Elephant Zine

Fire with Fire?

2010-06-13T22:53:00.001-07:00

So in Arizona now, it's illegal to teach classes that can be construed as aiming to "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

Hmmmm....So, like, does that include the usual Whites-Only history? Can this law be used to force the schools too include more ethnic studies in the classroom?

One can also make the case that an ethnic studies program is designed for ALL students, is not designed to promote resentment but understanding, etc...

in other news, better get ridda that accent!:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/arizona-ethnic-studies-cl_n_558731.html

Just Legalize It, Yo.

2010-05-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

Aah, Prohibition. Making liqour illegal seemed like a good idea at the time: everyone would just stop getting wasted, beating their wives, and dying yellow in a puddle of puke and twisted metal (oh those crazy new-fangled automobiles!). Unfortunately, people are going to drink whether they're allowed to or not. It was (and is) embedded in many American cultural traditions, it helps people relax, get laid, and party like it's 1929. So people started making alchohol in their bathtubs, sometimes blowing themselves up or blinding customers, empowering the mob to the point where Capone more or less ran Chicago, increased rates of alcoholism, and going to jail for the right to drink. So what did we do? We demanded our liquor back. Turns out the government can't stop adults from making their own choices. Now some choices people make- racially segregating bathrooms, serial killing, crack- are so harmful and stupid and just plain wrong that we can all agree (or almost all agree, maybe not if you're Rand Paul or Ted Bundy) that we have a moral obligation to do all we can to stop it. But many others have been shown to cause more problems when made illegal than they did beforehand.

Marijuana- Your mama smokes weed. Unlike legal alcohol, it is impossible to overdose on Marijuana; if anyone dies from weed, it's from getting really stoned and drag racing on the highway or something like that (not that weed causes people to want to drag race, mostly just order pizza and watch adult swim). Despite what propaganda commercials would have to believe, marijuana will not magically make you pregnant, and you won't shoot yourself in the face for kicks. The drug temporarily lowers your intelligence, reaction time, and inhibitions a bit, but not the way alchohol or other drugs do, rendering you a floppy mess, and it doesn't change your personality or make you do things you wouldn't do otherwise. Nor will you become irreparably insane; although, to be fair, like stress, abuse of even mild drugs (including caffeine) can sometimes trigger or worsen symptoms of pre-existing mental illness conditions. Weed is (with a few possible exceptions) the least addictive drug and, with very few and mild withdrawal symptoms, one of the easiest habits to break. Legalizing it would take revenue away from shady characters and college students and shift it to Business Hippies, make it higher quality and cheaper, and generate tax revenue. Not to mention all the medical benefits (see California) and possible renewed interest in Lava Lamps. Even better, it would stop sucking up taxpayer money and police time, as well as freeing up prison space for the real baddies.

Prostitution- Can you eradicate "the oldest profession" by making it illegal? Apparently not. Legalized/decriminalized prostitution both empowers sex workers by giving them legal rights and recourse against mistreatment (they can go to police for protection, they can form unions, etc) but it also gives "Johns" (and the rare "Mary") a safer, more ethical way to get their kicks- as opposed to picking up a 15 yo kid off the street, exchanging STDs, getting busted, and losing their Senatorial careers. Can legal prostitution still suck? Yes-but at least legalizing/decriminalizing sex work gives workers a voice, and vice squads can focus their energies on helping children, women, and men who are being victimized (as opposed to adults who choose and even enjoy sex work) by the truly horrifying exploitative sex slavery (and virtual sex slavery) practices that will remain very very illegal.

Guns- Waa? Huh? Yup, I said it... Oh, that Second Amendment. Why do we have that? I know- because back when our country was founded in an Indian Graveyard by a group of Enlightened bewiged Puritanical rebels attended on by African slaves, nobody knew what the fuck was gonna go down. Would the new goverment become tyrannical and take away South Carolina's slaves or Maryland's Catholicism? Who knew? The right to bear arms was not only so they could get their buff'lo huntin' and Injun killin' in on weekends, it was also so that the only people with guns wouldn't be The Man. And even though The Man now has the Atomic bomb (who can compete with that? Well, North Korea's trying to...), that's still important. Criminals will get guns. Making criminals of citzens who- even if they're wrong- feel they need a gun to protect themselves from criminals (or just cuz they wanna go deer hunting once a year) just seems like a bad call- especially when police officers (who all carry guns) have been known to fire into crowds of unarmed civilians, or just black people carrying cell phones. I'm not saying that people should shoot back, mind you; but I do believe that people should defend their right to defend themselves.

Herms

- aka the intersexed; people with nontraditional genitalia. This also applies to other Transgendered folks. Establishing a legal third gender status would not only be an affirmation of reality- some people, rarely, are born neither male nor female; others take advantage of surgery to alter their gender or simply use cosmetics and clothing to give that appearance- but it could also give them some protection from the ignorance-born predjudice they face daily. On the other hand, I suspect that some Intersex folks would choose the traditional binary in order to blend in to society better and not be singled out.

Gay Marriage

- this is just a no brainer.

Immigrants- People are just not gonna stop coming to America. And you can cry "they took our jobs!" all you want, but it's the illegal status of immigrants that makes it so they can work longer hours for less. If it were easier to become a citizen or legal migrant worker, with all the benefits that come with it (such as higher wages), I think it's quite probable that people would take advantage of that instead of risking deportation by remaining illegal. And as far as I'm concerned, immigrants enrich our culture- they start out poor, working hard at crappy jobs that Americans don't want, they send their kids to school, they introduce new cuisines, new language, new music- what's not to love?

Education- speaking of immigration, where does Arizona get off making it illegal to teach about non-whites? That is just fucking ridiculous. As it is, I've talked to many many racist people who truly believe that nothing at all of interest or value has ever occurred in the "uncivilized" parts of the world (the entire continent of Africa, most of Asia, the middle East, South America, and pre-European Invasion North America). This history is more likely to cause "division" in my view, because when minorities largely omitted, and thus are not important, are not valid. It reinforces & even institutionalizes ignorance-based (isn't it always?) racism- Black people have never accomplished anything! If they had, why aren't we learning about it in school? Clearly, they are inferior or they'd be in the textbook. As KRS-One says, "when one doesn't know about the other one's culture, ignorance swoops down like a vulture" (You Must Learn). And hey, white people, it's not just about "them", it makes us look bad too- when the positive accomplishments of European Americans in marching and dying alongside African Americans, Native Americans, and other non-whites, in fighting injustice are ommited it allows the already justifiably angry youth who senses the injustice of the system to "reverse" racism and feed into the "white devil" myth (that all white people are evil). More importantly, telling a school what they can and cannot teach is just crap- where will it end? We already can't teach evolution, can't teach sex- now we can't teach the History of Brown People? Does this mean we can't have a French club? What's wrong with just teaching the Truth? (by the way, I've heard that there is a Day of Solidarity with Arizona planned for the 29th, but thus far have not located a specific plan of action in Chicago.)

Activity: CopWatch

2010-05-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

who has the authority, who owns the streets? the guys with the biggest guns? the uniformed thugs funded by your tax dollar, who do they answer to? This month, if you see the cops pulling someone over, stop and observe. write down what you see. send it to elephantzine@gmail.com, or to your alder(wo)man.

Happy 420!

2010-04-19T13:33:00.000-07:00

This 420 season, take some time to fight for your freedom to smoke.

Contact your Alderman, Congressperson, Senator, Governor, etc. (calling or writing is recommended, but you can even just be a lazy pothead and fill out an electronic form online that Dick Durbin's staff could possibly glance at!) and tell them what Marijuana Liberation means to you.

Write to a political prisoner. Here is a list of people who are in prison for using pot to help with their painful illnesses. Prison sucks, and these folks were sick to begin with, cheer 'em up with a bit of fan mail. There are plenty of others not on this list that are facing unjust sentences. You can use prison search websites to find & learn about immates if you know their names.

Marijuana Law in Illinois basic info from NORML.

Earthquakes? Blame Vaginas.

2010-04-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

"Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes,"" (Guardian UK)

Immigrant's Address: Cervantes Women

2010-04-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

we are pleased to present the first poem in a series that were originally slated to be in an issue of Elephants dubbed the "where you're from" issue. It was going to be called the Immigrant's Address (as everyone, or nearly everyone, in our country came from somewhere else at some point). The first poem is from Cervantes Women. It's a really kickass poem by Jennifer Patino, a story of warrior teachers. Enjoy.

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first, an explanation:

Hey guys, as you probably know, about a year ago we said we were gonna put out a 'zine called Immigrant's Address (where are you from?), and we never did. thing is, I still have all these poems, and I want to put them up somewhere to be read, despite the fact that we just never got it together with graphics and whatnot, for a variety of reasons, for which I take personal responsibility. anyway, I decided, fuck it, I'm just gonna put up the poems as I have them. I just wouldn't feel right if I didn't at least post the poems online, with or without a zine format with awesome graphics. So I'm gonna put up one a week for the next several weeks. They're really awesome poems and I thank everyone who submitted and everyone who worked so hard trying to get this together before it fell off track and got stuck in the ditch. Perhaps we can pick up where we left off some day, or start over... Much Love. Enjoy these kickass poems. -HK

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From Cervantes Women

By Jennifer Patiño

“Take your notebook and sit down,” she says. “I will teach you how to write. Take your pencil in your hand and and start. Over and over again… Make the palos nice and straight. The bolitas nice and round.

These are the first exercises.” My mother watched her sisters do them.

| | \ \
oooO
| \ | |

“You’re doing good, Jennita. We’ll get you ready for your first day of school.”

Teachers still needed bodyguards decades after Revolution, Rural education was slow to reach my mother’s ranch. Smart Indians would be a nuisance, Smart women might be worse. And everyone was too poor to invest the time.

Her sisters ran away and became teachers,

While Josefina, my mother, taught herself to read and write. With borrowed romantic serials, imagined conversations between pictures.

“Keep writing, don’t get distracted. I want you to do good in school. ----Tienes que aprender ingles.”

| | | \
oo oo
| | \ |

To teachers with or without degrees, who craft our minds into bodyguards, To the Cervantes women, who are still teaching me who I am---

(You teach me the geometry that shapes every letter I will ever write.)

where on the spiral are you?

2010-03-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

I need a moment... lopsided. how big is it? expanding. what is happening there? soap riots. machine gun fire. moldy lettuce on sale. shirt on fire. caustic investing in high risk parasites. dope fiend extravaganza. host relations. PTA reality show finals. who are all these people in the street behind you? them. some of them are children. look around you. violent bastards. more than just a blood disease. teasing reality There seems to be some sort of smoke- I am the complete lampshade...oh, yeah, there must be some kind of fire.... How will this affect the polls? they don't matter okay hey cut this guy's mic i can speak through seaweed no, just shut up, you are a disgrace sir. this is all being recordid. mail aligned clutter. we have to go to commercial old gold! recycle for profits! how can you dodge the IRS without a fiery red beard? Second Amendment Rally. The Scroll on the bottom of the Screen says Vacate. Terror Alert Mango. 259 days til the Rapture. No I can get around on my sassy wheelchair here. True Americans. Vicks Vapo Rub a dub dub. I promised I wouldn't wet myself, America. sporting a promising red tie & gym shozin I'm going to start working out that optic nerve. keep doin wat you're doin America. & I'll do mine. Snake Oil! Wet Naps! Remember the Alamo! We hope to see you at the Abstinence Orgy Bakesale Friday. Tickets now on sale on our website along with Copies of my Book, Yelling at the Top of My Lungs Next: Sailing to Sleep Terrors Tremors in Capital Wasteland Autobiohazard & more Star Wars don't switch that dial -elephants reporting

2010-03-14T04:03:00.000-07:00

I found this on a site afiliated with something called the Humanists of Utah, when I was looking up why hamsters eat their young but got sidetracked when google autocompleted my sentence with "why can't I own a Canadian"? I thought this was great and decided to share:

Dr. Laura Schlessinger is a radio personality who dispenses advice to people who call in to her radio show. Recently, she said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22 and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following is an open letter to Dr. Laura penned by a east coast resident, which was posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as informative:

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other specific laws and how to follow them:

When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15:19- 24. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?

A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination - Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this?

Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room here?

Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? - Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted fan,
Jim

South Side Paddy's Day Pub Crawl

2010-03-13T03:00:00.000-08:00

TOMORROW! Ladies & Gents, they can take away our parade but they can never take away our freedom! through the magic of facebook a movement is assembling to have what may well be the largest (at over 3,000) pubcrawl in history take place in place of the traditional South Side Irish Parade. Drunks are to assemble at 103rd & Western at 12pm sharp on Sunday March 14th (but you can actually do what we'll likely be doing and start at 11am at 115th instead). There are 21 bars on Western ranging from Amazingly Awesome to At Least It's Cheap, and since no one will be expecting this you will likely be able to smuggle booze onto the metra train this year. Rowdiness is likely so be on your guard, don't get arrested! However, again there are lots of great bars on Western that will surely be glad for the business, not to mention great places to eat and shitloads of afterparties if you are a southsider or know one, which is really what it's all about (many southsiders contest that it was "tourists" who ruined the parade for everyone, although I surely don't put it past the southsiders themselves to have been behind some of the wanton destruction). Even the squares (aka my parents) are planning to continue the tradition of getting together with friends and family to celebrate an ever-more-distant heritage. So get your cheesy green together and come down to the South Side, celebrate what's good in life- friends, beer, and good cheer!

Yo, Streetwise! ...Slam Champ unClamp'd!

2010-03-10T01:07:00.000-08:00

This is the extended (and way more ridiculous) interview w/Bonner as featured in Streetwise. It's essentially the same but crazier, sloppier & with more action. plus the swear words are spelled out. we think our internet audience can dig it. For a more refined, prettier, glossy version with lots of pictures &loaded with extra karma, visit your local Streetwise vendor (my two favorites hang out at LaSalle Street Station & DePaul). Enjoy.

Changing the Sigils

an interview with this year's Windy City Story Slam All-City Champ, Alex Bonner.

Helen Kiernan

The biggest perk of winning the Windy City Story Slam All-City Championships (can you get a windier title than that?), says Alex Bonner, is that "next year me and Max [Glaessner, last year's Champ] get to stand up there with our belts and act ridiculous and no one else gets to."
The "belt" Bonner refers to is an oversized, red-white-and-blue boxing-champ style belt with the Chicago Skyline on it. Upon emerging triumphant from the Double Door, the newly crowned Champ proceeds to wear the belt all night, of course (wouldn't you?), while his friends lean against a The Wall painted wall and crack wise about him going into bars wearing nothing but and demanding top-shelf comped since he's "King of the City now and shit", with "Married With Children" blaring in the background.

In the weeks leading up to the competition, Bonner says, "I was just standing in my Grandmother's basement screaming at myself." His brother Brendon, sitting in the chair across from him, smiles and nods knowingly. "I'd go over and over it, making sure it wasn't confusing...take it apart, rewrite everything that didn't feel right until it felt better in my voice. Sometimes I was just punching the paper like 'Goddammit!'" he adds, laughing. To truly prepare for a Slam, of course, one needs the element that drives the Slam- an audience. So Bonner breathlessly practiced his stories ad naseum at friend's band shows and open mics across the city.
"Writing for a Slam is different from trying to get published in literary journals...it's a little bit more like how I would write a poem...it's putting your ideas into action...I try not to be just funny, or just snarky, or just showy. I try to make it more of a combination...I like to start out by joking around a lot and then get really really weird and serious, and then end with a joke". After having gone through that tension, the audience laughs harder, he says.

Pipe Cutters & Time Travelers

I first met Alex Bonner in a fiction class at Columbia College. His stories were a mix of mind-blowing, mystical science fiction and gritty, funny true stories involving tweaked-out pipecutters and time travelers.
As a kid, Bonner bounced around between North Carolina and Chicago; but, he says, "Chicago is home."
When asked how he feels about winning, he says, "Well, y'know, I've always wanted to be on winning team...I've lost many All-City Championships, y'know?" he laughs, "I didn't really know there was going to be a prize or anything, so the laurel wreath is nice...it means something, you know?" after all the hard work that comes with the territory of being a struggling writer, he says, to win something, "that means a little bit."

A Literary Mosh Pit

In typical egalitarian Slam fashion, the winner of the bout is chosen by audience approval; whoever screams the loudest. The "literary mosh pit" that is the Windy City Story Slam was created by boxer and Columbia grad/prof Bill Hillmann in 2007, after visiting Chicago's own Green Mill in Uptown, birthplace of the Poetry Slam. According to legend, Marc Smith (so what?) created the slam to get his drunk friends to listen to his poetry. Slam exploded the poetry scene in the 90s, turning the stereotypically droningly dull (or, more charitably, ethereal and moving but...quiet and polite) poetry read into a romping, stomping, roaring arena, launching poets like Saul Williams and Patricia Smith into the national spotlight and spawning several international competitions, many of them empowering voices that aren't typically listened to in stuffy, dusty academic forums; teenagers, outspoken queers, hip-hop artists; voices of the streets instead of the library.
Critics of the slam say that that slam poems can be low-brow, trite or unpolished; the language is simpler, more accessible, with more focus oftenput on the performance of the poem than the words.

  The beauty and curse of the Slam is that if the audience doesn't like it, they'll boo you, making many artists better (though scaring others away), and if the audience loves it, they'll howl, lending the poetry read more of a rock-n-roll atmosphere. In this way, the audience is invited to interact with the reader. And the judges are picked randomly from the audience, which means that anyone's opinion is as valid as the next person's, whether they be Poetry Professor or Construction Worker. Scores ranging from 10 to negative infinity are added up and the winner gets something like a box of twinkies, and braggin' rights. Some artists have moved away from the competitiveness that Slam breeds recently, saying that art is not a contest. Still, the true spirit of slam lies not in the win or lose but in losing one's inhibitions and screaming your guts out to a merciless roman arena.
  The Story Slam is a bit different but operates on the same basic philosophy, that "everyone's got a story". For one, there's the boxing theme, for another, the "judge" device is replaced by a simple "Applause-O-Meter" approach. A Story Slammer who is boring can be "cut" from the competition if the audience begins chanting "Blah Blah Blah!". Throughout the Finals performance, Hillmann often squatted at the side of the stage, sharpening what looked like two giant bowie knives.
  I was getting nervous," Bonner jokes, "'cus Bill was up there with this bowie knife tappin' the back of my head." This, it should be noted, was at the end of the show, when Bill was flourishing the knives over the heads of each participant as the audience cheered for their favorite. Aside from a couple of chuckles and roars, the audience was pretty damn quiet while Bonner was in the midst of spinning his piece, sucked into the sphere of the story.

The Butcher is In

Indeed, the audience was unusually (for a slam) quiet throughout the final, with very little grumbling. Bonner says, "In early bouts you had to blablabla people offstage, or they'd just go on and on about nothing...but I dunno, I think the 'literary' crowd is a little different from...the poetry slams that spurned this a coupla years ago, that involved screaming and improv... they like to listen to the whole story and then come to a conclusion, and also this is not a rock show where you yell at the band, 'you're fulla garbage!' It's like I'm payin' 10 bucks to get in, why ruin the show? But that's not indicative of all [story] slams. A lot of the early ones took place at bars where no one knew what was going to happen. It was like a Roman arena, which is what it's all about, just regular people...in early bouts if you went over like 5 minutes 10 seconds you got kicked off the stage. But this is the finals, there's only five left, and the quality of the writing was really high, so Bill was more relaxed." And so was the audience.

The biggest groan came when the first slammer, Fernando Hernandez, went on way too long (describing) taking a piss onstage (shaking the piss from his dick, etc.), as Bill crept up on him, knives flashing, and scattered audience members blahed while others cheered in protest of the blahers (or support of the slammer, or both). The tale round the campfire had Hernandez claiming he made up the whole story, which mostly involved an angry drunk midget, on the spot, totally free-balled it, which I believe wholeheartedly. Regardless, Hernandez had an undeniable fire behind him, and he was the last to fall under Hillmann's gleaming knives to audience screams.
The other three readers, Nicolette Kittinger, Maggie Ritchie, and Alexis Thomas were weird, witty women, with gutsy pieces detailing working in a sex shop, being a narc, and other mystical wonderments.

This is the Truth!

The worst part of the slam was the opening acts. I missed most of the band, White Mystery, which sounded decent, but no one wanted to hear Hemingway's grandson, however nice he may have been or how interesting his book on his transgender daddy sounds, go up on stage for two long-ass interviews, and the opening readers were less than awesome (actually, I liked one of them, she had some crazy shit to say about wanting to watch children burn or something, but at that point I just wanted to get to the action really). In a competition where one is meant to take cues from the audience, I wouldn't recommend screaming "this is the truth!" when you start to bore them, especially if you have nothing memorable to say over the strains of Moonlight Sonata. Not to name names, since I know the sting of falling flat on my face in front of a crowd and I have an ounce of mercy in me, but "that made me question the entire event that they had that guy go up" as Richard Dugan said. Next year, we'd like to see the slammers hit the stage an hour or two earlier, please, three-people-reading-this-who-have-nothing-to-do-with-planning-anything-but-maybe-will-pass-this-along-to-relevant-parties-for-us-if-we-offer-them-a nice-tasty-Peace-Tea-reward. Thanks.

Bringing the Noise

  Given the flawed nature of the "Applause-O-Meter" system, The Story Slam can become something of a popularity contest. "I didn't invite anyone to the first Slam, because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it without 'Friend Support'", Bonner says. Not so for the finals, he continues, "which I guess I shouldn't say because in America you're supposta try to hide that you're trying to gain support, it's that typical hypocrisy, like 'I didn't do this, The Friends did it'... I mean a lot of my friends are artists so I want to go see as much as I can, art shows, bands, plays...and hopefully if you have something that means a shitload to you people will come out..."
  Bonner talks rapidly and energetically, sometimes gesticulating wildly or altering his voice to illustrate a point. It is difficult to get all his words down on paper fast enough. He often makes exaggerated statements, frequently referring to his views on what he jokingly terms "The Dark Side", and the need to create positivity in the world to combat it. He talks at length about his interest in Chaos Magic; that anything is possible, that you can make things happen by concentrating hard enough.
  "I never thought I'd be performing at the Double Door. A lot of people don't get to do that in their lives. I decided that I would."

Un-Cog'd

  After working a series of mind-numbing jobs, Bonner tells me, he quit. He says he wanted to focus on his writing. "I realized I was not a cog, and I don't want to a cog in a big crazy machine, and nobody should be, it's the worst thing." In 2009, Bonner co-founded (with Felix Pineiro) Bailout Pictures, an independent film company based in Chicago.
  "With Bailout, we wanted to create a production company that could be an outlet for subversive films, as well as making some money, 'cus we gotta eat, too...But I do have a big belief in the need to work with small companies...I just wanna, I dunno, change the sigils that influence people...like you look out and see the giant McDonald's arches, you know, that control people, that take our identity... our generation is the first that can really see the tools of control and turn them on the oppressors and the machine...Bailout is our attempt to make something. Something of quality. Something other than...Transformers...'Buy our fine, heavy product with a serious radio and cupholders for your McDonald's and Pepsi Products and your 15 million dollar jetfighter!'"
  Bailout produces a variety of commercial films. The company's mission statement reads, in part: "We want to create films...that are a little more dynamic and, dare we say, hip. However, if you have a certain look for your business, we will match it (even if it IS square)". No matter how Square the production, Bonner says, they always try to "mess with" the audience's conceptions. In a recent commercial for Fantasy Costumes, Robert Hines, dressed as a pimp, scolds the camera, "I coulda been a doctor in this you know."
  Bonner notes that on TV, you don't often see African Americans portrayed as "slick, cool, intelligent", but typically, like Tracy Jordan, "crazy pants, not debonaire...even though I fucking love Tracy Jordan, but you know what I mean..."
  "Even if we're shooting a commercial," he continues "we try to mess with them [the audience] a little bit", Bonner says, "get them to think about what they're buying, why they're buying it...we just try to mess with their reality a little bit...I mean it's not like I'm a genius or anything," he quickly clarifies, "I mean we're not geniuses, we're not Shakespeare, we're too TV. But we have an ideology, and a lot of people who are willing to work for free....we're just tryin' something, with some relative success....not just protesting, but making something.... we're just trying." And after all, sometimes that's all you can do. Try something.

Transformers: Robots in Disguise

Expanding on the Transformers metaphor, Bonner says "If anything, Bailout is more like Transformers the TV show than the movie, but I dunno if I wanna say that, but I like the idea that, 'maybe kids will buy these toys if there's a super-epic story attached to it'. And it's so dark. I mean the toys are fun but...so dark...it's this whole weird thing where adults wish they were inside the womb, like 'help me! I'm an American! I can't do anything by myself!"
The solution, as Bonner sees it, is to cultivate an intelligent and innovative approach to art, media, even advertising. And people are doing that, he says. "Colbert is the Voltaire of our time. He openly mocks his sponsors, 'Verizon Wireless: Now in Wylde Raspberry!"

Chaos Magick

When asked what his concept of reality is, Bonner laughs, "that's the problem, I'm driving myself slowly insane...like I really believe in Magick."
Bonner goes on to tell me about the 4th resonance, which has something to do with Einstein, and how maybe 99.9% of the phenonana act like it's supposed to, but there's that .1% of time that just can't be explained by science, and how that shook the world of philosophy, that you think therefore you are in dreams, after all, and even though you can't prove it, you can't disprove it either, so every law is possible... Scribbling furiously, it's hard to keep up with this dizzying array of theory. I had the idea to look it up for the article, but I'm pretty exhausted at this point.... you can do that, can't you? I mean, if you're really interested. Let me know what you find out...

In fact, there's been several drunken nights when Bonner, and others who think like him, have tried to explain to me about why they believe in magick, and willing things to happen, and how 2012 is going to be the time when the world does not end but a huge shift is coming, either in human energy, output, positivity, or something like alien visitation....I used to make fun of these postulations. Raised Catholic, I wasn't a big fan of bullshit posturing and the supernatural. But nowadays, I just wanna listen. Because, who really knows? Shit, if it gets you through the day and you're not stoning homosexuals over it, go forth and prosper.
So, I ask, what practical applications does Chaos Magick have? Well, he says, "there's that Vonnegut quote; we are who we pretend to be. So be careful who you pretend to be." And there you have it. If only more mainstream religions made that much sense.

But I hope chaos magicians won't be offended if I don't buy into actualization as magic. Because when Bonner says that he visualizes success and it happens, it reminds me of working at Borders and the Oprah-worshipers grasping for copies of the Secret from their sinking ships. I think you win a slam because you fucking practiced a shit-ton, not because you wanted it harder than anyone else.

But hell, maybe there is something magick, or at least unexplained, at work here; because just like the rest of us poor pathetic slobs who calls ourselves writers, no matter how bad, you, gentle reader, might think we suck, Bonner just has that special something, that drive, that itch, that fucking addiction. "I've always written" he says, "I've always been a writer. I had to let myself know I wasn't a musician."

Word Junky

"And I like adventures, and good times, and I have addiction problems" he jokes, when asked to describe himself, "I flirt with the dark side, I'm a liar..." (which, as far as I'm concerned, is total bullshit) "Well, there's good and bad addictions," he says, asked to elaborate, "Writing is a good addiction. Like I'm on a family vacation and I'm just like 'I just wanna write, leave me alone!' And smoking's not good for you, but I don't wanna be one of those fuckers who don't smoke, cause fuck those assholes" he laughs. Bonner says he tries to avoid the bad addictions- drugs he knows might fuck him up, video games. "If I spent half the time I spent on video games, I dunno, learning how to fix cars or some shit, I'd have a different life, but hey man, video games have influenced my writing and helped me connect with my generation. It's not a passing fad. There's a lot of vivid poetry and soul in video games."

I ask him if all this technology isn't making people farther apart and he says no, not if "these kids can build things with their lightning minds to bring positivity to humanity to the earth, instead of moving into darkness, contributing to money machines and oil wars."

So instead of bemoaning technology, we use it to our advantage. Like Bailout, making commercials, but making them a little bit edgier, hoping to work for the little guy and milk the big guy for what he's worth to make subversive films. Bonner also recently started a blog, the Buddha Lunchbox, gushing about the Olympics, poking fun at Hollywood, and paying tribute to Our Corporate Overlords.

2012: The Next Revolution?

" It would be great" he continues, "if these kids could make some lightning fast computers and we were all flying around in super awesome spaceships... just to prove humans are worth a shit cuz our parents dropped the ball. They shot everyone who asked those questions; King, Lennon. We've been told for years and years and years that we're better than tribes, that humans have a rightful ownership over the earth and other people, a right to kill people, because it's cool. How can I describe it?When I go outside I see people enjoying their lives...taking their pills to be happy and darting in all these different directions searching for purpose and meaning or some shit... and that's capitalism's concession prize, okay so you might hate your life but look you can have all these creature comforts like TVs ,sofas...I dunno, I mean there's gotta be a balance between crappy hippy dirty and suit clean big fast shiny, can't we just like combine the two? It would be great if on 2012 everyone just quit their jobs and focused on changing the world to the positive."

I ask Bonner if he believes this is possible, and he laughs and says, yes, "The Dark Side can't always win".

PEACE TEA!

2010-03-09T01:01:00.000-08:00

THE GREATEST SHIT EVER!

The Great South Side Irish Riot

2010-03-04T22:00:00.000-08:00

Five simple ways to prevent the South Side Irish Pub Crawl (3/14, 12pm, 103rd & Western) from turning into a full-scale riot:

(1) Don't get stupid wasted & illegal all over the street. The cops are going to roll out the "paddy" wagons; don't let them fill them. this year, let's celebrate our (varyingly dubious) Irish heritage with some dignity. Confine your naturally modest drinking to private property and bars. REMEMBER, DRIVING DRUNK IS WORSE THAN EATING LIVE BABIES IN FRONTA YR GRAMMA & THE POPE. Try to avoid getting caught by cops pissing in alleys, which will be difficult due to lack of portapotties. To avoid possible heat, take shady activities (like blunt-smoking) a few blocks away from the main area of revelry.

(2) Don't resist arrest. many riots begin when someone resists arrest. if you fucked up, take one for the team and go quietly, so the rest of us can get on with it (it being reckless drinking of course).

(3) Don't trespass, steal or destroy property. a big part of the reason the parade was canceled was because local businesses and residents got sick of crazy drunken tourists (and fellow residents) trashing the place. If it's not your shit, don't touch it. and for the love of god don't wander into other people's backyards; they may be armed.

(4) Avoid sexual harassment. Straight boys: don't grab, taunt, or otherwise threaten women, as they will enlist the help of several nearby sisters, boyfriends, and/or muscular lesbian buddies in kicking your ass and the asses of anyone else who gets in the way, igniting a massive barroom brawl that will spread like the Chicago Fire until the National Guard is called in. Instead, channel your drunken horniness into clever, witty, bondesque banter; comment on the sparkling personality, aesthetic grace, and probable high intelligence of nearby females, who will thus find you irresistible and likely drag you off to the nearest vacant bathroom stall for make-outs.

(5) Watch your buddies. you won't be able to prevent idiots you don't know from doing fucked up shit, but you can at least drag your stupid drunk idiot friend back into the bar. Don't let your idiot friends OD during the pub crawl, as their bloated body may cause hazardous blockage of available fire exits, leading to utter chaos and trampling deaths.

Glory in the Bastard Song

2010-02-01T02:05:00.000-08:00

barefoot wandering poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Richard Bruce Nugent would scribble words on paper and toss them in the wastepaper basket of "Nigeratti Manor", Langston Hughes would fish them out of the trash, and Alain Locke would publish them. the only openly-gay man in a closeted circle, Nugent's writings are as bold and honest as they are playful...and contemplative. "Smoke Lillies and Jade" is a bohemian story exploring desire. In "Bastard Song", written for a lover, Nugent takes on the color complex. an excellent book about Nugent is "Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance" which from the vivid if fading memory of hours of fascination in the library, encompasses much of his writing, a kickass bios, at least one interview (he lived well into his 80s) and some of the kickass art that graced the pages of Fire!! and other renaissance papers.

from Smoke Lillies and Jade: He wanted to do something…to write or draw...or something...but it was so comfortable just to lay there on the bed...his shoes off...and think...think of everything...short disconnected thoughts...to wonder...to remember...to think and smoke...why wasn’t he worried that he had no money...he had had five cents...but he had been hungry...he was hungry and still...all he wanted to do was...lay there comfortably smoking...think...wishing he were writing...or drawing...or something...something about the things he felt and thought...but what did he think...he remembered how his mother had awakened him one night...ages ago...six years ago...Alex...he had always wondered at the strangeness of it...she had seemed so...so...so just the same...Alex...I think your father is dead...and it hadn’t seemed so strange...yet...one’s mother didn’t say that...didn’t wake one at midnight every night to say...feel him...put your hand on his head...then whisper with a catch in her voice...

Bastard Song for H.F

Since I am neither truly one, nor really true the other,
Can you not see that I must be the third-the first two's brother?
For it is true I am not black and just as true not white,
But when the day gives sudden way, dusk stands 'tween it and night
And dusk is just as true a thing as either night or day
And if the dusk smells faint of musk, turn not its scent away-
Night perfumes dusk's pallor-day etiolates the night:
My love for you is love for you though neither black nor white.
Yes, it's love I offer you and hope that you will keep.
This love you see is true, from me;--but no--it is to weep,
For you-pale white-cannot trust love from whom you've loved too long
And yet deride with untaught pride-my love is far too strong
So what thing can I offer you? What gift is there to give?
Not even dreams, or so it seems-for you refuse to live.
So this I offer you is weak with right and wrong--
Half dark, half light, half black, half white--a truly Bastard Song.

how to tell if someone is a douchebag just by looking at them....

2010-01-28T21:10:00.000-08:00

and other great shit at buddhalunchbox

here's a sample:

"After a robot told me in a very classy and placid voice that my phone call may be recorded for "customer service purposes" I then hit fifteen different commands on my cell that I believed would direct me to the wizard.
Emsa: Hello this is Emsa with customer service, how can I assist you?
ME: I want to talk to Stevey.
Emsa: Excuse me?
ME: I'd like to talk to my father Steven Jobs. "

=noise extrava-gander=

2010-01-28T12:13:00.000-08:00

RockBox

2010-01-26T10:40:00.000-08:00

"Februrary 1st (930-4am) at The Rockbox (2624 N Lincoln) will be a blow out. Featured readers include Matt Anderson, Alex Bonner, Nicole Wilson, and a selected recording of James Schuyler's "The Crystal Lithium." You don't want to miss this poetry event, that would not be okay. Watch the February gloom transform in poetry's beautiful eyes. The open mic list is stacked with talent, come and put your name down. Bring work by your favorite poet and your own. As always, $3 drafts and $4 Jameson shots, 21+. iloveyou" -Joe

got five bucks to spare?

2010-01-22T12:14:00.000-08:00

send it here.

Oxfam is a charity that helps people build/rebuild self-sustaining communities.

Beat the Block: Ride the SOC

2010-01-21T21:08:00.000-08:00

The SOC is the mad acid highway of jumbled brain wires in yr skull. Stream of Consciousness writing, also called freewriting, taps into your subconscious by beating and drugging your internal editor and shoving him (he is definitely a him, as in The Man, Getting You Down), gagged and ducttaped, into the closet, where he'll probably beat off in exstacy. now I'm no refined, pedigreed, medal-bedecked literary giant, just a dirty, starving word junky; but this is a great way to get a fix as well as a fucking amazing high. it's also something a lot of the legends exercised. and it's fun to do when yr board (that is not a spelling error, i meant to say when one is being a board, for commercial porpoises).

rules for free-writing (bone-based)

(1) keep yr hand/fingers moving. do not stop, pause, hesitate for any reason, least of all to think.

(2) if you fuck up, leave it and keep moving. no editors allowed in this groovy clubhouse.

(3) set a time limit or page limit, and force yourself to keep going to that point, even if it drains all the juice from you.

example:

i am high flying water oh ah oh eh hahaha nevermind munchkin kin ya feel it stop stop type faster faster harder harder errrrr i meanet error mcgovern mcmelon i said it was a gloombasement, base meat, stuck in walls like rats clawing like ratkin raking all of my dissent, decent, descent, scent scat scattking shitshit shitballs i mean COME ON COME ON. there was a riot a rat descent we burnt bridge b we falter fated altercated is this catered? come one. come call. to hip too fall. fuck it. lets revolutionize yr hair. THINK THIN! shit shit shit....my mother can cum fatster than STOP IT! Dirty dirty bad bad dont talk my mama like that is bad. secfret secret shupt shit. fuckt it up. this is bad example time for peepholes. is bad robot. no is bood cut leader. sneezer kneses, happy redskin, shut it. this is bad, keep bleeding. one more min to go before i hit the scarfoffogus. scrape the inside of my upperlip for food poisons. i meant to say meatantther tholl. doll. maybe youcan sex me up good this time, hahaha that is dumb. de dum dum dum. i slit my wrist to say howdy to mitochondria living in fashionable dining rooms inside. faster saster. shitshitshisthshististhistishi THIS IS SERIOUS! i am going to force feed you fruit looops. the king dom cometh for only the most inflexible rubber devices. shut yr stupid fucking pie hole. i am done here.

as you can see, terrible psychobabble. however, in creating it, you're stretching my mind, and just as a runner stretches out, so must a writer. note that i stopped too early- things were just getting interesting- and also that it takes a lot of bad shit to get a few good lines in these. Note also the sexual/violence free-for-all. Free Association, a similar, oral version of this exercise, is used by physcoanalists (fraudians) to root out fucked up subconscious desires like father stabbing and mother fucking in patients. of course, variations on such horrid, embarrassing themes lurk in the back of most of our minds, and as writers we must learn to write about that which embarrases us, cuz ppl love that shit.

live nude girls unite

2010-01-20T01:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.livenudegirlsunite.com/

2010-01-18T19:11:00.000-08:00

voter registration info

2010-01-18T12:16:00.000-08:00

Grace period registration info for the February 2, 2010 Gubernatorial Primary Election.

Windy City Story Slam

2010-01-17T21:08:00.000-08:00

2/26 8pm Double Door $7

feat. hometown hero Alex Bonner anna buncha other assholes i dunno...

PostPilsen Craft Fair

2010-01-14T12:19:00.000-08:00

Feb 20th Free postpilsen@gmail.com for info

DIY: Crimpin aint easy

2010-01-13T23:45:00.000-08:00

crimpity crimpity crimp

crimping is a style of a capella skat/beatboxing that can be improvasationalized or rehearsed. two or more crimpers speak it more or less in unison. often contain codes, inside jokes, stories, etc. rhyme and rythm are essential. often accompanyied by hand gestures to move the story along.

Loving Brothers

2010-01-10T15:00:00.000-08:00

Saw this on Evan's blog, thought it was sweet:

yr assignment: write an american haiku or a limerick based on this picture. Post a first draft of it in the comments section if you like.

New Year's Resolution

2010-01-09T14:58:00.000-08:00

Learn More Spanish

saul williams in streetwise

2010-01-09T04:34:00.000-08:00

it might be too late, but if you do happen to see a streetwise guy out there, he's on the cover this week.

De rattenkoning

2010-01-09T03:24:00.000-08:00

Caution: this is nasty:

beware the rat king!

Wist je dat? This horrific specimen is the Rat King, a group of rats that have had the misfortune of getting their tails all mixed up. this phenomenon was first written up around the 1500s in Europe, and examples are very rare. The current hypothesis is that: "for the formation of a rat king, rats should first huddle together as they usually do when sleeping in the nest chamber, especially when it is cold. If their tails become glued or frozen together, animals try to free themselves by moving in different directions. These chaotic movements may result in their tails becoming entangled in a tight knot. Even after removal of the initial cause (sticky substance or ice), they are no longer able to escape from the knot. The sticky substance may be blood, food items, [shit?], nesting material, etc.*".

The idea of the Rat King is so grotesque that many people disbelieve it even today, despite scientific samples that have been photographed and displayed in museums. One of the largest, pictured at the top of the page, was found in the 1800s and displayed in a museum in Germany. Another was shown to have callouses on the tails, showing that the nice rattus rattus had been able to live, eat, and move around while attached for some time. A 2005 *paper regarding a living rat king found in Estonia describes a group of 16, with 9 living, half buried in sand under the floor of a peasant's house, (two of which had brains eaten out somehow by the time they got to the museum ((zombie rat kings? or cat kings?)).

The sight of one was taken as a sign of plague in medieval times- probably because a shitload of rats breeding in close conditions in your floorboards could spread the plague. go fig. Legends developed such as that the Rat King was really one creature with many heads. Literary characters from the Rat King villain in the Nutcracker ballet to the Rat King villain in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles may have derived some inspiration from this freaky phenomenon.

jettison

2010-01-06T21:32:00.001-08:00

got to this too late, but the new ish is out, so groovy!

games are fun

2010-01-06T21:30:00.000-08:00

word game

trigger-happy cops

2010-01-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

PJ Piety's ridiculous, self-important, crazy-as shit ass has been an endless source of amusement for me, but his take on this recent incident was interesting to me in a different way because he makes it sound like it's common sense that no one should ever call the cops, an opinion shared by anarchists and gangstas. This is in contrast to the official position of major newspapers (they always seem to have bland, unimaginative, "official" ways of looking at things, don't they?) and the law of the land which tells us always call the cops.

the shooting of Prince Akbar

So it got me thinking of how many ways we can look at this incident.
You could say that this is an unfortunate accident, that the officer in question felt his life was on the line, that the man who was shot was out of control, and that the police responded appropriately to the best of their ability. Perhaps if the officers had not responded, the erratic man might have hurt someone, (although he had not done so yet and was unarmed), because he certainly did not hesitate to beat the shit out of two cops. after all, we do have these laws in place for a reason, because there are crazies out there who hurt people, and nobody wants to get hurt, so the cops were just doing the job we'd all asked them to do.
All the people in the cars who called the cops did so because they didnt want to get hurt, but they didn't want to let someone else get hurt either, or because they were angry and annoyed, but wanted to pass the buck, get someone else to handle it. unfortunately, sometimes when you call the police, you do more harm than good. So we could look at this incident as emblematic of a society of nonparticipation, noninvolvment, that the people who refused to let the crazy man use the phone should be held responsible, the people passing in cars should have lent a hand; or we could flip it and claim these people were overinvolved, that the man should have been ignored, left alone, that we shouldn't be so afraid of people acting strangely, even of possible injury, as to allow the government to gain so much power over us that they can shoot us in the street and ask questions later.
It is a natural reaction to resist imprisonment. Maybe the man would have desisted if left alone. Perhaps the man would still be alive if there were a peacekeeping force that could be dispatched instead of men with guns and tasers (which are often abused and have killed on their own). After all, he was confused, unbalanced, and seeking help- he just wanted to use a telephone. Perhaps he was going through that special psychosis that happens as a result of medication withdrawal. Hey, maybe we can blame the meds on this one!
Nobody sane would expect a man behaving in that manner to not have the cops called on him, especially since he was wandering the halls of a school and walking out in traffic; and you'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb as rocks to not be aware that cops in chicago (or calumet) will shoot you if you try to beat them to death. So you could say he got what was coming to him, that he was acting like an idiot, that he was a crazy asshole to beat a guy half to death when all he had to do was go with them, spend maybe a day in jail, and work it out in the court room.
If it is found in a court of law that the cops acted improperly, they will be punished to at least a small degree, so it is not as though there is no safeguard at all against police abuses.
however, there have been cases where police officers got away with illegal/immoral behavior (and not just "in the past" either, shit happens all the time), so we could look at this as a situation of abuse of power.

You could even go long with it and say that this is yet another example of how much power we give up when we let the cops get away with whatever the hell they wanna get away with, when citizens have no right to stop them or question their actions, because they have the guns.

You could blame the guns. You could say that cops shouldn't have guns: or that nobody should, as it certainly doesn't seem much better for all the local loonies and crooks to have them too, but it also gives that second amendment a bit of shine; what happens when the cops get even more out of line? So you could even go further and say give everybody guns, or advocate for revolution.

Or maybe it's just another fucked up thing that happened in a fucked up world.

Five Gloriously Violent Films

2010-01-05T09:32:00.000-08:00

Titus- based on a play so over-the-top with the butchery that many scholars denied Shakespeare's authorship of it, the film blends ancient and modern in a playfully decadent way that makes all the murder (often of one's own children), rape, madness, mutilation, racism, politics and cannibalism (starring Anthony "they're in the pies!" Hopkins in this classic pride & revenge tragedy) fun like family game night (if you happen to be an Aristocrat). The play starts off with the death of 20 sons in war, and Titus kills yet another of his sons in the first act when the uppity lad defends his sister's right to not be forced to marry/fuck some dude she doesn't like (the nerve!). If you've seen South Park's "Scott Tenorman Must Die" you may see a connection.

Caligula- This movie has it all- as decadent as the man himself was said to be, starring ultraviolent clockwork orange's malcolm mcdowell as the sister fucking, citizen torturing, senator murdering crazypants emperor.

House of 1000 Corpses- Rob Zombie's gruesome, tongue-in-cheek, bizarre Grade-A B-Spoof Horror flick includes gratuitous titties, necro(soft)porn, mutilation of the living and dead, hicks, mutants, face wearing, gimmicks, gaffs, and torture galore.

Reservoir Dogs- See "The Ear Scene"...this flick made the name Tarantino synonymous with violence. my big cringe is when Mr. Blonde splashes that gasoline (apple juice) on the gap where the ear used to be... the best trick of the film is that, like in psycho, you never actually see the most violent part- the camera pans away to a sign saying "watch your head". Tim Roth got stuck to the floor by the puddle of blood he was drowned in. A re-make of a Korean film that Glen says is way better.

Suicide Club: Japanese schoolgirls, wives, and businessmen, take vengeance on co-dependence with mass suicide, because "the children" told them too after they tied all their skin together in a bag, while a glam rock serial killer takes advantage of the situation...and that's not even the most gruesome bit, we'll let that be a suprise (hint: it involves cookies)...

honorable mention: Kill Bill

chicago writers: last chance

2010-01-03T19:29:00.000-08:00

if you're a native, submit your story to ACM by tuesday jan 5th for the Chicago issue.

Another Chicago Magazine Jacob S. Knabb 2608 W. Diversey Apt 202 Chicago, IL - 60647

roche moche at postpilsen

2010-01-02T18:11:00.000-08:00

haven't seen roche moche? havent been to postpilsen? see 'em together! it's like amsterdam hash in devils food cake. thursday, jan 7 @9pm POSTPILSEN 1816 S. Racine

also don't forget about joe bly's roxbox open mic monday nite, featuring nicole wilson & jimmy schuyler. 2624 lincoln ave 10pm.

don't kill boggins!

make yr own booze

2009-12-22T18:07:00.001-08:00

recipes found in the zine "Make Your Own Damn Alcohol" by Jarrod and Laurie of Bowling Green, OH (PO Box963 areacode4302) found at Quimbys ($1):

Prison Juice: fruit juice and rye bred. tastes awful. just needs to sit out for a couple weeks.

mead: what vikings drank. boil 11 pts water and dissolve 1 pt of honey into it. add ginger and orange peels. cool and add yeast. cover and sit out for three days. bottle it in soda bottles- glass will explode. let set for one week + before drinking.

Corn Mash Whiskey: this recipe includes charcoal, a baby pool, and corn meal.

apple cider: basically you just half a gallon glass jug cider with concentrate, sugar and yeast, stick a balloon in it, and let it sit til the balloon is full, bottle it, and let it sit out another week or so.

anyone got a recipe for dandelion wine?

Happy Winter Solstice

2009-12-21T03:30:00.000-08:00

have fun, fuck the bullshit:

- re-hijack the holidays: the majority of the traditions associated with christmas were hijacked from pagan rituals. this year, take back what, when, and how you break up the boredom of winter and/or celebrate broad abstract concepts that appeal to you. smear your body with paste and sacrifice a goat to santa-satan, get a tribal piercing, have a requiem for the dead, switch places with your slave/master for a day, smear your doorknob in butter, plant a tree (inside, with a sunlamp), give away all your possessions take hallucinogens and go on a spirit quest, air dirty laundry and dance around a pole, have a baloney throwing contest.

-fuck the mall: shop indie, shop local, shop thrift. our corporate overlords can be hard to avoid, and it would drive you mad to try and do so entirely, but there are great places to shop that will put a smile on your face and won't contribute to the gunning down of school children in some "third world" country- like the used bookstore on belmont where you can get your pal a vintage playboy, Ash's Magic Shop in Lincoln Square for the kiddies, Chicago Comics/Graham Cracker Comics for your favorite Bat-boy, Quimbys in Wicker for 'zines, and of course a shitload of used record stores (for cds & vids too) citywide for your favorite music geeks.

-bask in absurdity: host a Tomhanksgiving party. put up "wanted" posters for the grinch. steal money from the bank and burn it at the macy's window downtown. Create a new children's christmas carol akin to "joy to the world/my teacher's dead" and go carolling. give away baskets of crispy bacon to all the neighbors. dress up like a skeleton santa and frighten children at the mall. build shocking snowart in the front yard.

-have a white elephant party and exchange worthless and silly "gifts" like a boxfull of painted paper towel tubes or a collection of mcdonald's toys from the flea market.

-fuck christmas music: listen to sitting on top of the world by howling wolf ("had to take christmas in my overalls"), Grandma got run over by a reindeer, or Paul Brady's "Arthur McBride" which tells of beating up military recruiters on Christmas.

-go in the ramadan direction: in a time when most folks are gettin' greedy, give something up. think about all those kids in china who don't even have any meth, and try meditation instead.

-don't spend money: fuck the monetary system. make your friend a mix tape, give away one of your old favorite books, find some cool shit at the thrift for grandma, knit a sweater for your girlfriend, paint dad a picture, make mom a scrapbook. give shit.

- get wasted: have a traditional pagan midwinter orgy.

(Straight-edgers: celebrate your sobriety! get creative with it: have a painting party and wheatpaste your work to public spaces, or host a good ol' fashion "family party"and bust out the scrabble and charades.)

-give in: you know you love a charlie brown christmas, pine trees smell good, and your ma probably got you something really sweet this year. even if you can't get someone to cover your hours christmas eve, take some time off after new year's when everyone's through with the bullshit and cook a nice dinner with some friends (even if you only know how to make grilled cheese), watch homestarrunner's decemberween special or a bootleg of a very sunny christmas (try letmewatchthis), and just relax and enjoy, my friend.

-have a white trash christmas: make a homemade santa for your front yard. decorate your tree with maakies ornaments. make your own wreath out of found objects. put hunter s thompson in the manger this year.

-don't let the man get you down: be it scrooge, the grinch, the pope, our glorious corporate overlords, mom, or santa (he sees you when you're sleeping!), the man is always trying to get you down. this christmas, celebrate your hope for peace and freedom /love of the world by pulling a freak-out in a major shopping center, having lunch with a bum, or giving the homophobe old navy preacher a big gay hug.

far south side tonite?

2009-12-12T11:11:00.000-08:00

"The friends and family of Tariq Ali present a night of music, food, drinks, and friends to honor the memory of our dear departed brother."
$15.00 for 10 bands and food.
raffles, prizes, and a Best Beard Contest!

All proceeds benefit the Ali family.

hosted by intercontinentalballisticmissile
Saturday, December 12,5pm-2am
Tommy's Place
12237 Western Blue Island

Fornication Station/I Attack Holy Whores Dr. Midnight intercontinentalballisticmissile Johnny Vomit Souls Demise DeepSpacePilots Lair Of The Minotaur COULDRON

One Nite Only!

2009-12-09T23:07:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: Jordan's robot broke. so he won't be there. = (

Saturday Dec 12 8:00pm
Reversible Eye Gallery (1103 N. California Ave)
One Night Only Magazine Release

$10 at the door* $7.50 w/ preorder at : http://www.theonenightonlymagazine.com/store.html

*with admission fee you get a copy of the magazine, + all you can drink

contributer performances & music by Glittermouse, Ragged Claws, and kickass robotist Jordan E. Ramsier.

"The One Night Only Magazine is a new quarterly journal where each issue is structured around a theme, dictating the design and content, so that each full issue may stand alone as a complete piece. Our first issue is based in audio, and will come in the form of a CD with a 20 page booklet, containing selected work by Thax Douglas, Scott Blackwood, Mikey's Imaginary Friends, and many more."

why poetry is fucked

2009-11-30T08:59:00.000-08:00

PJ Piety is still talking. Let's give him several awards. He has been crowned King Poetry by all the highest Poetry authorities. We have given him paper dollars to put our words on the rock that he bought. but it wasn't a rock, it was a shitload of wires. they were all fucked up. he bought the name and he will pass it down to his children, artificially created in a lab.

POETRY IS A BRAIN RACE! I AM THE STRONGEST! HOORAY FOR ME! I HAS THE MOST PAPER DOLLARS!

who throned him? the Chitowlib, the Chitowpomag, Chitowpofest and various schmoets who gave him money. not only can art be a buisiness, it can have an elaborate ranking system, with bribery to gain entry! you love it.

next week: the war of the Loudmouths vs the SecretKeepers

Public Disturbance w/ Verbatim

2009-11-09T20:29:00.000-08:00

Verbatim is Columbia College's Performance Poetry Group, and they will be doing some guerilla action on the 12th. to check it out (and possibly add your voice) meet at 600 s. michigan at the underground cafe at 6 pm.

also:
november 20th: silvertongue and verbatim open mic/poetry slam. friday from 6-10 at the quincy young / hokin annex.

the EIN c O n vneinc

2009-11-08T15:59:00.000-08:00

the sweetest little loft space you're not sposta kno about, if you ever get invited to one of their invitation-only shows, take it. last nite we ventured over somewhere like roscoe vill to check out the fabulous songstress rachele eve, who was dressed, like most everybody, as a skeleton. the bands ranged in quality and style, mostly on the indie to punk track, playing with a passion that led to melting skeletal faces and passed out drummers on the sidewalk in front of the bar next door, and the crowd was super chill, some in costume for this post day of the dead show, others sporting the classic nerd look, sweaters and hefty glasses, making the floor throb with their goofy white people dance moves. the show started at 7 and wound down around two, when everyone was kicked out except "vips". the after party consisted mainly of a cheesy 80s music dance party. good times.

Roxbox Poetry Jam

2009-11-01T09:31:00.000-08:00

monday nite starting at nine @ 2624 N Lincoln Ave

featuring Switchback Books

$3 drafts, $4 shots, library books, books for sale, poetry readings, open mic, possible nudity.

as joe put it on the facedbook:

"Hi poets and poetry lovers, Joe Bly here with some great news. I am hosting a monthly poetry open mic and with your help it will be Chicago's new home of the late night poet. The better news? We are making sure this isn't going to be your typical open mic. On top of having fantastic featured readers every month, we are asking readers to bring their own work as well as pieces by their favorite artists to share. At The Rockbox Jam, our goal is for you to enjoy yourselves in a community created poetic realm. This means experiencing the balance of poetry from your freshest local artists to your age old favorites. We are all about having a good time, no pretensions here, just free exchange. So come and enjoy the words, show us what you love, and let the inspiration out. I'm happy to announce this Monday's featured readers come from Chicago's raddest and most debonair feminist press, Switchback Books! We will have a book table with their newest titles to check out, $3 drafts and $4 Jameson shots, and an eclectic mix of music all night long. A library of poetry books will available at the bar so everyone who wants to can read a piece. I think this is going to be a great night and I can't wait to see you there. Maybe a free shot or drink ticket will float your way... Thanks again and all my love, Joe."

The sneeze of the Daemon

2009-10-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

Today I woke up to the mystikal sines of the apocolypse. When I rubbed my groggy ass cheeks, the sound came to me--familiar, easy, like something I've known for such a long time that you begin to lose proper perspective--the marching ant, the long divided numbers, the touch of pink in the Irish glove--I don't know them anymore. BO BO BO BO BO BO BO BO BO BO OB OB OB OB OB OB OB OB OB OB BO BO BOB OBO OB BOB OB BOBB O B Y O B O B Y O B O YO BYOBYOB OBYOBYOBYOBYOBYOBYOBYOBB The feeling of the pinch growing number.

College reality

2009-10-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

College is like all these fuckin hamsters runnin around a maze givin awards to each other for coming up with a fuckin theory about cheese. I went to Columbia College for a few years, and I'm just constantly suprised at what goes on in places like this. Like there's a strict cult called the "Storytime Gang" that won't let anybody out of the circle. you're definitely not allowed to doodle, sneeze, or masturbate in the circle, nor can your eyes leave the eyes of the Eyemaster to wander out the window. then you chant in nonsensical unrelated word games...if you're lucky your professor will lean down and scramble, get out now. the poets down the street trade mostly in gibberish and hierchy. College is good times when you're not on the rack or in brazil, we had good times there, smoking in the park and passing around notebooks mostly. I drew spirals on my hand to fend off bad vibes. jabbing needles in my eyes made them callous off nicely. when my grandmother died we sliced up her coat on the maddening table. Trigger Trinadaddy didn't approve so I fed my brain to apes minus the waffles. it was a fabulous nightmare. kinda like that bad acid flashback shivering in woods when i couldnt stop falling down the trail. just this big fuckin circle, chasing around it, toe stumbling the big light the fuck? I was spose to cry about the indian but i forgot he wasn't a human he was a moviefilm. so we ate lobster in the starving square against the glass, college is where i learned some of these things too. and everything about evil white penises. but then i started thinking, there's lots of evil penises and vaginas and even some evil none of the aboves in the world. it doesnt seem to matter how much they've been bleached. humans are just fuckin strange. so you abandon the surface of the planet and step out of the Reality reality and into some other reality like Lizard reality or Spiralworld. and that's the best thing about college, you get passes to see some crazy shit.

it's a real toilet so be careful!

2009-10-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

The American Astronaut

Bathroom Dancing!

a mercenary space pirate running from a space professor with a deadly sand gun who can't kill him until he forgives him. there are no women and I haven't been to earth so I don't understand that joke...

It's All in the Mustache

2009-10-02T11:03:00.000-07:00

Teen Poet Superstar Saves Lives!

Already making valuable contributions to society as a poet/drug dealer, Teen Poet Mr. Fly has earned his mustache. During a poorly planned fire drill, Fly put on his fire marshall hat and led a group of talking dogs to safety.
"That man" Sparky barks, licking his balls vigorously while looking into the distance with a spoon in his eye, "saved my life".
Yes, Mister Fly is but one of many Teen Poet Heros of the new mellenium. Jess Rose recently saved a group of starving poets from sobriety with her magical glass reservoir. by scraping the glass she was able to save their ass...es. A Local SchoolBoy, Richard Dugan, of Our Lady of the Bleeding Womb, had this to say "i was just sitting there alone at recess. Jess Rose and HK and their possy came and showed me the wonders that could come in a brown bag. Now recess is So Much FUN!". Shortly afterwards, young Richard Dugan tragically succumbed to breast cancer, but his drunken underage smile lives on. Because we built a sculpture of it.
Baxter, one of the dogs whose life was brutally saved, composed a poem in praise of his savoir, "Ode to Fly, Not a Fly but a Guy Named Fly, and What a Guy, Oh My." Unfortunately, the rest of the text was lost in an unrelated fire.

att sucks

2009-09-29T10:23:00.001-07:00

if i wanted somebody to plop me in a phone cord after slicing my head off so i can wander around opening endless doors to endless empty offices staffed by flesh melting faces with the eyeballs sucked out so i can stumble around the maze stinging myself on electrick currents while paper dollars bleed out of my aching muscles searchin for the cheese while walking papers covered in meaningless jibberish shove gerbals down my neck, i'd pay for it. and i am.

Broke City Olympics

2009-09-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

What better way to say "fuck the olympics" than to wheatpaste this up on one of those (likely tax funded) leotarded pro-olympic flaywad sculptures set up in yuppiecommerceville? enjoy.

oh, and if you want the olympics real bad, maybe you can use newfangled technology to alter it into a thumbs up with YEAH OLYMPICS! on the bottom. that is if you wanna fuckin pay for it...

nonverbal poems (with vaginas)

2009-09-05T19:46:00.000-07:00

http://delirioushem.blogspot.com/

a project of artistic response to female poets, featuring Daniela, Abi, and Flynn amongst others.

Anal Rape in the Harrowing Chinese SchoolGirl Poolhouse of PJ Piety

2009-09-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

not a dugnovalesaachkay production

seriously, some anonymous joker sent us this. we were all like, wtf? but we decided to run it cuz we couldnt find any weed. not that we smoke weed, that would be illegal. we were going to hand it over to the proper authorities for destruction. not that we're narcs. we were gonna send an anonobot that would've self destructed at the first sign of police questioning. they're very reliable, those anonobots. just don't get too close to em.

"wait, is this the day the aliens have landed?"
"no, it's National Unexplained Phenomenon Day"
New Taxes on Pajama Bottoms, Buttons and Flies.
fruit?
zipper.

Review of Carnivore Carny

by All Words Copywrit All The Time Devour Press
excerpts:
Fair is Fair, bury the hatchet in vaginal mucus for sail to the children time. Once there was a city run by rats and animated pigeon robots. the sextoy robots had taken over. in this city was a diligent schmoet named PJ Piety who had carefully crafted a defense mechanism made of 011001 so he could own all the words. he stole all the words from the mouths of starving children, cut off their lips and taped them to his asshole. Four times an hour the Holy Hole would sing. it would sing songs about how mean and unjust all the other humans were before they got mechanized cuz they wanted to share words and they were communists.
"I got outta there with both lovely testicles intact" he told reporterbots at the scene, "but I had to scotch tape them to my forehead to stop the bleeding."
"let jesus fuck you!" his asshole sang as he fell into a deep state of epeleptic seizure, concentration, meditation, masturbation.
i went home. when i woke in the middle of the nite, 13 assholes were surround me, singing. four had assholes. and they sang

we are CHITOWPO,
we own all the buildings!
we own all the grass!
we own all the oxygen molecules!
you'll have to lick them outta our ass!

that is offensive to women! i screamed, but nobody listened cuz i was carving ovaries outta soap at the time.
but CJ Piety knew he wasnt crazy. He was the Jesus of Chitowpo. They were all trying to kill him. or anally rape him. o, they were clever. they would pretend like all they wanted to do was chew on words. theyd pretend like they couldnt hear him. but he knew that they'd scheduled their entire lives around his holy calendar. cuz it had holes in it, like swiss cheese. and it told the people the truth about how everyone was trying to anally rape his precious children. so PJ Piety decided to get some MOTHERFUCKING REVENGICIDE! he would not take that shit lying down. so he burnt down all the other calendars, even stonehenge, until nobody knew what day it was and the sun died. of venereal diseases. and PJ Piety masturbated in spasmotic glee.

...and they told the children, be careful which words you eat, or the PJ Piety will come...

next week: PJ Piety makes a web site about assramming elephants.

chicago poetry chicago poetry chicago poetry (x3=$45.6x3+9.18tx=$178.9)

tattoo a poet

2009-09-03T09:12:00.001-07:00

Faith Rice, prez of verbatim (columbia's performance poetry group) is getting poetry branded-your poem could be on her skin! look for verbatim's Poetry Tattoo Competition at colum's new student convocation in grant park.

wanna get involved?

2009-08-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

Elephantz is a community motherfucking art project, and we're looking to involve more folks in it. if you wanna get involved, give us a holler. we like people who like art, people who like making art, people who wanna have art shows, people who are good with words, people who are good times, anarchists, and renegade satanic monkey priests. elephantzine@gmail.com

another nite at carl's

2009-08-27T11:12:00.001-07:00

O man was last nite fun...you mighta noticed me, i was the loud drunk obnoxious asshole that was runnin around with a string can phone...well i did say i had fun, did i not?...on the way up i nearly got attacked by the tree branches that are growing out of the apartment... the boys had set up a stage with boxes and windows and leafy branches and a microphone on a string at the front for the spoken words, and carl's room was made up like his mind with blue wood windows smeared with typewritten martian law pages and the usual typewriter for hire in the corner. katie heath (whose name i've now forgotten about a million times but who's personality is unforgettable) had some sweet pieces up in the hall like i need a ~~job~~ /~~hobby~~ rolling papers and a liquor store map of her community, very handy indeed. Evan had some cool pieces up too, like bat glasses imploring "see me" but i can't really describe his style, you gotta see it. whitney (of roche moche) had some of her fucking amazing, haunting skeletal birdmouth paintings up too. There were lots of other kickass displays like birdsnests towers and photographs, with names on them that were all blurry (that or there was two of thems) and shit, kickass. Of course, it was Joe "OEM" Bly's day of birthening, so there was much drunken merry making and reuniting of folks we hadnt seen in a minute / all summer, happy to report that richard dugan is alive indeed, i also learned some interesting things about riker's from an irish ex-con...like prison rape? totally exaggerated. prison man on man action? everything you dreamed about and more. if you're into that kinda thing. Ike and Carl were the perfect hostesses, thanks for an awesome night guys! now to soak my head in a bucket of ice water...

notebook online

2009-08-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

all pages of notebook online here.

"around the clock" by Peter Skvara, "hypno fancy" by Evan Crown, "funny guy" by Riley, "signs" by HK

2009-07-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

and finally... That's All, Folks! Don't Forget to Tip Your Waitress!

This Friday!

2009-07-21T08:18:00.001-07:00

"Join us for a three dimensional freak out of color, form and material. Walk the isles of a hand-made grocery store created completely out of paper, shoot hoops on a 3 story high basketball net, or just sit down at our collage table and create some work of your own. After the opening and subsequent hangover, come back on July 25th for an art-making BBQ throw down as we combine our creative energies to make collages which we will hand-deliver for free to the people walking around this great city. So drop on by, check out some good stuff and make some of your own. We will have magazines, scissors and glue on hand but feel free to bring your own collage materials to throw down."

Participants: Chris Roberson, Emily Clayton, Dr. James Harry Ewert Jr, Rod Hunting, Adrianne Goodrich , Peter Skvara, Chad Kouri, Matt Nicolas, Jim Kozar, Ed Marszewski, Ben Speckmann, Sarah Jeziorski, Richard Smith and more. Audio collage performances by Le Deuce and Rik Shaw.

getittogethershow.com

Brought to you by Chad Kouri and Dr. James Harry Ewert Jr.

from Pete.

"Magically Real" by Carl Aagesen

2009-07-12T23:11:00.000-07:00

BRAVE NEW VOICES

2009-07-12T22:15:00.000-07:00

International Youth Poetry Slam Festival
July 14-19

Kevin Coval hosts the finals at the Chicago Theatre (175 N State);
anyone under 24 gets in for a measly $8 to see young folks from "over 50 cities".

Friday July 17 @7 check out Saul Williams and Alix Olsen at "Bringing the Noise" at the Merle Reskin Theatre 60 E Balbo $10.

Life is Living
feat. Beau Sia & Saul Williams.
skating, basketball & soccer, dance battles, graffitti.
FREE Claredeon Plaza (at Montrose), Saturday July 18 10am-4pm

Semi-Finals at the MCA, Columbia, Chi Pub Radio HQ, & Biograph Theatre

www.Bravenewvoices.org

Chicago NOW Open House

2009-07-11T23:33:00.000-07:00

Saturday the 11th (that's today, kids). "A celebration of feminist art." featuring music by Rachele Eve (5pm) and a reading by Daniela around 4pm at the EP theatre. FREE BOOZE.

Who Owns Chicago Poetry?

2009-07-10T23:38:00.000-07:00

a certain unnamed party has been harassing another unnamed party regarding ownership of this phrase. I'm not gettin into this one (check daniela's blog entry a couple weeks ago if you're interested, the hate sites are pretty fucked up) but i gotta ask:

how can you own chicago poetry? that belongs to all of us, man. that's like asking who owns this city. this is our fucking city. fuck daley and all.

Last Nite at the Mutiny

2009-07-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

i miss walking down Western Ave in Logan; Carl, Rob, and a coupla other guys usta have a house down there, which was frequently haunted by whiskey ghosts from other planets who liked to dance and break the furniture. this path i've treaded many times, even barefoot over broken glass caterwauling beatles tunes with Oem, a noisy, dirty, buzzing, laughing street, passing Arturo's, the ice creamery, the flag store, the neon store, the spy store (where Carl's spit is on camera file) down to Fullteron and the big ol' Old Style sign marking the Mutiny. I ditch my tallboy and walk in without any hassle, the doors playing and somebody who should've been wearing a sailor hat shooting pool. At the back of the club on the low stage Baby Tornado is gearing up. tired from work, I sit on the floor in front of the stage.
Carl screams and makes faces like an ancient evil alien ghost clown, dancing around in his loafers and nerd-o sweater like yr drunkard old man after a week neglecting his psychotropic medication.
Baby Tornado played pretty damn hard for a mystical alterverse connecting rod. Rob destroyed the drums, drunk and fulla rage, then switched with Ryan (who is not an accountant but a spook for wind-power in high tops who kicks ass), grabbing the gee-tar and turning his back shy.
"Sometimes There Are Bats Everywhere."
people dancing and passing around pitchers in the swarming black of the club (broken only by the red splash of the Helter Skelter 'giny pisser). the speakers ripple an aneurism through my ribs. a lot of people in this room seem to be missing chunks of koolaid hair & sporting sleeves of violent ink.
at the break we flood out onto the street where the owner keeps count of who's outside and keeps trying to shuttle us all back in when we're done with our squares. this is necessary because folks don't seem to want to go inside, they wanna talk loud and jump into old friends and shake off the sweat in this wierd July cool (Al Gore has been notified). Back inside, People Sometimes is playing, Watman is screaming and shaking wet hair on the crowd, and the lead guitarist takes the mic and and brings it down into the crowd. the crowd calls to the drummer, "take off your shirt!"
"I'll take my right shoe off".
i missed most of Tea Party's set in quest of pizza; they kept the frenzy building up to Roche Moche. everybody went nuts, man- stripping off clothes, pogoing and dancing and trampling in one big sweaty lektrik body.
after the show we went to a dying party and laid out on the roof. the guy who lived there was convinced we were comin down from acid.

Roche Moche, People Sometimes & Baby Tornado Thursday

2009-07-08T01:21:00.000-07:00

with Tea Party at the Mutiny.
2428 N Western. 9pm

wheatpastes by Jess Rose & you!

2009-07-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Five Broke-Ass Tunes

2009-07-02T22:27:00.000-07:00

for all the hurtin artists out there:

(1) Busted - sung by Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. Written in 1962 by Harlan Howard, a farmboy from detroit. About a hard-luck farmer whose crops are failing, hens wont lay, cows go dry. "My bills are all due, and the baby need shoes...the county's gonna haul my belongs away, cuz I'm busted". He can't get money from his brother and fears he might have to steal or move on and try to find work elsewhere, "but I'll make a livin', the lord only knows, cuz I'm busted".

(2) Mercedes Benz -sung by Janis Joplin, a piece of song recorded in a playful, joking manner that parodies the greed of the American Dream and the shame and isolation of modern American "poverty" -not having a TV, a cool car, or any money for drinks, workin' hard with "no help from my friends".

(3)I Spent TheRent -by the Queers; a 30 second, 8 word song about spending the rent money and saying fuck it. sometimes sung in a fake British Accent.

(4) Steak 4 Chicken -Moldy Peaches. an overlapping duet with some really funny, crazy lines: "Mardi Gras, came and went, all my money has been spent /how'm I gonna pay the Rent, sittin on your face. who mistook the steak for chicken, who'm I gonna stick my dick in?"

(5) Ma & Pa Poorhouse Blues -Ma Rainey & Papa Charlie Jackson in a simple, moving, moaning, uplifiting, painful, funny old blues song, "bein broke's alright, when you know you got some more money comin' in, but when you lose your money, that's when friends chip in..."

honorable mentions: "Spoonful" Howling Wolf, "Rock Bottom" Eminem, "Diamonds & Gold" Tom Waits, "Polly Put the Kettle On" Sonny Boy Williamson.

Columbia Poets: Where Are They Now?

2009-07-02T21:51:00.000-07:00

where to read kick-ass poetry

Burdock looks good. so does 11 11. of course ACM kicks ass all over town. Andrew's bludgeon chapbook is pretty much the shit. i highly recommend reading anything Flynn writes, especially on acid. Dolly's shit is sharp and funny as hell. dunno these other kids so good but then you'll havta read it to find out, eh?

Echo Report

2009-07-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

echo report

2009 New World Order Contestants

Innane Adverts

2009-07-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

How To Get A Girl Back
Make Her Yours Again With These 6 Tips. Get Instant Access via Email.
www.GetYourExGirlfriendBack.com

Want To End A Friendship?
Learn When To Say Goodbye To A Friend Without Leaving Scars
www.Lifescript.com

i did not make these up, these are real.

new issue of jettison

2009-07-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

includes fiction, art, recipes, and an article on why gay marriage aint happenin in il, jettison away!

good times poetry calendar

2009-06-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

a calendar of poetry that is happenin in chicago

(brought to you by the folks who brought you dancing girl press)

Activity: Talk Back

2009-06-29T23:10:00.000-07:00

You walk down the street past a billboard that says "Want People To Want To Stand Near You? Use Soylent Soap! Clean And People-Free", pass a street preacher yellin "how you gonna go to heaven, if you don't properly wash your vegetables? how you gonna go to heaven, if you a member of Sam's Club? how you gonna go to heaven, if you change a lightbulb wearing overalls?". You go to work and your boss tells you to quit jerkin off to high speed internet mature tentacle rape school girl innocent interracial insurance salesmen porn and recusitate that heart patient already or you're sacked. then you go home and the Surrounding TeeVee Walls tells you that you should really be offended by men who don't adequately cover their bald spots with a wig of at least horsehair quality at Socialist Funerals, and Something Must Be Done!, and it's good, real good, that President Andy set fire to that kitten.

Well, sometimes you just gotta scream, I'm Mad As Hell and I Ain't Gonna Take It Anymore!

*Create/write a piece in response to a message you're not generally invited to respond to.*

Then present/display your art/poem to that corporation/crowd/person/entity. Paste it up over that billboard /your mama's face! Send it in to the paper! Scream it on the street!

Extra Credit: Document your efforts and send them to elephantzine@gmail.com. The gods will reward you handsomely.

also, for those of you wondering- "hey, whatever happened to issue 3? and when the fuck they gonna have another show?" well, see, we really wanted to do it earlier, but like, had all these problems, like, first our car ran outta gas and we had to go back cuz we forgot to feed the cat and then our cousin from outta town showed up and he was with this kid who we recognized as a fugitive from the law from a wanted poster at the mcdonalds so we had to climb out the bathroom window cuz we heard sirens but it was only the fire truck across the street but then we forgot our keys and we didnt wanna break a window so we called the landlord but we hadta hang up on him cuz we remembered we forgot to pay the rent, so we went up to the pawnshop to tryn raise some dough but we got in a fistfight with the owner cuz he kept trying to tell us we couldnt pawn our fuckin shoes, even if they were mada solid gold cuz they got holes in em and our feet stank, then we heard about this rad free show happenin in the square but when we got there it was canceled so we got some 40s and got wasted and woke up in alberqurke only we couldnt even figure out how to spell it right so it ended up being fuckin newark, and we got lost and the only people we could find for directions were peruvian or some shit, and we tried to speak peruvian but accidentally ended up telling them to suck our dirty hairy bottoms clean of their mother's moisture, so then we had to run our asses to the #16 bus in a hail of gunfire and we got shot in the ankle so we went to the hospital only we didnt have no insurance so we hadta put on false mustaches but they fell of and we got kicked out so we hadta dig out the bullet with the same spoon that fugitive kid, our cousin's friend, had used to funnel outta prison, and it hurt like hell so we went uptown to score some painkillers off a down croaker, only he said he didnt write no more on accounta he had the fuzz sniffin around his coattails all the goddamm time so we bought a bottla cough syrup and drank it but then we remembered that we were late for work so we got on the bus only we didnt have no change anymore so we got kicked off the bus and then we were hustlin for change but the cops stopped us so we pulled some kung fu moves and got outta there only then we hadta steal a car and got stuck in a high speed pursuit along the dan ryan of all places but we knew a safehouse in hydepark so we ditched the hot ride and crashed in this girls house only her mama was there and she kept askin all these questions about our schooling and we didnt know cuz we hadnt been to school in ages so finally we said fuck it and went home and broke a window and passed the fuck out. but we'll get to it monday, we swear.

serously, we have some rad poems and if this weather holds we think we may be able to get it out around august or september. also we wanna have a fuckin show, just not sure where, anybody got a fuckin warehouse they can lend us? also also, it'd help if you sent us some work. ASAP, as in right fuckin now, you lazy goddamn waxy eared slack jawed cloudhed artistes. why dont you all go to accountant school get real jobs. we did and look at us! i mean, we're broke as shit but at least Mom's Friendly Robot Corporation is making bank, plus we figure in a year or two we got a good shot at embezzlement. so what were we saying, O yea, send us art/poetry/dead rats and we'll, y'kno, photocopy/upload/wheatpaste 'em for yas.

Cheers! -Elephant

"magnet" by Stephen Dvorak, "rocket" by Joe Bly

2009-06-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

^click on the image for a closer look^

"poem" by Zach Green, "beggar" by Riley, "atoms" by Jess Rose, "monster" by Stitchmouth

2009-06-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

"my head is a box" by Jen NW, collage by Joe Bly

2009-06-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

Women Fight Harassment with Poetry!

2009-06-16T10:02:00.000-07:00

Sisters who are sick of being harassed on the CTA will fight back with a poetry slam, to be held from 2 to 4 p.m. June 27 at Berger Park, 6206 N. Sheridan. http://www.suntimes.com/news/transportation/1622746,CST-NWS-ride15.article

From the Switchback Blog: "Switchback Editor, Hanna Andrews, will be reading alongside poet Carol Guess on Friday, June 26th. The event will take place at Women & Children First and will begin at 7:30 pm 5233 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL 60640". If you don't know already, WCF is a sweet indie feminist/gay/family bookstore in andersonville (redline-berwyn) with a great selection and an excellent staff. It's a nice place and the hood is pretty sweet to walk around in. http://www.womenandchildrenfirst.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp?s=storeevents&eventId=422274

read one of Hanna's poems here: http://thediagram.com/7_1/andrews.html

another switchbacker, Brandi "B-Ho" Homan will be reading soon too: "June 27 — Salon with Kathleen Rooney, Brandi Homan, and Carol Guess. Atelier Studio, 410 S. Michigan Ave, Studio 921, Chicago, IL. 2:00pm". Here's a Brandi poem: http://www.webdelsol.com/DIAGRAM/3_5/homan.html

Finally, I will be hosting a commie art party/jam session (give what you can, take what you need) in Little Village this friday, hit me up for details.

"Features" by Glen

2009-06-07T08:14:00.000-07:00

Philsy Denofrio, "bone" by Riley, "round tumblers" & collage by Jess Rose

2009-06-01T08:12:00.000-07:00

^click on the image for a closer look^

"Skitso" by Pete Skvara, art by Riley & HK

2009-05-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

Roche Moche!

2009-05-26T10:14:00.000-07:00

Roche Moche will be playing at the Elbo Room tomorrow nite starting at 9pm. Roche Moche means ugly rock, fronted by a screaming sweatin gothish girl who draws fragile psychedelic francophone bird skeletons on windows and wears a giant woolen hat. I saw them at the Mutiny and nearly creamed my pants. It was like what I always imagined bikini kill to be like, only with a more sophisticated musical what-have-you swirling through my brain and bleeding eardrums, sort of pumpkins-esque I guess, I didnt take all those fancy music classes.. I couldnt understand a damn word she was saying but I felt it, man. here's how they promote themselves on the facebook you damn kids love so much:

This wednesday may 27th at 9pm see roche moche and other great local acts perform awe inspiring and panic inducing incantations and wavical acts of symphonic schismogenesis right before your tender eyeballs and earholes. bring a friend to dance with and clean up your blood with. watch benben the circus shim eat a footlong hotdog in less than a second. other weird and mysterious acts sure to happen or not. go green and shit with new reusable toilet paper and barfbags. stop spreading disease by wearing gloves anytime you touch another human being. stare into space and think about how we are better than antimatter. cant have the life you dreamed of as a stupid little kid? take someone elses. free advice administered daily. no guarantees. make sure you quit that job and dump that lover and start over. work hard for a promotion and finally pop the question to your sweetheart. "high school was the best!" he said and rolled off the side of the bed. et cetera"

GO TO THIS SHOW! yea, okay, it does cost money and is at a bar but you will fucking thank me.

"disney empire" by Alex Bonner

2009-05-20T08:08:00.000-07:00

^click on the image for a closer look^

Streetwise Events

2009-05-15T13:47:00.000-07:00

Help the homeless out: "Next week is StreetWise awareness week and there are a number of events being planned to honor our organization. Two of the events are open to anyone who would like to attend. They are as follows: Tuesday, May19, starting at 6:00PM, come out for an evening of fun at 10 Pin Bowling Lounge located at 330 North State Street. $30 covers bowling, shoes, and a food buffet, with proceeds going to StreetWise. Thursday, May 21, starting at 6:00PM, join us for a happy hour networking event thrown by board members Adam Meek and Jon Reinsdorf at the Underground located at 56 W. Illinois. $20 donation towards StreetWise recommended." (from the SW newsletter). Also, check out my article on anarchists, coming out the 27th.

"aliens" by Faith Rice and Riley

2009-05-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

^click on the image for a closer look^

MANIFEST YR DESTINY!

2009-05-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

MAY 15th- friggin be there! right in the loop! Check out performance art on the street, guerilla poetry, the poetry tattoo parlor, crazy-ass art cars, and all kindsa other shit, free and in yr face: http://www2.colum.edu/manifest/

it's Tammy time!

2009-05-08T14:00:00.001-07:00

A new print journal of poetry and prose from Tyler Flynn Dorholt, Thomas Cook, and JoAnna Novak, and featuring work by Rick Meier, Lisa Fishman, Aaron Patrick Flanagan, and Catherine Meng, heeeere's TAMMY!

(by the way, they're totally excepting submissions).

"you live with people just to hear the guitar" by Jess Rose

2009-05-08T11:45:00.000-07:00

weekend happenings

2009-05-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

Home Ec

hosted by the Happy Collaborationists 1254 N Noble Art installations by Torreyanna Barley and Anna Trier. for info e-mail annatrier@happycollaborationists.com

****************************

JUNKYARD CARNIVAL

Trap Door Theatre -1655 W Cortland - $10

Friday, May 8, 7PM Show Music by Origin of Animal, Ryan Gunzel, House of Winehouse Comedy by Ryan Schefdore, Jody Serafin Burlesque by Cruel Valentine, La Lola, Alexandra The Romanian Belly Dancer

Friday, May 8, 9PM Show Music by Rachel Ries, Kory Quinn, Chris Elam, House of Winehouse Comedy by Ryan Schefdore, Matt Stromer Burlesque by La Lola, Viva La Muerte, Dominique Trixx, Alexandra The Romanian Belly Dancer

Saturday, May 9, 6PM Show Music by Nashville Wreckers, House of Winehouse, Lydia Palazzolo Comedy by Ryan Schefdore, Matt Stromer Burlesque by La Lola, Bizarre Sally, Pearl Pistol

Saturday, May 9, 8PM Show Music by Nashville Wreckers, Kory Quinn, Stealth Like A Canoe Comedy by Ryan Schefdore, Jody Serafin Burlesque by Donna Touch, Bizarre Sally, Pearl Pistol

********************************

Mouth of Feathers:

Rachele Eve CD Release Party at the Hideout

Friday, May 22nd 9pm 1354 W Wabansia

Rachele Eve is a folksy songstress who kicks ass. I don't know what else to say about her or her music, so just check it out for yourself: http://www.racheleeve.com/

interview with an anarchist

2009-05-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

this is an interview I conducted via e-mail towards an article on the Finding Our Roots Conference for Streetwise. Not sure when it's coming out yet, sometime after the 15th? See your local, friendly neighborhood homeless dude to get a copy. Also, if you happen to be in Pilsen and with a thirst for knowledge, check out Lichen Lending Library (more on this some other time, but you can google it).

HK: When did you become involved in the anarchist community, and what drew you to it?

KBunny: I first became an anarchist in high school, in the mid-1980s. I had become involved in anti-nuclear and anti-Apartheid activism, and was investigating political theory on my own. I actually initially got into Marxism, mostly because it was the only anti-capitalist philosophy that I could find material on. Plus I knew some Marxists and socialists through activism. I was also reading a lot about sixties radicalism. Like many my age I had heard of anarchy through the Sex Pistols, and was drawn to the idea without really knowing what it was. Then my senior year a friend showed me a flyer for an anarchist youth group that had begun meeting in the East Village (I grew up in New York), which at the time was not at all the arty yuppie enclave it is today, but rather the center of a militant squatters' struggle against the city housing authority, the police, and the forces of gentrification. I went to a meeting and met people who openly called themselves anarchists for the first time. I got involved in the community and the local political punk scene, and got access to all kinds of anarchist literature, from zines to historical writings. During a lot of the 1990s, after I graduated from college, I drifted away from anarchism in any active sense, and toward progressive liberalism (I actually voted for Clinton!). I moved to Chicago in 1999 for grad school. I slowly became re-radicalized by the events of 1999-2001: the Seattle uprising and the so-called "anti-globalization" protests that followed, the theft of the 2000 presidential election, the murder of Carlo Giuliani by police at the 2001 anti-G8 protests in Italy, and finally the imperialist reaction to 9/11. By the end of 2001 I was openly calling myself an anarchist again and participating in various radical efforts in Chicago. I guess I was drawn to anarchist community initially because for the first time I found folks who seemed to see the world more like I did, who were dedicated to politicized rebellion and divesting from the status quo, rather than just reformist protest, or replacing one totalizing doctrine with another. As a teenager it was exciting to meet people who dressed outrageously, lived as they wanted, and subscribed to all kinds of practices and ideas that made sense to me, such as veganism, feminism, polyamory, queerness, DIY culture, squatting, and sharing food, work, and living space in community. As I've aged I've certainly become more jaded about anarchist community, but I still feel compelled to create resistance with others, and it is still really the only "political home" that makes sense for me.

HK: How do you (and/or the community) define anarchy?

KBunny: Whew! Ask ten anarchists this question and you'll get about 50 different answers. Anarchists tend to be naturally free-thinkers who don't automatically accept what they are told, but rather must consider the evidence and arrive at their own conclusions - therefore each person tends to have their own working definition of anarchism, and their own vision of what anarchy means to them and would look like. A few things these visions tend to have generally in common include: hatred of and opposition to all forms of hierarchy, domination, and oppression - including the understanding that these things are inherent in the current system (and pretty much all others that have existed in human history); belief in mutual aid and the equal sharing of resources and work; and belief in individual and community autonomy and self-determination, which goes hand in hand with a belief that human beings are not only capable of but best suited to self-sufficiency, voluntary cooperation, and consensus - that people don't need and shouldn't have a "higher authority" to police our actions and tell us how to act and how to live. Of course, all of what I just said fits in with my own ideas of what anarchy is - another anarchist might give you a different answer to how "the community" defines anarchy. But probably their answer would contain at least some of the same elements. However, I don't know if you could accurately say that there is one "community" definition of anarchy, as we are always arguing the point amongst ourselves, and there are many different "schools" of anarchism. One thing I really value about Finding Our Roots is that folks from many different tendencies can come together and discuss, network, and strategize across ideological differences - which after all are much less significant than the differences between us and the mainstream political world. For my own version of anarchy I would also add that I tend more toward an individualist anarchism, meaning that I feel individual autonomy and self-determination trumps most concerns, unless it spills over into curtailing the individual freedom of others (for example, I don't believe that we are "free" to rape, assault, or imprison another). This means I struggle a lot with things like my ethical veganism, because as much as I believe that the meat industry is grossly oppressive to animals, I also believe that what one chooses to ingest is a personal decision that should not be dictated by another. However, I also feel that the supposed divide between "individualist" and "collectivist" anarchism (and here we're getting into multi-layered debates that have raged for decades in anarchist community) is actually a false dichotomy - because I enthusiastically support the idea of collectivism, and as an individual I can and do choose to work in many different types of collectives. This includes sometimes choosing to subsume my individual desire to the will and work of the collective, because I believe that the collective's goals and existence are more important. This doesn't always happen, though, and this is when the consensus process gets tricky: if someone feels so strongly about something that they would leave the collective if certain decisions are made, we have to keep working and debating until we can arrive at a decision that everyone can agree to. Consensus is definitely a much slower and more difficult decision-making process than majority rule or representative so-called democracy, but anarchists tend to feel that it is worth it to have decisions made in a truly non-hierarchical manner. By the same token, sometimes individual initiative is what makes things happen, and anarchists usually do not expect one another to wait for permission to act. It's a delicate balance of trusting the people you're working with, and not acting in a way that imposes your individual will on others without their consent.

HK: How does the anarchist lifestyle compare to the "average american's'?

KBunny: Again, there isn't a single "anarchist lifestyle." Some of us spend our time traveling around and living in the cracks of capitalist society. Some of us live collectively, dumpster-dive and/or grow our own food, and otherwise try to live as low on the food chain as possible, and try to avoid the need to sell all our time to capitalists for subsistence. Some of us are queer, and might be in open or multiple-partner relationships; some are straight and/or monogamous. For some anarchism is all about unionism, community organizing, or issue-based activism, while for others it's more about creating pockets of the world we envision now - and for many it's both. Some of us avoid TV and mass media, some don't. And some of us have spouses and children, own homes and cars, and have full-time jobs just like most "average americans." We have to find ways to survive under capitalism just like everyone else, and that takes different forms for different people. There are plenty of anarchists you might take for "just another average joe" if you saw them on the street - and in most respects they are "just folks," it's just that personal conviction and/or experience under the heel of capitalism have brought them to anarchism.

HK: There seem to be a lot of fears and misconceptions about anarchists; how would you respond to people who consider your ideaology dangerous or akin to nihilism or communism?

KBunny: First I should say that there *are* some anarchists who favor nihilist ideas and/or would claim the label "nihilist," as well as some who call themselves anarcho-communist and envision an essentially communist political structure, only without a centralized authority, and with community autonomy and collective, non-hierarchical decision-making. Most Americans equate "communism" with Soviet Russia, which is actually quite inaccurate - most radicals (anarchist and otherwise) would say that the USSR actually equaled "state capitalism," not to mention fascist imperialism more or less of the kind practiced by the US - only the power mechanism consisted of the state, rather than private corporations supported by the state. But because of widespread misconceptions about what communism is - as well as its implications of ideology and individual action being dictated by a central, controlling body - I myself think anarchists should not seek to embrace this term, even though a lot of what I practice and believe could be described as "communistic." In my view, anarchists are not communists precisely because of the value we place on self-determination, decentralization, and individual freedom. Other anarchists would of course disagree. I would say the single biggest misconception about anarchists is that we only want to destroy and create disorder, that anarchy equals chaos and "everyone for themselves." As you saw at the conference this is just not the case. I don't know how many times I've heard someone quip, "An anarchist conference - isn't that an oxymoron?" - as though getting together for a weekend and talking about stuff is somehow anti-anarchist. Yes, most anarchists *do* want to destroy capitalism, or at the very least create alternatives to it as it slowly crumbles under its own weight. But almost all the anarchists I know are much more about creating something - growing food, maintaining community spaces, organizing grassroots coalitions - than about destruction. That doesn't mean that some of us don't also subscribe to notions of direct action that involve actually destroying some part of the capitalist structure. But this is far from being destruction for its own sake, and many anarchists don't consider property destruction to be "violence" - especially when compared to the massive violence perpetrated by the state and the corporate power structure it protects. So, while anarchism does involve an element of "destroying what destroys you," at its essence it is about *creating* a world based on equality, cooperation, and the non-exploitation of one another and the earth. The notion that anarchism equals violence and wanton destruction is perpetuated by the existing system and its media to ensure that people continue to hate and fear us - because, in fact, anarchist ideas *are* dangerous to the capitalist power structure and the state that protects it.

HK: What is the purpose of the Finding Our Roots Conference?

KBunny: The initial idea for FOR materialized in 2006 as a response to organizing efforts taking shape around the coming presidential political conventions. Folks felt that, while they prepared for planned protests, anarchists should also work on educating ourselves about our history, ideas, and practice, and creating more space for open exchange and networking. The original idea was to have a series of three conferences within two years - the first on theory, the second on organizing, and the third on direct action. We did use the first two themes for the first two FORs. But by the time the first conference was over the idea had evolved into establishing an annual anarchist conference in Chicago. When folks met to begin planning this year's conference, it was generally felt that direct action was not an inclusive enough theme for a whole conference. So, FOR's purpose quickly expanded to be an annual opportunity for anarchists and the "anarcho-curious" in Chicago, around the midwest region, and beyond, to gather in order to discuss and debate ideas, network, learn about one another's work and our collective history, build community, and create bases for further organizing. It is also, secondarily, a chance to celebrate everything our community is and to connect with far-flung or seldom-seen comrades. While "outsiders" may have the perception that all anarchists know each other and work together all the time, in fact we spend most of our time involved in our own projects and immediate networks. In Chicago there is the added factor of the different neighborhoods being so spread out and isolated, as well as segregation across lines of race, class, age, etc. One of the things I love most about FOR is the way it brings together anarchists not only of different tendencies and with different focuses, but also of many different ages, class and racial backgrounds, genders and sexualities. To me this type of cross-sectional meeting is vital to our community and our collective struggle, so I'm very grateful that FOR seems to be sticking around as an annual opportunity to make these connections, and hopefully build on them over time.

HK: It seems that anarchist ideals may require a different approach to organizing something like this, how is this accomplished?

KBunny: See above, what I said about consensus. Also I'd add that an event that is anarchist in nature includes the assumption that no central authority dictates how it unfolds - so anyone is invited to get involved with the organizing, propose and put together a workshop, or take initiative in helping shape the event while it occurs, and all input is added to create the whole. For example, a common practice at anarchist conferences (which FOR has used) is to set aside space for "guerrilla workshops" - meaning that anyone can announce and hold a workshop that is not on the conference schedule. When you are organizing anything using consensus, the end result comes together through a combination of individual initiative and group decision-making.

HK: The theme of this year's conference was space; what can you tell me about the vitality of alternative living arrangements such as co-ops in Chicago?

KBunny: Stuff like that always waxes and wanes. Right now we seem to be in a period of abundance with regard to anarchist/anti-authoritarian spaces and collectives (housing and otherwise) in Chicago. One of this year's workshops that I helped plan was on collective living spaces. I was impressed by the sheer number of collectives that were represented there - easily more than a dozen, and that was only the folks who actually showed up! It seems that more and more people are seeking some kind of collective living arrangement, because they recognize the non-viability of the capitalist model where you choose between the nuclear family or solitary existence. More and more people are realizing that capitalism is increasingly going to fail to provide for our needs, and that we had best join forces now to try to do so for ourselves.

HK: What do anarchists do to improve their communities?

KBunny: I'm not sure I can adequately answer that question - again, there are at least as many answers as there are anarchists. Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "improve." I will say that being an anarchist is a process of continual self-critique and trying to figure out how to do things more effectively, and more conscientiously with regard to not perpetuating systems of oppression. We are all, especially here in the "belly of the empire," products and inheritors of this racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist world, and it's our responsibility to work continually to counteract these forces, as well as to overcome them within ourselves. As human beings all of us fail at this at least sometimes. But most anarchists are perpetually engaged with trying to live as close to our ideals as we can. One problem anarchist community always faces is being primarily populated by young, white children of privilege. It is always necessary to keep trying to push beyond these limitations, not only to "reach out" to people of color, poor people, and older people - but to support other struggles for liberation, and to make our community open and welcoming to people who may already be practicing anarchy, whether they call it that or not, in their own lives and communities. But as I said, one of the great things about FOR is the broad range of anarchists who show up and participate (I think the age range at this year's conference was 2 months to 70 years), proving that our community is not *as* homogeneous as it often seems.

HK: What are the biggest challenges to the scene?

KBunny: See above. Also, I would say that a big challenge is not getting so caught up in our own internal debates and differences that we lose sight of the larger struggle against oppression in which we're all engaged in some way. It can seem so impossible to get a roomful of anarchists to agree on anything, that we forget that in the eyes of the system and its adherents we're all the same.

HK: What do you think/hope the future of the anarchist scene will look like?

KBunny: Oy, another huge question! As an "older" anarchist - meaning not in my 20s (I'll be 38 this year) - I think about this question a lot, as it pertains to growing older and living a whole lifetime within a community of resistance that can tend toward young people who think they know it all and are quickly distracted. For one thing, I'd like to see anarchists make greater efforts to learn about and from our history, and to understand ourselves as part of a tradition of resistance, culture, and thought that goes back almost two centuries. I also hope that our community will continue to diversify and expand - maybe in another decade or two "anarchist" won't be automatically associated with the image of a young, white "alternative type." As far as my predictions, I think the current trend of collective living, building permaculture systems, and working toward food and energy self-sufficiency will continue to grow. I think and hope that this will be increasingly true - out of necessity - throughout first-world society, and I think it's encouraging and appropriate that anarchists are on the frontlines of this trend.

Top 5: Unlikely Comic Book Heroes

2009-05-02T10:10:00.000-07:00

IT's FREE COMIC BOOK DAY! stop by your local stores today, May 2nd, for a free comic book! freecomicbookday.com

(5) Krazy Kat- Ignatz Mouse throws bricks at her, and she loves him for it. Even in the surrealist, offbeat landscape created by Herriman, Krazy's devotion to Ignatz is more inexplicable than your average love affair.

(4) Waldo: Alias the Cat - Kim Deitch's sideshow shadow realm's greatest hero/villain, a horny, greedy, mischievous muse of sorts that is only visible to certain people, often those marked for doom and dementia. Waldo is a small black cat, shamelessly nude, who in various stories is credited with becoming a god to a primitive desert island tribe and subsequently destroying them, having an affair with a midget in a midget village alternately seen as a haven or a slave camp, and driving a drunken cartoonist into madness and social isolation.

(3) Rorschach: Watchmen - A violent vigilante who receives messages in the trash, has the overpowering smell of a vagrant hippie dumpster diver, and bases his costume on a dress ordered by Kitty Genovese (a woman who was tragically assaulted and murdered in front of her neighbors), which magically changes shape from panel to panel.

(2) Spider Jerusalem: Transmetropolitan - stick Hunter S. Thompson in a future New York filled in which the top children's television program is the Sex Puppets, fast food deals monkey and dolphin burgers, and humans are able to download their minds into a group of tiny computers that form a cloud ("foglets") and can arrange molecules to make any object of their choosing, and you have Transmetropolitan. A shit-talking, drug-addled, bowel-disruptor armed hero journalist, Spider abhors the fame that surrounds him after he outs a government plot to start a riot to kill the Transients, a group of people using alien DNA to transform their bodies for purely aesthetic rebellious reasons, which consequently dooms them to poverty and second-class citizenship. One wouldn't expect a comic based on a journalist, albeit a gonzo journalist, to be thrilling, but Warren Ellis' witty dialogue and convoluted plot coupled with Darick Robertson's imaginative yet realistic depiction of the future freaks of the City make it work.

(1) Dream: The Sandman - Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is so freakin critically acclaimed for a reason: reading it, you feel like you're falling into a strange and sometimes uncomfortable dreamscape, which is how you should feel reading a comic based on a mythological personification of the realm of Dream and his family, the Endless: Death, Destruction, Despair, Desire, and Delirium. In the comic, mythologies (comic, greek, christian, etc.) interweave to form an epic narrative.

honorable mention: Lois Lane- according to Blanche: "Lois Lane is often misinterpreted as the damsel-in-distress, but really she is a strong independent woman. She's also the only superheros girlfriend [that I know of] to have her own spin-off series." I'm not a huge Lane fan, but Blanche insisted that I include either Lane or Catwoman on the list. For the Batman universe, Catwoman is one of the more realistic superheroine/villain, so that's out...

"lesbian enclave" by Ike Floor, "X2 major" by Carl Aagesen, "alien" by Riley, collage by Joe Bly

2009-04-30T07:57:00.000-07:00

^click on the image for a closer look^

collaborative poem by Alex Bonner, Jess Rose, and Joe Bly

2009-04-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

^click on the image for a closer look^

Happy 420!

2009-04-20T16:20:00.000-07:00

inconvenience yrself tonite

2009-04-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

tonite: live @ the inconvenience...

Rachele Eve, Lion Limb, Gabe Ruiz, Ryan Murphy, & DJ DOJO
5$@door pbr@$1 wine@$2
3036 N Lincoln

"rocket" by Riley, "parody" by Jess Rose, "good grief!" by HK

2009-04-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

GRIT wants you!

2009-04-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

Kneeling on Grits, a feminist zine outta good ol' Columbia college, is calling for submissions. they want poetry, fiction, nonfiction/essays, and visual art (digital art, drawing/paintings, photography, comics). Submissions should address feminist, gender/sexual orientation, race, class, or other issues of discrimination and oppression. email stephzanie@gmail.com by April 23rd (a week from this Thursday) and include the name you would like to be published under. You will be notified by April 30th if your work is selected.

speaking of gender...

come to Columbia's

GenderFusions 5: FREAK PARADE EXTRAORDINAIRRE!

Full Schedule

SATURDAY APRIL 18th: The event kicks off at 6pm with a presentation by keynote speaker Del LaGrace Volcano at Ferguson Hall, 600 S. Michigan Ave (1st flr). At 7pm, the FREAK PARADE will take off from this location, and anyone is welcome to join the parade- jugglers, poets, stilt walkers, drag queens, hippie cyclists, cowboys, tattooed ladies, midwesterners and their ilk will freak out the squares and make sum noise, and you're invited to join! Aaand... there will be FREE FOOD! At 8pm, the Spectacle begins at 618 S Michigan (2nd flr). The spectacle will include performances by drag queens, drag kings, musicians, poets (at least one, that is- yours truly) & writers, dancers (burlesque and otherwise) in fabulous costumes and all shades of gender expression. it's a mere $5 for students ($10 gen), with 75 FREE tickets being reserved for the first 75 kids to e-mail lgbtq@colum.edu . Performers include Del LaGrace Volcano, Lenelle Moise, La Dulce Palabra, Matthew Hollis, Darrell Jones, Lisa Danielson, Tristan Silverman, Avery R. Young, Misty DeBerry, Ames Hawkins, Sharon St. James, & Johnny T. oh, & HK.

Graffitti Loves You!

2009-04-12T20:35:00.001-07:00

taken mostly in logan square in the loop, from the summer to spring of this past year. the last pic is from an actual police website dedicated to combating grafitti. while Elephant encourages the use of public space for artistic expression, we certainly do not endorse gang violence. the crayon grafitti that says kill pres i dent was in reference to bush, not obama. the CTA one was a sticker series that was posted on el cars. "rodents everywhere" was posted on the congress hotel, site of 5 year strike. that next to last photo says "implant this". a few of these are actually not grafitti, but cool anyway.

"How did I get to a place I never planned to be at?" by Alex Schmidt

2009-04-10T07:50:00.000-07:00

"total 1" by Jen NW, "ready to leave" by Sean, "o'yea" by Riley, "gummo" by HK, Jess Rose, & OEM

2009-04-03T07:47:00.000-07:00

^click on the image for a closer look^

SUPER FISH HOLE & "It's Just Bingo, Bitch!"

2009-04-02T12:12:00.000-07:00

TONITE! CITYWIDE! BE THERE!

This Friday: Pete Skvara's "SUPER FISH HOLE or how to get in shape" art opening show at 816 w 19th. exhibit will be open til the 30th. Wine & cheese. If you are epilleptic, be careful, there will be some crazy-ass lighting. Pete's past/current projects include Elephantz #1, the Mustache Gallery, and a stack of sci-fi books offset by a used bong, and Jettison Quarterly.

This Monday is the 7th anniversary of "It's Just Bingo, Bitch! with Frida Lay and Lauren Jacobs", aka drag queen bingo, at Charlie's, a boy bar off the Addison Red Line stop. It's free with $2 well drinks, but be sure and bring some singles for tips- everytime B1 is called, everyone gets a free shot. If O69 is called, you have to make sex noises. The prizes vary from week to week and are pretty decent, but the real entertainment is the sassy queens- the second i sat down at the table, one of them called out "she looks like she could eat a pussy down". well, nice to meet you too Miss Lauren. Get there early if you want a seat- while the night I went it was pretty quiet, regulars say the place is usually packed, and the ladies will be dressed in their finest, so you're gonna want front row seats. 11pm-1am 3726 N Broadway St

I finally managed to get out to the Ashland Open Mic, and let me tell you, it was well worth the trip. Musicians dominated, so poets, let's get out there! The Ashland is a neat, cozy little bar in Bucktown that sports Batman paraphanelia and colorful surreal local art. It was White Trash Wendesday, which meant $2 tallboys, a great deal that doomed me by the end of the night, trying to stave off the spins til Rachele and Niko, good folks that they are, got my ass home, altho i might not've made it if not for the free hot dog somebody gave me. one of the bar tenders was sporting a Dave McKean tattoo and we talked comics for a while, the other had mad dreds and talked about festivals. Some of the acts weren't that great, a few blew me away,The short time limit made the less than kickass acts more enjoyable. and they were all entertaining, and the crowd was enthusiastic and supportive. Thanks Rachele!

Joe Bly has posted a bunch of new poems on the redfloors blog. Haven't read them all yet but I am super fuckin excited to do so.

Also, buy a streetwise in the next week and you may see a familiar name (I'm in the West Loop issue) as well as gaining 2 bucks wortha karma points.

Citywide 2009

2009-03-30T12:52:00.000-07:00

Citywide

an annual celebration of poets from Chicago colleges

Thursday April 2nd 5:30pm

Conaway Center 1104 S Wabash

featuring our very own Richard Dugan!

free & open

South Side Irish Parade to be Canceled?

2009-03-30T09:30:00.001-07:00

Growing up in Beverly on the South Side of Chicago, I remember how closeknit the community was, how the adults around knew all the kids and all the kids knew each other, something I chafed at sometimes but later came to appreciate. Sometimes the near-suburban, half social-climbers, half white-trash neighborhood could be boring as hell, which is why a lot of kids like me ended up smoking epic amounts of pot and driving home drunk from keggers in the woods and the cemeteries (i didnt personally engage in the latter, but you could find me drunk in alleys and pissing in parks on occasion). you know, good times. There were also plenty of goody-goodys who spent their time in Beverly and the surrounding area engaging in little league, where I sold hotdogs at my first job when I was 14, burning up in the sun but coming home with a fat fistful of cash so long as I lied about my age and didnt eat too many tons of free skittles (and, you know, sold the hotdogs). There was also the Beverly Art Center, where the local Future Queers of America found their calling on stage, and so on and so forth. But the one time a year when the 'hood really comes together is the South Side Irish Parade. Every year, around February, I start getting excited, gettin ready to get riled, see my old homeboys, many of whom still live in the old neighborhood, most of them with mom and dad but some starting families of their own. My old enemies, best friends, so on and so forth. The South Side Irish Parade isn't just an Irish pride parade, it's a South Side Pride parade, a neighborhood fest. As a kid we'd come out to see the floats, hear the bag pipers, eat tons of candy. aS teens, we got wasted and caused trouble. As old fuddy duddys, I looked forward to the day I'd come back for a cook-out and, you know, boring fuddy duddy standing around. Shit, what is this moisture coming into my eyes as I write this? Could it be possible, that in my lifetime, they're gonna take it all away? goddamm bastards. There's no freedom anymore. Why this very year some cop made me dump my beer! Why can't they just let people celebrate, fuck eachother up, fuck property up, and whatnot, once a goddam year? Everyone knows that the cops turn a blind eye to most of the goings on, and I guess the aging committee just doesn't wanna deal with fights and property damage, but I hardly think that the chaos has truly increased (with a mere 53 arrests, a new record) so much as that the city / the neighborhood is getting stricter on folks. I say to hell with it, if someone wants to drink, let them drink, if they wanna fight, let 'em fight, if they fuck up your property, you know who they are and where they live, go to their house and fuck up their garage! shit. or else, get the cops really out there, really enforce the law, stop bringing in a bunch of northsiders who don't know shit and don't have anyone to visit (after the parade, most southsiders head to someone's house to hang out), extend the route to spread out the crowd, get more folks on the comittee, etc. etc, but don't destroy a beautiful annual tradition. If they insist on not holding the parade, I propose that we continue to show up in full force and give 'em hell every year. We're the South Side Irish as our Fathers were before, we're Irish to the core, and we ain't gonna take it no more! -HK

South Side Irish Parade Home http://www.southsideirishparade.org/

SUN TIMES ARTICLE

Interested in saving the parade?

(1) Write to Alderman Ginger Rugai (more importantly, get her actual voting constituents to write her!) and tell her what you think.

(2) Write to the South Side Irish planning comittee and tell them what you think. (website above).

(3) If someone were to get a group together to solve this issue, hold an "alternative" event for example, they could easily get support from the Unions, the Bars, and the citzenry, and all they'd have to do is get a permit (that'd be the biggest obstacle), and the kicker would be that there would naturally be less people. Or we could simply resign ourselves to not having a parade and get with the "alt" celebrations and have a good time and enjoy our old hood anyway. If anyone's planning something, let me know.

(4) Fuck it- write to the goddamm Mayor! write to fuckin' Obama! chain yourself to the Beverly Art Center! Go on Drinking Strike (like a hunger strike, only you promise to keep drinking til you get your way, which could lead to alcohol poisoning if done properly).

"Take the eggs home" by Rob Piskac

2009-03-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

^click on the image for a closer look^