The Futility of Hip Pessimism

Hating things is easy. There are many things to hate and most of them are well worth it. Finding pleasure can take more effort, more ingenuity. People love to complain--about work, the city they live in, the cultural void, the failed schools, the collapse of the earth, political differences, the lists go on. Sometimes whining becomes hip. Haters are valued as astute, intelligent, and credible. Lovers get ignored. Progressive hip pessimism often leaves a void where pretensions of hope become persuasive and good ideas couched in whining get ignored. When lefties take too seriously Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci's notion of pessimism of the intellect-optimism of the will, they fail to look for the irresistible, the pleasurable, the desirable. Rather, they intelligently criticize almost everything and turn themselves into groaning messiahs martyring themselves to movements that they don't believe could win.

Center for Tactical Magic

Everybody should check out all the amazing projects The Center for Tactical Magic has been engaged in for the past few years. The TCM merges showmanship, interventionist art practice, creative disruption, energy channeling, and a whole host of performances from The Tactical Ice Cream Unit seen to the right to free occult services where people can curse their least favorite institutions and "learn simple magical tactics for combating the abuse of power."

The Center for Tactical Magic engages in extensive research, development, and deployment of the pragmatic system known as Tactical Magic. A fusion force summoned from the ways of the artist, the magician, the ninja, and the private investigator, Tactical Magic is an amalgam of disparate arts invoked for the purpose of actively addressing Power on individual, communal, and transnational fronts. At the CTM we are committed to achieving the Great Work of Tactical Magic through community-based projects, daily interdiction, and the activation of latent energies toward positive social transformation. From the Center for Tactical Magic website.

Nia King's Borderlands Project

Many of you are probably familiar with Nia King's zine Borderland: Tales From Disputed Territories Between Races and Cultures. Its available at The Queer Zine Archive Project. If not, not you should get familiar. And in the meantime, Nia has put out a call for submissions for Borderlands 2! The call is below:

I am currently seeking personal stories and visual art on the theme of FAMILY for the upcoming issue of my compilation zine about mixed-race, bicultural and transracial adoptee identities. Stories should be
non-fiction and no more than 800 words. No poetry please. Visual art should be black and white and replicate well in a copy machine (minimal grey tones). Submissions are not due until JUNE 1st, 2008, but please don't wait to start writing! Your stories are valuable, and it's time to bring our often neglected cross-cultural and multi-racial experiences from margin to center by telling our own stories!

Send submissions to oxette    (at)   riseup.net. -- Nia King

The Dawn of Denver

Happily, I'm back in Denver for awhile--beautiful, dry Denver. Coming back from all these travels, I feel its quite important to find whats beautiful in one's city--the people, the projects, the geography, the architechture, art, etc...So, that's what I'm wanting to do--come up with more ways of celebrating the beauty of what people here are doing--through video, art, etc...

So for starters, I want to brag about a little something we are doing tomorrow at Free Speech TV--We are shooting The Activist Studio episode about Counter-Recruitment and Anti-War activism featuring Jeff Englehart of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Jessi Quizar of American Friends Service Committee's Youth and Militarism Program.

Ashara Ekundayo, the show's host, will be digging into what exactly is going on in our city in terms of anti-war activism, organing soldiers, and students in high schools and beyond. I am particuarly excited because Jessi is my roommate and a badass organizer/activist. Jeff, someone I've know through Anti-DNC/RNC organizing for a few months now, is also qutie an inspiration. When he was a soldier he was an active blogger writing against the occupation of Iraq. So check it out at our website.

In the meantime, if you live in Denver, start thinking of badass projects and lets start finding some wasy to promote that stuff.

Proximity

Two of the people it has been fun to reconnect with in Oberhausen were Ed and Rachael Marszewski. I remember Ed from my days in Chicago as a controversial, highly prolific curator of incredible social, political, and always artistic collaborations: projects like The Select Media Festival, Lumpen, Version Fest, and other amazing events at the intersection of art and activism. Rachael and Ed are now working on a new project: Proximity.

Proximity is an art magazine focusing on Chicago-based artists and projects. The design is stunning and the content inspirational--particularly from a town as curmudgeonly as Chicago. Temporary Services' Salem Collo-Julin and Brett Bloom have an excellent artice Together: Writing About People Who Work in Groups that examines the ways people in 2 person collaborations and amorous relationships maintain collaboration after breakups and other general amorous trauma.

I've not finished this first edition of Proximiity, but it appears to bring together some of the best minds in Chicago to reflect on the positive aspects of Chicago's art/activist scene. I am eager to continue reading this on my flight home.

Leaving Oberhausen

Well, tonight is my last night at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival and it has been a hell of a week watching some amazing short films, reconnecting with old friends and colleagues, making new friends, and overall being treated lavishly. Free Speech TV will be bringing home some incredible shorts to flesh out our schedule--some humor, some agit prop, and documentaries as well. Upon returning, I hope to get back to writing regularly for this blog so keep looking for more. As I am finishing up a fiscal year at work, my travel schedule will be limited for the next two months giving me more time to write. Germany has been amazing. Glad to be coming home, particularly inspired to continue looking for the cultural innovators, the artists, and activists doing amazing work in my own town of Denver.

Tipsy For Display

Tipsy and writing from Oberhausen Deutchland, I am quite glad. Glad for a life of privilege, of travel, of solitude. Though my privilege has been stolen and my life a scam, I am happy to know the sounds of my people, the German. I am horrified that these are my people, that my people have this heritage of fascism. Though, as an American, I must understand privilege from fascism: slavery--native genocide, these acts destroyed people, created people, created a nation of so-called freedom and liberty--bullshit. All freedom and liberty come at the expense of an other. Today, we Americans scam the poor, the immigrant, the global. This is how we maintain power--at the expense of the other.

So what do we do, as so-called revolutionaries, those who care?

We fight. Nothing. short of fighting--creating cultural suicide, matters. Nothing but the eminent destruction of privilege. I like my privilege. To life, to love, to the eradication of the U.S. empire. Fuck the U.S. Towards globalization of the majority and the death of empire! Love!