Black Mesa Indigenous Support

Keep fighting.

 

Oddly, this is exactly how I remember it

Babes in Toyland:

 

What the fuck happened to Saul Williams?

Was my general response after last Sunday’s show at the Varsity. Carl Atiya Swanson’s review of the show on the City Pages blog sums up my reaction nearly perfectly (I was less impressed with Dearling Physique than the author): 

 It may have started early in the night, the first time that MC Tchaka Diallo, who was acting as host for the evening, thanked their sponsor Budweiser. The Converse sponsorship was tolerable — if you can get money to finance a tour, more power to you Afropunk — but Williams has never seemed like the kind of man who would endorse American light lager…

But before Williams and his guitar and keyboard player would come on, Diallo and KiDTRONiK would perform as Krak Attack, and at that point the show definitively went off the tracks.

Wearing a vest decorated with a ribcage and flexing his biceps, Diallo rapped about being the best, as rappers are wont to do, but then paired it with lyrics like “Al salaam-aleikum/I don’t eat bacon/I am not Jamaican.” As if that was not ludicrous enough, the hype act became downright derogatory as Diallo and KiDTRONiK pulled women up onto the stage to perform their single “Big Girl Skinny Girl.” For an audience who came to see Williams — an artist whose book of poetry S/HE was a fragile, fierce and honest exploration of the relationship between him and the mother of his daughter, who refers to the powers he sees in the universe as “goddess” and promotes art as a vessel for independence and liberation — having some stereotypically objectifying bullshit club grind open up for him was downright insulting. 

It was grotesque, for sure. And, as a friend pointed out, the fact that Williams walked on the stage during their final song — participating in it, in terms of spectacle — only reinforces the point that he could’ve made mocked it, or inverted it, or something … or made it never happen. He’s the headliner, for fuck’s sake. Dude is his DJ and co-produced the record. At some point, he could’ve been like, “You know, I’m just not really comfortable with ‘Fat Girl Skinny Girl.’ Or ’Black Girl White Girl,’ come to think of it. They’re both just awful and contradict most of what I believe and have said previously, everywhere. Fuck you, guys.”

But nope, he rolled on stage in Niggy Tardust regalia and slapped his DJ on the back. What the fuck. His set was alright — actually, a little off — but totally soured by the nonsense that came before it. 

In other news, No Bird Sing stole the night.

 

A quick note on “property crime”

So I was briefly in court the other day. I am not going to comment much on the reason for my presence, though you can get an idea here.

What an amazing thing it is to be in court, though. The system stands naked before you and gets all awkward about the shit.

The last time I was in court, a few months ago, we (me and my co-defendants) were preceded by three different cases. One was a public urination offense and the other two were trespassing charges lodged against rather sad-looking dudes who had apparently slept in an abandoned house and a trainyard, respectively.

This time, since we had acquired counsel, we weren’t really even on the agenda. We mostly hung out in the hall, reading the formal complaints we’d demanded a month ago and received directly prior to the hearing. The state offered us the same basic offer we got last time, which we refused. One of us got our charges dismissed for some reason. Hell yeah for that.

Anyways, sitting in the courtroom, here are the two other charges I heard against others on Friday:

Public indecency: A woman was arrested passed out in the passenger seat of a car with no pants on. The representative of the state asked her very serious questions about this. She was compelled to answer very seriously. The prosecutor was a young white woman and the defendant was an African-American woman in her mid-30s, I’d guess. Everyone found it awkward and distasteful and stupid. Still, that’s how the system rolls.

Trespassing: An old man — grizzled, looking pretty beat-up but mostly from the travails of street-life, I’d guess — stood in shackles in that little booth Hennepin County mandates for inmates. Turns out, he slept in a bus stop enclosure and got picked up. It was readily apparent that he probably had nowhere else to go. Still, here he was, jumpsuited, shackled, looking like someone who’d hurt someone. Fuck if I know if he ever had. He mostly looked dejected and sad. He answered questions like, “Did you know, on the evening of October xx, that it was illegal to seek shelter in a bus-stop?” And he was like, “Yes, m’aam.” And looked down.

We, me and my co-defendants, are charged with allegedly impeding — in various ways — the eviction of a 25-year resident from her house. Later, it seems, they will arrest those who sleep in the house they just emptied. Later still, they will arrest those who “seek shelter in bus-stops.”

This is madness.

 

The Revolting Queers have a blog

It’s here.

 

Re:Activism Twin Cities

Come out & play!

We’re excited about bringing it here, and think it’s a good fit for the Twin Cities, for several reasons:

1. As we approach the one-year anniversary of the RNC, it offers an interesting – and hopefully fun and empowering – way to commemorate the events of last September before they’re shunted down the collective memory hole;
2. The focus on text-messaging and, perhaps, other emerging technologies that played such a primary role during the RNC can be metaphorically invoked in the way the game is played;
3. By placing the RNC and its attendant repression within the context of historical – and ongoing – local struggles, we can create for ourselves an opportunity to draw important parallels and bring these to the front of public discourse. We’d argue that for many, if not most, RNC activists, the point has always been that state oppression is the norm, that police brutality is systemic, that the sanctioned violence experienced by activists on the streets last September was simply a microcosm of the daily violence experienced by diverse communities every single day, and so on: Re:Activism, in whatever form we collectively shape it, contains within it a way to make these connections between struggles explicit, a way for us to learn about each other and further strengthen our solidarity; and
4. It’s probably a good excuse to bike around town, make noise, and generally disrupt business-as-usual, in a particularly theatrical fashion.

So, if you’re interested in playing, keep yr eyes on this page for details over the next week.

And we still need all kinds of help getting it off the ground, so if you’re one of those organiz-y types, hit us up: reactivismtwincities@gmail.com

We want a bunch of voices, a bunch of perspectives, and anyone interested in the history of radical struggle in Minnesota to be involved!

Facebook group here. Join us!

 

Transphobic tampon shilling

Aeryn over at Every Body Is A Modified Body provides a link to this bewilderingly insulting and simply bewildering Tampax ad campaign cum “high-concept” multimedia clusterfuck. Pretend 16-year-old Zack’s “profile” sets the stage:

Basically, Zack is a normal 16-year old guy. Except for the fact that one morning he woke up a little bit more like a girl.

That is, he seems to have “misplaced” his penis and found a vagina in its stead. The site includes videos, headscratch-worthy “blog entries” from Zack about the trials and tribulations of his new and utterly body-determined gender, and more. All of this to sell tampons, apparently.

And it somehow manages to get worse, a downward spiral into disturbing cliche, thinly-veiled patriarchal anxiety, and total incoherence that Aeryn chronicles astutely. In fact, just go read his site now for more.

 

“Paintball police”

Andrew Sullivan’s interns uncover the existence of so-called “marker rounds” … in Iran.

Any interest in what happened in the streets of St. Paul roughly a year ago? No? Hmm.

Too busy identifying discrepancies in stories of Trig’s birth, I presume. (For the record, I don’t deny Trig’s existence, I just doubt its logical basis. However, I am more than willing to entertain other theories, thus exemplifying the broad-based pluralism that should underlie all rational debate in a decent society. Eh, folks? Nudge, nudge.)

 

CRASS op-ed

For the record, I’m a co-author. But I still find it worth checking out:

New RNC charges highlight vindictive prosecutorial tactics.

 

Fair is fair!

Schultz speaks the truth.