Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

The Senate voted 60 to 39 to allow a vote on Healthcare. This is important. This is from some site called Chattabox.
“(ChattahBox)—- After hours of floor speeches in a rare weekend session, the Senate Democrats, with all 60 voting yes, moved forward the health care reform bill. In a procedural motion of cloture, House Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid’s (D- NV) health reform bill will now move to the floor for the debate and amendment process.
There was little suspense, as a voice vote was taken on the Senate floor shortly before 8:00 PM this evening. The last Democratic holdouts, Senators Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln, announced earlier that they would vote yes to allow the health care bill to proceed to debate. Still, it’s a major step in the process and moves the prospect of affordable and quality health care for all Americans that much closer.

The final voting tally was 60-39, with all Republican Senators voting no. The Senate bill to reform our broken health care system barely squeaked through cloture, requiring the yes vote of every Democratic lawmaker.

The debate process is scheduled to start when Senate lawmakers return from their Thanksgiving recess. And the debate on the public option will begin anew. The centrist Democratic Senators, including Blanch Lincoln of Arkansas remain strongly opposed to a public option.”

One step closer and the anti-health care reform forces are fighting tooth and nail to stop it. Now that it is almost here and it passed in the House and is now on the floor in the Senate, the opposition is going to pour on the heat and try and bribe the the conservative Democrats or possibly Lieberman into blocking it or stripping out the public option. We have to fight hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.
We have finaly moved in the direction of national health care and we have to make sure it happens. What we really need is single payer but that is probably another decade away.

I missed out on a Socialist conference put on by one of the old Trotskiest groups. I almost went. I was tempted but I am too much of an anarchist to buy into the Trotskyism. He was too much of an authoritarian and in the clinch he let Stalin take over in Russia and ruin the revolution. He also supported the destruction of the Anarchists in Russia and no matter how much I am critical of modern day anarchists I am still more aligned with them that with any Trotsyist group. Even if they call themselves the Party for Socialism and Liberation. If I were to be a Marxist I would be closer to the Maoists or the Council Communists. But I sure do like the Marxist propensity for organization. That is the one thing about anarchists I really get frustraited with the lack of organization. There is lots of idealism but it wears thin and then people move on and you get a new batch of idealists.

There is a new Anarchist Bookfair in January of next year being held at the Barnsdale Art Park. I don’t know if any anarchists today know it but the founder of the park was a buddy of the anarchists of LA from a century ago.

This is an article by someone who knows.

“California Dreaming: Team Aline!
by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Barnsdall Art Park was given to the city of Los Angeles—which didn’t want it, thanks—by oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, back when heiresses did something interesting with their time. (For what it’s worth, there’s at least one interesting and educated—Princeton and MIT, for fuck’s sake—and really quite lovely Annenberg heiress around these days, god bless and keep her, and that’s why L.A. has Farmlab.)

Barnsdall was a feminist, and a single mother back in the ’20s, when being a single mother wasn’t the load of laughs it is today. She was friends with Emma Goldman—the name under which my mother used to get arrested come Mother’s Day nuclear test site protests—and was followed by the FBI, which named her part of the “lunatic fringe,” for 24 years, until her death in ’46. She was also a passionate producer of experimental theater, and had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Hollyhock House on Olive Hill as an artists colony for poor undercultured L.A.

But Frank Lloyd Wright was an unbelievable asshole, an early Hiker of the Appalachian Trail, a shabby man who’d been for all intents and purposes run out of the U.S. following his desertion of his wife and six kids for the wife of a friend (his mistress was later axed to death by a servant during dinner at their home, along with her kids and a few guests). The house he built for Barnsdall—the celebrated Hollyhock House, which you can tour for a very doable $7, and we did, the day after being so angered by presumably very nice people doing nothing more objectionable than getting out of the house for an afternoon—is spectacular and infuriating and slapdash. My sister once had to leave a Christo retrospective in a huff because his wrapped Bundestag, she said, connoted secrets, and she didn’t like secrets. I never understood; I laughed and laughed; she was okay with his umbrellas killing people, but didn’t like whatever intent she’d surmised in the wholly nonlethal Bundestag? Ha ha! And then I entered Hollyhock and was angered for exactly the same reason.

Here are more than 6,500 square feet on the crown of a beautiful hill with gentle breezes and views to the ocean, and it manages to feel entirely cramped, because what does Mr. Great Brilliant Architect of the 20th Century do? He encases it in concrete, a miserable fortress. It’s claustrophobic and sarcophagal; Wright’s idea of contraction and expansion—crushing you like an ant so you’d be even more enthralled with the sudden open spaces—means here that the entryway features a six-foot-high ceiling of concrete blocks of unknown thousands of pounds crushing down right over your poor little head. I haven’t been that terrified since I drove the 5 past Mt. Shasta and couldn’t see the top; it was as though the mountain was a giant that could reach down and pluck us stupid mortals right from the road. So this was like that, but less eerie and otherworldy and more next-worldy. You know: because it will kill you.

Aline Barnsdall hated the house, which came in at triple-budget, years late, and with a staggering inattention to how houses work. It was drafty and damp from the concrete in the un-summer months, and it’s blazing hot now; the side of the house facing the sunset is all glass that doesn’t open, and the windows that do open are as narrow as archery slits. Aline Barnsdall could have roasted a turkey in it, no convection oven needed, if she were the kind of socialist who didn’t actually have an army of servants to do her turkey roasting for her.

I am all on Team Aline, and when I make my millions, I too shall spend them and my time getting innocent anarchist bombers released from prison, and employing servants, who after all do need the work. Screw Frank Lloyd Wright.

There’s a fun slideshow on Slate this week, about Philip Johnson’s terrible Glass House, and how badly made it is, and a rip-off of the Farnsworth House to boot. Frank Lloyd Wright may not have taken inspiration from anyone but himself for Hollyhock House, but only because he apparently considered all other human beings as beneath his emulation. He designed beautiful furniture for Aline Barnsdall, grand and broad and substantial and of a piece with the breathtaking living room (breathtaking, of course, because you’ve just come from being buried alive in the foyer). He designed her dining table for six, because he felt that was the maximum number for a successful dinner party. For another client, he designed not only the furniture and the art work, but the missus’s clothes.

Control freak much? Ugh. His second or third (or something) wife, by the way, was a morphine addict. I can’t imagine why.

I know the rest of society forgives its geniuses for any manner of ickiness; I don’t. I wouldn’t want to dine with Bukowski, and I told my hippie punk high school friends so every time they brought up how fuckin’ awesome it would be. I wouldn’t have wanted to take tea with Hunter S. Thompson or Jackson Pollock.

Maybe Picasso. I guess. He, at least, was never called an asshole.”

I don’t know much about the author but she did write an entertaining piece about Barnsdale. I totaly disagree with her about Bukowski. He was my idea of a great poet.

Here is the info about the bookfair. Maybe they will even ask me if I want to help out.

“US, 2nd Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair
Date Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:23:05 +0200

——————————————————————————–

The 2nd Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair is in the works. —- Actions, Conversations, and
Intersections: 2nd Anarchist Bookfair 2010 -After months of doing research and maneuvering
through intricate social mazes we have chosen a location for the 2nd L.A. Anarchist
Bookfair. —- It will be taking place in mid to late January 2010 on the beautiful
grounds of Barnsdall Art Park 4800 Hollywood Boulevard. —- We are already in the process
of organizing speaker panels, tabling, etc. If you would like to help or contribute to our
efforts please get in touch via our contact form on this site. - Also to keep abreast with
the latest activities in L.A. please check-out http://barnsdall.org/ The L.A. Anarchist
Bookfair Collective http://www.barnsdallartpark.com/ — http://laanarchist.org/”