“The vessel, though her masts be firm, beneath her copper bears a worm.”- Henry David Thoreau

American society doesn’t seem to have any shortage of techno-optimists and cheerleaders for the cult of infinite progress. You can pick your brand. There are the bitcoin bros, who want to create an even more abstract system of money than the one based on the abstraction of paper dollars and coins. There are the blood doping vamps who think they can beat death by taking the life force of the young. There are the nuclear enthusiasts who keep waiting for a breakthrough in fusion, but they are still waiting. There are the AI worshippers who think that regurgitated machine language is some kind of oracle to which they should bow down, and cast off their own human creativity. The problem isn’t their hope for a better future for themselves and their kids. That’s understandable. It’s not a popular view to take that the future won’t be better for yourself or your kids. The problem is the seemingly permanent state of glee over the very modest “accelerations” in a rather limited suite of technologies, and a devotional sincerity to overlooking the downsides of their widespread adoption.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in the American experiment and I am excited about the possibilities of our future. But that doesn’t mean I can’t cast doubt on the inherited notion of infinite progress inculcated by our society over decades. It doesn’t mean I can’t prepare for a looming second great depression. It doesn’t mean I turn a blind eye to the multiple climate change amplified natural disasters that leave communities devastated. Some never recover from those. It doesn’t mean I have to believe that a finite fossil fuel resource is somehow infinite just because we want it to be. I guess that makes me a doomer.

The techno-optimists don’t like to see the good that can come from embracing an outlook, that yes, every person, and every nation, and every civilization, has a life span of birth, growth, and decline. Looking around America right now, from my home in the Midwest rust belt, its hard not to see signs of decline all around me. There is still a lot of good stuff happening too, but it’s patched over failing infrastructure, declining mental health, and people glued to the technology that is somehow supposed to be their digital savior. Looking at these things, and seeing them for what they are, I guess that makes me a doomer.

​Here in the Ohio valley I’ve also visited a few locations known for their scary nuclear antics. Mound Laboratories in Miamisburg. Fernald. Jefferson Proving Ground. 

​Yet, despite the direct effects on the people in the area where I live (cancer, cancer, cancer), I get called a doomer if I don’t go rah-rah-rah for nuclear energy. The track record for nuclear isn’t very good. Just ask Sun Ra. 

Furthermore, nuclear energy has always existed hand in hand with the nuclear weapons industry. The one supports the other. Personally, I just don’t happen to be a fan of either.

That said, I actually don’t believe a nuclear apocalypse is that likely, at least not on the scale seen in doomer movies and read about in doomer books. Like the devastation left behind in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana there will be patches and places destroyed by nuclear power or weapons, but I don’t think Armageddon via nuclear weapons is likely to occur on a large scale. But whole areas might be destroyed, and that is sad to think about.  

Opting out of new technologies remains an option. Walking away from the notion that not everything is going to get better and better is a viable choice in face of the evidence at hand. I was born in 1979 and the standard of living has gotten lower and lower since that time.My personal wage at the place where I work has gone up, but so has the stagflation, meaning the ability I have to provide for my family is not as strong as it was for the boomers when they made the same wage I do, and who continue to hold onto a greater share of wealth. The oligarchy is also a gerontocracy, in case you hadn’t noticed.

Consider these prices: "Gasoline: In 1970, the price of a gallon of gasoline was 36 cents. Today, it averages around $3.65 per gallon—a nearly 917% increase.

New Car: A new car in 1970 cost around $3,500. Today, the price of a new car is approximately $47,000, a 1,243% increase.

Average Home: In 1970, the median home price was $23,000. In 2023, the typical home costs around $413,800—a staggering 1,700% increase.

Loaf of Bread: In 1970, a loaf of bread cost just 25 cents. Today, it costs about $2.50, reflecting a 900% increase.

Movie Ticket: The cost of a movie ticket was $1.55 in 1970. Now, it costs around $12.00—an increase of roughly 673%.

Postage Stamp: In 1970, a stamp cost just 6 cents, whereas today, it’s 66 cents—an increase of 1,000%."

That said, it does not mean I give up on doing good work for my employer, on continuing to do my own personal work, on continuing to be there for my family and friends, and make a go of things in the world. I volunteer with my ham radio club. I do special projects for the library. I continue to write and talk about all the great music coming out in the world, much of it, paradoxically, electronic! I babysit my grandkids. I visit my elders. Yet, I think that the crises around us will continue to unfold as we go down the staircase of decline. It’s a slow staircase and ragged. Gibson noted the future isn’t distributed evenly. He was right, but it’s the deindustrialized future, one where the internet might be gone in ten or fifteen or more years. Except as a plaything for the rich inside a gated community, and then limited again to the military-industrial complex, where it originated from in the first place. 

Doomers still create and make things. They just might not be advertising what they are making or doing. The things they make might just be for themselves, their families and friends. They might not be posted about online because many of them are off-grid. So in one sense they don’t exist for a lot of people. But a lot of good things can be made that are never intended for public consumption.

Other so called doomers are making businesses. Witness The Anarchist Workbench. Witness County Highway making a real newspaper when digital reading was supposed to be the gateway to the future.  Things can be done now to improve the quality of life in a declining civilization with less energy stuff and stimulation. Doing things about it is a counterweight against depression and acedia.

At the same time the techno-optimists continue to prognosticate on things that have never panned out. Somehow, though, they are always just around the corner. A few big ones include:

-nuclear fusion
-fully automated luxury capitalism-communism
-uploading ourselves into the cloud
-flying cars
-cities on the moon / mars

Everyone can look to the Soviet Union and see that it collapsed as then organized in 1991. Dmitry Orlov was there to witness it. The same has happened to other countries. The fact that it is a real possibility of happening here, in some manner is real. 

Will all technology go away? No. There is good reason to believe we can keep some limited technology going. The limit is the key though. What will the earth support and for how many people?

Techno-optimists in a way can be seen as mentally ill. They are mere consumers, waiting for the next thing to come down the pike and be fed to them, rather than learning what they can do to live when the power goes out, or some unexpected black swan wipes out their stock portfolio.

Where are all the people who told me they would become millionaires by investing in crypto? They are still working like everyone else, and not living a life of fully automated luxury. Yet that doesn't mean alternate forms of curreny aren't worth thinking deeply about, working on, and implementing. Whatever path there are no quick fixes. 

Techno-optimists get caught up in marketing hype, the belief that someone will do or discover something that will allow them to live inside the fantasy that things can just get better and better and better forever. So far, I'd say, human nature stays consistent across the millennia, no matter what technology we have, and that the technology we have now has made it easier to allow the worser demons of our conscience too much leeway. They may say doomers are the ones on a downward spiral. Maybe I listened to too much Trent Reznor in our teenage years. They like to think they are in a virtuous cycle where every experience can be optimized. Reality hacked.

Here in America, one of the great things we have going for us is our ability to disagree, to do our own thing, and despite other people not jiving with a particular worldview, our freedoms allow us to have that view and do what we can to live it out. In many ways America is a third world nation, and we are still coming to grips with our identity as such. We only climbed out of the backwater of the world thanks to the reordering of empire that occurred following World War II. Now as it schizophrenically disintegrates we are struggling from the stress of multiple personality disorder. Yet the paradox is that our dissensus and disagreement actually can lead to our resilience. It's part of what makes this countries experiment worth continuing. We are allowed to choose our own reality tunnel. And there are a plethora to choose from.

The view from one tunnel frequently contradicts the view from another. It can be helpful to try and see from another persons point of view. But the doomer reality tunnel might have something to offer the techno-optimists. We can help them zoom out to see that every nation, every age, has a natural life span. Western industrial civilization is going further into its dotage. What we do about that is up to us. But there is much to be done and save and passed on that is good from the life it has lived, saving what works for whatever societies come next.

In the meantime go outside and take a hike in the woods or do some forest bathing. Hang out with your loved ones. There is still so much worth doing.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.   I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

What happened to the ecological utopian visions and visionaries that came out of the counterculture of the fifties, sixties, and seventies? Prior to the role reversal of hippies into yuppies, of the back to the land dreams transformed into jobs at a bank, a life in suburbia, and 2.5 kids, there had been an Aquarian counterculture. Those Aquarians carried a strain of thought critical of technology, unafraid of our biology, inspired by ecology, and considered alternate economies and the prospects for degrowth as a way to shift culture. This nascent tradition aimed to put the brakes on the endless expansion of the industrial system represented by all things Establishment, man. If endless growth can be thought of as a synonym for cancer, then the push for progress at all costs is metastasis. These Aquarians sought another way.

Anthony Galluzzo’s book Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today, looks at these neglected Aquarian visionaries in an effort to rattle the hypermodernist cages and the addled worldview promulgated by the transhumanist inmates of Silicon Valley.

​To do this Galluzzo uses the schlocky yet profound seventies scifi film Zardoz as his lens. That makes his sumptuous word feast all the more delectable. The seventies produced some of the best scifi films of all time. Many of my own favorites are from that era and most of them had messages worthy of heeding. Soylent Green, based on the novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison showcased one possibility of the effects of global warming. Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 was a fever vision of a United States government converted into a totalitarian regime and reality show. To hide all the civil unrest caused by economic ruin they created a reality TV show (nothing prescient there, cough, cough) with drivers engaged in blood sport careening and crashing into eachother on a coast to coast kill spree that probably made even made J.G. Ballard blush. Writer and director Michael Chrichton brought Coma to the screen, based on the novel by Robin Cook. It centered on an organ harvesting conspiracy within the medical industrial complex. The film Silent Running showed what could happen to our forests and trees if we continue to give way to purely extractive economies. Zardoz fits in well with these and other films from the decade. For those who have yet to see this one, you may know it best by the reputation it has garnered form lead actor Sean Connery’s loin and groin costume, best described as a big red diaper.

Zardoz was written, produced and directed by John Boorman, the same guy who gave us Deliverance, Excalibur, and The Emerald Forest, among other iconic films. It takes place in the year 2293 and the world is as divided as ever. This time the divisions fall between the impotent but supposedly enlightened “Eternals” and those who don’t know how to read but know how to fight and get it on, called the “Brutals.” To keep the savages from killing everyone, a strange giant stone head floats around and commands a group of people known as exterminators to kill these other killers. Sean Connery’s character is one of these exterminators. In the process of learning that the stone headed god is not a god, but a kind of spaceship operated by a man a behind the curtain, a kind wizard of oz, the exterminator bucks the system and penetrates the “Vortex,” a world of scantily clad mystical midriffs where the Eternals dwell. The story touches on themes of eugenics, hierarchical population control, AI, and the degradation of the natural world.

The Brutals have to live in an irradiated industrial wasteland and grow food for the Eternals whose existence, though without meaning, is full of luxury. It sounds rather like the rightward end of the accelerationism, and neocameralist visions of corporate sovereignty, i.e., the feudalist tech-corp company town model embraced by Elon Musk and his Starbase. Consider this just another way that artists are capable of predicting aspects of our futures. Other possible real-world Vortexes now underway include the giant neighborhood Google is planning around its HQ in Mountain View, California or the “Zucktown” Meta is creating in Menlo Park. You can’t expect tech executives and their cohorts to be bothered with anything as essential to actual life as farming. That’s too biological. Too flesh oriented. Too dirty. 

Then Zed came along, a non-computable black swan event that brought chaos to rigidly calcified order. 

            Galluzzo’s reading of the film is “as another sort of ‘social science fiction,’ one that is also archaeological, as I excavate a broader post-Sixties movement and current of thought— decelerationist, neo-Luddite, and counter-modernist—of which Zardoz was a part. This constellation was an important forerunner of degrowth, among other contemporary movements, that see in a certain developmentalist imperative that defines the modernization process the root of our current social, ecological, and existential crises… [that] challenges us to think utopia and limits together in a way that is inexplicable to those ‘Star Trek socialists’ who cannot distinguish freedom and flourishing from Faustian final frontiers; in fact, Zardoz is very much a Swiftian riposte to Star Trek and the Promethean fever dreams of postwar science fiction. It is only after the ‘future’ and among the ruins that we will build our necessarily imperfect utopias.”

            Much of this tradition that was concerned with slowing down the pace of supposed progress has now been buried or put away into a cobwebbed corner of the counterculture. The environmental movement, for all its gains, has just as often been co-opted when it would been better if it had continued to be co-oped, held within a collective and cooperative framework on the fringes of the corporate system. Greenwashers have long since replaced green grocers. Key voices whose work would resonate together across an interconnected landscape have been sidelined as Promethean techno-utopias and the emissaries of transhumanism have gained ascendance. To look at one of the ways that played out, let’s take a brief detour into the world of Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog, which Galluzzo also touches on.

The rejection of the ethos encapsulated by the Whole Earth Catalog and it’s “access to tools” around ecology, self-reliance, the DIY ethic, appropriate technology and alternative education can be seen in the way Stewart Brand, its publisher, increasingly came to see computers as a means for liberation. In the process the ecological vision that the catalog originally championed was downplayed in favor of cybernetic connection. This is understandable given how big a fan of systems thinking Brand was, of how hard he worked at getting the work of people like Gregory Bateson, with his work on cybernetics and ecology, into the hands of a wider audience.
​
             The last issues of the catalog that truly adhered to the vision came out in 1974. Other issues followed, but many of these, like the 1977 issue, dealt with such fantasies as space colonies, or tellingly in 1984, the Whole Earth Software Review. Fear of Big Brother gave way to love of Big Brother. The eventual McGovCorp ownership of the cybermedia should come as no surprise given that it was built on technology engineered by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). A modernist and post-modernist vision of futurism dominated the former Aquarian milieu as the early Whole Earth Catalog was discarded in favor of a World Wide Web. Computers have excelled as information exchange systems, yet they have now reached a point where they have become our own mind forged media manacles. As that web proliferated, dreams of free communication and information exchange were trampled over by platform after platform during the internet’s wild west years, and its promise cashed in for filthy lucre, and filthy lucre traded in for technocratic control. 

​Brand may have given up on back to the land communes in favor of space colonies, as he became an advocate of, but his wasn’t the only game in town with regards to the ethos around appropriate technology. Many others in the sixties and seventies were writing about how to get by while leaving a smaller footprint on the planet, and how to flourish while doing so. Ernest Callenbach’s novel Ecotopia came out in 1975 and it gave popular voice to a number of the ideas being exchanged within the milieu. Other writers such as Christopher Alexander and Paolo Soleri looked at the way the built environment could be refashioned in favor of human life instead of factories and machines. Others such as the New Alchemy Institute looked at ways to redesign our support systems of food, water and shelter, and in the process created amazing bioshelters, aquacultures and other innovations, that if followed, could have alchemized our way of living. Other investigators, such as those at the Farallones Institute, pursued research into “integral urban living.” There were myriad others who pursued some form of organic gardening, food co-ops, alternative education systems, and related subjects in a search for new ways of living as traditional had been lost to industrialization. With the energy crisis of the time unfolding around them, and books like the Limits to Growth in heavy circulation, there was an awareness that the orgy of energy given by access to cheap fossil fuels couldn’t last forever.

The writers around appropriate tech weren’t the only architects looking to build “degrowth utopias.” There was a group of thinkers, connected not so much by shared ideologies as by conceptual resonance that are who Galluzzo calls “Critical Aquarians.” That he brings these thinkers together under a shared moniker was one of my favorite things about his book, as they really do fit together, and their work is important for regenerating this rich vein of thought.

            Who are these Critical Aquarians? Some include James Lovelock, known for his Gaia hypothesis. Others are Ursula K. Leguin for her writings on the possibility of anarchist societies in novels like the Dispossesed or the ecological questions posed in her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Other people he gives the Critical Aquarian moniker to are thinkers like Norman O. Brown who looked at the way eroticism and civilization have been at odds with each other, and reclaimed some of the bodycentric mysticism of Jacob Boheme and William Blake.

Galluzzo also puts Ivan Illich in the Critical Aquarian camp. At a time when the institutions of education are being attacked and questioned by federal institutions, educators might do well to look again at works by Illich such as his book Deschooling Society, where he writes, “The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” Illich’s work Tools of Conviviality where he explores these kinds of webs gives readers a real sense of the ways everyday people can create their own tools to bypass the structures imposed by the technocratic elite.

 In delineating and beginning to assemble those who fit into the Critical Aquarians, Galluzzo gives us a way to trace the theoretical underpinning that can work to compliment the visionaries of the appropriate tech movement. That he manages to do this using what some might consider lowbrow material makes it all the more interesting. But, just in case you were wondering, the use of Zardoz is not a fetishitic “retromania” by any means. In fact, one of the other reasons I fell under the spell of this book, is because it is a useful foil for some of the arguments made by the late influential theorist Mark Fisher and the ideas he put forth in his book Capitalist Realism and other writings. Fisher’s mourning of a lost modernist futurism always rather irritated me, even as I nodded along in agreement with many of his ideas. Indeed, Galluzzo writes, “under labels such as ‘left accelerationism’ and ‘fully automated luxury communism,’ we can detect an ironically backward-looking desire for those high-modernist ‘lost futures’ of the twentieth century, to invoke cultural critic Mark Fisher, that supposedly offer us the lineaments of a better world.” In a critical endnote Galluzzo remarks, “the ‘lost futures’ in Zardoz and so many of the other, comparable works from the time, are interrogations, and often outright rejections of the modernist futurism Fisher mourns, even as these works outline alternatives outside Promethean techno-utopianism, capitalist and socialist alike.”

            For those of us who desire something other than fully automated luxury capitalism or communism, Galluzzo’s text offers key theoretical pointers. One of the many points that he and the Critical Aquarians elucidate upon is an acceptance of death. This would be a stark rejection of the transhumanist visions of escaping our own biology. Instead, it is an embrace of biology, and with it an embrace of limits. Death is the ultimate limit. Instead of viewing that as something that needs to be transcended or a problem to be solved, death can instead be used as a way to make all of life much more precious. This is something Galluzzo gets into in the last part of his little book, and something I hope to hear him write about further in the future.

            If you are lucky enough to have a VCR that hasn’t died, cuddling up a copy of this text and watching Zardoz is the perfect decelerationist remedy for slowing down and tapping into other ideas about what our futures might be.

​Against the Vortex: Zardoz and Degrowth Utopias in the Seventies and Today by Anthony Galluzzo was published in 2023 by Zer0 Books.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.   I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​“Under the paving stones, the beach!” – French graffito 

Greetings and welcome back to Cheap Thrills, your source for speculation on the spectacle of modern living, and how to sidestep it by downshifting into a lifestyle less reliant on the systems of media entertainment pushed by McGovCorp. In this edition I’m going to head out on an excursion to extol the many virtues of taking a stroll and how the simple act of walking in this world can become a profound pastime. To that rambling end I will examine the tradition of the flâneur, the concept and practice of the dérive, and psychogeography. Along the way I’ll look at how industrial culture reordered traditional notions of space and time, and how the nascent topology of deindustrial culture might in turn cause new flows in time and space. 

            Walking is the most perfect exercise. It stretches and strengthens the body as it eases and expands the mind.  As the industrial revolution transformed the cities of the world, walking around the city also became a chance to observe the ways society was changing.

             Enter the flâneur .

            The word is derived from the Old Norse flana, which translates as “to wander aimlessly.”[1] The word found its way to France in the late 19th century, where flânerie gained currency to describe people wandering about without apparent direction, rhyme or reason; the people who engaged in this pastime were called flâneurs.[2] These were the idlers, people of leisure who transformed the mere act of taking a walk into an artful practice.  Observing the rhythms of the city, the flâneur is a passerby, just one of many, a person lost in the faceless crowd. Mesmerized by his or her own thoughts, the flâneur sifts through the secret strata of the city and comes to know its many mysteries.

            The practice of flânerie materialized at time when factories spewed coal smoke from their snouts like dragons of iron, when industrialization vivisected the streets with strangling traffic, when forge and foundry vomited pollutants into air and stream, when the labyrinthine passages and glass arcades of Paris were turned into homogeneous boulevards. The flâneur was there to explore the metamorphosis of urban renewal amidst the defilement of the old. Walking, they soaked in the modern metropolis as a spectacle: they were inside of it, yet through the act of watchful observation, they remained detached and apart.
       
     The word and concept may be French, but the literary origins of the concept came first from American writer Edgar Allan Poe and his short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840). The story centers on a man living in London who has just recovered from a long illness and who is finally able to get outside and onto the streets of the city again. Still fragile, he parks himself in a coffee shop and is enraptured by watching the coming and going of the passing crowds. First he sees them as a swarm of humanity. Then his view zooms in closer to observe different classes and occupations of people: the aristocrats, lawyers, merchants and clerks, common drunkards, pickpockets, ragamuffins and riffraff.  The narrator neatly categorizes each person, until an old man comes into view whose countenance grabs his “whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.” He becomes obsessed by this figure and thinks this man has a hidden power inside him, some kind of secret knowledge or history. He becomes so obsessed he can’t let him out of sight. So he follows him out onto the street, and it becomes a story of one man walking in a meandering circumambulation through byzantine thoroughfares following another walker. In his compulsion he follows the man until daybreak, then again all the next day until the sun disappears into night, finally acquiescing to the fact that however much he observes this person, he will never truly know the man of the crowd.[3] 

      French poet, essayist and philosopher Charles Baudelaire was a big fan of Poe, and a translator of Poe’s works into French. He was rather taken by the ideas Poe presented in his story and built on the idea of the restless city observer in his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” In one crucial section of Baudelaire’s peregrinating essay he draws a comparison between Poe’s protagonist and the artist Constantin Guys, and then uses Guys as a template to flesh out his vision of the flâneur:[4]

 The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amidst the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of those slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life who makes his whole world his family […] thus the lover of universal life enters the crowd as if it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy.

Baudelaire’s figure who walked and strolled through the lanes of life, often decked out as a dandy, as Guys was, became crucial to his understanding of the complex relationships between the individual and the masses inside the industrialized metropolis. A transformation in the consciousness of the city dweller coincided with urban economic transformation. The pressing in of people on all sides, the stratification and striation of the social classes, enterprise and business always on the go, twenty-four hours a day in full swing: all of this is enough to set anyone’s nerves on edge. Walking became a coping mechanism for those citizens who had what might now be called sensory processing disorder, a way to remain invisible by blending in with the swarm; and yet also a way to maintain autonomy from the swarm by cultivating the habit of detached observation and contemplation as an individual distinct from the concrete anthills of humanity. Walking remains a way to cope as industrial society breaks. Mind and body have a chance to reintegrate away from the fragmentation of spectacular digital life, while reassessing the possibilities of a disintegrated built environment.

As the habit of flânerie was taken up by the bohemian set, it worked its way from Symbolist poets, exemplified by Arthur Rimbaud’s precocious and prodigious tramping, on to the early modernists such as Walter Benjamin, who was the next to stamp his impressions on the term. For him the flâneur became an investigator of the city, a kind of journalist and amateur detective who made connections between the clue of a street sign, the evidence of architecture, and the forensics of local events and current conditions. These coalesced inside the mind of the observant walker until the code of modern life was cracked.

Benjamin also thought the flâneur was “a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.” In building on Baudelaire’s work Benjamin formulated two terms to describe opposite ways of reacting to the modern city. Erlebnis described the stress brought on by the sensory overload. To cope with Erlebnis he saw people retreating into a numbed-out, anesthetized life. On the other end of the spectrum was Erfahrung, which represented the enjoyment of mobility and the multitude of sensory textures the city had to offer.  

I see the deindustrial urban walker existing in a third point, triangulating the two ends of Benjamin’s spectrum, and mixing in with them the crucial element of imagination. As the walker’s feet wander, so the mind wonders on its own meandering paths. As the feet traverse the layered history of a neighborhood, so memories from a person’s past are also elicited. Interwoven with these come stray thoughts from the astral static, ruminations, and other glints from subtle and diaphanous realms. Discursive meditations are assisted in this ambulatory mode. The clues gleaned are insights that help resolve the mystery of how best to live in the days of decline. 

The artistic potential of walking gained further recognition from Guy Debord during his time in the Lettrist International (LI) and then the Situationist International (SI), whose members included sound and visual poets, filmmakers, political revolutionaries, and a cadre of bohemians just hanging around for the party.  When they weren’t drinking and talking in bars, they drifted around the city on long walks, and these walks became a major theme for the groups. Debord dubbed this practice the dérive, which literally means drifting, and he differentiated this from the classic notion of a walk or stroll by placing further emphasis on the way geography affects psychology and psychology affects geography. It’s not an original idea, but he was able to express it in an artistic and political language that was rather catching:

​On the one hand the drift was a way for them to cope with the spectacle of the city. It allowed them to discover a new city within the old, by studying it at different times in different lights and alternate points view. It was also a major tool for escaping boredom and the banality of workaday life. The drifts aroused their passions, their love for adventure and discovery. 

Those who share these adventurous predilections may find their peripatations also take them into the underworld of urban spelunking and the exploration of abandoned buildings that litter the world’s decayed urban landscapes. Those who become adept at this skill may even be able to parlay it into a way of earning a living. I can see a role for guides versed in the practice of urban exploration paid to retrieve objects or people from dangerous and poisoned locations of the deindustrial future.

            One of the psychogeographical games played by members of the LI and SI was called the possible rendezvous. A person is invited to go alone to a square, café, park, or other location at a preordained time. With no one to meet and no one to wait for, the player of this game is freed from keeping up small talk, or listening to a friend’s impressions, and so has more mental space to allow the surroundings to seep in. The possible rendezvous was also used to encourage a person to think of new ways to use time: in conversations with a stranger, in staring at a sidewalk, in witnessing something unexpected. The person who set the appointment may even turn up. If these rendezvous are organized by a large enough pool of participants, the parties may not even know each other. It’s a game that can help mix up the habits and routines of daily life. Games such as these can help a person become more agile and antifragile. As futures become more uncertain in terms of resource availability and unpredictable catastrophes, the ability to engage situations and people with a spontaneous awareness becomes an asset.

Tours became detours in this milieu. Going the long way around, or going the wrong way altogether, turned out to be a road into new places and psychological situations. Detouring cleared the path for one of the key strategies of the SI: détournement, a word that means “rerouting” or “hijacking.” It is shorthand for the phrase “détournement of preexisting aesthetic elements.” The practice involved taking preexisting works of literature, art, maps, sound, film and whatever else they could get their hands on, and reworking it into something new. Détournement treats all of culture as a common property for the artist to make creative reuse of. It actively encouraged all modification and transformation derived from old works into new works; it incited the deformation and reformation of cultural materials as an active position of agency and challenge. From highbrow to lowlife, from posh to pulp, all are fair game for fair use in a grand mash-up. In my mind détournement represents an early technique for cultural synthesis, beneficial as a way of retrofitting existing cultural artifacts into forms more useful for a world wracked by extreme weather events and energy shortages. Détournement could also be further developed as an art of combinations, potentially as one component towards a real-life Glass Bead Game.

To return from this meandering sidetrack, the Situationists took old city maps, cut them up and collaged them into new maps as part of their work. These détourned cartographies were used to reach places that didn’t exist before. Instead of looking for lines that made borders they looked for lines that made connections, pasted these together and attempted to follow them into imaginal territories. Cutting up a map and rearranging it cuts through time as well as space. Following such a détourned map gives odds to overlooked potentials. 

            To walk in 21st-century America is to have the experience of a schizophrenic. The psychological state of our cities is as split and cracked as its concrete and asphalt. Past the crumbling plazas with their succession of empty shops, past the gas stations with their promises of high-speed travel and convenience, another mental state of the union exists. This reality is waiting to be touched by a new breed of deindustrial flâneurs. It can be found underneath the bridges, where mini neighborhoods of tents and cardboard are set up to escape the rain, past the fringe dwellers who wait for derelict metro buses as the fumes of the frenzied motorcade sift into the dust-colored sky, past the rusted-out, broken-down vehicles of an exhausted country.

      As the phantom existence of the metaverse disappears into a mess of tangled wires, the streets will need to be revived.  Walking allows a person to see the world at a natural pace. Car travel rushes over the terrain, while on slow, observant strolls, details erupt from the landscape.

     Where the 19th-century flâneur was a spy on assignment in the world of consumption, the 21st-century flâneur is a vagabond fleeing the boredom of McGovCorp’s televised internment couch, looking to see what might remain and become of the city as the post-industrial marketplace shudders and shutters its doors, as the age of fossil fuels sputters and convulses. The deindustrial flâneur is an advance scout reporting on how the remaining detritus might be rearranged and combined into more useful arrangements.

      “Far-off times and places interpenetrate the landscape,” Benjamin said. Layers of history are present in the parade of architecture. Walking is a visceral way to learn local histories. Deindustrial flâneurs can become repositories for local lore that becomes the connective tissue between time and place.

     My wife Audrey and I have always enjoyed walking around our hometown and surrounding areas. It’s helped me to internally map the land I dwell on. Since 2019 we have been exploring the region a bit more systematically with the help of a guidebook (Walking Cincinnati). It’s a nice guide; it lays out walking routes for over thirty different neighborhoods; interspliced amidst the directions are choice tidbits of history that have given us have a greater appreciation for the heritage in our hometown. On one walk in the neighborhood of Glendale we stopped by the Swedenborgian Church where Johnny Appleseed was a congregant during his time in the area, and it imparted a sense of wonder to know that legacy is still with us.

While guidebooks like these don’t ever go too deep into details, they do serve as a point of introduction to the layers of the past still present. Building, street, and neighborhood names come alive when you know something of the biography of the people they honor. Another way to soak up local history from the ground up is to take frequent walks in graveyards, noting the names on stones of interest. The bits I’ve found really exciting often call for further research, another cheap thrill that can occupy hours of time inside libraries and archives and at the meetings of historical societies. These venues also provide opportunities to make friends with new people who share common interests. As the industrial age continues to unravel and once commonly agreed-upon understandings of history fall apart, all this research stands to become fodder for the propagation of new histories by which the future might better understand its past.

     If you happen to be lucky enough to live in a place where the buildings aren’t all brutal, where there is more brick, wood or stucco than siding, where the roofs are gabled and the windows are Folk Victorian style, then you may also benefit from an architectural guidebook, which adds another layer of enjoyment to an urban hike. Learning about the various types of houses (Italianate, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival…) gives a greater appreciation for the design of diverse domiciles. Knowing something of domestic and traditional architecture brings an awareness of the psychological effects of various buildings, often in counterpoint to the obloid shapes the architects of more recent structures have wrought on the landscape. The go-to book in my household is A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia Savage MacAlester.
             
            In all this talk of walking I’ve barely even mentioned the rural, the stretches between the towns which are perfect for rambling, for scrambling down ravines and up to high lookouts. While the flâneur remains the iconic literary walker of the urban wild, there is a class of wayfarers more at home along the brakes of creeks and down old country lanes adorned with unmortared stone walls where the mullein and mugwort bloom. Here the example of such writers as John Clare, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson may be of inspiration.

            When we drift, the spaces we inhabit are not just traveled through, but are experienced. When we invest them with time spent walking and learning they become invested with meaning. No matter where one lives, whatever the size of one’s income or lack thereof, the act of heading out for a walk opens the door to new zones of perception, to mental and physical liberty.

.:. .:. .:.

The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.   I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

FURTHER RE/SOURCES:
Here are just a few books to stuff into your backpack for reading on a bench next time you head out into the urban wilds.

Baudelaire, Charles. 1992. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Jonathan Mayne, trans., ed. Rochester, Vt.: Phaidon Books.

Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, trans. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

Cameron, Julia. 2003. Walking in this World: The Practical Art of Creativity. New York, N.Y. Penguin.
• This book is a sequel to Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and focuses on exercises and thoughts on manifesting creativity centered around the practice of walking. She encourages writers, musicians and artists of all stripes to take a weekly walk and this book is filled with a multitude of suggestions for sustaining the imagination.
Debord, Guy. “Definitions,” “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” “The Theory of the Dérive,” “Two Accounts of the Dérive.” Situationist International Online.  <https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html>

McAlester , Virginia Savage. 2019. A Field Guide to American Houses: The Definitive Guide to Identifying and Understanding America’s Domestic Architecture. New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf.

McDonough, Tom. 2002. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Several of the essays in this collection by Debord and others get into ideas about cities, urbanism, and architecture.

​Ninjalicious. 2005. Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration. [ See infiltration.org ]

• This is the guidebook for getting into places you are not supposed to be. From behind-the-scenes areas of in-use buildings, to abandoned sites, to drainage systems and other urban underground areas. Explore at your own risk.

Poe, Edgar Allan. 1987. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York, N.Y.: Mystic Press.

Wark, McKenzie. 2011. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Verso.
• This book is the best I’ve come across for putting Guy Debord, the Situationists, and their whole milieu into a social and historical context.

​
[1]      https://www.etymonline.com/word/flaneur

[2]      While the word flâneur historically implied the masculine, modern advocates recognize it as something that can be applied equally to women as well as men. In French the word passante was used as female equivalent, particularly in the works of Marcel Proust. Twenty-first-century academics have used the word flâneuse to designate the female version. For the purpose of this column I’ll be using the word flâneur as something applicable to all sexes. 

[3]     Poe’s story is great. The main character is also a bit stalky. I’m not advocating people go out and follow strangers around.

[4]     It was also in this essay that Baudelaire coined the term “modernity.”

This essay originally appeared in New Maps, Volume 2, Issue 1 from the Winter of 2022

Standby for failure. It is inevitable if you want to live a life of action. Of not standing by. Of doing and making your own things instead of being fed the garbage churned out by the corporate spectacle.

Do you think there is no future for you? There may not be within the preordained choices promulgated by straight society. But the future is at least partially amenable to our own interventions. If you don’t want to be just a fly on the wall, to live a life where nobody notices you and all you do is observe the actions of others, it can be helpful to get off your shit, detach yourself from looking at whatever the fuck other people are doing, and chart a course of your own.

The current state of our disintegrating culture would have us all feeding off the corporate tit, our brains plugged in to a digital matrix. Down home punks reject this insolvency. The only debt worth having is the debt to our family, friends, and ourselves – the debt to do better. We are free to pursue a course with no commercial potential. Yet often, what was deemed by the business world to be unvaluable has proved to be a viable way of making a living -and more importantly a way of living a life.

To multi-national corporate America, most of us, and whatever scraps of community are left, are just pawns inside an abstract data stream, numbers in a game, and they only take notice when those numbers fluctuate below the level they like or when there is a glitch in the system. Our soi distant overlords in the corporate managerial class have demanded that our lives be less lived, be depersonalized by consumption and playing the pawn in their game, and this has led many into quagmires of inaction and internal querulousness.

​Jon Lydon noted how “anger is an energy.” Apathy is the lack of that energy. And while many of us punks prefer the equanimity of peace, it seems that over time, anger has given way to a pestilence of inaction, afear of doing. It is a catatonia of anhedonia 

Yet the undercurrent of anger is there, and it has been there, and it can be tapped into. On the chessboard of life, refuse to be a pawn.  The authenticity and the ferocity, the energy that comes from doing your own thing in face of the prevailing winds opens oneself up to new eddies and swirls within the crosscurrents. Lean into the wind.

Instead of “do it yourself” there is a “do it for me” attitude, propped up by being habituated to the servile service industry. I think part of it is a kind of Stockholm syndrome resulting from being held hostage to interests that are better served by people being consumers rather than producers. These systems seem to encourage a heightened awareness of alienation.

At one time punk was about transgression, but transgression has become banal. And there is nothing more dull than banal. Our society transgresses every day. Transgress a healthy diet by eating Doritos and twinkies. Transgress a healthy boundary by revealing too much to strangers on the internet. Transgress our needs by giving into our wants and buying more plastic crap that serves no purpose. The temptation to transgress comes daily and those transgressions are rewarded by those who believe in putting no limit on their desires or the things they deserve.

But such a life is hardly satisfactory, and those with a conscience can feel the way these transgressions eat away at their integrity. The old adage that money can’t buy happiness still applies. The number of “likes” received on social media content will also not deliver the ultimate good, though it may deliver dopamine in increasingly small amounts.

The material affluence and corruption of decadent America has led to a withering of our self-control, and as those fruits have died on the vine, so too has our self-respect. Though the United States has been in sharp decline since the 1970s, we still live in a country that, for the time being, has a greater share of the earths limited resources. Within this affluence people have gotten bored on the glut of material out there for their minds to glue themselves too, rather than do anything on their own. Amidst the trappings of external wealth, we have become paupers with regards to the inner dimensions of life. This leads to our terminal boredom as the spectacle never brings true fulfillment.

Let’s just say you’d better have great discipline and a very rich interior life if you expect to be happy amid great affluence. If this is true of individuals, that money doesn’t buy happiness, why can’t it be true of a whole society?

The spectacle would have us all sit still inside a terminal waiting room, holding our breath, listless, flipping through magazines and taking in their ads and messaging, until our name is called. I say don’t wait for your name to be called, but get up and do something. Cancel the meeting with the higher authorities and make your own appointment with destiny.​

The monks of the Christian tradition had a name for the spiritual sickness of not wanting to do jack shit. They called it acedia. Weakness of will is not the curse of our time alone, though in our time it may be exacerbated by all the things around us that can sap the unwary of their will.

From the Greek, acedia is a word that means, “indifference, lethargy, exhaustion, and apathy.” This monk dude named Evagrius of Pontus wrote about acedia back in the 4th century, when he compiled a list of temptations known to plague those living the monastic life. As these became codified over time these temptations became the well-known seven deadly sins and the experience of acedia became better known as sloth.

Today this can be seen as a general aversion to activity, to taking action. For the most part this seems to be an acquired behavior -or lack of behavior. Sloth thrives on confusion and disengagement, two things the spectacle continues to provide. Confusion from the malfeasance wrought by a media now allied to the state, and disengagement by being fed a constant supply of dubious entertainments.

Leave the meh behind and get stoked. Blahness is so boring and passé. Excitement and interest generate resonance and relation and lead to activity in the areas of one’s interests. At a time when the noonday demon seems to be present at all hours of the day, buckling down to some good old-fashioned work may be the best thing to keep the demon at bay. This doesn’t have to be work for the system, for Babylon, or laboring for the false glory of making a manager look good.

A new self-respect can be built from taking on obligations -to oneself and to others outside the orbit of corporate control.  The good feelings generated by doing something voluntarily, by oneself or as a group, were part of the fuel that kept the punk rock engine burning.

Fulfillment comes from other things, and one of those is action. Distance oneself from the fear of failure and do whatever you can to put a leash on apathetic catatonia.

Living only on the internet tends to catch a person up in an abstract intellectual world. But reality, and its material components, are not primarily abstract. The abstractions society has found itself embracing from modernity to post-modernity to the atomizing effects of the internet, tend exacerbate this embrace of the abstract. What is happening online seems more real than what is happening outside the frame of the television, computer and smart phone screens. What is needed to counteract this late-capitalist abstraction is tending to the concrete. Even more than tending to the concrete, tending to the soil.

​Too many choices is no choice at all. So make one. Work with the hands and get out of the head.  

.:. .:. .:.

he  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.   I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here. ☕️☕️☕️ 
​Thank you to everyone who helps support the art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

When I first started collecting music the medium of choice was tape. My older sister had a grand collection of cassingles -all the greatest pop and rock hits from the late eighties and early nineties on short cassettes. She could buy one at a time, at a cheaper price, than paying for a tape of the whole album. She did get whole albums on tape -for some of her favorite groups, but often a cassingle would suffice. One to three or four tracks, sometimes with an instrumental on the B side, so you could sing it yourself. When I started buying my own music, tapes were the medium I (my parents) could afford. Allowances could be saved up for a tape, or they’d get me one as a special treat, along the lines of the paperback books and comics they bought for me too. Thanks mom and dad. I know you worked hard for stuff you didn’t like yourself and even found quite questionable.           

​At the time CD’s were still expensive, and we didn’t have a CD player in the house, probably until sometime in the nineties. It was just boomboxes with a tape player, or my sisters non-component stereo system. I still remember my first tape, the one I bought at what is now a dead mall, Forest Fair Mall. We went there to celebrate my eleventh birthday with a few friends from the street. I grabbed Anthrax’s, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tape, that had their “I’m the Man” track on it, which I’d heard from an older metalhead down the street. My mom wanted to take it back after she found it out what it was on the tape, but somehow I got her to let me keep it. There are advantages to being the youngest of three, as my older sisters never forget to tell me. 

​​I’m not quite sure what my first CD was, but I do know that when I got into punk a few years later, so much of it was on cassette. Taped by my older friend Andy Gable, who turned me on to so much good music, and then by other people. All of us made mix tapes and traded them with each other all the time. Some were for courting. Some were for tripping. Some were for rocking out.
            When I really started buying CDs I was drifting more and more into electronic music and industrial material. One of the first ones I bought was the Future Sounds of London, Lifeforms. I remember my friend Erik criticized it saying it was just a bunch of sound effects, but for me it was a doorway into my ambient listening habit which has continued to this day.
            Recently, while reorganizing the home multimedia library, I went through my entire CD collection and weeded it out. Periodic weeding is necessary in any collection if you want it to remain a collection, and not slip into the realm of the hoarder. It might be a fine line, and I realize I might get some flak for the idea of weeding the collection all, especially from my hoarder friends. Sometimes I’ve weeded and regretted what I got rid of… but most of the time, I haven’t missed the things I let go of. Hopefully they are making someone else happy now instead of just sitting on my shelves.

​​For awhile I stopped buying CDs, around the time when I stopped being a regular programmer on WAIF. Between 2001 and 2014 when I was on the air very regularly, towards the end, I got burned out and even got sick of listening to music. I got over that sickness after about a two-year break. Then I got into it again.
            Well, I never really totally stopped buying CDs or ever stopped listening. But a break from the way I had been doing it was necessary. When doing the two-hour radio show every other week or every week, I needed to have a constant supply of new stuff to play. Or I felt like I did anyway.
During the pandemic and when I’d gotten my musical mojo back, I started getting into building a Bandcamp and adding to my cache of files on the hard drive. Another collection built around things I ripped from the library and from friends.
Yet I still love a CD. I love reading the liner notes. I love the way it is easy to rip them to use in a DAW when making mixes for Imaginary Stations. And though I’m not on WAIF every week anymore, I do go up a few times a year to fill in for Ken Katkin’s Trash Flow Radio, and I still think the best way to do the show is to make two fully loaded mixed CD’s that I can then select from while on the air.
And I never stopped scouring the thrift store for CD’s or going through the bins of used CDs at the record store. It’s interesting because my local shop, Shake It!, doesn’t really even have a new CD section anymore. I spent a lot of money there on CD’s before the vinyl boom took off again. Now the store is very different than it was in terms of all the new music that is out on vinyl and all the used music is on CD. The trend has flip-flopped. I do buy vinyl, but not in huge quantities.
             Getting used CD’s has really come into its own again. It’s a great time for CD collectors to go out on the hunt again, because people are ditching their physical collections in favor of streaming. I think that’s a mistake, because unless you are your own streaming platform, ISP, or have your own internet radio station, someone else will always have control over your ability to access, download, or get to the music you want to hear and listen to.
            Sure, someone can rob or steal your physical stuff, or it could disappear without you knowing what happened, as if often the case when small little things get stolen by elves and pixies. Sure, physical media can be destroyed. Certainly, you can’t take your CD collection with you when the body is set aside at physical death. But perhaps some collectors will want to be buried with their media. None-the-less, if you want to listen to music offline, now is a good time to start raking through the used bins at your favorite record store, at yard and garage sales, at the thrift and charity shops. Vinyl is in demand, and even cassettes are in demand, but CDs are being turned back into the wilds of the secondhand market by those who believe a digital singularity is just around the corner.
            In combing the secondhand market I have been able to get a lot of good music that I couldn’t either afford back in the earlier heyday of my collecting, or that I I couldn’t find or obtain. Now it is out there, waiting to be found. I like looking at used CDs the same way I like looking at used books: there is serendipity at work in what you will find, synchronicity at play in the thing you want and need finding its way to you. I’ve also heard reports of people finding really amazing things: $1 dollar Steve Roach CD’s (his music is timeless and priceless), Sun Ra boxed sets at the thrift store. Other friends are reporting rare underground records from The Hafler Trio, Current and the album Le Mystere De Voix Bulgares, an influence on the vocal techinques of Lisa Gerard and Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance.

​This past fall I was tipped off by a coworker that the local NPR affiliate WVXU/WGUC was giving away boxes and boxes of CDs from their radio library. I went by and picked up several. The only rule there was you had to take everything in a box even if you only wanted one disc. But I managed to find some great recordings from the Hearts of Space label and a Hildegard Von Bingen box set.
            WVXU should know that keeping a collection is an archival commitment. It takes up space and time. They were in the process of moving to their new location, and so they had to free up some space to deliver more airtime. Some people don’t want to commit to the physical space CDs take, but too much streaming ends up cheapening the listening experience because it doesn’t take up space you have to commit too, and it fills time in such a way that almost anything will do (cue joke about the ubiquity of lo-fi beats for experiencing boredom). For them, I suggest the solid nineties option of a binder to put their CD’s and liner notes in. This doesn’t work as well as digipaks, but is still worth doing. It’s also good for burned CDs and very good for information gathered on hacking exploits as we learned from Mr. Robot.               

​There is another reason to build a physical music collection of your own. Streaming platforms may be fickle, and they aren’t great to artists either, but the energy they consume from the natures storehouse of ancient sunlight has very real limits. The amount of power it takes to keep the so-called “cloud” running is enormous. A little boombox could run on power from a generator or some off-grid solar panels in case of an energy disruption. The rolling brown outs and weather disruptions that have become more common with global weirding may mean a loss of internet connectivity for extended durations, especially as our ability to cope with these happenings is thwarted by the law of limits. Having some music on hand while you weather the literal storms can go a long way to making the psychological aspect of a long emergency much more manageable.
            It also makes economic sense to build a physical collection of music you enjoy. Many people cut the cord of cable for their television viewing habits and saved money by having a Netflix or Hulu subscription. That was when these first got going, but now people want to have every show from every platform available with a click, plus a Spotify subscription to have access to a world of music. Plus some Substack subscriptions to read some of their favorite independent journalists and writers (these are probably the best choice). I have done all this myself. Yet as stagflation sets in, it now may time to dam up the streams, collect physical media, and put up antennas for over-the-air reception of media. I’ve canceled several streaming subscriptions or memberships to certain services or platforms so that our household can save a bit of dough. My wages may have gone up over the years, but so have the prices for everything, and the standard of living has been going down ever since the 1970s. Being frugal and thrifty when it comes to entertainment, and having something physical listening on hand is a way to cut back on streaming services.
            It’s also a way to slow down, to really listen to entire albums, and to be more selective in how you feed your imagination and mind.
            The library is another option if you want to save even more money. Many have CD collections that are worth mining, and even a modest collection will have gems. My own work in writing about avantgarde music would have been impossible if I hadn’t been turned on to a world of music with “no commercial value,” but of immense cultural value. Libraries, community radio stations, and local PBS affiliates all have a role to play in preserving and transmitting things of cultural value, that may not have much mass appeal as commodified music in the capitalist system, but create the wealth that can be enjoyed by living a life of the mind. I hope families and individuals who are strapped can continue to turn to these resources for their education, entertainment, and edification.
            Beyond all that it is simply fun to pick through the detritus of the age and find your own listening treasure. Let us resuscitate the compact disc. Keep on digging!

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack is a beautiful book. It is not a book for the faint of heart, but it might be good to read anyway for those who’d rather bury their heads in the sand, or medicate themselves into a false rosiness (just as the mother in this story does). Cozy this is not. Tragedy it is. The kind of happenings it raps on could well be heading to a future near you, even though some of the elements of this near future tale date it to the time it was written, 1991. Kids connecting over payphones and landlines are part of my own fond memories so I was happy to read about them talking on the house phone anyway. These tech anomalies don’t matter too much in the end, because they aren’t the focus of the tale. This is science fiction of the social variety.

This was also my first time reading anything by Jack Womack. I’m glad I did because his command of the language in service to story is one of the things that made this book so beautiful. It is diary fiction. Specifically, the diary of a twelve-year old girl. I don’t imagine it is all that easy getting into the head of a twelve-year old girl myself. Writing from that first person perspective, in an extremely believable and absorbing voice was itself a major literary feat. The way he encoded her language with sprinklings of slang and the jargon of her day in the beginning, and the way her voice changed over the course of her violent awakening from sequestered private school girl, to open-eyed reveler in the harsh realities of economic survival and the ways of street, makes for a poetic breathtaking page turner.

“The whole West Side updown sounded livewired with gunshots and sirens and shouts and all the effects you get up here but now they played down the length.”

She writes to the diary as if it were a person named Anne. “Holidays pain your soul so Anne you always think where you’ve been and who with every year counting back and when they’re gone like this year the ache won’t stop. Even when weren’t moneyed here everything safed long as…”

The way Womack handles dialogue is a joy too, as Lola recreates her conversations in her diary. He might be writing about hard things, but he does so in an artful way. So what are those things he is writing about? There are so many themes to touch on in this book, and I want to encourage others to read this underappreciated speculative gem, so I won’t go into every detail. What follows are parts of the story that captivated my mind.

Lola is the daughter of a TV and movie writer, and an intellectual mother in New York City. They are starting to experience the nasty effects of economic downturn. Yet they still have enough at the beginning of the book to send Lola and her younger sister to private school. Things aren’t right in the United States of this book. Riots and crazy people are doing violent things to others on a regular basis. It’s become so common the violence is normalized. The kids see these things in Central Park one day when Lola goes out with her school friends after class. Along the way they see a homeless man get set on fire, but they continue on as if nothing big has happened. Meanwhile they can see the smoke rising from other parts of the city where the riots are in full swing.

One of her friends gets in trouble doing some stuff with a guy, some minor drugs, having a little party. She gets sent to a place the other classmates have already been talking about: Kure A Kid. As a late Gen Xer I remember full well the nightmare of the “troubled teen industry.” I had first hand experience of a place known as Kids Helping Kids, which operated in southwestern Ohio and Northern Kentucky. I wasn’t sent to this place myself, but two family members I am close to were sent there, and I attended some of the meetings they had for family as a grade school kid, among other things. To say it was culty is perhaps the least of the issues surrounding these programs. Yet the culty aspect is hardwired into them. Many of these programs can be traced in the way they operate directly back to the Synanon sobriety cult.

When I was in junior high there was a girl from a suburban school I became friends with at a weekend writing workshop aimed at encouraging kids who were deemed to have some literary talent. We bonded over zines and she was into the Riot Grrrl stuff coming out at the time. That was right around the time this book was written actually, or just after it came out. I lived in the city and introduced her to the punks and zinesters I knew, many of whom were older than me. After she came into town, and hung out with one of the older girls, something must have happened, because this girl was sent into a “treatment program” and I never heard from her again. Another close friend of mine, when his behavior was “out of control” was sent to a militaryesque Baptist boarding school.​

​Back then I was a big fan of the pop-punkers Screeching Weasel. I didn’t know it until recently, but it turns out Ben Weasel, the founder and singer in the band had been sent to the very troubled Élan School. Knowing people who got sent away on a regular basis, it was no wonder so many of us rebelled so hard. Yet the institutional adults who decide what goes into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders made rebellion a psychiatric disease as well: Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Call me defiant, but I could tell some more stories on this topic, but for those interested I recommend the book, Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids by Maia Szalavitz. You could also check out the newer The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia by Samantha Leach. 

The fact that this novel had an element of the troubled teen industry as part of its plotline only engrossed me further. Though there were many other places like Kids Helping Kids around the country at the time, Womack was originally from Lexington, Kentucky, just over an hour south of where I live. I wonder if Kure A Kid was modeled at all on Kids Helping Kids? It was certainly modeled on the many abusive behavioral modification programs happening around the country. The main characters friend Lori is out of luck when she gets sent to Kure A Kid, and when she comes back, she won’t even talk to Lola, or their other friend Katherine. She doesn’t talk much at all. Appears to be zonked out on heavy drugs that give her a blank faraway look. Yet, supposedly these places were supposed to help troubled youth get away from drugs. All too often, like in this book, they just prescribed them something to keep their vital energies sedated, while doing nothing to actually help them.

As the story progresses daddies writing gigs dry up and the bills start mounting, as do creepy calls from some money collector. The family has to move from their posh multiroom apartment close to the private school, to a place closer to Harlem where the rioting is really underway. They now live in a neighborhood where gangs walk the streets, and where they just manage to scrape by with her fathers meager paycheck from his new job as a clerk at a bookstore, where he works long hours for an abusive manager. He is hardly ever home anymore to see his wife and kids. Mom is editing manuscripts for a small bit of dough, and she was already taking lots of medicine for her anxiety, but it now seems to have gotten dialed up and up. She is checked out, numbed, medicated, hopeful in a way that is not practical.

Meanwhile Lola’s little sister is afraid of her older sister now, because of rumors that started about her being queer after it was let out that she kissed her friend Katherine. Too bad that information got out only by Katherine’s father talking to another parent at the private school about seeing his daughter kissing Lola. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been spying on them. When Lola gets branded as a dyke, it is what starts Lola’s dissociation with her friends at the private school. Soon she starts making new friends in her new neighborhood. Friends who have street smarts and get up to petty crime, who hang out and sometimes squat in abandoned buildings. Squatting in an abandoned building is better than living with abusive parents after all. She starts hanging with girls who might be queer too. Girls, who, though just a few years older, have a lot more experience with the gritty side of life.

Meanwhile, it seems as if every other week the president is getting assassinated and a new one has to be installed. New York City is under martial law, and the “greenasses” or army is in the street trying to keep order where the police failed. Further tragedies descend upon her parents, who do little to protect her. They are trying to keep their kids fed and housed, but it seems like they could have been doing more. In the end, the little sister is farmed out to the mother’s sister Chrissie who lives in some kind of Christian fundamentalist gated community. The younger sister is fine with that. She wants to go out there, where it is safe, and be a breeder.

The interpersonal dynamics of the girl gang Lola falls in with, the Death Angels, have their own troubled reality. Trouble finds trouble for these really troubled teens. Kure A Kid won’t help them, even if their broke ass parents could afford it. The society around them is crumbling and violent. The only thing left for them is to fend for themselves as another economic crash unfolds and civil unrest multiplies.
Told in blistering and beautiful bursts of pain bubbles, and the joyful excitement of youth, Random Acts of Senseless Violence may be a book over thirty years old. It’s really just now entering adulthood. Like all great SF, it speaks not only to the time it was written, but to the readers of today. It’s not really the teens who are troubled, it is the world that is troubled.
​
“Everything downcame today Anne the world’s spinning out and I spec we finally all going to ride raw.” 

This night in Dayton times goes slow
as the hot night before labored ever on.
Today was so long the broken clock did crawl
but not as long as yesterday’s labored draw.

This day it makes me so lonesome and tired
it wasn’t like this, oh those long summers ago.
These days bore with no fighting, no crossing the wires
into hostile lands, to take back what they stole.

No games this night, no festivals are flowing
with music and drink and gambling for gold
no long days floating on the tepid canal
or laughter from jokes the trickster has told.
 
The scrapping goes lean, the loving goes leaner
the towers all scavenged, the skyscrapers gone
the tubes on the teevee no longer flicker
the line on the tele connects to no phone.
 
The streets of the city are busted like rubbers
tires from the cars melted down for the tar.
The steel it was shined for the weapons of robbers
but in that old melee I was too young to spar.
 
No football gear ever again to be worn
no basketball dribbles on the court to be played
the horn of old plenty from the root it is torn
by the government, corporate, the people betrayed.
 
My plight is all somber like this thick Dayton heat
I’m wretched as an airplane with its last tank of fuel
gathering plastic bottles in the ruined streets
this night in old Dayton is as long as its cruel.
 
The last famous star men are long in their grave
and with them their toybox of endless supply,
and this night in old Dayton, cannot be saved,
the cracked concrete is ruined, I’m no longer spry.
 
Where in this dead city did the rest flee?
O where, in the world did my countrymen go?
I’m alone in the desolate streets of old Dayton
until the pit opens up and I go far below.

​I was born up in Cleveland, a city you may know,
my parents hard workers, to the factory did go;
my folks were pious, sent me to Sunday school
didn’t raise me up to add to the human cesspool.

​Then I got in with girls, guns, drugs and gangs
skateboarding, tags, graffiti, talking heavy slang
when my words hit the wall from the spray paint can
the cops were right there waiting to throw me in the van.

What I had in my pocket, it really made them scream
a semiautomatic with a loaded magazine
I was taken to the station, and then I went to jail
by iron bars surrounded, my poor folks refused to bail.

They held me in the juvey, for what seemed like forty nights
I learned how to do more crimes, & started picking fights.
I drank the jailers moonshine whenever I got a batch
it tasted like cough syrup, but I shoved it down my hatch.

It wasn’t the only thing that got shoved when time came to push
from behind, ambush, someone sliced my ruddy throat with a shiv
spraying blood all over the linoleum, I almost didn’t live.
Nobody said the living was easy or this was going to be cush.

The next day I plotted back on how best to get revenge
so in the play yard I got a rock, clobbered him like stonehenge
busted up his skull so good he was surely going to die
the jury found me guilty, electric I was sentenced, in the chair to fry.

​So they had to move on, sent me down to Mansfield town
I’d moved up to the big time, with my hangman’s head swinging down.
They put me on a southbound bus on a cold December day
I could hear my mom and dad crying, I had surely lost my way.

My dad he turned to drinking, and started going to the bar
my mom with spirits sinking lost sight of her guiding star.
She would come to visit me once, every couple moons
we’d between the glass, her heart had been harpooned.

I once had a girl in Cleveland town, a girl now I know I loved,
If ever I get my freedom back, I’ll act as simple as a dove.
If ever I get my liberty, this thug life I’ll surely shun
sipping drink and slinging drugs, fighting and shooting guns.

To you who have your freedom, pray keep it while you can,
Don't run around like a stupid clown and flaunt the laws of man;
for if you do, you’ll find yourself in a sorry state  like me,
rotting away behind bars, in the state penitentiary.

​CompleXities eXplained away by Boomers
             with no sense of guilt for eXcess
    becomes an eXcuse to do an end run nose dive
      leading by eXample straight to siX feet under.
 
One foot in the grave & still trying to hold on
        to the dyskinesia of gerontoXicity
        clutching the pill boX of the gerontocracy.
 
We are graphic designers inspired by FluXus
     who skip the eXamination to go on to the neXt McJob,
           feeling a sense that the future has been eXploited



sarcastic irony is a way of life when all things feel caustic
                     to the eXtent (of eXistenz)
that even I don’t need to put on my They Live X-ray speX
to see through the feigned fog of their neuropathic compleX.
 
       psychiatry industrial
 
Go back to your suburban dupleX
and your Viagra dreams of oral cyberseX
as we contend with fixing broken hyperteXt
collecting tchotchkes and Ikea objects
playing in basement bands and ministudio side projects.


Contend with too many Comet burritos
craft beer, now acid refleX, slow down reflects
try not to worry about making rent
or when its going to bounce, that check
or about lung cancer when smoking after seX cigarettes.

Let’s look each other up in the rolodeX.

This is a leXicon for the unorthodoX
follow the path of the bright eyed foX
into our own escape-from-reality sandboX.

​We eXult in all things auXillary
even as you ignore us in economic pillory.

We put it down all right there, in the miX tape we made
While Boomers with boners gallivant and escapade.
Sometimes I really do want to sink the blade,
but then I kneel down at the pew to reconcile my hate
that I need to eXplicate; while the tech barrons


                     dope blood rejuvenate
 
prepare to upload minds to a Silicon slice of heaven
while their cryogenic brain freeze farts
slurping bone broth health slushees from the 7-Eleven
in a stockyard bid to hold onto youth and power
    but the flower of your hour has passed
as have the hippies and the grass they pass
as even the youngest of X pass into midlife crisis

                 this too shall pass
 
but that doesn’t make us any less strapped for cash
while the big boom booms hold onto real estate
at least its only notional wealth, I seek a higher template


& so look to the eXemplars & so look to the templars.

The new culture in the crack of the old takes time to gestate
     germinate the wild dandelion weeds spreading seeds
    
          adaptable and invasive
 
in the face of mothers & fathers eating their young like cannibals.

Yet we brought you hip hop and trip hop and punk, it was so delectable
         but time zoomers right over us, so feral and ephemeral.
         This age pivots on its axial so radiant. Slipping into decline
                             at an ever tilting gradient.
It’s time to fleX, so don’t jinX us with your aXioms
though latch key, skipped over, we take our lot to the maXimum.


Dropping mail art in the post boX like we did before the Internet
when it crashes look to us and we will find the alternet
routes through communication space
 hosting shows that are all ages
straight edge X on hands again
while the machine burns
and our hate against it rages.

Did you ever hear about the hobo, Boxcar Clayton Jones?
He lied, cheated, and stole his way, across the interzones.
Once he was a stockbroker, or so the old stories say,
hated life on Wall Street and threw it all, shirt and tie, away.

He met his wife while hunting snipes on the streets of Chicago,
they shared a smoke and a toke, as she strummed her old banjo;
she’d just escaped the psych ward, wore a jacket that was straight,
said, “psychiatry is a racket, man. Me, they never will sedate.”

They hopped a train to the far out west, to live life in the sun,
and since that day have never strayed, have lived their life as one.
They made love in the orange groves, and picked Humboldt County weed,
sleeping underneath the burning stars in that far off land of the free.

One day he went to the pawn shop, to swipe her a ring of silver,
and when he slipped it on her finger, she broke out in goose bump shivers.
They were wed by a drunken preacher, one they met on a spellbound train,
who said that he was hellbound—preaching had only caused him pain.

In Chattanooga they got off the rails, to see what fortune had in store,
and there they met the Buddha of the south, in a shack on a dirt floor.
He was a sadhu from the holler, who found enlightenment on moonshine,
and folks came from all around to seek white lightning at his shrine.

Boxcar Clayton took a swig when the communion jug was passed around,
and felt the senses of his spirit tug when he heard the whistle sound;
outside the long iron horse was gathering up its coal black steam:
it was time to ditch this two-bit town and see if they could hitch a dream.

Now Clatyon Jones, he was not a rich man, he left all his money behind,
but he loved his wife and the clack of the track, and despised the daily grind,
so they road along the interzones from Kalamazoo to Poughkeepsie,
from the North to the South, to the West from the East, up and down the Mason Dixie.

​And when their bones got too tired to travel any further, or very far,
they settled themselves down on the Ohio river in a rusted out boxcar.