Jessica “Lil P” Pennell, Matty Sheets, and Emily Stewart

On Friday I woke up quick at about noon, just thought that I had to be at Art Fest soon. It was the 13th, and Occupy Greensboro was closing its three-day Art Fest with a hootenanny at Glenwood Coffee & Books, the most radical bookstore South of Lee St. There were arts, crafts, books chocolate marshmallow snacks. There was music, puppets, poetry, improv, dancing. The Crow and The Wolf would be performing a puppet show. It was 45º inside. I was ready to political party.

Glenwood Coffee & Books is striking in the most Greensboro way–a plain brick building in the lower-medium-seedy Glenwood neighborhood, the inside has two main rooms. The first is probably 500 square feet of red linoleum floors, old wooden chairs, and, not very shockingly, books! If you squint you might spot a little bit of yellow paint on the walls, but in this bibliophile candyshop you’ll probably be too busy gawking at Rembrandt collections and sniffing old Steinbeck prints to look up. They have sliding freaking ladders! As far as the other half of the name goes, it’s more Books & Coffee, really–they have a single urn filled and a couple muffins, but the cups were huge and the coffee was good enough to take it black, like my men.

The second room is a wide open concrete studio, the size of a volunteer fire station garage–in the back a collection of sofas and folding chairs, in the front a stage made of plywood risers. The backstage wall is decked with cardboard signs bearing galvanizing slogans such as, “Get $ Out Of Politics,” “People Over Profit,” and “There’s Always Money in the Banana Stand” (the last complete with pasted monopoly money). Seriously old-smelling bric-a-brac lines the sides of the room. GC&B is pretty super. But I wasn’t there to write a Google review. I had come to document a revolution–the sort that uses puppets.

The night was bitter; the format was open mic. During the first hour of milling about, as I was feeling guilty and journalistically unethical for eating so many marshmallow snacks, the time slots filled up with performers’ names. Non-performing ordinary people who wanted to write on things could participate in some anti-establishment arts and crafts: on one table had been laid out pieces of construction paper, asking “What are you to Occupy?”, the flip side reading “¿noʎ oʇ ʎdnɔɔo sı ʇɐɥʍ” for folks to fill out.

Tom Grant

Around 6:15 the bulk of the crowd had showed up, and the festivities began. Mo Kessler, who bottom-lined and emceed the event, announced the first performer, Tom Grant: ex-pat re-pat singer-songwriter and professor at GTCC. Tom played the kind of jazzy folk that my dad would like if my dad liked cooler music. Just barely leaning forward in his felt top hat and black New Balances, he treated us to charmingly menacing (because that’s a thing in the protest world) songs like “Freedom Threesome Loses a Leg” and “Deeper in the Hole.” The crowd was pretty thick by this point, and held rapt by Tom’s stories of busking on Zurich streetcars, which, again, is the kind of thing my dad would have done in the 70s if he were slightly cooler. His set was rounded out with the John Prine classic, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” to which readers should promptly memorize the lyrics.

Next up was a reading of “An American Poem” by Eileen Myles, performed by several Occupiers. The poem combined two of the most influential groups in 20th-century America: lesbians and Kennedys, and reminded us in the crowd that, despite being a party, this was a serious business party, and once we were done singing we would have to get back to re-conceptualizing the social system.

Following were Matty Sheets and (some of) the Blockheads. Singer, guitarist, Avant Greensboro guy Matty Sheets was flanked by Emily Stewart and Lil’ P on banjo and accordion, respectively. This was my first exposure to the Greensboro institution that is Matty Sheets (Avalon told me he was an institution), and it was real good. With his eyes closed and his flannel buttoned up to the top, Matty growled at us, starting off the set with “Slow Driver,” and impressing the holy hell out of the crowd. The Blockheads’ angle, from what I gather, is Southern Gothic without the black lipstick, but with the feathery scarves intact (the best part!). There was something eerie about the set, with Matty’s unspeaking female companions staring out over the crowd, opening their mouths only to sing lyrics that seemed to be channeled through them. Matty’s songs were beautiful tributes to the minutia of melancholy–I wanted to cry when his unshaven voice sang about his arm falling asleep when a lost love spent the night. Liz Bishop would have been proud. He was drinking a Coors light, even though we were in a book store, and it felt natural.

Then came the night’s main attraction: a puppet show put on by The Crow and The Wolf. The lights were dimmed, people crouched down into little boxes with puppets on their hands, and volunteer narrators read their scripts with light from their cell phones. The puppet show was a fable of sorts, warning against the dangers of mountaintop removal through the story of some tragic, homeless mountain trolls, a little orphan girl named Friend Emma, and a sassy spirit guardian known as Honey Bear. Embedded in the puppet show were several sharp cracks at the difficulties of social movements, the type of people who enter them, and why those people smell like patchouli. Since I was seven years old and my sister started taking art lessons, I’ve been terrified of puppets, and I managed to stay as far back from the stage as possible while averting my gaze. Nonetheless, the show struck a balance between humor and activism that cannot be undervalued, and ended with a Gandalf quote (to those who would level mountains, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS”).

After the puppet show, I managed to catch up with Mo Kessler, the evening’s organizer and a member of Occupy Expression Action Awesome Do-It, and ask her impression of how Art Fest had gone, and where Occupy Greensboro was going next:

Me: What role do events like this play in Occupy?

Mo: In order for us to be successful we’re going to have to do a lot of our protests through art. In light of the recent police crackdowns, it’s the safest way to be visible.

Do you have plans to expand Occupy Greensboro?

Totally. For the Winter we plan on having events like these still, but really we’re just gathering resources for everything we’re going to do in the Springtime. We’ve only been gaining members, but things are going to explode.

Are you going to keep the Glenwood location?

Oh yeah. It’s my mission to make this place an anchor for social justice. I think tonight was another good step towards that.

How do you see the movement transcending the social stereotypes that surround it?

Well, the social stereotypes are obviously just that. What gets news is direct action, but in the G.A. here I see people from all walks of life. There’s a very mild, patient atmosphere in the meetings that will never be reported on correctly because it’s not sensational.

Where would you like to see Occupy Greensboro in 2015?

Successfully creating out own society and figuring out how to support each other. Because things are only going to get harder if we want to live free ourselves from capital, and nobody from above is gonna help us.

The post Occupy Greensboro Art Fest, Part 2 appeared first on Avant Greensboro.

Last Wednesday-Thursday-Friday the 12th-13th-14th, Occupy Greensboro hosted its Art Fest, with events at the Wash Pub in Quaker Acre’s, Amanda’s House on Yellow Locust Drive, and Glenwood Coffee & Books in Glenwood. In addition, flash performances and happenings were staged throughout the city unannounced during the daytime on these days. I probably should have written about this 5 days ago, but sometimes it’s tough to get around to things when you’re the 99% (bloggers are part of the 99%, right?)

Anyway, I had heard about Art Fest through facebook or the occupygreensboro blog or through twitter or through real life, and it seemed worth checking out. Unfortunately, I missed the Open Miccupy at the Wash Pub on Wednesday because I don’t have a car because I don’t have a job. On Thursday I was better prepared, however, having talked my friend Kelly into driving me to a promising “Collaborative Mural Painting” scheduled to take place at “the intersection of Yellow Locust and Mystic Oak.” Poetic, yes.

Kelly and I got pretty pumped at the prospect of documenting Greensboro’s greatest artistic dissidents, painting capitalism out of existence in a grand statement of public defiance. As the ride to Yellow Locust and Mystic Oak took us farther and farther away from downtown, though, we started wondering who was going to see this mural when it was complete. When we arrived at that intersection of Yellow Myst, our misgivings were only compounded by the fact that we couldn’t see any evidence of painting, Occupiers, or radical locusts. What we did find was a piece of paper taped to a street sign, reading “Art Fest This Way–>” and pointing somewhere down Mystic Oak.

Rectangles.

Several quality pictures of Kelly walking around lost resulted. Here’s a sample. Finally, we spotted a house with an open, beaming garage, Approaching the garage, we noticed words painted on the walls in lime green: “Social Work 4 Life.” Above that, “BJs 4 Life.” The fact that there were several buckets of paint lying around suggested that we had discovered a collaborative mural painting, and not a random act of vandalism.

Kelly and I knocked on what we soon discovered was Amanda’s door, and were let in to what we soon discovered was a nearly empty house. Our next discovery was that the mural painting was not so much a public event as an intra-Occupy get-together. And not so much a mural painting as a let’s-paint-graffiti-in-our-own-garage-because-it’s-fun… thing. As a small circle of friends and Occupiers entered the room, I began to feel increasingly odd with my notepad–it was sort of like standing in the corner of a dinner party with a lampshade on my head. Amanda’s kitchen was quiet. “I Wanna Be Sedated” was playing, quietly.

Thank Christ we went out to the garage before much longer and painting started happening, though just how revolutionary the paintings were was questionable. One dude painted a tree with brown Nirvana lyrics for roots (“I heard it on the way here, and it really got me thinking about us, you know? Like us all.”) Ed Whitfield, executive director of the Fund for Democratic Communities, drew a nine-pointed star and giggled when asked if it was supposed to be satanic. One guy was busy painting a bunch of blue and red rectangles. Our conversation went, “What do these represent?” “Well, they’re rectangles.” Nobody painted over “Social Work 4 Life.”

I guess that’s pretty topical.

Getting ready to give up and crash somebody else’s party, I was caught on my way out by (the lovely and talented) Mo Kessler, who tipped me that the real event to behold would be Friday night’s “Occupy the Moment” at Glenwood Coffee & Books. There would be art. There would be singing. Rumors were circulating about granola. There would definitely be puppets. There will be another Avant Greensboro post about it by tomorrow.

The post Occupy Greensboro Art Fest, Part 1 appeared first on Avant Greensboro.

Usually when I have nothing to write about and lots of important schoolwork to do, I head downtown from my boring-ass little college island on my hip little ten-speed, tie said ten-speed up at the Green Bean and set off around the streets with my little notepad and pen, waiting for something to happen. “Looking for action.” I have special glasses for when I do this.

And downtown is usually good to me. I never have to wait long before I run into some oddball or another. Wednesday night was no exception, as, within ten minutes of stalking South Elm St, I spotted walking slowly up the opposite sidewalk a young man with a HUGE backpack on, complete with blanket roll and tent gear, a second bookbag strapped to his front, several layers of collared shirts, a mop of dirty curls, and a dazed and far-off look in his eyes. All this coated in a healthy wash of brown, like some time-warped Dust Bowl refugee. Bingo!

When I asked if he needed directions, he wanted to know if Occupy Greensboro was still camped out in Festival Park. I convinced him it wasn’t, and in an attempt (that worked!) to lure him into telling me his secrets, I offered to treat him to the Green Bean and help him find the phone numbers of some fellow revolutionaries. Enticed by the promise of fair-trade coffee beans and probably starving, he let me pay with my Bank of America credit card and proceeded to extemporize at length on life, the road, revolution, and Occupy. Here I present to you the story of Thomas Butler, Vagabond Yogi and DIY Bike-Tourist.

Sitting across from me amidst probably sixty pounds of baggage, Thomas wore a round, white, sharpie-scrawled pin on his shirt: “Thomas: They, Them, Theirs…” He spoke clearly and thoroughly for an hour; either he was a god-gifted orator or I wasn’t the first wet-behind-the-ears journalist to trade him coffee for story-time. “I’ve been going from Occupy to Occupy, helping out where I can,” he said. “A lot of places have packed it in; I’m not very surprised to find out there’s no physical Occupation here.”

Outside a train whistle blew, and suddenly Thomas leapt to his feet and jogged out the door, leaving me to watch all his shit. 30, 45 seconds passed. The girl who was sitting behind him stared at me. Finally he came back in, a little winded, explaining “Sorry about that, I just wanted to see how fast it was going” (he did this two more times in under an hour).

Originally from Austin, Thomas attended the University of Texas and lived in the 21st Street Co-op–a legendary institution at UT, a 100-student community where $4.28 plus 34 minutes of labor per day will earn you food, shelter, and concerts by Andrew WK and LCD Soundsystem (if you’re into that sort of thing). Clothing is optional. At the 21st-Street Co-op, Thomas became head of labor and a representative for the co-op to the North American Students of Cooperation consortium.

The Zine – DIY Bike Tour

When he graduated from UT, Thomas had the opportunity to travel to Washington, D.C. for the 2010 NASCO convention. With nothing else to do, and “sick of the academic ball-and-chain [he]‘d been dragging around,” Thomas decided to leave Austin a month early and bike to D.C.

After working in D.C. as a bike cabbie for a short time (“You can make $400 a day if you use your own bike”), Thomas heard about a caravan organizing to travel to the second U.S. Social Forum, a triennial rally of social justice activists, in Detroit, and was soon on the road. The oldest person on the Grassroots Caravan was 60, the youngest was one. “Seymour [the youngest] was crying like a baby on a bike tour basically the whole time.”

In Detroit that June, he and his fellow Grassroots bikers advocated for social justice when they weren’t partying or farming–Detroit, with its abundance of vacant land and its populace’s desperation for something to do, is a vanguard for urban farming in the states. But after a week of humanitarian debauchery, Thomas, now a month and a half out of college, decided this whole Grassroots bike tour thing was too restrictive for him, and set out on a solo bike tour to “places where nice people were.”

Some tidbits Thomas picked up while riding the country solo:

• “Residential dumpster-diving can be gross because there’s used diapers and sharp things, but industrial dumpster diving can be pretty fun.”
• “I’ve heard that every McDonald’s has a ladder leading to its roof, if you ever need a place to camp.”
• “Hitchbiking works really well… For some reason people assume you’re safe to pick up if you hold a bicycle.”

Perhaps seeing that I wasn’t believing anything he said to me, Thomas started to rummage through his bag for proof. And proof he drew from a water-tight bag labeled “steak jerky,” in the form of a black-and-white 20-page zine, bound with a wheel spoke and bearing the cover: “DIY Bike Tour by Thomas Butler.” Inside were photos of Thomas and other odd bikers scaling McDonalds, hand-drawn diagrams on how to fix derailleurs, and not a few last-minute margin manifestos against capitalism, cars, and, of course, the man. He also had a patch given him by an L.A. bike gang with “Thomas” written in reflective tape, which was pretty sweet.

“Bike touring on your own is far more possible than most people assume,” he said. “Of course, I have it to my advantage that I’m young and able-bodied and fairly-charismatic–” The train whistle blew, in a second and I was on my own again. After a minute he came back, smiling and slapping his hands together. “Oh yeah, they hardly crawl out of here,” he told me reassuringly.

But back to the matters at hand–namely, how Thomas wound up in Greensboro, where he was going, and how come he smelled like he did. In February of this year, another co-op conference had Thomas in Chicago at the start of the Madison, Wisconsin protests against the 2011 Budget Repair Bill. For those who don’t remember, the Madison protests gathered thousands of citizens against a bill that would damage workers’ ability to collectively bargain. At its height, the action saw 100,000 participants camped outside and inside the capitol building. In Wisconsin. In February. The protests started on Valentine’s Day; Thomas was there by the 18th.

In comparison with the Fall’s protests, Thomas said “I don’t want to call them more civilized, because I don’t believe that civilization is necessarily a good thing. But they were less barbaric in some ways…” He saw Madison as the start of a change in the popular mindframe. “In my mind that was the first real Occupation… People realized for the first time that another world was possible, and they collectivized to try to bring it about.”

Thus, Thomas was little surprised when the Occupy movement began spreading across the country. “I was back in Austin for the first time since I’d left school, and the second day I was home I heard about a General Assembly. They were expecting 30 people, and about 400 came, and I guess after that it seemed like a pretty sure thing.” Thomas, for two weeks, stayed and helped out in Austin, but, unsurprisingly he took to the road again by October, beginning his current tour (hint: he’s not using a bike this time).

“At most Occupations, there’s a check-in, a desk, or some sort of centralized point like that. I go there, point to my silly little name tag, tell them about my skills,and ask how I can help out… Sometimes they’ll hand me a broom right away, sometimes they’ll ask me if I can help them out with structural problems.”

Though he had yet to go to Wall Street, Thomas saw a similar pattern among the Occupations he’d visited. “I feel like I’ve seen a lot of burnout,” he said: movements start, people are electrified for a while, then for various reasons the scene tapers off. Thomas sees the reasons as “police repression,” “finding out it’s not cool anymore,” and especially “people realizing it’s sort of hard to start a revolution.” Case-in-point, our own deserted Festival Park.

Which begged me to ask, if Occupiers across the nation are half-assing or packing it in, what inspires this man–not six years older than myself, carrying his water bottle inside a brown sock and carefully eyeing the contents before drinking, questionably procuring apples to eat on his way back from the bathroom, working on an addendum to “DIY Bike Tour” that includes how to get your bike onto a freight car–what inspires him to keep up his travels?

“People get down, they say the movement’s not what it was. They get so defeated, and I tell people it’s okay… it’s about long-term community building.” Happy that “people are getting clued in to consensus,” Thomas saw positivity in people’s willingness to advocate for themselves. And he had no problem with the oft-accused lack of focus attributed to the group. “Yeah, the corporations owning the government is a problem, but so is our butt-fuck health care system, so is homelessness, so is gerrymandering… everybody’s got their own opinion,” which, he said, is the beauty and the curse of consensus decision-making. “It’s slow–abysmally slow.”

Thomas thought the movement would continue to grow so long as people kept up covert actions like the recent mic check at N.C. State and local events like wednesday’s Occupy Music at the Blind Tiger. “Banner drops can be really empowering, too, but you’ve gotta be willing to spend a night or two in jail.”

However, with no physical occupation in Greensboro, Thomas wasn’t planning on sticking around. In a generous move to make the Gate City’s nickname relevant, he re-arranged his plans to catch a train to New Orleans the next morning. When I asked if he meant the Crescent, he politely informed me that he didn’t take that kind of train, which I had actually sort of guessed. Thomas was going to push a broom, or help with sanitation, or, he said, “honestly I might just party with some people I know down there.” After Nola he planned to go home to Texas “for the Christian holiday,” then he told me he wanted to go visit Argentina, study how they manage industrial ventures with low fossil fuel usage, and bring what he learns back “so we can apply it for sustainability in housing co-ops.” And as I parted with that crazy bastard, watching him read a Slingshot in the Green Bean and clean his fingernails with a hunting knife, I believed he’d do it. Thanks for never disappointing me, Elm Street.

The post Thomas: They, Them, Theirs appeared first on Avant Greensboro.