Vigils and Protests

Hate crimes against trans* people now outnumber hate crimes against LGB people. Because of the increasing globalisation of our struggle, it's appropriate and important to hold vigils for those killed, whether they were local or half a world away. Let's be clear, these vigils are protests

Some issues arise. If vigils were not protests, it would be right and appropriate that the family have complete control of the speakers and what happens. This is the case at all funerals and memorial services. However, hate crimes are not isolated incidents. A hate crime is an act meant to target and terrorise an entire community. A vigil is a more public event that must therefore address the larger context in which the person was killed. These events therefore, should have input from the family, but also belong to the community effected.

Anyone can plan a protest or a vigil in regards to hate crimes. Alas, there are many opportunities. Yesterday, I went to a protest/vigil outside the Jamaican High Commission in London in response to the murder of Dwayne Jones. The planners of this event see hate crimes as a global problem and plan many such protests. This is unquestionably a good thing to do. They are fantastic. I'm glad they exist and they take these things on.

However, groups working to call for justice do need to have a bit of training, as was illustrated recently in New York. This is some of what you need to know:

If the person killed was trans, it's appropriate to have signs and chants that mention homophobia, but you must prominently mention transphobia. These two things are linked, but if somebody was murdered for being trans, it's confusing and incorrect to make signs that they were murdered for being gay. 'Trans' is not a type of 'gay'. Certainly homophobia is also a problem in places where trans people are murdered, but the issue at hand is transphobia. Again, its ok to link these things. A vigil for a victim of a hate crime is always about the larger climate, but it's important not to accidentally erase what happened to the individual in question.

Use the correct pronouns. If the pronouns are unclear, go for 'they' or something gender neutral. Do not assume that somebody's birth assignment is the correct way to refer to them.

If you have a trans group in your area, reach out to them or their leaders as soon as you decide to start planning and invite them to the meetings.

At least one of the speakers you have must be trans. If you are in the UK, the Camden LGBT forum may be able to help you find somebody, or the Peter Tatchell Foundation may also be able to help. Also, some of the trans people involved in the planning may be able to speak or know somebody who can.

If the person is a member of a racial or ethnic minority, this should be reflected in who speaks. If they were located overseas, a person from that country or their diaspora should speak.

Remember to invite trans people and trans groups to the protest. If you're in the UK, send a message to Protest Transphobia.

Reach out to potential allies. If you were planning to protest against hate crimes in Greece, you could reach out to other groups recently targeted there, such as migrants and sex workers. Or a protest about Russia could also include drug addicts, as they also suffer brutal repression under Putin.

What if you can't do all of these things? Don't worry. As long as you use the right pronouns and mention transphobia, you're ok. If you've made mistakes about this in the past, don't worry about them. Now you know.

Edit to add: solidarity

The important key here is solidarity. LGBT-phobia is a problem not unique to any religion or culture. Speakers at the event must not place blame on a either. They can call for social change a change in government policy, but they should not compare any other country negatively to their own. For those based in the UK, remember that homophobia and transphobia in most commonwealth countries came from the colonial law imposed by Britain. If you are in the US, full equality is still lagging. If you're in Australia, you've got major issues with asylum seekers. Etc. There is no country I know of that's completely safe from hate crimes, so focus on what you want to see change, not on how anybody else should be more like privileged countries or classes. If you are feeling at all smug about your country, just don't get up to speak. We're there in solidarity, not judgement.

You cannot shop your way to a better world

Shopping is not activism.

Let me state that again: a targeted, organised, specific boycott, like the United Farm Workers No Grapes boycott of the 1980's is activism. Because it has specific goals and is part of a larger protest movement. But buying only locally produced, organic produce from your local co-op is not activism. Because shopping is not activism.

Now, it could be very good for you and beneficial for your community to buy organic produce from your co-op, but that doesn't make it activism. Similarly, you can use voting as a way of mitigating negative political change in your area, but voting isn't activism either.

There are images going around facebook that suggest the "real" way to occupy Wall Street is by shopping at the right stores. I want to pick apart some of the problems with that.

Many of Walmart's shoppers are poor. they shop there because they can afford the produce there. It might not be great produce or an altruistic retailer, but they're eating better than they would be if they shopped someplace else. While it's true that their communities would be better off if there were more independent retailers, in the mean times, you're asking them to sacrifice feeding fresh fruits and vegetables to their kids. This is not reasonable. Also, by implication, the people who shop at Walmart become responsible of the bad effects of that retailer, when, in fact, they tend to suffer more keenly from those same effects.

Let's say you go to an independent shop to buy clothes. Good for you. What are you going to buy? You decide to avoid the cardigan made by sweatshop labour. Good for you. You decide to avoid the one made with polluting synthetic yarn. You decide to get one made from only ethically treated animals. And decide to mitigate pollution by only going for organically fed animals. So you buy a llama hair cardigan made by a local hippie who grew his own llamas locally, feeding them only locally grown organic feed. You have successfully avoided Wall Street, kept your carbon footprint low, bought a sustainable cardigan that will last for several years and keep you warm even when you get soaked by the rain. Good for you! That cardigan probably cost $200, every penny of which stayed local and was invested back into your community. This was a good choice of how to spend your disposable income.

However, buying your hypothetical cardigan was not activism. First of all, although it was a wise investment in your own clothes and the community, this was really not affordable to most people. Walmart shoppers cannot afford to buy your clothes. Buying that cardigan is certainly an ethical act, but it's not an accessible act. If you want to protest income inequality and economic injustice, this protest could not possibly come in the form of expensive personal purchases.

It's disappointing that voting and shopping are not actually enough to change the world in a meaningful, positive way. These things are, quite literally, the least we should do. And we should do them. Those of us who can vote should take that responsibility seriously and if you have enough money to be ethical with your purchases, then certainly do it, but don't make these things out to be bigger than they are. If you want to occupy Wall Street, then you're going to have to vote with your body, not with your money and not with a check mark in a box, but by physically participating.

Our consumer culture of predatory capitalism has gotten seriously out of control and fixing it requires people of different social classes working together. If your activism is not accessible to the poor, it's not in common cause with them. Anybody can stand in a mass demonstration. And we need to stand together.

I know we've been told our whole lives that consuming stuff is voting with our money, that we have choices that empower us through buying stuff and that we can build our identity (including our moral sense of self) by what we buy, but all of these ideas came from advertisers who want to sell us stuff. It's been drummed into our heads since birth, but it's not true. It's propaganda to keep us buying stuff and docile. The purpose is to prevent protest, not empower an easy for of it.

Activism is a group activity. If it's done at the mall, it comes with a risk of being escorted out by security. It is visible. It is disruptive. It is what we need.

Occupying Oakland

I was on the West Coast of the US for a few days recently. On my last day there, I spent some time at Occupy Oakland, one of the occupation protests to spin off from Occupy Wall Street. The Oakland protest was an encampment in front of City Hall. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon to find a bunch of tents set up and people milling about. There were signs posted, renaming the plaza to "Oscar Grant Plaza." Oscar Grant was, of course, the man shot by BART police a year or two ago. Other signs invited the 99% to "hella" occupy Oakland. Another large banner was against corporate oligarchy

Some of the people were working on stuff, so I asked a guy there if I could help. He sent me to the food tent, where there was another guy dishing up soup to passers by. I helped him out for a while and then he went off, leaving me in the tent.

Several people came up for soup, bread, grapes os something to drink. The soup was made in a large pot which was over a camp stove that was keeping it warm. It seemed like about half the people who came asking for food where people who had come specifically for the protest and the other half were people who might have been hungry anyway. I worked a shift in a soup kitchen once many years ago and this was not like that. In the soup kitchen, you have a stark dividing line between who is feeding and who is being fed. Some people bring food and others eat it. In this case, there were people coming constantly with donations, but everybody was eating together.

As long as people just wanted soup, I was fine and I could tell them where to put material donations, but anything more than that and I had no idea. I was alone in the tent for a while, unable to answer questions. Finally the women who knew stuff came back and told me to take a break.

I wandered through the tents to where I could hear music. There were native Americans playing a large drum and singing. A reporter from the local TV news recorded herself talking with them in the background. A circle of lesbians were sitting nearby with a MacBook, planning something. A woman from Revolution Books sold me a newspaper about how Bob Avakian is the second coming of Mao. I sat in the sun until the shade progressed over the entire plaza and then I moved towards more music.

I found a guy with an American flag T-shirt and a rockabilly haircut playing a guitar and singing something about a "rich man" through a PA system, when there seemed to be the sound of drumming getting gradually closer. There was a samba band marching up the street, to the occupation. As they arrived, the guitar player wrapped up his set and the drums played for at least an hour. They had a dance troop with them. Both the drummers and the dancers were amazing. After a long routine, they said they'd brought extra instruments and everybody should join them by playing or dancing. Many people did.

Meanwhile, the kitchen crew had gotten a BBQ going and were cooking something that might have been pork. A woman came by with a bag of apples and handed them out to all and sundry, so some people stood eating ribs or apples, watching people dance. This was Oakland, so the dancers were all races, all ages. Some of them were middle class, some were poor. Some were white, some were black, some were asian. There were LGB people, trans people, straight people, cis people, in what felt like a giant festival. A middle schooler lept into the middle of the dancers and started break dancing to wild cheering. Then a pair of guys in maybe their mid 20s started doing a sort of martial arts dance while the samba dancers danced in a circle around them. One of the martial arts guys was hopping up and down on his hands while the other one did some move I could never hope to replicate.

The joy, the diversity, the food, the music, the use of the word "hella" - it was pure Oakland. It's why I love the East Bay. It's why that protest gave me hope. With the wide swath of people participating, with the toilets donated by the unions (and by a local BBQ joint), it felt like real coalitions are happening. And while the demands of the protest aren't entirely clear, they're building something that seems like a movement. Real change might come out of this and it is change we desperately need.

Who's Streets?

I found a call for recordings for a politically themed musical thing, which always makes me happy because this sort of thing motivates me a lot. It's got an item for consideration, "How do we view the fact that our instruments for organising sounds are linked to instruments designed to control? Is there a relationship between organising and controlling?" (the whole thing is at http://www.sonoscop.net/pop-up/convzepp09ENG.html)

So I was thinking I could use some recordings I made of people chanting at the G20 protests in London and then juxtapose that with recordings of military chants that I could steal from YouTube.

And I am astounded, perplexed and unnerved that pretty much, crowds watching troop drills sound exactly like crowds at protests with chanting. I would not be able to listen to a recording and know if I'm watching an implicitly normative crowd cheering for marching at a football game or a bunch of leftists out to reclaim the streets. (I mean, the words are different, but playing recordings for a non-english speaking audience looses that signifier.)

This is kind of worrying because it suggests that there's not so much difference between how these positions are articulated or perhaps even between the positions themselves as they manifest in a public space.

Which manifestations are empowering and which are alarming would only seem to have to do with whether your own advantage is the one being promoted. Of course, I think there's more to it than that. Are we supporting the rights of people who already have power or people who do not? But this suggests that both positions might fill the same needs for observers and participants. And somehow that's disturbing me. Maybe people are more empowered by being reactionary. How can we reach out to them in that case?

Speaking of protests, there's one today about biofuels and I don't know whether or not I want to go. Burning acres of rainforest to grow soybeans for fuel has a worse carbon footprint than burning a whole lot of petrol. Is there a role for non-waste oil biodiesel in a green, sustainable model for fuel? I don't know. I really believed in biodiesel.

Hexing

I went to a hexing this afternoon. In the past few months, I've made it a point to say yes when somebody asks me to do something that I wouldn't normally do. So when an old friend forwarded me an email about a hexing ritual, open to "both women and men," once I found out the targets were hate crime committing rapists, I said ok.

We went to Ceasar Chavez park in Berkeley, which is also an off-leash dog area, so I'd been there loads of times before. We were in a stone circle, built to be a solar calendar, with the waters of the San Francisco Bay on three sides of us. Nearby, there were a million happy dogs, kids flying kites, a guy with a remote controlled glider. The grass was green from the recent rains and there was a cool breeze blowing from the West. It was all rather lovely.

As it happened, I was the only guy to go. All but around two of the women were Baby Boomers. Most of us were white, also. I went to Mills - a woman's college, so I'd dabbled in wiccan stuff and been to a few rituals, but didn't go on to do it after that. So I'd been to do pagan stuff a few times before and had mostly found it empowering, but not enough to overcome my atheism.

Despite this atheism, I was raised in a superstitious household and come from a superstitious country, so I couldn't help but think that going to a hexing might be marinating myself in some bad energy. What goes around, comes around. If I wish ill on others, it's going to come back to me, I guess I believe. I wonder if this sort of thinking is to keep women from being angry or from stewing in it. In any case, I was taking the negative energy seriously, as were the women there.

However, once things were under way, my mood changed from trepidation. The organizer had a bunch of 8.5x11 sized printouts of the Virgin of Guadalupe. She had cut eye holes in them to sort of function as masks and she passed them around with string. So I tied a sheet of paper with a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary to my head. And they set up some banners of her also.

I spend all day yesterday with a member of the Catholic clergy, so the sacrilege was actually getting to me, as much as feel goofy wearing such an odd non-mask. But also, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a symbol which belongs to the Hispanic populations of California, of which, as far as I was aware, nobody was present. My biggest negative issue with wiccans is not that it violates my unbelief, but that it appropriates the beliefs of others. And borrowing this symbol is cultural appropriation. So I felt kind of goofy and awkward and the only guy there and guilty for violating a heritage that both belongs to my people and belongs to others.

We formed a circle and she set up two very small cauldrons. We started by smudging everybody with incense. The woman who did the smudging sang a song while she did it. I didn't know what to think when she singingly called me her sister. I don't think she did it in response to me not passing, but because I did pass. Because if a guy was going to come into this space, he could deal with being left out of the language like women have to deal with it too, more often and in more places. Or maybe as she sang that I belonged, she sang the opposite also.

After we were all smudged, we hummed and then the leader invoked the four "grandmothers" of the four cardinal directions. Some coals were put into the cauldrons. She put frankincense on one of them. She had some yarn which represented the four rapist gay bashers who we were hexing. And their younger brother who knew about their crimes and was going to rat them out. I think she had a psychic vision of the brother. She cut the yarns and put them into the empty cauldron. And then she put in extremely foul incense. And we chanted about how they were bad people who were going to get caught and have bad things happen to them, while holding out our arms towards it.

Some of the dog walkers stopped to watch this, but only for a few moments. And also, one of the women had a movie camera with which she was documenting us. It's Berkeley, so I don't know if people thought we were making a fictional film or if a bunch of middle aged women dancing in a circle around the BVM, hexing rapists in the dog park is just entirely unremarkable.

The yarn she used was bright red. I don't know what it was made of, but it was clearly treated with some sort of flame-retardant chemical and wasn't burning as quickly as expected. So this required dumping on additional incense and some flammable stuff while we clapped and walked in circles around the altar thing.

At the end, when it finally, burned, we were to go around the circle and give blessings. Because calling for justice is positive. So even though it was a hexing, it was a positive thing to do. Thus neatly sidestepping the problems of calling up negative energy or other unseemliness. The first women to give a blessing was the smudger and she went on at length about womyn, and the womyn of the circle, etc. The next was my friend, who made a point of saying "people." Then it was my turn, so I said "queers." We all said something and afterwards, people said "blessed be" and then, thank goodness, it was time to remove the Virgin Mary from my head.

My friend and I took off right about then, without helping to tear down, as my friend could tell I wanted to escape. She said, "I swear they said 'all genders.'" I wondered if I felt more uncomfortable about being in a women's space or wearing such a goofy mask.

I think the most striking thing about the whole proceedings was that it was not symbolic for the women involved. It was not a protest. It was taking action. They believe that they've done something concrete in response to a terrible hate crime.

When I got home, I washed my face and hands, to get the smell of incense off of me, but it also felt like a kind of ritual, getting the previous ritual off of me. And it felt concrete too.

Fortunately, there is more concrete action that can be taken. There's a fund set up to help the victim. Unfortunately, this kind of hate crime is way more common here than you might guess. What's unusual is how much attention this one is getting. Gay and lesbian people are especially politicized since the election. Hopefully this energy continues. And as people take away our rights and and say we're like deforestation and literally assault us, hopefully, our protests and our actions create change, so hate crimes become uncommon, our rights are restored and people are ashamed that homophobia was once so apparent.

Berkeley Politics

My home town, the city of Berkeley, California is in the public eye for objecting to a US Marine Corps recruiting station downtown, near both the university and the high school. The right wing blogosphere went kind of nuts at this and you can read more about it here, at the Berkeley Daily Planet.

I went today to see the protests. The anti-war group, Code Pink was set up in front of the City Hall. They had camped over night. This is a women's group and most, but not all, of the women seemed to be retirement age. There were also a lot of very energetic young people running around, most ly on the other side of the street.

Also across the street were a bunch of right wing pro-war types. Even in Berkeley, alas. They had a very loud sound system set up playing Sousa marches and country songs. While I was mingling with the Code Pink types, somebody I knew from Mills came up to me. She said that when the pro-war folks showed up at 5AM, they started chanting "Burn! Burn! Burn!" at Code Pink. "They just seemed very angry." She said.

Parked behind all the action were a bunch of news vans. Whenever the police started herding people around, something they were fairly aggressive about, the news cameras sprung into action.

I didn't stay at the demo long. I was enlisted to help distribute water to the Berkeley High students. Many of them had cut class to go protest. I heard one girl telling her friends that her "mommy" had given her permission to skip school and protest. The kids involved seemed to be very diverse - girls and boys, many races, many teen sub groups. Skaters, goths, and jocks were all out there, all having a good time.

I quit distributing water when the kids started throwing it on each other. I'm not going to carry several liters of water around on my shoulder so they can play with it. As I got on my bike to leave, I went very near one of the news vans. Inside, I heard the anchor ranting about how this sort of thing has been going on for 40 years. The unbiased media was full of scorn for the peace movement. Isn't it tired to spend the last 40 years advocating for social justice and non-violent conflict resolution?

Even if some individuals have been advocating the same thing in the same way for almost half a century, that doesn't make their cause less right.

Back from France

I'm back and I want to share all. I wasn't sure where to start, especially since the trip ended much as it began: biking across Paris, towing a dog, trying to make a train connection. The second trip was a bit more hectic than the first because it involved a much farther away train station, a shorter time and a case of wine. Some Parisian yelled «Bravo!» as I struggled uphill across and intersection, trying to pick up speed to make the train on time. We had an hour and 5 minutes, two foldy bikes, a foldy trailer, dirty clothes, camping gear and the aforementioned dog and case of wine. And a medieval-style bugle that I bought in Orléans. 20 minutes to unfold everything. 20 minutes to bike from Montparnasse to Gare du Nord, 20 minutes to refold. I highly recommend sprinting across Paris with so many things, especially down the hill from the Sorbonne to the Seine.

We arrived in Paris the day of the election. The streets were crawling with Gendarmes, prepared for possible unrest following the results.

First stop, was the bakery near where my apartment used to be. God, they make the best bread in the world. First thing off my bike and I step in dog shit. Yay Paris. Some older French ladies approached me and spoke to me about my dog trailer. Maybe it was the nice weather. Maybe it was the expectant air around the election, but probably it was the dog. I almost never had conversations like that when I lived there.

The streets were full of flics and first-time roller bladers. At every corner, there were grim-looking cops in riot gear and young people on wheels desperately clinging to phone poles. Xena was trying desperately to escape her trailer as we slowly crossed the city. Nicole rode behind me, repeating "good dog!" over and over again. She said the scowling gendarmes broke into amused smiles as they spotted the dog.

We arrived in Orléans later that evening and went to the tourist office, which was closed. They also had cops everywhere. I tried to call the campground listed in the guidebook, but they didn't answer their phone. Rather than ride the 5km to the campground with the risk of having to ride another 5 km back, we went to the Ibiss, a 2 star hotel chain in Europe, roughly equivalent to the Motel 6 in the US.

And everywhere I went that day, I head over and over «C'est un chien!» It's a dog! but I felt very proud of myself when a kid added, «C'est genial!» That's brilliant! indeed. My goal was to take my dog with me and avoid the hassle of trying to find a sitter, but I don't mind amusing the French also.

Over dinner, I learned that Sarko had won. I hate that guy. He said several months ago that the (poor, immigrant) suburbs should be cleaned out with a pressure hose, a comment that contributed greatly to the riots that followed shortly thereafter, leaving many cars burned. His parents were immigrants! He's like the Ward Connerly or Clarence Thomas of France. In the time leading to the run off, he actively courted supporters of Le Pen, the ultra-right nationalist who adores Joan of Arc. Not because she was an awesome cross dresser who could place a cannon, but because she drove France's foreign enemies out of France - you know, like um, immigrants. Because immigrants are totally against the country they want to live in (yeah, I hate France and want to destroy it). And Joan of Arc was not accompanied by a huge bunch of Scots who were also foreign and there to help her.

As I was walking back to the hotel, I heard whistling and shouts. A huge crowd of youths came up behind me on the Rue de Jeanne d'Arc. They had a bedsheet banner that had an anti-sarko slogan on it. Other folks were joining them as they marched. The joiners had their cell phones in hand and busily SMSed and called their friends to let them know to join in. (I heard one guy saying something about "le podcast.")

as they marched down the largest street in town, towards the cathedral, under the huge patriotic banners and flags the town hung for it's yearly festival, the older, whiter, richer Orléanaise leaned out their apartment windows and looked worriedly on the crowd below. In the expensive apartment, old white folks worried. In the street, a young, diverse crowd marched, whistled and gave speeches.

WhenI heard Sarko won, I was disappointed, but not surprised. The poll numbers were in favor of him. He was running against a woman. Her "yay I won" speech after the first round was wooden and boring in a manner unsurpassed by even John Kerry or Al Gore (although maybe Bob Dole could give her a run). But still, I hoped somehow she would win and I was angry that she hadn't. But then, I saw these other angry kids and marched with them for a while. They were unhappy, but engaged. Their actions demonstrated hope. They weren't in the street just because they were angry. They were in the street in their smallish town because they knew it mattered. Their participation in this semi-spontaneous march meant something, not just to them and the worried old folks, but to their whole nation.

I felt tears in my eyes. How can such a great country be so stupid? I went back to the hotel to sleep.

Xtain Pacifists

So right before fall break, I happened upon a very small peace vigil in "downtown" Middletown. It was a few old guys with peace signs standing in front of the episcopal church. So I stood with them for a while, holding a sign with a pro-peace message on it and decided to come back the next monday after fall break. Being active is important. Maybe more so in tiny towns than in big cities where everyone expects you to be.

today I came back and it was raining, not hard but apparently enough to make the ink run on their signs, so they were standing in the church door, instead of down on the sidewalk. They were all fired up about the march on Washington, which they had gone to, but I did not. I stuck my bike in the vestibule and went to stand with them. Only one guy was holding a sign and it said "Jesus is the Prince of Peace." I picked up some sign about the administration lying and we stood in the church door while they stood around and dissed the Green party. The Greens in CT are apparently less together than they are in CA and are apparently looking to get some of the peace crowd to join the party. These guys were tired of the Greens trying to convert them, especially since they're so inneffective (because they have so few members) blah blah blah. Uh, yeah. I'm a Green. they've been tremendously successful in Germany. then the subject switched to SUVs. A woman there was talking about how tiny women drive SUVs. tiny women! They have no buisiness driving that kind of car! they get in accidents!

I switched the subject to SUVs as a symptom of class warfare, lest I start defending the right of tiny women to drive any car they damn well please. and it went around for a while until the Quaker woman standing next to me said that she was uncomfortable with the Jesus sign. I pointed out that it was impossible to tell whether the guy holding it was a pacifist or a bible thumper. He got adamant about how this was a religious peace group and he was not taking Jesus out of it. It was bad enough that they had to quit carrying the pro-Palestine signs because the local Rabbi had complained. and then the subject wended around to Jews.

It's a small town. folks in a small town might not know the difference between Zionists and Jewish people as a group. The problem with Jews . . .. Oh but that one guy that spoke at the march was Jewish . . . blah blah blah. yikes. So I ran away.

As I was retrieving my bike, they seem to have come back to their religious (Christian) identity. "We're a religious group!" the guy with the Jesus sign was saying. Quakers. Catholics. etc. "Actually, I'm an atheist." I said as I snapped on my helmet. yes really. maybe, indeed I would turn to God on my deathbed, who can know the future?

they want me to come back next week, maybe so they can convert me back to being catholic, or maybe so I can convert them all to being Green.

I reported all of this to Aaron, my housemate, and he said, "wow. Greens. Women. Athesists. you're lucky they didn't start talking about gay people."

indeed. I need a new peace group.

Day of Homeland Resistance

so after staying up too late last night wasting my time and money and hours of my life, which I will never have back by watching something on a par with Bulletproof Monk, I got up early this morning to go to a protest outside of San Francisco City Hall. I showed up 15 minutes late and there was no one there. the date on my watch is mis-set, so I became convinced I had the wrong day. I started to leave when someone approached me and asked me where the protest was. so we went looking for it and found some other members of the band. We played one song and the sherrifs said that we had to stop since the protest did not have a permit to be near city hall yet. So we marched and played over to where the rest of the protesters were (by the bart station) and then listened to some stock speeches covering all leftist issues in one breath. We need jstice, housing, healthcare, peace equality, and end to evil and more good. Yes.

then we marched back to city hall, but the band did not play, because the protesters wanted to chant. then we listened to more speaches for good and against evil. then we did not play because the protesters wanted to chant. Then everyone was assembling into a freedom for Palestine march to the Isreal consulate. It was a funeral procession. so we figured out some funeral songs to play. But the protesters started chanting again and I decided that I didn't want to carry a tuba over to a consulate and not play it. And i don't know as much as I should about the Isreal/Palestine conflict as I should anyway. I bought a Chomsky book on it, but haven't read it yet. so I took bart over to Christi's office

I have recordings of all the speeches and one of the two songs that we played. I also have recordings of comments people made to me about the tuba on bart. the best/wort one, "wow, that's kind of sexual." thank you. goodbye.

Sousaphone Protesting

I meant to post first about Tennis Roberts and then talk about the protest that I went to today, but I ended up digressing so much into tuning that I feared Tiffany would just stop reading the post, since she has no patience for rambling about tuning. So I've broken it into two posts.

Christi's uncle came over today to pick up our old imac. Late last night, I reofrmatted the purple imac's hard drive and put OS9 on it and a few applications. It's really much happier as an os9 machine. It runs fast and has a ton of hard drive space. But there's something very sad about about reformatting a computer and not restoring it. It's soul is gone. even if azll your data is moved over and you finally figured out how to move your bookmarks, it's still... No two computers are exactly the same. They all have bit rot. But they all have it in different ways. I should light a candle or something for the repose of the soul of the purple imac.

Um, anyway, Christi's uncle came over and we chatted for a while and then got lunch and then Christi started showing him how to use word. Christi's uncle, Forrest, works in a dump. He drives the forklift around. Maybe he runs the whole place. Apparently he sees imacs at the dump all the time, but he didn't know what they were until now. He just fished a plasma cutter out and now has a very nice welding rig. He says that he's seen every item in our house at the dump. He didn't know people were like that. What are they thinking about, throwing away their imacs?? Anyway, Christi asked him to fish them out. We could do some cool super-array of imacs runnign supercollider or something. It would be awesome.

So I left them to go play at the Okalnd docks protest. Last month, protesters formed a picket line across the entrance to the docks for APL, a military contracter that ships war materials around. The Oakland police shot at the protesters with "non-leathal" weapons and ended up also hitting some longshoremen and others. This was roundly condemned. I was in Seattle for the first one and missed it (which is ok, since I don't really want to be shot at). But the BLO was playing this time, so I lugged my sousaphone on to BART. My poor horn is covered with duct tape, which is sealing off several leaks. Many people felt obligated to make duct tape jokes about it. Yes, it is ready for biochemical attack. I just used the tape cuz I like John Ridge. Anyway.

A large croud of people was assembled outside of the West Oakland Bart at 5:00. At the same time, a group of people was protesting outside of the APL building in Seattle. Cool cross-costal actavism. People were handing out flyers and maps and stuff. Other folks were addressing the croud about non-violence and strategy and various important annoucements, whcih I ignored in favor of adding duct tape to the horn. You can't have too much duct tape.

some body gave a me a free newspaper that had in the mast head linked female signs with fists in them an a hammer and sickle. I was very excited to get the radical, communist, anarchist lesbian newspaper, but I can't find the queer content in it. Anyway, One of the organizers, named Gopal, decided that the band should lead off the march to the docks. I was darn hot and it's a long way to the end of the docks. I had to stop and pant several time during songs, none of which I had ever played before. The sax player who was being drum major would give me a quick run-down of the notes in the bass line, which I would promptly forget. But I was getting the hang of it the more we marched. and it was very nice to get a break at the last dock. I laid on the ground next to my horn and was then surrounded by press taking my picture. I guess exhausted sousaphone pkayers are picture-esque. Also, the horn is quite a bit bigger than me. I can see the captions now, "tiny sousaphone player can't actually play horn." Anyway, I might be in the Oakland Tribune tomorrow and the Daily Cal.

The rest of the band was coming in a 6:30 shift and was marching up from the bart station, so we decided to march back to gate 3 and meet up with them. The BLO is cool, because it has a strong emphasis on improvisation. We'll play the head of the song and them maybe a verse or something and then the drum major will point at somebody and they'll solo over the chord changes of the head. This goes on for a long time. Some of the folks a great solosists. Then we'll play the bridge section, then maybe the head again and then maybe end the song. Some times we'll sing the words instead of playing. So we played several songs on the way back to the gate and then played a bunch of songs there. We had just finished playing a very upbeat rendidtion of "We Shall Overcome," when Gopal announced that we had oversome and had sucessfully stopped work at the docks for the shift.

So we all marched very triumphantly back to the BART station. It was a huge, jubulant crowd. when you see pictures in the news papers of giant crowds of leftist europeans carrying signs and celebrating because they won some thing. It was like that. We played and sang "Le Internationale," but I only know the Billy Brag words and so couldn't sing along. During the entire evening, the cops just sat and watched. Some of them bobbed their head a long with the music. They were completely hands-off. A definite improvement.

During the triumphant march back, my back was having no more of it. I had already been playing and carrying the horn non-stop for more than three hours. It's a heavy horn. So I staggered back to the BART station, without playing anything. I felt vaguely guilty, but it hurt more than I wanted to deal with. Pain while playing music is not a good thing. It doesn't make you better, it just makes you hurt. Anyway, I'm sure I'll have a reputatiuon for being the whiny new tuba player or something. I'm very embarassed that I couldn't keep it up the whole time. I ought to be able to handle my horn. I expect that taking the sousaphone back up will get me back into shape though. And I expect that my shoulder is going to be screwed up for several days. All the weight goes on the left shoulder, high up, on the neck paert, right where I gave myself a nastly sunburn on saturday. But it wasn't bad until the bitter end.

We got back to the bart station and I laid on the ground again. I think more news types may have taken my picture, but I'm not sure. After a while, my shoulder no longer felt like it was on fire and played a couple more songs with the band. Then I staggered towards the BART platform while they were still playing.

So we won! It was awesome! ("awesome" is the word of the day.) And very high energy the whole time. I couldn't beleive it when I realized it was past 9:00 and I had been marching around for almost 4.5 hours. It's also great because I don't like going to things by myself and can't always find anyone to protest with me. I can't wait until next time. Maybe I'll do some pushups between now and then to build some strength.

the BLO

I have an mp3 of the BLO playing the commie anthem. I coudl tell you why I haver just this exerpt, but I would have to kill you. Disk 3 exerpt. It's short, low-fi and loud. It's also a recording of what tuba players hear in disorganized marching bands. You could use this for a paper, if you had to.

Highlights

Yes, it's highlights from the mp3s below. this is shorter and smaller, but you miss out on the general chaos. Highlights. It's also longer than the song i edditted it for. what to cut?

Field Recordings

Sounds of the peace protest on March 20th. Use a client that plays as it downloads. some of these files are large.

• Disc1 Track1 (13456 KB)
• Disc1 Track2 (17127 KB)
• Disc1 Track3 (3829 KB)
• Disc1 Track4 (25374 KB)
• Disc1 Track5 (10472 KB)

Total time is approx 74 minutes. There is some overlap. This is a very rough set of cuts, with mistakes and low-fi sounds, but it's cool cuz it's recorded with binaural mics, which means that if you listen with headphones, the stereo is awesome.

disrupting san francisco

Morning

So my housemate, Tiffany, and I met up in dowtown San Francisco this morning around 10:00 or so. Protestors were chained to large cement garbage cans in Market Street near 2nd. People were banging on drums and dancing around. Then the police got into formation and started marching around. They told everyone to get out of the street or face arrest. Most folks got out of the street and then the cops started very calmly arresting people one at a time. It all seemed very civil. The people waiting to be handcuffed seemed to be having amikable conversations with the cops. They were sat down, cuffed, then one by one phtographed and put onto a bus.

Then the fire department showed up and started cutting through the pipe and chain binding the chained-up protesters together. the police were getting frustrated and treating non-cooperative protesters roughly. they dropped one woman to the ground and twisted her arms back painfully. When she said she was in pain, the guy supervising said her pain was nothing compared to what she had caused commuters that morning.

The bus filled up. People on it were singing "We all Live in a Yellow Submarine." they drove away to cheers from the crowd. The crowd was non-confrontational. They were shouting things like, "SFPD, 99% of the time, you're the greatest!" And there were hundreds of cops. We outnumbered them, but there sure were a lot of them.

The problem for them was like the story of the person trying to move the ocean with an eyedropped. When they got an intersection cleared, we just moved down a block and stopped traffic there. People in office buildings stared down at us. work was stopping.

Noon

Tiffany and I walked to the Civic Center for the noon rally. There were hardly any cops around. The mood was more stressed, but still carnival like. Some speakers shouted. I purchased some sketchy food that will probably result in food poisoning.

All of us marched over to the federal building and surrounded it. People handed out flyers on upcoming protests, other political campaigns and how to be and stay a non-violent protestor.

We blocked traffic around the federal building. People sat in front of the parking garage exits. There were a few more cops, but not many. A reporter asked a cop behind me how they were planning on getting people out of the building. the cop said he didn't know. My father-in-law used to work in that building, I'm pretty sure. Stopping the Forrest Service doesn't seem super-productive. Anyway, it seemed like that if folks wanted out, the protesters would not only have let them out, but would have cheered them for leaving work. going back might have been a problem, it seemed, but then later I heard folks verbally discouraging a court reporter from going to work, and he got in anyway.

Some guy was holding a sign that said "Puke for Peace." I just read a news report that said that 300 people actually did vomit as protest. goodness.

I walked up the street and saw a marching band and asked them about joining, explaining that I want to get a marching harness for my lap tuba. The suosaphone player was exhausted. It was 2:00-something and he'd been playing since 7:00 AM and the wind was very gusty, which is hell for sousaphones with their big bell facing forward. So I marched and played a couple of songs. There was no printed music. He told me the songs were in d and F mostly, so I faked it.

Afternoon

The crowd at the federal building was thinning out, so we called Christi, my wifey, to find out what was going on. She had a tough call to make this morning, since she works for a struggling non-profit. After seeing the CHP looking grim in riot gear on the way in to the city, she decided to go to work rather than risk a scary encounter with one of them. Anyway, she told us that there was rubber bullets and tear gas being used over at 7th and Market and that there was an officer down.

Tiffany and I walked over to see what was going on and so I could get field recordings of it. I wore a pair of binaural mics in my ear all day, recording to a sony minidisk. the minidisk is the bomb. I never have brought my DAT recorder to a protest, even with the ghigher quality. I don't yet have a didigtal out for the disks yet, but anyway, we walked over there.

there was some spray paint and a group of what looked like black-block protesters. Thos are anarchists who wear black, spray paint and break windows of war profiteers. they want to end capitalism. there were a couple of folks sitting in the street, handcuffed, a lot of people milling around and a whole lot of cops. chanting was sparse all day and the afternoon crowd there at Market was nearly silent. Watching, waiting. the cops outnumbered the crowd. while i was there, a whole bunch of CHP showed up. The cops standing next to the sidewalk were the same cops I saw that morning, only they looked tired, more grim and angry. A few meters from me, they started arguing with some woman standing on the sidewalk. they threw her to the ground and cuffed her. She was screaming, that she wasn't a protester, she was just standing there, she didn't do anything. As far as I could tell, they did pick her at random. she was on the sidewalk, not blocking traffic. And they seemed to be using a lot of force. She was yelling that them, but dropping her to the pavement face first seemed to be excessive

Everyone was angry and the cops outnumbered us and seemed very determined. At the noon rally, the protest organizers told us to go to the financial district at 4:00 to block evening commute traffic. I think the cops were going to open the street, damnit.

No sign of what we'd been told over the phone happening... yet. So we went for a walk the other way. There was a crane picking up all the cement grabage cans and putting them on a truck so that nobody could drag them into the street and be chained to them anymore.

Later

after sleeping less than an hour last night, I'mm too dern tired to block commute traffic this evening. think I'll do more stuff tomorrow instead, after I write the music I need to write (deadlines....)

if you had an orange vest and some safety cones, you could cause traffic havok, just going from intersection to intersection, coning it off. The salvage yard in berkeley at 7th and ashby sells cones for like $1 each. fyi. there's also a movement to drive really slow. Drive slow, walk slow, hold up traffic. the slow-moving protest actually was instrumental in driving a dictator out of power, but i'm too tired to remember where. Tiffany knows all about it though. Ask her.

anyway, i have 4 or 5 minidisks full of field recordings, but no digital out anywhere on my recorder. la la la. need to get the recorder to dump to my puter.

stop work to stop the war!

Protest Song

(To the tune of that joyful toddler's standard, "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands") ....

If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.
If the markets are a drama, bomb Iraq.
If the terrorists are frisky,
Pakistan is looking shifty,
North Korea is too risky,
Bomb Iraq.

If we have no allies with us, bomb Iraq.
If we think that someone's dissed us, bomb Iraq.
So to hell with the inspections,
Let's look tough for the elections,
Close your mind and take directions,
Bomb Iraq.

It's pre-emptive non-aggression, bomb Iraq.
To prevent this mass destruction, bomb Iraq.
They've got weapons we can't see,
And that's all the proof we need,
If they're not there, they must be there,
Bomb Iraq.

If you never were elected, bomb Iraq.
If your mood is quite dejected, bomb Iraq.
If you think Saddam's gone mad,
With the weapons that he had,
And he tried to kill your dad,
Bomb Iraq.

If corporate fraud is growin', bomb Iraq.
If your ties to it are showin', bomb Iraq.
If your politics are sleazy,
And hiding that ain't easy,
And your manhood's getting queasy, Bomb Iraq.

Fall in line and follow orders, bomb Iraq..
For our might knows not our borders, bomb Iraq.
Disagree? We'll call it treason,
Let's make war not love this season,
Even if we have no reason,
Bomb Iraq.

Anti-war protest

Wish I could give a more in depth review. We showed up. Watched people march for a while. Listen to a speech by somebody who plays a hippy on the TV show Dharma and Greg, waited in a hella long line for the bathroom, picked up flyers from almost every socialist group there (the Spartacus folks are pushy) and then decided to go get food. I suck at protesting. Anyway, I got on some email lists and talked to some of the biodiesel people. I wish they'd had a stronger presence. I think biodiesel is definitely a solution to many environmental, social, and politcal problems.

Anyway, we walked from the Civic Center to a restaurant at 22nd & Mission that Christi likes. It's a tapas place called Esperento. None of the esperanto people were there. (yet another under publicized idea that can solve many problems. Did you know that more than 10% of the UN budjet is spent on translators?) The food was really good, but the background music was that song where the refrain says, "If you love me, say yes. If you don't then confess. Just please don't tell me Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps." Over and over and over again. The song played in a sort of a flamenco style the entire time we were there. I used to like that song.

I feel like yuppy scum, I show up at a protest as an excuse to try fine dining. Anyway, there wasn't any chanting. I'm good at chanting. There were just a whole lot of people milling around. I felt kind of like a spectator, since I didn't have a sign or anything marking me as a protester. So I picked up flyers instead. I also have a copy now of every socialist newspaper that was there. I also nabbed a copy of the The Little Red Song Book. So it wasn't just fine dining, it was also shopping.

Anyway, I think the bad that I'm in should play a cover of the socialist anthem. The songs in the songbook are designed to be sung on picket lines, so many of them are set to familiar tunes. They're wayyy too catchy. My factory lies over the ocean. My factory lies over the sea. My factory lies over the border. Bring back my factory to me. Bring back, bring back, bring back my factory to me to me. Bring back, bring back, bring back my factory to me. (it's been stuck in my head since saturday.) Other songs are folk tunes. The ones by Judi Bari are very interesting, but I can't talk too much about this because Christi hates Judi Bari. This stems from a summer job where Christi opened mail sent to the team working on the Spotted Owl Environmental Impact Statement. Christi's dad was on the team. Apperently, Bari sent death-threats to Christi's dad and Christi read them as a young teenager. When radicals threaten your family, it has a way of turning you against them, I guess. Renee hates Angela Davis, because Renee's uncle was a prison gaurd and was killed by an inmate whom Davis successfully defended. Or participated in the defense or something. Anyway . . .

The next protest is in February, and I might be in Portland or Seattle when it happens. Wherever I protest, I'm going to show up earlier and bring a sign. Maybe it can say "Peace" in Esperanto or something about biodiesel. I should join or found a radical biodiesel group that can hand out flyers about liquid solar power and the existing diesel fleet. I think that there's some good possibilities on this. Maybe we could grow algae in waste water (read: sewage) and harvest the oil out of it in a centerfuge kind of thing. Algae is about 50% oil. That oil could be used for fuel. Perhaps it could be heat-treated to kill germs. Tammy just got a job designing waste water treatment plants. I should talk to her about this.

Matthew reported that most of the Portland protesters were Baby Boomers. There were almost no folks his age. That's confuding to me because Matthew is draft age. Why aren't the folks with the most to lose out there? The San Francisco crowd had a ton of young people. It really was a huge crowd. Bigger than other thigns, I think. Ususally, when I go to gay pride, I see tons of people I know and we chat for a few minutes. At this event, pretty much all of my friends, queer and het were there and I didn't bump into anyone that I didn't arrive with.

The newspaper reported that a small group of black-clad protestors broke off from the march and broke some windows in the financial district. It was very targetted, apparently. They broke windows of banks that are war profiteers and Starbucks. Anyway, it occurred to me that if we were protesting an acual war in February, there were enough people there to shut down the entire city. Groups could fan out and stop all car traffic. We could block the Bay Bridge. Blocking BART would be harder, but it's part of the solution to oil wars, not the problem, so that's ok. If everyone decided that there was going to be a city-wide shut down, it would be impossible for the cops to clear it. They'd have to arrest thousands of people. More than they have jail space for. There's not enough cops. How could you arrest 50,000 people who have fanne dout across the city with the goal of sitting down in every interesection? You couldn't. They'd have to use other (bad) crowd control tactics, but honestly, I don't think they want to. (I saw somebody carrying a sign that said, "cops for peace.") First of all, a lot of them are probably anti-war. Secondly, anti-war protests are great for city tourism. People came from all over the west to protest in SF. Every restaurant for miles around the city center was packed with protesters. I hate to be so shallowly capitalistic and crass, but the hotel and restaurant business are probably overwhelmingly pro-protest, at least, unless they're Starbucks or the cops starting shooting out all the windows. And the protest was on a Saturday, so most non-tourist businesses are not affected. So if we did shut down the city, as long as we kept going into restaurants, staying in hotels and buying tourist trinkets (some from the protests, stay for Fisherman's Warf), and it was on a weekend, would the city really care? It would certainly be a great symbolic gesture to halt automobile traffic, if only for a few hours.

I bet it's illegal to talk about the pros and cons of blocking traffic. Maybe the FBI reads my blog!! Total Informatin Awareness is out to get us. I miss civil liberties. I hope that in the next presidential election, the votes actually get counted.