Weblog
25/12: an interesting (although not anarchist) website
i stumbled across this website
http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/
and it reminded me of all the stuff that i found fascinating about urban planning and architecture and of course the sits said it, and it's too bad that mostly the conversations i have about this topic are along the lines of debating whether atr the banks will be converted into housing, or if they have to be torn down because their structures are inherently authoritarian...
which sort of conversation is fun but constrained.
paying attention to how our built environments are affecting us can be a depressing game--since it generally tends to noticing how much worse things are getting (or could get), but considering how we would do things differently, and/or how we can change things in our own inspired ways, can only be helped by learning from sites like these.
one of the entries is about
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05/03: 8 days of anarchy--the quiet parts
fun anarchy-themed events for 8 days in march. (8daysofanarchy.org)
so much work to do, and the kind of work that is pretty invisible. designing pages, making lists of historical events, researching, marking up maps, editing, waiting for people to get back to me, remembering all the pieces of what i'm doing, remembering when to remind people of stuff, learning (always) about marketing, and trying to take what is relevant from marketing while leaving the rest.
but aside from one meeting place that i haven't found yet (makes sense that finding space in the bay area is particularly hard), it's pretty much all done. and there's this lull before the storm feeling... i've battened the hatches and put up the storm sail, next thing to happen will be all kinds of people coming in from out of town, the events actually happening (with all the last minute maneuvering that takes), and then the aftermath.
but really what i'm thinking about is the idea that so much of this work is about setting context.
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14/02: speaking of comics...
some people know this day to have a sick kind of significance for me.here is my favorite comic (today)...
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03/02: zizek and the limitations of information
in an interview with zizek on a u.s. talk show (quite embarrassing), the interviewer is questioning zizek about his book (this is after the interviewer smugly says how hard the book is to understand - as classic an example of fucking proud "american know-nothingism" as one could hope to find). z. says he supports the honesty of a parent who is upfront about telling his/her children what to do, vs. guilting, coercing, or manipulating them.for some reason (perhaps the embarrassment of choosing-to-be-stupid americans?),
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17/01: fun with false polarities, continued...
rationality and relationships are mutually exclusive.i will back down from that just enough to say that rationality can be useful in limited areas of problem solving for specific things within relationships, but good gawd people, rationality is such a small piece of what is relevant to human beings - and it is so over emphasized in this culture.
my friends (and some enemies) would tell you that i am a rational person - more head than heart as some have said - and there was a significant phase in my life when i had a list of the characteristics i wanted my friends to have, and i knew that people were my friends because of certain external criteria... and none of that ultimately meant a gdmd thing.
and communication - to the extent that that is code for rational verbal dialogue between two logical people - is over
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12/01: invasion of the body snatchers, the puppet masters, valley of the dolls
this week an acquaintance emailed me and some other people to complain about how a friend was representing him to another group of people (composed of one person he knows, some people he had met once, and many people he has never met).his complaints were vituperative.
and while there are things to be said about this acquaintance's specific issues (and the phenomenon of cranky and apparently badly-socialized middle aged men), what is interesting to me about this particular sequence is the vulnerability of representation.
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04/01: well, where is the line?
what is the line between talking about friends with other friends in order to have a different perspective on a problem you're having with someone, i.e. to problem solve, and talking with friends with other friends as gossip and shit-talking?anyone?
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24/12: more on engendering pain
in a discussion following up on someone's *hurt feelings* (see preceding mists of time), i mentioned occasionally not liking myself. this person responded that it would be helpful if i would talk more about that.while i understand the point of it--presumably i come across as hard and cold, and me talking about being or feeling vulnerable could make other people feel closer to me--i am very uncomfortable with the associations that i have with that kind of bonding practice.
my association is that of women feeling connected around feeling bad about themselves, very loaded in feminist circles... in both good and bad ways (although even the good ways feel bad to me right now). as i have heard it explained to me, encounter groups, the very ones in the 60s that were called inherently anarchist by one of those chicks, kornegger or somebody, were about women sharing with each other how their lives were (good but mostly) bad, and how the similarities in the badness were indicative of larger issues, encouraging women to expand their vision from their own lives to looking at how things worked in the bigger picture.
so there is a valid history here...
but these days
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11/12: the point of pain
Freedom in Education, by anarchist Elizabeth Byrne Ferm, is one of the tidy books put out by Factory School, and is on the theory behind the Modern School of Stelton, NJ, a libertarian education project of the 1920s.i have only just started it, but quite early on she talks about the adult prediliction for preventing children from experiencing things.
"Every human being has the urge to reveal himself in his acts and he will project himself unless interfered with. Interference, no matter how it rears its head as guidance, direction, help, making the indefinite definite, etc. only serves to perplex and confuse man."
i have been hurting people's feelings a lot recently.
my feelings were hurt this week too, by a half-assed attempt to be funny that
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15/11: conflict and confusion
it's always odd to be on the outside of other people's intense conflict. to feel for people without feeling with people.i recently spent time with some friends who are in what i would call the second stage of a break - the second stage being the angry, shit-talking part. (the first stage is deciding that separation has to happen - of course stages can happen concurrently.)
and having just gone through my own life-changing conflict, it is impossible not to
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