Shirari Industries

Home > Blog

Adventures in making art and living sustainably.

Free garden

By Ari | Jun 22, 09 10:58 PM

We made a garden this year almost for free. The seeds and seedlings were all given to us - someone always has too much of something, and gives away the surplus. (We too had so many seeds we passed them on. And I look forward to sharing and swapping produce!)

We made a raised bed out of an old shelf and cinder blocks, and traded for tomato cages and plant pots. We dumpstered some plastic buckets that have really come in handy. And the Dacha gave us a lot of compost they'd picked up, and we got more of that and mulch for free from Ithaca. Yay Ithaca compost! The only thing we bought was, early on and out of convenience, a couple of bags of organic potting soil. We needed it for some seedlings, right then.

It's much farther along now than it is in this photo - we'll have to post an update soon! Today we potted all of the remaining seedlings, moved everything around so they get better sun, put in mulch, and pulled out some weeds. Most of these plants are in pots, the rest in a raised bed, because the soil is full of asphalt driveway bits. The tomatoes are thriving, very tall and sturdy. There are also large pots of things we sowed directly in the soil, weeks before the last frost, that are probably the healthiest, strongest plants besides the tomatoes - onions, broccoli, carrots, and zinias, and some lavender and mixed perennial flowers from Lea. The eggplants and peppers are still very small, only a few leaves each. The cabbage, just a little bigger - maybe six small leaves apiece.

Well, that's the garden report. You can keep tabs on the action in the Flickr pool we made just for our garden (you'll get to see our old Brooklyn garden and our houseplants, too!).

This one's for you, animal family

By Ari | Jun 22, 09 09:27 AM

I've realized recently that I don't speak up enough for animals. I fear bothering people. I know that for me, going vegan was a long and sometimes jarring process. I remember feeling afraid and guilty and very challenged and uncomfortable at times. I remember that the idea of changing my life in what felt like a very drastic and unpleasant way (I really loved eating animals and things they make) was very threatening. So, being someone who likes to be liked, who doesn't like to make people uncomfortable, I've moved away from more confrontational advocacy. I do a lot online, where distance eases discomfort, but in the brick-and-mortar world, I sometimes hold a lot back. I'll be in situations where someone will say something or do something that is so, so oppressive to animals, my cousins, my family, my kin, my friends - and I'll say nothing. Out of fear, I won't leap to their defense, I won't say what needs to be said. If someone says something sexist or homophobic or racist I usually speak up, but with animals - I'm sorry, animals. I sometimes am just not the best ally.

So, I think I should write more about it here. I sometimes don't want to barrage our few blog readers with too much animal rights stuff, but it's a daily part of my life, so I think I need to start being more forthright about it. Maybe through writing about it on our blog I'll find more of a voice to speak about it offline.

Why is this so important? Here is one reason. Right now Snow is in my lap. She's a tiny sweetheart, my baby, my furry little darling. She's not a pet, she's family. She's an individual, a person. I respect her and her needs as I respect the personhood and needs of human beings. I can see that she's not a plant, that she's nothing like one, not an object but a person - she has gingivitis, and her gums hurt, and eating is difficult for her right now. Because she's not feeling very well, she's rather low-energy and is sleeping a lot. And because she's a very lovey, cuddly person, comforted by hugs and other physical contact, she likes to lay on me and hold onto my shoulder.

Some folks might balk at calling an animal a person, but they're certainly not places and they're certainly not things. They are definitely thinking and feeling. They definitely have desires and needs and wants. They hurt, and they cry, and they get hungry, and they love, and they play, and they have dignity and silliness and dreams and games. They get bored. They have fun. They are not things, but people. They may be very different from us, but there is nothing at all about them that is so different from humans that they deserve to be treated differently. Fuzziness or smallness or a lack of ability to speak English or Spanish or do math, does not justify their oppression.

So Snow is a reason why it's important I be able to talk about animal rights. She's one very important reason, and Sid and Zora, our other cat housemates, are also very important reasons. But there are even more reasons - billions and billions of reasons. All of the animals all around the world who can't cry out in words that we can understand, whose cries are ignored because we can't understand them, all of those animals are reasons why I need to be a better ally, why I need to wear my solidarity on my sleeve.

I can't forget them, and I never do. When I'm sitting at a table with human friends, and someone is talking about some delicious eggs, how can I be silent? How can I not speak up in defense of my sisters, the chickens? When I remember every moment that billions of you soft, sweet, helpless ladies are captive, making egg after egg until you're too old and too weak and you're killed and turned into soup, how can I say nothing? How can I pretend that everything is okay? How can I smile at my friend and swallow my discomfort? My discomfort is nothing, nothing compared to the suffering that animals all around the world are experiencing because human beings still believe that might makes right.

So, I'll try to be better. I'll try to speak up for my furry, feathery, scaly family. I'll remember they have no way to speak up for themselves, not even the awareness that freedom from oppression is possible. I apologize in advance if I make my human friends uncomfortable, but as a friend said to me online recently, transformation is painful.

And beautiful. The lovely, amazing, delicious thing about stepping away from exploitation and toward solidarity with other species is that it is a joyous thing, a homecoming.

If you feel uncomfortable when you remember where your food comes from - when you recall that it is a dead body, or that it came from someone who is confined, not free, a slave to human desire - if you feel that way, try not eating that food item, replacing it with something healthful and delicious that came from the earth and the warm sun and a seed, something that didn't cry out when it died. See how you feel. I don't mean physically, though it does feel good, physically, to eat healthful plant foods. I mean morally, ethically. See how it sits with your soul. See how your conscience feels about it. See if you feel better when you know that your food came from the sun and the earth, and not from a living, breathing, feeling person, against their will. That you can be nourished without their suffering is a beautiful thing, freeing. This is the feeling that we and our family are at last at peace, reconciled. That is a homecoming.

Clouds and rain and sky and deer and music and freedom

By Ari | Jun 22, 09 09:00 AM

Shira drove us to Albany this weekend to visit Jesse and Nitya. It was a fun, relaxing time. The drive both ways was beautiful - we went around Binghamton by taking a more rural route, and were able to cruise along in almost zero traffic. It was raining on the way over, and I saw lots of deer outside: two does walking through bushes, the one in front looking back to check on her friend; a watchful doe and her fawn standing in a pond, drinking; and someone standing under bushes, craning her/his neck up to pull at the leaves.

On the way home, we were listening to a playlist Shira made called "Peace and Protest" and I was reading Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, a young adult novel in the Golden Compass series. The book is about reclaiming your soul from organized religion. The songs were about giving children freedom to be themselves, about getting on the peace train, about people crying for freedom, about the poor rising up to get what they deserve.

As we drove we went in and out of the rain. I could look up at the sky and see the clouds go on and on for miles - dark and heavy with water, with sun peering through; patches of blue sky, with thin wisps of cloud floating off high in the distance. I love looking at the sky like that - something about the vast scale of those mountains of vapor, pouring over this horizon and trailing off over that one, reminds me we're on this little round planet, swaddled in air and water.

The book had me crying. The music and the beautiful world helped the tears out, I'm sure. I looked around and thought, how lovely, this. How incredible and beautiful. How lucky we are to have the senses we each have, to be able to enjoy this extraordinary place. The words of the songs and the book filled me with hope and awareness of others, who for generations and generations have been waking to the world's beauty and to our own power and strength. The people are rising up. The people are seeing heaven is on earth and not through some locked door guarded by people with power and privilege.

Are they? Are we? I hope so. As we drove, my mind flitted from idea to idea, ways to spread the bliss I was feeling; how do you tell others that another world is possible - that is is here right now, and that all we have to do is claim it?

Can you just write it on your blog? It's a place to start.

Ahimsa evolves, and an a-frame emerges

By Ari | Jun 19, 09 11:01 AM

Ahimsa has evolved from an ecovillage to a network - I think. We're still figuring it out. But it seems that everyone in the group is very motivated to work around the intersections of social justice, animal rights, and environmental sustainability - and we're all into community building. I'm kind of sad to see the idea of an ecovillage be pushed off into the indefinite future, but we were working on it steadfastly and it just wasn't something folks seemed ready to build right now, so we'll see what happens. Fortunately we've met a lot of awesome people and everyone has great ideas and energy - hopefully the convergence we're talking about holding later in the summer will happen, and then we'll see what comes out of that.

So, housing-wise, Shira and I are thinking again about what the two of us can accomplish on our own - or maybe with a friend. Something smaller. Something to help us become more self-sufficient.

I'm kind of in love with A-frames. I don't always blog when learning about this stuff, but I'm not sure how many people read our delicious links (rss feed), and I do think this info is worth sharing.

Why an A-frame? They seem to be easy to build. Based on the reading I've done and the things folks have told us, natural building requires so much labor that it may not be as affordable as it appears. It turns out that using available plans and simple conventions like a pier foundation can really cut costs (including labor). With the use of salvaged and freecycled materials, limited resources can stretch even farther. We like the idea that building something ourselves will give us and education and a workout, and will allow us to avoid a mortgage. We've also considered building something mobile so we could lease land and then take our home with us if/when we leave, but it would have to be very small, and that's probably not best for packrats like us.

So, we don't have to make an A-frame. A small cottage or cabin could work too, one with proper walls. Or a yurt, we've talked about that. But basically, it seems we're headed toward buying land and building something on it.

I think the reason I love A-frames is not only their easy construction but their aesthetics. I like that they look like cute little hills. I love the weird triangular areas that people usually block off and turn into closets - I want to just keep them open and put storage bins and things back there. I love the huge open floor feeling, the lofts. Here are a few links to linger on:

I've got even more links up on Delicious, if you like looking at this kind of thing. Check out our tags, and try grouping them to find specific things! I'm pretty into tagging, that way. Here are the best groupings on this topic, I think, and some interesting other areas we've explored:

Anyone out there have even better ideas for sustainable, cheap building methods? Please leave a comment!

Fresh websites, hot off the Wordpress

By Ari | Jun 19, 09 10:04 AM

Recently I've made the switch to Wordpress, where I used to use Movable Type. I like that they've been committed to Open Source from day one, whereas Six Apart, the company that makes MT, has always seemed more profit-driven to me. I was shocked at how easy WP is to install, and at how deliciously comfortable it is to use. I'm able to search for, install, and configure plug-ins from within the WP admin area. Same with themes.

Many of the folks we work with are on a very tight budget, or have no funding at all, so being able to create an inexpensive or free site very quickly is something I've been wanting to learn to do for a long time. With WP, I can make a beautiful site that anyone can keep up-to-date in just a few hours. Finally.

What this has meant is that suddenly I'm able to do much more work for many more people, much more quickly. Here are a few recent sites I've made or worked on. These folks are really cool, visit their sites to find out more about them!

Service Women's Action Network - SWAN needed a new logo as well as a new site that they could update easily and use to reach out to potential funders. This site is the result - it features a Vertical Response mailing list, Google Analytics and AddThis sharing. Before it was even online they were talking to Congress with their new logo printed on new business cards. Go SWAN!
Using Their Words - This site is an activist effort by a woman we've worked with over at NYCORe. I initially helped her polish a Google Site and created this new illustrated header for her. Then we found out that her radical web host, MayFirst (to whom Shirari Industries is now migrating!) wouldn't even support her domain pointing to Google, since they're so commercial. So we moved the site onto their server and installed WP. I set up the front page to look less bloggy since the site's primary function is serving up radical curricula - and I used tags and categories to help visitors find the kind of lesson plans they're looking for.
AEI Convergence 2009 - This site was particularly fun because it was a barter! In exchange for making my friend Emily's logo and putting together this quick WP, I got my bike fixed and she and Shira and I had a lovely meal together that she cooked and brought over one day. I love the little site, too - it's simple but it does what she needs it to do, and she can keep it updated easily, herself. And what a cool convergence she's planning! I love the photos she's adding to the site.
Share Tompkins - This one was particularly fun because I wrote the resources page, too. Well, the first edition. Now others have been invited in and hopefully the page will grow and evolve. The site is made using the free, hosted version of WP, in keeping with the Share Tompkins ethos of making life more sustainable and affordable through sharing resources. Using the free version of WP gives us less control over the site's appearance and functionality, but the important thing is to get this content out and usable - not to have it be 100% beautiful and customized. That might come later - this is only the beginning for this fledgling mutual aid network. Our friends Jason and Joe are working on an even more useful sister site, where members of the network will be able to list haves and wants, to facilitate easier sharing and bartering. In the meantime, folks can check out the many trade networks listed on the resources page, or they can come to our community swap meets.
freeDimensional - This site is still evolving, and has made some real progress lately! It's the only one here that's not a WP site - I built the splash page with some simple HTML, and the rest of the site is a Ning. Shira and I are very organizationally involved with these folks - we're both on their steering committee and we may soon have staff titles. Not sure - it's a horizontal network, and we're still discussing as a group how to best handle roles and responsibilities. But what all of this involvement means is that Shira and I have been intimately involved not only in the visual design of the site, but in creating the content on it, and even in making the organizational decisions that go into how the network presents itself and how it functions. It's an exciting process, with all of us volunteers and freelancers and staff people figuring out how to share power and how to talk about it. Mad props to Tricia Wang for her feedback on the site - I think we're making more and more sense, and becoming more and more easily navigable and comprehensible, and useful to everyone in the network that depends on the site.

That's it for now! Many more sites are currently in the works, and I'll share them when they're complete. Also on the table is a massive overhaul of this site right here, Shirari Industries. We're experimenting with a very new, flexible, open-feeling site navigation that we hope will be easier for us to keep up to date, and which will give a much better idea of all of our current projects. If there's anything you want us to keep or change or add as we do our redesign, please leave a comment with your ideas! We'd love to hear from you.

Stuff going on in Ithaca

By Ari | Jun 12, 09 12:37 PM

I just made two Google Calendars, for Ithaca events and for Ithaca Freeskool. Both are pretty empty right now because I'm hoping the folks I invited in start adding their own stuff - I didn't want to do the fun, easy part.

I hope that having collaborative, public calendars will help us all to avoid conflicts when scheduling stuff - and that this could be a useful place for progressives to post stuff, a one-stop shop. Right now it's hard to stay on top of all the progressive stuff happening in Ithaca - what calendar should you subscribe to, where do you look? Everyone has their own calendar but it's hard to find it all in one place. So maybe Ithacalendar can fill that gap. Thanks to everyone who thought of it last night at Shira's DIY filmmaking class!

If anyone wants to be an editor on either or both of the calendars, and if I haven't yet invited you (sorry, I'm doing this rather haphazardly, any omitted invites are not meant to be slights!), please let me know and I'll get you access.

Peanut tattoos

By Ari | Jun 12, 09 11:28 AM

lovebirds
Originally uploaded by picklepuff

Shira and I post a lot of our photography and art on Flickr with Creative Commons licenses so it can be used and shared. A while back I posted this sheet of tattoo art ideas that I sent to my brother Ant in Massachusetts. And then the other day I heard from picklepuff on Flickr; she wanted to know if she and her friend could use this little peanut guy I drew for matching tattoos! Ant said yes, so they got inked. Here's a photo. Eeee!

This is the second time that I know of that someone's actually gotten art by me tattooed on them. I've had some other art requests but I don't know if they panned out... I'm always too shy to check in. What do you say, "hey, did you get my goofy sketch permanently painted on your body?" Anyway, wow. I'm so happy to get this photo. Thanks to picklepuff and friend for bringing this peanut to life.

Check Out My Article About Food, Inc. at Documentary.org

By Shira | Jun 11, 09 02:44 PM

I had a chance to see a preview copy of the new documentary Food, Inc. and interview the Director, Robert Kenner. This is my first article for the International Documentary Association's blog, and I'm psyched to get a chance to write about a topic so close to my heart:

Here's an excerpt and you can read the full article online:
Change: It's What's for Dinner: 'Food, Inc.' Takes on Agribusiness

In a world dominated by corporations, it is no surprise that the American food system has been hijacked by the relentless drive for profit. Under the pretexts of affordability and convenience, modern industrialized agriculture has consistently ignored the unintended consequences of their "efficient" practices on our health and livelihoods, the environment and other species.
Equally implicated is the United States government, which simultaneously subsidizes and fails to adequately regulate the agriculture industrial complex. This reality, explored by Frederick Wiseman in his 1976 cinema vérité documentary Meat and more recently by Nikolaus Geyrhalter in the unnarrated montage film Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread; 2005), is more explicitly tackled in Robert Kenner's Food, Inc., which opens June 12 in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and nationwide on June 19.

The issue of food and the many ways in which it affects our lives is an enormous one, and the film is a broad undertaking, exploring everything from the health impacts of ever ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup (one out of three Americans born today is expected to develop early-onset diabetes), to water and air pollution caused by intensive factory farming, to human rights violations perpetrated against undocumented workers by mega corporations like Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer. Viewers are aided in processing all of this information by motion graphics created by Big Star NYC, which worked with Kenner to create an entertaining and helpful visual language for the film.

Ultimately, Food, Inc. is an examination of free market capitalism's disregard for anything other than the bottom line. "This is a film that's about more than food," says Kenner. "It's really about corporate consolidation and irresponsibility and about the relationship of these companies with government. It's not that different from what happened with the financial crisis. These companies have been totally irresponsible and at the end of the day, we're the ones who pay the price."

Rooftop Films: Spread the word

By Ari | Jun 3, 09 12:38 PM

If you're in NYC this summer, go check out Rooftop Films, a film series dedicated to showcasing new, independent films and emerging bands in unique outdoor locations. This weekend there are a couple of screenings coming up that look great - one has free beer, and both also feature live music. Good times!

Fri, June 5
Trapped Inside the Machine (short films)
A fun, frantic, fantastical program of films about losing your grip on reality, and reality losing its grip on the world.
Venue: on the roof of the Open Road Rooftop
Address: 350 Grand Street @ Essex (Lower East Side, Manhattan)
8:00PM: Doors open
8:30PM: Sound Fix presents live music
9:00PM: Films
11:30PM - 1:00AM: Open Bar at Fontana's (105 Eldridge St), courtesy of Radeberger beer
Tickets: $9, http://newyork.going.com/event-602721;Rooftop_Films_Trapped_Inside_the_Machine

Sat, June 6
Stingray Sam (Feature length film)
A dazzling six-episode musical-western comedy that takes place in outer space, written, directed by and starring Cory McAbee, the creator of The American Astronaut. The filmmakers will be in attendance. Watch a trailer at http://stingraysam.com/trailer.html
Venue: on the roof of the Brooklyn Tech
Address: 29 Fort Greene Place (Fort Greene, Brooklyn) MAP
8:00PM: Doors open
8:30PM: Sound Fix presents live music
9:00PM: Films
Tickets: $9, http://newyork.going.com/event-602737;Rooftop_Films_Stingray_Sam

Organizing, procrastinating, fixing, cleaning, sorting

By Ari | May 25, 09 04:15 PM

I have all these in-boxes. Big cardboard boxes and plastic containers full of unfinished projects, collected memory-type stuff, cards and other mail from friends, postcards and things picked up from our travels, broken things that need to be fixed.

They weigh me down and worry me, these boxes - I'm always seeing them and tripping over them and feeling anxious that they're piled up. But it's not like more boxes are arriving, so why sit on them forever, worrying for no good reason? Today I'm spring cleaning, going through them and sorting stuff out and putting it away or recycling it or fixing it. Such a relief.

Shirari Industries

Free garden

This one's for you, animal family

Clouds and rain and sky and deer and music and freedom

Ahimsa evolves, and an a-frame emerges

Fresh websites, hot off the Wordpress

Stuff going on in Ithaca

Peanut tattoos

Check Out My Article About Food, Inc. at Documentary.org

Rooftop Films: Spread the word

Organizing, procrastinating, fixing, cleaning, sorting

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Shirari's Peace & Love Podcast

Categories

Archives »

Shirari Industries