mikeymalmo-blog

[mikeymalmo-blog]

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

FRANTZ FANON Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

[mikeymalmo-blog]

Dead Pigeons.

Trade wars aren’t good for iphones

Counterproductive for mass production

Obstruct the Silk Road,

Constrict the flow of Capital.

Yet. 

Capital still flows

Data will still aggregate

While Capital flows are interrupted.

 Cobalt mines in the DRC

Will still be mined by minors.

Four year old fingers grip pick axes for a dime a day.

My two year old learns to swipe and press

and hears Raffi

Down By The Bay.

 The silk road is a river and perpetually more.

1’s and 0’s flow into the sea.

Technically they are carried in underwater pipes.

The Yangtzee flows into the South China seas.

Container ships…

igadgets still find their way.

Your rights to the App Store will not be collalteral damage in the trade war.

So help them God in whom they trust.

Capital flows.

Makes waves in an ocean of isms

South China seas

Tianjin

Zixingche da guo

A Kingdom of Bicycles.

Deng Xiaoping

China’s Mourning Mao

 Relief comes in the form of flight

A pigeon in everyhousehold.

Bipedals power bicycles.

Mao to almost now.

 Capital flows.

Yuan, Greenbacks, Pound

Shanghai, NY, London

insert symbols here. $, etcetera.

a sea of 1’s and 0’s

more convoluted than Matrix Reloaded.

Keanu Reeves is on a speeding bus

sipping tea with Laurence Fishburne.

 Wake up fools.

It never trickled down.  

That drop you felt. Never enough of anything.

It always flows in aqueducts for the accumulators

That drop you felt. That one time something cup spilled over.

Did it quench anything?

 Mandarins Bureacrats push envelopes and stroke keys to shift decimals

points.

The excess carried over the tenth column to the hundreth

Why do you think the haves have more ?

Arithmetic reveals the sum. 

Calculus obscures it

Derivatives make crass

Crash.

 Bureaucrats adhere to policy.

The proletariat – the vanguard.

Anointed Aristocrats.

 Capital flows where pigeons once flew.

Dialectics and materials gathered for the synthesis.

Marx & Engels.

Manifestos inform Red Books.

 A revolution wished upon five stars

Was it granted over Red flags

that wave over Tiannamen Square?

 Communism is one thing.  Is Freedom its brother ?

 Capital Flows nicely through open door policies.

 The view is different here.

Send up a drone. Bypass the great fire walls of china

 Scale for perspective.

Zoom out

Zero in

What lies therein.

 Is Possession nine-tenths of the law ?

Is Sharing caring ?

Cliches run amok

or raise questions

But do they float all boats ?

 The new economy

The Dragon overshadows tigers easily

And makes new monsters.  To feed itself.

Seized the means of production for mass production.

Surplus plus plus plus.

 Remember ’84?

Tanks overshadowed hopes of proclamations and declarations of independence.

Tanks drew their shadows over the man

What did happen to the tank man ?

Who the fuck knows.  They were tanks man!

Think differently.

And they did.

Apps to enable a sharing economy.

Supply and demand in the palm of one’s hands.

Would millennial pigeons take flight again in the streets again? Shenzen. Shanghai. TinJin.

 No longer the objects of affection.

Found Objects strewn about in manufactured landscapes.

Evoke Burtynsky.

When capital ceases to extract value from its production.

The means have reached their end.

 Capital recedes.

unwanted objects lay bare in its wake.

 Xeric.Arroyo.Wadi

Be like water. Be Lee

Be capital.

Dolla Dolla Bills Y’all

 Unwanted.Abandoned.No value.Useless value.

Eternally external.

https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Malmo/@55.5966693,12.933222,9932m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x4653a3fa01dcf673:0xf3f96c6a13cdefff!8m2!3d55.613553!4d13.002663

Democracy is one thing. And freedom might be its other.

How are we to know?

 Democracy is one thing. And freedom might be its lover.

I studied the first and found the other.

 When abandoned

What is private property anyways ?

When objects no longer hold exchange value

 Let alone

Left alone

 Make Use

Give Value.

 What Would Marx do?

What weight do German Economists hold

When the logic of kindness can help

Transcend alienation

Or at least slip through a gap.

All one needs is friendship

In the dusk of summer.

 And a bike to get you through the night.

 All that to say.  

 In seven days of summer.

My world was recreated.

 I saw the best minds of my generation amongst the madness,

Hungry ferocious naked,

Marching themselves through bourgeoistreets at dusk looking for justice,

Antifascistick youngsters burning for a future.  No need for a heavenly connection

Amongst the machinery of night.

[mikeymalmo-blog]

I. O, siris

We lay together in some sort of embrace.  Young bodies. One folded into the other. Resting inches from the ground on an Ikea mattress like the one I had in my apartment. What do undergraduate anti-fascist anarchists need bedframes for anyways?   Smashing the state and the disarming global capital are orthogonal to furniture catalogue home décor. We smoked cigarettes in bed while she explained the inner workings of refugee settlement in Sweden, street fights with neo-nazis, the architecture of consent, and the fact that she sometimes dated girls and at others she chose guys. The youth here glided smoothly over binaries while I was concretely defined by categories of heteronormativity. I was transfixed on an image beneath the lamp that stood beside her bed. She told me the photo was of her mother.  Naked. Pregnant. Beautiful. She was carrying the woman now beside me. Fully in her third trimester, seated at the rear of her father’s motorcycle, leaning back on him, glowing in Kodachrome hues. Her name was Siris, in honour of goddess of the afterlife, the underworld, and the dead. Osiris minus the “O”. How did I get here?

I found myself amongst an anti-fascist, anarchist collective spread throughout the streets of Malmo.  Being around them brought life to me.  I wanted to learn Swedish and tell my family I’d moved to Malmo.  I should have, but I didn’t. They marched in the streets of South Sweden. Organized transition programs for refugees and made great efforts to mix their movement with youth of colour.   A more honest look and I would have seen that they were mostly white.  The Iraqi and Somali kids were around, but weren’t necessarily the main organizers. But I wasn’t ready to critique them just yet.  They were all just so damn chill and nice.  I saw them as a collective of crew unified in opposition and held together by community. I came to see them as unrelentingly brave in their fights with neo-nazis. I thought they werer uncompromising in their challenge to the police and the state. I spent two days with them and I knew.  Not really, but I thought I did.

mollevangstorget at night.

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II. The Kindness of youth

Adjacent the bridge that shuttles Malmo’s working class to and from Copenhagen to accrue more Krone, I was freezing my ass off on the edge of the Orseund river in a Swedish military tent I shared with volunteers for this year’s European Social Forum.

 The volunteer camp was in Skåne County, Sibbarp to make “another Europe possible!” “Working for social inclusion and social rights—Welfare, public services and common goods for all”.

I spent the summer in studying in the north of Spain.  There to complete the language credits for my Poli Sci degree in the city Santiago de Compostela,  I was equipped for a Spanish summer and not a Nordic fall at the edge of a river bank.

 A mall food court served as a cafeteria for Forum volunteers. In need of warmth, I was on the hunt for a toque.

 I exited the mall, no idea where to go. All the shops in the mall were closed.  I needed directions. Across the street, a bar. People seated outside, beers, a backdrop of sunset.  

Two young women in multi-coloured adidas jackets, looking like they were b-girls of a local breakdance crew. They were clichédly blonde and caught my attention right away. I must have caught theirs as well.  We started talking.  Their hair may have been stereotypical and my reaction hormonally predictable, but everything after that cracked open my way of thinking about the world.

 “A toque?”

“Yeah, you know, a beanie, a winter cap, a wool…I’m just trying to stay warm.  I’m stuck up in Sibbarp with the rest of the forum volunteers.”

“A hat is going to be enough. And its going to shitty to go all the way back to the camp. How about a place to stay?”

 We talked politics, we talked about the forum, and we had more beers. I was confused about who was more down for me.  I got good vibes from both Siris and her friend bex.  I just dug Bex more.  She had mad jokes and had this hip hop vibe to her.  But early on, it seemed like she wasn’t feeling me.  And later on, it was Siris who took me home.

 That’s how it started off with Bex and Siris. The spark was attraction, but our mutual desire for wanting to stand for something held it all together. I would learn more from them about living your ideals than I would in any workshop or speech.  They believed in the same things at the heart of the social forum, but their politics, their strategies to make those beliefs tangible meant a willingness for direct action. Strategies that had them contently at the fringes, the frontlines of the movement.

It was comforting to feel solidarity as more than just something to aspire to. To form it with youth of my generation across an ocean helped dissipate feelings of loneliness I’d placated with alcohol in Santiago de Compostela.  Not for lack of company. The campus was filled with good people from New York, Vancouver, and Colorado. They just weren’t on the same mission I was.  Maybe they were, I just wasn’t ready to find it then.

 My brother died a year and a half before this trip.  I tried to get away from home and find a way to move forward.  I put half a heart into politics and tried to skip a few stages of grief.  It was the best I could do at the time. Still reeling, still mourning, I went back to school to wrap up my degree and found my way to Sweden.

I traded spaces on couches with their peers who were all here for the forum.

 As a volunteer, I guided people who registered to discuss new systems of governance to their respective talks.  I attended talks by philosophers I admired like Michael Hardt and Vandana Shiva. I spoke Punjabi with Punjabis from Pakistan.  I bonded with German manufacturing unionists and I discussed the state of the left in Canada.

Reclaim the Streets

Siris was a lead organizer for the big protest that was happening on my last night in Malmo. I was to spend a few nights across the bridge in Copenhagen.  Siris was on the front lines of protest.  So I marched with Bex.

 I saw, in her, everything I wanted to be. And much more.  A goddess in her own right, but I didn’t dare test her interest in me. Having a traveller’s romance with her best friend, Siris, a few short days ago, I’d wear out my welcome fast in this community unless she made moves first. So I left it up to her and until things would stay platonic.

 I told her about my plans for Copenhagen tomorrow. I told her how much I just wanted to ride around by bike all over the city.

 She said to me, “take one from the pile. No one will miss a bike thats been left at the Metro.  You’ll know it when you see them.  All objects of lost affections.”

I made mental notes.

“You’ll be tacksam. with your own wheels of steel.  cool? ciao,” she added.

 The “Reclaim the Streets!” march got tense. As we made our way into Malmo’s financial district, bank windows were smashed.  A stand-off with Swedish cops in riot gear followed. Things happened quickly.  Bex had to go check in with the collective.  We would meet up later tonight at a party, but if not, I could stay with her when I got back from Copenhagen.  We made plans to go see a hip-hop show in Lund. I eventually made my way to the party with the German union crew.

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III. hittat objekt / fundet objekt

I did find that bike.  It did set me free in Denmark.  I rolled straight out of the Copenhagen Metro took Bex’s advice and made my way to the bike racks.  It was a knotted, tangled mess of bikes.  The bikes that people gave a shit about were locked up in manageable rows, but the pile I was looking for was in the back where the dozen or so dudes were hanging out. They paid me no attention and so I picked up a 58cm frame bike that was a little to tall for me, but its shoddy black paint job spoke to me. I roamed freely throughout the city on my steel stallion. I visited Kierkegaard’s grave. Had French-press coffee at some aesthetically pleasing cafes.  Visited the youth house Norrebrø.  I curated my own social justice bike tour.  A rebel without a cause or a riding partner.  Free and alone. 

[mikeymalmo-blog]

IV: Bex in Malmö I had two nights left in Skane before I would fly out to Munich and prost one liter Steins at Oktoberfest with my brother’s friend. Back in Malmo, the plan was to kick it with Bex.  Siris was up North visiting her mother in Gotheburg.  Bex was down to go with me to Lund.  We loved hip hop and the intensity of Immortal Technique resonated with the both of us. We sat together in her apartment.  Larger than anything a student loan could afford in Vanouver.   That night, we watched Harlan County. A documentary about a Kentucky Coal miners strike--workers and loved ones banding together against  Eastover Coal.   The indomitable spirit of the miners in spite of the odds was inspiring.  I could not fully transport myself to 1973 Kentucky.  I was distracted.  I was on the floor, she was on her sofa.  I hoped she would ask me to join her. Even if it was for the sake of solidarity.  I would have obliged.  I wasn’t going to make a move unless she did.  But she never did.

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V. Un pueblo unido

We were two kids in that sea hip hop heads chanting “un pueblo unido. jamás será vencido”  - The people united, will never be defeated - with Immortal Technique in Lund.  A twenty minute train ride with Bex and we were the University town.  I rolled up a few blunts at a tavern we met her friends at with chronic I picked up from Freetown Christiania .  A few beers and conversations about the politics of the protests in Malmo and we were off to the show.

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VI. Tu es partout.

We walked down the stairwell of the student residence. And as walked those four stories, the music changed from the Knife to Edith Piaf.  It must have been around 1 am now. The french music reverberated through the concrete stairwell and the stillness of night carried Piaf’s voice out into the streets.  Bex and I were blanketed in those sounds.  I felt the erie calm like the soldiers in Saving Private Ryan and shared it with Bex.  She was listening to something else through her earbuds.  She came up close and passed me the bud from her right ear to put in mine.  I couldn’t hear the song.  Suppressing desire can be deafening. Or at least distracting.  I was haunted by Piaf like those soldiers, suspended in longing in the quiet calm before battle.