2004-05-28 - 12:10 am.
I have been, as one Culottes song goes, “tying up loose ends like broken shoe laces...”. The Culottes are the perfect summer band and I am excited to be heading out west in a little over a week where hopefully I will get to see them play. But right now I have been enjoying Brooklyn in May and all my friends that live here. I have felt so lucky over the past few weeks, especially since it was my birthday, at the way my friends have shoed their kindness, letting me know that when we talk about community we are talking about something real, something that sustains us now.
I spent the afternoon riding my bike around Brooklyn, dropping in on Nicole and borrowing a book from her for my thesis (Notes from the Underground, by Stephen Duncomb), seeing the amazing art work kids at PS 250 in Williamsburg created that was showcased in their “Arts Night.” Jamie was there helping people make one page books that doubled as the program for the night, she had been working with the school art teacher Celia and through a program called Parents as Art Partners to create accordion books that parents and their children worked on together. Then I stopped in on Keight to get some boxes to mail zines to myself out in Oregon. I love biking through Brooklyn, watching the neighborhoods unfold and flow into each other. This is not really my city to claim, not at all, and I am so happy it has let me in for a bit. It is a city that has been and is going through a lot.
I have been stressing out a bit, I have been putting a lot of work (or so it feels) into learning about arts education (even though I don’t even study art) and trying to do that for “work” after I graduate. But I wonder if this is the kind of “field” that my radical ideas can really take root in. I know that they can, but I find myself second guessing myself a lot. I guess I just can’t always rectify the fact that I am not the revolutionary I thought I would be when I was 17. I have definitely made a lot of choices that are more complicity with certain systems than I thought I might have to. Or to put it another way, as my old professor Amit Rai said, “We all choose our complicity.” But it’s not even a matter of just feeling complicit, it’s a matter of wondering what will be enough. Where do I enter in a place that recognizes the connections between struggles? I also wonder about the privilege of this question, because a lot of times people’s struggles get chosen for them. Besides, to look at myself as a white activist choosing from a smorgasbord of possible involvements also denies the fact that I am connected and implicated in systems of domination. However, I think I spend a lot of time glorifying activism in local communities without even educating myself about the kind of activism that is going on in my community and thinking about ways to get involved there as a logical starting point and connecting that with other issues from there. Put it on the list of “after I graduate.” Hah.
P.S. I put out a new zine, Indulgence #9, please see the previous entry for info!
