Apparently, I was the last activist in the US to hear about how great the Honk Festival was. As I was enthusiastically explaining the event to other people I kept hearing “Oh, I was on the Honk organizing team 10 years ago,” or “We helped start Honk in New York,” and equivalent recognition. But despite coming late to the party, it was still a transformative event for me, and the projects which surround me.
It started back in February when our Point A traveling heroes hit Boston. Maximus said, “We should come back for Honk” and like a fool, I asked, “What is Honk?” Fortunately, Maximus is patient with me.
Like many things, Honk grew out of a collection of activists trying something new. A collection of marching bands took over the streets of Somerville and started performing. They had fun, they made an impressive amount of joyful noise and they had multiple political messages. And they agreed to come back next year. This scruffy initial incarnation has become a treasured institution which brings protest marching bands from around the world.
I have to confess I had not thought much about marching bands as a protest tool. Maximus has thought about this a bunch. He pointed out the power of having noisy attractive mobile groups which do not require amplification. He waxed eloquently about what it means to take performers off the stage, put them in the street at the same level as the audience and the implicit invitation for people to join in, marching, dancing or banging on anything which one might find handy.
But this was all much later, once we were well into the Honk experience. It started, as many good things start, with dumpster diving. Maximus and Rachel had cooked a dumpster dinner for the 400 Honk musicians in 2016. His invitation to the Point A crew to come up and participate in Honk hoped to replicate their past success. Fortunately, this plays directly to some of our strengths.
Steve is a man of many talents. He was an obvious draft pick for this trip in that he can look at a full dumpster and see if there is anything good at the bottom and he can cook for huge quantities of people. Steve was just one of the ringers we brought on this trip. We had significant local talent was on hand as well. We had 4 teams which went out at midnight. Three of them were car based and one consisted of members of the local radical bicycle gang. The ten of us started at midnight.
But three hours of diving was followed by a couple of hours of cleaning and sorting and even some time spent arranging to get the above photo. We had originally scheduled two evenings to gather food, but we did so well the first night, that we canceled the second dive. We even had to re-dumpster some of our catch, because we exhausted the refrigeration space we had available to us.
Soon all this food would be cooked and prepped into a lovely dinner for 400 musicians. The other two dinners were catered, but several folks said ours was the best.
Honk has grown significantly from its early days. The city of Somerville has embraced this event, local businesses help sponsor it. But the costs are significant. They help subsidize the travel of bands from across the country and even other countries. There were many meals for the performers, most of which were much more expensive to produce than ours.
While our dumpster diving crew was dominated by out of town Point A activists, there was also important representation by locals who came from various places. Sophia used to live at Craft House, where some of us were staying, in Tracy Chapman’s old closet, which is where we met her. There are desirable attributes you hope for in a fellow dumpster diver: willingness to get dirty, good sense of humor, willingness to take chances, nimble and stealthy movement, healthy disrespect for the law, willingness to work crazy late without compensation, discernment about which food to rescue and ability to cook are some of them. Sophia had all this and more. And at almost 5 AM she climbed the labyrinth fire escape to the residence I was staying in to break me into my locked housing.
Acquiring the huge haul of food is just the first step in feeding the Honk musicians. We still had to cook it. Most of our original dumpster divers plus a handful of new locals came out for this formidable task. My terrible cooking skills are the source of legend and while others toiled in the First Church’s kitchen, I called wholesale hammocks customers. My old college partner Amanda came to help with the cooking, she had fond memories of being on the Honk organizing team years ago and was happy to return to support the effort.
Mysteriously, the grill which had been unlocked outside the church for months was moved ten feet towards the curb to aid in loading it into a vehicle to move to the VFW outpost where the meal was being served. But before we could pick it up, it vanished. Taken likely by someone who thought it was being left on the curb to be discarded. This cost us both a grill and preparation time. I drove one of the Skul radical bicycle gang who had helped with the dumpster dive back to their home to pick up a replacement grill and delivered it to Steve Compersia at the VFW where he started cooking like a fiend. The grill was not especially well designed and soon Steve was working without the propane on in a blaze of fire. This attracted the police who decided they were going to shut our meal preparation down. Fortunately, by the time we were caught, Steve had completed most of the cooking.
Part of the Point A mandate is to do skill shares when we come to town. We often do Transparency Tools workshops for the various living collectives we visit and this time we did one at Craft House on the Tufts campus. Before Honk, Courtney from Compersia had worked with Telos on a workshop on how to be an Ally. And when Courtney agreed to come up to Boston, this workshop became a multi skit performance.
Being an ally is hard. Many attempting to support oppressed people would get failing grades from the those they think they are helping. The metaphor which was used as a chorus in our performance was that privilege is like wearing heavy boots in a world full of people wearing sandals. You must keep being aware of when you are stepping on other people’s toes. Telos played the failed ally in a series of 20-second micro skits with Courtney using such lines as:
“You should not have put your feet there”
“I don’t see toes”
“Are you calling me a toe stepper?”
And my personal favorite line
“All toes matter”
The final toe stepping micro skit gave curious prospective allies insight into what they might do to get it right, a simple apology and a promise to pay more attention in the future.
We had communicated with the Honk organizers about our desire to do our performance and they had offered us the Elm St “stage” at 8 PM on Saturday after the last marching band. Sadly, the police were not given a schedule that had our performance on it and we were stopped again by Somerville’s finest just as we were trying to draw our crowd. Instead, we did a dress rehearsal in the Davis Square metro station to a slightly baffled collection of commuters. Maximus caught it on video.
Honk was an inspiring experience. At the last dinner, we had together it was obvious we all wanted to come back next year. As is part of the Point A culture we did a post mortem of our take away of what we learned. We listed a number of suggestions to improve our efforts. Get a dedicated food processing crew, distinct from dumpster divers to handle the haul after we retrieved it and not force divers to stay up most of the night. Bring more people. Practice our skits longer in advance. Work more closely with the event organizers to get on the official schedule, to avoid hassles with the police. Work in advance with more locals like the fine folks from Craft House at Tufts.
The most important transformative aspect of Honk was that we realized we wanted to become a circus. The Point A trips have often been referred to as a circus, in part because of the joyful chaos they deliver. But this was something bigger, the idea that we should step out of our comfort zone of giving presentations and workshops into something more theatrical, more like the famous Bread and Puppet troop (which was one of the Honk marching bands). To get out of the classroom and more into the street.
The excited conversation about our new incarnation explored the idea of circuses as part of transformative festivals. One thing which makes these kinds of events powerful is that they have the capacity to induce quinks. [Quinks are the opposite of trauma. Where some specific acute event leaves a lasting positive effect on your life.] When we reflected on the purpose of the Point A circus what we came up with was that we would try to induce quinks in both the participants and audience.
There’s much that could be said about building community. But what motivates people towards it isn’t usually what people say, but rather the way community makes them feel. People don’t decide to radically rethink the way they are living because someone told them they could, they do it because some powerful event in the lives made them believe it was possible. This is quink, and HONK is uniquely good at producing it. All the sound and color and joyful noise conveys an experience that words never could.
Our mission as Point A is to spread community into the urban areas that need them most. There are many ways to do this, and the most effective involve quinks. It seems like a parading circus is in our future…
After the final parade on Sunday, Daniel and Raven and I hopped in the car with two Estonian hitchhikers we had picked up through Craig’s list. Maia and Helis’s housing in NYC had fallen apart before our ride, so I spent most of the drive from Boston to NYC reaching out to various Point A allies who might host them. We ultimately succeeded and deposited them with willing hosts. Then Daniel and I drove across several states and arrived back at Twin Oaks at 3:30 AM, just in time to do a late night tofu shift. This revolution does not stop.
commune life 
[…] This post first appeared on CommuneLife blog. […]
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