To Be (Effective), Or Not To Be…

This summer I spent a few great weeks with my pal Matt in Bloomington, Indiana. Since I left, he’s been a busy guy. He spent a few months volunteering with the Midwest Pages to Prisoners project, then began working with Community for Effective Justice. CEJ began three years ago after an inmate was tasered to death by a guard, and operates a non-profit, New Life-New Leaf, a group that works directly with inmates in Bloomington’s local jail to help them navigate the system and exercise their rights as inmates.

Matt first got involved by facilitating a class for male inmates on how to be better fathers. In late February, he began working on a campaign to repeal a federal ban that denyies those convicted of drug offenses government assistance of any kind – that’s financial aid, food stamps, help with housing, anything. This lack of resources makes it really, really hard – near impossible – for ex-felons to get back on their feet after being released from prison. I don’t know what the prospects for success are for the campaign, but its first event, a community forum, (the flyer for which is above) garnered some great coverage in the Indiana University daily paper, followed by an editorial by the paper calling for a lift on the public assistance ban.

Matt’s been doing really inspiring work – and at the same time, he’s wrestling with a dilemma a lot of radicals wrestle with, myself included. As an anarchist, he doesn’t just want a better prison system, he wants a society that has no need for prisons at all – and so he’d very much like to be around people who share the same radical analysis of society. In Bloomington, most of those folks are to be found at the Pages to Prisoners project, which is hosted by the local anarchist bookstore, Boxcar Books.

But after months with that program, Matt became frustrated with the insular nature of the project – not that sending free books to prisoners isn’t absolutely essential work, work the Midwest P to P peeps are masters at, but that the project had very little connection with inmates, face to face, in a local setting, not simply through reading letters and filling book requests. So Matt has had to compromise his radical perspective to be involved in practical work with a real constituency – local inmates – while Community for Effective Justice does not connect its work to a larger analysis of society.

How to be effective and radical at the same time? I only have time for the moment to tell Matt’s story, a story still in the making with no conclusion, but there’s hope. Critical Resistance seems the best example of an organization doing practical work tied to a larger analysis, and two books recently released by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence hint they’ve got an idea of what they are doing as well. I’m sure there’s a huge list of other organizations and projects worth noting… Hopefully I’ll list more in the future. If you can link of any, name drop ‘em in the comments section!

Peace, Made Over Empty Bottles

My back alley is a perimeter of Bellingham’s downtown business district, something of a corner beyond which few middle class patrons (which in this town means students and senior citizens) will travel – on foot, anyway – to throw down their dollars. The block has its businesses, and for better and for worse, they’re businesses on the margins: on one end of the spectrum is Super Mario’s, Salvadorian food served out of a truck that might actually be the best food in town; and on the other, your average cigarette and beer mart that dishes out sweets and swill.

It’s because of the mart, and the alley’s close remove from downtown, that our back alley is, according to BPD reports in the Cascadia Weekly, “a favorite hangout for people to drink alcohol” (this week’s paper, “Fuzz Buzz,” p. 12). And by “people,” the BPD doesn’t mean college students, who can throw an all-night rager here with no police interference; they mean the people whom Marxists call the “lumpen,” whom liberals call the “homeless,” and whom the BPD themselves call “transients” (a word as appropriate for Bellingham’s college students, I’d say).

Another business is TJ’s, a long-time and now long gone breakfast place whose building has spent the last year being gutted, under some slow process of renovation. The parking lot has been tethered off with metal wire, and for months it’s proximity to downtown has rendered it a bittersweet reminder of what the majority of Bellingham is and always will be under capitalism: concrete with cracks and broken glass – but also autumn leaves with no blowers to blow them away.

In recent days I noticed this piece on the back of the building through the slim brown cracks in the fence between TJ’s and my apartment complex. At first I thought it was just a mess of tags, which would make sense, given the space has been serving overtime as a semi-clandestine watering hole for those whom the combination of alcoholism and no-fixed-address leaves little choice but to risk violating open container laws. But clearly, this isn’t a mess of tags, its something else. Somebody is trying to say something.

Skulls wired to fire – or are those waves of red the petals of a flower? Accompanied by a poem that exalts us to “STAY SANE… BY LETTING GO AND GIVEN OUT.” Not given in, given out: “TO YOUR SOUL. TO YOUR HEART. TO YOUR MIND. PEACE, MADE OVER EMPTY BOTTLES.” And then the tag “– IERUA [or something like it] BE TOLD!”

Not a master piece, by any means, but more beautiful than what is surely in store for this block once the TJs building is done over; and this piece will then surely be whitewashed. The empty bottles will be gone too – not abolished, only displaced to yet another “favorite hangout for people to drink alcohol.” And while websites are as tenuous as anything capitalism has yet produced, maybe, just maybe, my (digital) photographs will hold onto it for some posterity.

My So-called Zines

“I actually published my thesis on zines and how zines can serve as kind of a way to radicalize kids from communities of privilege–you know, like young, white, middle-class kids thinking about race, class and gender issues.” So says Jason Kucsma, co-founder of the now defunct Clamor magazine. Without having read Kucsma’s thesis, I immediately know what he’s talking about – zines radicalized me in a lot of ways, particularly the act of making them myself.

I didn’t do a thesis on zines, but they played a big part in my extra-curricular undergraduate activities. When I was still a student, I found that the access to resources – internet access, software, printing privileges – conspired perfectly for making zines. I know I’m not the only one: I even know of one person (who shall remain nameless!) whose zine-making several years before I started school was partly responsible for the university’s student printing paper quota. S/he’d stay up all night printing them off – and that’s exactly what I did too (for academic purposes, of course!).

Here are a few highlights from my zine-making days – all of which I recently donated to the fantastic Zinelibrary.net, an on-line database out of Olympia, WA. Click on the titles to be directed to where you can download them.

Breaking the MANacles: An Anti-Patriarchy Reader by various authors

I compiled this anthology together as a final project for a class on Anarcha-Feminism taught by the estimable Toby Smith at Fairhaven College in Spring 2004. It focuses mainly on how patriarchy manifests itself (usually unconsciously) within activist circles, primarily from those of us socialized as men. The articles are mostly centered around debates in anarchist circles that proliferated in the early years of the anti-globalization movement, including works by Dan Spalding, Chris Crass, Traci Harris, and the Rock Bloc Collective. None of the articles are perfect, but that’s sort of the point – the zine is supposed to be an entry into discussions about patriarchy, not the final say on it. I hope you find the illustrations as funny as I do.

Looking for Color in the Anti-War Movement by Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martinez

This an anti-war sequel to the seminal essay Martinez wrote following the WTO protests, “Where Was the Color in Seattle?“ It’s divided into two parts, the first addressed to white people and their historic ignorance of the imperialism in their own backyard; and the second addressed to folks of color concerning anti-war work. I made this into a zine when I worked at Western Washington University’s Peace Resource Center (now the Social Issues Resource Center), and I think we tried to use it in a discussion group that never came together.

Definitely one of the best articles I’ve read about the anti-war movement, along with Kenyon Farrow’s “Not Showing Up.” Martinez’s essay was written a few years ago, and definitely demands to be re-read against all the momentum the anti-war movement has been building in the past few months. Perhaps the topic for a future blog post if I can get my act together…

The Student Movement of 1968 by George Katsiaficas

My first zine I ever completed at school. As a college freshman, I was absolutely obsessed with the student movements of the Sixties, especially in images. I poured every book I could get my hands on that had pictures of the era. After reading Katsiaficas’ excellent primer on the era, The Imagination of the New Left, I decided to put together a zine matching his chapter on international student movements with my favorite pictures. Per my preoccupations at the time, this resulted in lots of militant street scenes.

Naomi Jaffe on the Weather Underground

As my studies of the Sixties era matured, I became more and more enamored with the story of the Weather Undergound Organization. I don’t necessarily care for their tactics, but more with their ability to grow over the years in a way that mirrors my own feelings on their era: from romanticizing street confrontations (e.g. the Days of Rage) towards much more strategic discussions about white anti-racism and solidarity. This trajectory is captured beautifully by Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America, but it’s also summarized by former WUO member Naomi Jaffe in this small statement written after the release of the Weather Underground film by Sam Green and Bill (for the record, a film I really don’t care for). I made this zine (more like a pamphlet, really) to be passed out a screening of the film and presentation on the WUO that I did in Summer 2005 (which didn’t go all that well).

Occupied Homes

 

“We’ll Leave Your Home… When You Leave Ours!”
- Grassy Narrows to Weyerhaeuser 

When I was in high school, I was sitting on a Seattle to Bothell bus one night when I spotted a dude reading Anarchism, Marxism and the Future of the Left by Murry Bookchin. Bookchin-crazy as I was at the time, I got all excited and introduced myself. That dude was Brady, and we’ve been pals and comrades ever since – sharing not only our affinity for anarchism but also our Bothell childhoods: my partner’s best friend in elementary school had a big ol’ crush on Brady, but he moved out of Bothell long before I would meet him on that late night bus (and funny enough, my partner was there when I met him).

I tell this quaint little anecdote ‘cuz on Wednesday, Brady returned to Bothell for an action in coordination with the Grassy Narrows First Nation and Rainforest Action Network targeting a housing development by Quadrant Homes, owned by the lumber company Weyerhaeuser. According to the press release,

Grassy Narrows First Nation, a Northwest Ontario Indigenous community that depends on the land for hunting, fishing and other cultural activities, opposes Weyerhaeuser’s use of wood supplied from clear-cut logging on their land. Weyerhaeuser is the top consumer of wood from Grassy Narrows territory, which comprises more than half of the company’s total volume. For years, the community has suffered the ill effects of clear-cut logging on its territory and has tried to stop it. They have been ignored by the Canadian government and by companies like Weyerhaeuser and Quadrant Homes that continue to profit from the wholesale destruction of the Grassy Narrows land and people.

After locking down on the roof of Quadrant’s model home, Brady and another activist were arrested and held in the county jail for nine hours, but not before the event was captured via helicopter by local television news. Brady would be the first one to admit, though, that his jail time didn’t mean shit next to what is at stake for the people of the Grassy Narrows First Nations. After all, it’s really their homeland that is occupied – not just by Weyerhaeuser, but by all us settlers. Again, from the press release:

“Enough is enough. The true cost of Weyerhaeuser’s clear-cuts is illness, the death of animals, and the ruin of our spiritual practices and culture. Because of the clear-cuts, we can no longer hunt, fish, trap, or gather medicine or berries like we used to,” said Maria Swain, a Grassy Narrows grandmother who has traveled over 3,000 miles to demand an end of the destruction from Weyerhaeuser.

This action tickles my fancy in a special way, given that it went down in my hometown. The lesson is clear: the affluence on display in a bloated ‘burb like Bothell is built on the exploitation of the global economy, in this instance represented by Weyerhaeuser. The house targetted by Wednesday’s action differs very little from the house I grew up in.

Growing up in Bothell, the immediate reaction of my self and others to that boring – but deeply moneyed - lifestyle is a total repudiation of consumer living. But it isn’t the products I buy or don’t buy – individual choices – that’ll change this system: it is specific actions with tangible goals, and solidarity with those most affected that move this struggle along.

Six years ago, Brady and I met on a bus, and I’m happy that we’re still in this together, moving forward!

More pictures of the action available here.

And here’s a neat little video.

The Flesh and Blood(shed) of Popular Culture

A friend of mine is due to leave for Iran in the coming weeks, where she plans to stay for several months visiting family. As she awaits her departure, she’s bombarded each day with media from all angles – film, print, politics – that seem custom-designed for U.S. confrontation with Iran.

The latest sour bit of propaganda is the sword-and-shield blood-and-guts dude-fest 300, currently tops at the box 0ffice, which pits its “heroic” Spartans against what it paints as a bloody-thirsty Persian Empire. A review in the Village Voice (“Man on Man Action“) assures me the film is as dumb as it looks, but lack of smarts has never been known to keep away American film-going audiences, nor has it ever kept the US government away from military interventions. In response to the film (and its politics), a petition is circulating demanding that Warner Bros. own up to its ahistorical warmongering.

But war-mongering needn’t be blood-red and blunt to be dangerous. Whether its art film or action film, the same stubborn assumptions keep popping up, as in a recent interview with Abbas Kiarostami, the celebrated Iranian filmmaker who has been in New York City recently for a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. The interview is with that most ostensible of liberal media, The New York Times, and “The interviewer, Deborah Solomon,” observes Zach Campbell, “seems to have one guiding theme–hit home that ‘over there,’ in Iran, those people, those Islamofascist tyrants who presumably control every facet of every citizen’s life, are … well, bad. And how crazy is it that Kiarostami is able to make his beautiful masterpieces in the midst of all that crazy oppressive fanaticism over there?”

It’s not that Iran doesn’t have its political problems – it’s that Iran is not the sum of its government’s vices. As film critic Jonathon Rosenbaum writes, “What Bush is choosing to call `Iran’ is chiefly a narrow-minded fundamentalist like himself, not a complex society of millions of diverse individuals that is every bit as multicultural as the U.S.” This a diversity featured heavily in Kiarostami’s films – from the severe class chasms and urban/rural divides of the informal Koker earthquake trilogy (Where is the Friend’s Home?, …Life and Nothing More, and Through the Olive Trees) and The Wind Will Carry Us; to the various nationalities of the passengers in Mr. Badii’s Range Rover in Taste of Cherry, to the varied ages, classes, occupations and love lives of the female passengers in Ten.

You might say the violence of the State is reflected in the violence of a film 300 – not only in its desire for bloodshed, but in its purporting to represent diverse and complex histories and peoples as the whole they are not. Kiarostami’s films, with their hours of driving, talking, driving, running, talking, and driving some more, are the very antithesis of violence – and perhaps at times, the antithesis of the State as well.

Elsewhere, author Fatemeh Keshavarz discusses similar problems as they exist in popular literature, in a recent interview posted at MRZine. According to Keshavarz, in print media of the past decade, such as the popular Reading Lolita in Tehran, “everything [about Iran] would revolve around religion or politics, and people would be villains or victims… I felt like saying to people, ‘This picture is full of holes! That is not about me! The culture I grew up in has its flesh and blood just like yours. It has good and bad things just like every culture. Shake my hand and you will feel it!’ ” Her own book, Jasmine and Stars, aims to rectify these oversights.

I recently read Seymour Hersh’s piece in The New Yorker about the Bush administration’s strategic swing against the Shi’ites, as represented – to them – by the Iranian government. Personally, I hold onto the hope that the severe U.S. shortage of troops (what I consider the biggest political booty of the anti-war movement so far) prevents invasion of Iran, but troop shortage doesn’t preclude a U.S. bombing campaign or other military attacks.

What does preclude military attack (at least of the overt variety), I realize, is popular opinion. Popular opinion, however nebulous it always is, however indistinct and unquantifiable, remains indispensable to the achievement of the U.S. government’s political objectives. After reading over the above interviews and commentaries, and reflecting on my friend’s feelings, I’m struck by how insidiously popular culture can prepare society for war – and I wonder to what extent pop culture swings public opinion.

For years, Kiarostami has played himself off in interviews as an apolitical person – and he has every right to be so, though I personally find a great deal of the political in his films. Nevertheless, whoever organized his retrospective is making a small, but very smart political maneuver: bringing attention to Iran as a nation, broader than its State, and beyond whatever designs the US government has on the region.

Behind the Music

I’m like VHI – constantly behind the music. What I mean is, I still listen to the same music I did in junior high school. Music trudges ahead and I don’t. One obscure musical subculture I’ve stayed strangely allegiant to over the years is “breakcore.” It’s a catch-all phrase for mostly loud, fast, noisy, beat-centered electronic music that sampled a lot of punk in its early days (ala DJ Scud’s Jackboots & Birds, pictured above) but now gets more mileage out of abrasive Jamaican dancehall chants. Wikipedia says it “encourages speed, complexity, impact and maximum sonic density.” That’s good enough a definition for me.

I’m not like my friend David. Where I’m behind the music, seems like he’s always way ahead. Seems there isn’t a low-rent house party where he isn’t behind the beats – like the last party we were at, where the stereo skipped anytime someone tipped-toed near it and the bass sounded as hollow as a fist on a card board box. David once even had aspirations to be a DJ, even threw down a few thousand for some decks, but it was an ambition he quickly relinquished after observing one too many cheezy-ass white dudes spinning platters with one hand and holding a droopy half-rolled blunt in the other. He did not want to be one of those guys.

I once felt the way about breakcore David feels about DJs: for years, my love of the music was at war with the seemingly frat-like stupidity of breakcore culture (probably summed up best by the gratingly “ironic” album art of Bong-Ra, full of bikes, butts and bikinis). When artist Rachael Kozak started her all-female label Homewrecker Foundation years ago (now defunct), the sort of stupid shit that flared up on list-servs taught me a hard lesson about hard music: radical, boundary-pushing politics don’t necessarily follow from radical, boundary-pushing music.

My attitude towards the tunes changed some once I discovered DJ /rupture. Firstly, he spins mixes so tight, dropping disparate sources loud and clear. The seamless Gold Teeth Thief mix starts at side A with Missy Elliot getting her freak on and ends at side B with Paul Simon getting all somber; and the two tunes are essentially bridged by an hour of breakcore and revolutionary hiphop. His site says, “His dynamic live sets simultaneously partyrock and suggest complex political undertones.” Under or over, I’m a sucker for any tone that’s political.

Above all, /rupture a.ka. Jace Claxxon proved to me breakcore could be literate. His blog provides the theory behind the music, as disprate and dirty like the mixes he spins. Who else features an obit for Baudrillard, the tune of a Turkish bellydancer, and a radical modernist lit take on T-mobile mall kiosks (at least I think that’s what it is)? All in a matter of days, all with a playful poetic wit that puts my plain-speaking prose (and my shameful use of alliteration meant to compensate) to shame.

But you know what? I’m still behind in my music. /rupture rolled through both Seattle and Olympia last week and I didn’t even notice until two days after he was gone.

À propos de Bothell, Part Deux

A possible definition of suburb might be a city or town that has no identity of its own, whose sense of place exists primarily through its relationship with urban centers.

By this definition, Bothell is the quintessential suburb. Even the City’s advertising campaigns admit it. Anna was going through a Sunset magazine and came across this ad for Bothell that reads: “Seatlle? Canada? San Juans? Think Bothell.” Bothell, it seems, is only known through the places it is within proximity of.

If you take a moment to Explore Bothell, the site mentioned at the bottom of the ad, you might notice that of 7 the 19 “attractions” are at Country Village. CV is an old-timey antique mall where unpainted shingles and folksy atmosphere are supposed to take the place of true history. They mostly sell Americana meant to decorate the interiors of suburban homes, a pastiche of the pastoral to subdue suburban malaise… at least that’s my take on it.

For those of us who grew up in Bothell, this sort of ad isn’t worth more than a laugh; anyone who vacations in Bothell has been had, plain and simple. It’s hard enough living there. Yet, perhaps we laugh because the ad is also a painful reminder of what little character Bothell actually has, what little real sense of place our hometown can claim. In the Sunset ad, the word “hometown” is even put in quotation marks!

The new town motto seems to admit this too. Before, it was “Bothell – for a day or a lifetime.” Now, it is “Bothell – closer than you think, better than you know.” Is it just me, or does the new motto sound incredibly defensive? Unlike the previous motto, which defined Bothell in terms of time, this new slogan is directed outwards, at someone who would dare doubt Bothell’s worth.

At least it makes for a better combination with the common defacement of “Bothell” as “___hell.” Now it sounds seductive and transgressive: “hell – closer than you think, better than you know.” Unfortunately, Bothell proves the adage that hell isn’t exciting; like Simone Weil said of evil, it’s “gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Alas, Bothell and hell alike are essentially banal.