"Your ticket to a world free of charge."
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Think about your direct
bodily experience of life.
The minutes and hours that add up to your life?
By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppress of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom?
Is pleasure dangerous?
could danger be joyous?
bodily experience of life.
No one can lie to you about that. How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined?
What are you being screened from?
How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously? (Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you ever have enough time to do all the things that you want to do? Do you have enough energy to?)
And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you effected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours?
Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and the people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What will you get later that could make up for this day of your life?
How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings?
And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it?
What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards?
Are we saving time? Saving it up for what?
How are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks? By moving, working, and living in two- and three-dimensional grids? How are you affected by being organized, immobilized, and scheduled... instead of wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?)
How much freedom of movement do you have—freedom to move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and unexplored directions?
And how are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting for the bathroom—learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges?
How are you affected by holding back your desires?
By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppress of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom?
Do you ever need to see the sky? (Can you see stars in it any more?) Do you ever need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving?
Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants?
Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving?
How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
Do videotapes of yourself and your friends fascinate you, as if you are more real in image than in life?
If your life was made into a movie, would it be worth watching? And how do you feel in situations of enforced passivity? How are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication—audio, visual, print, billboard, computer, video, radio, robotic voices—as you wander through the forest of signs? What are they urging upon you?
Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away?
Is looking away the very thing that is not permitted?
Where can you go to find silence and solitude? Not white noise, but pure silence? Not loneliness, but gentle solitude?
How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these?
Do you find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence?
Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express?
Do you ever feel ready to LOSE CONTROL?
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Tech specs
Size: 5.5" x 8.5" x .75"
Weight: .9 pounds
Pages: 292 + cover
Ink: Full-color on cover and black w/ full bleeds throughout.
Weight: .9 pounds
Pages: 292 + cover
Ink: Full-color on cover and black w/ full bleeds throughout.
Words: 68,361
Illustrations: 127
Photographs: 52
Index: Yes
Reviews
Illustrations: 127
Photographs: 52
Index: Yes
Reviews
"At 292 heavily illustrated pages, the flagship book of crimethink is the perfect size for any knapsack and the perfect reference manual for anyone seeking a life of passion and revolt. AK Press calls it "an underground bestseller," but, as it says in the preface:
"This book isn't designed to be used in the way a 'normal' book is. Rather than reading it from one cover to the other, casting perfunctory votes of dissapproval or agreement along the way, and then putting it on the shelf as another inert posession, we hope you will use this as a tool in your own efforts—not just to think about the world, but also to change it. This books is composed of ideas and images we've remorselessly stolen and adjusted to our purposes, and we hope you'll do exactly the same with its contents.
"As for the contents themselves: we've limited ourselves for the most part to criticism of the established order, because we trust you to do the rest. Heaven is a different place for everyone; hell, at least this particular one, we inhabbit in common. This book is supposed to help you analyze and disassemble this world—what you build for yourself in it's place is in your hands, although we've offered some general ideas of where to start. Remember: the destructive impulse is also a creative one . . . happy smashing! "
Your ticket to a world free of charge.
“The books vehement insistence that living is more important than art carries the argument beyond the typical debate. When you make it to the end, the personal testimonials about not working and the closing art pieces become an aria of voices urging you to close the book and live. Glorious, even for the most cynical reader. What more can we ask from a book? Whether or not you buy it probably depends on what you thought of the last Refused LP—revolutionary cannibals or well-dressed poseurs? Well-read former straight-edge kids or new messiahs? Don't think too hard about it—the book warns from page one,
'This book will not save your life; that my friend is up to you.'”
'This book will not save your life; that my friend is up to you.'”
“Less of a novel and more of an exploded manifesto, Days of War, Nights of Love might be just what we need. It is the type of book you'd thumb through in the store and actually want to buy (or steal). Avoiding the "thin gruel of narrative," the book instead gleefully mashed appropriated art pieces with personal testimony—reconfigured Frank Miller comic panels shout, "Face it, your politics are boring as fuck!" Whether you agree or not, there's a refreshing quality to a book that offers the same amount of information to both the serious reader and casual browser, because despite steady sales of The Revolution of Everday Life and Nation of Ulysses CDs, most of us are still living lives that are frustratingly incomplete."
