when people are throwing lady’s night retro parties for the year you graduated from high school.
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Archive for January, 2007
Come to this and support Just Seeds (and me turning 33!!)
There’s going to be lots of great art and good people and I’ll be playing music at some point in the evening with Dark Dark Dark, who are in town from Minneapolis via New Orleans.
Details:
Thursday, February 8, 2007, 6-10pm
Ad Hoc Art (www.adhocart.org)
49 Bogart St., Brooklyn NY 11206
Justseeds.org and Visual Resistance present a one-night benefit art show and sale at Ad Hoc Art, Thursday February 8, 2007.
There will be an exhibition of artists supporting the transformation of Justseeds into an artist owned and run collective. Art by Justseeds artists and friends will also be on the sale, with prices starting at $4. The show will also be the NYC release of the Street Art Workers (SAW) poster project.
The show will feature over 30 artists from NYC and around the country, including: Swoon, Chris Stain, Josh MacPhee, RB827, Christopher Cardinale, Michael De Feo, Kristine Virsis, Elbow-Toe, GoreB, Imminent Disaster, k.see, Nicolas Lampert, Meredith Stern, Cristy Road, Pete Yahnke, and many more.
Along with the exhibition of the above artists will be the NYC release of the Street Art Workers’ Land and Globalization poster project, a collection of 25 posters representing artists from 10 different countries and over 20 different cities.
All proceeds from the show will go toward getting the Justseeds Artists Cooperative off the ground. Posters, books, and zines start at $4, with most Artwork priced between $10 – 30.
About Justseeds
Justseeds was founded as a radical art distribution service by Josh MacPhee in 1997. In nearly 10 years of operations, Justseeds became a crucial resource for radical artists and activists throughout the US.
In December 2006, the company that was filling Justseeds’ online orders (including hosting the website, processing payments, and shipping products), unexpectedly went out of business, immediately shutting down its online store. On top of shutting down distribution, the fulfillment house owed Justseeds upwards of $10,000 (most of that money in turn was owed directly to artists and writers who sold items on the site).
Now, like the proverbial phoenix, Justseeds is rising: a national network of artists are banding together to create a self-managed cooperative that will help spread radical art around the world.
Today A’yen and I went up to the DIA Beacon museum about an hour and a half outside of the city. When the museum closed we were super hungry. Lots of places were closed because it was Martin Luther King Day. But, of course, Subway was open. We walked in, and it was just like any Subway: flourescent lighting, old New York City subway maps on the walls, everything green and yellow and this dull brown. There was a skinny white kid behind the counter with a bluetooth headset on and an older skinny white guy behind him leaning up against wall wearing an identical bluetooth headset. We ordered from the kid while the older guy just stood there there, staring through these coke-bottle glasses, watching the kid do all the work.
The place was dead silent and A’yen and I were the only customers in there. It reminded me of why I generally don’t frequent fast food chains– beside the fact that the food is disgusting and unhealthy, they destroy communities, generally exploit workers and natural resources around the world and they’re totally dehumanizing and soul-sucking, both to the people who work there and the people who eat there. Nonetheless, we stood there in awkward silence while the kid made us subs.
When we went to pay, the older guy stepped up to the register and rung us up, while we made small talk about the town. He said, “Yeah, I moved up here about six years ago with my wife,” he looked straight at A’yen and said, “she’s CHINESE.” Uh yeah, we both cringed. We stood and talked for a little while, asking about his life, and how the community has changed in the last 4 years since the big fancy museum has attracted artists and tourists and city-people who are moving, in droves, to the area. Because even if he was some racist creep, he was still a person, and I wanted to have some kind of exchange, a conversation, to better understand where he was coming from.
At some point while we were talking he turned sideways and I saw over the counter that he had a gun holstered on his belt. A fucking revolver. On his shift at Subway. Now, maybe there was a good reason for this. If anyone knows one, please tell me. Because, on the one hand, I felt like some city kid who’s lefty sensibilities were predictably taken aback by the harsh realities of a small-town fast food restaurant and a guy with a gun–and I probably should have talked more with him, asked him why he needed a weapon to make sandwiches. On the other hand, fuck it, the guy was creepsville and armed.
Yeah, we’ll take that to go, please.
There’s close to 1000 feet of blue plywood fencing along the Red Hook waterfront. It’s guarding the future site of the world’s largest IKEA store.
More pix:
Information on the crazy development happening in Red Hook and Gowanus here, here, and here.
