As a follow up to the previous post declaring my new tag -- The New Cultural Movement -- I'd like to outline some of the specific threads of opportunity that I see as being germane here. This is kind of internally remedial for me, but seems like a good exercise anyway, and probably helpful for others to get a sense of the scope of things.

So, as regular readers will know, I write occasionally under the subject of revolution (older posts here). What do I really mean by this?

Mark and I have started discussing again an old idea of ours, The New Cultural Freedom Movement. It's a terrible phrase (though developing) as far as marketing is concerned, which reflects the state of our thinking. After more than a decade it's still pretty vague; but it's the best idea I've got going, so here's the shot.

Early on in teenagerdom, those halcyon years when you were immortal and unfettered and when the idea of pure raw rebellion ala ¡la reveloucion! was a lot more plausible, we hit upon a pretty good insight: our ability to individually drive change through direct acts was pretty limited. The real action was in inspiration and empowerment -- in turning people on -- and maybe the real _real_ action is in inspiring and empowering people to inspire and empower _other people_, making waves and ripples and shit like that. I turned on to movement politics early.

This never took any concrete shape for Mark and I and our peers, but the idea lives and animates many of the things we and other people do in life. My politics has largely been driven by this kind of stuff -- inspiration and empowerment -- and Mark's work serves many of the same ends also.

UPDATE: Housing secured. Also, Brie would like to point out that she is not, in fact, a "gangbanger."

Any of my New York readers know of a place to say in Brooklyn?

Brie is teh awesome. You should be so luck as to have her as a roommate.

Out there in the world: Happy Birthday Big Gay Frank, homeowner, and now cat-owner. And Happy Birthday Brie, and thanks for writing such hilarious haikus:

August 2006:
One year in Cali
Ashley and Cian get hitched
I just used "Cali"?

September 2006:
Internet research.
WebMD is for suckers,
More like: FearMD

October 2006:
Life changes so fast.
Space aged chairs and vitamins
But still no answer.

As for me, I arrived last night in Westhaven with NZ Jess as a passenger. She's an old monkey comrade who I haven't seen since the summer of '04, visiting the states again and bestowing us with brilliant kiwi logisms such as "the hard yards" -- whatever's difficult and often avoided, but also generally rewarding -- and "overtaking" -- as an alternative to "passing" when driving. Definitely helped make up for the lack of stereo on the drive.

It's good to be back. Mark returns tonight and we'll be doing a fair amount of Burning Man prep over the next couple weeks. Should be a fun series of projects. The Rastafarian Navy will have a shower no matter what the devils of Babylon try to do to stop us!

Other things that are going on in my increasingly bourgeoise life:

Oh, and this too, from my Sister's (happy birthday brie!) former employer no less:

Well, I managed to recover my pickup from a lot in Contra Costa County today. It was an ordeal: trips to two police stations, a cab ride to nowhere in San Pablo, $650 in impound fees, and the discovery that some strange and dirty business had been going on. In addition to stripping out the last bits of my stereo, the thieves removed my futon from the bed and left a couple car batteries, and some other hardware back there. Plus about 1000 new miles on the odometer. Moamar! What happened?

This is all very frustrating, especially the bureaucratic runaround. Nobody seems to really know how anything works. The fees are an insult too (aren't I the victim here?), but luckily I can afford them and am fortunate not to lose the vehicle completely, so I'll can swallow it. But the whole thing makes me realize one again just how deeply fucked you are if you're poor in this country. Anything goes wrong and your back is up against the wall. It's a real shitty situation.

Anyway, it's interesting experience at least to see into the world of police stations and towing companies. To be honest, I really wish we didn't have such a car-centric culture. I think it would be a nicer country that way.

Spent the day yesterday with my suit on, something that I get to enjoy as it's not what i have to do every day. It was good. Quickly:

Remeber fun? Pure fun? I miss pure fun.

Somewhere along the way I started being more "serious" (and I mean that w/quotation marks) and it was good and important to be able to do, but it became a norm. I've been waking up to the fact that my seriousness, my skepticism, my increasingly reserved nature have pushed out other things that I love and are natural, really part of the organic composition of my soul. The human flower sprouts not from plastic, and so on.

There's no use in getting serious if you can't have fun. All the points you can rack up are... uhh... pointless, unless you can enjoy them, si?

The utilitarian view, that human hapiness as the only verifiable good is pretty persuasive. It's a basic thing that drives the emergent complexity of life, a rich tapestry of experience, etc. Happiness itself is complex, I think, because over the long run it rests on contrasts, challenges, risk, novelty, and most of all the happiness of other beings. It's certainly greater than stimulating a pleasure center in the brain; I'd argue that most crackheads aren't really happy, and those monkeys who starved themselves to death didn't seem to be enjoying it too much eaither.

In my mind there's an antogonistic relationship between recreation and responsibility. Is this true? I remember a common catchphrase from my youth, the "consequence free environment." That was Fun.

Can Coach Koenig learn to cut loose? I don't really know. I don't know that Coach Koening is doing a very good job right now, so I'm wary of even trying. But it's an issue, and it's one that's probably not going away.

Las Vegas airport has free wifi, which happens to reach the airplane while we wait for fuel (delayed by lightning). I'm in the midst of a travel run and it's wearing on me. New York was a much much better visit -- real good to see the Fam and have more time for enjoyment -- but I got sick again, probably from staying out all night on Saturday and maybe sleeping w/air conditioning.

It's not an evil flu, but rather a pernicious cough. I'd probably have it beat, but yesterday I flew real early back to Oakland, and today I'm my flying to Chicago started early as well. Nothing like sleep deprivation and air travel to boost the immune system. Still I feel I'm fighting through it. Feeling better today than yesterday, etc.

Life seems to be firing at me with both barrels though: I discovered last night when I got home that my car was stolen! Moamar, come home! Now, we always knew this was a possibility. It's easy to break into my car, and you can start an '88 Toyota pickup with virtually any car key, or the same screwdriver you used to break in even. Still, it's a bummer. The Lande man is flexing his Pig contacts to track it down, but I'm not holding out too much hope.

Possessions are fleeting, and we shall overcome. It's just a wrench in the works with a high cost of hassle.

UPDATE: Fortune smiles! My truck turned up impounded in Richmond, just as predicted. Moamar apparently got mixed up in a Grand Theft Auto, as a suspect was caught on video leaving my vehicle and breaking into another. I'll have to talk to him about getting involved with the Wrong Crowd, but I'm glad to know he's safe and sound.

I've been reading this book my man Franz laid on me. It's less a book than a collection of essays, all by the recently deceased philosopher Richard Rorty, who calls himself a protege of the old-school American Pragmatist, and favorite of mine, John Dewey. It's been getting me thinking quite a bit.

Franz was the one who originally turned me on to Dewey. He gave me The Public and Its Problems when we first met in mid 2003; reading this book in the thick of the Dean campaign created the cornerstone of my positive political idealism (as opposed to my reactionary anti-war activism). I've long wanted to try and write this out as a kind of manifesto, and someday I probably will, but that's a bit off the track for this post.

So Rorty's book is a bit more unabashedly heady than the stuff of Dewey's that I've come to know. He's addressing an academically philosophical audience, so it's more obtuse and answers a bunch of questions that most of us take for granted. Still, those questions underly a lot, and I like the way he deals with them.

The first essays outline the concept of pragmatism as a romantic polytheism, which breaks down as follows: