PBS has commissioned an amazing-looking documentary series called America Revealed (partially based on the popular BBC series "Britain from Above," from which I learned about the Teatime Deluge).
In this segment, they attach a GPS device to Dominos Pizza delivery guys in Manhattan to animate the patterns of pizza delivery on a Friday night.
And then the camera zooms out, revealing the routes of the pizza shops' daily deliveries from a distribution center in northern Connecticut.
And then the camera zooms out more, to show the routes of satellite-embedded, refrigerated trucks moving across the continent, bringing dough, toppings, cheese, and tomato sauce from farms and food processing facilities to the distribution centers.
This is a bit off-topic from this blog's usual fare, but very much worth reading, I assure you. A friend here in Portland has been coordinating a lot of international activism on behalf of Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist punk group whose members were jailed last fall for provoking the regime of Vladimir Putin.
The three imprisoned members are currently in the midst of a show trial, and expect to receive a sentence later this week. I'm dusting off my Russian to help compile and edit a collection of the group's translated texts, including letters from jail, manifestos, essays, and court statements, for a public reading in New York later this week.
These texts are heartbreaking, angry, and brilliant. But they also have a dark, cynical humor to them. The irony of suffering at the hands of the Russian state as they pursue their hopes for a better Russian society is not lost on them — indeed, it puts them in good company with dozens of other Russian artistic geniuses.
Of the pieces I've edited so far, this April letter to lame-duck president Dmitry Medvedev (whose "presidency" was merely a benchwarming interlude for Vladimir Putin, whose dictatorship at least has the modesty to make shallow gestures towards constitutional term limits) is among my favorites, for the way it relentlessly, humorously skewers the impotence of the figurehead president.
Here is the response Pussy Riot gave regarding D. Medvedev’s comment that the members of the group had “achieved their goal,” in a TV interview the Russian President gave to journalists from five TV networks on April 26 2012.
This response was written after the President refused to consider the evident violation of the principles of the law in the Pussy Riot case.
“Freedom is when you forget the name of the tyrant.”
Josef Brodsky, 1975
“Freedom is a unique feeling, which is different for each person.”
D. Medvedev, 26.04.2012
Dmitry Anatolyevich!
Exactly four years ago, in May 2008, a few days before your inauguration as a President, members of the art group Voina [translated as"War" in English — ed.] visited some police stations near Moscow to place your portrait on the wall as a newly elected president, next to the existing portrait of Putin.
Activists of the group Voina called your inauguration day “a great achievement of the Russian people”, “a victory of freedom,” and declared the seventh of May an important holiday, even more important than the other May holidays.*
Your portrait fixed to the prison bars of the police departments around Moscow encapsulated the hopes of millions of Russians in 2008. Your bright image was meant to penetrate into the darkest corners of the judicial, political, and incarceratory systems of the country, and was ready to confront the monstrous medieval barbarity that characterizes Russian law today.
Four years passed.
Atrocities and torture in your so-called police force have become increasingly systemic. Magnitsky, a lawyer, was executed in prison; his persecutors got a raise and were nominated for awards. Khodorkovsky and Lebedev got another big prison term. Taisiya Osipova has been in prison already for one and a half years without any medical help; she might hope that, after your regal attention to her case, she might embrace her daughter again a year or two before her ten-year sentence is due to end.
It’s touching, what you said in your interview: that you see a “lot of sense” in the fact that today, “all of these cases have become public, transparent.” During the last four years it has become absolutely transparent that in every serious situation in which conflicting interests demand legal justice, the Russian court will take the side of the stronger party, who has never bothered to pay attention to the law.
You proudly consider yourself a practicing lawyer. In reality, as you have repeatedly emphasized, a period of four years was not long enough to carry out the reforms which could bring Russia closer to a constitutional state. It was not enough time to educate a new judiciary and a new police force. Four years were not enough to wean public officials from bribes and to keep them from hating their own people. Four years were not enough to develop and implement your beloved electronic systems that were supposed to make the stuffing of ballot boxes impossible.
Four years: also the age of the children of our group’s imprisoned members – Gera and Phillip, a daughter and a son of Nadia Tolokonnikova and Masha Aliokhina, respectively. The court which you carefully and slowly reformed during the last four years has left these children without their mothers, indefinitely.
What is going on in the mind of our practicing lawyer, as he observes (as the head of the state, of course, he is not able to influence justice before the verdict is made, as you have already mentioned several times) how the court of our nation first refused to detain professional sadists — the policemen who tortured and killed people with bottles of champagne — and then twice extended the detention of women who, from the point of view of a religious institution, made a prayer in church with the wrong intonation?
As a “practicing lawyer,” does it not trouble you that that Ekaterina Samutsevich, one of the members of Pussy Riot, is placed to the same cell in the Pechatniki prison where Major Evsukov [a convicted former police officer who, while drunk and in uniform, opened fire in a crowded grocery store — Ed.] awaited trial in 2009? Is it possible to still keep self-respect as a law professional, and accept the authority of the court, when someone whose crime was a prayer in church should be isolated from society in the same conditions as a police chief who shot civilians with his service weapon?
During the interview you responded quite cynically concerning Pussy Riot. You mentioned that the participants of the act accomplished what they had hoped to. Not without reason, the journalists around you presumed that you were referring to the accomplishment of getting into prison. But you, after a dramatic pause, clarified your belief that we were merely seeking popularity and celebrity.
We would like to assure you, Dmitry Anatolyevich, that it is the monstrous reaction of the Russian authorities to the punk-prayer “Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away,” and the widespread outrage of a huge number of people, who can not understand why three women are in prison — these are the things that brought about our so-called “celebrity.” It is not on our merit that Pussy Riot gained international attention. Even you, at the end of your reign, forcefully emphasized in the same interview that nothing has actually changed during the last 50 years in Russia, and it was you who made the candid observation that, just as it was a half a century ago, a person of culture must resist the government, even through imprisonment and prosecution.
Naturally, many of your colleagues and subordinates – including the Ministers of Justice and Culture, and the heads of the Federation Council and the President’s Council on Civil Society Development — openly came out against the imprisonment of the members of Pussy Riot. It is evident to them that this trial will result in a public disgrace for Russian authorities. However, today the opinion of one man is held as more significant than all the power of collective intelligence and your starry-eyed abstract notions of freedom. That is why our group appealed to the Virgin Mary to banish this man out of Russian politics.
Thus the end of your presidential term will be remembered for the victory of bondage over freedom in Russia – the opposite of your ambitions. Three girls imprisoned in Pechatniki in Moscow are unequivocally recognised as prisoners of conscience by the international community and have become a vivid warning of Russia’s path.
And this path is due solely to a very specific idea of freedom: a freedom in which one person, acting alone, is allowed to make the important decisions in our country.
Pussy Riot
* Ed. note: The May holidays include May Day, the celebration of workers, and Victory Day, when Russians celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany. Both holidays are obviously more significant than Medvedev’s appointment as Putin’s benchwarmer.
And though Grist was very generous with room to write, there were still lots of fascinating details that I had to leave out of the narrative. I hope to cover some of those stories here in the weeks to come. So if you've just found this blog, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed or following me on Twitter (@vigorousnorth). Also, feel free to send me an email if you'd like to share an interesting story that I missed: the address is c.neal.milneil at gmail dot com.
The Los Angeles River has more than enough stories to fill a book. If you're a publisher, please get in touch!
Just got back from a vacation to southern California, which provided some material for a freelance project I'm working on. I think that I hiked more in Los Angeles during one week than I have all year here in Maine.
Growing food in abandoned city lots? That's so 2007. In the post-recession landscape, the edgiest agricultural trendsetters are growing cannabis in suburban foreclosures.
"Houses that sold for $1 million before the
crisis have been turned into grow houses, equipped with the
high-intensity lights, water and air-filtering systems necessary to
produce potent, high-quality marijuana," reported the New York Times in an article this spring.
A
foreclosed house in Vallejo, California, where illegal wiring for grow
lights caused a fire on the second floor. Photo by Jim Wilson for the New York Times.
It's the logical next step of the "urban farming"
fad. Abandoned inner-city lots for growing vegetables are becoming increasingly difficult to find. So what's an aspiring inner-city homesteader to do?
Drive 'till you qualify. There's a bounty of abandonment beyond the city limits. Find a nice quarter-acre lot with a nice lawn and privacy from any nosy neighbors, a good school district where well-to-do students will pay top dollar for your product, and five spacious bedrooms for your grow lights.
Who says the American Dream is dead? It just needs some pharmacological assistance.
In the late days of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force acquired miles of forestland in northern Maine to erect an enormous array of steel antennae, designed to listen over the horizon for aircraft and missiles approaching from beyond the iron curtain.
The installation, ironically enough, was located in a sparsely-populated town called Moscow. The steel towers have since been scrapped, but Dave of coldwarrelics.com paid a visit a few years ago while they were still intact, and got these amazing photos.
Naturally, the Soviets had their own over-the-horizon radar installation pointed at us. That array happens to be located near Chernobyl, inside the Exclusion Zone. It still stands amidst irradiated, wild forests, a mirror-world reflection of Moscow, Maine.
Officially called "Duga," or "Arc," for the shape of its coverage area, this array was known in the western world as the "Russian woodpecker" for the rapid thumps it broadcast into short-wave radio receivers. In the 1970s and 80s, civilian radio enthusiasts in the western world could hear these signals clearly, and were even able to triangulate their source to a location near Kiev. But beyond that, little was officially known.
In this 1982 BBC Horizon documentary, ostensibly about the technologies of Nicola Tesla, a Canadian bureaucrat named Andrew Michrowski speculates that Duga was a "Tesla magnifying transmitter" broadcasting psychoactive waves into the western world to interfere with our brains.
The beginning of this clip provides an audio recording of the woodpecker signal, followed by some entertaining Cold War conspiracy theories:
A partial transcript:
Michrowski: Because it is the same frequency, the same frequency range, and also the same kind of activity that goes on in our brains. That is the terrible thing about the Soviet signal: the capacity to impose on the way people, quote, think. This thinking that I'm talking about is the thinking of being peaceful, the ability to be calm, the ability to rationalize, [they] are all affected from a purely mental point of view by signals of this nature.
Narrator: Is there any defense? This personal transmitter puts out 7.8 cycles a second, which Michrowski says is a natural planetary frequency the body is tuned to. [...]
Michrowski: This is being used as far as we are aware by the German Civil Service... It is mainly a protective mechanism to ensure that the German Civil Servant, especially on external affairs duty, is able to keep his composure, in negotiations especially with other people and other countries. To make sure that they're not influenced.
To the BBC's credit, the documentary gives a more enlightening explanation of over-the-horizon radar technology once Michrowski stops hawking his protective organic radio wave device (at around 3:20 in the clip above).
These huge radar arrays, one located in the expansive forests of our cold northern frontier, the other located in a radioactive zone of exclusion, don't broadcast any signals any more. But as rusting relics of the 20th century, they still exert a morbid allure, inviting us to speculate about hidden, secret purposes they might once have had.
Years after the end of the Cold War, after the power has been shut down, their psychoactive properties finally begin to take root, affecting our thoughts and imaginations — not with a pulsing radio signal, but with the eerie quiet of an empty meadow and rusted wires stirring in the breeze.
I hope to visit the Moscow site later this summer, and hopefully to find some good local lore about the site. I'll keep you posted on this blog.
Lots of other cities have already pioneered the bikesharing idea (even Houston, Texas managed to implement bikesharing before New York did, with a much smaller 3-station downtown network that opened this spring). With origins in Paris and Montreal, bikesharing has always had a tinge of utopian socialism to it, promoting the shared use of public property over privately-owned vehicles.
But it's a socialist idea that works brilliantly, thanks to mobile technology: users can use their smartphones to locate bikes and a station near their destination, while bikeshare managers can locate lost or broken bikes with GPS, and dynamically track which stations need more bikes due to high demand. Lots of new business startups seek to duplicate the same communistic idea of letting people share their private property (whether spare bedrooms or automobiles) in exchange for small rental payments. Bikesharing makes cycling in cities easier, cheaper, and more fun, resulting in more people riding bikes for short trips in the cities where it's been established.
Private property, it turns out, is a hassle to take care of. But new technology allows people to enjoy the communitarian benefits of shared property thanks to the capitalist accountability of credit card security deposits and rental payments.
New York City's state-owned bicycles wholeheartedly embrace this ironic marriage of utopian environmentalist socialism with hard-nosed capitalism. They've been named "Citi Bikes," after Citibank, which contributed a $41 million for the naming rights.
Wall Street quants riding to work like Maoist factory workers (although even Maoists own their own bikes) will do so astride bikes plastered with the Citibank logo, and pay at stations that prefer MasterCard, another corporate sponsor.
And so here is a photo, via Streetsblog, of three transportation policy wonks (from left: NYC Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, Alta Bikeshare CEO Alison Cohen, NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan) and three billionaires (Mayor Michael Bloomberg, MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit).
In a few more years, bikesharing stations will be as much a part of our stereotypical vision of the generic urban landscape as newsstands and bus shelters are today.
“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day
without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in
the faces of older shoppers.
[...] They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our
carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.”
Our grocery store is finishing a remodeling project. The place feels different in ways that are hard to place — the changes are subtle enough that you can't remember what it looked like before, but the cumulative effect is of being someplace that's at once familiar and strange, as though pranksters moved your bedroom furniture a few inches while you slept.
When I visited yesterday, the changes raised all sorts of questions: how many focus groups and research studies went into determining how high this shelf is, or what kind of lightbulbs to use? And where is the yogurt?
And yet, the overall effect was effective: the colors seemed brighter, the aisles more spacious, my appetite for groceries stronger.
It reminded me of Don Delillo's White Noise, which has a number of amazing passages about supermarkets. I came home and skimmed the book for those passages again, and found my favorite, the one quoted above, which occupies the very last page of the book. A pretty amazing conclusion: an apotheosis of the consumer experience.
So it felt even more wonderful to experience the same sensations in real life, and be aware of them. Was this desire to consume more a subconscious reaction to the new environment that retail analysts and architects had designed explicitly for that purpose?
Or maybe the physical details of the remodeling are irrelevant, and the simple awareness of the remodeling itself — the mere idea of the remodeling — was enough to convey expectations that I should buy more, in order to blend in with the consensus of (real or imagined) focus groups and balance sheets. To be in harmony with the language of waves and radiation.
The first and only Portland Maine Bike Map highlights bike routes, lanes, and paths from Falmouth to Scarborough, Casco Bay to Westbrook - almost everyplace you can comfortably reach in an easy hour's ride from downtown Portland.
Garbage Land. An exploration of the secretive pathways of waste.
The Works: Anatomy of a City. An atlas of urban ecology, with detailed descriptions of all the infrastructure needed to sustain America's largest and densest human habitat.
