Growing The American Economy

In the recent presidential election, one side said that the way to grow the stalled economy was to relieve employers of the burdens of taxation and regulation, while the other said that getting new money into the budgets of middle class families would do the same thing by increasing markets for the employers to sell to.

"How do we grow our stalled economy?" is the wrong question.

A better one is, "How do we assure 300 million Americans of livelihoods, now that the economy has grown as far as it will?"

Deliverance And Integrity

Spent Thanksgiving with my family in Macomb, Illinois.

We celebrated at a rented lodge, four buildings in the woods built by a demented millionaire during the 1920s. It belongs to the university today, and a previous guest left a copy of James Dickey's Deliverance.

Dickey's great; everything in the story is imagined accurately and in scrupulous detail.

Ed Gentry -- the Jon Voigt character in the movie -- tells the tale. He is a partner in a pre-computer graphic design firm, and comfortably trapped.

Ed's friend Lewis -- the Burt Reynolds character -- manages inherited rental properties. Explaining to Drew, another suburban businessman, why Drew should prefer to share a canoe with Lewis, Ed tells him, "Fine. But you probably ought to know that he can handle a canoe pretty well, and I can't. He's strong as the Devil, too, and he's in shape. I'm not." Drew says, "I'm a-goin' with you, and not Mr. Lewis Medlock. I done seen how he drove these roads he don't know nothing about."

Ed introduces himself in the book's first section. "Before," and early in the second section, "September 14." Several of September 14's pages are a conversation that introduces Lewis. It's Friday morning and Ed and Lewis are in one of two cars, headed into the mountains to canoe a wild river that will soon be dammed for development.

" 'I had an air-raid shelter built,' he said. 'I'll take you down there sometime.' " Deliverance was published in 1970, when bomb shelters were already an anachronism, but Dickey may have been working on the novel for several years, and the shelter doesn't make another appearance. " 'I decided that survival was not in the rivets and the metal, and not in the double-sealed doors, and not in the marbles of Chinese Checkers. It was in me. It came down to the man, and what he could do. The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.' "

They drive on and Lewis tells Ed that he would move to the mountains, hunt and farm, if there were a nuclear war.

" 'Oh, I don't know,' I said. 'If you wanted to, you could go up in the hills and live right now. You could have all those same conditions. You could hunt. You could farm. You could suffer just as much as if they dropped the H-bomb. You could even start a colony, How do you think Carolyn would like that life?'

" 'It's not the same.' Lewis said. 'Don't you see? It would just be eccentric. Survival depends -- well, it depends on having to survive. The kind of life I'm talking about depends on it's being the last chance. The very last of all.'

" 'I hope you don't get it,' I said. 'It's too big a price to pay.'

" 'No price is too big,' Lewis said, and I knew that part of the conversation was over."

There's a piece of foreshadowing later in this conversation. They are talking about the integrity of fitting into your own fantasy. Both men have hunting bows.

" 'There're lots of other kinds of people to be than what you are,' I said.

" 'Sure there are, But this is my kind. It feels right, like when you turn loose the arrow, and you know when you let go that you've done everything right. You know where the arrow is going. There's not any other place that it can go.' "

Two days later, Lewis is lying on a beach at the bottom of the river gorge, with a compound fracture, and Ed has to scale a cliff, stalk a woodsman who has sodomized one canoeist and killed another. He must save his own life, Lewis' and the rape victim's by killing the man with bow and arrow.

At the critical moment, the man realizes he is in Ed's sights, and faces him. Ed's concentration evaporates, and he lets the arrow fly. It hits the man, but Ed falls from the tree he's used as a blind, breaking his bow and putting an arrow through his own side.

The man shoots at him, and Ed hides behind a rock. He watches his victim's agony, wishing death would end it. Ed passes out, and wakes to find the man gone. He follows the trail of blood to the woodsman's corpse, and can't be sure that he's killed the right man.

" '...you know when you let go that you've done everything right. You know where the arrow is going. There's not any other place that it can go.' "

The Conundrum of Our Time

It's clear to me from yesterday's blog that some occupations that are a drag on the economy. Armed Robber. Pimp. Corporate CEO.

If you accept Schumacher's claim that natural resources are capital and not income, and then -- thought experiment -- eliminate oil, everybody's broke.

Simplistic it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, if we're gonna dig our way out of this hole, we're gonna need a shovel and tetanus shots, etc. Somebody's gotta pump the oil, dig the taconite, and inactivate the tetanospasmin.

Buckminster Fuller suggested pensioning everybody off. (Quotes are from page 266 of Critical Path.) "Obviously the first step is to pay people the handsome fellowships to stay at home and say to themselves, 'What was I thinking about before I was first told, convincingly, that I had to "earn a living" by doing what someone else said I had to do?' " "With complete freedom of choice, much of humanity will begin to discover that it loves to work at tasks of its own choosing -- that it loves to discipline itself to demonstrate its competence to others -- that it will compete with the many to demonstrate its competence to serve on one of the multitude of production teams."

Aint' gonna happen.

But consider this: It's the hard-working middle class, whatever they do, that has the heaviest ecological footprint. There are too few rich to make much of a difference, and the poor don't consume enough. Corollary to "the poor don't consume enough," it's absurd to say subsistence is too much.

I have a schizophrenic friend who lives on less than a thousand dollars a month -- SSI, I do believe. He fouls the nest much less than I do, because he's so fucking poor, and he keeps trying to make a difference, persuading people to an environmentalist point of view.

Social Media and The Limits to Growth

I've been writing a column for Duluth's Zenith City (semi-) Weekly, profiles with portraits, of the kind of people I've covered on this blog. That's taken me away from here for a while.

I came back with the idea of short, frequent comments, and found that the software had changed, gone beyond what my decade-old iMac could do, beyond what I could upgrade to.

The IMAC is a great old workhorse. Congratulations to Apple for making something that's easy to use and that lasts!

One of the suggestions that The Limits to Growth made for limiting industrial investment to depreciation, and avoiding worldwide economic collapse, was producing long-lasting things that are easily repaired. Think of the old Volkswagen Beetle, or the chest freezer in my basement that's probably as old as I am.

Changes in Blogger (and other social media site) software doubtless fit Google's (and other companies') business plan and contribute to their bottom line, but they force us to scrap perfectly good tools, or opt out of the civic conversation. Do wrong or be disenfranchised. This depletes society's actual wealth, even though it employs and enriches some. It's an example of how individuals' interests can be contrary to society's, of how the short term preempts the long.

Jeremiad on the Economy

Did anthrogenic climate change cause Hurricane Sandy, the current midwestern drought, and the rain that started right after you washed your car? The standard answer is "You can't say." What you can say is that higher levels of "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere will cause weird weather in general, but there are too many steps between letting energy into the system and not letting it our, and any one event. And not much point in lingering over the argument.

You can also say that it's valid and legitimate to discuss the composition of the atmosphere when something unusual and unpleasant has happened.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I'd throttle back my energy use, and so should you, if I'd never heard of "global warming." I want to use climate change as an analogy for something else.

I've mentioned The Limits to Growth before. Limits was a 1972 report on a computer study that predicted global economic collapse in the 21st century unless the world limited births to deaths and industrial investment to depreciation. Australian Graham Turner surveyed the trends that Limits modeled: population, industrial production, agricultural production, services, and pollution. 1972 to 2000, those trends were as predicted.

Can we blame Greek and other European economic problems on Limits' predicted economic collapse? How about post-Sandy gas lines? 8% unemployment? Lockout at the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the NHL?

Sure. Take them as warnings.

Drawing Group last night, and I got some promising studies.

The last two weeks have been busy writing about synthetic marijuana, a new Minnesota drug statute, and a September raid on a Duluth head shop that raises questions about  official respect for the Fourth and Sixth Amendment. (The Fourth is the one about being secure in our persons houses and effects, and the Sixth says we're entitled to a speedy and public trial.)

At drawing group we talked about the new Vikings stadium that the state and city are going to subsidize. Sue had mentioned last week that a sports stadium anchors a lot of downtown businesses. I mentioned that professional sports provide a venue for deal makers to network. This week Sue said that the stadium is important to the future of the Twin Cities economy. I said that that is the reason I opposed the stadium. I mentioned The Limits to Growth, and Australian Graham Turner's confirmation that the LTG 1972  predictions for significant curves (Non-renewables, per-capita services, per-capita industrial production, per capita agricultural production, population, and pollution) were on track as of 2002. I said that the modelers had been able to avoid mid-century collapse only by limiting births to deaths and industrial investment to depreciation. Kathy had read about LTG recently, including the 2030 prediction for collapse, which comes from some other sources than the study. The modelers refused to be that precise, and the curves drop sharply in different parts of the century for different scenarios.

I said that I recognized that mine was a minority opinion, and that people need jobs.

One specific action that LTG suggested was stewarding capital by building things that last and that are easily repaired. Appropos of that, I'm writing this on a borrowed computer. Google has changed the format for Blogspot, and my browser doesn't support it. My perfectly good computer won't handle the update. This is something I've already experienced with YouTube, and -- I believe -- Facebook. Hell of a use of capital.

A Role Model From The Hunger Games

Busy week. The big chore was a profile and drawing, both of mega-structure architect Paolo Soleri, for Zenith City Weekly. When I started this series, I thought I could pull the profiles out of my skull. They all take research.

Last weekend, Sam and Marissa took us to the opening of The Hunger Games. Directed by Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Sea Biscuit), based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, HG is set in a dystopian future US, in which the dominant Capital exact tribute from its twelve provinces in the form of twenty-four teenagers who battle to the death of all but one on television. Jennifer Lawrence carries the show as the identity figure, with Josh Hutcherson as co-fighter and love interest. Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland, and, especially, Woody Harrelson lead a strong chorus.

The Capital is all flamboyant manners, contrasted with a Dorothea Lange grittiness in the provinces.

Two reactions.

Dystopia seems appropriate now, a reaction to our current peril, but I couldn't detect a justifying glimmer of the society I know in this film (or in the book). Nor could I trace a path from now to the world of HG.  I see two opposing points of view as possible foundations for an honest dystopia.

One is currently dominant, growing out of the 2008 recession and weak recovery, and Tea Party populism. In this view, taxation and regulation limit the engines of progress, that is capitalism, industry and technology. This imnpoverishes society and threatens a becoming human existence. Probably it threatens civilization.

In the other view, materialism mistakes capital for income, sees 20th century ingenuity at consuming capital as technological triumph over scarcity, and demands more in the face of overshot limits.

Maybe that's a little too deep. HG is a bagatelle, and taking a position on the economic controversy of our time might limit its greatest virtue. There were three little girls in front of us, two sisters and a friend, escorted by the sisters' father. The younger sister was probably eight, the friend and the older sister may have been eleven. They had all read the book, in fact they had read the entire trilogy,  and were excited to see the film. Jennifer Lawrence's character is steadfast, strong, self-sacrificing, competent, kind, moral, and (begrudgingly) flexible. She's a real heroine.

The closest comparable action hero Barbara and I could think of was Ripley in the Alien movies, which weren't made for girls of tender years. The girls in front of us and their generation have an advantage none of their older sisters did.

Alley Oop & Graphing Peak Oil

I've been thinking that the bell curve is a poor tool for communicating the problem of peak oil. It contains the information we need -- the volume of the planet's oil reserves, and whether we can expect to have more or less of it as we move along the curve -- but that's the area under the curve, and my habit, cultivated when Mr. Wassisname showed me how to graph mathematical functions, is to look at the line on the paper.

A graph like the one above would be more effective. If I were a citizen of the Jurassic Period, trying to plan an economy dependent upon the size of the dinosaur herd, this would give me a better intuitive understanding than the same information displayed as bell curves.

Me and all the other Alley Oops have our caveman enterprises in the dinosaur economy. I want to try something new and stegosaur-dependent in the late Jurassic. If I want to count on enough stegosaurs, I'll have to count on several business failures among the other stego-businesses.

Factoids About Food And Farming

Researching food production for an eco-village operating manual, I came across these factoids, mostly in a book by John Jeavons, called How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible:

The world has about one human lifetime of soil left, assuming industrial farming practices;

The world has about nine thousand square feet of arable land per person;

Nineteenth century Chinese practices allowed production for one person on four thousand square feet;

Jeavons and his colleagues at Ecology Action in Willits, California, can grow one person’s entire diet on five thousand square feet, with a six month growing season, and winters that allow them to grow grain over the winter;

Jeavons’ practices build soil rather than deplete it;

These practices require fifteen minutes (or less) per day, per one hundred square feet, translating to ten hours (or less) per day, per person, assuming the Chinese level of production.

Reading Environment, Power, and Society

I've been reading Howard Odum's Environment Power and Society. I don't read technical stuff well. Odum says that it's a work for popular consumption. I see how it could be more difficult, but a lot of new concepts come at you on each page.

Odum's goal for the book is to communicate a "macroscopic" -- as opposed to reductionist -- view of the world. He discusses the flows of power in ecosystems -- of which human economy is an example -- and suggests that human survival depends upon understanding the energetics of systems. He writes, "Since decisions on such matters in the arena of public affairs are ultimately made according to the beliefs of the citizens, it is the citizens who must somehow include the energetics of systems in their education."

I'll bite. I'm happy to be able to run my eyes over Odum's discussions of the power flows in various ecosystems. I'm grateful to him for providing a vocabulary of symbols used in network diagrams, such as the one above, which illustrates the flows of carbon in a microcosm. P=gross photosynthesis. R=respiration. Hexagons are self reproducing systems, either organisms or populations. The bulge on the left indicates plants as labeled. The things with roof are supposed to look like tanks, and stand for storage.

Growth, Development, And The Urgent Need For a Better Way

In Beyond the Limits, the twenty-year sequel to The Limits to Growth, the researchers make a distinction between development and growth, and write:


In the rich world, economic growth is believed to be necessary for employment, social mobility, and technical advance. In the poor world, economic growth seems to be the only way out of poverty. And a poor family sees that many children can be a source not only of joy, but also of hope for economic security. Until other solutions are found for the legitimate pproblems of the world, people will cling to the idea that growth is the key to a better future, and they will do all they can to produce more growth.

We should recognize that there's a certain amount of hurry-up involved too.

Beginning Beyond The Limits

In 1972's The Limits to Growth, the authors made a case that, if trends in resource use, population, pollution, industrial and agricultural production continued, the world would reach its limits to growth within a century. They also showed that it would be possible to avoid this catastrophe, and that doing so would be easier the earlier the world began.

Here's a paragraph from the 1992 sequel, Beyond the Limits:

But until we started updating The Limits to Growth we had not let our minds fully absorb the message. The human world is beyond its limits. The present way of doing things is unsustainable. The future, to be viable at all, must be one of drawing back, easing down, healing. Poverty cannot be ended by indefinite material growth; it will have to be addressed while the material human economy contracts. Like everyone else, we didn't really want to come to these conclusions.

Eco-Village, Neologism, And Artifact Ecology

Steve, my chief partner in writing the eco-village operating manual may have found a location.

I went to look at photovoltaic setups with neighbor, Joe Hesla, who asked me if I were planning on moving to the eco-village. I said that our neighborhood was my eco-village.

Steve likes to make up words and phrases. I believe English teachers call made-up vocabulary "neologisms." They are often Latin compounds. Steve usually makes his from scratch. His often seem to duplicate existing words, although Steve might feel that they remove some distasteful accidental meaning or emphasize something that isn't in the conventional word. "Woma" is a case in point. It really means the same thing as "woman," a mature female member of our species. The emphasis for Steve is sexual maturity, although I don't know why removing the en shows that. Inadvertently, or otherwise, it also removes the implication that a woman is a man with a womb.

One phrase of Steve's that everybody ought to adopt is artifact ecology. In artifact ecology, we consider the various materials and processes we use in providing ourselves with some means of survival or culture. Resource use, pollution, effect on community, benefit are all considered for -- say -- a person web logging.

George Papandreou And The Limits To Growth

Here's a 2500 year old Greek bronze discovered in the sea the same year, 1972, that The Limits to Growth was published.

LTG was the popular summary of an MIT study that modeled the interactions between population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and non-renewable resources in the world economy. There were about a hundred variables, and the researchers were looking to see what would make the system grow, collapse, or oscillate.

St. Paul native, and Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou has called for a referendum on his country's proposed European bailout. The trade is austerity for 110 billion Euros. Service contributes 78.8% of GDP, and the public sector accounts for 40% of jobs. Oops.

If anything can save us, it probably won't come from public policy, but maybe a country with a severely straitened economy could afford to tell the industrial economy to "Take a hike. We're going to see how many of us can keep eating."

Caged Hazel

Two year-old hazel, caged for winter. I lost half of my ten hazels last winter, and all ten of their predecessors. I don't understand, because deer are supposed to think they taste awful. I'm not taking any chances with the rabbits and mice this year. Notice the lid. The bit of silver immediately above is the caged Rabella.

Phone Conversation With Steve

Nice phone conversation with Steve last night about eco-village project, and general premises. Good communication. Sent him a copy of the current version of the Intro and outline for the Operating Manual.

Left voice mail message for Noel about TC Daily Planet story.

Winterizing The Rabella

Mellow late-October afternoon, first-season espaliered Rabella apple on dwarfing rootstock. Two three by three-and-a-half foot sheets of half-inch hardware cloth, spread with a piece of light lumber and stitched together with baling wire. Tried to anchor the cage with staples made from wire clothes hangers, but couldn't get a good grip on the ground. Scraped a groove with a garden trowel, and buried the bottom with dirt from a harvested potato tower to exclude mice.

Winterizing My Apple Trees

Two apple trees, planted about a yard apart. "Freedom" on the left and "Liberty" on the right, purchased from St. Lawrence Nursery in Pottsdam, NY. The names claim freedom and liberty from disease. A couple of big, permaculture orchards I know have had good luck with them. They are not on dwarfing rootstock, and I'm expecting to have to prune them to keep them at a scale that's reasonable for their site. I plan to graft branches between them, Freedom to Liberty, to form a ladder, and train other branches to a single goblet shape.

The top photo shows the trunks wrapped with "Tree Wrap," two inch-wide paper, to protect the bark from winter cold and temperature changes. In the bottom photo, they're caged with hardware cloth to keep snow-tunneling mice from gnawing them to death.

I will do something similar with my hazel bushes, whose predecessors were victims of predator bunnies, and an espaliered Rabella apple, as well as several more established, but still young fruit trees.

Landmark Forum, Breakdown-To-Breakthrough, Eco-Village Breakdown

Tuesday night was the last night of the Landmark Forum. Most of us brought guests. I didn't. Barbara was specifically not interested, and I didn't invite Sam, having made an executive decision that he should save his five hundred bucks.

Not a whole lot new. For the most part the affair was a sales presentation for the guests. It was an accurate presentation, and the guests received useful information, gratis. The value I got from the evening was a refresher of something I'd missed:

Landmark calls times when you're frustrated "breakdowns," and talks about how to turn them into "breakthroughs."

The way you do this is to work from the commitment the frustration highlights. The commitment's the important thing, and you need to act in some new way to further your commitment.

On the eco-village front, I've had a breakdown communicating with my colleagues. They are way under-capitalized (read "real broke"), and one way this manifests is e-mail accounts but no computers, pager accounts and balky voice mail, but no phones.

Breakthrough will come from initiative, persistence and creativity on my part. Use of the USPS? Regular, expected, calls to the voice mail? Regular, scheduled, meetings?

Maybe finding phones, computers and internet connections will be the ultimate answer. This will require funding, and I'm not that flush myself. A benefactor will want to believe we're capable of something beyond what little we've done so far. The Daily Planet story will help, as will production of the manual I've begun and that we will write. I've encouraged Steve to get together with the community garden in his neighborhood, so as to establish a track record.

Eco-Village.

I've known a guy, Steve, for about fifteen years. He's passionate about peak oil. He's also a client of the mental health system, and lives on a disability stipend. Something brilliant about him is his idea that an eco-village would be a good home for marginalized people like himself.

I have been helping him and two of his friends. We got together to prep for an interview that Steve had landed with a public affairs program on KFAI, the local community radio station. We're also working on a story we plan to submit to Twin Cities Daily Planet.

I'm working on an operating manual for the eco-village. My winter project. The technologies and lifestyle I'll describe in it are ones that I want to promote, but as a retired bus driver, I really don't have standing to be heard. The beautiful, ironic thing about Steve and his friends is that these marginal guys have standing. These confused social dependents want to live ecologically. Creating and building this way of life would demand a level of initiative and self reliance from outcasts that few normal folk show.

Landmark Forum

I complete the Landmark forum tonight. It's a seminar to help me be more effective. The thing that it's left me with is a better self-bullshit detector. Part of my bullshit -- they call it "rackets" -- is being unenergetic about the things that I want to pursue.

Planting Daffodils

We planted a hundred daffodil bulbs Wednesday. Daffodils are the first fairly large flower of the spring, and it felt as though we were making an offering to the gods of pollination.

Bateson Metalogue Impinges on Life

So “Father” convinced “Daughter” that things get in a muddle because there are many more ways of being muddled than of being tidy.

Flip a coin ten times, and there are 1,024 combinations of heads and tails, but in only two of them are there no heads following heads or tails following tails.

I dispatched buses. Let’s say a company drives twenty thousand miles a day, and has a breakdown or accident every hundred thousand miles. It would be preposterous to expect the problems to come every fifth day (“Hey, brother, watch your back, today’s the twenty-fifth”), so the dispatcher goes through periods of multiple crisis and periods of calm. Things don’t happen in threes, but they do bunch up.

Bateson's "Metalogues"

Steps to an Ecology of Mind's first chapter is a series of "Metalogues," ostensible conversations between "Father," the author, and "Daughter," Mary Catherine Bateson. The earliest Metalogue is from 1948, when "Daughter" would have been ten, and ending in 1969.

The conversations cover several of Bateson's interests:

The reason why things inevitably get muddled,

Non-verbal communication,

Games, play, seriousness,

Measuring knowledge,

Why things have outlines,

Metaphor/sacrament/performance/pretend,

and Instinct, explanatory principles, hypotheses.

Bateson wrote that the conversations "should be such that not only do the participants discuss the problem, but the structure of the conversation as a whole is relevant to the subject."

Late in his life, Bateson's nine-year old daughter, Nora, asked him if she would understand Steps. He said that she might be able to read the Metalogues. The last two must have been tough for her. "Daughter's" voice matures over the years, even though the conversations are compositions. She asks tougher questions, and gets more complex or ambiguous answers. All of the Metalogues are full of good things to ponder.

Several more Metalogues appear in Angels Fear, Gregory's posthumously published collaboration with Mary Catherine, most composed by a middle-aged "Daughter."

From "Why Do Things Get in a Muddle?"

D: Daddy, you didn't finish. Why do my things get the way I say isn't tidy?

F: But I have finished -- it's just because there are more ways which you call "untidy" than there are which you call "tidy."

D: But that isn't a reason why --

F: But yes it is. And it is the real, and only, and very important reason.

Bateson: Creatura and Pleroma

Where Basteson (1904-1980) wound up was dividing the world into pleroma and creatura, ideas he got from Jung. You see pleroma in the photograph of the badlands. Beautiful forms but it’s all uplift and erosion, physics and chemistry. Creatura is life: people, redwood forests, Congress, “mind.” Mind is made of interacting parts or circuits, requires collateral energy, is triggered by difference, and requires circular or more complex interaction. He divided existence this way to avoid the mind-matter Cartesian split that he felt had corrupted enlightenment epistemology. Cogito ergo sum, but I am thinking: something material is doing something mental. Mind isn’t separate, and is fair game for investigation.

For Bateson this was “religious” in so many words, but not mechanical or superstitious. He took a while to get there, though, and there’s a lot of it that leaves me thinking, “Huh?” or “Why does that follow?” Lipset’s biography helps, but I still fall off here and there. I’m reading Steps to an Ecology of Mind studying the building blocks slowly and painstakingly, hoping I’ll be able to make the tough connections.

More Bateson

I wrote a note to an old acidhead buddy to the effect that Bateson either makes me go "wish I'd said that," "wow, I never thought of that," or "huh?" I wrote a very telegraphic five hundred or a thousand words, and only got him out of his teens. I'm less than fluent with things like the relation between logical types/contextual paradox and double-bind theory. To say nothing of the relation between all that and phylogenetic homology. Still going "huh?". So now I've begun "Steps to an Ecology of Mind," the anthology of major Bateson academic papers, and the one among his three popular books I haven't read. Hoping for sort of reverse reductionism, or something like that.

Gregory Bateson

Brushing up on my Gregory Bateson for a profile in Duluth's Zenith City Weekly. Reading David Lipset's Gregory Bateson: Legacy of a Scientist.

 It's nice to have a guide. It's also interesting looking forward to explaining Gregory Bateson in under a thousand words. The great systems thinker, he's all of one piece; every idea depends on all the rest.

Trolley Tracks, Jon Freise, & Peak Oil

It would seem like a literary device, if it weren't something you can see half a dozen blocks from here, at the corner of Cedar Avenue and 35th Street: One of Minneapolis' many potholes, this one revealing the original brick paving and a rail from the 60 year-defunct trolley system.

A week ago I interviewed neighbor Jon Freise for the neighborhood newspaper, Corcoran News. I had heard Jon present an explanation of peak oil at the Corcoran Park building in February, and was eager to include him in my series of portraits of interesting neighbors. (Jon told me about the pothole; it's by his house.)

During our conversation, I quoted Wes Jackson to Jon as having said that those of us who conserve are making it easier for the profligate by not bidding against them in the de facto energy auction. Jon thought about this for a while, and responded that it's an accurate observation, but the rich bastards are not the only ones who need cheap oil. Operations that feed the elderly and the sick, people who have to get to work where there's no public transportation, and energy-intensive services upon which even the most conservative among us rely are examples of functions that we would not want to bid against.

Trying to Draw Like Al Hirschfeld

CD cover for my friend Lisa, designed by Dawn Yema, drawings by me. I'd been sketching Lisa while she performed for a few years, and turned a decent likeness into a caricature under the influendce of Al Hirschfeld. The drawings of the other artists are mostly from photos. The exception is Linda Tennyson, the bassist behind Lisa's elbow.

Hirschfeld, born in 1903, was the NY Times Drama Caricaturist. He died, still drawing, five months shy of his hundredth birthday. Of course the fellow with the white whiskers and the eyebrows is the artist in self portrait. The sketchier stuff is Hirschfeld, studying Tom Courtenay. Hirschfeld would attend opening night, sit on the aisle, and take notes or draw in a personal shorthand in his pocket. I've seen a video of the ninety-nine year old Hirschfeld working on a finished drawing of Paul Newman as the Narrator/Stage Manager in Our Town. The Tom Courtenay studies are instructive, but I'd give a lot to see some of the pocket drawings.

Lou Gottlieb

                         The Folksinger  Who Hosted a Commune



The idea of communes "working," flourishing, succeeding is always brought up, but this is beside the point in the case of the communes now existing in America. What is essential is to expose ourselves to a life of voluntary poverty, or life for minimal cost, and a life of sharing...because this is what it is, alone, that makes the commune endeavor an important thing in America.


                                                                 Elia Katz, quoted by Lou Gottlieb


It's a lucky child that has a chance to be reared in an intentional community


                                                                Lou Gottlieb

 Lou Gottlieb was born to immigrant parents in 1923, Jewish name, Catholic upbringing. (During his second LSD experience, he huddled in a closet and chanted Luke 1:31, "Fear not, Mary," mantra-like in Latin.) He played piano, oboe, and bass fiddle, and started college at 16. During the War, the Army Band, stationed at the Army War College, was shipped overseas. The College still wanted a band, and Gottlieb played bass in the replacement band. After the War, Gottlieb finished his education, played in jazz bands and a folk group, the Gateway Singers. He received a PhD in musicology in 1958, transposing fifteenth century masses into modern notation for his dissertation.

Post-doc, Lou continued to gig, and made a serious attempt at stand-up comedy, becoming friends with Lenny Bruce and Don Adams. He arranged tunes for the Kingston Trio, and enlisted vocalists Alex Hasselev and Glenn Yarbrough to help record a demo of his arrangements. Gottlieb, Hasselev, and Yarbrough began to tour as the Limeliters, and formed the nucleus of the ABC television folk hour, Hootenanny, with Lou arranging, playing bass, and wisecracking with the audience.

In 1962, the Limeliters took a break after walking away from a plane crash. Lou bought thirty-two acres of meadow orchard and redwoods, a former chicken ranch just north of the San Francisco Bay, with the idea of subdividing it. At the same time he was investigating yoga, Indian religion, and psychedelics. Lou and friends, Ramon Sender and Stewart Brand would visit the property to horse around. Lou moved his piano into a converted chicken shed, meaning to commit a program of classical music to memory.

In 1966 the San Francisco Diggers, accepting the responsibility for feeding the tide of young visitors to Haight Street, asked Lou if they could tend the orchard and start a garden. Somebody put up a sign inviting hippies to visit the "Digger Farm," and Lou Gottlieb's Morningstar Ranch became ground zero for the hippie commune movement. Between then and 1972, something like fifteen hundred people passed through Morningstar, some for a day, some years. Lou attended seven hippie births, and thought he had been an obstetrician or midwife in a former life.

Lou came to see "open land" as a necessity and way of ameliorating the human condition. Social wealth and automation were making some people "technologically unemployable," and some people were simply "impossibles," people whose need for leisure is more demanding than their fear of starvation. There need to be places where anybody may go, outlaw places where the impossibles are free to take their chances being impossible. Late in life, Lou said -- only half facetiously -- that this is the idea for which he should receive a Nobel Prize.

Culture shock and, we must surmise, a certain hippie fecklessness alienated Morningstar's neighbors. Over the commune's half-dozen years, petitioners and Sonoma County officials angled to evict visitors. At one point, Lou deeded the property to God. He paid $15, 000 in fines and did fifteen days in jail for contempt. Finally the county bulldozed the hippie shacks, the Morningstar adventure having cost Lou something like seven hundred thousand 2011 dollars.

The Limeliters re-formed, and Lou continued to make periodic attempts at working up a classical performance. He also continued to propose that society set aside remote sites where anybody could squat.

Lou died in 1996, diabetes having masked a malignancy until two or three weeks before the end. He faced imminent death with grace and humor.