Permanent Autonomous Zone: A conversation with zine writers Erick Lyle and Jeff Miller

by Matt Dineen

What if our lives were filled with moments of liberation from the everyday? Is it possible to carve out spaces that challenge the dominant logic of the market, where we can pursue meaningful work and actualize our dreams? This most daunting task must begin with conversations between co-conspirators.

 At the end of this past summer, I had the pleasure of sharing such a conversation with two writers who were on a tour together with their recently-published books. Erick Lyle and Jeff Miller both come out of the underground zine community and had just released anthologies of their past work, Lyle’s SCAM and Miller’s Ghost Pine. The morning after their reading at the Wooden Shoe anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia, I escaped my stifling wage job—still on the clock—to interview them in a park in West Philly.

Do you guys want to start by talking about the tour you’re on? You did an event here in Philly last night. You’re heading to Baltimore tonight. Can you talk about the idea behind the tour and also your books that have come out recently?Jeff Miller: Originally, the tour was my idea. I’ve been doing a lot of promotional events for the book in Canada and I kind of wanted to break out a little bit. I also feel like there’s not enough cross-border, cross-pollination of zines. Erick came up to Canada in 2008 and we did a couple shows and that went really well. I just thought it would be nice to meet some people in the States, try to sell some books, tell some stories, and travel around a little bit.

Erick Lyle: Yeah, it’s neighborly to get together like this—fostering international camaraderie. Jeff’s anthology came out pretty much the same time as mine. We’ve been pen pals for almost 10 years, so the timing was pretty good. I probably wouldn’t have gone on this trip, honestly, but since Jeff was gonna do it—it just seemed like a good idea. Like, “Oh that would be fun to team up on this.” And the timing was great because I have the SCAM anthology out now as well.

I think what’s cool about this tour is that we’ve read with a lot of different folks, and it’s been all over the map. Like in New York we read with Cristy Road and Mike Taylor who have made zines for years, but also with this guy Colin who does a blog about how he’s gonna eat pizza in every pizzeria in New York City. Or with this woman Eleanor Whitney who writes about art and design, and also food. We are reading with China Martins tonight who has done a zine for years about being a mom. So I think what pulls it all together, what it all has in common, is that it is the underground press; it is indie press. And we’re reading in indie stores, and that this is about supporting underground and independent alternatives. That it’s a vital thing to do, and that there is a community that exists outside of the mainstream that’s trying to continue this tradition of independent stores.

So like last night, we read here in Philly at the Wooden Shoe which is a place that’s been carrying my zine for like 20 years. They’ve got a great new space. It’s better than ever, so it’s nice to see that. Just trying to be a part of that all the time is really important to me. We’re going to Red Emma’s in Baltimore which is a worker-owned place. So that’s pretty cool.

And it’s interesting because Jeff works at a bookstore in Canada. I have worked at a bookstore before, and I’ve seen the corporate tour where the author comes and there’s 2 people. And our shows have been pretty packed, I would say. There is a vitality in the independent scene. It is a real deal. So it’s cool to see that. We’ve put a lot of work into this over the years and work’s coming back to us too. We’re enriching it together.

JM: I feel like one of the best things about being independent is that you’re resourceful enough and economic enough to get around and there’s a community of people that will help you get around and come out and support. And yeah, it feels really good to know that more people came out last night at the Wooden Shoe than come out when we do an event at the kind of corporate bookstore where I work in Canada. There, some best-selling author will read and there’s like 3 people, 4 people. So, like Erick was saying, it is a real demonstration of independent community, and not necessarily just a zine community. I think we’re really blessed to have a lot of overlap with music communities and activist scenes. People love to come out and hear stories. Our lives are so under-represented by current media and current literature that when independent voices come along, people respond strongly and it’s really amazing.

Well Jeff, you mentioned that you’ll be going back to Montreal to work at this bookstore. I was wondering if you could both talk about life after this tour in terms of how you’re supporting yourselves while continuing to create your art and everything?

EL: Well, I recently moved to New York City—I guess it’s been about a year—and, theoretically, it’s the most expensive city in the entire country. Although I moved from San Francisco and I feel that San Francisco is even more expensive in a certain way. So, it’s a hustle. But I don’t know, for me, it’s a lot of tried and true methods; like I steal all my groceries. New York is full of plentiful, dumpstered food. I was just talking about this with a friend at this cafe here. He was like, “Yeah man, last time I was in New York I dumpstered a bike and a bag of weed.” [Laughs] People are so rich they’re like, “I got a bike at home. I’m just gonna throw this one away. I don’t feel like riding it today.” [Laughs] So there’s plenty of excess, and that’s what we’ve been living off all these years. There’s plenty of copy scams to get the zines printed. We go on tour and sell the zines. So that’s a profit. But I don’t know. It’s the same old thing: scraping by, selling writing here and there.

The stuff that’s in this new issue of SCAM was originally freelance journalism that was printed in a newspaper and I wanted to re-present it to the punk scene. It was in the San Francisco Bay Guardian so I knew people weren’t gonna know about it. The usual SCAM readers weren’t gonna see that so I wanted to get it out to the bigger punk scene.

But it’s the same old scam, basically. Making it happen in any way. I just live in such a way that my priority is time, more than money. And that’s always been what SCAM magazine is about to me: the idea that you’re taking your life back, to devote it to the things that you want to do. That’s its own kind of work but it feels meaningful to me. I basically just spend all my time writing and doing things as much as I can for the creative stuff I want to do. And I’m always broke because of it, but I feel pretty good about it.

Oh also, the government of Canada pays me to not write zines. [Laughs]

JM: I don’t understand. [Laughs] Yeah, as far as money goes, it’s always been a struggle. But I feel like when you start monetizing the things that you care about, that’s when everything goes wrong, basically. If I were to say, “I’m gonna put, like, 50 hours into this zine and after I scam the copies I better make 10 dollars an hour.” If that’s your goal then you’re kind of doomed from the start. It’s just not gonna work out for you. So, I don’t know. It’s like Erick was saying, just living cheap and trying to keep as much time free as possible. I have a bunch of friends who are writers in Montreal and some of them have tried to find jobs where they can make enough money so that in the summer they have time to write or whatever. But I’ve always felt like that’s sort of a bad idea. The key, really, is to find a way to live on nothing. It gives you endurance as a writer if you’re scraping by somehow.

But yeah, in the 13 years of doing Ghost Pine it hasn’t been too much of a struggle. When you decide you want to do something you just have to fuckin’ do it and make it happen, despite all the obstacles that get thrown in your path. And maybe now it’s a lot easier just because I know the ins and outs of it through trial and error. And I’m more confident in myself, knowing that I can do it, pull it off and get better. So my advice would be just to accept being poor, strive on, and make whatever you need to make...
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The remainder of this conversation is published on Toward Freedom.

Matt Dineen lives and conspires in Philadelphia where he is part of the Wooden Shoe collective. He is also a publicist for radical activists and artists with Aid & Abet booking. You can write to him at: mattdineen@aidandabet.org and see things that he’s written and collected at: http://passionsandsurvival.blogspot.com

For more information about Erick Lyle and SCAM check out: http://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/zines/3124/
For more information about Jeff Miller and Ghost Pine check out: http://ghostpine.wordpress.com/

Seth Tobocman Performance and Interview

Political artist and founding editor of World War 3 Illustrated Seth Tobocman performs pieces from his latest book Disaster and Resistance (AK Press) on the Valley Free Radio program "Passions and Survival" in Northampton, MA. Fellow World War 3 editor Rebecca Migdal also performs a piece. They were joined by musicians Steve Wishnia, Eric Blitz, and Andy Laties before a conversation with host Matt Dineen. Recorded on October 13, 2008.

Listen to the recording here.

On the Lower Frequencies: An Interview with Author Erick Lyle

By Matt Dineen


When I was asked if the community radio station I'm involved in would like to co-sponsor an event with legendary zinesters Erick Lyle (aka, Iggy Scam) author of Scam and Cindy Crabb (Doris), I enthusiastically signed us on right away. Before their reading at Food For Thought Books Collective in Amherst, MA, I was going to interview Erick on my radio show about his brand new book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, and about the struggle to do what you love while surviving in a capitalist society. But that interview didn't happen. They were doing a late night event in New York featuring a performance by one of Erick's bands, Onion Flavored Rings, and my show is pretty earlier in the morning. So we just waited until after the event to chat.


Going into the interview I was inspired from their reading in which they took turns sharing stories from their books and zines. Cindy read about moving to the Ohio countryside and the challenge of talking about politics again without being dogmatic, while Erick told San Francisco tales of the city's most infamous 25 hour-a-day donut shop, transforming an abandon building on Market St. into a cultural center, and an April Fools Day "Pro-War" march right after the Iraq War began. I rode in their borrowed tour van back to Northampton, Ramones on the stereo, where Erick and I sat outside the local bowling alley off the freeway onramp and had the following conversation about writing, work, his book, and creating the kind of world we want to live in.

How do you usually respond when people ask you, "What do you do?" What does that question mean to you?

EL: What do I do? Well, I guess I've always felt like I'm a writer since I was a little kid. It's how I see the world—in terms of being a writer. I don't ever take pictures of things on vacations and stuff like that. I'm always just describing things in my head. I think writing informs my basic interaction with the world. And I've never thought of myself as an activist and all that, but I have always thought of myself as a writer.

Can you talk about living in San Francisco and not working a full-time wage job and what that means for someone who identifies as a writer?

EL: Well, it depends on what you call work. I haven't had a real, straight job in almost 20 years, but I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country to live in. So this is the paradox. I would say that I'm part of a community of folks in San Francisco—activists, writers, artists—that work harder than anybody, that are working like 80, 90 hours a week on their own projects. When I was at the Coalition on Homelessness working there, people didn't quit working until 10, 11 at night and then a lot of people slept in the office. None of those folks are really getting paid but it's their life's work to do this stuff.

In the book I talk about this street newspaper I used to do called, The Turd-Filled Donut with my best friend Ivy. We were putting out this skid row newspaper, living in welfare hotels and writing about the neighborhood, trying to highlight people's struggles: For tenants to organize against their shitty hotel owners, or for homeless people who were organizing to demand housing and things like that. We spent hours, all the time working on this paper, interviewing people, editing the paper, getting art for it, putting it out on the streets. It was a free newspaper. We gave it away. So that's work, but it's not work for financial remuneration.

That's kind of the subject of my buddy from San Francisco Chris Carlsson's new book [Nowtopia], how people are looking for community and meaningful work outside of, let's say, wage slavery. You know, most of the work that people are doing is completely meaningless and is not benefitting themselves or each other or the planet. It's just totally busy work and people are really dissatisfied with it. So there's all kinds of folks that are willing to work themselves to the bone 25 hours a day for what they believe in, but we're not working for…I haven't had a service industry job or something for a long time. The last real job I had was in 2000, I worked at a queer youth homeless shelter. That was the last "official" job I had. Since then, it's been freelance writing, crime, things like that…make ends meet. That's how it is. But always working on other stuff like putting on punk shows, protests, putting out a magazine that doesn't really pay for itself.

I think that element of community is so important, like the one in San Francisco you are part of, and relating that to the social pressure that a lot of people who don't have a community like that face. They can have these ideas, wanting to work on their own projects, doing things that aren't completely defined by a status job. But then they have pressure from their families, the larger society and just the economic realities of daily life. And that can be challenging even for people who do have really supportive communities.

EL: Yeah, I mean, things are awful right now with the economic situation…We're so far from changing things. We're sitting next to a freeway onramp. Everything is geared toward people having to drive everywhere they need to go. The food's being trucked in. The wage level is so low. The work is unskilled. People are working practically minimum wage. They need two or three jobs to make it. The economic situation in this country definitely makes it so that people are totally alienated and isolated. It's very cutthroat. It's an awful situation.

Some things you see are positive examples, like tonight we had an event sponsored by several collectives. People have come together to collectivize their workplace. That's one step in a positive direction. Is that gonna happen everywhere? I don't know. I don't think that invalidates the work that my community does, to say that we don't have an answer for how to get out of Wal-Mart or something. I know there are movements nationwide of people trying to hold these chain stores accountable for their labor practices, for their environmental practices...

Read this interview in its entirety at TowardFreedom.com
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Matt Dineen is a writer and the host of Passions and Survival, a weekly program on Valley Free Radio in Northampton, MA. Contact him at: passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

The Suspension of Fear: A Conversation With Sailor Holladay

By Matt Dineen
There's something oddly alluring to me about college towns. Perhaps surrounding myself in such an environment provides an illusion that my college years will forever live on and allow me to deflect the cold permanence of the so-called real world. Moving from one transient community to another, I found myself in Northampton, MA in 2005 looking for a cheap place to live after a few months of apartment-hopping. This was when I first met my new roommate Sailor Holladay, who like most people in this area, moved here for school. We lived together for the remainder of Sailor's time at UMass-Amherst. The following interview was conducted on my radio show "Passions and Survival" in May of 2007, just before thousands of diplomas were handed out, summer plans were actualized, and the population of this peculiar valley turned over once again. Our conversation covered the politics of debt and academia, traveler culture, the desire to desire, and the forging of practical ways to create and support radical projects.

Matt Dineen: Let’s start by talking about the de-politicization of the academy. Can you talk about how the Social Justice Education program at UMass-Amherst has differed from other higher education environments you have participated in?

Sailor Holladay: Yeah. What’s been interesting is, that while I’ve been cradled in this program within Higher Ed., I’m still in this huge research university that’s continually getting more and more elite. They say the average family income of UMass-Amherst undergrads at this point is $100,000 a year. So UMass is getting more conservative, more economically oppressive, however you want to put it. On the one hand I’ve been around some really radical, really amazing people in my program, but I’ve also been situated in the larger university and taken classes outside of my program. I didn’t come to the realization until maybe four months ago, in my third semester, that one of the functions of educational institutions, is two fold: Quarantine a small minority of radical or potentially radical intellectuals into tenured positions and push them farther and farther away from communities struggling towards a more desirable system; while the rest of us, public intellectuals—people who don’t need buildings to think—many of us who have fought to get here, we get saddled with debt, huge amounts of debt. I have undergrad students that I work with who are three years into their education with $60,000 of debt. So we internalize the belief that we have to get a job. You know, “there aren’t any other options.” That’s what we’re told. “What would you do other than get a job out of college?” And this process—getting the job, paying off the debt—serves to estrange us from the communities that we may have been connected to in struggle before we became indebted, or prevents us from being able to connect with those communities. That is why I’m so excited about the notion of having passions at all, of being in an incubator enough to figure out what my passions are amidst the system. To be able to survive in the system with our passions is one thing, but many of us don’t know what we want to begin with. So these processes, the miseducation and the debt that comes with them, is one complex way to keep us from even figuring out what we want, let alone act on those desires.

MD: Speaking from my experience, being out of school for four years now and avoiding this route of going back into academia, it’s been a political decision on some level. It’s the challenge of self-education, continuing to talk about ideas and create change outside of these academic institutions is a challenge because of these structures you’re talking about.

SH: Also, it’s not something that’s possible alone. We need other humans to do that with. There’s also the issue of fear. There are systems in place that are selling fear to us and when we buy into that we go down roads that may be comfortable to us, but they’re not things that are creating new alternatives.

MD: Well, let’s talk about the suspension of fear. After college there is this social pressure to go out and use your education to get a well paid job, to reap the material rewards. I think most of us who have been in this situation have realized that it’s not that easy, but there are also some of us who reject those values.

SH: In terms of the ease, both of us come from poor and working class backgrounds. Without the institutional connections it’s that much more challenging.

MD: That’s something we should get into: the privilege it takes to suspend fear. For me, coming from a working class background that privilege hasn’t come in terms of material abundance. It hasn’t come in terms of capital, or financial wealth, but by first taking the risk of applying to college. Most of my friends in high school who came from similar class backgrounds didn’t even bother applying, thinking, “Oh, I can’t afford that.” But I took the risk to go for it. I got financial aid, went to school, and jumping into it I accrued what some call social capital or cultural capital. And I think getting out of college I had that sort of privilege which helped me really suspend some of these fears, enabling me to not have a job for a while, leaving to travel and acquiring more cultural capital through experiences that I brought back with me and then figured things out.

And there have been so many challenges and struggles, but at the same time there’s been a lot of privilege involved with those decisions. But let’s talk about the present moment in our lives. We’re both at sort of a crossroads. Let’s look forward. Let’s talk about the trajectory that we may or may not be following. [Laughs]

SH: Yeah, I think that looking forward is possible when we suspend fear. I have a want to notice how much of those messages are coming from all over, at least in my world. They’re coming from the system but also from people that I care about, who deeply care about me and care about my wellbeing, who are locked in, who are afraid. They are afraid for me. They’re afraid for themselves. They’ve seen the ways in which people who don’t conform are ravaged in some way—economically, emotionally—by the current system. So it’s tricky. I guess, for me, the suspension of fear becomes possible when I’m in an environment where I’m surrounded by people who are interested in that, interested in suspending fear. That’s what I appreciate about having you as a roommate, Matt Dineen. [Laughs]

This is where identity becomes messy. Just because I share certain identities or backgrounds with folks, doesn’t mean that we’re going to be launching into the future together in a way that is more desirable. In fact, so much of these fear recordings are implanted specifically around identity—poor folks, LGBT folks, for different groups that I’m a part of, fear is a huge piece of keeping that identity in place. Choosing to mobilize around identity, and only identity, is something that I’m not interested in at this point. Mobilizing across identity, around desire, and the mutual desire to desire is what I find fun and worthwhile. Because these kinds of conversations are not encouraged in the current system they become challenging to have if we have the fear piece. So if we can shake it off or suspend it then we can get somewhere.

MD: Well here we are. [Laughs] Let’s talk about desire. In terms of incorporating my desires into this trajectory of what I’m doing with my life, I left a job and have been traveling off and on the last two months but am now committing myself back to this area, coming back to this piece of geography. So now for the first time since I’ve lived here I feel grounded and I want to stay here, but then it’s: what do I do with that? I do have a potential job opportunity that I’m pursuing right now that could lead me to financial stability for the first time in my life. I’ve been playing around with that idea and want to be very conscious of it. I’m not lusting after the material success. I’m more focused on getting rid of my debt and maybe saving some money, but most importantly doing what I truly want to be doing with my life. I want to be around people who are talking about these issues and this potential job could also help me incorporate my desire for participatory democratic organizing. I’ve been thinking about these possibilities.

You know, there’s that term “disposable income” and I think that term is rooted in this culture of disposability, and I don’t want income that I’m just disposing of. Any surplus income I have, I want to be redistributing to projects that I support. For example, the Catalyst Project in San Francisco working for collective liberation across these identity lines that you mentioned. Supporting them, supporting various organizations that are doing really important work that need the financial support of people who can afford to support them because of the system we’re living in. And I think a lot of people who are working toward social change don’t have the privilege of supporting them monetarily and that perpetuates the system. These projects that are trying to create fissures within this structure, they’re struggling too and their effect is limited.

So for you, what are your thoughts about finishing school and leaving this area soon?

SH: It’s funny because I have spent many years being angry at young people who I perceive as coming from middle-class backgrounds, who I perceive as “living simply.” I’ve had rage towards folks who have made choices to not work, who have made choices to travel around and eat freely or cheaply. You know, eat my food and take showers in my shower…but now I’m turning into one of those people! [Laughs] So right now I’m trying to suspend the fear. I plan to spend the summer, as much of it as possible, traveling to conferences and gatherings. I came to the realization just a couple weeks ago that I don’t actually have to get a job as soon as I graduate. One of the things I’m interested in is the notion of—and this comes from Heinz Von Foerster—acting so as to always increase the number of alternatives. I come from a place where if you have one choice that’s good, to have at least one choice. But what I’m learning is that if I don’t have at least three choices it’s not a choice, whatever I’m choosing. So I want to act always as to increase my number of alternatives. So for me to say, I don’t have to work…Sure, I could say that I have to work, that I’ve got $48,000 of debt that I'm graduating with and that my choice, my one choice is to work. But as a way to move towards self-actualizing my own liberation I’m making a language choice to say that I don’t have to get a job when I graduate and to state that in language is to create another alternative for me. So yeah, I’m working against my internal patterns and also my external environment that tells me that my only option is to get a job. One of the other things about that is that in the last couple years, especially in the last year, I’ve placed so much emphasis on personal relationships and the idea creation that comes out of them. It seems as though, I’m learning, that when we place value upon relationships other things fall into place. If I am only placing value on, say my job and my housing situation—the things that get my needs met—I don’t leave as much time for relationships and those don’t automatically come into place. I’m noticing that I’m actually an inspiration for folks. I see people shake off their ties to the current system around me, just by simply existing and thinking in different ways, encouraging thoughts that happen with me and around me to be other than patterned thoughts.

MD: That’s definitely inspiring to me and I’ve been thinking about all of this over the past two and half months of not working myself. There’s this assumption in our society that if you’re not working a paid job then you’re lazy, but a lot of us our involved with many different projects. I think that some people can’t even imagine what their lives would be like if they didn’t have school to go to and than after school straight to a job. So there’s the politics of boredom, because without these structures to mold us, “what could we possibly do with our lives?” Part of it is realizing that desire, to go beyond this structure and remain productive in our own ways, doing a lot of work that’s not necessarily defined as a job.

SH: Yeah, it’s also pointing towards when we get ourselves out of the hierarchical structure. The idea isn’t to not have a structure. The idea is that look, we can create our own together. By creating our own structures we become accountable, not responsible, to them and ourselves. The more people that we can get to take a second glance at the structures we all find ourselves in, in those moments we can begin to create our own temporary structures together. That’s what I’m off to do. And those begin in conversation…Another thing that has come up for me lately is noticing that I have a new feeling of being able to receive. I definitely got it real young that I was to be valued based upon my labor, whatever I could produce. It’s been interesting to receive and be open to the potential of future receptions. And it’s funny because those folks who are making offers are people who are working really hard to survive in the current system. So, how can I support those people? One thing I’ve been interested in lately is acting without fear of future funding and actually recruiting funders into projects as collaborators—knowing that there will always be funders, but that we need more makers. We need more artists. We need more thinkers, more project participants. And so if we can act without fear of funding than those folks who typically see themselves as funders of projects can become co-conspirators creatively with what is being made.

MD: And that fear is often what brings us back to these jobs that steal so much of our time away from us, and prevent us from engaging in those projects. That’s also related to what I mentioned before: if we do find ourselves in a situation where we have surplus income, to really seek out who is doing important work that truly needs that funding. It’s what some people have called social change philanthropy—so not just these large nonprofit organizations, but really grassroots folks who are doing radical stuff.

SH: As opposed to, you know, “Well, I haven’t had a car in six years so I’m gonna go get that Prius now.”

MD: Yeah, exactly. Trying this mental exercise: What would I do with four times the income that I lived on last year? This is a similar exercise that people go through when they fantasize about winning the lottery, and oftentimes the response to that question is: more stuff. The term I thought of for this is acceleration of lifestyle. I’m interested in injecting into this mental exercise, or if I ever find myself in this situation, the challenge to resist that acceleration of lifestyle materially.

SH: And how much of the acceleration of lifestyle is brought on by the deep sadness that we feel as individuals when we are pushed away from our communities that we were a part of or never got to get in touch with? It’s what Kathleen Cleaver calls the ‘personal aggrandizement’ that happens: My community is left back here suffering and somehow I figured out how to do this thing. And so now I’m going to comfort myself with X, Y or Z… I like this notion of actually figuring out practical ways of “giving back,” supporting projects from the communities we have solidarity with.

MD: Yeah, it’s working towards a redistribution of wealth on that level too.

Matt Dineen did not get hired for the job that would have paid him a living wage, but he still lives in Northampton, MA. Dineen serves on the Board of Directors of Valley Free Radio, the low-power community radio station in which he also hosts "Passions and Survival." This show is part of a project exploring the dilemma of following our passions while surviving in a capitalist society. Dineen also books tours for radical activists and artists with Aid and Abet Booking. Write to him at: passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

Sailor Holladay spent all of Summer 2007 travelling and conversing and is currently living in Urbana, Illinois participating at the School for Designing a Society.

Wonders of the World: An Interview with the Missoula Oblongata

By Matt Dineen

You may not know it yet but the Pioneer Valley is home to a self-sufficient, experimental theater company. It’s called the Missoula Oblongata and it is run by Northampton residents Madeline Ffitch and Donna Sellinger. They proudly declare that their self-sufficiency means that, “the artists who write the scripts also perform, design, build, and light the play themselves.” I had a chance to speak with Madeline and Donna before they left for a nationwide summer tour with their new show, “The Most Mysterious Day of the Year,” a story revolving around a community boxing ring, the imminent demise of the Morse code, and a kaleidoscope convention.

Let’s start with the origin of your name and the route from Montana to Northampton where you’re now based.
Madeline: Well, Donna had been making theater on the East Coast for a long time, but I was living and going to school and writing in Montana. I really loved it there and when we decided to start collaborating, Donna moved there and we made our first show, “Wonders of the World: Recite” in Missoula, Montana.

Do you want to talk about that show?

Donna: Sure. I had just finished a tour that was from September through December [2005] and it ended in Idaho so I was able to move to Montana. We spent about three or four months building the show. We wrote it in about two or three weeks and then rehearsed it in a dark basement, just the two of us. And then we invited our friend Leo Gephardt to write the music and we had our friend Sarah Lowry, who is now the third member of the Missoula Oblongata, come up from Denver to direct it. And then we toured it all summer from May to August and then moved here and got a lot of invites and requests to come perform it again which we had not really anticipated. We did a January tour and some shows in February.

What brought you to Western Massachusetts?

M: We were really happy in Montana and we had a really wonderful community there. It’s a very regionally-specific area of the country where there are some true originals.

D: We miss it very much.

M: Yeah, we’re pretty homesick. But I got into grad school here in the MFA program at UMass for fiction writing. And so I decided to move here and since Donna’s family is from the Northeast it made sense for her to move back and for us to keep making theater based out of Northampton.

Donna, can you talk about what you’re doing in Northampton in addition to this theater group?

D: Actually, this theater group is all I do, and I’m very happy about that. It’s all I really want to do. It’s my ambition so I’m glad to just be living somewhere and having a life where I can spend all my time working on creating theater with my very favorite people and realizing all of our artistic dreams. It’s really fun.

So, has this been a balance for you, Madeline, being in this graduate program and doing the Missoula Oblongata? Has that been challenging for you in terms of time?
M: Well, I’m lucky because the program here is very supportive. So far, the faculty seems to just want and expect that you’ll be doing your own artistic work, and you have some pretty structured goals of your own and they try not to interfere. If they do have to interfere they’re usually pretty apologetic. They expect that you’ll spend most of your time working on your own things and for me that’s really true. Also, it’s all connected. Being in graduate school definitely gives me support, some time, and a little bit of extra money to be able to just work fulltime on creative work and that includes writing and also theater for me. So it’s pretty complimentary…Donna and I write together and the theater company is a fulltime job for us. We work on it everyday, sometimes all day and sometimes have to remind each other to have fun and go dancing, [laughs] and not just talk shop all the time. And actually this semester I’m doing an independent study which is making the new show. So I prioritize the Missoula Oblongata and I find a way to spend almost all of my time doing that.

D: There’s no part of what we do as a little theater company that is peripheral to any of us. We’ve really worked to simultaneously prioritize this and dedicate ourselves to it quite single-mindedly, to the point of pathology, and yet have our own lives where we can do other things.

You’ve mentioned this really great community in Missoula and I’m curious how this area has compared.

D: It’s a really interesting question because we spend a lot of our time here missing Missoula and wondering, “Is there even a niche for us here? What are we doing?” We’ve struggled a little bit to find a community here that we can feel really connected to and to make ourselves feel like an integral part in whatever scene is going on. But at the same time, the shows that we’ve had here were extremely well attended to the point of people having to leave because there wasn’t enough room. We’re really well received and it seems like people want more things to happen. All of the feedback that we’ve gotten from people in this community has been like, “Thank you for making things happen!” So that is a real blessing because though in Missoula we had a great time and people we’re really supportive of experimental performance, I would be lying if I said things were as well attended there. It seemed like people there were happy to have us and excited about it, but so far the reception here has been really warm.

M: Yeah, it was a little slow going at first, especially since I was the pioneer coming out here in September and Donna joined me in October. I really had just met people in my program, but now we’ve met other people in the community who we really admire as performers and seem to be doing some pretty experimental, interdisciplinary things. That’s exciting. So, I think it’s easy to move somewhere and just feel like, “Oh, there’s nothing going on. Remember how it used to be where we lived before?” But I think that just has to do with being on the periphery and then learning how to get involved, and find community and respect the groundwork that other people have been laying to create a scene. There’s some pretty amazing and gutsy experimental work going on here.

For more information and tour dates visit: http://www.themissoulaoblongata.com/

Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Northampton. Contact him at: passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

More for Everybody: An Interview with James Tracy

By Matt Dineen


It was a warm summer night in Western Massachusetts when I first met anti-poverty activist James Tracy. He was on tour at the time, performing with the Molotov Mouths Outspoken Word Troupe. On the road from San Francisco, Tracy and his poetic comrades filled a kitchen with words of political intensity and inspiring visions. Soon after that night I came across “The Civil Disobedience Handbook” which he edited as tool for “the Politically Disenchanted.” Tracy’s dedicated community organizing work adds yet another dimension to a life deeply committed to the struggle for social change. I spoke with him earlier this year at the Left Forum in New York City where he participated in a panel on “Non-Reformist Reforms,” or what he simply calls “reforms worth fighting for.”

Let’s start with living in San Francisco and the evolution of your time there in the past 10 years or so, in terms of incorporating your politics into everyday life and the challenges of living in that area amidst all the dramatic changes that have taken place.
In San Francisco, really up until about 1993, it used to be a place where people could come and create counter-institutions. The rent was low enough that somebody with a dream about doing an infoshop or alternative health stuff could do it and the jobs were plentiful enough that you could work part-time, for your wages. You didn’t have to be a trust fund kid to get cool projects going. Building counter-institutions goes all the way back to the sixties with the newspapers and things like that. So now because of the sky-rocketing cost of housing it’s a lot harder to do those things. People don’t have the time to just take off. Some people I know do a really good job at working minimally for wage work. But those tend to be people who either have access to highly specialized skills where they can work two or three days out of the week with web design or what not. Or they have a lot of money. Or they’re just really, really good and highly skilled at living in a way that doesn’t consume much.

And I’m not really any of those. I work for a living. I’m an adult-ed teacher, in a way that’s increasingly political. I’ve always had a job and done politics on the side. Part of that is just financial. You know, you just gotta pay your rent. And then part of it is even though the sacrifice of working and doing your politics and following your creative passions is hard, it’s hard to manage your time, I’ve always felt that not divorcing myself from everybody else definitely enriches those things. My politics are enriched by the fact that I’ve driven trucks and wiped butts and bussed tables instead of kind of going the alternative lifestyle route. I’m not dissing the alternative lifestyle people it just hasn’t been my thing.

Can you talk more about how those experiences working jobs that have enriched your politics?
Yeah, like when I was a truck driver, I was already political, but I picked up sofas and delivered sofas all over the place and noticed how the city was laid out. It was right when the dot-com eviction boom was happening and my coworker and I just started noticing that we were doing a lot of pick ups for these landlords. People who they evicted had left some stuff behind so they donated it to the thrift store we were working at. So even though there’s a lot of theory behind the economics of housing and cities that are important to learn, it wasn’t theoretical—we were seeing it everyday, and hearing people’s stories saying, “Hey, that’s my sofa! Can you drive over here instead of donating it?” So it was a school. I’ve always felt that work was a form of the academy. It just helps with staying connected more than a lifestyle approach.

With your community organizing work have you had jobs where you’re a full-time, paid organizer?

Yeah.

Can you talk about that experience more and how it differed from those times in your life when you were working another job and doing politics on the side?
Yeah, my one full-time paid organizing job was at the Coalition on Homelessness and it was fun. I got to help them build their Right to a Roof program and we got a lot of really tangible things done. It was very enriching. I mean, the wages were shit. So it’s not like I was working for a labor union or something where you’re starting at 40 [thousand] and might be pulling down 60 in a few years. We were always laying ourselves off and things like that, but technically it was paid and I got to do it full-time. And I got to really build up a project that I was then able to turn back over to folks that had been homeless and at some point it was healthy. So that was nice because it allowed me the time to build something really quickly and do it well because that’s what I was suppose to do from 9 to 5.

And before that I had been part of a group that I helped found called the Eviction Defense Network where we only got paid stipends. The idea was that everyone that was getting a stipend would still be a worker. But your stipend would either allow you to work a little bit less out in the rest of the world and dedicate a little bit more time to the group, or it would just allow you to make up for the sacrifice of coming to meetings and outreaches and stuff that was really fucking tiring. I think we were getting paid like a 250 bucks stipend.

I actually like that model a lot. The core community organizers should get a little stipend. You shouldn’t necessarily be getting a full-time thing because when you’re a paid organizer full-time, even if you’re getting paid shit wages like we did at the coalition, you forget things like scheduling meetings when people can actually make them and things like that. When you’re scheduling around the 9 to 5 your sensitivity to those things tend to go down over time. It’s around your busy schedule not the busy schedule of people trying to form a tenants union or whatever you’re supposed to be there for. And I’m not against paid, full-time organizing. I’m just against it as a religion, as the only one model of social change. And there’s tons of problems with it, but it’s necessary at times.

In that job organizing tenants how did these questions differ for the people you were organizing compared with your experiences and that of other activists in terms of their survival and trying to identify what they really wanted to be doing with their lives despite the economic realities limiting that. Or did it differ at all?

Oh, it really differed—especially now with the conversation on the Left around the “non-profit industrial complex,” and questioning the coordinator class and who’s in it and who ain’t and all that. You know, we can sit around and talk about this shit forever, and talk in circles, and only on alternative Tuesdays actually get to something that’s productive and useful. But when I was organizing tenants they all had jobs. They didn’t want to be a paid organizer. They wanted to do what they had done. And they were glad that there was somebody who was being paid to be able to help them collectivize their energies, because it’s a big sacrifice to have somebody have to come out to a demo or a meeting after work. They were glad that someone was transcribing the notes and stuff like that.

I’m mainly thinking of these two buildings I helped organize—and I don’t like to think of organizing in terms of “I organize” and “they are organized,” because that sounds too much like colonizer and colonize. But if it’s a healthy situation where it’s transparent and you’re accountable, people definitely liked having a resource. It was almost like being their secretary, to make their self-activity more effective. The ideal model is: you build organizations where folks from whatever base take over all the positions and all the decision-making. But in real life, sometimes people are like, “I’m happy being a teacher. I’m a janitor. I don’t want your job.” It’s just a gray area thing. If you do it well and if you do it in an accountable way many people are glad to have the resource, if you’re actually just being a resource for folks.

Can you talk about the relationship between your politics and the more creative, artistic projects you’re involved with and the struggle to put time and energy into that in addition to political organizing and working to pay the bills?

Art is something I do because it makes my head feel better. You know, I can get really, really stressed out doing this stuff and writing, story telling is a part of mental health for me. I think I would be a really cynical sectarian bastard without it, so it’s something I gotta do. But luckily for the most part, if I’m writing poetry, it’s something I can do on the bus. I have a little notebook that I can scribble things down in. Of course there’s a revision process because I’m very much into craft, but I don’t have to buy a canvass for it. I don’t build fighting robots as my artistic expression. [Laughs] I can write on the back of a napkin, you know, so it fits in really well. But it’s hard.

The creative process is really nice, but everybody wishes they had more time for it. Without really listening to all the people I’m inspired by and getting to know them, my poetry would probably just be some kind of weird Baudelaire type of stuff. Which is fine—I like that stuff too—but it would be a lot less rich if I didn’t have the insights of folks. And hopefully I can amplify their voices and their stuff in a non-exploitative way. It goes up and down. Right now, a project I’m working on that’s nonfiction is a lot harder. Sometimes I get really aggravated and wish that I had all this access to the academy just to write. But if I had that access and fellowships, I’d probably end up being divorced from my real passion. And the real source of creative passion for me is the political work, the community work.

Well, you mentioned the academy. Have you ever thought about going in that direction more as a way to sort of solve these issues on some level? Would you plug into academia so you wouldn’t have to worry as much about financial security?

Well, it wouldn’t work right now, but in the future who knows? There’s a lot of good models—like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a wonderful model of a down, amazing public intellectual who uses her resources. But the thing that gets me about the academy and organizing and privilege is that a lot of professors are making a shittier salary than a lot of janitors these days, but their privilege comes in different ways other than finance. The people who got in a long time ago are making real good money and they have all these resources. But the people who are being hired now into the academy—it’s not guaranteed that you’re gonna have any resources. You used to be able to get the college to pay for speakers and now you can give them a little 25 bucks, like Roxanne has talked about. So it’s not guaranteed...It’s a possibility but it’s not where I’m going right now.

Is there anything else you want to add about this whole issue of passions and survival?

I just really think, as the great dub reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson said, we need more time. There’s all these great campaigns going on and most of them are completely worthy of our support. Certainly before we start thinking about agitating for the 30 hour week we need to put an end to this murderous fucking war. But we also have to think about, as we’re talking about economic justice and racial justice, reclaiming time so we can develop our capacity to participate more fully in the world and enrich ourselves as human beings that live in communities. We’ve had the 40 hour work week for a hundred and something years. So now it’s time to go for the 30. We need more of just about everything. I mean, I condemn consumerism but I’m really skeptical of the folks that are saying the only solution is this individualistic: “consume less, consume less.” I think we should be talking about more for everybody. Not more mindless consumer shit, but more resources and more money. But most of all more time because that’s where you can create more pleasure and more happiness. And that’s a reform worth working for.
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Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Northampton, MA. Contact him at passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

Beyond Available Alternatives: An Interview with Rob Scott

By Matt Dineen

"What are you for?" Variations of that question were constantly hurled at the early global justice movement that erupted, in the U.S. at least, in Seattle during the actions which shut down the WTO meetings in 1999. This was often an attempt by the corporate media to discredit the movement as a group of aimless idealists protesting just for the sake of protesting. But in recent years, particularly with the rise of global and regional social forums, activists within the movement have taken that question seriously by prioritizing the need for visions of the kind of worlds that we want to live in.

Nearly a decade before the Seattle uprising, a school opened in Urbana, IL dedicated to making those worlds a reality. The School for Designing a Society invites its students to ask the question: "What would I consider a desirable society?" and spend an entire semester designing projects toward realizing that desire. Recently I had a chance to sit down with Rob Scott who is one of the School's full-time instructor's specializing in cybernetics and ecological design. He came on my radio program "Passions and Survival" where we discussed what it would be like to live in a society beyond the one we have now.

Let’s start with the School for Designing a Society. Can you describe what it is and how you got involved with it?
 

The School for Designing a Society is a project started by activists and artists, composers, poets, people interested in language, politics, economics, and social change. It is aimed at trying to create a space for people to talk about the world as they would like it to be rather than only talk about it as it currently is. So it was taken as a point of departure that people already have a critique of the current society and that’s well known. Just because one has an articulate critique there’s no evidence, that I’ve seen, that one can go directly from the critique of the existing society to one that they prefer. Some space, some time, some environment has to be set up where people can speak with each other about, “What would we put in the place of the system that we disapprove of?”

So we get students that are interested in living in a different society. And rather than start off commiserating with each other about what we don’t like, we try to put a temporary suspension on the discourse of criticism and complaint and encourage people to make proposals as to how they’d like to see the world be otherwise. And to that, the semester unrolls itself in a set of classes, seminars, often discussions and readings, aimed at generating projects, generating activities, works of art, political campaigns—whatever it is that would meet the desires of the women and men who come to the school hoping that society could be otherwise. And looking to generate evidence, because the society we prefer doesn’t sit before us and ask us to simply just hit a button on it. You actually have to sort of make up the language to talk to about it. So that’s mainly what the discussions are aimed at.

Some people frame this challenge in terms of vision and it seems like this is a very visionary project. At a talk that I saw Michael Albert give about radical visions for radical change he discussed how in the past thirty or forty years, if you piled up the manifestations of the critique of existing structures it would go miles into the sky. But then if you made another pile of visionary work dedicated to productively contributing toward alternatives it wouldn’t go past his knee. So it seems like what you guys are doing is very urgent in that sense.

Yeah, it’s precisely that. And it’s not meant as a slander or negation of those that make life work of trying to simply put language to describing the oppression that occurs in the current society and trying to give a voice to those that have always been oppressed by the structure of society as it currently exists. Rather it’s to say that, we do that too and we want in addition to that—not as a substitution or a deletion—but in addition, we want to have this other type of discussion. We would also like it to be that somewhere in the world there’s a time that we say: No, now critique, we check it at the door with our coat, and maybe along with our ego too, and that we don’t know what society it is that want; and that if somebody has got some idea or some starting point we take it seriously. And I could say, in response to Albert’s thing, I’ve at least got a file cabinet that comes up to my neck. So, we do generate quite a bit of stuff in Urbana.

I’m curious about your response to people who are uncomfortable with this idea in general, in terms of trying to map out alternatives. I think there’s this hesitancy towards it as people are afraid of it becoming a so-called “blueprint” for a new society that is too rigid. How do you respond to people who are hesitant to even engage with this sort of project?

Well, I agree. Certainly there’s a lot of people who are hesitant if somebody uses a word like blueprint because there are so many manifestations of that from the Twentieth Century that have so many awful consequences—social engineering projects that one wouldn’t find so savory to talk about first thing in the morning. I suspect that the main reason people get uncomfortable when they hear about the school is that it comes up in an environment in the current society. And in the current society, often times people are trying to keep their job, are trying to survive. So if one goes into, say, an academic department that’s basically making its living off of running a discourse of critique of the current system it can be pretty uncomfortable to hear someone come in and say: “Okay, but if we all already agree that we don’t want the current society when are we going to have a discussion about what would we prefer instead?” And that’s, to a large extent, why we wish to have a school that is separate because it’s not fair to our comrades who work in academia who are trying to have a critique of the current system to bring that discussion there. In a way, it’s already in the job description. It’s already built into the structure of the buildings that are there. You have libraries filled with books about the current system. If you’re talking about a system that doesn’t yet exist you’re in this little part called fiction or maybe somewhere in the English department, I don’t know.

But yeah, defenses against it—there are two types. There are people who really do want the current system. That’s another issue. There are people that, even miserable, will defend the current system, it won’t defend them. And they’ll sit there and they’ll get in your way and they’ll get upset. It might not make any sense in language, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make bodily sense to the person. And no insult against people who think and have adjusted their bodies to the current society because I suspect a lot of it comes from childhood conditioning, the necessity of safety. And most people on the planet Earth are brought up with the threat of violence if they challenge the status quo from a very early age. So it’s really, really weird that you could have a school for designing a society and not be burned at the stake. Go back a hundred years ago—this would not be in existence. A full-fledged, year-long school aimed at nothing else but proposing that society could be otherwise and doing whatever we can to bring that into existence. That’s not every era of history that you could get away with that. It’s a pretty unique moment right now. And so, people are shocked by it. They don’t know how to respond to it. This has never existed before. So no malice against people for being scandalized—in fact it’s probably invited.

Well, maybe we can get into more of the details about this project. The way we’ve been discussing it so far is rather vague. A “new society” could mean something potentially worse, to some people’s perceptions, than what we have now. What are some of the guiding values that are leading this project?

Well, that’s a good question. I’m not sure that I would wish to give a prescription. One of the main issues is that we are not sectarian, [believing] we already know which society we want. We’re mainly taking a departure from the arts and inviting people, especially people who haven’t had time in the arts. If you haven’t been in a performance department or studied performance you don’t know that people ask you to change your behavior, change your language, change the way you speak on the stage in front of a room full of people and say, “Just act differently.” And you have to act differently on the spot right then. It’s basically instant social change. And the people who are interested in fighting poverty or racism or any of the other oppressions that we live in our daily lives, whether it be on the bus or in our schools, families and so forth, that you can simply change the way you talk on the spot and the whole social environment changes on the spot. That’s mainly what we wish to get across—that that already is a step in the direction of freedom and not some specific program of, “Here’s how it should be…”

We want to illicit desire. I mean, the only extent to which I would say we have some values that we could put upon as a sort of requirement of being in the School is nonviolence: You’re not welcome to come to the school and use violence or oppress anyone. Beyond that, if you say you want it, if you’ve got desires—and by desire I mean something that’s not available in the current society that you’d like to see tried—if it’s nonviolent, non-oppressive and other people in the room feel that way; if you’ve got something you’d like to try in terms of a new social relationship, or just, “I’ve got this new word I’d like to try out,” or “I want to try a project, I think the way eat dinner together is fascist and I’d like to reorganize that,” go ahead. If Matt came to the School for Designing a Society, the invitation would be, “Let’s find out what Matt wants that would not be in the social world if not for Matt.” And not so much the very old fashioned image of school where you sort of pour knowledge into the heads of students and therefore they have it and that presumably helps things. I would say instead that, contrary to all the evidence, we’re hoping that discussion and human intelligence could be useful humans. And that’s not really a program.
Let’s get more into the issue of desire. I know that part of the goal of the School is to work toward creating a more desirable society. Can you make the distinction between desires versus wants or needs?

That’s a good way of putting it. I think of want as very general word. We use it in our daily lives in a colloquial way, which means casually, and we can say everything from, “I want a sip of water,” to “I want a different society.” And they’re two different things because having a sip of water isn’t hard. That’s an available alternative in the current society—for me at least, maybe not for everyone. Even if I say I want everyone to have access to water I’m starting to break the boundary of what’s possible in the current society because it’s structurally set up to make it not so. So I use the word desire when looking at available alternatives within the current society and [seeing] this is not on the plate of alternatives I already got. Or you could think of it as a range almost: To what extent would it be possible that the thing I’m asking for could be satisfied in the current society? And the extent to which it couldn’t be satisfied, that’s the extent to which I would say that’s a desirer taking place and not just a preferer. I think of it in terms of preference versus desire. Meaning, if you are just selectively agreeing with what the world already gives you, you have a preference and you aren’t actually calling anything into question or pushing for change.

Maybe to be a little more provocative, a lot of things that people say when they come to the School for Designing a Society initially, I would say, are preferences. Including: “I want a low-power FM radio station in town, I want community, I want a potluck every night, I want…” These are basic things. And again, no slander or critique against available alternatives, especially those ones. I mean I do those things—I’m on low-power radio right now! But the point is that in addition to that we can have this discussion of: Let’s see where that beginning of preference that we sort of get from our current society…where it starts to become desire is the extent to which it starts to challenge the structure of what already exists. “I want a low-power radio station in every single town.” Alright, that’s actually not available and the whole society might tremble a little bit if that became true. If I actually had that desire satisfied we might already be inching toward a different system. “I want everyone to have all their basic needs met.” That’s actually structurally out of wack with a planet in which 2 billion people have to spend most of their day walking to retrieve water. And you’re right to say, “How is it different than needs?” because needs are just about as far opposite as you can get from desires. Not only do they already exist in the current society but they’re proper to your body and…at least the way I talk about it.

When I use the word needs I’m talking about biological, body will break down and die if these conditions are not met. And that’s, I would argue, something that has to be considered if you’re interested in designing a society and doing it in a nonviolent and non-oppressive way.

The issue of needs is the survival piece of the passions and survival dilemma. What basic human needs do we have to fulfill and at what costs in the current society? I’ve been talking with a lot of people about how those needs affect their situations in terms of having to sell their hours at wage jobs and how that conflicts with the true passions that they want to be able to follow and the challenges of doing that. Maybe you could address this dilemma.

Yeah, I think I could. I would add though one term to what you’re bringing up. When I speak of needs I’m actually speaking of something proper to my body. And when I speak of, for instance jobs and money and quote-unquote, “I need a car” and all of that way of talking, I actually want to say that’s a property of the system we’re in but not a property of my body and therefore I’m going to use the word necessity. In the current system it’s a necessity that I have a car to get to work. When someone says that I’ll say, “Okay, I agree with that sentence.” But, “I need a car” is…I would claim that it is an undesirable way of speaking and we become victims of capitalism when we speak in terms of, “I need money to eat.” It’s actually grammatically absurd if you think about it. You don’t need money to eat. No one eats money. But in the current society I agree with you if you say that, “It’s of the utmost necessity that I have money in order to meet my need for nourishment.” I could steal, I could try to do other things, try finding fruit on trees or something. In the current system it will catch up with me and stop me from doing that at some point. So for me necessity is something where there’s usually a trace of some past system. Someone in the past desired something. There’s no need or requirement that society go in the direction of capitalism where all the necessities are owned. But it’s gone there. So now we’re left living in the traces of paradigms past and we speak with a language that’s supported institutional oppression and systemic violence. When we say these things we’re either aware of it or not aware of it. And what I want is that we begin to have a conversation to try to use that distinction: You’ve got desires and that’s something that’s not already on the menu of available alternatives. And then you’ve got needs and those never go away—I’m talking about nourishment, water, shelter from the elements, and I want to add things like touch. I almost want to add language and interaction—and those are proper to my body.

And in between those two zones, the zone of completely constructed stuff, just made up, you can have a society without radios. You can have a society without stop signs. All this stuff is traces of the fact that people decided to add something to the world that wasn’t already an alternative at some time in the past. In between there’s the necessities, the things that were wanted and somehow directly meet our needs for survival. I would like to live in a world in which the variety of ways in which the needs are met is an expanding variety, that there’s actually more alternatives there, that there would be more alternative necessities if you will. And it wouldn’t be that it all comes through the one channel. If you wanted to design a system—social engineering or controlling people—making it so there’s one way is an excellent control mechanism because every need gets met through the same chute and if you want to interfere with the whole society and how their needs are met you can interfere with that one chute. Especially if you speak of countries that import most of their food, they’re really just completely at the whims of the international market structures. And we might not experience it so much in our daily lives in this country but I would argue that in the next 50 years we probably will with respect to water and even certain other things because it’s inconceivable that any Americans I’ve met, U.S. citizens, would have access to the basic necessities that they meet their needs with without the petroleum economy and that’s going to be an issue. So the needs sort of clash in contradistinction to the desires, but they also have plenty of edge space in which you can make those kinds of connections.
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Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Northampton, MA. He is currently on tour with Ben Dangl, the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007).

For more information about the School for Designing a Society visit their website: designingasociety.org

The Soundtrack to Protest: An interview with David Rovics

By Matt Dineen

I was in high school the first time I saw David Rovics play. His politcal folk anthems helped contribute to my growing consciousness of global justice issues, radical history and social change. Several years have past and David has gone on to travel the globe on countless tours supplying a rousing soundtrack to protests and activist conferences wherever they pop up. He has also written hundreds of new songs as there is no shortage of material lately for politcal musicians. Now David has a new album out and is beginning to tour once again. Before he took off we had a chance to discuss the recent changes in his life, Middle East politics, and the state of activism today.

When we last spoke, you discussed how working as a full-time musician--booking your own tours and playing internationally--was the equivalent of running a small business. How has that operation changed this past year now that you are not booking your own shows? Has it given you more time for other pursuits?

It's been wonderful working with Jen Angel (from Clamor), who is doing booking for me, for sure. Given that she has no background in the business, it's not changing the kinds of gigs I'm doing or anything, but it is giving me more free time which has pretty much all been taken up by my baby daughter, Leila, who was born last January 28th. I thought I might find more time to read books and that sort of thing, but that hasn't worked out so far. I'm still touring as much as ever, and I find I just have a bit more time to be human on the road rather than being constantly glued to my laptop doing booking-related email.

What other changes have happened in your life this past year?

Well, I've written some new songs, done a lot of work on the new CD and DVD, done lots more touring in North America and Europe, spent several weeks touring in Lebanon, Jordan and the occupied West Bank last September, and various other things, but certainly the birth of my daughter has been the most exciting development. Especially now that she's a little older: big difference between 4 months and 7 months, you know, they're much more interactive and they don't spend all their time sleeping anymore.

There seems to be a debate within activist communities around the efficacy of building community through travelling vs. "laying roots" by staying in one place. What is your take on this as an activist musician who is constantly travelling? How do you reconcile being essentially placeless?

I guess the debate also goes on to some extent among musicians, too. It seems to me generally that we need a lot more of both community organizing and laying roots as well as the traveling rabble-rousing kind of thing, big national and international demonstrations, etc. Lots more of all that would be very good. To me it seems like the idea that one is more effective than the other is a bit like saying broccoli is more effective than spinach. For people in my line of work, though, I'd say that the decision is largely made for us. You can't really make a living doing original music, whether political music or not, and stay in one place. You have to travel. It goes with the job. So basically if I thought staying in one place were more effective then I'd have to get a day job, or play background music in bars, and I have zero interest in either of those things, so I'll keep traveling.

You're a political folksinger in an increasingly politicized era. How have the global events of the past 5 years affected your work? More specifically, how do you deal with the dilemma of tragic world events being, in a sense, "good for business" in terms of creating and performing the music you do and building a fanbase?

I'm not entirely sure how good for business it is. I suppose among my niche market it's good for business, but generally, the vast majority of musicians are really marginalized by the music industry, especially political ones. As far as I can tell the folk music scene is pretty terrified of overtly political musicians these days, and so we're even marginalized within our own musical genre. Basically, I don't think any of us are doing it for the money!

In theory, if a large segment of the population were to wake up and smell the coffee, people like me could really do well, and I'd welcome that, and I'd deal with the contradiction: "The more bombs they drop, the more CDs I sell" kind of thing. But as it is, this is not happening. My audiences are not growing. In fact, they may be shrinking, but it's hard to tell, since they've always been small. Especially since February, 2003, people have just been retreating more and more, aside from a brief period during the presidential election when some people with Kerry buttons were coming to some of my shows.

In terms of my writing, the past 5 years have led to me writing even more songs about U.S. foreign policy, and fewer songs about IMF/World Bank protests, 'cause they have virtually ceased to exist in the U.S. since 9/11. But I was writing a lot of songs about Iraq, Palestine, etc. before 9/11, not because it was fashionable in the mainstream or even on the Left, but because it seemed important to me. Inexplicably, so many of my friends in the late 90's who were organizing against the IMF, World Bank, WTO, etc., didn't seem to know where Iraq was or what the sanctions were. Now everybody knows where Iraq is and most people have forgotten about the IMF. It's really pretty depressing.
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This interview was originally published on ZNet. Matt Dineen is a writer and activist living and working in Northampton, MA. For more information about David Rovics visit http://www.davidrovics.com/

Navigating the System of Class Privilege in Higher Education: An Interview with the Smith College Association of Class Activists

By Matt Dineen

In the United States, access to a college education is still a privilege not available to everyone. As the tuition rates continue to climb through the roof and competition for financial aid increases, more and more people are shut out of this system. What about those who do make it in? How does their class background affect the quality of education that they receive from local community colleges to the most elite university?

Recently I spoke with Cara Sharpes and Katie Zanetta, Smith College students active in a campus organization that addresses issues around class and privilege, about their experiences as low income students at an elite educational institution.
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Katie: I’m Katie Zanetta and I’m about to start my senior year at Smith College as a non-traditionally-aged student.

Cara: My name’s Cara Sharpes and I’m also a non-traditional age student at Smith. I’m also the leader of the Smith Association of Class Activists (SACA). We started off last Spring with a small group of seniors who basically wanted to make sure that something was started since they had such a hard road at Smith as low income students and first generation students. They wanted to just bring a group of students together. This Fall, myself and another student formed officially through the SGA (Student Government Association) and started having events and meetings. So we’re pretty new.

What was the initial inspiration for forming this organization?

C: I think we realized what a powerful experience it was to get together and just talk about our similar experiences as people who are navigating the system with no one coming before us in most cases. And just trying to figure out where we belong and being the minority certainly as low income students. From there realizing that there just really needed to be a dialogue on campus about class and how there was such a blindness to that. How every other socially conscious issue had been spoken about at length except for class and just showing the campus how it had to come to the forefront.

So the group was started by low income students. Has it broadened its base since then?

C: Yeah, we started off being defined primarily as a low income, first generation alliance and then from there quickly broadened to allow allies because we realized that we weren’t just interested in having a support group. We were really interested in bringing people together over issues of class and making a difference on campus. And there were so many allies that wanted to come and help us on class issues. So many activists who were willing to get involved and we didn’t want to narrowly define our group that way.

Katie, do you want to talk about how you got involved in the group?

K: Yeah. I was brand-spanking new at Smith in the Fall and I was walking around campus one day and I saw a flier, one of these great, wonderful, snarky little fliers that they put up that said something to effect of: “Have you heard? Why don’t you just ask your parents for the money? We have.” And I thought, I don’t know who those people are but they are clearly my people. So I sought the group out and I was really happy I did because I think that class ends up being very invisible at Smith. I wasn’t used to that. I had come from a state school—actually UMass-Boston was where I transferred from. It’s not only a state institution but an urban-focused institution where class is not invisible because we were all of a similar class background at UMass-Boston. So it was really hard for me to go into an environment where I felt out of sorts but there was no way to articulate that within the institution.

In what other ways did it differ when you started at Smith?

K: A lot of things are wonderful. Just the resources that are available are…

C: Mind-boggling.

K: Mind-boggling, yeah. It’s incredible what you have available to you but if you’re not used to that I also think that you don’t really know how to go about accessing them or to understand that you’re entitled to them. This is something that a lot of students don’t have a problem with—of course they’re entitled to the resources there. Even now, just learning how that process works and learning that they are actually there for me to take advantage of is still something that I can’t totally integrate with my past or my perspective on the world.

C: Or even knowing to ask. I think a lot of students come in just struggling by themselves and not knowing that they are so many people that they can ask and that it’s an institution that set up to help their students once they’re there. It’s a really hard thing to learn coming from most places where you’re just left to sink or swim.

Can you talk about how you both came to arrive at Smith College given your class backgrounds? How did that happen and what goals to you have now that you have entered into this more elite institution?

K: I had sort of a long winding path. I’ve done everything from factory work to just really low-level, pink collar, ghetto administrative work. And that’s what I was doing before I decided to go back to school. I was actually an ‘executive administrative assistant,’ which was great because it was the best paying job I had ever had but it couldn’t take me any further than that. I was 24 and I had maxed out. I knew that I had to go back to school, not only for the learning potential but because I needed to have that degree. It was a matter of validation and it was something that had always eluded me because of my financial circumstances. I couldn’t go right out of high school because there was no money for that and so I spent years just trying to work and become an independent student. So I ended up quitting my job and going back to school at UMass fulltime and then came to Smith actually sort of on a dare. A friend of mine was applying and said, “You have to apply. We’ll go together.” And in the end I decided that I wouldn’t be able to tell her that I hadn’t applied and I was actually going to lie to her and say that I didn’t get accepted and I realized that I couldn’t do that. So I did apply and I got in and she didn’t. Even that process was difficult—I had to call the admissions office at one point and ask them to pull my application because it occurred to me that if they processed my application check I would bounce. And so even to that point I almost didn’t get there because I was like, “No you can’t! I’m not gonna have enough money to cover that.” But who knows. I really don’t want to continue to work. That’s my impetus for being at a great school. (Laughs)

What do you mean by work?

K: I know what a real job is like and it’s not very fun. I don’t want to do that anymore. I think it’s great but it’s not what I want to do right now.

So where do you see yourself after Smith?

K: Grad school. And then hopefully academia.

How about you Cara?

C: I think I had a somewhat similar experience as Katie. My path to school took a long time. When I was in high school I had this image of school that was very much like Smith. I was really gunning for little, private, quiet colleges that I had really glossy, pretty brochures not realizing that that was highly unattainable. And my mom let me know at some point that this just wasn’t realistic for us, which is ironic now knowing they probably could’ve offered me a lot more financial aid than a lot of the places she was pushing me to apply. But we didn’t know that, we had not navigated the system before. So I ended up going to the local community college and dropping out and going back and dropping out because I was working fulltime and I was really burnt and it really wasn’t where I wanted to be. So it took me a while to just plod through that and get the half way point, the Associate’s Degree, and all the time working a string of fairly demeaning jobs: factory work, selling vacuums at some point, mainly restaurant work and getting really, really burnt on that. And from there, after I got my Associate’s and I felt free to figure out what my options were I took my time and really tried to figure out what school fit me best and Smith just kept coming up. And I didn’t even realize the weight of Smith’s name at the time, but I just went for it anyway and it worked out more than state schools that couldn’t offer me as much money. So that’s why I ended up here.

So where do you see yourself after Smith?

C: Ugh…That’s a really good question. I don’t feel like I have a vision yet. When I think about my family, my grandmother’s best vision for my mom was to be a secretary and to not have to work in the plant, and for my mom it was for us to go to college and I don’t know what it looks like after college. Just getting here was hard enough, I have no idea what is on the other side.

Let’s get back to SACA. Can you talk about the work that you have done on campus?
C: Sure. We’ve done a couple of forums where we’ve tried to kind of break the ice about class. Some of them have been a little disappointing. We’ve done them in conjunction with the SGA and have been a little bit out of our control as far as programming goes and we weren’t sure how we felt about the results. We started off being called Association of Class Awareness, but after these discussions we realized that maybe awareness isn’t exactly where it’s at. Maybe we need to get beyond awareness and get to action because there’s a lot of awareness of class privilege and there was just a lot of discussion about guilt. One of our buttons for fundraising now is: “Guilt is not an Action.” We aren’t interested in guilt. You have to push past that. We’re trying to get a little further into that. We’ve also been working on some other projects. We wanted to create a resource guide for students to teach them to navigate the system in a way that most of the seniors had once they had gotten to the end and learned the hard way. We’re working on a documentary on class experiences at Smith. There’s so much. We’re working on a zine right now. We’re working with the administration and the Dean’s office trying to make resources more readily available. There are just pockets of funding all over campus that you can apply to but it’s a really bureaucratic, red tape-laden system so you really have to jump through hoops for it. We’re trying to teach students that they’re there and how to access them and make it easier for everybody.

K: And a lot of important work around helping the administration be aware of the way in which the language they use to talk about low income and working class or first generation students is really tokenizing and difficult for a lot of the students to deal with. They’ll sort of throw around statistics about financial aid or about first generation or low income students and it’s almost like someone talking to you as if you aren’t there. And in a way to bolster a certain aspect of the college’s reputation but there’s a big problem about how those students are supported once they get there. And I think that that’s been really helpful, just pointing things out that I don’t think that many people who we’ve talked to about it before would’ve considered about how the language is really difficult.
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You can contact the Smith Association of Class Activists at saca@email.smith.edu. To read this interview in its entirety check out Toward Freedom.

Matt Dineen is a writer and activist living Northampton, MA. His Passions and Survival project explores the collective dilemma of following our passions while surviving in a capitalist society. This interview was conducted on his radio program of the same name and theme on Valley Free Radio . You can contact him at passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

D.C. Superhero: An Interview with Katy Otto

By Matt Dineen

How do people pursue their passions, the things that keep us going, while simultaneously surviving in a capitalist society? Katy Otto is one of those modern day superheroes that is truly following her dreams and getting by pretty well in this crazy world. Not only does she run a DIY record label and play drums in the fantastic rock band Del Cielo, but she is also the Director of Grants and Community Outreach for the DC-area Empower Program. She’s also been known to help organize, among many other things, the annual Visions in Feminism Conference and Lady Fest. Katy is an inspiration to all of us, and a living example of what a better society could look like. I had the chance to speak to her at this year’s National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR) at American University.

When people ask you, “What do you do?” how do you usually respond to them?

Well, professionally I work as a grant writer at a non-profit that’s a gender violence prevention program that works with youth. But I have a lot of other projects that take up a lot of time too. I play drums in a band, Del Cielo, that I love a lot, and I run a little record label with my friend Sara called Exotic Fever. I like to do projects and organizing. I think who I am as a person has been shaped by the community I grew up in—the punk community in DC. It has been very important to my organizing and has been my source of energy. And I like writing.

Tell me more about this grant-writing job. Do you enjoy that work? Is it a full time thing?

Mhm. I’ve been there for 6 and half years, two as an intern in college. I like it because I was a journalism major and it’s a way to combine some of my writing skills with interest I have in social justice work and particularly work around youth development and violence prevention, gender socialization. So, I like it.

Nice.

It can be stressful. Being a fund-raiser isn’t always a laugh riot. Especially in the current economy, and because we are not an abstinence-only organization. And under the Bush administration those kinds of organizations are experiencing a much better situation [than us] in terms of funding available and tax cushions because of certain laws. So that sucks.

Yeah. Well, do you think you would continue to do this kind of work even if you weren’t getting paid for it? It obviously incorporates some of your interests but is the main function just the income that it provides, so you can support yourself?

Well, no. I don’t think that’s the main function although I certainly wouldn’t be able to devote the same amount of time to it if I wasn’t getting paid because I have to pay rent and bills. But part of my work is helping to co-facilitate a teen girls group and help mentor them and that’s the most rewarding part of the job. They organize a teen girl conference. They do public speaking, and community organizing and education. They’re just 10 amazing young women. That’s such a rewarding piece of the work. For the amount of money that people in non-profits get paid it’s usually other things fueling you to be there. But grant writing is not a stroll in the park.

Can you talk about living in the DC-area and how that affects your lifestyle? How did you choose to live here and make this your community?

I really love living in DC for a number of reasons. Because we’re in such a politically volatile world climate it’s very energizing to live in a place where a lot of really atrocious policies and decisions are being made. It makes it so that you do not escape. Politics and international relations are very much at the forefront of people’s minds here. And I think that’s important for people who are interested in social justice because it keeps you alert and active and responsive as long as that’s where your heart is. There’s also a really large resistance community here and a pretty diverse one. So that’s nice because growing up it was easy for me to learn about these kinds of issues. Also, there’s a lot of non-profits that do youth development work. There are hundreds in DC. And the punk and independent music community is really thriving and there are people who are older than me who helped mentor me when I wanted to do things like start a label. There’s just a lot of infrastructure for projects. It’s also interesting to live in a place that’s essentially a colony, with DC not being a state. It’s a very embattled place in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of spirit here.

Can you talk more about the dilemmas you’ve faced trying to work on all these projects that you’re passionate about while being able to pay rent and getting by?

Well, the nice thing about the label is that it’s successful enough now that a lot of the expenses of running a label are covered because we have a catalog of releases that does fairly well. I think I still lose some money each year on it, but it is able to be an active project because of the exciting attention people have paid to the releases. So that’s helpful. And also having the label in partnership with my best friend Sara. That’s helpful because we share the burden of the work, the financial burden, and we also share the excitement and the interest. With the band it’s been cool because we’re a very, very intentional DIY band but we’re also very active and we work really hard on our band and have been a band for 4 years. So when we travel we don’t lose money because we work really hard. When we’re on tour we try not to have days off. We go to the record stores in town and try to sell our cds. We’re very diligent about it. We plan things very far in advance to try to make sure they’re done really solidly and really well. So that’s nice because it’s definitely not making money or anything, but it’s not costing us money to do. So that’s nice. Although I’d love some equipment. I’ve got the same drum set I’ve had since I was a very little lady. (laughs)

I don’t know…coffee is a really good fuel for your projects. I drink a little too much of it. And I live in a group house with 3 very supportive men. I think living in a group house can be really awesome especially when people share interests. It just makes it a lot easier to do things like shows in DC because there is a network of people. I did a show for NCOR Friday night and literally an hour before I was like, “Man, this is gonna be a tiring night.” But then people called and were like, “How can I help? Can I do the door?” I don’t think that happens everywhere. A lot of times if I’m organizing something like a show I’ll be in a pretty visible role, but I’m not the only person that’s worked on it. So I try to make sure people get credit where credit’s due.

Does the group house arrangement cut down on your cost of living?

Greatly. Especially for this area because we live in a house that’s cheaper than most houses and we’ve also converted a 3 bedroom into a 4 bedroom. Otherwise, this area is brutal. But my rent is $300 a month, which in this area is pretty unheard of. That’s really the only way to live that cheaply here. Oh, and we eat together a lot too. Not all the time but we just share things in general. It cuts down on bills. We’re able to get things like cable that if we lived on our own none of us would be able to get. That’s kind of cool. At first I was like, “No! No cable.” But it’s kind of nice because then we don’t go to Blockbuster anymore. We can just watch Direct TV movies.

It seems like that’s part of this lifestyle where you can be able to have more time to pursue projects if you don’t have to work as much.

Yeah. My work has been really supportive of my touring too. The summer before last, because I had been at my job so long, I was able to take a sabbatical. So I had a 6-week tour and I was paid for all 6 weeks of work even though I wasn’t there. But that’s only a once every 5 years thing. I think at non-profits because you’re working so many long hours there are things people will do to make sure that the morale is high.

If you had the opportunity to live off your label and your band would you do that? Would you quit the job you have now?

I do have a dream of one day to be able to just do the label. The band is a little harder to think about. It would be amazing if we could do that, but what’s most important for me about our band is that all 3 people in the band always feel that they’re in positions they’re totally comfortable with. To me, that’s a pretty radical thing as a band of all women that the most valuable thing about the band is all three members’ opinions and nobody outside of that has any more say in what that looks like. So that makes it really hard because you think about some of the things that need to happen in order to get to that point. I know some people don’t believe that it’s possible for anyone to ever survive off their band without booking agents or really high profile, somewhat corporate-influenced record labels and things like that. Or people say, “Only if you’re Fugazi.” Well, I think there are other ways of people making that a reality. But it’s not a part of my ambition with my band because I feel like the process and the things that I gain from it are so much richer than that could ever be. I mean, if it just happened—sure. (laughs) I’m a very process-oriented person.

This interview originally appeared in the September/October 2005 (#34) issue of Clamor Magazine. To learn more about Katy Otto's projects check out The Empowered Program, Exotic Fever Records and Del Cielo.