All Sorts of New Trouble to Get Into!

So, we have been a little busy here picking banjos and figuring out the mystical world of Accordion playing, and have neglected the updates. Here is a really brief update.

COMING UP:

Friday Oct. 3rd - 5:00 PM meet-up at the franklin house with your bike to gear up for the first ever St. Charles Critical Mass at 6:00 pm at Picasso's on Main Street. Critical Mass is an international bike ride, taking place in cities all over the world, traditionally on the first Friday of each month. Come take back the streets with us for an hour or two. Bring noisemakers and dress in a festive manner. Then at 8:00 head back to Picasso's for Virginia Harold's art opening!

Sunday Oct. 5th - Eddy Burke will be gracing our Sunday Potluck with his folk music sensibilities. http://www.myspace.com/thelegendofeddyburke Come on out for the regular veggie potluck and enjoy the musical guest.

Saturday Oct. 11th - This is a big ass fucking day. Get the Folk Up 1-9 pm Sat, Oct 11On the Quad(In case of rain, 3-9 pm, Grant Gym)A student-run, social-activist festival. Bands, booths, & more.A Year of International Human Rights event. Featuring David Rovics, the Riot Folk collective and some incarnation of holy!holy!holy! All of this at Webster University. We are hoping it runs until 8:00 instead of so everyone can make it on over here for the after party also featuring David Rovics. If you have never seen

David before, then there is a good chance you

have not been to many franklin house events, as he is our honorary house musician, even

though he hails from Portland OR, and spends a

great deal of his time flying around the world to play at all the best riots.

I believe the Riot Folk crew will be joining us for this evening as well, and we will be hearing more songs and doing a jam session until around 10:00 or so when we will be holding a very special premiere for Michael Moore's new film, Slacker Uprising. Right here in the back yard of the franklin house, we will be rolling out the red carpet to have a true blue film premiere, and for free to top it off. We will be asking for donations to help us recover from the vast amount of expenses we racked up this summer running this collective, no to mention all the hookers, booze and gambling we do!

This film tackles the 2004 tour that Moore pulled together as a last ditch effort to defeat GW in the last elections. It failed, and that is the basis for the film and for our discussion. Will mass youth voting movements work to creat change, or do we need to find new venues for democratic action? Be here for the music, the film and the discussion.

Monday October 13th - Klatt, Midas & Barnett. Join us on this Monday for an evening of your cool uncle's favorite music. Folk was once the voice of the people, as frog like as that voice may have sounded, and it sprang up from the Beat generations seedy cafe's in plenty. Jack Klatt, Bryce Midas, and Gabe Barnett have harnassed that raw energy and jumbled it up with some punk influenza to give us the raucus folk of today that we hip kids dig so much. Get your ass on out here and support this Minneapolis 3, and foloowing their performance, we may be showing a film. Or just picking banjos till the neighbors start shootin'.

So there is the next few weeks of your life, planned out for you courtesy of the Franklin House.

Oh, and by the way, check out the artical in Sunday's paper about a couple of us here: http://stcharlesjournal.stltoday.com/articles/2008/09/21/news/sj2tn20080920-0921stc-neigh0.ii1.txt not bad for small town journalism.

Come support the arts!

See you there!

This Tuesday Night, Here!

This Tuesday, as an addition to our Casino*Town Poet's night, we will be featuring Dirty Fist!, live for you all. Check them out at: www.myspace.com/dirtyfist or at the franklin house myspace, www.myspace.com/thefranklinhouse . this should be a rad show, so fucking be here, and if you can, bring some money for these travelling musicians, you cheap bastards!

The Case For Violence

Derrick Jensen is arguably the most contraversial author and speaker concerning the defense of the earth at all cost, and also possibly the most effective. In his two part epic manifesto, Jensen lays it out as clearly as possible, using plain english (or Finnish, Hebrew, Dutch, German or Danish if you prefer) that civilization, as we know it, can never sustain itself. This, Jensen points out, is not unlike the "great civilizations" that now line the oceans floor or the walls of a museum, and is also unique, in that the enemy we have now created is not an outside force waiting to invade and enslave the civilization, but is in fact ourselves, crumbling from the inside. He also points out the ominous truth that those who are profiting from this demise, will not stop on their own, and therefore, as reason follows, must be stopped.

Do not get me wrong, Derrick is not volleying for the salvation of this civilization, rather, a more expiditious decline. His belief is in the soil and waters of the Earth that we have inhabited since day one of our existence, and have destroyed over the past few thousand years. He lays out, clearly, the manmade deconstruction of the ecology of our living space, the vast abuse of resources by our cities, the greed driven raping of the rivers and wetlands, and the for profit depletion of entire populations of wild animals, and unlike liberal environmentalists, does not simply stop with the outline of our destruction. He procedes to make the most sane and logical case for violence that I have ever heard.

He is not talking about random, unjustified violence, like that used by the state in the form of police or military. Jensen speaks concisely of a bottom up defensive measure that is always shunned by a culture that is used to only one type of violence that is accepted, that being violence from the top down.

in an excerpt from Endgame: “We must keep in mind that the capitalist regime in Washington continues to harbor journalists, military leaders, politicians, and CEOs who have put in place and praised U.S. military and economic policies that kill millions of people annually.”

Anytime an act of defensive measure is reported on, of that defensive measure is carried out against "our" people, it is always, and without fail, reported as criminal and since 9/11, terroristic. Jensen inverts that upon the state, and points out it's bias and it's ludicrousy.

I do not want to paint him as a stern faced revolutionary though, well not always. Jensen is quite possibly the funniest and most enjoyable person to listen to in modern day journalism. Whether he is rewriting Star Wars, or mocking nearly every single group on "the left", or telling simple schoolyard jokes, he has the charm and wit of a Lenny Bruce. Derrick will be joining us on my radio show, Rabble Rouse Radio, on Monday September 29th, at 9:00 PM to listen to Derrick speak and have a chance to call in with a question.

www.blogtalkradio.com/RABBLE

Amy Goodman, friend of the Franklin House, goes down by Fascist Police Tyranny!