Anthropology News – Gibson Guitar and Global Wood Politics

posted from Anthropology News.

 

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Gibson Guitar Style

 

 

 

The recent saga of the Gibson guitar raid by the Fish and Wildlife Service continues to heat up. On November 2, Gibson CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz wrote an Op-Ed in the Huffington Post denying the use of illegal wood and admonishing the US government for using the Lacey Act to enforce Indian labor statutes that take away American jobs instead of protecting against illegal wood trade. After the raid in August, Juszkiewicz gave a press conference claiming that the seized wood was ‘certified’ sustainably harvested wood and went on a media tour, including to several ultra conservative radio and TV shows, to bolster his argument against government regulation. While Gibson does indeed use certified wood in many of their instruments, in this particular incident, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the certifying entity, has denied that this was the case. However, the raid and Juszkiewicz’ discourse have riled up conservatives who are against government regulation of “free” markets. Now Gibson has stepped it up a notch and hopes to get guitar lovers and enthusiasts riled up as well by launching a media campaign to rally music players to create songs, videos, and logos to amend the Lacey Act.

 

Cutting mahogany into neck blanks for Gibson guitars. Photo courtesy José E Martínez-Reyes

 

However, the key word here is “amend,” not end. According to Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy, Glenn Hurowitz, the Lacey Act has long been supported by the US timber industry and large guitar companies like Martin and Taylor because of the market protections it offers them and Gibson’s recent political crusade is a smoke screen to try to actually weaken the law—though Juszkiewicz calls it “strengthening.” Despite the support of several sectors (timber, retail etc), others have voiced problems with the Lacey Act. As anthropologist Kathryn Marie Dudley, said in a recent Op-Ed in the NY Times, there are aspects to the law that are unclear and which are having an impact on more vulnerable sectors like independent luthiers. Concerned guitar owners have also raised fears that their instruments might be confiscated despite the US Fish and Wildlife’s public declaration that they won’t impound individual instruments.

 

Pile of mahogany neck blanks selected (marked with check) and rejected (marked by X) by a Gibson representative from Guatemala. Photo courtesy José E Martínez-Reyes

 

What emerges from this debate is the complexity of the situation and how political timber really is. Missing from the debate so far, however, are the worsening conditions in tropical forest communities that supply the very raw material, or tonewoods, that make great sounding instruments, and depend on their continued existence. Deforestation in these communities has already created a ban on one of the original materials of 50’s era Gibsons, Brazilian rosewood. Since 1992, its near extinction led the international Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to halt its use and exportation. The wood in question in these recent raids was Brazilian rosewood’s replacement in guitar fretboards, Madagascar Ebony and Indian Rosewood.

 

The other tonewood that is important for Gibson, that is not part of the current allegations, is the one that is the foundation (the body and neck) of their solid body electric line, including the iconic Les Paul and the SG. It is the fate of this particular species and that of the communities that depend on it that worries me. Honduran mahogany is what dedicated Gibson enthusiasts want in their Les Pauls. They feel that the use of another fine tonewood, African mahogany (Khaya), would be somewhat sacrilegious and not faithful to the original Les Paul Standard and Custom models from the 1950’s, therefore Honduran mahogany continues to be used exclusively on their Standard and Custom Shop models. One example of why we should be concerned can be found at the Rio Plátano Biosphere Reserve in Honduras. This past summer UNESCO placed the reserve on their ‘In Danger’ category because of its increased deforestation rates. The communities around the Reserve grow the FSC certified mahogany that supplies Gibson.

 

The author in front of mahogany logs in southern Mexico before being milled into blanks. Photo courtesy José E Martínez-Reyes

 

Knowing something about Honduran mahogany global trade makes this case even more interesting. Exploited by the British in the former British Honduras (today Belize), and the Caribbean coast of Honduras in the 1800’s, it was used as a source to make fine furniture in Europe and North America. The tree was then transplanted by the British to Fiji after WWII. When it was time to cut the very first harvest in the year 2000, decision over who would control the mahogany market led to the 2000 military coup d’etat. According to the Nashville Business Journal, Fiji’s current prime minister (who reached power by a coup in 2006) is said to be in negotiations to supply their Honduran mahogany exclusively to Gibson.

 

In my research, I travel often to southern Mexico and observe the conditions of forest dependent communities, many of which grow Honduran mahogany. This past summer, I visited a sawmill that processes mahogany for Gibson. A Gibson wood inspector happened to be looking for aesthetic deficiencies in neck blanks and bodies that day. According to him, he found quite a few. Perfectly good pieces of mahogany with minor deficiencies that probably could have disappeared in the sanding process were discarded. The wood seller can’t do anything with the discarded wood because it had been cut to the particular size that Gibson requested. And so there they were, piles of precious certified mahogany neck blanks and bodies rejected and going to waste.

 

In his piece in the Huff Post, Juszkiewicz, skillfully employing ‘green’ rhetoric argues that countries should have a certification system so that the market can pay premium prices for the wood and thus combat the causes of deforestation. According to my sources, mahogany growers in Central America get paid between $7 per neck blank and $5 for a body blank by Gibson. Blanks made out of wood that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and the Rainforest Alliance (organization of which he was a board member) and will end up in a guitar that costs between $1,000 and $7,000 depending if it’s a low end Les Paul Special or a Custom Shop Les Paul 1959 Reissue. That the communities that grow mahogany should get paid better, is a call that I heard from them loud and clear.

 

What complicates matters even further is the consumers. Americans love their electric guitars, especially the more iconic ones, like the Gibson Les Paul and the Fender Stratocaster. I appreciate the heritage of Gibson as an American company. My son was handed down a 1941 Gibson L-4 that belonged to his great-grandfather and it has enormous significance to our family. I also credit, Juszkiewicz for saving the company in the 1980’s and making it profitable and popular again. The question of whether the company ‘knowingly’ imported illegal wood is still up in the air until the charges are pressed and proven. Perhaps a more important, or at least equally important question, is how much profit and how much growth is enough (20% annual growth, according to Gibson) to enable the long-term security of the tonewoods that guitar players appreciate the most and the well being of the communities that depend on it? I don’t know the answer to this, but Gibson, using a business model that strives to produce more and more, and makes consumers desire more and more, is contributing to environmental degradation without really realizing the consequences. Most likely Honduran mahogany will suffer the same fate as Brazilian Rosewood. The story of tonewoods from Madagascar does not look good either, particularly after the 2009 government overthrow. I realize it’s not solely Gibson’s responsibility, nor the guitar industry’s, it’s the consumers as well. Wood is political and this case shows it well. Bamboo Les Pauls, anyone?

 

Jose Martinez-Reyes is assistant professor of environmental anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His current research is on the global production, trade and consumption of Honduran mahogany, its use as tonewood for guitars, and the implications for environmental conservation.

 

From Biopolitics to Ecology

I feel I need to justify renaming my blog. For the last few years I have been exploring the rhizome of Deleuzian thought. The lines of flight have led on adventures. But while I’ve been enjoying this blog “another line of flight: a biopolitical ethnomusicology” I have become increasingly restless. Partly because I’ve been reading more Guattari over these last two years and also because of Hardt and Negri’s explorations of biopolitics in Empire, Multitude and Commonwealth (thanks Paul).

My restlessness has led to the starting and then abandoning of a music ecology blog while I’ve been writing this one. For some reason biopolitics and ecology have not fit together for me. I’m sure you’re reading this and thinking  - ‘how could you miss this?’. Well, I did. I couldn’t see how my ecology interests and my biopolitics interests could join and inform each other. Where was their point of connection? Where in the rhizome do they intersect? Never mind that the rhizome itself is ecology! (for readers of guattari – the ‘!’ is for you – for those of you that don’t read Guattari, he uses the ! a great deal!)

My decision to finally ‘fold’ “another line of flight” into ecomusicology has come out of two disconnected experiences. The first was a conversation with a farmer in the south of france two years ago. My wife and I were walking the southern french section of the camino de compostella and in the middle of the day we came across a farmer sitting outside his house watching the pilgrims as they pass. We waved and my wife (who is french) introduced us and began a conversation. He began to tell us about the pressure the local farms were under by what he called “american farming business”. I had already read empire and was in the middle of multitude and was ready for this conversation. We talked about the farmer’s unions and the way each of them were systematically swallowed up by bureaucracy. Our conversation swayed between rage and grief. I’ve since learned more about this process. Wendell Berry calls it agribusiness and identifies it as central to the “unsettling of america”. We took a photo of him as a remembrance of the chat and continued to reflect on American style farming in france and in western Canada where we now live.

The second influence has come from my continuing research in critical pedagogy. My recent publications have all explored the development critical listening, a critical media aurality (the listening version of media literacy). It seems to me that the development of an aural based critical method will be of value in a digital world dominated by technocapitalist-spectacle celebrating what bell hooks calls white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The development of critical listening takes its philosophical foundations from Adorno, its pedagogical orientation from Friere, Giroux, hooks, and McLaren, but its biopolitical value from its role in human history.

This is the point were critical listening takes me back to my conversation with the farmer. Hearing his story made the hegemony of agribusiness – or neoliberalism – very, very real. I was carrying around 3 large books which told me the same thing the farmer did (which i realized was Michael Hardt’s point in the introduction to empire). But it was the farmer that really drove it home. He spoke from his life experience and I was transformed.

Speaking and listening draws us into ecology. The social ecology that we speak and that we hear is transformed by the hegemonic forces of neoliberalism. We speak of investing time, marketing our brand and other such business speak. In dissensus Jacques Ranciere quoted Schiller: “man is only completely human when he plays.” It seems that play produces a great many things but none of those things correspond to the efficiencies and rationalisms (weber) of neoliberalism. Cultural Ecology is produce by play. Music plays a role in the production of cultural and social ecology. Perhaps music’s first role in human life is the production of ecology. What is certain is that the 20th century has transformed human relationships with the land, with each other, and with ourself. The financialization of human life is the industrialization of cultural ecology. So I have come to realize that the struggle, implicit in biopolitics, and the formation of community, implicit in ecology, are two sides of the same event. The restoration of human play is the restoration of cultural ecology and the repoliticization of the human commons. The struggle is not to overthrow something but instead to become more human.

Welcome to ECOmusicology.

A Tale of Cassie McCuish and other fashionless anarchists

During a regular coffee date my wife and I take, a friend laughed about me attending a Rainbow Gathering. Evidently he thought it was hilarious that someone like me would attend an event like this. Of course, this fellow, in his defense, thinks that he can tell who a person is  based on their clothes and manners. I usually permit this as I play the game as well as anyone.  I dress and behave like a “white male professor” and allow my teaching and social commitments to speak for themselves. But judgments sting.

Why should they not really, I’ve been judging myself for a long time and transforming myself into a better image of the “white male professor” during my PhD.  It shouldn’t surprise me that I am judged to be so and therefore a member of the educated class and distant from the anarchist communality that makes the Rainbow Gathering special. But symbols  tend to get in the way of things. Take for instance Cassie McCuish.

I don’t remember much about Cassie McCuish. She was an elderly gaelic speaking relative who we used to visit. Cassie lived in a small house in Loch Lomond Cape Breton with a few cats. Her first language was Gaelic and her english was heavily accented even for a Cape Bretoner. My father still caries the music of  language in his voice when he wants to. So do I, but I keep it hidden away. Rural accents are impediments. They get in the way of  being recognized for your skills and intelligence. An accent restricts you. With an eastern Canadian accent your heard to be a story teller or a comedian, not a university professor, musicologist, or critical thinker.

Cassie, with her musical speech, was not a fashionable anarchist. She would likely have thought me crazy to suggest that she was political at all. But I learned a great deal about anarchism from that generation. Not anarchism in the Negri-Hardt sense. Not even in the Direct Action sense. Cassie’s unfashionable anarchism was born of a life outside of representative government in a world where local people lived a life of commitment to each other.

I don’t want to mislead you. There was nothing special about Cassie necessarily. bell hooks in her new book Belonging: a culture of place goes a great way towards describing Cassie, even though hooks had never met her. Reading hooks description of the rural anarchists in the hills of her native Kentucky was like reading about my family living on the next farm. I suppose bell, that I am the great-grandson of those people. Those bigoted white stubborn anarchists who lived off the land and by their own rules.

I suppose it makes sense after all. From the hills of Kentucky to the backwoods of Cape Breton and all along the rural coast of North America we  came and settled here. The other “we”. Not the powerful elite we, but the foot soldiers of colonialism, we. Not the soldiers and merchants that built the towns but the other ones pushed off their homeland by famine, enclosure, or the dream of progress. The nameless people who enacted the great colonial invasion. Nameless. Let me give one a name. Let me call her Cassie.

Perhaps visiting Cassie was my first real political education. My father would bring me with him to visit the place where he spent his summers, Loch Lomond. We would drive past the farms and drop by the folks that were still there. The smell of boiled tea,  strong cheese, and bannock will always trigger the image of a line running off the front porch back to the outhouse, and the name Kenny Cameron. The magic of symbols. How the smell and touch of these little images combine. They don’t in-and-of-themselves make any sense. But they become infused with meaning and finished later. And sometimes they remain guiding questions. What does it mean to have these as memories. Why does the the memory of Cassie’s singing speech cause me to weep quiet tears. What is hiding behind these images, behind these symbols? Sometimes I feel that I am walking into an ambush of my own design. Or of a design by my elders.

My political education began when Cassie read aloud a birthday card she received from then Nova Scotia premier Donald Cameron. She recited the birthday greeting and a congratulations for achieving such an advanced age. Her pitch raised in incredulity showcasing the magic of her lilting speech: “Imagine getting a card like this, I’m not this old yet…and I didn’t vote for him either!”

Everything around Loch Lomond whispered tales of a community and of people that lived their lives together in a dance with this land. A community of people who looked to each other for support and looked down on intrusions from “outsiders” and those that “come from away”. I understand this anarchism – this way of being in community without a state. I think there is something really healthy about taking responsibility for your actions in the world and for each other. I think we could use a bit more of this fashionless anarchism.

Undergrad Teaching Workshop

On January 5th I’ve been asked by Renee at FGSR to share my experiences teaching large undergraduate classes.

Over 50 minutes I will focus on my discovery of Critical Pedagogy and how it has aided me in my struggle to maintain a socially responsive, caring, and critical environment in increasingly large classrooms. I will present my story as a starting point for a sharing circle which I hope will cover a wide range of issues for new and experienced teachers confronting large classrooms, new technologies, and performance anxiety.

More information:

6. Teaching Large Undergraduate Classes,Thursday, January5, 2012 – Room CCIS 1-160,9:00-9:50 pm

· Overview: Dr. Michael MacDonald may be considered a risk taker in the way that he teaches his large classes, and he has been nominated for an Undergraduate Award in Teaching Excellence in Arts. Michael founded “Sound and Noise”, an electronic journal and blog in an effort to provide his Popular Music students with an opportunity to gain practical and professional experience in music criticism, media, and critical writing. Currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Teaching and Learning, he is interested in how students learn, and can share some engaging insights into what has worked when teaching larger classes.

· Presenter: Dr. Michael MacDonald is a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Teaching and Learning.

Conservation

Sydney Steel Corporation

I grew up in Cape Breton. Specifically, my family are from Glace Bay on the south eastern corner of the island. I grew up thinking the pink clouds emanating from the stacks of the steel plant were beautiful. The symbol of the industry that had supported generations of us for more years than I could understand and powered by the coal mined around town. Coal, steel and fish were to Cape Breton what the fiddle is now. I played on a hockey team called the Clippers, great ocean going trading vessels. We played against the Sydney Steelers, or some name like that. Industrial lunch cans, piles of coal, and a fine beautiful black soot that would cover the new snow on the first cold days of winter. Those days when your breath would hang in the air, suspended for a moment. A moment not unlike the industrial moment which had just ended. But we hadn’t noticed it ended. No one told us that coal was cheaper in Mexico nor that great Spanish trawlers were pulling in well past their legal quotas just outside the territorial limit. We heard rumours that the walls of the mines were getting soft, falling apart. That steel was coming to an end. That finishing was coming to an end. But no one would believe it. No one could believe it. The Santa Clause parade was coming up next week.  Downtown Glace Bay, with its wooden hand-painted store fronts,  beckoned.  My breath hung in the air. This could never come to an end. If we only held out breath, this would never have to end.

But then it did.

We lost that place. Loss. This is not nostalgia brought on by the loss of childhood. This is the wakeup call that we collectively received when the we were told that the “Tar Pond,” the collected refuse of 100 years of steel making was a stinking and savage pit of death in the center of town.The loss that occurred when the actual ground started to give way and the streets, houses, and lawns began to fall into old long unused pits.

With the industries now gone it made sense to industrialize the culture. To market to tourists and to mine the imagination of musicians. Cultural industries without noting any irony. The industrialization of the environment led to unexpected and destructive outcomes for us. The expressions of local history, of place, of geographical features, of remembrance, of family, and of rage, were now shoveled into tourist machinery. Is this really unproblematic?

I perform for tourists and make a little extra money. My friends and I still play rock music but trad(itional) music is best for busking. I often feel like I am playing just a little bit country. Showcasing something I wasn’t. Hemming myself in and performing rural while reading  Marx and experimenting with electronic music.

Then I heard Elizabeth May speak and learned about the Sierra Club. Conservation, I thought, that is an interesting idea.

I moved away. First with a country band and then a girl. Ottawa became home. I had so many conversations about moving back to Cape Breton. Many ended with a hopeless sigh and another beer. Perhaps.

I’m an ethnomusicologist now. I study music and culture and teach about the popular music industry and conduct research in music education and the impacts of industrialization on human culture. I live in Edmonton, Alberta and watch the industrialization of the northern parts of this beautiful province. I see images of Tar Ponds yet to be named.

The industrialization of music…

The industrialization of natural resources…

Industrialization…

This probably happens to all researchers at some time in their professional life.

One day Dr. Researcher woke up and sat at her desk and realized that she was working on a problem that had occurred to her first when she was a child. Then she couldn’t say what was bothering her. But now she realized that it is a question of

Conservation…

Health…

Sustainability…

Community…

 

 

 

Decentralized Dance Party lecture

Decentralized Dance Party lecture – anarchy, boomboxes and the commons

educate in the urban arts instead of criminalizing

Dear Edmonton Journal Editor

Urban arts education is essential. Empty classrooms litter the city even as the Edmonton Police Service holds a conference about the “dangers” of one of the urban arts, graffiti.  I am concerned about the coverage of last week’s TAGS (the anti-graffiti symposium) received in the local media. I am concerned because of the way the conversation about graffiti was framed, as an a-historic social problem. All too familiar moral panic claims were being made as if verifiable and they were reported uncritically. By now we should be able to see through moral panics– of the dangerous insanity caused by marijuana (Reefer Madness) or heavy metal as the cause of teen suicide. I’ve grown up with these claims which a decade later becomes a joke. Last weeks uncritical coverage of TAGS stoked the fire of this most recent moral panic propaganda.

To be clear, the graffiti in Edmonton is bad and should be stopped. Not because it is a crime but because the taggers out there need an education in graffiti history and technique. As a lecturer in popular music at the University of Alberta I find myself often saying that the main components of hiphop culture are MC’ing, Breakdancing, DJ’ing, and Graffiti. But this spring I was stopped dead when a student shot up her hand and said, “A friend of mine was arrested recently by the Edmonton police for graffiti.” She went on to explain that he was found guilty of nearly 50 counts of mischief for spraying his tag around town. He is now apparently not allowed near Whyte Avenue nor is he able to own paint, or markers, or even sidewalk chalk. Why take a creatively motivated young person and sentence them like this? Why not send the offender to art school?

How is it that graffiti is both an important element of the global phenomena of hiphop culture and yet remains illegal to practice? How do we balance the contradiction between graffiti as high art, global urban marketing style, and illegal activity? American President Obama is even in the game and used the work of a graffiti artist Shepard Fairey for his now famous Hope poster. Is there a more recognizable example of contemporary art? And unfortunately for the EPS, it’s graffiti art. How can TAGS, the EPS, the city council of Edmonton, and the Edmonton School Board all ignore this? Why not educate instead of legislate and enforce. Have we decided to turn our collective backs on our creative youth?

Here’s a solution. Instead of spending money on a police service conference criminalizing a 40 year old art tradition–recognized world wide as high art–let’s put that money into urban arts education and provide our young talented artists (yes artists – not criminals) an opportunity for free night-time classes to learn the history and aesthetic practice of the urban arts. Let’s make a commitment to our youth and provide them with the creative skills they need to have a productive future in the arts instead of wasting money and time turning our backs on a productive solution to empty classrooms and disengaged youth, the real crime.

endnote:

See Henry Giroux’s very important Disposable Youth in a Suspect Society

The Decentralized Sound System and the Occupy Movement

text from The DDP website

The DSS is extremely resilient and extremely effective and 20 boomboxes can easily transmit music or voice to a crowd of 500. It is infinitely scalable, completely portable and can also be rigged to broadcast silently through headphones when noise regulations are an issue. All of the equipment is compact, inexpensive and readily available. And it can communicate twice as fast as the human microphone. For these reasons, it is believed that Decentralized Sound Systems would be a great asset to the Occupy movement.

And so this video was created. And so it is hoped that you will share it with anyone related to the Occupy movement and/or anyone who could use a DSS to better communicate/have more fun.

A PDF of The Future Will Not Be Centralized is available HERE.

Gary is also currently working very hard to get all the content back up on the brand new Decentralized Community website. For the moment it is unfortunately unimpressive…

In the near future, we’ll be releasing a step-by-step guide detailing how to create your own rock solid DSS and use it to throw life-changing Parties and/or aid world-changing social movements.

When did Graffiti become illegal?

The following is a reposting of a short piece I wrote this spring. I’m reposting it today because there is an anti graffiti conference happening in Edmonton this week with “experts” who have suggested (reported today on page 3 Edmonton metro) that graffiti is a gateway crime. The Edmonton Journal reported that

If a boy doodles graffiti sketches at the back of the classroom, that should be as clear a warning sign as if he brought a knife to school, argues Sgt. Val Spicer, a presenter at Edmonton’s two-day anti-graffiti conference that opened Tuesday.

“I compare it to girls slashing their wrists. That’s their way of getting out aggression,” said Spicer in an interview before she presented to a group of 160 police officers, business representatives and community groups Tuesday at the Westin Hotel.

The diverse group gathered from across Canada to discuss latest research, share experiences and find solutions to the common tagging and hip-hop pictures many say encourages more law-breaking in communities.

But graffiti writing  is also an urban art practice  with 40 years of cultural history and professional development. Why hasn’t this perspective been reported in the press?

Edmonton journal reporter Elise Stolte, in an attempt to balance the article concluded the piece:

Daniel Kirk, a former graffiti writer from Calgary, said he came to the conference to advocate a deeper look at the cause.

What the research and many mural efforts miss is the people behind the problem, he said. “It doesn’t go away if you just paint over the graffiti. It’s cause and effect. Graffiti is an effect,” he said.

Kirk first picked up a spray can when he was 14. He got in a bit of trouble, then his dad found out. Eventually, he and his parents found a solution – art classes every Friday night.

“To watch progress in my ability was great. To me, art was transformative,” said Kirk, who now teaches drawing to adults at a continuing education centre. He credits the art classes for giving him a way to express himself, and getting him through university.

The prolific taggers he knows see themselves as non-conformists on many fronts, and in that they share more with the Occupy Wall Street movement than hardcore criminals, he said.

“The more you try to suppress it, the more it tends to proliferate,” said Kirk, who is scheduled to speak on a panel with other graffiti writers. Look at the bigger picture, he said. “The anger you can see in riots in Vancouver after a hockey game. You think that’s something different than why someone wants to go out and write (a swear word) on a wall?”

This discussion is based on an  a-historic view of graffiti as a contemporary social problem – and does little to clarify the connection to hiphop culture or any of the historic aesthetic issues at stake. How is it that the EPS and everyone writing about this issue seems to imagine that graffiti is not already a global art phenomena that still is an expression of alienation in a society that continues to alienate by dismissing our own social history. If you want an example of how alienation works – read the coverage of this anti-graffiti conference. History is painted over  and replaced by hyperbolic claims based on tiny samples of people. We are supposed to believe that the colour of a wall will cause someone to steal? Does that mean that people who wear striped ties are more likely to gamble? (rock and roll and devil worship?)Because that is about as direct as the paint can-to-violent-crime argument is. It seems that journalists and politicians and police are preying on long standing fears of poverty to criminalize a 40 year old cultural practice instead of seeing the lack of its local development as an example of our failure to properly update our social services and education policies. Let’s spend time figuring out how to help taggers become artists instead of tracking them down as criminals.

–here’s the original post —

As a lecturer in popular music I find myself often saying that the main components of hiphop culture are MC’ing, Breakdancing, DJ’ing, and Graffiti. But today I was stopped dead when a student shot up her hand and said, “A friend of mine was arrested recently by the Edmonton police for graffiti.” She went on to explain that he was found guilty of nearly 50 counts of mischief for spraying his tag around town. He is now apparently not allowed near Whyte avenue, the main social street here in Edmonton, nor is he able to own paint, or markers, or even sidewalk chalk.

It appears that this is not an isolated case in Canada. Recently in Ottawa City police arrested three people for spraying.

But how did this happen. How is it that theoretically graffiti is an important element of hiphop culture, one that continues to have an impact on urban style, but still remains illegal to practice? How do we balance the contradiction inherent in graffiti being both high art and an illegal activity, simultaneoulsy. Even the current president of the U.S. reached out to graffiti culture in his now famous Hope poster. But wait even that artist, Shepard Fairey, was arrested for his art.

Can we continue to both celebrate graffiti and make it a crime? Shouldn’t we be having a conversation about art in our social spaces and providing young artists with support as they take on the city scape and their identities simultaneously? And why is it that corporations can plaster signs in the public space in the form of ads but artists can’t do the same. Isn’t the public space in the public domain and therefore open to public discourse. It seems to me that as long as governments blindly continue to make public art illegal they are, intentionally or not, preserving the public space for the needs of private business.

I am not saying that local police should be having a balanced conversation “art in social space” policy – because it is not up to the police to make policy decisions – communities and governments should be having these conversation and informing the police service about what our shared interests are. Here is what a balance conversation would sound like. Notice that graffiti and vandalism are not necessarily the same thing.

Decentralized Dance Party Documentary

Decentralized Dance Party: Managing our own public space with a party

It is not surprising that the Vancouver Police did not find fault with its inability to control this summer’s riot, there was just too many people. I think we all understand this. But I’m concerned about the most recent suggestions that what we need to do is to give more money and resources to the police so that this may not happen again. The reason I am troubled by this suggestion, of creating a police lock-down on social activities in public spaces, is quite simple. In a democratic society “we” do not “need” the police to control “us.”

Quite simply, it is not the job of the police to control public space. Their job is to ensure safety and security. Our job, as active members of society, is to ensure that our shared public space is under control. We are our public spaces. This might sound odd. But this is precisely the problem. It sounds odd because we have been slowly separated from our public spaces by laws and security protocols. Responsible people do not destroy their own property. They enjoy it together. We have to learn to take back our public spaces from police and government services. But we have to do this by first acknowledging that we are forcing our governments and police services to handle our comfort and security for us because we are shirking our responsibility.

So what is the solution?

One solution is education. Civic education can take many forms. Consider my recent favorite form of civic education: the Decentralized Dance Party. Tom and Gary’s Decentralized Dance Party is a social event that uses old technology: a portable radio transmitter and “boomboxes” tuned into the “party” frequency being emitted by the transmitter. And new technologies like an ipod (hooked up through a glove to the transmitter) and a facebook site that lets people know where and when the party is going to happen. One last piece of contemporary technology is required: a funding apparatus to get Tom and Gary to the cities where the party will happen. Tom and Gary’s travel (and the party safari) is crowd funded through Kickstarter.

Picture this: You are walking in downtown Calgary this Friday night and all of a sudden a dancing groups of a few hundred people absorb you. Everyone is carrying boomboxes playing the same music. It is a dance club without walls that ramps up the social energy of public spaces in a way that is socially constructive. Our public space becomes a shared experience made possible by those who choose to get involved.

The civic lesson is as visceral as it is hard to explain. If you want to know how to live in public, you have to learn by first, learning to live in public. Being social is the only way to learn to be social. It is also the only way to learn about how democracy can work.  I believe that there is no other way to manage our public spaces in a democratic world, we have to learn to do it ourselves, one dance step at a time.