Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

The protest started out simple as usual. Masses of fierce and dedicated bodies swarming the streets of downtown chicago, hungry for justice and retribution... hungry for a podium on which to spread their message: War is Wrong! We were met on Clark street by swarms of riot cops, men in big blue suits sending us in this direction or that. The problem there: Strength in numbers. The very first thing we heard upon reaching Michigan Avenue was a speech for the commanding officer. the jist of which was "Say whatever the fuck you want, but don't do it here, because we'll arrest all that assemble." the Michigan Avenue area... being the tourist spot that it is, has no room for people speaking out against injustice or preaching peace like the hippies our mothers and fathers were. We had about four good hours of protesting, marching, and screaming our lungs out, before the police decided to get heavy... and make threats. When they began to proclaim that arrests were about to be made for those who would not vacate the restricted areas, frightened protesters began trying to disperse. In a mass of bodies and passionate disorder, it was hard to tell which way from what, or to make a path through which to escape the chaos. In retrospect, the screaming bodies was a beautiful sight, but the anarchy it brought with it was quite the price to pay. A few of us began trying to lead the minors, out-or-towners, and other frightened protesters to towards the L-trains and empty streets, but as familiar with Chciago as I am, it was hard to see anything through the fantastically high body count. One of my friends and fellow activist, writer and self-proclaimed "hippie-queer", John McKenzie (who's underground book of poetry"Screams of Little Girls" I co-edited with him) went up to a riot cop encased in a plastic shield:
"Sir, I'm trying to get these people to the L. Can you show us a path or somehting?"
"Just get the fuck out of here."
"Excuse me?"
"I said 'just get the fuck out of here'. It's not my fucking job to help you get out."
"Well then why the hell are you here."
"To arrest little smart-ass pricks like you when they get in my fucking face."

The peeple we were leading became frightened, and all of a sudden, I felt like Malcolm X in 1957 when the massacre happened at one of his temple, and his men assembled in front of the police station to demand medical care for Johnson Hinston, though slightly less iconic, and with as simpler purpose: Let us out.
"Officer, I understand that you probably don't want to be here, but we're just looking for a way out."
Apparently my interference greatly spurred on his anger. He guided John and towards the other protesters who refused to move from Michigan Avenue, but didn't place us under official arrest; yet. We sat there for maybe 45 minutes until finally my firend John jumped up angrily and challeneged another police officer. "If you'ren ot going to charge us, then let us go home."
"Were you assembled on Michigan Avenue?"
"Yeah, but we left."
"I didn't ask you that. I asked if you were assembled on michigan avenue?"
"Yes sir, I was."
"Then you're under arrest."
I was asked the same question, and obiviously, I was, that was the whole reason I was trying to get home. I was placed under arrest and all were either charged with unlawful assembly without a permit, resisting arrest, or something pointless like that. Most of use were released the same night or the following morning. Jail's pretty fun when you're surroned by new-age hippies and modern radicals fighting for a cause. I spent the night in jail. Most of it. Relaesed at 4am, to the sullen face of my mother, who was dissappointed that I had fought for an "unwinnable cause yet again and got in fucking trouble for it". Anybody else gett arrested?
--k

The last time I was in Chicago, kayla, I was slightly younger than you are now.
I was 19 and it was 1968, the Democratic National Convention.
The Chicago cops were in fine form that night.
I still occasionally awake from a dream remembering
the sound of a billy club on a skull
when the tear gas got too thick
I headed back to Texas.

hmmm... land of the "bush"wackers. Lol. Couldn't resist. I'm porud of the 68 convention. I'm proud of the Chciago 7. I'm proud of Bobby Seale, and proud of the CPD for giving us something other than the president to bitch about. You should come back to Chicago one day. We're much nicer now, and they are serveral unbelievably cool hippie-chic freaks(like me) with which to nurture your hunger for radicalism.
--k

If I was in chicago on mother's day I would go to Red Emma's grave and leave a rose. The most dangerous woman in america, they finally let her come home to be put in her grave.

Anybody else gett arrested?
--k

the summer of Brown vs Topeaka, a southern city, going to summer school that year because I was always late for school because I was in the bathroom for forty five minutes combing my hair. I hit a cop. He was an artiste with that old wooden nightstick, a couple of jabs with it and he had me handcuffed to the call box.

back during the seventies I joined an outfit that was head quatered in the the windy city. MCHR, never can find much about them, stands for medical cadre for human rights, mostly staffed by kids, (I was in my thirties they barely in their twenties) medics who had returned home with the determination to end the south east asian war games.

Have no fears Algonquin J Calhoun is on your case

Your sullen mama, man I think one of the reasons that I am so grateful to have been born a man is that I didn't have to be a daughter. I remember when the women in my family owned my little ass, a scared kid watching three generation of tigers interacting and they would wind me up like a little spy doll to report on what any given 2 out of 3 women were saying about the onter one, the shiksa was the favorite target.
sorry for the ramble but got a lot invested in mother daughter relationships right now. I look for bits and pieces.

Later:
a long dark night. dark as only mercury vapor lamps can make it. I walk around my shack looking for one star to wish on.

Just a sleepless night I don't get many, I stayed up to watch a public television show about Red Emma, ever the sophomore I even took notes.



After McKinley’s assassin’s comment that “she had stirred his blood. She with drew from her life. “I had lost my identity, belief in values I so fervently believed in." She went to work as a nurse in the tenements of NYC. The anti war movement brought her back.

Alien and Sedition acts and the Palmer raids got her deported. J Edgar Hoover was twenty three and on a crusade to get rid of “intellectual perverts”

Sent to Russia and realized she was wrong about the bolshevists too. Lenin telling her that "free speech" is a bourgeois notion.
She was now in a no man’s land. She had no here to go. She became a specialists in exile.
She was an enlightened fool.