Dream Food for an “Economic Contraction”

Somehow this here is a food article with implications for my life. Purslane’s a weed growing in my non-Internet - and it could be sprawling in your zones, too. It’s like a baby jade plant - but less succulent, rich in omega 3’s and vitamin C.

Crunchy.

Zingy.

I ate it all afternoon in my garden while I weeded ( harvested?). Dinner with a summertime food posse somehow involved sautéeing some garlic, beets, purslane, and beet greens.

 It’s not like the Times to give away free miracle food secrets. One article I read in there was about almost-but-not-quite married bachelors and their friends jetting to some of the special expensive cities to enjoy thousand-dollar-a-head dinners in lieu of strippers. 

There are still some New York Times food tips out there to help the money flow of economy speeds. Last week,  Florence Fabricant got going about how you can have purslane for $6 a pound at the Union Square Greenmarket.

Weeding

The cast in the new Campus Center herb garden includes a summer intern and some roots. And, gosh, narrative analysis is failing. Like, what’s the object, guys? Rhizomes are the target and they’re the probe the gardener listens to slash kinda sorta becomes.  I’m tugging at the base of a clump ‘til the filaments crackle. Easy does it. It should sound and feel like velcro unhooking, a little bit muffled. Or else there’s a snap when a stalk jerks clean without roots.

This weeding is some good shit. The soil’s got you and you’re in the smooth crystal vacancy of labor. Who needs imported pleasures?  Not that a pure local experience is possible today, or any day. This afternoon’s work beat is provided by the end-of-year staff picnic a few yards away.  Bow Wow Wow Yippy Yo Yippy Yeah. Bow Wow. Yippy Yo Yippy Yeah.  ”Atomic Dog” is playing and no one else is dancing. 

Poetry Month

I run down Mercer Street pretty much every day because surely just a few hours before I come up the hill past the seminary the folks with the kissing geese sculptures in the window and Give Peace a Chance poster on the porch will have gotten down on their knees  in front of their house and chalked out another haiku, sonnet, or dialogue on the flagstone.

 The Easter Sunday crowd rubbed away that one Robert Frost poem about the time you and I went to that pasture together and shared the fog and silence while addressing pressing farm maintenance issues. 

Two sticky days of blue smudges went by, and then, this afternoon, there was this.

Snow Country

They play capture the flag in the courtyard, and you declare an aloofness zone by the halfway ice fort: ”The poles will melt! Bake sales won’t save the chickadee from heat death! Your island nation will drown! And I’m giving albedo to space and not typing letters!”

You don’t say that. You put new powder in a garbage can and mold a shrine to love because nature isn’t writing. Words came first, and a kiss will never be HEART spelled in a snowbank.

And when it gets hot and your forests move north with the tropical bugs, you can sing to the cloud country stronghold of ice truth outside of time! And not plant any paw paws!  And think about the past!

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

“Everything We Need That is Not Food or Love”

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers.[…]They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. The men scan for stamped dates, the women for ingredients. Many have trouble making out the words. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living. And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.

[via White Noise - Don DeLillo - ch. 40 ]

“Oh Yeah, Well in My Sustainability Epic…”

The Next Decade’s Top Sustainability Trends … 10.  Sustainability Movie/ Novel /Art/ Song

There has yet to be a significant work of popular art that I am aware of that captures the modern systemic aspirations of sustainability. In terms of modern life, some works have focused on environmental destruction, (Marvin Gaye’s song “Mercy Mercy Me”), the terror of abrupt climate change (the unsuccessful 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow), the international political subterfuge behind oil (2005’s Syriana with George Clooney, one of my personal favorite films), and the destruction of natural systems (Dr. Seuss’s 1971 book The Lorax) or cultural/species depletion (James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar), but no novel, song, painting or movie has come close to depicting a fictional world of what holistic sustainability solutions might look like, even feel like.

Odds are that breakthrough art successfully depicting sustainability will feature urban life in some fashion. After all, cities have gone from being perceived as the opposite of what the “environmental movement” has been trying to save, to ground zero for this new revolution that is launching in a city or neighborhood near you.

[via Worldchanging - 2010-01-05 ]

How would you “capture the modern systemic aspirations of sustainability” in your breakthrough work of popular art ?

ECOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS?

Is There an Ecological Unconscious?

What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.

In Albrecht’s view, the residents of the Upper Hunter were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault … a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” A neologism wasn’t destined to stop the mines; they continued to spread. But so did Albrecht’s idea.

[via Daniel Smith/ nytimes - 20100127]

Sky Box

Outer Space was liquid black and then the grid of light flipped on out of nowhere with the silk white humming tubes of the x axis stretching out forever - and y string walls to our port and starboard glowing through the roof - and axis z dead ahead in the crystal city quadrant where the quartz cells of the moss doubled and doubled and doubled and doubled and doubled until they hit the sky and doubled back inside their box.

Our neighbors rained into our barrack cell and bunk beds couldn’t procreate to hold them. And you gave me one of those looks:  ”That mattress has a corner left.”

And I said, “Shhhh…” and put my finger to my lips because that’s what you do in movies when the thunderclapping voice of a hidden and maybe invisible old man cuts through the crowd:

“This sky quadrant has cancer.This tower is a cancer cell.”

And we ran.

*****

We stood with our backs to the doomed planet museum. The sun was out and we were probably in America. I said: “So, is what’s-her-name still having a party?” And we found something else to do.