The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About The Politics Of Your Plate.epub
Leana Eckes
Many things have happened in my life since then, including my arrest and the two years I spent in prison, but in fact nothing has seriously changed. I keep asking uncomfortable questions. Here, there, and everywhere.
The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About The Politics Of Your Plate.epub
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The future has never promised to be bright, or progressive, or whatever. Things may get worse. They have been getting worse in my country since 2012, the year Pussy Riot was put behind bars and Putin became president for the third time.
When I try to find words to talk about a more holistic approach to world politics, when I suggest thinking about the future of the whole planet rather than the ambitions and wealth of nations, I inevitably start to sound naive and utopian to many people. I thought for a while that it was because of my poor personal communication skills, and maybe that is part of the problem. But I see this failure of words as a symptom of something larger. We never developed the language to discuss the well-being of the earth as a whole system. We identify people by where they are from, while never learning how to talk about people as part of a larger human species.
When deeds are faltering, we find words to inspire us. So add this to your checklist: remember to turn on your confidence. You do have power. Together, as a community or a movement, we can (and will) make miracles.
My father is not a religious person in any usual fashion, but he understands the importance of culture and a language that speaks about transcendent experience. We would visit Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches, mosques, synagogues, and even Hare Krishna events when I was a kid. My father imposed no dogmas on me. We would freely, joyfully, playfully discuss our different impressions and write down some of them.
When I was eighteen, I tried to convince my professors on the philosophical faculty of Moscow State University to let me pass exams by doing actions instead of writing a paper. We reached a compromise and I wrote a paper on action philosophy.
Diogenes died like a pirate too, on his own terms. Nearing ninety, he killed himself by holding his breath. (Either that or he ate bad octopus or died from a dog bite, which is too ironic for Diogenes the Dog.) It is said he died on the very same day as Alexander the Great.
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.
Minimizing junk, maximizing joy and understanding are a question of honor to me. At a certain point you say, fuck this shit, we can do better by ourselves. The DIY principle might help here: it makes you analyze, question, come up with alternatives. Start from scratch.
It is more convenient to work in pairs in supermarkets. You put the groceries in a cart, find a safe place in the store, and put them in your bag. Expensive and compact items like meat and cheese are easier to pack on your back or stomach, cinching them tight with your belt. Then you grab a loaf of bread or box of oatmeal from the shelf and head for the checkout counters. You pay for the bread or the oatmeal.
When you exit the supermarket and turn the corner, put the stolen items in your camping backpack. Your shoulder bag should be ready for the next store; always keep it empty. You must not go into the next store with items taken from the previous store. If you are found and detained, the list of stolen goods will include what you brought in with you.
Vote with your money. Every time we spend our money on something, we vote for this thing to exist in our world. Purchasing something sends a message to the marketplace, affirming the product, its ecological impact, its process of manufacture. Money is power, and with this power comes responsibility. If we spend our money differently, we can change the world.
The 30-day money experiment. Spend a month taking note of everything you purchase. At the end of the month, categorize your expenses into rent, food, electricity, wine, coffees, lunches, etc., then multiply those categories by twelve to get a rough idea of the yearly cost of each of the categories. Small things add up to significant sums over a year. This means that small changes in spending habits can produce significant savings.
Pussy Riot began rehearsing in a basement belonging to a Moscow church. It was the autumn of 2011. Construction work was going on. We would be recording songs, and workers with jackhammers were walking around us.
We rehearsed a number thoroughly and for a long time. Unlike punk groups who perform in clubs, we had to get the musical part down, but we also had to unpack and pack the equipment as quickly as possible. We not only sang during rehearsals but also tried to learn how to continue playing and singing when guards or police were grabbing our legs and trying to drag us away.
Time passed, and the renovation of the church basement was finished. The church decided to rent it to a store, and we wound up on the street. We went to rehearse in a pedestrian underpass from which we were constantly kicked out.
After hearing a full lecture on the history of the feminist movement a couple of times in response to their questions, the guards elected not to talk to us anymore and would just let us in without saying a word. That is just what we wanted.
At the beginning of the 1990s, he decided to write 24,000 poems by the year 2000. Twenty-four thousand because he wanted to produce one poem for each month of the next two thousand years. Prigov calculated how many poems he needed to write in a day and religiously followed his plan. He never skipped a day. And what do you think, he killed it! Always follow your own axioms.
Nobody refers to Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov just by his first and last names. He always wanted people to use his middle name, Aleksandrovich, with his first name. He treated his whole life as a work of art: his project was Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov.
Smile as an act of resistance. Smile and say fuck you at the same time. Laugh in the face of your wardens. Seduce your hangman into your beliefs. Make prison wardens your friends. Win the hearts of those who support the villain. Convince the police that they should be on your side. When the army refuses to shoot into the crowd of protestors, the revolution wins.
Here is a chapter dedicated to all sorts of pleasure that you can find, both earthly and otherworldly pleasure. Joy is my ultimate capital, but it resides in me and not in a bank. I find joy in my art, which is barbaric and primitive political cabaret. It might not look joyful, but I get joy out of it. I even found joy in prison, briefly and secretly.
Your tormentors are easy to spot when you are in prison. Less so when you live a comfortable enough life in the free world. But there are tormenters out there all the same. They are the ones who preside over a system that dumps trillions in debt on students and gives tax breaks to billionaires. They sell off public land and drill nature reserves. They make sure the 1 percent gets rich and the 99 percent stays poor, relatively. They start wars and turn cities into no-go areas. You know, the politics.
Dadaists lived in an awkward period: the time between two world wars. Since the Industrial Revolution, the West had been seriously obsessed with the idea of progress. Progress had replaced God. But during and after World War I, it all started to look pretty confusing. People were working sixteen hours a day, kids were toiling in poisonous factories and losing their eyes and hands, often to produce more weapons for people to kill each other. This surely was not pleasing, and it left a number of people feeling fooled.
The artists who would go on to form the Dada movement were really upset about philistinism and the idolization of mechanics and progress. It was a turbulent, dangerous, nonlinear time, the time after World War I and before the rise of Hitler in Germany. They were on to something.
Dadaists rejected the reality and logic of the uber-modernist society. Life was falling apart right in front of their eyes. They ran into the arms of nonsense, absurdism, making playful collages, sound art, sculptures, and the like.
Cut-ups are like collages but with words rather than pictures. Pussy Riot uses this technique extensively. When we decided to start a band, we hated the idea of writing poetry (we were suspicious about poetry because we came from a conceptual art background), but we still had to create lyrics for our songs. We ended up composing our lyrics from quotes of our favorite philosophers and media headlines.
I learned what it means to care and be attentive. I was able to see green leaves for about thirty minutes the whole summer. I was able to catch sunlight through the prison bars for ten minutes several times a week. I did it religiously every time I had a chance to see the sun. I caught rare raindrops and cried happy tears because of the shining beauty of the rain.
Can a period of history be heroic? I absolutely think so. There was something in the air in 1968 that made people use their imaginations to find new ways to revolt. Thinking about that year gives me chills. People knew how to dream about social justice, peace, and equal opportunities. There were labor unions, the civil rights movements in Russia, France, Japan, Egypt, Czechoslovakia, America. Words and deeds came together in new and inventive ways.
It was a year when everybody realized that it was time to rebel against the conservative archaic world. They felt that the ruling aesthetics, political regime, and official cultural codes did not represent them anymore.
Take a look at the slogans. They appeared as graffiti, chants, and posters during revolutionary events in Paris 1968. To me they seem to be a perfect manifestation of rebellious collective consciousness, precisely the kind of group action that makes regimes uncomfortable.
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