Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anti-police brutality rally, ☭☭☭, columbia, every heart is a revolutionary cell, hakim bey, insurrection, new school, nyu, occupy everything, peter lambourne wilson, pigs, police brutality, take back the night
Off the sidewalks, into the future! Swoooosh I guess we’re rupturing the spacetimecontinuum vortex now? As per usual an anti-police brutality rally was met with, surprise, more “police brutality”. Even with this it’s worth thinking about what “police brutality” looks like – or doesn’t look like at a majority white, privileged space like the New School. NYPD has a community affairs unit, who knew? It’s starting to feel like an insurrectionary circuit is being traced from union square via new school to washington square park and back. How do we abolish exchange? Perhaps our vegan potlucks in the park should become mutualist potlatches. Maybe we should start eating the pigs? Rev Billy showed up to preach but I guess we weren’t all buying what he was selling. Has even anti-commercialism been commodified? And how does his hair defy gravity so bouffantly? I want to know.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ☭☭☭, dissemination, every heart is a revolutionary cell, global southeast, GRANAD(A), insurrection, third world decadence movement
La Décadence n’a rien à faire avec Amour. La Décadence est un excellent marteau que nous employons pour détruire l’Empire.
[Decadence is not Love. Decadence is a hammer we use to crush Empire.]
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America is a series of several displeasures, beamed into our bedrooms in little increments of ketchup packets and adolescent angst. America is the kindly uncle that might violate you with his left hand even as he hands you tamarind sweets from his right. We’re feeling really unclean America, and we’d quite like a shower please, but your oceans are salty and even your rainwater runs cold. Never forget that we love you, America, even when we suspect you have mortgaged our dreams of personhood away.
We are brown and glossy and we think we have rather nice legs but our chappals are getting scuffy and that’s not going to land us an I-banking job, is it? Perhaps we should do good and queue up for the NGO-industrial complex to help you help us help them. Soon our governments will build another shopping mall, and we’ll program ourselves new dreams of getting off your global welfare state. Your cities are expensive, though and we cant afford your economic noblesse oblige anymore. We’e running out of band-aids already, yet we’re bleeding all over our new shoes. These heels are high! Slow down a bit there, we can’t quite keep up with your shadow. Yet with our orgiastic consumption and your immaculate white goods, we think we could be friends, what do you say?
Decadence is not Love. Decadence is a hammer we use to crush Empire
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anthropology, aum, ☭☭☭, bataille, becoming, blanchot, canetti, deleuze, dissemination, eisenstein, every heart is a revolutionary cell, extincts, extitutions, fascism, frekorps, guattari, hinduism, in the beginning, insurrection, larkin, nietzsche, superman, theweleit, universe, violence, what is to be (un)done
In the beginning was the language, and the language was gravity. Before the beginning was infinite violence. When violence met language, there was conflict; at once collision and collusion. Conflict became a reproductive space of exchange, and atomisation became the original sin. We learnt what evil was, and it was the One.
Gravity meanwhile was inscribed into (celestial) bodies, becoming the first legal contract between them. So it is that particles collide to produce fragmented planets and people, in an exchange of violent energy. Humans similarly collide to exchange pleasantries, and sometimes bodily fluids. On the level of language, morphemes collide to exchange ejaculations of speed and to reproduce meaning. In the eighteenth century, these forms might have been approached through money, character and root.
Yet this beginning is simply the beginning of the rational, instinctual Man-form, and its subsequent trajectory through time and space. Following Nietzsche, the universe itself is a monster of energy without beginning, without end, not expanding but constantly transforming, in an infinite play of forces, and waves of forces which work like concepts to create embodied affects. Violence is this monstrous energy.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, anarchist bookfair, anthropology, ☭☭☭, cat party, catastrophe, dead time, dissemination, dubai, expat crisis, future gutter status, headspace, listen trotskyist, new school, situationism, summer
“I sometimes think I envy those people who know where they belong;
writers who have a language and a history that is granted them with no catches, no hooks. Theirs for the taking. Along with a nation of willing accomplices, compatriots who see their own fate and that of their nation’s history and literary tradition reflected in the mirror the writer’s labour. It is all so neatly sewn up. Of course, I enjoy no such privilege. I belong to that nomad tribe, the great unwashed, those people born in the joins between continental shelves, in the unclaimed interstices between time zones, strung across latitudes. A tribe of no fixed locus, the homeless, the stateless. I have two passports and quite a variety of other documents to identify me, all of which tell the world where I have been, but not who I am, nor where I am going to…
A petrodollar summer?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: ally, ☭☭☭, bebsi bolitics, carlos latuff, gaza, israel, not-trot, palestine, passport privilege, semantics, solidarity, we are all, we are all german jews
What does it mean to say ‘we are all Palestinian’, or ‘we are all Gaza‘? (And for many now, ‘we are all Hamas‘ – is this a popular semantic de-bantustanising?) Because we’re not. I really don’t know what I understand by the concept of solidarity anymore. There’s different forms and gradations, sure, ranging from statements and Facebook updates, to protests, boycotts and direct action, perhaps all the way to using your passport privilege to plant yourself in front of an Israeli or Mexican tank or bulldozer. And not to knock or denigrate that in any way, but I wonder if there can be real solidarity until you’re standing at either end of a gun? Or perhaps solidarity must instead be defined by its very passive nature – of relative privilege and thus allyship – always in solidarity but never in the struggle? (With an emphasis on the relative as opposed to absolute, tied to [blank] oppression – there’s of course cross-solidarity between differently oppressed peoples).
Maybe this is stemming from frustration, at being in Dubai-not-DC tomorrow, at lacking the aforementioned passport privilege and protection that my decidedly not navy blue passport will never afford. (If you’re not Rachel Corrie, that is). Thinking of the ‘we are all’ standard phrasing though, where does it come from? I can’t seem to find out, though there are suggestions of it coming from Paris 1968, with the denizens of the Quartier Latin’s slogan, “We are all German Jews” in solidarity with the banned Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Or maybe it comes from anti-Nazi peace activist Rev. Martin Niemöller’s famous statement?
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Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: academic, academic essay, anthropology, ☭☭☭, bebsi bolitics, ben heine, columbia, darfur, denial, ehud barak, ethnic cleansing, eyal weizman, gaza, gaza strip, genocide, ICC, idf, israel, mahmood mamdani, massacre, palestine, politics of naming, semantics, wall, west bank, zionism
Is Gaza a genocide; is Darfur a genocide? Where do you draw the lines between ‘land conflict’, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide’, and what are the political value(s) of doing so? And how does something get designated as genocide anyway – is it, legally, only when the ICC at the Hague says so?
These are a couple of things I’ve been thinking through lately, having just taken a fairly broad based intro course with Mahmood Mamdani, which ended by looking at Darfur. To be fair, his somewhat controversial views did not come out explicitly in lecture, but having looked them up, I found myself agreeing, at least in part. With Darfur, as with Palestine I admittedly know only smidgens of the context from what I have read, but even in a vacuum, there’s value in the consideration that naming something a ‘conflict’ or ‘genocide’ has very real political affects. (The above is a real ad by the way, not a culturejam riff on Miranda July as I first thought. It ran in the New York Times Magazine, on April 10, 2008).
It’s especially interesting then as I just wrote a paper on said politics of naming in both Darfur and Palestine. (And ‘interesting’ is such a strange go-to-in-order-to-highlight word, one that I awkwardly cycle with ‘fascinating’, and even the aggrandising ’significant’. Because it is not strange, but indeed heart wrenching and what else can you do in powerlessness but a detatched and masqued quasi-academic commentary?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anarchism, ☭☭☭, collective amnesia, doris salcedo, el otro lado, eyal weizman, gentrification, green scare, istanbul biennial, postco, postracial scars, property not people, racism, RAF, rupture reveals structure, sds, seattle, shibboleth, violence, weather underground, western freedoms
A lot of things can happen between the gaps, and down little alleyways and other narrow spaces between one building and the next. Like this installation by Doris Salcedo at the 2003 Istanbul Biennial, which fills a gap between buildings by lowering in 1600 chairs. Or this ridiculous house in Seattle, found by Kyle Gabouer. He says that it was owned and inhabited by an elderly woman, who “was so insistent on living her last days in the home that no matter the price, she refused to sell it in order to make way for construction. The contractors decided they’d build around her. I heard that she recently passed, and the building isn’t even finished yet…” Something to think about with “Manhttanville”, perhaps?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: anthropology, palestine, street art, public art, billboard, ☭☭☭, gaza, israel, mark seager, gaza massacre, islamic university, taxis, bent jbeil, hassan nasrallah, anarchism
According to JustSeeds, this sick piece ” appeared yesterday in the South Bronx. The wall faces the Bruckner Expressway, a highly used elevated highway passing through the Bronx”. It got me wondering about graffiti in Gaza itself, and I came across Mark Seager’s amazing photographs. He says that these photos were taken during visits in 2001 at the beginning of the Intifada, and again in 2003 circa the Iraqi invasion. They’re almost all the more precious in that these walls are most likely bombed and decimated by now, with their images erased forever – unlike images buffed away on city orders, that still leaveghostly outlines.
MORE…
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: arab world, art, ☭☭☭, bebsi bolitics, dubai, dubai + middle east, gaza, gulf news, hamas, israel, latuff, massacre, media, media terrorism, ny times, palestine, solidarity, third intifada, uae
unknown, AP
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There was a crazy fog today and tonight – lower than I’ve ever seen it in the daytime-, covering everything with muffled dampness. Kind of like the Arab response, then? Dubai in particular usually drops big money on fireworks displays and the like yet this year festivities have been subdued or, like the fireworks, cancelled. I believe a bunch of other Arab states are doing the same, all in solidarity with Gaza. Shame that’s about as far as it will probably extend, humanitarian aid aside. And while people rally to protest at Israeli embassies around the world, here it happens at the Palestinian embassy instead. With no embassy in much of the Arab World, I did wonder where people would mobilise to, save for angry letters-to-the-editor invectives – L’Oreal counters perhaps? Libyans, however took to the Egyptian embassy instead, while others opted for the streets. From what I’m reading, Amman saw upwards of 20 000 taking to the streets demanding an end to the 1994 peace deal with Israel. |
bombs over baghdad, grenades over gaza? [warning: images may be disturbing]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, street art, public art, ☭☭☭, other, troy lovegates, crimethinc, trains, palace of the people, romania, anarchism
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Canadian street artist Other, aka Troy Lovegates has a new solo exhibition up at SF gallery / zinehome / seemingly all around rad spaceNeedles and Pens. You can see the pictures from the show here. And though I like the work on wood and its solidified cardboard cut out raised off the walls feel, I’m most drawn to his other work and its ridic use of colour and suface, especially on trains and murals. |
I dislike that Crimethinc has so permeated that I immediately associate freight train hopping with them along with indulgent dropout-yet-be-a-capitalistic-parasite and mountains of stale bagels. To me it feels more like a subculture than a social movement, kind of like playing a video game revolution. Not to rehash the perhaps tired body of Crimethinc criticism (and indeed there’s a lot that could be learned from their media machine), but I do rather like Anarkismo’s “Rethinking Crimethinc”
