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EXTRA BIG RECORD ANNOUNCEMENT dept. Our recent third full-length, Origin & Tectonics, is now available for purchase on CD ('compact' disc). CD only : $10 post-paid in US
posted by elvis TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks at a leaply latitude
posted by elvis TANKERTOWN is on an presidential holiday this week. In its stead, I direct your attention to these materials associated with CansaFis's upcoming art opening in Oakland on 3/7: BELIEVE IN BELIEVEACUSS.
Also, perhaps now is a good time for you True Tankertown Believers to re-acquaint thyselves with our story thus far... Regular comicxkal adventures will continue next week. posted by elvis The expansion of mankind, both in numbers and per capita exploitation of Earth's resources has been astounding (5). To give a few examples: During the past 3 centuries human population increased tenfold to 6000 million, accompanied e.g. by a growth in cattle population to 1400 million (6) (about one cow per average size family). Urbanisation has even increased tenfold in the past century. In a few generations mankind is exhausting the fossil fuels that were generated over several hundred million years. The release of S02, globally about 160 Tg/year to the atmosphere by coal and oil burning, is at least two times larger than the sum of all natural emissions, occurring mainly as marine dimethyl-sulfide from the oceans (7); from Vitousek et al. (8) we learn that 30-50% of the land surface has been transformed by human action; more nitrogen is now fixed synthetically and applied as fertilizers in agriculture than fixed naturally in all terrestrial ecosystems; the escape into the atmosphere of NO from fossil fuel and biomass combustion likewise is larger than the natural inputs, giving rise to photochemical ozone ('smog') formation in extensive regions of the world; more than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind; human activity has increased the species extinction rate by thousand to ten thousand fold in the tropical rain forests (9) and several climatically important "greenhouse' gases have substantially increased in the atmosphere: CO2 by more than 30% and CH4 by even more than 100%. Furthermore, mankind releases many toxic substances in the environment and even some, the chlorofluorocarbon gases, which are not toxic at all, but which nevertheless have led to the Antarctic 'ozone hole' and which would have destroyed much of the ozone layer if no international regulatory measures to end their production had been taken. Coastal wetlands are also affected by humans, having resulted in the loss of 50% of the world's mangroves. Finally, mechanized human predatim ("fisheries') removes more than 25% of the primary production of the oceans in the upwelling regions and 35% in the temperate continental shelf regions (10). Anthropogenic effects are also well illustrated by the history of biotic communities that leave remains in lake sediments. The effects documented include modification of the geochemical cycle in large freshwater systems and occur in systems remote from primary sources (11-13). posted by elvis TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis - Pauvrets palpitants sous ma lèvre, posted by elvis DO THE WOK OF LIFE Elvis’s recent China exposé tickled my Asian food fancy. While I am probably the biggest fan in the world of a double-hot dog smothered in cheese (see Let Them Eat Internet, Pt. 3 1/17/08), the Yanqui New Year found me looking towards a more sustainable diet. So I visited The Wok Shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown and bought this carbon-steel beauty:
Dig the orange counter-tops. To fully utilize a wok, it must be ween’d—excuse me—weaned with a seasoning ritual, done with your own bare hands. What follows serves to fully ‘de-metalize’ a wok and provide it with a template to lock in flavors correctly. STEP 1: Wash your wok (you don’t need a photo for this one!). STEP 2: Heat-dry wok on stove. You will notice it start to brown, nay,bronze, in the middle.
STEP 3: Pre-heat your overnto 450 m.f.ing degrees STEP 4: Coat the entire wok in vegetable oil! Try to avoid using a sock, but if you must, make sure it is clean! The sock I used was totally clean. Really!
Please make sure you wash the oil off your hands when you take pictures, especially if the camera you are using is not yours. Trust me, you want to take pictures. The wok will be with you forever and you must capture this intimate infusion initiation. ASIDE: What’s green and smells like pork? STEP 5: Place your wok upside-down in the scorching oven and let it sit there for 20 minutes. If your beautiful wok has a non-detachable wood or plastic handle, wrap it up in a damp cloth (or sock) and wrap the cloth in aluminum foil. The following picture totally kicks ass. It moves me.
STEP 6: Allow to cool in sink. Do not wet wok at this juncture as it may warp! LOOK AT HOW AWESOME IT LOOKS!!!!
STEP 7: Take a break and observe your roommate in his Ettrick t-shirt cooking polenta and black bean soup
STEP 8: Once the wok is cooled down, wok over to it and scrub the hell out of it. STEP 9: Heat dry on stove. Then kiss it.
Repeat the whole process two or three more times. Once you’ve completed the last cycle, place a little bit of oil in your wok, bring to a boil, throw in some green onions, and cook vigorously, making sure all areas of the wok come into contact with the onions. When the onions turn black you’ve hit the f’in jackpot. You’ve successfully bronzed your wok and are ready to get it on. Also, if you’re ever cold, heat up your wok and hover it over your head.
ASIDE 2: Kermit the frog’s finger! With you always, posted by mr. brian TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis UPCOMNG SHOW IN OAKLAND
posted by elvis TANKERTOWN weekly web comicxks
posted by elvis LET THEM EAT INTERNET, Pt 5 Posted in The photos in this final installment are a selective tour of several hutong, the traditional alleyways that were the foundation of Beijing dating back to the Yuan, Ming & Qing dynasties. They are of course being rapidly replaced by modern architecture and its associated comforts and aesthetics, for better and worse.
In conclusion, the heavy parallels between post-communist China & post-capitalist USA are on the table for anyone who cares to look, and they are ominous indeed: The tangible (literally - you could almost squeeze it) air pollution calls one's attention both to the past and future of the industrialized nations that got there first (but maybe not worst - we shall see). As I mentioned previously, there is nothing in America that can prepare you for this. Los Angeles on a bad day is minor league - you can see it on the horizon, but in Beijing you see it across the block. It is incessant, in the bone-dry 20F winter, even at night. I can only imagine what it is like during their highly desertified sandstorm season in the late spring, or in the pits of August. Perhaps I should try out for the marathon this Olympic round; my half-pack a day habit may gird the lungs relative to the pink-tissued pansies at the starting blocks under the Beijing sun.
Again, they have their "blue sky days" as well and it varies with the weather systems, but above all I am very glad I had this particularly apocalyptic experience. My perspective on the overall sustainability of our current petroleum orgy certainly wasn't changed, but it was underscored in a visceral way that I will value for a long time. You can search around and read a vast amount of discussion of China's impact upon the environment, and no doubt the korp narrative will turn to this increasingly as we move toward the Olympics this summer, but the basic summary rings loud & clear: China has made a big fossil fuel-based mess, and when the west yells at them to clean it up, they say: "fuck me? fuck you!" Their logic is not unsound: we did it first and arguably worst, and they, along with India, are merely playing catch-up with very similar rules. My empirical experience in Beijing draws a very distinct line between what the US has gotten away with thus far and what is looming for all industrialized nations in the very near future. The specific geography and methods that the US has chosen for its particular blackening/profiting experiment has - one way or another - afforded us a few more years of reasonably human pollution levels before it all goes to hell. But as the oil dwindles and Appalachia is leveled for the coal that lies beneath, the Capitol Mall will be looking like Tian'anmen Square on a bad day sooner than later. The lesson I took from this experience wasn't "China needs to clean up its act" but rather: "this is the near-term future of petroleum man, and boy are future generations screwed". Thus I, like many travelers, had my previously held paradigms enhanced & fortified rather than shaken.
The vectors of post-communist China and post-capitalist USA seem to be striking a heavy magick true tone and converging, with significant inertia, toward an intersection in the near future based upon controlled consumption conducive to both elite profiteering and largely non-violent pacification of the masses. I didn't watch any television in Beijing, but ignoring that admittedly significant variable, the fact that there was no pretense of democratic governance seemed uncannily insignificant. The carrot of increased consumption 'autonomy' hangs as heavily over Manhattan, or Atlanta, as it does over Beijing. It isn't even a degree of "the same difference" but rather no difference. The only thing better for the masters than a regular game of "meet the new boss..." is "boss, what is that?" If you provide the correct illusion of steadily increasing 'prosperity' and its potential to a critical mass of a state population, governance become increasingly irrelevant and control can easily be left to those with the propensity to control.
Regardless of your current impression, the only real level of internet censorship in the PRC is the usual question of who actually has access to the internet; aside from the BBC and many blogs (who needs them?), everything else is readily available. Most 'blogs' that use a distinct domain rather than a blogger account, etc, have no problem getting through to whoever calls them up. The PRC certainly does select and punish domestic dissidents who are publishing online from within China, but so do many other governments, including ours, as well as Interpol, the RIAA, etc. The bottom line is the carrot of prosperity and inevitable march forward; as long as the carrot looms in sufficient relief, questions of democracy or associated liberties are a secondary concern. Sound familiar? If anything, I see a near-term inverse movement of more US-style control in China, and more PRC-style control in the states. The federal government here may move toward more overt selective censorship of information and (already underway) increasing surveillance of the civilian population and hard police tactics on resistance movements. The PRC, on the other hand, is clearly aiming for the type of huge 'soft power' enjoyed by the media monopolies that stay comfortably under the covers with the state in the current US system. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some form of "Chinese democracy" is unveiled in the next ten years that has all the legitimacy and associated debate of our current system. Try hard to see the Chinese Communist party allowing one additional "opposition party" to challenge them as anything different than what you are pulling levers for in November (hint: you have to try really hard).
There has been a good deal of noise in the wrong kind of right journals here about the impending Chinese menace in military and economic realms, and I have some thoughts on the matter, although they don't match up with well-paid bores at the Heritage Foundation. I do see a legacy of pre- and post-1949 solidarity that is virtually non-existent in the states these days. There is a value applied to work and the subservient end of hierarchy that has long since disappeared in a vapor of air-conditioned cable television and high fructose corn syrup on the east side of the Pacific. My values are far out of line from both models, mind you, but I am simply trying to point out that they don't play the state lotto in rural China. Although the aforementioned carrot of wealth now hovers always over the skyline of the cities, the essential contemporary American value of something for nothing just doesn't seem to apply. Within my general prognosis over the next few decades, this is all highly significant. Relative to the US, I see the Chinese population as both better prepared to endure the inevitable hardships associated with our collective expulsion from the Garden of Cheap Oil, and more likely to conform into a functional & coherent national movement when the proverbial shit hits the fan. Add to this their abundance of indigenous coal (which the US holds as well), and their potential alliance with Russia and its remaining oil reserves (well, we have Iraq as well), and there is indeed a serious 'threat' to US hegemony upon the western horizon. As the remaining oil supplies dwindle the ensuing alliances will be significant & portentous, but not necessarily surprising or novel. A 21st century & heavily nuclear Sino-Russian axis will give the New York Times a lot to chew on as the federal government makes its own domestic preparations for the petroleum end game. I can't help but see the Chinese population summoning a bit stiffer upper lip than the current crop of video game-bred poker-spectator fast-food drones we have littered across the continent. Keep in mind also that the Chinese have a long (2,000+ year) history of dealing with tribal/ethnocultural strife and are still a relatively coherent national body, whereas the federal government is still trying to sort out ending African slavery and decide whether or not 'illegal' South American slave labor is a very good or very untenable component to the new economy. Then, again, if they manage to keep the cable on and the doritos flowing here in the states, we could have a real hot stalemate on our hands...
In contemporary Beijing the fetishization of Mao Tse-Tung is not surprisingly still in full effect in any historical or cultural site draped with the necessary amount of state regalia. What is more striking is the lack of any materialist nods to the true godfather of the current systems: Deng Xiaoping. In the same way that our dominant narratives fetishize our "founding fathers" over the rest of the more relevant players, the ghost of Deng is content to lurk in the background as his seeds flower and produce new skyscrapers bowed to international commerce each new schmoggy day. It is not the lack of discussion of the blood on the hands of the pantheon - we all know what Mao, Chiang, Jefferson, Lincoln, et al, did - but rather the lack of discussion of the contemporary masters that is significant. It is always more acceptable to look toward the history books in any light than it is to examine the current captain and his crooked trajectories along a dwindling sea & increasingly poisonous sea. Mao may have starved 30 million human beings in the late 20th century; if there were 30 million Indians at the end of his barrel, Andrew Jackson wouldn't have flinched - progress, you understand. Beyond the schmog, the aetheric Mao and Jefferson share a stately portrait while Deng extends his hand to a smiling Rockefeller and the masses happily cringe like some (western) socialist cartoon from the '30s; let them eat internet.
These evolving narratives of nationalism over time stick in my teeth, but resonate in my chest enough to tell me they are important, not just for our understanding of our past, but to inform our decisions in the future. At this point it should be clear to even the most cynical neo-liberal cheerleader or proper world-systems analyst that the 21st century ride is going to desperately & bloodily graft 20th century models onto a quicksand-like materialist foundation, and not vice-versa. The stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we allow our states to tell us, will determine how effectively we triage this gushing motherfucker of a wound in the human & non-human ecosystem. It is not a matter of how well the majority of homo sapiens are eating as they enter the next century, but rather what we have to do now to limp a sustainable number of homo sapiens into the future to start work on the next model. The history of the human race up until now has been about power; all proper liberal notions are secondary to this narrative (and relatively recent developments). The next chapter must necessarily be about sustainability. This is not a value or choice, but an inevitability. There is one other option but the dinosaurs already tried that one without much success. Ganbei!
posted by elvis
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