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Our new online home, Shirari.com, is finally up, as is our new blog. Pinkrabbitsays will only be up for a little while longer, before I archive and retire it. Please update your links:
Shirari Industries blog:
http://www.shirari.com/blog/
Our feed's URL:
feed://www.shirari.com/blog/atom.xml
A million heartfelt thanks to all of you who've been reading and commenting on pinkrabbitsays. I hope you dig the new site!
If you live in NYC, come check out my friend Lauren's show at A.I.R. on Thursday (or until February 2):
A text, a fiction, a fissured envelope
A.I.R. Gallery
511 W. 25 St, 3rd Flr., NYC
Jan 8- Feb 2
Reception Jan 10, 6-8 pm
Gallery hours: Tues - Sat, 11 am - 6 pm
Please spread the word and help this little coop survive the Trader Joe's / Whole Foods attack on Manhattan. Via the Socialist Party of New York City members list.
I'm a food co-op located at 58 E. 4th Street (between 2nd Ave. and Bowery) in the Lower East Side/East Village community. I am the only all-vegetarian co-op in NYC, and I carry a wide variety of organic produce, health food, vegan fare, and environmentally friendly household products and personal care items that are available both prepackaged and in bulk. I offer local and fair trade products whenever possible and am currently trying to eliminate all products produced by corporations with questionable business practices.Anyone can shop at the co-op but I'm all about giving discounts to members. I give up to 20% off ALL purchases and housemates can even share shifts but still get the full discount! Check my blog for more details on that.
We're always looking for fresh talent, so if you aren't able to work a weekly shift but would like to help out by sharing your graphic design, marketing, finance, or carpentry skills, or any other skills you may have, we can work something out.
4th Street Food Co-op
58 East 4th Street
(between Bowery & 2nd Ave.)
New York, NY 10003
(212) 674-3623Hours
Monday 11am-9pm
Tuesday 11am-9pm
Wednesday 11am-9pm
Thursday 11am-9pm
*Friday 1pm-9pm (morning produce delivery)*
Saturday 11am-9pm
Sunday 11am-9pm
Click for the full-size comic - sorry R Stevens, don't sue me. I just like it.
I totally agree with Indie Rock Pete in this Diesel Sweeties comic! Amen brother, we need pencils and vodka (or coffee, but whatever) to solve our problems, not new-fangled garbage that's hard to make and maintain. Down with your "soft drinks" and your "mechanical" "moon pens," techmology!
I think our future children might hate me. I keep finding myself muttering about "these dang kids", and I'm only 27.
Check out Design Observer's Steven Heller's post about bloggers and commenters using their own names when posting online. I really dig his message - here are some highlights:
... a real name at the end of a blog post is an indication that the person who authored the statement is taking responsibility, indeed ownership of the words — it is a simple act of honesty...If a blogger or responder does not have the courage to own up to his or her ideas then why should readers accept or respond to them? Having a pseudonym is not about, as some argue, building a brand story or mystique; it is about masking identity, which is inherently deceitful. Unless one has a good reason — like being on a black list or having a life in peril by a repressive government — the practice of anonymity should be considered unacceptable...
... it is only fair that those who respond to posts reveal themselves to further the debate.
Protagonism is this concept - you'll forgive my perhaps silly definition, but it's how I make sense of it - that we are the actors in our own "movie" (life), not extras or actors in supporting roles. We need to think of our lives as our stories, and of ourselves as the main characters in our own stories. We're not just here to support some main character (our mom, our boss, our partner, our friend, a god, a political figure, whoever). If we do that, our story is lost, and our life is a missed opportunity.
Protagonism is all about being yourself, being true to yourself. How can you further your story if you can't put your name, your real name, to your ideas and your words and your actions?
Just read a post over at Animal Writings that says that Bloomingdale's, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, Dillard's, Saks Fifth Avenue and Yoox.com are all selling products marked faux that contain fur from real slaughtered animals, including "rabbits, raccoons, and raccoon dogs (a type of dog, killed in China for the fur trade)."
(Hm, I didn't know there were such an animal as raccoon dogs. Rather sad to "meet" them under these circumstances.)
Here's the alert from HSUS, on the innaccurate fur labeling, along with helpful take action links.
Yet more reason to avoid these big corporations and their questionable sourcing and marketing - buy local, buy used, or do a clothing swap in your community instead!
I was reading somewhere the other day that instead of focusing on scarcity, we should look to those things we have in abundance, and be grateful for those things. This morning I'm working in our studio. Our happy healthy cats are full of affection and are rolling around playfully in the sun streaming through the windows. In the sunbeam falling on my iBook, I can somehow see the shadows of heat rising from the radiators in front of the windows. Otherwise invisible, its shadows furl across the sunbeams like smoke. The radiators hiss and pop and bang. (Walking from one end of our long railroad apartment sometimes feels like moving around in a submarine to me, because of this.) It's a beautiful morning, a comfortable one; I'm wearing fluffy bunny slippers Mom gave to Shira and I for the holidays, and a thermal hoodie.
I feel very fortunate to be home, working for myself, controlling my own labor, choosing my own projects, wearing what I like and being with my family (soon to be more complete, with Shira coming to work at home!). And I feel very grateful for the heat, on this cold morning. Not everyone has it in such quantity; some folks don't have it at all. I know I'm enjoying it at the expense of others (it's coming from an oil-burning boiler) and I know it's precious, costly, a luxury. I hope it's not immoral to know where it comes from and be happy for it, but I am. I don't think you can help loving heat when you're cold. Anyway, it's a beautiful morning, and I'm warm, and grateful.
Well, Shirari.com is not yet up, but it will be, by the 8th! We've worked hard on it nearly every day for the past week or so, but are really pushing for perfection (my CSS has never been so crisp and clean), so it'll be just a bit longer. I don't mean to toot our own horn. It can't be perfect. But it's been like two years in the making now, so it's close.
I'd write about new year's resolutions, but there's a jackhammer going outside my window, so I'll just get to work. Happy new year!
Hundreds honor girl who needed liver transplant [LA Daily News]:
Nataline died Thursday just hours after her insurance company, Philadelphia-based Cigna HealthCare, reversed two prior decisions to deny her a liver transplant despite the pleadings of doctors. The insurance company, which deemed the surgery experimental, stated it would pay for the procedure "in this rare and unusual case" after loud public protest..."We're here because of an insurance failure, not being able to get a patient in time," added Berdj Kasbarian, president of the Hye Riders Motorcycle Club, among two dozen Armenian bikers attending the service. "We should change the health-care system to a European system, where everybody is covered."
This holiday season, Shira and I somehow found ourselves discussing the essential goodness of human nature with her family and mine, on separate occasions. Are our ideas too idealistic, too naive? Can humans really create a peaceful, sustainable world out of the one we've been suffering in for so long? Or are we at heart hurtful, fearful, angry, selfish, ready to take from each other for our own benefit?
Thanks to some books I've read this year, I really believe that humans are capable of living peacefully, allowing ourselves happiness. Anarchism does not point at evil lawlessness, each person for themselves, but at equality, love for community, cooperation over competition. It's not an idealistic, unrealistic, naive pipe dream, but a reality springing up all around us. And you can read about it happening.
Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina (Marina Sitrin, editor) is an incredible collection of transcribed statements and discussions from folks involved in the popular uprisings in Argentina. Read it and you'll have hope for our future. People are capable of greatness, and this book proves it - and hints at yet more greatness to follow.
Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism is a tiny little volume, just 63 small pages, but it contains more hope and love than books ten times its size. The Zapatistas aren't just freedom fighters forging a new world outside of Chiapas, Mexico - they're poets. Read this little book, and you too will ask, "Who now will be able to tell us that dreaming is lovely but futile? Who now will be able to argue that dreams, however many the dreamers, cannot become a reality?"
Peace and love in the new year!
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