Radical Craft comes to the Tron
Sorry Hamilton! I have neglected you for far too long. Hope to see as many locals there as can make it.
RSVP on Facebook and spread the word.
Reminder: Wellington Talk Tomorrow!
See you there!
RCS in Wellington!
Announcing my next talk!
I hope to see all our Wellington readers there. And if anyone wants to come and have a stall selling crafts or homemade food, please get in touch with me asap.
RSVP on Facebook and invite your friends
Some finished stuff!
The thing I love the most about designing patterns is seeing what other people do with them. I haven’t seen any finished ones in a while but I just got two in two days!
Firstly, Megan bought the Question Authority pattern the other day and finished it already! Quickest stitcher in the world award I reckon! And it looks great
Looks cool in that frame too! Which incidentally is way more organised than me on that front..
Also Hali has finished the Firefox pattern!
It’s beautifully stitched and looks gorgeous on the ivory fabric. Yay Hali!
Clever People Abound
I’ve been finding all sorts of cool, inspiring and useful stuff online over the last day or so, and decided I’d share them.
Firstly, Sayraphim has written this great wee tutorial on how to publicise your exhibition or event. I would call this a must read for anyone putting on an event and wanting some helpful tips on how to get people there. And kudos to Sayraphim for putting this out there. I’ve been rather critical of parts of the Melbourne arts scene recently and it’s mostly because there just isn’t the community based cooperation that exists in the craft communities. I’m a staunch believer that creative communities should be taking a lead in demonstrating how people can work together. So yes, nice to see someone putting some genuinely useful information out into the public sphere!
On the helpful stuff front, I’ve had a few chats with people recently about getting grants for all sorts of things. And I have to recommend OurCommunity as a GREAT website with all sorts of helpful tips on how to write applications and they have lots of databases of grants to apply for.
Just Seeds has got the call out from the UK Anarchist Federation about a publication they’re doing on the intersections between art and anarchism. I know a fair few of you will be interested in this one, I’m sure they’d like as many submissions as possible!
And if you need a bit of inspiration I urge you to check out INCITE! and online journal of experimental and radical aesthetics. Most of it is film based so a fair bit of it went over my head but I still very much appreciate seeing artists get together with a radical analysis. The manifesto section was particularly inspiring!
Finally, if that doesn’t fire you up, this surely will. The Heretics is a new film coming out real soon about the Women’s Art Movement in the 1970s in the US, mostly New York. It’s based around a collective which produced a women’s art journal called Heresies. And the best bit is that they’ve pdf’ed all the old issues and you can download them for free. I downloaded one issue and the contents included words like: radical, anarchist, anti-colonial, revolution, liberation and strategy. How could you go wrong? I’m really looking forward to the film coming out. I’ll try and update progress on this one. In the meantime, get reading!
Hoopla (Finally) In The House!
A wee bit beyond deadline but Hoopla #3: Radical Inspiration is now available for sale. It’s been a bit of a mission and my plan to get it out in October was a bit overshot. But finishing a project before the end of the year is always satisfying!
Contents include:
creative action inspiration
projects
two patterns (cross stitch and menstrual pads)
plus more writing, pictures and fun!
The first three online orders will get FREE shipping!
Hoopla available in all usual stockists (soon). If you have a zine library or store, infoshop or craft store and are interested in stocking Hoopla, please get in touch.
Thanks to all the wonderful contributors this issue: Cate, Nina, Camille, Katie Lee, Rayna, Zoe, Johanna, Angela, Sarah, The Baronness, Estelle, and Cross Stitch Ninja.
Supply Side Solutions – My Ass
I bet you been hearing a whole lotta talk from the housing/building/development industry recently about how the reason housing is so expensive is ’cause there’s not enough houses. And – my favourite excuse – that the industry hasn’t got enough land to build on.
The politicians, of course lap this up. Given that the majority of them aren’t actually trained classical economists, and a fair amount of them get some pretty nifty donations from the industry and a decent percentage probably make a reasonable income from property investment. It all makes sense to them.
And land rezoning is about the easiest thing a politician can do. It doesn’t require any legislation and they get a cool photo op with a spade and a pretty yellow sun hat.
UNFORTUNATELY this is all a bunch of bollocks.
Thanks to Tohm Curtis and his recently released report commissioned by Earthsharing Australia, we can now quite conclusively demonstrate that the issue isn’t supply it’s speculation.
Any idiot can tell you that if you have a resource and you want to make it more valuable, you don’t sell it all at once, you drip feed it into the market. That is exactly the issue facing our housing market. Far from the real estate industry’s advertised vacancy rate of 0.7% in inner Melbourne, the actual vacancy rate is 7%. To put that in real terms that’s 2,317 properties empty in central Melbourne during Australia’s worst ever housing crisis.
This speculative vacancy is what’s really driving the housing crisis.
So while there’s over 200 Melbourne University students without a home, there is enough housing vacant in Carlton alone to house every single one of them. And it’s their parents’ generation that is doing it to them.
At the start of last year there were 38,000 existing residentially zoned blocks of land vacant in Melbourne being help by the six big developers. This year Brumby gave a massive handout to the development industry and rezoned another 90,000 blocks of land for residential purposes.
NINETY THOUSAND
So has anyone noticed the price of land drop this year? Didn’t think so.
Of course the majority of that land was already owned by the developers so the rezoning made them overnight bajillionaires. And no, they won’t be building affordable housing, they’re building more suburban mcmansion ghettos which will be drip fed into the market to ensure they can charge the maximum amount for each and every one of those houses.
Our generation has come aboard the space ship of planet earth but all the seats are taken and we are left squeezing in the aisles.
The time has come to get real angry about this. Not angry and irrational, but angry and organised. Anyone keen to help out with creative action on this issue (and there are so many fun, beautiful things we can do!) should get in touch. We’ll be getting together in the new year to plan what to do.
Patch Your Pants! Smash The State!
One day I’ll make it to this:
Revolutionary Craft Circle, Thursday October 30th, 7-9pm
Get your craft on and get down to Loophole on the 2nd and fourth Thursday of the month for a Sewing good time! No experience necessary, spontaneous skill-sharing predicted, bring a project you have or start something new! Patches available by donation, BYO pants/clothes to sew, other DIY Projects welcome. Sewing machine available to use. People of all gender identities welcome.
At Loophole, 834a High Street, Thornbury, Melbourne. Say hi from me!
Wear it with pride
This is quite a timely post given all the elections flying around at the moment. Typically when one thinks of a rosette, the image comes to mind of a slightly greying man in a grey suit, bad glasses and a slightly worn brown suitcase. He’s just knocked at your door and is trying to convince you that he deserves your vote (power, baubles, junkets) to do absolutely nothing different from the other guy.
Well politics has changed a little bit but the rosette is still a time-honoured tradition of all political parties. A rosette is designed to proudly declare your political view. It says ‘hey look I support this party and I’m a good person so it’s ok for you to support them too’.
A rosette is also used a prize. I’m sure you’ve all got memories of a country fair or a horse show or something similar. The shiny blue ribbon rosette which declares a winner is always worn on a puffed out chest, especially if it’s a first time winner.
Which is why I absolutely adore the new rosettes from Zoe (see podcast episode 5). She has taken a selection of colloquial terms for menstruation and turned them into rosettes so you can wear your moon on your chest!
Zoe has been pretty busy recently ’cause she also co-presented a Pecha Kucha night with Jared Davidson from the Garage Collective. They did 20 seconds each on 20 slides about art and activism. I was hugely inspired listening to this and I totally recommend anyone who is into conscious practice to take 10 and have a listen.
Economics without the spin
If you’ve been watching any of the news about the global economic crisis recently you’re probably wondering why all the ‘expert commentators’ are bankers, traders and politicians aka the people that got us into this mess. But if you wany to learn about what this economic crisis is really about and learn about the real solutions to use the economic system to put us on a true path to sustainability, Economics for Activists is the course for you!
Hosted by Karl Fitzgerald who you all know as the host of the Renegade Economist on 3CR, this four-week course is designed for activists keen to get to the root causes of many of the social and environmental injustices we face today.
It’s a four week course starting next Tuesday and registrations are limited and essential. It’s only gold coin so anyone can afford it. Get on over to the Earthsharing Australia website and register your bad ass self today.
xox