(no subject)
Goodness there is so much to say. Suddenly I want to tell you all everything everything about my life, because it has all seemed so improbable lately. After graduating in January I took a week in Boston to, without quite realizing it, complete the healing of a broken heart that I've been nursing for many months. I discovered bicycles on bridges and empowerment in love and then went to Brooklyn, where I snuck into the fall season fashion shows and found true acceptance in an old friend and got invited to be an agricultural consultant for the microbrewery portion of a writer's colony. Then a snowy four days in D.C., panic, gifts, absinthe in museums, a brokedown train to greensboro, a hitch-ride from the Daytona 500 to the Everglades for my birthday; beautiful latin american solidarity workshops, beautiful backyard gardens in Lake Worth, long trips with rodeo-riding truckers and their giant belt buckles, and then New Orleans, where I am now. Oh, New Orleans.
Whether fortunately, paradoxically, or tragically, New Orleans today is truly the hub of a thousand different overlapping currents of activity in the U.S. During the day you hear the sound of hammers everywhere and see homes writhing with workers dismantling moldy walls; are greeted by the staring alien faces of teenagers in respirators. At night the unlit, glass-scattered streets of the ninth ward fill up with punks on bicycles who are going to busk in the French Quarter, break into abandoned school gymnasiums or dig through some evicted family's belongings in the Bywater. There are thousands of volunteers but also thousands of opportunists -- squatters, salvagers, construction workers, photographers, engineers with products to sell -- and seeing the degree overlap between these groups leaves me with a constant sense of vertigo. Like microbial decomposers, like the blooming weeds that are slowly beginning to churn up the crushed sidewalks, the momentary inhabitants of this city are gobbling up every nutrient resource that has been left exposed (residents from distribution centers, gypsies and travellers from abandoned homes) and recycling it into something that is ambiguiously black or white, young or old, wonderful or terrible. Does morality exist in a place like this, where civilization's cycles and processes and simultaneous self-destructions and resurrections all seem to be happening in triple-time, to resemble natural cycles and to have the vast momentum of nature behind them? The insulted and ignored members of long-time poor communities are beginning to reinhabit their own spaces, calling on old neighbors from around the country to join them, and it's pretty beautiful to see. But these communities are in danger from above and below; sometimes the whiteness of the faces growing increasingly comfortable in stricken communities seems just as sinister as the mayor's plan to bulldoze the ninth ward into casinos and golf courses. Where and how can justice be found in these mixed-up spaces? Even in the Common Ground barracks there is this constant senselessness, this absense of sense in the way we locate ourselves and navigate work and treat each other, that resonates with the chaos of the broken-up outside world and its empty-eyed traffic lights.
A friend spoke of the economy of political activism and how its geographical fluidity resembles that of labor markets, with members of the radical community swarming into hotbeds of political tension or injustice. So many seem to carry with them a sense of righteousness and entitlement that makes me itchy, but the ideas being passed around are so appealing that they are difficult to contest. For better or worse, many creative groups are seeing New Orleans as kind of tabula rasa upon which to manifest their dreams for a better society; they are coming here to start their biodiesel refineries, public bike projects, community gardens. When I came here I did not expect to find myself located in the middle of so many projects in art and sustainability, but having looked around I am guiltily deciding to stay, to learn as much as I can from the groups who are present while doing my best to be of use to the local community. I feel much dirtier about staying than I had ever expected, because the benefits of being here are as much selfish as ethical, but I'm going to try to hang around until May unless I start to feel that I'm really not furthering the ends I want to further.
As it is, I'm busy all the time. I'm mostly working on bioremediation project, helping educate community members about how to clean up their soil using microbes, fungi and garden plants. I learn new things constantly, walk constantly (5 miles today). Today, for example, I spent a lovely afternoon with the quiet fungus boy and found out how to use layers of wet cardboard to grow mushroom spawn, which we will eventually use to remediate for things like arsenic, diesel fuel and persistent aromatic hydrocarbons. When I have time, I work in the kitchen. Last week I ran a gazpacho-making operation that served 300 people!
Oh and it is sad here but so beautiful, beautiful in the places where persistent night flowers unexpectedly release their scents, beautiful in the rust and the everpresent bacchanites and the mardi gras floats in torn up warehouses, the anarchist carnival parades, the meeting of the trains and the mississipi, the painted houses.
Now what is next I just don't know, but I have set my sights on a permaculture center in Austin and the Beehive Collective in Maine for summer, or maybe labor union organizing, or perhaps some old cook-by-day fly-by-night story. I am not sure I was ever meant to be one of those rootless anarchists. I miss my kitchen and my kimino. I want to be what they call "Porch Core," but perhaps angrier and fuller of wine. Anyhow perhaps I'll see you around April 9, I have an interview in Boston for money to go back to Brazil.
My new permanent email address: savanna("at" symbol)post.harvard.edu (this forwards to savanna.may("at" symbol)gmail.com for the moment)
My mailing address:
c/o House of Excellence
1415 Franklin Ave.
New Orleans, LA 70117
I didn't mean for this post to be such a performance. I haven't felt good about writing for a long time, and now I want to say everything at once. Hope you're all well.
Whether fortunately, paradoxically, or tragically, New Orleans today is truly the hub of a thousand different overlapping currents of activity in the U.S. During the day you hear the sound of hammers everywhere and see homes writhing with workers dismantling moldy walls; are greeted by the staring alien faces of teenagers in respirators. At night the unlit, glass-scattered streets of the ninth ward fill up with punks on bicycles who are going to busk in the French Quarter, break into abandoned school gymnasiums or dig through some evicted family's belongings in the Bywater. There are thousands of volunteers but also thousands of opportunists -- squatters, salvagers, construction workers, photographers, engineers with products to sell -- and seeing the degree overlap between these groups leaves me with a constant sense of vertigo. Like microbial decomposers, like the blooming weeds that are slowly beginning to churn up the crushed sidewalks, the momentary inhabitants of this city are gobbling up every nutrient resource that has been left exposed (residents from distribution centers, gypsies and travellers from abandoned homes) and recycling it into something that is ambiguiously black or white, young or old, wonderful or terrible. Does morality exist in a place like this, where civilization's cycles and processes and simultaneous self-destructions and resurrections all seem to be happening in triple-time, to resemble natural cycles and to have the vast momentum of nature behind them? The insulted and ignored members of long-time poor communities are beginning to reinhabit their own spaces, calling on old neighbors from around the country to join them, and it's pretty beautiful to see. But these communities are in danger from above and below; sometimes the whiteness of the faces growing increasingly comfortable in stricken communities seems just as sinister as the mayor's plan to bulldoze the ninth ward into casinos and golf courses. Where and how can justice be found in these mixed-up spaces? Even in the Common Ground barracks there is this constant senselessness, this absense of sense in the way we locate ourselves and navigate work and treat each other, that resonates with the chaos of the broken-up outside world and its empty-eyed traffic lights.
A friend spoke of the economy of political activism and how its geographical fluidity resembles that of labor markets, with members of the radical community swarming into hotbeds of political tension or injustice. So many seem to carry with them a sense of righteousness and entitlement that makes me itchy, but the ideas being passed around are so appealing that they are difficult to contest. For better or worse, many creative groups are seeing New Orleans as kind of tabula rasa upon which to manifest their dreams for a better society; they are coming here to start their biodiesel refineries, public bike projects, community gardens. When I came here I did not expect to find myself located in the middle of so many projects in art and sustainability, but having looked around I am guiltily deciding to stay, to learn as much as I can from the groups who are present while doing my best to be of use to the local community. I feel much dirtier about staying than I had ever expected, because the benefits of being here are as much selfish as ethical, but I'm going to try to hang around until May unless I start to feel that I'm really not furthering the ends I want to further.
As it is, I'm busy all the time. I'm mostly working on bioremediation project, helping educate community members about how to clean up their soil using microbes, fungi and garden plants. I learn new things constantly, walk constantly (5 miles today). Today, for example, I spent a lovely afternoon with the quiet fungus boy and found out how to use layers of wet cardboard to grow mushroom spawn, which we will eventually use to remediate for things like arsenic, diesel fuel and persistent aromatic hydrocarbons. When I have time, I work in the kitchen. Last week I ran a gazpacho-making operation that served 300 people!
Oh and it is sad here but so beautiful, beautiful in the places where persistent night flowers unexpectedly release their scents, beautiful in the rust and the everpresent bacchanites and the mardi gras floats in torn up warehouses, the anarchist carnival parades, the meeting of the trains and the mississipi, the painted houses.
Now what is next I just don't know, but I have set my sights on a permaculture center in Austin and the Beehive Collective in Maine for summer, or maybe labor union organizing, or perhaps some old cook-by-day fly-by-night story. I am not sure I was ever meant to be one of those rootless anarchists. I miss my kitchen and my kimino. I want to be what they call "Porch Core," but perhaps angrier and fuller of wine. Anyhow perhaps I'll see you around April 9, I have an interview in Boston for money to go back to Brazil.
My new permanent email address: savanna("at" symbol)post.harvard.edu (this forwards to savanna.may("at" symbol)gmail.com for the moment)
My mailing address:
c/o House of Excellence
1415 Franklin Ave.
New Orleans, LA 70117
I didn't mean for this post to be such a performance. I haven't felt good about writing for a long time, and now I want to say everything at once. Hope you're all well.