Scam #7

by Erica Dawn Lyle

Erick seeks to quash the myth that Miami is a 24 hour party and/or police state. Visitors know little of his city except for what they've seen during Art Basel or the FTAA protests, and Erick attempts to shed some light on the real Miami. He's assigned to cover Art Basel for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and takes the opportunity to profile Take Back the Land, a Miami-based group of activists helping the homeless squat bank-foreclosed homes. Erick briefly interviews Shepard Fairey who's in town painting a mural for Art Basel, and he also shares his thoughts on the FTAA protests in 2003. (From Last Gasp website)

64 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Erica Dawn Lyle is a writer, experimental musician, curator, and cultural instigator who lives in New York and Florida. Formerly the touring guitar player for Riot Grrl punk legends, Bikini Kill, as a solo performer, she has released musical collaborations with Bernadette Mayer, Kim Gordon, The Raincoats, Kathleen Hanna, Brontez Purnell, and many more. The author of several books, she has been a frequent contributor to Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and other publications. Her artist books are in the permanent collection at MOMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, Yale's Beinecke Library, the University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, The Getty Museum, The Hammer Museum, and other institutions, and her writings, papers, and correspondence are permanently held and viewable at the Erica Dawn Lyle archive at University of Miami. In collaboration with her partner, Midnight Piper Forman, she is currently at work on Our Place In The Sun, a speculative fiction film about climate collapse and gender transition in Florida that has screened as a work in progress at North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art and California School of The Arts in Valencia, CA. Her most recent book is The Knight of Cups (Belladonna Press, 2023).

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erick Lyle has the potential to be one of the most inspiring authors I've read, and each new unit of Scam or its related zines quickly makes its way to the top of my must-read pile. However, Lyle's one achilles heel is his feeling of superiority about certain approaches to political, social, and community organizing. He has a way of writing off those whose means are different than his as completely ineffective--and glorifying those means he agrees with in a somewhat unrealistic way, and while this can be an acceptable form of criticism sometimes, I found that over the course of this zine I was reading down his nose at various different people in a way that made me uncomfortable, even as I basically agreed with him. He's a strong-enough writer to get the ineffectiveness of tactics he disagrees (and the effectiveness of those he supports) with across without framing them as clownish cartoons.

Otherwise, the zine is well worth reading, and aside from this one small quibble, which I think I've blown out of proportion, definitely enjoyable.