Author Reese Erlich
2007-10-11 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
Will the United States and Iran Find Themselves at War? In The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis (Poli Point Press, 2007), author and journalist Reese Erlich shows how the U.S. government is planning to subvert the Iranian government and lie about it to the American people. He traces the troubled history between the two countries that has led to the current showdown over nuclear technology and he reports from Iran and northern Iraq to uncover details of how the U.S. has funded ethnic minorities to carry out guerrilla raids and terrorist bombings inside Iran. Potluck at 6 pm and talk at 7 pm.

In his previous book, the best-selling Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with Norman Solomon, 2003), Erlich presciently exposes the harsh realities and consequences of the run-up to the Iraq War and the media’s failure to present the full spectrum of the facts to the public.

Reese Erlich has been a working journalist for 40 years– starting as a staff writer and research editor for Ramparts, an investigative reporting magazine published in San Francisco from 1963 to 1975. Today he works as a freelance reporter, regularly filing print and broadcast stories for the Canadian and Australian Broadcasting Corporations, Radio Deutsche Welle and National Public Radio. His articles appear in the San Francisco Chronicle, St. Petersburg Times and the Dallas Morning News. His television documentaries have aired on PBS stations nationwide.

Produced by the Iran Working Group of Upper Hudson Peace Action and co-sponsored by Women Against War and Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace.

Haale
2007-10-12 20:00 - 22:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Haale, vocals, guitarMatt Kilmer, percussionChris Hoffman, cello

Haale evokes both the spiritual and traditional culture of her parents’ homeland of Iran and the energy of psychedelic rock and roll from the sounds of New York City, where she was born. Her music and her message are formed by the powerful combination of these influences, invoking both a swaying trance and a rock sensibility she describes as “psychedelic Sufi trance rock.”

Haale never strays far from the cultural and mystical influences of her Persian roots, but she’s no throwback to the New Age movement. Haale’s music is a new kind of global rock, and while some try to find the neat stylistic pigeonhole for her, the best response is to go along with her, wherever that may lead.

Co-sponsored by Women Against War.

"Mission Accomplished", 10/15 - 11/14/07
2007-10-15 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
A response to President Bush’s statement made early in the Iraq War, Christine Heller’s installation, Mission Accomplished is layered with the grey Muslim figures tangled in wire and fencing. Limp and skeletal, the figures are shells, souls, and shrouds. Their life is gone. They have faded from existence, faded from our consciousness, a reminder of lost identity and lost life. These figures represent American soldiers. Iraqi citizens, prisoners at Guantanamo, or those tortured at Abu Ghraib.

Since 2005, Christine Heller’s installations have focused on the devastating physical and emotional turmoil of the Iraq War including America Comes Home, about the ravaged lives of American Soldiers, In Our Name, about Iraqi children in the war, and Mission Accomplished, about the continuing struggle in Iraq.

Army of None
2007-10-17 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
With the Army of None Project, David Solnit aims to counter military recruitment, end war, and build a better world. He is traveling across the United States to share his knowledge and experience with the counter-recruitment movement, one of the fastest-growing, most strategic forms of community organizing.

The military recruitment complex insinuates itself into the daily lives of children and youth in ways of which most people are not aware. Millions of dollars are poured into advanced marketing strategies; recruiters walk freely into classrooms with false promises of a way out of poverty.

The Army of None Project argues that childhood should be free of military influence and the constant pressure to enlist. This is not just a way to protect our most valuable national resource– children; it is an effective way to take local action to provide equal opportunity and youth leadership training for those who bear the burden of fighting in Iraq and beyond.

Co-sponsored by Women Against War and Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace.

Journalists Dahr Jamail
2007-10-20 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for more than four years. He has reported extensively from inside Iraq for eight months and has also reported from Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Jamail has filed indispensable reports from Iraq that have made him this generation’s chronicler of the unfolding disaster there. In Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail brings us inside the Iraq we never see, presenting never-before-published details of the first two years of the occupation.

Now, as popular sentiment has turned against an occupation that has all but unraveled entirely, demand for independent reports has grown. Jamail’s consistent visits to occupied Iraq and courageous record of reportage from Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria make him an invaluable voice of dissent, bringing us inside Iraq inside the Iraq and Middle East we never see. Jamail writes for the Inter Press Service, The Asia Times, and many other outlets. His reports have been published in The Nation, The Sunday Herald, The Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, and The Independent, among other publications. On radio as well as television, Jamail has reported for Democracy Now!, and numerous other stations around the globe. Jamail is also a special correspondent for “Flashpoints” (KPFK Radio/Pacifica). He lives in California.

Co-sponsored by Women Against War. Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace and the Chatham Peace Initiative.

Free Jazz from the Sanctuary Presents Michael Vlatkovich Quartet
2007-10-22 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Michael Vlatkovich Quartet features Christopher Garcia, percussion; Jonathan Glove, electric cello; David Mott, baritone saxophone; Michael Vlatkovich, trombone. Trombonist, composer, and arranger Michael Vlatkovich is one of the leading talents among Los Angeles improvisational players. Located on the West Coast since 1973, he is an emotionally charged performer who has performed extensively in the United States, Canada, and Europe. According to Jazz Review, “Vlatkovich is the finest trombonist improvising today… While this music isn’t exactly ‘out there’ it is far from the ‘mainstream’. In the end, it doesn’t matter as this music shines in or outside of any context.” His improvisationally free music expresses raw power and beauty in a minimally structured format.

In addition to leading his own diverse imaginative ensembles, Vlatkovich has performed with a wide array of singers and instrumentalists including Peggy Lee, Brian Setzer, Bryan Adams, Bobby Bradford, Gerry Hemingway, Rob Blakeslee, Rich Halley, among many others. The trombonist has also performed on soundtracks for a variety of television and film projects including The Mask, Jingle All The Way, and the critically acclaimed John Cassavette’s film The Tempest.

One of the 13-part “Free Jazz from the Sanctuary” series recorded live at The Sanctuary for Independent Media – a unique celebration of freedom through creative expression. Co-produced by NY Media Alliance and the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

"Hands of God" with Filmmaker Joe Cultrera
2007-10-26 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
How does filmmaker Joe Cultrera’s film Hands of God (2006), about Catholic clergy abuse, not descend into depression? It helps when the victim doesn’t act like one but uses his own intellect and humor to fight back. Unlike any other look at this topic, Hand of God is a poetic and provocative tale of one survivor and his family beyond the headlines. statistics and ecclesiastical spin. Cultrera grounds the story of his brother Paul in the details of their Sicilian-American Catholic upbringing. From baptism to abuse, silence to dialogue, resignation to action, the film follows one person’s internal and external journey from potential priest to a scathing critic. Hand of God is a frankly told tale of betrayal. In balancing faith against disappointment, the subjects survive it all with their humor intact.

Nosferatu with the Devil Music Ensemble
2007-10-29 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
The Devil Music Ensemble performs their original score live to Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (F.W. Murnau, 1922), the classic black and white vampire movie. Devil Music Ensemble, formed in Boston in 1999, is comprised of Brendon Wood on guitars, lap steel, and synthesizer, and Tim Nylander on drums, percussion, and synthesizer.

"Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and Erosion of Integrity" with Author Anne Elizabeth Moore
2007-11-08 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Writer and activist Anne Elizabeth Moore investigates corporate America’s inroads into– and alliance with– the cultural underground in her just- published book, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and Erosion of Integrity (The New Press, 2007).

For years the do-it-yourself (DIY)/punk underground has worked against the logic of mass production and creative uniformity, disseminating radical ideals and directly making and trading goods and services. But what happens when the underground becomes just another market? What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are co-opted by corporate America? What happens to cultural resistance when it becomes just another marketing platform?

Moore is the co-editor of Punk Planet, the Best American Comics series editor, and the author of Hey Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People (Soft. Skull Press, 2004). She has written for Bitch, the Chicago Reader, In These Times, The Onion, The Progressive, and Chicago Public Radio WBEZ’s radio program 848. She lives in Chicago.

Free Jazz from the Sanctuary presents: "Sax, Soup, Poetry and Voice:" A Multimedia Performance with Nicole Peyrafitte and Joe Giardullo
2007-11-10 15:00 - 21:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Multimedia performance artist Nicole Peyrafitte was born in Luchon (French Pyrenees) into the 5th generation of a family of restaurateurs. Since moving to Albany in 1992, she has dedicated herself to multimedia art work. She considers each step of her work an attempt to fulfill her compulsion to learn through a process of immersion that generates performances incorporating voice/ painting/ videos/ writing and often cooking. Peyrafitte will be performing with saxophonist Joe Giardullo.

Presented with support from the New York State Music Fund.

Be The Media! Workshop with Carlos Pareja: Media Art in Your Activist Toolbox
2007-11-11 13:00 - 17:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
You know that media is your #2 issue, but what can you do about it? This workshop will examine an array of highly successful strategies and models of using media to advance social causes from around the world. Participants will learn how to use media as an organizing tool, and will have an opportunity to create an effective “Media Action Plan” for their respective campaigns or organizations. (Track: Growing the Grassroots.)

Author Michael Yates
2007-11-12 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
The road trip is a staple of modern American literature. In Michaels Yates’s Cheap Motels and a Hot Place: An Economist’s Travelogue (monthly review press, 2006) an economist hits the road, observing and interpreting the extraordinary range and spectacle of U.S. life, bringing out its conflicts and contradictions with humor and insight.

Disillusioned with academic life and thirty-two years of teaching economics, Michael Yates took early retirement in 2001 and with his wife Karen traveled around the country, often spending months at a time on the road. Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is both an account of their adventures and a penetrating examination of work and inequality, race and class, alienation and environmental degradation in the small towns and big cities of the contemporary United States.

Co-sponsored by the Troy Labor Council.

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
2007-11-14 07:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
A Map With Gaps (2006), directed by Alice Nelson, uses a combination of archive audio recordings, still photographs, drama reconstruction, and animation. This surreal and comic tale is an account of a journey made by the director’s father through Soviet Russia in the early 1970s in a van he built and named “Supervan.” Truth can indeed be stranger then fiction, and sometimes the area between the two is the most interesting place to explore.

In Today’s Man (2006), directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Nicky Gottlieb is a young man struggling to leave the comfort and safety of his parents’ home and find his place in the world. While he can calculate the square root of any number in the blink of an eye, he has trouble reading the simplest of facial expressions, making social interaction difficult. At the age of 21, he is diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. This loving portrait by his filmmaker sister is both a personal exploration of one family’s journey and a broader effort to understand this mysterious disorder.

Part of iEAR Presents!, co-sponsored by the Department of the Arts at RPI and funded in part by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Eye Music Portraits, 11/15 - 12/15/07
2007-11-15 18:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Photographers Andrzej Pilarczyk and Don McKever have specialized in photographing musicians across a broad spectrum of musical styles for several decades. By combining the visual principles of portraiture with a fine-arts aesthetic they have been independently documenting the ongoing evolution of jazz, blues, folk, African and Latin music- genres which are often overlooked and neglected by the mainstream music industry and press. The exhibition will be on view from November 15th through December 15th, 2007.

Don McKever has photographed almost every major jazz and blues musician who played over a period of 40 years.

Andrzej Pilarczyk has concentrated on photographing live musical events within the Capital Region for more than 20 years.

"Meeting Resistance" with Filmmakers Molly Bingham and Steve Connors
2007-11-16 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Meeting Resistance (2007) is set in the streets, alleyways and ubiquitous teashops of the Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad. It enters the physical and psychological heart of the “insurgency” against the American occupation. Presented by photojournalist/directors Steve Connors and Molly Bingham, who spent ten months among the insurgents there to create the exclusive, unique, and at once compelling and insightful film about their lives, motivation, and goals.

Meeting Resistance focuses on eight “insurgents,” each with his or her own take and reasons for opposing the American-led occupation. All are people who, within days of the fall of Baghdad, were arranging themselves into resistance cells, finding the money and weapons to fight against the American military. The film witnesses how they began to organize themselves, reveals why they have decided to violently oppose the occupation of the country, and hears in their words the underlying ideological foundations to their fight and how and why those have changed over time.

The directors’ unsurpassed access and visually stunning cinematography makes this film a one-of-a-kind; essential viewing for audiences around the world concerned with a deeper understanding of the current situation in Iraq, and with the human condition of resistance.

Co-sponsored by Women Against War, Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, and the Chatham Peace Initiative.

"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War" with Photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson
2007-11-19 19:00 - 21:00
Arriving in Iraq on the eve of the U.S. invasion, unaffiliated with any newspaper and hoping to pick up assignments along the way, Ashley Gilbertson was one of the first photojournalists to cover the disintegration of America’s military triumph as looting and score settling convulsed Iraqi cities. Just twenty-five years old at the time, Gilbertson soon landed a contract with The New York Times, and his extraordinary images of life in occupied Iraq and of American troops in action began appearing in the paper regularly.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (The University of Chicago Press, 2007) gathers the best of his photographs, chronicling America’s early battles in Iraq, the initial occupation of Baghdad, the insurgency that erupted shortly afterward, the dramatic battle to over take Fallujah, and ultimately, the country’s first national elections. This wide-ranging treatment of the war from the viewpoint of a photographer is the first of its kind. In it he grapples with the reality that Iraq – despite the sacrifice in Iraq and American lives – has descended into a civil war with no end in sight.

Co-sponsored by Women Against War and Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace.

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
2007-11-28 19:00 - 21:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Sisters in Law (Kim Longinotto & Florence Ayisi, 2005, Cameroon). “Men are going to get the message now.” The lawyers and judges in one small courthouse in Kumba, Cameroon are helping to transform women’s and children’s lives by protecting them from domestic violence. From the maker of Divorce Iranian Style and Gaea Girls comes this latest project celebrating dynamic women in non-traditional roles. A testament to how a few strong women can help to make an impact on individual lives as well as traditional world-views.

Part of iEAR Presents!, cosponsored by the Department of the Arts at RPI and funded in part by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

The Thirteenth Assembly
2007-12-01 20:00 - 22:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
The Thirteenth Assembly is a touring collective made up of four musicians (Mary Halvorson, Jessica Pavone, Taylor Ho Bynum and Tomas Fujiwara) organized into four different and musically distinct small ensembles. Styled somewhere between the classic r&b/soul revues of the 60’s and a postmodern traveling circus, The Thirteenth Assembly presents a selection of some of the latest-emerging young artists and bands in New York’s creative music scene in one package. Over the course of an evening, each group performs a thirty-minute-minute set, offering a glimpse of the vibrant and varied stylistic diversity and creativity of this particular musical community. The ensembles are: The Thirteen Four, Taylor Ho Bynum/Tomas Fujiwara Duo, Mary Halvorson/Jessica Pavone Duo, Taylor Ho Bynum Trio (with Mary Halvorson & Tomas Fujiwara).

Presented with support from the One of the 13-part “Free Jazz from the Sanctuary” series recorded live at The Sanctuary for Independent Media – a unique celebration of freedom through creative expression. Co-produced by NY Media Alliance and the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.New York State Music Fund.

Be The Media! Workshop with Victoria Kereszi, Andrew Lynn, and Branda Miller: Holiday Animation Camp
2007-12-02 13:00 - 17:00 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Learn do-it-yourself stop-motion animation techniques in this fast-paced hands-on workshop. Participants will work in small groups with clay, collage, and/or cut-outs to create animated scenes, characters and short stories. Youth ages 10-18 are encouraged to attend; all ages are welcome.

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival
2007-12-05 18:00 - 20:30 | The Sanctuary, 3361 6th Ave, Troy, 12180, United States
Flock of Dodos (Randy Olson, 2006). Who are the dodos in the current debate over evolution versus intelligent design? With a Super Size Me – style good spirit, marine biologist turned filmmaker Randy Olson travels the country in search of an answer. He starts with his 82 year old mother who is neighbors with the top lawyer for intelligent design in Olson’s home state of Kansas, which is the epicenter of the controversy. This film gets beyond the tedium of the “debate” of who’s right and who’s wrong. Instead, it explores how those who embrace each side are “communicating” their ideas to the public.

Part of iEAR Presents!, co-sponsored by the Department of the Arts at RPI and funded in part by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
