propositions press... 2.0

it's messed up, and i'm feeling at home

After six years of living in Madison, more or less, I have taken a liking to this town. I found an excellent community of activist intellectuals, a cell of radical designers and picture-makers, a reliable and enjoyable network of neighbors. I live about 150 yards from Lake Mendota, where our street ends with a primitive landing at water’s edge. The lake is recreational hell in the summer, but on a chilly still fall night one can meditate on the rocks and catch a whiff of the North Woods. There are always bands on the calendar worth seeing. The produce, cheeses, and meats available around here are among the best the nation has to offer. The many bike paths ensure safe coasting.

Great quality of life stuff is what bothered me about living here. Thankfully, the easy living is dying, and not just because the restaurant scene is overhyped to the point of embarrassment. The days—and decades—of being clueless and content in Madison are over.

The beginning of the end was signaled by the attacks on the public sector in February of 2011, to which the massive Wisconsin Uprising was a response. Wisconsin labor had been a victim of a previous generation’s success. Current workers enjoy standards of living hard-won by earlier struggles, lifestyles that had allowed workers to nearly forget that they are labor. But since the Uprising things are different, and working families in Madison know that from now until the end of their working lives and probably beyond, it will be a fight against Wisconsin’s right wing wrecking crew, currently led by the inimitably rodent-like Scott Walker. Walker and his lieutenants won their battles in the legislative halls but in the process woke the population. Austerity will do that.

The final shattering of Madison’s paradisiacal illusions comes from a different direction. Rather than from the stroke of an elected leader’s pen but in some respects seemingly as rapid, this blow takes the form of a demographic tidal wave, brown and black, surging via the late Millenials generation. One does not see it at the farmers’ markets, nor in the Overture Center lobby, nor in the crowds at the Badger football games. The Establishment class and culture in this town remain largely white.

But this complex future already resides in the public schools of Madison. The four general high schools range from 1500 to 2100 students. Various alternative programs serve another 400 high school-age students. The city as a whole is 7% African American and 7% Latino while the high schools are in aggregate 19% African American and 15% Latino. Along with the 9% Asian Americans, 8% self-described as mixed race, and the 0.5% Native Americans, the high schools serve a population only about 48% white. It’s California in the tenth grade.

Socioeconomic diversity is beautiful in the abstract, a make-believe harmony invoked by those flakey coexist bumper stickers one sees around the white neighborhoods of Madison. But in the flesh, the mixing of races and ethnicities brings with it a complicated set of problems, particularly when racial and ethnic groupings correspond to lines of class stratification and spatial segregation, as they do here. Because the dysfunctions of poverty are racialized and there is a generation gap on top of that, Madison’s aging white liberal establishment class is about to face its biggest test. Coexist, or turn reactionary.

Where are all these children of color coming from? The Latino kids are mostly of Mexican origin, but beyond that, I do not know of any pattern—whether they predominently are from another US city and/or whether most of them can trace lineage back to a particular set of places in Mexico. There probably is a pattern, but I do not know if any data has been collected. The Asian American kids seem to fall into three groups: children of East Asian/Asian-American professionals, children of South Asian/Asian-American professionals, and children of Southeast Asian-Americans, generally a working-class segment. It would make geographical sense for the Native kids to be mostly of Wisconsin tribal origins, for example Menominee, Ho-Chunk, or Oneida, but I do not know of any statistics regarding tribal membership.

The African-American kids are the most contradictory in terms of collective identity. Apart from a handful with African immigrant parentage, most of them moved to Madison from Chicago. A smaller number relocated from Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Beloit.

Chicago, as a place of origin, is the contradiction because it is shared, but not. What I mean is, of the Chicago migrants, an individual student might have moved to Madison from the West Side, the South Side, Uptown, or one the inner ring suburbs such as Evanston, Maywood, Ford Heights, or Blue Island. Or from the pockets of poor and working-class African American residence that dot the suburbs, even the largely white western suburbs like Willowbrook or Lombard. Whatever “Chicago” means to an African American student relocated to Madison cannot be assumed as shared with another “Chicago” kid in its details because Chicago and its sprawling environs are themselves widely variable in terms of local character, even when narrowed to one socioeconomic class.

And yet, in relation to the other students, “Chicago” becomes a convenient group identity, threaded together through superficial commonalities. The condition of many African American youth, therefore, is one of being caught between the assigned identity of “Chicago” and a substantive meaninglessness of the same. What shared experience there is comes only after their relocation to Madison, primarily through the spatial segregation that results when the black folk without much money —and in Madison that is the vast majority—end up living in the parts of town offering the most affordable rents. Apart from the exceptional affordable rental building here or there, most African American residents of Madison end up in the concentrations of cheap rentals in segregated neighborhoods, parts of town where the streets don’t end at the lake. For example, the Owl Creek neighborhood of the far southeast, in the clusters of apartment complexes along Schroeder Road in the southwest, or the rentals around Allied Drive south of the Beltline. In a city built around four large and irregular lakes, being away from all of them may be the truest measure of isolation.

I do not know what Madison becomes as the town’s Sixties-descended liberal establishment runs its course as the dominant culture, but I am quite sure the city will look different than Madison of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. What kind of a progressive formation steps up to defend what the earlier generation built—civil, middle-class, rational—as the right wing assaults on the public sphere sharpen, and the dysfunctional social dynamics perfected in our neighboring big cities threaten to reproduce themselves here? More to the point, how do we of the older generations and the youth who embody this emerging society together build the necessary progressive formations? There are few models and no certain paths forward, but failing to try is not an option.

What I see is a town long accustomed to a comparatively equitable distribution of modest affluence becoming a city not unlike others around the Great Lakes, separated into first, second, and third classes of citizens, colliding segments that enjoy the healthiest, best educated, and most tasteful lifeways against those made up of families trying to get by in the least hopeful of times.

But I must say I prefer living in a place that bundles external but proximate anxieties instead of allowing the space for endless indulgences in self-absorbed neuroses, high-brow escapist distractions, or views to faraway countries for reasons to decry imperialist policies. Post-Uprising life in Madison serves up global problems on a local platter, and that is a specialty we would do well to appreciate. 

ox-bow to sundance, or benton harbor to braddock

This post belongs under the tag “mental-spatial corridors.” It is about how two places got connected in my mind—two places that I have never been, but were introduced to me by persons from those places, while we were visiting two other places. The two places I was introduced to are Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Braddock, Pennsylvania. The two places in which I found myself a visitor when getting these introductions are Ox-Bow and Sundance.

By description, Benton Harbor and Braddock are mirror images in comparison to Ox-Bow and Sundance, on the levels of institutional nature, class wealth, popular reputation, and racial composition. It is strange to be comparing municipalities against a private art school and a private resort, but they are all places—pieces of the earth, named and demarcated. Had I traveled to Benton Harbor or Braddock I probably would have visited particular places within the city. Instead, I only have the names of the cities—and what I have read and been told about them—to think of as places. With Ox-Bow and Sundance, by contrast, I have the real experience of having been to them, and more or less fixing them in memory with specifics of time, place, and sensory input.

But Benton Harbor and Braddock are places where people actually live, raise families, grow old, and die. People work at Ox-Bow and Sundance, and visit. Nobody really lives there. They are mostly places for employment and for retreating from where the visitors actually reside. So while I made it to neither Benton Harbor nor Braddock, I met people whose lives had been shaped by those places as children and who still maintain ties through family. To put it another way, Benton Harbor and Braddock host societies while Ox-Bow and Sundance are society hosts. Meeting somebody from Benton Harbor or Braddock is meaningful in a way that meeting someone “from Sundance” does not even make sense.

But these four places—two and two—were linked in my experience.

I was at each by invitation.* Given that my times at both Ox-Bow and Sundance were made possible by professional opportunities, I am realizing how my mental maps are often determined by the concretely capitalized opportunities of which I avail myself. Put another way, what does it say about our structures of creativity that I or any artist could associate Benton Harbor and Braddock not for their Rust Belt similarities alone, but for having discussed those deindustrialized cities while participating in programs at two notable pockets of the highly privileged? In the case of my 2012 summer, a Rust Belt corridor of poetic travel tying together Benton Harbor and Braddock became visible to me through real travel enabled by the wealth of the elites.

Benton Harbor has been on my mental radar ever since Alex Kotlowitz’s book The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America’s Dilemma was published in 1999. It was one of those books I never got around to reading but heard about plenty through the public media echo chamber, especially in Chicago, where I was living at the time and where Kotlowitz is a local literary star. In the last year or more Benton Harbor has been in the national news for the appointment of an unelected emergency manager to run the city. One of the controversies had to do with a land grab—related or unrelated, depending on who you ask—in which a jewel of a public park bequeathed to the city by a prominent Benton Harbor family many decades ago would be partly privatized through a golf course development. Rachel Maddow brought the story to a national audience, thereby shining a spotlight on the vultures that descend on broken cities, an increasingly common happening across the Rust Belt. There was a local resistance movement, led by a Reverend Pinkney. This was about all I knew of the story when I got to Ox-Bow, though the pattern sounded all-too-familiar.

A staff artist at Ox-Bow, Jerry Catania, a lifelong resident of Benton Harbor, offered me his perspective. He declined to criticize the emergency manager, spoke harshly about the decades of corruption and city mismanagement, and expressed relief over the city finally moving forward with some real changes, even if that meant having to accept the appointment of an emergency manager. Jerry described his years of frustration with the city commissioners as a small businessman, artist, and youth art educator. He pointed out that the new mayor, a youngish new-blood African American leader who is not a part of the old guard, cannot get the commissioners to co-operate with him, either. He also downplayed the land grab, describing the park as having been neglected for season upon season over decades, to the point of it being woefully underused and ignored. He was glad to have some reinvestment in the city, exclusive though the golf course may be.

I have no basis for evaluating any of Jerry’s opinions and testimony. All I can say is, he was sincere, informed, and committed to living and working in Benton Harbor, and is fully invested in its future. Far from a corporate type, or a conservative of any stripe, Jerry’s views are shaped by his experiences and first hand observations rather than an ideology. His vision was limited to the conventional, however. Jerry privileges tourism as the answer to Benton Harbor’s ailing economy, and did not seem to consider his city in the regional or global context. Such contextualization would not necessarily change his feelings about recent developments, but might open his imagination to a radically different lakefront of the future—one dependent on neither philanthropy nor private recreation, but on changed human relationships. Nonetheless, being immersed as I am in the daily struggles of public schooling through my daughter (and that is in Madison, a very well-funded system), I completely understand how everyday, all-the-time challenges push out visionary thinking—as I am sure the youth education Jerry is doing in Benton Harbor has its share of difficulties.

While at Ox-Bow I also became acquainted with the affable artist John Bankston. He spent his days there roaming the studios, including using up a couple of afternoons hunched over a woodblock in the print shop where Isak and I were teaching. Turns out John, too, is a native of Benton Harbor. Though San Francisco-based and influenced (see this video), John still has family in his hometown. I asked him if he stayed abreast of Benton Harbor news. He proceeded to run through the controversies with the familiarity of one who has the city’s history in his blood, but with the distance of a once-a-year former resident, long ago having left for higher education and a career. John did not have the same passion as Jerry, and instead spoke as one whose memories of the place ceased accumulation upon young adulthood. Taken together, Jerry and John brought a personal counterpoint to the reported stories I had heard and read, thereby inoculating me from quick conclusions about what is happening in Benton Harbor, and what an artist and activist like myself might have to say about it.

Fifteen hundred miles to the southwest of Ox-Bow is Sundance, the luxurious and spectacularly beautiful resort property owned by Robert Redford. It was the site for this year’s Creative Change Retreat, a gathering of cultural workers, donors and foundation people, and political organizers to which I was lucky enough to have been invited. My fellow artists in attendance included LaToya Ruby Frazier, a conceptual documentary photographer who hails from Braddock. Just as with Benton Harbor, I had heard and read about Braddock but never met anyone who actually grew up there as a native. What I knew was what most artists had heard—that Braddock was a mini-Detroit, that artists were moving there for the cheap property, and that controversies surrounded the town’s young activist mayor John Fetterman, a guy who ran with the idea that ramping up the arts could help revitalize the town. Most notoriously, he supposedly struck a marketing deal with Levi Strauss that in effect represented the town to the rest of the world, but paid fees straight to Fetterman’s non-profit instead of to the town’s treasury. The advertising campaign stamped Braddock as a "frontier," a place from where people fled and left empty. Frazier's family (and many others) never left.

LaToya added quite a bit of additional information from her perspective as one who has witnessed this latter-day influx of homesteading artists, most all of whom are white and many of whom come with some financial security of family assistance and/or upper middle class upbringing, and none of whom have the sensitivities or intimate knowledge needed to navigate the fraught terrain of competing local agendas, old divides, and the long-standing inequalities of power particular to the town. LaToya is in a delicate position, knowing as she does the nuances of the town’s politics while gaining art world recognition for her work. At the same time, she feels the burden and challenge of having a greater investment in the town’s future than the newcomers, if only because her relatives and longtime neighbors live there, and are not moving to the next hip town that catches an online buzz. Listening to her, I learned something about the complexities and unintended consequences of using arts as a catalyst for economic change. Also, she made me think hard about what it means to belong to a place, to be rooted so deeply that one’s work in some profound sense always will belong to that place.

And again, I felt like I had been introduced properly to Braddock without having gone there. That it was at Sundance that I had the opportunity to come face-to-face with the passionate commitment of a person fully invested in the town, and not at the town itself, begs the question, what exactly is this system of circulation we artists travel? What is the connection between Benton Harbor and Braddock, as represented by encounters with these people, when these encounters are engineered through the peculiar mobility afforded to contemporary artists?

The larger point is, the fact that these voices were delivered into my hearing through the vehicles of privilege that are Ox-Bow and Sundance underscores the complexity of any analysis I might offer of Benton Harbor’s political situation or of cultural politics in Braddock, and the contradictions of any position I might take. Based solely on the corridors of connection—the multifaceted, multi-directional streams that connect these four places for me—a democratic opposition equal to the forces of enclosure now at work will necessarily take forms far beyond the familiar. The contradictions cannot be resolved, so it will be a form that inhabits the contradictions, rather than ignores them. That is another way of saying, perhaps indirection of movement in today’s chaotically organized world is the fastest way to not only be genuinely introduced to a place otherwise superficially represented in media, but also to be reminded that the threads tying together places like Benton Harbor and Braddock, or Ox-Bow and Sundance, or any combination among the four, exist precisely because of the proximate flows of people, resources, and ideas—complex, yes, but ultimately organized according to the profit-generating logics of capital. This is not to be reductionist, but to acknowledge that living in and through these flows at times offers opportunities for relationships with places and fellow human beings that fall outside of the spectacularized relations constantly served.

]

Sometimes eighteen hundred words need some help. Consider the two views below, both hand drawn by me.

First is a conventional (if minimal) mapping of the four places. The direct scaling down of spatial relationships results in an image not at all compelling. In fact this map obscures the relationships that made the whole experience, that is to say, the relationships that brought all these thoughts into being.

And second is a poetic mapping, an indirect representation, one that takes into account the irresolvably different scales at work: individual personalities, the places one visits or is from, how information travels between people but also across space, and the global system that made these connections possible. If nothing else, the second map/image was a lot more fun to draw.

*These summer encounters only happened thanks to the amazing management at Ox-Bow and the visionary organizers from the Opportunity Agenda, who put together the Creative Change Retreat. 

finding our global midwest

I am just returned from the Opportunity Agenda’s Creative Change Retreat 2012. The three full days we shared were filled with an effective combination of directed exercises, facilitated conversation, and free form socializing. The place was the Sundance Resort, a superlative setting with a worry-free culture of service, comfort, and natural beauty. The experience as a whole was complex, enormously inspiring, and indeed revitalizing. I can superficially summarize by saying the retreat was amazing and I feel very fortunate to have been invited. What the experience meant and what it might lead to requires a long moment of reflection. It is too soon to know.

The retreat was generative, that is for certain. I left thinking about many things, but one simple question stands out.

On the final afternoon, after participants had two days of forming new friendships and becoming acquainted with each other’s histories and thought processes, a program segment was reserved for Open Space Conversations, a time for participants to generate their own topics for small group discussions. People were asked to suggest a topic or question—anybody could do it—and then everybody else was free to group around whichever topic attracted them. Being too curious about what topics others would offer, and just being too slow to think on my feet, I failed to offer one of my own. It only occurred to me after the process had moved on, but I offer it now: where is the global Midwest?

I have been using the descriptive term “global Midwest” here and there, including once or twice at the retreat. Some of my Compass comrades may be using it, as well. But I myself have neither attended to the task of defining what it might mean, nor, perhaps more pointedly, located it. In some larger and indirect way all of the Compass work around the idea and reality of the mrcc is about locating it. Asking others to locate it, or simply posing the question of where it is, opens another pathway for thinking through the problem of place in the neoliberal age.

A radical reorientation stands at the heart of the question. The regionally demarcating term “Midwest” carries with itself a legacy of spatial orientation based on imperialistic Manifest Destiny. My feeling is that the descriptor “global” may productively upset the ways in which neoliberal structures reinforce Manifest Destiny, but only if we who are indigenous and immigrant, straight and queer, precarious and secure, bind our futures to a sense of place that stands in opposition to neoliberal logic. Capital has an answer to my question. What is our answer? Where is our global Midwest?

At the retreat I met Bao Phi, a spoken word artist and organizer of Vietnamese descent living and working in Minneapolis. He put his voice into the mix, exemplifying for me the task of revealing the contradictory "glocality" people live with everywhere, but especially in the Midwest. Dig this, a poem he performed for us at the retreat. Bao had another poem picked but in a last minute decision changed it this one because he had just learned of the verdict in the Private Danny Chen hazing case. The poem is, in Bao's words, "from a body of my work where I explore alternate and untold stories and perspectives from Vietnamese American lives, through fictional persona poems."

 

Mercy

Nguyen, John – ROTC, Iraq

 

Let my father know it is not

for his blood

that I fight this war.

 

His decision, made in Saigon.

Mine, made at a recruiting table in an L.A. high school

 

Let him know that his hands, which once cradled guns

in another war,

are not my hands.

 

Let his friends know the difference,

at least to us,

between a communist and an Iraqi

and understand why he won’t speak about me.

 

Let my mother know one day where she

does not fear violence an ocean away

where the body and home

are not always in a dance

toward fracture.

 

Let my little hippie sister’s letters to me, telling me it’s not my fault

I was sent to this unjust war, be true,

at least in the eyes of God.

 

Concerning my little brother

who stabbed a white man in San Jose for calling him a chink

let the judge presiding over his case

know that what my brother did,

he did in the name of war.

 

Let the last cradle of my tender vessel

not be this godforsaken Humvee.

 

Let this boredom, this blessed boredom,

easily fill that thin space between my finger

and the trigger.

 

If bullets should fly, let the air pounding from

my lungs as I run be my song.

 

Let my affection for the people here, for the children here,

be real, not sweetened by Nestle or Coca-Cola

or plastic toys Made in China.

 

Let them know I am trying to understand

no matter what I say or do,

it is never enough

because they never asked for this.

 

Let me not tear apart a people, a country, causing Iraqi food

become the nouvelle cuisine in twenty five years back home,

like they did to my people –

let me not become my father, and my son or daughter, myself,

wandering the wavering borders made by someone else.

Let me ask this and mean it,

Though I’m the one holding the gun.           

 

Let the globe on the desk be mightier than the grenade.

 

The soldier, who looked at me and snorted, gooks killing ragheads,

that would make a great video game, let him know a hatred

he never asked for and cannot reason with, and let him die with it

choking his sleep, and let it pass

onto his children and haunt his children’s children,

without mercy.

 

The Eminem wannabe Marine, who when freestyling in the cipher in our barracks squeaked me love you long time, saw me scowl at him, and who the night after left a bullet on my pillowcase with a pair of tiny lips scratched into the casing, let me not be tempted to be first, to beat him to the finish line of the race that he and his kind set up, let me not be tempted to line up the promise in the eye of my M-4 to the back of his bleached blond hair, let me not chain lightning from my finger through the hollow echo in the valley of the chamber through to the domed pellet of steel that would become his whistling reaper, let me not be the first, of he and I

 

to play God.  Let me not pull the trigger on his story.  But let everyone know

that I could have.

 

Let me pronounce the last names of the curly-haired Filipina twins in the next platoon correctly, even as they pronounce Nguyen as best they can.

 

Let every poor brown, black, yellow soul who signed up for college tuition have children who grow up to be NBA stars drafted for millions out of high school.

 

Let me have the courage to erase the names of the dead

from my cellphone.

 

Let my lover, in our most private darkness, know, that when I tell her

you have a Quixotic pussy

except

that your pussy tilts windmills –

let her know, that I mean

that she, the all of her,

has a gravitational pull

and I am only a man

helpless in her current

I am swept in her undertow

and I drown

gladly.

 

Let her know, as the Lord is my witness, that I have confessed

to doubting God

but I have never doubted

her.

 

If we mirror one another then let us be both our homelands –

she, the jagged edge of California, and I her reflection, the jigsaw

coast of Viet Nam, or one, the other,

 

and let no one say I fought this war to make a better world

for our unborn children.

 

Let them know, that I mean the first Persian Gulf,

let them know I mean Viet Nam, and Korea,

and the bombs that made blossoms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

let them know I mean every man that will call me gook

every man that will slap my sister behind a closed door

let them know I mean police beating down Cambodian kids

in the park

and people who make fun of my mother using welfare checks

at the supermarket

let them know I mean my father screaming in nightmares

and ghetto neighbors who call my parents gook

when walking by their front yard

Let them know I mean my uncles drinking themselves to death

and aunties losing life savings at blackjack and

white hunters killing Hmong in Wisconsin

and yes, let them know I mean this, here, now, Iraq,

when I say

Fuck this war.

 

Bao Phi

 

 

closing down the drum tower office

The first and most important phase of The Journey West is a wrap. My collaborator and the project’s heavy-lifter Stephanie Rothenberg is in Beijing for another day or so, bringing the Drum Tower travel office to a close.

 

Was it a success? Yes. Why? Because it happened. The point being, staging something like this is not a small achievement for two foreign artists working in China for short periods without any kind of gallery, residency, or curatorial support. The essential support we found, we found by ourselves, and without it the project certainly would have been less fully realized. But as it happened plenty of folks chipped in with substantive involvement. For example, Elaine Wing-ah Ho and the Homeshop crew made the worker performances, Lee Ambrozy offered lots of feedback and supportive writing on Artforum.cn, Ed Sanderson made himself a critical observer from the get-go, and Peggy Wang is busy roping us into her world of research even as I type. Plus lots of others, to be named in the future.

So what happens now? Mainly it is a matter of continuing to build the discourse through secondary exhibitions and conference presentations. There are so many angles to this project and each one of them is so complex that the constraints of group shows and conference panels will be helpful in giving us occasions to focus on just one or two angles at a time. Also, having the distance of a show or conference in North America will inevitably help to clarify some of the outstanding issues made visible by the Drum Tower storefront, but that we simply did not have time to address while in Beijing.

Selected material generated through The Journey West project will make appearances in group shows in Buffalo and Brooklyn in the late summer and early fall, and possibly in a couple of conference gigs for 2012. Details posted here later as things develop.

As for the travel office itself, another iteration will be appropriate in time. I think that will happen only if and when the groundwork has been properly laid for a trip to really take place. With the way things work in China, we may find it easier to arrange a tour without going through the retailing of it. In which case, the Drum Tower travel office will go down in history as a one-time show, installation, and performance, in the best tradition of China's avant garde.

 

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.

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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.

 

towards home, but still drifting

The China Drift continued even as the traveling group fractured and parts went in different directions. Wuhan was the place from which the big group, which grew over the first week to twenty-two or so, started to lose members. Xiao, Qu Ge, Orienna, Michael, Emi, Desiree, Jing, and Gordon all caught Thursday night trains back to Beijing. Gao Bei stayed to visit her family and I think SiSi went to another town to see hers. Elaine returned to Beijing the next night.

From Lashihai it was I who fell behind first. After two days together at the Lijiang Studio, I waved goodbye to Jay, Sarah, Ula, Claire, Brian, Stephanie, and Mai Dian as they rode off in the studio’s van, bound for Wumu on the rainy third morning. After another two days with just myself and the neighboring He family for company, I flew back to Beijing, rejoining Jing and Gordon. One night later, Ula and Stephanie caught up to Gordon, Joseph, and I for food and beer in Caochangdi. Stephanie and Ula brought stories of mountain liquors and pictographic scripts from Wumu, the remote Naxi mountain village. I wished I had gone with them until I heard about the rain and stomach bugs.

I had to get back to Beijing a day before them in any case. I needed a day to visit a future niece at the Shepherd’s Field Children’s Village way out of the city, practically in Tianjin. The outing mixed family stuff with research, which is to say, I was quite curious about Shepherd’s Field. It is a full service foster home for Chinese orphans with special needs that grew out of the Philip Hayden Foundation, a fifteen year-old service organization founded by an American couple dedicated to helping orphans in China. I was told that there are currently some 75 children in residence. A minority of them will be adopted into forever families (that is the lingo of American child services culture, something we’ve learned as we have gone through that culture ourselves). Some children will live at Shepherd’s Field for years.

Where would China be without all these Christians helping out? I am sure the society would be worse off, and that there would be many fewer social services than exist now. But I don’t think there would be any hugely increased number of Christian converts. I know that there are intense cultures of Chinese Christianity in both Taiwan and Singapore, as well as overseas. And yes there have been religious movements in China, some of them quite potent on a political level, from the Taipings to Falun Dafa. But I simply cannot imagine a faith like Christianity (which, let’s face it, is founded on some pretty outlandish stories) gaining serious mainstream traction in post-’89, post-idealism mainland China. After all, the missionaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not manage to reshape China in any ultimately significant way, even though they fed millions of poor and hungry. My bet is, to most Chinese Christianity is, in the end, something that will always seem foreign. And therefore irrelevant to them, but for the concrete contributions the Christians can make.

More universal, and deserving of more effort to connect and weave narratives are the analysis of and the shared discontents around the concrete conditions of life. The Drift, at its best as an encounter-based research method, extends odd and specific strands of connection, far beyond the convoluted theologies of the proselytizers. So as the China Drift participants went off on our separate ways, I am sure many of us continued to draw connections. That was the case for me when I found myself eighteen hours beyond Beijing, traveling by pick-up from the Bainbridge Island ferry landing to to the Poulsbo home of climate and conservation scientists Jennie Hoffman and Daniel Froehlich, on the Kitsap Peninsula across the water from Seattle. My first stop: the grave of Chief Seattle, he of the famous words that laced a requiem for his land and culture with the biocentrism we dream of today. What place to kiss the ground of my country could be more American–and more global. And true to the experience of drifting over histories, places and cultures, thoughts about common fates and all the rest, I was just a little surprised to find that Chief Seattle had been, according to his gravestone, baptized. Those Christians again. Maybe they'll get us all in the end, Chinese or not.

Later that evening Dan continued telling me about the local history, Poulsbo’s Norwegian heritage, the raising of Seattle, and so forth. In the process we came across this photograph by Asahel Curtis documenting the flattening of old Seattle’s Denny Hill, a project also known as the Denny Regrade. The earthen towers visible in the photograph are the property owner holdouts who demanded better compensation or maybe just refused to leave. Having just returned from the land of the nail house, I thought I was seeing double, through time and space.

The part of Seattle that was reshaped by the Denny Regrade eventually became known as Belltown. Decades after whatever upheavels caused by the Denny Regrade had been settled or forgotten, artist Brett Bloom documented the neighborhood’s recent creative efforts to humanize the available public space. I remember learning something about Belltown when Brett and Ava Bromberg released the book seven years ago. But it was not until this trip, with China’s nail houses, big hydroengineering projects, and, most of all, the report we received while in Wuhan about the property megadeveloper OCT’s plans for an amusement park on the shores of Wuhan’s jewel, Donghu, fresh in my mind that the work in Belltown resonated. Now I wonder, after the futility of a last stand, whether in the face of corrupt developers or unstoppable eminent domain, what are the struggles and achievements to come, even on the same piece of land? What the Denny Regrade showed is that after the development happens, other problems and challenges emerge; it is always a matter of spatial politics in the end, and there is never a perfectly satisfactory (or even minimally functional) spatial arrangement for every stake holder. There is only another political problem.

I spent my first night back on North American soil managing my jet leg constructively—a 3:30 AM departure for the backlands of Fort Lewis and McChord AFB, to help out with some bird banding. It was the first session of the season for this particular station, one of several maintained by the Puget Sound Bird Observatory.
The data collected is given over to the MAPS program of the Institute for Bird Populations, one of the only continent-wide research programs that allows for a large-scale picture of bird populations, without which conservation management would be comparatively blind.

Dan told me the story of how the MAPS program came to be. It had to do with the timing of radioactive releases from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the suspicion that catastrophic breeding failures among certain West Coast raptors that year were linked to the April 26 disaster, but then not having the data to conclusively determine whether the radioactive iodine cloud could in fact be counted as the aberrant factor. Thus the MAPS program was born, to build a global perspective on bird population trends across species, through continental units. Obviously, with the Fukishima disaster still unfolding, not to mention the acceleration of climate change and habitat destruction, the work of collecting data is more important now than ever.

That said, it is science, meaning, attachments to presuppositions must be held minimal, even if those presuppositions are somewhat operational. There are simply too many factors at play at the level of detailed interaction between organisms and environment. Dan himself offered that the data collection helps with the broad outlines of what’s going on, but in the end the whole effort is still an educated gamble. While the physical laws point us toward definite conclusions (ie greenhouse gases work in a known way, therefore the planet is warming), the complexity of the planet’s natural systems makes management often less than straightforward. To the politically minded inhabitant of planet Earth and the politically-minded experimental artist, it is where our work exists: careful diagnosis, experimental strategies of response, and uncertain outcome.

 

 

china drift: reflections on the lijiang studio

What a relief. The houseflies have gone to bed.

The flies, the spiders, the farm cats, and the rain are constant reminders of where Lijiang Studio is. As are the bits of Naxi speech that constantly waft in from the nearby fields and farmyards. This is Naxi farming country, the valley and community of Lashihai, about an hour beyond Lijiang, over a mountain pass via an increasingly congested and very narrow two-lane highway filled with a line of breadloaf taxis and heavy trucks carrying gravel, rock, and lumber. It is not the easiest place to get to, but it is not the most difficult, either.

Wholly unlike the common language of Mandarin and all other regional variants of Chinese, Naxi is the main tongue of Lashihai. All my efforts to improve my language skills (one new word a day!) would have been of little use here, except that most all of the Naxi speak the common tongue, too. Their bilingualism intrigues me, since it represents a kind of bi-culturalism, and even bi-nationalism—these folks are at once Naxi and Chinese. But the contemporaneity of hybrid or multivalent identities that city people and other modern creatures get accustomed to seems somehow far away from Lashihai. After all, much of life around here goes on as it long has, maybe for centuries. Media penetration is minimal, social life is interwoven with daily and seasonal labor, foods are mostly local, and the cash economy leaves a comparatively light imprint. Life is slow, cyclical, weather-dependent, and, if the word still means anything at all, traditional. And yet, this is hardly a pre-modern environment. Most obviously, the Chinese state governs, and that includes administering large projects such as building an earthen dam for water control around Lashihai (also the name of the nearby lake) in the 1950s and again more recently, or, presently, building a new highway that will cut through the valley. Also, there are the schools. They now teach English beginning in the elementary grades, producing some rudimentary trilingualism among the younger Naxi. And there are the contemporary artists.

We blog, photograph, document, install, paint, draw, film, write, discuss, taste, study, take long walks, get inspired—a whole suite of behaviors that don’t have much to do with the life of the native people. Or, rather, didn’t used to have much to do with their life. But Jay Brown, American by birth and Chinese by adaptation, has been living on and off in Lashihai for nearly a decade. With the incremental improvements he, his neighbors, and his resident artists have made to the compound that is Lijiang Studio, one can really say he has moved in. As have the procession of resident artists who come for weeks or months at a time. For our brief time here, the China Drift crew, including we four Compass comrades, played the part of this relatively constant presence of artists. 

It is easy to immediately pose here the same question that vexes artists back in cities like Chicago. And that is, what is our role in the process of gentrification and development? Except here, the forces are not entirely familiar, the fault lines less clear, and the minority people possibly being put at risk of displacement (culturally and/or spatially) seem rather savvy to the ways of power as seen in their adaptations to the loopholes around them. For example, as with other people in China, many of the Naxi around here build structures on lands that they know will be taken for new roads. Especially on such lands, in fact, in order to increase the compensation they will be due. It is the Chinese version of eminent domain—they can’t fight it, so they figure they’ll increase the value of their land by improving it before the road comes. To achieve this they will build without any regard for permits or legality, essentially changing “the facts on the ground.” And for decades they have existed semi-autonomously under the umbrella of the People’s Republic of China, and for centuries before that, under the waxing and waning reach of the imperial dynasties. Somehow they’ve managed to persist as a culture and a people. If the Naxi are a people who have negotiated contradictory social forces and locations successfully for generations, then what is going on perhaps is just another chapter in a continuous tale begun long ago, and at least co-authored by them rather than for them. 

But do the visiting artists—let us just say, does the Lijiang Studio—have something to do with this development? Of course they and it do, but I think we should avoid the question of effect and impact. Those concerns are a smokescreen, an incubator of liberal guilt, and a distraction from the more important problem of grappling with ethical relations. The question I do want to ask is, what is the most responsible way to build a working relationship between visiting outsiders (who bring their own culture, and in the case of our six people coming together, our own society) and the Naxi of Lashihai? The answer is difficult to grasp positively, but fairly easy to identify in the negative. For example, the Ancient Town tourist market of Lijiang offers a model that seems most definitely undesirable and not worth replicating. Stall after stall, scores of them, offering “authorized” minority handicrafts, food stuffs, musical recordings, and assorted souvenirs, along with Naxi-led pony rides and costumed performers, reduce the relationship between visitors to one of seller and buyer, and the Naxi sellers themselves into competing retailers.

 

The arrangement at Lijiang Studio is very different. There, the visitors are expected to be producers primarily and consumers secondarily. We come to make, to create, to build, design, express, grow, and learn. Not to buy, and only to consume as our sustenance demands. There isn’t much of a place for such activity in the Ancient Town. So far, so good. But create what? Art objects and art images? Or a society, economy, and culture that brings people from the far corners of the earth into affectionate, mutually supportive, and productive contact? If it is the former, exclusively, then we might as well forget the whole project and go back to the Western-oriented hang-outs in Lijiang. Thankfully, and it is pretty obvious once you are there, Lijiang Studio leans heavily towards the latter set of possibilities. But how do visitors—people who are known in advance to be leaving at some point in the future, whether that’s weeks, months, or years, and probably are not returning—help to create the worlds implied by the latter?

One way to think about it is to understand that investments are always limited. There aren’t too many examples of unlimited investment in this world. Therefore the limited inputs of any given resident artist should not by itself be reason to discount the truth of their contribution. On the concrete level, I’m afraid to offer any suggestions on “what to do.” Partly, that is because I am not familiar enough with the workings of the Studio and the Lashihai milieu to confidently prescribe a course of action, having only spent a few days there. But also it is because I believe that mapping the appropriate ethical relations is a site-specific project in the most literal sense, meaning such a map is specific to each one of us, and follows the contours of not only our skill sets and life histories, but also of our own spiritual callings. That is not to say that there aren’t any models. At the Lijiang Studio, Jay Brown has been mapping these relations according to his callings for years now, creating a model, with the help of his Naxi neighbors and resident artists. We on the Drift were fortunate to travel the territory with him for a little while, adding our footnotes to the map he has been drawing.

 

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!

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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： [email protected]。 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:[email protected].	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 /// [email protected] 
       [email protected] 

 

report from madison: why wisconsin?

We are into phase two.

The massive crowds of 15-30k on the weekdays and 75-150k on four consecutive Saturdays have dispersed. Now the people are spread out, working the ground of the entire state in a multi-pronged strategy of electoral canvassing, working recall campaigns, bird-dogging Republican state senators and the governor himself wherever they go, organizing targeted protests, coherently and incoherently boycotting businesses that are said to have a Walker association, or simply lashing out in hundreds and maybe thousands of acts of primitive resistance, ranging from wheatpasting General Strike posters on utility boxes to gluing locks. Wisconsin is alive, electric with political activism and political expression, both organized and not. Window and yard signs blanket the neighborhoods of the hippie east and the bobo west sides of Madison.  In Milwaukee, joint union/teacher/immigrant rights actions are being planned. Nine hundred people marched in the little town of Mt. Horeb a couple weeks ago, which is more amazing than 100k in Madison. Our new adoption worker, a woman just starting out in her social services career, showed up on our doorstep smiling and professional, but sporting bright blue and yellow anti-Walker buttons. The bus driver wears a button that says Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Republican. Many at the Stoughton Opera House for Friday night’s Tim O’Brien show (high quality white music, for the unfamiliar) wore Kloppenburg buttons.

The political inhibitions of the average Wisconsinite, only two months ago seemingly internalized to the degree that politics had become a subculture rather than everyone’s business, have evaporated, steamed off by the extreme attacks of Scott Walker. The political has returned to Wisconsin, to everyday life, to people’s expressions in both private and public spheres. And just in time, because it is not too early to call a victory for Scott Walker. More on that below.

But first I continue my inquiry into the conditions of the uprising. What has been happening, at the various distances of the local, the regional, and the global, that the Walker agenda began to generate a kind of oppositional coherence, a broad sense of belonging to a current far beyond oneself, or one’s town, or one’s country? On this blog I have already discussed both the local and the global, how the Madison infrastructure and the international echoes of Cairo played into the uprising. From where I type this, both of these elements continue to be present. Last Wednesday evening I attended the Chris Hedges event on the UW campus. After being out of town for nearly two weeks, I was curious about what I’d see. The lecture was held in Humanities 2650, a room that seats 268. There were hardly any empty seats and quite a few standing in the upper reaches of the hall. People came out on a crummy, cold and icy night—a good sign that interest and motivation remains high at the grassroots level. The energy in the room was lively and Hedges ended up taking questions for an hour after a thirty-five minute lecture.  Whether we are talking about movement analysis events organized by the Havens Center, immigrant rights groups working to fight Walker’s cuts to bilingual education, the neighborhood bars hosting benefits for interfaith labor justice projects, or the Dane County administration and judicial establishment standing up to the GOP’s legally questionable manuveurs, the Madison activist and progressive infrastructure is humming. 

As well, the global echoes—drowned out and overshadowed for weeks by everything from the disaster in Japan to attention on the Wisconsin 14 and the villanous Koch brothers—reappeared on the fifth Saturday, in all-too tragically convenient a way: the massive demonstrations that were sparked by Scott Walker’s attack on the day Hosni Mubarak resigned came to a close on March 19, both the eighth anniversary of the bombing that started the Iraq War in 2003, and the first day of American and European bombing of Libya. If the War at Home/Wars Abroad meme had been shoved aside for a little while, history will always neatly bookend the first phase of the Wisconsin uprising in the wrapping of a single global class and energy war, and the beginning of generalized global chaos. Lots of us, including Iraq Veterans Against the War, who called for the March 19 Madison demonstration and came out in a force of more than fifty GWOT veterans, would not have it any other way. 

So, we have the local and the global. What about the movement dynamic at the state and regional level? Or put another way, why Wisconsin, and why now? Sure, it is a comparatively homogenous state, with a strong and distinctive tavern culture, a single, statewide university system, and self-embraced customs of beer + brats, dairy + deer hunting. But what of the conditions in early 2011? What was different then?

Having made something of the echoes of Cairo, I must say, the story of the 2010-2011 Green Bay Packers also helped to set a kind of pre-uprising climate in Wisconsin, because of how they reached and won the Super Bowl, the kinds of storylines that spun out of the team’s postseason run, and the fact that the Super Bowl was played on the Sunday of the same week in which Scott Walker later unveiled his budget repair bill. Given the event proximity, two of those storylines resonated with the Wisconsin uprising of a week later. The first concerned the Packers as an institution. When the Packers take the national stage, the national media enjoy re-telling the story of why and how the comparatively small city of Green Bay, Wisconsin (pop. 102k), happened to land and hold onto the most storied of all NFL franchises. This happened in the old media world of January of 1997 when the Packers last reached and won the big game, and it happened again in 2011. The surprise ending part of the story goes, little Green Bay keeps its team because it is… (drumroll) publicly owned! The merits of public ownership and non-majority ownership clauses are then held up for consideration as an historical quirk that actually works—unlike the failure of private ownership, for example, to currently supply Los Angeles with an NFL team. The merits of public ownership are then brought into the national conversation, in however superficial a way. For Packer fans, who like most midwesterners are more self-conscious than their coastal countrymen about how they are perceived by the bi-coastal media/cultural establishment, it is another reason to take pride in who they are, and another media-reflected self-image around which the trace of a collective identity coalesces.

The second important storyline emerged in full as soon as the championship game was over. Starting the day after the big game, sports talk radio chatter turned the topic from post-game analysis to the negotiations between the NFL owners and the NFL players association, a looming millionaire-versus-billionaire labor showdown that cast a shadow over the whole season and now finally took center stage. The contentiousness between the two parties got football fans everywhere considering the possibility of a canceled season or watching scab teams. If nothing else, this situation (which weeks later hangs in a stalemate due to the owners locking out the players) imposed a discourse of labor politics on a wide swath of the football-watching population. A great many apolitical fans are being forced to think about the fact that labor conflict exists. And once engaged, a lot of fans see the players as reasonable given their concerns about things like cumulative head injuries and the owners refusal to disclose their profits. Here in Wisconsin, it didn’t hurt the image of the players association that the Super Bowl MVP, Aaron Rodgers, the latest player to reach Packer greatness, is also the team’s union rep. Finally, there were the two Super Bowl XLV competitors, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers, each club named after the twentieth-century workers associated with those towns, and each club bucking the labor-bosses faultline—the Packers with their aforementioned anomalous shared ownership and the Steelers with their outspoken owner, Dan Rooney, who has openly complained about the greed of his fellow owners. The fact that both teams had this vestigial identification with the working man, and whose current ownership didn’t fit the venal role played so well by that of other NFL clubs, and yet had risen to the top of the competitive hierarchy by beating everybody else on the field, dispelled the claim that labor-friendly relations lead to a decline in quality and performance. If anything, these two teams proved that the opposite is true. 

So this whole NFL thing, with the Packers as newly crowned champs after an improbable, attention-getting run of four straight do-or-die victories (not including the final game), has been running parallel to the Wisconsin uprising. At times it crossed over, with some Packer players, including star cornerback and team co-captain Charles Woodson, tweeting statements in support of the Wisconsin state workers. The Sunday, March 19 NYTimes sports section featured an article on the NFL lockout and its effects on the town of Green Bay. It was the first post-uprising piece on the Packers I’d seen, and it necessarily mentioned the political turmoil of the state—not the usual thing for sports journalism.

On the question of spatial scale, the Packers reinforce state identity as a constituency, because in Wisconsin the Packers are regarded as belonging to the entire state and not just the city of Green Bay, literally owned by thousands of shareholders around the state, and Packer fandom is practically a secular religion binding together far-flung Wisconsinites, including those of the Wisconsin diaspora. Also interestingly, of all the population centers in Wisconsin, Madison is the least Packer-crazy town. Too many transients, hoity intellectuals, and Chicago transplants, plus a fan focus on the University of Wisconsin teams. So the NFL and Packer storylines spoke more directly to the people of Wisconsin outside of liberal Madison than inside, helping to generalize the politicized climate of labor strife to the far corners of the state. Even more than that, the Super Bowl underlined a fundamental turn in consciousness that informs any political uprising, anywhere. And that turn happens when an angry people wanting to do something become aware, and then are self-confident enough to tell themselves, “Why not us, and why not here—after all, we are somebody, we are somewhere.”

 And that's how we get pure Wisconsin action, like artist Rick Kurki showing a new painting at a recent protest up north in Hayward, Wisconsin. Pic by Pete Rasmussen.  

Not to overplay any of these factors—the Packers, Cairo, the built-in activism of Madison—but taken together, they all mattered, they all reinforced the tide. Then, as a movement imprinted with the stamp of multiple places, signaling a simultaneous belonging, echoes of it could be heard in other places. Demonstrators in Albany on March 23 chanted “Wisconsin, New York—the struggle is the same!” Last week a solidarity event in LA drew more than ten thousand people and featured Wisconsin firefighter’s union president Mahlon Mitchell, one of the scores of new leaders to have emerged in the course of the last six weeks. Activists in Michigan have measured the smaller demonstrations there against what happened in Wisconsin, trying to ascertain the different limits under which a nascent Michigan movement toils. Movements sited in and identified by place, whether that place is first thought of as a city, a state, a country, or a region, are doing the work of validating the movements of other places. We have learned from the world social forum strategy from the past decade. No more summit hopping. We work where we happen to find ourselves, but build into the process a sending and receiving of signals from other places.

My attempt, speaking to Oaxaca and Wisconsin, from Chicago, pic by Alice Kim:  

*

More to say about Wisconsin, good and bad, besides the Packer thing, but moving on…. 

Let me end this post by addressing the state of the movement, in bullet points.

1. Now it is clear that the story of the fourteen senate Democrats who fled the state in order to stall the passage of Walker’s bill stands in danger of overwriting the earlier heroism of the grassroots. Had not the Madison teachers, public school students, firefighters union, the Teaching Assistants Association, a goodly number of undergraduate students and lots of independent citizens stuck their necks out in the days leading up to the Flight of the Fourteen. And yet through all their hero’s welcome, not one of them has given full credit to the strategy of peaceful, legal escalation that gave them the opportunity to take dramatic action with full confidence of widespread support. Even worse are their exhortations to support the Democrats, exclusive of the many elements making up the backbone of this movement. As the struggle continues through a protracted phase without further massively unifying attacks by the GOP, the splits between Democrats and the grassroots will widen.
2. Walker won. His bill is still not clearly law, but he’s not waiting around for any court decision to implement it, even though every move he makes toward implementing it further muddies the legalities. And the question of political payback remains highly motivating, and there are plenty of deserving targets, not only Walker himself. Through electoral politics we will end the careers of at least a few, and make life at times miserable for the rest through all manner of activist confrontation. But the fact is, we will live with a seriously degraded state bureaucracy and a dysfunctional state government, and a horribly unbalanced state budget for years to come. Undoing the damage will be monumental task beyond the capacities of the Democrats. Thus, one of the high points of the liberal state structure—twentieth-century American Upper Midwestern state government, effective, professional, and mostly non-partisan—in Wisconsin is definitively no more. Time to roll up our sleeves, grab a tool, and start planting or building whatever it is that we want to grow.
3. The movement response to the March 9 surprise assault by Walker and his state senate minions remains unexamined. Surprising, when one considers the fact that we know the day and even the moment the movement lost the battle over Walker’s bill. But perhaps not so surprising when we consider the unpalatable truths such a examination would reveal. To begin with, the failure to meaningfully respond begs the question, where, exactly, the union interests lie? If the rank and file’s willingness to strike was overridden by the leadership, that is one thing, complete with an ugliness all its own. But what if the basic conservatism of the unions crouched in a defensive posture stands at cross purposes with those of us looking ahead to a different world? In other words, what if, as Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs would say, a job ain’t the answer? Even though the various unions took all different kinds of heroic and historic action over the last six weeks, I can’t help but point out that the visionary element is completely missing from the union side, and the lost opportunity of March 9 showed us the price of accumulating power, even oppositional power, without vision. Nicolas, Erin, and I are working up a fuller treatment of March 9. Will post when it’s ready.

 

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.