It isn’t an understatement to say that we live in a world that has been meticulously predicted. 

Just read “The Machine Stops” by E.M Forestor, or Simulation Simulacra, or Society of the Spectacle. To everyone who sits dumbfounded at the state of things: you should have seen it coming. 

So we’re here now: the picture is officially better than the original, our products become trash while they’re still in the box, and we waste food like its’ money, and money like its’ not real, nobody can read, and we’re all just miming to each other under an avalanche, inside a fire that we barely agreed to tolerate. 

My driving idea for Rambler – that things must have been better back then, the anachronism at  naive heart, that we need to return to something before – that is gone. I see now that a request to go back to a time when we couldn’t watch genocide and injustice in real life, in real time, on our personal devices – asking to go back, saying things were better in America back then – this is just a sly way of saying you’d like to keep your eyes closed. American innocence was strictly guarded then; we need not see the atrocities our dollars inflict – the rich kids tried their best to become hippies, and whether the drafted was successfully dodged or not, they still served as CIA pawns. What did the counterculture movement of the 60s achieve? Some breathtaking music, a beautiful decoration to our descent into total and utter ignorance. Leaders of the free world: the blind need their slaves to have eyes. 

So now we are here, strategically, in the dystopian novel I read five different iterations of as a kid. And with all the instantly accessible information about our shortcomings, and all the resources for class consciousness, there is still a resistance to general strike, or general anything, because we’ve forfeited common language and community for its’ internet counterparts. I am no longer claiming those are bad outlets – they are just terrible if they're the only outlet, and if that outlet is monopolized by corruptive capitalism. 

We take our mere pictures of participation as enough – we call it engagement. Engagement is not participation. We are living in an age of engaging with everything and participating in nothing. 

What does that all have to do with why Rambler exists? I started Rambler with less ambition than I had desperation. I went to a highschool in a rich white conservative pocket of Southern California. We had the opposite of an art scene. The gallery space sat empty and neglected, our kiln room was a place to smoke blunts, and nobody gave a fuck about whatever the band and theater kids were doing. 

At 17, I had felt like an experiment all my life: a black girl with white family, at a white school, in a white part of town. I rarely, if ever, saw anyone who looked like me. It was hard to recognize myself in the mirror. 

After discovering The Messy Heads, and WIISAA (specifically Midnight Ramblers) years earlier, and integrating into the local indie scene that existed in more diverse areas of my hometown, I began to feel the veil lifting on the general disillunionment caused by my immediate surroundings. I discovered what creativity could do for my soul and I could not ignore the connection between viscerality, spontaneity, good art,  and a good life. 

At my high school, in the very least, I saw an opportunity to play an experiment on the existing social hierarchy — and although I respected it in theory, when popularity and relevance started to become more about a good photo than a good time, I was pushed to action by many small desperations and terrified conjectures about how I would end up in my adulthood…I had decided I did not want to be ignoring the call to live my life in favor of watching and obsessing over it behind a screen. We have known these tracks were rusted for a very long time, yet the train hasn’t stopped. So Rambler for me, was a jumping off point, a leaning way out point, trying to ride the wind and not the train. 

I forced my closest friends to let me make their art into a zine, and we threw a house show on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and asked everyone to leave their phones at home. It was the best night of everyone’s lives. We didn’t have an Instagram, and barely made a flyer in time. It was a social experiment disguised as a school club. We were, and will continue to be a social experiment hiding in plain sight — would you leave your phone at home tonight? Go out in your best outfit and take no photos? Kiss a stranger without the obligatory Tik Tok story time? It is not a question of whether social media is good or bad: it is too late to be seeking an answer to that question. We are not a think tank. We are looking for the people who care more about the original than a copy of a copy of a copy… 

As friends, lovers, collaborators, we grew together, and then grew like crazy. Our second event, a $10 show in February of 2020 was jam packed even though The Frights were playing a free show 20 minutes away. We quickly claimed our unique ‘no phones’ space in the San Diego diy scene. 

When the pandemic hit only a month later, we pivoted almost completely and became involved heavily in BLM protesting. We saw that movement get gobbled up by capitalists and sped to commercialization by soulless incentives. I saw activists become influencers, and I saw influencers mime activist. After I was featured in a handful of news segments, opportunities for personal gain sprouted faster than the change did, and I was again left completely disillusioned. I quit social media for two years and held an even darker distrust of its corruptive capabilities. I fled the scene: I moved to New York. 

When I arrived in January of 2021, eager to join a collective with an ethos similar to my highschool club, I found the search fruitless, but the soil fertile. 

No phones, no photos, no flier raves were the only events I could find. There was sweat on the dancefloor, there was kissing, there was crazy dancing, and so much smiling, but most surprisingly; so much love! Real love! Love for thy neighbor. Humble admissions that we need one another — that we only have each other – that to live in isolation is to barely live at all! I met so many soulmates that year. I thought I had stumbled into heaven. And then lockdowns fully lifted: everyone went back to their whos-whos parties, phone up in the club, making barbie dreamhouse spectacles. 

It took me a while to accept that nobody else saw the dream dying, and that I would have to be somwhere near the helm of keeping this thing alive: I desperately wanted to be a part of something larger than myself; and so again, desperation called for unforeseen measures. 

To my surprise, friends who has been close to the collective in our hometown of San Diego had a similar community void experience in their college towns — and so out of necessity, Rambler grew again, to New York, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz. 

I realized that my disillusionment with political movements and social movements were not seperate – and it evolved into an idea that I believe in the central tenet of Rambler’s philosophy: that art will start the revolution. 

Art is a catalyst for communication and change because art prompts us to see the world from somebody else’s perspective, and if successful, forces us to acknowledge that perspective as valid even if it almost seems like they’re living and acting from different world. Art reminds us that there is the reality of individual experience, and then there is the reality that we agree upon. Art is the bridge between the paradoxically different ways that those realities interact. We are all universes that brush up against one another — and art for arts’ sake revives that potent truth. 

This distinct power of art is the power that Rambler rests on, and is the explanation for our development and prospective future. As citizens of the Western world, the most painful thing to do is hold up the mirror to see what we’ve become. Art is that mirror. And as long as it is, Rambler will serve as an idea to remind you to pick it up and look. 

Around this idea has grown: a curiosity, an urge for discovery, for community harvesting, and has since pushed Rambler around the US, and around the world, in search of the rest of us who want to keep the potential of artistic expression ripe in the collective consciousness. 

In New York, a handful of us kids convinced the landlord of an old brownstone that we wouldn’t burn the place down. We live and make art together in Brooklyn, and have affectionately named the space “Rambler House”. It has not been easy, (everyone wants revolution but nobody wants to do the dishes) but it has definitely been worth it. As scary as it is — we are all we have. And its’ just getting started. We would love to have a Rambler House in every chapter, where we can live, work, and play while acting as local catalysts for lasting change. 

As we expand internationally, we continue to seek out and inspire artistic individuals to the point of action: we need folks who do not want to go numb in the face of a million small injustices and unanswerable questions. Those brave folks who aren’t afraid to admit they need something, need someone. Those who know you have to break to let the light in. How terrifying to depend on each other! Even more so to live pretending you don’t need to. What a world…