Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

The event started quietly, on a Thursday. For this day, in order to save money, we didn't rent the theater, and instead put on the free skillshares?radical graphic design, pirate radio, and graffiti?in a room at the public library and a local independent show space. About thirty people showed up to each. The graffiti skillshare spilled out into the streets at the end, to decorate the walls in preparation for the weekend. Some people showed up firom out of town, and we arranged for locals to house them. We also printed up programs for all the weekend's activities, and distributed them thickly.

The next day was the first day in the theater, so we showed up early to cover the walls with radical posters and set out tables of free literature, homemade radical fortune cookies, and dumpstered organic fruit juice. Many people from our commxmity of dropouts and dissidents brought free food, dumpstered goods, and reading material of their own to share, and put these out on the tables as well. During the day, the theater hosted six free skillshares: bicycle repair, folk dancing, drumming (in which stolen drumsticks were distributed free to everyone who showed up), an herb walk showing all the edible and medicinal plants that grew locally, a discussion entitled "how to cripple privilege" about the ways able-bodied people can be aUies to the handicapped, and print-making, the results of which were soon pasted up all over the walls. That night we charged for two showings of fig^t Club and one of Brazil Before each, there was a speaker: one was introduced by radical cheerleading, another by a spirited anarchist manifesto, another by

the widow of a man the poHce had recently murdered; she was being silenced by the local media and deserved a chance to speak to the public. In one intermission, we opened the theater up again, so a local cop-watch group could offer a free presentation on dealing with the police. Quite a few people showed up, but the theater wasn't sold out by any means; there probably weren't more than a hundred people in it at any given time.

The next day was the free day. In addition to the previous day's decorations and amenities, we added a massage table, at which a local massage therapist gave free massages, and a screenprinting table, at which people could learn screenprinting and print free shirts; the local Food Not Bombs group also provided fall meals of delicious free food, and free groceries for anyone who needed them as well. We showed four movies, including Spike Lee's Malcolm X, and Three Kings, a Hollywood action movie uncharacteristically critical of the first Gulf War, to which a local antiwar professor gave an eloquent introduction. The theater was packed throughout the day with a diverse but predominantly white audience, reaching its fullest during the showing of the former movie; that was perhaps one of our most important achievements of the weekend, that we got so many white people out to learn black history.

We had a trick up our sleeves, too, so that our demonstration of alternative economics would not be limited to the movie theater. During the day, we passed around hints that there would be an exciting adventure after the last showing. At the end of the day's final movie, a woman leaped onto the stage and tremblingly declared that a group was going out to take over an empty house nearby to show what positive things could be done with vacant buildings, and that everyone was invited to participate. Proclaiming this publicly was a risk of sorts, but as it turned out, word didn't reach the police; not only that, but a majority of the people in the theater decided to come along!

In order to avoid attracting the wrong kind of attention, the crowd split into smaller Pesthals groups, each following a guide along a different route to converge at the abandoned 24s

building. In minutes, the place was bustling with life: people who had never squatted a building before were sweeping up dust, covering the windows, and exploring the basement. After a few minutes, everyone who wanted to stay in the building for the night packed tightly into one cramped room to hold a discussion about pressing issues: how to handle the police if they showed up, what the goals and priorities of the action should be, and what to announce to the community at large about the event. A pamphlet on squatting that some people had prepared in advance was distributed. For me, the most exciting moment of the whole weekend came during this meeting, when I looked around and saw that two teenagers who had come from out of tov^m for the festival were there in the group, their eyes wide with the magic of what we were doing.