Posts tagged with "Books and Writing"

Interview with Lioness Filmmakers on MediaRights.org

By Shira | Jul 28, 10 01:29 PM

We've been working with Room 11 Productions, the team behind the documentary Lioness for a few years now, having designed their website, poster and DVDs. I recently interviewed Meg and Daria about the film's impact for MediaRights.org.

Check out the article:
LIONESS Outreach Journal: Engaging Americans Around the Changing Role of Women in Combat

Rabbity websites are on the way (for reals)

By Ari | Apr 17, 10 10:36 AM

Shira and I are planning a new website that will replace this one - a shiny new redesign that will not only transition us from Movable Type to Wordpress (finally!), but which will explain and show what we do much more effectively. I can't tell you how incredibly out of date this site is. I look forward to being more up to date and more interactive!

Now, I know I've been saying "we're working on a new site" for some time but I really mean it, and it's coming soon! Have you heard that saying, "you're your own worst client"? It's true. Take my usual copy writing and organizational perfectionism and multiply it by ten thousand.

Our new design will have rabbits, of course. Which brings me to another website - Pinkrabbitsays.com. Does anyone reading this blog remember my old blog? I used to do more activist rambling, and I think I need a place to do that again. Props to my friend and colleague Tricia Wang for setting such a great example of online representation. I like the idea of compartmentalizing my audiences. (That's just a painfully geeky thing for me to say, isn't it?) So that's coming soon as well.

Stay tuned for updates... more soon, I hope!

I wrote an article about how to organize a community swap/barter meet for Shareable

By Shira | Feb 4, 10 12:47 PM

Shareable, a website that "tells the story of sharing,” invited me to write a how-to article for their site and I seized the opportunity in the hopes of inspiring similar efforts in other communities.

Read the article: How to Throw a Community Swap Meet

Photos from NYC and Thanksgiving

By Shira | Dec 4, 09 04:31 PM

Our 2nd Annual Shirari Week

By Ari | Nov 30, 09 10:49 AM

We took last week off from most of our regular work so we could focus on big and/or neglected projects. Here's some new stuff to check out, if you want to see the fruits of our labor:

Made and launched a site for Frac Attack and arranged our world premiere (Dec. 10 at Cinemapolis in Ithaca)
Event outreach and site updates for Share Tompkins (next swap is Dec. 12th at Southside)
Posted and tagged photos of natural gas drilling for Shaleshock
A new look for Shirari.com!! (Not done yet, but don't worry, there will be bunnies.)

Basically, we still worked the hard the whole time, and barely left our computers. Whoo! It wasn't all work though - we also went to NYC to hang out with Meg and Kevin and see Devendra Banhart, and we hosted a Dacha-licious mostly-vegan Thanksgiving. Shira wrote and recorded a new song which is not up on her MySpace yet but here's the link anyway, and I wrote 32,876 words in November - not a novel yet but it's on its way. And now that we're done with our working break, it's back to work again. Happy Monday everybody.

Dehumanizing humans: Why animal rights should matter to us all

By Ari | Oct 21, 09 11:11 AM

When I read Ian Perl's piece on on health insurance reform, I Am Not a Dog (Huffington Post) I kept thinking, if we treated animals with respect and compassion, calling a human an animal wouldn't be quite so dangerous.

Perl has muscular dystrophy and has been a target of discrimination:

Our lawsuit uncovered insurance company documents that confirmed my suspicion that I'm a target of discrimination. The documents revealed Guardian had compiled a "hit list" of its costliest members, including patients with muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, brain injury, and paralysis. Guardian executives referred to us all as "dogs" and "trainwrecks," and they debated how and when to dump us from the rolls. Laws prohibited the cancellation of the individual members with serious chronic health problems, so Guardian opted to cancel the plan for all members of this specific health plan in New York, an action that violates federal law.

Human beings have a history of using animal names and comparisons to justify the exploitation and oppression of other human beings. We can call a woman a "cow" to justify raping or abusing her. We can call people we want to exterminate "cockroaches," people we want to enslave "monkeys," and people we want to ignore "urchins." And we can call a man to whom we want to deny medical care a "dog." We can call humans all of these things, minimizing that which makes them worthy of our concern - their humanness - to justify treating them inhumanely. The animals who bare these names are, of course, even less worthy of our concern. Animals are not just denied medical treatment or abused, they're routinely forcibly inseminated by the billions so we can torture them for a short time before slaughtering them to fill our bellies.

In one of his novels, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, "As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right." Isaac saw that when we treat one sentient being as an object, we open the door to treating others in the same way. Leo Tolstoy too said: "As long as there are slaughterhouses... there will be battlefields." Will we one day realize, as a species, that our treating any feeling creature as if they can not feel pain (or as if their pain doesn't matter) is just not morally acceptable?

For some painful but illuminating perspective into the issue of treating people "like animals" and what that means about our treatment of animals themselves, please read:

Distractions from Wild Things

By Ari | Oct 2, 09 09:06 AM

I love how human and accessible Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze sound in this glimpse at the writing of the "Where the Wild Things Are" screenplay:

Eggers and Jonze also talked about the difficult process of turning a short storybook into a full length movie. Eggers had never worked on a screenplay before, and he didn't have any software. He and Jonze wrote the first draft in Microsoft Word, adding tabs and capitals themselves. Jonze kept getting easily distracted and wanting to go to the store or watch Youtube videos, so Eggers was more of a task-master, keeping him in focus.

I think of these guys as such pros, so it's nice to hear that even they get distracted by YouTube!

"A Recipe for Change: Documentaries on Food" - My Most Recent Article on MediaRights.org

By Shira | Sep 24, 09 04:15 PM

Check out my new article on food documentaries. It's kind of a survey/opinion piece and I'd love to know what you think!

Read the full article:
A Recipe for Change: Documentaries on Food

Here's an excerpt:

These days it seems like green is the new black. From designer grocery bags to eco-tourism, popular culture has finally embraced environmentalism and, for better or worse, begun coopting it with profit-driven campaigns. Regardless of how you feel about capitalism, the good news for mother earth is that changing your daily habits to lower your impact is no longer wholly dismissed as radical, hippy behavior, at least not by people in blue states. Core to this cultural paradigm shift is food. Americans are making the not-so-giant-leap in logic that what we eat affects our health and the health of our planet, and documentary films have played a significant role in getting us here.

In 1976 Americans were reeling from the Vietnam War and Watergate. The utopian visions of the sixties were fading memories and food was already firmly established in the collective psyche as a “product” – fast, cheap and out of control. It was in this context that filmmaker Frederick Wiseman released Meat, a cinema verité portrait of what was, at the time, one of the country’s largest slaughterhouses. Years before animal rights activists were capturing the disturbing conditions at factory farms with hidden camcorders, Wiseman invited Americans to meet their meat through his nuanced filmmaking. (Read more)

And, the article got a mention on Ithaca's Food Web, a new blog about local food - thanks Alison!

Sometimes the Dalai Lama sounds like Buckminster Fuller

By Ari | Sep 24, 09 09:20 AM

One of the most powerful visions I have experienced was the first photograph of the earth from outer space. The image of blue planet floating in deep space, glowing like the full mood on a clear night, brought home powerfully to me the recognition that we are indeed all members of a single family sharing one little home. I was flooded with the feeling of how ridiculous are the various disagreements and squabbles within the human family. I saw how futile it is to cling so tenaciously to the differences that divide us. From this perspective one feels the fragility, the vulnerability of our planet and its limited occupation of a small orbit sandwiched between Venus and Mars in the vast infinity of space. If we do not look after this home, what else are we charged to do on this earth?

- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, in The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality

I just finished making this movie for the Ithaca Area Poets

By Shira | Sep 15, 09 09:39 PM

Our friends Josh and Jeci organize monthly open mics/slams for Ithaca Area Poets. They're applying for a local arts grant and thought having a video of one of their events might strengthen their submission. So they asked me to make a 5-minute piece and in exchange they hooked us up with many beautiful baskets of fruits and veggies. Yay for swapping! Here's the video - I hope they get the grant!

Yay updates

By Ari | Aug 30, 09 04:03 PM

New stuff just posted:

Other places we're blogging:

Planning to Change the World 2009-2010 Planner

By Shira | Jul 30, 09 10:42 AM

I had the privilege of designing the cover for the new planner created by the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) and the Education for Liberation Network. Today is the last day to pre-order your copy for the discount price of $14.00.

Last year's planner was awesome and I think the new one will be even better!

Planning to Change the World is a plan book for educators who believe their students can and will change the world. It is designed to help teachers translate their vision of a just education into concrete classroom activities.

Planning to Change the World is an imaginative and innovative idea in the field of education. It is something that teachers all over the country who have social consciences will find useful because it will give them an opportunity and a framework for putting into practice what they believe. I hope it will be widely adopted.
–Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

Summer sci fi: An AI arms race and an elevator to space

By Ari | Jul 15, 09 04:31 PM

The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
I'm a fan of Buckminster Fuller's world-changingly-big ideas for future human housing and transportation, so this book was right up my alley. Arthur C. Clarke tells the story of the construction of a "space elevator" and couches his suspenseful, fun narrative in a rich, invented history that has so many parallels to our own it's positively believable. Clarke seems to fall in the atheist camp, but the story playing with the "Tower of Babel" concept and the idea that engineering projects of this scale bring us into conflict with the gods - whether we've invented the gods, or they invented us.

Peace on Earth by Stanisław Lem
Lem's story of the arms race crossed with artificial intelligence is a wry, witty, imaginative page-turner that brings us from a futuristic earth to the surface of the moon, where fantastical robots baffle the narrator with their technological innovations. The characters aren't very likable but they're very funny and well-written; the ending fell a little flat but was ultimately satisfying.

View all my reviews >>

Photos from Israel

By Shira | Jul 12, 09 06:38 PM

After our week on Wasan Island in Canada, we traveled straight to Israel for my grandmother's 80th birthday celebration. Ari was out of commission for most of the trip because she came to down with lyme disease (no worries - she's on antibiotics and feeling much better). But thankfully she came out of quarantine the last few days to hang out with my family, check out some art in Ein Hod, and see a modern dance performance in Tel Aviv.

During the trip I spent a lot of one-on-one time with my grandmother, savta Margalit. I shot some beautiful video of her telling stories about the Holocaust and her life since for a film I'm making with my brother. I'm also going to be laying out and publishing a book of her poetry later this summer. She's a very inspiring lady - Happy Birthday Savta!

Check Out My Article About Food, Inc. at Documentary.org

By Shira | Jun 11, 09 02:44 PM

I had a chance to see a preview copy of the new documentary Food, Inc. and interview the Director, Robert Kenner. This is my first article for the International Documentary Association's blog, and I'm psyched to get a chance to write about a topic so close to my heart:

Here's an excerpt and you can read the full article online:
Change: It's What's for Dinner: 'Food, Inc.' Takes on Agribusiness

In a world dominated by corporations, it is no surprise that the American food system has been hijacked by the relentless drive for profit. Under the pretexts of affordability and convenience, modern industrialized agriculture has consistently ignored the unintended consequences of their "efficient" practices on our health and livelihoods, the environment and other species.
Equally implicated is the United States government, which simultaneously subsidizes and fails to adequately regulate the agriculture industrial complex. This reality, explored by Frederick Wiseman in his 1976 cinema vérité documentary Meat and more recently by Nikolaus Geyrhalter in the unnarrated montage film Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread; 2005), is more explicitly tackled in Robert Kenner's Food, Inc., which opens June 12 in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and nationwide on June 19.

The issue of food and the many ways in which it affects our lives is an enormous one, and the film is a broad undertaking, exploring everything from the health impacts of ever ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup (one out of three Americans born today is expected to develop early-onset diabetes), to water and air pollution caused by intensive factory farming, to human rights violations perpetrated against undocumented workers by mega corporations like Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer. Viewers are aided in processing all of this information by motion graphics created by Big Star NYC, which worked with Kenner to create an entertaining and helpful visual language for the film.

Ultimately, Food, Inc. is an examination of free market capitalism's disregard for anything other than the bottom line. "This is a film that's about more than food," says Kenner. "It's really about corporate consolidation and irresponsibility and about the relationship of these companies with government. It's not that different from what happened with the financial crisis. These companies have been totally irresponsible and at the end of the day, we're the ones who pay the price."

No bosses here: A book from the past to help us work more equitably today

By Ari | May 1, 09 09:17 AM

No bosses here: A manual on working collectively and cooperatively by Karen Brandow

My review

This book was published in 1981 but activists today would do well to read it. It touches on many aspects of working in collectives, cooperatives, and other non-hierarchical arrangements, from bookkeeping to running effective meetings, to dealing with feelings and working against power and privilege. It's a quick read, well-organized and full of useful examples from collectives around the US. I think it's appropriate I finished reading it on May Day!

View all my reviews.

Some good books: DIY media labs and culture, environmental sci fi, the origins of aggression, and tantric buddhism

By Ari | Apr 20, 09 09:13 AM

Grow Your Own Media Lab by James Wallbank

My review

I found this book tremendously inspiring and challenging, and hope that others who are interested in technology and communities give it a read. It's an accessible and engaging short howto to making technology more accessible to people regardless of class and abilities. It helped me to see the importance of embracing free and open-source software, and the huge potential of dumpster diving and recycling for meeting people's technology needs economically and in an environmentally sustainable way. It also helped me understand that the key to empowering tech users is not detailed instructions, but rather, to serve as a facilitator of their interaction with technology as they learn how to educate themselves and solve their own problems - basically, teaching others the value of the DIY ethic.

The Wounded Planet by Roger Elwood

My review

Awesome different ideas about the future, written from an early 1970s viewpoint. Scary to see how little has changed about our behavior, especially considering how much has changed about our understanding of our impact on our environment.

On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz

My review

This book, though it's very pre-identity politics, had a lot of excellent takeaways for me, as a peace activist. It shows how human behavior and animal behavior (humans being animals) reveal patterns that can help us understand how to break free of self-destructive and socially-destructive behaviors like war.

Introduction to Tantra: A Vision of Totality by Lama Yeshe

My review

This book is written in an engaging style which is meant to approximate the voice of influential Lama Yeshe, who died in the late 1980s and was reincarnated to parents in Spain. The text explains how someone can use tantric (Tibetan) buddhism to reach enlightenment efficiently, which theoretically will allow you to, like Lama Yeshe, control the process of dying and rebirth so that you can help others and create a more compassionate world. It includes detailed descriptions of meditations and other exercises one can do in this pursuit, and serves as an overview of the first stages of tantric practice, encouraging readers to find a Lama they like so they can pursue further study in community.

Personally, I enjoyed the style and content and found the ideas very intriguing - but I shy away from organized religion and power hierarchies, and tantra as outlined here does seem to depend on such things. It also seems somewhat heterosexist. I hear that not all followers follow plans like Lama Yeshe's to the letter, though he does speak with such an authoritative voice that one would think that his plan is the tried and true method to attain enlightenment.

These criticisms aside, I did love reading the book, and felt many of the techniques outlined in it really are useful and do contribute to the practitioner's experience of bliss and wisdom.

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore

My review

This book made me reevaluate my relationship with money and has challenged me to figure out how to make a living while really retaining my integrity as a culture worker. I mean, I've been working on that for years, but the author of this book and the many interesting people she interviewed are helping me see that I could go even farther. Good stuff - and an excellent primer on the punk movement, as well as on street art's evolving relationship with commerce.

View all my reviews.

Imagine all the people

By Ari | Apr 19, 09 10:51 AM

I was just reading this article about tweens in love with the Obama girls, and I was glad to read that the Obamas are really trying to minimize media contact and coverage of their daughters - despite the awesome cuteness of so many kids obsessing over them like they're pop stars. I think people being in love with the Obamas is 100% great. I mean, yes, we should be critical and we should demand good policy and decision-making from Obama, but if tons of people love the First Family and want to be friends with them, I think that bodes well for our country. It sure is nicer than the atmosphere during the Bush presidency. Those were an uncomfortable eight years. I'd rather feel love than contempt for my elected leadership, personally.

However, love that finds its end in consumerism (the article suggests that concert tickets or DVDs are usually the outlet for kids' celebrity obsessions) or in oppression (the media spotlight and the paparazzi can be incredibly unhealthy) is not just love, it's become something else. I dream of a day when humans can love ourselves and other humans for who we all really are, without regard for artificial hierarchies and power structures. We put some people up on pedestals and obsess about them, lionize them or demonize them, over-analyze every gesture and purchase they make. Even if we love them dearly, we may be setting ourselves up for sorrow or for disappointment, depending on how their media image and their life (separate things!) pan out. Or we may subject them to such scrutiny they self-destruct (sorry Britney). This is why I don't believe in heroes.

Continue reading "Imagine all the people..." »

Going Green, One Film at a Time

By Shira | Apr 15, 09 08:56 PM

My interview with Larry Engel, Co-Author of the recently released Code of Best Practices for Sustainable Filmmaking, was just published on MediaRights.org and featured in their newsletter to over 20,500 members:
Going Green, One Film at a Time

Here's a choice excerpt:

Shira Golding: Do you think documentary filmmakers have a particular responsibility to be sustainable?

Larry Engel: Yes. Those of us from Filmmakers for Conservation and the Center for Environmental Filmmaking, are very much in the forefront of contact with the most exotic and fragile environments. We’re in the face of animals who are threatened and near extinction, and we make stories about them. It’s important to do that so that the public sees how beautiful and precious our world is, and exactly how fragile it is. Yet, for many many years, it didn’t matter how many Land Rovers you had – it didn’t quite matter what imprint you made on the land or the animals. And that didn’t make any sense.

This came to me many many years ago when I was working with a dear friend of mine and Co-Producer, Tom Lucas, out in Yellowstone. We had done an hour-long film for the National Wildlife Federation and PBS called Wildfire. We were tracking the ‘88 Yellowstone fires, and in the winter we went back to see how the park was doing, and we witnessed many many elks starving.

One of the researchers with whom we were working said, “You know, we’ve been doing studies about the caloric impact of human contact on animals from the back-country, and we learned that one contact can burn up hundreds of calories. Even if the animal doesn’t run or leave or do anything, just the stress and awareness, the adrenaline, consumes calories. In a marginal year, human contact could make the difference in the life and death of individual animals.”

At that point Tom and I looked at each other and we said, “Well you know what? We don’t really want to film anymore of these animals.” And she said, “You can keep filming them, but back off. Let’s make sure to use blinds and work in the trees so we minimize contact, instead of clomping around among hares and elks and buffalo. Let’s change our behavior.” Tanya really emphasizes that we have to change the behavior and sensitivity of the whole filmmaking world, from distributors, to programmers, the filmmakers, the manufacturers, all through the line.

Because if we can’t come around to figuring out how to create a sustainable lifestyle as filmmakers, then we’re doing a disservice to our subjects and therefore also to the audience.

Take a read and let me know what you think!

A Feminist Review: Fear of Fighting by Stacey May Fowles

By Ari | Mar 20, 09 11:11 AM

"Fear of Fighting is a short novel about a woman living and working and looking for love. It reminds me, oddly, of Chuck Palahniuk's novels, though it's more comfortable with its queerness..."
Read the rest of my review at feministreview.org

The Beasties: Horror for young environmentalists

By Ari | Feb 11, 09 09:22 AM

The Beasties by William Sleator

My review

My mom found this book and thought I would like it. She was right! It's creepy but fun, an unlikely combination of sustainability, mythology, and horror. It's meant for young adults but I'm 28 and was turning pages with excitement, wondering what would come next. I won't say anything about the plot because the less you know, the more enjoyable the book will be. I didn't have a dust jacket on my used copy, and the plain black cover with its enigmatic title was even more successful than the spooky eye graphic shown here. Probably best for older kids, it's got some very grim imagery and some violence in it.

View all my reviews.

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities

By Ari | Feb 11, 09 09:15 AM

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
When I found this book, I jotted down, "looks like the way to go if you're working on an ecovillage or intentional community project and don't want to doom it to failure." Two careful reads later, I'm pretty sure I was right, and we're using the book to guide our own ecovillage project as it forms. This volume is jam-packed with insights into the many legal, financial, social, and other issues surrounding the complicated but world-changing subject of intentional community. There are sample agreements, vision documents, financial arrangements, and other useful tools. The author is a member of Earthaven community, and her book draws on interviews and research into many communities all around the world.

View all my reviews.

The Group House Handbook: How to share your kitchen without going crazy

By Ari | Feb 11, 09 09:05 AM

The Group House Handbook by Nancy Brandwein

My review

This book is really, really useful for anyone considering sharing a house, either to live in, or as a common house in a cohousing situation. It's a bit dated but provides a fun window into sixties counterculture - and it's surprising how much of the content is still totally appropriate for today. It includes sample budgets and other useful documents, and is full of goofy cartoon art of group house residents alternately delighting and bothering each other.

View all my reviews.

Warriors: Man, being a feral cat must be rough

By Ari | Jan 14, 09 05:39 PM

Thanks to J for giving me Warriors: Into the Wild! It's a young adult novel of the entertaining-to-adults variety, and there's a graphic novel version as well. It's part of a series about feral cats and their culture - but crossed with very anthropomorphic yet entertaining mythologies and intrigues. What a cool book. I can't wait to have kids so they can read stuff like this.

Our three vegan cat friends are from Bushwick - they were all feral cats, homeless street kittens, when we adopted them. Look at them, they're really awesome.

Read on for my GoodReads review.

Continue reading "Warriors: Man, being a feral cat must be rough..." »

Two new Feminist Reviews

By Ari | Jan 14, 09 12:06 PM

I've had two more book reviews published by Feminist Review. Both of these were awesome books. Ain't I a Feminist in particular really expanded my horizons and pushed me to think about privilege and identity in new ways.
Argentina: Stories for a Nation
Ain't I a Feminist? African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom

Yay Feminist Review! Contact them if you're interested in writing reviews - you get to keep the book (or movie or album) in exchange for your review.

freeDimensional: Birthing a web 2.0 child

By Ari | Jan 12, 09 06:44 PM

I hope executive director Todd Lester of freeDimensional doesn't mind if I quote him with the title of my post here, but this is how he described the collaborative experience of launching fD's new site this weekend, and I think it's particularly apt: We all birthed a web 2.0 child. You can go meet it here: freeDimensional.org.

freeDimensional is an organically-growing, partnership-based organization that links activist culture workers (journalists, artists, writers, and the like) who are facing repression and censorship with support services, including safe haven placements in artist residency programs. The power of the organization is in its social networks around the globe. These programs, these services, these people, are all out there - the challenge is only to connect everyone so we can all engage more effectively in mutual aid.

I met Todd way back at the end of 2005, through Shira and their work around the Media That Matters Film Festival. He needed a site, and at the time, I remember seeing that they'd need something much more interactive in the future, but that for now, I could make a small, informational site to give them a web presence while they built their organization. For a long time I thought that in the future we'd hire some big web design firm to come in and create some perfect glittering website for them that would magically fulfill all of their many needs.

In the interim, I had a bit of an awakening about the internet, via my understanding of web 2.0 (collaborative, online) technologies. The internet can be an extension of our physical lives, a way for us to transcend space and time. Our blogs and Flickr photostreams and Tweets and Delicious links and Facebook updates are extensions of and aids to our imperfect human memories. Email and messaging and Skype and the like allow us to connect with each other across great distances, often instantly. We're all learning how to use the internet most effectively to meet these great needs, and in the process, I believe we're gradually realizing our commonality, and creating new solutions to age-old problems that formerly seemed unsolvable. (I have a theory about web 3.0. If anyone reads this and is interested, comment and I'll write about it!!)

So when fD finally outgrew their little site and was ready for something new and more useful, Shira and I were ready to craft a solution for them. It was time for them to clarify what they were all about, explain it well, and then provide an online platform for the incredible social networking that had been happening in the real world. fD was ready to go web 2.0.

Shira made a short video intro for them and helped them rework and refine their mission statement and other organizational copy. I helped them look at their many technology options and to select free services that will allow them to grow and extend their reach with minimal cash outlays. The site is built on the Ning custom social networking platform (the free version for now). We're transitioning the mailing list to Vertical Response and their lovely nearly-free non-profit program. Shira chose the beautifully high-res-capable video service Vimeo to host fD's intro video. We integrated Twitter, Flickr and YouTube feeds into the site. We'd settled on Network for Good to collect donations a while back. fD also has accounts on other social networking sites, which we've been using to meet and collaborate with even more people around the world.

These free and low-cost services have limitations - you're fitting your own complex self into a sometimes-imperfect template, and you don't have the same level of control over your content that you'd have if you were hosting the whole thing on your own server. However, they make an extraordinary array of sophisticated communications features accessible to organizations that don't have tens of thousands of dollars to drop on a new custom-crafted interactive site every few years. The internet is changing so fast that production cannot keep up with the technology if we follow old models of design and interaction. This solution can and will grow and evolve, flexibly adapting to and taking advantage of new technologies as they come.

This project would not have been possible if Shira and I, or fD, worked in a more mainstream and less openly collaborative way. Shira's and my cooperative approach to design problems and fD's trust and willingness to experiment made for a very organic design and production process that drew on the strengths and knowledge of everyone involved. This web 2.0 child we've birthed together reflects that process, and is stronger for it.
freeDimensional.org »

More Do Not Leave Unattended

By Ari | Dec 12, 08 09:43 PM

A while ago I wrote about a collaborative notebook project, Do Not Leave Unattended! We were lucky enough to get one of Jude's first notebooks; I passed it onto Shira, and then she passed it onto Angela. She wrote about it and you can see it at Do Not Leave Unattended! It is pretty awesome. I found it really moving.

Join in and get a notebook!

Previously:
Do Not Leave Unattended: Dispatches from Ithaca
Do Not Leave Unattended!: New design launched

Radical solidarity - an artist's statement

By Ari | Dec 11, 08 01:05 PM

It looks like Socialist Party USA is going to publish some of my more activisty artwork in the upcoming International Women's Day edition of Socialist Women. I've done some custom illustration for them and even laid out the whole magazine several times, but this is the first time they'll be publishing the art I make for my own activist purposes. Since it's heavy on animal rights and sustainability and the issue (like most issues...) didn't have any content along those lines, the editorial collective asked me to write an artist's statement to go with the work. I sometimes have a hard time asserting myself as an earthy-crunchy animal-loving hippie in the socialist community, and people have a tendency to get pissed when one draws connections between the oppression of humans and animals, so writing this was a challenge! I really welcome comments from folks - let me know what you think.

In progressive activist circles we often talk of solidarity, and with good reason - unexamined privilege and blindness to the oppression of others makes social change difficult. If we come to activism with open minds and open hearts, we'll find allies everywhere, and our unity will advance the causes of peace and social justice. Fortunately, over time, the circle of compassion has widened further and further. People really seem to be learning to look beyond our differences and understand and identify with each other's struggles on an international level. And finally, activists working in all areas are realizing that this compassion needs to be extended not only to all humans but to the home we all share, our earth.

However, many people are still reluctant to open the circle of compassion to non-human animals. Even in the most radical queer or feminist or socialist spaces, mentions of animal rights are often met with ridicule or patronizing requests that we stick to "real issues" like human rights. Though animals feel pain and pleasure, are sentient enough to have families and desires and agendas of their own, and there are vegan alternatives aplenty to their exploitation, animal rights, we are told, will have to wait until after the revolution.
This pattern is an old one, repeated time after time throughout history. Sojourner Truth was told that black women's rights had to wait until after white women's suffrage had been secured. Bayard Rustin was denied credit for organizing the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom because he was queer. Every time we disregard one person's rights to advance someone else's rights, we may think we're being strategic, but we're also oppressing someone and holding back their struggle.

The means are the ends. We need to be the change we wish to see. It's time for a radical new solidarity that acknowledges all oppressions and all struggles as interconnected. Believe it or not, there are no limits to compassion. Perfection might not be attainable, but it is entirely possible for each of us to begin to abstain not only from the oppression of other humans, but from exploiting animals as well.

Animals may not be able to communicate in a language we can understand, but they have many allies in their struggle: vegans, finally coming to accept and move beyond our species privilege. We may be part of the "circle of life" but our species is capable of great things, including forging new paths that don't include the strong preying on the weak.

I'm an activist / artist living in a progressive town where my partner and I are organizing a back-to-the-land vegan housing collective. I work with local groups and folks online to do community organizing and create art and outreach materials around issues of sustainability, radical solidarity, nonviolence, and economic justice. You can see my work, find out about my current projects, and check out our blog and podcast at shirari.com.

Exuberant nudity

By Ari | Dec 7, 08 08:56 AM

I've been catching up on my reading, and have encountered two incidences of happy nudity that I just had to share.

In Carbusters #36, at the end of a report on the World Carfree Day events in Curitiba, Brazil: "Finally we began our bike march: 300 cyclists swept the streets of the city. The feeling of freedom and happiness was so intense that a few riders couldn't resist, and took off their clothes."

And, in Communities Magazine #138, in Anissa Ljanta's story of the shock of moving from an intentional community to a mainstream neighborhood: "I missed being naked, and the ease with which people were naked at Twin Oaks. People made an effort to appreciate beauty of all kinds, not just the skinny hairless women validated by mainstream media. I got to live in a culture that embraced me for who I was, where body image and dress were not fraught with tension."

Ljanta's story is sadder - she goes on to express her resentment at being asked to wear clothes while swimming; she describes her run-ins with sexism and the very real possibility of sexual violence which requires women in mainstream neighborhoods to be careful when walking alone at night, something she didn't fear at Twin Oaks. However, both of these stories offer glimpses of a kind of happy nudity that sounds like something that should happen more often.

Seriously, how often do you feel happy and free enough that you can revel in the body nature gave you? If we're all born with a naked body to enjoy, and we like looking at naked bodies, and all other species are running around naked all the time, what exactly is up with us that we have so many hangups about nudity? Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where nudity was not only safe and socially acceptable, but viewed as a healthy expression of joy?

Art for feminist, socialist healthcare

By Ari | Nov 11, 08 04:07 PM

Thanks to Liz Henry of Composite: Poetics and Tech for using an illustration I did for her excellent post, Argentinian feminists in the early 1900s.

You can also see and comment on the art here: "socialist heath care" on Flickr. This art was originally an illustration for an article in Socialist Women, about a woman's struggle in the U.S. healthcare system. If anyone out there is still afraid of socialists, read about Socialist Party USA's wonderful healthcare campaign.

"The role of trust in high tech work- The case of Freelance Web-Designers in NYC"

By Ari | Nov 10, 08 03:36 PM

A while back I participated in a study by a Columbia sociology student named Matthias Thiemann, who has written a 120 page thesis in German based on his research. He's translated a four-page section of it which may be published as a chapter in an upcoming book, which I really got a kick out of and wanted to share here: The role of trust in high tech work- The case of Freelance Web-Designers in NYC (PDF)

Some highlights that I really identify with (and I guess I should, since I was part of the sample):

In sending away clients to cheaper, better suited competitors or building little devices free of charge, freelancers establish a reputation of putting the clients’ welfare first, generating trust. Such acts of gift-giving then can lead to overcome the volatility of market-demand by generating referral networks for the freelancer and binding the gift-recipients for the long term.

I totally do this! I learned this from Tekserve, where I first worked when we moved to NYC - and it's not something I do to get something out of people, with the expectation of returns. I do it because, like Tekserve, I care about the people I'm working with, and about their projects, and if I can do something that's perhaps small and easy for me, but of great value to my clients, I'll do it in a heartbeat. This is also why Shira and I sometimes refer clients to other designers - if we know someone who can do a given job better or more economically for some reason, we pass it on, because it's in our client's interest. And rather than losing us clients, often those same clients come back because they know we did them a good turn.

In the sample, the more successful freelancers deserve special attention to the communication process, attempting to include the wishes of the customers and providing them with the feeling that they are in command. This strategy does not only bind their clients to them and leads to several referrals due to the pleasant process of cooperation, it is also a lucrative strategy in itself. The increased trust into the interaction partner seems to arouse the desire to actively engage in the process of production. This not only increases the satisfaction with the final product, it also increases the amount of work time spent on a project which adds to the income of the designer.

Here too, we don't use this strategy so we'll spend more time and make more money, though of course those are nice side effects which do happen on some projects. Shira and I treat every design job not as merely a service for pay, but as a cooperative partnership - we specialize in helping to give form and reach to our clients' ideas. The result is that the client is usually very, very happy with the product, and the product is very, very useful to them. We do give advice and make calls as designers, because we often have a deeper understanding of communications strategy and visual design principles than do our clients (which is, after all, why they hire us), but we don't steamroll our clients into accepting things they don't dig. We like to work with people to make things they love, and which will last. It's good for the client, and Matthias's study is helping me see how good it is for us, too.

Click here to read the paper, and let me know if you too are a web designer who'd like to talk to Matthias. His research goes on...

Ari's Early Animal Rights Influences

By Ari | Nov 3, 08 10:01 AM

I was sitting here in our cute little library (our new place in Ithaca has a tiny room just right for books) and I looked up at our shelves and thought, a lot of books here really changed me as a child. Somehow I went from eating animals and wearing their skins to thinking of animals as my brothers and sisters. It took a very long time and I'm still working on it (I think I always will - species privilege is really hard to work against), but I know that even as a kid, I was starting to form that consciousness. So, I figured out the titles that I think had the most impact on me early on, and I put them into this GoodReads shelf: Ari's Early Animal Rights Influences

Was anyone else out there spurred to a more developed social consciousness as a result of childhood readings? What titles had the most impact on you?

Read on for the reviews / notes I posted in GoodReads, on each title - or visit the shelf to read them on GoodReads, and write your own reviews.

Continue reading "Ari's Early Animal Rights Influences..." »

Do Not Leave Unattended!: New design launched

By Ari | Oct 23, 08 04:52 PM

The site I designed for Jude of Randomly Run4istRun, for her new collaborative writing/art project, Do Not Leave Unattended!, has launched. Visit the site to see current contributions and to sign up if you'd like to participate. I'm particularly happy with this design, which put my handwriting and illustration style to good use. Thanks to Jude for the support! It's nice to work on projects that allow so much creative freedom. Thanks also to Krissy for the logo collaboration, and to Barbara for the excellent WordPress coding skillz.

A fun fact: the notebooks that appear in the layout (in the navigation and the background) are photographs I took of actual notebooks and handbound books I've made and filled. Which is cool, because this is the first time they've appeared publicly outside of my "i made this" photoset on Flickr.
Do Not Leave Unattended »

Previously: Do Not Leave Unattended: Dispatches from Ithaca

Quote of the day: How to have huge dreams

By Ari | Sep 18, 08 09:15 AM

"Community has made everything in my life easier and has allowed me to have huge dreams, inconceivable without community. The skills I've learned, practical and human, seem infinite. My love for humanity has thrived and expanded. Nothing about community has been easy, but it all has been fun. This is the work for political activists who want to live their solutions. If we are to survive as a species we will do so learning the ecstasy of community. We do have to get together."
- Patch Adams, in his Foreword to Diana Leafe Christian's Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities

Jonathan Safran Foer Tells It

By Shira | Sep 10, 08 10:55 AM

He never uses the word "vegan" so I'm not sure exactly where Mr. Safran Foer stands, but he makes some great arguments for going vegetarian, especially if you're a Jew who keeps Kosher. I particularly like this bit where he quotes Tolstoy...

For some reason I hold in the back of my mind that everybody I know is going to be a vegetarian in twenty years, it's something I really believe... Tolstoy once said that if everyone were vegetarian, there wouldn't be war anymore. And it sounds like a very silly statement on the surface because what on earth does one have to do with the other. But I thought about it a lot, and I believe in it - not because the meat industry itself is causing wars, but because if we became the kind of people who were regularly choosing our reason over our hungers, being more deliberate, more willful about our sense of what's right, we'd be living in a very different kind of world.

The Great Turning: The world getting better, already in progress

By Ari | Aug 11, 08 11:06 AM

If you read one book this year, please make it David C. Korten's The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. I really think this book has the potential to change the world. Actually, I think this book is only one small part of the movement it describes - not only is another world possible, it's being built right now. This book explains what's happening all around us clearly and with compassion, and invites us to take part in the great turning of human civilization from age-old patterns of domination and exploitation, to cooperation, partnership, and peace.

Korten comes from a mainstream U.S. background - he worked for years trying to help folks around the world improve their lives through the application of global capitalist strategies. He discovered that this didn't help but rather hurt people, and over time turned instead to more progressive means. Today he is co-founder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network and YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, and works on a host of other amazing projects aimed at creating a better world right now. The Great Turning is Korten's careful explanation of where we've gone wrong, what's happening right now, and how we can turn it all around for the better.

Continue reading "The Great Turning: The world getting better, already in progress..." »

Resistance is Fertile: It's Time to Start Guerrilla Gardening

By Shira | Jul 15, 08 05:38 PM

My latest article is up on MediaRights.org. Here's a taste:

In more recent years, guerrilla gardening has exploded in cities like Chicago and New York where waves of development have too often ignored the need for green space. In neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification, like where I live in Bushwick, Brooklyn, it is very common to walk down a block and see three or four empty, fenced-in lots that have been bought by developers, but which are just sitting there, collecting trash. For this scenario, guerrilla gardeners have come up with the perfect weapon - the seed bomb.

And a great video on the topic...

More on Click!

By Shira | Jul 15, 08 01:14 PM

My name on the wall of the Brooklyn Museum!
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

Ari and I went to check out the Click! show at the Brooklyn Museum. Seeing my name and photo on the gallery wall was a little anti-climactic, but thrilling nonetheless. While the methodology behind the project is very interesting, the gallery execution felt a little flat. It would have been awesome, for example, to see the results animated on flat-screen TVs, alongside snippets about crowd-sourcing, curation and the nature of photography.

The show is getting some press coverage...

From Proles vs. Pros: An Experiment In Curating by Robin Givhan:

This exhibit may have been particularly suited to crowd-based curating because photography is a medium that people experience every day, whether it is a particularly artful photo in the newspaper or an artsy black-and-white snapshot of their newborn they're e-mailing to relatives. There's a sense of ownership and accessibility with photography that doesn't exist with sculpture or painting. That connection is one of its pleasures; it doesn't seem so precious or elitist.

And 3,344 People May Not Know Art but Know What They Like By Ken Johnson:

How people arrive at consensus in the art world is worth studying. So is the tension between experts and nonexperts, which can extend to the highest reaches of the culture industry. So it is possible that Mr. Surowiecki’s ideas might yet prove fruitful for the business of art. But it will take a lot more persuasive reasoning to convince anyone with a serious interest in artistic quality that “crowd-curating” is a good idea. The best you can say for “Click!” is that it’s a good conversation starter.

Here's a podcastof the panel at Governor's Island. I ask a question at about 44min. 30 sec.:

And there's a book of the show available through Blurb:
Buy the book!
$3 off discount code

"Chickens are decent people." - George Carlin

By Shira | Jun 29, 08 07:06 PM

About four minutes into this amazing monologue about a woman's right to choose, Carlin asks, "How come when it's us, it's an abortion, and when it's a chicken, it's an omelette?" While Carlin was not a vegan (or vegetarian), he was an astute observer of American society, including its schizophrenic attitudes towards animals.

Carlin died just as I started reading Lenny Bruce's autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Carlin has cited Bruce as an influence many times and was actually at the famous Lenny Bruce performance when Bruce was arrested for obscenity.

While America has a long way to go in the struggle for social justice, I've got to give props to these comedians for moving us forward in significant ways and paving the way for today's politically progressive comics. After all, could Stephen Colbert be named the 3rd most influential person of the year by TIME Magazine readers if Lenny hadn't pushed the envelope in the '50s and '60s? Nope.

The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder

By Ari | Jun 23, 08 11:13 AM

Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, who successfully prosecuted 21 convictions including Charles Manson without a single loss, author of Helter Skelter and Outrage, has penned a new volume, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. He argues that after he leaves office, Bush should be put on trial for the murder of the nearly 4,000 American soldiers who've died fighting the war in Iraq.

For a great interview with Bugliosi, read The Nation:

What similarities, if any, would you expect to encounter in preparation for the trial of President George Bush compared with someone like Charles Manson?

Well, with Manson we're talking about seven murders. With Bush it's hundreds of thousands.

Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World

By Ari | Jun 6, 08 01:12 PM

We've mentioned Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World a bunch of times but never blogged it properly, so here goes. Read it! It's amazing. It was written in 1970 but is still all-too-relevant today. The cover of our awesome 1973 Bantam edition (pictured here), reads, "Why the Things You Buy Are Expensive, Unsafe, and Usually Don't Work! With some startling practical alternatives -- like a radio that costs 9¢, a $6 refrigerator, a television set for $8, and much, much more! Design For The Real World by Victor Papanek: Human Ecology and Social Change With an Introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller; Completely Illustrated". Papanek adorably refers to his friend and introduction-writer as Bucky throughout the book, and relates stories of visionary design teams doing what the two men refer to as Anticipatory Comprehensive Design.

Basically that means looking at real-world problems and trying to solve them in an ecologically-sound and efficient, forward-thinking way, with the help of the stakeholders, the people who are actually affected by the design problem and its potential solutions. This is opposed to the more common practice of profit-driven design, which uses planned obsolescence and the vagaries of "fashion" to sell the same old crap year after year, dressed up in fancy new skins or even just different marketing. For every cool new low-cost, low-impact tool that's accessible and useful to folks who really need it, there are a million new expensive, ugly and possibly dangerous items put on the market simply to make a profit, Papanek says, and his message holds true today. The design world, for all of its improvements, does continue to churn out useless junk and endless repetitions of bad ideas.

Here's part of the flow-chart illustration with which Papanek ended the book - you'll have to read the book to see the rest of it, including his suggestions for how to get around the problems outlined here. But he doesn't give us all the answers - the flow-chart only goes so far as suggesting possible solutions to the world's problems; he puts it on us to fill in the rest of the chart as we move onto creating those solutions.

Since Shira and I are all about creating sustainable solutions in every area of life including the design work we do for clients, we found the book's message right up our alley, and the suggestions for improvement just as relevant today as they were when they were written nearly 40 years ago. It's encouraging to see that when Victor wrote this book he and Bucky were really trailblazing a new approach, which today has many adherents, with dozens of books and websites now dedicated to designing for the great majority of people instead of the privileged few who pay big bucks for pretty new designer chairs and the like. But we've still got work to do. So, read this book, and act on it!

Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical (going back to the roots) in the truest sense. It must dedicate itself to nature's "principle of least effort," in other words, minimum inventory for maximum diversity... or, doing the most with the least. That means consuming less, using things longer, recycling materials, and probably not wasting paper printing books such as this.

Fortunately, Design for the Real World has been in print for many years, and is available used from many freecycling / swapping networks as well as libraries and used bookshops, so no new materials need be used today in learning from this beautiful and clever and useful book.

Utopia now

By Ari | Jun 5, 08 08:29 AM

We're reading Chris Carlsson's Nowtopia, and just happened upon Real Utopia. Good stuff! No matter how fast we read, there's always more amazingness out there we've never even heard of.

The basic premise of these books is that not only is another world possible, it's actively under construction, right now. If you're worried about peak oil, despairing about politics, or fearing the end of capitalism will never come, I highly recommend reading books like these for a healthy dose of hope and happiness. Nothing can restore your will to act and create change like reading accounts of many other people who care about this stuff and are working to build a better tomorrow today.

Reproduce & Revolt/Reproduce Y Rebélate

By Ari | May 17, 08 09:29 AM

Reproduce & Revolt/Reproduce Y Rebélate is a new book edited by Josh MacPhee & Favianna Rodriguez for Just Seeds Visual Resistance Artists Cooperative (published by Soft Skull Press), and is a must-have for any activist group who needs to give their posters and handbills more visual punch: $18, 196 pages, 100 artists, 25 countries, 500 public domain political graphics. It's bilingual (Español/English).

I'm not usually a fan of clip art, but I make a lot of posters for activist groups, and I really see the need for this collection. Grassroots groups are more likely to have to make posters in a pinch, very quickly, for events that are hard to find high-quality images for. Ever tried to throw together a quick broadsheet for a screening of an extremely indie feminist slideshow about imperialism in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and The Philippines? Try finding photos for that online. (Seriously, if you search photo sites for Hawaii and women all you get is hula girls. It's depressing. And part of why we should be talking about imperialism in Hawaii.) Now what if you're not an designer, illustrator or otherwise capable of turning grainy JPEGs or phone camera snapshots into decent printable graphics? This book has the potential to make life a lot easier for groups with limited means.

My only critique is that the book apparently doesn't come with a CD. Which I guess is good because it means less waste. But it does mean a lot of people will likely take messy scans of very pretty graphics. Or maybe folks prefer photocopiers, though I think there's a lot of waste involved in cut-and-paste photocopier-aided layout. Perhaps a companion online download area would have worked well? Anyway, despite being anchored in the material world, this book is pretty awesome.

Shirari's Peace and Love Podcast #2: Housing

By shirari | May 14, 08 12:09 PM

We're sure that you've been on the edge of your seats ever since we released our first podcast. Well, edge-dwell no more - here's the second installment.

In this edition we discuss the topic of housing, focusing on our upcoming move to Ithaca, NY where we are exploring the idea of building our own home from local materials and maybe even starting a vegan ecovillage.

Shirari's Peace and Love Podcast #2: Housing »
May 13, 2008 - 48 minutes - 5.5MB

Show Links:

Recommended Books - check your local library or buy used:

Nim Chimpsky, humans, and the animal family

By Ari | May 7, 08 10:53 AM

An activist friend of mine, Jesse Lokahi Heiwa, sent me a link to Chris Colin's The chimp who thought he was a boy, a Salon interview with Elizabeth Hess on her new biography, Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. What a read. I was once interested in doing sign language research with primates, and today am very glad I didn't end up going that route. On the one hand you get this real sense of our connection with our ape cousins, and a new illumination of their personhood, but on the other, you can't really forge such a close (and arguably productive) relationship without harming the ape you're communicating with. Apes aren't meant to be pets, actors, research subjects, or companions to humans - they're evolved to hang out with other apes. The interview, and I'm sure the book, paint a very sad picture of how hurt Nim was when people stopped treating him like a human and started treating him like an ape again.

The article begins "Sometimes we're animals." Colin means it in the sense that what members of our species did to Nim was "bestial," inhumane (inhuman). But I think he's got it backwards. Humans are always animals; the other animals are our family, like it or not. We may try to "elevate" ourselves from their ranks, call human actions moral ones, and equate animals with lawless cruelty. But when we treat our cousins badly, our behavior isn't bestial but all too human. Only we set up research labs, and only we have the power to call the shots on our brothers' and sisters' lives with impunity. I think we need to spend more, not less, time thinking of ourselves as animals, and develop some empathy out of that connection.

Vermont Commons: The Decay of Capitalism

By Ari | May 6, 08 11:05 AM

Richard Davis's short opinion piece, The Decay of Capitalism, sums up how I've been feeling about the state of world affairs for a long time. Back when I read (parts of) Marx's Capital in school, I remember this graph showing capitalism's inevitable crash - there are only so many workers and resources to exploit before you run out of room for profit and the whole thing has to come tumbling down. I think this article does a good job of tying it all together, from fuel prices to the mortgage crisis to the healthcare industry's problems: "How did we get to the point where we replaced ethical principles and a sense of common good with profits at any cost? It is the natural evolution of the capitalist system in societies without a soul."

Lest this post sound too depressing: let's not forget that people are (and have been for some time) constructing socialist alternatives all over the world. Read Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, La Realidad, Mexico for just one glimpse of the new worlds being forged to take the place of the old.

My Feminist Review: Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men

By Ari | Apr 12, 08 01:13 PM

My review of Lori B. Girshick's Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men is up at Feminist Review. This was a really good one! I'm genderqueer and have read quite a bit on this subject, but I learned a lot. I loved reading the words of the people Lori interviewed for the book, and seeing their photos - I found it really made me care for all of them, identify with them, want to be in unity with them, to change things so we all have a safer, happier world to live in. Any book that can do that is a good book, I think.

Our Eutopic Vision at Forbes.com

By Shira | Apr 11, 08 06:08 PM

Ari's rendering of our eutopia

When Ari and I posted our vision of a Radical Solidarity Ecovillage to the Intentional Communities Directory, we really didn't know what to expect. So far, we've gotten a couple of email inquiries from potential members who we're going to connect with in Ithaca, and we're eagerly awaiting more interest.

One thing we certainly didn't expect was to be contacted by Forbes.com. After Elisabeth Eaves interviewed us for her article Ecotopia we were kind of nervous. She had never heard of Community Supported Agriculture, not to mention Freeganism or an assortment of other strategies that we discussed. Considering that Forbes is entrenched in capitalism, we worried that maybe our earnest ramblings might be used against us.

Luckily that was not the case! In fact, we're right up at the top of the article, and we don't sound (too) crazy:

After six years in the city, Shira Golding and Ari Moore want to try something new. The two 27-year-old artists came to New York after college, but now yearn for less urban and more affordable living. Rather than retreat to suburbia, the two are trying to recruit like-minded souls to join them in an artistic, vegan commune, which they plan to form in upstate New York.

"The number of people doesn't matter so much as shared values," says Golding, who then elaborates on a philosophy of animal rights, ecological sustainability and "freeganism," in which "you abstain from capitalism by getting things for free or [by] barter[ing]."

Golding and Moore's utopian vision is in its infancy, but they aren't alone in their desire to build their own self-contained community.

If we're going to be picky, freeganism doesn't really include "bartering," as much as giving and taking freely, and we prefer "intentional community" over "commune." But what really matters is that the mainstream media is paying attention to alternative visions for sustainable living. If Forbes.com, whose tagline is "Home Page for the World's Business Leaders," is doing a whole feature on utopias, who knows what's next!

Which brings me to the word "utopia." As our friend and wordsmith Orion pointed out at our Peace and Justice Passover Seder last year, “utopia” comes from the Greek for “no place” or “nowhere.” In other words a "utopia" is a better society that does not and cannot exist. That's not very optimistic. Orion suggested "eutopia" as an alternative spelling, meaning a "good, happy place." The article Visions of Utopia or Eutopia? at CommonDreams.org, puts it this way: "Eutopia is a vision of a preferable place - but one with a bridge that gets us from here to there. Visions of a better society don't attract a critical mass of people. Only future visions with a visible, viable bridge can do that - a lesson many progressives have yet to learn." Let's start building those bridges!

My Feminist Review: Bipedal, By Pedal!

By Ari | Apr 5, 08 11:47 AM

My review of the great critical mass zine "Bipedal, By Pedal!" is up at Feminist Review. Anyone out there done a critical mass bike ride? I'm embarrassed to say I haven't yet gone on one - I'm afraid of cars when on a bike. But this zine made me want to join up...

R.I.P.

By Shira | Mar 25, 08 01:55 PM

rip - 3.08.08.jpg

When people die around the same time, are their souls somehow interconnected? I'm not sure that I believe that we have a "soul" and I'm pretty certain that there is no after-life, other than a slow reunion with mama earth, and yet when people pass away in close succession, I can't help but searching for common threads. (Remember when James Brown, Robert Altman, Saddam Hussein and Gerald Ford died in November/December 2006?)

So what do filmmaker Anthony Minghella, author Arthur C. Clarke and musician Israel "Cachao" López have in common? They were all creative visionaries.

Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley is a beautiful film that captures the conflict between external and internal identities in a way that I have never seen before or since. It also shows how totally destructive homophobia, especially the internalized variety, can be.

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was written concurrently with the production of Kubrick's film and published after its release. The film, the book, the whole of Arthur C. Clarke's work, is an example of the best of what science-fiction has to offer the world - a glimpse into the future that shows us what we need to do today.

I actually hadn't heard of Israel López until a few days ago, when his death was announced. On NPR he was described as the "inventor of Mambo music." While I'm sure that, as with any artistic movement, López had many collaborators and co-inventors along the way, it's still pretty amazing to be known as the creator of anything. It's time to listen to the Buena Vista Social Club Soundtrack again (López composed a number of the songs).

So rest in peace Anthony, Arthur and Israel. If there is a heaven, I hope you're all up there working on a mambo/sci-fi/cinematic mash-up.

Drawing Truth

By Shira | Mar 21, 08 01:18 PM

My article about animation in documentaries is up on MediaRights.org. I got to interview filmmakers Brett Morgan, Judith Helfand, Dan Gold, Emily Hubley and Jeremiah Dickey for the piece - it was a lot of fun.

I really want to get more into animation myself. I've done a few simple pieces in Flash, but After Effects is calling my name...

Fight Military Recruitment in Schools

By Shira | Mar 1, 08 07:21 PM

The New York Coalition of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) have recently released a curriculum that helps teachers educate their students about military recruiting tactics. The goal is to empower students with concrete information and to make sure they know about alternative ways to access education and career-building tools after high-school.

Ari and I had the pleasure of designing the cover for Camouflaged: Investigating How the U.S. Military Affects You and Your Community, which you can preview and buy online through Lulu.com.

If you're a teacher who want to get involved, you should come to the meeting this week...

NYCoRE's Counter Recruitment Project Meeting
Thursday, March 6, 5:30-7:30
CUNY Graduate Center 34th St. & 5th Ave., Room 5489
Please bring ID

Topics of discussion include:

Bringing teachers together to develop a workshop for other teachers around unpacking military recruitment in New York City Schools and across the country
Outreach to bring teachers and administrators from Upper Manhattan neighborhoods to the workshop
Strategizing ways to share the ideas developed by New York City teachers in NYCoRE's recently released curricular guide Camouflaged
Developing ways to be a voice in the events acknowledging the anniversary of the war in Iraq

If you are interested in attending or getting involved, email Edwin at NYCoRE.

And here are some great videos about recruiting and the impact of war on veterans from Media That Matters: No Child, All That I Can Be and Night Visions

If Only All Capitalists Were Ed Begley, Jr.

By Shira | Feb 20, 08 05:29 PM

Go, Ed Begley, go!

Books: Searchable, free, earth-friendly, and extremely organized

By Ari | Feb 15, 08 10:29 AM

I read a lot and am always keeping lists of books I want to read. After cutting and pasting into text documents for years it occurred to me there must be a better way to do this; sure enough, there is. I tried LibraryThing (not free after 300 books!) and Google's My Library (lousy interactivity and no way to add notes). Then I actually typed "track books want read" into Google and Ask Metafilter came to the rescue.

Folks seemed to really like Goodreads, and now I know why. It's free and very interactive, and offers fields for notes/reviews and recommendations. It also automatically offers you "read" and "to-read" bookshelves, with the capability to add as many other shelves as you like - useful if you want to offer lists of recommended titles on particular topics.

In the process of all of this catalog-perusal, I realized something that I guess should have been obvious if it wasn't. I've long been annoyed by not being able to hit Command-F ("Find file...") in the real world. I mean really, wouldn't this make life a lot easier? With books it's particularly infuriating - unless I take copious notes and write in my books like crazy, I know the likelihood of my actually being able to find a quote or idea in the future is pretty slim. Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to search your shelves for "nonviolence," say, and find all references, across genres?

Well, at first I thought it was silly to input books you already have into a catalog tool like this, but now I get it. It's surprisingly easy and quick to get them in there, and then, you can search your shelves. This is where Google is supposed to be better, allowing you to actually search within books - but for me, the interactivity of GoodReads outweighs the usefulness of that feature. In any case, I'm now able to hit Command-F and then find the result on my shelf, and however imperfect the system is, it's made our library more useful.

A major issue I have with all of these sites is that they usually offer purchasing links, and those links all send you to giant corporations who send new books through the mail. My ideal book is a used one my neighbor hands me - no new printing and paper, no shipping materials or freight fuel and pollution, no participation in global capitalism. Unfortunately none of these sites allow you to customize the book purchase links that come up while people are looking at your catalog, so the best I could do was put a list in my profile. Here it is, if you too like to get books but want to do it in an earth-friendly way:

FreeCycle - facilitates swapping free used stuff in your local area
PaperBackSwap - book/DVD swapping community
BookCrossing - used books sent/left and tracked, sort of a worldwide booksharing system
Better World Books - Carbon-offset shipping, profits support literacy programs worldwide
Alibris - used books, for sale
Abe Books - used books, for sale

The Indypendent Printed My Illustration for "Revolutions: Read All About ’Em"

By Shira | Feb 3, 08 06:22 PM

I had fun working on this piece to accompany Chris Anderson's review of the new "Revolutions" series from Verso Books.

I'm really looking forward to checking out the series. I'm especially excited about Slavoj Žižek's intro to Mao's "On Practice and Contradiction."

Here Comes Everybody

By Ari | Jan 30, 08 08:56 PM

Why User-generated Content Mostly Isn't by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody:

The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label 'media'. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can't be fit into the old mode of "content", where one group creates and another merely consumes.

(via unmediated)

Feminist Review: Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina

By Ari | Jan 21, 08 11:12 AM

My review of Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina is up at Feminist Review:

Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina is not an oral history, but a small part of a story that is still being told. Something incredible happened in Argentina on December 19th and 20th, 2001. The government had frozen the people’s bank accounts so they could use the money to pay off an IMF loan in order to get yet another one, dragging the country’s economy even further than it had already sunk. Business owners had fled, leaving thousands jobless, struggling to feed their families while their workplaces stood empty... (read more)

I can't recommend this book highly enough for progressive activists and others interested in social change. The folks in this book are doing some really incredible things we can all learn from. Published by AK Press.

Posts tagged with "Books and Writing"

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Yay updates

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My Feminist Review: Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men

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R.I.P.

Drawing Truth

Fight Military Recruitment in Schools

If Only All Capitalists Were Ed Begley, Jr.

Books: Searchable, free, earth-friendly, and extremely organized

The Indypendent Printed My Illustration for "Revolutions: Read All About ’Em"

Here Comes Everybody

Feminist Review: Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina

Shirari Industries