We all know that New York City is not immune to anti-choice activism. We’ve seen the protestors outside the clinics - blocking entrances and exits, following and harassing women, moving beyond peaceful protest in their attempts to prevent women from accessing critical reproductive health care services.

New York City’s current law doesn’t go far enough to protect reproductive health care providers or women who need reproductive health services from harassment and intimidation.

We’re letting the City know that we need a change!

The newly introduced Clinic Access Bill (Proposed Int. No. 826) would make it illegal to follow and harass any individual or place that individual in fear of physical harm within a 15-foot area around a reproductive health care facility. The bill would also prohibit blocking a clinic’s entrance or exit, including its parking lots and driveways. The Clinic Access Bill would not, however, prohibit people from peacefully gathering and protesting.

What can you do to protect women’s access to reproductive health care facilities?

Please join us next Tuesday, November 18, at 10 am at New York City Hall to show your support for the Clinic Access Bill. Anti-choice activists will surely be present in full force. We need to show our legislators that New Yorkers support this important piece of legislation and that we care that women are able to access reproductive health care services without fear of harassment or intimidation. Please contact Lalena Howard at lhoward@prochoiceny.org or 646-520-3506 for more information and to RSVP.

You can also send a letter of support to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who introduced the Clinic Access Bill last month. Tell Speaker Quinn that as a pro-choice New Yorker, you appreciate her willingness ensure that women will receive the respect and dignity they deserve when seeking reproductive health care services.

A live soundtrack for a live cinema: You are invited to attend a special viewing of LIVE VIDEO with Dusty Rhodes’ and Peter Moffit’s improvised soundscape in Jan Baracz’s Reality Cinema Theater at Art in General on Tuesday, October 28, from 7 to 9pm.  Please rsvp to kara@artingeneral.org

Tuesday, October 28, 7 pm – 8.30 pm

LIVE VIDEO

Jan Baracz

September 26, 2008 — December 13, 2008

For his newest project, Reality Cinema/Live Video, Jan Baracz has transformed the Art in General storefront gallery into an intimate cinematic screening room. Driven by a desire to draw viewers into an experience that challenges them to view themselves in a new way, Baracz has created a space where live video feeds, culled from several cameras recording the streets outside the gallery, are mixed and projected to create an ongoing “movie.”  While the content of the film is the action on the street, a soundtrack mix by Toshio Kajiwara with off-screen dialogue voices of Erika Latta and Eric Dean Scott, provides a sonic environment for the ongoing “movie,” prompting narrative imagination among the audience, setting off chains of unexpected associations and stories.  Special evening “performances” with live soundtracks provided by by Zeljko Mcmullen, Patrick Mckearn, Dusty Rhodes, Peter Moffit and others will take place during the duration of the project.

The installation allows for new and unexpected interpretations of the ‘normal’ occurrences of everyday urban street life. As Baracz states, “I’m interested in the quiet drama of the perceptual shift that occurs when what we look at becomes something very different from its initial appearance. We ask, how could we have seen something else before?  Am I a different person from the one who looked at it before?  Possibly.”

Baracz takes up the conventions of cinema (the spatial arrangement of audience with respect to the screen, for example), and probes the history of its once exclusively collective reception.  Employing curiosity and voyeurism, Reality Cinema/Live Video tests viewers’ tendencies, on the one hand, to see most spaces in the city as sites of commercial and economic exchange, and on the other, to project narrative on any registered event.

Reality Cinema/Live Video takes on the notion of “reality art” and the street spectacle that often seems to be more attractive than a movie or an art experience. Potential movie scenarios include a few lonely souls in the theater on a rainy day looking out onto a wet, empty street or an exuberant crowd of tourists filling the theater watching construction workers unloading a truck.  As in the traditional cinematic experience, the defining moment of this spectacle will be the experience of the shared viewpoint.

For additional information, please contact: Claire Sexton

tel: (212) 219 0473 x 31, Art in General, 79 Walker Street,

New York NY 10013

212 219 0473 tel, 212 219 0511 fax

press@artingeneral.org

Opening Hours:  Tuesday – Saturday 12 – 6pm

Andrew Cassese, an actor well-known for his role as Harold Wormser from Revenge of the Nerds, and I got together to discuss his fetish for shrinking women, or microphilia. We decided it would be fun to do a photo shoot illustrating his fantasy.

Andrew says, “I have always been fascinated by it.  I’ve never been able to pin it down. It’s just something I’ve always felt.  I fantasize about a full grown woman shrinking, rings and clothes falling off as she gets smaller.  While most people with this fetish are concerned with the idea of a tiny woman, the process of a full grown woman transforming into a small woman is what gets me excited.”

Last year, I visited beautiful San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua.

My dear friend lives down there and has been helping the community by donating time and materials to the library and shelter.  After I graduate with my MSW, I’d like to spend some time there volunteering. If you’d like to donate any resources to Casa de la Mujer, his contact information is below.

**********************************************************

The name is Casa de la Mujer.  House of the woman literally.  Its purpose is to get woman away from abusive husbands.  We are also setting up programs to help the women become self sufficient so they don’t ever have to go back to abusive relationships.  As you can imagine it’s a very difficult thing for us to do.  There is no money from the government.  When I found out about the Casa de Mujer, they didn’t even have water.  Someone had stolen the water pipes to the house as well as broken in and stolen everything.  The woman who runs the organization is a very nice Nica woman who is a volunteer.  She is overwhelmed and unequipped to do anything.  Rachel and I paid for local laborers to install water to the casa but they stopped half way and demanded more money.  I finished the job with a few volunteers myself.  Today we are using donated money to buy cleaning supplies. This weekend we going to paint with volunteers and donated paint and supplies.  My friend Bonnie is giving free English Lessons.  Many of the people in the classes are under 16 years old and already have children.  Most of the these people can not read or write in Spanish let alone English.  Without help, they and their kids have a future of being poor, abused, uneducated and unskilled.  We would like to break this cycle and give these women hope and the means to better themselves.  Here is a list of what needs to be done.

1. Purchase cleaning supplies and clean the Casa.
2. Purchase paint supplies and receive donations of paint and supplies.  Paint the Casa.
3. Review and update the charter.
4. I will do a security review, donate an alarm system and make sure these woman are safe if the men they leave try to retaliate.   
5. Make sure these woman get any medical treatment that they need.
6. Form a board of directors to oversee the operation of the Casa.

I have been asked to be on the board and to oversee the distribution of the funds. For the time being I am going to handle all the donations as well as being the PR person for the Casa de Mujer.  Once the board is formed the board will decide how to handle things from there.  We are also looking into forming a USA based foundation so we can make any donations from the USA tax deductable.

I am attaching pictures of the casa in its current state to this email.  If you would like to do a fund raiser or help in any way please let me know.  We sure could use more help.

Lee Greenberg
Owner: TECH-Nica SA
San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua

Office:  505.568.2082  Cell: 505.808.3255  USA Phone:  (703) 738-4478

www.tech-nica.net

The Obama campaign just launched a new one-stop voter registration website called Vote for Change:

http://my.barackobama.com/vfc

You can check your registration status, register to vote, look up early-vote information for your state, apply to vote absentee, or even find your polling place.

It’s the easiest and most important thing you can do to bring the change we need. Make sure your voice is heard.

—————————————-

“I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.”

From Eve Ensler’s essay Drill, Drill, Drill

Perhaps it’s because I’m a Virgo and more tuned in to other Virgos; but it seems to me that there are a myriad of us running around. If you do the math, we were conceived around the holiday season.  Hot toddies, egg nog, and champagne + celebration, revelry, and joy = SEX.

So to all of the many beautiful Virgos I know and love, Happy Birthday!  xox, Zoe

photo credit: Natalie Chan