A few of us attended the Left Forum this weekend, and with the exception of an embarrassingly biased panel on the current civil war in Labor, had a pleasant enough time. Besides picking up a new Burn Collector, we saw some great stuff from some wonderful places, not least of which include the
Just Seeds Collective (who we have bought enough prints from to decorate numerous rooms in the apartment I am in and who we would stop buying prints from if they would only quit making such nice prints),
Deep Dish TV,
Autonomedia, and the relatively new
PM Press who put out the
Big Noise Dispatches series that we love so much.
Why are we name dropping so blatantly? Well, we enjoyed the conference, but we have a longstanding and complicated relationship to the "big-L" Left and can't help but notice that these left media and art institutions, that provide us such wonderful and enriching material, are not funded by our opponents, the rich. And so they really do need all the help they can get to stay afloat and get to the next level. So if you're getting birthday gifts for Aunt genericname or looking to learn more about topic Imakeupoffthetopofmyhead, instead of heading to the mall for a boring print or amazon for the book, maybe check out some of these fine institutions, their fine wares, and get it from them at the source and make sure none of it gets skimmed off the top to some megacorp that we all hate.
