March 13, Seattle

OK! update. I will be reading at Left Bank books in Seattle, March 13 at 7:00, hopefully with a couple other people - like Nealy from Mend My Dress.

study + friends

I remembered, when I can't figure out how to get my head to work, study always helps. Active reading, taking notes, thinking hard about things outside myself.

I have been thinking about how much nicer it is when we tell eachother what we like about eachother. I seriously think hardly any of us get enough acknowledgement, and a lot of times we focus on the negative things about our friends, or if we think our friends are great, we compare ourselves to them and think we suck. but why? So many of us feel so lonely and unappreciated and self hating, so I want to recommend that we start practicing telling eachother what inspires us about eachother. a lot.

committment

I just want to aknowledge how hard it is to do almost anything half the time. I think sometimes that people think that they are the only ones who struggle with motivation and despair and committment and getting shit done, but if you feel alone, you are not. It is so fucking hard to keep going and stay focused. Like, right now I am trying to start on this writing project, and I said I would write on it for 3 hours today, but I just scratch away and think of a million reasons why I can't write it, why I don't know enough and can't focus enough and don't write good enough and what if I get it wrong. And I just want to go work, do some mindless tasks. This is the struggle. to keep going despite it all.

books I need

Hi! I am about to start working on my political autobiography, which sounds kind of weird and self-important, but it's really more about the political stuff that has been going on in my lifetime than about me. But I have a lot of research I need to do, so if anyone has books about these subjects that they don't want anymore, let me know. You can send them to pob 29 athens oh 45701:

Alternative Schools in the 70's
Sanctuary Movement
US intervention in Central America
bombing of Granada
Anti-Aparthied Movement + US Divestment from S.Africa
Reganomics + funding cuts for artists
Deep Ecology + Social Ecology vs Deep Ecology
Judi Bari
Co-op Movement in Minneapolis (from the 50's or whenever)
Love and Rage
ACT UP
Gurilla Girls
Riot Girl Movement
Self-Defense Movement
Sex Wars (anti-porn vs pro-erotic freedom or pro-sex)
Media Representation of social movements since the 80's
James Bay
Prarie Island
ARA
Punk (espcially 80's and 90's punk stuff)
Straight Edge Movement
Fetal Subjectivity
Rise of the Christian Right - especially about their tactics getting on school boards, etc.
Clinic Defense
Beginnings of the WTO, World Bank and IMF - or overviews of how all that developed
Identity Politics
Class Identity and the shrinking of US Middle class
Free Trade + US companies moving to Mexico, etc
500 Years of Resistance
Food Not Bombs
Zapatistas
Autonomen (I don't know how to spell it - German radicals)
Squatting in US
Anti-Mass
Zines (I don't want a bunch of zines, because I have tons, but maybe a book about them)
Crimethinc
War on Drugs
War on Terror
Incarceration of African-Americans + the Prison Industrial System
Iraq Wars

I know there's a lot I'm forgetting right now. It'll all come together better once I'm in the writing.
thanks!!!

Jazz Brunch

Oh, Baltimore. Once upon a time there was a church that was falling apart and couldn't pay their bills, and had been involved in radical stuff since forever, and so they approached the Anarchist bookstore, Red Emma's, and asked if they would like to do community events in the big room in the church. So they helped fixed it up and they have events, even punk shows in there. But what I went to was Jazz Brunch, which I figured would just be a silly punky thing, and I learned a jazz song to sing, "My Cat Arnold", by Karen Mantler. Because I'd heard that if you brought an instrument you got $4 brunch instead of $7. But when I got there it was the sweetest, more commuinity kind of thing I'd ever really seen. It was punks at the door and serving the food, but it was all kinds of people. all ages and not just white. and there was a real jazz band playing that was two kids who were probably about 15, and three older people. And the line for brunch was out the door. there were big tables, lots of them, and a girl with long dreads and a good loud voice who was a welcomer, and welcomed each section of the line, explaining how it worked. The welcomer made it feel so welcoming! So much less confusing and more fun, less alienating. I wish all punk/anarchist spaces would remember about being welcoming, and making a point to really do stuff like that.
Jazz Brunch. I love Jazz Brunch!

accountability

A lot of people lately have been asking me what I think accountability is. I have recently been trying to demand accountability from two people who are assaulters. One of them is an ex-good friend of mine, who was totally clueless about the fact that he assaulted someone - he thought it was consentual but was totally willing to accept the survivors experience. I don't think that in his heart he really sees himself as a perpetraitor though.

I think everyone needs to hold perpetraitors accountable, and that if the person isn't doing serious, ongoing work to learn and change, that they need to go to counciling. Friends who are trying to help rehabilitate the perpetraitor need to consistantly demand that they go to counciling.

In a couple instances lately, perpatrators I have known have gone to counciling that was specifically for rehabiliting perpatrators, and these councilors usually deal with people who have been court ordered to go there. I wish these worked, but I feel like these councilors have downplayed the importance of more subtle forms of abuse and consent, and have made the perpatrators feel like what they did was no big deal.

I have gotten a lot of criticism about the tactic of ostricizing perpetraitors from communities, and a lot of talk about how the perpetraitor is not going to change if people aren't staying friends with them. I believe that ostricization is a powerful tool. I believe that people are capable of making fundamental changes in themselves, but I have seen over and over again that many people are not willing to make these changes until their lives become too fucking uncompfortable for them to avoid dealing with it. Ostricization makes people uncomfortable. Friends of the perpetrator who believe that they can help the perpetraitor change need to be consist and active in pushing for accountability and change. there is a fine line between being an enabler and helping someone change.

I expect friends to make demands on the perpetraitor, to talk to the people in the larger community about what they are doing, what progress is being made, and to ask the larger community what expectations and demands they have.

I have also heard a lot of talk about "what is community", and how we don't really have one so how can anyone be held accountable. I think this is bullshit. Community doesn't have to be super tangeble to be real. If you work with someone, if you go to the same places as them (shows, coffee shops), if you live in the same neighborhood or town or even city, all those things count. Community accountability is about breaking out of the "none of my business" mentality that has allowed abuse to happen and contiuing happening. It is all of our responsibilities to speak out and stop abuse.

baltimore and Seattle reading

I'll be in Baltimore doing a zine reading thing at Red Emmas bookstore on Feb 18, at 7pm. and in Seattle on March 9th I'm not sure what time.

mrr column 3

i forgot to post this one.

What was it that brought you into punk? was it just the music or that you couldn't fit in. Was it so much anger inside of you that had no way out? Was it the emptiness of pop music and looking for something more. Was it rebellion, pure and simple? Was it because you had a punk crush? Was it because it was cool? What has it grown into? Was it because punk was the only thing that could keep you alive.
What brought you into it, and what are you going to do now? The reasons we start aren't always enough to hold us steady. We have to constantly rethink what we want from where we are, and how are we going to move forward, once we have treaded water long enough, once we have learned how to swim. We have to recreate what punk means in our lives so we don't just turn our backs on it when we grow.
There is so much pushing on us, so much capitalist bullshit standard beauty crap what makes us worthwhile what shit our parents shoved at us what shit our schools did, and the magazine adds and the shitty music and lack of culture or patriarchial culture, and shoved at us "why don't you smile", and meaningless debates where they don't even begin to ask the right questions, and lovelessness and alienation and despair.
So yeah, it makes sense to define ourselves as other. as against all that regardless of whether or not we know what we're for. But I want to know, someday, what you want to create. I want to know what's the revolution we're gonna make? Because it's Us vs. Them? but who is them exactly? Is it my 91 year old grandma? who was talking to me about the gay rodeo. She said "I used to think gay people deserved to die, but now I just can't imagine what my problem was!"
Is them my mom, who never made it out of the suburbs, and couldn't figure out a way to resist beyond school boardes and unshaved armpits, and teaching us daughters that we could do anything. who it took 13 years to get out of an abusive relationship, and by then it was too late, the aftershocks killed her.
Is them my older sister, events coordinator at Dartmouth college, who is too afraid of the world to let her kids play outside, and whose method of survival requires holding tight to forgetting and denial.
Is them the kids who aren't punk enough or the kids who are punker than thou. the ones who don't care about anything other than drinking and fucking shit up, or the ones who are so self righteous in their politics you can't even talk to them. Is it the old punks for leaving or the young ones for repeating the same actions and making the same mistakes. And what is the difference between critique and infighting?
In Andrea Dworkin's book Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, she says "I learned never to ignore the reality of power pure and simple. I also learned that one could get a bunch of people to do something brave or new or rebellious, but if it didn't come from their deepest hearts they could not maintain the honor of their commitment... nor can rhetoric create in people a sustained determination to win".
What is the revolution we're going to make? What is deepest in our hearts? I know that sometimes all we can do is figure out a way to stay alive, but after that, what is it we're feeling and what are doing just because it's been set up for us to do. I want us to think hard and often about what it is we're trying to create, what is deepest in our hearts, and not just what we hate or what's simple.
A friend of mine recently came out to me as being not an anarchist. She said she thought people were inherently lazy, and I know I live in my own little bubble of denial in my head, but I cant believe that's true. I think so many of us work really hard in a world that is so against us. I've seen so many people work hard just to live. people doing the hard work of surviving incest, surviving rape, surviving partners who tell them they're shit, surviving being beaten, being ignored, being not believed. And if we are doing this hard work, there's got to be a deep desire in the rest of us.
Right now. I want you to think seriously about what kind of world you want, and how we can take steps to get there. I want us to talk with our friends about real things, and cut the bullshit. Like if you talk shit about women, what are the reasons behind it? what is the benefit for you? what do you think might be the actual real ways it hurts us. If you dismiss people who are trying to change the world, I want you to challenge your dismissal, and to think seriously about what it is you don't like about their ideas or tactics, and what it is you think should be done differently, and how can you work to make that happen?
It's time to work hard. I want to uncover our secrets and our lost abilities. I want us to stop making fun of each other. I want us to feel deeply and to love and to learn to trust our bodies and to learn which people we can trust and who is trying to trick us.
I want us to stop worrying so much about whether or not we feel like we belong, stop trying to prove ourselves. Nothing is comfortable in this world even if we can find bits and pieces of it, bits and pieces of community. I want us to be able to agree to disagree on things. I want us to encourage a diversity of identities and a diversity of tactics. I want us to study. There is an embarrassing lack of political knowledge and shallow political rhetoric that doesn't sustain us. I want us to embrace challenge, and to fight for what we belive, and to stand up for each other, to learn how to live in different worlds. I want to sew it all together, the ways we fight and create and think, not a single thread all mashed together in fake unity, but a net of identity, culture, resistance, community, and family, to catch the ones who are falling. to break their fall.
At the Black Bear, Butcher Wolf, Red Herring show, Chris Somerville from Black Bear says into the microphone, "This song is about the problems that arise when people are divided from the natural world." and if the basement had been packed and the amps had been louder, the force of the music could have pushed us all together and the violin bow as a needle could have sewn up the divisions and the revolution would have streamed out through everything. As it was, I could only stand there with my hand on my heart, trying to hold it in.

Seattle Doris Reading?

I think I'm going to be in Seattle on March 9. I don't know if I have any dorisy people in that sweet city, and I've never been there before. but if anyone is out there, and thinks I should try and do a reading somewhere, tell me! where?

how to built stuff

sometimes i used to not build things because I thought I didn't know how. Now I have been building things for a long time. I don't know if you can tell how crooked this is, but it is very crooked. who cares. it stands up. here is how you do it. find wood. cut it. if you use a circular saw and you have long hair, make sure not to get your hair in the moving sawblade. cut little strips of wood for the shelves to rest on. If you are hammering them in or screwing them in and the wood keeps splitting, drill holes first. the holes should be a little smaller than the nails or screws. I totally recomend this drilling step. It takes away a lot of frustration.
measure, or just put everything near eachother and guess.
to make it not so tippy, put a board going diagonal against the back, and then screw this into the wall.

ride to balitmore

these are my old roommates new pigs.

i am trying to find a ride to baltimore, (from athens or columbus ohio). anyone? I know it's a long shot.