Urban Landscapes and Wilderness

Often as both a child and an adult, I read about how wonderful it is for children to go exploring in the woods, to lose themselves in a sort of wilderness.  In my life, I’ve also gotten exposed to a few corny movies dwelling on this phenomenon.  And then there was a ton of stuff in the horror genre, both stories and movies, which dwelled on this or that old house deep in the woods, which, while supposedly horrifying, was  really a celebration of the thrills and mysteries that can be enjoyed, especially when you’re a kid, from exploring unknown terrain deep in the woods or forest.  Of course, going way back, there were a whole bunch of fairy tales about that too.

But since I was born and raised in New York City - mostly in some very urban areas of the The Bronx - and spent my whole life in very urban parts of big cities, I haven’t had that kind of experience with the forest or the woods.  All this stuff in the movies and in old books about kids’ scary adventures in the forest were sort of like stories from another world for me.  On the other hand, I had my own wilderness to explore, which I deeply appreciated as a child and still appreciate fully now.

Thanks to Wood’s Lot, tonight I’ve found a wonderful piece of text describing this other wilderness in terms that fit very well with my own thoughts and memories.  And, actually, it’s written by a photographer, as an introduction to a beautiful set of photographs.  That photographer is Paul Raphaelson, and this work is included in a new site called Urban Landscapes.  Raphaelson writes:

In the early nineties I lived in a working class neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, which was surrounded by sprawling reaches of hard to define space.  Old New England houses mingled with empty lots, crumbling husks of factories, tract houses, and a dizzying web of trees, weeds, cyclone fences, and high tension wires.  Layers of growth and decay concealed any easy answers.  While it could seem as if the landscape had been born of a simple mix of accident and neglect, the feeling was one of a larger process at work.  I saw a kind of unconscious synergy in the acts of people, nature, and erosion that had shaped these spaces over many years.  When I later moved to an industrial section of Brooklyn, New York, the mix of these elements changed, but the underlying feeling stayed the same.  There was more to the garbage than garbage; more to the desolation than desolation.

I titled the work Wilderness early on, in response to these impressions.  The word has meant different things to different cultures over the years, but it has usually carried senses of mystery, of darkness, and of an emergence somewhere outside the borders of the comfortable and the known.

The Wilderness has been a place that we feared but at the same time longed for, often with a sense that only there, far from the safety and attachments of our everyday lives, might we finally find ourselves.

Exactly!

Something I Wrote In Defense of Cities

Below is a slightly rewritten version of a comment I wrote on this thread at Infoshop.org.  It’s mostly irrelevant to the article, and so I wondered if I should have posted it.   Although, fortunately, I also wrote something else that was much more relevant.  (You can see the other comment that I wrote, because I signed them both “Richard S.” Oh, and by the way, also check out the article, on the social systems of the Iroquois - Mr. Stephen Arthur obviously put a lot of work into it.)  Anyway, I felt compelled to write my particular, mostly irrelevant comment because someone else in the comments section seemed to be going in the direction of a traditional primmie take on cities:  cities = bad, cities are the cause of imperialism and environmental destruction, etc.  And that’s one thing that I can’t let go without disagreeing, because…

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In present times, to say that cities are most responsible for imperialism or economic destruction and people outside of cities less so would be absurd.  It is extremely rare to find people and communities outside of the city who can use means of transport and sources of food or energy that aren’t in some way connected to the global system that survives by a destructive level of extraction from nature and major exploitation of labor.  Moreover, it is extremely misleading to imply that in a place like, say, the U.S., individuals living outside of the cities are less responsible for this extraction and exploitation than people inside the cities. 

To give one small example…  Who lives outside the city who doesn’t depend on driving a car at some point?  I’ve lived in NYC for most of my 45 years and never even learned to drive.  And there are a lot of other people in NYC who never drive, even if they might have at one time.

Argue as much as you like about how cities contributed to the destruction and exploitation (and imperialism) in ancient times…  But in the present situation, the creation of cities -  that is, areas in which people live in larger concentrations -  actually provides more of an opportunity to minimize each individual’s contribution to ecological destruction and global exploitation, because it forces people to share more resources and it provides them with more of an ability to travel by public transportation, especially subways, etc., than a suburban or rural dwelling that requires virtually everyone to commute in automobiles.  Moreover, because people in the cities are by necessity in the most direct contact with the collective waste and pollution generated by their daily living and working lives, they become more directly aware of, and responsible for, the necessity of cleaning up after themselves.  (Not that we do this so well - but we might do better, if the city residents’ waste were all we had to deal with.  If only the city - especially the poorer areas in today’s cities - didn’t have to be the dumping ground for so much garbage and pollution from people living in safe suburban or rural areas many miles away…  Even when the city is not the direct recipient of garbage from such people’s homes, it’s the recipient of so much waste caused by  many of them during the workday, before they hop into their polluting, gas-guzzling automobiles to flee to a superficially cleaner environment.) 

Given all of the above… I believe that the most “green” environment in the present day, and probably in the future, would be an ecologically conscious city, especially one designed to encourage equal sharing of facilities and public transport (which would be most possible, of course, if it didn’t function according to capitalist principles).

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Property More Valuable Than Lives

Somewhat related to some stuff that I said in the prior post, I’ve really appreciated this quote that I got from Loveecstacycrime, originally from a guy named Derrick Jensen, whom I don’t know much about:

The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control–in everyday language, to make money–by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

Don’t have anything to add except, how very true…

A Welcome Victory for Jeff Luers

I was very pleased to see over at Bombs and Shields that Jeffrey “Free” Luers has been granted a reduction in his jail sentence by as much as 15 years.  Originally, Luers had been sentenced, at the age of 22 or 23, to his age in prison, more or less, for torching a few empty SUVs and not physically hurting anyone.  The sentence was obviously politically motivated, though it was also sort of typical in a land where almost any one person’s property is considered so much more valuable than another person’s life.

The sheer injustice of this sentence, this attempt to totally destroy 23 or so years of somebody’s life for a very inadequate reason, should have been a cause for outrage from people with many different political interests and beliefs.  Instead, many “progressives,” both liberals and leftists, refused even to talk about this subject because they disagreed with Free’s tactics or his priorities.  Which was completely beside the point.  Torching SUVs isn’t exactly my tactic and global warming isn’t my main/exclusive focus, either (I think a lot more people will suffer and die first from war, lack of access to healthcare, and poverty); however, I would never have used those differences as excuses for not speaking up against this injustice.  Sometimes people on the left can act very stoopid when they’re asked to help defend the rights or liberties of someone who isn’t exactly in their particular niche…  I also think that so many people are just chickenshit.  (Is it possible that we might see a little more courage all around when it comes to speaking up about this sort of miscarriage of justice and even acting against it now that the Bush regime and all that went with it have been discredited to some degree?  That would be nice, but I think that we’ll only see a little bit of that change in social climate, and only for a short time, unless bigger changes happen further down the road.  But I digress.)

Anyway…  It is nice to see a little good news in the news for a change.

Introduction

This blog is mainly a combination of two endeavors that have taken up a lot of time in my life (which life has amounted to 45 years and four months so far, at the time of this writing).  They are political writing and music criticism (”rock” criticism, but not really).  My politics might be called “libertarian socialist” or “ultra-leftist.”  (”Ultra-leftist” is considered a derogatory term by some, but I don’t mind it.)  In music, at this time, I am most interested in cutting-edge electronica, trip-hop and hip-hop, dancehall music, and some goth/punk/industrial post-rock

I earn my living mainly as a proofreading temp, and through some writing once in a while.  I consider myself to be very much in a condition that a lot of Europeans define as “precarity.”  This probably weighs heavily on the way that I think about things.

I live at the bottom of The Bronx, in a neighborhood known as Mott Haven.  I share a house with four other people and three cats.  I had “my own” cat, but he had to go somewhere else for a while.  That was sad, but as long as I can have some cats around me…  I love cats.

This blog is called “Commie Curmudgeon (II)” because it is a successor to another blog that I called “Commie Curmudgeon.”

[P.S. "Editorial note," some months later:  I looked at this post when I noticed in my stats that someone had visited it...  I originally had written that this was duplicated in my "about" section.  But that has changed, as has my life, a bit.  For one thing, I now live in Queens.  So, I thought I better add something here, though it's many months after I wrote this post.  (Do people normally do that in blogs?  Or is this "cheating"?  Hmm.)]