All Earthlings Belong to the Co-Op

"The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation." -Bertrand Russell

Competing interests…it’s all part of the deal. In Austin for instance, the skyline has been transformed by countless new gleaming glass towers, a physical manifestation of tech’s imprint on a city that was once a sleepy college town with a downtown of nondescript low-lying government office buildings.

Despite the sea of changes, there remains a reverence for live music, the arts, books, vibrant public spaces, innovative food and beverage, and progressive points of view. For all this, we are thankful. On the live music front, seeing bands that I love at small venues is a priority, and Austin is loaded with small venues that rock. Venues like The Historic Scoot Inn in East Austin, where we recently saw Sarah Jarosz, and Meanwhile Brewing’s new outdoor stage, where we recently saw Leftover Salmon.

Live music, Austin, Texas

Click here for the live download from Nugs.net of the Salmon’s smokin’ Austin show.

Organic Farms and Gravel Pits, Now Side-by-Side

Contested lands are nothing new in Bastrop County or anywhere else in America, for that matter.

Peter Holley of Texas Monthly does a splendid job reporting the issue as it plays out today, just a few miles east of Austin and a few miles from our home in the Lost Pines.

For the first few decades of Bastrop’s existence, the Indigenous population violently opposed the encroachment of Mexican and European settlers onto its lands...Nearly two hundred years later, the rich, alluvial soil outside Bastrop is once again the scene of a clash between new and old. Because three years after Elon Musk’s purchase, the fertile land along the banks of the Colorado, shaded by pecan trees and frequented by bald eagles, is being transformed into an environmentally hazardous industrial park.

Some neighbors, Holley writes, have accused Musk of importing a “move fast and break things” mentality from Silicon Valley—a philosophy, they say, that is fundamentally at odds with small-town Texas. I’m in agreement with that sentiment. There’s only one Colorado River running through this county. We can’t let anyone break, damage, or disregard the river.

When Party Time Turns to Story Time

We were at a party in suburban Houston on Saturday and one of the guests told me that non-U.S. citizens are able to vote in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. “The crazy cities,” he called the grouping of our nation’s most prosperous and diverse cities (along with Houston).

I said that was against the law, and he replied that non-citizens could vote in local elections in these cities.

When I got home on Sunday, I looked up the claim and Fox News talking point and learned that there’s the slightest thread of truth in it. In San Francisco, non-citizen parents of children in the city’s schools can vote in school board elections, but the registration process is totally separate from voter registration.

Facts. How neatly they unwind the distortionist’s distortions.

Walk Into Splintered Sunlight

Box of Rain is a new documentary about fans of Grateful Dead from director, producer, and Deadhead Lonnie Frazier.

I like how the film’s primary subjects remember and recount some of the most magical moments from Grateful Dead days, and get into the details—the music, people, and events that shaped that particular night, or stretch of shows. It makes me want to recount some of my own most memorable times at shows.

Hampton Coliseum, March 22-24, 1987

When the band’s annual Spring Tour came to the East Coast in March 1987, it had been nine months since the band had played the area, and the first time since Jerry Garcia’s recovery from a lapse into a diabetic coma. There’s talk in the film about how cooperative people in the Deadhead community were then and remain today. I agree, but I’d like to add some depth to that perspective.

One night that winter during my senior year at Franklin & Marshall College, my friend Andy Davis came over to my off-campus apartment in Lancaster, PA, and woke me up at 2:00 a.m., so we could hightail it over to the mall and get in line for Grateful Dead tickets to Hampton Coliseum for the first three shows of the upcoming East Coast tour.

We waited in line outside the mall throughout the night with hundreds of other Deadheads and all was cordial and good-spirited until the mall authorities opened the doors in the morning. At that point, chaos descended. Once the doors opened, the line that had been formed and maintained for hours disintegrated.

I yelled some obscenities at the kind hippies who were cutting the line, but my friend Andy had no time for commentary. He fought his way to the front of the new line inside the mall but still outside the department store where the ticket outlet was embedded. When the store finally opened its doors, the scene repeated itself and the heads scrambled this way and that to get to the back of the store and form a line for tickets.

I was so pissed off and disappointed. Nevertheless, I found Andy at the front of the third and last line of the morning and gave him my money for tickets. If he hadn’t gone with the flow, or flood in this case, and instinctively understood that he had to compete, not cooperate, then we would not have had tickets to the Hampton shows in 1987.

When we did attend the shows in Virginia that spring, there were lots of people seeking tickets. Miracles needed and fingers raised! The energy outside the venue was crackling with excitement and I vividly recall being in line to enter the venue when two dudes with some sort of tools managed to quickly and expertly loosen and then drop a heavy glass door in seconds. When they did about 100 or so people ran at full speed through that opening. It was masterful work and also necessary, or those 100 people would not have seen the show.

The Natural Give and Take

Cooperation and competition are both natural responses to the environments we inhabit. Wildlife competes for habitat and we humans do the same. It’s silly to think we won’t compete because the act of competition is built in. We’re wired for it but we don’t have to be bound by it. The beauty of cooperation is how it taps our better selves, and consequently, the results of this higher frequency collective movement tend to be beautiful, profitable, and important.

Lagniappe

1. Claudia Sheinbaum, an environmental scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, was overwhelmingly elected Mexico’s first female president.

2. Poppi, a prebiotic soda maker based in Austin, faces a lawsuit that is putting the brand's "gut healthy" claims to the test. [Source: Austin Business Journal]

3. The best films, music, food, advertising, media, and so on, are all made by teams. Therefore, joining a highly functional team and learning to be a productive member of the team is the way forward for ambitious makers. [Source: Adpulp.com … also promoted by @CommArts on Twitter]

4. The story of Birkenstock’s rise to fortune and fame. [Source: Bloomberg]

5. Sixty percent of U.S. workers said they didn’t ask for higher pay when they were last hired, according to an April 2023 Pew Research Center survey. [Source: CNBC]

6. “Stop worrying about what happens in some gatekeeper’s office in New York. The action right now is happening at the grassroots level.” -Ted Gioia, a.k.a. The Honest Broker

Thanks for being here now,

When you are ready to grow a mission-based organization, spark a social change movement, or run for office, please let me know. I’d like to help.