by Crimethinc. Workers' Collective
Available in 284 free installments
Owner:
The steel door slammed and was barred shut; there was a moment of silence as each of us stared at the four other strangers vnth whom we would live for two weeks. An instant later, a msh of excitement spread over the room: there was spontaneous clapping, laughing, and shouting?then another silence. We looked around the room, and then at the car?and saw that it had been a musical instrument all along. We had driven there in that car, but in this room, by an act of declaration, it had become nothing less than a limitless material.
We began by locking ourselves in, but it was just as much a lockout. We locked out as much of the world as we could, in an attempt to find modes of collaboration and production that had been inconceivable in our day-to-day experience. We locked-out in order to make new instruments and new music. These would be the exclusive products of the new world we had claimed. They would be inconceivable in the terms of the outside world!
Yet, inevitably, we made drums, basses, didgeridoos, thumb pianos, slide whistles, and little percussion tools. Even the mechanical drum machine was derivative of instruments we had seen. But didn't we use these instruments to make music that was a pure expression of a hermetic society? As it turns out, no: the music we made could only be a strange hybrid between the circumstances we chose and the music we had heard and made all our lives.
Our building never stood still. In it, we roamed through the rain of one region into the cold of another. Through the open roof and our one window we met a world increasingly foreign as we became a world of our own.
One would think our open roof showed us the same sky through the leaves of the same six trees. But as we traveled, we left Pittsburgh's black-orange midnight for the ul-
txaviolet glow of a late morning that promised to soak us all day. And it did. The next day we drifted under a sunny gap in the clouds. We climbed up to the old I-beam structure to be closer to the sun.
On the west side of the building was our only point of contact with other humans, a plate door with an expanded steel window. Through this window, we saw blazing hot streets, pedestrians sweating in shorts, motorists with their windows rolled down for dogs with their noses to the wind. All of this, while our massive brick walls kept us cold and our flywheel trees made the long-gone rain coast on for hours. The disjunction between out and in proved our suspicions and confirmed the gap between worlds. Nevertheless, we dragged the whole scene with us as we went: windowless corrugated steel architecture, pavement, telephone poles, and litter all followed. A huge hospital building with an emergency room dock was inertia-free and hot on our tail. Ambulances screamed and ran hot just to catch up and deliver their goods.
Even the inside of our buUding transformed: one moment it was a living room with stories in the air, the next it became a deafening garage, a dining room, a studio ... seconds later we stumbled into a house of worship with high walls and a ceiling fresco of living green.
Visitors sometimes misunderstood our circumstances as hard or painful. They found the fact that we didn't "get to" take showers for two weeks troubling, and often betrayed the assumption that it is human nature not to get along with one another. Folks would ask through our window, "Aren't you all going crazy in there?"
We had put out word that on the morning of the 8*, people were invited to come help us celebrate our exodus. But after falling in love with our circumstances, leaving didn't seem like such a cause for celebrating. Moments before we were to emerge, we changed our minds. We began to play our instruments, building from a whisper up to out and out chaos, then threw open our doors and let our friends come in because?"Aren't you all going crazy out there?"
Thintdank 557
Torches
Ingredients Dowels, at least 1" THICK
(wooden table or chair legs work fine) Tin cans ? small (15-ounce) or
MEDIUM (26-OUNCE)
Kerosene or lamp oil
Old cotton t-shirts or cloth Hammer and nails or screws
and screwdriver Ventilated working space
Instructions Nothing livens up a night march or gives titiat "peasant revolt" look like bright, flaming torches (and pitchforks). A festive, safe torch is easy to make. Begin by removing any paper from the outside of your tin can. Lay the can on its side and, with a hammer and nail, punch some holes along the top and middle of the can. This will allow more air to reach the center of the torch, making for bigger flames.
