OCCUPY/HEART

The Urban Military/Police have descended upon the occupation. Armed with flash grenades and pepper spray, they are charged with defending the 1% against the audacious ideas and visual spectacle of an awakening 99%. In a fantastically Orwellian narrative twist, the big city mayors have cited “public safety” as the impetus for the raids on, and subsequent eviction of, a growing list of occupy sites from coast to coast; Liberty Square, Oscar Grant Plaza, in tatters. Justin Herman and Occupy SF, surrounded. The writing is on the sidewalk, the revolution is revolving, the strategy shifts. As the occupiers (Freedom Fighters) ask themselves, literally, “Where do we go from here?”, the Revolution at large asks itself, philosophically (and in theory to action), the same question. As in the microcosm, so the macrocosm. In Still Life With Woodpecker, Tom Robbins asked, “How do you make love stay?” This question is pertinent, in my view, to the topic at hand. Love, in the macrocosmic, can be thought of as a kind of vitalality, an explosion of life energy, a sensation of unity, a bigness. As a movement in the most literal sense, moving/revolving, we are faced with the significant task of maintaining (expanding) the love/energy on whose waves the Revolution, as imagination, merely surfs. By asking, “How do we make love stay?”, we begin to answer, “Where do we go from here?”

In Jerry Rubin’s 1970 revolutionary manifesto Do It!, he suggests that an anti (anti-war, anti-poverty, anti-anything) movement can not sustain itself energetically, in effect can only run on negative energy for brief spurts, so that eventually (in combination with ignoring, minimizing, demonizing and/or disrupting) the Powers That Be can wait out any anti movement with nervous confidence that it will, given a little time, go away. Positive energy, on the other hand, is the Revolution’s sustainable energy. To stand in opposition to something is to be fractionalized and is by it’s nature a passive act. It is to define ourselves in opposition to a dominant, thereby contextualizing the relationship in a subordinator/subordinated paradigm and allowing the subordinator to define the terms, to draw the boundries of the conversation. Reaction is passive-action as action is positive-action. Do we allow our actions to be guided by the actions of others or do we allow our actions to be guided by our values, our experiences, our suspicions and our imaginations?

Every passive-action functions as a mirror, reflecting the suggestion of positive-action. The anti-hunger activist who decides to stop spending their time petitioning signatures for a ballot measure to “fight hunger” and instead volunteers to help build community gardens in impoverished neighborhoods and educate people about the mechanics of growing/raising their own food source , instantly becomes pro-urban gardening and positively effects the production of food in his/her community (to dismiss this as a purely semantic arguement is, I believe, to seriously underestimate the power of language in the harnessing/invoking of energy). Passive-action is abstract (holding a sign to end homelessness) whilepositive-action is tangible (squatting a vacant house). Passive-action waits for a revolution, Positive-action is in perpetual revolution, and performs revolutionary acts.

What we learn from the Occupy Movement is not that a group of people can hold signs in a park for longer than the establishment could have imagined, but that a group of people can form a voluntary association and establish imaginative models of community governance. That a group of people can come together in a circle without the help of the State or would be authorities and figure out how to provide themselves with healthcare, food, clothing, counseling, libraries and music festivals. We learn, above all, that a community is made of people and that the strength of a community is relative to the strength of it’s people. The Occupation has provided an example of radical models of social orginazation and our neighborhoods provide the opportunity to imaginatively explore those models through positive-action. To borrow a term from Chris Carlson, the revolution is nowtopian, and it is our charge to create the infrastructure of the future right here in our neighborhoods, to fashion a viable, alternate way of existing together as a people right now, and, by doing so, to “Make Love Stay”.

It is an illusion of the technocratic worldview that only through changing the macro can we change themicro. That only through petitioning the goodwill of the leaders of the free world can we effect change in our communities. It seems much more plausable that only through changing the micro can we change themacro. A number of individuals make up a neighborhood just as a number of neighborhoods make up a city and a number of cities make up a geographical region and so on and so forth until we are finally, always, citizens of the earth in solidarity, victims (or not) of the same circumstance: birth, death, and the space in between. The primary unit is one, the universe extends from there. The Revolution on the inside, through postive-action, manifests itself on the outside. And so we are left with you as the revolution and me as the revolution. We are challenged to become the Revolution we seek, to tear open our hearts, to strip away the cultural clothing that hangs on us like ill fitting, damp, and worn out rags. We are challenged to mix it up in the dirt a little (or a lot), to question everything and believe nothing until further evidence, and to add our odd fitting pieces to the puzzle, never completed.

-Mark Matos 11/17/2011

 

12/27/09 REMEMBERING VIC AND THE DECADE

the year is running out on us.  shit, the decade is running out on us.  we are perched on an edge, looking out over the lip.  standing again at the border, behind us our personal and shared history, ahead of us what we make of it and (allow me the clunky rhyme) mystery.  here in the land of the survivors (there are still four or five days left in the year and all the mystery those days may bring, but for now it looks like we have survived this year/decade), as i was saying:  here in the land of the survivors, i nod to those bringers of magic moments who didn’t make it through this strange decade, a decade that always struggled for a proper moniker and never really got one.  the aughties? the naughties? the zero’s?  we push forward.

after spending the 90′s in a state of flux, travelling always and never spending more than a better part of a year in any one locale, i found a home in tucson, arizona near the beginning of this decade.  i was drawn to this desert mini-city with it’s rich musical history and it’s forever shabby ‘economy’ as if by a sun powered tractor beam.  a new story would start for me in tucson, i would start a band in tucson, i would learn how to write a decent song in tucson, i would fall in love and learn how fragile and fleeting that is.

the first concert that i attended upon unpacking my bags and staking out my corner of the old adobe, was this:  vic chesnutt with band in tow at the solar culture gallery.  the opener was a kid with a violin that had spent some time in the squirell nut zippers, the kid’s name was andrew bird.  when i got to the concert andrew bird was toward the end of his set inside the gallery but i never made it inside, i was more concerned with the goings on outside of the venue where vic chesnutt sat in his wheelchair sharing a laugh with tommy larkins (longtime jonothan richman drummer and, although i would not have imagined it at the time, someone who would play drums with me on a number of occasions over the still fresh decade).  i was introduced to vic for the first and last time on that solar culture front porch and i can only say that he exuded kindness and had the hands of a magician.

the word had come down the pipe earlier in the day that the vic chesnutt show would likely be cancelled due to the fact that the tour van had broken down somewhere upstate, but we hopers and believers held out and showed up and, a very late start later, we were treated to one of the most inspiring performances i have ever witnessed.  vic was a rock n roll preacher, shouting his sermon on the stage, yelping and banging on his old gut string guitar.  i was transfixed, i had never seen anything like it.  when i got home at three in the morning, after being acosted by a peckerwood tucson tweeker, i was emotional, exhausted, inspired.  i immediately sat down and wrote and recorded a new song that was a complete rip-off of one of the vic chesnutt tunes i had heard that night, or rather a complete rip-off of ‘knockin on heavens door’ which vic had ripped off for one of his songs and somehow made it, not only plausible, but completely his own.  i had to see if i too could work a little magic with those three tired chords.  i couldn’t, but i learned something in the process, something that had to do with sincerity and personality and not giving a fuck but really giving a fuck and embracing the unknown and smiling in the dark.

a couple of years later, campo bravo had established ourselves in the old barrio and we were asked to play a concert supporting vic chesnutt at the old club congress.  i couldn’t have been more humbled, more thrilled, more nervous at the prospect.  i rehearsed the band until nearly every member told me to chill out, or fuck off, or relax man.  but the week came and i felt like we were ready.  four days to go now and david slutes from club congress calls me.  i answer, “hey dave, what’s up?”, dave tells me that, due to a family emergency, vic chesnutt had cancelled his upcoming show in tucson.  it wasn’t going to happen, it never was going to happen.  that’s how it went down, how i almost had the honor of sharing the stage with vic chesnutt.  when he died on xmas it all came back to me, i hadn’t thought of it in years.  so much had happend since then:  i had left tucson for san francisco, put out some records, played with some of the best rock n rollers anywhere, fallen in and out of love, and had come closer to myself, learned to be okay, most of the time, with the good parts and the bad parts.  that night in tucson listening and watching vic chesnutt helped set all that into motion. some people can recount how that speech that martin luther king gave in ’63 inspired them, set them on their course, or maybe it was listening to cornell west or maybe it was jimmy swaggert before he started fucking prostitutes in motel rooms, i don’t know, but that night vic chesnutt set me straight, into the mystery, and it’s a whole lot crookeder and a whole lot more magical than i could have ever imagined.  this is a salutation, the grandest of thank you’s.

-Mark Matos

 

(INTO COMPROMISE)

we are born
kicking and crying
into compromise

birthed raw
confounded and moody
into the incomplete

we spend our days
piecing together
the odd fitting shapes
of our waking lives

measuring against
half remembered dreams

measuring against
the crazy thoughts
we think
but never speak

and the puzzle
that seemed so nearly
understood
at 18

transforms
at 37
into a fragment
of a landscape so strange
even dhali
could not imagine

we begin to suspect
that the puzzle
is in the pieces

scattered

across the living room floor
of our lives

across the fenced in prairies
of our hearts

this lovely letting go
never completed

-mark matos

2/10/10  SITTING BULL & SUPER BOWL

I did not watch the super bowl on sunday.  I woke up monday morning waiting for the FBI to show up and ask me to relinquish my american citizenship but then I remembered that I had relinquished my citizenship back in 1999 in a show of solidarity with native Hawaiians in the sovereignty movement, although I never really figured out why they wanted to go back to being the Kingdom Of Hawaii.  A kingdom implies a king and a queen and a king and a queen implies bowing and if you agree to bow you agree to bend over.  You would think that a group of people who have been getting bent over by the u.s. state for the last century wouldn’t want to replace one fucker for another but then the grass is always greener in the land you don’t remember.    Lest you think I am anti big sporting events, just you wait for the World Cup this summer in south africa.  I just can’t dig american football, it’s too controlled, too respectful of authority, too militaristic for my anarchistic tastes.  Listening to Dylan’s  Hard Rain on vinyl and it re-inforces my belief that 1974-75 was Dylan’s peak as a performer (his peak as a writer was probably in the previous decade, although his mid-seventies writing was amazing: Desire, Blood On The Tracks…).  He never sang better than on that Rolling Thunder Revue tour, just belting and reaching, an edgy mystic, a cranky prankster, the ring leader of a wonder-freak circus.  Folks can argue as to whether the old fighter has aged gracefully or not, debate it all you want, but he has most certainly aged bizarrely, and that is, not just fitting, but the only way it could have gone down, dig?  This is what I want:  A half full bottle of wine,  three or four cigarettes, a window to throw a TV out of,  and an in-tune piano.  If I hadn’t become a rock ‘n’ roll avenger, I would have liked to have been a stand-up comic or an agitator, a monkey wrench, or Sitting Bull.  I am selling an old guitar today for just enough money to buy me some time.  I never named her and that was the death of her, or the moving on of her.  I am drinking coffee and thinking of peyote.  The sky doesn’t know what to do with itself.

12/28/09 SMELL THE COFFEE EYES

back in san francisco before sun up and it’s like coming home from a late night and your lover is still sleeping and not wanting to make too much noise, not wanting to disturb her small, sleepy breaths with your crude stumbling, with your clumsy awakeness. i can’t stand to be at home and awake at this hour, even after a week away from my cozy confines, i need to get out of the house and touch the asphalt, come back later after the sun has gotten her first kicks in. i beat it to the mission and touch down on 24th street as the stars fade out and the coffee shop doors creak open and the bleary eyed barista makes a hand signal as i enter stage right and order a turkish coffee, light milk, light sugar. who is awake at this hour?
two female police officers who look entirely too kind to be dawning the ugly blue slacks and heavy black pistols of the SFPD; a tourist with a triple A guide of our fair environs asking questions on his cell phone about tours of muir woods and negotiating hotels, car rental, making plans; the aforementioned sleepy eyed barista; a reasonably well known beat poet anxiously asking for the time and lamenting the lateness of a friend, hedging his bets, getting ready to leave now, it’s been thirty minutes and that’s just too many minutes he says; a couple of construction workers with the hard work still ahead of them; the owner of the coffee shop who is too eager to talk it up with the police officers, too eager to place them in a crystal sequined box, too eager to embrace america, too eager to turn away when i fix him with my eyes, hard and accusing eyes, wild and wide open eyes, big laser beam lazuras eyes, stop sucking america’s dick eyes, why are those cops more important than anyone else eyes, fuck you eyes, empathetic eyes, have a good cry eyes, wake up and smell the coffee eyes.