propositions press

cramming mrcc time

Between family commitments and work, I have less and less time to explore my world. These explorations—which sometimes involve doing nothing—were always a luxury, but one that, for artists, is practically a requirement of the work. Studio creations and new texts grow out of them. As departures from the routine, they fuel thought, feeling, vision. These days, if I have a rare opportunity to get out of the house for no particularly good reason, I grab it.

One of the best outings from my home in Madison is a one and half hour drive up US Highway 14, through Cross Plains, Spring Green, and Richland Center, to Viroqua. It makes for a terrific day trip, a car trip along a midwest radical culture corridor. But this time I had only a half day to spare. My friend Mike Koppa hosts a mid-morning radio show on the community radio station WDRT and he invited me to supply the records. I could make it for the show, a quick lunch and stroll, and then return to Madison before three. It was worth the drive, even through the dense morning fog of an abnormally warm mid-March Thursday.

Besides getting to enjoy the very impressive studios of WDRT, I caught up with Mike and all his goings on. New cabin under construction out at the Acres, new gig for his band, and with the spring coming, more stone lettering.

I also managed to get in a few minutes of browsing at Driftless Books. Luckily for me book hunter Eddy Nix recently hauled in an exceptionally deep collection of books on China, now filling a whole wall of cases in the front room, outside of the store proper. I took home two, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949 by Gail Hershatter, and The Making of a Hinterland by Kenneth Pomeranz. The Pomeranz book caught my attention for two reasons. One, it is a study of western Shandong, the province of my ancestors that I periodically visit. And two, he writes about a region that historically had no name, but that he somehow identifies as possessing a geographical and historical coherence, enough to write a book about. Being interested in the slipperiness of regional definition, I want to find out more about his methodology.

It was also fun to see the Compass production A Call to Farms out on a display table of titles by area authors, especially knowing that the book is now very hard to get.

 

Because it was only a half day, I spent most of this trip in my car. But that was okay, too, because this was my first time out to the Driftless Area since late last summer, before the Walker recall campaign got underway. I was heartened to see a good number of anti-Walker signs along the way, including these sturdy constructions, which gave me reason to pull over for some quick pics.

I am refreshed, with ideas. I’ll make it out there again this year, I promise. Maybe with the family, next time.

 

 

 

l.a. report

I am just returned from a very short trip to Los Angeles. The excuse for the trip was having the chance to present a paper about The Journey West at the College Art Association’s annual conference. In the weeks leading up to the trip I found myself in conversations with art friends that went one of two ways. Either they would say, “Are you going to CAA? Let’s get together.” Or else it would be something along the lines of “I can’t believe all these people go to CAA. It is so lame.”

I have never fully understood the gripes about CAA. It is true that CAA excludes participation because of its registration fees, and that the format is not very imaginative. But what do people expect? The conference for any professional organization costs a lot to stage, and CAA's registration fees are much more affordable than that of organizations in many other fields. And while colleges and universities range from semi-accessible to elite and exclusive, they are not exactly the same as corporations or government institutions. They are knowledge and education factories, and as such offer a space for protected intellectual activity on a limited but real and substantive basis. As a vehicle for serious discourse and the sharing of ideas, I find CAA much more palatable than, say, the add-on symposia or discussion events that seem to be attaching themselves to all the commercial art fairs.

I have been to CAA eight times. Some of my friends think that is a lot. I first started going because for about three years after I finished my degree program, I had no functional intellectual community. I would save for the trip and that would be my big travel expenditure for the year. From the beginning I always worked in visits to family and friends, too. The conference alone was never enough to fully justify a trip, especially without free couches to sleep on.

Then I found my community of artists and researchers. I stopped going to CAA for about five or six years, except for once when I had a chance to present for the first time (and visit a friend I had not seen in years). Then I attended again in 2011, playing the role of editor and coordinator of the annual newsletter of the Radical Art Caucus, for the first of two years. I have gotten something out of RAC and CAA. I figured it was time to give back, in a capacity appropriately minor to my life as an adjunct professor.

This year I was at the conference for only a couple of hours besides the time of our presentation, plus a little time for shopping at the conference book fair afterward. My Columbia College colleague Annika Marie gave a great lecture on Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons. Our session was organized incredibly well by fellow Madisonite Laurie Beth Clark, we received good feedback, and the whole presentation exercise was valuable in advancing our understanding of The Journey West. A highlight of the conference was seeing the work of my Madison brothers, Lewis Koch and Patrick JB Flynn on display. Lewis’s book marked down to a clearance price.
Yup, that is cheap. I left it for somebody else; I already have a copy. Patrick got the design gig for the new Baffler. Very sweet to see it being pushed.
I got the newsletter put together, this time with a poem by mrcc resident poet Matthias Regan as the featured art content. But I did not even have a chance to see the hard copies in action at the conference.

So that was CAA. 

More interesting was speaking about the Wisconsin Uprising on Friday night at the Public School in Chinatown. The attendance was almost as good as that for our CAA session (about eighteen), but in a much better space with a non-academic audience. As an autonomous educational entity, it was impressive–something we who are trying to keep the Madison Autonomous University alive can aspire to. As a social space, it was lovely. As a community, it was supportive and welcoming. I am a fan, and it was a privilege to have the floor there for an evening. And I must say, the interest in the Wisconsin political situation was enthusiastic.

I stayed with my friend Ava. She was one of the original Mess Hall keyholders. For the past year and half she has been working as a project manager of a large real estate development called Atwater Crossing, or ATX. The last time I was in LA was in October of 2010. Ava was just about to start on the job then, and drove me around the complex. There were only something like five or ten tenants then. Now there are something like forty. Nearly all of them are creative industry or arts-related concerns. She took me there again this time, to scope out the buzzing restaurant scene. It reminded me of large developments in China—creative industry and design-oriented businesses taking root in clusters, but here it was with more substance and breadth. The interactive media companies are there, but so are theater companies. Crafty artist’s studios are there, but so is Pomegranate Pictures, who make videos for System of a Down. You won’t find that in China. 

ATX is very impressive, all the more so for Ava having managed it all without hardly any staff until about a week ago.

Before heading out to catch my overnight return flight Ava and her boyfriend treated me to an excellent departure dinner at Lou, on Vine. The restaurant had an outline map of the US on one wall, with handwritten names and arrows pointing to their sources. They had probably twenty or twenty-five different suppliers named from across the country. Well, well, well. The state outside California with the most suppliers named was Wisconsin, with four. And that is where I was headed. Home, sweet cheesy home, where all the battles are currently raging. Including about Wisconsin farmers supplying not upscale wine bars in LA, but the neighbors of the farmers. In about six hours time, I landed in Milwaukee. Back in the midwest, home of the emerging locavore economy and KillerSpin (in airports).

 

 

a book, from cell 29 to room 458 (with an ocean view)

Steamed clams for dinner and a marion berry cobbler for dessert. Sideways rain and a cozy fire in the hotel room. Hot tubs, a movie, and a book. A view of waves pounding, the tide coming in, and a jigsaw puzzle on the table. 

For a short two days we are doing what winter vacationers do on the Oregon coast every year, plus enjoying this year’s speciality: Santorum jokes. 

Vacations are about getting away, but like all our Oregon trips, this one is the yearly homecoming. Our household has Oregon roots on both sides, so our trips fall under the heading of our travel corridors: back and forth, once a year, Portland/Salem/the coast to Madison/Chicago/the Midwest. But on this trip out the book I have before me takes me back the way I came, back to the places where a lot of it started for me, namely Detroit and Chicago.

I found this volume in the anarchism section at Powell’s in Portland. I was about to pass on it because $40 is a lot to pay for an old book that has seen better days.
The spine is damaged and the copyright page is torn. The corners are turned and overall, despite its lasting beauty and impressive durability–appreciate the lettering on the cover: gilded and feathered elegance in anarchism!–it is a book that clearly has been through many hands. But this isn’t just any title or any volume. This is a book of writings by Albert Parsons (aka husband of Lucy Parsons), one of the Haymarket martyrs and an anarchist printer, published posthumously. I cannot say for sure if it is a first edition, but it is copyright dated 1887 with no other dates, and the book has the look, feel, and construction of an object 125 years old. So, really, it would have been difficult to forgo even without this clincher: upon examination I noticed that it bears a stamp from the Wayne State University Libraries.

Therefore it is entirely conceivable that this very object passed through the hands of the Detroit anarchists who made up the radical world that influenced a good number of us teenagers back in the 1980s in the suburbs of Oakland County. Maybe the Detroit printer Fredy Perlman, who helped to usher into the English-speaking world the thought of Debord and the Situationists, held this very book in his hands. Maybe the activist lawyer Kenneth Cockrel, who did so much work for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and who had earned a degree in political science from Wayne State, had racked up overdue fines on this book. Mine is not as good a story as my bibliophile friend Kevin Connolly’s tale for the ages, but in terms of a single book tracing a personal and social history generations after its publication, and the possiblities of connections we can now dream about, it is the best I have had.

But what does the journey of this volume say about the corridors of time and space that a strain of radicalism may travel? The book took shape in the cell of a wrongly condemned anarchist in the Cook County Jail,

 became a published reality shortly after the state-sanctioned murder of the author, landed for who knows how many years in the collection at Wayne State, which for many decades was one of the most accessible of America’s public urban universities. And then the book was returned to commercial circulation via Powell’s Books. Between those steps there were undoubtedly other stops—circulation through private collections, sales and re-sales, years on the shelves belonging to now unknown shops, libraries, owners, or borrowers--maybe in Michigan, maybe in Oregon, and who knows where else. In early 2012 it comes into my hands, slightly callused from guitar and presswork but mostly soft like an intellectual’s, suffering invisibly from carpal tunnel, to take back to the Midwest. Is it the completion of a circle or just another returned book in the great cosmic radical library? 

Given the battles being fought in Wisconsin, the Rahm Emanuel mayoral disaster unfolding in Chicago, and the ongoing contested destruction and reconstruction of Detroit, it feels good to be returning home with a book that others used in their midwestern-global struggles from earlier times. Maybe the timing puts a digestible veneer on my hydrocarbon privileges. If it were only about collecting this would be just another instance of radical nostalgia. To safeguard against that, who, in my turn, can I influence? Anybody out there want to borrow this book?

 

another book event: madison

As I've mentioned before, I contributed a couple of texts to the book We Are Wisconsin–texts that originated here on this blog. One by me, and one co-written with Nicolas Lampert.

Editor/instigator Erica Sagrans has been pounding the pavement, getting the book out into the reading public. This weekend we'll have two events around the book, a discussion at Rainbow Bookstore on Saturday and then a panel at the UW Cinematheque on Sunday. The Sunday event is a part of the weekend's Wisconsin Book Festival. I'll be saying something at both events, along with some of the other writer/activists. Amazingly, this will be the first time that I will be in town for the festival since having moved to Madison after having missed it because of travel or whatever, for five consecutive years. 

These will be the first events for this book to take place in Wisconsin, and for that reason obviously they will produce a different and more meaningful atmosphere. Undoubtedly, these events will be high energy and participatory. Many if not all of those in attendance will have had some involvement in the Uprising and subsequent movement, including in the offshoot campaigns targeting politicians for recall, saving Badger Care, protecting the Penokee Hills, and so forth. In this sense, these events will likely include an organizing element and take on a social forum character.

See you there.

Here's a bit of the event copy from Erica: 

"We Are Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Uprising in the words of the activists, writers, and everyday Wisconsinites who made it happen" is a new collection that gives an up-close view of the Wisconsin struggle. This mix of essays, blog posts, and original writing looks at what happened, what it means, and what comes next—and includes the real-time, fast-paced story of the Capitol occupation as told through tweets from those who were on the inside.

In conjunction with the Wisconsin Book Festival, join us to celebrate the launch, talk about what's next for this movement, and hear from contributors including Andy Kroll from Mother Jones, Alex Hanna, Jenni Dye, Dan Wang, and editor Erica Sagrans. 

We'll also be showing short films on the protests produced by Shahin Izadi and Jason Nolen.

Sponsored by the Teaching Assistants' Association.

Books will be available for purchase.

http://www.wearewisconsinbook.com/
http://www.twitter.com/WeAreWIBook

Sunday, October 23 · 2:00pm - 4:00pm

UW-Madison Cinematheque 

4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave

Madison, WI

 

book points, furniture joints: John Preus and The World As Text

The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College commissioned me to write a text to accompany the exhibition The World As Text from earlier in the summer, organized by artist John Preus. The publishing schedule has been pushed back, the show is over, and I have not been given any info on a definite timeframe. But that is what a blog is for. Here it is.

– Dan

Book Points, Furniture Joints: John Preus and The World As Text

❆

What do books ask of us, besides some time with our minds and our eyes? Our ears, fingers, and palms? Our butts and our backs? Using a book usually means using all of these things. The comfortable functionality of most ordinary books is based on conventions that attend to the act of reading, that is, bringing all these body parts into coordination. But while the average paperback bears evidence of considerations that go into making a book a user friendly object, the space beyond the reader’s body almost always seems to lie outside the bookmaker or designer’s purview. And still the books demand of us—their readers, borrowers, and collectors—a consideration of space and support, of storage and display solutions. Books need a furnished space in which we can read them, look at them, and learn from them. A collection of artists’ books want even more, neither the false neutrality nor the ostentatiousness of a collecting institution, but rather a space equal to the books themselves.

✴

For decades now artists have been making books and book systems that take note of the space in which books get read and browsed. That attention could be negative, as in the literally passive aggression of Jorn and Debord’s sandpaper-bound memoires. Or utopian, as in the swarming circumvention of commercial art scenes and the creation of autonomous networks through mail art, which so often made use of book forms. The fine press bookmakers who create amazing hand-bound or letterpress printed books that seduce through aesthetics and celebrate a shared history of analog skills, situate their books self-consciously or not in the conservative surroundings of the special collections libraries or within vitrines in museums and art centers. Artists of a revolutionary nature have sometimes reworked the relationship between books and printed matter and their spaces of study altogether, as in Temporary Services’ Binder Archives. But it seems the “reading room” itself remains under-developed as, ideally, an aesthetically unpredictable but eminently functional space.

✼

Lots of books need to be disposed of. Bad novels, mass market paperbacks, textbooks, pamphlets, ring binders, magazines, and manuals of all kind overflow the bottom tier secondary markets. That is, if they are lucky enough to make any stops at all before going to the recyclers, incinerators, and landfills—in the case of mass market paperbacks, sometimes from the store rack straight to the dump, unsold much less unread. Books-on-demand and the new legitimacy of self-publishing are bringing books into existence that as of yet have no clear long term place in the world. E-books promise a whole other universe of waste, plastic, recoverable heavy metals, and unread gigabytes. Perhaps the Adam Batemans of the future will arrange thousands of e-book readers in carefully interlocked stacks. On the other hand, ever more books are collected, protected, conserved, and put away with some notion of perpetuity—or else treated as a semi-liquid investment. The pool of buyers of vintage, antiquarian, and collectible books, magazines, newspapers, maps, cards, art books, and comic books, has been greatly enlarged by the Internet marketplace, bringing in who knows how many buyers who otherwise might never have found access to such objects. Other than bidding and buying, the disparate online world of book wealth includes the viewable items of special collections libraries, the pictures of personal collections that generate bookshelf envy, and the occasional news item about institutional acquisitions of personal libraries and archives of notable persons. Electronic media in all its forms and uses in relation to books only makes the problem of real space functionality and purpose if not more urgent, then at least more neglected. Just ask any librarian, or for that matter, the former strategists of Borders. 

✥

How many of us have furnished our own homes in ways shaped by the spaces of books, from out in the world? I have a favorite reading chair. It is a sturdy Danish armchair with a torn leather seat that I rescued from the curb in Hyde Park, which also happens to be one of the best neighborhoods for finding books—new, used, and thrown away. That chair, both in my front room and on the curb where I found it, represents the way in which books exist not just a medium and a technology in themselves, but also as a core form around which revolves a particular field of behavior and material support. I have a friend who bought a table from a public library that was in the process of replacing their furniture, repurposing it as a kitchen table. How many and what kinds of books had spent time on that four-legged construction? Weeks after making the purchase at the library garage sale, he found a clue—may ’68 had been carved roughly into the skirt. In the case of my chair, somebody’s junked furniture eventually got plugged meaningfully into another person’s life through the activity of armchair reading. My friend’s table, once the site of quiet study and silent subversion surrounded by public stacks, now supports lively multi-generational conversations and the conviviality of family life, surrounded by a private collection of books. In both cases, we as secondary users and owners came into an inheritance of furniture that merged with the past and present of books.

❉

With The World As Text, artist, designer, and builder John Preus works with and about books for the fourth time.* In each case a client or an exhibition space invited Preus or the collaborative group that he was a part of to design a solution to a problem having to do with books. Books themselves are not one of his media and in none of the four projects did he or the group select the books for which they built structures. His responsibilities essentially ended where the books began. Thus, on one level Preus relates to books as do all busy people in that he simply wishes he had more time to read, finding in them the world of ideas. But having to meet the design needs posed by book collecting clients or book-centered exhibitions reveals aspects of the life, materiality, and use of books that most people, including most book artists, do not think about. Moreover the privileged perspective into books that may be gained by designing and building reading and display spaces, as well as objects made out of books, becomes quite interesting when set in relation to Preus’s constant interest, the inheritance and mutation of building and architectural materials and their utility. The question is, how and where does his evolving understanding and view of books, book collections, and book culture dovetail with his larger commitments to building out of materials—often scavenged or drawn from streams of surplus—that contain particular histories of design put into use, cultural patterns, and economic conditions.

❀

As with my friend’s table or my chair, the desks and chairs in The World As Text have been brought out of one bookish environment (maybe an office, maybe a waiting room) and put into another. The difference is that Preus and his team were charged with no mere task of salvage and re-use, but rather of formal mutation within the confines of overall functionality—in other words, to create furniture that leaves the realm of furniture, but still functions as furniture. It is an ambition to match that of those who curated the books on display, as well as of those who authored, designed, and crafted the books themselves. The measure of success then, might also be those of the books. That is to say, will the creations of Preus and his team—not only the discrete objects, but also the reading room as a whole—live on after the show, as the best books live on after they are returned to the shelf? My guess is that Preus himself will only grant success when he sees that the project lives on as not only material evidence, to be seen and used again, but rather as the most powerful inheritance of all: as inspiration.

 

* The projects were:

2nd-hand reading room, threewalls, Chicago

Another Story, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago

Dorchester Project, Chicago

John has designed and assembled storage systems for several private residences, as well. Check out the Dilettante Studios site.

 

from the we are wisconsin book release

Video documentation of the panel conversation from the book release event that happened the other night in Chicago, right here. Micah and Peter were terrific, check it out.

we are wisconsin: the book

On Wednesday evening I’ll be at the book release for We Are Wisconsin at the Chicago offices of In These Times, in conjunction with the exhibition of Wisconsin Uprising posters and signs now up at Art In These Times. The evening opens at 6:30 PM and the speakers begin at 7:30 PM.

Erica Sagrans, the editor and coordinator of the book, will open with an introduction. Then three contributors, Peter Rickman, Micah Uetricht, and myself, will each take a few minutes to make some remarks.

Erica sent around a prepartory email to the three of us with a useful bundle of questions, intended as starting points for the discussions that will undoubtedly last into the fall season. They are worth posting here, for all who have invested time, labor, and spirit in the Wisconsin movement to consider.

What is your vision of the strategy for going forward in Wisconsin or with this fight more broadly--with a Walker recall, 2012 elections, other electoral or non-electoral strategies?

-- What did the media miss in telling this story?

--  A pervasive theory about the 2008 election was that progressives hit a ceiling with involvement and massive turnout of the Democratic base and young people and people of color. During the Wisconsin protests, lots of new people got involved--were these people who hadn't been involved in '08? What would we have to do in 2012 to get these people involved and active in elections?

-- Was the Wisconsin fight fundamentally about labor rights and unions, or something else?

-- A remarkable thing about what happened in Wisconsin, and particularly with the recalls, was alliances between groups on the left that otherwise wouldn't have worked together--how do you think that happened, or do you see that continuing? What have been the benefits as well as the challenges to that?

-- We know about the incredible protests that unfolded in Madison, but less talked about is what happened and is still happening around the state. Can you talk about how a movement was built statewide with less likely people and places involved?

-- One of the defining aspects of these protests was how many people who had previously not been at all political got involved and got politicized or radicalized. Also defining was the re-politicization of many established institutions and unions. How did that happen?

-- How do you think the half a year of this movement compares with the timeframes of other social movements? Is this the birth of a new social movement, and can social movements have geographic components?

-- How are groups in Wisconsin planning to counter the influx of corporate money that has influenced the recent recalls and will influence the Walker recall effort?

-- What role did technology and the internet play in driving action, distributing information, and telling the story of the Wisconsin protests? How did online and offline work together?  

 

In These Times

2040 N. Milwaukee Ave.

2nd Floor
Chicago, USA
Western Stop on Blue Line
http://artinthesetimes.wordpress.com/
http://www.wearewisconsinbook.com/

 

a new york journal

I just reached home after two weekends in Chicago and the days in between in New York. I went for the CAA conference, or at least that was the excuse. The last time I was in New York was the fall of 2008. It was September, around when Barack Obama’s candidacy first started to take on a sense of inevitability. The stakes of the presidential election had been raised that very week with the $600 billion bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Creative Time’s Democracy in America Convergence Center opened over the days I was there and so did Signs of Change show at Exit Art. There was a sense of possibility in the air and in the season.

This time it was different. Signs of Change is now a wonderful book as well as an exhibition. A little more than two years into the Barack Obama administration, the United States is in the full grips of a conservative reaction. How appropriate is it that the only show I managed to see in a week in New York was AbEx in NY at Moma. Not that the AbEx artists were conservative (Motherwell’s Spanish Revolution elegies positively radiated with the vitality of revolutions, then and now), but the retreat into formalism, individual spiritual journeys, and abstract systems is a path that always stands in high relief in times when retreat from the political seems perversely reasonable from a survival standpoint. I was fortunate to walk through the show with one who knows about painting, my neighbor from Madison Derrick Buisch. True to myself, I found the drawings and work on paper as or more satisfying than the canvases. But as far as seeing other shows goes, fortunately this was New York, which meant I could see some cool and canonical things without having to go out of my way, such as…

 

The conservative climate of the nation was not in evidence at the conference. It being CAA, there were quite a few sessions that included a radical or leftist scholarship. My contribution to the conference was managing the production of the Radical Art Caucus newsletter and helping to distribute it on site. This year’s was the first issue overseen by me. The heavy lifting was done by Sam Gould of Red76, whom I drafted in by suggesting to him that we make it an issue of the Journal of Radical Shimming. Being a touch manic and always open-minded about audiences and opportunities, he jumped aboard. Sam, in turn, brought into the project (it had by this point become “a project”) our friend Mike Wolf. The two of them engaged in an extended Google chat done over two sessions about something they’re calling “critical imaginative communities.” You can read that chat here. 

Sam did the layout and the interior graphic art. I assembled the newsletter text and fed him the files. I composed and proofed the front page display text in hand-set wood and metal type, scanned it, and sent that to Sam for use in the layout. Sam had a line on a very reasonable printer in Queens, arranged for 1500 to be printed, and had the invoice sent to me.

 

Joanna Gardner-Huggett, our RAC secretary, took on the task of receiving the delivery at the hotel, right near the conference site. Over the days of the conference I called her probably ten or twelve times, trying to figure out how to pick up another bundle. The three co-presidents, Linnea Wren, Travis Nygard, and Kaylee Spencer, kept getting them from her, too. Joanna managed the central distribution point well and with good humor. Together we distributed nearly all at the conference. I blanketed the first Dark Matter session, and Alan W. Moore had the second Dark Matter session well-supplied. I started a couple of stacks going around in the jam-packed Centennial Session on Feminism. I passed them out at the Diasporic Asian Art Network meeting and at the University of Southern California reception. I got them into the hands of Margo Machida, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Martha Rosler. Through run-ins, I got them to some of the friendly faces I first met at other conferences: Richard Meyer, Peter Mortonböck, and Helge Mooshammer. I got them to some people who are name-checked in the interior cascade of critical art players. They seemed to enjoy finding others they recognized in the jumble, and wondered about the names they didn’t know. 

JRS #12 definitely reached hundreds and hundreds of people in the field whom I do not know, and who possibly do not know any of us who were involved in the project. Also, the conference was a great place to make guerrilla placements, like at the book fair. In that sense, making use of CAA as a ready-made audience was a big success. At the same time, there could be some big improvements. For one thing, the listings info was incomplete in one vital area, announcing RAC’s Friday evening meeting and reception. Which, by the way, turned out to be organized as a terrific discussion with two visiting union organizers. I just didn’t have the information when we needed it for inclusion. And for another, the readability of the text in Sam’s radical art tribe graphic was compromised in some key places, which blunted the intended messaging. But no matter—we got it done and distributed, much to the expressed delight of many a conference goer, with only about three weeks lead time, a small budget, and only partial available attention. Not bad for a first effort, and in spirit very true to the best Red76 work.

Other highlights from those days included visiting the activist and videographer Dara Greenwald (who is taking it easy and slow while undergoing medical treatment), getting to see for the first time my collaborators Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross present in a public event setting (along with Lize Mogel and Sarah Kanouse), and catching up with my crash-pad host Naeem (who was in full-press deadline mode). Oh yeah, and the Mubarak regime fell. That was crazy—sitting in sessions or hitting sessions with stacks of the newsletter while receiving Egypt update texts from Naeem, including a blow by blow account of the president’s final, intrasigient address to the nation.

Finally, I crossed the Whitestone Bridge for an overnight visit to Connecticut to see an elderly uncle who no longer travels. I had never driven that part of the country and was blown away by the many miles of decades and decades worth of suburban overflow from the city. Rolling past all the wealth, the northern end of what the Don Draper character once called “the Cash Belt,” all I could think of were prep school feeder populations and quiet desperation amid the boatloads of taste. The stone walls visible along the Merritt Parkway screamed affluence; the age and history represented by the hundreds-year-old wall work only come into play as a corollary to the modern day wealth of the area. Once in Cheshire, the village where my uncle has lived for 45 years, the blue collar returned to the landscape in the form of Aldi stores and Chinese buffets.

 

 

 

detroit scouting trip: labadie and the people's movement assembly

Not much time to rest after KC. The next week we were off to Detroit. For me, it was the third time in nine months. The “we” were Brian Holmes, Sarah Lewison, Claire Pentecost, Rozalinda Borcila, Amy Partridge, and myself. The trip proper started from Chicago. Sarah came up all the way from Carbondale and I from Madison, of course.

We traveled in two cars. Claire, Brian, Sarah, and Rozlinda in one. Amy and I in my car. We departed on Friday morning at around 9:30 AM, after a quick check to make sure everybody had their passports with them. We didn’t use them, but you never know when you might want to scoot across the border to Windsor. For dim sum, if nothing else.

Coming from the west, stopping by the Labadie Collection was the obvious first thing to do. I have said this before: for any leftist or radical researcher or history buff (and what radical isn’t a student of history), this place really is a must-visit. The thing is, you must go with some idea of what to request, otherwise there is just too much, especially on a first go ‘round. Well, I certainly had some ideas. I wanted to see Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (D.R.U.M.)-related publications and ephemera and a late Sixties/early Seventies radical black paper from Detroit called Inner City Voice. Inner City Voice and D.R.U.M. were contemporaneous expressions, and I was curious about how D.R.U.M. and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers were covered in the local radical press of the time.

Julie Herrada, the gracious and super knowledgeable curator of the collection, took the time to introduce all the others (this was their first visit) to the Labadie and how it works. Claire and Sarah ended up studying original copies of Mother Earth, while Amy delved into a portfolio of daily newsletters called The Punch Press, produced by and for the striking laborers of the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike. Those were amazing. Apparently produced everyday or nearly so, they are a moving document of organized and creative working class culture. Not only are there strike news items told in the language of outrage skewering the Fisher Body management, but also notices for union dinners complete with menus, reminders for social events like dances, and funny little hand drawn graphics. Judging by The Punch Press, the striking workers had some joyful experiences in their togetherness, even as they engaged in militant struggle and took life-changing risks.

You may enjoy excellent scans of what appears to be the full run of The Punch Press right here.

 

punch press, flint sit-down strike bulletin

 

strike bulleting, menu, 1937

 

strike bulletin graphics, 1937

Julie hooked me up with all the materials I could possibly digest. Particularly interesting was a D.R.U.M. publication titled “The Midwest and the League.” The opening article was about the black revolutionary workers movement and the regional particularities of the industrial midwest, from an early Seventies perspective. There was also an interview with one Mike Hamlin, evidently one of the founders of the League and a main activist in D.R.U.M., and, furthermore, one of the editors or main writers for Inner City Voice. The design is subtle but clear, with a minimum of graphic elements, very readable layouts, and a choice of display text that maintained a uniformly militant tone. Designers of radical publications today could certainly take a lesson from this pamphlet.

the midwest and the league

 

early seventies interview with Mike Hamlin

 

fredy perlman's not the only detroit-paris connection!

Then, the serendipitous began.

vintage issues of inner city voice

Julie, who kept checking in with us because of her curiosity about our impressions (and seeming to like having the opportunity to reacquaint herself with some of the holdings through our fresh eyes), mentioned that there happened to be a conference going on that day and the next, and that Mike Hamlin was scheduled to speak. Wow. We printed out the conference schedule and decided it was too good to pass up, especially since it was free and held right there on the Michigan campus. We resolved to attend the Friday evening panels, of which there were two.

 

julie @ the labadie

So after a cheap dinner in the student ghetto, we made it to the Labor and Economics Panel and, after that, the Movement Panel: What Is “IT”?, the “it” being the “it” in the conference title: Take It Back, Bring It….

Mike Hamlin was on the first panel and he was intense and excellent. I could sum up his fifteen minutes by simply quoting him: “I was a revolutionary then, and I am a revolutionary now.” Yup. Dean Baker was pretty good, too. Arturo Rodriguez spoke about farmworker organzing back in the day, but was mostly quiet during the discussion segment. The drag of the panel was, unfortunately, the youngest participant, a Michigan student named Yousef Rahbi. He was introduced as an experienced student activist, but most of his exhortations fell into a category of sentimental idealism that bordered on the embarassing. For example, he urged those in the audience to dispense with ideological thinking and keep utopic visions in mind when acting in the day to day by remembering “the beautiful scenes…of dogs and frisbees, people really living.” I kid you not. Where are the young radical lions I have known, the Emily Formans and Daniel Tuckers of today, when you really need them? Because Mr. Rahbi wasn’t it.

mike hamlin @ take it back, bring it forward conference

The second panel was much better. Al Haber, from the original first generation SDS cohort, presided. Rich Feldman from the Boggs Center sat on the panel and was awesome. His longtime friend and our Chicago pal Bill Ayers was on it, too. Ron Scott, former Panther and now doing Peace Zones for Life activism in Detroit, kicked butt. He put on a clinic for how to stay rad while embracing new complications that blur the old lines of antagonism, say for example, between cops and inner-city residents. Bob Zellner, who was active in SNCC, gave an inspired presentation. I really hate to say it, but again, the weakest presence was the youngest person, a woman who had done much for Michigan Peaceworks, Laura Russello. She chose to speak about therapy and wellness for activists. Yes, important, but not all that relevant on a panel about movement lineage, inheritences, and innovation. It could have been analytical, with something to say about how movement work can be disfiguring, but her treatment was rather superficial, I thought. As well–maybe we got a skewed sampling since we only attended the one evening session, but the panel composition was awfully male. Out of ten contributors there were only two women. What is up with that?

But it was worth attending. It was fun to see Bill Ayers in a non-neighborhood context, and Julie ended up going, too. And Sarah Lewison recognized Peter Linebaugh sitting in the row behind us. He is a radical historian who teaches in Toledo but lives in Ann Arbor. Our colleague Brett Bloom met him at some event in Europe and turned on the rest of us to his lectures online. So we got to make his acquaintence, though I’m not sure he knew what to make of four of us mobbing him all at once. All I can say is, it could have been six.

 

Interview - Peter Linebaugh - The Magna Carta Manifesto

Anyway, we were off to Detroit after that, for a late night arrival.

The main feature of the next day was the Detroit People’s Movement Assembly, held at the Central United Methodist Church. There were probably about forty-five or more people there. Maureen Taylor kicked things off with a rousing welcome, an impassioned and downright furious condemnation of the latest DTE disaster, in which a family whose heat had been cut off by the utility suffered a deadly fire when they were forced to turn to space heaters for warmth.

There was some general USSF stuff discussed, but mostly it was very Detroit-centric. What I mean is, most of the time was spent on short presentations by four activist initiatives already underway with actions timed to coincide with the influx of USSF activists in June. After the presentations, we broke into small work groups around each of the four campaigns. There were worksheets provided that had outlines and blank lines for strategy, target, message, action, etc. This part of the PMA was clearly an organizing session, but which was open to anybody who came to the PMA, not only including but especially welcome to the out-of-towners. Here is some footage from the PMA, this bit featuring Steph Guilloud of Project South.

Stephanie Guilloud at PMA, 3/13/2010, Detroit from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.