On April 24, students, faculty, and community members assembled on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin to demonstrate against the complicity of the university administration in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Fearing a repeat of the upheavals that have taken place at Columbia University and elsewhere around the country, campus authorities mobilized a massive number of police in response. Yet despite arrests and violence, the demonstrators ultimately outlasted and outmaneuvered the police. In the following report, participants describe what they learned.

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Student-led solidarity actions at universities have been taking place for six months already. In the last week, however, they have escalated, with encampments and walkouts at over 40 campuses across the country. Students as far away as Australia, Italy, and France have organized their own encampments and other protests in solidarity. In the last 48 hours, new encampments have appeared on at least fourteen US campuses, including at least three encampments—in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC—that are cross-institutional collaborations. Police have evicted some of these, but others continue to hold their ground. Over that same period of time, at least six schools have hosted walkout demonstrations. Two school encampments took over campus buildings.

In the wake of the events described below, UT faculty members published a courageous statement in support of the demonstrators and joined some of the student organizers who were arrested yesterday in organizing a massive rally for today, which drew 2000 people to the South lawn. In speeches, some of the student activists directly connected the ongoing movement to the nationwide uprising that took place in 2020 in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others.

Defending specific territory gives a movement a place to cohere and opens up a space in which the participants can build relationships and go through a process of political development. At the same time, it provides adversaries a fixed target against which to direct pressure. Defending encampments in the open is more challenging than defending indoor occupations, even if the latter can entail greater legal risk. In both cases, what happens outside and around the police response usually determines the outcome at least as much as what occurs inside the occupation. As the building occupation at Cal Poly Humboldt demonstrated, police can only besiege and evict occupations if they are not themselves besieged.

Current campus organizers might benefit from reading participants’ reflections on the “autonomous zones” of the 2020 uprising:

Even if our goal is simply to hold a particular physical space, we have to prioritize carrying out offensive activities throughout society at large that can keep our adversaries on the defensive, while investing energy in the activities that nourish movements and spaces rather than focusing on defending particular boundaries. We should understand occupied spaces as an effect of our efforts, rather than as the central cause we rally around.

It might also be instructive to consult the experiences of the student occupation movement of 2008-2010.

Centrist media outlets have dishonestly portrayed the participants in these demonstrations as “anti-Semitic,” intentionally obscuring the fact that a significant plurality of the organizers are anti-Zionist Jews. In fact, only four months ago, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas voted against barring members from associating with Nazis and Holocaust deniers after a prominent Texas Republican hosted a well-known white supremacist and anti-Semite. Those who are repressing these demonstrations are the ones with ties to organized anti-Semitism. As students chanted yesterday in Austin, “APD, KKK, IDF they’re all the same!”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu maintains that the Israeli military is still determined to carry out a ground assault on Rafah, where over a million refugees are currently crowded. If the events of the past six months are any indication, should such an invasion take place, it will result in the deaths of at least tens of thousands more Palestinians, disproportionately impacting women and children. This is the horrific scenario that demonstrators are mobilizing to prevent. Everyone who aspires to stand in solidarity with Palestinians should be thinking right now about what they can do to prevent Netanyahu from ordering a ground assault on the people in Rafah.

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University of Texas Austin Students Take the Lawn

On April 24, 2024, students, faculty, and community members converged at the University of Texas at Austin campus (UT) to protest the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The initial protest, a walkout from classes and a Popular University spearheaded by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, drew several hundred people to the area surrounding the Gregory Gymnasium. At the behest of the University President Jay Hartzell, an unprecedented array of militarized police immediately attacked the protest, including mounted police officers, heavily armed state troopers (some bussed in from Houston), and officers from the Austin and the University of Texas police departments. Over the next six hours, thousands bravely confronted the police officers, playing a game of cat and mouse across campus that culminated in an hours-long standoff in the South Lawn. Eventually, the police were forced to withdraw and the crowd won control of the Lawn.

Unable to countenance any resistance to the ongoing acts of violence they sponsor, US authorities have deployed police to universities across the country, including New York University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Southern California, Emory, and Emerson. UT Austin was no outlier to this emerging dynamic. Before the protest even began, the University was prepared to deploy police in large numbers.

As soon as people assembled, police wasted no time charging and snatching people from the crowd, clubbing and pushing without provocation. The crowd persevered, repeatedly routing officers or surrounding them in larger and larger concentric circles. On multiple occasions, small clusters of officers found themselves enclosed on all sides by crowds that outnumbered them by an order of magnitude. In the end, it was the police who gave up and left campus in defeat.

The dedication and creativity of these demonstrators is worth celebrating. Our contemporaries at encampments in universities across the country have provided us with their own hard-earned insights and reflections. In return, we send warm greetings to them and humbly offer a few reflections on yesterday’s events for our comrades struggling at UT Austin and to those elsewhere who are still planning their next moves.

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Bold Actions, Bold Words—Courage Is Contagious

All of the police tactics aimed to instill fear: large numbers, riot gear, horses towering over the crowd, vague commands, snatching protestors one by one.

Demonstrators did not succumb to fear—and were rewarded for their courage. When police grabbed the first person, students surged forward chanting “Let them go,” encircling the police cruisers and lining up face to face with helmeted police. Bold actions resonated broadly in the crowd. The crowd took space forcefully, eventually kettling the police on the walkway. It was tense and sweaty, with a steep learning curve, but five hours of facing off with the police made the crowd more confident, not less.

No More Wait and See!

Twenty minutes into the action, the march became headless. But it was never directionless, and its refusal to be controlled was a strength.

Moments of stagnation, imposed both from within and without, repeatedly gave the police the opportunity to make the first move. In these moments, the words and improvised gestures of individuals enabled the crowd to develop its collective intelligence. Whenever the cops succeeded in splitting us between police lines, on opposite sides of a thoroughfare, on opposite sides of a building, our calls to action flowed like water around them.

Proposals spread throughout the crowd. Some fizzled out. Others caught on, sparked enthusiasm, and spread like wildfire until the whole crowd shared a goal. The lawn! We’re taking the lawn!

Students succeeded in achieving the goal of taking the lawn by choosing not to wait for instructions and by getting creative, finding and showing each other back routes to it. Police attempted to block the march on a main road, but participants split up and dashed through alleys, hopped down stairs, ducked around bushes and into buildings. Doors were propped open and hundreds poured through them onto the unguarded lawn. Passing through these buildings was a baptismal moment.

In Europe, this strategy of breaking up and reforming on the other side of obstacles is called five fingers make a fist.

Keep Moving, but Don’t Run Away

The march was most successful when the participants maintained the initiative, moving before the police moved them. In the most inventive moments, the crowd remained mobile, responding to dispersal orders and impenetrable police lines by spontaneously redirecting the march.

Sometimes, in protest movements, crowds simply flee from confrontations in hopes of “remaining flexible.” Thankfully, this is not what happened at UT. There is a balance between confronting obstacles and remaining unpredictable. While it is necessary to make the best of moments when we are forced back or out, in the long run, movements need to be able to force out the police. Instead of engaging in protracted face-offs and waiting to be dispersed or moved, we should take this lesson from Thursday to heart: fight where it is possible; where it isn’t, remain mobile.

Surround Them

Despite their heavy-handed tactics, the police failed to control the crowd. They had the lawn, but we had everything else. All afternoon, students, faculty, and community members flowed into and around the South Mall. Police got themselves surrounded repeatedly, and eventually had to push through the crowd to obtain access to food and water. Protesters could have done more to take advantage of that moment. Spatially speaking, as long as the police occupied the lawn, we had the upper hand.

While they had to defend their precarious position against wave after wave of students, we could come and go, regroup, take breaks. When horse-mounted cops rushed the crowd in order to sweep the sidewalk, they weren’t attempting to control the crowd or push us anywhere in particular. They were trying to escape.

Make Space(s) Worth Defending

To sustain momentum, especially the momentum of an occupation, people must have a vision of what they are fighting to defend, what they want to create together. Spaces of joyful imagination and exuberance give us momentum and direction even when there is not a line of police or enemies to confront. Chanting can keep spirits high during the direct confrontations, but nobody can shout all day, and the energy of the space dies along with the chant. Blankets over the lawn become supply depots, where the distribution of pizza or hand sanitizer becomes a site for the collective reproduction of our lives. Office supplies become the ingredients for a direct-action training. These efforts reproduce themselves in ways that words alone cannot.

As soon as we occupy a space together, we should fill it up. Every friend, classmate, coworker should be called to join us, bringing things to sustain the space and refresh the front lines. Food, water, games, activities, and music can provide an anchor for our resistance. What we do together in these moments will shape what we will be capable of doing with the rest of our lives.

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With a little more initiative, small organized groups could have taken advantage of the situation to greater effect. Much of the campus was left vulnerable. That being said, the confidence built by yesterday’s events was obvious to anyone who remained on the lawn. It will only continue to grow. For now, some university faculty have declared “No classes, no grading, no work,” and will be gathering at noon to pick up where yesterday left off. [Editor’s note: at the time of publication, this had already occurred; see the introduction for details.] The concession of the lawn by the administration represents a definitive win.

What happens next will be determined by those who are willing to continue taking bold action. The circumstances demand it of us. Do what is necessary to stop the genocide in Gaza. Defeat is not an option.

Daniel Goldhaber’s climate-activism thriller deftly combines human drama with sincere political exploration

by Josh Lewis

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Adapted from the 2021 nonfiction manifesto of the same name by human ecology lecturer and climate activist Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a white-knuckle thriller that takes revolutionary political arguments about the viability violent sabotage as a tool against fossil fuels/CO2 emissions and places them into both dramatic logistical practice and a righteous, furious act of self-defense in the face of the real human suffering and despair of late-capitalism.

Directed by Daniel Goldhaber (whose debut film Cam was a timely combination of both the authentic reality of sex work and parasocial, online horror filmmaking), this sophomore feature traces a group of activists led by Xochitl (Ariela Barer), a radical and determined college dropout whose mother tragically passed away during an unexpected heat wave. The film offers an opportunity for pyrotechnics to anyone who, like her, is dissatisfied by the passive and incremental steps being taken to address what is indisputably an issue of apocalyptic proportions.  

Deftly cutting between the nuts-and-bolts direct action of their radical mission to blow up a Texas pipeline—including the recruitment process, literal building and tense transportation of IEDs, and the tactical planning of property destruction with the least human collateral damage possible—and the sympathetic backgrounds that brought this crew together, we gradually accrue the weight of their decision to take action. Goldhaber’s depiction of the unbearable tension of the work (which stylistically lands somewhere between the sweaty, patient doom of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and the concentrated, desperate viciousness of the Safdie brothers’ Good Time) ultimately reveals an uncomfortable truth about the necessity of overcoming our natural desire to resist danger in order to better serve the goals of this political project–depicted here with a rigorous, almost instructional action-heist quality that chews through one suspense sequence after another: one of tires being slashed, of strap-threads tearing, and of explosive powder carried over bumpy roads.

The film’s closest companion in terms of its subject matter is maybe Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, which similarly adheres itself to the tough reality and procedure of eco-terrorism; but where Reichardt opted for a bleak, dispiriting moral compromise, Pipeline offers an overwhelming and powerful conviction.

Like Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Pipeline adheres itself to the tough reality and procedure of eco-terrorism.

It helps that the script (co-written with Goldhaber by Jordan Sjol and star Areila Barer), while lean and functional in all the right ways a thriller should be, is fuelled by a genuine sense for the rippling pain of climate disaster. For something that could’ve easily been approached at a didactic remove is instead–with the help of the film’s editor Daniel Garber–a sharp, non-linear story that ties this ugly, necessary work to brief-but-clarifying emotional histories; like Theo (Sasha Lane), whose childhood spent playing in the acidic rain near local oil fields has resulted in leukemia, or Michael (Forrest Goodluck) and Dwayne (Jake Weary), whose blue-collar Texas and indigenous backgrounds inherently challenge the corporate seizure of land to build the steel monstrosities responsible for poisoning us. It’s a clever cinematic merging of the collective and the personal and how they inform one another that crops lot throughout the film, like the image of a hole being dug for their explosive barrel visually infected by and transported to Xochitl’s mother being lowered into the ground at her funeral.

In the past, the goal of capturing this visceral, human element around an ideological project has frequently been done in the name of bankrupt ambiguity. An intellectually lazy way of inserting a “both sides are sort of in the wrong” shrug, and if there’s any more praise to throw on Goldhaber and his team (and there is plenty; the dirty, yet glowing 16mm photography courtesy of cinematographer Tehillah De Castro; or Gavin Brivik’s pulsing, spacey soundtrack; plus some fantastic elemental location work in North Dakota and Texas) it is that they not only deftly avoid this pitfall but appear to be making a strict argument against it.

There are certainly opposing voices heard in the film, as the crew themselves differ in opinion about the effectiveness of nonviolent protest, the history of achieving political goals in America (i.e. the civil rights movement), and minute details like who will be hurt by the eventual price-gouging that occurs due to their action. But these voices are not heard simply to poke holes in the mission, but to acknowledge and reaffirm the commitment to it, not unlike Gillo Pontercorvo’s blunt, unglamorous depiction of the use of force and achieving political goals under violent conditions in Battle of Algiers—one of, if not the greatest piece of guerrilla resistance cinema.

In many ways, the diverse and complex feeling of powerlessness that stems from those realities is the subject of the film itself, and by merging the sensitive character drama of the team’s shared connection through the collective understanding that destruction and death are imminent (individually, politically, etc) with genuinely methodical genre thrills, Pipeline eventually builds to its own intensely cathartic sense of control.

It’s a motivating formal argument that echoes Malm’s critiques of pacifism and fatalism by depicting urgency and fear as tools that can be weaponized by a team devoted to achieving a tangible goal.

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The post REVIEW: “Pipeline” Is A White-Knuckle Thriller With Revolutionary Politics appeared first on Blood Knife.

somesurprises' album Perseids is out on Doom Trip Records Friday, April 19. by Dave Segal

Of the thousands of bands I've talked to as a music journalist, somesurprises are the most soft-spoken. Their absolutely chill voices barely register on the playback of our interview, which took place in their Fremont rehearsal space, ExEx Audio. And this chillness seeps into the Seattle quartet's extraordinary music, which alchemizes a few of the finest rock strains—space, kraut, and shoegaze—into songs that massage your mind and tingle your body with subtle insistence.

Led by guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Natasha El-Sergany, somesurprises began as her bedroom solo project in 2012-2013. It expanded to a duo when guitarist/synthesist Josh Medina joined in 2015. The highly skilled rhythm section of bassist Laura Seniow and drummer Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy—who replaced Emma Danner and Nico Sophiea, respectively—fill out the lineup.

They've been in serious grind mode in the weeks leading up to the April 20 Tractor Tavern release party for their second album as a full-fledged band, Perseids, which LA's Doom Trip Records issues on April 19. A live appearance on KEXP follows on April 22 at the ungodly time of 9:30 am.

Clearly, momentum's building for somesurprises. They've been one of Seattle's most enthralling rock groups since 2017's Alt, but Perseids is their most melodically sophisticated and rich-sounding collection to date. Paurl Walsh—who's played in an experimental duo with Medina for years—expertly engineered and produced the record. 

<a href="https://somesurprises.bandcamp.com/album/perseids">Perseids by somesurprises</a>

Five years have passed since their self-titled LP on Drawing Room Records; much of that silence was due to COVID-19, of course, but also somesurprises decided to extensively labor over these nine songs, most of which El-Sergany wrote during the worst months of the pandemic. Plus, working with a limited budget and holding down demanding jobs further delayed things. El-Segany recalls one Thanksgiving weekend where "we were [in the studio] going insane for eight hours with a really loud [imitates a metronome's ticks], killing the vibe completely."

She adds, "The long process allowed us to add new parts to songs and even new lyrics, so I wasn't playing as I was writing lyrics; I was just able to listen and really see what it made me feel like. That was a benefit, too."

In addition, Medina's ability to spontaneously create parts to El-Sergany's songs has improved over the years. He also praises Walsh's ability to layer and overdub sounds, and the two's telepathic musical relationship helped the band to reach new heights. "He did a little bit of what we refer to as 'dub production,' throwing drums through delay and things like that. We've developed as a band and as individuals with Paurl's help, as well." 

The extra effort—plus contributions from avant-garde cellist Lori Goldston and vocalist/Persian poetry scholar Jessika Kenney (both Stranger Geniuses)—has paid off handsomely. The album opens with somesurprises' boldest stab for a hit single in these shoegaze-friendly times, "Be Reasonable." With its frictionless, laid-back motorik groove, it captures the feeling of an easygoing ramble down the Autobahn. While listening, one feels bedazzled and adrift with cool-breeze pleasure. "Bodymind" is a pulsating swell of overdriven klang while "Why I Stay" begins as a hypnotic and moving waltz-time ballad before the song gloriously ascends and expands to blot out the sky. On "Ship Circles," Goldston's cello adds sinuous beauty and gravity to this mesmerizing, hushed ballad, complementing El-Sergany's voice, which is at once icy and deeply moving. "Untitled" is a gorgeous, contemplative instrumental somewhere between Opal and early Felt. Tip: listen to this record on good headphones to catch the enthralling microscopic details and the jaw-dropping, macroscopic scope.

The LP's longest song at 8:09, "Perseids" is a masterclass in building suspense. The rhythm clicks swiftly and metronomically while a cyclical, spangled guitar riff tingles synapses. Then comes a soft explosion into a six-stringed meteor shower amid some intricate, magical bass/drum interplay, as Kenney steps to the mic to recite a poem by 14th-century spiritualist Hafez about the Islamic lore of demons being vanquished by meteors. 

El-Sergany elaborates on this theme: "After this album and song became centered around the idea of meteors and meteor showers, our three birthdays [Natasha, Josh, and Laura's] being in Leo season, at the peak of meteor showers, I thought surely there must be some meaning behind this in my faith. So I looked into it and, yeah, the first image that I came across is that of demons being struck down because they couldn't reach the heavens. It seemed a little cartoonish in my mind; I couldn't grasp it." Fortuitously, Goldston's friend Kenney was in town while somesurprises were recording Perseids, so they invited her to bring her knowledge and dramatic vocal stylings to the studio.

The Hafez poem that Kenney suggested revealed the metaphor's meaning to El-Sergany. "Even in Western discourse, people use the term 'demons' to mean the things they're struggling with personally. But [the poem] talked about the demon of grief and this image of meteors being able to strike out the demon of grief. And I thought that was powerful because you seem like you're a whole person regardless of what has happened to you, and understanding that and being able to transform the trauma or the bad thing that's happened to you into part of your story can therefore eliminate the power that that thing has over you. I was really inspired by that."

Throughout the album, I note, there seems to be a tension between angst-ridden lyrics and liberating music. El-Sergany agrees. "Because you can't really have one without the other. You can't get to the liberation part without the struggle. I do like to think about dream spaces where everything is the way it should be. And maybe that's not so different from being in the struggle, too. As long as you're moving toward some kind of truth, you're already there."

Only in dreams. COURTESY OF DOOM TRIP

When The Stranger interviewed El-Sergany in 2017 for a Person of Interest feature, she said, "I'm not going for escapism so much as attempting to create space for reflection on themes of love, loss, and isolation. I think it's really important to stay human now and stay connected to your imagination. So I hope that our album can help people do that." Is that still the case? "Yes. Well said," she laughs. 

Does El-Sergany view somesurprises as a vehicle to create positive change in the world? "Not really, but I think it's a way to connect with people in a really authentic way."

On Perseids, there's less reliance on motorik rhythms compared to past releases, partially due to El-Sergany writing most of the songs by herself. Also, she was listening to a lot of Cluster—especially Cluster 71 and Cluster & Eno—which led to her "wanting to have more color than structure. There was one year where I was in the .01% top listeners to Cluster on Spotify. I wear that as a badge of honor. I always liked melodic music and actual songs."

That being said, somesurprises' motorik songs work really well live. "That's what gets people dancing most of the time," Seniow observes. Medina adds, "We always laugh when everyone just wants to hear us play one chord loudly." The thing is, it's a good chord.

What happens if somesurprises get really popular? Do they quit their jobs and dedicate their lives to the band? Or will it still be a side hustle? "It's been a really slow burn and we expect that to continue," El-Sergany says. Medina says he'd never quit his job as an administrator at a Montessori school, nor would El-Sergany leave her job as an immigration lawyer. And neither would compromise their art in order to break through.

"I feel principled, to a fault, maybe, and Natasha's the same way," Medina says. "We shoot ourselves in the foot all the time," El-Sergany admits. They turned down an invitation to appear on Band in Seattle and they almost got on Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in 2017. "That was crazy," El-Sergany says. "But they turned us down. We would've totally done it." 

"It blew my mind, because I recorded this song ["Mayor Skipped Town" from 2017's Serious Dreams] on a cassette tape and they want to use it on national television," Medina says. "I thought, 'This is a joke...'"

"It was a fun thing to be able to tell my mom, you know?" El-Sergany says. "They wanted to play it while Tony was riding the ferry to the clambake on Bainbridge Island or something, and then have synchronized swimmers. It sounded very elaborate."

With shoegaze gaining widespread popularity now—particularly from what I've gleaned secondhand from TikTok—are somesurprises angling to cash in on the craze? "I have a TikTok account, but so far I get like seven views on things," El-Sergany says. "I'm trying to go viral, but it hasn't worked yet. Maybe I need to do more skits or something."

"I told her the magic would be covering pop songs in her reverbed-out way," Medina says. "And do some actual magic tricks," Thomas-Kennedy advises.

With deadpan snark, El-Sergany says, "Okay, I'm on it."

somesurprises play Tractor Tavern on Saturday April 20 at 8:30 pm with Coral Grief and Anthers.

naamahdarling:

littlemizzlinguistics:

Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how “your generation can’t speak right/ you’re butchering the language” they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn’t language wonderful?“

And you too can be like this! Without even being a professor!

medeae:

Anne Carson, ‘Wildly Constant’, London Review of Books