Alcatraz – Prisons as Tourism
My 18-year-old niece, Emily, is visiting this week from Pittsburgh, PA. On Friday, we went to Alcatraz – I haven’t been there since the ’90s, and she really wanted to go. Well, she loved it – I think it was her favorite part of the trip.
In the picture, we’re on the ferry boat heading to the island. The tours, which run every half hour most days, are usually completely sold out. When you get to the island, you can walk around to the different building and see what it would have been like to have been a prisoner or a guard there. The warden and some guards (and their families) lived on the island, some lived in San Francisco. The cellblock features an audio tour with narration from former guards and prisoners. The prison closed in the ’60s.
Why We Protest
Stephen Dubner’s August 20th “How Much Do Protests Matter?” was a well-timed pep talk for activists everywhere. In the lead up to the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh later this month and the United Nations climate meeting in Copenhagen in December, this is a moment to be thinking about our power.
In Dubner’s blog post, he quotes several noted activists and scholars – Chester Crocker, Bernardine Dohrn, Donna Lieberman, Juan E. Méndez, David S. Meyer, and Howard Zinn – on whether (and how) protests have shaped history.
Here are some highlights:
Juan E Méndez:
Ultimately, protest works if it intelligently combines speech with action and a genuine attempt to persuade rather than simply antagonize. Under such premises, protest will continue to be a viable, indispensable ingredient of democracy for generations to come.
My Publicity Workshop
So, I think most of you know that one of my main jobs is as a publicist working with my friends Matt and Justine through our agency, Aid & Abet. Here’s a video of a Publicity on a Shoestring workshop Justine I did in March 2009 at the Women, Action and the Media conference. Here’s the link to part 2 of the video.
Right now we’re also in the process of writing a manual so yes, you too can publicize your own book or project if you can’t afford to hire us to do it for you.
Chevron, Again
OK. Update #1 on all the projects that are overwhelming me at the moment.
On August 15, 2009, there will be a rally and protest at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, CA. You can find out all the details here. I will be participating and I hope you will, too.
This is not a new issue. I’ve written about it for the last several years (see June 08, May 08, March 08, and March 07)
Chevron is a huge corporation that needs to lead the way in building a sustainable energy future and be a good neighbor to the communities that surround its facilities here in Richmond and around the world. There is a broad coalition of community-based groups that are opposing the expansion/re-tooling of the Richmond refinery to refine heavier crude, and are being portrayed in the media as environtmentalists causing the community jobs. The groups need the help of the larger community to win this fight – for their future.
Three things we can do:
Security Culture
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
OK, Apparently, I am too inept to imbed a video into this blog. But, here’s the link to the MSNBC story I want you to watch.
Yes, I know that Shane, Sarah, and Josh’s detention in Iran is really upsetting. I don’t really know them and don’t know what they were doing there, but my thoughts are with them and the people that care about them right now. You know, a very obvious comment on the problems with borders.
But what I really want to talk about right now is the news story I posted above from MSNBC. I’ve been going back and forth with a few friends about Facebook and whether it’s a good thing or not, why some people choose to use it and some people don’t, and all of the arguments center around whether it’s a good idea to have so much personal information out there where you can’t control it, or you have no idea who is seeing it.
In this story, the reporters show the Facebook page of one of the people, reading aloud their status updates. I think most people believe that only your “friends” (approved people) can see these status updates, but really, not, if they are being broadcast on national TV. How is this possible with Facebook’s privacy settings? Well, all it takes is one of your approved “friends” to show your page to the news. Or, who knows. Maybe Facebook isn’t all that private. Of course, the story also showed and read from the individuals’ personal and professional websites.
Operation Bite Back
Last night I saw Dean Kuipers read from and talk about his new book, Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness at Diesel Books in Oakland.
So, I haven’t read the book yet, and when I do, I’ll review it for Ampersand. But, I wanted to shout out about it because Dean’s talk was so great.
The book is essentially the story of Rod Coronado’s life in activism, written from Dean’s experience covering Rod’s actions and animal/environmental activism for years as a reporter with the LA Times.
During his talk, Dean gave a brief overview of how the government has used different legislation such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, the Patriot Act, and Terrorism Sentencing Enhancement, how those pieces of legistlation are related and how they have developed and worked over time, using Rod’s experience as an example. Dean is knowledgeable and talked about how this legislation has influenced the “Green Scare” cases. In his talk, Dean said that he felt that this has had a chilling effect on activism, and that mostly experienced activists have attempted to steer clear of actions that could be covered by these laws, while the legisltaion has primarily served to sweep up younger, less experienced activists who are looking for an outlet for their frustrations. Dean also discussed often controversial definition of “non-violent direct action,” and in general did a great job of navigating and discussing objectively a lot of the complex issues – is direct action effective? do animal releases or arsons help animals? is media coverage of activism worth it?
I like to read books
I’m going through this major period of renovation in my life. There’s no other way to put it, really. It’s about redefining who I am and how I think of myself, choosing the important things and letting other things go. This blog will be going under some kind of overhaul in the near future, no doubt.
So, in the meantime, this means starting new projects and ending others. Like, you know, the new blog I just started, coz I don’t have enough of a web presence, right? Anyway, it’s called AMPERSAND, and it’s a group book review blog, where there are lots of contributors who write about all the fascinating stuff they are reading. Old books, new books, and all sorts of topics – fiction, nonfiction, cookbooks, how-to, and yes, even poetry.
Documentary Photography
I love photography. I always have.
When I was in Guatemala last year studying Spanish at the PLQ I met a photographer named Lucas Mulder. You can see his work here or read his blog. I particularly love his recent black & white photos from Cuba.
A little while ago, a documentary photography site, Verve, posted one of Lucas’s photos (shown above). Thanks to Lucas for turning me on to the site, and I’ve added it to my list of blogs that I read regularly.
Act Against Torture
Grabbed this photo from the Just Seeds blog – and just wanted to take a moment to highlight this creative action to bring awareness to a supermax prison in Illinois. A group of people went around with this HUGE *mud* stencil – what a creative action. Please read all about it (and see tons more photos) here and support the artists and this campaign!
David Solnit & The Art of Protest
David Solnit - Photo by Brihannala Morgan
I first met David Solnit in 1996, during the Active Resistance conference in Chicago. We became close after I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and I’ve really learned a lot from him.
He’s spent the last 25 years organizing in a variety of movements, from anti-nuclear to anti-war, and I’ve come to really respect him as someone who has a wide and long-term vision for how change happens, directly influencing the nature and style of social change organizing in the U.S.
I interviewed him in November 2008. Because David was involved in the organizing of the 1999 WTO Protests in Seattle, I had originally conceived of this interview as a reflection to be published in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of that moment. But the interview is much more wide ranging than that, covering, more generally, art and protest in the United States.
The interview has just been published online by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and you can read the full length version here.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
JA: Seattle was such a flashpoint for a lot of people, but it didn’t happen over night. Can you talk about the process of leading up to the ‘99 WTO protests and battling the myths that have come up about that organizing?
DS: Seattle brought together many of the movements that had been simmering; forest activism, sweat shop organizing, housing and homeless, environmental, workers, solidarity–all different kinds of movements– and it created a systemic framework in which people could converge and act in concert. There is a widespread activist myth that It was a spontaneous rebellion, which has led to a lot of badly organized mass mobilizations where people think that the Seattle recipe is you put out a call to action, set up a website, rent a convergence center, you know and people will miraculously come. Instead it was six months of creating organizational structures and building and strengthening networks, doing mobilizing which means face to face meetings and events, getting lists of people who are going, helping them get on busses and carpools, training people and preparing them for direct action and massive infrastructure, mass trainings and building alliances between movements. The mobilizations this year around the Democratic and Republican Conventions, while amazingly audacious and courageous, they lacked broad-based organizing and basic what and why strategy and the hardcore of activists who did step up got pretty beaten up.
