Rust Punx Radio is a show that highlights the latest in DIY punk & hardcore from across the so-called Rust Belt. Hosted by some kids from the Filler Distro, an anarchist zine distro, record label, and news website based in Pittsburgh, PA.
Filler just recorded a single for our homies in DECIVILIZE, all proceeds from this track will support Pittsburgh’s friendly neighborhood anarchist bookstore The Big Idea Bookstore, Inc as they close their doors during the Covid-19 pandemic.
THE BIG IDEA’s STATEMENT (originally posted to their facebook)
The Big Idea is temporarily closing due to growing public health concerns in the midst of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
As anarchists, we assert that in times of crisis people have the capability of taking voluntary action, both collectively and individually, to mitigate the risks posed by an outbreak such as this. We understand it is imperative to slow the spread of contagion to lessen the chance of our catastrophically unprepared healthcare system becoming overwhelmed. It is in the spirit of these concerns that we make this decision.
However, we are also aware that state and government forces are more than willing to exploit crises by abusing tools like quarantines and other states of exception. This often comes at the expense of the most vulnerable, especially those detained and imprisoned in overcrowded jails, prisons, and concentration camps. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and critically and encourage all to do the same.
We apologize to all of those in the community who rely on our space. Hopefully we will be able to open our doors again soon.
(statement copied from our comrades at Wooden Shoe Books and Records since it was so well written!)
There’s a lot of music coming out of Pittsburgh lately, and it’s easy to forget to check out a new release. Rust Punx Radio* will be dropping a mix of new local punk and hardcore every few months, because up the punx. We’re mostly hoping to keep up with good music, but we’re also thinking that maybe this project might connect some dots across the fractured Pittsburgh hardcore scene(s).
You can stream the first RPR mix at the bandcamp linked above, or you can just check out the tracklist below.
*(radio, streaming a mix, whatever)
SUPPORT PITTSBURGH PUNK & HARDCORE
If you want your band’s music to be on the next mix, or if you don’t want your band’s music to be on here at all, send us an email @ fillercollective [at] riseup [dot] net
It’s no secret that Pittsburgh’s (thriving) DIY music scene is fractured by genre, geography, and age. We’ve got the South Oakland indie/emo kids, the Hazelwood folk-punk/hippie types, the Polish Hill crust punx, the (fill in your own neighborhood / stereotype combo here), etc. But every so often there’s a band that comes along and draws in folks from just about every corner of this big small town. Shin Guard is one of those bands.
Shin Guard is a hardcore act whose blasts and breakdowns are just as heavy as their most atmospheric interludes. In 2019 alone they’ve self-recorded and produced two albums: a full-length, “2020,” and a 12″ split with For Your Health (Ohio), titled “Death of Spring.” Emotional, conscious, talented, and young, Shin Guard remains rooted in the local DIY community, even now as they’re starting to blow up.
With their 2020 tour only a few weeks away, Shin Guard guitarist, lyricist, and vocalist Owen Traynor was cool enough to find some time between booking shows and attending class to answer some questions for an upcoming issue of Filler.
We talk about the DIY ethic and community(ies), the band’s radical shift in sound and style, their recording process and upcoming tour, and a whole bunch of other shit. Check it out!
Filler:Who is Shin Guard? How’d yinz meet?
Owen: We’re 4 people playing heavy and intricate music. We’ve had some lineup changes but we met through high school and going to shows.
F: Where was your first show? What was it like?
O: It was in Jake’s parents’ basement, we invited all of our friends from high school so there were about 50 people there. It was very hype, some stuff got broken but that’s the way it goes.
F:In an interview on No Static At All, you mentionthat I Hate Myself was a big influence on Shin Guard circa “Five Songs,” the four song EP (2017). Since then, your band’s sound and lyrics have ventured into some far darker, heavier, and oftentimes pretty chaotic territory. What’s behind this shift in your sound? What are some newer influences on the band?
O: We wrote all of Five Songs and Cerebral while we were still in high school. It was a weird time in my life, as it is for a lot of people, and I felt the only way I could convey my emotions was through this music. After recording Cerebral, our original guitarist quit the band. Alex asked to join and everything became better instantly. They enabled us to be more technical, therefore opening us to so many more possibilities. Another facet of our shift in sound is our dissatisfaction with the state of the world. I think a lot of our musical peers have their lyrical content and ethics as separate entities. I use Shin Guard to voice my feelings on many matters, whether it be oppression, depression, death, love, etc. Regardless of the topic, the passion behind the lyrics is consistent.
F:If you had to distill all the musical and emotional intensity of Shin Guard into a single slogan or sentence, what would it be?
O: Bangers only.
F: Did Epstein kill himself?
O: Nope.
F:So there’s a lot of hype around your band these days, and its definitely well-deserved. But I’ve noticed there’s something about the hype around you guys that doesn’t really come up when talking about other local bands — your age. Even though DIY is (or at least should be) an all-ages movement, do you feel like your age ever impacts your experience in the scene? Is there any generational tension? Have you ran into any ageist bullshit?
O: Being zoomers has been a double-edged sword. We get a lot of admiration for being young and proficient, but a lot of bands we love don’t take us seriously sometimes. Most people our age don’t make the type of music that we do, so it can get kind of lonely, but also it is a great feeling to be different.
F:As a band that has produced and released much of its own music, what does DIY mean to you?
O: DIY has been everything to us. Everything we have done has been on our own terms so far. We know the way that we want things done better than anyone else would. That being said though, we would not be opposed to breaking that if our creative intent remains intact.
F:What do you love about Pittsburgh DIY? What do you want to see more of? Is there anything that you think the scene/community needs to seriously work on?
O: It’s a very warm scene. It has gotten a lot better over the years and people have been more vocal about problematic things. Though I love Pittsburgh DIY, I feel that the scene is very white and not as charitable as it could be. I wish that DIY folks and punks would get along better. I think it would go a long way if there was a meaningful goal that both scenes wanted to accomplish. In Boston, I went to Sheer Queer Fest where the fest of LGBTQ+ bands raised money for UAINE(United American Indians of New England). There was no scene beef with the DIY kids and punks, it was all love and communal greatness. I don’t book shows very often but I feel that I should start doing it again and create local showcase charity shows. As a white person, I think it’s more and more important that I should use my platform to do something that has an impact and inspire others to do the same. I worked with an experimental band called Not Your Friends and we agreed to donate all of the money from Bandcamp toPAAR (Pittsburgh Action Against Rape). I know it isn’t much but I am still doing anything I can to be helpful. I think we should also give media like Filler and S.C.A.M. a platform at DIY shows. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to set up another table with their media. Education should always be an ongoing process and this would go a long way if this were to happen.
F:A lot of your lyrics are situated at the intersections of personal turmoil and social war. On the bandcamp page for your 2018 album, Cerebral, there’s a quote from the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, “Hate does not produce love, and by hate one cannot remake the world.” Is Shin Guard also a political project? If so, what does that mean to you? What does that look like for your fans?
O: I don’t consider Shin Guard a political project. I am emotionally invested in the corruption of the world around us. The circumstances we live in are emotionally disturbing to me. I feel complicit if I don’t say anything about it.
F:Hey uh… so this one time a while ago a few Filler kids broke into Cafe Verona because a friend of ours forgot their wallet… will you forgive us?
O: Never.
F:I first caught you guys play back in March at Cafe Verona with For Your Health(Ohio), Plague Walker (Indiana) and Give Me Back (Pittsburgh, demo coming soon!)—an entire bill stacked with politically-charged emotional hardcore, and everyone absolutely killed it. Later that spring, Shin Guard and For Your Health dropped one of my all-time favorite splits, “Death of Spring.” Is this the beginning of new wave of skramz / hardcore? Is this the prelude to the RAWRing 20s???
O: I guess so! I think there’s been a resurgence of this type of music. With revivals like this, I think the genre improves. I feel like I would be making this type of music even without the newfound hype surrounding the genre.
F:What’s the relationship between you and FYH? What do you think the Pittsburgh and Columbus DIY scenes have to offer each other?
O: We are best friends. We were all in one van together for a whole month and survived somehow. We’ve only played in Columbus a few times so I don’t have the insight on their scene as well as I should have. Hayden from FYH told me that they have more Pittsburgh fans than Columbus fans. Every time we play Columbus now, it’s a great time. It can feel more intimate sometimes. The people are very welcoming and it goes off!
F:Sup with tour? Where you going, who you playing with? What are you excited/nervous about?
O: If everything falls into the right place, 2020 is going to be a tour heavy year for us. We plan to go all over the country and even out of it. We’ve made a lot of friends this year and we’ll be touring with some of them! I have nothing but excitement for this. I’m only nervous about potential vehicle troubles and bad weather, but that’s the way it goes.
F: How did you get into recording music?
O: I love making music but the biggest obstacle was figuring out how to record it. It ended up being my biggest passion.
F:What DAW do you use, and are there any plug-ins you’d recommend?
O: I use Ableton, Logic, and Pro Tools. I recommend iZotope, Fabfilter, and Waves plugins.
F: What gear do you use to record?
O: It’s been different every time depending on the resources I have at the time, but I use a lot of different mics (Shure, Audio-Technica, Audix, etc.) that I’ve bought and I’ve borrowed a lot of my friends’ equipment as well. I’ve record into Scarlett, Zoom, and Behringer interfaces.
F: What do you wish you had known when you first starting recording / mixing?
O: How compression works, the effect of mastering, etc. There’s always something to learn and recording/mixing techniques are contextual. There’s no right way to do one particular thing.
F: Do you master your own mixes, and if so what’s that process like for you?
O: I usually do, it can get very intense and time-consuming because it’s very intricate and you can lose your mind while doing it. Your ears get so used to the frequencies that you have to step back at some point and revisit it.
F:Anything you want to add?
O: Support your friends, give hugs, be the change you wanna see, riffs, etc.
F: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us! And double thanx for bringing some Filler zines on your upcoming tour!!!
Photos of Shin Guard were taken by Emery Myer and Cody Walsh, we just ripped them from the band’s website.
You can support Shin Guard by catching a show, picking up some merch, or by following them on social media:
Filler is an informal DIY collective that runs a zine distro, recording studio, record label (sorta) & anarchist news website in so-called Pittsburgh, PA (occupied Shawnee territory).
A SCAM FOR THE BIG IDEA is a Pittsburgh anarcho-punk compilation album benefiting The Big Idea Cooperative Bookstore & Cafe.
You can buy or stream the album on bandcamp. It’s also available for streaming on spotify, youtube, and a bunch of other sites. All proceeds go directly to The Big Idea.
Over the last 18 years, The Big Idea has become a second home for many Pittsburgh anarchists. The space’s rent got jacked up recently, and it’s likely to get raised again in the coming months. With that in mind, some Filler kids figured it was time we pay The Big Idea back for all the coffee, books, zines, pins, patches and vegan goodies that we’ve nabbed over the years.
We found some cheap recording equipment and decided to hit up our friends to see if anyone wanted to record a track or two for a benefit compilation album. Now that the album’s done, we’re offering free recording to anarchist bands/musicians living near the three rivers, so hit us up for free recording!
The accompanying zine will be released in the coming weeks, be sure to check it out! It’s gonna have art/lyrics for every track, as well as some perspectives on anarchy in the East End.
An excerpt from one of the introductions to the compilation zine.
Bloomfield remained relatively affordable throughout the last decade of gentrification in the East End, and it’s made us complacent. This supposed hub of radicalism has failed to meaningfully contribute to the ongoing struggles against cultural erasure and displacement in other East End neighborhoods. And now, as developers rapidly encircle Pittsburgh’s so-called “Little Italy,” the rent hikes are accelerating again. How many friends have already been priced out?
Anarchists cannot continue to passively rely on Bloomfield’s proximity to whiteness as a shield. The fact that fucking “Little Italy” is experiencing another wave of development is proof that the capitalist class has already outmaneuvered community resistance elsewhere. “We” have failed to materially disrupt revitalization, even now as everyone seems to be scoffing at Peduto’s “Most Livable City” propaganda.
Gentrification functions differently in every neighborhood. Here in the East End, the rent hikes threaten a budding inter-generational anarchist community(ies). We don’t all hang out in the same spaces or roll with the same crew, and this benefit album is not an attempt to cohere around a single space (sorry infoshop vanguardists) — but if we lose our infoshop, it’s safe to say we lose our neighborhood.
The Big Idea is a project that spans nearly two decades of Pittsburgh anarchy. In other words, it’s one of the few remaining places capable of retaining collective memory.
If it weren’t for the things I’ve read, the people I’ve met, and the boxes of old junk I’ve dug through at the Big Idea, I would have never heard of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group, East End Mutual Aid, the Greater Pittsburgh Area Anarchist Collective, Indymedia, Anti-Racist Action, Occupy Pittsburgh, TheYinsurrectionary Times, Landslide Community Farm, Fight Back Pittsburgh… on and on.
If it weren’t for The Big Idea, I would not know the names of our dead. I never met Mike Vesch, but The Yinsurrectionary Times is what inspired me and some other Filler kids to expand our fanzine into a local counterinfo website; I never met Daniel Montano, but I’ve read his writings about art and resistance nearly every day since I moved here in 2012—MF1 is still all-city, even after years of buffing and gentrification.
As the years went by and I began to lose some of my own friends and comrades, The Big Idea also became a place to remember them, to share stories about the life they breathed into Pittsburgh anarchy.
Stephie was a Big Idea collective member. If you drop by Big Idea and look at the wall above the comfy chair in the corner, you’ll see a black and red flag with an angry cat in the center. That’s Badcastki, that’s Stephie. Her art was subversive; her ideas as dangerous as she was kind. She organized at the intersections of anarchism and mental health during a time when few people in the scene seemed to recognize just how militant you have to be to fight on that front. Badcatski chose to commit suicide on May 5, 2016 at the age of 34. Knowing Stephie, her decision was patient, deliberate, conscious, intentional, necessary. Like all anarchists who have died in the social war, her act can also be remembered as martyrdom. Sometimes during quiet shifts at Big Idea I sit in the comfy chair in the corner, drink coffee from her favorite mug, and understand that she is here. That realization reminds me to take a minute to be honest with myself, to confront my feelings. She reminds me to take care of myself and my friends as if the fate of the movement depends on it—and she’s right, it does.
In acting and learning to act, we find that we can share stories, skills, lessons, memories, tactics, and ideas. We should never be content to just survive, to go through life as a passive spectator in the spaces you inhabit. There’s a difference between life and survival. We are at war. Every decision we make—from where we live and who we live with to what we do for fun and how we do it—might be better understood strategically, and taken with intent.
I often hear stories about the glory days of Pittsburgh anarcho-punk scene and wonder what the fuck happened. Of course, there are still some really good bands and cool spaces, but the reality of the situation is that anarchists and punx don’t really organize much together. It seems that when someone burns out from one scene, they turn to the other.
But if we think our scene(s) are lacking something, that shouldn’t mean we just drop out of them. Instead we might ask ourselves how we could contribute materially, artistically, and sincerely to all the shit that we can’t help but care about.
Why do so many of us find ourselves living in the East End? What would a new anarcho-punk movement look/feel like in Pittsburgh? What are the first steps? Here’s a collection of preliminary answers/thoughts/desires/filler from a few of the kids featured on this comp:
I want to know that my broke ass won’t be turned away by a $10 cover charge at the door, so I guess I could reach out to the promoter and put up a few flyers around town earlier that week.
I want to hit the bagel dumpster before my shift at the Big Idea so the staffers during the rest of that week can eat for free.
I want to know who the harm reduction distro kids are so I can cop more narcan without having to go out of my way.
I want to know what my friends’ basic boundaries are with strangers so I can understand when I’m expected to step up to a jag, when I just let the homie handle it, and when I should just chill out and stop being such a PC cop.
I want to write hyphy reviews on my friends’ bandcamp releases.
I want to learn to make tapes and record music and help my talented friends finally put that album out.
I want to be the designated driver and get my friends to the gig because I know the homies will buy me some merch from the touring band as a thank you.
I want to know that my skill set can help my friends save money (or at least keep it in the solidarity economy) because they won’t be overpaying some capitalist to repair their bike/car/phone/drywall.
I want to film my friends’ protests, shows, music videos, skateboarding—fucking whatever, honestly—cos I know I’m pretty good at making that shit look wayyy harder than it felt at the time, and I like to hype my friends up.
I want to know that my friends won’t judge me when I tell them that I’m in active addiction, again.
I want to start writing again because all my friends love sharing their zines with each other, and because I know they will actually read what I give them and invite me out to talk more about it over a coffee or a few beers.
I want to start going to shows again because I realized most of the people I run into are passionate about the music, the spaces, the ideas, the projects, the food…
I want to know every word to my friend’s band’s songs, and when that drop comes I want to rush to the front of the pit and shout I THINK THERE’S SOMETHING IN THE WATER!
I want to stop buying dumb shit online because I’d rather buy the clothing and furniture and jewelry and patches and art that my friends make, not just because I can save money though! I know that those earrings they made will turn heads.
I want to start tabling again because sometimes there’s honestly nothing hotter than a crew of six dekt queer punx rolling up to an event, nodding to the person running the door, and walking in for free with 3 boxes of zines, a foldout table, a bag of narcan, and a stack of flyers for next week’s show.
I don’t want this shit to feel like a job or duty. I can’t do everything I would like to. And I especially don’t want to have to prove my worth just to feel like I’m allowed show up to an event. I don’t have to do jack shit if I’m not feeling up to it. And I don’t find myself wanting to do this shit for the woke internet posturing, or to climb some scene’s social ladder. Sometimes I just want to throw a beer can across the room, or tag some toy shit on a condo, or toss a U-Lock through a windshield. And I sure as hell don’t feel like justifying that to anyone.
I’m a punk because I’m a fucking nerd. I’ve only ever had like 3 or 4 close friends at a time. I’m constantly cycling through tides of depression, anger, and mania. Most of the time, I feel like I can’t really hang, and so I don’t really go out much, unless it’s to a show or something. Socializing is a lot easier for me if there’s something creative or fun or useful I can bring that might make it easier to talk and connect with people. The lyric sheets I that grew up on told me that punk’s not a fashion show— it’s a fucking way of life. I feel like that punk should mean something more than whatever bullshit it is I find myself doing these days.
Find each other, because the Something we’re waiting for is never going to happen unless we become Something. If each of us acts on our own ideas and desires, a shared perception of our situation is temporarily understood every time we act collectively—every time we create spaces, projects, and experiences together. Which is really just a roundabout way of saying, whatyou do or don’t do makes all the difference.
It’s time we see ourselves for what we are and have always been: a movement. We’re an international web of relationships, held together by a few DIY spaces, bars, art collectives, bands, distros, niche skillsets, and the mutual aid that arises from common needs and interests, from the experience of building something together: from living communism and spreading anarchy.
Punx and anarchists cannot face down these monied developers alone, but together we can face these faceless profiteers and build something resembling a community in the process. With all the struggles in our own personal lives, the raging fires across the planet and our neighborhoods can seem like someone else’s problem. It feels like we don’t have the strength, the time, or the resources to face these problems, but your own resilience, endurance, and passion can surpass even your most arrogant self-confidence. Now is the time to come together in solidarity. Keep moving, keep fighting.
punx is weapons // punx is small town
– Filler Distro
“East End, the fashionable residence quarter of Pittsburgh, lies basking in the afternoon sun. The broad avenue looks cool and inviting: the stately trees touch their shadows across the carriage road, gently nodding their heads in mutual approval. A steady procession of equipages fills the avenue, the richly caparisoned horses and uniformed flunkies lending color and life to the scene. A cavalcade is passing me. The laughter of the ladies sounds joyous and care-free.
Their happiness irritates me. I am thinking of Homestead. In mind I see the somber fence the fortifications and cannon; the piteous figure of the widow rises before me, the little children weeping, and again I hear the anguished cry of a broken heart, a shattered brain….”
– Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist
I was surprised to hear from you today given how busy we both have become, but I am grateful for your letter. I have no doubt you’ve heard me mention the person you are inquiring after from across the room or have seen their text on occasion across the various social media platforms. I openly acknowledge the enigma surrounding the person you’re looking for. It seems they are too-often explained in only the fuzziest usages of language, and so this begs your question: who is the gender abolitionist?
It is probably best to begin by pointing out who the gender abolitionist cannot be. They are not a feminist, for what they strive for is neither the equality of gendered bodies nor the liberation of women from men. This latter point is important, because while the gender abolitionist admits openly that the millennia-old subjugation of women’s bodies is the root of immense and ongoing global catastrophe, they do not see the continuing existence of these bodies as possible after that patriarchy has been truly dissolved. The culmination of a global, years-long campaign to eliminate all misogynistic practices only arrives for the gender abolitionist when women and men have been rendered so materially indifferent to one another that the distinction between the two is decided to be eliminated. I will return to this point later.
The gender abolitionist is, similarly, not one who tolerates the crux of performative accounts of gender such as those advanced by scholars such as Judith Butler. Certainly, transgressions against norms of gendered practices are punished, but this does not reduce the vast structural forces that enforce those norms to the role of policing one’s appearance alone. It is true that trans women faces misogyny in-so-far as they attempt integrating into what is conceived as a normative womanhood, and that trans men may, conversely, reap social and political benefits. Yet we should not forget that it is equally true violence against a trans woman stems from their body’s challenges to a coercive and mandatory practice of strictly gendered sexuality; a body may be altered or disguised, but so long as these two methods by which one pursues performance lies strictly within the structure of gendered discourses, the gender abolitionist must reject them.
If the preceding two approaches do not set out satisfactory practices for the gender abolitionist, what does? I am not sure I can answer this question on every gender abolitionist’s behalf, but I will try my best to at least elucidate what I consider the most important points.
First, to return to a previous point: the gender abolitionist sees patriarchy, and not gender binarism, as the root of the gendered conundrum humanity has found itself in. This is a not unimportant distinction. To decry gender binarism as too limited a model for the possibilities of gendered expression is entirely anti-ethical to the understanding that it is the oppression of one class (women) by another (men) that gives rise to gender in the first instance. By shifting rhetoric from patriarchy to gender binarism, the critics of gender abolitionism immediately give up the ghost of any potential for revolutionary change, and instead embrace a comfort-oriented politics aimed at a mere expansion of terms for those beings men will ultimately, and usually already do, work to subjugate. As I’m sure you are already aware, the historical struggles of black anti-racists have shown us there is no room for the inaction of moderates who prioritize their personal comforts over substantive change during revolutionary struggle.
This is not to say that those who feel as if they to need to step outside of gendered terms in order to describe their way-of-being are at any fault for recent rhetorical shifts. Obviously, the constraints of gender have been felt by much of humanity for many thousands of years, and those who protest these limitations to their desires have always existed. Yet the ways in which this problem has been addressed have been historically unsatisfactory, often leading (if they lead anywhere at all) to the creation of new social roles which are still uniformly constrained but can function as a release valve for the pressures of ongoing, patriarchal oppression. For the gender abolitionist, the various alternatives to what is merely gender binarism, and not gender itself, are not satisfactory in a post-colonial world.
More contemporarily, an increasing number of people now describe themselves as non-binary, genderqueer, or some other variation of an essentially anti-gender impulse. For the gender abolitionist, this is an encouraging development, but it is also a potentially dangerous one. These anti-gender identities are not themselves revolutionary in content; this is all the more apparent to the gender abolitionist who, as I have already pointed out, rejects performativity as an accurate accounting of gender. On one hand, this allows the gender abolitionist to correctly locate the root of anti-gender identities and acknowledge them in their friends as something not based within performativity-based practices such as “passing”; on the other hand, the gender abolitionist recognizes that anti-gender identified friends who fall short of practicing a politics that centers the destruction of patriarchy are not yet themselves gender abolitionists. The non-binary person who still reproduces patriarchy by refusing women dialogue, by not acting in direct opposition to legislation targeting women, and by not even disputing gender directly outside their own self-affirmation cannot be recognized by the gender abolitionist as a comrade in pursuit of gender’s systematic destruction.
All of this to say: representation is dreadfully incapable of telling the gender abolitionist who can be called a friend.
As you know, it is not enough, nor has it ever been enough, for white people (myself especially) to simply call ourselves “not racist.” We long ago agreed that every white person worth their salt in a fight carries out anti-racist practices in order to not just abolish race, but specifically their own whiteness. The gender abolitionist would, I think, hold that this logic extends to gender, ham-fisted of an analogy though it may be. It is not enough for those who refuse the constraints of gender to be not men or neither woman nor man. Those who go about their lives being systematically recognized as a part of manhood must seek to be anti-men; not just among their fellow radicals, but everywhere they go. This is not a process that can leave any stragglers: trans men and non-binary people cannot abdicate their practical complicities in the subjugation of women due to a misguided belief that it is only the binary or the binary’s lack of inner mobility which is the fundamental problem. Such a belief reeks of all the mistaken judgements that characterize the white person who is racially “moderate” and believes the simple construction of a black middle class will soothe all the ills of society.
Ultimately, the gender abolitionist is the one who asks everyone to take up the practices of leveling gender just as readily as they would ask them to be anti-capitalist and anti-racist, because it is only via this leveling that gender’s horrors will be forced to exit from our collective history. Forcing some to give up their real or desired power over others will never be a peaceful or comfortable process, but it is a necessary one.
My friend, I am sincerely sorry for the length of this reply; I do hope it goes some way in prompting even more questions about this topic that we can discuss next time we sit down over a meal.
Yrs., L. T.
***
Filler is a DIY media platform, recording studio & anarchist zine distro affiliated with Pittsburgh’s autonomous student network and the Steel City Autonomous Movement (SCAM).
You can send your report-backs, zine submissions, critiques, graffiti/action photos, demo tapes, hate mail, memes, etc to FILLERCOLLECTIVE [at] RISEUP [dot] NET … we’ll try to get back to you in a reasonable amount of punk time.
We recommend using Tor and guerrilla mail together if you want to submit something anonymously.
Sometime after midnight on Saturday, August 18th, a dozen or so anarchists rolled up on a Skull Fest (it’s a punk fest) show with a sound system, flags, banners, and goodie bags full of road flares, black masks, and pamphlets about the National Prison Strike.
From August 21st (the anniversary of Nat Turner’s revolt and of the assassination of Black Guerrilla George Jackson) through September 9th (the anniversary of the Attica prison uprising), prisoners from all across the so-called united states are rising against the modern plantation system.
“Already, the strike has spread into Canada, and numerous facilities around the US are already seeing hunger strikes pop off as prisoners issue demands. Prison officials are also cracking down on various facilities, shutting them down, and locking up prison rebel leaders as deep in the hole as they can.”
Since we figured Skull Fest punx probably know shit is fucked and might be down (?), we took the opportunity to incite our friends on the outside to act in solidarity with our friends who are locked down on the inside. Even small gestures like ours can subvert the isolation of prison, inviting the unrest that’s too often locked and hidden behind walls into our streets.
Out of the large crowd, a few punx showed interest in joining the march, and some actually did for a bit, which was tight. But tbh most remained indifferent and just kinda stared at us. One jag yelled, “Burn out already!!” If only he knew how many times we have (: …but pamphlets about the strike were distributed to the fest goers, and a few fists were raised. Punk is dead, blah blah. ANYWAYS, the march made its way up on to fucking Butler Street. What’s good, hipsters?
After leaving the show, we marched a short ways through Lawrenceville, distributing literature to some (surprisingly receptive?) folks at a few hipster bars. We dispersed shortly after the cops arrived, but not before getting a few laughs in first—this one pig’s tough-guy “who’s in charge?” routine devolved into him jogging from person to person straight-up pleading for someone, anyone, to talk to him. He had this sorta desperate look on his face, clearly just couldn’t process it. Dude was shook as fuck. The authors of this report would also like to add that we hope he winds up like those two screws who got shanked at Allegheny County Jail the other day.
It’s been a hot summer in Pittsburgh, but as the homies at Torchlightwrite,
“[Pittsburgh’s new protest restrictions] make it obvious that the cops are gaining confidence and worrying less about Pittsburgh going up like Ferguson.”
Spontaneous, unpredictable actions do more than show solidarity and “raise awareness” — they disrupt the state’s ability to use threats of repression to siphon unrest into the professional Left’s array of dead-end “community” dialogues and electoral campaigns. The new protest guidelines threaten to criminalize radical individuals, crews, and organizations who continue to organize beyond the self-appointed leaders and managers of the various movements. Solet’s continue catching the pigs off guard, challenging their newfound confidence, and opening up space for further decentralized, autonomous action — by any means necessary.
Solidarity with everyone that’s still pushing the envelope in Pittsburgh. Solidarity with all prisoners.
Behind Enemy Lines probably said it better than us:
Immersed in political strategies Government policies create endless catastrophes and we all pay the price when our movement becomes stagnant, anchored by apathy We can’t just give up, we can’t just give in There are no wasted attempts when it comes to action The smallest act could cause a chain reaction that could bring this entire system down Light it up Ignite a spark Every single action could be the start It will take all of our efforts to get out of the dark You could be the one that offers hope and inspiration to everyone who feels defeated and moves the depleted towards motivation and helps the flame continue to burn The most important thing that we still need to learn is that we’re in this together, don’t shut out one another Don’t ever forget that we depend on each other
