More is happening than we’re fully aware of. It’s freezing in here, but in Argentina the air is thick, people are wiping pieces of fruit from their faces, and one of them is about to have a baby in a bathtub, after which she’ll call someone who’ll call someone else who’ll call someone else who’ll call someone else who’ll call someone else who’ll call me, and then I’ll call someone else. It’ll take hours, but we’ve got plenty of time.

In Whitworth Park, guys are still playing futbol in the mud and the old men on their benched perches still yell obscenities aggressively to female foreign students, but it sounds as if they want to cry instead. Upstairs, someone’s TV makes the windows vibrate, we did not drop off the laundry, and instead of birds I hear singing cars and alto airplanes.

I want to start the new year right, painlessly, on a moped maybe. We’ve started singing more songs and watching the news less — there’s too much emphasis on death. Why, with all the new life happening, would we pay attention to anything else? I hobble a little, in someone else’s suit jacket, at the end of another era, to the closet to the front door to the train downtown and to the park, where I’ll pay my last respects.

Here’s why:

1. They raised the T fare $0.45, and the bus fare $0.25

2. As of January, they’re starting to charge a 15-20% “surcharge” if you pay cash per ride, or if you buy a “Charlie Ticket” instead of a “CharlieCard”

3. “CharlieCard” is two words, not one, and it’s a stupid name anyway, and putting two capitalized words together is so 1999.

4. You can’t buy an unlimited monthly T pass anymore! But they don’t want you to realize that! Their website talks in circles about CharlieCards, but doesn’t spell out that you can only put an amount of money on the card, which is now deducted per ride. The only alternative is to buy the “Link Pass”, but that’s for T and bus, which I don’t even need.

5. No more entirely free transfers.

6. The MBTA is a privatized company, run by a board of directors who, from what I read, are mostly lawyers, bankers, real estate investors, etc., as well as some Romney-appointed Transportation Secretaries. They’re a private agency! That’s why they close at 12.30 a.m.! That’s why they choose to charge surcharges on fares!

7. They’re making the city too expensive to live in, although I’m pretty sure we’ve reached that point already.

{Puke puke puke.}

Philadelphia was canned food and middle-aged women wearing red, the Barnes & Noble bathroom, latin brunch downtown, and warm wind. The old radio announcer came to church as usual and it was great to see him, an incredibly happy man, with his band-aid and missing teeth. He turned around in the pew during the collection and gave my mother and I a big thumbs-up.

On Christmas we sat in a closed coffee shop listening to the exiled Polish revolutionary owner talk about how Christmas Eve used to be in her country…you had to leave an extra place at your table for someone with nowhere to go, and there was much drinking and church-going (in that order) and general revelry. She met her husband in Berlin, during an English class. The day after they met, he showed up with a list of 13 points outlining why she should marry him. “And I thought, ‘This guy is nuts!’” But she married him anyway.

I’m back at work now. The hum of the computer, the buzz of the harsh lights, and a poorly-filtered air system are all I can hear, which, when you think about it, is completely antithetical to productivity.

So it goes.

Via blip.tv, I came across this ad for Dove — they’re having a contest to see who can make the best commercial for their Cream Oil Body Wash. Deadline for submissions is January 15. You can submit as many videos as you want, each 25-30 seconds, and they give you stock imagery and audio files.

My challenge, I’ve decided, after watching Frontline’s documentary on the advertising business, is to become a finalist in their competition without ever actually using the product. Who wants to be in it?

The other night DD and I walked around the city for hours, which has been our favorite thing to do together since 1998. Good relationships feel like fleece, and now December feels like summer. Combined, that means evenings in front of the aquarium, staring at the seals.

Thank God they made a free outdoor exhibit, open all night: behind a giant wall of glass, seals swim, bored, and jump up on rocks and stare at you. We saw a spotted guy who was particularly social. I’m not sure whether my favorite part was the animals themselves, or the teenage European tourists enthralled with them. After making emotional connections with various mammels and eavesdropping on some French people cooing, DD and I moved on to walk by the private boats docked next door.

And then we sat in a North End cafe for hours, playing Neapolitan cards.

I have some hope for winter — I hope it pulls me together, sits me down to write holiday cards and edit four overdue, looming video projects, and return phone calls, and sing more karaoke.

Reposted from Another Limited Rebellion. I think this is really cool! Georg, Mark, & other designers, you should do this!

Activist artists Zoeann Murphy and Josh MacPhee (JustSeeds.org) want to put a new face on the labor movement. To that end they’ve put out a call for poster designs, the best of which will be exhibited in NYC and also printed and distributed nationwide. The full details are below:

The American labor movement has an amazing history of graphic production, creating some of the most effective political images in the history of this country. However, work and workers, along with the labor movement, are often depicted as experiences of the American past: photographs of children in factories in the early l900’s, paintings of Joe Hill or Rosa Parks, historic strikes and Rosie the Riveter.

Now the labor movement needs new images of the issues confronting workers today. We are asking innovative artists to create posters that relate to today’s workers. Twenty-five posters will be chosen to exhibit. Five designs will be selected for mass printing and distribution in union halls, schools, and community centers around the country.

Posters can be in full color, and must be 19” x 25” (horizontal or vertical). All submissions must be received by February 12, 2007 for an exhibit in April. The exhibit will be at the Bread & Roses Gallery in the Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Center in Time Square, New York City.

This project is sponsored by the Workforce Development Institute, Bread and Roses Cultural Project of 1199SEIU, and JustSeeds.org., and curated by Zoeann Murphy and Josh MacPhee (Stencil Pirates). For more information contact Zoeann.Murphy[at]gmail{dot}com or josh[at]justseeds{dot}org.

Specifications:
We are asking you to design a poster (or multiple posters).

– The poster designs can be full color
– All posters must be 19″x 25″, either horizontal or vertical orientation
– Posters must be made available as full-sized 300 dpi digital files. If you do not work digitally, we can work out scanning of your design if it is chosen.
– The posters designs should fall into one or more of the following categories:

The Environment & Labor
Immigration & Labor
Women & Labor
Diversity in the Labor Movement
Organizing

More information about each of these categories is available from Zoeann. If you want a list of resources, you can contact her at: Zoeann.Murphy[at]gmail{dot}com or by mail at “The Workforce Development Institute, 24 4th St. Troy, NY 12180.”

Deadline: All poster designs must be received by February 12, 2007. Designs can be sent in two ways:

1. Via email
Initially send 9.5″x12.5″ images as 72di jpg files. We will follow up with you to receive full size files (remember, design your posters at 19”x25”, 300 dpi or larger!).

2. Via regular mail
a) You can send a CD of your full size file (300dpi, 19″x25″)
b) If you are sending actual artwork, please send protected and flat, or in a tube. We will not be able to return artwork unless you include money for return postage.

dream: the 9-year-old
me came to my door and i
almost slammed it in

her face. this was meant
to save us both, the future,
etc. still,

she smiled and turned,
used large words she didn’t yet
understand the way

i used to at that
age. makes sense, right? she was me –
polysyllabic,

too sarcastic in
ways funny only to her.
endearingly gauche.

what a small, coy thing
you are, i didn’t say, and
noticed the way her

hair parted, scalp showed,
the incessant talking and
how her braids bended.

behind her stood some
others: the 80s version
of my mother, plus a

dear old friend, now gone.
much like our waking dream will,
the night dream ended.

Ok, so the other day I attended a Be the Media conference held at Third Sector New England and co-sponsored by Project Think Different (PTD). It was a small conference of nonprofit communications people from all sectors of the lefty world, talking about how to improve media and PR practises.

I won’t go into the whole thing; I’ll just say that, aside from finding much of the PR tips helpful, I thought the overall tone was very positive. Everyone was really friendly and eager to connect with one another. Since I love networking, and enjoy hearing about the neat things people are working on, it was pretty cool to be there.

For the 12.5 of you who actually read this blog, I have a few related announcements:

- I posted some highlights of the Digital Disobedience thing at Harvard tonight on my mobile blog — actually just Fred Turner, who really gets it. Actually, the Berkman Center just put up a post about Fred that includes an MP3 interview, which I’m sure is much more interesting than my one phone photo.

- PTD has launched a beta site for networking which they aim to make “the lefty Myspace”. I don’t know if they’ll achieve that goal, or even if it’s what they should be going for, but I do know they’re planning on hosting an interactive calendar to which anyone can submit events, and you can run city-specific searches on arts/community/nonprofit/political/tech events in your area. Let’s hope they at least publish a site feed for event headlines on their calendar, much like Trumba does (big boos for Trumba, though, which raised their price 1200% in the past six months).

Anyway, just thought I’d throw that out there. I’ve really got to get on the ball with this blog and encourage more link sharing and promotion (I’ve done nothing, so far), otherwise I’m going to continue to burn my eyes out typing into the shallow digital abyss for the better part of my golden pre-40s.

Is anyone out there?? Anyone who doesn’t find my technifiling completely mindless? Comment!