Impactivism

Teen activism, prom style

On Tuesday, dozens of Bay Area high-schoolers took to Union Square in downtown San Francisco to protest the use of toxic chemicals in cosmetics products. They wore prom dresses and combat boots.

Their message? To pressure cosmetics companies to remove ingredients linked to cancer or birth defects from products.

Learn more about the problem and check out the video from Tuesday's "ProjectPROM" event below.

70 years of shock and awe

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica. As George Steer reported in the (London) Times the next day, "the whole town of 7,000 inhabitants, plus 3,000 refugees, was slowly and systematically pounded to pieces" by the German air raids. "Fighters, meanwhile, plunged low from above the centre of the town to machine-gun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields."

Mark Kurlasky has a decent piece in today's LAT about the bombing. He writes that "to many previously apolitical Americans and Britons, it was the bombing of Guernica that convinced them of the brutality of fascism."

Well, maybe. But as for the U.S. and British governments, they tacitly supported Franco, who had called for Hitler's support to overthrow the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic. I wrote more about this recently.

Halliburton solves global warming

I saw one of the most brilliant pieces of culture-jamming art I've ever experienced at The Andy Warhol Musuem in Pittsburgh today. In fact, every time I think of it, I can't stop laughing.

The Yes Men's Halliburton parody is in many ways so simple, yet so cleverly executed. And it has quite a delicious sense of the absurd.

At an insurance industry conference last year about disaster preparedness, in a presentation entitled "What Noah Knew," the Yes Men, posing as Halliburton executives, introduced the Halliburton SurvivaBall™, an invention for business executives designed to "save a human being, no matter what mother nature throws at him."

It's a large inflatable suit to weather any environmental disaster that might befall us. A gated community for one, if you will. The exhibit at the Warhol included several inflated SurvivaBalls™, video from the conference, video simulations of people in SurvivaBalls™ withstanding arduous weather conditions, and many fabulous illustrations of its myriad uses and capabilities, including this usage and safety card.

I love to see culture-jamming. Because it's fun. And creative. And because making people laugh is much more memorable than telling them what they're supposed to oppose, or who they should vote for.

I'll let Amy Goodman tell the story below, and you can check out more photos from the "Catastophic Loss" conference here.

What are you against today?

And, more inspiringly, what are you for?

Party Music by The Coup is in my rotation again. There's an interesting story to the original cover art for this CD, which appeared to depict lead singer Boots Riley and Pam the Funkstress detonating a bomb at the World Trade Center. The album was scheduled to be released in September 2001; the cover was pulled after the September 11 attacks.

This song is called "Ride the Fence:"

Land and freedom

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Second Spanish Republic. On April 14, 1931, King Alfonso XIII left the country.

The Republic’s new constitution, adopted later that year, established freedom of speech and association, separation of church and state, universal suffrage and a right to divorce.

Overall, in spite of a wide range of liberties, the constitution failed to agree in key areas with the conservative right, which was very powerfully rooted in rural areas, and the powerful Catholic Church, which was stripped of schools and public subsidies under the new constitution.

The constitution also recognized Spain's regions' right to autonomy for the first time in history. Catalunya (1932) and the País Vasco (1936) exercised this right. Before the civil war broke out later that year, Andalucia, Aragon and Galicia had taken steps toward similar autonomy.

On July 19, 1936, fascists under the leadership of General Francisco Franco attempted to overthrow the elected Popular Front government and take the garrisons in Barcelona. Workers, soldiers, civil guards and policemen faithful to the Spanish Republic fought back and successfully drove out the fascists. The celebrations did not last, however.

Franco pressed his assault on the Republic from other fronts and was, crucially, lent support from Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. (Picasso's famous, immense painting Guernica, which I saw last year in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, depicts the Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, destroying the town and killing many hundreds of people.)
 
Leaders of the so-called free world, on the other hand, largely stood by and watched as Franco’s forces defeated the Spanish Republic.

Despite the pretense of neutrality, in the United States, Roosevelt’s administration effectively undermined the Republic because it saw in it the threat of a popular revolution. Roosevelt's "neutrality" stand was carefully crafted to deprive the Republic of arms and oil. His administration pressured suppliers (including foreign ones) to refrain from shipping materials, including shipments contracted earlier.

The fascists were getting guns from Germany, but they didn't have any oil. But Texaco, which was run at that time by an outright Nazi, had contracts with the Republic. They terminated those contracts, and contacted ships at sea to deliver the oil to the fascists instead, which was illegal even under the U.S. Neutrality Act.

For its part, Britain, under Churchill, virtually absolved the fascist elements and outrageously blamed instead "the swift, stealthy and deadly advance of the extreme communist or anarchist factions" for the outbreak of violence in Spain.

Footnote: An Irish brigade of 700, La Bandera Irlandesa, organized by the right-wing politician Eoin O’Duffy, organized to fight for Franco’s fascists, despite a declaration by the Irish government that the war was illegal. Interestingly, the conservative Catholic Irish contingent originally refused Franco's order to fight against the separatist Basques of the Republican side, seeing parallels between their recent Irish independence struggle and Basque aspirations. Irish people fought on both sides of the war: many also joined the international brigades to fight for the Republic.

The Spanish left was far from blamless, strategically: At a point when German and Italian-supported fascist armies were marching on the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, Communists, Trotskyists and Anarchists--collectively the staunchest defenders of the newly formed Spanish Republic--began shooting each other. Instead of figuring out how best to defeat the fascists, these three forces fought to define which of them was the superior or true anti-fascist.

The fascists ended up capturing the whole of Spain in March 1939, a prelude to World War II. The divisions of the Spanish Civil war still echo today in Spanish politics.

If your love is true, click here

Today's advice column question in Salon's "Since You Asked" made me smile. And cry just a little. (But using my inside voice.)

From the question, "I'm obsessed with being a hipster:"

I think that I should be happy to be in more comfortable surroundings, yet I feel so dissatisfied. I go to my job with my wonderful co-workers, and I judge them for listening to Coldplay. I judge my kindhearted friends for not having dark-rimmed glasses and Vans. I judge my neighborhood for not having galleries, or the right ZIP code.

I should be happy, but instead I achingly obsess over Pitchfork reviews and Vice Do's and Don'ts. At work I sit in front of my computer and listen to people talk about Nine West heels and 401Ks and I just want to drink whiskey till I die. I want to read Kerouac and smoke cigarettes until my lungs are black and filthy.

Yes, quite. Ah, the melancholy of being neurotic and obsessive. In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me; you say it wearies you.

Fo' reals.

And from the answer by Salon's Cary Tennis:

Before, when we lived in places, this need could be met by places. But we don't live in places anymore. We live in the electronic wind. We live in twitters and tweaks and snippets. We live in dream sequences and stream of consciousness. We live in downloads and compression. We live at 120 miles an hour. We live in Sensoria, Ill.

Yes, it appears we still have much ado to know ourselves.

Hope springs eternal from the Irish man's burden

I wasn’t sure if I was quite getting the depression quotient I was clearly craving from over-listening to Damien Rice’s new album “9” earlier this year.

So I’ve moved on to The Frames’ “The Cost,” which, for an album filled with so much pain, regret and sadness, is actually rather hopeful. Musically, it is powerful stuff too, and often is underscored by Colm Mac Con Iomaire's electric-fiddle-playing duels with the guitars.

I saw the Frames play the Fillmore on Saturday. They’re always a great show. True to form, lead singer Glen Hansard performed with the cracked-out intensity of the tortured Irish soul that he is.

from Bad Bone
There’s a bad bone inside of me
All my troubles started there
And all the cracks are adding up to be
A little more than you can bear
When I met you, you were bitter still
From a scar you’re never going to show
And I was cursed with a jealousy
That’s killed every love I’ve ever known

What is with us Irish, anyway?

Yet out of the ashes of loss, hopelessness and occasional anger rise the stirrings of an undefeated and resilient heart. Although the shroud of heartbreak hangs everywhere on this album, you can’t help but feel that finding (or holding on to) love is always worth another shot. And another.

Because whatever doesn’t defeat you makes you stronger, right? At the very least, perhaps, it reminds you that you are alive.

from People Get Ready
And we have all the time in the world/
To get it right
And we have all the love in the world/
To set alight

from Falling Slowly
Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice/You have a choice
You’ve made it now

Those pesky Guantanamo detainees

Those terrorists at Guantanamo are just never happy, no matter how much we do for them.

In case you missed it, the NYT reported yesterday that more than a dozen prisoners at the U.S. detention center there "are subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment."

You know, kind of like the way you subject yourself to your co-workers breaking wind. It was your choice to go to work, after all.

It reminded me of the indoctrinated news coverage of the prisoners who committed suicide at the prison last summer, whose deaths were (I'm not kidding) generally covered in the mainstream news media as a calculated assault on the United States. As I wrote at the time:

At first I wasn’t exactly sure what was behind the Guantanamo Bay suicides. But after reading the news reports carefully, I finally got it: we Americans are under attack from a bunch of guys rotting in their jail cells.

You see, the terrorists are trying to make us look like the bad guys by killing themselves while they’re supposed to be under 24/7 supervision. As Adm. Harry B. Harris explained to reporters, the men who committed suicide at Gitmo “have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own.” Harris believes the suicides were “not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

That’s right, these guys who choked themselves to death with their own bedding are a perfect example of how the United States is suffering more than anyone in this latest front in the war on terror.

First, media reports reveal that the three detainees had the audacity to avoid discovery by prison guards while they quietly offed themselves. Not happy to play by the rules, they apparently dispensed with the usual suicidal cry of, “Come quickly, I’m killing myself!”

To those of you who whine they were imprisoned for nearly four years without being charged with a crime, I say: Get used to the new reality, constitution geeks.

Next, they fashioned a noose out of their bed sheets. Allowing prisoners such “comfort items” as bed sheets and toiletries will now have to be reassessed, according to Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, head of the U.S. Southern Command. We’ve treated these people so well and this is how they repay us? Instead, the army says it will replace the standard issue Bed, Bath & Beyond “Egyptian” cotton sheets with recycled copies of Martha Stewart Living. Hey, it’s good enough for the homeless—plus you can learn how to etch your own suicide notes into ocean-worthy seashells.

Finally, the terrorists capped their carefully-staged prison revolt by unhurriedly hanging themselves until they asphyxiated. The army later said they would reconsider providing other luxury items at the prison such as three-speed brushed nickel ceiling fans, to which prisoners could potentially fasten a noose when they’re not cooling off after a long day of tropical confinement. I know the blinkered ACLU-loving beatniks will complain as usual—but everyone knows the wire cages at the lavish Cuban prison camp already boast A/C to temper the oppressive 110-degree heat.

You know we’re in trouble when it seems like the terrorists are winning the P.R. war against us.

The White House assured Americans that the deceased men were “committed terrorists,” according to the New York Times. Who amongst us actually needs to see evidence produced in court in order to believe the men who work for the president?

Just because the U.N. Committee Against Torture says detaining prisoners at Gitmo violates international law doesn’t mean that we can’t operate it according to basic business ground rules. So, tired of thwarting prisoners intent on hunger strikes by strapping them to restraining chairs and force feeding them through plastic tubes, President Bush announced additional measures the United States will undertake to prevent further suicides:

• All Guantanamo detainees will undergo “sensitivity training” to show them how much it hurts our feelings—and kinda makes us look bad—when they kill themselves in despair at being locked away indefinitely with no legal recourse;
• All newly-admitted detainees must complete a “prison application,” which requires prisoners to disclose all previous instances in which they have been imprisoned indefinitely without charge, and whether they tried to commit suicide there or not;
• To improve prisoners’ treatment by guards, “360-degree review” will be instituted, in which prisoners are encouraged to openly and honestly assess the job performances of the prison guards who terrorize them with dogs and occasionally urinate on their Korans;
• Some prisoners previously transferred from Abu Ghraib will be allowed to leave, on condition that they sign “confidentiality agreements,” in which on-the-job skills such as balancing, hooded, on a wooden box while attached to electrodes and remaining calm in their restraints while being sodomized by a broomstick* couldn’t be disclosed to future jailors, in order to avert leaking any “trade secrets.”

It’s understandable if we occasionally feel just a little bit bad for these evildoers, especially if some of them are merely shepherds from rural Afghanistan who were attracted by our shiny yellow food ration packs—or was that a cluster bomb?

And so what if 25 other Gitmo prisoners previously attempted to commit suicide there? It’s still the Caribbean.

But we can’t forget who the real victim is in this latest terrorist plot—the United States of America. Remember, our enemies only engage in shallow propaganda stunts such as committing suicide while indefinitely imprisoned without trial because they hate our freedoms, our generosity and our love for the rule of law.

*Actually happened, according to a U.S. Army report.

The death of recycling?

Has traditional recycling outlived its usefulness?

And what would you think about a large swathe of the environmental movement, involving trillions of dollars worth of resources annually in the United Sates alone, whose co-option environmentalists ignore?

Paul Palmer argues that what we really need is a system for designing and manufacturing products with perpetual re-use in mind. That we need to recycle the function of products, not just the materials they are made of. This, obviously, has significant implications for design.

In this essay he notes that:

1) The garbage industry moved to take over the recycling movement, turning it into a division of garbage management, finally paying recyclers a surcharge to co-opt them.

2) The recyclers accepted the pre-eminence of the garbage industry and dropped any notion of replacing or closing dumps.

But in the new zero waste theory, products are designed from the start to be reused over and over.

I plan to read Palmer’s book, Getting To Zero Waste. Very soon. Well certainly after I finish reading the four books I'm currently reading.

In the meantime, I suppose I'll continue separating my recyclables so a small percentage of the waste I create doesn't go into the ground or the oceans. Grrr.

Brit but u know it

Lily Allen wants you to think she's the baddest girl of Britpop.

As she writes on her blog, after failing to win any of her four nominations at the Brit awards in February, "I went out for a few drinks, assaulted some paparazzi with my stiletto and went to bed."

Allen is playing tomorrow (Monday) night at the Fillmore (it's sold out but you can always try Craigslist). Last time she was in San Francisco, she says she "had a row with some journalist cause he kept trying to make comparisons between myself and Paris Hilton saying that we both got where we are because of our families' money and connections, and the 'obvious' musical similarities. I told him he was misinformed and where to go."

Like Jem, Allen's writing is often clever and insightful, especially when recounting the vacuousness of some romantic entanglements. Her music draws on reggae, ska and hip hop for inspiration. Unlike the more affable and gracious Jem, however, Allen is arrogant and in-your-face.

But sometimes that's just what we need. And want. Innit.

An authentic voice for a snarky, disillusioned generation, or a royal fuss over absolutely nuffink?