I’m on the always inspiring Garden Fork podcast this week talking with “East Coast Eric” about my adventures in 3D printing, woodworking disasters, and a really useful note taking program called Obsidian. If you subscribe to Eric’s podcast you get to hear an update on my Little Free Blockbuster Library.

I never thought I’d want or need a 3D printer but, somewhat impulsively, I picked one up on a buy nothing group I belong to. It’s a Creality Ender 3 V2, a budget printer that’s been around for many years. You can certainly get a much better printer, but this thing works perfectly for what I use it for: boring projects around the woodshop. Here’s some of those dull, but useful, projects:

An adapter to connect a belt sander to a Festool vacuum hose.

Knobs for the massive 1950s era scroll saw I found on the street.

A template for that troubled chair project I’m still working on.

Sharpening guides.

A custom router table plate.

And, while not boring, a project I wish didn’t have to happen: whistles to hand out to neighbors to warn about ICE raids.

The humor in this post hints at the sometimes difficult to justify niche that 3D printing occupies. Not everyone needs one but I have to admit the thing is kind of fun and can have useful applications. I’ve seen some really nice whistles designed by folks who know their way around the design programs much better than I do and also know the nuances of the printer’s many settings.

Most of the objects I’ve printed were designed by other people and downloaded from Thingiverse. A few of them I designed in the free version of Autodesk Fusion, which has a steep learning curve. I use Bambu Studio to turn the files into something the printer can understand. I was also guided by a Fine Woodworking 3D printing class I took online.

Like most inexpensive tools, you get what you pay for. The Creality Ender took a lot of tinkering to get going and I think I’d look for a better printer if I were buying one new. But don’t say no to a free one.

My main DIY task for the past few months has been the unexpectedly fraught process of choosing and making a set of dining room chairs. Chairs are one of the more difficult woodworking projects. The main challenge comes in the design phase, in determining details such as: How much the back should tilt? How high should the seat be? How much should the seat slope? How wide should the chair be? How much of a curve on the back? The standards for these measurements come in a range that you have to refine. These details then enter into a challenging comfort vs. aesthetics dialectic. Even though I’m making a reproduction I still have to consider and modify all of these details since I’m working from photographs, not physical measurements of antiques.

The chair has only three legs and was designed to promote good posture in the sitter. If the sitter adopted any other position rather than one with two feet on the ground with weight evenly distributed, the chair would become unstable.

The model I built definitely had this posture-policing quality. Sit in it like a slob and you’ll topple over. Lean back and the chair will break. The chair’s curves and elegant inlay work asked you to up your drip game. I imagined something like this:

Jean Delville, Portrait of the Grand Master of the Rosicrucians in Choir Dress, Joséphin Péladan (Portrait du Grand Maître de la Rose+Croix en habit de chœur, Joséphin Péladan), 1895.

Final chair on left, model on right.

At last I found a much more modest chair with a cottagecore vibe that I was pretty sure would work, an obscure Gustav Stickley design from 1902. I built a full scale model and went through a long series of adjustments (I hinged the back so that I could get the optimal angle for comfort). I made adjustments to the plan in Sketchup and commenced building the final chair (shown at the top of this post) with some quatersawn white oak that I had laying around.

Mistakes happened as they always do. I cut the front legs too short but figured out a way to add on some wood to hide the mistake. I pre-finshed the wood before assembly but in the process of gluing it together somehow managed to not apply enough glue to the side rails.

Once I finally got the chair assembled I struggled over stain color. Ironically, I’m in a philosophy class this month where the subject of color came up, as it also did in a previous philosophy class I took last year. I’ll spare you the details but let’s just say that Plato, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze all struggled over what the f*** color is. If you really think about color you’ll come to see that the paint sample chips at the paint store lie to us with their certainty and granular specificity. Color perception in a piece of furniture can shift depending on the time of day, the initial color of the wood you’re working with and your mood. I was happy with the color but Kelly was skeptical and she’s the one with the art degree so I’ve learned to respect her expertise.

I finally finished weaving the seat, was not happy with the results, and the rails came loose again. I think the chair is too low, the slope front to back too dramatic and the color wrong. I’m definitely going to have to cut apart my mediocre weaving job, bang the chair apart and hope I can fix the bad glue joints. I’ll probably have to sand it down to bare wood again and restain. It might look okay in the picture but you’ll have to believe me when I say it’s getting as close to firewood as any project I’ve ever done. I’m considering making a second one with the lessons I’ve learned and later attempting to fix this wonky first attempt.

In woodworking, after an initial period of enthusiasm about beginning a new project, there’s always a phase of imposter syndrome. That’s a good thing because you have to stay humble when working with natural materials and manage both expectations about how long it takes to build something as well as realism about your skill levels. Sometimes things go smoothly, but most of the time they don’t. I’ve come to believe that in woodworking you never reach “mastery” you only get slightly better at recovering from mistakes. The paradox is that you make more mistakes because you’re always trying to strive for something slightly out of the reach of your skills. In short, it’s always just plain hard.

I helped a friend take two cats she’s currently fostering to Santé D’Or to get their shots and I got to hang out with all the foster babies for a few minutes. The spicy cats have to wear a little tie so that people know to keep an eye on them. I watched this cute little jerk running around and picking fights with all the other cats. He took a break to sit on the kibble barrel.

When I see wildly divergent movie reviews I know to head straight to the theater. Such was the case with a new film, Rabbit Trap. Reading between the lines of the, mostly, bad reviews I could tell that this was probably going to be an interesting film that breaks the mold of Hollywood’s tired formulas.

Rabbit Trap is, in fact, a very good movie. As the Weird Studies podcasters point out in an episode about the film, Rabbit Trap resembles a decadent, fin du siècle Arthur Machen story come to life: the Welsh mythology, the eerie mood, and the emotional transformation of the characters.

I won’t do any spoilers here but the film owes a lot to 1970s British folk horror both visually and in terms of a slower pacing than most new movies. The film is heavy on atmosphere but also rich in character study and drama. It fulfills my main requirement of a good movie, that the actors are transformed over the course of time, different at the end than at the beginning. For those who don’t like horror I’ll note that there’s no slasher or violent content.

The cast is made up of only three characters. Rosy McEwen portrays Daphne Davenport, an experimental electronic composer and Dev Patel is her husband who collects field recordings for her music. Jade Croot is a mysterious and ambiguous child who appears appears at their isolated, rural house. The experimental music and the field recording conceit allows for a rich sonic texture in the film and a good reminder that, in my opinion, sound is just, if not more, important in a movie than image.

The conclusion of my favorite Machen story, A Fragment of Life might be the best, if oblique, way of summing up Rabbit Trap,

So I awoke from a dream of a London suburb, of daily labour, of weary, useless little things; and as my eyes were opened I saw that I was in an ancient wood, where a clear well rose into grey film and vapour beneath a misty, glimmering heat. And a form came towards me from the hidden places of the wood, and my love and I were united by the well.

One of the many benefits of woodworking as a hobby is the privilege of customizing furniture to fit your house. You can make a unique piece to fit a unique room. See also Gesamtkunstwerk, of which I’m an adherent, somewhat to the annoyance of my forgiving spouse.

Most, but not all, of my furniture pieces are reproductions often extracted from auction photos. I spotted the Stickley chair with inlay, designed by Harvey Ellis, at the top of this post and immediately wanted to make a copy. I suspect this chair was a one of a kind prototype that I thought would make a good dining room chair to replace the thrift store chairs that offend my vision every single day.

To do all this pretentious Gesamtkunstwerking takes forethought. Wagner didn’t toss off those operas in an hour, after all. As a wise shop teacher once said, “always have a plan.”

Towards that end I recently spent a few days reviewing the finer points of the 3D modeling program Sketchup. I’ve used it for years but it really helps to know, in detail, what all the tools do and also to commit to memory the many keyboard shortcuts. FYI: the Los Angeles Public Library, like many other libraries around the U.S., offers free digital resources including Linkedin Learning (formally Lynda), which has a great Sketchup class.

Note–the chair rails would have curves that I did not cut in the model.

Chairs, even rectilinear examples like this one, are complicated objects with many oddball angles. They also are subject to more stress than most furniture as we haul our heavy asses up and down out of them many times a day. Due to all these angles, the 3D model took longer than usual. That this chair also has intricate inlay work means a big commitment and I wanted to make doubly sure that the chair would work in our house so I also took the step of making a full scale model out of scrap wood.

Cat for scale, but the photo does not do justice to how ridiculously oversized this chair seems in our tiny house.

I’m very thankfully I made this janky model as it became immediately apparent that the chair would be way too big for the room. It’s like something for your Edwardian era baronial dining room, not a scrappy Los Anglees bungalow. I’m a lowly blogger, after all, not a captain of industry.

While I’m disappointed the chair won’t work, I’m happy I didn’t waste wood and a lot of time. Thankfully I spotted a very strange chair from the same period in the De Young Museum in San Francisco and I think I might draw up a model of this chair. Story to be continued . . .

I have a theory about this day and it has nothing to do with patriotism, hot dogs or Yankee Doodle. The 4th is simply an “upside-down” or “misrule” day like Mardi Gras, Saturnalia, Halloween or the Medieval Feast of Fools. It’s a day when social order lets off some steam and the authorities look the other way. Another example would be the large packs of dudes on dirt bikes (now sometimes electric motorcycles) popping wheelies. A mass act of civil disobedience, on the other hand, would receive a very different response from the authorities.

If just from the reaction of our terrified cats and dog I’m not a fan of the 4th. When I woke up and peered out the window at 6 a.m. the next day I saw so much smoke I that I mistook it for fog. The air quality was in the “very unhealthy” range.

We could get into the NextDoor fireworks freakouts but that would be the length and tediousness of a grad thesis for a sociology degree. I’ll just say I’d be happy if the holiday went away especially now living in a city occupied by a masked force of Federales. I’ll leave the last word on the 4th with:

L.A. Taco reading the Declaration of Independence and Alan Ginsberg’s thoughts on Independence Day, written in the 50s but still remarkably prescient. See also Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age starting around page 46 for a lengthier history of misrule days and their historical consequences.

An errand took me back into Los Angeles from my Pomona pet sitting gig today and I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s post about what’s going on.

Whenever some big news event happens here, such as Trump’s chaotic immigration crackdown or the horrific fires back in January, the media tends to make it seem like the entire city is on the verge of collapse. I don’t want to minimize the events of this year–I’m appalled by what’s going on–but life in most places outside of downtown is pretty normal. Los Angeles is an enormous city both in population and geographical size. My journey today took me through Union Station, the subway and Hollywood. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The muffler colossi still overlook the sun baked streets (though this one installs glass so, apparently, put down his muffler).

I say nothing was out of the ordinary except for the disruption to the bus route I take to get back to Pomona. Due to street closures the stressed out bus driver got lost and had to make a u-turn on a busy, narrow street with a long, double articulated bus. This bus route caters to lower income working class folks and elderly people and the disruption is a major inconvenience. If the strategy is to “own the libs” it’s hurting the wrong people. Libs don’t take the bus. The disorganization of the current administration seems to result more in chaos and cruelty than any consummation of their goals (that, to be abundantly clear, I disagree with). And sending troops here right now is completely ridiculous.

If you want to know what’s going on my city councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez has been a voice of sanity. I feel like I’m better off listening to him than all the sensationalism in social media and in the mainstream press.

To travel from one place to another, particularly in this, our fragmented postmodern age means to traverse liminal border spaces: highways, airport waiting rooms, bus depots, interstate highways–what Fredric Jameson calls the “hyperspace” of late stage capitalism. Yesterday I found myself on a longer than expected liminal journey, making my way, via public transit, from central Los Angeles to pet sitting duties in Pomona, a little over 30 miles east.

As coincidence would have it this journey coincided with the protests that were taking place in Downtown Los Angeles surrounding Trump’s ICE raids and the arrest of union leader David Huerta. My trip kept skirting the zone where protestors faced off with an alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies. The bus I was on diverted as did the long range commuter bus I was expecting to catch. Stops were re-positioned unexpectedly. I jumped on the subway to get to Union Station thinking I could get my commuter bus there only to find it diverted to a stop outside the station. While I couldn’t catch the bus I found myself with a view of hundreds of police cars streaming towards a blockade of the 101 freeway. I ended up giving up on the bus and catching a train. The minor inconveniences I faced are, of course, nothing compared to the journeys many immigrants have made to this country in search of a better, peaceful life.

Ironically, I was in Los Angeles to attend Pentecost services, a day that celebrates an abolishment of borders, when the apostles found themselves communicating in languages they didn’t speak and implying a new way of doing things outside the boundaries of identitarian affiliations. As the new pope, Leo XIV put it in his Pentecost homily,

The Spirit opens borders, first of all, in our hearts. He is the Gift that opens our lives to love. His presence breaks down our hardness of heart, our narrowness of mind, our selfishness, the fears that enchain us and the narcissism that makes us think only of ourselves. The Holy Spirit comes to challenge us, to make us confront the possibility that our lives are shrivelling up, trapped in the vortex of individualism.

“I dreamed I could Fly” by Jonathan Borofsky in the Civic Center subway station.

During my trip I kept encountering something I find very odd: the use of classical music to, somehow, magically make unwanted homeless people go away. I went to grad school to study music and can’t help but notice this. The 7-11 near the beginning of my bus trip blasts classical music. I encountered it in the Civic Center subway station and in the bathroom at Union Station. Instead of using our national resources to provide health care, housing and education we spend it on the military that Trump is sending to Los Angeles and on the obscenely expensive gadgets monitoring us from the air. When this diversion of resources leaves people homeless, rather than get people housing and the help they need, we put up some speakers and blast Bach. Welcome to dystopia.

No, despite the propaganda, the whole city of Los Angeles is not somehow out of control. Most people are going about their normal business–remember, this is an enormous city both in population and square mileage–but I think it’s safe to say that most people here are angry at the hatred directed at our immigrant neighbors. If the hope was to intimidate us it’s not working. We’re coming together instead. As the pope says in that same homily, “Where there is love, there is no room for prejudice, for “security” zones separating us from our neighbors”

I’ve discovered, as an Apple cult member since the 1980s, that their devices tend to last. But after a number of years Apple effectively makes them obsolete by no longer allowing you to update the system and then they end up in the landfill.

A few years ago I tackled the arduous process of installing a solid state drive in a 2010 iMac, thus giving it a new lease on life. Unfortunately, it could only run a very old operating system making many of the applications I use unavailable. Just last week I discovered OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a free means of loading more recent operating systems on old Macs and other hardware devices. There’s a helpful YouTube tutorial if you want to give this a try:

Installing OpenCore was far easier to do than replacing the drive. Just make sure you’ve backed up everything and are prepared to wipe the drive. The old iMac now runs 2023’s Sonoma Operating system and it’s a bit slow but perfectly usable for most applications. I don’t think I’d use it for more intensive stuff like video editing.

I’m attempting to get to know how these machines work as part of an ongoing project to use computers rather than letting them use us. More to come . . .

Kelly and I made a pilgrimage this weekend to friend of the blog Daniel Hawkins’ spectacular and improbable Desert Lighthouse.

The fully functioning, solar powered lighthouse sits atop a hill overlooking the town of Hinkley just west of Barstow. Hinkley is best known for unfortunate reasons, due to water contamination caused by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and portrayed in the film Erin Brockovich. The population has slowly decreased over recent years.

We got to go into the lighthouse and climb a ladder up to an observation deck.

It was a beautiful day in the desert–many thanks to Daniel and the people of Hinkley who hosted us.

“East Coast” Eric over at Garden Fork has a new newsletter called Cool Stuff and it’s full of, well, cool stuff–like growing rhubarbs in the dark, waterproof Airtags for your puppers, and lots of pictures of puppers. Sign up here.

Loaf fail!

What could go wrong in a recipe with just four ingredients–flour, water, salt and yeast? When it comes to making bread, it turns out, a lot. In addition to the some recent, notable bread disasters, such as the one above, I felt that I had also fallen into a lazy rut, baking loaves that were edible but uninspiring.

The book is divided into four parts: recipes that use commercial yeast, recipes that use a sourdough starter (or levain), pizza and a section on doughs that combine sourdough starter and commercial yeast. I’ve never tried this heretical combination and I decided to give a go.

I was blown away by the results. You get the same sourdough tang and long shelf life (due to the preservative effects of the acidic culture) combined with a more open crumb structure due to the extra power of the commercial yeast. It also idiot-proofs the proofing since just a small amount of added commercial yeast (a 1/4 teaspoon in Forkish’s recipes) gives you a greater chance of success, even on the cold day.

I really like Forkish’s clear instructions in this book, especially his suggested baking schedules which involve feeding the starter in the morning, mixing the dough in the late afternoon, shaping the loaves in the early evening and proofing the dough in the refrigerator overnight. This schedule is more likely to fit into a normal day, though it can, of course, be modified.

The book owes a debt to Chad Roberston’s methods including baking the loaves in cast iron pots. Unlike Robertson, though, Forkish’s recipes are easier to follow and intended for a home baker. In addition to the heretical commercial yeast/levain dialectic, Forkish also skips the slashing step allowing the loaves to, in effect, slash themselves in the baking process.

Now all I want to do is bake bread instead of make dinner.

José García Hidalgo, Levitation of St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross at the Convento de la Encarnación, late 17c.

I’ve long kept an eccentric morning habit, reading the Daily Office Lectionary followed by some philosophy tome before the distractions of the day begin.

The, often dense and ridiculous, readings have varied over the years and, if I have any regrets, its been that I’ve worked backwards rather than starting with the Greeks. Western philosophy is a long series of dialogs and disagreements. Individual philosophers are contained, like Russian nested dolls, one inside another all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.

The two authors I’ve tackled over the last few months reflect my schizophrenic reading practice: the late literary professor and philosopher Fredric Jameson and history and religious studies professor Carlos Eire. Coherency be damned, I’ve enjoyed this particular contradictory juxtaposition.

Italian School, 18th Century, The Ecstasy of Saint Joseph of Cupertino.

Flying Saints and Witches on Broomsticks
Carlos Eire’s book They Flew: A History of the Impossible is an incendiary look at levitating and bilocating saints, demons and witches. Eire dares to take narratives of the “impossible” seriously. As Eire explains, we have more credible accounts of, say, Theresa of Avila’s and Joseph of Cupertino’s many moments of ecstatic flying than we have of well accepted moments of European political history.

Personally, I had always taken a cop-out attitude towards such paranormal phenomenon, thinking that it’s not important if these miraculous events were “real,” that what really matters is what they mean in the context of history. Towards the end of the book, Eire quotes religious scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal’s irritation with this stance,

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard an otherwise admired colleague say something like, “Well, it does not really matter if Joseph of Cupertino flew up into the tree after a scream, or if Teresa of Avila floated off the floor as her sisters piled on top of her to avoid a social embarrassment.

What matters is how the popular belief in such presumed levitations was disciplined, controlled, and maintained by the church and later constructed as sanctity and as a saint…. Really? I want to pull my hair out in such moments…. A super-pious Italian man ecstatically flies into a tree and has to be retrieved with a ladder, or a raptured Spanish nun cannot keep herself on the floor in front of some visiting noblewomen, and these physical events do not matter to you? Uh, excuse me, if either of those things actually happened (and our historical records suggest strongly that they did), such anomalous events change pretty much everything we thought we knew about human consciousness and its relationship to physics, gravity, and material reality. Either single event would fundamentally change our entire order of knowledge. And you don’t care? Don’t you find that disinterest just a little bit perverse?

Inside of many of us, particularly a certain class of over-educated folks who live in big cities–I’m including myself here–is an inner, literal and very annoying Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I’ll be blunt. I no longer want to inhabit Neil’s disenchanted world. It’s flat, boring and meaningless. Call me a crank–I don’t care anymore–I want to stay open to the possibility of the impossible. Let’s fly again.

If this book floats your boat you’ll enjoy my favorite podcast Weird Studies which turned me on to Eire’s work.

I kind of wish this was real and not just a meme.

Theory Bound
As an example of just how disjointed my morning reading can be, I also just finished Fredric Jameson’s book The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, a transcription of a lecture series delivered via Zoom during the pandemic.

Jameson in lecture mode is easier to read than his normal and, very dense, academic prose. In the lectures he gives you the historical context for a chain of post WWII French thinkers from Sartre to Latour. Jameson knew many of these people personally, and the lectures have an often funny, gossipy tone.

If, like me, you went to grad school in the 80s or 90s you likely got a dose of French postmodern theory. If also, like me, you studied music, or art or literature you likely got that theory secondhand, from a well meaning professor who perhaps lacked the philosophical chops to give the contextualization for theorists such as Foucault and Derrida. Jameson’s book corrects a lot of misconceptions I had about this period. Jameson has the background to engage with and explain their thinking. Let me also note here that most of the critics of postmodern theory haven’t bothered to actually read it (I’m looking at you Jordan Peterson). Admittedly it ain’t beach reading but that’s not a bug it’s a feature.

It’s true that some of these French thinker-dudes ran their conceptual ships ashore on the rocks of extreme skepticism and dense prose. In so doing they inadvertently created an anti-metanarrative-metanarraive of avoidance and rhetorical vagueness. That said, we live in a media landscape they anticipated and this is, perhaps, their most enduring legacy, despite the fact that most of them died at the advent of personal computers.

I recently stumbled on an Instagram rise and grind influencer who explained, without knowing it, Baudrillard’s version of sign theory. To overly simplify, the Mercedes logo doesn’t refer to a car, it refers to things like “luxury” and “freedom”. This influencer knows sign theory intuitively, uses it to make money and even authored a book that’s kind of what would happen if Jean Baudrillard wrote a version of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I think this demonstrates why it’s helpful to have some postmodern theory in your understandin’ toolkit to navigate the moment we all find ourselves in.

If you’re a theory-head you’ll love Gilles Delueze riffing on topics in alphabetical order for six whole hours (!). Someone has thoughtfully uploaded a subtitled version to Archive.org. It’s hard to believe, in our idiotic present, that this kind of content used to be on mainstream television. Lest you think this is just a French thing I’ll point out that, when philosopher Henri Bergson came to New York to do a guest lecture in 1913, he caused the first ever traffic jam on Broadway(1). If you’ve only got an hour and a half of theory-time, there’s also a great documentary about Derrida on Kanopy.

This week I managed to cross off a years-in-the-waiting “honey-do” request from Kelly: fixing the busted drawers in a built-in hallway cabinet. Our house, now in its 105th year, was built to less than perfect standards. The nailed together drawers just didn’t work anymore.

The first step was to replace the wooden runners with high quality Blum undermount soft close drawer slides. I mounted the slides to pieces of wood that I attached to the sides of the empty cavity of the cabinet. Since this house is well out of square, this required some shimming and milling pieces of wood to bring the cabinet into a more rectilinear geometry. This was somewhat of an “off-label” type operation but it worked despite Blum’s admonition that their product is not for retrofitting wonky old cabinets.

Next step was to head down to Bohnhoff, my favorite lumberyard to get some hard maple for the drawers. At this point I’m going to plug two things. First, woodworking as a hobby has been eminently practical and I’m thankful that I put in the time to learn how to do it. Because I don’t have to hire someone to do the work, such as retrofitting these old built-ins, I can use the savings to buy nicer materials like maple, that would never have been used in such a modest house. And, let me to use this moment to say how much I dislike the big box players, such as Home Depot. Smaller and medium sized lumberyards, in my experience, have actual people you can talk to and higher quality materials. Also Home Depot isn’t always cheaper. I only go to Home Depot now if there’s something I absolutely can’t get at Bohnoff or Ganahl.

Once I got home from the lumberyard I set about installing the slides and making story sticks, which are pieces of scrap wood cut to the precise size of the final drawer and used as a guide for milling and sizing the final dimensions of the maple I had bought. In making drawers there’s a very, very small margin of error in terms of sizing. You have to be precise.

The next step was to cut the dovetails. I took a class a few years ago on how to do this by hand. I had previously cut dovetails with a router and a special jig but I much prefer doing it with a dovetail saw and chisels. The router required HOURS of tedious adjustments to get the jig to work and often ended in frustration when the router bit would tear out huge chunks of wood. While it took some practice to get the hang of cutting dovetails by hand, I much prefer the flexibility in layout and the pleasure of working with traditional tools. I still have room for improvement in cutting dovetails by hand, but I’m getting better. In the video above you can see a time lapse of me cutting dovetail pins using a blue tape trick invented by Mike Pekovich of Fine Woodworking Magazine. For the front of the drawers I reused the faces from the old ones.

To cap off the project, we went to Pasadena Architectural Salvage to get some pulls for the new drawers and visit their 21 year old store cat. One last rant here: I really like being able to touch and hold an object rather than spend three hours reading online reviews and guessing about quality and size. I dreaded trying to order the pulls online and am glad to have a resource like this salvage shop. I’m willing to pay a little extra for the privilege. Plus the cat . . .

I’ll close with a quote from Roland Bathes from an essay “Toys” in his book Mythologies. The essay is short and well worth reading. The first part discusses the problems with how many toys prefigure and circumscribe social constructs as opposed to the open ended promise of plain building blocks. You can see this in how Legos, which used to be just plain blocks, have, over the years, morphed into hideous pre-made Star Wars building sets. Bathes concludes the essay with an appreciation of the qualities of wood,

Current toys are made of a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature. Many are now moulded from complicated mixtures; the plastic material of which they are made has an appearance at once gross and hygienic, it destroys all the pleasure, the sweetness, the humanity of touch. A sign which fills one with consternation is the gradual disappearance of wood, in spite of its being an ideal material because of its firmness and its softness, and the natural warmth of its touch. Wood removes, from all the forms which it supports, the wounding quality of angles which are too sharp, the chemical coldness of metal. When the child handles it and knocks it, it neither vibrates nor grates, it has a sound at once muffled and sharp. It is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. If it dies, it is in dwindling, not in swelling out like those mechanical toys which disappear behind the hernia of a broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time. Yet there hardly remain any of these wooden toys from the Vosges, these fretwork farms with their animals, which were only possible, it is true, in the days of the craftsman. Henceforth, toys are chemical in substance and colour; their very material introduces one to a coenaesthesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child.

If you’re a local you can do a favor for two of the many victims of the fires. Joseph Abrakjian and his partner Pam Watanabe, who run Seed Bakery, lost their home in Altadena. Thankfully, the bakery is still running. Please consider dropping by for lunch or breakfast. The food is amazing.

Joseph generously helped the Los Angeles Bread Bakers meetup that I co-ran several years ago. At the bakery he mills his own flour and works with a variety of whole wheats. He’s one of the best bakers in California. Unfortunately, since the bakery is right on the edge of the fire zone, business is down a bit. Seed is located at 942 East Washington Blvd. in Pasadena. Seed is takeout only and the hours are Tuesday thru Saturday 8:00 – 2:30 and Sunday 8:00 – 2:00.

I have a goal in 2025 of reducing the number of subscriptions that parasitize my bank account. Towards that end I searched for an alternative to Evernote, a note taking app that I used to keep track of everything from financial information to bike tire sizes to combinations for locks. Sometimes it’s handy to have this information both on your laptop and your phone but I became disenchanted with Evernote over the years due to the yearly cost.

Thanks to the YouTube algorithm I came across a flock of what I’d call “rise and grind” life optimizer bros pushing a program called Obsidian. While I may not vibe with their (atomic?) habits, these dudes were right about Obsidian. While it took many hours of tutorials to get it to do the things I needed, I’ve been impressed with the results with a few caveats I’ll get to. And Obsidian is free for non-commercial use.

Use Cases
So far I’ve used Obsidian to:

• Create a list of books I’ve read and books that I want to read.
• Keep track of movies that I’d like to see or have already viewed.
• Clip web articles to read later.
• Keep track of the aforementioned random bits of info, for instance, when I pick up a heater filter at the hardware store and need to remember the size.

Graph view from example on web.

One of the features that I did not expect to use but has ended up being transformative for me is the graph view, which shows, visually, connections between notes. It seemed like a gimmick until I used it to integrate two related sets of information for a project I’m working on. Immediately, I started to notice connections that I hadn’t seen in the spreadsheet I had been working from. The graph view also seemed to, unexpectedly, affirm some of the ideas in the Fredric Jameson book I’m reading now, The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, especially the importance of contextual relationships in understanding information.

My book list made with a plugin that searches a book catalog and creates my own personal Goodreads.

A lot of people use Obsidian for daily note taking but I prefer a pen and paper diary for this. If you prefer a computer I think it would be great for this purpose and you can even integrate your notes with a calendar. Obsidian is highly customizable if you’re willing to sift through documentation.

There’s a few downsides. Obsidian makes heavy use of user contributed plugins. Some are great and some cause instability. I also had some trouble at first sharing information across my laptop and iPhone but managed to get it working using my iCloud. Obsidian offers a paid cloud based storage sync option but that involves a subscription which, as I said at the beginning of this post, I’m trying to avoid. I’d also suggest going with the official documentation for Obsidian and its plugins not the aforementioned YouTube tech influencer bros, because if the video isn’t up to date you can run into problems.

My movie list made using a plugin that grabs images and descriptions from IMDB.

Perhaps the best feature is that the files Obsidian creates are .md markdown files, plain text files that can be read by any computer. If Obsidian goes out of business all my files will still be readable now and in the future. If you’re jumping ship from Evernote, there’s a handy plugin to convert your notes to .md files.

Alternatives
Obsidian is far from the only note taking program out there. Zettlr is one that I’ve heard is more stable, likely easier to get started on, but has fewer options. Wikipedia has a long comparison table of note taking software on Wikipedia.

If all you want to do is generate interactive graphs and are comfortable with a command line interface on your terminal app, Cosma is impressive. The Cosma documentation is so well written that, if you go through it patiently, you’ll have a better grasp of what’s “under the hood” of your operating system, another goal of mine in 2025.

I had hoped to begin the year with a few lighter posts about projects around the house, but the events of the past week have started 2025 off on a dark note. Yesterday, on my evening dog walk, I found a charred page from Winston Churchill’s book The Gathering Storm that must have come from one of the many destroyed homes in Altadena, carried aloft by hurricane force winds a distance of 12 miles.

We have never lived in Altadena but Kelly and I both feel a deep connection to the place. We met a lot of people there in the years after our two books came out. Altadena is the kind of place you’ll find creative people who like DIY projects and envisioning better ways of living in this world. It’s also one of the last affordable (by Los Angeles standards) cities where middle class families can buy a home.

One of the people we met through our book was climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who lived in Altadena at the time. In a recent column for the New York Times “As a Climate Scientist, I Knew It Was Time to Leave Los Angeles” Peter lamented the climate driven destruction of his former hometown.

I’ve been watching this week’s tragedy unfold from afar, piecing the story together through local news reports and texts and videos from friends, some of whom have lost homes, trying to figure out what has burned and what hasn’t. Our dog’s pet hospital, gone. The church where our boys’ string recitals took place, gone. The weird Bunny Museum I’d wonder about on my bicycle, waiting for the light to change; the friendly hardware store I went to a hundred times; the coffee shop where I’d meet friends and climate activists; all gone.

My former neighbor texted me Thursday to say that our little cul-de-sac burned, his house and ours and all our neighbors’ homes except for one. The beautiful house we raised our children in, gone; and my tears finally came.

No place is truly safe anymore.

I can continue Peter’s paragraph. The historic Zane Grey estate where I used to teach classes with the late Joseph Shuldiner and the former owners, Steve and Gloria, gone. A friend’s house, gone. Anther friend’s former house (right across the street from Peter), gone. The office of a massage therapist who helped me heal from a  car accident, gone. The hardware store I’d drop into, gone. The coffee place, gone. The gallery I went to an opening at just last weekend, gone. The burger place we ate at last Saturday, gone. The place I did book tour lectures at, likely, gone. Historic churches, gone. The Theosophical Library, with 15,000 rare books, gone. To have walked around just last weekend to go to that art opening, shop at a nursery and visit the Christmas Tree Lane model railroad with some friends and then see many of these places vanish off the map just days later is unthinkable.

If you had told me that the upper parts of Altadena, that border the vast Angeles Forest, suffered damage I’d be saddened but not surprised. But the fire reached deep into an urban area at a great distance from the wilderness, much further than I ever would have expected. That this fire hit a place where so many people are aware of and working to counter the dangers of climate change shows, as Peter says, that no place is safe.

As an Altadena resident said on Reddit, “Losing everything is an abstract notion until you lose everything”. Here’s a handy resource guide for those in need. For those of us who are safe, scroll to the bottom and you’ll find a list of organizations (that I can vouch for) that need donations. I donated to the LAUSD Education Foundation Emergency Relief Fund.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Harrowing of Hell

Early this morning a neighbor texted a photo of a charred page from a screenplay that landed on his roof over the night. That page likely drifted from the Eaton fire twelve miles northeast of us.

Other than horrible air quality we’re safe but I made the mistake of checking the news on the cesspool known as X, hoping to check on some friends in Altadena. Instead of helpful information, I found right wing misdirection and conspiracy theories, blaming the fires on political enemies, water policies and diversity programs. I feel the need to counter a few of these narratives with a few reminders:

1. A single agricultural oligarch family, The Resnicks, consume more water than the entire city of Los Angeles. As I’ve written about before, the Resnicks launder their reputation by giving big gifts to CalTech, The LA County Museum of Art and political contributions to governor Gavin Newsom and many other politicians.
2. No one, myself included, wants to read about, ponder or confront any news about climate change. It’s overwhelming and dis-empowering. I don’t have an easy hot take here but when you have an apocalyptic fire in December you have to, at least, take climate change seriously.
3. Every time there’s an attempt to do an even modest increase in taxes to pay for infrastructure and public safety improvements, an unholy alliance of real estate interests, Wall Street, the California Apartment Owners Association and more spend millions on disinformation campaigns. What little money is spent ends up wasted on graft and corruption via engineering and construction firms controlled by these very same interests.

I have friends who had to evacuate from Pasadena last night who live in a house very far from any wilderness area on a street I never imagined would ever be threatened by a wildfire. I hope that their home and many others will be spared and, when this is over, that we can all join together to work on making our city more resilient. Most of that effort, I’m afraid, will come down to the dirty and un-fun work of grass roots politics.

When I asked a friend what he was going to do for New Year’s Eve he told me that he was going to go to bed like he always does. Then he informed me that Kelly and I once hosted a small New Years gathering where we all sat around and listened to Art Bell’s predictions show where random, unscreened callers would prognosticate about, mostly, doom and gloom stuff. I have no memory of this gathering but put a bootleg podcast of Art on this evening to drown out the fireworks and keep the animals calm.

I worked all day in the woodshop making frames for a friend’s gallery show so I too will be heading to bed early. No Club Los Globos for us tonight.

Best wishes to all for a happy 2025.

Even though it seems like Christmas cards are less of a thing (we get fewer every year) Kelly and I wanted to send some out. We weren’t happy with the commercial options so I went looking on the interwebs for some high resolution antique cards and found a nice selection in the digital collections of the New York Public library.

I downloaded two of these cards, adjusted them with Affinity Photo, and sent them to my local print shop, E.R. Copies on Sunset. They printed them up on matte paper for a very reasonable price and I really liked the results.

Coincidentally, the LA Times has a story today on the particular genre of one of the cards I picked, “Christmas greetings, with a touch of gloating, from sunny Southern California“. These early 20th century cards were a way of promoting the place at a time when real estate interests were trying to get people to move here from the rest of the country. From the article,

One, at least, from Pasadena to Pittsburgh, didn’t bother to be coy or even polite, and I have to admire it for that. It showed a “California Christmas” image of palms and poppies, and “Eastern Christmas” of snowbound pines and dead-branched deciduous.

“Dear little postcard, swiftly go / Back to the land of ice and snow / And bear this Christmas message please / To those dear friends of mine who freeze / Our California’s fine — just listen: / You simply don’t know what you’re missin’!”

Best wishes for a happy and peaceful 2025.

A traveling exhibit from the Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum landed at Japan House this month and it’s both a fascinating look at the intricacies of Japanese joinery as well as a beautiful example of how to do good exhibit design.

From the catalog,

The exhibition is structured around the 5 pillars of daiku culture: a reverence for nature and the Japanese forest, the master carpenters’ refined tools, the practice of domiya daiku – the temple and shrine carpenters, kigumi – the strength and beauty of Japanese joinery, and the work of the sukiya daiku – the skillful carpenters employing natural materials to detail and finish teahouses.

We attended a talk by the curator, Marcelo Nishiyama who bemoaned the sorry state of most contemporary building practices in Japan and the lack of respect for the craft of carpentry. As I’ve learned from my furniture making hobby, carpentry requires a combination of physical stamina, a sense of design and a hand/eye finesse similar to playing a musical instrument. Nishiyama noted that we consider the trades as lesser than going to college and this attitude needs to change. In particular, the complex joinery involved in Japanese temple architecture demonstrates a high level of skill and experience.

The films Nishiyama played during his talk, which are screening at the Japan House mindfulness lounge on weekdays throughout the run of the exhibit show the extremes of carpentry: kumiko masters cutting thousands of tiny slivers of wood to temple builders hefting giant logs and connecting complex joints designed to withstand Japan’s frequent earthquakes.

The exhibit runs in Los Angeles until January 22nd and then it will travel to London and São Paulo. I’m going to go see it again.

“What I always expect from history is surprises, and surprises which I still haven’t succeeded in explaining, although I have made great efforts to understand.” – Jacques Lacan The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man

It feels like we’re on the cusp of an epochal change with what has come to be known as neoliberalism in crisis and an unknown future showing the first signs of breaking through.

Understanding our neoliberal present led me to a life changing book, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Fisher, in turn, guided me to the writing of Richard Seymour, specifically his book The Twittering Machine. The central thesis of that book, that we think we are “tweeting” when we are, in fact being tweeted is something I think about as I, and I’m sure many of you, struggle with the amount of time we are captured by the algorithms.

Seymour has a new book out, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization that grapples with our present confusing moment. In the book Seymour analyses the international rise of authoritarian leaders in the U.S., Brazil, The Philippines, Hungary and elsewhere and how these emerging movements create compelling, though false, narratives to explain real crises such as climate change, immigration and economic disparity. As Seymour puts it, “disaster nationalists offer a curative decivilization: violent restoration, followed by laughter and forgetting.”

Against a background of atomization, loneliness and toxic individualism disaster nationalists provide what Seymour calls “participatory disinfotainment” such as Qanon and a violent “death squad populism” of strongmen like Rodrigo Duterte.

The difficulty with an honest assessment of the troubles we face is the abstract nature of problems such as climate change and disaster nationalists know how to exploit this. Seymour says,

Many of the sources of our problems are obscure, remote and impersonal, and they can appear almost random. For example, it was reported in 2022 that austerity policies in the United Kingdom had caused 300,000 excess deaths. That causal relation would not necessarily have been evident to surviving relatives at the time, when the deaths would have been attributed to ailments such as cardiovascular disease rather than to the conditions making people vulnerable to the disease. If one wasn’t tuned in to politics, one might have been aware of losing a loved one, of misfortunes piling up, of the quality of life generally getting worse, without having a face to put to the crime. In those circumstances, resentment might either remain below the threshold of awareness or settle on a personal or political scapegoat.

Pro wrestler Kane in the ring with future education secretary Linda McMahon.

While the disaster nationalists offer “a nimbus of piety, sex and violence.” (see the six part Netflix documentary about pro wrestling impresario Vince McMahon for a perfect example of this) the centrist politicians who oppose them keep us in a state Mark Fisher described as “nihiliberalism”. As Margaret Thatcher said “there is no alternative” and as Joe Biden promised, “nothing will fundamentally change.” Seymour describes this now stagnant and fading order,

The point was not any admirable social goal, but merely the maintenance of a market order in which everyone competes in a state of ignorance: ‘a willed and deliberate unknown,’ as Raymond Williams put it, ‘in which the defining factor is advantage’. This pointless pursuit of advantage as the summum bonum of social life also entailed constant measuring of self-worth against the success of others, so that failure became unbearable at just the point where millions could amount to ‘literally nothing’.

Seymour spends the bulk of the book analyzing the qualities of disaster nationalists, their obsessions with violence and sex, the ways they use celebrity and technology, the differences and similarities between them and the fascists of the 1930s. It’s definitely not a fun beach read but if we’re going to counter this movement we’ve got to do some ‘know thy enemy’ homework. Seymour sums up,

Where real crises abound, disaster nationalism is enthralled by entirely fictional crises. And, inasmuch as it presents itself as a solution, it is also palpably hankering for a world-shattering, cleansing crisis: bring it on. This disaster fiction, I have suggested, is a kind of dreamwork enacted on the real crises of the age, conducting the molecular flow of economic, emotional and erotic miseries into a building tidal wave of vengeful violence.

Seymour hints at two promising suggestions on how to counter the disaster nationalists. He says we need a basis of, ‘bread and butter’ politics—addressing people’s material needs for health care and housing. But he suggests that this is not enough. We need to work, Seymour says, on the “bowling alone” problem described by Robert Putnam—the fact that we lack connections between people that used to be formed by churches, labor unions, clubs etc. I don’t think anyone knows how exactly to go about solving that lack of group cohesion but I also agree we have to try. The neoliberal order wants to keep us isolated on our smartphone screens while the far right offers a togetherness rooted in an “armed shitstorm”. We have to offer a compelling alternative based on solidarity.

I gave a neighbor’s high school kid a ride to school last week and when he got into our beater car he informed me that the interior, “smells like a Jersey Mikes.” Before I could finish apologizing he informed me that this was a compliment. It turns out we’re both obsessed with sandwiches and the rest of the trip to school we agreed on the thesis that one should be allowed to eat a sandwich for every meal of the day.

The unlikely ascendancy of social media star and former Netlix executive Barry Enderwick tells me that we’re on the verge of the sandwich breaking out of the lunch ghetto. Barry films an aggressively low budget video of himself making a sandwich from some weird old cookbook every single day and posts it to all the platforms. He’s got his own tag lines and lingo, “Let’s give this sandwich a gooooo” and describes necessary improvements to these old recipes as “plus ups”. I catch his channel on YouTube where it appears around noon, just in time for lunch.

When Barry announced a nationwide book release tour I snapped up a ticket for the local show making me, I guess, some kind of Sandwiches of History groupie. It turned out that Barry’s a natural entertainer, easily trading witticisms and barbs with his co-host, actor Rob Huebel while they made one of the stranger sandwiches from his book, the “Dairy Sandwich” of 1909, which consisted of only two slices of Swiss cheese with butter in between. The lack of bread brings this one into the contentious ontological edges of sandwich theory, such as the related question of “is a hotdog a sandwich,” a topic tackled in the introduction to Barry’s book.

If you missed the Los Angeles show, Barry just announced some upcoming appearances in Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston and New Orleans. He has a website, Sandwiches of History, where you can find links to all the platforms he appears on.

And punishment for me sitting on this blog post for a week–I got out-scooped by CBS Sunday Morning. Does anyone still watch this show? I remember it as a kid and I’m old. But good on them for getting hip to Barry and his ye olde sandwiches:

There’s a hole in my late night soul once occupied by the late, great Art Bell. No talent can ever replace that voice, emanating as it did from the vast mysterious desert of the Southwest, spinning tales of the great mysteries of this land, from UFOs, to Bigfoot, to ghosts to the shadow people that haunt the margins of our vision.

I listen to a few podcasts in an attempt to fill that Art Bell hole including the Dark Histories Podcast. The host, Ben Cutmore, did an episode on a very unlikely exorcist, the Anglican clergyman reverend Dr. Donald Omand. Cutmore based the episode on a book, The Man Who Exorcised the Bermuda Triangle by journalist Marc Alexander. I picked up a copy of this book in the library and it proved to be page turning fun.

Father Omand’s ecclesiastical career first came to prominence when he became the chaplain of a traveling circus. It was his work with this circus where his exorcism skills first came to use. A tragic incident occurred in which an otherwise normal and much loved strong man antagonized, in an uncharacteristic and unexplainable moment, the lion tamer’s animals causing them to attack and kill the tamer. Omand was asked later, by the superstitious circus performers, to exorcise the lions.

The press picked up on this incident and Omand’s skills were soon in demand. He built up his exorcism chops (which he traced to the supernatural skills of his Orkney born mother), starting with possessed individuals to ever more geographically spacious and seemingly absurd projects ranging from roadways with high accident rates to remote “sea madness” vortexes in the North Sea, to the Lock Ness Monster and his magnum exorcism opus, the entirety of the Bermuda Triangle.

I had expected the book to be more absurd and unbelievable than it actually was. By the end of the book, Omand’s project seemed sensible as a purging of the psychogeographical bad juju that we all intuitively feel in our desecrated landscape of parking lots and freeways. Omand comes off as careful, kindly and sincere, a man with a sense of humor and not the attention seeker you might expect at first. The Lock Ness exorcism is indicative of his approach. Alexander’s book explains that he wasn’t really seeking to end sightings of the monster but, rather, to stop the negative “vibes” associated with the Lock Ness Monster’s apparitions. In so doing Omand not only keeps the British Isles’ enchantment intact but even ads some “rizz” to the mystic Albion of our dreams. I’m left wondering if the U.S. could use one of Omand’s large scale psychogeogrpahical exorcisms at this present moment.

I recommend you dig The Man Who Exorcised the Bermuda Triangle out of the dusty stack of your local library, but if you want a quick summary of Omand’s life the Dark Histories Podcast episode, “The Spectacular Life of Donald Omand, Exorcist Extraordinaire” is a fun listen. The BBC segment above doesn’t capture what I think Omand was attempting to do, but at least you can see him at work and hear the bemused opinions of the Lock Ness locals.

Our first book The Urban Homestead went to print just as the financial crisis of 2008 hit and its success I attribute, in part, to the well known fact that in times of economic stress people turn to subjects such as growing food, canning, mending, and preparedness. Enthusiasm for these subjects surged after the stock market crash of 1929 and the oil crisis of the 1970s. Catastrophic financial trauma usually results in a rightward turn: fascism in the 1930s, Reagan in the 1980s and the shape-shifting postmodern right of our time.

By now, myself included, we’re likely fatigued by a tsunami of premature hot takes on the U.S. election results this month. At the risk of adding yet another, I want to mention one aspect related to our book and the subject of this blog. Specifically, I’ve long thought that what caused many of us to turn to pastimes such as gardening and cooking has a lot to do with a metaphysical uneasiness with postmodern consumer culture that the 2008 crisis greatly exacerbated.

Figures on the right like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Viktor Orbán know how to exploit this uneasiness. These far right politicians accurately name our anxieties: a lack of meaning, skyrocketing grocery bills, and downward class mobility. In contrast, neoliberal, centrist politicians, such as the leadership of the Democratic party, tell us its our own fault, that it’s all in our imagination, that we’re uninformed, that we should download a mindfulness app and suck it up, and that, ultimately, you’re on your own to solve your unhappiness. While the centrists gaslight us, the far right misdirects—instead of grounding these legitimate concerns in the system itself they blame whatever minority group is easiest to kick down—immigrants, trans people, imaginary communists etc.

The results of the U.S. Election last week are a resounding referendum on that centrist gaslighting and scolding. It feels as though the shock of 2008 has finally delivered us, after many bumpy years, to the end of the ‘end of history,’ in the sense of Francis Fukuyama’s notion that liberal society has reached its peak, fulfilled all our needs and we can all just go to brunch. Fukuyama’s teleological fantasy hit a wall this month and brunch got permanently canceled.

Food and Drugs
One of the things I’m least looking forward to in the coming years, is hearing the raspy voice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapping into that spiritual unease I’ve just mentioned while, possibly, wielding immense power over our food and drug system. Like his far right compatriots, RFK Jr. does the same two step rhetorical dance by first accurately calling out the rot at the core of our food and medical systems but then going on to misdirect our attention from the real cause of the problem: a system based on capital accumulation that only provides food and healthcare as an afterthought.

RFK Jr’s rhetoric isn’t worth the time it would take to refute but it would be a mistake to condescend to his followers who face the same chronic health concerns and the plague of sadness that effects us all. Condescension, a fatal trait of the professional classes that support the current Democratic party is one of the reasons Harris lost in my opinion. I knew there was a problem when, a few months ago, I spotted a sign in our neighborhood of $1.5 million+ homes reading, smugly, “Harris for President OBVIOUSLY.” Cults do this type of messaging which is more about reinforcing notions that you’re somehow part of the chosen few rather than, much more productively, winning people over to your side.

You also can’t “fact check” your way out of this crisis or RFK Jr.’s bullshit. The overly literal and materialist biases of the ruling class are part of the problem. We have somehow neglected the tool kits that religion, poetry, art, philosophy and the humanities offer to refute the impoverished belief systems of people like RFK Jr. We don’t need fact checkers, we need better belief systems backed up by the principle of love of neighbor.

No Plaster Saints

Lest I contribute to black pilling anyone who still reads this old blog, the two things keeping me going this week include the fact that the local campaign I helped out with succeeded in throwing out a corporate Democrat by appealing to people’s material needs, most specifically addressing the problem of high rent in a very unaffordable city.

I’m also holding in my mind this picture of the no-nonsense Dorothy Day looking like a character in a film noir. I can imagine her taking a drag on that smoke and saying, as she once did, “Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.” Then I can imagine her, as she also did, getting to work in a struggle harsh on systems but big on love of neighbor. As she said, “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”

Update: Shortly after posting this Trump nominated RFK Jr. for the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services which will Senate confirmation.

Given the outsized coverage of the U.S. presidential reality show in the past eight years it seems that the old cliche “all politics is local” no longer holds. Never mind that in our highly interconnected world all politics is actually international.

But you have to begin somewhere. I’ve focused on the local for the last 20 years, having worked as a low level volunteer on and off on a variety of issues and campaigns. “Local” in Los Angeles, given the size of the city (3.8 million) and the region (12.8 million), means that more people live here than all but 5 of 56 states and territories.

We have a chance tomorrow to replace one of our worst and most corrupt councilmembers, Kevin De Leon with a grass roots candidate Ysabel Jurado. While most of you reading this probably aren’t in Los Angeles let me explain why this race is important wherever you live.

How Big Real Estate Influences Politics
Real estate interests drive the overwhelming majority of local political corruption. In America’s big cities the combination of a housing shortage and outdated zoning codes create the opportunity for developers, construction firms, consultants, landlords and lobbyists to influence local officials who have broad powers to make or break developments. Thanks to the supreme court’s Citizen’s United ruling, these real estate interests, in addition to outright bribes, can pour money into what are called “independent expenditures” to support messaging in favor of their favored candidates or initiatives. Increasingly, real estate interests use police and fire unions to mask the true motive of these independent expenditures with a false “public safety” scare narrative. Combine all this with a gutted local press and public officials know that they can get away with all kinds of petty schemes since nobody is watching them.

As a solidly “blue” city, campaign funding in Los Angeles flows to Democrats but the money itself is agnostic. If this were a “red” city the contributions would fill the pockets and campaign coffers of Republicans. This type of real estate corruption happens everywhere, for example, with New York City mayor Eric Adams who seems to have taken foreign money to facilitate local construction projects.

A Local Example
Let’s take a look at six recently disgraced Los Angeles city councilmen to see how (mostly) real estate interests drive political corruption:

• Jose Huizar: Sentenced to 13 years for taking bribes and other perks including casino trips and escorts in return for favorable treatment of developers, notably Chinese billionaire Wei Huang. Huizar was assisted in this scheme by the former general manager of LA Building and Safety and deputy mayor Ray Chan and also by Huizar’s special assistant George Esparza and real estate development consultant George Chiang. Others involved in the crime: political fundraiser Justin Jangwoo Kim, lobbyist Morris Roland Goldman, Huizar’s brother Salvador Huizar, developer Dae Yong Lee, 940 Hill LLC, and Shen Zhen New World LLC.
• Mitchell Englander: councilman and reserve LAPD officer sentenced to 14 months in federal prison for accepting “cash payments, expensive meals, escort services and other gifts” in return for obstructing the Huizar investigation
• John Lee: Allegedly “staffer B” in the Huizar indictment. Staffer B accepted “multiple gifts from a businessperson and a developer, most of which exceeded the gift limit.”
• Mark Ridley-Thomas: In addition to real estate, some corruption comes from what you might call the “non-profit industrial complex,” non-profits that influence policy and/or receive funding from the city. Former councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas was convicted along with USC dean Marilyn Louise Flynn for taking bribes in return for directing funding to USC, a university with so many scandals that LA Times reporter Paul Pringle wrote a book Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels describing them along with this powerful university’s successful attempt to suppress Pringle’s reporting, for over a year, about an abusive, crack smoking USC medical school dean.
• Curren Price: According to the LA Times: “Price, first elected in 2013, is accused of voting on development projects in which he had a financial interest, and receiving tens of thousands of dollars in medical benefits for his now-wife while he was still married to another woman.” One of Price’s plural wives–yes you read that correctly–ran Del Richardson & Associates which, among other alleged activities, advised developers on how to evict tenants so that they could build luxury housing.
• Kevin De Leon: Someone leaked a 2021 recording of councilman Kevin De Leon and former councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Nury Martinez in conversation with Ron Herrera, former president of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. In the recording they discussed redistricting the city to remove power from tenants rights groups. They also talked about the location of a football stadium and Olympic business. In between this naked corruption they went on vile racist rants insulting nearly every ethnic minority in the city. Despite being asked by everyone from Rick Caruso to Joe Biden to resign, Kevin De Leon stayed in office and is up for reelection next week. For the love of God, if you live in De Leon’s district, which encompasses downtown, Boyle Heights and Eagle Rock, please vote for Ysabel Jurado.

A Happy Ending
Involvement in politics can easily turn you into a black-pilled Joker, but one should sidestep that nihilism for the solid fact that ordinary citizens can have an impact on local politics much more so than national politics. Small donor campaigns replaced three Los Angeles council seats with councilmembers not in the pockets of big developers. We have a chance to gain a forth seat tomorrow. There is hope for a better future and a government that serves working people.

When we first moved back to Los Angeles in 1998 I had a recurring dream that our house had many more rooms than I knew about. That our long neglected bungalow needed a lot of work, no doubt, triggered these nightmares in my subconscious. I’d often wake up remembering a bible passage I’ve always found odd and ambiguous–John 14:2, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”

Interior of the Westin Bonneventure

moments before the wind

Friend of the blog Lee sent me this meme and I really wish we lived in a universe where this was real.

10 year anniversary of the Detectorists

The joy of clutter

On fairy tales

One tip instead of a link this week: Sahara rockers Etran de L’Aïr are touring North American and you should go see them if you have a chance. Kelly and I caught their show at the Lodge Room last night and we want to turn into groupies and follow them around.

The Tuareg people have developed a distinctive swirling, jangly guitar style over a complex rhythmic base and this particular group has taken the Saharan sound in innovative directions.

It looks like they have three remaining concerts in Ojai, Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Here’s their label’s website with information on these upcoming concerts.

I wrote about it earlier this summer but want to remind my California friends to download the MyShake app. I was pet sitting for friends in Pomona last Saturday week when, in the early hours of Sunday morning around 3:51 am, the app’s loud warning sound beeped simultaneously with a 4.5 earthquake that rattled the house. I was half awake but the alarm woke me up completely. The cat ran off and the two little dogs looked around, decided it wasn’t worth worrying about, and went back to sleep.

What I appreciated about the alarm was that it made me more conscious of what was going on. I could also instantly see where the earthquake happened and assess whether I needed to get up and check the gas line. I could also see reports from other people in the area confirming the dog’s opinions that this quake was not much to worry about. Even though I didn’t get an advanced warning, I think the alert made me better prepared to do something if it had been a stronger jolt.

When I was up in San Francisco visiting family my friends there thoughtfully gifted me with a snack for my long Amtrak journey back to LA, Snoop Dogg’s O.G. Bar-B-Que Cheddar Cheese Puffs. Like other celebrity driven food products this cheese puff proposes a kind of synesthesia by asking us, “what would gangster rap taste like?”

The answer is a kind of compromise in the great American barbecue sauce war between the tangy and sweet camps, though Snoop clearly comes down more on the sweet side. But this is being charitable because this thing tastes stale and lifeless, like a slightly sugary Styrofoam packing peanut. In the end it’s probably not worth the 380 calorie hit, though on a slow Amtrak journey even the most humdrum food can taste like the ambrosia of the rap gods.

Naturally, this cheese puff comes with a “story,” a rise-and-grind message by way of a quote from Snoop himself, “Make every opportunity count . . . stay focused, be relentless and do whatever it takes to master your craft.” Relentless cheese puffs!

Like so many things in our neo-liberal life this “food” acts more as a vehicle for capital accumulation and “branding” than nourishment. I always come back to the evergreen Onion gag about Nike supposedly giving up on making shoes and just doing ads.

Maybe Snoop has strayed too far from his musical roots, what with his cavorting with Martha Stewart, chilling with Rick Caruso and clowning around at the Olympics. Perhaps, like the future shoe-free Nike company, he should swear off the music (if he hasn’t already?) and ascend to the realm of pure signs. Whereas we may have previously imagined Snoop rapping through a cloud of pot smoke, he’s now, apparently, more likely to disappear in a puff of powdered cheese flavoring down at the knock-off Cheeto factory.

James Turrell Skyspace at the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

How Google is destroying Root Simple

Medieval manuscripts online

Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse

Joy

The before and after horrors of SF Daily Photo.

It seems as though all the spaces we inhabit–from our offices, schools, markets, and malls to the innermost sanctums of our homes bask in an obscenely bright light reflecting off a banal ocean of white paint. We go about our lives in spaces as bright as surgical theaters thanks to all those ceiling cans Chip and Joanna Gaines insist we have to have. Curse the house flippers! When will this bright nightmare end?

Edgar Allan Poe noted the American love of over-lit spaces in his 1840 essay, The Philosophy of Furniture. Poe says,

Glare is a leading error in the philosophy of American household decoration . . . We are violently enamored of gas and of glass. The former is totally inadmissible within doors. Its harsh and unsteady light is positively offensive. No man having both brains and eyes will use it. A mild, or what artists term a cool light, with its consequent warm shadows, will do wonders for even an ill-furnished apartment.

Print by Kawase Hasui.

But the most spirited opponent of glare is the Japanese novelist Jun’ichirō Tanizaki whose 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows we should make our rallying cry against the tyranny of light. His essay begins, unexpectedly, in the toilet of a traditional house.

The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden.

Maki-e sake bottle with Tokugawa clan’s mon (emblem), Edo period, 18th century. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Tanizaki goes on to explain how many traditional Japanese crafts make sense only in a dark space,

Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a singe glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, of overtones but partly suggested. The sheen of the lacquer, set out in the night, reflects the wavering candlelight, announcing the drafts that find their way from time to time into the quiet room, luring one into a state of reverie. If the lacquer is taken away, much of the spell disappears from the dream world built by that strange light of candle and lamp, that wavering light beating the pulse of the night. Indeed the thin, impalpable, faltering light, picked up as though little rivers were running through the room, collecting little pools here and there, lacquers a pattern on the surface of the night itself.

When Kelly and I were in Japan earlier this year we visited Kanazawa, historically a center of gold leaf work. The brightly lit showrooms displaying everything from traditional gold leaf screens to gold leaf ice cream bars seemed almost as garish as a Las Vegas casino. But once you consider the original context for gold leaf work, the dark inner rooms of a traditional house, the craft makes a lot more sense. Tanizaki says,

And surely you have seen, in the darkness of the innermost rooms of these huge buildings, to which sunlight never penetrates, how the gold leaf of a sliding door or screen will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light cast into the enveloping darkness, like the glow upon the horizon at sunset. In no other setting is gold quite so exquisitely beautiful. You walk past, turning to look again, and yet again; and as you move away the golden surface of the paper glows ever more deeply, changing not in a flash, but growing slowly, steadily brighter, like color rising in the face of a giant. Or again you may find that the gold dust of the background, which until that moment had only a dull, sleepy luster, will as you move past, suddenly gleam forth as if it had burst into flame.

Tanizaki’s essay takes a few detours into inevitable Japanese cultural supremacy as well as some retrograde notions about women. The play of light and darkness in Western cathedrals actually reinforces his point rather than contradicts it. But he’s certainly right about our destructive quest for progress, a drive entwined with our over-lit spaces. In this Poe, and Tanizaki align. Poe says,

The cut-glass shade is a weak invention of the enemy. The eagerness with which we have adopted it, partly on account of its flashiness, but principally on account of its greater cost, is a good commentary upon the proposition with which I began [the American love of $$$] . . . The light proceeding from one of these gaudy abominations is unequal, broken, and painful. It alone is sufficient to mar a world of good effect in the furniture subjected to its influence.

We need a renewed embrace of the darkness not just in our homes but in our outdoor spaces as well. The detrimental effect of artificial light on birds and insects is long known and universally ignored. For us humans, artificial illumination has been linked to cardiovascular disease, depression, cancers and many other health problems. People who work night shifts disproportionately live unhealthy and shorter lives. And what does it mean to no longer know the poetry of the night sky, obliterated as it is by artificial light?

Entrance foyer of the Gamble House one of the most eloquent examples of the embrace of shadows.

I think we have in light pollution one of those lost causes for which we should not give up hope. As the recently passed Fredric Jameson once said,

It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world— better to say the alternate world, our alternate world—as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.

A sacred darkness awaits us. We have nothing to lose but our ceiling cans!

Thanks to Amy our friend in Japan for introducing us to this essay and the NHK documentary based on In Praise of Shadows.

Meme via @OpenlyGayAliens

I was binging the Garden Fork podcast and the host Eric mentioned the importance of colonoscopies. In August, I had one and the doctor asked me, as I left, to promise to tell everyone I know about the importance of this procedure. So here we go.

Yes, it takes a day and a half away from your schedule and the procedure is the butt (haha) of puns, old person humor and scatological jokes. A neighbor, in fact, told a fantastic joke that I can’t repeat here, unfortunately.

Far more important than your future stand up routine at the Burbank Flappers, however, is the fact that a colonoscopy can prevent some terrible cancers that the home test kits can’t detect. Both times I’ve had a colonoscopy the doctor found and removed polyps. The gunk you have to drink and the time by the toilet during the prep time is a small price to pay for the peace of mind you get once you’ve checked off this important task.  If your doctor wants you to get one make that appointment today.

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Oscar Wilde’s house decorating tips

Cookies!

When the memes hit.

In September, when the rest of the country begins chugging pumpkin spice lattes and preparing for Christian Girl Autumn we, here in Los Angeles, enter into a month when our mild Mediterranean climate becomes more like a desert. This past weekend the temperature hit 111ºF (43.8ºC) and our neighborhood had almost 48 hours without power. It didn’t cool down at night as it reliably does the rest of the year. And Kelly came down with COVID.

It was a trial run for how prepared we are for an earthquake and we did poorly. I was especially upset to observe my own crankiness. I think that crankiness could have been prevented with a few simple comforts such as a fan and better food. I know from camping and backpacking how looking forward to a meal can go a long way towards elevating your mood.

Two lessons from the weekend come to mind:

• While Kelly kept the house reliably lit with solar charged LED lanterns, it would be nice to have some kind of battery backup at least so we could run a fan. Keeping the fridge going would be nice but a battery large enough to do that is prohibitively expensive. If any of you have recommendations please leave a comment.
• As friend of the blog Johnny Sanphillippo discusses on a podcast appearance in early 2020, it’s better to rotate through bulk food than stockpile it. If you just stash it away odds are it will go bad or you won’t know how best to prepare it. Rotate through your food stocks and you’ll know what foods you like and save money while you’re at it.

The weekend had a Road Warrior vibe when it became obvious that many or our neighbors had evacuated to somewhere with power, either relatives houses or a hotel. It felt like a preview of future climate uncertainty and a sober reminder of the tasks we have to prepare. At least we have kind neighbors who are motivated to make sure we look out for everyone and we’re going to talk to our city council office about what happened.

The last time I was on the Garden Fork Podcast, the host, “East Coast Eric” challenged me to build a Free Blockbuster Little Library and I finally made good on the promise. I managed to install this garishly painted DVD, VHS, CD and video game themed little free library in our parkway yesterday as the sun went down.

With the exception of the hinges and Lucite, I used repurposed materials and patterned the design after a lararium I saw online. I downloaded a digital stencil file from FreeBlockbuster.org and cut it out using the Cameo stencil cutter at the Los Angeles Central Library’s awesome Octavia Lab maker space. Many thanks to the librarian who helped me figure out the machine.

I’m hopeful this Little Free Blockbuster proves successful–physical media is a great alternative to the high cost of streaming services.

The Tomb Effigy of François de Sarrà: A Grim Reminder of Mortality (Via @silverlakelee)

Are songs from God?

Download More than 2,500 Images of Vibrant Japanese Woodblock Prints and Drawings From the Library of Congress

The problem with watching films by Andrey Tarkovsky is that they make every other film seem like a waste of time. Even Tarkovsky’s lesser films are still better than any other film ever made. And you’re left wondering how a mere mortal could be behind work of such transcendent detail and beauty, particularly someone who endured the miseries of the Soviet Union during World War II and the turbulence of artistic production during the Cold War.

Last night we attended a screening of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer, a documentary made by his son Andrei A. Tarkovsky. The documentary combines excerpts from his films, behind the scenes footage and extensive recorded interviews of Tarkovsky explaining his approach to art and the great questions of life. Tarkovsky’s films act as gateways to the ineffable, like the icons painted by Andrei Rublev in Tarkovsky’s film. The key to that gateway is unlocked, as Tarkovsky explains in the documentary, through art that acts both as poetry and prayer.

I’m always reluctant to watch a Tarkovsky film. They are long, demanding and emotionally overwhelming. Just thinking about the bell scene in Rublev makes me tear up and unable to speak. They force you into a confrontation with the meaning of life and death and it’s far easier lapse into the cynical embrace of some dumb Hollywood action movie and avoid those big questions.

Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer is worthy of multiple viewings as Tarkovsky’s thoughts are both profound and dense. Lately I’ve been getting back into physical media and I’d like to own a copy of it as well as a complete set of Tarkovsky’s films. You can find this documentary as an extra feature on the Criterion version of Mirror and on the Criterion channel.

You can watch Anrei Rublev on YouTube as well as Mirror, Solaris, Ivan’s Childhood and Stalker but I’m considering purchasing the higher quality restored versions on DVD. And, of course, you should jump at the chance to see them on film in a theater if possible.

I’m working on a longer post on this subject that I’ll put up when I’m finished reading the Tanizaki Junichiro essay, “In Praise of Shadows” that this NHK doc is based on. Let’s just say our living spaces, particularly in the early 21st century, are completely over-saturated with light. HGTV wants us to live in one big, bright operating theater. Counter this blazing hegemony by watching the doc.

The price we pay, here in Los Angeles, for not having hurricanes and tornadoes (for the most part) is the ever present threat of an earthquake. Yesterday, a minor quake interrupted our brat summer here in Silver Lake. I heard it described as “4.5 on the hipster scale.” The New York Times couldn’t resist piling on the stereotypes, “In Silver Lake, during a cycling class, the bikes swayed slightly, giving some riders a woozy feeling.”

Kelly and I were parking our car when it happened and, at the risk of piling on yet more stereotypes, on our way to a hipster lunch place when the MyShake app on my phone went off to alert us that we should “drop and cover.” We froze, waiting for shaking to start only to realize that we had missed the quake. Our neighborhood text thread lighted up with talk of loud noises and long shaking but no damage.

I got a VERY good shake alert on my watch — about 15 seconds of warning, told the family, and then we all felt the earthquake roll in together

When I saw the estimated magnitude, I knew it wasn’t going to be huge but we all had enough time to get under the table if we needed to

If you haven’t downloaded @myshakeapp now would be a good time! Also the system is improving constantly so even if this one didn’t work I guarantee future you will appreciate the warning https://myshake.berkeley.edu

This was probably the best-case scenario for people in LA to get an early warning — big enough to trigger the system, far enough away to get advance notice.

The paradox with the early warning feature of this app is that, of course, the further away the quake is the more time you’ll have to react, but the closer, more dangerous quakes won’t come with a warning. Still, I’m glad I downloaded the app and, even if you don’t get advanced notice, it’s helpful to know the location and strength of the quake. In our case, we knew we didn’t need to rush home and could enjoy our expensive sandwich.

Thanks to Root Simple Tokyo correspondent Amy for letting me know about the shaky spin class and for telling me that in Japan this minor of a quake probably wouldn’t make the news.

Paintings of cats stealing food

Where Facebook’s AI Slop Comes From

The tiny gardens of Anne Ashberry

Dog starts a house fire in Tulsa, Oklahoma

We close with a joke for my LA friends

The Attainment; Vision of the Holy Grail to Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival by Edward Burne-Jones (1891-1894)

Back in May I began an overly ambitious look at why we’re all addicted to our devices via the ancient concept of Acedia. This task was a practical one in that I’ve found myself, way too often, lying in the internet gutter like a junky on a bender. After considering the notion of Acedia, heaven help me, I thought I’d look at Martin Heidegger’s take via his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology.”

To summarize that essay in a blog post is to miss its point by falling into the error of treating everything and everybody as some kind of means to an end that, constitutively, is a world shaped by technology. But if I were forced into giving a “takeaway” (ugh) I’d say that Herr Doktor Heidegger is saying, of our technological world that, “when you’re holding a hammer everything looks like a nail.” But it cuts much deeper than this cliche. What he’s really saying is that when you’re holding that hammer your world view, your way of seeing, your ethos, your view of the cosmos is fundamentally shifted. And this shift is totalizing. As Heidegger puts it, “the approaching tide of technological revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” (Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p 56 as quoted by Drefus).

What emerges in this technological mindset is a utilitarianism, seeing everything as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” as something to be exploited. As Federico Campagna puts it, “A forest is no longer a forest, but a stockpile of timber ready to be sent to production; a waterfall is no longer a waterfall, but a stockpile of hydro-electrical units ready to be extracted; a person is no longer a person, but a stockpile of labour ready to be employed.” (Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality)

It’s also not about the hammer itself. Indeed, Heidegger is not suggesting throwing out technology and living some kind of neo-primitive lifestyle. He’s directing us, again, to consider our enframing. The example of technology he uses in the essay, a communion chalice, is pregnant with meaning, forcing us to consider the object’s telos, it’s end purpose. Or maybe, as in the case of the communion chalice its poetic “uselessness”. Considering a technology’s telos, say Mark Zuckerberg’s social media, for instance, might lead us to conclude that it’s more about capital accumulation via harvesting our attention than connecting people as Zuck likes to claim. It might also lead us to consider the dreary, unpoetic qualities of much of the internet.

If I were a good blogger in the, long past, golden age of blogging I’d conclude this post with a convenient listicle, “10 ways Heidegger can help you deal with your phone addiction.” But, to do so, would fall into the very utilitarian enframing we’re trying to escape. We can’t treat our tech addictions as yet another technological problem to be solved with more technological solutions (apps to block apps). We have to get at the root, enframing and teleological questions. I’d suggest you read Heidegger’s essay for its poetic qualities which, in the end, is the point. The doorway to our escape lies in the ineffable, that which can only be accessed, if dimly, through poetry, through art, through the irrational.

If you’d like to read Heidegger’s essay I’d suggest heading to your library where it can be found in a book Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, edited by David M. Kaplan. That book also contains an essay by Hubert Dreyfus “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology” that gives some more context. You can also find Heidegger’s essay here. And I recently began a book by Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, that riffs and extends the notion of enframing into an astonishing analysis of the world we live in.

Kelly and I attended a screening last night of a new documentary, seven years in the making, profiling the work of Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, best known for the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. I read this book when it came out and it had a profound influence on me, leading to years of joining clubs and organizations.

The documentary is professionally produced and features some high level interviewees including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg and David Brooks. More importantly, the doc includes people actually involved in a wide variety of orgs such as the Odd Fellows, a farm-based church, a black bike advocacy group and union organizers.

At the center of the doc is Robert Putnam, now 83 and still parsing sociological data to prove his thesis, that healthy societies are made up of people who work together in networked social organizations. The film traces his career from his early work in Italy to the writing of his magnum opus, to his ascendancy to the corridors of power during the Clinton/Obama years.

Putnam’s work brings up issues of causation. Does membership in groups drive positive change or is it merely a symptom of economic prosperity and political stability? It’s been a long time since I read the book but I recall that Putnam acknowledges economic factors, particularly the need for both parents in most family households to have jobs and how this drastically cuts down on time available for joining groups. That said, I do wonder if the particularly insidious form of capitalism we’re enmeshed in, variously called “neo-liberalism” or “late stage capitalism” has more to do with the decline of organizations than people simply not wanting to join groups.

One of qualities of neoliberalism, is a capitalism that has penetrated every single social relation on a worldwide level. This is what social media does: monetize our relationships and diverts us from the types of groups we may once have joined. How ironic that some of the loyal stewards and cheerleaders of the neo-liberal order such as the Clintons, Buttigieg and Brooks would deflect criticism of the economic system they benefit from by latching on to Putnam’s work that finds the source of our problems, conveniently, elsewhere.

Pete Davis, one of the co directors and producers of Join or Die and a former student of Putnam, led a spirited question and answer session after the screening. There was a group of Odd Fellows in attendance and one of them got up to note how many of the charitable activities they used to be involved with have been professionalized and subsumed into the non-profit industrial complex that, I agree, we should interrogate. Davis made a good point that in times of low engagement you get dubious groups. Someone will come along and give you an easy solution to your loneliness through joining a coercive, destructive or racist group like, say, Qanon.

While I think Putnam’s thesis has fundamental flaws, his positivity and sincerity is apparent in the film and I definitely agree that we should do more things together. I’ve found myself involved in two groups in the past few years, the Episcopal Church, which is in a steep decline due to a complex set of factors (maybe I’ll blog about that someday) and the Democratic Socialists of America which is attempting to undue the damage of a neoliberal order that, I think, is one of the main factors in why we don’t belong to things anymore. My reservations aside, if this film gets more people to get together, even to just have a dinner party, that would be good thing.

Join or Die is touring the country right now and will likely hit a streaming service at some point. If you’re part of an organization you can also request a screening which would make for a great discussion. 

Vintage Smart (Fully Intact) FM Radio

Uncover the Secret Lives of Snakes

Strolling in the back alleys where the Enoden runs in Kamakura

Help undue medical debt

Cenni di Francesco di Ser Cenni, The temptation of Saint Anthony, a detail of the polyptych with Coronation of the Virgin and Saints, Los Angeles, The Getty Museum.

COVID update: I feel totally fine. Not too bad a case. Should be out of jail by Tuesday.

Rent-a-sister: Coaxing Japan’s hikikomori men out of their bedrooms

Totally wired: why are so many young people addicted to video games?

In this satirical city builder, your goal is to convert walkable cities into parking lots and use propaganda to convince everyone it’s what they want

Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet

I had ambitions plans this week to do blogging and house repairs but I managed to catch the COVID that’s ripping around Los Angeles this summer. It’s round two for me. So far I’m just tired and, while I’ve had much worse colds, I don’t feel like doing much except doom scrolling and watching stuff on Kanopy. Luckily, Kelly seems to have escaped infection by a well timed trip to see her brother. I’ll be back in a week, I hope.

Minuncedda di Sternatia

Ted Serios and Thoughtography

7 Masterworks of Land Art Hidden Across the United States

Screenshot of Little Free Library App

I think I’ve invented a new and unadventurous fitness routine: walking between Little Free Libraries. Whether I’m walking the dog here in Los Angeles, looking after a relative in San Francisco, or pet sitting in Pomona I like to punctuate my urban dérives with visits to these little cast-off book sites.

To navigate, I have a Little Free Library mobile app on my phone. With the app you can check in and note if you left or took a book. There’s also a web based version. The app and map have only the Little Free Libraries that someone has decided to list, so you can, of course, find many more unofficial libraries out in the wild.

I seldom take a book and usually regret when I do. You can often guess why a book no longer “sparked joy” in the owner’s life and ended up in a Little Free Library. Case in point: Aziz Ansari’s book of dating advice. But I have, occasionally, found some really interesting books such as a catalog of the works of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark and a guide to Los Angeles’ dive bars.

I also had an odd coincidence recently with a book I found in a Little Library on a walk up Geary Boulevard, San Francisco’s most boring street. Back in the 90s, when I was in music grad school, I took up fooling around with circuit boards. I often leafed through a copy I had of a strange book, 21st-century Electronic Projects for a New Age that, at some point, I Marie Kondoed back to the universe. The book contains plans for ESP testers, UFO detectors, biorhythm devices and Kirlian photography machines. I’ve long regretted getting rid of this book even though it’s unlikely I’ll ever build any of these ridiculous gadgets.

After looking through it again I realized why I got rid of it. For now I’m holding on to it, but I may go through another cycle of purging, regretting purging and circulating between Little Libraries in hope of finding it again. At least I’ll get some exercise.

I’m just back from a month in Pomona pet sitting for friends and I thought I’d do a series of short posts about what I was up to during my sojourn.

Probably the most exciting moment was witnessing a cloud of miner bees on one of my walks. There are, apparently, over 1,500 different kinds of miner bees so I’m not sure which species I was witnessing. They are a solitary insect that only emerges once a year for a brief period. Look closely at the video and you can see the little holes where they live.

In fact, I thought I was seeing honeybees but the way they were flying around in a large cloud without settling down didn’t look like normal honeybee behavior. Eventually the very nice homeowners drove up and explained to me what I was witnessing.

They even have a metal sign on their lawn to explain that miner bees are non-aggressive and the brief period when they appear. Nice to see native bees getting some love.

The great California water conspiracy

Bear troubles

The gardener who took a Canadian city to court for the right to not mow his lawn

Derek Jarman’s garden

In a recent post on acedia I took a look at this ancient concept, often oversimplified as “sloth” or, perhaps, “distraction” and considered how it applies to the struggle we all have with the siren-allure of social media, our phones and the internet. I don’t think we can consider our technological acedia without a look at narcissism, which seems to be a constitutive driver of the economics of social media via the online doppelgänger we all obsessively curate and disseminate. We’ll do this by way of a review of a 1979 bestselling book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by the historian Christopher Lasch which has seen a revival in recent years in rarefied corners of both the left and the right.

Lasch reminds me of a my friend’s African grey parrot named Harpo that I’ve been babysitting this month. Every afternoon that I let him out of his cage he climbs up to a shelf to attack a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged which my friends helpfully provided just for this purpose. Harpo goes at this book with gusto, shredding the remaining pages and tossing the book off the shelf where it thuds to the floor and scares the cats and the dogs. Lasch had the same fury in his critique of the self centered culture of the 60s and 70s. I suspect much of the revival of Lasch has a lot to do with the fact that the social media that dominates our lives is nothing more than an obscene narcissism machine gestated in the fevered dreams of the internet’s  Randian hippie progenitors of the Whole Earth Catalog era and now existing as a plague on us all.

The Culture of Narcissism feels like it came off the press last week. While writing at the dawn of cable TV, Lasch seems to anticipate a more interactive internet era,

We live in a swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors. Life presents itself as a succession of images or electronic signals, of impressions recorded and reproduced by means of photography, motion pictures, television, and sophisticated recording devices. Modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions—and our own—were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time.

There’s a sense in which, as I noted in my earlier post about ancient and medieval notions of acedia, there’s nothing new about this distracting “society of the spectacle” but it does seem like problems have vastly expanded since the advent of the world wide web in the 1990s and the subsequent explosion of social media that the Surgeon General now wants to stamp a warning sticker on. Here’s Lasch anticipating what feels like the schizophrenic implications of social media use,

Among the “many narcissistic uses” that Sontag attributes to the camera, “self-surveillance” ranks among the most important, not only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self-scrutiny but because it renders the sense of selfhood dependent on the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the reality of the external world.

There’s much more to The Culture of Narcissism than I can hope to explain in a short blog post. Lasch is a clear writer, good at explaining complex ideas without resorting to jargon. But I should also note that he can get as cranky as Harpo the parrot and can lapse into the vice of trend observers, an over emphasis on the influence of big ideas and an under-emphasis on economic conditions and forces. He also holds some retrograde views that, in my opinion, haven’t aged well such as his opposition to no-fault divorce.

He does have some valid criticisms of the New Left of the 1960s which, I think, are still relevant in our time. He laments a “politics of theater, of dramatic gestures, of style without substance” thinking of, I imagine, moments like the time the Yippies cast a spell to levitate the Pentagon or, in our time, throwing soup cans at paintings. He also targets therapeutic culture (much like Mark Fisher) and delivers a spot-on evisceration of New Age and Gnostic spirituality all of which he considers as support structures for a narcissistic ideology.

I couldn’t help thinking about Lasch as I viewed the new Max documentary/reality show Ren Faire, whose main protagonist, the 86 year old “king” of the Texas Renaissance Faire, George Coulam, embodies some of the worst elements of hedonism, greed and cruelty of the narcissism Lasch describes. In Ren Faire we watch Coulam toy with his employees and go on dates at the Olive Garden with a series of 20 something women that he meets online on a site called SugarDaddy.com. Coulam’s shameless and humiliating treatment of these young women reminds me of this passage in The Culture of Narcissism,

Sade imagined a sexual utopia in which everyone has the right to everyone else, where human beings, reduced to their sexual organs, become absolutely anonymous and interchangeable. His ideal society thus reaffirmed the capitalist principle that human beings are ultimately reducible to interchangeable objects. . . In the resulting state of organized anarchy, as Sade was the first to realize, pleasure becomes life’s only business—pleasure, however, that is indistinguishable from rape, murder, unbridled aggression.

The hedonism, exploitation, capitalism and fascism described by Lasch and Ren Faire, taken to their unbridled extremes, is the theme picked up in the hardest movie to watch in all cinema, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s horrifying indictment of fascism, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Let’s just say that, while I’m not a big adherent to generational essentialism, I’m beginning to wish that a certain generation of entitled, narcissistic old men, who seem to be clinging to power in this country, would shuffle off this mortal coil soon.

Lest I be the one casting the first stone, I should note my own complicity in our age of narcissism. While there are certainly narcissistic personality types of the sort pathologized in current diagnostic manuals, or in extreme outliers such as the king in Ren Faire, there’s also a broader narcissism, of the sort Lasch is talking about, in which we all participate. Oh, how much I’m addicted to the likes on my Instagram posts!

If not overcome by acedia, I hope to move on from simply calling out the internet addiction problem and move on to the treacherous terrain of “what the hell do we do about it?” Lasch has a few ideas, ending The Culture of Narcissism on a positive note,

In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody—in the guise of personal “growth” and “awareness”—the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment. The custodians of culture hope, at bottom, merely to survive its collapse. The will to build a better society, however, survives, along with traditions of localism, self-help, and community action that only need the vision of a new society, a decent society, to give them new vigor.

I have personally witnessed the emergence of these signs of a better way to do things and I hope to also get to some ideas about techniques for dealing with social media addiction. In the meantime I recommend you consider taking a look at Lasch’s very readable book (here’s a pdf–the internet can still be useful!). The Regrettable Century Podcast has two episodes (I and II) about The Culture of Narcissism with guest, C. Derick Varn that provides some further context for Lasch’s work. And here’s a short article about Lasch and his other books.

DIY Cider Press

Build a circle arbor

The Hyperloop was always a scam

Pocket dump from Reddit user ymxyh.

It’s been a long time since I reviewed the Everyday Carry (EDC) discourse (Kelly reviewed hers in 2011). A mostly male bastion of the “prepper” subculture, EDC’s highest expression is the “pocket dump,” a picture, posted to the internet, of all the things you carry with you. Pocket dumps range from mundane photos of leather wallets and keys to more provocative displays of handguns, mace and knives.

Pocket dump from reddit user ChromeOcelot.

They almost always consist of male coded dark wood background and black or leather objects.

My EDC

My current and very boring EDC also with dark objects and a dark wood background.

Other than the keys, eyeglasses and iPhone my EDC consists of two distinct objects:

1. Multitool
Since the days I did video work back in the 90s, I’ve always carried a Leatherman tool. My current life mainly revolves around being the onsite building manager of our 104 year old house, so I carry the Leatherman Rebar that I geekily wear on my belt with a leather box sheath (I’m not a fan of the canvas one it comes with). I probably use it once a day for something even if just to open a box. The pliers are particularly useful.

2. Field Sketchbook
I’ve tried the sketchbook thing before but this time around I’ve actually made a habit of it after a key insight I had about how to keep one going. Here’s that insight: notebooks and sketchbooks need to be private and are not for public consumption. In my case this is not because there’s anything in it that I wouldn’t want to share but that doing so would make my notes and sketches performative rather than useful. There is way too much notebook/sketchbook porn, especially on Instagram, my principle social media addiction these days.

In my case I use mine, mainly, for three things:

• Note taking about books I’m reading, things that happened, stuff I need to remember to do, public transit times and general ideas.
• To practice doing quick sketches.
• To improve my cursive writing (more on that in another post).

Every few days I review my notes and take action, if needed. It really helps prevent me from reaching for my phone and falling into an internet hole.

One issue I’ve had is that my notebook doesn’t fit well in a pant pocket and we’re moving into the season where it’s too warm to wear my jacket. I may have to explore the idea of a smaller one for the summer months.

Our militarized lives
I was reminded of the whole world of EDC discourse via a discussion on an episode of a podcast called Nostalgia Trap. The host, David Parsons and his guest, Justin Rogers-Cooper noted how, in the United States, we tend not to feel physically safe and how this leads to things like EDC pocket dump posting.

I think some of this concern for physical safety is warranted and some is paranoia. Crime is not, of course, evenly distributed in this country and exposure to it has a lot to do with what class strata you occupy. As I’ve mentioned before, our recent trip to Japan gave me a taste for what it’s like to live in a place where you never worry about physical safety (except for earthquakes, which should be a concern of ours in California too). But, alas, we can’t have nice things in this country. Note that Japan’s strict knife rules make my multitool illegal to carry.

Everyday Memeing

I’ll conclude this EDC revisit with me, a geezer, attempting to interpret a meme about EDCs. I can only interpret some of it and I do so at the potential ridicule of my younger comrades. I think that the snarky implication here is that young women these days are Hegelian Trad Caths who embrace old school femininity (Lana Del Rey) while the boys are boring (iPhone) nihilists (cigarettes and E.M. Cioran).

I had to reverse image search some of this to discover that the set of books is a manga called Alice in Boarderland and I’m not sure what the chewing gum, Coke Light and baby deer are about. If you know please do fill me in. I include this meme just to emphasize the gendered factors in EDC discourse which you could just scratch the surface of in a book length discussion of the lack of pockets or strange, small symbolic pockets that exist in women’s clothing and a parallel discussion of purses vs. “man bags.” For the record my own EDC leans towards “girl’s pockets” if just for owning a copy of and occasionally attempting to tackle that infamous Hegel b0ok.

Feel free to drop your EDC into the comments.

‘We sold everything off, even the semen flasks’: the film about the farming couple who struck gold by rewilding

The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes

Bolwoningen: Living in Spherical Homes

What’s Inside this Mysterious Desert Lighthouse?

I started enjoying fungi when I stopped worrying about if they were edible or not. Now I just enjoy looking at them (and occasionally eating chicken of the woods, the only one I feel confident enough to identity).

This weekend in Pomona I spotted the notoriously NSFW stinkhorn mushroom which I’m pretty sure is Phallus hadriani. It fruits quickly with the tip oozing a slimy substance attractive to insects. I witnessed a pill bug and some gnats circling the morel-like tip. Stinkhorns use these insects to distribute spores. In short, a very cool mushroom in a horror movie kind of way.

Starting a Scrap Garden

Daniel Hawkins’s Wild West Dream of a Desert Lighthouse

Prayer for Good Humor by St. Thomas More

A nice place to go

Pan-Fried Teriyaki Tofu Bowl

I’ve got a long list of problems that rattle around in my head for which I’m woefully unqualified to even contemplate, let alone write about. Like, for instance, how do I stop looking at my damned phone! I suspect that many of you have also gone down a hole reading articles and self-help books that will, supposedly, break this addiction. Almost all of these efforts, in my opinion, run aground when they inevitably reduce the problem to something that’s “in our brains.”  Somehow, by the end of the self-help article, we end up in an MRI machine to find out there’s a phone addiction part of the brain and, gee, we just can’t seem to do much about it! We don’t even have a good name for this problem which is why I’ve been thinking again about how the 4th century monastic notion of acedia might just be the framework we need.

The root of the word acedia comes from the Greek word ἀκηδία meaning negligence or lack of care. Thomas Aquinas developed the concept of acedia into a dual framework of “sadness about spiritual good” (tristitia de bono divino) and “disgust with activity” (taedium operandi). In this formulation, Acedia is neither boredom nor laziness but a kind of frenzied, inability to focus that leads, ultimately, to a dark night of the soul. It came to be called the “noonday devil” for its tendency to haunt monks in the middle of the day.

Aquinas’ twofold definition captures both an underestimated spiritual sadness and the repulsion we all feel these days with our lack of focus. Over the centuries acedia came to be included in lists of the seven deadly sins and get reduced, unfortunately, to “sloth” which loses the original nuance of the term. Perhaps Pieter Bruegel’s print above does a better job than the philosophers, capturing the same surreal and schizophrenic frenzy as a present day doomscrolling bender.

To Aquinas’ definition I think we need to note how, in our time, capitalism intensifies acedia due to the simple fact that you can now monetize it. There’s a whole class of folks who have figured out how to turn our phones into the attention grabbing equivalent of a slot machine by delivering a low but constant level of excitement yoked to genuinely useful features such as maps and online check deposits. In modern acedia we have a socially constructed ill that can’t be countered just by personal willpower. Socially constructed problems require social constructed solutions, that is, we will all have to join together to counter the power of system that profits from acedia.

That said, we’ve still got a problem that we have to deal with personally while we, hopefully, join together to attack the systemic problem. The Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 4th century, Thomas Aquinas and many others spilled much quill ink tackling the solutions to acedia. Applying acedia to phone addiction is a book length project, not a blog post, but allow me to consider some of the solutions these thinkers came up with.

First is simply mapping the qualities of acedia to better understand what to do about it. The Desert Fathers, sitting in their cells, found that restlessness could mean just looking out the window to see what’s going on. Paradoxically, as the Desert Father Evagrius Ponticus pointed out, restlessness can even involve doing something seemingly worthwhile, such as visiting the sick, not for the sake of actually offering any help, but just for a change in scenery.

Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism updates restlessness to our time. Fisher describes a student in one of his classes who was wearing headphones during a lecture. When confronted, the student protested that he wasn’t actually listening to anything. As Fisher put it, the student needed to be jacked into the entertainment matrix in a state Fisher termed “depressive hedonia” or what he describes as the frenzied inability to do anything except seek pleasure.

In the restlessness of iPhone doomsrolling there’s also a quality of schizophrenia with the constant barrage of unrelated images and text. One millisecond you’re watching a cat riding on a robot vacuum and the next you’re reading about “Baby Gronk rizzing up Livvy.” In this insanity, signifier and signified get detached, precisely in the way Jacques Lacan defined schizophrenia: as a thought salad of disconnected images and thoughts.

To get back to the Desert Fathers, they mapped many of acedia’s extended symptoms, some paradoxical: narcissism, hypochondria, binge eating, aversion to physical work and doing too much work, neglecting rules and following rules too strictly.

Perhaps the most important quality of acedia is its metaphysical dimension, something ignored by the popular response to iPhone addiction, because Western elite culture tends to shy away from anything beyond the epistemological limitations of an MRI machine. Failure to recognize the spiritual, existential basis of iPhone acedia, the profound emptiness and despondency it causes is why the proscriptions to make your screen black and white, turn off notifications, or buy a minimalist phone fall flat.

In addition to recognizing it for what it is and calling it out, the suggestions for dealing with acedia of previous times were varied and still useful: meditation, manual work, contemplating of the shortness of our lives, taking time for work and time for leisure uninterrupted by work (something developed in Josef Pieper’s book Leisure the Basis of Culture which also mentions acedia specifically). Philosophy professor Brandon Dahm has a detailed explication of acedia and some practical solutions in an article Correcting Acedia through Wonder and Gratitude that’s well worth reading. In short, wonder and gratitude dissolve the “lack of care” part of the acedia trap. We should also cut ourselves some slack. With all the temptations around us, none of us are going to turn into focus ninjas anytime soon. YouTube holes and Instagram scroll sessions will happen especially when we’re feeling down.

One thing both the Desert Fathers and Aquinas suggest is persistence. The singer Nick Cave has a great blog post on persistence. Cave describes the time he visited Bryan Ferry’s palatial estate with his wife and, before he met Ferry, fell asleep by the pool,

After a while, I awoke to find Bryan Ferry standing in the swimming pool in his bathing trunks. He was white and beautiful and very still. He turned to me and said, ‘I haven’t written a song in three years.’ ‘Why? ’I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He made a vague circling gesture with his hand taking in both of us, the swimming pool, the high hedge, the manor house, the apple orchard, the walled garden, the mare and foal, the swallows in the eves, our beautiful arboured wives, and the pure, blue sky itself and said, ‘There is nothing to write about.’ Then he pushed off into the water.

Cave goes on to describe what he learned from this:

This incident instructed me on the fragile and capricious nature of the creative spirit and reminded me of the necessity of constant daily work. I think of it when I struggle with my own vacillating creativity. Because deep in my heart, I know there is always something to write about, but there is also always nothing – and terrifyingly little air between.

A Journey to Avebury, a short film by Derek Jarman

A friend recommended Indian recipe website

Erfurt latrine disaster

How to avoid ultra-processed foods

Guide to Middle Eastern food

How The World’s Rarest Pasta Came Back From Near Extinction

How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat

The life of a simple man who lives quietly alone in an old house

DreamSpaces on Instagram

I feel the need to introduce two new (I think) hashtags with a related vibe to #Procrastibaking–that bad habit where you bake some elaborate cookie/cake/ instead of cooking a healthy dinner or cleaning the house.

#ArtShopaholism: Not actually making art but, instead, shopping and/or obsessing over art supplies. I’ve found drawing useful, but it’s a skill you have to practice in order to get any good at. To counter this I’m only allowing myself to draw with whatever crappy ballpoint pen I have on me. No thinking about, buying or obsessing over having the “right” pen pencil or sketchpad.

#BiblioShopaholism: Shopping for books rather than:

A) Picking them up at the public library.
B) Reading.

How to Make Japanese Curry Roux

Michigan woman found living inside rooftop store sign with desk and coffee maker

Don’t be a palm, be an oak

Happy Eurovision to those who celebrate

Cat chase POV

Cats with checkbooks

We have two senior cats. One of those cats, Buck, has had a lot of health issues over the years, including heart problems, digestive issues and a blood clot. He’s likely on eight of his nine lives and can add another health problem to his long list: hyperthyroidism.

Thankfully this can be fixed with an expensive radioactive iodine therapy. He’s such a sweet cat that I thought we owed him a chance, plus the alternative treatments, a special diet or pills, just won’t work well for him.

Waiting for food.

Radioactive iodine therapy involves one shot and several days at a treatment facility to let the radioactivity levels subside. It doesn’t cause the cat any pain, but they can’t be around people or other animals for a few days. When he gets back we have to minimize contact with him for awhile and scoop out his litter into a bucket that has to sit for a few weeks before we can dispose of it.

I’ve never been to a vet as organized and efficient as the folks doing this treatment, Advanced Veterinary Medical Imaging in Tustin. They send a daily spreadsheet update, call frequently and there’s even a webcam in Buck’s cage which has allowed us to watch him beg for food and hide from the vet techs. I really wish our human health system in the country spent a little more money on communicating with patients and families. It would make life easier for everyone including our overworked doctors and nurses.

Mr. Buck came to us over a decade ago as a kitten from a neighbor who found him unconscious in a driveway. I feel privileged to have lived with this feline in all his ups and downs and when the time came to make the decision on this treatment I didn’t think about it long. We’re fortunate to be able to afford it and I felt an obligation to make whatever time we have left with him as comfortable as possible.

Until this absence this week, I didn’t fully realize what a presence he is, the way he bosses the dog, the other cat and even us around. The house is haunted by his absence, by the way he bangs on the window by the bed to wake me up at 5:30 for breakfast, his nocturnal zooms and his conspicuous midday napping.

You know those days when you spend many hours baking some ridiculous dessert instead of preparing a healthy dinner? I just learned that there’s a hashtag on Instagram for this, “#Procrastibaking” which is what I did recently, in the most decadent and absurd way possible, when I asked ChatGPT to come up with a “coffee sandwich.”

First, the backstory. There’s a long gone bánh mì, Pho and filtered water shop called Lu Sub that used to sit between a pet food store and a laundromat on the Glendale Boulevard traffic sewer in Silver Lake. Their sign promised “Coffee-Sandwich Drinking Water.” A friend and I used to speculate about what a “coffee sandwich” would consist of every time we went past the place.

It took may years but I decided this month to bring some closure to this idle speculation. I based my prompt on the dessert sandwiches I ate on our recent trip to Japan. Typically, those sandwiches consist of a fruit and whipped cream filling served on fluffy Japanese milk bread called Hokkaido (北海道). I guess I could have invented a savory coffee sandwich (maybe pork with a coffee rub?), but instead I decided to go down the sweet path:

While I’d really love to tinker with this recipe and develop a thicker frosting I have to put aside the #Procrastibaking towards the goal of keeping off the fifteen pounds of pandemic pounds I lost recently. But I’d welcome any of you who want to take of the challenge of perfecting the coffee sandwich and taking it to market.

Special thanks to Sandwiches of History for the inspiration of using AI to create a recipe.

Here’s the Yelp for the now closed Lu Subs. While I’m not a fan of Yelp I find it useful as a kind of museum of long closed businesses.

A harrowing and heartbreaking video from a very talented filmmaker, Brad Abraham about the late conspiracy theorist and artist David Dees.

Abraham casts a compassionate eye on the haunted spiritual margins of our society. His feature length documentary, Love and Saucers is also well worth viewing.

Nick Cave on Loss, Yearning, Transcendence

Also, putting up the wrong link to this podcast with Nick Cave gives me the chance to suggest listening to this moving conversation again.

The hearing, in the court of Superior Court judge Kerry White lasted just minutes. The prosecution was seeking documents in the case which both Price’s attorney and the City Attorney are attempting to block. The judge claimed to have not seen the documents and punted the next hearing to June 5th.

It seems like the city does not want any details coming out about this case. If the case moves forward and Price is convicted he’d be the fourth councilman in recent years to live up to what Foucault once said about those seeking power ending up either in politics or prison, likely both.

Kim Kardashian sued for saying her tables are authentic Donald Judds

How scientists are learning to eavesdrop on the sounds of soil

The Easterner Goes West in Three Early American Comics

Willy O Winsbury

How’s that for a click bait title? But I really did spend almost a year on this with most of that time eaten up teaching myself how to do marquetry and inlay work. As I mentioned before, my first attempts didn’t go well and I spent a lot of time searching for advice on how to do this particular style of Art Nouveau work that almost nobody does anymore.

Sanding and finishing metal and wood right next to each other also proved difficult and I’m not entirely satisfied with the result, though even I couldn’t see the imperfections once I put the bed in the bedroom. The bed is made of solid, quarter sawn white oak and it’s HEAVY.

The inlay includes, maple, mahogany, cherry, birch, oak and walnut all sourced from scraps from other projects and cut by hand with a jeweler’s fretsaw using the double bevel method. The metal is copper, brass and pewter. The straight lines were made with plumber’s solder that I hammered into place and sanded flat. I modified the original inlay design by adding a tall mountain to make the scene more California. Almost all the supplies and tools for the metal work came from LA’s massive downtown jewelry district, a resource that proved inexpensive and convenient.

The oak I was working with was from the bottom of the pile and not the best quality. It’s also hard to find thick white oak here in California so I had to glue up thinner pieces to make the big horizontal stiles. The tapered legs are also built up from smaller pieces and veneered on two sides so that the medulary ray pattern appears on all sides. This is a detail only nerds will notice. I finished this beast with the sort of dark stain that has fallen way out of favor these days and I felt counter-cultural applying it.

The design of the bed is, allegedly, by the architect and artist Harvey Ellis who worked for Gustav Stickley and it’s, apparently, a prototype that was never put into production. The Stickley company still makes a version of this bed. The design looks a lot like the two settles that my friend Jimmy and I built that were designed by the architect Henry W. Wilkerson so I wonder if the attribution is accurate or if Ellis just designed the inlay work.

I like the dreamy, magical, vaguely medieval quality of the furniture and architecture of the years between 1900 and 1915 before the horrors of the 20th kicked in. My near term plans involve laying in this bed imagining the fin de siècle odors of absinthe and incense as I drift asleep reading Arthur Machen.

The print above the bed is “Floating Up” by David Huggins which I learned about via the amazing documentary Love & Saucers.

Before and after shots from SF Daily Photo.

I heard the podcaster Amber A’Lee Frost give name to a common internet trope, what she called “flipper rage bait,” those horrifying before and after social media posts showing quaint old houses stripped of their ornament, their oak floors replaced with gray laminate flooring, their warren of tiny rooms open-concepted into one big whitewashed expanse as brightly lit as an operating room and as memorable as an airport hotel lobby.

Before and after shots of a San Francisco flip from SF Daily Photo.

The Instagram account SF Daily Photo is where I consume my flipper rage bait. Or I can just take a walk. My Los Angeles neighborhood of 1920s era bungalows has few that are anywhere near intact. The worst have become open concept hells–all white on the inside, stripped of their modest details and, lately, painted jet black on the outside.

Before and after from SF Daily Photo. At least they left the windows but why remove all the moulding?

If rational thought drove our internet obsessions we might all focus more on the lack of affordable housing, the fact that many young people can’t imagine buying a house especially where we live in California. But I don’t think flipper rage bait has anything to do with the quotidian details of housing policy and rent stabilization discourse. Rather, I think it’s part of a trend I’ve long identified as a justifiable unease with modernity, a sense that something that we can’t quite identify is rotten in the state of Denmark in spite of all the comforts we in the west enjoy, that even with our cars and HBO subscriptions we’re all profoundly unhappy. As W.H. Auden put it in his poem “In Memory of Ernst Toller,” we’ve seen “something horrid in the woodshed” that haunts our unconscious and eludes identification so that, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”(1).

That power is, of course, capitalism which removes so much of our lives from conscious, collective oversight. Whatever a just housing policy might be is, instead, a casino where the chips are held by those with inter-generational real estate wealth. The flipper aesthetic is just what the free hand of the market favors which, unsurprisingly, seems to look like one big liminal shopping mall or hotel lobby, spaces that reflect the qualities of late stage capitalism: center-less, bland and cheap all built with de-skilled labor pulled from the colonial periphery.

Over time “change” for the sake of change becomes a virtue in itself, intrinsic to a power structure we don’t understand or even see. It’s as if “change” prepares us to accept the austerity and precarity or our future as Uber drivers. The house flipper is the handmaid of the rootless, asymmetrical, and nonsensical domestic spaces of late capitalism, constantly re-configuring them for maximum disorientation.

What should our response be? Psychologist James Hillman asks,

Do we ever protest and go on strike because of the insulting, repulsive, and just plain ugly places of our work? Of our malls and strips? Of hospital buildings and government decor? Of the materials we handle, the lights we submit to, the “workstations” we are confined within, the lecture halls that we must endure? Yet these aesthetic oppressions affect our bodily feeling, our emotional well-being, and we must ward ourselves from their influence, the despair they produce, and the exhaustion. (Hillman, James. City & Soul (Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman Book 2 p. 141. Spring Publications.)

Why cede beauty to the right twitter architecture bros, the ones with a Caesar portrait in their bio? They correctly identify a problem, “stuff is ugly” but misdirect the criticism to some kind of moral failing on the part of architects or house flippers, or worse, they blame immigrants or, inevitably, “the Jews.” They never name the actual culprit, the unseen, unacknowledged power of the capitalist system we live under.

I keep coming back to William Morris, who understood that the reason we work towards a more just world is so that all will have necessities of life and be surrounded by beauty. We have the resources for everyone to have a roof over their head and we can re-enchant and embroider that new world. Bread and roses.

Studies into the Past by Laurant Grasso.

Japan’s culture of school cleaning

Nick Cave: Loss, Learning, Transcendence

Eclipse in LA as projected through my binoculars.

I’ve always wanted to see a total solar eclipse and a few weeks ago contemplated a trip to San Antonio where we have some friends. But a few minutes looking at last minute flight options quashed our attempt to check this one off the bucket list. The weather didn’t cooperate in most of Texas anyways so we would likely have ended up drinking beer on our friend’s couch, not necessarily a bad outcome.

Instead of a trip to Texas I decided to stay put and participate in a physics experiment run by HamSCI out of the University of Scranton that is attempting to answer the question, “How do solar eclipses impact ionospheric structure and dynamics?”

To answer this question HamSCI uses data collected though amateur radio transmission and reception reports. To participate in their eclipse experiment all I had to do was fire up my ancient and somewhat dusty $50 Radio Shack 10 meter radio and, using a digital transmission mode called FT8, send and receive as many messages as I could before, during and after the eclipse. My laptop generates the signals and, using a 3rd party interface box, connects and controls the radio. The folks at HamSCI will analyze the signal reports that are collected on the interwebs.

One of the remarkable features of this digital transmission mode is that you can send and receive messages with people all over the world with very little power and, in my case, a primitive, repurposed CB antenna. The signals bounce off the ionosphere, sometimes multiple times, to reach their destinations. The map above shows the other stations that received my signals during the day of the eclipse.

With the way the signal propagates I can easily reach the East Coast of the U.S., Central and South America and the South Pacific and Asia. I’ve never managed to reach the Midwest or anything north due to the path of the signal and, likely, some issues with my cheap antenna.

Once you get past the initial setup of the open source software used for these digital transmissions, communication is simple. You choose an open frequency with your mouse using the spectrum display at the top and the software handles the back and forth between you and whoever you are communicating with. The messages consist of an exchange of call signs, signal reports and a closing “73” which means something like “best regards”. The lack of a language barrier makes it easy to contact people all over the world.

While I’d love to have been in the path of the eclipse I did get to see at least a third or so of the moon cover the sun as well as some noticeable dimming of our always bright Los Angeles landscape. I spent the time near totality running between our porch and the closet that houses the old-man radio equipment.

How did your solar eclipse viewing go? Were you in the path of totality? What was the scene like? Leave a comment!

‘Les Animaux Mythologiques’ by Hinzelin Emile, (1857 – 1937)

US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in ‘climate time bomb’

Amazon Ditches ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores

Did Pope Gregory IX Order A Medieval Purge of Black Cats That Caused the Black Death?

Christianity Was Always for the Poor

The night people

All the buildings on Sunset Boulevard

Just one link today: the transcendent last few measures of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal.

Ray Chan Photo: LA Department of Building and Safety

The TV in the waiting room in the Kaiser ophthalmology department yesterday blared nonstop coverage of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ legal troubles (in between ads for Kaiser, ironically). You wouldn’t know that a far more important legal situation was taking place in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge John F. Walker, where former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Raymond Chan was on trial for a bribery scandal involving former Councilman José Huizar.

I was in Judge Walker’s courtroom on Monday to hear the last of the prosecution’s witnesses, FBI Special Agent Andrew Civetti testify about the financial details of the scandal as well as some 4,500 missing, and presumed deleted, text messages between Chan, Huizar and real estate consultant George Chiang. Both sides rested and closing arguments took place yesterday.

Chan was on trial for aiding Councilman Huizar’s pay-to-play relationship with a number of billionaire developers as well as, allegedly, benefiting financial from these deals. What made Chan’s trial significant is that Judge Walker made public a full range of salacious details about the scandal that, because Huizar pled guilty, we didn’t get to know about until now. Those details included the Councilman’s Vegas trips, dalliances with prostitutes and many envelopes of cash. To be clear Chan was not part of those Vegas trips but he was alleged to have been a part of Huizar’s financial entanglements with developers. Developers bribed their way into favorable zoning and building arrangements as well as having Huizar grease the wheels with trade unions. For more details on this scandal I’d suggest reading Esotouric LA’s substack (2nd article here).

Unfortunately, the LA Times has been gutted and very few people are paying attention to what’s going on at the local and state levels leaving amateurs like me and a few other activists to go to meetings and attend the occasional court proceeding. The spectator gallery on the day I attended Chan’s trial was mostly empty except for a few FBI agents. You can bet that Diddy’s trial will be standing room only.

I’m hoping to do more writing about LA’s rampant corruption in the months ahead including the upcoming trial of yet another Councilman, Curren Price. If you’re wondering why infrastructure projects are so expensive in the country, why we don’t have more affordable housing, why efforts to deal with homelessness seem to stall, one of the first things I’d look at is rampant corruption at the local level in most cities in America. This corruption cuts across both political parties, by the way, and makes what little money we spend on services outside of the military and police so expensive when compared to other industrialized countries. It’s well past time to turn our attention away from has-been rappers.

UPDATE: Chan was found guilty today according to the Los Angeles Times:

Former Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Raymond Chan was found guilty Wednesday of racketeering, bribery, fraud and giving false statements to investigators in a sprawling corruption case targeting pay-to-play schemes involving developers with business at City Hall.

The federal jury reached the verdict in a matter of hours, finding Chan guilty on 12 of 12 counts. Lawyers for both sides finished their closing arguments on Tuesday afternoon.

Sentencing is scheduled for June 10.

If you haven’t seen Dune parts one or two yet, I can summarize it for you: it’s about a family that moves from Portland to Los Angeles and gets involved in our local politics. The visuals are stunning as one would expect from any movie by David Lynch.

Just kidding. You should go see the new Dune movies if just because they break with the tired tropes of so many other science fiction films. Fans of brutalist architecture will especially dig the sets and spaceships.

One of the plot points of the books, de-emphasized in the movies, is Frank Herbert’s notion of a “Butlerian Jihad” a war against “thinking machines”. The lack of blinking and chirping computers differentiates the Dune universe from most other science fiction and I think it resonates with our current struggle against the siren lure of our “smart” phones. The movies tend to overplay what I think is Herbert’s less interesting and overly reductive view of religion.

For a further exploration of the present day implications of a Butlerian Jihad and neo-Luddism the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast had a freewheeling discussion about the recent Dune movies.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there’s an ongoing Butlerian Jihad happening in my woodshop. I’ve been thinking of expanding the jihad to other areas of my life and will blog if and when these efforts prove successful.

Unraveling the Mystery of San Francisco 7-Eleven Stores Selling Onigiri With the Mayor’s Face on Them

The website of the artist behind the Onigiri prank

An app that shows if a book you’re looking at on Amazon is at your local library

How to Build a Small Solar Power System

Henry VIII’s pastry tent

More pictures from our trip to Japan?

Did we experience Sakura season?

This is actually the Huntington Gardens in San Marino, a 20 minute drive from our house. And you should go now if you’re here in SoCal. The Chinese garden, in particular, is popping with flowers, calligraphy demos and live music. And there’s a newish historic building relocated from Japan that’s been meticulously restored and landscaped. This was the perfect way to ease ourselves back from vacation.

Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins were a husband/wife collaborative duo who worked in painting, conceptual art and poetry but are probably best known for their architectural experiments of the 1990s. While we were in Tokyo we visited their Reversible Destiny Lofts, a brightly colored and highly experimental apartment complex, that blurs the lines between architecture, art and philosophical thought experiment. We spent a few hours exploring two of the units with a Reversible Destiny Loft employee and with our very capable guide and interpreter Yuka. The remaining lofts of this nine unit building house residents and a unit you can rent for a short term stay.

But Arakawa and Gins complicate this surface reading. The full title of this apartment building is “Reversible Destiny Lofts: In Memory of Helen Keller.” The lofts are intensely tactile and in a manual they wrote for residents they suggest, “At least once a day amble through the apartment in total darkness.” The irregularities of the space that make it difficult for someone with mobility problems might, in fact, make it an ideal space for the blind.

Bonaventure lobby interior. You can tell this isn’t Tokyo because it’s completely empty.

The highly non-Euclidean space of the Lofts got me thinking about the similarly disorienting Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, famously chronicled by Fredric Jameson in his book Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Specifically, I was thinking of Jameson’s idea of “hyperspace.” The Bonaventure troubles our notions of up, down left and right through a complex, impossible to comprehend jumble of elevators, ramps and staircases where it seems like you can transport yourself anywhere and arrive nowhere. Imagine the infinite hyperlinks of the internet as a physical space and you’ll have some idea of the disorienting complexity of what Jameson means by hyperspace, which he connects with what he terms the “late stage capitalist” system that we all live under (whose qualities are multinational, post-Fordist and radically disruptive and complex).

This hyperspacial character is echoed in the Loft itself and its surroundings. The urban hyperspacial maze that is Tokyo makes both the Bonaventure and the Reversible Destiny Lofts seem comprehensible by comparison. The Shinjuku train station, to take just one example, contains a dizzying number of public transit options on multiple levels connected to a massive shopping mall with escalators and elevators leading to what seems like infinite floors of retail spaces selling food, cosmetics, electronics, and clothes all interpenetrated by a maze of tunnels and exits to yet more enormous malls, restaurants, nightclubs and oh so many bright pulsating LED billboards (virtual tour here). Jameson’s description of the Bonaventure could equally apply to the Reversible Density Lofts and Tokyo’s urban hyperspaces that have, “finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself…in a mappable external world.”

One of the first things you notice on arrival at the Lofts is Arakawa and Gins’ vibrant color scheme. In their instructions they suggest, “Use your loft’s brightly colored shaped volumes to structure and compose your own vitality” and, “Use the brightly colored shaped volumes to increase your ability to remember things and events.” Their work runs counter to the sedate white and concrete boxes of modernist architecture. I remembered how this type of colorful and playful postmodernist architecture came under a blistering critique in the undergraduate classes I took taught by Thomas Hines who liked to quip about how it would feel to come home to such exuberant spaces if a loved one had just passed away. It was his way of suggesting that our houses need to provide comfort and, in order to do so, need a kind of quiet dignity to them. Hines’ bias was not surprising given that his principle work was on the Austrian-American and über-serious modernist architect Richard Neutra.

Children’s Museum of Houston by Robert Venturi. Photo by WhisperToMe/Wikipedia.

But, once again, Arakawa and Gins complicate this surface reading. The Reversible Destiny Loft do not come off as silly or jokey as do the fake Corinthian columns and 80s color schemes of other post-modernists such as Robert Venturi who were Hines’ main target. You do feel, in Arakawa and Gins’ Lofts, that they were genuinely attempting to better the lives of their occupants not telling architectural one-liners. In particular, the notion of using living spaces to improve memory seems like a idea worth exploring further.

But in evaluating this work I think it would be a mistake to fall into moralizing about their stance. Getting too judgy-judgy about the Reversible Destiny Lofts or our postmodern lives is like a fish criticizing the water we swim in. In withholding easy answers Arakawa and Gins help us “map the territory” as Jameson would put it. The Reversible Destiny Lofts get us thinking about our mortality which is more than you can say about the infinite shopping malls of Shinjuku, Las Vegas or Times Square. And in mapping the territory of postmodernism they help us visualize and question the hyperspacial complexity we navigate. Like all good art their work shocks us out of complacency and gifts us with new eyes. They were first rate artists and philosophers and, if you have a chance, you should experience their work.

On that note, one can hope that their Bioscleave House in the East Hamptons will someday be open to the public. Should you visit Tokyo (and you can if you should) here’s how you can visit the Reversible Destiny Lofts. If you can’t get there here’s a virtual tour. Arakawa’s paintings are also worth a look.

Print by Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) high res scans available here.

Search for art images

The Art of Meredith James

Marie Kondo Appalled! Extreme Hoarding and Trash-filled Homes in Japan

Here’s how to see ‘horned’ comet 12P/Pons-Brooks in the night sky this month

How to make drug eggs

We spent the past two weeks visiting a college friend of Kelly’s who moved to Japan thirty years ago and raised a family there.

What follows is a touristy slide show because I don’t want to be one of those people that drops into a place and has opinions after just a short stay. Most of our time we were in Tokyo but took a day trip to Kamakura and a three night trip to Kanazawa.

We met a few Buddhist temple cats.

Our hosts took us to the Jindaiji Temple’s Yakuyoke (Ward Off Misfortune) Ganzan Daishi Festival during which you can have a priest write a character on one eye of a Daruma doll to bring good fortune.

Daruma dolls for sale at the festival.

Our time in Japan was just before Sakura (cherry blossom season). A few trees were blooming early and the stores were full of Sakura themed goods and foods.

There’s even a Sakura themed Domino’s pizza meal.

Tokyo was immensely fun to wander at night and I kept thinking of the class I took on Frederic Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In that book Jameson links the particular stage of global capitalism we live in with the confusing “hyperspacial” non-hierarchical architectural spaces we navigate. Tokyo’s huge, meandering shopping malls, train stations and packed boulevards overwhelm, disorient and perfectly exemplify what Jameson describes in that book.

We took a day trip to Kamakura to see the many Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples as our hosts warned us that Kyoto has become, sadly, over-visited with crowds of misbehaving Westerners.

The bamboo forest of the Houkokuji Temple in Kamakura.

Buddhas at the Hase-dera Temple in Kamakura. This temple also has a stunning 30 foot wooden Buddha.

We took the sleek Shinkansen bullet train to Kanazawa. The train covers roughly the same distance I regularly travel on Amtrak to get to San Francisco. Of course the Shinkansen does so in a fraction of the time, with no waiting for passing freight trains and with clean bathrooms. Unfortunately, we can’t even aspire to this kind of basic social democracy in the U.S., i.e. things like healthcare for all and decent public transportation.

In Kanazawa we had a guide to show us around and one of the stops was at a gold leaf workshop. Gold leaf is one of the crafts Kanazawa is known for.

We stayed at an inn and enjoyed a fancy Japanese breakfast.

We visited the reconstructed Kanazawa castle to nerd out on the joinery.

During our brief two weeks in Japan we visited three architectural museums and the Reversible Destiny Lofts (more on that visit in another post).

At one of the museums they still burn fires in the old buildings to keep the termites at bay and demonstrate the old ways.

There was more nerding out over woodworking to be done at one of the architectural museums. You pull rather than push Japanese saws and planes and they were traditionally used from a seated position.

There were a lot of warnings while we were there predicting a possible large earthquake in the Tokyo area and our visit coincided with the March 11 anniversary of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster.

Near our hotel was the headquarters of the Japanese Communist Party which is more of a progressive party not a Stalinist type org. These two posters say Yes to higher wages and No to military expansion.

On the other end of the political spectrum we also got to watch a bizarre and loud caravan of Japanese Qanon enthusiasts, their loudspeakers echoing through a fashionable neighborhood of ceramics shops, popup doughnut purveyors and soba restaurants.

Once the jet lag subsides I’ll attempt a blog post about the Reversible Destiny Lofts. In the meantime many thanks to our hosts for their hospitality.

There’s nothing like the unintentional horror of a 1970s era British public service ad.

The woodworking I do combines machines and hand tools. I have kind of a early 20th century shop–machines for the rough stuff: table saw, band saw, jointer and planer and hand planes and hand saws for the details. I took an excellent hand cut dovetail class taught by Chris Gochnour a few years ago where we learned how to make dovetails with a hand saw, chisel and fret saw. I’ve been practicing the skill ever since. While my dovetails aren’t perfect I’ve gotten to the point where they come together almost right off the saw.

I invested in an expensive Lie Nielsen tapered dovetail saw for this purpose and it’s one of my favorite tools.

I used to use a router jig to cut my dovetails but I now prefer doing it by hand. There’s a lot less dust and noise and that router jig was a real pain to set up. Plus I’m beginning to enjoy accumulating odd, outdated hand skills just for the sake of those skills. You can make perfectly serviceable drawers entirely by machine but if you have the time and are making things for yourself not for work, I think doing it by hand is the way to go.

Better late than never news from the flower/celebrity gossip world

‘A soul killer’: what’s behind the US’s critical veterinarian shortage?

How effective is honey for seasonal allergies?

Museum Selfie-Takers Are Causing Damage by Backing Into Artworks

Beware of the other’s dream

Perfect peel at the 11foot8+8 bridge

I’ve been spending the past few months building an elaborate reproduction of a bed designed by Harvey Ellis. The central panel features some inlay work. I cut the wood and metal for this inlay using a jeweler’s saw. My first few attempts were so bad that I considered trying to cut the material at my library’s maker space with a laser cutter. But I struggled for two days trying to learn the software I’d need to use. I just don’t like sitting in front of computers if I don’t have to.

Instead, I decided to just keep practicing doing it by hand, guided by a YouTube lecture by a marquetry expert who learned his craft working at his family’s jewelry business. I used time during a pet sitting gig to make many attempts at the central woodland scene until I understood how to use the tools.

There’s nothing wrong with using computers if you use them consciously. The Bauhaus, the architects of the International Style, and the mid-century work of the Eames all make use of a machine aesthetic that can be elegant. But in 2024 I have an intuition that we need to return to hand work, perhaps as a reaction to the excesses of our Silicon Valley overlords.

The panel above, which awaits more sanding and staining, was done with a combination of hand fret saw work and inlay facilitated by a Dremel and router.  Instead of a CNC router I did it freehand. It’s not perfect but that’s kind of the point.

What industry “secret” do you know that most people don’t? (via Recomendo)

Mass trespass on Dartmoor to highlight England’s ‘piecemeal’ right to roam laws

Ex-deputy LA mayor loses bid to exclude ‘salacious’ evidence from racketeering trial

Apple AirTag: Antitheft or Antistalking?

Everything is Connected and No One is Saved Alone

First I strongly support a vote for Karla Griego for District 5. This article goes into why this race is so important but I’ll just summarize by saying that Griego will stop the privatization and degradation of our schools here in Los Angeles.

Secondly, pedestrian and cycling deaths have skyrocketed since the beginning of the pandemic and the majority of our city council and the mayor, unfortunately, simply don’t care. It especially makes me very angry to hear the heartbreaking stories of moms who have lost children to our deadly streets. This is why you should vote yes on measure HLA.

Lastly let me say that most people have no idea what’s going on at the local level here in Los Angeles. The news mostly covers the drama at the national level and the lack of focus on the local is only going to get worse with the layoffs at the Los Angeles Times. Perhaps I’ll write more about this at a later date but I’ll just say that the level of corruption and grifting going on in this city is truly astonishing. Almost a quarter of the city council is in prison or on the way. We live in what some call “Chicago by the Sea.”

For the rest of the ballot here’s the DSA-LA voter’s guide.

The AI children’s books advertised on my Kindle combine titles that have an English-as-a-second-language vibe, vaguely Manga style cover illustrations and author names such as “Leanor Varelade” that either yield no search results or are close to the names of real people (Leonor Varela is a Chilean actress). In short these books are what you would get if you took a statistical average of the entirety of the internet and barfed it out as a book. This is, of course what “artificial intelligence” actually is. We don’t and likely never will understand what human “intelligence” is let alone come up with a model of it. What we call AI is just a enormous statistical modeling game not “intelligence” whatever that is. AI is part of yet another hype cycle out of Silicon Valley giving us things that move fast and suddenly break leaving the world a worse place. We’ve seen this with self driving cars, cryptocurrency, social media, and Elon Musk’s tunnels to nowhere and failed Hyperloop.

There’s certainly useful things we can do with these large statistical models. Writing children’s books, however, is not one of them. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of language, how humans gain experience and how creativity works. I met a translator recently who does English subtitles for Japanese movies and TV shows. Her work is beginning to be replaced with computer based translations. She expressed her frustration that the studio bosses don’t understand that the Japanese language is not in some kind of one to one relationship with English, that it carries cultural associations and subtleties that no computer will ever be able to parse. In short, that translation is interpretation and that human beings need to be involved in that process.

What I got when I asked Google’s AI, Gemini, to create a Thomas Kinkade painting with brutalist buildings.

Part of me admires these AI children’s book hustlers. There’s a long and creative history to be told about the long arc of scammers, from the card sharks of earlier centuries to the crypto bros of the present. If I taught creative writing I’d suggest to my students that you should go ahead and try these tools and see what happens. Maybe there’s a great post-modern novel in this technology, a true “death of the author.” And the early, wonky, days of AI images produced some hilarious results. But I suspect that the real scam is likely selling people on the hustle of  selling AI books, not actually creating and selling the books. I’ve been unable to figure out if these titles are the result of an individual or some kind of foreign scam farm. I suspect the latter since someone has the capital to buy a lot of Kindle ads.

What AI text tools like ChatGPT really excel at is filling out is bureaucratic forms, those documents nobody actually reads. An admission: I once used ChatGPT for this purpose and got complimented for my writing skills. Maybe we can replace the bosses with AI bots who will simultaneously generate and read this textual nonsense leaving us all more time to garden, handcraft chairs and go for long walks. But that’s not, of course, the way things will work out. AI will likely just put already vulnerable people out of work.

A dead person loses the predicates of a living being, yet he or she remains the same person; an undead, on the contrary, retains all the predicates of a living being without being one — as in the above-quoted Marxian joke, what we get with the vampire is “the ordinary manner of speaking and thinking purely and simply — without the individual.”

Root Simple friend Nance Klehm is doing some soil workshops this weekend at the Arlington Garden in Pasadena. Link is here if you’d like to sign up.

LA’s Corporate Class Wants to Reverse Progressive Gains

Mindfulness in a Distracted World with Nate Klemp

Driverless taxi vandalized and set on fire in San Francisco’s Chinatown

Just gonna put this here and see if anyone can explain how it’s possible to jump that far in high heels

Spent a hard day struggling with measurements in the shop and can’t stop thinking about this

There’s two kinds of 12 volt landscape lighting: cheap, ugly and flimsy or expensive and durable. You can find the cheap stuff at the big retailers and the expensive stuff at specialty retailers that cater to professionals. I’ve always been dissatisfied with the cheap stuff but I’m also unhappy with the pro lighting, which tends to have a overly sleek Dwell Magazine type vibe.

We had some unused Moroccan style lamps laying around and I figured out that I could wire them into our existing 12 volt system by implanting them with some G4 light sockets and G4 LED bulbs that I picked up on Amazon. It was a simple project to install the socket and seal up the top of these two lamps with some silicon caulk. I hung the lamps in our pomegranate tree and wired them into the system which is set on a timer to turn on at sunset and go off a few hours later.

I placed these lights to help illuminate the treacherous and irregular 1920s staircase leading up to the house. I also have a few pro style downlights along the stairs and another light hanging over the entrance arbor.

The entrance arbor light was a 12 volt path light that I turned into a hanging light.

In general I like to keep outdoor lighting to a minimum as it’s not good for insects and birds. I use outdoor lights only where necessary, in this case to prevent staircase accidents, and I run them only during the hours they are likely to be needed. We need to embrace the night not try to hold it back.

That said, I’m happy with this DIY effort and plan on making some more lights with some of the metal cutting skills I’ve picked up doing inlay work on a bed project. More on that in a future post when I get that bed done.

This brand new video from YouTuber Internet Shaquille will resonate with anyone who owns a pizza oven and has tried to use it at a party. In short, it’s hard to operate the oven and pay attention to your guests. IS has a clever solution: bake the dough ahead of time and use it to make sandwiches. I’m definitely going to try this at our next outdoor party.

Trevor Paglen is an artist and geographer who explores the blank places on the map. I came across his work during my time at the Center for Land Use Interpretation.  In lieu of links today here’s a short but detailed dive into his work. I’m especially fond of the secret program patches he’s collected.

In an effort to take off some pandemic pudge and eat more healthy we’ve been baking our own 100% whole wheat breads. The King’s Roost and a Mock Mill make this easy and convenient but you can also get decent whole wheat flour from Central Milling and King Arthur. On my last trip to the King’s Roost I accidentally bought a bag of Sonora wheat, a white whole wheat originally brought to the Sonora desert in the 17th century. It has a light yellow color and makes a delicious bread. Sonora wheat tastes great plain but, inspired by Josey Baker’s book, I’ve been adding additional ingredients for some variety. This week I added some sesame seeds and one of my favorite spices, za’atar.

Sonora Sesame Za’atar Bread
The night before mixing your dough create a pre-ferment:

56 g Sonora wheat (or any whole wheat)
67 g water
10 g sourdough starter

In a separate container soak 90 g of toasted sesame seeds in water.

In the morning mix together:

509 g Sonora wheat (or any whole wheat)
403 g 80º F water
13 g sea salt
pre-ferment
sesame seeds
3 T za’atar

1. Mix the dough until all signs of dry flour disappear. While you’re mixing the dough heat a mason jar of water in your microwave. Place your mixed dough in the microwave to proof for a few hours. Stretch and fold the dough a few times every hour to shape into a rough loaf.

2. Once the bulk fermentation is sufficient, shape into a log and place in a greased bread pan (I use this one with Pam baking spray). Use a spatula to make some diagonal indentations and sprinkle the top of the loaf with some more za’atar.

3. Reheat your water and put the baking pan in the microwave to proof for an hour or two. When the dough is getting close to the top of the pan pre-heat your oven to 475º F.

4. Bake with the lid on for 20 minutes. Remove the lid and bake until the loaf is golden to chestnut brown, likely another 10 to 15 minutes.

Our home city of Los Angeles is in the news for a series of heavy hitting winter storms. While we’re on high ground and in no danger of flooding, our under-framed old house made ominous creaking sounds throughout the night.

I checked on our rain garden late last night (excuses for the bad photo) and the water level was the highest I’ve ever seen it. The rain garden gets all the water from one half of our roof which I calculate to have been about 1,500 gallons of water in the last 24 hours.

To briefly get back to the Žižek book I rambled about last week, I was reminded of Lacan’s notion of the “Real”, that which is unrepresentatible, unthinkable. Subjects such as our own deaths and climate change fall into the category of the Real. The incomprehensibility, the challenge of forming symbols or language around climate change and the hard choices we face in the future are why it is so difficult to understand and discuss this issue. Five inches of rain in one night in Los Angeles ain’t normal. It calls for a response outside of our current symbolic system. Welcome to the New Real.

A note on this photo: my wood shop is right on the street and I have a dog cookie jar for the neighborhood doggos. The ones on extendo-leads just run into the shop and others pause with this expectant expression until I stop working and open the jar.

We’ve found it folks: mcmansion heaven

A nice collection of Indian recipes

The reasons medieval people slept in cupboards

Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to use

Free high res art to print out and frame

I have a morning routine of reading the Episcopal (Anglican) lectionary over breakfast followed by some thorny philosophical tome while I drink my coffee. It’s reading habit I’ve kept for years to the point where its become an eccentric hobby. When I took an online class last year via the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on the topic of Fredric Jameson’s book Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism I discovered that there were other philosophy nerds unconnected to any academic institution. I had “found the other” as Timothy Leary once put it but instead of golf or model trains, it was theory.

There’s a virulent anti-intellectualism in this country that would declare this pastime pretentious and silly. Which is unfortunate because I consider this morning reading as eminently worthwhile as the carpentry that fills much of the rest of my time. Ultimately the lesson of this morning habit for me has been humility. Shit’s complicated. There ain’t gonna be a definitive answer to the big questions and mapping the complex territory we inhabit requires a lot of verbiage and, often, a befuddled silence.

But I’ve been frustrated of late with my retention of some of this reading and I think the only way to remember what I’ve read is attempt some summaries on this blog. I was inspired to do these reviews by Root Simple pal Daniel Saunders who has created his own version of Good Reads using Airtable to track all the books he digests.

I won’t be offended if you skip these reviews or feel they are “off topic.” And a disclaimer: I’m an amateur and I don’t necessarily endorse an author’s entire work because a review appears on this blog. We begin with Slavoj Žižek’s Tarrying With the Negative, but first . . . 

What I’ve learned about difficult reading
Tarrying With the Negative is not a beach read, which is the point. The fact is that questions of subjectivity, of what it means to be human, the psychological factors in political belief and the nature of group ideology are far from simple topics and they require nuanced and sometimes highly technical writing. I’ve found it useful to take two passes on reading a chapter in this type of book–an initial surface reading followed up by a closer look. It’s also been helpful to seek out audio or YouTube lectures by experts in the field. And I can only read this stuff over coffee in the morning.

Yes, someone in my neighborhood drives a Tesla with a personalized “Zizek” license plate, here seen in the infamous Silver Lake Trader Joe’s parking lot. I’ve spotted this oh-so-LA car twice. Would Žižek approve of this parking job? Photo by Adam Assad.

Tarrying With the Negative
Slavoj Žižek holds the celebrity philosopher crown right now meaning he’s popular with nerdy laypeople like myself and largely dismissed by academics (because of the YouTube hits?). His popularity stems from his jokes, his charm and the use of popular culture touchstones to explain thorny concepts. He writes both popular books and academic tomes and this difficult to read 1993 book is in the latter category, written before his fame and at a time when he was still a thing in academia.

The book begins with the question of who is the Subject , the “I or He or It (the Thing) which thinks?” Žižek illustrates this conundrum with a contrast between classic film noir and the neo-noir of the 1980s. Protagonists in 1940s noir often suffered some sort of amnesia or general delusion that resolves in the end by finding their true identities. This stands in stark contrast to the ending of Blade Runner where the detective discovers that he is, in fact, an android, that he will never understand who his “I” is. Žižek goes on to show that you can trace this destabilized “I” back through the history of philosophy, that the “I” is unstable all the way back to Descartes but especially through Kant, Hegel and on to Lacan. In other words, questions about subjectivity are not just some new postmodern concern.

The current debates over artificial intelligence makes this discussion far from academic. As to the question of can computers achieve intelligence, Žižek turns the question around and asks how are we so sure about our own intelligence? This never to be resolved question of who the “I” is has implications for ethics and the notion of human autonomy and agency. As an example of the implications of the destabilized I and its place in a web of others, Žižek offers as an example, “the Protestant gesture of dislocating actual social freedom into “inner” moral freedom, which leaves untouched all the distortions of actual social life.” This failure to recognize the “I” in a social context may, in my opinion, be one of the great and ubiquitous errors of our time.

As a layperson I had great difficulty with this book and had to read chapters twice, sometimes three times and I’m still unable to summarize large sections. Žižek assumes familiarity with Hegel and Lacan, two notoriously difficult thinkers. Lacan’s thought evolved over his life and you’d have to read a lot of material to get a handle on his ideas, not to mention also being familiar with Freud. That said, Žižek helped me better understand Hegel’s dialectics while giving me an introduction to Lacan that I’d like to explore in the future. Typical of Žižek’s fondness for Hegelian humor is this passage,

Let us just recall the usual outcome of psychological training intended to deliver the individual from the constraints of his or her everyday frame of mind and to set free his or her “true self,” with all its authentic creative potentials (transcendental meditation, etc.): once the individual gets rid of the old clichés which were still able to sustain the dialectical tension between themselves and the “personality” behind them, what take their place are new clichés which abrogate the very “depth” of personality behind them. In short, the individual becomes a true monster, a kind of “living dead.” Samuel Goldwyn, the old Hollywood mogul, was right: what we need are indeed some new, original clichés.

If there’s a lesson from the first section of this book I think I’d summarize it as a need for humility when it comes to the question of who we really are as humans and a need for healthy suspicion when someone claims to be able to neatly explain who we think we are or the basis of our social and political allegiances. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from doing door to door political work it is that people’s beliefs (and I’m including myself in this) are far from coherent. You need both the toolbox of philosophy and psychology to understand social dynamics and, indeed, this book could be seen as a kind of philosophizing of psychology.

The Wound is Healed Only by the Spear
I studied music in college and share with Žižek a fascination with Richard Wagner’s complex, challenging and transcendent music. Žižek takes up the plot of Wagner’s opera Parsifal to continue his explication of the who the hell “we” are.

What’s striking about Parsifal and what differentiates it from other operas is that the hero comes completely from outside the symbolic system. He’s a kind of Holy Fool, an outsider who heals the fallen grail king via the very object that wounded him. Žižek, building on Freud and Lacan uses this as a metaphor for the ways in which we use language and narrative to deal with the struggles of life by reenacting pain and pleasure cycles in order to heal.

In the final chapters of the book Žižek moves on to collective forms of ideology via a deep dive into Lacan. Of our current system Žižek says,

The elementary feature of capitalism consists of its inherent structural imbalance, its innermost antagonistic character: the constant crisis, the constant revolutionizing of its conditions of existence. Capitalism has no “normal,” balanced state: its “normal” state is the permanent production of an excess; the only way for capitalism to survive is to expand. Capitalism is thus caught in a kind of loop, a vicious circle, that was clearly designated already by Marx: producing more than any other socioeconomic formation to satisfy human needs, capitalism nonetheless also produces even more needs to be satisfied; the greater the wealth, the greater the need to produce more wealth. It should be clear, therefore, why Lacan designated capitalism as the reign of the discourse of the hysteric: this vicious circle of a desire, whose apparent satisfaction only widens the gap if its dissatisfaction, is what defines hysteria.

On this note let me note the case of the recently elected anarcho-caplitalist president of Argentina, Javier “El Loco” Milei. He has already started moderating his radical proposals as he’s discovered, the hard way, that the purpose of governments in capitalist countries is to stabilize an inherently unstable system. If you take the brakes off, the system self destructs. My further two cents: because of ecological limits, even with government stabilization, the whole thing self destructs in the end, but I digress.

Žižek explains ideological systems via the Lacanian concept of the Big Other, “a hypothetical observer watching our every action and conversation, whose demands we obey and for whom we perform.”(1) This book was written around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and Žižek explains how the Big Other can suddenly, without warning, dissolve,

The feature common to all these moments of the big Other’s collapse is their utter unpredictability: nothing really great happened, yet suddenly the spell was broken, “nothing was the same as before,” reasons which a moment ago were perceived as reasons for (obeying the Power), now function as reasons against. What a moment ago evoked in us a mixture of fear and respect is now experienced as a rather different mixture of ridiculous imposture and brutal, illegitimate display of force.

One such moment that Žižek mentions elsewhere is the underappreciated Haitian revolution of 1791–1804. When French troops sent to put down the uprising heard the Haitians singing in the distance they assumed it was some kind of African chant. In fact they were singing the French revolutionary anthem La Marseillaise. As Žižek says, “Sometimes, therefore, the only truly subversive thing to do when confronted with a power discourse is simply to take it at its word.” In the Haitian example the challenge to the system comes, like Parsifal, from outside the system, from African slaves who took seriously the claims of the French revolution. Sometimes I feel like we’re on the precipice of the collapse of the American Big Other, but these things, as Žižek says, can’t be foreseen.

I’ve taken Instagram and Twitter off my phone and I nuked my Facebook account (for the second time) a few months ago.

Why feed the social media beast when I have my own blog? Why line Zuck’s pockets?

Why not just take a few shots during a day spent building a new bed and getting the house prepped for a winter storm?

Pics shot with a 19 year old digital SLR camera fitted with a Holga lens. Many thanks to the Root Simple reader who gifted me the camera (sorry I don’t remember your name!).

I have so many questions about this. Was it inspired by Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book? Is it some kind of postmodern meta-commentary on the “death of the author” or some kind of new literary Maenad cult? Watch with discretion or you may fall down a Cathy Mitchell hole and discover her other books such as Dump Dinners and Dump Desserts.

Thanks to Jimmy C. for the tip.

A Hidden, Handmade House That’s an Immersive Work of Art

Renaissance Watercolours: materials and techniques

DIY tunnel explainers: the Chabad tunnel and that tunnel influencer

Three Delightful Alcohol-Free Cocktails

Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?

Governor Newsom’s “Climate Commitment” Does Not Include Walking and Biking

For those of you outside of the Western U.S., In and Out is a culty burger chain with an elaborate secret language customers in the know use to unlock variations on the simple menu. You’ll hear some of this on the recording, though not the more rare and elaborate special orders such as a “Flying Dutchman” (two meat patties and two slices of cheese with nothing else). In and Out is in on the game since they list some of the most popular menu permutations, such as “animal style” and “4×4” on their website and have trademarked a few.

Alas, the golden era of the radio scanner listening is quickly coming to a close. There was a day when cellphones, cordless phones, baby monitors and all kinds of other radio transmissions were accessible to anyone with a cheap scanner. Even police and fire departments are starting to encrypt transmissions. This particular In and Out got so popular that they switched to having an employee in the parking lot with a tablet to take orders which brought an end to our office fun.

I invite any musicians in the Root Simple audience to make a Eurotrash dance remix with these recordings. In addition to the one above there’s three more at Archive.org.

The Kept and the Killed

2023 Top 10 of Olden Tymee Cook Books on Sandwiches of History⁣

2023 Top 10 Worst Sandwiches on Sandwiches of History⁣

The San Francisco Bay’s Red Rock Island is for sale for $25M

Headlights Seem Brighter?

Jan. 18, 1968: Eartha Kitt Spoke Truth at the White House

Blood, Guns, and Broken Scooters: Inside the Chaotic Rise and Fall of Bird

This will inspire the worst critical theory essay of all time pic.twitter.com/emrU444aRX

— David Griscom (@DavidGriscom) December 29, 2023

I’ve fallen down a deep hole of learning how to do marquetry and inlay work for a bed I’m building and I’ve been on the road for Christmas. These are my two excuses for not popping on here for a few weeks. Hope to have some shots of the bed soon (if I ever finish it!). In the meantime this seems important to note.

Dr Phene in his garden

Build yourself a viking ship

Old man parks his car in a very small garage

Play Freebird!

I don’t now why it took me so many years to realize that our kitchen temperature is too low for proofing bread. Most of the year here, except for the hotter months, our interior temps are in the 70sF (20sC). Bread wants to ferment in the 80sF (upper 20sC). Professional bakers either have a hot kitchen or proofing boxes to maintain this higher temperature.

If you’ve got a microwave you’ve got a proofing box. Just heat a mason jar filled with water for a few minutes and stick your dough in for both the bulk fermentation and proofing. If you don’t have a microwave you could heat some water on a stove and put it and your dough in a cooler. If you want to get really fancy you could use a seed propagation heating mat in a cooler. I don’t have a mat so I’ve been using the microwave and it works great.

There are reasons you might want to cool dough and prolong fermentation, either to develop flavor and/or to put off your baking time to a more convenient hour. Your proofing box and refrigerator thus become, to use an old person metaphor, like the fast forward and pause buttons on a VCR.

Concluding note
I’ve gotten back into bread baking after a pause, specifically making whole wheat breads. If you’d like to try baking yourself, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I highly recommend the Josey Baker Bread book. Why? It’s to the point, beginner friendly, has a lot of whole grain recipes, and is the book most likely to help you develop a regular bread baking habit.

Mike the British Museum cat

All roads lead to Thaxted

British (and U.S.) children shorter than other five-year-olds in Europe, study finds

JFC, calm down about the medieval Church

The destruction of Cincinnati

Like many, I struggle with digital clutter–too many photos, emails, and articles I’ll never look at again. To tame the photo clutter, I downloaded an app to sort through years worth of digital photo detritus. The app I tried is kind of like Tinder for photos. A simple swipe sends a photo to a folder or to the trash. It was useful but ultimately too buggy: it crashed frequently and can’t seem to handle videos. And, of course, the features this app has should be built into iPhoto itself.

More interesting than the app was the exercise of time traveling backwards, via my photos, though the pandemic. Concurrently with this exercise Kelly and I watched the vastly underappreciated David Cronenberg movie eXistenZ and, in my mind, this film, and my digital photos and the pandemic became one.

What struck me about the contents of my phone during the pandemic was the sudden increase in memes, indicating a lot of time spent online looking at Instagram and the website formerly known as Twitter. The early pandemic period sorted us into the Useful People, who care for the sick, build houses, grow and sell food and the Useless People who look at their phones and attend Zoom meetings. For some it was a a world of anxiety, literal blood and guts and for others the time to kick back on the couch and watch every episode of Tiger King. But this is, of course, too much of a dualistic view. Many who were stuck at home also had to deal with the reality of panic over finances and taking care of family members.

And most of us, including a lot of Useful People, ended up spending a lot of time looking at screens and this is where the paradox of all that digitality and Cronenberg’s movie align. All the digital photos I accumulated are “virtual” in the sense that they seem to occupy no physical space but this masks the reality that our digital files, in fact, very much occupy the “meatspace” of digital cloud storage, an industry that uses immense amounts of power, occupies countless technicians, programmers, HR departments, outsourced content moderators and janitors and eats up land in the from of massive warehouses, power stations, undersea cables and telecommunications stitching facilitates. The hidden physical reality of computer space is realized and satirized in eXistenZ in the virtual world of a video game that sits atop an infrastructure of typical Cronenbergian biological messiness: game controllers made from the parts of some kind of mutant salamander creature assembled in hellish Third World butcher shops.

eXistenZ also troubles the idea that we can somehow have a viewpoint outside of the virtual one we inhabit. This is one of the many ways in which eXistenZ is a much better movie than The Matrix which has an overly Manichean take on reality, and implies that we can escape into the Real (in the later Matrix sequels revealed as the 1990s underground rave city of Zion).

More fundamentally, eXistenZ also undermines our sense of who is the “I” inside of us. The characters in eXistenZ, (who are also of course real life actors in a movie) begin to question their own lines of dialog, wondering why they are conforming to the plot of the video game within the film. As Mark Fisher points out this mirrors the ways in which we find ourselves acting on the wishes of some algorithm, following the guidance of Google Maps, some fitness app or getting in a flame war on social media and thereby feeding the conflict based profit model of our Silicon Valley lords. Are we tweeting or being tweeted? as Richard Seymour might put it.

If Cronenberg’s icky body horror puts you off, know that in this movie its a bit tamer than his others and played for laughs. There’s a whole bit about a biological orifice for the game controller that’s hilarious but also speaks to the fear of infection, physicality and proximity to other people that the pandemic exacerbated. And eXistenZ‘s game controller reminds me of the way the engineers at Apple made my new iPhone shudder when I touch it, creating a tactile desire very much like the appeal of the fleshy, nipple like appendages of the bio-electronic controller in eXistenZ that the characters just can’t seem to resist fondling.

Unlike the Matrix there’s no neat way out of the mirror house postmodernity of the eXistenZ universe. Ariadne has left no thread to escape the maze. The best you can do is to map the territory. Towards that end, instead of a photo sorting app, I’ll leave you with two book recommendations: K-punk : the collected and unpublished writings of Mark Fisher  which contains the essay on eXistenZ that inspired this post (I’d recommend reading his book Capitalist Realism: is there no alternative? first), and Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine. If you know of a good photo sorting app leave a comment!

Turn-of-century Berlin and more on cheerful Art Nouveau postcards

‘Your wife wants to see you’: 18th-century Spanish letters seized at sea by British published online

Removing a motorway to bring back the original waterway

How to tie a trucker’s hitch

Cathedral Wagon On A Medical Train. Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, Russia. Photo: Emile Ducke

The sun painter

Free early music online radio station

Seed to plate, soil to sky : modern plant-based recipes using Native American ingredients

The Coast Realty Archive

Pumpkin spice/”Christian Girl Autumn” arrives here in Los Angeles without the warning of red and yellow leaves that comes elsewhere. In our house we believe in making hoshigaki in the fall with persimmons from either the market or, better yet, a neighbor or friend rather than chugging those pumpkin spice lattes. We’ve got a row of seven store bought persimmons hanging in a south facing window and plans to start more.

Here’s what they look like when completed.

If you’ve never tried making hoshigaki, a kind of transcendent dried fruit product that’s very expensive to buy, I can report that it’s one of the more worthwhile DIY projects on this blog and we’ve got directions here. EaterLA has a post on different methods and the history of the practice.

Our original post on the subject resulted in one of the more surreal episodes over the years running this blog: being invited to be on a Japanese reality show that matched non-Japanese participants with experts in Japanese crafts and arts. I exchanged emails with the producer towards flying over until a friend of ours, who lives in Japan, warned us about the sort of humiliation this particular show trades in. If you want to respond with some form of “you only live once” I’d invite you to google “extreme Japanese reality show” and see the type of thing I was worried about.

That said, get yourself some persimmons and give this a try. Maybe you’ll get a free trip to Japan.

Do-It-Yourself Curb-Cut Guide

18th Century Trade Cards

From compressed yeast to cream cheese and cornflakes: one man’s search for the world’s greatest sandwich

Ideal built-in furniture

Great app I’ve been using to sort way too many photos

Arend Hendriks, Cat at the top of a Dark Staircase.

All the Whole Earth Catalogs online

Make a timelapse camera with a Raspberry Pi

‘Dangerously misguided’: the glaring problem with Thomas Heatherwick’s architectural dreamworld

Missing Downtown Connector Bikeways

Leon Ray Livingston, America’s Most Famous Hobo

Grid Beam chair from gridbeam.xyz

Root Simple reader LeJun, responding to my post on my Enzo Mari table, left a link to two more ideas in the sphere of DIY furniture: Grid Beam and Open Structures.

Grid Beam, pioneered by Ken Isaacs in his book How to Build Your Own Living Structures, relies on either wood or metal with a regular series of holes drilled to accept bolts. Grid Beam is modular and you can use the method to make chairs, tables, beds and rooms. Pieces can be taken apart, reused and reconfigured. If you want to try it you’ll definitely want a drill press and a jig to make the holes uniform and square. Thankfully you can find many used drill presses in the wild as they are a common tool in both wood and metal shops.

Open Structures table from openstructures.net

Open Structures is a similar modular concept by Brussels designer Thomas Lommée done with metal tubes and connectors. I find it a bit more aesthetically pleasing than the drilled 2×2 lumber in the Grid Beam system, but you’ll need to be handy with metal if you want to try to homebrew this.

Note that I’ve got a whole roundup post about DIY furniture on Root Simple here. Many thanks to LeJun for the tips and I’ve amended that older post with Grid Beam and Open Structures.

My friend John came over last week with a stack of 2x6s that have been sitting in his yard for awhile and we spent the day making one of Italian artist and furniture designer Enzo Mari’s tables.

A few years ago a reader tipped me off to Mari’s book Autoprogettazione, a difficult to translate neologism that means, literally, “self-design”. The book (free download here) contains a suite of furniture that Mari describes as a “project for making easy-to-assemble furniture using rough boards and nails.” With just rudimentary tools, pretty much anyone could use his book to furnish their own house. John and I built the base of this table in a day and I added the top the next day. This is significantly faster than the fussy hardwood arts and crafts stuff I usually make, which can take months to complete just one piece.

You don’t need a wood shop to make Mari’s furniture. That said, John and I were able to reclaim some of his twisted 2x6s using my jointer, planer and table saw. But here’s where things get confusing. European readers please correct me if I’m wrong here, but when Mari calls for a 25mm x 50mm piece of lumber he means literally that, what would be 1-inch by 2-inches in our convoluted imperial measurements. The problem is that a “1×2” on this side of the pond is actually 3/4-inch by 1 1/2-inch. The luxury of having woodworking tools is that I can plane down larger pieces of wood to make any dimension that I need, so we were able to make the 25mm x 50mm stock Mari calls for from our larger “2x6s”. But if you’re not fortunate enough to have these expensive tools, I think it would be easy to make this same table with slightly thinner wood, fresh from the lumber yard, without any significant sacrifice in strength.

Mari’s designs take their inspiration from American house framing which replaced earlier timber framing methods. Balloon framing, and its more fire-safe 20th century replacement, platform framing, democratize construction and put building in the hands of anyone with a hammer and nails. The clever thing about Mari’s furniture is that it exposes the framing that’s normally hidden in a way that’s both aesthetically pleasing and functional, a bit like Frank Gehry’s early work. Mari’s furniture is based on triangular bracing that he imagined could be applied to any piece. He imagined that if you wanted a custom piece you could use this principle to make anything, hence the notion of “self-design”.

Mari struggles with many contradictions in the text that accompanies the designs. Will a table inspired by framing appeal to workers who actually frame things or just well to do hobbyists such as myself? Probably the latter. He also points out that industrially made furniture requires less material than the examples in this book.

I experienced my own contradictions making this table. Using reclaimed lumber meant the base was free but the decking material used for the top (it’s an outdoor table) was expensive. And my little modernist experiments in furniture–this table and my Gerrit Rietveld chairs–live outside, while a Medievalist arts and crafts fantasy plays out in the furniture I’ve build for the inside of the house. Such is the fate of attempts at revolutionary design within our post-modern age. Everything gets subsumed within a vast parade of styles and one can easily imagine this table on sale at Urban Outfitters at your local mall. Mari, who we lost to COVID in 2020, had the genius and grace to acknowledge the contradictions in his own work while not letting this discourse get in the way of making objects of usefulness and beauty and helping others to have nice things at a reasonable cost.

Alexander Shayle’s coffee grinders

Raspberry Pi All Sky Camera

Stop obsessing over heirloom seeds and let plants change

A Letter from an 18th-century Journeyman Cabinetmaker

You are not, in fact, the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn

I lieu of links this week, here’s a conversation between three of my favorite writers, Richard Seymour, China Mieville, and David Bentley Hart. Topics include “dandy” prose, materialism and metaphysics, non-human intelligence, and if you stick it out to the end, a moving plea to re-enchant the world.

It’s a long conversation and technical in places, but well worth a close listening.

Thanks to Daniel Saunders for the tip.

Los Angeles Library card holders can check out an air quality monitor and participate in a crowd-sourced science project to monitor and map air quality.

I checked out a portable monitor at the Central Library, called an AirBeam, that measures two kinds of particulate pollution and feeds the results to an app on your smartphone. The AirBeam looks at two different sizes of particulate matter: PM2.5 and PM10. PM2.5, the smaller of the two, comes mostly from burning gasoline, diesel fuel and wood. PM10 (which, somewhat confusingly, includes PM2.5 particles) comes partly from fossil fuel but also consists of dust from agriculture, construction, wildfires and pollen.

The AirBeam has a loop which I attached to my belt, allowing me to take the device on my morning dog walks. The period in early August that I took measurements was unusually good for Los Angeles in August due to a mild weather. Only on one day did smoke from a distant fire up the central coast give me a reading that air quality officials would deem as “unhealthy”. It should be noted that there is actually no level of particulate matter that is “healthy” but, even without human activity, there would still be some particulate matter.

The app gives you both a graph of your readings and a map view, in this case from a walk I took down to the always congested 101 freeway. Everyone can view results via the web on this map.

You can also use the AirBeam to make stationary measurements indoors. Indoor particulate matter consists of things such as cigarette smoke and mold spores. Thankfully we seem to have good indoor air quality.

The real promise of the AirBeam and the LA Library’s lending project lies in creating a hyper-local mapping of pollution as well as creating a kind of air pollution literacy. With a lot of people wandering around with these monitors we might be able to identify pollution hot spots in need of attention. While there is more to air pollution than just particulate matter, I also feel like I have a better idea of what air quality reports mean and almost a nose for it.

In addition to the AirBeam, the LA Library also has a number of other kits you can check out to monitor mosquitos, light pollution, water quality, biodiversity, and heat island effects. They also have curriculum materials to support these kits if you’d like to make these part of a school project.

Meme found on the interwebs (not sure where). Totally agree about Trader Joe’s!

On the Origin of the Bass Face

Demonstrating neighbourhood-scale civic infrastructure for social, ecological, economic, and climate transition

A school for “radical attention”

The rock’s the star: meditative film about a Cornish stone goes global

A Kali Mirch Paneer Pasta Recipe from Pijja Palace

Pentagon’s Budget Is So Bloated That It Needs an AI Program to Navigate It

Mr. Charlie’s: The Vegan Fast Food Joint that Looks Familiar But is Unlike Anything You’ve Seen Before

I took a pizza class at Josey Baker Bread in San Francisco this month and picked up a great tip from the instructor, JB pizza baker Caitlin (sorry did not get a last name!). She told us the bakery keeps a rye starter. This has two advantages: rye is more active so your starter will have a higher likelihood of success and you’ll always be ready to make a rye loaf. If you want a white or whole wheat dough all you have to do is add white or whole wheat flour and a spoonful of your rye starter.

I keep a small amount, like three tablespoons of starter on hand that I feed every day. When I want to make bread I do a build overnight and the next day I’ll have the quantity I need to bake a loaf or make pizza dough. This week I switched my starter over to rye using the small amount Caitlin gave us. I’m baking a loaf today and it’s rising like crazy.

As to the pizza we made in the class it was probably the best I’ve ever had. It’s a quirky pie: the secret is a dark, almost burnt crust brushed with garlic olive oil and sprinkled with Maldon salt. They keep the toppings simple as not to distract from the cracker-like sourdough crust. They have a pizza night at the bakery every Monday from 5 to 8 in case you don’t want to roll your own.

Looking for an easy Halloween display that uses stuff you might have at hand?

In this video Joshua Ellingson shows you how to create the 19th century Pepper’s ghost effect using an iPad, some plastic film and a glass container. YouTube is full of pre-made Pepper’s ghost videos so you don’t even need to shoot anything.

If you want to go deeper there’s a free version of a video DJ type program called VDMX that you can download and Ellingson also has some videos on how to hook up old TVs to a laptop to create bigger Pepper’s ghost setups.

I’m thinking of doing a simple Pepper’s ghost for the huge trick or treat crowds in our neighborhood. How huge are those crowds? Most years we run out and close early at about 300 little customers. Many of our neighbors are in the film industry and put up some truly wonderful displays that likely account for the crowds. It’s always a fun evening.

A mini Red Car at L.A. Train fest

Plant-based meat once seemed unstoppable. What went wrong?

Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again?

Pruitt-Igoe residents exposed to government testing seek compensation. ‘What about us?’

‘Rat tours’ boom in rodent-infested New York

Building Myself a Reading Tracker App with Airtable and Deno Fresh, Part 1

With the news that Amazon is flooded with dangerous, AI generated mushroom foraging books, this seems like the perfect time for this blog to point towards the Japanese kid’s show Ultraman Taro, specifically episode 31, “Danger! The Poisonous Mushroom of Lies”.

The episode opens with a giant, ambulatory mushroom, named Mushra, destroying a Japanese city. Ultraman Taro, a sort of size-shifting superhero, defeats the monster but not without a release of spores. After the battle the main protagonist of the series, Kotaro, meets a lonely latchkey kid, Daisuke, and gives him an experimental device that allows him to communicate with plants, as one does. Daisuke uses the device to communicate with mushrooms (I know, not a plant, but stay with me here). Handed such a device, let me just say that my first impulse would also be to communicate with the mushrooms to just ask them, like, what the hell are you all up to?

Daisuke, unfortunately, gets prodded by a bunch of hoodlum teens to eat one of the mushrooms and a seriously bad trip ensues. Daisuke becomes a mushroom monster and, due to the spores, turns the whole town into mushroom zombies.

Ultraman Taro returns to combat Mushra and this time drys up the giant mushroom’s water supply with some sort of zappy laser thingy. The mushroom zombies turn back into normal townsfolk. Daisuke’s mom apologizes for prioritizing work and, this being a Japanese show, everyone enjoys a bowl of mushrooms over rice.

That paradoxical love/hate/fear relationship we have with fungi, an organism that can nourish or kill or create visions thus provides the perfect plot points for this bit of pop cultural symbiosis and, as a bonus, you get an unexpected side plot dealing with women in the workplace in 1960s Japan.

Here’s the whole episode for your viewing pleasure:

‘Life or Death:’ AI-Generated Mushroom Foraging Books Are All Over Amazon

Scientologists Ask Federal Government to Restrict Right to Repair

Plan for 55,000-acre utopia dreamed by Silicon Valley elites unveiled

Tennessee woman sets record for world’s longest female mullet

Mystery totem pole appears on coastal path in south-east England

Sandwiches of Histsory

Coit Tower mural by Bernard B. Zakheim, 1934.

New York’s traffic-halting astronomer

How LA Failed to Stop Landlords From Turning Low-Cost Housing Into Tourist Hotels

Wildlife webcams

San Francisco’s Audium

Plastic waste scrimshaw

Luke the dog

Living, as we all do, in a fog bank of texts, emails, social media updates and more it can seem as Marx put it, that “all that is solid melts into thin air.” Thus, visiting the physical headquarters of the Internet Archive, is somewhat contradictory. Yes, in fact, you can ride the #38r Geary bus to see a website. We forget that the “virtual” things in our lives exist in the real world of servers, cables and cooling systems.

The Internet Archive, founded in 1996, is a “non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” I’ve used it many times for research and even built a fence based on images in one of the books contained in their Building Technology Heritage Library. In addition to digitizing books, records and other media they maintain the Wayback Machine which archives a searchable selection of websites.

In 2009 they purchased a massive Christian Science church building at the corner of  Funston and Clement in the Richmond district of San Francisco. The paradoxical physical presence of the Archive is as much a story about the virtual as it is about the decline and repurposing of old-school religious institutions but that story will need to be told in another blog post.

A group of publishers did not agree with this arrangement and sued. The judge agreed and the injunction will remove a significant number of the books they currently lend online. Concurrently, a group of record labels have sued to stop the Internet Archive’s efforts to digitize and make available recordings on 78rpm records. Parsing the dialectical relationship between the value of public domain material and the rights of creators and publishers is beyond my pay grade. Let’s just say it’s complicated and made more so by technology and the huge data models gestating in the, perhaps over-hyped, world of AI.

If you come by the archive at 1pm on Friday you’ll get a tour, often led by the founder Brewster Kahle. Kahle was on vacation so our tour was capably led by gentleman whose name I failed to get, unfortunately. After explaining the history of the building, our tour guide showed us the contraption they use to digitize books. He noted that the majority of the books they digitize are sent to the Philippines and digitized with cheaper labor.

You can donate books and other materials to the Archive. They have an app that will tell you if they need a particular item and will sometimes pay for shipping.

The Internet Archive is a throwback to the heady, more optimistic days of the Internet familiar to those of us older than 50 who can remember things like Mondo 2000 and rave fueled techno-optimism. Everything will be free! Undeniably useful, the Internet Archive contains many, entertaining quirks such as Ted Nelson’s collection of vintage junk mail and their annual celebration of Public Domain Day when materials lapse into free use.

Ceramic installation by Nuala Creed.

If you’re in San Francisco the free tour is well worth it if just to meet the celebrity tech tour guides and the rotating art installations. And you can have lunch afterwards on Clement Street, sometimes known as “the other Chinatown” (I’d add less touristy Chinatown) and then go buy a book at Green Apple if you have lingering copyright guilt.

I’m in San Francisco this week hanging out with a relative and everywhere I go I see driverless Cruise and Waymo cars inching about the streets. Based on my years in transportation advocacy and my highly uniformed opinion, I have two prognostications about these things:

1. Autonomous cars will mostly, kinda work in some places but will require significant alterations to the built environment to function fully. They will bump up against that conceptual horizon at which it becomes impossible quantize the unquantizable. Human beings and the environments we create, combined with the complexity of the weather result in unknowable unknowns that no computer algorithm can anticipate. I can maybe see these things bumbling about the calmer parts of San Francisco but good luck in Los Angeles where there’s a culture of speeding and sociopathic driving, or snow, ice, fog and all the other variables of Mother Nature.

As Paris Marx points out in his book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, accommodating self driving vehicles will replay what happened in the early 20th century when the automobile and oil industries pushed for significant changes to our roads and cities to make cars work. For instance, these powerful economic and political industries turned the simple act of crossing the street into “jaywalking”. Then there’s all the parking lots, highways, gas stations and other infrastructure that worsened the quality of our built environment. As Marx points out, autonomous vehicle advocates have already speculated about gates for pedestrians at intersections as well as requiring all pedestrians and cyclists to wear beacons.

2. Politicians of both parities will be seduced by Silicon Valley’s hype and money instead of doing the boring and tedious work of building out and improving existing public transportation. This will prolong the failed embrace of the automobile and their effect on our cities and climate. Improvements that could happen right now, like better bus service and new rail lines, will be postponed indefinitely.

Resistance
But autonomous vehicles are not popular and the reaction to them reflects a growing uneasiness with Silicon Valley’s products. Activists in San Francisco have discovered that if you put a cone on the hood these things it will stop them, an echo of the early 20th century when mobs would swarm and beat up wealthy automobile owners. I’ve noticed that the Cruise cars have a phrase stenciled on their sensor apparatus warning, “Records audio and video,” as if the company knows they are hated. San Franciscans seem both horrified and delighted that one got stuck in wet concrete this week and a bunch bricked themselves due to “connectivity” issues relating to a large music festival. Despite these concerns, the California Public Utilities commission voted to let these companies start charging for rides.

I see some hope in my own Los Angeles neighborhood. The councilman I volunteered for during the election, Hugo Soto-Martinez, is about to begin a process of bus and bike improvements in his district. Unlike his corporate predecessor, Soto-Martinez plans on enlisting volunteers to engage in door-to door conversations with residents and business owners about these improvements, listening to people’s concerns and carefully explaining the benefits of the changes he wants to make. This is the hard work of politics, something our tech overlords try avoid and subvert.

The changes we need to make are a matter of hands-on politics, not waiting around for some grand technological fix. While technology can definitely contribute to improving mass transit, I think we’re going to need to lean more on rhetoric to shift us all away from the car-centric errors of the 20th century. I have some notions about the type of arguments to make but that will have to wait for another blog post. I’ll just say that I think autonomous cars are a distraction from this vital work.

Wait there’s more . . .

I can’t help but point out that one of the best documents of what cities looked like in America before “jaywalking” became a thing is this film of Market Street in San Francisco in 1906, shot just four days before the devastating earthquake and fire. To modern eyes this street scene seems chaotic but I would argue that we should see it as more democratic since no one type of transportation, horses, cars, trains, pedestrians or cyclists have priority. In our present time if you can afford to own a car you get priority over everyone else. Autonomous vehicles are just a continuation of this bias.

At the end of Market Street in this film you can see the Ferry Building which was obscured by a double decked highway built in 1959. When this ugly concrete mass collapsed in the 1989 earthquake it was, thankfully, demolished and not replaced. Hopefully similar wisdom will prevail and we’ll stop building infrastructure for private transportation.

Alexander Graham Bell’s Tetrahedral Kites (1903–9)

Dystopian On Trial: Alice Coleman’s Architectural Determinism

HGTV Personality Tarek El Moussa Denies He’s Evicting North Hollywood Tenants To Build New Complex

Gym shorts and a leotard: subway rider’s bonkers looks divide TikTok

Hungry Summer Ghosts

I have a lazy and ridiculous fantasy of picking up cookbooks at the library and handing them off to a personal chef to cook from. That will not and should never happen. That doesn’t stop me from impulse checkouts when I’m near the Central Library’s exit. Such was the case when I picked up Milk Bar All About Cookies by Christina Tosi when I really should have check out something more healthy.

Using the excuse of having a friend over for drinks, I baked Tosi’s Chocolate Toffee Hobnobs, an improved version of the popular UK biscuit. I screwed up the toffee topping but substituted a chopped up Heath Bar. If I had to quibble I’d say the toffee making instructions could have been a bit more detailed. That said, this book will make you very popular around the holidays if not sooner. Most of the recipes, including the one for these Hobnobs, seem doable and a step above the usual cookie. A lot involve ironic takes on commercial products or make use of things like Ritz crackers and Cookie Crisp cereal.

You can find Tosi’s hobnob recipe online here. Now off to find a salad cookbook and take off a few pounds.

Handle It
Does this handle thingy do anything in terms of cleanliness? I’m gonna take a bold guess and say no. Seems like the dreaded “fecal plume” triggered by flushing would grace both the underside of the lid and this handle. But does it spark joy? You decide.

The Slammer
Thou shalt not have “soft-close” (a.k.a. “slow-close” or “no-slam”) and regular toilet seats in the same household. Why? You will forget and slam the trad seats in the rest of the house. In general I’m not in favor of the slow-close seat as why would I want to introduce a point of failure in a simple device that might otherwise last decades all for just a minor, lazy convenience?

Ghosts in the Machine
Motion activated faucets, towel dispensers and hand dryers in public restrooms don’t work half the time in my experience. When, despite waving my hands back and forth, I fail to activate these things I feel like the main character in the 1962 cult film Carnival of Souls who wanders Salt Lake City before we all realize she’s a ghost. But maybe ghosts would more easily trigger these damn things?

Fecal Plume: Electric Boogaloo
Hot air hand dryers are bullshit. There, I said it.

When I’m having a spat with the Muses, I tend to write long, ponderous and negative blog posts that, mercifully, never leave unpublished draft status. Inspired by the literary form of the miscellany, a type of grab bag of short, random articles popular from the Middle Ages to 18th century, I hope to, periodically, drop some short anecdotes on this blog that, if I were hip and younger, I might make a TikTok about. In the hopes of better relations with the Muses, I’ll start with a shameless Oppenheimer tie-in in lieu of links.

I went with family this week to the always fun Balboa Theater that was showing both Barbie and Oppenheimer. A lot of people there were, in fact, doing a double feature Barbenheimer. To save you the trip to the theater, I thought Oppenheimer was confusing and pretentious but maybe I’d think otherwise had I done the Barbenheimer thing enhanced with a few beers and edibles like many of my theater companions.

During one of the Oppenheimer great-man-doing-physics-in-his-brain sequences, I remembered witnessing some cold war shenanigans on a Center for Land Use Interpretation tour of the perimeter of the Nellis Range in Nevada many years ago.

Towards the end of the tour we were on a freeway in sight of a very sensitive facility where nuclear weapons are stored in bunkers. Off in the distance we saw a Frito Lay delivery truck winding its way though those heavily secured bunkers. It was at that point when the entire busload of folks realized that, apparently, our government moves nukes in Fritos delivery trucks because I can guarantee you that there’s no Fritos vending machine or liquor store amongst those bunkers.

If you think about it this makes a certain amount of sense. I mean, you wouldn’t want to move nukes in a vehicle labeled “nukes”. But ever since, every time I see a Frito Lay truck, I think it might just have a very large bomb in it.

Vincent Woo surreptitiously stuck a GoPro to the front of a BART train to make this magical film, Tunnel Vision. An SF Gate reporter described the vibe in the sold out theater where it screened this month:

The best part of the experience was not the surreal footage but the chance to share it with an enthusiastic audience. The crowd was peppered with San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency merchandise: Muni hoodies and BART beanies and Christmas sweaters. When the train pulled into a station, the audience sometimes clapped and cheered. (16th and Mission got the most cheers. I tried to start a round of applause at Powell Street, but it didn’t catch on.) A man sitting in front of me began headbanging to the chime of the closing doors.

Woo has generously uploaded Tunnel Vision for us all to enjoy.

Quilt, Solar System. 1983.0618.01.

Ellen Harding Baker’s “Solar System” Quilt

Nobody Drives in LA — Exploring Downtown’s Calvin S. Hamilton Pedway

A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

The Best Commuter Bike Lights

A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives (via Recomendo)

Soda Can Aluminum Chuck Glider

Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Maps and Charts

Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907)

The Navajo farmer taking a traditional approach to making baby food

Historic San Francisco tiki bar the Tonga Room is a rite of passage. But is it really worth visiting?

‘They’re in the air, drinking water, dust, food …’ How to reduce your exposure to microplastics

Doppler Radar Telegram Critter Cam for Under $10!

HGTV is making our homes boring and us sad, one study says

Could an ancient, climate-friendly crop be the future of beer?

The Titan Submersible Was “an Accident Waiting to Happen”

Cat GPT

A Solar Powered Website

Too Good to Go screenshots.

While I’ve attempted to curb my internet addiction by removing Instagram from my phone, one app continues its siren call: Too Good to Go.

Launched in 2020 Too Good to Go offers restaurants and grocery stores a way to sell meals and ingredients that have gone unsold or are near their expiration date. The app let’s you specify the distance you’re willing to travel to pick up your food. When you see something appealing you reserve and pre-pay. When you show up at the store you display a code on your phone and they hand you a bag of food. You don’t get to choose, so the bag is a surprise which adds to the addictiveness of this app. In our hipster neighborhood Too Good to Go’s offerings center around cafes, so you mostly get pastries and bread but you can also find vegan groceries and Armenian flat breads.

Until recently, we would eagerly await the daily time (4:20p.m.–haha) that the illustrious bakery Tartine would release their delicious breads and pastries at a steep discount for pickup the next day. Sadly they seem to no longer participate which is probably good thing considering my burgeoning pandemic gut.

Too Good to Go operates in the U.S., Europe and Australia. When we were in London last year I was tempted to use the service but Kelly found the idea of eating food that sat around the Paddington train station all day less than appetizing.

Quality varies depending on the restaurant or grocery store. The food from chain places I’ve found to be stale, pre-packaged and of low quality. But we’ve also had some excellent bagels, breads and pizza from some of the better participating restaurants in our neighborhood at amazingly low prices, generally somewhere between $4 and $6.

I do question if we have another tech company monetizing something that would otherwise have gone to, say, a food bank, a gleaning service like Food Forward or to employees. A worker at one of the bakeries assured me that this food would have ended up in the dumpster so, perhaps, Too Good to Go is at least a neutral service. Salvaging the food waste stream is a neighborhood organizing project waiting to happen that would be nice to take away form the tech people. That said, I don’t see my Too Good to Go addiction ending anytime soon.

If you’ve tried this app leave a comment with where you live and what you’ve found.

To my dear Root Simple friends: I’m back. Our webmaster and book designer Roman Jaster took on the arduous process of switching our hosting service and has restored the ability to subscribe to posts via email. Thank you Roman!

While I recover my muse, have a listen to this excellent summary of William Morris’ life via the Jacobin Podcast. The more I become familiar with Morris’ art and politics the more I think he speaks to our time, of the need to recover an optimism about the future and the right we all have to meaningful work.

Image: Andrew @ortofarms

The bee swarms of spring makes my inbox overfloweth with requests to remove bees from where they take up residence. Mostly I pass these jobs to a professional, but when a friend or acquaintance calls, and the job does not involve a lot of demolition work or hanging on the end of an extension ladder in a bee suit, I’ll say yes.

The process of removing an established hive involves opening up whatever they are in, cutting out the comb and then scooping up the bees that often will retreat to some out of the way spot. This last part, scooping up the bees, can be time consuming, frustrating and potentially dangerous if the bees are in a cranky mood.

For years I’ve resisted making a bee vacuum with the idea that it’s a crutch, somehow an excuse for bad technique. You can use a smoker to herd bees off the comb and, if you’re careful, once the queen is in the bee box the workers will follow. But if a tool makes things go more smoothly, why not give it a try?

There are a lot of different bee vacs that you can make or buy. I built mine using instructions by P. Michael Henderson. It consists of a box with an inlet for a shop vac and another tube to suck up the bees themselves. It has a removable bottom that you can put on top of another bee box once you’ve finished cutting out the comb and putting it in a box. Then you just remove the false bottom and the bees migrate back to their comb.

This past weekend I, along with my friends Andrew and Stephen, removed some bees from a backyard rotating compost bin (a common place bees like to settle in, by the way). We had to Sawzall the bin apart, unfortunately, and by the time we started removing the comb, most of the bees had settled into a hard to access corner of the bin. With the bee vac, we were able to quickly vacuum up those bees and get them into their new home.

Bee vac on top–box with relocated comb on bottom. Image: Andrew @ortofarms

Then, as usual, with this otherworldly creature, something unexpected happened. A cluster ended up on the pavement of the parking garage at the bottom of the apartment building we were removing them from. Somehow some had gotten smashed on the ground–maybe run over by a car? This attracted other bees. There were a lot of bees in the air too. Thankfully it was a holiday weekend and very few people were home and the bees were not at all aggressive. After pondering what to do in this not great situation, I pulled out the vacuum again and, after a few minutes, we had the rogue clusters vacuumed up and added to the box we wanted them in.

We came back after dark a day later and picked up the box and sent them to Andrew’s farm. I don’t have a lot of hope for this hive as it was very small and not very well established. But for this situation, the bee vac came in handy. Not only were we able to extract the bees from a tight spot but we were able to do so quickly and minimize the chance that they would go after people or pets in a dense urban location.

Dispenser for Sowing Tiny Seeds

I Get No Mail and It’s Glorious

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson’s Forest House

The Blitz, September 1940-May 1941

Reconstructing the Apollo Belvedere

Officials won’t stop wrecking ball for Canada’s ‘most photographed house’

That weird coronation thing

Behold the ultimate McMansion

I’m thankful for the luxury of being able to do a completely pointless project occasionally. In this case using scrap wood from the fence I built to make models of the Garret Rietveld chairs and tables I built during the pandemic.

I think I need to do this more often. Chores be damned!

The workers of The Flipping El Moussas.

I consider it a character flaw that my evening media viewing sessions often devolve into Lacanian jouissance, a state of mind that Mark Fisher explained as the “inextricability of pleasure and pain” that “transforms an ordinary object causing displeasure into a Thing which is both terrible and alluring.” (1)

The focus of that jouissance one recent evening was the HGTV show The Flipping El Moussas wherein real estate investor Tarek El Moussa and his new bride Heather Rae El Moussa attempt to rehab and sell a lackluster mid-century house in our expensive, hipster LA enclave.

The El Moussas inhabit a world that I imagine prioritizes skin care routines, personal trainers, luxury vehicles and relentless self empowerment propaganda. Their plastic skinned appearance means they could probably slip into that weird new Barbie movie without putting on any makeup.

This first episode of their new series focused on the affluent life of the hosts as they moved between suburban pool parties and their bland office. But what fascinated me most was what the show obscured: the immigrant workers who do the construction of their projects. You never see the worker’s faces, only their backs, arms and sometimes just the tools they hold. You never hear them speak or anything about their lives, families or backstory.

The obsession with flipping, the bidding frenzy and final price of the house at the end of the show obscures the real source of value which is the workers. The El Moussas inadvertently provide a textbook example of Marx’s labor theory of value. Without the workers their capital accumulation game wouldn’t work (2). And injustice is baked into the system since the workers don’t get their fare share of the “surplus value” generated by their labor nor can they afford the product of their skills. How strange is it that we have a housing system more interested in generating profits than, say, actually housing people. And it’s even weirder that we’ve turned this unjust system into an entertainment spectacle.

Nearly all of the decisions the Moussas make in this first episode are predicated on maximizing surplus value rather than housing people. The house they tackle didn’t have any structural problems and a minimum amount of touch up work could have made it more than livable. Instead they embark on a costly and unnecessary rehab, moving walls, adding bathrooms, painting everything white (of course) all to cater to the latest HGTV generated trends.

Construction work is hard and dangerous. A life of it can degrade the body and run you into the ground. On this May Day let those of us lucky to have a roof over our heads remember the workers who built those roofs and work towards a future where all will share in the benefit of our labor.

When public transportation took you to the mountains in SoCal. Image: Library of Congress.

Jumping the Gap: Where Green Transphobia Leads

DIY smart watering system

Easy Way to Clean Gutters

AI pizza ad

Kim Gordon Denies Getting Bit By A Coyote At Whole Foods

H.P. Lovecraft’s Completely Normal Obsession with Cats

We were deeply saddened to hear of the death of Father Peter Rood this past week. Peter was the rector of Holy Nativity Episcopal Church in Westchester for many years before moving to Oak Harbor, Washington to serve at St. Stephen’s Church in 2019.

He liked to call Holy Nativity a “community center that just happened to have a church attached to it” and said yes to pretty much anyone who wanted to use the church for the greater good of the world. He ripped out a side lawn and created a community garden. When the neighborhood wanted a playground he took out a section of the front lawn of the church.

He was also a big supporter of Kelly and I. Along with Environmental Changemakers he hosted book events for us. He collaborated with the Los Angeles Bread Bakers in building a community oven which became a place to gather for monthly bread and pizza parties. Peter had the same condition as Kelly and was very supportive during Kelly’s two open heart surgeries. He was a kind, creative and loving soul who will be greatly missed by so many people.

I went though my photos to find pictures of Peter at work but he was always moving around too much to get a shot. I did find a sign that hung in the parish hall at Holy Nativity that sums up Peter’s life: “May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe you can make a difference in this world so that you can do what others claim can’t be done.”

Peter is survived by his children and stepchildren, Dylan, Julian, Hilary, Kajia, and Paul: a half-brother, Austin; and several grandchildren. His wife, Christen Herman, died in 2021.

If Herbert Marcuse did a lot of cocaine and ditched critical theory for interior design he might have penned this very much of its time coffee table book: Sensuous Space: How to Create Romantic, Seductive and Sensuous Settings by Sivon Reznikoff. Reznikoff owned the Louisiana Interior Design Institute in Baton Rouge, and was a professor of Environmental/Interior Design at Arizona State University. She adopted a gender ambiguous name in order to work in the male dominated field of architecture and interior design.

I reference Marcuse because this tome has much more theory in it than you’d expect. Before you get to the photo spreads of shag rug lined love dens and teal penthouses you’ll encounter thirty pages of thoughtstylings and graphs. Reznikoff posits three types of Eros driven spaces: romantic, seductive and sensuous that then break out into specific color, form texture, musical and even scent suggestions over the many pages of charts, spreadsheets and graphs. We’re 30 pages in by the time we see our first hot tub.

The power nexus of the erotic panopticons in this book are, naturally, your disco control centers because your house must have its own private discotheque. I don’t know how you keep the blow from gumming up the electronics.

Of course, such idiosyncratic spaces are the domain of the ultra-wealthy who can afford serial remodeling. Reznikoff notes that many of these spaces are second homes. A particular class of nouveau riche spring for this kind of sensual ostentation. The really wealthy elite go for austere modernist boxes to make a show that they put their money back into capital accumulation rather than spending it on gold swan faucets and pebble lined hot tubs.

The interior sensuousness of this book ended in the AIDS/Reagan era 80s  and now you’re more likely to see the nouveau riche class burn their cash by building an underground town simulacrum in their McMansions.

The last time we saw this kind of decadent sexuality in architecture was the Art Nouveau period of the 1890s and early 20th century which ended in the horrors of WWI. Its reappearance comes intertwined with the liberatory politics of the 60s and 70s but those same left movements can prove prudish. Perhaps the flipper white cubes will get all funky and sinuous in our Acid Communist future and maybe we’ll have a more expanded and nuanced view of what “eros” means than the reductionist wife swapping parties of the Sensuous Spaces era. My shag conversation pit lacks a crystal ball.

Thanks to Cocaine Decor for tipping me off to this book.

Source: the deep interwebs

ChatGPT Is Not Intelligent (a great podcast episode on the hype surrounding AI)

The art of Henricus Jansen

A house with a strange design feature

What is Acid Communism?

Gareth’s Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales

When it came time to replace an old, poorly built fence I headed to the Fine Homebuilding website and found a design by Michael Crow (“A Privacy Fence with Appeal“) that, I think, matches our 1920 bungalow.

A few things about the design appealed to me. The slats are alternating sizes which gives some visual interest, the trellising uses the off-cuts from the slats and the central pressure treated 4×4 posts are covered in cedar making them bigger and more attractive. The trellising at the top creates a kind of filtered view of neighboring vegetation while the lower panels obscure stuff you don’t want to see.

Alas, nothing is simple at our funky property and I had to interrupt the fence twice to accommodate two trees that straddle the fence line. I also had to deal with a slight slope and a month in which it just kept raining and raining and raining (which is why the nasturtium leaves are so big).

Rather than go to the Big Orange Store I got my supplies at the fancier Ganahl lumber which actually had better prices and selection. Plus you can drive your car right up to the lumber pile and skip the frantic crowds over at Big Orange.

Over the pandemic I upgraded my table saw to a SawStop cabinet model which, while expensive, has paid for itself in all the projects I’ve completed including this fence and a lot of furniture. It also gets used by friends and neighbors.

On one of the many rainy day breaks during the fence build, I glanced at my bookshelf to discover that I have two books by Michael Crow, Mackintosh Furniture: Techniques & Shop Drawings and Building Classic Arts & Crafts Furniture. I actually built a Limbert settle out of the latter book. One of these days I hope to build a room of very strange Mackintosh furniture. In the meantime I like looking out the back door at the new fence which I completed just as the house next door went up for sale.

Re-growing spring onions

Make a pallet coaster

Paper sundial kits

1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities

Operation Breakthrough: America’s Failed Government Program to Industrialize Home Production

Image from the deep internets.

The stupidity of AI

Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.

No, Cities Aren’t Doomed Because of Remote Work

Los Angeles’s Metro Is Using Classical Music as a Weapon

‘A living pantry’: how an urban food forest in Arizona became a model for climate action

History and Future of the Compressed Air Economy

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I watch so many how-to YouTube videos. I’m sure I’m not alone, especially among readers of this blog, in enjoying watching people explain things we’ll likely never do.

I think this has a lot to do with a general estrangement from physical tasks. To put a finer point on this, Marx described a quality of what he called alienation that encompasses this separation but also has broader implications. In Marx’s formulation we are both estranged from production, but also human relationships, for instance that direct contact that used to exist between you and, say, the village blacksmith. These days we walk into a Costco and encounter a world of objects that seem to have a life of their own abstracted from the people that made them, likely, a continent away. Relationships between people get replaced by relationships between things.

I believe that one of the ways we compensate for these multiple levels of alienation is by watching people doing things. Mostly, I watch woodworking videos which is a task that I actually do almost every day. But here’s the odd thing about this. I pay for subscription to Fine Woodworking that includes hundreds of detailed videos, carefully edited, that actually show you how to perform specific tasks. Do I watch these? Sometimes, but I’m more likely to hate-watch a live edge table YouTube video of someone making something that I will never make on principle (I really hate live edge slab tables).

Recently in my Instagram feed, a woodworker appeared who does not ever mention his real name but goes by “Lehigh Valley Workshop” (I’ll call him LVW). LVW attempts, via self-reflexivity to subvert and comment on alienation directly. His work transgresses all of YouTube’s woodworking norms. His videos contain leftest rants that, judging from the comments, horrify and trigger a lot of viewers and contrast vividly with most other woodworking influencers with their Rifle Coffee sponsorships and American flag cutting board projects. He also points out the contradictions that generally go unspoken, such as beginning the video above by noting, “The first thing you’re going to need for this is about 10 to $15,000 worth of woodworking equipment.” He ends the video by poking at another sacred cow, the subversion of hobbies into our culture’s ubiquitous push to turn everything into hustle and grind,

Now you can make a bunch of these, put them up on Etsy, realize that you can’t compete with drop shippers if you want to make a profit, and ultimately give up, casting blame on everyone but yourself, end up back in some mindless company riding the spreadsheet fellatio train and go home staring at your tools wondering what could have been and waiting for the sweet embrace of nothingness.

LVW appeared in the social media woodworking firmament as a bright fiery object and I wonder what where his trajectory will go: towards chain reaction or implosion? LVW is smart and self-aware and I’m sure is fully conscious of the fact that late capitalism subsumes all transgression into yet another hustle and grind: punk rock becomes Hot Topic. Perhaps LVW will turn that subsumption into an infinite recursion, using this contradiction as a way to market more “basic bitch cutting boards” or, as is the ultimate goal of every social media star, to sell the idea of a basic bitch cutting board rather than the physical object.

Lest I seem to be criticizing, let me note that LVW is much more self aware than Root Simple was at the height of our popularity when our books came out. During my longish absence from this blog in the past few months I’ve been attempting to lift the hood a bid on the whole urban homesteading thing. As Frederic Jameson says, “We have to name the system.” This mapping and naming process is the first step towards constructive work. LVW is attempting to do just that and the fact that your right wing relatives and your hipster artist types all follow him in Instagram says something about the value of his strategy.

You can find LVW on YouTube and Instagram

I’ve been absent for awhile due to a mountain of volunteer responsibility that devolved upon me in recent weeks. Everything is okay and I’ll be back to thoughtstyling here soon. In the meantime, please enjoy this inexplicable chicken nugget intervention I spotted on a recent dog walk.

A Very Moynihan Train Hall Thanksgiving: ‘Wow, I Can’t Even Sit Down?’

Hero of 2022: Those LA Police Funding Billboards

Gramsci on hating new year’s day

2-Dog Backpack Boat: the Dogmaran

Are Aliens Who Visit Earth Likely to Be Socialist?

CATS CATS CATS and other critters

I also set up an automatic feeder in the garden of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral so that I could keep an eye on the feral cat population that some nice folks in the community had helped me trap and neuter.

We managed to capture and neuter four out of the five cats that live at the cathedral. They are way too feral to adopt out, unfortunately. We’re hoping to capture and neuter the last one this next year.

Meanwhile, in our own house I keep finding our cat Buck in the bathtub, holding a mouse and staring at the faucet.

Every spring I capture at least one swarm of bees and hand them off to a friend who has an urban farm and apiary.

Kelly and I have a pet sitting arrangement with some friends of ours. When we go away they watch our menagerie and when they go away I head out to Pomona to look after Harpo the parrot and his dog, cat and gecko companions.

Random Wanderings

When you see a display of fake plastic corn dogs you have to take a picture.

I tried and failed to get through James Joyce’s Ulysses. I think I got to the fourth chapter before getting distracted by another book. Gotta make another attempt this year.

The Los Angeles Public Librarians on lower level two of the Central Library have a great sense of humor. They curated a selection of B-list celebrity cookbooks including Sammy Hagar’s Are We Having Any Fun Yet? and Al Roker’s Big Bad Book of Barbecue.

MUSHROOMS MUSHROOMS MUSHROOMS

I grew blue oyster mushrooms and . . .

pearl oyster mushrooms and . . .

pink oyster mushrooms.

I also went to the LA Mycological society show in the spring.

A new world dawns

Why do people put up DIY slow down signs in LA?

This is why. We have dangerous, ugly streets.

Partly to deal with those ugly streets, Kelly and I spent most of 2022 volunteering through DSA-LA in support of the Hugo Soto-Martinez campaign. Thankfully Hugo won in November and has already got to work making our streets safer and helping tenants and unhoused people.

Tech

I put up a 10 meter and 2 meter radio and did a little bit of amateur radio stuff. I’m not great at it but did manage to make digital contacts as far away as Indonesia with ancient Radio Shack equipment.

I also figured out how to decode airline data transmissions but did not figure out why I would want to decode airline data transmissions.

I did far more woodworking, including building a reproduction of a rare Stickley couch along with my friend Jimmy who also built one for his house.

I repaired two iPhones and replaced the hard drive of my old iMac, which now runs like new.

Speaking of tech–Kelly and I spotted this ridiculous “robot” which is just a remote controlled cooler operated by some underpaid gamer. This is what happens when you burn venture capital money.

When I went to Kaiser to get one of countless COVID booster shots I spotted their security “robot”. I looked across the street and saw a man in full joker makeup and that was when I vowed to someday leave this city.

Apologies for the blurry photo here, but our street, with its majestic, 100 year old palm trees has that iconic LA look and has become a destination for Instagrammers.

Behold the most liminal space in Los Angeles, a corridor in the mall that also houses the plastic simulated corn dogs.

I correctly predicted the meltdown of crypto, an utterly worthless trend.

These things are sprouting up in the neighborhood. I call this one the Death Star.

I got lazy and did not make enough bread. This one is one of the only loaves I baked.

On one of my many Pomona pet sitting sojourns I discovered an abandoned sushi buffet shaped like a boat.

And a brutalist Baptist church.

You’ll also find this mysterious, unmarked business.

While in Pomona I took a zoom class on how to draw cartoon characters. The instructor had us draw Spiderman. He did it by leading us though the abstract shapes that make up Spiderman’s mask. What’s funny is that I don’t really know superheroes very well and didn’t know what I was drawing until the end of the class. When we finished the drawing he had us all hold up our sheets of paper. That’s when I found out that everyone else in the class seemed to be professional animators.

Kelly and I spent a fun evening counting bats under a freeway overpass for the Natural History Museum.

I did my first guilding project.

Jimmy and I made a pair of Stickley poppy tables.

On a trip to San Francisco, I noted that they keep the philosophy books locked up at Green Apple books.

Our Saluki Ivan likes to go out and lay on the hot pavement even in the middle of summer.

Plane spotting has become a boring new pastime.

Kelly and I have hundreds of photos of our cats snuggling together.

Our friend Daniel used my shop to make frames for a show about his desert lighthouse project. It was one of the best art shows I’ve ever seen and another friend, Doug Harvey, wrote about it.

Someone please stop the house flippers. This is one of the worst flips in the neighborhood–ugly windows and cheap siding. Yuk.

Can someone also please stop the black house trend. It’s horrible anywhere but makes absolutely no sense in a hot Mediterranean climate.

Spotted on a truck in the library parking garage. Not sure what’s going on here.

I’m old I guess, so I’m getting ads like this in my social media feeds.

Travels

To celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary Kelly planned out a magnificent trip to England. Here’s the Sir John Soane museum, an early 19th century architectural masterpiece.

We went to Canterbury and stayed in a hotel with a view of the Cathedral. All is well in the world when you fall asleep admiring this view.

The end of the year

When we got back from London I tore down the chicken coop. Some friends adopted our last chicken.

The Central Library Christmas tree had ornaments make in their Octavia maker lab.

And I spotted the Chabad Menorahmobile.

More sleeping cats.

Looking back to the spring

Kelly’s rain garden, fed by our roof gutters looked great in the spring.

Loquats happened.

Projects, memes and new years wishes

And Jimmy and I finally finished our Stickley couches.

I read a lot of Mark Fisher and some Frederic Jameson.

My phone also has a lot jokey memes that I collected.

Kudos to Amtrak for making fun of Southwest Airlines long before the recent kerfuffle.

COVID finally came to our household but we’re okay thankfully.

Best wishes to all of you, our dear readers. May your 2023 be full of joy.

I’ve got a pile of objects that I’ve kept around with the idea that I’d write about them someday. Ironically, this stash includes a copy of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. In the interest of whittling down that pile we’ll begin with a review of a book, Killdozer: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage that I found in one of the Little Free Libraries I visit on my morning dog walk.

On June 4th, 2004 the author, Patrick Brower, witnessed this bizarre and largely forgotten incident in which Marv Heemeyer, a skilled welder and muffler shop owner, demolished the town of Grandby Colorado with a DIY tank.

Dubbed the “Killdozer,” Heemeyer’s tank, built on top of a Komatsu D355A bulldozer, included armor plating, external cameras, and a 50 caliber rifle. Heemeyer piloted the Killdozer around Grandby destroying the offices of Brower’s newspaper, the Sky-Hi News, and many other businesses and government buildings. Miraculously, no one was killed or injured except for Heemeyer.

Brower describes, in detail, the petty grievances that led up to the incident and dismantles the hero worship of Heemeyer that began immediately after his death. Heemeyer occupies a very familiar class of people: aggrieved and violent middle aged 50-something men who are relatively prosperous independent businessmen. Coming out of a culture of toxic individualism you can easily link Heemeyer with people like Ammon Bundy and the clownish January 6th rioters. Look closely at any of these men and what you will find is a basic inability to share toys in the sandbox. Unfortunately this toxic individualism can manifest in acts of what has come to be called “stochastic violence,” self-radicalized terrorism.

There was some real bravery in Grandby on that day in 2004, from the cop who jumped up on top of Heemeyer’s moving tank, to the heavy equipment operator who attempted to disable the Killdozer with a commandeered road scraper. If not for these delaying tactics many lives might have been lost.

Sadly, I think we’ll see more of these types of incidents such as the recent attacks on the power grid as well as the mass shootings we take for granted in the United States. Brower’s detailed description of what led up to the incident as well as its aftermath can point to ways to end this cycle of violence. Undoing the myth of individualism that’s so much a part of this country is a start. That, and providing the unflattering context for these acts of violence in order to prevent these idiots from being elevated as martyrs or heroes.

First the weirdness of Victorian Christmas cards.

If you’re stuck at home I thought I’d drop some Christmas Eve services on the timeline. First, a church we visited in London.

Then something more local to us. Extra points if you spot me.

Defenestrated
Back in 2021 I wrote about windowless buildings. In that post I mentioned the 10 freeway adjacent Abram Friedman Occupational Center, a monolithic, windowless building ornamented only with a crass Harbor Freight  sponsorship ad. Thanks to Steven Sharp, editor of Urbanize LA I now know that underneath all that stucco there’s a handsome 1920s era building:

Or, to repeat the most bizarre architectural conspiracy theory on the interwebs, could this be another attempt to erase the lost Tartarian civilization?

a sense of unease, akin to travel sickness, engendered by such anonymous environments as airports and shopping malls whose sameness seems to deflect even the possibility of nostalgia for a past that is wholly absent. Instead these spaces, whose endless repetition the world over leaves one feeling as if one could be anywhere, provoke ‘the sickness of travel [. . .] a complement to, not the opposite of, the sickness for home, nostalgia.’

I recommend Coverley’s book and, in my own take on Christmas ghost story reading, I just picked up a copy of Mark Fisher’s hauntological classic Ghosts of My Life.

Root Simple email subscription
A few readers alerted me to the fact that they were no longer getting Root Simple’s blog posts emailed to them. It turns out our subscription feature got nuked by Feedburner. I’m looking for an alternative but it’s going to take me awhile. I’ll let you all know when I find a solution.

Happy holidays to all of you who have stuck with this blog over the years and best wishes for a great 2023.

Detail from Canterbury Cathedral.

Pruitt-Igoe: A Black Community Under the “Atomic Cloud”

LA Trade Tech has a nearly 100-year-old vacant theater on its campus that it plans to demolish

This house may or may not be real

Hide Glue from the Gas Station

Kisho Kurokawa’s metabolist masterpiece ‘capsule house K’

All Saint’s Margaret Street. Photo: Diliff

A Plea to Resurrect the Christmas Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories

If you like the idea of Christmas ghost stories let me recommend the writings of M.R. James that you can access here for free

Eric Garcetti’s Broken Sidewalks

Coincidence department: Will Self discovers evensong and the hidden charm of All Saint’s, Margaret Street (which we visited last month in London)

Watch out for the flu

Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Christmas Tree Pops

How to take care of your avocado trees

Polyrhythms played on two Igbo cowbells

LA City Council meeting now with more cowbell

Outrage: future generations will laugh in horror and derision at the folly of facadism

Weirdcore and the Eerie Atmospheres of Postmodernity

Rationalist Harry Potter and the Collapse of Crypto

Elon’s Biggest Boondoggle Why did the world’s richest man spend the past five years trying to sell cities a hole in the ground?

The Truth Was Out There: On the Legacy of Art Bell

We made it almost three years but finally caught the Covid. Thankfully we’re fully boosted and doing okay.

Kelly woke up with flu symptoms on Tuesday and used a home test kit that flagged her as positive. A very nice friend and neighbor offered his garage accessory dwelling unit for me to quarantine in. As a precaution I went to my health provider for a test on Thursday which came back positive today and now I’m back in our house.

Kelly felt bad this week and her doctor put her on anti-virals that seem to be working. I have very mild symptoms so far.

I think we’re in the midst of a huge covid surge that’s vastly under-reported. I know a lot of people who have come down with it in the past few weeks.

I’m very thankful for our dear neighbors who are looking after us. Be careful this holiday season.

Projector Using Old Smartphones

Truss Frame Shelving Unit With Home Theater

Separated Bike Lanes Means Safer Streets, Study Says

COVID-Denying Medical Group Implodes Over Founder’s Extravagant Spending

Delicious meals for $20 a week: June Xie on changing the way you cook

Make a small boat

Pencil/Tool Case From a Bike Inner Tube

Yet more proof that crypto is just one big Ponzi scheme

Cocktail of the week: Rockwell’s whisky and ginger highball – recipe

In Jordan, an Ancient Bread Tradition Rises Again

Staircase of the Red House.

The reason this blog has been silent for a few weeks is that we took a trip to England to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. The pandemic gave me a pretty bad case of agoraphobia and I’m thankful Kelly pushed me to take a much needed break from Los Angeles. She had the great idea of organizing a trip around the houses and favorite places of the 19th century poet, designer, artist and socialist William Morris.

Unfortunately the first two days of the trip Kelly got a stomach bug, leaving me to travel alone to our first stop, the William Morris Gallery, located in the house he lived in as a teenager (thank you Cathy Ward for the suggestion). This concise museum gives an introduction to Morris’ superhuman output of everything from books to wallpaper to furniture to stained glass to socialist newspapers.

While viewing these exhibits I kept thinking of Morris as an English Richard Wagner but with much better politics, though Morris really hated the German composer. However, both were interested in Icelandic sagas and medieval legends. Both were proponents of Gesamtkunstwerk, a kind of total aesthetic control of one’s world and surroundings. That said, Morris distinguishes himself from Wagner with a much lighter and more joyous aesthetic and through his dedication to fighting for the rights of working people.

One of the rooms of the Gallery is devoted to that activism. The view out the front door of the Gallery, pictured above, tells us that Morris’ political and aesthetic revolution did not come to pass. The class struggle Morris expected instead happened in undeveloped Russia. In the U.K. and U.S. we got, instead, consumer culture. The revolution Morris worked towards never came to pass because, as Herbert Marcuse put it,

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is a attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes but the extend to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the establishment are shared by the underlying population.

Ironically not only do we all enjoy the same newspaper (Netflix in 2022?) but we can also all buy a mass produced William Morris coffee mug and scarf in the gift store. If this is a new level of contraction in Morris’ legacy, the great man was well aware of the contradictions of his own life–the life of a successful businessman, born of a wealthy family, selling very expensive interior decor to rich people while, at the same time, working to undermine the system that gave him the privileges that he enjoyed. Importantly, Morris did not use his awareness of those contradictions as an excuse to do nothing. Instead he worked himself to death, agitating against his own class interest while simultaneously, attempting to revive lost crafts, translating sagas, weaving, designing and building.

The Red House was more modest and more experimental than I expected. It has only come into the National Trust within the last few decades and was lived in up until relatively recently.

You can see in the house Morris and Webb trying out different ideas–a kind of spare Medievalism, attempts at wall murals as well as Morris’ greatest gift–pattern making.

Webb had much to learn. The roofs are at a bad angle for the rainy climate of England and, as a result, there’s been a lot of leaks over the years. That said, the house is a masterpiece.

Just outside the Red House is a landscape Morris would, no doubt, be disappointed with. A few blocks down this prosaic road is the Canterbury trail.

Speaking of which, since we’re Episcopalians, we made a side trip to Canterbury Cathedral, the mother church of Anglicans.

During our trip we discovered a hack of sorts which was to visit churches while services were going on. I highly recommend this. There’s a service or evensong going on every single day in most towns. We dropped into evensong services at St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Christ Church Oxford and Canterbury and attended mass at Canterbury Cathedral. We particularly enjoyed mass at All Saint’s Margaret Street.

If you’re budget minded, attending a service lets you skip admittance fees but it also means you get to see the building  the way it was meant to be experienced: in use. Arrive early and you can often get a seat in the wooden stalls right next to some of the best choirs in the world. Evensong services were a great way to just sit down, be quiet, listen to some beautiful music and take it easy after a day of rushing around. Anglicanism is relaxed, everyone is welcome and it’s perfectly fine to either participate in the service or just watch. There’s a website for finding an evensong service as well as a radio show on the BBC.

The murals are very dark and hard to make out. What does work is Morris’ pattern work on the ceiling.

From Oxford we headed towards Morris’ Kelmscott manor. On the way we stopped at one of Morris’ favorite buildings, the Great Coxwell Barn built in 1292 for the Cistercian Beaulieu Abbey.

The children’s bedroom in the attic were especially memorable.

The house has a nice collection of some of Morris’ design work such as these tiles as well as the extraordinary embroidery of May and Jane Morris.

Morris and his wife Jane are buried in the graveyard of the church under a modest marker designed by Philip Webb.

We also dropped by the nearby St. John the Baptist church in Inglesham. This church also reflects the influence of Morris’ ideas about building preservation. In 1880 Morris started a campaign to oppose a major remodeling that was proposed for this church. That campaign was a part of his Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings which still exists. SPAB’s philosophy is “to stave off decay by daily care … and otherwise to resist all tampering with either the fabric or ornament of the building as it stands”. St. John the Baptist church has 600 years worth of wall paintings as well as 17th century box pews and 13th century stone carvings.

I’m a big fan of this cat head downspout.

We journeyed back to London to visit Morris’ city house in Hammersmith where his press was located.

When Morris lived in Hammersmith the house was next to a slum district called Little Wapping described by one 19th century writer as “a seething mass of misery”. It was here that Morris became politically active, participating in several socialist organizations, editing a socialist newspaper and giving as many as 200 political speeches every year. I suspect Morris would not be happy with the ugly traffic sewer that’s now in front of the house.

Nor would he appreciate the a pedestrian tunnel under that traffic sewer.

No doubt Morris would have a lot to grapple with in the way London has been financialized and gentrified, haunted by the specter of real estate speculation along with all the other big cites of the West such as New York, San Francisco, Paris and Los Angeles. The poor have been pushed out to make space for giant blinking ads and NFT exhibits.

And everywhere bleak new buildings are popping up with construction barriers decorated with images of what some architectural critics disparagingly call “renderite”.

On the flight over I was reading a history of the Frankfurt School, Grand Hotel Abyss. All during the trip I kept wondering if  Walter Benjamin’s view of history could be considered as like an exploding thrift store: everything from the past as one big mass pushing us reluctantly forward.

On our second to last day in London we went mudlarking on the Thames with a guide next to the Millennium Bridge. Each day the tides wash up a centuries of pottery shards, animal bones, clay pipe stems and vape cartridges. Here was Benjamin’s history supernova now including the renderite and NFT exhibits.

Against this tragic mass of history stands William Morris: his art and his activism. Modernists, such as the Bauhaus folks admired his connection between politics and art but did not like his aesthetic, dismissing it as a medievalist fantasy. But seeing his work in person deepened my appreciation for it. Something about its biomorphic sensuality speaks more to this time than the machine aesthetic of mid-century modernism in my humble opinion. Perhaps some new dialectical movement will soon emerge inspired by Morris, an aesthetic neither modernist nor historical fantasy.

We can also hope that this new movement will take up the cause of working people just as Morris did. Young people today are increasingly aware of the horror of capitalism and not as indoctrinated in cold war propaganda as are people my age. Together we can strive for the world, as Morris put it,

a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realization at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH.

We returned to an election here in Los Angeles that appears to have resulted in a socialist candidate beating the incumbent in my own council district. After a long horrible interval, Morris’ struggle is reborn.

For more information on William Morris there’s a William Morris society in the UK and in the US. I belong to the US one and they have a nice series of lectures via Zoom and they both publish journals.

Image: DSA-LA

I got sucked into local politics out of a desire to help make our car-centric city a safer place to walk and ride a bike. After years of effort I came to the realization that the establishment politicians who run Los Angeles can’t be worked with, that they need to be shown the door. I also came to understand the interconnectedness of the problem, that unsafe streets are just a symptom of a crapitalist system that also creates economic and racial inequality.

Working with elected officials here is incredibly frustrating. I found them arrogant, dismissive of activists and only interested in answering the needs of their wealthy campaign contributors. As it turns out they’re also literal gangsters.

As many of you might know by now, since it made international news, a surreptitious recording of a meeting between LA city council president Nury Martinez, councilman Gil Cedillo, councilman Kevin De León and Los Angeles County Federation Of Labor president Ron Herrera surfaced over the weekend. Because the coverage of this recording by local and national media has been not always complete I want to emphasize that, in addition to the truly vile, racist talk on the recording, we should not lose sight of what this meeting was all about: machine Democrats, in a backroom with a corrupt labor leader, gerrymandering their districts to cling to power and disenfranchise African-Americans, renters and progressive voters.

Almost half of the city council is now either in jail, under investigation or caught up in this recent scandal. My own city councilman, Mitch O’Farrell is attempting to distance himself from Nury Martinez, Cedillo and De León but we should not let him do that. On the recording Herrera says, “I want to make sure we protect Mitch.” If you live in Mitch’s district you should vote for his challenger, Hugo Soto-Martinez who is part of a young group of activists challenging LA’s status quo.

If there’s something good that has come out of this weekend it’s that the old order seems to be collapsing much faster than I ever thought it would. There’s a motion to put a measure on the ballot to expand the size of the city council, which has been just 15 representatives for a city of 4 million people since the 1920s. I suspect that progressive challengers like Soto-Martinez and Kenneth Mejia will win on November 8th.

But there’s still a lot of work to do. Now is the time to seize the moment. The old guard relied on us all to be passive and let “the adults” lead. We all will need to pitch in and participate in local government and at our unions to make the changes we need to make. Some resources:

DSA-LA voter guide

Knock LA’s coverage of the leak

LA Podcast Emergency Episode

Mike Bonin’s moving speech at yesterday’s council meeting

In leaked audio, LA City Councilmembers Nury Martinez, Gil Cedillo, and Kevin de León discuss redistricting, are extremely racist

Make a metric clock

William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness’

Yet another gender reveal party disaster

Denver destroyed by cars

A fight over worms and moats

San Francisco’s crosstown trail

What the year 2000 was really like

Stereo photos for your viewing pleasure

The Herbalism Community Is at War With Itself Over Abuse Allegations

McMansion of the week

Strange house of the week

Mixing it up with Garfield

Skypace by James Turrell. See it here.

Google map of Los Angeles air raid sirens

The strange world of r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix

The Bus Stops Here: What it’s like on six Los Angeles bus routes that are crucial lifelines for under-served Angelenos

Sabadell Spain’s new bus mascot

The FDA’s Warning About NyQuil Chicken Resulted In Around 7,000 Searches For It On TikTok

Profiting from poison: how the US lead industry knowingly created a water crisis

Workers creating music in a scrapyard in Indonesia

Better than Bulgaria but not as nice as Cuba: how did the US become such an awful place to live?

Against Pickleball

Driving an EV does not make you pro-environment

‘Too many close calls’: why some US cyclists quit riding bikes on streets

12 Tiny Homes Destroyed and 10 Damaged in Fire at the West LA VA

Cats Stealing Food in Still Life Paintings

Dig this floor plan

Okay, this really is the worst house flip ever

September in Southern California brings heat waves, fires and smog. The one ray of light is the appearance of chicken of the woods mushrooms (Laetiporus gilbertsonii is the species we have here) a delicious and easy to identify fungus whose favorite host in our neighborhood is the carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua).

One needs to set realistic expectations when it comes to finding edible mushrooms in our dry climate. To take a walk and simply enjoy the sight of fruiting mushrooms should be enough but, being human, FOMO and greed inevitably set in. Anything humans like to eat will be popular with all manner of non-human species. That and our dry climate make this place not exactly a Mecca for edible mushrooms.

This year a freak rain caused mold growth on the chicken of the woods that I harvested from my friend Lee’s backyard tree. There were also tiny mushrooms growing on the mushrooms (!). You have to hand it to nature to evolve a decomposing mushroom to decompose the decomposer.

Better luck next year, I suppose.

See last year’s post for more information on Laetiporus gilbertsonii.

Cancer breakthrough is a ‘wake-up’ call on danger of air pollution

Milwaukee, 1870s & 2022

Mr. Biden tear down this highway

Tiny Houses, Big Dangers for Homeless People

‘An unfinishable, endless house’: the untold story of Casa Sperimentale

All types of drywall and concrete anchors

DIY Low Cost Floating Valve for Low Tech Irrigation Automation With Ollas

It’s hot as hell!

What’s the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

How to Grow Old Gracefully As a Cyclist

Derrida In ‘Ghost Dance’

Some hauntological music

My Pomona comrade and shop collaborator Jimmy has a habit of suggesting woodworking projects that, while not fulfilling vital needs around our old houses, somehow just need to get built. Such was the case when he proposed making two reproductions of the obscure Gustav Stickley Divan #165, one for his house and one for ours.

The couch dates from the summer of 1900, when Stickley employed, at great expense, the architect Henry W. Wilkerson to design a line he called “The New Furniture.” Wilkerson is probably best known as the architect of one of New York City’s few Arts and Crafts style apartment buildings. Fun fact: Madonna lived there, and if you’ve got a $5,000,000 housing budget and can afford the $4,000 a month maintenance fee so can you. But I digress.

Wilkerson’s design has some of Stickley’s austere reaction to fussy Victorianism but softened by gothic arches in the back seat slats and a kind of Greene and Greene-esque shape on the bottom rails.

We found measured drawings in Robert Lang’s Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture for a later, simplified couch with the same dimensions. We popped the measurements into Sketchup and changed the back slats into Wilkerson’s arched design using auction photographs as a guide. I’m guessing, for some combination of a desire for a more rectilinear design and ease of manufacture, Stickley eliminated the arches in later models of this couch.

I noticed this couch in the background of Greene and Greene’s dreamy James A. Culberton house, the location of America’s worst remodeling disaster.

Since Jimmy can only work on Saturdays our two Divans took many months to complete. The wood had to be milled and shaped and the piece has 58 mortise and tenon joints. We also had to figure out how to do the curved top rail. We used quartersawn white oak, the same wood that Stickley used for most of his furniture. Manny at Custom Designs Upholstery in Pasadena did the cushion.

I’m very pleased with the end result and thankful to have a wood shop. The divan has decadent 1900 vibes, kind of the perfect couch to faint on after too many rounds of absinthe consumed while your significant other plays the Liszt Wagner transcriptions on the nearby piano. That’s the fantasy, at least. More likely I’ll simply fall asleep on it after a lengthy Twitter doomscrolling bender.

The HGTVification of America

Should It Be Easier to Take Away a Driver’s License?

That Breezeway pic again . . .

WeWork grifter pivots to residential real eastate. What could go wrong?

I gotta kick my Twitter habit but this is pretty funny

Worst flip ever

Bragging rights if you know where this is and leave a comment . . .

Aubergine dip, chicken skewers and beans with dill: Yotam Ottolenghi’s Persian recipes

Bunya nut bounty: How to process and cook Australian native bunya nuts

Block ads and trackers with a Pi-hole

A Twitter thread on what a Pi-hole is

Elon’s Biggest Boondoggle: Why did the world’s richest man spend the past five years trying to sell cities a hole in the ground?

Philadelphia Becomes First City To Be 100% Parking Spots

Greene & Greene Architectural Records and Papers Collection

My friend Jimmy makes furniture in my woodshop. Sometimes he finds stuff that’s so cool that I want one for myself and we make two. Such was the case with this reproduction of an oddball, early Gustav Stickley poppy table.

Mostly known for his rectilinear “Mission” furniture, Stickley would occasionally detour into curvy Art Nouveau territory. He traveled to continental Europe in 1895 and, I’m guessing, also read German language newspapers published in American which covered the latest trends. He had a brief few years of staggering creativity and innovation in the first decade of the 20th century, quickly went bankrupt and faded into obscurity until a revival of interest in his work in the 1970s.

It wasn’t too difficult to make this table if you don’t count the many hours of filing and sanding all those tight radius curves. I wish I could say that you don’t need many tools but that’s not the case. We deployed a jointer, planer, scroll saw and hand planes. We freehand routed the poppy pattern on the two horizontal surfaces. The quarter sawn white oak came from Bohnhoff Lumber.

My workshop is right on the street so people walking their dogs and heading to the hip restaurants on Sunset boulevard see me working. I felt weird working on this particular table because it’s about as far from what’s fashionable now as you can get–kind of like Pearl Jam, but furniture. The brief fling with Craftsman style and Grunge back in the 1990s is long over, replaced by mid-century modern and unstained Silver Lake Shaman furniture. But I don’t care. I vibe with this table’s biomorphic exoticism and decadence. It’s just missing the absinthe fountain dripper.

If you’d like to make one of your own you can purchase plans here. I used these finishing directions, specifically for the “Onondaga” finish.

Medicine cabinets in the Pacific Ready Cut catalog.

Better streets via AI

New (and Old) Books for Urban and Rental Gardens

A tread on why Amazon buying Roomba isn’t a good thing

Strange Zillow listing of the week

How to make poor man’s fiberglass

In Poland, People Are Roleplaying as Americans

Oprah’s ‘happiness guru’ designed apartments to maximize joy — and they start at $5 million

Bank of America Memo, Revealed: “We Hope” Conditions for American Workers Will Get Worse

Fear of Rampant Crime Is Derailing New York City’s Recovery

‘Dark stores’ offer anything you need in 30 minutes. But there’s a human cost

A bike lane built for a car crash

Real estate find of the week

The Cat with Magic Ears

The performance collective Fulu Miziki, which means “music from trash” hail from what they call a “bad neighborhood” in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. This music video gives you a sampling of what they can do with instruments they fashioned out of industrial waste. A commenter in YouTube puts it well, “Just blew 3k on a guitar. Feel like an idiot these people rock!”

In a Guardian profile drummer Sekelembele says, “We hope our collective can put a spotlight on this pollution problem in Kinshasa and other parts of Africa . . . finding solutions is what Afrofuturism is about . . . if Africa is the dumpster of the entire world, it is already facing difficulties that everywhere else will face very soon.”

Watch a longer video from the 2020 Taksirat Festival

There’s a Window Preservation Alliance

TikTok’s Viral ‘Pink Sauce’ Makes Everyone Want to Puke

The coolest guy on TikTok

A deeply weird Zillow listing

What the inside of an iPhone6s looks like.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog I’ve made a very dull hobby out of repairing old Mac devices including iPods, iPads and an old desktop computer. I now have more functional Apple devices than I have uses for. This week I tackled the repair of my ancient, but still in use, iPhone6s.

My phone needed a new battery, screen (ironically, broken while repairing my iMac), lightning and headphone connector assembly. At just shy of $100 for all the parts, sourced from iFixit, my repair was a dubious financial gamble. But I just can’t stomach throwing out a device that’s the product of horrible labor practices and extractive mining, especially since it still worked.

Breakfast nook Genius Bar.

By far the hardest part of this repair was getting the broken screen off. Apple uses a strong adhesive that doubles as waterproofing. To loosen the adhesive you need to heat up the phone with a hair dryer or heat gun and pry off the screen with a suction cup that iFixit sells. You will also need a lamp with a magnifying lens, especially if you’re old like me.

Once you’ve got the screen open the main challenge is to keep track of the dozen or so different sized, microscopic screws. I used labelled bowls, but some people use an ice cube tray. The iFixit guides will step you through the repair process as well as help you keep track of all those infernal screws. As you do this you will gain appreciation for the workers who spend long days doing nothing but turning a screwdriver–a hell that I can’t imagine.

Another thing I’d suggest is patience. If things go south for some reason, take a break and come back to it later. Definitely check the phone before you reassemble it. In my case, before I applied new adhesive, I powered up the phone to discover that it was locked in a shutdown loop. I thought that I had damaged the logic board somehow, but on doing more research I discovered that faulty third party batteries are common and will cause this problem. I had another battery for Kelly’s phone and plugged this one in and the phone worked perfectly.

Replacing the screen was simple, the battery somewhat more difficult and the lighting and headphone connector assembly the hardest, because it involved removing a whole lot of screws and other parts. I would suggest reading the iFixit instructions thoroughly before you begin to make sure that you have all the tools and parts you need to complete the repair. I’d also suggest reading the comments to see what problems people have had with the repair or with the instructions.

I’ll note that one of the shortcomings of iFixit’s crowd sourced repair guides is that, at the end, they say, “reverse the steps.” Most of time this is okay but sometimes the process of reassembly isn’t the same as disassembly. This is where sorting through the comments helps. iFixit sells an adhesive strip that supposedly restores the phone’s waterproofing. You don’t need this but I bought it just for the experience and it was easy to apply.

My iPhone6s now works as new and serves its purpose. Looking back on all the mad device repairs I’ve done, the most rewarding was the iMac drive upgrade I blogged about previously. In that case I ended up with a fast, new computer.

I’d encourage you not to be afraid of doing iPhone repair. That said, I wouldn’t do this with a device that’s still under warranty or a more recent and expensive iPhone. Basically, I do these repairs on devices that would otherwise end up in the landfill. I’m still using my iPhone 6s as a phone but old iPhones make great mp3 players and small wifi devices. I still use a 2009 era iPhone to play tunes in my woodshop.

We tend to forget about the physicality of the computers we’re surrounded by. They are made by people, often in horrible conditions. The materials are mined at great ecological peril and even in their use they are supported by  server farms that require vast amounts of energy and human toil. To make sure the adhesive seals you stack a bunch of books on the phone. The video tutorial I watched used a copy of Steve Job’s biography. I substituted Marx’s hefty Grundrisse. As I think Marx would say, our iPhones are embedded in a web of social relations and physical conditions. If you want to understand this device, you might start with disassembling it and you’ll need a book of many more pages than Job’s biography to both put it in context and to make the glue stick.

Michael Grave’s original plans for Portland City Hall had a little town on top via @jmfowl.

Two Men Had To Be Extinguished After Catching Fire At Goop Store

A beautiful art book about spiders

LA Restaurants Are Breathing Life Into the Architectural Ghosts of Fast-Food Past

China Miéville: “If you don’t feel despair, you’re not opening your eyes”

Energy use from US cryptomining firms is contributing to rising utility bills

I’ve been obsessed with making frames for the past week so excuse this link to some very nice . . . frames

Strawberry Hibiscus Butter

Great podcast episode on the problems with AI–extra points for mentioning my thesis advisor George Lewis

Thames barge break

Ugh

Meme using a photo by Edward Burtynsky.

I had an aesthetic/moral/anxiety crisis this month which triggered a case of writers block that just wouldn’t stop. The causal chain of my block had a number of reasons but let’s just say that the feel-good filters we use when navigating this world dropped away for me a bit and I became overwhelmed by the multiple crises we seem to be in right now.

One of those problems is the sorry state of the places we inhabit in what we were all taught is supposed to be an “exceptional” country. I think it’s safe to say that the quality of cities in the U.S. went into a steep decline with the ever expanding sprawl of the latter half of the 20th century. Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass quotes a Native elder “The problem with these new people is that they don’t have both feet on the shore. One is still in the boat. They don’t seem to know whether they’re staying or not.”

In our day to day lives we screen out the horror of this rootless landscape. We don’t think anything of navigating a hellscape of cars, concrete, billboards and power lines. Worse, our filters blind us to the suffering of our fellow human beings: the poor, the disadvantaged, refugees, and those suffering from substance abuse and mental illness. These filters, instilled in us Americans through the rhetoric of exceptionalism, also don’t let us see the exploitation and injustice perpetrated in our name around the world.

We live under the spell of a rapacious capitalism that’s a race to the bottom and the aesthetic ugliness that surrounds us is just the visual manifestation of a system that accumulates unfathomable wealth for a few and leaves so many people bedding down every night on the hard concrete.

Perhaps we need a Virgil to guide us through the layers of hell and purgatory we find ourselves in and lift the filters from our eyes. During my period of writers block I kept thinking of writers, artists and film makers who attempt, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to wake us from sleep walking through this injustice both aesthetic and moral. I thought I’d rattle off a short list of people who aspire to this role, each of whom actually deserves a lengthy blog post of their own.

High Culture Haters
A long line of enemies of modernity has queued for this gig but unfortunately they tend to have a right wing outlook I’m not a fan of. I’m thinking of people like Roger Scruton, Prince Charles, James Howard Kunstler and Trad Architecture Twitter shit posters. The problem with these critics is that they reduce the problem to the moral failings of designers and architects. They conveniently avoid the real elephant in the room which is a capitalist system that seeks to exploit human labor and relationships and every single resource the earth has to offer. In short they are moralists who fail to make a systemic critique.

Michelangelo Antonioni
I just re-watched two of the films of one of my cinematic heroes, Michelangelo Antonioni: Zabriskie Point and The Passenger. The first part of Zabriskie Point takes place in the billboard strewn and ugly Los Angeles of my childhood and even includes a scene at a gun shop just blocks from the house I grew up in. I think what makes these first scenes so compelling is, in addition to the astonishing cinematography, Antonioni’s outsider viewpoint: as a foreigner he can see the things we filter out.

There’s a trajectory in the film from the student revolutionaries at the beginning to the liberatory ending with its discordant Pink Floyd soundtrack over a literal explosion of American consumer goods. Zabriskie Point dates from a period, long before the Marvel dreck we’re stuck with now, when people still thought a movie could change the world. On re-watching Zabriskie Point this year, that final scene sent a shiver down my spine because, let’s just say, I have hope that we’re about to experience its revolutionary potential.

I won’t get into the The Passenger but, in short, it’s a prescient commentary on the post-modern condition of Instagram inauthenticity and you should definitely watch it. The Passenger is the internal landscape to the physical landscape of Zabriskie Point.

Skeleton88

https://youtu.be/UC47WI2Vl4c

There’s a YouTuber who goes by the name Skeleton88 whose hobby seems to consist of making high res videos with a GoPro mounted on top of a car while driving around Las Vegas and other western U.S. cities. His videos, as bleak as anything in the horror fiction of H. P. Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti, have no narration or music.

I don’t know Skeleton88’s motivations. Sometimes I think these sorts of videos are about blaming homeless people and sex workers for blight, as if they were at fault for the ugliness of our cities rather than victims of a system that both creates ugliness and fails to take care of people. Perhaps it’s just an oddball hobby, but Skeleton88’s viewpoint, a kind of car top Eye of Sauron, tends to dehumanize. Google Street View has a similar viewpoint.

To get a better lay of the land you have to leave the car and talk to people, otherwise you separate the built environment from the social relations from which it arose. That said, it’s hard to deny the impact of Skeleton88’s videos where a kind of supernatural horror seems to lurk just behind the auto body shop on a bleak Las Vegas boulevard.

Octopolis

Another candidate for our American Virgil goes by the name Optopolis. He tours and live-streams mostly abandoned retail spaces on the outskirts of towns in Wyoming and Colorado. His videos remind me the essays of the land artist Robert Smithson, who wrote about America’s blighted infrastructure as if it was like discovering a Mayan ruin. I had a lot of trouble narrowing down Octopolis’ prodigious output for this blog post. I recommend you spend a mind bending evening binging his work. And if you’d like to know what I was like as a young person, well . . .

Segregation by Design

We Prefer the Before

We Prefer the Before is an Instagram account that shows the horrific HGTVification of the last decent period of vernacular architecture in this country, those magic years from around 1900 to 1929. Here in my own neighborhood most of the old bungalows have been bungled by house flippers who rip out walls and details and paint everything white, white and white. Chip and Joanna Gaines are, of course, the ring leaders of this dark satanic trend. Not since the Puritan’s iconoclasm have we seen as much architectural detail smashing.

For you, my dear readers sake, I suffered through a few chapters of Chip Gaines’ latest book in an attempt to find some sort of philosophical basis for this madness. It was all about how much he WORKS and then he WORKS SOME MORE and then WORKS EVEN MORE. Chip’s book reminded me of what Mark Fisher had to say in Ghosts of My Life,

Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there’s no work to do. If neoliberalism’s magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fanaticism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.

Capital demands that we rip out a perfectly good 1920s bathroom and replace it with the latest stream of vomit from Home Depot. And when the lateral wood and diagonal tile go out of fashion in a few years capital demands we rip it out again. The iconoclasm combined with the de-skilling and exploiting an underpaid immigrant workforce inherent in the flipper methodology deserves a longer blog post.

What we need to end this cycle is for David Cronenberg’s to do a horror movie with the Gaines’ as the art directors. Cronenberg has always been interesting to me because he sets his bio-horror films not where you’d expect, say in a dilapidated Victorian house, but rather in our impoverished and sterile modern spaces. Maybe the sight of some bloody lump slithering across the laminate flooring or a blood splattered giant clock, will finally stop the Gaines’ reign of terror.

Tartaria

The overall premise is an alternative history. A vast, technologically advanced “Tartarian” empire, emanating from north-central Asia or thereabouts, either influenced or built vast cities and infrastructure all over the world. (Tartaria, or Tartary, though never a coherent empire, was indeed a general term for north-central Asia.) Either via a sudden cataclysm or a steady antagonistic decline — and perhaps as recently as 100 years ago — Tartaria fell. Its great buildings were buried, and its history was erased. After this “great reset,” the few surviving examples of Tartarian architecture were falsely recast as the work of contemporary builders who could never have executed buildings of such grace and beauty, and subjected them to clumsy alterations.

Like a lot of conspiracy theories it seeks a clear and certain explanation for a much more complex history. I’d be into enjoying this conspiracy, as well as the trad architecture fans on Twitter, if it weren’t for the racism and antisemitism that inevitably creeps into this stuff.

Some good news to wrap this up
We may not have found a definitive Virgil for our little tour of hell but, in the midst of my silly little writers block crisis some good things happened here in Los Angeles. A young activist and fellow DSA member, Eunisses Hernandez beat an entrenched incumbent and machine Democrat, Gil Cedillo in a race for city council almost nobody thought she could win. Another candidate and DSA member that I’ve been doing some volunteer work for, Hugo Soto-Martinez, came in nine points ahead of the incumbent Mitch O’Farrell and will head to a runoff in November.

Both Soto-Martinez and Hernandez represent the sort of leaders who understand the connections between poverty and the sorry state of our built environment. We can take care of people and have trees and beautiful public spaces. Give us bread, but give us roses.

Yes, someone once thought this was a good idea. Via @skepteis.

Where’s the herd immunity? Our research shows why Covid is still wreaking havoc

The farmers restoring Hawaii’s ancient food forests that once fed an island

Council member’s emails show inconsistencies with stance against bike lanes

My neighbor’s dog smells the chicken I’m grilling

They still make nice new buildings

A thread on eco-fascism

cats CAN’T have a little salami

You can visit Mt. Wilson!

Editors note: new post coming tomorrow, God willing.

Enter the phrase “brutalist McDonalds” into Dall-E and you get this.

That weird and funny AI thing on the internet where you type words and get an image

An ancient Roman multi-tool

Lambor . . .

Since this winter I’ve been experimenting with growing edible mushrooms both indoors and outdoors. Recently, I joined forces with a few other interested folks to attempt a technique called PF Tek that we learned about in a class taught by Peter McCoy. We grew oyster mushrooms, the Angelyne of fungi.

Growing oyster mushrooms is a four step process:

1. Harvest spores or clone tissue and grow out in a petri dish. This must be done in a sterile environment, usually with a laminar flow hood. I have not tried this yet and it’s the most difficult part of growing mushrooms. Thankfully you can skip this step by purchasing liquid culture online.
2. Take your liquid culture and inoculate grain, in mason jars, sterilized in a pressure canner. Someone in our little growing group purchased the liquid culture for around $10 for a syringe that was more than enough to inoculate 14 pint jars .
3. When the grain in the jars is fully colonized, you use it to inoculate bags of straw that have been pasteurized in hot water. I think we ended up with something like 16 small bags of straw divided between our group.
4. Keep the bags inoculated in step 3 in a humid environment with some indirect light and wait for them to fruit.

This all sounds a lot harder than it actually was. Oyster mushrooms have a reputation for easily out-competing molds that can tank other mushrooms. The culture we used in step 2 aggressively colonized the grain (we used sorghum bird seed called milo) as well as the straw. If anything the problem I had is that it went faster than I expected. Once the jars are colonized you have to move the grain to straw. Nature has a tendency not to care about human schedules.

Hot Pink Results
Some observations from this last experiment. We chose pink oyster mushrooms because they tolerate heat and will grow well at this time of year here in sunny and hot Southern California. I can report that, despite what some have told me, pink oyster mushrooms are delicious and do, in fact, have a vague ham or bacon flavor. While they lose their vibrant pink color when you heat them, they are still a colorful yellow hue after cooking.

So far I’ve grown pearl, blue and pink oyster mushrooms. My favorite for flavor and texture was the pearl oyster but the other two are a very close second. I’m going to grow pink oyster mushrooms again soon and like that you can grow them here in the summer.

I need to improve step 4. The difficulty with getting mushrooms to fruit is that they benefit from humidity and oxygen–you can’t just put them in a bag with no ventilation. While I’ve grown mushrooms outside without any kind of humidity control, I think I’d get bigger mushrooms with some kind of fruiting chamber. A lot of people make what’s called a Martha, named after a Martha Stewart mini greenhouse. I’m of two minds about this kind of thing. I’d like slightly better results but also like to avoid gadgets and plastic. But with three successful growing experiments, I’m leaning towards the Martha.

I might try growing pink oyster mushrooms on the oak sawdust I generate in my woodshop. I grew blue oyster on sawdust and I found it easier to work with than the straw. Straw has to be shredded and I found it hard to pre-moisten and pasteurize. With the sawdust I just poured boiling water over it in a tote and let it cool overnight. But I’ve also heard some say that oyster mushrooms grow better on straw. I guess I need to do a side by side experiment and find out.

While it was handy to have an outdoor area to shred the straw, one of the things I like about growing mushrooms is that you can do it in an apartment. I’ll also add that it was fun to do it with a group of friends. We got together to do the pressure canner step together and I was able to use my backyard to shred straw for the folks who didn’t have outdoor space.

Crypto posters on telephone poles–signs of a bubble?

How to Watch the (Potential) Tau Herculids Meteor Shower Tonight

Gardeners use plant dyes to combat toxic chemicals used by fashion industry

End of an era as New York removes last public payphone

Eelgrass is an ancestral food in Sonora’s Comcaac community. Now it’s gaining global attention

Much warmer and drier second half of May, and some thoughts about summer to come

Governor Gavin Newsom shoveling something with Stewart and Lynda Resnick. Source: CalTech.

For many years we’ve been in a drought here in California as a result of climate change. In response our elected officials, through the mainstream media, push out a message of water rationing in cities. Here in Los Angeles we’ve all been asked to restrict watering to two days a week.

There’s no doubt that we’d all benefit from ditching lawns in favor of native and low-water landscapes. However, I believe these calls for household water conservation are a kind of misdirection from what’s really going on. In short, we as individuals are being blamed for a water shortage that would be better attributed to a class of Central Valley agricultural oligarchs whose profligate water use dwarfs what we use for our urban landscapes.

Source: Public Policy Institute of California.

Journalist Yasha Levine did a superb story on the unholy relationship between governor Gavin Newsom and billionaire pistachio/pomegrante/Fiji Water oligarchs Stewart and Lynda Resnick that deserves more attention. Levine details a hustle typical for our billionaire class. The Resnicks launder their destructive, extractive capitalism through “philanthropic” schemes, in their case things like art museums and a “sustainability center” at the California Institute of Technology. Of course, they are also generous donors to politicians such as Newsom. Here’s now Levine describes Newsom’s trip to the opening of that sustainability center,

“Philanthropists” is an interesting way for the Governor of California to describe one of the most powerful forces in farming in the state — a billionaire family that owns something like 300 square miles of Oligarch Valley land, has its own toxic corporate farm worker town, and, from their ridiculous mansion in Beverly Hills, has been on a destructive quest to eviscerate the state’s river system and plunder its aquifers, helping fuel a mass extinction in the San Francisco Bay Delta…all so they can grow and export pistachios, a fringe snack food that people around here barely eat.

But then calling these rapacious oligarchs “philanthropists” is exactly the point. Governor Gavin was going out to Pasadena to do some public relations work: to lend his name and image and the respectably of his public office to Stewart and Lynda Resnick’s ongoing effort to rebrand themselves as do-gooders and environmentalists, rather than the industrial-scale destroyers of the environment that they are.

Levine also notes the irony of a family that exports water from Fiji and even had a journalist deported for digging around into their sleazy business practices in that country.

In addition to the misdirection issue, hastily conceived water conservation policies have gone poorly when it comes to our urban landscapes. Take, for instance, LA’s horrible lawn replacement rebate program that ended up in the hands of fly by night operators who exploited their workers and left us with acres of gravel and plastic lawns. Or, since most homeowners don’t have any understanding of climate or horticulture, we just get dead lawns or, at best, decomposed granite and a few sad cacti. Coastal California is not a desert yet, and our landscapes can be both lush and not use a lot of water. Plus we might want to use water for things like parks, schools and athletic fields especially when that use is small compared to what the Resnicks extract to make their billions.

My big fear is that, while technically the water restrictions don’t apply to trees, in practice people withhold water from trees and we end up with a further destruction of our already stressed urban tree canopy. Our cities get hotter and the Resnicks get richer.

Doctor dog treating sick cat, 15th century

I am losing my mind over the kitty grabber

The Cult of the Veiled Prophet

Landlord Lobbyists Pour Nearly $2 Million into LA County Political Ads

This gas would have stayed in the ground if it wasn’t for bitcoin

Oligarch Valley

Have a place in your heart and home for a sweet little cat? Got a text from some cat rescue folks I met recently:

Grumpy, our foster, is very far from grumpy. We had been feeding him in an alley near our home and thought he was feral, but when we trapped him we discovered he is friendly! He is the sweetest boy; a true lap cat. He is about 2 years old (estimated). Grumpy would love nothing more than to spend his most of his time snoozing on his owner’s lap. He isn’t super frisky or active, but he does play with wand toys. He is friendly with other cats, non-aggressive. When confronted with aggression, he hides rather than fights back. So he would benefit from a calmer environment, maybe a single person or a childless couple, who spend a lot of time at home and want a best friend like Grumpy. He could be in a multi cat household as long as it wasn’t more than a couple cats. He would be an excellent companion. He is very loyal, loving and snuggly.

Grumpy was neutered at FixNation, received shots, flea treatment. will be given dewormer treatment, and he tested negative for FelV/FIV1. One notable characteristic is his distinct limp – it’s likely he had an old injury on his front left leg which caused this. He had x rays and exams by two vets- there are no visible or palpable fractures, and there is no muscle atrophy, meaning he still uses the leg. So even though he limps, it won’t require any further treatment. He gets around just fine.

He is a special cat who has been through a lot (likely dumped on the street by a previous owner) and he needs a wonderful home. For any potential adopters, we will want to do a home check either in person or by video, and have a meet-and-greet at our home so we can see how they interact with Grumpy. Any renters will need to provide landlord’s contact info so we can verify that pets are allowed. A few character references will also be required, or I can take your word for it if you’ve known someone a long time.

Send me an email at rootsimple@gmail.com if you’d like to adopt Mr. Grumpy and I’ll put you in touch with the rescue folks. If you can’t adopt Mr. Grumpy please send this post around.

Our ballots just arrived in the mail here and, in lieu of my usually links roundup, I thought I’d speak to my neighbors to suggest that you vote for Hugo Soto-Martinez for council district 13. The current occupant of this office, Mitch O’Farrell, has had nine years to work on issues such as homelessness and the safety of our streets. He’s spent those years virtue signalling and doing the bidding of his wealthy patrons. Mitch’s campaign funders include wealthy real estate interests, slumlords, lobbyists and gig economy companies such as Doordash and Airbnb.

We need someone like union organizer Hugo Soto-Martinez who, I believe, has a compassionate approach to homelessness as well as solid positions on transportation and the environment. You can read more about Hugo on his website Hugo2022.com.

The early war on sleep: Arkwright’s Cotton Mills By Night, 1782 by Joseph Wright of Derby.

Our beat on this blog has been appropriate technology, gardening and urban homesteading (whatever that means!). Ironically, Kelly and I have had to spend a lot of time in front of screens researching and writing about these very analog subjects that, for the most part, involve an off-line engagement with the natural world. We’ve done this at a time of the explosive growth of social media. Early on there was a line of thought that social media could be used for positive social movements. I think it’s safe to say that, at this point, only the most fervent Silicon Valley cultists still have any faith in garbage products like Facebook and Twitter.

My own ideas about the internet have whipsawed over the years from an enthusiastic optimism in the 1990s to, more recently, a gut feeling that we need to just burn it all down. Two books I’ve read in recent months fall into that burn it all down category. One, a collection of William Morris’ political writings, and the other, Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Morris and Crary have much in common. Writing in the 19th century, Morris could see the brutal trajectory of industrial capitalism. Writing in our own century Crary itemizes the wreckage in a screed that the Los Angeles Review of Books described as, “a polemic as finely concentrated as a line of pure cocaine.”

Central to Crary’s argument is capitalism’s “relentless capture and control of time and experience” through the use of addiction technologies that both keep us tied to our screen and control, narrow and channel the content of our communication. For Crary, the idea that these technologies are somehow neutral is absurd and, in the words of philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a “product of the media apparatus in which they are captured.”

Crary believes that the internet co-evolved with a particularly brutal stage of free-market capitalism that’s come to be called neo-liberalism. This isn’t a coincidence. Our communication technologies, Crary believes, are intertwined with our economic system.

Bowling Alone
I was particularly excited by a passage in the book where Crary mentions something that I’ve long noticed but never heard anyone else talk about, the media’s obsession with religious cults. It’s not that there aren’t such destructive groups, but the sheer number of documentaries about cults seems more about what Crary calls a “bourgeois horror of the crowd” that forecloses the possibility of communitarian forms of mutual support.

There are the countless narratives of cult-like communes of obedient converts ruled by homicidal madmen and cynical manipulators. Echoing bourgeois fears in the late nineteen century following 1871, the idea of a commune derived from any form of socialism remains systemically intolerable. The cooperative, as a lived set of relations, cannot actually be made visible–it can only be represented as a parodic replication of existing relations of domination. In many different ways, the attack on values of collectivity and cooperation is articulated through the notion that freedom is to be free of any dependence on other, while in fact we are experiencing a more comprehensive subjection to the “free” working of markets. As Harold Bloom has shown, the real American religion is “to be free of other selves.”

We get, in Crary’s words, “the elimination or the financialization of social arrangements that had previously supported many kinds of cooperative activity” through the false communitarianism of social media.

This brutal, every man for himself ethos intersects with the war on sleep in issues such as the way we deal with homelessness.

Public spaces are now comprehensively planned to deter sleeping, often including–with an intrinsic cruelty–the serrated design of benches and other elevated surfaces that prevent a human body from reclining on them. The pervasive but social disregarded phenomenon of urban homelessness entails many deprivations, yet few are more acute than the hazards and insecurities of unsheltered sleep.

Where do we go from here?
The book was written almost 10 years ago in 2013, but the only thing that dates this book is Crary’s attack on blogging which he calls a “one-way model of auto-chattering in which the possibility of ever having to wait and listen to someone else has been eliminated.” Guilty as charged, but blogging now seems quaint next to the horrors of social media which was only just gestating when Crary wrote 24/7.

Perhaps to update his argument a bit Crary’s has a new book, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World which continues many of the themes developed in 24/7. To extract a personal strategy from either of these books is to miss the point. Pervasive, addictive technologies must be confronted in solidarity with other people. Nevertheless, books like these make me more inclined to pick up a garden spade or hand plane rather than a laptop and recognize how privileged I am to be able to make that choice.

Billy Bragg sings the Internationale

William Morris How I Became a Socialist

Vision zero is going well here in LA

Riding a bike in American should not be this dangerous

Texas Plans to Punish Companies That Move Away From Fossil Fuels

Buckets and Hydroponic Baskets for Growing Summer Veggies

I’m for more caftans

The right kind of worker (a podcast episode for your May Day)

One of this month’s cat sitting clients.

Drought-tolerant carnivorous plants

The Newest Bitcoin Diet Trend Is Hating ‘Seed Oils’

Hungry javelina, trapped in car, goes for a drive in Arizona

The incredible hellscape city that I live in

Japan’s ‘Old Enough!’ Sparks Questions About Car-Dependent US Childhoods

Retirement the Margaritaville Way

I went on a Los Angeles Mycological Society mushroom foray with Bat Vardeh of Foraging and Mushroom Hunting Women of SoCal, on the 9th way up in the Angeles Forest. It was the most gnomecore thing I’ve done in a long time.

We traversed an area dramatically altered by the Bobcat fire of 2020, giving our gnomecore revelries a bit of a post-apocalypse vibe. But amidst the destruction we found mushrooms that thrive in burn zones. The fire vaporized whole trees leaving nothing but a pit where roots used to be. In fact you could follow the negative space of those vaporized roots in the landscape. Within these crevices tiny mushrooms have started the work of transforming the burned remains of the forest into a new landscape.

One thing I learned on this walk is that children are the best mushroom hunters. One particularly enthusiastic kid found the first mushroom and consistently, throughout the day, found more and more. I think it’s because children don’t have the filters on sensory inputs that we adults have. They welcome sensory chaos and don’t yet have the fully formed defenses we adults have to filter, classify and, at worst, ignore the wonder around us.

We didn’t’ find any edible mushrooms, though morels pop up fleetingly in similar burn sites. But I’m happy to look at any mushroom and edibles are just the icing on the cake.

In addition to mushrooms, the fire revealed opportunities for an archeology of late capitalism. Here a Wizard Charcoal Lighter can from maybe the early 1970s washed down from the nearby Buckhorn campground.

And a vintage Pepsi can, also from the early 70s. If only the fungi could learn to metabolize these things but I’m afraid we’re stuck with them.

More on mushrooms in burn areas.

I’ve taken a break from Twitter for a few weeks and so missed friend of the blog Peter Kalmus’ arrest this past week for locking himself to the JP Morgan Chase building in downtown Los Angeles. Peter, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, says in an editorial for the Guardian that he and other activists, part of Scientist Rebellion, chose Chase because the bank funds the most new fossil fuel projects.

Explaining his action Peter says,

Nothing has worked. It’s now the eleventh hour and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity. I feel deep grief over the loss of forests and corals and diminishing biodiversity. But I’ll keep fighting as hard as I can for this Earth, no matter how bad it gets, because it can always get worse. And it will continue to get worse until we end the fossil fuel industry and the exponential quest for ever more profit at the expense of everything else. There is no way to fool physics.

As this protest took place during a week when temperatures here broke records you’d think that the local media would have said something but there wasn’t a peep about it with the exception of the excellent LA Podcast.

@ClimateHuman chokes up speaking when talking about his son and why he’s chaining himself to Chase bank entrance, along w three other scientists: pic.twitter.com/r2vt8YDy3n

— Erin Stone (she/her) (@Erstone7) April 6, 2022

Peter was a guest on episodes 39 and 116 of our podcast. You can follow him on Twitter at @ClimateHuman. There’s a fundraiser for his and other activist’s legal defense here.

The New Trend Is Gnomecore

Raccoon steals security camera

Connecticut mechanic finds art worth millions in dumpster at abandoned barn

Nixon’s resignation lunch

California cities spent huge share of federal Covid relief funds on police

USC Insiders Demanding Justice For 61-Year-Old Custodian Arrested For Placing Lost Backpack Away For Safekeeping

The old drive covered in 12 years worth of dust.

I belong to a cult. In my cult we have different levels achieved at great expense. The leadership is authoritarian and opaque. We use technology to mediate our experiences. The headquarters is in California.

The cult is called Apple and I’m in deep and have been for a long time. Since 2010, most of the thousands of posts on this blog have their origins on the dusty drive you see above.

I always think of the way Umberto Eco described the Apple cult and its main competitor,

Over the last year I’ve set out on a project to demystify Apple’s closed system by popping open its sleek minimalist objects to peer inside, to fix and prolong the life of a motley set of Apple junk I’ve come into possession of. I repaired an iPod and a iPad. Last week I revived my 2010 iMac.

In order to upgrade that iMac with a new solid state drive, I had to find an identification number. The i.d. number I needed was printed on the bottom of the “foot” that holds the heavy screen in a microscopic type printed gray on a gray background. Apple has a fetishistic design aesthetic that I’ve come to see as getting in the way of the functioning of the machine. The USB ports, for instance are placed in an awkward to access rear portion of the screen so as not to interfere with the sleek look of the damned thing.

To peak under the foot of the iMac I had to lean it back and use my iPhone camera to magnify the type. As I leaned the heavy iMac I inadvertently tipped over a small statue of the Egyptian god Anubis that had been banished to the windowsill of the walk in closet above my computer. Anubis fell and struck my iPhone, shattering the screen. So I had to add a new iPhone screen to my computer parts order (!).

In a technological realm designed for easy repair, which is not the capitalist world we live in, you’ be able to easily access all the interior parts of your computer. Such is not the case, of course, with an iMac. It’s not the worst repair project I’ve ever tackled but I wouldn’t call it easy either. You have to carefully lift the heavy screen out of the case and detach a bunch of delicate cables in order to access the old drive.

Once you put the iMac back together you have to install new system software. I’ll spare you the details but just say that Apple makes it difficult to install legacy software on old machines. In order to do it I needed another old machine and some arcane commands in the terminal application to get the iMac working again.

The end result is a remarkably fast and new seeming computer. The old drive in my circa 2010 iMac could not keep up with system and program demands and became so slow as to be unusable. The new solid state drive I installed makes for a new computer good enough for most of the tasks I use it for. You can do this same upgrade with old mac laptops.

Still, the arduous process of ugrading this machine made me want to deprogram myself from the Apple cult and join up with the Linux folks and some more user-configurable machine.

If you want to try this iMac upgrade for yourself here’s how to do it.

Wordle but in Morse Code

A secretive LA group has a new mission: paint untouched crosswalks

RIP Christopher Alexander

That mushroom trend . . .

A friend left a bag of ratchet straps and one of the cats has been sitting in it for a week

I think being an Umarell is in my future (thank you to John Zapf for this mind blowing Wikipedia article)

A 2-way wrist radio

At SXSW, A Pathetic Tech Future Struggles to Be Born

“We’ll see you all at Oki-Dogs”: The story of L.A.’s legendary punk hangout (with hot dogs)

Down on Alvarado Street by the Pioneer Chicken Stand

It’s possibly the most LA thing ever to have a private, invitation-only opening for a piece of public infrastructure built for walking and biking and then provide the attendees with only driving directions.

The island with no water: how foreign mining destroyed Banaba

Goblin mode

Possum body slams skunk

Music break

Movie break

Could of read, watched something good or just taken a walk but no, had to waste a precious hour of my life on the new Netflix show Is it Cake? which turns the pandemic trend of similacrum cake art into yet another competitive, “reality” TV show.

Is it Cake? is hyperactive, annoying and unfunny while constantly reminding you that it’s hyperactive, annoying and unfunny. It could just be the show at the end of history that portends the imminent eclipse of civilization. Watch just one episode and you’re ready to return to the pre-dawn of human consciousness, foraging tubers with your bare hands, unaware of your own mortality.

And yet you’ll be tempted to skip to the last two episodes which will plunge you into the extremes of post-modern skepticism. In the penultimate show, you’ll find out that the final bake-off involves making a cake that is a simulation of cake, which leads the contestants in the show to question if everything is, in fact, made of cake, that we’re living in a vast cake simulation.

In the the last episode the losing contestants, angry at missing out on the $10,000 prize and driven mad with their epistemological cake crisis, set out to slice the meta-obnoxious host in half with a Katana sword to see if he is, in fact, cake. They then stumble out of the studio, armed with more swords, machetes and knives, to slice open everything and everyone in sight to test their thesis that reality itself is make of cake. We the viewers, caught up in the cake or not cake question smash up our smart TVs to find out if they are made of cake only to discover that they are not cake and the cycle ends.

But then, too distracted to read a book, we open our laptops to this very blog post which concludes with the revelation that someone paid, via Cameo, the famous for being famous (rappers? unususual hair dudes?) Island Boy twins to read a passage from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

The Island Boi’s Present: A Spoken Word Presentation of Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle”

I can’t believe this just happened the world is very weird#IslandBoys #flyysoulja #Kodiyakredd #IslandBois #guydebord #spectacle pic.twitter.com/cOlGIOmo0l

— Sterling Crispin (@sterlingcrispin) October 24, 2021

And the cycle begins again.

A little over a month ago I took a hands-on mushroom cultivation class taught by Peter McCoy. He sent us home with a bag of straw inoculated with pearl oyster mushroom spawn and a bag of sawdust inoculated with reishi mushroom spawn. Yesterday we harvested the first bunch of pearl oyster mushrooms and it looks like the reishi is about to fruit.

In the class, McCoy showed us how to handle liquid mushroom cultures in a low-tech technique called PF Tek invented by Robert McPherson, aka Psylocybe Fanaticus. McCoy will speak at the next meeting of the Los Angeles Mycological Society on Monday, March 21st at 7:30 p.m. via a livestream you can access on YouTube.

The oyster mushrooms we’ve grown this winter have been so delicious that I’m going to get myself a pressure canner and get the PF Tek method happening at the Root Simple compound.

What’s great is that you don’t need a yard to grow mushrooms. We grew this batch of oyster mushroom in the bathroom and affectionately call them the “bathroom mushrooms.”

At over 3,500 posts on this blog we sometime get amnesia here at Root Simple. I completely forgot that McCoy was a guest on episode 77 of our podcast, currently on hiatus (I have thoughts about bringing it back, by the way). 

The battle of Bir Tawil

Why A Small-Scale Artist Is Rebuilding Tiny Versions Of Iconic LA Buildings, Including This Eastside Burrito Joint

Neutra house for sale in Redlands

St Mary’s, Mundon, Essex

The Polaroids of Andrei Tarkovsky

A podcast about the very strange Alexandr Dugin: Russia’s State Philosopher

With great hubris, allow me to toss my thinking cap into the realm of litter box design. I say hubris because only the cat that has the right to hold an opinion on the form, location and orientation of any litter box.

Commercially available litter boxes I believe, and I think our cat friends would agree, are made for the convenience of humans and the profits of the pet store industrial complex. Nobody talked to the cats about them. Most are too small and they’re all ugly. For years we’ve been using a 28-inch by 15-inch plastic storage bin. It worked fine from the cat’s perspective, but stray litter gets kicked around and behind the box, staining the bathroom floor and walls where the litter box resides. Frankly, it’s gross.

So I set about to make a larger box in which to house the same plastic tray. Essentially, I enclosed the plastic tray with an open topped box with a circle cut out so that cats won’t have to jump over the box (they are in their senior years). The tray fits inside an inner shelf to prevent loose litter from falling down into the bottom of the box.

I had grand visions of a neo-classical litter box temple housing the aforementioned tray but this vision got simplified in the interest of ticking off a long requested project on the honey-do list. My table saw and router table made fabrication quick and easy.

In some ways we’re the worst possible test for this litter box concept. We have two cats who have never had an indiscretion outside the litter box in the over 11 years we’ve had them. I’m aware that some cats react with horror and anger at an ever so slight change in litter box placement or aesthetics, as if even an errant moon beam hitting a slightly moved box will cause a fit of piss fueled revenge.

Should this box fail in any way I promise to be a good blogger and post an immediate update. Wish us luck.

Loungin’ – The Original Onesies

Dog Poop – The Secret Ingredient in Victorian Leather (Thank you Lee for the link)

My friend Nik sent me this realter.com listing late last night. He found out about it from a real estate agent friend. In the suburbs of Atlanta, you’d never guess from the unassuming exterior what’s going on inside.

At half the price and almost three times the size of our present 100 year old bungalow in gritty Los Angeles, I gave some serious thought about a, shall we say, “lifestyle shift.” And if you think this living room delivers, wait until you see the rest of the house.

Shag conversation pit. Check.

You also get this room with a large interior fountain smack in the middle. Inside? Outside? Do these categories exist?

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any groovier, you get to the master bedroom and, well, of course you need a circular bed and mirrors.

But, wait, there’s another bedroom in which you realize that, in order to do this house justice, you’re gonna need to institute weekly “key parties” even if you find the idea distasteful. How else to do justice to a curved, mirrored ceiling, framed in shag, facing a shoji screen. Not sure why the previous owner has a small dinosaur skeleton opposite the bed.

I covet the curved underground workshop. I’d add NORAD themed decor for a missile silo vibe.

Swap out the pool table in the bonus room for a foosball table and you’ve got your own tech startup office.

Lastly, you get a kind of half-assed tiki themed garage.

I told my friend that if we turned this into our retirement commune I’d wake up every morning and spend the rest of the day laughing. Those laughs would begin with the absurdity of the house but, I have a feeling, turn into a darker, existential laugh recalling the Charles Fort quote, “If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?”

May Morris Digital Archive

Embroidered sculptures of woodland treasures – in pictures

Japanese farmers using hammers to grow more mushrooms

Reality Overtakes Hyperloop

Imagine if you went out bird watching and half the birds didn’t have names. That’s where we are with fungi according to mycologist Noah Siegel. Fungi are essential for life on this planet, but since they are mostly out of site and out of mind they don’t get the credit or protection due to them.

Siegel delivered an entertaining lecture at this year’s Los Angeles Mycological Society Mushroom Fair this past weekend. He emphasized the important role amateurs can play simply through photography and posting reports in apps like iNaturalist.

When Siegel was asked about the medicinal benefits of certain mushrooms he responded by saying that, “there’s a lot of snake oil out there.” Amen to that. I have to say I’ve become increasingly frustrated with some in the mycology sphere who are more interested in self promotion than in exploring the fungal world in all its majesty and complexity. Comrades, we need better science popularizers!

I also had the privilege of taking a cultivation class the day before the fair taught by Peter McCoy. He taught us a cultivation technique invented by an amateur Robert McPherson, aka Psylocybe Fanaticus, that makes use of sterilized mason jars to inoculate grain. McPherson’s method, which he calls PF Tek, allows you to propagate fungi in your kitchen without a lot of expensive lab equipment. You do need a pressure canner which I’m lobbying the administration here at Root Simple to let me order.

Odds are there’s a mycological society near you. While it’s interesting to grow mushrooms and forage for edible species it’s also just plain fun to look at them wherever they are, in the woods, in a garden or in an alley.

If you’re a local, the LA Mycological society has a very cool reading group run by Aaron Thompson. It’s free and you can sign up here.

Farmers in Senegal learn to respect a scruffy shrub that gets no respect

Mushroom observer

Facebook/Meta Asks: “Wouldn’t It Be Nice To Die?”

Pedestrian Deaths Spike in U.S. as Reckless Driving Surges

The Last Vestige of an Old Order in “The Nineties”

I really wish I didn’t know that there’s a flat earth themed country album by a posh Brit

I live in the most corrupt city in the United States, Los Angeles. A quarter of our city council is either in prison or under investigation. The way you get elected to the city council here is to take money from developers and real estate financiers. Once you get in office you serve those interests. Between elections you fix the occasional pothole and show up for photo ops when there’s a new star on the Walk of Fame. Meanwhile, income inequality, unafordable housing, homelessness, and traffic deaths have increased.

Nobody epitomizes this status quo and lack of vision more than my city current councilman Mitch O’Farrell. In the nine years he’s sat on the city council he’s failed to advocate for housing and services for the homeless and instead has pursued a discredited policy of criminalizing poverty. Instead of pushing for safer streets for pedestrians and cyclists he’s failed to implement even modest improvements and, as a result, our streets are grim, high speed traffic sewers. He and his staff fill their hours by serving the interests of a parasitic class of real estate investors, bloated non-profits and lobbyists who are his patrons.

Thankfully we have a chance to change things for the better by electing Hugo Soto-Martinez for council district 13. Hugo is the son of street vendors and has spent the last fifteen years as an organizer for UNITE HERE Local 11, a union of hotel, warehouse and food service workers. Once elected Hugo will represent the interests of ordinary working people. He supports building social housing, jobs programs and making our streets safer for everyone. You can read more about his platform on his website.

Electing Hugo is just the beginning. There’s a lot of work to do to turn this city around. Thankfully, more people are starting to pay attention to local elections. You can help out by going to my fundraising page for Hugo and chipping in a few dollars.

Wherever you are you can be a part of change at the local level. I believe that Hugo is a great model for community power. Let’s take Los Angeles back by electing Hugo in June!

Furniture by William Morris

Uber’s plans include attacking public transit

Behold, the southernmost Lenin statue in the world

Rack of squirrel, anyone? The chefs putting invasive species on the menu

Mold, leaks, rot: how Brad Pitt’s post-Katrina housing project went horribly wrong

The Revenge of the Hot Water Bottle

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Whale

A Magazine From 1997 Is Selling For Thousands of Dollars Online Because of QAnon

Tent-safe DIY heaters for unhoused people cost just $7 to build

A few months ago a light bulb went off. I mostly produce oak sawdust which just happens to be one of the ideal substrates for growing mushrooms. While I love looking at mushrooms and attending lectures about mushrooms via the Los Angeles Mycological Society, I don’t know anything about growing them and my two previous attempts were complete failures.

Techniques for growing mushroom range from simple to extremely high tech. For this experiment I wanted to try the simplest method I could find that would not require buying equipment, plastic bags or maintaining a temperature and humidity controlled indoor environment. Put simply, I wanted to try growing mushrooms outdoors on oak sawdust in Southern California, a region not known for growing mushrooms.

I asked a few friends who know much more about growing mushrooms than I do. They all suggested trying oyster mushrooms since this species easily out-competes molds and other organisms that try to colonize the substrate.

I ordered a four pound bag of blue oyster grain spawn from North Spore. Following the instructions on Fresh Cap Mushroom’s YouTube channel, I poked 1/4 inch holes in the sides of a five gallon bucket and 1/8 inch holes in the bottom to drain excess water. The white oak I used mostly came out my planer and jointer, both of which produce thin chips of wood that get sucked up by my dust collector.

On January 4th, I put the chips in a plastic bin and soaked them in boiling water to pasteurize them and give the oyster mushroom spawn a better chance of growing. I let the wood chips soak overnight. The next day I squeezed excess water out of the chips and put them in my holey (holy?) bucket, alternating layers of wood chips and spawn. I placed the bucket outside under the dense shade of our avocado tree. You can also, by the way, use straw instead of wood chips.

By January 18th the oyster mushrooms were “pinning,” that is, beginning to fruit out of the 1/4 inch holes. On January 27th, I harvested my first cluster of mushrooms. I can report that blue oyster mushrooms are delicious, with a concentrated umami/super-mushroomy flavor.

One curious thing: the mushrooms I harvested look more like the Italian Oyster mushrooms that North Spore sells, so I wonder if a mix-up happened. I’ve written North Spore for a clarification. [Editors note: North Spore got back to me and they say that these are blue oyster and the the Italian oyster has a wavier cap.]

This was my third and only successful attempt at growing mushrooms. The spawn cost $28 and I’ve harvested about 2 pounds of mushrooms so I can’t call this experiment a financial success just yet, though it looks like I might get a second flush out of the bucket. Financial considerations aside, the mushrooms were so delicious that I am definitely going to try this experiment again. Towards that end I’m taking a class this month with mushroom expert Peter McCoy.

Working backwards to the more involved processes of growing your own spawn and developing your own strains is, I’m guessing, the best way to make this more sustainable. I may try growing some pink oyster mushrooms, though I’ve heard mixed reports about flavor. McCoy is sending us home with kits so I’ll report back on how those grow.

Thank you Jimmy C. for texting me this image.

Posted a joke about hobby tunneling last week and this week it’s in the news

A new philosophy of art just dropped

World’s best building award won by rainwater-harvesting hospital in rural Bangladesh (thank you Nic for the link!)

Dawn of the Space Lords

NFTs Are, Quite Simply, Bullshit

The Great Los Angeles Train Robbery Is an Exercise in Misdirection

The exact moment the German health minister became legendary on philosophy Twitter

The new Root Simple house cocktail

RIP Don Young

To use the Tabard Inn Library you signed up for a lifetime membership for $3 (which would be about $100 today). This entitled you to borrow books for an additional 5¢ per book. The kiosks could be found in drug stores and other retail establishments. Eaton also had a home delivery book service called the Booklovers Library. The scheme didn’t last long but did result in the creation of a huge mailing list that Eaton attempted to use for other businesses. Does this sound familiar? My local Von’s grocery store has a DVD rental service kiosk out front that still gets use.

No, I’m not going to build a Tabard Inn Library reproduction for myself but I certainly admire this beautiful example.

If you’d like more background on the Tabard Inn Library and related businesses head over here.

Cactus at the Huntington Gardens.

Meet the LA Collective Taking the Plant World by Storm

Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme

What If We Just Stopped Being So Available?

Target Supremacy: What You Should Know About the 2013 Security Breach

How to do a campaign ad

Hobby tunneling

Trichia decipiens. Photo: National Parks Service.

You really should join your local mycological society. How else could you have your mind blown by an entire evening devoted to slime molds?

Such was the case last night when Kelly and I found ourselves entranced by a riveting Los Angeles Mycological Society Zoom lecture exploring the little known world of this odd, tiny organism. You too can and should watch the lecture by mushroom ethusiast and slime mold nerd Leah Bendlin.

Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa var. poroides. Photo: National Parks Service.

Yes this was a mycological Society lecture but slime molds are no longer lumped in with fungi. While they both produce spores, slime molds have membranes made of cellulose as opposed to fungi, which are made from chitin. Slime molds belong to the Kingdom Protista, a weird and diverse branch of the life tree that also includes seaweed and amoeba.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by leah_mycelia (@leah_mycelia)

Slime molds have never had their 15 minutes of fame and, as a result, few except “dog vomit” slime molds have popular names. The rest are the obsession of highly specialized academics who own microscopes. This is a shame as Leah Bendlin’s talk showed a mind bending set of ravishing images. She also has a “slime mold Sunday” feature on her Instagram @leah_mycelia.

Put plainly, slime molds are just super cool to look at even if you’ll never master the details of their taxonomy and their outre life cycle. They can, apparently, even solve mazes. You can find them on all continents and they pop up even in dry places such as where we live. A dog vomit variety regularly appears in a crack on our front stairs.

Many thanks to friend of the blog Aaron who encouraged me to rejoin the Los Angeles Mycological society and runs the awesome LA Mycological society book club!

Strange Zillow listing of the week

Frank Sinatra’s Chatsworth Home Listed For $21.5M (It’s actually kinda nice)

Cat on a hot satellite dish: Elon Musk’s Starlink antenna hits surprise problem

Climate change, rising temperatures will lead to rise in kidney stones – study

Vision Zero failure: 18 bike riders killed in Los Angeles in 2021

Gas stoves and indoor air quality

There is No Red Pill

Hacked Prius Running on MUNI Power Lines (spoiler: this is one of the best April Fools day jokes ever)

Fredric Jameson begins his essay “Utopia as Replication” (Valances of the Dialectic. New York, Verso, 2010) with the example of Los Angeles’ freeways, a kind of new order superimposed on an older kind of city. In the new Freeway city cars hover and over preexisting, denser, centralized spaces. In the collision of these two urbanities a new kind of city emerges, one that we’re all familiar with. The freeway builder’s utopian promise of speed and liberty delivers, instead, exurban sprawl, congestion and waves of urban decay and gentrification. That utopian vision of Freeway building is personified in mid-century figures like Robert Moses and the city fathers of early 20th century Los Angeles.

But Jameson goes on to question, “does anyone believe in progress any longer?  . . . are the architects and urbanists still passionately at work on Utopian cities?” An answer to Jameson’s question came this week in an astonishing and horrifying set of PowerPoint slides for the I-710 Corridor Aesthetic Master Plan released to the world via StreetsblogLA’s Twitter. The 710 freeway embodies the global, neoliberal economic order. It’s the main trucking route for all the crap from China that flows into the Port here and towards the massive distribution warehouses of Amazon and Wallmart. One of the many casualties of the global economy are the poorest residents of LA County who live in the pollution plume of the 710.

These PowerPoint slides prove that, yes, the engineers (architects?) are still designing stuff but they don’t believe in it anymore. It’s just a job. I suspect that at least some of them know that their work only makes things worse. At the end of the day these engineers and consultants get on the very same congested freeways they don’t believe in to commute to their exurban homes with the better schools. Gone is Moses’ utopian bluster, replaced with the most banal office PowerPoint slide pixel pushing, probably outsourced to some bored consultant.

This particular slide may be the best ever proof of the thesis of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs book, that perhaps half of all people in Western countries are engaged in useless, soul-sucking office work. I mean, spend a moment appreciating the visual chaos that is this image. Ask yourself if it has any purpose whatsoever other than fulfilling some checkbox on a list of meaningless public engagement metrics. What possible purpose does this slide fulfill?

Then appreciate this bleak slide depicting a vista we’re all too familiar with.

Of this slide StreetsblogLA says in Twitter, “And, hey, @metrolosangeles @CaltransDist7 what’s this beige-clad blond businessman doing walking across the 710 Freeway in Southeast Los Angeles? Why not depict Latino families who depend on these bridges to get to school?” Indeed, that beige-clad business man has never seen the outside of his Tesla when out and about. Meanwhile the car-less in this city, largely Latino and African-American,  have faced a striking increase in pedestrian and bike fatalities in the past year.

The French have an expression for this one, “a bandage on a wooden leg.” Here in the U.S. we might say, “the cherry on the shit sundae.” Create a bleak, hostile landscape and put up some kind of bland mural that serves only to accumulate diesel particulate.

Jameson acknowledges something that the writer and philosopher Mark Fisher later built on, how stuck we are in the way things are, unable to imagine a different way of doing things. But that’s precisely what we have to do: imagine and tell stories about a better world. Jameson concludes the essay,

Utopology revives long dormant parts of the mind, unused organs of political and historical and social imagination which have virtually atrophied for lack of use, muscles of praxis we have long since ceased exercising, revolutionary gestures we have lost the habit of perform- ing, even subliminally. Such a revival of futurity and of the positing of alternate futures is not itself a political program nor even a political practice: but it is hard to see how any durable or effective political action could come into being without it.

We lost Mark Fisher in 2017 to suicide. After his death his students painted a quote from his book Capitalist Realism. “Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.” Freeways may seem inevitable and necessary but they’ve been torn down in many cities now. We can do the same here in Los Angeles. Let’s stop composing Powerpoint slides and break out the dynamite.

Spotted in San Francisco: some strange brickwork.

Omicron could peak in U.S. fairly soon. Maybe.

30 Belgian Houses That Are So Bad, They’re Good

The Getty’s Gift to Locked Down Los Angeles: 71,139 Ed Ruscha Vintage Streetscape Photos Digitized

Column: He’s L.A. food royalty. He began with a taco cart. Let street vendors thrive

TikTok Star Who Sells Her Farts in Jars Starts Selling Fart NFTs

A Night at the Church of Salt Bae, America’s Newest Celebrity Chef

The old golden savages killed their philosophers

‘I felt powerless – so I started filming’: CyclingMikey on his one-man battle with dangerous drivers

Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement

America’s midlife crisis: lessons from a survivalist summit

Venice Bridge Will Be De-Calatrava’d to Keep Pedestrians From Face-planting

Kelly and I took a trip up to San Francisco over New Years to see relatives. While up there we were lucky enough to attend a seaweed foraging class with ForageSF that took place north of Bodega Bay.

Foraging for seaweed is a lot simpler than my recent, rekindled interest in edible mushrooms. In California there are no poisonous seaweeds, just ones that taste better than others. In this class we focused on Kombu, Laminaria setchellii a California version of the closely related seaweed that the Japanese harvest (Kombu is just the Japanese word for kelp). You can use Kombu in Japanese recipes, as a flavoring in soups and stews, as well as a substitute for Beano.

To conveniently harvest Kombu you need three things:

• Unpolluted water
• A rocky beach
• Ultra-low tide (so called “negative” tide)

You also need to learn to distinguish between “true” Kombu (Laminaria setchellii) and “false” Kombu (Pterygophora californica). [Editors note: I’m not 100% sure of the scientific names in this post so please correct me if I’ve got this wrong] False Kombu looks like a palm frond and is tasteless. They both tend to grow together.

Responsible harvesting means cutting no more than a quarter of the leaf like structure of the Kombu, leaving around an inch at the base of the cut for the kelp to regrow.

Seaweed begins rotting almost immediately after harvesting so you’ll need to start the drying process immediately. Before drying you need to wash the seaweed. Purists do this in the ocean. We didn’t have time for this so we did it at home. The disadvantage is that fresh water will dissolve seaweed so you have to work quickly and start the drying immediately. Drying can be done in the sun, on a dashboard, in a dehydrator or in an oven at the lowest setting. As it was dark and cold by the time we got home we used Kelly’s step mom’s oven.

Our very small Kombu haul dried and ready to use.

You should only harvest what you have space and time to dry within 24 hours after harvesting–the sooner the better. It’s legal in California to harvest up to 10 pounds of seaweed for personal use without a permit but you’ll probably want to harvest considerably less than this as scampering over the rocks, hauling it all back and processing it is exhausting work. It would be easiest to divide duties between a group of people if possible.

Our choice of footwear, loose fitting rubber boots used in construction work, was not up to the task. The best option would probably be a wetsuit. The water is cold, the rocks jagged, and you’ll want to also step around carefully so as not to kill starfish, anemone or one of the many other lifeforms that inhabit the shore.

In addition to Kombu we also encountered Bladderwrack Fucus distichus, the tips of which can be used in salads and a few other seaweeds. We hope to come back in the summer when you can find Nori.

The beach we were at also had enormous mussel beds. If I ever get around to attempting this I’ll blog about it but, from my initial research, mussel harvesting seems simple (leave a comment if you’ve done mussel or other shellfish harvesting). You just need a fishing license, a scale, a bucket and gloves. You’ll also need to check in with the state’s shellfish advisory website or hotline (1-800-553-4133) to avoid biotoxins that can be present in mussels at any time of the year but especially during the summer months. I should note that an unfortunate trend of irresponsible tide pool harvesting got going during the pandemic as reported by the LA Times.

Back to seaweed. Here’s a few resources:

California Native Plant Society article (pdf) on California Seaweeds
Fin + Forage Kelp Identification guide
A guide to brown seaweeds
The sea forager’s guide to the Northern California coast by Kirk Lombard and Leighton Kelly (has a short section on seaweed)
LA Times article on seaweed foraging in Southern California (I’ll note that I’ve heard conflicting information on whether SoCal beaches are too polluted to harvest seaweed)