In advance of this workshop I have been revisiting “counterculture” both as a general category of phenomenon and as that historically-specific wave in post-WWII United States which in extended form dates roughly from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. Now that we are living through the 50th anniversary decade of the 1960s, it is a good time to ask: What does counterculture mean? Where does it reside, if anywhere? And what about the Counterculture—what is a proper perspective that history from the year 2016, as every week seems to bring the death of another figure from those frequently recalled decades?
Revisiting this history led me to read Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, two titles from the countercultural lit canon I never read. Taking them consecutively had the effect of marking the beginning and end stages of the period, The Dharma Bums having been published in 1958 and relating stories from the middle Fifties, and Dog Soldiers published in 1974 and set in that time.
The Dharma Bums fictionalizes the adventures of a protagonist based on the author and his friends in real life. Kerouac captures the travels, personalities, and Buddhist explorations of a set of friends making discoveries against the backdrop of an American society dependent for order on a suffocating quiescence. But outside the narrow social norms of the times, the limits were unknown and the paths to freedom seem laughably available compared to the crowded and surveilled planet of today. Backcountry camping trips were easy treks into solitude, freight-hopping was a method of free transport, and gender politics were largely unarticulated. For white guys, it was a time of freedom. To me at age 47 the language reads as amusing and innocent, the story of young men living in a of fraternity of poets. As in most of Kerouac’s writings, the cast of characters is based on the real people who collectively earned renown as the Beat Generation.
The Dharma Bums features Japhy Ryder, a character sketched from the real guy Gary Snyder. Kerouac’s descriptions of Ryder’s outdoorsy ways read like a pre-history of what is now a billion-dollar outdoor rec industry. Ryder’s campcraft cooking of dehydrated foods are new to narrator Ray Smith, who describes them in a way that makes a reader hungry despite having eaten many a tasteless wilderness meal. In Ryder’s duck down sleeping bag, yab yum exercises, and a score other details, one can see the roots of modern hippie-dom, the “granola” subcultures of love and self-absorbtion that long ago took root in towns like Madison, where I live.
(For people just putting together the worlds of the Beat writers, this is a useful key to Kerouac’s characters. As well, there are many interesting essays and articles out there now about the Beats as seen through the lens of gender, including this one that brings attention to Natalie Jackson, who, along with Elise Cowen, ended up two of the known casualties of a world not ready for them.) Dog Soldiers presents an entirely different vibe. The adventure related is no spiritual journey but rather a desperation trip fueled by drug duplicity and the opportunism of those countercultural freeks surviving the jaded post-Sixties mood. The story takes place on the downside of the high water mark, in a landscape of burned out, once-idealistic characters—types that Stone knew well from time spent in the Bay Area psychedelic scene of the mid and late Sixties. But here the drugs are numbing opioids, heroin and dilaudid, not happy face marijuana and LSD. In little more than fifteen years the California of Japhy Ryder’s mountain hikes, meditation practice, and cabin parties has turned into the sleazy California world of black market hustlers and amoral perverts, none to be trusted. Ray Hicks, the smuggler on the run, practices no Paramita of Dana; his only concern is offloading a package of heroin for a decent price, a stash that he never paid for.
Unlike in Kerouac’s world, Stone offers up fully sketched women characters in key roles, for example, Marge, a woman on the run with Hicks but chasing her own dragon all the while. Depressingly, the women in the story are about as wasted and desperate as the men. The purity of Ryder’s forests are from a different age; this tale ends with an outlaw run across the desert and a paroxysm of violence, a surrealistically described episode that reads as a fitting end to not only that particular drug deal but maybe the promise of the Counterculture as a whole. So we have on the front end the blissful, worry-free days of The Dharma Bums—the segregated South and Cold War propaganda notwithstanding—and on the far side of the arc, the cyncism and drug-hazed dread of Dog Soldiers, a paranoid hangover of late Nixonian meanness and blown optimism.
Interestingly, a transpacific element shapes the plotlines of both books. For Kerouac, it is the impending departure of Ryder to Japan, a turn in the story based on Gary Snyder winning a fellowship to study there (which led to his living in Japan for ten years). For Stone, it is the opening scenes, where his protagonist Converse, a burned out war journalist-turned-junk smuggler, makes his exit from Vietnam (Stone himself had been a correspondent assigned to report on the war). Considered in this way, both novels read as evidence of countercultural links to East and Southeast Asia—strands of proof that the US was heavily involved in Pacific Rim exchanges of all kinds over most of the twentieth century. Combining sites of an Other attractive to white Americans (zen!) and theaters of imperial overreach and colonial violence under one vast geocultural region called Asia, of course does little to sort out the particulars. And yet, most Asian Americans can trace in their family narratives the too-heavy footprint of the American empire—my family included.
Whether in reference to the Euro-attraction to “Eastern spirituality” or the antiwar analysis regarding the South Vietnamese client state, Asian Americans may have a critical view on the Counterculture’s understanding of things Asian. But Asian Americans must take care—a good number of us (again, my family stands as an example) come from lineages aligned with the reactionary sides of the conflicts that drove our families into diaspora—anti-Communists, particularly. The lack of a political consensus within Asian America and the historical culpability of respective camps creates a complication that raises the stakes. Laying a claim to countercultural legacies precisely because we may have a view of it beginning, as Ronald Takaki might say, from a different shore, seems like an important opening to follow. I am looking for cracks to widen, points from which the contradictions frozen by ideology and historical circumstance might be de-stabilized, through a strategic irreverance of ethnic references and a diasporic tramp philosophy. Let’s see where this goes.
I was eight years old when my dad took me to the Green Acres theater in Saginaw Township to see Rocky. It was just Rocky, not “the first Rocky movie,” since nobody had any idea of it becoming a so-called franchise picture, much less that some of us would be talking and thinking about it nearly forty years later. My dad is not a boxing fan but he always had a big spot in his heart for the city of Philadelphia, where he and my mother spent two of their early married years in the US before us kids came along. As noted here, Philadelphia as cityscape, underdog atmosphere, and supplier of extras is almost a recurring co-star of the series. While he enjoyed that part of it, for me the story of a nobody hitting the big time did it. I remember getting teary-eyed in the theater.
I was so taken by the film that afterward, maybe a year later, I got my hands on The Official Rocky Scrapbook (most likely from the books section at the Kmart that my dad often browsed for bargains). Even though I discarded that book probably thirty years ago, I still remember some parts of it. For example, where Stallone tells of the extras who made up the rowdy crowd for the championship fight, lured into the job by a free chicken dinner, a low-budget filmmaking tale if there ever was one. During a break in the filming the extras got restless and started booing and throwing chicken bones into the ring, rushing the shooting. Pretty funny. Stallone wrote the book text, beginning with the story of how he came up in the world of acting. Ultimately more important as a seed planted in my pre-teen brain than the film itself was Stallone’s account in the “scrapbook” of his vagabonding and early times as a struggling artist. When I learned of Stallone’s romantic wanderings on a shoestring, that sensitivity to the bittersweetness of the once-in-a-lifetime shot (or so we thought, before the sequels were made) made sense. For years afterward, Rocky was my go-to reference for popular films that refrained from victory endings. But as the film aesthetics and improbably storylines went from low-budget/semi-independent to designed blockbuster, I stopped paying attention. Another Rocky movie. Whatever.
Then a few years ago I read Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties by Mike Marqusee. Not only is the book an excellent account of Ali during his height as an athlete and his brightest, most dangerous moment as a public figure, but it is also a capsule history of racial politics as played out in pro boxing, which for much of the twentieth century was considered the ultimate in competitive sport. There is a great passage in there about Rocky as a kind of recuperation of the surplus aggression expressed by Ali in particular and by the Black Power and Black nationalism movements in general. By sketching out the white protagonist as the downtrodden, disadvantaged sensitive type and making Apollo Creed into a near-caricature of arrogance and showmanship, for Marqusee the writer/actor Stallone capitalizes on the racial fatigue afflicting the post-Civil Rights mid-Seventies white America. Marqusee’s reading of Rocky suggests that in only fifteen years—say, from the first Freedom Riders of 1961 being beaten by white mobs to a Best Picture winning film of 1976 representing a black champion as The Establishment—the racial power balance had been completely reversed. The movie seemed to say that in the year of Bicentennial celebrations, the forgotten man in the story of national progress was the white working class stiff, the hardscrabble guy true to his roots, just trying to get through life with minimal dignity.
I believe Marqusee’s reading of the film is only partially correct. I think he correctly reads the reserve expressed by white men in the face of Ali-style bombast as a quiet resentment. But he is a bit unfair to Stallone the writer, who in fact drew up the Apollo Creed character (and the whole all-black Creed team) as canny and deliberative, as a knowing performer. Establishing the Apollo character from the beginning as a thinking human being set the stage for the series, which went further in exploring a transracial rivalry-turned-friendship than almost any other dramatic film or series of films that I can think of. To me the curious thing is, after the first film and as the Rocky and Apollo characters move towards the intimacy of friendship, racial difference fades. The two fighters become increasingly less representative of their races, and more representative of the other persistent trope of boxing, that of the final alone-ness experienced by the boxer, that for fighters the social dimensions of life evaporate once an opening bell sounds. That the only peope who understand fighters are other fighters.
Lost in the development of the Rocky/Apollo friendship is a resolution of the racial divide identified by Marqusee. They end up just two good guys fated to be comrades, practitioners of a common craft and bound together by a common nemesis (Clubber Lang in Rocky III) and the common call to represent the nation (against Drago in Rocky IV). I went to see Creed with an eye towards this part of the story—how would the writers portray the fatherless son building a relationship with the surrogate, the one being a young African American and the other Philly’s most famous white ethnic character? Turns out the writers play it safe—social difference is indeed raised as a pivot point in one of the subplots, but it is not racial difference that has to get transcended. Instead, it is the progressive disability (hearing loss for a musician) looming in Bianca’s future that marks difference, to the degree of it producing an awkwardness that has to be negotiated between the characters. Racial difference as a fault line dividing society never really comes into play in relation to Adonis’s opponent, the white working class Liverpudlian “Pretty” Ricky Conlan. Post-Cold War globalization, the film seems to say, has turned diversity into a simple fact of life.
The series contributes to the naturalization of transraciality as a standard component of male bonding. I suppose this is an accurate reflection, on some agreeable level, of our half-imagined national progress. In his time Ali was reviled by a majority of Americans but has since been embraced as a living symbol of noble competition and principled living belonging to the whole nation and even the whole world. Presuming Ali’s politics have not substantially changed, this is a turn that speaks well of American society. On the other hand, Ali is no longer a threat, living out of the spotlight and having been rendered disabled by illness. His transformation into a silent figure now fighting a battle against his own body seems representative of the Civil Rights generation. Those still among us are ebbing, with a social voice losing its power, while the younger generations live in a diffuse, leader-variable social movement landscape—today’s heroes of justice are either accidents of media or else have been academically prepared to take the role. Young people now have more choice than ever and Adonis’s path is a chosen one. Rather than update the story by raising present day race-infused controversies and problems as background noise, the film’s story of dual redemption places in parallel two essentially individual journeys devoid of social impact. The resolution between Rocky and Apollo, it seems then, is transmitted to the next generation by diving into the bottomless well of contemporary individualism, where racial identity may be subsumed into mere personality and a black fighter (or retired white champion) is never more than a lone man fighting his personal demons.
*note: I loaned out the Marqusee book so I don't have it handy to quote or even double check. When I get it back (if I get if back), I'll revisit the parts recalled above.
We took the intersection for twenty minutes, causing a stir. There, standing in the middle of the intersection of Doty Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, several hundred yards from where the regressive Scott Walker only minutes earlier took the oath for his second term as governor of Wisconsin, members of the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition made their public vows as the leaders of a new movement.
The movement may be new, but some of the words used in this movement are old. Some feel like tributes. YGBC principal Brandi Grayson, a frequent chant and march leader, often finishes off a rousing passage with the full throat call ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!! At the few YGBC rallies I have attended the response often feels fresh and committed. But a couple of times it sounded less than total, including out of my own mouth. I suppose it is in the nature of the call and response to wear down as much as to build to crescendos. In the search for renewed political militancy, this is the paradox we inhabit—caught between hot, fresh emotion and exhausted gestures.
I can hear warm, not hot, enthusiasm in my fellow demonstrators’ voices. This makes sense, seeing as how we are charged with supplying the response in a performance of words that originated in a time meaningful but mythical to many of us—the 1960s—a time that continues to loom large in our common understanding of political possibility. This is not a terrible thing—YGBC rallies have produced many surprises, including on the day of the vows what seemed like a closely held plan to block the intersection. Given the unpredictability put into play, clear historical references may be useful as familiar anchors. As long as the #FergusontoMadison movement produces truly novel situations, immediate and repeated references to historical models might be helpful signposts as the movement carves out unknown political territory. Or they could serve to confuse us, mistaking the models from the past as perfect templates for the present. The choice of battle cry is a small but concrete example of the difficult challenge faced by YGBC and all the #BlackLivesMatter activists, ie how to claim a radical tradition, but also find ways to critically advance that tradition without repeating the mistakes of movements past.
Seven YBGC principals took their oaths while holding books of power. One of the seven, M. Adams, carried a short stack featuring a copy of Manning Marable’s book, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. Coincidentally I had finished reading the book only about two weeks before. Before, I only knew of Malcolm's story through the Autobiography and a collection of his speeches. Marable's book makes for a timely revisitation, as Marable’s scholarship serves those who oscillate between fidelity to a bygone form of militancy and organizational strength, on the one hand, and on the other, new democratic tendencies that make space for contemporary voices that the older social movements never did. The YGBC core, strong in queer and female leadership, represents the shift in boldness of visibility, and therefore the paradox of today’s condition—we honor the radical past as a political statement but live in and help shape worlds unimaginable to the ancestors.
And yet some brutal realities have not changed.
As Marable tells the story, the event that first brought Malcolm to public attention (including, significantly, to the attention of the NYPD’s secret operations unit) happened in 1957. Malcolm put his stature on display when a crowd spontaneously assembled in response to a police beating of three Harlemites who had verbally intervened when they witnessed a young man being roughed up by NYPD officers. Two of the three men were members of Harlem’s Temple No. 7 (later renamed Mosque No. 7), where Malcolm had been minister for going on four years. One of them, Johnson Hinton, was beaten badly aross the face and shins and then dealt the further indignation of being jailed for resisting arrest. Malcolm calmed the vengeful mass, which had grown to an estimated two thousand and gathered in seething anger outside the police station. To the frightened amazement of police, Malcolm did what they could not—he sent the Fruit of Islam home with a wave of his hand and authoritatively dispersed the crowd. Later, when, in a #Ferguson moment, a grand jury failed to indict the officers responsible, Malcolm blasted the decision and his life as a public political voice began.
*
Malcolm’s emerging politics generated friction in all directions—between him and the white establishment, between him and the largely southern Civil Rights leaders, and, fatefully, between him and Nation of Islam leadership. Elijah Muhammad lead the NOI on an apolitical path, basing its low level of engagement with current events on an ideology of separatism and self-reliance. But political differences are not what drove Muhammad to dismiss and eventually attempt to silence his top minister. Same with personal jealousies—they played a part but did not define the split. The split hinged on Malcolm’s knowledge of and negative response to Muhammad’s exploitative sexual adventures, which played out in the insular circle of his young female personal secretaries. In other words, for these men, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm, who perceived themselves as dealing with fates of entire peoples, destinies and histories writ large, the absolute and irreconcilable source of conflict seemed to come from the realm of intimate relationships and personal sexual behavior. Here again, contemporary relevance is not hard to spot.
It is tempting to take the story as simple confirmation of that adage by now worn thin, that the personal is political. Of course it is. But that is a starting point in an analysis, not a final conclusion. Also, there can be no way to adequately frame the misdeeds of the Messenger according to today’s points of reference, supplied as they are by a toothless left reduced to spending enormous energy parsing microaggressions and individual cases of sexual misconduct on elite college campuses while the business of brutal capital accumulation proceeds without obstacle on all fronts, churning up lives by the millions. Here is the value in Marable’s telling of the story, the lesson for today. He throws into high relief Elijah Muhammad’s sexism as more than a matter of interpersonal politics. Rather, it was a general political disaster.
Muhammad and the NOI foregrounded black existence as the everyday contradiction, and claimed that it could be resolved only through adopting the Messenger’s teachings. That meant accepting a disciplined, absolutist structure and a readymade racial theology. Because of this very rigidity, the NOI found great success (as exemplified by Malcolm himself) in cultivating membership from among the current or ex-incarcerated, thereby introducing into the NOI a pronounced class element. The numbers of rank and file who came out of the urban street culture differentiated the NOI from the Christian middle class blacks who were the face of the Civil Rights movement. Malcolm’s work with the educated activists he attracted to his Organization of Afro American Unity and his late drift towards the MLK wing of black activism produced class tensions incommensurable with the dominant NOI culture. The same could be said of his revised racial analysis, based on the multi-racial realities he witnessed on his international travels. Thus, Malcolm’s evolution as a political thinker and organizer resulted in tension traveling in multiple directions. A scandal falling within the zone of any of them might have grown into a general crisis, unraveling relationships along all lines of fissure.
That event happened to explode within a set of relationships in which power was distributed according to gender, as it happens in an autocratic context by which the women of the NOI were made clearly subservient to the men. Beyond the extremism of Muhammad’s own behavior towards women, this framework for managing gender roles and divisions of labor brought the unpleasantries of contradiction to the intimate sphere, including in Malcolm’s fraught and unsatisfying connection with his wife, Betty (one of many controversial aspects brought to light in the book—watch this video for short but intense debate that touches on Marable’s treatment of their private life). But it is important for us to recall that the women who bore the Messenger’s children, and who had their lives strictly and cruelly constrained afterward, but who chose to never describe their experiences to people outside the NOI, did not use the terms made familiar by second wave feminism, “the personal is political.” In relation to the discourse of second wave feminism, the women of the NOI lived apart in time, place, and sociopolitical context.
Marable certainly makes it clear that Malcolm’s great blind spot was his inability to form a political analysis through the lens of gender. Nevertheless, Marable’s complete tale makes me believe that the oppressive gender dynamics at the top of the organization caused a split because Muhammad’s serial transgressions could not be kept separate from the other tensions then also eroding unity and trust. Rather than reducing Muhammad’s infidelities to a matter of interpersonal politics, I believe it is more useful to think of Malcolm as having to navigate a layered matrix of contradictions in which alternately a race, a class, or a gender fissure might take center stage as the focal point of a crisis—all while the other fissures remain in play and can never be excluded. Seen in this way, the legacy of Malcolm even fifty years after his assassination provides us with a new starting point. Far from being an end, diversity is the problem with which movement partisans always begin—and not a diversity simply of static social identities but rather of constantly shifting and differently weighted antagonisms.
*
An oath taken today on Marable’s book says this: We who were once invisible even to our own esteemed leaders, who have suffered exploitations seen and unseen through generations, are, as the ultimate survivors, central to the struggles ahead. No more blind spots, no more excuses.
Having to negotiate between a powerful historical example and their own lived experiences—absorbing The Then but finding ways to act effectively in The Now—is undoubtedly a tall order. When social movements really succeed and change a society, one consequence is that later generations have to contend with the received history. Fixing histories in Hollywood movies, stone monuments, and passive holiday observances does the opposite, it severs the past from the present. Casting contemporary problems as unfinished movement business is a way to connect the achievements of the ancestors to the challenges of our time. The YGBC-led activism in Madison is more than an inspiring local manifestation of the post-Ferguson movement for racial justice. With demonstrated commitment, a strategy of issuing radical (and radically realistic) demands, and an evident openness to tactical creativity, this movement has the potential to play out as the best case scenario, whereby a fresh culture of political engagement reinvests the retro-saturated cry ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE! with a multi-dimensional analysis and intersectional agenda.
Finally, in addition to quoting from the past, and perhaps as an antidote to the pitfalls of scripted nostalgia, the other stand-by call and response chant at YGBC events leads from the present moment in the other direction, towards the future, in words and feeling. It is a chant that lays claim to future victory—something that will happen—in a contemporary cadence equally suited to the sporting spectacles out of which it was born and those celebratory moments in this new struggle, when we look around the occupied intersection, at each other, amazed to see that we really are the leaders we have been waiting for.
The book
publishing industry is going in a lot of different directions right now. Given
the uneveness and increasing instability of the societies served by the
long-form text, not only in terms of business climate but in areas of
technology, consumer economics, and subcultural trends, it makes sense that the
industry will stay in fractured flux for quite some time.
Against
these conditions there appears this article about independent bookstores in
Madison and Dane County from the Cap Times. It cheers greatly to read local
media giving some love to our area’s small bookstores. But the author only
scratched the surface. With each having a different story behind it, the
article could have profiled other stores for a much longer article, easily. I
do appreciate that the writer featured Arcadia Books (not to be confused with Arcadian Press). I had not known about
this place and it looks terrific—judging from the website it strikes me as one
of those semi-idyllic crapshoot businesses that are simply done well enough to
make it. I am going to find an excuse to go to Spring Green.
Disappointingly,
the author did not include any mention of Rainbow. Neither did he make note of
the second-hand shops and discounters. Frugal Muse, Half-Price Books, and Stony Hill Antiques are all worth a browse. Board
members suggested that we draft a letter in response, to have our say and, more
importantly, help the article gain in scope. Pasted below is what we came up with.
Few are the cities of Madison’s size that can support so many bookstores. As the field of bookselling and distribution continues to shift, and as books themselves continue to diversify in form, I wonder which of our town's stores will ride the oncoming waves into a new golden age of books and if any will drown in the choices before them.
Dear Cap
Times:
We read Rob
Thomas’s article about Madison’s independent bookstores with delight and
optimism. Ten years ago, by which time the big box stores had crushed
independents in nearly every retailing category, who would have predicted the
demise of the chains? And again, only five years ago the e-book revolution
promised another sharp turn towards a paperless world. But in towns with
serious readers books and independent bookstores persist.
Books, it is
true, we can buy straight from our screens to our mailboxes. But books are
always better with their associated people. The friendships, debates, and
hanging-out that come with finding the people that correspond to one’s books
are what we at another of Madison’s independents, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative,
aim to provide—books that come attached to an open community of engaged
citizens, adventurous thinkers, and committed activists. Our store hosts events
and study groups once or twice a week, at least, thereby helping to cultivate
the progressive and intellectual life of Madison.
When it
comes to the bookselling business, the writing on the wall is never quite what
it seems, except maybe in the reliably quirky space of your favorite independent
bookstore. So please come out, not just to Rainbow, but to Frugal Muse, Room of
One’s Own, Paul’s. Go to Driftless Books and Music in Viroqua and People’s in
Milwaukee. And Woodland Pattern, and all the other independent booksellers we
are lucky to have across southern Wisconsin. Browse the shelves and maybe buy a
book, but either way, leave with something priceless: a community and a culture
that belongs to where you live.
Sincerely,
Dan S. Wang
Susannah
Tahk
board members, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, Madison
10/30/2012: As of last Sunday and for the two evenings before that, this
little frame house long abandoned and brought back to the world of warm bodies
by the artist couple Jon Brumit and Sarah Wagner, was full of voices,
movements, spirits. It was a Compass gathering. Now it is Tuesday and in the house are just I and the spiders. Even they
are not much for company, static as they are for the cold season.
This latest of Detroit excursions started with my
attentions on family at the beginning of the weekend and then shifted over to Compass
by noon on Sunday, except for a short overlap on Saturday night. It was a bit
stressful because there was no place near the D*Flux house for my family to
stay, and no affordable vacancies in the downtown area because of the World
Series, forcing me into driving between the city and Southfield, where the three of us stayed.
Helpfully, on this trip Rozalinda shared with me a few of
her further thoughts on the social construct of nuclear parenting as it remains
unaddressed in practice by the better part of the left movement spectrum. Her
critique rings true, I must say especially in relation to parenting teenagers,
who require very imaginative solutions to the problems posed by their needs. I
never thought about it deeply before I became a parent myself, partly because frankly
I never had to, and partly because the people closest to me with the divided
attention problem mostly deal with small children. For better or worse,
there is a popular starting point for the conversation about family-inclusive
practices in relation to small children, and that is childcare (and how to best
provide it, how to ensure its quality, how to pay for it, etc). I never did think
about it much beyond that, even though childcare as conventionally imagined is
ultimately on many levels a stop-gap. But for adolescents it is even harder because the conversation has no obvious starting point.
In any case, there were plenty of reasons for my
time-segregated weekend having to do simply with scheduling and the
aforementioned distances. So I only enjoyed about an hour of the full Compass effect on
Friday night. It is wonderful to be with Compass collaborators in any situation, including the institutional setting of
MOCAD for our screening of the Monsanto Hearings and book release, especially while the exhibition Vision in a Cornfield is up. On Sunday afternoon, after the second of the two lightly attended but invigorating public events, the group began to disperse. I missed not only
the full group in its nighttime form of deep, joyful discussion lubricated by
love, but also in its daytime form of group drift. In this instance the outing was conceived, researched, and scouted by Rozalinda B, in keeping with her work around Foreign Trade Zones and migrant labor justice in the Chicago area. Early Sunday morning the group ventured out to view selected Detroit FTZs, evidently containing the faceless warehouses in which
is parked a considerable fraction of the world’s aluminum stocks. Who knew? Well, according to Compass research, Goldman Sachs knows this well. The London Metal Exchange is where the prices are set and the futures traded, but Detroit is where tons of the actual material is held.
By Sunday evening the group of nine melted down to five,
with five leaving and one (me) rejoining. We were smaller but charged up fresh from an appearance by Cheri Honkala, the Green Party VP candidate, only about nine days before the election. Ms. Honkala, who described the Green Party ticket as "Jill Stein from Harvard, and Cheri Honkala from the School of Hard Knocks," laid into the System. She was not there to discuss the Green Party program, but rather to critique directly the deadliness of the status quo. She had as openers our Detroit acquaintences Maureen Taylor and Elena Herrada, and a special warm-up by the Rev. Pinckney of Benton Harbor. We couldn't pass up a photo op with Cheri.
After that it was another freewheeling late
night Compass gab-fest. Brian and Claire burned the threads
brightly as usual. Such a pleasure, although I tend to get a little lost when
the property rights discussion takes off. That is because unlike responsible
intellectuals Claire and Brian, I never bothered to read John Locke. And I do
not plan to, not after Nick S, a grad student from southern Illinois who joined
us for the weekend, briefed us on what Locke says in his three applications of
the Digger Winstanley's argument for autonomy to the argument for private property rights.
Got it. Sort of.
*
10/31/2012: More powerful for me is what I am
reading, a D*Flux house copy of The
Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. The event as Hersey reports it is gripping
by itself, but that he could not have known in 1967 what Detroit would become
decades later makes reading it alone on cold rainy nights in Detroit in 2012—in
fact, on both Devil’s Night and Halloween, still notorious nights in Detroit
for the long shadow cast from the bad old days—feel especially elegiac. It is
as if the Rebellion wrenched open a new set of historical possibilities, but
none of them were taken, and I am visiting the city that grew from the default path that ensued. The New Left proved unable to avail itself of the new or
refreshed opportunities due to unresolved contradictions within the movement. Big
labor certainly could not either, bound in partnership as it was to the
industrial capitalism that it ostensibly resisted. The forces of Black
liberation failed in the same as well, due to their unresolved contradictions. Instead, the rot of corruption, dysfunction,
and disinvestment set in, hollowing out the pride that once existed in the word public. The economic and physical void left when capital flees now moves into the last of the vulture stages: the late return of speculators, this time would-be emergency management profiteers.
Because Detroit has evolved into such a visually sublime
city, with evidence of a once-dense urban terrain confirmed only through absence
and fade, I cannot help but read the book with massive visualizations and
curiosities about what Detroit looked
like in 1967. Not the famous sights of Belle Isle, Tiger Stadium, or the flagship Hudson's department store, but the seedy stretches of
Woodward, the commercial strips along Grand River and Gratiot, and the small machine shops and parts factories that dotted the city by the hundreds—the cityscapes
that probably nobody bothered to record. All that remain are decaying fragments
here and there. The moving imagery of the Prelinger compilation Lost Landscapes of Detroit helps, but much of it is in black & white, or very grainy and degraded color. Very beautiful in its aging, but I want images that are better preserved, still and not moving. The neon palm-decorated motel sign featuring the “Africa-whispering
name” as described by Hersey, sits in my head tugging at retronaut pleasures, in full color. Thanks to the wonders of the Web and a vintage motel postcard, here it is, an answer to one of my desires: to have a picture of the Algiers Motel, which even by 1969 had been renamed, two years after the police killings of the Incident.
Today
the corner of Woodward and Virginia Park bear the trace of previous decades in
the negative, through empty spaces. The car wash behind the motel mentioned by Hersey is still there, but there is nothing but a lawn where the motel once stood.
In 1967 that and most other spaces were full I am guessing, but how
healthy did they appear then? It says a lot about the illusions of our world
today if Detroit entered its terminal crisis 45 years ago despite having visually
apparent vitality.
The racism of the policemen involved in the incident is made
evident particularly in the words of Robert Paille and David Senak. Theirs is a
racism built of neither a pointed prejudice nor a self-aware loathing, but
rather a pervasive and personally-felt negativity in attitude toward whole
groups of people. It is a negativity that precludes any benefit of the doubt
and any true witholding of judgment, not to mention forgiveness. On the
contrary, it is a glacial racism of slowly accumulating resentments. Paille on the Negroes: “It just seems that the more
you give these people, the more they want.” This again resonates deeply with this moment. It is a few days before the
general election of 2012. The hard right hatred of Barack Obama exceeds
anything that was directed at George W. Bush. The rich-poor white coalition of
rural conservatives, suburban elites, and disappearing white workers is rabid.
The feeling comes from resentment: the Obamas are living like kings while the
rest of us are struggling, and they only got in there because of their race! Indeed the putrid slogan belies a constituency.
Hersey draws a clear picture of the troubled entry into adulthood of directionless working class black urban young males–a latent force of talented, brutalized, traumatized beings now three generations lost. For example, from all the descriptions of him, one of the three youths killed, Auburey Pollard, comes across as too quick to fisticuffs and way more intense than was good for him. He is described as a promising draughtsman and generous guy, but he also clearly did not care to consider the consequences of playing the role of muscle. These none-too-flattering leanings are conveyed through the words of his own family and friends, not Hersey's imaginary rendition. But Hersey reports contradictions and reversals as they occur. For example, one of the witnesses and a friend of the deceased, Michael Clark, comes across as arrogant and uncooperative in court, to the point of dislikeability, even by most of the other young men.
Presenting his unvarnished findings with regard to the flawed characters he found in researching this tale, Hersey's writing strangely hints at an age to come, in which the post-traumatic moral impurities, real or fabricated, of individuals are exploited expertly by the Right. The absolute injustice of the slayings–Pollard's clearly being a confessed police killing–is in no way lessened by the sometimes unsavory profiles of the young men. Hersey's research presents the criminal policemen, Officers Senak, August, and especially Paille, as surpassing the mediocrity of the victims in one chilling respect, at least: an insensitivity to their own violence.
*
11/01/2012: I imagined coming to Detroit to think about and travel Cass Corridor and University
Research Corridor. That was the ostensible starting point for my research residency
at MOCAD, but my focus quickly devolved. By noon
Monday, my first day alone, I fell into the general poking around that I often
do when traveling solo. That day was spent waiting for messages to get to people I hoped to see (did I bother to arrange any of that beforehand? No, that would be way too organized), so I let myself get side-tracked by the products, the interiors, and the people of Hello Records, John King Books, Dabl’s
African Bead Museum, Source Booksellers, Lo & Behold in Hamtramck, the food
at the Yemeni Café, and the coffee and sweet rolls at Avalon. Those are the places I spent my money, and if the opportunity presented, time in conversation with shopkeepers and acquaintences.
I recommend a leisurely browsing of all the places named above, and eating at the Yemeni Café, a Hamtramck hang-out for Yemeni dudes (but warmly welcoming to all) that serves an excellent combination platter of lamb, vegetable gallaba, and fragrant rice. I cannot judge the food for its authenticity, but it was so tasty I went there three nights in a row.
A big part of the week's equation was the crummy weather. The days forming the heart of my visit were
dominated by storms, rains, and chilly winds blown through the interior by
Hurricane Sandy. For three days I'd leave the house at about ten and not return until I holed up for the night starting at around eight o'clock. I stayed indoors during the day, just not in the house, but rather in stores, coffeeshops, and libraries, and driving around town. Instead of taking the walks I had hoped, I opted to stay warm, dry, and more or less sedentary. Staying warm meant leaving the house because it is heated by wood stove. The warmth is terrific, but it takes over an hour for the fire to attain a charcoaled state, and thereafter requires the constant feeding of wood. Being the sole occupant and therefore the only one working the stove, it was easier to only have to start and tend the fire at night and then let it die as I went to sleep, instead of having to keep it going during the day.
Hurricane Sandy was only one of the events that made this particular week memorable. There was also the aforementioned World Series and Devil's Night. The Tigers home games took place on Saturday and Sunday, losing both, and with that the Series. On Tuesday and Wednesday, for Devil's Night and Halloween, the city imposed an early curfew for youth.
And there was the imminent election, featuring a scion of Michigan royalty challenging the centrist African-American president, as well as a number of interesting ballot initiatives. On Monday I dropped by the Teamsters hall on Trumbull and picked up a yard sign.
I may not be a Michigan resident but the collective bargaining amendment put in front of the voters under Proposal 2 contained more than an echo of the WI Uprising.
To sum up the historic week: the Tigers lost, the storms of Sandy kept most people in and washed out the expected Devil's Night fires, and the Romney campaign pretty much threw in the towel on the candidate's home state. But rain or no rain, these were no ordinary days to be visiting Detroit.
11/02/2012: My final night in Detroit was enlivened by the appearance of the artist Åsa Sonjasdotter. We met some years ago in New York. At that time she was just beginning a new job in Tromsø, in the far north of Norway, helping to establish an art department at the university there. She was back in the States to take part in a show in Cincinnati and had a week or two for traveling around the region. She'd made her way from New York to Ohio, from there to Chicago, and then back eastbound. Being a food activist and an artist of critical engagement, she had intense curiosity about Detroit. As well, she has experience traveling and working in some of the desolate urban industrial landscapes of the post-Soviet cities of northern Russia.
We went to Windsor for Chinese food, confused the Homeland Security man upon re-entry with our convoluted stories in response to the question "how do you two know each other," and lingered into the night with discussions about art, politics, and of course Detroit. Jon gave us a tour of the D*Flux Sound House–a house around the corner from their homestead as of now entirely given over to sound installation/recording/performance experiments. The house itself is an instrument, set up currently with deep looping bass rumbles triggered by the opening of the front door. The interior paint job was executed by two visiting artists from L.A.
The next day, Friday, I left for family visits in Ann Arbor. Åsa stayed for another day or two, courtesy of Jon and Sarah, and continued her solo drift from there. In Ann Arbor I made a last acquisition in my research residency book hunting: a hardcover edition of Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine. I skipped the Port Huron at 50 conference, napped at my uncle's house, and drove home with a mobile library of Detroit-related, -relevant, and/or Detroit-found titles. I resisted the urge to lift Jon's ratty copy of the Hersey book, partly because I knew I could find it in Madison. The next week, it might have even been on Election Day, I called Paul's. They had a copy for three dollars. Who really needs Amazon when you live in the mrcc?
In Madison, Wisconsin, fifteen months ago the pitiable American inhibition on public political expression dropped away on a mass scale. The result was, among other things, the collective performance of an insurgent spectacle, beginning with the demonstrations under the capitol rotunda. For once in my political lifetime we had more performers than cameramen and the stage was accordingly enlarged. The resultant images were and are fundamentally appealing. With everybody participating, the picture represented not merely a small group but rather a whole public, a whole society, a body in which many viewers would recognize themselves, and, most significantly, want to join.
The images of the Wisconsin Uprising were made enduring through thousands-fold repetition, most of them slightly different versions of the same picture, a proliferation of infinite protest details bound by a whole, generated over the many days of action. There is no doubt—the pictorial, video, and sound documentation of the movement is vast. But finally, the social movement actually lived up to the flood of documentation produced of it.
Writing is a peculiar form of documentation. Unlike photo and raw video, writing by the nature of its production takes on a variable temporal distance from the events being recorded. From on-the-spot tweets to daily or weekly blog postings, to articles or columns that undergo an editing process for webzines or newsmedia sites, to texts written for traditionally published and distributed books, writing provides space for reflection and descriptive processing. For that reason, in terms of understanding the hows and whys of what happened in Wisconsin, writing is the most important kind of documentation we have. And we have a lot of it.
There can be no hope of reviewing even a sliver of the ‘first order’ online reporting that took place as the Uprising unfolded. There is simply too much. For example, as of this posting I have well over 600 webpages bookmarked in my browser’s Wisconsin Uprising folder, each url representing a notable detail or moment in the struggle. As a whole my bookmarked sites preserve the feeling of daily and weekly turns of events, and how people were thinking in the moment. These are but an unknown fraction of all that was typed and posted.
I have taken on the more doable task of reading through a selection of the ‘second order’ movement literature. These are the print media published works, ranging from proper books published under well-known left wing imprints to DIY zines produced by small groups or individuals. Though these works vary in their physicality, professionalism of editing, and ideological orientation, they all belong to the Uprising in the sense that they are addressed to a movement-identified readership. This literature grew to a considerable body of work less than a year after the uprising broke out, and the titles I review here are not the complete roster.
The question of time frame must be considered from the outset. The writings compiled in and through these publications represent the period January 2011, when Scott Walker was sworn in as governor, through December of that year, by which time the effort was underway to gather signatures to force a recall election. From where we stand now, at the end of June of 2012, after the June 5 election debacle in which Scott Walker engineered a decisive victory, that period can be considered the first and brightest phase of the Uprising—and, most importantly, a phase of the movement that is definitively over.
The writings of that period are optimistic in comparison to the post-June 5 spirit of the movement. Even the most critical pieces are informed by the memory and experience of the initial insurgency itself—the heady first week through which a movement of many tens of thousands unexpectedly materialized out of little but a suddenly recognized common precarity. After June 5, the point of reference is quite different and certainly more difficult. Perhaps more than even before June 5, then, we need to study our movement, our collective decisions, mistakes, hopes, and potentialities, as found in the literature of the Uprising, and do it with the sobriety of the defeated.
*
These are the four books I have read:
We Are Wisconsin: The Wisconsin Uprising in the Words of the Activists, Writers, and Everyday Wisconsinites Who Made It Happen, Erica Sagrans, editor. Minneapolis: Tasora Books, 300 pages.
It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest, Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, editors. Brooklyn: Verso, 181 pages.
Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back, Michael D. Yates, editor. New York: Monthly Review Press, 304 pages.
Uprising: How Wisconsin renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, John Nichols. New York: Nation Books, 192 pages.
*
Out of the four books We Are Wisconsin has the distinction of having appeared earliest. Being a contributor, this is the one I know best. It was a project initiated by editor Erica Sagrans, a young refugee of Nancy Pelosi’s DC office who was inspired by the Wisconsin Uprising from a distance. The collection of texts she put together make for a remarkable pre-recall, pre-Occupy Wall Street document. Especially valuable are the reprinted tweets, complete with time and date stamps, grouped on pages interspersed between the essays. They convey the excitement, anxiety, determination, camraderie, and astonishment of the Uprising’s first days and the occupation of the capitol. Look no further than the tweets for evidence of the ‘now-time’ theorized by Benjamin, the messianic arrival of historical possibility.
Though none is longer than nine pages, the articles are formally diverse. A good number are first person, bridging the gap between the tweets and the analytical pieces. Nationally-known left wing luminaries like Medea Benjamin, Noam Chomsky, and Van Jones supply familiar voices at best and a platitudinous superficiality at worst. Making the first of their appearances that run through two of the other books are words from Michael Moore and John Nichols. On balance, the lesser known and local writers offer the stronger contributions. For example, UW graduate student Alex Hanna’s critical take on the Madison-Cairo (dis-)connection is an informed and tempered analysis of two insurgencies that in some respects jumped a border, but also remained particular to their locations. More so than either Benjamin or Chomsky, both of whom also wrote about the Middle East/Midwest vector, Hanna parses out the parallels worth holding onto. He is in a position to do that given his membership in the TAA and the fact that his area of study is Egyptian social movements.
The best articles are those that expand the scope of the Uprising while retaining the urgency of the first phase. For example, in “What Next: Mobilizing or Organizing?” Milwaukee activist Monica Adams argues for revisiting the known frames of oppression—racism, sexism, and other forms of exclusionary supremacy—to interrogate the “we” of the Uprising slogan “we are Wisconsin.” As well, she takes the mobilization/organization dichotomy of her title from Kwame Ture’s differentiation between mass action against something (mobilization) and mass action for something (organization). One both scores she adds substance to a struggle represented mainly as a battle about collective bargaining rights. The text is an excerpt from a report she delivered to the Left Forum on March 20, only about five weeks after the Uprising began.
It Started in Wisconsin has the feel of a local production though it is the book with probably the widest reach because of its publisher, Verso. The cover image is a photo of the capitol dome and the endless blue sky above it, a pure Madison image. It is the only one of the four books to use a cover photo at all. The visual richness continues inside in the form of photographs at chapter breaks, several comic spreads, and a couple samples of graphic art. Though not a large selection, the visual voices range from a wonderful shot of Uprising nuptials taken on a snowy day in front of the capitol by wedding photographer Becca Dilley to the minimalist iconography of Lester Doré. Other distinguishing features of the book are the lists of recommended further readings at the end of selected chapters.
Editors Mari Jo and Paul Buhle have ties going back to Madison’s radical heydey during the Vietnam era. As the founding editors of the 1970s-80s New Left periodicalRadical America, they helped to disseminate essential political ideas of from their generation’s struggle. The Buhle’s experience in an earlier era is evident in the comics spread titled “Solidarity 1970.” It tells the story of the TAA’s contract battle of that year, their first. The then-newborn union won most all of their demands through a spring semester strike that was respected by Teamsters Local 695, whose drivers refused to make deliveries across picket lines. The chain of solidarity running parallel to the narrative of escalation in 1970 rang true to the opening salvos of February, 2011, when the growth of the Uprising similarly corresponded to the escalation of resistance actions.
I remember the book for some spot-on texts, including Mari Jo’s “The Wisconsin Idea.” She could have gone for the boring straight treatment, but instead she plays off the familiar term to describe the complex and crucial sense of identity, belonging, and ownership that produced the movement and that in turn were produced by it. As she writes, “No idea figured quite so prominently throughout the course of events as that of the identity of Wisconsin….” The insurgent re-definition of Wisconsin and Wisconsinite (finally!) is an aspect of the Uprising that has not been remarked on in many places. Only after the expanded discussion about the Uprising’s claim on the state’s identity does Mari Jo return to The Wisconsin Idea as an historically specific policy orientation with links to the Progressive Party.
Another valuable contribution is Patrick Barrett’s interview with Madison organizer and Green Party activist Ben Manski. Manski and one of the organizations he helped to found, Wisconsin Wave, were protest stalwarts. They came into the Uprising with an anti-corporate, alter-global politics, and use as their banner motto the European anti-austerity slogan “we won’t pay for their crisis!” The Wisconsin Wave was significant because it offered the movement an organizing force and a political discourse that went beyond the special interest represented by the unions. As such, the Wave (as Manski calls it) helped to dilute the predominance of AFSCME in the movement. This was a great service even though the Wave itself was and is arguably unfocused in its organizing priorities.
Wisconsin Uprising is the most ideological of the books, though not pointlessly so (I will get to the pamphlets in a minute). The book frames the Uprising as a working class labor struggle, pretty much in those terms. Going beyond the Wisconsin-specific touchstone of La Follette’s Progressive reforms, the contributors to this volume variously analyze the Uprising in relation to earlier episodes of labor organizing from throughout labor history. Elly Leary goes back to the Knights of Labor, the Japanese Mexican Labor Association of the early twentieth century, and the IWW-led strike against the American Woolen Company in 1912. Michael Hurley and Sam Gindin consider the lessons from the Canadian hospital workers strikes of Ontario in the mid-1990s. Rand Wilson and Steve Early co-author a chapter on the experience of recent union organizing in such open shop states as Tennessee, Texas, and North Carolina—a discussion even more relevant after June 5.
These and other authors make a compelling case for a wealth of tactical creativity available in the broad history of militant labor struggle. What they do not address are the reasons for the Uprising’s failure in strategic orientation, that is, why exactly the constituencies that initiated the chain of militant escalation allowed for the strategic re-routing of their movement. The failure is recognized as such given that it was the teachers’ sick-out that raised the spectre of larger strike actions, and even gained the term general strike traction at the height of the Uprising across a grassroots segment of the movement. For example, both Dan La Botz and Frank Emspak describe the strike possibility in their chapters, but neither offers a good explanation for why the movement went in the direction of electoral politics, just that it did.
Lee Sustar comes closest in his article titled “Who Were the Leaders of the Wisconsin Uprising?” In it he tells who actively argued for a general strike (J. Eric Cobb, executive director of the Building Trades Council), who was friendly to the idea (Joe Conway, president of the Madison chapter of the firefighters’ union), and who was against it (the top leadership of AFSCME, WEAC, and the state AFL-CIO). If there is a take-home point in Sustar’s piece, it is that the big unions prioritized the preservation of their dues-collection apparatus over the defense of their membership’s standard of living. As we now know definitively, this is a losing strategy.
John Nichols’ resume reads like a long prologue to the role he played all through the Uprising, that of a Madison-based progressive journalist and commentator with national visibility. He has written books about media democracy, socialism in America, and a critical profile of Dick Cheney, and finds regular work as a Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine. As one of the most consistently present pundits delivering the Uprising to a TV audience (being a frequent guest on MSNBC’s The Ed Show and other cable news programs), as well as occasionally himself taking the microphone in front of protestors, it was almost a foregone conclusion that his Uprising would be the first book-length treatment of the subject by a single author.
Nichols opens with a foreword that spells out his claim to authenticity as a fifth-generation Wisconsinite, and points out that at one time in their respective careers, he and Scott Walker were actually on good terms. As a political reporter allowed the space to roam, Nichols brings in not only discussions of labor battles from the past but the more timeless questions of democracy itself. For example, in Chapter 2 “First Amendment Remedies,” he unpacks the problems of despotism and the faltering constitutional guards against tyranny exposed in the course of the Uprising. He interweaves into these expositions of political history brief profiles or testimonies of the ordinary Wisconsinites he discovered at the demonstrations. As the expert journalist, he always attaches a human being to the most abstract parts of the narrative and then name drops the heavy hitter (Michael Moore, Rev. Jesse Jackson, etc) to keep up the narrative of national attention.
My main objection to Nichols’ book is really that of Nichols’ politics. He is basically a social democrat, which colors his perception of certain events. For example, when he writes “It was hard not to feel hopeful on March 12, the day that 180,000 Wisconsinites welcomed home fourteen Democratic state senators who had fled the state to deny Governor Walker and his Republican legislative allies the quorum required to pass their anti-labor legislation,” I question whether he attended the same event that I did. Hopeful? I and almost everyone I know remember it feeling like a wake. It was three days after Walker and the Republicans rammed their bill through in a surprise procedural move, and the labor leadership did nothing at all, even though thousands who gathered at the capitol on the night of March 9 chanted “general strike!” at the top of their lungs. By Saturday’s demonstration, the predominant vibe was, the protest phase is over and the movement suffered a significant defeat. Nichols’ experience of that day might have been too heavily informed by the cheers he heard from his position near the stage.
To wrap up my comments on the four books, I honestly recommend reading them all for the fullest understanding of the Uprising. As with any genuine popular movement, all the perspectives and even the major storylines cannot be told in a single volume. Outside of the broad outlines and a handful of recurrent voices, there is surprisingly little overlap between the four.
*
In the next post I will cover a selection of pamphlets and zines.
Oh, and if you need another take on Wisconsin Uprising and It Started in Wisconsin see Allen Ruff's review here.
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.
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).
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. (I wish I could perform a Josh MacPhee-style interpretation of the cover, but I cannot find later editions against which to compare.) 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 young people 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 theories 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?
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.
