Max "Bunny" Sparber

THIS LAST WEEK HAS BEEN FUCKED UP. The pressure to stop writing broadsheets has increased. It shouldn't matter to me, as I will no longer work with the anarchists that have responded badly. Still, I can't help but be disappointed.

I moved in with the alternateens. This looks like it is going to be trouble, because most of the kids in the house decided spontaneously to move out. This leaves the one remaining alternateen and myself with a massive rent and needing to find new roommates.

When I went to the skinhead house to get my stuff, I found I was locked out. I explained that this is illegal and I would call the police, but I was not let in. I called the cops, and they hassled me a little bit, but ultimately explained to M that she was breaking the law and I could sue her. I said that I didn't want to sue her, I just wanted my stuff back. My reputation was already suffering in the anarchist community, and I am sure that because M is their friend, they will side with the landlord against the rights of the tenant.

KF, who is one of the main characters in the local anarchist scene, and his sister went to the Emma Center general meeting on Monday to demand the following: that the Emma Center stop producing Digger Broadsheets; the current broadsheets be taken down; and that the authors of the broadsheets be expelled from the collective. The audacity and hypocrisy of this move defies language. I do not care to write about it now; my anger is spent.

I had a marvelous day with KA today. She has been having some familial troubles, so she has been as depressed as me. She told me that when we dated, back when she was 17 and I was 18, she intended that I would be the one to whom she would lose her virginity. This never happened, because I stupidly let a large period of time go without talking to her, and by the time I saw her again it seemed too late to save the relationship. I told her this, and she seemed surprised. I also told her that I was then a virgin, and would have liked to lose my virginity to her.

This talk made her nervous as hell. She was driving and made several wrong turns, went the wrong way on one-way streets, etc. I also found out that when we first saw each other a couple months ago, she was dating a guy who she now doesn't see. Later, we sat together on my sofa and talked, and we touched quite a lot. I am elated.

JS and I have decided to form a new collective, which we are calling the Media Active Collective, or MAC. Our first project will be a zine, which we have already been working on, called, simply, Media Active. The focus of the zine will be threefold. 1. Suppressed information; 2. Hijacking currently existing media forms; 3. Creating alternatives. This is all summed up in the zine's motto: Free the media, seize the media, be the media.

This coming Monday, we will be interviewing Ramona Africa, the only adult survivor of the 1985 bombing of the MOVE compound by the Philadelphia police. She is speaking on behalf of Mumia Abu Jamal, an African-American journalist on death row in Philadelphia who is accused of killing a cop.

I HAD an unusual dream last night. I think it might have been influenced by composer Eric Satie, although I know almost nothing about the man's biography. The dream was about a man who has just returned home from college, which he has left without completing his education. The time is either the end of the last century or the beginning of this one. The man comes from an extremely wealthy family -- so wealthy that they had purchased a house at the university for the man to live with, which he shared with his brother. It is clear that the man became disenchanted with his education, as he had spent the last several months practicing abstract and tuneless noises on the piano. Now home in a mansion in New York, he tries to explain his infatuation with the piano. Through the creation of these abstract musical figures, he is able to construct complex patterns in his mind, which he manipulates by alternating or modifying the musical figure. His girlfriend believes he is worthless now, and she storms out, saying "Never have a heard someone speak so meaningfully of their ignorance!" She has studied piano her entire life, and his atonal noises just seem like nonsense to her.

I actually found his music quite pleasing, but it was easy for me to see that people of his time would not appreciate the complex pattern of chords he was building. Perhaps this was also inspired by Charles Ives?

It is clear in the dream that the man's relationship with his family has soured. Without education, they find him worthless and he is openly contemptuous of their lives. During an argument with his grandmother, she leaves saying that she will not subject herself to this insolence. He responds that what she today condemns as insolence she will one day welcome as honesty.

He flees to an airport or train station. A large caravan of gentlemen, traveling with an Asian woman, are here. They have a room to themselves and are engaged in yogic exercises. He asks if he may participate, and then travel with them.

I woke up at this point, but was excited enough by the vividness and complexity of what I had dreamed to complete the story in my head. He travels the Orient briefly and then turns to Paris. The burgeoning jazz scene there maintain a respectful distance. They are able to see in his piano playing an enormous originality, but the ragtime they play is rigorously structured. He moves again, traveling Europe, and becomes caught up in the Dada scene. The story ends happily, with him playing piano at the Cabaret Voltaire.

In other news, to my great relief, a group of three young people I call the Alternateens have asked me to move in with them. I will do so at the end of the month or the beginning of April.

I spoke to my friend MM today for the first time in just under a year. Now I feel terrible about not talking sooner, but I did not have her number. We talked for several hours. All my sense of despair and betrayal came out, to her horror.

I also spoke with KA. We will be getting together next week.

KA HAS BEEN DISTANT. I am not sure if this is because she is not interested in oursuing a relationship with me, or because she is a little flaky, or because she is a woman who requires considerable pursuing. I am still attracted to her, and, if I have the energy, I will continue to pursue her.

I have decided to move sometime in the near future. This winter has been a particularly depressing one for me. I have almost no energy, I have not written anything, I canceled the two musical performances I was scheduled to play. I suspect it is, in part, seasonal depressing, but I think it also comes from an enormous sense of disappointment. I find myself constantly chasing after the things that promise liberation, and anarchism held the greatest promise. But, in its local form, anarchism closely resembled the cliquishness and tyranny of high school. Criticisms are met with defensiveness, while critics are ostracized and (sometimes) beaten. SD was threatened with physical violence by his roommate for writing broadsheets. The roommate had mistakenly (and immodestly) thought he was being referred to when SD wrote that he had tried to make friends with the "handsome and witty" activists. As a result of this threatened attack, SD will not be writing any more broadsheets. We continue to receive phone calls asking us about the authorship of the broadsheets. Their lack of respect for anonymity is positively stunning.

I am also having terrible trouble with my living accommodations, as I live in a house near Powderhorn park owned by a very immature young woman named MA, who happens to be an anarchist as well, and also, disconcertingly, has a very large and violent group of skinhead friends. The house is, and has been since I moved in, legally uninhabitable, but I had little choice about where to live after JM threw me out. Between the filth that MA leaves on the floor, dishes in the sink, dogshit and piss everywhere, and dangerous conditions elsewhere in the house (inadequate lighting in the stairwells, a half-collapsed garage in back, I have not been willing to pay rent for about a month. I am astonished that once again self-described anarchists are treating me worse than the law would allow (and the law is notoriously unsympathetic to renters rights). As a result of my rent strike, I have received an eviction notice.

I do not know where I will go, but I have found a certain freedom. Because of my college education, I isn't hard for me to get jobs. I can live for extended periods with almost no money. I can go anywhere and live with as good, or better, a quality of life as I have in Minneapolis. So why stay? As much as I love Minneapolis, I feel it has, in some way, played itself out for me. I have a terrible sense that the next six months of my life might be a replay of the last six, and I desperately do not want that.