Someday the Bricks Are Gonna Fall

Or, how I know what I know

First, announcements:

I will be having a (very welcome) surgery in mid-November and my recovery will likely take through the end of the year. This is a soft notice to plan ahead if you’d like to get tattooed before the end of fall. I’ll be sharing some ways you can support as the date gets closer, and am so appreciative of everyone who has already offered help!

I have a tattoo cancellation spot open THIS SUNDAY. Email if you want to sneak in for flash or a custom piece.

My friend Tina Horn just released a great book, Why Are People Into That? A Cultural Investigation of Kink. We will be in conversation THIS SATURDAY at 4pm at Powerhouse Books in Industry City. We are strongly encouraging masking, as New York is in the middle of a major Covid surge. Wheelchair accessible, RSVP here.

Some civic business:

·      Oppose the proposed mask ban (more info and action items here)

·      Send a letter of support for the proposed Willoughby-Hart Historic District, a landmark initiative that will protect Black and Brown-owned brownstones in BedStuy.

·      G.L.I.T.S. is raising $1M to support the thriving of transgender people in New York City. There is some incredible and much-needed programming in the works-- donate here.

·      This Sunday! The Crown Heights C.A.R.E. Collective is holding a People’s Library at the Brooklyn Public Library in response to Eric Adams’ budget slashes and resulting library closures. Join them for a book exchange, kids activities, and abolitionist teach-ins.

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In the course of producing my thesis work during my recent graduate program, I initiated a personal obsession with bricks. If we’ve caught up during the last year, you’ve likely heard me make passing mention to my “brick project,” one that at the present moment has no end date in sight.

This past April, I traveled to Durham, North Carolina to participate in the DocX Fellowship program at Duke’s Documentary Studies department. It was the first time I’d presented my ongoing brick project in a formal setting and in a (somewhat) cohesive manner. Over time, what I’ve come to understand the project as being about is the pursuit of the brick in the radical political imagination, and in presenting on this pursuit, I was forced to reckon with the question: how do I know the brick in the ways that I do? As a brick through a police cruiser windshield, the beginning of the Stonewall Riots, the stuff of barricades.

Answering this question meant taking my younger self more seriously than I’d previously allowed myself to. Talking about punk as an adult seems to require a certain amount of distance and self-deprecation; we have to make fun of it at the same time as we claim it as our history and, often, our present. Even as we see the same friends at the same kind of punk shows nearly 20 years later, there can be a residual embarrassment around subcultural youthfulness and a desire to acknowledge that yes, it’s sometimes juvenile and corny, while still being very much a part of our lives.

Something I hear often is people asking how they can begin to be involved in activist and organizing work. People have the urgent desire but aren’t sure where to begin. It’s made me realize, and recently more so than ever, that coming of age steeped in radical politics is the exception and not the rule. I was in a web of social connections to all kinds of learning, available for deeper connection and engagement whenever I was ready to step into it. DIY made us believe we could do anything: build our own bikes, feed our neighbors, tattoo ourselves, build our own miniramp in an illegal loft. Once, a friend in Seattle fed me a sandwich on bread he had baked, piled with lettuce and tomato he’d grown in the yard and tofu he’d pressed himself. This was often to mixed results; at one punk house, I exploded a glass container all over our kitchen trying to ferment my own hard cider.

I definitely zoomed in to see what books were on my shelf, and wish I still had all of them today.

When I arrived at age 18, New York City was the land of Bluestockings Books, Food Not Bombs, St. Marks Place, CBGBs, ABC No Rio. My first year in New York, I spotted Sturgeon from Leftover Crack at St. Marks Church screaming “Burn the church!!!” at a priest, as the attendants of SquatterFest kicked up dust in a circle pit in the courtyard. At a house show in Crown Heights, a tall guy in the kitchen asked if I’d have coffee if he made some. I’m pretty sure that’s Aaron Cometbus, I thought for no good reason. It was. There are certainly things I look back at and cringe about, and things I wish I could forget (every lyric of this Defiance, Ohio song, the hours I spent reading Derrick Jensen books, the time I brought this Crimethinc poster to my freshman gender studies class). So much of what I learned then began as a zine order from Microcosm Publishing.