One Night" as performed by Roberta Flack.
• Stardust, "Music Sounds Better With You" (from eponymous EP, 1998). Vocalist is Benjamin Diamond. Samples Chaka Khan's "Fate" (from What Cha' Gonna Do for Me, 1981)
• Carl Thomas, "I Wish" (from Emotional, 2000). This "mid-tempo groover," says AllMusicGuide.com, "is a great introduction to [his] soulful vocals and substantial sense of great lyrics."
• The Trashcan Sinatras, "Hayfever" (from I've Seen Everything, 1993)
• Truth Hurts feat. Rakim, "Addictive" (from Truthfully Speaking, 2002). Samples Lata Mangeshkar's "Thoda Resham Lagta Hai", from the c. 1981 movie Jyoti.
• Vanessa Williams, "Darlin' I" (from The Right Stuff, 1988)
• Vivabeat, "The House is Burning (But There's No One Home)" (from Party in the War Zone, 1981). Also featured in the movie Body Double (1984). Cf. Talking Heads's "Burning Down the House" (from Speaking in Tongues, 1983), featured in another 1984 movie, Revenge of the Nerds.
• Ween, "Push Th' Little Daisies" (from Pure Guava, 1992)
• Whitney Houston, "I Learned From the Best" (from My Love is Your Love, 1998) (D: Kevin Bray). The video, filmed in Koln, premiered nearly one year after the album's November 1998 release.
• Material featuring Whitney Houston, "Memories" * (from One Down, 1982). Not "unreleased" but very rare. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau called it "[O]ne of the most gorgeous ballads you've ever heard." The piano gives the song a James Bond-theme tone, especially like Shirley Bassey's "Diamonds are Forever" or even "Moonraker."
• Winger, "Headed for a Heartbreak" (from Winger, 1988). The video was released in early 1989.
• Zero 7, "Destiny" (from Simple Things, 2001)

"Fact: Stacy Higa Supports Continued Marijuana Eradication!"

"Language most shows a man; speak that I may see thee," said Jonson. With that in mind, I reproduce in full Stacy Higa's letter to the editor in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald (5 June 2007, p. A4) on how he really is for marijuana eradication:

Higa takes exception

I felt that I would wait for your newspaper to print the "correct facts" regarding the marijuana eradication grant funds. As usual, your newspaper doesn't accurately report the news.

Your Sunday headline states, "Green Harvest funds cut." WRONG. Fact: My vote was to remove these funds from the budget process, which we did. Green Harvest funds for county budget year 2006-07 is still in the police budget, and they will have enough money to continue their operation till the grant ends in September or October of this year. Fact: When the police department applies for next year's grant, (which should be around September), they will have to appear before the council and request that we accept or deny these funds by resolution. Fact: During this resolution process before the council, marijuana advocates will have the opportunity to present their testimony again, and so will the police.

During my three years on the council, I have been privileged to hear the testimony from the pro-marijuana people, but I have not heard the police side of how they conduct their operations. My vote is for the "process," and I want the police to explain to the council and the public all the facts on how the operation is handled. Educating the public and informing all of us on what is taking place in and around our neighborhoods are very important.

Fact: Stacy Higa supports continued marijuana eradication! I have heard some of the horror stories about helicopters hovering intrusively above homes, and stories of the police supposedly traumatizing children and family members. These claims have come from marijuana advocates, but I have never heard the police side of these allegations. The public needs to hear BOTH sides of what is happening.

To my constituents and supporters who have asked the question, "Why did Stacy Higa vote against marijuana eradication?" the answer is ---that was never the question. Stacy Higa voted to change the process of how the county accepts the federal grant money.

I think it is very sad that I have to write a letter to the editor to correct the misinformation that the newspaper prints in its headlines. Don't believe everything you read in the headlines or the newspapers, without verifying the facts.

Councilor Stacy K. Higa

District 4-Hilo

Degrassi Spoilers

http://www.tv-eh.com/tag/degrassi/

5 June update: According to this interview, Deanna Casaluce ("Alex Nunez") considers leaving the show.

CTV.ca: What's next for you in your acting career?

Deanna: This is the very tip of the iceberg; at least I hope it is. I think after this season, season seven, I'll be leaving the show. I'm planning on moving to Los Angeles in September.
I'm halfway done a degree in philosophy with a minor in social psychology, and I'm leaving that behind for now. I would like to finish my degree because I love learning. But I'm too busy right now.

On Vermont's Secession Movement

The aghast headline from The Drudge Report:
VERMONT GROUP WANTS STATE TO SECEDE FROM USA!

The more sedate title of the Associated Press article which is linked at Drudge:
In Vermont, nascent secession movement gains traction

5 June update: VT Secession's YouTube page http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=VTsecession

The Sopranos

With the final episode to air next Sunday, I'll be writing about lesser-known aspects of the show, especially the Sopranos know-it-alls and A.J.'s music.

Lady in Waiting

http://yabanji.tripod.com/

17 July update:

Exclusive to CounterPunch Newsletter Subscribers!Why Hillary Clinton Has Always Been a Republican

In the first of a series of profiles, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair chart the formative years of Hillary Clinton. Watch her as she zigzags from Nixon campaigner and vote-fraud investigator in 1960 to Goldwater Girl and President of Young Republicans at Wellesley to her
internship for Gerald Ford and campaigner for Nelson Rockefeller. Witness her reaction to the student protests at Yale and the demonstrations at Grant Park during the Democratic Convention in 1968. Learn how she and Bill vowed to "remake" the Democratic Party--using the Nixon model HRC learned about as a member of the House impeachment staff. And much more!

Gassy Old Pachyderms Self-Destruct

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts05232007.html

Hilo: Hawaii's Forgotten City

http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-big_6may13,0,96324.story

"America's Mayor"

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900E4DD1031F933A25756C0A96E958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

and

http://www.tenant.net/Tengroup/Metcounc/Feb98/stanton.html

Wolfowitz in Hawaii--Five Years Ago

I found a transcript of a May 2002 interview Paul Wolfowitz did with KSSK Radio
: http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3429

KSSK: Is this your first time here in Hawaii?

Wolfowitz: Oh, no. I've been here many times. I'm kind of an old Pacific hand in some ways myself.

KSSK: I didn't know in your current capacity if it was the first time you've had a chance to visit us. I was assuming it was.

Wolfowitz: In my current capacity, yes, it is my first time and it's exciting to be here. in this position, I must say.

[more follows at the above link]

The 1980s: Early, Mid-, and Late

The early 1980s: 1980-1984

The mid-1980s: 1985-1986

The late 1980s: 1987-1989

The Return of Gekko

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/05/arts/web0505-fmwall-46347.php

Rap Nostalgia Songs

Ahmad, "Back in the Day"

Boot Camp Clik, "Think Back"

Coolio, "I Remember"

Lady Sovereign, "Those Were the Days"

Happy May Day! Happy Lei Day!

An article on May Day, from Wikipedia, mentions that:

In Hawaii, May Day is also known as Lei Day, and is normally set aside as a day to celebrate island culture in general and native Hawaiian culture in particular. While it was invented by a poet and a local newspaper columnist in the 1920s, it has since been adopted by state and local government as well as by the residents, and has taken on a sense of general spring celebration there. The first Lei Day was proposed in 1927 in Honolulu. Leonard "Red" and Ruth Hawk composed "May Day is Lei Day in Hawai'i," the traditional holiday song. Originally it was a contemporary fox trot, later rearranged as the Hawaiian hula song performed today.

More here on the history of Lei Day.

Book cover of Feather Lei As An Art by Mary Louise Kaleonahenahe Kekuewa, Paulette Nohealani Kahalepuna, and Karen A. Edlefsen (Mutual Publishing).

An Interview With Stanley Crouch

http://www.salon.com/books/int/1998/02/cov_si_25int2.html

Knowing One's Rights as a Shareholder

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/01/050201.asp

Revamped Sunday Star-Bulletin Comics Page

http://starbulletin.com/2007/04/22/features/story01.html

Blacksburg

The town of Blacksburg, Virginia, site of the bloodiest school massacre in American history, was a few days before named by Money magazine as one of the best places to retire young. Found here. One blog comment: Blacksburg, Virginia–Never heard of it

New Comics in Honolulu Star-Bulletin

http://starbulletin.com/2007/04/15/features/story09.html

When you read tomorrow's comics section, you'll notice some changes.

Webmaster's Note: The comics appear in the print edition of the Star-Bulletin only.

This is Step 1 of the revamping of our comics selection -- Step 2 happens next Sunday with a new lineup of strips in a new format (more on that later).

Weekdays, Zack Hill, La Cucaracha, and Preteena have been voted off the island [as a result of this solicitation--P.Z.], replaced by:

Housebroken: Steve Watkins tells the story of DJ Dog, a self-described "Ghetto Snoopy" and his adventures with two African-American siblings -- Mya Watson, 9-year-old multimillionaire businesswoman, and Malik, her free-spirited brother who masquerades as the costumed crime fighter "Blackman," fighting racial injustice (real or imagined).

State of the Union: Creator Carl Moore calls himself a "fallen liberal," and his caricature-driven satirical strip definitely has a conservative slant. But he says he's really a libertarian who only calls himself a conservative because "not enough people know what a libertarian is." ...

Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!: Satire takes on a more sci-fi flavor at the hands of Tim Rickard, who describes his strip as "a parody both of old serial comic strips such as 'Flash Gordon' and 1950s B-level sci-fi movies. 'Brewster's' reach also extends to skewer other genres such as superhero, fantasy, monster and horror. Even real science and current events aren't safe." His setting is the space station R.U. Sirius.

Enjoy. We'll talk again next week when we debut an exciting new Sunday comics section.

30 April update: Back when Zack, Cucaracha, and Preteena were fresh.

Start Your Week Off Right

Kunstler usually has his weekly column posted on Sundays, despite the claim that it's published Monday mornings. This week, he takes on Thomas Friedman and his sanguine take on "The Power of Green."

Tom Friedman has no idea what the implications are of all these things. His fatuous advice to the nation -- served up by a confused and cowardly Times editorial staff -- will only spur more delusional thinking, which is, of course, the last thing we need. The showcasing of Friedman's article may represent an inflection point in the fate of the mainstream media -- the moment when it demonstrates most clearly its failure to make current events comprehensible, the moment when its lost legitimacy is finally recognized. That legitimacy has been passing to the Internet, where commentators have no advertisers to pander to and no need to defend any status quo.

UPDATE, 20 April: Harvey Wasserman, author of SOLARTOPIA!: Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, takes Friedman to task in CounterPunch for suggesting that "clean" coal and nuclear power be considered green.

UPDATE, 22 April: Friedman's documentary, Green: The New Red, White, and Blue premiered Saturday on the Discovery Channel. (Here)

R.I.P., Don Ho

http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2007/Apr/14/br/br4376190825.html

22 May update: As The Sopranos comes to an end, I wondered if there are any connections between the show and Hawaii. I recall a scene from one of the later seasons in which a newlywed couple was on their way to a honeymoon in Hawaii and a character calls out, "Say hi to Don Ho!" (I'll try to find more on this later.) This is an article on Dominic Chianese and his visit to Honolulu in 2004, where he showed up at Don Ho's Waikiki show.

Photo Caption: He may not be a soprano but HBO's "Sopranos" star Dominic Chianese did get a chance to show his musical side when he showed up at Don Ho's show.

More Lookalikes

I was watching Olbermann today. He interviewed Bob Herbert by telephone about Dun Miso* and I just realized how much Herbert resembles Michael Berryman. I mean no disrespect to either man, but the similarity of their faces, especially about the eyes, is amazing.

--------

*An anagram for a grizzled old coot fond of wearing cowboy hats indoors.

The Coombsweb

http://coombs.anu.edu.au/

Johnny Hart, Creator of "B.C." Comic, Is Dead

Josh Fruhlinger, of ComicsCurmudgeon, was one of Hart's more vociferous critics, but he writes:

"I’m not going to write anything mean about him today. Instead, I’ll just note that the dude died at his drawing board. That’s hardcore."

Both B.C. and The Wizard of ID will continue, according to this:

"Richard Newcombe, the founder and president of Creators Syndicate, which syndicates both BC and The Wizard of Id, said both cartoons would continue. Family members have been helping produce the strips for years, and they have an extensive computer archive of drawings to work with, he told AP."

Hart was a devout Christian. This article from 1996 is about his faith.

17 April update: Brant Parker, with whom Hart collaborated on The Wizard of ID, has also died.

Update to List of Links

I've just added CounterCurrents.org to the list of political links. Based in India, it's a webzine much like CounterPunch. I found it yesterday while searching for writings by Thomas C. Mountain. I'll also add links to the names and titles listed in the Cockburn post.

Alexander Cockburn on C-SPAN2's BookTV

http://www.booktv.org/General/index.asp?segID=7879&schedID=482&category=In+Depth

Update (April 4, 2:58 p.m.): A brief segment (1:08:55-1:16:35) in the middle of the program features Cockburn at his place in Petrolia. Towards the end (beginning 1:15:17) were three lists:

People Who Have Inspired Alexander Cockburn

His father, Claud Cockburn
His mother, Patricia Cockburn
His friends at New Left Review
His friend, Andrew Kopkind
His friend, Pierre Sprey
The Abraham Lincoln Brigades
Patrice Lumumba
Frantz Fanon

Some of Alexander Cockburn's Favorite Writers

Marcel Proust
Stendhal
Nikolai Gogol
Mikhail Bulgakov
Thomas Love Peacock
Gustave Flaubert
James Joyce
Flann O'Brien
Theodor Adorno
H.J. Massingham
Edward Abbey
Ezra Pound
Jean-Paul Sartre
P.G. Wodehouse

Alexander Cockburn is Currently Reading

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Control*
Douglas Peacock, Walking It Off
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews
Ella Lingens-Reiner, Prisoners of Fear
David Arora, Mushrooms Demystified*
E.C.S. and Elizabeth Handy, Native Planters of Hawaii*
Joan Halperin, Felix Feneon
K.T. Achaya, Historical Dictionary of Indian Food
Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead*
--
*As identified on C-SPAN2. The author's first name is spelled Sigfried and the book's title is actually Mechanization Takes Command (all emphases mine)

*As identified on C-SPAN2. The book's title is actually Native Planters in Old Hawaii: Their Life, Lore, and Environment. The C and S in E.C.S. were transposed. The author's initials are actually E.S.C. (short for Edward Smith Craighill). An index to Native Planters was compiled in 1987.

*The Amazon.com results list for David Arora includes an item for a work (Treatment Options for Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and Other Contaminants in Recycled Backwash Water [American Water Works Association, 2001]) co-edited by one Harish Arora. I wonder if David and Harish Arora are related.

*The original meaning of "the quick and the dead" is explained here.

GOP Hawaii Blog Returns

After an eight-month hiatus, GOP Hawaii ("The unofficial blogspot of the Hawaii County Republican Party.") returned March 30 with a blast at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the earmarks approved in order to secure 218 votes for H.R. 1591. The writer reminds people that:

In 2008 we need to support the conservative agenda and that means supporting either Rudy Guilani, Mit Romney, Newt Gingrich (if he runs) and possibly, Fred Thompson (again, if he runs). NOT JOHN McCAIN. This guy cannot be trusted. He is the GOP / MALE version of Hillary Clinton.

Kunstler Reports on His Visit to Maui

After reading The Long Emergency and many of the posts on Kunstler.com, I've wondered what Kunstler thinks of Hawaii and its fate after oil production diminishes. This post answers my questions in part.

March 26, 2007 Zowie

For all of you out there disposed to twang on me for riding a jet airplane all the way to Maui, please consider that United flight 35 would have flown from San Francisco to Maui with or without me on it. Here's the deal: I had to go to San Fran to give a talk at the Commonwealth Club. From there, I had a lecture gig on Maui. I stayed three extra days and nights -- since I'd come all that way. So, sue me. Now, to the business at hand, which is my impressions of Maui. Beautiful as much of it may be, it is hard not to view it through a tragic lens. Most of the damage on Maui has been inflicted over the past 30-odd years -- that is, since the Pepsi Generation got their mitts on the island. Certainly, there were massive prior insults, starting with the first landings of the Haole (foreigners, in particular caucasians) in the late 18th century, the introduction of cattle, eucalyptus trees, the mongoose, the monoculture of sugar cane, and other intrusions that upset the island's ecology. But the boomer-hippies really iced it. Those who managed to stop smoking marijuana long enough to string two consecutive thoughts together grokked the related notions of tropical paradise and land development with predictable results. That is, they turned the place into just an annex of California. The flatlands were allowed to develop along the lines of Fresno or Lodi, while the uplands became Pacific Palisades Lite. The longest stretch of the best beaches in the place with the least rainfall was converted into a strip of jive-plastic supersized resort hotels. The automobile was given first dibs in all civic design matters. The island's beauty has not been entirely defeated, but the usual complaints are heard for the usual reasons -- mainly, that the overwhelming majority of buildings, both residential and commercial (including the big hotels), are graceless industrial sheds, deployed artlessly on over-engineered streets, which has conditioned the public to believe that all man-made things are worthless pieces of shit. This in turn conditions the public to believe that nothing man-made can be ultimately beneficial, which makes it impossible for us to imagine coexistence with the rest of nature, and so on into the usual swamps of suburban dialectic. The terrain, of course, has largely determined the situation with the car. Maui is mostly composed of two rugged mountains, and cars have made it possible for people other than farmers to settle the slopes. Without motor vehicles, a person living up in Makawao, maybe two or three thousand feet above sea level, would be lucky to get down to the main trading town once a month, let alone to a job every day. But work-a-day Maui operates just like work-a-day California, and all the associated norms of behavior are in place. You drive everywhere for everything. As far as I could tell, even the educated locals out in Maui today are consumed with the same trivialities about traffic and "density" that you'd hear back in any mainland town. They are not thinking beyond the usual NIMBY issues. But it seems perfectly obvious that Maui life will change drastically in a future of oil-and-gas scarcity. The commercial airlines are the "canaries in the coal mine" of advanced industrial civilization, and they are very sick canaries right now -- even with the price of oil relatively stable the past six months. The airlines have pared down their employee ranks about as far as possible. The scene at the Maui airport this Sunday was a clusterfuck -- largely due to the fact that United Airlines had only one person manning the ticket counter, and 98 percent of the visitors have to check through luggage. A couple more rounds of oil price spikes and the airlines are going to be lying tits up with glazed eyes. Perhaps aviation will then reorganize itself on a smaller scale serving only the elite, for a while, anyway. In any case, that will be the end of the mass middle class consumer phase of commercial aviation -- and also of mass middle class type tourism. [Cf. Paul Fussell: "The touristic class is predominantly the middle, the one that has made Hawaii, as Roger Price unkindly designates it, 'Roob Valhalla.'" (p. 109, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, New York, 1983, Rpt. 1992)--P.Z.] Few people on Maui I spoke to were mentally prepared for the implications of this. But it's perfectly obvious that the Hawaiian Islands will become much more isolated again, and that the way of life that has developed there since 1970 will have to change drastically. I'm glad I went. I don't know if I'll ever go back. Beautiful as it was, I got tired of being in the car all the time and there was really no place to walk.

Comfort Food, Various Links to Purveyors of

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2007-03-22-comfort-food_N.htm?csp=34

http://www.smacnyc.com/

http://www.wichcraftnyc.com

Miami Rice Pudding

Rice to Riches

http://www.cereality.com http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/2004-12-08-cereal_x.htm

http://www.springwise.com/food_beverage/dessertonly_restaurants/

http://www.nyr4d.com/

http://www.chikalicious.com/

http://www.epicurious.com/gourmet/blogs/foodeditors/2006/12/dessert_bars_ia.html#more

West Egg Cafe
--------------
Lickity Split Chocolate

Happy Birthday, Paul Fussell!

Paul Fussell, critic and historian, turns 83 today.

Why Newspapers Won't Go Out of Style

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/01/10/keillor/index.html

I Hear Voices

http://www.wiredforbooks.org/swaim/

LibraryHistoryBuff.org

I found this site while searching online for a card catalog, namely the cabinet that holds the cards. It looks interesting.

Lawns to Gardens

I'm adding to the list of links lawnstogardens.com, which I found through Kunstler. It's a peak-oil website, but addresses many other topics as well.

Ted Steinberg's book American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn (Norton, 2006) is out in paperback next month. I've been meaning to get a copy but kept forgetting about it. The best (i.e., most eco-friendly) way to keep a lawn trim is to let animals (e.g., goats, deer) eat the grass. Close behind are regular mowings with a push-mower. The Brill Luxus is a nice example.

I'll be discussing lawns more soon.

Kunstler Speaks with Salon.com

Browsing dKosopedia, I found this link to a Kunstler interview with Salon.com.

Divided They Fall

"Nader and Libertarians Not Welcome: A Splintered Antiwar Movement"

There was not a single Libertarian speaker even though the Libertarians and Old Right have been far more outspoken in opposing the war than the liberal "Left." Compare the pages of The American Conservative or Antiwar.com [not to mention Chronicles--P.Z.] with the editorials of The Nation, which endorsed the pro-war Kerry candidacy in 2004. This writer tried for months to get Ron Paul, the Libertarian/Republican Congressman from Texas, now a Republican presidential candidate, invited to speak at the rally and did so also in 2005. Several of us made an appeal to get Justin Raimondo, the Libertarian editor of Antiwar.com invited to speak. We got no response from UFPJ, and still have received none. In contrast, Raimondo advertised the UFPJ demonstration in a prominent place on his web site, and he even offered to pay his own air fare to D.C. to speak. But no response was forthcoming from whatever committee decides on the speakers, a committee which is none too visible. UFPJ was just plain rude to Raimondo. In general it appears that the liberal "Left" has scant knowledge about the Libertarians and less desire to acquire it. Libertarians are just "a bunch of selfish people," according to the PC liberals. But there are more things in heaven and earth than the very PC have dreamed of.

Airships

http://www.aerosml.com/news-press.asp

From high-altitude surveillance to a hybrid luxury cruise liner, our skies may soon be home to the next generation of multi-purpose airship....

Here is a fun blog on airships by animator Sean Hayden.

Advice from Kunstler on Surviving the Long Emergency

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.

Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

...The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
...
We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient....Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.


We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.

We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff....We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.


The age of canned entertainment is coming to and [sic] end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).


We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing....

We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.

Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I am not providing you with anything to think about or devote your personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to ... demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

Making Other Arrangements

http://www.orionmagazine.org/pages/om/07-1om/Kunstler.html

Excerpts therefrom:

There may be other ways of moving things above the ground, for instance balloons, blimps, or zeppelin-type airships. But they will move much more slowly and carry far less cargo and human passengers than the airplanes we've been enjoying for the past sixty years or so. The most likely scenario in the years ahead is that aviation will become an increasingly expensive, elite activity as the oil age dribbles to a close, and then it will not exist at all.


We have to do better. We have to start right away making those other arrangements. We have to begin the transition to some mode of living that will allow us to carry on the project of civilization—and I would argue against the notion advanced by Daniel Quinn and others that civilization itself is our enemy and should not be continued. The agenda for facing our problems squarely can, in fact, be described with some precision. We have to make other arrangements for the basic activities of everyday life.

In general, the circumstances we face with energy and climate change will require us to live much more locally, probably profoundly and intensely so. We have to grow more of our food locally, on a smaller scale than we do now, with fewer artificial "inputs," and probably with more human and animal labor. Farming may come closer to the center of our national economic life than it has been within the memory of anyone alive now. These changes are also likely to revive a menu of social and class conflicts that we also thought we had left behind.


The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives and, increasingly, a luxury that will be resented by those who can no longer afford to participate in the "happy motoring" utopia. The interstate highways themselves will require more resources to maintain than we will be able to muster. For many of us, the twenty-first century will be less about incessant mobility than about staying where we are.

We have to inhabit the terrain of North America differently, meaning a return to traditional cities, towns, neighborhoods, and a productive rural landscape that is more than just strictly scenic or recreational. We will probably see a reversal of the two-hundred-year-long trend of people moving from the country and small towns to the big cities. In fact, our big cities will probably contract substantially, even while they re-densify at their centers and along their waterfronts.

It is harder to predict exactly what may happen with education and medicine, except to say that neither can continue to operate as rackets much longer, and that they, like everything else, will have to become smaller in scale and much more local. Our centralized school districts, utterly dependent on the countless daily trips of fleets of yellow buses and oppressive property taxes, have poor prospects for carrying on successfully in an energy-scarce economy. However, we will be a less affluent nation in the post-oil age, and therefore may be hard-pressed to replace them. A new, more locally based education system may arise instead out of home-schooling, as household classes aggregate into new, small, neighborhood schools. College will cease to be a mass-consumer activity, and may only be available to social elites—if it continues to exist at all. Meanwhile, we're in for a pretty stark era of triage as the vast resources of the "medical industry" contract. Even without a global energy crisis bearing down on us, the federal Medicaid and Medicare systems would not survive the future as currently funded.

As a matter of fact, you can state categorically that anything organized on a gigantic scale, whether it is a federal government or the Acme Corporation or the University of Michigan, will probably falter in the energy-scarce future. Therefore, don't pin your hopes on multinational corporations, international NGOs, or any other giant organizations or institutions.

Recent events have caused many of us to fear that we are headed toward a Big Brother kind of governmental tyranny. I think we will be lucky if the federal government can answer the phones, let alone regulate anyone's life, in the post-oil era. As power devolves to the local and regional level, the very purpose of our federal arrangements may come into question. The state governments, with their enormous bureaucracies, may not be better off. Further along in this century, the real political action will likely shift down to the local level, as reconstructed neighborly associations allow people to tackle problems locally with local solutions.

The Quick and Dirty IQ Test

http://www.blogthings.com/quickanddirtyiqtest/

Germans in Hawaii

http://www.islander-magazine.com/germans.html

More later.

New Found Blogs

Ilind.net today mentions a blog by Oahu-based historian and UH-Manoa professor Dr. Andrew Wertheimer. "Dr. Drew" writes mainly about the histories of libraries and Japanese-Americans. Ilind also points its readers to "SusHI" or Sustainability in Hawai'i, a blog by Ken Stokes.

One key phrase for a journalist: quietly disclosed

Greed:	Very Low
Gluttony:	Low
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Very Low
Pride:	Medium

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Aristotle On Youth

Jimmy Akin quotes Aristotle's commentary on young men.

Happy New Year, Part One

The first movie I saw this year was Hibari no Hanadata Tantei Gassen (1958). I fell asleep about 10:15 New Year's Eve and woke up about 12:15 a.m. The TV was on NGN3, which plays Japanese movies. It was fifteen minutes into the movie, which played from 12 to 1:35 a.m. (Every New Year's our cable company has a free preview of Nippon Golden Network, which plays over three channels. During this time people can sign up for NGN at a discount, which is what we did this week) I watched about thirty minutes before falling asleep again.

Much later, from 4 to 5:35 p.m., the movie played again. I missed the first ten minutes but watched it until the end.

Also known as Detective Duel, Hibari is both a romantic comedy and mystery about two detectives competing to solve the case of a missing woman. Yukiko (played by Misora Hibari) is a sleuth up against the more experienced gumshoe Mitamura Eiji (Takakura Ken).* They tease each other but soon unite to solve the case of a missing woman, and thwart an intricate plot against her. (*In Japanese custom, surnames are placed before given names; e.g., Takakura Ken.)

Kunstler's Predictions

Like Janus, Kunstler simultaneously looks back at 2006 and ahead at 2007. He concludes a lengthy but worthwhile post with this:

To sum it all up, I believe 2007 will be the year that the US finally feels the pain. More disorder will appear in the system. More cries of anguish will be heard throughout the land. More paralysis will set in. The bid for leadership may not follow the current story line -- Barack...Hillary...Edwards...McCain...blah blah blah. Jokers and wild cards could step into the frame. America will be looking for a man on a white horse and instead they'll get Newt Gingrich on an electric Humvee.

As the Year Ends

what do you remember most?

Judith Regan

is dismissed. Yay!!

http://www.nerdsgonewildmagazine.com/issue02articles/degrassi.html

The Golden Globes Nominees Are

here.