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.

 

Local resistance news round-up

The Quad-City Times has a pretty decent article on Minneapolis resident Carrie Feldman and her refusal to testify before a Davenport, Iowa grand jury. The focus on the raid itself, rather than the undemocratic nature of grand juries (to put it mildly), is sort of unfortunate, but actually not that unfair, in my opinion.

 

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.

 

Empty your bongs, everybody

This is absurd:

MINNEAPOLIS (Oct. 23) — Bong water can count as a controlled substance, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a decision that raises the threat of longer sentences for drug smokers who fail to dump the water out of their pipes.

In a 4-3 decision Thursday, the state’s highest court said a person can be prosecuted for a first-degree drug crime for 25 grams or more of bong water that tests positive for a controlled substance.

Update: In a worthwhile link provided in the comments section below, Thomas Gallagher deploys a helpful analogy:

We are all aware by now of the frequent news reports about the drugs in the rivers and most of our municipal water supplies (not concentrated enough to hurt us, we are reassured).  Type “in water supply” into your favorite internet search engine and you can read thousands of reports of scientific studies documenting this. As a result, if you have water sourced from a river, like we do in Minneapolis, then you could now be charged with a Minnesota Controlled Substance First Degree Crime (toilets tanks hold way more than 25 grams of water with illegal drugs dissolved).

 

The Revolting Queers have a blog

It’s here.

 

“The revolution will not be funded”

I’ve heard a ton about the anthology put out by INCITE (Women of Color Against Violence), but I haven’t gotten around to actually reading it. This sucks, and is something I plan to rectify.

However, the notes and background on their Web site are worth reading in and of themselves. Here’s a particularly relevant bit to those who toil, have toiled, or might consider toiling in the galleys of professional world-changers:

WHAT IS THE “NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?”

The non-profit industrial complex (or the NPIC) is a system of relationships between:

• the State (or local and federal governments)
• the owning classes
• foundations
• and non-profit/NGO social service & social justice organizations

that results in the surveillance, control, derailment, and everyday management of political movements. The state uses non-profits to:

• Monitor and control social justice movements;

• Divert public monies into private hands through foundations;

• Manage and control dissent in order to make the world safe for capitalism;

• Redirect activist energies into career-based modes of organizing instead of mass-based organizing capable of actually transforming society;

• Allow corporations to mask their exploitative and colonial work practices through “philanthropic” work;

• Encourage social movements to model themselves after capitalist structures rather than to challenge them

This is consistent with my experience. I wonder what others think.

 

Will Potter on Iowa grand jury resistance

Supportive and worth a read:

As you can see in Feldman’s grand jury subpoena, the government provides few details about what is actually being investigated. That’s no accident: grand juries, by design, are secretive and conducted outside of public scrutiny in a legal void where basic Fifth and First Amendment rights do not apply. [Here is a handy booklet on grand juries with much more information.] If activists refuse to participate in the political witch-hunt, they can face serious jail time. Jordan Halliday has done exactly that with a Utah Grand Jury, and he is facing federal criminal contempt charges.

This is an Orwellian, Kafka-esque, insert-relevant-paranoid-literary-figure-here arrangement that needs to be done away with in its entirety. Cheers to Carrie and all others who resist.

 

In other news …

Blackalicious feat. Saul Williams:

 

I dislike Beyonce

There, I said it.

There are apparently a lot of reasons to like her, if record sales and literally mind-numbing radio play are to be believed (not to mention the inexplicable, almost familial affection of some of my friends).

But there are several reasons not to. Clutch Magazine listed fifteen. But they fell short. Here are mine.