Punkin carving! i luv it.

pumpkins in order:
dave’s, jon’s, adrians, alicia’s, sarah’s, becca & will’s, the whole group

Everybody is having a great time – thanks Adrian and Sarah!

Nick Currie looks towards the future and gives his predictions for what the world will be like in 2015:

(I’ll block quote from the article here because this really is that good)

Ah, postmodernism! There’s something that’s gone out of date in the last seven years, for a start. The binary collapses executed strategically by postmodernism (the collapse of high and low culture, past and present, local and global) are, by 2008, boring us to death. We’re thoroughly sick of art which appropriates popular culture, of meta-layering and shallow, reflexive irony, of pastiche and of the mapping of museum to supermarket and supermarket to museum. Philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have proposed forms of neo-foundationalism, austerity, even collectivist authoritarianism as ways beyond postmodernism’s banal ouroborosity (the ouroboros — the snake that eats its own tail — is the perfect symbol of postmodernism’s unbearable reflexivity, and the choking it provokes).

*******

But it’s now becoming clear that 2015 will not be so much about
globalization in the sense in which Fareed Zakaria describes it in his
book “The Post-American World”: “Generations from now,” Zakaria wrote,
“when historians write about these times, they might note that by the
turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its
great, historical mission—globalizing the world.” That’s a peculiar
construction; why did it take America to “globalize the globe”? Surely
the globe was already global?

I think by 2015 the US will have declined sufficiently (economically,
militarily and culturally) for us to see that there is a difference
between globalization and globe — between, in other words, a world in
which an array of colourful “Others” are arranged around a central
“sole remaining superpower”, and a world in which the Others relate to
each other on equal terms, and don’t worry so much about how they’re
represented. There will be a clear shift, in other words, from
monopolarity to multipolarity; from what, in the airline business,
they call the hub-and-spoke model to the point-to-point model.

What that means, in cultural terms, is that there will be a net
decline in orientalism (the Magic Realism and World Theatre of the
1980s, for instance, or the constant “dialogue with the Other” seen in
today’s art biennials), and a net increase in point-to-point
conversation which cuts out the middle man, the arbitrator, the hub,
which is, in most cases today, the United States and Europe. Instead,
aided by increasingly sophisticated digital translation tools, there
will be, by 2015, a many-to-many culture, a point-to-point culture.

The digital will continue to make old media irrelevant: CD albums,
paper books, newspapers and magazines, public cinemas will all more or
less disappear, except for peripheral retro-fetishistic enclaves (like
the flourishing vinyl fetish). Physical goods will circulate less,
while intellectual goods circulate more and more freely. Copyright as
we know it will die. National television and radio will also melt away
after a series of crises. Media which bring people physically
together, on the other hand, will flourish — ephemeral performative
arts like live music, theatre and dance have a strong future. People
don’t want to spend all their time online, after all.

More spontaneous actions like flash mobbing will develop, and cities
will become backdrops for ludic “urban exploration” and “pervasive
urban gaming”. Some of these new “disorienteering sports” (the
“ostranenie” of Russian formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky
mapped to the “derive” of Situationists Guy Debord and Michel de
Certeau) will be organized by city mayors as part of local tourism
initiatives. Others will be more dangerous and unpredictable, shading
into terrorism, autonomy, and micro-revolution.

At the same time, people will travel less as oil costs increase and
travel is seen as environmentally unacceptable. So the point-to-point
global dialogue will happen mostly in the digital realm, whereas the
performative boom will be a local one, centred on particular cities.
We will see cities become semi-autonomous, as they were in renaissance
Italy. (Some may, alas, need fortified city walls.)

Steep increases in basic commodity and transport costs will make
people adopt more austere and self-sustaining lifestyles, the kind
once called “post-materialist”. There will be general exhaustion with
the old consumer capitalist tension between haves and have-nots,
between boom and bust, between anorexia and bulimia. Instead, modest,
simple lives organized around local barter, community arts, and
self-sustainability will become the ideal, although people may well be
inspired by models on the far side of the world.

Just as we’ll see a return to Renaissance-style semi-autonomous
cities, I think we’ll see the re-emergence of the “Renaissance Man” –
an all-rounder who can bake bread, edit films, code for the web, write
poetry, eat fire, and cook home-grown vegetables for twenty friends
and neighbours. As the mist clears on the “uncanny valley” of 2015,
what emerges is not a robot, but Leonardo da Vinci.

Nick touches on all kinds of really important themes that resonant with me: the free circulation of ideas, the primacy of digital media, the idea of the “well-rounded” and not-particularly-specialized 21st century person, environmental sustainability, re-emergence of distinct local culture, the death of post-modernism, slow living, and point-to-point cultural contact.

I can only hope that some of this comes true in seven years – it’s idealistic, sure, but I think it’s very possible, even in my own life.

I know I’m not typical of my generation, but my primary work experience has already been full of point-to-point cultural contact with people from around the country and the world: I count as friends and mentors people from the UK, China, Central America, New Zealand, Africa, and South Asia. And I’ve only had a “real” job for the past five years or so!

I’m into the local community arts scene here in BR, I can do some web design, and grow some spring vegetables in my friend’s community garden. I’ve gone digital with most of “the stuff” in my life (well except books!). Dave and I use the Creative Commons for our content here, the list goes on and on but I won’t at the risk of sounding narcissistic.

The real question, I think, is not whether I’m ready for this kind of world, but for whether the rest of the country is. Will America welcome the “post-american” world, or as
Fareed Zakaria calls it, “the Rise of the Rest”?

I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a ‘yes’, but I guess only time will tell. See you in 2015!

My grandfather was a conservative with reservations. He admired Reagan, but I’m positive he would not have liked him. What could Reagan have understood about an ethnic frenchman, raised without English, or Hollywood, or Protestantism? Sure, they could of talked about ‘Republican Values’, but could the former president really have understood life from the perspective of someone so radically different from himself? I doubt Reagan would have even been interested in trying.

So, with a bit of sadness, I watched the VP debate tonight wondering what Papa would have thought about Sarah Palin. I think he would have disapproved. It’s not just because he would not have wanted a woman in the white house, or because he would have been suspicious of her Yankee (Alaskan!) ties, or because she has no intellectual credentials. It would have been because she, quite literally, comes from a completely different and disconnected world than the one he grew old in.

One of the many problems with American politics is trying to define what and who America is. Watching Palin talk about hockey moms and Biden talk about the middle class steel worker provoked a kind of lingering sadness – the man who understood me, who really knew me – is gone.