Life is all about contrasts. You need to take it all in. I truly believe that.

Last Wednesday was the end of Ramadan. After a busy day visiting people all over the city, and an evening sharing a few drinks with some friends, I headed home. Before getting too far though, I got a call from a Malian buddy of mine. He was at The Starlight (which I just happened to be passing by). He and some Malian friends had bought a bottle of liquor and there was room for one more. I should definitely meet them as I would not need to pay the cover charge.

The scene in that night club was unlike anything I have ever experienced. The place was absolutely packed. I had been to The Starlight before, but that night there were twice the number of people that one would normally find. In addition, usually there are several Lebanese and Tooboboos (white people), but that night I seemed to be alone in a sea of Africans. It was epic. Every single person was dolled up in their best African dress. Every man in his brilliantly shiny and flamboyant Booboo. Every woman in her hand-tailored, perfectly fitted African dress, made entirely out of Basin with vibrant African colours.

The men had cigars in their hands, and bottles of scotch or vodka on their tables (yes I’m talking about celebrating the end of Ramadan – Mali is a Muslim country, but it is in no way a DRY Muslim country. Malians drink, they just do it in the dark). The women were sipping on their pineapple juice, unless they were too busy shaking it on the dance floor.

West African Club music pounding away, with its repetitive drums forcing your body to vibrate. All of a sudden Snoop-Dog gets mixed in and the crowd of dancers do not miss a single step. More Ivoirian and Senegalese dance music and then the euro-summer hit Looba-Looba-Ley chimes in. 50-cent. James Brown. A little techno for good measure. It all gets mixed into a juxtapositioned world dance scene and the crowd keeps on moving, all the while sporting their unique African threads.

Africans can dance. Let me tell you. I have spoken of this already, but let me reiterate. There are street parties next to my house where you see 12 year old boys dancing better than any North American Hip-Hop artist, little 4 year olds – I am not exaggerating – shaking their asses to the beat, beautiful 10 year old girls dancing more seductively than Jennifer Lopez or Britney Spears. They learn young, and they only get better. You can imagine the scene in that club.

These people were having the time of their lives. Some clearly with lots of money, others hanging off of their sugar daddies. For a few, this would be their one big night of the year. For many others clubbing is a relatively regular affair. Many young girls in West Africa live off of finances from well-to-do men. The more fun you are, the better looking you are, and the better you dance, the better chance you have of living a slightly higher lifestyle. Call it prostitution, call it inequality, call it survival, that is the sad reality (Mali ranks as the 4th worst country in the world on the UNDP’s gender-related development index – probably due in large part to the 98% of girls in this country that still undergo female circumcision).

Regardless, that night everyone was in their element, and clearly having an amazing time. They weren’t thinking of poverty. They weren’t thinking about colonialism. They weren’t thinking about development. They weren’t thinking about HIV. They weren’t thinking of the near hopelessness of much of this continent’s current situation. They were thinking: Dammit, I’m going to live. I’m going to have a good time. Just watch me.

I left the club at 4am with my ears ringing, my head spinning, and my thoughts whirling. A child put out an emptied and cleaned out tomato can in front of me with a couple of 25 franc coins in it, and mechanically said: donne moi 100 franc. An artisan tried to sell me a letter opener, a prostitute sent me kisses from across the street. A late night tea session was interrupted as I walked by so that brief, yet mandatory, salutations could be shared. I passed the Grand Mosque in my neighborhood and was convinced I heard dance music coming out of the Islamic speakers, from which I am so accustomed to hearing prayer calls. I smiled to myself when I realized the music was coming from a late night party and was merely bouncing off the walls of this large religious structure.

I went up to my roof, got under my mosquito netting and into my Mountain Equipment Co-op sleeping bag. The crescent moon shinning in the sky, illuminating this diverse city.

It’s all about contrasts.

Live and love life,

Michael

Abbas: “The credit for the evacuation is for you and for the martyrs who sacrificed themselves and gave their lives for the homeland” http://www.ghanaian-chronicle.com/thestory.asp?id=7499.

“So the Israelis launched the “crushing” attack early today in Gaza with deadly air strikes. The Israeli leaders gave last night a “license to kill” for their army (as if they need one). Of course, they are retaliating to Hamas militants firing 35 rockets at Israeli towns, which were in retaliation to Israeli massacre of Jabalya, which followed the militant firing rockets at Israeli towns, which was retaliation to Israeli killing three fighters from al-Quds Brigades early on Friday just hours after Israeli soldiers evacuated an army base. So it’s a cycle of violence. But who to blame? Yes, you know the answer… Palestinians.

No where in the MSM you will find the complete story. All what you will hear is that Israel retaliation to Hamas firing rockets on Israeli towns. But why Hamas did that, no body tells you. Why? Because you are not suppose to know. Because all what you need to know is that Palestinians are terrorists, and they are born to kill. Because Israelis are all angels. They just retaliate when these criminal Palestinians target their civilians. Because you should not know that Israel is the OCCUPATION.

Just another drop in the pro-Zionist media to brainwash the mass.”

“On ABC’s Nightline Monday night, a reporter interviewed a young, sympathetic Israeli woman from the largest Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim – a girl with sincerity in her voice, holding back tears. (…)In the 5 years of Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinian uprising against the occupation, I never once saw or heard a segment as long and with as much sentimental, human detail as I did here; never once remember a reporter allowing a sympathetic young Palestinian woman, whose home was just bulldozed and who lost everything she owned, tell of her pain and sorrow, of her memories and her family’s memories; never got to listen to her reflect on where she would go now and how she would live. (…)Where were the cameramen in May 2004 in Rafah when refugees twice over lost their homes again in a single night’s raid, able to retrieve nothing of what they owned? Where were they when bulldozers and tanks tore up paved streets with steel blades, wrecked the sewage and water pipes, cut electricity lines, and demolished a park and a zoo; when snipers shot two children, a brother and sister, feeding their pigeons on the roof of their home? When the occupying army fired a tank shell into a group of peaceful demonstrators killing 14 of them including two children?”

(both quotes taken from Palestine Blogs)

Perhaps there is a rascism among some of the millions of different individuals with different religions and nationalities who have watched the long tragedy of the Middle East unfold. Certainly, in many ways we must be receiving a distorted portrayal of the people there, but Palestinians should be aware of what seems a fundamental factor in how they are portrayed (or why they are not portrayed) in the press. It is not an issue of race, or of good Israeli’s versus evil Palestinians, but is instead an issue of communication, and what the activites of ‘martyrs’ communicate in comparison to the activities of ’states’.

I am not on either a “pro-zion” or “anti-zion” side. I don’t think dividing questions into simple adversaries ever helps unpack their moral complexity, much less move toward peace and conflict resolution. The descriptions of the attacks on refugee camps like Jabalya or Rafah reveal them to have been horrible cruelties, whatever the possible justifications. Personally, I think all violence is a tragedy- a wasted opportunity for more productive communication, and for the unfolding potential of exchange and insight and collaboration and innovation that successful communication can produce. The problem with terrorist attacks- martyrdoms that are encouraged by the religious and political elite, uncoordinated militia warfare- is that they seem to come from the blue. Their strategic strength is their long-term failing: they could come from anywhere, anyone, at any time. There is no clear body who tried to communicate publicly in a non-violent way, and no communicative acts that speak of a desire for peace. Even Abbas praises the ‘martyrs’. But martyrdom acheived with a suicide bomb makes no suggestion of how the perpetrators of these acts see themselves other then as weapons or soldiers, dying for a religous statehood that doesn’t seem as though it would allow the rest of us to exist, and go about our business, to have our own ideas about what god is like and what we are here to do. In fact, what Islamic terrorism, and I think, terrorism generally, communicates most forcefully is not a desire for land or peace or recognition but instead for the destruction of potentially anyone and everyone. There is no suggestion from terrorism that it would participate in a conversation about just war. So it becomes possible to believe that terrorists would train other terrorists in elementary schools, or convince lonely teenagers to blow themselves up rather then audition for Arab Idol, or whatever. All kinds of manipulation and distortion seem possible, and necessarily defended against, when attacks are coming in an uncoordinated, incommunicative way.

Terrorism (martyrdom) offers no theories about life after terrorism for those of us who remain here on earth, and nothing for the watching world to understand except violence and death. The Isreali state, while communicating with violence in all kinds of tragic ways, also makes other kinds of communicative gestures about what they want. The orchestration of the Gaza pullout is one example, and the wall is another. The more profound examples come in a wider layer of discourse in the history of the Israeli state, and on the International stage, about democracy, universities, poverty, about the right to practice any religion, or of freedom of expression, or for people of any gender to make any life choices they like on their own.

As a global civilization we must pay attention to the ways victimized people (jews, blacks, women, arabs) have successfully forced the world to see that they are human; successfully drawn media attention and money to their cause; the ways they behave to try and communicate their own worth. They do so by figuring out that the most pragmatic tactic is to communicate the worth of each unique human life no matter what gender, religion or race; and it is impossible to communicate this logical, protective bit of sense with a suicide bomb.

The whole world- but especially the current American administration, the Israeli administration, and the current leaders of the Arab world- should be seeking to learn lessons from successful acts of communication, rather then retaliating, blaming, torturing, punishing and generally perpetuating a coversation made of death and pain and sorrow and loss. Otherwise the time will come when people will reject their promises of differently flavoured utopias and chose different ways of interacting. Remember: Force is always on the side of the governed. (Hume) There are more of us, and though your stories are pretty, we will eventually see through you and come to want something better for ourselves and our kids.

If you know me, you know I would suggest that this other system “the governed” will choose, will be one that is collaboratively using the tools and spaces created by open source software.
But that’s another article.

peace all.

(ps- I do not put the word ‘martyrs’ in quotes to indicate any disrespect of these children, men and women who felt the greatest contribution they could make to humanity, the greatest use of their god given abilities, the greatest tribute they could make to His goodness, was their own death and the murder of others. I do not doubt the intensity of their faith, or of their desperation, and I know I could never fully imagine what it has been like to see what they have seen and to live as they have lived. In addition, I have no priviledged access to the thoughts and intentions of our creator, I have no way of knowing if there is such a being or what he or she would want. Perhaps fundamentalist Muslim interpetations of the Holy texts are correct, and terrorist martyrs will be rewarded in spite of all the writing about forgiveness and love in the good books. I put the word ‘martyr’ aside a bit because I think it’s worth suggesting that, though this may be how they are perceived to some, other messages are being communicated to other audiences by these same acts. And these messages are disordered and chaotic, their intentionality is widely various, not easily synthesized by a political theorist, let alone a journalist, and so their actions are difficult to sympathize with and their story is incredibly difficult to tell. )

What I didn’t quite say in my first open source related public talk…

Well, I walked into the conference room at CRIM for my little talk about OpenJournaL last night and immediately began deciding to ditch my written presentation and just have a talk with these folks. The guys that straggled in were all different degrees of polite and friendly, bi-lingual geeks; and after a few minutes of programming-speak and acronyms it was clear that my communications theory about how open source interacts with monopolies of knowledge was the wrong place to start.

I left my notes in my bag on the seat next to Elran and stood in front of our very own Open projected huge and high quality on a giant screen embedded behind me in the wall, and faced the room of linux users and local leaders with only a few laptops and a small mic between us. I started out just trying to introduce the idea of the site: our intention to open up the act of writing, and to open up boundaries between disciplines, and to draw open source into the communication discourse in some different ways.

(communication discourse: all those people and texts that talk about communication. The field of Communication Studies)

At Open we’re trying to make a space that bridges huge communication gaps between geeks of different kinds (theory, literature, health, law, or code geeks), and between geeks and non-geeks. And the deep need for this kind of space was made all the more evident by the few gaps and snags we met, and collectively surpassed, last night.

The most interesting moment for me was in a back and forth with Brad from Ubuntu and Hubert, an independent software consultant, about how personal ego and programmer-brain can get in the way of the expansive potential of open source. We talked about how the design of a graphic user interface- the face of the software being made, or of the bug-reporting site for the software- can fail to communicate with Others who aren’t already part of the in-club. And this echoed the comments I’d already made about my intentions with the evolving design of Open- of trying to keep some white space, and of trying speak in a language that’s not too theory-y and alienating.

The interesting thing to realize is that we all have this potential to speak in domain-specific or peer-specific language. We all know specialized terms, and we can all get so used to them we forget how they sound to an equally-intelligent outsider. It is even possible to assume that we understand each other, because we translate their phrases through our own assumptions and biases. (Never assume, my grade 8 teacher told the class, or you’ll make an ass out of u and me.)

For example, have you ever watched a television show with other people and realized by the way they are making fun of it that they are missing some information about how it works, or what its intention is, or what the real character relationships are? Or have you ever realized in the middle of a fight (with your mom, say) that the other person isn’t accusing you of the thing you are angrily defending yourself against? We have no means of ‘perfect’ communication between humans, we’re all alone in these bodies of ours, we make mistakes all the time.

The two examples I just described are situations where the gap between the message sent and the message being received becomes apparent, but what happens when it doesn’t? And how do media – the systems we build to enable and extend this flawed communication of ours – interact with our messages? Harold Innis, my favorite communication theorist, says that media distort knowledge when they are structured by monopolies. He suggests we think about how personalities are distorted by power, and how they then support the formation and expansion of monopolies of knowledge (PE in the MS, intro.). A monopoly of knowledge is a fixed version of reality determined by the communicative choices made by an elite (regulations, protocols, etc.) A monopoly of knowledge is formed by the means of communication becoming un-accessible: one-sided. And eventually it is brought down by force.

My suggestion, based on Innis’ theories about public opinion and crisis, is that the open source process offers us the best means of deflating that tendency. Open source software will be continuously improved by surprising perspectives, and so will produce layered media for open source communication- beyond the desktop, or the browser, or the website, other means and metaphors for the network will emerge. This communication will have the potential to bridge gaps in communication (like Unicode already does) but will build layered ways for this to happen over time: gradually and in fits and starts opening up communication between math and other kinds of languages, and between cultures, and between genders.

I hope some of this came across last night, but every failure makes the usefulness of the evolving space/metaphor that is OpenJournaL more apparent.

Caithream Celtic Dance Fusion was founded in 2002, by Andrée Charlebois and Jenn Macquarrie, as a professional performance company. This is, already, an unconventional move: beyond the hours of kicking in a line lovingly supplied by Riverdance, there aren’t really any Celtic professional performance companies out there. Because, as Jenn Macquarrie recently explained to me over a weekend in the Ontario countryside, Highland dance has been a rigid and closed system. Hoping to preserve its heritage it has become, in many ways, a museum dance. For Jenn and Andrée, good Canadians, raised with our rhetoric of Multiculturalism, this traditional structure called out to be opened up. And once they set their sights high on this kind of mind-blowing bit of Scottish hubris the ideas started to fall into place:

The Company’s goal is to lead a revolution in the dance world by defying conventional categorizations. Through the fusing of styles such as highland, jazz, contemporary dance, and traditional dances of many cultures, we are creating a new form of dance that is uniquely Canadian.

I got to extend my conversation with Jenn Macquarrie in an email interview and so to get a little more information about what these wild gals have been up to, and how the Highland world is responding.

I was wondering If you’d describe a few of your dances, and where they diverge from traditional highland.

Traditional highland is very technical; it’s locked in its form for history’s sake, so it can’t be corrupted. We try to respect that – all of us are trained in it, as well as other forms of dance – and all of us love it, or we wouldn’t be doing this. But it can be very stagnant after a while, and we feel that art has to move forward, and to reflect the times it’s in. So we take the vocabulary from highland and fuse it to other forms of dance. So, a propelled pivot turn with a salsa move. Or a strathspey with a turning leap at the end. Just to see what would happen. Because Andy is trained in modern (contemporary dance), we use that a lot. But we also use ballet, jazz, ballroom, hip hop, French stepdancing, African dance – whatever we can get our hands on.

You’ve seen our website, right? Well, there are some photos of our dances there that might help give you a kind of idea about the sort of stuff we like to do. We’ve got a whole set about women, and what it means to be one, with three dances ranging from the power of a woman, to love between a couple, to the sheer joy of being a young girl. Or we’ve got a kick-ass version of the Can-Can. Or Brave Newfoundlanders, which makes us cry every time we do it.

As for differences between that sort of thing and traditional highland – well, all highland dances are short, to start with. The Fling is less than a minute, the Reel is only a couple. Our longest piece is 10 minutes (so far), and we routinely put on full-length (hour and a half) shows. The next obvious difference is that most of highland dances are done solo, performed by individual dancers (except for the Reel, which is done with four dancers). So, when you have anywhere from one to fifteen dancers on stage, the dynamic changes immensely.

I think that those two factors, combined with our attempts to take something old and make it new and relevant, have really been key to our success with audiences. Unless you’re a highland dancer yourself, or related to one, or perhaps just excessively obsessed with all things Scottish, highland dancing isn’t really a spectator sport. No one really wants to see identical little girls performing identical little steps to a bagpiper for a judge. But boy do they like to see DANCE.

Could you compare your dances to others that you’ve performed alongside? Could you talk about how audiences react to you?

When we competed Because We Can at the national competition, the judges HATED it – and the crowd actually went wild. And we’re talking about the most uptight traditionalists you can get. We go to the nationals as often as we can (last three years running) just to see if we can shake a few things up. There are other highland choreographies out there, but they’re still in the stage of taking whole steps out of the highland syllabus and performing them to celtic music – without taking the risks of innovation – although there are more and more of our kind of thinkers out there all the time.

If you had unlimited funding what kind of an event would y’all put on?

If we found a patron angel to fund us, I know exactly what we’d do: something we plan on doing anyway, only we’d be able to do it a whole lot sooner. We’re intrigued by the idea of the Celts throughout the world – the notion that they were such travellers. Pieces of Celtic culture can be found almost anywhere – and culture survives in dance longer than most things. We want to go to Gaul, and Tuscany, and Wales – to outposts of Ukraine, to North Africa, to Turkey, to find out what lingers in the blood of their dancing there. And then we’ll bring back what we find, and create a full-length show – a massive production – about the roots we’ve found, and the new places they’re growing now. The Gathering of the Clans. Only not just the Macs of the Hebrides – the clans reach a lot further now – in both time and space.

Read up on the history of the Salon:

THE POWER OF CONVERSATION: JEWISH WOMEN AND THEIR SALONS.

Parlor Politics:
In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government

“…without the face-to-face relationships and networks of interest created in society, the American experiment in government could not function.
Into this conundrum, writes Catherine Allgor, stepped women like Dolley Madison and Louisa Catherine Adams, women of political families who used the unofficial, social sphere to cement the relationships that politics needed to work.”

“The particular kind of event that I consider here may be situated sociohistorically:” he says; “the Cajun music “renaissance” that developed slowly in the 1960’s reached a crescendo in the mid-1980s and now has settled into the continual development of Cajun cultural forms. Among the most important of these are the expansion of the repertoire of musical compositions, both old and new, and the maintenance of a limited number of dance steps, notably the Cajun waltz and two-step, to which has been added more recently an adaptation of the jitterbug to Cajun music (see plater, Speyer and Speyer, 1993). On the couple-dominated social dance floor, whatever the cadence- that is, the aural landscape to which one responds, or dance steps chosen- there exists only the “in-between” of this smooth-striated interaction, yet in various degrees of modulation between the smooth-striated poles. For the relation of dance movement to the space of affect is not fully striated- that is, strictly hierarchized by customs and rules set in place, despite the implicit imposition of many of these depending on the particular venue. Nor is the relation entirely smooth, allowing unfettered openness to free flows of movement or total improvisation, yet again depending on the venue. Rather, only passages and combinations of movement and rest between smooth and striated spaces emerge to animate the initially empty dance site.”

When the dance competition was over and all of us non-competitive fan dancer types pushed onto the floor, you could feel the smooth-striated lumpiness rolling into different kinds of affects. We had more moves than we’d had before and we were inspired by the partners’ voguing, swinging creativity. Out on the street hungry people still asked us for change, and as we walked up St. Laurent someone remembered that there had been a shooting the night before outside a club we were close to passing by, and that the girl who had been shot was exactly my same age. These are the facts, the striations, the dark valleys that every kind of joyful interchange exists in the face of. We can dance, or drink, or sing, to build a closed, delighted, forgetful space where we allow ourselves to feel above the city’s dark sides and dangers. Or we can dance to build up our courage a bit, and to reach out a little further beyond our circles to the people left waiting in the wings.

Nights like last night’s danceoff that echo with old wartime history, and with new kinds of inclusions, (and homemade cupcakes,) have a quiet politics at their core. And maybe this is a product of this strange bubble, bi-lingual, splotchy thing that is Montreal (the same kind of between-binaries Franglais hybridity that sprouted Cajun culture too). And maybe also it’s the product of hours of creative work of the part of promoters like Murad- who has been handmaking little matchbook fliers and inspired evenings for us for years. But mostly, as we all knew and said to each other yesterday, those kinds of nights are the product of many strange magnetic coincidences, drawing us out on a Monday when we had no real plans towards the brilliant ridiculousness of a danceoff that suddenly, for a moment, gave the sticky fest-filled summer a new shape.

by Risa Dickens

I think this can make us feel desperate to be living well at each moment, to fill it up with good, or life, or at least survival. Like Martin Amis writes in London Fields: “all women want to be the bitch in the book.” And it’s true, sometimes I feel my gut aching to leave everything and somehow get deeper in there, whatever it is. And other times I feel like burying my life quietly behind someone else, not risking too much while this life is still known and fine.

Men feel time stretching long with no loud ticking body clock, and it could be speeding or still all the time. So, in a visceral way, the passing of time has no certainty. And it brings them to the same sets of intense emotions and strange relationships to time as we have.

Alternate routes, different bodies and abilities, and all we keep walking on and off of different people’s paths, repeating their bits of experience and learning. Giving each other advice as we head off together or on our own; and creating whole new patterns of these countless bits of code.

Louis Erdrich writes in “The Antelope Wife”:
“Ever since the beginning these twins are sewing. One sews with light and one with dark. The first twin’s beads are cut-glass whites and pales, and the other twin’s beads are glittering deep red and blue-black indigo. One twin uses an awl made of an otter’s sharpened penis bone, the other uses that of a bear. They sew with a single sinew thread, in, out, fast and furious, each trying to set one more bead into the pattern than her sister, each trying to upset the balance of the world. “

I think every individual is stringing there own beads into the net, as it were. We can dislike and be cynical of others’ prides and fears and failings and their lame jokes and boring stories, but beneath that superficial irritation of brushing up against eachother we know that these are little half-blind lives that are just like ours, just trying to make things work.

Watching musicians all day I thought how they write a little piece of that life into the most catchy, compelling piece of code they can, and when it works best it not only hooks into something we’ve already figured out and felt, but also opens a thought into the unknown thoughts and voices of experiences we hadn’t yet had to imagine. And these, as Elran pointed out, build into new status quos over generations. Tony Blair was at LiveAid 20 years ago, and my stepdad wonders what Live8 will make him remember.

Each of the 150 bands that played today speaks to a specific audience of their fans as well as to a wider, stranger group. They put their songs into this context where their words can take on new layers of meaning, and hand experiential knowledge and feeling across sub-cultural and cultural borders. Like Sting’s “we’ll be watching you” to the leaders of the 8, and Green Day’s performance of “we are the champions of the world,” and Madonna’s “music makes the people come together.” And whether they connect with us or not, they always connect with someone. In this way musicians play our emotions and can trigger the best of our desires, and when that voltage they make is supported by planning and infrastructure and a clear and informed message they can build something we can get behind, pick up, and wield. http://www.live8live.com

In this review of the new film “March of the Penguins” (scroll down the page to get to it) reviewer Lisa Schwarzbaum seems for a moment to be headed toward the same old “yeah, but they’re just birds” deflation of the anthropomorphic love and survival narrative the movie tells. She does mock the film-maker’s imaginative recreation of the birds’ communication, but then she adds a surprising twist: “They are birds, miraculously designed, as all living things bright and beautiful are, to reproduce.”

Initially I was all hackles-up at this simplistic hetero claim, as it seems to exclude not just homosexual love, but also all the people born unable to reproduce, and those who choose chastity, and those who don’t manage to hook up, and everything we do besides make babies, from the great ‘design’ (making it a very limited and blinkered design indeed.) But then I started to wonder if all this difference, this unique life and variation, might be included, in unexpected ways, in the miracle of all things reproducing.

If the basic evolutionary driving mechanism is reproduction, and it’s the the key to our design, then acts of communication and collaboration, system design and building, government, education, music, football, whatever, are either all elaborate theaters for the performance of our desirability, and subconsciously we participate to hook ourselves some mates, or else they suggest a more complicated understanding of what is it we want to reproduce. Maybe we don’t just want to reproduce little versions of ourselves, or continuations of our species, but beings connected to the rest of the everything that is reproducing. Maybe with our sentience we’ve added (or discovered) dimensions to that which is reproducing. Not just living things, but ideas, kindnesses, and cruelties have a way of making more of themselves. Maybe we improvise new nets and tactics to deal with unexpected collisions and deviations on the way to reproduction- poverty or inherited abuse or culture (valuing male over female life, say) make a “successful” reproducer abandon their product, and the system of living things improvises to fill the gap. I think we need to keep our minds open to the surprising and delightful ways we find to right the balance, because, by definition, it won’t look like what we expected.

We know now, for example, that many animal species, including penguins, choose life-long homosexual monogamy, and that sometimes they adopt abandoned eggs and make great parents.

Realizing all the ways our feathered and furry neighbors communicate and collaborate twists back into an interesting challenge to the way we think about human evolutionary success. I always wondered as a kid in intro to philosophy why we so rigidly defended our exclusive right to sentience. Why do we need to be the only ones who think and feel?

today Professor Rae Staseson sent me a link to this website, Kidd of Speed, about long rides into the ghost town at Chernobyl. ‘Elena’ lives in Kiev, and rides her motorcycle, and tells histories with photos and her own sweetsad wit. I read her chapters about Chernobyl, and digging at WWII battlegrounds , and the Orange Revolution, and I thought this is what the Internet is for.

I also thought about a paper I had written last year about a Pedestrian methodology- about ways of moving up to and around a subject that build on the methods described by Meaghan Morris in Things to Do With Shopping Centers and Doreen Massey in A Global Sense of Place.

Methods of moving through and of attempting to grasp mediated spaces are explored in both “Things to do With Shopping Centers” by Megan Morris and “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Space” by Doreen Massey. In “Things to do with Shopping Centers,” Morris’s narrator is a pedestrian feminist encountering Australian suburban commercial space. Her method is a kind of leisurely, and sometimes fretful, motion. In Massey’s “Power Geometry,” she adds a next dimension to “easy and excited notions of generalized and undifferentiated time-space compression” (63) by suggesting that this experience exists relative to a power structure. Although Massey is clearly drawing on some conceptual principles from general relativity and complexity theory, in a way, her methodology is also derived from the mental movement of a modern pedestrian. Massey and Morris are feminist geographers- they chart the spaces unaccounted for by modern and postmodern theory, and they map the same spaces again from new perspectives.

In “Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place” Doreen Massey examines the postmodern concept of time-space compression. She does this with a methodological mode that can expand and retract its focus. Several times throughout the text Massey asks the reader to slide their imaginative gaze out into space, and then to sweep back in, close enough to consider time moving at a pedestrian’s pace.

Imagine for a moment that you are on a satellite, further out and beyond all actual satellites: you can see planet earth from a distance and, rare for someone with only peaceful intentions, you are equipped with the kind of technology that allows you to see the colors of peoples eyes and the number on their license plates. …) Furthest out are the satellites, then aeroplanes, the long haul between London and Tokyo and the hop from San Salvador to Guatemala City. (…) Look in closer and there are ships and trains, steam trains slogging laboriously up hills somewhere in Asia. Look in closer still and there are lorries and cars and buses and on down further and somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa there’s a woman on foot who still spends hours a day collecting water” (61).

The narrator of “Power-Geometry” has places to go, things- gaps, flaws, omissions- she wants us to see. She identifies a lack of content, especially social content, in the concept of time-space compression. She deconstructs notions of time-space compression that propose the inequalities of capital as the sole determinant of the subject’s experience of time by introducing the obvious other factors – gender and ethnicity. Massey is clear on this point- she is introducing complexity (60) into postmodern theories of space-time, refracting their logic by drawing in the great chaos of transnational social networks.

This movement guides the reader to a conceptual understanding of the local that looks like a Mandelbrot set of linking networks converging at a locus- never frozen in the Heidiggerian moment of Being, but instead always Becoming. What Massey wants to emphasize about the complexity of time-space compression is, as she puts it, “the power-geometry of it all” (61). This principle allows for a shifting of focus, a kind of scaling analysis that slides along lines of force to examine an object, a location, even an individual perhaps, from different perspectives. It is in the specificity of these geometric connections that Massey identifies the origin of uniqueness:

“The uniqueness of a place, or a locality, in other words is constructed out of particular interactions and mutual articulations of social relations, social processes, experiences and understandings, in a situation of co-presence, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are actually constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself (…) Instead, then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings.”

Massey makes good on the promise of her sweeping Hubble vision when she pulls her gaze all the way down to the heart of her own local- walking, just like Morris, through a multiple and much loved commercial space. From this setting she sketches “the links between Kilburn and the world” (65), and even stops to look back at the space from which she, as author, held our gaze a moment earlier:

“Overhead there is always at least one airplane- we seem to be on a flight path to Heathrow and by the time they’re over Kilburn you can see them clearly enough to discern the airline and wonder as you struggle with your shopping where they’re coming from.” (65)

Massey walks and wonders, and we get a sense that it is the fruits of those meandering thoughts we are reading now. Perhaps because both reading and writing are like walking in some ways when the narrative eye swoops into the sky and around the globe it still keeps the rhythm of the woman walking and imagining.

Massey refers to principles from biology and from modern poetry to counteract unprogressive notions of pace (67)- to argue that space, like capital, is not a thing but a process. This idea puts space back into time and into multiple, subjective times and “facilitates the conceptualization of the relation between the center and the periphery” (67). Space, when understood in terms of the social networks that traverse and produce it, can retain its specificity without becoming static. In order for an author to represent this idea she must keep moving and keep looking around and back and forth while she goes. To develop what we need according to Massey, “a global sense of the local, a global sense of place,” we have to piece together histories, like Carrington’s history of Corsica, that reflect the endless movements of people, ideas and powers.

In “Things to do With Shopping Centers” Morris sketches the outlines of a history of this kind while thinking about women and shopping. The narrator of “Things to do With Shopping Centers” moves slowly to allow questions, doubts and alternatives to work their way into her considerations. A few paces into “Things to do with Shopping Centers” the narrator realizes that if this chapter could have a subtitle it would be “pedestrian notes on modernity.” Rather than spiraling off into space to map the power geometry of modernity, Morris walks up to, into, and around her object of inquiry. Connected by the act of walking to other bodies, she looks at the space from unexpected, difficult, even exhausted, angles. She builds an understanding of women’s experiences of these spaces, and of the subjective nature of History as her body, step by step, builds an understanding of other bodies in time.

The pedestrian mode allows Morris, like Massey, to see the complexity and contradictions of the shopping centers and of the institution’s conception of their ideal user. Of the anxious or pleasurable experiences of actual users, and of the theories that have tried to contain it and them:

Just like studying women modernists, thinking about shopping centers should be a way to (…) ask not “why does this fall short of modernism” but, “how do classical theories of modernism fall short of women’s modernity?”

This is, I think, the most outstanding question in this chapter, at least for me and my research on open source, and on the Countess Castiglione. Morris begins the endless journey of exploring the gaps in classical modernism by walking beyond the limits of the spaces included in modernist theories. By taking the ambivalence of certain activities- the anxieties of certain pleasures- into consideration: “if walking around for a long time creates absorption in the spectacle, then one sure way to begin from a sharply defined sense of critical estrangement is to arrive at a drive-in center on foot and have to find a way to walk in.” The commodity spectacle of the suburban drive-in center behaves differently and, by doing so, suggests that typical narratives about structures, access, and identities might be limited in their scope.

Morris pauses her progress to question the images produced by any attempt to know Ordinary Woman, or Shopping Woman, or Academic Woman (and we might add Historical Woman, Beautiful Woman, Open Source Woman.) She offers an artifact for our consideration: a photograph, a piece of surveillance, that has been decontextualized and reframed by a marketing discourse about women, consumption and pleasure. This object yokes together the problematic notions that characterize discourses about the relationship between the means of production, the commodity spectacle and women’s identity. At this point the narrator nearly gets stuck in the theory loop. She frets about her role in the production of object-images of women and about her ability to access any woman’s experience by way of feminist theory. She sees herself writing over other bodies, mapping theories onto places where they don’t quite fit. The escape from this eddy of self-doubt- this theory about theory loop- is made possible by a different kind of motion. Morris realizes that “a feminist study ought to be able to occupy this user-designer, consumption-production gap, not to “close” or “bridge” it but to move outside the repetitive terms of the disciplinary polemics it imposes.”

So maybe we should think some more about a pedestrian methodology and about how it might relate to motorcycle methodology or a search and surf and clicking kind of Internet methodology. About the way your mind travels while walking, triangulating your position in space and time. This mental method, when interpreted from inside a body that understands fretting as well as leisure; anxiety, irritation and confusion as well as pleasure; exhaustion as well as curiosity can, I think, find a path beyond repetitive terms. This method is fundamentally related to Massey’s emphasis on the gaze that places a space within a network of social relations.

Morris moves with her subject away from the city, out towards the country town, up to the image of the shopping mall and of Shopping Woman. There follows a shopping mall triad, in which three spaces are yoked together by the author’s subjective experience as well as by systems of production and consumption. Then the analysis focuses on the history of one space: Green Hills Shopping Center. Using the history of the space provided by a local newspaper Morris reconstructs a story about the corporate creation of a collective identity and the destabilization and re-narrativization of a unique community.

By the end of her long walk in and around these shopping centers Morris can suggest that there are stories here that do not obey the transitory, fragmented, insubstantial logic of the swirling commodity spectacle: of the flaneur’s experience of modernity:

I would argue that the proclaimed dissolution of public and private on the botanized asphalt of shoppingtown makes possible, not a flaneuse, since that term is anachronistic, but an experience of “modernity” for women in which it is vital not to begin by identifying heroines and victims (even of conflicts with male paranoia) but rather a profound ambivalence about shifting roles. (88)

Morris sees a female experience of desire in suburban shopping centers that is ambivalent- articulated in terms of sufficiency and confinement, role play and repetition. And so she suggests that a pedestrian narrative about women and consumerism might figure the shopping experience as moving in ways that are more like S&M and less like phantasmagorias and strip-shows.

Meagan Morris and Doreen Massey want to intercede in the loops of theory active in certain realms of cultural studies. Both authors disrupt essentializing ideas about place and, by extension, about people, by employing methods in motion. Whether it is the telescopic and then geometric gaze of “Power-geometry” or the ambivalent gaze of the wide-eyed but critically distant pedestrian, both narrators manage to incorporate the multiplicity of identity and of perspective into their spaces and texts. By moving around their subjects with their bodies and minds they reveal gaps and patterns and blockages and alternate routes and rhythms.

For my final project I would like to think more about pedestrian methodology, about the kinds of information that become apparent when you take your theory on the road, when you walk with it and allow the ideas and images you encounter to intersect with your desire to know and to possess your subject. I would like to walk through the private rooms and public spaces that structured the Countess de Castiglione’s life- to imagine her in her cities and spaces and in her time. To map the networks of narratives of power and desire that combined to make her photography and her life exceptional. I would like to think about the ways cameras and shopping centers are discursively linked in modernity to women and femininity. There is a power geometry that determines Castiglione’s relationship to photography and history’s relationship to her, and I myself am twisted up within it, wanting something from her, and in a position of authority in relation to her- fretting about my own objectifying theories.

In another essay I might like to think more about the relationship between S&M and women’s experience of modernity, but for now I will just suggest, based on my own experience recently rassling with the objectifying desire that dominates the discourse around the Countess’s body and her body of work, that Morris’s idea about S&M might reflect her own experience as a historian.

My questions, then, for the end of this, are: Where do methodologies come from? What kinds of experiences structure them, how do they become reified, and how can we analyze our own methods without ending up “confined by the very terms we are contesting?” (Morris) How is our method related to our desire and what kinds of desire are prominent or possible here, in this time and place?