occupy wall street - 2012 - We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation

We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation
Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, Mike McGuire (eds)
AK Press
2012

The Occupy Wall Street Movement was, to an outsider, at some times exhilarating to watch, and at other times, very strange and occasionally disappointing. The police are part of the 99%? An anti-capitalist moment of silence for Steve Jobs? Why? Because he was a vegetarian in addition to being a brutal industrialist? Still it was a real uprising in America, in lower Manhattan, that largely adhered to anarcho-socialist ideals of building a new world in the shell of the old.

Occupy Wall Street generated a lot of literature within twelve months of the movement's start date of September 17, 2011. There were many books about Occupy published even before January 2012, when the movement still seemed like it may continue in its original form. We Are Many, from the venerable AK Press, is a collection of reflective pieces on the movement that came later in 2012, with a number of its authors referring to writing their entries during the summer of that year. Almost all of the authors are almost politically radical and while there is a great deal of variety to the entries, many of the pieces are critical of the more liberal side of the movement. This was the side of the movement who suggested that police were part of their class and, presumably, felt that Steve Jobs was an honorable exception to the plutocratic class the movement claimed to opposed.

The book includes dozens of short entries, including pieces on the handmade signs, spirituality, race and gender issues, connections to other uprisings, movement strategies and constitutive documents, and many personal reflections. The entry that struck me more than any other when I was reading the book was titled, The Tourist Brochures in People's Hearts: A Snapshot from Occupy Santa Fe. This was a piece in which the author, artist and writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore paints a picture of a local occupy movement directed by people who may be members of the %99 but they wouldn't be members of the %95, if that was the term adopted by the movement.  Bernstein Sycamore's piece expresses a passionate love for the ideals of the movement to be realized, and a bitter critique of a local encampment which was turned into a public relations forum for a thriving local arts market by wealthy art dealers, gallery owners, and artists. The piece reads like an address to a general assembly, and perhaps that's what it was written as, but more importantly it sketches out a situation where all of the radical energy of the movement was siphoned away by liberals and their wish-washy views on society. The idea that the arts community just plain belongs to Occupy is a liberal one. Bernstein Sycamore laments the tears of someone crying in anguish over the closing of twenty galleries, which, sure, sounds bad, until our author goes on to note how many many  galleries there actually are in Santa Fe and how much money and competition there is in their market. You might cry for the art galleries and you probably wouldn't shed a tear for luxury car dealerships but both types of commercial institutions cater to upper-middle class consumers and play a role in economic disparities.

The book covered many aspects of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, but not all of them. The role of social media was actually downplayed in this book. I don't remember reading a mention of the 'We are the 99%' tumblr page that featured those iconic and mimetic images of individuals holding up their handwritten stories of woe in selfie shots and affirming their support for the movement. I don't think Anonymous' role in the movement was given much attention here, and I would have loved to have read something about the library at Liberty Plaza. Oh well... it's still probably the best book I've seen on the movement to date.

outlaw bikers - 1971 - Buttons: The Making of a President

Buttons: The Making of a President
Jamie Mandelkau
Sphere Books Limited
1971
157 pages

Buttons was, briefly, the president of the Hells Angels England chapter, and the man who obtained an official charter from the California chapter for the England Hells Angels. Not long after he officially became an Hells Angel, he wrote and published his memoir of his experiences as a biker. Some time after the publication of this book he must of lost his president status as a 1974 BBC documentary of the England Hells Angels shows Mad John as their president and the only mention of Buttons featured in the documentary is a flash of the cover of this book.

I don't know who author Jamie Mandelkau is/was but I suspect that his book was rushed to market to cash in on a late-60s/early-70s craze for biker stuff, and more specifically, Hells Angels stuff. This craze was due in part to the 1967 publication of Hunter S. Thompson's bestselling book Hell's Angels, as well as some high profile criminal incidents stemming from club activity, most notably the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert in late 1969. The content of the book shows that there's not a lot of history to Buttons' life and very little to his life as an Angel, at least by the time of publication. The book seems to break down into two large parts: his life as a Rocker fighting the Mods in the mid-60s, and his trip to California to hang out with the Hells Angels and rape teenage girls. His lurid anecdotes of pointless violence and sexual abuse are the stuff of fantasies for impotent men and the sort of deranged losers who also admire serial killers. Wilhelm Reich describes this books target audience in his Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Mandelkau's transcription of Buttons' dimwitted life story is a dull view into the world of dying masculinity and white supremacism. Getting it on with a bird, doing a blokes head in, etc, in repetition with slight variations, occasional violence and plenty of sexual violence, that's the content of this book. Pornography for people who felt that Hitler's definition of freedom suits them just fine. The book does include a couple of interesting bits about the biker culture in England circa 1971, though: in England bikers all over were wearing Hells Angels patches, and it almost sounds as though bikers who wanted to declare themselves outlaws would do it by putting on their patch. One of Buttons tasks was dealing with unofficial Hells Angels chapters in England. Also, Buttons wore a small deaths head patch, which apparently had some link to the origins of the Hells Angels MC, and only the first four chapters wore that patch until Buttons put it on for England.

The last interesting aspect of the book are with Buttons stories of being a Rocker and fighting Mods in the sixties. I don't know much about these subcultures although I think Dick Hebdige might discuss them to some extent in his Subculture and the Meaning of Style. Rockers are apparently greaser guys into leather jackets and motorcycles and sixties rock. Mods are different although their difference isn't discussed in the book. Still, as far as I know, this is a significant source of information about the Rockers of mid-60s England.

civil rights movement - 2005 - The Long Walk to Freedom

The Long Walk to Freedom
Tom Weidlinger
2005
Moira Productions
30 min

This documentary shares its title with the much better known Nelson Mandela autobiography and film adaptation, so it's search-engine obscure thanks to this.The Long Walk to Freedom is a short documentary featuring civil rights activists speaking to students at George Washington High School in San Francisco California. The documentary is another addition to the long list of documentaries on the American civil rights movement, but it also demonstrates the ongoing commitment of civil rights activists to educate new generations about a struggle that in many ways continues still.

The documentary shows a racially diverse group of activists speaking to public school students about their experiences. It is broken down into segments organized by themes like music and non-violent resistance. I assume that the documentary's ideal audience are students, and the setting for viewing is a classroom. The division of the film's subject matter into short and easy to comprehend thematic segments is an ideal way of presenting this subject for classroom discussion.

irish nationalism - 2008 - Hunger

Hunger
Steve McQueen
2008
Film4 Productions
96 Min.

Steve McQueen's 2008 film Hunger is about the 1981 IRA hunger strikes that took place in Long Kesh prison that resulted in ten dead men, including Bobby Sands, who was elected to British parliament before his death. Hunger was probably one of the best films of 2008 and was almost certainly better than all of the Academy Award best picture nominees of that year.

Long Kesh prison included a set of buildings called the H-Blocks, 'H' shaped structures where IRA prisoners were held. During the late 1970s and early 80s, the IRA prisoners waged a series of protests within the H-Blocks to obtain political prisoner or political status and its associated privileges. McQueen's film, representing these protests, is composed of two long segments. The first features the blanket protest, where prisoners went without clothing to protest their being denied civilian clothing in prison, and also the dirty protest, when prisoners kept their body waste in their cells. The second segment represents the hunger strike with an emphasis on the experience of Bobby Sands, whose commitment to the strike was fatal but still intensely meaningful to those agitating for a united Irish republic. This later segment largely shows

Sands on a bed in a white room, as though he's already in heaven, an apotheosis and a counterpoint to the hell depicted in the first segment of the film.The two sections are divided by a prison meeting-room conversation, about the hunger strike, between Bobby Sands and a Catholic priest. This scene comprises the majority of the film's dialog. This scene is also a single take, is long, possibly nearing twenty minutes in length, and as a piece of film-making, is incredible.

The rest of the film is largely silent, there are bits of dialog here and there, but otherwise if there are vocal sounds, they're shouts of anger or pain. Otherwise the focus of the film is on the emotional intensity of the prisoner's resistance to the authority of their institutions and the minutia of prison life. The small details of the protests are emphasized, the shit on the cell walls of the dirty protest,
the insects that collect, the architecture of the prison, the damaged knuckles of the guards. This film targets the senses, with disgusting smells, textures, and tastes implied through much of the visual imagery, and the aural compressed into the dialogue scene. The dark and filthy aesthetic of the film in its representation of these protests recalls music videos like Poison by Prodigy,

or David Fincher's video for Nine Inch Nails' Closer.

Those videos take place in a metaphor, while mcQueen's Long Kesh H-Blocks are a dramatic representation of a real and still existing site.