A monthly guide to stuff we think is cool


A new issue every
Friday morning

AUGUST 2ND, 2013 THE COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS - BOSTON ISSUE 14
Dispatches from an anti-authoritarian farm / by S.J. Lee


WEEKLIES


Coast 2 Coast by Krystina Krysiak
A hardcore tour.



by John Flynn
The National Security Agency.





by Liz Pelly
24 hours in Montreal.




By peculiar coincidence, early Tuesday and Friday mornings have become the “radical politics discussion hour” on my organic vegetable farm in middle Georgia.

Round about the time we are bunching kale still soaked in dew, the conversation turns to the kind of things that anti-authoritarian farmers are especially concerned with: intersectionality, race and labor issues, sustainability, the future. We see in our return to the soil a place to plant roots of resistance against a food culture run by corporate interests, poisoning our bodies and our planet, fueled by existing racial and economic hegemonies, and dependent on the exploitation of bodies of color and excessive cruelty towards non-human animals.

We talk also about our experiences as activists, and the frustrations that we have felt when trying to make food and environmental justice a priority. Why is food so often left out of the . . .

The fifth year of the Czech Republic’s Creepy Teepee Festival / by Taylor Miles

My doctor said to eat fruit and rest. His other advice: “No parties and no sun.”

I listen to him for three days. But on the fourth day, I hear about Creepy Teepee, an underground music festival that takes place in Kutná Hora. The town is about an hour outside of Prague, where I’ve been living and working this summer.

That Saturday, I decide to catch a train from Prague’s main station. I arrive in Kutná Hora by early afternoon, just in time for the second day of the festival. My head is underwater with pressure but I don’t care. As I start wandering toward Kutná Hora’s

Centrum (the center of the city), I can’t tell if I am sweating from the sun, the decongestants, or if I’m hitting a fever. So much for my doctor’s advice.

Kutná Hora, surrounded by a lush green landscape, is known for its beauty and its churches. The Ossuary is a very distinct one,part of the Cemetery Church of All Saints that houses bones from at least 40,000 people, arranged into various decorations, such as giant skull formations, and a chandelier containing all the bones in the human body.

As I come up a hill near the center, I look to my right, and see dozens of people lying in the grass.

Behind them, I see a hand-painted Creepy Teepee sign peaking out from a gate enclosing the festival’s location, an ex-brewery with a traditional red roof, pale exterior, and towering central brick chimney.

By then, it is a late sunny afternoon. In the former brewery’s courtyard, I catch a set by Dracula Lewis, the stage name of 31-year-old Italian electronic musician Simone Trabucchi. He immediately has my attention with his psychedelic sounds, which bring me to another place entirely.

Trabucchi disregards the stage, playing his entire set on the ground with the audience. A punk

old-school suitcase encases pieces of his sound system. Some audience members watch from above on a secret roof cove. In all of its bizarre noise, I don’t want his set to end.

+++

“I don’t like the stage,” Trabucchi says, sitting on a curb the next day, the sun still strong and high above the stage. “It’s too big. So I prefer to be playing on the floor. I think it was a good choice for everybody.”

Trabucchi started the music project Dracula Lewis about six years ago. Over the years, he’s released music with Souterrain . . .


ABOUT                              CONTACT                              CONTRIBUTORS                              DONATE