Back in New York. For now. The Realizing the Impossible Tour was super fun. Every night we stopped in a different town and played at the local infoshop/radicalbookstore/free school/community space– in places like Portland, Montpelier, and Wilamantic Connecticut. We swam in the ocean, muddy rivers, creeks, and a deep, icy cold river gorge with a covered bridge. We ate tahini/kale sandwiches. 13 shows in row without a day off was a lot, and I’m glad to be home.
Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority Book Tour & Multi-media Event!
Just published on AK Press, Art Against Authority (edited by Josh MacPhee & Erik Reuland) is 300 plus page collection of writing and images investigating the instersections of art and anarchism.
The authors will discuss the book and present documentation of creative art actions from around the world.
Dark Dark Dark will play their music to melt your longing heart.
Dara Greenwald will make you laugh and cry with her revolving and evolving collection of short videos.
Who we are:
Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator and activist whose work often revolves around themes of radical politics, privatization and public space. His first book was Stencil Pirates: A Global Survey of the Street Stencil (Soft Skull Press, 2004). He also organizes the Celebrate People’s History Poster Series and is part of Justseeds Visual Resistance Radical Art Cooperative.
Erik Reuland (AKA Erik Ruin) is a Minneapolis-based, Michigan-raised puppeteer, printmaker, and erratic editor of Trouble In Mind, a zine about the intersection of art, everyday life, and radical politics. He works/has worked with several art collectives, including UpsidedownCulture, Street Art Workers, Prison Poster Project, Barebones Productions, and Justseeds.
Dark Dark Dark is a group of musicians informed by the mountains, plains, seas, and cities in a tradition of exiled wanderers. City Pages of Minneapolis calls it “a gently spooky American folk with eastern European exoticism.”
Dara Greenwald makes short videos that capture the interesting and strange sides of life, subculture, and the bizarre inner workings of her brain. New site coming soon.
Tour Schedule:
|
Date |
City |
Venue |
Address |
Start Time |
|
5/26 |
Albany |
Ironweed/Free School |
8 Elm Street, Albany, NY
|
8 pm
|
|
5/27 |
Boston |
Lucy Parsons |
549 Columbus Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts |
3pm |
|
5/28 |
Portland |
People’s Free Space |
144 Cumberland Ave. Portland, Maine
|
7 pm |
|
5/29 |
Montpelier |
Black Sheep |
Langdon Street Café 4 Langdon St. Montpelier, VT
|
7 pm |
|
5/30 |
Amherst |
Food For Thought |
106 N.Pleasant Street Amherst, MA
|
7 pm |
|
5/31 |
Providence |
Building 16 |
39 Manton Ave. Olneyville
|
8:30 pm |
|
6/1 |
Brooklyn |
AdHoc Arts |
49 Bogart Street, Buzzer 22, Unit 1G, Brooklyn |
6:30 pm |
|
6/2 |
New York (music only show) |
ABC No Rio wi/ Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship?
|
156 Rivington Street, NY, NY |
3pm |
|
6/3 |
DC |
Brian Mackenzie Infoshop |
1426 9th St. NW (btw O & P St) Washington, DC |
6 pm |
|
6/4 |
Baltimore |
Red Emmas |
800 St. Paul St. Baltimore, MD 21202; (410) 230-0450 |
Call for time |
|
6/5 |
Philly |
Temple Gallery |
259 N. Third St., Old City |
7 pm |
|
6/6 |
Connecticut |
Wrench in The Works |
861 Main Street Willimantic, CT |
7 pm |
In the winter of 1997 i was living on Avenue A and 5th Street. I was just finishing college and pretty clueless about…well…most things. But for the purposes of this post, let’s be more specific and say that I was pretty clueless about the squats and the anarchist scene on the Lower East Side. At that point, the only experience I had resembling an interaction with that scene was walking into Blackout Books and getting vibed…hard.
One morning, just after my 23rd birthday, I was walking down Avenue A and saw a whole bunch of police barricades set up on 5th Street between A and B. I asked someone on the street what was going on and they said that the city was about to demolish a building on the street. There had been a small fire in the squat in the middle of the block, and the city was using this opportunity to rid the neighborhood of the building and its residents.
I ran home and grabbed my super8 camera and walked down towards the barricades. I started shooting. I only had one cartridge– about 2.5 minutes. While I was standing on the street, I ran into an acquaintance who lived opposite 5th Street Squat. She let me come up into her apartment and shoot from the fire escape.
The city demolished 5th Street Squat that afternoon, in defiance of a court-issued injunction. The residents’ clothing, belongings, identifications, and even pets were inside. As was Brad Will. Story has it that it was a space heater in Brad’s room that may have caused the fire. Maybe this is had to do with why he would pull something as crazy as defending the building while a wrecking crane was smashing it to pieces. But I imagine, had he not been responsible for the fire, he would have defended the building in the same exact way.
Three weeks ago, while doing video journalism for Indymedia, Brad was shot and killed by plainclothes police (paramilitary) in Oaxaca and a community of people in and beyond New York City are filled with grief and rage. There is a lot of organizing being done in the wake of Brad’s death to show solidarity with the popular movement in Oaxaca. I think he would be proud of his friends.
Over the last ten years, as my own late-blooming activism began to take shape and direction our paths crossed more often and I got a chance to know Brad a little– though not well enough. This footage I shot of him back in 1997 was my first and clearest memory of him– and also a visual representation of one of the most politicizing moments of that part of my life. It’s sad to be digging it out under such shitty circumstances, but important to share.
For more on the situation in Oaxaca, check here.
For the Shadow’s article on 5th Street Squat check here.
well. it’s not that late. but this working full-time stuff, it sure makes 1am feel late. my friend asked me tonight what the hell i was making a blog for. i didn’t have the answer. other than that i wanted to figure this shit out– because i obsess over figuring these kinds of things out. but the main reason, and the reason why no one will ever see this– is because i need a more dynamic journal. i handwrite things so infrequently that my already illegible penmanship has become totally indecipherable even to me. i have a text document that’s been running now for years– it has music, voice, images, writing…all kinds of things. but it’s clunky. and ugly. and i can’t get to it when i’m travelling because it exists on a harddrive. so, i thought i’d give this a crack.
anyway, the thing that concerns me most is the ability to embed files. so many of the projects that i’m working on or have worked on are in some digital format that i’d like to store here.
this past summer, before i started the full time job, my friend sumitra and i came up with the idea to create a media history timeline. it was based on project south’s curriculum. the top is above-ground media history– including technological developments, regulatory precedents, well-known milestones, and notable trends. on the bottom is a more ‘underground’ or resistant media history. the dichotomy is somewhat arbitrary and admittedly simplistic. but, i thought it would be interesting to create some sort of graphic representation to illustrate some developments in the world of media, both parallel and divergent– and, more importantly, to create something that media activists, media makers, and educators can use as a tool to teach and learn about the legacy of independent media and also to help us situate ourselves in a trajectory…a history that came before us and a future that we will continue to shape. goodnight and good luck.
Flash Video: 
