The NYU Student Animal Legal Defense Fund presents “Muzzling A Movement” a speaking engagement with former SHAC 7 prisoner Andy Stepanian, and Dara Lovitz whose book, Muzzling A Movement, on the suppression of speech & first amendment protected protest within the animal protection movement, is due out this summer from Lantern Books.
Activist & former SHAC 7 prisoner Andy Stepanian tells his personal story of standing up to one of the worlds largest contract animal testing labs, being charged with “terrorism” for his efforts, and serving 3 years in a federal prison. To learn more about the SHAC 7 please visit http://SHAC7.com .
Attorney and animal law professor Dara Lovitz describes the money, power, and politics behind animal enterprise terrorism laws in support of her claim that animal activists are being silenced, as set forth in her upcoming book, Muzzling A Movement.
Please support Lauren Gazzola & Kevin Kjonas two of Andy’s SHAC 7 codefendants who are still incarcerated write them a letter or send them a book today http://shac7.com
You can RSVP this event on Facebook here. You can download a flyer for he event here.
It’s exciting news to say that after a lot of saving up money, designing, and signing contracts the Sparrow Project is proud to announce that this Spring 2010 we will be launching a line of benefit shirts, that are sweatshop-free, printed with love in Long Island with soy & water based inks & color discharge elements. They are full-bleed, seam-to-seam, art prints that benefit the projects we love most. The Spring 2010 line will benefit Farm Sanctuary, Hope International for Tikar People, The Uganda Skateboard Union, Clean Ocean Action, The Icarus Project, & the Sparrow Media Project.
Each design is a partnership between Sparrow & an artist or activist who works with one of the organizations that will be benefiting from the sales. We are calling the project 50%50 because even though we offer art direction we want to empower the people involved in the causes to have their struggle reflected in the art. This is just a sneak peak at what will be coming. Tee’s will be available online soon for $25. They look good & feel good.
Many thanks to Brooke, Alex, Beck & Jason at MerchDirect for bringing this all together.
Recently we were hired to make a video short to help promote Brent Gentile’s latest exhibition called Island to Island. All smooth-talking aside, it can hardly be considered work when you are dealing with content as interesting as Brent’s. Merging what some call graffiti with victorian styles Brent Gentile uses ornamental flourishes, stencils & urban typography to take a less traveled approach to painting. Brent is a designer, graf writer, and contemporary painter who derives inspiration from beautiful wall paper patterns, rich family stories & victorian ornamental designs.
So please, if you are in the NY area, be sure to come to the opening 8pm Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at the Special Sauce Gallery, 303 Main Street, Huntington, NY 11743.
ISLAND TO ISLAND
NEW WORKS BY BRENT GENTILE
8pm, Saturday January 23rd, 2010
at the Special Sauce Gallery
303 Main Street
Huntington, NY 11743
“Green” Media Guru Chloe Jo Davis reached out to Nicolette & Cassi Gibson to run a feature on the Skate & Solidarity Project in Kampala Uganda. Please be sure to check out the article on the Girlie Girl Army, leave comments, and thank them for supporting the project.
Jackson Mubiru is the director of the Uganda Skateboard Union, Kitintale Skate Park. Located in the Kampala district of Uganda the skatepark has been existent for about 4 years now and is going into its fifth year. From the initial amount of kids skating the numbers have grown due to an increasing popularity of the sport. Today the popularity of the sport is growing exponentially; at least fifty kids are skating, upwards from a humble beginning of less than thirty. This is great news, however, nothing is ever easy, and with the rise in number of kids attracted in to skating there is lack of gear, skateboards, and most of all the kids are in need of a bigger and better skate park. Despite these setbacks, folks have reached out and sent donations from time to time and have kept Kitintale skate park in theirs hearts. There have been many passing foreign visitors at the skate park and some have donated money for the cause. This is vital because the park relies solely on private donations, for now.
On December 3rd, The Sparrow Project joined Rawthentix.com, Special Sauce and the Guardian Brian Foundation in presenting “Street heART,” a unique benefit art auction aimed at raising awareness & much needed funds for individuals with severe brain injuries, brain cancer, and prolonged brain trauma. What started as an idea shared by Vanessa Diaz of RAW creative agency and Maria Ruggiere soon became an event that would encompass all walks of life and give hope to so many. For many artists & attendees at the Street heART opening it was a night of firsts. For some in attendance it was their first brush with activism, for some of the contributing artists it was an inspiration to be able to help people, for others it was the definition of solidarity in action.
The debate and debacle over heath care in this country has become a familiar topic for all of us. Outside of the media spectacle and whirlwind of pundits the issue of health care is an all too real and at times fucked up reality. Sadly, the medical expenses related to prolonged brain traumas are often not completely covered by those victims with the best private medical insurance… now imagine what it is like for the partially insured, or worse yet, the uninsured…
“Outside of the heated national debate engendered around health care, too often victims of serious brain injuries, even those who have insurance, cannot receive the proper benefits to help them meet the special needs they have, making it even harder to maintain a semblance of what most of us take for granted as a ‘normal life.’ This is why the work that The Guardian Brain does is so essential,” says Vanessa Diaz director of events production for Special Sauce. “Special Sauce is proud to be bringing together 22 artists spanning from Los Angeles to the Netherlands to support individuals who suffer from the lasting disruption of brain trauma and cancer.”
“Recently I learned that the Guardian Brain Foundation gifted a wheelchair accessible van to a local family whose 7 year old son suffers from limited motor functions as a result of a brain hemmorage,” says Street HEART contributing artist Brendan Munday of Huntington, Long Island, “I am grateful that my art can help benefit another child just like him.”
Solidarity. Standing together as a community, graffiti writers, urban typographers, stencil artists, illustrators, and graphic designers donated their talents to raise thousands to benefit local individuals who suffer from severe brain trauma, cancer, and prolonged brian injuries.
Street heART’s opening event had a few stars, a few pro skaters, a few professional break-dancers, good music, and it resulted in a decent amount of local press coverage. Sparrow Media sent the press releases and The Long Islander (local weekly, circ 18,000) ran a nice spread on the opening. You can check out our video wrap-up above and you can visit our exhibit page for a gallery of high-res images of the opening.
17 of the 25 pieces sold before the show came to a close on December 30th, the remainder of the pieces will remain available for purchase downstairs at special sauce’s flagship store, every dollar raised from the sales will directly benefit the Guardian Brain Foundation’s efforts to directly support Long Island’s brain injured.
For Vanessa Diaz & Maria Ruggiere Street heART started as a small idea & quickly grew into a event that inspired hundreds and raised thousands of dollars, their inspiration was infectious…
While overseas on tour with The Urgency this spring, I revisited 15 or so of the larger cities in the UK and Ireland. Regretfully, I can’t say I was reborn. Though I love Manchester, parts of London, Edinburgh and a few other damp and dismal distractions in the region, for the most part the UK is “a bit shit”, to be honest. Culture and cuisine are always interesting, new people are always entertaining, but I promise I that any less-than impressed judgment I make is based on much time and many cities, much socializing and many historical tours and much booze and many moons.
I can however offer credit to the big island and its neighbors in one very overlooked category, the support for live music. Kids climbing from the walls and media outlets covering everything from the mega artists that sell out Wembley Stadium, to the shrimps that happen to impress them, music is widely appreciate and followed (though outdated, most of us Statesiders would argue). Coming from what my peers and I would like to consider one of the more influential (though now completely dead) underground music scenes of recent history and working in the Music Industry for the better part of the last 8 years, I have to admit that I am at best, completely jaded when entering into anything from a music based conversation to a music faced venue. All that being said, for me to be excited about a show takes a lot.
Being on tour with a Welsh band is awesome. They are ball-busting, bowel-blowing descendants of amazingly interesting tribes and a families, most surnamed “Jones”, “Smith” or “Smith”. The Blackout were gracious enough to not only take us on a tour that saw 1,000+ new faces a night, but show us their home and their friends in what became one of my more favorable cities of the United Kingdom, Cardiff, Wales. After a hometown show, The Blackout took us barhopping just around the corner from the University we just played. Forgive me, but I cannot remember the name of the bar we went to. It was lit in red neon signs, very unassuming but very hip and guess what? The show was FREE!!! Real bands played there and real people came to see them. Upon walking into the cramped, crooked and loud venue, I took a non-autonomous turn for the stage, where normally my belly drives me to the bar. Setting aside for a moment what I heard, I looked toward the stage only to set my eyes on the quintessential counter-culture front man. At 6’6” and nearly 300lbs, the 3 piece’s leader was cloaked in a purple wizard’s smock, androgynously dressed in neck and arm accessories, dreadlocks and demanding an intricately delayed guitar solo out of what looked like a miniature telecaster in the hands of a giant African warlord. He was so captivating that I nearly forgot music was being played.
Once I tuned in to sonic stimulation I realized how incredible the actual music was. The other two members (Tom Herbert and Leo Taylor), both skinny, white and disheveled, were in such perfect rhythmic coordination with each other that it afforded Dave Okumu, the lead singer and guitar player, the freedom to completely exaggerate every sound and texture possible. I thought I knew a thing about guitar effects until I saw Dave make a mess.
Digressing from my drawn-out introduction, all these wonderful things lead me to the point of buying their album and sharing my thoughts about it with you.
The Invisible starts their record with s theme that runs through out the entire body of work, texture. Within 16 bars of a minor acoustic introduction, space and ambience somehow creep there way into the song. The opening song, “In Retrograde”, eventually moves into a sound-scape that would be more appropriate in the movie 300, or Gladiator, some world music battle scene, if you will.
After the less-than-comfy introduction, the band begins to showcase their song writing skills, never predictably. One who has real appreciation for how difficult it is to write a good song would admire how interesting the actual notes were built around such bizarre backing music. The songs move in and out of abstract noises and dissonant notes to a remember-able melody that may be a little dark and disturbing, but in a major key it could pass for a pop song.
I hate comparing bands to bands, but I find what The Invisible so interesting that it almost compliments them. They remind me of the choral guitar-ie feel of Prince, guitar effects of The Edge, the instrumentation of The Talking Heads, rhythm like Block Party, melodies that would make Robert Smith proud and the flavor of something a little more urban like Gnarles Barkley. Everything moves in and out of a very dance feel, while satisfying the core indie properties, innovation and deviation. The brilliance of it to me is that Dave Okumu gives off the vibe that he could have easily gone in and wrote an R&B record with Stevie Wonder, but his true passion was for something a little more interesting.
Some of my favorite tracks on the record include Passion, London Girl, and Monster’s Waltz. However, the track that makes me so glad I found this band is Baby Doll. The song is what I love most about music, the ability to fuse conventional melodies that would make anyone sing along with a Kandinsky, or a Jackson Pollock…something so bizarre that it just makes sense.
This band is not only a great album creator; they are an incredible live group. They’ve been praised by magazines as prestigious as NME in the UK and though I don’t think the US has the palette for them yet (regretfully), I really look forward to getting back over the pond and trying to catch another night with this band. It’s one of those bands that will inspire so many to follow, but maybe never be as recognized as they deserve to be. One of those bands I’ll stay up at night wishing I found them first and picked them up. One of those VERY few bands that I will listen to over and over again, finding new inflections each time I listen, like a good book.
For those visiting from outside sparrowmedia.net this article along with video originally appeared in the reviews section of the Sparrow Media Blog
Last Month I posted about the privatization of water through corporate control of municipal water systems. As I mentioned in the previous post, the second way corporations are stealing our water is through bottling. FLOW (For the Love of Water), a documentary which came out in 2008 brilliantly (and frighteningly) lays out the international water crisis, including the role of bottled water. I would highly recommend everyone rent, borrow, or buy this film. After watching it, I did a down and dirty post for Girlie Girl Army but here I’d like to dig a little deeper.
As you probably already know bottled water is terrible in numerous ways. It’s no safer (and in some cases, less safe) than tap water, much worse for the environment in many way than tap water and a gigantic waste of money. In the U.S. and abroad Nestle, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are the chief corporations creating a false demand for bottled water by making people think it’s healthier and safer than water from the tap. It’s a masterful marketing campaign the opposite is often actually true. Then again, usually when a corporation tells us anything it’s probably safe to assume the reverse. Tap water is subject to state and federal safe drinking water standards by the Environmental Protection Agency, whereas bottled water is far less regulated because it’s done so by Food and Drug Administration.
More than just the plastic waste created with every bottle of water tossed in the trash after drinking, the making of plastic bottles and transporting the water-filled bottles all across the country takes a lot of energy and creates a lot of pollution. Although this is of course an argument against all plastic containers, remember, the same water already comes out of the faucet. The infrastructure for drinking water out of the tap already exists and it’s a lot more eco-friendly! No plastic waste, no trucks driving water all over the place. Its genius but unfortunately municipal water bureaus don’t have millions of ad dollars to market tap water the way Coca-Cola can market Dasani.
On top of the waste created from plastic production, shipment and destruction, corporations often devastate the environment to extract water at an alarming rate. Nestle is a notorious offender. In 2003, Nestle after failing in Wisconsin, set sights on Michigan and set-up a bottling plant, extracting groundwater at the rate of 400 gallons per minute. Citizens won in court claiming that the pumping had a negative effect on the environment but Nestle appealed and continues to pump water while the legal battle with Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation continues.
Finally, bottled water is a huge waste of money for the consumer (hopefully at least after reading this, not you) and communities. Buying bottled-water perpetuates the falsehood that it is safer than tap water and diverts concern (and eventually dollars) away from municipal water systems. In my other post about bottled water I mistakenly said that when you buy bottled water you are paying for what you could get at home for free. That’s not true of course, municipally-owned water you get from the faucet is not free to you or the government, it actually costs millions of dollars for government to provide safe and clean drinking water. But that is still a fraction of the cost of bottled-water and corporate-controlled tap water.
To learn more on the ills of bottled water you can read the Take Back the Tap report. In it, you’ll find the many local groups are fighting big corporations’ bids to set up bottling plants in their communities. Additionally, groups like Food and Water Watch and Corporate Accountability International are helping convince individuals, governments, restaurants, campuses and stores to move away from bottled water and start offering tap water. Both have many resources on their sites if you want to help. Sometimes all you have to do is ask, or not even. I’m so happy to report that after my friends who run Food Fight Grocery! in Portland, OR read my other piece on bottled water they stopped selling it altogether and instead now offer free water that customers can fill up reusable bottles with (thanks guys!)
Food and Water Watch suggests that it’s not enough to simply give up bottled water and they advise that government at every level needs to protect our sources of water as well devote needed dollars to drinking and sewer water systems. I agree but would add that giving up bottled water is a great first step that everyone can take. Right now. More than immediately decreasing demand for the product, when you buy and carry around plastic water bottles, you send a message that it’s an acceptable product. So, go rent FLOW, learn more about the global water crisis in general, and take the pledge to give up bottled water.
“I want someone to sit me down and say, what the fuck was up with that?,” says Tim McIlrath, front man to Rise Against, a pop-punk outfit from Chicago. In an interview off the set of the music video shoot for “Re-Education (Through Labor)” the single off their most recent album “Appeal to Reason” (DGC/Interscope) McIlrath states that “Americans are coddled with images of non-violence,” and that, “we have a war raging in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of people are dying,” and that “this video is about not coddling Americans and letting them know that this is a reality, this is a potential reality, treat people fair because these are realities we can be looking at in our future…”
These “realities” to which he refers to are depicted in a music video montage of typical music scenesters on an atypical self-styled campaign of destruction. (Quite literally the video shows your cookie cutter hot topic set running around with and eventually detonating improvised explosive devices.)
Rise Against, who in recent years have developed a groundswell following have made a conscious effort not to fall into lockstep with the process of corporate grooming & imaging that most of pop-punk acts succumb to. Simply put, many of the record companies are afraid of their artists getting overtly political, especially when it involves issues that make us all feel uncomfortable. Generally, the record company opinion is to do everything not to alienate a potential buyer, because they buy your merch, your albums, go to your shows, etc. The next part goes like this… “don’t get too political, because when you do the people who don’t share your opinion will feel alienated and henceforth you will narrow your audience, you will sell less stuff, and since all we care about is money we don’t want that.” I applaud Rise Against for trying to keep the grooming to a minimum while watching their sophomore album “The Sufferer & The Witness” go gold with certification by the RIAA and while “Appeal to Reason” is creeping towards gold, debuting at #3 on the billboard charts selling 65,000 copies in its first week alone. This is an accomplishment in itself considering the internet has made it nearly impossible for an indie artist to go gold, let alone a hardcore band, and it’s even harder for a hardcore band with a political platform.
But enough saccharine…
When I first saw the video, I think I regurgitated the exact phrase McIlrath hoped to evoke. Literally I think I said something like, “What? – How? – What? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me?” or a derivative of such. So many things came to mind, too many to list but if I had to sum them up I was thinking…
1.) How did this get play?
2.) Is this what the kids need to see? – Maybe?
3.) Does this drip with wanton irresponsibility?
I took this question and the clip to a friend of mine, a videographer who makes campaigning tapes for unions in NYC. He laughed when he saw it and said that, “corporations love that teen angst stuff… that shit appeals to kids. They don’t expect it to go anywhere.” I guess that’s how Rise Against’s handlers, MTV, Music Choice, Fuse, and whoever else’s hand this touched saw it as well, teen angst and nothing more. To chalk it up to “teen angst and nothing more” is a sad commentary considering the state of the world today: two wars waged without public support with little to no outdate, the rate of species extinction increasing 1000-fold in the last 100 years, genocides in Gaza & Darfur (and probably a dozen similar events go under-reported,) billions of animals killed annually for human excess or vanity, the continued objectification of womyn in pop culture, and the commoditization of everything living from children in sweatshops to forests slated for sale. There are a lot of real issues to be upset about.
I think the reality of the situation falls somewhere in between, I think people are upset, and this type of content is becoming more appealing to folks as the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost. However if this video posed a true threat would the networks still agree to play it?
For those of you who know my background you are aware that I spent years in prison for being charged as an alleged “extremist activist” so perhaps I look at this topic through a biased lens. However, I do question whether or not it is responsible for bands to produce videos such as this. Sadly when one becomes a celebrity in our spectacular culture they become a spectacle, a larger than life figure, sometimes even a role model, and with the fame they inherit a heavy burden of responsibility.
The real question here is will kids feel the hype of this video and go out and follow suit?, or will they just feel the hype and shake their fists? Anyone can realize that when you employ mass destruction as a direct action tactic the chances of hurting someone are inevitable. It is my opinion that there is no moral argument for violence against people or animals, and by the tenor of his interview McIlrath seems to echo that opinion; so this is where the situation gets murky. Rise Against must consider that as their audience widens with their success the gamut of their listeners/fans is going to span all walks of life, all temperaments, various types of people, some more rational than others, and some who feel incredibly disparaged. Some listeners may be moved to act, and if they are moved to act should they be moved in a better, more sustainable direction than the imagery reflects this recent video? It is clear that there is an abundance of work that needs to be done, and we are going to need to cultivate a culture of life-long activists to address these seemingly endless problems. Wrecking shit is not always pragmatic. Not if it allows systems of oppression to stage which-hunt style grand juries, or raid homes, or scare off future activists in response to one night of wreckage. We need to plan for the long haul, and sometimes that means working on projects a lot less glamorous. Making copies, cooking food for hungry people in your community, cleaning up an old factory to make a D.I.Y. social center, this things don’t exactly meet the criteria of sexy, visually inspiring footage to make a music video from, but this is the backbone of the revolution, not an aesthetic of tattoos, angular haircuts, and burning skylines.
I don’t say this to undercut the effectiveness of direct action, but rather to say that we should be constantly critiquing (in a positive, constructive manner) ourselves, our movements, and our social scenes. In the case of this video I would have preferred to see solid examples of activism, realistic and less violent implementations of direct actions, and a more constructive approach to social change depicted in the video treatment, but alas maybe that would be too boring and the video would miss rotation…
In place of railing against Rise Against and their video for “Re-Education (through labor)” we thought it would be more constructive to invite them on here for a dialog, lets say less of an interview and more of a dialectic. Stay tuned to SparrowMedia.net for follow-ups to this. I thought it best close this out with a few links to real projects you can get involved with in your area. Take time to whittle out a long lasting sustainable niche for yourself within our larger movement, find something inside that means the world to you and take action for it. If not you, who? If not now, when?
Jamie Tworkowski is the founder of a non-profit called To Write Love On Her Arms aimed at helping high risk young people combat depression, self injury, and addiction by meeting them where they are, online.
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