Climate Ground Zero to speak at the Rail

Monday, December 14! 7:30 PM! Film, presentation, all type of thing. 
 Free & open to the publick...  Click image for larger flyer
One of the presenters writes:

****

Climate Ground Zero doea non-violent direct action in west virginia against mountaintop removal in appalachia. climate ground zero uses a variety of tactics, from rallies and marches and sit-ins to lockdowns to mining equipment and tree-sits. we work to raise awareness and bring publicity to the issue of mountaintop removal and coal and its direct effect on carbon emissions and the growing climate crisis. mountaintop removal devastates both the environment and people of appalachia; it poisons the groundwater and headsprings for the rivers which supply drinking water for the entire northeast region, wipes out indigenous species, demolishes some of the oldest and most biodiverse mountains in the world, and brings countless health problems to the people who live near mountaintop removal and coal processing sites.

Much of climate ground zero's focus is presently on coal river mountain, the last untouched peak in the coal river valley. massey energy very recently began blasting on coal river mountain; we're working hard on actions to stop work and bring attention to sustainable wind energy as alternatives to coal. the coal river wind project aims to put wind turbines on coal river mountain instead of blowing up the mountain for coal; this would provide permanent, green jobs in contrast to the few short-term mining jobs that would be available in destroying the mountain for coal.

ClimateGroundZero.org
MountainJustice.org

PROTEST! New time! Keep the heat on wage-stealing TONY MORAN'S ! Time to escalate!

NEW TIME!

Meet up Thursday, October 29th at/outside Tira Misu 55, a bar at 123 Carondelet, at seven thirty P.M. to organize and plan. From there, we'll march over to the location of the protest: TONY MORAN'S "Italian" restaurant on Bourbon st. near the corner of Bourbon & Conti.

Tony Moran's management have been demanding workers do hours of prep while off the clock, have CONSISTENTLY STOLEN TIPS, and have withheld, bounced, and fiddled paychecks, often hiring people for catering jobs and then just refusing to pay them.

This behavior will continue-- more hard-working restaurant employees will be fucked over-- unless we send them a strong message that this behavior is unacceptable!

New Orleans restaurant workers are NOT interchangeable or disposable. All employees deserve fair pay, honest treatment, and dignity-- NOT bullying, discrimination and theft.

Attendees of the last protest got a chance to meet arch-villain Jobert Salem, the owner of (among other things) Tony Moran's and a world-class charmer : he was out there slapping at cameras, attempting to bully and shove protesters, press and passers-by, cussing, threatening, calling the cops, dancing with rage like a tantrum-throwing sweater-wearing child.

Have you or anyone you know had an abusive, bullying boss? Have you been underpaid or maltreated by your employer? This is a chance to stand in solidarity with others, united and strong, and say: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. We must send an unmistakeable message to Jobert and bosses like him: Treat your workers fairly.

This protest is being organized by ROC-NOLA, Restaurant Opportunities Center of New Orleans on behalf of its members who've been cheated and robbed by Tony Moran's.

All of us must KEEP THE PRESSURE ON this restaurant until management agrees to sit down and negotiate. It is vital that all New Orleanians concerned with social justice join in this effort. Last week, ROC's initial protest, went well, but let's bump the turnout up and let Jobert Salem and fat cats like him know the era of screwing over workers has ENDED.

Our city is overdue for some social justice victory... let's take a stand for our fellow restaurant workers! Please join in this important action, please invite friends and associates, please help spread publicity, and together, we'll stand strong against worker exploitation!

Thanks... and we'll see ya on the picket line!!!

YOU DEMAND, WE SUPPLY

I try to get the word out.

Having just mass-mailed a newsletter with no subject line and committed whatever passes for a faux pas in the horrid twilit dork-a-verse that is "Facebook," I cannot but eagerly anticipate what will go wrong with this fuckin' blog posting. Perhaps I will inadvertantly include my social security number? Perhaps I will CC my employer?

Anyway, to the crux:
ASHER is back at the Iron Rail, giving massages!

Today, Sunday, 3-7 p.m.!

Now, I try not to objectify allies, but rest assured, were you to find Asher merely TWENTY PERCENT as charming as does the average person, you would still be more charmed by him than first-time parents are by their newborn.

I say 'newborn' for purposes of analogy, but make no mistake: Asher's hands are unambiguously full-grown. They are the hands of a great sculptor, or perhaps a symphony conducter who splits his own cordwood: the hands of a do-er, a master craftsperson, a kinaesthetic shaper of better destinies.

And folks, it is THOSE EXTRAORDINARY HANDS, those same heaven-infused, sinewed extremities which Asher will deploy to sculpt YOUR VERY FLESH, working out stresses that might date back months, even years... tension you've been carrying for a decade, unawares! This is your chance. He's got the goods; let him heal you.

Asher is a certified, professional masseuse who is generously donating his skills to help raise funds for our ambitious but impoverished littleinfoshop/spa. He's got a chair and everything. Pay what you can, but do not miss out on this...

EXCERSIZE

Get a pen... or since you're on a computer, open a new text document. List the five objects, services or experiences in your adult life that have given you the most pleasure. Go on, write 'em down.

If you have had an exceptionally rewarding time on earth, list ten.

OKAY, THAT WAS PART ONE. Now list the five (or ten) most expensive objects, services or experiences you have paid money for... including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements and taxes.

Do those lists overlap?

Mine kinda do, more than I expected they would.

A PILLAR OF WIND

I spend a couple weeks preoccupied and this place is a morgue. COME ON FOLKS.

So I happen to work in an office. It's an easy "go-to" when I need something to castigate myself over, that I'm a white-collar wage lackey. Anyway my office is in a building with a really powerful elevator, and when I ascend the elevator to work and there aren't other people I like to close my eyes and experience the WHOOOSH as the elevator yanks me skywards. It's astonishing when you consider it... there's this giant WELL and you step into a brass bucket and WHOOSH it sucks you up through space at however many miles per hour.

There are probably all kinds of interesting effects in the elevator shaft itself created by having something rocketing through at such a high speed. The elevator is fancy but you can hear whistling air if you press your face to one of the seams in the side panels and thus get a sense of just how crazy the physics of it is. So even though it demoralizes me to have a job and not a trust fund I must say it's cool that at least 2 or three times every shift I have the experience of being rushed heavenwards on a pillar of wind.

WHAT, YOU DON'T THINK THAT'S REMARKABLE OR INTERESTING? YOU THINK THAT'S OPPRESSIVELY MUNDANE? Well fuck you, if you were trapped 10,000,000 miles below ground and you felt like you were constantly exhausting yourself in the fight to get up to Zero, the level from which most people start their days, if you felt like you were buried so far below any kind of real life that even breaking through the surface of Zero for an occasional gulp of air and a glimpse of daylight was an accomplishment to be savored, then you might get a kick out of zooming around in an elevator too. God, my pretty little turns of phrase are clearly wasted on you! Can't you allow me my small pleasures, you philistine? Fuck it that tears it I'm going to go get drunk.

JAKES ON THE BLOCKS WE OUT-CLEVER

Here is a video showing a pair of pigs skulking along in a St. Paul poor people march. Keen eyes may spot other items of interest as well, and by 'items,' I mean awesome ion-beam sweethearts, and by awesome ion-beam sweethearts I don't really mean much at all because I'm too burned out to formulate a properly tedious and convoluted inside joke.

FRAUD RADTKE

What is this nonsense? Some dupes are claiming Fred Radtke painted over Dr. Bob's Bywater sign? BULLSHIT. I know my boy's handiwork. I know his technique, and I know his approach. I know the brushstrokes-- rollerstrokes-- that make a Radtke a Radtke; I see them in my dreams.

This hasty, half-assed hackwork, this sloppy, slipshod slapdashery is NOT an authentic Radtke. I say it, and I will pin my reputation as a Radtkologist upon it. The photos tell the story, and examination in person certainly confirms it beyond all doubt, or certainly would if I was to ever venture somewhere as déclassé as the Bywater. Pay nothing for this piece, and reprove its provenance, 'cuz it's straight-up a FORGERY!

Whatever one thinks of the gesture-- the effacing of beloved, cheerful public art with magisterial grey-- this gesture was not carried out by the maestro, but by some imitative Other. The incomplete coverage, the awkward mélange of horizontal and vertical strokes... dead giveaways.

What then does it mean? What motivated this copycadtke? ...can it be? Can this be the time long foretold by Mayan calendars, convicts' knucklebones, and Jackson Square tarot readings? It is! The hour is finally upon us when other painters admit defeat and each take up the mighty grey torch, spreading it to a grey conflagration. Let remaining taggers, sign-painters and muralists tremble! This is the great crisis, the birthing of the future! Secure all tray tables in the upright and locked position: we are in final approach to a glorious Grauenacht!

OR

maybe this is someone's attempt to make Radtke look bad. If that's the case, while I generally avoid passing any sort of judgement, it does seem to me that you have in this case achieved an un-victory. Of course you have outraged those whose whole lifestyle and worldview is founded upon their own outrage-- but that's no accomplishment. Those people are professional shriekers; Radtke is just one dark deity in their teeming personal pantheons of put-uponness. Career complainants, eternally victimized by the less enlightened. Oh how dare he! I bet he won't vote for Obama, either! Radtke, blasting Pop Country from a Humvee... there, I just made them all quit reading, 'cuz they fainted.

No, if you're trying to make Radtke look bad, I deem it an un-victory because the quality of your work stands in such stark, unflattering contrast to Radtke's. It's a travesty that anyone could mistake your work for his! Many think what Radtke does is easy, in part because he executes an individual work relatively quickly, but first of all, any given Radtke is just a piece of the larger Ur-Radtke, and second of all, his technique, honed over more than a decade, is explicated in the parable of the zen ceramicist:

"Master, how can you sell that pot for eighty dollars? It took you only ten minutes to create it on your potting wheel."
"Grasshopper, creating this pot took me my entire life, and ten minutes."

That's where Radtke's at. Second or third- or whwhatever... fuck these are strong ... of all, when you use Radtke's language, the grey language of obliteration, you are totally in his power, even moreso than the reactive, semi-satirical school of "Radtke-critical" art that has sprung up in supposed opposition to him (a school of art ferociously excoriated at the tragically American-spelling-of-grey-employing therealgrayghost.blogspot.com). By trying to make a point about Grey with grey, you are playing poker with his chips, so when the chips are down, they're always gonna be his chips. It's trying to tear down the Grey Master's house with the Grey Master's tools, y'erdme?

BUT

If you're just some dipshit who thought it would be funny to stir the pot by Greying a giant, prominent Dr. Bob piece, then baby, let's get drunk and screw, because you're my kind of reckless, socially irresponsible adolescent nihilist!

In conclusion : not a real Radtke : portends a new era in Radtkism I am too fucked-up at present to figure out : author needs a disco nap.

--the mighty respiratory-infection-riddled d-block

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN

CHOCOLATE CHIP LABELING

REVENGE OF BRIDE OF RETURN OF LABELING PARTY

Do you know how sometimes something feels so good that you just can't stop doing it? That's where we are with the labeling parties. Oh dear. The labeling, the alphabetizing - where do we start? Where do we stop? Slowly, the dream that was the labeling party has become our day-to-day, and the rest of our lives... the hours empty of labeling... have faded to the texture of dream. Only labeling is real. Did you know that piracy goes in class war/labor studies? I did. Plus, we chucked out a bunch of Maoist stuff, so if you want hardline polemics to inspire your shrill, hectoring newspapers which no-one reads, you'll have to go elswhere. Seriously, 'communism' is now 6 books thick - it's original texts only - direct action/protest has been EXPANDED. Christianity is the next to go - tomorrow. Each book in the section will be marched up the steps to the guillotine, summarily judged, and sentenced to the free pile.

My co-author is being kind. We're burning books at the iron rail. No way, that's not even funny. Yes, it is. We aren't, though. Because YOU, gentle reader, will come be a voice of reason in this purging, by contributing your time and talents to the labeling and cataloguing process. It's spelled cataloging!!! However it's SPELT, there will be a lot of it tomorrow, and it will be exhilirating, like a fox. Like the hot orange blur of a fox, and the henhouse is our overstuffed shelves full of insufficiently revolutionary books. He totally stole 'like a fox' from me, btw. Like the internet for dummies, and "A pseudo marxist critique of freudian lesbianism from the 1950s". No just kidding.

We're thinking it will kick off around 1:30 PM, and we'd love you to intervene and save us from ourselves. We're going to hopefully provide chocolate chip cookies. Sunday, July 6th. COME GIVE US A HAND WE'RE WICKED SWEET. (That is true).

-- SARAH -&- the mighty d-block

JOB OPPORTUNITY: Infiltrate Vegan Potlucks for the FBI

Some at the Iron Rail tend to follow a more continental diet-- black coffee, unfiltered cigarettes, discarded shrimp heads, and whatever middle-aged married businessmen buy for us at bars-- but if you're willing to leave the Clamato out of your beer for a meal or two, Uncle Sam wants YOU to rat out your skinnier, less diabetic fellow-citizens in the run-up to the RNC:

http://articles.citypages.com/2008-05-21/news/moles-wanted/

"What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at 'vegan potlucks' throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force,"

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

--the d-block