Author: Slingshot Collective

MIT Press

One Rogers St.

Cambridge MA 02142-1209

Reviewed by dj dio

The Invisible Committee made a name for itself with it’s 2007 “The Coming Insurrection” and is something akin to a wordsmith’s Banksy…. faceless yet familiar and often suggesting what is on the tip of our collective tongues. This followup effort is less predictive and more prescriptive, offering a friendly hand and headlamp to radicals and activists attempting to wade thru the sad morass that is the post-modern capitalist landscape.

It opens with a quote from Jacques Mesrine “There is no other world. There’s just another way to live.” before jumping in with it’s first chapter entitled “Crisis is a mode of Government”. The invisible committee offers an analysis of how our modern societies function, the relationship of revolt/insurrection to institutional power structures and a compass of sorts for those interested in serious, wholesale social change. Adventuresome, intellectually complex and courageously skeptical of left/right sacred cows and stagnant ideologies: this writing suggests that it is every one of us that needs to change… not just “them”.

Primarily addressing the state of political/economic relations in the developed world, the writing leaps and soars, lands for some nifty bulldozing work, sneaks around the corner with a gasmask and a molotov cocktail and finally concludes with a “to-be list that is childishly straight forward…and therefore maybe even be-able!

Mixing french style standup comedy with occasionally ridiculous polemical excursion (and contradictory statements aplenty), it serves up an invigorating deep tissue massage to your radical brain structure. You don’t have to agree/disagree with it’s many insights and speculations because it’ll get your own thinking juices flowing and that is clearly the underlying raison d’être of this project. This is not a recipe book.

Anticipating the retreat and accompanying loss of vitality that a life of contemplation can bring and offering a friendly kick in the pants to get off the couch and into the soup pot, it boldly claims that we cannot lose unless we choose to. If you want a sky-is-falling bummer-athon, look elsewhere!

Read this book if you’ve tired of DOA leftist tropes, competitive victim posturing or the droning techno-chatter of the new world order.

It will put a smile on your face.

Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual Aid? by Ron Sakolsky

LBC Books, PO Box 3920, Berkeley, CA 94703

Review by A. Iwasa

Radio Tree Frog’s Ron Sakolsky coined the term “mutual acquiescence” in 2006 and its evolution from his article “Why Misery Loves Company” in Green Anarchy to this book. In this lengthy essay, he states “What I call mutual acquiescence is the polar opposite of the anarchist concept of mutual aid in that it paralyzes revolt rather than facilitating it.” Sakolsky rapidly expands on this in the main body of the text.

The essay moves through past eras of Anarchist thought and action with a refreshingly non-sectarian perspective. He also goes about connecting the concept of mutual acquiescence to past Anarchists’ and others’ ideas of voluntary servitude or similar schools of thought such as the Surrealists’ miserabilism. There is a brief but blanketing denunciation of “identity politics” as a form of mutual acquiescence that I suppose shouldn’t be a surprise. But I never agree with anyone 100% of the time, so it’s a bitter pill but easy enough to swallow.

Contrary to the title, Sakolsky goes on to point out how there are more ways to think and live outside of a mutual aid or acquiescence binary, such as Desert’s “active disillusionment,” still arguably a form of mutual aid. He also acknowledges that we can find wisdom in Marxism, specifically within the work of Antonio Gramsci. But make no mistake; Sakolsky is no friend of state Communism. For example, Poland’s 1980s oppositional Socialist Surrealist Orange Alternative is described a length.

Essentially there’s something in here for everyone with an open mind but especially for Anarchists and Fellow Travelers. It’s very philosophical, but grounded solidly in practice. The book is all over the place, but never loses focus. If you’re Anarcho-curious, this would be a great place to start. If you’re a long-time Anarcho-committed whatever, it’s a great refresher.

Making Asian America in the Long Sixties by Karen L. Ishizuka

Verso, 20 Jay St., Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Review by A. Iwasa

Jeff Chang starts off Serve the People with a strong foreword, immediately challenging the Model Minority Myth and connecting it with the era many of us who rally around the slogan, Yellow Peril Supports Black Lives Matter, trace much of our politics to.

But Chang doesn’t dwell on or lionize the 1960s very long. Chang moves quickly and critically through the “five decades of reactionary backlash” both slamming the questionable and giving props to those who have continued the struggle.

Ishizuka follows a similar trajectory in the Introduction, before writing up a comprehensive list of books about Asian America (in the United States) with descriptions ranging from middle class and reformist to revolutionary in their outlook, then describing her entrance into the Movement in 1969. This flows into her explanations of the interviews she carried out for the book, “believing that the makers of history are often the best historians.”

Act I, entitled American Chop Suey, plays on the explicitly US American roots of Chop Suey. Like Fortune Cookies, it’s something completely Asian American, though thought of as Asian.  Thus the liminal space we are also assigned:  neither white nor Black in a racist society dominated by binary thought.

Ishizuka does an excellent job alternating between the larger political stories such as those of migration and racism and the personal accounts of people both positive and negative trying to navigate these circumstances.

Ishizuka goes on to write about the origins of the Model Minority Myth, which turns out to be classic race baiting of the divide and conquer variety. Emerging just “six months after the Watts uprising—with the article ‘Success Story, Japanese-American Style’ by sociologist William Peterson in the New York Times Magazine.”

Like most myths, this one has a lengthy historical trajectory from which it sprang, that Ishizuka methodically wades through. Working her way back to the early 1970s, she goes on to write how Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chen had theorized the formation of the Model Minority Myth as an example of racist love, as opposed to racist hate!

Although my POC credentials come from being half Japanese, I never understood the Model Minority Myth, though never wondered where it came from either. Similarly, I never understood and have always been uncomfortable with Occidental fetishization of my father’s culture, so it was refreshing to read how Ishizuka could contextualize all this historically and theoretically, citing sources to boot.

I understand rebellion against linear stories, but was exhausted by the frantic, whirlwind like, historical time and place jumping of the book. I think the various stories and concepts are really treated too briefly before the author moves on.

Though in defense of Ishizuka’s rapid subject changing, especially by the 1960s and ‘70s there was so much happening all over the place, the nature of the topics covered easily gives way to a manic style of writing not unique to her coverage of the New Left.

Possibly the highlight of the book for me was when Ishizuka wrote about the Asian American movement’s 1950s and ‘60s predecessors in the form of “’social bandits’–prepolitical insurgents who flouted authority and championed the masses against oppression a la Robin Hood and Pancho Villa.”  I found this particularly interesting since much of the New Left had this sort of focus, such as the Young Lords and the Young Patriots in Chicago.

In the final chapter, Ishizuka uses her own generation’s examples of disconnection with the Old Left, and the possibility of lessons lost by what Diane Fujino calls “intergenerational discontinuity.” It’s a fair warning, and a good note to end on.

Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.

1385 Broadway, 5th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Reviewed by Leonie Sherman

What does an anti-Assad activist do after she receives the coded phone call that means the police are coming for her? How does a mother determine whether her son is alive after more than 300 people are killed in a single day in their hometown? Dispatches From Syria: the Morning They Came For Us, by Janine Di Giovanni, illuminates the causes and consequences of the Syrian conflict through the stories of people who live there.

The book details Di Giovanni’s experiences traveling around the country between June and December 2012, when the civil war was barely a year old. Each chapter bears the name of a Syrian city or region. The author makes each location the gateway to a geographical, cultural and religious history that adds depth to the searing stories she collects from the individuals who call the place home.

Though Di Giovanni includes a thorough and concise chronology, dating back to the 3rd millennium BC (over three quarters of the events detailed take place between 2011-2015) the book itself is not in chronological order. This can be confusing for a reader, but also helps them empathize with the disorientation of Syrian citizens.

As an award winning foreign journalist, Di Giovanni had access to the Syrian elite. She records the voices of the wealthy and powerful, some of whom are vigorous Assad supporters, or in outright denial about the crimes perpetrated by their government. Their accounts are jarring, but ultimately help Di Giovanni provide a richer portrait of the Syrian revolution than many of her contemporaries.

The Morning They Came For Us is a compelling account of critical current events. Readers will learn about the Syrian Civil War, but more importantly they will feel some of the intimate pain that every military conflict generates. I couldn’t put this book down, but now that I’ve finished and reflected on it, I can’t wait to pick it up again.

We’re publishing two obituaries of people close to Slingshot collective who died in the Ghost Ship artist warehouse fire in Oakland Dec. 3 in which 36 people died. The fire had a profound impact on the underground scene in the East Bay — it felt like everyone knew someone who died and many of us knew a number of people. Such a great loss leaves a terrible void. It isn’t feasible for Slingshot to publish 36 obituaries but we’re sorry to leave people out.

 

By Hayley

It is with a heavy heart that we share that Ara Jo, who drew some of the pages for the 2013 Organizer, perished in the fire at the Ghost Ship art collective in Oakland on December 3.

I met Ara Jo at the Paco Dog Collar shop in 2012. I was handing out Slingshots. I had no idea if she worked there or was just hanging out or what. When she saw the Slingshot, she got super excited and mentioned she’d always wanted to draw pages for the Organizer, and it so happened there were some pages left, so she was able to join in. She was so flattered and tickled to have her work in Slingshot, it helped me feel excited about the project.

Ara Jo was a key figure at Oakland’s Rock, Paper, Scissors Collective and a prolific zinester. She was one of the main organizers of the East Bay Zine Fest. The numerous memorials that spanned the weeks after the fire were touching testaments to Ara Jo’s impact in several communities. Over and over at these memorials, friends described how infectious Ara Jo’s excitement was and how strongly she believed in the inner worth and creative projects of her friends. Although her passing leaves gaps in the lives of all who knew her, her presence imbued those around her with the courage of self-expression. Her bubbly enthusiasm about all things creative was contagious. It was great to have her at creative jam sessions. Her well-wrought line-art defiantly challenged social norms.

Now is the time to make art like our lives depend on it. For Ara’s memory, and for all the great artists we’ve just lost.

Today and everyday we want celebrate the badass no-apologizes life of Denalda (who the newspapers are calling “Nicole Siegrist” for some reason), who lost her life in the fire at the Oakland Ghost Ship. She was formerly based out of the Sketch Pad, an Oakland dream squat circa 2014. You could usually find her around at the women-only squats, Fern and Eris, and pretty much anywhere underground worth being. She was in this band, Introflirt, with Charlie Prowler (who the normies labeled as “Ben Runnels”) who died in the fire as well. Their dark synthpop music was the backdrop for many a good house show.

Denalda fucking knew what it was to be a squatter; to be in it for real. To fucking take that time and space you need to have your real self emerge. To take it from the city and state, yeah! Everything Denalda did, she meant. Nothing she did was fake. It was terrifying when she got mad at you, because you knew she meant it. But her smile was everything. Her emotions were just out there, for all of us. She showed us what it means to take emotional space. To become real. To give others the privilege of getting to know her, of pissing her off.

Hayley: Once I had to ask her to leave an art show due to reports of unruly behavior. I remember her standing there on the sidewalk, her eyes tearing up. She was pissed about having to miss the show, but super forgiving. Like she was hugging me with her eyes. Like, even while getting thrown out of a show, Denalda was willing to hold space for me as a complex being. I’m really sad and angry we never got to resolve things. Fuck.

Another collective member:

The city coroner tells us that everyone in the Ghost Ship died of smoke inhalation before the fire got them, so they didn’t suffer too much. Is that supposed to make us happy? She’s still gone. What hurts is to still feel a lot of love for her. Like she’s not here any more, and there’s this love. What do we do with this love?

Fuck ideas of “the afterlife.” Thank you, Denalda, for showing us what it means to live.

 

Thanks if you purchased a 2017 Slingshot Organizer – they are how we pay to print and distribute this newspaper for free. We still have copies available if you want to order some.

And . . . we’re already starting work on the 2018 organizer. If you’re an artist who can draw calendar pages or a cover, we need you — contact us. We’re also looking for:

• Help, during May and June, editing the historical dates

• Additions to and corrections of the radical contact list, in June and July.

• We’ll make the organizer the weekends of July 29/30 and August 5/6, so anything you send us is due July 28. Take your vacation in Berkeley those weekends to help make the organizer.

By A. Iwasa

In spring 2010 I experimented with the Three Sisters Companion Planting, a Native American companion planting of squash, corn and pole beans, for my first time. There were some points where I didn’t follow the directions at all, so I thought I would write a How To article to share the directions I received, how I did or didn’t follow them, and the out comes.

The Three Sisters Garden Package included a 57-gram packet of Tennessee Red Cob corn, one ounce of Kentucky Wonder Garden Beans, and three ounces of Seminole Pumpkin seeds.

The plot is supposed to be a circle 25 feet in diameter, and a diagram is below. The packet of corn was far more than I needed, and I ended up planting out a rectangular area that was roughly 25 feet by 60 feet, using the pattern recommended, with seed left over.

The corn is supposed to be a tall and sturdy variety, to support the pole beans and planted when the soil was warmed up and the nighttime lows are only about 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

In southern Iowa that year, it was shortly after Mayday. The corn should be planted out in mounds that should be five inches high and 18 inches across. I later noticed I was supposed to flatten the tops, which I didn’t do. I made the mounds with compost of mostly broken down straw and sheep manure. This turned out to keep the mounds together really well through fairly heavy rains that spring when the soil which is heavily clay was all flattened out around the mounds. The mounds should be separated five feet from the center of each next mound, and in staggered rows. Four corn seeds should go into the mound forming a six-inch square. I buried each seed of corn with a handful of compost from another pile that was mostly broken down food waste, straw, grass, goat and chicken manure. The seed germination rate was nearly 100%, though a few plants turned yellow and died.

A comrade tilled in between the mounds then I cultivated in between the mounds with a hoe, and worked some of the soil onto the mounds, to try to help them keep their form.

When the bulk of the corn was roughly four inches tall, I planted four bean seeds per mound three inches from the corn plants, making squares like in the diagram below.

The one-ounce package of beans was half of what I needed, and a comrade bought me another packet so I could finish planting out the area.

I was supposed to wait until the beans sprouted before I planted the pumpkins, but the day the beans were supposed to start germinating we were expecting heavy rains, so I went out, cultivated with a hoe again, and made mounds for the pumpkins the same way I did for the corn and beans, in between the central mounds of corn and beans. Again, the amount of pumpkin seeds didn’t match the ratio for corn.

The directions, as shown above, advocated filling nearly all the areas between the corn and bean mounds with squash mounds, planting three seeds per mound, and then thinning to two per mound after germination.

Due to lack of seeds and my previous experience with squash, cucumbers and pumpkins there, confident in their ability to take over the area, I ended up mostly making two rows of mounds. They went through the corn patch long ways between the corn and bean mounds, with two pumpkin seeds and handfuls of compost per mound. I made a couple other mounds to use my last four seeds on the edges, so I could still train the vines to grow along the corn patch if I had to.

I was supposed to only hoe the plot one more time if I had to, but I was nervous and kept the plot cultivated very well until the pumpkins started to fill out.

Possibly because it was too wet and/or cool, the bean and pumpkin seeds didn’t germinate too well, at about 50%. But what did germinate was vigorous! Very quickly the beans started to grow up the corn, and the pumpkins filled up the ground. The corn grew to be some ten feet tall and I saw why I probably didn’t need to cultivate as much as I did after all.

By Mark C. Marino

A story has been running all night through the streets of Los Angeles. “Fake News, It’s everywhere.” We caught up with it just long enough to take a selfie with it before it leapt off the Hollywood sign. It wasn’t the first. Fortunately, it sustained only minor injuries.

Fake News is a contemporary moral panic. It’s noise jamming the channels of transmission, but it’s also troubling our ability to recognize real news. It may have even influenced the recent U.S. Presidential election.

In response to this panic, and in order to make sure we left no bandwagon behind, Talan Memmott, the Provisional Provost at the UnderAcademy College, a non-degree granting alternative non-institution of higher learning, and I decided to walk into the mouth of the beast to teach a course in “How to Write and Read Fake News,” subtitled, “Journullism in the age of Trump.”

For the course, we used Medium (medium.com), which is also a strong platform for making any article look like real news, though I don’t know of any fake news scandals that have used it. Our chief organ is The Fake News Reader: (https://medium.com/the-fake-news-reader), which serves as our central course hub. Our journullists have the opportunity to publish in any of our three other course publications: CTRL-ALT-RIGHT: our right-wing tabloid; West of Knob Lick: our left-leaning broadsheet; and The Trumpet Blow Institute: A think tank where journullists can publish fake studies to support their fake news posts.

The goal of the course is to address this moment, what some might call a crisis if they wanted some serious clickbait, by diving straight into the shark infested waters and swimming around. We ask the students to write a Fake News article per day. However, since UnderAcademy is an alternative institution, we give them the option not to, and most of the lazy s.o.b.s (students over burdened) take that second option.

But what is Fake News? For the most part, it’s propaganda. But for our course, I’ve created a typology of about 6 kinds of fake news. Fantasy Fake, stories designed to be fun diversions; Funny Fake, generally satire; Fony Fake, hoaxes and ruses; Falacious Fake, misleading or sensationalized news; Flat Fake, an unfunny story passing itself off as real news; and Falshivka Fake, fake news from Moscow. My way might not be for everyone, and for those who don’t like it there is also “the highway.” However, I do feel that distinctions must be made between various kinds of Fake News, for example between Fake News and fake news, lest we give Fake News a bad name, unintentionally.

What about the Fake News Media? Well, the Trump Administration and his Trump Train have attempted to delegitamize professional journalists by denigrating their work as fake. Historically, this would be considered a kind of psychosis as it represents a break from reality. But in this case, the term is being wielded more as another form of propaganda through censorship and censuring any organization considered to be critical of the administration.

Can their be real news after fake news? I hope not. In other words, if you mean, can we go back to innocent perception of news as being free from ideology, then that would seem to me both unlikely and undesirable. If you mean go back to a time when people did not routinely deny empirical facts, then I’m doubtful but have some hope.

How can we tell real news from fake news? Well, you have got to think critically and triangulate. First, receive all news with a hermeneutics of suspicion. Long before this moment, even before the days of yellow journalism, consumers of news or official announcements needed to read between the lines. On the other hand, an educated citizenry requires sources, other trustworthy authorities, that can be used to try to corroborate or disprove the current story. Even then, a certain critical distance is obviously necessary to assess the legitimacy of those sources.

Curiously, the Trump Army believes that it is doing this critical work by circulating its counternarratives about hidden monetary forces behind grass roots protests or conspiratorial jihads for global domination in Islam. Reading through the Trumpian Twitterverse, I see these messages and the pride and righteous indignation of those who reTweet them.

The bigger question, I suppose, is how does anyone develop the critical faculties to critically evaluate not only the news they are receiving but also their corroborating sources when our tendency is to accept only the stories that jive with our narratives, our politics, our ideology. In a U.S. divided — actively pulled apart — by partisan media channels, how can a thoughtful citizen see past their own biases?

I suspect only through person-to-person human contact with those who believe differently. That is step one.

When did all this fake news start? It started with the first lie, the first rumor. Seriously, fake news seems to begin with the advent of communication itself. I have published a timeline where I try to review some of the more notable moments, though, including wonderful gems like The New York Sun publishing stories of winged humanoids on the moon, the Yellow Journalism that Hearst promoted, and the various attempts to create bogeymen out of one minority group or another (to name a few).

But in more contemporary times, it’s only about as old as the Internet. Here I’m referring to Populist Propaganda or Flat Fakes, or those news stories that look indistinguishable from something you could find posted on abc.com, except it turns out the source is abc.com.com. For as big a difference as those two little letters make to nature of source, the difference between the way those pages look is small.

Are there any fun ways people can approach fake news? I mean, is it okay to have fun with this?

Hmm. Do you want to have REAL fun with fake news? Find a story that seems to good to be true: Trump wins Nobel Peace Prize. Then send it to 15 of your most partisan family members. Watch to see if anyone reposts it on social media, and when they do laugh the bitter guffaws of those who brought lighter fluid to the fire of Rome.

Does satire still have a place? Yes, but it has to learn to be a bit smarter and maybe try to get a bit more sleep. More blue pills, fewer red pills. Or is it the other way around?

What’s the play with the Fake News Course? Well, the UnderAcademy has a tradition of provocative courses, including my class in Grammar Porn. Talan and I felt the current moment was offering an assault on reason, so we figured we’d assault it right back. In other words, to fly straight into the mouth of the fake news beast and see if we could at least make it down to the entrails.

Does the fake news class really teach people to write fake news? What are some of the assignments?

We teach people what is in fake news, largely through modeling and burying them in readings, and we also spend a little time explaining our 80-20-10 model of Fake News writing. However, what they do with that information is up to them? Most of them seem to be ignoring it.

I think my favorite is the post-fact checking, in which we ask students to corroborate an existing fake news story by finding support for its claims on the Internet. For every fiction, you can find a dozen sites (or more) with the same story. It’s very hard to break out of that bubble.

How does fake news connect with your broader experience of subverting / bringing play to the new media? (and what is the new media? How might we think of it?)

I have a bit of a history in troubling the waters of new media. First, there’s the overall creative category of netprov, or improvised networked narratives, that Rob Wittig and I have been working to promote. Our recent collaboration with Samara Hayley Steele and Cathy Podeszwa, Thermophiles and Love, brought play to online dating as we imagined a 5-gendered dating site for micro-organisms.

Other netprovs have been a bit more hoaxy. In Realy: Being @Spencerpratt and Speidishow, Rob and I played in the world of a Reality TV Star, playing with the borders of the same surreality in which our current President flourished. However, our work was to play improv and poetry games with the followers of Spencer Pratt and his wife Heidi Montag.

We took up a more direct political cause with Occupy MLA, a fictional occupy collective taking on the Modern Language Association, particularly on the topic of adjunct labor. However, we learned quickly that sometimes literary organizations like when things operate literally.

Our goal with these was never to troll or moll or manipulate. Our goal was create art that challenged people’s relationships to social media and that raised important issues through the telling of stories of characters. For example, the Occupy MLA group were terribly dysfunctional, ridden with in-fighting and acrimony, dragged down by the collegiate forces they sought to oppose, all the slings and arrows that assaulted their self esteem. Tempspence, the obscure poet who took over @SpencerPratt’s account, only wanted to get his name out there, but because he had taken on someone else’s (illegally) he was doomed to obscurity.

Even in our fake news class, we have fictional characters, who are posting articles — but their articles challenge the authority and structure of the class itself. So in my impish brain, I guess I’m always trying to undercut any dogmatic agenda my self-righteous brain might put forward as a way of avoiding some of the plights of orthodoxy and to explore the realm of what’s really at stake, the realm of our humanity (and inhumanity).

There is the money-making factor of face news. Should we take advantage of it while it lasts?

There’s money in lots of things. Selling mortgage defaults, oxycotin, steaks. So if that’s your thing, have at. But the biggest money will go to those who own the sites that serve up the ads on news fake and real. Want big money? That way go.

Do you think there will always be suckers ready to share fake news? I hope so. It’s perhaps the most truly American virtue.