à l'allure garçonnière

Le Manteau d’Ernst Jünger 2011

We must resist. We must refuse

i have a poem for & after yoko ono in the beautiful new issue of tinderbox

A banner listing the names of the six men killed in a mass shooting at a Quebec City mosque this week was hung from the constituency office of Conservative MP and leadership candidate Kellie Leitch.

Images of Leitch’s office in Collingwood, Ont. surfaced online early Wednesday.

“Hate puts us all at risk,” the banner reads, before citing the six people who were gunned down Sunday night during evening prayers:

Azzeddine Soufiane, 57

Khaled Belkacemi, 60

Boubaker Thabti, 44 (his first name was spelled incorrectly on the banner)

Abdelkrim Hassane, 41

Ibrahima Barry, 39

Mamadou Tanou Barry, 42.

Though the banner includes the term “#notmymp,” the organizer behind a lawn sign campaign using that hashtag in Leitch’s Simcoe-Grey riding told the Collingwood Connection Tuesday that her group was not responsible.

Leitch has called for immigrants, refugees, and visitors to screened for so-called “anti-Canadian values” and raised eyebrows by lauding the election of Donald Trump last November.

Though she has long denied that the controversial policy is directed at Muslims, fellow Tory leadership rival Michael Chong dismissed it as “dog-whistle politics”and xenophobic.

Top, photograph by Carl Weinrother (?), Drei Pfeile, Symbol der Eisernen Front - Demonstration gegen die NSDAP (Three arrows, symbol of the Iron Front - Demonstration against the NSDAP), December 1931/1932 (?), Berlin. Via. Via. Bottom, screen capture from Australia’s ABC News, Zoe Daniel interviewing Richard Spencer as he gets punched, Washington DC, January 21, 2017. Via.

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 You may have seen it, it’s a meme now, set to backing tracks of Bruce Springsteen, New Order, even a song from Hamilton. The punch, landed by a masked protester on Inauguration Day, lends itself perfectly to a beat. Spencer, who states that America belongs to white men, was in the midst of telling an Australian TV crew in DC that he was not a neo-Nazi, while pointing to his neo-Nazi Pepe the Frog lapel pin. A black-clad figure then jumps into frame, deus ex machina, with a perfectly placed right hook to Spencer’s face. The alt-right poster boy stumbles away, and his anonymous attacker bounds out of sight in an instant. I don’t know who threw the punch, but I know by his unofficial uniform that this was a member of our black bloc that day. And anyone enjoying the Nazi-bashing clip (and many are) should know that they’re watching anti-fascist bloc tactics par excellence—pure kinetic beauty.

(…) Not everyone can participate in a black bloc. Those with a vulnerable immigration status, or arrest records, or good reasons to fear police repression because of the color of their skin, often don’t participate in activities where the risk of arrest is high. Friday’s bloc was by no means all white, but it was predominantly white. If bearers of white privilege can do one thing, it is put ourselves on the line and take risks where others can’t.

 Natasha Lennard, from Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer Got Punched - You Can Thank the Black Bloc, A dispatch from inside the J20 protests for The Nation, January 22, 2017

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Getting to this real abstraction entails an analysis of what I call capitalist realism. Capitalist realism – which by no means collapsed with the banks last year; on the contrary, there is no greater testament to its continuing power than the scale of the bank bail-outs – is the notion that capitalism is the only viable political-economic system. It maintains that there is an inherent relation between capitalism and reality. Capitalist realism is a kind of anti-mythical myth: in claiming to have deflated all previous myths on which societies were based, whether the divine right of kings or the Marxist concept of historical materialism, it presents its own myth, that of the free individual exercising choice. The distrust of abstractions – summarized by Margaret Thatcher’s famous denial: ‘there is no such thing as society’ – finds expression in a widespread reduction of cultural ideas and activities to psychobiography. We are invited to see the ‘inner life’ of individuals as the most authentic level of reality. Much of the appeal of reality television, for instance, consists in its seductive claim to show participants for what they ‘really are’. The media is a sea of faces that we are encouraged to feel we are on first name terms with. Feature interviews in mainstream papers and magazines are invariably structured around biographical chat and photographs. In Britain, now more than ever, artists and musicians are faced with the choice of representing themselves in this biographical way or not appearing at all. Attempts to appeal to abstract ideas alone – either in the art itself or the forces it is dealing with – are habitually greeted with a mixture of contempt and incomprehension.

When my abusive ex made shirts that read “break barriers burn bridges respect each other”  I immediately thought how dare this person appropriate tenderness and a ‘ethics’ for community when they do not enact the same politics interpersonally. 

Yesterday my friend and co-editor of a forth-coming zine “Witches Heal” posted this amazing response to abusers appropriating tenderness: 

When abusers appropriate softness, we must be hard and cutting.

We must grasp our knives tightly, between bared teeth, ready to strike. Puncture. We can pop pneumatic predators luring in the vulnerable and newly recovered. We learn to take care of ourselves and our own. We learn vigilance. We strike. Backs up. Blades out.

There is a difference between a victim becoming a bully and a victim having an appropriate response, a response that is Step off Fuck off Do not fuck with me I will cut you do not think I won’t. There is a learning here. It is a deep learning. It comes from the gut. We process trauma and spit it out. Our bodies can learn to reject violence, not absorb it. This is where we step into Fuck off. Become it. Learn it. Chant it. Tattoo it on our forearms. Repeat mantra day in day out. Mantra.

Too often victims (of crime, rape, abuse) are further punished when they refuse to smile sweetly and kiss the feet of their perpetrators. This is a broken system. We are punished when we stand up for ourselves. When we know our worth. When we dare to have self respect. We are told: Do not rock the boat. We are told: This is just how things are. We are told: He can do what he wants. We are told: Suck it up. Swallow. Make yourself small. We are told: Disappear. We are told: Tell no one.

I tell and tell and tell. I tell everyone who will listen, and also the ones who don’t. This is where my softness lies: in truth telling. This is vulnerability, testimony, memoir. This is a knife, hard blade, two edges. They say: A witch who can’t harm can’t heal, a witch who can’t curse can’t cure. They are right.

Softness without hardness means we will die. Means: We disappear. Means: We abandon our truth and our worth because being engulfed in niceness narratives is easy, feels safe even though when we are in this boat it is always already sinking.

I ask:

Where do you keep your knife?

I know where I keep mine.

Written by fellow witch friend Sabrina Scott, they are the author of the beautiful book Witch Body

⚔🔪💄🌑

Maggie Nelson, in response to ‘Is it important to risk sentimentality?’ in an interview with Genevieve Hudson for Bookslut (via arabellesicardi)

Always, still, misquoting this in my head. 

Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience

January 26 – March 4, 2017

A project by Kent Monkman Opening reception January 26, 2017 6:30-8:30pm University of Toronto Art Centre

Kent Monkman’s new, large scale project takes the viewer on a journey through Canada’s history that starts in the present and takes us back to a hundred and fifty years before Confederation. With its entry points in the harsh urban environment of Winnipeg’s north end, and contemporary life on the reserve, the exhibition takes us all the way back to the period of New France and the fur trade. The Rococo masterpiece The Swing by Jean-Honoré Fragonard is reinterpreted as an installation with Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, in a beaver trimmed baroque dress, swinging back and forth between the Generals Wolfe and Montcalm. As both artist and curator, Kent Monkman’s first major solo-exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto includes his own paintings, drawings and sculptural works, in dialogue with historical artefacts and art works borrowed from museum and private collections from across the country. The exhibition narrates a story of Canada through the lens of First Nations’ resilience. With a focus on his new paintings and drawings, Monkman’s visceral and moving exhibition provides a searing critique of Canada’s colonial policies in response to celebrations of Canada’s 150th birthday. As Monkman explains, “The last 150 years—the period of Modernity—represents the most devastating period for First Peoples, including the signing of the numbered treaties, the reserve system, genocidal policies of the residential schools, mass incarceration and urban squalor.” After premiering at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, this large scale exhibition will travel across Canada over the next two years. A catalogue  is forthcoming in the fall of 2017. It will be published in English, French, and Cree.

The R.K. Teetzel Lecture in Art by Kent Monkman

Wednesday, February 1, 2017, 4:30-6:00pm University College, Room 140 The lecture will be followed by a reception from 6:00-7:30pm at the University of Toronto Art Centre

Unknown Artist Martyrdom of St. Lawrence