Been in Chicago for nearly 3 weeks now. Haven't taken any pictures.

I have been scheming/brainstorming a lot. Trying to work my way into some kind of space where I don't need to work at a coffee shop full-time to survive. Which at the moment mean applying for everything possible, trying to think my way into every possible fellowship, grant, residency, whatever. Without further adieu:

DIY -> DIT. I've been obsessing over this idea of a Do It Together aesthetic/ethos for a while now (not my idea). I've been thinking of it lately not as a rejection of a sort of punk DIY ethos, but an extension of it, maybe a maturation of it? As in, insofar as DIY is about rejecting unethical corporate products (ie making clothes instead buying from GAP) or supplementing failing industries (ie zines supplementing a faltering media culture), DIT is, too...Doing It Together doesn't mean Doing It With Our Corporate Buddies. Rather, it's an acknowledgment that not only do communication and collaboration enrich nearly every undertaking, but also that doing everything yourself is somewhere between impossible and ridiculous. If, for instance, I learn how to be a carpenter, it will take a good long time, time that I don't have at the moment, and it would render my friend who is a carpenter redundant. So what really has to happen is that I have to realize is that there is nothing to be ashamed of in saying "I don't know how to build this shelf and I am going to totally fuck it up if I try to build it" and calling my friend for advice. Not even calling him and saying "do this for me," but asking for help. I mean, if there is a flaw in DIY thinking, it's just that - the idea of DIY, especially a sort of radical/punk/whatever DIY, is that you become self-reliant. I don't like self-reliance because it smacks of Emerson, because there is nothing more preposterously American than thinking you can do everything yourself, and because there is nothing more preposterously macho and American than being ashamed of yourself for asking for help. And if there's two things the world could use less of, it is macho bullshit and American bullshit.

Also interesting is how this sort of ethos fits into models of resilient communities and other paranoiac models of community/the future that I am obsessed with. With everything from window farms to John Robb, there is an acknowledgement that we cannot accomplish radical actions by ourselves (or even mundane actions), that we need support networks...

The Peer Learning Institute. Building off of this DIT thing and the ideas discussed in Jacques Rancière's idea of intellectual emancipation as discussed in The Ignorant Schoolmaster...basically what I'm envisioning is a social network of learners/teachers. You create a profile, you say what you want to learn, where you're located, a preferred method of communication (in person, via Skype, whatever), and find somebody else who wants to learn something that interests you and engage that person. The idea is that anyone can learn anything from anyone, regardless of that person's supposed "mastery" of any given subject, simply by means of questions and concern. As in, I could teach you French, even though I don't know French, simply by giving assignments and, more importantly, checking in on a regular basis to see what you've learned; and, say, you could teach me The Odyssey, even though you've never read it or don't remember it. Then we would have mutual concern and responsibility to each other: I would read The Odyssey so that I could talk to you about it, you would learn French so you could talk to me about it. And so on.

My Jewishness. Something I hitherto haven't really considered, but now I am...trying to think my way into this thing, trying to figure out some way to address something useful, critical, or interesting about being a non-commital American half-Jew, some project that I wouldn't sneer at. I am very much not into the idea of rehashing Zorn, "modernizing" Jewish music or something. I don't think that playing a really crazy ambient version of "Hava Nagila" has any effect or bearing on what it means to be Jewish today. I think it's actually a total fucking joke. What I am curious about is why none of these projects from the last couple of years address anything to do with Israel and its policies...what does it mean to be a skeptical Jew? If I disapprove of Israel's policies, if I view it as a near-fascist state imposing apartheid on a helpless people, even though I am, by cultural heritage at least, a Jew, what does that mean for me? If I view the knee-jerk rhetoric of the state (in short, if you're not with us you're a terrorist/anti-Semite/Nazi) as reductive, gross, misleading, propagandistic, demagoguery, what does that mean? And how can I possibly deal with that with music or sound?