Noble Friend. Noble Death.

On October 27, 2006 my friend Brad Will was in Oaxaca, Mexico filming the intelligentsia uprising of a grass-roots movement to remove the local Provence of a bullshit governor.

On October 27, 2006 my friend Brad Will would wake up, as any other day, put his shirt on as he did any other day and go to work. Brad didn’t work in an office or a factory. Brad didn’t work to pay bills or develop habits that most of the other folks around him would. Brad worked to collect information, to shape it, to document. Brad was working for other people. For the people that for the most part had been ignored or drowned-out by louder voices and politicos, corporate industrial noise. He would walk with like-minded comrades. He didn’t know he was being followed, filmed, watched. He didn’t know, or maybe he did. It wouldn’t have deterred him from anything.

On October 27, 2006 my friend Brad Will was filming, camera in hand. Not a gun. Not a rock. Not a harsh word. Silently watching with eyes for everyone in a boxy extension of his hand.

On October 27, 2006 my friend Brad Will was shot dead.Brad was carrying a camera when he died. In his last footage he documents his assailants. They would later be named, Oaxaca government officials.Brad was wearing an Indymedia tee shirt. The “i” surrounded by double parenthesis. A black shirt. White screened logo mark. A perfect target.Brad was shot two times in the chest. He did not die immediately.Brad hardly knew Spanish.Brad hardly knew anyone in Mexico.Brad made quick friends.

Brad made fast enemies.

Brad’s friends’ enemies were quick to murder my friend.

Here

Photos from the post St. Marks Memorial procession

Learn more about Brad in the Village Voice cover story here

See excerpts of my video of the procession, and subsequent insurrection at CHAPAS/Bario Community Center here

and in front of the location of the 5th Street Squat, now raised

Further peaceful protest with the friendly 9th Street gardener

Democracy NOW! episode on Brad after the shooting

Brad was a good friend and activist that I have known since 1991, in Boulder. Last I saw of him was 2000-2001 in Prague, where he was part of the communications crew during the protests surrounding the IMF protests, codenamed s26.Brad utilized my flat in Prague as a center of information and to house much needed gas-masks during an unruley protest climate via the anti-globalization movements finest hours. Brad was one of the finest examples of the new-activism since Seattle in 1999. When I found out he was assassinated by corrupt Mexican government officals in Oaxaca while filming the teachers’ uprising and standoff since six months before, I knew I would have to be at his memorial. I knew he would have one. His personal reach was far and a well deserved tribute would happen.

I got to St. Mark’s Church, right as the memorial service was ending. So many people in this hall at St. Mark’s Church in The Bowery. More than I had expected. Brad’s personal items lain out to take – like parts of the WTC after 9/11 – people would search for just that small piece that memory demanded, a hat, tee-shirt, his Press Pass, or armband, anything personal. Anything intimate, that would connect them to everyone’s friend, everyone’s hero.

Talked to a few luminary friends I hadn’t seen in at least 5 years, some as long as 13 – strange that this man, this friend would bring us all together like this (again). Talked to Anne Waldman, cofounder of Naropa University’s Kerouac School, director emeritus of St. Mark’s Poetry Project now in it’s 31st year. Visited Ginsberg’s marker in the garden, shed a last tear for the old Lower East Side resident, my teacher and friend. Last I saw of Allen alive was there, in that garden and on Avenue A. Last I saw of Brad was Prague, Allen’s history there – Kral Majales (King of May,1965) Brad and I visited Narodni Trida (National Street), to pay homage to Allen there. Told Anne, Brad and my teacher at Naropa – Allen’s self professed “spiritual wife” – she had been seeing her friends die for so many years.. now she’s watching her “kids”. Something no mother, even of the cultural-sort, should have to see.Followed the funeral procession, with marching Band, up into Alphabet City. We snaked the streets. Up A, B, C. Down 1, 2, 3. Stopped at the old 5th Street squat location. Saw the City had tore it down, now high priced condos. Spiraled over the 9th street Bario/CHAPAS old community center – been there since 1965. Nuyorican inspired, now bought by a little man that shut down the community activities that made the site great. Broke the padlock. Wandered in. Some tagged “BRAD WILL PRESENTE!” or a circle A. The lock was replaced with our lock. Fitting. Reclaiming the community.

Ended at the 9th Street community garden, where folks gave talk of Brad. Saw people that I barely knew, but had been in my flat in Prague during IMF protest S26 y2k. Heard legendary stories. Mostly true. Grandiose notions of a man that was kinda what they said. Heard 13 years of friends talk about how this reaction. How people who barely knew him were inspired by an idea of who he was. And made me think how much he would have liked that. Fitting legacy. Spoke, said he was a “catalyst” and that he was, still, after death.

Went to Times Up on Houston. Critical Mass location/organization center. After-party there. Got closer to the variety of people that knew Brad. A filmmaker from LA, activists from Dreamtime village, Indymedia folks. Kids. Elder anarchists, old gardeners. Watched projected films of Brad speaking of his pirate radio show, singing protest anthems, being drug away by police for protests and raising arms triumphantly on top of a squat as it was being torn down. I drank a bottle of cheap wine from a discount wine shop. Didn’t get drunk. Walked past locations changed. Saw that a Saturday Night in the Bowery is the young upwardly mobile, with money and the artists, musicians and friends have all moved away (Williamsburg? Lower Losaida?).

I walked down Avenue A at 3AM and not once got stopped for money, not ONCE did I hear the familiar “smoke, smoke”. It was safe, too safe. I could walk around with my money in my hand, iPod in my ear. No fear. Disheartening somehow.

My old teacher and Lower East Side denizen, Allen Ginsberg, had written a poem about this place, “Charnel Ground” [download poem here], about the Lower East Side. His loft apartment on East 13th Street near First Avenue, he was in many regards an unremarkable figure, an old man with a relaxed gait and a bearded, bespectacled visage that looked ever so familiar. But to those who could put a name to the face, Mr. Ginsberg was larger than life, a bridge and throwback to the illustrious history of a place that he, as much as anyone else, had helped put on the cultural map. How this place is never hermetically sealed, things are building on the waste and rubble of the last burnt offerings. How the creative energies cannot be contained, and the organic revitalization of this city-of-cities life-force center of creative juice is ongoing until the Kali Yuga – in the pantheon of India’s many religions, the end. The city has done a great deal to contain the Lower East Side and it’s luminous residents. I feel it will never be the same. And in this… I am sad. Is it the end? A beginning?

And with Bradley Rowland Will, a martyr for the cultural work, maybe a new starting point emerges for the neo-mainstream. The fringe of an integrated journalism, art, and cultural activism has an icon of sorts. And who better than the smiling, laughing face of a documentarian-poet-cum-videographer and journalist who would never back down when he thought a story was unheard or a injustice was perpetrated on people doing “the good work”. May we all be as fearless, act small and be as large.

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Published:: November 21, 2006 / 5:54 am

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gabriel bear 11.21.06 / 10pm

“Activism” can be a damaging word to real revolution. Action requires thought, plan and execution.
This is the Kali Yuga…already over.just atarting.
Juga means, merely, yoke…the tool that cuases the power of the oxen to bring forth food and a better tomorrow.
Communication is the yoke of the revolution. When activists, revolutionaries and those who admit that we all want the same thing–a better tomorrow–will use to join with those who have been mislead by a promise of stasis.
The chalk on the sidewalks of alphabet city will meet a gentle rain that will return it to a sea so ever changed, so still the same, as when that chalk was alive in itself, instread of bringing to life the dreams of an artist.

voxpoet 11.22.06 / 10pm

Gabriel,

Anne Waldman writes of Charnel Ground in an issue of the Buddhist Trycycle:

“THE WORD “CHARNEL” derives from “carnal”-in or of the flesh. A charnel ground is a place where fleshly bodies are discarded after death, where vultures, jackals, ravens descend to feed upon the juicy raw meat, leaving bloodied severed limbs and bones strewn about. Heaps of bones pile up. The charnel ground is a cemetery, a highly visible boneyard. It is the ritual spot where tantric adepts perform the shamanic chod, or “cutting” practice (a meditation…)”

Allen’s “The Charnel Ground” poem reads, in the last lines:

“The whole point seems to be giving away the giver.”

And I suppose, that is what has been done to the resident-artists and forces of the Alphabets. But you don’t have to like who the sacrifice was fed to, now do you.

voxpoet 11.23.06 / 10pm

btw, Brad Will was on the NYPD’s R.N.C. hit list and featured as “one of the Top 50 Anarchists in America” on a special edition of ABC’s “Nighline”
http://www.thevillager.com/villager_73/anarchistssaysmearwere.html

gabriel bear 11.24.06 / 8pm

the Zoroastrians understood something:
th birds, Her agents, remove the flesh, leaving the serpentine spine.
in europe, up til recently, 1/2 way between the sign that the sun would come back
the the proof that light and shadow dance, the remains of those gone would be diinterred to be excarnated
by Her birds, so that the Hagia Sophia could return to the hearth.
the manual labour was done by the crones and the about to be not-virgins.
:”But you don’t have to like who the sacrifice was fed to, now do you.”
prometheus tells ( even while his brother is saying, reopen the box to let out hope)
that 2 sacrifices need be offered, side by side, so that those who thinks they are gods choose totake the offal.

voxpoet 12.10.06 / 3pm

Brad Will was definately on a trajectory since the early 90s – many people are on a similar trajectory.

Brad and I met at The Jack Keroauc School of Disembodied Poetics, he paid for his tuition for his first summer by being known NYC anarchist Peter Lamborn Wilson, a.k.a Hakim Bey’s teaching assistant. I was Peter’s assistant the year before, and a paying BA/MFA student and by that time the program’s general assistant and assistant to then director, Anne Waldman. The trajectory that a fast-paced, rapid-fire activism-friendly education like The Keroauc School inspired and still inspires is hard to shake. Brad was one of the few that embraced it fully. We were close friends and collegues on a number of those early fronts. The article here spoke of the “wedding” during the Promise Keepers event in CUs stadium 1993, I was the “bridesmaid” to Brad’s soon-to-be wife, Pasq. We were also roomates for awhile, in a very odd situation, surely not his last. And I my apartment in Prague, Jenny Smith of the article was in NYC already, was the “home base” for his and a number of other people’s activities during the IMF protest in Prague, 2000.

History, if learned, is a necessary hinderence to immediacy. History gives us the tools to make saftey a particular priority – Brad in his own struggles often taught “non-violent activism” workshops, however, if the demand is greater than a face-to-face confrontation with the genderless-blue-baton protest techniques may not be enough preparation. The immediacy too of the internet and the speed of which information and reportage can, and is demanded to, travel (remember: travel is based on the same root as “travail” – meaning literally “trouble”) – via Indymedia here but it could be anything (blogs, vlogs, even this comment-forum) causes the well-intentioned among us to make rash choices.

I think it is well documented by now, even the most radical of his friends and collegues believe Brad may have made a very rash choice in going to Oaxaca. I won’t develop this point further, except to say I am not sure many would have went into the situation feet-first. His dedication to the philosophies of direct-activism and helping grassroots communities that need exposure pushed him headlong into a situation he couldn’t have anticipated. But maybe now, the still fledgling indie-journalism school will utilize some of the more traditional tools of the trade for the saftey of thier correspondents. It might change the nature of the first-response attitude, but it could thawart this kind-of intrusion on the working elements of a community to happen again.

I’ll close with this:

Brad Will considered himself an anarchist. His anarchy, his politics and idealism was defined by his relationships with notable figures in the community. As in all movements and philosophies, we are responsible for the lengths that individuals take to carry-out the principles of the mores of the community en masse. Brad was a catalyst, and as with any catalystic personality has seeming infinite energy to kick-start a situation. Let us that have less boundless energy and attention take a different approach and look at what this recent history teaches us in terms of making sure direct-action and reportage on the smallest scale remembers Brad Will.

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Noble Friend. Noble Death.

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