If you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store (And why no one should ever listen to Naomi Wolf about "protests")

Two brief notes on the alleged occupations of streets, Wall and otherwise.

1.

Things are starting to get the tiniest bit messy.  Good.  

Big cheers to those who know that's what it means and takes.  And to the messy spread of it to other places, to other "issues" (read: capital, state, and - for old time's sake - church; jail, immigration, unpaid labor, policing, foreclosure, access to medicine)  that have nothing to do with "Wall Street greed," as none of this has much to do with that in the first place.  

Scorn and loathing to those wee katechons who restrain, who make nice, who tell you to sit down.  Whose breath reeks of the word peace as if they've long been drinking from the toilet.

2.

But a brief comment, one that applies not to those who got picked up on that bridge but to a whole lot of what has been said about this?

No one should not let oneself "get" arrested.  There is nothing sexy, useful, or sacrificial about doing so.  It is a waste of legal fees, time, and zip ties, and it renders protest recognizable in an old-fashioned, familiar, and therefore irrelevant way.  (And not "old-fashioned" in the Barcelona 1936 way, for example, which would be quite another story.)

If one thinks that 700 people getting arrested makes a splash, try seeing what happens when 700 people don't get arrested, despite police efforts to the contrary.  See what happens when a video is released of forty people un-arresting someone successfully.  See how that will change the stakes in the way that a mass arrest never can.

But if you want to get arrested for your cause, you should rob a liquor store and use the cash to buy needed materials for those protesting.  That is literally more useful.  And hell, you may even get away with it.

Do not sit there and wait for it.  Do not listen to others who tell you to do so.  If you see someone people to do so, shout that person down.

[Case in point, someone like Naomi Wolf.

Who writes:

"please protesters, I can't say this enough: DO NOT MARCH. SIT DOWN or stand with linked arms. DO NOT MARCH. I have studied protests for the last fifty years -- the ones that ended in state violence (they always win) are short and the MARCH. the ones that brought down regimes are LONG and STOP TRAFFIC and involve SITTING DOWN OR STANDING STILL WITH LINKED ARMS. They take patience. "

Well... In response to her, adopting her preferred typographical choices for ease of comprehension: 

DO NOT LISTEN TO LIBERALS as their historical moment has passed and CONDEMNED THEM TO IRRELEVANCE.  Stop traffic, yes, but there are many things that stop traffic other than your own BODY.  They are highly worth considering.  Many of them may be found in or directly alongside those roads on which the traffic moves.  It's what we who have "studied protests" typically call BARRICADES.  

We know the Gandhi-ish examples she likely has in mind.  Those bear no connection to the state of affairs in the US today.  One shouldn't confuse recent instances of "protests without high death counts" and "peaceful protests": they are not the same thing.  A single example refresher on said point ("Unlike previous protests, there was no large scale police crackdown. The parliament was partially burned during the protests.").  

And if she thinks that what happened in Egypt, or the Arab Spring more broadly, was "peaceful" or related to "SITTING DOWN OR STANDING STILL", she has simply no sense of what went down, the risks people took, and the steps they took (i.e. sharing information, choosing not to just "stand still" or "sit down" and take it, not going back to work) that made those risks worth taking.

 
And in case our historical memory is as SHIT as Wolf's, let's recall that the "protests" that "brought down regimes" recently, or come anywhere near doing so, are ones that a) threaten to, or do, bring their economies to a halt, b) cease to draw a clear line between the political, the social, and the economic, c) defend themselves, d) do not sit down and wait for the very state violence you mention,  e) recognize that insofar it is serious, it will end in state violence one way or the other, and f) leave behind that entire terrain of "march", "sit down", and "protest" and begin doing things closer to what the words "occupy", "assemble," "riot," "get very seriously organized," "barricade," and "halt" actually mean.  

P.S. And remember, it's we're gonna run these streets tonight, not we're gonna stand very still with our arms linked on these streets tonight.  It's the streets will run red.  Not that the streets will sit down, red.]


 Become enormously, allergically suspicious of the word "peaceful."

And above all, do not sit and watch others get arrested while waiting your turn.  Do not let the taking photos (even if they look like they'll be very good) of that act take the place of stopping that arrest, even if it means that the subject of the photo - someone being pinned and hurt by a number of men - will cease to exist.  In this case, it is the absence of a picture will be worth a thousand words.   For when people speak of "a critique of separation," of the problem of a fundamental divide between seeing and doing, this is the sort of thing they have in mind.

And for once, they're totally right.

Here's to a grease fire

["Research":

]

[encoded obscenities: the lingering dissolve from the baseball game onto the slang hangs over a college-aged man talking to two college-aged women, such that while the correct research gives him "oolie droolie" and "solid sender", we have just read - and do not stop reading - "two ply poke" and "bob the apple."]

Then the dissolves come unstuck and the words hang, not as things that have been heard but as injunctions (clip the mooch!)...

... and descriptions that goad on the described.

Further proof that the difference between mainstream film and its experimental counterparts is not a difference in kind and rarely has been.  It is merely a difference in

a) quantity of filler, against which the dissolves, nonsense speech, and drooling is off-set, and

b) location of that filler: in the film itself, padding it out to 2 hours and 17 minutes, like caulking padded around one little razor or opening, or as the entire negative space surrounding the film (read: the social relations of everyday life; the social relations of cinema), as if what we watch was a very small and quite temporary black hole burning in a sea of fat.

So, here's to the re-cutting of all that has heretofore existed.  To a little padding where it's missing, to let a razor breathe from time to time.  To less of it overall, to those little holes chaining together. 

For here is, too, a grease fire.

Vista 1-2-3

 If you stood here at dawn you might be the first person in the country to see the sun's first rays

Vista 1

 Vista 2

Vista 3



Later Cadillac founded Detroit, inspiring the name of the prestigious automobile

Escape From Venice (Snake's Postcard to Utopia About Difference)

Utopia,

I’m writing you from hiding, because I’m hiding I have crouched down and pulled a wet version of a cardboard box over myself, right beside a short metal pole, and I am breathing very quietly.  To be perfectly honest my pen may give me away and then where will we be. Like dragging a dead car across tin foil.  SCRITCH SCRITCH

But I’m not hiding because it’s loud, I’m hiding because I just killed a man, he had sweet soft jowls, his hands were full of rope, just like a cartoon of an old-fashioned sailor, yeah, but he recognized me, that big dopey face opening and then darkening and I saw the mouth start to come open to say SN…  And he did not finish his word because I killed him and then I got inside the box.

But I’m not hiding because it did not say a name, I’m hiding still, still here and still as all, because nearby someone is playing the harp.  There must have been a very nice harp left somewhere because this is no janky bit of twine and stripped buoy parts, it’s the real deal.  And before I saw that man I heard the harp, I said to the guy playing it, I love that song! because he was playing Debussy’s “En Bateau”, which is very fitting because this is a city about water.  He said, yeah, I bet you do.  It’s killer.  And now I was gonna say to him, hey play that more, did you see what I just did to that guy, play that Debussy, but he never stopped playing, and I am hiding because I truly cannot tell you if he ever was playing Debussy or if he is playing Jimmy Buffett’s “Stranded on a Sandbar”.  I get convinced it’s the Buffett, and that’s fine, because the Debussy was good when it lasted, and it was different, it’s still good that way, it’s like milk totally surrounded by glass that’s sitting next to milk that is just sitting out and smells like it.  And then I’m saying, no, it’s definitely still the Debussy, I was such a fool, a real ninny for thinking of Buffett, I’m in Venice after all, Venice where one most certainly does not think of Jimmy Buffett or any music that is made for people in shorts who play songs about people who wear shorts and smoke weed and just talk about smoking it and crumple their dicks in their hands and do the same with puffy dying birds and lead business seminars.  Buffett does not have four hands!  You do not think of Buffett in Venice, in fact it is impossible to think of him here, the canals block it out, like moats do.  Because Buffett never makes the music water and vice versa, he’s never played a note that shook itself off and drunken slid back in amongst the rest of them, without shivering.  Buffett just writes songs about all that.  He wants to tell you, I have heard there are those who do not crumble puffy birds, dying or not.  This song is a war on them.

But I’m not hiding from anything, I’m hiding because there is no more difference anymore.  There is no more difference between “En Bateau” and “Stranded on a Sandbar” then there is between a city and a fog these days, between a bear chock-full of maggots that aim to conspire to rise and fall like a bear’s chest and a bear.  There used to be a difference.  A difference between dicks and birds.  It was plucked out by the century.  Between my left eye and where my right one used to be.  Between a day with a few clouds and a night with many things on fire spaced at very even intervals.  Between a city and a fog that is shaped like a city.


 If I don’t make it home, at least you will know exactly what happened and just what to tell them, and you should know also that I always thought there was a difference between you and a century and I do not even care if that is true or not because it does not matter to have difference but it does to have had you.


Love, Snake

But negation is not always made of razor wire.

A long piece from me at The New Inquiry on cinema, counterfactuals, riot police whose throats remain intact, the limits of criticism and of the films critiqued, sword-forging, restoring old houses, forcing Wes Anderson to remake La Terra Trema in black-and-white with an all-Limp Bizkit soundtrack, pseudomorphism, and, above all, more compelling uses of teeth.

Good evening, everyone, and here is the latest news from Athens: Good night. (Also, watch out for floating torch lamps. We've had reports they're heading west.)

A briefest of evening news.  A very long commercial break.

(Note on the alarming autophagy of all things spectacular: the pre-broadcast video features a happy gathering of young people raising what look like flaming rocks to the dark sky.  In a time of forthcoming civil war, it appears that if you can't beat them (i.e. anarchists),  then "join" them.  By "join", that is, we mean "make sure they are smiling, well-buffed yuppies with sexy hair and that they do not touch the things - those Ikea molotovs - that are burning as they rise upwards magically to touch nothing, like banks or cars.  No, just to softly illuminate the night.  You know, just like hope.  Or something.")

Weep me deadly (Il nuovo caso Matarazzo, 3)

 1952.

A nun is crying very hard, near hiccuping, because outside where it is brighter, they are carrying her son in a coffin and she just threw flowers down on him, they fell surprisingly fast, flowers she borrowed from the feet of a stone Mary and she then apologized to Mary.  It's the end of a film.  The word that tells us so comes from the depth of the frame, glowering just before her, terminal, and growing in size.  But the closer it gets to the surface, the further it gets from having any excuse to participate in that depth, any more than the names that spelled out who spent money and picked out costumes could touch the stone quarry they obscured.  And yet the more the word swells, the more it does interfere and cast, the more it glows, making those tears flare and shine, hot as radiation.

But this is not an ending, after all.  It is merely a halfway point, three years before it is picked up again, in 1955.  Then the story opens up once more, to burn a whole lot faster and stranger this time, doubling her into a desired knockoff played by herself and impregnated by the same man, three years before Hitchcock will do so.  Building its pitch to the shriek of ending high above another courtyard where this time this nun will try to stop a women's prison riot by appealing to every mother everywhere ever.

That same year, another ending, another opening, further west, by the water.

Hot as tears.

For the record:

May 2008.

The parole board in the state of Georgia spared a convicted killer from execution hours before he was due to die by lethal injection on Thursday and commuted his sentence to life in prison.


At Thursday's hearing, his lawyers presented a dossier of evidence attesting to his remorse and good behavior in jail, according to local media reports. The lawyers also said he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from a cocaine addiction at the time of the crime.
 
This in a case in which there was no doubt about the evidence and the man in question pleaded guilt.


The man in question, for the record, was white.

Treno Popolare

for Sav

1933.

RIP


This place where we live, it gets worse and worse, and it stays exactly the same.  At the same time.  And on and on and on and on.

Awry

In a little less than 4 hours, the state of Georgia is going to inject a man with enough poison to kill him, despite already having kept him in jail for 22 years, despite being entirely unable to prove his guilt, despite recanted testimonies and allegations of police pressure on witnesses, despite appeals, despite protests.

But until protests stop being protests and start literally, materially, physically halting the normal functions of the state (for yes, this is a very normal one), we cannot be surprised in the least that things like this happen and that they will continue to happen, ad infinitum.  Saddened, yes, furious, yes.  But surprised, no.

And honestly, that blood's on our hands, if we ever think that we did all we could have done about it.

Today is a disgusting day.

[Addendum:
Good intentions aside, this is a sterling portrait of irrelevance:

Wendy Gozen Brown, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, said that Troy Davis would want the protests to remain peaceful. 

"In this type of situation, there's always the potential for it to go awry, with certain groups, angry rhetoric. But Troy Davis would want people to keep fighting peacefully, for him and for, as he would put it, all of the other Troy Davis's out there." 

This is very simple.  If it does not go awry, then nothing changes.  (Awry means "crooked or turned".  Wry means "turn."  Something that is awry has taken a turn.  Something that has not gone "awry" has continued to exist the way it was.  It has remained the same.)   And all the "other Troy Davis's out there" will precisely continue to be "Troy Davis's" in that they also will get jailed and will get executed, despite whatever flurry may or may not occur on Twitter.

To speak the word peaceful in relation to the execution of a man is unconscionable.]

Shed! (The sun considers a relatively large hole hanging in space)

Oct. 28. – Misery, dismal forebodings, and despair. Beware of all light discourse -- a joke uttered at this time would produce a popular outbreak.

Oct. 29. – Beware!

Oct. 30. – Keep dark!

Oct. 31. – Go slow!

Nov. 1. – Terrific earthquake. This is the great earthquake month. More stars fall and more worlds are slathered around carelessly and destroyed in November than in any other month of the twelve.

Nov. 2. – Spasmodic but exhilarating earthquakes, accompanied by occasional showers of rain and churches and things.

Nov. 3. – Make your will.

Nov. 4. – Sell out.

Nov. 5. – Select your "last words." Those of John Quincy Adams will do, with the addition of a syllable, thus: "This is the last of earthquakes."

Nov. 6. – Prepare to shed this mortal coil.

Nov. 7. – Shed!

Nov. 8. – The sun will rise as usual, perhaps; but if he does, he will doubtless be staggered some to find nothing but a large round hole eight thousand miles in diameter in the place where he saw this world serenely spinning the day before.

M. Twain, 1865

As if you're some criminal or something

This should be watched.

Escape From Venice (Snake's first postcard to Utopia)

Utopia,

Just arrived in Venice.

As I suspected, tourists everywhere!  But what can you do about it.  Besides, it’s not as if I’m a local.  Not like I belong here.  (Not like anyone does.)

I’ll tell you one thing: this place ain’t what it used to be.  Trash everywhere.  Gonna be tough to get an authentic Italian meal.  Although they let you row the gondolas yourself nowadays.  That’s pretty awesome.  You know I always wanted to do that.

First thing I did on arriving?  Went to La Fenice, the opera house.  (That’s where I’m writing you from.)  Remember the one from that film, where the Italian woman is fucking that Austrian soldier whose pants are always wedged way up his ass and she gives him that cash that Italians were going to use to fight the Austrian soldiers? 

No one asked me for a ticket.  Found an empty seat near the back, though it was pretty packed.  Hushed.  I don’t know what they were performing, think it was Cavalli, but it’s been a while.  The stage was lit by three torches, or not torches, just big bowls with burning oil in them. One man was on stage, a bull of a man, his voice massive, it leapt and ran, climbed like a deer, like shadows, like the fact that I wept, sentimental old coot I am.  It soared high, highest and just then, just a moment ago, when it dropped from its peak, he drew the knife that had been drawing from the aria’s start the rest of the way across his neck, the last note ending in a hiss, in an opening gurgle.  His throat whistled.  The sound of the blood is lost in the applause, but still, I know it is there.

Wish you were here.

Love,
Snake

CANTSTOPHIPHOP

Kinema Nippon Out Now

Get it while it's hot.  Free for download if you're hard up, but it's a hell of a little book.  As always, small publications by sharp people are bound to be of more interest than the lumbering footfall of the publishing industry.  More importantly, if you can, make it to the screening series, which will be remarkable...

Like us

They who go down to the sea
In shops, Zig-zagging across the
Sloping grass on their way, nerves
All a window’s arranged waves

Q & I brought the antler down off the shelf
It once had been a book that has been there too long
It hid, like us

Ploughed a dust-bowl, called it quits
like us, Traded that time for another time
Skated it.  The way the idiots

Took her off the wall, just like a chicken
And dragged her to the sink, through the dust
I thought, where they
Saw what chickens get done and
How they went on for exactly twenty words too many

Put the antler away, sold.
I heard they did not ever
Quite make it to the sea

Noise to be made

[read below and get busy with this.  via Signalfire]

Over the years long standing organizing efforts by class conscious prisoners in the Virgina state system’s two maximum security facilities (Red Onion and Wallens Ridge) have been met with systematic repression including beatings, assaults with electrical and chemical weapons, isolation in special segregation units, interdiction of communications and at least one shooting incident.

Most recently Kevin “Rashid” Johnson a founding organizer of the NABPP-PC (New African Black Panther Party-Prison Chapter) and author of the book “Defying the Tomb” has been subjected to an extremely restrictive communications regime including the suspension of all outgoing mail and deprivation of most telephone access.
This is being carried out within the context of a broader agenda on the part of the Virginia DOC to criminalize and smear prisoner organizing as “gang activity”.

According to a recent message from an outside supporter on Rashid’s current situation:
“Basically, they have stepped up their interference with his
communication  network and also their efforts to
stigmatize him as a  “gang-member.”

Under the direction of one M. Duke, a gang task-force member who wears a  T-shirt with the inscription GANG  UNIT (in very big letters), Rashid’s cell  was raided and all of
his stamps were  taken. While his cell was being  ransacked, Rashid questioned Duke, pointing out  that the latter’s insignia was  like a signal to incite violence on the part
of  the authorities. He  explained to Duke that the NABPP opposes gang behavior and  asked why he was being targeted. Duke’s only response was that he “just happened
to be there that  day.”

All Rashid’s phone connections have been blocked…
He thinks that all his outgoing mail has been blocked.
He asks that protest be made to state officials. He holds
Tony  Adams (an  “investigator”) responsible for the
cutting off of his lines of   communication.

Rashid wants “noise” to be made — to protest the
interference and also to  protest the labeling of the NABPP
as a gang.”

From Georgia to California and access the country the prison struggle is a key link in the broader class confrontation today and we need to support those organizing on the front lines under conditions of maximum repression and control.

Please call Red Onion State Prison at  (276) 796-7510 or mail a letter to ROSP, PO Box 1900, Pound, VA 24279 to politely express your concern about the ongoing political repression and forward and repost this information as widely as possible.

Flood ornament

 if you attack the world with sufficient violence, it ends up spitting its filthy lucre back at you; but never, never will it give you back joy

(Houellbecq)