Smashing The Machinery Of Conformity

"Reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby, and fictitious liberty extolled by the school of J-J. Rousseau and the other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each—an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero."

Currently digging: Long walks with my daughter and her new love of giving forehead kisses punctuated with an exaggerated MUAHHH, the writing of Daniel Guérin, catching up with friends, Emma Swift’s Blonde On The Tracks LP, the band Chain Cult, the latest issue of Ugly Things, proper Indian food, and getting writing done daily.

Not digging: Loud yuppie transplants in NY shirts, Bill de Blasio, boot-lickers (in particular old subculture types who once claimed to be anti-authoritarian), QAnon and conspiracy kooks (especially those from the "wellness community"), chinstrap maskers, the accelerated rise of American fascism, and on and on.

Quote from Daniel Guérin's L'Anarchisme: De La Doctrine Å L'Action (1965)

Hung Upon A Dream

"My cup is in the sun. So maybe an ice cube."

He walked quietly, so as to not wake the dog, and filled a blue plastic cup with a blend of iced tea and lemonade.

"Thank you. Do you mind if I walk over to the beach and just let the water run over my feet for a bit?," she said with tears still damp on her cheeks.

He nodded, kissed her forehead, and took a long drag of his cigarette. A small grin crossed his face and he thought to himself that for the first time in months, he actually felt free.  

Words and photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2020

No Gods, No Masters

Now that NYC is an "Anarchist Jurisdiction" I imagine we can skip paying federal taxes and freely jaywalk? Can we also rename Prospect Park, the Emma Goldman Freespace? Perhaps the BQE can be now known as the Peter Kropotkin Expressway (PQE).

Art via The Base (Brooklyn)

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."

Art by Martin Sprouse (3chordpolitics)

Take Me Home

Toots Hibbert

Rest In Peace

I saw The Harder They Come when I was around 12 or 13 years old and fully fell in love with Jamaican music (and became a forever fan of The Maytals). Toots sounded like a Jamaican Ray Charles; he also had the same uplifting feeling stretched across his catalog. His loss is immeasurable, but his music will live on forever.

Quiet, Please

"Quiet, please, not only because it is a mark of respect for the deceased and their friends and families, but also because it is the sound of silence that many New Yorkers find so evocative of those days just after the attacks. Our streets closed to regular traffic, patrolled by police and the National Guard, we wandered in mute disbelief at what had happened, at the enormity of our loss. Even the emergency vehicles that raced along the empty streets did so without their sirens. We murmured softly amongst ourselves, looking for answers as many of our fellow citizens still searched for news of their missing loved ones."

Words by Michael Winship

Photograph by Lee Greenfeld © 2020

The Nail That Sticks Up Gets Hammered Down

Sam McPheeters' latest book Mutations: The Many Strange Faces Of Hardcore Punk (Rare Bird Books), is a memoir, of sorts, of a life informed by music as both a participant and most of all, a rabid fan. It's a beautifully crafted book, imbued with passion (sans nostalgia), humor, and refreshing unvarnished honesty. It is also incredibly biting at times, but thankfully lacks the vitriol McPheeters once trafficked in through his music and fanzine writing.

Among the superb band "profiles," record reviews, essays, memoir fragments, and the must-read endnotes (as Tobi Vail states in her foreword, you would do well by reading them first), one quote jumped out to me and hit home hard: "We begin our lives struggling to grasp the mysteries of adulthood, then spend the rest of our lives struggling to access those raw emotions of childhood." This is what makes the book burn bright: reflections on a youthful existence mapped by music and rebellion (real or preceived), and how one carries that forth into adulthood.

A highly recommended read, whether or not you're a fan of McPheeters' bands (Born Against, Men's Recovery Project, Wrangler Brutes), fanzines (Plain Truth, Dear Jesus), or even hardcore. As with the best memoirs, it's a total page-turner and McPheeters manages the rare feat of pulling off an emotional portrait of the artist as an angry young man growing up in public, filled with epic stories and revelatory self-reflection. He throws the traditional constraints of memoir writing out the window, and never loses sight of his love of music, and its potential to transform, inform, and destroy.

Review by Lee Greenfeld © 2020

The Answer May Surprise You!

David Graeber

Rest In Peace

"What if freedom were the ability to make up our minds about what it was we wished to pursue, with whom we wished to pursue it, and what sort of commitments we wish to make to them in the process? Equality, then, would simply be a matter of guaranteeing equal access to those resources needed in the pursuit of an endless variety of forms of value. Democracy in that case would simply be our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems — since problems there will always be — a capacity that can only truly be realized once the bureaucracies of coercion that hold existing structures of power together collapse or fade away."

Words from The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (2013)