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Defense Industry Report VIII: WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD CRIMES GONE?

So. 9/11. Boom Boom. Civil rights canceled. Special Delivery. Airmail. And woe is us, for the forked phallus of Wall Street was the lodestone of the Bush Gang, without which maps and words lost meaning, until Operation “Enduring Freedom” kicked down the doors of the wrong war.

Most of the real terrorists were killed at the crash site, so the Department of Justice took advantage of aggressive new statutes to give a violent monster named “Free” twenty years of jail for burning down a beautiful young Truck. National discourse about this chain of events was relegated to sloganeering as the recently purchased Fourth Estate parroted the “For Us or against Us” hokum coming from our beloved “leaders”.

BaaderBumperSticker2

The message to The Left was clear: Motherfuckers ain’t up against The Wall no more. A New Dark Age was upon us, complete with thumbscrews and crusaders. So, all the protest kids lost their phone numbers, changed aliases, switched partners and cooped up in different crash pads. Scared. Riots failed to occur where they were guaranteed before and, consequently, tomatoes lost their flavor.

I put my Defend Brooklyn militia project on the back burner. Who knew what a “terrorism czar” was, or what he thought about jingoistic AK 47 t shirts? The Brooklyn we were defending had been overrun, anyway. By people like me, who I hate. It was fucked up.

see what happens if you sleep on defense

The profits accrued during those <911 days afforded me the scratch to start looking for a neighborhood with hardwood floors where I could dig in and the copycat hipsters couldn’t follow me to make my rents go up. Queens was too complicated and there were too many honkies in Harlem. The South Bronx had real potential as the place from which to Defend Brooklyn.

The great restructuring of American cities by Robert Moses has rendered the south Bronx into a prep jail. The rate of incarceration was so high that certain surviving elders felt it wise to teach a lethal fighting style to the local youth in order to enable them to stay out of gangs.

It was a good pitch, anyway. Soon “Jail Karate” had a producer and some Swedish television station showed interest. (Films like “Jail Karate” constitute escapism in Sweden because an effective social system has dulled Svenski graffiti, hip hop and street violence to the most boring in the world.)

Jail Karate’s thesis dovetailed nicely with the previous Defend Brooklyn work and helped me define the nature of the resolve worn so readily on so many T-shirts. The clannish atmosphere of the various dojos and the vulgar noblesse oblige of the Bush administration made me want to conjure a serious, violent left-wing militia into existence, if only just to have someone to talk to.

Inside Man bank robbers

Friends of mine from New Orleans told me about this guy named Jac Currie hacking the “Defend Brooklyn” meme with “Defend New Orleans.” Apparently he was claiming that he was the genius behind the brand that was sweeping the nation.

It didn’t bother me that much as I was busy parsing what it meant to “Defend” a neighborhood with a bunch of Five Percenters and Werner Herzog’s production manager without getting killed. I’d become inured to salon crusties making chippie money off my reverse prole drift since the third weekend.

the original bite defend new orleans

Jac Currie’s plagiarized “Defend New Orleans” shirt had an old musket which will make a nice paddle the next time they blow the levies. I won’t even bother to crack on the skull-with-mohawk stencil stolen from Manic Panic hair dye kit. I emailed this Jac Currie and told him that I was about to hire a bunch of lawyers to monkeyfuck him if he didn’t quit messing with my Defense Industry project. I figured that would be all it took, as the threat of a righteous copyright litigation had worked on all the other wannabes.

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Biters copying my work all over the country proved that I had a nationwide mandate. This spurred me to try and create more complex types of manipulation than just a T shirt. I was going to use my enormous talent as a documenter and a writertarian to subvert the dominant paradigm from within the military industrial entertainment complex, and make tons of money.

My first assignment was a piece on Larry Clark for The Face magazine, from which I quote myself, respectfully, with permission:

face cover

You are familiar with Larry Clark’s photography even if you have never perused his seminal photobooks Tulsa(1971) or Teenage lust (1983). Before Larry was a film director he was already ‘the photographer who changed American films and photography.’ The proof is found in the works of Mario Sorrenti, Nick Knight, Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Corrine Day, Nan Goldin, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Alexie Hay, David Armstrong or Steven Klein (whose work graces the cover of this magazine).

So many photographers have bled Larry’s art for their advertising work that Larry has been implicated as the father of heroin chic. One critic so profoundly misunderstood the situation that he said “Kids” looked like a bad Calvin Klein ad.’ This is why Larry refers to anyone in the industry as “fashion cunts.”

“They got it all wrong. They don’t understand it. I’m documenting real life. They thought it was all about the drugs. They take what I do, use it and make a lot of money at it. My art is personal. I don’t fucking sell clothes. And then some art director goes out and buys a book and says ‘Here it is! This is the next ad campaign!’ Is that supposed to be talent?” Then Larry calls them cunts again.”

TULSA 1971

It was unnerving to listen to Larry rail about photograpers who’d stolen his style while they took the picture of him, as if Larry hadn’t shot a guy over a poker debt.

At the time, I thought all the outrage was due to Mister Clark’s prison inculcation, as his conversation is peppered with dogmatic rules like “Don’t talk for nobody,” “Get people back” and “Don’t pop off with no antisemitic bullshit.” Plus, it was hard to hate Steven Klein and his boyfriend as they were nice, cute, and didn’t call anybody the “C” word while their assistants made us coffee. They even let Larry pet their great danes.

The plagiarism implicit in mimeo art and sampled music had eroded the ethics of the arts world allowing Larry to be brazenly robbed in more than one format. If you believe a 19-year-old is capable of being the “creator” of a feature film like “Kids” then you might believe Larry Clark made Gummo, pissing him off all over again.

Gummo_US_500

I didn’t know that having someone successfully plagiarize your work is akin to an artistic rape, resulting in a bastard which the artist can neither claim or deny. Or how distracting it is to lay in bed night after night thinking about how you are going to hit somebody in the head with a brick for pissing on your life work.

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It wasn’t until I got the first emails accusing me of being the jerk for stealing Jac Currie’s idea that I began to understand the rage.

I was lying in bed, too angry to sleep, realizing that if violence was part of the Defend Brooklyn ouvre then plagiarism of that work demands a violent response. Or else I lose my tough guy rights. I called Jac Currie’s answering machine and called him a fashion cunt and told him I was serious about the lawyers and the monkeyfucking. For some reason I got no return call.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit. The “Defend New Orleans” flag made great video bites for the national news, emblematic of the necessary feel-good story about town pride bringing people together after a racist storm. Someone sent me a link of Jac Currie claiming the Defense Industry as his own on television.

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I couldn’t believe it. After all my revolutionary talk and half-assed planning it had been stolen by a shakey-voiced party chaser wearing my name out like a bitch. Then I recognized him. The salon bedhead. The hundred dollar jeans slouched off the ass. I saw him get off the RISD bus. Jac Currie was the very guy we were Defending Brooklyn from! Of course he would be related to that thieving-ass Ellen…

I called some evil people I knew and plotted a trip to The Big Easy.

COME STALK THE STREETS OF NEW ORLEANS IN THE NEXT CHAPTER OF THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY REPORT: ANATOMY OF A BITER

DEFENSE INDUSTRY REPORT VI: Master Blaster Rule Barter Town

This is the sixth part of a series about how, in the course of harvesting the pocket change of his peers with an irresistible T-shirt, Dave Reeves glimpsed the gears of a great machine where the will of a generation was made. Now he will endeavor to impart the wisdom gained from laying his eyes upon these inner workings, like Dante after swimming the Styx.

defendbrooklyn_shirt_ffffff

The orange lettering of Defend Brooklyn flared in the logoarchy from Greenpoint to Redhook. The only reasons it wasn’t graffiti is because I got paid for it. And did I ever. If Americans vote with their wallet then I was the mayor of Williamsburg. Curiously, I found that a majority of my consumers perceived the logos behind the logo and asked, “When’s the meeting?”

Motivated by my newfound civic responsibility Defend Brooklyn LLC bought a video camera to sacrifice at Quebec City Riots. She was a young camera, so full of promise. I post her dying moments below to remind readers of that time we call “<911,” when people were sensible and kicked the windows out of any city brazen enough to host a convention of corporate colonialists trying to genefuck the world’s seedbanks into sterility.

quebec city riots 2000

Do you remember those <911 days? I don’t either. It seems a thousand centuries ago. It’s as if our minds have been magically erased by some unseen force.

I’ve been sifting through my notes and my <911 data suggests that, in those times, protesters traveled from faraway from places like Eugene or Oregon in solar-powered vehicles to protest how a man’s life is cheap in the third world, women cheaper still and children sold for parts .

It seems that <911, Alpha Hipsters attended an “Action” in Quebec City because “Nothing really costs ninety-nine cents, man, it’s built on somebody’s life,” and “If you don’t riot, you can’t complain.”

Furthermore, my notes report that, despite their heritage, French Canadian resistance was vigorous and well organized: “Outside the fort stores stay open in solidarity. Bought beer and nice cheese. Watched peace hooligans in full hockey gear fire bomb bank across street..Gas Gas gasss…Poured most beer onto my face until the Black Cross came and sprayed antacid in eyes… Throwing empty bottles at the Mounties is a clear vote, and no hanging chads…”

Evidently, “Actions” were like a big party with literate chicks, free lawyers and Black Cross medics quick to break into the medication. I can’t think of anything to compare Actions to in these >911 times. Try to imagine Burning Man with a purpose. One could only assume that, if allowed to continue, this milieu would have produced more intelligent offspring than Facespacing “Idiocracy” into prophecy.

History says that people do what their clothes tell them to do. Togas made the Roman orgy. Jackboots and crossbones drive certain people to genocide. Skirtlines fluctuate with the market. Pastel suits equal cocaine abuse. So what was the orange AK-47 telling people to do?

Unfortunately for mankind, I can’t say what Defend Brooklyn really means as fine artists never interpret their own work. I will say that in those <911 times it screamed to me, “Cut this idiot manchild from the president’s office and run him to death before these fatcats pass so much as a fart in Congress.”

It’s easy to laugh at talking machine guns now, but in the summer <911 it was a serious fad. Groups of people were defending everywhere back then, in Davos and in Spain. The mandate cleaved evenly. The government was being run by distracted, greedy halfwits and The Man was on the run. Scared.

fuck_bush

My piece de resistance had chummed the waters. Fashion cunts were schooling around, looking for the next way to waste their time. I knew that they would follow broke music geeks and Alpha Hipsters anywhere after they were lured out to Brooklyn. This time we were going to mug them into doing something good.

See, Hipster hierarchy dictates that Fashion Cunts are the last stop on the way to mainstream acceptance. If we played the crowd right brains might catch on like tattooes, and soon everyone would have one.

We would mobilize the heretofore useless nabobs to strike while the mandate was halved, utilizing their book learning, fancy college talk and clean unearned money. “If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would soon be over.”

If mobilized as a faction, hipsters could be as big a game changer as the heretofore unknown black vote . We could have used this power to overthrow the dominant paradigm once and for all. We’d start over with a new set of rules, using the light of modern reasoning as a guide. For instance, if weed was legal, I could be a cop. Then it would be time for some real justice.

It could have happened. If herded properly, lemmings might go somewhere smart. Don’t believe me? Here is a picture of the owner of an uberhip fashion magazine, Eric Lovioe, trying to blink the Maalox out of his eyes after getting teargassed:

eric lavoie with maalox in his eyes

Soon, I had an investor and was going to some fashion show called Magic. I had to design a label, because that’s what clothing labels are (duh). The Fourth Amendment fit the bill.

Applying a stroke of genius toward the master plan, the “Defend” line of clothing would feature secret pockets with your Fourth Amendment sewn in as the lining. So when The Man makes you turn your pockets out, it would be there for you.

closeup defbro ny mag sept 30 02

You could say to the policeman, “Say, look here. Hate to bring it up… but my Fourth Amendment here says that I have the right to not be searched or seized.”

When they’re like, “Wait, what does that mean?” you kick them in the balls .

waris

That strategy would have worked, too. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only masterminds in the world plotting things that fall.

NEXT DEFENSE INDUSTRY REPORT VII: Add it up! >911 + 911 = <911.

DEFENSE INDUSTRY REPORT 2: Genesis of a Militia

If you missed the first installment of the Defense Industry Report then here’s a recap of that amazing document: Hate me now for I, Dave “Affadavit” Reeves, started “Defend Brooklyn”, the contagion of which continues to this day in many bastard forms.

That’s right. I have become a thousandaire by harvesting the pocket litter of jingoistic hooligans and those who pay to dress like them. The quick wisdom of the “Defend Brooklyn” slogan has eclipsed everything else I’ve done in my life. Women have loved me, left me and tried to kill me with weapons purchased from the filthy profits of this T shirt. It introduced me to famous people and conned that bunch of Hollywood hacks calling themselves “writers” to let me into their guild.

But why is this? What does it mean? What the fuck? Defend Brooklyn thrives in ambiguity like middle east politics or the lyrics of Powderfinger .

First off: I am not really from Brooklyn. Brooklyn became home for me after a series of nasty run-ins with North Carolina authorities, culminating in an assault on a police officer. (Be careful about assaulting a police officer, as you will end up like Danny Chavez of the seminal Negroclash band “Apollo Heights” or or worse.)

I was acquitted of assaulting said police officer not because of my rights or anything but because I was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of my harassment. Still, small town cops watch out for their own, so they sharked ever closer in my rearview mirror, trying to force the swerve. Eventually I called a friend of mine who’d been kicked out of college the same week as me for some advice. He told me to come up to his spot in New York City where the cops don’t give a damn about anything.

I was such a hick when I got off the plane. I had never eaten sushi, falafel balls or lox bagels before. I thought Alphabet City was so named because the bums walked around chanting “A” “D” “C”, only to learn that these are the initials of drugs (acid, heroin, cocaine respectively) they peddled. And they were junkies, not bums. Things like junkies were news to me.

My boy’s “spot” was a squat sponsored by a Cooper Union painter. We were allowed to crash in his studio at night along with a guy named Doug, who seemed normal until he lost his life paying Russian Roulette. We took herbal ephedrine to help us relax while playing chess and waiting for photo assistant gigs.

I was able to enjoy my birthright of a full flowering southern degeneracy by drinking beer day and night anywhere I wanted: forties on the stoop, tallboys on the train, a wee nip in the hall to help soften the floor for a good night’s sleep. Dinkins was in office and the Lower East Side was an open air drug market. I couldn’t get arrested in that town. Nobody cared about a white boy with all his teeth.

My friend played saxophone with downtown jazzbos Cecil Taylor and Butch Morris. We smoked weed with Zorn, who clowned my choice of clubwear. It was made clear to me that I had to get hip quick or get shipped back to the sticks. They were famous downtown horn tooters and piano beaters but who was I and what did I think I was doing stomping around New York City in hiking boots?

To rank as a New Yorker one had to do something. But what? I didn’t think to just steal somebody else’s idea, paste it on a shirt and sell it as my own, which would have made me an equal with my contemporaries in the t-shirt propaganda game, without having to go through all the messy work of actually being creative.

As I pondered this situation providence intervened. An undercover cop disguised as a barefoot rasta busted a friend of mine for drinking beer on the stoop. It was Giulliani time. Overnight, our idyllic crowded Lower East Side squat zone became an expensive, cop-infested hell. I cried, tore hair and lost all hope, until a real rasta told us shit like that never goes down in Brooklyn because those cops out there are busy.

So, we scouted across a dangerous mix of rusty metal plates cattywamped between patches of thick blacktop and muggers called the Williamsburg Bridge .  

The caged walkway ended in dark, pocked leavings from the great insurance fires of the seventies. It was 1994 and the area near the bridge was empty, except for an old Amish mobster singing weird songs though a big tube on top of the Jew church.

As we headed north the streets were rimmed with fresh-off-the-jet types, drinking beer on the stoop, radios turned up to eleven. Back then it was correct to consider Williamsburg a tough neighborhood in San Juan. Every day was Puerto Rico Day, and then at nighttime too.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.santafe.com/articles/images/1994.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.santafe.com/page_redirect.php%3Fpage_id%3D892&usg=__MxbZfapDpnmJHpUCX5h--mWi0c8=&h=1000&w=827&sz=177&hl=en&start=3&sig2=ZujA6DbGVl6PfH7jZytEAQ&um=1&tbnid=zbbaTJUI_lB9oM:&tbnh=149&tbnw=123&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwilliamsburg%2Bbrooklyn%2B1994%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26sa%3DG%26um%3D1&ei=DQjLSprQOojetAOR1Z3NBA

When cumbia and car alarms mixed together on Bedford it was disorienting as a casino. It was the summer lazer pointers came out, so we had to advance up the Avenue fighting the urge to flinch at the red dots dancing on our shirts, comforted by the belief that maybe there wasn’t a gun at the other end of the beam.

The locals sized us up. We were too weird to be cops, too fat to be junkies. What did we want? I told them, “I want to be in America. Okay by me in America. Everything free in America.” We had the dance-off, and I won. (footage lost) So, according to their custom, they had to treat us as equals and rented us some rooms above a Bodega for six hundred dollars.

After this, an initial force of somewhere between six and ten white black and french types occupied that room, spoke English and dug in. More Alpha Hipsters came across the bridge every day, run from their hometowns like common lepers or Mormons, unafraid, broke and weird. The world had cornered us in Brooklyn, between the recycling plant and where lead paint sandblasted off the bridge fell to the ground.

def bro 1996 me


next: The Glory Days of Gentrification.