Up a tree

Oh man. Last night was sort of strange now that I think of it.

Went to see Casiotone for the Painfully Alone with a few friends. Brought an ice cream cone into the venue and ate it while sipping Castle Point. Music was good! As I had not heard Casiotone before, at some points I expected him to break into a cover of Laurie Anderson or New Order. Everyone else was cheering for his cover of Paul Simon.

Casiotone - a one-man band - was highly likable. He talked about how he really enjoyed this visit to New Zealand, as he saw some animals he didn't get to see the previous time, such as the yellow-eyed penguin and the spiny echidna. After the show, I invited him over to dinner on behalf of Tom and Criggy.

Then I climbed off the balcony and onto the nearby roofs, up a fire escape ladder, and finally into what turned out to be the courtyard of the venue-formerly-known-as-the-Valve.

Epilogues were doing the jerk to a teenage punk band at the Mighty Mighty, and, of course, chips and cheese at a kebab shop. It was an enjoyably strange night.

Addendum: Tom and I were mightily pissed off to learn that we had missed seeing the Verlaines the previous night.

Not spoken lightly

Or: Live acts I won't see while in New Zealand.

Admittedly, the list of live acts that you can't see in NZ is fairly long. I recently figured out why prices for live shows of any reputability were so high in Wellington: Because there's only one venue large enough to accommodate a significant crowd. Curse you for your monopoly pricing and shitty beer, San Fran Bathhouse!

Prompted by a Verlaines song from Tom, I went out in search of Kiwi rock bands. I didn't know much apart from some hand-wavy references to Flying Nun Records and the Dunedin Sound. So I lucked out when I found the blog Kiwi Tapes, which aimed to preserve all these random bits of musical flotsam and jetsam from New Zealand's period of cultural independence (c. 1980-present).

Kiwi Tapes collated four discs worth of music, 80 songs from 80 different artists. Some is virtually forgotten - when I try to search for a quite excellent Gisborne band called "Wasp Factory", all I get is references to an Iain Banks novel (whoever he is). Other bits of it are relatively well known.

Chris Knox is one of the better, and better known, artists on the tapes. He was part of a pioneering lo-fi band called the Tall Dwarfs, and then put out a bunch of solo material. Like some of his contemporaries, he was influential in the American indie rock scene. Minimum instrumentation, striking vocals. I would describe him as the Lou Reed of New Zealand rock.

(Then again, I probably have a penchant for describing people as the Lou Reed of X. Once Anne and I got into a heated debate over whether Richard Hell or Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks was the Lou Reed of punk rock. I was winning until one of us pointed out that Lou Reed was the Lou Reed of punk rock.)

So I've been getting into Chris Knox. I put his best-known song ("Not Given Lightly") on a mix for Anne. And today, I read in the paper that he had a stroke that left him virtually incapable of speaking. He's said to be in high spirits, which is good. But it looks as though no tours are on the cards.

I recommend that you check out Kiwi Tapes, because I'm just going to play them for you anyway the next time I see you.

Addendum: One interesting tidbit from one of the articles I linked to above:

“Punk was big for sure but in Dunedin we were extremely isolated and it took a long time for musical trends to filter down this far. You have to appreciate the pre-globalisation technological environment that existed back then (at least for us). A record released in the UK may have taken up to two years before a copy of the master was shipped out here and the pressing plant in Wellington produced the record. Case in point, Ian Curtis was dead and buried before any JD records were released here. They were awaited with great anticipation because people had read about the band in NME or whatever, but the actual records took an age to filter through. Being something of a backwater meant there was something of a disincentive to follow trends (why bother when they were moribund at their source by the time we knew about them). This allowed or fostered inclusive listening habits, anything from the 60's up to punk. (hence my rather conservative record collection was not frowned upon in any way as being uncool).” -- Graeme Downes, by email, 2005.

This is the reason why I am doing an informal series on New Zealand trade policy in the pre- and post-1984 era. As this passage indicates, daily life and culture were dramatically different in a distant economy with import licensing and without modern instantaneous data exchange. Because LPs had to be made in New Zealand rather than imported, they couldn't be had rapidly. (One of the most interesting bits of junk is a mix tape in a friend's car. The cassette tape reads "Made in New Zealand under license from West Germany" - a fossil in more than one respect.)

The Galapagos era of trade policy sometimes enabled a multitude of cultural, social, and technological niches to thrive. The results were often slower and clunkier, of course, but there were diamonds in the rough. New Zealand is more complicated to assess, as its arguably didn't begin to assert a culture independent of Britain until the 1980s, when trade barriers were being swept away rapidly. As a result - or a cause - of the still-mutating NZ identity, the last few decades have seen increasing film-making in NZ, and increasing consumption of local music.

The urbanization of the Third World

As I have mentioned before, I am working on updating several papers I wrote in my last semester of college. The essays dealt with a few similar themes: revolutionary classes and production arrangements, the spatial dimension of insurgency, and the urbanization of the Third World in an age of persistent economic crises. My instinct is that these things are connected, and that they can be theorized together through a central concrete phenomenon. (In this I am drawing upon Walter Benjamin's method of building theory through "constellations" of related images or phenomena.)

As I've finally finished a draft of this essay, which deals with the relationship between slum growth in the Third World and war and conflict, here is the rough draft of the introduction:

The world's demographics are rapidly changing as the Third World moves towards "maximum urbanization." Global population is expected to peak around 10 billion in the middle of the century, and most of this growth will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, which are forecasted to double to roughly 4 billion inhabitants by 2035. Poverty and socioeconomic exclusion are expected to follow, as the cities of the developing world lack the employment opportunities, land, housing, and infrastructure needed to sustain this burgeoning population.

This growth will, in turn, shape and change cities themselves. The biggest housing boom of the next decades will occur not in the Californian exurbs but in informal settlements in and around hundreds of Third World cities. UN-Habitat forecasts that the number of people dwelling in slums will more than double to 2 billion in the next 25 years. It defines slums as "an area that combines, to various extents... inadequate access to safe water, inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure, poor structural quality of housing, overcrowding, [and] insecure residential status." (UN-Habitat 12) Beneath this definition lies a range of social and economic ills ranging from poverty and joblessness to official hostility.

In short, "slum" is a term that encompasses a very heterogeneous mix of living situations ranging from poorly-built and -maintained state housing projects to small self-constructed encampments in marginal land. And as slums are a phenomenon that spans the globe, slum-dwellers are correspondingly kaleidoscopic in their origins and identities. As a result, it is difficult to survey the slums, and even more so to theorize about them. However, it is equally clear that it is necessary to engage with the slums.

Two recent works attempt to do so. The first, UN-Habitat's 2003 report The Challenge of Slums, attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon. In keeping with the UN's Millennium Development Goals, it focuses on developmental and economic aspects of the slums, arguing that the key problems are lack of housing and lack of regular work. The second, Mike Davis's polemical 2006 book Planet of Slums, adds to this report, delving into the environmental, health, and social problems arising from the growth of slums. It takes an apocalyptic stance, arguing that rapidly growing Third World cities represent an unrecognized humanitarian catastrophe for their inhabitants.

In the epilogue to Planet, Davis meditates upon the consequences of slum growth, which he sees as a sign of the creation and entrenchment of a "surplus humanity." Drawing upon US military planning documents, he suggests that one possible result would be the entrenchment of a new type of conflict - "a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor." (PS 205) However, this speculation is more of an apocalyptic coda than an in-depth analysis. Neither Davis nor UN-Habitat is willing to go too far "down Vietnam street". (PS 205)

This essay sets out to analyze the relationship between slum growth and conflict. In many respects, the urbanization of insurgency - as a 1994 RAND Corporation report called it (PS 203) - is creating an entirely new style of warfare. Conflicts are increasingly fought in a new type of terrain, in which the opposing sides employ new spatial, organizational, and technological advantages. On the other hand, today's urban wars tend to resemble the old form of partisan warfare, as practiced by both the Spaniards against Napoleon's invasion and the Viet Cong against the US military.

German legal theorist Carl Schmitt's 1963 Theory of the Partisan draws upon this historical scope to lay out the characteristics of irregular partisan fighters. He argues that partisans have four key characteristics. First, they are irregular fighters, both legally and spatially, hiding within local terrain and civilian populations rather than fighting in the open. Second, they arise, autochthonically, from that terrain and population, and fight primarily to defend it. Third, their fighting - and hence political commitment - is a product of real enmity that is limited to specific territories and objectives. (However, partisans are susceptible to capture as shock troops of aggressive movements aimed at overthrowing the global order.) Fourth, they are caught up within a "forcefield" of technological progress, keeping pace with new developments in military hardware and tactics.

While Schmitt developed these categories to describe the rural anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements of the Cold War, it can productively be applied to conflicts originating in the Third World slums of today and tomorrow. This essay will argue that Schmitt's theory of the partisan is still relevant today, and that it suggests that the mass production of slums will tend to engender persistent, albeit episodic and territorially disconnected, violent encounters between slum-dwellers and Western militaries. This will continue, his theory suggests, until the conditions that produce slums are erased - either by development aid and economic opportunity, or through their inhabitants organizing themselves into a cohesive global opposition movement.

To support this thesis, I will draw upon the studies by UN-Habitat and Davis, and also upon the growing literature on cities, demographics, and war. The latter, which dates to the mid-1990s, has been written by a strange mix of military planners and leftist academics. While it is sometimes linked to research being done on Third World urbanization and the growth of slums, it does not tend to focus closely on those phenomena. However, the studies that I will draw upon, which include both military research and skeptical analyses of military plans, suggest both that war and insurgency is becoming increasingly urban, and that Schmitt's theory of the partisan remains relevant in a new milieu.

Across countries

I made mischief with the internet this week. According to the email list of the Williams cross country team, of which I was a member, a competing team had stolen their mascot, a three-decade old, repeatedly patched and modified stuffed bear. This is basically a yearly ritual. Revenge was being planned, including spamming the other team's email accounts and mobile phones.

I thought that this was pretty childish, and, in a puckish mood, forwarded all of this to a random member of the other team. It seems as though my ex-teammates' plans were foiled, as I was unsubscribed from the listserv and sent hate-mail.

While I ran for four years at Williams, the team never sat right with me. It was very cliquish - never openly unfriendly, but definitely cool towards people who didn't fit in in terms of attitude, culture, or background. I agonized about not "fitting in" for a while, and finally decided simply to show up, run, leave, and do other things with the rest of my time.

The contradictions of the situation can be summed up one of the nasty emails I received. It was sent by someone that I barely knew - I don't think that he made much of an impression on me because he was not particularly interesting. The letter reads, in part:

You piece of shit. What the fuck is wrong with you? If you didn't want to hear about the bear then get off the listserv. Come to think of it, the fact that you were on the listserv in the first place is a fucking joke considering how small of a role you played on the team.

[...]

God, I hate you. Eat a dick and die you fucking turncoat.

There is also a lot of incoherent swearing and the (frankly laughable) threat that "I can't wait to cross paths again. I assure you, you will be getting a fucking fantastic reception." But consider the logic contained within these two paragraphs. In them, the correspondent makes two contradictory claims.

Assertion 1: Because I played a small role on the team, I shouldn't consider myself a part of it.
Assertion 2: I am a "turncoat" for letting their rivals know of the plans.

The entire reason that this person claims to "hate" me is because I "betrayed" the team, of which I was a member. But at the same time, he argues that I was not a real member of the team in the first place. See the logical problem? One can't simultaneously not be in a group and be a traitor to the group.

This, I suppose, is the reason that I have always been uncomfortable with the Williams cross country team. They consistently signaled to those on the margins that they (a) weren't good enough (or WASP-y enough) to be part of the team and that they (b) had to display obsequiousness to the totems and rituals of the team. I thought that this was absurd, and still do.

A lot has been happening lately

Deer Jesus: He was mounted for your sins.

My sin is that I'm too damn busy. I have been writing an essay for the past week and a half - the longest time I've ever spent writing anything. It's the slums paper - at last. I've been waking up at 7am to write.

Also: Geoff came down from Auckland to visit. That was fantastic. We drank beers and played on flying foxes.

We threw a Halloween party that entailed Anne going insane for half a week while running around for decorations. The pumpkins have gone moldy and we threw out the fake cobwebs and burned all the candles to stubs, but we've still got:
-Five plastic skulls, painted red;
-Three maroon curtains;
-Beads galore;
-A framed photograph of Karl Marx; and
-Some of the surplus booze that people brought.

I dressed as Fidel Castro. We were serving vodka martinis from a pitcher in the fridge.

This weekend we set off fireworks in a slightly belated Guy Fawkes. Went to the beach in November and could actually swim; discovered that the second-best fish-and-chips shop in the country was serving fish-on-a-bun in Paraparaumu. Finished watching the second season of Star Trek that same day. We're drinking it in as fast as possible. And drinking as fast as possible.

Thin lives

Today, I took advantage of the lengthening days and ran up to Brooklyn, down through Happy Valley, and out to the south coast in Owhiro Bay. A few stereotypical white clouds dotted the sky to the south, and the sinking sun was turning the headlands to the west into dark silhouettes and the rocky coastal outcrops to the east into brightly-lit montages. The white-capped mountains of the South Island were barely visible to the west; a view straight south fell entirely off the horizon, and beyond that, Antarctica.

I ran east along the coast, past hard black volcanic rocks and weatherbeaten houses with rust streaking from every nail, to Island Bay and then back to human things. Berhampore, Newtown, Aro Valley.

Last night we were up in Wadestown, to the hilly north, at a going-away party for a French friend. At a lull in the party, I walked out the front door and ran out of words. The house looked straight out across Wellington Harbour, and it was a dark night. The docks below us cast some lights onto the water. To the north there were the bright lights of industrial Petone. Across the harbour I could see two lines of light - one running completely horizontal on the road out to Eastbourne, and the Wainuiomata grade slanting up into the hills. A few stars were visible above. Every other part of the vista was completely black.

Wellington Harbour, although deep, is wide with a narrow mouth. That, combined with the heavy winds that sweep down through it, keeps chop and waves to a minimum. (On the ferry back from Picton I could actually see the wind cutting the tops off of the waves left in the boat's wake.) So at night, there's very little to distinguish it from the sky above.

Sky above me, sea below, and very little to distinguish the two. Humans were present only in a narrow band of light. I thought about it.

The universe is an incomprehensibly enormous place, and no human has ever been more than 240,000 miles away from the earth. On a galactic scale, that's a rounding error. The part of the earth's atmosphere that is suitable for human life extends barely ten miles above the earth's surface. With short exceptions, we can't live outside that infinitesimally tiny bubble.

Our normal human activities don't go any deeper than the deepest mineshaft (a bit over two miles) or any higher than the average commercial flight (roughly 6 miles). In actual fact, most human life takes place within a thin terrestrial crust that's perhaps 50 feet thick. We don't even cover the whole planet, 70 percent of which is covered with water, and which has one whole continent that is permanently covered in ice. By any reasonable scale, our crust is unimaginably tiny - or perhaps, thin enough to be conceivable by us.

I don't think that there's a system of thought that is truly capable of coming to terms with this extraordinary fact. Our modes of thinking are definitively crustismic.

My former high school principal

To my great delight, my mom sent me this story from my old local paper. My old high-school principal, Becky Smith, is on forced leave after seemingly threatening a student with a pellet gun. (Article at Contra Costa Times.)

The principal of Monte Vista High in Danville is on administrative leave while the school district investigates her handling of an Airsoft pistol in front of a student.

Rebecca Smith has been on leave since Oct. 8 while the district investigates an incident in which she "handled a gun in an inappropriate manner in the presence of a student," said San Ramon Valley school district spokesman Terry Koehne.

He said the district has determined it was an Airsoft pistol, which shoots plastic pellets that generally cannot break the skin. They are available at sporting goods and other stores. The pistols, generally considered a toy, are not powerful enough for hunting.

Sources have told Bay Area News Group that the incident stemmed from actions before a girls volleyball game, when a player had an inflatable toy that resembled a gun. The student was called to the principal's office, which is where the incident with the Airsoft pistol took place.

Translation: She waved a pellet gun in the student's face.

Smith could not be reached for comment. She came to the school in 1981, working as an assistant principal before becoming principal in 1996, according to the school's Web site.

Her time at the school has not been without controversy. In 2007, a district audit found that nearly $100,000 raised by recent graduating classes was spent for items not approved by students. The funds were raised by each graduating class during their years at the school, with students determining where the money goes, but administrators instead transferred the cash to other accounts and decided where to spend it. Items purchased included computers, landscaping and rugs.

My own experience with Becky Smith has been that she's mendacious, authoritarian, and interested in her own personal aggrandizement much more than the interests of her students. The only time I dealt directly with her was during my senior year, when she advised me to lie on a scholarship application.

It was the Bank of America scholarship; they picked four students for different areas. I was selected for applied arts because (a) I had taken technical classes (Architectural Design) and (b) had a really high GPA. They could have found people better qualified in the applied arts, but never mind that.

Smith brought us in to her office to tell us about the scholarships, applications, etc. In the process she suggested that we improve our chances of winning (and her chances of looking good) by padding our resumes either by exaggerating upon things that we had done or adding additional things that we had not done.

I was quite disgusted by the entire thing. I later learned that one of the girls who did get the scholarship did weasel on her resume. Meanwhile, I kept myself to the facts, and didn't get the scholarship. So my opinion of Becky Smith is quite low, and this worsens it.