The BAD PODCAST – Antifa as Revolutionary Nonconformity in Dance, Theater, and Respect for Unhoused Neighbors

(lightly edited for readability – beware the sarcasm and the lost tone of a transcript that was auto generated)

Aly
Hey. Hey. Howdy. Hey, lovers to haters. But especially the lovers. I'm Aly.

Jim
Ca-cawww-awww-awwww

And I'm Jim.

Aly
And we are Bozeman Antifa Dance (& Theatre Collective).

Jim
I'm gonna let you say it. That's right. And we're here doing one of our projects, the BAD Podcast.

Aly
We have several projects, but this is this is one of them.

Jim
This is one of them. Thanks all of you who listen ... all four or five.

Aly
More people than that? Yeah, but thanks for stopping in. Umm, I have had a pretty crummy weekend with a stomach thing that happened. I, like, poisoned myself with a quesadilla that I made.

Jim
Nobody cares, Aly! I think I gave her a virus, actually.

Aly
No, I don't think you gave me a virus ‘cause I have weird stomach stuff that happens like this from time to time. But I couldn't go to a punk show yesterday, and I, like, couldn't function through the night because I have a weird thing where I can't throw up. So it takes me double the amount of time that all you people who can vomit. It takes, like, double the amount of time for me to get over a stomach thing.

Jim
Yeah. I mean, we're gonna ...

Aly
I was tortured.

Jim
Yeah, you are going to dispel the rumor that instead you had a one-night-stand with your ex.

Aly
Oh, that would be because Ethan did visit this weekend briefly. Maybe, the neighbors are, like, wondering about that. I sometimes think the neighbors, like, gossip about me.

Jim
Because there's always a different man going into your apartment.

Aly
And because, like, I'm seeing dancing in my apartment, and I chat with the neighbors who the other neighbors don't find to be very good people. You know, yeah, I love being the center of scandal. But anyway, even though that was uncomfortable and not a great time... still always realizing my privilege.

Jim
And how are you feeling right now?

Aly
I'm feeling okay, you know, I had some food today. The stomach, like, is a little tentative. If I had more food, I think I would be uncomfortable right now, but I'm good.

Jim
Stomach’s good, yeah.

Aly
How are you feeling emotionally?

Jim
I'm emotionally just fine. I had an improv workshop this morning for three hours about long scene improv, although we didn't actually do any long scenes.

Aly
And was that deeply moving to you?

Jim
No, it wasn't deeply. The lesson from it was specificity. So maybe I'm not being specific enough in my description of this workshop, but it's not really what we're here to talk about.

Aly
Yeah, you maybe don't need to do that because that would be kind of boring.

Jim
It would be a tangent.

Aly
Which we’ll get on many so... where we want to start specifically is with our dance, which, if you've looked at our Instagram, if you've heard any other podcast, it's Bozeman Antifa.

Jim
Where is our Instagram?

Aly
That's just it.

Jim
@bozemanantifa

Aly
Yeah, @bozemanantifa, and our website is bozemanantifadance.org. But if you have seen anything related to us or talk to us, you know that we dance.

Jim
You got it.

Aly
But you can see what we do at a surface level of what it objectively is. Or you can talk with us and listen to us discuss, I would say, the political meaning of our dance because it is political to me.

Jim
So yeah, let's break this down. So we call ourselves...

Aly
Break it down. What, what, what?

Jim
We call ourselves, cutely, BAD, but Bozeman Antifa Dance, and we'll leave the Theatre Collective piece for later in the episode.

Aly
Stay tuned.

Jim
But we use the shocking word “Antifa,” and I think that's what gets people's attention, and we juxtapose it with the word “dance.” Typically, when people think of Antifa, they think of punk anti-racist kids who go after fascism and fight other punk, fascist, racist kids and stand up against fascism in a very direct way, you know, often confrontational or outing fascists or taking down their literature or letting people know that there are fascists around and that we're going to stand up against that.

Aly
Right.

Jim
But we say Bozeman Antifa Dance. What does that mean?

Aly
It's a play on expectations, for sure. So yeah, I would say that also there is some overlap. We also do some of the things that those punk kids do, like we do confront fascism. We do challenge people's ideas, we are anti-racist. We talk about privilege. We have conversations with people in our community about these issues both in a bit of a more assertive way as well as a more passive one. That we do this through, I would say, embodying our ideals physically in how we express and in how we move...

And I heard a really great thing the other day from some professor who had moved to the US from living in Europe, and she was saying I can tell that we're in an unfree society in the US because when you walk around, particularly as an outsider from somewhere else, you can tell that there is an unspoken set of rules of how people are supposed to behave here. And if you don't behave in that way, you will be looked down upon. You will be socially ousted, you know, talking about homelessness, talking about, you know, being too loud, talking about moving in a certain way, wearing something that denotes that you're poor rather than affluent. People will create notions about you, and you might be considered to be less safe, a problem, not be able to get a job as easily, and feed your family - all these things. So because there is this unconscious social order that we find ourselves in, that we have to follow, you cannot say that we are free. And so to me, a very logical response to that is to behave as if we are free in a free society - how we would want that to look like while realizing that that is very much not what we are living in. So in a world where you need to just walk down the street to your nine to five, maybe get a coffee first, but it shouldn't take too long. Da da da da typing on my thing outside of a coffee shop. Gotta go to eat. Gotta go get a beer after work. Have surface level conversation. Go home, sit on the couch. Do it all over again. I am seeing someone dancing on the very street where you were just going about your life and.... a droning monotony ... is like, what the fuck is that? Maybe, I'm in the matrix. That's weird.

Jim
I think what you just said was all really beautiful and really eloquent. I'm going to break it down.

Aly
I probably didn't exactly answer the question, but...

Jim
No, I think you do answer the question. No, I I'm just going to bring a different angle or drill even deeper into...

Aly
That's what you can do.

Jim
What I think what that description gets at is a sort of conformist society that we associate with fascism. However, of course, in the strict sense, people might mean fascism relates to Neo Nazis and people who are outspoken, racist people who are outspoken nationalists trying to project a certain view of authoritarian Americans.

Aly
And a lot of those people are people walking to their jobs, getting coffees who are in your neighborhood. As we have seen on nextdoor in Bozeman, we have fascists walking amongst us doing these conformist things.

Jim
Yeah, so that wasn't quite where I was going to go with it, but yeah.

Aly
I'm just adding on to that it's like they’re just like...

Jim
That's right.

Aly
…these people that you recognize as fascists. They seem like normal people.

Jim
What I'm getting at is, though, the idea that this sort of conformity where in certain cases it comes out in the form that we all recognize as fascism, but it all tends in that direction. So if we are unfree because we aren't moving in our bodies, if we are in a society where we're afraid to speak out ... we're afraid to move in certain ways where we feel like there is only a particular way that we can conform and where we don't feel safe or like we can move or express ourselves in different ways, then maybe it's not fascist in the most overt possible way that we think of as fascism and all agree as dangerous. But it's still trending in that direction, and it's creating the conditions for us all. It actually makes it safe in many ways for the type of fascism we all hate, right? And there's far less than that's also abominable in our society. One doesn't have to be screaming for Hitler's name to still be living a life that's not as free as it could be and is also repressing people from that kind of expression. So if you don't want to use the word fascism because that's a strong word, I would want to...

Aly
Fuck you. Yeah.

Jim
…to use that word because it's still part of the same thing that gave rise to the worst forms of fascism and is worth resisting. And if we can, if we can radically rearrange how we move through our world and make it safe for expression to actually be that expression, then we are changing the bodily habits that tie people down into very narrow ways of thinking - one of those roads leading to the word that we typically associate with fascism. So to be Antifa, anti-fascist, does for me mean to go to a much broader, deeper place than simply confronting racists, which, as you said, we will confront racists. We will do all those traditional things, but we also believe that that if we just do it in a particular way - if there's only one way to be anti-fascist – well, that seems like a like a pretty fucking fascist way to say for one to have to be anti-fascist by following a certain path.

Aly
Absolutely. I think it's a big illusion in activist circles that, you know, there are only a few tactics that “work,” quote UN quote. You know, there are endless creative conclusions we could come to if we sit down and try to talk about what we feel called to do … what we maybe yearn to do but don't even have quite the words for it. I feel like we're in a continuous unraveling of the concepts of activism and how we want to continue doing it in this way that is not restrictive, that is not conformist, and that isn't typical. And how amazing would it be if more and more people started getting together thinking about what they felt called to do and then taking steps to do it. Even if there's somebody you know on one side of town doing something that looks nothing like what we're doing on the other side of town, but people see multiple things happening in a town that - we just described in the car right here - seems like Pleasantville. We're in a town that is masquerading as perfection - because of how much affluence there is here - that is masking probably the suffering and pain of the affluent who are not communicating to each other and being intimate ... as well as the poor who get forgotten about, discarded, and actively abused. So there needs to be more fucking happening. We're not a city like New York where people are out doing their own thing all the time and where they feel empowered to do that. You know, it’s because of the place that we're in. People find us shocking on the street. We still get glares. We still get people mocking us. But if you mock us while we're dancing, we'll say, hey, we got you to dance. Anyway, even if you're pretending to get down like us and you think you're being funny to your friends, you're dancing. We made you change up your habitual little walk.

Jim
Right. We are, like you said earlier, playing against certain expectations; so people expect Antifa to be people who are, first of all, not a group because Antifa technically isn't a group, right?

Aly
Like they do expect it to be a group, but they don't.

Jim
So there is a right-wing conspiracy that Antifa is coming to your town.

Aly
A black shirt and mob that's gonna smash all your windows in tomorrow.

Jim
That's going to smash. Right. And believes in violence and is funded by certain wealthy liberals. We are playing on those fears. We're playing on the expectation of a certain form of Antifa, and we're playing against that in a sort of somewhat humorous way. It's probably not humorous to... “Oh, yeah, you dance, so funny” ... but funny in the sense that...

Aly
Right.

Jim
…that's not what you're expecting. You're not expecting a middle-aged man and a young woman to come in brightly dressed and be performing anti-fascism as a sort of radical art theater dance concept in the streets. But I don't think that there is any difference between what we're doing and someone who is actively confronting the racist in the street. Because we're dealing with the same ethos, the same thing that brings us all into this radical disempowerment and this radical conformity that we have in our society.

Aly
Right. It's just looking at it from a different direction, from a different vantage point, I think.

Jim
And a more interesting one and a less boring one, and one that's not like if you're going to fight fascism, if you're going to fight radical conformity in the society, isn't the worst way to do it to look like you're another form of radical conformity?

Aly
Also, conforming.

Jim
If someone who hates the idea that there are Antifa in their town, in their lovely Pleasantville town that you described of Bozeman, shouldn't we be our own form of beautiful, our own form of weirdly pleasant, our own form of something shockingly different? And maybe it's not that shocking, but it's still different and interesting and fun.

Aly
Yeah. And we keep coming to the conclusion that we absolutely should, but I think the reason that more people don't question, maybe, the organization that they're in or how they're doing things or have judgment towards us and what we do if they do, I've perceived some possible judgment - but can't confirm it - is because it actually feels really vulnerable and scary to do something in a smaller group publicly. Like, there is obviously safety in numbers. If you're doing something that's risky, not that the organizations are doing anything risky, but there's also, once again, more social support to do an action within a group, so you may feel like this is more effective because you're doing it in a larger organization versus, you know, people can obviously look at two people on a street and say, “Well, that's not going to change anything because it's just two people” … meanwhile ignoring that the larger organization is also most likely not going to be able to do anything in that sense in terms of being able to affect the system from within the system - because any changes using the state to create a change is not going to be lasting. Change is not going to go to the heart of it. And we know that we alone cannot change the world, right? So in that way, everything is ineffective. But people do value ... because we've been taught to value this change happening in an organization that's recognized as a 401C, whatever or something like that. Because that seems like, “Oh yeah, I should put my trust in that.” Oh yeah, you know, it just seems more valid even though when you actually look at, it may not be. And who is deciding what is and isn't valid for us?

Jim
Okay, so that's the one side. So mainstream society may look at us and say, “Hey, you guys aren't being effective because you guys aren't organized and you're not making any changes in the system. You're just cutely out there performing. And that's cute and all. And it makes us smile, but that's all it does.” Then there's the other side, right, the activist side, who might say, “No, I get it. You guys are doing your own thing, but I wouldn't call that direct action. You're not doing anything to ... like you're not blocking a railroad, you're not doing what we consider direct action – like, making an economic harm to the system.“ So there's the radical critique too, right? You could come in from the left and say, “Hey, wait a second, you guys are definitely free to organize the way you're doing. I see the effectiveness of that. But you guys are generally being silly and actually just entertainers for the capitalists and probably propping up capitalism through your actions.” How would you respond?

Aly
I would say that the feeling of having children dance with us and people, you know, move by us and actually be excited by what we're doing as well as shouting “Go get a job” and something about being homeless - you know, all of these reactions that people have in response to us - I viscerally feel. And from an art perspective, I've always said that art does its job if it made you feel anything. And from someone who has felt numb in my life and sees so many people generally feeling numb and apathetic about their reality even while working in an organization, I see a lot of people ... feeling apathetic. I say that the strong feelings that are both brought up in us and with others that we are with are showing that there is an effect happening. It may not be a city-wide effect that people glamorize and want, but I have moved my scope both in art and in activism to only be looking to really affect myself and one other… then with, you know, the other possible cherry on top of affecting more people than that. But as long as I am doing something that I myself am so moved by and one other person being you or one other person who sees it, then that's all I needed to do. That is deeply meaningful to me as a person who used to be numb and used to think there was nothing for me in life besides getting married and having a baby and shutting the fuck up. So because I prevented conformity for myself and I see how freeing that is and how that makes me more likely to participate in radical actions of all kinds, I'm open to radical actions of all kinds. If I'm in a trusting affinity group, then I know that other people may also be at that precipice where they too are feeling numb and disempowered ... but they could take a step into deep and radical empowerment. And don't we want to live in a society where all of the people feel empowered from a deep, soulful place? Wouldn't that create the conditions in which we could cause so much more social change from a grassroots perspective?

Jim
I'm hearing two really, I think, really deep trains of thought going through you. One is this idea that you raised of being able to affect one other person, and the critique is you're only affecting one other person. Like would it be more effective if we affected more than one other person? I'm going to go for a little bit on this.

Aly
Go for a little bit. I feel like I went on a rant there; so you can extrapolate and add some.

Jim
So I want to actually get out my point of view without me, you know, feeling like you have to get into a defensive place because I'm actually agreeing with you completely. So for me, there's a conformity that we're fighting against in our society that says, “Hey, to be successful, you must make the maximum impact with your life. You must affect the most people and create the most change to be a great activist.” You have to do all of these things. I would argue that's a capitalist fascistic principle that's being put on us. So when you say you your goal is to only affect one other person, maybe two other people, not much further from your range of being, and that's like to the critic “Whoa, you're just basically admitting my point. You aren't very effective.” And we're saying, hey, actually, no, we are radically changing what the meaning is of being effective when society went and alienated us and said we had to act on behalf of every abstract person that's out there and affect them and affect the maximum - and thus become like saviors and Superman.

Aly
And impersonal.

Jim
Superman, right? That's the language of fascism. Then we haven't succeeded. So one, that's a critique of that. The second thing I heard you say was a deep analysis of what it is to be somewhat of an activist - the sense that we are tightly confined. So in my example I said, hey, you could have stopped a train and stopped the economic functioning of capitalism much more directly, and that's true, direct action. Go block trains if that's what you're called to do. I totally applaud and support you if you can stop the economic functioning of capitalism. But if that's our whole range of action, if that's all it is to be in our society, to be political beings, to be economic beings...

Aly
Aye, Lieutenant.

Jim
We are not fully who we are, none of us. I don't wake up in the morning and say to myself first thing, how much money do I have and how much power do I wield? Like, I don't wake up and say wow, I've got more power than this person and less power than this person, and I've got more money than this person. And I'm not thinking in those terms. I'm thinking, what do I want to do today? What would be fun? Who do I want to connect with? What do I have to get through? And yes, then money becomes part of it. And what I can and can't do in society becomes part of it, but they’re only aspects of who I am as a person. So when we're dancing, we're breaking free from that mold of what activism has to be. We are completely fucked in many ways - economically, politically, but also in our bodies, in our expression, in our sense of self and our connections with each other. And if we are not taking action to break those, too, then we are also missing a piece. So we can easily go to the person blocking a train and say, did you dance today? And that would not be fair because they're doing that action that their consciousness is driving them to do, and we're doing actions that are consciously driving us. And actually we don't just dance, right? We actually are full humans, and we are doing activism. I mean, I've done a shitload of activism in my life of great variety, and we on our website don't just do dance and theater. We’re going to talk about it later, but we care about a great deal. We've. done cop watches together. We do stuff.

Aly
Yeah, I have radical conversations about these things at my work and in my neighborhood and am trying to talk…

Jim
We're not here to congratulate ourselves, but...

Aly
…to more and more people about radical issues, even though that's an edge for me. I'm an introvert. I don't love talking to strangers, but I'm having pretty positive interactions from that.

Jim
And let's face it, 150 years of anarchism - last episode you can listen to two hours of talk about a lot of that stuff.

Aly
I thought it was great, but I'm buying it.

Jim
The Nielsen numbers don't agree.

Aly
Okay, we got more than one other person to listen to it. So we're good.

Jim
We definitely did. 150 years of anarchism, and it can't just be economics and social power relationships. There has to be something else that we're missing, and that's what's drawing me. That was definitely true in my own life ... is that my body was tight. I was saying beautiful things - revolution and togetherness and love and resistance - but my body was in resistance to itself, you know, and opening up and freeing. And we're going to get probably talk to some of this with theater - but I've been reading, you know, some about some activists who embrace surrealism and...

Aly
Yes, I was about to bring that up.

Jim
…and how surrealism was originally seen. I mean, it was probably somewhat Marxist but was seen as an art form - not just because it was cool and different and weird and dreamy, but it was meant to open the individual to social revolution.

Aly
Right, art movements have coincided and worked together with the political revolutions of the time.

Jim
Political social revolution. But it was not meant to just be a supplement to it but was supposed to open up the individual so that that could happen.

Aly
Right, it was its own feeling with its own experience … yeah.

Jim
Right, not just in support of… . In fact, the art had nothing to do with social revolution. It could be a melting clock like Dali, right? That's the example everyone knows about. It seemed to have nothing to do with it, but the very acts...

Aly
To me it feels like it does, yeah, because we're so obsessed with clock time. And that's something that props up capitalism so much.

Jim
And then Dali left the movement and got in bed with fascists.

Aly
Sometimes happens, you know. They've got nice beds.

Jim
Yeah, we can talk about the ins and outs of surrealism, but it the idea is that there are things that we are trained to conform to, and we aren't free. It's kind of what you were saying right at the beginning so eloquently.

Aly
Thank you. I am trying to be eloquent.

Jim
Did they hear...

Aly
Probably not.

Jim
...hear you

Aly
Probably not, probably not. These are the voices in my head that Jim is enacting.

Jim
I think we forget that we're having, like, a conversation to other people sometimes. Like, we get really engrossed in the...

Aly
I don't forget it. I've been thinking. “Oh my God, this is so good. I'm so glad other people are hearing me.”

Jim
Who are you talking to?

Aly
I'm talking to the collective unconscious.

Jim
The collective unconscious. Hello. What's his name?

Aly
His name?

Jim
It's him. This guy. That's what came to me. It can sometimes be a him.

Aly
His name is Tom.

Jim
I don't know Tom at all. Shoemaker. Unconscious. Happens to be male. Sorry.

Aly
Tom the shoemaker. Jim has decided that, and we're being oh...

Jim
No, I channeled that.

Aly
Okay. And I can't argue with you channeling something because that is...

Jim
No, I can't even argue with it.

Aly
It's the truth. It's the truth, guys. That and karma are just ... you can't argue against them, but that leads us into our next topic.

Jim
That's right. What saint should I be thanking here?

Aly
Oh, Archangel Michael for sure.

Jim
Archangel Michael.

Aly
My parents were not called. All these things, they're relevant to my life, but so....

Jim
Okay. No, we're not going into that...

Aly
We're not going into it, okay.

Jim
...thing I had because we talked about surrealism. I...

Aly
You want more? Okay. Oh, we should go into....

Jim
I have a creative exercise for you.

Aly
Okay, we're mixing...

Jim
So I have a piece of paper and a pen for you, and I gave you a book so you can write on.

Aly
...it up. Do I need to keep it on this place?

Jim
No, you can put it wherever you want.

Aly
Or going to go up my vagina.

Jim
And surrealism did not start as melting clocks or art. It started as essentially automatic writing.

Aly
Love it.

Jim
And I want you to take just a moment to do some automatic writing while I talk about this. Okay? And you can tell me when you're ready, and then we can...

Aly
Okay.

Jim
...read it. Does that sound good? Should I set a time limit? You're big on time limits. You have a minute, okay?

Aly
Sounds good.

Jim
All right. Andre Breton was a Frenchman who died in the 60s, but he was big in the Dada movement and in surrealism. … But Andre Breton, a lot of people have heard of automatic writing, and automatic writing is basically a process of just writing whatever comes to your mind automatically, even if it makes absolutely no sense. And in fact that's probably preferable. And the idea is it sort of frees your frees your mind, and what comes out is of secondary importance but could be quite interesting or weird - maybe not always clever and maybe not make any sense whatsoever. And Breton said it really doesn't matter. That's secondary. What really is important is the freedom of process. And we see that in our dance. That's how we conceive of our dancing. We're dancing to be free. We don't have set moves. We go with how we feel. That's what ecstatic dance essentially is. And maybe you've done mandala art. That's a kind of art where you're just encouraged to put your feelings out on paper spontaneously. So it's a spontaneous exercise that draws us out and breaks the pattern. And that's what we're talking about in this episode, and that's probably been about a minute. So I will leave you to read what you came up with.

Aly
Wonderful banging pots and pans over the broken balcony. Purple. Purple. All I see is purple. Yesterday was all green, but the people revolted against green. A bird soars past the dog in my stomach. Barks. Love is a ripe and dripping orange. There are no clocks. 1-3-8.

Jim
So I hope you enjoyed that. Some things kind of made sense. We don't judge it. We just say that's what came out. Sometimes when I dance, I do some beautiful tap dance moves, or I'll start swing dancing, or I'll do things that I've been taught because that comes out of my consciousness. Right?

Aly
No judgement, yes. People will tell me all the time, “Well, it's easy for you to dance on the street, Aly, because you're a good dancer.” And I'm like, “Thank you for the compliment, but no, no, no. Just because some of the movements I do incidentally look good because they fit your perception of what good dancing is does not mean that I'm a good dancer. I am simply moving.” And for every movement that I have that is like, palatable and pleasing to the eye, there is an equal move that is very weird and not palatable and doesn't work with the music and all these things. So the body is just being the vessel for this creativity that we kind of talked about coming from another place, sort of a collective unconscious of its own … but us being channels for not like a deity but for whatever the fuck, for creative powers that we can...

Jim
1-3-8.

Aly
...feel. And, like, if you are a writer, you may relate to the experience of sitting down to write and having a plot in your head but finding that the characters actually seem to want to go on a different plot than what you had written. And it's like, okay, do I stick to the plot that I had planned to write that I had in my outline or do I see where these people actually want to go and where I feel like their actions would actually lead them, you know?

Jim
Gray specks of mud follow us wherever the pigeons drop. And what's next?

Aly
I guess we could go into the housing situation in Bozeman or, rather, the urban housing situation.

Jim
Yeah, we can talk about that.

Aly
Were you wanting to talk about art? And then go to....

Jim
No, no, we were talking about doing the sandwich of serious issue.... they're all serious issues.

Aly
They're all ... we take our dancing seriously and also not seriously.

Jim
Yeah, we can talk about that. I was just thinking how it's too bad on a podcast where you can't dance. So we're trying to make our words dance. We're trying to be clear, and we're trying to do all these things. And there is a really interesting kind of limiting aspect to the medium that I just wish to break out of, you know, a little bit. But it is what it fucking is, and we will do our best by just being ourselves.

Aly
We will dance within the confines...

Jim
Within the boundaries that the podcast Man gave us. He's also a man.

Aly
Yeah, maybe it's still Tom. Maybe, Tom's controlling everything.

Jim
Like Myspace; wasn't he that guy on Myspace. Tom?

Aly
I have no idea.

Jim
Oh yeah, he was your friend. You always had a friend.

Aly
Oh well, I had a Thom.

Jim
You still have a friend named Thom.

Aly
Yeah

Jim
I don't think it's the same Tom from Myspace. When you join Myspace, like this is before Facebook, there was this always this guy Tom, who was immediately on your friends list.

Aly
Okay. Oh, that's funny that they did that.

Jim
He was. Yeah, I think he was like maybe the Myspace founder or something.

Aly
I had a Myspace briefly, but....

Jim
You always were friends with Tom. I don't even know if they use the word “Friends.” But yeah, Tom is your friend, the collective unconscious. And what else? What did he do? Does he do?

Aly
He repairs shoes.

Jim
Shoe repairman. Okay.

Aly
Yeah, so urban...

Jim
Urban camping in Bozeman.

Aly
It's a hot button topic right now because people think that they're better than other people for simply having housing in the formal sense.

Jim
Yes, like in a lot of places, there are large numbers of people who don't live in - Bozeman's no exception… Bozeman might have ... I have no idea whether we have more or less than other places … but we do know that there are more people who don't have homes than there is shelter for them at the Warming Center here in Bozeman.

Aly
Yes, which is pretty much the only resource for the unhoused.

Jim
So one resource. But of course, that assumes that every unhoused person wants to be stuffed in the Warming Center.

Aly
Which is something that white saviorism tries to do is make assumptions on behalf of people that they don't know and thinking that they have the knowledge and the appropriate ability to do so.

Jim
Yeah. And right now, there's a bill... an ordinance, a proposed ordinance...

Aly
But they're trying to make it into a bill.

Jim
Well, bill is like Congress. It's a proposed ordinance in the city. We don't have a City Council. We have a City Commission here.

Aly
Yeah, I guess that's true.

Jim
And they make all the decisions for the city. And the city staff I believe came up with a plan to limit urban camping - people who live in trailers or their vans, vehicles, or it could be tents around some of the ponds around town - to try to limit and restrict the camping. They can't outright make it illegal because there's a court ruling in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that says if you don't have enough shelter then you can't criminalize people for sleeping in their vehicles or sleeping in tents.

Aly
But they're going to make it so fucking hard for you to do so that you just feel ashamed to be here and might go somewhere else if you have the ability to.

Jim
So there is an ordinance proposed that would limit the amount of time you could stay to five days, set up all sorts of restrictions on sanitation and other matters for what you could do in that space. And it only applies if there is enough room in the in the Warming Center. If there is enough room, then that's where you should be going. So this only applies to people who are considered ... what is the adjective they use? It's in my essay.

Aly
Go read the essay. We don't fucking know.

Jim
Bozemanantifadance.org … people who are involuntarily homeless. So...

Aly
Right. Which in itself is absurd to label these things.

Jim
So a distinction has been made between... they don't define voluntarily homeless … but an involuntarily homeless person is a person who cannot find shelter or who cannot get, like, emergency shelter, aka our Warming Center, which is our only our only homeless shelter and...

Aly
And I will add a quick personal anecdote here and say that I volunteered once at the Warming Center. Our friend Lilly works there full-time and has a lot more experience.

Jim
Former guest.

Aly
Yes. And just from volunteering there one night I was stressed from not even being in the position to meet their resources. Like, that place is crowded. They have whatever random food is able to be gifted to them from grocery stores that week, which mostly means pretty bad pastries and, like, dried quinoa or something that they can't even cook there because there's no way to cook. And there are a lot of people in distress and a lot of people who need to have certain kinds of conversations with people. But other people don't have space for it emotionally, either the workers or other guests. So it's a very hectic, stressful place, and I thought well, you know, I have mental health issues. If I found myself in a situation where I didn't have housing and I wasn't able to stay with friends or family, I wouldn't necessarily feel good about going to the Warming Center because it could potentially make me spiral just from the sheer amount of people in my space alone, and from the fact that everyone there is having a very particular personal experience like. It's a lot so I can see why people would be like, hey, I want time to myself. I want quiet. All of these things that we, you know, take for granted if we have spaces to be quiet and be alone in.

Jim
Right. Which isn't to say that the people there aren't good people or aren't providing a service for people who want it and need it.

Aly
Absolutely not. No, none of that was to say negatively...

Jim
It's just that…

Aly
But they can't do everything.

Jim
Right. And for the purposes of this discussion, it means that because that exists under the proposed ordinance, there are now considered two classes of people, those who can get shelter at the Warming Center and those who can't. And if you can, none of these rules apply to you because you have shelter. So this is for the people who can't get shelter any other way. So you've got a rising number of people. Then you have this growing animosity in the town of this growing population of people.

Aly
Ooh, it's growing.

Jim
Things happened. One of the urban campers has been arrested for allegedly raping a 14-year-old girl, which, of course, is very upsetting.

Aly
But how many men in houses are going around raping girls every day?

Jim
Right. So what happens is we talk about a population of homeless - we call them “the homeless” - and we notice amongst this group of people, we've generalized as “the homeless”…

Aly
And who we've alienated from ourselves just in wording.

Jim
…that some of them don't have jobs. Some of them are drug users, some of them are mentally ill, some of them could have jobs but don't have jobs,...

Aly
The most egregious thing...

Jim
Some of them just want to free loaf off of society and live in their van down the road, obviously.

Aly
How shitty. Yeah, man, I probably wanna date him.

Jim
You might have already. Past episodes.

Aly
I love how you're always trying to plug past episodes. Yes, yes, all these lists of behaviors where one might think to themselves, “I've done that.”

Jim
Oh yeah, I've done that or not done that or … but the idea is…

Aly
Or I love people who do that and it's acceptable because I like them, and they do this thing.

Jim
Right. But we've associated some people, and then we generalize it to a whole population. We treat it as a problem, and then we expect the city to create an ordinance to do something about this problem. And in fact they have to because the current ordinances in the Bozeman code actually criminalize living in a tent. And they're not in compliance with the court order, which makes the people in the city mad enough that they even have to accommodate anybody at all.

So I decided to write an essay suggesting that nothing makes you morally better just because you live in a home or choose not to live in a home or don't have a home because you can't help it. Whatever your circumstance, nothing about being in a home … like, imagine if we had said like you were, I think, alluding to where we found people “in homes” who are rapists, drug users, unemployed, willfully unemployed, mentally ill. Surely we can find people like that who live in in homes, and what if we created a population called “the homed.”

Aly
Oh, oh.

Jim
And we said, “Hey, you, ‘the homed.’” You know?

Aly
I see a surrealist art project being based on “the homed.”

Jim
I'm not sure that's surreal. That would just be satire.

Aly
Well, depending on how you do it. If we painted it, it would be surreal because we wouldn't be able to tell what it was exactly.

Jim
Could be all giraffes... So first of all, the overgeneralization of people who are individuals … the second thing is the moral superiority that people think, who live in houses, that they're better for the fact that they live in houses - in part because they've generalized what they take to be a particular population.

Aly
The fact that we have witnessed some of these people who live in houses on nextdoor, the website app for neighbors, calling unhoused people parasites, saying that they should just go somewhere else.

Jim
And a viral video that's not on nextdoor, but on Facebook, where he outright calls urban campers “bums.” He was pretty upset about the rape. That's very upsetting, but then he made the generalization and then said the city had to do something about it. And many, many residents here agree. And what I was saying is, “Wait a second, there's nothing morally better that makes someone in a home or not in a home better.” So you have to take each of these cases individually and get rid of the whole concept of “the homeless” because that's a generalization.

Aly
Anytime we're making generalizations, we need to stop ourselves and consider.

Jim
And generally treat people with respect. Just because you happen to own property and you are a taxpayer doesn't make you more - it makes you more privileged - but doesn't give you any moral right to impose. So we're here actually all neighbors, including the person living in a van or a trailer outside your home. She or he or they are your neighbor. And the person, likewise, who's living there ... yeah, that person is your neighbor. And of course, problems are going to arise from that.

Aly
Right. Conflict was going to be my next thing that I was going to bring up.

Jim
And the conflicts are going to happen in part because society has said, “Wait a second, I'm going to have this home, I'm going to have this yard, I'm going to have this parking area. Wow, I don't have a parking area anymore, and man, he's throwing garbage all over the place. And I don't know them, and I don't like them. Can I trust them.” You know?

Aly
Would you say we're a conflict-avoidant society … to make a generalization?

Jim
I would say so. Yeah, people call the police to deal with those problems, right? And then the city is saying, “Hey, it's actually not against the law for this person to be here. That's a public street. There is no parking restriction on your street. That person is allowed to actually be there.” And so they're going to the city trying to solve this problem rather than actually say “Hey, maybe there's a solution here. Maybe we can talk about this.” But because there's such a negative impression. Why? “Oh, yeah, you can't talk to those people.” Do they even try?

Aly
Great. This is a very radical notion. In a conversation with my coworker, which she came back several days after we talked about this ordinance and me referencing things from Jim’s article, but also riffing on stuff … . And she was like, “You know, Aly, you really changed mine and my husband's opinions about the people sleeping in campers in our neighborhood and what you were saying was very simple. And I feel kind of silly that I even needed to have a conversation about something so simple that I didn't realize it myself. But needless to say, we are going to try to act more friendly to the people in the campers and try to include them in our community. And you know, if any issues come up, we want to try to talk with them personally about it rather than calling someone else.” And I think that's a huge deal.

Jim
It's a radical deal. So just as our dancing is radical, the idea that you can directly talk to someone - take direct action talking to someone rather than instantly calling for the mediation of people who have no business mediating anything ... the police are trained to enforce laws…

Aly
No, no.

Jim
…and not necessarily to be therapists who solve problems between people or mediators. Yeah, some of them have some mediation training. I'm sure there are some police who do a better job than others, but well, first, can you directly do it yourself? Second, you must have friends who are good facilitators or who are good at mediation … or know someone who can.

Aly
Or maybe you need to make some new friends who are.

Jim
And second and thirdly, this is neighborhood by neighborhood. That's not saying this is going to be easy. There are going to be some conflicts both ways. They're going to be conflicts...

Aly
You probably have some conflicts with your neighbor right next to you, and you have wars over the grass or whatever the fuck.

Jim
War is going on with your spouse.

Aly
Yeah. Yes.

Jim
So we have all of these problems breaking down intimacy, but we assume that we're going to create an ordinance - that's going to make it that much harder for people not deal with any of the underlying social issues which are happening nationwide, not just in Bozeman - and think that somehow this problem is going to go away or you're going to make Bozeman so unlivable that that you're going to kick the problem somewhere else. Yeah.

Aly
It really makes me feel that any bill that passes, whether it's something that we can in some ways support or something that we do not support, is a form of avoidance.

Jim
Right, so as anarchists, we believe in direct action. We believe in directly dealing with things and also localizing problems. The problems are local. So let's say there's a neighborhood across town where the people learn to work it out, and they pass this ordinance. Suddenly all these people that they're now happy neighbors with have to move in five days or 10 days or whatever arbitrary number they're going to ultimately come up with. 14 seems to be the number that people think of as reasonable, as if that solves a social problem or deals with anything.

Aly
Right. These people are being violently displaced…

Jim
So you may be in a neighborhood where...

Aly
….we’ll ignore that situation.

Jim
Let's say you're in a neighborhood where you worked it out with the people. You guys get along. Now the city comes along and says, “Hey, you've been here for 14 days. You've gotta move.” Now you got a whole new set of neighbors coming in that you're gonna have to redo this with every time. So it's a one-size fits all approach. It's a top-down approach, and it radically disempowers people when we could be solving problems ourselves. And I think that's the thing that my essay is really about. It's not about solving some problem called “homelessness” ‘cause I don't consider it a problem.

Aly
That's the first deconstruction that needs to happen.

Jim
It's certainly a problem for many people who are homeless. They don't necessarily want to be homeless.

Aly
But that's different from viewing the individuals as problematic.

Jim
Or assuming that someone just because they are homeless did not choose that way of life. And why isn't that an okay way of life choice? Why can't we respect that people, whether they live in homes or not, can be as morally valuable as anybody else? So this whole idea that we have to deal with it gets us all in the same social conformity. This whole episode is about conformity - conform to a particular way of life where we all live in houses or all have permanent shelters over our heads. And if we don't, there's something morally wrong with our society. Why is that? The assumption makes no sense to me.

Aly
Right. Well, I think it's partially an assumption that we back up because, like, I'm thinking about my grandparents who are going to die soon. They have seemed so old since I was young, and they are miserable. And they've been mentioning for years that they feel like life was kind of a sham because they just worked their entire lives and raised kids their entire lives and rented out houses their entire lives and did all the things that you're supposed to do also … were fundamentalist Baptists their whole lives and they'll die fundamentalist. But they don't feel that was fulfilling. I feel like it almost is a subconscious attack on people continuing to live that way to see people not living that way. Like, I think most of us at one time or another, even if we're still adhering to capitalism, even if we believe there's no other way, we'll feel an inkling of maybe it's not supposed to be this way … and then we shut that feeling down and then we see other people not living in the same accordance to capitalism … and we like people who are living in accordance with it … and are not trying to challenge it. Even mentally we have to attack them, have to shut that down in order to not examine themselves.

Jim
Yes. And we see that, I think, especially in the movie Nomadland where you have people actually choosing … these are older people choosing a way of life not to live in houses and then dealing with all the prejudices that come with that and the assumption that there's something wrong with them and maybe ... and in the case of the main character had options to then live in a house - either from a family member or from other people.

Aly
And they were like, “Oh, we have to help you. You can't live this way.” If she's choosing to live this way...

Jim
And she was more miserable in the times where she actually had to live in a bed. And so why do we assume that it's a one-size fits all? Sure, for probably the vast majority of people who aren't living in homes, that is not their first choice, and there are probably a lot of reasons why most people live in homes for lots of good reasons. But the assumption that we have a social problem and that if people aren't following the conformist social rules, there is something morally wrong with them … and so they either don't deserve our sympathy … or we have to do something to force them to assimilate into our society. It was the same thing that white people and Americans did to Native Americans. You know, a long time ago it was the idea that they were not staying on particular pieces of land. They weren't living the way that civilization thought was the right way to live...

Aly
Right. Yeah, it's gentrification. Yeah.

Jim
...has continued on, and then we apply the same paternalistic solution to the problems that are going to arise no matter what.

Aly
Right. It reminds me of Harriet Beecher Stowe in writing Uncle Tom's Cabin and that being the radical anti-slavery work of the time. Meanwhile, she completely paternalized black people and the picking of each black character in the book as not mentally aware, almost mentally handicapped individual who cannot function without the guiding hand of white people. And she got her inspiration for these characters from her father's fucking slaves. But that was considered radical action at the time.

Jim
Fuck. So yeah, that's essentially what my essay, my 3000-word essay is about.

Aly
It didn't feel that long. It was a very quick, breezy read for me.

Jim
Well, I don't think most people got through it all based on the comments. It is clear they didn't read it. I got a lot of supportive comments, too, and it's definitely something that divides our community. But even amongst those who don't appreciate this ordinance, there tends to still be a paternalistic attitude people take towards homelessness as an issue ... that it's something that we need to solve and fix instead of actually respecting people and engaging with people as people and coming with community solutions to whatever problems do arise rather than ... yeah, when I say these paternalistic approaches, they're the same conformist approaches.

Aly
Yeah. And as long as you are devaluing the voices of the people with the least privilege, then you are going to just be re-creating forms of oppression.

Jim
Yeah. And those who are opposing the ordinance are just trying to stop an ordinance, which is great, but it doesn't mean we need something better in its place that's going to fix everything. Let's solve the problems ourselves. Let's do the hard work.

Aly
Let's just stop the ordinances. And yeah, I referenced karma earlier in the episode because we had one regular on the post continuing to say things like, “Oh, it's these people’s karma for not having houses,” which is just a fun little spiritual bypassing move that my parents also have done because they were in the same cult we found out.

Jim <br. Right. We justify society because there must be something spiritually wrong. So if you've got more stuff, It's because your karma gave it to you. Yeah.

Aly
And can you imagine if that's actually the way things were like - if karma was dictating how we lived, I would be resisting that. I would be fighting karma. Like, that's absurd.

Jim
Instant karma is going to get you.

Aly
Maybe it will. Try me. I fucking challenge you.

Jim
57.

Aly
I always tell my dad … he would be like, “You're going to realize when you get older that God exists in the in the way that we've been telling you God exists. And when you die, you're going to be shocked that ...” I was like, no, if I die and I meet God exactly how you have told me, I'll fucking challenge that motherfucker. How dare he? The audacity, the paternalism. So I'm ready to fight God when I die.

Jim
And Tom says to you.

Aly
No, Ali, you must be peaceful.

Jim
I'm your friend. Okay, well, that's one more topic. Do we want to go to the...?

Aly
We can go to the third … third base.

Jim
Anything else to say about this? We've had a whole episode about conformity … lack of conformity.

Aly
Yeah. I mean, sometimes I worry that I will almost, like, get trapped in a mode where we almost conform to our own style of activism. So I'm very excited that we are adding in the theater element. So I guess I am just going on to the third topic, but yeah. So, like, we will always dance. I dance in my house. I dance on the streets. We will dance forever because we believe in it deeply. But sometimes, I'm like, you know, I want to diversify. I want to do more things. I would also love to dance with more people in other places. I see these, you know, park-wide dances in City Park in New York. What's it called?

Jim
Ecstatic dance.

Aly
No, no. The park in New York.

Jim
Oh, which park was it? I don't remember.

Aly
I don't know any ... Central Park, not City Park.

Jim
Oh, it was in Central Park?

Aly
Yeah, Central Park. And so it's like I want to be part of big dance things too, and I want to, you know, do dance - move and dance random things. But we don't want to continue doing the same thing for us, even though we're doing something that is beautiful.

Jim
But we're still dancing, and we should have announced we will be dancing if you get this in the next week. We're dancing September....

Aly
Oh yes.

Jim
...16th, 2023 at 11 AM Mountain Time.

Aly
Yes. And if you live here…

Jim
I'll put it in the intro.

Aly
…you can travel from somewhere else and come dance with us. But yeah, so...

Jim
We'll dance at any other time. Just reach out to us at bozemanantifa@gmail.com.

Aly
Yes, that was the last thing we needed to plug. So I'm always thinking in my own life, what are other tactics, actions, or ways of organizing community that I would like to do? And something that we've been wanting to do for a while is guerrilla theater.

Jim
Yes, great. We are going to...

Aly
Take it away, Jim.

Jim
...get ape costumes and we're going do theater. No. When I was in DC, there was a group called the DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency. And they just did poetry. And they had their friends in the DC Rhythm Workers Union who banged drums and they would have the drummers and the poets going in a city park a few times a month. But sometimes they would walk through the streets and do poetry, and sometimes they would just do events at other places and do poetry. And anyone could do it. And it was also an open mic. You didn't have to be in the group to be able to do it, and we could do poetry. I'm open to all art, but I like doing theater. You’ve been in some plays at The Verge theater here. I've been doing some stuff off and on at Last Best Comedy, and I've always just loved acting. But what I really don't like are auditions. You know, I don’t like...

Aly
Nobody likes auditions.

Jim
And I don't like the idea that art is just the performance for the elite that you pay money to go. The Verge has a nice sliding scale.

Aly
Sometimes they have a sliding scale.

Jim
I think they're going to that as more of a policy

Aly
They are, but for a while they didn't, and people resisted that and thought it was a bad idea.

Jim
But it's also expensive to keep space. There's all these reasons why people...

Aly
Of course.

Jim
...have to charge more. But I resent the idea that art is an elitist thing, just like I resent dance as an elitist thing that you have to be a so-called great dancer.

Aly
And have to do it in the appropriate setting. Fuck appropriateness.

Jim
A great singer to sing. You need the right theater. You have to pay for this expensive space. And that furthermore, we live in a society where people are not dancing, they're not singing; they're walking to work, they're shaking hands. They're...

Aly
Tis better to be singing off key than not singing at all, my people.

Jim
They're talking; they're not singing. They occasionally give each other a high five or a...

Aly
Bro, the way they talk does not inspire me.

Jim
There's bro hugs and slaps and...

Aly
But that they even have to qualify it as a bro hug is pathetic. Just hug. It doesn't have to be bro.

Jim
There are these things. And occasionally there are hugs in our society, too.

Aly
Occasionally, there are hugs.

Jim
So I I've been attracted to the idea of breaking patterns … like we watched these musical films. I like the MGM films of old - the old dance song and dance movies - where they were doing it all on an MGM stage. As it turned out, they were actually supposed to be out on the street or in in life, and they were tap dancing and they're singing to each other and everything breaks out into song. And I was like, why aren't our lives?

Aly
Why can't we break out in the song?

Jim
Yeah. Why can't we break out in a song? Why can't we tap dance down the road? Why can't we have a theatrical conversation with each other? We're here having this conversation.

Aly
And I feel it in my bosom?

Jim
Would you have this dance with me?

Aly
I would.

Jim
And then it goes on like that. And we just break out of the patterns of our normal way of talking. It would be so much more interesting and so much more fun. And we can still have the normal ways. They'd be amongst the artistic choices we can have. We can still have rational conversations with each other.

Aly
We're not throwing all logic fucking out the window.

Jim
All of these things would become far more interesting if it was in a world where all of these other kinds of moving and ways of being are real. That's what BAD really is. It is Bozeman Antifa Dance (& Theatre Collective). The idea was to confront the fascism in our society through dance and then - in parentheses - in theatre. And we just haven't done the theatre yet. But we are planning to.

Aly
We are, and the actions that we take - just to reiterate a point that may have been made or may not ... the type of world that I would want to live in, post the type of revolution that I would want to have, would be one that just feels more colorful, feels more enlivened, where people have more healthy responses and opinions about conflict, where people feel free to do their own weird thing that they've always felt like they could only do in the privacy of their own rooms … or not. Even there, because we police ourselves so heavily in our minds and where you see so many interesting things happening, on your way to probably not work - because in my idealized revolutionary world we wouldn't have jobs in the traditional sense - but on your way to go pick up vegetables at the community garden, you know, you see so many quote UN quote “odd things” happening that you don't need to even take out your phone and record them ... like people record us while we're dancing … because it's not notable … that actually is just how life is. So we want to create a world in which what we are doing is not the norm in terms of everybody dancing on the street, but the norm in terms of people no longer being afraid to show what their soul looks like externally of their body. And so how do we get there? By helping more and more people to feel safe to do that now.

Jim
Right. And let's say you are one of these naturally dry, dull people. The thing is right now you're being crowded out of your individuality by all these other people who are not naturally dull, who just act like you.

Aly
Don't you want to be one of the only dull ones?

Jim
You will totally stand out just by being yourself in a way you just do not stand out now.

Aly
Yeah, people are cosplaying as you.

Jim
And we’ll appreciate your individuality because you actually are being your individual self right now, but most of you are not, and you are crowding this - he's probably a guy, too - this guy out. Yeah, step back. Step back from Walt.

Aly
Let Walt be Walt. So I'm trying to be Walt. It's not going to happen.

Having to wear only beige and gray if you do not like wearing only beige and gray. What an idea. I think I just changed lives with that quote alone.

Jim
That's for Walt's, not for you. It's for Walt! Stop trying to be Walt!

Aly
When he looks at his closet, he's happy to see that his ...

Jim
So now, because he hears us and feels all this pressure, he goes, “No, this is who I really am. I am expressing me every day.”

Aly
And there is art in that.

Jim
And he's not allowed to express himself because you've all crowded him out. You've drowned him out with ... you don't have to be Walt.

Aly
You do not.

Jim
Thankfully, I'm not, so I'm going to....

Aly
Sometimes you dress normal, but you usually at least wear some green and....

Jim
When I dress semi-normal, I feel like that's its own art statement anymore because people notice it. People notice me when I....

Aly
They're like, “Oh my God, you're not wearing something crazy.” Yeah.

Jim
Right, exactly, which is how I want it. I want everything I wear to be its own kind of statement. And sometimes, yeah, it could be a pair of blue jeans and a shirt. And they'd be like, “What?” Today I'm all in purple. Yeah, I'm purple from head to toe, except there is a little bit of black in my sock and I'm...

Aly
And I have purple jeans on, but they're really fun because they have frills and lace and stuff all over them that people look at them like they're atrocious and they're kind of like tie-dyed purple. But I love them. It makes me think of our server in Butte, who called how we dressed that day “ballroom opulence,” which he talked about being a direct...

Jim
Oh yeah.

Aly
...action against the bourgeoisie, yeah.

Jim
Hello, Tristan. And you, if you're listening... . He's not.

Aly
But when people use their own expressive style to dress in ways that have been formerly - and I guess still - being just allotted to the wealthy … so when people who are not part of that class take on elements of that style with their own unique twist as if it's a play on that, it is actually, you know, considered an act of resistance in some circles in some literature.

Jim
Mhm. Sounds good. Yeah. So what theater are we planning on?

Aly
The theater that comes to us and that we put together with our friends in a normal space.

Jim
Yeah, we met a friend who ... I don't know how much we want to say … but this friend has, like, theater space in her backyard that she's developing and inviting the community here in Bozeman into. And we plan to totally make use of that space. And we also want to be in the street. So the great thing about a backyard is like it's still normal, but it also can reach those people who aren't ready to do things right out like we are in the middle of the street. And even when we do it in the street the first time, it'll be a learning and an edgy example for us, although our dancing already is theater in the street. But I mean theater, where we're actually using our voices and....

Aly
Right. And we'll have to coordinate stuff and yeah.

Jim
Right. And we have been doing some writing and have some things in the works. So if you're in Bozeman, look us up if you're in another part of the country. Yeah, we will accept your generous gift of plane flights to your town, and we will dance on your garbage cans and...

Aly
Tap dance on the garbage pan.

Jim
And do absurdist theater.

You and I have also been painting recently, and we painted something that was semi-surrealist, I would say.

Aly
The height of surreal art.

Jim
Okay, semi-surreal and the height? Halfway between each other

Aly
No, it wasn't the height, but it was unencumbered. We did do free-form free process painting, and the inner children came out, which is a very healing thing. I think it's healing to my inner perfectionist to be able to just throw stuff on a canvas and not care about the outcome. If it happens to be good by whatever standards we've been told, good is great. If it doesn't, then just the process of it – because I’m so process oriented - was worth it in itself. And so one idea that our friend had for doing group theater was doing, you know, something that's mutually devised but where we go inward alone and write something and then bring all of our ideas together. And so not all of us have written that thing and brought it to the group. So we haven't worked on the actual process of mashing up the elements and things like that, but I really like that as a concept, and I thought I would just throw that out there where you can write something. I mean, you know, and have your friend write something and then bring it together. I know your son does this because he and his friends have, like, stories that they write where they can try to chapter.

Jim
Right. Yes, they do - the chain stories. And they'll come up with whatever rules they want to for each other for the writing. Sometimes you can go with no rules. Sometimes you can have rules. You consent to however you want.

Aly
That is so fun.

Jim
Play. But the more you play creatively … you know for a lot of you, it's role-playing games, perhaps, or whatever it is. All of these things that break us out of these patterns, I think, are helpful practices.

Aly
And how can creative thinking in solely artistic pursuits ... . Once again, we don't think that art is limited to actually doing things that we recognize as artistic practices. We think anything can be art. The way that you live can be art in a broad sense. But how can thinking creatively in so-called artistic pursuits not help you in every other aspect of your life? Like, how can that also not help you become more creative in your solely identified political pursuits? You know, because we're not just isolated individuals. We're only doing one thing. For this part of our personality, it affects nothing else. The more that we see ourselves as interconnected with all of our parts and interconnected with each other in our environments, I think the better we are able to handle conflict, come up with creative ways to fight oppression, and so on.

Jim
And it’s anti-fascism because I think the number one resistance people have - at least people who would be otherwise interested - some people are resistant, probably, at a very deep level but are resistant because they're afraid of judgment, right? And the fact...

Aly
Yes, they are. Yeah, which is natural and normal and I feel that, too.

Jim
And the fear of judgment, though, I think comes from the fear that our society essentially already is fascist, that if you act differently than the norm, act differently from the mainstream, you are an object of scorn, ridicule, laughter. Maybe hatred if it's if it's strong enough...

Aly
I love how much we're circling back to my original idea. It makes me feel really smart.

Jim
Because it was really well said, I was not being patronizing. I really meant it.

Aly
I know, I know. But yeah, we do. If we didn't have that fear of being ridiculed, then we wouldn't live in this society.

Jim
Yeah, right. This is the society we've created, unfortunately.

Aly
So clearly it is a fascistic one.

Jim
And we probably ourselves are guilty of ridicule and shaming. Like, we could probably point to ourselves in the mirror the other way as well. We've seen some singing very badly and couldn't help but laugh. Or we've seen someone who was really white guy dancing, and we're like, ah, at that guy. Right.

Aly
Yeah, none of us are free from judgment and having thoughts that are not thoughts that we would hold up on a podcast and say this is a great thought that I had. This is really good for my ideals.

Jim
But I really believe it's dangerous if we don't take actions against this movement in society, and we're seeing it. We're seeing the rising tide of fascism, the growing voice of it, in the most extreme form. I love it and when we see ways that people are breaking out of it … like we see the TikTok videos. We see the ways people, feeling a little bit safe, doing weird, funky things, too. But if we can be that in front of our neighbors, if we can be that in front of each other, and gradually find that support, it will transform and revolutionize society. It won't just revolutionize yourself. We talked about effectiveness of one or two other people, but really if you reached a critical mass of people, it would change things radically. It would change everything about our society. It would start breaking apart the economics and social fabric. How could you not think about that? How could you not if everybody is goofily singing and dancing and being themselves across the street change how you view other people?

Aly
Right.

Jim
Even if it's your rich boss who started dancing down the street, I have a feeling that that by itself would start breaking down some of those relationships, and your relationship with money, and your relationship with power. I think it would almost have to change the way your body is wired. That sounds very spiritualistic, but I do think that that is...

Aly
But maybe we are kind of spiritualistic and that's fine.

Jim
But I do think you can connect those dots.

Aly
You can. Oh my God, I forgot my thought. Go on.

Jim
Nope, I'm done.

Aly
Uh, no. It was basically just … oh my God. No, I'm not. I'm not done. I'm trying to find it … dance … I Am Robot. So we're hoping … I found it! You know, with these seeds that we plant or with these little particles of weird dance funkiness, …

Jim
Tom says, Look left. I'm sorry, I'm being very bad.

Aly
…we hope that it spreads. We hope that more people become inspired to look at themselves. I have called what we do kind of an inner activism to people who have asked me to describe it because that's how it feels to me. It's like I started doing a lot of deconstructing of myself and the reality that I'm in and how I live, and that has been able to help me become more external and to do things in community and to widen my scope in my town, my neighborhood. But I needed to start with the inner stuff for me. And you know, I hope other people think that they might want to do that as well and find what their thing is. And then we might actually find streets where everybody is singing and dancing.

Jim
Yeah, we do want people to dance with us. If you're listening and....

Aly
If you feel called.

Jim
...want to do theater with us or support that in some way, preferably as a performer, but any way you can think of, we're open...

Aly
Or if you're doing something in your town that you're moved about, I do want to hear about it because I want to...

Jim
Tell us about it.

Aly
…do so many things. I want to challenge myself. I want to step out of my own boxes all the time.

Jim
I don't really care if you have a theater house and are selling tickets. You're a fucking capitalist.

Aly
Yeah, I don't care about that at all. It's not that I don't really care, it's that....

Jim
You know that's great. No, I mean....

Aly
I don't care.

Jim
…honestly, that's great that you're doing that, but it's not what I'm talking about. I want to hear about the spontaneous actions of creativity that people are doing that are breaking the mold that to me are radically anarchist - surrealist, perhaps?

Aly
I want to know why you did that. I want to know what you were thinking when you did that. I want to know the process because to me, spontaneous acts of creativity feels like something spiritual. When you're in it, it feels like finding the best, like, plot ever for your story, but then allowing the plot to change. It's...

Jim
It's very mind expansive, right? It's what people on psychedelics talk about, you know - their colors having flavors and all of these things. I feel like that way when...

Aly
Dude, that's how when I explore these ideas in my body and my mind....

Jim
…yeah, without that. Yeah, something…

Aly
…that caused me to mostly stop taking psychedelics in my life was realizing that the best moments that I had had while on these psychedelics were very similar - if not exactly the same - to moments of strong feelings that I had had sober. And I thought maybe that's not the norm for people. I mean, it's definitely not because we're not living neurotic exotic lives, but it can be the norm for me. So why do I need to do something outside of myself to create that when I can create it? And that way to me felt disempowering because it's like, why do I need to go seek out a person to give me this thing to then have connection if the connection is always possible here? And that may be harder for some individuals than others, and I'm not anti psychedelics - and I don't think Jim is either even though he's never done them.

Jim
No, I'm not necessarily against them.

Aly
Yeah. So it's like do whatever, but...

Jim
Yeah, I'm open to the wide range of experience that people want to have.

Aly
But I joke to you. Recently I was like, what if we just talked about anarchism like it's better than drugs.

Jim
Yeah, because, it's like joyful…

Aly
Yeah. I can't speak for every anarchist. Jinx. Yeah, because it's like, I also don't want to generalize. Other anarchists like anarchists who wear black and are punk. I don't want to...

Jim
…at least our anarchism is.

Aly
...generalize them.

Jim
Yeah, like Walt.

Aly
Because we've been talking about how generalization is harmful, and this is the point I'm sure every person who fits the mold of what people think of when they hear Antifa is a very diverse, nuanced person inside, and we may be friends with them at some point. And you know, it's not to make any harmful generalizations about people.

Jim
No, I totally respect all the stuff that people are doing in that regard. It's amazing.

Aly
Yeah, but once again, is that actually true to you? Is that what you were feeling? You know, do you feel safe to truly express how you want to? Maybe not.

Jim
There's always room for that self-critique. We're doing it.

Aly
Every day.

Jim
Yeah, and….

Aly
I really do critique myself.

Jim
…and to also feel good about the actions that resonate for you, and it isn't for everybody to be dancing street theater.

Aly
It seems to be for very few people.

Jim
I don't know about that. I mean, we get a lot of love from people.

Aly
Just how hard it is to get people to do....

Jim
It's a ray.

Aly
...it with us.

Jim
I think capitalism in general is a really hard thing for people to overcome. And so you see little glimpses of them, right? You see them dancing, you see it.

Aly
It's a joy thief. Yeah, we get tons of glimpses.

Jim
But you also see it in every aspect of life. You see that thing that breaks the conformist mold all over the place, and it's just for a split second, and we're trying to hold it. We're just trying to hold that second much longer.

Aly
Right now, I'm so glad to do what I do with you. Right. I'll leave a damn situation, and I'll be like, “Oh my God, all these people glared at us. These people hated us.” All this stuff. And you'll be like, “I think people mostly really liked it.” And I appreciate that you're there noticing the positive reactions.

Jim
And I wrote a post about our dancing. I did write an essay about that, and I wrote an essay about my journey into dance and why street dancing in particular was important to me. I did not mention Antifa in in it, but I mentioned, you know, basically what we do. And it only got love total love and from dozens of people.

Aly
Right. So that means that people aren't uninterested in the things that we're talking about, but they're scared of the language that we use. And we're not going to stop using the language that we use. I think it's a very important aspect of the work. There's a person in the hall. Person, hello person, don't be scared.

Jim
In the heart of our language, person in the hall.

Aly
Don't be scared of fascism when we say it but be scared of fascism in the world! Purple, purple, purple 1-3-8.

Jim
Any final thoughts, or do you... I shouldn't presume... feel complete enough in that?

Aly
I mean, I never feel fully complete because there's always more.

Jim
Feel complete enough for the purposes of a podcast.

Aly
For the purposes of our confines.

Jim
Yeah, we will continue.

Aly
No. Yeah, I mean, I could go on for hours. I also kind of have the fear that everything I said kind of sounded the same. But I think we...

Jim
Are you afraid that you express fascism?

Aly
No, no, no. As in, I'm just repeating myself, I guess that it could be fascism.

Jim
Is it okay? It's okay to repeat yourself, right? Isn't that another way we can stop conforming?

Aly
Yeah, I mean, I repeated myself in my poem and...

Jim
So what we'll do next episode is we'll record five minutes, and we will just....

Aly
It was considered our...

Jim
...loop it for an hour and a half.

Aly
That would save time. That would be very efficient.

Jim
And it would break the mold of what you expect.

Aly
Yeah, we could do that. We could have it looping for the time period while we go out and stop a train.

Jim
Yes, we could be totally efficient.

Aly
On the topic of stopping trains, though, that is especially a situation where the group that you're doing that with needs to have trust in each other, needs to realize that there are physical risks with stopping a train. I know there are multiple methods, but I have heard of people getting seriously injured trying to do that. And, you know, make sure that your kids and your pets have care if you go to jail for it.

Jim
Yes, but what if they choose not to be safe? Is that an okay choice?

Aly
Then I hope they don't have kids and pets.

Jim
Can't we respect their kamikaze mission? Yeah, and there’s that.

Aly
I'm just out here worried about the kids and....

Jim
The book I'm reading right now is about anarchism in China, partly inspired by you talking about Manchurian anarchism. Interestingly, this hasn't gone into Manchuria at all so far, but they were talking about early Chinese anarchists who really appreciated assassination actions but only if the assassination was taken from sort of a moral standpoint of an individual act of sacrifice, not because they hated the person or just wanted to knock them off because they felt like killing somebody, but because it came from this incredibly moral place. So there is something in anarchism's history around what is your motivation for stopping that train? And then they don't all equate in their mind. Anarchists can also be pretty judgmental of the rationales people take…

Aly
Oh yeah.

Jim
…for their action. Did you stop that train because you're in bed with the airplane industry?

Aly
I mean, right, and you can have the debate of how much intention matters with an action forever. And it's like, well, of course I believe intention matters a lot, but an action is an action by how it objectively affects other things and people as well.

Jim
Right, right. Does your affinity group matter more than all the stopping the commerce of America or, you know, all these tough moral questions, but that's a whole other … right?

Aly
Yeah, I wouldn't say it matters more, but I would say that once I stopped trying to naively save the whole world and wrongly trying to save the whole world and just change my focus to what I can affect in my life, I've found that much more, I will say, effective and empowering. So I think it's just changing a focus. You can't say that one matters more. We're not doing the trolley problem. Throw out the fucking trolley problem. You're never going to be in a situation where you have to put five people on one side and one on the other. Like, fuck off, you know? Like, just affect what you can affect and do that to the best of your ability. You will make mistakes. You will have to work to heal from mistakes that are made. All of this requires open and honest communication, and in my experience, everything goes a lot better if you shake your ass a little bit.

Jim
Well said, Tim.

Aly
Thank you. You are Tom, you are the Shoemaker. Who is…?

Jim
So it's tough. I messed up Tom's name. I miss Tom. I don't really. Those were my final thoughts, yeah.

Aly
Really, you don't have anything super deep? It's kind of tiring to be this deep for so long. Like, we're always deep. But I have kind of a headache ... not too deep.

Jim
I do have a headache, but I do want to remind people one last time … these are long episodes … bozemanantifadance.org. That's where you can read our most recent essays. You can see us dancing. We have some dance videos. We have a lot of cool stuff there that we've been posting. A lot of that stuff also appears on our Instagram, but you can read the longer essays much more easily if you go to the website.

Aly
I'm going to try to start writing more on the website. Jim has been carrying us for a minute.

Jim
Well, the podcast will be going up at Bozeman Antifa Dance. I'm in a good writing phase, so that's....

Aly
Yeah. Well, I'm going to be in one, too.

Jim
Okay, we're not equal. We must be equal.

Aly
I'm gonna write more than you.

Jim
So we gotta figure it out.

Aly
And yeah, dancing.

Jim
I'm more privileged than you, and so I write more. Sorry, where? Where? I'm sort of sub...

Aly
That means that I should write more because I'm less privileged.

Jim
...subtweeting in a weird way. I'm throwing shade.

Aly
Yeah, you go off Twitter just so you could tweet in real life. Shade received.

Jim
Not at you.

Aly
We're dancing on the 16th of September. Right. That's the date.

Jim
Saturday the 16th, 11 AM at Soroptimist Spark.

Aly
At 11

Jim
And if you want to dance with us other times, just reach out to us at bozemanantifa@gmail.com.

Aly
If we haven't made it clear that we're desperate for people to dance with us, it is known.

Jim
And people have been dancing with us when we dance, and we have some friends who sometimes also joined for the whole time. But it's … . Yeah, we're ...

Aly
People have been. Jim thinks we maybe have sounded pathetic on past episodes, but we're not pathetic. We have friends.

Jim
...we're consistent.

Aly
I just want more connection. I want to diversify my social group.

Jim
We have more and more friends. I want to keep doing it. Yeah, I want a crew with some energy.

Aly
And if you're also really reliable and kind of intense about doing things, we actually....

Jim
Now she's succeeding. Throwing shade at people. They're not listening anyway.

Aly
Bing. Bing. Bing. Yeah, you're so sassy, anyway.

Jim
Lovers to haters.

Aly
See you later.