Leave Lights On? No! Always Switch Lights OFF!
When I was in sixth grade, back in the early 70s, I had the worst teacher imaginable. He played favorites, and others he tortured. Guess which one I was.
I don’t remember why, but one day he went off on us. He stormed over to the light switch, and furiously turned the switch on and off, on and off, on and off, and railed at us about wasting energy.
“Every time you do this” on and off, on and off “you waste energy!” he ranted and raved.
Turns out, he was wrong, according to the following article: Read more…
Some SoCal Earth Month Events 2009
We’ve all heard it: Every day is Earth Day. Every month is Earth Month. But in April we are reminded more than ever because April 22 is “Earth Day,” and the month is marked by numerous events around the globe. If there isn’t anything going on in your neck of the woods, make something happen! Around southern California, events include:
What: ‘”Quail Springs is a learning oasis and permaculture farm dedicated to demonstrating and teaching holistic ways of designing human environments, and to facilitating deeper understandings of ourselves and one another through immersive experiences in nature.” This field trip will include a tour of the property, learning exercises and some really fun work!
Not Allowed: dogs, pets, drugs or firearms
and if you’re NOT going to COACHELLA (boo hoo!), there’s lots to do without getting too hot…
Saturday, April 18
The Spring Garden Tour is a fund raising event to benefit the development of a Botanical Garden in Grant Park located above City Hall. venturabotanicalgardens.com The Garden Tour is from 10:00 am until 4:00 pm. and is followed by a Wine Reception from 4 to 6 PM at the home of Pat Jump. Tickets for the garden tour are $25 in advance and $30 on the day of the tour; the price of the tour plus the post-tour reception is $50. Tickets may be purchased at Palermo, 321 E. Main St, Ventura, or by sending a check to Ventura Botanical Gardens, Inc., P.O. Box 3121, Ventura, CA 98006-3127.
Celebrate Easter with a Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race!
Participants in the 9th Annual San Francisco Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race are being threatened with tickets. According to SF Gate, the online arm of the SF Chronicle:
Police officials said late Tuesday that they are still reviewing the event and have not decided whether they will ticket Big Wheel riders. Organizers, who have reached out to neighbors with events such as a fundraising barbecue last week, hope to convince city officials that they can run a free and safe event without expensive permits or corporate sponsors.
“If this doesn’t work out, there will be no legal way for people to get together without people paying money,” lamented Tom Price, who is helping to organize the event, which will take place around the corner from his house at 20th and Vermont streets around 4 p.m.
Oakland resident Jared Hirsch said organizers are using their money to provide portable toilets and encouraging participants to act responsibly. He said the race could be a model for other events.
“This is about community, about getting people off their couches, getting people involved and creating our own fun,” Hirsch said.
A Burning Mom who is involved with the event emailed to say, “Two prosecutors and a rep from city hall have confirmed that the arrests would not be prosecutable if they choose to arrest racers. It’ll be really unfortunate if this event and everything like it disappears just because of one irresponsible pillow
fight mess.”
Wrote one commenter to the article: “So, this gets a crackdown but Critical Mass doesn’t? Once a year, this event shuts down a stretch of one block that sees no traffic, but it needs shutting down. Plus, the organizers are working their butts off to make sure the event causes no problems. Critical Mass is designed to disrupt as much as possible, and they get police protection. I’ll be out on there my Big Wheel. Write me as many tickets as you want.“
Read more about the demise of fun in San Francisco here: http://www.sfbg. com/blogs/ politics/ 2009/04/death_ of_fun_sfpds_ crackdowns. html
Here’s a video from the 2006 race which was held on Lombard Street in San Francisco.
Hmmn, we FFArtRiders may need to expand our wheeled chariot selections next year and add a Big Wheel Race of our own! Palm Street anyone? How about a flash mob FLASHDANCE on the Promenade on Prom Night May 1??
Green Drinks April 8 at Camarillo Red Cross
Green Drinks is an informal social gathering/networking event for folks that are environmentally minded to cross pollinate, make new friends, catch up with old ones, and maybe even sprout an idea or three. Green Drinks is held monthly in 350 cities across the country, and the idea is rapidly spreading.
This Earth Month, make a point of seeking and finding your local Green Dinrks gathering–or make one happen!
In Ventura County, Green Drinks approaches a different host each month who selects the venue of their choice for a second Weds meet and greet from 530-730pm. This month, I plan to head for Camarillo’s Red Cross. Will you join me? Find your own? Or start one? Let us know in the comments!
Yesterday I filmed and edited this video of “EVEN IF THE PAIN” by Siddiq Turkestani and “ODE TO THE SEA” by Ibrahim al-Rubaish, two of the poems from the collection, Poems from Guantanamo: the detainees speak edited by Mark Falkoff (University of Iowa Press).
Poet Adrienne Rich writes of the collection: “Poems from Guantanamo brings to light figures of concrete, individual humanity, against the fabric of cruelty woven by the ‘war on terror.’ The poems and poets’ biographies reveal on dimension of this officially obscured narrative, from the perspective of the sufferers; the legal and literary essays provide the context which has produced–and under atrocious circumstances–a poetics of human dignity.”
On Monday April 13 from 7-9pm, poets and peace activists will present “Poems from Guantanamo” at a Place for Peace, 896 E. Main, Ventura California. A donation of $10 per person is requested; funds will be divided equally between Place of Peace, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Veterans for Peace. More details here.
Poets, peace activists and celebrities poems are presenting the poems in various venues to call attention to the continuing plight of the detainees who are still being held and tortured or recovering from their ordeals in Guantanamo and in the hands of the US military. Many of the past performances have been filmed and posted on YouTube; we will post ours also.
Three myths about the detainees and torture have been called to my attention. Read more…
Hear Poems from Guantanamo: April 13 7-9pm
EVEN IF THE PAIN by Siddiq Turkestani
Even if the pain of the wound increases,
There must be a remedy to treat it.
Even if the days in prison endure,
There must be a day when we will get out.
Please join us for Poems from Guantanamo: the detainees speak presented by poets and peace activists Monday April 13 from 7-9pm at a Place for Peace, 896 E. Main, Ventura.
The program will open with background information from Vincent Warren from the Center for Constitutional Rights, continue with readings of many poems from the book with introductions by event organizer Grant Marcus, include an intermission with music from the Place of Peace Choir, and conclude with a Q and A. A donation of $10 per person is requested; funds will be divided equally between Place of Peace, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Veterans for Peace.
For more poems, ride the Poetry Train.
LA Times on Bruce Springsteen: It’s no dream
“There are a lot of ghosts in this place,” Bruce Springsteen told the LA Times Geoff Boucher
as his boots clomped on an ancient staircase at the Asbury Park Convention Hall. It was here in this old seaside venue that Springsteen, as a teenager, watched Jim Morrison prowl the stage and Keith Moon thunder away on drums for the Who. It was also in the corridors here that he brushed past a wild-child named Janis Joplin. “Our elbows, they came this close,” said Springsteen, somehow still amazed that a Jersey kid could come within arm’s reach of rock history.
LA Time’s reporter Geoff Boucher traveled to the land of Bruce to land an in-depth interview with Bruce Springsteen. The article in last Sunday’s LA Times (April 5, 2009) features hometown, homegrown stories and a number of photos of Bruce, including an intimate photo of Bruce working on his set list, sitting on a leather couch strumming a guitar, his hair still dark but thinning, his bifocals casually laying across sheets of paper with familiar titles, even in shorthand. As Bruce puts it at the end of the article,
“Patti told me there was something about getting into your 50s, that people get very focused and busy in their 50s, and that maybe it’s because an oncoming train focuses the mind,” he said. “There may be some element of that involved with me right now. I
hear a whistle in the distance somewhere — maybe I’d better start to writing.”
You can read the whole article here. But you can only see those photos in the print version unless I scan them!
Bruce Springsteen comes to LA next Wednesday and Thursday, April 15 and 16 (and then on to Coachella for the weekend to play with Paul McCartney or Leonard Cohen or Conor Oberst??) Meet you back here for more news from the streets–and backstage as I am sure the Big Monkey will be hanging around to get Bruce to sign a photo of them together from their younger days.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-springsteen5-2009apr05,0,7079301,full.story
Allegra Huston: “Love Child” tour of America
Jim Nave, a poet friend of mine, encourages me to go hear Allegra Huston on her national book tour from Los Angeles to Asheville, which starts tomorrow, (and moves to Santa Barbara Tuesday night where I plan to hear her) and I’m encouraging you to go too. The schedule is below.
I met Nave at the Taos Poetry Circus in 2000; he was the host of the slam where I competed for the first time (and placed 7th out of 40!). After we practiced yoga together, he invited me to teach yoga at the creativity camp he was facilitating with Julia Cameron, author of the Artists Way. While I didn’t get paid, I did get to participate in the week’s workshops, enjoy excellent meals, and meet many wonderful people.
Creativity Camp evolved into Nave’s latest projects, the Writing Salon and the Imaginative Storm, creativity workshops he leads around the world, often with Allegra Huston, author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found. 
The book jacket states:
When Allegra Huston was four years old, her mother was killed in a car crash. Soon afterwards, she was introduced to an intimidating man wreathed in cigar smoke—the legendary film director John Huston—with the words, “This is your father.”
Nave writes: Read more…
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.”–John Steinbeck
“Out here the nights are long, the days are lonely
I think of you and I’m working on a dream”–Bruce Springsteen
Ron Wells, a friend of ours and a huge Bruce Springsteen fan, provided the quotes above. He traveled from LA to Arizona to see Bruce’s “Working on A Dream” tour stop Friday night, April 3 in Glendale and wrote the review of the show which follows. We’ll likely see him (as well as Bruce!) at the LA Sports Arena for the Springsteen shows April 15 and 16. Didn’t know we were Bruce Springsteen fans? Go here for more. Go here for more about the LA shows and an LA Times interview with Springsteen. Here’s Ron’s review of the Magic show last year in San Jose. Now for Ron’s review of the Glendale AZ show:
The wind in Phoenix on Friday was blowing like some erstwhile Oklahoma dustbowl, dirt and debris like dashed hopes whipping against people struggling to stand upright. It was appropriate that at a time in America when the screendoors have come off of their hinges, dresses are tattered and torn, and tents pop up housing humans who could pass for ghosts, that Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band blow in to try and build a little fortress in your heart that can hold something like hope.
There are a lot of destitute souls wandering this bankrupt landscape tonight, and Bruce comes bearing nothing more than a chance to make some connections with his own brand of faith and redemption. Read more…
FFArtRide May 1: Prom Ride to the Promenade
Last night’s First Friday’s ArtRide: Bunny Hop was a blast! Along the way and especially along the Avenue people honked and waved.
It was really great to have 2 kids on TRAILABIKES–
we’re really inspiring people! Jason Ward took some photos and did a collage for his facebook page which I stole and put on my blog–go see!
Jenessa Nye sent me these photos taken by her or with her camera–can you tell we’re having fun??
When we started talking about doing the FFArtRides, Jason Ward shared that he’d love to see a ride go from the Govt Center all the way down Main Street.
Helen O’Neil and I talked about having dj dancing & drinks at the end of a ride and the Prom Ride having a Prom at the end–with music and dancing and photos and ??
City Council member Brian Brennan pointed out the best place for a prom is the Promenade…
So for the next FFArtRide, the Prom Ride May 1, Read more…
art predator 