Ten Reasons to Come to the Real Change Fundraiser if You're in Seattle Next Wednesday. (click on image to enlarge to full size)
1.) You'll be able to watch the sunrise on your way downtown.
2.) Our 2007 Change Agent Award for "visionary organizing and exceptional effectiveness" goes to Jon Gould of the Children's Alliance, and he's promised to say something moving and profound.
3.) I'll talk too, and you never know what the hell I'm going to say.
4.) The food won't suck, as it has in previous years at a certain International Conference Center near Bell Harbor, which shall remain unnamed.
5.) Our keynote speaker will be radical, funny, and inspiring, and her book will be for sale.
6.) Sixty bucks is a lot of money for breakfast, but the company will be fabulous.
7.) All day long, we'll consider you one of our 500 closest friends.
8.) Real Change is Seattle's essential alternative weekly media source, offering dignity and opportunity to 270 vendors each month.
9.) You'll get to hear about our new organizing project that's finally going to kick some ass in this town.
10.) If you've got it to give, donations of $200 or more at the breakfast will be matched.
We'd love to see you there. Your friends too. Email me. Or Joe. Or call 206-441-3247 x208.
Rich Lang sobered me up yesterday just long enough to get me onto his weekly radio show Living Faith Now. The cocktail he gave me on the way over (black coffee, Methadone, and Demerol — it's an old Methodist trick) acted like a truth serum, and I babbled on the air like some sort of a snake handling Pentacostal.
There were a couple of moments of lucidity, but my preceding hell week and the insomnia that went with it turned the show into more of a monologue than a conversation, and there are times, when I listen to the recording, where I wish I'd just shut the fuck up.
I coherently discuss Real Change, and get in some great stuff about structural unemployment and homelessness, and I probably manage to piss off ninety-percent of my allies by talking about how Lora Lake is a diversion from the larger problem we have in Seattle, but I get all vague and spaced out when I try to recall why the left is pathetic on class and I ramble and repeat myself when I talk about the problem with Ten Year plans and why I hate Philip Mangano so much.
In all seriousness, it wasn't my finest hour. I wish I'd done more to prepare.
Rich, however, charitable soul that he is, seemed to think it was OK, and bills me as "one of Seattle's finest provocative minds." Well, provocative anyway.
You can stream the show from the website. Rich's line-up up of previous usual suspects also includes the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness' Bill Kirlin-Hackett, the effectively low-key Michael Ramos, the irrepressible Alice Woldt, and Cecile Andrews, who, to my great delight, seems to cross my path every twenty minutes or so these days.
By now, most Lora Lake watchers know that an injunction was issued yesterday that will probably prevent the demolition of Lora Lake until after a March hearing. This legal maneuver comes out of the little discussed King County Housing Authority eminent domain threat that was issued a few weeks ago. Sandy Brown of the Church Council is quoted in the PI saying, "When I heard, I couldn't help but jump for joy."
There's a visual. Sandy pogoing in his office like Joey Ramone in a suit.
Speaking of seventies punk icons, Carolyn and I are going to see Patti Smith at the Showbox tonight. To commemorate the occasion, I found this highly unlikely clip on YouTube: Patti Smith in 1979, on ABC's Kids are People Too, belting out Debbie Boone's You Light Up My life with Joe Brooks on Piano.
It's a little embarrassing, but she's very sweet as she answers questions from girls in the audience and talks about kids taking back Rock and Roll from the corporate exec's. This was the year that Todd Rundgren produced Wave, Patti's final album before her period of professional retirement. Wave featured the brilliant but then unnoticed Dancing Barefoot, which was described by Rolling Stone as,
her mystical ode to sexual rapture. "I think sex is one of the five highest sensations one can experience," she said in 1978. "A very high orgasm is a way of communion with our creator." She added that she masturbated to her own album cover photo, as well as to the Bible.
So. Let me tell you what's going on at Real Change these days.
Things are awesome. And they suck. But both at the same time, so it's OK, and the work is happening. It's just there's a lot to do and only so many of us doing it.
Brooke Kempner, our longtime volunteer turned staff person who manages our volunteers and keeps the computers running and knows how the server works and shit just left to pursue some media studies grad school thing in New York that I should be able to remember but can't 'cuz I still can't get over the fact that's she's gone tho I just saw her yesterday or the day before when she dropped in to help us for about three hours because the person who was going to take over her job now can't, so we're kinda screwed.
About 260 vendors are out every month all over the place, selling quality independent journalism and doing something to change their lives while they help us all to change the world. This is the time of year when we need to feel your love.
Our Annual Breakfast is at 7:30 on October 24 at the Westin and you have to come because if you don't I'm going to have to assume that you're one of the people I've pissed off this year because ever since I've started keeping this blog I've been having a harder time than ever keeping my mouth shut about anything. I've become immoderate and unsafe.
Cecile Andrews is our keynote. She came to my wife's Quaker meeting last winter to talk about her new book and it was like this conversation between ourselves because these other people, apparently because they're Quakers, just weren't really saying much. She was a volunteer here like ten years ago at the front desk and did a column for us briefly until Wes made fun of her in his column and then she stopped. And as we were talking it dawned on me that the kind of authentic community she says drives social movements is the stuff that we make every day with our newspaper and the vendors. And that she's funny and smart and mad and knows what's wrong with things and what we need to be doing. And I like having lunch with her. Especially when she pays.
And we'll give someone an award and honor the vendors and be glad to see each other and know that we are strong. And the food won't suck this year because after three years we finally figured out that Bell Harbor can't serve a decent breakfast to save their lives and the Westin is just better.
I think tickets are sixty bucks. I'm not sure. I'll have to ask Joe. Tables are in tens. We'd love for you to be a Captain. Email me. Or Joe. Or call 206-441-3247 x202.
“Being is becoming,” and if we’re not “becoming,” we’re probably not doing much “being” either. This blog was started in a half-assed attempt at self-excavation. I have at least two unusual personality traits. The first is that I’m abnormally comfortable with ambiguity. I can happily muck about in the gray areas for years on end. This is probably why I love Seattle. The other is that I have a completely unrealistic belief in my own agency, which I tend to act upon. This blog has changed my life in more ways than I ever imagined. As my job as ED of a activist newspaper sold by homeless people, my vision for organizing, my thinking as a teacher, my history as a working-poor loser turned middle-class “advocate,” and my life as a parent swirled about me, this blog has been a path toward the center. We live in dangerous times, and the seductions to an easy, half-lived life of anesthetized materialism are all around. I have come to understand that my work is to be a revolutionary, both out in the world and within myself, turning over what is old, rotten, stale, and repressive, and building for a future where we can all find happiness and have the things we truly need.
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