Wednesday, July 31, 2019

VALUING THE NEW

Thanks to VJ for valuing the old. As the exploding population eats up more of the earth's resources, we have to find a way to use up less. Old phones, old toasters, old cars, old buildings use up fewer resources than mass produced new ones, especially a lot of the cheap Chinese products no one needs, or the ubiquitous cement buildings.The old might (in some cases) raise costs, but they will also create more local artisan and other jobs. Jamaica might do well to create an "old fashioned" brand, suited to tourism, and VJ may be showing us how to do it? It's clear that a vast majority of VJ members appreciate the old over modern junk.

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Quick Reflections (incompleteness and impressionism)
From:	e.
To:	dale.kopp ; trevoroche
Date:	Thu, May 9, 2019 10:03 am

Scarcity of time -- due to what causes? More people, way more information. more ability to "talk," more complexity.

A way of writing in the age of social media might cater to reduced attention span BUT NOT ONLY THAT

Attention up to now has been influenced by an Enlightenment proclivity to delve in detail into details--what I call for now "field independent" thinking.

As social media gets more people talking together, and a civilization of an intertwined global civilization with an impossible load of information at its behest

We might examine "field dependent" thinking, which is perhaps the field dominated by women and the third world (that sees the whole but less so the details).

-------------------------------

A great weakness in my communication is to try to get the entire message (as I perceive it) across to people who can't manage and are not prepared to digest it,

(A lot of my thinking process is also flawed.)

I at least now am thinking that communication on Social Media needs to capitalize on incompleteness, at impression and on feeling.

While I might have an elaborate project to recommend, and that I want to be immediately understood and acted on, I might try dishing out a germ of the idea, toward an extended process of idea and concept formation. A little at a time. I know where it should go, even if the followers don't and can't.

The standards to apply for writing are art standards. Something beautiful must be communicated, and that beauty has to have fairly rigorous standards, despite incompleteness. (a poetic approach maybe)

------------------------------

Sorry if all this is sounds like rubbish, but I don't want to lose the thought and it applies to book project.

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GARVEY
From:	e.
To:	trevoroche
Date:	Sat, May 4, 2019 4:52 pm

Leo Smith Good. And you might also lighten up with the labels. You may be right about the calculation by the west that repatriation would diminish them either in the west itself or in their ability to reap African resources in the continent. But this is a complicated issue.

Garvey taught--and I read this within the last year or two--that we were needed for labor, and when we weren't needed any longer we were expendable. (Brother James Baldwin said the very same thing, but MMG said ity 100 years ago.) We are no longer needed for paid labor, but concentration camp labor in the prison-industrial-system works. So you're right about neo-slavery.

The Civil Rights movement was a rouse (good intentions and brilliant work notwithstanding) It came about at the high point of American civilization, when energy resources and consumption were at their highest. This enabled the plenty to somewhat generously spread around. Now, as energy resources dwindle, the available economic pie has shrunken, meaning there isn't that much to spread around, leading to us-against-them strategies to get what is left. Since the Civil Rights game was to integrate into into a disintegrating building, it has no answer for these times of intensified racism. (We can go into why Civ. Rts policy was so misguided some other time.) But I will repeat that MMG could see the systemic nature behind this 100 years ago.

I do not take everything MMG said as gospel. I look for the underlying idea. I doubt that he could have seen the rapid, near term collapse of European empire, or the environmental catastrophes and overuse the system was wreaking. He was all to guilty in his promotion of industrialism for the African. But those are details. He understood the underlying need for African nationalism...at home or abroad. I submit that, even now, in 2019, there is scarce comprehension of that need, here or anywhere else on Facebook.

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FACEBOOK (a contrary opinion)

I have misgivings about the meme that Facebook should be broken up. No doubt it has many many flaws, but its current and potential benefits seem to call for keeping it solvent and strong. 

The entire world--rich or poor--now has a free medium of communication to share their mutual concerns. (One of my most keen FB correspondents is all the way in Uganda.)

FB is too new for most of us to understand that it gives us our own individual publication to do with as we choose. In a world with such great environmental, social and economic injustices, we need a voice to get at how we strategize and organize to counter our enemies. Such enemies might be the very ones trying to weaken FB. 

If what I'm saying has bearing, FB should be stronger (to withstand monumental deep state opposition)  rather than weaker.

IMHO

HAMILTON BLDG
From:	e.
To:	trevoroche
Date:	Thu, May 30, 2019 5:13 pm

Hamilton exhib

https://news.yale.edu/2019/05/29/alexander-hamilton-mushroom-gentleman-american-hero?utm_source=YNemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=yn-05-30-19&fbclid=IwAR07NTg5eIWbGqVpbG8QZXiCvaimtUBRnOm5d4NafiTg8fTiFN46iu6O7So

Quonset Hut Pop Up Re: Photos from your exhibit(ion).
From:	e.
To:	heliops
Date:	Thu, May 30, 2019 6:13 pm

Lovely to hear from you, Michael. Sandi and I would be most interested in attending your September show. The display I shared took place at the park in Cerrillos, and there will be a similar opportunity to show in Cerrillos again in the fall (this time on the booth-lined main street, with burro races, and many kinds of entertainment in the park). A landscape-architect professor friend in Miami asked me about a text for my work too, and I'm trying to understand what he and a reference of his would like to see. (You may be able to help me by sharing what you would appreciate seeing, what areas or themes. It's really amazing that your and Roberto's concerns are so in sync.) I plan to develop the pop up theme for the fall Cerrilos show, possibly including a pop up roof as well, using the "same" materials. I'd love to see what the quonset hut has to offer in terms of spacial and other pertinent ideas. I'd be glad to talk more with Dee, and see pictures of the space whenever possible. Our number is 505-455-7926.

Warmest wishes for you and Phil.

Trevor

-----Original Message-----
From: diaz/loomis <heliops@aol.com>
To: trevoroche <trevoroche@aol.com>
Sent: Tue, May 28, 2019 6:28 pm
Subject: Re: Photos from your exhibit(ion).

Hi Trevor,

Thanks for forwarding these images. I really appreciate the text and the consciousness about using found materials. I think they offer new directions for content and intention, no? Maybe gifted materials, too.

Where was this show? My friends Dee Homans and Andy Davis have recently acquired a quonset hut which they've installed on their land off of the 599 bypass. Their intention is to offer it to artists for pop-up shows. They had their inaugural show 1 1/2 weeks ago and the space really worked well. Dee asked me to pass the word on so if you're interested in showing your work there just let me know and I'll put you two in touch.

I'll be having one at 5.Gallery in September. Opening 9/20, I believe. I hope you and Sandy can make it.

Let's keep it up!

Michael

Quanset Hut

Hi Michael,

Hope you're both thriving. This is just to show you that I DID use the wonderful (hoped to one day be famous) yellow sheet you shared with me! :-)

With huge thanks,

Trevor

EPA as model
From:	e.
To:	Trevoroche
Date:	Sun, Jun 2, 2019 9:59 am

Trevor Burrowes We're looking at an economic system that is contracting. A capitalist global economy is based on growth. (If it doesn't grow it collapses.) It should be clear to anyone who's looking that growth can't go on infinitely on a finite planet. Climate change is all over the news, as one manifestation of limits. Much less touted is resource depletion--topsoil, forests, fisheries, minerals... Even less considered is the contraction of the energy industry--oil, gas, coal primarily--due to the easy pickings having been exhausted and the harder-to-find new sources costing too much to produce for people to afford, pointing to the eventual collapse of the main energy sources. The development industry wants you to believe that we live in normal times when you couldn't imagine the end of growth. They are pushing the meme of the yeast in a sugar lined petri dish, where the yeast keep expanding till the sugar is gone and they die. Since EPA is vulnerable at a much earlier point than the surrounding "mainstream" communities to this kind of growth, it can't afford development as usual. It has to be unusually thoughtful and conservative in how it develops. How things are done in other places isn't necessarily the model for EPA. Since EPA is so vulnerable, it is indeed the canary in the coal mine that alerts others to the vulnerabilities of the broader global system. And if it can figure out how to hang on despite the coarse and inconsiderate development breathing down its back, it could help a range of other places that, sooner or later, face similar threats.

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John McHue

It's been some time and I hope it's been rewarding. Your dad is nearing 100, and how to celebrate that might be weighing on you as well.

One possible institution that can be brought into that recognition is the first St. Ann's Bay Primary School (at 16 Church Street by Davis Street?) that is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. His name comes up prominently as one of the students who christened the then new school by marching from the Baptist church with their school books. I didn't realize that school building is now a prime structure of our colonial heritage. The louvers look modern, and it's hard to believe they are the original. He must be tired of the queries, but whatever he might wish to share about his time there (and of course one is as interested in the building as in everything else) would be gratefully received.

Among the policies that are flat out not working are: affordable shelter, the destruction of tourism through destruction of architectural heritage, the destruction of food producing land through mindless bauxite mining practices, the destruction of fisheries through mindless coastal developments, the destruction of coastal ecologies that could contain sea level rise...

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White Jamaican Revolution--Up with George William Gardon

I'm not a historian, so bear with me:

- George William Gordon was a white Jamaican revolutionary. His is probably the extreme example of the white Jamaican soul, in that, just beneath the surface in the white Jamaican, there beats the heart of the white revolutionary who has yet to emerge.

- The white Jamaican is no angel, but as one of them told me, we (meaning ALL Jamaicans) have blood on our hands. So let's stop pointing fingers.

- The white Jamaican, with their subtle and not so subtle privileges, is more aware and sensitive to architectural and natural heritage than the black Jamaican, who sees them as a mark of shame and backwardness. The argument over heritage preservation between the Custos of Trelawny and the Mayor of Falmouth is illustrative of the issue.

- Where it comes to heritage preservation, and not for all eternity, the white Jamaican must be put at the head of the table.

- Just as the Chinese Jamaican is not at all the same as the foreign national Chinese, the white Jamaican cannot be compared with the foreign white person (ESPECIALLY the militaristic, break-your-ass Blackwater American types we might encounter. By contrast, the Jamaican white person has been nurtured by centuries of cultural blending, rendering them highly civilized by contrast.

- In this time of utter catastrophe for the preservation of Jamaican heritage, the Jamaican white person must be taken out of the glass cage (in the same way the Garvey must be taken out Of the glass cage, in a different context) and put back to work leading the preservation effort.

- We need a serious governance program run on Garveyite principles on one hand, and we need a colonial and natural heritage program which features Jamaican white people on the other.

Building Paradigm
From:	e.
To:	trevoroche
Date:	Tue, Jun 11, 2019 11:18 am

Graham Trow Thanks for adding some light to this. Bamboo construction is wonderfully apt. Bamboo grows like a weed. And we need to teach it along with other skills. I'm seeing a great diversity of architectural disciplines--wattle and daub, knog, bamboo... But they can function in a different and complementary way to whatever colonial structures remain or can be replicated. The colonial structures go on the outside, next to the street, and are what the tourist sees. The tourist is then being educated about Jamaica's stylistic heritage, as are our own people benefitting from the tourism. Wattle and daub would seem to be compatible with colonial reconstruction; it is plastered over to resemble any other form of masonry. You can also add on and experiment with other types of construction at the back, out of sight from the road (and this universal approach would fascinate the tourist as well if they visited the inside). We would be setting a global trend for diversity, sustainability, and practicality.

Importance of Jamaican Architecture
From:	e.
To:	trevoroche
Date:	Fri, Jun 14, 2019 5:44 pm

Trevor Burrowes Dianne T. Golding Frankson I'm working on the same thing. Over three hundred plus years, the major visual culture of Jamaicans comprised colonial architecture. African sculpture, like African languages, was taboo. The entire visual African heritage went into those buildings. But it did so in a subtle and underplayed way. That is the essence of creole visual culture. We take pride in the spoken and musical manifestation of that culture, but none at all in the visual, since it's thought to be entirely white and foreign. When we wipe out this heritage, we lose the only real visual culture Jamaicans possess. And since the largest part of the brain is devoted to visual experience, when this culture is erased, Jamaicans become a stunted and deformed people. This is not a good thing, and this is why I say (with a little exaggeration) that preservation of all sorts of colonial architecture is the only critical issue the country faces. Everything else is irrelevant.

Aesthetics (I wonder if any publisher would bite on this?)
From:	e.
To:	TREVOROCHE ; dale.kopp
Date:	Sat, Jun 15, 2019 8:40 pm

As before, I greatly enjoy listening to Bramble On on KMRD today from 11 to 12. And am gratified that it dealt thoroughly (from its viewpoint) on aesthetics, a subject so dear to me.

I made a few quick notes, hoping I can get more into the subject later.

My window into the environment was based on aesthetics. When I returned to Jamaica after seven years of one type of art school, then another, I was convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt, that everything was wrong. They were cutting down trees and tearing down houses, replacing the latter with sharp-edged blocky highrises. No one else was nearly, or at all, concerned the way I was. The difference is that I was trained to see more, I had travelled to Europe and gotten my mental wiring transformed by seeing so much beauty.

But architecture wasn't separate from the natural landscape. Although I had zero training about plants, I could see that a very integrated and deep beauty was being removed and replaced by monoculture non native species. The latter was what I'd call a false aesthetic. It had to do with destructive ideas of merchantilism, growth, expedience, blindness (where you don't see the landscape but only can calculate in hard, left brain ways, how to make money from it).

So I would hesitate to make a distinction between aesthetics and practicality. There is always aesthetics; you can't get away from it anymore than you can from air to breathe. There's the aesthetics of life and the aesthetics of death, and a considerable muddle in between.

Another way I look at aesthetics is openpenness to the world around you: visual appearance, sound, movement. Hunter and gatherers must rely greatly on aesthetics to know when or what to hunt, when to move, when plants do what. I hold that aesthetics are a means of survival

What matters most to me are the little incremental hurts to scenic character along the Turquoise Trail. Things like sculpture right against the road to remind viewers how clever humans are, and why nature can't catch a break away from them. Why do we need human artifacts when the natural landscape does something wonderous in terms of complexity--who could ever fathom the complex undulation of planes along the route from here to the city? Where else could we get a sense of infinite space without losing access to the infinitely small? Isn't human sculpture just a stale and limited thing by comparison? Isn't building on such land--because it's your legal right--not just a violation of nature's aesthetics, and replacing it with a false aesthetics around human sense f entitlement?

We must remember that If you are surrounded by nature where you live, Madroids have no other way to be in nature other than driving through this landscape that is relatively unfettered. And other people driving through might have even more need for this scenery.

So I don't see concern about the Turquoise Trail as being a preoccupation with aesthetics. Neither is it just a spiritual necessity for the inner joy and peace of people; it's also about our relationship to the land.

Can nature catch a break, and left just to BE?

Many other points there isn't time for now involve:

- consider aesthetics are about relationships. There might not be a distinction as in saying it is different from that

- collectives thinking vs individualism

- Madrid is a wood place

- status and aesthetics

- the politics of aesthetics

- principles that underline and guide the work

- the visual underline as stabilizing elements

- syllogisms --creating separations that are the product of a mental framework, and baseless.

- GLAD AT THE MENTION THAT USING NATURAL MATERIALS MIGHT NOT SUIT OUR MOMENT AS WELL AS USING WASTE AND DISCARDED MATERIALS FROM INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY --the new natural

- the relationship of aesthetics to intuition

- Intuition as a way of knowing

- the eye is the main door of perception

- Frank Lloyd Wright and Starchitecture

- elitism--is it always bad?

- style as the set of visual metaphors

Dear Penny,

One of those "can't sleep so get up with the idea the higher forces downloaded instead" moments. Quickest of notes:

SAVING OLD BUILDINGS

We lack power to keep places the way they are and we are loosing structures faster than we can count them. This applies globally, but I try to focus on the issue in the three places that I know from living there (but very loosely speaking, with lots of diversions):

1) East Palo Alto

2) Madrid, NM (The Turquoise Trail, etc.)

3) St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica

REMEDIES

- I sense that all the "remedies" we can apply are pretty much common to all three settings (and pretty much anywhere else)

- They have to do with an economy of a tourism of place-as-it-is that you and JB have taught me so much about.

- Using digital photography, email and Facebook as major tools, we might be able to start a program of photographing structures, measuring them, and reproducing them in another location.

A MODEL

Marilyn Scoot's house on Clarke Ave in EPA

- might be one of only a handful of Weeks-related buildings left

- help for the project might be available from Mitch Postel, Stanford (Michael Levin's old associates), or other educational institutions.

- BUT maybe anything realistic depends on Mitch (Marilyn's house COULD actually be the only intact Weeks house left.) He would have to refer it to some source that would take major responsibility for it. Without that, I imagine that the project is a no go.

- I wonder what you think of the idea of (someone) photographing and measuring the house and stashing the info in several places in case money, space, will ever result in applying the info now or in the future.

- IF you think it's worthwhile, would you be able/willing to give Mitch a call and check what he has to say?

MISC

- Students need something useful to do, so piling this issue on them isn't unreasonable.

- YOU most likely don't have the wherewithal (to say the least) to do any major work on this.

- It is a subject better suited to Mitch than to Levin, whose loyalties and aspiration remain unclear.

- If the program can get off the ground in EPA (including extensive photodocumentation) it might be more palatable to other places, notably Jamaica.

- The idea is to spread the work so that many hands make light work (or something like that).

So what do you think ? :-)

PS: As I recall, I tend to think issues are much simpler than they turn out to be, so there's THAT to consider also!

A TOURIST PROGRAM FOR SAB
From:	e.
To:	trevoroche
Date:	Sun, Jun 23, 2019 9:42 am

WHAT IS EDUCATION DOING TO HELP?

Without education, property owners can't see the value in their broken down wooden buildings. The buildings are broken down because they cost a lot to repair, and the people who know how to repair them conventionally are now few and far between.

In society we seem to follow programs. Slavery was a program, and was once widely seen as the way it was. British colonialism was a program, and once seen as normal. Since colonialism, a new program took over: It was an American system of consumerism and "modernism" based on concrete construction. That seems to still be the acceptable program in SAB. There are no end of supermarkets, it seems. Lot's of white concrete buildings with air condition. The ones I saw sold foreign products that were cheaper than Jamaican ones. The air conditioning was soothing on a hot day. The food was tasty, no matter if it was loaded with empty calories. It might have spiked diabetes, but I lack specific information.

But it doesn't have to be that way forever. Things do change when they're not working.

The foreign Chinese supermarkets are tearing out SAB heritage buildings. And SAB is supposed to be a historic city, right? Jamaica's first capital, correct? Something is clearly wrong with this picture. Tourists don't go to Jamaica to see what looks like Miami or Phoenix.

So where is the education program that trains people to repair and maintain the wooden buildings? Those wooden buildings are part of the heritage of my family and thousands of other SAB families. We don't have a tourist attraction if we tear that heritage down. We don't have a historic city if we tear those buildings down. We lose reference to the place Marcus was born and grew up in. But who is training the young people to value and maintain this heritage?

My thoughts run to the Marcus Garvey Technical High School. Does their program support the material heritage of Marcus Garvey's birthplace? If not, why not? What does their program support instead? The principal, Steven Golding, is also the local head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which was created by the greatest son of SAB, Marcus Garvey. Does the SAB branch of the UNIA support preserving the material heritage of the UNIA? If not, why not? What does it support instead?

Does Mr. Golding support the preservation of Marcus Garvey's birth home? If he does, why does he not support the preservation of Garvey's hometown? If I didn't get it wrong, Garvey was taught early on through a program associated with 6 Bravo, recently torn down to build a Chinese supermarket. Is Mr. Golding aware of the Garvey and UNIA heritage that SAB is losing? Where is he? What is he up to? Does anybody know?

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Battered old vehicles as art
From:	e.
To:	trevoroche
Date:	Fri, Jun 28, 2019 12:07 am

People buy products for irrational reasons. And it's never clearer than why they buy art. While my art is essentially non commercial, I'm starting to appreciate the "business" side of it. As far as I can tell, a niche market, at least, could be had for battered old vehicles from a simpler era and easier to repair. There's a lot of art around battered old pieces of metal, and battered old vehicle often function (without maximizing its advantages) as mobile art. A less rigid market more on the art side is likely to interest more people over time.

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The world will need to become more religious. I read recently that material poverty was a hallmark of monasticism. It could work out that material riches is substituted for by spiritual and intellectual riches, and that extreme material poverty will be sought after and valued in this new monastic culture.

WRITING

If we take a random survey of obstacles or threats to the land, we see the futility of addressing them one at a time. The head of the UNIA in St. Ann's Bay (SAB), Steven Golding, also approves membership in the Ethiopian World Federation (EWF). He is also the principal of the Marcus Garvey Technical High School. It now appears that he is the son of a former Prime Minister, Bruce Golding. All of a sudden, things take on a sinister glow. Steven's position must be based on the entrenchment of brutally murderous politicians and their cronies. They operate in secret, and have their own agenda. So if I'm thinking that Steven is merely a dolt who lacks vision or insight, an idiot who could be shamed out of his retarded behavior, it could be worse than that.

In the Cockpit country--perhaps to the southern region?-- farmers were told they had nothing to fear from bauxite mining. A simple lie (they being located in the official permitted mining area map). Lying is an effective means of placating simple people who lack the wherewithal to study the issues or defend themselves. They would naturally want to believe that all was well with their continued ability to grow food and support themselves. I wrote the following on the Facebook thread where I learned about the event from a post--it saw this as an isolated moral case of mendacity, one that could by implication be corrected through moral entreaty:

"It's worse than that. This is part of a raging and programmatic war on the land and people of Jamaica. Everything being done is normal global behavior of predatory capitalism, which must grow infinitely and ruthlessly, or collapse. We don't need to correct the system; we need to change it."

I'm starting to isolate the threat posed by the party system with its secret societies, its gunmen, its corruption, greed, larceny, strategic ignorance--a kind of ignorance that is systemic and forecloses on all possible avenues of liberation. It's like climate change. How do you address such a monolith? Here is one prospect: Since the predatory capitalist system is indeed contracting (on a trajectory toward collapse), one can hope that as the system collapses (slowly, it would seem), its hold on power will decrease, allowing for pockets of resistance to take root. Garveyism, wherever it can be planted, is Jamaica's main avenue of resistance. And Garveyism might be seen as the tiger the present governing party introduced long ago by appointing Marcus Garvey Jamaica's First National Hero. It is said that when you ride a tiger, you dare not get off.

In the case of SAB, was Steven Golding deliberately put there to sedate or entrance the tiger?

-----Original Message-----
From: e. <trevoroche@aol.com>
To: lmanheim <lmanheim@aol.com>; trevoroche <trevoroche@aol.com>
Sent: Sat, Jul 6, 2019 4:45 pm
Subject: Re: Trevor's Thu., 7/4/19 score; Fri., 7/5/19 score; Sat., 7/6/10 plan:

Without measurements of any kind, one goes by the vaguest of hunches. There might be three GROSS categories if drivers: repeat, drivers who can be influenced; repeat drivers who don't give a rat's behind; and new drivers. The ones who can be influenced are numerically and psychologically overwhelmed by the non compliance of the other two. Keeping the signs (street art made with pasting paper on roadbed) maintained for longer than normal might give that first group the encouragement to stick to principle, and not be too cowed by the hooligans on their tail. And if that gained traction, we don't know what we could expect. I would think that would create momentum. (If we're looking at the issue, as I think we should, in physics terms.)

The foundation for the visual arts has to be colonial architecture. That is what our ancestors spent centuries building, while other plastic visual creations were forbidden. Just going off and being creative, without the proper foundation, will produce a shaky house.

OUR FOURTH OF JULY?

It's the Fourth of July, 2019 today. America was not given Independence. It seized it through whatever means thought necessary. It seized it through big ideas. America as a governmentally unified area of land was a human invention that seemed crazy to most people at the time. IT WAS SOMETHING NEW.

Marcus Garvey's project was a similar independence for Africa. But even as a unified American state was built on the foundation of slavery that negated the unified sense of place, a unified Africa has no practical (let alone, moral) reason to follow the American example. Large groupings of humans like nations or civilizations require some form of energy to run apart from what nature provides through sunlight and photosynthesis. For groups larger than hunter gatherer bands, it most often required coerced human labor. Until fossil fuels were discovered. Garvey lived his entire life in the age of fossil fuels. The notion that fossil fuels could wreak environmental hazard, or become uneconomical as supplies dwindled, was not a popular notion in his time, and indeed is still somewhat foreign to most people. The fact is, however, that supplies are running short, and the effect of indiscriminately spewing fossil fuel emissions into the air has led humankind to the brink (although we aren't told this by our leaders).

So an African independence movement must take a different turn, one somewhat more closely aligned to Rastafari than to the UNIA...or maybe some sort of synthesis of the two. Some sort of earth ethic would seem to be required. As would a philosophy of cooperation and nonviolence. Maybe a critical mass of society can veer toward monasticism, which has generally required material poverty but high spiritual and mental development. This would be a good subject to hear from others about. Then again, where is Africa? The African continent has always been viewed as its exclusive location. But being as we get to decide such things, just as the American founders got to decide similar matters for themselves, we might well have reason to see Jamaica, the nation that produced Garvey and that is over over 90% black, as the first intentional offshore African state, And it might even be compelling to see St. Ann's Bay, Garvey's hometown, as its capital.

as the first intential offshore African statevide up people based on race. You can't maintain a healthy place through divisive means. Our war of independence must be a war against division and inequity. It is not a war for equality, since nature doesn't function through equality. But it's a war that puts the land first, seeing that the land was not only here before people, but actually produced the people.

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EAST PALO ALTO (EPA) AS A CENTER OF HISTORY

Within the space of a few years during the 90's, I conducted over 500 driving tours centered on the historic Weeks Neighborhood. I used my own car, and asked for no payment. I didn't get around to considering a tourist program for EPA HAS, much less one for the entirety of EPA. I would frequently tour the whole city, since it entire city offered something different and historic for my outsider tourists.

I left town just as IKEA, Home Depot and the rest were being constructed. A nearby housing development was also in its early stage, managed by EPA CAN DO. By the way, what does the N in EPA CAN DO stand for? If it's part of the following title, East Palo Alto Community And Neighborhood Development Organization, it fell down on the neighborhood part. There has been no consideration of neighborhoods, and no plan that I know of, for any of EPA's traditional neighborhood other than the one done by EPA HAS for the Weeks Neighborhood by means of the Weeks Neighborhood Community Plan.

So why was the plan ignored? What harm did it do? None that I can tell. It allowed for the same number of residences as the neighborhood was zoned for. What was wrong with that? The unit sizes envisioned were varied, allowing for diverse incomes. The old Weeks lots with their elegant deep lots with long views down it it past large trees would be something any right thinking person would appreciate.

But this perfectly sensible plan that would have created a parklike neighborhood that all income levels could afford, was cut to ribbons for all kinds of foolish reasons. It was zoned residential, although neighborhood businesses on the wider avenues were valued and planned for. So why has it become chock full of large charter schools? Why were buyers able to imagine they could just sit on the land until large apartments could be persuaded to be built on them? One hears talk of making the neighborhood look like Manhattan. What is wrong with EPA to allow for these travesties of action and intention?

Bay Road was always there. It might have been an Indian track before Isaiah Woods built the village of Ravenswood along it around 1850. And the entire town west of Bay Road was laid out by Charles Weeks around 1920. That included University Avenue, extending all the way to Stanford. Weeks and Stanford worked together on this, and Weeks advertised the Weeks Poultry Colony, AKA Runnymede, now called the Weeks Neighborhood, as a University town. Rail lines ran along University. The next oldest neighborhood is Palo Alto Park, built in the 1920's. So the Weeks Neighborhood, with some extension into what is now Menlo Park (including O'connor Avenue, for instance) made up the great bulk of modern EPA up until the 1950's. And even including those 50's additions, the city's built environment is older than anything else around and is more deeply historic than anything else around. Palo Alto and the entire Mid Peninsula have been going about demolishing anything predating 1980. That makes EPA the last bastion of history in the region. The whole city could be a heritage park, and gain income by so being.

But who cares about history?

This affects art, since everything I do is art. I'm trying to fix the boat while it's sailing, and art is my methodology.

-----Original Message-----
From: e. <trevoroche@aol.com>
To: lmanheim <lmanheim@aol.com>; trevoroche <trevoroche@aol.com>
Sent: Tue, Jul 9, 2019 8:09 am
Subject: Re: Lynn's Mon., 7/8/19 score; Tue., 7/9/19 plan:

My current idea--let's see how long it lasts--is to turn tracked and opt items into 1 min tasks, then really try to do them. It felt good when i TRIED IT YESTERDAY. Then the process becomes somewhat organic. Some unexpected considerations take over. Some tasks get drawn out, and it's compelling to get them to a given stage. Another consideration is the need to back off finishing or continuing a project when instead they can be left unfinished in a way that invites further discreet increments of effort on them. It seems that somehow, over time, significant tasks get accomplished, almost by themselves.

Thinking Globally

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

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Subject:A Missed Opportunity (A Parks Paradigm)
From:	e.
To:	trevoroche
Date:	Mon, Jul 8, 2019 9:04 pm

Thinking Globally

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

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