Our Future Now
Almost nothing produces more landfill fodder, waste and general pollution than a fully-loaded concert or arts festival. From his vantage point on stages across America, fiddler Michael Kang of The String Cheese Incident has witnessed this large-scale consumption and waste all too often. So this summer Kang and two friends, co-artists David Fulton and Matt Atwood, launched Our Future Now, a non-profit designed to counter the impact delivered when revelers gather by the thousands.
“The potential of these concerts is to reach 10,000 to 90,000 people at once,” said Kang, who’s spending his summer interweaving the values of Our Future Now into String Cheese’s tour schedule. With cooperating festival producers, Our Future Now will actively promote carpooling and bicycling to events to reduce carbon emissions, help erect “recycled art” projects and compelling renewable energy demonstrations, install solar- and wind-powered generators, purchase compostable cups for drinks, and serve food made from organic and local ingredients.
“We want to bring this message to people in a way that makes them feel good and want to be a part of it,” Kang explained. “The waste generated by most festivals is astonishing, and I honestly believe that once most people make the connection between the trash and the problems it creates, they’ll want to help correct it.” So far, Our Future Now has leant a shade of green to mass gatherings like Lollapalooza and the Virgin Festival in Baltimore; this month it will participate in greening Burning Man.
Instead of the heap of trash most tours behind, Our Future Now seeks to leave a greater legacy in the communities it touches. “The goal is to instill our message in millions of people who will take it home and put it to daily use,” said Fulton. “This needs to go way beyond the festivals.”
Learn more or contribute to the cause through ourfuturenow.org.
— Alastair Bland
Marriage of Architecture and Green Design
The sun is setting on Wilshire Boulevard. At Art + Design Museum, across the street from LACMA, a crowd mills about, framed in sharp relief by light spilling from the building’s innumerable windows. The guests have assembled for a wedding — and yet many are strangers to the happy couple. As the bride assumes the position, her dress, a delicate, evanescent confection made of paper, crinkles.
Paper? Strangers? This is clearly no ordinary wedding. In fact, it’s a statement on consumer culture and a showcase of environmental design to kick-off A+D’s current exhibit, “SAUMA [Design as Cultural Interface].” One local couple, originally destined for City Hall, volunteered to participate — the bride donning one of the exhibit items, the aforementioned paper gown, created by Finish artist-designer Tuija Asta Jarvenpaa.
Consider the environmental footprint created by the average wedding dress: the yards and yards of fabric and the energy used to manufacture it, the bleaches to treat the fiber, the trims and beads and plastics, the fuel to transport constituent parts from around the world (silk from Asia, lace from Belgium, a plastic zipper made in Thailand…), the chemicals used in dry-cleaning the dress… all this, and then it’s packed away, rarely to be passed on for others to use. But a paper dress, states the artist, can be made from recycled materials, creates far less energy waste, and can be recycled into something new.
It’s not just the dress taking the [wedding] cake here. Also on display: a kitchen replete with a sink so beautiful it doubles as a fountain (made entirely of recycled plastic material); the cool and slickly-designed “Flat Light Lighting Concept,” which uses a teeny amount of energy to create an expansive flood of soft, gentle light to suffuse a room; and the art installation “City Wipeout,” which allows users to move a handheld interface that literally “wipes out” the pixilated image of a raucous cityscape with invasive advertising.
Perhaps most fascinating, though, is the paper dress. Bridezillas nationwide take note: environmentalism isn’t just about happy little trees — it’s about making the world we live in kinder and gentler. Reminding ourselves that a wedding dress is just a thing, as impermanent as paper, can help us prioritize what’s actually important: not things, but people.
Now that’s an idea we can get hitched to.
Exhibit on view through 8/28, at Art + Design Museum (5900 Wilshire Blvd., aplusd.org )
— Lucinda Michele Knapp
Worth Repeating
“What have the immigrants been doing once they get into the US? Taking up time on the elliptical trainers in our health clubs? Getting ahead of us on the wait-lists for elite private nursery schools? In case you don’t know what immigrants do in this country, the Latinos have a word for it — trabajo.”
—Author Barbara Ehrenreich arguing against the proposed immigration bill that would fine undocumented workers (TheNation.com, 6/12).
“Tomato ketchup has higher levels of lycopene [a strong antioxidant] than either organic or conventional tomatoes. So if you want lots of lycopene, you should eat tomato ketchup.”
— Lord Krebs , former chairman of the Food Standards Agency, commenting on a recent study showing organic tomatoes have almost double the quantity of antioxidants called flavonoids than tomatoes conventionally grown ( Times UK, 7/05).
“Without oil we could no longer produce or transport food, and most of humanity would starve. That would be a tragedy, but at least all those bodies could be turned into fuel for the rest of us.”
—Satirical message delivered by ethics activist Andy Bichelbaum of the Yes Men at a fossil fuel industry conference. Bichlbaum posed as a representative of the Natural Petroleum Council, which is led by a former Exxon-Mobil CEO (blog.wired.com, 6/14).
“It takes almost seven days of training to become a Starbucks barista. Add just one more day and you can become a gun-toting member of the Iraqi police.”
—Blogger John Aravosis responding to an NPR report that Iraqi police trainees are allowed to keep their uniforms and guns after only eight days of training, at which time many of them defect (AMERICAblog.com, 6/21.)
Finding Meaning in the Music
Curious questioners shake the Radio8Ball
It’s almost certainly happened to you. You’re sitting in your car, or working out at the gym, listening to your iPod, or the radio, while idly mulling over a question — can this relationship be saved? Is there life on other planets? What should I have for dinner? All of a sudden, as if directly attuned to your thoughts, the music seems to answer the question for you in the lyrics of a song — “Hit the Road Jack,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” or “A bottle of red… A bottle of white… whatever kind of mood you’re in tonight…”
Singer/songwriter Andras Jones has fine-tuned this musical coincidence into a multimedia art form. For nearly ten years, Jones has hosted Radio8Ball, a Seattle-area radio show, podcasting live on Tuesday evenings from 6 to 8 pm at kaos.evergreen.edu/listenlive.html. The format is simple. Listeners call in with a question (A recent show featured such disparate questions as “What would happen if a spider caught a bee in its web?” and “Is anonymity possible in today’s world?”), Jones selects a CD at random, puts the CD in the player, and then selects the shuffle function — what he calls, “Consulting the Pop Oracle.” Jones interprets the lyrics of the song for the caller and asks their opinion as well. “It’s kind of calisthenics for the part of the mind that recognizes synchronicity,” Jones explains. “As the questioners work out that part of their brains, they become more open to synchronicity.”
The Pop Oracle (sans Jones’ expert interpretation) is available 24 hours a day at radio8ball.com — and Jones has also developed Radio8Ball as a live show, sort of a combination cabaret/rock concert/tarot reading. On August 21st and 22nd, Radio8Ball makes its Los Angeles debut at the Hayworth Theater. The musical guest on the 21st is Jon Auer, lead singer of the Posies and a Radio8ball veteran, and the 22nd’s performer is Mirah.
The live shows offer a visceral, edge-of-your-seat excitement that often pays off in startling ways. Jones shares one of Radio8Ball’s most dramatic moments: “Someone asked ‘What is the lesson for human beings as a species?’ The answer that came up was a song called ‘Love Everyone.’ When that happened everyone in the room froze and held their breath for a second. Everyone had the same chill up their spine.” Though the show was over a year ago, Jones still sounds elated: “That was a perfect answer.”
— Paul Constant
U.S. Military Spending: One Seriously Chunky Monkey
What do an upside-down school bus and a stack of oreo cookies have in common with U.S. military spending?
It’s not the start of some random joke — it’s “Topsy,” an “art bus” created by Ben (as in Ben & Jerry’s) Cohen — and it’s following candidates along the Primary Trail this election season.
Part of a campaign co-sponsored by True Majority and Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, the Topsy bus takes aim at the U.S government’s upside-down budgetary spending. Bearing the message “The U.S. Budget is Topsy-Turvy,” Topsy follows in the tracks of earlier Cohen projects, like the animated flash “oreo cookie video” which made web rounds in 2004. In the video, a cartoon Cohen stacks oreo cookies representing the U.S. budget. A 40-cookie tower equates the Pentagon’s share of the federal pie, an annual allocation of $463 billion. The tower dwarfs the 4 cookies allotted for K-12 education, the single cookie allocated to world hunger, and the piddling quarter of a cookie parceled out to alternative energy projects.
The total annual cost for American “security,” including defense expenditures for the Departments of Energy, State, Justice, Veterans Affairs, Treasury and NASA, is a whopping 934.9 billion dollars — more than the total defense expenditures of all other nations combined. This incomprehensibly large sum still does not include the cost of war in Iraq and Afghanistan — an amount which, growing by the minute, has already surpassed half a trillion dollars.
Cohen and his coterie propose that the “cookies” allocated to defense spending are supporting outdated and ineffective measures. “A bunch of the candidates [on the campaign trail] have admitted that there is a tremendous waste in the Pentagon and that they would seek to compact that waste,” says Cohen, who is marshalling 8,000 volunteers to spread the word in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire. “People are talking about how the military is so stretched now. It’s beginning to become mainstream.”
“Wars of the future,” according to Cohen, “are not going to be against other countries — they’re going to be against guerillas and terrorists. Nuclear submarines don’t really play a roll in that.”
The Sensible Priorities campaign proposes to take that $60 billion dollars (or 6 cookies) and rebuild schools, eliminate need for Middle Eastern oil, feed the six million starving children worldwide, provide all children with health insurance, and give Head Start to every kid who needs it.
To find out when Topsy rolls into your town, check out sensiblepriorities.org/topsy.php . Watch Cohen in the cookie flash movie at truemajority.org/oreos .
— Jessie Tierney
Don’t just get mad… get active
As if the rest of the country needed another reason to revel in the stereotype of the self-centered Angeleno, a recent study from the Corporation for National and Community Service just ranked LA close to the bottom for community volunteer work. Out of the 50 largest metropolises in the US, the city of angels comes in at a pitiful 44 for volunteer rates and 39 for volunteer hours, both under the national and California average. Apparently our notorious traffic is the culprit; “commute time” was the most common factor preventing LA residents from lending a helping hand.
We can do better, don’t ya think? If gridlock is the only thing keeping you from helping out, consider virtual volunteering. All you need is an Internet connection and a telephone to make someone else’s life a little easier (no commute required).
caresforkids.org Cares for Kids, Inc. provides less fortunate children around the world with the basics needed to survive. They’re seeking a broad range of volunteers to fulfill numerous duties, including grant writing, marketing and fund raising.
sustainableharvest.org Sustainable Harvest International needs bilingual Spanish-English speakers to translate educational manuals and outreach materials for use in Central American countries struggling with rainforest destruction.
commongroundrelief.org Established the week after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Common Ground Collective aids those still suffering in the wake of the disaster. They need selfless volunteers to advocate, spread awareness and raise funds for their Lower 9th Ward Project.
—Jessica Ridenour
If Another World is Possible, Another U.S. is Necessary
First U.S. Social Forum Meets in Atlanta
Imagine a country built on peace and social justice, on racial and gender equity, on ecological and economic security for everyone. Imagine a culture that excludes no one, marginalizes no one and leaves no one behind. Imagine another world… a better world… a world made of many worlds… Imagine a country called hope.
For those who were able to attend the first U.S. Social Forum (USSF) June 27-July 1 in Atlanta, Georgia, a glimpse of this future appeared on the horizon. The USSF — a national spin-off of the international World Social Forum, a global gathering of activists that began in Brazil in 2001— brought together over 10,000 people to dream, plan, strategize and act on the notion that if you want peace, you must work for justice.
The gathering took place in Atlanta, birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because, as W.E.B. Dubois said, “As the south goes, so goes the nation.” By coming together to strengthen their movements — in the words of Kai Barrows, an organizer with Critical Resistance, “to turn many movements into one Movement that really moves” — participants in the USSF hope to bring about long-term, radical social change.
Over 900 workshops, cultural events and lectures took place over five days, touching on issues from immigrant rights to environmental sustainability to abolishing prisons. The overwhelming majority of presenters and participants were young people of color, affirming what 21-year-old Julián Moya, a representative of New Mexico’s Southwest Organizing Project said: “As youth, we are not the future, we are the present.”
Tom Goldtooth, Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, pointed out that, as the first people of this land, native people need to be at the forefront of any movement for social change, while Ed Ott, from the Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO reminded the crowd that immigrants come to the US for the same reason migrants everywhere cross borders — to work for a better life.
Given the presence of so many youth, the plethora of cultural events and the strong will of everyone present to learn from each other and work in unity, the spirit was wildly exuberant. Still, while the goal of the USSF was to envision the road to positive change, it remained painfully clear that with 2 million people in prison, over 85 million lacking health coverage and a war with no end in site, we have a long way to go. Nonetheless, the crowd roared when Eli Painted Crow, a Yaqui woman from Arizona who has become a voice for peace after serving twenty-two years in the military, reminded us that “Peace is not something you demand — it is something you become.”
Look for a global week of action next January, and regional social forums happening across the country until the next US Social Forum in 2010.
— Jeff Conant
