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) 674-3623

Hours
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.
This call to be up-front about who we are, and to take ownership of our ideas, really resonates with me; I've just read Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina and am really digging the idea of protagonism, which the activists in Argentina are really developing.

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!

Should Animals Be Held in Captivity? Some See Zoos as Educational; Opponents Say Wild Animals Should Remain Free (ABC News) is an article accounting the discussion going on around the San Francisco Zoo's recent tiger-mauling/ tiger-being-killed incident. I found this statement particularly interesting:
"I take great offense to anyone saying there's no education done there," [Jack Hanna, director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo] said. "Most of these animals live better than people in the world. You have to have the love for animals in order to save animals, and that's what we teach. … We're doing the best we can to provide habitat for these animals."
How ridiculous is that?

• "Most of these animals live better than people in the world." A cushy prison is still a prison. No matter how nice their lives may be in captivity, they are still being denied self-determination, autonomy, freedom. And many zoos are responsible for practices like buying animals from murderous sources, selling older animals to canned hunts, "trophy" collectors, roadside attractions, circuses, or just crappier zoos who will do the dirty work for them.
  
• "You have to have the love for animals in order to save animals, and that's what we teach." No, that's not what zoos teach. Studies have shown that people at zoos don't learn much, but frequently leave confused as to which species they've even seen - it's an entertainment, not a learning experience, for most folks. And as for love, we've also learned that people who see animals in a zoo are getting a lesson in objectification, decreasing the respect they may have had for the animals imprisoned inside. The "mighty lion" doesn't look so mighty when conked out bored on a rock in a piddly little "habitat," eating lion chow instead of hunting. And someone who loves animals doesn't do this to them - love would be to let them live their own lives.
  
• "We're doing the best we can to provide habitat for these animals." Humans can pretend that the habitats we produce for animals imprisoned in zoos are somehow meeting those animals' needs, but it's a joke to think any animal could be truly at home in a closed, manufactured environment with no exit, nowhere to roam. How could a big cat or an elephant accustomed to walking hundreds of miles across vast savannahs be happy in an enclosure designed to ensure they're seen easily and frequently by zoo patrons? How could birds, who when free can fly the skies unhindered, be happy in a net-covered aviary? How can animals who hunt to survive be satisfied by cold corpses, sides of beef? No human can create an adequate habitat for an animal, because the animal's true habitat is of its nature a part of the earth, connected to other species - not a tiny chunk of land with a fence around it, but out there in the open, free.
  

Then again, why should only "wildlife" (read, "free-living animals") be allowed their freedom? Does the interminable length of one's enslavement justify further enslavement, is that why dogs and cats and pigs and cows and chickens and cows and goats and fruit flies and "lab" rats and horses are not just denied their freedom, but forceably and/or through ignorance bred to ensure that future generations will live and die in our service?

For a (surprisingly) more anti-speciesist dialogue on this incident, read S.F. Zoo's Tatiana acted her part as alpha predator, experts say (San Francisco Chronicle): "She was everything that a tiger is supposed to be... She was essentially shot and killed for being a tiger... She was an alpha predator in her environment. She was killing mammals and eating meat."

What were we then? We're not the "top of the food chain." We're weak and cowardly jailors with guns, who murder the animals we imprison when they try to behave as they've evolved to behave.

A postscript: I say all of this with the deepest respect, condolences and feeling for the families of those injured and killed. I may love animals, but that doesn't mean I don't love humans; we're animals, too, after all. We're all family.

Right now I'm in love with Lavender Diamond (thanks, Shira!), a peace-and-love music group that's part of the psychedelic folk movement. Their music is about love and ethics and the environment and social change, and is beautiful and fun and happy-making. Here is a taste, if you don't know them yet.

Arthur Magazine Issue #26 features a great interview with Becky Stark (Lavender Diamond's front woman) - click the link to get to download the whole magazine in two parts, it's worth it. I think the interview is in part one, but you should really check out Arthur, so you'll just have to look for it. The awesome cover art is of Becky Stark (the preacher figure in the photo), ostensibly with some bandmates or fellow dancers, though I don't recognize them and am honestly not sure who they are. Anyway, it's gorgeous.

Here is the band's official site, featuring Peace Comics, among other things.

And finally, here is the "Open Your Heart" video, which has a lot of excellent dancing:

This year, I read a handful of books by or featuring Ernest Callenbach, a science fiction writer who was at his most popular in the 1980s. He created the environmentalism-focused utopia called "Ecotopia" and, so they say, coined that word in the process. Today the ecovillage and sustainability movements have taken the concept much farther, but his books are an entertaining read, and happen to be jam-packed with ideas that are still useful today.

Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston
The book that introduced Ecotopia, this slim volume jumps between journal entries and articles written by Callenbach's alter-ego, William Weston, a skeptical reporter allowed to cross the border for the first time since northern California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the U.S. He discovers love and community there. This book made me cry like five times. If you're considering activism for the first time or becoming more environmentally conscious, I imagine this book will be very affirming. If you're just someone who wants love and community (and who doesn't), odds are, it will really resonate with you, too.

Ecotopia Emerging
This book gets more into the nitty-gritty of how Ecotopia works by following the story of its founding. Basically a primer for anyone interested in community organizing, creating social change via the electoral system, and secession. (Turns out this is not a dead idea, but one I think we need to do some research on, if we're going to make the U.S. more livable. Check out Vermont's efforts, meet secession.net, and read about the American Secession Project.) I found it very inspiring and useful. There are a lot of great ideas here about how to run meetings, how to live in a green way using found and repurposed materials, and other details - but there's also a pretty good story. Not as good as the first one, but exciting, what with the secession and all. However, this book's plot centers heavily around a young woman who's coming of age (and simultaneously creating a sophisticated new energy technology for the masses). What this means is that you get to read a lot about what a dude in the 1980s thought about the budding of a young woman's sexuality. Yaaaay. Not as creepy as it sounds, but anyway, a word of warning. Perhaps he should have teamed up with Ursula K. LeGuin or another lady for this part of the story. It's a worthy read despite the silliness though, and for a 1980s dude, Callenbach was pretty liberated, so it's not all bad.

The Ecotopian Encyclopedia for the 80's: A Survival Guide for the Age of Inflation
This book makes me want to write books. Seriously, it looks like Callenbach just had notes on what he thought was best in every situation (How can you outfit a new apartment with stuff found at thrift stores? What is a composting toilet? What's wrong with the school system?), threw them all into a book in alphabetical order, and made a bunch of money off of it. (I've got ideas too! And I know the alphabet! I'm halfway there!) While his ideas do feel outdated at times and overlook certain issues of class, labor and animal rights that environmentalists today are getting better at dealing with, it's still a fantastic read. More than his other books, this offers a snapshot of early environmentalist thought while introducing tons of great ideas about how to live a full, rich life that's light on the earth.

Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias
This collection, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, contains just one story by Ernest Callenbach, along with others by Ursula K. LeGuin, Gary Snyder, and other environmental sci fi writers. Callenbach ventures away from Ecotopian territory and tells a story that looks back at our culture from the far future. Published in 1994, the book seems a fitting evolution of Callenbach's neotribalist experiments, but ventures farther into primitivist ideas than do the Ecotopia books, away from technology and toward a fusion of indigenous ways of living with the perspective gained from looking backward at the failures of industrialized society. Also, it includes a story about bears discovering fire. Just sayin'.

via gristMill

Found this desktop image of "otters holding hands for Christ" while searching for photos of people holding hands. (Specifically, funnily enough, I was looking for photo references for a godless gay heathen poster design.)

It was made by a cartoonist operating out of Minnesota, FaithMouse. And you know, there is just enough insanity there to merit a link. I really think you should see it. I think you should learn about the dangers of "the ACLU Ferrett", find out how best to pray for "Hillary Chipmunk", and meet the draq queen alter-ego of Rudy Giuliani, "Ruby Jewels." Enjoy.

From the Neoyorquinos Socialistas list: A Major Fascistic Step: House Passes “Thought Crimes” Bill (Revolution: Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA). Give it a read. Looks like now being a political dissident is equated with terrorism, as is being "radicalized".

As the article explains, that means if you're muslim and you give up drinking for religious reasons, you've become more dangerous. Also, animal rights and environmental activists take heed... with this bill's passing, we're yet another a step closer to Guantanamo, too.