Sat, Oct. 21, 2017 ⁄ 8:00pm

With Radical Love & Fierce Resistance Radio

radio

In concept and habit Beyond Repair was established to respond to the relationships that form through its being present. That means that things should change when things are changing. And so we have exciting news to share and hope that you’ll join us to see it into being.

Drop by on Saturday and Sunday evening, Oct. 21st & 22nd as we begin to transform the space in the Midtown Global Market so that we can house With Radical Love & Fierce Resistance Radio, our new neighborhood micro-broadcasting platform. Basically it’s a barn raising… for a radio station.

We have some ideas of how we’d like to build the space out, but we’d love your input as we transform the shop, creating a DJ booth, lounge, and new entrance.

What’s more, we want to tell you about what the future holds and how you can take part. Become a DJ at the station, tell us about your ideas for new, free printed projects to circulate around the neighborhood, and hear about the new parallel space we’ll soon inhabit, just down the Greenway from the MGM, which we’re calling Assembly (more on that soon).

Bring some tools if you got’em and ideas on how you want to get involved.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Poster

The shop was closed, for the most part, the last few days. It was the kids spring break and we went to visit my family, the day following our great Municipalism assembly on the MidTown Greenway with Alan Moore. I closed up the shop in high spirits, but I can’t deny that I’ve returned feeling a little low.

All throughout my childhood, like so many others my age on the tail-end of the Cold War, I felt like the bombs could drop at any moment. Annihilation was not a possibility, but a promise yet to be fulfilled. In an essay I wrote a few years back, I wrote:

“Somehow within our conversation Erika and I started to discuss ideas around uncertainty, fear, everyday terror, and simply the plain unease of the unfamiliar in mass, and this evoked for the both of us our states of feeling in relation to being a kid… It may seem odd to anyone growing up post-1989 but the underlying feeling of ‘maybe today’s the day’ seemed ever present.”

This “everyday terror” is, of course, a familiar trope, and atomic bombs are simply its most intersectional weapon. This terror isn’t unique to nuclear war. Nuclear war is simply its endgame. A well oiled system dispenses terror bespoke, tailoring our fears as a form of control for various publics based on race, gender, class, ethnicity… Nonetheless, the bomb is one-size-fits-all.

Posters

I want to find middle ground though. Facing not the reality, but the existential threat of nuclear war, how does one confront the problems and desires of home and neighborhood through a lens of hope and togetherness? How to avoid the nihilism of the “what if…?” I know there’s an answer, a compelling proposition to suggest that, if we all focus intently on where we’re at we’ll get through this to a better place. It’s not an easy road to travel. If anything, that’s a certainty.

As one method of working through these feelings I made this poster this afternoon. Feel free to stop in and take one.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Our old friend, Randall Szott, posted these “alternatives to liberalism” drawn up by Wendell Berry. We thought it advisable to move them around as well. In any confluence of people, especially neighborhoods such as our own here in the 9th Ward of Minneapolis, these are core questions to keep close at hand.

 

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?

2. Always include local nature-the land, the water, the air, the native creatures-within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

4. Always supply local needs first (And only then think of exporting their products, first to nearby cities, and then to others).
5. Understand the unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of “labor saving” if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of the national or global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

8. Strive to produce as much of the community’s own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.

10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community for as long as possible before it is paid out.

11. Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, teaching its children.

12. See that the old and the young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, nor necessarily and not always in school. There must be no institutionalized “child care” and “homes for the aged.” The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or “externalized.” Whenever possible, these costs must be debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighborly acts. In our time the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, leaving people to face their calamities alone.

16. A rural community should always be acquainted with, and complexly connected with, community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. A sustainable rural economy will be dependent on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞