I found these a while ago while flipping through a book on herbal/natural medicine at Corinna’s during game night. I’m in the process of cleaning out the pages in my hipster PDA and this was written on one of the cards.
In ecological terms, an indicator species is life that can draw attention to the condition of an ecosystem and even warn of an impending biological crisis. The Pittsburgh-based performance group, The Indicator Species, tries to draw attention to social crisis – the unbounded growth and abuse of the prison industrial complex and violence in our communities – in their shadow puppet performance, The Hardest Question Ever, which will be performed Thursday, July 6 at the Monroe County Public Library Auditorium at 6pm. Admission to this performance is free.
In their 30-minute multimedia performance that beautifully combines live music, life-sized shadow puppets, projection, letters from prison inmates, and recorded audio, The Indicator Species tells three true stories of violence and incarceration from their community in Pittsburgh. However, these stories are ones that can and have repeated themselves and provoked communities to ask hard questions in Pittsburgh, Bloomington, and places all over the country.
In one story, a man with a history of violence and closely connected to the Pittsburgh activist community is convicted of rape and murder. In another story, a teenager murders his best friend in a manic episode. In the last story, a well-loved member of the community who was deeply involved in community building and organizing, is murdered while walking home by a group of youth from his neighborhood.
All of these stories remind us of the complicated nature of violence and punishment in our society and how our fears about these things creep and twist around questions of race, class, prejudice, security, justice, and compassion. In the end we are left with no easy answers, but only more questions. Does the prison system protect us from members of our communities who we consider to be dangerous? Or does it contribute to social conditions that aggravate violence? Can the prison system, or any system, rehabilitate those who have committed horrible acts against others? How do we feel safe with our neighbors and in our communities? Following the performance, there will be a discussion about violence, community, and prisons where the performers, audience members, and representatives from Bloomington community groups involved in addressing issues of violence, punishment, and rehabilitation can discuss some of the questions raised by the performance.
Though there is no explicit language or imagery in the performance, it does directly address the reality of rape, murder, domestic violence, and incarceration and may not be suitable for young children.
The Indicator Species is a group of activists, educators, artists, and performers who engage in prison and other community issues through a variety of groups and projects in Pittsburgh. These projects includethe Book Em’ books to prisoners project and The Prison Poster Project, a collaborative art project that combines prisoner art to create an educational tool about the prison industrial complex. Their performance evokes the politically charged imagery of artists such as Seth Tobocman and the powerful delicacy of shadow puppeteers such as Eric Ruin. In addition to their Bloomington performance, The Indicator Species is touring throughout the summer with The Hardest Question Ever, bringing their provocative performance and dialogue to a number of different communties across the country.
The Bloomington performance of The Hardest Question Ever is produced in conjunction with The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project and as part of this summer’s Plan-It-X Fest. The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project is a long-running volunteer effort that meets weekly to send free books and other reading material to people in prison for the purpose of self-education, rehabilitation, and relieving pain and boredom. It also hopes to offer an accessible way for members of the community to begin to think and talk about prison issues. In its third year, Plan-It-X Fest is a week long festival of musical performance, workshops, and classes exhibiting and fostering do-it-yourself music, art, activism, and community.
For more information
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So here’s the skateboard design that Ryan came up with for a potential Defiance, Ohio skateboard put out by our friend Chris’ skate company Front Porch Skateboards.
The CD burning program that I use under linux doesn’t support burning mp3s to audio cds directly, so I have to convert!
for i in *.mp3; do lame –decode $i `basename $i .mp3`.wav; done
The Linux MP3 CD Burning mini-HOWTO was super-helpful with this.
Lightning Strikes: Climate change/Life change
This is Where We’re From: 46 houses behind miles away
Research: NOLA, voyeurism, ownership of tragedy
Death at an early age: photos from palestine, privilege and solidarity
$ mplayer rtsp://real.npr.org:80/real.npr.na-central/fa/20060414_fa_01.rm -ao pcm:file=hater.wav -vc dummy -vo null
This page was helpful as a reference.
Last week’s Boxcar planning meeting seemed to move too slow for me, which is largely my fault because I was facilitating. It made me realize that its a bad idea to try to facilitate a discussion when one has a lot to try to think about or say about ideas. I felt like I was on a different page, in some ways, and in different ways, from a lot of the people I work with. At one point, I talked about how it was important to think about roles and responsibilities that are beyond what’s happening currently at Boxcar, and nothing could come to mind as a good example. Listening to the radio, I came up with this idea, and while it could be effective from an assy marketing perspective, more importantly, I feel like it will help to generate excitement about books and some of the cultural and political ideas that members of the collective feel are important and offer a more relevent selection of books to the community.
Here’s the role description:
Ordering Consultant
An ordering consultant will assist the ordering coordinator by suggesting books to be ordered for the store, though final decisions about ordering will continue to be made by the ordering coordinator. They will print out “As Featured on This American Life” or “As Featued on Democracy Now!” or other labels to help people notice books that were mentioned in the media. They will find and excerpt reviews of new books (or write ones themeselves) that are ordered to include with the books in the store. They will be responsible for writing a newsletter column, website article, and perhaps a periodic e-mail update/Myspace bulletin to the e-mail list talking about new books.
When I was at Corinna and Riley’s radio show last night, Corinna mentioned that Democracy Now! had reported that recent statistics state that, in the US, 1 in 136 residents are in prison. This is crazy and more than any statistic I’ve heard about prisons, drives home the enormity of the prison system in the US.
This past weekend on This American Life, they played some audio from a film called Troop 1500, about a Girl Scout troop whose members are all the daughters of women in prison.  The last two weeks or so, TAL has had stories relating to the lives of people in prison. I was happy that prison issues were getting so much coverage, but I really wondered about the sudden concentration of stories about prison, on the radio show, and in other media. I guess its really the case that imprisonment and its effects on families and communities is really a huge part of the reality of American life. 1 in 136 is such a tangible, familiar fraction and it just makes me think that if this is the case, that 1 in such a small number of people is deemed to be unfit to participate in the rest of society, that this says that something is horribly wrong with our society.
I’m pretty exhausted right now, and I wish I could articulate this better, but the statistic and the realization that even the cultural media is reflecting this statistic, makes me feel pretty sad.
I’m going to be playing records on my friends Corinna and Riley’s radio show, The Manion Companion, on Bloomington’s community radio station WFHB. The show is from 11p-1a eastern standard time. You can liten in Bton at 91.3 and 98.1 FM or stream it on the web.
xo,
Geoff
Update: Here’s my playlist.
This is what I would have played had I had the time:
