Boldly Going Where No Zinester Has Gone Before: Zine Reviews

Zine Reviews

Å¡! Baltic Comics Magazine #10

komikss@gmail.com Biedrība Grafiskie stāsti
Robežu iela 18-4
Rīga, LV-1004
Latvia

Each volume of the Latvian Å¡! is centered around a theme. The concept pushing #10 into the world is “sea stories,” which half of the time means the beach. The beach marks our entry into the dominant geography of the ocean. The beach offers us comfort in the face of the open sea. These comics, done by Baltic artists, as well as artists from abroad, explore the fears and joys that accompany human relationships with the sea. The 146-page publication is perfect-bound and printed in full-color. Twenty-nine artists contributed to this issue.

Something for everyone. (joey)

Datacide: Magazine for Noise and Politics #11

datacide@c8.com C. Fringeli c/o vision

P.O. Box 591 CH-4005 Basel, Switzerland

MRR-style publication with stories in the front (business), reviews in the back (party). Seemingly these cats are talking less about “noise” in terms of non-musical sound specifically, than as a generic term for electronic music in Europe. This issue includes pieces on raver politics, right-wing elements in martial industrial & neofolk, poetry, and reading recommendations. Layout is so plain you’ll be looking around for ketchup. (joey)

Artifacts of Light

luperci@gmail.com

Carefully presented photographs of empty landscapes. Black frames border these glimpses into silent films that never were. Light finds its way to the viewer twice removed: once through the photographs, and a second time through photocopy (this is a conservative estimate… if one considers the number of times an image can be copied for a zine, it could be much more). The graveness of the photos seems to hint at the world-weariness mentioned by the author, an Albuquerque-to- Oakland transplant, at the end of this collection. Recommended punk-house coffee

table zine. (joey)

North American Yob

P.O. Box 4912 Thousand Oaks, CA 91359

The mind behind Southern Californian zine BACON IN THE BEANS is back with a new one. The font gets just as small as previous issues, so bring out your magnifying glasses and enjoy. Starts out with a story about sexual segregation at a Florida KFC continues on with bad advice and all-around degeneracy with a soundtrack. This issue has a couple of comics, including a page full of puns by Slimey Valley legend Joe Franke, of 80s fanzine LIFE IS A JOKE. The author promises an answer to the riddle “Who’s the one posing? The punker or the sheep?” in issue #4 so stay tuned. (joey)

Scam #9: Damaged 1011 Bedford #3 Brooklyn, NY 11205

Long-time writer Erick Lyle spent his 2012 researching the story behind Black Flag’s “Damaged.” And did he put some work into it. Lyle’s work included interviews with all of the bandmates about the recording that he wouldn’t hear until 1988. For not having lived it the first time around, Lyle does some serious footwork to make this a worthy addition to the Black Flag Library (c). Chronicles the war on the punks by LAPD. Understand that police story. I will always have respect for the band that provided my first glimpse of an anarchist lifestyle. It was all through a fourth generation copy of Decline of Western Civilization playing at my local record store. Seeing that they managed to live in closets, without understanding exactly why, and avoid rent to make music was awe-inspiring and terrifying to a me at 12-years. Hopefully this zine will make its way into the hands of unknowing youth in a

similar way. (joey)

Scream Queens interview Yacob/Melting Wreck screamqueensradio.tumblr.com

berkeleyliberationradio.net

An accompaniment to the Yacob/Melting Wreak cassette split. Got this one at a house show with what change and lint was in my pocket. This zine contains a transcript of an on-air interview with solo electronics manipulators Yacob and Melting Wreck. Both seem to drift in and out of the Oakland scene with many hats. These cats are pretty political, which made for an exciting interview. The facilitators of the interviews are a collective of DJs who call themselves the Scream Queens, who have a radio show every Wednesday night from 10 pm to 12 am. Like the tape it is meant to supplement, this zine has a side A and B for each interview. Included are life-size reproductions of the Yacob/Melting Wreck tape’s art. (joey)

Nancy: A Queer Zine #1 creepclub.co.uk/nancy

“Hail to the Nancy! Effeminate queers are my heroes.” These are the words that open Alex Creep’s zine. NANCY is a day-dreaming manifesto for the effeminate queer with pop culture on the mind. References include “My So-Called Life”, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, Glee, Ziggy Stardust, and more. Like clip-art, Creep’s cartoons create homes for themselves among the text. The images, both hand-drawn and software-illustrated, feel like escaped characters from 1930s Betty Boop shorts. For all you World Wide Web potatoes, be sure to see Alex Creep’s online presence, which is a meeting place for glitched-out GIFs, music videos, and digital mixtapes. (joey)

The Core infect@hirntrust.at

This colorful comic by Dieter VDO is the European answer to Johnny Ryan. Four short stories manage to incorporate aliens, body-builders, Smurfs, and monster dance parties in just sixteen pages. Full of shiny nudity and violence. Unlike Ryan, Dieter is a bit more playful and less dogmatic. Very phallic art. One representation of poop inside. The people at Hirntrust seem to put in extra effort to make sure degenerate art like this is circulating in the world. (joey)

Size Queen infect@hirntrust.at

Surrealist digital photo-collage on glossy paper. Why he isn’t the official portrait artist of US Presidents might explain the problems the US faces on a whole new level. These portraits devalue the subject matter, highlighting the absurdity of power. Yes, that is Lincoln as a unicorn. Theodore Roosevelt has two space-surfing dinosaurs flying out of his skull. Richard Nixon is high on lawn gnomes. Thank Lachlann Rattray for SIZE QUEEN. (joey)

Shit Your Pants and Do the Death Dance #3 and #4 $2 or trade

NickKiniris@comcast.net

SYPADTDD (!) is made by a bay area teen who goes to a lot of shows, listens to a lot of new albums, and then records it all in his zine. What I like about the authors record reviews is that he sometimes reviews each song on the album and when referring to an album he doesn’t like, he says stuff like “it’s not really my cup of shit.” The band interviews are funny and entertaining and with each issue getting progressively better, issues 3 and 4 go hand-in-hand, showing that the author has found his niche and even have him showing more of himself through the writings that were not found in issues 1 and 2. Highlights in issue 3 are the cool flyers for upcoming shows and ads for his OWN zine. And, in issue 4, the readers are finally clued in as to what the death dance really is. There’s no way you could flip through the pages of this zine and get bored when both the writing and eye-catching cut and paste style on every page is frantic, fun, and drenched with humor and attitude. I look forward to many more issues and catching up on all the latest bands and shows through the author’s (enthusiastic) point of view.(vanessa x)

Jealouzine: Hellousy is Real #2 $2

jealouzine@gmail.com, jealouzine.tumblr.com

The stories in this Jealouzine are all very personal and very real. Each contributor has written (or drawn) their own experience with jealousy, a topic that’s not so easy to talk about. The stories range from very serious self-help style essays to fun and amusing comics about queer jealousy, where the author creates a new name for her jeawlousy as “chillarity.” My two critiques would be that some of the handwriting and fonts were too small to read but I was able to understand them, and I would have liked to see a male perspective, as this zine had all lady contributors. Regardless, I found each story to be important and inspiring and Jealouzine shows how different our triggers, our feelings, and our relationships can be. This is not just a zine, but a conversation piece and a chance for the reader to reflect on the subject and work through their own feelings of jealousy. If you’ve ever dealt with jealousy or are currently dealing with it and want a DIY therapy session, pick this up today! (vanessa x)

Keeping Carbon in the Ground: Indigenous Sovereigntist camp blocks proposed pipeline corridor slated to move tar sands and shale gas to Asia

As the winter snow descends on the North creating a pristine canopy of green and white, resistance remains strong and active at the Unist’ot’en Camp. Here, 66kms south of the colonial town of Houston, British Columbia, a solid core of indigenous community members and allies are forming a resistance community to protect unceded Wet’suwet’en territory. These ancestral lands are being threatened by several multi-billion dollar pipeline projects. These proposed pipelines represent the efforts of government and industry to construct a giant ‘energy corridor’ to connect Tar Sands and shale gas extraction projects with ports in Kitimat and Prince Rupert on BC’s west coast. The aptly renamed Carbon Corridor intends to blaze a right-of-way as much as three kilometres wide through hundreds of kilometres of wilderness, farmland, and traditional indigenous territory. The Unist’ot’en and their allies have determined to never allow this to happen.

In 2010 the Unist’ot’en clan decided to clear a site and begin building a cabin on their traditional territory of Talbits Kwa. The cabin is located on the west bank of Wedzin Kwa (colonially known as the Morice River), directly on the path of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway and Pacific Trails Pipelines (PTP). In the summer of 2012, construction on the cabin was completed just in time for the Grassroots Wet’suwet’en to host their third annual environmental action camp. The camp convergence was attended by over 200 supporters from across Turtle Island, and a crystallization of long-term solidarity took place as the grassroots Wet’suwet’en called for a shift from passive support to the forming of a concrete, committed network of allies.

During camp and the following months, many new structures were created including additional outhouses, a smokehouse, a sauna, a root-cellar, and a major expansion of the main cabin itself. Then, to defend against the probability of industry attempting to re-enter the territory, members of the Unist’ot’en and Likhts’amisyu clans made the important decision to permanently occupy the camp following the August convergence. The family did this to make a permanent home, and to allow for 100% monitoring of territory.

Crow, a permanent supporter at camp, reflects on the late summer and fall berry-picking season, and on the ecological stewardship of the territory practiced by the Wet’suwet’en. “When I arrived at camp in early September, I was amazed by the vastness of the berry patches. I had never seen such a wealth of berries in one place. Later I learned of practices that the Wet’suwet’en had to ensure the abundance of the land, practices that today are known as permaculture. More and more I am becoming aware of the wisdom that allowed the Unist’ot’en to live in harmony with the land, in a way that did not degrade the land base and did not rely on exploitation. That way of life, as well as the land itself, is what the Unist’ot’en Camp is here to defend,” states Crow.

The Grassroots Wet’suwet’en

The Wet’suwet’en are composed of five clans: Unist’ot’en, Likhts’amisyu, Gitimit’en, Lakh’silyu, and Tsayu. The Unist’ot’en (or C’ihlts’ehkhyu, Big Frog Clan) are the original Wet’suwet’en distinct to the lands of the Wet’suwet’en. Over time in Wet’suwet’en History, the other clans developed and were included throughout Wet’suwet’en territories. The Unis’tot’en were the strongest and most resilient clan as they dominated vast regions of Wet’suwet’en territory, and were know to adapt and thrive in very treacherous terrain. To this day, Wet’suwet’en territory remains unceded. They are not and never have been under treaty with the colonial government, and they maintain complete sovereignty over their lands which are not under the dominion of the Canadian state.

In order to assert their traditional sovereignty over the territory, the Grassroots Wet’suwet’en have broken away from the Office of the Wet’suwet’en (OW), an institution that was created as part of the treaty process with the Canadian government. Despite the presumptuous title, however, the Office of the Wet’suwet’en is not the representative of the Wet’suwet’en people, it is an illegitimate colonial proxy-institution that remained after all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en opted out of the treaty process in 2008. Today the Office of the Wet’suwet’en remains as a hub for corrupt community members to sign up-front deals with industry, which normally come with cash incentives. Most recently, OW has signed confidentiality and communications agreements with PTP and are trying to reignite the defeated treaty process with the government.

In the present day, the more traditionalist and grassroots elements of the Wet’suwet’en have designated themselves the Grassroots Wet’suwet’en to identify as separate from certain corrupted and co-opted segments of their nation. Asserting themselves as Grassroots Wet’suwet’en they do not operate from a boardroom, they walk and breathe their laws with a powerful and unbreakable marriage to the land.

The Pipelines

Several companies have proposed projects intending to cross Wet’suwet’en territory as part of industry and government’s conceptual “Energy Corridor.” Several shale gas pipelines are also proposed to run from Summit Lake and the Horn River and Liard Basins, fracking fields in northeastern BC’s Montney Shale Formation. The intended destinations of these pipelines are LNG processing terminals in Kitimat and Prince Rupert.

The first and most immediate threat to Wet’suwet’en territory is the Pacific Trails Pipeline (PTP), which intends to transport shale gas through a 42 inch diameter bidirectional pipeline. The project including the pipeline and processing terminal on the coast called Kitimat LNG (KLNG) was shared by EOG Resources, Encana Corp., and majority owner Apache corp. of Houston, Texas. PTP is the intended trailblazer of the prospective ‘energy corridor,’ and plans to stretch 463km from BCs fracking fields, all the way to the Douglas Channel on the west coast.

Then, on Christmas eve, the KLNG/PTP project sent the Unist’ot’en resistance an interesting present. In a surpise move EOG and Encana sold their shares in the project to Chevron Canada, a subsidiary of Chevron Corporation, which will now move into a 50% ownership position along with Apache for the continuation of the project. This consisted of a big shift in the complexion of the project considering the small-player-status of EOG and Encana, vs. Chevron as the second biggest oil company in the U.S.

Coastal GasLink is another prospective shale gas pipeline and LNG terminal project proposal. The pipeline would initially carry 1.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day from the Montney formation over 700 kilometres from Groundbirch, near Dawson Creek, also to Kitimat, on the west coast. The project is owned by a consortium of Companies called LNG Canada led by Shell Canada Limited, including Mitsubishi Corporation, KoreaGas (KOGAS), and Petrochina. TransCanada corporation is contracted by LNG Canada to build Coastal GasLink, the same company trying to force through the notorious Keystone XL Pipeline.

The LNG Canada project has been estimated to be in the $ 12 billion range, while the Coastal GasLink Pipeline is estimated at $ 4 billion, and according to BC Energy Minister Rich Coleman is slated as “one of the largest, if not the largest, investments ever in B.C.” The pipeline dimensions are projected at 48″ (1.2 meters), six inches larger in diameter than PTP. In short, everything about this pipeline is big.

But the Grassroots Wet’suwet’en have no intention of allowing any of the pipelines to happen. “The Unist’ot’en with Grassroots Wet’suwet’en will stop all pipelines by any means necessary. In solidarity with nations also opposing pipelines in their territories, we do not take any “Not In My Back Yard” approaches in our strong stance against poisoning waters for money and greed,” declares Freda Huson, spokesperson for the Unist’ot’en. “We stand beside communities in all directions taking action to stop the pipelines that exist,…. or proposed pipeline projects awaiting approvals.”

Resisting the Carbon Corridor

The Grassroots Wet’suwet’en have already twice acted to protect their territory from contractors working for the Pacific Trails Pipeline (PTP) project. In November of 2011, they confronted, and escorted out, PTP field workers attempting to carry out directional drilling.

Just over a year later, On November 20th, a crew of surveyors was intercepted at the cabin site entering Unis’tot’en territory. In the absence of Freda Huson, Toghestiy, hereditary chief of the Likhts’ amisyu clan invoked biKyi’ waat’en, the right of the husband, in telling the industry surveyors to immediately leave the territory, and issued an eagle feather to the crew. In Wet’suwet’en law, an eagle feather indicates a first and only warning of trespass.

After they were turned back, a crew from Unis’tot’en camp snowmobiled some 20 kms to retrieve materials left behind by the work crew. The materials were confiscated and brought back to camp where they are being held until Apache and PTP agree to open up appropriate lines of communication with the Unis’tot’en. An active blockade of the territory started and a letter was delivered asserting the sovereignty of Wet’suwet’en territory and denying of consent to the pipeline project, stating that “any further unauthorized incursion into traditional Wet’suwet’en territory will be considered an act of colonialism, and an act of aggression towards our sovereignty.”

On December 6th, PTP under the cover of FNLP (First Nations Limited Partnership) held a town-hall meeting informational session at the Moricetown Band Office in an attempt to entice the community with the promise of economic benefits. The grassroots Wet’suwet’en quickly mobilized and stormed the meeting with banners, drums, and a traditional war dance. Towards the end of the meeting, Lhtat’en, an Unist’ot’en elder, speaking decisive words declared, “the Unist’ot’en have never lost any wars, and we won’t lose this one either!!” Facing overwhelming opposition and pressure from hereditary chiefs and clan members, the meeting was cut short and the FNLP reps fled without addressing the media.

Developing a Grassroots Network

The support from allies across the country during the November 27th day of action, Raising Resistance, proved that grassroots networks working together can equal or surpass the efforts of large NGO coalitions. Having money but often lacking base support, the NGO model has shown itself capable of mobilizing, and often wasting, large amounts of resources towards sensationalist one-off actions, and incapable, or uninterested, of developing meaningful relationships with communities. That is why the Unist’ot’en and Grassroots Wet’suwet’en in 2011 made the decision to turn from unhealthy, non-reciprocal NGO partnerships, and to go the grassroots direction instead looking to long-term sustained relationships for the future. In this context of looking to genuine, long-term community building, collectivist and mutual aid principles brought forward by Anarchist allies at camp have meshed well with communal indigenous practices.

Now is a crucial time to develop that spontaneous outpouring of grassroots support into a sustained solidarity network. Straight up, community awareness creates increased security for the camp. The more people that know about us and actively show support, the harder it is for government and industry to move against us.

The past and the future connect on the territory in a very important way. Hereditary chief Toghestiy explains how “the Grassroots peoples have a great potential to reverse impacts of colonization and eradicate the resultant social and spiritual poverty by continuing to show the next generations to walk with their laws. The Grassroots peoples of the Wet’suwet’en are healers, warriors, elders, hunters, fisherpeople, knowledge keepers, and are culturally driven.”

The camp and growing community at Talbits Kwa is an effort to get back to the land, and to reassert traditional practices. One of those practices is the Free Prior and Informed Consent Protocol where all visitors upon arrival wishing to enter the territory, must introduce themselves and answer questions before being granted permission to enter. This is a living assertion of traditional Wet’suwet’en law asserted via protocols such as this one for thousands of years. The Wet’suwet’en also had to present themselves as such when travelling to neighbouring peoples’ lands to conduct trade, build and maintain relationships, assist allies in battle, and attend feasts and ceremonies.

In the contemporary context, the Free Prior and Informed Consent protocol is part of an ongoing process of decolonization and harmonization. It serves as a re-actualization of natural law and a manifestation of mutual freedom and respect in moving across land and territories without state borders. It also presents an opportunity to implement a new standard of autonomy within indigenous territories, re-establishing spaces free of the existence of the state. One of the greatest necessities in addressing the global ecological crisis is the imperative to localize our economies, and this also requires us to localize our communities. As such, this new emancipatory process that the grassroots Wet’suwet’en have adopted offers an opportunity not only for political and cultural decolonization, but for the creation of healthy, local, and sustainable communities. The collective aspect of their strategy is that they are not claiming ownership over the grassroots FPIC protocol, but actively encouraging other clans, nations, and territories to do so as well.

Likhts’amisyu Chief Toghestiy speaks of harmonization as moving beyond decolonization. Having shed the social and cultural damage of the past, harmonization points toward creating a natural balance between human and the wild, and to understanding and coming into harmony with the interconnectivity of everything in the ecosystem. In other words, harmonization is the pursuit of an eco-spiritual balance. Toghestiy speaks of liberating our thoughts in order to cast aside the idea that there are superior and opposing forces. Fighting against something feeds energy to it, and so harmonization seeks to move beyond the idea and the omnipresence of capitalism and colonialism, and to live spiritually, socially, and culturally in a world that is ours, on our own terms.

Starhawk speaks of “embodying the alternative,” and Eduardo Galeano writes about finding answers to the future in the traditions of the past. That is what we are doing here. We are not just fighting to overcome the affliction of industrial consumerism, but for a way of life that is ancient and perfect. What is now unfolding on the west bank of Wedzin Kwa is not simply resistance to a pipeline and the defense of a territory, but the building and rebuilding of a radical alternative and traditional living. That is why such a strong emphasis at camp has been placed on community building and empowerment, so that organizing and resistance can be integrated into the spaces of everyday life. This is pre-figurative organizing that confronts an injustice by counteracting it with an alternative. The resistance community, therefore, is the illustration that building and creating is the most comprehensive form of resistance, that there is no separation between life, and the defense of life.

It is time to start creating communities that are both able to sustain themselves on their own terms, and able to maintain their autonomy from the ever-present threats of industry and state. Clearly it is a tall order to start a community from the ground up, and for that reason we encourage the forging of strong alliances with communities already on the ground, and new ones to come. The Unist’ot’en Camp anticipates total victory in its fight against the carbon corridor and the hope is that the success of this community can serve as an inspiration and as a demonstration of the possibilities born of strategic occupation. We expect victory to come with sacrifice and this success to come with our ability to mobilize and build relationships with the people, groups, and communities around us.

Let us unite and harmonize by always putting the earth first!

Check unistotencamp.wordpress.com to donate or unistoten on facebook.

Growing The New World In Our Hearts: Radical Spaces Around the Globe

Here are some new radical spaces that we’ve heard about since we published the 2013 Slingshot Organizer plus some corrections to the organizer. Each in their own way and with their own style is an experiment. These are spaces for building physical expressions of a world where human beings, love, creativity, solidarity and the environment matter. These counter-institutions allow us to practice cooperating with others to create community — not just the carbon-copy retail wallpaper always blindly scraping for another buck.

Building something we control that operates outside capitalist limitations can be tough and many of these projects are small and struggling. They need your support. These experiments are crucial because they go beyond just talking about a new world or hoping for a new world. We demand meaningful and pleasurable lives now, not someday in the future. As the radical cafe in Istanbul, Turkey listed below puts it: “We are growing the new world in our hearts, here and now, through sharing and solidarity.”

Check the radical contact list on Slingshot’s website for the most updated list of radical contacts around the globe, and please let us know if you know of spaces not on the list or see errors we should fix: slingshot.tao.ca.

Glenwood Coffee & Books – Greensboro, NC

A worker co-op that hosts events and organizing efforts. They feature zines and locally published hand-bound books. 1310 Glenwood Avenue Greensboro NC, 27403 336-525-1646 glenwoodcoffeeandbooks.com

Nowe Miastor – New Orleans, LA

A collectively run community space with an art/performance space, a library and meeting space in a converted warehouse that hosts events. Above the space is an affordable housing coop. 223 Jane Place, New Orleans, LA 70119 
(Mail: PO Box 53011, NOLA 70153
) (504) 451-3693 nowemiastornola.org

Black Coffee Co-op – Seattle, WA

A worker’s co-op café with a library and infoshop that hosts community events. Open 7 days a week. 501 E. Pine St. Seattle, WA 98122

Interference Archive – Brooklyn, NY

An archive and gallery that explores the relationship between cultural production and social movements with objects that are created by social movements: posters, publications, t-shirts, buttons, photographs, audio and video. They have a study center and host talks, screenings and workshops. Open Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday. 131 8th St. #4, Brooklyn, NY 11215 interferencearchive.org

Bread Uprising Bakery – Durham, NC

A bakery co-op that features sliding scale pricing for organic and vegan items. 816 Yancey Street
 Durham, NC 27701 breaduprising.wordpress.com

Stone Soup Community Center – Worcester, MA

A center that houses artists, activists, non-profits, co-ops and grassroots organizations. They are re-opening after a fire. 4 King St. Worcester MA 01610

CRIC House ‘n’ Homestead – Sebastopol, CA

A rural permaculture project. CRIC stands for Cultural Rehabilitation Internship Center. No drop-ins please – contact them first if you want to visit. 13024 Green Valley Rd. Sebastopol, CA 95472 (707) 829-3551 crichouse.blogspot.com

Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) – New York, NY

A museum of squatted buildings and community gardens located in what used to be C Squat. 155 Avenue C New York, NY 10009 (973) 818-8495 www.morusnyc.org

Willamantic Food Coop – Willamantic, CT

A food co-op. 91 Valley St. Willimantic, CT 06226
 (860) 456-3611 willimanticfood.coop

Durham Bike Co-op – Durham, NC

An all-volunteer community bike shop with tools where you can learn to fix bikes. 715 Washington St. ‪Durham, NC 27701‬ (919) 675-2453 durhambikecoop.org

The Bikery – Seattle, WA

An all-volunteer community bike project with tools and resources help people fix their own bikes. 1265 South Main St. Seattle, WA 98144 (206) 568-3535

Plan B Bikes – New Orleans, LA

A do-it-yourself bike shop with tools and parts. 1024 Elysian Fields New Orleans, LA 70116 (504) 272-PBNO (7266) bikeproject.org

Living Energy Farm – Louisa, VA

An experimental farm project that aims to be self-sufficient without using any fossil fuels. Residents also practice income sharing. 1022 Bibbs Store Rd., Louisa VA 23093 www.livingenergyfarm.org

Tahoe Cooperative Community Center – South Lake Tahoe, CA.

A 900 sq. ft space that shares with the Tahoe Wellness Center and holds events, dance & art classes, yoga, tarot readings, meditation with plans for a Free School. 3445 Lake Tahoe Blvd. S. Lake Tahoe 96150 (530) 544-8000

Acorn Community – Mineral, VA

An income-sharing sustainable egalitarian community. 12159 Indian Creek Rd. Mineral, VA 23117 (540) 894-0595 acorncommunity.org

Pizza Carrello – Gillette, Wyoming

A mobile wood-fired pizza truck that acts as a gathering spot for alternative community in a very rural, isolated area. Check for each day’s location:

(307)363-1743 www.pizzacarrello.com

Hydra Bookshop – Bristol, UK

A cooperative operated radical community bookshop, coffee shop and meeting/event space that grew out of Bristol Radical History Group. 34 Old Market,
 Bristol, 
BS2 0EZ
 0117 3297401 www.hydrabooks.org

Bokkafé Vulgo – Gothenburg, Sweden

A queer, vegan, anarchist bookshop and cafe that hosts meetings and events. Nordhemsgatan 49, Gothenburg. +46(0)31-364 64 54

26A Collective – Istanbul, Turkey

An anarchist collective that operates a cafe and a bookstore at two locations and hosts meetings, events. Their website is translated into Farsi, Russian, Greek, Georgian, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Porteguese and contains an inspiring manifesto. Tel Sokak No: 26 / A Beyoglu / Istanbul 
(0212) 243 60 85 www.kolektif26a.org

Errors in the 2013 Slingshot organizer

• The Bellingham Alternative has a new address and website: 306 Flora St., Bellingham, WA 98225 altlib.org

• Harmony House in Lincoln, NE doesn’t exist anymore.

• We published the address for the Hugo House in Seattle, WA – the project we meant to feature is/was the Zine Archive Publishing Project which Hugo has frustrated / attempted to take over. Go and check it out for yourself.

• We forgot to list The Birdhouse at 800 N 4th, Knoxville, Tennessee 37917. Sorry.

• Biblioteca Popular de Barrio in Chicago, IL has shut down.

• We got mail returned from the Front Stoop in Lincoln, NE. Not sure if they’re gone or ?

• The Sporeprint Infoshop has moved. Their new address is 979 E. 5th Ave., Columbus, OH 43201. www.sporeprint.info They are now located at a building owned by the Third Hand Bike Coop. www.thirdhand.org

• We got mail returned from Sister’s Camelot – it seems like their new address may be 2647 37th Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 55406.

• Blast-o-Mat in Denver, CO morphed into two new venues, neither of which is called “Blast-O-Mat”. The original location at 2935 W. 7th Ave. is now called the Seventh Circle Music Collective. There is also a new venue called Aqualung’s Community Music Space at 4315 Delaware St.

• Hammer Time! in Fort Collins, CO has closed the 1000 E. Laurel St. location and moved their infoshop to GNU Gallery at 109 Linden St. and is changing names but we don’t have new contact info yet.

• Rag and Bones Bike co-op moved to a larger location:

3110 W. Leigh St. Richmond VA 23230. (804) 386-5692 ragandbonesrva.wordpress.com

• SPATT in Gothenburg, Sweden no longer exists.

2013 Calendar

February 14 – 18

Earth First! Winter Rendezvous Athens, OH appalachiaresist.wordpress.com

February 16

International Anti-Surveillance Day in solidarity with Berlin (see p. 14)

February 17

Los Angeles Zine Fest, @ Ukranian Cultural Center (4315 Melrose Ave) lazinefest.com

February 23

International Day for Privacy anonrelations.net/idp13-privacy-day-655

March 3

International Sex Worker’s Rights Day Look for events in your region

March 8

International Women’s Day internationalwomensday.com

March 15th

International Day of Action Against Police Brutality, Corruption, and Murder Demo Birmingham, UK facebook.com/birminghamstrong4justice

March 16 – 17

Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair XVIII The Armory Community Center @ 14th & Mission, San Francisco, CA bayareaanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com

March 17

Berkeley Anarchists Students of Theory and Research & Development (BASTARD) conference – East Bay sfbay-anarchists.org

March 24 • 4 pm

Slingshot new volunteer meeting / article brainstorm 3124 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley

April 6 • 2 pm

Meeting to discuss how Slingshot relates to digital technology – techies welcome 3124 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA

April 15

Steal Something From Work Day stealfromwork.crimethinc.com

April 15

Zagreb Anarchist Book Fair Zagreb, Croatia. ask-zagreb.org

April 20 3 pm

Article deadline for Slingshot #113 – send articles to slingshot@tao.ca

April 21 – 22

Look up! The Lyrids Meteor Shower peaks during this period

April 25

Denim Day, day to protest rape culture internationally denimdayinla.com

May 1

May Day & International Worker’s Day Ask an anarchist or an immigrant organizer about events in your area

May 12

Mother’s Day, the United States’ original anti-war holiday

May 13

Three Days of Struggle (Noise Festival) in Vittorio Veneto, Italy. codalunga.org

May 24 – 26

Balkans Anarchist Book Fair in Ljubljana, Slovenia a-federacija.org

May 25 – 26

Montreal Anarchist Book Fair and Festival of Anarchy anarchistbookfair.ca

June 8 – 9

The 37th Annual San Francisco Free Folk Festival @ Presidio Middle School (450 30th Ave @ Geary)

August 10 – 14

Joint conference of the Mycological Society of America and the American Phytopathological Society in Austin, TX msafungi.org

Ongoing Events

The San Francisco Critical Mass meets on the last Friday of every month at 6 pm in Justin Herman Plaza

Mynstrual Mistake and Other Slingshot Organizer Notes

Thanks to you if you bought a 2013 Slingshot organizer – selling them funds this paper and other radical projects! We still have a few copies available if you want to buy one or make a wholesale order. This year the binder made about 1,000 slightly defective pocket sized ones, so if you have ideas of ways to give free surplus copies to low-income teens or other folks who are unable to afford one, let us know. Email slingshot@tao.ca. 



We spotted two big errors in the organizer so far:

(1) In the spiral version only, on the 3rd page of the organizer that has a full year calendar for 2013 and 2014, the title at the top says “2013” over the 2014 calendar and “2014” over the 2013 calendar. Please correct it in your copy and tell your friends.

(2) In both versions the menstrual calendar is missing some numbers towards the end of each month. The calendar still works, i.e. the order is correct – you just have to hand-write in the last few numbers for each month. Below is a corrected version that you can paste into your organizer to fix the problem. This is also on our website so tell a friend.

Believe it or not we do have a big group of proofreaders each year, but sometimes errors creep through, even though when the proofreaders finished this year, they left so many sticky notes on the layout sheets that it looked like the organizer had chickenpox.

The award for the most creative use of the organizer goes to Diane of the Origami Resource Center. She made amazing book sculptures out of a box of surplus 2012 organizers and you can see photographs on their website.

Six months ago we agreed to create an organizer “app” for the iphone and other smart phones, but we still haven’t found a programmer who can turn our ideas into reality. If you know how to program smart phone applications, let us know. We can pay the right person to do this work. Let us know if you have specific suggestions for what you would like to see in an app.

We will continue making paper versions of the organizer, too, until someone pries the scissors and pens from our cold, dead hands.

Let us know if you want to help create the 2014 organizer. We’ll work on editing the radical historical dates in May and June, do the artwork for the calendar in July, and put the whole thing together over two hectic weekends August 3 & 4 and 10 & 11. If you want to design a section of the calendar or send us historical dates, let us know by June 22. Send us information for the radical contact list, cover art or features for the back by August 3.

From Sidewalk to Slammer: A New York Teacher Gets a cheap education

Early this summer, I was arrested for participating in a political march and became one of the 7,000 people nationwide jailed as part of the Occupy movement. I was surprised to find myself part of this group, not having intended to commit civil disobedience or otherwise risk arrest.

The march was a Casserole, a style of protest seen recently in Chile and Canada, in which people make a loud clatter by banging on pots, pans, and other kitchen utensils. Casseroles had been occurring for about a month in New York City in solidarity with a student strike in Montreal, which had shut down universities there for three months. The New York marches also highlighted issues of educational access: student debt, tuition hikes, and cuts to public funding of universities. As a teacher, these issues are important to me, but I was drawn to the Casseroles as much for their style: their gesture of converting the tools of domestic labor into the cacophonous instruments of protest. As someone who served food at Zuccotti and cooked a lot for Occupy, it felt appropriate to get out of the kitchen and into the street. This was my third march, and, luckily, the first time I went with someone I knew, an old friend named Benin.

We showed up at Washington Square a little after 8:00pm. There were between 200-300 people milling around, listening to speeches, and getting ready to set out. In addition to the usual culinary noisemakers, a couple drums and a cowbell lent the evening a festive feel, though the police presence was noticeably larger than at recent marches. A little after 8:30, Benin and I moved with the crowd to exit the park at the northwest corner. A few protesters entered the street and walked against traffic, which was stopped at the light. Benin and I crossed Sixth Avenue and turned south at the gutter. But a few steps from the sidewalk, my legs were swept from under me. I was on the ground, my glasses knocked off, two buttons torn from my shirt, my knee hurting. I didn’t see who had done this, but I heard, “He’s on the ground,” and “We’ve got one. We only need one.” Someone bent over me and shouted, “It’s over.” Another voice: “Just take it easy.” Someone else said, “Put your hands behind your back.” I recovered my glasses with some trepidation, announcing that I was doing so. The comment “it’s over” struck me as humorous. I wondered what “it” referred to. The march certainly. “You’ve got me in the wrong movie,” I wanted to say.

As I was handcuffed and placed in a van, people from the march asked for my name. After calling it out, I nodded towards Benin to indicate he would give folks my information. A man yelled, “We love you, Rory!” Soon I was in the van, and my biggest feeling was the absurdity of the situation–being tackled by three large cops for crossing a street. The sense of farce increased as the two police officers, who were stationed in the Bronx, got lost repeatedly looking for the seventh precinct, a police station on the Lower Eastside. Benin trailed the van for a while as it circled Washington Square, and when I scooted over to look out the window, Officer Antwi asked what I was doing. When I mentioned my friend would be calling my family, he treated me to a lecture on paternal responsibility and then, improbably, on Martin Luther King: “You’re not following the King route. You’re going the Malcolm X route. You’re engaging in violence.” When I responded that I didn’t see how I committed any violence, he clarified: “You didn’t listen. You didn’t follow directions.”

The seventh precinct looked like a cross between an upstate pizza parlor and a strip mall office in the Midwest, maybe a tax return outfit. As I was checked in, Antwi said I would probably receive a Desk Appearance Ticket, which would let me leave the precinct in a couple of hours without going to central processing. He didn’t mention the charges, but I assumed (correctly as it turned out) they were disorderly conduct, a convenient catch-all.
I sit alone in a cell at the back of the station for about an hour, when I hear a female voice in front singing the Sesame Street song. She is referred to as “Sarge,” so I think, “could this actually be a police officer?” She is placed in the other cell, out of my vision. About ten more male protesters and one woman are brought in, mostly in their twenties and early-thirties. They include:
Jorge, 26, born in Mexico, grew up in Texas; at one point in the evening, he references Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, though both he and I have trouble explaining it.
Tom, 20, who lives with his parents in Westchester and is still facing more serious charges from May Day. He is very angry to have been charged with resisting arrest: “It was the first time I didn’t resist!”
Joel, 19, does a lot of push-ups and explains how people think he’s an undercover cop because of his style and penchant for Oakley sunglasses.
A man in a dress shirt and shoes who immediately starts meditating. He avoids eye contact, and when someone says something to him he puts his finger to his mouth.
Julian, an anti-globalization veteran of the last 10 years.
A 20-year-old Goth kid who sings duets back-and-forth with Sarge, who is still down the hall. He explains he really wants his DAT so he make it to an Occupy after-party.
Jack, 57, was arrested on December 17, along with several clergy members, after attempting to occupy an abandoned lot owned by Trinity Church. Jack is HIV positive and has been on a hunger and medication strike for three weeks to draw attention to the issues surrounding his arrest.
Mark, late 20s, hipster, complete with coke bottle glasses. People ask if he is with the protest, and he gives the universal gesture for smoking pot. Learning of our situation, he frustrates several protestors by good-naturedly insisting that “Occupy” is a brand and that parodies cannot separate themselves from the media they criticize. I later learn he is an art critic and an archivist at the School of Visual Arts.

In general, I found the hours sharing a cell with ten other protesters challenging. There was a lot of anger and some taunting police, which mostly felt counterproductive, although I did chuckle at cracks about Officer Best’s cheesy forearm tattoo. Occasionally, heated arguments broke out, including over whether someone who got pretty beat up should ask for medical attention or whether he should forego it to expedite his release.

At 1:30 a.m. I was told that because I had an out of state driver’s license, I would have to go through processing at Central Booking, New York City’s downtown jail which is known ubiquitously as “the Tombs.” Jack got angry on my behalf, but he also freaked me out by making the experience sound worse than it would turn out to be: “It’s a nightmare. You can be in with murderers!” Julian, the anti-globalization veteran, tried to reassure: “It’s not so bad. You’ll find a corner and go to sleep. You probably don’t want to talk to people, but talking to people in jail is not such a good idea anyway.” Jack: “You can’t sleep–people will beat you up!” Julian continued to be mentoring, detailing how a trip to Central Booking should last about a day but might stretch into a second. Earlier he taught me an old jailhouse trick where you lay down on the concrete floor, mentioning that a shoe makes a pretty good pillow, which it does.

There were about a dozen protesters waiting outside the jail when I came out to be transferred. They started applauding. Throughout the whole process I was very aware of Occupy’s support as well as the help of the National Lawyer’s Guild, which offers pro bono representation to people arrested while protesting. Knowing they had my back made the whole process much easier.

Three officers drove me in a squad car to the Tombs. After learning that I was a fellow New York City employee, they became oddly jocular with me as they racked up overtime on my behalf. Upon arrival at the jail, Officer Best decided to show his sense of humor, perhaps in revenge for the protesters’ gags about his tattoo. Waiting for an elevator to take us inside, I watched as the police emptied the bullets from their guns. “Don’t worry,” Best deadpanned. “This isn’t the execution wall. That comes later.”

The Tombs lived up to its Gothic name. I was taken down several flights of concrete stairs and was led through winding, empty passages. There was a lot of standing around at checkpoints. I had a retinal scan and another set of mug shots taken. I also had a perfunctory interview with an EMT: I stood at the top of a flight of stairs while he sat twenty feet away, behind a desk, while a zombie show unspooled on a small TV. Following advice from my comrades at the seventh, I decided not to mention my swollen knee.

I got to my cell around 4:00am. In it, 14 men were sprawled out, 13 Black guys and a Latino, lots of people my age, in their mid-to-late 30s and 40s. I sat down next to Will, a guy in sunglasses. Upon finding out I was in for protesting he mentioned he spent a couple of days at Zuccotti, but couldn’t handle sleeping outside. The dominant personality in the cell was the Raconteur, who told a series of fantastic tales (snowboarding off a cliff in Tahoe, being with three naked girls from Dallas but being too stoned to make the most of it). Unfortunately, the Raconteur decided to take me into his act: “Those are expensive shoes; he’s got some money at home”; “He looks like Bernie Goetz”; “his hoodie is Nike too; I always know when people have money.” He also made a few comments about the protests being for whites only.

While this idea about New York Occupy is not really fair, certainly not in terms of its aspirations, it has a grain of truth. My cellmates at the seventh (eight of twelve were white) did not really approximate the demographic mixture of the movement. I would guess most Occupy marches in the city are about 90% white. The over-representation of black and Latino protesters in jail indicated more targeting by police–a targeting which parallels the day-to-day policing of New York streets, the biases of which were on full display in the cell in the Tombs. To the Raconteur, I mumbled a few things about Occupy turning out for the Trayvon Martin protests and anti-Stop and Frisk marches. But I began to sink into myself, practicing an abstracted stare, which came surprisingly natural. In fact, the Raconteur’s last taunt was “Man this dude is too cool–doesn’t he know we’re monsters in here?”
I still had Jack’s warning about violence ringing in my head, and while I was never exactly scared I was definitely uncomfortable. But fairly soon I came to realize there was nothing threatening about my cellmates. Before long people were embarrassedly recounting the trifles they were there for. The trivial nature of the offenses was astounding: things that white or rich people would have walked away from with a ticket at most. The offenses included riding a bike on the sidewalk, riding a bike against traffic, peeing in public, transporting fireworks, a lot of smoking a joint, and one case of dealing pot. One man in my cell had been out on bail awaiting trial for armed robbery, but now he had been arrested for possessing pot. He expressed scorn for the detectives who wasted their time on him.

The Raconteur and an older man named Taylor started talking about Harlem. When asked what part of Harlem he lived in, the Raconteur replied “All of it!” Taylor mentioned that he lived on 140th and 8th Ave, at which point I emerged from my abstraction to say I had been teaching a couple of blocks away from there at City College. Taylor said, “See, this guy is cool. Why are you giving him a hard time?” Taylor relished contemplating what I would teach my students tomorrow, and my nickname from the Raconteur evolved from “Player” to “Teach.” Over the next few hours, Taylor and I commiserated about missing our daughters and laughed about the excuses our partners were making up to cover our absence.

Around 6:00am a corrections officer read off names for morning court appearances, and six of my cellmates joined about twenty other prisoners in chain gangs going upstairs. Thirty minutes later, two more protesters arrived in my cell, Tom the kid who “didn’t resist arrest this time” and the hunger-striker Jack, whom I happily greeted. Other cellmates began to join our conversation about the protests and police violence. It quickly became evident why jail can be a powerful space for consciousness-raising: you have shared conditions, a common enemy, and ready examples of how the system works. There was a lot of cooperation too. People shared food and legal advice (some of it dubious), negotiated cramped sitting and sleeping space, tried to get the guards’ attention if someone else had an issue, and helped each other clean up.

Another dynamic that changed with the arrival of my fellow protestors was that people became at least a little more careful about using homophobic and sexist language (in general the amount I heard the phrase “faggots,” along with “bitches” and “cunts,” was upsetting and somewhat disorienting for me). But people were largely caring and polite with Jack as an out older gay man. I never heard slurs directed towards him and on at least two occasions someone apologized for saying faggot–“you know how I mean it.” Jack would just shrug his shoulders and smile sadly.

There was a free phone in the cell, and I called my wife a couple of times. Overhearing other prisoners’ conversations was a window onto how the damage of arrest spills outward. The man up for armed robbery, which carries seven-to-fifteen years in prison, yelled at a significant other over the phone about the triviality of the new offense. When Tom called home, his father kicked him out after hearing he had been arrested again while awaiting trial. Tom hung up on his mom when she told him to be more conscientious.

“Have more conscience?” Tom said exasperatedly, “I wish I didn’t think so much!” Tom broke down in tears, and Taylor reached out to him as a parent. He told Tom his parents love him, and talked about how slow parents are to come around to respect the things their children do.

Jack and I had more constructive conversations in the Tombs than we could back at the precinct. He described his four previous arrests over fifteen years, including his first arrest at the Matthew Shepherd protest in the late-1990s which drew attention to anti-gay violence. Jack also made a point to ask about how I was feeling. Following a conversation about how the arrests are meant to intimidate he said, “Not to offend, but are you intimidated?” I responded that I was on two different levels. Not only had I seen how easy it is for the police to detain people who are simply at a protest, but the experience was giving me a concrete sense of the system that I’d only understood intellectually before. I knew I was only grazing the tip of the structure, but even this glimpse showed the massive array of force that defends the status quo. A landscape of prisons spread out before my imagination, each designed to humiliate, stigmatize, separate, isolate. I said, “How does one fight against that, let alone transform it?” Jack said, “this whole thing has to be torn down.” I said, “I know, but the question is how.” Jack said, “you have to keep fighting, tell all your friends about what happened to you, put it in a blog.” This article is my small effort to honor my new friend’s advice.

One of the most difficult things of the time was not knowing its duration, lacking signposts to measure progress, and indeed having few markers of time at all. Everyone played a guessing game of how long the process would take. Several times anger washed over me at the time the police were stealing. I imagined my daughter upset in the morning when I wasn’t there, and being more so if I didn’t make it home for dinner or bedtime.

But at 4:00pm my name was called right after Jack’s and I felt like Bob Barker had just invited me onto the Price is Right. I walked in a chain gang with four other prisoners up several flights of stairs. The guards told me repeatedly to move faster, but I couldn’t because my knee was hurting badly at this point.

Upstairs, there were twenty people in a waiting area, some of whom had been there since morning. I talked to an older man, probably in his fifties, who soon became embroiled in a debate with three others. A disagreement swirled around whether he should have run when caught with a joint in Central Park. “That’s youth talking,” he shrugged. “This way, I know it ends here.” His Legal Aid reported back that the prosecutor’s offer was three months in jail. I felt angry for him, but he was stoic and ironic. He explained that he had a decade-old felony conviction for selling marijuana. He was glad the prosecutor didn’t ask for six months.

Pretty soon I met with a National Lawyer’s Guild Attorney, who heard my side of the arrest and explained that I would be offered an ACD (Adjournment Contemplating Dismissal), which meant the charges would be dropped if I wasn’t arrested again within the next six months. Although I felt confident that the allegation that I was blocking traffic would not stand up in court, I was tired and wanted to avoid the hassle of a court date, so told him I would take the ACD. As I was called to the courtroom and said goodbye, one of the kids up for dealing called out, “This dude is our protester. Don’t fuck with him!” It hardly seemed necessary, but I appreciated it.

Entering the courtroom was to pass into a world of civility and decorum, with mahogany pews, men and women in suits, and lots of natural light. The waiting bench for prisoners was made from the same wood, signaling, I suppose, our equal participation in the affair. But on the inside of the elegant barrier that separated our bench from the rest of the court, prisoners had scratched notes from the Tombs, reminders of what structure this space sits above, what it depends upon and reinforces.

I waited for fifteen minutes in court, and then copping my plea took 45 seconds of the judge’s time. Outside the courthouse a support person from the NLG checked in about how my case was resolved and five or six people from Occupy doing jail solidarity offered me snacks. A medic in the group looked briefly at my knee, told me to ice it, and offered a cigarette, which I declined.

Getting home just in time for dinner, I was very happy to soak up the last rhythms of the day. But as we were eating Chinese take-out with my in-laws, who were celebrating their anniversary, I mentioned how I felt a wave of survivor’s guilt, mostly for the poor souls in the Tombs for another night but also for the people this system has its hooks in deeper.

During the experience, many of my cellmates had been able to sleep for a few hours on the cement floor, but I never managed to doze off for more than five minutes. Now, as I lay down in my own room, I was kept awake, by recollections as well as a new emotion: a euphoria, as if I were buoyed up on a swell.
So often while organizing, apathy or indifference appears the real enemy. Many times I’ve had to swallow a sense of embarrassed futility while making a minor ruckus in a day that seems hardly disturbed. But we stand in a moment of possibility and openness, even if it has shut some since last fall, and that moment is attested by the fact that a few hundred kids beating on pots and pans can seem to those in power a serious and dire threat.
Special thanks to n+1 who published an earlier version of this piece at: http://nplusonemag.com/crossing-sixth-avenue
The names of all protestors and prisoners in this article were changed, excepting Jack, who is publicly identified with the movement

Your Soul is your library card: Liberated library enlivens community

In the first recent action of its kind, anti-austerity Occupy activists and radical librarians converged on a newly opened derelict building in Oakland, California’s Fruitvale district on Monday, August 13, and began to stock it with books. The building at 15th and Miller Avenue had been a library for over six decades, then an alternative continuation school founded by radical Chicano activists, and an adjunct to a halfway house across the street; but it had been abandoned for over a decade since. The library was part of a national set of Carnegie grant donations, still known for their architectural beauty; the building remains in the National Registry of Historic Places. But long years of absolute neglect have meant a decaying facade. A crumbling barbed wire fence kept families and children from using the green space on the building’s grounds, and for years has created a dark corner where drug-addicted people and street sex workers escaping police harassment have sought refuge; not surprisingly, and with other things on their minds, they left a pretty foul mess inside and out, that the city had little interest in addressing.

That all changed on Monday morning. Having gained access to the building and grounds, with the main gate mysteriously moved aside and the door wide open, activists and community members spent hours cleaning the built-up and stagnant refuse of the forgotten interior’s accumulated detritus. Others brought milk-crates full of books and stocked the shelves, still in place over forty years after the building had ceased being a library. The call out to resurrect the library brought more books; one activist estimated that there were well over a thousand books on the shelves, sorted by author and subject–non fiction, fiction, young adult, children’s, poetry and Spanish language. Activists suffered under no delusions about the permanency of their act–they realized that at any moment the police could arrive and evict them. They were only a handful for the first hour or two, but the community immediately appreciated the significance of a sudden library in the middle of the neighborhood. The first patron was a sex worker who picked up a romance novel; then a Spanish-speaking resident on his way to work, beaming with joy and surprise.

By noon, kids and families from all over the community were stopping by the new library and picking up books. Books were checked out on the honor system and no card was necessary; as one activist put it, “your soul is your library card”. The response from the community was overwhelming: “thank you for doing this, please stay”. With such an incredible amount of public support for reversing the neglect caused by the city’s austerity logic, it was not surprising to face an exaggerated repressive police response. What did surprise activists was its quickness; less than an hour after a rousing inaugural potluck and poetry reading and the ground-breaking of a community garden bottom-lined by the neighborhood’s children, police cordoned off four square blocks around the library. Dozens of squad cars descended on the neighborhood; police threatened those inside with arrest and gave them scant time to rescue the books and leave the area.

Activists took the books to safety, and, disheartened, agreed to meet at the library again the next morning and decide how to proceed. No one involved had high hopes. The dejected group sat in front of the newly secured space–the front door blocked with plywood, the gate awkwardly fastened with hard plastic zipties–but couldn’t decide what to do. The kids who had set up the first garden-beds showed up, asking if they would be able to finish their work. Somewhat bolstered, the group decided to bring the books back and arrange them in front of the fence. By afternoon, a sidewalk iteration of the library was open, and the banner had been transferred to the fence. The new stacks looked oddly triumphant and unbowed in their ad-hoc milk crate bookshelves. Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez was back, after only a brief pause in its newborn life.

The community seemed more engaged at this point, not less. There was a great deal of anger against the police reaction, not surprisingly–residents roundly denounced the response, given the awful impact of the decrepitude of the building and its new, empowering incarnation as an aggregator of community. More books were brought out by members of the community. Another potluck was held; one member of the community, a master chef, undocumented immigrant and resident of the community for decades, brought home-made fettucine al pesto and flan. It was a bribe, he said, to convince the activists to stay. The community had never had anything like this and needed it. Dozens of similar interactions have followed. Neighbors nightly brought out gallons of coffee and cookies; another neighbor brought a bag full of the tamales he makes and sells for a living to help the activists who guarded the books from being taken by police. The answer from the community was overwhelming; don’t leave. And the activists and the community responded; as one passerby put it, “Alright, you’ve got the books on the sidewalk. They ain’t stopped nothin’.”

Mainstream media, normally addicted to negative stories about occupations, covered the story both honestly and sympathetically. A City of Oakland library administrator and candidate for the district seat even visited, giving their kudos. Despite this wide-spread mainstream support, the radical politics of the action have always been front and center. That’s because they are easy to understand for even the least politically sophisticated persons: people have the right to control their communities, no matter what city government says; taking property left to rot through willful incompetence and/or greed and repurposing it for communal good is an unimpeachable act; cities are perhaps the worst austerity offenders, directing endless finances at “security” measures through police, while cutting off funding for neighborhood keystone services vital to social health. Most importantly, all sanctioned attempts to end this reign of misuse have failed; it must be contested through direct action. Every response to Biblioteca from the community embodied these points.

After the books and garden were transferred to the sidewalk, activists and members of the community focused their attention on the nascent garden bed that had been started by kids from the neighborhood on Biblioteca’s first day, entering the grounds to fill it, despite admonitions from police that trespassing charges could result. The first bed was laid with donated soil, compost and starts, then another was built and filled, then another. Homemade compost bins were added, and some benches were made from discarded lumber found in the neighborhood. There is no shortage of police for stopping the positive use of forgotten property, but dumping of all kinds continued right in front of parked police cars throughout the last weeks. For once, that waste goes towards enriching the neighborhood, not cluttering it.

This is where the rubber met the road for Biblioteca activists. The neighborhood called “murder dubs” didn’t get its name by accident; incidents of violence are high, the neighborhood faced police invasions in the days after the raid as a consequence of shootings and armed burglaries. Moreover, the area is ground zero for International Boulevard’s notorious sex trade, where a small army of young and very often teen women march day and night under a feudal patriarchal regime as toxic as any that mainstream capitalism can produce. Some of Biblioteca’s biggest supporters are ex-felons, and more than one is a former occupant of the halfway house across the street. One of them, in fact, berated police on the day after the raid, recounting all the times he had shot heroin and received blow jobs in the building under their nose. He meant this as a bit of sardonic and comic criticism. But that supporter has battled with heroin addiction for the majority of his adult life – some three decades according to his own math. Facing poverty and a lack of options, he’s tried to kick the habit with Methadone over the last few years, with a marginal level of success. Biblioteca’s most enthusiastic participants are often undocumented; one new bottomliner commented that a relative had been recently deported due to a routine brush with the law that would generate no more than an expensive traffic ticket for a legal resident. The dangers are real, and the ambiguous relationship with the police can be a source of insecurity and stress.

The kids who’ve adopted the building and grounds as their own also face a sobering environment; they live with the constant threat of their parents disappearing into the legal system and facing deportation, sometimes unhealthy and violent home environments, and the call of attractive solutions to tough problems embodied by prostitution, violence and drug use. More than one of the parents of the kids who are responsible for helping to create the community garden are “paleteros” – selling popsicles for lack of better options. They must hope for the best in the summer for their unsupervised children.

There are also logistical challenges. By the end of the second week, activists and community members were facing some predictable stumbling blocks. Books can endure only so long unprotected from the elements. And the elements are not the only enemies facing the milk crate sidewalk library – a 24/7 watch by activists was running on fumes by the end of the first week and exhausted activists faced the reality that the books would be vulnerable to vandalism and large-scale theft from local entrepreneurs or official efforts to eliminate this on-going referendum on city government’s uselessness. Indeed, shortly after activists made the decision to conserve energy for other efforts and cease the night vigils, someone vandalized the library, destroying crates and books, flinging them into the street and over the fence and tearing the eponymous banner in half. Hours of very careful and detailed sorting and categorizing were undone in moments.

Prompted by this sudden and cruel reality check, and the work of recreating the library that would be needed, the activists moved forward with an idea that had been floating around for some time – moving the library into the grounds behind the building along with the community garden. Biblioteca became a self-contained and unique entity, existing on unused city property, ostensibly without permission, and under the control of members of the community. The space weds the healthy food and knowledge base absent from communities like the “Twomps” – the experience of Biblioteca demonstrates that these are the most intensely felt aspirations in the community as residents seek to end their cycle of poverty, violence and decaying infrastructure.

A great challenge has been figuring out how to provide community members the space, sense of security and resources to step up fully and take over what the activists began on the inaugural day of Biblioteca Popular. Regular meetings to discuss the disposition of the library and the building have begun, and while there are many issues to circumvent – including translation and varying levels of political sophistication and vulnerability before the law – community members seem very excited to create a new kind of political and social zone in the Biblioteca.

None of this is easy – the odds of a successful outcome are daunting. But there are heartening signs: police began avoiding the 15th street side of the building where the garden and library were located almost completely. More and more community residents became completely comfortable with enjoying the benefits of a modest library and open green space in their neighborhood, and even undocumented residents who voiced concerns about entering just a few days ago started their first bold forays into the contested space. The community’s natural, if not always recognized leaders, have become increasingly involved, not just in “helping”, but in directing the future of the space, including a campaign directed at eventually opening the building.

Just when the library was on a steady course to become a self-sufficient community aggregator, police arrived again on August 28 to patch the holes in the fence. They had no further orders, however, and the library on the other side of the fence remained intact. The action had a different effect than the one intended by the district’s city council member Ignacio de la Fuente, who most likely ordered the police response. Several neighborhood residents who came to use the library and found its entrance closed were incensed. They went out to organize the community to come to the meeting at 5:30pm that day that had already been scheduled. In one of the most organic congregations of community that I’ve witnessed, about a dozen or so parents came out with their children to talk about the next steps; not only in re-securing the space they were coming to depend on, but to re-open the building as a library and/or community center. Most of the participants were low-income working people of varying levels of documentation in this country, they brought their children, some of whom participated. The meeting was bilingual and facilitation and structure also developed organically, which for me, after a seeming lifetime of frustrating inflexible meeting structures, was especially gratifying. The next steps will include direct actions aimed at council members and a petition drive of neighborhood people which will demonstrate the overwhelming support for community control of the space.

As this article goes to press, participants have agreed to keep the library going on the sidewalk on the 15th street side again, during after school hours, until the grounds are secured again for community use. No matter what happens, Biblioteca lights the way for a new form of activism, where Occupy tactics reshape community organizing and open up the potential for creating organically self-radicalizing communities.
This article adapted from the author’s blog: hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com

Black Bloc Breaks windows, fails to make impact

Gentrification is a process where a working class, low-income neighborhood is colonized by the affluent, and transformed into a bourgeois area. The ’embourgeosification’ of a formerly proletarian quarter often begins when authentically impoverished low-income artists and bohemians move in. Minimum-toil-culture types are drawn to a low-income area by cheap rents, and are also often animated by an authentic antipathy for the larger homogenous corporatized society around us. Their marginal presence is followed by a proliferation of artsy enterprises: high-end galleries, shops, bars and restaurants drawing mainstream prosperous types to shop and consume in an area once thought to be too dark, dirty and (usually) non-white for upper middle class tastes. The gentry come to shop and party, and end up moving in, driving up the cost of rental housing, annexing affordable housing altogether, helping to drive hardcore wage slaves and the poor out of their homes and remaking an area in the image of the gentry’s grasping, conspicuously consuming, conformist selves.

Gentrification is all about private property and the primacy of property rights over human needs in a market society. Vandalism of the property of wealthy invaders is an organic automatic response to the threat of dispossession gentrification brings. But sometimes a brick through a window is only a brick in a window. In fact, in most cases a broken window is just a broken window, a mere expression of atomized powerless rage. Context is everything.

A one-night-only mass vandalism spree that occurred several months ago in San Francisco’s rapidly gentrifying Mission District shows how a successful episode of mass property destruction can in fact be a complete failure in terms of authentic subversive social struggle.

On the night of Monday, April 30th, a rally associated with the Occupy movement was held in the Mission District’s Dolores Park. As the rally ended, a march departed from the park and headed down 18th street, which is now a hyper-gentrified corridor of expensive restaurants and stores. Marchers vandalized a number of highly appropriate targets and eventually turned onto a particularly loathsome stretch of Valencia Street. Valencia is ground zero in the negative class transformation of the formerly working class Mission and on Valencia, more high-end eateries and stores were paint-bombed and had their windows broken. Expensive cars were also trashed. The Mission District police station was paint-bombed and some of its windows were broken as well. According to the capitalist news media, more than 30 stores and restaurants were vandalized. Only one person was arrested, and this person was quickly released.

This event was an excellent first step.

Unfortunately there was no second step:

The people who did the April 30th action made no subsequent effort to communicate their reasons for indulging in mass vandalism, thus robbing their efforts of all credibility. Evidently they said nothing because they had nothing to say. Their mass vandalism spree could have been a foot in the door for a larger message against the gentrification of the Mission in particular and against capitalist society in general, but nothing more was heard from them. With this lapse into characteristic complacency and silence, in their passivity and juvenile ineptitude the wannabe insurrectionary vandals handed a huge propaganda victory to both the Mission’s bourgeois invaders and to the corporate news media, who were able to portray the event as an exercise in self-indulgent adolescent nihilism. This silence of the lambs also left an opening for the event to be denounced by obnoxious liberalish elements in the local Occupy movement, who were given center stage by the dumb vandals to decry the vandalism in any way they choose. In fact, people I spoke with at random, both around the neighborhood and at Occupy Oakland events at Oscar Grant Plaza surmised that the police themselves were behind the April 30th vandalism action. This seems absurd, but the silence of the vandals and their abject social ineptitude led to this.

In an anti-gentrification fight, time is of the essence in all things. In a larger sense, public high-profile anti-gentrification actions have to begin before the transformation of an area has become irreversible. And in an action like April 30th, the larger objectives that motivated the action’s authors–if indeed they had any motivations beyond providing themselves with entertainment–have to be communicated while the event is still fresh in people’s minds. This would have meant some kind of transparently clear public statement within a few days of April 30th. No such statement was forthcoming.

As I write this, in mid-September, it’s been four and a half months since the April 30th nocturnal vandalism spree, and there has been no subsequent noticeable public action against the gentrification of the Mission. The vandalism spree did not lead to any new resistance. Forms that public collective resistance could still take include rowdy demos on Valencia Street during the dinner hour on Friday and Saturday nights to disrupt the pleasures of the table for the bourgies, and big public neighborhood meetings, and sustained picket lines outside of the business offices and home addresses of egregious gentrifiers–all of these in combination would be best.

An article in the ‘New York Times’ about the current tech-boom-generated gentrification of San Francisco compares the tech boom of the late 1990’s and the tech boom of today, saying, “…Back then, antigentrification posters appeared in the Mission urging people to vandalize luxury cars parked in the area…few marks of protest have occurred this time…” (‘New Tech Boom Brings Jobs But Also Worries,’ NYT, June 4)

Barely a month after the April 30th vandalism spree, the event was completely forgotten, and not perceived as a credible threat to the galloping gentrification of one of San Francisco’s last remaining working class areas. Indeed, April 30th compares poorly to the much smaller but sustained effort of the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project of the late 1990’s. The MYEP, with fewer than a handful of people in a long-term effort, did more to publicize gentrification as a class-conflict issue than did a hoard of one-night-standers in April. A useful critique of the MYEP can be found at: www.infoshop.org/myep/love_index.html)

In a period of relative social peace, authentic revolutionary extremist action is all about communication. It is about communication to the virtual complete exclusion of all else. If an action or event fails to communicate, then it has failed completely–and it doesn’t matter how much fun it was for the people doing it. Subjectively, radical individuals have to try to communicate an uncompromising subversive message, on as wide a scale as possible, of direct relevance to the mundane everyday life concerns of mainstream working people. By this measure the April 30th Mission District vandalism event was an abject failure. To some degree, it even represented a brief ‘colonization’ of a real world problem by the 100% American / consumer society / all-entertainment-all-the-time ethos of the Black Bloc.

Black Bloc tactics are solely for the fleeting entertainment of the people who take part in them. They communicate nothing to the world at large. They lead nowhere. They offer nothing to build on. Mainstream working people aren’t going to adopt Black Bloc tactics, or join the Black Bloc at protest ghetto events.
The lack of credibility and commitment and failure of imagination seen in the April 30th Mission District vandalism spree is a symptom of the fact that a society gets the dissidents that it deserves. A society that proclaims that being entertained is the highest possible form of human aspiration gets a brand of ersatz radicalism that loyally mirrors this.

Slingshot Introduction: Issue 111

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988.
Slingshot isn’t like other papers. In the mainstream press, you’ll find glossy articles about things that already make perfect sense. They feature fake controversies that mislead us into believing that we don’t have the power to enact change ourselves, but that we must go through the “proper” channels, like voting, writing letters to the editor, etc, instead of taking to the street. We are not the rulers of the world — we are not in charge — our narrative is broken by the limits of our power. We are engaged in projects that are not yet complete — projects that are being actively blocked by those who have accumulated wealth and use their power to control everyone’s lives while running the planet towards destruction.
We aim to be edgewalkers; working on projects at the edges of capitalism — radical squats, experimental farms, urban guerilla collectives — while striving to extract our psyches from the sway of consumerism. Every few months, we take a break from these projects and come together to create Slingshot. These are the ideas that come to us as we lay awake at night, dreaming of new spaces, reflecting on what we have accomplished.

Our articles can be rough at the edges, the arguments incomplete, but grappling for insight. The arrows of inquiry are shot out into the void, but don’t always reach a target — they burn up in the atmosphere, like so many meteors that never reach the earth.
A number of articles in this issue struggle with identity and privilege in different ways. With each voice, different assumptions are made. Often words of an author become mired in complex tangles that cannot be so readily teased apart. Not every person in the collective nor in our readership identifies with these pieces, but we present them to open a conversation about real positions in our world.
At one point while making this issue, one of us exclaimed “I detest this article!” but as we discussed it, other people saw things in it that were important, and in the end it went into the paper unblocked. We hope that, if you feel strongly, you will join the discussion by sending us an article for the next issue.
***

The centerfold poster was inspired by poetry Sean Swain sent us from his prison cell:
A Handful of Leaves
A prayer for the children of the next Neolithic,
That we leave to them
A field of lilies where a WalMart once stood,
Salmon upstream from the ruins of a dam,
Kudzu vines embracing skeletons of skyscrapers,
Cracked & overgrown ribbons of nameless
super-highways
That you may lay entwined in fields of lilies,
Sustain yourselves on sister salmon,
Climb the vines of kudzu to shelter,
Salt meat on the remains of the highway,
and use this poem for kindling at sundown
So you can spare a handful of leaves
Where the gods write poetry of their own.
***

As the paper went to press, we unpacked a huge truck of 2013 Organizer calendars, which is how we fund this paper. Last spring, we decided to make a version of the Organizer for smart phones since so many people use them instead of paper calendars nowadays. We have a good idea of how we want it to look but we’re still looking for someone to write the code, so if you know how, contact us. We need someone with follow through and the time and skills for a paid gig. Target completion date; Jan. 1, 2013.
***

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers, translators, distributors, etc. to make this paper. If you send something written, please be open to editing.

Editorial decisions are made by the Slingshot Collective but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collectives members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.

Thanks to the people who made this: Angie, Ant Claire, Coleen, Dana, Darin, Enola, eggplant, Gnatalie, Jasmine, Jesse, Joey, Jonathon, Julia, Kermit, Lew, Kilroy, Samara, Sandy, Solomon, and all the authors and artists.
Slingshot New Volunteer Meeting

Volunteers interested in getting involved with Slingshot can come to the new volunteer meeting on Sunday December 16, 2012 at 4 p.m. at the Long Haul in Berkeley (see below.)
Article Deadline & Next Issue Date

Submit your articles for issue 112 by January 19, 2013 at 3 p.m.

Volume 1, Number 111, Circulation 20,000
Printed September 28, 2012

Slingshot Newspaper
A publication of Long Haul
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Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703
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