It's pretty crazy 'round these parts thanks to an upcoming apartment change. I can't believe how exhausting it can be to move forty blocks (craigslisting, brokers, credit checks, money woes, etc)! It would be so much simpler if our movements controlled the land, no?

Speaking of, here's a part two of a poem by June Jordan entitled "I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies." Jordan was a brilliant poet and social critic, and a longtime friend of Adrienne Rich, about whom I've been blogging a bit lately. Jordan's poem is dedicated anti-colonial fighter and president of Angola Agostinho Neto, and dates from 1976:

How many of my brothers and sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

I know, I've posted a lot on this blog about Adrienne Rich. Poet, feminist and political radical, Rich has written fantastic poetry and prose that I can't shut up about. But gosh darn it, the hits keep coming!

Here are a few excerpts from a 1984 essay by Adrienne Rich entitled "Notes toward a Politics of Location," published in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979--1985.

In it, Rich turns away from some of the sweeping universalities of second-wave feminism, and toward a multiplicity of gender struggles that incorporate different understandings of race, class, and imperialism:

A few years ago I would have spoken of the common oppression of women, the gathering movement of women around the globe, the hidden history of women's resistance and bonding, the failure of all previous politics to recognize the universal shadow of patriarchy, the belief that women now, in a time of rising consciousness and global emergency, may join across all national and cultural boundaries to create a society free from domination....

This is not what I come here to say in 1984. I come here with notes but without absolute conclusions. This is not a sign of loss of faith or hope. These notes are the marks of a struggle to keep moving, a struggle for accountability.
...
As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely by condemning its government or by saying three times "As a woman my country is the whole world." Tribal loyalties aside, and even if nation-states are now just pretexts used by multinational conglomerates to serve their interests, I need to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create.

Here's a pretty great video by Jay Smooth (no relation to Jay of Meerkat Media fame), host of WBAI's hip-hop show The Underground Railroad.

Big ups to Illvox.org for spreading this around the radical listservs!

Is psych-folk songstress Joanna Newsom down with the movement of the proletariat toward its own liberation? I wish there were a radical gossip mag in this city, because surely I would write in it about this.

I've been bumping my head lately to Yarn and Glue, an early self-distributed Newsom EP given to me by my friend Lex. My fave ditty by far is the title track, which features what sounds like a thumb piano pulsating beneath Newsom's bare, witch-like warble.

But it's the song's lyrics, not the production, that've got me stoked. Catch these selected lines from the track "Yarn and Glue," which catalog the toasts of conspiratorial workers on their day of rest, amid a world of power, money and surveillance:

Do you know what this is son?
This is the panopticon
And all around us blink the brash
And shifty eyes of common cash
...
So gather twilight to your breast
And couch the rabble-rouser's nest
And we will take a day of rest
And we will all be heaven-blessed
...
We toast the fallow furrows that we sow,
We toast the monies that we owe, owe, owe.
We toast the creditors we daily face
Who topple down with gruesome grace

And we toast the aristocrats with blood of blue
Because we know our collars are that color too...

Something has lit a fire in my gut lately, and it’s not the tangy gazpacho chilling in my fridge. It’s not the body bags piling up in Iraq, or the precipitous decline of our planet’s wild systems, or any of the other train wrecks concocted by elites in the Global North. For the last three weeks, I’ve been spitting barbs because so many people I know have been getting targeted, terrorized and thrown in jail by the police.

The number of folks in my field of vision who’ve been rounded up since mid-June is startling, and I feel compelled to write about them here. Though they might appear in the news as a series of disparate, isolated incidents, I think my friends’ stories indicate a broader pattern of police repression that’s all too common--particularly against activists of color.

NYC

Following the April 26th acquittal of four cops who killed Sean Bell and wounded two others in a hail of 50 bullets, NYC saw a surge of social movement calling for police accountability and community power. Rallies, marches, and a near-riot popped off around the city, while Al Sharption’s "slowdown" blockades on May 8th captured national media attention. Since that time, actions specific to the Bell case have largely subsided, and much of the public energy and outrage has dissipated (or, at least, been brought to a simmer.)

At the same time, a few sustained projects have taken root in the wake of the NYPD’s most brazen murder yet of an unarmed person of color. Among these is a series of citywide copwatch trainings being promoted by the People’s Justice Coalition and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, coupled with a growing interest in community alternatives to policing generally.

Caught in this climate is Rebel Diaz. A conscious hip hop crew comprised of three MCs--Chilean brothers RodStarz and G1, and Afro-Boricua rapper Lah Tere--Rebel Diaz is well known in both activist circles and hip hop scenes in NYC. In the crowd I run with, they’re public figures you can count on to be outspoken about imperialism, racism, gentrification and police brutality. So it’s not surprising that they were singled out for special treatment by New York’s Finest.