The kids are off from school today. We opened up the shop much to their excitement as they were ready to sell more of their drawings to the nurses and other workers from Alina. They have a rare capitalist gene I do not possess.
Just after opening, Mostafa – who runs a shop on the other side of the market – came in to make some copies. I was playing Nass el Ghiwane, much to his delight. “This is music from Morocco. Revolutionary music!” I could tell this was a rare time he’d heard his home country’s music in Minneapolis, let along music like Nass el Ghiwane. I told him how I liked them, but only knew a little bit about their history. I mentioned how I knew they were a very political group. “Yes,” he said, “they are people’s music. They risked very much, and even went to jail.”
We spoke of Morocco, and his family’s city, Fes, a place I have always wanted to visit. Louis gave him a Pokeman drawing.
All yet another reason why I love spending my days at the shop, and how much that love is energized, in good part, by everyone here at the Global Market.
Album de photographies anti-communard. Louise Michel, chef des incendiaires, 1871. Photographie d’Ernest Charles Eugène Appert (1830-1891). Paris, musée Carnavalet.
This morning, after dropping the kids at school and Laura at work, I swung back to the neighborhood. Got two coffees at May Day Cafe, and drove over to pick up Alondra so that we could listen in on the session proposing HF322 to move to the Public Safety Committee of the State Legislature. The bill passed 9 – 6 in favor.
The bill proposes to be able to file civil suits and, in turn, collect damages from individuals to “recover costs” for those who have been arrested during public protests. HF322, brought to the floor by Rep. Nick Zerwas MN30A (who I am sure has been greatly effected by the throngs of protesters in Elk River over the last few harrowing years) is tactically vague and draconian. It fits perfectly into the mind-set of these times. There’s plenty to be concerned about right now, this bill being one of them. The measure, in essence, is a tactic to 1.) intimidate and corral potential protest, 2.) give more leeway and narrative framing ability to the police in regard to tactics of crowd control and its aftermath, and 3.) create a system to tie up the courts with “do-gooder” lawyers, tiring them out with cases to handle – of merit, though much of the dog & pony show variety – while other cases and incidents get less attention. Like Trump and Co. have already shown in just five days in office, disruption and confusion is their go-to tactic; a slight of hand to dismantle the demos and its strengths.
I hate going into government buildings. They give me the fucking creeps. And, generally speaking, I try to shy away from working with the electorate. Electoral politics isn’t where my heart lies, and I often find them playing catch up to my own desires for the world I wish to live in. But this fight we are in will take all of us. The words of, among others at the session, Reps. Omar and Dehn were a relief. Their questions and commentary illustrated their deep commitment to the long fight ahead.
Many individuals associated with BLM were also present. Jason Sole, and especially the always passionate and inspiring John Thompson, were there to make the point that HF322 was proposed, in large part, as a response to BLM protests and shutdowns (MOA, 4th Precinct, I-94, etc…) over the last few years. The point, rightly, was made that this is, in effect, a law to systematically silence black dissent. We’ve seen this before and there is no reason to think that it wouldn’t, in a viciously organized and populist fashion, rise to the surface again.
But herein lies the problem, and in certain regard, the dog whistle to those who feel that now, after all this time, they must act and get in the streets with BLM and others fighting for justice. Zerwas and Co. propose this bill, yes, in response to the generous and necessary work of BLM and their allies, but also as a means of stopping dissent off at the pass and corralling future action, or at least momentarily confusing it, from all parties. It is a bill that shouts to non-POC, to the middle class of all colors who have been concerned, but out of the fight, to stay on their couches and keep scrolling through Facebook. A warning that the street, the highway, isn’t simply not safe for body, but unsafe for your bottom line and bank account. BLM inspire you? Trump got you all riled up? Pissed at the future environmental disaster that is DAPL? Tweet about it, but don’t make a move. Stay shackled to your digital soapbox.
But if we are to move past this moment, and force the reigns of power away from the fascists, the Republicans, the middling liberal Democrats, the skinheads who are energized and emboldened by this moment, the corporate CEOs and those who profit off their devastation of land, people, and future then getting into the streets (along with so much more) is exactly what we will have to do. And the streets will need to be filled across issue: BLM against DAPL. Middle class Edina mothers and fathers marching and blocking highways for the lives of indigenous women, and so much more.
This confounding group who, without forethought, can seem at cross-purposes or antagonistic to one another is exactly the coalition that will bring about another world. Otherwise we have no power. If HF322, and the many subsequent bills to be proposed in the future, stay an anti-BLM measure alone, they will do so precisely because their intimidation tactics for a larger body of cross-issue dissent was locked up by fear before it could gain momentum and strength. That is exactly what they want and exactly why this bill is moving forward.
About ten years ago I took an amazing and inspirational road trip around the country visiting past sites of social upheaval and dissent. I stood on the roadside along a highway in rural Alabama where a group of racists had firebombed a bus taking Freedom Riders from one destination to the next. A hotel in Montana where an IWW organizer fighting for the rights of striking miners had been abducted from his hotel room, dragged through the streets, and had his corpse deposited in front of the union hall with the dimensions of a grave carved into his back. The people whose lives, across an American history of dissent that I encountered, were not extraordinary. That is to say they were not born with special gifts that allowed them abilities that you and / or I do not possess. They simply had had enough and were compelled to act. They sought out the tools and relationships that manifest change in the world because they were compelled to live in a world that was just, fair, and vibrant.
On this same trip I visited, with my dear friend Dan S Wang, the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection. Just that day the archive had received a very special new addition to the collection; a photo album featuring individuals, and more striking to me, group family portraits of individuals, who took part in the Paris Commune of 1871. Anarchist, revolutionaries all, these mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, lovers, looked so unthreatening. So, startlingly, middle class and comfortable. Radical is not the adjective I would have used to describe them. And yet there they were. Coming from many different walks of life, many different stories to share, they stood at barricades, conjoined their homes to create new streets by blasting through the walls of their apartments. They fought and died together, because they, in collaboration, believed that between their diverse set of experiences another world was possible. I looked at these photos – at their normalcy, their pedestrian quality – and thought, “how isn’t this me?”
As I walked away from the Capitol this morning and headed back to the car with Alondra I could not help but remind myself of when I held that photo album in my hands.
“How isn’t this me?” That is the question, with all the complications it entails, that we need to be asking ourselves, and ourselves in proximity or in distance to one another, as scare tactic, fascistic, “no wait NOW is the time we get into the street TOGETHER!” bills like HF322 are brought to committee by cowards and sycophants like Nick Zerwas.
Yesterday and today the shop has been closed. We’ve been out in the streets with our friends and our neighbors, voicing our anger, our commitment, desire, rage, and love in this moment.
With the help of Labor Camp we made a gigantic banner, as wide as the street itself, that Sam and Derek carried with Sam’s kids from Lake & Nicolette all the way down to City Hall. Together with thousands of others, it was a cathartic and beautiful collision of unique experience and shared purpose.
Today we made our way to the Minnesota state capitol for the Women’s March, joining over 100,000 others expressing our support for women’s rights in the fight against misogyny and systemic sexualized violence against women.
Many doors to a more inclusive and progressive future are wide open today. Our challenge? Keeps those doors open for as long as it takes to bust the hinges off.
This will take more than marches and more than slogans. It will mean not asking for permission to takes the streets. It will mean speaking up and acting out in our places of work and education. It will take confronting difficult issues at home with loved ones, and in our relationships with friends alike. It will take – each and every one of us – being active, energized, and out front each and every day. In all our moments, not simply the ones we see as “political.” It will take the recognition that politics is, simply, power and how it operates. And power exists between individuals, their relationships, their institutions. It takes our shining a light on that power – ours and the power (or lack thereof) of others – and pushing that power towards what is right…
Women’s Power – POC Power – Indigenous Power and Reconciliation – Economic Equality – Environmental Justice – Immigrant Rights!!!
It will require an America identity that sets a true example for the world about how to treat other humans and the planet we share. But what more? Putting gender, race, class, sexual orientation, nationality aside it might serve us more so to get down to what we can agree on when we think about being “human.”
At the moment this human thing, at least as regards the way we’re engaging it now, isn’t doing us too much good and we are quite literally sketching out our own extinction. Rather than jockeying for positions of power, what if we began to consider what is best for all of us and not just some of us? What if we began to think small as a path towards thinking big; looking directly in front of us rather than squinting into the distance and inevitably distorting what lies right in front of our face? What’s closest to you? What is it connected to, and you in turn it? After a while we begin to understand the network, and radically, deeply personally, comprehend our value as a node within it.
Sunday’s Anarchy is Female workshop felt like exactly where we needed to be. A large group of people arrive at the shop ready to get to work; to plan and organize together, to imagine ways of being, acting, resisting, and re-imagining the world outside of, and in resplendent antagonism towards, the specter of patriarchy.
Many flags were hand-drawn and matchbooks stamped. Variations on the Anarchy is Female logo were printed. 200 were produced and handed out, many of these being delivered to Washington D.C. for the inauguration, and others staying here for various actions.
As the day ran on Crystal and Sam both thought the gathering shouldn’t simply occur just once. After the Inauguration we’ll re-group and plan on future, possibly monthly, Anarchy is Female gatherings. Stay tuned.
Get Brewing!, the 9th Ward’s neighborhood funded platform for creative direction against the bullshit of now, starts in just three hours! Join us atEastlake Craft Brewery at 7pm with an idea to share for highlight and strengthening mutual support and resistance to hate in our neighborhood.
Here’s some words of inspiration from the great Charlie Haden…
“The music in this album is dedicated to creating a better world; a world without war or killing, without racism, without poverty and exploitation; a world where men of all governments realize the vital importance of life and strive to protect rather than destroy. We hope to see a new society of enlightenment and wisdom where creative thought becomes the most dominant foe in all people’s lives.”
– Charlie Haden (liner notes to Liberation Music Orchestra; 1969)
Based on inherent feeling towards what is and what exists around us, the battle against this patriarchal culture, is inherently female.
Around the rallying cry “Anarchy is Female” all are invited to come together for a printing event and skill / knowledge / experience share. Throughout the day we will be printing multiple different Anarchy is Female designs to be used for the inauguration protests within the city and throughout the US, including the Million Women’s March in D.C.
Furthermore…
Matchbook Club:
As a quick reaction to the recent electoral let down, a group of female artists have come together to create. Started out as a “book club”, they quickly shifted into a loving and creative space to discuss and create. For this event, the Matchbook Club will have matchbooks for take-away, as well as a handful of posters that respond to harassment in a non-violent way. Words are our friends. We have to start somewhere and we have to keep moving.
Make Flag / Burn Flag:
Many citizens are feeling disillusionment, anger, and frustration after an ugly election where expressions of xenophobia, racism and misogyny flared and threaten to become normalized. Burning a flag is considered “symbolic speech” and protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. In conjunction with the exhibition “BLEED & BURN ” Alexa Horochowski invites participants to make their own, small flags with personalized statements, to be burned independently.
The Exhibition, “BLEED & BURN,” is on view at The Soap Factory, January 14-21, 2017.
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All are invited to utilize the space in and around Beyond Repair to consider and convene their ideas on creative resistance to misogyny and patriarchy.
MPLS Folks, a quick reminder that Get Brewing! will be taking place at Eastlake Craft Brewery Friday at 7pm. Come with an idea that energizes creative direct action in the 9th Ward, drink some beers! $2 of every beer sold during the event goes to a fund to support a proposed project chosen by all those in attendance. What can you do for your neighborhood? At the very least, start by drinking some beer and listening to your brilliant neighbors this Friday. As the ambassador of soul, Mr. James Brown, said, “Get up. Get into it. Get involved.”
Sue Anne lives across the street from the market. She came in today to see if we would hand out some of these fliers she was distributing – handbills for a multi pronged Resist Trump march on Inauguration Day. We said of course and asked if she needed any more printed. “How much?” Sue Anne asked. “No charge. I could do it right now for you.” And we did. How are you fighting the good fight? Come on over and we’ll see if we can’t make that fight easier for you.
The Ross Art Museum asked Sam to contribute a project in response to the election which will begin in time for the Inauguration and run for six months. Keeping with Beyond Repair’s desire for a “deep local” practice, any projects that happens outside the 9th Ward needs to be, in some fashion, reciprocal, providing a meaningful exchange with the work going on at the shop and in the neighborhood.
With these desires in mind we’ve developed, in collaboration with Derek Maxwell and Public Address, W R/L F/R Radio, a networked radio project that builds its programming off the phrase “With Radical Love & Fierce Resistance.” Taking all interpretations of that phrase into account – from discussions on creative direct action, such as this beautiful moment from yesterday’s hearing on the appointment of Jeff Sessions’ for Attorney General to deep cuts of Alice Coltrane – W R/L F/R Radio provides a holistic and critical space for ideas and people to meet. Available streaming online, as well as broadcast over FM anywhere anyone would like to set up their own transmitter, W R/L F/R Radio existing in the ether, and is reflected on the ground, manifesting in broadcasts which broaden a social landscape of solidarity, support, and transformation, node by node, across the USA.
The images below will welcome guests into the Ross Art Museum as window decals, and a flag, which will be displayed directly outside the museum’s entrance.
Over the course of the installation students, teachers, staff, and locals are invited to submit program suggestions to be broadcast on W R/L F/R Radio.
The Walker Art Center asked a small group of artists for book recommendations in response to the upcoming Trump presidency, here’s a shortlist off the top of my head:
