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Events for August 2010
Monday Aug 2, 7PM @ Red Emma's : Noel Ignatiev on C.L.R. James
When we heard that Noel Ignatiev—former member of the Sojourner Truth Organization, co-founder of the journal Race Traitor, and author of the essential book of antiracist history How the Irish Became White was putting together a collection of the writings of C.L.R. James—an autonomist Maxist decades before the Italians made it popular, an anticolonial activist both in his native Trinidad and around the world, as well as the most important cricket journalist ever and a pathbreaking scholar of Herman Melville—we were thrilled. When we heard that Noel wanted to come to Baltimore to talk about the collection, which includes the two critical programmatic essays Every Cook Can Govern (James' nuanced take on the birth of democracy in ancient Greece) and The Invading Socialist Society (which traces the autonomous sparks of real socialism growing within the heart of industrial capitalism), we were ecstatic!
Saturday Aug 7, 11AM @ The Baltimore Free School : Fault Lines and Subduction Zones: The Slow-Motion Crisis of Global Capital: A Seminar with Brian Holmes
At the height of the Bush/Cheney war regime in 2005 radical theorist Brian Holmes and his co-conspirators launched a series of Continental Drift seminars to see how the drive for global economic integration was leading toward a systemic crisis. These meetings brought together artists and activists along with cultural critics and social theorists in an attempt to “feel out” the ways that the political order of the world was shifting beneath our feet. Since then we have witnessed the global banking crisis, the indisputable rise of East Asian economic power and the dramatic melting of the Arctic ice in the summer of 2008. Sudden events come to punctuate long-term trends in a surreal collapse of geographical scales; the time of everyday life seems out of joint with the time of the world. Is it possible to map out the social and ecological consequences of recent tectonic shifts, and to help set a political agenda for left-leaning activism over the upcoming decades?
This weekend seminar in Baltimore forms part of a new program entitled Four Pathways Through Chaos, which seeks to draw practical conclusions from a survey of the various phases of American hegemony since WWII. This time we will focus on the constitution of the neoliberal period since the early 1980s, the emergence of the real-time global financial system that necessarily accompanied it, and the gradual intensification of new economic, political and ecological contradictions that now seem certain to tear apart the neoliberal order, not in one day or with one event but instead in a series of crises and increasingly chaotic conditions that is likely to continue for the next ten or twenty years. By examining the dialectical shifts in four key categories – Productive Processes, Social Integration, Global Protocols and Agents of Change – we can begin to understand the specific components of the current order and the conflicts and struggles that gave them their present forms. From that standpoint it is much more realistic to ask why the basic categories of social existence are now gradually morphing into something else, through the struggles and conflicts that are unfolding right now in the world. The point is to grasp our own potentials to participate in long-term systemic change.
More info: faultlines.redemmas.org
Wednesday Aug 25, 7PM @ Red Emma's : J.C. Hallman presents In Utopia
In 2005, J.C. Hallman came across a scientific paper about “Pleistocene Rewilding,” a peculiar idea from conservation biology that suggested repopulating bereft ecosystems with endangered “megafauna.” The plan sounded utterly utopian, but Hallman liked the idea as much as the scientists did—perhaps because he had grown up on a street called Utopia Road in a master-planned community in Southern California. Pleistocene Rewilding rekindled in him a longstanding fascination with utopian ideas, and he went on to spend three weeks at the world’s oldest “intentional community,” sail on the first ship where it’s possible to own “real estate,” train at the world’s largest civilian combat-school, and tour a $30 billion megacity built from scratch on an artificial island off the coast of Korea. In Utopia explores the history of utopian literature and thought in the narrative context of the real-life fruits of that history.
Friday Aug 27, 7PM @ 2640 : Free School Talent Show Extravaganza!
Calling all performers, artists, and aficionados!
Brush off your dancing shoes, tune up your instrument, practice your do-re-mi's to show off your skills in our very special Talent Show Extravaganza, a fun-filled fundraiser for the Baltimore Free School.
Performances can include dance, song, music, dramatic interpretations, step, juggling, stand up, ventriloquism, bird calls, magic tricks, or anything else you have a talent for that you'd like to share. You can sign up to perform by emailing freeschool@redemmas.org with your contact information and a description of your act. Solo and group performances welcome.
Stage fright? No problem! While enjoying the wildly entertaining displays of our community's talent, you'll be able to sign up as a monthly sustainer of the Free School or make a one-time donation. We'll be calling out our monthly pledges telethon-style, as well as giving away some fantastic door prizes.
Free admission. Cash bar. Nuff said.
And really folks, the Baltimore Free School is actually the city's truest, year round talent show, where we celebrate talent, skill and knowledge - for free!. You can always share your talents with others as an instructor, cultivate new ones as a student, or make it all possible as a sustainer.
More info on the Baltimore Free School: freeschool.redemmas.org/
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