1013 Permalink -via vasundharaa

non-violence isn’t about being nice

josiahd:

It’s about setting up situations so that the bad guys will be forced to either do the right thing or be openly and undeniably violent.

And then when the bad guys are openly violent, it makes it possible to point out the violent nature of their everyday behavior.

It’s not about being gently persuasive. It’s about provoking people in ways that provide clarity.

4 Permalink -via mayamac

nathan leigh on bangs, unemployment, and alcoholism…

mayamac:

2 Permalink

28 is dead! Long live 29!

I spent my 28^th birthday—November 14^th 2011—the way I had spent most of the days of the previous month and a half; down at Zuccotti Park / Liberty Square talking about the glorious future that was imminent, maybe even inevitable. Rosy came down with me for the first time that day. There weren’t a lot of people that I knew that day, so I just showed her around We talked for a good long while with this teenage couple from New Jersey. The Park had just survived a threatened raid, and spirits were high. There was a palpable feeling of optimism. What I didn’t know at the time was that my future roomates were at that very moment setting up camp. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

That night, we went out for drinks with friends at this bar near our apartment. Some old friends I hadn’t seen in a very long time came by. I was heading off on tour the next morning and had grand plans to visit Occupations in every city I drove through. We had just done a concert version of my musical Darling (written with the incomparable Jesse Geiger), I had just spent a week in the mountains of Banff writing the score to Froggy (with writer Jen Haley and director Matt Morrow), and of course my serial musical Sealand (directed by the effervescent Kel Haney) was still destroying at the Serials at the Flea. It would have been harder for things to have been better, or more exciting than that evening. I went to sleep that night on top of the world.

I passed out in a bed of total contentment; completely oblivious to the fact that as I slept, some of my closest friends were being arrested and beaten by the NYPD for having the gall to stand up for their beliefs. Some of my more transient friends lost their literal homes, while the rest of us lost a spiritual home. All of us lost some possessions. And that naïve optimism—that belief that if we just wanted it bad enough, we could fix everything—curdled overnight into a mess of anger, bitterness, and confusion. The memory of the raid on November 15^th became an open wound. One which has taken nearly a year to even start healing.

That proximity of emotional high to utter emotional bottom on my 28^th birthday set the tone for the year to follow. On the eve of back-to-back workshops of Sealand and my kid’s show Rose Garden Recipe (with the always generous Rebecca Schoffer), I was beaten about the chest by the NYPD at the March 17^th 6 month anniversary of Occupy. Nearly a year to the day after my right lung collapsed a first time, my lung collapsed again. The excitement I had for my upcoming workshops turned into panic about how to not lose the momentum I’d spent years building. Two months later, the day before rehearsals were to start on the world premiere of The Consequences (written with the indefatigable Kyle Jarrow) at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre (my artistic home for many years now), my lung collapsed a final time. I would push back surgery until after opening night. But what should have been (and still mostly was!) one of the best experience of my life personally, professionally, and artistically, became a literal struggle to survive.

And finally, after beating death (with the help of Mitt Romney’s sweet sweet socialized health care!) and releasing my long-delayed 2^nd solo album A Life In Transit (Joel, Drew, Mike, Kyle, Sol, Phil, Chelsea, Ike, Nora, Sean, Alex, Charles, and Denis: you’re all insane and wonderful), I headed out on tour with my good friend Joshua Stephens. Though maybe not the most financially rewarding tour of my career, driving across the country gave me some much needed perspective and focus. I returned to Brooklyn with a sense of purpose and direction. I was maybe not fully recovered from my surgery (it still hurts like hell when I hiccup…), but I had reached a point where a full recovery felt possible. Optimism was rearing it’s ugly head again, just as the girl I had shared my life with for 4 years and home for 2 years decided she was done coming along for the ride on the Alanis Morissette song that is my life. Back to couch surfing! Back to uncertainty! Stress caused a resurgence of lung drama. And in a final blow to morale, my new car was a few hundred dollars shy of being totaled when a friend crashed it. (I still love you Joe. Asshole.)

I list these tragedies and ironies not to say “woe is me! I demand sympathy!” but to provide context. Because 28 may have been the year where my body kept trying to kill me from the inside. It may have been the year where I spent far too many nights wondering which of my friends was in jail on trumped up charges. It may have been the year where I learned that unconditional love still sometimes carries conditions. But it was also the year where I met some of the closest and most generous friends I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet. The emotional and physical support of my friends from the Puppetry Guild can never be repaid (Alma, Joe, Rachel, Morgan, Claire, Kim, Jo Robin, Andrea, Erik, and yeah, even Eliott: thank you). Though I’m sure I would have survived this year were it not for them, I’m not sure it would have been with my good spirits and faith in humanity still intact.

28 was the year where for the first time in my life the majority of the projects I was involved were projects that I genuinely wanted to be involved with. It was the year where those projects were universally well received. I still had to fight to get my voice heard and to be taken seriously as an artist, but I had allies and supporters in that fight. I may still have a very long climb ahead of me, but I’m no longer doing it alone. It was the year where I stumbled into a job writing for Afropunk (endless love and respect to Matthew, Jocelyn, Lou, and Alex) that I neither deserve nor am qualified for. But I’m daily grateful to have been welcomed with open arms into such an amazing and vibrant community.

This was also the year where at the end of all of this drama, I fell into an incredible collective house in Bed Stuy / Bushwick. Even ignoring the gratuitous luxuries of our house (A washer/dryer? How bourgeois!), I have never been more excited for a living situation. Much music making, gardening, and political discourse will take place in our amazing co-operative duplex. This is the living situation I’ve spent most of my life searching for, and for the first time in 4 years I actually feel comfortable and at home in New York.

So this for sure hasn’t been a boring year. And it would be easy to dismiss it as a terrible year. Certainly it has been tempting. But the changes 28 has brought in my life are too meaningful to dismiss. I’ve never been surrounded by so many incredible people, and I’ve never felt such a clear trajectory for my life. So I no longer believe that all people are inherently good. But I’m absolutely that there are enough inherently good people in the world to make it all worthwhile. I no longer believe that another, better world is inevitable. But I am absolutely certain that it is possible. The naïve optimism I had on November 14^th 2011 is gone, maybe forever. But it’s been replaced by the certainty that I’m living the life I’ve always wanted to live. And I’m living it the way I’ve always wanted to live it. That’s about as solid a foundation to build 29 on as I could hope to have.

“I might die young or I might die old, but I will never die of boredom” - Prince Roy Bates I of Sealand 1921-2012