richardsebastian.com

The Richmond SPCA’s Robin Starr sent out another update about the cat colony living behind WRLH-Fox Richmond and the ongoing disgraceful actions of that shiny, sugary, and apparantly predatory bauble of a local broadcast station, whose news division has been voted “The mid-South’s Most Sycophantic News Team” two years running, by the way. The email from Robin Starr is below. If you care about these cats, and appreciate the work of the local humane groups, consider donating your time and some bejamins to these groups.

After we made our supporters aware of the horrifying steps taken by WRLH Fox Richmond to destroy a colony of feral cats living behind their television station last week, we were overwhelmed with the heartfelt support expressed to us in so many ways.Your swift and powerful backing of our defense of these innocent animals has made a great difference in their prospects for the future.I now want to provide you with an update on their situation.

History
The feral cat colony in question has lived behind the businesses in the 1900 block of Westmoreland Street for at least 30 years and has been well cared for by at least two caregivers.Many had already been trapped, brought to the Richmond SPCA’s spay/neuter clinic for surgeries and given appropriate inoculations.While most of the adults are feral and run from direct human contact, some of the adult cats are sociable and were probably strays that somehow wandered into the colony over the years.

What Happened to Them
We have had confirmation that Critter Control, the pest control company that was hired by Fox, trapped and killed three adult cats before we were ever aware of Fox’s efforts to destroy the colony.Critter Control wisely decided to cease its trapping activities.That was when Fox undertook to bulldoze the habitat in which the cats have lived for decades.When I heard from the station manager that the bulldozing was underway, we asked local media to come to the scene.They filmed the destruction in process and, I assume due to the discomfort of conducting this brutality in front of television cameras, Fox decided to stop after having destroyed about half of the cats’ home.

What is Happening Now
Since that time, Fox has continued to tell the story that they are working with local humane groups to trap and remove the cats but they have never contacted the Richmond SPCA nor any other humane organization of which I am aware for such assistance.Henrico County has said that they are investigating the matter and whether criminal charges will be brought.We are working in a strong partnership with SOS, Somebuddies and other humane organizations and volunteers to care for and manage the colony in the proper way through a trap-neuter-return program.

Kind volunteers are trapping the cats, taking them either to Prevent-A-Litter or to the Richmond SPCA for spaying and neutering and for basic veterinary care and inoculations.The cats that are not truly feral but exhibit sociable behavior will be adopted to responsible and loving homes and the same will be true of the kittens that are small enough to socialize.The feral adults will be returned to the colony to live there and be managed under our ongoing partnership trap-neuter-return program.That is, unless Fox takes further steps to remove or kill them.

Our Approach
Relocating a feral colony is a difficult proposition that is usually not in the best interests of the cats.The cats are usually very frightened and disoriented and will not stay in the new location unless they are provided with a large condo unit to keep them there until they recognize it as home.This often takes a long time. If they are not kept in such a unit, they will run away and find themselves in a location where they do not know how to take care of themselves.The well recognized best practice is to allow the colony to remain in place and be managed in a TNR program. Since there are a number of other feral colonies in the area, relocation is likely to be totally unproductive since the other cats will probably just move into the vacated territory.

We have released a joint statement with our partner organizations working on this matter explaining our approach to the public. Click here to read the statement >>

What Happens Next
We do not know what Fox plans to do next. If any further steps are taken to hurt the cats or destroy their habitat, you may be assured that we will be there to do all in our power to protect the animals.And, we will ask for your help. If you are interested in adopting one of the kittens or sociable adult cats from the colony, please contact SOS or visit their website for pictures and adoption information (http://www.saveourshelters.com/ or http://www.sos-penpals.com/).

Your compassionate response to this situation through your massive numbers of outraged calls to the media and to WRLH, signing of online petitions, blog postings, and expressions of your heartfelt support to us has been incredibly powerful.I have received copies of numerous messages from local businesses saying that they will be pulling their advertising from WRLH because of their treatment of these innocent creatures.Because of your support for the Richmond SPCA and your deep caring concern for the companion animals that share our world, we are a force for animals.

Gratefully,

Robin Robertson Starr
Chief Executive Officer
Richmond SPCA

Peter Griffin, Homer Simpson, Judge Judy, and Charlie Sheen: I couldn’t think of more appropriate company to place the caricatures called the Fox news team. It isn’t enough that Sinclair Broadcasting-owned Fox Richmond violates our community nightly, along with our other local *news* outlets, with superficial and utterly useless broadcasts of weather warnings, traffic alerts, and crime-porn. Now they are inflicting violence and ineptitude on the kittehs, moving to exterminate a colony of feral cats living on their property despite offers of assistance from local animal groups. Here’s the real kicker–after howls of protest from the community, lead by the Richmond SPCA–they lied, and continue to lie, about partnering with local groups to humanely relocate the remaining colony (the ones they didn’t kill).

Go to the Richmond SPCA site for more info. Most of all you can STOP WATCHING.

I should say props to WRIC news for actually covering, and continuing to cover, this local story.

Richmond Free Wireless (RFW) is a new community-based project with a goal of bringing free wireless Internet access to the Richmond area and, eventually, the state. That’s right: free access. The project encourages volunteers (aka heroes) to share a gateway connection from their home or business using a fairly inexpensive and easy to set-up piece of technology called a Meraki repeater. RFW was recently given some virtual ink on Richmond.com:

Explaining how to create a city-wide network can become mind-boggling, but here’s the gist. First, get a few people living on the same city block interested in sharing an common Internet connection. Each person then goes online and purchases a “Meraki repeater node” – a piece of technology that lets the Internet signal “bounce” between other nodes on the community network.

Each person then goes to their home or office, plugs in their node, and registers the node’s unique ID number and their street address on [the] RFW website, richmondfreewifi.org.

With enough participants, the nodes overlap and provide the city with more or less blanket wifi coverage.
It is good to see this exciting project getting some attention, especially this early on in the project. Getting the word out the the larger Richmond community will be an important part of making this project a success. While the wifi acees will be a free public commodity–part of the Richmond commons–it does require a handful of citizens to step up and be willing to support their little piece of the network by buying a repeater and sharing some broadband bandwidth.

The educational implications of this project are especially exciting. Free wireless, especially in and around poorer communities, is yet another way to provide lower-income students with much needed access the Internet.

If you are interested in hosting a repeater, fill out the contact form on the RFW site.

Say what you will about Mayor Doug Wilder, he is not a lazy man. Not busy enough single-handedly busting up the rusted guts of Richmond city government, he is now taking on Web 2.0 by explaining (as patiently as he can, understand) the exciting new world of online collaboration. This week he clarifies once and for all what the term RSS really stands for: Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Syndication (guess what–it’s neither).
Go to Richmond.com to submit a question to the Mayor about podcasting, social bookmarking, or tagging, or to post a comment to the mayor’s blog.

Dancer Moses Pendleton made a big impression on me when I was 13 or 14 years old. Not as a dancer, but as an eccentric personality and avante-garde artist. After watching a PBS documentary called Dance in America in which Moses was featured, I started carrying around a cheap tape recorder in my pocket and recording every minute of my day, like Moses did in the film. In the documentary, Moses, whose elongated features reminded me of an exaggerated Mick Fleetwood, had an an enormous wooden chest in his NY apartment overflowing with tapes of his daily recordings. The best thing about those tapes, though, and what made me want to imitate him, was that he threw them into the chest without ever listening to them. In fact, he never listened to them. For some reason, I thought that was brilliant. So I tried it too, but quickly came to realize I wasn’t as committed to the idea as he was. And besides, I was sending all of my paper route money to TDK.
Last night, Moses’s dance company Momix was at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for a performance called The Lunar Sea. This performance clearly demonstrated that Moses is as much an artist, or in his words, an illusionist, as a dancer. The performance was about an hour and half long, without a break, and took place behind a large scrim at the front of the stage that displayed close-up images of astral objects and natural landscapes. The dancers moved behind the scrim, their bodies transformed by black-lights and reflective costumes into organic shapes that seemed to float on air, like undersea creatures.

From a review by The Stage:

Dancers morph into one another, their foreheads pressed together, bodies rippling in clever physical illusion to become ghosts flitting through the night, ethereal mermaids swimming across the dark stage, ice skating planets, glowing, shunting, whirling and spinning mid-air.

The brilliance of the company can be seen in that they do not only rely on the spectacle created by costumes and props but by the shapes that can be created by the body and that powerful tool - the imagination. Give them a shower curtain and an umbrella and you get jellyfish. Give them a pair of stripy Camden market tights and you get a carnivorous spider or two.

The music was as ambient and ethereal as the dancers’ movements, creating an otherworldly, underwater atmosphere.

Still, for me, the overall performace came off as a bit gimmicky. I enjoyed its visual cleverness and imagination, but after the initial and quite pleasing opening performance, the visual tricks got a bit old, and I yearned for a respite from the floaty, eerie, Windham Hill world on stage. And besides, the images dancing across the scrim often seemed too neutral and predictable, and I wondered if they were actually just big Windows Vista screensavers.

I also couldn’t help comparing this performance to the BattleWorks performance we saw at Modlin last fall, but perhaps this is unfair. The two performances had quite different goals and used radically different techniques. Still, I suppose I was in the mood for something more physical and visceral, like Robert Battle’s pieces, not the hypnotic, aquatic mood piece of The Lunar Sea.

As anyone who has lived in this city for any length of time knows, Richmond has its gaze fixed longingly toward the past. Back toward the ante-bellum South, the Civil War, to a long-gone era where the city was at the height of its powers and influence. For decades, city leaders and a complacent Richmond public have figured that the only way to recapture the faded glory of yesteryear is to try to keep the past alive instead of making an effort to reorient the city’s future toward new ideas and a new vision.

So I was surprised to see two “futurists” listed as speakers at last night’s Richmond Forum event. The first was Alvin Toffler, author of the influential book Future Shock. Appearing beside him was New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of two slim but popular volumes, The Tipping Point and Blink.

The speakers that the Richmond Forum usually attracts rarely capture my interest. In the past they have skewed toward the conservative side, with more political figures and entertainers than academics or thinkers, and more males than females. And they have tended to be older, more mainstream speakers–John Glenn, Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger, etc. You get the picture. So, I was especially interested to see Malcolm Gladwell, with his shock of reddish kinky hair, appearing before the somewhat geriatric and brightly bow-tied Richmond establishment. When I called about buying tickets, though, I found they were priced to keep the slackers, punks, and low-culture types like me out of the conversation. Thankfully, a friend of my dear, sweet mama had season tickets and couldn’t make it, and offered the tickets to us.

Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves despite some typical Richmond touches that prevented us from being too impressed. For example, the stage set was ludicrous. The stage was dominated by 5 towering fiberglass, faux-finished Corinthian columns , each surrounded by potted ferns. The columns had the effect of dwarfing the speakers, making them look Hobbit-sized. Before the presentation, a slide of the American flag was displayed, and we all stood to sing the National Anthem (Odd that I find that act to be divisive and partisan). I figured it was just something the old-schoolers in the audience were accustomed to–like saying grace before dinner, opening a door for a lady, and taking off one’s hat indoors.

Toffler talked about his new book, Revolutionary Wealth, highlighting an emerging new economic model that measures not only traditional markets, but also a growing non-money economy created (by among other things) the open-source movement and user-generated products, all made possible by Web 2.0 and the knowledge economy. He referred to this as prosumer participation–productive consumers–and cited YouTube and–a bit anachronistically–Famous Amos as illustrative examples of how non-monetary economies become marketized, and cited Napster as an example of how money economies become demarketized.

Much of what Toffler discussed was old news, in a sped-up, Future Shock sense at least. With Time declaring You (or is it Me?) Person of the Year due to the explosion and influence of personal media and social networking tools, Toffler the futurist seems to be playing catch-up. He didn’t even mention the real fortunes being made off of virtual goods in digital worlds such as Second Life. Do I pay a personal property tax on my 512 square feet of land in Second Life? How will this new revolutionary economy handle places like SL?

When Gladwell took the podium, he clarified that he was not, like Toffler, a futurist. His presentation was pretty much a rehash of a recent New Yorker article in which he framed the current information revolution around a Puzzles vs Mysteries analogy. Basically, to solve a puzzle, we need to collect more information. Once we get enough information, we can solve the puzzle. For mysteries, it isn’t a matter of collecting more information but sorting through and selecting the right information,  which should lead to one of (perhaps) several solutions. He used Watergate as an example of a puzzle. Woodward and Bernstein had to gather hidden information by tapping anonymous sources and using old fashioned investigative procedures until they had enough information to expose and bring down President Nixon. In contrast, Enron was exposed not by uncovering hidden information, but by meticulously sorting through and closely examining dense, complex information that was readily available from Enron’s website.

Gladwell believes that more and more we live in a world of mysteries, requiring a new set of specialized skills in which we don’t need more information but need to find the right information (take that, NSA). Gladwell’s ideas were fairly *lite* and superficial compared to Toffler’s notable gravitas. He stuck with his well-researched repertoire, and during the discussion period had trouble extending any of his ideas to several, perceptive questions from the audience. I suppose this is a fairly responsible approach–why would he know anymore than anyone else how the information age will effect organized religion? Still, his reluctance to engage turned what could have been a lively debate into a pretty staid, one-sided conversation.

It was an enjoyable evening overall, and as Elaine and I strolled arm in arm out of the Landmark Theater and into the Richmond streets, we were met with an unseasonably warm breeze as we turned toward where our car was parked. Perhaps it was the winds of change, finally arriving in Richmond after such a long, long absence. Or it could have been just a bunch of hot air.

Tip of the hat to my friend Jill, who sent me a link to the Seeds of Tolerance documentary video contest. Unfortunately, online voting has ended for this, but you can tune in to the site to see which video wins. One of the videos is about the sad, sad history of Virginia’s Native American tribes called Ghost Tribes. Another is an independent video by Richmond resident Lucas Krost called One Nation Under Guard about the swelling population of inmates in America’s prison system

There are some interesting connections here, having nothing to do with this contest. Jill is Native American and replaced me as the ABE/GED teacher at a local jail. Coincidentally, I have a bit of history with Lucas Krost, too. For some reason I remember signing him up for a membership at the independent video store in Richmond where I worked, geez, 12 years ago. I like to believe this made a significant impact on his filmmaking career.

We are heading over to Southside this Sunday night (Dec. 3rd) to see The River City Rollergirl’s debut bout, festively named Season Beatings. The ladies take on, well, each other, dividing into 2 teams: the Abominable Snow Women vs. the Disco Shockers. The sweaty nastiness takes place at Skateland on Hull Street. Toss in a little Octane Saints and some locally grown Luche Libre and you got yourself a full dance card, pardner.

Find out more about RCRs at http://rivercityrollergirls.org/