how this book came to my hands. that's a story i must tell, or write. or something. it's a story like other stories. it's a story hypertext. which is like saying that no story lives on its own. or that stories are linked in mysterious manners. or this is just my fingers warming up to the keyboard.
picture this, a huge plaza in mexico city, la Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the site where in 1968 the
Tlatelolco Massacre took place, around 200 students killed. and there in 1999 i was standing watching a rock concert where punks and ska punks and metal heads and old school rockers shared the space as the bands came and went. when a punk band was on stage, a bunch of punks would take over the main area and the metalheads would go to the corners. and when a metal band was playing punks would go away. a shifting of tribes.
long haired metal head i was, but i was also a traveler, so i was paying attention. and when this
punk band named graffiti 3X was playing and image got branded in my memory. i mentally tagged the image as "post-apocalyptic". picture this: brown skinned, green tall mohawk, gas mask, fucked up shorts heavily pierced no future kid dancing in the middle of the mosh pit. mexico city smog sky. and i thought. that's it. that's the image of apocalyptic despair.
fast forward. 2007. i'm taking this
permaculture design course. long haired no more. metalhead still. big apocalyptic city and now i'm again surrounded by punks. mohawk wearing black dressed vegan punks. and my post-apocalyptic tagged image is replaced by a strange feeling: punks excited about compost.
yes. urban looking military boots and band t-shirt wearing punks... excited about compost.
and it's great. and among them was the bright william faith.
but let me be clear. i always admired punks. particularly in mexico. a lot punks are well organized, dedicated and strong workers. between the two tribes (punks and metalheads), punks seemed to me the most compromised. so in way it's not really surprising. but it's still beautiful.
so william faith told me that the first time he heard about permaculture was from mexican punks. and that certain image that also transformed him was to see a group of punks plastering toxic walls in mexico city with cob (a building material consisting of clay, sand and straw).
and so was william faith the one that helped organize this urban permaculture design course through
radical change L.A.and so was william faith the one who one weekend asked me, so have you read any of the crimethInc. books? and i said, yes, i have seen one of them, and the following weekend he shows up with this two books (
Days of War, Nights of Love, and
Recipes for Disaster) and after 20 minutes of excited browsing on my part i ask, so when do you want them back?
and he says: they are for you. since the first time i heard you speak i knew you would love these.
and william faith was right. i just finished reading Recipes for Disaster and i love it. i recommend it, i would say please read this book. please put these recipes into practice. and please visit the crimethInc. website at
www.crimethinc.com (they need some support these days) and while you are there read this excellent
Introduction to Anarchism
and Resistance in Bogotá.
i have, in way, recovered my faith in a bunch of words and feelings by reading these. and my
D.I.Y'er spirit has been enlightened. so here, i'll leave with a quote stolen from this book:
The raw awareness that you have the power to change the world is more important than any other resource - it is the hardest one to develop and share, and the most essential. Giving your endorsement to political representatives, social programs, or radical ideologies will be of little avail if the fundamental problem is that you don't know your own strength.
Self-determination begins and ends with your initiatives and actions, whether you live under a totalitarian regime or the canopy of a rainforest. It must be established on a daily basis, by acting back on the world that acts upon you- whether that means calling in sick to work on a sunny day, starting a neighborhood garden with your friends, or toppling a government. You cannot make a revolution that distributes power equally except by learning firsthand how to exercise and share power- and that exercising and sharing, on any scale, is itself the ongoing, never concluded project of revolution.
as if muteness was a precondition for these affairs i found myself -wait, did i find myself?- at the new ilcorral (self described as "an experimental all-ages artspace devoted to the periphery where you can be free to enjoy the strangest, newest or most familiar experiences and artists") now called ZeroPoint. although calling it the new ilcorral might be tactless altogether; some things Change, and that is it. some things change and that is all about it. change, move, relocate, migrate, evolve? mutate... sadly enough it did move quite a distance from it's previous reincarnation were we enjoyed a good many shows just a short bike ride away. such is the nature of cities. things move to cheaper rents and larger spaces as bubbles boiling to the the outer edges of boiling planets. nonetheless we did manage to show up at zeropoint last night to see our friend astronovazz and as an added surprise we got to see, to discover, to stumble upon this band. oh, i so Love that feeling of finding a band -or being found by one- that strikes your senses in one clean swoop. beautifully slender grRrl on the guitar, two drummers, solid bass player and the occasional trumpet (soon to be a full member of the band i hear), the only vocals were sung through a salivated guitar pickup. "Jolting, hocketing rhythms, atonal surf riffs, and blackened salsa grooves combine to create a singular brutal, polyrhythmic spasmathon. A primordial beastie unleashed on the world in either fury or love! " (self description on their current rupert murdoch owned website - as accurate as words get). i'm starting to think that oakland has more than a fair share of good bands.
