Comparing Oscar Grant.

This happens on the subway in New York. The profanity, the derogatory, the racism, the abandonment of clothing, the curses, and not until the individual leaves, attempts to engage, pursues and vandalizes a retreating woman, challenges the community, does any physical restraint occur. (And when it finally does, it is the people who act. One lowly officer sheepishly stepping just ahead of them)

And then the inverse of the situation, the negative exposed. A previous moment in time, which anachronistically places this as predicate (4:40). A scene where restraint was already in place, the community at bay, the numbers trippled, and yet, based on intonations of skin, still, not quite enough.

Oh, the raw and brutal power of an explanation point. The true and downward slope of things!

Average Median Income 2008.

Below the median American income, the majority of America. Or, how do I spell "Class War?"

In Solidarity with Student Occupations

Occupy California

UC Davis Bicycle Barricade

Occupation Guide (in neat .pdf form!)

Occupy Everything

Regarding the importance of amnesty for student demonstrators, there is no better example than UC Irvine.

Comrades in SF.

Reclaim UC, gives some Sac Town love.

Notes from UC Santa Cruz, our most prized example.

We are the Crisis. With this indispensable post about demands.

Those who Use it.

What the UC Davis administration did, after having arrested 52 non-violent students and faculty members, to reveal exactly how afraid they are of the student movement.

Puerto Rico, getting it D-O-N-E.

Always a great resource, Student Activism.

What happened during a rally against cuts in Milbank, was awe inspiring.

Some nice collected thoughts about the UC situation, and education in general.

Edited version of collected UC manifestos from the 2010 occupations, "...after the fall." Also available as .pdf through this web page.

The birds eye view abstracted from the bird: G 20 Toronto.

"We have willingly suspended our disbelief on strings in order to manipulate it from above."


"Riot guns with rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons, flying wedges of heavily armored police, are not only incapable of dispersing the dark crowd, but, by inciting a phase change in the visible crowd, expand its ranks."


"The viewing public demands an image of itself."


"We can feel the changing of the tense."


"Well regulated peacetime sorrow."


"The inspector laughs because you're laughing."

[Quotes from Angle of Yaw, ---Ben Lerner.]

a nod,

Have been much enjoying ECW's blog and notes on salvagepunk. I stumbled upon his work via this, which was also informative.

Thus tentative titles for a new verse-theory centered publication: kitsch & crumble / [symptom & solution].

Spring Meets Winter.

"You may cut all the flowers, but will never eradicate spring.”

Tell Dracula His Kung-Fu Death is Real: A Thousand Devils.

more medallions for the devoted

In the growing flarf conversation one can't but pay attention to Mohammad's work. He picks the eerie pieces of our anonymous conversations---comment boxes, blog posts, message boards, chat rooms, status updates---and coalesces them together into snapshots of our digital-unconsciousness. There's no doubt that America has long been a violent place, founded in revolution, constantly beating down any insurrectionary movement inside and out, so that the general perspective of our culture is one which has decided it can instantly fill the roles of judge and executioner. Watching the news coverage the day of 9/11 my boss at the time stated that we should nuke Iraq and turn it into a parking lot. Considering consequences is just a means of delaying the stick, the positivist version of theory and praxis. And so Mohammad taps into the instantaneous gratification of each user letting their id hide behind their insignificance within his texts. It's no wonder he doesn't laugh when he reads his poems. We can tap Zizek on the shoulder (knowing I'm not the first to do this); first as tragedy, then as flarf.

Some say fire and some say ice; I say fire and ice
And digital cable. I say every iconoclast has its price.

The terms of this debate then shift from developing a left movement which finds itself in conflict with this violence, and one which incubates this alongside that of resistance. As we learned in The Coming Insurrection, "An authentic pacifisim cannot mean refusing weapons, but only refusing to use them. Pacifism without being able to fire a shot is nothing but the theoretical formulation of impotence."

Mohammad reminds us that there is a large part of our population still eliding impotence and violent aggression. Yet we also know that we live in a temporality of flux; the impotence of peaceful protests without the means to defend oneself is being reformulated in Thailand; the violent aggressors of the internet hope, more than anything, to keep their day jobs, where they can continue to preach dependence, nihilism, the trick pony of 'growing up.' The trick is to reverse this shape and the debate it is premised upon. An anonymous aggression in opposition to structural impotence. Less Pfizer, more philos.

K. Silem Mohammad, great flarfist circa post-modernity, can be found here.