Panel on Anarcha-Feminism
This last weekend, on Saturday I went to the first annual Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair at the Southern California Library. I’ve been to a few Anarchist Bookfairs up north in San Francisco, so I was very interested in seeing how this would turn out. I couldn’t make it to all the workshops/panels but I did make it to a few.
More after the jump.
5.99 WOW!!!
I was unlucky enough to be a child of the 90s. The 90s sucked. I always wished I could have been a child of the 80s, but no I was stuck in the decade that started sarcasm, plaid shirts as fashion statements or rather just not washing in general as a fashion statement. It was filled with lots of music that I hated, but had to listen to because there was nothing else available. Lots of whiny songs about killing yourselves and the gov’t and how it sucked and blowing up shit, but it wasn’t fun like punk in the 1970s it was all 1990s and crap. Oh yeah and techno started then too, freakin’ great disco without the cocaine or fun lyrics.
Is it just me or do the chickens on our side of town seem to be more belligerent than the chickens further west at such places like Kookooroo, where they seem to be just zany, avant garde and delicious?
You want some of this?
I had written this serious post about crap you already know. Coupons, going back to school, roommates, moving back in with your parents and then I thought of something. We’re in La La Land.
Image is EVERYTHING!!!
This is why so many of us get in a hole in the first place, so I decided to give you advice on how to survive economic harsh times, yet keep your rep firmly in place. Being eccentric and bat-shit crazy always sounds better on paper than just poor.
If you are going down the economic ladder, do it with insane style!!!
One thing you can do is join a cult. Cults are always accepting new members. And many cults have a crash pad. When you have no money you isolate yourself from your friends and family anyway, so you’re ripe for a cult. Yeah you might have to do animal sacrifices, but if you aren’t a vegetarian this won’t be a problem and also there are animal friendly cults that just sacrifice people, though those kinds of cults are Continue reading
I found a new phrase.
Hipster Racism, I found it at Racialicious, the ladies over there are so smart.
“I define hipster racism (I’m borrowing the phrase from Carmen Van Kerckhove) as ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning “ironic†nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy.â€
AJ Plaid, Racialicious
I used to just call it the “tattooed, pseudo progressive, over-educated, asshole” problem, but this is much better.
Back in the day (the 90s) an ethnic minority in Los Angeles only had to stay away from Republican areas and never visit the Southern part of the United States (or the South Bay, oh let’s throw in Covina and Tujunga too) and they would be shielded from being openly mocked owing to what they were ethnically (not from being harassed by the cops, they will always be a problem), but those days are over.
We can now enjoy being mocked by Obama supporting, vegetarian diet, Ivy League graduate liberals, with “multi-colored” sex partners. Well thank god. We’ve come so far.
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Did you wake up one day and realized that you weren’t the most valuable living being on the planet? No, neither have I, but I am making a real effort at getting there.
Maybe you can’t change the world, but you can change a piece of it for at least twenty minutes and if you changed twenty minutes and another person changed twenty minutes, possibly all of you together could have an impact on someone’s day.
If you believe in that kind of concept and you think patchouli smells good here’s a list of your things to do.
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“Tesco is to stop importing about £1m ($2m) of fresh vegetables from Zimbabwe, reversing its previous stance that the trade was essential to support the families of the farm workers who grow crops such as mange tout and baby corn.†By John Willman in London and Tony Hawkins in Harare at the Financial Times.
Tesco owns the recent upstart in the organic food game, Fresh & Easy (which for some odd reason the blogosphere is obsessed with.)
Not that I believe that Tesco was only trying to help, but how far is too far in regards to “helping†and what’s not far enough?
On Friday I went to a get together at MacArthur Park’s Mama’s Hot Tamales in support of the ongoing carwash boycott that first came to the attention of the media with the boycotting of the Pirian-owned Vermont Hand Wash in Los Feliz.
At the event Barbara Ehrenreicht (author of Nickle and Dimed and the new book This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation) gave the boycott organizers and their supporters her encouragement.
“America has forgotten it’s own history of organized collective action and outright rebellion…†Barbara Ehrenreicht.
That to me is the key. You can’t go too far, but you can screw yourself if you don’t go far enough.
I was riding the Blueline train the other day and this young black man was trying to get my attention. He wasn’t that cute, he was too young, and I have a boyfriend.
I mean I have a boyfriend; even if he were the right age and was cute I definitely would not have talked to him. I don’t think.
Anyways me ignoring him pissed him off, so he proceeded to call me a “f*cking b*tch.â€
It was weird, because I haven’t been called a bitch by a black guy (that wasn’t homeless) in years. The last time a black man called me a bitch was when I brought a white guy friend on accident (sort of) to a coffee shop that was very heavy on Nation of Islam types. Well this guy didn’t so much call me a bitch, but pulled out a gun and threatened to kill the guy I was with (he said he didn’t believe in hurting black women,) that actually happened. Awesome story, but that’s another post.
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But actually calling it a SRO is a bit negative. It’s a very small studio or maybe if you were really optimistic a very small loft (since loft seems to mean now apartment with no walls.)
I sublet a portion of my studio in Boyle Heights that I was illegally living in and I’m now using that income to pay for me to live at the Rosslyn.
Is that welfare? Is that capitalism? I don’t know it’s maybe a mixture of both.
I missed that Sex in the City gene of loving to shop and waste money (hey I thought that show was supposed to be satire…) To me paying rent is a waste of money, which means you should pay the least amount of rent that you can get away with.
In college when I moved out of the dorms I lived on Sunset and Fairfax directly across the street from the Virgin Megastore for four hundred dollars a month. Yes four hundred dollars!!!
That was one of my most proud achievements as a college student. I would invite people over and go, “Guess how much I pay?â€
My old friends have grown tired of this game and always say thing like “Two dollars.â€
Such jerks. That destroys the whole beauty of the game.
I’m currently wearing a coat that costs me five dollars. There is this great store by the Hammer, everything is five dollars.
In LA no one admires thrifty people.
I’m the cheapest most glamorous woman in the world.
I had a friend who used to brag about how she paid one million dollars to live in Mar Vista. I always thought that was a horrible story.
My parents are working class stock. I remember when applying to college my dad was actually very proud of the fact that he had worked so much over-time that I no longer qualified for need based financial aid.
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The talk about amending Special Order 40 pisses me off.
This has nothing to do with gangs. This has to do with one thing, race and class, well that’s two, but you know what I’m saying.
LA has always had a major gang problem. It just sickens me the right wing has gotten their teeth into the grief of this family and are using them as tools to pass some stupid racist bs agenda.
I’m not exactly sure how people actually continually fall for the gang rape trick.
What is the gang rape trick? After America got embarrassed about killing Native Americans, lynching black people, excluding Asians, and subjugating women for just being who they are biologically, they needed another way to justify crappy unjust treatment, because why be fair when being an asshole is so entertaining.
So what they decided was to get laws passed that are under the guise of anti-gang, but in actuality they are laws that rape the civil rights of people of color, who the cops can just lie and say are gang members.
If you’re a young person of color how do you convince someone you’re not a gang member?
You can’t.
College was an interesting experience for me, because I really hated it.
I meet teenage women of color at times (I give back and that crap, so I volunteer at places) and they think I’m so neat and they are impressed that I went to college and want to know what school I went to. I get conflicted as to what to tell them. Should I tell them the truth? My truth seems so harsh.
Most people of color always say this, “I loved college it made me such a better person and blah, blah, I was so happy to have the opportunity to learn to kiss ass properly.â€
I hate the taste of ass.
Prius drivers get tax breaks, why not transit riders?
“Because it’s entirely different,†a person who knows where I’m going with this, but wants to stop me, because bringing up race and class is divisive and makes people feel bad.
Well too bad.
Ever since I’ve given up my car I realized some things:
The bus takes way too long to come.
It is very easy to not pay and take the Red Line.
I get treated way differently than my white boyfriend in regards to not having a car. No one ever asks Bob if he has a car when he’s applying for some little shit job to make some extra cash, but that’s one of the first questions that will come out of their mouth with me.
“Do you have a car?â€
I applied for a job at an environmental organization and they wanted to know if I had a car?
WTF? If I can do the job what does it matter how I do it, especially if other people there don’t have a car?
What the fudge kind of environmental agency are you anyway?
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