We Have Entered Into The Next Wave, How Will We Do it? Who Are We Anyway?

As one era ends, and another begins, do we have to be ready to dive in or is it time to sit back and watch?

Aftermath of the Paris riots, 2019 © Bil Brown

I’ve never been one to shy away from danger, in fact when I became an artist years ago in the 1990s one of my first experiences in the public arena was at a MLK day riot in Denver. At the time I was an MFA student at a small college in Boulder that was founded by a Tibetan Buddhist Rimpoche that had given up his vows to become secular-ish and teach meditation to white people, the school within the school was named after a writer that was apologetically the spiritual influence of the Hippies that would become the Yuppies and completely fuck-shit-up. The Kerouac School was a minor icon amongst a few people, founded (with Chogyam Trungpa’s influence) by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman in 1974. I made it there via a few other schools, and by the time I got there in 1991, The Naropa Institute was pretty established as a location for not only Buddhist scholarship, but activism, poetry, music, dance, eco-enlightenment and everything that the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s had that was what we would call today “Progressive”. It was, as we referred to it, “cool school.” So, with all of this in mind it makes perfect sense that the first full year I was there I would end-up at a riot, in front of the Capitol of a state that had at the time a Black Mayor who on the holiday of the iconic Civil Rights activist Rev. Martin Luther King decided it was a GOOD idea to put the Klu Klux Klan on the steps of the Capitol Building. This, of course, caused a minor riot.

The riot on the steps of the Denver Riot of 1992 was caused by a misstep of the idea of the First Amendment. The KKK used it. They knew what would happen, or hoped, so that they would look calm in comparison. The Capitol Building was situated near two iconic neighborhoods in Denver, Poet’s Row and Five Points. Five Points was a traditionally Black neighborhood, while Poet’s Row was filled with progressive whites. When President Ronald Reagan signed the bill in November 1983 that started the holiday there were many groups that didn’t like that historical moment. The Klan of course was one of them.

I sat near the building with a few friends as the annual peaceful march turned violent. I started writing. I didn’t have a camera at the time, I was a writer. I was a poet. One of the friends I was with shook me, “Get out of the way!” as I was writing in the way of mounted Police trying to curb and angry mob, as the Klan members were taken through the capitol building to a waiting bus.

They knew what they were doing.

A young child ran past us, holding a radar gun. 10 feet ahead was an overturned police cruiser with broken glass, and spinning tires. “I’ve got me a radar gun, I’ve got me a radar gun!” the child yelled. there were so many people around us, as the mounted Denver police charged into the crowd and a few police with helmets (but not much else) tried to calm the anger. This was what maybe could be explained as the Mob, or rule by the Mob, this was not Democracy but at this time, and place, it was majority rule.

This of course wouldn’t be the last time I experienced majority rage, in fact it wasn’t the first. One of my other schools before Naropa was Tulane during the first Gulf War. I think the statute of limitations has passed after 30 years and I can say, one of my roommates best friends fire-bombed a gas station in New Orleans. The “tick-tick-tick” of tapped landlines would click for months after that at our apartment phone. Was it the Feds? The FBI? No, it wouldn’t be the only time I heard that either.

The Kerouac School’s Summer Writing Program was notorious for bringing in avant-garde, advanced voices. 1992 was no different, I was lucky to have poet Amiri Baraka as a teacher starting that year. The year, my home of the last 10 years Los Angeles, experienced an Insurrection.

“ALL HAIL THE LA FREEDOM FIGHTERS. DEATH TO RACISM, DEATH TO THE KLAN,” proclaimed Amiri Baraka in his reading during the Kerouac School’s convocation, the same convocation that Allen Ginsberg would read for documentary two years later his seminal poem HOWL, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by MADNESS…” These words, these poems rang in my ears, for four years I would begin to understand the history of WHY they were written, why progress had been made and had to continue to be made.

My sister Brenna, 10 years my senior, was a flower child a late one because she wasn’t a 60s flower power flower child but a 70s one. When she left home at 16, she already had a baby, had already seen her best friend die and her best friend’s brother — who was the father of her baby — be killed. The killers, weird extremists, going under the name of the Progress Church from California. Gnostics, they didn’t believe in anything but their own stories of government being filled with demons or lizard people or whatever the 1970s version of “the swamp” would be. They killed Brenna’s friend Rita with a seven inch knife after kidnapping her from her Drive-In Job. They would go back the next day and pick up a young GI and do the same. They believed that what they were doing was part of God’s plan. A plan that evidently included human sacrifice or at least death.

You can’t argue with people that believe in things that are not real, and will kill for it.

Brenna, on the phone with me years later and seemingly lifetimes later, when I was concerned about my next move as an artist or a person or something said something I will never forget: “You know who you are.” Do I? Maybe I do, but maybe it is more than that. It is what I must be.

“Black, Latino, Asian, and Progressive White People all banded together and got them on the run,” Amiri said in 1992, talking of the LA Insurrection. Living here in LA, I can see that. When the mass protests started after the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016, I was there or here, in downtown Los Angeles. It wasn’t a time like 1992, we weren’t burning down the city. We were protesting the coming injustice.

For the next four years, it was all I could do to do anything “normal”. The editorial work I did all had stories and histories to be a warning, I started making my visual work as a photographer advance ideas and histories of the past. I dug in, I wanted to warn us, myself, of what was to pass. As a poet, I made connections, erudite and often esoteric of what was coming. Did anyone know what I was talking about when I turned a fashion editorial into an expose of the Baader-Meinhoff RAF group of counter-terrorists, or when I called the pre-days before when the rich and wannabe Dirty Rich were partying “Weimar Los Angeles?” Did anyone get it? That I was warning that we BROUGHT it on ourselves, that our creativity, our art had become CONTENT with our the substance. The Mob as they call it, is Democracy. It’s all we have left if the majority doesn’t get their voice heard, and after the debacle of the Electoral College not electing the popular vote a second time (the first was Al Gore vs George W Bush, and we know how that went in Gulf War 2.0), we didn’t get our voices heard. The protests were like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide would call the third planet from the Sun, “Mostly Harmless.”

When I turned 50 in 2019 it took me a few months to realize it, but I was now the same age as some of my more active teachers at the Kerouac School. Ed Sanders, poet/activist, founder of the Fugs and Peaceye Bookstore and the iconic arts and culture magazine of the Yippies “Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts” was 50 when he taught me Investigative Poetics (a practice of creative expression and data clusters, turned toward journalism). Anne Waldman was just a few years younger and had just finished her epic three volume book length poem “IOVIS”, a study of the male energies that defined this world taken from a personal standpoint. What had I done, at 50? Not a overachieving Boomer, nor part of the post-war Greatest Generation, but a Gen X slacker? What was I doing in this, as the Buddhists would call it, “lineage” of artists that all but changed culture? This artist-lineage is American Exceptionalism, not Donald Trump, someone by all indications was and had been a Russian asset for decades, but like Rock-n-Roll or Blues or Hip-Hop was something that would actually change the world. Something not even (and literally_ all-the-money-in-the-world was able to contain. What was I doing, what had I done? Did I know who I was? Really? Did I know… my purpose, my Karma?

Hindsight is 2020. And 2020, the year, is when all time stopped. Just maybe, it even converged. Karma is a funny thing, it isn’t what we usually say it is. Karma is action. Every action has its consequences, or a future reaction. What has led up to now, we can see clearly if we trace our path. I started teaching in 2020, this isn’t out of the ordinary, people who feel like they have some information to share is a whole cottage industry now. YouTube and even Patreon both have it, and I’m not going to lie, I’ve tried both of these a little. It somehow seems disingenuous, because I don’t have the drive to make myself pretty for a camera (I much prefer to be on the other side!), or feed people a bunch of bullshit unless I can somehow, like Holden Caulfield, make it pure. I owe you that.

Let’s face it, we have had enough of people’s opinions. it’s time we reaffirm truth and inevitably fact. In all of its subjective objectivity, a truth that can be observed.

How will we do it? Allen Ginsberg once said, “Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the big lie.” I’m no journalist, I can’t always give you facts, I know who I am. If there is no truth but points of view, let these writings and images be my Perspectiv. You can be the judge.

Bil Brown, Los Angeles, Feb 1, 2021