:: Music As Social Agitation Records::

:: Friday, September 10, 2004 ::

on the greyhound again, just got done dropping people off and picking people up in toledo, OH on our way from kent, OH to chicago, IL. toledo was were we had missed our connection last time through due to the bus being late and we decided just to express-line it to NYC. kent was alright, another mostly college town. lots of rich kids, a semi-historic looking downtown. mc homeless, aka matt, set up the show and it was at his friend julie's house. about 15 people showed up or were car-pooled there. the kids around here are super on top of their leftiness, and though many looked like normal dames and dudes, many were hard core socialists or hard core anarchists, etc. ohio is another swing state this year, and we had a nice debate on the car ride to the venue over how important it might be to vote for kerry (over nader or another). i think very. tim started the show off and then i followed and then mc homeless through down some words acapella style. i am eager to hear what it sounds like with beats behind it, it was pretty good stuff. then this kid jeff played some songs on julies electric guitar and ended a short set with "a boy named sue." julie was then inspired to play a couple instrumentals and that was that. the plan was to go to Noah's apartment and cook some food before heading back to matt's dorm to crash. noah was in the middle of moving out of his apartment though due to some black rot issue and so we went to this other kids house and noah cooked up a fine vegan dish, we also went and got a vegan pizza on top of that at this pizza bar place and i hung out with the apartment dude and this girl he was trying to pick up on. got a shot of whiskey. got sick of transient associations again. played tool's "anema," sinatras "when i was 17" and princes "1999." on the juke box. tonight was thursday, a big party night, and there were tons of kids out and about and we drove by a lot of frat parties as well. after eating we headed back to matts kinda quick since we had to get up early to get a ride to the bus station. maria, jeffs girlfriend, was kind enough to give us a ride early into akron (10 miles away) so we could catch our bus. and here we are. i am looking forward to chicago tonight, i guess mostly because i know what to expect since it is a bar show and such. this last batch of gigs have been house show oriented and that is a lot more socially taxing than a bar, and a lot more unpredicitable. yesterday, when it was warm and rainy outside, the driver had the heat fucking cranked. it sucked with irony. all other days have been freezing on the bus due to too much AC being blasted. of course, i also dont have much to wear in the warmth department since i have left all my warm clothes elsewhere, including my sleeping bag. last night was the worst night of "sleep" yet. hard, cold floor. AC going.arm for a pillow, windbreaker for a blanket. the third week out is always the toughest for me. that is when i really start to miss everyone and when i get frazzled by the new city everyday transience. the fourth week, and hopefully in this case tonight, things begin to be homeward bound and it makes it much easier, plus you start to get into more familiar parts of the country. anyways...

back to jail. lots of dialogue throughout the night as frustrated detainees chimed in at the frustrated cops on the other side of the grate. for many, many hours only about 5-6 people were being moved along each hour. the funniest thing was probably the solidarity clapping and cheering that would take place when any of the female inmates, who were being detained in another big room like this, were brought into the medic area in our room. often times these cheers sounded like catcalls and it was kind of funny. we had sporadic phone access in this third cell finally. a cop would log in who wanted to make a call and then dial it for them and allow about 10 people every hour or so to make calls. i called the Legal Justice Center folks on a couple of occasions to try and get word on my one concern of having out of state warrants. i called tim as well, to give him an update on what had happened. about the only thing they told me was not to tell them that over the phone. many of the cops spent many consecutive hours passed out in the chairs outside the cells. just waiting like us to get there shit processed. i did not see my officer throughout the night at all. one time i awoke and saw a glimpse of him and figured he would be here for now and so i wanted a few minutes to call him over and see what our status was. he was gone for several hours before i saw him again. the cells were a cig smoke stained yellow. there were benches around the outside. the rooms were about 20 feet by 30 feet or so and there was at many times, more than 60 of us crowded in. it was nearly impossible for us all to even sit down anywhere and lucky were the ones who passed out length-wise on the floor first. early in the am, probably about 1 or so, things started to pick up a bit and more and more of us were being released to the next stage. everyone started to get increasingly anxious to be moved along. most people were able to see/chat with there officer to get an update. apparently the drama was that the officer had to go with all his detainees at once to booking and so it was a matter of finding the five people they arrested and getting their paper work all together. it was another two hours before i saw my office again. his named kept getting called while he was gone too, which meant that his papers were coming up if he was just there enough to get them. when we chatted he said he was a long ways away from getting everything together, so sit tight. he kept moving in and out, probably just as tired as me, he had been working since noon the day we got arrested. on two occasions i had to shout out his name so he could hear from the hallway that his papers were getting called. finally, at about 4am or so i was called out and handcuffed to a chain of four others. it was so nice to be able to move this freely. we were led to the fingerprinting area and i began to freak out here again about the whole prior record thing and being detained longer because of it. i had one bench warrant out for past court fines and another for an incident involving a BB gun and a non-moving vehicle in the spring time. they had the high-tech fingerprinting machines, no-ink, just laser-imaging and high-speed connection to a national database. after finger-printing they brought us to a smaller, yet more barred cell that put the prisoners on each of the long walls and had a middle cage for visitors, perhaps lawyers or family or whatever. on the other wall was a group of women who were at the same point in the process as us. some chats occurred about how everyone was doing and after a half hour we were called out again. it was no time for the mug shot. it was a longer walk to the basement to get the mug shot and apparently at this point we were entering the real realm of the corrections department. it was also here that we first came in contact with other arrestees and prisoners. while waiting in line the guard, older and pretty nice, spent 20 minutes scaring the shit out of us about how much we were gonna get messed with once we made it into a cell-block. i was pretty much shitting my pants, not so much from his dialogue, but just realizing i might be one of the few protesters to get left in the system for awhile. behind me was a kid who was in the same boat, as he had been arrested on friday for protesting and was released with a DAT (date to appear ticket) which gained him his release, for now, but prohibited him from returning without hard consequences. we were both pretty sure we would be there for another couple days and set loose with all the normal patrons (said to be murderers, rapists, psychos, etc). the CO's were pretty harsh and blunt, as they have to be, and they had a fun time with all us soft-skinned babies for the next 12 hours. got our mug taken, and then lined up to be brought into a cell block. after 20 minutes we were lead into the pistachio green cell block and all the familiar faces surrounded us. we were welcomed by the familiar cheers and claps. we had phones here in each cell and i called tim and the LJC folks again and again didn't learn anything. the CO's were really having fun with us, yelling at us excessively and being generally pissed off for having to deal with 1500 of us. after a few quick medical questions, we were moved across the hallway to another cell. it appeared that there were 12 of these small cells down the hallway, and the center of the passage way was the desks and working center for the CO's. another batch of sandwiches and fruit and milk was brought to us and one cell, in solidarity with the palestinian prison hunger strike apparently decided they were not gonna eat any food. apparently soy bologna exists and apparently we were offered it. some people tried it, but no one really believed it was veggie. apparently bloomberg had told the press that we were gonna be giving boca burgers in jail. that is funny on so many levels. a major thread of the dialogue between protesters and cops that week was that the cops were on our side, they had been fighting (and protesting) for a new contract and the protesters often reminded them of that with chants like "come join us" and many anti-bloomberg things. our whole cell block took to chanting, and randomly shouting fuck bush, fuck bloomberg. back in the yellow cells upstairs, there was this kid with a funny accent. when we were given cereal and milk to eat, he wanted more rice crispies, what he called in the funniest of accents "crispies." "can i get some more crispies" sounded hilarious enough, but when we all took to protesting chants he would often change the nouns in the chant to crispies, and we soon followed his lead. "what do we want? CRISPIES! when do we want them? NOW!" was some funny ass shit. anyways, a lot of chanting happened in the green cells and at times we had the upper hand. the CO's were not as easy to ignore us when singled out and yelled at and there were some heated shouting matches. i think what pissed the CO's off the most was the special treatment. everyone on their side, and our side, was completely blown away at how much off a failure the set-up to get us processed and through the system was. of course, this was the single largest amount of people arrested in one day for them ever, and we were part of the largest protest the streets of NY had ever seen. (or something close to that). that was a good feeling. so word came down from the CO's and through the telephone wires that lawsuits were being filed against the city to get us immediately released and that it was likely to succeed, apparently a lawsuit was also being filed against our treatment (both for the pier conditions and for the length of our jailtime). they are not supposed to keep you more than 24 hours without arraignment (though they claimed that normal inmates sometimes went days before it). i was never read my rights, though i think they didn't have to for some reason. anyways, this cell was the most cramped and the most uncomfortable and everyone was exhausted and trying to sleep, which didn't work to well. they started to call people out again and at a somewhat quick rate and, for the first time, i was one of the first half of people called. we were told we were being taken to see a legal advisor and then to see the judge. fuck yes (even though my hands began to sweat at this point over the warrants). we were brought to another cell in another part of the jail, these were beige and fit five of us. with me know was one of the protesters who actually got into the convention and made a spectacle in front of all of madison square garden (not during bush's speech of course he was not set to speak until the morning) throughout jail, it was kind of hinted that we were being detained so long to keep us off the streets. i dunno, it seemed like the system was just not set to handle all of us. i do know that many cops admitted that they would be cracking down exceptionally hard on thursday and they would have no tolerance for deviance. we were also threatened that if we were arrested again things would be a lot different. after 15 minutes there, my lawyer (i requested an LJC one) arrived. i immediately asked her about the warrants and she seemed to think it wouldn't come up, since they were trying hard to get everyone out now and plus she had apparently all the paper work the judge would have in front of her and she didn't see any mention of warrants. five minutes later, at 2:45pm, i was sitting off to the side in the air-conditioned courtroom watching the judge make 30 second decisions, all the same, all for conditional releases that as long as we didn't get in trouble in the next six months charges would be dropped, and two minutes later i was thanking my lawyer, thanking god after two hours of sweaty nervousness and walking out the courtroom a free man... -matt

:: brs 2:24 AM [+] ::
...