The Nation Guide to the Nation (Vintage) - Softcover

Lingeman, Richard; Nation Magazine, Nation Magazine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307387283 ISBN 13: 9780307387288

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

The essential lifestyle guide for the millions of progressives on both coasts, The Nation Guide to The Nation will help left-of-center types find left-leaning shops, cultural institutions, and gathering places in their own hometowns and on the road.

CULTURAL: Art collectives / activist documentaries / political circuses / film festivals / writers' colonies / left-brained bookstores / arts advocacy groups / indie book publishers / the 25 greatest political movies / detective stories for liberals

SOCIAL: Organic and slow food restaurants / political saloons and bars / bookshop cafés and conversational coffeehouses / sexy singles meet-ups / reading clubs and discussion groups / camps for radical kids / parades and festivals / parks and preserves

ENVIRONMENTAL: Activist groups / monkey wrenchers and sea shepherds / eco-friendly products / favorite green markets / super co-ops / eco-tourism / farm communes / energy solutions

ORGANIZATIONS: Peace and anti-nuclear / feminist / GLBT / economic policy / immigrant rights / labor issues / campaign finance reform / civil liberties / radical mouthpieces / liberal think tanks

MEDIA: Left-talk radio / press watchdogs / anti-corporate media / regional and local papers / alternative weeklies / a guide to the blogosphere

GOODS AND SERVICES: Natural food stores / no-sweat clothing / socially conscious mutual funds / political tours / eco-beers and hemp pretzels / funeral homes and cemeteries (for a green send-off!)

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Editor Richard Lingeman is the former longtime executive editor of The Nation and a biographer, historian, and satirist. Consulting editor Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of The Nation. Consulting editor Victor Navasky is former editor and publisher emeritus of The Nation.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Part I.

COLLECTIVES

Beehive Design Collective. Members of the busy Beehive Design Collective refer to themselves as "culture workers" or "pollinators"; individuals use "bee" as a surname. The group is based in an old Grange hall and identifies with the Grange's nineteenth-century Populist fight against Wall Street. They oppose transnational corporations, free trade, biotechnology, industrialization; they believe that art (design, graphics, cartoons and caricatures) can play a pivotal part in conveying political ideas. They conceive their role in the fight to be designing elaborate, historically accurate posters; touring universities with graphic presentations on the issues; discussing same with other activists at the grass roots and giving away their posters.

3 Elm Street, Machias, ME 04654, (207) 255-6737, www.beehivecollective.org <http://www.beehivecollective.org>

The Bubble Project. Artist Ji Lee cut out 30,000 blank white bubbles and plastered them on ad posters all over New York City. People responded by filling the bubbles with caustic, antiadvertising quips. Lee slapped the funniest bubbles on his website, which received 50,000 hits and crashed. In 2006 he collected some of the all-time great quips in a book called Talk Back: The Bubble Project. In late 2007 Ji Lee told us: "The BP is still going strong. The website has been visited by over two million people. The bubbling has spread to hundreds of countries. I receive e-mails every day from different bubblers around the world, from India, Australia, China to Turkey. Now Italy has a Bubble Project website (www.progetttobolla.com <http://www.progetttobolla.com> ) as does Argentina (www.proyectoburbuja.com <http://www.proyectoburbuja.com> ). The BP has taken on a life of its own, and it will keep going as long as there are ads on the streets!" Recently sighted on the Bubble Project website: "What country would Jesus bomb?"

www.thebubbleproject.com

The Busycle. A bicycle built for fifteen, a pedal-powered traveling art piece, this contraption sits on the stripped-down chassis of a van. Fourteen pedalers sit seven to a side, facing out, a set of pedals in front of each of them. The driver up front guides the Busycle as they pedal in unison. Their leg power is transmitted to a central gear shaft that turns the wheels. The Busycle travels to different cities on cross-country story-collecting tours. During stops, the crew invites locals to climb aboard, work the pedals and experience the purposeful joy of pulling together, of being cogs in a larger effort. Then they assemble around a virtual campfire to tell their stories, which are videotaped and shared with people at the next stop. The Buscycle was created by Boston-based artists Heather Clark and Matthew Mazzotta while they were in residence at the Berwick Research Institute's Public Art Satellite Program.

www.buscycle.com

Center for Tactical Magic. CTM believes in opening creative lines of communication, spreading information and bringing people together. Over the past eight years they've mobilized more than 200 people on projects in cities across the United States as well as internationally. For example, they have a Tactical Ice Cream Unit (TICU) that distributes free ice cream and political literature from a truck, which "is familiar but different-it's a fully armored car that's an ice cream truck." It displays two menus: "treats for the streets" and "food for thought." The truck carries audiovisual equipment and is available as the centerpiece at rallies, providing the sound system, stage, music and refreshments.

1460 Madison Avenue, Memphis, TN 32104, (901) 722-3001, www.tacticalmagic.org <http://www.tacticalmagic.org>

Critical Art Ensemble. CAE is a collective of five "tactical media artists"-Steve Kurtz, Robert Ferrell, Steve Barnes, Dorian Burr and Beverly Schlee, who are variously trained in computer graphics and web art, film/video, photography, text art, book art, performance art and science. They formed CAE in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1987, because they wanted a public voice and chose collective activity. "The idea is to look for cracks in the system and exploit them," says Kurtz. His 1994 book The Electronic Disturbance attacked the Internet and urged "digital disobedience." One CAE project in Halifax, Nova Scotia, invented a cultural tour of the city. CAE produced glossy brochures, icons and LCD displays of what was wrong with the city, such as its sewage-filled harbor. Marching Plague (see box), illustrated a 1952 British Army experiment, in which the spread of bubonic plague was studied by infecting guinea pigs. The installation was displayed at the Whitney Biennial in 2006.

www.critical-art.net

Ron English. Call him English the Highwayman. He hijacks billboards. It all began back in the 1980s while he was a student in northern Texas. His MO was and is covering a billboard with his own message. Of course, this requires fast hands, and English has trained himself so that he can paste over a billboard in seven minutes flat. His messages have included: cigarettes kill, fast food makes you fat, right-wing talk show hosts are nuts, Jesus would not have driven a large SUV, and Apple Computer does not have the right to say what companies Albert Einstein would have endorsed (in its "Think Different" campaign). Since his first boardjacking, Ron English has covered more than 900 of them. Notable ones include: The Poor: What Good Are They?

www.popaganda.com

Guerrilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls are five or maybe thirty or twenty-five (the number is secret) artists, who take aliases of famous women artists, such as Frida Kahlo or Georgia O'Keeffe. Their objective is to rag the art establishment for what they see as its systematic exclusion of women. Their means are humorous, because humor gets through to people. First, of course, are those gorilla masks they don before invading an exclusive art site (inspired by one of their members' misspelling their name as "Gorilla Girls"). Second, they create a lot of alternative art, for example, posters that have become collectors' items, been sold in galleries and hung in museums. These were published in a book, Confessions of the Guerrilla Girls. See also The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art and Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers. The GGs contributed an illustration to a special issue of The Nation on the movies called The Anatomically Correct Oscar-a drawing of a statuette of a fat white guy with his hands modestly covering the family jewels. This was enlarged and appeared on a billboard in Hollywood at Academy Awards time with the legend "He's white & male, just like the guys who win!"

www.guerrillagirls.com

Preemptive Media. This collective, born at cutting-edge Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was the brainchild of Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer. Its vision is making works of art that subvert actual technologies used by the government and companies to mine data and amass information on all of us. An example of their creations was the project Zapped! that focused on radio frequency identification (RFID) tags used by companies like Wal-Mart to track products and sales. Preemptive Media has held workshops that have instructed people on how to build detection devices to tell them they're being monitored. Still another work is called Swipe, created to blow the whistle on the way merchants lift data encoded in the magnetic stripe on drivers' licenses. PM sets up a real bar serving drinks at social functions with a real driver's license scanner. After reading his receipt, the customer can down a stiff drink to numb the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307387283
• ISBN 13: 9780307387288
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 401
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland