Oops, I forgot a link:

Dustin pointed out this SO PERFECT Alternet article: Are Liberals Pathetic? My answer is a solid YES. Gotta love that Chris Hedges! This is a must read, for sure.

In an anarchist society, who will pick up the garbage? A spot-on, super quick read. (Thanks to Facebook pal DS for the link)

And from anarchism to my other love, thinking consumerism! A really great gift guide that the Bonbons were included in– I sort of want everything mentioned, particularly the quirky and lovely animal portraits.

And also

Good article in the NYT on the dangers of kitchen plastics and chemicals.

Also from the NYT, an article pretty much totally about my life, except that I don’t sell my wares on Etsy. And don’t make “more than $140,000 a year.” But still, it’s my business life down to a tee: a so-called perfect work life whose one big giant trade off is working every minute of every day, forever.

Oh, and! As previously mentioned, my farmer pal Kira got a sweet little write-up in the Times too! Oh, how cute is she? I’m amazed they got her to stand still long enough to take her picture—by far, she’s the hardest working farmer I know.  (And I make it a point to know farmers, so I know of what I speak.)

My fave band/performance artist, The Blow, is back from a little hiatus!

My BFF Christy introduced me to this lovely Portland blog. It’s super stylie, pretty,  & thoughtful—in short, delicious in every way. We both hate American Apparel and love hair dye, fermentation projects, and veganism, wooo!

Randy has a great post all about his fermentation 101 experiments (among other interesting life tidbits) and I’m not just saying it’s great because he mentions me favorably in it! Sample bit of typical Randy awesomeness: “there seems to be an unwritten exception to noise ordinances allowing any amount of racket so long as it is produced by gas powered tools designed to manage nature.” Oh god, so true.

This is a reminder, to myself (and maybe you too!) to save my copious amount of jars for the fine folks at Wintergreens when I get back to cooking next…decade!

Word on the street (that street being audubon.org) is that the excellent Audubon Field Guide to Mushrooms is soon to be an iPhone app!!!! My exclamation points runneth over! My dog-eared copy of the book hangs out in my car trunk, along with a battered ’shrooming basket, and the promise of a shiny new fabulous-sounding app (the bird one has bird calls!) is making me feel all tingly.

…Or so I’ve been telling myself since I was fifteen and first read The Fountainhead and committed those lines to memory.

Well, here’s a shameful secret: I’ve really been enjoying the audio book of this new Ayn Rand bio. I’ll have lots of thoughts to share about it…soon.

Sorta soon.

In the meantime, it’s my busiest work week of the year (making hay while the sun is shining sounds good on paper, but it sure sucks when you collapse from sunstroke…) and after that my sweetheart will be home for a few days and we’ll be raking leaves and petting lonely cats and catching up on Mad Men and generally acting like we share our lives even though our lives seem to be conspiring to make us liars lately.

Until then, here are some peeled chioggia beets and raspberry orange tarts. Enjoy!

While I’m gone please feel free to debate and discuss the philosophy of Objectivism; Ayn Rand’s insanely weird life; the virtues of altruism versus the virtues of egotism; various thoughts on the sexiness or lack thereof of Ayn Rand’s characters (I have soft spots for Howard Roark and Dagny Taggart, myself), whether or not the grassroots left truly is being torn apart by lazyass dreamers who can’t shake themselves out of their idiotic mystical visions long enough to get anything done; and, the topic I really want to bring up: can collectives ever accomplish anything? I’ve been a part of a few, and I think I can make a strong case that Rand-style individual actions get a shit load more done with a shit load less drama. Is there something inherently virtuous in working together, or are we deluding ourselves? No collective I’ve  ever seen is a true collective, all have had a certain sort of hierarchy in order to survive. What’s wrong with that? As long as it’s not a fascist hierarchy that is killing its underlings, what’s wrong with admitting the truth: we are all good at different things, and shouldn’t pretend to be equals at everything.

Also: should an avowed anarchist who describes her political leanings as somewhere to the left of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky be getting as much pleasure as I am getting out of the ideas of a woman who so loved capitalism? Or could it be said that in a certain sense Rand was an anarchist? Her love for capitalism was, it seems to me, really a love of the meritocracy. Money doesn’t have to be involved in a meritocracy, and I’ve always thought that in any worthy anarchist society cream would still rise to the top (which by the way is a totally vegan metaphor if you’ve ever opened a can of coconut milk in the wintertime)—it’s just that everyone, creamy or not, would have a say and a stake in how they live their lives.

Here’s another thought: as much as Rand was an avowed capitalist, I’m an avowed barterer (I GOT THE COAT! IT WILL BLOW YOUR MIND! PIX TO COME!!), and it seems to me that bartering is the purest, most anarchic form of capitalism—bartering is capitalism minus governmental and societal bullshit, it is capitalism stripped of anything but the perfect question: “what is it worth to you?”

So basically what I want to say is that lefties shouldn’t ashamed to like Ayn Rand. She made a lot of mistakes and was sort of a giant bitch with an addiction to amphetamines and some serious emotional issues, but! Her sometimes overly simplistic, sometimes shrill ideas have real value. Inherent value, even.

xoxoxo

John Galt

PS: Um. Maybe I just shot my wad on that Rand post TK. Oops.

Ah, remember that one time when we made everyone in town hate Brittany, aka the “Ralph Nader of New Paltz”? Funsies! Kiddos, don’t do what we did and dare to believe that you have a right to run for Village Board without the approval of one of the two major parties or the third party to which you belong—running without the express approval of any of these groups and instead merely as a person who would be kickass for the job will, with absolute certainty, cause people to scream at you for all eternity because you “spoiled” “their” election. But weren’t the signs ridiculously cute? And the boys sharpening promotional pencils? (Click that link above for the cuteness)

On our little New Paltz Green Party email list, we’ve been having a little discussion about why we didn’t take a more active role in co-sponsoring and participating in a recent anti-war rally.

Rallies are a bit of a touchy subject for me. To put it plainly: I hate them and think they are stupid.

Well, to be fair and a little bit more nuanced, I should say that it seems to be that not only are they largely ineffectual, they have also become festivals of ridiculousness for well-meaning but largely idiotic lefties looking more for a playground than a revolution (I should here perhaps remind people that I generally dislike any sort of festive public gathering, political or not). I’m the last person to say that artistic expression isn’t a part of the revolution, but the lack of focus at most rallies is disturbing.

Unless they are supremely giant (Sandor Katz, Jacob and I went to the 2003 NYC anti-war rally together and that was the last time in recent memory that I felt even a vague a sense of purpose in a group of lefties….On the other hand, Sandor spent that night in jail, if I remember correctly.) they accomplish less than nothing, because they make us look stupid. And a supremely giant rally is nearly impossible to create.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote to the group, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Oh! First of all, I should state that my bestest frenemy made some points I completely and totally agree with:

I think that it’s a waste of the organization’s time to make any attempt to end the war in afghanistan directly. The purpose of the Green Party is to implement our vision of the world through first electing Greens to positions in government, then electing enough Greens to hold majorities and govern, then to have those Green majorities implement public policy that is going to quickly bring us implementation of the Green Party vision. The New Paltz Green Party’s reason for being is supposedly to build an organization (and support for that organization) large enough to hold majorities on the Town Council, Village Board and send five or six Greens to the Ulster County Legislature.

That requires an organization geared towards raising money, recruiting members, articulating what Green means in the context of New Paltz policy and training our members to run for and hold office.

Since the Green Party seems only rarely able to make any efforts in that direction I, as a party member would have grave concerns about our leadership spending energy on quixotic protest movements as well. There are many, many other organizations focused on national and global political issues and if wanted to work to stop the Afghanistan war, Id join and work with them.

I would even argue that the New Paltz Greens should not run anyone for Congress on a stop-the-war platform unless and until we have a local political party doing local political work again, rather than what we seem to have now — just another vaguely leftist protest group which uses the Green Party name to help get Democrats elected.

Yeah, well, the end is crap, but there are some good points in there. Here’s what I wrote:

Thanks for raising this question. I was the one you mentioned, I believe, who tossed off a remark about how I don’t think rallies of the sort that took place last weekend do any good, and thanks for the opportunity to expand on that, which might have seemed callous at the meeting.

Actually, Jason said pretty much exactly what I was going on say on this issue (except for the part where he insults the NPGP, which might be true in some ways [not the part about getting Democrats elected, Jesus Christ, you endorse one awesome Democrat [Kitty Brown! Vote for her!] and….breathing breathing breathing, moving on] but certainly isn’t productive).

Here’s my take on it:

It’s not that I don’t think protests and rallies and demos can never do any good, it’s just that in terms of time spent versus results achieved, I don’t see a strong enough connection to put in the time.

In 2003 pretty much the entire world rallied around not invading Iraq, and I don’t see that it did one iota. (Yes, we had a different President. But still.) That was very disparaging, especially when I had seen how rallies could make a difference—when I was a kid in Arizona my mom and I went on dozens of MLK Day rallies, and eventually Arizona recognized MLK Day. It felt like we accomplished something. (On the other hand, I also remember going to rallies against that idiotic Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and he is still as crazy as ever. And many pro-choice rallies, which you could say, I suppose, have worked. And countless demos against meat…which people are still eating.).

While I’m inclined to completely agree with Jason and take the position that the NPGP should focus on issues closer to home and become a stronger group before we tackle larger problems, I also think it’s wonderful that there are people in the group who are concerned about those larger international issues and want to fight against war, for example, in the name of the New Paltz Green Party. That warms my heart.

On a personal level, however, here’s how I see it: I have a very limited amount of time on this earth. I need to pick my battles. Though I very much want to end war, I have serious doubts that going to a rally in Kingston will do anything at all to accomplish that. I could listen to speakers saying what I already believe in the company of others who completely agree with me, but what else will I accomplish?

Instead, I work most of the time and try to use my job as an example of what a small business run with principles other than capitalism at its heart can be. In my spare time, I try to do what little tiny bits I can to ensure that in my little tiny town good people are elected so that New Paltz continues to be (or, um, begins to be) a well-functioning, progressive town.

I don’t do nearly as much of that work as I should, but it is my belief that in focusing my life on those two issues (as well as a few other little tangential pursuits) I can have a greater impact on those specific goals than I could have if I spread myself so thin trying to do so much that I never accomplished anything.

This is why I do not personally go to rallies, though I would very much like to see our country end its violent overseas policies. I am worried that this makes me seem heartless and like I don’t care about anything outside of New Paltz and my life, but I’m just not convinced that even if I tried I could have any impact on how whether or not my country decides to uselessly kill people on the other side of the globe with my money.

I understand that a huge principle of progressive democracy is that if we all do a little bit—voting, calling our elected leaders, working on campaigns, and yes, going to rallies—we can see big changes (for the record, I do all of those things except go to rallies). If everyone in New York went to that rally, it most certainly would make a difference, I do believe that. And by saying that I won’t go because I know everyone won’t go, I understand that I am part of the problem, not the solution, as the saying goes. I am happy people are organizing antiwar rallies, even if I can’t quite put my heart into attending. I wish there were more politically active Greens so we weren’t always spread out so thin and that we could carry a banner at the rally. I don’t see why, if we were a bigger party, we shouldn’t.

But again: I feel most sane and like I am making the biggest impact when I am focusing my life like a laser beam on what I feel I can reasonably accomplish. It’s not perfect, it’s just where I’m at right now.

For a white hetero dude, he’s pretty OK! (Hey, that’s high praise coming from me!)

Paltzians, dudes, you’ve got to write a letter to the editor in support of Michael Nielson. OK? You know full well the New Paltz Times publishes every letter they get, and you also know that people vote for whoever’s (whomever’s??? Does anyone ever know that shit?) name they have heard more. The New Paltz Green Party had a great meeting with Mike last week and he really walks the environmentalist walk—and knows his shit well enough to know that we don’t have to spend more to make the Highway Department productive as well as eco-friendly. Check out his website, kick him some PayPal monies, and write a letter to the NPT, yo!!!!

As you know, I loathe Democrats both locally and nationally (it’s utterly amazing how in New Paltz they are just as weaseley as they are nationally! The Greens are a bunch of deadbeat freaks, I’ll be the first to admit that, but at least we’re not [except for maybe, oh, two], outright weasels). That said, there is a contingent of seriously progressive non-weasels who are trying to wrest control of their party from the demon clutches of the old guard, and they need to be supported. They seem to me to be real Democrats—that is, little d democrats who truly believe in, you know, de-fuckin’-mocracy. We’ll see.

Anyway, here’s the letter I wrote—no copying!

As a member of the New Paltz Green Party, I am proud to support Mike Nielson for New Paltz Highway Superintendent. Mike recently took the time to fill out the New Paltz Green Party candidate’s questionnaire, which asks detailed questions about issues important to Greens and other progressives in New Paltz (the questionnaire can be found at newpaltzgreens.org/elections.html). His answers were thoughtful and detailed and made me proud that we have a candidate running who is so clearly concerned with how the Highway Department can contribute to making New Paltz a more sustainable place to live. He has concrete plans to reduce carbon emissions, control beaver activity with nonlethal means, improve union relations, prioritize using permeable materials for grading and paving and more. I am convinced that Mike will work to make the Highway Department more efficient without scrimping on essential services and will always keep what is best for our town at the root of his policies.

Lagusta,
New Paltz

Here’s what I like:

Holding two completely diametrically opposed ideas in your hands and your heart at one time and rushing out into the world, thrusting both in front of you, living as hard as you can through both of them.

I’ve come to like, in truth, being a big giant hypocrite: I talk such talk about not compromising, drawing lines in the sand, and purity, but every second of my life, pretty much by definition, is a compromise on shifting sands of impurity.

I live in the world, therefore I fail just a little. Most of the time this doesn’t bother me. I’ve come to understand that a nuanced worldview and commitment to focusing my energies where they will be best utilized is more important than slavish attention to purity. The purity game is a fun one, most of my 20s was spent in its clutches, but in the end it’s a sad, small way to spend a life.

Striving for perfection—while simultaneously recognizing its impossibility: that’s my game these days.

These rather abstract ideas have been floating around in my head more so than usual the past few days because of this great article in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert . The always-brilliant Kolbert writes about how silly and absurd those gimmicky blogs (and the books that inevitably follow) are where someone painstakingly catalogues their vainglorious attempts at eco-friendly perfection.

Specifically, she’s talking about that No Impact Man blog (which at least the dude, Colin Beavan, admits was a stunt all along), as well as two extreme-sports 100-mile dieters (who wrote a blog, then book, chronicling their year eating food grown within 100 miles of their apartment) and that woman whose blog I actually pretty much like who resolved to do one “green life-style change every day for a year,” ranging from selling her car to not using toothpicks.

Let me say this first: there is a place for them in the world. Useless extremism can teach us something, for sure. But as a genre I’ve been irked by all this for a while now. Not only because, as Kolbert so adeptly points out, they are all 100% stunts manufactured for publicity and book deals—I believe the authors all genuinely believe in their missions despite their complicity in the capitalist system, and though this might out me as a ridiculous Pollyanna, that’s OK—but mostly because they are actually doing the environmental movement, in the long run, a disservice on two fronts.

The first problem is the problem of nuance: lack thereof. The second is that the ingrained inequities and malfunctions of our beloved late-stage capitalism really don’t allow for your giant eco-leaps to mean much to the society as a whole. Yes, admitting that kinda sorta invalidates my entire lifestyle, but it’s a good reminder to me that all my organic jeans and local produce and composting don’t give me a free pass to stay home when I should be out smashing the state like a good anarchist.

First the first: Maybe they are fun books and blogs to read for those of us who consider ourselves grassroots environmentalists, but for the culture at large, to whom they are almost exclusively aimed, I think their projects backfire. If you teach someone that eating locally involves growing and grinding your own wheat when you can’t source it near your home, no one is going to want to eat locally.

What, exactly, are these capers meant to show? Why do they irk me so? I guess it’s a certain self-righteousness (and I of course, Ms. bicycle-powered-washing-machine and whatnot, don’t like competition in that department) and…what? It’s just media-savvy lefty thoughtful people trying to draw attention to a giant problem, right?

I think it boils down to this: nuance as a methodology for long-term sustainability.

Pop culture, by definition, cannot accept nuance, so we get these wild extremes. But if we truly want long-term solutions, we need nuance. We need, for example, salt. No one wants to live without salt, and it shouldn’t be seen as a virtue when you decide you’re going to go for a year without salt. Or, for that matter, cumin and coriander and cardamom and cloves (did you ever notice how many spices start with “C”?)—in short, the richnesses of the world. Having spices literally broadens our horizons and enriches our lives. There are smart ways to harvest and transport that which cannot immediately be grown in your neighborhood, just as there are smart ways to reduce your environmental footprint without reducing your life to such a tiny circle that one day you find yourself, as No Impact Man and his family did, to climbing fifty-four flights of stairs a day and eating endless amounts of, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, “cabbage slaw in the dark.”

Perhaps no one looks at these books and thinks, as I fear they do, “It’s too hard, I won’t even start.” Maybe your standard American housewife will buy Sleeping Naked is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days and will be inspired to walk to work more or turn down her thermostat, or something. Perhaps these quirky personal stories, a bit of medicine with a good deal of sugar thrown in, are what we need to turn our brain-dead populace into something closer to thinking, consciously consuming upright citizens. I sort of doubt it, but who knows.

On to my second point.

As Kolbert brilliantly points out (she can’t do anything non-brilliantly, have you noticed?) in the sort of commentary I’d expect to find in The Nation, not The New Yorker*, the primary problems are structural, not personal, and therefore personal solutions aren’t always (or, let’s be honest, ever) the best solutions (Ms. the-personal-is-political, are you listening?).

She puts it so much better than I ever could that I’ll just do a little copy and paste action:

So committed is Beavan to his claim of zero impact that he can’t—or won’t—see the deforestation for the trees. He worries a great deal about the environmental consequences of Michelle’s tampon use and the shrink-wrap around a block of cheese. But when it comes to his building’s heating system, which is apparently so wasteful that people are opening windows in the middle of winter, he just throws up his hands.

A more honest title for Beavan’s book would have been “Low Impact Man,” and a truly honest title would have been “Not Quite So High Impact Man.” Even during the year that Beavan spent drinking out of a Mason jar, more than two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his. Most of them were struggling to get by in the slums of Delhi or Rio or scratching out a living in rural Africa or South America. A few were sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street not far from Beavan’s Fifth Avenue apartment.
What makes Beavan’s experiment noteworthy is that it is just that—a voluntary exercise conducted for a limited time only by a middle-class family. Beavan justifies writing about it on the ground that it will inspire others to examine their wasteful ways. On the last page, he observes:

Throughout this book I’ve tried to show how saving the world is up to me. I’ve tried hard not to lecture. Yes, it’s up to me. But after living for a year without toilet paper, I’ve earned the right to say one thing: It’s also up to you.
So, what are you going to do?

If wiping were the issue, this would be a reasonable place to end. But, sadly—or perhaps happily—it isn’t. The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.
What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

Totally, totally, totally.

But! This is not to say, I don’t think, that personal solutions are no solutions at all. I think the trick is a mix of personal responsibility (cutting consumption, buying mindfully, etc) and massive societal structural overhaul. Sadly, I don’t think any of these books and blogs contributes all that much to either.

*The blow job to Bloomberg in the issue before reminded me what I was reading though, don’t worry.

Here we go again, a little less achy this time—please.

I just read the questionnaire he submitted to the Green Party asking for our support, and I’m sold. He really needs to beat Phil Johnson, a business-as-usual incumbent without an environmentalist bone in his body.

Read the questionnaire here, then check out his website, then join me in working on his campaign!

In lieu of a real post about last night’s New Paltz Town Comprehensive Plan Committee meeting, I am just going to copy and paste my half-drunk Facebook updates about it, OK? You’ll get the gist. Brittany and KT and Anya, if you want me to black out your names (sorry to repeat your FB comments to the wider internet, but somehow I don’t think you’ll mind) just let me know.

I didn’t make up that the meeting was supposed to be at the Community Center, people. I’ve got proof! (Also: “Welcome to Town of New Paltz Community Center”? Would a “the” have killed ya?)

…and from there we just started talking about bacon and things in beer, so I’ll spare you that discussion.

I’m frustrated.

That’s it.

Oh, speaking of time off: if you’re going to be at the M. Ward show in Athens, Georgia today or Nashville tomorrow, come by the merch table and say hello to yours truly, whose sweetheart has put her to work selling swag!

Girlfriend vacations are the best. Oh, I miss you two already so much!

*

Hey, the owner of the Rosendale Café (nope! See below!) has a rad blog all about Rosendale!

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You’ve probably already heard about this stupidity, but in case not: Barneys’ windows decorated with the oh-so-edgy “Drop Dead Gorgeous” theme, complete with fake blood and mannequins in contorted poses.

*

My friend-of-two-friends Amelia (two otherwise unrelated pals who are both pals with Amelia: don’t you love it when that happens?) is having a solo show in Seattle, how freaking rad does it look? “Hollywood Depicted in Needlepoint and Lace”–I don’t even quite know what that means, but it’s just my style, I can tell.

*

Thanks, Obama! (thanks, for real, to Ilene for the tip)

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Monthly vegan cooking competition in Chelsea NYC! (thanks Nelson!)

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OK, I’m way too snotty to have an iPhone app telling me what’s vegan at horrid trash chain restaurants (though I ate trash hash browns at Waffle House the other day and was happy I didn’t know where on the griddle they were cooked….I was in Virginia, can you blame me? They were great!), but if you travel in non-vegan friendly places it might be useful—and it has a list of vegan wines & beers!

*

And an inspiring ending:

Why I adore my mentor Selma: she is gathering the archives of Bloodroot to be archived at Yale, and had this to say about it:

“We are very absorbed in the stuff with Yale, gathering all these memories, letters, writings, photos.  Very strange. I find it somewhat depressing.  Carolanne [her partner] thinks  it is about mortality; I think it feels like a bad thing to spend so much effort on the past, when what I require is new creation for the present and future…”

Selma’s about 73 years old. Every day I’m heartened to know someone who is so stimulated by new discoveries and projects.

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