The Legend of Giant the Jack-Killer

by Whatsblem the Pro

Chicken John Rinaldi -- PHOTO: Chris Stewart

Chicken John Rinaldi — PHOTO: Chris Stewart

People talk a lot about translating their Burning Man experiences to their lives outside Black Rock City, but given the breathtaking diversity of what people take away from Burning Man, that can mean a lot of things; some interpretations are fairly accurate reflections of a large percentage of burner viewpoints; some seem way over the top or even downright silly, like when people get the notion that burners should never, ever sell anything to each other, ever, for any reason. Burner diversity means that if we want to get at our commonalities, we have to take a broad view of things.

Not much is universally applicable to burners; we might get close, though, by saying that burners tend to do the things they do in an active/aggressive manner rather than a passive one. Feeling small and alone and powerless is for other people; we know we are giants, and we behave accordingly, for better or worse.

Civic pride is one of the more obvious manifestations of that oh-so-zesty active/aggressive attitude toward daily life that year-round burners have in common, and last Wednesday night a sleepy little coastal hamlet called San Francisco, California got a lovely example of it, albeit from a man who would surely curl his lip at me if I called him a burner.

John Rinaldi never needed Burning Man to unlock his creativity or his dynamic nature; he is more of an originator of burner culture than any kind of convert. His own civic pride seems to know no bounds; he even ran for mayor of San Francisco once upon a time, and unleashed a zombie flash mob on the debate proceedings as part of his campaign.

When Chicken John heard that corporate chain Jack Spade was moving into his neighborhood, displacing local small businesses and threatening to further infect his demesnes with that dreadful sameness one sees in strip malls all over the country (and the world), he didn’t sit and cry about it, and he didn’t start making plans to move elsewhere. . . he got off his ass and did something about it.

Long story short: Jack Spade will not be opening a store in John Rinaldi’s neighborhood.

How did one man manage to stand off a billion-dollar corporation bent on invading the Mission District? By his own admission, he didn’t, not really, not all by himself. . . but he did rally a tremendous amount of support, and managed to put some formidable pressure on Jack Spade. I’ll let John speak for himself on all that:

The representative from Jack Spade that was at the hearing on Wednesday night was standing around afterwards chatting. Someone handed her this flyer:

And she said: “Yeah. I think we are going to pull out.” With no irony, she said “pull out.” The comedy here is amazing.

Yesterday morning, the CEO from the parent company that owns Jack Spade wrote a letter saying they surrender. We won the hearing, and thus we were in a power position to annoy the shit out of them for six months or more. Meanwhile, that $12,000 a month rent is really starting to add up. . . all the calls and letters and e-mail were probably clogging up their days as well. In the end, we’ll never know if it was this flyer that pushed them over the top. . . but I’m going to say it was because it’s funny.

Tonight our activism is a victory lap, but don’t think for a second that we are done fighting chain stores. There are two pieces of legislation that the Board of Supervisors will be voting on November 25th. There is legislation to be re-worded. . . and there are safeguards that need to be put in place to protect us from carpetbagging interlopers.

So even though we won, and Jack Spade is not opening in the Mission, the Jack Off is ON!!!! Come. Or cum. Or whatever. And know that anything is possible. You can bend the will of a billion dollar company by threatening them with a circle jerk everyone knows you can’t deliver on. If that is true, and we have proven that today, what else is true that we thought impossible?

Forty-eight people in sailor suits forever changed the direction of the Mission district by altering the path of a chain store worth over a billion dollars.

All you ever really need to do anything is a plan. No matter how stupid, insipid or impossible that plan might be. Now, this action wasn’t really the reason why Jack Spade “pulled out.” It was many little things, a few big things and this action came at the right time as the straw that broke the camel’s back. There was all the letters you guys wrote. There was the bombing of their Facebook page. There was the phone calls. There was the comments section of the articles. The bad press. There was the VCMA doing the appeals of their building permits. There was the members of the Latino Community that spoke out at the hearing, and Calle Biente Quatro. There was the letters from Supervisors, assemblymen and legislators. There was the people who showed up to City Hall and spoke. There were the merchants who put “no Jack Spade” signs in their windows. There was the t-shirt company that made shirts for free: Ape Do Good. Arin Fishkin graphic design. The Make Out Room for letting us have a benefit there (that paid for the appeal filings). There was the plea to action for the Mission Merchants Association (a cabal of landlords) that got the conversation going. And a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting and even some stuff I probably don’t even know about.

The point is that we committed. We committed to do whatever it took to get it done. This is paramount. We stuck together and stuck it out.

What can you commit to that will make things better, in your home, your neighborhood, your city, your country, your world?

Burning Man® and the Old Switcheroo

by Whatsblem the Pro

Photo by Sincerely Hana

Photo by Sincerely Hana

The JACK RABBIT SPEAKS has an interesting bit of wording in the latest issue. It’s in a section called “Black Rock City Civics” and it has to do with decommodification:

See, one of our core principles is Decommodification … which means amongst other things, that Burners don’t want to be treated like a consumer to be sold to, especially on playa. Here’s the full description: “In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.” Besides, fliers create more MOOP, and we really don’t need any more of that, either!

Nothing wrong with any of that, is there? Except for that one little phrase: “especially on playa.”

Obviously none of us wish to be marketed to on the playa, but by slipping that little qualifier in at the end, Will is telling us that the Org disapproves of us buying things from each other no matter where we are. Of course, that doesn’t count if the Org gets to be in complete control of your interactions with other burners. JACK RABBIT SPEAKS, the official newsletter in which we are being encouraged to regard conducting trade with each other as taboo on or off-playa, often contains advertisements for burner-to-burner businesses.

You foolish children, they seem to be saying to us. Why would you want to network with each other and do any kind of trade or business together? We and we alone will moderate your interactions with each other.

In light of the Org’s trademark lockdown that attempts to prevent the very people who build and maintain the Burning Man brand from using it for non-commercial purposes to gather together and spread the culture beyond the playa, it seems absurd that they want to preach to us about decommodification. . . or about fostering the culture.

By the time Will gets to the part where he quotes from the ten principles, the ‘we’ in phrases like “we stand ready to protect our culture” has been twisted to mean “the Org.” Why is the Org interested in protecting the culture from burners themselves? Because by “our culture” what they really mean is the Org’s exclusive right to exploit burners, on or off the playa.

As we’ve already reported, just days ago the Org in their quest to “protect our culture” sent vaguely threatening messages to several Facebook group administrators, asserting that the use of the words “Burning Man” as part of a group’s name is some kind of trademark violation (it isn’t). The group in question is called “Burning Man Classifieds,” and it was made by burners for burners. Burners actively protect it from cynical outside commodification, and they don’t need the Org to help them do that.

It’s all well and good to blithely assert that “Burners don’t want to be treated like a consumer to be sold to,” but when you’re dealing with a group of burners who have voluntarily gathered in a particular place to do exactly that – have a burner swap meet – then maybe you’re going a little beyond the bounds of “protecting our culture” and sidling into territory that is more aptly described as “a corporation bothering people for no good reason.” Or maybe an even better description would be “a small handful of people, using a corporate trademark to co-opt YOUR culture and profit from it.”

Call me paranoid if you must. I realize that the wording in the JRS is subtle, but coming on the heels of the rising unpleasantness between the Org and burners on Facebook, this smells like a subtle attempt to sway burner attitudes toward an unthinking response that supports the Org’s commercial ambitions for the future. It cleverly ties the idea of any kind of commerce whatsoever between burners to concepts that are already familiar and repellent to us all: commerce on the playa, and MOOP.

The Org is not the culture; burners are the culture. It’s high time for the Org to admit that they have a massive conflict of interest between their stated purpose of spreading and nurturing the culture, and the personal interests of the Board of Directors.