Today is the International Transgender Day of Remembrance. Here's a heartbreaking video list of 2009's Trans deaths around the world.

Here are the International Transgender Day of Remembrance Day events planned today in Seattle, at the University of Washington:

“Die-In” rally (12:00-12:30) Red Square meet at noon by the obelisk structure (University of Washington campus)
Candlelight vigil (6:00-7:00 PM)

Also, good for Chaz.

I was living in Berlin—in West Berlin—on November 9, 1989. I moved to the city earlier that year with my boyfriend, Peter, and we quickly fell in with the expats and artists and queers that filled the city and made it their own. But the city was by no means "full." It was actually underpopulated and food was expensive, as everything had to be shipped in, so there were massive public subsidies for residents and a West German males could avoid military service by moving to West Berlin. There was a huge U.S. military presence and the city stank of the dirty brown coal East Germans burned to heat their homes. Most of the West Germans who lived in West Berlin moved there from other parts of West Germany because they didn't want to be at the center of German life—politically or socially—and they were attracted to the existential quality of living on this island in the middle of East Germany. By choosing to live in West Berlin they were somehow rejecting West Germany. Most cities and states in West Germany were conservative and constipated. West Berlin was easy and liberal and vibrant and teamed with Turks and faggots and artists.

And then the wall came down and West Berlin was suddenly the center of Germany—it felt like the center of the universe—and soon West Berlin was filling up with Russians and Poles and East Germans selling off military paraphernalia and nesting dolls and busts of Lenin (I still have one on a shelf at home). The Russians and Poles and East Germans would buy up bananas and water heaters and used clothes to take back home and sell. Soon other West Germans arrived, conservative and constipated, and they started buying up apartments and speculating on land in corners of the city that had been isolated by the wall but were now at the heart of what was going to be a reunified Berlin and a united Germany's new/old new capitol. The character of the city changed so quickly and so radically that the people who had moved to West Berlin to escape Germany and the Germans—and most of the people who moved to Berlin to do that were themselves German—started wearing "I WANT MY WALL BACK" t-shirts in protest and loudly telling anyone who would listen that they were moving to Prague.

My favorite memory from the days after the wall came down: There were gaping holes all along the wall and you could peer into the no-man's land, the death zone, which had been guarded by East German soldiers with shoot-to-kill orders just days before. No one knew if there were still soldiers in the guard towers or if the shoot-to-kill orders were still in effect or if Soviet tanks were coming or what. One night my boyfriend and I slipped through a hole in the wall and stood still, waiting to see what would happen. Nothing happened. We started to walk along one of the marked trails in the no-man's land and eventually wound up near a guard tower right behind the Reichstag. There was a door at the back and it was open. We went inside and climbed up the ladder to the top and peered out over the wall and into West Berlin through the guard tower's mirrored glass. From the outside the glass was this weird shimmery burnt orange/brown color that you saw all over East Berlin. We looked down at the crowds gathered along the wall, chipping away with sledgehammers, and some people were looking up at the tower, no doubt wondering if there were still East German soldiers up there, if they were still being watched from those towers, and what their orders were.

From The Philosophy of Right (1821):

The principle of family life is dependence on the soil, on land, "terra
firma". Similarly, the natural element for industry, animating its outward movement, is the sea.

For me, rocks are invisible. All I can and want to see are the mountains. The molecules of water bore me to no end; I'm only moved by the great lakes and oceans. To understand capitalism and history? Not as a matter of individuals and coins but of major bodies of water. Pre-capitalism corresponds with the Mediterranean. Modern capitalism corresponds with the Atlantic. Postmodern capitalism, with the Pacific. The first is linked with theology; the second, with philosophy; the third, with political economy. The first, is linked with humanism; the second, modernity; the third, globalization.

The image is from ngader.

The other day at the Henry—where several shows are currently kicking ass, from the Mapplethorpe Polaroids to achingly honest (and noble) photos of a timber town—somebody was saying the word "uncouth" didn't used to mean rude. "Uncouth" used to mean unfamiliar. That somebody was right:

uncouth

O.E. uncuð "unknown, uncertain, unfamiliar," from un- (1) "not" + cuð "known, well-known," pp. of cunnan "to know" (see can (v.)). Meaning "strange, crude, clumsy" is first recorded 1513. The compound (and the thing it describes) widespread in IE languages, cf. L. ignorantem,, O.N. ukuðr, Goth. unkunþs, Skt. ajnatah, Armenian ancanaut', Gk. agnotos, O.Ir. ingnad "unknown."

So many foreign languages—Old English, Old Norse, Latin, Goths, Sanskrit, Old Irish, Greek, Armenians—whose words for "foreign" were so closely related. Can you imagine some Goths and some Romans, or some ancient Indians and some ancient Irish meeting on a road somewhere? Each group sizes up the other, recognizes the weirdness, then turns into itself and mutters "uncouth"—using very close words to describe the distance between the people.

(I feel like I should be in a college dorm room with a bong or something: "Language, maaaaaan.")

Thomas L. Friedman clumsily connects a victory for freedom with an attack on freedom:

A few weeks ago, Americans “observed” the eighth anniversary of 9/11 — that day in 2001 when the Twin Towers were brought down by Al Qaeda. In a few weeks, Germans will “celebrate” the 20th anniversary of 11/9 — that day in 1989 when the Berlin Wall was brought down by one of the greatest manifestations of people power ever seen.

To middle with: The fall of the Berlin Wall is far more significant than the set of spectacular terrorist actions that happened on American soil. The first event closes the short 20th century (to use the language of Eric Hobsbawm—though he ends the 20th century in 1991) and opens the 21st century. The terrorist actions only intensified the 21 century, or closer yet, accelerated it, in the way Hiroshima accelerated but did not inaugurate, the 20th century—which began with the end of World War I and began the ideological contest between what LKJ called "Di Eagle An' di Bear."

To end with: The 21st century will not terminate in the land of the eagle, or the bear, but the panda bear.

Here's the beginning of an "In Event of Moon Disaster" speech imagining Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin dying on the moon:

Awesome work, Gawker.

From Capital:

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.

Let's not waste anymore time; let's begin with this insect, the honey bee:
What catches our attention (the attention of a Marxist) is not this insect's happy dancing business, nor the way it builds its complicated hive, but this dark and deadly practice:

The queen is normally the only egg producer in the colony and this condition is maintained by a pheromonal 'feed back' system, whereby worker ovary development is inhibited. The queen and the brood both produce pheromones that inhibit worker ovary development, which prevents individual workers from exploiting the system.

...When populations are large and the nest is physically widespread, the distribution of pheromones reduces at the outer edges, simply because of distance from the queen and brood as well as the larger area of the outer periphery of the nest. this gives rise to a condition of reduced suppression of ovary production... [And this gives] rise to an increase in worker laid eggs, but the numbers of drones arising from them is a very small fraction of those that are laid. 'Worker policing' is the mechanism that causes adult workers to eat 'worker laid' eggs, which are identified by other workers. It is speculated that normal queen laid eggs are marked with a pheromone that is produced by the queen, which is coated on the eggs as they pass over the sting sheath. Worker laid eggs are thought to lack this pheromone and are thus identified as such and eaten by the workers.

It has been suggested that aggression towards workers with activated ovaries is another potential mechanism of worker policing, but I am unsure whether this applies to workers being hoisted out of cells as they attempt to lay an egg or whether the aggression goes further and results it the fertile worker being damaged or stung.

But it is ridiculous for us to think about human policing without considering worker bee policing. To see some of the reasons for one form of policing, will help us see some of the reasons for the other. Also, we have to read the queen's "pheromonal 'feed back' system" in the way Althusser read the ISA, the Ideological State Apparatus. When this mechanism of oppression and control (the Church, the media, the education system) fails to produce the desired behavior (or subjects), then it is replaced by direct police action: "Hey you!"

The next post will look at paper wasps.

I walked by this van and...I could not stop thinking.

[In 1977,] I went into Star Wars a Christian and walked out of it an atheist. Before seeing the movie, I understood the war of Good against Evil to be an entirely Christian one: God vs. Satan. The war happened on the ground, in the sky above, and the immense dark space beyond the moon. The universe was ordered by heaven and hell. So imagine the shock of seeing on the screen a whole different order, a whole different war between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil; a war, furthermore, that made no mention of Jesus, or Lucifer, or the star of Bethlehem, the Romans, the beasts in “The Book of Revelations,” the Last Supper. Yet, in the absolute absence of Christian codes of goodness, I still sided with these other codes and acts of goodness taking place in a faraway galaxy.

In the bright afternoon light of that day, I realized that God was limited, and what was infinite was the Good itself, and that the Good could take on different shapes (Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi, John, Luke Skywalker, Jesus, Princess Leia, Mary).

Similarly, I can attribute my (brand of) Marxism directly to the way James Cameron's Aliens opened my eyes one afternoon in a cineplex in downtown Harare:

For reasons that need no explanation, this film, Blade Runner, is the source of my cosmopolitanism/urbanism:

As for the space left empty by the death of God, it was filled by the TV show Cosmos. Where once there was Jesus Christ, there was now Carl Sagan:

69, 69, 69, 69, 69, 69, and a beautiful sunset:

Jonanthan Raban writes:

There must be a cause for these sunsets: The scattering effect of salt particles from the Pacific Ocean in the air and the reflective properties of the Olympic snow fields seem the most likely candidates. Whatever their physics, the spectacular ultramontane sunsets are an important part of Seattle's claim to be "a flower of geography" — as Henry James called the city in 1907, placing it in the company of Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, Naples, Sydney, and San Francisco.

The image, which is taken from our photo pool, is by Justin Kraemer.

(Guardian) After Barack Obama and Tony Blair, Muhammad Ali today became the latest world celebrity to reclaim his Irish origins.

The boxing legend became the first man to be given the freedom of Ennis, County Clare, for 600 years.

Ali visited the town, in the west of Ireland, to pay homage at the home of his Irish great-grandfather, Abe Grady.

Thousands turned out to honour him as he received the civic accolade.

The former world heavyweight champion also met four of his distant cousins during the closed ceremony, which was broadcast live on a giant screen into the middle of the town.

Ali, 67, then drove through Ennis, taking in the Turnpike Road area from which his great-grandfather came.

He attended a charitable function at Dromoland Castle before flying back to his home in Kentucky.