Posted by grillcover on May 22, 2022
Originally published: 2/22/2022
Reflections: (June 2021)
In June I began to come apart. As mentioned in May, there were major climaxes approaching with the Democratic primary and the city budget. And near the end of May I'd been fortunate to receive a gig through my pals at BKBX for the end of June to look forward to. But still, things outside of my control kept tripping me up, and I was doing my best to just keep up with what little work I still had.
This month I'm going to flip the breakdown and start with the activism, before going in to the art and life section. A lot happened, but June really culminated in a cathartic fusion between all those elements, and the resulting nuclear cataclysm led to the flickering burnout that would continue to wane through the fall.
Protest & Organizing
As a part of the DefundNYPD Week of Action I worked with comms to put together a series of articles to push back on incomplete narratives about the police and public safety. On June 1st we released "People’s Budget NYC: Defund the NYPD & Invest in Our Communities," a thorough explainer breaking down the policy research the campaign had done; I was proud to be able to include my maps based on the research and outreach for the Public Safety Pledge. We followed that up on June 3rd with "The Demand to #DefundNYPD Is Alive and Well," where we drew on news, polling, and other community proposals to paint a picture of the growing movement. Countering the ongoing and bogus "crime wave" narrative was paramount, especially facing the potential of a corrupt cop mayor.
Below: Two maps I made based on our candidate research. On the left in blue you can see just how many candidates across the city were proposing some sort of budget justice -- i.e., reinvesting the bloated police budget into other underfunded services. Over the course of June I'd also add a handful more districts on the right in red as candidates came onboard.
I was too scattered with work to attend any of the other DefundNYPD Week of Action events during the week, but the morning of June 2nd I attended a protest, "All Out For Public Power," lead by the NYC Ecosocialist Working Group, in a final push to expose fossil fuel-powered lawmakers and support the Build Public Renewables Act. A few hundred people backed by several current state legislators and DSA-endorsed candidates gathered in City Hall Park before marching around to 250 Broadway for a show of civil disobedience.
I spotted myself in this tweet holding a banner during the march; you'll notice a bearded white guy with glasses and a red t-shirt with his hair tied back... No, the other one. (It's hard sometimes being "that guy.") After a litany of speakers the occupation of the intersection eventually led to the arrests of the frontline people. Protesters had linked their arms, handcuffed together within pipes and tires, across the roadway. They had to bring out circular saws and carefully cut them apart in the street. We chanted and sang songs and jeered from the sides as the cops held up several blocks of traffic and slowly processed the disruption.
After some difficult months, I confess to venting quite a bit of pent-up spleen into those chants. Roaring from the front, I wasn't shy about mixing in my own reply to the chant prompt, "What do we want?" Where my comrades were calling to "Tax the rich," I offered one bellowed word: "Everything!" Sadly, perhaps not unexpectedly, the craven state legislators failed again to include any major climate legislation in the term.
That weekend on June 5th I joined back up for the climax of the Week of Action with "Defund the NYPD, Refund the People," a rally and march through downtown Manhattan. This was organized in coalition with other activist and community groups to help reinvigorate the protests that had died down from the previous year. Between movement in-fighting, activist burnout, non-stop criticism, cooption, and fearmongering from the Powers That Be, and the various concurrent crises, the real radical memory of the George Floyd Uprising was fading from popular view except as a punching bag for Dems.
Beginning in Foley Square, well-marshalled and full of energy, drumbeats, and righteous joy, we stomped through Tribeca and Lower Manhattan making stops at various landmarks of the deeply entrenched carceral state, including the offices of the wretched PBA, the largest police "union." I had a stack of palm cards from all my tabling, skirting the margins of the fast-moving march putting cards in the hands of onlookers and giving brief explanations as needed.
But undoubtedly the most memorable part was cracking open the gigantic papier-mâché piggy-bank piñata that we'd been carting the whole time in the middle of a Tribeca intersection, space we held for as long as it took to clean up all of the candy and various bits of debris. The next day on June 6th I was split, and helped set up and pass off the materials for a Defund table before rushing off to a BKBX mime meeting.
Below: The giant piggy bank wearing a badge containing goodies for the community. A whimsical manifestation of the sobering fact that NYPD gets $11bn annually, which continues to rise while all community services are cut.
On June 11th I sent a letter to a swath of friends and collaborators who I'd talked to about the Dianne Morales campaign, or who'd engaged with my posts, or that I'd seen volunteering. When I started typing I had no idea how long it'd get, but it became a synthesis of everything I had seen and how I was feeling. I truly don't regret anything I put into the campaign, but after this point I pretty much put it and the mayor's race out of my mind.
That night I was meeting some friends for dinner, and we decided to stop by the newly established Washington Square Park Mutual Aid, which had sprung up partially in response to the violent park closures that were starting to become routine around the city. The ostensible rationale of public safety and preventing trash build-up obscured the brutal over-policing of the homeless, and the nearby property owners sick of NYU students and the general public. But a winning tactic seemed to be hosting community and mutual aid events to counter the vilifying narrative promoted by the police.
The battle over WSP would continue at Build the Block meetings and other protests before eventually dying down, but the fight over public space and encampment sweeps continues. Some of the grassroots formations that arose are also still growing and evolving, with groups on the ground helping protect against sweeps and provide tent-safe heaters to keep people warm during the bitter NYC winter.
On June 14th I began the first of two trainings for the Religious Leader Interview Project. While I didn't end up following through on volunteering for the project (for now) I still learned a lot from these meetings. Something different about these interviews is they're not accompanied by any "ask"; they're truly exploratory to better understand different congregations' efforts and needs. Eventually the hope is to bring interested leaders together to self-organize, build networks, and catalyze ongoing work.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that most world traditions are fundamentally anti-capitalist, so I hold faith this project will bear fruit. But I decided, I think wisely, that I was too emotionally unstable to put forward a good face to religious leaders for this kind of outreach. I suspected the vulnerability needed to make those connections would make the dams I was just really becoming aware of burst.
As the primary approached and Defund remained a hot button topic across the city, we tried to amplify what we'd learned from our months of outreach and research. This came together on June 20th when we published an article detailing the success of our tabling and petition, and released a beautifully-designed voter guide on Instagram. We showed how when voters were given the policy proposals behind Defund in a brief honest conversation, there was significant support across the city. But those invested in the status quo continued to malign the concrete demand as a "slogan" in favor of "reformist" language that inevitably, time and again, leads to increased budgets with zero oversight or accountability.
In the end for the Public Safety Pledge, after countless emails and nudges, Zoom calls with candidates, a chance face-to-face encounter and some high-stakes convos with some competitive campaigns, we collected 43 signatures, nine of whom ended up winning. We'd also identified another five who ostensibly supported the policies, making over a dozen legislators looking toward our abolitionist horizon.
Below: I used the data from our 1,200 petition signatures to map the support for our Defund demands across the city. Each signature reflects a meaningful in-person conversation and incremental progress in shifting the cultural and political imaginary.
Also in that last week before the primary, I ventured back into Kensington and Borough Park for a final round of postering for Brandon West, and this time saw the opposition had thoroughly advanced on the territory. I found myself replacing posters that had been torn down, and lamely nestling ours next to multi-lingual (usually Bengali) posters that felt better suited to the neighborhood.
But the most memorable thing from that trip had nothing to do with the campaign. Outside a laundromat on Church Ave I got to talking with a man who'd grown up on the block, whose family used to own several buildings, but now did odd jobs for the laundry owner. He told me in hushed tones about coming home one night 30 years ago to find his murdered father and guilty uncle, and how that'd been the beginning of the end for his family's reign on the block. The new owner shooed him away, offered his support for Brandon, and bragged about knowing the current congressman. New York!
On June 20th I did one last door-knocking shift in Crown Heights, but at that point a lot of people had already voted or had already been visited by a canvasser enough times that it was probably hurting the campaign. And on the day of the primary, June 22nd, I clocked in for the very last shift to stand outside a poll in Park Slope and hound last-minute swing voters. It feels a bit forward but it's also definitely the clearest way to make notches in your canvassing belt.
As much of a release as the election was, the results were pretty disappointing. Both of the candidates I'd been working the most for lost. One felt like a fair beat by someone I can support; the other was the invisible hand of the market and Democrat establishment winning out in the end. And it was looking like Eric Adams had taken it. There were some highlights here and there, but overall, it was pretty gutting.
Life & Art
I'm gonna start with the good news before getting to the bad news. It all comes together in the end, anyway.
The good news in June-- though I still wasn't a full-time collaborator-- was getting back into the rehearsal room with Broken Box Mime for a powerful project called "Asks Why". Throughout the pandemic, the more emotionally-equipped members of the company had been iteratively working on potent virtual content for school-age kids, especially relating to protesting and issues of racial justice.
On June 6th we had a kick-off meeting, and it was great to be looped into all the great work that had been percolating while I'd been off fixated only on politics. The script they'd developed was an exploration of company member Regan's question: why are Black people hurt more than white people, in America? The piece didn't shy away from the deep and dangerous answers lurking in history, but told the whole thing through physical storytelling and metaphor.
Still minding social distancing, the project was conceived as a hybrid virtual event that blended recorded video, live-mixed video, and live performances into a multimedia journey. The new technical elements and script are obviously a departure from our mainstage work, but I was happy to join June 11th and 16th and offer what I could to the process. The live element was taking place at the ART/NY Gural Theater, where we'd performed two shows, so being there with everyone really felt like a return home.
Below: I was very grateful for this photograph. To paraphrase my Twitter post, seeing myself in my element helped me feel whole again. Photo by Bjorn Bolinder.
On the other side of things, though, as I approached the five-month anniversary of the Capitol Riot I was riding a fiery wave of urgency and action. And so on June 7th I sat down and decided to post my honest gut feelings on Facebook, with the hope of spurring some action in my network and diffusing some of my anxiety. I also felt ready to be open about witnessing the Capitol Riot, something I desperately needed to get off my chest.
Unfortunately, no one ended up reading it there, because within minutes it had been scrubbed from my feed and was only accessible through a leftover link in the "Grid View" of my profile. It's hard to describe, as someone who teetered on the brink of madness and was specifically suffering paranoiac fears related to the riot, to stare at the very real evidence of my suppression. I ended up writing the story, and while it may sound at times unhinged, in reality it did help me calm down and move on. Fuck the algorithm, fuck fascism, it is what it is. And it's all still coming.
I didn't have long to cool down, because on June 9th the rain came back-- with rats. I hadn't reported on the flooding in my apartment last year, as my update from the summer was brief and catching up after eight months. I also had no idea what it would become. But long story short: I've been suffering sewage backflow through my toilet during major storms, and the situation keeps getting worse. I've gone through proper channels but my landlord decided to ignore my notice and complaints.
That day wasn't even the worst flood, but I'd gone to get my super to confirm the flooding in person, and so was lucky he was there to see the rat himself. It was honestly like a cartoon. Me, unwrapping the towels from the toilet, explaining to my super how the water turns dirty, then lifting the lid to reveal a giant slick sewer rat sitting in the bottom of the bowl almost entirely still, wide-eyed and looking back and forth at me and my super, as my super and I did the same. Just three guys who didn't want to be there. After some fuss we trapped and released it. I'm grateful for my kindly super; my unresponsive landlord, not so much.
So these were the things hanging over me as I continued on with everything, holding it together and charging toward that primary date. And sure enough, it came to a head on June 22nd, the day of the primary itself, when I broke down to a longtime client over the phone. It was the first time I'd had to explain to someone beyond my inner circle why I'd been off-kilter, and I could no longer hide behind carefully worded emails and bursts of manic energy to keep up with work.
Thankfully, it was someone I'd worked in an office with years ago before going freelance, who was sympathetic and helpful. After pulling myself together and putting in a concerted workday on that project, I did that final GOTV shift before joining at a nearby bar for the primary results watch party. I was maudlin and out of sorts but once I got greased up had a bunch of good conversations. I was glad it was over. I still had work to do.
The Stuck Layer Players
For the real heads out there, I did an in-depth retelling of this eventful day behind the paywall. But suffice it to say, on June 30th I debuted The Stuck Layer Players, a solo street performance that has been in the works for years. Originally conceived as mashup of Brechtian Lehrstücke (or, "learning plays"), various styles of Living Newspaper, and a desire to bring more theatricality to my usually staid canvassing, I'd been interested in building a radically political show that I could pop up anywhere, from parks to theaters and every street corner between.
Below: My revolutionary wigged scene partner seen here raising a fist should get a collaborator credit for the production. They really made a scene, and I will be forever grateful and inspired.
So in partnership with Creative Time and BKBX, who had secured a slot and then offered it to me, I took to Rashid Johnson's Red Stage in Astor Place for a blistering Wednesday high-noon hour to strut and fret and improvise and nearly pass out from heat exhaustion while assaulting the crowd with radical soap box rants. The audience interaction led to some genuine conflict with the organizers, but it couldn't have been more perfectly on-message. And in the end I felt like I'd stepped outside of my trauma, gave it a persona, space, and a distance.
I had prepared a series of bits, scenes, and rants around themes of liberation, along with a stack of handbills containing media recommendations and organizations to look into around different areas of social justice. The person who stepped up to hand out my fliers, and who was most interested in my calls for revolution, was someone who I'd previously overheard arguing with event staff about how the stage had taken over the square. Navigating that conflict and my own mania was a wild, moving experience and in the end I think everyone left changed a bit for the better. A seriously cathartic and appropriate way to close the month, and a pretty good story.
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My intention for the rest of the 2021 updates is to begin combining months, as things began to slow down through the end of the year. I'd intended to get fully caught up in January, but ironically life and organizing has picked up again in 2022, making me fall further behind. We'll get there soon!