Thanks to everyone who came to the Justseeds fire sale last night and Todd’s bday party. It was rad. Thanks to Wooster for posting it and to Visual Resistance for workin so hard. Thanks to Dark Dark Dark from Minneapolis & the Miss Rockaway Armada for playing a slammin show!
Tag Archive for 'activism'
My boss Luke Harris is on Nightline tonight!! Check out this piece on poverty in Camden, NJ
I just got this email from Justseeds. With the collapse of clamor magazine’s infoshop, everyone from leftturn, justseeds and spread were totally screwed and lost all their distro and huge chunks of money. I know that Josh MacPhee lost about $10,000. I’ve just gotten this note from him below that they have raised $8,056.84 to recover some of that debt incurred by Clamor’s bankruptcy, that an artist doing a service to our community has been saddled with. I’m so glad people have pulled together to help keep this art available and right this terrible situation. Right now they seem to be just under $2000 short–so close to the $10,000 that needs to be recovered. So, I wanted to tell you how to give, and recommend you do it too. Just visit: www.justseeds.org/donate.html Thanks to everyone who has given to help a small art institution in peril.
Hello Everyone-
First, I want to send out a giant thank you for the overwhelming level of support people have shown over the past couple weeks! Everyone has been so generous with their time, ideas and money. In the 3 weeks since my last email, I have raised $8056.84 to cover a significant portion of the debt dumped on Justseeds. It’s been amazing to have so many people offer help, and enlightening to realize how few places there are to get interesting, intelligent and political art.
Also in the past 3 weeks, me and several other artists have put into motion a plan to relaunch a better and stronger Justseeds sometime in March. A dozen artists have banded together to convert Justseeds into an artist/worker owned and operated collective. The new Justseeds headquarters will be based in Portland, OR and largely run by two artists that have had art available on Justseeds before, Icky A. and Pete Yahnke. We will be doing our own order fulfillment out of a space owned by one of the collective members so the means of distribution will be in our own hands rather than in the hands of a possibly unreliable third party. Additionally, we will be launching a new website which will have new features making it a destination for information and dialogue as well as shopping.
I will not be sending many more Justseeds email updates until we launch the new justseeds site. Keep an eye out for the launch! Thanks again for all your support during this difficult period. Your support made it possible to continue justseeds.
Wishing you all the best in the new year.
Solidarity,
Josh
Andre Anderson’s mother gave a wonderful impassioned speech at the end of the ride. Noah Budnick is behind her. He also spoke (he is a great speaker).
A plaque for all the unreported bike deaths.
Nuckel speaking at Eric Ng’s memorial. Through this experience of losing someone so close to the community recently, Erc’s friends have pulled together and remembered Eric in resistance. Nuckel’s speech at the ride and at Eric’s memorial ride have been heartwrenching and empowering. He’s really an amazing organizer and member of this community.
Rachel in a bike lift on 9th ave. Rachel helped organize the ride and is an awesome Time’s Up organizer.
Bronx Jon’s ghost bike in Williamsburg at S.4 and Roebling, a site tons of cyclists pass by every day, including me. This cyclist was an active member in the messenger community and is missed terribly by his loved ones and friends.
hanging bikes with wings above the ghost bike at Kevin Powell’s memorial site. Mr. Powell’s murderers have not yet been found.
Thanks Todd, for posting:
This is reposted from the Visual Resistance site:
On Friday, December 1, Eric Ng was riding his bike up the West Side bike path. He was on his way from a show to a party — that was Eric, always busy, always seeing people — when a fucking drunk driver ran him down. The driver had traveled at speed for over a mile on the bike path, ignoring dozens of exits, literally dozens of chances to return to the road. Dozens of choices. The car hit Eric with such force that his bike was crushed, he was thrown into the air, his tire and shoe landing fifty feet away. The horrific details are in the news, if you want them.
—–
A big group of Eric’s friends spent the weekend mourning, talking, and, finally, making. We made a ghost bike for him on Saturday and sunflowers on Sunday. Eric’s memorial plaque reads “Love & Rage†— no resting in peace for this rock star.There’s a memorial ride this Saturday, December 9th, meeting at 1pm in Washington Square Park and then proceeding to the site of Eric’s death. Non-bikers can head straight to the site, on the West Side bike path near Clarkson St. Please bring flowers (especially sunflowers), sidewalk chalk, paint, whatever you want. There will be a memorial service after the ride with music and a slideshow, and a party later that night.
Check the VR site for more updates.
So I’m home. I know I didn’t mention it. Having some serious post-partum with the raft and life on the river. Here’s a pic I took of the story booth Todd and I made with Callie and David Ellis to do our oral history project in. That part was amazing. When I put my 2900 pictures on my computer and go through them I’ll do a long post about how I just lived on a raft made of trash that we made for 6 weeks.
For now, here’s our booth. And there’s always our blog.
Oh. And also, today is September 11, the 5th anniversary. A lot of people have asked me about the political meaning of the trip, or if there was any political significance. I’ve been the first to say that it was perhaps a little bit of pre-figurative politics, or “being the change you want to see,” but it was a world I might like to live in for a while, but would never preach as a sustainable solution for others. It was an experiment in sustainable technology–wind turbines and biodiesel, creating 1 bag of trash per week for 30 people, composting, dumpstering food and all that. But come on! Seriously! I don’t think people with kids or people without the resources and luxuries we had to go into this trip would have been able to pick up and jump on the river so easily. That kind of cultural imperialism is silly as hell.
But here’s what the trip did do. I live in a world where I work in an office, in midtown, where I struggle to pay rent and spend so much money on food and rent because I work hard and I don’t have time to cook and I want to live closer to work so I pay more rent, and I cool off by blowing money on beer or whatever I blow money on to reward myself for working so hard and it’s one big vicious cycle. Argh! Stopping the cycle and running off to learn how to build things and live off of dumpsters and good will wrought by inspiration was pretty fucking inspiring. Making a giant floating sculpture–a 110 foot raft made out of garbage–was pretty amazing. And how will I ever be able to imagine a life I want to live if I never take a moment to step outside of the one I live in for fear of not having enough money to get off this hamster-wheel? How can we ever make big changes if we can’t imagine what the outcomes and goals ought to look like? I’m not advocating an end to the hard political work so many of us are doing, but I am advocating for more inspiration and joy. The corporate model of working and living, participating willfully in an economic system that has only profit by any means necessary at its bottom line, is at best unhealthy. How can we live like this? It is not sustainable if we are to imagine a world with less injustice gnashing its teeth and striking dull blows moment by moment. There’s more to say about poverty and shame and change, but I feel so inspired by the trip and doing what we did, what a lot of folks are still doing out on the Miss Rockaway.
So today, five years ago this city groaned and grieved and I saw things I will never ever forget; people watching loved ones die, a sense of fear anywhere we went, the most open-hearted sense of human kindness I have ever witnessed. My friend Jordan stretched all these brown paper rolls on Union Square and people wrote all kinds of things, sometimes leaking their hearts onto the paper. What a privilege it is for us not to have bombings and fear of war at home be a daily reality for us. That day launched us into five years of uncontrollable war, a maniac president and a complete sense of powerlessness over the actions of the government. What despair and resistance that has caused. Today I feel somewhat renewed, like my brain is exploring its capacity to be inspired again even though it’s hard to be back. Maybe doing something wild that only creates beauty has practical effects.
what they say