Birds Before The Storm

Well, I’m back in the States. Usually I’m so excited about leaving wherever it is I am to go somewhere else, but I didn’t really want to leave this time. Two days ago I woke up in a sailboat docked in a small town in Finland where the sky looked fake it was so pretty. Now I’m in NYC. No offense to NYC. It’s nice enough, I suppose.

Hopefully in the coming weeks I’ll be sifting through even more of my photos from this summer and posting more. And hopefully I’ll figure out some good reasons to be excited about being here.

I started as columnist or guest-blogger or whatever over at Squat The Planet. The first piece is a slightly longer version of something I wrote about here, entitled Anarchy in Finland: Musta Pispala. I think I’ll be writing there approximately weekly. I might crosspost for awhile, as well. Expect to find me writing more about the personal side of squatting and traveling.

I’ve begun writing review essays for the site The Anvil. The first piece I’ve put up is entitled Outsider Anarchism and is about the book METAtropolis and, as you might imagine, outsider anarchism in general.

I’m going to cross-post from postcivilized.net for a little while, I hope you forgive me. This version will be more image heavy though.

Last week I had the privilege to witness (and photograph) the first sailing of The Silakka (silakka is Finnish for “baltic herring”), a boat built almost entirely from scavenged materials. Only the rope and some of the screws and bolts were purchased. The pontoons are made from empty drums, the platform is woven with firehouses. The frame is scrap metal and wood, the mast and sail are secondhand. And of course, it’s powered by the wind. They aim to prove it seaworthy this summer (though I believe their plans are sea-, not ocean-, worthy).

These same people built a river raft entirely out of debris in the past, in Lithuania. They collected empty plastic bottles into wooden crates to provide buoyancy. And that journey was photographed by an intensely capable artist.

Lest you think that they are doing this purely for fun, the Silakka’s mission statement will clear everything up for you in a rather surrealist way:

Unreasonably cheap energy is running out, climate conditions are changing radically, paradoxical economy of constant growth will bankrupt itself, governmental fascism will be declared, racial breeding is practiced to embryos, genetic manipulation will get out of hand, Coup d´état of racistic red necks will happen in the name of revolution, the language loses its meaning, virtual schizophrenia is getting pandemic among the Internet users, obsessed disciples of Tony Robins will get at each other´s throats in the search of lost childhood, fourth world war is waiting at the gates, psychedelic-communistic revolution will fly in the ring like a freshly whiten towel in a heavy weight boxing match while the master is beating the breath out of his competition, heavenly escalator is transporting Jesus down in between the supermarkets while aliens will return to planet earth to complete their work of creation, dystopies and utopies will shake hands, up and down will change the place, emerged birds will withdraw back to the shells. Shit is about to hit the fan, even though a good life needs just bearable conditions and a hand full of material mixed with a drop of good will. We are living strange times – are we? But why?

At the moment we are building a wind powered rescue boat out of waste that our contemporary lifestyle is producing. During the summer 2010 we will sail to Baltic sea and archipelago, far from rectangular conventions and dusty tasting logic of the mainland, to rescue some leftovers of endangered wisdom we are still able to rescue. Maybe we will find some time to think, maybe we will discover something that won´t leave us anything else to think about.

The rest of my pictures from the day below, of raising the mast and sails, and of the ungodly beautiful sky that crept up on us that evening.
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The Sisters of Mercy are pretty obviously influenced by Leonard Cohen. Their name is a reference to the song Sisters of Mercy, pretty simple. The name of their album Some Girls Wander by Mistake comes from the Cohen song “teachers”, which I just found the audio of them covering (above).

A well-done, simple video advertising the upcoming protests against the International Monetary Fund, put together by the IMF Resistance Network, who I don’t really know anything about. They are calling for protests on October 9th to 11th, 2010, in Washington, DC (where the IMF is headquartered).

The IMF is, in short, an institution pushing global capitalism as the solution to all the world’s problems. Ironic, of course, to promote capitalism–an economic system intentionally engineered to siphon resources, money, and power into the hands of a small minority of people–as the solution to things like poverty. The IMF has an absolutely horrid track record as well. This is the kind of stuff that led to the anti-globalization movement of a decade ago, the same movement that largely defeated the consensus that neoliberalism was an effective system of global governance. Of course, as an anarchist, I’m rather against the idea of global governance at all.

From the IMF Resistance Network:

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have a well-deserved reputation for being the loan sharks of global capitalism. Both institutions are infamous for forcing poor countries in the global south to ruin their own economies in order to further enrich Western corporations. Nations who decline to borrow money at exorbitant interest rates and then beggar their populations to pay it back (or worse, default on their existing debt), are subjected to trade sanctions that have been described as “the economic equivalent of nuclear war.”

Contrast!
Above: the sky this evening over the lake.

Below: “She Fell Away” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (not a video, just a song)

I spent this past weekend at the Musta Pispala festival in Pispala, a suburb of Tampere, Finland. I don’t know… this might have been the best anarchist gathering I’ve ever been to. A few hundred people came over the course of the weekend, mostly anarchists from all over Finland. I was immediately struck by how welcoming the atmosphere was, by how friendly people were, how engaged and unpretentious the scene here seems to be. I sat in a meeting in which green and red anarchists listened respectfully to each other… hell they even work with each other here. I led my usual anarchism and fiction workshop, and a really interesting anarchism in the USA workshop in which tons of people had insightful comments and questions. I attended workshops on the anarchist prisoners of spain and on the anti-fascist scene and struggle in Russia.

The festival opened with a few hundred people marching without incident from the city center out to a complex of three abandoned factories in the suburbs, where a squatted party was thrown. The sun went down sometime after eleven and the twilight lasts until 1am before starting again sometime around 3am. I never got over this.
The second night I went to the beach on a lake. The third night, a crowded punk show at a collective-run bar and venue, where I watched an amazing doom/stoner/hardcore/crust band that refuses to record, I think named Ward. The fourth night, after the festival was over, I watched the world cup championship. Something I never would have dreamed of doing had I been in the states. It’s bizarre and beautiful to be places where my cultural conceptions and stereotypes simply do not apply.

36 images below, most of abandoned factories and sunsets and all of that lovely stuff.

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I spent an enjoyable few days in Naples, one of the more lawless places I’ve been. Unfortunately, the city is run by the Mafia instead of the cops, which doesn’t really make it much better, but it’s still fascinating. Once while we were walking, two cops told a man on a scooter that he couldn’t drive his scooter where he was. “I don’t care,” he said, and kept going.

I heard stories about how, if the police try to chase someone, the general populace throws debris or soapy water and the like into the street to prevent the police from their pursuit.

The city is absolutely the most cyberpunk place I’ve ever seen, and unfortunately these photos don’t capture that. The buildings are old and cracked from a decades-old earthquake and left with scaffolding to hold them together. Immigrant children play with LED lit mini-drones in the middle of medieval squares, and what would be pristine, tourist architecture and monuments are covered with graffiti and youth. People play football in the streets, ignoring passerby and plants grow wildly out the side of the walls of buildings. It’s fascinating.

I went on a tourist tour of the aqueduct beneath the city, and our tour guide was trying to explain to a typical american tourist that he thought that bank-robbery was awesome when no one got hurt, that catholicism was worse than useless, all kinds of fun things. Anyhow, while down there I saw people growing plants underground, fascist graffiti from WWII (hitler on the left, Mussolini on the right, “we will win” carved below, fortunately incorrect), strange artistic testimonials to the war, and the recreated conditions of the original aqueduct. I also saw the Mediterranean Sea for the first time.

Before we left the city we went to see sulphur fields in the suburbs, with boiling mud and constant steam, part of an active volcano and apparently where the Romans believed the entrance of hell to be situated. I’m fascinated by the idea of old ruins and strange things that are situated in the suburbs (like the sunken market that looks like a temple)… I heard from my friend in Sweden that he took public transit out to the pyramids in Egypt, because they are basically now in the suburbs of Cairo.

This following photo is of a statue of King Umberto I, killed by an anarchist. Nya nya.

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I’m crossposting this from Postcivilized.net, a site which is now up and running. Mostly, it features various articles related to post-civilization theory, but it will also include bits related to a sort of post-civilized culture, like the following:

I ran across this today: Route Couture. (site is in Finnish, but there are two galleries of images: fashion photos and art photos. There is also an artist statement in English elsewhere.) Some Finnish radical fashion designers have created “high fashion” clothing out of roadkill. According to google translate, and confirmed by my Finnish friend sitting next to me:

The group seeks to comment on the works for the fashion industry, a market economy and human-animal relationship.