a METROPOLARITY reading + some other jawn
greetings
thought i'd drop you a line to say that my sci-fi coven is reading with Kimya Dawson from Olympia and Merce Lemon from Pittsburgh on JULY 4 (next wednesday) at Little Berlin. here is the full event link. it's 15 bucks. i am not personally familiar with Kimya Dawson but it seems a lot of ppl fuck w/them. we were supposed to do something with Kimya like a year ago but then something happened and ...well, here we on on the 4th of july in Kensington. party on. fuck amerikkka.
also, you're invited to a funny first friday type thing i'm doing on JULY 6 at this place called Paradise Diner at Front & Girard. It's across the street from the el, and it's just beautiful old school little diner with old school little diner prices.
here is the event description:
There is nothing special about a plastic bag.
They get used. They rip. They are thrown out.
Not meant to last
Caught in trees
Found alongside the other trash on the ground
Stuffed in a big with dozens of others like it
And plastic is not good for the environment,
so
More and more places are starting to ban them.
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1 ~ You're invited to a display of a collection of plastic bags.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Probably, you're familiar with them. Some are more rare.
Some say Thank You. Some smile. Some boast about their businesses.
Nylon fabric bags don't seem to be any less disposable, and they don't say Thank You either.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
2 ~ Bring your own collection of plastic bags & we'll take photos to archive them online.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
"Think what you want, but often my wretched heart is actually uplifted by these hard working, throwaway bags and their gratitude for being used. They also make me meditate on the sentiment of a neighborhood business as being in service to its customers and not, for example, to prey on them and their basic needs. I know I'm certainly not the only person to collect plastic bags for their designs, nor is my collection very strong. If you have your own, bring it!"
So yeah, it's about plastic bags. I've been iffy about what to really do with this collection of mine, but I decided to start a very low pressure instagram archive of them, @serviceappreciation, which you're also invited to send submissions to and follow.
Right after I sent that last newsletter just the other day, I was like oh shit I meant to share this article about counter mapping – it's so fucking good and is about mapping from the perspective of the Zuni people, which prioritizes cultural heritage and memory over enclosure and all the other exhausting bullshit. there is a video that accompanies the article but here is the intro:
The Zuni were not alone in having their ancestral lands bounded and constricted in this way. Over a billion and a half acres of indigenous lands were seized by the United States government between 1776 and 1887.3 By the mid-1800s, executive orders had replaced treaties as the tool at hand for claiming territory. Native lands disappeared swiftly with a few strokes of a faraway pen. Once an order had been issued, government surveyors were dispatched to carve out the territory.
The maps that resulted from such orders—atlases, political maps, topographical maps—became unquestioned and lasting truths of ownership and identity. Modern maps show the decisive outline of the A:shiwi (Zuni) reservation in New Mexico, that of the Diné (Navajo) in Arizona, the Lakota (Sioux) in South Dakota, the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) tribe in Montana, and many more.
Such maps are widely assumed to convey objective and universal knowledge of place. They are intended to orient us, to tell us how to get from here to there, to show us precisely where we are. But modern maps hold no memory of what the land was before. Few of us have thought to ask what truths a map may be concealing, or have paused to consider that maps do not tell us where we are from or who we are. Many of us do not know the stories of the land in the places where we live; we have not thought to look for the topography of a myth in the surrounding rivers and hills. Perhaps this is because we have forgotten how to listen to the land around us.
A growing community of Zuni elders, religious leaders, and tribal members have set out to remember.
The website hosting the article intrigues me and features a number of interactive "articles"... some are hour long podcasts, or game-like "experiences"... all from this challenging decolonial perspective??
There's another article/audio-article that talks about progress and cyclical time that was very good. "Progress is a quest for transcendence: a quest to always be somewhere else; somewhere better." Now, of course I've been on the time is a spiral is a hologram is a cycle wave for a while, much in thanks to the work of my coven mate Rasheedah Phillips and her Black Quantum Futurism collective. But I think it's important for people like myself who are not of the African diaspora to search for their own pre-capitalist pre-colonial pre-Christian knowledges... and as someone of Irish descent, that progress/time article struck a chord with me. I told a witch that most of what my Irish nana told me as a child was folklore of leprechauns and fairies and the little people, and I think that is probably all that I've got to work with besides following my mother's attempts to trace our family lineage to when it assimilated into whiteness. shout out to all the halfbreeds working to remember.
anyway...
IF YOU'RE IN PHILLY THERE IS
a protest tomorrow the 29th, 10 AM, at the 40th street Cinemark (fka The Rave) movie theater. it's in protest of how the the theater staff called the cops on a Black family IN the theater, who were then prevented from getting their own kids out the theater, etc...
and the following all from the Philly We Rise listserv Upcoming Events:
June 29, 12-2 PM Deliver the Message Philadelphia - Reunification NO Detention Open Letter Drop-Off Pat Toomey's Office, 200 Chestnut Street Suite 600, Philadelphia
June 30-1 Crash Course in Workplace Organizing- Philly Edition Jerry's on Front, 2341 N. Front St, Philadelphia
June 30, 11 AM - 1 PM End Family Detention Rally Logan Circle, Philadelphia
June 30, 2-3:30 PM Families Belong Together Vigil, Action and Event 121 Park Ave, Swarthmore
June 30, 2-9 PM Palestine Teach-In Uncle Bobbie's Coffee & Books, 5445 Germantown Ave, Philadelphia
July 2, 4:30-7:30 PM Stop Ice Rally City Hall, Philadelphia
July 7-8 Philadelphia Enforcement Resistance Training Juntos, 600 Washington Ave, 2nd Fl., Philadelphia
July 7, 9:30 AM - 2 PM Still Marching Philadelphia Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy, Philadelphia
All we have are each other.
Love to you. Take a good deep breath.
@}-}--;-------
monk