The Breaking Time

Poems for Friday: A History Without Suffering

Rainy Streets of London on a Quiet Night, by Eric Magnuson

After blasting Frank Zappa's Trouble Every Day this morning, I settled down and decided that this piece by E.A. Markham was better suited to the times at hand.

In this poem there is no suffering.

It spans hundreds of years and records

no deaths, connecting when it can,

those moments where people are healthy

 

and happy, content to be alive. A Chapter,

maybe a Volume, shorn of violence

consists of an adult reading aimlessly.

This line is the length of a full life

 

smuggled in while no one was plotting

against a neighbour, except in jest.

Then, after a gap, comes Nellie. She

is in a drought-fisted field

 

 with a hoe. This is her twelfth year

on the land, and today her back

doesn’t hurt. Catechisms of self-pity

and of murder have declared a day’s truce

 

in the Civil War within her. So today,

we can bring Nellie, content with herself,

with the world, into our History.

For a day. In the next generation

 

we find a suitable subject camping

near the border of a divided country:

for a while no one knows how near. For these

few lines she is ours. But how about

 

the lovers? you ask, the freshly-washed

body close to yours; sounds, smells, tastes;

anticipation of the young, the edited memory

of the rest of us? How about thoughts

 

higher than their thinkers?...Yes, yes.

Give them half a line and a mass of footnotes:

they have their own privileged history,

like inherited income beside our husbandry.

 

We bring our History up to date

in a city like London: someone’s just paid

the mortgage, is free of guilt

and not dying of cancer; and going

 

past the news-stand, doesn’t see a headline

advertising torture. This is all

recommended reading, but in small doses.

It shows you can avoid suffering, if you try.

Law-less zones: when authority and anarchy shake hands

Just another Pirate Utopia. Photo by Laura K. Gibb.

Some interesting news out of Copenhagen, as the squat of Christiania just won long-sought autonomy:

"'It's not a perfect society, but one of the nice things about being here is that it doesn't have to be," says one resident, who calls himself only Vesinger.

Vesinger delivers his assessment of Christiania with obvious affection. He has lived here with his two little boys for six months, a recent convert to the Christianian way of life.

And it is not hard to see why this tiny enclave just south of Copenhagen's city centre is an attractive location for a family.

Trees and plant life thrive free from human interference and pesticides. It is more racially diverse, culturally open and creatively expressive than your average Danish neighbourhood.

Christiania has been a squat for nearly 40 years, ever since a group of enterprising hippies broke down the fences and set up in the disused military barracks.

And after a recent government ruling, this small society is celebrating its independence as a kind of semi-autonomous region. They call it Freetown Christiania.

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Under the new rules, residents are allowed to buy their land at knock-down prices and the remainder will be put up for rent by the state.

Although this effectively turns a hippy haven into a local council for Ms Larson, it means for the first time they can exist in security as well as peace.

"It will be a new way of living," she says.

"We do not have to worry anymore about whether the government will throw us off our land. Hopefully now that we have won our right to own the land, then we will be able to feel more secure and start to deal with some of the problems that exist here."

Ah, "we won, now what?" the question would-be revolutionaries in every field have to grapple, specifically, Christiania's relatively lawless status has drawn increasingly violent drug dealers:

There have been outbreaks of violence including gun battles on the streets as rival gangs fight for control of Christiania's drugs trade.

On the notorious Pusher Street, skinheads with pitbulls glare menacingly from behind their stalls draped in camouflage netting at anyone who looks like they might be there to do anything other than buy drugs.

Society: never a simple issue.

Christiana's problems aren't new ones either. Back in 2008, I did a brief write-up on the history of the Kowloon Walled City for Coilhouse. Instead of hippie idealism, in that case the lawless zone was founded on a far more mercantile culture, but it faced many of the same problems. As I summed it up then:

Yes, the anarchistic types out there are correct when they say that the Walled City is evidence that humans can co-exist, and even thrive, without laws constantly piled on them. But it’s not that simple. After all, without massive police raids (government incarnate), the place would have probably become a mob-run tyranny. Its residents had a degree of freedom that anyone who comes home to piles of bills or endless forms can’t help but envy. They also had darkness, a lower life expectancy, filthy living conditions and huge numbers of drug addicts.

If the problems with the drug gangs keep building, Christiania will probably need police raids, ironically, to keep its ungoverned character. Anarchists, by ideology or default (as in Kowloon) have never been particularly good at handling organized violence. At the same time, while a hell of a lot greener than the urban labyrinth that was Kowloon, many of the other traits seem similar: functionally self-governing, relatively peaceful, ensconced in a niche and free of some of the surrounding society's ills.

This brings up a paradox: in both cases, lawless areas had their lawlessness preserved by, well, the law. So, what does one do with that particular contradiction?

The Ice Age is coming: England in riot

A woman and two children walk through debris while riot police try to contain a large group on a main road in Tottenham on Aug. 6. Leon Neal, Getty Images. From the Boston Globe's chilling photo series.

Britain, or England, at least, is in absolute turmoil, with police overwhelmed by a wave of riots causing terrible destruction. The initial spark for the chaos was the shooting of Mark Duggan by the London police last Thursday.

Ironically enough, for all that immigrants, in Britain as well as here, are often derided as parasitic sources of turmoil, their communities are largely holding the line:

"It was between about nine and 10 at night," said Yilmaz Karagoz, sitting in his coffee shop next to a jeweller's shop that has been shuttered since Sunday when the rioting began and a pharmacy that closed a day after.

"There were a lot of them. We came out of our shops but the police asked us to do nothing. But the police did not do anything so, as more came, we chased them off ourselves." The staff from a local kebab restaurant ran at the attackers, doner knives in their hands. "I don't think they will be coming back," Karagoz said.

Not everything works to suffering, of course. People also used social media to organize cleanup crews.

Picture from Twitter user Andy B

Surviving unrest, in the long run, depends on more people deterring rioters and cleaning up after the carnage than looting.

Rioting is stupid and ugly: about the worst possible way to lash out at poverty or a form of oppression, and it naturally attracts those who simply want blood and loot.

It's also not exactly unheard of in London: the city has a tumultuous enough history that its history of affray has its own Wikipedia page. Then, as now, it's not as spontaneous as authorities (through the centuries) usually assert. Rioting needs fuel — resentment — to flourish. Riots happen for many reasons, but they always happen for reasons.

So, consider the following.

Throughout this year, I've followed the fate of protests — peaceful, by and large — against the sweeping cuts in social services carried out by the current government. The poor will bear the brunt of these cuts, all while there is considerable tax evasion at the highest levels of British society.

At every turn, the police have reacted with violence in attempts to suppress, especially through the notorious kettling tactic, legitimate calls to not dismantle an important part of what makes Britain's society work. 

Remember this?

Not exactly a recipe for domestic tranquility. If that's what English police do in broad daylight, with media and thousands of observers, to peaceful protesters, imagine what they do in impoverished areas when no one's watching. Or, it probably seems to many of the inhabitants, cares.

Add in this contradiction: the same leaders making those cuts, the same ones calling for crackdown and blaming this eruption on the mysterious failing moral fiber of their nation, spent their youth as professional rioters.

Here's a handy directory

Prime Minister David Cameron, London Mayor Boris Johnson and Chancellor George Osborne were all part of the Bullingdon Club, a blue-blooded society dedicated to getting drunk, smashing up wherever they happened to land and harassing whoever they happened to dislike.

What makes this an acceptable tradition versus an unforgivable crime worthy of harsh punishment, apparently, is that they were all born into enough ridiculous wealth to avoid the consequences of their actions. That's the very definition of privilege: their law is not the same law meted out to someone in Tottenham.

Observing that dousing everything around in gasoline is a really, really bad idea does not means one endorses the inevitable fire. To carry the analogy a step further, it doesn't mean not to fight the fire. But it does mean that it's time to realize that one shouldn't turn the surroundings into a firetrap. When endemic poverty and a lifetime of rage meet an oppressively brutal police force, well, the place is ready to go.

My fear, from reactions like the lovely "let's police social media idea" now spreading across the Atlantic is that the initiative is behind trying to create stupidly useless measures to clamp things down even further. A catastrophic approach, and one that simply doesn't work. 

When BBC reporter Alex Hudson asked a protester when the unrest would stop.

"When there's war." Later that night, he was beaten.

The Ice Age is coming.

That old line by the Clash was the only thing I could think about, reading those words: an escalation between ever more-desperate attempts to clamp down on ever-more brutal unrest, any hope for better frozen solid.

London (or any city in the world) has long periods of relative civil peace when most people feel they have personal and political opportunities, combined with a basic degree of responsiveness from their rulers. Take that away, and all it takes is a spark.

Defanged metropoli

London! Culturally vibrant! Economically mighty! Politically impotent! Photo by Jason Hawkes

Cities! Over half of humanity now lives in the damn things. Naturally, the futurists are f'ing beside themselves over the wonders this portends. Why, here's prosperity prophet Richard Florida, writing in The Atlantic about how "giant city-states" will own your future: 

Gradually, our great complexes of cities and suburbs are being knit into mega-regions -- giant city-states that are home to millions upon millions of people and generate billions and in some cases trillions of dollars of economic activity. Driving this is not just our individual choices and preferences but the very logic of economic development. Geographic concentration and clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates powerful economies of scale.

He's got a point, of course, though for additional perspective you should read Nicholas Lemann's (paywalled, sadly) piece on the fight over urban identity. But there's one problem with dubbing this the new age of city-states, namely, the "state" part: most metropoli don't have a huge amount of say in government, often even in their own.

Why, for all their economic and cultural importance, are cities still politically impotent?

Revenge of the commons

The original gang territory? The medieval center of Siena.

The commons has received much praise as a powerful model for our own era, but mostly forgotten is how those extolled structures were actually run, and what they did to their rivals.

Some fascinating information in this article on medieval communes:

Because much of medieval Europe lacked central authority to provide protection, each city had to provide its own protection for citizens both inside the city walls, and outside. Thus towns formed communes, a legal basis for turning the cities into self-governing corporations. Although in most cases the development of communes was connected with that of the cities, there were rural communes, notably in France and England, that were formed to protect the common interests of villagers.

Every town had its own commune and no two communes were alike, but at their heart, communes were sworn allegiances of mutual defense. When a commune was formed, all participating members gathered and swore an oath in a public ceremony, promising to defend each other in times of trouble, and to maintain the peace within the city proper.

What did it mean for a commune member to defend another? If a commune member was attacked outside the city, it was too late to call for help, as it was unlikely anyone would arrive in time. Instead, the commune would promise to exact revenge on the attacker, the threat of revenge being a form of defense. However, if the attacker was a noble, safely ensconced in a castle (as was often the case), the town commune could not muster the forces to attack him directly. Instead they might attack the noble's family, burn his crops, kill his serfs, or destroy his orchards in retribution.

"How do you govern a community?" is an old question. The rise of towns and cities as a counterbalance to aristocratic authority was a major factor behind the Renaissance and, by extension, the modern world. In some ways, the urban rise hasn't stopped; most of humanity now lives in a city.

The medieval commune busts the stereotypical version of medieval history that, if it considers the peasantry at all, considers them mostly as oppressed masses, focusing instead on the culture and fights of the nobility. Turns out that peasants were plenty active in trying to develop ways to make their own lives less dangerous and hurt those that hurt them. Furthermore, they began independently adapting this basic structure once it proved successful elsewhere.

The medieval commune began by addressing the most basic need: physical protection. It then follows to the most basic way of deterrence: revenge. It is revealing that, in such an anarchic environment, peasants and artisans had an extremely no-bullshit idea of what would protect their own independence, and on what principles their rivals operated.

Interesting too to compare the way the word "commune" has changed over the centuries, from a revenge-based structure of expedience to a byword for egalitarian experimentation. 

In function, the medieval commune was more like a gang than a utopian social movement, not striving for any higher ideal than "don't fuck with us and let us run our own affairs." Which, for a medieval peasant, was a big deal. Notice that this relied on organized banditry — including the slaughter of serfs — to protect its own independence.

Like a gang or tribe, anything outside its orbit was expendable, and it focused on striking where its enemy was weak.

Of course, the communes didn't stay that communal, because ad-hoc organization is usually a precursor to more formal hierarchy. The Siena commune, one of the most successful, was ruled by an oligarchy of nine local leaders by the late 1200s. In Italy and Switzerland, where communes had the greatest success, they formed the foundation for more structured city-state republics.

Widespread disorder was a major reason for their existence in the first place, and the formation of centralized states both reduced that issue and created standing forces capable of subjugating the more rebellious communes.

Nonetheless, an interesting wrinkle here: contra the modern narrative, the communes were cooperative and competitive, with the threatened destruction of their foes (or their lands) a major reason for their existence. At the same time, their example shows that the most enduring structures start with an effective structure for a basic need and build from there.

Flowers in the Rubble

That is the first picture I ever took with a cellphone. My ancient, brick-like Nokia, survivor of two runs through a washing machine, had finally died, and I was still getting used to a handheld device that did anything more than take phone calls.

Muttering as I navigated the strange new features, I saw the above scrawled into the powerbox of an abandoned building. There is no lack of graffiti on the streets of Asheville — some brilliant, most of it terrible.

But this struck me. This was not one of the usual tags. There was a calligraphy to it, just a touch of style to enhance the words.

It's gone now, painted over as the same building is slowly renovated. I've switched devices several times since, and the first thing I do is set this picture as the background. It is a rebuke to the old, frenzied shouts of "no future!" Something is growing, always.

Magnifying a subculture (or: why are there so many assholes on television?)

Christian Slater, playing the latest iteration of Hollywood executives' ongoing love letter to themselves

Matt Seitz has a piece in Salon that hits the iceberg tip of a much larger phenomenon. Ostensibly a review of the truly atrocious-looking new comedy Breaking In, Seitz instead turns goes in a more interesting direction entirely:

If you've ever asked yourself why so many TV shows and movies glorify people who strut around growling orders and insulting underlings and barking, "Think, people! Think!" and otherwise acting like insufferable jerks, you've never spent any time in Los Angeles. Hollywood is a dream factory run mostly by and for raging narcissists with power and money. Its mass-produced dreams are overseen by people who want to be constantly reassured that they're talented, sexy, charismatic warrior-poet visionaries, and that you can absorb such invaluable knowledge by being around them that the abuse they heap on you is totally worth it. That's why the preferred dramatic configuration of ensemble TV shows is the ragtag band of eccentric professionals (read as: creative types), led by a well-dressed, middle-aged boss who reflexively needles and insults people and throws temper tantrums and sometimes puts on an expensive jacket and sunglasses, hops in his expensive car or on his expensive motorcycle, and takes off for parts unknown without warning, forcing underlings to wonder where the hell he is and talk about him nonstop until he reappears unannounced and provides them with the final piece of whatever puzzle they were trying to solve in his absence. These shows exist to kiss the asses of people who approve shows.

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The autocratic mentor-leader with no time for pleasantries is a masturbation fantasy of super-rich producers, directors, studio executives and network suits. The archetype keeps showing up on-screen because it's an easy way to stroke the ego of a boss who's not very smart or self-aware. ("See, the FBI team is headed by this handsome, mysterious, brilliant guy in his 40s with this young, hot girlfriend ..." "I like it!") Roughly a third of CBS' prime-time lineup and a lot of Fox's has a Hollywood boss surrogate as its hero, and pretty much every other network and cable channel has its own versions scattered throughout the schedule.

Despite their relative clout, the executives Seitz skewers in this piece are a relatively small subculture, ensconced in a small part of the world. However, they do have control over some entrenched, widespread media platforms.

That's an important possession, and it's why TV the world over gets blasted with magnified versions of a relatively narrow subculture. This isn't even some intentional cultural push: these particular egos, naturally enough, just think reflections of themselves are awesome.

It's not like aging Hollywood narcissists are the only ones who do this, either. Last year, Conor Friedersdorf wrote an excellent series on the cultural Tyranny of New York, and observed the following:

every week in San Francisco when the Sunday New York Times arrives at the doorstep or is picked up at the Starbucks, its readers get international coverage, national news, and a first rate national magazine, accompanied by a bunch of cultural commentary, slices of life, and other miscellany filtered through the lens of NYC, magnifying its ethos and crowding out the local equivalent.

The history of alt culture, from one perspective, is based on exactly this phenomenon, often spread further by tying to and infecting parts of the mainstream. Those parts, in turn, find sifting through exotic cultural movements useful for their own reasons.

Now, with the power of traditional media diluted, and new options available for those without a producers' means, there are some interesting possibilities that weren't easily available before. Could a subculture magnify itself intentionally?

Food for thought.

A world of cupcakes and gang turf

A map of San Francisco's Mission District, combining the location of cupcake bakeries with the territory of the Norteño and Sureño gangs. Map by Danya Al-Saleh. See the full, glorious original

My, that's quite an arresting image, isn't it? Al-Saleh, a UC Berkeley undergrad, told Edible Geography that she made the image, in part, as a reminder to those dining in a hip neighborhood that a very different reality existed around them.

It's an innovative piece, and does what excellent maps do: give us a greater awareness of the world. In this case, Al-Saleh illuminates the cultures and economies existing right on top of each other. Cupcakes and Sureños are only a shard, any metropolis has similar layers upon layers. The decision to add the boundary of the gang injunction is the icing on the cupcake; showing a state attempt to deal with a borderless entity.

Remember this when someone tells you, blithely, that "everybody knows." I hear this a lot in Asheville, but we've got no monopoly on the attitude. "Everybody knows that part of town is crap."

Do they now? No, what the speaker actually means is "me and my friends believe." The slippery thing about knowledge is that always remains unknown to someone.

And speaking of puncturing things "everyone knows," feast your eyes on the 12 States of America.

Fuck you, Red State/Blue State. Map by Column Five Media

Yes, back in the dirty days of the 2000s, everybody knew that the country was divided into big blocs of Red states and Blue states, each representing two diametrically opposed cultures. It was convenient, giving the right-wing a chance to feel powerful and Yankees another paper-thin excuse to feel superior.

Along comes this new map, befitting a fractured era concerned with a shaky economy. The 12 "States" measured by the differing effects of income inequality over the past 30 years, are swaths and enclaves, things like "tractor country," "minority central" and "service worker centers." While obscuring plenty, it's a hell of a lot more accurate (and interesting), than its predecessor. We live in a world where cupcakes and gang territory coexist, like it or not.

Building for disaster

Houses swallowed by the tsunami burning in Sendai. Photo from the Kyodo News, via The Associated Press

I awoke this morning to news of the terrible earthquake/tsunami that struck Japan: 

TOKYO — An 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast ofJapan on Friday, the strongest ever recorded in the country and one of the largest anywhere in the last century. The quake churned up a devastating tsunami that swept over cities and farmland in the northern part of the country and set off warnings as far away as the West Coast of the United States and South America.

Japanese police officials said that 184 people were confirmed dead and another 700 were missing, but domestic media quoted government officials as saying that the death toll would almost certainly rise to more than 1,000. Some 200-300 bodies were found along the water line in Sendai, a port city in the northeastern part of the country and the closest major city to the epicenter. Thousands of homes were destroyed and many roads were impassable in the region.

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Vasily Titov, director of the Center for Tsunami Research, said that coastal areas closest to the center of the earthquake probably had about 15 to 30 minutes before the first wave of the tsunami struck. "It’s not very much time. In Japan, the public is among the best educated in the world about earthquakes and tsunamis. But it’s still not enough time.”

I hope everyone reading this will donate to the Red Cross or aid in any other way they can (here's a handy list). Disasters like this remind us all that we are human and still stunningly vulnerable to natural catastrophe. There is nothing more basic than helping others in a time like this, even in a small way.

Over 1,000 people have died in the quake, but it would have killed many, many more if not for Japan's strict building codes and preparation. 

With over half the human population living in cities, designing them to survive natural disaster is a must. Japan got hit hard today, but it's a first-world country with extensive resources. The devastation a similar event would wreak in Mumbai or Beijing is nearly unimaginable.

In much of the first world, questions of metropolitan design too often revolve mainly around issues of aesthetics, culture and autonomy. There are valid issues there, but they're secondary to some more basic consequences.

Cover a city in asphalt sprawl? Floods and erosion will tear it apart. Have lax building standards? Blocks will burn or collapse. All it takes is one really bad day to make metropolitan design a matter of life and death.

Those pushing for localism as the future's panacea should take a reality check from this. Sometimes, large central organizations that can enforce common standards and muster a lot of resources are really useful.

A little autarky can be a good thing

People clamor for bread in Cairo. Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu, the Washington Post

Out of France comes a report that, as farms increasingly flee cities and their surrounding areas, metropoli like Paris and Milan might struggle to feed themselves:

Paris used to be a city of food artisans and its suburbs a melange of lush market gardens thanks to the Seine's alluvia. The globalization of the food system symbolized by, among other things, the international wholesale market of Rungis built outside Paris in the late '60s, brought in standardized products at a much lower price. Add to that real estate speculation and the absence of proper agricultural land management and soon farms were pushed farther and farther from the city and converted to better-yielding crops. 

Beyond the loss of patrimony, the disconnect from food production puts the capital in a precarious food security situation. With a food system relying on unsustainable oil-fed transportation, not only Paris but also most cities throughout the world are at risk. If the transport system were to fail, food would run out on supermarket shelves within a few days. 

Keep in mind that the writer isn't talking about a notorious sprawl like Los Angeles, but far denser European cities. 

The majority of humanity now lives in urban areas, a trend that probably won't cease anytime soon. While cities can be more sustainable than their detractors suggest, vulnerabilities like this leave them open to disaster or civil unrest.

Meanwhile, nations around the world practically quaked as China's rare earth embargo promised to deprive materials needed for the electronics societies have become increasingly dependent on.

Autarky — self-sufficiency, in short — has a bad reputation in economics, and rightly so. It is impossible for a society to be completely self-sufficient in any sort of complex economy. The attendant attempts to cut off trade entirely are usually the province of dictators and extremely stagnant societies. However, both of the above cases demonstrate that in targeted areas, autarky is a necessary balance in an increasingly interconnected world.

Remedying these vulnerabilities aren't impossible. Rare earth mines in more locations or writing policy in a way that preserves urban farmland (as Japan has done, with some success) are both relatively inexpensive moves that save a lot of trouble in the long run, without requiring economic cloistering.

Advanced technology and global trade networks are an important part of an evolving world. But the idea that the resources and connections they depend upon are inexhaustible or invulnerable is ludicrous. Preventing collapses depends as much on preparation as innovation.