Photos by Fred Askew

For years now we’ve had a Christmas truce with the family–don’t shop for us and we won’t shop for you. So far the truce has held and we’ve been able to avoid Christmas shopping, as we’d rather be waterboarded than spend a second in a shopping mall.

We had planned to issue an anti-Christmas harangue, but this holiday season we’ll leave it to the Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. The Homegrown Revolution mailbox received its first plea for publicity this week with an invite to a preview screening of the Reverend Billy’s new documentary, What Would Jesus Buy. We’ll keep to talk of compost and chickens and leave the film criticism to the folks at Cahiers du Cinema, but we’ll make an exception for What Would Jesus Buy. We enjoyed this movie immensely for its anarchic stick-it-to the-Man attitude, and Reverend Billy’s tireless efforts to exorcise the demons of Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Disney.

What Would Jesus Buy opens on November 21st in Los Angeles at the Sunset 5 theater. Check the What Would Jesus Buy website for listings in other cities and for a preview.

Now part of Reverend Billy’s message is about shopping locally so we’d be remiss by not highlighting our comrade Doug Harvey’s upcoming Christmas themed screening at the Echo Park Film Center on December 15th at 8 p.m. Doug will be showing experts from the suppressed and highly challenging Star Wars Holiday Special that will stop the shopping urges of even the most credit addicted shopaholic.

Today, October 24th, is Take Back Your Time Day which, according to the website www.timeday.org, is “a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.”

So take it easy out there.

Homegrown Revolution has never been to Burning Man, but we’re big fans of the movie The Wicker Man and we figure it’s probably similar, which is why we’re happy to announce that we’ll be doing a brief appearance at the Los Angeles Burning Man Decompression this Saturday October 13th in support of our book The Urban Homesteader, due out next May from Process Media. The Burning Man Decom will take place on Sante Fe between the 4th and 6th Street Bridges in the Artist District deep in the beating heart of downtown Los Angeles (map). We’ll be delivering a harangue sometime around 4 or 5 pm. Come out and see us and stay for the sacrifice!

In honor of World Car Free Day celebrated every September 22nd Homegrown Revolution presents an open letter:

Dear middle-aged office lady who tried to run me down while I was walking my dog in a cross walk across a quiet residential street,

I know you’re in a hurry to get to your job to pay for the $40,000 behemoth you use to transport yourself. Let me extend a welcome to my neighborhood which you use as an alternative to the freeway. It’s not the first time me, my wife, friends and neighbors have been threatened by folks like yourself piloting 6,800 pound death machines. It’s snarky but I have to point out our weight differential. Me and the doberman weigh a combined 240 pounds. It looks like you alone weigh that much due to your sedentary lifestyle. Add that 240 pounds to your multi-ton choice of transportation and I hope you understand why we’re angry when you seem to forget that me and the dog are living beings as you accelerate towards us.

Perhaps you just dropped off your kids at school. Too bad they’ll be suffering from type two diabetes because of inactivity, probably because when you’re not cruising around solo you’re ferrying those kids everywhere in your car. But I suppose it’s not safe for them to walk or ride their bikes to school because of all the SUV drivers like you playing chicken with pedestrians to see who can beat each other across the intersection.

I could keep ranting, mentioning the things we all know, the childhood asthma rates of our polluted city, the melting polar ice caps and dying polar bears, the 39,000 traffic fatalities on American roads, and all those folks dying in Iraq to supply the oil that feeds your addiction.

So perhaps morning rush hour was not the appropriate time for my Tienanmen Square moment of blocking your forward progress by standing in front of your custom grill to scold you for nearly killing me and my dog. How amusing that you circled your finger around your ear and pointed to me indicating wordlessly that you thought I was crazy. We’ll let history be the judge of who’s insane (I’m not putting my money on the oil addicted). In the meantime let’s focus on that tricked-out grill you paid extra for to enhance the meanness of what the designers in Detroit have already managed to make plenty sinister. Do me a favor, step back and ask yourself why you and the car manufacturers have altered the anthropomorphic features of front grills to express homicidal rage.

Oh angry middle-aged driver, would you have behaved better if instead of a cranky middle-aged eco-blogger dressed like the Unabomber and walking a doberman you had encountered a little girl on a pink bicycle with a golden retriever puppy? Perhaps this is why friends and neighbors of mine have all had the same idea of constructing a dummy child and puppy that we could fling out in the street suddenly to slow you all down. Or, is your head so brainwashed by automobile advertising that our animatronic ruse would only be a minor speed bump on the way to the office.

But let’s not end on the negative. Middle-aged office lady (I’m going to call you sister from now on) it’s time to set yourself free! Remember the words of the Situationist muse Guy Debord, “Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things and of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.” Break those chains liberated sister and get out of that Yukon. Slow down and live the authentic life! Remember what Debord also said, “Traffic Circulation is the organization of universal isolation. In this regard it constitutes the major problem of modern cities. It is the opposite of encounter, it absorbs the energies that could otherwise be devoted to encounters or to any sort of participation.”

Someday sister you will liberate yourself from that metal glass and plastic cage you’ve locked yourself in.

Happy World Car Free Day,

Homegrown Revolution