recipes for disaster.

Don't be surprised if things slow down around here. I have found myself dutifully employed, M-F, 9-5.
No, it's not like that. At the moment, I am a bike courier. Soon I will be wearing tight pants and growing dreadlocks. But I digress... my copy of Recipes For Disaster came in the mail recently. It's over 600 pages, so don't be disappointed that I haven't had time to really dig deep into it.

Getting a package from Crimethinc always fills me with conflicted pleasure. It's like getting a distant postcard from that one 'crazy' friend you have, who tried to shoplift a case of beer from the LCBO while barefoot. The postcard is saturated with joy and stories beyond belief, and you are caught shaking your head, wondering if you could or would want to live like that. Hitchhiking in the bayou. Getting shot at in Kentucky. Sleeping in a ditch with dirt in your hair and woken up by an organic farmer in the morning. It is oh so tempting. But for now, you think, I will settle for this postcard and the certainty of a hot shower in the morning. Still, it nags.

And so it was for me again. I come downstairs, and there, like a pregnant belly, is the Crimethinc package. You tear it open and look at all the goodies-- Crimethinc absolutely spoils you with free stuff above and beyond what you buy. This time, there were two copies of a children's story by one of the authors of 'Off the Map.' The book itself, the byline being 'an anarchist cookbook', is definitely an achievement. If you are looking for technical information, how to, say, fix a tire or pick a lock, you'll be sorely disappointed. Also, unlike that other cookbook, there are no phony bomb recipes. No, the recipes included are those of the social persuasion.

The most substantial chapters in Recipes for Disaster those that focus on organization: creating anything from a bike collective to a black bloc. I'm sure there are a lot of people who have had previous experience with these efforts, but the book is full of creative hints and ideas that struck me as almost revelatory. If you've spent any time as an 'activist', a lot of the recipes in the book will be familiar; I doubt, however, that you won't be able to glean something of use from them.

From there you get into some of the deeper stuff. 'Surviving a Felony Trial', fr'instance, or 'Sabotage.' There is a chapter titled 'Evasion', but it focusses on actual Evasion and nothing to do with the book. What I found very compelling was a firsthand account of sabotage. The (anonymous) author detailed what went right, and what mistake ultimately led to a four-year prison term. The bullshit factor is nil. Nobody is pretending that actions don't carry a large amount of risk. The grating tone of activist self-congratulations is kept to a minimum.

So what sort of book is it? Where does it fit into the Crimethinc canon?

I admit that I really enjoy what Crimethinc does. Written in between their words is a harrowing level of joy. I can read Evasion and just drink it up, smiling to myself on the subway. Even if I'm not about to stop paying rent. There is a hectic kind of idealism in Crimethinc writings that gives me pause. I don't think my metabolism is quick enough to digest the infinite amounts of joy and danger that they prescribe. I'm not that sort of individual. I'm a self-styled rationalist... which is to say, chickenshit. So I do occasionally settle for reading about joy, instead of doing it...

Thus when I am reading the words of someone that resembles me not at all, am I defeating the purposes of having a Crimethinc? Do I rely on their works as an innoculation of adventure, when I'm not feeling adventurous enough? Has Crimethinc become what they hate most: a distributor of rebellion as a commodity, doing what the starved masses feel they can't do themselves, and then selling them the thirdhand account?

No, actually I don't. Let me go about explaining this by way of a confession. I used to listen to Rage Against the Machine. (copyright Epic/Sony, those murderous bastards) From there, I picked up a book that they had suggested in their liner notes. Chomsky, of course-- are you surprised? Built inside me already was a sort of undefined anger. I couldn't understand why I hated arrogance so much. I would root for Daffy Duck because I knew he would ultimately be humiliated by Bugs Bunny. Rooting for him didn't change the cartoon at all. But still I'd do it: root for the underdog. If I had kept doing that while watching tv, I probably would have ended up becoming a fashionable nihilist or something. I think a great many number of my age group fall into this category.

I didn't. Seattle happened in November 99. I heard about it on the radio. In April, I was in Washington D.C. Then onwards and onwards, and so forth. That first morning, though, driving through the empty streets of a place much bigger than me, I was terrified. It was maybe the first genuine emotion of my entire life.

It's a shame that we live so utterly in a spectacle society that we use it to define what is possible. It's a shame, but there it is. I don't know how people live as I once did: rooting for the slick villian with something to say, even as they know convention demands that he be killed. All I know is that I might have been there, in front of the television, if there hadn't been a Seattle. If there hadn't been that chance to redefine the possible. While reading Evasion I dumpster dove for the first time. (my first time shoplifting, however, was six years before that.) After reading a zine, I graffitied(sic) for the first time. It's not a matter of innoculation but of gentle pushes, baby steps. Baby steps because revolutions don't come natural to me. Sorry. But I'm working on it. And some of us need this, need these stories to be told. It may take fifty postcards, but eventually I may come to see New Orleans.

And that explains my conflicted love of Crimethinc canon. The nagging feeling I get is coming from me, telling me to Go Out and Do It now that I know how to do it. Crimethinc act as one of the last bastions of cultural idealism. They continue to do what they do because ultimately they still believe that culture can be force for political change. That's right! Even after punk died. Even after all the Che t-shirts at Parasuco. Even after corporations took the aesthetics of culture-jamming and made it into 'guerilla marketing.' (uuuuuuggggh....) Culture can be dangerous. Which is why I'm so happy to see this big book on my desk. Crimethinc could have settled for publishing fifty more Evasion-type travelogues. But they didn't. They filled a book with personal accounts to triumph and adventure and defeat, and then pointedly tell you how to Do It Yourself.
So go Buy the Book. Or write your own.