Four hundred and fifty-six hours/ Notes from the end of an endless road.
Four hundred and fifty-six hours ................... 5 Notes from the end of an endless road ............. 22
— Four hundred and fifty-six hours — A moment can last a long time. Here, I want to spell out the moment of our travel across North America during the month of April in the year of 2011. A moment that stretched over nineteen days or, otherwise, over quite precisely 456 hours. What lay behind travelling along small stretches of one ocean and another was the urge to start building links of affinity and solidarity, to make a first step in shattering the mediation of spectacle that has wrapped around and kept our struggles apart. This, I think, did happen. But another strange thing also happened. It was as if the dam holding back the unsaid and the unseen was lying just behind the airport’s arrivals security desk: from the split second after we passed through, a deluge of images and stories started to well up. The next few pages contain a hurried attempt to put some of these images and stories together, and so to keep them close. But they also contain an attempt to understand our American experience through the lens of our own experiences in struggles and in places far, far away. An attempt to read our differences and similarities as traced in this vast space. Space, as John Berger would have it, not so much as an emptiness but as an exchange. I hope these pages are the sound-check to our exchange. Antonis in Exarcheia, Athens in the month of May, in the year of 2011.
—6—
—7—
One. New York City. To reach North America we must make a New York City stopover. From the airport we get a swirling ride with friends old and new. A quick pause and fast forward. Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights in Queens. Gold hagglers with confident smiles, relishing the power to buy and sell whatever, whenever. But the pavements on which we stand bustle with energy, the strips of the everyday we walk along are still fighting off capital’s forced array of mute absences. Another quick pause. Back in our private conversations a void forms in the air above us, lingering over stories told about a friend who is now away. Daniel, last time you were still around. In a city of ever-blasting noises your absence is deafening. There is nothing we do not know about New York City and there exists no particle of this information we have not received in mediated form. Arriving, walking, eating and sleeping here has the feeling of diving headfirst into a film. We have seen it all before, over and over and over again. And yet we have touched nothing, we have smelt nothing, we have experienced nothing. For the hurried visitor the experience is daunting: the sense of sight still prevails but scenes and sounds are reproduced as in a film that
has only just become tangible. I think of the Puerto Rican migrants in Queens, of the Greek restaurateurs in Greenpoint, the Chinese in the motherland Chinatown in Manhattan and its satellite in Flushing, the Russians who headed for the sea over at Brighton Beach and Coney Island... The spaces they have tried to grapple in the city cradle a longing and nostalgia within. But nostalgia is always mediated by time. Think of an aerial photograph of New York City. Or zoom out a bit further even, and think of a satellite image of the city instead. It’s an image taken at night. What do you see? Millions of small dots are scattered around, similar to any satellite photograph of a city at night, only blown up to an extreme. The image strangely resembles an astronomic photograph except here, conurbations replace constellations and the city’s ethnic enclaves become its shining lights. Each enclave transmits a ray, like stars transmit rays back to Earth’s inhabitants. And just like the inhabitants of Earth can see the light of a planet that is no longer there, outlanders visiting New York City may gaze over enclaves reflecting and longing for a motherland that has long ceased to be.
... Morning two, Jackson Heights. The street block ahead of us on Roosevelt Avenue has just been cordoned off by police. Hurried commuters turn into groups turn into crowds turn into a thick outline swirling around the police duct tape. The news spreads fast. A person has slipped to their death on to the subway tracks. The death shocks us into reality. This city is not a mediated experience any more. New York City is not an out-ofthis-world stopover on our way to America. We are here. It’s raining hard. ... I soak in the stories of the Puerto Rican barber in Hell’s Kitchen about his son. He’s been travelling and working, he tells me, in two deserts. First he was dispatched to Iraq, now he is a truck driver in Nevada. I dare not ask about the first desert and I don’t think I will hear about it either. Nevada is our comfortable chit-chat of preference. The long working hours, the satisfaction of delivering useful goods, and_. He pauses. And I guess he has stopped delivering death. I do not know what to tell him. My silence is lost under the roaring of a bus engine starting up.
—9—
—10—
Two. The East Coast. A rusted megaphone announcement, the end of the bus ride. Baltimore. The city that wanted to become Philadelphia which wanted to become New York in turn, as they tell me. My host and I agree this is way too harsh. For a city under the shadow of foreclosure Baltimore has some incredible vibrancy and vitality to it—or maybe it is precisely because of that. People from the local youth project asking animatedly about the political affinities of our movements, questions of tactics, housing struggles across continents... The desire I read in the eyes of the middle-aged exile from the Greek dictatorship, and his need to know exactly what is happening in the far-away place he may still call home. Door lock, engine on. West Philadelphia. An eerily familiar feeling, and it is not just because of the city’s Greek name. Cops on every street corner. The civil rights movement tastes of bitter coffee brewed in a pot and cheap cigarettes sold behind a tall counter. I order both. ... Door lock, engine on, again. A confused, unguided cruise down the East Coast. We catch the beast of its endless
conurbation asleep. Car lights shining on the highway and we are headed South. A fruitless search for the mythical nightlong diner that would serve bottomless coffee and overlook the lazy night traffic. We take a wrong turn, hit a dead end, another wrong turn and we have arrived at sleepy American suburbia proper. Spotless lawns, SUVs neatly tucked in parkways, streets carrying names of places of billboard beauty. Inexplicable dead ends and curb extensions that sing fuck off to the visitorintruder. I convince myself Baudrillard had something very appropriate to say about a similar moment, but I am too tired to remember what it was. I can only think: this is all good, but we are going to miss our flight. Dulles airport, DC. The terminal building has been designed, it feels, with the aim to keep itself frozen in time. To push back anyone who would try to rest against its inward curved walls, to prevent those who would try to leave any mark on its granite floors, to teach passengers they are merely that: fleeting shadows on a shiny background. I know millions must have passed through this building but there is nothing for me to trace their existence. Just like them, we are gone way before we depart.
—11—
Three. A prolonged state of Bœing. The flight Further West. We hang mid-air inside a cabin designed to give you a fully digitalised experience. Our aircraft pompously cruises through time zone after time zone. John Berger again: within a single present, within digital time, no whereabouts can be found or established (2007: 123). What time is it, and where are we? Dawn rises in the horizon but we swiftly overtake it. Inside the cabin, its dim rays are instantly killed off by the bright fluorescent lighting. We order water via a touch-screen and gaze at the always-on computer facilities. Always on? A chilling feeling this might truly be so. The soothing Californian sun brings us back to planet Earth, only on its other side. California, then. The land I had pinned in my mind with the clarity of Constantine Manos’s photo slides: a shrouded everyday cruelty trying to hide behind pin-up snapshots only to expose itself over and over again to the glaring sun. I’m atop a hill overlooking Oakland, the city destined to live sandwiched between the riches of San Francisco and the obnoxiousness of Berkeley. Wasn’t it Baudrillard who spoke of the rich trapped in their vitrified luxury, sentenced to die slowly
in their aquarium like goldfish? Some of the university campuses in California, he went on, remind me of this (1988: 44). Right here, by this hill next to a cemetery, when I squint I think I can just about see them, the vitrified walls of San Francisco and Berkeley. Were they shattered when this city was burning for the assassination of Oscar Grant? Was there fear in the eyes of the bland professors, the obedient citizens? Or a little bit later, when Berkeley was burning, did the walls break— even for an instance? I wish I had been here to see. Four. North-West of where? At the lawn of the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The realisation kicks in that we must rush up to Seattle early. Another car. Door lock, engine on. Driving out of the state, the crystal-clear images I had kept from Manos are by now intermingled with the muddy, rushed and tired images I have collected firsthand. Hours later, the North West. That mythical outlandish place of our childhood where everything seemed to come from. Nirvana and the riot grrrls. Anarchists with beautiful, handstitched long flags taking on robo-cops firing rubber bullets from behind miles-long security
—12—
—13—
—14—
fences. Street battles we watched with awe, glued to our screens. The feeling that the fight was on, and the longing for our turn to come. Hello Seattle, and sorry to be a dozen years late. What holds? I walk through Pike Place Market with the by now familiar feeling of fatigue running through my body. Someone’s playing Polly, but it’s on an acoustic guitar. Back in the day I would have despised him—now it almost sounds appropriate. Perhaps it is that I am by now semi-feverish, and any mellow sound will help. We are watching the highway sitting on the backrest of a bench. The thick flux of its vehicles and their roar blend with a scent of oceanic breeze. Deep inhale. ... And then we are three again. Olympia, Washington. The last bastion of the anti-war movement, only a few years ago. I see a photograph of three people linked to each other with metal tubes, pulled apart by sheriff’s deputies as tanks roll in the background, about to board the ships to Iraq. Something wild lingers in the air in this city, still—but it’s much more inconspicuous now: the radical college town and the military
thoroughfare rest atop each other, fighting it out in the most seemingly indifferent of ways. Door lock, engine on. Portland welcomes us with a hangover. The strangeness of the city does not help. Immaculate show-off cyclists, ever-confident yuppies, too-clean burritos and food vans that neatly repack and resell the street food idea. Baudrillard comes to mind once again, only now he does makes some sense: A man eating alone in the heart of the city. You see people doing that, (...) the human flotsam of conviviality, no longer even concealing themselves to eat leftovers in public (1988: 38). The lowest of the low? We are in a Portland park kitchen. Even if we do not eat alone, the experience is eerily similar to that of Baudrillard’s, with a twist. Positioned in a circle, the food vans form for themselves a line of protection, a veil-onwheels behind which to hide while consuming the refried experience of the swift, cheap food. Which was great. Five. Nowhere. A morning call from a new friend. They left town a few hours ago and they have just flown into their destination, and have I ever been in this part of the country? The realisation strikes
—15—
—16—
that my knowledge of the place they now traverse is limited in it lying somewhere deep in the middle of this long stretch of land, far away from both oceans. John Berger: Most mobile phone conversations begin with a statement about the caller’s whereabouts. People need straight away to pinpoint where they are (2007: 119). We have the need to share our own transient landmarks, surrounded as we are by so many abstractions. During our phone conversation I have no ability to pinpoint their whereabouts. Worse even, I have started to lose my ability to pinpoint where I am myself, day after day cruising through places unknown in directions unknown. We hang up. Six. After. (Or: perspectives)
on
war
and
Back in Athens. Messages swirl in, and the phone keeps ringing. Friends wanting to hear about the trip, to share updates about our struggles on the ground here. Come the morning, I will be fully subsumed in them. After the days of December the state of emergency has become for so many of us a state of being, a feeling that everything near us is under attack, the sense that
acting is always urgent. A cold everyday realisation that we are at war. In the morning then. But tonight I want to relinquish the war here, to think of the war over there. I want to summon these images as quick as possible, to stop them from disappearing. I want to fight to prevent what has disappeared, what has become invisible, falling into the negation of the unseen (Berger, 1991: 50). In our trip the unseen surrounded us, regardless. What we glimpsed at was nothing more than a splitsecond moment, a tiny fraction of life in a vast land. Still, what we could see clearly was that this land is also at war. Is it an invisible one? In Vancouver we felt the most tangible indication the war has always been there. Engraved in the occupied land that capital now tramples over. Drawing fictitious lines to keep people so close, but apart. And I think of the land of my childhood, where I am now. We have always been at war here, too. The soothing force of spectacle managed to veil this for a while. But now, instead of the spectacle covering up war, war has gone into producing spectacle in full force. Paul Virilio: War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle: to fell the enemy is not
—17—
so much to capture as to ‘captivate’ him, to instil the fear of death before he actually dies. (1989: 7-8) Think about one of the quintessential military terms, the ‘theatre of operations’. Or the term that has replaced it, the ‘theatre weapon’. Virilio again: this shows that the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception (1989: 10). This war is not about territorial, economic or material victories—or rather, it is not about these alone. It is about the ability of the assailant to keep hold of the perceptual fields. To keep visual control of what is going on, of what is narrated, shown, told. To ensure the assaulted cannot see or feel the assault. For as long as this condition remains the war is mostly an invisible one, just like it was here until December. Another similar moment might, or might not come—that is, a shift in the charge-ahead of capital that will expose its assault to the assaulted. But we cannot wait for this moment any longer. In the mind of John Berger, political resistance often begins in a meanwhile. Possibly so. But it definitely begins at the split second when we shift our perception, lift our head and finally see capital’s war machine for what it really is. In these four hundred
and fifty-six hours, I saw more people having lifted their heads than I would have ever dreamt of._
Words and inspiration by Jean Baudrillard (1988). America. London: Verso. John Berger (1991). And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. London: Vintage. John Berger (2007). Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance. New York: Pantheon Books (Uncorrected bound galley copy). Manos, Constantine (1995). American Color. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Paul Virilio (1989). War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso.
* This trip would not have happened without the companion and the aid of good friends, old and new. Thanks!
—18—
—19—
—20—
—21—
— Notes from the end of an endless road —
(...) The comrades wait for you at JFK Airport, hugs, kisses, smiles, gestures...happy - Loud yelling in front of the terminal - On the other end of the road, a white punk car, with doors in different colours, makes a quick u-turn, stops the traffic and breaks with noise in front of your feet - Open trunk, there is an anarchist poster from Athens in there, smile, drop bags in - On the expressway - A photographic lift towards Jackson Heights Poster in Greek above the desk - Cola and Mexican food in a living room in NYC (...) Walk to a squat in Brooklyn - More anarchist posters in Greek and in English on the walls Michalis Prekas - A ride on an ‘overground’ subway - Drop by leftist bookshops in Manhattan - Walk to a favourite Italian restaurant - Happy birthday (...) Wake up in the basement of a house in Queens - Eat fresh mango on the streets and go to Manhattan (...) Riding the city’s highways on a fast van, carrying a dozen of folding chairs on the trunk, while smoking Greek cigarettes, you are late - Comrades smoke on a sidewalk of a dead end, in front of a warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn, they wave - Printing press test pages all over the
floor - The dusty printing press is behind - Talk and discuss on the dance-floor of a bar (...) Confront the bouncer of the hipster bar who asks for ID Does not work - Use friend’s name to walk in, drink ending the un-ending conversations (...) Running to catch the bus to Baltimore - Somebody dies above your head - For ever - This is death: for ever - It may happen today may happen tomorrow - Just make sure that did not happen yesterday without you realizing - As slogan goes: some people die when they are 18 or 21, it is just that they bury them when they are 75 * ‘The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.’ ( J.-P. Sartre ‘Nausea’) Ignoring the ambulance which was just arriving, the NYPD cars with their sirens on and the TV cameras, we are bending under a white police tape that has ‘crime scene - do not cross’ written across it. A middleaged woman warns us loudly in Spanish not to continue and
—23—
—24—
so we are climbing the stairs back down. Within this crowd of people and amongst so many sounds my weak ears can separate a repetitive, monotonous voice coming from nowhere, declaring: ‘compro oro’. An unfriendly photo-journalist holds up his camera and tells us that somebody has slipped on the wet platform of the station and ended up on the electrified rail. Perhaps the deceased was trying to have a look at the movement on the streets under the rail or they were just in a hurry. Last night we were in Queens in a subway station together with a group of NYC-based comrades. It was one of these stations on the number 7 line which although they are part of the subway are over the ground, running above a busy street. One could hear the noises from the street but there were only a few ruptures in the hard surfaces through which you could watch the traffic of people and vehicles under your feet. Playfully and laughing we are trying to take glimpses of what is going on down there. However, it was only a couple of hours since we had landed in the US and we were pretty jet-lagged and dizzy, so our effort to see some moments from the movement under our feet was combined with a feeling of nausea and a struggle to balance, to keep our feet on the ground in order not to end up on the electrified rail in the ditch. This feeling of dizziness and nausea, while trying to take a glimpse of the
—26—
movement through ruptures on hard surfaces - while at the same time trying to balance in order not to fall - was a feeling which followed us for the rest of this hectic trip, meeting and talking with our comrades in North America. * - Meet in Penn Station under the rain - Walk from North Manhattan to the south through Chinatown - Wall Street behind barricades - They are scared, because they know - Talk about revolt, violence, fights, political splits and lost friends - Meet randomly a comrade leaving their work, in a hunter’s leather jacket - Take the boat to the islands and breathe Atlantic wind (...) Chat about the purpose of the trip in an orange living room (...) Wake up in a basement - Write - Take the subway with a comrade and get lost at a junction - Talk at CUNY - Unfamiliar familiarity - Meet old friend for the first time - Other old friends unexpectedly next to you - Run to catch the bus to Philly - ‘Sometimes they flip over’ - On the road, in the night - Lights, bridges, skyscrapers (...) On the trolley running along Lancaster Avenue - You are white - Lancaster Av. circa 10:30pm - Where is everyone? Telephone? - Eventually persuade an unknown person to lend you
their cell phone and arrange to be picked up - On a parking lot next to Lancaster Av. we open the trunk : Aha! the book – Tired not any more, sad not any more - Rushing back to the diner, cold pizza and strange ales - Comrades in the heat of the conversation, we are the only ones in the diner shared on two tables, I join (...) It is almost midnight and the diner’s doors are locked as soon as we move out - Farewell to Philly’s comrades - Empty street - Campus police next to us - An Ivy League university campus in the middle of one of the most poor and worn-out districts of the city (...) On the road trying to find DC - Lost in the Suburbia of DC - Lost in a built, electrical desert - Roundabout after roundabout Suburbia is spooky - Shiny cars - Shiny houses - Shiny asphalt Sick orange light illuminates the streets - A dead end without lights - A huge moon exactly above the roof of our car - It is almost 4 in the morning - The lights of a car turn on, on the horizon - At last - Oh no, cop car - Speed back on the expressway (...) Dulles Airport - Architectural crime, it feels like huge concrete octopus Check in - After the Revolution we should stop building such big buildings - They feel like you are entering the grave of the giants Scumbags they built them so big in order to make you feel small - It is almost half past five in the
—27—
morning - No sleep yet - Wait for the first shop in the airport to open - Gets an air burrito and fly over on it (...) * ‘Only in Cali where we riot not rally to live and die’ On the BART - Mission Dolores, buying fruits - déjà vu - Have been here before, have memories - Crack-heads on the square and ‘Ela Re’ from behind the back - Old brother who I meet for the first time - Station 40 Comrades preparing things, cooking and running around, the place is alive, sun enters from the windows warming the place up (...) Breakfast with mole - Discussions on the hills watching at San Francisco - Too exhausted to sleep - Too excited to write - I watch the traffic on the street from the window - A pair of shoes hanging on the cable in front of me (...) ‘Food not bombs, come here, try the food’ - It tastes good (...) Drink beer in a corner in Mission - Old friend from London, crosses the road, passes next to us without recognizing us rushing to the event - ‘Heeey!’ hugs, good mood - Talk starts upstairs, discussions and more talk in the bar (...) Walk to the mountains above Berkeley watching the city
- Driving by Oakland lake (...) Night, in an illegal party, on a roof in San Francisco - Hula hoops and live music - Front gates are locked, it is almost three in the morning, the news about the party has spread, people from all over SF are concentrated in front of the locked gate - Get out through the back door of the building, walk through the parking lot, exit through the automatic door and get into a car with some new friends (...) Speed on the bridge between Oakland and SF (...) In the Bay Area Anarchist book fair - Alexis Grigoropoulos, Oscar Grant and John Williams murdered by cops in three different cities of this world, over the last two years - Deaths leading to riots, to clashes - We don’t forget, we don’t forgive - Panel on police violence and anti-police tactics Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland and Athens in a packed room – ‘Cops, Pigs, Murderers’ - Cops are the long arm of power, they could be considered worse than their masters, because they are screwed by the system, but still they are eager to support it, yet they are just the violent glass window of a rotten apparatus as Katerina Gogou’s poem goes, ‘they aim at the legs but the mind is the target’ - Mind the craps sister (...) Party in downtown SF - Mexican beer in huge bottles - Enthusiasm - Happiness
—28—
—29—
—30—
- March to another party, block and barricade the streets - Chant anarchist slogans and laugh Smashes - Cops - Dispersal in the streets around the avenue Rage, Quarrels, Agreements and Disagreements (...) Morning - Berkeley for BASTARD Conference - Arriving late but works out well - Discussions and meetings - The campus is a bubble which is penetrated by anarchists for a few hours US army has a stall recruiting people eager to kill and die for the motherland - New and old friends from all over US are on the grass and the campus’s rooms - Last year these buildings were occupied in one of the historic recent student occupations (...) Issues of Anarchy on the table - In 1965 it was occupied – ‘Occupied California’ – ‘Strike, Occupy, Take Over’ – ‘Occupy Everything Demand Nothing’ (...) In an apartment in Oakland cooking and drinking - About two dozen people carrying food and drinks arriving constantly - Chat about last year’s university occupations, sex work, photography, education, anarchist documentaries, war zones, Turkey, the Oakland port - A cake in flames, like our burning minds - The roof is on fire - Burn baby! Burn!- We ARE ON FIRE
* Wake up in a garage in Oakland - Go to a community college in Livermore, where they built nuclear weapons back in the day - Talk about revolt and world history - Somebody from the audience says that it makes sense - ‘This was the most radical thing that most of these people ever heard before’ - Back to Oakland to visit AK Press comrades in their Western home - Then ride to SF trying to rent a car for an all night ride to Seattle with a sketchy credit card - Manage it - Goodbye to the first Seattle crew - Stay in California - Walk around SF centre - Union Square and Chinatown, climb the hills It feels unreal like they are just the props of a movie scene like everything is made out of paper - Like they are just painted - I touch the walls of a house, they do not collapse... * ‘A surface which seems to be unsupported by any volume, or whose putative volume (rectangular, trapezoidal?) is ocularly quite undecidable.’ (F. Jameson ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’) I want to go back to the comments about ruptures that I started
—31—
above. The hard surfaces of the capitalist spectacle have many ruptures, you could see through them, you could see through the smiles of the comrades welcoming us at the airports, stations, squares, houses, infoshops, social centres, universities or the rest of the spaces where our discussions were housed. The decay was obvious in the materialities of the spectacle, in the barricaded Wall Street, in the semi-empty new developments of Central Valley in east Oakland or in Philadelphia’s Lancaster Avenue, in Seattle’s new building developments, in the heroin addicts next to the new shopping malls in Vancouver’s centre, or in Olympia’s posh suburbs. It will not collapse like a skyscraper with lights, fires and explosions. The solidified mask of the American, English, Greek dream (and the rest) gets ruptures exposing its rotten intestines. Ruptures that are caused by historical decay and are endemic to the asymmetries of the system, but most of them you could hardly see by yourself, it was the comrades who talked to us about them pointing the finger and turning the tacit rot into an explicit understanding of the crisis. The comrades added sound to the images. Fast images, moving images of the old capitalist glory. ‘Crisis’ means opinion, thinking, judgement.
Crisis is like the moment of judgement, a moment when we should express our thoughts and opinion, to act, more intensively than ever before. * Newly built but empty houses along the expressway - Talk about jail, highways and Anarchism, tactics and contexts, cities with bad water, agriculture and cooperatives, landing fields and future grass, grass you are not supposed to step on and the Gallo company - The Modesto Anarchist space has two banners in solidarity with struggles in Greece - The talk and discussion lasts for more than three hours, linking crisis in Greece with the capitalist crisis in California and the movements in the two places - What can we do? - At the end a big fire is burning next to the Firehouse - an actual fire, not a metaphorical one, that as well, but now I talk about the more pragmatic fire - Somebody hands me a burrito from the Taco trucks around the corner - ‘Central Valley hospitality’ they said - The conversation continues by the fire with beer – ‘Modesto Anarcho: Proletarian Youth Gone Wild’(...) - Did they appropriate the park? - Did they appropriate everything that has been stolen from us? - Oakland - Farewell to California, in a bar,
together with two friends next to somebody who says that she is a ‘social capitalist’ - Welcome back ‘to the desert of the real’ (...) * Seattle from above looks like it is painted with black, white and greys (...) Dramatic entry to the city in a huge white car - Pass by the Boeing factory With The Doors playing on the radio (...) Left Bank Bookstore, to say ‘hi’ - Strong coffees and gossiping about people we know in Athens and the US - Above the port viewing the highways and the mountains - The city is full of anarchist graffiti (...) Pop, MTV-style music playing loudly in a punk house - More anarchist posters in Greek, we make one more on the spot (...) * In Seattle there is a burnt building. It is a block of flats. On the one side there are traces of a fire, on the other side a banner from a recent flash-mob action which took place there, on its corner there a sign announcing its demolition, bulldozers were already there. Perhaps by now it has been demolished. The fire was a suicide, the last resident of the building after long pressure by the developers for them to leave the place set themself ablaze in his flat burning a part
—33—
—34—
of the building. The flash-mob was the response. Capitalism will develop further and further to nowhere until the snake eats its whole body, but still even after eating its whole body the head will continue to live forever if we do not cut it. * ‘From Olympia to Greece...’ Olympia - Evergreen College in a NW forest - It was built in order to become a prison, if the college idea wouldn’t work Bentham’s panopticon principles: The big clock-tower in the middle of the campus was obviously designed to be a watchtower... if necessary - Schools guarding minds - Strike, Occupy, Take Over to turn them into places of freedom - It is raining - ‘I don’t know where we are going’ the friend said - Somebody appears from behind the bushes and says ‘Hey dude, are you here for the talk?’ (...) Talk and discussion in a big lecture theatre - Again too unfamiliarly familiar Feeling feverish - The Tacoma crew are coming in - I know them already (...) Around a big table in another punk house in Olympia - This one is located in a posh neighbourhood and the neighbours complain - So the meeting goes louder - Systema and anthropology - Again
pop music playing loudly and more and more (...) Everybody singing and chanting anarchist slogans - Recalling incidents about common friends and laughing - Two vast bottles of vodka together with plenty of Red Bull have vanished - Caffeine and alcohol in the middle of the night (...) In bars in the centre of Olympia - Deeply on the back of the bar there is a band playing garage rock - Dance - The bartender brings us two big jars of beer - Out of control - These kids are crazy - OioiOIOIII! (...) Morning walk to the forest Chat about Rachel Corrie and anarchists in Greece with a new friend (...) * Cross the Bridge and enter Portland - Law and Disorder Conference – Exhausted and hung over - The brother who helps us to put everything together is stressed seeing our state - We get a plenary slot at the evening - In a big theatre in Portland State - Oregon feels strange - But the talk goes very well and we are all happy at the end - No time for comments and questions though - A Black (Anarchist) Panther (Ashanti Omowali Alston) follows, his talk is exciting, linking our talk with the local struggles and the capitalist crisis - The room is
—35—
shaking with enthusiasm at the end of his talk - We like the man - We meet and chat - He is gifted he has seen and done a lot (...) Enter the Red and Black Cafe An Anarchist cooperative - As soon as we enter the person on the bar tells us that he is closing in 5 minutes, we are just about to exit when he asks ‘Are you the Greek comrades who partied with my friends in Olympia last night? Good to meet you! Stay, I will make you food’ and he pushed drinks towards us - We stayed for a chat, a couple of beers and some tapas (...) * In Portland between two factories and two railway lines there is a small haunted house. It is elevated from the ground, you do not know where it stands, but it is well above the road (perhaps it has a vast deep basement) and for some reason the moon still is full for the last three days. It is a small house but it takes ages to walk from one side to the other, dunno why. This house is inhabited by the ‘RAF’ and ‘The Movement 2 June’ and the fans of the Bear, a huge table lamp, about 30 old bikes, 16 hats, a severed head (it does not say much though). There is also a Chinese Dragon mask, if somebody wears the mask after eating strawberries and
drinking wine they start to dance automatically. Then they need help to pull the mask off their head in order to stop dancing. Moreover, in this house lives a giant who did not return for the night, but I think he was just sleeping in the locked bedroom across my bedroom (...) On the highway parallel to the Pacific Ocean for five hours The wind smells good - Late in the night under rain we arrive back to Seattle (...) Everyone is up early in the morning to go to the courthouse - A comrade from the home has been charged with something and he has a hearing - He is not dressed in a black hoody this morning, but in a grey suit and striped tie - There is a black and red star on his jacket pocket – In the courthouse we comprise most of the audience (...) Talk in Seattle Autonomia Center - Feels strange to end the US talks - What should we do? We should make spaces like this one and like the Firehouse and like LAVA and like Charles Place and like Station 40 and like and like and like... (...) Good night everyone, next morning another comrade from the home has to appear before the court, but we cannot attend this one, we have to go (...) *
—36—
Bye bye friend(s) in the US On the train from Seattle to Vancouver - The most beautiful railway ride you have ever seen - An easy crossing of the US-Canada border - A lot of people we met cannot cross these borders any more - It is political, of course - Welcome to Vancouver - Comrades on the station - Bags in the red truck - My dad has the same one in another colour, in another country - Lunch with someone from Vancouver Media Coop and two more comrades - ‘Balaclava’, ‘The Dominion’, ‘VMC Greatest Hits’ (...) Joe’s cafe - Guided tour along the streets where the recent fights took place - The asphalt is deformed from the burning barricades of some months ago - They didn’t fix it - Good to remember - If they find out, they will fix it, so don’t show them They took the park, but we won the political battle - Visible and explicit - A discussion over dinner which lasts for several hours - It is one o’clock in the morning Sleep in a room with green walls, somewhere on Porter St (...) On the way to another comrade’s for too late brunch, walk for several miles to find the place - Another new friend meets us accidentally on the street and explains to us how to go to the place, cause we are lost by then - We laugh and we go - We manage to arrive eventually - Wandering for a
while around and then some last additions to the book - Final version of the book to the printers for the actual print run, there from the Turk in Vancouver, next to the deformed asphalt (...) A comrade from Prince George arrives in Vancouver after a 10-hour-long trip - ‘I started by myself a few months ago, but now we are five anarchists there’ - 12th and Clark is under attack by the City - Struggle for selfmanaged spaces is not easy (...) Yesterday we received an email, they got an eviction notice - But what the space has achieved politically is obvious - New infrastructures will replace the lost ones - Vancouver comrades know how to party and probably they will do so tonight - Smile, just one smile is enough to bury them (...) After the talk at Joe’s one of the questions comes from a 93-old comrade - He wants to know how a particular type of Molotov Cocktails he saw in one of the videos is being made - A long discussion follows the talk - We just ended these talks, we did not understand how and why but it is finished - I do not want it to end... but hey, anyway, it never ends (...) Violins, guitars, harmonicas and a bad trumpet - They sing amazingly - I dance and sing and I just realized that I definitely do not step on the ground properly - Now I see that this has been going on for
—37—
20 days - It is just a moment of self-realization - Ignore it - You are in love - in love with (y)our politics - (y)our practices - (y)our discourses - with solidarity - the atmosphere in that space - with the comrades - with the trip with the people you met during these 19 nights and days of April 2011 - with what we are doing and what we are - with the side we are on - with Occupied London - with the old no 7 - Speeding on a wagon wheel – ‘Rock me mama’ - Dance, sing and break stuff - ‘Oh mama rock me’ - It is after four o’clock in the morning - Cannot recall the last time you slept properly - This is the end of the trip like an American movie - An anarchist American movie - An endless end - With perfect music, party, amazing voices, beer, moonshine and a potlatch - Smashing our own stuff on the floor (...) but nothing ends really ... Yesterday I was at Mayday’s actions in Brighton - Knowing that all these people exist across North America, Being in the street is not the same any more... In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni Dimitris D. Mayday (night) 2011, Brighton, East Sussex
Words of Inspiration from Jean Baudrillard (1988). America. London: Verso. Guy Debord (1978). In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. Available at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/ debord.films/ingirum.htm Katerina Gogou (1978). Three Clicks Left (Tria Click Aristera). Athens: Kastaniotis Fredric Jameson (1984). ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ American Studies 29/1. Jean-Paul Sartre (1938) [2000]. Nausea. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Slavoj Zizek (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. Thanks to Tim, Emilia, Catherine, Antonis and Eleni for the corrections.
—38—
—39—