Volkswagen started as the people’s car company. During the ’60s they embodied an ethos of do-it-yourself auto-maintenance and tongue-in- cheek subversiveness. A generation later I believe they’re at it again. Their fun theory initiative is part Candid Camera, part Big. Yes, it’s about branding, but it’s about the joy of using things and making things and not accepting the status quo.

Here’s a fun way to throw away the trash.

via BoingBoing: This example of cardboard animation is awesome. You have a marginal narrative. Small enough not to get in the way. What you get are city scapes. Google take note: Cartoons against background increases capacity to navigate. Put another way, if you empathize with (or in this case, feel disgust for) something you can place yourself somewhere.

That’s what the Aspen Project/Google Earth approach lacks. It’s third person versus second person. The only book I remember reading in second person was Bright Lights, Big City, which had something about a ferret in The New Yorker, and the phrases “Peruvian marching powder” and “all messed up and no place to go”. Perhaps it said something about society. I digress. The important thing is to watch the video. Then maybe go out and make one yourself.

Don’t underestimate the power of paper in film. Bob Dylan used it to great effect in Subterranean Homesick Blues, an iconic video that was made before videos were made.

Have been thinking about political stuff (g20), but I offer this instead.

Is it the path to enlightenment or the work of a psychotic? Jung’s Red Book has arrived on the scene. I’m usually bored by Jung, but I like Jungian things. Anyway, I’m quite interested by this.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

In regards to a recent Chris Briem post here’s a graphic on crowds.

Thanks, Dan

The Times’ reporting on violations of clean water regulations is nothing short of devastating. Clean water is something you take for granted, but the article by Charles Duhigg is a vial of smelling salts to make us think of an issue too easily ignored. The article is a combination of research, moving stories of people victimized by a rigged system, and lots of hand-wringing or silence by politicians and public officials.

In Charleston, West Virginia, the water is unfit to bathe in, let alone to drink.The poor water quality is due — not according to coal companies but anyone with a shred of scientific capacity — to coal companies injecting slurry back in to the ground. State DEPs and the EPA have been hamstrung in their efforts to police bad behavior. According to one regulator . . .

“We were told to take our clean water and clean air cases, put them in a box, and lock it shut. Everyone knew polluters were getting away with murder. But these polluters are some of the biggest campaign contributors in town, so no one really cared if they were dumping poisons into streams.”

So the costs were externalized onto the people of Charleston, who can’t take a shower for fear of getting a rash, or take a drink for fear of losing their teeth or gall bladders.

The problem with enforcing the regulations is that it’s not so apparent that our water is polluted. Toxic chemicals found in tainted water can be invisible. In the ’70s when The Clean Water Act was instituted, the problems were more apparent. Raw sewage made a better target than minuscule quantities of arsenic.

Regulations come with a cost. Fining and restricting coal mining activities will surely raise the price of coal, and therefore of electricity. The average utility user will bear the burden. But it beats having to use bottled water to brush your teeth. Plus, we’ll have the bonus of being awake.

We are wealthy in direct proportion to the ability we have to act on our dreams, to make what we only imagine.

Recently, our city has lost the capacity to make a million barrels of beer — not that the Iron City Brewery has made that much beer in a while. Sales have been below 200,000 barrels for years. Much of that capacity was used to make crappy beer, malt liquor and light beers. I for one found myself a lone defender of Iron City beer, though it could give you both a headache and a stomach ache after two beers (which probably had to do with how much adjunct grains they used).

The big loss is not the beer. There is no lack of beer. The loss of the skills, talents, and connections that were part of the workforce of the brewery, the nearly hundred workers who knew how to run a boiler, create a valve, maintain the flow of thousands of gallons of water, or fill thousand of cans a minute will be lost. A shop full of artisans is a hard thing to create, but in deciding to close shop, the owners of the brewery have undone what had taken years to do.

The oldest parts of the brewery buildings will remain, maintained perhaps by the mechanisms of preservation law. What mechanisms do we have to preserve the artisanal and craft abilities of a hundred workers?

Just got the darned thing unblocked. Lost the draft about I don’t know what. Anyway I’m virtually in Irwin. You can catch up to my virtual travels there.

My iPhone wordpress app is crashing.

Mark Stroup
smallstreams.wordpress.com

While we were in Massachusetts, Liz picked up a book for me at the Annisquam Seafair. The book, Pittsburgh Regional Economy, seemed a long way from its origins. But I can imagine its sojourn to New England on the fetters of an environmentalist, its dormancy, and the happenstances that led to a planting into my hands.

Paperback, saddlestitched, and typeset with an IBM Executive typewriter, this 38 years-old book would only seem to be classified as ephemeral, what with all the technological developments and the shifting environmental landscape.

Unfortunately, the problems remain the same (air and water pollution, gypsy moths, strip mining, the degradation of bee habitat, ad infinitum) and the public awareness and will has barely changed. If you go back another 30 years you begin to think we’re seriously moving backward.

We entered the war [World War II] with a vast and well-organized collection industry of over 200,000 junkmen withh their horse-drawn carts, push carts, and motorized trucks. By February, 1942, the federal government had
organized the junkmen, gas station personnel (no gas to sell) and the
rest of the civilian population down to the city ward levels with Allegheny County having 5 pick up zones. The whole country went from one pick-up drive to antoher with scrap rubber campaigns being the most numerous. For rubber, tin, and lead there were house-to-drives as well as campaign goals for the nation, the state, county and collection zones. The 1942 June scrap rubber drive achieved its commonwealth goal of 355 tons but not all collection zones achieved their target goal in our area. By 1944, the scrap rubber campaign ended as a result of a reduced demand for rubber goods by the military and the production of adequate synthetics by industry.

From Pittsburgh Regional Ecology, edited by Earl R. Schmidt,
published by Vulcan Press, State College, PA, 1971.

Think of it, a network of 200,000 junkmen, most likely free agents with volumes of embedded knowledge, and myriads of customer and vendor connections. Talk about a distrbuted solution! What if we could make ragman as desirable a position as barista?