Imagine that a peculiar species of mold was growing in the walls of your house. Now imagine that you could somehow shrink yourself down and explore that mold, directly encountering the alien shapes that make up its microscopic structures. Finally, imagine that you were able to enter those structures to discover that deep within the invisible folds of the mold’s cells, tiny creatures living inside the mold were having some sort of outrageous underground party. This is one way to attempt to describe the Autonomous Mutant Festival. Another way to describe the Autonomous Mutant Festival would be to say that it is a self-organizing, spontaneous conspiracy to commit a festival, held once a year incognito in the national forest system, at time and place determined by anonymous group vote somewhere out in the wilds of the internet. And finally yet one other way of describing the Thirteenth Annual Autonomous Mutant Fest, which took place in Umpqua National Forest, Southern Oregon, the first week of July in 2009, would be to say that it was the place where, for the first time in my life, I found myself face to face with a real, live, dead human body.
Arrival
I arrive at the Autonomous Mutant Festival at three in the morning. I am in the forest. It is extremely dark. I have been following a list of directions, hastily transcribed onto the back of a wax-paper muffin bag. I peer into the headlights cone-view of the Forest Service dirt road ahead of me and hope that I am not lost. I passed the last town hours ago, filled up on gas, and vanished into the forests of eastern Oregon. Up ahead someone has tied a pale red raver’s glowstick to a road-sign that simply reads “FSR 080” . Adjacent to it someone has made a tee-pee of sticks, decorated with a piece of cardboard displaying a welcoming skull and a sign saying “Mutant Fest”. Mutant Fest is asleep. I follow the looping dirt road into the night and through the silent sleeping tents of the first arrivals at the Autonomous Mutant Festival. Somewhere in the night there is music, a constant electronic thrumping-beat, that follows creepy shafts of light coming through the trees. Somewhere ahead of me are the shifting lights of what appear to be a flying saucer, parked in secret within a circle of conifer trees. Sophisticated speaker setups and a DJ table decorated like a pagan ritual altar provide eerie beats and creepy party noises.
Vignette #1
What would it be like to wander into the forest, off on a fishing trip or a camping vacation, and stumble accidentally on one of the strangest gatherings of freaks, weirdoes, anarchists and fiendish party enthusiasts ever to gather in the national forests? Some days into the middle of the festival and needing to clear my head, I am walking down the road, when a truck with its trailer pulls up beside me to inquire. “Who are those people?”, A woman with a face full of slightly mind-blown wonder and her mind-blown husband. They saw “back there”. Who are “They” Note: I look reasonably normal. “That’s the Autonomous Mutant Festival Ma’am. Gentle mutants from all over the country. Once a year they meet in the forest to hold their techno-music parties. No one knows when. They have no leaders and no rules.” The woman’s eyes were wide open in amazement. “They all smiled and waved”, she says. “They all seemed like such.. such nice people.” I mention that the festival was open to all, and that they were welcome to pop by anytime. They drive off shaking their heads. I try to imagine what the scene down the road might have looked like through their eyes. Driving down the national forestry service road, off to camp in their trailer, they see first one car, and then another, parked by the side of the road; ruined jalopies, dust-choked trucks with strange symbols drawn in the dust of their rear windows, fancy sports utility vehicles, decrepit vans full of mandalas and fuzzy dice. And then the people – peering out of the forest, strolling along the road, with dreadlocks, psychedelic haircuts, braided beards, torn and elaborate clothes, impossible jewelry, complex codices of tattoos, old people, young people, little children holding their mother’s spider-web enshrouded hands, gypsy boys in overalls playing banjoes and hauling electronic gear, dressed in rags and chains, and smiling, all of them smiling and waving, from the side of the road.
Vignette #2
S.P.A.Z., the Semi-Permanent Autonomous Zone, is the Bay Area anarchist collective that conceived of and still provides much of the motivational infrastructure for the Autonomous Mutant Festival. As I understand it, AMF basically started out as a party that SPAZ members held in the woods for themselves and their friends. Being radical anarchists they quickly decided to saturate the telephone poles of San Francisco and Oakland with flyers announcing a free and law-less music party in the forest, and at present the festival is in its thirteenth year and has grown to approximately five to six hundred people in attendance. It’s hard to say exactly of course, because there are no tickets, no lists, no registers and no control of any sort over the proceedings. What you see at AMF is what you get, because there is no documentation giving it any official existence besides the evidence of your senses — evidence that, considering what most folks are up to at AMF, would certainly present some difficulties were it to be presented in court. Pioneers in nomadic techno-parties and innovative urban survival designs (how do you work it out so that over a dozen people can live in an illegal warehouse with no legitimate plumbing facilities and not have everyone die of botulism?), the entire operation is kept on the run by zoning and code enforcement. One way to think about it is that city codes and ordinances are there to keep the entire community safe and healthy. Another way of looking at it is to acknowledge that in this society it’s basically illegal to put together a way of living that doesn’t involve making or spending money. Groups like SPAZ are trying to create pockets of temporary time and space where people can have intense and potentially life-changing experiences, which are in no way mediated, organized, or controlled by anyone else. Events that can’t be counted don’t get measured, and aren’t documented or documentable.
Vignette #3
Years ago, at one of the SPAZ parties, Flip, my German hipster friend was stunned. Invisible Jim (who I will introduce in a moment) appeared to be connecting a vivisected Fisher-Price “Speak-N -Spell” to a set of speakers. Was he trying to fix the device? wondered Flip. “I’m not trying to fix it. I’m trying to break it in an interesting way..”, said Invisible Jim. Not trying to fix it, but trying to break it in an interesting way could be held to be a general motto for a lot of the SPAZ-kids’ attitudes toward civilization in general.
AMF and Burning Man
One way to describe the Autonomous Mutant Festival is to define it in opposition to Burning Man. It seems difficult to discuss AMF without engaging in at least a cursory discussion of the difference between it and the at this point legendary alternative lifestyle inferno occurring ever year in the deserts of Nevada. The Autonomous Mutant Festival is not Burning Man and there seems to be some hostility towards the latter expressed by devotees of the former. BM’s international fame and wild popularity has transformed it into something like the Cirque du Soleil of anarchist festivals. Like the corporate circus giant, BM has played a major role in revitalizing and re-popularizing its medium (circuses or festival gatherings respectively). Also, like Cirque du Soleil, BM is viewed by many to be a one-time maverick, which now had become the establishment, devolving into a system of inflexible cliches, or at least to having become a copy of a copy of itself, maintained primarily by the image of its own fame. Like CDS, BM is extremely expensive, with ticket prices in the many hundreds of dollars, and so although BM defines itself as a “radically inclusive” experience whose “meaning” is potentially accessible to “anyone” (according to their website), the economic realities surrounding it have tended to stream-line the populations attending it into fairly affluent, solid-citizen types who come annually to blow off some Dionysian steam before re-submerging into their jobs and families. BM defines itself, according to its mission statement, as “a society that connects each individual to his or her creative powers, to participation in community, to the larger realm of civic life, and to the even greater world of nature that exists beyond society.” SPAZ defines Burning Man (by at least one post on their communal web-site) as “the annual mating season for alt-yuppies and ravers looking for an expensive drug binge. Additionally, Burning Man is full of police, which is not okay according to many of the anarchists, even the ones who are not up to anything illegal. Burning Man has facilities, toilets, first aid, etc. AMF has none of this management-provided infrastructure. Bathroom facilities must be dug by hand. BM is bring your own water. AMF is bring your own water and toilet paper.
How I Got Here
I am here with Invisible Jim. In fact, the only reason that I have any inkling that ANY of this exists, from the AMF to the anarcho-dervish lifestyle philosophers to the existence of groovy techno-occultists from Alaska, is because Invisible Jim and I met in an experimental computer-art project our freshman year of high-school. Back then, Invisible Jim would take me to parties where bank robbers smoked hookah pipes on oriental carpets on the straw front lawns of Oakland occultist houses, full of magicians and speed freaks. Back in those days I wore a suit and tie to high school every day. Invisible Jim is my on-again-off-again Virgil of the underground. A hyper-distractible genius guide to the great big circus of underground culture. He arrives in a spindly collection of dapper earth-tone coats, vests, and argyle socks. Contrary to popular rumor and a few vertiginous moments of panic, it turns out that Invisible Jim has not been killed in a highway crash. About Invisible Jim I once wrote: “Invisible Jim called the other day to say that he was in New York, trying to impress a girl. Voodoo gods have commanded me to spend this entire month wearing white and pouring milk over my head. Yesterday I walked into the only occult supply store in Olympia and asked the girl at the cash register for a rainbow flag and nine pine-wheels. It was her first day on the job. Can you help me get ballet tickets? By the way, I highly recommend that you check out a Siberian herb called Rhodiola. It’s an adaptogen. It helps you adapt to your environment. By the way! I have almost convinced several graduate schools that I am normal. They will give me much money and I will spend it all in the name of research. Gotta run.” He hung up. The next time I saw him he’d filled a barn with floating candles and configured powerful speakers to produce hypnotic webs of sound in four directions at once. There he was preparing a lecture on how tiny bugs will clean up toxic waste and how invisible organic space-ships can destroy disease. Earlier this year, Invisible Jim was admitted to Stanford University for graduate studies in science.
Campfire Cookouts With The Semi-Secret Sound Societies
Invisible Jim and I pitch our camp with the Katabatik sound-system. There, Goths cluster around pots of lentils, hoisting banners of glowing robots and squid god DJs, celebrating the pleasure of being alive, together in the woods, thriving in the midst of total madness. Almost everyone at Katabatik is dressed in black, ranging from gruff paramilitary style boots and jackets, to girls in elaborately layered gothic-lace dresses, dyed pink hair done up to make them look like wicked children’s dolls. This is Katabatik, and there is an aesthetic that lurks beneath the dimly lit trees, and shines on the speaker system beneath an enshrouding tent, draped in dark images of ghostly octopi. Slowly the sonic-devotees of H.P. Lovecraft and William Burroughs are assembling their speakers and ghostly banners around the future dance-hall of the forest floor. In the communal kitchen, I cook cabbage, carrots and kale in a stir fry.”Yummy kale!” say the electronic-music occultists.
Elaborate Taxonomies Abound
Slimewave, death trance, abandoned house, zombient, satanic disco, weirdcore, tentacle funk, queasy-listening, funereal lounge, and other are all musical styles which one might encounter at the Katabatik sound-system, according to an older poster. Who knows what kind of music they are making now. The fact is that most of the people making music at Mutant Fest are so far out into the frontiers of technological research and experimental taste that even they don’t have anything resembling systematic labels for what they do. It’s rare though, to find yourself there and listening to anything that doesn’t make you want to dance, although it’s important that by “want to dance” I’m assuming a broad envelope of what “dance” means. Some of the music seems to be chill out lounge music , if chill out lounges happened underwater and were peopled exclusively by electric squid. Several days later, when the festival is in full swing, I mention to Invisible Jim how much I liked what I describes as “the techno-tracks playing at dawn over at the SPAZ camp earlier that night.” Invisible Jim corrected my use of the term techno. He said “DJ Dimentia was spinning at SPAZ that night. He would call that stuff electro-with-hella-analog-synth-leads. I think of techno as being more minimal, like stripping music down to the most basic elements necessary to make it impossible to not shake your ass.” Elsewhere in the festival, other sound-systems play other styles. Olytopia, along with Christmas lights, pillows and huge stuffed animals, provides elaborate noise collages under a parachute-enshrouded geodesic dome. Monkey-Town plays more conventional hip-hop, reggae and dance-music all day long (“boooring” say the cryptic hipsters). Not far from Katabatik I can hear the sometimes abrasive thrumping-speakers of Magical Unicorn Landistan, from Ashland, Oregon. Many of the sound-systems I never even manage to find. Everyone sets up in the woods wherever they feel like, or wherever they can find space.
Fun Quote From A Prominent Elder Member of SPAZ
A little known fact about AMF, is that every year now since 2007 someone has signed a Forest Service permit. Often the signer uses an assumed name, and the festival itself has been given various names. For example, in 2005 a Forest Service permit was signed by Scott Baio for an event called “The Ronald Reagan Memorial Campout”. The rangers’ attitude seems to be essentially, “please someone, anyone sign this piece of paper so I can tell my boss that someone signed this piece of paper.” Occasionally the rangers will patrol main roads and make minor drug busts and write tickets for vehicle violations. They’ve never attempted to infiltrate camp areas. I think it’s kind of cool that no one really knows what the deal is with the rangers. And for what it’s worth, it can be a different deal depending on who you are and if you are stupid enough to get in trouble with them by doing something sketchy on a main road within their view.
Crusties and Dirt-Fucks
AMF is like a very small nomad city, and it too has its bad neighborhoods. While staggering from camp to camp in the post-arrival early morning, Invisible Jim and I are howled at by filthy fiends encamped over dying punk-rock fires. They have crazy hair. They are drinking beer at dawn. They are dirty hippie road kids, some with young beards and disintegrating long-sleeved rainbow sweaters. Some in patchwork military surplus with bedrolls stuffed into backpacks, hand-rolling cigarettes.”Wake up and rage!” one of them howls, banging on arrhythmic drums at dawn. They are here, free, void of the apparatus of support, and impatient for the party to start. The party engineers, meanwhile, are asleep, or deeply grumpy about still being awake, because they have a lot of work to do before any kind of relevant madness can start. At first I feel inferior to the counter-culture. They are all cooler, better, more authentic, stronger, more likely to survive the apocalypse than I am. Later I will be totally over it. The crusties are one manifestation of the idea of anarchy and freedom. People unwilling, or in many cases, unable to live in a world that is fake, pre-packaged and for sale. They don’t work, have no money, and are basically modern hobos — a cultural phenomena that as far as this amateur researcher can tell was never born and never died. From Tang dynasty Taoist drop-outs to Huckleberry Finn, it’s something that humans have always done and will always do unless life on this planet radically changes. The crusties are also assholes, by and large, or at least they certainly are from point of view of the people trying to create these temporary festival utopias In general the crusty relationship to festivals is this: (1) The festival organizers arrive, section off space, coordinate the flows of set-up and the creation of barriers (those which keep the festival separate from the outside world and those which keep one section of the festival separate from another, etc.) followed by: (2) the crusty feral train-hop panhandler set arrives and sets up their own camps outside the bounds of the official festival, living off of the waste, discards and hand-outs of the festival. (Many hippie festivals forbid alcohol, and the crusties tend to be heavy drinkers, hence their formation of external enclaves). However, in the case of AMF, sans organizers, tickets, or impermeable barriers of (hardly) any kind, the patterns of growth and distribution of space between festival-insiders and outsiders is much different. There are no “outsiders” here, but there are populations deeply invested in producing environments of a certain physical and philosophical quality. This as opposed to populations that basically don’t give a shit, and are here to rage, drink, leer at women, socialize with each other and throw all their garbage in random directions. It’s a problem that has been growing every year since the festival began to attract many or more people than originally founded it. One issue this year is that the sound-systems are late. The networks of information feeding into AMF are changing. Early AMF was advertised mostly by flyer and word-of-mouth. Now its location and identity are disseminated over the internet. For this reason, the crusties are hearing about it and showing up before any of the mutants arrive (they certainly have less to carry). The problem with the crusties is not that they are young and angry. Most of the mutants are young and angry too. The problem is that they are pan-handling the mutant-sound-anarchists, strewing the forest with garbage and filth, and getting crazier and more threatening in their behaviors. One frustrating issue is that Mutant Fest by self-definition is open to all, and anyone who wants to can show up. Another complexity is that many of the mutant-sound-anarchists used to be crusties themselves. So while everyone finds the crusties obnoxious, no one is willing to totally write them off. As the festival progresses, however, tensions mount. This year is particularly tense seeing as the sound-systems are late and the crusties were early. Thus SPAZ, which almost always, as in this case did, arrives early, but is immediately emulsified by a thick layer of crusty camps. Forest meadows generally are the footprints left by extinct lakes or ponds, and so the fingers of forested land extending into the meadow are what were once peninsulas surrounded by water. They are now surrounded by bog, which is still fairly impassable by anyone who does not want to become covered in mud and be attacked by clouds of blind, idiot, blood-addicted bugs. The SPAZ camp is at the very tip of the largest of these peninsulas serviced by the forest service road network, and should be the heart of the festival. It still is, more or less, but it’s covered, as mentioned before, by a fairly foul caking of arteriole plaque, the thick morass of crusty camps which by the end of the festival, people have been referring to as “crack-alley”; (whether owing to confirmed sightings of crack-use or not I cannot say), and which most people who are not crusties chart alternative routes and pathways to expressly avoid. But one by one the sound-systems arrive. Soon they will displace the “dirt-fucks”; I use this term because it is a term I hear people use. It is also a “class-issue”; Young folk with nothing, hitching rides up and down the 101 to Grass Valley, CA, get stuck in Sacramento, say “fuck this town”, and keep it real, living the intense and savage life. Crusties are not equally snarly towards everyone. They can’t be. They depend on others for transportation. Crusties make their way around by recognizing flows of hostile and welcoming cultural zones. This can be as simple as knowing what cities and towns are friendly towards road kids or which will run you out of town. As fixed as a city, neighborhood or knowledge of a system of squats or safe-houses. It can be as abstract as knowing that certain highways at certain times of the year are more or less likely to yield rides and avoid trouble. Or the knowledge of the nonlinear calendars of festivals and gatherings where they stand a chance of mooching, meeting new people, getting free handouts and getting to enjoy a crazed rave. But now the sound systems are arriving and the crusties are running out of food, booze and tobacco, so many will hit the road. The counter-culture is vast and uncountable. How would the sheriffs clear us out of here? There are no leaders, no registers, no tickets, no rules. We’d be like trying to pick up water with your hands. Of course, there is no “We”. Concurrently, there is no “They”. One cannot say “Goddamn dirt-fucks, what’s up with them?” There is no “Them”..
I Try To Take It All In
I’m sitting in a psychedelic Bedouin tent, attended to by Persian carpets and citronella candles, listening to overlapping layers of techno sound systems blending through the forest, contemplating my day. Here are a few vignettes: Walking through the edges of the SPAZ camp feels like stepping into a slightly alternative parallel universe. Folks cook food together and have set up an elaborate and sensible dish-washing station. Kids bounce outside on a trampoline by the laundry lines. Under a parachute dome with one of the founders of SPAZ, we recline on cushions and help brilliant children solve puzzles. The whole scene seems so wholesome that I almost want to cry. A bald man in a leather skirt with a spike through his neck is pouring syrup over blueberry-pancakes. Nearby somewhere I overhear: “Oh, the Countess wasn’t satirical. She was hard-core, hard-core in the way that only a beautiful heroin-addict named “The Countess” who played in an immaculate Goth band called “the Necro-Sluts” could be…” The band at Katabatik is set to go on, but Chains the hermetic woodcut shaman accordionist and lead singer, is missing. Backstage in the kitchen, sloth and intoxication are debated as being the most likely explanation for the young alchemist’s disappearance. By the time he is found and has donned his white cartoon wolf-mask, a crowd of gothic silhouettes mutter and cheer beneath the dimly lit trees. Chains starts his sculptured moaning and renaissance howling, while dark figures (the rest of the band) whose dim purple LED head-lamps shine like alien eyes in the dark, manipulate synthesizers. Chains traces a figure in the air with a sprig of smoldering herbs. The entire scene is lit by one green light. Serious dancing ensues. The next morning I slump in the kitchen and listen to records of Vincent Price relating the secret occult history of WWII. Similarly slumped, Chains giggles. It’s getting colder. Strange sounds are coming in from all directions. Last night Invisible Jim danced his heart out at the disco, red siren lights flashing on the sound system that wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t risked everything in some unspecified intrigue. Underground life is fun for some, but the value of fun depends on your circumstance. There are fiercely compromised individuals howling away at this party-within-a-party. People who deal daily with addiction, poverty, crime, loving people who are extremely difficult, etc. etc. If you don’t put your whole soul into what you are doing, Invisible Jim says, shaking off his demons on the dance floor, it means that either you’re a coward or you have no soul. I felt very much like a coward. Last night at SPAZ, I overcame my shy kick and rocked out with the blue electric juggling balls to flashing red lights and minimalist techno. Later a crazed clown with a thick beard and I had a deranged contact improvisation dance jam, trying to play catch with glowing balls while the clown in his day-glow orange striped suit experienced some kind of a seizure. Over at Monkey-Town sound-system I did cryptic I-Ching torch-light ba-gua juggling (a very precise and technical term) and gave circus lessons to a young mind-blown hippie raver who looked like a teenage Cat Stevens with glow-sticks.
Last Night I Was In The Group That Found The Body
The dead body is found at the edge of the meadow. One of the girls from the gothic ritual band, with dark star makeup around her eyes comes out of the woods calling for help, screaming as loud as she can, which isn’t very loud. We all run over. Invisible Jim and I have known each other since we were fourteen. Our birthdays are two weeks apart. Now, a month before we both turn thirty, we rush out of the pavilion towards the crying Goth girl and, together, discover our first dead body. At the edge of the bog, by the tall swamp grasses, currently marked with the Sheriff’s tape, a corpse is lying face down, up to his earrings. His pants are found later. His dead back is cold and filthy. Seattle Scott is brave enough to lay his hand on the corpse’s shoulder blade and announce, “he’s stiff”. At the thirteenth Autonomous Mutant Festival, by the edge of the bog, face down for at least the six hours needed for rigor mortis to set in, one of the crusty-punks is dead. From a speaker system somewhere, Frank Sinatra plays across the meadow. The more experienced camps shut down early and are dark before morning. Only Monkey-Town and the Oregon puppet-punks called Magical Unicorn Landistan still play music. For the most part people sheltered around chiaroscuro fires and grouped under lights or in dark shadows, badly shaken. I sit around a fire with the girl who found the body and her boyfriend, drinking home-made Absinthe. Dealers and users hide their stashes as the call is made to the authorities, but when the sheriffs arrive no one is shaken down. “Overdoses happen at festivals”, the authorities are reported to say. They find the body’s ID. They say they have located the parents. No one knows what was the cause of death. Everyone gets to find out what happens when you die. Not everyone gets to find out what happens when you discover a dead body in the forest. My first reaction was a total blank. Crickets chirping in an empty head. Somewhere or other the dull sub-vocalization that “this is happening”. Eventually followed by a single sentence. “I suppose some people see this every day.” Suddenly this has become a “serious” experience. It has become about attitudes towards life and death. How do I feel when I see a dead person? How did the people around me feel? In the face of these slices of actual, irreversible reality, everyone present gets to discover the private answer to the question “what kind of a person am I when something real happens?” There’s no way to read about it, or vicariously absorb it through the movies. I was there when the body was rolled over. I saw the face and the blood. Half a dozen of us stood around the corpse by the edge of the meadow. I expect everyone present saw something different in that dead mirror.
Conclusions
So what now? What does this mean for anarchy and freedom? What does this mean for raging mystic transformative dance parties in the woods? Will it be in the papers? Will people stay or clear out? Is this the Mutant Festival’s Altamont Speedway? – The Rolling Stones free concert where the Hell’s Angels stabbed a man to death in front of the stage and the sixties dream that rock music and ecstatic parties could positively transform human consciousness basically ended?
One problem is made very clear in the festival’s aftermath. Whatever philosophies and intentions gathered everyone to the edge of the meadow, huge piles of garbage were left behind for the spaz kids to clean up. Sanitation has become a major issue. Mutant Fest enjoys an excellent reputation among the forestry service rangers because, although it does not bother seeking permits or permissions, it always cleans up very well after itself. The ratios, however, are changing between the founding individuals who are willing to stay and make sure that the site is left as immaculate as possible, and the free-loaders who show up, take advantage and then piss off leaving ravines full of trash. Fights are happening. People feel threatened and harassed. Now AMF has experienced its first dead body.
Later, wandering around the huddled clumps of people at Katabatik, which have shut down and do not reopen before I leave, occult musicians under green light discuss social strategies and communal coping mechanisms. Volunteer emergency tripping disaster rangers? Eyewitnesses say the guy had been spun and deranged all evening, smashing himself into trees, verbally assaulting women. His friends had all cleared out. As I pack to leave the festival I move from conversation to conversation. Should the festival cease to announce its presence and coordinated over the internet? Should the location only be made public at the last minute, so as to give the sound-systems and core-members a chance to set up first? Should a system of volunteer rangers be set up to deal with conflicts and individuals who are losing it? One positive conclusion about all of this is that events like AMF provide slices of reality, which are not always pleasant, and clearly contain the potential for danger and tragedy, but which nevertheless are real experiences and not merely representations or simulations of real experiences. Thus, while more and more commentators, critics and concerned self-aware people are talking more and more about the crises of information-overload and image-overload (where no one is directly connected to their own experience. Always on-line. Always on hold. Remote controlling, remote consuming, unwilling or unable to express sincerity, crippled by irony, etc.) AMF is, at least in my own experience, an actual antidote to this. An actual authentic experience that wasn’t “made possible” by the good folks of anywhere (more or less). If AMF is an organism, can it evolve an appropriate and adaptable immune system? If it does, will it become just another official anarchist party with tickets and a board of directors? The bottom line is, despite the growing problems there is also a growing community of people who want experiences like this to survive and continue. Maybe it’ll need to shed its name. Maybe it’ll need to take on a different form. As I haul my bags up to the car, I pass through a collection of shocked mutants huddled together by the main stage at Katabatik. From the concerned organic mass of opinion I hear the following. “Maybe it’s time for the Autonomous Mutant Festival to mutate into something else…
David Bernbaum
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