Update ( 19.3) : COMMUNITY WORKS : HOLLIS IS HOME !

[ A listing of Hollis Hawthorne Benefits Here + Below ]

Stop what you’re doing right now, just for a moment, and imagine Life and Death are knocking on your door with equal ferocity. And now that you’ve imagined it, Know For Certain they are Always Knocking. And wouldn’t it be good to know you have friends + family + extended family when you need them most !!?

We’ve been meaning to address the Health Care issue for some time, wanting to propose some sort of anarchic front and immediate bypass surgery (and/or electrical shocks) to the beleagured attempts of medical professionals, Washington bureaucrats, pharmaceutical giants, lobbyists, insurance and vacuum cleaner salesmen, and YEs… evil-doers! to fix the problem.

And rather than concocting a theoretical molitov cocktail and praxis redress to the ongoing national wounds ( not exactly a US nightmare alone, but certainly one of the more shameful examples ), a real life situation is writing the realtime prescriptions instead. Saves alot of time, and frankly we had no idea where and at whom to throw our love and weaponry first.

So before we get into the bloody bigger picture, one urgent story that needs your attention is Hollis Hawthorne, a SF bike-dancer/performer with the Bay Area Derailleurs, who was traveling in India and is now needing help returning home after a horrible hit-and-run accident.

Read the full rousing account by John Rinaldi aka Chicken John at Laughing Squid. Read updates here: Friends of Hollis Hawthorne. And DONATE !

The mobilization of her extended community making the incredible happen becomes in itself a multi-faceted artwork guide to inventing alternative social nets for all.

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Health Care From A DIY Anarcho-Syndicalist Insurance Sales Clown Perspective !

Warning: Reading further should be dangerous to the current For-Profit Health Care Industries, and should not be considered a substitute for State-Level Responsibility to provide an adequate universal strategy. Emergency grassroot supplements will cause severe inflammation of the public desire for more intelligent communities beyond swollen government limitations.

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Already a number of events and actions are in motion to assist in this one tragedy, but could we all possibly expect “a family circus” to arrive in our time of dire need ?! The efforts being mobilized in the situation above are a pretty unique episode, and a key word, to say it bluntly, is ‘pretty’, cause one could point out that this is a very fotogenic, and we dare say, ’sexy’ artworld cause. Doesn’t really address a zillion other misfortunes and particularly those which occur in the shadows, but the key concept for us here is in Chicken John’s call for an activated community, a 3-ring socialism that we’d rather have rush to the scene of an emergency over an accountant behind the desk of an insurance corporation anyday.

So maybe to patch the massive leaks of the failed and tangled systems, and one which will inevitably lack heart since a system will always be a detached, an abstract band-aid, something a citizenry attempts from a remote distance to do in order to retain a modicum of civility… in a clearly historical and uncivilized mess of typical human behaviours.

In other words what if the concept of INSURANCE, which will need to be renamed to separate it from the image of dark suit casino vultures doing the voodoo math on your deathbed, became a vibrant living entity with real compassion and empowered by a tribal network of your creative and caring peers.

So while we will have to return to this to flush out some specifics , an idea that was already floating in our collective conscience was that we need some sort of local DIY Community Insurance Policies, NOW ! We’ve got some scattered notes on the subject, and we’ll need to assemble them further for public use.

But to begin, lets start with the artworld since that’s the territory we know a bit about to build upon.

Why not establish an Art Insurance Policy?! All artists, like a trade union, a guild, should join their local “AIP ” ( temporary name), something like a volunteer Art Fire Brigade, which comes to the aid of anyone in our community that needs our help. Of course we must all go about our lives and cannot obviously respond to every emergency call, but given that everyone ( willing to admit it) is in some sense an artist… and that means quite an infinite brigade when it comes to developing a fundraiser for a neighbor in need.

Aside from one-off events, it could also be developing a Fund-base, a community bank ( something like Space Bank perhaps), collecting/saving thru both its cultural events, productions, and perhaps even member/citizen taxation, patronage, donators, etc. Neighbors in urgent need could then also apply ( situations would be selected by a tribal council) for support funds (with ZERO bureaucracy which tends to be a haunting lingering burden).

An army of musicians, djs, performers, filmmakers, writers, event producers, goodwill artists of all-stripes could form! Depending upon the various skills and capabilities of the various rhizomatic stations/orgs, perhaps all off-the-grid of typical non-profit organization hell and governmental oversight… and all ready to help a neighboring town’s brigade and causes if it needed artist reinforcements and such.

Of course emergency funds are just one means of coming to one’s aid. Of course the traditional hospitals and doctors are hardly a bygone institutional necessity… and hey we can only fix a few things at a time. In the immediacy we need to go either straight for the jugular vein of a vicious capital-propped madhouse we live in currently, and/or we need some 24 hour On Call insurance hackers, if u will, to be our friends in the storm. Shit, we might as well arm our DIY ‘Red Cross’ as well to keep the mafia republicrats out of the till and from fucking everything up with their fixed free market plunders, but ok that aspect requires a much much longer debate / auseinandersetzung.

Got any ideas for the AIP/ Community Art + Fire Brigades to begin forming ??! Drop us a line !

Of course we’ll have to come back and relate this to the miserable Health Summit flailing like a biblical doomsday circus in a corporate-nation jungle of predatory, merciless and saber-toothed neo-cons, and not to mention, locked in a cage of an entire government of vampire clowns from Hell.

tbc…

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A list of upcoming benefits for Hollis Hawthorne ( SF Bay Area, Portland, NYC, etc.):

7.3 > The Heart Knows No Borders, 342 Maujer St., Brooklyn

10.3 > For The Love Of Hollis, w/ members of the Yard Dogs, 316 NW 4th, Portland

12.3 > Gold Rush Benefit at Slim’s, SF

4.4 > TBA

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