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NOVEMBER 4, 2016 AN AD-FREE WEB-PAPER ISSUE 73
On DIY touring and mental health
An interview series by Bean Tupou

In May of 2016, during a long stretch of solo touring on the East Coast and the UK, I began to feel vulnerable and homesick. On this particular tour, I had a lot of time to reflect on the very act of touring in a way I hadn't before. These reflective, existential moments

would happen in the backseat of our forest green Volkswagen, the tiniest car I had ever squished my body into. (Cars in the U.K. are very small, I learned.) Driving through the anonymous English countryside, I thought, “This makes one really wonder about purpose.” What was mine?

The idea occurred that I didn’t have to just wonder to myself. I could ask other queer, black, brown, nonbinary, and female performers about their own experiences with touring. Why not seek advice and wisdom from my contemporaries? . . .

Capital punishment opponents, including many prisoners on death row, want voters to know about life without the possibility of parole / by Sam Lefebvre

Many opponents of state-sanctioned execution in California refer to prison sentences of life without parole as “the other death penalty.”

And they’re complicating voters’ choice come November 8th, when Californians reckon with two competing ballot measures to overhaul capital punishment: Proposition 66, which looks to expedite executions and save money; and Proposition 62, aimed at repealing the death penalty and resentencing the state’s current death row prisoners to life without the possibility of parole (LWOP).

To those who object to capital punishment, the choice between Prop 66’s bloodlust in the guise of fiscal responsibility and Prop 62’s bid to abolish a baldly barbaric fixture of the carceral state at first seems clear.

And yet many activists, including incarcerated people, emphasize that though there’s value to decommissioning the lethal-injection chamber at San Quentin State Prison — Prop 62 hardly impacts the state’s authority to condemn people to death; it softens, if anything, the language of death’s administration.

“Proposition 62 only appears progressive,” said Mohamed Shehk of the prison-abolitionist organization Critical Resistance, which is nationally headquartered in Oakland. Like Proposition 47 — which in 2014 reduced certain drug felonies to misdemeanors but also amplified police presence in public schools — Shehk cast Prop 62 as a reform that actually expands the prison-industrial complex. ...




The Media's fourth annual editorial meeting, an all-ages space for Arcata, and more.



PHOTOS




By Alex Kress



by Hannah Shields
Long Island Ladies, a DIY show-booking collective in suburbia.


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