Mass Media: Enemy or Tool? Workshop video from Food Not Bombs World Gathering

Enjoy the lush view of my backside as I talk about media structure and how opposition media workers can use it for their own ends.  Things get interesting towards the end when Vermin Supreme drops by!

New Call of Duty Villian Based on Julian Assange

In case you hadn't already figured out that video games that put you in the shoes of an 'elite' soldier were always authoritarian wet dreams/fascist training tools, this one went ahead and made it a little clearer.

Black Ops New Villain "The Leader of the 99%"

Anarchism and Japan's Anti-Nuclear Movement: Part 2

Here's part 2 of my recent talk at All Power to the Imagination, about Tokyo's anarchists and the antinuclear movement.  Enjoy!

Video: Anarchism and Japan's Anti-Nuclear Movement

Here's the video of my recent presentation at New College of Florida's All Power to the Imagination conference in Sarasota, FL. It was a great experience, with a small but attentive audience of anarchist activists and (mostly) theorists.  It's an annual event, and I highly recommend that you make the trip next year if you're at all interested.

Steampunk Magazine #8: Late Twice.

I can't believe I didn't post anything about this already, but I guess I've been pretty lax with the blogging in general lately.  Three or four weeks ago saw the release of Steampunk Magazine #8 . . . which contains the first piece of fiction I've published in almost a decade, along with an essay about the ideological relationship between Occupy and Steampunk.  The issue is available online, but if you have the means and interest, I highly recommend you pick up the print version - it's a truly beautiful thing, full of illustrations that deserve to be appreciated in full size on good paper.  We actually have copies with the Occupy Tampa Mobile infoshop, so if you happen to run into us, you can get one without paying for shipping.  In fact, the Infoshop will be out in Gainesville this weekend at the Southeast Regional Convergence of Occupations, so keep an eye out.

Steampunk Magazine is a shockingly awesome radical science-fiction magazine.  Members of its writing and editorial staff have been heavily involved in Occupy, and long before Occupy were doing the godly work of understanding the radical past.  The deep interest in history that the magazine displays is really powerful.  Please check it out.

Un MU.ZZ.LE

I find myself deeply and sharply inspired by the Xanga page Findingatiger.  It's an achingly personal journal of what could probably look from the outside like a pretty boring life.  It's a real journal, but it's written with both the arcing ambition of a piece of serious fiction and, intentionally or not, in a fragmented, attention-fractured voice that either 'captures' or simply really is the way people in their twenties now think, talk, and feel.  It is literary in heft, while still being utterly trivial in content.  It makes me ask a quite serious question about how much of our life is inner and how much objective and factual.  It also encourages me to maybe try some things in this blog that I haven't tried in this or any other space in some time.

I was thinking about my life - my by many measures extremely lucky, slightly crazy, weird life over the past ten years.  And I compared it to the slight echo of disappointment that lingered in the air after all of it.  The idea that maybe I haven't been great, or that I was not entirely present for the moments that counted, or I have been so awkward-and-proud-of-it that I've missed one too many things to make my weirdness worth it.  It's impossible to know, I guess - it's like that old question about whether my 'green' is the same as your 'green,' and how could we know if we can't literally get inside one another's brains?  Maybe some people see and feel the drama and turmoil of their inner lives simply because they spend the time looking there.  Maybe I can be such a chipper dude simply because my brain chemistry is like whatever's the opposite of psychotic.

I'm listening to the new Gonjasufi album, MU.ZZ.LE.  I put it on right after the Bad Brains' I Against I, so I must be on some sort of thing.  The Bad Brains was what I put on after I bailed on Occupy Tampa for the night.  I stopped by very briefly, just long enough to hear the start of a conversation about the kitchen that I really didn't have even the slightest desire to stick around for.  A substantial part of energy in the camp is going now into these sorts of discussions - which as simple as they sound, regularly explode into massive personality conflicts that stretch over multiple meetings, night after night.  This is because the camp is made up more than anything else by asocial narcissists, including longtime homeless, travellers, borderline head cases, and apparent drug addicts.

It took less than a month for this population to make up the  critical mass of the 24/7 occupation of Occupy Tampa.  I have some serious concerns about where we go from here, despite the valiant efforts of several organizers to keep momentum going into several ongoing and exciting projects.  The idea of the 'occupation' has been so crucial to the appeal of the movement in the public eye - but I have seen much firsthand, not just in Tampa but in New York City, to suggest that in the long term these occupations might have destroyed themselves - that in fact the police in cities across the country are doing Occupy a huge image favor in decamping them before their tents become symbols, not of freedom and uprising, but of needle drug use and screaming matches.

What does this say about the ethos of the Occupy movement, its commitments to horizontalism and autonomy?  Well, it leaves me sorely tempted to declare that, at least at the very extremes, there are people for whom the chance to make their own decisions represents a clear and present danger to themselves and others.  Occupy has attracted a great number of, first, genuinely mentally ill people, and second, borderline personality types.  People shout to get attention, and turn it into a fight when shouting isn't enough.  People badmouth one another and scream and cry.  People require regular trips to the hospital from participants with cars, for injuries incurred long ago and far away.

And yet.  These people are broken, beat, tired - and yet I can't bring myself to dismiss them, to throw up my hands in despair.  They are struggling just like the rest of us.  And god knows, this is where any of us could end up if we were taken off our Xanax and put in a minimum wage job for ten years struggling to take care of kids and a wife and a house until one day suddenly it's all gone away.  Or been put out of the house at fourteen and made to fend for ourselves.  Or had to grow up transgendered in a macho Latino family.  Sometimes the cliches are just true.

We all fancy ourselves misfits, we suburban white kids and Brooklyn hipsters, but how ready are we to recognize a real one?  I've never been one of the hipster haters, I think that art is essential to progress and pretension is essential to art.  But the almost complete lack of trendy participation in Occupy has maybe disturbed the comfortable fiction I'd so long lived with that under all the superficial bullshit these people shared my discontent.  That their consumerism was, as they often claimed, somehow ironic.  But I saw a cute couple the other day, in Ray-Bans and cutoffs, and realized I've never felt more distant from people like that.  They were suddenly only slightly less offensive to me than the Britnis and Bobbys who had tormented my high school years (or at least haunted my imagination).

Occupy, at least out here in the real hinterland, is a province of the true fringe - the left behind, the kicked out, and the fucked up.  And even though I don't always look like it or often give in to it, I'm one of those myself.  I mean, I guess I must be, or why am I spending so much time with this gang of losers?  I went to the Publix Greenwise a few miles from the Occupy Tampa camp tonight - it's a kind of commercial-organics-froufrou grocery store, like a low-rent Whole Foods.  It was full of beautiful women in their early 30s, shopping alone.  They were dressed like me, in the nearly automatic neat-creative mode that comes with giving a shit and making an adult, white salary.  But there was something in their eyes, something scared and vacant and confused.  They didn't know (and here comes another true cliche) how they could still be unhappy after buying the things they had been told to want.

I can't deal with that.  And I'm also realizing: maybe the only thing stopping me from truly feeling those situations, that amazing past I've travelled through, was that I haven't spent enough time writing about it.  I am a writer - why is this not how I've been creating myself?

From Here On Out: Where Occupy Tampa Has Been, and Where It Can Go Next

Yesterday, Tampa Food Not Bombs and Occupy Tampa jointly held a luncheon at Voice of Freedom Park near central Tampa, Florida.  Voice of Freedom (VoF) is a park privately owned by Joe Redner, a Tampa entrepreneur and frequently outspoken public figure.  The event included not just some great food from FNB, but several great activities for local kids and training for Occupy participants.  There was some press coverage,  a good number of visitors both from out of town and from the local community.

Though it was by design small and casual, yesterday’s event represents an important evolution of Occupy Tampa specifically, and may offer some useful points of reflection for other Occupy groups. 

WTSP - Bought, Paid For, and Worth Every Penny.

You can’t expect much from local news, with anchors hired primarily for their hair and content intended to titillate mouth-breathers.  But on Tuesday night, Tampa’s WTSP 10 mixed up the usual local palette of heroic three-legged dogs and unfilled potholes with coverage of the most important political event of the last year – the Occupy movement.  Predictably, understanding the significance of Occupy and presenting it to its viewers in a coherent, balanced manner proved too much for their pretty little heads.

The story that aired last night was focused on Occupy Tampa, and it made no bones about being a "gotcha" attack.  The tagline - "Are Occupy Protestor's Hypocrites?" - invites only one answer, and the setup during the show was no more subtle.  “They say they want change, but do they practice what they preach? A look into some of the protestor’s own voting records, and some startling results.”  The meat of the story is that the station had pulled the voting records of the 22 participants who have been arrested since the beginning of the Tampa Occupation about six weeks ago.  Their findings were that of the 22, 64% were registered to vote, about 33% voted in the last presidential election, just under 25% voted in the primary, 15% voted in the 2010 midterm, and less than 10% voted in recent municipal elections.

Leaving aside the issues with sampling, these are objectively not good numbers. As the smug, spray-tanned, pudgy male anchor framed it, “many [Occupiers] may be a bit hypocritical.”  But, blinded either by its overt hostility to Occupy (whose motivations we'll get to in a second) or by a more basic inability to see further than the tip of their nose, WTSP’s team failed to put them into any kind of context.

Red Bandana Lab, Ochiai Soup, 7/2/2011

Had a really fantastic time Saturday at Soup, normally a home for experimental music, this time more focused on political messages and satire. The first act was a Ukelele/drag singer.  The prominence of broad drag on the Japanese radical left is something I've only just really noticed, and I haven't quite processed it. It's particularly interesting because the same scene is home to a higher-than-normal concentration of transgendered people.  It was a lot of fun and in good humor, but still I wonder how those in the audience (a couple) felt about seeing this:



The main attraction was Red Bandana Lab, who I knew from their appearances at numerous sound demos going back years. They really blew me away, both with their otherworldly track selections and MC Yuso's furious styles.



The event attracted a huge swath of Tokyo's radical left.



Kei of Irregular Rhythm Asylum



Taku from Shirouto no Ran



Photographer Goso Tominaga.  I wrote a mini-essay for a book of his pictures coming out sometime in the fall.

In conclusion, stay away from awamori, that stuff is dangerous.

Regarding Workers

I took the above photo a couple of days after the 3.11 earthquake, mainly to illustrate the amazing speed with which Tokyo returned to everyday normality. The guy in the middle is just one subtype of an eternal Tokyo presence - the sidewalk promoter. He's giving out flyers (and probably tissue packages) to promote a contact lens shop, but you'll also see people doing much the same work in service of Italian restaurants, Karaoke boxes, manga kissaten, Korean barbecues, and hostess clubs (including the vile subspecies who harass passing young women to try and lure them into the sex industry).

I've lately been thinking about how little I understand the human element of a job like this. It's just one of a variety of undeniably crappy jobs you see people doing every day in a city like Tokyo, from fast-food server to Donki clerk to construction-site traffic-director.  The last time I worked a job of this sort was about a year ago, when I did short stints as a parking-lot attendant and line-cook as part of my confused attempts to deal with unexpected funding shortfalls in my last year of grad school.  Both were part-time jobs, and the line cook job was actually a hell of a lot of fun, but  I ended up quitting both jobs with no notice in moments of frustration and/or overwork.

I had that option, because I knew I was on my way to other things, but I was nonetheless able to hold onto some (facile, superficial) sense of solidarity with "workers," thanks to my cushioned, provisional version of poverty, and the genuinely merciless grind of grad school, in some ways undeniably more demanding and even exploitative than this sort of service job.

Now, though, I'm realizing how much that illusion of lived solidarity was insulating me from a real consideration of the challenges posed by living in a mercilessly stratified society.  Job-wise, I'm now living a ridiculous fantasy, which if not quite financially secure does happen to include total freedom.  I'm suddenly not sure how to feel about the legions of workers through whom I float, to whose daily struggle I find it more and more difficult to truly relate.

5.7 Anti-Nuclear Demo: A Simplistic Message Fuels a Profound Event

I've already waited too long to set down some version of my very intense experience at Saturday's anti-nuclear rally.  The numbers coming back from news organizations paint it as a bit of a disappointment - partly due to rain, partly due to a major victory handed to activists by PM Kan just the day before, in the form of the ordered shutdown of a reactor in central Japan.  Speaking strictly for myself, I think the core message of the demo - "No Nukes!" - is almost childishly simple, perhaps distracting from the really constructive project of promoting renewable energy, not to mention the more profound and radical possibilities for overhauling industrial capitalism (perish the thought).

All that aside, this was a transformative event.  I came to it as someone who has attended a lot of marches put on by the central organizers of this demo, Shirouto no Ran.  They frequently have demo/parties on May Day and generally are interested in poverty issues - but always with a slightly confrontational edge, including a profusion of absurdism and rnoisy music, which helped these marches palpably alienate passersby.  This one was different.



All along the route, there were both people who seem to have broken off from the march (as seen here), and those who just happened to be passing by, saw what was happening, and smiled, waved, or in some cases started cheering along. The energy was amazing.

Another great thing was how wide a spectrum of people was represented, from kids to older folks, and not just fringe or freaky people. Many of these people had never participated in this sort of demonstration before.





This is a huge contrast with the regular Shirouto no Ran demo, which is made up largely of punk rockers, dadaists, and other weirdos (not that there weren't some of those here).



I suddenly found myself with a new appreciation for all those slightly alienated May Day marches, whose effectiveness I've always been pretty skeptical of. They were dress rehearsals for this - an issue powerful enough to draw in people, who just need experienced organizers to give them an outlet for their anxiety and anger.