We're trying to find another LA!
You’re already here, we’d just like to see you a little clearer.
(please forward widely)

The Llano Del Rio working group is creating a map, to be published and made available (free to you and others) of Another LA. We seek your entries of sites where activities making real other possibilities occur.

Are you encouraging individual and group detours away from economics as we know it? Are you a guerrilla historian? Participating in an alternative news source? Do you operate a no-profit space? Are you developing stuff that will make sense when the shit hits the fan, the love bomb drops, or somewhere in between? Are you pursuing alternative models of development? Do you operate a backyard beehive? Member of a coop? Part of a cycling mob? Are you working in public, not getting paid and not considered a social worker or public artist? Are you painting bicycle lanes on Glendale Boulevard? Are you planting gardens in traffic medians? Are you inventing, selling, or operating solar powered gizmos? Stirring shit up? Tilling an urban farm? Planting urban nightmares? Do you participate in schizo-cultural activities furthering esoteric beliefs and practices? Do you chew gum in public with friends and call it something other? Do you run a print kitchen, beer kitchen, bicycle kitchen, bio-fuels kitchen, a stitching kitchen or just heat an oven? Are you a part of a neighborhood vigil against war? Are you aware of a business resistant to time like a typewriter shop or a mythic location where shamans roam the valley? Is there a neighborhood your aware of with so much front yard agriculture that you just got to share it? Are you supporting the pursuit of an esoteric art and craft? Player in a radical cheer group, marching band, or cycling ensemble? Popularizer of unpopular or unknown wisdoms? Do you have difficulty with the pronoun “I”, but find comfort talking about “we”? Are you aware of another LA beneath the traffic lanes?

Please email llanodelrio@gmail.com with the following information immediately (deadline Oct.31).

1) The name of group, activity, collective or etc…. (something that can be a title).
2) A two to three sentence concise description of what you do otherwise.
3) The physical address or addresses of your center of operation(s).*
4) Email contact info.




*If you are shy about giving an exact location, consider sharing your neighborhood, or perhaps a fictional LA address will do.

If you have any questions please contact us at llanodelrio@gmail.com.

We look forward to seeing you all.

The Llano del Rio working group is an ad hoc group of artists, activists, social ecologists, and writers with a long standing interest in the alternative infrastructure of LA. Author and activist Chris Carlsson contends in his book, Nowtopia, that beyond the world of traditional labor, people are building practical alternatives to the current order. We’d like to see ifand how that is so. Maps will be a part of an exhibition planned for this Fall at Otis College. There after they’ll be distributed widely.

While ideally I think this is a fucking awesome idea, especially given the layout of Los Angeles County and how it's such an isolating social prison... if one's perspective is that they are at war with the state are members of the party of the insurgents, it would be highly detrimental to give away one's location widely to the enemy. There just seems to be too much of a security culture risk by doing this.

I feel like this is trying to be done "neutrally" but the reality is that there's a war on and there is no such thing as neutrality. There is and will never be ("Introduction to Civil War" TIQQUN).

To summarize: If one is serious about pursuing another world (ie. insurrection or at the very least collective states of being of communism and anarchism) then the best thing is for those to exist in anonymity, hidden to the point where there are zones of opacity (ie. the point at which the density of the agents of insurgency is so great that it is hard to tell a model citizen from a member of the insurgent alike). Therefore I think this type of project is potentially dangerous because of it's specifics and it's ambiguity (What is "another LA"? does this assume people are CONSCIOUSLY working towards living in communism based on anarchist principles or that they are just doing what people normally gotta do to save money and get by? etc etc.
And if people are CONSCIOUSLY working towards those things then
this is essentially dangerous. Yes, give away the coordinates to our enemies)

We must find other ways of finding each other.
And of ensuring that those we find aren't just "diying" it
because they think it's trendy, or cool, or environmentally green,
or because they gotta get by, but because they are members of the
party of insurgents. Anarchists, communists, etc. Whatever you want
to call the modern day heretic.

question everything.
Assume that forces are opposed to collective action.
nuf said

I agree.
There is and always will be civil war ("Introduction to Civil War" TIQQUN)

I think there are plenty of heretics out there, even in LA County.
The question is, how to find each other?
(and not give away where we live to our enemies)

Clearly the positions articulated here (ours vs freethinking's) parallels the historic split between the Red Brigades and the Autonomous Movements. While we have absolutely no interest in fighting this battle again as it's a historic dialectic (and as both sides had valid positions) , we would like to highlight the clear need for above ground projects.

The position articulated by freethinking is clearly vanguardist. There certainly is a need for (ESPECIALLY IN LA) a vanguard that applies theory and practice (especially a disciplined marxist or anarchist or marxist/anarchist theory) in fresh new contemporary ways (rather then steeped in rhetoric. lite analysis, and posturing).

However let's recognize that Indymedia is a LA collective that is accessible.. It has (well had) a mail address, its organizers are well known. Because of Its visibility and accessibility it clearly provides a critical infrastructural resource for both above ground and "below ground" activist.

Further its visibility provides something else... accessible imagination space. It provides people a clear and visible alternative to mainstream, capitalist, hierarchical media. Its very visible presence stands out to refute the idea that all things must be done for profit, that resistance to contemporary capitalism is futile, and that there can not be multi-ethnic cross ideological organizing done in LA. Without a visible mappable LA IMC, the vital service it has provided LA for the past ten years (happy birthday IMC!) would not have occured.

While clearly "security culture" is important to some folks... for others who are working precisely with germane publics or feeding necessary tools for those who are working "underground" there is no risk and clearly a benefit to create a map that "daylights' the radical alternatives and spaces and projects of a city that wish to be so. It may not be the dirty work of your collective, and it certainly isn't appropriate for all, but it is important work nonetheless.

What is an anarchist social center that nobody knows about? What is a radical bookstore that is hidden? What is a radical gardening project that is hidden? At its worst they are hobby spaces for the elitist and priveleged self-marginalized few, rather than explosive dynamic spaces that have historically, and to this day , influenced LA's radical traditions, movements, and victories. While working at the margins, much less "underground", is a very important place to work, it need not be the ONLY place to work. Clearly both underground and above ground groups have worked throughout history to advance the struggles of radical peoples.

We stand firmly behind the belief that no single person or beleif or ideology knows the best way to advance radical or even revolutionary struggle to the exclusion of others. While we don't think that Freethinking is making this claim, we would like to state that to do such a thing, claiming authority for how people should be working as "radicals" is foolish and besides the point. To struggle, that is the point.

Each by their own means.

Llano Del Rio Collective