Mourning our dead—who herself did so much to mourn via her music against the often-murderous violence of the Catholic Church, colonialism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, fascism, and more—as seen wheatpasted in a bunch of public places around so-called Asheville, NC.

There’s such strength in this image, with eyes so intent on seeing and confronting hard truths, underscoring her own lyric, “I’m proud to be a troublemaker.” And yet there’s a sorrow to this image, to those eyes, that almost unwittingly makes one start replaying other lyrics of hers, tape-loop style, in one’s head: “To say what you feel is to dig your own grave.”

Others have already said this, but it hits me every time I see this outdoor “altar” to Sinéad O’Connor / Shuhada’ Sadaqat: she, like other brave feminist truth tellers and healers, should have been honored in life, not relegated to a social death during life, nor had life made so hard and repeatedly abusive that death came too early.

May her memory spark a blessed revolution.

(photo: black-and-white headshot of Sinéad facing directly at the camera, with eyes wide open and no smile on her face, pasted on a buffed-gray wall)

#ArtOfResistance
#ArtOfRemembrance
#MourningOurDead
#MendingTheWorld

Are you an anarchist artist whose rebel creations are premised on an anarcha-feminist sensibility, ethic, and/or embodied practice? And one who is queer+trans friendly!? And whose #ArtOfResistance is used on the streets, for solidarity efforts, and/or for general educating, organizing, and agitating purposes?!

I’m looking for contributions (ASAP) to an “art section” in my next edited anthology, revolving around present-day ways that folx put anarcha-feminism into practice. The book’s title is still a work-in-process, and the whole project is a labor of love, not profit (indeed, any meager royalties will be passed along to anarcha-feminist projects). One of the last pieces is this art section—made up of up to a dozen anarcha artists, each sharing one B&W image plus up to two paragraphs of “caption” alongside it.

If you want to run artwork by me, please email me at cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Deadline: by or before August 6.

(photo: sparkly sticker by @zola_mtl, as seen many moons ago on a #FuckPatriarchy walk on the stolen streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, in the times before this current pandemic.)

No matter the region, still not 🖤’ing fascists.

That said, definitely ❤️‘ing the specificity of this southern-style antifascist sticker, harking to the history that shapes the white supremacy in these parts, and thus what resistance to it has, does, and could look like.

Hey, northerners, what would your/our version of this #ArtOfResistance be? Or for that matter, easterners and westerners?

(photo: three-arrow #FuckFascism design on a circular sticker with the words “Southern antifascist anti-Confederate” on it, as seen on a sunset ramble this eve through the stolen streets of Asheville, NC)

There’s something about anarchists and animals. We anarchists love us a good animal on our #ArtOfResistance artwork.

If you want to get your fellow anarchists to “ohhh” and “ahhh” over your latest T-shirt, bookfair poster, or tote bag design, or get loads of “likes” on your latest meme, just toss a critter on there—and the cuter and more expressive, the better. Or better yet, if a certain nonhuman species is causing what Green Anarchy magazine used to call “animal uprisings”—perhaps one of the few redeeming qualities of that periodical from back in the day—then borrow their likeness for your next illustration or tattoo, and you’re sure to bring a smile to any anarchist face. Orcas, for instance, are au courant these days, and for jolly good reasons.

On a snail’s pace of a #FuckCapitalism walk today—after waiting until the “unhealthy for sensitive people” air quality index to dropped to merely “moderately” toxic to venture outdoors—I communed with chipmunks and squirrels, teenage geese, and turtles, large and small. Birds darted to and fro, as if wanting me to hear their songs up close and in stereo. And a wild bunny, with soft-looking charcoal-black fur, nibbled on bright-green grasses about six feet from my feet—after glancing up to make eye contact. People kept passing me, and even when I tried to say hello, no one replied, and most people didn’t even seem to register my presence.

Maybe that’s part of our anarchist love affair with animals. Many of them retain a far greater sociality than us humans, putting mutual aid into better practice, knowing they still need each other. And they wouldn’t so despoil their own ecosystem to the point, say, of making the air deathly dangerous.

Perhaps animals tickle our anarchist fancy so much because so many of us are both social and antisocial. We love many people but hate what certain human systems have done to this earth. We yearn for social fabrics of collective care, and busy ourselves trying to weave them, but hate how this social order rips so much apart.

(photos: stickers with, respectively, a snail and a cat hating on landlords, cops, and fascists, as seen on today’s walk on stolen Anishinaabeg lands)

When I was gifted this sticker during the hectic yet beautiful Montreal Anarchist Bookfair back in May, I had little time to think about it, much less look at it. Along with other sweet anarcha-gifts, it was tossed into pile to take home, and later, tossed into a small ziplock bag of other stickers that then, unfortunately, got lost under a pile of papers, which in turn got tossed into a box that recently traveled to the US Midwest. It was only rediscovered a couple days ago when I wanted to take an alleged #ArtOfResistance stroll and rummaged around for companions.

Audrey Hepburn? I stared back at her confident (defiant?) gaze and couldn’t understand why someone had paired her with “antifa.” Maybe, I thought, it’s a meme I missed. Or some sort of irony? Or simply that whomever crafted this design just likes Hepburn as an actress? Or maybe some antifa dude wanted a pretty female face to draw attention to the message? (Yuck!) Perhaps, to be less skeptical, they wanted to show that folks other than cis-males can be antifascist?!

It’s then that I thought to do that most modern of things: an online search (versus the old-fashioned act of going to an actual library). Keywords: “Audrey Hepburn antifascism.” And I learned something, or was reminded of something: stickers can and sometimes should make us think! They can and sometimes should serve as the #ArtOfRemembrance, honoring our chosen rebellious ancestors. They can and sometimes do both, while also putting out a much-needed stances: #ResistFascism!

What I learned, moreover, was that as a teen in the Netherlands, Audrey did her part to resist Nazism: “I [gave] underground concerts to raise money for the Dutch Resistance movement. I danced at recitals, designing the dances myself. I had a friend who played the piano and my mother made the costumes. The recitals were given in houses with windows and doors closed, and no one knew they were going on. Afterwards, money was collected and given to the Dutch Underground.”

Be like Audrey—and stick firm to solidarity (and now, some public walls and street signs).

Housing isn’t affordable anywhere. And gentrification and displacement are phenomena everywhere. At least in what’s called North America.

So this graffiti could be anywhere and everywhere.

Yet there’s something particularly heartening when tagging takes on a homespun flair and speaks with a regional vernacular. As if spray paint, in its own humble way, can conjure a sense of place, a sense of home, that can’t be commodified. That in fact, is at cross-purposes with capitalism’s homogenizing logic, where the local vernaculars of how people have built housing for their own use and of their own crafting that fit the social and ecological contexts for millennia get demolished, and in their places rise up profit-based boxes of gray and glass condos.

So this graffiti, with its down-to-earthness, slang, and misspelling, captures something of the Midwest, including the rust-belt rage over the material abandonment and climate devastation that hit here many decades ago now. Rising rents and hipster art galleries and all the other trappings of this contemporary wave of theft and dispossession have come more slowly here in the flyover land. But make no mistake, it is here too—in this place being remade into a brutal copycat of the “property is theft” that is rearing its head anywhere and everywhere.

#MakeArtMakeTrouble
#ReappropriateOurWorld
#LandBack #HousingForAll
#CommonsNotCapitalism
#ArtOfResistance

My longtime friend @spirochristoff sat down with me on a park bench this past winter, both of us bundled in coats and scarves, to chat about anarchism. It wasn’t all that cold outside. Still, it was March in Montreal—meaning there is often a long way to go before one reaches the possibility of warmth, (re)emergence, and blossoming.

Perhaps it was the perfect time for a conversation—or rather, interview for Stefan’s Free City Radio show—about trying anarchism for life, because we often have a long way to go, too, as warm-hearted rebels before the possibilities we offer up against this icy-cold social order start to (re)emerge and blossom.

Now Stefan’s labors have flowered into episode 169 of Free City Radio, recently broadcast on five stations in so-called Canada, and I’m delighted to share the link with you, if you feel so moved to listen.

https://soundcloud.com/freecityradio/169-cindy-milstein-try-anarchism-for-life

Ostensibly, the show was supposed to revolve around my latest book, #TryAnarchismForLife (@tangled_wilderness, with joyous cover design by @eff_charm using a circle A by @landonsheely). Yet one of the many things I appreciate about Stefan, who has been and remains anarchistically awesome for years, is that he curates all sorts of imaginative cultural spaces, leaping off the predictable (in this case, a straightforward book interview) to weave artful alternatives and dreamy otherworlds.

Not that this short radio chat does all that. Nonetheless, I like to think that our real-life friendship shines through and our shared commitment to not merely the #ArtOfResistance but also conversing and organizing as of social relations matter. As if promise and possibility and care matter.

One can only do that, I think, if one hangs onto prefigurative politics, which brings us full circle to my book—made up of picture-prose that look at some of the many beautiful dimensions of anarchism.

Which circles us to one of the artists, @the_sabot_cats, who sent me these two photos of their circle A framed by their adorable graffiti!

#AllCatsAreBeautiful
#TheBeautyOfOurCircles

The world is on fire today, on this 44th anniversary of the starting spark of the Stonewall rebellion. It’s hard to see that as good, though.

Yes, Paris is caught up in flames of protest, but only because police murdered yet again—this time a teenager, Nael M, during a traffic stop.

And for sure, no light can be found in the Quebec fires, further dispossessing and displacing Indigenous communities from their unceded lands, or its resultant smoke, paying no heed to borders as it freely travels across unimaginably vast swathes of the United States, Canada, and Europe with toxic air.

Never mind how Christo-fascism has only been further fueled this past year by latching onto banning abortion and implementing all sorts of genocidal machinations aimed squarely at queer and trans people.

Just trying to take a walk to stir the embers of my imagination or merely as a form of mental health/wellness—my go-to for both—is now an exercise in burning my eyes and lungs, and breathing in the rancid odor of what smells like many, many, many houses on fire.

But lest I wander completely down the path of dystopia, this Stonewall uprising day, I took a #BeGayDoCrime stroll in honor of all of those many moments—past, present, and future—when rebels danced around flames of their own self-organizing and direct actions—flames that illuminate other possible worlds with their brilliance. Per usual, the #ArtOfResistance didn’t disappoint, even if this afternoon, in the unhealthy smoky part of this planet where I was walking, it took the form of noticing a little anarchic sticker asserting “Trans resistance” with flames of its own.

And thus my heart felt just a bit warmer, a little less burned by despair.

On many a #FuckCapitalism walk (or should I say #FuckYachts walks?) through the stolen streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, I’ve chanced on small, multicolored, clearly hand-crafted stickers—some torn and others faded from long exposure to the urban elements. I’ve always been drawn to them, both for their block-print style and #ArtOfResistance (or should I say #PodsOfResistance). And I’ve no idea if they preceded the now-famous orcas who are increasingly emboldened—as we ecological anarchists like to imagine—in their direct actions in defense of the earth.

Yet when I spy one of these stickers nowadays, I delight not only in what’s right in front of me. I feel deep, pure, utter, unabashed joy in conjuring up images in my mind’s eye of all the many, many anarchic artworks being made and shared on social media of rebellious orcas rising up to #MakeTotalDestroy, as it were, luxury boats. The orca memes, in fact, haven’t yet once failed to make me smile, make me laugh, and make me proud. (It is, after all, “pride month,” with pride being a riot.)

I say “proud” not because the orcas know that I and many others appreciate their (seeming) resistance. Rather, I feel proud of us humans—or at least those of us who are taking vicarious pleasure in the orcas’ self-organizing—because we’re able to break through our own sense of despair, our own increasing sense that nothing we do can stop the tsunamis of fascism and ecocide, and via our dreamy-humorous-playful memes, swim toward possibilities side by side, metaphorically, with the whales.

If some scientist finds out that the orcas’ aren’t proactively and strategically engaging in direct action, and thereby aspiring toward social and ecological transformation, who the hell and high water cares?! We’ll still have a boatload of anarchistic illustrations that can buoy us when needed—that is, when we feel the immense heaviness of these impossible times wash over us again and our hopes start to sink anew.

For now, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to keep riding the uplifting wave, thanks to the orca black bloc!

#WaterIsLife
#OceansOfResistance
#MakingAWhaleOfADifference

So many ideas for various “picture-prose” pieces have been floating around in my head—and so many photos of the #ArtOfResistance have been filling up my phone. Yet there have been way too many “real life,” aka in-person, happenings to carve out the time-space to craft words for Mastodon—most of them sweet, even if overwhelming, like helping to co-organize this weekend’s huge #MontrealAnarchistBookfair.

So for now, I’m savoring the fact that social media isn’t lording over my “life” as much. Instead, I’m grateful for what has become so much more rare since pandemic times, and thus so much more precious: face-to-face human connections that also revolve around face-to-face anarchist connections, including friends old and new. And I hope to say hello to and swap stories with a whole lot more of you in person this weekend!

No doubt, this current moment will end. Such is the poignancy of all our anarchist time-spaces: we continually have to make and remake them, carrying memories and social relationships between them.

There will, alas, be a “downtime,” and my picture-prose pieces on social media will re-emerge—part of my own #ArtOfResilience to help get me through. To help me dream aloud when dreamy days feel further away, and mourn well and rebelliously too, since our grief is a carrier for what we love and fight for.

For now, here’s a tiny glimpse of a tiny sticker I saw outside a cooperative bar that lent its time-space to host a fundraiser the other night on the stolen lands of Tio’tia:ke for @stopcopcity. For it’s true: whether here in Montreal or amid @defendatlantaforest, the land already knows it is free. It just needs us humans, especially those who think they can play god with it, to let the land be free of colonialism and capitalism and so much else that separates us from ecological and egalitarian lives.

(Photo: Pink and blue sticker with the words “The land needs no ‘lords.’”)

Gentrification ruins everything.

Or aspires to.

Among other thefts and displacement, it steals what is formerly subversive, transforms it into edgy-hip, then sanitizes and disappears the real deal to lure in the rich who want to feel “safe,” replacing it with a tamed, sanctioned, peppy-happy-vacuous stimulation.

I keep walking past this street art on the unceded lands of Tio’tia:ke in so-called Montreal. It’s in a neighborhood called “Little Italy” that now has few Italians, and a decreasing amount of graffiti and other rebel redecorating.

It pleases me to read it’s tag—“Oh no! Graffiti!”—against the grain, or maybe with the double meaning intended by its maker, @lost.claws (with their signature image of a skull, as if themselves either grieving all that’s being destroyed here, playing with the ephemerality of everything including art, or underscoring how human systems like capitalism kill off all that’s life-giving).

The tag could be directed at those who buff walls and think they can control them, either to keep those walls whitewashed or set up some fancy city-approved mural festival to deaden the wall with pretty, apolitical pictures. Or those who just paid a pretty price for a renovated apartment nearby and now feel “violated.” (Oh no, NOT graffiti!?!) Thus it could be a “fuck you” to capitalist upscaling, and what and who it dispossesses.

I prefer to read it from another angle, because I mourn the fact that on each return to this diasporic “home” of mine, there’s palpably less and less scrappy and/or militant and/or in-your-face and/or anarchistic street art, and more and more blank walls or wheat-pasted advertisements. To me, it cries out joyfully, “Oh no! Oh yes! It’s still possible to do graffiti! Hehe!”

There are always cracks in every wall. And some paint too.

#MakeArtMakeTrouble
#ArtOfResistance

I rarely get to “catch someone in the act” when I see a rad wheat-pasted poster beautifying the landscape and thus share my appreciation in person, not just on social media.

Yet in this case, that takes on a whole new poignancy, as the city of Montreal has recently sent out notices to several anarchistic efforts to cease and desist from such activities, or get caught in legally unfriendly ways for doing this act.

Such crackdowns, or attempts at them, go hand in hand with skyrocketing rents and luxury development and all the other infrastructural trappings of gentrification—or what’s just plain-old-fashioned dispossession and displacement on these already-stolen lands. For what sticks together far more firmly than wheat paste to a wall is the blend of state and capitalism, with the not-so-secret ingredient of cops.

All the more reason that it’s wonderful to see a new anarchist event, a zine fair, in the midst of winter—creating more space for folks to gather, share subversive as well as liberatory literature, and sustain the fight, or at least the inspiration for it.

Zine Fair Anarchiste
Saturday, March 4, 2023
11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
La Ligne Verte, 2531 Ontario E
Metro Frontenac

#WheatpasteNotPolice
#ArtOfResistance
#ZineFairAnarchiste
#AnarchistZineFair

Wednesday-of-action postering as seen in a small corner of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal today in solidarity with the upcoming week-of-action gathering (March 4-11) for @stopcopcity in a big forest in Atlanta.

The particular wall pictured here has seen layers of the #ArtOfResistance related to stolen lands and stolen lives—from a powerful mural painted during @unceded_voices several summers ago to an enormous wheatpaste in defense of @yintah_access this past year to mourning and honoring Tortuguita, recently murdered-by-cops in the @defendatlantaforest struggle.

May our solidarity be thickly layered too, from those sticking side by side in the Weelaunee Forest this coming week to all those offering support, love, and collectively caring anarchic infrastructure from near and far.

Tangibly, check out @defendatlantaforest for ways to plug in and pitch in, and give generously to @atlsolfund to abidingly aid all those who the state tries to target.

#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#MayTortuguitasMemoryBeABlessing
#WeAreAllForestDefenders
#TreesAreLife

Perfect welcome sign to the city that feels most like home—and is home to an abundance of anarchists of many generations—on exiting the metro just now: “neither nationalism or statism,” or more specifically, neither Quebec nationalism/sovereignty or Canada.

#ArtOfResistance
#SolidarityNotStates

The sun came out for something like a whole 20 minutes yesterday when I was on a #FuckCapitalism walk, grouchy about, or more likely going mad from, day after day—after day—of nothing but gray and often rainy-drizzly-misty skies.

Winter in the Midwest used to involve lots of snow, which even if the sun wasn’t out, created a sparkly cheer. And when it was sunny, the combo of snow and sun was brilliantly enervating.

Now, as if the world weren’t depressing enough, capitalist-fueled climate catastrophe has to steal our vitamin D too!

At least my 20 minutes in the sun was paired with running across the perfect sticker, which brightened my day, especially just as the clouds started returning over the stolen Anishinabeeg lands.

#CapitalismIsTheDisaster
#SunshineNotStates
#ArtOfResistance

(photo of a blue-and-pink sticker with the words “system change—not climate change” and “all days for future,” with a circle A, overlaid on a photo of a rail-line blockade likely related to pipeline resistance)

Pausing for a moment of queer joy.

This world is stone-cold hard. It’s too easy to sink into that grayness. To see nothing but what paves over all we love, all we desire and yearn for.

To always feel, as the hauntingly beautiful new album from @blackoxorkestar phrases it in a song that could make a rock cry, that “there’s something missing that could make us whole.”

Queer joy makes whole. Not always, and for many, not often. Or not often enough.

Yet it never abandons the desire for that nonbinary messy beautiful wholeness, complete with cracks still visible and honored.

And when those moments come, queer joy knows how to revel in them, dance with them, share them; squeeze out every ounce of delicious, self-generated, spontaneous, otherworldly time-spaces; dream forward about more euphoric moments.

So one has to pause each time, and leave a “note to self” etched across the barren landscape. As remembrance, as fuel and fire. As shared wink to others of what’s possible. As concrete evidence that those moments aren’t mere moments. They are the connective tissue of lives worth living.

#QueerAsFuck
#BeGayDoCrime
#BeGayDoJoy
#ArtOfRemembrance
#ArtOfResistance
#TryQueerAnarchismForLife

(photo: purple circle A spray painted across a sidewalk leading into @defendatlantaforest, because #QueerNotCops, paused by in mid-October, and woven—through friendships new and older—into the queer-joy pause of the few days in Oberlin and Cleveland, thanks to too many fabulous anarchists to name here)

#writeaprisoner #acab #allcatsarebeautiful #revolution #anthro #furry #AnarchyCats #cats #illustrators #illustration #art #ArtOfResistance #anarchistart

Such a treat to get the 2023 @certaindays @beta.birdsite.live in my snail-mailbox!

It’s made all that much sweeter because I’m not only honored to have a prose piece in it, titled “Sticking Side by Side,” but my words also get to accompany the powerful “Until Every Prison is a Library” artwork by @seize.the.mean for December 2023!

And not only that, but I get to share time and calendar space with dear friends and accomplices like ZOLA street art (whose handcrafted #WetsuwetenStrong wheat paste graces the cover and the month of January), @mtilsen, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Upping the Anti, @kill.joy.land, and others!

But best of all—besides getting to savor twelve months of the #ArtOfResistance in words and images—Certain Days is far more than a *mere* calendar. It is, quite literally, about sticking side by side with political prisoners and their freedom. That is, until every prison is abolished. Certain Days raises awareness, of course, but it raises funds too—its raison d’être (reason for being).

So don’t you want to get your copy in your snail-mailbox? Or a bunch to help sell to friends and accomplices? All proceeds are, as Certain Days explains, “donated to organizations and campaigns working to abolish the prison industrial complex and support those locked inside.” The list of past recipients is long and meaningful, from @rappcampaign to @addameer_pal, from @atxabc to @the_cldc, from @tgijusticeproject to @unistoten.camp, from @prisonhealthnews to @bflobooksthrubars, and so many more.

What’s not to love about this beautiful—literally and figuratively—calendar?

For all the details on ordering, see Certain Days at your fav social media!

#UntilAllAreFree
#CareNotCages
#SolidarityIsOurBestWeapon
#Abolition