Birds Before The Storm

I went with my friend Dea to the boat graveyard in Staten Island, a fascinating place where they just dump boats to rust and rot. It’s beautiful and spiky and probably not particularly safe. i played a lot with my new pinhole lens, as well, so that’s the deal with all of the hella-blurry pictures. Dea and I shot with the same camera, so it’s not actually 100% clear who took which pictures, which is fine with me.

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I went with my friend Enola out to Jersey to where one might catch freight trains for the purpose of travel. Instead, we went for the purpose of doing a photo shoot for a piece about crud goth (which is, of course, crusty goth, only crusty like dirt not crusty like “crust punk” the musical genre). As much as I used to love NYC, you don’t get to watch sunsets like this here. Strange that I felt happier to be in what seems basically like a suburb, complete with huge generic stripmalls. [I'm particularly interested in photography crusty goths, by the way, for a whole crud goth photo essay I want to be doing. In case any are reading and would be down to be in it]

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I admit it: I don’t spend much time on the picket line. I’m mostly one of those “rooting for 100% unemployment” types, politically. But I recognize that while I may be looking for the abolition of alienated labor, there are people who got families to feed. And they shouldn’t be treated like crap. And what’s more, we should help them represent themselves as a unified work force. Syndicalists do this fairly well.

The SAC is a syndicalist union in Sweden that’s been around for 100 years, which is awesome. And they’re remarkable in a lot of ways that really deserve more words than I’m going to give them now (but they represent a lot of immigrants, fight for precarious labor, and aren’t just a bunch of bureaucrats. And they call their pickets blockades, cause they blockade!).

I was in town for part of their 100th anniversary get-together and it really, really warmed my heart. I got to meet syndicalists from Spain, Siberia, Italy, and the UK (and Sweden). And I went out to the picket line one night to photograph and participate. The picketers were made up of the SAC and then a student group that was some sort of… i dunno, liberals or marxists or something, but they were cool too. Everyone wore almost the same reflective jackets as the police.

The place they were blockading, Berns, is a super-fancy hotel and club that treats their workers like absolute dirt, makes them work ungodly long shifts, fires them for organizing, etc. etc.

The police were trying to claim that the picketers are mafia, in essence. It’s disgusting.

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I’ve come to realize that my photo-essays here on Birds Before The Storm don’t have much text on them, or captions or anything. I guess the essay is told in photos rather than accompanied by photos. Ah well. Suits me okay.

Regardless, I stayed a couple weeks this summer in Mainz, Germany, which is the birthplace of Gutenberg, the guy who invented the movable-type printing press. Well, several hundred years after China did. And also he did it with a friend but then they like sued each other or something and the other guy lost, so Gutenberg is famous as hell and the other guy is just some dead guy. But the museum is awesome, filled with old printing presses throughout the ages and also with a large section devoted to non-western printing as well. Unfortunately, after the first room of presses, someone noticed me taking photos and made me stop. But here’s some printing-press porn for those into such things:

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Several years ago, I lived in Amsterdam for awhile. And I lived at the Amstel, a huge old historic building that had been squatted by some people that I came to know. A really magnificent place. Anyhow, I returned this summer after so many years away to find out that an eviction was immanent. I borrowed a key to the now-empty building and went through to photograph what was left of the place. The last two of these shots are panoramas, and really need to be seen a bit larger to be truly appreciated.

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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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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 in Finland!

Finland is one of my favorite places. This is my third time here… I guess I come here every five years. Anyhow, the reason Finland is great is because Finnish has no gendered pronouns! For awhile I was advocating its use as the universal language, but I never got past cursing, ordering beer, and thanking people. Also, Finnish doesn’t have the word “please,” near as I can tell. Which is also somehow kind of cool.

Right, anyway, I went for a walk in the woods about five minutes from the house I’m staying at. I took pictures:

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I couldn’t help but think that whole “when in Rome, do as Romans do” cliche the whole time I was in the car on the way to Rome. I, of course, didn’t know what it is that Romans do. I still don’t. So instead I guess I did what tourists do. I went around the center of the city, I went to the Colosseum and I went to the Forum. I thought about how the Goths sacked Rome and about how lovely it will be when the Goths get their shit together and sack the rest of civilization.

I took a lot of photos of the gladiator stuff, because its fascinating to me. It’s sort of the root of civilization: you take people, make them put on ridiculous costumes, and then make them kill each other. All the while the rest of the civilization cheers them on. It really gets right down to the root of it. I probably also took lots of photos of the various helmets and such because I’m a geek and grew up playing dungeons and dragons. There was also an old-school multitool on display, which is cool.

And there was the best human statue I’ve ever seen.

We also went to a squatted 19th century castle (it had a moat! it counts as a castle). Most of what I did in Rome, which was sit around a hacker conference, I didn’t take photos of.

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