The Breaking Time

Poems for Friday: "Our god is speed. The heart is our drum."

A ROSTA window by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Welcome back to the Breaking Time, dear readers. My regrets about that unfortunate intermission, but sometimes duty calls and there's simply no way around it.

For this Friday's poem we've got "Our March" by the brilliant Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky (you should also read his work A Cloud in Trousers). It's got all the hallmarks of the great futurist anthems — the fiery call to break with the past chief among them — that still make it bracing stuff in our own day. It dates from 1917: a catastrophic Breaking Time if ever there was one, full of hope, collapse and danger.

Mayakovsky did much in his relatively brief life. In addition to his poetic and dramatic work, he also, with Lilya Brik and Mikhail Cheremnykh, played a key role in creating modern propaganda. Their efforts, especially the famous ROSTA (the Soviet telegraph service) windows, helped the Bolsheviks rally support and win the brutal, fractious civil war wracking Russia at the time.

Mayakovksy ended his own life in 1930. It's a major understatement to say that the revolution he worked so hard for turned out to be a very different creature than he expected. Keep that in mind as you read his call to arms — or today's.

Beat the tramp of revolt in the square! 
 

Up, row of proud heads! 
 

We will wash every city in the world 
 

With the surging waters 
of a second Flood. 

The bull of the days is skewbald. 


The cart of the years is slow. 
 

Our god is speed. 
 

The heart is our drum. 

Is there a gold more heavenly than ours? 


Can the wasp of a bullet sting us? 

Our songs are our weapons; 
 

Ringing voices -- our gold. 

Meadows, be covered with grass, 
 

Spread out a ground for the days. 
 

Rainbow, harness 


the fast-flying horses of the years. 

See, the starry heaven is bored! 
 

We weave our songs without its help. 
 

Hey, you, Great Bear, demand 


that they take us up to heaven alive! 

Drink joys! Sing! 
 

Spring flows in our veins. 
 

Beat to battle, heart! 
 

Our breast is a copper kettledrum.

Intermission (with tommy gun)

I'm going to be extremely busy with journalism and freelance work over the next few days, so posting will be light.

In the meantime, here's Winston Churchill with a Tommy Gun.

Asheville in Six Words

For those of you who don't know, dear readers, I live in Asheville, North Carolina. Asheville is a fascinating city, with an extremely dense downtown and more than the usual share of activists, beer, good food, music and Art Deco architecture.

It's also a city in near constant conversation on its identity: what that is, where it's going and what threatens it (or who's already ruined it, opinions vary). I've found this one of the more interesting aspects of the city since I moved here about four years ago.

So I wanted to distill the debate some, and test the citizenry's creativity in the process. 

Fortunately, Twitter provides a wonderful way to do this. Ernest Hemingway famously said that he could tell a good story in just six words. So yesterday, I put the simple challenge around: 

Describe Asheville's nature in six words or less. No one word answers.

Thus was the Asheville in 6 Words meme born (I started a meme! I get a medal, or a toaster, or free beer, right?). Replies have come from across the spectrum, including answers bitter, earnest, political, spiritual, humorous and everything in between. We've had newspapers, local bloggers and city council candidates all weigh in.

I've found the response both cheering and interesting. Keep 'em coming y'all.

And hell, this game shouldn't be locals only. If you've visited or had contact with the city, feel free to weigh in, here or via Twitter.

That old black market (in your pocket)

AK-47s in an Iraqi grocery store, 2006. Photo by Christoph Bangert

Over 15 percent of the world's GDP comes from criminal activity. So comes the word from long-time journalist and crime investigator Misha Glenny.

Yes, that means that every time you put down a $20 bill for dinner, $3 of that comes from illegal activity: drugs, guns, smuggling, cyber-crime, you name it.

Think about that. 

What I'm trying to unravel is why exactly organized crime has boomed so much, so recently. One of the reasons, of course, is globalization. With more economic connections than ever before, and large underdeveloped swaths of the world desperate to escape poverty, so there's no shortage of opportunities and those willing to take advantage of it.

But there's another factor here as well: decades of attempts by nation-states to crush out certain activities by making them highly criminalized. The U.S. has led the way in this, especially with the War on Drugs, but they're far from the only state to try to put the lid on activities or products they view as undesirable.

Every time this happens, it creates a gap, and into that gap driven individuals or groups looking for quick money will race in, as the risk and rarity that come with making something illegal raise the selling price through the roof.

This happens even outside of products that are strictly illegal. To use an example fairly close to home, a Hezbollah cell in Charlotte made millions smuggling cigarettes. While it's perfectly legal to smoke or buy cigarettes, increasing taxation in most parts of the country made it well worth the cell's while to smuggle them to other states. This also, for some time, sailed below the radar for law enforcement, who were more preoccupied with hard drug trafficking.

Bureaucracy and force were the main methods nation-states used to bring some semblance of structure to vast areas and complex societies. Overall, those have been remarkably successful — look how well tribal or feudal systems have fared against it.

But the times are changing. Perhaps the first strain could be seen with the widespread failure of alcohol Prohibition in the early part of the 20th century. Looking back, it does seem like its collapse was the beginning of the end for the idea that if a state just passed a law — and enforced it — humanity could be increasingly perfected towards a noble, if utterly boring, ideal. Importantly, Prohibition also jump-started organized crime networks as we know them. 

Desire and need are amazing drivers and as long as they exist, someone will find a way to provide. Recently, I've been re-reading W. Bruce Lincoln's Red Victory, the best account of the Russian Civil War I've found. The USSR, especially in its earliest days, was the epitome of the bureaucracy + force approach. Facing widespread shortages and possessing an apparatus who wouldn't hesitate to steal and ration any resource they found, it should have been the ideal time to enforce total control on the populace's economic activity.

Yet even when the people of Petrograd and Moscow had nearly nothing, the black market still thrived, trumping doctrine. The anarchist Emma Goldman reported of the open-air markets that "Here gathered proletarian and aristocrat, Communist and bourgeois, peasant and intellectual. Here they were bound by a common desire to sell and buy." 

Eventually even Lenin and Trotsky had to rein in their desires for total control and allow the private markets some leeway.

Today, there's also an entire, legal, private economy that makes a great deal off criminal activity: or, more accurately, the increasingly large fights against it. Drug arrests keep the prison-industrial complex booming, and local criminally-connected paramilitaries and gangs simplify some matters greatly for corporations operating in the developing world. The same social problems caused by such activity also provide politicians with convenient boogeymen in their own searches for meaning and votes.

At the same time, this raises the Disruption Problem I've talked about before. Criminal organizations can rush into the gaps formed by the trembling remains of old-style nation-states and they can sure as hell disrupt the traditional economies and power structures, but they can't replace them with anything viable. 

After all, that's not their goal. They're just out to gain money and power. 

And for that the black market needs the law. What it makes difficult criminal organizations profit by making easier. It's clear that a radically different approach to law and trade (e.g. drug legalization, just to name one possibility) would be necessary to suck much of the power out of the cartels, smugglers and terrorists. It's also doubtful that we'll see those steps until matters get a good deal more desperate.

Poems for Friday: Pirate Jenny

From the Watchmen, art by Dave Gibbons

I usually don't post song lyrics, but the immortal words of Bertolt Brecht's Pirate Jenny, from the equally immortal Threepenny Opera, have stuck fast in my head. It really must be heard, and Nina Simone does it perfectly. Beautiful rag-tag ode to the simple class war urge to really, really fuck up those who dump on the forgotten worker.

"You gentlemen can watch while I'm scrubbing these floors

And I'm scrubbin' the floors while you're gawking

Maybe once ya tip me and it makes ya feel swell

In this crummy little town, in this crummy old hotel

But you'll never guess to who you're talkin'.

No. You'll never guess to who you're talkin'.

Then one night there's a scream in the night

And you'll wonder who could that have been

And you see me kinda grinnin' at the window

And you say, "What's she got to grin?"

There's a ship, the black freighter

with a skull on its masthead will be coming in.

You gentlemen can say, "Hey gal, finish them floors!

Get upstairs! What's wrong with you! Earn your keep here!

You toss me your tips and look out to the ships

But I'm counting your heads as I'm making the beds

Cuz there's nobody gonna sleep here, honey. 

Tonight none of you will sleep here.

Then one night there's a scream in the night

And you say, "Who's that kicking up a row?"

And ya see me kinda starin' out the window

And you say, "What's she got to stare at now?"

There's a ship, the black freighter

turns around in the harbor shootin' guns from her bow

Now you gentlemen can wipe that smile off your face

'Cause every building in town is a flat one

This whole frickin' place will be down to the ground

Only this cheap hotel standing up safe and sound

And you yell, "Why do they spare that one?"

Yes, that's what you say, "Why do they spare that one?"

All the night through, through the noise and to-do

You wonder who is that person that lives up there?

And you see me stepping out in the morning

Looking nice with a ribbon in my hair.

And the ship, the black freighter 

runs a flag up its masthead and a cheer rings the air

By noontime the dock is a-swarmin' with men

comin' out from the ghostly freighter

They move in the shadows where no one can see

And they're chainin' up people and they're bringin' em to me

askin' me, "Kill them now, or later?"

Askin' me, "Kill them now, or later?"

Noon by the clock and so still by the dock

You can hear a foghorn miles away

And in that quiet of death I'll say, "Right now.!"

Then they'll pile up the bodies

And I'll say, "That'll learn ya!"

And the ship, the black freighter 

disappears out to sea and 

On

It

Is

Me.

Sheriff's office investigating accusation of deputy road rage

A possible incident of road rage involving an undercover Sheriff's deputy in Asheville has resulted in an internal affairs investigation and the return of the age-old questions about who polices the police:

A local woman’s accusation that an off-duty Buncombe County Sheriff’s deputy threatened her in a case of road rage has sparked an internal affairs investigation. She has also sharply criticized the conduct of the Asheville Police Department, which responded to the call.

On July 9, Julie Brown, a Clyde resident, says she was driving home from work when a jeep cut her off at the intersection of Patton Avenue and New Leicester Highway. (Scroll to the bottom of the page to listen to the 911 calls of Brown and the deputy.)

“He just moved over. There was no turn signal or anything and I was already slowing down for the light, so I had to stand on my brakes — I honked my horn, big time, because it scared the heck out of me,” Brown told Xpress. “I came to a stop and he jumped out of his vehicle, came over to mine. I hit the door lock, and he was screaming ‘what are you going to do’ at me. He tried the door handle, he punched on the windows. I couldn’t look at it. I was afraid the glass would break. I reached for my phone and called the police.”

She said the man then left and got back in his vehicle. She continued down the road, calling 911. According to her, the man continued to follow.

“He’s behind me now. I’m really freaking out, I’m scared to stop,” a distraught Brown says in the call. “He tried to pull me out of the truck. Now he’s behind me.”

Dispatchers told Brown to find a public place, and she turned her vehicle into the parking lot of a nearby Shoney’s restaurant, where she was met by Asheville police.

At roughly the same time, the man, an undercover narcotics sheriff’s deputy whose name is being withheld by the Sheriff’s Office, also called 911, saying that “I’ve got a vehicle here giving me the road rage, flipping me off. I don’t know what in the world’s her problem.”

The man adds that “I’m in my personal vehicle. I’ve got my family with me. She wants to act all stupid, so I want to show her how stupid she is when she finds out who I am.”

In the call, the deputy says that “I got over, I didn’t cut her off or nothing, and she gets right on my rear and she lays on the the horn. So I get out of the car to see what her problem is. She’s all cussing and raising Cain, so I’m like, I ain’t even going to deal with you, I’m just going to call.”

Later in the call, when the dispatcher says there aren’t any units nearby, the deputy replies “Well, she’s heading towards home. She lives in Clyde. So you can just cancel that. I’ll just get her tag number down and pay her a visit.”

The Buncombe Sheriff’s Office of Professional Standards is looking into the case, Sgt. Randy Smart confirmed, and the investigation is ongoing. Asked if the deputy getting Brown’s tag number and visiting her house would have been professional conduct, he replied “No, it’s not. I’m sure he was just rattled and wasn’t thinking clearly.

Coilhouse Issue 03: get one

I'm proud to announce that I've got an article in Issue 03 of Coilhouse, now available for order. It's on the Kowloon Walled City, a fascinating, lawless pocket of Hong Kong that's the closest thing to a pirate utopia in the modern age. Greg Girard and Ian Lambot's gripping, gritty photographs of Kowloon make it a piece I'm extremely happy with.

The entire issue is chock full of excellent material and I count myself lucky to be associated with Coilhouse, both online and in print. I keep having high expectations of where they'll go next and they keep blowing those out of the water. Buy one. You won't regret it.

"To outer space, every one of us!"

While ruminating on the anniversary of the moon landing, I remembered the above sequence from the glory days of Cartoon Network's Toonami block. The tagline (Space is the Place) stuck in my mind, as did the rat-tat-tat array of armadas, alien vistas and bitchin' 19th-century style military uniforms.

It should be noted that while many popular fantastic visions have turned inward or backward, to fantasy or apocalypse, anime, particularly the first wave introduced by Toonami, is rich in space epics. Gundam Wing, Outlaw Star and even the cynically perfect Cowboy Bebop all take for granted that humanity — however flawed, brawling and mad we might be — will reach the stars and keep on going. There's a vitality there that always brings a smile to my face.

Toonami did several of these promo sequences, usually on a similar subject, either philosophical (dreams!) or dramatic (amazing f'in robots!). They're good, and some of them are damned good. Besides for the space number above, my favorite is probably the sublime Mad Rhetoric [Walking Stick] piece below.

More of these gems below the jump.

All Tomorrows: The Dying Earth

My column on this beautiful and surprisingly influential classic is up on Coilhouse:

"A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone’s written the story. He’s supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment."
-Jack Vance

In 1955, The Lord of the Rings was published, and promptly changed fantasy forever. In its juggernaut status, the particular breed of epic it spawned often pushed aside, in the popular mind, any type of fantasy that came before.

Just what was that? Its rough-hewn predecessors took the form of hybrid stories rooted in fairy-tale, lurid history and the raw juices of pulp adventure. Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery romps are a perfect example — as are H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares, for that matter. While the characters here may be connected to grand events, this was a fantasy of short stories, not novels. Instead of a painstakingly described mythos, this thrived on brain-watering mysteries and jolt endings.

Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth hit the stands in 1950. A collection of six perfect, interlaced stories set in a time when Earth’s sun is sputtering out and no line remains between sorcery and science, it didn’t exactly produce the literary paradigm shift that Tolkien did, but it has had its pull. Gene Wolfe, Tanith Lee and numerous other authors were influenced by Vance. Gary Gygax also drew heavily from it when crafting the magic of the original Dungeons and Dragons.

I’d read about it often before finally tracking down a tattered paperback copy (it seems to come in no other form). The feeling I got when I finally immersed myself in its pages was that, growing up, these were the fairy tales I’d always wanted.

In a happy bit of synchronicity, the New York Times just did a damn good profile of Vance.

A lonely orb, and very far away

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum."

-Arthur C. Clarke

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing and I can't help but feel it a bittersweet occasion. Not because of anything to do with the original event — it remains a triumph of human determination and scientific prowess — but because of what it marked in the history of the space program. The Moon Landing was the zenith. Instead of the cornerstone of perpetually increasing exploration, it became a triumphant high point before a long, sputtering decline. 

One of the things that's broken in these times is the belief that such achievements are not only possible, but inevitable. The massive degree of national organization that made the moon landing possible now seems itself a thing of the past, as nation-states seem to be fracturing and localism is increasingly seen as the way out (I don't think it is, or at least, not just the way). 

The governments of the world seem to be doing all they can simply to keep their economies together, much less embark on any great enterprises. Space travel has widely been out of favor as a political priority of any clout long, long time. Space travel has lost its hold in the popular mind to tales of magic and apocalypse.

Usually the space program only makes the news when a disaster strikes or the ramshackle International Space Station is again in desperate need of repairs.

Few have made the conclusion that exploring outside of our planet is not only desirable, but must go hand in hand with trying to solve the problems down here. The late Octavia Butler, in the superb Parable of the Sower, made that leap, but most others have sided into the simplistic "look at the wonderful world of tomorrow" or "space travel is a waste" camps. 

Clarke definitely fell in the former camp, and it's easy to see his faith in Science the Great Solution as a thing of the past. It's clearer than ever that satellite communication won't make a technocratic world state — or universal peace, for that matter — inevitable.

But he had a damn good point. Most forget that the technology created to put humans on the moon paid back the investment many, many times and now plays an important role in everything from computers to pacemakers and fuel cells.

Many also conveniently ignore that massive wars and corporate bailouts dwarf the expenses that would be required for even the most ambitious space jump.

What would get humans back into space? What will have to change? Why does it no longer inspire us the way it once did?

I'll admit I don't know the answers to those questions. But I'll second Clarke on the following too.

"For all but a brief moment near the dawn of history, the word 'ship' will mean simply — 'spaceship.'"

Here's hoping.