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Culture jamming actually being practiced in the world (as distinct from that practiced in glossy mags) makes me extremely [...]]]> Urban-ism has a nice roundup of some standouts from culture jamming genre, the best of which are the Homeless street signs in Toronto by Mark Daye, a graphic design student.  My favorite sign is at right.

Culture jamming actually being practiced in the world (as distinct from that practiced in glossy mags) makes me extremely happy. Everyday interactions are suffused with political assumptions that usually remain buried, but clever jammin’ makes these visible, overt.  It jars you into another mode of thinking. You know, that hard, critical one.

More importantly, when done well, the subversive images are very funny, and a mirthful cityscape is an end unto itself.

Modern construction methods are incredibly wasteful of resources. Up to 25 percent of the total waste generated in the United States, India, and other countries is directly attributed to building, construction, and demolition activities. These [...]]]> Vani at Shape of Now makes a convincing argument for rehabilitation of existing structures rather than constant new construction, an excerpt:

Modern construction methods are incredibly wasteful of resources. Up to 25 percent of the total waste generated in the United States, India, and other countries is directly attributed to building, construction, and demolition activities. These — often hidden — waste products can be environmentally hazardous and polluting, both as solids and in the atmosphere.

Externalities strike again! Working on major construction projects, I’m constantly amazed at the massive amounts of materials wasted, often in the name of labor saving. For instance, all the slabs in one buildings I’m working on have ~20% larger rebar than they actually need so that holes can be drilled anywhere later without the contractors needing to add plate or angle reinforcing underneath. It’s much more material-efficient to just reinforce openings where they occur, but the added time to install reinforcing later or to carefully plan opening locations and reinforce beforehand makes it cheaper to just increase the reinforcing everywhere. It saves the contractor and owner money, but wastes a lot of steel.

That time trumps material/energy efficiency is why it’s so much cheaper to just build new buildings. As Vani says:

…adaptive reuse is much more labor-intensive than new construction, because it involves the reconditioning the existing structures to adapt to modern day requirements. This dependence on human resources encourages the local community to participate and potentially revives a vernacular rhythm in architecture. This activity can remind us that vernacular architecture is one cornerstone of our identity.

Identity, lacking a clear economic value, is often ignored and few developers see past the “labor-intensive” (read: $$$) part of the sentence. For localized construction efforts at the family or neighborhood level, sweat equity can certainly bring projects down to the cost of materials (which if of the “found” variety, can be nothing), but this usually means structures built without professional assistance — structurally unsound, lacking in basic utilities.

As some sort of crazy commie, my solution tends to be that design and construction assistance should be a free service available to all. Families could take their ideas to a sort of Free Design Clinic, get guidance and materials from professionals, and then go start their projects. Sort of like the community design centers try to do, but more DIY.

More realistically, it would be possible to create market incentives for material efficiency, which goes hand-in-hand with adaptive reuse (since not demolishing is the most efficient of all). Maybe the carbon tax and trade schemes suggested as anti-climate change initiatives would have this effect as building materials became more expensive to produce. I want to believe that a green capitalism is possible, but remain skeptical.

Shown above is La Meme, a medical student dormitory in Brussels that is pretty amazing.

…to assist at-risk and former gang involved youth to become contributing members of our community through a variety of services in response to their multiple needs. Free programs — including counseling, education, tattoo removal, [...]]]> No, it’s not a new catholic rock band. Father Greg Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries, whose mission is to:

…to assist at-risk and former gang involved youth to become contributing members of our community through a variety of services in response to their multiple needs. Free programs — including counseling, education, tattoo removal, job training and job placement — enable young people to redirect their lives and provide them with hope for their futures.

Excellent organization, which features a quality cafe in East LA, whose food I highly recommend (the service is iffy, but you got to make allowance for the fact that the waiters are in the process if learning their trade.) This is a particularly important effort in a city whose gang policy has been stuck in Operation Hammer mode for years, with little attempt at addressing the underlying structural causes. Civil society has had to take up the slack, and Homeboy Industries has been one of the wonderful success stories of this effort. It’ll be exciting to see the results of these continued efforts and the recent improvement of LAPD policy re: gang interventionists.

Anyway, what prompted this is Good Magazine, who, as part of their continuing effort to be the ‘zine of all things of interest to me, has a wonderful profile of Father G. Check it out.

Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin says “We feel that it’s our obligation because of this war to shut down the recruiting station.” That’s silly. When you focus your protesting on the military, you distract from the argument over the war. It’s a staggeringly bad idea.

True (the [...]]]> Ezra Klein on Code Pink’s protest of a military recruiting station:

Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin says “We feel that it’s our obligation because of this war to shut down the recruiting station.” That’s silly. When you focus your protesting on the military, you distract from the argument over the war. It’s a staggeringly bad idea.

True (the political fallout, etc.), if all you care about is this war. But remember, that Code Pink “Calls on women around the world to rise up and oppose the war in Iraq and future wars.” If you want to reduce the future ability of the US to conduct wars of choice (a laudable goal), then decreasing the size of the military makes a lot of sense.  I think this makes it just a bad idea (the political fallout, etc.), with no staggering.

A better plan, that might be effective and consistent with the broader goals of the anti-wars movement would be to set up anti-recruitment stations (comprehensively, not just in liberal enclaves) that made their case to individuals considering military service.  You know, we report, you decide.  Less confrontation, more respectful — and it would lead to metrics by which we could judge its effectiveness (personal contacts, recruits turned around, army recruiting stations closed).

Despite the political reality of runaway nationalism that make this impossible to say by anyone with power, individual soldiers do have agency and are responsible for choosing to sign on to this war, in the same way as someone who goes to work for Enron or a Pregnancy Crisis Center is responsible for their work.  You can’t know enough about someone’s individual situation to judge their livelihood decisions (the only potential recruit I’ve ever given shit to is my brother), but I choose to believe that there’s some other, less messed-up opportunity for the two hundred thousand recruits signing up every year.  So: bad choices are being made; it’s legitimate to try to convince people of said badness; more power to Code Pink.

But, for the sake of your goals, try to Code Pink smarter.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces

Teens can get their kill on in a Christian way. Everyone wins except Satan! Unless you play as the Satanic forces. Slight bug there…

More Seriously, Zeitlin’s actual point in the above-linked commentary was that there is a [...]]]> There’s an easy solution to the controversy over evangelical churches hosting Halo Nights:

Left Behind: Eternal Forces

Teens can get their kill on in a Christian way. Everyone wins except Satan! Unless you play as the Satanic forces. Slight bug there…

More Seriously, Zeitlin’s actual point in the above-linked commentary was that there is a dearth of liberal community and few prospects for its revival. To quote:

Liberals, because of their disavowal of transcendence and pursuance of essentially rational, veil of ignorance defined politics and ideas, do not have a coherent core to build any of these social capital maximizing institutions around. Jonathan Haidt’s identification of liberals as those who value maximizing reciprocity and minimizing harm in their moral calculus — and do not consider purity, in group identification or hierarchy — gets at the core at why liberals are having difficulty building or maintaining any institutions comparable to the megachurch.

All of this to say: “liberal” is not a real term. In the electoral realm, we’re united in our desire to win against conservatives, but beyond that, want vastly different things out of government and economy. There’s not an obvious reason we should all be friends outside of campaigns. This isn’t to say that conservatives have ideological unity, but they seem to have a few major, identifiable divisions (christian vs. fiscal vs. hawk) where liberals have many, less individually significant schisms. In fact, if we could all agree on even something as vague as the ‘veil of ignorance’ as a decision-making process, that would be a big step forward.

Then, Zeitlin looks back to the golden days of the CIO as a time when these disadvantages were overcome, and widespread liberal community successfully formed.  However, this strikes me as wrong.  The 30s labor did not somehow overcome a set of community-formng disadvantages inherent to liberals — they simply didn’t have those disadvantages.  Instead they benefited from a shared, transcendent ideology: socialism.

To be sure there were divisions, but the non-professional unions were a bunch of radicals who had much more in common that current “liberals.”  That’s why when the Taft-Hartley act required (among other things) union leaders to sign statements that they were not “communists,” the CIO had to purge many members (to TNR cheers.  They’ve always been tools.)

So then, the question that community-lovers need to ask is:”How do we arrive at shared transcendent ideology?”

Union are one answer, though Zeitlin discounts them, saying: “as Andy Stern and his service workers are the most important union in the country, and since service workers are a more transitory and diverse workforce than the industrial workers of generations past, the labor movement will not be the locus of liberal community.”  This does not follow.  If the most important union has achieved success by organizing workers who are, because of the nature of their work, especially difficult to organize, that would seem to point to the great potential for a resurgent labor movement if other unions, who operate in industries with less structural disadvantages to organizing, copied Stern’s methods.

See, this is an important point that may not be obvious.  The success of SEIU and, to varying degrees, the other CTW unions has to do with how they organize.  They conduct strategic campaigns, targeting companies in markets they want to move into or who threaten the existence of workplaces they’ve already organized, rather than going wherever worker outrage is highest.  The normal union ratio of service reps to organizers is 3:1.  SEIU & co. reverse this, recognizing the necessity of growth in order to succeed against the ever-expanding companies they target.  They pioneered card-check as an organizing strategy and partner with (or create) community groups to pressure targeted companies on other social justice issues.  None of these tactics are somehow uniquely applicable to the service industries.  When (if?) these tactics are widely adopted within the labor movement, we’ll have a much better labor movement.

So even if service workers’ unions aren’t ripe sources of liberal community, it’s entirely possible to export SEIU tactics to unions where revived unionism would create community.  However, I disagree with the premise; SEIU and HERE have created community, it’s just not in places Zeitlin or I would tend to see it — unions don’t have Halo nights for the kids of their white suburban members, or Megachurch-like weekly meetings.   My anecdotal experience is that they do lead to lets of small gatherings and friendships, and the union house is still a place one can go and hang out, but that’s different from saying the union is a relevant community institution in latino and black urban populations.

Regardless, union relevance as a community would seem to be entirely proportional to union density.  Right now, one person in my friend-group is part of a union.  So it doesn’t seem relevant.  But if we all were housekeepers in a Santa Monica hotel, HERE would be an important part of our community infrastructure.

Which is to say, more and better unions is still a viable path to community.

Which reminds me of my favorite page of Days of War, Nights of [...]]]> There have been posters for “The Gamekillers” around my neighborhood for a long time (years?), but I’ve never known what it was about.  Apparently, it’s a strange deodorant-sponsored show, part of the continuing Axe campaign to ensure I realize that chemicals = girlz.

Which reminds me of my favorite page of Days of War, Nights of Love,which they would want me to steal, and quote at length:

Eight Reasons Why Capitalists Want to Sell You Deodorant.

1. Body smells are erotic and sexual. Capitalists don’t like that because they are impotent and opposed to all manifestations of sensuality and sexuality. Sexually awakened people are potentially dangerous to capitalists and their rigid, asexual system.

2. Body smells remind us that we are animals. Capitalists don’t want us to be reminded of that. Animals are dirty. They eat things off the ground, not out of plastic wrappers. They are openly sexual. They don’t wear suits or ties, and they don’t get their hair done. They don’t show up to work on time.

3. Body smells are unique. Everyone has her own body smell. Capitalists don’t like individuality. There are millions of body smells but only a few deodorant smells. Capitalists like that.

4. Some deodorants are harmful. Capitalists like that because they are always looking for new illnesses to cure. Capitalists love to invent new medicines. Medicines make money for them and win them prizes; they also cause new illnesses so capitalists can invent even more new medicines.

5. Deodorants cost you money. Capitalists are especially pleased about that.

6. Deodorants hide the damage that capitalist products cause your body. Eating meat and other chemical-filled foods sold by capitalists makes you smell bad. Wearing pantyhose makes you smell bad. Capitalists don’t want you to stop wearing pantyhose or eating meat.

7. Deodorant-users are insecure. Capitalists like insecure people. Insecure people don’t start trouble. Insecure people also buy room fresheners, hair conditioners, makeup, and magazines with articles about dieting.

8. Deodorants are unnecessary. Capitalists are very proud of that and they win marketing awards for it.