Black Eye

Black Eye was a zine out of New York, and this book offers some of the best pieces from this fiesty, piss-and-vinegar, punk-inspired series. Pieces on living your life creatively at work, fiction starring John Zerzan, journal notes on the process of a budding anarchist leaving a Trotskyist group, the taking (and taking back) of Tompkin Square Park, the significance of play, and much more. Black Eye was born pathogenic and perverse in a basement in the Lower East Side's Heart of Darkness in the 1980s. Half a dozen comrades armed with even fewer weapons (besides pens and typewriters, a few cartoons and quite a few ideas) set out to upend this rotten yuppified, spectacular world and provide first-hand reports of its demise. Initial articles ranged from paganism to the poverty of student life to the confessions of an ex-Trotskyist. Fiction and poetry complement revolutionary theory and resurgent utopianism. Eclecticism continues to be a virtue, is desired and cultivated, a political gesture itself in an era of heterogeneity. The common ingredient is liberation. Black Eye wants to corrode all your received ideas and cherished ideological assumptions. It will give you a Black Eye if it doesn't open your eyes, and it might just set you on an adventurous path of zero-work role refusal and you'll discover you're a voluntary conscript in an army of conscious egoists practicing the permanent revolution of desire. Black Eye is a proto-council of the marvelous. Contents 4 Introduction 8 Diary of an Ex-Trot by Edwin Hammer 22 Puppy & Kitty Prison by Tek Luxx 31 Out in the Park by Billy88 40 ...and into the Streets by Billy88 43 Why Did the Cops Try to Close Tompkins Square Park? by Joe Braun 46 I Am Not A Woman -or- Those Who Fulfill a Revolutionary Stereotype Make a Stereotypical Revolution (Har, Har) by Edwin Hammer 50 Finding an Enemy on a Rainy Day in Philadelphia by Edwin Hammer 52 The Organization's New Clothes by Paul Z. Simons 72 Capital and Crack by Edwin Hammer 78 Anarchism 102: Mr Thedford 83 Seven Theses On Play by Paul Z. Simons 86 Nietzsche and the Dervishes by Hakim Bey 91 Squatting as Self-Determination by Mary Shelley 98 Lock Up Your Daughters by Sasha Forte 103 Take Things From Work: The Strategy of Appearance. The Audacity of Real Life as a Tactic by ummfatik 105 The Rule of the Roles by Edwin Hammer 124 How to Think Like a Jacobin by Paul Z. Simons 135 Some Aspects of the Vietnam War by Major Bellows 144 For a Congress of Weird Religions by Hakim Bey 160 The Destruction of the UK's Mirror of Consumption by Dave W 168 The Social War No. 4 by Paul Z. Simons 178 Watsonian Anarchism by Bob Black 182 John's Adventure by Gerry Reith 185 Decadence by Major Bellows 194 Health and Disease 195 Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century 200 More Definitions 202 Gotterdammerung 206 Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll 207 Mannerism, Myth, and Legend 210 Orientalism 211 Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun 213 The Legacy 216 The American Way of Decadence 218 The Decadence of Capital 221 Decadent Modernism 225 "Long Live Decomposition" 227 Book and Gun by Paul Z. Simons 229 The French 231 The Italians 240 Lessons 251 lmmediatism by Hakim Bey 254 Death to Democracy! by Anonymous 261 Miserable Citizens!! 262 Liberal Garbage 263 Cretinization of the Masses 264 Democracy Will Steal Your Furniture 268 The Global Democracy Swindle! 269 The Workers' Democracy Swindle 271 "The Negation of Democracy" 273 PUBLISHED BY ARAGORN MOSER LAYOUT BY LEONA BENTON PRINTED AT "THE COMPOUND": 1818 CARLETON ST. BERKELEY,CA 94703-1908 PUBLISHED BY ARAGORN MOSER,LAYOUT BY LEONA BENTON,PRINTED AT "THE COMPOUND":,1818 CARLETON ST. BERKELEY,CA 94703-1908