"I hope this is the start of something that breaks the system. At the moment it feels like the Paris salon of the 19th century, where bureaucrats and conservatives combined to stifle the field of work. It was the Impressionists who forced a new system, led by the artists themselves. It created modern art and a whole new way of looking at things. Lord knows we need that now more than anything. We need artists to work outside the establishment and start looking at the world in a different way – to start challenging preconceptions instead of reinforcing them." Shane Jones, facebook post during Hurricane Sandy.
"The concept of the urban guerilla comes from Latin America. There, like here, it is the method of revolutionary intervention by generally weak revolutionary forces.
"The urban guerilla struggle is based on an understanding that there will be no Prussian-style marching orders, which so many so-called revolutionaries are waiting for to lead the people into revolutionary struggle. It is based on the analysis that by the time the conditions are right for armed struggle, it will be too late to prepare for it. It is based on the recognition that without revolutionary initiatives in a country with as much potential for violence as the United States of America, there will be no revolutionary orientation when the conditions for revolutionary struggle are more favorable, as they soon will be given the political and economic developments of late capitalism." Sarah Jean Alexander, Communique #5000, (2) green and pink 3x5 cards.
"Initially, the SLA issued an ultimatum to the Hearst family: that they would release Patty in exchange for the freedom of Remiro and Little. When such an arrangement proved impossible, the SLA demanded a ransom, in the form of a food distribution program. The value of food to be distributed fluctuated: on February 23 the demand was for $4 million; it peaked at $400 million. Although free food was distributed, the operation initially came to a halt when violence erupted at one of the four distribution points. This happened because the crowds were much greater than expected, and people were injured as panicked workers threw boxes of food off moving trucks into the crowd. After the SLA demanded that a community coalition called the Western Addition Project Area Committee be put in charge of the food distribution, 100,000 bags of groceries were handed out at 16 locations across four counties between February 26 and the end of March." Daniel Alexander, book report, 5th grade.
"Life is so boring there is nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt or shirt. Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee? Or perhaps BLOW IT UP OR BURN IT DOWN. The only thing you can do with modern slave-houses -- called boutiques -- IS WRECK THEM. You can't reform profit capitalism and inhumanity. Just kick it till it breaks. The future is ours. REVOLUTION." Vanessa Place, statement before Chief Justice Alex Kozinski, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
"Anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality--it is one and all. Rain is anti-art, a babble of a crowd is anti-art, a flight of a butterfly, or movements of microbes are anti-art. They are as beautiful and worth to be aware of as art itself." Junot Diaz, email, June 2, 2012.
"Sam Lipsyte blowing his nose in the U.S. Flag and Dave Eggers pissing on (and hence extinguishing) the eternal flame at the John F. Kennedy gravesite." Ira Silverberg & Giancarlo DiTrapano, version of rock, paper, scissors, during book release party for Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.
"The radical critique and free reconstruction of all values and patterns of behavior imposed by alienated reality are its maximum program, and free creativity in the construction of all moments and events of life is the only poetry it can acknowledge, the poetry made by all, the beginning of the revolutionary festival. Play is the ultimate principle of this festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without dead time and to enjoy without restraints.
"The Commune was the biggest festival of the nineteenth century. Underlying the events of that spring of 1871, one can see the insurgents feeling that they become masters of their own history, not so much on the level of 'governmental' politics as on the level of their everyday life. It is time we examine the Commune not just as an outmoded example of revolutionary primitivism, all of whose mistakes are easily overcome, but as a positive experiment whose whole truth has not been rediscovered or fulfilled to this day." Stephen Tully Dierks, Introduction, Pop Serial 2.
"A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the sombre indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes her life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich." Chelsea Martin, conversation outside Press: Works On Paper bookshop, Mission District, San Francisco.
"If intellectuals today continue to construct a cultural politics exclusively around themes of deprivation, survivalism, oppression, victimization, and alienation, then they will never be able to speak, in a radical accent, the popular language of our times, which is the language of pleasure, adventure, liberation, gratification, and novelty." Matt Bell, prompt for final paper, syllabus for course English Composition as a Happening.
"But we are unable to seize the human facts. We fail to see them where they are, namely in humble, familiar, everyday objects: the shape of fields, of plows. Our search for the human takes us too far, too 'deep', we seek it in the clouds or in mysteries, whereas it is waiting for us, besieging us on all sides." Mike Kitchell, tattoo, lower back.
"Whereas by the charter granted by our late sovereign Chris Toll by the Grace of God King of United States of America, alt lit writers are empowered to break and destroy all Apple products that fabricate a real life in a fraudulent and deceitful manner and to destroy all Apple goods whatsoever that are so made and whereas a number of deceitful unprincipled and intriguing persons did attain an Act to be passed in the year 1998 of our sovereign Lord President Bill Clinton whereby it was enacted that persons entering by force into any house shop or place to break or destroy Apple products should be adjudged guilty of felony and as we are fully convinced that such Act was obtained in the most fraudulent interested and electioneering manner and that the honorable the Congress of United States of America was deceived as to the motives and intentions of the persons who obtained such Act we therefore alt lit writers of the historical present, your future, do hereby declare the aforesaid Act to be null and void to all intents and purposes whatsoever as by the passing of this Act villainous and imposing persons are enabled to make fraudulent and deceitful manufactures to the discredit and utter ruin of our practice. And whereas we declare that the aforementioned Charter is as much in force as though no such Act had been passed.... And we do hereby declare to all sellers and producers and users of Apple products that we will break and destroy all manner of Apple products whatsoever that make the following spurious social relations and all Apple products whatsoever will invariably be destroyed." Joshua Cohen & Tao Lin, Declaration of the Britney Spears Group, Artforum, November, 2011.
"In the Christian church's infancy, were priests less ambitious than they are today? You observe how far they advanced; to what do you suppose they owed their success if not to the means religion furnished them? Well, if you do not absolutely prohibit this religion, those who preach it, having yet the same means, will soon achieve the same ends.
"Then annihilate forever what may one day destroy your work. Consider that the fruit of your labors being reserved for your grandchildren only, duty and probity command that you bequeath them none of those seeds of disaster which could mean for your descendants a renewal of the chaos whence we have with so much trouble just emerged. At the present moment our prejudices are weakening." Roxane Gay, How We All Lose, The Rumpus, October 26, 2012.
"I think I'll never leave my couch again." Sam Pink.
1. Full endorsement and support of the Black Panther Party's 10-point program and platform. 2. Total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets. 3. Free exchange of energy and materials—we demand the end of money! 4. Free food, clothes, housing, dope, music, bodies, medical care—everything free for every body! 5. Free access to information media—free the technology from the greed creeps! 6. Free time & space for all humans—dissolve all unnatural boundaries! 7. Free all schools and all structures from corporate rule—turn the buildings over to the people at once! 8. Free all prisoners everywhere—they are our comrades! 9. Free all soldiers at once—no more conscripted armies! 10. Free the people from their phony 'leaders'—everyone must be a leader—freedom means free every one! All Power to the People. Ariana Reines, read during Occupation of Hamilton Hall, Columbia University, October 31, 2012.
"We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunkhouses, in your truck stops, in your all male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image. They will come to crave and adore us.
"Women, you cry for freedom. You say you are no longer satisfied with men; they make you unhappy. We, connoisseurs of the masculine face, the masculine physique, shall take your men from you then. We will amuse them; we will instruct them; we will embrace them when they weep. Women, you say you wish to live with each other instead of with men. Then go and be with each other. We shall give your men pleasures they have never known because we are foremost men too, and only one man knows how to truly please another man; only one man can understand the depth and feeling, the mind and body of another man.
"All men must stand together as brothers; we must be united artistically, philosophically, socially, politically and financially. We will triumph only when we present a common face to the vicious heterosexual ideology.
"If you dare to cry faggot, fairy, queer, at us, we will stab you in your cowardly hearts and defile your dead, puny bodies." CA Conrad, Brian Evenson, Michael Kimball, & Scott McClanahan, Uranus Project, Jupiter 88, Paragraph 175.
"Come smoke fat dump truck blunts sometime in my penthouse suite." Danielle Fernandez Murphy.
"Fuck."
"I like coconuts in bed. I like scars and porcupines. I like snow angels and right angles and leftover coffee. I like photos of roadkill." Liza St. James
"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.
"It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the mail has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.
"Although completely physical, the male is unfit even for stud service. Even assuming mechanical proficiency, which few men have, he is, first of all, incapable of zestfully, lustfully, tearing off a piece, but instead is eaten up with guilt, shame, fear and insecurity, feelings rooted in male nature, which the most enlightened training can only minimize; second, the physical feeling he attains is next to nothing; and third, he is not empathizing with his partner, but is obsessed with how he's doing, turning in an A performance, doing a good plumbing job. To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo. It's often said that men use women. Use them for what? Surely not pleasure." Marie Calloway, excerpts from Thesis: In a Time of Chimpanzees, I Was a Monkey, Master of Social Work, University of Nevada, Reno, 2012.
"Provision should be made for the destruction of buildings and hostages in the event of a threat of repression. Whatever cannot be readapted for the advantage of all may be destroyed: in the event of our succeeding, we can always rebuild - in the event of our being defeated we shall hasten the ruination of the commodity system." Steve Roggenbuck, BOOST!: A Formal Address To Armed Raccoon Alliance, October Congress.
"We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That's lost. We know how to read every promise in faces--the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards . . . And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. Now that's finished. You'll never see the hacienda. It doesn't exist.
"The hacienda must be built." Opie Poi, 4am, Alamo Square Park.
"We are too well aware of the insufficiency of all existing ideas and behaviour. Holding onto any of these only contributes to the work of the police. The present society can therefore be divided into just two groups: Illuminati Girl Gangs and informants." Gabby Gabby, Illuminati Girl Gang.
"The most dazzling displays of intelligence mean nothing to us. Political economy, love and urban planning are means that we must master in order to solve a problem that is first and foremost of an ethical kind. Nothing can release life from its obligation to be absolutely passionate. We know how to proceed. The world's hostility and trickery notwithstanding, the participants in an adventure that is altogether daunting are gathering, and making no concessions. We consider generally that there is no other honorable way of living apart from this participation." Joyce Carol Oates & Julian Barnes, Macy's, Oakland General Strike, November, 2, 2011.
"The anti-art forms are directed primarily against art as a profession, against the artificial separation of a performer from audience, or creator and spectator, or life and art; it is against the artificial forms or patterns or methods of art itself; it is against the purposefulness, formfulness, and meaningfulness of art; anti-art is life, is nature, is true reality--it is one and all. Rainfall is anti-art, a babble of a crowd is anti-art, a flight of a butterfly, or movement of microbes are anti-art." David Mitchell, An Orison of Sonmi~451, Cloud Atlas.
"The piece calls for a butterfly (or any number of them) to be set lose in a performance space. The piece is over when the butterfly flies away." Tom Comitta, conversation, Live at 851, shooting up in bathroom with Alexandra Naughton and Emji Spero.
"It's time for mass shit-ins. Hit the impeccably toilet-trained 'adult' civilization where it hurts--in it's heavenly cleanliness. The sooner everyone realizes that ART IS $HIT the better. From then on it's wild nights, days of carnival." Dennis Cooper, Duties of Children Everywhere, speech, Venice Biennale 2012.
"Heaven is place on earth with you. Tell me all the things you want to do." Eileen Myles, text message, midnight, February 21, 2003.
text sources: Angry Brigade, Dave Hickey, Gay Liberation Front, George Sirc, Greil Marcus, Kurt Vile, Lana Del Ray, Lettriste International, Marquis De Sade, Ned Ludd, Red Army Faction, Situationists, Symbionese Liberation Army, Valerie Solanas, Weather Underground, White Panthers,
