17 Comments

1. skol:

   Voices!! Awesomeness!!

   12 October 2007, 2:26 am

2. Stan:

   To the footnotes, I will add two more writers, who discuss urban-suburban development: Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, and Matthew Lassiter, author of The Silent Majority.

   Since we did this some months ago, our preoccupation with the suburbs hasn’t abated. Reasons? (1) It’s where more than half of all the people in the US live. (2) It is the demographic to which both main political parties orient their messages and policies. (3) It is the “here” for most people in the US when we ask the question, “How do we get there from here?” (4) When we study the preceding question, we quickly realize that, no matter how badly designed and potentially helpless these middle-class drone-barracks are, this is where a lot of people are going to have to continue to live now (so we have to be thinking about their transformation, on site).

   12 October 2007, 5:45 am

3. r graves:

   see also Dolores Hayden’s work on retrofitting the suburbs from a planning/design perspective, particularly “Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life”

   12 October 2007, 9:19 am

4. r graves:

   oh, and of course paul goodman’s classic “communitas”

   12 October 2007, 9:20 am

5. Required:

   I love the format. When I used to work in a factory one one of the ways I would pass that time is by listening to radical interviews and speeches on my Mp3 player. Plus sometimes the interplay between two people speaking opens up tangents that would not other wise happen. However, sometimes one person is about to say something you’re interested in and the other cuts them off or redirects the conversation, which can be crappy. But I thought it was very interesting and I can’t wait for the next one. I think it flowed well from topic to topic. I think the interview format was good. Might experiment with extra people. Not too many, maybe 3 or 4. I think it would be great for the next EWN segment to focus on gender in some way.

   One method you might want to look into is making these into video segments for You Tube. The visuals could just be some standard photos of Stan and DeAnander. When you mention stuff like the home owners asociation you could display links or when you mention books put up pictures of the covers. It’s not going to make a visually exciting piece but it will open you up to another sea of potential listeners. It’s fairly common for people to take their favorite songs and make a video which consists of a slide show of pictures of the artist, so I don’t see why the same couldn’t be done with EWN.

   At first I found it kinda hard to hear what Stan was saying, but after a bit you get used to it. I guess the sound quality is a result of doing the interview via a mobile (Aus speak for cell phone). My other issue (which seems to conflict with the first) is the file size of the Mp3’s seemed pretty big. I’m not sure if it was experimented with, but I’ve found with speech you can lower the quality of the mp3’s (and thus the file size) quite a bit before you start to lose sound quality to any noticeable degree. If it’s not possible to reduce the quality, it might be beneficial to cut them up into smaller pieces so people with slower connections can get them more easily.

   13 October 2007, 2:00 am

6. Josiah:

   Good stuff. I especially like the discussion of the “barracks” model of suburbia, the separation of work from home, atomization, etc.

   13 October 2007, 5:12 am

7. dan of steele:

   b real posted a link to this at moonofalabama and it made my morning. I have been reading De’s words for a long time and always admired her insight and desire to make things better. to finally hear her voice is double chocolate frosting on the cake.

   I recently got into a really ugly argument with my sister who owns a home where they have a homeowner’s covenant. she told me she was not allowed to hang clothes out to dry and I remarked that I thought that was a really stupid idea. she had bought into the crap that the rule was there to keep her property value high and kept saying that at least they didn’t have old cars parked on concrete blocks in her neighborhood. we haven’t spoken since.

   don’t know if you have mentioned it in other places but everyone can raise some food for themselves. you can raise tomatoes in your kitchen or on the terrace or on the rooftop. you can grow chives in any flower pot. even small lemons or orange trees will happily grow inside and when they get too big you just give them to someone who has more room.

   two final words. well done!

   14 October 2007, 3:31 am

8. Bench:

   Great stuff. More, please.

   I would like to second what Required wrote and add a few things.

   Technical stuff first:

   The trade-off between sound quality and file size can be minimized by encoding the files as VBR (variable bit rate) MP3s. I think every encoder these days will do VBR but I don’t know specifics as to what options to use or what bit rates will work best for this case.

   When there are only two people, having each on a separate channel (one left, one right) would make it easier to understand someone who is just finishing up a sentence and not necessarily aborting a tangent when yielding to the other person — even if the listener has to skip back a few seconds and lean up to one speaker or muffle one headphone. I tried that a couple of times on this one but it didn’t work.

   Regarding content:

   I think adding video is a great idea, although it would obviously take more resources to produce. You could include graphs and references could be numbered to correspond with the online footnotes. Lots of possibilities here. It seems like more of a long-term nice-to-have, though. There’s plenty of room to grow and experiment using just audio and online notes.

   You could announce upcoming topics or guests and solicit “questions from the audience” in advance.

   I would love to hear a segment on vermiculture, including the combining of it with humanure recycling. I saw a Canadian (I think) documentary on FSTV a couple of years ago called Crapshoot. What an eye opener. So I had that filed away for consideration and then encountered worm composting here. I started a bin in my apartment last spring and now I have a bucket of compost and a bottle of worm tea, ready for next year’s garden at a location TBD. Thanks for the tip! The humanure part is still purely an academic exercise but I would like to learn more about it now so that I (we?) can be recycling my/our own “waste” before the toilets stop flushing at our convenience. That ties back into the issue of HOAs and local regulations, and of course reconnecting the food cycle that has been so completely broken at every stage. Is it easier or more difficult to challenge bans on humanure than bans on clotheslines and vegetable gardens? Is it even an issue? I recall reading somewhere that humanure composting is not even on the radar in most places. Does that mean it’s a fight that hasn’t even begun? Will it require legislation at the state level? If lots of people in a small area start doing in their backyards what they consider to be humanure composting, will it need to be regulated? Will we need city/county compost pile inspectors? Or will smell and peer pressure alone be enough of an educator and motivator to get people to do it correctly and not just throw buckets of crap in a corner of the yard? Are these all questions that would be answered if I just sat down and read The Humanure Handbook cover to cover? I don’t know. But I do know the answer to one question. How cool would a segment (Ha! I am still discovering these puns!) of the Emergency Wormcasting Network be with DeAnander and Joseph Jenkins discussing the pros and cons of separating urine and fecal matter in a home humanure composting system? Double plus cool.

   14 October 2007, 11:26 pm

9. James M:

   RE: File size & audio quality - thanks for the comments about this. Given that I’d never produced this sort of format before, I used the specs from NPR’s Fresh Air podcasts as a template for this one, and the files came out to about the same size. But I’m not averse to using VBR or a lower sample rate in the future to accommodate our friends with slower connections.

   As for the viability of the medium: I spend about as much time listening to spoken-word radio / podcasts / audiobooks as I do reading, and often find the medium more immediately accessible in an intellectual sense. Plus it’s a great way to engage the mind while doing things like cooking dinner, cleaning house, driving, or mindless repetitive tasks at work.

   And with regard to future wormcasts: I think I heard somebody was knocking around the idea of doing one about local currencies …

   15 October 2007, 5:37 pm

10. DeAnander:

    I am on the road, basically flitting through hometown for a few hours between excursions to south and north. Wanted to say mille grazie to James for his careful, artisanal attention to the EWN Segment Zero engineering; and to those who’ve said encouraging things here. As it so happens (@Bench) I do know quite a bit about vermicomposting and about humanure composting with worms, and it would be cool to do a segment on this topic — it’s relevant on two fronts. One is its agricultural implication for soil fertility and sustainability, also water quality (”modern” sewage treatment plants are insane, as Jenkins points out at length and with supporting doco in his book); but it’s also highly relevant to maintaining a good quality of life and health during the collapse of centralised State facilities like pressurised water and sewage processing. One of the first bad consequences of a prolonged water outage is inability to flush toilets, and most people have absolutely no clue as to how to process their own wastes harmlessly. I’d be very pleased to do a EWN segment on this topic, and I have firsthand experience (lived with a composting/worm loo for a couple of years as an educational exercise and produced some very fine compost without my suburban neighbours ever noticing a thing).

    Gotta go pack for tomorrow’s journey… sorry to post-n-run.

    PS Hi DoS, can you send URL to B’s mention of EWN release?

    18 October 2007, 7:11 pm

11. Chris Daniels:

    I’m listening to this at work and it’s marvelous to hear Stan and De talk and laugh and generally bounce of each other. Thanks, both of you. I hope this continues.

    While I’m no expert, I spend a lot of time puttering around with mp3’s - ripping, converting, burning, etc., as I’m a total music lover, but I do know for sure that you can get away with a much smaller file size with speaking voice. If you have any questions or need help, feel free to email me and I’ll help as best I can with suggestions for software, all of it free.

    18 October 2007, 7:33 pm

12. Lacedo:

    I’ve been lurking for over a year. I’ve noticed Stan being hounded off of Daily Kos. Listening to De and Stan is music. My only complaint is that, listening on iTunes, I can’t pause your ‘cast in order to take a leak.

    Looking forward to De Anander’s discussion of vermicomposting human waste.

    We moved to our farm 9 years ago to fulfill my dream since first grade of growing my own food organically.

    We grow most of our food, save spices, condiments and grains. Before our move we lived in a row house, with a tiny yard in which we grew tomatoes, pole beans, chard, basil and butternut squash. We trained the squash vines on the stockade fence and told the neighbor to take the fruits that grew on her side. That was good for one year, after which she asked us to refrain from the practice. So we let the vines take over the postage stamp lawn.

    Now, with nine years’ experience of organic growing in raised beds (clay soil) I realize we could have grown much more in that tiny yard.

    We have red worms in our compost, and bring a bunch indoors for the winter, keeping them in the basement, just in case the winter is too severe. We hadn’t before considered feeding them our own excrement. As it is, we flush only a couple times a day, and our raspberries grow atop the drain field of our septic tank.

    I eagerly look forward to listening to EWM Network.

    18 October 2007, 10:55 pm

13. DeAnander:

    I’m back in the land of high bandwidth…

    I’ll work on the EWN main page, add future topic ideas, and invite readers to drop by this thread to ask questions and suggest more topics. At present we have three new segments in mind:

    1) a sample of the provocative essays of Ran Prieur, feral philosopher and downshifter (in progress)

    2) vermicomposting and humanure: politics, practicality, how-to
    (in fairly imminent prospect)

    3) local currencies: how they work, what’s the big idea, where are they already working today (being mulled over)

    I would like to do a segment on industrialism and gender, loosely based on (a) Jensen’s Strangely Like War, (b) Whisnant’s essay on Nauru and sovereignty, and (c) Mies’ Patriarchy and Accumulation; but it’s a huge topic and might need to be broken down into subtopics…

    pls suggest more topics! I’d prefer to stay away from “current events” except insofar as they illustrate perennial themes (like using Stan’s HOA vs Vegetables case as a springboard into issues of permaculture, autarky, resistance); it would be nice if the EWN recordings maintained their value over time instead of becoming “yesterday’s news.”

    we’re also tossing around some more “personality” interview ideas, and looking at other online radio formats with an eye to understanding what works, what doesn’t, what attracts listeners, etc. would be interested to know what podcasts or audio downloads readers are fond of and what is attractive about them… and what the EWN can offer that is not already out there in quantity.

    we have a couple of basic format variants: 1) a hosted interview with one or more guests, 2) a conversation on a specific topic between “regulars” (a la Radiolab or My Dinner with Andre), 3) audiobook-esque spoken text, i.e. medium-lengthy texts read aloud.

    I am tempted to add “lengthy texts read aloud and then discussed or critiqued” but that could get really loooong. an unexplored option is fiction or even audio theatre; no one involved has any acting chops so we haven’t gone there.

    question: would anyone be excited about, say, selected chapters of Stan’s books read by the author? sounds kinda neat to me… but it’s a lot of hours of work. would anyone be excited enough to pay a few bucks for an iPod-ready version of a PDF that they could download for free? is audio a value-added extra that might generate some income to pay IA’s hosting bills?

    other question: are there essays of particular wit, relevance and charm that our readers feel would make great mp3 offerings, which are not so commercially successful as to involve us in copyright nightmares with corporadoes? I have blanket permission from P Linebaugh to record any of his historical essays that appear at Counterpunch, for example, and I find his style and his insights very appropriate for reading aloud — he’s a storyteller. Ran P is also a natural storyteller. Dmitry Orlov’s essay about collapse of the USSR would be a great mp3 series… OTOH, pace Charles, I doubt that the Grundrisse would make riveting listening

    22 October 2007, 7:41 pm

14. The Buffalo In Da' Midst:

    Dissemination thought: It would be easy to put these broadcasts on archive.org. They’d be glad to have them, it’s easy to use, and the audience is global and quite large.

    Here what one of the Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary postings looks like:
    [October 22 2007] Travus T. Hipp Morning News & Commentary: Jock Culture… It’s No Accident That Sports Metaphors & Political Pundits Go Together

    http://www.archive.org/details/tth_071022

    25 October 2007, 6:56 pm

15. Mark Homer:

    The idea of combining permaculture and resistance on the web is a good one, with two limitations to be kept in mind.

    1. A real permaculture community is off the grid, meaning that it gets its energy largely through solar panels. If it rains or is cloudy for a day or two, people must check the energy storage level before turning on the computer. That limits audience unless back podcasts are stored.

    2. Many people in the permaculture movement are putting their energy into building a parallel society, and holding a space open for other people to explore their addiction to the consumer lifestyle and their ambivalence about losing it.
    Permaculture folks are generally not into resistance. Perhaps, realistically, they should be, but they are not. On the other hand, it is doubtful that they could create their new social reality if they were into resistance.

    31 October 2007, 7:36 pm

16. Stan:

    This is precisely why the two have to come together. They cannot survive without one another. Resistance has no current practice that breaks dependency; and even those who evade politics will be found by it eventually. A question as simple as the right to buy raw milk is political, and requires political work and organizaton to resist.

    1 November 2007, 3:52 pm

17. DeAnander:

    I concur… going back to Salatin’s famous essay “Everything I want to do is illegal” we have a long history of the enclosure of food production and distribution, by legal means, at the behest of capitalists, under the guise of public interest. The finance capital nexus is totalising; its voracity is such that it cannot permit any productive activity to take place w/o profit taking and control by the kleptocrats.

    The agribiz nexus has been busily at work over the last 20 years trying to make it illegal to grow your own food, or for individuals to sell or trade food. They are coming at it along multiple attack vectors simultaneously: contaminating the genomes of common cultivars with “patented” genes so as to assert ownership and extort tribute; medicalising herbal remedies and supplements to as to pull them into the legal realm of controlled pharmaceuticals; prohibiting any food processing or packaging outside huge overcapitalised, central industrial plants (dairy, meat, preserved foods); spreading scare stories (at least one per year) about “bad organic food making people sick”; buying up organic/local companies and folding them into transnational brands (Coke bought Odwalla years ago and has just acquired the yuppie ‘vitamin water’ brand Glaceau) under centralised management; adulterating/weakening the organic certification to permit industrial practises, so as to underprice and outproduce susti producers but still fool the public into thinking they are “eating organic”; RFID tagging every single livestock animal in the industrialised nations and driving out of business any farmer who refuses or cannot afford to comply; and so on.

    Their goal is nothing less than the complete Enclosure of food production, processing, and transport under centralised control by finance capitalists. And this suits authoritarian governments just fine, because factory food and long supply lines mean that hunger becomes a ready and easy weapon of state control against the people. Permaculture folks are vulnerable — much as the population of Iraq was vulnerable — to this Ag Mafia war against small producers, heirloom cultivars, and sustainable polyculture. They are — by their very lifestyle — resisting a totalising agenda. The more that agenda succeeds, the more their small resistance will become intolerable to it and the closer the jackboots (or the lawyers) will get to their little enclaves.

    In the meantime, those who talk about (sub)urban resistance while still relying on WalMart or Safeway for their daily bread, have to be kidding. No strike committee can get people to hold out while their kids are literally starving. You can’t effectively resist an authority that controls your food and water supply (we might in our day add your electricity supply, since so much that we do requires light and power tools). Resistance without local, physical autarky is just hifalutin rhetoric — too much like those silly Post Apocalyptic movies where a buncha macho guys are roaring around a desert in souped up ATVs killing each other over gasoline, never a living plant or animal nor an oasis in sight, yet somehow they are all well fed and never dehydrated. Where’s the food? where’s the water?

    The link between food security and resistance is intimate and very well known to conquerors since imperialism began. Western invaders in Hawai’i diverted streams away from indigenous villages to starve the people and their animals and crops. The Conquistadores burned the traditional crops of the people they enslaved and prohibited them from replanting. And the Americans are trying to replace the traditional dryland adapted crops of Iraq with “superior” patented GMO wheat and corn. They know what they’re doing — and we should, too.

    1 November 2007, 4:10 pm

Leave a comment