An Interview with Claustrophobia

Claustrophobia was one of the most interesting underground press projects in Baltimore during the late ’90s and the early ’00s. The collective around the project not only published a roughly twice-yearly newspaper, but put out pamphlets, broadsheets, stickers, and books on everything from Wilhelm Reich to the black bloc (through the imprints “Sex-Pol Editions” and “Insubordinate Editions”). Some back issues and other documents can be found online via the Wayback Machine (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://charm.net/~claustro), but by and large the history of the project is not very well documented. And that’s why it was fantastic to get a chance to interview Nathaniel—one of the project’s founders—over email for this issue. 

John Duda: Moving to Baltimore in the middle of 2003, I feel like I just missed out on Claustrophobia—I’m not sure I ever initially saw a physical issue, but I was always hearing about it—in many ways it seemed like the project was playing a fairly central role in holding together the Baltimore radical community.  I was wondering if you could me fill in the basic history of the project? From what I gather, Claustrophobia put out 12 or 13 print issues, with the last one coming out in either 2001 or 2002. I haven’t been able to figure out exactly when the paper got started (early- to mid-nineties?) 

Nathaniel Taintor: I think we got started around 1994–95, but the first five or six issues were only ever distributed in prisons and maybe at a few infoshops “to the movement.” Around ’97, after we had moved to Baltimore, we started orienting more to the local street scene. Prison was the guiding metaphor for a while, the way Tupac said, “you ain’t gotta be in jail to be doing time” or that prisoners would refer to life on the streets as “minimum security” or “population.” So we started telling the stories that would bring out that perspective, trying to bring out the insights that would come to people going through their daily life about how constricted their opportunities were. We worked on trying to generate feedback loops that would reinforce the desire for rebellion and community. 

If we helped organize or hold together any kind of radical community, I think that was just a function of the time and place we were operating in rather than any work we actually did. We were certainly pretty ambivalent to the existence of the “radical community” for the most part. 

Baltimore’s radical community always came in waves. We got active around the end of a major wave of activity in the early ’90s, where there were a number of collectives, spaces, and such. During most of the time we were active, there weren’t a lot of projects going on with bigger ambitions than handing out flyers at a punk show or drinking 40s at a rowhouse talking revolution. So maybe we helped keep a sense of community alive until the subcul- ture and movement began to coalesce again in 1999–2000, when the anti-globalization movement started to become a point of orientation for a lot of younger radicals. 

John: One of the things that most interests me, looking at Claustrophobia’s back issues, is the very definite political stance taken by the collective behind the paper—you all wrote in one of your statements introducing the project that “we call ourselves anarchists, and make no apologies for that.” Having worked a bit with the Indypendent Reader, which covers a lot of the same Baltimore issues that Claustrophobia dealt with (for instance gentrification, structural racism, the prison system, labor struggles), I’m amazed at the difference in tone between the two projects despite the similarities between a lot of their politics. 

In particular, Claustrophobia was much more self-consciously and explicitly a revolutionary project. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where Claustrophobia’s politics came from and what it saw its political mission as. 

Nathaniel: I guess at the start, we did come from a specific political orientation, but as we grew and started to get feedback and traction and draw more people into the conversation we were trying to start, we kinda developed a journalistic mission which superseded any political mission we had at the start. Even in that same introduction you mention, we also quoted an old Situationist International slogan to the effect that we were only trying to organize the detonation, and that the explosion that came out of anything we did had to escape ours and any control forever. We weren’t exactly SI/po-mo nerds, but if anything from the “old politics” defined us, that’s probably a more true reflection of our political mission than anything established in the anarchist scene. 

So the skills that became important to us were very different than the skills that were important to people inside the activist milieu, who would go to meetings several times a week and learn to remember acronyms and jargon, speak in turn, and win people over in debates. We were more focused on listening to the streets, in writing in such a way that the people we were writing for would recognize their stories, and in visually designing our message so that it would flow out into all 

the networks we were trying to orient to. 

We also grew much more interested in individualist politics as we developed—Nietzschean philosophy, the ultra-left and the insurrectionists, and some of the wilder cultural politics that came out of the ’60s New Left. Partly that was a theoretical evolution on our parts, and partly that came naturally out of the politics of the working-class and hipster scenes we were writing from and for. The biggest reasons that the scenes we were moving in didn’t orient to the Left were: one,  the 

Left was just plain boring; two, the Left really didn’t offer any personal growth possibilities beyond becoming an “activist”—and people who were already being forced to subsume their personal identity for half their day to the demands of their work weren’t really willing to give up the rest of their identities to become this alienated individual who lives in moments of past glory (the Spanish revolution, 1968, the Russian revolution) to compensate for the miseries of present-day life. 

John: How did Claustrophobia fit into the larger anarchist and radical scenes in Baltimore back in the ’90s? What about larger nationwide movements and networks—for instance you also mention being inspired by the Love and Rage anarchist federation at some point in that introductory text I mentioned earlier. 

Nathaniel: Like I mentioned, there really wasn’t much activity in the Baltimore anarchist scene during most of the time we were active. Black Planet, which was the germ that later became Red Emma’s, kept a physical space open through most of the ’90s by sheer force of will, it seemed—there surely weren’t enough customers to pay the bills most of the time. We tried to do something different that reached outside the limited political ghetto, and in the process we transformed ourselves into something very outside the Left. 

We didn’t have a lot of models starting out. There was a tabloid out of Minneapolis called The Blast that I thought was pretty cool. That came out of people involved with Love and Rage, with the Race Traitor journal, and some radical pro-choice people out there. It was a lot more a product of the established anarchist scene than we were, and more geared at explaining political theory to people than amplifying discussions happening within working-class scenes, but what I liked was that it had some decent writing and layout, and most importantly, it actually tried to write in the language people actually spoke, rather than the political jargon most movement papers used. 

Later we found examples of a few experiences where radical publications were trying similar kinds of experiments as we were. The “full fountain pen” theory developed by the Correspondence/Facing Reality group in the ’50s, a handful of fringe journals on the illegalist fringes of the ’60s New Left, and a few ultra-left agitation projects in out-of-the- way industrial cities in places like India or Brazil. We learned from and networked with some of these people, but mostly our influence stayed in bars and buses and workplaces around the city. 

John: Since this issue of the Indyreader is specifically about media, I’m also curious about the actual paper and how that got printed and distributed and so on. What was the paper’s circulation and audience like? Who read Claustrophobia? Where did you print the paper? Was the project more or less sustainable financially? How did the collective go about putting the issues together? 

Nathaniel: For the six or seven issues that were actually distributed on the streets, we printed and distributed between 1000 to 2500 copies each. Out of those, probably 80 percent were just given away around Baltimore. We developed a list of laundromats, liquor stores, bus routes, and stores that gave us the best response and spent a lot of time covering the city delivering papers to those places. It was kind of undercover; we had to track papers as best we could and it took a while to find out where we could reach people best. Sometimes we’d find the organic intellectuals who worked at liquor stores or barber shops that would hand out the paper to their customers and give us feedback and stories the next time we came in. Other times it was just a gamble and we’d find out down the road that a paper left on a bus seat at rush hour made its way into a factory break room and sparked some discussion. 

We basically covered the printing costs out of our own pockets and with donations from friends. We printed a couple ads, but that was never the business model we tried for. We put out maybe two full issues a year, and in between those, we would do several smaller issues—ranging from full-page broadsheets that we’d wheatpaste around town to flyers handed out to intervene in specific situations to stickers with brief slo- gans. 

John: Why did Claustrophobia eventually come to an end? 

Nathaniel: Well, we were never more than a couple people at the core, and we didn’t have enough group momentum to keep us going when there were other things happening—new relationships, new jobs, political differences, legal and financial troubles, all these things wear you down…. 

A lot of our approach and style was being taken up elsewhere, and it was harder to stay relevant. The City Paper started borrowing some of our snarky outsider tone, inside jokes, and in-your-face graphic styles. I don’t think that was necessarily an imitation of us, just a reflection that hipsters from our generation had started to take over the editorial departments there. In any case, as we got slicker, the liberal mainstream got hipper, and our papers didn’t stand out with that powerful shock of something new and different in the same way. 

The movement was also starting to sound more like what we wanted in some ways. A lot of the new crop of activists coming up were active in cultural struggles around them, doing political work where they lived and worked, and held on to some kind or real identity outside the political scene. There was also a whole growing subcultural trend, I guess CrimethInc. was the figurehead for a lot of it, but it went deeper than them and a lot of what was happening was not quite so cartoonish. This was not really the sort of thing we were calling for at all, but it did share a lot of the critiques about the role of activists, the need to be part of lived community, etc., that we were making. 

Basically, what we were doing was still valid and necessary. In the subculture, in the activist milieu, and on the liberal fringes of the establishment there were all kinds of people looking for easy answers or a way forward. We would have had to really hunker down and develop a concrete proposal or a clear articulation of our vision in order to set ourselves apart and be a useful part of the discussion, and we never quite managed that. 

John: What’s your favorite thing that Claustrophobia published? 

Nathaniel: The most fun pieces to do were the shorter ones, the stickers and one-page broadsheets. We’d have to compress as much meaning as possible into one image, or one slogan, and they would have by far the widest audience. We did some stickers right after 9/11 saying things like “God Bless My Ass” and “I Wish They Had Got Bush Instead” … stirred up some interesting shit. But I think the most useful pieces we did were the running columns. We regularly published people’s stories about ridiculous experiences with police, we did a series of pieces about quitting jobs with style. Those fit most closely with our central focus, of listening to people’s stories and drawing what we found interesting out of them, and bringing that conversation to wider groups of people.