Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

It was in the car on our way back from a Reclaim the Streets in Raleigh that a noise parade was first suggested. "What can we do to shake things up?" Downtown Greensboro seemed the perfect canvas?a place designed for routine, for liie soulless, lifeless exchange of capital, inhabited by robots, the businessmen and -women who've had all their creativity suppressed by a lifetime of bourgeois comfort and control.

So the idea was to create a breach, an interruption, by means of noise and costuming. To this end, we made elaborate noise devices; some were designed to be percussive, others to create droning, constant sounds. We made enormous, absurd costumes with giant masks and metal frames; we devised bizarre uniforms and color-coordinated protest signs proclaiming nonsensical slogans. But our inventions and proclamations were only instruments; the creative medium that really interested us was inside the onlookers. When we walked by and they said, "What the hell is that!?," that would be our painting, that confusion our poetry, that curiosity, that disbelief, our sculpture.

And we couldn't resist the opportunity to make demands. So we targeted the owners of this town?the Jefferson Pilot Corporation, the only ones with enough resources to make the necessary changes.

From the outset of the organizing, we realized that we needed a delicate balance between spontaneity and precise planning. We established an elite corps responsible for the planning, so the project would be focused and coordinated, and invited a large number of others?the "periphery"?to join at the last minute, bringing with them the fresh enthusiasm that can otherwise be destroyed by a month of weekly meetings.

The core group began meeting about a month and a half before the parade. At our first meeting we established our responsibilities: which of us would make the signs, who was in charge of costumes, and so forth. We chose a date for the parade, established a timetable for the coming meetings, and set deadlines. All our dates and deadlines were pushed and pulled, of course, but we continued to meet weekly. The Sunday before the Thursday of our parade, we held a "stuff meeting," and then a "final orientation" the night before. These last two meetings were more like art exhibitions than anything else, as our artists brought in their outlandish costume designs and noise instruments. We began to get excited, to feel like the event was actually going to happen.

To make free marcliing drums, you can gather five-gallon buckets from behind business establishments, and poke holes In their sides through which to slide straps that go around the waist or over the shoulder.

Marches and Parades 343

Marches and Parades 344

The periphery began taking shape less than a week before the parade. Most of the people involved didn't come to a single meeting, they just showed up on Thursday morning, ready to make noise and get cra2y. By noon, the preparation was over and the chaos began. We threw everything in the van and drove to the departure point dovmtown. We dressed and got ready in the Food Not Bombs park, and set off down Elm Street around 12:20 p.m.

All of us were clad in black choir robes that hung to the ground. A? wore a backpack of percussion devices that jingled and boomed as she walked; one of them could be operated by a drawstring hanging before her. Mounted on J?-'s shoulders was a geodesic dome that surrounded him to a radius of a few feet; a keyboard was built inside it for him to play. I was blindfolded, playing a boviphonic ohm cannon (see Musical Instruments, pg. 383), with a camera on my head recording everything I did not see as a man in a gorilla mask led me through the streets. Three more of us bore an enormous drum on a stretcher. Others beat drums or brandished signs: "Just Married," "You Can't Push a Rope, Nope," "I Can't Fly Either." We had undercover agents planted in the lunch-rush mob, too: at one point, a man in conventional business-district attire leaped from the crowd, shrieking, "Oh my god, what are you doing? What's this about?" As the majority of the parade's participants had not known this was planned, it made everything that much more intense for us as well as the onlookers. We maintained our monastic muteness, of course, marching forward with only the cacophony of our instruments for an answer.