Creeping Familiarity

interview with Leslie James Pickering

This is a much shorter edit for print in the Squeaky Wheel journal.

Leslie James Pickering – Roundtable interview for Media Curating class.  February 2009

Anna Scime

Jessica Thompson

Dorothea Braemer

Carl Lee

(question from Liz Flyntz, not present)

at Squeaky Wheel

Dorothea: Start maybe talking about the genesis of the Arissa Buffalo Project.

The Arissa Buffalo project was definitely influenced by my experience with the Earth Liberation Front which I will get into in a minute.  What we wanted to do was bring what we were calling a “revolutionary consciousness” to target communities in Buffalo.  These communities were targeted because the people who were living there were living in prolonged states of poverty, generation after generation.  And not only were these people in poverty and without the resources that other people typically had, they also didn’t have any hope or the belief that they could change the situation.  They didn’t have the so-called American dream - where you feel where you could improve your life.

That all comes from the first survey that I did in 2004 where I walked around Buffalo all summer with one of the first Ipods that came out and this little Griffin attachment that allows you to record voice memos.   I asked people questions about what they thought was wrong with Buffalo.  I recorded all of these and edited it to a half hour program, which we aired on the radio distributed free on CD format in early 2005. 

So we analyzed that as an organization when we first formed Arissa and came up with a whole bunch of reasons why people in the community felt that Buffalo was in such bad shape and wasn’t improving.  They were all the typical reasons you hear of all the time; there are no jobs here, the economy, but there was also a glaring overreaching feeling over the whole project that these people didn’t have any hope.  Not only was it a bad situation in Buffalo but also there was actually no hope for change.  Elected officials and the economy were not going to change for the better. The only hope was to get the hell out of Buffalo.  That’s mostly what people do if they can…they get out of college or high school and they go somewhere else.

We thought we would do an educational program that presented information about how people in similar situations across the US throughout recent history were able to affect positive change in their areas.  So basically if we could show people in the area how other people in poor communities who were struggling and suffering the same way are able positively impact their situations and come up with some solutions to their problems - then maybe the people in Buffalo wouldn’t be so hopeless and we could bring about change that way.  So that’s really what Arissa Buffalo was doing - lending people who didn’t have access to social justice education access.  We mostly went about doing that by showing documentary films in community centers in target neighborhoods. 

The films we showed had a lot to do with what I studied in graduate school, which was revolutionary social justice movements in recent US history.  People knew a lot about things like the Black Panther Party or the Attica prison uprising in certain neighborhoods.  We started with some of those basics like Malcolm X and then we expanded out from that to movements like the Young Lords, which was a Puerto Rican organization similar to the Black Panther Movement.  We showed some contemporary stuff about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, worker owned cooperatives in Argentina.

A key aspect to the presentation was a discussion that went on afterwards that usually went on at least as long as the film. It wasn’t a talking heads situation where we were trying to toe a political line.  That ended up being something that was confusing about our organization because people didn’t know what our agenda was…they wanted to know that we wanted or what we were going to do… “When are these people going to take over a building themselves?”  But that wasn’t what we were trying to do…we were trying to educate people and bring an unknown and unpopular kind of education to people who really needed it. 

We didn’t necessarily have a program for people to join, like, “Okay pay your union dues and move on this and strike on that!”  We didn’t offer that to them.  And so people were a little bit lost but they kept coming back for the education.  That was a limitation. 

Carl: was that your goal?

It wasn’t a goal it was just a limitation in our capacity as an all-volunteer group with no funding.  We all had day jobs.  We didn’t have enough resources and volunteers to come up with a lot of action plans. 

When you bring ideas or concepts or media to people that are powerful or insightful there are repercussions afterward.  People want to engage afterwards and we hadn’t planned for how to deal with the energy that we were creating.

Carl: How often were these events?

The events were once a month for a 2-year period.  Starting out at the Massachusetts Avenue Project on Massachusetts Street, before it got burnt down.

One of the early things we did was a public forum with two of the county legislators who were responsible for making decisions to shut down libraries in 2006.  We invited people from the community and media and the whole cafeteria was packed with people who were pissed off about their libraries being shut down.  They really grilled the legislators on this issue.

At the peak we were doing one event on the East Side and one on the West Side each month.  At Mass Avenue project on the West Side and the African American Cultural Center/Paul Robeson Theater on the East Side.  We did at least one at El Buen Amigo.

I had a lot of experience before Arissa with protest organizing so I just applied that experience to the best of my ability.  We put notices in Artvoice calendar, used email lists and newspaper ads… in my experience that that stuff is pretty useless.  We were lucky if we got one or two people from an Artvoice calendar listing.  An article or editorial in the newspaper is a better thing but the real bulk of the people were from posters we designed that always featured images from the film and a quote from the film were showing.  For instance, a picture of Huey Newton with a shotgun and quote from Huey.  Underneath just a date and time. 

We enlisted as a block club. The first thing we did publicly was give a presentation of the survey we had done and aired the recordings and talked about them.  People there from United Neighborhoods, a very legitimate community organization in Buffalo, really liked what they saw and offered to list us as a block club and give us all the resources block clubs have.  To this day I am still getting Christmas cards from the Mayor with his family around the Christmas tree.  He has no idea who he’s sending these things to, because he sends them out to all the block clubs.  One thing we really took advantage of is free photocopies at United Neighborhoods.  Block clubs can print up 200 flyers a month.  We brought our own paper and sometimes printed a lot more.  We had a donation of cases of legal sized glossy paper from one of the members.  Making those posters and hanging them in the neighborhoods and corner stores got the vast majority of our audiences. 

It was a strange ironic situation because we were talking about the politics of revolutionary change but using government resources under the radar.

Anna: Do you ever regret or feel paranoid…there were a lot of places where they had taken what you said out of context.  Do you feel like the ELF history follows you? 

I feel like the controversy and stigma around the Earth Liberation Front followed me when that article came out in the Buffalo News.  Its one thing to be labeled a terrorist when you are representing ideas that are motivating what might arguably be called terrorist actions.   Of course I didn’t argue it that way - I argued that it was property destruction just like the Boston Tea Party and like several other examples that are championed events throughout history.  It comes with the territory when you are representing the ELF to CNN and Fox News, I expected that.  But when you are showing films to people in the community who are starving for education and opportunity, that is a public service.  If it weren’t for my history with the ELF I could still be doing that. 

In general I was the spokesperson for the ELF Press Office which wasn’t part of the ELF -  it was an organization that was created as a mouthpiece and clearinghouse for public information on the ELF.  You can’t interview people who are living underground.  The media couldn’t ever have a clear story about a group when its members are breaking the law, because they can’t appear or they will be arrested. We followed models that had been used historically and created this ELF Press Office.  There were actually only two of us who did it, and we did the best we could to understand where they were coming from and represent those issues in a way the American public could digest in a 10-30 second news clip, which is a very daunting task.

I did pieces with Frontline, Rolling Stone magazine, Vibe magazine, National Geographic television, 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, Dateline, every major newspaper in the country.  It was a hot topic.  I mean, these people were underground, the FBI couldn’t catch them and they were causing on average a million and a half dollars per arson and their targets were major corporate and government facilities that were responsible for environmental destruction.  It got a lot of attention.  And it wasn’t even anything that I did; it was what the underground ELF members were doing.  But because myself and this one other person were the only people in the country that would speak publicly in support of what they were doing, we got a lot of attention. 

Liz emailed question, read by Jessica:  It seems that there is a relationship between being a spokesperson and being a curator.  I think this relationship might be especially pronounced in the case of being a spokesperson for a radical or “outlaw” group like the ELF.  Usually a spokesperson is defined as someone speaking for a service, organization, or product, and whose name becomes associated with that product. This seems to be the case with your involvement with the ELF but with an additional role as a conveyor of “protected information” like a confessor or a lawyer.  To speak for the ELF you had to be in a somewhat unique position of being knowledgeable of, and sympathetic to, their ideology and tactics while remaining ignorant of specific identities.  This is sort of similar to the way a curator must be sympathetic and knowledgeable of the aesthetics and goals of the artists he or she is showing but must also retain a certain critical or professional distance in order to maintain their goal.  Being a spokesperson for a radical group requires maintaining sympathetic outsider status the same way a curator does.  Do you think this metaphor is appropriate?

I do think that metaphor is appropriate. As she pointed out, your name and reputation and face become associated with whatever you’re representing..  Its not that I had qualities that were going to improve the reputation of the ELF, it’s only that I had the passion and guts and motivation to do it.  I wasn’t the biggest environmentalist in the world, but not that many people who were going to put their neck out to represent radical illegal activity in the national arena.

You have to maintain a professional distance.  The distance I had to maintain was pretty extreme because if I didn’t maintain that distance I would be in federal prison for a long time.  That was motivating factor. 

C: You also put things in context.  Do you think you brought arguments to it that you didn’t necessarily get from their communications?  

There were only a few examples of times where lines from the communiqués were printed or read aloud in the news.  Regardless of how big the story was they often wouldn’t have a single line from any communiqué. 

There were a couple of different strategies I used to get radical environmentalist ideas out through the media.  The first one which now seems really naïve to me, was when they come to you and ask questions about why a building was burned down you tell them “Well Monsanto is marketing this seed that is sterile so the seed can’t reproduce and marketing that with a cocktail combination of their pesticides so the seeds will only grow with their pesticides.  Then they are marketing this product to people in Africa so that these people will have no opportunity to develop sustainable agriculture.  Instead they will be reliant on Monsanto that will end up in an oppressive company store situation…”.  They would let me say it and then reply “Well that’s terrorism, that’s violence” then I would respond to that, and when the piece came on TV all that was on there was the part about violence and terrorism.  And if there was a part where I paused or stuttered they would always put that on TV.  Eventually I evolved to doing sound bites, where you ignore the question that was asked.

Our situation was unique.  They were going to do the story and put you on TV no matter what.  That opened the opportunity for me to say whatever.  I would only get 10 seconds so I would watch their mouths and wait until they stopped talking and then say what I was going to say.  That was the only opportunity to look okay.  Of course they are going to have a terrorism expert, and the local police, and someone from the FBI and the fire department and try to make the environmental struggle look bad.  The hope was though, that there would be someone watching who was upset about the environment and didn’t trust the government, who would hear my 10 seconds and support the ELF in one way or another.  That wasn’t that great of a scenario either, and after a while of doing that I got frustrated and came up with another strategy.  This one is a little reactionary and had varying results, but at least the results varied sometimes into an interesting news story.

It was guaranteed that they were going to come at me with “this is violence, this is terrorism, why aren’t you doing this like Martin Luther King?”  And back at the beginning I would say “Well, Gandhi was only one part of the Indian independence struggle, there was also an armed struggle, and the US itself was founded on armed struggle, every successful social justice movement in history has some element of armed struggle.  It’s absurd to argue that armed struggle isn’t a legitimate part of freedom movements when it’s the basis for almost all freedom movements throughout history.”  They would never air anything like that.  After a year or more of trying to argue with them where every news piece would ignore the environmental issue and just want to discuss the terrorism issue, I just figured I would cut that argument short and we could get down to the business of the environment. 

So my new strategy was when they would say, “You are a violent terrorist, defend yourself”, I would say, “Call it what you want to”.   Instead of saying that the actions were nonviolent because they only destroyed property, instead of harming people (which was our argument all along) we would just say: “Okay, but can we talk about the issue of the environment?”  I took it farther to where I would just milk their sensationalism. They want a story about some outlaws who are destroying property and can’t be caught by the FBI?  I’ll give it to them!  So I would go on the news and have a little attitude, and not deny that what they were doing was causing a lot of destruction, and not waste my time with arguments of violence and terrorism.  I would just say, “Yeah, so was George Washington. But this building is responsible for polluting the Willamette River, which is causing cancer.  So lets get back to the environmental issue.”  That didn’t always work either but at least sometimes you would get those stories in there.  Especially in the Pacific Northwest you had quite a few stories about radical environmentalism during these years.  

It relates to the curating thing…I haven’t really thought about it this way before. I had to be a curator for something that I did avidly support but was not personally responsible for.  How do you go about doing that?   Especially since I had very little formal training and knowledge of that.  If you are a curator for something you need to work as hard as you can to best represent it and you need to work get the right people in there, the right people to see what you are doing.  

When we were doing the Arissa programming that was a major factor.  We had to work to get the right people in the room.  It didn’t matter if we got 5 people or 75 people in the room; if they were the right people then it was worth it.  We did have events where there were 25 people or less there.  And it didn’t even phase us because we would look out there and see that 12 of those people were definitely off the block, another 6 of them have been to every one of our events.  If you’ve got something that you are presenting to the world in one way or another you want to get the right people to see it and you want to create the right forum for it to best represent itself.  You want to create an atmosphere where people can best appreciate the actual content what you’re presenting.  Not just what you are saying about it.