Plants Growing Through Cracks in the Concrete

I did one of those low-intensity creative practices that I used to do all the time last week: I shared a set of photos and videos on social media that expressed what I have seen lately and what I had been listening to. Polaroid pictures of my everyday commuter, my sticker-covered cargo bike, a discarded lazyboi, buffed graffiti against a parking garage wall in an alley, some trashure (ABS-too-fresh's nickname for a graffiti-covered dumpster) coexisted alongside videos of me commuting on a bike quest to get visit bookstores and record stores on an average day in April. Don't underestimate what sharing something as simple as a set of pictures can do for breaking loose the dam on your own human expression. I felt that characteristic feeling of flow that comes from letting something out of my heart to share with the world. A simple message of, "slow down and notice the world," can literally be all you need to get yourself back on track.

Let me take a step back, it's been 6 months or more since I showed up here, so you might be wondering what I mean by getting myself back on track. Remember when I used to write something each week for two years? I do. I really, really miss that time. However, life changes. I have two kids now. My day job is bazonkers. I was absolutely correct in the assumption that I would not be able to write every week once baby M arrived. Welp, guess what folks? The test results are back. It is indeed almost impossible to work a demanding, full-time job, be an engaged, 50/50 parent with my wife, and still have time for the sort of large, engaged art projects I am accustom to working on. So, I have sort of felt adrift in my wish and hope to turn this project into: 1.) a physical zine and 2.) have a corresponding corner of the web for all my favorite things to exist.

It's all in the process of becoming, but I just haven't had the time to really show up to the page to begin to reflect on where I am at in the process. Most nights, I collapse after working from 5:00 AM-7:30 PM on my day job/child & elder dog caretaking. If I am lucky, I am get a wee little bike quest in while I am getting food for dinner, going to the library, or looking for my turtle friends on Sand Creek. Truthfully, there have been plenty of downs during this process as I have had to remember what it's like to be a parent of a young child in a late stage capitalist hellscape that builds and drops bombs instead of childcare centers (or schools, housing, hospitals, animal shelters, etc). It makes me feel empowered to speak this truth to the world, as we inhabit a hurtling rock full of "parenting influencers" that want to sell me their one time $49.99 course on how you get only the peak experiences of parenthood without the valleys (again, another con in an incredible age of con artists--see also the AI Scam, cryptocurrency, cheetohead's Incredible Time Machine taking us back to a more brazenly racist, imperialist US). This process is intense for all of those of you who have gone through it. However, most of my processing has been quiet and out of the watchful lens of public sharing.

And yet, I would not trade this experience for anything, because it has cracked open every illusion of what I thought being a human means. I think my fren Kailea Rose Lofton put it perfectly in a note on Mothering recently: "Only choose this path if you are willing to have your life not actually be about you." As someone who chose a pathway of public service, I thought I knew what it meant to be a person for others. My experience as a parent quickly dispensed of this illusion – as first-hand influences so often do to the creations of our imaginariums. There is no more self-giving path that I have experienced than to be a parent. All my decisions are made with how they will impact my wife and two kids. There is no me-me-me-me-me-me path anymore. There is only us and what we will do together. I traded in the old self-centered world handed to me in my culture for a relational existence woven together with them.

My fiber art has always been a form of performance art. One of the most important parts of my art practice is demonstrating to others that you actually only need two hands; simple, cheap wooden tools; and some raw materials to express yourself and build worlds. It's one of the reasons, aside from contributing to the online fiber arts community, that I posted so many videos of myself spinning yarn on a tiny $20 drop spindle and weaving on a frame loom that you could make yourself from a discarded frame and some nails. Why? Because people, especially those born to single moms who have been fighting since the jump, need to be reminded that they are capable of building worlds and making their dreams a reality. You don't have to just sit on the sidelines and passively consume. You get to be a part of something. You don't just have to cheer on your favorite band, writer, artist. It doesn't matter what people think of the work you make. It's the process of making it that matters. Revolutionize your everyday life and the world you experience will change right alongside you.

If my performance was directed toward the outside world before, now that performance is for my kids. Again, it's no longer about just me anymore and what I-I-I-I-I-I-I can contribute to the world. My life is about offering them the same experience I had as a kid with my mom: countless hours spent watching my mom crochet, illustrate and write children's books, and share her poetry online. I want them to be embedded in a world that honors their creative vision and offers to take that vision to the next level. I want to demonstrate to them that they're making matters, so they grow into adults that don't lose the love of learning or discovering new things about themselves in the creative process.

Case-in-point: my daughter J has been on a mud kick lately. This morning, as we are trying to gather everything together to get to my in-laws, J was cooking in her mud kitchen. I have baby bro M strapped to me and am running things to the car in that focused, mechanical mode parents can fall into. Suddenly, J declares, "Look at my diamond." I look over and realize that she has thrown the mud against our house. At first, I was angry as any parent in focused, mechanical mode would be. Ugh, that mode is so necessary as a parent, but I love when I can turn on a more inquisitive, exploratory mode. I softened my immediate response and replied, "That's beautiful." I then offered her the offramp of throwing mud against a large sheet of crafting paper instead of against our old stucco covered house that is in sore need of touch ups. Am I the perfect parent? Absolutely not, however, I was proud of myself in that moment of finding a way to keep her burgeoning abstract expressionism mud collection going without relying on removing parts of our home to document it a la Banksy.

Ok, now you can tell what I have been up to. I am in flux and so are my projects. I am in that deep-time work, generational curse-bursting work, and survival work above-all-else. I am still working toward the goal of my first physical zine of my work. I was hoping to have one zine done before May 31, so I could apply to vend at the Denver Zine Fest. It doesn't look like I am gonna get to that goal after four rounds of norovirus and a bout with hand-foot-and-mouth disease, so I will have to circle 2027 for that event. I still am pushing forward with the project. It's probably for the best to not vend anyways, since I am still in flux. I'm still in my, "I just want to trade and give the zines away mode," so its best not to take a spot from someone who is trying to make a go of running a business by selling zines (if I would even get accepted). I think the new goal will be to have some copies of something to trade and give away at Denver Zine fest in September while walking around. How else am I going to make friends in my 40s?

I also have been working on all sorts of woven work, some gifts and some magical offerings. Those works have been filling me up so much. In alignment with trying to only tell those stories here in this space and in the new zine, I haven't been talking about them on the social medias. This is certainly a new approach for me. It's one I am really excited by, because I just want my work to exist outside of that ecosystem. I want to amplify little broadcasts on social media to inform people of things on my little pirate radio channel and then retreat back to my little nook and cranny where I can dig deep into my ponderings without the immediate fear of the the ever-encroaching techno-feudalist oligarchy making money off my storytelling.

I had a wonderful experience with my woven work this week in an uncharacteristic circumstance. Recently, Lily, J, M, and I all took turns with norovirus and had a snowday on Wednesday. In such instances in the past, one could usually find me doom scrolling my brain into oblivion and decrying the general status of the universe as I try to continue to work from home. Wednesday was different. I called off work and just simplified things down to being responsible for childcare with Lily. If there is anything I have learned being a parent for six years and a human for almost 40, doing one thing at a time can really unlock a very different experience of reality, even if it means using precious paid-time off.

Instead of trying to work, I co-played with the kids. They played with toys and watched 'toons while I did a variety of little projects. I started my day off with reading Ursula Le Guin's translation of the I Ching. It set the tone for the whole day. Le Guin's translation is the best I have read. When I did the whole "I-am-a-white-dood-who-uses-ancient-wisdom-traditions-instead-of-going-to-therapy-shtict," I did a daily journal/meditation practice with the I Ching. It was great for opening up different ways of being. However, the results of this experiment are also back: you can not cure OCD with I Ching journaling. Go figure, right? (Le Guin's translation though....she just may have done it. I kid. I kid. Exposure therapy for the win.) One set of verses at this moment in my life jumped off the page as I was reading:

"Racing, chasing, hunting 

drives people crazy

Trying to get rich

ties people in knots."

Yes, trying to do more than one thing does drive you crazy. I can testify to that having tried and failed to do it so many times over the last six years. So, that day, I just focused on caretaking.

In the nooks and crannies of time when I was not needed as a pirate's booty waiter, I worked on a present for my new co-worker who just reached the end of his probation period to attain his career-service protection. I wanted to weave something simple and full of earth tones that would still have some utility for a bookish/dataful fellow like him. What do you think I made for the master? Yes, you guessed it. I made him a bookmark. (hehe) I have really taken to weaving folk bookmarks since I started making as gifts for helping us postpartum with Baby M. They are perfect scale project for the parent weaver to make for folx who are childful (of or relating to a condition of being full of children - hehe). You can whip one up in a day of work and not be too bogged down in the minutiae of a larger, more complex weaving. Like a mixtape, it is a handmade notice for the person that you love and appreciate them enough to make something for them.

There is also something deeply playful about bookmarks as this zone of creativity. The stakes are much lower when you are not putting together an explicit death work weaving or a birth quilt. Bookmarks are also devoid of the stakes that accompany larger woven works. Without the expectations that come with those works, you are free to just play with colors in new ways or iterate on past design concepts that you have already visited many times over. Given that I was easing my way back into the Tao's reminder that, "when you do nothing, nothing's out of order," I went with a return to the early days of my practice with an iteration on minimalism and lines. I used a bunch of my handspun shetland fiber sourced from Dyer's Wool that I had in my stash, I wanted big stretches in the weave that lacks a sense of seriousness that I approach magical fiber offerings and larger weavings. Here I was just iterating on leaving space for a design to breathe

There is something cool about opening that tiny space of cloth up for the sort of color experimentation or iteration on past concepts that I wouldn't do with a bigger weaving. As a very planful person there is something deeply healing about that. My glob, just letting the weaving happen there moment to moment is sort of a rosetta stone for how I try to live my life. With kids, I am sort of forced into that sort of way of living more and more, which is good for me. Lily and I now live by just trying to live four hours at a time (the typical wake window for a baby). I wonder what will happen when we get out from under that imposed baby time. I have to think it will change us. I know going through it with our daughter J did.

Plants Growing Through Cracks in the Concrete

(A (Mostly) Photo Essay)

As a generally curious person with a library card who found Studs Terkel and Hunter S. Thompson books way too young, I have always been curious about the world around me, who brought it alive, and how we got to this sorry state of affairs. This is obviously one of the key sets of animating influences that ended in me getting a PhD in sociology. But, this general curiosity about reading the world around me has never waned. In fact, I have grown even more interested in examining the world I move through by understanding what the writers are saying in their tags. I think it's an occupational hazard of becoming a sociologist who studied culture and inequality. I am hardwired to split hairs over messages scrawled on walls that I pass by. Also, I am an elder millennial steeped in the gospel of Banksy who bide me to retake the world of corporate-soaked semiology and ideology surrounding me:

"Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs."

Given this, graffiti isn't vandalism to me. No, at its best, writers are taking back our community for us from these blood-sucking vampires of corporations that are all telling us that we aren't enough – when of course we already are.

Most recently, I learned more about OHURT, a local writer who I had seen all over my commute to work and during my bike quests. Local writer Paul M. French wrote a profile about her in Denverse after hanging out with her and her husband Fewer one night while they were writing. The article opened up my eyes to the world that was coexisting alongside without me even knowing about it. A litany of rules, norms, and feats undergirded all the tags that I typically had paid no notice to. It became a joyful game to play tagemon go on my commutes to the office for my desk job to keep my eyes trained for the physical markers of this other world. Instead of thinking about how unnecessary, dangerous it was for me to commute and work in the sky catacombs (office) while COVID is still a danger for most of my kinsfolk, I would get lost in thinking through how the writer, OHURT or others, would have completed a tag without getting caught or gotten to a particularly out of the way spot. It was a comfort to know that there were other worlds out there where people got to pursue their art and expression and I got to witness it in the open air gallery of the community I lived in.

Anthropologist James C. Scott, who wrote Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance, would term this other world I was noticing a vernacular order. When juxtaposed with the dominant world of laws, capital, and religion and its imperatives that the world look, sound, taste, feel, pray, and do commerce a certain way across an entire country, a vernacular order is that localized lifeway that is deeply embedded into a place or practice and is often at odds with the dominant culture whose imperial ambitions it seeks a reprieve from. In his essay collection Two Cheers for Anarchism, Scott talks at length about the imperial ambitions of the state (but we might as well include corporations and religious orders as well) to standardize and homogenize these sorts of vernacular orders out of existence:

"Once in place, the modern (nation-) state set about homogenizing its population and the people's deviant, vernacular practices. Nearly everywhere, the state proceeded to fabricate a nation: France set about creating Frenchmen, Italy set about creating Italians. This entailed a great project of homogenization….The powerful agencies of homogenization …have tended to replace virtually all vernaculars with what they represent as universal, but let us recall again that in most cases it is a North Atlantic cross-dressed vernacular masquerading as a universal. The result is a massive diminution in cultural, political, and economic diversity, a massive homogenization in languages, cultures, property systems, political forms, and above all modes of sensibility and the lifeworlds that sustain them. One can look anxiously ahead to a time, not so far away, when the North Atlantic businessman can step off a plane anywhere in the world and find an institutional order-laws, commercial codes, ministries, traffic systems, property forms, land tenure-thoroughly familiar. And why not? The forms are essentially his own. Only the cuisine, the music, the dances, and native costumes will remain exotic and folkloric ... and thoroughly commercialized as a commodity as well.”

Despite the insistence of government, corporations, and churches to stamp out alternative ways of existing in space in my community, (graffiti) writers keep alternatives, a visible vernacular order, alive for us and show us how we might refashion our community for ourselves.

This perspective on writers, like OHURT, underscores the common ground I share with them in wanting to express myself and be seen by my community. What do I have in common with a corporation that sells out my children's futures to make a buck today? What do I have in common with a state that criminalizes experiencing homelessness and raises jail, police, and defense budgets at the expense of providing for people? What do I have in common with religious institutions that justify the killing and maiming of people? This is reductive, I know it's more complicated, but I want to make my point clear. I have much more in common with the person who seeks to reclaim space for their own expression within their own vernacular order than I do any of these dominant institutions that attempt to impose a whitewashed culture on me. Isn't that what I am doing here and planning to do it print? I just want the ability to take up space with something I created that can tell people of the marvelous things they could accomplish if they just believed in themselves and tried.

At my core no matter how many of the awful things I see in what humanity is capable of, it still holds no light to the absolute wonders that I have seen humans accomplish in the nearly 40 years I have been here. It's easy to lose heart and lack faith in humanity given the absolute onslaught of horrors that we are inundated with on a daily basis. However, that story too is far too reductive and ignores the countless billions of lives that are saved everyday by all of us conspiring to help each other get by and survive until tomorrow. Could things be better? Absolutely! Could we stop warmongering? Yes, please. However, I won't get lost in a deluge of despair. No, I remain resolutely hopeful in the world we all can create together, built on that fundamental premise that we all are and will continue to work in building a world we can all share equitably. Here, I am not talking about a "We-Are-the-world," Koom-bah-yah-esq utopia. No, I am simply referring to building a world where we get: i. our rightful seat in the democratic decision making that shapes our communities, ii. the ample opportunity to take up the shovel and hammer in the growing of the food that fills our community's stomaches and building the roofs over our heads, and iii. the space to create the art that lights up the imaginations and hearts of our community with the possibilities of tomorrow.

Yeah, I am on that Kropotkin "Mutual Aid" tip. He wasn't wrong. Hell, as David Graeber, who wrote The Dawn of Everything, Bullshit Jobs, and Debt: The first 5000 years, tells it in his introduction to the 2021 PM Press reporting of Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Darwin was coming around to the understanding that mutual aid, cooperation, and solidarity were key reasons that humans were able to survive a harsh world before he died. I still see it that way. I will always see our communities as able to continue based on our ability to provide for and help each other get through tough, challenging times like the ones we are in now. So, please dispense with your doom and gloom. I think that time is closer at hand than we think.

Interestingly, many of the class conscious tags I have been collecting photos of lately, like Eat the Rich and Live, Laugh, Loot, point to the possibility of social change that is on the horizon. In Fluke Fanzine 18, Matthew interviewed Susan Phillips, who wrote The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles, and asked her about the effect of political graffiti. Phillips' answer was super instructive for helping me understand the outpouring of class conscious tags I have seen recently:

"We have traditionally had very little political writing in the United States except during times of upheaval. In Europe and Latin America, or during any revolution such as the Arab Spring, political writing is ever present. This is because political systems are being challenged in those situations and are in flux. I analyze this as meaning one thing: political writing appears in places where change is possible. The United States has been in stasis for so long, but to me these writings are a power signal of the potential for change."

In a context where levels of economic inequality have reached levels on par with or surpassing the gilded age (Source), writing an "eat the rich" tag at the entrance outside a country club that has a tens of thousands of dollar initiation fee is a direct challenge to the idea that such ostentatious wealth is legitimate. Similarly, tagging live, laugh, loot at the intersection that borders the most affluent inner suburb of Denver presents a visual challenge that someone can just "live, laugh, love" their way through the looting of the lower classes labor that many affluent built their fortunes off of.

Color me a situationist who is drunk on this psychogeography, but I am very excited about what this post-hope (the Obama era sloganeering) period of American politics will bring about. We've had the slogans, and now we can vote for specific policy packages. Zohran balancing the NYC budget by cutting consultant contracts and raising taxes on the wealth? We love to see it. Let's hope these are just the first plants shooting up in the cracks in the concrete. We have a new world to win! Solidarity forever.

Ok, 4,500 plus words is enough. I am a madman. However, this is the stuff that fills me up. I will be riding the wave of writing this, snapping these photos, and sharing this for the rest of the week. Remember to take Half Letter Press' advice and "Leave a Record." Life's too short to not create something. Our societies'

aren't anything but the sum total of all our actions and creations anyways. You can get this postcard for all your friends as a reminder. I already got like 40 to send to people, because it brings me go to send letters. Anyways, be well, hoss. Until Next time.

James