propositions press

the dying art of hitchhiking

Traveling the Madison-Chicago expressway corridor is all about routine. Lots of people do it on a regular basis. In other words it can be very boring, as predictable as zipping across concrete at 70 mph can be.

So it was a treat when the other day I picked up a hitchhiker for the first time in quite a few years, as much for me as for him. This man was sitting on the side of the road at an entrance to a South Beloit truck stop with a sign that said I-39 South. He and his dog rode with me for about fifteen miles, to where our temporarily common paths diverged.

It had been years since I had given a lift to a thumb-traveler, mainly because I do not see hitchhikers very often anymore, even though it seems that I drive more frequently than ever. Hitchhiking is a mode of travel that seems to have declined markedly in the last fifteen or twenty years. You would think that with the rise in gas and automobile prices and unemployment among the young we would be seeing an uptick in hitching. But no. These days the culture of Fear, now as American as apple pie, trumps even the once-powerful national longing for adventure and the irresistable draw of a free ride. Instead of hitting the road and exploring this vast land our young men (not sure hitching was ever that imaginable for women) are sitting on couches, scared of what is over the horizon, brave enough only to do battle in make believe video worlds. Do we need any more evidence of the empire in decay? 

Turns out this fellow was a brother of the road, a modern day vagabond, what Hunter S. Thompson would have called a Road Person. John was his name, shabby but very polite, looking weary after ten years of hitching and tramping. The story he told me was that he had to reach Missouri to apply for a new ID card, the last state from which he’d had one issued. His wallet had been stolen a year earlier and since then he’d had nothing but trouble finding work and a stable living situation. Even when he could find the work (he had all his construction worker tools with him), he’d have trouble getting hired.

Starting out from Florida at age 21 and now 31, having gone through his young man’s period of deadhead drifting and numerous cross-country sojourns, John was ready to stay put for a while in Green Bay, where he’d found a steady job with a builder friend. He wants to get an apartment of his own but that was all on hold until he could show Somebody Who Matters a proper ID.

We spent our short time together trading thoughts about hitching rides, how things have changed since I hitched a few trips back in the 1980s. Together we bemoned the security state and what it has done to relations between strangers. He said what irks him the most are the strapping clean-cut white dudes driving pick-ups who never stop to let him catch a ride in the box. It would not bother him, he testified, except that he still gets a fair share of rides from little old women driving alone. I said it is ironic, but perhaps unsurprising. Sometimes the people who have the least reason to fear are the most fearful. 

John likes to draw. When I dropped him off he took the time to pull out a couple of his drawings, pieced together from notebook paper and rolled for travel. The first he calls Dragon and Harlot, based on an episode from the Book of Revelations. He explained to me that he was scared out of his wild phase through the harsher parts of the Bible.

The second is a Sponge Bob Jerry he did as a gift for his niece who is a young, post-Jerry deadhead. Imagine growing up with Jerry Garcia as a departed mythical figure but having Sponge Bob Square Pants as a very present television companion. Considered in that way, I suppose this picture makes sense.

So, where is all that dark matter of cultural production that Greg Sholette talks about? Some of it, at least, is on the side of the road, waiting for a ride. As soon as I pulled away, John went back into an undetectability in relation to me and most of modern America—he has no email address, phone number, street address, or cyberpresence. John is still in that other America, the one I passed through every now and then in younger years, but that has become largely invisible to not only the mainstream, but all of the mediated cultural spheres we live and work in–the art world, academia, creative industries, "alternative scenes." Though I feel for his exhaustion, I am gratified to know that it still exists.

 

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.

 

 

 

the getaway that left questions

Walking home from the hardware store, I was lost in my own thoughts when a rising gutteral roar turned my head. My eyes settled on a remarkable scene unfolding in comical slow motion across the street from me. The first thing I saw was a young pale-faced man in a name-patch uniform lumbering across the lot of a BP gas station, apparently at a full sprint, but weighed down and misbalanced by a beer gut so big that he might have rolled faster than he could run. Then I saw what he was running after. Super loud but super slow, a rust-eaten nineties mufflerless Caprice with a young black man about two-thirds reclined behind the wheel lurched out of the lot, accelerating at a rate just barely faster than the man on foot. For another two seconds it was a contest, but the car gained in momentum what the belly lost. The chase went into the street but after another moment it was all over except for the cursing.

I deduced what had happened easily enough, but the meaning of the event is not so simple to determine. To my mind the story of this one event can be interpreted in at least three ways.

1)    It was a routine drive-off from the pump, the kind of loss-leading nuisance that vexes small retailers daily, the costs of which are built into the price of purchase.

2)    It was a counterproductive assertion of entitlement, feeding the perception in the secure spaces of white America of a growing and increasingly dangerous black and brown criminal underclass.

3)    It was an act of everyday resistance, a concrete, elemental, but banalized fuck you of the kind for which even the anti-capitalist activists of Occupy Wall Street essentially lack the guts.

These interpretations do not hold mutually exclusive purchase. In fact, all of them make sense simultaneously because of the subject positions in play, not only across the spectrum of positions but within them. Consider the players. First there is the station attendant. Then the driver/perpetrator. There was a white man watching from one of the other pumps. And there was me, witnessing from across the street. The multiple interpretations move across the complexities of and between these subject positions.

My first assumption was that the paying customer at the pump would tend toward interpretation number (2), but who knows; there are ostensibly anti-racist white leftists around here among whose questionable ideological merits include the capacity to rationalize even the most anti-social of behaviors on the part of African American persons. There was part of me that hoped the driver himself harbored a feeling going in the direction of number (3), but it was probably more like a perpetrator’s perspective on number (1); he was likely already thinking about how to get his next tank of gas as he pulled into traffic. He already had to seek out a non-pre-pay station for a fast one, and how far could he get on a single tank of gas, in a guzzler? For the station attendant thinking about his job—how to explain the incident to his boss, maybe having to fill out a theft report—number (1) might be the go-to interpretation. But the driver was an African American man, with all the stereotypical indicators of an inner city migrant, quite out of place in Middleton, Wisconsin, a town less than 2% African American. With an outsized pride of place, some residents of Middleton (adjacent to where I live in Madison) actually believe that Middleton is one of the country’s “best places to live,” as trumpeted in mainstream media reports. Would these factors of race and social exclusivity figure into the station attendant assigning number (2) as a meaning? 

Finally, the station was a BP. After feeling the frustration of both last year’s impotent post-Deepwater Horizon boycott campaign against BP stations, demonstrating that consumers really do not have the power to meaningfully punish transnational corporations, and of the current inability of the Occupy movement to exercise a power beyond changing the national conversation (which I acknowledge is huge, gratefully), I tended to see the episode as an example of number (3). I was actually glad to witness an action that could be described an unapologetic fuck you—after all the devastation (which is still inconclusively known, but constantly upped in estimation) in the Gulf of Mexico and BP’s proven impunity—finally! Inarticulate or not, politically meaningful or not, counterproductive as it was, for one short moment, in my mind I quietly saluted the driver.

But then I felt terrible afterward, for the knowledge that the tendency toward racial profiling in an area where even I, a Chinese American, routinely get stared at had just been fed the equivalent of an energy drink by this young man's action. Also for what such an act of disobedience says about the conundrum facing the Occupy movement. That is to say, significant parts of the Occupy movement must show that they can make progress in creatively addressing the system it critiques, opposes, and abandons, as one that is fundamentally racist. But the all-important African American street element, having suffered thirty years of massive incarceration and everyday police repression, is basically neither politically present nor self-consciously politicized, made up of individuals existing in survival mode, same as the driver of the Caprice.

Finally and not least, I felt the negativity of the continued erosion of trust that goes along with another business perhaps deciding to safeguard against theft through pre-pay means. On the other hand, why should the self-satisfied town of Middleton expect a different standard of public trust than what millions of people live with in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and other places across the region? Another salute....

I witnessed a crime. Or was it an act of resistence?

These questions follow:

Is an interpretation informed by racism in any way a reasonable response?

If not, then how does one begin to address racism when those who racially profile their fellow citizens believe it reasonable?

What hope have we that the everyday daring of the most economically desperate become self-consciously politicized? 

How do those of us who are less daring than we need to be model ourselves on the driver and inflict a pain, no matter how small, measureable in units other than webpage hits?

 

nyc: summit notes, before the event

I was conversing with an artist friend yesterday. At one point we talked about the Creative Time Summit 3 in New York, which I am on my way to now. He said that he’s been finding these kinds of gatherings less and less satisfying, ie conferences and symposia in which a bunch of socially engaged artists come together and discuss how and what “social engagement” means for art and artists. I understand where he’s coming from. When Daniel Tucker and Nato Thompson organized a one-day gathering in Chicago back in January of 2009, inviting what would be for any conference an impressive list of art activists, I skipped it. Maybe because I already knew a lot those folks, or it didn’t seem clear as to what the purpose of such a meeting would be. Many of the people already had working relationships with each other. And—now I’m remembering—at that time I just needed to stay home in Madison for a while and not travel. All in all, for me the event just felt kind of unnecessary.

I also recall people asking questions about the first Creative Time Summit, which took place in the fall of 2009. The presence of a few art star names in the program, while not exactly disappointing, did pose the question of what this event was aiming for, in terms of status, prestige, and constituency. That was my main question, understanding that those considerations can be quite practical. For others there was the hang-up about access, specifically the price and availability of tickets. This event charges more than a nominal fee for entry—some of the costs are definitely passed on to the audience. For a summit ostensibly about exactly those issues of democratic process, access, and structures, it did not seem out of line for art activists to wonder aloud. 

And when I heard about Open Engagement, I concluded that the deed had been done. Now we can say it. The collective force of artists, curators, teachers, writers, and others has successfully opened up a new genre, even though we haven’t made our society any more democratic or participatory. We have carved out a tiny niche in the resource-rich world of cultural production, a niche that seems to be going by the name of “social practice.” If, as Todd Gitlin likes to say, the Sixties generation took over the English departments but left the real power of legislating and governing to the Right, then we have achieved something, but haven’t even accumulated English-department levels of power. What we can do is organize periodic get-togethers, and even sponsor some of the travel.

Where is this all going? And what are these gatherings for? Based on how Summits 2 and 3 were designed, I can see that these questions have been considered by the Creative Time team. The presentations were streamed live for Summit 2 and archived—I don’t think they were streamed live the first time around. And the range of presenters for Summit 3 is noticeably wider, reaching out of the art school/art world and into social service and regionally identified people and projects. They also dropped the "Revolutions in Public Practice" tag that was used for years 1 and 2.

I certainly still have those questions. But here I am, participating in Summit 3. Why? 

Well, for one thing, it is hard to say no to Nato, the curator. His friendly force of personality—let’s call it that laid-back California soft persuasion I find irresistible—is perfect for the job of bringing lots of interesting people together, and making intense, urgent topics fun. Plus, not to be discounted, it's a mostly-paid for trip to New York. That could just be me, or an art thing; some people and groups who are farther from the art universe who were invited didn’t get on board. (That's another way of saying the spectrum of participants is not quite as wide as it was hoped to be.)

Beyond Nato and the personal pleasure of helping to realize his vision of what the Summit could be, there is the substantive reason I was invited: to say something about what happened in Wisconsin and especially Madison back in February and March, to a New York audience of artists, activists, and intellectuals. Yes, somebody has to do it—or more to the point, the Summit audience definitely needs to hear about it. And yes, bringing an account of the most important turn in American labor and left wing movement politics in the last three decades is a good reason for being here.

But then I’m back to the problem of these gatherings, on a structural level. There are about thirty presentations. Outside of the keynotes and performances, the slots are limited to eight minutes at the microphone. You can say a lot in eight minutes about one, precisely bounded thing. A single, titled art project, for example—which is what many of the presenters talk about. Try saying something compelling in eight minutes about an incredibly complex social and political movement, one that’s not finished and in fact continues to unfold even now, to an audience of people who might know a lot about it, or nothing at all. As is always the case with any kind of conference, the best conversations will happen outside of the program structure, in the socializing and informal encounters. But the presentation is the only time when the whole assemblage will get their ears stuffed with Wisconsin Uprising info. What am I or anybody speaking about the Wisconsin Uprising under such constraints supposed to say?

Even though I’ve rehearsed and have my talk pretty much down, I have no idea how it’ll come across. The points I make might be obvious or even stale to many, but completely baffling and without context for others. I guess all I can plead is, folks, go through my old blog posts on the Wisconsin Uprising and do some searches of your own. There is so much great reporting out there, tackling the million or so angles on our movment: John Nichols, Rebecca Kemble, Abe Sauer, Lane Hall/Lisa Moline, and others. And there you go—the last and best reason for being here: I’m at the Summit to get people intrigued, to open the doors of their curiosity about what the hell is happening in the Great Lakes states, and, hopefully, to direct people to the world of activism, movement analysis, and exemplary solidarity work that is our Wisconsin of the moment.

 

The Summit schedule is here.

I'm going on at around 12:30 PM or shortly thereafter. Catch it live here:

http://www.livestream.com/ 

 

 

 

 

summertime in walkerville

It is high summer in Madison, warm lakes, fireflies, and thunderstorms. 

And camping. Not in the woods, but on the sidewalks and patches of grass outside the Capitol.  

The Wisconsin Uprising lives. Which is saying a lot considering that after the real, meaningful, and historic victories of the first two to three weeks, we have suffered a string of defeats, each more serious than the last. But the movement is in a stage of metamorphasis, in a fragile state but trying to grow wings.

So let us review the political achievements of the Scott Walker regime, pretty much all of them concluded in the month of June. After recounts, at the very end of May the April 5 election for Supreme Court was finally certified in favor of the reactionary incumbent, David Prosser. The state’s Government Accountability Board declined to review the widely reported irregularities in the Waukesha County vote-counting process that made the difference in the election, despite problems during the recount that were documented by observers. The challenger declined to call for an investigation, instead opting to note the irregularities in a statement that called for improvements in the election system. Only about two weeks later the Supreme Court overturned the ruling by a Dane County judge that blocked the GOP-backed law stripping state workers of their collective bargaining rights, in a legally unconventional opinion blasted by the minority. The end of collective bargaining and payroll-deducted dues collection is now the law and will probably be upheld against further legal challenges. And then, as of last week, the budget, packed with deep cuts to nearly all state services (for example, BadgerCare, the state’s award-winning Medicaid program that serves about a million people), savaging anything progressive in particular (past provisions friendly to wind energy), and doling out special favors to private interests (the highway and road construction lobby), was passed with zero input from the Democrats and now waits to be signed by the governor.  

The curtain on this first drama has been drawn. Austerity is come to Wisconsin, dressed in the brown shirts of anti-abortion fanaticism and the Voter ID xenophobes, planned by the hard-scheming policy minds of ALEC, and sponsored by Koch Industries and the Cline Group.

On the left the consensus is emerging, just maybe, if the many movement analysis panels are to be believed, that the leadership of the unions was too timid. Of course the rank and file and grassroots knew this as it happened—on the night of March 9, to be exact, when Scott Walker essentially dared the workers to strike by ramming through his union-busting bill. As gratifying as it is to have one’s assessment affirmed even if long after the time of consequence, moving forward I am not convinced that the movement, at least as constituted in Madison, has the power for what it is going to take to halt the Walker regime, never mind undoing the damage. That is because the movement’s last remaining hope in the legislative arena is in the recall elections and our efforts on that front have been spotty to say the least.

Six sitting Republican and three Democratic state senators will defend their seats in an August 9 recall election. The money on the conservative side is already pouring in, as are the dirty tricks, the most widely publicized of which is their tactic of running fake Democrats to screw up the primary elections. Knowing this already, and having seen the Waukesha County electoral theft in plain sight, the Republicans will no doubt resort to any tactic that they can get away with. They know full well that a result short of a three-seat net gain for the Democrats will preserve not only their lock on Wisconsin government, but also crush the chances of a later recall campaign targeting Scott Walker (which cannot be filed until he’s been in office for a year).

In the meantime, the looming recall elections have the Republicans nervous enough to be piling on new policy and legislative initiatives at breakneck speed. There are too many proposed laws and regulations to go into here, but you can trust that they are nearly all uniformly hostile to any sort of public interest, and some are so extreme in their costly privatization schemes and ideological slants that even Republican voices are questioning them. The recall elections are all the more important as a result, but only as a negative achievement. In other words, if the Democrats do not gain the majority, the Republicans will trumpet their victory, call it an approval of the Walker agenda, and press forward even harder. If the Democrats win, they can only slow or stop the process, at best. Nonetheless, we must win. Youth and minorities will make the difference, which, again, given their rates of participation is anything but a safe proposition. 

So what to do? Helping with the dispersed recall campaigns in other parts of the state (election in seven weeks) is only the first of at least three shifts attention away from Madison. The second is finding meaningful ways to reach out in support of our comrades elsewhere, to return the favor to the people of the world who touched us back in February and March, whether in Spain, Greece, and Egypt. These gestures are more important than ever in the YouTube age.

 

But the most important pivot turns toward the looming battle over proposed new mining in northern Wisconsin. This is primary extraction, a proposed four-mile long dirty gash (inevitable leaching of sulfides, acids, and mercury) at the headwaters of the Bad River, which flows directly into Lake Superior, the largest and cleanest of the Great Lakes, the planet’s largest freshwater system. The formerly unprofitable levels of iron ore are now viewed as a pile of cash, an illusion driven by the appetite for steel in China and India—the main markets to which the taconite pellets will be shipped. Some of it would probably end up being unloaded in Tianjin.

The battle will bundle together a host of constituencies, pitting Gogebic Taconite and their hired representatives (GTAC, as they are known, was a big out-of-state donor to Scott Walker and expect to benefit from industry-friendly streamlining of regulations that are currently some of the toughest in the nation) against the citizens of the progressive strongholds of Ashland, Bayfield, and Iron counties, along with the Bad Water Band of the Lake Superior Ojibwe, whose traditional wild rice harvesting beds lie downstream from the lands eyed by GTAC—all in the context of lost American industry, globalization, and new BRIC economic power. This federally recognized band, though small in numbers, includes veterans from the Walleye Wars of the 80s and the Crandon Mine campaign of the 90s, both of which were successfully fought by grassroots anti-racist and anti-corporate coalitions. In the two campaigns, activists led by indigenous defenders of the land performed direct actions that confronted racist groups on the ground, stopped industrial equipment on the roads and tracks, and engaged legislative and media fronts simultaneously. In meetings, in letters to the editor, on message boards, references are already being made to both struggles. If the efforts to begin mining continue to advance, then the north woods is where colorful midwestern radicalism will make itself felt again. With the mining interests attempting to divide public opinion by promising jobs (first 700, then inflating that number to 2800–who believes them?), the position of labor will be interesting to watch. I’m not very hopeful, but what a time and place for labor to break its conservativism in relation to environmental politics. If there ever were an occasion to gang up on the common enemy, this would be it.

*

After the budget was passed last week, activists struck the camp. The square is mostly quiet, the Capitol will be reopened without metal detectors in about a week.

Walkerville is no more. Everywhere is Walkerville.

 

selections for homeshop, may 19, 2011: listening, learning, and...rocking

The text that follows is a modifed version of the handout distributed at the event. Will post Chinese translation when I have it, plus pics of the event afterward.

Selections for HomeShop: Music from Detroit and Michigan

A group of us are starting out on about twenty days of travel and research through different parts of China, beginning with a week in and around Beijing. Four of us come from current homes in the midwestern part of America, specifically the states of Wisconsin and Illinois. Together and separately, we have been writing and making art about the many ways that the economies, social movements, and institutions based or begun in the Midwest gave birth and remain tethered to the global systems of exchange that now bind humanity in a single flow of information, capital, biology, and cultural forms. This event helps to serve the purpose of introducing ourselves to you, of telling you where we are coming from, and of describing through music another of our place obsessions, Detroit.

The music history of Detroit and lower Michigan is as rich as that of any other American region. But unlike the older musical traditions of regional America—for example, the Delta, Appalachia, or New England—the musical culture for which Michigan is known is newer. Michigan artists did not make a collective impact nationally and internationally until the 1960s. But beginning in that decade and continuing ever since, a steady stream of artists with Michigan origins have put out sounds across genres that have entertained and influenced millions of listeners far and wide, in contradistinction to the very specific and provincial characteristics of Michigan society. Obviously I can only deliver a very limited introduction in one evening, leaving scores of important artists and hundreds of outstanding songs and albums not even mentioned, much less heard. A comprehensive introduction is hopeless, and, I must emphasize, my knowledge is pretty superficial. Instead, I have brought along seven long-playing records and suggest we go deep into them. The playlist emphasizes rock but includes a significant chunk of soul. It is through these records that I can give you some idea of the culture of Michigan—a culture that is now emerging as a post-industrial present from which other places all around the world can and must learn.

The musical culture of lower Michigan was fertile in the 1960s because of several factors. First of all at the material level, the state was by then an established economic engine, creating the conditions of marketplace, education, and leisure time. The postwar generation of autoworkers, due to the long growth phase of mid-century America and to the political power of the unions, became probably the best paid working class the world had ever seen. The management and owner classes, for their part, enjoyed an overflowing affluence akin to the tech fortune amassed on the West Coast a generation later. This was the consumer/producer society in a kind of temporary and relatively stable balance, at least regionally. There were good jobs for the working kids and good universities for the bookish ones. Individual workers had not yet been deskilled but also performed the part of the mass consumer. The conditions were ripe for hugely increased local consumption and production of media in general, and of popular music in particular.

Then there was the mix of cultures, races, ethnicities, and nationalities. The massive influx of economic migrant communities over the decades of industrial expansion created in lower Michigan a northern stew unlike in any other place, especially when the proximity of Ontario is recalled. With the longtime presence of both Canadians and Mexicans, vast numbers of southern blacks and southern whites, small but intense Chinese and Korean communities, big Polish, German, Greek, Jewish, and Arab communities, the mix of cultures contributed to the trading of influences evident in the work of, for example from the 60s Mitch Ryder or the Funk Brothers, and in the 80s with the innovations of the Belleville Three. In particular, black owned media was strong early and consistently in Detroit, including in radio. In recent times the tradition of artists upholding a musical multiverse continues in the Detroit scene. For example, for those who understand southeastern Michigan it probably was not a surprise that the first white rapper to earn a large and hard-won black fanbase, Eminem, came out of the Detroit area. Similarly, African American musicians like Mick Collins keep race-based genre-definition unbalanced now, as did Question Mark and Mysterians forty years ago (in the years before the lead singer legally changed his name to “?”).

It must also be said that while the mixing took place constructively at the level of cultural innovation, on the political and economic levels there was a constant low level of class-defined strife even when times were good. Add to the primary class division the intra-class fault line between blacks and whites, plus the many lines of separation between different ethnic communities, and you see the complicated tensions present. The Detroit rebellion of 1967 was only the most dramatic and violent uprising in a social landscape made up of everyday inequalities of power, economic and political, that are being played out in the present-day politics of austerity even as we speak. So while the industrial strength and wealth of lower Michigan did not fashion a conflict-free society at all, the musical output as a whole was and is, truly, the sound of a polyrhythmic, multi-vocal, politically clued-in family of subcultures. Formally innovative, sonically seductive, bodily pulsating, emotionally uninhibited, and artistically committed, in the musical realm this was and is a literally unofficial harmonious society. And a loud one.

As a native of the state, I declare the places that I lived, Saginaw in the mid-1970s and then the suburbs of Oakland County north of Detroit in the mid-1980s, amazing places to grow up with musical sounds in the air, for kids like me, grade school and then teeanage consumers of popular culture. My generation went from grooving to the national AM hits on the transistor radio—everything from Afternoon Delight to Abba and the Ohio Players—to hearing harder stuff on Detroit’s legendary free-form radio station in its late years, WABX. Lots of stations mixed local and regional acts like Grand Funk Railroad, Martha and the Vandellas, and Alice Cooper in with the national stuff, thereby launching a great many careers. Even as we studied the soul and psychedelic sounds from the earlier generation, in my young memory disco wasn’t so bad and the synth-pop/indie/alternative/punk mix that dominated the suburban 1980s also made sense. Not everybody liked everything, but in that place and in those years we were exposed to it all, and had artists we could believe who represented where we were from.

The Selections

Artist—Album

track title

Please note! This is a sequence of tracks delivered pretty much in the order that they appear on the records. That is how we will listen to them, just like I would do at home. This whole exercise is about listening to records, not deejaying or play-list writing. 

Laughing Hyenas—Life of Crime 

Here We Go Again

Wild Heart

Outlaw

Life Of Crime

The Stooges—Fun House

Down On The Street

Loose

Fun House

MC5—High Time

Future/Now

Skunk

100 Proof Aged In Soul—Somebody’s Been Sleeping In My Bed

Somebody’s Been Sleeping

Love Is Sweeter (The Second Time Around)

I’ve Come To Save You

Ain’t That Lovin’ You (For More Reasons Than One)

Martha Reeves—eponymous first solo LP

Power of Love

Sweet Misery

Question Mark And The Mysterians—Action

Don’t Hold It Against Me

Just Like A Rose

Do You Feel It

The Paybacks—Harder and Harder

Bright Side

Me

Can You Drive

Scotch Love

The Guide: A Random Selection of Twenty-Five Artists and Entities with Michigan and Detroit Connections 

This is laughably basic list. No geeking out here. Hopefully there is a name or a factoid that my music geek friends had not known of before. But, really, this is a guide for people who have no context, no experience with the broad outlines of Michigan music history, and possibly no working knowledge of rock history in general. And yet there is a thriving rock scene in Beijing, with lots of kids going for the image, the look. Let's help them get deeper into the spirit of the thing. Dylan just played Beijing like a month ago; how is anybody supposed to get Dylan without a bit of context? It is important that we make the info available, beginning with the basics that we who grew up in America tend to take for granted. So:

1. Hank, Thad, and Elvin Jones

One of the great families of jazz, spanning pianist Hank’s mastery of the 40s and 50s styles to trumpeter Thad’s big band arranging to Elvin’s landmark work with John Coltrane and and his own groups after.

2. Mitch Ryder

One of the original rock and soul voices of Detroit, blending black soul styles and harder white rock, who came up in the mid-60s with his group the Detroit Wheels. He still performs in clubs.

3. Crucifucks

A 1980s punk band from the Lansing scene whose lyrics and sound were harshly anti-authoritarian, perfect for the Reagan-era America, or, for that matter, right now. Founding singer Doc Corbin Dart remains vocally radical and antiwar.

4. Carolyn Franklin

Talented sister of Queen of Soul Aretha and daughter of the Rev. C.L. Franklin, a black preacher widely renowned for his oratorical performances from the pulpit. Along with sister Erma, Carolyn performed backing vocals for Aretha on a number of different recordings and also wrote songs for her.

5. Bob Seger System

Led by the raspy-voiced singer who came out of the Ann Arbor youth scene, the band is remembered for a hard rocking antiwar single “2+2=?” Seger later recorded the album Live Bullet at Detroit’s Cobo Arena, the last of his rock efforts before going on to mainstream success.

6. Grand Funk Railroad

A rock outfit from Flint that became one of the country’s biggest selling arena acts of the early 70s. After the group’s demise, a bunch of the alumni formed a short-lived band called FLINT.

7. Mabel John

The first female vocalist to be signed to the Tamla label, the label Berry Gordy founded before he reincorporated it as Motown. The lesser known but equally talented sister of rhythm ‘n’ blues legend Little Willie John.

8. Death

Recently rediscovered proto-punk/hard rock band, with reissued lost demos and studio cuts for a mid-70s record that never happened.

9. Eminem

Starting from the D12 crew to becoming one of the biggest selling musical artists of our time, he also starred in the 2002 movie 8 Mile, which put Detroit back into the popular consciousness as a post-industrial society and culture.

10. Detroit Cobras

For more than fifteen years Rachel Nagy and Mary Ramirez have lead a group in performing garage rock covers of obscure soul singles.

11. Rodriguez

A late 60s-early 70s lost folk-soul legend who somehow gained a cult following first in Australia and then in South Africa and Latin America, in all cases years after he’d first recorded and been consigned to obscurity in the US, including in Michigan.

12. Mary Wells

The song My Guy was one of Motown’s biggest early hits and helped to establish the label. Mary Wells had record company disputes and health problems for years after that kept her career limited, passing away at age 49.

13. Sun City Girls

Though the experimental and avant garde Sun City Girls formed in Phoenix, the Bishop brothers grew up in Saginaw. Their Middle Eastern musical influences came to them through their Lebanese relatives, part of a large lower Michigan Lebanese community.

14. Jackie Wilson

Wilson was one of the most amazing singer/dancers of his generation. Even though other artists named him as an inspiration, by the time of his death in 1984 he had been largely forgotten on the popular level as an outstanding talent. Michael Jackson kept his memory alive by often citing Wilson as a key influence.

15. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles

One of the Motown label’s earliest and longest-represented artists. His career with the Miracles, and as solo artist and record company executive, was celebrated with a National Medal of the Arts lifetime achievement award in 2002.

16. Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen

A country rock outfit from Ann Arbor with a honky-tonk barroom sound unusual for the time, and that went completely against the grain of the hard rock psychedelia of the local countercultural scene.

17. The Go

Part of the same late 90s scene that produced the White Stripes, but with a touch of psychedelia, helping to bring honest, dirty, loud guitar riff-based rock music back onto the national scene in the early 2000s.

18. The Layabouts

Originating out of the Cass Corridor scene of early 1980s Detroit, inspired by Crass, the Clash, and the new political music of that time, the Layabouts are still together today. Over the years they have played their fun but acerbic radical songs at continental anarchist gatherings, all kinds of political rallies, and countless benefits. 

19. Dennis Coffey

Session guitarist from the Upper Peninsula who played as a member of the Funk Brothers on many of the Motown tracks from the labels second phase, when many of the artists were turning to a harder, acid-influenced sound. He regained critical appreciation with a new record in 2011.

20. The Up

Along with the MC5, The Up played as a house band at the Grande Ballroom, the performance space around which the late 60s Detroit counterculture centered. Unlike the MC5, they never recorded for a national label. Until a compilation of their singles was released in 1995, the band was hardly remembered and even less heard.

21. Big Mack label

A Detroit label from the 60s and 70s golden age that pressed many singles by casual semi-pro local talents over its twenty years, scoring no more than a few very minor local hits. The label’s catalogue was given the Numero Group Eccentric Soul treatment in 2006.

22. Insane Clown Posse­

Using a carnival/horror concept for a tasteless hip hop act that many have never understood or taken seriously, this group with Detroit origins somehow manages to sell multiple millions of records.

23. Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

If you see a car bumper sticker reading “See you in August!” they’re talking about this festival held on private rural land on the state’s west side, the largest and most complete of its kind. Womyn-built, womyn-sponsored, womyn-consumed, the festival has been a kind of long term practical project in constructing a temporary but perennial womyn’s world.

24. The Belleville Three

Kevin Saunderson, Derrick May, and Juan Atkins were three teenagers in the early 80s living in Belleville, a suburb between Detroit and Ann Arbor, often credited with inventing the sounds that become Detroit techno. The culture born partly out of the innovations of these three lead to the establishment of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival as the first and still biggest event of its kind in the US, beginning in 2000. May and Saunderson both took a turn managing the festival.

25. Tempermill

Suburban Ferndale studio founded by musicians where dozens of Detroit artists and groups have recorded some of their most important work over the past twenty years. 

YouTube Sampler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsQ0rDnlhNM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjZ5ECKC8do&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwqL3ENO4sA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RchoabH5fhg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7eTOnNBwYU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_OHry9Nf0Y

 

Books

John Hersey—The Algiers Motel Incident

John Sinclair—Guitar Army

Angela Jimenez—Welcome Home: Building the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival

Donald Goines—Dopefiend

Craig Werner—Higher Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and the Rise and Fall of American Soul

 

 

china drift, initial itinerary!

Pasted below is the schedule of events for our China Drift, with plenty of middle dates yet to be filled in. They will be; we'll be having some announced events in both Wuhan and Chongqing. Many thanks to the HomeShop crew for their fabulous organizing and networking skills. Stay tuned!

*

大陆漂流 . 中国 Continental Drift China

2011年5月18日至2011年6月5日
18 May �C 5 June 2011

“大陆漂流.中国”活动将众多的艺术家，策展人，理论家，与活动家召集到一起，共同探索当 代地理政治转化对于公共框架与亲密生存 空间的影响。在一周的时间里，本活动将“漂”在北京，尝试将抽象分析（经济，社会学，都市生活研究，美学等等）直接导入不同的艺术实践当中。通过报告，工 作坊，讨论会与实地考察等方式，我们希望自己能在闹市与乡间的穿梭中构建一个充满欢乐，感觉试验，偶遇与思考的游历方式。

The Continental Drift China brings together artists, curators, theorists, and activists to explore the impacts that current geopolitical transformations are having on the public frameworks and intimate environments of existence. For one week, the roving seminar will drift through Beijing, endeavouring to bring abstract analysis (economics, sociology, urbanism, aesthetics, etc.) into direct contact with situated projects. By way of presentations, a workshop, discussion sessions and site visits, the project provides a movement through space thriving on conviviality, perceptual experimentation, unexpected encounters and informed travel in both metropolitan and rural settings. 
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本次大陆漂流活动由 "我们家” 青年自治中心，“家作坊”，“哪里哪里”策展联盟，与“罗盘”（美国中西部激进 文化走廊）等组织共同合作举办。

The Continental Drift China is developed by Desireè Youth Autonomy Center, HomeShop and the Where Where Curatorial Collective, in conjunction with Compass (of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor).

活动安排 SCHEDULE
欲知所列每项活动的细节，请看本安排表下的具体内容。请注意不是所有的活动都在同一 场所，活动地址安排如下：
For detailed descriptions of each of the events listed, please see below. Note that not all events are at the same location; addresses are listed accordingly.

星期一 monday	星期二 tuesday	星期三 wednesday	星期四 thursday	星期五 friday	星期六 saturday	星期天 sunday
			19 “合辑”，底特律音乐人类学赏析，王念华主讲 “Selections”, an evening of musical anthropology led by Dan S. WANG 晚上7点开始 地点：家作坊，东城区交道口北二条8号 Thursday, 19 May, 19.00 HomeShop; Dongcheng District,Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8	20 “大陆漂流”漂去天津Continental Drift to Tianjin	21 杨先让（艺术家， 曾任中央美术学院民间美术系主任）讲座 a Talk with Professor YANG Xianrang, artist and former head of the Central Academy of Fine Arts Folk Arts and Crafts department 具体时间待定 地点：家作坊，东城区交道口北二条8号 Exact time to be confirmed HomeShop;Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8 “西�[计划”艺术假扮旅行社简单开张 “Journey West” Travel Agency performative soft opening 5下午4点开始  钟楼湾胡同41号  Saturday, 21 May, 16.00 41Zhonglouwan Hutong (next door to The Drum and Bell Bar)	22 《北二条小报》自办出版工作坊 Beiertiao Leaksself-publishing workshop 5月22－23日，周六到周一，早上10点开始直到印刷完毕 10.00 until the presses are hot HomeShop;Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8
23 《北二 条小报》自办出版工作坊 Beiertiao Leaks self-publishing workshop 5月22－23日，周六到周一，早上10点开始直到印刷完毕 10.00 until the presses are hot HomeShop;Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8	24 从5月23日“大陆漂流”继续向武汉与重庆漂流，6月4日返回北京。如果你对我们下一步的旅行感兴 趣，请e- mail垂询： lianxi@homeshop.org.cn。 From the 23rd of May until the 4th of June, the Drift continues on to Wuhan and Chongqing before rounding back up in Beijing. If you are interested to continue with us on this leg of the journey, please inquire:lianxi@homeshop.org.cn.	25	26	27	28	29
30	31	1	2	3	4	5 “哪里哪里” 艺术空间将与大陆漂流参加者联合举办一个开放总结论坛。更多的详情稍候发布。 The Where Where Exhibition Space in Caochangdi will host a final forum with China Drift participants open to the public. More details to be announced. 下午3点开始 15.00 “哪里哪里” 艺术空间 朝阳区草场地村319-1艺术东区A区内 Where Where Exhibition Space No. 319-1, East End Art Zone A, Caochangdi

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关于“大陆漂流”About the Continental Drift project

漂流是一个开放性的实践研究项目，由布赖恩・赫姆斯与克莱尔・潘迪科斯特所发起。项目基于这样一个观察可得的事实，即全球化是根据政治和经济 力量的大陆性 区隔构成的。大陆漂流以自组织的研讨小组的形式，在纽约与萨格勒布进行，合作者包括了雷内・加布里，艾林・阿纳斯塔斯以及策展人集体WHW (What, How for Whom)。2008年，漂流以移动的形式，在中西部进行了为期十天的考察，自此以后，常有定期的短期旅行。 今年4月，克莱尔与布赖恩与阿根廷同志一道从罗萨里奥旅行到巴利亚・布兰卡，追踪南半球之后新自由主义弧的区域范围。现在我们与“罗盘”的同 志、以北京为 基地的合作者以及受邀的朋友们一起，将进行为期20天的讨论与交会，中国漂流会令大陆漂流项目将在全球化大潮中进一步做杯水车薪的努力。

更多关于“大陆漂流.中国”的参加者信息在：www.douban.com/group/topic/19783008/

The Drift is an open practice research project initiated by Brian HOLMES and Claire PENTECOST that begins with the observed fact of globalization structured along continental blocs of political and economic power. Continental Drift has taken the form of self-organized seminars in New York and Zagreb, with the collaboration of Rene GABRI, Ayreen ANASTAS, and the curatorial collective WHW (What, How and for Whom). The Drift took mobile form for a ten-day expedition around the Midwest in 2008 with regular short trips afterward. In April of this year Claire and Brian traveled with Argentine comrades from Rosario to Bahia Blanca, tracing at regional scale the post-neoliberal arc of the global south. With Compass comrades, Beijing-based collaborators, and invited friends on board for twenty days of discussions and encounters, the China Drift will bring the Continental Drift project one step closer to squaring the circle of global society.

For more information about the participants of the Continental Drift China, please visit:www.homeshopbeijing.org/blog/?p=2482

合辑 Selections

5月19日，周四，晚上7点开始
地点：家作坊，交道口北二条8号
Thursday, 19 May, 19.00
location: HomeShop, Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8

“合辑”是 一个聆听系列活动，2003年产生于芝加哥，目的是为满足音乐爱好者在学术界和吵闹的俱乐部之间的中间地带上彼此分享他们最喜欢的或最感兴趣的录音。最初 开始于芝加哥的一个实验文化空间“膳房（Mess Hall)”， 这一系列至少包括九个活动。在家作坊这期的“合辑”是第一次在美国本土之外举办。过去的主持人包括批评家Mike O’FLAHERTY，谈论关于 1984年的地下摇滚、艺术家Marc FISCHER表演音乐中的叫喊，作曲家Janice MISURELL-MITCHELL谈论关于先锋-古典传统、以及实验音乐家Gabriel SALOMAN谈论关于Crass的无政府主义朋克。通过适 当的音量和友好的讨论，“合辑”是另一种乐迷悦耳的完美去处。在今天晚上的节目中，艺术家兼作家王念华将播放两小时来自底特律和密西根的强烈 摇滚和真正黑人灵歌，在音乐方面，最具创造力的原创之一。

Selections is a listening event series born in Chicago in 2003 in answer to the need among music fans to share their best-loved or most intriguing recordings with each other, in the terrain between uptight academia and too-loud clubs. Beginning at Chicago's experimental cultural space Mess Hall, the series has included at least nine events. Selections at HomeShop will be the first in the series to take place outside the US. Past presenters have included the critic Mike O'FLAHERTY on the underground rock of the year 1984, artist Marc FISCHER on screaming in music, composer Janice MISURELL-MITCHELLl on the avant-classical tradition, and experimental musician Gabriel SALOMAN on the anarcho punk of CRASS. With moderate volume levels and friendly discussion, Selections is the perfect place to treat your ears to the fandom of another. For this evening's program, artist and writer Dan S. WANG plays two hours of intense rock and true soul from Detroit and Michigan, one of America's most musically creative regions.

西�[计划 The Journey West

5月21日，周六下午4点 
地点：钟楼湾胡同41号（钟鼓楼酒吧隔壁）
Saturday, 21 May, 16.00
location:  41 Zhonglouwan Hutong (next door to The Drum and Bell Bar)

作为“大陆漂移项目”的一部分，丝特芬妮・若芬堡和王念华将为他们那个名为“西�[计划”的合作旅行社项目开一个张。这个旅行社位于钟楼和鼓楼 之间， 将提供一个你连梦都没梦见过的“美国梦”一条龙服务。

As part of the Continental Drift program, Stephanie ROTHENBERG and Dan WANG will present a soft opening of their collaborative travel agency project entitled "The Journey West".  Located between the Drum and Bell towers, the travel agency will offer full service package tours of an "American Dream" that you haven't even dreamed of yet. 

《北二条小报》Beiertiao Leaks
5月22－23日，周六到周一，早上10点到印刷完
地点：家作坊，交道口北二条8号
Sunday & Monday, 22-23 May, 10.00 until the presses are hot
location:  HomeShop, Jiaodaokou Beiertiao 8

北二条小报将于2001年5月22日至23日着手进行第二版的筹划及发行工作。以日报的形式为模板， 我们将再次把注意力集中在日常生活中的某一天。胡同里的新鲜事，天气状况，转瞬即逝的交易等等都是我们探索并试图记录的对象。 由于本次活动 与大陆漂流艺术项目正好同时举行，我们的记者需在运动中记录下自己所背负的种种。报道作为一种投射或敏锐感知的前提是它必须对读者的反应有某 种预判，通过模糊性，虚拟性与可能性达到对事件即时性的超越。
 
具体事宜：
从2011年5月22日开始，我们将相聚在家作坊北二条新闻/设计/印刷室，在此参与者们将各就各位，在实践中面对文本交织的瓶颈并探索隐匿 其中的突破口。 在活动结束前，小报将以丝网印刷的方式出版并准备好投放到读者手中。 我们欢迎您在这两天中随时到访，为《北二条小报》提供 文本，图像，信息，周边新闻，设计，工作，点心或灵感。 至于我们每个字的稿酬，你可以向任何记者打听：写作赚不来钱，但我们的工作是出于对 新闻事业的热爱，对吧？

Beiertiao Leaks continues with its second edition for a two-day workshop from 22-23 May 2011. In the tradition of the daily paper, we will again address the content of a single day. The local news, the weather, fleeting bargains and other phenomena are still to be sought out and documented. But in this edition, coinciding with the Continental Drift in Beijing, we must also record the baggage we bring with us as our correspondents go mobile. Reporting is a form of projection as much as of sharp perception, insofar as it organizes reception. Insofar as it follows stories beyond their immediacy, through ambiguity, virtuality and possibility. 

The Facts: 
Starting at 10am on 22.05.11, we will gather at the Beiertiao newsroom/design department/printing press in HomeShop, where participants will take their positions and weave together the unweavable. By the end of the two days, the edition will be silkscreen printed on-site and ready for distribution. You are welcome to come at any point over the weekend to contribute text, image, information, local rumors, design, labor, refreshments and/or inspiration. As for our rate-per-character, ask any journalist: writing doesn't pay. But we're in it for the lifestyle, right?
-- 

 家作坊 HomeShop 
 北京市东城区交道口北二条8号，邮编：100007 
 Beijing 100007 Dongcheng District 
 Jiaodaokou Beiertiao, Number 8 

 T /// +86 010 8403 0952 
 W /// www.homeshop.org.cn  
       www.homeshopbeijing.org/blog 
       www.weibo.com/jiazuofang 
       www.douban.com/group/HomeShop/ 
 E /// lianxi@homeshop.org.cn 
       jiazuofang@sina.com 

 

the wisconsin uprising: why madison?

 While conservative assaults on anything with the word ‘public’ in front of it proliferate around the states of the American midwest and beyond, the struggle in Wisconsin continues. In its non-response to Scott Walker’s declaration of war on the evening of March 10, the unions absorbed a defeat even as the movement energy turned to legal and electoral fronts. How much of this defeat can be rolled back on the electoral terrain is an unanswered question, but the very least we can say is, the damage inflicted by Walker’s bill will likely never be undone in full, even if Democrats manage to retake control of the state senate, the state assembly, and the governor’s mansion. The primary reason being, they are Democrats. In anycase, the struggle has entered a protracted and highly localized phase. Even though things continue to develop—just yesterday a Dane County judge put a temporary restraining order on the authoring of Walker’s bill, thereby halting it from taking effect as law just yet—it is an apt moment to ask questions that had been put aside by the month-long maelstrom of events. 

Nicolas Lampert, Erin Stalnaker, and I are currently composing a text reviewing the first phase of the struggle and that will among other things dissect what we see as the March 10 failure, so I will hold off on discussing that episode for now. Instead, let’s consider the question of place. Why Madison? In Tunisia, Sidi Bouzid was the town of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who became a movement martyr. In Madison there was no individual act of heroic, dramatic resistance as a precipitating event. Instead, it was collective offense and collective outrage. First a thousand people, then 15k, then 30k, then at least three consecutive Saturdays of near or over 100k, four straight weeks of demonstrations, plus an extended occupation of the Capitol. All in a second-tier city that would probably strike any distant observer as equally obscure compared to the other sites of global uprising from the past several months.

If it is true that under the auspices of globalization, if you look hard enough at what is right around you, you will see the whole world, then Madison is one of those places where you don’t have to look very hard; the city suffers from a conceit of cosmopolitanism, a scene where sporting Guatemalan pants or quaffing Belgian lambic can be passed off for consciousness. Needless to say, in normal times this tendency is irritating to the critical eye. But in extraordinary times the substance behind the superficiality does make a difference. For example, Madison is a favorite stop for national leftwing figures, always supplying them a reliable audience. So when Chomsky wrote this short analysis for Truthout in which he links the Cairo and Madison movements, he’s thinking about a town he’s been to regularly over the years—in both 2009 and 2010 he lectured to a packed house at the Orpheum Theatre. Even better, this profile of a local boy who’d gone on to report from Tahrir Square for Al-Jazeera was published on February 8, mere days before the Wisconsin uprising broke. The internationalist awareness of the local populace worked to the movement’s advantage over the first week in the many echoes of Cairo, and then all the way through to the Ian’s phenomenon, before fading as the political narrative split into different storylines. Whether and how that internationalism will be re-injected into the language of the movement is unknown, but internationalist terms remain as a potential advantage and cannot be erased for as long as the movement’s demonstration element is sited primarily in Madison.

Perhaps more importantly, just about every constituency that Scott Walker antagonized in his short tenure on the statewide stage is present in Madison. The teachers and public sector workers, of course, but also the environmentalists, who were dealt the dual slap of a hostile appointee to head the state Department of Natural Resources and the axing of a new biofuels power plant conversion project. Poor people's services, already slim from past attacks, were put on notice for draconian cuts, angering the whole social service establishment, not to mention the people who use services. Mass transit and anti-sprawl advocates got theirs when the governor-elect declared that he wouldn't accept federal stimulus money for rail development between Madison and Milwaukee. Therefore, as soon as the unions were kicked into action, plenty of the local citizenry instantly knew the common enemy.

*

Picture this~

Pedaling downtown from my home on Madison’s West Side for a show on a warm summer night, it is six miles of easy slopes along Lake Mendota. Getting there early, I take a stroll up State Street and around the square. Students in town for the summer are out entertaining themselves with burgers, candy, and ice cream while their professors dine out for Nepali food. A man with a guitar who resembles the other man with a guitar a little further down the street, tunes his beat-up instrument while arguing with somebody about nothing in particular. On my way up towards the square, coming the other way are a few small packs of drinkers who have strayed out of the sticky beerhalls zone at the campus end of State Street. Near the steps of the Capitol a homeless gentleman makes his bed, as do others in spacious intervals along the square. It is very still, just slightly more peaceful than sterile. A few patrons of upscale locavore restaurants stroll to and from their car parks. The occasional cop zips by on a bicycle against the lit-up Capitol dome, under which a couple of teens puff on the lawn. Hardly noticed but playing roles we can only imagine, a lone suit working late—a capitol aide, lawyer, or lobbyist—crosses the square from office to condo. After the show at the Orpheum or the Majestic or the Frequency, I munch a fresh donut at the Greenbush Bakery to fuel my return passage through the quiet dark streets and leafy bikepaths, far from the turmoil of the world. ~

The idyllic life that is or was a kind of norm in Madison could be described for that same summer evening in probably three dozen ways, depending on your hobbies (knitting…or kayaking?), tastes (artisanal brews), and budget (state worker classification). Because Madison is that placid kind of midwestern town, well-educated, competently governed, economically stable, full of intelligent diversions—which is to say, it is not a normal place at all. It is a Rust Belt city enjoying the trappings of a modest twentieth-century affluence while hundreds of cities, towns, and villages throughout the region deal with economies that have gone down the greased chute of globalization, leaving behind wrecked communities. It is the comparatively intact economy and communities of Madison, and the peculiar abnormalities of Madison thus made possible, that are worth considering after the events of the past five weeks.

In relation to how the movement materialized over the first two weeks of the uprising, the most important fact about Madison is its management as a people’s city, as opposed to a police state. Madisonites take it for granted, but nearly all the out of state visitors I met mentioned the unbelievably low and casual police presence, especially over the first two weeks. For example, when I ran into Brooklyn-based activist artist Jim Costanzo on the steps of the Capitol on the second Tuesday, nearly a week into the occupation, he declared the action around us impossible to imagine happening in New York because of the security priorities. On another night in the occupied capitol I met a UWUA staffer named Mark Brooks from Nashville who came to see for himself what was going on. One of the first things he said was, this slumber party/occupation could never happen in Tennessee. The police simply wouldn’t allow it. Speaking about policing from a Chicago perspective, where the cops routinely line avenues wearing $700 worth of hardshell riot gear to contain depressingly small antiwar marches, I can say that by comparison Madison has indeed fended off the pressure to militarize America’s police forces.

There are reasons for this. One, the Madison Police Department is as committed to a trust-based and non-confrontational philosophy as any department in the country. Two, it is a comparatively well-educated force. And three, by a long stretch the main public security threat in Madison revolves around massive numbers of out-of-control drunk college football fans on six Saturdays a year, plus the regular party atmosphere in the drinking district. The Madison police are professionals who deal with drunken fights, falls, sexual assaults, vandalism, and alcohol poisoning all the time. Demonstrations at the Capitol are nothing compared to the puke-fests going down on the other end of State Street three nights a week. Even in terms of outside agitators, it is the bars that attract the out of town rabble, not the demonstrations. The city police know this, and so does county law enforcement.

The consciousness of the police and county sheriff bled over into sympathy for the forces opposed to Walker at a pretty early point, thus depriving the governor of a ready onsite tool of enforcement. In time both Chief Noble Wray and Sheriff Jim Mahoney publicly questioned and/or criticized the governor, speaking from their perspective as public security professionals. Their statements damaged the governor, further (and correctly) painting him as a hyper-partisan extremist, and reinforced the broad unity of public opposition. So when right wing outsiders were baffled by Walker’s tolerance of the occupation, they did not understand that in Madison the police have different and more intelligent priorities, unlike in most other places and unlike the authoritarian law enforcement most Americans now accept. 

The lesson is, building the conditions for large social movements that can assemble in spectacular masses includes working on civilizing your local police. 

*

Another thing about Madison is its progressive and countercultural infrastructure, and latent political potential. The latter was put on display last fall by a thirty-six year-old Green Party candidate, Ben Manski, in making a serious first run for the open state assembly seat representing the West Side, and who has since performed as one of the voices of the movement in media appearances. But it's been long term labor that laid the foundations. Over a couple of generations at least, people in Madison have built up a functioning network of co-ops and enlightened businesses, a healthy local alternative media in print, radio, and online, several locally-based but internationally networked progressive organizations, and thriving local cultures of both food and biking. This infrastructure is maintained and used by a population of grad students, educators, sort-of-creative types, and lots of people who work secure, moderately-compensated state jobs, folding a degree of everyday activism into a large proportion of Madison's population. On the whole, this is a city population that has, compared to the big city rat racers, a good deal of free time. To put it negatively, Madison is one of those enclaves where “artist” is not a meaningful professional category, the local currency project trades heavily in bodywork, and an awful lot of residents seem to have the time and narcissism to “work” on themselves. 

But as my friend Chris B once said, as pathetic as the prospect may be, the hippie freeks just might be humanity’s last and best hope. By essentially hosting the Wisconsin uprising, the hippie element of Madison did in fact prove its worth. Without the laid back vibe and good humor, the anger might have gotten out of control. Without the easy generosity expressed in a thousand little ways (I did my part early on with a midnight delivery of five dozen donuts to the occupied rotunda—the pleasure is truly in the giving), the welcome would have stayed theoretical. And most importantly, it was the people of Madison, dedicated and available, who kept the attendance of the weekday rallies at respectable and sometimes very impressive numbers for four weeks, in between the massive weekend rallies. Different unions bused in people from Milwaukee and other parts of the state for a day at a time, but without the thousands of local people going down to the square multiple days a week and often a couple of times a day, with many temps in the 20˚/-6˚ range, the movement would not have gained the respect that durability commands. Even Scott Walker had hoped at first to wait out the demonstrations, but in the end could not.

Now that the demonstrations are winding down and the epicentric role of Madison takes a backseat to the statewide April 5 election for Wisconsin Supreme Court, the dispersed recall campaigns, and the wider battles around the region, for people who live in Madison one question is, what will be the lasting effects on our city of this historic uprising? Will the nascent police state patched together by Scott Walker to maintain control of the Capitol building become a permanent feature of our town? Is it a foothold for the militarization trend that has been thus far successfully avoided? What special sorts of punitive measures will the conservatives aim at the city of Madison? Will the events of the past few weeks open opportunities to bring the segregated communities of Madison—all of which will suffer under the Walker agenda—into substantive contact? How will the Gen Y students—grad, undergrad, and high school—who played powerful roles and gained real political experience, move forward as young, radicalized adults facing much greater personal uncertainties than those before them? Are we seeing the beginning of their generational moment?

Although nothing in this struggle has been settled with finality, I can say that the old “normal” of Madison, if it never comes back, won’t be much missed. It is like what Rich Feldman said about the so-called economic recovery—the recovery the pundits keep talking about, and so much of officialdom presents as desirable, is basically imperialism. Scott Walker’s attacks have revealed what used to be normal as a temporary mirage. It lasted for decades, but it was temporary nonetheless. If Madison was a pocket of comfort, health, and freedom, in the continuing unfolding of the global crisis of capitalism that pocket has been turned out. Over the last four weeks, and really just in time, the people of Madison, in a big way, rejoined the people of Detroit, Fort Wayne, Rockford, Saginaw, and the rest of the settlements of the midwest in our regional front in the global class war.

*

My last note on Madison in the Wisconsin uprising is a parable of sorts. While we were out battling the Walker agenda on the square and in the Capitol, the power of volunteerism, enlightened consumerism, best retail practices, and the cancerous business models of corporate America came home in the news that Borders would be shutting down its Madison store. So for a short while I allowed myself to relish the difference between this,

the window of Avol's Books, one of Madison's independent bookstores, and this.

There are those who believe that the death of any bookstore is reason to mourn. I disagree. But the thrill of our independents outlasting the deep pocketed growth/choke out strategy of the big box chains is only tempered by the knowledge that the independents remain precarious. The latest and most serious threat to an independent bookstore happens to involve our very own Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative. Please support them.

the sunday after wednesday's attack and saturday's masses

This past Saturday’s demonstrations brought 150,000 people out in Madison. But unlike the celebratory mood on previous Saturdays, this was a comparatively somber day. It had to be. After Scott Walker rammed his “budget repair” bill through three days earlier, down the throats of the public, even if possibly in violation of more than one law, by Saturday the fact had settled in. Scott Walker had called labor’s bluff and labor did nothing, at least not immediately. He and the top state senate Republican, Scott Fitzgerald, then went into good cop/bad cop mode, with Walker speaking his reassuring words while Fitzgerald continued to deride all elements of the opposition, especially his Democrat senate colleagues. Either voice by itself would be irritating enough; as a coordinated follow-through to their manuveur, it galls like a hard poke from a momentarily triumphant inferior.

Late into Wednesday night and all day Thursday, angry strike chatter filled the tweet and comment threads. Student walk-outs were floated for Friday, but no union called a strike, and no wildcat strikes erupted. Scott Walker’s move was a dare to the workers. Go ahead, strike, and see what happens, he seemed to be saying. The union leadership studied the situation in emergency meetings and decided against it. Given the lack of strike funds, the likelihood of being fired, and the possibility of public support evaporating behind a work stoppage, there were in fact good reasons for refraining from striking. The unfortunate thing is, the emotional momentum that would carry a strike forward as a real weapon of disruption, similar to how the occupation of the Capitol had brought forth a previously unknown community of support, is now lost. A strike still may be called eventually, but now it can only be a symbolic strike, a one-day affair with no real power. A disruptive strike, as a premeditated action, will surely lose public support, and therefore is off the table, unlike the spontaneous or immediate strikes that could have happened, and would have been, by contrast, driven by the emotion of the events rather than the political calculations of the leadership.

So where does this leave the Wisconsin uprising? Back home in Madison late on Friday, Sam Gould, Jerome Grand, and I worked up a flyer to pass out on Saturday, discussing this situation. We got about 400 out by hand, a drop in the bucket of 150k bodies, but nonetheless a real attempt to have people reflect on our options and opportunities at this time. It was heartening to see many, many signs supporting the Kloppenburg candidacy. To me, this showed that the April 5 election is widely recognized as the next urgent battle, and our next best chance to land a blow on the Walker regime.

The text of our flyer:

 

We will

always remember

who fired

the first shot 

in the      

class war  ❧

  

AS ONE OF OUR COMRADES, SAMUEL Á LOVE, DECLARED on the evening of Wednesday, March 9, 2011, we will always remember who fired the first shot in the class war. On that night the Republican Party of Wisconsin, led by Governor Scott Walker, played the hardliner card. No more pretending. 

After a night of loud protest in Madison, on Thursday the most aggressive part of the so-called budget repair bill—that which strips public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain—was passed by the state assembly. Walker signed the bill, rescinded his layoff notices, and now puts on a happy face, telling everybody to go along with it, that he knows better than anyone how hard the medicine is, but never fear, it is for the good of all. Arrogance is apparently a requirement for the new generation of conservative ideologues.

So even as we prepare for and attend the largest demonstration we can possibly muster for Saturday, we must at the same time consider the reality. This first phase of the struggle—heroic, inspiring, and creative in many respects—is drawing to a close. They won.

But the war is far from settled.

Their opening victory and our setback took place even as the next three fronts open up in full. They are:

1. The April 5 elections for Wisconsin Supreme Court. That is right around the corner.
2. Challenges to the legality of the new law. The day Walker signed the bill, Dane County filed a suit to block the enactment of the bill. Other lawsuits may follow.
3. Recall campaigns, already underway for state senators, and less than a year from now for Scott Walker.

Of the three fronts, the most pressing is the April 5 election. JoAnne Kloppenburg must be elected. David Prosser, who has already declared his intention to support the Walker agenda from the bench, must be defeated. The current court is split 4-3, with a conservative majority. We have the opportunity to overturn the balance. The term for a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice is ten years. Both candidates have accepted public funding for their campaigns and therefore cannot accept donations of funds from individuals. But you can help the Kloppenburg campaign through volunteering, spreading the word, and most of all, voting and making sure your friends and family in Wisconsin vote, too.

The legal challenges are mostly out of the hands of the grassroots. But here again, the April 5 election matters, because many of these laws will be decided by the courts. A vote for Kloppenburg is a vote against Walker!

The recall campaigns need all the help they can get, both in terms of funds and volunteer labor. The sixty day countdown is already down to less than fifty. Being specific to senate districts, all of them depend on the committed activism—and voting!—of local citizens. But there is no precedent for a tide of recall campaigns on this scale. By seeing these recall campaigns through to their ends, with focus and dedication, our movement can make history again.

To sum up this short analysis of where we are at, the utility of the demonstrations is fading. We in the movement must pivot; the electoral campaigns on the horizon can stop and/or undo the Walker attacks, but will depend on grassroots engagement of a level similar to that which went into the demonstrations. And it needs to happen now—both the April 5 election and the recall campaigns are sprints already underway. Many of you have attended demonstrations repeatedly and regularly over the first phase. Let’s apply the lesson from that experience to the next phase of the struggle: how do we build into our regular lives the political work that is now needed?

Scott Walker is counting on us forgetting this ever happened. He and his people will do everything they can to both rewrite history and distract. In addition to their manipulation, we’ll have to combat the natural distraction of the corporate media. This is the challenge as we move into the protracted phase of the struggle.

Electoral politics are not fun, not glamorous, and there is no guarantee that retaking control of the senate or the governor’s office will result in the undoing of the Walker agenda. This is not a philosophical argument for electoral engagement, only a view to what is immediately ahead for us. After April 5 and the recall campaigns, there will be yet more and different things to do. A culture of resistance, with variable tactics and a diversity of engagements, is what we are building. Let’s keep on building it together, in Wisconsin and around America—BECAUSE WE WILL ALWAYS REMEMBER.

—Your fellow citizens of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor, 3/12/2011

 

 

the conservatives go on offense

I type this post tonight from Chicago, where I'm staying with my ill mother. Though I've been in and out of Madison ever since this whole thing started, it is the events of tonight have shown me what it feels like to watch what's going on in Madison from a distance and wish you were there. At the same time, in the age of mediated political conflict, getting the distance view is also important to understand in order to better shape the local, on the ground struggle. In Madison, it's a battle for space, control of the Capitol, and a gathering of massed bodies, but at the same time it's the production of a representation for distance media.

Tonight Scott Walker, through the actions of his senate allies, played his hardliner card, with textbook lead-up. Yesterday’s weirdness, in which Walker leaked emails between he and some of the awol senate Dems, had people wondering what was up. Now we know. The emails were completely insubstantial and didn’t go anywhere, supposedly of a “hey, let’s talk”, “what about?”-variety, and not much further. But the fact that he could prove that he sent an email and Dems responded meant that he could sell a line to whatever media would listen to him, ie that he was “in negotiations,” that he was “softening,” that he is “willing to talk.” Lies, media manipulation, and more lies.

It was a perfect set-up for tonight. We were taken by surprise. Touche, Mr. Walker.

But he didn’t count on a few things. One, it seems that again he underestimated the motivation, the level of engagement, and the speed in communication in the movement. People were being called to the Capitol right around 6 pm in emergency emails and social media, as soon as word of their procedural plan broke. This created the dual movement surge: of bodies on the square and grassroots media rippling through the communication ethers, instantly countering the right wing narrative. This thing was not going to be snuck through without hailing the people into impromptu physical demonstrations and crazy message sharing, not with such thick and rapid communication networks and such practiced demonstrators. Sounds like the crowds on the square grew all night long from then on. 

And two, Walker wasn’t able to fully secure the Capitol (much less the square) before pulling this provocation. Partly because of having alienated the Madison and UW police departments, not to mention having antagonized the Dane County Sheriff, Walker couldn’t realize the police state I'm sure he wanted and was advised to impose. The result is that tonight demonstrators have re-taken the Capitol, with anger, joy, and massive numbers. The people’s noise chamber and social forum, which drove Republicans crazy for two weeks, is back for the moment. Nobody's sure how long this occupation will last, but the point is made–the GOP doesn't hold title to this building. Check out the live stream. In between chants and songs protestors are discussing through an open mic under the rotunda the question of where this movement is going, what needs to be done, etc.

Finally, the recall efforts targeting the GOP state senators have just gained another shot of energy. John Nichols believes that the recall efforts already had senators scared on the GOP side, and that this manuveur was triggered in part because of GOP leadership nervousness. Read this impassioned response to the Republican move by Kristopher M. Rowe, coordinator of the grassroots, self-organized Alberta Darling recall effort, and one of the amazing voices to have emerged from this movement. If you can, do like I did, give them a few bucks. The north shore villages she represents are some of the wealthiest parts of Wisconsin.

I and many coming from Chicago will be there for Saturday, which now promises to be the biggest demonstration thus far, probably by a wide margin. A lot of things can and will happen between now and then, particularly in the area of legal challenges and whether strikes commence. School walk-outs are planned for Friday, as are sick-outs.

What has become clear after tonight is that this man will stop at nothing. He doesn't know any limits. But we also now understand that he will continue to make mistakes.