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?

Delicious Old Wine, Shiny New Bottle

Have you heard? Occupy Tampa has expanded its Occupation from Curtis Hixon park to Voice of Freedom Park at 2101 W Main Street, Tampa FL 33607.  This is incredibly exciting, and represents a shot in the arm at a time when many Occupations are facing huge uphill battles.

The park is owned by Joe Redner, a local businessman and activist, who has given OT carte blanche to use the space as they see fit.  This presents all kinds of new opportunities and challenges.  The group has been forged in the fires of a months-long confrontation with the police, and the opportunity to truly organize infrastructure and facilities may allow that energy to be channeled in new and interesting directions.

Either way, the space is incredible - as you can see above, we have a fire pit!  There's also a kitchen:

And a medical tent:

There's also power and wi-fi, though there's still work ongoing to solidify the latter.  I'll be working on a more in-depth discussion of what this means and what challenges remain, but in the meantime, head on down and check it out for yourself!

(All above photos are taken from Occupy Tampa's Facebook page)

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. 

Ritual Unrest - On the Symbolism of Occupation

On the evening of Thursday, December 1^st, at about 8pm, a group of about 150 people operating as Occupy Tampa conducted a march from Curtis Hixon Park in Downtown Tampa to Julian Lane Riverfront Park.  After arriving at Julian Lane, members of the group held a meeting at the park’s ampitheatre and collectively agreed to establish an encampment there.  The group then moved to a small hill, where they pitched a handful of tents.  At 10:56 pm, 13 unmarked Tampa Police Department squad cars pulled into the parking lot of Julian Lane Park, and around 30 police officers moved into the park.  They issued a warning to the group of campers that they were trespassing in the now-closed park.  After allowing several members of the group to exit willingly, the police surrounded those who refused to leave.  Two hours later, 29 people had been arrested for trespassing and, in many cases, resisting arrest.

These facts, like most, do not speak for themselves.

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.

ASAP Rocky is the fucking future

I didn't post about it when it came out, but it's taken me a month or two ago, but it's taken me that long to really absorb what genius this track is.  Somehow the most amazing part is how conventional the lyrics and imagery are - and yet it totally embraces its own mythic dimension, twisting it around so the 'hood is the most unreal place possible, a slow-motion fantasy without equal.

How I Invented Witch House

No, seriously!  I just noticed that Craig Eley, master of Field Noise, current member of Datagun and former member, with me, of Single Indian Tear, has posted our little-seen non-masterpiece, a 30-minute remix and re-scoring of Dario Argento's epic Tenebre.



This was performed about two and a half years ago, and while it's not nearly as polished as the Pictureplane or Salem stuff that was coming out at about the same time (in our defense, the sound here is from a live recording) we were really treading some strangely similar water - dance beats, analog synths, and vintage spook themes.  It's particularly striking if you check out the stretch from about 5:30 above, or the beginning of Part 2 below.

Part 2: