This afternoon, I saw Avatar, directed by James Cameron. I saw it at a gigantic multiplex in Greenwood Indiana, in 3D in an IMAX format. I had an excellent seat – sixth row centre. The 3D glasses were large and comfortable.

My point is not to describe my experience of the film, although it is an important part of Avatar, and will play into some of my discussion of the film. I am not a film reviewer, nor am I much of a film theorist, but I feel this film requires my attention and focus for a variety of reasons that will come clear.

First off, people will ask “So what did you think of Avatar?” and “Did you like it?” These two things are not necessarily linked, and what Avatar is and does is very complex, and points directly at a number of critical issues in contemporary civilisation. What struck me on viewing the film, in terms of images, what I saw was a large number of references to films I very much like – and these references were seductive and interesting.

In the Home Tree, I saw the Camphor Tree in My Neighbour Totoro. This is where Mei discovers the nest of King Totoro. Totoro is a wood spirit and lives in the Camphor Tree – the Na’vi live in the Home Tree. The Tree is an ancient symbol of biblical proportions and esoteric meaning.

The general reference to Dances With Wolves is also obvious – a soldier who leaves European ways behind and goes to live with Native Americans. However, I see that actually as relatively uninteresting due to its obviousness, although that theme is something I will come back to.

The planet has floating mountains, which remind me of album covers for the Yes group by Roger Dean – covers like Close to the Edge

Close to the Edge: floating worlds...

and other images by Roger Dean from that period, such as flying dragons – looks a lot like a Banshee, no?:

Jungles floating in the air:

Alien landscapes:

Floating pastoral worlds:

And floating trees and rocks:

I could go on, but now, look at this preliminary concept art from Avatar:

and this still from the film:

and it is pretty clear that Dean’s playful organic fantasy artwork must have had some influence, which is fine by me. Dean is no Da Vinci, but his artwork reminds me of happy times in my adolescence, spent listening to music by Yes with my friends and arguing over the lyrics with precision I can best describe as Jesuitical. It was what teenage fans of ProgRock would often do in the mid 70s… When I was young, the floating jungles and weird landscapes of Dean were a fantasy space I would sometimes imagine myself inhabiting, especially the floating world of Close To The Edge. Seeing this realised in Avatar struck a comforting cord in me.

Another fond memory Avatar brought back with the Floating Mountains was that of Castles in the Sky, by Miyazaki. I have always enjoyed Miyazaki’s work – beautiful, lyrical, gentle and unalterably peculiar.

In these ways, the imaging was something I was immediately comfortable with and inclined to have “good feelings” about; they formed a seductive landscape.

The design of the extended starship in Avatar reminded me of the ships in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running.

Silent Running is a story that occurs before Avatar – In Silent Running, the “wild” world has been sent offworld into ships for its own protection. Of course, as soon as it became economically burdensome, the wild world bottled up in these ships is disposed of like so much useless baggage. Avatar talks about how the world the humans come from isn’t green – how it is dead and grey. That would be the world after Silent Running, and like Silent Running, whose name reminds me of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, both films are warnings about the predations of industrial civilisation. Silent Running shows the imprisonment of the wild world, and its execution at the hands of capital. Avatar shows the pillaging of nature to feed the industrial war machine, as symbolised by the RDA corp. and the military goons it has brought along. In this way, I think Avatar is much more direct and accurate – Silent Running is a despairing work with a poignant ending of doom: a small robot must take care of the last remaining forest. In Avatar, direct action on the part of the Pandorans changes things and even defeats the industrial war machine (IWM).

In Avatar, the industrial war machine is only defeated when two things occur: the Na’Vi collectively band together and take up violent resistance to the IWM, and when knowledge of the Other is communicated and integrated into the world data system of the living Pandora planet. This idea of Pandora as a living planet reminded me of the film Solaris, first by Tarkovsky and then by Soderburg as produced by Cameron – only without the tedious psychology of the films or the book. Communication is a critical point in this film, and it is also important in my view of this film as an object in society.

This brings me to the essential contradiction of Avatar. The film is an extremely expensive, complicated, ultra-high technology story whose very existence is predicated on the industrial extraction and processing of resources that are, for all practical purposes, irreplaceable.  The story it tells is how a society based on such principles is, by even a cursory analysis, inherently evil and self-destructive. Evil, in that it practices direct violence upon those who stand between the IWM and the resources it requires. Self-destructive, as discussed earlier: the planet Earth in the year setting of the film (2154)  is a grey and dying place. Also, the system is logically self-destructive: such systems require continuous exponential growth; growth that is simply impossible on a finite planet in a materially finite universe.

So, here we are faced with a film, a commodity, that points directly at the industrial system that spawned it. It says that collective action can stop the unrelenting madness of the IWM, even as it is a product of the very same system. Just as the Na’Vi will never leave the Home Tree voluntarily, the IWM will no surrender peacefully. The IWM must simply be destroyed, which brings us to some rather interesting conclusions. The film takes place on Pandora. The story of Pandora is well known, so I will simply note that the result of Pandora’s foolishness was that while she unleashed all manner of madness upon the world, we still retain Hope.

Derrick Jensen’s essay in the book The Future of Nature (Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis. 2007.), titled “Beyond Hope”, he directly attacks the notion of hope in our present circumstances:

Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held  among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in mis fortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power ssurely as a belief in some distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more thana secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane.

… hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

His is one particular angle on hope, one vision of Pandora. He accurately critiques the common notion of hope, one I frequently hear from students when they say “give me some hope.” Counter to both my students and Jensen, I prefer the idea of hope as articulated by James Howard Kunstler:

“and a lot of time, college kids say ‘can’t you give me some hope?’ Can’t you give me some hope. Well, here’s the deal. I’m not a hope dispenser, OK? You have to generate the hope. It’s got to come from you. And the way you generate it is by proving to yourself that you’re competent people, that you can deal successfully with the circumstances and the changes that reality is sending to you. That you’re successfully negotiating your living arrangement and your reality. And that you’re paying attention to the tasks that need to be done in your society. And you’re not just relying on wishful thinking and waiting to win the lottery, or sitting around thinking you’re going to get something for nothing, or wishing upon a star. People who are generating hope are the people who understand the difference between wishing for stuff and making stuff happen.”

I agree with Kunstler more than Jansen, in that Kunstler is re-defining hope for the age we are in, and giving us a process for creating hope. And it is that sense of hope that is demonstrated in Avatar. The Na’Vi band together and DO SOMETHING. Their cause is hopeless – they cannot successfully fight the blitzkrieg of the IWM, and their casualties are huge. The Na’Vi are only saved when the “Cavalry Arrives” in an inversion of the Cowboys and Indians.

Here, the indigenous Na’Vi (the “Indians”) are fighting the Cowboys. Normally, in the Western Genre, the Cowboys are faced by a brutal and implacable enemy in the Indians, and are saved at the last minute by the U.S. Military  – the Cavalry comes to save the day. In Avatar, the cavalry is the biosphere itself coming to the aid of the Indians, and the Cowboys, the IWM, are the implacable and brutal enemy. This inversion is underlined in the casting of Sigourney Weaver as Dr. Grace Augustine. She is a human – a member of the invasion force. An Alien. But she is an Alien who cares about those she has invaded, unlike Weaver’s foe in the film, Alien (dir. Ridley Scott. 1979.), which was an implacable and brutal enemy. In both films she is employed by an interstellar corporation. In both films she is an invader of an alien world. In Alien, we are asked to sympathise with her and her invading team sent there to mine ore. In Avatar, we are asked to sympathise with her as she attempts to help the Na’Vi, while despising her “team”, the RDA corporation who sent them to Pandora to mine ore.

The success of the Na’Vi is predicated on the arrival of the Cavalry – the giant and ferocious animals that are commanded to come to the aid of the Na’Vi by Eywa, the Mother Goddess of the Na’Vi. Eywa was informed of the peril of the situation by Jake Sully in his Avatar form. Dr Augustine’s character had died and her memories absorbed into a kind of spiritual database in the The Tree of Souls. Examining Augustine’s mind and her memories of the devastated Earth and the brutality of the IWM, allowed Eywa to understand how desperate the situation was. The war was won through information that allowed for the  amassing of forces significant enough to repel the invasion.

So what message does this film have for us, today?

1. The destruction of the IWM can only be accomplished through direct action.
2. Key to this is the acquisition of substantial forces, which is accomplished through communication.
3. Hope (Pandora’s gift) is possible, however, it requires an enormous amount of work.

From Kunstler, we understand that it is precisely this work that creates the hope most needed in these desperate times, as civilisation faces the greatest transition and crisis it has ever faced in 10,000 years of indoor living, and humanity faces its greatest challenge to its very survival in 70,000 years.

This leads to the Necessary Contradiction of Avatar, and it is an instance of the Necessary Contradiction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), as Avatar is simply an instance of ICT.

Per a Fox spokesman in an article by David Patten, Avatar was officially budgeted at $237 million and an estimated $150 million for marketing, for a total of $387 million. To illustrate the size of that sum, For FY 2009, the budget for the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts was only $155 million. To fund this film, directly out of pocket, every man woman and child in the USA would have to pay $1.27. Obviously, this endeavor is something that American society deems to be of some importance, as it is willing to invest such significant sums in its development. Its development is that of a media commodity, one with significant and rapid profitability potential.

Media commodities exist in a commodity culture – the devices and systems that the media commodity is made on and distributed through are also commodities. These commodities are only possible through industrial production means and methods,and the resources that go into these systems are subject to thermodynamic losses and material dispersion. These systems, as commodities, exist in a system predicated on continuous growth. Any continuous growth operates by exponential mathematics and can be called exponential growth. Exponential growth, as it requires continuous exponential resource acquisition, is simply unsustainable on a finite planet.

In Avatar, the Earth of 2154 was unable to acquire a critical resource, comically named “unobtainium“. It is the exploitation of unobtainium – valued at $20 million a kilo – that has brought RDA corporation to Pandora, and put RDA and the IWM it is part of in opposition to the interests of the Na’Vi.

Science Fiction is often not about any actual future – it is usually a commentary on the present, and Avatar is no exception. As much as it is a classic tale of imperialism, restating the theme of “Dances with Wolves”, given the contemporary crises of peak oil, the impending peak of phosphorus and other critical materials, and the continuing growth of the human population creating a perilous condition of overshoot, films that engage the issues of peak oil, the disaster that is suburbia, the unsustainability of civilisation, or, if the film asks, “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

Then we need to look at them differently, as all entertainment (ICT) systems are intimately connected to some of the most rapacious and destructive resource acquisition systems on earth, as well as being directly a creature and critical path creator of contemporary globalist economic systems. It is important to connect entertainment and ICT. Since the digitalisation of culture all such devices require electronic components and computational facilities, and these components and facilities are made from materials all over the globe, and the co-ordination of the production of these materials, their processing, and final manufacture into ICT commodities require the movement of digital data via ICT, we can only see ICT as both creature / creation of the global industrial war machine and its critical path creator, as without ICT, the co-ordination and manufacture of these globalised ICT systems would simply be impossible. As these systems are identical in both nature and function (a computer is a computer is a computer) we can only see our contemporary entertainment networks as creations of the IWM. The linkages between the I and the WM are well detailed by other theorists (viz. Virilio, Hardt, Negri, DeLanda, Jensen, Zerzan, and many others) and I don’t think it necessary to detail that here.

From this, ICT – as a critical path component of the IWM – brings this weight to any content it provides. So, a film, such as Avatar, that is critical of this relation, is then subjected to charges of hypocrisy. I do not agree with such charges. In fact, I stand opposed to such charges, and have put them into what I mentioned earlier: the Necessary Contradiction of ICT. It is not that  ICT embodies this contradiction (which it does, but not my point) as much as that it is necessary that we maintain ICT, even as ICT is such a destructive system to the earth and is part and parcel of the IWM. So, even as we decry the ongoing ecocide, we use ICT to decry the ecocide at the same time ICT is central to the ongoing ecocide.

Now, this is nothing new – above are links to media critical of the IWM, and you are presently reading some.

This leads to other ideas I have about the future of ICT and its relationship to society, but that is beyond this particular writing. All societies communicate with the systems they have at hand. Our system is predicated on the IWM, therefore, our communications are complicit to the actions of the IWM, even if they are inimical to the interests of the IWM. Avatar brings an anti-industrial message in the most advanced industrial method possible: large scale 3D digital cinema. Avatar is a product of the IWM, even as it satirises the IWM. This contestation leads to complex results: Avatar could be seen as Hollywood greenwashing, or the first blockbuster film celebrating the end of Industrial Civilisation, or, and this is very likely true: it is both.

Stuart Hall discussed these negotiated relationships people have with media, but this was largely around issues of content. Now we are faced with a radicalised McLuhanism, where the medium IS the message, and the medium is part and parcel, creature and creator, of the problem itself. Organised Networks rely on the technology developed by the IWM for their existence. At the Internet as Playground And Factory Conference in November 09, Christian Fuchs talked about a communist ICT infastructure. While an admirable goal, I don’t think it is either possible (politically or materially) or likely (due to the exigencies of resource extraction). This is a longer discussion that looks into an inherent weakness in Leftist theory and praxis, but the important point is to get the conversations started.

Avatar, a piece of blockbuster entertainment that brandishes a theme of anti-industrialism, and prescribes violent and bloody opposition to the IWM is, at root, entertainment. A fun story. However, given the crises we face, and the gathering storms of catastrophe on the horizon, its ecological message needs to be amplified and brought into public awareness. We, as a society, must make plans for a very different sort of existence in the next few decades, and use this huge transition as an opportunity to create a better, more humane and caring society. The easy road is one we have seen before in Rome, Central America, and Easter Island, and that road is a very sad and lonely Road. Avatar is deeply flawed in many respects (the reliance on Joseph Campbell formulae, the music was awful, the acting was wooden, and the story was predictable) but it stands in opposition to many other great Science Fiction Films. In 1984, the people are victims. In Blade Runner, the people are victims, even or especially when they’re artificial people. In 2001, Bowman is basically on a big ride – he has little agency. In Alien, we empathise with a crew who went someplace they had no business being. In Slient Running agency proves futile, and the biosphere is left in the hands of a small robot. In the Andromeda Strain, people are just disease vectors and victims. In Stalker, the Room in the Zone is all powerful, and personal agency is used against the agent. In Avatar, the people,as symbolised by the Na’Vi, rise up and smash the invading Industrial War Machine.

That they only succeed through the intercession of a “goddess” brings it to an interesting point, as the “goddess” is actually a material fact – it’s an organic data base held by the biosphere itself. It is the biosphere, the moon of Pandora istelf tht destroys the IWM on Pandora, and it is the biosphere on earth that wil smash the IWM on Earth, as we hit the wall of Peak Everything, and civilisation transitions to its next phase. Luckily we have had the luxury of the Golden Age of petroleum,  and we have seen glimpses of fairness and justice, and we need to preserve these ideas through the transition and build a better society on the other side. It may well prove to be a neolithic society, but the lives lived in it need not be nasty, brutish, and short.

My daughter, like every other North American 12 year old, is caught up in the “Twilight” film and book series. And when she was younger it was Pirates.

I am considering this: that the present day fascination with pirates and vampires is because we live in a piratical and vampiric society, and this is a way to project our own self-disgust into a social spectacle that not only exalts these creatures, but is more a way for us to render evil fashionable, so we don’t see the vileness of the global and environmental results of our own common actions.

Pirates were considered vile creatures – we would hang them at the entrance to harbours, as a warning to all. Vampires, while fictional, were always loathsome creatures – just watch Nosferatu and see how creepy and disgusting they were considered. but now, we humanise and venerate these parasites, these vile corrupt murderous undead beings.

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than an undead parasite that lives off the blood of his lessers?

What could be a more appropos symbol of capitalism than the pirate?

These are not people to admire – these are people to abhor. The pirate is not about finding new methods of helping rid society of disease and crime and violence – the pirate is all about aggrandising the self at the expense of society through crime and violence. The pirate doesn’t fight disease – the pirate is disease. The pirate is all about the gang, not the polity; the benefit and glory of the gang leader, not the common wealth.

The vampire is of another nature for as material and sadistic is the pirate, the vampire is metaphysical and seductive. The pirate operates through theft and actual murder. The vampire, being a creature of fiction, operates through parasitism and symbolic death. The vampire lives off of “precious bodily fluids” within the imagination of the audient. Previous media representations of vampires range from the bleak shabby elegance of Dracula to the ghoulish Nosferatu. With Ann Rice’s mythology of vampirism, the vampire, while still a wicked undead beast, was portrayed in much more humanistic terms – ,a href=”http://a.abcnews.com/images/GMA/sipa_Interview_Vampire_090325_ssh.jpg”>child vampires,, ancient vampires who could barely move, romantic and handsome vampires drawn into a disaster not of their own making.

As alluring and attractive and malleable such a fictive creature can be, they are, simply, parasites.

This is the other side of the capitalist ideology: you too can partake of the riches of this world and live forever – all at the expense of worthless dupes and victims whom you will feed on. You will carry the guilt, but learn to ignore the shame, and eventually revel and thrive in your parasitic madness. And internal to vampirism is the same failure of capitalism: what happens when you run out of victims, when the entire world is populated by vampires? What do you do when the engine of production has exhausted the planet’s resources and there is nothing left to profit on? The answer is the same: collapse and extinction.

This is never a point ever thought through, because of the dominant demands of short term necessity refracted through the lens of industrial destruction and capitalist exploitation. Hence, the mythology of parasitism must be inculcated at as young an age as possible, and so we have 6 year olds dressing as Dracula and Blackbeard and movies for teens like Twilight and Pirates of the Caribbean. The most impatient people, the young, are taught to look upon parasitism as just another and therefore acceptable, part of society. So, when they labour at some job for the rest of their lives, they won’t mind that a small number of parasites at the top are reaping all the rewards at their expense. They won’t mind that they, as members of the crew, make their living stealing from others.

This logic can go forward, and as usual, it is through comedy that this society deals with it most directly: the next example is a vampire pirate. And we have one: in the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” in the form of Jack Sparrow’s father played by Keith Richards. It is well known that Richards is undead and a vampire. This can be said because vampires don’t exist, therefore any attribution to Richards as a vampire is as fictive as the notion of vampire itself. to feed this mythology, he regularly has his blood transfused in order to continue living his vampiric life, where over the years he has increasingly come to resemble Nosferatu, feeding off the ashes of his father.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Keith Richards the person. I have never met him, and I am sure he’s a funny and decent dinner companion. The Keith Richards I am addressing is the fictive and mythological Richards – the media creation of Richards – the only one history will ever really know as it writes the story and mythologies of our times. This Richards is a scary and demented derangement of party animal and cultural parasite – someone who has looted all the blues riffs ever known and sucked them dry of their essence and blasted them together in the form of his playing in the Rolling Stones music ensemble – a band who built their career upon defiance and the hint of revolution and then sold it all for millions of dollars, pillaging music history and sucking their fans dry of money for their records, performances, and ephemera in the process.

There is nothing sustainable about Richards – he is the drug-addled adolescent with half a century of practice under his belt, and looking worse for the wear and tear he has put himself through. The excess he has subjected himself to would have killed weaker men, and for that his persona takes on a character of the undead – the vampire – Nosferatu. due to his age and condition, Richards cannot be the face of acceptable vampirism to a new younger generation – so he is the vampire father of the pirate role model for the younger generation.

And the vampire? In the form of Twilight’s Edward Cullen, he is not some rotting husk – he is a rutting hunk, designed and delivered for the fantasies of teen and tween girls. He makes victimhood seem reasonable, as he and his clan are now “vegetarians” in a vampiric sense: they only drink the blood of animals. A more “sustainable” approach to industrial capitalism. Rather than chop down the forest to power the machines, dig up the coal and oil, and slaughter wild animals wholesale for the vampirism, as it mimics contemporary western food patterns of industrial meat production.

At core, they are still vampires. They are still parasites. They take one’s most precious possession, time, and give only illusions and fantasy in return, flickering page turning revelries of fictive space, making us feel good about being hapless victims of a vampiric system of global piracy.

In the mean time, the rivers are dammed up, the earth continues to warm up, and precious metals are ripped from the dying earth to make a handful of people fabulously wealthy. And we’re all OK with that because we get to watch vampire pirates on the screen.

To quote Brian Eno:

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others punctured
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble

Beak and claw, remorse reminder
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble
Back and forth and back to nothing
Keep them tidy, keep them humble.

Chop and change to cut the corners
Sharp as razors (shiny razors)
Stranded on a world that’s dying
Never moving, hardly trying.

I was just a broken head
I stole the world that others plundered
Now I stumble through the garbage
Slide and tumble, slide and stumble.

Today was a long day. My most interesting writings were:

from the LEV list:

> so it is true, there still are people who do genuinely believe in
> society being malleable….
> i’ve always taken that for sentimental gossip…

Gee, you sound like someone who’s too cynical to believe in nihilism…
Pity that.

1. You don’t have to “reform” society – it reforms on a daily basis, it changes all the time. Repetition is a form of change. All you have to do is stand up for something and go for it. But if you twiddle your pomo thumbs you’ll just sit there. Twiddling your pomo thumbs. Also note: 100 years ago cinema was black and white, silent and passive and insanely expensive. Now performance cinema is in colour (often lurid, but that’s another issue) with sound, it’s active, and the means to do it are little more than a keyboard, a laptop, and a projector… Society changes. All the Time.

Also: in the early 1900s there was a strike at a mine in Colorado. People wanted to work only 5 days a week. The governor, who was in the pocket of the mining interests, called out the State National Guard Units and had them move on the camps. they fired into the strikers tents. All the men were at the mine, picketing, so the soldiers shot 24 women and children DEAD.

They died so people in the USA could have a 5 day work week.

There is absolutely nothing sentimental about brutal blind slaughter. People dying in order to change the world is not “sentimental gossip”. The hand wringing attitude that it is such only serves the interests of the likes of the crypto and not so crypto fascists who are presently running things.

2. Performance cinema must stand on its own, claim its own intellectual space, with its own theory and aesthetic. This must be articulated and the articulation must reflect the diversity and complexity of the the source material.
You can either help or hinder. I’d REALLY like it if you could help. I’m running myself broke to put this symposium on – (so far) no company has stepped in to help, no government has squeezed its teat to make this happen. This makes its free and open and very low budget but also of the highest possible integrity and purpose.

3. As performance cinema stands and articulates itself in time, our media culture will be that much more vibrant and interesting, and Bog only knows what will be born from it.

Got a note from Kim Cascone – hope to have lunch with him and his family this coming weekend. It’ll be good to see him.

Completed recording post audio for SEI down at Chris Tann’s digs in S. San Jose. He has a wonderful home theatre set up. Someday I will too…

Elizabeth is in swimming camp this month. She’s a sweetie bump. She showed me how to pronounce Montmartre. It sounded more like MonnnMarrr. God bless the good ship FAIS and all who sail with her.

Saturday, July 29, 2006
Peak Oil at SF LAFCo

Such excitement!

A few days ago, the fine folks in the SF Energy Community

(Offnote: I am disabusing myself of the notion of Peak Oil. From what I can gather, it’s either upon us or will happen soon enough that the notion is absurd. It’s like “Modernism” or its stumpy halfwit encore, “PostModernism”. They are not the answers to the problem of contemporary history, and Peak Oil is not the correct understanding of the problem of contemporary civilisation. The problem is energy production and resource consumption combined with massive overpopulation and a rapacious political economy and attendant false consciousness. But – I digress. Suffice to say, Stuart Studebaker has had it up to his eyeballs with Peak Oil which now has become more of a gloomy subculture with pseudo-religious overtones – and that creeps me out. So, from here on, you may consider me an Energy Activist. Attach my name to peak oil, and expect to arrive home to a house with your garbage missing and the pets all pregnant. Or something really bad like that. I digress…)

were able to set up a meeting in front of the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission. This was held beforecity Supervisors Mirkarimi, McGoldrick, and government employees Schmeltzer and Sullivan. Mr Mirkarimi was Chair. First, there was a Media Advisory on the steps of City Hall.

I was starved, and went down the block to get a small sandwich, and arrived as the speeches were already in swing. first up at the podium was Mr Richard Heinberg. (Picture #1)

He gave a very nice verbal outline of the Obvious Situation, and was well recieved. I would estimate that there were at least 40 people standing and listening.

After Mr H, was was David Room who shared a few words as well. He was followed by Supervisor Mirkarimi, who was forceful in his views which seemed quite sympathetic with the audience at hand. He was followed by someone in a beige suit whose names escapes me.

(off note: if anyone can fill in the names I forget – and I forget often – please leave a comment and I’ll fix the post itself. I make no pretense to journalism – this is a blog of my bad attitudes and observations.)

Then we all filed into the meeting room. It quickly filled up to standing room only.

Another room was opened and a video feed was sent in and projected so people could at least see the proceedings. I sat up front so I could take pictures. The Supervisors McGoldrick, Mirkarimi and gov’t apparatchiks Schmeltzer and Sullivan filed in and took their seats.

After some pro forma agenda stuff regarding the minutes of the previous meeting and such like – all performed under Robot’s Rule’s of Order and other similar parliamentary hocus pocus – the first to present was Richard Heinberg.

It was a classic Heinberg tour de force of facts and figures that paint a very ugly picture for the 21st Century. If you’ve read Powerdown or The Party’s Over, you’re pretty much up on what he has to say. The benefit was that he had several pieces of recent data to support his ideas. Excellent presentation, in his classic low key demeanor.

The Next speaker was David Room.

David’s presentation was interesting but was about twice as long as it needed to be. I thought he had a number of good ideas, but didn’t seem to have any concrete proposals. The supervisors had to ask him to cut it short, so perhaps he would have gotten to more concrete policy suggestions and strategic proposals, but we didn’t get to find out.

The third person was a clear and articulate woman from the San Francisco Department of the Environment. (her name escapes me – anyone?)

Being the natural born clumsy doofball that I am, I accidentally stabbed myself in the hand with a ball point pen at that moment, and was in some pain and didn’t really get to concentrate on what she had to say. I do remember it was interesting when I wasn’t wincing in pain.

After she spoke, the citizens were allowed to come up and talk to the Supervisors. Most of the speeches were passionate and articulate. A few were off the point, but not absurdly so. One gentleman started railing on about how we don’t have a democracy, and seemed completely oblivious to the irony of his statement… But even he had good points about energy and politics. I even spoke – I said who I was and what I do, and that I knew politicians liked specific and useful ideas, so I chimed in with three.

1. Disallow the Registration of SUVs as private passenger vehicles in San Francisco.

2. Subsidise electric bikes.

3. The city should invest in a kind of polysilicate bank, and use these cheap rates of PV to develop its own electrical generation for City Government buildings and public housing. This would do two things – it would permit the City to get into the business of renewable electricity generation, and act as a first step int opublic ownership of city based wind and tide power generation. The localisation angle on this is obvious, as is the direct connection to Public Power, but leapfrogging the gooey disaster that is PG&E – rather than “get control” of PG&E, the city could get into renewable power generation directly, and bypass the whole mess – let PG&E die on the vine as the oil runs out…

Supervisor Mirkarimi was impressed and asked me to email him with my ideas – he’s a well known advocate of public power, so I am not surprised that he’d find my idea #3 to be interesting…

More people spoke, and with some more Parliamentary hocus pocus, the meeting was over. At that point I got to take a nice picture of Mr Heinberg.

At that point a bunch of us all wandered down to a vegetarian restaurant run by devotees of Sri Chimnoy. The food was very very good, and the conversation was great.

Mr Heinberg liked me bringing up electric bikes. He said that he thinks electric bikes were likely more efficient than regular bikes. Each calorie you burn pedaling represents 10x as many calories that you don’t get to expend, because it takes so much energy just to make food. From a total energy view, the electric bike is much more efficient. Personally, I’m not sure that’s all true, but I do find the idea rather exciting. I’d have to do some crazy Odum-like analysis to figure it out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Heinberg is correct.

I made some points to the assembled dinner crowd that we need to get culture workers hip to and working to promote energy awareness – even if they are celebrities and make their living on the commodity culture, they are in positions of great value in our society, as people trust their culture heroes more than politicians. Celebrities sell soap and life insurance, cars and medication – why not energy awareness?

I pointed out Al Gore’s movie went ahead because of the entertainment industry, and that culture, as a lens AND mirror of society, will always be out ahead of the politicians. Whether its writers, filmmakers, musicians, actors, DJs – whatever – we need all hands on deck, and the biggest gains to be realised in the slackening of the depletion curve will come culturally.

After dinner, myself and two companions, Dennis and Chuck, wandered over to the Noc Noc club and hoisted a few foaming frosties to our health and did a post-mortem of the meeting. After much convivial and interesting conversation, I found my way to a bus and after a long walk up a hill, I went to bed.

Today, I sent some dead computer gear to be properly recycled, and then Beth, Elizabeth and I had lunch at Kan Zaman middle eastern restaurant. Then it was off to Amoeba, where I purchased some used CDs and then home to a yummy salad dinner.

Monday is my birthday. Yay.

Monday, April 03, 2006
Chevy Tahoe Commercial – Culture Jamming Opportunity

Those are cool, but why leave culture jamming to the professional agitators, when you can do it at the request of corporate giants?

Here’s One I Made
(LINK IS NOW BROKEN – 22 FEB 09)

that’s a quick example of what I am talking about.

It seems the witless dinosaurs running the show over at Chevy haven’t been able to come up with any good ideas to sell their gas guzzling Stupid Useless Vehicles. So they are enlisting the General Public to make ads for them. you can enter a contest. I have no idea what the prize is (probably one of those stupid Tahoes) but the fun part is this:

1. They supply a bunch of video clips and music
2. You can put any text you want over the images

When you’re done, remember to email yourself the link to the movie, as if you’re letting a friend know how cool your Tahoe Commercial Is. As If.

Then pass the link around (I put mine through tinyurl.com for the sake of clarity…)

They see it as advertising, but it’s an open invitation to massive criticism, IMHO.

Make your own here:
(LINK IS NOW BROKEN – 22 FEB 09)

Chevy puts a sign on its back saying “PLEASE KICK ME”

What a bunch of idiots.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006
A Syriana Moment

Last week my wife, our daughter, and I went to visit the George Washington Museum in Morristown, NJ. The Museum itself was closed due to construction, but the mansion where he lived was open, and it was a very instructive and insightful display as to how people lived before petroleum. It was only a few generations after the Revolution that oil was discovered in Pennsylvania, and America was drop kicked directly front and centre into the Petroleum Age. I would argue that the age of the American Empire is almost directly coincidental to that resource. While it is true that the european invasion of North America was a rapacious disaster for the locals – starting with a mass death from smallpox, and culminating in death camps and forced migrations – that particular brand of murder and imperialism was largely limited to the North American continent, and the American Ruling Elite hadn’t yet dreamt of the global hegemony it now enjoys.

The addition of oil to the mix is what made America’s global empire possible, as it directly leapfrogged the coal powered weed of the British Empire. This leapfrogging was aided, in no small part, by the tiny brained tribal battles of Europe’s idiotic fratricidal warfare. And before this oil fueled leapfrogging, the European immigrants lived rather dire lives in America, and the Morristown settlement was no exception. The houses were, for the most part, small hovels centered around a hearth. In Morristown, the largest house was the one that was Washington’s HQ for the winter there. Even by today’s standards, it was a large house, but we had driven through endless acres of McMansions that were larger. The winter Washington spent in Morristown made Valley Forge look like a picnic. Valley Forge had breaks in the cold – the winter in Morristown was one of the coldest ever on record.

The ground in Morristown is similar to much of that part of the country – thin soil on top of a hilly rocky base – not very good for farming. The winters are cold and snow is common. The Summers are hot and filled with mosquitos. Not an optimal location. Today, many thousands of people call it home, as they bask in their centrally heated and air-conditioned homes, many of which are much larger than the mansion Washington called home, and most of them much larger than the hovels the peasants lived in at the time of Washington.

During the winter, sometimes parts of the big house were left unused as they were too hard to heat. Note: this is how Washington, a member of the ruling class, lived. The servants who lived there were crowded into a few small rooms with low ceilings.

There was a book for children in the heated trailer next to the house. It talked about how different the life of a child was in the 18th century. At the age of 12, children were given adult responsibilities, and girls were often married off a few years later. Schooling was limited to the barest necessities of reading, writing, and simple arithmetic. Books were rare and expensive. The evening meal was the largest and it took much of the day to cook. People worked, all the time. Knitting was a continuous occupation, as was the carding and spinning of yarn. In fact, people would load up a spinning wheel on a horse just to go visit a friend. Women would often get together and spin thread as a social occassion.

Due to the local soil conditions, farming was hard and continuous. Because houses didn’t have the luxury of fibreglas insulation, and houses were built without precision saws and tools, homes were often drafty affairs with low ceilings and small windows. Trees were cleared quickly, to make way for farms and to be used as wood. Thanks to replanting and the advent of petroleum, there are as many trees in New Jersey now than at any time since the arrival of Europeans – in fact, by 1900, much of NJ was clear-cut rolling hills of farm land. I walked back to the mansion and stood in the upper hallway looking out over the Museum grounds, and that’s when I had a Syriana Moment.

I was thinking of the Matt Damon character talking to the prince of Syriana:

“You want to know what we think of you? We think that 100 years ago you people were living in tents and chopping each other’s heads off, and we think that’s exactly where you’re going to be in another hundred years.”

I looked out the window at the parking lot full of SUVs and minivans. I looked in the sky at the contrails of jets flying off to distant parts of the globe. I looked at the rocky eaten soil, and the spare grey trees. I thought that General Washington probably looked out that same window at similar trees – shivering thin midwinter sticks – and that he gazed at a similar broken land. Where the asphalt parking lot now sits filled with gas guzzling wagons of heated suburban comfort, was probably a collection of meagre frozen tents full of enlisted men and disease, huddled together against the cold.

And then I thought:

“You want to know what I think of you? I think 200 years ago you people were scratching out a miserable existence on this crappy rocky soil, and that’s exactly where you’re going to be in another 200 years.”