Post by XiaoDi on Aug 31, 2004 9:14:04 GMT -5
Alternative Cultural Scene Goes Into Overtime
By JULIE SALAMON
Published: August 30, 2004
On a tropical summer night with a big moon hanging low, New York City can look like a landscape meant for poets and dreamers. At least that is how it seemed in the late hours after Sunday's big protest, even with clusters of police officers gathered at street corners and helicopters buzzing overhead.
The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade didn't want the day to end. So toward midnight, tired and sunburned from marching and hanging out in Central Park, about 65 of its members gathered in a borrowed Chinatown space to eat and entertain themselves with what they referred to as a "talent show," which lasted until nearly 2 a.m.
"We think people even in the most intense time need to be involved in artistic endeavors," explained Sunsara Taylor, a slight, intense woman with a bourgeois reluctance to specify her age beyond "in her 20's," who is a poet, office worker and spokesperson for the Youth Brigade.
Ms. Taylor and the rest of her group — Marxist Leninist Maoist followers of Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party — are young, mostly in their late teens and 20's, which may explain their casual mixture of summer camp and radical rhetoric (they believe in the inevitability of armed revolution) and their stamina. When Ms. Taylor's turn before the audience arrived, close to 1:30 a.m., she delivered two fiery poems in a voice hoarse from shouting during hours of protest.
[Rest of story at
www.nytimes.com/2004/08/30/politics/campaign/30CND-NIGHT.html
I think you have to register with NYT to access it. Earlier version of the story had a photo of the show.]
By JULIE SALAMON
Published: August 30, 2004
On a tropical summer night with a big moon hanging low, New York City can look like a landscape meant for poets and dreamers. At least that is how it seemed in the late hours after Sunday's big protest, even with clusters of police officers gathered at street corners and helicopters buzzing overhead.
The Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade didn't want the day to end. So toward midnight, tired and sunburned from marching and hanging out in Central Park, about 65 of its members gathered in a borrowed Chinatown space to eat and entertain themselves with what they referred to as a "talent show," which lasted until nearly 2 a.m.
"We think people even in the most intense time need to be involved in artistic endeavors," explained Sunsara Taylor, a slight, intense woman with a bourgeois reluctance to specify her age beyond "in her 20's," who is a poet, office worker and spokesperson for the Youth Brigade.
Ms. Taylor and the rest of her group — Marxist Leninist Maoist followers of Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party — are young, mostly in their late teens and 20's, which may explain their casual mixture of summer camp and radical rhetoric (they believe in the inevitability of armed revolution) and their stamina. When Ms. Taylor's turn before the audience arrived, close to 1:30 a.m., she delivered two fiery poems in a voice hoarse from shouting during hours of protest.
[Rest of story at
www.nytimes.com/2004/08/30/politics/campaign/30CND-NIGHT.html
I think you have to register with NYT to access it. Earlier version of the story had a photo of the show.]
