On Gravity: an essay by Sam Gould

Stacking boxes. One on top of the other. Day after day, hoping that it amounts to something, that someone is looking and might begin to help with the stacking or at the very least, whisper in your ear and say, “This feels like bullshit to me.” A sense of uncertainty and unease. Everyone around you seems to be doing the same thing. These are all feelings that I can’t help but have to negotiate, as I’m sure you do too. As a daily practice over the last seven years, I’ve had to keep reminding myself to not care about the boxes any longer. Put the box down, and leave the stack behind.

It was when I first began to think of how sick of stacking boxes I was that I accepted the invitation of a friend to temporarily store a geodesic dome in my yard. It needed a home, and I figured something interesting could come out of that. It was the end of winter, which is the beginning of mud season in Minnesota. The solar properties were perfect for the dome to act as a seed starting space, and one much bigger than what my family needed. So I invited others to do the same. 

And why not start other things? Time shifts during a Minnesota winter. Exterior becomes interior. We move indoors, and often enough, inside ourselves, so the dome seemed fit to act as a space for re-starting our connections to each other. As I encouraged my neighbors to see the space as public, as ours just as much as my family’s alone, people began to show up in the yard unannounced. To talk with a friend, to teach people things, to play music by themselves or with others. The dome acted as a clock. Appropriate for the season. When spring left, so did it. This rhythm felt good to me, and I knew that it was something I wanted to keep in time with. 

No matter how seemingly “radical” my art practice may have been in the fifteen years leading to the dome going up and being taken down, it always felt like climbing a ladder too. A justification, however cloudy, was that at the top of that ladder was a place where I could tinker with things. Where time was different, and experimentation was rewarded as the utmost of activities to pursue. As the ideal. When not linked with institutions that helped fund those actions, I couldn’t stop myself from seeing projects as product. As individual packages of ideas, calling cards to institutions and agencies that could pay me in money or a kind of status. Each payment for each package was also an invitation up the ladder to an imagined place of freedom from simple exchange. All hierarchy and linearity. 

It felt out of step, and I knew it was wrong, at least for me. Counterintuitive to everything that I cared about and wished to share with others. And so, following a season of hanging out in a geodesic dome in my backyard, these thoughts were all very much on my mind. How could they not be? When Laura came back from stopping at the Midtown Global Market (MGM) one day and said to me, “There’s a space open. You should open a bookstore,” I couldn’t resist thinking about how to continue what the previous season had set into motion. A chance to exist out of time. Or more accurately, to upset the rhythm. 

Transmission was a space in South Minneapolis, a few blocks away from my house down the street in the Midtown Global Market on East Lake Street. The MGM, a public market of immigrant-run and start up small businesses, was founded some ten years prior as a public / private partnership between the city, a large construction and property development corporation, and a nonprofit, which was in charge of managing the market itself. The building is a centerpiece of the neighborhood, a sixteen-story monolith of an old Sears retail and warehousing space that had been derelict for twelve years. 

I talked about my plans with the market’s manager, who liked them, but because the nonprofit ran the space, their board needed to approve my plan to finalize things. This took some time, and it was a bit of a surprise to me that they accepted it, as what I proposed was definitely unusual for what the market was used to: a hybridized bookstore and print shop where all the titles available were printed on-site, and the content, generally speaking, was produced in association with the ideas generated by guests and neighbors who dropped in to spend time there. Not unlike the dome. What I didn’t highlight was that, apart from those practical functions, I wanted to create a space that was constantly out of step with the daily goings-on and transactions of the market. A place where the simple exchange of goods was constantly confused. Some days my kids would come in and make bookmarks from the scraps I had laying around or ask me to print out copies of drawings they’d done, so that the three of them could walk around and sell them to people sitting eating tortas and drinking beer. Often they’d make more money than I had that day, which, however illogically, I considered a kind of success. Their father, running a store that wasn’t particularly interested in selling anything. My kids, creating a roving graymarket where they subverted the hierarchies and norms of the marketplace with their speed and cuteness. 

As I’d hoped for, people came into the space either curiously confused or perfectly at ease. Many sat down to chat. Most stayed for a long time. Friends, neighbors, the market’s manager, other shopkeepers or employees. When people came in confused, I saw it as an opportunity. 

What were these machines? What are these books? Why does this place look so weird, like a bird's nest made out of wood? 

Invariably this would allow us an opening to talk about the interests and possibilities of Transmission as a platform for the neighborhood, and us as neighbors, to consider the present and future of the place where we all lived. A chance to talk about these ideas outside of time, outside of responding to calculated notions of crisis or our own unique anxieties, so that we could imagine and broadcast a possible future in the making.

One guy who kept showing up had just gotten out of prison in Iowa. When the market was still functioning as Sears, he’d worked in the warehouse there. He had learned a type of meditative martial art, some idiosyncratic derivation of jujitsu, while “sitting” in prison, and wanted to start a dojo in the neighborhood to help other folks transitioning out of incarceration. He and I drafted a broadside to circulate. I printed up a stack for him so that he could post them around the neighborhood. 

In time, either through repetition or reputation, people began to understand that the clock was different inside Transmission. Expectations were not the same there as they were at, say, the bakery or taqueria. They were, to an extent, more similar to someplace like Mohamed’s shop, Dar Medina, where he’d often sit drinking freshly brewed tea with people on one of the rugs he had for sale. I met Mohamed when one day he came running excitedly into the shop. I’d been blasting Nass El Ghiwane and the sounds of their music floated across the stalls, above the din, to the other side of the market. 

“How did you find this music?! I’ve never heard this music anywhere in America. This is the music of my people! Of revolution!”

Duaba was one of the people who arrived in this context. He asked a lot of questions, and we sat down for a few hours. He’d come in, initially, because a couple of his friends had said that I rubbed them the wrong way. Wanting to see who this asshole was, he made his way over to the shop. Did anyone else even come in during that time we sat with one another? I’m not sure. It didn’t particularly matter. We talked for hours. Duaba came by more regularly after our first meeting and started using the machines for actions he was working on, like some he was collaborating on with Million Artist Movement. Some folks from the group had come in months earlier and had helped open the space by singing to Emory Douglas after he and I and Chaun Webster had a public conversation, all to set the tone for what I hoped would come.

Conversations happened. People ate lunch together. My friend Marlon, who lived upstairs, came to consider Transmission his second office, often opening up shop hours before I got there and sometimes calling to ask how to work the riso again because someone wanted to make a copy of their passport (the DMV was in the basement of the MGM). He wrote at least half of one of his novels there as we sat across from one another listening to records. I worked on print collaborations with different authors or neighbors, or other kinds of projects they wanted to get off the ground. 

Despite this feeling of existing outside the space of capital, Transmission didn’t exist outside of the space of exchange. Its construction was meant to complicate the simple exchange that took place all over the market. Bowl of pho for $9. Carnitas taco for $2. A pint of beer for $6. Action for action. Object for object. Capitalism creates a rigid, tense simplicity around our interactions with one another. A form of social measurement. Acts of what can be love if you’re not being exploited, such as perfecting a recipe to serve to others, are simplified by the passing of bills or the swipe of a credit card.

In this regard, everything was confusing at Transmission, and by design. Time, money, interactions, roles, purpose in general. “What is this?” Meaning, “What is the intent of this place?” Never just a simple, “Where am I?” Everything rested on the surface of everything, everyday, there to be skimmed off as the broth boiled down. But that’s not to say confusion was the goal. Confusion was there to force a simple, though important idea out into the open. To allow us to ask, “Why is what I’m in the middle of different from what’s around me?” The intent was to create space for neighbors to pause and gather with the ability to utilize the tools available to illustrate and broadcast their needs, dreams, and desires. This could be a broadside, a chapbook of poems, some fliers promoting the protest of a local ICE facility. The outcome didn’t matter, but the intent did. And along with that intent came the understanding that we could continue to converge. We didn’t need to show up after “something happened.” Neighbors, people who found they shared similar interests. We gathered on our own time, outside of the clock of crisis.

The shop, in part, felt like a pocket park. A small respite in the middle of a chaotic, bustling swirl of exchange. A space for a certain segment of the neighborhood to cross paths and share the news. That news could be wildly divergent. It could just as easily be about some actions against the Minneapolis Police Federation, the union arm of the Minneapolis Police Department that had a stranglehold on the city, as it could be a conversation about a new poetry chapbook someone was working on. A meandering conversation over lunch. But as time went on, it began to feel like every moment was newsworthy and needed to be reacted to. In the lead up to the 2016 election and what followed, each day felt like a day of action and activity. Relationships, however filled with camaraderie and energy, began to feel mechanical. The desire to avoid responding to the movement and machinations of power became less and less plausible when day after day, another new insult and assault was lobbed into the public sphere. Time began to shift inside Transmission, and while the space still fulfilled a need, as that need shifted, it became overwhelming. We still needed a space outside of time, but now we needed more tools to hold it. Transmission was living up to its moniker, but what could we broadcast if there was no time to contemplate and consider where we were in relation to each other? No time or space to scan the social landscape? To map out what you saw and experienced? This was where the idea for Assembly grew: an unaffiliated workers hall, filled with tools and social space to think through ideas and orientations. 

In time I found a space down the street from Transmission, in a former outpatient facility with a big back parking lot, many offices, a kitchen, and two large common areas. A group of us went in on it together, sharing equipment, and hosting workshops and events when it seemed appropriate. While folks might have had their individual spaces, we all agreed that the overriding agenda at Assembly was that it was a space for people to pass through and figure things out on their own time. The accumulation of our crossing paths mined as something more powerful than us alone. Through this space for critical downtime, when something came up, we’d have Transmission down the way—which Derek and I were in the process of transforming into a radio station—to help distribute and broadcast these ideas and proposals through print and the airwaves. It felt like an ensemble was being put together organically. Different drummers posted up at varying spots in the neighborhood. Individual rhythms crossing time signatures to create a whole.

It was around this time that I noticed I wasn’t feeling all that well. Psychologically, I’d been out of sorts because I’d been dealing with the possibility of a ten thousand dollar fine and a year in jail. I had been in and out of court the whole first half of the year charged with a Gross Misdemeanor. Early that winter, I had confronted a cop who John and I witnessed beating up a suspect and told that cop that I was going to report him. A few months earlier, I’d set up a project at Transmission poking at the head of the police federation. Word went far, and he wound up coming to the shop to confront me. Too much out in the open. I got pinned. It was a dumb mistake on my part, how I handled it.

But once that was resolved, I knew that the drag on my body and mind the first half of the year wasn’t just the possibility of a jail sentence over my head. From one doctor to the next, by the time Assembly opened I’d already had surgery for cancer. As winter came, the cancer returned. Chemotherapy lasted for months, and its lingering effects made it so keeping both spots open just wasn’t feasible unless someone else was going to pick up the slack. I remember, in the middle of chemo, laying on the floor as Dee Dee Halleck was in town, visiting Assembly and talking to a large group of folks about her work with Paper Tiger Television and other tactical media projects over the years. The best I could do was burrow into the old receptionist area, a strange curved greeting space, drained and sprawled out on my back, attempting to absorb as much as my depleted psyche could, and hoping that when it was all over there would be a kernel of insight to energize myself with down the road. 

From my perspective, and for all its good moments and the bonds that it created for some of us, Assembly slogged along throughout its run. Cancer and the Trump Years, seemingly neck and neck, pressing down on my ability to focus on anything but a life of maintenance. Time slowed to a crawl. Every moment, with slight variation, repeating itself. Endless repetition of my same inability to move through space. If it wasn’t the news repeating a variation of the same fucked up scenario, it was my body telling me it’s not time yet. Each time I tried to start the engine, it sputtered and stalled out. As luck would have it, after a series of debacles with our crooked landlords—such as the roof caving in from water damage, going unfixed for months—we were able to break our lease just before the pandemic hit. 

In May of 2018, about a month after I finished chemo, a fire burned down a building known throughout the neighborhood as Roberts Shoes, after the shoe store that had been the corner tenant for nearly a century. If you had grown up in Minneapolis, like Laura did, your mother took you to Roberts. But the space above and beyond the shoe store was a hodgepodge of live / work lofts and artist studios. Small shops, like a mariscos taqueria and a capoeira studio. Michael, who owned Michael’s Hip Hop Shop, would often sit outside his storefront on a stool chatting with neighbors as they strolled by. In a window display that led to no shop in particular there was a gallery run by Sean Smuda, who lived upstairs and would often host events in his large open living room space. Decades earlier, Robert Pirsig had written Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in one of the offices down the hall from Sean on the second floor. Roberts was an anti-institution, organically tended to over the decades. The tenants lost everything they owned in the fire. The building was beyond salvageable. And now, with a high-priced condo going up across the street at the corner of Chicago Avenue and East Lake Street, the ever-looming threat of widespread and calculated displacement seemed all the more present. 

For a few years I tried to garner support for someone to buy the lot so that it wouldn’t fall into the hands of a developer, continuing the tide that we all figured was inevitable. But very early in 2020, something seemed to click when our local city councilperson connected me to the head of a foundation based in the neighborhood, who seemed to understand what we were all talking about. As that process took shape, and their board approved the purchase, they asked me to help figure out what would come next for the lot. While putting the pieces together, I reached out to Duaba. All the small movements, conversations, and configurations that came out of Transmission and Assembly felt like they could be put into place to consider this site and likely further afield around the neighborhood. What that meant exactly, and how that would manifest, was still unclear, but Duaba and I had already spent years searching things out at our own pace. The structure would appear when it made sense. All we needed was this: an avenue. 

As this process and the people involved took form, all of a sudden, this virus we’d been hearing about shut everything down. It seemed that the entire world was stuck in the same psychic / bodily limbo I had felt myself trapped within the previous three years. Somehow, because it felt all too familiar, and because now I felt I had company, I kept moving forward trying to think of a form that we could shape so our neighbors could enter it. How do you figure out what people want to build together? How do you build something authentically relevant and elegantly organic to a wide swath of people, when you can only see one another at a distance? While the pandemic placed us at a two-dimensional divide, it could easily be argued that the previous years had placed us into a different sort of two-dimensional, or simply limited space of encounter with each other. The pandemic, despite its very real space of trauma and anxiety, felt like a gift in other ways. It afforded Duaba and I the time to craft a plan at our own pace to ask these questions. Unencumbered by the clock of capital. The neurosis to work in lockstep towards a common end no matter the cost. As difference was our neighborhood's greatest strength, pacing and multiple paths of encounter were our best avenue towards really seeing one another in full. People needed to be able to show up on their own time, in a space where our rhythm intersected neatly with their own because, and not in spite, all our different signatures. 

Those early weeks of the pandemic began to reveal a certain weirdness. Nothing truly out of the ordinary, but things began to crack. On the one hand, people began to drive like maniacs. Burning down city streets, passing cars at stop signs to zoom straight into oncoming traffic. As if they had somewhere to go, something urgent that needed them. Nothing, in that moment, was urgent except figuring out how to live, which of course has its own special kind of buzzing urgency. 

I remember trying to keep the beat going, to feel a steady pulse that could move me forward. It was a time of small rituals, often private. 

Powderhorn Park is a bowl-shaped tiered space, abundant with trees, with a lake at its center. It’s a block away from our house. Laura started taking our twin daughters there each night at dusk to look for frogs, which seemed more plentiful this year than in any year past. Honora began naming them all, though each with the same name. The park was crowded with frogs named Jeremy. On May 25th after dinner, Laura, Esme, and Honora walked the dog down into the park for their daily visit to the frogs. This was the new pacing. A steady rhythm where the day began to end as the sun set, and the frogs and crickets began their night chorus. What I’ll never be able to separate in my recollections of the beginning of those times was how, as George Floyd was taking his last breaths six blocks away, Honora was picking up another frog to be named Jeremy, the sun setting at the same angle on them all.

In the end, the city was made of flammable material. Everything burns with the right amount of energy, in its own time. Organic. Overnight, when we began to gather at Roberts to ask these questions of ourselves, that lot was just one of dozens of empty spaces dotting the neighborhood.