More events in February! Edible Plants, Anarchist Panthers, Monstruo de DF
Hey!
Yes you!
What are you doing this week? I have news for you and that news involves a plethora of upcoming events in Houston the hotbed of the radical gulf coast!. Sedition is super excited to be welcoming Ashanti Alston, former political prisoner and editor of the Anarchist Panther zine. Ashanti will be speaking at SHAPE community Center on Friday. But before that we have a slew of other events ranging from Sundays Edible Wild Plant Walk to Wednesday's reading on Mexico City by long-term troublemaker and journalist John Ross. Then on Sunday more info from Adrienne Pine speaking to us about the ongoing resistance to the coup in Honduras.
We have recently gotten a few shipments of new merch for the bookstore, come in and buy something, that's the way we keep the doors open. Speaking of keeping the doors open, we are hosting a meeting on Feb 22nd to discuss the future of Sedition Books. It is basically a get together focused on hearing what folks think we are doing right and what they think we need to improve, change or get rid of. If you have ideas or energy that you would like to bring to the meeting, please do not hesitate to attend.
Sedition has apparently entered the era of new media, that's right Sedition's on Twitter! Follow us to get day-of event reminders as well as notices about upcoming actions around Houston. Search for us under SeditionBooks or follow the link! www.twitter.com/seditionbooks
Sedition Books is still located at 901 Richmond Avenue (That's one block East of Montrose) and you can call or check out our website for more info: 713.523.0807 or www.seditionbooks.org You can also look for us on facebook or myspace.
As always. All events are free but we can always use your donations for the infoshop and the touring bands and speakers.
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Sunday, February 14th
1:00 PM
Merriwether presents: Edible Wild Plant Tour
Join us for a walk around the neighborhood to see what's to eat in Houston and how to responsibly harvest these tasty wild plants.
Dr. Mark "Merriwether" Vorderbruggen, research chemist by day, leads this tour and presentation based on his catalog of edible wild plants around Houston.
Wear walking shoes! If you don't catch him here, find him at some of the other locations he teaches at around the city. See more of Merriwether's work at http://houstonwildedibles.blogspot.com
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Wednesday, February 17th
7:30 pm
El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City
A Book Reading/Signing with John Ross
John Ross—poet, journalist, and globetrotting troublemaker—has lived in Mexico City since the 1985 earthquake crushed out as many as 30,000 lives. Over the years, he has watched the city—El Monstruo—pick itself up, bury its dead, and come battling back. But he is filled with a gnawing unease that Mexico City's days as the most gargantuan, chaotic, crime-ridden, toxically contaminated urban stain in the Western world is doomed, that the monster he has grown to know and love through a quarter of a century of reporting on its foibles and tragedies and festering blight will be globalized into one more McCity.
Covering 4,000,000,000 years of history from the primal broth that first spewed out the monster to the Aztec-Mexica oblivion through centuries of rapine and revolution all the way to the Great Swine Flu Panic of 2009, El Monstruo is a phantasmagoric retelling of the story of Mexico City, with which Ross's own history has become hopelessly entwined.
John Ross is an author and journalist based in Mexico City for the last two decades. His reporting has appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Nation, Texas Observer, and Counterpunch. He is the winner of an Upton Sinclair Award and an American Book Award. His books include Rebellion from the Roots, The Annexation of Mexico, Zapatistas, Murdered by Capitalism and the novel Tonatiuh's People.
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The following events are being organized and or sponsored by Sedition but hey will be held in other (read: larger, better heated, more chairs) spaces. Please be sure to come out and support Sedition and these other valuable community resources.
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Friday, February 19th
7:30 PM
S.H.A.P.E. Community Center
Ashanti Alston: Race, Resistance, Cross-Border Struggles and Anarchism
Ashanti Alston Omowali is a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. He spent more than a decade in prison after he was captured and convicted of armed robbery. He has spent time in Chiapas, Mexico, studying the autonomous structure of Zapatista communities, and resides in New York, where he is the national co-chair of the Jericho Amnesty Movement (to release U.S. political prisoners), an active member of Estación Libre, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and Critical Resistance.
Ashanti is an activist, speaker and writer. He is a former Institute for Anarchist Studies board member, he publishes the zine Anarchist Panther and has been a guest lecturer at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, speaking on the Panthers and the history of Black nationalist movements. His writings and interviews can be found on www.anarchistpanther.net
This event is sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies, Houston Anti-Racist Action, Students for a Democratic Society-UH, Critical Resistance (Houston) and Sedition Collective.
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Sunday, February 21st
7:30 PM
Houston Institute for Culture
708-B Telephone Road (Next door to Bohemeo's)
Anti-Authoritarian Popular Uprising in Honduras:
A Discussion with Adrienne Pine
While the Honduran military coup of June 28th, 2009 is not without historical precedent, the massive and ongoing Honduran resistance to it is. No one expected Hondurans to rise up as they have—daily and in the hundreds of thousands—in protest against a de facto government that can most accurately be described as fascist.
One of the most interesting elements of the Honduran resistance is its avidly non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian character, this despite a near-complete absence of self-consciously anti-authoritarian organizing within Honduran prior to the coup. In this talk Adrienne Pine will discuss what we can learn from the Honduran experience and how we can act in solidarity with Hondurans, whose situation has only worsened with the institutionalization of the coup government through a U.S.-led fraudulent election.
Adrienne Pine is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University. A militant medical anthropologist, Dr. Pine has done fieldwork in Honduras, Mexico, Korea, the United States, and Egypt. Her book, Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (UC Press 2008), examines the symbolic violence resulting from Hondurans’ embodied obsession with certain forms of "real" violence as a necessary condition for the acceptance of violent forms of modernity and capitalism. Prior to and following the June 2009 military coup in Honduras, she has collaborated with numerous organizations and individuals, both inside and outside the academy, to bring international attention to the Honduran struggle to halt state violence (in its multiple forms). She blogs at http://quotha.net
We will be starting the evening with the inspired rhymes of Dee!Colonize--so get there on time!
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Monday, February 22nd
7:00 - 9:00 pm
Future of Sedition:
Open Forum on the Mission, Goals and Future of Sedition Books
Sedition is having an existential crisis! We’ve been selling tons of books, hosting loads of events, tabling all over, and seeing new faces. At the same time, we’ve lost plenty of volunteers and collective members and seen new faces, never to see them again. We now need to rethink how we’re operating, what we're doing, and what Sedition Books can grow to be. This may involve discussions of the collective's processes, attitudes, goals, political approach and ideas, how we relate and interact with each other, how we handle conflict, or anything else - we need your input.
We’re asking any former volunteers or collective members to come to the infoshop on Monday, February 1st at 7pm to discuss how to improve this radical space. The meeting will be open, candid, on friendly terms, and we promise, will officially end by 9pm.
Items on the agenda:
* What have you seen that you’ve liked or disliked about how we operate, what we do, what we carry?
* What is the purpose of an infoshop, and how can we fulfill that purpose better?
* How can we outreach to the community more, making us a truly effective organization?
* How do we retain members better?
* Anything else that people want to talk about.
Hopefully this meeting will provide us with some much needed feedback and understanding of various people's experiences of the project. Then armed with that information, we plan to work on better serving the community. If we're not helping to build and strengthen local movements to the best of our ability, and if we're not allowing more and more people to become informed and engaged over time - then we're not doing what we need to be doing.
We truly encourage you to come. There’s a much longer history of Sedition Books than just the current collective members, and we can’t do this without everyone’s input, good and bad. Please feel free to invite people who may have been left off this invite list. Our systems for keeping track of volunteers are definitely one of our issues. If you can’t make the meeting, please send your thoughts to seditioncollective@yahoo.com. We’ll go through the e-mails and put your input on the agenda. We all know the importance of a radical space in Houston, now it’s time to discuss what this space needs to be.
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Tuesday, February 23rd
8:00 pm
Ciclo de Cine Radical en Español (Spanish Language Film Series):
¿Quién Mató a la Llamita Blanca? (2006, 112 min, In Spanish with English subtitles)
Jacinto and Domitila are two indigenous Bolivians, happily married... and the most notorious criminals in the country. When they are paid to transport 50kg of cocaine to the Brazilian border, they embark on a journey that will take them through the jungles, mountains, deserts and cities of Bolivia on a riotous adventure that will test their relationship and make them question their future as criminals.
The man behind the smuggling operation, known as El Negro, is actually a blonde, blue-eyed American with a well-kept secret. Hunting down the criminals are two of the best anti-narcotics officers in the country, a corrupt Lieutenant, and his racist cadet.
Both a celebration and a parody of Bolivian customs, countryside and culture, 'Who Killed The White Llama?' is a boisterous comedy with a more serious message at its heart: When it comes to poverty, nothing is sacred. Despite the continuing criminal, political and economic scandals that plague the country, the racial divides and the drug-trafficking, the media story that really sweeps the nation concerns the accidental killing of a baby white llama.
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Wednesday, February 24
7:00 pm
Dinner and a Movie: A Celebration of Howard Zinn's Life
7pm Dinner: A delicious vegan meal
8pm Movie:The People Speak
Come out to Sedition to enjoy a tasty vegan meal as we remember the ways that Howard Zinn's life and work affected us. We will screen The People Speak (2009, 90min) a beautiful and moving film inspired by Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States - first published in 1980 and one of the bestselling history books in the U.S. - and Voices of a People's History of the United States.
The film features the actual words (in letters, songs, poems, speeches, and manifestoes) of rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from our past--and present--including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Bob Dylan, Langston Hughes, Chief Joseph, Muhammad Ali, and unknown veterans, union workers, abolitionists, and many others never featured in high school textbooks. These dramatic moments from our history are brought to life by a group of remarkable musicians and actors.
Like Howard Zinn's work as a whole, The People Speak celebrates the extraordinary possibilities for creating social change that ordinary people have realized throughout the course of our nation's rich but often ignored history of dissent and protest.
$5 suggested donation.
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Sunday, February 28
7:30 PM
Catching Out: The Secret World of Day Laborers
A Reading and Signing with Dick J. Reavis
You have undoubtedly heard of them, Labor Ready, Volt, Labor Finders, Adecco are some of the names. You can check in the Yellow Pages under "employment, temporary" and find probably two dozen halls similar to those spoken about in this book. Seasoned journalist Dick Reavis reported to a labor hall each morning, hoping to "catch out," or get job assignments. To supplement his retirement savings, the sixty-two-year-old North Carolinian joined people dispatched by an agency to jobs for which they were paid at the end of each day.
Written with the flair of a gifted portraitist and storyteller, Catching Out describes Reavis's jobs at a factory; as a construction and demolition worker, landscaper, road crew flagman, auto-auction driver and warehouseman; and several days spent sorting artifacts in a dead packrat's apartment. On one pick-and-shovel job, he finds that his partner is too blind to see the hole they're digging. In each setting, he describes the personalities and problems of his desperate peers, the attitudes of their bosses, and the straits of immigrant coworkers, so many of whom make up the three-million-strong day-laborer poor.
This is a gritty, hard-times evocation of the men and women on the bottom rung of the American workforce. It is partly a guide to performing hard, physical tasks, partly a celebration of strength, and partly a venting of ire at stingy and stern overseers. Reavis reminds us that physical exertion, even when painful or unpleasant, remains vital to the economy -- and that those who labor, though poorly paid, bring vigor, skill, and cunning to their tasks.
Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator and author. He was active in the civil rights movement in the South and with SDS at the University of Texas in Austin. He wrote for Austin’s underground newspaper The Rag, and was a senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine. Dick Reavis’ book, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, about the siege and burning of the Branch Davidian compound, was published by Simon and Schuster and may be the definitive work on the subject.
