Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

To raise funds, you can hold benefit shows, soHcit donations from wealthier folks, even sell community memberships. Speaking of finances and other resources?as in all do-it-yourself endeavors, be careful not to overextend. An infoshop can help foster a community, but the community has to be there in some form already to support the info-shop. Don't undertake the taxing project of getting a permanent space until there are enough people involved and enough momentum to sustain you over the initial hurdles and well into the day-to-day grind of keeping the place going. Make sure at least a few of the organizers are in it for the long haul; at the same time, always seek new blood to keep things fresh, and stay fiexible enough to provide new resources and serve new roles according to the changing context and needs of the community.

The bottom line is to get people to spend time in the space?and then to help them feel entitled to take the lead in making use of it. Serve free drinks and snacks, make your place a social center that people will drop by to see friends and hang out; be sure no cultural demographic monopolizes the atmosphere, so people from different social circles wiU all feel welcome.

Distribution, Tabling, and Infoshops

Account We were invited by a rival anarchist collective to travel many hundreds of miles up the coast to Boston for the Wake Up the Earth festival, a family-oriented all-day event at which they had reserved spaces for tables. We brought our fiying circle-A with the twenty-three-foot wingspan, and set it up over the grass across from our booth to make our presence known. Our table was beside the Food Not Bombs serving tent, between the other political tables (the Socialists, Democrats, independent candidates, and other bloodsuckers) and the rest of the tables?mostly small-time capitalists hawking food and crafts. It helped quite a bit that this festival already had a sort of eco-friendly, liberal slant to it; at the same time, it was unfortunate that we were from out of town, as it 216 meant that we couldn't connect people to local networks except by proxy.

We taped copies of our posters to hang off the sides of our table, and covered it with stacks of newspapers and boxes of pamphlets and posters filed vertically. One of us offered fortune cookies to passersby; these were vegan chocolate chip cookies wrapped in strips of xeroxed paper. I heard one father reading his son his fortune as they walked away: "Next Christmas, dress up as Santa Claus and give children free toys off the shelves in corporate .. , department... stores. Hmph."

We'd brought three pinatas made from cardboard and paper mache to add atmosphere to the event: a black box with barred windows, reading "Prison Industrial Complex" on three sides, a sneering fat cat businessman, and a big ugly pig with "police brutality" scrawled on the sides?^we'd avoided making human effigies, so as to seem like nice folks to uptight parents like the one I just mentioned. All were stuffed with stolen vegan candy, and the fat cat was also stuffed with fake dollar bills with little anticapitalist slogans printed on them. As soon as the park crowded up with people, we tossed a rope over the branch of the nearest tree and hoisted the Prison-Industrial Complex aloft. To our surprise, a small crowd of kids gathered around us immediately: "Whaf s that?" "A pinyata." "A what.^" "Pinyada." "Oh, a.pinata\" one little brown-skinned girl chimed in, pronouncing it properly for us white folks. "Can we break it? Can we beat it?"

Most of the punks and anarchists in the area had gathered across from us under our flying circle-A, and now a small corps of them started up a rhythm on their marching drums to build excitement. I produced a blindfold: "Who wants to go first?" "Me! Me!" Now there was a small army of kids swarming around us, tugging at the baseball bat in my hands. I picked the smallest one, spun her around in circles, and gave her three tries to swing the bat into the box, while my companions struggled to hold back the screaming, surging crowd. It was the closest thing to a punk show environment I've ever experienced in a public park. One of us was pulling and releasing the rope that sus-

Distribution, Tabting, and Infoshops 217

In music file-sharing venues, you

can put tracks of radical propaganda

online with the same names and song

lengths as popular songs, so people

seeking to download the songs can

be exposed to something unexpected.