What It Is

LOUDCANARY is intended to be a diverse and pithy exploration of interconnectivity, sustainability and marvelous nature from within the bowels of modern mass society. That's it.

Canaries in coalmines sit in cages, waiting to die and let miners know that something is gravely amiss. The metaphorical mission of LOUDCANARY, and of my work and play in general, is slightly less morbid, and favors singing over dying.

So who assembles LOUDCANARY?

Call me Brian Awehali, writer, editor and designer at your possible service.

For most of the past six years, I've led a fitful bicycle-centric life in and around the Oakland Bay Area, but most of 2010 will be spent in Taiwan, China, and Guatemala. Other than learning Mandarin, strengthening my Spanish, meeting as many people as possible, eating as many new foods as one human can, and generally reacquiring something like a naive state of mind, I do not have any specific goals in mind for these travels. I'm hopeful I might learn more about China's efforts to find more sustainable modes of development. It would also be nice to watch sheets of lightning over the Motagua Fault in the Guatemalan highlands.

I started LOUDCANARY in order to have a creative, free-flowing outlet for writing about things I find interesting, useful, and/or troubling. The loose form of blogging suits me, and gives me an alternative to the structured research and writing I'm presently doing for a forthcoming book. At the outset, I planned to do only editorially-driven, themed posts, but the pressure to produce those on any kind of regular schedule proved daunting, so I've decided to begin incorporating commentary about my travels as well. If everything's connected then everything's connected, right? I will also be activating comments on the site and seeking dialogue soon.

Before doing this, I founded and edited LiP: Informed Revolt, an award-winning North American quarterly magazine devoted to politics, culture, sex, and humor. The goal was to talk about the world in a politically engaged way that was lively, interesting, funny, free-thinking, and not at all like taking your vitamins or toeing any discernible line.

LiP ceased publishing at the end of 2006, with our Grossly Unexpected Bugs issue (available in PDF form here.) In the Fall of 2007, AK Press published an anthology of the best collected works from LiP, entitled Tipping the Sacred Cow. Historian Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States, called it "funny, refreshing, intelligent, and outrageous!" I was proud that the anthology was produced entirely on 100% PCW recycled paper stock, with vegetable-based inks, and was printed at a union shop.

LiP was deeply rewarding, not least because of the community it brought to me, but I also grew tired of its expressly "political" focus. I was ready for a change, and wanted to try and find more creativity and synthesis than LiP and its demands permitted me. In some ways, I'm still reaching for that new voice and direction, and I suppose that's what this blog is for.

Before LiP, I did a lot of other seemingly unrelated things. I worked for MTV in New York (sorry; I was young and didn't know any better). I worked alongside migrant laborers, packing tomatoes and peppers into semi-trucks day and night in Immokalee, Florida. I was a hilariously miscast consultant for the accounting firm Ernst & Young, in Chicago (again, I was young and knew no better). I was a phone salesman for Fred Astaire Dance Studios. I did web and design work for the Great Books Foundation, and for the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co., the world's oldest continuously operating radical labor press. I spent about a year of my life as a grossly overcaffeinated door-to-door canvasser for an environmental organization based in Seattle.

I also worked as Arts and Entertainment (and, later, Technology) Editor for Britannica.com. I do believe I can proudly claim the distinction of being the least formally educated editor in Britannica's history, since I spent much of my teenage years homeless and attended virtually no high school, and do not hold a college degree.

My writing has appeared in or on Alternet, The Black World Today, Z magazine/ZNet, The Progressive radio show, Native News Network, goodwriters.net, ColorsNW (Seattle), High Times, The Santa Fe New Mexican, Tikkun, Asheville Global Report, Global Policy Forum, Online Journalism Review, and Hedonia: Your Journal of Directed Pleasures, and has garnered awards from the Society of Professional Journalists (2003) as well as Project Censored (2005 and 2007).

Various and Sundry Additional Details

"Awehali" is a chosen name, and is one of several variant Cherokee spellings for "eagle." I am a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

When I was young, my great-great grandmother Lucy Daylight gave me my Indian name, and my chosen name is based on it. Before you trip down a whole path of associations or jump to unwarranted conclusions related to that fact, let me share that I'm half Irish, I did not grow up on a reservation, don't remember the few pow-wows my mother took me to when I was very young, and never attended a sweat until I was 20. I spent just about as much of my childhood in The Hague, attending a private international school, as I spent in Oklahoma and Missouri, where I was a bookish misfit in glasses among jocks, aggies, and born-again zealots.

I chose this name because I'm proud of being named by my great-great grandmother, and because I believe I belong to the land and to nature, not the other way around.

* * * *

A recurring theme in this blog will be the collapse of modern industrial society and the development of viable post-collapse alternatives. This doesn't owe to some overweening morbid fascination on my part, but to my belief that modern industrial consumer culture—greening or not—cannot persist in its present form. Even the most modern, ecologically "sustainable" cities aren't going to fix the problem. The collapse I imagine coming for us, while difficult, is cause for happiness, and even a sense of balance about the relationship between nature and human beings. Then again, I'm someone who gets equal satisfaction out of natural disaster footage and taking sunny naps with my cats, Simon LeBonBon, Count Spookula, and their mother, Felix (pictured)...