Christopher Brown's Blog, page 7

The movie version

In the movie version we were taught to expect, things would have turned out differently.

You could see that version playing out right after the event, in the pictures that emerged of special ops soldiers gone neo-cowboy, Grizzly Adams beards on horseback in the cold desert, outfitted by REI and action movie propmasters, hunting down medieval necromancers in their Blofeldian mountain hideouts—a postmodern western of virtuous retaliation.

But the movie lost its final reel when the bad guy escaped capture at the big showdown.  The ending never resolved, and even when that thread closed a decade later, it was enabled by illusion, and too late to close the wounds.

This was at the same time, you may recall, that the hypercapitalist abundance of the Long Boom that had been inflating everyone’s retirement accounts for the preceding decade, disguising the workplace as playpen, was revealed as a gigantic scam procured largely through fraud.

In the movie version we would not have used our injury as pretext to make a whiteboard war real in our naive neocon fantasy that we could defeat radical Islam by toppling one of the region’s strongest governments.  In the movie version the dictator would not have eluded capture so long, and we would have found his cache of secret weapons.

In the movie version, when New Orleans flooded, we would not have abandoned the poor to fight it out.  Heroes in uniform would have rescued them, instead of shooting them on the bridge as they too tried to escape.

(Do you remember at the time, when the news earnestly disseminated stories that people in New Orleans were slipping into cannibalism?)

In the movie version, I suppose the bankers might have been even more criminal than they were in real life, but we would not have had to spend the better part of a decade propping up a fragile simulation of prosperity with zero interest monetary policy designed to make entropy look like growth.

In the movie version, the principal force of “change” would not be a hate-spewing narcissist freak allowed to use the mass mind manipulator of mainstream media to stoke the darkest embers of our primitive tribal natures.

On days like today I read the news and feel like we let Osama win, by breaking the master narrative and failing to heed “the better angels of our nature.”

There’s a more hopeful future out there, one we can imagine, but it won’t manifest without us doing a better job of mapping it out.  It’s a future based on diversity, equality, a conception of prosperity that embraces the limits of the land and sky that sustain us, and a freedom that finds its strength in the collective genius of many individuals rather than silverback cults of individual power acquired through competition and consumption.

The end of the Cold War extinguished the utopian visions that fueled most of the progress of the post-Enlightenment West, and 9/11 shifted the American movie into torture porn mode—the Cheneyite narrative that we must become evil ourselves in order to combat dark forces and protect our “homeland.”  Fifteen years later, we can’t seem to navigate our way back to a more redemptive endpoint.  Perhaps because we need to envision a new place to go—an aspirational destination, the kind of thing that our social theories and speculative fictions used to provide.  Dystopia may be what sells, but it’s not a place I want to live.  No one person has the answers—especially not a politician or another boss—but maybe the chorus of the networked multitude will soon write its own music.

Fiber hawk

We live at the end of the road in an industrial part of East Austin, but the road used to continue on, following the course of the Lower Colorado downriver to what used to be the bigger towns like Bastrop.  While the old road is now an empty lot that abuts the woodland floodplain, it’s still right of way that’s used by telecom infrastructure, the line of poles marching off along the trail of the past.  I read last year in Tung-Hui Hu‘s amazing book A Prehistory of the Cloud how something like 90 percent of the Internet traffic in the U.S. travels over fiber optic cable laid in old railroad right of way, and I’m sure there are plenty of other spots where data travels along the path of pioneer trails, many of which were Indian trails and before that animal trails.  Google Fiber has been coming out here lately in their big cherry pickers, hanging new line on these poles, which they share with TimeWarner and probably AT&T and the local power company.  The ethereal future is anchored in the deep memory of the land, and sometimes even makes inadvertent habitat for the wildlife it might otherwise displace.

The hawks that live in these woods love those telecom poles, and you find them up there most mornings from daybreak until the beginning of the work day.  Their favorites are back in there past the door factory, where the right of way runs along the fenceline of the dairy plant. Between the plant and the woods are ten acres or so of empty fields, bulldozed thirty years ago for the industrial park but never developed. Dudes come in and mow those fields twice a year, keeping the baby mesquites and retama from taking over.  Most of the year, there is just enough cover for small mammals to think they can probably make it through, but always patchy. And so the hawks watch, and wait, and feast, while the trucks and planes come and go in the near background of the human space on the other side of the fence.  They never let a dude with dogs get too close, but close enough that you can usually make out the silhouette of what they may be holding in their talons—usually mouse, rat, or vole.

The pole in this picture is right by my front yard, visible from the door to the 1978 Airstream trailer that serves as my home office.  So I often see whoever may be perched up there, and usually have ready access to my real camera, the one with better zoom than my phone.  I have yet to succeed in getting my shot without causing the raptor to fly off after a second, but I’ll get there.  It’s been raining all week, a freak occurrence for Central Texas in August, so I was hoping the downpour would better mask my simian stumbling.  It did, but not enough.

The empty lot next to that pole sold last year, and the construction supply warehouse back in there just got listed for $11.6 million.  Just west of here, Oracle is building a gigantic new campus.  The economics are finally approaching the point where the numbers will work for a gigantic dairy plant to get relocated to make room for offices or apartments.  Some of us work on protecting these little pockets of wild urban habitat, and we’ve had good success, but even if you keep the buildings back along the road you can’t really do anything to limit the human bustle—indeed, those of us who live back in here are the most permanent human presence, even if we try to make our own yards into better habitat.  So some of the species will move on, like the barred owls that hang out in tall trees just below this pole, where the city drainage culverts empty out into an Anthropocene lagoon that nourishes the thirsty cottonwoods.  Maybe we should see if Google and Oracle want to chip in for the conservation efforts.

Yesterday afternoon when I got up from my desk and the downpour had settled into a light rain, I heard a coyote howling back there in near-perfect sync with a police siren hurtling down the nearby highway.  I guess that is as close as we are going to get to talking to each other, for now.  But our Anthropocene future is going to require us to learn how to make better home for wild nature in the city.  We could start by remembering that there is no such thing as an empty lot.

 

Armadillocon 2016

My schedule for Armadillocon, for those of you planning to attend in Austin this weekend:

Blurred Lines SF by Writers from the Mainstream

Fri 5:00 PM-6:00 PM Ballroom E

C. Brown, Catmull, W. Siros, Weisman*,

Panelists will discuss the phenomena of SF writing by mainstream writers. Does anything make it different? What can we learn from these writers?

Reading

Sat 1:00 PM-1:30 PM Southpark B

Christopher Brown

SF and the Environment

Sat 3:00 PM-4:00 PM Ballroom E

C. Brown*, Dimond, Latner, Reisman, Schwarz,

How is SFF affected the ways we define ourselves and our environment? How is SFF changing? How is our conversation about the environment changing? What books and movies on this topic are especially interesting?

Dystopias

Sat 9:00 PM-10:00 PM Ballroom F

C. Brown, McKay, Schwarz*, White, Young

Why do we love them? Which ones do we love, and which not so much?

 

Wednesday morning edgeland remnant

Found on this rainy morning rambling the riverine woods behind the dairy factory.

Looking through holes in the border wall

[pic: The U.S. border where it walks into the Pacific, viewed from Tijuana.]

If I had never left Iowa, the state where I grew up, I might find all this talk of building border walls more persuasive.  Iowa is a long way from Mexico. But I’ve lived in the borderzone longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, and spent a good bit of time crossing over. Since 9/11, I’ve seen the U.S.-Mexico border become one of the most fortified places on Earth.  Six hundred miles of sophisticated new physical barriers have been constructed since 2006, in the places where the Border Patrol said they were needed, expanding on the barriers that have been going up since the Clinton years—like the fortification pictured above that comes up out of the Pacific between Tijuana and San Diego.  Other sections are fortified by the “virtual fence” of sensors, drones, blimps, surveillance towers and armed patrols—much of it using technologies and methods developed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s easy to talk about border walls.  I’ve written about them—here, here and here—arguing that their real purpose is not so much to actually keep people and contraband out as it is to persuade citizens far from the border that the legal fiction the wall renders tangible really exists.

It’s not as easy to look at border walls, especially if you don’t live within driving distance of one—or don’t want to confront the reality that diversity is the future no matter what barriers we may erect.  But there are other ways to experience the reality of U.S. border fortifications that already exist.

Last year, for a conference in Monterrey, I conducted an experiment in looking at the border wall without ever getting up from my chair.  Drawing inspiration from the work of the artist Jon Rafman and the Mexican photographer Alberto Rodríguez, I traversed the length of the border in Google Street View, on both sides, looking for holes in the wall.  Here is some of what I found.  Even better, try it yourself.  Open Google Maps, find a spot along the border, launch Street View, and look for a way to cross.  If you can find a hole, click on it, and see what happens.

Border wall gate at Brownsville, Texas

 

21st century border wall as minimalist land art, looking at Arizona from Sonora

 

Hole in the border wall, Matamoros

 

View through the border wall, Mexicali

 

Texas backyard: trampoline, border wall, nine eyes

 

FM 1419, Texas

 

Border wall gate, Arizona

 

Forager in the shadows by a crack in the border wall at Matamoros, Gateway bridge span in the background

 

DMZ of “Friendship Park,” San Diego Imperial Beach, looking at the border wall where it goes out into the Pacific

 

Spectral street dog in Tecate, “Pueblo Magico”

 

Under construction, Arizona

Nogales, pedestrian crossing

 

Arc lights over the border zone, suburban San Diego

 

Nogales, long view

 

Art museum with border wall, Texas

 

Memorials to a few of those who didn’t make it alive

 

Arizona DMZ, at the spot where this Border Patrol officer made the Google car turn around.

 

 

Sunday morning spelunking in the abandoned semiconductor fab

Not far from where I live, on a high point at the edge of town, hidden behind the woods along a generic frontage road, looms a gigantic ruin of a lost future. From the Ford Administration until the last gasp of the Long Boom, they made the brains of machines there, with acid and silicon.  The company that built the fab was old tech, guys with Florsheim shoes who made 1930s police cars and cabs into networked devices.  They had their own space program at the peak, launching private payloads to build a corporate orbital net twenty years before Bezos, Branson and Musk got in the game.   Capital moved on not long after, the company was broken into pieces, and most of the semiconductor business offshored.  The company no longer exists, but this remnant is still there, in the negative space of city.

The facility is likely get repurposed before too long, in line with a greener vision.   On a recent Sunday morning I had the opportunity to help document its current state—a million-square-foot concrete labyrinth finding its way back to wild.

From the outside, as you approach through the tall grass, it’s like stumbling upon a lost pyramid of the twentieth century, a sprawling complex of big box buildings and industrial infrastructure formerly occupied by white-smocked techno-monks, getting slowly overtaken by invasive foliage.  Through the door, on the upper levels, miles of abandoned cubicles, cavernous spaces for mass gatherings, conference rooms with enigmatic messages left on the whiteboards.  A piece of brutally awful corporate art still hangs on the stairwell up to the C-suite, a three-dimensional explosion of wood and acrylic designed to warn you off the den of corporate authority.  Past the trophy wall of MIMS chips is the old auditorium, littered with printed-out story problems from a logic test whose mass failure may have contributed to the demise of the facility.  Every drawer seems jammed with binders of bound manuals left behind, obsolete volumes of design documentation and safety procedures spilling out on the floor as if through some unexplained process of post-mortem seepage.  On one of the loading docks I found an old camcorder tape sitting next to a copy of Excel 98 for Mac for Dummies, perhaps containing a few minutes of footage that would reveal what really happened here, if only the playback device still existed.

Down inside the plant, where the light cannot reach, are the metal and concrete caverns of the old fab, looking every bit the marooned spaceship, seemingly endless rooms where you can’t really tell which side is ceiling and which side floor.  The warnings are still marked on the doors that lead to narrow anterooms lined with symmetrically arrayed chrome valves.  You need a respirator to enter, and a powerful flashlight, and a brief suspension of your sense of self-preservation.  When you shine your lamp you see a piece of paper taped to a column, an obsolete certificate from the Bureau of Radiation Control.

Back upstairs on the other side of the fab, on a chair in the abandoned library, there is an altered photograph.  A portrait, posed for a corporate ID badge, but smudged, and seemingly marked with pencil, like some naturally occurring Gerhardt Richter miniature.  But you are pretty sure the only curator of this site is entropy.

Below is an image of that photo, and other smartphone snaps from our excursion (click for larger versions).

(This place is also a secure site, and an unsafe one, so don’t get any goofy ideas.)

Corporate creek going back to wild.

 

Whiteboard cave painting in an abandoned conference room.

 

Command and control.

 

Inter-office escalator.

 

Bridge to the exhaust tower.

 

Server room.

 

A note from the Bureau of Radiation Control.

 

Employee cafeteria.

 

Clean room smocks.

 

 

 

Designated smoking area. “SQUIRRELS WILL BITE.”

 

Abandoned auditorium, after the last all-hands meeting.

 

Applied symbolic logic.

 

Feral skywalk.

 

Cubicles in the labyrinth.

 

Stairway to the acid pit.

 

Fab room floor, like an abandoned spaceship.

 

The number you are dialing has been disconnected.

 

Coded columns.

 

Wafers on a trophy wall.

 

Hold your breath.

 

Accidental abstract expressionist portrait, 3×5, in an abandoned corporate library.

 

Close up

 

Done.

 

The Senate Torture Report as Invisible Literature

When I posted on Facebook last month inviting my Austin friends to come out on a Sunday afternoon and hear me talk about the Senate Torture Report, my wife made fun of me for the singularly uninviting nature of the topic.  She was right.  We didn’t get much of a turn-out for the program that Joe Bratcher of Malvern Books bravely put together to observe International Day in Support of Victims of Torture—but we did get video, which the shop has now uploaded to YouTube.  Embedded above is my brief talk on the “Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” considered as both political document and literary text.  My talk followed the remarks of Celia VanDeGraaf of the Center for Survivors of Torture, which does amazing work right here in our community, and was followed by an improvised performance reading of excerpts of the report by Mathew Hodges & Taylor Jacob Pate.

I first read the Senate Torture Report as a PDF when it was originally released in December 2015, and then as a thick paperback from Melville House that I bought at Malvern, a shop that mainly sells poetry and small press literary. Maybe that’s why I read the report as government verse. Invisible literature of a corporatized state, a text that shares more with J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition than any documentary expose—549 pages of short numbered fragments composed in lawyerly cryptomes, powered by the narrative negative space of national security redactions, and by Talmudic annotation with 2,725 footnotes, each of which also works as a freestanding narrative fragment. An executive summary of an even-longer work we will likely never be permitted to see, the Torture Report is best read (or more easily endured) in fragments—bureaucratic cut-ups from the first-person point of view of a nation-state acting out its feelings in response to existential threats it cannot really understand.

Time and context did not really permit me to read directly from the report at the June event.  I posted a few excerpts on my Tumblr when the report was first released, but everyone really ought to do their own sampling, as a matter of citizen engagement.  Maybe you can even fill in the blanks.

 

 

 

 

Readercon 2016

I will be at Readercon this weekend—with a busy Friday since I have to leave early on Saturday.  Full schedule below—hope to see you there!

Friday July 08

11:00 AM    6    Cowboys of Space. Scott Andrews, Christopher Brown, Phenderson Clark, Molly Gloss (leader). Let’s discuss some of the ways in which SF and Fantasy perpetuate a cowboy mythology—a mythology of violent heroes, with a legacy of exploitation, vigilantism and brutality, imbued with fears, biases and insecurities about uppity women, swarthy foreigners, corrupt law enforcement, and government conspiracies. The true histories of cowboys in the American West are far more complex and colorful than many movies and paperback westerns would have us believe. How can we draw on real history to subvert and dismantle cowboy spaceman clichés?

4:00 PM    5    End of the World and After: from Mary Shelley to J.G. Ballard, Russell Hoban, and Beyond. Christopher Brown (leader), Elizabeth Hand, Jack Haringa, Faye Ringel, Henry Wessells, Gary K. Wolfe. Modern sf stories of the end of the world often mask romantic fantasies of abundance and dominion, usually to the benefit of one or a few privileged protagonists who survive the disaster—Brian Aldiss’s “cozy catastrophe.” Sometimes the vision is grounded in nihilistic misanthropy—like the scientist in Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, who initiates extraterrestrial first contact in an effort to lure aliens to exterminate what she considers an irredeemable human race. Other apocalypses, from early examples like Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to more recent work like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and even Mad Max Fury Road, explore even bleaker scenarios. Could a study of comparative apocalypses yield ideas for better utopias?

7:00 PM    A    Reading: Christopher Brown. Christopher Brown. Chris Brown reads from Tropic of Kansas, a novel forthcoming in 2017 from Harper Voyager.

8:00 PM    6    The Future of Government . Christopher Brown, Alex Jablokow, Paul Park (leader), Steven Popkes. We like to think that US democracy is the ultimate and best form of government, but it has its weaknesses as have all the types of government that came before and exist today. What forms of government are coming? What new technologies, economic ideas, or environmental changes might play important roles in these new types of governance? Was Marx ultimately right and we just haven’t gotten very far along his timeline yet? What forms of government have been proposed that haven’t existed in the real world?