thoughtcrime blog
Design “Co-omperatition” deadline extended…
Hey everyone. We just got really, really busy with the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair, school, and publishing projects this month, and haven’t had time to follow up with the thoughtcrime ink design co-omperatition. You might’ve noticed that we don’t have our “design ranking” pages up yet — we are pushing to finish these in the next seven days. We’ll be sending out announcements all over the place when the gallery of entries and the ranking pages are up.
Thanks for your patience with us! In the meantime please keep submitting designs, as we have extended the co-omperatition deadline till Dec. 5 (perfect for deciding if your US-election-related t-shirt desgn is still going to be relevant)!
posted Thursday, October 23, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
“Shift in Progress” to be launched at Happy Harbour Comics Nov. 20
Shift in Progress: A Not-So-Comic Book is a graphic story anthology centered around the theme of young people and fighting back against oppressive aspects of the workplace. To our knowledge, it’s the first comic book produced by the Edmonton “General Membership Branch” (GMB) of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). It’s finally being launched November 20, and you’re all invited to celebrate its release with us! It will soon be available on thoughtcrime ink for sale in the new books section.
Interviews with seven young workers and the real-life experiences of the artists themselves provided the inspiration of the five stories in Shift in Progress. In The Illusion of Time, Eva sacrifices everything to her job, friends, relationship at the expense of her health. In A Black Sheep Tale, Chan has a mohawk, an anarchist t-shirt, and an attitude. He works hard but unhappily in a garment factory and has disturbing dreams. Can he grow into his t-shirt? Rights of Passage tells the tale of April, an avid skateboarder who has to work at a bar where the lewd customers are never made to feel uncomfortable for their sexual assaults on the female staff. In After Breakfast and Just Before Bed, Dhan is gay, East Indian, and pathologically driven to over-perform, micromanage, and burn out. For what and whom is he driving himself? Finally, Grind tells the tale of Julie, who comes to work in the oil patch with boyfriend and baby. One accident later, she is the sole breadwinner of the family and sets off to work at the local caffeine dealer. What next?
Shift in Progress’ intro is written by Eugene Plawiuk, and contains organizing information sections compiled by Nick Dreidger and Steve Nixon.
Date: Thursday, November 20, 2008
Time: 6:30 pm
Event Location: Happy Harbour Comics (10112 - 124 Street), Edmonton
Event Admission: free!
More Info:
Your purchases: helping to power A-bookfairs, other radical projects.
So the last time we mentioned raising funds for grassroots projects in Canada, via the shirts you were buying, we still had our vision of raising $5000 for the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair. Raising $5000 didn’t quite happen, but at least we dreamt big!
Partway through the year, we did ask ourselves if a single Anarchist Bookfair truly warranted getting $5000 when surely there were other people needing assistance in getting bookfairs started. We ended up donating some to other bookfairs in Canada. Your money you gave us for shirts broke down like this:
Victoria Anarchist Bookfair - $150 donated
Calgary Anarchist Bookfair - $200 donated
Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair - $200 donated
Saskatoon Anarchist Bookfair - $200 donated
Winnipeg Anarchist Bookfair - $200 donated
Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair - $200 donated
Because Edmonton’s bookfair has aspired to pay travel fees for everyone, we also donated additional funds ($400) for travel fees for Ward Churchill, and also donated buttons and lit to sell at the door (about $400 worth) to offset costs. This year we also donated buttons and supplies to Edmonton Anarchist Black Cross and were able to afford a lit donation to the Calgary Anarchist Black Cross.
Finally, thoughtcrime ink gave a small amount to the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) Solidarity Fund, roughly $200, and helped out an anarchist collective in Oaxaca, Mexico, for $500. More updates on this funding later.
Even more exciting news is that we are able to launch our book imprint, thoughtcrime ink books, and our ”Infoshop in a Box” initiative. This provides a plentiful selection of anarchist and radical literature (radical to some, common sense to us), along with optional shirts and buttons, at cost to people looking to table lit at events. If you are interested in Infoshop in a Box, just mail about it.
posted Friday, August 15, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
Design competition/cooperation to raise funds for Anarchist Bookfairs and similar projects
ThoughtCrime Ink, a volunteer-run, anti-capitalist “apparel-based community maker” which raises funds for mid-size and new Anarchist Bookfairs across Canada, is holding a t-shirt design “competition/cooperation”. We’re selecting up to four winning designs, and giving out 100 dollars (CDN) to their creators, plus one dollar for each shirt sold. All remaining profits from the t-shirts go to support Anarchist Bookfairs and similar grassroots community projects across Canada - we are a volunteer collective and we don’t take a ‘cut’ in any way.
More details can be found here:
http://www.thoughtcrimeink.com/design
We are hoping that you might consider entering the t-shirt design “co-omperatition,” or share this weblog entry with an artist interested in political design, art, craft etc. If you are not a designer but have good ideas, consider teaming up with an artist to produce a kick-ass t-shirt — collective submissions are OK! If you like, feel free to submit prototypes of your design to our “critiques” section and get constructive feedback before entering them. You may also submit as many entries as you like.
Although we in the thoughtcrime ink collective identify as anarchists, not everything we like screams “anarchy!” So, feel free to make the politics of your design as subtle or “in-your-face” as you want. Express any style, feeling or mood in relation to your subject matter. The criticial requirement is that designs you submit must be original (ie. yours - if you just want “public domain” graphics (from the Spunk archive, for example) printed up on a shirt, there are easier ways of going about that.) We are looking to stoke new expressions of visual resistance.
Keep in mind that there are printing limitations for this contest (which are described on the design page linked above). Also, this time around, we’re not doing “slogan-only” shirts, though text is certainly OK to incorporate into your designs. You should also design with “placement” on the shirt in mind, and t-shirt colour. We print on a mix of Justshirts (fair trade) and American Apparel (“sweatshop-free”) stock, so you can print on any of the colours here:
http://store.americanapparel.net/2001.html
We’re hoping to take thoughtcrime ink to the ‘next level’ by making the design cooperation/competition “live.” Logged-in visitors to thoughtcrimeink.com get to score the designs and leave constructive comments for works under consideration. The scoring really helps us determine which shirts should be printed. We’re hoping that everyone who reads this will create an account on thoughtcrimeink.com in the next few weeks and score some designs. We’ll send another callout when the scoring wall is up.
We’re aware that technology is a barrier for many artists, however, so if you’re a brilliant woodcut artist who wants to enter the design cooperation/competition, and you don’t know you way around computers, just let us know at and we’ll do our best to help your design get entered.
Questions? Just email , or visit http://www.thoughtcrimeink.com/design to read more info, download the designer’s kit and get started…
Solidarity,
Rob
for thoughtcrime ink
http://www.thoughtcrimeink.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/thoughtcrime-ink/21316665733
posted Monday, August 11, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
New books section on thoughtcrime ink!
We launched the books section of thoughtcrime ink today. Just two four books for now! The first is a sweet edition made of a section of Alexander Berkman’s “What is Anarchist Communism” we titled Reformers, Socialists and Communists: An Anarchist Critique. We have the first English translation of Makhno’s Russian Revolution memoirs, courtesy of Malcolm Archibald, and Archibald’s brief biography of Maria Nikiforova, the “Anarchist Joan of Arc.” Finally, we have online the zine-sized, beautiful, perfect-bound edition of Kropotkin’s essay we’ve brought to several bookfairs, Anarchist Morality. These titles will be followed by many more in the coming weeks. Onward!
posted Friday, August 01, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
Background Color: a bang-on indictment of racialized fashion
Our friend Dawn Babs Davenport gave us the heads up on a thoughtful, must-read article by Mimi on ThreadBared (a weblog that critiques “the politics of fashion”). The article discusses a ‘racialized’ photo shoot in trendy fashion rag Nylon. The Nylon photo spread seems to represent an emerging way of being “edgy” in mainstream capitalist fashion that many are catching on to, of explicitly playing up racial inequality like you just couldn’t care less.
This may seem like nothing new (readers of No Logo and Adbusters might remember discussion of Diesel ads from the mid-90s). “Slumming it” always seems to be recurringly fashionable. But in the case of the Nylon shoot, the indifference is carried through to the likely drafting an unwilling model (in this case, a housekeeper) and being well aware (and not giving a shit) that the worker knows they have to do it or likely lose their job. (“Hey, we can do this because we’re hipsters at Nylon and you’re nothing.”)
While we at thoughtcrime ink ponder the implications of this for our own present and future “model photography” for our shirts (we definitely don’t want our highlighting of this article to be taken as saying ‘look at us, aren’t we so perfect or immune to critique’), here is the article on Threadbared.
posted Thursday, July 31, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
Prison Justice Day, August 10
Prison Justice Day is a day dedicated to demystify the untruths propagated about prisoners and the “justice” system.
The aim of the prison abolition movement is to eliminate prisons, jails, immigration detention centers, and prisoner of war camps by alternatives which we argue more useful and more humane.
Come join us for a day of awareness featuring:
Vegan Food
Films, including: One Dead Indian, and Life Inside Out: Life inside a Women’s Prison
Workshops on Books to Prisoners, Prison Abolition, Know Your Rights and more!
Benefit Show to follow at 6:30 ($5-10 sliding scale)
Tabling Welcome!
Date/Time: Aug. 10, 2008 - 11am - 7pm
Event Location: Ukrainian Center 11018 97 Street (Near the Stadium LRT station and the 140 and 3 bus routes)
Event Admission: by donation
More Info: email
for more information
posted Thursday, July 24, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
Come say hello at the Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair silent auction!
The Edmonton Anarchist Bookfair is just three months away, and at the end of July the organizing members of the EABF are holding their silent auction. There’s always awesome stuff to bid for at the annual auction! Come down for the community, the bidding and the free vegan food. We should have our new shirts printed by then and will be auctioning some off.
Read more at the EABF site.
Date: Saturday, July 26, 2008
Time: 7:00 pm
Event Location: Remedy Café (8631-109 St, upstairs)
More Info: our party address of course,
posted Sunday, June 29, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
Visit the “Anarchist Gifts” application on Facebook!
Possibly great. Possibly annoying. Possibly trivial. Possibly all three. For better or for worse, we used a little program on Facebook called Gift Creator to make a gift-exchange Facebook add-on, Anarchist Gifts. Now you can exchange little presents of love and solidarity with your fellow addicts (must… get… off… the internet).
Some things, Gift Creator doesn’t let us do. This is supposedly going to be fixed soon. “Unlocking” gifts sucks!
We’re going to plunk a great big catalog of ‘anarchist gifts’ in there eventually so there’s lots of things to send to friends. Anyway,
posted Tuesday, June 24, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
folk extravaganza at remedy!
featuring gretna green, lex mckie, garrett johnson and forgetful florence.
Date: Thursday, June 26, 2008
Time: 7:00 pm
Event Location: Remedy Café (8631-109 St, upstairs)
posted Sunday, June 22, 2008 by Alex C | add a comment
Hamilton shows southern Ontario how it’s done
Hamilton had its first Anarchist Bookfair thanks to the good people who work with the Common Cause anarchist organization. Thoughtcrime ink was able to meet lots of great vendors, participants, and fellow organizers who came to partake in this celebration of education, struggle, and solidarity. A huge thanks to all who made our trip to the underdog city both worthwhile and enjoyable!
posted Wednesday, June 18, 2008 by Jeff M | add a comment
Do the Edmonton’s People’s Pedal survey, grow a shared bike network
People’s Pedal is an independent, all-volunteer bike mechanic co-operative in Edmonton. They provide cheap bicycle transport in Edmonton through a system of shared bikes and racks around the city, like there are in other European and North American cities. You get access to the bike system by buying a dirt cheap membership (or volunteering some hours) and get to borrow bikes whenever you want, for a few hours at a time.
They are looking for people who live in Edmonton to answer an on-line survey to get some feedback on the best way to expand and improve the bike sharing system. It takes about 10 minutes to do, and you can even win a free years’ membership! (Your odds are pretty good, too — word from the designer.)
Read more about People’s Pedal, take their survey; or .
posted Tuesday, June 17, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
Visit us at the Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair June 14!
Common Cause will be hosting Hamilton’s first Anarchist bookfair on June 14th, so if you are in the area, drop on by and meet the thoughtcrime ink crew in person!
For more info on the bookfair, visit hamiltonanarchistbookfair.wordpress.com.
Date: Saturday, June 14, 2008
Time: 10:00 am
Event Location: Westdale Highschool (700 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario)
posted Monday, June 09, 2008 by Rob Butz | add a comment
Featured shirts now $18 CDN; old shirts on for $11 in the new sale section
Two new featured shirts! knowledge tree and revolutionary heart.
Because Canada’s dollar is near par with the US dollar, we’ve lowered the price on featured shirts to $18CDN.
We have a new sale section of tees that are still pretty awesome. These are going for $11. Please check out the sale section here.
posted Thursday, December 20, 2007 by Rob Butz | add a comment
Visit us at the Victoria Anarchist Bookfair; upcoming site additions
Yes, we’ve made the trek to the Victoria Anarchist Bookfair in British Columbia. Come visit our table.
We’re also planning for a few additions to the site. Stay tuned for extended scrapbooks of the designs, customer photo galleries, and the thoughtcrime ink design co-omper-ition! As well, our back catalogue of sale shirts (none you see pictured in the regular section at the moment) will be going online.
Date/Time: September 8-9, 2007,
Event Location: Victoria Cool Aid Society (755 Pandora Street, Victoria B.C.)
Event Admission: Free admittance.
