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From the chaotic Cracking the Movement: Squatting Beyond the Media by the Foundation for the Advancement of Illegal Knowledge, in the Netherlands: Pedestrians have become part of the stream of traffic which may not stand still, but must keep circulating. The individual moves as a simple particle in the stream. The other becomes a hindrance instead of a potential ally: people no longer meet in the street. The ideal of free circulation has been allotted a vector, in the form of automobility. Regulated traffic gives the stream a direction. This offers the individual traffic participant the security of being a part of a collective project: the conquering of space, freedom of movement without obstacle. When one has taken one's place in the cabin, the other users of the road lose their reality as people who are capable of anything. They are absorbed into the only remaining reality, that of traffic as continuous movement. In both cases, on foot and in the vehicle, the crowd no longer perceives itself as a crowd, but as a medium for transport from a to b. reply to this dispatch.
i just posted a new little essay i wrote about the raging pronoun debates in my life. its a good thing to read if you're friends with me or another trans person, or if you think you might be later, or if you're about to meet a trans person, or if you have a crush on one. in the piece, i talk some about the awkwardness around pronouns and i have some ideas about what happens in weird pronoun conversations and what we should all do about it. to give it a try click here. reply to this dispatch.
Lately I've been thinking about political communities, the real work of carving out a space of shared agendas and urgency, of sharing ideas and strategies. And I love those moments when I feel that this space is wider and reaches further than I imagined. Riding the subway, I glance graffiti scrawled across a city promotion: "Fuck Giuliani." At the station, I spot a critique of consumer culture tagged on an ad for a pricey art school: "Spend money=be an artist." My heart flutters; there are more of us! I think the guy who walks by and says he likes my Drop the Rockefeller Drug Laws button also is saying the same thing: there are more of us. I couldn't have felt more alone, isolated and immobilized than I felt last night at a so-called "Town Hall" meeting with fuckhead Giuliani himself. Expecting to find legions of agitators and crazy activists, instead we were subjected to an endless supply of upstanding citizens (government plants?) praising the right-wing mayor for cracking down on crime (their actual words!) and "cleaning up the streets." That NYC is a police state (a point emphasized by the scores of suited-men, wires creeping from their ears, who circled the periphery of the middle school auditorium) proved not enough for these eager-beavers. They further requested more arrests of illegal vendors, street sweeps targetted at people spitting, and a reconsideration of the direction benches faced in one city park. @#!\\$?! During the entire 45-minute theater of the absurd, the proctors summarily ignored the group of Asian youth from CAAAV waving their hands to be called on. Did they come with explosive words aimed at blowing up the lie that everything is okay and everyone will gladly submit to Giuliani's war on the poor? Did they come to challenge the shut-down of the Grand Street subway stop, to call out this latest component of plan to cripple Chinatown and make way for further gentrification? Giuliani quickly thanked the crowd and ended the night to chuckles and applause, at which point Shannon (sigh... my hero) lept to her feet, screaming across the complacent crowd, "Why was this group of youth not called on all night? What are you so afraid of Mr. Mayor?" The script fell apart, heads spun, and Shannon saved all of us from the feeling that we could only be extras in a show produced for the benefit of the mayor's administration and dutifully transmitted by the public relations firms we call the press. Broken but not defeated, over drinks later, we mended our bleeding hearts and plotted revenge.
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Having been sent on reconnaisance missions to such exotic locales as Syracuse, Boston and Kinkynaughty, Ohio, makezine had trouble finding time to skate into cyberspace this past week, but we're making our ways home again. For me, visiting my parents' hometown in Ohio is a step into a parallel universe, a place of catholic schools and sububurban streets named Blossom Boulevard, that could have been my life. Had they not shuttled me off as a child to the steamy possibilities of Florida, what shape would my world be in today? Like my cousins, would I be married and have kids and live within a short driving distance of my brothers, sister and parents? In the Jorge Luis Borges stories I'm reading these days, time divides itself infinitely, setting our lives in a million irreconcilable directions at once; our choices connect arbitrarily to futures we can't guess at. These long summer days seem to set my head to spacey wanderings. In more coherent moments, me and Mimi have been trading thoughts on patriotism and the politics of feeling good. Within a national project of showing a citizenzry that "everything is going okay," what political possibilities get lost, what agendas fixed? Something to chew on for Bastille Day. reply to this dispatch.
As those friends/allies I run to about the things that make you go hmmm? have put it -- where have all the conversations gone? In addition to the urgent, material work of day-to-day "organizing," (for lack of a better umbrella term), it seems our politics are significantly comprised of conversations. Does this make sense? We trade ideas, we disagree, we argue points, we gain insights, we open up political possibilities for a "world" (again, for lack of a better umbrella term) that better suits more people. Can we make conversations that make changes? Can words be a weapon and also a salve? Can we keep this up? reply to this dispatch.
Watching the new film Bread and Roses, I am reminded that in politics the categories of selling-out, winning, losing, and surviving are not as absolute and self-contained as we tell ourselves. Through a fictional narrative, the film depicts the real-life story of the battle being fought by Los Angeles janitors against poverty wages and divide-and-conquer union-busting strategies. I remember watching the television coverage last spring of the Justice for Janitors campaign: hundreds of workers taking over the streets, bringing to a standstill this city of hostile downtown boulevards and impenetrable glass skyscraper-fortresses. The movie shows the success of this organizing drive, but shows also the real and uneven risks of organizing for vulnerable workers in a capitalist economy that fosters under-employment and a ready pool of replacement labor. I'm shaken up by the story, embarassed about the arrogance and entitlement I carry in my backpack while doing politics, and humbled to remember that in organizing and activism, poor people of color who have so little to start with nonetheless find even greater sacrifices to make. reply to this dispatch.
The attack on Charas is huge and important both concretely and symbolically. Losing that space, a rare public space, will be a tremendous loss to so many different communities of people. The amalgam of meetings, activities, organizations, puppet building, bicycle recycling, theater, movies, parties, celebrations and support groups that take place at Charas is an intersection of so many lives and causes; it is a rare place. The loss of a space for all of the aformentioned will be devastating. The immediate and real need to carve out a new space will be a challenge. And then the more devastating picture. The relentless attack of public spaces; facing the reality that affordable space is becoming nonexistent in this city. The blatant disregard for the needs of real people, people who want to build community, people who want to fight the injustices that surround us, people who have a vision of a world that is not driven by the market and capatalistic development schemes, and people who want to have fun. It sucks a little bit more hope out of me. It makes me want to leave the city a little bit sooner than I thought I would. But then again, we can't let them win. Maybe it makes me fight back with more vengence than ever. reply to this dispatch.
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