2075 – Garage People (2020 documentary)

timespace coordinates: early 21st c polar Russia

instead of the outdoor Kachalka working-class bodybuilders can work out in the garage

“In Russia’s north [NB city of Murmansk, Kola Peninsula], garages stretch out into endlessness. Behind rusty doors everything can be found, except cars. They are the refuge of the Russian man, the vanishing point out of bleak daily life and a signal of hope for big dreams.”(idmb)

For a short time, ARTE channel offers a shortened (51 min), I guess one could say TV version of the feature-length (1:44) documentary directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Natalija Yefimkina.

In the German text description of Natalija Yefimkina’s documentary this retreat of the Russian man into the space of the garage – exemplifies escapism both from the hard capitalist realities of the post-Soviet life functions as a sort of parallel universe, a paradisiac insular living. I want to add more to this and give it a different direction since what I feel this missed is the entire 1989 history, one that is either forgotten or misunderstood. I want to add that more importantly than the above the garage is liminal space, multiplying in btw workshop, kitchens space, bar, sauna etc – it is also a strange secular space (even if used as an ikon carving atelier and ikons commissioned by local priests as present to the factory managers). It is really an incredible window into live that live amongst some of the most incredible stark landscapes one can imagine, almost like on another planet (think of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus exoplanet).

the workshop is also a place of the bricoleur, the repairmen that fix everything

The Garage has nourished the small illicit pleasures, giving satisfaction in an improvisational way that does not depend on outside resources or commercial infrastructure (not say infrastructure of any kind other than the one remained from the Soviet investment in affordable living). The infrastructure that exists is one of mutual help, without ableism and ageism and feeling of being needed and helping others even when one is not able to help oneself.

when it snows it snows and nearly everyone has its own chimney peeking out

These are the efforts of a different kind of survivalist than the Western (or US Hollywood movie cinematic or YT channel) preppers, the preppers that prepare in the US against the destruction of their way of living or live under the scare of Big Government or even (ridiculous!) fear of exactly some form of Red Scare(Red Storm 2019 is very real for the crazed alt right), socialist takeover (?!) and now they see themselves vindicated by atomic attack threats. These are not the libertarian gun activist that bunker up, stockpile provisions and hamster guns. These ex-Soviet survivors in Russia (and all over the east, be it Romania or Ukraine) are the survivors of a world in perpetual “transition” a transition they are not in control of. The broken or at least ruined and traumatised bodies and hands of men that have survived both the extractive industries and the sell-out of these industries to bigger conglomerates and monopoly consolidation.

cars are nearby but there a lot of singing and get together in front of the garage

We see in them in a sense a versus to the more familiar Midwestern US working class from the “rust belt”, on the other side of the planet, the Trump voters and “basket of deplorables”. Languishing in this ex-Soviet post-workerist milieu of great polar mining towns, are people who made it through the biggest expropriation and wealth transfer in recent history (similar to the enclosure of the commons or colonial exploitation). When we look into these pauperized yet lively garages we actually see the outgrowth of a harsh reality that came out of 1990s shock therapy and the disappearance of both the Soviet Union, public places and public services.

I don’t want to riff idyllically on the anti-consumerist ethos here as if it is a life choice here – it is not, and it is like this out of necessity or out of desperation or skepticism, or need for having something to do during the long arctic nights, yet it is always there. It is not just escapism but also a permanent shelter. I have been discussing with Julia my partner – and who she felt this group of elderly men from Murmansk is so much different than the Piemont Italian truffle hunters (of roughly the same age group) or what unites them (if).

Both of them somehow suffer under increasing commercialism, the disappearance of what they are best at doing, yet there is also a huge gap btw them. This one is a very funny yet also very desperate, self-deprecating, bleak, darkly humorous, and utterly absurd universe – though the more previous the fragile friendship that seems to exist on the borders of the world, at the end of post-industrial civilization, on the brink of junkyards and garbage dumps.

the garage rows in the long polar night

These cobbled up mutual social webs of inter-dependencies (as in repairing, soldering, and mending) – are marked by impossible projects, deaths and illness under harsh conditions. Yes, this may be a self-made world of decrepit individualism & vodka consumerism (even pole dancing – in one scene), yet they exist in the face of stark post-1989 inequalities, were playing with the idea of suicide or death (no matter how terminal might seem), offers some form of respite.

there is a lot of customization and there is a lot of diversity and variety of these parallel worlds

I also enjoyed their insider discussions and self-deprecating thoughts – their own self-reflexive positioning about their own ‘garage’ existence and artistic marginality or even about a Putin picture or foreign cars and brands. All these constitute materials and facets of a material culture that is very much alive. I like the way they distinguish the Russian or ex-Soviet garage life from the garage mythology of the US Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (be it Steven Jobs, Bill Gates or Google founders).

three friends discussing inside a garage

There is no start-up from the garage into the unlimited growth, growing out of the garage into the corporation, but a rather what I would call a start-down, the looking down the hole, the certitude that you can dig only below your garage not up, since it is just a step from garage people to mole people (like in one of the protagonists that dug up single-handedly 5 levels under his garage and left this bizarre subterranean space to his grandson).

I think Natalija Yefimkina manage to open up these garage doors with incredible sincerity, in a serene, humorous way, a caring and non-judgmental way, the same way these people have invited her (and the film crew) into their shelter livelihoods.

Here you can watch (in various languages) a shortened version of her documentary

imdb

1916 – Curing the Human Condition: On ‘Wild Wild Country’ (podcast 2021)

First much appreciation for both Phil Ford and J F Martel. I do not manage to listen to them as often as I could, but when I do, it is always a blast. That is why one needs friends (not friends-bosses or friend-unfriend dynamics as talked about in this piece. Friends to recommend and catch one looses trough a web cast to widely.

What I appreciate about their heady mix is first the way they never belittle and be dissmissive with their subjects, their topics (and their public) their humility and modesty in front of such vast subjects.

No matter how diverse or dispersed things are and rabbit holes go – they always manage to follow a certain waveform, play on certain motifs. They can combine high theory (Deleuze), avant-garde (Burroughs) with the most harrowing examples of heroin addict descriptions. They can both make a sociology of taste, follow on the strictures of Bourdieu, while at the same time catching a strong whiff of spirituality in Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, while at the same time finding religious (initial sin) groundings of Marxist critique of commodification, ideology and cultural superstructure. They can talk about the merits of secular society, while at the same time pointing towards the commodification behind new religions, prosperity gospel, as well as the sort of spiritualized practices, anthropotechnical hacks that are everywhere – from Silicon Valley to self-actualization corporate seminars. They decry the anxiety of cultural appropriation, its totalizing and too large terrain – while at the same time they weigh in on all the decontextualized, fetishized spiritualism, that leaves all the burden, the suffering out. They take the critique of Buddhism by Zizek, the Buddhist apparent integration of human universal suffering, while at the same time warning about the free style of new ironic class, the distinction proffered by hipster irony-non-irony thin line and the constant hard to learn code switching. One of my favorites is the part about friends – about Buddhas (and especially Osho’s speech on friendship!) sermon about the future master transforming into friend, never so true as in today’s corporate culture. Societies of control complete changed the rule of the game that went hand in hand with a changed definition of friendship, removed from the one inherited from Aristotle.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

In this never-before-released episode recorded in 2019, Phil and JF travel to rural Oregon through the Netflix docu-series, Wild Wild Country. The series, which details the establishment of a spiritual community founded by Bhagwan Rajneesh (later called Osho) and its religious and political conflicts with its Christian neighbors, provides a starting point for a wide-ranging conversation on the nature of spirituality and religion. What emerges are surprising ties between the “spiritual, not religious” attitude and class, cultural commodification, and the culture of control that pervades modern society. But they also uncover the true “wild” card at the heart of existence that spiritual movements like that of Rajneesh can never fully control, no matter how hard they try.

REFERENCES

Chapman and Maclain Way (dirs), Wild Wild Country
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste
Peter Sloterdijk, German cultural theorist
Weird Studies, Episode 47, Machines of Loving Grace
Slavoj Žižek, On Western appropriation of Eastern religions
William Burroughs, American writer
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”
Bhagwan Rajneesh/Osho, Speech on friendship
Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
James Carse, The Finite and Infinite Games

1915 – Dark Matter: A History of the Afrofuture (documentary 2021)

“The arc of black history shares an uncanny resemblance to the plot points of classic sci-fi including ‘alien’ abduction, enslavement and rebellion. It’s this unlikely relationship that provides the inspiration for Afrofuturism, the broad cultural trend that encompasses works by Jean-Michel Basquiat to Grace Jones, Solange Knowles and Sun Ra. In this film, we meet, see and hear from artists across three continents who each, in their own way, explore the Afrofuture to look at the horrors of the black past and imagine alternative futures.

Hew Locke, Burke (RESTORATION series), 2006 (detail)

The mysterious yet influential Detroit techno duo, Drexciya, take the Atlantic Ocean, a site of death and destruction during the African slave trade and reclaim it as a place of creation and beauty. Through a series of releases from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, they envisage the unborn children of enslaved pregnant women, thrown overboard during the Middle Passage to the Americas, adapting to breathe under water and thrive in a Black Atlantis. The mythos is vividly brought to life by the Drexciyan collaborator and graphic artist Abdul Qadim Haqq as a thriving, technological undersea world.

A. Qadim Haqq  and  Dai Satō The Book of Drexciya: Volume One 

Visual artist Ellen Gallagher similarly transforms the violence of the ocean into rebirth and renewal. Her film Osedax, made with Edgar Cleijne, is an imaginative retelling of how the skeletal remains of dead whales sustain new life in the curious form of the bone-devouring worm of the title. Whereas for artist Hew Locke, as well as the ocean itself, it’s the Atlantic’s coastal fringes that inspire his world of bricolage phantoms, plucked from the ghost stories of a Guyanese childhood.

Sun Ra

The Afrofuture is perhaps most commonly imagined through the rubric of outer space, thanks in no small part to avant-garde jazz musician and poet Sun Ra. Born in the southern US in the early 20th century, Ra underwent an interplanetary conversion, claiming to have been teleported to Saturn. As with funk pioneer, George Clinton, who describes a similar close encounter with extraterrestrials, Ra’s identification with an alien presence can be read as more than simple escapism. It’s also a biting satire on the alienating experience of being black in America. For Ra, space is also an alternate destiny for black people, as the title of his 1973 Afrofuturist feature film Space is the Place insists.

Reaching beyond these fictional ‘Afronauts’ is the conceptual artist Tavares Strachan. His performance piece, Star City, Training in Six Parts, sees Strachan visit the famous Russian space centre to undergo the same rigorous – and often tortuous – training of the Cosmonauts. Strachan likens one of the exercises, which measures our capacity to withstand disorientation and gravitational stress, to his impoverished upbringing in The Bahamas.

The film concludes with an exploration of the idea of double consciousness. Coined in the early 20th century by WEB Du Bois, the influential African American sociologist, double-consciousness describes how black people in western societies see themselves twice over. Through their lived experience but also how they’re perceived within a dominant white culture.

Curator and writer Ekow Eshun traces uses of the idea through Ralph Ellison’s lauded mid-20th-century novel Invisible Man, and painter Kerry James Marshall’s image of the same title, right up to the Black Lives Matter movement. Predicated upon recordings of anti-black violence often captured through digital tech, Eshun argues these ‘expose’ a double consciousness at work, the world as experienced and seen through black eyes, laid bare for all to witness.

Other artists and commentators featured in the programme include Nuotama Frances Bodomo, Aria Dean, Ayesha Hameed, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Shabaka Hutchings, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Cauleen Smith and Greg Tate.” (watch on BBC 4 page)

1521 – Spaceship Earth (2020)

Crystal Palace, Epcot Center, Mars space station all in one

It is not hard to be enthusiastic over Matt Wolfe’s new documentary. It also made me acutely aware that artistic works & investigations of biospherics or extra-terrestrial ecologies in their more outlandish, performative and experimental dimensions by Ralo Mayer might get forgotten or unduly overshadowed by the newer Spaceship Earth, big -budgeted more classical documentary formats.

studying the researchers

This being said, I think both Mayer’s unsettlements pioneering work and Matt Wolf’s more recent accomplishment are very important stations of closing the gap btw the current rise of collapse studies, Extinction Rebellion in the Anthropocene as well as establishing a counterpoint to the current capitalistic Star Settler exiters.

good times, thermos times & big mobile phones

Spaceship Earth is without a doubt one of the most honest and important appraisals of High Weirdness as defined by the Erik Davis in regard to our current situation, starting with the very practical things such as learning to live inside a closed system inside a closed (Earth) system and ending up sailing on a Spaceship of the Imagination while on indefinite quarantine.

oh, those banana sugar-free cakes keep on coming

Nevertheless I’ve got to mention a missing element. This powerful and complex all-American perspective ignores the earlier Soviet biospherian experiments called Bio-3 in Siberia that became an input for the new. Also very importantly, and missing from the 2020 Spaceship Earth documentary are the theoretical and popularizing work done by Soviet cosmist Vladimir Vernadsky, namely his 1926 The Biosphere book, considered by many oone of the founders of biogeochemistry, radiogeology and geochemistry, the first who defined ecology as the science of the biosphere. I completely understand the focus on West Coast/Frisco Haight-Ashbury scene, but still I miss the role played by Soviet experiments or how the closed system research and Bioregenerative Life Support studies plays out within the Soviet Space Program. I think this is to be regarded as a late-Soviet chapter of the biospherian saga, closing the strange loop of the earlier desert adobe architecture commune 70s work with the later – 80s 90s corporate, fully Bucky splendor, all via Siberia of all places.

sweet potatoes today sweet potatoes tomorrow

What I deem very important, and the docu makes sure of it is the performative, bricoleur attitude and avant-garde theater dimension, the way it synergetically feeds back (to take one of the keywords of the whole endeavor) with all the communal group practices. Their lofty ideals offer them a hands on experimence with designs and materials science approach. Maybe this also a true salvagepunk school of acting and thinking, in tune with current concerns and the need for recycling and trying out disparate things, new and old, low and high tech, China and Greece with ferrometal (their vessel has sails from Chinese junks and is called Heraclitus). This also brought stronger into focus what Hannah Arendt’s said in a 1970s interview after quoting René Char – “our inheritance is not guaranteed by any testament” to which she added “we are entirely free to help ourselves wherever we can from the experiences and thoughts of the past” (and future I would also add).

research vessel Heraclitus

Spaceship Earth does great service not only to the excommunicated founders (for the first time since Ralo Mayer work), but also to the rich brew of ideas, from the Tangiers scene of Burroughs & the desert beat generation retreat, as well to the whole gamut of such influences as René Daumal‘s Analogue Mountain(first published in 1952!), Manual for Spaceship Earth, Whole Earth Catalog etc

One can also understand the method behind it all as an Avant-Garde ecological collage, the garden of eden as Burrough cut up technique horticulture.

Biosphere 2. The ‘Biospherians’ pose for the camera during the final construction phase of the Biosphere 2 project in 1990. Left to right are: Mark Nelson, Linda Leigh, Taber MacCallum, Abigail Alling, Mark Van Thillo, Sally Silverstone, Roy Walford and Jayne Poynter. The 3.1 acre air- and water-tight building became their home for two years. Biosphere 2 was designed to allow study of human survival in a sealed ecosystem. The costs of this controversial, $150 million project were met from private funds. The Biosphere 2 project building is at Oracle, Arizona.

It is also a proof that heads and fists combine, both psychedelia and activists shared a common ground and a very applied outlook in this common space. All these iterations, incarnations and phases since the Theater of All Possibilities in 1967 up to the 70s The Synergia Ranch towards the current The Institute for Ecotechnics, the October Gallery in London are exemplary in this sense. One can question the Ed Bass family oil money connection – by all means, but this also pinpoints to the greater issue troubling current greening, greenwashing, ethanol/biofuels conundrum, as well as the fragility of this relationship with Big Business.

laid back John Allen back then

They had both very lofty, incredibly utopian, dreamy and long term thinking as well as very down to earth and experimental approach, the two do not exclude each other. Even the guru – John ‘Dolphin’ Allen is a creature from another era, more like a wide eyed Soviet Stakhanovite (стахановское) model worker, a strange engineer metallurgist & human potential coach. The gradual jump from adobe to boat making to geodesic architecture to cosmic ark and spacefaring civilization was one single strive for them. Also without reading his books or being able to asses his ideas (just dwl a paper on ecosphere & technosphere), I am somehow feeling my way trough a possible gnostic influence – especially when dealing with the eschaton, the ecospheric collapse etc Again the media talk about his apocalyptic vision seems to be spreading some sort of misinformation regarding his thoughts on that.

laid back John Allen now

The entrepreneurial aspect is also important, they have been also pioneering this startup dimension, in a sense they were one of the first and most advanced startups with all the trappings: angel investors, CEOs, public relations, financial officers, Wall Street Goldman-Sachs intrusion and final corporate raid. At the same time they, maybe also because of the performative aspect, because of their avant-garde roots or ecological de-growth orientation, have been cut loose out of the recent tech boom or Burning Man celebrations happening nearly at the same time in California. Spaceship Earth catches also the lack of – inin a key sequence when a group black students decries the whiteness of the biospherians andand their low or near absence of multiculturalism, while all the sampling is rather just biomes, the spectacle is very white future, as white as the 60s-70s commune seems to have been. I really enjoyed the short moment of a different speculation that did not play out in the 2 years of isolation & the provocation to think future as afrofuturist theatre inside the dome and what has to be remedied in this sense.

imagine waking up to this

In my view, even the spectacular – the media stunt aura actually saved them from joining a viable corporate environment, the one that gave rise to geek culture success. My thesis is thus that the sort of tekkie streamlining of stark minimalism that started to dominate both the

from above

Steve Job dogma + all the later incarnations was at odds with the zany, colorful, pantomime that united the Biospherian extended team and gave them an undeniable flair of late Blowup street comedians or low art Esalen members mixed with dessert greening of permaculture enthusiasts. They also embodied the spirit of Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. This aspect also probably contributed to their becoming easy prey to the media, a kind of naive but subversive theater play becoming just one show on the 57 channels and nothing on – post-spectacle reality TV machine, chewing them up and spiting them out. Hard to miss out the complete absence of screens, absence of touch screens, there’s only the glass – aquarium Vivarium dimension of it all. There is a lot to be said about Biospherian handshakes, touching the other trough glass, being in touch on the other side of the Zoo screen and being inaccessible in plain sight. The Pillar Artist project in 2019 Timișoara touches the same ground, of being accessible whilst at the same time isolated, in a public (closed) space exposed but out of reach.

hiding from the cameras in the welcoming thicket?

Somehow the peekaboo Wall Street Steve Banon boogeyman apparition coincides with the media tantrum about them being ‘fake’ or not scientific enough – all the tell tale signs of both tabloid press, climate change denial and post-truth. In fact with a high dose of cynicism one could say that once the public got over their novelty status, it became more important for the ratings to transform them into villains, fakers, cult members or plain old freaks. In a sense this shows also the limits of a Mars mission based on selling the exclusive rights to a future streaming of an on board soap opera as the means to sponsor the mission. To end on a good note, Spaceship Earth shows the all importance of dreaming as well as having a world wide experience, of nomadism as well as living under a desert dome, of actually being in touch with multiple realities around the globe or how this should inform whatever we want to achieve in outer space. Another big novum is switching the places with the researchers – now it’s fashionable in Natural History museum to watch trough a glass a bunch of paleontologists molding & casting dinosaur tracks, but Biosphere 2 was the first to allow such a direct peek into the theatre of scientific fact on a grand scale. The possibility to look at the experimenters while they did the experiments, to actually switch places, study the ones who do the studying.

Finally it also allowed for a credibly futuristic cosplay, of dressing up as your favorite Sci-fi show and getting away with it. Even when considering the incredible hardships in the midst of an eco-technosperic collapse living, it still permitted the incredible morning wake-up in the misty clouds of what comes magnificently close to an artificial atmosphere on another planet.

imdb