hermit w/ wifi: walk diary #1: scattered reflections, rural alabama to memphis

Below follows a slew of photographs, impressions, and thoughts that have cropped up in my life on the road. I share them as an update on my life, and in the hope that they may by intriguing to you as well.

Shooting fig loot in the woods at Cane Creek, Alabama — This was our home base for a week of filming and editing in the woods. Not too many bugs, a warm river to bathe in, gorgeous sunsets, and only one run-in with the cops at gunpoint (someone called them on us thinking I was holding Ben and Chauncey hostage — partially understandable, as they were in chains all week leading up to Juneteenth). You can watch it here.

The Frank Lloyd Wright house in Florence, AL — One of around 60 "usonian" homes around the United States designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s-50s. "Usonian" serves as an alternative to the term "American" when referring specifically to the United States to avoid lumping in or excluding Canada and Mexico. It also refers to Wright's architectural movement, which sought to break from the European tradition and instead embody the unique "usonian" relationship to the city and nature. Each home design, always incorporating local materials, thoughtfully incorporated the natural environment, molding the built environment around the existing environment to promote the harmony of the two. These homes were also designed for the lower and middle classes, manifesting physically the belief that every person deserves to, and can, live in a beautiful space in balance with their environment, not just the wealthy. Unfortunately, neither the term "usonian" nor the bespoke high design for the masses caught on in the long term, and these homes, rather than being lived in as part of every-day society, serve as museums and pilgrimage sites to a movement that could have been far more wide-reaching. American society instead pivoted toward Levittown suburban leveling and cookie-cutter cheap and shoddy mass-production, which continues in the form of the McMansion today, a hollow luxury supercharged evolution of the post-war boom.

Testing the TVs at Goodwill in Florence, AL — I half expected the demon child from The Ring to crawl through. Do modern flatscreen TVs still capture this cosmic microwave background space junk, or just old tube screens?

Meeting a life-model in Corinth, MS — There is no question in my mind that representation plays a significant role in the way individuals conduct themselves in society. When I am not critically engaged in an inner process of envisioning a future I want to create for myself, I find my imagination limited to what I see others doing, both in my networks and in the extended human network of the media. What I see others doing sets the horizon of what is possible for myself, and it is a matter of selecting from among what is possible as instantiated by others. But whenever I meet or become aware of a person doing something unheard of to me, I am reminded that I myself am not limited to what others before me have done. This is how I felt upon meeting Professor Bushoven, a former professor and friend of Ben and Chauncey's from Saint Andrews University in North Carolina. He lives a life that resonates deeply with the desires I have for my own, but have not seen in the world in the same ways: a teaching job where he gets to engage deeply with students, inviting them over to his place on campus for long philosophical exchanges, yearly trips to India with students, lots of time to write... I don't want to replicate his life exactly, but I the elements of his life that excite me can serve as inspiration for creating those same elements in iterations that fit in their own way in mine.

Vintage RV in Corinth, MS — I was seriously tempted to upgrade from the Subaru to this thing, but it didn't have an engine. The headroom and extra storage must be nice, but it probably wouldn't get great gas mileage. These are the tradeoffs of vehicular living.

Self-checkout — Grocery stores are weird, right? They increasingly strike me as the bellwethers of evolutions in usonian late capitalism. All WalMarts now have self-checkout areas and even lanes, which appear to be taking over from traditional cashier-and-bagger model. Now, you can have one employee overseeing ten or more automated kiosks, only needing to intervene for technical difficulties or to verify your age for the sale of alcohol. Of course, fewer workers saves money for WalMart, and, to the extent that we want to consider scanning and bagging our products as service labor, shifts more of this service labor onto the shopper — without, presumably, shifting any of the savings of this model to the consumer in the form of lower prices, but rather redirecting it toward CEO and management pay, or maybe operations costs.

"Enhanced water" — Ummm.... I think I get what this is (probably tap water with some extra minerals or flavorings added), and view it as a step beyond commodifying a basic life essential ("bottled water") to creating new needs and tastes through marketing and supplying the fodder for the amorphous usonian craving for differentiation and individual choice.

Rowan Oak in Oxford, MS — I made a pilgrimage to the home of writer William Faulkner. He devoted his life to writing what he knew, which was the sociology and psychology of the post-Civil War South.

Finally arrive in Memphis — The studio where Elvis recorded his first big hits.

Bass Pro Shop in the Pyramid — Memphis, Tennessee is named for an ancient city in Egypt, and this gleaming glass pyramid, built in 1991 jointly by Shelby County and the city originally as a sports arena, presumably pays homage to this namesake. You can see it in the distance, on the shore of the Mississippi River (the US's Nile?).

The interior is one of the most surreal things I have seen. It is 32 stories tall and houses a hotel, archery range, restaurants, and a bowling alley. Rising from a synthetic swamp, replete with large bass swimming through the murky waters beneath the reflection of displays of children's toy guns, rises a blacklight-lit scaffolding structure, like the path of an alien tractor beam. Coming from Massachusetts, the availability of firearms is still shocking, but even more bewildering is the culture celebrating firearms for fun and defense. I can understand hunting for subsistence and even for sport, but not assault rifles. I have talked to several guns rights advocates who would sooner die than lose rightful access to serious firepower, which they depend on for a sense of "personal defense turned national defense" against a distrustful government. I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but I do find it a bit comical to imagine militias of the rural U.S. taking on our military — though the Taliban did just defeat us after an ineffectual 20 years, so who knows. Most disturbing to me is encountering children who have already internalized a love of guns and shooting. While I played a lot of Call of Duty growing up, it did not transition beyond simulated digital form.

National Civil Rights Museum — On April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a sniper while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis. He was in town to support the local sanitation workers who were on strike. The night before, he gave his final speech, about the mountaintop. In it he says to the striking workers and their allies,

we've got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We've got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

This message of utter solidarity, and class consciousness, is not usually associated with MLK. For him, it was not just about securing equal rights for Black folks: it was about reuniting the oppressed working class to fight for greater equality throughout all of society. He ends his speech on a prescient note:

I've been to the mountaintop... Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

It is little-known that, in 1999, a jury in a civil trial in Memphis found U.S. government agencies guilty of conspiring to murder MLK. As more information about the FBI's COINTELPRO come to light, and assassinations of such key Civil Rights figures as Fred Hampton, we are still uncovering the extent of this illegal surveillance and suppression of political groups deemed "subversive."

Security is tight upon entering the museum portion of the site. Overall, the museum is impressively thorough in its historical account of the history of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

A dystopic detail comes at the beginning of the linear series of exhibits. After a few minutes in an annex chamber full of the history of the transatlantic slave trade and agriculture in the New World colonies, visitors are funneled into a movie theater for a short orientation video. The first thing that pops up on the screen is the image of an executive from the Ford Motor Company, affirming the company's stance against racial discrimination. Should MLK be alive to witness this corporate sponsorship, he might bring up the biting irony of this statement given the egregious injustices and exploitation this company has perpetrated on their low-wage employees of all races over the years and still today.

You could say that Henry Ford was not only an early innovator of manufacturing processes to maximize productivity, but that he invented the super-efficient moving assembly line production model. Taking after the Taylorist scientific management approach, Ford built the largest "integrated factory" in the world, which still serves as model for contemporary factories today. But he also theorized beyond the factory to an entire social approach to capitalist production, which rested on efficient mass production, and higher wages for more widespread mass consumption by the workers. Antonio Gramsci would term this social form, which would come to dominate post-war United States and the world, "fordism." The aim was profits above all else, and the company cracked down on anything that might threaten this. He created a company secret service to ensure his workers were living upstanding lives in accordance with his strict social code. His security force avidly suppressed the power of organized labor to demand better working conditions and fairer wages. All of this to say, given MLK's fight for workers' rights, the irony of this corporate sponsorship is especially biting.

Negatives from the 1963 "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom."

Memphis Justice Building — While out on a food walk, Chauncey and I encountered this building, which sparked a conversation about our society’s orientation to “justice.” In the downtown core, which is full of abandoned buildings and is the main area where the city's houseless population hangs out, the justice building and the courts are immaculately manicured. The architecture of this building speaks volumes. The style is literally called "brutalism," popular in the 1960s and 70s, the period leading up to the Wars on Crime and Drugs. You could say our approach to justice is a brutal one, very much grounded in a punitive mode, rather than a restorative or transformative one. As we walked by, police rolled up to disperse a group of houseless people "loitering" by the entrance. Where houselessness is criminalized, justice looks like punishment, rather than help.

"Genocidal Roguish Co-Conspirators Who?" — Seen on the streets of Memphis, a cryptic message spray painted on what appears to be plywood covering up a busted window.

Couchsurfing in Memphis — Thank you to my beautiful CouchSurfing hosts Christy and Josh! I am so grateful to have found you. Keep up the impeccable ambassadorship of Memphis.