Center City

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James Howard Kunstler, 4/27/09:

The Joker

Things come out of the woodwork. All of a sudden it's a mutant H1N1 swine flu, with bird and human DNA accessories. We don't know where this is taking us. It could be a media blowover, like SARS, or it could be a big deal, shutting down travel and assemblies of humans. It would be a very big deal if it killed, proportionately, as much of the population as the 1918 flu event -- the worldwide toll then was roughly 30 -100-million out of a global population around 1.7 billion. Now the world population is over 6.5 billion. The only thing anyone can predict at the moment is that there will be a lot of very worried health officials and politicians out there in the days ahead.

This flu epidemic comes just as global economy itself lies comatose in the economic intensive care unit, with IV lines of dollars, euros, yen, and renminbis transfusing its hollowed-out carcass. It's an odd time for attention to be diverted from that awful spectacle. The cash transfusions have sent the Cable TV gang into raptures of "optimism" -- meaning they expect debt securitization to resume as before, along with Yuletide-level credit card shopping sprees in the malls, a mass splurging on new cars, and a renewed frenzy of house-building in the Florida buzzard flats. Those "green shoots" and sprouting "mustard seeds" they report seeing may themselves be a flu-like symptom. I don't know what the so-called Mexican swine flu will lead to, but the global economy as we've known it is a goner.

[...]

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Chinatown, New York

I took the Chinatown bus to NYC yesterday. Had to go to Brooklyn to talk to Lewis Warsh's class. It went well and I had a beer with the students afterwards.

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More Broad and Erie

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Broad and Erie

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U.S. Cities Increasing Use of Armed Mercenaries to Replace Police

Jeremy Scahill in Alternet, 4/24/09:


The United States is in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history. We see this in schools, health care, prisons, and certainly with the US military/national security/intelligence apparatus.

There are almost 200,000 "private contractors" in Iraq (more than U.S. soldiers) and President Barack Obama is continuing to use mercenaries there and in Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine. At present, 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is going to private companies.

This privatization trend is hardly new, but it is accelerating. While events such as the Nisour Square massacre committed in September 2007 by Blackwater operatives in Baghdad show the lethal danger of unleashing mercenary forces on foreign soil, one area with the potential for extreme abuses resulting from this privatization is in domestic law enforcement in the U.S.

Many people may not be aware of this, but since the 1980s, private security guards have outnumbered police officers.

[...]

In New Orleans, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of the city, private security poured in. Armed operatives from companies like Blackwater, Wackenhut, Intercon and DynCorp spread out in the city. Within two weeks of the hurricane, the number of private security companies registered in Louisiana jumped from 185 to 235.

In New Orleans at the time, I interviewed Israeli commandos from a company called Instinctive Shooting International as they operated an armed checkpoint on Charles Street after having been hired by a wealthy businessman. I also interviewed private guards who bragged of shooting "black gangbangers."

[...]



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MOVIE NITE at DIXON PLACE

161 CHRYSTIE STREET (bw Rivington & Delancey), NYC

MAY 1 & 2, 2009 8PM

A Mini-Festival of Live Interactives, Musical Attacks,
Neo-Benshi, Experimental Video and other damages
to the World's Cinematic Legacy

A Benefit for Dixon Place

Advance Tickets: $12/show ($15 at the door) Both nights: $20

Advance Tickets Available (and highly recommended) at www.dixonplace.org



Friday, May 1st

Sharon Mesmer, Dainipponjin
David Larsen, Logan's Run
Edwin Torres, Five 1/2

Intermission

Nicole Peyrafitte, A Voyage to the Moon
Julian Brolaski (with Paul Foster Johnson), Another Man's Poison
Bruce Andrews (with Brandon Downing), Sip Girl
**Video by Konrad Steiner, Linh Dinh, Nada Gordon and Brandon Downing


Saturday, May 2nd

David Larsen, Troy
Nada Gordon, Navrang
Tisa Bryant, Untitled
Gary Sullivan, Darby O' Gill and the Little People

Intermission

Eileen Myles, Satyricon
Bruce Andrews (with Brandon Downing), Gossip Bruce
Drew Gardner and Risa Puno, Untitled
**Video by Konrad Steiner, Linh Dinh, and Brandon Downing



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Center City

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Center City and Bella Vista

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Torture whitewash from The Dark Side

Pepe Escobar in Asia Times, 4/24/09:

It's a script worthy of Freddie Krueger, the fictional character from the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. Nearly five years after the irruption of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, here's another chamber of horrors, another glimpse of how The Dark Side really works.

But the George W Bush torture memos released by the Barack Obama administration last week, written in legalese by Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, are just a preview. Many will relish the newspeak. ("We conclude that - although sleep deprivation and use of the waterboard present more substantial questions in certain aspects under the statute and the use of tile waterboard raises the most substantial issue - none of these specific techniques, considered individually, would violate the prohibition in sections 134:0•2340A.") As for the whole movie - a 21st century remix of a D W Griffith epic - it could be called Death of a Nation.

The US Senate report, also just released, reads like deja vu all over again: the US establishment under Bush was a replay of the Spanish Inquisition. And it all started even before a single "high-profile al-Qaeda detainee" was captured. What Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and assorted little inquisitors wanted was above all to prove the non-existent link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda, the better to justify a pre-emptive, illegal war planned by the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s. The torture memos were just a cog in the imperial machine.

[...]





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Bus Angels

The Telegraph, 4/23/09:


Children tracked by sat nav to stop bad behaviour

Children will be tracked by satellite on public transport and encouraged to spy on their friends and report bad behaviour, under a pilot scheme by the Welsh Assembly.

Pupils will use a picture swipe card to clock on and off the bus allowing parents to keep a closer check on their child via a website

The project is being trialled across the six North Wales counties to tackle anti-social behaviour on school buses.

Pupils will use a picture swipe card to clock on and off the bus allowing parents to keep a closer check on their child via a website.

It will help deal with a number of issues including truancy, drivers reporting and identifying ill-behaved children and monitoring a child's whereabouts in the event of them going missing or a bus breakdown.

The scheme include 'Bus Angels' aged 14 and above, who covertly report incidents of bad behaviour [...]

Big bank profits are bogus! Massive public deception!

Martin D. Weiss, 4/20/09:


A big bank CEO on a mission to deceive the public doesn’t have to tell outright lies. He can con people just as easily by using “perfectly legal” tricks, shams, and accounting ruses.

First, I’ll give you the big-picture facts. Then, I’ll show you how big U.S. banks are painting lipstick on some of the fattest pigs ever raised.

Six of America’s Largest
Banks at Risk of Failure

As we have written here so often … as we documented in our recent white paper … as we showed in our presentation to the National Press Club … and as we explained again with new data in our follow-up press conference, the nation’s banking troubles are many times more severe than the authorities are admitting.

First, look at the megabanks: The authorities SAY that all of the 14 largest banks have earned a “passing” grade in their just-completed “stress tests.” But just six months ago, the authorities swore that, without a massive injection of taxpayer funds, those same banks would suffer a fatal meltdown.

Was the bad-debt disease magically cured? Did the economy miraculously turn around? Not quite. In fact, we have overwhelming evidence that the condition of the nation’s banks has deteriorated massively since then.

How can our trusted authorities be so blatantly deceptive and still keep their jobs? Perhaps you should ask Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Not long ago, for example, he declared that the total losses from the debt crisis would not exceed $100 billion, while conveying the hope that most of those losses could be soon written off. Also around that time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated the losses would be $1 trillion, with only a small percentage written off.

The IMF’s latest estimate: $4 trillion in losses, with only one-third of those written off so far. Bernanke’s error factor: He was 4,000 percent off the mark, in a world where 50 percent errors can be lethal.

Meanwhile, based on fourth quarter Fed data, we find that, among the nation’s megabanks, six are at risk of failure in our opinion (seven if you count Wachovia and Wells Fargo as separate institutions).

[...]






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Note: Hope = Truth

James Howard Kunstler's post this week is even fiercer than usual, and a great read, but what he sees as a blindspot in our ruling class, their supposedly inability to diagnose our main problems, I can only interpret as deliberate criminality. They're not here to save anything, only to loot.



People of good intentions and progressive predilection are scratching their heads wondering just how President Barack Obama managed to turn himself into George W. Bush Lite with sugar-on-top just twelve weeks after that fateful walk down the US Capitol's east stairway to the waiting helicopter. I'm hardly the first observer to note that Mr. Obama's actions in the face of an epochal finance fiasco and economic collapse are a mere extension of the pre-January-20 policies, carried out by much the same cast of characters.

[...]







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Banana is Good

I've been asked to contribute a handful of blogposts for a major newspaper. The theme is "the search for contentment in tough times." Preoccupied with photography the last several weeks, my writing chops are very rusty, so I'll use this space to warm up:



Before American steel mills went silent, Lowry Graham's dad labored in one for four decades. A high school graduate, he was more educated than most of his co-workers. He liked his job, became a foreman and was proud of it, but one shouldn't forget that just before World War II, steel workers had to go on strike to demand, among other concessions, a 10-minute lunch break and a room to shower and change at the end of the day. It was a dirty, backbreaking and sometimes lethal occupation. These days, we read about horrible working conditions in places like China, our greatest trading partner and creditor, but that was us two generations ago, when we were still an industrial, and not a service and financial sheenanigan, economy.

Lowry went to college and became a nurse, but his goal was to have more control over his life. To gain time, he was willing to make less money. "I wanted to be able to do laundry in the afternoon if I felt like it." In the 80's, Lowry bought cheap properties just beyond Center City, on a block considered iffy, if not suicidal. Neighbors tagged him the "pizza man," as in, "Pizza man, can you give me some money for a slice?" Lowry got a gun, tested it at a firing range. Got a bike, so muggers couldn't tail him when he left his front door. He hired me and others to fix his investment. I scraped wallpaper in sub-freezing temperature, sanded and painted, but even now, these houses are far from perfect. Where railing should be, there are hanging ropes, and some ceilings and walls are patchy, with the frame showing through. Prying steel windows, burglars have broken into his home twice, but a decade ago, Lowry could quit his job to live off his rentals. Unlike most of us, he is no longer indentured. The banks won't bother him. With more time, hence freedom, Lowry goes to operas, concerts and frequents neighborhood bars, not so much for the booze as the conversations.

To mingle and chat, experience each other face to face, is a basic human need, but in our culture, this necessity has been deformed into FaceBook, chatrooms, emailing and texting. We spend days alone with a billion virtual buddies. Don't I know your emoticon from somewhere? Compulsively surfing when not fixated by the boob tube, we hardly know where we are, our brain a permanent loop of chirpy commercial jingles, sports hysteria and news chatter that evades the roots of any problem, be it rampant white collar crimes or naked, systemic torture. Walk into any café and you'll see the majority staring at a laptop, with some also plugged into an ipod.

Philadelphia is not immune from any social malaise, of course, but I'd bet that many people moved here to avoid being marooned in an exurban home with 500 plus channels, a vast CD collection and a dozen porn flicks. Leaving a Philly bar, I can just stagger bedward without endangering anyone but my pickled self. Everyone I know here, I first met at a watering hole. Where else can one socialize? In America, a plaza is not a square where folks gather to mix with neighbors, but a strip mall, and don't you loiter!

Coming to the city, the immigrant relies on a network of acquaintances to find work and lodging, and for a whole range of advices on how to get by. He walks, bikes or uses public transportation. Teeming with newcomers, his neighborhood is alive. He is initially comforted by this, then annoyed. He scrutinizes those who arrive after him, notices their wrong jeans, their odd haircut, and reflects, This is not really America. But thanks to a no money down, adjustable rate mortgage, as purveyed by a very nice, suited broker, the immigrant finally escapes to a suburb where he has a front lawn and a backyard, where each of his children can watch television, alone, in his own room. Sipping a can of corn syrup, the immigrant can see someone's rows of corn just outside his bedroom window. A citizen now, he spends two hours each morning cocooned in a private steel box, commuting to work. He listens to Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh and classic rock. "On a dark, desert highway," he shouts as his old favorite comes on.

Confronted by a torrent of bad news from our capsized economy, many people anticipate at least the kind of unrest that has already broken out in many countries, but we are so docile, really. Some speak of heading for the hills and stocking up on canned food, potable water, guns and slugs, but isn't this bunker mentality just another manifestation of our alienation? Instead of fleeing one another, like we've already done for half a century or so, shouldn't we figure out how to be closer in every sense? When I moved to Philly in 1982, I never saw personal ads by anyone under 30. Now, even teenagers in school must advertise for a partner.

Like Lowry, I hoard my time for what I need to do, and I'm actually super productive at tasks that don't make money, not that I have any aversion to cash. Unlike him, I own next to nothing. At 45, I have neither house nor car, and I have never had a credit card or health insurance, which is very risky, I understand. The other day, one of my teeth simply fell out. Needless to say, I haven't seen a dentist in ages. Economically, my life is one long depression, punctuated by rare episodes of relative affluence, which to me is any entrée costing more than ten bucks, but am I unhappy? Absolutely not.

More Americans are experiencing poverty by the day, and I'm certainly not making light of destitution, but increasing consumption, i.e. "growth," isn't the answer. Worse than broke, we can't just borrow and spend our way out of this mess. Less than 5% of the world's population, we already gorge on a third of its depleting resources. It's time to slim down. Smaller portions are in order. Let's shorten distances and trim excess media from our lives. Simplicity is OK. Banana, good.

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Escape from the Zombie Food Court

I wish I had the wisdom and humanity of Joe Bageant, who is also a great prose writer, clear, at times wickedly funny but always filled with compassion for the lowly sufferers. 4/3/09:


Joe Bageant recently spoke at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University at Lexington, and the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, where he was invited to speak on American consciousness and what he dubbed "The American Hologram," in his book, Deer Hunting With Jesus. Here is a text version of the talks, assembled from his remarks at all three schools.


I just returned from several months in Central America. And the day I returned I had iguana eggs for breakfast, airline pretzels for lunch and a $7 shot of Jack Daniels for dinner at the Houston Airport, where I spent two hours listening to a Christian religious fanatic tell about Obama running a worldwide child porn ring out of the White House. Entering the country shoeless through airport homeland security, holding up my pants because they don't let old men wear suspenders through security, well, I knew I was back home in the land of the free.

[...]

1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India

The Independent, 4/15/09--Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine

"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."

Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.

[...]





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Late Weather

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Lowry's house,

just south of South Street. Using his saving as a nurse, he bought 5 properties in the 80's for next to nothing, and is now living off rents. Neighbors call him "the pizza man," as in, "Pizza man, can you give me some money for a slice?" His house has been broken into twice. Lowry owns a gun.

[Ropes for railings]

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Crabs Chang Chang

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Joe Tiberino and Clark DeLeon

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Joe is an artist and owner, for ten years, of the Bacchanal, where I met Etheridge Knight. Clark is a long-time columnist for the Inquirer. Both are Philly natives. Joe told me that when he took his daughter, Ellen, to his old neighborhood, West Kensington, two guys ran out of an alley with uzis. Ellen said, "What are you guys doing? My dad just wants to see the house where he grew up."

"Has Philly become more menacing?" I asked Joe.

"I think it's worse than that," Joe said in his quiet, always slightly bemused voice.

Clark is a rugby enthusiast who's gone to Ireland several times to compete. Last week, an Irish group hired him to give them a tour of Kensington, the movie home of Rocky Balboa. Speaking of which, here's a definition of the "kenzo mouthwash," as lifted from Urban Dictionary:

"A violent act in which a person is made to bite the edge of a sidewalk and someone else stomps the back of their head. This generally causes massive head trauma and results in the loss of many of the front teeth. The term originated in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, a notorious Irish slum, incidentally an area where oral hygiene is quite poor, possibly as a result of the Kenzo Mouthwash."

In the 80's, a TV station hot air balloon malfunctioned and landed in Kensington on July 4th. Its crew freaked out and abandoned their equipment, which was promptly stolen, as expected. Over the years, this tiny mishap has morphed into a horrific tale of news crew badly beaten and anchor woman raped, within minutes of landing, before the cops could arrive to save them.






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Center City

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CA Conrad


































CA with Karen Rodewald. Karen teaches photography at U Penn.














Frank Sherlock and Ryan Eckes. Frank is not just hanging out. He works as a bouncer at Dirty Frank's.

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Shattered Glass, Butterfly

A gift from Henry Avignon, sent via Facebook:

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Center City

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I got too cute today and was caught taking a picture of a grown woman holding a doll (for her child). My sneakiness was not appreciated. I denied, not at all convincingly, that I was snapping her. She and her female friend thought I was some pervert prowling the street. I felt like shit. I try to never let on that I'm photographing someone, lest they change what they're doing. Also, I aim to get away with as much as possible, but I do not like to offend.

Sabotage attacks knock out phone service

San Francisco Chronicle, 4/10/09--Police are hunting for vandals who chopped fiber-optic cables and killed landlines, cell phones and Internet service for tens of thousands of people in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Benito counties on Thursday.

The sabotage essentially froze operations in parts of the three counties at hospitals, stores, banks and police and fire departments that rely on 911 calls, computerized medical records, ATMs and credit and debit cards.

The full extent of the havoc might not be known for days, emergency officials said as they finished repairing the damage late Thursday.

Whatever the final toll, one thing is certain: Whoever did this is in a world of trouble if he, she or they get caught.

"I pity the individuals who have done this," said San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis.

Ten fiber-optic cables carrying were cut at four locations in the predawn darkness. Residential and business customers quickly found that telephone service was perhaps more laced into their everyday needs than they thought. Suddenly they couldn't draw out money, send text messages, check e-mail or Web sites, call anyone for help, or even check on friends or relatives down the road.

Several people had to be driven to hospitals because they were unable to summon ambulances. Many businesses lapsed into idleness for hours, without the ability to contact associates or customers.

More than 50,000 landline customers lost service - some were residential, others were business lines that needed the connections for ATMs, Internet and bank card transactions. One line alone could affect hundreds of users.

[...]



[Check out John Robb's comment on this incident.]

The Official End of Obama’s Honeymoon

Matt Taibbi in True/Slant, 4/10/09:

"But [Lawrence] Summers, a leading architect of the administration's economic policies and response to the global recession, appears to have collected the most income. Financial institutions including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form." -- via Summers Raked in Speaking Fees from Wall Street in Washingtonpost.com

So I guess that $45,000 speaking fee from Merrill Lynch wasn't technically a bribe because Summers wasn't named to Obama's economic transition team until Nov. 24 — a full 12 days later. I'm sure Larry Summers had absolutely no inkling whatsoever that he was going to be one of the key advisers to the new administration on Nov. 12.

It likewise makes perfect sense that Merrill Lynch, a company just months removed from having to be rescued from bankruptcy by an 11th-hour, pseudo-state-subsidized buyout by Bank of America, would decide to spend $45,000 on a speaking appearance by Summers because, well, they really valued his economic expertise and his proven ability to rally the troops with his stirring rhetoric.

[...]

[Two charismatic tools of the banksters. Remember Carlos Menem?]


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Around Broad and Girard

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