USSF: The Journey Continues!
Hi folks! As I type this, Suzanne and I are sitting here inside of Cobo Hall at the US Social Forum at the AK table, and trying to blog in-between customers, visits from AK authors, and other assorted friends who have been dropping by. In case you were wondering, the Social Forum is intense! There really are thousands of people wandering around Detroit wearing neon orange wristbands and attending the hundreds of great workshops, panels, cultural events, and, of course, meetings taking place in a variety of locations. Of course, we’ve been too busy tabling to get to many of the events, though Suzanne managed to sneak away from the table for a little while this afternoon to speak at the “Popularizing Radical Politics” panel hosted by the Institute for Anarchist Studies and the Friendly Fire Collective.
The tables have been packed all day, and as expected, we sold out of Detroit, I Do Mind Dying midway through the day today, and we’re starting to run low on The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.
That’s Jessica working behind the table there. We just hired her to be our new marketing & publicity guru, and though she doesn’t start officially working for AK until July, she decided to come along to the USSF and help out at the tables (which totally saved our butts)! Check out this wide expanse of table frontage we scored in Cobo Hall, the epicenter of the USSF (also where the Detroit auto show is held … ie, it’s huge.)
Yesterday (Tuesday, which was the first day of the USSF, which included the opening plenary in the evening, and a mass march through the streets of Detroit) we also had a booth outside on Hart Plaza which is adjacent to Cobo Hall, and also hosts the cultural stages. It was an interesting experience, and quite a bit slower and more low-key than Cobo Hall, which is like a beehive of activity at all times. It was also extremely windy, being right on the water, and on several occasions we had to stop out tent from blowing away!
Today it was muggy and rainy, so we opted to forego the outside table. The jury’s still out on whether we’ll open up outside again tomorrow (Thursday). It’s nice being able to switch from inside to outside throughout the day, but we’re short-staffed, even with the help of Jessica, and John (pictured above), since all of us are speaking on panels and workshops in addition to tabling … and maybe attending a workshop we’re not part of … maybe. We’ll report back on that tomorrow.
We had visits from lots of great AK authors today. Craig Hughes and Stevie Peace came by the table today to pick up copies of their brand-new book, Uses of a Whirlwind, which we had rush-shipped from the printers so that it would be here in time. Craig & Stevie led a workshop this afternoon that was packed to the gills, and the book has been selling like crazy! Team Colors has another workshop on Friday, and will officially launch the book on Friday night at the collective book release party at the New World From Below Convergence Space at 7PM.
The always lovely Chris Spannos came and volunteered a few hours at the table this afternoon, helping us tremendously and telling us about some of the new projects he’s been thinking about and working on. Exciting stuff, as always!
Jeff Conant came by the table today and got to see his brand-new book A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency for the very first time! This is another one we rush-shipped to have here in Detroit for the Forum, and I was lucky enough to be able to capture that exciting moment … a joy, because we usually don’t get to see our authors see their books for the first time!
Seth Tobocman also came by the table for a few hours, and signed copies of You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, Disaster & Resistance, and Understanding the Crash, his latest, co-authored with Eric Laursen.
All in all, it’s been a lovely day for us, but we need food, and we need beer, and we need to go and dig through the left over stock from Allied Media Festival to replenish our tables for tomorrow, so we’ll sign off for tonight. Tomorrow: the saga of the outdoor table continues, Grace Lee Boggs talks with Immanuel Wallerstein (!), I talk about Direct Democracy with the IAS, Friendly Fire Collective, Firestorm Infoshop, and others, and we continue to wish we’d brought more copies of Detroit, I Do Mind Dying! Until then, dear readers …