25 Weird Facts About Me

1. I can't ride a bike.
2. I've never drunk a cup of coffee.
3. I am a master of fantasy baseball. I have won our league 6 times, including each of the last 3 years. One year I drafted 2 teams and finished in first and second.
4. I hate the Smiths, the Cure, and Joy Division, and I think the Who, U2, and R.E.M. are totally overrated.
5. I own over 1,000 books but only 3 spoons and 1 glass.
6. I bought my car for $500 4 years ago. It has at least 238,243 miles on it (I say at least because the odometer no longer works). It has no A/C, the CD player is broken, all the hubcaps are gone, the right front and right rear taillights are broken, and the driver's side seat belt has to be manually unrolled.
7. I enjoyed living in Kansas far more than living in either New York or Florida.
8. I have taught approximately 2,500 college students.
9. I vomit often, and violently.
10. My first concert was Kiss and W.A.S.P. at the LA Forum in 1986.
11. I am often accused of being a liberal but I'm really more of a communist and I wish people would get it straight.
12. When I first moved to Kansas someone spraypainted "Ryan Moore is a Hotty" on the side of a train. My friends Brian and Natalie Donovan saw it and took a picture. I have no idea who did it or if it was even about me.
13. I once dressed as "The Dude" for a showing of The Big Lebowski at Colgate.
14. I have only been in one fight. In the 7th grade I punched Nick Rollins in the face because he was taunting me in front of a bunch of other kids. I ran away and then started crying when I was called into the principal's office.
15. My favorite Marxists, in this order, are: Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. Guy Debord would make the list if I included the other Situationists along with him.
16. I ran a marathon in June 2008.
17. The names of my fantasy baseball teams over the past 8 years: Spitzer Swallows, The Urge to Surge, The War on Christmas, The Caminiti Crackwhores, Condi's Cunthairs, Great White Pyrotechnics, The Vatican Sodomizers, The Santee Slaughter. In 2004 I wanted to name my team The Feeding Tubes in honor of Terry Shiavo, but Lance beat me to it with Feed Me Bush.
18. One of my dogs is named after 60s radical Abbie Hoffman.
19. After my punk book is published later this year my goal is to write 2 books called "The Zenarchist Manifesto" and "Marx in Vegas."
20. I took guitar lessons for 6 months but still cannot play a single song, and I haven't picked up my guitar once since I stopped taking lessons.
21. I despise Robin Williams and all things Monty Python.
22. I never get ice-cream headaches.
23. Jim Morrison died on my first birthday.
24. I went to kindergarden at an international school in Hong Kong, and some of my first memories are of being evacuated in response to bomb threats during the fall of Saigon.
25. I once got multiple rounds of free drinks at a bar because the bartender thought I was Dave Grohl. I proceeded to get drunk and play air drums to Nirvana songs on the jukebox.

Zombies! Organize!!

Whereas my last adventure in live music took me to the depths of North Miami’s ghettos for the International Noise Convention, this weekend found me in the upscale consumer’s paradise of West Palm Beach for the politically radical 80s kitsch techo/rap of Zombies! Organize!! and Freeze Pop. Full disclosure: one of the members of Zombies! Organize!! is my student Laura, who was one of my undergraduates and has since enrolled in our Master’s program and taken two graduate seminars with me. I had no idea that Laura was even in a band until a few months ago, but I’ve since discovered that they have quite the following among hipster kids in South Florida.

I’ve never had any reason to visit West Palm Beach’s downtown shopping district, so I don’t know my way around. I find myself stuck in the Saturday night traffic of something called CityPlace, which in truth is neither a city nor a place (discuss!), but instead an expanse of lame high-end boutiques and shitty mid-priced restaurants. Then again, while crawling through the Manhattan-paced traffic I watch some cops maliciously eyeing a handful of black teenagers who are aimlessly loitering in front of one of these stores, and I think to myself that maybe that this is a city after all.

The cover charge tonight is 15 bucks, and I’ve driven over 50 miles to get here, so this better be a good fucking show. I chat for a while with Laura, who is outfitted in a black tank top and a pink tutu, and she introduces me to the other band members, who as it turns out are her sister and her sister’s husband. Yes, this is a family band.

Zombies! Organize!! take the stage and all the hipsters rush in from the bar to start dancing. Their sound is composed of rudimentary keyboard beats and deadpan white-kid raps of the sort I haven’t heard since Lambda Lambda Lambda’s triumphant performance at the end of the first Revenge of the Nerds movie. I am filled with a teacher’s pride when I listen closely to the lyrics that sound like snippets of Marxist theory and Situationist sloganeering being rhymed at a high school pep rally. It’s like Judith Butler became a member of Devo. No wait, it’s like Le Tigre schooling Grandmaster Flash in queer theory. I mean how could you not love a band that uses “hegemonic masculinity” in a chorus or rhymes “Spartacus” with “lick my robot clitoris”? Adorable!!! Now I got it: It’s as if the little girls who once comprised the Shaggs had been abducted and forced to bear children for the benefit of a techno-socialist cult led by the members of Kraftwerk, and then said cult decided it was now time for their children to form a band that could de-program the exploited and pacified masses of late capitalism and its culture of the simulacrum with hypnotic retro hip hop beats and mallrat accents.

Freeze Pop are the main draw tonight, but it’s a tough act for them to follow. They are a more grown-up band featuring a sexy female singer and two guys who are masters of the key-tar (you know, a keyboard that is slung over the shoulder and played like a guitar with an extraordinary amount of ironic posturing). It’s a good show finished off with some totally bitchin’ covers of “The Final Countdown” and “Don’t Stop Believin.’” I stick around for a while longer because I am inexplicably struck by the urge to keep dancing with some friends I have run into at the show. It’s almost 2 AM now and time to go home. On the way back to I-95 CityPlace is deserted with the exception of security guards and police officers. I indulge the fantasy that they are there to restore order after all the consumers have had their brains eaten, or better yet, decided to go get organized.

The International Noise Festival

In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, the French theorist Jacques Attali wrote that “What is noise to the old order is harmony to the new.” It’s Friday night and I’m driving with two film professors and one of their girlfriends through one of the deepest and darkest ghettos I’ve ever been to in North Miami. The nearest exit ramp has been closed so we’re driving through the neighborhood known as Little Haiti, where there are no street lamps and few street lights, long stretches of warehouses and storefronts protected with wrought iron, and the occasional cluster of gangsters lurking ominously on street corners. We arrive at our destination, a punk rock club called Churchill’s, and suddenly there are nothing but white hipsters with chopped hair and tight pants who look like they’ve stepped out of a Hot Topic catalog.

We are here for the International Noise Convention, an annual event at Churchill’s which I have heard much about but never attended. The club is small, dank, and filled with the familiar scent of sweat, spilled beer, and stale cigarette smoke. About 50 kids are standing in a semi-circle around a young woman who’s on a slightly elevated stage and looks to be plugging various chords in and out of some kind of machine while popping cassette tapes in and out of a tape recorder. It’s a surreal, post-apocalyptic scene like something out of Blade Runner or Mad Max, with all these kids attired in tribalist and retro styles hypnotically bobbing their heads to sounds that can’t really be called “music” but are undeniably entrancing. I close my eyes and allow myself to be overwhelmed by the noise, which I can only try to describe as the rhythm of an old dot matrix printer periodically interrupted by the chirping of birds.

She finishes, and almost immediately a band starts playing in the center of the club on a stage that isn’t elevated at all. Churchill’s is so small that I don’t even need to move, I just turn my body to the right and find myself uncomfortably close to the band. A guitar player produces a few solid minutes of feedback, and then the drummer begins pounding out some beats and the place erupts into a mosh pit with bodies flailing and pushing in every direction, including right back into the drumset and amplifiers. It’s one big mess of piercing sounds and pierced bodies, and I’m totally digging it. Some kid next to me is smoking a joint and later in the night he walks by and whispers that he’s selling doses. I shake my head no and then spend the rest of the night debating whether this would be the best or the worst of all possible places to drop acid. Since I wasn’t fortunate enough to be at the Masque in 1978 or Cabaret Voltaire in 1918, this is probably as close as I’m going to get to seeing the decline of western civilization in all its glory.

Some of the performances were unspeakably terrible, like the wannabe Jesus guy who kept chanting and moaning into the microphone or the dorky kids with all the good equipment who thought they were New Order or the drummer who stuck his fingers and his drumstick down his throat to induce vomiting on his cymbal. But on the whole it was so refreshing to see the spirit of anarchy alive and well as a succession of unknown kids took the “stage” with the confidence that the rules don’t matter anymore because any piece of technology can be a musical instrument because any noise can be considered music. Jacques Attali was writing about this sort of noise more than 25 years ago: “Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.” And so on that note we stepped out of the club and back into America’s Third World, a warzone of disorganization in the moment of our global economic meltdown, and I prayed not to get lost on the way back to Interstate 95 (we did get lost for a little while, but obviously did get back safely enough for me to tell you this story).

Straight Outta Immokalee: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Last spring we organized a trip out to Immokalee, a patch of swampland in the center of southern Florida where great numbers of tomatoes are picked by immigrant workers who toil under the most horrifying conditions of exploitation. Our tour would be guided by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (www.ciw-online.org), a community-based worker organization that has been working since 1993 to increase wages, improve working conditions, and put an end to modern-day slavery (yes, slavery, see below) in Immokalee. In 2001 the CIW launched a national boycott of Taco Bell that called on the fast food giant to take responsibility for the human rights abuses that occur as tomatoes are being picked for its “restaurants” (a generous term for Taco Bell, I know). They were eventually victorious in their “Boot the Bell” campaign when students at 25 colleges and high schools—including Duke, UC Berkeley, Notre Dame, UCLA, and the University of Michigan—successfully pressured their administrations to kick Taco Bell off campus. In 2005 Taco Bell finally capitulated and agreed to meet all of the CIW’s demands to raise wages and improve working conditions. Since then the CIW has also won a two-year battle with McDonald’s and entered into comparable agreements with Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods.

Needless to say, I find the CIW’s example tremendously inspiring in this time of global capitalism when it seems like corporations have absolute power over both workers and consumers and we are always being told that organized labor is a thing of the past. On Saturday our group was joined by a number of students from the University of South Florida and Outward Bound, totaling about 50 in all, at the CIW community center. The CIW is planning to launch a new campaign that targets the food service corporations (Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass) which are awarded contracts to feed students on college and high school campuses across America. Toward this end they have created the Student/Farmworker Alliance (www.sfalliance.org) which seeks to educate students who can then pressure their administrations in the manner that was so successful in the “Boot the Bell” campaign. A similar movement arose in the late 1990s calling itself Students Against Sweatshops, where students exposed the brutal conditions typically involved in making the clothing and apparel that display their school’s logo. These movements have proven successful because students are such a coveted demographic of consumers, and today’s corporations and universities are especially sensitive about protecting their image and brand names.

After a short presentation the CIW organizers took us out on a tour of Immokalee. Of course everything had a Third World feel to it, but it was also a bit like stepping back into the 19th century. Immokalee isn’t a “community” so much as it is an old-fashioned labor camp. After a trip to the parking lot where masses of prospective workers come every morning before 5 AM hoping to be picked up for work in the fields, we are taken on a walking tour of the residential area where some 20,000 people live in a 9 block area of rusted mobile homes and dilapidated shacks. The great majority of workers do not own cars, so they must live close to the parking lots where the buses pick them up for work. Our guide points to one of these decrepit trailers and informs us that between 10 and 15 people are typically living in one at any particular time. Most only have 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom, so people usually just throw down a mattress wherever they can, and if you need to cook something or take a shit then you’ll probably need to get in line. They rent for about 400 dollars per month because all of the trailers are owned by two families who can take advantage of their monopoly to jack up the rents. It’s the same story at the grocery store, where price gouging is routine because people don’t have the option to shop around when they’re on foot or riding a bicycle. With this in mind the CIW has recently established a little cooperative store that sells staples like tortillas and corn oil at wholesale prices, thus forcing the grocery store to lower their prices a bit.

Relatively speaking, the people living in the trailers are probably the lucky ones in Immokalee. Over the past several years the CIW has exposed 7 cases of slavery involving about 1,000 workers. The most recent case decided in December 2008 involved a family who would lock their workers in shacks and box trucks at night and tie, chain, and beat them if they tried to leave. The members of this Navarette family were convicted and are due to be sentenced in federal court. The CIW says that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that slavery is in fact rampant. It’s not hard to see how it happens: workers can be taken miles away from civilization into the Everglades, without a phone or a car, and so if you do escape, where are you going to run? Most of the workers are immigrants from Guatemala, southern Mexico, or Haiti, they don’t know anything about what little rights they do possess, they don’t speak English and frequently can’t even communicate with each other because they speak regional dialects, and of course the fear of deportation can be used against them in almost any situation.

Walking through Immokalee was depressing, to say the least. Far removed from either coast, it had already gotten oppressively hot in March, and periodically a dry wind would sweep through and smack our faces with dust and dirt. I tried to imagine what it would be like working in the fields in this baking sun, getting paid 40 fucking cents for every 32 pound bucket of tomatoes I could gather, meaning that I would need to pick 125 buckets of tomatoes—that’s two and a half tons—just to make 50 bucks. But when we got back to the CIW community center I felt a renewed sense of energy and hope. I reminded myself that these people had taken on some of the most powerful corporations in the world and actually won a little something for themselves. The CIW had created a community radio station and a couple of little kids were running around and playing like they were on the air. The CIW told us about how they had started hosted meetings for women’s groups and how the center would be packed every Saturday night when they showed movies on their projector. In other words, this isn’t just a labor movement, it’s a culture in the making. They don’t have any illusions about what they’re up against, but the collective sense of courage and

The U.S. Social Forum and the Next Left

I was pretty sure I knew what I was going to get when I left for Detroit to attend the U.S. Social Forum. Yet I came away surprised, because even though I found the expected sources of frustration and some new ones as well, I discovered a greater number of reasons for hope and optimism about the resurgence of the Left in the U.S. For four days the city of Detroit was the hive for a swarm of non-governmental organizations with a largely youthful and substantially black and Latino constituency of some 15,000 community activists, cyber-anarchists, and radical pedagogues. It can be difficult to watch and listen to the growing pains of this movement of movements, but compared to other Leftist conventions, meetings, and events I’ve attended off and on over the past two decades, this current multitude certainly represents an advance in both theory and practice. The U.S. Social Forum makes capitalism the nucleus of its analyses in ways that the politically correct Left never approximated in the 1990s. Its several hundred workshops and panels consider the myriad ways in which that class and labor conflicts intersect with the inequalities of racism and sexism, thus generating a more dynamic analysis that transcends the previous divisions between identity politics and Marxism. But the even more significant developments are in the demography of the members, how people are getting organized and mobilized, and the communities they are trying to rebuild in participatory and sustainable directions. I’m used to national Left conventions being unholy meeting grounds where the militant misfits of graduate school join with postmodern primitives in dreadlocked drum circles, and while those two populations were still out in full force in Detroit, they were joined by a third contingent of young people of color whose presence has noticeably multiplied with community organizing around urban issues and the use of digital media to fight the power. This is starting to look more like a global movement, or at least one that reflects America’s increasingly global culture. It is only beginning to scratch the surface of its potential, and it can grow by more leaps and bounds if it sheds some of the Left’s old baggage and builds a new, more inclusive, and truly popular culture.

I flew to Detroit on Thursday morning, June 24. My trip was not off to a good beginning: I had made a late reservation and got stuck in a middle seat, and I booked a nonstop flight but this came with the Devil’s bargain that a foul fog of flatulence would accumulate over the course of my three-plus hour flight. The cabbie who picked me up at the airport was absorbed in the Slovakia vs. Italy match of the World Cup, insisting that I watch the final minutes of the game on his mobile phone while he drove me downtown. These were the only minutes of the World Cup I actually watched, and although it was a virtual shootout with a score of 3-2 and apparently entailed the upset and elimination of a major international contender, the white-bread American part of me was still entirely bored. I checked-in at the hotel and began walking to Detroit’s Cobo Exhibition Hall, where I was greeted by a huge bronze statue of the boxer Joe Louis and a moderate number of people milling about, occupied with their laptops and cell phones, or flipping through the program schedule for workshops to attend. A friend and I were firing off texts at one another about our present locations, leading me upstairs to the press briefing room in one of the media centers, a cavernous and chaotic room where perhaps a dozen people worked on desktops while a tangled mass of wires and backup devices lay in waiting on adjoining tables. Inside the press briefing room, a panel was being conducted in Spanish about neocolonial economics in Latin America, and my friend was one of perhaps ten people who were filming, with maybe twice that number in the audience. We split when the Q&A began and walked over to a local bar & grill to grab a bite to eat and make plans for the days ahead.

My buddy spent most of the next two days filming and uploading footage for the People’s Media Campaign. He begins trying to explain that they an offshoot of the official conference that follows a more de-centered encuentro model, and therefore were engaged in a conflict with the official media center where the press briefing had been, but at a certain point all the sectarian in-fighting must have made my eyes glass over. I would spend my time wandering around various parts of the conference hall and taking pictures, looking through the book exhibits, engaging in a few conversations, watching graffiti artists at work, and sitting in an amphitheater listening to rappers. The fusion of Leftist politics and hip hop culture—not just in music, but the revival of graffiti art and break-dancing as well—was one of the most striking features of the U.S. Social Forum. Over the past 20 years or so, hip hop has become a truly global form of popular music and culture that nearly everyone in the world can adopt to speak to their perspective and experience—the most memorable performance I witnessed was by a Lebanese feminist and peace activist local to Detroit. Hip hop has supplanted, in this regard, folk music and more recently rock, the latter of which seems to be in danger of being wholly converted into reactionary white people’s music if the Left cannot reclaim its place in previous social struggles. Whereas rock music was a central element in peace marches and fundraising around the abortion issue at least through the 1990s, guitar-oriented music was noticeably absent from the U.S. Social Forum.

I attended and participated in a few workshops, and tried to get in to a couple more that filled the convention room beyond capacity. My friend and I went with hundreds of others to hear the plenary speakers and watch them projected on large screen TVs in the main exhibition hall. But in my opinion the most significant event was on the final night of the conference, when the younger participants convened for a dance party at the so-called Leftist Lounge, a labyrinth of interconnected clubs fashioned out of industrial space in the motor city’s gutted downtown. It was in these remnants of warehouse and storage space that we danced the night away as a tribe of tribes and not only a movement of movements, the beats and rhythm uniting thousands of bodies in an atmosphere of collective effervescence, with the posters of revolutionaries and radical activists haunting the rafters and beams overhead. If it sounds disparaging to say that the best part of a radical political convention was its dance night, this is only half of my intent. From an intellectual perspective, the analyses of American society and global capitalism offered in the speeches and pamphlets at the U.S. Social Forum are disappointingly simplistic, don’t seem to seem to have advanced much in the past 20 years, and are lagging behind the rapidly changing realities and possibilities of our time. From an activist perspective, there is a promising amount of networking and a necessary degree of cheerleading, but in the digital age most of this no longer needs to be done in face-to-face settings. But from a cultural perspective, the dance party at the Leftist Lounge was inspiring because if the Left is going to take power in this day and age it must also build what Michael Denning has called a “cultural front,” and it is precisely in this crucial area of cultural struggle that the Left has been most deficient since the end of the 1960s.

At a time when commercial entertainment and media permeates seemingly every pore of social life, Stephen Duncombe has recently argued, the Right has learned to fit its politics within the culture of spectacle and fantasy, while the Left continues to focus its resources on the increasingly irrelevant tasks of presenting facts and exposing lies, making logically sound arguments, and trying to tell people the truth. Outside of the Leftist Lounge and the appropriations of hip hop, this shortage of cultural weaponry was quite noticeable at the U.S. Social Forum. For example, at a time when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have gained huge audiences of young people in large part by skewering the Right, it is disheartening not to see the Left nurturing our own cadre of political comedians, and this forum certainly could have benefited from a healthy dose of humor to balance the usual onslaught of movement moralizing. Likewise, digital technologies and software have radically democratized the ability for anyone to make short films that might bridge the experimental and the political, and yet there was nothing of this sort to be found here either. And of course the biggest elephant in the room—totally absent from the workshops and panels—is religion and spirituality, for the great absurdity of our time is that the Right has effectively hitched Jesus Christ to its agenda of greed and militarism, and that the Left has sat back and left them do it without recalling his teachings on equality, peace, and love. Hardcore activists are loathe to admit it, but there is no chance of building a powerful Left in American society if we cannot divorce compassionate spirituality from institutionalized religion while responding to people’s needs to find meaning in their lives through faith in a power greater than themselves.

Having been out until 3 AM, we slept late into Saturday morning, which only offered a truncated schedule of panels and workshops on the forum’s final day. We browsed the book and information tables one last time, talked with some anarchists from San Francisco, went to get something eat, people watched downtown, and finally just sat in the grass to read. One more expensive cab ride to the airport later, I was checking in for my Saturday night flight back home. Also on my flight was a large contingent of young black people who had also attended the U.S. Social Forum. In a clearly audible and irreverent tone, two of the young women declared that ours was now a “soul plane,” and with just enough joviality to assuage the other passengers, another group seated in the rear of the plane began a chant about taking back first class. At that time I giggled to myself with the feeling that despite all its frustrating shortcomings, the best days of this movement are yet to come.

Righteous, bro!

What's with these kids today getting all pierced and tatted up for Jesus? I tried to ignore this movement and hope it would go away but of course it wouldn't, and so I turned to Lauen Sandler's Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. It turns out these kids "found" Jesus while they were looking for something that all the alienated youth of America have been looking for since at least the 1960s--authenticity above all else, but also community and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. I get that part. They're converting to Evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity (I know there's a difference, and multiple people have tried to explain it to me, but I still don't understand) but they're using an anti-establishment/hipster style and rhetoric doing it, you know turning their trucker hats sideways and skating a half-pipe for Jesus and moshing to hardcore and all that. I sorta get that too, because there is a long history of Christians in America (especially the poor and working-class ones) challenging the official dotrine of The Church, usually in the name of more authentic purity to The Word and in the process of challenging the hypocricy of the established authorities in the older generation. But it seriously baffles me that alienated kids who want to rage against the machine are then drawn to doctrines that call on them to submit to a higher power, live in complete denial and repression of their sexuality and their bodies, and renounce drugs and alcohol. I can't understand kids who aren't into sex and drugs, or maybe it's the case that they're actually REALLY INTO sex and/or drugs and they're at war with their desires and their bodies (that's sad, isn't it?) On an intellectual level, I do understand the submission to a higher power, because it recalls Erich Fromm's idea that freedom and individuality is actually terrifying for many (most?) people, and so they turn to the state and/or religion, or, in Fromm's day, the Nazis, because they desire a set of rules and a surrogate father, and they are terrified of being an individual stranded alone on the desert island of (post-)modernity. I understand it intellectually, but I just don't get it personally, I don't "feel it." Yes, the "Secular" culture does leave us stranded and alone, turns us all into numbers not names, leaves us with little cultural meaning besides celebrity trivia and absolutely devoid of any higher purpose beyond career and money. But why does this make people want to vote for George W. Bush, or caucus for Mike Huckabee, or put their bodies in front of abortion clinics with those gigantic pictures of aborted fetuses? But maybe there is hope. First of all, I just can't imagine that kids today are going to put up with that authority/patriarchy/Father bullshit for long, to me it seems like a retro-pose or an ironic fashion statement--like a "wife beater." Maybe the unintended consequence of our consumer culture will be that people are less inclined to "buy into" that top-down patriarchy nostalgia and more insistent on ideas that preserve and uphold their individuality and their rebelliousness, even if they are just imagined identities. I can see that these Jesus freaks have co-opted the 60s, but the 60s have also co-opted them, if you want to use that language (I prefer the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci's phrase that culture wars amount to a "war of position"--All co-optation presupposes some degree of infiltration). But if the kids want authenticity, individuality, creativity, and community, don't you think they'd more naturally be drawn to anarchism, communism, socialism, or any other -ism you might be to find at Ned Flanders' "Left-Orium" of political identities/ideologies/commodities? (and let's face it Lefties, there's a new equation in our society and it's identity=ideology=commodity and on that count our stock has been massively devalued)