Sunday, November 27, 2005
Down on the Farm
It’s been a busy T-day season for me.
Thursday was, of course, the day for feast-induced somnambulism. After eating enough turkey to induce a coma in a bengal tiger, we sat around and watched a documentary about Jeff Koons. He was extensively interviewed in the film, and I am more convinced than ever that Jeff Koons is a charlatan and anyone who invests in his crap is an utter fool. There was a segment where he demonstrated a model for a giant sculpture – It would be a HUGE structure from which a steam locomotive would be suspended, pointing down. Once a day it would run, emit a lot of steam, the wheels would turn, and the whistle would blow. Then it would slowly stop.
The kicker? He said it might end up in Los Angeles…
Perfect: the largest American city best known for having the lousiest public transportation system for a city of its size and having willfully dismantled one of the largest trolley systems in the world, housing this desecration of the iron horse. BRILLIANT! I can only think of one coupling as a better marriage: Jeff Koons and Las Vegas. The “sculpture” should adorn the parking lot at the Belagio…
The interviewer, the incomperable dumbass, Tom Ford, asked the camera “Is he for real, or is he just full of shit?”
The Answer from this audient: “He’s simply full of shit.” Tom Ford interviewing Jeff Koons… “Mr Pot? I’d like you to meet Mr Kettle.”
After that we sat around, chatted about the movie where we came to a collective agreement about Jeff Koons, drank some coffee, ate sugary desserts, sobered up, and I made my way home.
Friday I slept the tryptophan coma off, and woke up in time to go to Arlo Guthrie’s Fortieth anniversary of the Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. Yes, 40 years to the day, Arlo and his compatriots were arrested for littering, and a few years after that, he wrote the song about it, and the rest, as is often said, was history.
Arlo was amusing, insightful and kind. I enjoyed the concert very much. His daughter and her husband opened the show. He, John Irion, was very good – a nice voice and a decent guitarist. She was less of a guitarist, but sang like an angel and is very beautiful in both form and countenance, i.e., she’s gorgeous. Then a band called the Mammals played. Some of there stuff was utter dreck, but much of it was very good. Their last song was a rousingly funny and pointed critique of the plutocratic bastards in the White House. Arlo was excellent. Arlo had an interesting insight that really inspired me, which I will get to later…
Saturday, I hopped into my tiny little car, fed the squirrels under the hood, and made my way out to the rural outer regions of Eastern Pennsylvania. I grew up in NJ, near New York. I know very little of this area beyond New Hope or Scranton. What I saw did not impress me.
The description was that we would be having a fabulous dinner in a farmhouse located on 170 acres of land. I was looking forward to seeing how a small farm operates, and what was going on with the area in general. What I learned was deeply valuable and instructive. We often read about the predations of suburbia sprawling into the hinterland, indeed, Darrell Clarke brought this article to my attention which discusses the idiotic psychology of the McMansion phenomenon, where people cheerfully buy gigantic homes they can’t possibly use, just because they can. This phenomenon is in full swing in Eastern PA. I drove past acre after acre of houses, arranged in pseudo-communities with pretentious Anglophilic names on the order of “Buckingham Fox Run” or “Durham Mews” or some other drippy nonsense. Of course, each neighbourhood
(note: I use British spellings in general as I spent a lot of time overseas, and frequently correspond with people in Australia, the UK, NZ, and Canada – so my use of the spelling is out of respect and laziness, not pretense.)
has a sign attached to a cobblestone wall that has the name of the “community” carved into wood and adorned with fake gold paint or composition gold leaf. Both of which use brass as a colourant which is oddly and sadly symbolic.
The devastation of Eastern Pennsylvania by the blight of McMansioning is well documented in this webpage.
The farm house I was in wasn’t directly surrounded by these monstrosities, but they weren’t far off. They sat a few farms over, like giant hulking dinosaurs dressed in cheap poorly fitting barn suits sleeping in expensive shrubbery. One of the owners of the farm where I was to have dinner had sold most of the land to other farmers, and the land was presently being used for growing sod for these horrible McMansions. This left the house standing alone in a giant lawn. And we all know what kind of miracles ripping up sod does for the topsoil.
The old woman who lived in the house was very sweet, kind, and sharp as a shiny razor. She had been born in that house shortly after the First World War, and would likely die there. Her family had built the house in 1865. While it appeared to be in excellent condition, some of the other guests explained to me that its technology needed upgrading – the electrical system was antique, the plumbing was delicate, the water system was inconsistent, and the gas for the stove had been recently repaired. In the middle of the house was a giant hearth big enough to park a smartCar. The old stove had long since been removed, and it was now mostly for ornament. The house had been switched to oil heat back in the 1930s. In fact, she talked about how her school had shifted from a “potbellied stove” to oil heat in the early 1930s, and everyone was so amazed at the modern convenience of fast reliable heat.
The walls of the house were easily 18 inches thick, and at points more like 20 – 24 inches thick. The ceilings were low – most were barely 7.5 feet tall, often lower. The rooms were many and small with very few closets. Clearly a house built around the energy system at the time – wood – as produced by the giant hearth, which, in its day, undoubtedly heated the entire building. The kitchen was next to the hearth, and while it had the “modern conveniences” of a gas stove, a microwave oven and refrigerator, they seemed oddly, even comically, out of place – like Groucho Marx’s small narrow face adorned with his huge painted moustache and eyebrows.
We ate a massive Thanksgiving Dinner that couldn’t be beat, and had happy pleasant conversations. After dinner, we talked more over some sugary desserts, and my friend and I dazzled our dinner mates as we had our machines do something like the Vulcan Mind Meld Trick and exchange data over the Firewire cable. She now has a week’s worth of music for her listening pleasure…
After that, the sun set quickly in a dazzling orange blast over the trees behind the sod fields, and people left quietly in pairs. I left at the same time as my friend and her husband, and after hugs and photographs, I drove off alone into the night, thinking about this place – eastern Pennsylvania – and how it is an ecological failure thanks to the vanity and stupidity of these greedy dullwitted exurbanites. I saw it as a tragedy, and I was happy that it was dark out so I didn’t have to look at acre after acre of the hideous monstrosities these knuckleheads call home. I turned on the radio and listened to a variety of stations – finally settling on one that alternated between the theme songs of ancient TV shows and punk rock. “Hey Ho Silver – Away!” “Here we are now, entertain us!” “Caspar the Friendly Ghost” “Your future dream is a shopping spree!” “My Mother the Car. . .” “Kill kill kill kill kill the poor. . .” Eventually that faded out and there was little left to listen to except Classic Rock or Hip Hop stations, neither of which I find that interesting – there is something pathetic about being caught between the middle class suburban mystified bleatings of Fleetwood Mac and some abusive dumb ass shouting about being some kind of a tough thug, something that I find utterly depressing. And that it was all broadcast to my car, for my “entertainment”, indicates a deep moral depravity and absence of imagination, such that my mind reeled in anger and frustration. So I turned off the radio and sang to myself.
When I arrived where I am presently hanging my hat, my friends were watching “Gangs of New York”. Now there was a nasty bunch of corrupt and violent thugs – these people make the crack dealing rapper thugs of today look like the dimwitted amateurs they actually are. In the film, New York is portrayed as it was, a corrupt and violent hellhole and San Francisco is seen as a distant dreamtime. I look forward to leaving the New York area and returning to San Francisco to be with Mrs. Studebaker and little Avanti – but that’s a personal discussion not for the dear readers of Early Warning. . . What was interesting was the vision of New York City prior to petroleum. A dim and filthy place, filled with muddy streets of horse shit, the smoky air heavy with coal and wood fire, the clothing rough and in neutral shades of brown and black, and everyone’s hair flat and often greasy from a lack of shampoo and conditioner. Was it 150 years ago, or 150 years in the future?
Are we that far from it all? Half of my ancestors arrived after 1864 – they arrived in the New York City of the 1890s from boats arriving from St Petersburg Russia, Gdansk Poland, and Konigsberg, Prussia. They were leaving societies that were pre-petroleum and arriving in a nation that was just about to spin into the stratosphere of consumption and power. They would have been contemporaries of the parents and grandparents of the woman who lived in the farmhouse where I had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.
It’s hard to blame them for having so many children – in the old country it was a survival strategy. So few children would live to adulthood, having children was a numbers game – out of five or six, two or three might survive, and it had been this way for the past 200,000 years. But in the 1890s and 1900s it all changed. Modern medicine and all the other luxuries permitted by petroleum came and re-arranged society. 30 some odd years the potbellied stove was gone from the rural schoolhouse, replaced by an oil-burning furnace. Soon, the population exploded and housing developments appeared where farms had stood and the schoolhouse, with it thick walls of stone, small wooden windows, and peaked wood roof, itself was replaced by a “modern” school with a flat roof, acres of metal encased glass, and oil furnaces.
Here we stand at the cusp of a new world – our petroleum crutch slowly withering beneath us as we speak and our bloated population of wage slaves stupefied by pointless entertainment and luxuries unimaginable by previous civilisations. Some of us are working to prevent a catastrophe that seems increasingly likely with every passing day that the world sits in its self-satisfied ignorance, but the message is not one people want to hear: that – barring some miracle or three – they will have to use less and less energy, forever.
There is room for hope – technologies continue to develop and come online every day. There is a possibility that catastrophe will be avoided – but every day the sheeple of this world continue to adhere to idiotic superstitious notions of an antiquated religious decree to procreate and dominate the planet, to obsequiously follow the whims of witless, corrupt, and incompetent imperialist leaders, and continually fatten themselves and their scatterbrained children on an ill-gotten bounty of ignorance and greed, the catastrophe inches that much closer. It cozies up, like the final stages of heroin addiction, where the joy and rush of the drug is gone, and all that is left is the scrounging and theft to feed the addiction, all motivated by a dread and paralysing fear of what lies ahead without the drug.
This is a catastrophe that can and must be avoided, but it will only be avoided if everyone gets with the program, and does so immediately. The call is now. We must heed it. The rising industrial nations of China and India haven’t as far to fall, nor do they consume as much as the USA and Europe – which is why the hardest, largest, and most necessary reductions in petroleum use must begin with the USA and Europe. Quitting the addiction now will serve us well later. Quitting cold turkey from a habit as intense as ours is not possible – it must be prefaced with reductions. But these reductions must begin immediately so we can use what remains of the petroleum gift to fuel the start of a post-petroleum future.
And this brings me back to Arlo – he had the audience singing along to his dad’s song “This land is your land, this land is my land” when in the middle he stopped. The band stopped and looked at him and he went on a typically elliptical rant, that went something like-
“When a thought comes by, you jsut gotta grab it when it’s there, and I was thinking about how powerless people feel – like they can’t change anything, and I was thinking of Joseph, from the Bible, and how he had this really neat coat, and he wouldn’t do anything, and his brothers got all pissed off and decided they’d kill him or sell him into slavery. So one day his brothers went off into the fields to work. His father came by and told him to get off his ass and help his brothers work. So Joseph got up and went out and couldn’t find them, and this guy just happened to be there and said “They went that-a-way” and so Joseph went in that direction, found his borthers, was sold into slavery and had all kinds of terrible times. He ended up in a prison cell with all kinds of mean ugly nasty people – funny how that doesn’t change – and the meanest nastiest ugliest one of all was having problems with bad dreams. And so Joseph fixed his dreams and the big mean dude said “I’ll remember you for that” and was released soon afterward. He got a job with the pharoah, and the pharoah was having problems with dreams, so the big mean guy who was a slave for the Pharoah said “I know just the fellow” (and he told the rest of the story about Joseph getting in good with pharoah, etc.) and then he invited his family to live with him and after that there was Moses and Jesus and the whole religious thing that continues on today. And who have we got to thank for it all? Some anonymous guy in the desert who said “They went that-a-way” – because without him, none of the rest would have happened!”
And I think that’s important to remember. We all contribute to the effort – the human world is big and complex, but it is closed and finite – everything affects everything else. The more each of us contributes and points “that-a-way” the more people will understand that it’s the way to go.
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February 25, 2009 
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