Blast From Yer Past: "A16"

Oh, that good old Spirit Of Seattle. Turtles’n'Teamsters everywhere.




The mood and solidarity between different parts of The Movement — folks like old-skool unionists and environmentalists discovering common goals and realizing they were fighting the same fight against the same enemy — were electric and invigorating in the months following Seattle, and none quite like the personal charge I got when, just a couple of weeks afterwards, I saw the action call posted in alt.activism for the April IMF/World Bank Mobilization in Washington, DC, for April 16, 2000 — the now-legendary “A16".

Blast From Yer Past: "A16" IMF/WorldBank Mobilization, 04.16.00 from Mike Flugennock on Vimeo.

At last, no more watching for little shreds of TV coverage, of scouring another city’s IMC postings — the revolution circus was coming to my town, and I was going to actually be in it, and photographing and taping it, and telling the story of that week for everybody else out there… and, the wheatpasting. Oh, yeah, the wheatpasting...

Blast From Yer Past: Washington DC 09.27.02

Are you ready for some football?

 
September 27, 2002: the first day of "Peoples' Strike" weekend, three days of mobilizations against the policies of the IMF and World Bank, and George W. Bush's war in Afghanistan. It was 7am when I showed up at Franklin Square in downtown DC -- way too early for a guy my age to be up, even back then. A loose confederation of anarchists and affinity groups was gathering at the Square, planning to stage an unpermitted "wildcat" march downtown to the IMF.

As it turned out, the march got as far as Vermont Avenue and L Streets NW before being trapped by police and scooped up. At least 400 protesters and bystanders were arrested en masse that day downtown, at Franklin Square and Pershing Park. I somehow managed to avoid being nabbed by noticing the police line forming up early at Vermont and K, seizing a moment of opportunity and slipping through before more police arrived there. It was all over by about 8am -- and I still had a whole fun-filled day ahead.

   
Good morning, boys'n'girls! Hanging out and drumming at Franklin Square while waiting for folks to show up for the ill-fated wildcat march.

   
Whose streets? The march heads out of Franklin Square, taking the street at 14th and K Streets NW. After turning north on Vermont Avenue, they encountered a police motorcycle blockade at L Street. Anyone who didn't notice the first cops appearing back at the other end of the block quickly enough would find themselves in a world o'trouble.

   
Are you ready for some football? While it probably seems dull to most of you, to me this is a memorable and iconic image -- the moment I realized the cop at my left was distracted by some action to his right (out of the frame), stepped away and left a huge gap for me to dash through. Up until this moment, I was worried that I was nabbed for sure -- and suddenly, daylight! He who hesitates is lost, as the old poet wrote.

   
All she wrote... Some moments later, more cops arrived, the line firmed up, and people trying to sneak through the gaps were being collared and shoved back into the crowd.

 
It's a gas! Yep, that's tear gas drifting through the foreground, there. By this time, there was nothing left for the people trapped on that block to do but wait around for the buses to arrive to haul them to the lockup.

BLAST FROM YER PAST: Happy Birthday, "Sweet A16"

This Was What Democracy Looked Like

Time once again to fire up the old TARDIS, and dive into this action-packed day of gleeful antiglob frenzy at the IMF, World Bank, and all over downtown DC on April 16, 2000 -- and, unlike the '60s, if you can remember it, you were there!

While the Anticapitalathon's scraggly gaggle is ignored by global capital and its fawning media, now would be a good time to remember more inspiring times -- times when The Movement™ wasn't afraid to protest against a Democratic Administration, times when The Movement™ wasn't cowed and intimidated by the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO.

In the Spring of 2000, Ralph Nader and the Green Party were calling bullshit on the Democrats and challenging their stranglehold on the US Left, the Democratic Party was pissing in its shoes, and the US Left couldn't have been happier -- as opposed to today, when the US Left is sitting on its hands, and the "progressives" couldn't be happier to be marching over a cliff behind Barack Obama and his cult of personality.

This was a time when The Movement™ was riding high on a wave of energy and solidarity after its victory in the Seattle Rebellion, and was full of hope for bringing about change in our future -- before the Democratic Party got its hooks into us. (D'oh, sorry; I just said "hope" and "change" there, didn't I?)

Episode 1, 09:13




Episode 2, 06:45





Download mpeg4 files: Episode 1, 33.8mb; Episode 2, 27.6mb

A16 Poster Series, from January 2000.

The Spirit of '99

Holy jeez, gang, has it really been ten years already? Phew, now that really makes me feel old. Luckily for me, fiftysomething is the new thirtysomething...or something.

So, when I was asked to design the poster for the Seattle/WTO Tenth Anniversary event here in DC, there was only one thing to do -- another parody of a famous work of art, in this case, a classic of Kitsch Americana, Archibald Willard's iconic Spirit Of '76, the hit of the show at the 1876 Columbian Exposition.



But, aaa-aaaanyway...the big do is on Monday, November 30, at Chief Ike's Mambo Room in Adams-Morgan, 1725 Columbia Road NW, at 7pm; it's a fund raiser for the Washington Peace Center and the Funk The War Alumni Association (for all you ex-college kids who are too old for SDS, but still want to get funky). There'll be the obligatory drinking and party-mix grooves, of course. There'll also be some vintage Seattle/WTO rebellion video running, because we really loves us some anarchy.

Medium-res jpg image, color, 1mb
Medium-res jpg image, grayscale, 792k

So, hit the copy shop, mix up the paste, grab your rollers, and hit the streets, kids, and I'll see yer butts down at Chief Ike's on N30!

Cover Art, The Progressive, October 2002

After the Washington Post feature and the Swedish Public TV interview, this pretty much capped off what I liked to call my "Elvis Year" -- at least until '06, when I got to go on a couple of right-wing talk-radio interviews, where I had the pleasure of making the hosts crap their pants while asking me why I hated America as a result of my participation in the Holocaust Cartoon Competition.

Thankyuh, thankyuhvurymuch.

"Poster Boy of Protest", in the Washington Post

For a number of years in high school and college, one of my big dreams was to take over Herblock's job at the Washington Post -- or, perhaps, to hit the front page in the Post's Style/Arts section. Needless to say, as my work took a more radical turn, I realized that my chances of making the Arts page -- let alone becoming the successor to Herblock -- were slim at the very best, and I got a little more realistic and focused my attention to creating cover cartoons for the Yipster Times or trying to break into High Times or Rolling Stone.

So, imagine my surprise when I found myself the subject of a front-page "personality profile"-type story appearing on the front page of the Post Style section a good twenty-odd years after my giving up on the idea of ever breaking into the Post at all. The Post had done a couple of previous Style profiles on local antiglob/antiwar movement figures, and apparently, now, it was my turn; it turns out that a certain Post reporter who'd been covering the local movements since Seattle had been a fan of my work for quite awhile, ever since it began appearing with regularity, wheatpasted on DC's streets beginning with the original "Blood For Oil" series during Iraq War I.

It was with a mixture of surprise and ironic glee, then, that I found myself and my work "writ large" on the front page of the lifestyle section of a major US city daily, getting top billing over -- of all people -- Catherine Deneuve (ooh la-la) and Robert Duvall. I was even more surprised to see myself getting an even-handed, quite positive treatment, as I was worried at how I'd be portrayed in print after seeing how the op-ed columnists were savaging the anti-globalization movements ever since Seattle/WTO and A16.

Story by David Montgomery; photographs by Andrea Bruce Woodall.
Adobe pdf file, 4.3mb

Strike for Statehood!

Time for another parody of an iconic American image, this time the famous photograph of the Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima island during WWII. Once again, it's not like it's been done before, but like all the great Renaissance painters doing their own versions of the Annunciation and Crucifixion, I decided it was time for me to do my own version of Iwo Jima.



This piece advertised the planned "Peoples' Strike" focused on the residents of Washington, DC who, the organizers of the "strike" assumed, had reached the point where things had gotten bad enough to spark a mass general strike to coincide with the IMF/World Bank meetings. Sadly, somehow, despite the loss of the city's only public hospital, the closure of homeless shelters and the sale of schools and the property under them to condo developers, many residents of DC chose not to join the "strike" as apparently things still hadn't gotten bad enough -- either that or, as I suspect, they were awaiting permission from the local Democratic Party to organize and rise up on their own behalf.

Medium-res jpg image, 710k

Fall 2002 IMF/WB "Map"

Part of the '02 IMF/World Bank festivities was a planned widespread, networked civil disobedience around the city of Washington, DC, which organizers hoped would include major highways and subway lines in and out of the city. In order to dramatize the organizers' intent, this poster depicted the entire city of DC squeezed and choked at the various intersections of highways and rapid-transit lines -- or, resembling some kind of weird alien bodily organ, depending on how much Star Trek you've watched.

Medium-res jpg image, 839k

Fall 2002 IMF/World Bank Series

By this time, the approach of summer meant one thing: time to get going on the posters for the Fall World Bank/IMF Mobilization! A more militant local outfit, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, was taking a large part in this year's mobe as many in the movement were becoming dissatisfied with the more "moderate" position of the large NGOs such as Global Exchange, and DC's own Mobilization For Global Justice (originally formed to organize the A16 WB/IMF actions in 2000).



As was customary, my posters for the IMF/WB Mobe sought to be simple, easily-read portrayals of the issues our movement was addressing; in addition, this year I also added a series of images depicting our movement's vision for a peaceful and just society, to shut up all those conservative wags out there predictably whining "we all know what you're against, but what are you for?"

Complete set, Adobe pdf file, 3m

Out With the Crew for an Evening's Postering, Fall 2001

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room,
where I got me a date with a pretty little girl from Greece;
she told me she would be there with me
when I paint my masterpiece!
--Dylan.



I try to think more about the guy we met at Dupont Circle who was overjoyed to have finally discovered where these posters came from, or the students from the George Washington Action Coalition out for a late-night bicycle ride on P Street who stopped off and jazzed us up with a quick blast of solidarity ("Yo, wheatpasters!") to take my mind off the "neighbor" on Connecticut Avenue who stalked us -- tearing down posters -- for two blocks, and the DC cop who became frustrated with his own piss-poor knowledge of the law and inability to cite us for anything and proceeded to stalk us and tear down posters all the way down P Street from Dupont Circle almost to Georgetown, committing no less than half a dozen separate basic Constitutional violations in the process against our crew.

So, the next time you bump into some pacifist liberal who wants to "negotiate" with the police, direct them to this video.

Fall 2001 IMF/World Bank Series

The Fall 2001 IMF/World Bank mobilization was to be our blockbuster sequel to A16, rumored by many to be the biggest mass mobe in town since Vietnam -- Lord willing and the creek don't rise, barring any sudden freakish turn of events -- such as, say, a large airliner or two or three diving into a few really large buildings.

Needless to say, the wheels pretty much came off The Movement's™ wagon very soon after 9/11; the Mobilization for Global Justice and Ruckus Society practically tripped over each other while backing out, citing (as I recall) "respect for the victims" -- even as the neocons and other right-wing freaks at the time were preparing for endless war overseas and endless abuse of the Constitution at home, also out of consideration for "the victims". Luckily, there was ANSWER, which went on with its events, shifting to a pro-civil liberties, anti-war focus for what was previously an anti-globalization mobe, so at least the Left hadn't been totally bullied off the streets by the Neocons and their brownshirt pals in Free Republic and Gathering Of Eagles.

Liberate Labor, high-res jpg image, 1.1mb
Demand Justice, high-res jpg image, 645k
Take Back Your Dignity, high-res jpg image, 1mb
Defend Democracy, high-res jpg image, 1mb
Restore Your Planet, high-res jpg image, 839k

Monkeywrench Grrl

What's especially ironic about this piece was that it was a piece with a World War II patriotic retro-kitsch motif based on the loud, kitschy, big-time phony WWII-era posters on the bus shelters and subway billboards being used to advertise a recent Disney special-effex blockbuster, the infamous Ben Affleck masterwork Pearl Harbor that came out early that summer... a good three months before the real, live, non-ironic, mindless patriotic kitsch seizure following 9/11.



On the purely non-issue-oriented side, a design and technical epic Win. The layout, pose and color came out a perfect match -- I was able to find a high-res scan of the original WWII piece to point-sample my colors from -- and it was also the first time I made serious use of top-highlight and middletone shadow hatching effects, drawn on a sheet of tracing paper with a dark graphite stick, scanned as a separate layer and dropped over the main drawing in Illustrator. I'd been kicking the idea around for a while, playing with it just a bit, but decided to try it whole hog after seeing Van Gogh's La Meridienne at the Musèe d'Orsay a few months before.

High-res jpg image, 1.8mb

"A16" Series

Oh, that old Spirit Of Seattle. Turtles'n'Teamsters everywhere.

But, seriously, folks... the mood and solidarity between different parts of The Movement -- folks like old-line unionists and environmentalists discovering common goals and realizing they were fighting the same fight against the same enemy -- were palpably electric and invigorating in the months following Seattle, and none quite like the personally charged feeling I got when, just a couple of weeks afterwards, I saw the mobilization action call posted in alt.activism for the April IMF/World Bank Meetings in Washington, DC, for April 16, 2000 -- the now-legendary "A16". At last, no more watching for little shreds of TV coverage, of scouring another city's IMC postings -- the revolution circus was coming to my town, and I was going to actually be in it, and photographing and taping it, and telling the story of that week for everybody else out there... and, the wheatpasting. Oh, yeah, the wheatpasting was going to go big-time (during the run-up to A16, the posse and I were followed around the streets awhile by an NBC crew one night after giving a class in wheatpaste-mixing and postering to a bunch of student activists at George Washington University).

Seeing as how the newly-named Lamppost Liberation Front (our regular flypasting posse) were going to go big-time for a big-time event, the event and the mood called not just for a single poster, but a series, a complete iconography that signified concerned groups from all backgrounds uniting for social/economic justice, and all that other good stuff. Once again, I went for an image that everybody knows, usually used to symbolize humanity in some noble, artistic fashion or other. Also once again, I'm far from the first to rip off DaVinci's famous Vitruvian drawing for analogy or satire, but everybody here thought the context was quite "fresh".

This series also appeared on t-shirts sold to benefit the Mobilization for Global Justice. The t-shirts had their own special heroic history; maybe a couple of weeks before A16, the convergence space was raided and shut down by the cops and the fire marshal on trumped-up fire hazard (coleman stove brewing coffee) and explosives (coleman stove tank) charges and, in the process, a large number of the shirts were siezed. We managed to sell the rest, but it several months or so before we got our shirts back, meaning that there are a couple of small surviving batches of brand-new, unwashed, unworn A16 shirts out there at last report.

Blue-Collar Labor, medium-res jpg image 323k
Hippie, medium-res jpg image 323k
Office Worker no.1, medium-res jpg image 323k
Student, medium-res jpg image 323k
Office Worker no.2, medium-res jpg image 323k
Anarchist, medium-res jpg image 323k
Fast-Food Slave, medium-res jpg image 323k
Janitor, medium-res jpg image 323k
Environmentalist, medium-res jpg image 323k
Sushi Chef, medium-res jpg image 323k
Help! I'm a Cop! medium-res jpg image 323k