Table of Contents:

Steve Walters coverDavid Stein Letter to Obsolete 2Editorial Intro to Issue #2 3Alissa Bader How I Spent My Summer Vacation 3Debra & Gary Parky Greetings From Grand Isle, LA 4Rich Dana Interview w/ Karl Schroeder 6J.D. King Just a Mirage 8Rich Dana & Deborah Reade Artist Profile: Peter Aschwanden 10Jonathan Shaw A Night in the Zone 12 Reviews 13Marina Deb Ris Pollution Reborn as Art 14Joolz Denby Not Perfect Wild Town 15Qojak Featured Artist Portfolio 16Alex the Card Weaver The Luddite Cafe 17Ricardo Feral The Power of Poo 18Will Grant The Scrounge 3 &18

Special thanks to contributing artists, editors, photographers and distributors, including:Blair Gauntt, Peg Dana, Ericka Wildgirl Dana, Eric Houts, Don Rock and all of the wonderful people who donated to our Kickstarter online fundraiser. Thanks to all of those great folks, OBSOLETE! will be distibuted free for the next year.

Issue #2

ob·so·lete (adjective)

Definition of OBSOLETE1 a : no longer in use or no longer useful <an obsolete word> b : of a kind or style no longer current : old-fashioned <an obsolete technology>

2 of a plant or animal part : indistinct or imperfect as compared with a corresponding part in related organisms : vestigial— ob·so·lete·ly adverb— ob·so·lete·ness noun

Examples of OBSOLETE 1. The system was made obsolete by their invention. 2. <I was told my old printer is obsolete and I can’t get replacement parts.> Origin of OBSOLETE Latin obsoletus, from past participle of obsolescere to grow old, become disusedFirst Known Use: 1579

Synonyms: antiquated, archaic, dated, démodé, demoded, fossilized, kaput (also kaputt), medieval (also mediaeval), moribund, mossy, moth-eaten, neolithic, Noachian, outdated, outmoded, out-of-date, outworn, passé, prehistoric (also pre-historical), rusty, Stone Age, superannuated

Near Antonyms: contemporary, current, mod, modern, new, newfangled, new-fashioned, present-day, recent, ultramodern, up-to-date, up-to-the-minute; fresh; modernized, refurbished, remodeled, renewed; functional, operable, operational, work-able; active, alive, busy, employed, functioning, operating, operative

Rhymes with OBSOLETEaquavit, at one’s feet, balance sheet, biathlete, bittersweet, booster seat, bucket seat, catbird seat, cellulite, cookie sheet, corps d’elite, countryseat, county seat, crystal pleat, decath-lete, drag one’s feet, driver’s seat, easy street, exegete, incom-plete, indiscreet, latent heat, letter sheet, lorikeet, make ends meet, marguerite, Masorete, meadowsweet, meet and greet, miss a beat, Nayarit, off one’s feet, on one’s feet, on the street, overeat, overheat, Paraclete, parakeet, pentathlete, prickly heat, rumble seat, saddle seat, scandal sheet, self-conceit, semisweet, shredded wheat, sliding seat, spirochete, super-heat, to one’s feet, triathlete, trick or treat, two-way street, undertreat, up one’s street, winding-sheet, window seat

OBSOLETE! Magazine is a quarterly tabloid publication in the tradition of the International Times, OZ, The East Village Other, The Berkely Barb, The Chicago Seed, The Whole Earth Catalog, PUNK! and the other great underground rags of days past.... We are interested in high-quality poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, comics, photography and other 2D art. Submissions can be on any subject; however, we are especially interested in work that voices alternative, non-mainstream, even radical views on politics, tech-nology, the environment, and modern culture. Poems can be traditional or experimental, fiction of any genre will be considered, and non-fiction should be fast-paced and challenging. Please submit no more than four poems, one short story, two REALLY short stories, or one essay. For visual art, please submit no more than 3 pieces in any one media. Want to pitch a story idea? Contact us at the address below. Please send a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) with your work if you would like it returned. Do not send your only copy! Please do not send original artwork. We ask for first North American serial rights only. Copyright reverts to the author upon publication. OBSOLETE! compensates it’s contributors- please con-tact us or check the website for current rates.

OBSOLETE! Magazine PO Box 72 Victor, IA, 52347. obmag@feral-tech.com, http://obsoletemag.blogspot.com/

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

What I did on my Summer VacAtion

As I write this introduction, it is fall, 2010. Summer is over. I sit alone in the house of a dead woman, look-ing out the door toward the Puget Sound. The sun is bright above the thick quilt of fog. I’m waiting for the movers, who missed the ferry. Barbara was a journalist, an artist and interior designer; she transformed things and places. Now, her meticulously arranged home is being disassembled- the last pieces carefully packed for their trip to a Seattle auction house.------------- It’s fall and school is back in session. If you had to stand at the blackboard on the first day of school, what would you tell the class? What did you do on your summer vacation? Did you have a great adven-ture? Did you max out your credit card for a few days of blissful escape? Or did you stay at home and pray the AC kept working and that you might soon find work? Did you fall in love... or did you sit on the couch and watch 24-hour cable news coverage as the US of A declined into a made-for-TV remake of the Weimar Republic? In the current state of the Union, the idea of a “summer vacation” is disappearing over the societal horizon faster than my Dad’s Country Squire station wagon crossing the Badlands. But we still have “The Holidays” to look forward to, right?------------- Barbara understood how things worked. She care-fully restored Victorian furniture that she found at Goodwill. She practiced Ikebana, the art of floral arrangement, which she first studied in Tokyo as a G.I. Bride during the Korean War. She understood time. She survived a decades-long fight with disease through faith, not in God but in herself. Faith... and just the right amount of denial. She didn’t sweat the small stuff, but she was obsessed with detail. I wish I could talk to her. I talk to her.-------------

The movers arrive. Zack, a skinny 20-something hipster wearing a wool stocking cap despite the unsea-sonable heat, and Bob, a down-on-his-luck middle-aged tattoo artist. His tattoo shop was destroyed in arson’s fire, and he has a new baby to feed, so he’s moving antiques. Together, we organize and load the truck. I give Bob some of Barbara’s oriental art books, Zack some old vinyl. They are happy, especially Bob, who lost all of

his art books in the fire. We all shake hands, wishing each other the best.

They drive carefully up the steep and wind-ing driveway. I lock the front door and take one last walk through Barbara’s

beautiful hillside garden.-------------

By the time you read this, we will have completed another

painful, pointless election cycle. Americans will have made another

desperate attempt to elect the corporate puppet who will most effectively suppress the people they hate. It’s like being asked to decide on which carny we want to run our economic roller coaster. “Hmmm, I think I prefer J-Dog the toothless meth-head’s stand on health care- or should I vote for Cletus the Baptist child-molester? His stand on Rowe v. Wade is more to my liking...” but we go on. We get by. Maybe next summer. Just don’t sweat the small stuff and pay attention to detail. We stand in the garden in the shadows of late afternoon and take a deep breath,

and go on. Into the fall, and winter....

In this second issue of OBSOLETE! We play with the idea of “summer vacation” with writing and art by contributors from California, New York, Chicago, Iowa, New Orleans, Colorado, New Mexico, and the U.K. and Brazil. No mat-

ter where you go, no matter how the politicos howl and bray, summer days are long and the nights are hot, and it’s the time to get away...

How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

This summer, I did not go to Burning Man. Thank god.

Don’t get me wrong here. I got nothing against camping, or hippies. Hell, I’ve even got nothing

against people walking around naked— nudity being something that often happens at hippie camping events like Burning Man. In fact, this is one of those few times I’m glad my eyesight sucks – if an unattractive naked person, or group of unattractive naked people happen to walk past me, I can just take off my glasses and it’ll be a giant blur. (Disclaimer: I have yet to be in a situation where I see groups of fine-looking naked people in real life. If I did, then yeah. I might think differently.) I got nothing against self-sufficiency. Y’all want to build a city in the desert? Fine, go ahead. Truck in a bunch of crap, put together what you gotta put together, plug it into whatever giant gas-powered monstrosity of an generator you brought along with you, and boom! Instant blinky-lights! And I do admit that blinky-lights in the desert really are pretty cool.But then, compound those blinky-lights camps by the hundreds, mix in the thousands of people, combine it all with the crappy boom-boom-horrid-techno-oh-my-god-earplugs-don’t-work-because-you can-feel-the-vibra-tions-through-the-ground music, and the miserable excuses for “art” you’ll come across, and the ever-present dust-storms...and you can’t help but think...”Damn. No amount of drugs they’ve got available here is gonna help me escape this.” And that’s Burning Man. Seven days of what the or-ganizers call “Radical Self-Expression” in the desert. Oy. So this summer, instead I lounged around my friend’s kiddie pool, drank a few beers and reminisced about crazy 80’s teen idols. I drove up to the mountains a couple times, ate at a Japanese restaurant in town I always wanted to try, went to an amusement park and almost lost my dinner on the twisty turns of a roller coaster called “The Wild Chipmunk.” That was all. Super low-key. A time of “self-expression?” Maybe. But much as I do love me my blinky lights, parties, and being around the crazy hippies, sometimes you just gots to relax.

-Alissa Bader,Denver CO

by

Gary and Debra Parky

The following photos were taken in early September, primarily in Grand Isle, Louisiana. Grand Isle was prominently featured early-on during cov-erage of the Deepwater Horizon oil “spill” (often referred to as “gusher” or “geyser’ in the local New Orleans media) for President Obama’s unconvinc-ing photo ops. It was, at the time, Ground Zero for the media’s coverage of the nation’s largest environmental catastrophe. We had traveled to Pensacola, Florida and seen plenty of submerged tar balls while snorkeling and we had seen the dead jellyfish washing ashore in Pass Christian, Mis-sissippi. The clean-up crews we saw in both places were mostly not clean-ing anything, just sitting under tarps on the beach. I was still unsure of what direction to go in covering this event for OBSOLETE! We were thinking about it as we drove down to Grand Isle

Greetings From Grand Isle. LA.

from New Orleans. Debra and I sometimes drive around the city and the region and take photos of old and/or primitive signage. In Larose we found an entire side of a building covered with a protest collage (complete with a rendition of Shepard Fairey’s Obama profile); further down Route One we came upon a piece of plywood painted with relevant images that was somewhat reminiscent of R.A. Miller’s work. As we got into Grand Isle it became apparent that this we were in the right place. There was no shortage of homemade, hand-painted protests against BP in people’s front yards. We occasionally saw professionally printed signs as well, which still had a pissed-off & sometimes humorous local point of view. Grand Isle residents are clearly frustrated with what was unwillingly foisted upon them, from the catastrophe itself to how it is being handled by the government and corporate America.

Gary & Debra Parky reside in New Orleans. According to Gary, “Every now and then we do something interesting, like the time we had a band that played obscure R&B and Rock & Roll from the late 50s & early 60s, complete with go-go dancers. We called ourselves the SophistiCats and the SophistiKittens, and we released 2 full length CDs and did a lot of cool gigs. Another time we opened up a store on Magazine St called Sputnik Ranch that sold stuff like Western Wear, cowboy boots, designer vinyl toys, lowbrow art and other fun stuff. That was pretty crazy! Sometimes we even ride around the French Quarter on vintage 1950s bikes dressed up like cow-boys (the Roy Rogers/Nudie/Manuel suit wearing kind…yes, we have the suits) with our friends. We also like to drive around our neck of the woods and take photos of cool stuff that we’re afraid won’t be around too long. Unfortunately, we’re often right about our choices. Our favorite dogs are Border Collies; we have two. Their names are Bunny and Lux.”

Check them out at: SputnikRanch.com & SophistiCats.com.

Greetings From Grand Isle. LA.

When you understand wetlands and integrate it into your urban setting and use it... that is not stepping back from technology...that is the highest technology- the full culmination of technology.

R: It makes me think of John Todd and the New Alchemist Institute and “Living Machines”...

K: There is always a role for stewardship, but what we need to do is find our role as equals in nature, and not fight it as an antagonist.

R: You talk about Ecosystem services and as-signing monetary value to those. How does this relate to carbon trading? In the aftermath of the collapse of the derivatives market, it seems that carbon trading is falling out of favor as people see it as another dubious “financial instrument”...

K: In systems theory, you can map out the inter-relationships between the parts of the system. One of the things you have to do is draw a bound-ary and say, “This is the edge of the system.”. That boundary is often drawn arbitrarily. In busi-ness, we call things outside of that boundary “ex-ternalities.” What we are really talking about is a reform of accounting practices. There are a lot of ways to do that. We need to account for the cost of the toxic stuff that you have been dumping for the last 25 years- we used to be able to dump it over our neighbors fence- we need a system that doesn’t allow that anymore.

R: We are in a market system that internalizes profit and externalizes risk. What sort of societal change do you see happening that will allow for this new way of accounting? Why should they want to pick up their trash if they aren’t required to?

K: There is a new profession known as a gar-bage designer. It’s the person that designs the output of an industrial process- or tunes it- in such a way that it can be sold as an input into another industry. Industries can generate an income stream from what was considered waste.

R: You talked about relinquishing control in your talk as well... about moving ahead to letting go of our control over nature. In the short term, that’s going to leave a kind of void. Are we designing these systems and setting them free, or are they overseen by a government agency? Are they a

Detournement and Re-Wilding:

A Discussion with Karl Schroeder During the early part of summer, 2010, I stum-bled across an announcement for a Science Fiction Convention at a local hotel. Although I’m a life-long reader of Sci-Fi and full-fledged geek ( I proudly admit that I once worked at Forbidden Planet, NYC’s largest comic book and sci-fi store), I rarely venture out to “Cons” these days. Some-thing on the schedule caught my eye, though. Canadian author Karl Schroeder was slotted as a special guest and was scheduled to moderate a panel on “The Politics of Climate Change.” “This should be interesting,” I thought. “Can a room full of people dressed as Klingons, pie-eyed gamers and Asprergers sufferers have a coherent conver-sation about the ultimate reality?” I got in the car. Although the turnout for the session was small, it was a thoughtful discussion and the group was extremely well-informed for a lay-audience. The group included one hard-core denier, but even he contributed relevant points and despite dif-ferences, minds were open on both sides of the argument.

Schoeder lead the discussion with the deft hand of someone who understood his audience. He also brought a Canadian perspective on what is possible when a nation is not yet completely controlled by a coporatocracy. Having watched a Youtube video of Schoeder at OSCON (the O’Reilly Media shindig) in which his ideas of “re-wilding” were presented. I was anxious to sit down with the author and talk about his ideas. Karl was kind enough to oblige. Upon describing the theme of “Obsolete Magazine, we immediately dove into a discussion of “Detourne-ment” the situationist idea of reuse of elements and William Gibson’s early cyberpunk novels like Count Zero and Neuromancer, in which Schoeder pointed out that “... the characters are constantly cobbling things together out of stuff the street has abandoned- there is a tradition of that in science fiction going back at least that far and before...”

R: You come from a tradition of science fiction that is heavily influenced by the “Science”. Are there instances where sci-fi has had an effect on science?

K: Science fiction can’t make things come true, so it may not have had a huge influence on sci-ence, but it has had a huge impact on making people want to become scientists. I often hear people say that reading science fiction as kids got them into science. The line between science and technology gets blurred a lot. Many people went into computer engineering with the expressed intention of making their science fiction fantasies a reality. Gibson’s vision of cyberspace is the prime example. Computer engineers have been frantically trying to construct since that book came out. I don’t think you could find anyone in silicone valley that doesn’t read science fiction.

R: In the review of Ventus, Cory Doctorow refers to you as an autodidact. Do you see yourself that way?

K: In the strictest terms I am an autodidact in that I’m a high school dropout. I’ve taught myself es-sentially everything I needed to know about the science and technologies I write about. I firmly believe that if you know how to learn, all doors are open to you. At this point though, I’m pursuing a masters degree in “Strategic Foresight and In-novation,”... which, when I tell people that, causes them to stare at me blankly. It’s a new program, but not a new idea. The idea of “Foresight” goes

back to the Rand Corporation in the 50’s, and even prior to that. It’s not about predicting the future, but it is about minimizing surprises. For me, it dovetails nicely with writing science fiction. In writing science fiction, I can be as outrageous in my predictions as I want. Now, I’m getting the tools to look at the future in a more sophisticated way.

R: Do you think that your educational background or lack thereof sets you apart from your colleagues in the program? Are they at all bur-dened by pre-conceptions that you might have? I’m thinking of Buckminster Fuller, who was kicked out of college several times before he went on to be one of the greatest big-picture thinkers of the 20th Century. He always said that his best education came from being a supply officer in the Navy.

K: I’ve deliberately avoided becoming a specialist, because with that comes a specialists perspec-tive. I always wanted to be a well-rounded gener-alist, because of what I wanted to write. This pro-gram at the Ontario College of Art and Design is a generalists’ program. The other students come from a wide range of backgrounds - from advertis-ing to medical technology to government policy. They share the characteristic of wanting to have that big picture view of things. The courses in the program cast an extremely wide net to broaden the toolset for understanding the world.

R: I have heard you talk about the idea about “re-wilding”...

K: I want to write a novel laying out these ideas. I use “re-wilding” as a metaphor for what we need to control in the world around us and things we can let go of, because we better understand the world around us. In the past we tried to control everything in the environment around us in order to survive because we didn’t understand how the world worked. Hopefully, we understand the environment well enough now to let go of some of the systems of control that we’ve developed over the centuries.

R: You mentioned the “re-sanctification” of the natural world, and I found that a strangely spiritual idea in a pretty technical discussion.

K: It’s not if you understand the metaphor I’m working with here. There is the “re-wilding” of the physical world, where we selectively un-build those parts of our industrial infrastructure that we no longer need and restore as much of the natural systems around us as we can, but there is a psy-chological and possibly even spiritual component that comes from the great revolutionary science of the Twentieth century, which is cognitive science- understanding ourselves gives us the opportunity for the first time to reassert a natural and healthy relationship with the world around us as people.

R: You are sort of talking about pushing past technology. How do you think that differs from the people who originally coined the phrase “re-wild-ing” who are the sort of Earth First!, Primitivist types. The Unabomber comes to mind. These people think that we need to go back to nature, not forward to nature through technology.

K: There is no going back. The project that we are engaged in has no reverse setting. But what it can have is a fulfillment. It’s like water filtration plants and wetlands. When you don’t understand wet-lands you have to build the water filtration plant.

private endeavor? This gets into the politics – is this a sort of Green/Anarchist endeavor? What is our model?

K: I wanted to give a new name to what I’ve been talking about because it doesn’t fit with the traditional themes of the modern environmental movement, or the Greens. I don’t see a clear distinction between natural and artificial systems. I think it’s increasingly important not to make such distinctions, particularly in a highly political and moral sense. By taking a moralistic stance toward nature, we are basically condescending to it and imposing our own prejudices on it. There have been a number of people in recent years that have been trying to get beyond the rhetoric of environmentalism. Bruno Latour, a French philosopher, wrote books like We Were Never Modern, and other books like Ecology Without Nature. They dovetail well with what I’m talking about. 20th century environmentalism is one of the things we need to get past to save the planet and save ourselves. It creates too awkward of a dichotomy between us and them, humanity and the natural world.

R: Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame has a new book out that embraces nuclear power and genetic engineering as the solutions to the problem. It’s a very iconoclastic approach and he is pissing off a lot of old fans that grew up with the “Deep Green” idea. Patrick Moore, who founded Greenpeace, is another one who now supports nuclear, because carbon reduction is what we are after. It seems like there is an “either/or” thing happening, either you are on this team or on that team. People are forced into making black and white binary choices. You talk about a lot of the shades of grey...

K: That’s absolutely right. If you want to preserve the environment, the best place to do it is in a high-rise. We can’t go back to making our clothing out of all-natural fiber and hunting and gardening for our food. Imagine nine billion people trying to do that. It fails on the simple basis of scale. We need intensive industrial systems to maintain hu-man life, at this point. If that is the case, we need to optimize them.

R: I always love to read John Zerzan – love his ideas about primitivism, but ironically, of course- I read about them on his website!

K: Yes, the only way we could go to some sort of neo-primitivist society would be if we reduced our population by ninety-nine percent.

R: According to a friend of a friend who does environmental analysis for the CIA, they think that a likely climate change scenario is exactly that- a pandemic will probably occur which will reduce our numbers and our emissions significantly. The planet will self-regulate.

K: I have spent the last three months studying strategies for intervention and negation of climate change. I’ve identified three points of intervention. I haven’t really heard the discussion framed this way before, but you can intervene at the origin of the CO2, you can intervene by removing the CO2 from the atmosphere, or you can reduce the temperature change itself, through geo-engineer-ing activities. I’m currently working on the idea of carbon/air capture, which involves sequestration (through plants) but also removing the carbon di-rectly from the air. It’s a scrubbing technology that pulls the CO2 out of the ambient air and drives it into deep strata. Obviously reforestation is one way to do it, but it’s a slow process. I’m looking at industrial processes that can take advantage of the infrastructure we already have in place. I think an industrial-scale capture process is the only way we can reduce CO2 levels to a pre-in-dustrial level in a timely way.

R: Are there companies engaged in this process now?

K: There are researchers working on it, and com-panies in Canada and the US being formed- it’s still a stealth technology. - Al Gore doesn’t men-tion this as an option in his new book, but it is one of the three pillars of climate mitigation, and one we should be working on it more.

R: There is a lot of talk in this country, and in the Midwest in particular about using perennial grasses to create a “carbon sink”.

K: There is a lot of potential there, but it would have to be done on a global scale. We also need to increase our food production, and you can’t tear down one part of the biosphere to prop up another.

R: What about the idea of vertical farming? Even here in the middle of farm country, the majority of our actual food is shipped in from California or even Central America. We grow animal feed and high-fructose corn syrup. Is the idea of vertical farming something we should be looking at?

K: Vertical farming is an idea that has been cham-pioned by a guy named Dickson Despommier. He has a website called verticalfarming.com. I don’t claim to be an expert in that area, but by using hydroponic technology you can increase produc-tion by four to twenty percent. The least efficient thing you can farm is cattle. By stacking your acreage in a tall building, making it mostly self-sufficient for water and protecting it from outside environmental effects like frost and pests, then you get further multiplying effects. One projection that Despommier’s group makes is that using one block square, fourty-seven-story building could feed 50,000 people on an ongoing basis.

R: It also reduces the transport costs and energy use...We are working here on increasing the effi-ciency of local food systems by looking at making farmers trips to market more than just a delivery- we (Feral Technology Institute) are working on a system that would have a someone from the farm delivering produce and picking up waste grease and food to return to the farm for composting, biodiesel and biogas production...

K: That goes back to the idea of a garbage designer...

R: Hey, I think I’m a garbage designer!

K: Yes! In science fiction, Samuel R. Delaney uses the idea in a novel called Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand which was published in the mid 80’s- he treats a city as an ecosystem in which the most valued members of society are the garbage collectors, called “Tracers” who liter-ally trace the flow of materials through the sys-tem.

R: I can’t let you go without asking you to talk about your concept of “Thalience” – the idea of science being done outside the sphere of human influence.

K: My ideas have evolved a lot in the 10 years since I came up with the idea of Thalience. The question was whether computers and other tech-nology just mirror human’s view of the world or if they can develop their own. What those ideas have evolved into is my concept of re-wilding- giv-ing natural systems intelligence through a network of sensor nets, Internet connections and legal instruments. For instance, the new constitution of Paraguay gives rights to nature, and allows indi-viduals to litigate on behalf of natural systems.

R: So maybe we should be willing to do for nature what we have done for corporations? Create a legal persona?

K: Exactly. If a corporation can be a legal person, there is no reason that a natural system can’t also be a person. I’m writing a story about that right now.

R: So is the original idea of Thalience still rel-evant in the real world?

K: It is, but it revolves more around arguments having to do with artificial intelligence. I hasten to add that I am doing a mashup between AI and environmentalism in my work right now. On one hand, treating natural systems as potentially intel-ligent legal entities and on the other hand, trying to see the natural or the non-conscious in hu-man nature and the systems we create. If I could describe these ideas in a few words I would, but sometimes you have to spread out the argument over many, many pages.

R: Do you think that AI and technology is reach-ing a point that it can start creating itself? I guess the other vision of that scenario is “Skynet” in the Terminator movies...

K: Our traditional vision of computers is the Ter-minator model of intelligent machines taking over. What I’m talking about is natural systems that have been augmented with technology. So it’s not robots that are taking over, but your local aqua fir.

R: Genetic engineering is one nightmare vision of technology escaping into nature- I’m much more excited about artificial intelligence escaping into nature...

K: That’s what Thalience was about...and my idea of re-wilding is that there is no distinction between nature and technology. If we replace nature with technology, technology is our natural world. It will evolve on it’s own because things do evolve on their own. To a great extent, control is an illusion.

R: We had an ice storm here two years ago and lost power for six days- it really illustrated how much of an illusion that control is!

K: Events like that are more catastrophic when you are trying to maintain a state of direct con-trol. When your systems are optimized to coex-ist with nature, events like that are not nearly so catastrophic. When you don’t need to control the system, you don’t care what breaks down.

Karl Schoeder is the author of nine novels, includ-ing the Virga series, as well as co-author with Cory Doctorow of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Science Fiction. http://www.kschroeder.com/------------

by J.D. King

It caught her eye, made her brake, that mailbox: a little log cabin, its red flag at attention, practically saluting her. Putting down the blue Schwinn, she walked over, opened the box, pulled out a letter addressed to an APO. From a pocket of her khaki shorts, Tammi produced a chrome-plated lighter, flipped it open, flicked, held a flame to a corner of the envelope. When the burning paper got too close to her fingertips, she let go, the smoking ash dropping to the roadside. She led her bike by the handlebars down a sandy driveway to the house, a pre-fab log cabin: the mailbox all grown up. Too funny! On the right sat a black SUV with caramel panels, a yellow Support The Troops magnet on its butt, a tin of Skoal on the dash. The sign in the yard read: The Longs. No barking. That’s good. Up two steps, on the porch. The screen door was closed, but the real door was wide open. Peering in, blocking August noon sun with hands cupped to her temples, she could see the living room, the dining-area, sliding doors to a deck, Lake Kayuta beyond. She rapped her knuckles on the doorjamb. Nothing. She knocked hard. Still nothing. When she pulled, the screen door opened. In the living room, she said, “Hello!” Silence. She turned a radio on, then off, proceeded to nose around. On the mantle, an array of framed photos: perky mom; beefy dad; two young boys; a soldier in desert camos, boot on a Jeep’s bumper; some old folks; everyone smiling for the camera. Say cheese, douche bags. Looking around the living room, a flat-screen TV, no books, some maga-zines: People, Field & Stream, Us. In the kitchen, Tammi opened drawers, poked through cabinets, scouted the fridge, grabbed a bowl, a spoon, milk and a sealed box of Sugar Pops. She opened the box roughly, like an animal, poured cereal into the bowl, then milk. Leaning against the sink, she ate. The kitchen smelled faintly of spices. She should’ve been ner-vous, anxious about someone coming home, but she wasn’t. If need be, she’d feed them a story. People are dumb, they’ll buy anything. After the snack, she went down the hall, into a bedroom on the left: bunk bed against one wall, Sponge Bob and Harry Potter posters opposite. Seeing a toy car on the floor, she crushed it under heel. Next, the other bedroom, past the unmade bed to the dresser, she rummaged drawers. Stashed under dad’s socks, some cash: three twenties, one ten, a five, four ones. She put the dough in the same pocket as the lighter. In another drawer, a loaded .38 revolver. She held it with both hands, mimed Hollywood action poses, saying, “Pow! Pow! Pow!” before placing it on the dresser. Rifling the bathroom medicine cabinet she found a treat: almost a dozen codeine tabs in a green bottle. She popped the container in her other pocket, along with the tube of coral lipstick she used to gesture a smile face on the mirror, an oversized version of the ones she drew in place of the dot over the “i” when signing a love-note. Sometimes Tammi sent love-notes to several guys at a time. It cracked her up. The lugs fell for that corny bullshit, even older lugs. Especially older lugs. Back in the bedroom, she kicked off her Keds, stripped off her American flag T-shirt, bra, shorts and panties. Before the mirror, she held her breasts, one in each hand, admired herself, then snuggled into bed, fetal position under the covers, drifted into slumber, breathing the scent of Mama and Papa Whoever. Close to a half-hour later she rose, did some stretches, then snapped out thirty pushups. “I

should join the Marines!” Back in the bathroom, she turned on the shower, adjusted the temp to nice-and-hot, stepped in. Water blasting, Tammi masturbated, not fan-tasizing about anyone, just getting off on pure sensation and the danger that, at any second, a stranger could burst in bellowing, “What the hell’s going on?!” Squeaky clean, she got out. Not bothering with the mat, a large puddle spread across the tiles as shook semi-dry, like a dog, her whipping hair splattering the walls. She sang, “Bomp! Bomp! Just a mirage, that’s all you are to me...” Tammi’d heard the song yesterday, at her mom’s, and it stuck in her brain like bubblegum to the bottom of a movie theater seat. In the living room, still undressed, she picked up yesterday’s Observer-Dispatch, sat down, add-ing a wet spot to the couch while reading about Utica’s latest murder trial. Bored, she tossed the paper on the floor, went out onto the deck, placed her hands on the railing, leaned forward, saw the pier below, gazed across the lake, took a deep breath, held it and thought, “Lake life is the greatest! Especially during the week when no one’s around...” Then she trotted around in a wide circle, head bowed and bobbing, spanking her ass, mimicking a frisky race horse with jockey. The sun felt good on her bare hide. Returning to the fridge, Tammi rustled up some cheddar cheese, whole wheat bread and a jar of red peppers. She made a grilled cheese in a black iron skillet on the old propane stove. At the dining-area table, the sandwich, with a leftover

bag of Fritos, a can of Pepsi and two homemade cupcakes was a fine free lunch. Just as she was finished, was slapping her flat but full belly, a motor boat approached, cut its engine. In the surrounding woods, birds chirped. She got up, behind by the sliding glass door, saw the family docking at the pier, towheads hopping out, tying the boat to the landing, just like Pop had taught ‘em. In the bedroom Tammi picked up the .38, clicked off the safety, padded back to the kitchen, slid the door open, stepped out. From the dock, a family looked up to see a naked young woman on their deck, her right hand on her hip, her left hand pointing a pistol at them. She yelled, “Think fast, motherfuckers!” Just before Tammi squeezed off the first round, the older of the two boys thought, “Wow! She’s beautiful!”

J.D. King is a freelance illustrator, active for over two decades. His work has appeared in many national publications (The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Forbes, The Village Voice, New York, The Progressive, Business Week), as well as ad campaigns (Master/Visa Card, Absolut Vodka, Seybold Seminars), and CD and book covers. Previous to illustration, he was an underground cartoonist with work appearing in several titles includ-ing R. Crumb’s Weirdo magazine. His avocations are experimental music (J.D. King & The Coachmen, two albums on Ecstatic Peace) and writing fiction. A collec-tion of short stories is scheduled for Water Row Books, and a novel is completed and searching for a publish-er. He lives in Remsen, NY and his interests include jazz, reading, bicycling, hiking and cats.

Just a Mirage

Help keep OBSOLETE! free!!! Thanks to the support of a lot of great people, we can distribute OBSOLETE! Magazine to fans of the printed word, free of charge. Unlike a lot of other free papers and zines, we pay our featured artists and writers (as much as we can- unfortunately not all they are worth!) and often trade or give away ad space to projects we like. Not really a sustainable business model, right? Well, it can be, if readers who like ObMag! chip in just a little bit- whatever they can.

Here are a few ways that you can show your support...

*Subscribe ($12.00/ 4 quarterly issues)*Advertise your project in ObMag! (visit website for rates)*Buy a T-Shirt ($20- Shipping included in the USA)*Buy books and other cool junk from our Ebay store*Donate cash!

No cash but still want to help? We are looking for people to distribute OBSOLETE! to their local indepen-dent book shops, record stores, coffee shops and clubs. Drop us a line and we will send you a bundle.

For more details or to order or donate us-ing paypal, please visit: http://obsoletemag.blogspot.com/

Whitey, old guy from Brooklyn Ericka Wildgirl Dana

Peter AschwandeN:

Illustrator and Godfather of the D.I.Y.* Movement *Do It Yourself

By Rich Dana and Deborah Reade

Recently, I found myself perusing the book tables at a sustainable living fair and came across a copy of The Septic System Owners Manual. Granted, it’s not a title that would attract most readers, but if you live on a farm with an aging septic system as we do, it might. There was something about the cover of this book, with it’s play-ful turn-of-the-century fonts and the tightly drawn pen and ink cartoon that made me pick it up and start leafing through the amazing illustrations. I remembered immediately where I had seen this drawing style before. In the early 80’s, I was living above George Herget’s bookshop on Magazine Street in New

Orleans. One of my roommates, George Morrissey, had undertaken a complete rebuild of his VW Rabbit (to the dismay of the neighbors and landlord) on the sidewalk outside, as well as on the living room floor and kitchen table. Ever-pres-ent was a copy of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Rabbit Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Com-pleat Idiot. The illustrations in the Septic System book were in the same meticulous yet quirky, humorous style.

Peter Aschwanden’s work was ingrained in my memory - the “compleat idiot” se-ries of VW repair books were omnipres-ent among DIY’ers of the 70’s and 80’s, and were the predecessors to an entire genre of informal “how-to” books. His illustrations adorned t-shirts and post-ers of VW nuts across the world. With the launch of OBSOLETE! Magazine earlier this year, I decided to look into the work of this guy whose skill with a pen rivaled that of other better-known 60’s illustrators like R. Crumb and Spain Rodriguez. I wanted to meet this guy. Unfor-tunately, Peter had passed away in 2005. I’m indebted to Deborah Reade and Francisco Aschwanden, who very generously helped me put together this profile of Peter, his life, and his work.----------

Peter Aschwanden was born in Los Angeles in 1942. He was drawing and painting from a very young age and in high school he illustrated the yearbooks and drew cartoons for the school newspaper. At Pasadena City College, he studied under Leonard Edmond-son, an influential California artist and teacher. During this time he also worked on floats for the Rose Parade. It was a period of change in America, with car culture on the rise and social upheaval on the horizon. Aschwanden spent the period after Pasadena City College hitchhiking around the country, living first with friends in New Mexico, then in a loft on Fulton Landing in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. His travels then took him to the center of 60’s counterculture, San Francisco, where he painted faux finishes in houses that were being renovated and studied for a time at the San Francisco Art institute. Peter returned to New Mexico in the late ‘60s where he eventually bought land and built a house. While living in Santa Fe he worked construction, as a barista at the Three

Cities of Spain coffee house, and as a sign painter. It was because of Peter’s carved and painted signs that John Muir chose Aschwanden to do the illustrations for the now leg-endary VW books and many other Muir publications. John Muir was a quintes-sential American icon of the 1960s. Muir, a descendent of the naturalist with whom he shares the name, had “dropped out” of his life as a missile engineer for Lockheed Aerospace to become an auto mechanic in New Mexico. According to Phil Patton’s book Bug: The strange mutations of the world’s most famous automobile, “...His wedding was attended by 500 people, including Wavy Gravy and the entire Hog Farm Commune.” He became leg-endary for his hippie philosophy and his view of the VW as a metaphor for life. Muir decided to write a how-to book on fixing VW’s that focused on “listening” and “feeling” - concepts strangely com-mon to both gearheads and hippies. In 1969, at age 51, Muir

self-published the first spiral-bound edition of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive; A Manual of Step-

By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot with illustrations by Peter Aschwanden. Most agree

that it was the perfect chemistry of Muir’s homespun Zen approach and Aschwanden’s illustrations that made How to keep you Volkswagen Alive one of the biggest selling, self-published books of all time. Muir publications grew to include not only automotive books on VW Rab-bits and vans, Subarus, Hondas and Datsuns, but also books on midwifery, greenhouses and the “Peoples Guide” series of travel books. Peter spent a lot of time in the mountains of northern New Mexico during the late 60’s and early 70’s, living “off the grid” while illustrating Muir’s publications by the light of a kerosene lantern. The drawings for the Velvet Monkeywrench, Muir’s musings on subjects both political and philosoph-ical, were done mostly while Peter was

living in Mexico. Deborah met Peter in 1980 when she

arrived in Santa Fe and started working at John Muir Publications as a typesetter and

one of three artists working on the Honda book. Deborah remembers, “We would layout

the drawings in pencil and Peter would erase them

over and over again until we got them right. Then he would refine the pencils and ink over them--changing the drawing again and again until he was satisfied.” According to Deborah, Peter never actually owned a VW bus or bug himself although he drove a Rabbit while illustrating the Rabbit book. Muir includes a story in that book about when Peter fell asleep and rolled the car and walked away with-out a scratch to show how safe the Rabbit was. Aschwanden was a tal-ented mechanic and would partially

or completely disassemble the cars that he was illustrat-ing. He had a 51 Ford Panel Flathead Strait 6 after which he named his company, “Flathead Graphix.” A friend is currently in the process of restoring the truck. Starting in the 80s he drove Subarus, which he told Deborah was “like having a VW with a water jacket”. Peter and Deborah have two children, Francisco and Sophie, who are attending college in Chicago and Portland, Oregon. The whole family works on different aspects of Flathead Graphix where they sell

T-shirts and posters with Peter’s designs at www.PeterA-schwanden.com. They also maintain a gallery page on the site and a Facebook page, which highlights different examples of his art. In our correspondences, Deborah provided me with most of the information incorporated into this piece, but in conclusion, I would like to quote her directly- she sums up Peter’s work in a way that as a mere fan I never could. In Deborah’s words:

“Peter absorbed many artistic influences both in formal training and also from his wonderful curiosity about the world. Black & white line art of the 1880s that developed into steel engraving and woodcuts and eventually the cartooning of the 1920s and ‘30s were the roots of Peter’s style. Using that 19th-century style but making it mod-ern was what his illustration style was all about. As the “king” of perspective, he could turn a simple drawing of a

carburetor into something that looked like it was flying through space. I think Peter was able to incorporate the 60s feel so eas-ily into the rest of his influences because he WAS that scene–or at least a part of it. All the influences that made that scene were his influences as well–where he lived, the people he knew, the lifestyle he lived. The Southwest influenced him because of the art, the quality of the light, the cultural influences and the landscapes–which he painted a lot. Art was his life and pushing himself to create the perfect line, the per-fect perspective and in the most beautiful way was what it was all about. “

End of the day. Copacabana. Chilly summer Sunday’s end. Sitting at my regular seaside table at the end of the beach, observing the crazy mov-ing beehive hieroglyphic puzzle of early night’s activity, people walking past the bar here. People, disjointed illegible figures. They’re all out tonight; a weird mix of lost dog gringos, fuzzy-looking mulatta whores, faceless locals and bitter-faced street beggars with distilled cachaça livers and deathly shit-brown botiquim patinas; all sharing the dirty sidewalk with crummy piss-picker pi-geons -- nature’s answer to rats in this place. And I sit here at the end of Copacabana, look-ing out over world’s edge, a green coconut de-scending into my hand, my stomach full of beans and rice. The good life; watching the waves roll in peopled by the colorful ant-dots of surfers pray-ing to the last waves of dusk. A white white cruise ship disappears over the green to gray post-sun-set horizon. I reflect on the ho-stroll conversa-tions raging around my ears here, conjuring up a fond memory of last night... the warm feeling of homecoming as I flew through the night air on the growling black wasp, leaning into the familiar curve of Prado Junior. Sugar Loaf Mountain to my back and the green blur of the Aterro de Flamingo still bounc-ing around in my nostrils, I pulled up to the curb and ground the bike to a stop to greet my little group of curbside hookers. They were all out on the street, lounging on parked cars like cynical scrawny crows on a ghetto fence. Prada Junior whores... hipster legends of the lost spirit nights of Copacabana. My raggedy pirate-eyed friends. I get along well with these streetwise coked up old alkie whores. Better than I ever did with straight chicks. I especially love their ribald mortuary humor. Their off-color stories are as dark and raucous and irreverent as the redlight hallways they patrol from town to town like a tribe of gypsy crabs, peddling pussy and personality with that timeless tough-luck courage that gives them more balls than the average guy whose tired grunts they fondly tolerate with their legendary quickwit-ted cool. Man, if the average woman had a thim-bleful of these bitch’s class and courage, I think as I hand a sweaty banknote to Brenda. Brenda struts off to buy her and her partner a couple of doses of cheap white rum. As soon as she’s out of earshot, my friend Shirley, Brenda’s longtime neighbor on their curbside perch here, eases up and leans into the crook of my elbow, talking out the side of her mouth through crowded teeth, all flashing black eyes and skinny hair and pointy angles. “I’m sick of her shit, Cigano,” Shirley drawls. “Yeh... there goes one useless old ho... lissen to this: I get us a class trick last night with a high rollin’ gringo. Fancy hotel, jacuzzi bath, panoramic view, got the whiskey and the cashew nuts, room service, the fucking works, hein? The gringo’s gonna give us 200 each. Sweet deal, right? So soon as we get up to the room, off comes my clothes and splish splash, rub a dub, right into the tub. Sure baby. Cash in the hand, panties on the land. Whaddya think? Shirley’s gonna get paid! Fat City gringo trick...” She cocks a razor-sharp sneer towards the corner bar where Brenda’s disappeared with my money to get their booze. “That one, hah, all she’s good for, gimme a buck here, gimme a buck there, no, fuck no... go go go--- nada! She’s just along for the ride again while I do all the fucking work and then she wants her half. Her half!?! Some fucking balls! Fucking boozy old freeloading chicken! Hah! Me and the gringo in the tub playing hide the salami and ya think she’d even take her fucking clothes off? Hah! Shit, not even one shoe came off while she’s hitting the

frigo-bar, and she’s drinking the gringo’s hotel bill into orbit, munch munch, cashew nuts gone... at 10 bucks a can! Two cans! Down the hatch! Whiskey? Gone. Beer? Not a drop left, and it’s glug glug munch munch chomp while the gringo’s wearing my fucking pussy out, and he don’t even get to see the color of her fucking toenail polish... “... and just when he’s finally popping his nut and it’s time for me to get paid, then this lazy old ho nearly breaks an elbow sticking her hand out. Hah, well, the gringo ain’t having none of that shit. No no no. He hands me my 200 sweet as can be, then he just puts his wallet back in his pants, doesn’t even look at her and that’s where she starts in. You get me up here and now you won’t pay me blah blah blah ... now the gringo’s getting pissed, I can see it coming. And I’m getting pissed off too. Sure, I’m gonna get clobbered by some fucking gringo on account of that bitch?! Then what am I supposed to do? Run to the cops? Sure, that’d be the deal. All the gringo’s gotta do is tell em whatever the fuck he wants to tell em in gringo talk, whatever, like we tried to rob him or whatever. What am I gonna say? I don’t even speak a word of gringo! So then I’m off to the pokey for the cops to pluck my 200 off me and give me the back of their hand if I talk back? No thanks, Brenda. “...last time I ever go out on a call with that lazy old bitch. Let her ass collect cobwebs sitting on this fucking car hood waiting for some sucker who’s too drunk to fuck, cause that’s the only kind she goes out with, just a hand job, quick half a blow job in the car maybe and then she’s out the door with his money before he peels the fucking rubber off. Can you believe it? Fucking useless parasite. The rest of us down here, we get cus-tomers. That bitch gets victims...” Then, without missing a beat as Brenda slides up with their drinks, Shirley starts cooing like a horny pigeon”...oiiiii, Brenda dear” with a big cheery smile. “We were just talking about you, baby. I was just telling the Gypsy here what a good friend you are. Best partner a girl could ever have in the zona... right, Cigano?” she says, nudging me with a jagged elbow. I nod like a cab driver’s little doggie dashboard ornament.

BLOG 2

Brenda, oblivious to Shirley’s curbside irony, just perches her bony ass back down on the car hood where she was sitting when I pulled up. She smiles seductively at a car full of rich boys out cruising with daddy’s car while casually reaching out her hand for another one of my smokes. The carload of leering young eyes slows down and Brenda slides down off the hood like a drunken salamander and slithers over to where they’ve stopped at the curb. She leans in the window, flirt-ing with the driver. Shirley pounds down her glass of rum in one go and continues with bitter wit, leaning crookedly against my motorcycle with her hand resting on my knee. “Playboys!” she spits. “I wouldn’t waste my fucking spit to get up and talk to those punks. Condescending little daddy’s boys, never worked a day in their useless lives, hah, they roll up here with their load of shit, talking about, hey ‘little kit-ten’,” she squeaks, hilariously imitating the stiff-ass accents of the idle upper-class Brazilians, “...and all this ‘you wanna come up to a party at my place, we got whiskey and weed and a nice kitchen full of food’... Food? Party? Hah! “Shit!” she snorts, “...only if you’re having a money distributing party over there! You think I’m out here peddling my fucking ass for a drink of whiskey or a puff on some rich kid’s joint? Fala serio! If you wanna party, baby, you’re in the wrong fucking place.... THIS PLACE,” she announced proudly in a haughty tone befitting

royalty, “is a place of professional prostitution. If you’re not down with the programa, better you haul your sorry little asses back to Ipanema and find some some other kind of fucking ‘party’ Hah! And then...” she continues with a self-purpose-ful disgust-building momentum, “then they give you that hurt little whipped dog offended look and roll away, oh, maybe 20 yards down the road to try the same line of crap with the NEXT group of hookers... like they never even heard a word I said! Unbelievable stupidity. Agh! No no no. And you think I’m gonna get up and waste good shoe leather to stand there talking to a carload of arro-gant little slugs like that? No way! Nope. But there goes Brenda. God! Only her...” Shirley’s getting really riled up now. Rolling on her own steam and the shot of rum I just bought her, she rants on hilariously. “Yeah. Playboys! Condescending punks. Roll up here and think they gonna pull out a fifty and wave it under our noses like that shit was even money and they’re doing some poor little whore a big fucking favor. Arrogant little limp-dick faggots! No thanks! Odeo esta raça! I hate that race! Gimme anything but the playboys. Anybody down here looking for a little slap and grunt’s all good with me. Crippled hairlip midget, cross-eyed Chinamen, whatever ya got down here, okay, let’s go! Fat smelly French guy, no problem! Just keep those fucking god-damn Ipanema playboys away from Shirley.” As if to underscore her last words, she took a last deep drag on her cigarette and flicked the

Night in the Zone by Jonathan Shaw

butt in a wide arch, bouncing it off the car’s door and sending a shower of sparks onto Brenda’s shoe. Brenda looked over at Shirley, her brows arching over her stupid bovine face sadly like a pair of confused caterpillars. Shirley, laughing riotously, gave her an aloof disgusted look of such regal disdain it nearly moved me to tears on the spot. Poetry in a glance.

BLOG 3

Before Shirley could resume her playboy tirade, I reached over to fire up the bike. I was feeling the need of some wind in my face. The Prado Junior ho-stroll, even being a block from the ocean, can start to feel somewhat claustrophobic after awhile. Before I could take off though, a couple of the other girls wandered over and started talk-ing of ghosts and sinister apparitions that appear along the street. My attention hijacked again, I cut the motor again and continued sitting there on the bike listening to their macabre recollections. I contemplated the dark side of Copacabana as they all chattered about the man who appeared in a window above them one night threatening to throw himself out from the 6th floor. “We’re cold blooded down here, Cigano,” one of the newcomers, a smiling bleached-blond mulatta in a sparkly mini-skirt and fuck boots an-nounced proudly. “...so then we all started shout-ing JUMP ASSHOLE, JUMP!” “And he did...” the other one chimed grimly. “It sounded like a gunshot from down on the corner when his head hit the fucking pavement. We hear a lot of gunplay down here, ya know, so I didn’t think nothing of it... until I saw this big crowd gath-ering around, and there was a big puddle of blood creeping out on the sidewalk under people’s feet, so I went over to see what the fuck... Porra! The crash had tore his face right off his head like a broken doll or something...” She scrunched up her nose and the first girl cut in excitedly, “yeah, and his shoe ended up a block away, remember? That shit shot off him like a bullet!” “Yeah. It was pretty disgusting.” the other one conceded. “He shit his pants and everything... the works...” “That didn’t stop all those bums hanging around on the corner from going though his pock-ets before the cops came though, remember?” somebody else said. “Cops, ha!” Shirley guffawed, her hand play-ing up and down my leg like a pianist. A penisist, I thought, smiling to myself as she talked on, sparks flying out of her skinny pink lips, “...them fucking pigs just came and threw some news-paper over all the fucking hamburger and left it all sitting there rotting away for hours! Useless. But when they want their ‘protection’ money, then they’re right here, hein? Protect us from the smell? Ha! Those fucking bums are gone!” “Yeah, and that was a burning hot summer too. 45 degrees at midnight... and the fucking humid-ity. Ugh! The whole street stunk to hell’s waiting room for days. I had to go all the way up by the other corner to work. Couldn’t stand the fucking stink...” Just as i was about to ride off again, along comes Maria, strutting up out of the shadows. Her razor sharp antennas always fine-tuned to pick up the slightest off-color static, Maria eased right into the topic like a languid gator slipping into a warm swamp with her battle scarred gaunt white-trash pirate face and cool manner.

BLOG 4

“The best part is what follows, Cigano,” Maria begun, pinning me to the spot with her smiling brown intelligent eyes. They peered at me like burning lasers from her drug-ravaged face with traces of what was obviously once great beauty. Maria. An old lady at 24. “They went up and cleaned out the guy’s apart-ment and found it was all full of voodoo stuff,” she drawled between jagged tobacco-stained teeth in

her distinctive aristocratic gutter-goddess patois. “Hundreds of candles and plastic statues and shit, all kinda images of every fucking saint and entity in the book, all this crazy ritual magic stuff. “Vigi Maia...” Maria crossed herself. The other hookers did the same. “...so they clean it all out, Cigano, slap a fresh coat of paint on the walls and rent the place again... now, would ya believe...” she paused a moment for emphasis “...not a month goes by... and the new tenant gets up one night and... chucks himself OUT THE WINDOW! Just like that! Boom-ba! Landed right on the hood of a guy’s car who was talking to Rosie who used to stand over there...” “Sounded like a bomb going off!” one of the other girls chimed in. “Fucked that guy’s car up real good...”

“... didn’t do Rosie’s career much good either,” Maria said. “Blood and brains and shit all over her new white dress. Ugh! Remember she used to dress up all in white every night like some second rate suburban angel? Hah! After that, everybody kept calling her ‘the fallen woman’ and finally it re-ally started getting on her nerves, so she stopped talking to anyone down here. Stuck up floozy.... then one day she was gone...” “I heard she married a rich Gringo and moved to his country,” one said. “Fat chance with the mug on her! Them big greasy eyeballs, man... she looked like a lonely old Chihuahua,” another one guffawed. “Some psycho gringo probably hacked her up and took her pussy home in his suitcase...” They all laughed. I knew their tale-spinning session was just getting warmed up. The long night ahead was but a child for these girls. I was getting restless again. Finally I gave them a few cigarettes and kisses. Then I rolled off down the beach, knowing that if all else failed I’d be back around dawn to give little Shirley a ride home with a quick stop at my place. She wasn’t much to look at, old Shirley, but she liked to dress up like a schoolgirl. With those skinny pasty legs and rolled up white cotton stockings peeping out from the blue skirt, it always gave me an extra thrill to fuck her till dawn. She’d scream loud enough to wake up my square neighbors on their workday mornings. Good times. When we were done I’d always grin and hand her a few bucks for cab fare home. That was just our little private joke though, since Shirley lived only a few buildings down the street from me. Then I’d roll over and pass out in the rumpled sheets smelling of lust and cheap perfume and her cigarette smokey hair as the morning-birds darted to and fro outside my 6th floor window. After a while I stopped thinking about whores and switched channels. I just sat there quietly by the beach, listening to the graveyard waves of approaching night, thinking about my recently deceased father, wondering how he was making out there in the afterlife. Salty old bastard. Maybe he’d even be proud of me, I thought, if he only knew anything about my wonderful life.

Jonathan Shaw is a many things; tattoo artist, writer, world traveler and “whorehouse philosopher”. Son of jazzman Artie Shaw and Hollywood starlet Doris Dowling, he has worked as a merchant seaman and a writer at the legendary underground paper, the LA Free Press in the 60’s, where he befriended Charles Bukowski. He is the author of several books, including “Narcisa, Our Lady of Ashes” and “Lovesongs to the Dead.” His upcoming release is “Scabvendor: Confes-sions of a Tattoo Artist.” Check out Jonathan’s amazing blog, www.scabvendor.com.

ReviewsSpeed Speed Speedfreak:A Fast History of AmphetamineBy Mick FarrenPublished by Feral House

Question: What did Judy Garland, Baby Face Nelson, JFK, Adolph Hitler, Elvis and Charles Manson all have in common? Answer: They were all speed freaks.

In Mick Farren’s latest book, he examines the history and sociologi-cal significance of amphetamine and discovers (not too surprisingly) that the use of speed is woven throughout the tapestry of 20th century culture. Invented initially as a bronchodilator at the beginning of the industrial age, it didn’t take long before Benzedrine became the fuel of the burgeoning entertainment industry, the assembly line industrial model and the war machines of governments across the globe. In Farren’s inimitable gonzo journalistic style, he reveals the untold history of the one of the most influential forces on human development- how amphetamines were invented, how they found there way into mainstream culture, and how they remained legal while other drugs suffered from political prohibitions. The history of speed, it turns out, is the history of power. In 206 fast-paced pages (the book itself is shaped like a “black beauty”) Farren rarely misses a beat and keeps the reader engaged with a mix of historical detail and political intrigue, topped off with an insiders look at the effects of speed on the psychedelic 60’s, biker culture and the punk scene. Farren, as the lead singer of “The Deviants” and one of the godfathers of punk rock experienced that story first hand, and tells it with a survivor’s sense of humor. Mick Farren is the author of 23 science fiction novels and 11 non-fiction books, including The Hitchhikers Guide to Elvis, The Black Leather Jacket, and Give the Anarchist a Cigarette (his autobiography).

Borderland:Seven Lives. Seven Stories.As Told by Victims of Human Trafficking.by Dan Archer and Olga Trusovapublished by Archcomix www.borderland comix.com

In what artist Dan Ar-cher describes as a “com-ics journalism project”, he collaborates with Fulbright Fellow Olga Trusova to tell the stories of seven of the 12.3 million adults and children forced into bonded labor and prostitution around the world. Trusova traveled to the Ukraine in 2009 to study hu-man trafficking and returned with stories of the desperate and risky lives of people in a country ravaged by economic collapse. Archer transforms these stories into stark, mono-chromatic graphics, highlighted in sepia to convey the gray, eastern European atmosphere. At times the drawings almost feel like Soviet Era agit-prop, yet the heroic workers have become grimly ill-defined and the crimson backgrounds have faded to the color of clay as the hammer and sickle disappeared from view. The workers paradise has become the workers purgatory. The introductions to each of the seven stories convey the hard facts and statistics about the situation in the Ukraine. For instance, over 14% of the victims of trafficking have uni-versity level degrees. One story tells of an educated, middle aged woman who, desperate for money, took a construction job in Russia and ended up chained in a shed, forced to milk cows until she was too weak to work. Luckily, she escaped, and through the kindness of strangers, made it back home. Comics have a long tradition as a serious story-telling and news medium in other parts of the world, and Borderland is a fine example of how a serious subject can be addressed in an engaging and graphic format for an English-reading audience. The stories are tightly packed, with interludes with statistics, references, and links to the websites of NGOs working to stop the abuse. Borderlands is a cautionary tale for those of us in coun-tries with our own “dirty little secrets” and stories of worker exploitation. It’s an eye-opening read.

Marina Deb RisPollution Reborn as art------------------------------ Marina Deb Ris has been picking up trash along Westside beaches and creeks for over a dozen years. Her mission began when she moved from Bondi Beach, Australia to LA’s Westside. “In the beginning I would just pick up stacks of Styrofoam cups and bring them to the local 7-11, but I soon realized that this wasn’t really attacking the root problem. I needed a creative way to draw attention to it. The whole idea of making beach detritus into art started just over two years ago from the realization that the waste we create always comes back to haunt us.” Her work has been regularly on display in juried shows in the Los Angeles area and often lends her artistic talents to Sustainable Works, Heal the Bay, Friends of Ballona, Surfriders and other environmental organizations. Trained as a graphic designer at the Rhode Island School of Design, Marina’s interest in the intersection of art and the environment has been a constant. “My first goal is to provoke viewers into thinking about the consequences of our habits, and how we can change them. My second goal is to get rid of all the garbage in my garage! In a responsible way, of course.”Marina Deb Ris’ website: http://www.washedup.us/

Not Perfect by Joolz Denby © Joolz 2009

The days are getting shorter - the nipping cold winds aroundHer ankles like a cat asking to be fed and the sky is a domeOf hard blue crystal wiped over with ragged scrims of high clouds;She sniffs, and stuffs her balled fists into the pockets of herBoyfriend’s hoodie, the one with a wiry scribble pattern of gunsAll over it, the cheap grey fabric bobbled, snagged and bagged;She puts the hood up, blinker-style, and turns on her knock-off MP3; The dirty pods in her ears banging out top-end frequencies that are destroying her hearing like mice nibbling at a lump of cheese.

In her belly, beating in the hot bloody chamber of her wombThe cells pulse, divide and bloom weed-wild in thick adulterated fluidShot through with cocaine, lager, nicotine, vodka, satvia and skunk,Injections of curdled fat from her three times daily Maccy Dees,Washes of caffeine and adrenaline, and the gonging thud of electro-pop;The baby thrashes in her flesh, slung in her soft belly like a promiseOf entanglement and complication, of endless talking and the shoutsOf other generations she can barely comprehend and doesn’t like,But needs, in her time of panic, of travail and juggernaut metamorphosis.

The baby comes in Spring, he comes like a kiss with the cherry blossomAnd the tender warmth of hazy sunshine - the boyfriend is long gone,She barely remembers him if she’s honest, but she still has his hoodieAnd she has his son, who she names for a young TV star she likes, Bringing him head-first slippery-screaming into a world of grannies who coo and cluck at his big grey eyes, his dimples and his rosy mouth,And his mother, chewing gum, adores him with a passion that detonatesIn her heart with a vivid nuclear ferocity every time she sees, or smells Or touches him and you know what? It’s not wise and it’s not perfect, no,

but it’s love;

It’s love;

It’s love.

Wild Town by Joolz Denby © Joolz 2009

Dogs walk with their flap-slappy ears smacking in the windAnd the smells from the moor-lands jostling in their heads;Babies shoved along the Leeds Road wriggle in pushchairsHowling for more more sugar and to get at the dogs and bite them; Girls stilt along on catalogue stilettos getting cross whenBoys hang out of yellow cars and notice their breasts,Boys get giddy on traffic bang-ups and lean on the hornFor half a mile of ratcheted cacophony while they roll a bluntTo take the edge off the coke and keep the day at bay.

More shops have shut over night and stolen away with nothing,Gypsy Poundshops spring up with shelves full of tattered remainsAnd toothpaste from the Ukraine or baby oil from Saudi Arabia;The Arndale Café serves the same clientele and the same cakesThat taste of nothing and chew like melting rubber laced with raisins;The air outside the treadmill mall is dusty with Autumn comingIn sheets of savage gold that wrap the city trees in perfect splendourAnd the skies burgeon with a blue more tender than the Virgin’s cloak.

The Council is still corrupt and without redemption hidingIn the dense gothic eyrie of the city hall guarded unwittingly by apathyAnd the stoic grind of the peasant mind unable to believe in hope;The apparatchiks fence their jobs in with barricades of paperwork And try never to look out of the arrow-slits at the town uncoilingInto desperation below them in case the virus of despair is catching;The Great Pit dug for the phantom shopping centre fills with waterAnd grows its own Dawinless eco-system of aquatic creaturesThat roil and bubble in the dim, blind underwater car park caverns.

And roses bloom in cheek-red clusters by the garage while daisiesJaunt on the verges alongside memorial poppies and butterfly studded Buddleia with purple cones seedily aromatic and sneezily pollenous;A columbine coils sexily through the blistered turquoise of the ruined ironRailings by the sore-shaped demo site and foxes trot russet and oblivious Through the cool misty morning’s breakfast tumble and yawn;Ducks pedalo on the lake in the big park where the bandstandServes as a nest for spiders webbed in diamonds and leaf-litter;The city is reverting to the wild; the town is going feral;And the heather and the bracken will one day soon, cover it all again.

Born in 1955, Joolz Denby is a writer, poet, spoken-word performer, illustrative and fine artist, curator, photographer and tattooist. Her poetry collections include The Pride of Lions (1994), Errors of the Spirit (2000), and Pray For Us Sinners, a book of short stories and poems published in 2005. Her first novel, Stone Baby, won the 1998 Crime Writers’ Association New Crime Writer of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey Memorial Dagger. Her novel, Billie Morgan (2004), was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. Her most recently published novel is Borrowed Light (2006). Read more about Joolz at:http://www.joolz-denby.co.uk/

The Luddite Cafe:A Six-Month Experiment in Skill Sharing in Chicago

By Alex the Card Weaver

In 2003 a comrade of mine, urban wood carver David Stein, told me he wanted to start a Luddite Cafe in response to Internet Cafes and the laptop hell many coffee shops had become around Chicago (Chi) where there would be spinning wheels for making yarn and all sorts of other pieces of pre-industrial technological equipment. Fast-forward six years. I had organized a weaving workshop at a dance hall in Maloy, Iowa. Card weav-ing is an ancient form of technology for weaving straps for everything from bracelets to belts that is practiced all over the world. I had been inspired largely by Da-vid’s wood carving to pick up my own small craft that I could practice and share wherever I went in my travels. I organized the second card weaving workshop with hopes of making it a part of a series of events teaching crafts like candle making. I asked David for permission to use the name “Luddite Cafe” to describe the hap-penings instead of a place, and he was cool with it. That fall I returned to Chi and got started in earnest organizing a series of free, primitive skill “shares” with David under the name The Luddite Cafe. We issued a proclamation, The Luddite Cafe Manifesto to promote the idea and our first two Cafes and similar events. The first Luddite Cafe was held in November 2009 at the Lichen Lending Library in el Barrio Pilsen, Chi. We made a specific point of holding it in a collectively run community space that was one of the venues of the Chicago Free Skool because of what we considered a shared set of values. I taught card weaving, and had a literature table that included copies of our Manifesto and Rebels Against the Future and The Right to Useful Unemployment. That month we also won a micro-grant from Sunday Soup, a fantastic local grass roots fundraiser for artists. In December David and I printed a ‘zine, The Lud-dite Worker #1 to help promote the cafes and our ideas. We chose the name because we had met through participation in the Catholic Worker Movement, though neither of us were Catholic or had jobs. David taught urban wood carving techniques at the Luddite Cafe that month, at the same venue that had recently changed its name to La Biblioteca Popular. In January 2010 we started a north side Luddite Cafe at Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chi. I taught Card weav-ing there again and printed a second edition of the Luddite Worker. In February David taught the Urban Wood and a student from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and Wax Wing ‘Zines taught Paper Making and Book Binding at the South Side Luddite Cafe at La Biblioteca. In March another student from the SAIC taught a macramé session at the Mess Hall. The Luddite Work-er #4 also promoted the Free Speech Artists Move-ment that a number of volunteers from La Biblioteca had become involved with. The South Side Luddite Cafe was my first attempt at a Luddite Cafe Crafting Amoeba where people could just bring any craft project they were working on, and perhaps get a lesson from someone there if they were interested. Both events were total flops. In April the Mess Hall Luddite Cafe totally flopped for the second month in a row. The Luddite Worker #5 was a last ditch effort to try to get new teachers and writers to step up before I left for the summer to farm in Iowa. Though it wasn’t our intention, it seems to have turned into the last issue. We had a very special South Side Luddite Cafe where Richard Flamer from the Chiapas Project came and talked about his work in Chiapas, Mexico; farming, working with migrants, and with the San Andreas weavers. He also showed pictures and some video footage of the weavers that showed them shearing wool from sheep, dyeing it, spinning it into yarn then weaving it. We also tried to get a Luddite Cafe going on the Northwest side where we held one Card Weaving Lud-dite Cafe at Dr. Who’s in el Barrio Humboldt Park, Chi. We tried to set up a prototype for Luddite Cafe Crafting Amoebas at the St. Francis Catholic Worker House in Uptown, Chi. I taught card weaving while David carved wood, our comrade Alberto drew and our token right wing community member, Den, made not one but two excellent meals while we sold our work alongside of some stuff he had scavenged and buttons our com-rade Veronika made as a fundraiser for The House. This was my north side going away party and the last Chicago Luddite Cafe, at least for the time being.

“Darius “Qojak” Carr is an artist living in Tama, Iowa. Darius makes art, tattoos and takes photographs when he is not trying to make a living working at the casino on the Meskwaki settlement. Look for more of Qojak’s work in our next issue- until then check him out at: www.qojak.com

Can Poo Save the World?

The simple answer is, SHIT YEAH! In fact, looking at the issue from a broad perspec-tive, efficiently managing our waste streams is the ONLY thing that can save the human living environment on earth. The great 20th Century designer and systems analyst R. Buckminster Fuller once stated, “Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not har-vesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value. “ Re-cycling is not just putting your plastic and glass out to the curb, it’s one of the keys to

personal freedom. In his 1973 book Methane Digesters For Fuel Gas and Fertilizer, published by the New Alchemy Institute, South African farmer John Fry laid out his integrated farming system in which an anaero-bic digester system provided waste disposal and water treatment, power, and high quality fertil-izer. The technology is not new. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where food is manufactured, not grown, and the fertilizer is made from natural gas and shipped from China to the American farm belt. It’s time for us to stop waiting for permission to institute change. Along with using bio-intensive gardening techniques and season extension to grow your own food at home, building a home-scale digester is one of the cheapest ways to utilize “living technology”.

From now on, remember that every time Rover leaves you a present in the yard, he is giving you an opportunity to start changing your world.

by Ricardo FeralFeral Technology Institute

And every Saturday we work in the yardPick up the dog doHope that it’s hard Take out the garbage and clean out the garageMy friend’s got a ChryslerI’ve got a DodgeWe’re just ordinary average guys

-Joe Walsh, Ordinary Average Guy

Does picking up after Rover seem like a thankless task? Hauling bags of stinky rot-ten trash bumming your muffin? Did you know that you might be throwing away a valuable renewable energy resource? Yes, your family dog’s doody, along with other biodegrad-able waste like food scraps and lawn clippings could be providing you with useable energy (in the form of “biogas”) and high-quality compost. Dog and cat poop actually contain more energy than almost any other organic sources - 40 lbs. of pet poop contains as many BTUs as a gallon of gasoline. That’s more energy per pound than low quality coal. Using a micro-scale anaerobic digester system built from salvaged materials, you can reduce your energy bill and greenhouse gas emissions. Al-though one family may not create enough waste to make a large amount of biogas, it may be enough to cook several meals a day. An apartment build-ing or neighborhood could build a communal digester that could provide a significant amount of gas to heat a greenhouse or community center.

Anaerobic digestion

Anaerobic digestion is one of the most basic pro-cesses of life on earth. Anaerobic means “in the absence of oxygen” and anaerobic digestion takes place when biodegradable matter decomposes in a closed environment. Anaerobic digestion pro-duces biogas, which consists mostly of Methane, Carbon Dioxide and Hydrogen. By managing the digestion process and capturing the biogas pro-duced, we can use it as an energy source. Although not widely used in the United States, small-scale digester systems are used success-fully all over the world to turn small amounts of manure, plant waste and food scraps into usable energy utilizing very simple, low-tech designs. For hundreds of years, biogas has been used in China and India (and more recently in Africa and Cen-tral America) to provide gas for cooking, heating and lighting. In areas of the world where energy resources are not as readily available as they are in the United States, the micro-digester is an important technology because of its low cost (and the ability to adapt salvage materials or materials that are commonly at hand), simplicity, and envi-ronmental benefits.

Using Biogas

So, once you decide to build an anaerobic digester, what will you do with your biogas? Wired Magazine recently ran an article on Conceptual artist Matthew Mazzotta, who is using dog poo to power lampposts in a park in Cambridge, Mas-sachusetts. Through MIT funded “Project Park Spark”, Mazzotta has set up a project in a dog walking park in which: “Dog owners collect their dog waste in a special biodegradable bag and throw it into the digester –- an air-tight cylindrical container, where the dog feces are broken down by anaerobic bacteria. A byproduct from that process is methane, which can then be released through a valve and burnt as fuel. In this case it is being used to power an old-fashioned gas-burning lamppost in a park.” (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/ dog-

poop-powers-park-lights). Biogas can be used in many cases as a re-placement for natural gas or propane. It can run a gas grill or cooker, gaslights, a generator, or even a propane refrigerator like those used in campers and RVs.

How It Works

There are two basic types of digester designs: continuous-flow and batch processors. In a con-tinuous-flow digester, new material is regularly fed into the digester. The slurry moves through the digester, pushing out digested material just like a giant intestine. Batch digesters are loaded once and then the material is allowed to digest. When the digestion is complete, the effluent is removed and the process is repeated. Each type has its ad-vantages. Continuous digesters produce biogas without interruption. Batch digesters, on the other hand, are simpler and less expensive to build. Continuous-flow designs lend themselves better to manure-based systems, while batch processors may be more appropriate for unprocessed plant-based substrates. There are many designs available for small digesters made from everything from old 55-gallon drums to tractor tire inner tubes or plastic bags. The basic idea in all designs is to maintain an airtight di-gestion chamber where the anaerobic process can occur, and storing the gas produced in a pressurized collection ves-sel. A good list of resources on small-scale digester design can be found in Micro-Scale Biogas Production: A Begin-ner’s Guide, a free publication from the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Ser-vice. It is available free online at http://attra.ncat.org/publica-tion.html#energy or by calling their 800 number (800-346-9140) for a paper copy.

The Power of Poo

hwww.catnipfarm.comhYour source for excellent organic catnip, kitty greens/pet grassYYY and other good stuff for pets and people! YYY

h GOT GRASS? h

Specializing in handcrafted, premium baked goods

SWEET TREATS · BREAKFAST PASTRY · SPECIAL SAVORY LUNCH ITEMS · HANDMADE ICE CREAMCOFFEE & ESPRESSO DRINKS · TEAS · MR.BISKYPARTY PLATTERS · CATERING · GIFT BOXES · EAT IN · TAKE OUT

635 5th Avenue near 18th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215 · p 718.369.6355info@littlebuddybiscuitcompany.com · www.littlebuddybiscuitcompany.comFollow us! http://twitter.com/littlebuddybisc or become a fan on Facebook.

MR. BISKY1" PINS/10 DESIGNS

ON SALE NOW!

Can’t come to Brooklyn to try our

chewy, decadent cookies? Fuhgeddaboudit.

We ship gift boxes!Call or write for more info today!

Advertise in OBSOLETE!Ad Rates Available at: http://obsoletemag.blogspot.com/

-----Get the word out-----