Birds Before The Storm

Crazy old photos from the trash

Magpie — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:20:16 +0000

A few years back, my friends found a steamer trunk filled with old photos next to a trash can in Baltimore. I obsessively scanned everything in it. I only started uploading them to my flickr last night though. Lots of strange portraits!

Being The Explorations #5

Magpie — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:35:41 +0000

Being The Explorations is my series of photo zines that document my travels. I did one a season for a year, mid-2009 to mid-2010, but stopped for awhile. I picked it back up, though, and this edition is larger than the other 4 combined: it’s 170 full color pages with 228 photos from 2011. You can download the web-quality version for free, too!

download (free!)
purchase ($25 but worth it!)

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Taughannock Falls

Magpie — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:27:56 +0000

Two weeks later and I’m in the opposite corner of the country. On one of the coldest days of the year, my friend and I left Ithaca, NY to go to Taughannock Falls on Cayuga Lake. Okay, it wasn’t very far away. But it was beautiful.

The mud pots and slab city

Magpie — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:28:24 +0000

The desert called and I returned to Slab City. This time, I filled my car up with punx and we went to “the mud pots”, a geothermal spot with bubbling clay. It wasn’t long before most of us were covered with hot clay. Then we stopped at what I got told was an abandoned whorehouse before driving back to Slab City to shoot pellet guns and shave Matt’s head.

2011 in review

Magpie — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:11:28 +0000

I kind of enjoy these end of the year year-in-review posts. They help remind me that I actually get things done, since the end of December is usually a kind of low-point in my mood and productivity. I did one for 2010 and 2008. I tend to leave my personal life out of my blog, and I’ll continue in that habit.

I published Graceless: A Journal of the Radical Gothic, a magazine I edited.
My first fiction book came out: What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower.
I resumed my editorship of SteamPunk Magazine, which I’d dropped in 2008.
I participated in the US’s first general strike since the 1940s, in Oakland, California. I also had the privilege of helping facilitate numerous general assemblies at Occupy Santa Cruz and teach other folks about non-hierarchical decision-making.
I did readings and presentations across the US and a bit of Canada with my books, at anarchist bookfairs and steampunk conventions alike.
I traveled to five new countries: Greece, Bulgaria, France, Spain, and Canada (going when I was too young to remember doesn’t count).
I managed to live in one place for three months of the year!

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Eviction of Occupy Santa Cruz

Magpie — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 18:12:46 +0000

Occupy Santa Cruz, in San Lorenzo park, was told that everyone had to clear out by 5 or 6 on December 7th. I showed up to support in case the police came in to arrest people. But of course, as per usual with the occupy movement, the police waited until the early hours of the next morning to evict so that supporters and media weren’t on hand to document their tactics.

It was a sad site to see the camp being dismantled, but to be honest I’d expected it weeks or months earlier.

A few more photos after the cut:

25% off my stuff at AK Press, also your Magpie holiday shopping guide…

Magpie — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:42:32 +0000

Everything from AK Press’s enormous distro is on sale this weekend, 25% off. (AK Press is the US’s largest anarchist publisher and distributor, and is a collectively-run business.) They also publish and distribute my books and whatnot:
(shameless self-promotion)

SteamPunk Magazine Anthologized 7 issues of steampunk magazine under one beautiful cover.
Mythmakers & Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction: a book of interviews about fiction and politics, including Ursula K Le Guin, Alan Moore, Derrick Jensen, Lewis Shiner, Cristy C Road, and more.
What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower: a steampunk choose-your-own-adventure novel, complete with revolution and absinth.
A Steampunk’s Guide to the Apocalypse: A thick zine of survival skills and contraptions.
White Is The Color Of Death: Three short stories (one of which is mine) that explore a victorian snow-apocalypse and the subsequent re-ordering of society.
Being The Explorations #1: Covering my travels in summer 2009 and including fairly extensive coverage of moutaintop-removal mining.
Being The Explorations #2: Color photo zine of my travels, autumn 2009.
Being The Explorations #3: A color photo zine covering my travels from winter 2009-2010.

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Why Steampunk Still Matters

Magpie — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:47:47 +0000

Parliament and Wake have an amazing essay up called Why Steampunk (Still) Matters. This article comes from some of the folks running the 100k+ member steampunk community on facebook, but it also comes from people deeply invested in radical social change. It comes from people who, like me, felt betrayed by a part of steampunk’s disdain for actually challenging anything within the real world.

It’s long, but it’s worth reading to the end. Even for those who don’t give a shit about steampunk, it’s worth reading, because it gets to why having ideas for the future matters. I remember when I watched the Chomsky vs. Foucault debate how Chomsky lost terribly and sounded like a whiny liberal. But I was frustrated, because the core argument was Foucault arguing that revolt was all that mattered and Chomsky defending the idea of having ideas of what to replace this society with. And I agreed with Chomsky, even though he got his ass handed to him.

Destruction of a community park in Santa Cruz

Magpie — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:26:17 +0000

There’s been this gross dead corner lot in Santa Cruz for the past however many years, one decorated only by mulch and drug paraphernalia. So last weekend people turned it into a small park, to the immediate joy of other folks in the neighborhood. But a new Walgreens is being constructed nearby, and apparently they’re not so happy with it, so they bulldozed it. They were going to do it yesterday, but 30-40 people showed up to protect the space, so they left it alone. At 8 this morning, they came in, fenced in the people using the park, then called the cops on them. After the people were kicked out, they brought in a bulldozer. Some people stood in front of the bulldozer for awhile, and I guess someone put mulch in the exhaust. Cops came again, drove everyone away, then a repair truck showed up and they bulldozed the park. So now, once again, the corner is a bunch of dirt. Thanks, Walgreens. Glad to know that you’re not some just faceless chainstore that doesn’t pay attention to its local community.

More photos after the jump:

SteamPunk Magazine anthologized!

Magpie — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:30:20 +0000

Holy shit! 432 pages of SteamPunk Magazine, all in one place. I edited the first 4 (4 and a half?) issues of this magazine, which is now brought together lovingly by an introduction from Jake von Slatt and a cover by John Coulthart. To say I’m excited about this is an understatement. The pages of SteamPunk Magazine collect together everything I’ve loved about steampunk: the DIY ethos, the radical re-imagining of society, and the weird clanking machines.

The anthology was released by Combustion Books and is available for $20.99 from anarchist-run distributors AK Press and of course by that evil Amazon thing.