Chris Time Steele

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A Fatigue Wearing Judas: Acknowledging Histories and Breaking Cycles by chris time steele from Trust Kids: Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy edited by carla joy berkman published by AK Press

get the full book here https://www.akpress.org/trust-kids.html

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Transcript - carla joy bergman on Youth Autonomy, Adult Supremacy, Trust and Friendship

chris time steele  

Welcome to Episode 56 of the Time Talks Podcast part of the Channel Zero Network. This month I had the honor to speak to my good friend carla joy bergman. carla is a joyarchist, a weaver, a healer, listener, writer, author, and revolutionary. In this episode, we talk about her latest book Trust Kids: Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy, which is an amazing book. I also have a chapter in this book, and I'm grateful carla reached out to me about contributing. In this episode, carla discusses youth autonomy, adult supremacy, trust and friendship, the Purple Thistle, and intergenerational solidarity. Thank you to AwareNess for the music and here's a brief jingle from a fellow Channel Zero Network member.

 chris time steele  

So my first question is if you can give some moments in your early life, where you started questioning these dominant narratives, so what you usually refer to as Empire, but to break that down of capitalist imperialist white supremacist childist patriarchy.

 carla joy bergman  

You start with the hard question. Well first of all, thanks for having me here. I love coming into the Time Talks portal. Time listening it should be called. It's such a big question. I was thinking that maybe I would, because it will help me not go off on a big long tangent, maybe keep it around the topic of adult supremacy and kids, maybe a little bit if that's okay? But yeah, I think it's so good, it's such an honor to be asked these questions because you get to play with time a bit. It's always always interesting of how we affect the past with these reflections. I definitely was a kid who right away didn't like injustice, especially socially speaking. So I was, I think in my kindergarten, or probably even actually in church, like even early on, like, even before school, at my new school I was in trouble for always talking back. The talking back was usually because somebody was not being treated well, like usually another kid was being bullied by the adults. Really, it gets visceral, like I really remember always being that person who stood up for the kid being bullied by an adult and including in my home. I'm the youngest of five siblings with like a quite a large age difference with some of them. So, you know, that's where it really that kind of talk back started. Then with my parents as well, and it played out all through school, like before I dropped out. I was either like, kind of the teacher's favorite, or the one who they they sent to the office every single day, because it was based on that. That was the bar, like, are you treating the young people in the room with respect, then I'm gonna treat you with respect back, like, you got to set the tone. So if a teacher like was a bully, and was disrespectful, I was their thorn in their side, and to the point where I even had one teacher, I'd walk in, they'd be like carla out, I'm like, I didn't even do anything. But I know you're going to like in the hall, I was, you know, the quintessential kid in the hall. It was like our elementary or what's it called middle school or whatever. It was all like at this modern school that was had all glass windows. So if you're a kid in the hall you could see in and so that's why I was always kicked to the office because I just continued being a problem in the hall. So you know, I just talked back really like right away and that included like between kids too like I was that kid who got in between two kids fighting or my brothers were fighting I got in between them. So it's just like, I don't remember a starting point, and it just really comes down to and maybe it's empathy or compassion or who knows what it is but I I really couldn't stand by when an injustice was taking place. So that just continued to grow as I like aged and noticed that happening writ large and it really, publicly it started like with the kind of anti nuclear stuff with like the Sandinista stuff, like in the late 70s, early 80s. That's where I really started to get involved in going to protests and marches and being aware. I was that punk kid, like during the punk scene, and it just slowly grew. It was almost external, in a lot of ways, that kind of stuff and it really wasn't until I became a parent. I always say that Zach was born the same year the Zapatistas did their thing. So I don't know they're both are, they're both important. I think also Rwanda happened around that time, too, that genocide was also really impactful. I spent a good chunk of my academic time, majoring in genocide studies. So I don't really want to minimize that, because it's really important and they all kind of work together. So having a kid who is neuro different, and watching his, his way of being in the world be squashed from institutions and other adults, including close to us adults, it just broke me open in a new way. To the point where I even had to leave university because that doing genocide study stuff and trying to like work at that level of politics was so disconnected from my community and from like, trying to figure out how to work to undo adult supremacy how to like, put my kid but all kids maybe have more thriving in their life. I started getting involved in alternatives to education and alternatives to school and other ways of connecting that solidarity.

 chris time steele  

No, that was good. You were involved in kind of like the punk scene in the 80s in Vancouver, did that have any  influence on collectivity or organizing? Or was it just something you were drawn to, but then something you learned from and helped grow as well?

 carla joy bergman  

Yes, well, so I was in the punk scene in Victoria, which is like the island, the capital of like, the so called colonial province that I'm in British Columbia. The punk scene, there was actually pretty awesome, some great bands came out of there, like No Means No, and Dayglo Abortions, and many others, I think the thing that like got seeded there was I was about 18, or just turned 19 and the only bar that the bands could play at and, you know, we got to go for free to watch them for a really low price burnt down, and No Means No's equipment was part of the part of that fire, which was really distressing. My brother lived in a really cool big collective house that I spent a lot of time at. So I asked them, if I could start running events there for punk bands, and to that all the proceeds of the door would go to the getting gear back for No Means No and then whatever else and connecting it to other struggles in the city and stuff. So I think like that kind of organizing a social space that brought people together around shared ideas, and then branching out solidarity really did get seeded by this like disaster that happened. That's something that's carried through my life is more that and then in terms of like, mutual aid, or collectivity, or whatever, I actually, like, I grew up on a military base, the first 12 years of my life or something. That kind of like ethos of the soldier of like no one left behind or whatever played out in this, like, beautiful way in the neighborhood. Everyone took care of everyone else's kids. No one like I doubt it's like this at all anymore. But you know, I always joke that everything I learned about mutual aid solidarity and like reciprocity, and like the true ethos behind collectivity, or anarchism, I learned on the army base. So yeah, it's just something that was everyone took care of everyone, everything for everybody.

 chris time steele  

Awesome, thank you, and you write about a lot of that in your pamphlet on mutual aid and that was also in the Building Power While the Lights Are Out book edited by Jimmy Dunson.

 carla joy bergman  

Yeah and you're in that book too.

 chris time steele  

Well, my next question is about Joyful Militancy, you and Nick Montgomery interviewed many people about autonomy, autonomous communities, finding ways to thrive and playing with what joy means, which doesn't always mean happy. There are so many threads in this book with trust and youth autonomy with stories of the Purple Thistle. I was wondering if you can talk about these works, how these kind of work together and feed each other and what you further weaved into your newest book, Trust Kids.

 carla joy bergman  

Thank you, that's an awesome question. Yeah, they're so connected, it's interesting because I also made a film about the Purple Thistle and trust was like at the center of it. Nick actually was showing that film to his class the other day and he texted me, he goes, trust and friendship, trust and friendship. It was really sweet because it's like yeah, like those are, those are kind of the notions or the themes that animate the work that like my eldest Zach said that joy is something that I'm aspiring to, to embody more and to become and to have more in my life like I definitely it escapes me a lot. But he's like trust is something that you know you that animates your life, like how you work with people, how you like, show up. And I think that comes back to that kid thing. Like, I really noticed when I wasn't trusted, or, you know, to put it in maybe less abstract way, I really noticed when people don't believe me, right? Whether it's my experience or my perspective, or my ideas. So yeah, trust is like, to me the foundation of any good community or any potential for a community to thrive and do well by each other's that, you know, this kind of baseline trust for each other is like what we talked about in Joyful Militancy is really important as a common notion, something that is like an ethical emergence that has to be at play for things to go well and we put it together with the idea of responsibility because trust can't be a demand and it can't be rigid and it can't be this thing that is static, it's always emerging and fluid and then alongside that is our responsibility for each other for how we show up and breaking that word apart. Like thinking about the ability to respond so like thinking about like bringing in intersectionality around disability justice or children or folks who can't show up at that you know, we can't have a flat like a bar of how you must show up or whatever it has to be nuanced and

 chris time steele  

I like the no assholeism rule you all had at the Thistle.

 carla joy bergman  

Yeah, that was a Matt Hernism. It was very good it was on the door it was the only rule and no sleeping there but that was something else.

 chris time steele  

I wanted to look more at the Roots of Trust Kids, one thing I found when researching the Purple Thistle and this was started in 2001, it was in a shared yellow building in East Vancouver is that right?

 carla joy bergman  

Chartreuse actually, Chris, okay, it was Parisian green is what I was told. (laughs)

 chris time steele  

I don't have my color wheel key out. On the Purple Thistle blog in 2014, you wrote an entry called Trust Each Other So We Can Be Fearless and I'd like to read part of this entry and have you respond and talk a little bit about it and the Thistle, and you wrote, "Giving folks and especially young folks the trust upfront is a terrific and important place to start. In fact, I think it's the most important foundation for a strong and caring community. I am not talking about the kind of trust you would build over time in your long term core relationships but something more in line with care and respect, like friendship. I think without a starting place to trust our foundations are weak, and then all kinds of problems can grow from that lack of trust in each other. In contrast, when I'm trusted, I do better, I'm going to step up and do well by that trust. So I think starting with something simple, like, I trust that the folks who I am working with will do their best is a terrific place to begin to rethink our practices and the ways we treat each other." This just seemed like such a seed of what Trust Kids bloomed out of.

 carla joy bergman  

Thanks for reading that and finding that yeah, it was actually, we had a broadsheet like one of those really old analog massive beautiful designed by Joi Arcand at the Thistle and so every once in a while I'd write a little piece for the cover. If you've read haven't read Joyful Militancy, we interviewed Kian Cham for the book and we ended up putting his entire interview in the book because he was a kid who showed up at the Thistle and was part of the project for a really long time and he really talks about trust in a really neat way and how it played out at the Thistle and so I just really recommend that because it had a lot of, I wanted to bring up that because it really influenced Trust Kids and I think the way that it flowed out because I mean you can have this kind of I don't know ethical way of being in the world but you don't always get it reflected back to you. You don't know if it's actually landing and Kian's words about like he said, like it was just wild like you just trusted me like you and the other adults like you just you just like I was there for like a week and I got keys and then like I was there for a month and then I became like the anchor of the garden project and was given this budget and told like, he has this quote where he's like, I could have ran off with all the money but like I didn't because you guys trusted me like it's like this weird dynamic, like you just did this thing. Yeah, it was this interesting thing that was in practice at the Thistle, because of the intersections of difference that folks who were involved, that came from all kinds of different backgrounds, class, race, genders, all of it just busted it all, disability, abilities. I think, like, how that connected to the book is that doing that work at the Thistle publicly and having folks in other kind of movements not really get it, like, there was this disconnect around youth oppression, they thought it was really great what we were doing at the festival, but they kind of pushed it to the side. To the point where some groups, some people, some organizers would reach out to say that they wanted to come and give a workshop to the youth on how to run a space. My brain would be like what, like, like you, I mean, you never got to experience but the Thistle was really dynamic, it had all ages, and you know, all kinds of art projects happened there. They knew how to run a space quite beautifully, actually and they made the same kind of mistakes that any age group makes, it was just this wild ageism, right, this idea that kids no matter even though they're doing it, they still need to be taught, right? Then I just wasn't, you know, I didn't notice that, it's just starting to bust open more, but it's still like often left off of the list of oppressions as a it's just a given, right? Like kids are these things over here. That's when I started using the phrase solidarity begins at home because they go together, like how kids are treated out in public is this thing that's happening. But really, it's all starting home. And what was happening as I was noticing a lot of the most radical organizers who got platformed and held up didn't think about kid oppression, and a lot of them are parents. I just was curious about like that cut off, like, how do you reckon with that? How do you reckon with your own adult supremacy?

 chris time steele  

I think you explained that really good of how like trust and how these adults who are even in "solidarity" are coming in and still reinforcing that childism.

 carla joy bergman  

Right, I guess the thing is, it's a part of the conversation of undoing all oppressions, or collective liberation, that gets sort of put to the side in a lot of ways. There's a lot of practical reasons why, because of capitalism people are struck with so many decisions to make around schooling and not schooling, and like, making sure their kids have, you know, some skills for life and all these things. So part of how that work at the Thistle influenced the book, and then my home life influenced the book and thinking about solidarity in a larger sense, was like, how can I have this conversation? How can this conversation break through some of these barriers that are from Empire that are bigger than us?  One of those ways was to really center this ocean of confronting adult supremacy. Often this conversation gets siloed in youth liberation and just like women's liberation was, it got siloed. It took some really powerful folks like bell hooks to go wait a second, this is about patriarchy, you know, we want collective liberation, actually and we need to, look at patriarchy and invite people to this conversation who are like, wielding the patriarchy and right, so it's kind of similar, what was influencing me and bell hooks really influenced me because she actually centered children as a site of oppression that prevented collective liberation. So yeah, all of that is to say that trust is where it all begins but solidarity is a big part of that and how can we grapple with our own, including my own, like, I'm still grappling with my own adult supremacy and how I deal with it.

 chris time steele  

Thank you so much, I think one other way that this ties in with Trust Kids and the Purple Thistle is your theme through your work is about questioning institutions and also deprofessionalism. One thing that was really cool is on some of the blog entries when that this whole was closing, it was written in there that the Thistle was never meant to be an institution. You all had written, "this had shown us that perhaps we're no longer needed in the way we were in the past and have pretty much done our time," and you all write, "everything does end and to be honest, we wish more places would end when it's time but unfortunately we live in a system that values longevity over thriving, and that ain't us", and I thought that was really powerful. That capitalism thing of having to grind and then this other side that you are brought in of like we're not going to be an institution, we're going to trust and listen and do what we need to do to move on from there. I was wondering if you could speak on that experience?

 carla joy bergman  

Yeah, thank I mean, yeah, closing the Thistle was probably in terms of community work and organizing and accountability to others was probably one of the hardest things I've ever had to do it. It took a very, it was not done in silo, it took a lot of conversations. I met with every single collective member, one on one first, every person who was ever involved in the Thistle had like, including Matt, who had been gone for a couple of years. I met with him, he was one of the first people I told, and yeah, it was just really important to me to change, change the discourse a bit about closing and ending because, you know, yeah, another level of gentrification, it was happening in Vancouver and continues to happen. The closing of spaces was connected to that, the cutting off funding to spaces was definitely a big part of that. That was a part of the story at the Thistle too, but there was also these other stories. I think we can we can, as activists and organizers, and people who are really pissed off at the world can just keep in the one narrative. I think that it didn't do it justice, it was like it was going to leave behind the beauty that was happening at the Thistle, which was always a response to the kids in the neighborhood at the time and what they needed, it always was based on that. Like, it was always like, that was the story. So yeah, like, what else is going on? Let's step back and look at all the the other parts. One of the biggest things that was going on was a lot of former people involved at the Thistle were opening their own spaces, which is like amazing, right like that were based on their predilections and their communities needs and the little bit of funding that was left at that time in the spaces was going to the Thistle because we had the we had the reputation, and we had the support. So it was like, yeah, I think we talked about calling it the Quakers ethos of like, sometimes you just gotta lay it down, like get out of the way and that was also at the like, core of the Thistle and the core of how I parent, and the core of how I work with people is sometimes it's actually about getting out of the way. Like, you know, yes, guidance is important. Yes, mentorship is important. But sometimes you just gotta like, go away. Just let people experiment and do their thing. So yeah, it's, and it was, it was really, I think, an important way to end it did change discourses, I had people from socials, we had run social spaces summits, through what we call the Thistle Institute, then people came from all over who ran social spaces. So we had this network, and a lot of those spaces reached out and we're really grateful for that new framing. Because, yeah, I think we can just replicate the systems that we're trying to fight against, when we just keep it really linear. One story just about anger, just about victim, like there's always so much more going on.

 chris time steele  

Yeah, thank you, and solidarity begins at home, one of your chapters that you wrote in Trust Kids, you really talk about how there's a lot of these normalized social fractures in our community, and that they chip away at our relationships, and cause rifts in social bonds and that was just really powerful. One of the things you wrote was "the roots are often still there deep in the ground but there's a disconnect or more precisely, there are institutions built on top of the buried social ways of being in relationship that cut us off from our more autonomous and communal ways of being together and children spend a great deal of their lives locked away in one of these institutions." I thought that was really powerful and you kind of explain that, like, those roots are already there, they're just disconnected. Yeah, I just wondering if you had anything to add to that?

 carla joy bergman  

Yeah, thanks, I think that's like why I think how I could connect it maybe to the work or the book is like why I focus on autonomy over youth liberation, or is like that autonomy away from institutions. And because so much of like, how empire and whether it's the state or capitalism, colonialism, or white supremacy, all of it continues to subjugate us all in different uneven ways. But still, it's still going on is that we're so reliant on institutions, everything, you know, how we raise our kids, how they get educated, how we grow our food, what we eat, how like everything is, has been sort of taken away from us and these forms of life are removed, and there's many, many stories of the reclaiming of that there. There's a beautiful upgrowth of autonomy and flowering and blooming and they don't always last though, and I have, there's a lots of reasons why they don't last because you know, because the state comes crashing down, and capitalism doesn't like it. But also I think it's because a lot of them still send their kids to school, or like, have a, I think that's one of the like, strongest colonial holds still is that kids still need to be educated away from community. Toby goes into this really well in the book Toby Rollo about how like, if children, if we don't actually deal with children, childism, and the oppression of children, everything we do gets cut off in one generation, because it gets everything gets replicated again, through these systems of control through the various institutions. And I also want to say all this, that I tend to stay out of the school, not school conversation a lot, and I decentered it in this in this book on purpose, because I think it's one of the ways that this conversation gets marginalized around children immediately, because it gets people in their camps instantly, like, oh, it's so privileged to unschool your kids, it's so privileged to remove your kids out of school. And it gets away from actually the heart of the conversation, which is how can we like undo adult supremacy and create a life of collective liberation and more justice for everybody? Right? I'm more interested in talking about school solidarity, like how can we work to be in more solidarity across all these intersection issues, if the goal is to undo empire's hold on us to truly like have collective liberation, then we have to think about autonomy and autonomy, the way that I think of autonomy, I know that autonomy is one of these words that can get really liberalized fast. But the way I think about it is like autonomy from the state, right? Autonomy from the institution's, autonomy from capitalism, autonomy from and then autonomy for our community, for each other.

 chris time steele  

Thanks for getting into the difference between youth autonomy and youth liberation in your view too, one of my next questions is if you could talk about some of the ways that trusting kids is a way of solidarity, in not just providing a co-mentorship and stuff and kind of that difference, because I feel like that can get marginalized, that can get kind of put into a binary too like, well, I'm going to trust a kid by being a mentor, kind of like what you're saying about the Thistle on how people, some people are trying to come in and do workshops, and maybe some examples of how you see that not working and ways it can work.

 carla joy bergman  

Are you maybe getting into like power, the responsibility of power?

 chris time steele  

Yeah let me give one more example that I left out, you are a part of the podcast Grounded Futures with your kid, Liam and Liam always talks about how it's okay to have guidance as well. It's not just like a kid on their own and adults are just watching them be free and trusted. So I guess kind of that nuance of like, what true solidarity looks like, and how that can kind of be confused with being a mentor as well, but also there is the need for guidance for kids.

 carla joy bergman  

Oh, yeah. that's wonderful. Yeah, and it gets into this idea of neglect and Liam is, so he's been my kid who's just really always brought it right down to like, the, the core point, I'm just like, appreciate him so much. Oh, my God. Because like I would, you know, occasionally I'd be like, oh, through being in solidarity and listening to my kids like, is there a fine line to neglecting them? Like from becoming their best selves or something and Liam is like no, like, the parent who forces their kid to all the things is literally neglecting them, like literally neglecting their souls, like not listening at all, because they've heard that kids need to be in six different things to become the adult they're meant to be or whatever, and I was always so grateful for him. Yeah, and it's why I am not big on and I I very rarely, if ever, in support of parenting books and parenting advice and Trust Kids is definitely none of those. Because, as Liam always points out, it's not going to work because it's the opposite of listening to, and being emergent with your child and being in solidarity with them at the moment they're in. And sometimes that means, truly, like this is just an anarchist ethos of meeting somebody where they find themselves or where they're at, right. And so sometimes that means doing a whole lot for that kid. Like, it can look like beyond mentorship, like you're actually doing tons for them. And from the outside, they can look like you're this controlling A type parent, but really, you're listening to a kid that maybe has anxiety disorder or is autistic or whatever, right. Like one of the things that emerges a lot in youth liberation circles or alternative schooling circles is an entrenchment of individualism. And this is another reason why I like to move to autonomy and solidarity as the ethos around this work instead of liberation, but I think just moving away from that, is because, you know, it's like, I heard this really good bell hook's quote the other day about the difference between equality and reciprocity and so like I'm really interested in like, it's not about trying to get equality, it's about reciprocity and about justice. So that means listening, that means showing up and being in solidarity across difference. And mentorship flows in all different directions. But more than all, and then all of this aside, is that, you know, I've been around, you know, as an as somebody who's older than my kids, quite a bit older, I have some experience, I have some things to share. And there's a time and place for me to show up in that way in a really solid way. The solid part of solidarity is just be solid. I don't know if I answered it. It's always changing for me. It's relational, Joyful Militancy really is that this is in that book, right? It's relational. It's, it's back to that word responsibility, like, how do I respond? That's based on trust is that I'm, yeah, it's just always responsive. Being responsive versus having a guidebook or a handbook or a parenting how to in front of me and checking off things. Instead, I'm like, looking and listening and hearing, and then responding.

 chris time steele  

Awesome. Yeah, the the reciprocity that you're talking about through that is so key. Thank you. That was a really good answer. My next question is, there's a lot of talk of throwing around the term, abolishing the family and I wanted to ask you about, I don't know, just kind of a discussion of, of trusting kids, like you say, solidarity begins at home and this nuance between abolishing the family or denuclearizing the family?

 carla joy bergman  

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. I really don't like abolish family. I'm not on social media anymore. So I don't pipe in like I did. But anytime I would see the list of all the different abolishing, and it would have family I would always pipe in and say I think you mean denuclearize the family? I think you really, could you please just step back and really think about that for a second. Like, are you kidding? We need more kinship, we need more, we need to actually expand it, what we mean by family and reclaim it. I also think that there's a lot of whiteness, and a lot of colonialism in that statement of abolishing family. Most of my friends who are Indigenous, People of Color, particularly with Latino roots, like the familia is everything, like everything, you know, and it's expansive. It's not the nuclear family, and it stretches beyond bloodlines even. And I know that a lot of it comes from, it's like queering the family, queering kinship, which is really important. I'm really grateful to decades and decades of the LGBTQ+ queer communities who have expanded what it means to build kin like I'm so deeply grateful, because I think that there's an intervention into whiteness that happens at that one that's really important to highlight and the oppression of children still happens in those homes. Because that's not brought into the fore as an intersection. And so I think that's why there's like, anti authoritarian or an anarchist view of like abolishing families, because it's, there's a belief that it's just inherently patriarchal, inherently hierarchical, but it's not like if we stretch back, please read Toby Rollo's essay in Trust Kids, if you stretch back to like that families weren't not hierarchical. Or even, you know, like Silvia Federici touches on this really beautifully in her in her weavings of the past that the subjugation of women through the patriarchal family and then the subjugation of children is all part of capitalism. It's all part of the plan, but sorry, Marxists it actually predates capitalism. It's actually a colonial idea. And it's very actually ahistorical to just root it into capitalism. So it's very much this idea of like a family being inherently patriarchal, heteropatriarchal and hierarchical is flawed. Is it happening? Yes. And it's located in what's called the nuclear family. And that part is really important. And it keeps whiteness really strong. It keeps colonialism really strong and it's about capitalism as well. So yeah, I'm somebody who promotes and talks more about denuclearizing the family and creating larger webs of what it means to be in family and in kinship and, you know, I'm with Donna Haraway, like making kin is the most important thing that we have to do right now and that includes across all species and includes like fungi and more than humans and trees and, and speaking about mentorship, I mean, most of the guidance and mentorship I receive is from, you know, the fungi and the mycelium and the trees about cooperation and mutuality. Right? So I you know, I want to make kin with even more kin, more family across bloodlines.

 chris time steele  

Yeah, that reminds me of what you kid Zach always says when he sees fungi, he says what's up ancestors? Yeah, definitely expanding what family and kin is to the non human more than human. It's cool you said that because this leads to my next question is a chapter you cowrote with Zach called Magneto's Dreams. I love this chapter and I love the art in there too, by Gadzooks Bazooka, and you have this nuance of Professor X and Magneto and what I really liked about this essay is it's not mean to Professor X either. You all talk about how he provides shelter. He saves lives, he provides trust. But you know, this goal of his is assimilation, and is to work for the state and to kind of bring back the status quo.One quote I really liked on what you all said about Magneto is you say "Magneto supports dissidents and gives them space to exist freely outside the stratification of the state, prefiguring a liberated now." So I was just wondering if you could talk more about that quote, and kind of this chapter. I think it's a really just creative and genius chapter and take on, on the whole book, too and I love that it's at the end of the book.

 carla joy bergman  

Thank you so much. I just want to go on record to say, if you read Trust Kids you'll read it in my acknowledgments but Chris was really, really important for this book coming together, because you showed up at a really important time. And with a lot of joy and excitement, enthusiasm and knowledge, and an understanding of what I was trying to say and but you really helped. And I really want to thank you, and your essay is so so good. Thank you so much. I'm worried we're gonna get this call. And I didn't get to say that. And including, nothing's done in silo, like nothing. And I've been this person in smaller ways than Chris was for me. But like when you put a book together like this, especially something that involves a lot of people's voices and a lot of vulnerability on the line. And then like all the people who aren't in the book, all the conversations, all the music, all the songs, all the movies and TV shows and like all the books and people's work that influence the smallest conversations that watered seeds that made this book grow. And you're like sitting alone with it. And it's this bizarre thing. And so it's really important to have friends, like Chris was to me that he was somebody I could text and say, I really want to put it in this order what do you think and just having that I don't, I think it doesn't get talked about enough. And I know that most people who write have Chris's in their life or like, and I've been that person for other people. So I just really wanted to thank you publicly for everything you did for this book. And I you know, sometimes I think your name should be on it. You help so much. So thank you.

 chris time steele  

Thank you and it was an honor to be a part of the book and help out and I had a lot of fun and learned so much. So yeah, thank you very much for that.

 carla joy bergman  

So connected to that, X-Men and I, you know, Liam, who his full name is Uilliam has an essay in the book, he did a solo essay. And then my partner, Chris [Bergman] did some art in it. And so I was trying to figure out how, you know, the reason why, like I said, like, having Zach was what got me on this path and opened up my world in such massive ways. I can't even begin to talk about it, you know, in a way that captures what he's done for me and continues. So I was really, I was coming up to the end of the book of finishing it and sending it in. And I asked him, if he would cowrite a piece about Magneto. He isn't actually an X-Men fan. He read the comics a bit as a kid. And because I had Lupus, when he was young, I used to always call myself an X-Men that I was, I was mutated, I had mutated. I have like that. I'm actually a powerful person with my Lupus. And we had a fun little joke going about that I was at, and we just nerd out about that stuff. And we're both really into Nietzsche and other philosophies that kind of intersect with these ideas. And so he's like, sure, okay, let's do it. So I just wanted to say that and that's why it was done around that. But also, I went off on a whole tangent about you helping with the book, but I forgot your question about like the quote that you wanted me to respond to.

 chris time steele  

Oh, yeah, it's talking about this kind of this nuance between Professor X, like providing trust but his goal is assimilation. Then you all had said that Magneto supports dissidents and gives them space to exist freely outside the stratification of the state prefiguring a liberated now and in the your time at the Thistle too and the metaphor of the helmet and how Magneto had the helmet to protect himself, but you can use that to protect others and just so many good metaphors in this.

 carla joy bergman  

Yeah, thank you and I apologize to true X-Men fans and Magneto fans, we went way off. But I know it's pretty common for anarchists, particularly to have an affinity with Magneto in the shows and in the books, so I think it wasn't too big of a stretch. But yeah, I personally, like there was a time when I was working with the youth and they would call me Professor X and I really liked that. It wasn't until when one of the newer movies came out where the writers went back to kind of the origins of Magneto and his army of misfits and how he was really upset with the assimilation stuff that Liam again, said, "no way you're a Magneto, you're all Magneto" and so I got deeper into like the the nerd verse of who Magneto really, maybe was meant to be in the potential that was cut off. And even Stan Lee himself knew that he wasn't a bad guy. Like he didn't mean for that to happen. And that was, you know, whatever Marvel movies did that, and other writers but I just really liked the idea of, I think it's like a, it's a timing thing. Like we've seen this big opening around neuro difference around people, about the celebration of us that like we don't all have to be medicated and assimilated into being this ideal person this ideal youth, this ideal, whatever professional, that we can like step back and kind of deprofessionalize how we view how we show up together and community and Magneto as a symbol for that shows that, like, yeah, it's not easy having this difference, but we can work with it together. And you can be you can be your full, beautiful, different self. In community, you have a role you have something to offer. And one of the things we nuance in the book is that like, yeah, Professor X, that they trust, and they finally or that they finally find an adult saying you're not broken, how important that is for someone who maybe has come from huge trauma, but also, like, let's use Rogue, for example, when I touch somebody they die, like I actually am broken, like in my soul, like I need some help. I need to not just be put into an a uniform and become an elite member to go fight for the state. Like I actually need some care and love and support. So like there's nuance there. I don't mean to just leave people alone in there. But also like, you know, and I think it's just really connected to adult supremacy and how adults can show up and yeah, and the helmet was the goal of the book is, or that essay is that we can we deal with it, adult supremacy to the point where all adults can take their helmet off, who are doing the work because like, I know, I have to wear my helmet because people are constantly trying to tell me that I'm messing my kids up by raising them the way I do.

 chris time steele  

Thank you for that, that was awesome. Thanks for breaking it open. My next question is kind of on intergenerational solidarity and also ties into EMMA Talks, the program that you had put together with some others. You talk about this patriarchal carelessness, and how many events and talks to a horrible job and that's why many women don't agree to do certain talks and how you had some success with EMMA Talks. You also had Helen Hughes in Radiant Voices and it was in Trust Kids, this interview with Helen, and she was part of the Listening House since she talked about listening and voice. Kind of just wanted, that really showed a lot of intergenerational solidarity that talk is really comforting to read. Then also just how that curtails into patriarchy, too, EMMA Talks if you could just talk about those, those two kind of how they dovetail together.

 carla joy bergman  

Oh wow thank you. Yeah, I think there's a few things there. When I started community organizing around creating multimedia works, I right away was like, how do I really bring in youth and children and you know "emerging." Or I think we're always, always always emerging, everybody. You know new writers with what you know, longer term, well seasoned, well known writers in a way that's not tokenistic. And how do I do this in a way that feels generative and pushes against the patriarchal and other gatekeepers around how we share media and talks and our ideas? So I started with a magazine project and one of the ways is, it's the way it's done. So I had youth do the magazine with me. So right away, that's going to disrupt a level of tokenism. And there's older people on part of the collective as well. I think from the first issue I had Matt's kid Daisy, who was 10, at the time, write a piece called Daisy's Rant next to a piece from Noam Chomsky. So like, even like layout is really important, and that was really important. And that Daisy had a voice that was just as important, if maybe not even more important in lots of ways to Noam Chomsky. So yeah, and then whatever. And then so years go on. And then a lot of the times I create things because I face barriers. Personally, I have speech apraxia I have a learning disability. Writing is really hard for me, speaking publicly was like, I couldn't even talk in front of a room of six people. So being in collectives is really hard for me always, because I didn't like the tyranny of the round. I would just die. I'm somebody who would never have given a TED talk, I was asked to do one of those smaller TED talks I was like no way. And so I was like, what? So I'm always interested in the conditions and we talked about this as anarchists a lot, right? If the conditions are such things will flow, right. And so EMMA talks was like, what would work for me to do a talk? And I still didn't do one then. And I wasn't even the emcee. I never ever stood on that stage at EMMA talks, talked into the mic, because I wasn't there yet. But, and so one of the things was, yeah, like, EMMA stands for Engaging Monologues Mutual Aid. So monologues, the person on the stage has the first word and, and the last word, there is no Q&A there is they get to just tell their story. And we created beautiful videos that go with it that are accessible, that close captioning and everything. And so if you're in the room, you got to experience the beauty of the evening. But then part of this was I did with Corin Browne, and she was the director of that part. And she trained young women and gender nonconforming folks on camera, there was four cameras going and really highly produced videos. So it was also like part of the mutual aid was to give the speakers something that they could have to share with the world. We also did the people who came the night of they donated to whoever the speaker wanted to donate to whatever cause or organization. Yeah, and so because we have all been to the talks, where we know who lines up first, at the mic primarily it's cis white men or men, often not with thoughtful questions often just to show that they know, they want to say what they are thinking about the topic or adding to the topic. And what it did, the feedback I got was it gave a lot of the speakers the space to go a different route with their work, because they knew they weren't going to get interrupted, they knew they were going like, like, could be vulnerable. I don't really want to name names, but like one of them said, like, they usually wouldn't do that talk that they did, because they are always so emotional after it's about their child and they cry, and they have to go to the green room after and just be alone or be with their people. But if they had to do a Q&A after forget about it, so they wouldn't ever do that talk. So that's an example of how it broke that open. I feel like you had it at an add on.

 chris time steele  

Just the other part was Helen Hughes and intergenerational solidarity.

 carla joy bergman  

So it's like, giving a platform or a space for women, for folks who maybe don't always get the space to talk. So that's like one side of it. But the the other part was listening, like creating space for listening in this really cool, different way. And I learned a lot about how to truly listen to young people from Helen. She was one of my main mentors. She was the founder of Windsor House, a publicly funded democratic free school that ran for 48 years or something in Vancouver, really important for because it disrupted capitalist models because it was free. It's part of the system. And she just really listens in a way that's profound. And I think, like one of the, it was, it was interesting, like, the feedback from men, cis men who came to EMMA talks was like, wow, you created a space where like, I had to really get uncomfortable with the fact that I wasn't going to be talking like I had to like, listen, I know. But I liked it. I like the feedback. I guess. I guess the thing with Radiant Voices and why that book happened as an outgrowth of EMMA Talks is the publisher actually asked me if she could do a book based on the EMMA Talks, and I thought that was really kind but like, I really care about who has access, who gets to tell stories. So I wanted to invite other folks in who would never stand up on the stage. Right. So we did weave in eight of the EMMA talks into that book, but then I asked, I asked 12 new folks to participate in the book, and one of them was Helen.

 chris time steele  

I really love one of her quotes in the interview you did with Helen where she says, "Move toward the trouble it rarely goes away on its own".

 carla joy bergman  

That's beautiful. Matt had that was also a thing at the Thistle, like, go towards the trouble, or Klee Benally has a term he calls the anti retreat. He first spoke about it at a social spaces summit that he came to, from his space that he ran, runs and ran, had a lot to do with youth, Indigenous youth and media production. And yeah, if something came up, if conflict came up on the collective or, like, instead of retreating from each other, they called it the anti retreat like you actually go towards the trouble. You don't, you don't retreat from it. So I really love that.

 chris time steele  

That's great. The documentary Common Notions is so powerful. I was wondering if you could talk about, you already kind of talked about this documentary a little bit, but maybe the documentary and the trip that you all took to Mexico, and the interviews that you all had with Gustavo Esteva, who I want to say rest in peace to. You actually dedicate Trust Kids to Gustavo. His interviews were so deep. It seemed a spirit of collectivity and real community were huge themes there. I just wanted to give a little space for you to talk about that trip, talk about Gustavo and really just how he really highlights friendship throughout those interviews.

 carla joy bergman  

Yeah, thank you. I'm so sad that he passed this year. That was the first time I met him when we went there in 2012. I made that film with Corin Browne, who I did EMMA Talks with, and a bunch of the youth from the collective came from the Thistle. We got to spend time in his home and he shared all his thinking and ideas with us, a lot of them are rooted in Ivan Illich's ideas, he challenges me, he continues to challenge me. He, you know, I would, he could always notice the one word that would undermine my whole statement. So I often sent him work I really, really miss him. You know, like, if I said, I think in like Making Kin, the pamphlet I did I think in the beginning I say, systems of care or something and he messaged me and said, I think you mean webs of care. Why would you want a system? You know, like, I just I don't know, I mean, maybe you come a bit close to that, Chris, but like, I don't have anyone else in my life. I mean, I mean, Nick a little bit too, but like nothing like Gustavo and he did it with such delight and conviviality and friendship at the heart of it like it never felt harsh. It always felt deeply, deeply care centered, and friendship centered, the embodiment of like, carla, like, I know, you mean something else? And I'm gonna help you in this moment. So really, one of the last things we did together was, he cowrote an essay in Trust Kids with his two friends, Madhu and Dana, it's so good. They wrote one of my favorite papers of all time about liberating from pedagogy, and a very anti pedagogy piece, which I'm in line with them and deprofessionalism and all that stuff. But I asked them for their bios, and Madhu sent this really flowery, fun, playful bio, she's a philosopher of education at Penn State University and has cowritten a few books. And she just sent a really playful, joyful bio and Gustavo got back and said, oh, my God, Carla, you need to change my bio, it needs to be more playful. And I was like, okay, well, here's mine. And we all did really playful bios together and Dana got in there and the four of us had this really uplifting, joyful, playful encounter for Trust Kids, and it was like the last emails I had with him. So I mean, I'm so grateful and just heartbroken. But I feel like I didn't answer any questions. I really, really grateful for the space to talk about him. A really big memory, of course, is that you and I got to have a Zoom session with him about some work we're doing together that hopefully we'll put out and because he just dropped so many incredible ideas and information for us both to to live with and be with. So I'm grateful for that. I miss him. He would have really understood what the book is doing and what it was about. Yeah, I don't I don't know that the movie would have been nothing without him like to come back to Common Notion like literally that that film he was so integral and the reason why we went there I need to say is that both Matt Hern and Richard Day who we interviewed for the movie earlier on both said in our interviews, you need to go to Mexico and talk to Gustavo. So it was like within the making of the movie that that trip happened.

 chris time steele  

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing those stories and thanks for letting me be part of talking to Gustavo too. That was an honor. Kind of what you were saying about how he gives you those suggestions reminds me of that radical honesty that bell hooks always talked about too, or critique as a way of love, or just different ways of just interacting in a kind of way.

 carla joy bergman  

Yeah, I feel like bell would would have been that friend too. That would have sent like, you don't mean to use that word.

 chris time steele  

This is my last question and basically this question is about sci fi and you, your influences. I see Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler is present, they're present in all your work you do, and also was wondering about your future explorations in writing fiction and sci fi. You have a new essay coming out or a story coming out on Baba Yaga. That's already out in a zine by Dani. So I was just wondering if you could kind of talk about on some of these ruminations of sci fi and you and your exploring writing fiction and sci fi.

 carla joy bergman  

Thanks so much, I don't get asked this very often. That's really nice. Every time I visit Ursula Le Guin, whether it's rereading The Dispossessed or I just finished Always Coming Home. I'm just blown away with how many, I'm gonna use your phrase watered, the seeds she watered by reading her work. Like, I just just, it's all there. It's just like, wow, that had more of an impact than probably any nonfiction book I ever read. I also think she wasn't she was so experimental and not afraid to bring in different worlds and make worlds that like I guess like at the term I think I was like, she's such an incredible time binder. Like she was so good at thinking through time. She must have been a time traveler. I don't know. At least this this just plugged in or something. So yeah, she's really really important. And then Octavia Butler in a different way, influences influences the way I am or think about the world or want to write but and many other writers too, but like definitely Le Guin like, yeah, I don't even know. I know it was her birthday yesterday. It's like, oh my gosh, like Orwell too, I want to give a shout out to Orwell because I think like, I think because Orwell started writing in nonfiction and writing about the world, and then moved to fiction, like I actually feel an akin to him like not that I'm like him, or do what he does, did, but that I understand this desire to be like, ah, I got to just move to fiction because and maybe Ursula and Octavia were just smarter and knew, like, this is the way you can impact people in a deeper way longer than writing your rant in a in a journal or something. But the freedom that comes with writing fiction is just there's just nothing like it. And I know you've dabbled in fiction and you do I think you I would say your songwriting does it too maybe you can speak to this better than I can, because I'm just starting. But there was a freedom in my voice of like, like the true me of what I want to say when I write fiction that is maybe connected more to the ether of ideas of the times. So that's what I think I mean, by time traveler, like the connecting to all the ideas that are floating around, and I'm really excited about, yeah, I'm working on a couple stories. And they're not one genre, like I, that's the other thing, too, is like I needed people who could bust through the gatekeepers a bit. And we're seeing more and more of that, but I'm really interested in like, creative nonfiction, but also like mixing that with fantasy and some magical realism and sort of blending them or busting them up, doing both at once. So I'm trying to do that. And it's hard because you, you know, gatekeepers are pretty there. That's a real thing. Yeah, I have been working on one and like that, I did talk to one of my publisher friends, and they're like, I just don't even know. I don't know how to pitch this, because I don't know what genre it is. Like, oh, no. I'll just have to publish it myself. Yeah, I don't know if that answered your question. But I'd like to hear from you. Because you seem to you have I think more experience than me why you might go into that world in fantasy and

 chris time steele  

Yeah, I guess there's like a freedom in, in fictionalizing things but there's also it breaks a binary, that nonfiction gets stuck in like there's an institutional kind of thing in your back. And when you write nonfiction like, oh, this Western thought of, got to have citations, it needs to be rooted in truth, needs to be verifiable. And those are lies in nonfiction, but they can get stuck inside of you. And when you write fiction, your nonfiction is still there. Like, your stories there. Your friendships, your it's still, it's still autobiographical. So I think fiction breaks down some of these dimensions, but it lets the truth creep in too. So it's kind of it's a magic, you find that in your writing, which I like.

 carla joy bergman  

That's really well said. Thank you.

 chris time steele  

Thanks. I never thought about it thanks for asking.

 carla joy bergman  

But it's true. Like I was trying to think of like, when I write nonfiction, I have all the critics in my head. And it's that it's the institutionalization, it's the like, the lie of Western thought, being there and the linear linear time and that they're, what's the word? teleological that? You know, that things run in linear in a linear way? Whereas when you get into fiction, you get to really disrupt all those ways? Yeah,

 chris time steele  

yeah. Yeah. That's, that's what I find in songwriting. I can, I can describe a vibe or a feeling it's not. It's make many different people or many different situations.

 carla joy bergman  

yeah, you do that. Well. That's amazing.

 chris time steele  

Thank you. Well, thank you for doing this wonderful interview.

 carla joy bergman  

That was fun. Thank you.

 chris time steele  

Thank you for tuning into this episode of the time talks podcast. I want to thank my friend Carla for taking some time to speak with me. Please pick up Carlos newest book, trust kids. It's amazing. Thanks to everyone who shares the show around thanks to awareness for the music. And as Lonnie poplin always said, keep the peace

[christimesteele]

Transcript - Time Talks Ep 43 - Brandon LaBelle on Autonomy, Sonic Imagination, Listening, Acoustic Justice, Bioacoustics, Audism, and Anarchism

chris time steele  00:04

Welcome to Episode 43 of the Time Talks podcast part of the channel zero network. This month I had the pleasure of speaking of Brandon LaBelle. Brandon is a musician, poet, artist, writer, author and theorist who works with question of agency, sound culture and voice. LaBelle is a professor at the Art Academy at the University of Bergen, Norway. Brandon's latest book is Acoustic Justice: Listening, Performativity, and the Work of Reorientation. Some of Brandon's other books are Sonic Agency, Lexicon of the Mouth, Acoustic Territories, and Background Noise. In this episode, LaBelle discusses autonomy, sonic imagination, listening, acoustic justice, bioacoustics, autism, and anarchism. I want to give a special thanks to carla bergman for connecting me to Brandon for this interview, thanks to Awareness for the music. And here's a brief jingle from a fellow channel zero network member

 RansomNotes 00:59

RansomNotes. In our case, an anti authoritarian movie podcast that's going to come out every month. Rising up against the oppressor that you see in hip hop. Let me give you a sample of some of the lyrics they had some of the older ladies among the stockholders quite dismayed. They don't know, got libsyn.com or get them from the channel zero network.

 chris time steele  01:41

Brandon, I'd like to start in 1983. But we don't have to stay there. And you grew up in California, and went to Margate Intermediate School, and you were wearing your Door's shirt. And I was wondering how you were interacting with sound at this time? And when was a transformational moment or process when you started thinking critically about society? ideology, sound? or listening?

 Brandon LaBelle 02:07

Okay, yeah, that takes us back. Yeah, no, that actually is a nice way to begin. And a nice question because I just returned from Denmark where I was participating in a sound art biennial, on the west coast. And for that project, I actually worked with a group of teenagers. And through interacting with them, we basically opened a music club, in an empty warehouse, near the harbor area of the city. And the project really was about reflecting upon teenage life, and reflecting upon how important music culture is, to those teenage years. And so actually, the project really led me to a lot of memories in terms of thinking about, you know, being a young teenager and starting to play drums, when I was 13-14. And playing with, you know, a group of friends and forming a band at that time, and how, how important that was just in terms of not only sort of helping me, you know, become a certain kind of subject or, or an identity, but also to carve out a sort of autonomous space, outside of the family, outside of school, in which myself and my friends, you know, worked at a kind of creative activity that became so much more than just music, but became also about relationships that became very transformative in terms of really allowing us to express, express ourselves in a new way. And to kind of, you know, find a sense of freedom, I guess, defined by ourselves and defined by this kind of sonic musical practice, which clearly also became something very social. So as a band, we immediately started playing at parties and playing at, you know, different dance, dance events. And I think for myself, what was so important as well as all that sort of sense of friendships and relationships was also realizing the power of sound as a social medium. And as a drummer, this becomes very palpable and very direct, in terms of making people move. And the ways in which rhythm and drumming really, really energize a space and really change the way people are behaving together and bring them into this kind of sonic imaginary space, you know, something that you know is there in an environment in a space but It opens up a totally another way of being in that space. So these years of 1983-1984 was, I guess, when all of that was starting. And certainly that led me into, again, sort of realizing, you know, sound as a very special kind of medium and a special kind of, force.

 chris time steele  05:20

Awesome, thank you for sharing that story. And along with, with sound, and community, and kind of that social imagination, or sonic imagination, you were talking about, when did you start, like seeing through cracks in ideology, or when you started questioning that there's more going on with society and power structures that weren't necessarily weren't truthful, that you were digging deeper into,

 Brandon LaBelle 05:46

you know, I guess, probably, you know, staying with this, this time period, staying with these early experiences, I think one thing that immediately happened in this is, of course, a very, maybe a very typical story of being a young teenager, once we started to experience something defined by ourselves in terms of the band, and in terms of our music, and how people gathered around that music, you know, made me realize there was a another way of being in the world, you know, another way, another kind of social formation another way of being together, again, that was quite different from, you know, being in the family, being in school, and to realize that we could create something, you know, we could create something. And once we did that, you know, immediately, you start rubbing against a social structure that also maybe, maybe feels threatened by what you're doing. So certainly, as a teenager, maybe we experienced a lot of tension with authority, a lot of tension with, you know, the, the structures around us, you know, that wanted to be sure we were, we were staying on track, as young as young boys. And so you know, and it was funny, because we never really thought of ourselves as rebellious or as being against society, really being against anything, we just were doing our music and feeling, you know, that that that was, you know, what we wanted to concentrate on, but through doing that, yeah, then we then we confronted a certain kind of response and a certain kind of reaction to that, which in doing so kind of, sort of criminalized us, you know, suddenly we were rebellious, we were kind of troublemakers, you know. And so then I think once that happens, you start to realize that there is a kind of ideological situation going on, or that you are encountering a social structure or social ordering, dynamic, that then requires a kind of way of navigating a way of negotiating a way of maneuvering through that. And I think being an artist really helped me do that, or it kind of, you know, became a path for staying with what I felt was really important in terms of a kind of creative position, and finding the vocabulary, finding the tools, the knowledges, that could help me along the way, in terms of staying with that. Staying with or negotiating those frictions.

 chris time steele  08:35

I love that answer. Yeah, it's when it's it's really surprising when there's just a even a small aberration, how state and power structures will push back quite quickly, when you're not going with dominant tonalities, to use one of your terms, then it exposes larger gashes and the systems, I like that.

 Brandon LaBelle 09:00

Very true, Chris, very true.

 chris time steele  09:03

You've been opening my mind more and more with your reading. So thank you for the work you do. But wanted to stay on kind of that topic of concerts, or performing. And this may relate to your early concerts when in the 80s to conferences and stuff that you do now. And it was kind of a feeling of an ecology of feeling and vibes. Like how sound vibrates us at concerts? And I was wondering, can you talk on how that's a communal experience and cause I I feel there's a circuitry as an artist, when when I perform I've been a rapper for about 15 years and I've definitely performed for lots of floorboards and dust bunnies all around the country. And when I do that, I'll feel drained, depressed and hopeless, sometimes after performing but in front of a large crowd, we've opened up for big artists in a sold out crowd, and they're really loving the music, there's a circuit, and we're all energized after that. And I was wondering if you could speak to that, and with your studies and your experiences,

 Brandon LaBelle 10:17

interesting to hear about your, your experiences, Chris, no, I can also identify, playing, you know, performing in front of many different kinds of situations and crowds and contexts. And I think, for myself, I also really, I think, I like all that diversity as well, you know, from from the empty, empty club, to the, to the packed club, and maybe in a way, also moving from, you know, starting off very much as a musician, as a drummer. And then moving more into art, and moving more into being a sound artist, or an experimental musician, was also a little bit about feeling that I felt more, you know, kind of interested in all in all the diversity that that presented, like, for instance, I guess, as a musician, you know, the clubs started to feel very repetitive, and the structure in which one gets on the stage and performs for, you know, a set, you know, felt very, you know, very structured and very defined and didn't really vary too much from club to club. And from state to state, it started to feel, you know, a bit the same and not to belittle that in any way, I still, you know, feel that's very powerful, and a very important circuit, you know, and structure to work in. Moving into being an artist, I felt maybe more along these lines of ecology, as you point out, which is to say that there's many different kinds of elements that are active within an artistic situation. For instance, you know, that working in an array of kind of spaces or environments or contexts in which the encounter with others is much more varied, I felt, so being able to kind of like, maybe even as you say, from concerts, to conferences, and all the in between kinds of things that can happen has been certainly a focus for me, and to sort of cultivate and craft sort of hybrid, hybrid practice, across artistic and academic work and from research to material practices from the institution to the non institution. And I think through that, I definitely like you, I've experienced so many amazing exchanges with other people, so many moments of feeling like we are doing something together, and we are doing something very special. And we are sort of finding our way into sort of, you know, uncharted or kind of less defined, or scripted ways of being together that feel very rich and very affirmative. So I think many, much of this, I still feel even though at times I may not be working with sound or like directly, or for instance, performing with sound, I feel like my experiences with sound and my understanding of sound informs how I approach people and how I approach being a creative practitioner. And making these kind of situations with other people. I think sound and listening really helped me aim for those kinds of ecologies that they're speaking about in terms of nurturing and facilitating, and, you know, kind of fostering social formations that can be transformative.

 chris time steele  13:50

And from seeing the pictures of a few of your events such as Magic Block and Radio Memory. They look so collaborative, and you have other people involved with sound and like you said, it's not the typical structure of like, a hierarchy of a concert or something where there's people below and then there's the, you know, cult of  personalities on stage, talking down to people. Instead, you're, you're kind of taking you're creating an ecology with a lot of your events, which is which is awesome. And what which is what comes through in the pictures I see and it looks like a moment for people to engage with each other and in in the in those art projects, which is really inspiring and cool to see. One of my next questions is on kind of like what are some of your favorite examples of disrupting distributions of who is heard, and tying that kind of in that's a riff, I guess that terms intended with. Jacques Ranciere who you were talking about in Acoustic Justice and you also tie that in with the rhythm of power, with Roland Barthes, and I was just wondering, like, what are some examples you like, of maybe renegotiating the rhythm of power, or disrupting distributions of who is heard?

 Brandon LaBelle 15:10

Thank you, Chris. Let's see. I mean, one of the things that I immediately opened up with in the publication Acoustic Justice is the example of the uprisings in Beirut, which happened, started almost two years ago now, in the end of 2019. And in a way, it's not necessarily a outstanding example or anything, I mean, we can certainly point at other situations in which uprising against the sort of, you know, established government structure by, you know, by the people or by movements of people, often, you know, enact or sort of find traction or find the capacity for such uprising, through a sonic, sonic register for his help ways in which sound can contribute to those uprisings, you know, from anything from, you know, the capacity to make noise on the streets, to even enacting also forms of silence, in which groups of people can come together in different ways in new ways. So exactly that disrupting these dominant tonalities, or the ways in which existing systems shape and distribute sound or distribute, or partition, what is heard, and what is not heard. All those things in which sort of movements of people often challenge and immediately disrupt. And what happened in Beirut is one to a journalist from Al Jazeera, he actually kind of coined it or dubbed the uprising, the open mic revolution. And one of the things he was pointing out was the relationship to media channels. So many of the television and news channels that were reporting, which are often quite controlled by existing political and religious structures, started to kind of hand their microphones over to people. So there was a moment in which the reporters, you know, were reporting on the streets, and then maybe in a sympathetic moment, started to just, you know, let people say things, and this, you know, this was part of that, that disruption and sort of outstanding aspect of it, that led this journalist to talk about the open mic revolution. And that's clearly a kind of example of the importance or the the ways in which interrupting or intervening within existing tonalities or distributions of the heard, really, in a way also contribute to social movements and contribute to people feeling a sense of agency or the capacity to intervene within an existing situation. So this can also maybe be complemented with another example. I was always very struck by within the situation in Istanbul, for instance, in 2014. If I remember the Taksim Square uprisings and occupations in Istanbul, there was a performance artist Erdem Gündüz I believe his name is Erdem Gündüz, who in response, he started standing in the square silently. So, suddenly this this man appeared standing facing the Atatürk Cultural Center and doing nothing, you know, standing silently and people were in you know, occupying the square, there was this protest going on, there was a lot of activity. And suddenly people started to notice this single individual standing, and it quickly caught on and people started to copy him suddenly, you know, this this silent gesture, really, you know, kind of had an amazing sort of effect. And suddenly there was these demonstrations happening of groups of people standing silently facing government buildings facing civic spaces and environments and you know, so this kind of silence that was so charged and so, you know, without even saying anything became meaningful, I find also to be you know, a disruption that, you know, as you say, also can be thought of as something that counters the rhythms of power. You know, if you think of the rhythms in which things are also structured or maintained, but also the rhythms of protest that often, you know are very loud, you know, that often are very outspoken, that are very much about speaking out and being heard. I really appreciated this gesture and what it meant to in terms of opening up a completely different way of understanding power or ways of countering power. That became extremely effective.

 chris time steele  20:31

Thanks for sharing those examples. And I really liked the open mic revolution that you wrote about it, it made me think about on one end kind of reminded me of Studs Terkel's work on just interviewing in the book Working, where he just interviewed like, working people. And it really showed how a lot of people were radical and desired freedom. And it also made me think about the filmographer and artist Arthur Jafa, who talks about the violence of the camera, and how when the lens is on someone, they can see it, and it changes them. And it can freeze some people, and made me think about the nuance of the microphone in the open mic revolution, and how the microphone can be something that can be very violent. And it can also be cathartic. And it also has the opportunity to ask questions, and invite listening and healing. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the nuance of the microphone,

 Brandon LaBelle 21:32

That's nice, for sure to think about that. I mean, just this past week, I was in in Norway, where I'm teaching at the University of Bergen. And I was running evening, an evening a series of evening sessions called the Pirate Academy, from which I started this, this semester will continue. And at the Pirate Academy, we really tried to experiment with ways of, of teaching new ways of teaching ways of interacting with students and, and bringing in different forms of practice, different guests to give input. And one of the guests that I invited, Karen Werner, who is an artist, and a PhD student in Bergen, is working with radio. So she's very dedicated to community forms of community radio, forms of pirate radio, forms of micro radio, we're really using radio as an artistic and also communal practice or medium. And for her presentation, she, we were in an auditorium kind of seminar room. And she basically set up a transmitter, we sort of made a radio station in the auditorium, had a table with four microphones, and a transmitter, and then some radios in the room and also out of the room in the hallway. And they said, just turned the transmitter on and invited students to sit at the table and test it out, you know, just come into the space of radio, and speak into the microphone, and put on headphones, so they could hear their own voice, and they could hear the voice of the other people speaking. And it was kind of an amazing transformation, you know, that happened. Suddenly, this radio space really opened up. Even though you know, we were all just in the same room. And students, we had just been kind of talking beforehand. But once they sort of came to the microphone, and entered this kind of structure, another kind of conversation started to emerge, it was really, actually surprising and totally unexpected. They, the students, I mean, they started talking about lots of things, and it became extremely intimate kind of, on one hand, it was sort of became a bit confessional with students really speaking about things that are really troubling them, things that they're wondering about, about life and about gender roles, and about their experience as a student. And then it opened up into, you know, other kinds of reflections Well, about what they could do as an artist in their life. And it also became very funny, and there was moments where they just started also playing music and laughing and sort of, and it was just kind of great to see that sort of the way they're energized and then how the microphone, you know, really opened up another. Yeah, another way of thinking and being together and talking together, that I was really it was really quite clear to see how this, I don't know this, this, in this case, this radio system, you know, really kind of changed, changed their sense about themselves. And also maybe also brought in a kind of intensity around speaking. But really they had something to say and that they were saying to each other, and they were being heard and, and they were really getting involved in in dialogue. So I think on some hand, maybe this is an aspect of the microphone, when the microphone is suddenly there. I mean, as you say, it can be violent, it can be invasive, but it sort of also invites or kind of requests, a kind of engagement and, and kind of maybe reflection and a seriousness maybe about what it is we say. So this kind of maybe it could be something to think about.

 chris time steele  25:45

Yeah, I really liked that intentionality that the transmitter created. And there was one part that you wrote about on transmission, and you say "transmission, in short, is a deeply complex process of imagining otherwise", I think that really fits into that story you were sharing. Thank you. This next question is about bioacoustics and climate catastrophe. And I wanted to quote a part of that you wrote from Sights of Sound. And you say "this street as a space haunts the very buildings which reside on its edge for the street is unpredictable, existing as a possible chaos an order always in the process of undermining itself." And to put this into context. I was thinking about the recent floods from Louisiana, to New York and Philly, from Hurricane Ida. And there was this really visceral image in Philly of the highways being turned into canals of water that were 13 feet high. And I was reading Sites of Sound at this time, and I was wondering if you had any just ruminations on bio acoustics and climate catastrophe? And how spaces are rapidly changing, and have been changing?

 Brandon LaBelle 27:06

Yes, thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, the question of the bioacoustic is something that I started, or maybe only recently kind of opening up. I mean, it sort of exists as a as a topic or as a field of study related, for instance, studying animal communication, or animals signaling, the ways in which ss humans, we communicate acoustically, or audibly, and I've kind of been sort of wanting to move it also, in relationship to questions about bio power, and about bio politics. So thinking how sound relates to life, and even conceptualizations of life by way of sound. And also hearing. So in the Acoustic Justice, publication, I sort of, I sort of explore this in relationship to the legacy of, or to the experience of deafness and Deaf culture. So thinking the bioacoustic there, as the ways in which the hearing world understand the Deaf world, or as as understanding and it's kind of not hearing, and therefore, often at times a bit less than human. So there's a kind of question of repression there a question of, even colonialism as some Deaf studies scholars would say, so the bioacoustic is something I'm sort of wanting to pose as a framework to talk about this relation between sound and life, between how we understand being human through sound or through the experience of listening. So this is something that may lead us to questions about the more than human and about ideas of ecology and, and climate catastrophe, and maybe sort of approaches to that through a sort of framework of sound and listening. And one of the things that certainly has been talked about in sound studies and many other scholars from the, you know, from starting with acoustic ecology in the 1970s, in which you know, a lot of attention is on the effects of sound on environments. That of course, include not only human subjects, but many other creatures and many other living entities. So I'm always very interested in and curious how you know, sound and listening as frameworks as, as materials as, as capacities can also connect us, of course, away from our human centric perspective and human centric sense about the world, so we hear, of course, so many other things that are not human, we hear things, you know, we hear animals, we hear the wind, we hear all these elements that we can understand as voices, if we want to, again, without sort of making them human, but understanding this vitality, and the kind of ways in which the world is animate, and living. And so often listening, can be posed maybe as a way of honoring those connections, and a way of deepening those connections that maybe can help us when we start thinking about the climate. And we start thinking about climate catastrophe and climate crisis. And many scholars kind of refer to listening in that way to say, in a way to ask us to listen, of course, to our environments, to listen to the rhythms of the world of the planet, to extend our attention towards a broader set of voices, to appreciate the polyphony of planetary life, all these things that you know listening is sort of posed as enabling, and that can maybe guide us towards, you know, finding, you know, another sort of way of, of treating that planet. So I'm very struck by that and very interested in that conceptualization of listening. And I think within bioacoustics, we can we can maybe start to elaborate that we're kind of given a certain materialization. If we think, again, in a broader sense about what life is. And if we think that acoustically what are the kinds of arrangements we might make to to allow for you know, those kind of interconnectivity and interdependencies to, to guide us to lead us in terms of how we how we do end up living life.

 chris time steele  32:08

I love that answer, thank you. It gives me a lot to think about and, you know, just noise pollution and ecosystems, and just so many things that intersect with what what you're talking about. Then the next question, I wanted to talk about your chapter Deaf Attention, since you already touched on this. And you had mentioned Paddy Ladd, on colonialism, and how it's at work with histories of deafness, for example, with governments calling sign a non language, and just the horrible history of the treatment of those communities, and still bad treatment of those communities. And you mentioned in Acoustic Justice, how untethering hearing from the ableness of an ideal listener, I was wondering if you could talk more about audism and audio supremacy. And since this is a podcast, one way I've been working to, to fight against the audism of a podcast is having transcripts of the episodes. And I was wondering if you could speak of other ways sound is articulated, as you mentioned, through feeling movement and visualization.

 Brandon LaBelle 33:22

Yeah, thanks. This is, of course, a really important topic. And I think for myself, you know, I really tried to address it within within the Acoustic Justice project, I think also on a very personal level in terms of, you know, recognizing that, you know, as a, as a scholar, as a, as an artist, working in the field of sound studies, you know, that it's important to maybe reflect upon the tendency to assume things, you know, assume that we are addressing a hearing world. And that, you know, we talk about sound as a very important, very important topic, that we also have to recognize the limits sound, you know, in the limits of how we position sound. So, I think I wanted to intentionally a little bit upset and complicate my own my own thinking my own assumptions. And so, that was a really important research and writing to kind of try to follow and get further into Deaf studies, scholarship and to learn from it. So the the legacy of audism, of oralism and audio supremacy these are of course, your very strong topics and histories that are you know, I think important to to reflect upon, in doing sound studies. But I think it helps, you know, complicate again, that story of what sound offers us and how we also understand what it means to hear so exactly that you know, kind of you know, in getting into Deaf studies and sort of following many of the researchers there, you know, became quite apparent and clear. That hearing, you know, can be conceptualized in different ways. So rather than understand deafness as being without sound, this is, of course, this is actually not true at all. So learning about that and the ways in which sound is experienced by Deaf individuals by Deaf communities, you know, whether that's a question of feeling, sound feeling, vibrational qualities of sound, or even understanding that sound is a visualization as well, or that it's, you know, in seeing the leaves move. There's also a sense in which one hears that, even if one hasn't technically heard before, through the, through the ear, you know, the, you know, many, many Deaf scholars and individuals will speak about this or will refer to the sense in which listening is very present in terms of what they see, even in terms of communicating across a room, for instance, the capacity to, of course, gesture and sign, and sort of animate things around is often you know, referring to a sense of, of hearing, something that you can say, immediately extends our sense about what communication is. So there's lots of moments in which this becomes a, you know, a kind of wonderfully elaborated story about listening. And there's one artist that I mentioned in, in the chapter, Christine Sun Kim, who is an American artist, but based here in Berlin, she's a Deaf artist. And she's been working with sound specifically in a way to also challenge and sort of interrupt a little bit, the field of sound art and sound practices by introducing this Deaf perspective. And so often, some of the things she does is about visualizations of sound. So even so far as to think, the score itself, the musical score, as a visualization of sound, so making scores or extending the score, and the kind of graphic languages of scores, to sort of listen visually, or to hear, you know, hear the graphic language. These are things that I think can help us exactly appreciate, you know, the kind of extensiveness in which hearing and listening happen and take place. And that I think, in doing so, can certainly, I think, help us appreciate deafness and a new way. Certainly, if we kind of embrace the, you know, the work being done in honoring the diversely abled, you know, and sort of changing that vocabulary to kind of, you know, elaborate also how we understand the human subject and our sensorial capacities. So I tried to contribute, I think to that, to that project in the chapter.

 chris time steele  38:20

Thank you for thank you for that answer. And sharing those stories. And that was a great way to end the book on Acoustic Justice and thank you for that. My my next question was wondering what is your relationship with anarchy or anarchism, or listening in anarchism as a form of caring, challenging hierarchy and power systems? I see that a lot in your work. I see that also with listening. Like digging more into your work, you had discussed the you discuss prisons a lot, pirate radio. And these are some aspects of, of anarchist work such as prison abolition, or you discussed the detainees held on the Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, and also the squat community in Madrid, and I just see threads that may fit into that and was wondering your thoughts on on that topic?

 Brandon LaBelle 39:15

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's, I think it's something that is is lurking in the work and is is present also in my artistic practice. I've been very, very, I mean, even going back to these early memories that we started with, in terms of the ways in which the band becomes a self organized, anarchic unit that I think immediately, you know, challenges or or kind of organizes itself in a way that is very much in keeping with certain a kind of anarchic perspective or position. I mean, I think early on, I learned I learned from that I think I pretty much to carry that with me, even for instance, now in the Pirate Academy in terms of understanding my role as a teacher, creating an environment in which students are very much given agency and invited into a framework of a kind of horizontal framework is a very kind of important to me. And, and I very much see sound and listening as participating with it within or being like a medium or material or a way, a relational capacity, you know, that really puts us into an opportunity for, for caring for each other for, for creating situations of, you know, kind of doing it together in a way kind of kind of communal collective efforts in which, you know, sound and listening help, they help in terms of what I might think of as always interrupting subjectivity, I think sound and listening are very, I think of them as very interruptive in a very productive sense. The way that sound, of course, is something that, that comes into us, that comes about us, that is often quite uncontrollable, that is again, not always human, that is kind of enigmatic in terms of not really knowing for sure where it's coming from the origin of the sound, but the way that sounds are immediately, kind of, on top of other sounds. So there's this kind of ongoing compositional noise event that is always coming at us coming around us. And in doing that, maybe sound teaches us, you know, how to be interrupted, how to be exposed to others, and how to work with how to collaborate with others, that aren't always of course, the same as us. And that, you know, introduce other kinds of meanings introduce other information, other desires, so I think sound, you know, really teaches teachers how to collaborate. In that sense, if we, if we kind of embrace it, if we embrace that, that moment of listening, as specifically, what, what interrupts us and then interrupting us also kind of fulfills us, if we think that our project as as persons is to, is to be together is to live together, then listening certainly fulfills that in a very bold and dynamic way, by always leading us into a sense of having to be present, you know having to be present and attuned to those who are around us, and how that is, of course, always changing. And it's a dynamic force. And so how to develop the skills and the ways of practicing that listening. So that becomes a very productive and generative and rich story of you know, being in the world and being in the world together. So I think this kind of relationship to anarchism is there in that sense, you know, in terms of that we, we do this together, and we do it in a way that's also a kind of social adventure, that is not always so scripted, not always defined by others, that isn't authoritarian, that requires everybody to take responsibility and to engage with each other in a caring and careful manner, in terms of what kind of world are we are we making, and we're kind of perpetuating, so I think they're, I mean, there's a there's a lovely article by Jamie Heckert, that I can refer to kind of an ethics of listening where he bases his thinking on anarchism, I think it's called listening, caring, becoming, that I have referred to. And there I think this is also a nice, beautifully articulated article connecting anarchism and listening. So I think there is something, something there to be appreciated.

 chris time steele  44:21

Indeed, that's from, you discuss Heckert's work at Sonic Agency, is that correct?

 Brandon LaBelle 44:27

Yes, that's right.

 chris time steele  44:28

Great, great work. So thanks. That's where I heard about Heckert's work too. Yeah. And yeah, you can make a great point on just listening and caring. I'm speaking from US culture where a lot of our media is taught on what you should consume. And a lot of things that are highlighted are really attacking listening. And even with social media and those things and it's it's just a great disruption and to really highlight caring and listening and attentiveness to others. My last question was when I was kind of telling you about my experience with thinking more about podcasts, and it really came out more when I was reading your book, Acoustic Justice on Judith Butler, and performativity. And I was hanging around some social media influencers. And I had noticed that they really weren't asking other people questions or talking to them. And then as soon as they went live on their Instagram Live, they started talking to all their followers, like, hey, how's everyone doing? How was your weekend? And it made me think about kind of that mixed with podcasts on are we creating a form of like, performative listening? Or it is, is that something you've ever seen in your research or thought about, because I've noticed that maybe necessarily, someone who would not communicate with someone on the street or even a friend, they may have a podcast and when they hit record, they become kind of this performative listener. And I was wondering if that's something maybe of technology or just of culture of my friends joke around of kind of like listening for clout or something like that of something that has developed from maybe social media or consumer based culture?

 Brandon LaBelle 46:21

Well, thanks for sharing that. It's interesting because often of course, we think or another kind of perspective that might be put forward is that the ways in which technologies and social media and digital networks can also jeopardize listening there's also this kind of argument or perspective that you know, we're always tapping away on our phones or always connected to some network or sort of losing our immediate engagement with who was around us and you know, being present in you know, in the spaces that we inhabit in real life or these kind of like perspectives so it's interesting and nice to hear you kind of position listening within the framework of social media and to kind of appreciate that as an arena in which listening is performing and then people are speaking and listening to each other. So I take I take that as a positive positive view that it's all not falling apart around I mean, I guess for myself Yeah, I mean, this is Yeah, maybe something to reflect upon. Sounds like also maybe from your own experience, you know that you you have this this you know, you have this experience and this kind of perspective, which is really great to hear about I mean, I guess one of the things that maybe I also want to maybe emphasize maybe we could think around that as well as is of course listening you know, is always you know, there is this kind of great way in which it participates within human communication you know, as we've talked about, it's so vital to you know, to engaging with each other and to learning from each other and you know, if we think also anything from from friendships to to diplomacy you know, the importance of listening and then you know, at the same time I mean I'm also really really fascinated and interested and think it's so important to appreciate how listening you know, going back to this understanding of interruption and this this also relates a little bit to the mention that you were mentioning of transmission earlier how listening also you know, we we encounter the strange through listening and through sound also delivers the inhuman and it delivers this kind of imaginary space of you know, alien life or or you know, all these ways in which sound also, you know, delivers the unrecognizable and the you know the the you know that which also interrupts communication so, of course, noise so, I think this is also to be, you know, appreciated and inserted into the equation or into the discussion of sound and listening and human communication to also appreciate that aspect. And this is something maybe that radio and early early communication technologies brought with it was this relationship to static now there's relationship to noise and, you know, we know that story of like, you know, what's the ghost in the machine you know, and like, what's what's occupying the, the media channels and maybe within this space, The social media space of maybe podcasts as well. I mean, maybe it's interesting and important to, to maybe hang on a little bit to, to noise you know, to hang on a little bit to the alien interruption that comes in and ghosts, the machine that it isn't all sort of so clear and communicative. I mean, maybe this is an element and for instance, we could think, you know, one of the things that I'm a bit critical about or, or kind of worried about sometimes is is the smoothness of our technologies you know, you know, everything you know, we're it's, it's it's so liquid and so can be so smooth, and it makes us feeling that that it's also easy and accessible. And you know earlier you know maybe earlier technologies you know, had a certain kind of there was this you know, I mean there is this glitch, or this moment of breakdown or the circuit doesn't quite work or transmission is broken or there is this material friction that keeps us close to the texture of the real you know, if I don't sound too old fashioned and reminds us that that you know, we are we are bodies, you know that this computer in front of me is is material that someone made, you know, and that comes from the land. It is mineral, and this so the smoothness I think I worry about the smoothness. And so again, maybe this interruption this noise, this moment of breakdown or can help us stay connected to materiality. These are just some some thoughts that come to mind.

 chris time steele  51:46

I love that. Yeah, I've always I've always wished during like a zoom call. There would be some of that rainbow tracking of like a VHS just randomly on someone or my friend who's a sound engineer he always puts like a grungelizer on stuff or a vinyl hiss plugin on like really clean vocals because he wants it to sound like a little grungy a little wrong. And it does, it makes you comforted by that buzz or that humming sometimes.

 Brandon LaBelle 52:16

It's true. Maybe there's this dirtiness. Again, maybe that dirt? You know, we need dirt.

 chris time steele  52:23

Yeah, like the earth, forcing its way into this clean technology back to, to remind us,

 Brandon LaBelle 52:30

yes.

 Brandon LaBell and James Webb  52:32

Now you're going to be doing things down the hall of it, kind of walking, wandering, going in and out rooms and the show this all way we're doing everything. There's a couple monitors on the wall, next to things to listen to. And again, another window, another window. space in the back garden. Mr. Scott Russell, you got to hear it. But it's there. You think about the sound of the wind blowing leaves Boeing, now they touch each other. You think of this here and this whole way, you got to midway doing things. Not really they're not really they're not really at the entrance anymore, but not yet to the end. Kind of right in the middle. Or I am or I'm situated. I'm in the middle here and surprise you here in the middle. I'm just hovering around there. Pointing you this way. And you are and you look out the window. The window that always greets you that always distracts you that always sets you're daydreaming doing things this windows also just pass it for a second, not even really thinking not even really balancing you just keep going. You're on your way to something. You're curious about what's coming. You're looking for what's coming the answer there towards the end of the space pulling you towards the farther away Here we are in this between space but dreaming space non sleeping fully awake kind of daydreaming curious exploring this maze with the tree outside. I follow you on your shoulder you guide me. You are and I can't see anything in front of me. Show me the way. Show me the way.

 chris time steele  59:04

That was the song Hall by Brandon LaBelle and James Webb. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the time talks podcast. Please support the podcast on Patreon if you can, and thanks for all that do. Please check out Brandon's work and music. Thanks to AwareNess for the music and check out the other podcasts on the channel zero network.

[christimesteele]

Transcript - Time Talks Ep 37 - Felicia Rose Chavez on Poetry, Dismantling Patriarchy, Anti-Racist Writing Workshops, Mutualism, Building Power, and Grief

chris time steele  00:06

Welcome to Episode 37 of the Time Talks podcast part of the channel zero network. This month I had the opportunity to speak to Felicia Rose Chavez, along with being an educator and professor, Chavez is an activist, writer and author of the book The Anti Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative C lassroom. In this episode, Felicia Rose Chavez spoke about poetry, dismantling patriarchy, anti racist writing workshops, mutualism, building power and grief. Thank you to awareness for the music. And here's a brief jingle by fellow channel zero network member.

 Silverthreads 00:41

still walking, still waking is co hosted by me carla bergman, and me Eleanor Goldfield. This is where we interview long term organizers and radicals about their watershed moments, what they've learned along the way and how they maintain their hope on this path, dreaming and building emergent worlds for a present and future anchored in justice and freedom for all because there are forks in the road. But they all lead us home to the fight to the build

 chris time steele  01:38

You wrote about the influence of June Jordan's Poetry for the People. I wanted to read an excerpt from it because I feel your book does this just so much as well and your writing. I read all of your, most of your short stories and essays that I could find online as well which were just so powerful. She writes, "poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair and build revolution in which speaking, and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter." And building on top of this, I was wondering if you could speak on a transformational moment. I don't know if this goes back to when you went to Albuquerque Academy, or after it or before or maybe it's a process, a moment that radicalized you to interrogate the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy further, but to also fight against it, but also building outside of it?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  02:48

That's a powerful question. I don't believe that it's any one moment. I mean, I think there are shocking moments that we lived through, that we can point to and remember, by the narrative that I've had the opportunity to reflect on is one of consistent lived experiences that I like to think of as splinters right, they just kind of splinter under the skin where you're like, something's not right about that. That's not, is it just me, am I being crazy? Am I being overly sensitive, or why being too critical? And it happens again, and again, and again, until something's just like so much in your face that you can't, you can't deny it anymore. And you have a choice to make, you know, do I, you know, shake my head walk away, talk about it later, rant privately with my friends, my parents, my partner, or do I take action against it. And I think it took me many, many years to finally commit to that action. First through proper channels. You know, like in graduate school, I was petitioning for change and working on academic committees, working with faculty to create my own class. And nothing happened as a result of that. I mean, it was a lot of extra labor with no real fruit. So it took me writing down my own experience on the page and being vulnerable, and saying, hey, you know, I'm going to I'm going to count these splinters, I'm going to take them out one by one. And that started as early as, you know, elementary school where you're like, ah, why am I being treated differently as a student of color, you know, and then throughout middle school in high school, as you said, I went to a private predominantly white school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And by that senior year, I was furious. The context of college changed everything. You know, when I when I saw how easily my peers kind of transitioned into higher education, as though it were all laid out for them. And it was, you know, it was it was predestined. And for me it was real work, something I had to kind of claw for, and hang on to. So, you know, I guess the ability to articulate what it is that was wrong, presented itself in my teenage years. But it wasn't until later in life in my in my 30s, really where I was able to put it down on the page in a way that felt like I was doing it justice.

 chris time steele  05:36

Your thoughts about that moment were really, blossoming. When you were in Iceland, going back to when you said, when you were in elementary school, I remember you mentioning, in the book or a talk when you handed your husband, something from the third grade, where you were really,

 Felicia Rose Chavez  05:54

He was like, really, we're going all the way back? And I'm like, yeah, we're going all the way back. But that experience of reading, the very earliest rendition of the book was a 10 minute speech, where I just spoke to what I experienced at the University of Iowa as an MFA graduate student in creative nonfiction writing. And then a list of practical strategies that I do now kind of pivoting, from the way I was taught and embracing a new way to teach creative writing in the classroom. And I cried during that speech I stood up and just cried and cried. Because I was saying it. I was, it was my testimony, I was testifying to the people I went to school with and the people who taught me they were in the room. And I was, I was really summoning the courage to say what I experienced out loud, I think so many of us don't, we don't have that opportunity to go back and say, listen, this is what happened to me here. And we need to change so that this doesn't happen again, to your current students and your future students, it was a powerful, powerful moment that I think emboldened me to move forward to write the book.

 chris time steele  07:12

And I really thought the Iceland story was so powerful, because you said in, in one moment, you were so emotional, and cried, because you felt like you were betraying some of these people. But at the same time, when you when you did that, you found that you had so many people on your side, you know, when people were passing around the paper and trying to dismantle the systems that you spoke about was so violent.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  07:39

That was the great surprise of this book. And it happened twice. So once in Iceland, where I'm sobbing, because I think, what are they going to say, you know, and then I get this glorious response as you said from, from both the people of color in the room and the white educators in the room who said, we don't want to, we don't want to replicate this sort of harm. So what can we do to help? You know, like, can we have a copy of your speech? Send it to us, you know, and I thought, well, I could do more than a speech, i'll write on this, I'll really give it everything I have. But in the process of writing, I can't tell you. I mean, it was two years of constant paranoia, I mean, really awful, agonizing moments, day and night, where not only am I dredging up, hard to confront moments from my past and trying to make art out of it, trying to make a message out of it. But at the same time, I'm thinking, this person from graduate school is going to call me a liar. This person who taught me is going to is going to, you know, say that I got it all wrong. This person, I mean, I just was constantly thinking of strategies of defensiveness and dismissiveness and denial that has been the signature moves of white supremacy throughout all of our lives, right throughout history, and so I thought how many people are going to shut this down before he even has a chance to speak to anyone? Luckily, before it was published, as we were in the editing phase, a group at the University of Iowa called Black at Iowa Writers came forward and started calling out faculty members by name, specifically one faculty member John Degotta(?) and spoke out against their unfair treatment in the nonfiction writing program. I wasn't hip to it, a friend kind of nudged me to check out this social media account and I cried and cried. Then too, I mean, just out of pure relief, that it was real, that this experience was shared, and that someone was bold enough to come out before me and do this work. And then in an, in a sense, hold my hand and walk me through the process so that I could be brave enough to do it next.

 chris time steele  10:08

Thank you for sharing that story. That's, that's really powerful. And it really shows you that when you have the courage to stand up, that others are going to stand with you, even though they feel so alone. And that vulnerable moment,

 Felicia Rose Chavez  10:20

Absolutely, they didn't know, no one knew that I was working on this manuscript, it wasn't like I kept in touch with the alumni committee. You know, like, you never know, you never know how your work is going to impact someone, how your story, just sharing it aloud, it's gonna impact someone to, to go on and share their own story. And that's the power in in storytelling, right. And so, that was such a relief for me to feel supported in that way and less isolated.

 chris time steele  10:55

I think, another part of your, your writing that has such a liberatory and powerful effect is that you call out these systems as they are by using bell hooks, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. It's, it's right out in the open is, it's not something that some writers try to hide it by talking about systems and things like this and something so refreshing about your work. And you explicitly tell your story, which I feel calls out patriarchy as well. You mentioned how a colleague had to leave, and someone said we don't want to mother, these students and I loved how you reformatted the language. And you made it so powerful of talking about how we are multitudes mothered again and again in rhythm and time. And you talk about in the piece Color Lines about the coop living situation and the racism and patriarchy you had to endure there. From your story, the Brown Line, which just, which would be a simple walk for a man is this horrifying event for you. And for a woman that shows that inside your house, you have sanctuary but you should have that outside as well. It should be your sanctuary, your stories make these be so apparent. And was just wondering if if these tools to dismantle these systems like patriarchy? Is it just in the writing? Or what are some strategies you use to help dismantle or show these systems with students or more in your own writing?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  12:30

Well, first of all, thank you, I feel so heard and seen by that quick analysis. That was really that was wonderful for me. Thank you for, for that quick overview of different works that I've put out in the world. That was really special. Yeah, I think that it takes this reorienting, we're so accustomed to, especially within our educational journeys to say the right thing, to be what ever the person in front of us teaching us needs us to be in order to move forward, move on, get the grade, whatever it may be, right tune out. My practice, at heart, it's about tuning in, it's about doing the opposite, right? It's not about the authority in the room. It's about becoming our own authority. And the more that we can tune in and quiet everything around us, and listen. And the first step is to listen to our fears, and to listen to our insecurities, because that's just another iteration of white supremacy in our brain. So it's just another form of manipulation and control to say, you can't do this, you're not any good at this. Who do you think you are? Right? And sometimes these are the voices within our own families from internalized racism, right? This is who you know, who do you owe your fancy? Who do you think you are? Right? So, so these are, these are the voices that haunt us, but they live there and they're not going away? We just got to acknowledge that that's what that is. And then we move forward and we say, Okay, if I can move past fear, right, what do I want to try? What do I want to risk and failure's okay. So if we just accept the failures, okay, what do I want to try? And when we attempt something, whatever classroom it may be, it doesn't have to be a creative writing classroom. My goal was the anti racist writing workshop, is to couch it in creative writing, but like, please extend it. Right? I'm working with science teachers, I'm working with math teachers and working with history teachers, like extend it beyond, let's activate our imaginations to see how much we can empower students across the academic curriculum. And so we we embolden our students to try something that they're afraid to try and, and then as they're doing it, we ask them to listen. How's it going? check in with yourself? What are you proud of? What, what's really hard for you? What do you want this to be? But it's not yet, right? And we ask questions, encourage students to ask questions of themselves to be their own assessors. And then finally, how did it go? Right? What do you think about what you produced? What do you want to change, if you had an opportunity to change it, go on and try it, right? until they're able to tune in and say, I trust my own voice, I trust who I am, my gut, whatever we want to call it right to be able to go inward and say, I'm going to tune you out right now and listen to me. And I think that is so powerful for all of our students, but especially our students of color, and especially our young women of color, who can say, okay, now I can trust me, I'm going to listen to that voice that tells me this is an unsafe situation. I'm going to listen to that voice that says leave now. Right? I'm going to listen to that voice that says you cannot talk to me. No, thank you. Don't talk to me that way. And I'm going to trust that voice. And I'm going to act on it. So it is, as I said, it's couched in creative writing. But the whole gist of it is, how can we truly embrace our own voices and exercise those voices to create change in our culture?

 chris time steele  16:28

Yeah, I love that answer. And you really talk about boundaries in your in your book as well. And how were you when you were turning 30. And you talked about the trust in yourself and the power of No, and how this helped you fight back against educational and academic trauma that you were experiencing?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  16:46

Yeah, that that was the turn for me, was becoming a mother. And it was a really hard time period in my life. My husband, I was a new mother. And I don't consider myself maternal. And there are some women who are like that I've since learned, you know, are we like, you know, I changed the diaper for the first time when I changed my son's diaper. It was on on the job learning. And, and I had I experienced postpartum depression, probably as a situational and hormonal kind of situation, we had just moved to a new town, my husband took on a new job, he was traveling a lot, I didn't know anybody. And I just remember being in the house a lot. There was this huge wildfire. And so we weren't allowed to go outside for weeks because of the smoke. And so it was just like, contained. And and this, not a good recipe for mental health, for a new mother especially. And it was then that I start I knew I had to speak up. Like I knew I had to start saying what I wanted, what I needed. And so that was a that was a big turn for me. Again, intricately linked with with being a woman.

 chris time steele  18:05

I was wondering on my next question, Is this the kind of two questions they may relate I notice a lot of mutualism in your writing in your pedagogy? How you talk about deep listening, it also reminds me of some of those Zapatista teachings of asking, we walk kind of that we, we learn as we go, and we reflect as we go. But we don't get paralyzed by that fear. I was wondering if if there's a relation with mutualism, with your inspiration for your writing. And it also sees this ties in with Audre Lorde on quote you used, the way we can do is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence at the same time as we are resisting it.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  18:51

I mean, that's, that's the difficulty that presents itself, right is that we're on a learning journey together as educators, those of us who are invested in doing the work, and I'm doing facilitations now all over the country, with elementary, middle, high school, undergraduate and graduate teachers, who are eager to learn that the question comes up again and again, is this the right place to do this work? Can we do this work within the institution? How do we, how do we flourish when the structure is set up so that we fail? And it's a tough question? It's a question that's keeping me up at night. Especially when it comes to our younger students like they're so they're held to a particular learning standard, right? Very strict learning standard. And there's no collapsing that system yet. As one brilliant educator just shared with me the other day on a meeting. He said let's do it anyway. With our with our kiddos with our little ones, let's just do it. Let's Let's lead them through an anti racist writing workshop curriculum. And then they'll become the next generation to overturn the standardized tests and the learning standards that they've been held prisoner to, for so, so long. And I thought that was really exciting, exciting way to think about it, right? How do we, how do we learn along the journey to change the restrictions that we face on a daily basis? Right. And it's, it's reminiscent of that last letter that I include in the book, which is addressed to the reader? And it's something like how do we live racism and mourn racism and fight racism all at the same time, it feels impossible, sometimes it's just, I'm just gonna lie in the bed, be useless, because I'm so overwhelmed by all of this. And then there are other days where you can take on the fight and try to change the system within so

 chris time steele  21:03

are you referring to the Letter to Close? When the police officer was blocking your driveway? This, this may lead to my my next question. And you may have already answered it with I really liked that answer. We're planting the seeds, and the students in the next generations to fight the threat to blossoming that is in academia or just education systems. And this question is of the do you worry about your book being co opted by liberal institutions? As an example, after George Floyd was murdered, we saw many businesses and colleges make statements about white supremacy and racial justice. But at the same time, there's been so many murders since then, of people of color Black, Indigenous communities and Black trans communities. And also with the recent killings of Daunte Wright and now Adam Toledo. My academic institution has been silent as well. Do you worry, the term anti racist writing workshop will be branded but still reproduce the violent and toxic problems that you wrote about?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  22:11

I mean, likely? Likely, I mean, look at, you know, these schools that I'm working with now, quite a few of them preempted, you know, before the book preemptively took on this anti racist initiative. Right, Colorado College, whom I work for, has taken on an anti racist initiative college wide. They're attempting to do the work. I feel, perhaps more so than some of the colleges that I kind of, you know, step foot in, and then and then exit. When I do these facilitations. They're at the very beginning of this initiative, whatever they label it is true anti racist work. I wouldn't call it that. Right. I think that's the term that's popular at the moment. But hey, that's a lot further than what we were three years ago, right? No one was throwing around that term at the college and university level, to the extent that they are now, again, co opting is the right term. I think that they're putting out fires. Because students are demanding again and again and again, that there's change. So I think it's a gesture to address those concerns. The real work happens daily, and college wide. And that's where we get into trouble. Because I think the attitude of many faculty members is, oh, well, we'll just have to wait on so and so's retirement in order to stop implementing harm. Because we all know so and so is, you know, horribly terrible, right? There's this 10 year old system where we have folks who are irresponsibly educating their students, it's hard for me to enter into the Zoom space and do these facilitations when I can see the dismissiveness at play sometimes with faculty. This isn't to say that it's always this way. Sometimes they're very sincere groups who are asking a lot of questions that are very engaged. Sometimes people turn their turn their bodies away from me, they'll roll their eyes, they'll sigh they're clearly doing something else, right. they're required to be there to hear me out or tune me out, whatever it is that they're doing. The University of Iowa just brought me in to do a panel and a public reading, which was a surprise for me, and it was one of the worst couple of weeks I've had since the book came out. I was not eating well, I couldn't sleep. It was reliving a trauma that I hadn't anticipated would be so difficult. For me, and it truly was, and I think that was also damage control. Right? I think it was putting public facing events out to the world to say, Yes, she, you know, she writes about her experience. So look, we're listening to her, will there be change that comes as a result of that I'm not facilitating workshops with those faculty members. And I'm curious if that does happen, right? I don't know. It's disappointing a lot of the time, and I get a lot of hate mail. And you've talked about the gendered politics of this all I mean, there's horribly sexist, as well as racist. And it's discouraging. It's disappointing to hear echoes of these hate messages out of the mouths of professors who are responsible for generations of students, you know, quick to dismiss and deny that racism even exists. It's scary sometimes.

 chris time steele  25:58

I think you made a great point of many awesome points, that just having an anti racist workshop, even if it's not being lived up to it lays this great foundation for it to be called out and put back into place, when it's not being used correctly. By as you said, these students who seeds were planted in optimism of this?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  26:20

Absolutely, I do a facilitation called self advocacy for students. And that's my favorite one to do. Because it's, it's how to hold one another as peers accountable and how to hold our educators accountable. Every time I talk to educators, I say you need to explicitly say it. I teach an anti racist writing workshop, I teach an anti racist econ class, I teach an anti racist history class, like, How can you be so explicit, so as to empower your students to hold you accountable, right, because if you just come out and say it, now you've got to follow through. And, and I want all of our young people to be able to exercise their voices in that way, where they were their reminders, constant reminders to one another, and to their, to their teachers, that they deserve better.

 chris time steele  27:17

I also loved throughout this book that you call out gatekeeping even with, not just within academia, but within these writing groups that these workshops, there's often a lot of gatekeeping that goes on, and I like the you talk about gaslighting, and also the importance of language, all these different things that really cause so much violence, and how you call out words like literary and classical, which are another synonyms for gatekeeper. And I just really love that you I just wanted to highlight that this is so important what you bring out. And when I was teaching political science and history, this was something I was trying to change in my department to stop using words like slave and using enslaved, I had a big fight with my department when I tried to get rid of a Pearson textbook, and try to add Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, The People's Indigenous History of the US.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  28:14

Wow, that was a fight?

 chris time steele  28:16

Yeah, then they told me because I didn't have a PhD. I didn't know about scholarship, that the book was against America and all kinds of things is so horribly racist things and it really reminded me of your story on Shakespeare, but not being a play that was highlighted for just not one time, which became an outrage.

 Felicia Rose Chavez  28:37

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just just earlier today I, a board member at the creative writing studies organization, I just joined, and they put out a call for proposals for conference panels. And I just read the call and noted language in there, like, you know, you must have, you must cite other sources, scholarly sources that support this work, you know, this, this is the same old rhetoric that that we offer one another to maintain this, this domination over who gets the control of the narrative, right. And to me, that's no different from our officers saying, you know, there was a meme that I posted, you know, it's a package of Skittles, it's a gunm a cell phone, it's a gun, a sandwich, it's a gun and then a taser? Oh, no. Right. I got confused. I didn't have you know, a gun is a taser like it's, it's control of the narrative. So, so it extends across our culture. It's not just within academia, but it is shameful, how we use that as as a standard to enforce white supremacy without having to use those words.

 chris time steele  29:56

Definitely. Thank you. This is probably my last question, I want to be mindful of your time, along with your amazing book which I have already recommended it to so many people, the Anti Racist Writing Workshop, I'd like to talk about your other writings as well. And I love Femme Fatal. the great frat boy in the sky, your other writings, how they deal with a field to deal with a lot of grief, Anatomy of a Life is one, the Mindful Birthing. I love that one. I was wondering if you could talk about the piece Memory Loop, which I found extremely personal and powerful and vulnerable. Wondering if you could talk about the process for this piece of was it therapeutic to write? Did it reopen wounds? Or did it help to heal wounds? Or was it a combination?

 Felicia Rose Chavez  30:49

That's That's the one. I feel like all the other writing was just practice, right. I mean, it was just fun. Well, not always fun. But but more experiments. You know, I wanted to try different things with my writing. But that was the very first piece I ever wrote. I taught writing for many years as a way of supporting myself. And I taught writing because I was such an avid reader. And so I think the two go hand in hand and in that I was able to share strategies that appealed to me, as a reader, and relay that but not necessarily coming from a place of a writer speaking to another writer, I thought of myself as a teacher for so many years. And it took needing to relocate to Albuquerque, from Chicago, to go back home and serve as a caretaker, to my parents, my dad specifically, that motivated me to say, well, I'll try. I'll try graduate school, I'll try a writing program, let me dedicate some time to writing. So I showed up for a two week period, I showed up every day, a little bit early to work. And I wrote, you know, maybe 20-30 minutes per day in my little cubicle. And I would write and cry and write and cry. And what I created, I didn't edit I just sent out. And that was the very early version of memory loop. It took me between 10 and 12 years to return to that piece over and over and over again, I did so many different versions of that piece. I mean, the bones are still the same, but I tried reordering it, retitling it, like I mean, I just just adding a ton of research, taking it out. It was the, it never felt right. And once I achieved the draft the current draft, I thought I just knew it. It's like the body knows. It just I just knew it was almost like a sigh of relief. Like I finally did it. And it was, I think, transitioning from this is what happened to me, right, which I think is what we all come to the page as an act of like, release, right, this is what happened to me, I was witness to this, then, you know, this is, let me try to get inside the head of my mother who had experienced great depression. And it's kind of a stunning, shocking depression, which felt out of nowhere, when in truth was years long in the making, once I stepped out of her experience and into my own and really owned my own my own actions, like I'm complicit in this story, I'm not just there watching it happen. I'm involved, and I need to point the finger at myself as well, it needs to be, you know, like, it needed to be way more complicated than I was initially prepared to make it because I had to, I had to process it first. So to make something of it took many, many years. And it taught me something I learned about myself in writing that and coming to terms with my own guilt, as a you know, a participant in in the story. And in that in that few years, you know, 10, 5 years of my mom's life. And I'm really grateful that I didn't settle for that first draft. I'm really grateful that I did that work and went back again and again. Because I think that I needed to teach myself something in that writing.

 chris time steele  34:22

Wow, thanks for sharing that process it's such a powerful piece, you switch from narrative so smoothly. You know, some writers have to use the three stars to show we can do the scene as a new narrative. And then your piece went to so many different avenues that was just so powerful. Thank you for explaining that process.  Thank you for listening to this episode of the time talks podcast. Please check out some other shows on the Channel Zero Network. Thanks to Awareness for the music, please support his music on Bandcamp and please pick up Felicia Rose Chavez's his book out on Haymarket, the Anti Racist Writing Workshop, and check out her other writings. I'll link them in the show notes. See you all next time and free Palestine.

[christimesteele]

Transcript - Time Talks Ep 40 - Melancholy Joy Mixtape ft. carla joy bergman

Transcripts for Time Talks Ep 40 - Melancholy Joy Mixtape w ...

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

song, melancholy, music, joy, talking, people, melancholic, love, feel, listening, thought, big, play, life, hear, playlist, sad, carla, called, sole

SPEAKERS

Tracy Chapman, Pet Shop Boys, Holy Cole, Sade, Burial, Final Straw Podcast, Bobs Your Uncle, Sole, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, SBTRKT (feat. Sampha), Chris, carla, Andre 3000 - Me&My, Time  me, Jason/Maudlin Magpie & produced by A Thousand Vows, chris, Juice WRLD, Nat King Cole., Organized Konfusion

 chris time steele 00:04

Welcome to Episode 40 of the time talks podcast part of the channel zero network. This episode I'm joined by another channel zero network member. My wonderful friend carla bergman. carla is co-author of Joyful Militancy with Nick Montgomery. carla edited the book Radiant Voices and put together the Emma Talks series, and collaborated on the work Pandemic Solidarity. Along with being an author carla is a filmography checkout joyful threads productions. On top of that, check out the podcast carla collaborates on. There's the Silver Threads podcast and the Grounded Futures podcast. These links are in the show notes. For this episode, we had a conversation and put together a playlist on the topic of melancholy joy, sharing some of our stories and the ways we use music to navigate life and living. Thank you to Awareness for the music and here's a brief jingle from a fellow channeled zero network member.

 Final Straw Podcast  00:59

The final straw is a weekly anarchist radio show. It's fucking awesome and you're never gonna hear me say fucking awesome on our show. Because we're FCC regulated, there's a black part of my heart that that just flutters when you when you talk like that. Talk, then more yelling. it's a weird sort of like nice thing in a way but also can get kind of crushing at times the finalstrawradio.noblogs.org

 chris  01:32

I just wanted to begin and say that you're a wonderful writer, poet, curator, conductor, filmographer, author, revolutionary, Joyarchist, artist, kinetic thinker and so much more and just wanted to thank you for doing this Melancholy Joy Mixtape. I was wondering if you could kind of open with what you kind of frame what melancholy joy is? Because when you first mentioned it to me, just the phrase put together a lot of things that in a way that I like sad music and how sad music brought me relief, and how I've been attracted to two minor notes and all that and just the vibe so I really meant a lot to me when you mentioned it to me.

 carla joy bergman  02:14

That's really nice. It's an honor  to be here. Thank you. And I would repeat all that back to you, that you are too - kinetic thinker and Joyarchist, and all that.. thank you means a lot. I'm a bit nervecited as the My Little Pony say, Just give me a second. Yeah, if it's okay if I can give a little bit of a historical story around it because it like everything with me and always has this like, aha moment. So similar. I've always been attracted to sad music. And it was actually we have a radio station in Canada, that's, I guess, a public radio called CBC and did really good shows on it. And there was an episode on this idea of melancholy music, and so I was what's that? And of course, they talked about Joni Mitchell a lot, a Canadian sweetheart. And I was like, yeah, that's real. And they had said the person I can't even remember who was on probably a musician in Canada, but they said, you know, melancholy just means a thoughtful sadness. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that's what I am. I'm like, thoughtfully sad. But as time went on, I went through just stuff that was happening on the global like, collective grief 911 happened, some other stuff, some personal stuff. I really noticed that through all my sad periods of time, I always had a belly full of joy. Best way to describe it, I just, Joy's just really, really big in me. So I thought about a decade later, I I think I tried to create a handle on Twitter, melancholy joy, but I had done a few forums, online forums... And a part of it was because, I had a bit of a judgment that if you weren't melancholic, you weren't paying attention to the world, and but that you could still have a thriving life. So it has a kind of a political resonance to it like it will not even it went beyond music. The story moves into militant joy,  because militant, to me is more has more power, I guess, or more collective power. It's more active than melancholy. But the pandemic hit again, or hit and melancholy really resurfaced in my life. Collectively, I could feel that collective grief. And I was just really attracted again to listen to melancholy joy music and, really listening to your album that you put out this year. reignited that again in me and I think that's why I said sent it to you because I was like, Oh, this is melancholy, joy, music, then your newest one that you've put out.

 chris  04:44

Thank you so much. That's so kind. And I also see the phrase you use of melancholic hope. And that's a really powerful word too. And I think that's kind of what you find in the melancholy joy is this hope of kind of listening to sad music or music that helps you reflect and re energize yourself again, and there's a hope in melancholy, of just even being able to verbalize or feel that you're melancholic is the hope because you're able, then you're reflecting and saying, like, I'm sad, I have sadness and anger. And I'm able to work with those now, and kind of water those seeds to work through problems. And I think that's one thing that music does so well.

 carla  05:30

Yeah, I love that. Nick Montgomery, who co wrote joyful militancy started talking about Empire and joy, and our book, using music as an example. And that Empire has this really loud music that's really loud and drowns everything else out. And when I started, when you asked me to do this show, I was like, Oh, I wonder how melancholy joy music fits into disrupting that, because one of the things that I added to the conversation was that it's, the problem is listening. It's not so much that it's louder. I think that we, all the other music or other sounds are the other ways of talking with each other is there, it’s present. And there's something about that melancholic hope, like you say that it's there. Like the possibilities are there, the seeds are there, and they just need us to water them, as you so graciously said to me once, that I loved. Yeah, so yeah, I love that.

 chris  06:23

Yeah, what you say of how it's there. That's really, I feel the explanation and so hard to explain it with melancholy joy in those terms, like it's something that's there, it's something you can feel, and it's like a vibe, and joyful militancy. I really liked the quote from Glen Coulthard. When you mentioned you all had mentioned that he put his finger on something of sadness and anger and how they often stem from love. And just a little bit of this quote is: "I think that for the somber, melancholic militant, I get it, I understand it, how could you not be, and this is my point, the only way you respond to the world like that is because of some base sort of individual and collective self respect, some love for oneself and others, were the land that you are being violated in a profound way. This produces melancholy, anger, whatever, they're not separable." And I really thought that that whole quote is just powerful. And for anyone who has a book, it's on page 175. So there's no citation violations there.

 carla  07:27

Nope. You can also get the book for free online.

 chris  07:32

Yeah, I wanted to. I really thought that that quote was, he added more to this conversation too.

 carla  07:38

Thanks for finding it. I need to put his whole interview up. It's so incredible.

 chris  07:43

That'd be awesome.

 carla  07:44

Yeah, that's really good. Because we interviewed him, obviously, because he talks about resentment and anger so much. And it was, like affirmative theory. It includes anger and  rage. It's not negation, right, like, negation something else. And so I, thank you for bringing him in. Because I think that's a really important distinction about where melancholy fits into the conversation right now. I worked really hard to not be a melancholic person. So it's like dang, it's back again.

 chris  08:17

Well, yeah, I hope it's like a productive melancholy joy. I mean, that's what I wanted. That's what I really felt with this mixtape. And then it brings up deeper discussions on our end.  And, feelings and, and just other reactions that I feel are productive in thinking deeper about society. And a lot of these things are produced from such a disgusting messed up society, at least with my picks that helped me find ways to navigate through these parts of society. So before we start, I was just going to just give a little intro on why I picked these, a whole foundation of how I picked them. And I just wanted to say that I framed how I picked my choices with assuming that there's a lot of nuances and and I'm sure that's why you picked yours as well, that they have nuances that they're not just the songs but they relate to life, your life and timeline. And I picked these songs for a few reasons. For one, they may sound like they're more melancholy songs, but they bring joy and solace. They are often songs I go to when I feel no more hope or little hope, songs I go to, to recharge, to recalibrate, to keep reminding myself that I'm not going to feel this way forever. And along with these choices, when I'm stressed I often find I get attached to a song and it becomes my crutch. I don't know if you're that way. They become my friend when I'm lonely and alienated, usually from work and ironically self imposed isolation that I often do unknowingly and then realize  ...these were also songs that were some of my only friends during tough times that helped me build me back up again. Hopefully they can be tools for others and spark other discussions, another playlist like this.

 carla  10:02

Oh, that's really beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, definitely some of that. For me the friend part for sure. The helping me move through like, I think melancholy is something that is imposed on us from the conditions of the world we're living in. And I think joy maybe is something that's within us that we can... Ursula Le Guin in the dispossessed talks about it as something that you can't control at all, It just will come in and do its thing and leave. I just really love that distinction. It was the seed for me thinking about joy differently. So yeah, when I think with my playlists, there's a couple things. I physically get affected when I'm sad. So my body gets, I get sick. I can't move. So for me, music has to have an element that makes me move. And I think that joy moves - when I move it moves with me or it moves first. I don't know what you know, is what comes first. But the music definitely, because thinking about like, part of whether it's collective or individually, like we try to find some harmony, and you think about that in terms of music, right? Like, what is that about? Like, what was that? What are we looking for ourselves, when we're not doing well, when were depleted and stagnated? and sad? Yeah, so I think that, that played like a role. I also thought about my personal journey in terms of finding freedom within myself. From stagnant music, what do you call it? First Family, our family of origin stuff that I needed to get away from some of those songs are about that and becoming a parent. I have like a definitely a theme of Don't tell me what to do. And I don't want to grow up. I think all of that kind of fits in. And it's kind of covering up Mushishi

 chris  11:49

Yeah

 carla  11:49

Because it's connected. I have a question for you before we maybe share playlists but I was rewatching Mushishi, maybe you can explain what Mushishi is after people need to but just google it. It's an animation. It's beautiful. Zen Buddhist healer Guy Ginko. But one of the episodes was about I think it's like the second or third one of the first season. I'm not gonna go into details of it because it's a small part of the story but Mushi comes in... mushi are these things that are not human, they are not fauna or flora, they're in between. And it comes into when there's no sound around. It burrows into the human's ears and eats their sound. I don't know if you remember that one. But, so it made me think about like, what is my sound? because I think this is connected to what music I'm drawn to. Because maybe that counterpoint or, or where's the harmony, from my sound to the sound from music. And in the show the woman who talks about it, her sound is lava, which is really intense sound to have to live with, holy. I asked my friend in Japan if it's a Japanese thing, and she said it's not but maybe regionally. I tried to find it, but there's probably not an English translation for it. But it feels pretty human. Like, I think it's pretty pan human probably that we can think about this. So I was thinking about like, my sound feels like if I feel into it, it's like the wind is collaborative. It's like the wind off of like a soft ocean, but it it has to go up into the trees too,  like it's like this.woosh woosh. So when I thought about all the music I picked, I could hear it, I could feel it in it. So I'm curious if you've ever thought of that? Do you have a sound?

 chris  13:34

That's an awesome question. I love the wind that you're talking about. The wind. I like wind in music. Sometimes I hear that a lot like Kate Bush's music, she creates these atmospheres. And a lot of her songs are about the mountain to go on top of the mountain. I would say a sound that I really resonate with is something I resonate most with is rain. So in a lot of my lyrics I'll use different words for rain like the typewriter rain tapped on the roof or the Fred Astaire rain or something like I'm always trying to get back to rain and I find it comforting and I live in a desert in so called Denver so we don't get a lot of rain. And, I also I like water too, sounds of water I find that calming, in Mushishi really has its soundtrack is very calming to the Anime. And I think it's the episode you're talking about when the mushi is in the pillow and going into people's ears, and the mushi turns into almost like conjis and it's dancing and going into people's ears or something. That one is so powerful. And one thing I really like about Ginko is he kind of does this mutual aid where he's going around town to town just helping people in educating and he's very introverted, he's not the most outwardly kindest person but Ginko has so much love in him. He just has a different way of his love language speaking.

 carla  14:20

Yeah, everyone should watch Mushishi, or read the manga because they're equally as good if you need books.

 chris  15:08

So good. Yeah, I love it.

 carla  15:11

Yeah. And I think, yeah, we could we could do a whole show on Ginko

 chris  15:16

That would be great.

 carla  15:17

Because, ok just real quick the thing I always tell people why they should watch it is because there's no there's no judgment on the mushi or on the person who has it. The only judgment really is the people who don't help the person who's not well, that's the only time I see Ginko get upset with somebody is when they've done the wrong thing in terms of helping somebody, like they've judged them or something. And we could just all embody a bit of that we'd have a better world. You know?

 chris  15:42

Yeah, I love that. I love that interpretation.

 carla  15:45

Also, I need to say because any of my friends who are listening in family, I need to respond and say that rain is like, my favorite thing in the world. I did a whole project called rain. It stood for radical art in nature.

 chris  15:58

I love that

 carla  16:02

Yeah. rain is and I live in a rainforest. So I get a lot of rain. Yeah. So much of my son's music, Zach's music has rain in it. I am with you on that one.

 chris  16:12

That doesn't surprise me. We have so many commonalities.

 carla  16:15

I know.

 chris  16:16

So I'm gonna start with Bob's, Talk to the Birds by Bob's Your Uncle.

 carla  16:22

Okay, so this came out in 1985. I was living in so called Victoria, which is like the capital of British Columbia. And I was 18 just going on 19 and I hung out at a punk bar. With all the punk bands that played there that came through No means No, Dagloabortions, a lot of local people, but also Black Flag came through and so on and so forth. And when Bob's your Uncle came through, it was so exciting. First of all, a woman front person was really quite rare. A woman of color was even more rare in punk. And they were just they talk about joy, but it was also about feeling alienated as young people and poor people. And so it had that melancholic energy to it. And I bought their tape and I had a little yellow Walkman and I played it so much that it died. And she's at she's went on Sook Yin Lee has gone on to be she was like a vj for Much Music, which is the Canadian version of MTV which was really big back, and she was in Shortbus the movie. Now she's on CBC and does other stuff but yeah, I talked to birds I still do. I still talk to the birds.

 Bobs Your Uncle  17:35

SONG: Talk To The Birds

 chris  21:12

I love that song. When I heard this song, it really made me think just like the rebelliousness of school at first. Kind of imagine the teacher and then ditching class and then getting your real class from talking to some birds, or your real education from leaving school and going into nature. Also thought of it as an overarching ideology as well.

 carla  21:40

Oh, yeah, say more

 chris  21:42

Or just, they'll tell you, they tell you to do this, they say do this. But usually everything that they tell you to do with an ideology or hegemony is some form of coercion to get you to start renting somewhere, because you need to have all of these things, but you have to sell your time and your body for money. And people will tell you, well, if you don't have enough money, ideology, and capitalism says well get two jobs, you know, and they are always telling you something that's going to lead to more coercion instead of any form of liberation.

 carla  22:19

Yeah, they're really fun. People should look them up. They have this one song. If I knew  baking a cake or something. It's probably a cover. If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake. You know that song?

 chris  22:30

Oh, yeah.

 carla  22:31

 Yeah, they do it really well

 chris  22:33

Anything else you want to add on that song?

 carla  22:36

Oh, just I mean, I think like, the big thing was that they were just, it was just really great to encounter them during a time when punk was really important to me. But alongside that in a city that racism is really, really ramped. I was just everywhere, Victoria is very British. Like you cannot always tell the difference between the skinheads and the punks. So I don't know. They were just really great.

 chris  23:02

That's awesome. Thank you for showing me their music. Okay, so this song is by Organized Konfusion. Who is Prince Poetry and  Pharoahe Monch. And they're, they're an older group. And Pharoahe Monch has turned out to be one of my favorite lyricists when I got older. And Prince Poetry was amazing. And this song is probably one of my biggest go tos when just feeling down or, or depressed or existential. Yeah, that song is just really deep. And it talks about these two fetuses inside of their mother. And they're kind of just rapping about life.

 Organized Konfusion  24:07

SONG Invetro

 carla  24:33

I love that one really speaks to that power of the joy. You know? Despite everything, be curious and dream. I Love it. And it also makes me want to move, which is like my criteria for melancholy joy music.

 Chris  27:44

It's a great beat. I love it. And one of the lines that when I was re listening to this song is by Prince poetry, he says, “overshadowed in darkness where curiosity is my light.” And I just love that bar so much. And it reminded me of our conversation. But like the deeper, like a deeper meaning to this song is I don't know, it just makes me think about mortality a lot. And when my mom was pregnant with me, she smoked. And the whole time I resonated with what Pharoahe Monch was talking about. And he was born with asthma, actually. And I think he struggles with that during shows but is an amazing performer. And then another thing is when my mom I think was about eight, nine months pregnant, she fell down the stairs. And she landed on her stomach. And she was bleeding profusely and she was crying. She's freaking out. She went to the hospital. And the doctor told her that her baby was dead, which was me. And she needed to have it removed. And she was just in shock. So she left the hospital and was like, oh, I'll deal with this tomorrow. And then when she went back to her own doctor, they were like, No, your baby's alive has a heartbeat. So it must have been knocked out or something. I don't know.

 carla  29:15

Wow, that is beautiful.

 chris  29:17

Yeah. crazy story.

 carla  29:21

So my mom was told that I wasn't gonna I was dead too. I wasn't gonna live.

 chris  29:26

Wow. And

 carla  29:30

yeah. She didn't have an accident. I was like, it was just, it was a situation and during labor. And they had to make a decision to save her or me, they chose her because obviously she had four children.

 chris  29:44

Wow. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that story. That's so powerful

 carla  29:50

Well same, I guess we really needed to be here.

 Chris  29:55

Yeah,

 carla  29:55

or wanted to be here

 chris  29:56

Alright, so I'm going to play the next song, which is Don't Give Up by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.

 carla  30:03

I mean, first of all, that hug in the video, just the beauty of the like friendship that they have for each other and the intimacy that's just so pure. I tried to post it early on in the pandemic, because I was like, Who else needs to see this all the time? But I kept getting taken down because I didn't have rights to it. But, yeah, it's kind of like an ethos that's run through my life. I even had a campaign during the Thistle days that I went around to all the schools me my friend, I probably shouldn't say whatever, it doesn't matter. We had stickers that said, don't give up quit. Because to me, it's like part of not giving up is not giving up on yourself. And so that means you sometimes gotta quit a whole pile of things. Especially with young people I like to frame it that way. And yeah, this song just when I'm at my like, lowest lowest point I always go to it I mean, I Gabriel is just so important when I was a teen and Kate Bush especially later on... also other people who have performed it with it. I loved it too like Paula Cole, who was his backup singer for years and then went on to her own career. Yeah, just, it's just a it's a it's a love story about friendship. I think a lot of people think it's about a romantic relationship but I mean she she even talks about like what your your your friends we have you we got you, you know? Yeah, somebody on the brink helped remember that friends. It's so good.

 Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush  31:30

SONG: Don't Give Up

 37:22

Yeah, I love this song

 chris  37:24

Yeah, I love this song and I really hadn't really heard it much until you had mentioned it to me. And I've been listening to it all week. And yeah, you're right. It's like a love story about friends. So cool and people need to hear those words don't give up but they also need to hear you worry too much. Just move on with it. So those messages

 carla  37:48

Yeah, and on a personal trajectory like that last part. When Gabriel goes into the big reveal walking across the bridge like that. I listened to that probably on repeat when I was making the decision to leave my family behind. And like I would put it on my headphones and walk over these bridges. Like, act it out, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. So yeah, just like finding belonging. They talked about that in the song. It's so powerful. And what gets me is that it is still powerful, you know, after all these years, because it's speaking to our alienation from each other. And

 chris  38:28

Yeah, that's how you know, it's, it's so real. I think another thing really cool about Kate Bush, and she actually incorporates her family a lot in her music. You know, her son was the one who encouraged her to go back into performing live again. And then she has him on her last live album. He's singing like three different songs with her. And I didn't know he was the one who made her start doing live shows again, and his voice is awesome, too.

 carla  38:55

Thanks for sharing that I had no idea about that. And of course, as you know, I collaborate with my kids so that..my eldest had everything to do with helping you pick out this list.

 chris  39:07

Exactly. It made me think about that.

 carla  39:09

And that's really nice. And he's actually a huge Kate Bush fan bigger than me, so that's really nice. I wonder if he knows he probably does. Sole actually texted me the other day and said, it must be amazing to collaborate with your kid like, holy shit.

 chris  39:26

This song is by Andre 3000 from OutKast, and he's taken a big hiatus, aside from doing features and stuff. He's been just learning to play the clarinet and diving into jazz more, but he came back and did this song, I believe with James Blake, who did the piano and the song is another song that I go to. It's a heartbreaking song called Me and My To Bury Your Parents.

  Andre 3000 - Me&My  40:05

SONG: Me and My

 carla  43:48

I had never heard that song until I saw your list and it's really sad. But also has this thread of like I can feel the light in it , and the joy. I mean, personally, it may not think about my parents, but it made me think about my eldest brother who died. Who was like my... there's the chorus of me and my and my and they don't say, he doesn't say anything else. Oh, yeah, that. 

 Chris  44:14

Yeah. And when you mentioned that, I noticed today that he goes, me and my mother. At the end, he goes, me and my mother, me and my father, me and my, me and, and then me as he ends it, and I had never noticed that breakdown until today. It was like, gave me goosebumps.

 carla  44:36

Totally.

 chris  44:37

Yeah, and it's such a heartbreaking song. But yeah, you're right. It has this joy in it. It has this nostalgic joy of even though, you know, he had to bury his parents. He has these memories and he has love with them. And as we talked about, time not being linear, so much. That's the beauty of nostalgia and the beauty of music that can conjure those time frames.

 carla  45:01

You have an album called Newstalgia, did you come up with that?

 chris  45:05

Like at the time I thought I did, but I don't know if I really did. Because I think there's even a producer or a rapper that goes by the name Newstalgia

 carla  45:13

Right. Well, first of all, I heard it. And what I liked about it, I think there's an eagle right over my head. PS like, five inches. Okay, we talked about this a lot on this Silver Threads podcast, because I'm really interested in like, grabbing stuff from like, from the past and the future. But making sure we weave it into right now in the present. And newstalgia just captures that in a way that I hadn't really, I didn't have a word for it. I was just like, grab the thread from there and there and make a thing. And that's what I hear in the song. It's really great.

 chris  45:56

Yeah, that was my exact thought with the album. I was like, I’m such a loser. I'm always like, with nostalgia. I'm always going towards it. It's like, but you have to love the present too. And I was like, what if I you know, the present could feel like nostalgia. If you were making those, those memories and those feelings and feeling them as nostalgia feels in the present. I feel there's a danger of just going to nostalgia all the time.

 carla  46:24

Totally. Yeah.

 chris  46:25

At least for me.

 carla  46:26

Same, that's where depression links. lingers. Yeah.

 chris  46:32

Okay, we're going to go to Fast Car by Tracy Chapman

 carla  46:36

We won't play this whole song.. cry. Well, first of all, Tracy Chapman is like, where I really learned my politics. You know, like, you know, I grew up in around a lot of punk music and stuff, but I have a joke where like, there's sex pistol anarchism, and then there's anarchism, right? Or anti authoritarianism or whatever. Anyways, Tracy is like her music just educated me in a way that the other punk didn't - she's just incredible. I saw her live. It was like the best thing ever, outside... And this song as someone who grew up pretty poor in a dysfunctional home and when I met my partner like it's just our song just everything about it. And you know, it is our trajectory like if he could just like give me the foundation I will take us places kind of thing and even after it's been moving together over 30 years and we still like hear it and go it's feels like yesterday, but we had to take this leap of faith together and run away or run towards joy in our life and yeah, it's just I think it's like a pinnacle melancholy joy song because it's a lot of loss wrapped up in it but it's also about freedom and liberation and finding your way.

 Tracy Chapman  48:37

SONG Fast Car

  chris  52:00

I love that song. The way that she goes from narration to heart so effortlessly is just amazing. I love the lyrics so much. And I was wondering when you said that, along with punk because I know you have a history with the punk scene, the different branches that Tracy Chapman gave you maybe with like a political vocabulary or outlook?

 carla  52:26

Right, I mean, I guess it was just, you know, to borrow the phrase intersectionality I mean, that it had also had especially to that album, like it had a lot about forgiveness on it and love. And yeah, finding the path towards liberation versus just always in fighting against or negation. And that was something I really needed.  You know, early on, when my brother was into punk, I used to say, I don't know how you can listen to this. It's just all negative. And like, No wonder you're depressed all the time. Like, you know, I listened to The Police instead. This is like 77/78. So finding her like she had that kind of like, you know, things are bad. Call things what they were, she was, you know, obviously, pointing out the horrors of the world. But within this framework of a container of like love and kindness, forgiveness, that was really beautiful. Like the other song on the album, though. Chris, my partner, when I met him he had played on the guitar. Three of the songs he played and sang.

 chris  53:35

No way. That's awesome.That's so cool.

 carla  53:40

I don't know. What about you? 

 chris  53:42

When I first heard this song, it really brought out a lot of the just the stories that you don't often hear about, of a really just class issues. And of course, race and white supremacy tied into these. But when you hear the the one that really resonates with me is the man who was drinking becauses his body, he felt had no more use, but his he was much too young for how his body looked... that's so powerful, just that, that phrasing of the way that she took it. And it really just made me think of when I worked in the Union. I worked in the stagehands Union for a while, right before COVID or year before COVID. And I was on the carpet duty which was a horrible thing. So I would lay miles of carpet a day in the convention centers for Comic Cons and stuff. And these guys that I worked with that had been there for years, they could only be comfortable when they were laying carpet when they were trying to walk out to the light rail station, it brought them horrible pain to walk and they had their legs had so much arthritis and stuff and these guys weren't even that old. It really, that lyric really resonated with me when I heard this again.

 carla  54:56

Yeah, yeah, the working class stuff was really. It's a big part of why that song works for us.

 chris  55:03

Do you want to add on this?

 carla  55:06

Just that it had the theme of finding belonging again, which was like oh, there's that that's probably what's underneath all of my play song

 chris  55:14

this story behind this song too, that you shared. So I'm gonna play the next song is miserabilism by Pet Shop Boys

 Pet Shop Boys  58:12

SONG: Miserabilism

 chris  59:20

The way I got into this song was actually when I started working from home during COVID. I've been laid off from my other job, and I started at the call center job I was talking about. And this was like a hellacious job in between calls which was usually only about 20 seconds. I would throw on I was like I'm gonna try to get through all these discographies of people I like, and I was like I was going through Pet Shop Boys, I had never heard the song it was on some B-side and I was like this song is amazing. It's because I've always thought that the whole Disney narrative has messed up so many people of this capitalist thing of working hard. There's someone for everyone you'll find love, all these things. They create a golden, a gold plated lust. That is a form of what they call love, and dusted with capitalism or something like that. And when he's talking about just that life will be disappointing and all these things and not having expectations. It's just so well said and comforting. I found, especially while working in a call center.

 carla  1:00:25

Yeah, thanks for sharing that story and re-listening to that and hadn’t listened to it years, but there was a line in it. I think, I  hope, it's in it. Oh, my gosh, it made me think: I wonder if this was some seeds around the melancholy thing of being like wearing it as a badge of honor because it there's that line where just for the sake of it, make sure you're always frowning It shows the world you're got substance and depth. Like I was quite judging of you if people were not melancholy. I was like, You can't be paying, you're just not paying attention. How many people are suffering?

 chris  1:00:58

Yeah, that's actually yeah, that's the third verse. Yeah, it's it's one of my favorite lines, because it's just it's funny for one, but then yeah, it's kind of deep too. And it's like, there's a lot of people who, and I know there's so much to you know, different neuro divergence of sometimes people who smile the most are actually very depressed. I just like how he plays with this whole thing of you have to show that if you see someone frowning,  they understand this philosophy of miserabilism. There's no happy endings just a message to depress and it's so funny and true.

 carla  1:01:35

And it has a beat that makes you move so that the joy can move. Yeah, they always said the great dancy beats. Okay, so now we're going to Nat King Cole. Song Nature Boy. Oh, I didn't have the song on my first playlist. I think first one, I sent to you didn't have this. I do have it on the large original one. But I was on a walk with Zach and  he reminded me that I sing the song all the time.  When I am not doing well. And also because like love was like the thing like you centering everything in love is what actually got you healthy. It's not It's not about the negative and fighting back and Don't tell me what to do and don't want to do this and I don't want to it was all about actually more affirmative and really big fan of Moulin Rouge, seen it more than I want to admit and including seeing it in San Francisco at the Castro with everyone's with a sing along. So the song is just incredible and because there is the melancholic energy throughout it but you know, the message is so short and so quick, but it's everything.

 Nat King Cole.  1:02:44

SONG: Nature Boy

 chris  1:05:10

I think that is just such good advice, this song and I wish I would have heard this when I was young. The the message is so powerful. Oh, you were speaking of the Moulin Rouge

 carla  1:05:36

Actually been there I haven't been inside but I've seen it outside of Paris  - that's really good to know. Have you not seen the movie?

 chris  1:05:45

I'm not in a long time. I haven't No.

 carla  1:05:48

Yeah, it's we have a joke in our family that it's actually Christian that is actually the character not Ewan McGregor but the joke is a Ewan McGregor gave me a call tomorrow that I dumped the whole family. But it's it's really that character just heartache, and so beautiful.

 chris  1:06:09

Love it. And this is the most common song that you you actually verbalize when you're stressed out?

 carla  1:06:16

Yeah. that's one of those things I didn't even know I did it can reflect people you live with reflect back to you did this thing

 chris  1:06:25

I love that your kid collaborated and got this song on here and then got this song into my into my heart in my mind. Okay, so I'm going to now play  Sade - When Am I Going To Make a Living?

 Sade  1:07:20

SONG: When Am I Going To Make a Living?

 chris  1:09:56

So aside from this, it has been an amazing song, and I am a big Sade fan, when I was in high school, I stopped playing basketball, and for the school, and I broke my knee and had surgery and then to play basketball. So I started working at the hospital. And I was working at Rose Medical Hospital in Denver. And they had this free jukebox in the cafeteria. And this was one of the albums that was on there. And there was this this woman who I worked with in the cafeteria and in the kitchen and she showed me this song. And she was kind of like my real teacher, she was teaching me through Sade. She was saying, she would always tell me the line that the waste your body and soul if you allow them, and she was an older Black woman from the south, and she was like a mentor to me, she was like you need to do good in school, would talk to me about getting out of there getting out of the kitchen, if I could. So I was a pot washer, was probably there till I was 19, so probably about five years. And the jukebox had all kinds of other annoying albums. And this was the one that was great. I remember they had a Who let the Dogs Out by the Bahama Men, and it was a single, and this one cook he put in the code like six times to drive people crazy. And then we'd have to unplug the jukebox. But I really just learned a lot from this song. This song just has such a powerful message.  

Carla 1:11:14

I love that story. Holy moly. Is that like layers? Yeah, she's amazing, big on the playlist of me, choosing joy over sorrow, really, at that time in 2001. And listen to her a lot. This song is really important for me too, because I was in the restaurant business for years. It's like generational, like my grandmother owned restaurants. And I was really good at it. And I was in Toronto and I was the the owner wanted me to open a restaurant with him in Vancouver and be partners and I was listening not to the song, but to some part of my playlists and other people and just like I'm gonna not be working class anymore which is a joke ,because you can't actually say you're not going to do anymore. But I decided that I had a retirement party. And I've never turned back. I've never worked in a restaurant since I was 35, I think it's just a really important message in there is just an important nuance because people like capitalists, what's that shit line of like, do what you love, the money will follow bullshit. But there's the thing with like working class folks that we do to ourselves where we don't we don't believe in ourselves and I love that in this line. But in that line in the song I think yeah, there's just a nuance in it that it's not about playing the capitalist game, but it's about believing in yourself so that you can find thriving. Yeah, thanks for picking it.

 chris  1:12:49

Yeah. I love that. Thanks for adding that. We're doing the Holly Cole version. So this next song is I Don't Want to Grow Up

 Holy Cole  1:13:26

SONG: I Don't Want To Grow Up

 carla  1:17:00

Yeah, so this song has played a factor, since I was a teenager because the Ramones did it first, much more upbeat, funnier version. Really, I think, the perfect version for a teen to listen to, really resonated. I have fought so called adultism all my life in terms of the rigidity that I seen the suffering and whatever that meant. And then fast forward bunch of years, just after I gave birth to Zach my oldest son in 94. That's around when she came out with this album, she covered a bunch of Tom Waits songs. Which is funny because Tom Waits version is actually the one that resonates the most with me now because it feels so playful and he's older and I don't know I just relate to him more I think but this was really I was really stuck with what does it mean to not want to grow up in this way but be  a parent and i just yeah, I listened to it often and with you know, my baby on my on my chest, thinking about it didn't give in didn't grow up in that way.

 chris  1:18:09

I love those threads that you put through it. Yeah, I do. I think the Ramones is the the you know the most playful and then Tom Waits is kind of the middle, which Tom Waits is what Tom Waits is so good at, of being melancholy and playful and funny at the same time. And then Holly Cole just really brings out, takes takes away that sarcasm and you really just feel the the rawness of the lyrics, which is why I love this version  it's Yeah, it's so powerful, but still resilient at the same time.

 carla  1:18:40

Totally. Yeah. Tom Waits. Exactly. And I originally picked his version because it is melancholic joy. But the story is better.

 chris  1:18:48

No, yeah, thank you for something that all together. We messed around and made a really good playlist.

 carla  1:18:54

Yes. Totally fun. It was Yeah, melancholy joy.

 chris  1:18:59

So I'm going to play the track Legends by Juice WRLD who recently passed away rest in peace Juice Wrld

 Juice WRLD  1:19:06

SONG: Legends

 chris  1:22:15

You can hear Juice WRLD’s, his heart and his music and his his soul and just the vulnerability of mostly  Juice WRLD's music is so powerful and his voice the the beats that he uses too. And I really just resonate to the song because I don't know if it goes back to when my mom was smoking when she was pregnant, but my lungs, they they collapse randomly and actually collapsed four times one right when I turned 18, just back to back and then I had up surgeries. And the top lobes of my lungs had to be removed. And I was going in and out of the hospital for probably about a year or two. So I was always on dilaudid in the hospital, just messed up my head so bad. And then they would give me like percocets and all this. And, you know, it's essentially like battling with addiction of pain pills, just because I was depressed. But I didn't think I was I think that was the scariest thing. It just was like, Oh yeah, I'll take one because I have all these and I have a little bit of pain. And then it was turning into, you know, a hole to dig down that that was a dangerous hole. And I really just relate to what, what Juice WRLD’s talking about in this on top of this. And the things that he struggled with. I know there was another artist that was lost who had a similar vulnerability to their lyrics was Lil Peep. Couple years ago, too. It's just had this amazing way of writing too. And the lyrics that really resonate with me in the song is that I usually have an answer to the question but this time I'm going to be quiet. Ain't nothing like the feeling of uncertainty that eeriness of silence. And so powerful. When I work with a lot of youth in high schools, I know a lot of them relate to juice wrld too, because they're going in school at this time that's worried about school shootings, worried about climate change. So many existential things are already heavy on top of just being in high school, those feelings at the time. So there's just a lot of intersections and things that collide with this song and why I relate to it.

 carla  1:24:25

Thanks for sharing about your story and being vulnerable. I am so sorry. That's a lot to contend with. Glad you

 chris  1:24:32

Thank you.

 carla  1:24:34

Yeah, music really helps, right?

 chris  1:24:37

Yeah.

 carla  1:24:38

I love that song, too. I actually had the same quote pulled out so not surprisingly, I just yeah, I had shared the list with Zach today. And he was blown away that the song was on it. And he was like, Oh, it's just too sad. Lil Peep and they're all dead...Yeah. But yeah, the love for each other, though that comes through in the song. Like about, you know, like the music will live on it's one of the things that writers die to like I'm like, I'm so grateful that I still have their their words to carry me, carry generations, not just me. I really like that in that too. Yeah.

 chris  1:25:17

Yeah, and like one beautiful thing about art is that it literally saves lives. And I know that this song saves lives every day. And that's another thing of just beautiful art.

 carla  1:25:30

Yeah. yeah

 chris  1:25:31

Okay, so this next track is better by Burial. The new song is Untrue.

 Burial  1:25:35

SONG: Untrue

 carla  1:31:15

Feelings, feelings and saw because you girl, man Yeah, there's like many stories for this. I think probably why I I think probably why I chose it is in 2017 I got really sick and was in bed for about eight months. I love to dance. It's how I like how I move through being sad, and I couldn't dance. So I kind of came up with this plan that if I put a record on and laid on the floor, like on the hardwood floor, I would feel the vibrations of the music. And my body would get my Vegas nerve activated. Move. And Zach put on this and yeah, it just became like a healing theme song. Especially Untrue. And then during the pandemic, it just, you know, that feeling of being in quarantine and stuff and being stuck at home like, had a similar feeling even though I could physically dance. So, you know, I just listened to it every day. And I mean, we have all of Burial's stuff. But this is the one that I go to. And then I think I shared this with you. But Mark Fisher writes about a story about him writing this this particular song with his mom and him being really sad. I think if their dog his dog just died or something. And he wrote something, and his mom didn't like it and told him to like, just go make some tea and fuck everybody and do his work, find his passion or whatever. I can't remember the exact quote. It's really good. And that just made me love it even more, because he immediately went and wrote this song  Untrue, and she loved it.

 chris  1:33:02

And then it turned to be his breakout hit right?

 carla  1:33:04

Yes.

 chris  1:33:06

I love his story so much I had never known until you told me it's so cool. So when you started using the song kind of as a ritual for healing Did you notice a big difference right away?

 carla  1:33:18

Yes.  Sorry, the wind

 chris  1:33:19

 It’s fine. This episode is featuring the wind.

 carla  1:33:23

Yes. Which is our sound?

 chris  1:33:25

Yeah. It's a form of music. I mean, I first heard Burial, it was on a Thom Yorke remix and I just love the haunting syntha but it's still dancey and some my favorite type of music, a reason why I love the new wave so much and Trance and some EDM and stuff like that. I love that this pick is on the playlist. So next we're going to a Channel Zero Network friend, Tim who is Sole and the song is called Last Earth.

 Sole  1:34:08

SONG: Last Earth

 chris  1:36:22

So, for one, Sole is one of my favorite lyricists, one of my favorite writers, I don't know how many albums Sole has, it's gotta be, it's in the 20s it may be in the 30s, a prolific writer. And the reason I like this song is it has a melancholy joy to it. It's a lot of Sole's music does, but this is more of a dancey beat. It has William Ryan Fritch, from Sole and the Skyrider band singing with him. Just the beginning bars, so cool, I might be dead, but no flies on me. And he lived in Denver for a while. And we would often go to protests together. And I remember one day we were at one of these protests and he disappeared and he was arrested, kind of just for stepping off the curb for a second you know, the average blocking traffic or something. And the line all up in the cell talking FTP, is just so funny to me, but so Sole at the same time, and so true. And the just the way that he gets into other topics too, he says that's a bad trip, like when whites cross the sea, talking about colonialism, questioning dogma, which is something he does so well with his the way that he intervenes with anarchy and anarchism. And the course to the planet Earth, you don't belong to anyone, we will undo the feudal age. And then he always gets into little sci fi tangents as well like talking about the simulation theory or are we in a projection, and then the playfulness of Sole as well that sometimes he dreams he's flying through space to sees other just all these images of liberation will talking about desecration at the same time, which is I find inspiring and comforting and reflective.

 carla  1:38:07

Thanks for putting the song on. I hadn't heard it. Already adore Tim/Sole. So I had pulled out similar lines as you but I'm the one in the chorus that we will die trying, I love so much because I mean that's that willingness, you know? I think like in all my social media bios I just wrote, I try...  because I think that's like the least we, I mean, it's the most we can do actually. And I think isn't there like a Rebecca Solnit told me this, like, it's actually what an essayist is, like somebody who writes political stuff for the world is at the ideas you try. So just really gravitates to that, so hearing that in the song with that, with those lyrics, I was like, that's the point. That's the whole entire point is to try.

 chris  1:38:53

It really reminds me of the whole, Sole always did the whole détournement of Guy Debord and kind of see this in three parts. So the first one being 50 cent, Get Rich or Die Trying. And then Dead Prez, they kind of did a détournement and they said Get Free or Die Trying and then Sole, kind of Sole is in that vein very much with his music of or we will die trying

 carla  1:39:16

Nice connection. Nice weaving. took what I said, no grounding and grounded it Thank you.

 chris  1:39:27

No way. I didn't even think of it. until you brought it up. So yeah, that's the beauty of collaboration. Oh, you're so nice. You picked our song for the last song, which is I've always loved the monsters by by me, Jason/Maudlin Magpie & produced by A Thousand Vows

  Time (me), Jason/Maudlin Magpie & produced by A Thousand Vows  1:39:58

SONG: I've Always Loved the Monsters

 carla  1:43:26

So I wanted to pick something on the larger playlist too I also just picked something that just came out from Kinnie Starr... I just really wanted to bring it current. I listen to this song more than I'd like to admit it.. thank you so much for creating it both of you. It just. Yeah, it does bring that melancholy joy because it roots me into like a lot of things. I mean, almost every line, it's something that I've like, pondered or thought about, not in the exact same way or not in the same poetic way. But one of the things I'm really trying to figure out is like how to get out of my head and be more present so that I can just live more of a thriving life and so much of my work was about like creating thriving environments and containers for people but then I overworked myself and didn't thrive myself. Then there's just you have that in there and, and on the one hand like, like, the Jason's melody, like, it's kind of this counter to it because it's it's like this dilemma that I have around like more thought is like, takes me way out of presence, but yet your thoughts do untangle it all for me. So anyway, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna put your lyrics back to you.

 chris  1:44:37

I love that. Thank you, it's an honor that you feel that way. And to just give a little bit of context to this song is I had, I believe I've told you the story, but I had recorded this song, and this song talks about death like a lot of my songs which I get made fun of for. I had recorded this song. and it even says the one one day years hard will be beating the the next it might not be. And literally the next day, I got in a horrific car accident, almost died and had internal bleeding and stuff. And then my mind didn’t work that well for a while. It's such a severe concussion. And when I kind of came back to and I was able to write again and work on this album, I wanted to redo this verse, the song and Jason was like, no, that you recorded that. It's like, it almost was your last recording. Like you have to keep it. It's crazy. It's eerie. And maybe he's kind of a macabre person for wanting to keep it like it was but it was a good idea. But then I found out later that he actually wrote the chorus when I was injured pretty much, and he said he was kind of talking about how my mind is it always like can make a lot of connections and goes places so I was like wow, I never knew the chorus had to actually do with me and that he was worried about me when I was injured, so it kind of made, ties the song more together.

 carla  1:46:04

Wow, that is probably what I've like it just has such it's so affectual like it's kinetic. Like I feel it in every way and also like I do a lot of work with my ancestral stuff and you just you cover it all like yeah my my sights.. What is it, my thoughts steal my sight? Oh man. Yeah, my daily. I apologize to my kids and my partner for that.. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that story. And I'm so glad you survived that accident. Yeah. And not to mention the title because we both love monsters.

 chris  1:46:42

Yeah, no, definitely. That was that was the other thing of yeah, always, always love the Yeah, the monsters are not always the heroes of the stories or what's really strange is this last track that I picked by SBTRKT featuring sampha trials of the past is a song that actually was one of the ways I healed after my car accident. I didn't even think about how these lined up. I was I never took a day off of teaching after the car accident, which was a really dumb idea because I was throwing up after a lecture, anytime I use my my brain even if I read a text message, it would make me nauseous. And I was stubborn and took place in this debate I had already said I would go to on fracking, which I was glad I did because the fracking debate was horrible. And I threw up after that too. But this was a song that I would always listen to on the light rail. And it brought me peace and it made me feel free.

 SBTRKT (feat. Sampha)  1:47:45

SONG: Trials of the Past

carla  1:51:15

I really like the songs, how does it help?

 chris  1:51:19

Back to that thing where you say like it's just there, that vibe of this melancholy joy. For one, it's just the beats. I love this like tube synths in the minors in it and then some - Sampha's voice, it's just so soulful, and so calming and poetic. But when I would be on the light rail, and I was trying to get to like the front or the back of the car, and I stand up, and then I would pretend I was flying. And I didn't feel good, you know, because I couldn't really think, so I feel kind of weird too. I felt spacey. So I actually felt like I was flying above the light rail while listening to this over and over again for about a month. And then I love the second verse where he says I was always floating around the city, going with the flow without ever knowing where I want to be. So I got into crazy situations. And a loyal soldier who acts who acts who acts but never asks, that was my favorite line. And I just love that. And I know you and me, we really resonate about talking about questioning and questions.

 carla  1:52:23

I really liked flying on my back, the looking down. Really, really related to that I think it has like it had this sense of like astral projection or something in it. I think there's some kind of like, beyond this physical realm. I mean, that's the joy. I think I pulled from it out of that.yeah

 chris  1:52:44

Yeah, it reminds me of your story about Burial a little bit too, about how you were trying to get the nerve nerve activated going and like that form of dancing. And we had talked about in an email before this on other topics of what music is and music and ableism. And I was telling you about a friend I have who's a non hearing friend, and they told me, they were explaining to me about going to shows and that they enjoy going to shows where they can just feel the bass and the bass in their chest. And just the vibes of the energy of a show and all of those things. And just those things to consider when people are talking about music and ableism and all those things that tie in, and how music is part of everyone's realities.

 carla  1:53:32

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. It's really important. That's the thing like rhythm. Yeah, even a non hearing person they can feel it in their body. And I think that's really important because that's like I shared that quote. It's Zach's favorite quote the one about like that sound is you can't have music without sound but you can have sound without music and so therefore sound is more important. But it makes me think about that just opening up what sound is and how how we experience it and in even like a harmonic way or harmony way, like that's probably a whole other conversation that I'm probably not the best person to have it with because I don't really understand music, but just even the western narrow version of what music is versus the east. Just continues on the white supremist hegemonic road even what constitutes music.

 chris  1:54:24

Yeah, like always trying to categorize and break things into binaries that are not necessarily. Going back to what you were saying about how you enjoy dance. And that's a way that you're able to express, just yeah, the music of that and just the rhythm of movement

 carla  1:54:42

Even separating that in the West.

 chris  1:54:47

I love that bird

 carla  1:54:48

A little music

 chris  1:54:51

And is a perfect book end because that's how we started it with talking to the birds.

 carla  1:54:55

Yes. Nice. Nice. Did you want to say anything about your larger list before we wrap it up?

 chris  1:55:03

Like the ones that I really picked on my extra was a song that I really grew up listening to which was Respiration by Blackstar. It's talking about the city and the beat by Hi Tek is really contemplated and I love like the poetry of Mos Def (Yasiin Bey). I had Prince on there, which we're both big Prince fans, I have a lot of jazz that was on there like Archie Shepp, big Tom Waits fan like you were talking about. So I had stuff from nighthawks at the diner, which was, you know, kind of a play into our newest album Nighthawks at McCoys, Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest of all time, I just love, everything Stevie does, going back to the hospital when I worked there, Frankie Beverly and The Maze of a co worker taught me about them in the song Joy & Pain ties in so much into this. And then the Priests, I really love the Priests and their music in Earth, Wind and Fire, one of the members from Earth Wind and Fire's from Denver. I am a big Frank Ocean fan as well. New wave, so Joy Division, and I probably end up putting a New Order or someone else on there if we kept going with this playlist.

 carla  1:56:08

Well, I did 13 so you can add a couple more. I'm so excited to share this list. I'm gonna start with the couple that like we're in that we got booted out of the top seven which is Sun Ra, Blue Soul, So I mean, I just, I don't know, I feel like I'm from another planet most of the time, so I really relate to Sun Ra's stuff and, and really get lost in it. And then Sinead O'Connor really, really important. I mean, her and Tracy Chapman, you know, are my political educators. Oh the song that I kicked off right away was for the one that Zach told me to do nature boy, but This is for Life from Luka Bloom. I don't know if you know his stuff, but he's Irish. Just an incredible singer, singer songwriter, and it's really about a song during the troubles where a man or woman fall in love and he gets put in prison because he kills somebody. But they stay together despite it all and it's all about time and how he can't actually watch the moon because he's in jail and it's really really sad but there's like a beauty about it that they commit to life together their love their love is going to transcend this physical distance. Yeah, so and Prince, of course, it was really hard to pick a Prince song. I was really wanting to do something from his early stuff that Purple Rain is the one that had to be and then The Cure. Aw, man, I probably listened to Cure like three times a week because  it's a dance. It's not you know, it is melancholy Joy to the max because it has the beat to dance. But the songs are so sad. Sigur Ros is another, all of it. It's my every time I go on a flight. I listened to Sigur Ros. I love it. The Police's like circa you know, teenager, I just felt completely lonely. It's from their first or maybe their second. I thought it's from the first album. And then I have a couple jazz stuff on there to Steal my Joy from Lee Williams. Do you know that song? So good

 chris  1:58:09

No, no.

 carla  1:58:11

it's about not stealing,  It's like don't steal my joy is actually the song

 chris  1:58:15

Nice.

 carla  1:58:17

Sounds really, really beautiful. And then of course, At Last lost I borrowed from a friend who did a playlist about hope and Rebecca Solnit actually, she had it on there. Because she's you know, sometimes sometimes we have to wait for it. Sometimes there's patience in the fight, in the build. So I thought it was a good one in terms of ending my playlists. Sometimes the Joy has you have to wait a bit.

 chris  1:58:45

I love that.

 carla  1:58:46

They cover them all. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, Walkabout real quick. I love Atlas Sound. And I really wanted the song on the film I made about the purple thistle and I went through a lot of networks to get it but of course, you know, you're in the business. He didn't he doesn't actually have rights to the song so I ended up not using it but yeah,

 chris  1:59:05

on dang. Yeah, I love your extras on here.

 carla  1:59:10

Oh my god. I missed Sour Gout. Yeah, that's my kid. It was hard to pick but I picked the one that resonated the most. He's written a couple songs for me. I should probably have done one of them but had a lot of rain in it.

 chris  1:59:26

Awesome. All right, carla. Well, I'll talk to you soon. Bye

 carla  1:59:30

Bye.

 1:59:32

Thank you for tuning into this episode of the time talks podcast part of the channel zero network. Please check out carla bergman work and support their endeavors. Links to carla's works are in the show notes. Please send me an email and tell me some songs you listen to when you're feeling blue, or share a playlist with us. My email is [email protected]. thanks to awareness for the music, share the show around, rate it up and give someone some water. peace.

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Calm. - Things I Learned While Dying in Denver (OUT NOW!)

The album is about failing, failing better, doing an autopsy on yourself and breaking open the gold coated egg of capitalism to see the dirtiness inside to navigate away from alienation. The album also speaks out on homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Calm. - Things I Learned While Dying in Denver (OUT NOW!) 

Bandcamp: https://thisistime.bandcamp.com/ 

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/0gNMa6h79q4wk0jZAW59mJ?si=-xNFifW6TB6O0l4RoqtmeA 

Apple Music: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/things-i-learned-while-dying-in-denver/1442004546 

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/music/album/Calm_Things_I_Learned_While_Dying_in_Denver?id=Bl27eczn3rqsfbynohl5a6g66nm&hl=en

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Examining the Role of Community Armed Self-Defense in an Era of Gun Violence

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/44150-examining-the-role-of-community-armed-self-defense-in-an-era-of-gun-violence

New article up on Truthout:

"I think it's time for all of us within civil society to think about how we want to respond, autonomously and collectively, without waiting to be saved by the same reactionary governments and corporations that have produced the crises in the first place." — scott crow, Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense.

There are as many guns in the US in private hands as the population -- an estimated 300 million guns. Seventy-four percent of gun owners are male, 82 percent are white, and 61 percent of adults who own guns are white men, with white men making up 32 percent of the US adult population. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has pointed out that the top reason for gun ownership is for protection, asking, "What are white men so afraid of?"

link to full article here: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/44150-examining-the-role-of-community-armed-self-defense-in-an-era-of-gun-violence

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(via https://open.spotify.com/album/24RalwAPeEYCCCWYVvz3JK?si=Qy60Xay1SNiEhFx80CBnFg)

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Violence as a Way of Life: An Anarchist Analysis of Gun Control and State Power in the US

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/44137-violence-as-a-way-of-life-scott-crow-on-media-narratives-gun-control-and-state-power-in-the-us

New article up in Truthout

According to an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force memo, author and activist scott crow is "... considered armed and dangerous. He is proactive in civil disobedience skills and goes to events to instigate trouble." Having been involved in myriad organizations and direct actions ranging from anti-racist to environmental to disaster relief, crow was under surveillance and investigation by the FBI for at least three years for political activity relating to anarchism, animal rights and environmental activism. crow's book Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective, tells the harrowing story of going into New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, where he co-founded Common Ground Collective, now known as the largest anarchist organization in modern history. Building off his experiences in New Orleans with armed self-defense, horizontally-organized disaster relief aid and FBI informants, crow is the editor of the newly released anthology Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense. In this interview with Truthout, crow discusses his experience with armed self-defense, the current gun control debate, the student-led protests on gun control, the militarization of police, the media framing of police killings and the military-industrial complex. .... link to full article here http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/44137-violence-as-a-way-of-life-scott-crow-on-media-narratives-gun-control-and-state-power-in-the-us  

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stream it up

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New Show Feb. 27 with Talib Kweli in Boulder

We’re playing with Talib Kweli and Niko Is on Feb. 27 at the Fox in Boulder. get tickets here: 

https://www.foxtheatre.com/event/1607861-talib-kweli-boulder/ 

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As Trial Begins, Trump Protest Attendees Face 60 Years in Prison

A combined total of 12,000 years in prison is what close to 200 protestors, journalists and legal observers are facing from attending a protest at the January 20 inauguration of President Donald Trump. After a superseding indictment, the US prosecution is seeking to charge each person with 60 years for allegedly urging a riot, breaking less than 10 windows and conspiracy charges. The US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia claims that the property damage totals to more than $100,000. DC police spent $300,000 on weapons and equipment for the inauguration and just added $150,000 to the DC budget to review police conduct during the inauguration. While many lawyers are calling the blanket felonies and excessive charges unprecedented, civil liberty advocates are worried about the precedent these extensive charges and grandiose metadata subpoenas will have on chilling free speech and stifling dissent. READ THE REST HERE

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Decolonizing the Classroom: Embracing Radical Internationalism

Decolonizing the Classroom: Embracing Radical Internationalism by Chris Steele [Truthout]

In this interview, author and historian Gerald Horne discusses the resistance to white supremacy in the US from both enslaved Africans and displaced Indigenous peoples, and the need to emphasize that resistance in the teaching of history. He also touches upon the history of the KKK in Cuba and Fiji and the role of imperialism in religious conflict.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41600-decolonizing-the-classroom-embracing-radical-internationalism