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Giordano Bruno, in his essay on Image Magic, famously remarked that it was far easier to ensorcell millions of people at once, by such means, than to make a single person fall in love with you. And as Ioan Culianu famously remarked, in his seminal Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, this Brunonian insight marks the foundation-point of all modern brainwashing, mind-control, advertising, “publicrelations” and propaganda. In other words these sciences in fact comprise a form of magic that happens to work. This explains the age-old attraction between Intelligence (spying) and Magic, including stage-magic and illusion as well as “real” occultism, as Konrad Becker herein points out and documents; and of course codes and cyphers, once the avocation of alchemists and astrologers such as Trithemius and Della Porta, now the obsession of quantum spooks. The corollary of Bruno’s remark — its occult reversal, so to speak— suggests that one can use Hermeticism not to “enchain” others to illusion, but to free yourself from these vinculae and attain a relative autonomy or freedom from ensorcellment, the hex or fix that disempowers you — perhaps even from the Big Lies that pass for Consensus Reality. This process could be considered hermeneutics or even esoteric hermeneutics (ta’wil, as the Suffis called it) — an exploration and unpacking of a thing back to its origins. Etymology offers one good way to go about this — the discovery of the hidden origins

of words— which branches off into a magical philology that makes use of puns, rebuses and gematria — the subconsciousness of language itself, the generative “space” of magic. A very Viennese idea, it seems. Even the form of Konrad’s “dictionary entries” here is typically Viennese— they are in fact feuilletons, blätter, “leaves,” mini-essays in the tradition of Karl Kraus and the fin-de-siècle coffeehouse wits. Konrad personifies old Vienna for me; his great-grandfather was Admiral of the Austrian Navy, which sounds like a joke (like “Swiss Navy”) until you remember that Austria once possessed an Empire and owned the port of Trieste, where at various times James Joyce and the mad Hapsburg Empress Carlotte of Mexico dreamed behind façades of genteel respectability. Konrad is an ectomorph, wears a mournful suit & tie, is an expert on Viennese pastry, and performs fake Spiritualist séances complete with ersatz ectoplasm and eerie post-industrial noise. The Hermetic Imagination is an epistemological weapon. A radical dialectic or tri-alectic can be traced from Paracelsus to Boehme to the Rosicrucians to Romantic Science (Novalis, Goethe, Swedenborg) to the left Hegelians. Spinoza may be involved. Then the radical French occultists like Nerval or Eliphas Levi. Then onward to Surrealism, Situationism and Psychedelicism, the last gasps of the old magical tradition.

But after the last gasp there still remains (like an ectoplasmic stain) the unacknowledged Eternal Avantgarde, which has never ceased since about 40,000 years ago to hope and agitate for an end to alienation. It’s the Old Mole, the Neanderthal Underground — the same gesture of refusal since the archaic dawn of hegemony. The 21st century Hermeticist’s alchemical lab has become the conceptual (laboratory as oratory) — a Memory Theatre. The computer is its diabolical twin. The subject of much of the work tuns out to be communication theory, meta-network theory, sociology in a world where the Social has come to an end in ecstatic representation. But at bedrock level the theory miraculously resurrects an animism so basic, so primitive as to be called a Doctrine of Signatures. “Everything is alive.” The point of the Hermetic critique revolves around the protection of that life against the antibiosis of Capital in its spectral form — against the Totality of the Image as erasure of the Imagination.

Ac·tion He·roes: Volition is a process by which one commits to a course of action, conscious or automatized as habits. Will-power, cognizance and affect are primary psychological functions. These three domains are targets of psychophysical systems with differing approaches — from Hoodoo to Zen or competing strands of medieval Christian mysticism. Meaning depends on framing expressions. Volition seeking expression and resolution in aggressive or sexual acts informs conflict represented in Amor and Mars. Hostile identification with the other renders aggression ambiguously self-defeating. Yearning for action to affirm being alive is ritualized in episodic rages of killing time in a night out. In A Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, stretches of well-managed work and free time, carefully designed to be uneventful, contract into a quest for thrill and excitement. Looking for action and challenges in life is a fantasy play involving fashion, styles and accessories. Domains of imaginary expressivity commercialize the difference to the safe and silent spaces of the middle-class. Action-adventure media-markets provide less risk of injury for a fee and offer cheap ways of engaging in character plays without harm. Patients and prisoners obsessively measure time to kill it. Industrial societies developed weapons of mass destruction to kill time. Identifying with stereotyped protagonists in action and peeping in on fateful sensational situations. Living once-removed is a bargain. Shadow theaters for a dislocated, proxy self permit unexpected rescues, demonstrating that the lead will never surrender against all odds. This recurrent movie feature applies to expendable secondary characters just without the luck. When people overexposed to confusing and contradictory messages pay attention to narcotizing and dysfunctional media, information is the opposite of action. Even though most labresearch looks at automated processes of action control, conflicting insights and desires clearly weaken purposeful striving towards goals. Nevertheless, taking a chance depends on commitment to a situation not under control. Not every problematic is consequential, but situations that can be solved through the toss of a coin are rare. Fundamental attribution errors overrate consistency and internal traits of personal agency that are constantly modulated by external vectors and contingency effects. Personality-based explanations are vastly overestimated, and situational setting or social context misjudged in explaining volitional behavior of others. In interpreting our own performance, good fortune is credited

to oneself, while external factors are only considered to find excuses for failure.

is channeled into violence against scapegoat groups made to symbolize a survival threat.

A gaze, in an implicit understanding that a background is less relevant, makes assumptions about significance. Focusing on figurative cues, at the expense of context, produces cognitive artifacts analog to optical and narrative illusions. Psychophysical systems target configurations of foreground and background in conscious experience. Escapist flight refuses prefabricated choices in political spectacles. Appropriated into the arsenal of power, independence and autonomy need to be cleared from delusive drives in the political realm.

“Lacking control leads to an instinctive need for order, even imaginary order.” Experiments of reducing control show participants to have increased illusory pattern-perception; they are more likely to identify coherent and meaningful interrelations among a set of random, unrelated stimuli. Cognitive autonomy addresses this effect when, in contrast to a delusion of knowing, intelligence is capable of accepting uncertainties without irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Anx·i·ety Man·age·ment: Explanations for attitudes toward political issues usually include economic circumstances, social relations and education. However, people with different attitudes also differ in threat sensitivity. Research suggests conservative or protective social beliefs to be related to a higher automatic fear response. Socialization in rigidly authoritarian ways makes susceptible to conformism and hostile hyperawareness of potential threats. Emotional distress and traumatic experiences render pro-establishment viewpoints and charismatic authoritarian leaders more attractive. Terror-management theory looks at emotional reactions to an acute awareness of death, resulting in behavior change and beliefs that protect world-view and self-esteem. Insulating from fear self-images allow denying the susceptibility to a short-term existence. Passing away is an existential source for anguish; reminding people increases needs to boost confidence. Neurological pathways for physical pain and pain from social exclusion overlap. Incidentally, a twentieth-century discourse on the self concentrates on memory and trauma as proof of individuality.

Seeking emotional control and cognitive closure, conservatives do not tolerate jokes that fail to provide resolution of incongruent elements. In contrast to a more abandoned self-expression and thought they fail to accommodate double meanings, the timing and reversal of expectations. They tend to have a bad sense of humor. All theories of absurdity are predictably incongruent, but clearly humor can both contain and release. The Weatherman acid test to single out infiltrators proved famously inadequate, but in the higher spheres of nonsense humor some will certainly never get the joke. Busi·ness Em·pires: espite economic myths that growth will benefit the less fortunate, if only on the long run, pauperism and plutocracy complement one another. Global finance feeds on local misfortune. Just like the mythical race from the aerial land of Magonia traveling the skies in cloud ships. Working with tempestarii, weather-magi, in magically raised storms they were said to swoop down in clouds to steal the grain from the fields.

World-views diminish psychological terror, providing meaning and continuity, help making sense of the world as a stable and orderly place. Cultural standards create confidence in living a meaningful life. After subliminal exposure to the national-flag test, persons are more likely to endorse right-wing views, strengthening the conservatives and weakening the resolve of the less nationalistic.

Like nomadic tribes providing “security” for caravans, speculative investors do not recognize systems of social organization other than clan laws or blood feuds. When government business and global finance overlap criminal enterprise schemes easily supplant public interest. Players operate across countries, cultures and continents. Shapeshifters manage identity to exploit the eterogeneity of standards, norms and law enforcement. Multinationals trading with their branches and subsidiaries, called transfer pricing, evade taxing without actually violating each countries laws.

Compliance with cultural values boosts feelings of security and therefore people cling to traditional assumptions when reminded of their inevitable demise. At the same time threatened world-views and endangered self-respect drives to devalue and challenge other views. Triggering a spiral of conflict where mortality salience will reinforce stereotypic thinking and intergroup bias. Besides reactionary fears of social change, fear

Capitalist systems predicated on spatial and temporal expansion, of market penetration and speeding up of product cycle, always reach limits. Structural adjustment costs are burdened on the periphery by way of enforced trade imbalances, imposed credits, overblown taxes, and control of currency or natural resources. Surplus value from the periphery transfers back to the core through unequal exchange.

Enforced flows of finance secure power projection, channeling petrodollars under diplomatic or military threat into financial recycling nodes and vascular investment regimes. Regardless of ideologies that markets function spontaneously they never do; helped along by military expeditions or incitement of civil wars. Inversions of the transaction cycle manifest as overproduction crisis and overtrading on virtual or anticipated future income. Overaccumulation leads to devaluation and unemployment, exporting surplus to territories forced open to capital and labor produces conflict.

ued state of dependency serving as a screen for depreciative projections. A look into the motivational base of the self-appointed good seems very appropriate in some blue eyed worlds that claim the moral high grounds. Sociopathologies of rebels or revolutionaries without a cause not only populate the fringes of science, politics or the arts and cultural domains. People inflate personal grievances onto a political agenda and project their own shortcomings unto sectors of society. Attacking hypocrisy, unconsciously directed against childhood authorities, or exposing injustice driven by issues of abuse in growing up.

Growing commercialization of everyday life is a fierce neoliberal assault on the public. It applies weapon grade corporatization of science and education, militarization and privatization as well as the dismantling of welfare systems. Liberalism, a belief system of the ruling elites in a Jihad against the have-nots, not only assumes Godgiven hunger for the poor but a natural law of enrichment by the wealthy. Conservatives, opening the public sphere to individual profit or neglect, prefer to regulate individuals instead.

Techniques of indirect speech and innuendo keep knowledge compartmentalized. Collective action depends on shared knowledge but speaking up is taking a risk and exposes the one that tells. Disagreeing with power in support of those who are not, the fearless speech of parrhesia bridging individual and shared knowledge is a catalytic revolutionary agent.

Justifying the dominance of a ruling group requires a set of ideas that provide a narrative plausible enough for creating believe in its reality. Privileged Westerners cherish the idea that poverty is a voluntary human condition since the reformation. Now positive thinkers see it as active denial to embrace wealth and expose misfortune of poverty to ridicule. Power flows in processing assemblages of superstitions, secrets and non-sequiturs in media and education channels. Helped by the entertainment industry power networks recapture the free time that once was won in revolutionary struggle. Extracting value through data-mining and at the same time subduing lower classes with toxic by-products of bourgeoisie tastes. Di·lem·ma Reb·els: Social psychology suggests a motivational drive to reduce cognitive dissonance. Ideas or behaviors that conflict with a fundamental element of the self-concept are powerful causes of dissonance. Anxieties in regard to self-image lead to rationalizations that produce justifications to support one’s choices. In the negative-state relief model humans have a drive to engage in mood-elevating behavior of an egoistic nature. Helpfulness paired with positive value such as smiles and thanks, reduces bad feelings. Negative affect, like guilt, embarrassment or awareness of cognitive inconsistency, increases motivation to help others. Altruism interested in self-help only might prefer a contin-

Pointing out contradictions in quaint traditions and exposing cherished ideals to be myths may fuel disobedience but not necessarily mutual cooperation. Everyone is witness to the remorseless exploitation of life through coercive immersion in financial schemes. Apathy prevails in the face of a rotten political sphere, the excess of wealth and the desolation of the poor. In late capitalism, resistance is futile by default. Additionally, similar to the prisoner’s dilemma it is allegedly irrational to participate in dissident activities. Potential rebels have an incentive to a free ride, so why contribute to the public good. If one receives the benefits regardless of whether one gets involved in revolutionary activities, why participate and pay the costs? Rationality results in market failure of rebellion. If rational actors will never engage in fighting oppression or overthrow a tyrannical regime, popular revolutions remain an enigma. Communal norms created by coercion or social contract cannot solve the dilemma. However, dissidents sharing common knowledge and ideas overcome mutual ignorance and the narrow self-interest characteristic of market solutions. Rebel potential rises to collective action if based on shared processes of dissent, where vectors of conformity and innovation, ritualism and retreatism collapse into rebellion. Dream Traps: Advertisement is a major supplier of emotional experience where streets are dark and empty without the glow of its reflections. Exploitative fabrics of psychological manipulation weave commodity symbols into personal experience. Advanced product placement in libidinal streams of

desire installs false memories to enhance brand receptivity. Like processed textiles ripped and torn to simulate years of intense activity, life becomes a design issue. Predatory brandscapes leave products behind for anticipative experience patterning. Branding is not just advertising, but a constitutive cognitive control technology, an emotional intervention where losing brand identity means loss of self. Feeding back enriched streams of loaded symbol chains into mediated publics requires analyzing prevalent cultural trends. Steering identification to have targets project their innermost desires captures affections. Inducing experiences and situations, invisible governance makes one feel like doing something without direct suggestion. Targets persuading themselves are a strategy of covert persuasion and milieu control its principal device. Contagious narratives spread through mimetic affinity. To get imitated, before a groove can stick, a gesture needs to draw attention first. Ideas not reproduced are socially non-existent. Media technologies interact with an imaginary where availability heuristics shape judgment and decisions. Audiences get drawn to ideas and factoids that prominently reoccur in the cognitive media environment, issues not reported are massively underestimated and consequently produce distorted views. A story of a rise from rags to riches picked up and replayed manifold supports myths of how easy it is to changes one’s social class. Unwarranted belief in opportunity and upward mobility makes inequality more acceptable. People join a brand, a cult or simulations of community moving in lockstep to belong and draw onto meaning. Mimesis allows coming closer to others in regard to having company and finding out what the world is about. Cognitive goods are the product of social processes based on isomorphism. Scientific discoveries have thrown humanity into a dark and cold cosmos. In momentary lives as miserable nothings, herd instincts compensate for isolation and anxiety at the heart of modern life. Technologies turn scientific formulas of conceptual torture chambers into meaningless realities. Stereotypes bind people together in citadels to fortify their imaginary media environments, worlds kept alive by the desire for a home. Methodologies to bind are similar in any church. Commodities as objects of devotion and emotional identification accommodate a desire for transcendence. Creating mystery and belief in a story, brand management systems produce meaning and loyalty beyond reason. A colorful target marketing delirium

may look like a better option than a dull life. However, in devolution from cortex reason to mammal emotion and reptilian brain imprints, David Ogilvy reminds “Customers need a rational excuse to justify their emotional decisions, so always include one.” Ex·treme In·tu·i·tion: Intuition is about acquiring knowledge without inference of reason and through insights that one cannot easily justify. From Latin intueri roughly meaning to “look inside,” it is like a psychic radar to feel out situations or persons in decision making and problem solving. Beyond the characteristic immediacy there is not much agreement on its distinctions. Some hold intuitions to be similar to beliefs based in subjective experience differing between social groups. In analytic philosophy rational intuitions distinguished from beliefs and appealing to “common sense” make a kind of necessity claim that something seems a priori inevitably the case. Form-generating capabilities of our senses, the Gestalt effect, help the recognition of figures and forms instead of just a collection of lines and curves. Enabling a coherent world the nervous system integrates multisensory information but brings into question the idea of separate senses. As in the illusory continuity of tones and the double-flash experiment where sound makes you see things that do not exist. In Cryptesthesia, or “hidden sensation,” information is gathered by the senses outside the boundaries of an ordinary awareness where consciousness represents the tip of the iceberg. Sensory hallucinations may bring information to the forefront of cognizance as perception or integration of physical cues. A narrative based on sensory input intuitively refocused through pseudo-extrasensory perception. Correspondingly spaces and locations take on the aura of practices taking place in it. Even fierce secularists fall into cultural molds formed by devout activities and mind frames. Thin-slicing, the ability to find patterns based on narrow windows of experience is making quick decisions with minimal amounts of information. Analytic language and verbal overshadowing in problem articulation significantly obstructs capacities for intuitive thinslicing. Decisions based on flash instincts and deep intuitive knowledge about another human presence is the opposite of statistical weighing of categories. Objects can be understood relatively, as in comparative analysis, or an intuitive mode. Analysis, the creation of concepts through a division of points of view, produces models but cannot transmit implicit experiential

understanding itself. One may pile commentaries upon commentaries and never grasp the value of a graceful line. Connecting to things in a deep empiricism and losing sight of oneself as a subject in a struggle against conceptual knowledge existence cuts through the thickness of surface reality in flashes of illumination. Immediate perception of life processes as patterns suggests realms of expanded consciousness. Mystic communication is based on direct knowledge through subjective experience of intuitive insight. Modern neuroscience concurs with ancient sages that the self is an emergent cognitive construction, both existential and an illusion. Sufi traditions sought knowledge beyond thinking and feeling to connect with a reality beyond forms, arresting the psychological function of sense experience as the greatest obstacle to intuition. Mediating between light and dark, the shadows of ideas are the footprints in the forest of matter. Hu.man Sac·ri·fice: In early capitalism, ostentatious acquisition of wealth became a fundamental criterion for status; withholding value from circulation was a measure of individual worth. After agglomeration of great fortunes, conspicuous consumption and waste was the order of the day. Excessive displays of affluence and phantasmal deliriums of wealth that make no sense in any rational economic logic. Threatened by debates on redistribution of wealth, the moneyed preferred to retreat and promote a culture where prestige goes to those who have most but show least. Excess and libidinal pleasures of luxury, curbed and refined into a more austere conduct, ascetic capitalism was also a secular response to religious damnation of worldly pleasures.

its children in periodic warlike situations where a nation’s psycho-sexual relation to the world is expressed in a proliferation of prostheses of ever enlarged size or power. Death by a specific circulation of goods is calculated violence and killing millions part of the deal. While more than fifty million died during the great famines in India, food was exported to England. Famines are characterized by starvation not lack of food; speculation on food stocks creates hunger. As Mike Davis observed, it is not barren lands that drifted offside in the course of world history, but the fate of tropical regions changed when their products and labor were forced into a London-controlled world economy between 1870 and 1924. Agriculture production fostered bond-slaves and hungry peasants as cheap labor for producing stuff for the overstuffed. British India produced more serious famines during their rule than in the thousands of years before. Advancements of European powers in the colonization of Africa and Asia were immediately followed by disasters of drought, famine and disease. Such catastrophes and symbols of cosmological crisis provoked superstition and obsessive beliefs in witchcraft. Destroying systems of mutual support and aid, contingency plans, communal reserves etc. the invisible hand demands human sacrifice. Ritual slaughter is also a traditional form of internal state terror to sustain the power of the sovereign. Much talk about inner demons is in denial of demonic manifestations and Wiener clarifies in God and Golem: “using the magic of automatization to further personal profit or let loose the apocalyptic terrors” is today’s evil sorcery. Sorcery, adapted via Old French from the Vulgar Latin sortiarius, meaning “one who influences fate.”

Unlike feudal lords or patricians of antiquity, social status today is not so much defined by metaphysical hierarchies of ancestors but “success.” Nineteenth-century cult of success still measured achievement against an abstract ideal of discipline and inner-worldly self-denial; twentieth-century competitive individualism turned to winning in a war of all against all.

In·di·vid·ual Con·form·ism: Miraculously, almost all Western societies were sold on neoliberalism and the totalitarianism of a mythical center. How has its logic subjugated just about the entire political spectrum? How come societies with all-time-highest education standards are governed by principles which do not hold water? A questionable achievement not owed to analytical intelligence but a farce that found its actors.

Immense inequalities are hidden in the invisible depths of finance capitalism. More than half of the stock in the US market is owned by less than 1% and half the population owns less than 3% of private wealth. Regrettably, money’s use value is inverse proportional to the wealth of its owner, and its initial distribution is unjust. To strengthen forces of social cohesion, civilizations adhere to cults of blood sacrifice. Killing

Totalitarian conformism can do without a traditional apparatus of dictatorship, at least temporarily. Some 95% of the parliamentary spectrum is pedantically conformist, despite ideologies which ostensibly celebrate individuality; the rest is subject to police observation. Strongly unified and homogenous political and governmental bodies, with no corrective mechanisms of diversity in opinion, produce very stupid ideas. No-

questions-asked in conformist cultures; a mesh of spineless corruption and calculated disorientation. Consumer democracy breeds conformist individualists, each in a shrinking market segment. In the torturous regime of modern individuality, multiple dependencies and permanent contingencies must be interpreted into an imagined rational path of individual determination. Social conformity and mutilated subjectivity in an exploited psychological domain of popular esotericist beliefs do not help to escape the prison of abusive structures that render the social crisis an individual crisis. Despite niche marketing, skimming the Gaussian middle is a lucrative media business. Not even media workers can afford a perception of their own. Regrettably, it is difficult to understand something when income depends on not understanding, and the faithful gain prestige by managing to believe even more impossible things than their rivals. Even when newspapers are not fully advertisement-financed, with up to 70% of revenue through marketing, editorial content is secondary.TV is not free; every consumer pays tax for commercial messages that try to make one into an idiot. Marketing often excels 80% of the price tag; specifically for sneakers; or textiles; the cost for the workers can be less than 1%. Studies regularly reveal traditions or cultural norms seemingly based on ignorance and credulity to be solutions to problems of a certain class of people. Similarly, psychological deformations or even intense aberrant behavior is often a solution to a deep dilemma or effective in avoiding cognitive dissonance. Structured experience supports modes of conformity in self-hypnotized subjects, hiding what is beneath the layer of false memory implants. It is an awkward homo economicus, worlds away from the brute and passion-driven unreasonableness of individuals and the supposedly even more irrational crowds. When in late modernity the subject split into a restless swarm, chasing mirages in perpetually unsatisfied desire, the “wisdom of the crowds” was a desperate attempt to save the invisible hand. Contrary to silly hypes, masses only make better decisions when there is independent diversity of opinion, free of influence and pressure, decentralized local sources of knowledge as well as appropriate means for turning individual judgment into collective decisions. In perilous infinity, multiple realities and omnidirectional conflict, mediocrity becomes a natural point of gravity.

Mar·ket Lu·na·cy: Rational-choice theory is a dominant framework for modeling social, economic and political behavior. Crude simplifications and idealized conditions in denial of uncertainty make it a poor tool to deal with complexity, yet its illusory clarity continues to draw a following. With rational actors in efficient markets, the price of a product is always right and thus, in mysterious ways, the market “speaks the truth.” This fantastic idea of interpreting markets and financial transactions as revelation stands in the tradition of reading entrails or cephalomancy, divination by means of a donkey’s head. According to investor George Soros “market prices are always wrong.” For the reason that economic decisions are never based on facts but on financial information, a biased view of potential and belief in projected future returns. It is not the value of an investment that drives stock prices up, but faith in finding someone more stupid to sell — as the greater-fool theory explains. Ever-growing pay, and bonus packages for finance managers, are not driven by markets but by soft extortion schemes. Insider-knowledge racketeering exploits the information asymmetry of the agency dilemma. The New York Stock Exchange Index tends to be negative on cloudy days, and data shows that market returns are correlated to sunshine in almost all countries studied. Bright days put people in a mood where they make more optimistic judgments. Victorian England was so fascinated with sunspots and their influence on the economy that they shifted the blame of market failures to the stars. Rationality makes sense only in the exotic case of a normal situation, but fails miserably in negative or positive stress, bubbles or crises. Belief in the efficiency of markets and the rationality of individual actors as well as illusions of markets to move independently, are obvious flaws in risk-management calculations. The crazy gospel of rational choice, a self-help survival cult for the cold and hard world of paranoid, cutthroat business, misses out on groupthink. Economies are instable nodes in multi-dimensional networks and complex adaptive systems, not isolated mechanical machines of parts not directly connected. Exposed to confirmation bias, selective thinking, informational cascades and contagious behavior in networks of mutual codetermination, interacting agents reinforce decisional feedback-loops where the dimensional space of opinion sets shrinks. Temporal hegemonies of making sense drive market bubbles, cultural fads and trends.

A financial crisis is a crisis of rationality in societies where finance is a synonym for social rationality. Lunatics roaming the streets went unnoticed when their madness was identical with the logic of the environment. Extending their self-projection into the technologies of power, people become invisible, not just merging in the background but, like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, becoming machinic reality itself. Cybernetic machines of finance capitalism are haunted by fear, mania and insider information. Surveys on widespread underlying belief, in angels or demons, show the foundations of consensual hallucination to be porous. Beliefs hidden in the cracks of official world views may break through and nullify economic rationality at any time. Net·work Econ·o·mies: Modernity’s conquest of space, dropping transportation costs of things and ideas, globalized people and institutions into a web of complex interrelations. Increasing connectivity and speed came with a dematerialization of systems of exchange. Computers have been around a while, but systemic changes in society are specifically about networking them. Enhanced connectivity multiplies differences. Relations become ever more multifaceted, and in complex systems small perturbations can produce large, unexpected effects. Connecting everything, as in total paranoia, the dynamic of complex networks produces change. Founded in 1971, the US NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations) quickly became the largest electronic securities market, trading more volume than any other stock exchange in the world. What LANs were for corporations, systems like CHIPS or SWIFT were for banks. Starting in the early 1970’s, transaction networks made finances a transnational business. Universal product barcoding enabled bitstructure-managed diversity, distributed identities and disembodied territories, by 1976. Complex dematerialized interrelations and increasing speed led to higher volatility, and complex financial instruments to distribute these hazards generated even more instability and risk. Endogenous conflicts of interest in projected market values, indicators and collateral debt obligations challenged models of probability, calculation and risk evaluation, with the ontological impossibility of setting binding meta-rules. Money, bridging the gap between the actual and the possible, accelerates the speed of the present. Options and bonds weave deep into a future modulated by permanent scanning of the environment for potential alterna-

tive paths. Classic market analysis assumes atomistic individuals, not waves of intertwined, cascading-flow systems or material and social processes interlocked in complex feedback loops. Change in environment-structure produces deep transformational shifts in network economies of cultural and technological interaction processes. Crude economistic universals define everything that does not fit into a financial logic as simply uneconomical. Yet, in a crisis of representation in religion, culture, business and finance, signs become ungrounded. They unstably float in turbulent currents, broadcasting a paranoid crisis of confidence. Ritual acts or beliefs based on mental or practical techniques bridge dangerous gaps in significant human pursuit or critical situations. Magical belief in the inherent higher reason and logic of functional systems has somewhat declined since the last economic crises. However, powerful people with weird beliefs tend to be shy about it. Fundamentalist and esoteric obscurantists are rampant in high places of government administration or business; security agencies and scientific organizations are infiltration targets for bizarre ideas. In contrast to traditional interest groups, new power-networks are not defined by boundaries, but gravitate around core attractors. Bound by invisible alliances, a swarm of satellites creates an image of reach and impact; echo chambers amplify the network signals toward the media and the public. Prop·er·ty De·vel·op·ment: Devoid of the benefit of unions, egalitarian hunters and gatherers worked only ten to fifteen hours a week, without straining the ecosystem through extensive exploitation. Violent and stratified societies, governed by ruling classes that maximized production and population density, defeated free reciprocal societies. Expulsed from common land in historical processes of enclosure, predatory exploitation of communes based on free cooperation continued as salarization and proletarization. Money organizes the transition from common wealth to exclusive individual possession. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century European living standards were considerably below the rest of the world, and South Indian workers were better off than their British counterparts. Refined goods being much more available, Asia held the centers of trade and productivity, as well as learning and medical sciences.

Commons considered a waste in taxable property, a division of public and private land, played a crucial role in the interference with rural societies. Enclosing the commons for the benefit of the few and loss of the many, the freely available space transformed into a commodity. To communicate is to establish a common, a place where people share understandings. Ideologies of property do not understand how the private is based on the common. How it became private in the first place remains shrouded in mystery. Carpocrates asserted “Property is theft.” The first-century Gnostics established communities that did not buy into concepts of converting into private property what naturally belongs to all. When all “melts into thin air,” property offers a surrogate narrative for the self and a strategy to avoid the gaze from the void. Thus ruling classes worship Pleonexia, the ruthless goddess of self-interest, with an insatiable desire for things and exalted libidinal orientation towards having. Due to limits of sucking ever more out of the living, surplus-value extraction expands beyond factory gates into the bio-economy and the spheres of cognitive labor. In increasingly precarious work environments, financial mechanisms become integral to consumer markets. A virtual economy comes to be cosubstantial to the production of actual goods and services. Money works like a drug, where one adapts to a level and must score above the baseline to get a high. Doubling the experimental experience of happiness in getting a gift of ten coins requires forty, not twenty coins. Monetary reward, the cocaine for economic pleasure- centers, stimulates deep parts of the nucleus accumbens; yet cerebral activity involved in social interaction is more complex. Financial incentives are not the prime agency to increase motivation; social pressure is cheaper and more effective. Most Western people reject a deal, if they consider it unfair, even when they would gain. Anthropological game rules and emotional decisions of what is fair differ in various cultures. Social construction of fairness has different interpretations. In comparison with psychopathic inmates of German high-security institutions, financial traders scored significantly higher in reckless asocial behavior, according to a 2011 study. A miser does nothing right, except when he dies. Pseu·do Dis·sent: Lifestyle niche markets of alienated middle-class youth supply radical chic, strictly segregated from real social struggles and safely removed from the militant or those on the margins. Pseudo-dissent consumer markets sell things not by a uto-

pian promise of enjoyment, but a narcissist rebel pose and telepresent contagious postures. Countercultural ideas of individual liberty or less over-regulated lives turn into libertarian echoes of neoliberal dogmas. Deregulated privatization converts to conservative dog-eat-dog scenarios. With the decline of essentialist identity concepts, leftist discourse exchanged equality for difference. Nobody wants to be equal anymore, but individually different. Unfortunately, the freedom to choose is most often spent on emulation. When free choice degenerates into gross consumerism, the maximization of choice opens venues of neglect and exclusivist societies. Haunting revelations, that things are not what they seem, spawns a cynical appraisal that could not care less. That meaning lies in the mind of the beholder turns toxic, into a cheap ersatz critique. When nothing matters, there is nothing to rebel against. When there is not even the chance of glorious failure, only a fate of insignificance or careerplanning remains. Destabilized by a lack of meaning in the eternal regress of the real, people gravitate to those who project an image of being self-assured and to the simplest recipes that offer closure. Attraction to a pre-sexual radiance of narcissist personalities produces celebrities that promise deliverance from anonymous crowds, by turning followers into a faceless mass. Mindsets and background beliefs affect interpretative perception. Conscious thinking, powered by unconscious processes, produces narrative rationalization, retrospective justification, and constructive suspension of disbelief. Cultural nationalism successfully exploits chronic economic insecurity and social immobility to vote against one’s own interests. Business and academia greatly value ideas that prevent people from grasping the basis of their social existence. When political traditions for a more equitable distribution of wealth and power lost the infectious visions and utopian dreams to carry forward revolutionary impulses, reactionary politics invaded dreamtime. In perfidious dreams of a neoliberal utopia, disproportional wealth for the rich gives the poor opportunity to share the leftovers. Paying for a movie inclines one to like it. Otherwise you paid for having a bad time, and this might make you look stupid. Holding negative views on something requires effort and frustration-tolerance. This seduces people to accept stupid things and drives to dumbness. Expanding frustration-tolerance is, after all, part of upper-class training for career-building. However, there is a positive

reward system for specific stupidity — better jobs, or even a Nobel Prize. On the other hand, certain social setups perceive anyone not ruthless, greedy and vile as vaguely stupid. According to Flaubert, “To be stupid and selfish and to have good health, are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.” This constellation produces a conspiratorial consensus of mutually-enforced mediocrity against the need for change. Shad·ow Gov·er·nance: Governance, the new concept for government by contextcontrol, shares the same root word as cybernetics. Based on technocratic steeringmodels and naïve beliefs in optimization, it thinks in terms of streamlining efficiency, not in terms of strategies, political outlook or a need for change. Ahistorical perspectives hide asymmetrical relations of power. Participation is instrumentalized toward narrow forms of problem-solving and reductionist efficiency concepts. Autonomy and consensus are appropriated into the arsenal of power as the latest strategies of force. A new breed of shadow elites operates under the radar of public visibility. With professional influencers maneuvering in new power networks, the existing means of holding public decision-makers accountable seem hopeless. Exploiting the redesign of governing and transformation of the public sector, shadow networks organize the interrelations between state and private. New layers of control strategically oscillate at the interface of public and private interest, bureaucracy and market. Blurring the boundaries between these domains, they privatize information and personalize bureaucracy. In ever-changing roles, the new gatekeepers of sensitive information apply it to produce opinion. Mapping social data with information systems permits visualizing sociographic hot spots, trends and patterns. Aggressively flexible modes of organization influence public policies, and engineer the coincidence of interests far beyond the reach of legal instruments. Not simply your old oligarchic elites, the flexible private-state networks are an ambiguous set of interconnections woven together by shared activities and histories. Legal corporations resemble angelomorphic personifications. A body of an immaterial being becomes immortal, being invisible but real. The king “is a corporation in himself that liveth ever” was a commonplace in seventeenth-century legal dictionaries. Spatial plurality in the collective body was discarded for a corporate persona mystica where

plurality is only on the time axis of succession. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Covering up problems of continuity creates a fictious linked permanence, a world of no beginning. Exalted kingship transferred in a secular setting, the state became a quasichurch or mystical corporation organized by a specific rationality. A doppelgänger is inscribed into the fabric of the corpus mysticum and corporation. A duplex corpus of natural and mystic, of personal and corporate, individual and collective, has survived in the political sphere, mostly by juristic means. Since the nineteenth century, courts have extended other rights to the corporation and “corporate personhood.” Black helicopter shadows designate areas of ambivalent psychological energies. Similar to fairy circles, burned into the ground by dancing elves. Zones frequently connected with the idea of UFOs or other alien footprints. Extraordinary-rendition programs for the extrajudicial-transfer operate unidentified shadow flights into the underworld of black sites. Popular traditions warn against entering such dark gateways to other worlds. If one returns from a dance with these phantoms, the world has moved on in time. Spec·u·la·tive Fi·nance: Calculated risk is supposedly the difference between gambling and speculative finance, but the dividing lines are unclear. Credit default swaps and a range of arcane financial instruments not only bet on the misfortune of others, but influence the outcome. Like taking insurance on the other village and then starting a fire. In 2000 a Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) exonerated US financial speculation from gambling laws, facilitating a shadow system where transactions soon exceeded traditional banking. Finance discourse pretends that money is about exchange-value, not a system of credit. Banks create money out of thin air by issuing credit. At first the virtualization of credit and foreign-currency exchange domesticated the absolute powers of feudal monarchs. Moderating follies of despotism, it balanced desires towards a more reasonable attitude in the view of the gentry. Since only small groups have sufficient access to credit to be actionable in accumulating wealth, the economic system still amounts to financial feudalism.

unexpected phase-transitions on the dynamic edges of order and disorder, it is delusional to call financial investments “securities.” Not even real economies are secure. Financial tools to manage risk in precarious Ponzi-scheme markets produce more increased volatility and uncertainty than stabilizing effects. Transactions moved from natural to legal persons and to interest in corporations, from corporations’ activities to derivatives in relation to such interests. In a daily trade of 1.2 trillion dollars, less than 5% relates to direct investments or trade deals; the rest is speculation and arbitrage. Everything is telemarketing in a spectral network economy, and financial markets are a play of signs. Placing bets on risks of complex indexes is not grounded in value but speculative manipulation. In the alchemy of virtually undetectable particles, turbulent brief-lived bits in the phantom flow of financial trade, illusionary ex nihilo creations have bloody real effects. “The body of money is but a shadow,” but the repressed world of bodies haunts spectral economies. Over-accumulated virtual capital hovers over the material world like a ghost in search of a body, in bubbles producing death and destruction. Spectral derivatives, descending onto housing developments in the 2009 subprime crisis, gave rise to ghost-towns stripped of life by toxic assets. Incarnations in real estate materialize as haunted houses; speculation in food stocks produces death and starvation. With the global ascent of capitalism and new theories of the body, a rich texture of bloodsucking stories spread widely. Also throughout colonial Africa, vampires rise from their graves in masses. Finance, an exalted medium, channels the uncanny abstractions of blood sucked from the living. Restless, drifting ghosts in the midst of the tumult, feeding on corpses but starving for stimulus, mirror the psychological condition of urban dwellers in the wheel of existence.

Las-Vegas-style gambling is domesticated. It rules out nonlinear processes and stochastic events with contained and evenly distributed probabilities. Today’s immaterialized world of finance is in the business of wild bets. In an environment of disruptive,

Cho ms ky: 14

This is a shorter and slightly revised version of an interview with Noam Chomsky which appeared on Sunday, Dec. 8, 2013 in the Syrizaaligned paper Avgi in Greece.

It Is All Working Quite Well for the Rich, Powerful By CJ Polychroniou and Anastasia Giamali, Truthout

C.J. Polychroniou and Anastasia Giamali: Neoliberal ideology claims that the government is a problem, society does not exist and individuals are responsible for their own fate. Yet, big business and the rich rely, as ever, on state intervention to maintain their hold over the economy and to enjoy a bigger slice of the economic pie. Is neoliberalism a myth, merely an ideological construct? Noam Chomsky: The term neoliberal is a bit misleading. The doctrines are neither new, nor liberal. As you say, big business and the rich rely extensively on what economist Dean Baker calls “the conservative nanny state” that they nourish. That is dramatically true of financial institutions. A recent IMF study attributes the profits of the big banks almost entirely to the implicit government insurance policy (“too big to fail”), not just the widely publicized bailouts, but access to cheap credit, favorable ratings because of the state guarantee and much else. The same is true of the productive economy. The IT revolution, now its driving force, relied very heavily on state-based R&D, procurement and other devices. That pattern goes back to early English industrialization. However, neither “neoliberalism,” nor its earlier versions as “liberalism,” have been myths, certainly not for their vic-

tims. Economic historian Paul Bairoch is only one of many who have shown that “the Third World’s compulsory economic liberalism in the 19th century is a major element in explaining the delay in its industrialization,” in fact, its “de-industrialization,” a story that continues to the present under various guises. In brief, the doctrines are, to a substantial extent, a “myth” for the rich and powerful, who craft many ways to protect themselves from market forces, but not for the poor and weak, who are subjected to their ravages.

What explains the supremacy of market-centric rule and predatory finance in an era that has experienced the most destructive crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression? The basic explanation is the usual one: It is all working quite well for the rich and powerful. In the US, for example, tens of millions are unemployed, unknown millions have dropped out of the workforce in despair, and incomes as well as conditions of life have largely stagnated or declined. But the big banks, which were responsible for the latest crisis, are bigger and richer than ever, corporate prof its are breaking records, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice is accumulating among those who count, labor is severely weakened by union busting and “growing worker insecurity,” to borrow the term Alan Greenspan used in explaining the grand success of the economy he managed, when he was still “St. Alan,” perhaps the greatest economist since Adam Smith, before the collapse of the structure he had administered, along with its intellectual foundations. So what is there to complain about?

ries in Chalkidiki are putting up a heroic resistance both against the predatory aims of Eldorado Gold and the police forces that have been mobilized by the Greek state in support of the multinational company.

decent human survival is at stake. The earliest victims are, as usual, the weakest and most vulnerable

The growth of financial capital is related to the decline in the rate of profit in industry and the new opportunities to distribute production more widely to places where labor is more readily exploited and constraints on capital are weakest - while profits are distributed to places with lowest [tax] rates (“globalization”). The process has been abetted by technological developments that facilitate the growth of an “outof-control financial sector,” which “is eating out the modern market economy [that is, the productive economy] from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid,” to borrow the evocative phrase of Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, probably the most respected financial correspondent in the English-speaking world. That aside, as noted, the “market-centric rule” imposes harsh discipline on the many, but the few who count protect themselves from it effectively.

What do you make of the argument about the dominance of a transnational elite and the end of the nationstate, especially since its proponents claim that this New World Order is already upon us? There’s something to it, but it shouldn’t be exaggerated. Multinationals continue to rely on the home state for protection, economic and military, and substantially for innovation as well. The international institutions remain largely under the control of the most powerful states, and in general the state-centric global order remains reasonably stable.

Those enthusiastically leading the race to fall off the cliff are the richest and most powerful societies, with incomparable advantages, like the US and Canada. Just the opposite of what rationality would predict apart from the lunatic rationality of “really existing capitalist democracy.”

Europe is moving ever closer to the end of the “social contract.” Is this a surprising development for you? In an interview, Mario Draghi informed The Wall Street Journal that “the Continent’s traditional social contract” - perhaps its major contribution to contemporary civilization - “is obsolete” and must be dismantled. And he is one of the international bureaucrats who is doing most to protect its remnants. Business has always disliked the social contract. Recall the euphoria in the business press when the fall of “Communism” offered a new work force - educated, trained, healthy and even blond and blue-eyed - that could be used to undercut the “luxurious lifestyle” of western workers. It is not the result of inexorable forces, economic or other, but a policy design based on the interests of the designers, who are rather more likely to be bankers and CEOs than the janitors who clean their offices.

One of the biggest problems facing many parts of the advanced capitalist world today is the debt burden, public and private. In the peripheral nations of the eurozone, in particular, debt is having catastrophic social effects as the “people always pay,” as you have pointedly argued in the past. For the benefit of today’s activists, would you explain in what sense debt is “a social and ideological construct?” There are many reasons. One was captured well by a phrase of the US executive director of the IMF, Karen Lissakers, who described the institution as “the credit community’s enforcer.” In a capitalist economy, if you lend me money and I can’t pay you back, it’s your problem: You cannot demand that my neighbors pay the debt. But since the rich and powerful protect themselves from market discipline, matters work differently when a big bank lends money to risky borrowers, hence at high interest and profit, and at some point they cannot pay. Then the “the credit community’s enforcer” rides to the rescue, ensuring that the debt is paid, with liability transferred to the general public by structural adjustment programs, austerity and the like. When the rich don’t like to pay such debts, they can declare them to be “odious,” hence invalid: imposed on the weak by unfair means. A huge amount of debt is “odious” in this sense, but few can appeal to powerful institutions to rescue them from the rigors of capitalism.

The US remains a world empire and, by your account, operates under the “Mafia principle,” meaning that the godfather does not tolerate “successful defiance.” Is the American empire in decline, and, if so, does it pose yet a greater threat to global peace and security?

There are plenty of other devices. J.P. Morgan Chase has just been fined $13 billion (half of it tax-deductible) for what should be regarded as criminal behavior in fraudulent mortgage schemes, from which the usual victims suffer under hopeless burdens of debt. The inspector-general of the US government bailout program, Neil Barofsky, pointed out that it was officially a legislative bargain: the banks that were the culprits were to be bailed out, and their victims, people losing their homes, were to be given some limited protection and support. As he explains, only the first part of the bargain was seriously honored, and the plan became a “giveaway to Wall Street executives” - to the surprise of no one who understands “really existing capitalism.” The list goes on.

It is rather likely that the next government in Greece will be a government of the Coalition of the Radical Left. What should be its approach toward the European Union and Greece’s creditors? Also, should a left government be reassuring toward the most productive sectors of the capitalist class, or should it adopt the core components of a traditional workerist-populist ideology?

In the course of the crisis, Greeks have been portrayed around the globe as lazy and corrupt tax evaders who merely like to demonstrate. This view has become mainstream. What are the mechanisms used to persuade public opinion? Can they be tackled?

These are hard practical questions. It would be easy for me to sketch what I would like to happen, but given existing realities, any course followed has risks and costs. Even if I were in a position to assess them properly - I am not - it would be irresponsible to urge policy without serious analysis and evidence.

The portrayals are presented by those with the wealth and power to frame the prevailing discourse. The distortion and deceit can be confronted only by undermining their power and creating organs of popular power, as in all other cases of oppression and domination.

Capitalism’s appetite for destruction was never in doubt, but in your recent writings you pay increasing attention to environmental destruction. Do you really think human civilization is at stake?

What is your view about what is happening in Greece, particularly with regard to the constant demands by the “troika” and Germany’s unyielding desire to advance the cause of austerity? It appears that the ultimate aim of the German demands from Athens, under the management of the debt crisis, is the capture of whatever is of value in Greece. Some people in Germany appear to be intent on imposing conditions of virtual economic slavery on the Greeks.

I think decent human survival is at stake. The earliest victims are, as usual, the weakest and most vulnerable. That much has been evident even in the global summit on climate change that just concluded in Warsaw, with little outcome. And there is every reason to expect that to continue. A future historian - if there is one - will observe the current spectacle with amazement. In the lead in trying to avert likely catastrophe are the so-called “primitive societies”: First Nations in Canada, indigenous people in South America and so on throughout the world. We see the struggle for environmental salvage and protection taking place today in Greece, where the residents of Skou-

US global hegemony reached a historically unparalleled peak in 1945, and has been declining steadily since, though it still remains very great and though power is becoming more diversified, there is no single competitor in sight. The traditional Mafia principle is constantly invoked, but ability to implement it is more constrained. The threat to peace and security is very real. To take just one example, President Obama’s drone campaign is by far the most vast and destructive terrorist operation now under way. The US and its Israeli client violate international law with complete impunity, for example, by threats to attack Iran (“all options are open”) in violation of core principles of the UN Charter. The most recent US Nuclear Posture Review (2010), is more aggressive in tone than its predecessors, a warning not to be ignored. Concentration of power rather generally poses dangers, in this domain as well.

You have said that elite intellectuals are the ones that mainly tick you off. Is this because you fuse politics with morality? Elite intellectuals, by definition, have a good deal of privilege. Privilege provides options and confers responsibility. Those more privileged are in a better position to obtain information and to act in ways that will affect policy decisions. Assessment of their role follows at once. It’s true that I think that people should live up to their elementary moral responsibilities, a position that should need no defense. And the responsibilities of someone in a more free and open society are, again obviously, greater than those who may pay some cost for honesty and integrity. If commissars in Soviet Russia agreed to subordinate themselves to state power, they could at least plead fear in extenuation. Their counterparts in more free and open societies can plead only cowardice.

Michel Gondry’s animated documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? has just been released in selected theaters in New York City and other major cities in the US after having received rave reviews. Did you see the movie? Were you pleased with it? I saw it. Gondry is really a great artist. The movie is delicately and cleverly done and manages to capture some important ideas (often not understood even in the field) in a very simple and clear way, also with personal touches that seemed to me very sensitive and thoughtful.

Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you have said all along that the one-state/two-state debate is irrelevant. The one-state/two-state debate is irrelevant because one state is not an option. It is worse than irrelevant: It is a distraction from the reality. The actual options are either (1) two states or (2) a continuation of what Israel is now doing with US support: keeping Gaza under a crushing siege, separated from the West Bank; and systematically taking over what it finds of value in the West Bank while integrating it more closely to Israel, taking over areas with not many Palestinians; and those who are there are being quietly expelled. The contours are quite clear from the development and expulsion programs. Given option (2), there’s no reason why Israel or the US should agree to the one-state proposal, which also has no international support anywhere else. Unless the reality of the evolving situation is recognized, talk about one state (civil rights/anti-apartheid struggle, “demographic problem”, etc.) is just a diversion, implicitly lending support to option (2). That’s the essential logic of the situation, like it or not.

TheLas tGasp ofAmer-ican Demo

This is our last gasp as a democracy. The state’s wholesale intrusion into our lives and obliteration of privacy are now facts. And the challenge to us—one of the final ones, I suspect—is to rise up in outrage and halt this seizure of our rights to liberty and free expression. If we do not do so we will see ourselves become a nation of captives.

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The public debates about the government’s measures to prevent terrorism, the character assassination of Edward Snowden and his supporters, the assurances by the powerful that no one is abusing the massive collection and storage of our electronic communications miss the point. Any state that has the capacity to monitor all its citizenry, any state that has the ability to snuff out factual public debate through control of information, any state that has the tools to instantly shut down all dissent is totalitarian. Our corporate state may not use this power today. But it will use it if it feels threatened by a population made restive by its corruption, ineptitude and mounting repression. The moment a popular movement arises—and one will arise—that truly confronts our corporate masters, our venal system of total surveillance will be thrust into overdrive. The most radical evil, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, is the political system that effectively crushes its marginalized and harassed opponents and, through fear and the obliteration of privacy, incapacitates everyone else. Our system of mass surveillance is the machine by which this radical evil will be activated. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuse of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion. And the security apparatus will blanket the body politic like black mold until even the banal and ridiculous become concerns of national security. I saw evil of this kind as a reporter in the Stasi state of East Germany. I was followed by men, invariably with crew cuts and wearing leather jackets, whom I presumed to be agents of the Stasi—the Ministry for State Security, which the ruling Comr e p r i n t e d

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munist Party described as the “shield and sword” of the nation. People I interviewed were visited by Stasi agents soon after I left their homes. My phone was bugged. Some of those I worked with were pressured to become informants. Fear hung like icicles over every conversation. The Stasi did not set up massive death camps and gulags. It did not have to. The Stasi, with a network of as many as 2 million informants in a country of 17 million, was everywhere. There were 102,000 secret police officers employed full time to monitor the population—one for every 166 East Germans. The Nazis broke bones; the Stasi broke souls. The East German government pioneered the psychological deconstruction that torturers and interrogators in America’s black sites, and within our prison system, have honed to a gruesome perfection.

bribery—are protected speech under the First Amendment. They define corporate lobbying—under which corporations lavish funds on elected officials and write our legislation—as the people’s right to petition the government. And we can, according to new laws and legislation, be tortured or assassinated or locked up indefinitely by the military, be denied due process and be spied upon without warrants. Obsequious courtiers posing as journalists dutifully sanctify state power and amplify its falsehoods—MSNBC does this as slavishly as Fox News—while also filling our heads with the inanity of celebrity gossip and trivia. Our culture wars, which allow politicians and pundits to hyperventilate over nonsubstantive issues, mask a political system that has ceased to function. History, art, philosophy, intellectual inquiry, our past social and individual struggles for justice, the very world of ideas and culture, along with an understanding of what it means to live and participate in a functioning democracy, are thrust into black holes of forgetfulness.

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain catThe political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, egory of the population.” And because in his essential book “Democracy IncorpoAmericans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and co r p o r ate state, geographical movements are Th e recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, i n ou r c a se, ha s there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the th e l aw to state deem it necessary. This in- use d formation waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to q u i etly abo lish th e be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent Fou rth an d Fi fth that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is a m e n dm e nts of irrelevant. The object of efficient totalitarian states, as George Orwell understood, is to create a climate in which people do not think of rebelling, a climate in which government killing and torture are used against only a handful of unmanageable renegades. The totalitarian state achieves this control, Arendt wrote, by systematically crushing human spontaneity, and by extension human freedom. It ceaselessly peddles fear to keep a population traumatized and immobilized. It turns the courts, along with legislative bodies, into mechanisms to legalize the crimes of state.

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The corporate state, in our case, has used the law to quietly abolish the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution, which were established to protect us from unwarranted intrusion by the government into our private lives. The loss of judicial and political representation and protection, part of the corporate coup d’état, means that we have no voice and no legal protection from the abuses of power. The recent ruling supporting the National Security Agency’s spying, handed down by U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III, is part of a very long and shameful list of judicial decisions that have repeatedly sacrificed our most cherished constitutional rights on the altar of national security since the attacks of 9/11. The courts and legislative bodies of the corporate state now routinely invert our most basic rights to justify corporate pillage and repression. They declare that massive and secret campaign donations—a form of legalized

we drink it at noon and at daybreak we drink it at night we drink it and drink it

We, like those in all emergent totalitarian states, have been mentally damaged by a carefully orchestrated historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. We increasingly do not remember what it means to be free. And because we do not remember, we do not react with appropriate ferocity when it is revealed that our freedom has been taken from us. The structures of the corporate state must be torn down. Its security apparatus must be destroyed. And those who defend corporate totalitarianism, including the leaders of the two major political parties, fatuous academics, pundits and a bankrupt press, must be driven from the temples of power. Mass street protests and prolonged civil disobedience are our only hope. A failure to rise up—which is what the corporate state is counting upon—will see us enslaved.

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The Romanian poet Paul Celan captured the slow ingestion of an ideological poison—in his case fascism—in his poem “Death Fugue”:

we are digging a grave in the air there’s room for us all

were

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Our corporate totalitarian rulers deceive themselves as often as they deceive the public. Politics, for them, is little more than public relations. Lies are told not to achieve any discernable goal of public policy, but to protect the image of the state and its rulers. These lies have become a grotesque form of patriotism. The state’s ability through comprehensive surveillance to prevent outside inquiry into the exercise of power engenders a terrifying intellectual and moral sclerosis within the ruling elite. Absurd notions such as implanting “democracy” in Baghdad by force in order to spread it across the region or the idea that we can terrorize radical Islam across the Middle East into submission are no longer checked by reality, experience or factually based debate. Data and facts that do not fit into the whimsical theories of our political elites, generals and intelligence chiefs are ignored and hidden from public view. The ability of the citizenry to take self-corrective measures is effectively stymied. And in the end, as in all totalitarian systems, the citizens become the victims of government folly, monstrous lies, rampant corruption and state terror.

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mocracy and a totalitarian core. And the anchor of this corporate totalitarianism is the unchecked power of our systems of internal security.

rated,” calls our system of corporate governance “inverted totalitarianism,” which represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.” It differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader; it finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, replace decaying structures with new structures. They instead purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of expression and the press, the right to privacy and the guarantees of law. But they so corrupt and manipulate electoral politics, the courts, the press and the essential levers of power as to make genuine democratic participation by the masses impossible. The U.S. Constitution has not been rewritten, but steadily emasculated through radical judicial and legislative interpretation. We have been left with a fictitious shell of de-

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Artists Organize Artists Organize Artists Organize Artists Organize Artists

T h i s e xc e r p t o r i g i n a l l y a p p e a r e d i n A Pe o p l e ’s H i s t o r y o f t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s : 2 5 0 Ye a r s o f Ac t i v i s t A r t a n d A r t i s t s Wo rk i n g i n S o c i a l J u s t i c e Mo v e m e n t s , p u b l i s h e d b y T h e Ne w P r e s s . R e p r i n t e d h e r e w i t h p e r m i s s i o n .

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Prior to the start of the Works Progress Administration-Federal Art Project (WPA-FAP), the Artists’ Union in New York City was already a well-developed organization, and by the end of 1934 it had upward of seven hundred members. Meetings were held every Wednesday night, and attendance often fluctuated between two and three hundred people; crisis meetings would draw upward of six hundred. Locals were also formed across the country, in Philadelphia, Boston, Springfield (Massachusetts), Baltimore, Woodstock (New York), Cedar Rapids, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. By 1936, the WPA-FAP employed more than five thousand artists and well over a thousand of these artists were Artists’ Union members, spread out across eighteen states. Many of the Artists’ Union members, though not all, were also affiliated with CP USA and Communist campaigns. Others were fellow travelers, sympathetic to communism and socialism and the movement against war and fascism. The Artists’ Union, however, distanced itself from direct Communist ties, stating that it would not align itself to any political party. Instead, its primary role was economic—helping unemployed artists obtain work in federal and state art programs, and advocating for the arts to reach all Americans. In short, the Artists’ Union became the mediators between artists and PWAP (and then WPA-FAP) administrators, settling grievances between workers and administrators and threatening to take direct action if needed.

On November 30, 1936, more than 1,200 artists, writers, actors, and actresses gathered in protest in New York City over WPA funding cuts and layoffs. Two days later, on December 1, more than four hundred Artists’ Union members gathered outside the WPA administration offices on Fifth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street while 219 demonstrators stormed the offices and occupied them. The administration’s response was to call in police, who proceeded to assault them. Twelve Artists’ Union members were badly injured and taken away in ambulances, including Philip Evergood and Paul Block (who had led the demonstration), and all of the demonstrators were arrested. In jail, some gave fake last names to the authorities, claiming to be Picasso, Cézanne, da Vinci, Degas, and van Gogh. A couple days later, the 219 individuals arrested were arraigned in court on December 3, found guilty of disorderly conduct, and given a suspended sentence. More protests would follow. On December 9, some 2,500 WPA workers orchestrated a half-day work stoppage of all art projects to protest pending dismissals. Three days later, artists joined in with 5,000 other WPA workers in a picket at the central WPA office. The January 1937 cover of Art Front—the Artists’ Union’s official publication—documents their capacity to demonstrate. Visualized is a street packed with protesters; prominent among them are Artists’ Union signs and red banners with the “AU” letters. Also held up high are cutout images of pigs with top hats—a likely reference to bankers.

These demonstrations produced results. The street protests, the police brutality at the WPA offices, and the resulting press caused Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to make an emergency trip to Washington that resulted in funds not being cut. Gerald M. Monroe writes, “While average employment on the WPA as a whole de- creased 11.9 percent from January to June 1937, employment on the four Arts Projects increased 1.1 percent.” However, this temporary reprieve was short-lived. In April 1937, President Roosevelt and Congress pushed through a 25 percent cut of all WPA funding that did not spare artists. In late June, WPA-FAP employees began receiving their pink slips, setting off another wave of sit-ins by the Artists’ Union and others—writers, musicians, actors, and actresses—who occupied the WPA offices in Washington, DC. In New York, six-hundred-plus demonstrators occupied the Federal Arts Project Office and held Harold Stein, a New York City Art Project administrator, captive for

“Art has turned militant. It forms unions, carries banners, sits down uninvited, and gets under - foot. Social justice is its battle cry!” M a b e l

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fifteen hours. There, he was ordered to call his superior in Washington, DC, and relay the strikers’ demands that all cuts should be rescinded. Eventually, Stein signed an agreement that the layoffs would be delayed, but in reality Stein had no power in stopping the cuts from eventually going through. These actions alone represented a new militancy among artists as they began to realize their collective strength. Stuart Davis, the first editor for Art Front, wrote: “Artists at last discovered that, like other workers, they could only protect their basic interests through powerful organizations. The great mass of artists left out of the project found it possible to win demands from the administration only by joint and militant demonstrations. Their efforts led naturally to the building of the Artists’ Union.” Others were less apt to pay compliments to these tactics, or to the Artists’ Union. Olin Dows, an artist and the director of Treasury Relief Art Project (TRAP), believed the actions were counterproductive: “It was grotesque and an anomaly to have artists unionized against a government which for the first time in its history was doing something about them professionally.” And Audrey McMahon, head of the New York City Art Project, argued that the Artists’ Union, along with other radical art groups, tarnished the image of the entire WPA-FAP, for it led the public and conservative members of the government to see all artists as radicals. But, the Artists’ Union represented the workers’ perspective, not management’s. They held little faith in the sincerity of government bureaucrats and believed that it was the artists’ ability to organize that had led to artists being included in the WPA programs in the first place.

10 by Gar Alperovitz and Keane Bhatt

Ways to D e m o c r at i z e Our Broken Economy

The richest 400 Americans now own more wealth than the bottom 180 million taken together. The political system is in deadlock. Social and economic pain continue to grow. Environmental devastation and global warming present growing challenges. Is there any path toward a more democratic, equal and ecologically sustainable society? What can one person do? In fact, there is a great deal one person working with others can do. Experiments across the country already focus on concrete actions that point toward a larger vision of long-term systemic change — especially the development of alternative economic institutions. Practical problemsolving activities on Main Streets across the country have begun to lay down the elements and principles of what might one day become the direction of a new system – one centered around building egalitarian wealth, nurturing democracy and community life, avoiding climate catastrophe and fostering liberty through greater economic security and free time. Margaret Mead famously observed: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Some of the 10 steps described below may be too big for one person to take on in isolation, but many are exactly the right size for a small and thoughtful group committed to building a new economy, restoring democracy and displacing corporate power. As the history of the civil rights movement, women’s movement and gay-liberation movement ought to remind us, it’s precisely actions of this sort at the local level that have triggered the seismic shifts of progressive change in American history.

Democratize Your Money! Put your money in a credit union – then participate in its governance. Credit unions are commonplace financial institutions that typically facilitate loans for everyday purchases like homes and cars. But behind their unexciting veneer lie transformative possibilities. Unlike the large commercial and investment banks responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, credit unions are nonprofit cooperatives that are member-owned and controlled. These democratized, one-person-onevote banks already involve more than 95 million Americans as participant-owners. They lend to minorities and low- and moderate-income families to a far greater extent than do commercial banks. Taken together, they hold roughly $1 trillion of assets—the equivalent of one of the largest US banks, knocking Goldman Sachs out of the top five. Credit unions’ direction of capital to community-benefiting endeavors has a long lineage. The Bronx’s Bethex Federal Credit Union, founded in 1970 by Joy Cousminer and the “welfare mothers” in her adult education class, is a good example: it now serves more than 9,000 members, has $16 million of deposits and continues to empower local residents with a wide range of services and loans for students and businesses.

Hope Credit Union of Jackson, Mississippi, has generated more than $1.7 billion of financing for more than 130,000 individuals in the Delta region. Half of its loans go to minorities and women. More than a third of its members were unbanked before joining. Hope’s CEO explicitly states that one of the credit union’s purposes is to ensure that “no one is victimized by the predatory lenders that prey on vulnerable, minority, low-income and elderly residents.” Alternatives Federal Credit Union, in Ithaca, New York, lends to cooperatives, workerowned enterprises, small businesses and community groups and offers microloans to self-employed residents. While many older credit unions have become quite cautious, it is also clear that collective efforts to direct capital in their communities can work. In Washington, for example, activists from the small town of Vashon formed an organizing committee that was able to get three seats on the board of the Puget Sound Cooperative Credit Union (PSCCU) then worked to open a branch for Vashon. PSCCU was “willing to cede substantial control in exchange for new members and deposits,” wrote the LA Times. And, according to the activists, the credit union was “already doing the most aggressive energy conservation lending in the state,” including home weatherizations—a good fit for their vision for a coal-free Vashon. PSCCU supported the idea of nonprofit groups using their own savings to guarantee microlending on community projects. And in its first year, the Vashon branch enrolled 16 percent of the population, with local deposits totaling almost $20 million. These examples point to an opportunity for activists to build a nationwide, democratic, localized, nonprofit alternative to corporate finance – and, where possible, begin to deprive it of the wealth that has become a stranglehold over our political system. If you don’t already have your money in a credit union, move it! And if your local credit union isn’t living up to its potential as a democratically owned, communitybased financial institution, get involved and organize members to take it in a new direction!

S eize the Moment: Time For Worker Ownership! Help build a worker co-op or encourage interested businesses to transition to employee ownership and adopt social and environmental standards as part of their missions. Worker-owned co-ops bring democracy and democratic ownership into the economy and into community life. Several older and newer co-ops show what can be done. Equal Exchange’s 100-plus workerowners, for instance, generate $50 million of annual sales while pursuing an innovative agenda to make international trade in coffee and other food products more ethical. The WAGES-incubated green housecleaning worker cooperatives in the Bay Area provide critical job security for the

immigrant women who work in and own them. In Chicago, the New Era Windows Cooperative is saving the jobs of workers who famously occupied their factory on Goose Island. And the United Steelworkers, working with the Mondragón Corporation, has proposed a nationwide effort to create unionized worker-owned co-ops that is beginning to bear fruit in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and elsewhere. The most common form of worker ownership is the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Although there have been difficulties with some ESOPs, research has shown that workers in ESOPs are much less likely to be laid off than those who are not. Furthermore, ESOPs tend to be more profitable, more productive and more efficient—especially with training in selfmanagement—than comparable firms.

mission statement declare, ”We choose coownership over hierarchy, democratic decision-making over centralized leadership, sustainable growth over aggressive expansion, and collaboration over competition.” They benefit from transparency of all company information, a 4-to-1 cap on the ratio of highest-to-lowest pay and six weeks of paid vacation. If you are in a union, you can encourage your union to promote worker ownership, as some already have done. Within the world of ESOPs and co-ops, the potential for organized labor should not be underestimated.

An ESOP works like this: a company sets up a trust on behalf of the employees, into which it directs a portion of its profits. The trust uses that money to buy the owners’ shares for the workers, either all at once or over time. Currently, there are 10,000 ESOP firms successfully operating in virtually every sector – 3 million more individuals are now worker-owners of their own businesses than are members of unions in the private sector.

The Massachusetts-based architectural lighting manufacturer Litecontrol is a 100-percent worker-owned ESOP, and 60 percent of its workforce is unionized through the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Industrial brush manufacturer and supplier Maryland Brush Company, also totally employeeowned, allows United Steelworkers union representatives three seats on its board of directors—the same number of seats as management. Recology of San Francisco, a fully worker-owned business, is the largest ESOP in the solid waste industry and is 80 percent unionized through the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

In the next decade, millions of business owners born during the baby boom will retire. And if they sell more than 30 percent of the company to the employees, the owner may defer capital gains taxes (provided that the proceeds are invested in US companies). This incentive could have an enormous impact on America’s business landscape. Advocacy for such conversions could be a powerful strategy for building more stable, vibrant worker-owned businesses and economies.

Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA) of the Bronx, New York, is the country’s largest worker co-op (and certified B Corp), consisting of more than 2,000 mainly Latina and black home health care providers. CHCA collaborated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to unionize its workforce, with the broader aim of raising the wages of home-care workers throughout the industry (thereby raising the payroll costs of its competitors to measure up to CHCA’s

Consider the case of Fort Collins, Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing Co., America’s eighth-largest brewery. When chief executive and co-founder Kim Jordan sold the enterprise to its more than 400 employees in 2012, she considered the conversion to 100 percent worker ownership a rare opportunity to “have multigenerational impact.” Soon afterward, the worker-owners met to discuss cutting into the company’s near-term profits to power their entire facility with wind energy. “Within a minute or so, we had decided as a group to become the world’s largest single user of wind power,” said Jeff Lebesch, a co-founder. New Belgium is committed to open-book management, whereby all employee-owners can review finances and provide feedback. It also became certified as a B Corp, which enshrines in the firm’s bylaws both social and environmental goals as well as profits. Conversions to worker cooperatives also confer tax benefits to business owners who decide to sell to their employees. Among employee-owned institutions, co-ops allow for the most democracy. Namasté Solar in Boulder, Colorado—a $15 million-plus-a-year solar energy services firm—converted to an employee-owned cooperative at the beginning of 2011. Its workers own the firm equally and manage its operations on a one-vote-per-person basis. Having also certified itself as a B Corp, Namasté’s mission consists of creating “holistic wealth for ourselves and our community.” Its worker-owners in their

Take Back Local Government: Demand Participatory Budgeting! Organize your community so that local government spending is determined by inclusive neighborhood deliberations on key priorities. Participatory budgeting, pioneered in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989, is a bottom-up process through which community members collectively decide how their local tax money is spent. While Porto Alegre’s initiative involved up to 50,000 people and 20 percent of the city’s annual budget, participatory budgeting (PB) has been adapted to the differing contexts of 1,500 other municipalities worldwide, from small towns in Europe and Africa to bustling metropolises like Buenos Aires and São Paulo. And PB has now arrived in the United States. In 2009, committed organizers partnered with Chicago Alderman Joe Moore to institute the country’s first PB initiative. Following the example of other cities around the world, Chicago residents brainstormed ideas, developed them into proposals with the help of volunteer delegates, voted on the various proposals, and were then able to direct more than $1 mil-

lion of the ward’s discretionary funds toward their top projects. In New York City, communities and local government officials have followed suit, committing $10 million in taxpayer money to the process. In 2012, the City Council of Vallejo, California, instituted the first citywide process of this kind in the country. You too can help propel this empowering approach and reconnect politics to concrete human needs like housing, schools, infrastructure and jobs. As the Participatory Budgeting Project argues, the process contributes to more robust selfgovernance, greater transparency, betterinformed citizens, more equitable access to decision making and spending and real community building in the neighborhood—a central organizing unit of democratic life. And as such efforts grow, the idea of democratic, larger-scale planning undoubtedly will become less peculiar and remote and could evolve over time to manage mass transit, high-speed rail and regional economic development—and beyond. Lawmakers who have embraced participatory budgeting have found it to be enormously popular with their constituents across the US and the world, so educate and encourage your city council member to take the plunge into direct democracy!

Push Local Anchors to do Their Part! Make nonprofit institutions like universities and hospitals use their resources to fight poverty, unemployment and global warming. Hospitals and universities are increasingly recognized as important “anchor institutions” in their local communities. Unlike other large economic actors, they are geographically tethered to their localities. Their missions, invested capital, nonprofit status or public ownership, and other relationships contribute to their permanence. By encouraging anchors to play a responsible role in their local communities, activists often can influence and partner with them to solve social, economic, environmental and health issues. Higher education as a sector employs a workforce of nearly 4 million, enrolls 21 million students, retains more than $400 billion of assets, and contributes $460 billion of annual activity to the US economy. Universities, spurred by student involvement, can leverage that economic power to go far beyond narrow academic missions. Over the years, university students have won remarkable victories from their institutions – divestment from apartheid South Africa and the cancellation of contracts with retailers engaged in sweatshop production, for example – but there is much more work to be done to push for proactive and positive investment of assets, as organizations like the Responsible Endowments Coalition have argued. There are also opportunities to work with groups like 350.org in the effort to push for fossil fuel divestment on campuses across the country. In such campaigns it’s essential to have a clear idea of where university en-

dowments and other resources should be directed; namely, to investments that support not only green energy but healthy local economies. If you are a student or a member of the surrounding community, you can help organize campaigns to deploy university assets toward local job and wealth creation, education, housing and the provision of healthy food for low-income residents in the area. Promising examples of university engagement are emerging throughout the country. Community investment of university endowments is a crucial field for activist involvement. Schools like Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, for instance, have taken important first steps. By supporting Durham’s Latino Community Credit Union and Self-Help Credit Union with a total investment of $12 million, Duke is aiding the credit unions in their efforts around affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. Nationally, nonprofit hospitals report annual revenues of more than $650 billion and assets of $875 billion and can be powerful allies in addressing the social, economic and environmental factors that lead to poor health outcomes in the first place. Bon Secours Baltimore Health System is one of the largest employers in West Baltimore, in a neighborhood where life expectancy hovers in the low- to mid-60s. In 1995, George Kleb, executive director of housing and community development, made a commitment to residents that “there were no longer going to be unilateral decisions: Everything else moving forward will be done in partnership with the community.” A process that involved the input of hundreds of neighborhood residents now guides Bon Secours’ efforts – which have run the gamut from developing more than 650 units of affordable housing and repurposing more than 640 vacant lots into green spaces to getting rid of rats and trash. You can work in your community to seize on an important provision of the Affordable Care Act (often referred to as Obamacare) – Section 9007 – which requires every nonprofit hospital to complete a Community Health Needs Assessment every three years, to engage the local community regarding its general health problems and to explain how the hospital intends to address them. Health is connected intimately to economic conditions. Given that hospitals must now reach out to the community, especially underserved populations, residents can push for community-based economic strategies that fight unemployment, improve educational achievement, foster community safety and build stronger social service networks. The integration of hospitals, universities and other anchors into a long-term vision for a community-sustaining economy is a significant development. In the University Circle area of Cleveland, for example, such institutions spend $3 billion on goods and services a year. None, until recently, purchased from the immediately surrounding neighborhoods facing high unemployment and exclusion. An integrated group of worker-owned companies has been developed, supported in part by that purchasing power. The Cleveland co-ops offer laundry and solar services and run the largest urban greenhouse in the United States. The aim is to create new businesses, year by year, as time goes on.

The goal is not simply worker ownership but the democratization of wealth and community building in general. Linked by a community-serving nonprofit corporation and a revolving fund, the companies cannot be sold outside the network; they also return 10 percent of profits to help develop additional worker-owned firms. Organized community members can interact with anchors, municipal government and conveners like community foundations, to adapt aspects of the Cleveland model and an economic development strategy that uses the power of the anchors and builds from the bottom up. Numerous other cities are exploring efforts of this kind, including Atlanta; Pittsburgh; Amarillo, Texas; and Washington, DC. If your community is suffering while big nonprofit institutions enjoy generous tax breaks or are recipients of public funding, get organized to push these institutions to use their economic power to benefit the community, following models now emerging in many parts of the country. If your university is investing in fossil fuel companies, organize to bring about a major change in investment priorities.

Reclaim Your Neighborhood With Democratic Development! Build community power through economic development and community land trusts. Unlike corporate developers, a variety of nonprofit organizations manage the ownership of real estate in ways that promote inclusive and sustainable use. The structure and mission of community development corporations, community land trusts and housing co-ops allow them to democratize the stewardship of land. Community Development Corporations (CDCs) are community-based organizations that anchor capital locally, usually in low-income areas, through the development of residential and commercial property, ranging from affordable housing to shopping centers and even businesses. Roughly 4,600 CDCs operate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and they have created tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space a year. Although many are smaller in scale, there are efforts like New Community Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, which employs 600 local residents, manages 2,000 housing units, has roughly $500 million of assets and owns businesses whose proceeds go toward underwriting such social programs as day care and medical support for seniors. Also important: as a neighborhood-based, 501(c)(3) nonprofit, at least one-third of the CDC board is composed of community residents, allowing for the possibility of direct, grass-roots participation in decision-making. Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit entities that operate in more than 200 communities and have helped produce close nearly 10,000 housing units of lowcost housing nationwide by taking land off the market and placing it in a trust. Most CLTs lease homes to residents. And

by retaining the majority of the home equity gained over time, the trust is able to continue to make homes available to new members at affordable, below-market prices. Like CDCs, land trust boards are typically composed of at least one-third landtrust residents. Organized communities can incorporate CLTs into their broader vision for economic justice. Take the Dudley Street area of Roxbury—one of the poorest neighborhoods in Boston. Residents of the predominantly black and Latino neighborhood convinced Boston city officials to grant the community the power of eminent domain over 1,300 parcels of abandoned land – an unprecedented step – then promptly established a land trust. Today, the highly democratic CLT Dudley Neighbors Inc. (DNI) ensures “community land ownership, permanence and affordability,” having rehabilitated many of those parcels into hundreds of high-quality affordable homes, along with community centers, new schools, a community greenhouse, parks, playgrounds and other public spaces. John Barros, executive director of DNI (and, at this moment, a candidate running for mayor in Boston), says the initiative counters the narrative of “economic development from the standpoint of a singular individual.” In communities of color, he said, “We need advocacy for collective wealth building,” not simply “individual wealth building.” You might also build on the some of the lessons learned from another low-income, largely minority community that formed a housing cooperative. The Alliance to Develop Power (ADP) in Springfield, Massachusetts, began as a small nonprofit fighting local displacement – until its members decided: “We want to own stuff too, not just fight people who own stuff.” The organization mobilized renters in a largescale campaign and bought 1,200 units of housing from private owners, making it the largest block of tenant-controlled housing in the United States. The democratically governed, multimillion-dollar organization subsequently embarked on an effort to build a “community economy,” leveraging its ownership over property to anchor and incubate businesses whose surpluses go back into ADP’s programming– including advocacy on behalf of the whole community. As communities attempt to carve out holistic economic development, they are incorporating the interests of tenants, homeowners, businesses, workers and families. As ADP Executive Director Tim Fisk writes, “We are attempting to not just push back and improve individual and community standing within an unequal world, we are attempting to build the world as it should be. A world framed by our own definition of community values and shared prosperity.” Get involved in your local CDC, CLT or housing co-op, and encourage them to leverage their assets to support inclusive economic development. Connect activist struggles for economic and housing justice to institution-building strategies to build up long-term power for such work.

P ublic Money for the Public Good! Organize to use public finances for community development. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, some cities in Oregon responded to organized constituents and set in motion an effort to keep municipal money circulating locally in ways that help build the local economy. Until this point, cities could make federally insured deposits only up to $250,000 in credit unions. A state-led program now provides regular oversight and insurance, allowing local governments to deposit more than $250,000 safely. Cities such as Portland and Beaverton already have started shifting their money. In total, 10 area credit unions have accepted deposits of more than $27 million since the program began in April 2013 – all of which can be reinvested in the local economy under the purview of communitybased democratic participation. Oregon’s treasury holds credit-union securities as collateral, monitors them monthly, and can sell them to recover any funds in case of financial-institution failure. “It makes sense for local governments to move some of their money from Wall Street to Main Street,” observes John Trull of the Northwest Credit Union Association, who helped facilitate the program. Over the longer term, grass-roots momentum is beginning to build around the ideas of shifting state finances away from for-profit banks through the development of public state banks. Activists have been pushing for legislation in many states that would replicate key features of the Bank of North Dakota, a successful public bank founded in 1919. The bank leverages $5 billion of deposits from taxes and public funds, and partners with and backs local banks, which then offer loans to small businesses, farmers and college students. In times of economic hardship, the Bank of North Dakota injects credit into the state economy, providing a countercyclical cushion; it also returns millions of dollars of profit annually to North Dakota’s general fund. Vermont State Sen. Anthony Pollina is championing the effort to create such a bank for his home state. Pollina, quoted in The American Prospect, expressed frustration regarding the for-profit financial institution that currently receives the state of Vermont’s deposits, TD Bank: “They charge us fees; they lend our money wherever they want to lend it,” but “they don’t do that much lending in Vermont anymore.” In California, organizations like the Public Banking Institute (PBI) have begun to advocate North Dakota-style public banking options as well, given that the state’s taxpayers pay millions in interest on bonds and loans for their infrastructure needs. PBI’s Marc Armstrong observes that if “California had had a state bank, we could have used the state bank credit to fund virtually all of that debt at very low cost.” Many experts believe that it’s only a matter of time before the next financial crisis hits – and when it does, a different solution

to bailouts for reckless for-profit banks may well be possible at the national level. In a sense, public banking is a very conservative as well as progressive concept: Public banks and credit unions weathered the last crisis much better than private banks, benefiting the communities they served as well. There is a role for action at every level, and especially through institution building at the local level and organized advocacy for state-level democratization of finance. To build a financial sector that works for the public good, start organizing at the city, county and state level to make sure public money flows through community or publicly owned banks – get involved with one of the many groups dedicated to these efforts around the country.

Stop Letting Your Savings Fuel Corporate Rule! Get your workplace to offer more retirement-plan opportunities for responsible investment. If you have retirement savings, chances are that they are currently being invested in Wall Street and are thus being invested in ways that work against workers and communities. As British historian and sociologist Robin Blackburn has observed, the “boring world of pension provision now fuels the glamorous world of high finance, property speculation, rogue traders, media and technology mergers, and stock exchange bubbles.” However, socially responsible investing (SRI) is now an important and expanding realm and can increasingly be applied to pension plans. Pushing your employer for more SRI options, and in particular supporting the community-investing sphere of SRI can lead to important impacts on the national and local economy. Firms and employees in the private and public sectors can learn from the positive experiences with community investing of some state pension funds. Since 1990, for example, Alabama’s somewhat unusual public pension system has invested 10 percent of its resources within the state (including in worker-owned businesses) to enhance economic development, and a 2012 study found that returns on that investment were greater than if they had been put into traditional investment vehicles. California’s state pension fund, CalPERS, has similarly directed almost 10 percent of its investments, or $23.5 billion, to community-building efforts in the state rather than handing them over to Wall Street. Private pension programs also can follow the lead of Illinois-based General Board of Pension and Health Benefits of The United Methodist Church, which in 2012 invested more than $750 million of its assets in affordable housing and other community-development facilities. The potential for impact through directing worker pension funds in support of workers’ priorities is enormous, and some have even called for a 21st-century New Deal financed by working people themselves. A Green New Deal leveraging the $4.5 tril-

lion in public pensions and private-sector-union pensions could help maintain public ownership of critical infrastructure and protect workers’ rights while creating well-paid jobs. Such a realignment of workers’ capital would transform power relationships in local communities by creating alliances between state and local governments, public workers and labor unions. The effort could help lay the groundwork for a different pattern of political economy that could address deeper systemic challenges, as union pension funds also could be used to help develop worker-owned, unionized co-ops. If you have an SRI option at work, use it! If you don’t, have a conversation with your coworkers about demanding investment options that support an economy that you’d prefer to live in. Push public officials to use public pension funds to help change ownership in general.

Democratize Energy Production to Create a Green Economy! Get involved in public and cooperative utilities to fight climate change. Public utilities always have been important in providing energy to US homes. In fact, more than 2,000 public utilities supply power to tens of millions of Americans. On average, their customers pay 14 percent less than customers of private utilities. One obvious reason: they get pretty much the same work done for far less. CEOs at investor-owned utilities earn on average almost 25 times more than their counterparts at public power companies. State and local governments benefit more too. Although public utilities do not pay taxes like traditional private utilities, they transfer to state and local governments a greater percentage of their median revenues than the median taxes paid by private energy firms. Public utilities are subject to citizen pressure and involvement and can be recruited to play a powerful role in building a greener economy. In California, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District—one of the 10 largest public utilities in the United States—now supplies more than 24 percent of its retail energy sales from renewable sources and expects to reach its goal of 37 percent by 2020. In Texas, Austin Energy provides about 15 percent to 17 percent of its power from renewable sources – primarily wind – and expects to reach 30 percent to 35 percent renewable energy by 2020. Electricity cooperatives also serve tens of millions of customers. They are oneperson-one-vote institutions owned collectively by their consumer-members. Employing more than 120,000 and generating $45 billion a year in revenues, co-ops are also able to demonstrate the innovative possibilities of green energy. Co-ops in Kentucky and South Carolina are retrofitting homes at no up-front cost to customers, reducing electric bills while conserving energy use dramatically. Others are involved in upgrading their distribution systems to “smart grids.” In Tennessee,

one co-op makes direct stakes in a new solar farm available to its members, and a Montana co-op helped rebuild a municipal hydroelectric plant. “Investor-owned utilities are legally required to prioritize shareholder profits,” observes journalist Brooke Jarvis, but electricity co-ops “are required to maximize value for their members. That makes a cooperative potentially more willing to try out a program with an as-yet-unproven effect on the utility’s bottom line, but with the immediate potential to help member-owners and wean the region off fossil fuels.” Active member participation in co-ops can redirect their priorities dramatically. Philadelphia residents created The Energy Co-op as a simple cost-saving measure to buy heating oil in bulk. Through the vision of its members channeled into the co-op’s democratic processes, the company added sustainability to its institutional mission in the 1990s. Today, The Energy Co-op offers its members 100-percent renewable electricity and has developed Southeastern Pennsylvania’s largest biodiesel distribution business. Using a closed-loop process, the biodiesel is produced, sourced, distributed and used within the state. Regular electronic polls answered by memberowners also guide the company’s longterm policies and everyday practices. Community engagement in municipal energy can have a tremendous impact on the fight against climate change as well. In Boulder, Colorado, grass-roots activists and the local nonprofit New Era Colorado Foundation have been campaigning to create a new public utility for the city so as to pursue renewable options more aggressively and reduce carbon emissions. In November 2011, two ballot measures narrowly passed that would allow for “municipalization”—the legal process whereby the city can form its own public utility company and purchase the infrastructure of the existing private provider, Xcel Energy – all in spite of Xcel’s massive efforts to stymie that process. This year, Xcel Energy pushed new ballot measures to reduce government debt, limiting Boulder’s effort to move forward with the process. In response, residents have turned to supporters across the country and the world through a crowd-funding campaign that has generated massive solidarity for their precedent-setting effort. “If we can do it, maybe other communities will start wondering what the millions they pay in profits to their power provider can do in their city,” concludes the nonprofit. “If we win, we trigger a national model that can be replicated across the country.” Cooperatives and municipal utilities already account for more than 25 percent of the nation’s total electricity, representing an enormous arena for democratic involvement and growth. In addition to politically helping achieve greater environmental sustainability, local control can allow these firms to serve as anchor institutions that can support local economies through their procurement, employment and banking decisions. An expanding, democratized energy sector that provides citizens with ever-greater renewable energy can serve as a driving force for the national policies needed to address climate change and keep fossil fuels in the ground. Participate in your utility co-op’s elections to push for innovative green strategies like those taking place across the country. Organize in your area to press your local

government to municipalize private energy. Campaign to make your local public utility provide more renewable energy and use its economic power to benefit the local economy.

Mobilize the Faith Community!

Get your religious organization to move its money to a local financial institution involved in community development. Religious groups and faith-based organizations, often strongly tied to local communities, have been pioneers in the field of community development. Black churches have long been involved in equitable neighborhood development, and much community investing as it is understood today is a consequence of earlier efforts by Catholic women’s religious orders that tied the stable retirement of nuns to investment in nonprofit food banks, affordable housing and community land trusts. Today, congregations of the Sisters of Mercy, through their Mercy Partnership Fund, invest directly in nonprofits like women’s and day care centers, as well as cooperative business. The potential to leverage the capital of faith-based institutions committed to economic justice is immense. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility’s 300 faith-based investor members boast more than $100 billion of combined assets. More and more religious institutions are beginning to dedicate “1% or More in Community Investing,” as encouraged by the Social Investment Forum, a membership organization advocating responsible finance. Moving a portion of your religious organization’s investments to a community financial institution involved in improving lowincome neighborhoods is a straightforward alternative to patronizing profit-chasing banks. Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), for example, invests $7.5 million in Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs)—banks with an explicitly nonprofit, community-development mission, often involved in affordable housing, smallbusiness creation and financial services for underserved areas. JFSJ also links its investment to educational efforts, such as field trips for students to participate in and learn from exemplary community-finance initiatives around the country. The effort also offers the nation’s Jewish community “a way to participate in community investment with only a $1,000 minimum.” Additionally, JFSJ, Dignity Health and the Unitarian Universalist Association all invest in Hope Credit Union’s valuable work in the Mississippi Delta region. The long history of American religious institutions serving as economic and financial bedrocks for their neighborhoods, especially in minority communities, suggests broader possibilities. Consider the Mondragón cooperatives in Spain. Founded in 1956 in the wake of the devastation of Spanish Civil War by Catholic priest Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta, one cooperative in the oppressed Basque region with ﬁve employee-owners making paraffin stoves laid the foundations for a modern multi-

billion-euro network of firms employing more than 80,000 community members involved in everything from construction to supermarkets to financial services to hightech equipment and advanced research. Partlyh the result of community-anchored economic engine of Mondragón, the Basque Country’s unemployment is much lower than in the rest of Spain. Resources abound for getting a conversation started with your congregation about building a new economy. These conversations can then help you build support for putting your religious institution’s money where it can do more good—and less harm.

10 Make Time for Democracy!

Fight unemployment by joining the fight against work Even in economic hard times, the United States already has an economy that produces the equivalent of over $190,000 for every family of four. At some point we must ask when enough is enough. Although the economy has steadily been producing more goods and services in less time with less effort, most workers’ wages have largely stagnated and work hours have increased for the past four decades. The long-term solution is not a dash for growth, imposing a greater ecological toll on the planet. Rather, it is redirecting an already-productive economy toward redistribution and community needs. Also, as sociologist Juliet Schor has argued, one key step toward such a shift is to encourage more leisure time. This can also include taking advantage of opportunities to share work, and—where possible—to work less, discouraging excessive overtime, and pushing employers and legislators for a reduced workweek. One practical way to get started is by exploring the possibility of work-sharing. The program works as follows: rather than fire one employee, a business can opt to reduce the workweek of five employees by one day each, thereby retaining their skills and the ability to quickly ramp up production in the future. But the employees working four days instead of five will retain 90 percent – not the expected 80 percent – of their wages, because unemployment insurance steps in to cover that gap. In fact, there are already 24 states, including the District of Columbia, that have work-sharing programs of this kind. In Rhode Island, state officials have promoted their program aggressively to employers and credit it with preventing 16,000 layoffs from 2007-11. As of 2012, according to economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), fewer than 40,000 workers nationwide were participating in shorter work programs, mainly because of lack of awareness. “To increase this number,” he writes, “states will first have to publicize the system. Many employees don’t even know that the program exists.” And even states that don’t currently offer such measures “could also receive federal money to establish short work programs,” he added. Companies facing slower demand through-

out the country should consider the policy. It can reduce local unemployment and offer more free time to families. The long-term importance could be tremendous: if we Americans grow increasingly accustomed to working less for only modestly less pay, there could be greater political momentum for guaranteed time off and, over time, for slowly relegating work to a receding portion of life. Questions of leisure, community building and political engagement may one day emerge as feasible for an increasingly larger portion of society. Furthermore, work sharing can be a potent tool in the fight against climate change. “The calculation is simple,” says CEPR economist David Rosnick. “Fewer work hours means less carbon emissions, which means less global warming.” Seek out feasible opportunities for work sharing. As you try to make space in your own life for the critical practice of democracy and community building, continue to challenge the unhealthy dilemma of overwork or unemployment imposed by the current economic system. And There’s More There are many additional practical precedents to build on, refine and adapt. The examples outlined above aim to encourage thinking about how we move beyond partial experiments toward greater publicly benefiting democratization over time. For many others, see Community-Wealth. org and What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution, by Gar Alperovitz. But all of this hinges on the strategic and self-conscious decision to adopt a sustained course of institutionchanging action – one linked to movementbuilding politics and explicitly understood as a way to begin laying the necessary groundwork for something more.

I HEAR T NSA a project by Industry of the Ordinary In 1977, Milton Glaser designed a logo to promote New York City. The logo, ‘I Heart NY’, would become globally recognized as a nod towards the shared assumptions people from America and beyond had about the city and its culture. At once catchy, memorable and kitsch, the logo spoke to simpler perspectives. Industry of the Ordinary (IOTO) re-purpose this logo to draw attention to the current state of the nation. IOTO believe that politics and art are central components in our broader notion of ‘culture’, and that Lumpen is the perfect forum for the kind of debate that the National Security Agency would prefer that we didn’t have. What does America become when it doesn’t trust itself? Our double-sided poster has this re-imagined image on one side and a visual representation of a Google image search for ‘ordinary terrorist’ (which in itself may invite scrutiny from the monitors at the NSA) on the other.

I NSA

they are coming up with are not good enough, go far enough, and do not address the root causes of the diverse issues they seek to work on. What is viewed as an artistic and activist solution does not alter the reality of problems. This is Social Practice’s major blind spot, many have no idea how to engage the world beyond the art world, but there is hope.

S o c i a l Pr actice A r t Q u e s t i o n s

f o r

As people who educate, think about, write about, and follow contemporary art, it is up to us to ensure that artists are doing more good than harm. In their efforts to socially engage with broader non-art publics around project-based community practices, some are not accomplishing what they set out to do. There is too much theorizing about art and not Social Practice is a semi-recent development in the visual arts that seeks to place art in the service of society. Social Practice also continues the legacy of blurring the boundaries between art and the everyday. Problematizing the art | life paradigm in favor of an “expanded field” for visual art has become a mission of Social Practice, thus making it all the more difficult to discern where everyday living stops and art begins. Social Practice artists view various forms of social engagement, audience participation, human connections, and local interactions as art in and of itself. Many artists affiliated with Social Practice contexts, often claim that they use art and their artististic positions as a vehicle for some kind of social change or social transformation. The range of what constitutes “change” or “transformation” is extremely broad and unlimited. Many Social Practice projects center on a particular social issue or community deficit; often using artistic components to elevate the status of an issue or alleviate certain identified symptoms caused by a set of cultural circumstances or political systems. Recent Social Practice artist projects appropriate form and content from other social arenas such as anthropology, sociology, social work, and education. Many Social Practices are social justice and political oriented; some examples include projects that address racial profiling, political corruption, equitable housing, deconstructing the school to prison pipeline, thinking about gang and gun violence, undocumented workers, voting rights, issues around social welfare and mental illness and so on. Sometimes Social Practice is about a social issue and other times it can be as simple as “repairing social bonds” ( a la Jacques Ranciere) that become severed through various forms of cultural alienation. These projects take the form of more intimate gatherings

such as dinner parties, bar scenes, community gardening, book clubs, etc. In my opinion, Social Practice art is a subconscious reaction to neo-liberalism, late-capitalism, and globalization; systems that dismantle working class solidarity, redraw and divide up the commons, and cut various forms of state sponsored social welfare. It should come as no surprise then, that contemporary artists are responding to a culture of privatization and disunity. The concept of the social artist can be traced back to the 1890s and should be recognized as nothing new, but still, we might view this renewed effort as relevant and worthwhile as it attempts to addresses our neo-liberal and hyper-capitalist moment. On the surface, there is nothing wrong here. I believe that Social Practice has incredible potential to raise awareness, solve a few problems, and engage new types of art audiences. If artists want to engage in social projects that fill in social service gaps, activate social consciousness, and do work that rehabilitates the evercollapsing zones of togetherness, we should encourage them. I want to fully support Social Practice visual artists who are making their work about or in the service of social issues that affect others. It is very important that every generation view their work as a social tool and that artists view themselves as connected to a larger social body. Recent art should raise questions and ask audiences/participants to think about issues larger than themselves. In a world where asking thoughtful questions and thinking critically seems at an all time low, perhaps art should being doing more of this. That said, one of the greatest problems facing Social Practice is its obvious ignorance and misunderstanding of the political economy, globalization, late-capitalism, white privilege, race, class, gender, and sexuality. The approach that artists are taking and the questions

enough theorizing about education and people. When projects go off the rails, we hear artists theorize about “failure” and how that’s okay because it’s their artwork and it never had goals to begin with. When your artwork is “Other people,” you cannot let yourself off that easily. Working with people requires skilled sensitivities, a lot of listening, reflection, and self-study on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, privilege, capitalism, and political economy. Working in communities is a very big responsibility and artists doing this work need to be held accountable in ways that I do not feel the art world has ever had to consider. Working with Others takes time, patience,

consultation, community trust, etc. Many Social Practice artists are bypassing a series of critical inquiries that any ethnographer would automatically build into a project. Art institutions and art professors need to do a better job designing these projects, offering critiques, and advising their students before they attempt this work. If professors are going to teach Social Practice, they need to stop using art world/art star examples and develop a strong curriculum that looks more like teacher training than art history lectures. Learning how to teach teaches a person how to facilitate ideas with others collectively and collaboratively, this may be useful for artists wanting to engage the social realm. They also need to openly address power and authority more. What counts as Social Practice often takes on a missionary character because some of the ideas are rooted in subconscious white supremacy, i.e. a white liberal humanitarian artist seeking out victims to save. I have outlined what I see as the SocialPractice template scenario below and have also created some critical questions that may serve social practice art, artists, curators, and art professors. A template has emerged: This how formulaic Social Practice art has become. A white artist of privilege studying at an elite school quickly identifies a newspaper headline (enter cliche white bread social problem). The artist identifies the group of people most affected by the social problem (gun violence, rape, poverty, school shootings, police brutality, etc.). The artist goes to where those people live to work with the people most affected in order to “help” them. The artist comes up with a nifty way to raise awareness (insert visual art form/visual representation/action) to the plight of the identified group of people. The work continues until it reaches a moment of culmination. The duration of projects are hardly defined nor is that given much attention. The most important part is that the artist presents the project/work to an art world audience. This is where the work gets credibility, legitimacy, praise and attention. These kinds of artist talks on social practice projects are very important because it can help the artists secure notoriety and funding for her/his next project.

In lieu of thinking of a methodology, criteria, or evaluation system for social practice artists, perhaps we may just ask that artists seeking to engage people simply read a few essays around culture, education, and politics. The following is a list of authors whose work I feel addresses and reflect upon many aspects of cultural work. If artists had access to each of these authors, then perhaps Social Practice would find new enhanced ways of working.

Ackbar Abbas,

Dipesh Chakr abarty

Jean-Fr ancois-

Slavoj Zizek

Lyotard

Meaghan Morris

Theodore Adorno

Paulo Freire

Ma x Horkheimer

Myles Horton

Arjun Appadur ai

Martin Luther King

Roland Barthes

Jr.

Michel Foucault

Brian Holmes

Tony Bennett

David Harvey

Lauren Berlant

David Gr aeber

Homi Bhabha

Thomas Fr ank

Pierre Bourdieu

Edward Said

Michel de Certeau

John Dewey

Judith Butler

Irit Rogoff

Rey Chow

Amilcar Cabr al

James Clifford

Antonio Gr amsci

Teresa de Lauretis

Audre Lorde

Nancy Fr azer

Eduardo Bonna-Silva

Gayatri Chakr avorty

Chela Sandoval

Spivak

Jane Addams

Richard Dyer

Richard Delgado

Stuart Hall

and Henry Giroux

Dick Hebdige Donna Har away bell hooks Jean Anyon Donaldo Macedo Raymond Williams Cornel West Peter Stallybr ass Edward Soja Simon During

By W.Keith Brown

Q u e s t i o n s : Why is the default position for social practice to help the needy? Is it because white artists were raised in white environments where help comes in the form of Salvation Army, Red Cross, faith-based coat drives, soup kitchens etc.? We must ask why they think this is the best way to help? Did the people that the artist identified ask for this help? Why do white artists projects typically help and identify poor people of color? Sometimes helping means going to the source of an issue, not identifying victims who might seemingly require momentary relief and aid. When asked, most oppressed people want to abolish the system that oppresses them. Short-term relief is great, but does not solve the problem. How can social practice combat systemic and structural issues? Why does the artist feel her/his art project is the best way to help? What happens to the people when the artist leaves and moves on to the next project? Who has the right to speak about the project at its conclusion? Does the artist tell the project narrative accurately? Would the people involved tell the same narrative? Does the artist get grants, get fame on the backs of the people she/he “helped?” Do Social Practice art projects deliver what they promise? Who decides how the project affected the population it sought to serve? A project that I think uses a very simplistic notion of art in the service of people is Thomas Hirschhorn’s recent Gramsci Monument. In this project the artist identified a community in need of art appreciation,

Forest Houses in the Bronx, to stage a highly intellectual and elaborately scaled exhibition and community program. With half a million dollars provided by Dia Art Foundation, Hirschhorn created a site-specific community monument to the political activist and writer Antonio Gramsci at Forest Houses. The Dia Art Foundation website tells us that:“Gramsci Monument is the fourth and last in Hirschhorn’s series of “monuments” dedicated to major writers and thinkers, which he initiated in 1999 with Spinoza Monument (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), followed by Deleuze Monument (Avignon, France, 2000) and Bataille Monument (Kassel, Germany, 2002). This fourth monument pays tribute to the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), famous for his volume of Prison Notebooks (1926–1937). Gramsci Monument is based on Hirschhorn's will “to establish a definition of monument, to provoke encounters, to create an event, and to think Gramsci today.”

Although Hirschhorn was ethical in his approach with community leaders and housing residents on the project prior to its construction, I feel that the project misses opportunities to explore major issues in society that connects to larger social issues that generate project housing in the first place. What could half a million dollars have been better used for? By offering up hip academic style programs such as lectures, poetry readings, symposia, block parties, dj sets, field trips to art museums, makeshift classrooms, etc. what did this project really do for the community it had hoped to serve? Did anyone in the community really learn about the work of Antonio Gramsci? Are they now capable of incorporating Gramsci’s teachings and theories into their everyday lives? The artist Glenn Ligon smartly observed while visiting the site, that children’s public writings on the monument were full of misspelled words and grammatical mistakes. Ligon asked himself, could the community and Hirschhorn at the very least helped these children to spell words and use grammar correctly. In these social art projects, attention to small significant details get quickly overlooked. What about offering a day-long reading and writing program to neighborhood youth instead of having intellectuals wax philosophically about Gramsci for an hour?

In the November issue of Art Forum Julian Rose does a great job discussing the projects flaws when he states, “Although Hirschhorn surely deserves praise for mobilizing Dia’s resources in such an original way, troubling questions remain about the role he expected local residents to play. His own rhetoric is less than reassuring. For example, while planning the piece, he wrote, “Gramsci Monument wants to be a universal artwork,” and asserted that this universality would be “a way of fighting” reductive concepts such as “identity” and “culture.” While the artist rightly dismisses simplistic identity politics, the notion of universality is equally problematic. One might have hoped for a slightly more nuanced view from an internationally famous European artist undertaking a project—one bound to raise questions not only about culture and identity but about race, hierarchy, and privilege as well—in one of America’s poorest neighborhoods, where the population is predominantly African American and Latin American.” This is the problem of social practice. As an art form it requires a great deal of study and reflection if it is to achieve its goals and begs the question of its usefulness. I do not want students of art reading about Hirschhorn and thinking that this is a successful model. Jet-setting around the globe working with “different types” of people seems like a cool job as well as a worthwhile pursuit, I get it. The romantic glamour attached to art stars swooping in and out of time zones to do a one-

month project that helps people sounds good, but this is no different than NGO missionary work. What gives someone the audacity to think that her/his presence and artwork is going to do anything to prevent or transform oppression and exploitation? Hirschhorn does not claim that his art will do this, but we should not let him off so easily. Just because he claims no responsibility and no deep goals does not mean that he should get away without answering some questions, e.g. Why do all of your monuments choose poor people as the target audience? What is the connection between your favorite philosophers and the poor people of color you are attempting to enlighten? Would this project be less meaningful in a wealthy community? Why did you choose the South Bronx, why not Staten Island? Who stands to benefit most from this project? In closing, the most successful Social Practice art projects are created by people that never defined their work as art or new what Social Practice was until now. Activists who happen to be artists tend to create the best projects because they understand how to do this work in a way that is patient and careful. Not until recently have they been appropriated by Social Practice (co-opted by art worlders who want use them as case studies). In Chicago, people like Dan Peterman, Craig Harshaw, John Preus, Theaster Gates, Jim Duignan, Mary Jo Reynolds, Lavie Raven, Lisa Junkin, and so many others began working with

s o ci a l pr ac tice as an art form begs the q u estio n o f i t s u s e f u n e s s.

people in a very natural way. Across the U.S. many non-profit art centers, organizer-activist-political artists, community art teachers, and religious leaders do this work too. If artists want to work with people I suggest they look outside of art to learn how to do it in a way that does not exacerbate our current problems. Learning about social justice, postcolonial theory, neo-liberalism, race theory, Marxism, and critical pedagogy may help artists who feel lost or pressured by the missionary qualities of Social Practice.

Conclusion: The aim of this writing was not to attack Social Practice, it’s about expanding it and making it better. I simply want to elevate the discourse in a way that takes into account the many nuanced sensitivities required when working with people. My goal is to make Social Practice artists aware of what their work does and has the potential to do long-term. My hope is that Social Practice makes necessary adjustments to its modes of operation and art school education so that it is more sensitive to innerworkings of race, class, gender, and sexuality oppression in order to better understand the structures of neo-liberalism, capitalism, and political economy thus providing more insightful ways of working toward its goals and futures. Social Practice needs a somewhat universal methodology and code of ethics. I hope that we can begin a critical art conversation here in Chicago.

by Brian Mier Brian is Lumpenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Editor-at-Large and will be releasing his book, Slowride in Spring 2014.

The following texts feature an excerpt from the book and a recent report from working n the Favelas.

by Brian Mier Brian is Lumpenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Editor-at-Large and will be releasing his book, Slowride in Spring 2014.

B RA ZIL DIAR IE S The following texts feature an excerpt from the book and a recent report from working n the Favelas.

As I sip my drink she tells me that she likes to sing directly to the teenage girls in the audience so that they don’t fall for the first guy who sweet-talks them. A guy with a pistol at his side and a drink in his hand comes up and tells us we can start filming. He explains where we can stand and we are told we can only film from one part of the crowd forwards. As we push through the crowd I feel something metal against my side. It is a pistol but belonging to a drunk teenager with braces who tries to touch one of the girl’s asses and gets his hand slapped away.

DRUGS Despite the initial shock of seeing machine gun toting teenagers at tables covered with cocaine and ether on the street, Rio de Janeiro’s favela slums are safe places to visit if you speak the language, know people there and know how to follow the rules. The only real danger you can get into is trying to take pictures or film people. The reason for this is because undercover police do this all the time and use the footage to target people for sniper attack. Since there were around 2800 murders and 5000 disappearances last year in Rio, gang members are only being realistic when they shoot people for taking pictures, as they did to a German tourist in Rocinha favela a few months ago. This complicates things for people trying to make documentaries, and this is what I have been doing for the last year. In another one of life’s surprises I am now working in television production and it seems like everyone is parachuting into Rio trying to film scenes in the favelas in the media frenzy leading up to the World Cup. I cast this funk singer named Thamy Delicia for a documentary that will come out on British television next April and I am sitting there in a night club one afternoon watching this bored public school type film her acting in a twerk video. One of her entourage asks me if it we want to film her in a special appearance that night in Vila Pinheiros. He tells me that he used to manage Naldo and knows head of the drug gang that controls the area. I agree, and the production company hires a French cameraman named Miguel to accompany me. I have now moved up from fixer to production assistant to field producer to the point where I will be directing my first sequence. I get Miguel on the phone and we talk over the security situation. The main danger is going to be going in and coming out. There will be no danger of a police raid, I am told, because the big boss is coming to the party and everyone has been paid off. All we have to do is meet at 2am in front of the local police station. On the way to pick up the cameraman than night we see a police car driving down the street full of guys sticking their machine guns out the window. The trunk bounces up and down as it drives along. It pulls up next to a guy on a motorcycle and a guy in black jumps out of the trunk and sticks a machine gun in his face. Our driver is an experienced guy who doesn’t stop when, coming out of the Providencia tunnel, a group of teenage girls jumps out and tries to block our way. We cut this way and that,

through shady areas of coke bars. I ask him to slow down and he tells me he can’t because we are in an area “surrounded by thieves.” Finally we show up in front of the police station and park in the gas station next door. Like most ghetto gas stations in Brazil this one has a giant party going on in its parking lot, with people coming in and out of the mini mart buying energy drinks and beers. 15 minutes later a minivan comes up with the manager, Fabinho, his buddy, Thamy and her dancers. Fabinho, a huge teddy bear with a goatee, says, “I hope we can get in and out quickly. I am scared to death of these kinds of parties.” His friend points to his giant purple polo shirt with a number 3 on it and says, “You’ll be fine. We are going into Third Command territory and they will love your shirt.” He goes up to our driver and says, “you don’t have any surprises that will end up screwing us, do you?” He laughs, “everyone says I look like a cop.” We get back into the car, pull behind the minivan and ease onto an unpaved side street, following favela protocol: headlights dimmed, windows rolled down and cabin lights on to show our faces. The van stops in front of two motorcycles. Fabinho’s friend gets out and talks with a couple guys holding two-way radios. I am told to move into the back seat of our car and a young guy in surfer shorts, flip flops and a sleeveless t-shirt gets in the front. We start up again and head into the favela. David Chapelle once said that you can tell how ghetto the neighborhood is by the age of the children on the street at two in the morning. And true to form, there are kids running around everywhere. We pull up a crowded street, motorcycles zipping back and forth, open air bars full of people drinking with each place blasting a different funk or forró song. It takes a while to park but we manage to do it without hitting anyone. I get out of the car and walk up to Fabinho. “What can we film? Can we film her getting out of the car and walking down the street into the club?” Shortly later a one-armed white guy with slicked back blond hair in an adidas jacket with big silver rings on each finger of his only hand comes up. He doesn’t look or talk

to me or the cameraman. Speaking directly to Fabinho and his friend, he tells us that it is fine to film on the street and that once in the club we should set our equipment down and wait for further instructions. The camera man hands me a light. Thamy and her entourage pull the minivan back out and pretend to park as we f ilm. I walk backwards behind the cameraman through a maze of motorcycles, children, drunks and potholes directing the light on Thamy as she walks towards the club. ‘There goes my directorial debut’ I think. The club is a “Brizolão”, one of the 1000 public school complexes designed by Oscar Niemeyer during the 1980s. Niemeyer was the king of free-form modernism and in his typical style the complex is all molded concrete, curves, ramps and Pelotas. There are two guys holding AR-25 Machine Guns at the door. They set their guns down as we come in and we are told not to film them. Once in the door, we turn off the cameras and walk through the front doors of the school, past two more guys with machine guns, past an empty classroom with laser lights and techno blaring and into the schools huge back yard, where thousands of people, some armed, are gathered around a square wooden stage that has been set up in the middle of a covered ball court. Children are running around the grounds and there are women everywhere. We don’t make eyecontact with them as a precaution against accidently appearing to f lirt with a trafficker’s girlfriend- a microwavable offense and something that almost happened to a pro soccer player in the same neighborhood two months ago. According to the papers he was tortured for an hour before his buddies stepped in and managed to explain that it was a misunderstanding. We set our equipment down and stand around waiting for further notice. Naldo, a popular “Melody”, or pop-funk singer grew up in this favela. His big hit record was about mixing whiskey with Coconut water. I walk over to a kiosk, careful not to make eye contact with any women and order a 12 ounce cup of whiskey with coconut water ice cubes for $2. As I am sipping it, one arm comes back and asks us to film the headline act for the night, a band called Juliana e os Fogosas. Juliana is a veteran in the funk world and appears to be around 30, with an enormous free silicone pumped rear end. She also has colored braces- a fad even for people who don’t need them these days.

Thamy does a few songs to warm up the audience. The cameraman positions himself in front of one side of the stage. We are surrounded by 12 year olds, gaping as the dancers bend over and shake their asses to the rhythm and she sings about taking it on all fours. When she finishes the lights go off. The one-armed man turns out to be the MC. He invites our cameraman on stage to a deafening roar of fireworks shooting off from the top of the school buildings in gun fire rhythm. Waves of rockets shoot over the crowd to the school building where a cascade of colored sparks waterfalls down the side. I see the cameraman panning across the crowd as hundreds of teenagers throw up the Third Command gang sign- a C formed with thumb and forefinger with the other three fingers positioned above it. People wave bottles of vodka and whiskey in the air and behind us, out of camera range. I see machine gun barrels sticking above the crowd and people shooting in the air. Juliana’s dancers position themselves on the stage, hugging the floor and shaking their asses and she walks out with the microphone and begins to talk to the crowd. “I want to say something to all the girls here. If you’ve ever been cheated on, wave your hand in the air. Don’t be shy. It’s happened to all of us. It’s happened to me too. Because men aren’t worth fuck all. And you know what you do when your man cheats on you, don’t you?” She yells, “Fuck his best friend!” The bass and drums kick in and she starts to sing, “We were in love, you thought you were smart, you went out and cheated. I fucked your friend and now our love has gone to the whore land of nowhere!” I am stuck in a sea of pushing teenagers. This guy with goofy glasses on with a pistol tucked into the front of his jeans keeps drunkenly bumping into me. The set ends, the cameraman comes down and we go back to the wall near the whiskey stand. Fabinho’s friend comes up. “Wasn’t that great? Ok guys. All we have to do now is wait for them to let us go.” “Wait for them to let us go?” “Yeah. Don’t worry it will just be about 10 minutes.” An hour later we are still standing there waiting for them to let us leave. It’s 5am and Fabinho looks stressed out. We finally relax when we find out that we were really waiting for the big boss to pay Thamy and her dancers some extra cash for doing a good set and asking them to return. We caravan back out and breathe a sigh of relief when a car that our driver says was following us from inside the favela turns off onto a side road.

I said, “don’t you think that teenagers are reckless by nature? I am not saying that they shouldn’t be punished but I know people who did all kinds of crazy shit when they were teenagers who turned out to be perfectly normal adults when they grew up, contributing fully to society.”

At the mercy of the

Cachaça gods I took a shower in the doorless bathroom and cracked open a beer while Aline got ready. We walked down the stairs and onto the streets of Montes Claros. There was an open air hamburger joint across from us with a few people sitting on plastic tables eating and watching a DVD of a Forró band on a big screen TV. Aline made it clear that she didn’t have high expectations for our evening. She didn’t see the magic in the place that I did, not being a cachaça fan and preferring Vodka and beer. We crossed the empty square and headed up a parkway lined with stucco bungalows that looked like they were built in the 1920s, interspersed with the occasional school or government building of the size you would expect in a regional hub town. At the end of the parkway there was an intersection of art-deco 4 story buildings with a few bars at ground level that spilled out onto the sidewalk with red and yellow plastic chairs and tables sponsored by the different beer companies. I looked down the street and saw a few more crowded bars at the next corner. We arrived there and bypassed the more expensive looking restaurant bar for what is called a pé sujo, a joint. A TV was showing the news and there was a barbecue grill made from half of a black steel barrel covered with chicken legs and thighs. I saw a video jukebox inside and there was a wooden barrel of homemade cachaça sitting on top of the bar. We sat at the only of the half-dozen plastic tables that was empty. I ordered a large bottle of ice cold beer and a cachaça. The cachaça cost R$1 and the waitress served it to me in a half-full 8oz glass, the kind that you get free as a jar of tomato paste in Brazil, typically called an “American cup.” The word cachaça is sometimes erroneously translated as rum, for example in some of the Jorge Amado novels. It isn’t rum though and the last thing you ever want to do is drink Brazilian rum. Rum is made from sugar. Cachaça was invented by slaves who used the humid sugar cane husks after they were pressed for making sugar and discarded behind the factories. Since Brazil provided most of Europe’s sugar for hundreds of years there was always a lot of this prime material left over. The husks are thrown into a vat and fermented into disgusting bubbling foam which is then distilled. There has been a lot of consumerism in the last 15 years regarding cachaça in Brazil. Entrepreneurs

and then larger and larger conglomerates have started scores of luxury brands of cachaça, aged for two years or more in different kinds of aromatic wooden barrels. Sometimes they will put a piece of burnt sugar into the copper vats to give it a whiskey-like, golden color. But to me, aging a cachaça for more than a year or two robs it of its essence, turning it into a sipping drink like cognac. The real beauty of cachaça is the raw energy buzz that it gives you when it is fresh from the still and clear or, in cachaça drinker terminology, white. This is a drink that doesn’t even get you drunk. It puts you somewhere else, worse than a drunk, or depending on your standpoint, better. I could tell from looking at this glass of cachaça that it was a good one because of the ring of bubbles that formed a semi circle around the top that aficionados like to call “the rosary.” I took a small sip because if you drink small sips you can drink a bottle by yourself over the course of an afternoon without getting drunk. If you take tequila style gulps you will be chimpfaced after three shots. There was a faint, kerosene aftertaste but it went down smooth. It didn’t taste like something with 100 proof. Just a light burn going down followed by a warm feeling in my chest. I offered a sip to Aline. “Ok, you know I hate cachaça, but I’ll try a bit just for you since you are so excited to be drinking cachaça in Minas.” She took a sip and pointed to her arm. The hairs stood up. “Whore who bore me! Even I have to recognize that this is a good cachaça.” We got a chicken thigh for R$2 and sat quietly for a while, during that uncomfortable moment between when you start drinking and when the buzz kicks in. I ordered a second cup of cachaça. There was a story on the TV about an armored car robbery with several gunshot deaths. Two of the perpetrators were minors. Aline grew up watching sensationalist local news programs in São Paulo and had friends in the police force who participated in the Carinduru prison massacre.

She said, “that doesn’t mean that they should be able to get away with it.” I said, “I committed felonies when I was a teenager. The only reason I am here today at this bar table is that I was never caught. But in my neighborhood I was one of the most well behaved people. I have friends who did a lot worse shit than me who are grown up leading normal lives now. I’m not saying I ever robbed a bank or killed anyone or anything but I participated in all kinds of petty crimes. We used to break into apartment building basements with lock cutters to steal quarters from the laundry machines in the basements. I helped steal a bunch of air conditioners from a storage room in my friend’s apartment building once. Just little shit, but if I had been caught and sent to the Audey Home back then my life would be different.” Aline said, “I remember once when my friend Flavia was dating one of the leaders of the traffico and he asked her to help him out with something. So she asked me and another girlfriend if we would like to help her take some guns to Vitoria.” “How old were you?” “15. They were these huge AR-15 assualt rifles. We wrapped them in newspaper and we had a big suitcase full of bullets. We couldn’t take the bus obviously so we went out onto Fernand Dias highway and tried to hitch a ride with a truck driver. It didn’t take long for this guy to stop. He told us he was going up to the border with Espirito Santo and that he could give us a ride there. So we got in the cab with him. Once we were moving he put his hand on Joana’s thigh and said, ‘I’ll take you there, like I said, but one of you has to put out.’ Flavia was sitting behind us. She unwrapped an AR-15 and pointed it at the guys head. He turned white. She said, ‘Since you’ve been so rude to us, now you are going to drive us all the way to Vitoria. And on the way, I’ll think about whether I will tell my boyfriend about this.’ He didn’t say another word for the next 10 hours and he drove us all the way there. So we got there, handed off the guns, spent the night in Vitoria and the next day someone from the trafico drove us back to São Paulo. And they paid us each R$150. That is a lot of money for a 15 year old.” I entered the land of cachaça high - a raw, electric buzz. The lights were a little brighter and the music warmer. The waitress brought us another chicken thigh with farofa, another beer and an

She said, “one of the reasons that this country never goes forwards is because the penal age has to be lowered. Look at those sons of whores. The only thing that is going to happen to them is 2 years in the juvenile prison. That is where they were recruited in the first place. There is no impunity.”

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Music Interviews

Nick Ciontea, AK A Brown Shoes Only is an analog video designer and manufacturer of synthesizer modules. He’s created visualizations for music videos and live shows.

Chandeliers B Lumpen: What does sound visualization add to a show? Nick: For me it's everything, but not necessarily lights or video. That's not always the visual goal, some rock bands are about the energy on stage, and some musicians its about a more ambient atmospheric vibe. I think most shows put thought into how it comes across visually, from clothing, to stage presence, to lights, and all the way up to video. These visual parts of a musical showcase put you in the in moment, and it's typically what you remember later.

o w n

S h o e s Only

For CAVE's video for "Shikaakwa" it looked like you made the players' entire bodies into sound waves. How do you do something like that?

What do musicians and audiences prefer about sound visualizations as opposed to synchronized lighting during a show?

The video for 'Shikaakwa' is a bit of a throwback. It's done recreating technologies of the Rutt Etra Scan Processor, which was invented in 1972. The number produced was extremely low and units are beyond rare today. This video was programmed using analog video synthesizer modules from 'LZX Industries' and my own synthesizer company 'brownshoesonly'. It takes a good amount of know-how but basically I showed up for a number of practices and filmed the relevant shots. Following that I spent many late nights in the dark programming the vector synthesizer patches which were output to vector monitors (very much like old arcade monitors, except small, around 5 inch screens). I then filmed the vectors in real time, and edited those shots together.

Video is just bigger. It will always be bigger. There is so much you can convey with video. The sky is the limit... On the other hand I gain more inspiration personally from lighting designers than video designers though, because I feel they have mastered the feel, atmosphere, and emotion due to more experience. These are things that have been taught in lighting design classes for theater for decades. I also feel that the music is what ultimately decides. Generally I don't wanna see a punk band with anything other than some static color. Electronic and psych music can go all the way with both. It has to fit the music, and video is not as much of a general utility as lighting.

And related, to what extent can people get better sound visualizers to listen to whatever music they're listening to? I really don't have much to say on this subject. I could try to convince you to buy a video synthesizer, but typical starting systems are around $2,000. I'd try iTunes.

Chandeliers plays danceable art rock. The quartet’s last album “Founding Fathers” was released in the summer of 2012. Members Scott McGaughey and Chris Kalis were interviewed.

Lumpen: How did you guys find each other and come together as a group? Scott: It started through some semichance meetings & then a group desire to meld our mutual musical wishes; which seemed to coalesce naturally. The sometimes skewed interests & individual hopes provide incongruent fantasy partners for our ears. This can feel perfect! We all taught one another through our separate examples & absorbed curiously— at its best, the group breathes symbiotically. Not always the case, but that's what every band strives for when you write & play. The lineup has changed subtlety throughout the days, but each cast brings their unique fresh spices to each season & stew.

What is "dillwave?"

Chris: Its a made up genre that I used on Soundcloud for my other group Songs for Gods and I guess I used it for Chandeliers too since you are asking about it. I guess that it means the song uses a 2 bar phrase sample that is then chopped into 12 pieces and played back like a polyrhythm of 3 over 4. This is the what I believe to be the technique that J Dilla mastered on his LP "Donuts".. So that's where the "dill" comes from. What are the best places to find great indie music on the south side? C: I don't know, I hear that Beverley Records is cool, but I've never been there. There is a record store called Record Breakers by our loft, but its a terrible place to find good or cheap records. "The Future is Cancelled" on Saturdays at Maria's.. Although not a record store or particularly "indie", its the best place to hear rad tunes by DJ Mike Broers and friends that you otherwise would never know about.

Do you prefer the sound you have recorded or live (and how is it different)? C: I don't have a preference, it depends on the mood or the setting. Sometimes the live sound is the same as the recorded sound, like with Dirty Moves, a lot of that stuff is us playing live in a room with 1 mic. The last record "Founding Fathers" is much more of a studio album where there are much more intricacy and layering of the sounds and instruments. I think its a good thing that generally the live experience is different or an augmentation of the record, that way there is something unique to the live show and perhaps mysterious about the recordings.

What are your personal influences, and how do they come out in Chandeliers? S: Sometimes the inf luences feel so inherent that they're almost unspoken. I think the lenses that each of us view our sound through ranges from graphic design, f ilm + the basic hope that we're making something that we'd fall for if we stumbled into it as a stranger. Musically everyone's listening to a million different things just like most people these days.

What programs do you use to create those visualizations? I don't use any software. I am total analog junkie. I build video synthesizers and I use video synthesizers. Computers can't do what my video synthesizer can do because of processing limitations. My video synthesizer works in REAL_TIME. Meaning there is no rendering and it's impossible to overload. I guess that's just the beauty of analog. On the other side, it's very complex, steep learning curve, expensive, and you can't save. No presets. No saving. Real time.

M u t a n t Beat D a n c e S t r e e t — walker

G h o Arcade

Beau Wanzer

Lumpen: What are you up to?

Mike : I've been making and releasing and djing electronic music for about 12-15 years in Chicago. I started making dj tapes in High School and moved on to releasing 7"s for my own and friends projects and have done some 12"s too. I have worked with several collaborators on projects like MultiModal, Ghost Arcade, Mandate, and MR 666—now I'm focusing on solo work, and an electronic improv project with Bob Konow.

Lumpen: How'd you start making

Beau: record.

Plugged everything in and pushed

How'd you start making music? Why electronic?

What tools/software do you use?

When I was young I tried piano and clarinet but hated my teachers and got frustrated when I started to understand I was just memorizing the motions. In my teens a friend had a drum machine and a synth and I thought it was awesome to program sequences (no more memorizing) and just get a lot of mileage out of muting drum parts or switching to fills, and tweaking synth sounds all over the place. Add some delay and you get so much depth and texture so easily. There is something really fun about approaching music making this way: you can create a whole song yourself, you don't need to have an idea in your head when you start, the loopy nature of these first drum boxes and synths is hypnotic to me and instantly gratifying.

Ghost Arcade LTD’s Mike Broers ditched his clarinet early in life—because he’s no robot . Lucky for us, he soon stumbled upon a drum machine and now jams on acid techno, sometimes with a laptop (even though he hates it a little bit).

Tell us about your style. What inspires your music? What do you hope it invokes for listeners. How do you define/not define your music.

Thoughts on performance in an electronic context?

music.

How do you define/not define your

I don't define it....

What else should we be listening to?

Die Todliche Doris, DJ Skull, and the complete Bunker Records catalog.

Can you share a bit about your style, what makes your music unique? ....it's open to interpretation What's your favorite drum machine? Roland Cr-78

Analog or digital?

Both What do you like most about the Chicago music scene? How supportive everyone is. No bullshit city.

Beau Wanzer of Mutant Beat Dance and Streetwalker likes parsnips and wants you to listen to everything that’s coming out of Bunker Records. We’re not sure, but it also seems like he’s a biologist or something.

Other endeavors?

I section paraffin embedded animal organs and work with X-ray fluorescence microscopy.

Other projects?

Mutant Beat Dance, Civic Duty, Streetwalker, Hypercube, and others web?

Where can we find you on the inter-

www.beauwanzer.com

Other thoughts?

Mashed parsnips are amazing.

Mike Broers

music?

Drum machines, synthesizers, and effects. No software.

My style these days fits neatly in the subgenre classification of acid techno. I like hard beats, echoey klanks, and weird synthesizer sounds. I think I was most inf luenced and inspired by the midwest and New York techno records I heard in the 90s. It was minimal stuff, but it wasn't boring or neutered like the "mnml" business I hear today. I thought "I can make that—I've got a drum machine and a synth!" and have been trying to achieve those styles in one way or another ever since. I wouldn't call that style unique, but its a sound that seems to have evaporated from this area so I suppose I'm stepping in to fill that void. Hopefully listeners are ready to nod their heads, move around, and get hypnotized by this style again.

What tools/software do you use?

I use Ableton Live to sequence, mix, and for fx—its really fun. I use typical acid gear like a 101 and RZ1 or clones of the classics like the Syntecno Teebee and the 9090, and have been working towards finishing a simple DIY modular.

Coolest show you've ever played.

Probably one of the more fun shows I've played was Ghost Arcade opening for Magas, 900 dix, and Quintron at Fireside. I miss that place.

I used to care a lot more if there was a laptop on stage. Now I am guilty of bringing one out to use as a sequencer/mixer/fx for convenience and flexibility. I definitely prefer live electronic music with SOME element of gear besides a laptop, but I think this electronic context debate is silly to rehash and has probably been going on since the days of Stockhausen. Piano players are button pushers. Rock bands go through the motions like programmed robots. To me it’s just about hearing the sounds in the venue that make it a "performance".

What's your favorite drum machine? Very difficult to pick one. I love drum machines and have a special place in my heart for all the classics that have passed through my collection. I've owned two TR-909's and multiple TR-606's and Casio RZ-1's so those probably are my favorite.

Analog or digital?

Why not both? How’s you wind up in Chicago? I grew up here and don’t feel like leaving. It’s an awesome city and I'm proud to call it home. What do you like most about the Chicago music scene? The Chicago scene seems to have a good mix of people who are open minded and hard working but not overly competitive or backbitey. The electronic music history of house and industrial in Chicago is pretty inspiring too.

still helps to get recognized and pushed by actual labels I'm sure. In Chicago the current labels that first come to mind are Captcha, Catholic Tapes, Still Music, Nation, and Mathematics, not to mention the awesome reissues Numero and Drag City keep pumping out. Which new records should we be getting our grubby little hands on? I could shout out all my friends that are making cool jams but if I miss one I would feel bad. Go to Saki and ask for Karl. Go to Reckless and ask for Jim. Go to Kstarke and Gramaphone and Permanent and Logan Hardware and buy some new and old electronic jams—these places will all hook it up proper.

Where can we find your music?

soundcloud.com/mbroers facebook.com/mbroers ghostarcadeltd.bandcamp.com

Is it important to be on a record label? What labels do you think are doing great work here in the city?

LTD

I’ve self released everything I've done on Ghost Arcade LTD from 2001 until this year, and to be honest it feels good to have someone else bet on you for once and to do the work of promoting which is my least favorite part of the process. The internet really made being on a label less important, but it

While not designing Lumpen, Jeremiah Chiu of Deep Sleep Vibration runs Zen & Japanese Culture Records and Plural. He enjoys the sweet sounds of the French horn—especially from an old Casio CTK- 611.

Jordan: I'm a dj from Chicago, and I make my own electronic music. I make electronic music and house that's influenced directly from my upbringing in Detroit Michigan, and my last 15 years of living, djing and curating music in Chicago. I record for K-Starke Records. It's a Chicago House label that specializes in rare and previously un-released hard to find versions of Chicago house and other rarities. Although our release together is new material that I produced, wrote and recorded in Chicago in 2013.

D e e p Sleep

Jeremiah Chiu

How’d all that musicality get started? I started composing music when my sister stopped practicing her Casio CTK-611 keyboard, which features 6-tracks of realtime recording and playback, which, in 1996, was virtually unheard of. I would spend hours in the living room while my parents were cooking dinner, overdubbing the french horn patch. To this day, I have not heard a better french horn patch. Sounds electric. Were you always plugged in? I grew up playing piano and violin, purely sans electricity. As I became more interested in synths (due to the CTK-611), I began to see the potential of having all instruments at the touch of a key, even french horn. Electronic music is cool because you're harnessing electricity, which has only existed for a little over 100 years.

Describe your “style,” please.

I try not to subscribe to a 'style' per se. For me, the act of creating music about the process of evolving a simple idea or jam or loop and experimenting from there. In the words of James Hetfield 'my lifestyle determines my deathstyle. '

Why electronic?

The white noise from percussion machines and the sub bass from a synth is it for me. What makes your music different?

I feel like my music is a product of living in the Midwest my entire life. I like to record live, with little to no editing, I think that's the best way to show'em what ya got and to learn. I currently don't use any samples in my music, I prefer the raw sound of electronics to communicate with.

Lumpen: Who are you?

Jeremiah: I'm a synthesist and I play in several groups, Deep Sleep Vibration, Chandeliers, Teacher's Pet, Axis:Sova, Dar Syndicate, and Space Rattle n' Roll. These groups by and large ser ve as the flame underneath the Shape Shoppe. I originally came to work with the Shape Shoppe Artists Cooperative through Icy Demons. I currently run Zen & Japanese Culture Records, which so far has no releases.

How'd you start making music?

I wanted to learn how all the music that I've loved and collected for years was made, and then go beyond.

Lumpen: What’s your deal?

What’s your musical muse?

The people around me.. Our urban landscape. Frigid Midwestern winters.. Playing records in Chicago. What impact do you want your music to have on listeners?

Thoughts on performance in an electronic context?

What's your favorite drum machine?

I've recently been a bit more focused on the sensibility, or the evocative nature of the music I'm working on. I used to just get really into a loop or a sound and just go with it, but now I'm trying to think a bit more about the overall emotion. For me, it really has to do with the environment that I'm making things in... the time of year, the time of day, the instruments I'm playing, my general disposition. I'm generally a pretty optimistic person, so I hope I spread positive energy.

I go back and forth on this... when I started to learn sequencing, I got really into it, and did several performances where I felt that it was interesting that I could play and tweak so many sounds live, but I also felt like I wasn't playing anything. I still juggle with that balance, as I'm originally a player, and like to be active in performances. Playing a mixer is no fun to me. If I'm doing a 'sequenced’ set, I tend to leave most of it unplanned, as I know that the timing will be there, so I can wing it a bit more and know that it'll be fine. I've watched a lot of electronic music sets... unless it's someone that is an expert knob twiddler, like... Michael Broers, it's usually pretty boring to me. With Broers, you watch what he's doing and he has such precision over each instrument that even if you know exactly what it's doing, he has the ability to mutate the sound in such a way that changes the timing, feel, quality, etc... It's pretty amazing. Most people just press play and knob the cutoff.

I would like a Jaki Liebezeit

Fav tools?

I have my go tos: Sequential Split8, Oberheim SEM, MPC1000, 808, OP1.

And the music you make with them:

'Art from the heart'

Coolest show you’ve ever played.

La Terra Trema Festival in Cherbourg, France. It was the last date of our Icy Demons Euro Tour back in... 2009 or something. Harbor. Sunset. De-shelled mussels on toothpicks. Peace vibes. Hook us up with some recommendations. Ryuichi Sakamoto, solo stuff and Fieldwork. Alvin Curran. Music from Memory reissues. Locally, check out Axis:Sova, MDB, Michael Broers, Dar Embarks, Golden Birthday, Keefe Jackson, Dylan Ryan Sand, Josh Abrams stuff, Bitchin Bajas, CAVE, Oscillator Bug, Quartet Datura, Domestic Animal, Night Terror, and Cameron.

Analog or digital?

Anal you do?

Besides jamming, what else do

I run a art/design studio called Plural.

Where can we find you?

soundcloud.com/deep-sleep weareplural.com jeremiahchiu.com

V i b r a tion

Jordan Zawideh

What have you got in your arsenal? Mostly older analog/digital synths and drum machines. I tend to like some weirder and less popular machines. I use ableton to record the final product to usually, but sometimes I'll just use an old tape machine. Just depends on what's in front of me, working, and sounding right.

K Starke

Define your music!

It's my take on Chicago and Detroit's rich music history, and it's future or something. What should be on our iPods or other mp3-like devices? The Fantasy, Charles Manier, Streetwalker, Shadowlust, Sound Signature, Dark Entries, Interdimensional Transmissions. There's so much more that I can't even think of at the moment.

How can we find you?

I produce and organize a monthly acid house night in Chicago called Acid Dreams at Berlin nightclub. Our next party is January 16th, 2014. We don't only play acid house, but it's definitely a part of the music spectrum that the night covers. It's house, but it's also an abstraction of it. Bare bones stuff, stripped down music. Stuff for your mind and body.

What's your favorite drum machine?

What do you like most about the Chicago music scene? It's depth and variety. I always find myself talking about how deep the music scene here is. It's so deep you can easily get lost in its manifold genres. Oh and it's weirdness, there's so much. Is it important to be on a record label? What labels do you think are doing great work here in the city? Yes and no. Make music first, if that makes you happy. And if you want to get your music out there to be heard, then a label with supportive people behind you is important to help facilitate this. — Nation Records, Mathematics Recordings, Beautiful Granville Recordings, Gramaphone Records, Kstarke Records.

What’s going on, besides music?

I like to ride my bike and read a lot for fun. Lots of djing and curating music nights.

The Roland Tr 808. Not that I own one, they just sound awesome.

Analog or digital?

Both Why did you move to Chicago and then decide to stay here? The people here are tough and goodhearted, I like that. It makes me feel at home. Plus you can find some of the best records in the world here.

Records After growing up in Detroit and whiling away the last 15 years in Chicago, Jordan Zawideh is a total Midwester-nerd. And you can hear it in his raw, no-nonsense, bare-bones style of making music.

Jim Magas is an artist and his drum machines are his paint . And like many creative minds, he’s continually inspired by stuff he hates, a process that has helped Magas develop what he calls his “signature sound.” He prefers analog, and hopes that if the prices of equipment ever go down, you will too.

Dar Embarks’ Ken Zawacki wants you dancing to the Philip Dick-like grooves of his science fiction-inspired tunes—preferably with the lights off. Even if you don’t like it right away.

D a r Embarks

Jim: My name’s Jim Magas and I’ve been ma king music for about 20 yea rs. Played in weird bands in the 90s and started doing stuff on my own in ’99. What’s the Magas music creation story?

Ken Zawacki

Lumpen: Tell us a bit about your self/music/label.

What's your favorite drum machine?

Ken: Currently record & perform as Dar Embarks. Acid from Chicago's southside.

It’s a tie. TR-909 or the TR-606m, but for different reasons.

Can you share a bit about your style, what makes your music unique?

I don’t know if it’s unique. I try to make art from the heart. That’s the only objective. Do you what you love. What inspires your music? What do you hope it invokes for listeners? Science fiction. Music that’s played in the dark. I hope it invokes them to dance.

What tools/software do you use?

My main 2 tools right now are the TR-909 & TB-303. The hardware versions. music.

How do you define/not define your

Dance music. Jacking dance music.

Coolest show you've ever played.

The next time you go see me play a live PA.

Lumpen: Who are you?

What else should we be listening to?

Something that you don’t like right away. Listen to things that challenge you to listen to them. Thoughts on performance in an electronic context? Bring gear. Bring an instrument. If you play a guitar or a turntable. Bring something.

Analog or digital?

I’ll go with hybrid. I like having some digital synths (Elektron Monomachine is my current fav) and analog synths around. What do you like most about the Chicago music scene? I like to make music with my friends. Is it important to be on a record label? What labels do you think are doing great work here in the city? For me personally, that would be a luxury. But I have always been more on the side of DIY.

Other projects of yours?

I play with my friends. I like playing with Jeremiah from Deep Sleep & Chris from Chandeliers. Those are my buds. Where can people find out more about you? Any upcoming shows? Smartbar. Chicago. Live acid.

When I was a kid, there was always an outof-tune guitar with missing strings that I’d fuck around with. Then I got a toy that was an electronic noisemaker with some oscillators and filters. Can’t remember what it was called, but my brother and I loved playing with that thing. Got an electric guitar in 8th grade, but never really got good at it, I just liked making a bunch of noise with fruitcake tin lids and stuff. Later on, I upgraded to a sliiightly less shitty guitar with a Morley Power Wah Fuzz, but then some guy stole all that. Then I got another guitar and amp (a Roland Jazz chorus amp, which I used in Couch and then later used by Weasel in Lake Of Dracula. I wanted to start a noise band and started Couch, with a guy named Pete Larson. We weren’t really a noise band, but we were noise-informed and kind of weird or unique for the time and place. Once Couch got off the ground and discovered I had a knack for non-music, my ego was too big to go back to not doing music. It was the only way I could get girls. Why would I stop?

Why electric?

Electronic music seemed to offer the most freedom, to the artist or individual. You are only limited by your own imagination or unwillingness to experiment. Or you can set limits for yourself if you’re going for a certain sound. The sky’s the limit and you’re not limited to constrictive time schedules as with a band. I like to obsess and work on music for long hours, as often as I can. Electronic music is the perfect medium for this.

What’s your signature?

My style is known for a minimal pounding. Twenty years of 4/4 thuds. They’re heavier now than they were 20 years ago, but that primal thump has always been central to my work. I don’t really know any other rhythms. Sometimes there is singing, other times there isn’t. I’ve learned a few things over the years. What makes me unique? I think there is a ‘Magas sound’. You can hear a track at a party or club and know it’s a Magas track, just by hearing that heavy raw beat and rocking synths. Or you might say ‘This sounds like a Magas track.’ It took me a few years to get there, but I think I’ve developed something of a signature sound. Everything I do is some variation of my limitations. What inspires you, and what’s it doing for other people’s ears? Most of my music is a reaction to stuff I hate, fueled and informed by the stuff I love, which is the sound of complete freedom. Sometimes I can be inspired at a completely boring show. I start daydreaming and the next thing you know, I have an idea. Oftentimes in reaction to the boring thing I’m watching. I hope my music evokes a feeling of excitement, some emotion, be it happiness, sadness or just a straight-up ice grill. That’s a feeling, too.

What’s in your toolbox?

I use mostly analog synthesizers and drum machines. I’m very lucky. I was interested when they were much, much cheaper. But if I didn’t have all this stuff and were just starting fresh, today, I’d probably start with an MPC. music.

How do you define/not define your

I don’t really try to define it. I leave that to the listeners. I guess that sounds kind of precious. You can just file it in ‘dance’ and call it a day.

Coolest gig you've ever played.

Too many to name. There have just been too many shows that have been ‘I-can’t-believethis-is-happening’ mind-blowing. I think my favorite shows are ones that I get to play with old friends, so we can catch up and talk shit.

What should we be listening to?

New stuff? I'd say Nate Young, Asia Argento, The Stranger, Raspberry Bulbs, Demdike Stare, Aaron Dilloway, Theo Parrish, Bill Orcutt, Wolfgang Voigt, Gherkin Jerks, Omar S, Beau Wanzer…that’s just off the top of my head. There’s so much good music coming out right now, it’s pretty great. Loads of great reissues. A lot of garbage, too, of course, but it’s my trade to know the difference. I’ve been working in record stores for a long time.

What else do you have going?

Right now I’m working on music for a film. Asia Argento's Incompresa. It’s quite an honor and quite frankly, one of the most exciting things I’ve done in the past 20 years of making music. I'm absolutely humbled by the experience and it feels like we're making poetry.

Where can we get our Magas fix?

I’m pretty easy to find on the internet. Twitter, website, Vine, all that jazz. Magasworld. com No shows booked right now. Busy with stuff in the studio. Thoughts on performance in an electronic context? Performance in an electronic context can be anything you want. Everybody has their own criteria for what they want to see. Some people want to see a rocking performance. Some people want to see analog gear exclusively on stage. Some people want huge modulars with lots of patch cables. There are MPC, 8-bit freaks. MaxMSP and Ableton freaks. There’s so much variety in electronic music that one style of performance might work in one scenario or context and it might be terrible in another. It’s such a wide spectrum, so I would expect to see a wide range of performance styles. If I went out, that is. What's your favorite drum machine? I love all sorts of old drum machines. It’s hard to pick one favorite. The 808 has been my anchor for years, but I like to f lavor it with other drums, like the Casio RZ-1 and the TR-505. I’ve also made kick-drums with the Korg MS-10. I love the Roland CR-78, the Pearl Syncussion. Drum machines are like paint. Sometimes you want to use a lot of color but then sometimes you just wanna go all black.

Analog or digital?

I prefer analog, but I’m not going to be a snob about it. A person can get very nice results with digital stuff these days. It can be muddied up in a variety of ways, with tape and so forth, so it’s really the finished product that matters. Analog gear is generally out of the price range of most people. As I said earlier, I was lucky enough to get mine cheap. However, a lot of companies are making smaller versions of classic machines, using the same or very close to the same circuitry, so it’s becoming a little more affordable again. It’s not what you have, but how you use it.

Why Chicago?

I moved to Chicago in ’95 because rent was cheaper than in Ann Arbor, I was attracted to city life and all that it offers and I liked the energy of the scene here. Also, there was a power struggle with the label I was involved with, so I was like, ‘Here, you take it. I’m outta here.’ I also liked the fact that there were 100 Indian restaurants to choose from instead of just 2. You get the idea. More bang for the buck. What keeps me here? Well, I never made a conscious decision to stay here forever, but now that my daughter is in a fantastic public school, I think we’ll be here for some time. What do you like most about the Chicago music scene? Chicago has always had a healthy, widely varied scene. For every kind of music you can imagine, Chicago has a scene for it. The history is rich. In 1995, there was a lot going on. Quintron had just left, but there was Duotron, Scissor Girls, Flying Luttenbachers, Monitor Radio, Dot Dot Dot and lots of other bands keeping things weird.

How important is it to be on a label?

I really have no idea what’s the best thing for an artist these days. Nobody knows what’s going on. I’m just as confused as anybody as how to proceed. Labels can help. I don’t know if they’re necessary or not. I have an agenda to get my stuff on vinyl and not enough money to do it myself, so I’ll probably look for labels to release it, or maybe they’ll come looking for me, if I’m lucky. If I had the dough, I’d start a label. There’s so much great music out there. Nation is one Chicago label doing nice things. There are so many good ones.

What else you up to?

Just regular shit. Work. Raise a daughter. Fix stuff around the house. Parent/teacher conferences. Rake leaves.

Lumpen: Anything you'd like to add?

2+2

Jim M a g a s 49

J + J +

Lumpen: What are the current bands that you play in and describe their sounds. Hunter: My main project is a tropical industrial (made up genre) two piece with my colleague Josh Johannpeter, a founding member of our former ba nd Ma hjongg; we’ve been playing forever. It’s two drumsets, hard edged dance beats, drums talking to machines, special effects... you know, the good stuff, the hardcore shit. Our fans have generally been using an amalgamation of our names to describe us: HUNTER&JOSH, HUJO or even better HJ (hujo.io). Creative I know! In the interest of transparency I will make no definitive statement as to our true name, which is subject to change without notice. Also I’m in Chicago’s #1 “post” gabber duo SAFE WORD (cokling-the-helmuk.com). We have a lazer cage. Finally I perform solo as WINSTON LASKER (winstonlasker.com), it’s a white-dinner-jacket heavy vocal thing, like ELO backwards run through a lot of distortion, sort of depressing. Can you describe who inf luences you the most when you make music? I usually hack into a computer which belongs to a musician friend whose trust I have gained (”I was just wondering what’s your mothers maiden name?” “What street were you born on?” ) and then proceed to take advantage of them by ripping all their mp3’s and Ableton files, then I jock their style for like two months. I can re-invent myself like three or four times a year this way. JK! Srsly tho this season has been a good haul: Barron Johnson, Ryan Stinson, Paul B. Davis. Oh and my partner Jamie Fletcher from SAFE WORD sometimes sends me long lists of tracks and I slice ‘em and I dice ‘em. Ah, my friends! Oh duh, Josh, who I mentioned above from HUJO, he’s the best! #1!

J+J+J is a duo of synth players named Joanna and Johnny. The third J is Jesus.

Hunter Husar Who are your favorite musicians to perform with?

Will there ever be another Mahjonng show?

I judge musicians by their ability to count “in pretty proportions” while they play. If they play [or pretend to play] with feeling at the same time and look sexy, I think they’re super awesome. Another joke, sort of. Honestly the only person in this world I’m interested in performing with is Josh Johannpeter, who I’ve now mentioned three times. Why eat hamburgers when you got steak at home?

No! Fuck that!

What advice do you have for musicians trying to make it in Chicago? Give up! Just kidding, sort of. No one knows what anyone is talking about when it comes to music, it’s all just a bunch of opinions so if you don’t want to suck (that is if you want to do something actually new) you have to challenge yourself constantly and put yourself in terrible, awkward positions: play a bunch of garbage shows, be broke and generally have a terrible, struggling life. Don’t whine! You don’t deserve success, few do. Most of your music is going to suck no matter what happens. Also you’re going to be swallowed by a volcano of people who claim to be “playing from the heart” when ”playing from the brain” is way cooler. If you can handle all that, go for it, it definitely beats working. Also don’t listen to me, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Additionally: don’t try too hard, that’s not punk. Proportion is everything!

How does one figure out what Hunter Husar is up to? hunterhusar.net was recently updated, go there and sign up and I will take care of you. Also I made a television show WINDY CITY TELEVISION (windycitytelevision.com). It’s features all the underground weirdos of Chicago, think ESPN / CNN “HD-VHS” quality streaming videos filmed from bedroom studios. None of that sharecropping streaming garbage, this is all hand coded by yours truly. Green screen bed sheets!

Hunter Husar is the man in front and behind the curtain on many musical projects including Mahjongg, Water Babies, Winston Lasker and his new jam, Hunter & Josh. A long time Lumpen family member, Hunter is our guide to what is happening now.

Is there a solo album in the works?

We have both been messing around with some solo projects this past year. Joanna's solo project is Surf Dude With Attitude. It's a synthesizer-surf band heavily influenced by the movie North Shore, the band Surf Punks, and the TNBC Television series California Dreams from the early 90's. Johnny's solo effort is called Kiosk of Power. It's a straight up Techno offering in a similar vein of early 90's campy techno/hardcore (Human Resource-"Dominator", DHS "House of God", etc...). Right now we are in the studio recording Joanna's project. We are also working on a ton of new J+J+J material, mostly for live sets and whatnot. Johnny's project is on the back-burner until campy techno comes back into style, which may be never...

Lumpen: The third J is Jesus. Could you expand on that? J+J: Yes. Many years ago we met at a punk rock show in a church parking lot in Schiller Park, IL. We thought it would be funny if we let Jesus be in our band. 11 years later, it's still funny. Who/what is Kapelmeister and how did you end up working with them? K apel meister is Claud ia K apel meister from Northern Italy. We got hooked up with her through the Piatto's (Italo Buisness, N.O.I.A., etc.) Back in 2004, N.O.I.A. remixed "Portable Ultra Sound" on our first Album, and we've been long distance pen-pals ever since. When Claudia needed someone to step up and sing a cover of Bruce Haack's "Funky Little Song", we jumped at the opportunity! Kapelmeister's latest album features several versions of "FLS" as well as "Sunny Day" for which Joanna also provided vocal duties. Her album is available on Beatport for download now! http:// www.beatport.com/release/funky-littlesongs/1182468 What's the secret to a catchy hook (all your songs have them)? Sorry we can't tell you our secret, man...Just kidding. The secret is to have a funny line, and then repeat it a bunch of times. It doesn't matter if you can actually sing or not (we can't). It also helps if you listened to a LOT of pop punk in High School like we did :)

What sorts of contrasts musically have you discovered that you've put into J+J+J's sound? We've always tried to follow our hearts and do what we want to do. No subject is too absurd to sing about, and no synth patch is too thick to try and make a melody out of it. It's creeping up on 10 years since our first release and the lyrics are still as ridiculous as ever and the synths still sound tight! As long as it still makes us happy, we know we did something right :)

Stave is a solo project by Jon Krohn, who collaborates with Male. Flingco Sound has produced Stave’s debut, “Reform.”

T h e — Drum

What can people expect from the rest of "Reform," after listening to "Tower9?" The record was created out of material that I had been working on since October of 2011— I was getting used to some new equipment at the time and was trying to recreate the feel of the records that I either grew up listening to or was inspired by. I’ve always linked the styles of punk/rock/electronic music together. Techno and rock lived in the same world when I was buying my first records. Hopefully listeners can see the connections through the material.

The Drum is a duo, Brandon and Jeremiah, that creates its sounds from R&B and rap samples. Their debut full-length album Contact is available from Adraglint .

Lumpen: Where do most of your vocal samples come from? There's a pretty wide array of sources. Early on it was largely sampling records and acapellas but over the last couple years we've developed a pretty nice library of singers we know and work with. Every once in a while we record ourselves too.

Talk about your attempt to create a dark, cold and unsettling sound world. ‘Dark, cold and unsettling sound world’ wasn't a term that I came up with! So that term….I think works for what I make, but maybe isnt all that I am trying to do? I think ‘unsettling’ is a good word though. Music should always be unsettling—any style— when it’s too ‘easy’ it becomes non-existent —I like when there is a sense of danger when listening to something. It’s not that I want to make or be a challenging musician, rather opening up avenues for thinking. ‘Faster but slower.’

Lumpen: What is Flingco?

Jon: Flingco is the Chicago based label of Bruce Adams, who co-founded Kranky records in 1993, sold his share at the end of 2005 and the first Flingco began in 2007. It has a fantastic roster of musicians that range from micro-tonal drone works to black metal. I thought it was the perfect fit and Bruce has been a fantastic supporter of this style of music. Stave seems like a deliberate contrast to Male, which is about sonic landscapes and improvisation. Is that intentional?

Drum?"

Why is the band called "The–

J.A. Fox from Jeremiah's other band VALIS suggested it. When we first started we were mainly trying to make beats and wanted a producer tag like Bangladesh or Jahlil Beats. He showed us this track by Universal Funk called Drum Beat and it had an awesome sample of a booming voice saying 'The Drum'. We thought it was really good and realized that if we put a hyphen in between the words that it would almost be The-Dream, an R&B producer/singer that had been one of the biggest inspirations for starting this project.

How will people be drawn to Stave?

The internet and not the internet.

Here's that track: grooveshark.com/#!/ search/song?q=Universal+Funk+Drum+Beat

Stave

What mood are you going for with all those echoes and the manipulation you're giving to the samples?

What is the "quiet storm" genre, and how would you describe it to someone who has a vague notion of electronic music genres?

Previous to The-Drum Jeremiah had been the singer in all of his projects and wanted to instead focus on using samples and vocal manipulations as a instrument unto itself. We were interested in trying to lyricless R&B. As far as the overall feel etc. we've had the idea that music often sounds really interesting and amazing when our brains are altered chemically and we wanted to approach this projects production as a way to induce that feeling with or without any chemical agent acting as a catalyst. Psychedelic R&B that evoked the feeling of normal/classic R&B but with a different soundscape and a lack of lyrics to guide you.

Quiet Storm is basically sexy late night R&B. It's named after a series of radio shows of the same name. The first one bearing that name was called that because the first song played was A Quiet Storm by Smokey Robinson. We really like the vibe of those shows and thought it was appropriate for the psychedelic R&B instrumentals we were first working on. You can read about the full history of Quiet Storm here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_ storm

What's the biggest difference for you when you go from producing tracks for others to doing your own? The biggest difference by far is that when we are working with vocalist we need to take out about half of what's on our track initially since our productions tend to be so maximalist and full. Other than that it's really on a case by case basis. Some situations are very close to how we always operate and some are a totally different process. We try our best to adapt to what makes them most comfortable but still impart what we think the most effective way to get to the best final product.

Jon Krohn

With this project i think the main difference would be that there is a deliberate ‘steady rhythm’ and industrial repetition that I am aiming for—aside from that—a lot of the elements that I would work with and produce with the Male project are basically the same. Ben Mjolsness, who started Male with me, plays on a track on the Reform LP. There is still an improvisational method in the way I create beat driven music, which I find important.

Wind— break— er — Comics

Windbreaker is the solo project of Nick Read from Lazer Crystal. He’s currently on a European tour.

Nick Read

Lumpen: Does the changing sound of Windbreaker reflect a shift in your musical interests? Nick: Things are always changing. I have been doing this project on and off since the late 90s. I think its important to keep things changing. If you always sound the same, you get bored. Sometimes when you sit down in the studio, you end up writing the same song over and over. It is also really easy to get stuck in a particular song writing process. I like a lot of different types of music, and so I wouldn't say that the change comes from a shift in musical interests so much. Just trying to keep things fresh. from?

Where do you get your inspiration

Over the last couple of years ive been wanting to get away from the normal song format that i had been doing in the past. I have been trying to work towards a more looping in your head type of sound. Riffs that give you space in your head. Space to think about things while you are listening. I have a room full of synthesizers. I find inspiration when I walk into that room.

The most recent tracks have almost existential titles: "all we have left here is 4.5 billion years" and "primitive humans." Where did those come from, and how does that influence the music? Ha! In fact these titles were not meant to be so related to existentialism. Its more simple than that. Simple being the key word here. I had been watching a lot of paleontology documentarys around the time of making those songs, and the drum programing I did is very simple. So with the title "primitive humans", its just a joke about cave man drum programing. Simple songs for simple people. With "all we have left here is 4.5 billion years", I had heard that in one of those documentaries, and thought it would be a really funny song title. I think humans have only less than a billion years left on this planet though. I find that to be a funny thing to think about. I don't think you can do much about that fact.

Have you done shows in Germany before? Has that been an influence on your work? I have played five shows in Germany in the last year, but im not so sure it has influenced my work. They like dance music more over there than they do here. Also, most young Germans speak English better than most of my friends here. They don't use the word "like" three times in a sentence. That is something I have noticed a lot. Could you explain the photo of the helicopter on SoundCloud, and how it relates to "windbreaker?" That photo is the cover art for my 2011 release on Captcha records. It is a photo that i took from an early 80's British military propaganda magazine. I would like to think that the military helicopter pilots in there are pumping windbreaker really loud..

5 6 ↑ A n dy B u r kh o l d e r → B EN MARCUS

58 ↑ Eric Rivera → Grant ReynoldsS

6 0 ↑ J o e Ta l l a r i c o → K e v e n B u d n i k

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↑L e s l i e W i e b e l e r → L e s l i e W i e b e l e r

C N SI

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Generously Supported by Photos: Mike Boyd

From $300 a month Free heat, electricity, parking and WiFi Info@BridgeportArt.com 1200 W. 35th Street Chicago 773.247.3000 www.BridgeportArt.com

“Taste is okay but very peppery, like duct tape and very bad coffee.” “The smell of this beer cleared the room”. “Weird beer. ” “This beer is an atrocity on epic proportions. ” “Poured one glass to drink, and then poured the rest on the ground for my dead homies... they turned over in their graves and gave me the finger.”

Pocket Guide to Hell seeks artists, writers, fabricators, and historians to bring Chicago’s past into the present with fun and free talks, walks, and reenactments.

a e m o c e b

! r e e t e k c Po l a i c o s , y r o t s i h r o

lab

s t u n a e justice, p

upcoming events

Studs’ Place, March 16, The Hideout (1354 W Wabansia), 7 PM Destination Freedom, Version Fest 2014

to volunteer

Facebook/pipeworks pipeworksbrewing.com

visit pocketguidetohell.com or email pocketguidetohell@gmail.com

Quimby’s Bookstore

INSPIRED BY THE WORK OF HOWARD ZINN, NICOLAS LAMPERT TAKES AMERICAN

zines ~ books ~ comix

ART HISTORY OUT OF THE

weirdo reading material you’ve made and consigned

MUSEUM AND INTO THE STREETS

“Lampert’s eye-opening, history-enriching, and superbly well-illustrated exposition of the union of art and activism reminds us of how creative dissent can be and how necessary it is to our democracy.” —BOOKLIST

1854 W. North Ave Chicago, IL 60622 773-342-0910 quimbys.com

“A much welcome, fresh view of American political art.” —PAUL BUHLE, CO-AUTHOR OFA PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF AMERICAN EMPIRE “An important first volley in what I hope is an ongoing fusillade of people’s art histories.” —LUCY R. LIPPARD, AUTHOR OF GET THE MESSAGE? “An antidote to the conventional ‘Art’ model where form dominates content and artistic creativity is reduced to marketable commodities.” —LINCOLN CUSHING, AUTHOR OF ALL OF US OR NONE “An inspiration. . . . Highly recommended.” —ERIKA DOSS, PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

THE NEW PRESS

THE NEW PRESS Publishing in the Public Interest www.thenewpress.com

The Community of the Future is a not so tongue-in-cheek reference to the burgeoning cultural scene in Bridgeport. Stop by Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar at 960 W 31st Street to get your bearings. While there enjoy one of the largest selections of craft and imported beers and ales in the city of Chicago. Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar, 960 West 31st Street, Chicago IL 60608 PHONE: 773.890.0588 WEB: community-bar.com STORE: 11AM to 2 A M Sun. – Fri. AND 11A M – 3 A M Sat. BAR: 4 P M to 2 A M Sun. – Fri. AND 4P M – 3 A M Sat.

MARIA’S PACKAGED GOODS & COMMUNITY BAR