"The Party's Over" - Return of a Familiar Friend?

"ARM TEH POOR," Graffiti in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, April 2012 (photo by me)

In the 1980s, a striking graffiti logo appeared all over the streets of lower east side Manhattan. The scene of an extended conflict over gentrification and how New York City would evolve, the LES was home to tenant activists, counter-culture punks, pioneering queers, artists, and the struggling Puerto Rican working class people who took the neighborhood over from the immigrant Jewish community who had, as it were, moved on up. The graffiti was an abstract depiction of an upturned cocktail, and was said to symbolize "The Party's Over." The graffiti was ubiquitous and mysterious, though it turns out it was completely the creation of a local musician and activist, Peter Missing. You can see an original here.

"OWS 2012" Graffiti in Union Square, March 2012 (photo by me)

Is the iconic "Party's Over" logo making a little comeback? I first noticed the upturned-cocktail in chalk at the Occupy Wall Street Union Square encampment in March. But then I noticed it on a lamp-post in Brooklyn, along with the inscription "ARM TEH POOR" ("teh" being the ironic/hipster misspelling of "the," of course) and a hammer and sickle.

It's got an almost apocalyptic resonance, this logo: Which isn't that far off, since the 1980s in which it first arrived was a massive cultural and political turning point both for the city and the world. It does seem appropriate that the symbol return with OWS, who reminds us that we are complaisant with today's challenges at our own risk.

We Are The People I Have Been Waiting For

I stopped by New York's Union Square on Monday night to see a new incipient occupation run by some OWS folks. I had some mixed feelings about the small encampment, but the bricks next to the encampment were filed with lovely chalk graffitti, "We Are The People I Have Been Waiting For". Just about sums it up.



"People Have The Power," of course. One of those clichés that, well, if people really listened to, things would be a whole lot different.

Every night this week Union Square became the scene for a confrontation between cops who vastly outnumbered the number of people wanting to stay in the square, with some moments of grotesque brutality. There was a scene of an activist having a seizure while handcuffed on the ground while the cops stood around doing nothing. Midweek the same space was the scene of a few thousands-people strong rally of support for Trayvon Martin called the Million Hoodie March. By the end of the week the city installed sadly hilarious new signs around the park with a long list of "don'ts," each one accompanied by an icon, that ended with "no unpermitted rallies allowed." Pardon my french, but fuck you Bloomberg.

There's so much more to the Occupy movement right now than this bit of daily theater between demonstrators and cops. Neighborhood assemblies including the one I participate in are building up across the city, and daily actions and meetings display deeper concerns and visions than does this battle for public space. But Spring is here, and the voices shouting for justice are still being heard, and that is very good news indeed.

Without Comment: Peace Prize

Found on facebook.

The Election...Eighty Years Ago

I stumbled across this photo on the internet a little while back. It's election graffiti from the 1932 German elections: it reads "Wählt Thälmann," or "Vote for Ernst Thaelmann," the candidate of the KPD, the German Communist Party, that in the years following was ruthlessly crushed. Here's the amazing thing about this photo: it was taken in Marburg, Germany, in 2008. Which means not only did it survive the 1932 elections (the KPD did not win a majority, as we know), it survived the rise of the Nazis, the brutality of WWII, and all the attempts since the war to control the narratives of history.

I've written before about those 1932 elections and about Ernst Thaelmann. The last time in fact, I pondered whether this era of elections, marked by a rise of the extreme right, would be the undoing of today's civil society. Interestingly, I failed to see the possibility of the return of a mass leftwing, popular movement. I saw the main hope, inadequate as it is, as defensive voting for Democrats. I find it worthy of note that while the mainstream of the Republican party has indeed drifted right, that the people out in the streets are no longer the teabaggers of the right but the Occupy movement of the left.

Which changes everything.

Big things are being planned for May Day, even. And frankly, despite the horrible words spouted by those horrible people on the daises of the Republican debates, and despite the transparent posturing of President Obama, they all seem a little bit irrelevant to the possibilities for the future. Not that one of them won't probably win come November, but that no longer engenders such a sense of foreboding hopelessness.

This election graffiti has survived eighty years, telling all sorts of stories about the way things were. While some of those stories are sad, with tragic endings, it occurs to me that the current story is still being told.

Anti-American Art: Yankee Sonuvabitch

Two choice bits of Sandinista stencilry on a wall at the Mercado Oriental in Managua in 1986. At right, "YANKEE HIJO E PUTA SEGUIMOS DE FRENTE" (Yankee Son of a Whore We're Staying with the FSLN) with an outline of Augusto Cesar Sandino; at left "YANKE QUE SE RINDA TU MADRE PATRIA LIBRE O MORIR" (Yankee, Surrender Your Mother; Free Homeland or Death) with FSLN colors. Never have these two casual obscenities been used better.

Click on the photo for a closer peek.

Nicaragua 1986: the Battle of Ideas

Denounced as a beachhead of Soviet-style totalitarianism by the American government, Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution of 1979 was actually a vibrant democracy with an open civic life. What the Americans couldn't handle was that most people in Nicaragua actually supported the FSLN government. There was civil opposition from left, right, and center, with different social classes and strata tending toward different forces and parties. The disagreements were on full display on the walls of the country when I spent a few months there in 1986.

Above is wall graffiti in Managua dating from the 1984 elections. Stencils from the Communist Party of Nicaragua and its trade union federation CAUS are crossed out by a large "FSLN" and the red and black Sandinista colors: the "X" not only defaces the PCdeN graffiti, it alludes to the mark to be made in the ballot. The FSLN won handily.


Above a mural of an FSLN martyr graces a wall in Granada. A handwritten slogan reads "El llanto de las madres exigen aniquilar a los contras de Granada" or "The Cry of the Mothers Demands the Annihilation of the Counterrevolutionaries of Granada." But below the wall's upper panel is graffiti from the PLI, or Liberal Party, one of the center/right parties, reading "Yo Soy Liberal" or "I Am A Liberal" and calls to vote for the Liberal Party's candidate Godoy.


Eden Pastora was one of the heroes of the Sandinista revolution, known as Commander Zero. But he was not a socialist, and shortly after the triumph of the revolution he spectacularly switched sides and joined the side of the Contras. Here on an earthquake-ruined wall in Managua pre-triumph graffiti celebrating Eden Pastora is updated in broad strokes with the word "TRAIDOR" or "TRAITOR."


Finally here's graffiti from the walls of the ruined cathedral in downtown Managua expressing a more fundamental battle of priorities. Competing with "Sandino Vive" or "Sandino Lives," refering to the 1930s revolutionary hero the FSLN is named after, are various obscenities, mostly crude drawings of penises. The empty cathedral was, among other things, a cruising ground for gay men looking for sex and a little privacy.

(All photos by me. Click on the images to see them larger. Many more of my Nicaragua photos can be seen by clicking on the Nicaragua tag below or by clicking here.)

The Walls Speak

I went to Puerto Rico last year on holiday: saw this random chipped plaster wall with sharp-eyed graffiti commentary in the historic neighborhood of Old San Juan. "Africa."

Managua 1986: Words Everywhere

In the average American city you're constantly surrounded by advertising images. There are billboards, shop signs, advertising posters, stickers, signs on the sides of trucks and buses everywear you look. Lit up at night and sometimes blinking, these messages beg for our attention constantly, each one with its promise of our enhanced appearance or the possibility of entertainment or trying to convince us to part with our hard-earned money for something we don't want or need. Many of these signs are lies, carefully worded attempts to delude us into thinking we have the possibility of absolving our previous bad choices for something better. I work as a graphic designer, and I know what that's all about, trying to sell things I don't really believe in to people who probably would be happier without them. It's a living. But I digress: we learn to tune out the incessant chatter. When you watch TV really, how many cars can you buy, how many 4-hour erections can you fret over, how many medicinal side effects can you ponder before you risk the latest wonder drug, how much shampoo could you possibly use (rinse, lather, repeat again and again and again?), how many candy bars can you eat, how many laxatives will you then need to unclog your bowels of all this pollution you have bought? If I drink a new kind of beer will I be thin and beautiful, or if only I had a child with a terrible medical condition I could be unbelievably rich for the rest of my life thanks to weaselly sounding lawyers.

Most of these words mean nothing; they're irrelevant. It's all crap, and it's miraculous we're not all insane.

When I stayed in Nicaragua in 1986 there were also words everywhere you looked. But it was different. Few people had any money, and because of the US embargo there was nothing to buy anyway. I don't know what it's like now, but then there were no storefronts, no shopping, no brands to choose from. The competition of words was a different kind: I wonder if it was less futile. It certainly had more substance. These words offered actionable hope or righteous outrage or real-life determination.

The stencilled sign above from the official Sandinista trade union, on the side of a factory in Managua reads: "Cada Fabrica una trinchera por la defensa de la revolucion por la construccion del socialismo. No Pasaran!": "Each factory a trench for the defense of the revolution, for the construction of socialism. They shall not pass!"


There wasn't a lot of paper clutter in Nicaragua; paper was valuable and rare. Here's an unusual flyer, pasted on a wall by the Maoists of the MAP-ML/Frente Obrero calling for democratic rights.


As if their spoken words were not enough, here a banner behind the FSLN leadership at a "meet the people" function at a factory warns the imperialists to back off. That's FSLN chief Daniel Ortega fourth from left.


In the center of the city still unrebuilt after the earthquake of 1972, every blank wall was the canvass for another political message. Here the MAP-ML Maoists, who suffered occasional repression at the hands of the FSLN, campaign against the legalization of bourgeois political parties.


On the first of May the ruined Cathedral in the center of town was draped with banners. The one on the bottom reads "Muerte al Yanque Invasor": "Death to the Yankee Invader."


All the messages were about taking the future into one's own hands. Here the sign outside a hall says "Saca tu dolor cobarde...." "Take your pain, coward, release your sick mind...Brother are you looking for forgiveness: remember the Companeros of AA." It's an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting hall; that's the serenity prayer on the left.

If the world around me is to be cluttered up with words, I'd rather read these crude hopes and wishes and exhortations than the prettied up lies of American consumerism.
All photos copyright by me, 1986. Click on them to see them larger; they embiggen nicely.

How Sandinistas Remembered Their Martyrs

The struggle against the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua was long and bloody. The FSLN itself -- the Sandinista Front for National Liberation -- was formed in the early 1960s by a number of young Nicaraguans from varying backgrounds. Only one of the original founders survived to see the revolution's success in 1979. Nicaragua is not a huge country, and when I stayed there for the summer of 1986, it was clear that a kind of intimacy remained with all those who had fallen at the hands of the dictatorship's US-backed military. There were lots of wall murals and posters memorializing the FSLN's martyrs, and even small monuments marking the spot where some hero or heroine had fallen. Here's another batch of photos I took, showing some of these memorials. Click the label "photography" below for more of my Nicaragua photos. Click on the photos themselves to see them larger.


Rigoberto Lopez Perez was the assassin of Anastasio Somoza (father of the dictator the FSLN finally overthrew) in the 1950s. He was a poet and composer, and shot the dictator after infiltrating a party; he was killed in the attack. This wall stencil in Managua reads, "Con el heroismo de Rigoberto, Seguimos en Frente con el Frente" or "With the heroism of Rigoberto, We Stay Ahead with the Front"


This Managua mural marks the "Heroes and Martyrs of the William Diaz Neighborhood" especially Carlos Calero: "Companero Carlos Calero Presente Presente": "Comrade Carlos Calero Still Present."


The Nicaraguan revolution captured the imagination of young people in the 1970s: many of those who were gunned down by the forces of Somoza were teens. I don't know the name of this young girl heroine, whose small shrine was tucked into a Managua street corner.


A billboard set up for the anniversary of the revolution celebrations reads "Nicaragua Victoriosa: Ni Se Rinde, Ni Se Vende" "Victorious Nicaragua: Neither For Sale or Surrender." It shows Rigoberto Lopez and FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca sandwiching Sandinista namesake Augusto Cesar Sandino, the revolutionary who tried to drive out US forces in the early 1930s.


This mural in Granada honors fallen FSLN founder Carlos Fonseca Amador. Fonseca was the main theoretician of the FSLN, and was killed in the guerrilla phase of the revolution in 1976. The mural reads, "We're trying not to simply change the men in power, but to change the system; for the defeat the exploiting classes and the victory of the exploited classes."

More Nicaraguan Revolutionary Graffiti

Here are color photos of graffiti from my stay in Nicaragua in 1986. These were shot on slide film with an amazing, now lost, Pentax camera lent to me by my friend David France. All photos are by me.


From Masaya, "Obreros y Campesinos al Poder! Frente Obrero/MAPML" "Workers and Peasants to Power! Workers Front/MAPML" from the Maoist/Hoxhaite Movement for Popular Action Marxist-Leninist and its trade union group. The graffiti defaces other graffiti from the official FSLN women's group AMNLAE.


From Managua, a stencil depicting Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and VI Lenin, with the slogan "Trabajo Disciplina Organizacion Defensa de la Revolucion, "Work, Discipline, Organization (means) Defense of the Revolution." Though unsigned I'm guessing this is from the Communist Party of Nicaragua (PCdeN).


By a railroad track, another stencil from the PCdeN urging support of the Communist candidates in recent elections.


From Masaya, more graffiti left over from the height of the 1978-1979 revolution. "Ante la Guardia Golpista, Insurreccion Sandinista - FSLN GPP, "Before the Reactionary Guard, Sandinista Insurrection." Signed by the "Prolonged People's War" faction of the Sandinista Front, one of the three FSLN factions that united to successfully overthrow the dictator Somoza. The slogan is attacking the armed repression of Somoza's National Guard calling it reactionary (literally "coup-ist") for militarizing the dictatorship, and urging immediate uprising.


The factional struggle writ large: also from Masaya, opposing FSLN factional graffiti also from the 1978-1979 conflict. "Ante la represion militar, la unidad de todo el pueblo. FSLN Proletarica, "Before military repression, the unity of all the people." From the Proletarian faction of the Sandinistas; the implication vis the previous photo, urging political struggle against the dictatorship rather than an armed uprising.

Click on each photo to see it larger; and click on the "graffiti" or "Nicaragua" tag below to see more graffiti from 1986 Nicaragua.

More Nicaraguan Graffiti

More photos from my 1986 stay in Nicaragua. The first installment can be seen here.


"Carcela los Somocistas, Libertad a los reos comunistas. CAUS" from the Communist-lead trade union federation CAUS, "Jail the Somozists, Free the Communists" on a wall in Masaya, I think.


You wouldn't know it, but this was evidence of a battle over gay liberation in Managua. One day on a cement fence out by government ministries appeared the shocking slogan "GAY LIBRE" ("Free Gay" or "Gay Freedom"). It stayed up only a couple days before "GAY" was obliterated by the ugly splotch of paint and "PATRIA" written to the left to change it to "FREE HOMELAND."


Managua was destroyed by an earthquake in 1972. Dictator Somoza absconded with rebuilding funds; in 1986 much of the central city was still a neglected ruin. Here's competing FSLN and Maoist MAPML graffiti on some of the few large buildings left more or less standing downtown.


Graffiti and stencils for the Maoist/Hoxhaist Movimiento de Accion Popular Marxista-Leninista (MAPML-People's Action Movement Marxist-Leninist) and its Juventud Marxista-Leninista de Nicaragua (JML-Marxist Leninist Youth).


"No a la Constitucion Burguesa - Central Sindical FO": "No to the Bourgeois Constitution - Workers Front Trade Union" from the Maoist MAPML's trade union group.


Competing graffiti in Masaya from the Communist Party and the MAPML. The MAPML says "Obreros y Campesinos Al Poder!," "Workers and Peasants to Power!"


From a wall in Rivas, a logo from AMNLAE, the FSLN run women's federation, the Luisa Amanda Espinoza Association of Nicaraguan Women named after the first Sandinista woman to fall in the revolution against Somoza.


Competing graffiti in Masaya from the Socialist Party (PSN) and the PCD, the right-wing Conservative Democratic Party, whose slogan was "Vote Verde" or "Vote Green" after the Party's color and in opposition to the red and black of the Sandinistas.

Nicaraguan Revolutionary Graffiti

In the spring and summer of 1986 I spent several months in Nicaragua, accompanying friends who went down to build their journalistic careers. The Sandinistas were celebrating the 7th anniversary of their successful revolution against the US-backed Somoza regime; the war against the US-supported "contra" (from the Spanish for counter-revolutionary) rebels in the rural north and east of the country was at its height. I had not much to do but walk around and take photos: I took hundreds.

One of my fascinations was the graffiti. Coming from New York City I was used to seeing lots of graffiti. But this was different: this graffiti all had something to say. It was difficult to judge the age of all the graffiti I saw. Some clearly dated from the years of the revolutionary struggle in 1978-1979 itself, and some was related to current election and political issues. The ruling FSLN was a vibrant, popularly-supported force. But it was clear that there was a vibrant political life in general, and not everyone in opposition to the FSLN was a right-wing stooge of the US.

Here's some of the graffiti I documented. All these photos are by me, and I reserve full copyright. I'll post another batch later.


A wall in Managua: On the lower right, "Seguimos de frente con el Frente" was current 1986 FSLN graffiti, a sort of pun: "We stay in front with the Front." The larger graffiti is years older, from a leftwing faction of the FSLN. "Por un gobierno popular democratico - Guerra Popular Prologanda FSLN GPP": "For a people's democratic government - Prolonged People's War FSLN". The lower left graffiti is from CAUS, a trade union federation, from the constitutional debate: "The constitution should establish a republican and parliamentary government. CAUS"


From a wall in Rivas: Competing left and right. "...FSLN es votar por el pueblo" says a vote for the FSLN is "Voting for the people." "Viva el PLI - No al comunismo" from a right-wing opposition party, "Long live the PLI, no to Communism."


From a wall in Masaya, competing leftwing parties debate. "Vote for the the Program and the Candidates of the PCN (Communist Party of Nicaragua." and "Long Live the First of May, International Workers Day - PCN." This is challenged by the Maoist/Hoxhaist Workers Front: "Abajo los falsos comunistas! (F.O.)" "Down with Fake Communists! FO"


Also from Masaya, yet another leftwing party speaks out: "Carlos Marx vive y transforme el Mundo (PSN)" "Karl Marx lives and transforms the world (Nicaraguan Socialist Party)"



In Managua, stencilled graffiti to "Vote for the Communist Party."


On the earthquake-ruined cathedral in Managua, "El Pueblo Dice NO MAS SOMOZAS." "The People Say No More Somozas"


From Masaya, a clever stencil from the FSLN. Designed like traffic signs: "No Girar de U. No Girar a la Derecha. Solo Izquierda. Siga de Frente. FSLN." "No U Turn. No Right Turn. Only Left. Continue Forward. FSLN."