Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens

"Mr. Bucket, my Lady."

Mr. Bucket makes a leg and comes forward, passing his familiar demon over the region of his mouth.

"Are you waiting to see Sir Leicester?"

"No, my Lady, I've seen him!"

"Have you anything to say to me?"

"Not just at present, my Lady."

"Have you made any new discoveries?"

"A few, my Lady."

This is merely in passing. She scarcely makes a stop, and sweeps upstairs alone. Mr. Bucket, moving towards the staircase-foot, watches her as she goes up the steps the old man came down to his grave, past murderous groups of statuary repeated with their shadowy weapons on the wall, past the printed bill, which she looks at going by, out of view.



This is my favorite print from Bleak House. It's not the most memorable scene -- but it's the one I love best. Cheers to Lady Dedlock, who never missed a meeting, and kept all her affairs in the best of order until they finally collapsed.

loose definition of terms

David Graeber has this great page-and-a-half screed, in Direct Action, about the difference between hippies and punks. Really, he's interested in talking about Situationism, post-68 divergence, and the loss of the traditional terms like "alienation" and "ennui" in lieu of new terms like "aporia" and "detournment" -- but in the process, he gives a quick breakdown of terms:

No one would ever use these terms to describe themselves. I've never heard anyone say "I am a punk" or "I am a hippie." They are terms you use to describe someone else. In East Coast circles, to call someone a hippie is always to make fun of them, at least slightly...("when you're proposing we organize a drum circle, are we talking *good* drumming, or just bad hippie drumming?" The term "punk," in contrast is almost never pejorative. It tends to be used in a more simply descriptive fashion: i.e., "I'm talking about Laura. You know, that kind of punky girl with the green hair?"

Most people, he notes, are an idiosyncratic combination of both. Still, the terms are mostly used to differentiate. "Hippie" in fact regularly becomes a synonym for "pacifist," and "punk" for "youneger, militant anarchist." At Occupy, you see that pretty clearly in the breakdown of different working groups -- between say, facilitation (interested in the rigorously structured principals of a just conversation) and direct action (fuck the police, let's go party).

I was listening to this song, the bit about "the hippies and the punks and the skinheads and the skaters," and I realized, "Fuuuuuuuuck! The hippies? They're all my friends." They're probably your friends too -- you know, the ones eking out a highly privileged existence running food justice trainings in boxcars, editing magazines, running school garden programs, and otherwise safely embedded in the world of real professionals. They're probably YOU, and everyone you know. Hardworking. Ethical. Hard to get to know.

The punks, on the other hand -- they remain beautiful and obscure -- a lot like David Graeber. John Darnielle is a punk -- a friendly, nerdy dude with a preference for boxing and death metal. Parts and Crafts is full of them: the nerds and the freaks, the folks who are ill at ease. "DIY became the basic punk credo. Make your own fashion. Form your own band. Refuse to be a consumer. If possible, become a dumpster diver and don't buy anything. If possible, refuse wage labor. Do not submit to the logic of exchange. Reuse and redeploy fragments of the spectacle and commodity system to fashion artistic weapons to subvert it."

Sound familiar? Sound silly? Sound romantic? That's you and everyone you know.

old haunts

I spent all day yesterday biking up Myrtle Ave, all the way to the overpass of the JMZ line at myrtle and willoughby. Last time I was at this intersection I was pissed off and breaking up with [this asshole]. Not being one to lay a grievance behind, I stand for a minute and take it in.



It's really dark, for one thing. There's five or six roads that come together, so crossing the street is incredibly treacherous. And under the subway tracks, there's this proliferation of commerce -- it's like being at Yankee Stadium, with fourteen different bodegas and people standing out at every corner hawking incense and necklaces. Really fucking beautiful.

I turn up and around the side streets, looking for Surreal Estate. Not finding it, I look for Troutman (out of a bizarre desire to rehash old wounds). Luckly, I don't find that either.

I met this woman today who really hates Occupy Wall Street. She's the resident artist at Proteus Gowanus, and was convinced that everyone living at the camp was an ivy league student. "Of course they can take off work! They have all this money!" I don't think that's true, but I didn't really want to argue with her about it.

I do wonder how she managed to get to Zucotti Park and only speak to academics -- if it's anything like Boston, it would have been hard to take one pass through the park without stumbling over two drunken fistfights and one completely sober and intentional threat to physical violence.

Sometimes I wish I was not so bitter about the site. I turn left up Bushwick Ave and make a mental note of buildings that are boarded up, empty lots, open gates. I wonder why they opted for tents. Why Zucotti? Why that space, over any other? Did they expect it would last -- or did they expect to pitch tents for three days, and then find themselves with a long-term occupation? Passing by St. Mark's church, I make a note of the intersection and wonder idly whether I'll pass the big condo conversion anytime soon (I read about it: I know it's here somewhere).

People are so quick to shake off misalignments, small hypocrisies, to try to separate themselves for the sake of calling shit out and holding people accountable. I remember when Darrin drove up to the site in a BMW -- or when AFL-CIO called me up and said, "yes, we're making hats especially for occupy" My thought was, "what the fuck, you don't get this at all." But Darrin spent a couple of years organizing prisoners before he got snapped up by SEIU and is grateful to make it to thirty -- so what if if he has a nice car now? It's so hard to know people, to know where they come from.

Sometimes you go on a couple of bad dates -- sometimes the union calls up and wants to make you hats. Sometimes you find a building and fall in love with it, and sometimes you find yourself in the middle of an occupation, and just have to go with the flow.

hippies || punks || skinheads || skaters

I was in a conference call this afternoon to talk about Oakland. Inevitably, the question of violence was at the heard of the conversation -- what is violence, what do we think about it, and how does what happened in Oakland affect the wider movement?

For context, Occupy Oakland tried to do a big move-in this past weekend, taking a vacant building and throwing a festival to initiate stage 2 of the occupation. It didn't go well. Lots of arrests, lots of protesters beaten up, a non-negligible number of felony charges stemming from police violence. Some protesters broke into City Hall and vandalized some stuff. Stupid shit, and a pretty awful display of militarized police force. The press, on the other hand, has been writing about nothing other than the "violent turn" the protests have taken.

The call was pretty heavily mediated, and seemed like more of an opportunity to just give people space to talk about this, rather than to develop movement-wide strategy for how to respond to Oakland. Midway through the call, Starhawk, a longtime activist who has been involved in just about every major mobilization over the last thirty years, got on the line to talk about her experiences at Seattle, and about broken windows.

What she said is, I think, pretty true -- which is that it doesn't matter what you think about violence -- or how you define it -- or even whether you choose to define it at all. When people break windows or throw things at police, it immediately distracts from *anything else that could possibly be happening at that moment.* It becomes about the spectacle, rather than the act - and because it is in may ways quite a romantic spectacle - the brick through the window, cobblestones pried up - it sucks the air out of the room for any other tactics that might register on the collective radar.

I bring it up because, in the differential spectrum between "hippie" and "punk," the vision of the militant young anarchist throwing a brick through a window is about as romantic as you get.

It's mostly a fiction, of course -- most of the anarchists I know at occupy work in the library, and are peacefully fucking shit up doing childcare for militant housing organizations or putting together theatrical programs for teens. Violence or nonviolence also takes a whole different resonance when put up next to non-Occupy cases of police brutality -- like Ramarley Graham, the Bronx teenager who was shot to death in his bathroom after being chased into his house by a phalanx of New York's finest.

And yet, the stereotypes hold -- when we talk about violence, we're still, to date, mostly talking about Seattle, bricks, black-clad anarchists, black blocs, punks, and their differentiation from hippies. I wish I knew how to push this conversation in a more productive direction -- to take into account a definition of violence, to talk about people vs. property, to get beyond the paradigm of marches, and to talk - really talk! -- about the systemic violence of capitalism, which is supposedly why we're all here.

It's a nonstarter. Masks and bricks. Punks and hippies. That's where the conversation is invariably going to stall out, and it's where we'll be for awhile yet.