Call to Artists

Create.
Girl Gone Wild is actively seeking projects from all mediums to showcase to a broader audience. I am looking especially for under-represented artists, authors, musicians and activists with projects that are compelling, compassionate, address social or political issues, or are just plain amazing. Do you have a project that you think is a good fit with Girl Gone Wild? Read the blog, then go to www.rubygonewild.com and send me a brief description of your work and a link to your project. I will be interviewing and writing about a project a week for the next several months and would love to hear from you. Please share this opportunity with others!

Also, a taste of a previous, proto-profile:

Magdalene.

There is a quiet revolution taking place in popular music led by artists interested in both the evolution of digital sound and the complexities offered by the rhythms and melodies of traditional cultural music. Pushing past the early pioneers of fusion, Paul Simon's Graceland, for example, recent bands such as Beirut and Beats Antique have eschewed any sense of Americanism and instead have modernized and digitized old-world sounds. Now, bands like Black Magdalene are taking the strong vocals and dominant guitar and bass that characterizes American rock and layering it with North African, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European rhythms, sounds, and mythology to create a wholly new, and wholly modern sound. They call it Organic Darkwave.

Listen:
http://www.reverbnation.com/blackmagdaleneband

Photograph:
http://www.digitallatte.com/

Tell It Like It Is

Surveillance.

If you do not remember or have never heard of the Yippies, let me explain. The Yippies were a social and political change group in the 1960's famous for shutting down Wall Street, running a pig for president, and other acts of radical protest. They were thinkers, truth tellers, activists, and pacifists. Abby Hoffman and his American flag pants is probably the best-known part of the Yippies, but their work and modern legacy hardly begins or ends with him. Judy Gumbo, one of the original Yippies and co-author of The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, has emerged as an important voice in the 21st century debate over privacy, spying, and the power of government. Gumbo's writing about the 60's is not nostalgic but provocative, underscoring the need to face historical truth, and speak with clarity and honesty about the U.S. government, free speech, and the consequences of fighting for social change. Fifty years later is a great time to evaluate what we did and did not learn and accomplish in the 60's, perhaps it will help us find our way.

To read her important blog, Yippie Girl:
http://yippiegirl.com/judy-gumbo/bugged.html

Photo:
http://societeperrier.com/blog/digital-museums-the-15-best-collections-on-tumblr/

Stone Soup

Hash.

According to a 2012 report released by the Natural Resource Defense Council 40 percent of the food in the United States goes to waste. Much of this is in the production and marketing of pre-packed and pre-prepared foods, and much of it is due to over-sized restaurant portions. But a lot of it just gets tossed from our refrigerators because we forgot to get around to cooking it.

Food waste argues against itself. There are no good reasons to waste food, only good excuses for why it happens. I believe that one of the primary contributors to American food waste is the loss of home life and the domestic art of cooking. Sure, people still make a couple of things here and there, and we will still make a special trip to the store to try a new recipe from the Times, but the art of daily cooking, and the practice of sitting down to eat has been disappearing from our lives since the 1980's. Cooking has become a form of social action.

That we make too much food and then throw it away or let the leftovers go bad is true, but an overlooked and important contribution to food waste is in our food preparation. More specifically, because we no longer cook from scratch or with regularity, we waste more food. Vegetable ends and peels go into the trash or compost instead of a broth. Past-fresh breads and pastries are thrown out instead of cooked into a bread pudding. Leftovers and need to be eaten now items are tossed over for takeout instead of cooked into a improvised hash. Knowing how to prepare our food, what is edible and is not, how long it can be kept, or how to freeze and preserve leftovers or seasonal batches can prevent food waste as well. Do you use the lemon zest before you slice the lemon? Do you remember to toss the squeezed lemon wedges in with the chicken to season it as it roasts?

While food preparation waste may not be the largest contributor to our overall food waste, the NRDC claims that a decrease in our food waste of even 15 percent could feed 25 million Americans annually. Small changes go a long way.

The best things you could be cooking with things you might otherwise throw away:

1. hash
2. vegetable broth
3. sweet or savory bread pudding
4. veggie and cheese spreads/tapenades
5. smoothies and juices

Recipes:

Hash is an dish with protein, veggies and some kind of starch (potatoes etc.) although you can substitute a grain like rice or quinoa.

The New York Times lists lots of simple and delicious hash recipes:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/vegetable-hash-for-an-easy-dinner/

Vegetable and meat broths can be made easily from scraps and frozen until you need them. An easy starter recipe from Frugal Living:

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/makeyourowningredients/r/Vegetable_Broth.htm

Bread puddings are easy and flexible, substitute any kind of bread and add or subtract sweet and savory ingredients.

Ina Garten's Bread Pudding:

http://www.barefootcontessa.com/recipes.aspx?CookBookID=0&RecipeID=813

Veggie and cheese spreads can be made in minutes with bits and pieces of whatever you have lying around. Alton Brown has a great beginners recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/roasted-vegetable-spread-recipe/index.html

Smoothies are almost infinitely variable. Better Homes and Gardens provides a great selection of recipes:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/drinks/anytime-drinks/smoothie-recipes/

Resources/References:

NRDC Report of Food Waste:

http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf

A Laying On of Hands

retreat.

One of my favorite things to advocate for in terms of the promotion of a healthy environment and good nutrition is the formation of community. Or, put differently, the loss of community in the modern way of life appears to be intimately linked to the destruction of the environment and the deterioration of public health.

We began to lose community in the process of trying to create it. In building suburbs we created lifestyles based on long, isolating, gas-guzzling commutes that eroded our personal time making social interaction and exercise harder to come by. Beyond that, we designed our suburbs without sidewalks, town centers, or public play spaces, effectively isolating our children from one another and putting them and their caretakers back in the car in order to grocery shop or go to the park. Of course, once you’re in the car, the likelihood of each person on a particular street going to a different park or grocery store increases, decreasing the casual everyday interactions between neighbors that do so much to foster community. The time and energy required to prepare meals of whole foods from local sources was also squeezed out by the distribution of our lives across a greater geography and our increasing desire for “down time” and instant gratification.

And isolation breeds isolation. Once disconnected from our neighbors and surrounding community, we are more likely to tell ourselves that video tennis is a reasonable substitute for actually going to play tennis, forgetting that going to play tennis may involve taking a walk, running into the neighbors, getting substantively more exercise and valuable vitamin D, and interacting with our children and the environment.

And infrastructure breeds infrastructure. Once we are tied to our cars for all of our activities we need an increasingly large number of roads, increasing in size, to handle our increasing numbers and increasingly large cars. Retreating to our houses necessitates larger and larger houses, filled with more and more things, to fill the void left by the absence of regular social interaction and the necessary chores of a conscious lifestyle. Consumption itself becomes a hobby. Instead of community centers, our houses become show pieces, museums to ourselves with all the accoutrements of a modern lifestyle, televisions, stereos, Jacuzzi tubs, and little evidence of actual interaction with the world at large.

I suggest that the formation and fostering of community in and of itself is an act of subversion, or at least a tangible protest of the current status quo. I believe that community is one antidote to deteriorating pubic health, eroded social services, environmental decline and climate change, and the propagation of an unhealthy and unsustainable popular monoculture. And it’s easy. And it’s free.

The Re-education of Little Miss

release.

In the art of trapeze, during a release, there is a moment in which the performer has to let go of the bar behind them and reach out to the thing in front of them. They float, suspended for a moment, before reaching out to grasp their new anchor. It’s the moment that the audience comes to see, to witness someone put themselves into that space of vulnerability and risk to emerge, whole and strong, on the other side. It’s an art based on the concept of looking forward, fearless, and letting go of what’s behind you. This is the moment in which I find myself. I think, I hope, that it’s a moment that will be embraced by increasingly more of us, as we struggle to redefine ourselves in this new climate, economy, and global community.

Real change, whether we seek it out or have it thrust upon us, requires us to embrace this moment of release, with all its fear, uncertainty, and aloneness, trust that we will be alright, and reach out for the things that make us whole.

Fly.

Eyes Wide Shut

trust.

I am an idealist. Still. Not because I maintain naiveté regarding the nature of the world or ignorance of its evils and seeming inevitabilities, but because it’s in my nature and, well, someone has to be. Idealism gives us cause to fight the good fight. Idealism gives us hope. However one of the complications of being an idealist is the ever-present and looming threat of disillusionment. To combat this I have had to create a paradigm of hope and faith in certain over-arching values, love, compassion, charity, through which to see the world in order to reconcile the evening news with my vision of a peaceful society. The extension of my idealism to my personal life and relationships creates a peculiar and piercing vulnerability, particularly in terms of trust. And trust, as with idealism, is both important and dangerous. Trust is the thing that binds me to the people to whom I am the closest, it lets me be my true self, free from fear of judgment, allows for the exchange of confidences, and combats loneliness. Betrayal of trust is the fastest route to a loss of self respect and a profound sense of abandonment that I have ever experienced. It is easy in the face of betrayal to want to put up barriers and refuse to trust again. But we can’t afford to do that. I think my willingness to trust other people is directly tied to my idealism, my hope. And I choose not to live a life devoid of hope. So I take a breath, gather myself, and begin to trust again.

Also Referenced:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trust/
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trust

Gag Order

unacceptable.

I want to talk about torture and I don’t want to talk about torture. I am at a loss to understand how any group of people can possibly endorse, legalize, or justify the brutal and vivid mistreatment of anyone, regardless of perceived threat or political climate. Let me be clear, I am not entering into a discussion or debate regarding this issue. I am not entertaining the possibility of sleep deprivation, the withholding of food, temperature extremes, stress positions or water boarding being acceptable behavior. Ever. There are no grey areas. There are no excuses. Every one of us knows cruelty when we see it. We are taught as children that violence is neither a solution to conflict nor a means to our desired ends. It is unacceptable for us to forget or fail to heed this lesson as adults.

Our detainees, prisoners, whatever we are calling them are people. They have souls. And they are in our care. We can make no real progress towards the formation of a peaceful, compassionate, and sustainable society while we, through our complacency and silence, endorse torture. We have to stop this, and we have to stop it now.

Write to a member of congress, the president, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, let them know that Americans believe in compassionate justice, that this is not how we choose to be represented in the world.

For a Congressional Directory:
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

To Email Barack Obama:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

I tried to find an email address or contact information for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but couldn’t. Go Figure.

Photograph Courtesy of :
http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/gallery_images/0812/0000/0258/washday_005_mid.jpg

Playing For Change

allegro.

Playing for Change is an organization dedicated to the creation and propagation of peace through shared humanity and aesthetics, the playing of music. More specifically, Playing for Change is an international collective of musicians that play benefit concerts for and build music and art schools in impoverished communities. The project is rooted in the belief that music is an equalizer, a common thread that allows people to transcend distance and boundaries, be they political, economic, cultural, or ideological, that music is a path to peace. They illustrate this by producing mosaic videos of musicians from around the world playing the same song, somehow together, as a one-world choir, despite the distance. And they seem to play straight up into heaven, and right through to your soul.

They have a point. Music unites.

Watch and Listen:
http://www.playingforchange.com/episodes

Participate:
http://www.playingforchange.com/participate

Raise Your Hand

faith.

A moment of prayer, joy, and hope, captured at the inaguration. A good reminder that now is the time for us to stand up and be counted. A reminder that we are all one voice, one helping hand, one foot soldier pushing towards a new way of being in the world. It is the actions of individuals that will steer the path of the masses.