Usher: Climax

From the classic car imagery to the vocal desperation to the simple, warm beat, it's hard not to read this as heavily influenced by Frank Ocean's "Swim Good."  Usher's song is solid, but I can't say I prefer it.

 

Post-Fukushima Japan: Civil Society Rising

A quick writeup here from Daniel P. Aldritch, which is light on specifics but with a good overview of recent substantial shifts in the role of civil society in Japan.  For decades, sociologists and political scientists mourned the seeming near-absence of a civil society in Japan, but that has, at least for the moment, all changed.

Why You SHOULD Go to Graduate School

Hey, so a couple of years after writing this, I'm out of academia!  Temporarily! Maybe!  Check out my new blog, focused on my interests in weird fiction, experimental music, and generally all things so post-academic that they're not academic at all, over at Blownhorizonz.com.

I spent a good chunk of last night strolling through the excellent blog, 100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School.  I'm reading it from a particular perspective - about a year and a half after finishing grad school, now with a couple of years of good employment under my belt and a slow, tentative sense that everything might actually work out okay.  I think the blog is great because much of what it highlights is simply facts about graduate school that, apparently, people don't necessarily enter into it fully aware of - the amount of work, the need to be truly fanatical about your intellectual interests, the difficulty of writing a dissertation.  But particularly in reading the comments, it strikes me that as factual as it may be, it's obviously set up to emphasize negative possibilities, and encourages a tendency of certain people to generalize their own experience to an entire institution.  So I just want to take a second to say one thing:

I spent six years getting my PhD, and it was the best decision I possibly could have made.  Therefore, GRADUATE SCHOOL IS OBJECTIVELY AWESOME and everyone should do it.

I'll show you the life of the mind.

Okay, kidding aside. I had a great time in grad school, and I knew many other people who did as well.  There's no denying there are a larger number of people who have a negative, or just a more complicated, experience - but I think it's just as important to attract the right people as it is to warn off the wrong people. Maybe if I present where I came from to have such a positive experience (and what I'm beginning to suspect might become a good career, but who the hell knows) it'll help people make the right decision at least as much as having a list of warnings about potential negatives.

Un MU.ZZ.LE

I find myself deeply and sharply inspired by the Xanga page Findingatiger.  It's an achingly personal journal of what could probably look from the outside like a pretty boring life.  It's a real journal, but it's written with both the arcing ambition of a piece of serious fiction and, intentionally or not, in a fragmented, attention-fractured voice that either 'captures' or simply really is the way people in their twenties now think, talk, and feel.  It is literary in heft, while still being utterly trivial in content.  It makes me ask a quite serious question about how much of our life is inner and how much objective and factual.  It also encourages me to maybe try some things in this blog that I haven't tried in this or any other space in some time.

I was thinking about my life - my by many measures extremely lucky, slightly crazy, weird life over the past ten years.  And I compared it to the slight echo of disappointment that lingered in the air after all of it.  The idea that maybe I haven't been great, or that I was not entirely present for the moments that counted, or I have been so awkward-and-proud-of-it that I've missed one too many things to make my weirdness worth it.  It's impossible to know, I guess - it's like that old question about whether my 'green' is the same as your 'green,' and how could we know if we can't literally get inside one another's brains?  Maybe some people see and feel the drama and turmoil of their inner lives simply because they spend the time looking there.  Maybe I can be such a chipper dude simply because my brain chemistry is like whatever's the opposite of psychotic.

I'm listening to the new Gonjasufi album, MU.ZZ.LE.  I put it on right after the Bad Brains' I Against I, so I must be on some sort of thing.  The Bad Brains was what I put on after I bailed on Occupy Tampa for the night.  I stopped by very briefly, just long enough to hear the start of a conversation about the kitchen that I really didn't have even the slightest desire to stick around for.  A substantial part of energy in the camp is going now into these sorts of discussions - which as simple as they sound, regularly explode into massive personality conflicts that stretch over multiple meetings, night after night.  This is because the camp is made up more than anything else by asocial narcissists, including longtime homeless, travellers, borderline head cases, and apparent drug addicts.

It took less than a month for this population to make up the  critical mass of the 24/7 occupation of Occupy Tampa.  I have some serious concerns about where we go from here, despite the valiant efforts of several organizers to keep momentum going into several ongoing and exciting projects.  The idea of the 'occupation' has been so crucial to the appeal of the movement in the public eye - but I have seen much firsthand, not just in Tampa but in New York City, to suggest that in the long term these occupations might have destroyed themselves - that in fact the police in cities across the country are doing Occupy a huge image favor in decamping them before their tents become symbols, not of freedom and uprising, but of needle drug use and screaming matches.

What does this say about the ethos of the Occupy movement, its commitments to horizontalism and autonomy?  Well, it leaves me sorely tempted to declare that, at least at the very extremes, there are people for whom the chance to make their own decisions represents a clear and present danger to themselves and others.  Occupy has attracted a great number of, first, genuinely mentally ill people, and second, borderline personality types.  People shout to get attention, and turn it into a fight when shouting isn't enough.  People badmouth one another and scream and cry.  People require regular trips to the hospital from participants with cars, for injuries incurred long ago and far away.

And yet.  These people are broken, beat, tired - and yet I can't bring myself to dismiss them, to throw up my hands in despair.  They are struggling just like the rest of us.  And god knows, this is where any of us could end up if we were taken off our Xanax and put in a minimum wage job for ten years struggling to take care of kids and a wife and a house until one day suddenly it's all gone away.  Or been put out of the house at fourteen and made to fend for ourselves.  Or had to grow up transgendered in a macho Latino family.  Sometimes the cliches are just true.

We all fancy ourselves misfits, we suburban white kids and Brooklyn hipsters, but how ready are we to recognize a real one?  I've never been one of the hipster haters, I think that art is essential to progress and pretension is essential to art.  But the almost complete lack of trendy participation in Occupy has maybe disturbed the comfortable fiction I'd so long lived with that under all the superficial bullshit these people shared my discontent.  That their consumerism was, as they often claimed, somehow ironic.  But I saw a cute couple the other day, in Ray-Bans and cutoffs, and realized I've never felt more distant from people like that.  They were suddenly only slightly less offensive to me than the Britnis and Bobbys who had tormented my high school years (or at least haunted my imagination).

Occupy, at least out here in the real hinterland, is a province of the true fringe - the left behind, the kicked out, and the fucked up.  And even though I don't always look like it or often give in to it, I'm one of those myself.  I mean, I guess I must be, or why am I spending so much time with this gang of losers?  I went to the Publix Greenwise a few miles from the Occupy Tampa camp tonight - it's a kind of commercial-organics-froufrou grocery store, like a low-rent Whole Foods.  It was full of beautiful women in their early 30s, shopping alone.  They were dressed like me, in the nearly automatic neat-creative mode that comes with giving a shit and making an adult, white salary.  But there was something in their eyes, something scared and vacant and confused.  They didn't know (and here comes another true cliche) how they could still be unhappy after buying the things they had been told to want.

I can't deal with that.  And I'm also realizing: maybe the only thing stopping me from truly feeling those situations, that amazing past I've travelled through, was that I haven't spent enough time writing about it.  I am a writer - why is this not how I've been creating myself?

Delicious Old Wine, Shiny New Bottle

Have you heard? Occupy Tampa has expanded its Occupation from Curtis Hixon park to Voice of Freedom Park at 2101 W Main Street, Tampa FL 33607.  This is incredibly exciting, and represents a shot in the arm at a time when many Occupations are facing huge uphill battles.

The park is owned by Joe Redner, a local businessman and activist, who has given OT carte blanche to use the space as they see fit.  This presents all kinds of new opportunities and challenges.  The group has been forged in the fires of a months-long confrontation with the police, and the opportunity to truly organize infrastructure and facilities may allow that energy to be channeled in new and interesting directions.

Either way, the space is incredible - as you can see above, we have a fire pit!  There's also a kitchen:

And a medical tent:

There's also power and wi-fi, though there's still work ongoing to solidify the latter.  I'll be working on a more in-depth discussion of what this means and what challenges remain, but in the meantime, head on down and check it out for yourself!

(All above photos are taken from Occupy Tampa's Facebook page)

From Here On Out: Where Occupy Tampa Has Been, and Where It Can Go Next

Yesterday, Tampa Food Not Bombs and Occupy Tampa jointly held a luncheon at Voice of Freedom Park near central Tampa, Florida.  Voice of Freedom (VoF) is a park privately owned by Joe Redner, a Tampa entrepreneur and frequently outspoken public figure.  The event included not just some great food from FNB, but several great activities for local kids and training for Occupy participants.  There was some press coverage,  a good number of visitors both from out of town and from the local community.

Though it was by design small and casual, yesterday’s event represents an important evolution of Occupy Tampa specifically, and may offer some useful points of reflection for other Occupy groups. 

Ritual Unrest - On the Symbolism of Occupation

On the evening of Thursday, December 1^st, at about 8pm, a group of about 150 people operating as Occupy Tampa conducted a march from Curtis Hixon Park in Downtown Tampa to Julian Lane Riverfront Park.  After arriving at Julian Lane, members of the group held a meeting at the park’s ampitheatre and collectively agreed to establish an encampment there.  The group then moved to a small hill, where they pitched a handful of tents.  At 10:56 pm, 13 unmarked Tampa Police Department squad cars pulled into the parking lot of Julian Lane Park, and around 30 police officers moved into the park.  They issued a warning to the group of campers that they were trespassing in the now-closed park.  After allowing several members of the group to exit willingly, the police surrounded those who refused to leave.  Two hours later, 29 people had been arrested for trespassing and, in many cases, resisting arrest.

These facts, like most, do not speak for themselves.