Presenting Day Zero of Free Concord’s Occupied Chicagoseries. The series features limited commentary over the raw video taken while traveling to and attending the NATO summit protests last May. This segment takes place in Boston, and begins with the group returning to its starting point eight hours after departure. After finding out that our bus trip would be replaced with a flight from Logan airport, some consumed their goods that were not approved by the TSA. This attracted South Station’s police, who in decriminalized Massachusetts chose not to act against the smokers. Once bus transport for the two or three among us who couldn’t fly is secured, an activist from Acton reads the subway guidelines for the week of the summit in Chicago. The video ends with a preview of Day One’s footage, to be released in the next week.
Tonight’s episode of ShireTV featured multiple angles of video from the premiere gathering of Robin Hood’s Merry Men in Keene. Robin Hooding is a not so new a form of activism in the Keene area, but Saturday was the first time that a coordinated effort of more than two or three activists organized to prevent the parking enforcement officer from being able to distribute paper fines. The video embedded above features multiple videographers’ content and opens with narration from Free Concord’s Garret Ean.
At Fr33manTVraw, playlists feature all footage captured by individual video artists. Linked there you can see unedited footage from Darryl Perry, Garret Ean, James Cleaveland, and Chris Cantwell. Other edited segments have already been created from the raw content, including these two videos previously featured on Free Keene from Chris Cantwell. Recent other Robin Hooding has occurred on Dec 26, Dec 31, and Jan 2. Garret Ean and Pete Eyre had a Mexican standoff of videocameras with a parking enforcer when they came across her parking van, as usual, parked at an expired meter on December 28. The parking enforcer encountered on January 5 by the group, Jane, was the most intriguing enforcer yet, interacting with activists despite their open opposition to her official activities. Alan, the male enforcer, has previously refused to answer questions and has made distasteful faces when around activists.
Recently published was a new Ridleo chronicling a history of arrests of Russell Kanning in New Hampshire. Russell is partly responsible for the reputation of Keene area activists as civil disobedients, as he had originally moved to that area of the state as he made waves over a number of victimless offenses.
Kat and Russell in Keene, NH
The video also features footage from Michael Fisher’s illegal manicuring event from 2005 in Concord. The headline-generating fingernail beautification by a Free State Project participant is referred to by Ridley as a “textbook act of civil disobedience”.
Russell currently faces federal chalking-related charges in Waco, Texas. Though he also had chalking charges from Concord, New Hampshire, Kat Kanning reports that the NH charges were dropped because, “[the] NH court said they thought he could be prosecuted adequately in TX, so they dismissed their charges.” Authorities may have prevented Russell’s legal adventures from taking him back to NH also because he would attract more supporters while in the Shire.
Yesterday was the inauguration ceremony at the state house and a number of other scheduled festive events to ring in the new administrations. After doing some promotional chalkings around the perimeter of the building, I headed inside and met with other independent media personalities visiting town from Keene. When we discovered a line outside of the governor’s office, we were struck with the urge to file in.
A staffer noticed our rolling videocameras and informed us that the line was for a photograph with governor Maggie Hassan, but that she would not have time to dedicate to a videotaped interview. Darryl, Kate, and James decided to find other items to film, while I perused the posters featuring the event’s corporate sponsors, which included everything from New Hampshire businesses to pharmaceutical multinationals.
It was a very rushed encounter, as most happenings with lines tend to be. I quickly asked after handing off my rolling camera and being flashed by still cameras, “Will you be doing anything to decrease New Hampshire’s dependence on the United States federal government?”
“Uh, well, I think that’s something we’ll all talk about, thanks.”
I picked up a cheesecake item and walked to the house chamber to listen to a colorful choir. Outside of the office, the line to see the new state president grew. In the lobby, chocolate bears were being distributed. It was a statist synthesis of Christmas and Easter, and there was free stuff to go around.
On this first day of the New Year, I was motivated to do something I don’t normally, and that is contacting federal ‘representatives’. A website linked on my Facebook feed made it as easy as customizing a form letter to address three congressman and the president. The letter called for the immediate closing of the US Department of Defense’s School of the Americas, also known as WHINSEC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. WHINSEC is a training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia where primarily Latin American militants loyal to US foreign policy demands are instructed in tactics of controlling and killing. You don’t often (or ever) hear the four politicians who received my message discussing the collateral damage and crimes attributed to graduates of the school, which made it the most fitting way to frame a new year, while talking heads babble on about fiscal cliffs. For more on legislative and other actions to take against the School of the Americas, check out soawatch.org.
I’ve been working on a project to release my raw videos from the NATO Summit protests in Chicago and recently created an introduction segment. The videos will be released first as single videos featuring an entire day’s footage to Fr33manTVraw. From the single large video, a trimmed cut will be produced with audio commentary and released on the FreeConcordTV youtube channel. After creating the intro, I found that it worked very well as a trailer for the footage to come. It features video from both myself and other videographers, with channels cited in the video description.
Presenting Day Zero of Free Concord’s Occupied Chicago series. The series features limited commentary over the raw video taken while traveling to and attending the NATO summit protests last May. This segment takes place in Boston, and begins with the group returning to its starting point eight hours after departure. After finding out that our bus trip would be replaced with a flight from Logan airport, some consumed their goods that were not approved by the TSA. This attracted South Station’s police, who in decriminalized Massachusetts chose not to act against the smokers. Once bus transport for the two or three among us who couldn’t fly is secured, an activist from Acton reads the subway guidelines for the week of the summit in Chicago. The video ends with a preview of Day One’s footage, to be released in the next week.
