Culture and Politics

For the past 6 months I’ve been consulting the All-Ages Movement Project (AMP), a member-driven network of community based organizations that connect young people through independent music and art. AMP connects DIY and grassroots music organizations together to make them stronger, and currently has assembled a network of 94 organizations across the country.

In this vein, I am republishing AMP's organizational spotlight series here on FM, so you can get to know a few of the estimated 200-300 orgs across the country working in the trenches- changing the lives of young people and the direction of this country by making activism and participation cool again.

Turn the Beat Around: Youth, Art and Activism at 924 Gilman

By Shannon Stewart

SPOTLIGHT ON 924 GILMAN'S PARTICIPATORY STRUCTURE

You Are Responsible for Your Participation

When you first walk into the little warehouse in front of a canning shop on Gilman Street you might, like me, stand in the middle of the room sort of awkwardly and wait for someone to ask if they can help you.

And you will stand there for a while.

The second time I did this, the back door was propped open and the sun backlit people walking in and moving around me as if I were an inanimate object rather than a curious and semi-lost looking person standing in the middle of the concrete space.

As I wondered whom I should talk to about getting on the agenda for the 924 Gilman membership meeting, some guys in clad shirts screaming band names in scratchy fonts moved nasty couches around and disturbed the mice hanging out underneath. I flinched at the sight of the urban wildlife inside and was rewarded with a couple knowing smirks. Strike one.

People meandered in. A whiteboard was slid out and propped up against some chairs with all-caps agenda items like "BOOKING" and "SECURITY." We were 12 people: mostly male, mostly wearing all-black clothing. One person was putting trucks on a new skate deck.

Ben, the facilitator, pushed his thick black glasses up the bridge of his nose and pulled a pen out of the front pocket of his plaid button up shirt. "OK, let's get started. First of all, does anyone have anything they would like to add to the agenda?" There were a few retorts back, and then he says, " OK, well how about you go first then?" I looked up from my notes to find 11 mostly disinterested sets of eyes focused on me, seemingly sizing me up. I passed around a few copies of my case-study proposal. I knew that every major decision at Gilman is passed through membership.

After a few questions about my proposal, Mike asked if anyone "wanted to vote" on whether or not they approved of Gilman's participatory structure being written about. Even though every decision has to go through membership, not everything is voted on, and in this case, no one piped up. This struck me as such a no-brainer way to keep every decision from seeming process-heavy as they normally do in collective settings.

The conversation then moved on to a lengthy discussion about creating a new "head of security" position and formulating the best strategy for working with the city in dealing with noise complaints.

Crossposted at Young Philly Politics

In this series of videos you can see Philly Against Santorum volunteers and myself setting up and working a table at an R5 Productions show at the Starlight Ballroom.

The first video shows me introducing the various materials that Philly Against Santorum used for our youth outreach to that night's volunteers. On this particular occasion we had to make do with a smaller set of materials, since the box of materials that we usually left at the Starlight was misplaced:

Next we have a very nice little video that shows all of the partisan project posters on a mirrored wall at the Starlight, while a band plays in the background:

Finally, here's a video of the PAS table in action:

This past week I was doing some research on The ONE Campaign, the campaign to stop AIDS and Extreme Poverty in the developing world (disclosure: I was researching The ONE Campain because I applied for a job there), when I came across a group of kindred spirits known as Lokahi Outreach. The first thing that caught my eye in regards to Lokahi was their mission statement, on the side of their blog, which sounded a hell of a lot like what we do:

I founded Lokahi to promote social justice & civic involvement. We do this by partnering with likeminded organizations, such as the ONE Campaign, Oxfam and Witness, & taking them on the road. We specialize in grassroots campaigning: outreach, campaign building, marketing, volunteer training & recruiting, etc. - all in unique settings that allow us to build support for the campaigns we are working on while also engaging and empowering people to become active, get involved and make a difference. We are ‘roadies with a cause’, specializing in concert outreach – going on the road & on tour with our partner organizations. We specialize in this because, well, we’re really good at it, & it’s a great way to talk to lots of people in a short period of time while rapidly building support for a campaign.

The second thing that got my attention, was their Flickr pictures, where I noticed that two of the people who worked at my first show with MFA (which you can read about in Keys to a Future Majority) now work with Lokahi (Carlos, who was Music For America’s Warp Tour person, and Kevin, who worked for Punk Voter) . If you want proof that what Lokahi Outreach is doing is effective, take a look at what happened to me after I worked that Warped Tour show back in 2004. The only thing that I believe Lokahi is missing is a dynamic web presence / online community site where volunteers can stay in contact with, and feel a more active participant in, the organization, which is the second reason that I ended up becoming so deeply involved in politics.

I’ve added both The ONE Campaign and Lokahi Outreach to our Cultural Capitalizer’s block, keep up the good work!

Two University of the Arts Students, Alana Hoffman and Raeann Drew, took video of some of the youth outreach work that I did for Philadelphians Against Santorum during the 2006 election, for their documentary: "Generation Gap". They were nice enough to send me some of their footage, as well as the full documentary, and gave me permission to post it all to YouTube. I'll be posting this video in a few posts over the next week or so, but if you want to see the entire series check out the Future Majority YouTube page.

Here are two videos of Anna Hyclak and Kayla Hilliard, two Temple students who I met while doing outreach on campus with the Temple College Democrats, and who ended up becoming two of the best volunteers for the PAS youth program. They were also the ones who connected us with the filmmakers and they are featured in a majority of the clips.

Here are Anna and Kayla working the table at the First Unitarian Church on the night before the election:

More to come soon!

After my last post I clicked on the Technorati tag Culture & Politics that I created to see if anyone else recently tagged their posts with the term. From that search I stumbled upon a video from an New York City based organization called the Culture Project, who combine culture and politics in a way that we don't usually cover here--through theater. Below is the promo video for The Culture Project, whom I've added to our "Cultural Capitalizers" sidebar, but one thing I want to point to is their great motto, one which I believe in religiously: Culture First Then Politics.

Yesterday I happened upon a great podcast interview of R5 Productions' Sean Agnew at The Flux (Right click on the first link and click "save link as" to save the podcast to your computer). In this interview Sean covers a wide range of topics, including attempts to get him to run for City Council, the difficulties of staying in business as an independent promoter in Philadelphia, and the reasons why cities should support companies that bring culture to a city (like R5) and thus help it to attract and retain young people.

If you want a great example of the many ways in which culture and politics intersect, espescially for young people, give this podcast a listen!

Over the past several weeks, I've been seeing posts on many a-list blogs pushing the narrative that "Kinky Friedman is a racist," or at least that "Kinkey is Pat Buchannan in a more colorful garb." Having some familiarity with Friedman as a cultural figure and as such taken some interest in his independent campaign for Governor, I was alarmed to see these posts.

My alarm turned to something more like disappointment and resignation though when I dug a little deeper and figured out this was a pretty poorly constructed negative campaign, trying to swing support to Democratic candidate Chris Bell, and that many of the people I enjoy and respect in the NetRoots were participating.

This coordinated negative push is mis-conceived and will be unproductive.

Living Liberally vs. Politically Correct
One of the better concepts to come out of the NetRoots is the "Living Liberally" meme. The idea here is that a liberal/progressive movement needs both a social foundation for its base, and an attractive/enjoyable culture to grow. This is a keen insight, and it's one of the things that makes the Drinking/Laughing/Screening Liberally family of events so valuable.

What's confusing and distressing to me is why people who understand the value of that can't see how they undermine the same process by participating in this negative campaign against Friedman.

I finally met Sean Agnew in person on Halloween night at a show at the Trocadero in Philadelphia, just a few days from the election. As I mentioned in my last Keys to a Future Majority (my Masters thesis) piece, I had been told on numerous occasions that this was the guy to know in Philly if you were interested in both politics and music. I had attempted to meet Sean in person a few times to talk about politics, music, and the Philly scene, but his reputation for being extremely hard to track down was well deserved, and my NYC-Philly commutes made my schedule pretty inflexible. However, I did reach him via e-mail a few times; he was unbelievably helpful, and he allowed Music for America to work at almost all of his many events. He also was really excited by what MfA was doing, and seemed genuinely interested in helping to build upon MfA’s model of culturally based political engagement. Though he said the story I was often told about Ed Rendell, the Governor of Pennsylvania and former mayor of Philadelphia, asking him to run for City Council wasn’t really true, I could tell from our e-mails about politics why it would ring true to people. When I e-mailed him that I wanted to bring him some MfA t-shirts for helping us out so much he seemed really excited, and asked if I could also get some shirts for his staff, who I had also found to be extremely helpful and politically engaged. He told me that he would definitely be at the show on Halloween, and so I gathered up a big bag of shirts and headed out to the show, where I was going to work as an MfA volunteer.

When I was introduced to Sean I was a bit shocked. Whenever someone talked about him they made him seem like some sort of industry big-wig, and I fully expected to find someone who was, at the very least, full of themselves (even though he was nice enough over e-mail). Instead I met a young, punkish, and unbelievably humble kid my age, dressed in jeans and a hoodie. I wanted to thank Sean a thousand times for what he was doing, and yet he thanked me for the shirts and helping to turn kids out at the shows. I only got to talk with Sean for a few moments that night—keeping an entire city’s independent music scene vibrant is hard work for one man—but before he left he mentioned that this show was going to be the last for him at the Troc. The Chicago-based company House of Blues (who have since been bought out by Clear Channel) had just finished negotiating for the booking rights to the previously independently booked venue, which meant that Sean would no longer be able to throw concerts there.