Presentation

Loose Lips is a Queer open mic night hosted by Austin based arts collective, Queer Sol. Come support local poets and musicians and queer artistic expression. Expect to be moved, expect a packed house, expect the unexpected, but above all come with an open mind and ear.

Sign up begins at 7:30, show begins at 8

This Loose Lips will be a little different this month. We're going to have some GREAT musical performances.

8:00 pm performances start/empiesa el flor y canto
9:30 pm Son Armado fandango and taller/ Son Armado empiesaloose lips el fandango y taller
10:00 pm Las Krudas

Meet us inside and feel free to BYOB

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Metahuman is a hip-hop lyricist, filmmaker, speaker and performance poet, a political dissident, radical transsexual activist, autobiographical confessionalist, outspoken social misfit, friend, lover, and teacher. Metahuman mixes politics with the visceral love of flow to create a unique sound that blends old-school rap metaphors with radical queer politics. Metahuman also writes and produces films, including the short comedy “Queerer Than Thou” which has screened at over 30 film festivals worldwide. He also runs the LA-based arts collective Trans/Giving.

In addition to the performance at Monkey Wrench, Metahuman will also present a workshop on transgender youth at the Abriendo Brecha VII conference at UT on Saturday, February 20th, 11:30-12:45, Asian Culture Room, Free and open to the public.

Representatives of the Speaker's Bureau for Austin's important comprehensive plan will be speaking at Monkeywrench to get community members involved in the planning process.

The Speakers Bureau presentation is designed to introduce citizens to the Comprehensive Planning Process and what it means for the Austin community. Here is the website for IMAGINE Austin: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/compplan/ The web site is loaded with information including the planning process, the project journal, how to sign up to the interest list and take the on-line survey.

While the Honduran military coup of June 28th, 2009 is not without historical precedent, the massive and ongoing Honduran resistance to it is. No one expected Hondurans to rise up as they have—daily and in the hundreds of thousands—in protest against a de facto government that can most accurately be described as fascist. One of the most interesting elements of the Honduran resistance is its avidly non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian character, despite a near-complete absence of self-consciously anarchist organizing within Honduras prior to the coup. In this talk Adrienne Pine will discuss what we can learn from the Honduran experience and how we can act in solidarity with Hondurans, whose situation has only worsened with the institutionalization of the coup government through a U.S.-led fraudulent election.

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As part of an ongoing series on Austin geography and history, geographer Eliot Tretter presents a talk about the City of Austin's urban renewal policy in the 1960s and 70s, the University of Texas' expansion plan, and its impact on the Blackland neighborhood in East Austin.

The caravan Journey for Justice is coming to Austin to denounce the role of the School of the Americas--a notorious combat training facility in Fort Benning, Georgia for Latin American soldiers--in the killing of Jesuit Priests on November 16, 1989, and a series of other human rights abuses. Graduates from the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, have been linked to various forms of torture, murder, assassination and rape. The tour is on its way to Fort Benning, Georgia for the annual vigil in front of the gates of the School of the Americas.

Carlos Maurico will speak on his experience as a torture survivor, escaping the grip of Salvadoran death squads during the civil war in the 1980s and taking those responsible to justice.

For information on the upcoming march, visit: http://soaw.org/

We will show the "recipee" used repeatedly by the CIA and US State Dept. to destabilize countries before a coup is launched, assisted, and later legitimized, and how the School of the Americas has always played a training role in this system.

We will show "The Revolution Will not be Televised," a short documentary on the April 2002, U.S.-backed coup in Venezuela, to illustrate the day by day execution of the destabilization-coup-legitimization recipee. During a closing Q/A session we will explore current similarities and connections between Honduras and Venezuela.

The "Revolution Will Not Be Televised" will also be presented as a work which inspired Oliver Stone to produce his latest documentary which places Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leadcers vilified by the US Media and State Dept. in a larger context.

As consolidation and a lack of diversity in mass media grow in the U.S., a movement of media reformers, community media-makers and activists is resisting the corporate control of how we communicate.

This past July, the Allied Media Conference in Detroit was a gathering space to address this. Local media activists and filmmakers will report back on the issues covered at this conference and the national organizing movements which met there. This interactive discussion will focus on how the policies of media justice are crucial to all communities and social justice movements.

Steven Hebbard will be presenting and leading a discussion on the topic of : Scaling our Communities to the Size of Our Diets.

What does it mean to flourish as a human being? Most people are thinking about how they’re going to save their job or afford that car, not insignificant thoughts like human flourishing. What might look different in this country if we asked what it meant to flourish as a nation rather than what our Gross Domestic Product is? How might such a framing for life affect the way we see our local community? How might this change the way we approach our three daily meals? In this discussion we’ll be looking at the effect that our choice to be active members of our local communities can have on our ability to imagine a better world than the one in which we live, and the essential role that a local food movement could play in making such a world possible. Another world is possible.