Why so tired? My last night on Julia ended early with the alarm to get up and go visit my friend Mark. I woke up before then, stuck to my sleeping bag due to Knoxville humidity. Last night, Zach insisted on taking me out for beers. I was into it, so seven of us piled into the Road Dog truck and drove to a few spots before we found a late night bar that served food down in Old Town. Stef also turned 23 at midnight Monday morning, so we bellied up to the bar, sucked down car bombs (shots of Jameson in stout beer), and played songs on the juke during a few pool games. Time flew as usual so I crashed after 2 AM, with Zach playing a mellow song on his iPhone to sooth me into my last night on the road with the Sustainable Living Roadshow. This weekend flew by, a blur of Tennessee memories.
Friday night, I biked away from the Roadshow set up to attend Knoxville’s Critical Mass bike ride. It meets up at the Sunsphere around 5:30, so I showed up a bit early. I saw Sam, our UT contact for the SLR event, and his girlfriend head over to the Sunsphere. I asked a rider if it was free to go up and he said it was. So I ran and caught up with Sam. He turned 21 on Friday and was already a bit drunk. He and his girlfriend were headed to the bar up the tower, so I went up and checked out the view. Not to impressive, but fun to do. Back down, I handed out flyers to the Massers. Everyone seemed to know about the UT SLR event and was excited that we were here. No one knew that it was San Francisco’s Critical Mass 16th birthday, so I spread the SF history and cheer to all the Knoxville folks.
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See that pink poster with the Pentagon in the middle of this flyer? I was fortunate enough to add this poster to my personal collection after Al Kizziah at Al’s Comics gave it to me. Soon after I received the poster, my friend Josh MacPhee began co-curating this amazing poster show for Exit Art in NYC. He already had too many posters to hang, and initially turned down my offer to mail the Yippie Pentagon Levitation poster to him. He then emailed me back to tell me that it was too good to pass up. So I mailed it to him to fit into the crowded walls at Exit Art.
Check out Exit Art’s page on this exhibit to see all the amazing programming, and political poster art, for this great show. Thanks to Al for his communal spirit and thanks to Josh and Dara for all their hard work on putting this show together. Hope I can get up there to see it!
After driving Pricilla through low hanging trees and bushes, we finally park her just below the United Mountain Defense Volunteer House. Matt from UMD met up with us in Happy Hollow where we’d spent the last two nights. He showed up just as we were about to drive north to the Volunteer House, where we would assess the gravel drive up to the house. We had directions, but Matt got to hop on the bus and talk us up there during Knoxville’s rush hour traffic.
With the Julia crew in Atlanta, dealing with a gas shortage after a great gig at the Tupac Shakur Foundation, we’d spent the last few days promoting the UT event. I had a great day biking all over the city, dropping off print jobs, hanging with the UMD folks at their on-campus bake sale, picking up flyers and posters, and then wandering around hanging the posters. I got to meet great folks, hand out flyers, and talk about the Roadshow. Many of the people knew about it, or let me hang posters. I even found a few stencils along the way.
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Greets from the United Mountain Defense Volunteer House in North Knox(ville). Got to spend two brief nights here at the house and will head to the UT campus’s frat row for the rest of the week. We begin to set up the Roadshow tomorrow. Written post coming tomorrow. For now, check out some pics from the past week in Appalachia.
The small hill behind these creepy signs are mineland reforestation, headed up by Jon Rockett. I got to visit Wise County, VA’s Powell River Project Site during the ACE conference. I took the photo because of the blasting info, which didn’t happen while we were on the property.
Further in the blasting site, the dead mountain looms over a reforested cow field. To the left of this blown up mountain, several rolling hills of blasted debris have been seeded for grass and tree growth. I took this photo to show everyone what Big Coal is doing to the Appalachian landscape.
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Something seemed to be missing from Jon Rockett’s “Mineland Reforestation” tour. Some 60 miles north of Abingdon, VA, up in Wise County, Rockett took a group of about 15 people to several sites on the Powell River Project, and talked about all the great things that he and the mine company had done with these model reforestation projects. At the first stop, we looked at two areas that had grown back into nice wooded areas. Just down the road, beyond the sign that alerted visitors to blasting signals, a coal processing facility churned the coal out on to train cars and dump trucks. Beyond the processing facility, off a ways in the distance, a mountain stood over the scene, dead and bare. Most of the mountain had been blasted by tons of explosives to get to the coal seems that lay underneath the once forested geologic formation. Rockett didn’t bring up the mountain, and kept showing us the nice regnerated former wasteland that he’d worked on over the years. (more…)
Just a quick note from Chicago: SLR happened to be in Chicago during a record-break day of rain. 6.8 inches fell on Saturday, the most ever recorded in the city. So we kept the dome up and took down the games in ankle-deep mud. Had one workshop in the deluge and a nice amount of people attended. Friday had rain as well so attendance was low. Workshops were the highlight for Friday too.
We’ve managed to keep our spirits up and will head to Knoxville, TN. One bus will head to Georgia and then Mississippi and Louisiana. After an event for the Tupac Shakur Foundation in Atlanta, SLR will back up Jennifer Johns, and the Green for All organization, at LSU’s homecoming and at the presidential debates in Oxford, MS. The other bus will stay in Knoxville for pre-event production while the truck heads to western Virginia for the Appalachian Community Economics (ACE) Conference. Then the truck will head back to Knoxville for more pre-production and set up. All roads lead to Knoxville, my last stop on the bus!
Meanwhile, here are a few photos of a recent promo romp through Chicago’s Loop, along with one shot of the dome going up at UIC. Our set up day was beautiful, with the shiny Sears Tower in the background of our festival space. Puppets are from the Backbone Campaign.
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