May 8, 2008
10:00am-5:30pm (two sessions)

Please join the United Nations Department of Public Information, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the Natural World Museum for a groundbreaking international seminar. The Art Changing Attitudes Toward the Environment seminar will focus on a top priority for the United Nations: climate change and the environment. The seminar will contribute to keeping the spotlight on the issue from a different perspective and will be an important contribution and forum to reach out to the general public.

Admission is free to the public. To RSVP email unchronicle@un.org or call 917.367.9326
For additional information, please visit http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/tolerance/seminar.html

London, March 15: Brian Holmes Book Release, "Unleashing the Collective Phantoms"

Saturday March 15th, 6:30 PM book launch
Housmans Bookshop, Kings Cross (www.housmans.com)

Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays In Reverse Imagineering by Brian Holmes

Come join us to celebrate the release of Brian Holmes’ new book Unleashing the Collective Phantoms. These insurgent essays describe, prolong and critique some of the cultural and artistic projects that arose with the worldwide wave of protests around the turn of the millennium, against what the global South calls neoliberalism. Dissent and the refusal of a programmed existence continually return to the streets; but they also unfold in the imagination.

Hosted by Autonomedia (www.autonomedia.org) and Mute Magazine (www.metamute.org)
For info on the book: http://www.autonomedia.org/unleashingthecollectivephantoms

Housmans Bookshop
http://www.housmans.com
5 Caledonian Road
LONDON, England
N1 9DX, UK
Nearest tube: King’s Cross St Pancras

'The New Spirit of Capitalism, Value and the End of Critique'

An ephemera workshop (www.ephemeraweb.org), 29-30 May 2008 Co-organised by the School of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, and the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School.

Call for contributions and participation

Novelty has, for a long while, been a source of value for capitalism. Writers on management churn out 'new' organisational structures and control systems at a rate that would put a Parisian fashion house to shame: MBO, JIT, BPR, TQM, CoP, Culture, Quality, Flexibility, Outsourcing, virtual, virtuous networks of CSR, PR and RM. Like Klee's Angelus Novus, the shock of the 'new' drives us irresistibly back to the future as the debris of progress pile up in front of us as an indistinguishable mass of failed experiments and outmoded ideas. Indeed, with such a rate of continuous change, one cannot help but wonder whether, like the 'idiot's tale' in MacBeth, the whole discourse of change is 'full of sound and fury' but 'signifying nothing'.

In such a context it takes a certain bravado to offer up the grand claim that Capitalism has undergone a fundamental restructuring, and yet this is precisely the argument made by Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. According to Boltanski and Chiapello, Capitalism found itself in complete crisis in the late 1960s. With students rejecting careers in management and workers no longer satisfied by the prospect of higher wages for higher productivity, the entire capitalist system was on the verge of collapse. From within this critique, however, came the seeds of its rebirth. Demands for autonomy, empowerment and creativity at work were met with a new idea of capitalism, far removed from the fusty, grey-suited atmosphere of 'Organisation Man' and the hey-day of the faceless Goliaths like IBM. The new capitalism is an entirely funkier affair, where surfing has become the ruling ideology and 'excitement' has replaced 'security' as the dominant value.

Carnival at the End of the World

A Benefit for Fifth Estate Magazine

New York City, Sunday, July 8, 4-6 pm

Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery
just north of Houston

(F or V train to Second Avenue, 6 to Bleecker St.)

212-614-0505

$6 (admission includes free issue of magazine and subscription for the next issue)

An Afternoon of Poetry, Anarchism and Banjos

Banjos:

Eli Smith

Joe Maynard

Speakers:

Spencer Sunshine

Cara Hoffman

Jack Bratich

Stevphen Shukaitis

Poets:

Steve Dalachinsky

Jim Feast

Ron Kolm

Yuko Otomo

Jill Rapaport

Jessica Slote

Christian Parenti Speaking Event/Benefit July 5 NYC

A benefit for Green Scare defendant facing trial in September, Eric McDavid

Thursday, July 5th @ 7 pm

6th Street community center

638 East 6th street between Avenue B and C

Cost-$5 suggested donation

Food and drink will be available

Eric's trial is slated to begin in early September and he needs $6,000 to retain adequate council. All proceeds will go toward his legal fees.

Who is Eric McDavid?

Eric McDavid was arrested in Auburn, CA on January 13, 2006 as part of the government’s ongoing Green Scare campaign. He now faces two decades in prison. Eric has been held in solitary confinement at the Sacramento County Main Jail since the day of his arrest. He was arrested along with Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner and all three were charged with “conspiracy to destroy property by means of fire or explosives.” The government’s case is based on the word of a single FBI informant who was paid over $75,000 to fabricate a crime and implicate the trio. Both of Eric’s co-defendants have since caved under the threat of being imprisoned for 20 years and plead guilty to a lesser charge. In doing so, they also agreed to testify against Eric and cooperate in every way possible, including testifying in front of secret grand jury proceedings. Eric has been repeatedly denied bail. For over a year, he has only been allowed to leave his cell for a few hours per week and receives very little contact with the outside world. He needs your support now more than ever, as his trial date is quickly approaching.

For more information and past support updates, please click here.

To read the criminal complaint against Eric McDavid, please click here.

ABC No Rio writes:

BOOKED! Benefit Celebration and Silent Art Auction
For Books Through Bars

New York, June 22, 2007

FRIDAY JUNE 22 at 7:00pm at ABC No Rio

Books Through Bars sends books and reading material to prisoners nationwide. More information about Books Through Bars can be found at www.abcnorio.org/affiliated/btb.html

In BOOKED!, the current exhibition at ABC No Rio, street artists and grafitti writers were asked to re-imagine books. The “books” to be auctioned include works by get2, gaia, celso, anera, viking, klepto, deeker, az star, superk8, infinity, asbestos, c.damage, luna park, Matt Lock, elbow-toe, ceito atv, Suejin Jo, pufferella, matt siren, windowzoo, plasma slugs, royce bannon, Lisa Paolucci, Abby Goodman, Adam Lawrence, Kelly D. Williams, Pamela Matsuda-Dunn, and Stepanie Brody-Lederman.

Bidding will end at 10:00pm

BOOKED! was curated and organized by AnerA and ELC. Work in the auction can be viewed at www.flickr.com/photos/betyourlife/

BOOKED! VIEWING HOURS:

Sundays 1:00 - 3:00pm

Wednesdays & Thursdays 5:00 - 7:00pm

ABC No Rio

156 Rivington Street

(between Clinton & Suffolk)

212.254.3697

http://www.abcnorio.org

Women and biotechnologies: scientific and feminist approaches

International Conference

21-23 of June

Aula Convegni CNR

Piazzale Aldo Moro 7

Rome, Italy

The term "biotechnology" refers to the use of living organisms or their
products to modify human health and the human environment. Biotechnology
represents a frontier area in scientific development and its importance
goes from ethical to environmental and economic issues as is re-designing
the possibilities of transforming life.
The aim of the Wonbit conference is to promote an interdisciplinary and
wide debate among feminisms and science.

We've defined four areas of discussion:
-Women scientists in biotechnological research
-Bodies, cultures and scientific metaphors
-Environmental effects of biotechnologies
-Facing impact: society and biotechnologies

The Institute for Anarchist Studies presents

Friday, June 8 at 7pm

Provisions Library, Washington, DC

(Dupont Metro, above Ann Taylor Loft on Connecticut)

$5 suggested donation

For the last four years, courier Colin Bossen has been
organizing with the Chicago Couriers Union, a minority
labor union of primarily bike couriers affiliated with
the Chicago General Membership Branch of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Due to both the
nature of the courier industry and the ideological
orientation of the union’s organizers, the CCU has
been organized using what Staughton Lynd has called
"solidarity unionism." Solidarity unionism is the idea
that workers have the most power when they organize
around specific workplace grievances rather than
struggle for legal recognition and the right to
negotiate a contract. Using this model, the union has
met with modest success, and over the past three year
it has built a small but stable base of militant
workers in the industry and won several small
victories including a wage hike effecting
approximately 100 workers at the third-largest courier
company in Chicago.

This talk will examine the CCU as an example of
solidarity unionism, chronicle its success and
failures, and suggest the lessons the union has to
offer anti-authoritarian and anarchist workplace
organizers.

Resistance -- A Radical Social and Political History of
the Lower East Side

16Beaver Street, 4th Floor, NYC

7:30 pm

This Monday we are pleased to host a discussion with several of the
contributors to the recently published book Resistance: A Radical Social
and Political History of the Lower East Side, including (but probably not
limited to) Clayton Patterson, Alan Moore, and Jim Feast.

They will present the project of this just-published book, three years in
the making. Hopefully some images, although mostly talk. Is this an
"autopsy" of bohemia? Maybe. New York's Lower East Side has been pivotal
in the development of politically radical practices, lifestyles and
thought. This legacy, stretching back to the days of Emma Goldman's
residence at the turn of the century, seemed to come to a sudden end with
the 1988 Tompkins Square Park police riot and the subsequent repression in
the neigbborhood of homeless people and squatters. What can we learn from
examining this neighborhood's history of resistance?

Radical Politics & Publishing in Eastern Europe Discussion

Tuesday June 5th @ 7pm

ABC No Rio, Gallery Space

156 Rivington Street (between Clinton & Suffolk)

Come join us for an informal discussion about radical politics and publishing in Eastern Europe with Gediminas Baranauskas from the Lithuanian publisher Kito Knygos. Kito Knygos is the publisher of a variety of books on radical politics and arts in Lithuanian by authors such as Noam Chomsky, Guy Debord, Valerie Solanas, Hakim Bey, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut, and Henry Miller.