Thank you so much to everyone who came out on this first weekend of spring break, day after St Paddy’s Sunday go to meeting at FrogSong with Burners Without Borders. As Carmen so aptly put it we were not so much meeting with Burners Without Borders, we are Burners Without Borders!
We learned about some of the projects BWB has worked on locally such as the sign the kids from the Phoenix made for Petaluma Bounty to beautify the spot where local folks can come to get free farm fresh produce. We talked about a project in Fresno where they organized to be able to keep chickens in their backyards with CCLUCK, and the Carver Gardens project in LA, and a really neat project in Chicago where just cutting the drain pipes and putting in rain barrels helped to prevent flooding. Water reclamation, flood prevention, these are all things we are excited about incorporating into our first project.
People are fired up locally about working to improve living conditions for migrant farm workers, and finding ways to beautify their surroundings and legitimatize their labor in the community. Working for parks, schools and placing art in public places, using art to bring visibility to both creativity and the surrounding wild spaces it is placed in, using recycled, reclaimed, upcycled materials, whimsical sculptural recreations of common objects that incorporate ecological components. A bench or a gateway for a garden that has a water collecting shade structure and raised beds with solar lighting. Lots of great ideas.
Art in public spaces is more BRAF than BWB so right now we don’t have anything specific we are working on that would fit into the civic model, which is fine. There is time for that later once we get ourselves established. Right now we are going to focus on the opportunity we have to work with the United Flyers of Sonoma to make a piece for the disc golf course going in at Taylor Mountain Open Space.
In about seven months the UFO’s will be installing baskets up at Taylor Mountain. We are going to propose a large scale interactive piece for the park – a whimsical recreation of a disc golf basket that is an interactive playstructure and observation platform. We will look into the feasibility of including water reclamation features, and find out what the safety requirements are which will determine how much of the structure will need to be new materials. We hope to construct most of it from scrap.
In other news, Mel lets us know that the Marin County Humane Society has a lot of chickens that need to be adopted. You can contact Mel at chippermel (at) lvha (dot) net if you want to help him out with building some coops and putting up fencing. He could really use a hand. Mel was one of the original Burners Without Borders down at Katrina, and it was really cool to see him at the salon. I really enjoyed hearing about Carmen’s journey from BMIR to BWB and the first project with the burn barrels down on Ocean Beach. It’s very inspiring, Regyna gets all choked up hearing about the people who lost everything building effigies and turning trash into art. The bold statement and the small gesture, there is value in both.
I knew a little about the disaster relief part of what BWB does. (please refer to above – BWB is you!) It was nice to hear more about the civic projects serving the under-served in small but powerful ways. Having a beautiful, colorful sign says we care about you, homeless people getting free food. It’s not a big deal, you’re not going to change their world with a sign really, you can’t eat a sign. But it will make you smile when you see it, and sometimes that is enough. I mean they funded a handcar for Regatta! Clearly they get whimsical.
Along with our ginormous, possibly climbable golf basket and it’s companion sculptural basket pole coozies we have been working on a little project with Ty Jones of Regatta fame. There is a property on Hewitt and N Dutton in the Historic Santa Rosa downtown which is owned by a city agency he is currently in negotiations with regarding a trade of manual labor in the form of landscaping and upkeep on a very not up kept property in exchange for possible use of such property for things like making ginormous art pieces, storing fabulously donated and found upcycling items, and having workshops offering art education to the public. With rilly cool artist support services and other perks for members sorts of things. We are beginning to form a board and create a nonprofit and perhaps our whole burner fabulous take the art to the masses agenda will mesh nicely with his arts promotion and economic development model. RLL certainly hopes so, but these things take time, and the learning curve is steep. woo there. am I on belay? more on that soon.
We have also been offered the temporary use of a lovely vacant lot in Petaluma to store any scrap items we might find that won’t fit out at Green Valley, or are just too durn heavy to cart out there. Yay, thank you! We are currently in negotiations to secure us a bay in the barn at Green Valley Village, so we will hopefully have workshop space there soon. There will be plenty of opportunity to pitch in out there too so if your name is Manuelle Labore then come on down to the barn and bring your gloves. Saturdays are a good day to help out, there is usually some project going on.
I’m thinking we go out before the skill share and just clean up a bit although things are in great shape out there in general. They do need some retrofitting to the barn before it can be used (and insured) for larger events, so some of our more skilled laborers are considering working out a trade in our favor. If you have contractor or other professional construction skills please contact Paolo at ppedrinazzi(at)yahoo(dot)com to volunteer. I know they need a sprinkler system, I don’t recall the other specifics but if you are interested find out more. It’s an awesome space, a lovely Victorian barn with a great dance floor and ceilings even a stilter could love. We may throw a whang dang doodle to fund some repairs because wow, what a great space to gather the community! We are very honored to be invited out to share it, and look forward to working on the farm together soon.
Enough meetings, let’s do stuff! That is all the blather that is fit to print today good cit’zens, and the story of how we find our way. Many ideas are percolating, the enthusiasm is there. We start somewhere, see how it goes and then lather rinse and repeat. We are on to great things, today is our day! and stuff. Bringing it home, borderlessly yours, RLL
- Tighthouse Kickstarter is in video editing!
- Porchfest collaboration with Hootenanny this summer!
- TRUTH by CowboyAngel from 2007 will be in San Rafael soon!
- He wants to do a block party with fire spinners and you!
- The Spirit of the Man ~ opens at Paradise Ridge May 11!
- Skill Share Fest at Green Valley Village April 14!
- Monthly Salon moves to Skill Share Fest for April!
- Regional Ranger Training April 15th!
- Arcata Town Meeting in June!
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