From: scatter@theicarusproject.net
Subject: In Memory of Brad Will: Old Friend, Mad Revolutionary, Taunter of Death
Date: October 30, 2006 7:54:01 AM EST

i'm sorry to be the bearer of such horrible news but inevitably some folks are going to get this email who don't already know that our friend brad will was shot and killed by paramilitary forces last friday while he was covering the teachers strike in oaxaca, mexico. his videocamera was in his hands when he died. this is what i had to write to keep myself from losing it in the last couple days up on the farm. it's very much not finished but i just have to get it out there, i guess for my own sake. thank you for all being still alive enough to read these words, let's not take each other for granted, huh? if you have stories to tell about brad please tell them, i think it's through this strange human patchwork history that we keep each other alive, and keep each other close.
i'm in the city now and hundreds of us are about to gather in the streets outside of the mexican consulate - somewhere between a protest and a memorial, and activities are going to be going on all week round these parts. here's the link to find out more and see the international outpouring of love from the activist community for our lost friend.
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/10/77757.html
love sascha

goddamnit brad i'm not taking you off my email list


In Memory of Brad Will: Old Friend, Mad Revolutionary, Taunter of Death

The memories haven't stopped pouring out of my head like a flood all day. I woke up this morning and they overpowered my dreams and spilled all over the sheets. I can't seem to be present with the people around me right now, my head keeps slipping into that etherial place between life and death, memory carrying me back more then a decade and then flashing to those photos on Indymedia yesterday in Oaxaca, photos of Brad Will with a bullet in his chest, lying dead on the dusty street with a group of strangers standing over his body. So I have to write this down just so I can come back to life and figure out what the hell to do next.

It's always so strange when our friends die, how they get frozen in time while the rest of us keep moving and getting older. For the rest of my life Brad is always going to be that scruffy-faced, fire-breathing rebel taunting the cops on the streets of the Lower East Side; that madman on the roof of 5th Street Squat getting right in the way of the wrecking ball on a cold February morning cause he was determined to keep them from demolishing his home; that badass motherfucker who wasn't scared to be right on the front lines and scream in the face of authority. Brad was always tempting fate and putting himself in the line of fire, in a way where it was never clear if he was heroicly brave, a raving lunatic, or some complex interplay between the two.

I first met Brad Will at a place called Dreamtime Village outside Madison, Wisconsin during the summer of 1995. He was loud and obnoxious and full of himself and had an explosive, michivious laugh and told great stories. He had been traveling around with a band of guys performing guerilla theater in the streets, inspired by the idea of creating Temporary Autonomous Zones and conjuring up spaces to shake up modern capitalist notions of normality and productivity. We both reveled in the power of our freaky friends, the magic of the nomadic traveling circus, and the beauty of our underground anarchist culture.

We crossed paths again shortly thereafter at Blackout Books, the infoshop on Avenue B where all our people hung out. He'd just gotten a space on the second floor of 5th Street Squat and was getting it ready for winter, excited about joining the Lower East Side squatter community, sheet rock dust in his hair and a grin on his face. We were both in New York that late fall when Steal This Radio, the squatter pirate radio station, went live on the air for the first time at ABC No Rio. And we were both there for those roving Friday night parties when the station broadcasted its signal from a different squat every week to evade the FCC. It was the place to be, the best party in town, a radical talent show and celebration. I have warm memories of it being really cold outside and Brad Will wailing on his guitar in rooms full of people.

I went down to Central America that winter to do solidarity work in Guatemala and Chiapas and then I ran into him again the following summer in Chicago during Active Resistance, the anarchist gathering organized to the protest the Democratic National Convention in 1996. I have this memory of sitting around a small fire with him on the outskirts of the city and our friends were singing that beautiful song "Angel from Montgomery." I remember Brad rubbing my travel-weary shoulders, he had really strong hands and when I complimented him on his strength he proudly flexed the tendons in his forearms and laughed that crazy laugh of his, squinting through his spectacles. It's etched into my memory cause that was his freaky style.

Like a bunch of our friends we were both riding a lot of freight trains back then. He knew a lot more than I did about the history of the railroads and hobo culture in the United States. One day on a street corner in Chicago I remember him schooling me about the Dust Bowl and the Depression, migrant farm workers and the Wobblies, incredulous that I didn't already know my own history. He busted out his guitar right there and belted out a string of Woody Guthrie songs, looking straight into my eyes as he sang the words:

I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind

California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

After Active Resistance he gave me the key to his room at 5th Street Squat and I kept it tucked away in the pocket of my filthy black Carhartt pants. I showed up at his squat covered in diesel grease in the middle of the night off a Chicago train. I stayed in his room for a month before I left town to head back West.

The next time I saw Brad Will it was the following winter and it was just his image on a screen from the video of the 5th Street Squat eviction that Seth from C-Squat had sent to my house in Oakland. There had been a sketchy electrical fire in late February, the police forcefully evicted everyone, and then they used the fire as an excuse to demolish the building without giving anyone a chance to even get their possessions out.

But they never got Brad out of the building. In the video that crazy motherfucker was on top of the roof trying to keep the wrecking ball from slamming into the building, waving his arms frantically or triumphantly, it was hard to tell. The footage was grainy but that just made it more dramatic. They pulled him out of there and brought him to jail but once he got out he was a man on fire. He ended up doing a one-man tour around the country talking to groups of friends about the demolition of his building and the gentrification of our neighborhood and the corruption of the city. He was so enraged about the whole thing, and desperately wanted the world to know what had happened.

We organized one of those talks for him at the Epicenter space in San Francisco. It was the same era as Prisoners Literature Project, when local activists and traveler kids would show up to fill book requests to prisoners from a donated library. Brad was shaking as he told the story and everyone in the room was visibly moved. Earlier that day Brad had showed up in town at my girlfriend's house with a big crate of fresh asparagus because his family in Stockton, CA were asparagus farmers. Even in his rage and anger, I remember Brad Will as really generous and quite often bearing gifts of food.

My next memory is a couple years later when Brad lived at Dos Blockos Squat on 9th Street. It was the early days of the More Garden's Coalition being organized out of Aresh's tiny apartment on Clinton Street. The city was evicting community gardens all over the city and we were doing direct action street theater by City Hall on a regular basis. It was also the time of the Reclaim the Streets actions and the early Time's Up Critical Mass rides. Then there were those benefit shows that seemed to happen almost every week on the first floor of Dos Blockos and all the freaks and outlaws and junkies and hoodlums that called that place home. There was the South Bronx/LES connection through Casa del Sol and that whole wild crew. There was everyone hanging out at Brooke Lehman's apartment on 12th street, blowing off steam after actions or building stuff to go out into them. The eviction where our friends bolted big metal spikes onto the roof of the Dos Blockos so that the city couldn't land a helicopter and storm the building. It was a crazy time.

My next memory is the following fall when the People's Global Action Caravan folks showed up in New York from all over the world to make the trip to Seattle together to protest the World Trade Organization and Brad was one of the folks who was with us in the streets outside of the public relations firm Burson Marsteller, protesting their corporate whitewashing. Brad and I were the two people wearing suits with red paint on our hands asking the (visibly sketched out) employees as they walked in and out of the building if they could "help us get the blood off our hands." It was strikingly awesome.

A couple nights later on the Halloween Critical Mass Ride, hundreds of us costumed freaks shut down Times Square, I think for the first time ever - a big crowd of bikes held high in the air cheering and laughing. I remember distinctly that Brad Will was creating a fiery spectacle blowing huge fireballs from his mouth and a cop grabbed his bicycle that was on the ground next to him. I'm not sure how he did it but he was slick enough to drop his torch, grab the bike out of the bewildered cops hands, and speed off into the crowd. Later we were all riding down Broadway, back to the neighborhood, and Brad biked by me grinning, laughing that crazy laugh of his, and disappearing into the mass.

I don't remember the next time I saw Brad Will. We were all in Seattle for the WTO protests and I know that after that he was one of many of our friends that started making their way around the world to organize and participate in anti-globalization protests in DC and Quebec and Genoa and Miami and Cancun. He loved being in the streets. He loved the action. He had a very strong sense of right and wrong. And he loved fighting the good fight with all the good people.

I remember Brad Will on fire in the streets during the DNC in Los Angeles in 2000. There had been a police riot earlier in the day. I remember me and my friends getting shot up with rubber bullets and tear gas making our way back to the convergence space all beaten and weary. I have this really vivid memory of looking down from the second floor of the convergence space building and seeing Brad Will amidst a sea of people in the courtyard and he was singing that Desert Rat song, fiercely, loudly, proudly:

So I called upon you brother, and you asked what I would do,
And I told the truth dear sister when I spoke these words to you,
I will stand beside your shoulder, when the tear gas fills the sky,
If a National Guardsman shoots me down I'll be looking him in the eye
I will wash their pepper from your face and go with you to jail,
And if you don't make it through this fight I swear I'll tell your tale.
I will stay with you in the prison cell in solidarity
And I will not leave that cursed room 'til you walk out with me
For we the people fight for freedom, while the cops just fight for pay,
And as long as the truth is in our hearts we're sure to win someday.
I will not falter when that iron fist comes out of the velvet glove,
I will stand beside your shoulder to defend this land we love.

I know shortly thereafter he got really passionate about documenting revolutionary movements in Latin America and he got really involved in the Indymedia scene. He had steady gigs making good money doing stage set-up in New York. He would work long hours in the city and save up to buy travel money and video equipment and then spend large chunks of time in South America documenting multiple revolutions. I remember sleeping with a cast of motley characters at the Indymedia office in midtown Manhattan, all 2am fluorescent and coffee and deadlines, Brad and his partner Dyan saving up money to head down South. At some point they lived at that warehouse on Walker Street. I crashed on their couch a couple times then . Then later Brad had a cheap little apartment in Brooklyn that he shared with a couple activist friends who were also in and out of town. He'd always offer me his place to crash at when we'd run into each other.

The night they arrested Daniel McGowan and everyone was gathered at Bluestockings trying to figure out what to do I spent a long time walking around the neighborhood with Brad Will. We talked about how scared we were for our friend who was suddenly looking at a life sentence for being a "terrorist" and had clearly never hurt a soul. We talked about the terrifying political situation in these early years of the 21st century and how it looked like it was just starting to get a lot worse. Brad talked about his own fears of past clashes with the law catching up with him eventually, how he had made a lot of enemies in high places, how it was just a matter of time that they would try to pin something on him. The wind was blowing hard on Allen Street that night, the cold just settling in for the winter.

We spent a couple hours on Brooke Lehman's roof sometime this past summer, just the two of us, looking out over the city, and catching up. We talked about the revolutions in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Mexico, about how brutal the global political situation was and how it inevitably was going to explode and spill over into the streets of this country. We talked about the mental health support work I've been doing with the Icarus Project, about how focused I've been on my determination to imbed our radical asses into mainstream institutions like universities and hospitals so that it won't be so easy for them to pull us out when the fight comes. We talked about shared pasts and loves and our friends. We expressed our mutual love and respect for each other and the paths we'd taken.

The last time I saw Brad Will alive was actually just a month ago. He showed up at an Icarus event at the Judson Memorial Church, a radical mental health skillshare, and the first of hopefully many to come. Daniel McGowan was there; it was the first time I'd seen him since he was off house arrest. It was a celebratory day, the sun was shining and clearly good things were afoot. A bunch of our old friends were there, teaching workshops or participating in them, mixed in amidst the slightly younger crowd. Brad told me he was getting ready to head down to Mexico. I asked him if he was going to Chiapas and he replied in that incredulous, obnoxious voice of his: "What are you kidding, man? I'm going to Oaxaca. Haven't you been reading the news? There a revolution going on in the streets down there!" I hadn't been reading the news.

And I can still hear his voice saying the words. And he still feels so alive to me. I've been hearing his voice talking to me constantly like a running dialogue. And I know from experience that memories fade, that voices fade, that the only way we can keep our people alive is by telling their stories.

It's now almost 1am on Monday morning, I just spent the night with all these old friends and we're all heading into the streets early to the Mexican consulate to shake shit up Brad Will style. We're still all in shock and don't really know what the fuck to say to each other, but we have each other, and we are so strong and beautiful.

So I swear I'll keep telling your tale, old friend, you'll be right there in the streets with us. Solid. Mad Love, Sascha