With campaigning for the 2012 general election well under way, Downtown for Democracy, the political action committee established during the 2004 elections, is back. Aimed at motivating and engaging the creative community to political action, the organization has begun this cycle’s crusade with the publication of a 75-page civics primer. D4D and OHWOW Present: The Pocket Guide to Politics breaks down and clarifies the complicated, and some might say confusing, workings of our representative government.

The product of a collaboration between Downtown for Democracy and the OHWOW Gallery, the book elucidates and visualizes the workings of government functions. Or, in the words of OHWOW founders Al Moran and Aaron Bondaroff, “[It] is an attempt to translate the American political system into the language of the creative community, a demographic that influences what young America reads, listens to, watches and wears. We hope this resource will help inspire the creative community to get active and involved in our political system as election season approaches.” Contributing artists featured in the book include Joana Avillez, Tim Barber, Dan Colen, Alex Kalman, Andrew Kuo, Casey Neistat, Terry Richardson, Konstantin Trubkovich, Bert Rodriguez, Aurel Schmidt, Adam Squires, Josh Safdie and Aaron Young. Their various works tackle and illustrate some of the dire issues confronting this year’s voters, such as the economy and national debt, healthcare reform, women’s reproductive freedom, gun control, and marriage equality.

As illuminated by the wide breadth of these concerns, this election is not only about our next president. It is also about the quarter of Senate seats and all 435 spots in the House of Representatives that are up for grabs. Having seen the 2010 midterm elections usher in a majority of extremely active and vocal ultra-conservatives into Congress, this time around they are aiming at seizing control of both Houses. This in effect would have the right-wing controlling the running of our government for the years to come. With so much at stake, it is clear that this is an imperative election requiring mobilization from those that influence culture, and the far-reaching, young demographic that spreads the word.

The pocket guide is the preliminary tool in the call to action.

The guide is set for release on May 1, with a launch at The Standard. D4D and OHWOW Present: The Pocket Guide to Politics, costs $10.00 and will be available through the OHWOW and D4D websites.

Few of us enjoy the annual ritual of mailing our annual income taxes into the Feds. For Dustin Grella, getting a letter in the mail can be a literal drag.

Grella, an artist and a C-7 quadriplegic who resides in Tribeca, has been mailing himself a letter daily for the past 10 years. The letters, numbering 3,650 and counting, still unopened, are now on display in a show, entitled Notes to Self, in Chelsea.

While letter-writing has become a bit of a cultural anomaly, Grella has enjoyed this practice of the daily writing; however, actually getting the epistles to post has proven less than straightforward, given the wheelchair inaccessibility of many of the city’s post offices.

So Grella chose tax day, yesterday, to stage a performance protest. With his taxes in his mouth and his wheelchair chained to his ankle, Grella attempted to drag himself up the 30+ steps of the James A. Farley Post Office on 32nd Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan at 6.30 pm. Grella was apprehended and made to detach from his chair, so the artist proceeded up the stairway to the cheers of onlookers and supporters – many in wheelchairs themselves – sans chair, on his behind. Once inside he dragged himself to the line, did his postal business and then slid himself back down the steps, one at a time.

And Grella was not the only protester on view in midtown yesterday. A festive group of young men in baseball uniforms, calling themselves the Tax Dodges paraded around with their hoola-hooping counter-parts, a group of girls in red cheerleading garb calling themselves The Loopholes.

Taxes paid, theater in check.

Notes to Self can be seen at the AC Institute Satellite Space, 547 W. 27th St., Suite 210, NYC through April 28.

Obama made an appearance at the Apollo last night for a fundraiser, also attended by Al Green. Channeling the Reverend, the President sang a few lines of Let’s Stay Together. It reminded me why I liked Obama so much four years ago.

The current vogue for “ruin porn” – the sensationalized and aestheticized images of dereliction and decay – was on our minds when Salome Oggenfuss and I visited the Uranian Phalanstery on a hot and humid day last September. Salome had heard from a colleague about two decrepit old interconnected brownstones on East 4th St, between Avenue C and Avenue D occupied by hoarders who gave their disposophobia artistic and spiritual pretensions. They were set to move at the end of the month and we decided to plan a visit before they vacated the premises. We knew a bit about the Uranian Phalanstery from an online search and would soon find out more from our guide, Medhi Matin, who was living in a room on the top floor. In 1959, artist couple Richard Oviet Tyler and Dorothea Baer founded the Phalanstery in New York City while living in a still-active synagogue serving Ukrainian immigrants. When the synagogue closed in 1974 the building became the headquarters of the Uranian Phalanstery. Designed as an “anarchist utopia commune for practitioners of art and cosmology,” the name comes from the philosophy of the visionary Charles Fourier, who in the beginning of the 19th century designed the Phalanstère: a sprawling structure that would hold his own imagined utopian community. Soon the couple would buy the building next door and create the First Gnostic Lyceum of New York.

Just around the corner from the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Phalanstery and Lyceum were very active until Richard succumbed to face-cancer in 1983. During this period they hosted a Tibetan Burial Society and spiritual tattoo studio (at a time when tattooing was illegal in New York), celebrations of various solstices and equinoxes with music and dance, and a printing press for artist publications and Gnostic pamphlets – all the while envisioning the space itself as a constantly evolving artwork. From the outside there was nothing extraordinary about the Phalanstery, which looked like a normal, if shabby, building in Alphabet City. After answering the door Matin, 32, introduced us to the place and their dedication to individual and communal expression and creativity. At the time of our visit, only he and Dorothea were living there. It was only three weeks before they had to move out, after selling the buildings for over $3 million to partially pay a tax lien and relocating uptown to Hamilton Heights.

After our quick chat Matin handed us a pair of flashlights and graciously offered to let us wander around for a bit. There were no overhead lights and the electricity came from extensions chords anchored in the building next door. The piles of folk art, musical instruments, stuffed animals, tchotchkes, etc., make it tempting to think of the Tylers as so-called outsider artists, but the fact that Richard and Dorothea had studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and that the former had sold works to the Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller collection and the Smithsonian bellies that somewhat condescending label.

We followed Matin down a dark creaking staircase into Richard’s basement studio. Entering the room, the first thing he pointed out was the bed in the corner where Tyler died. Matin said he’d show us Richard’s series of self-portraits detailing his facial deterioration but he never mentioned it again and it felt too macabre to remind him. The studio perfectly provided the context for Richard’s work, both temporally and thematically. My flashlight first fell upon newspaper clippings of mug shots from the Chinatown gang the Ghost Shadows, prominent in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The roof of the studio was completely covered with A4 posters, Tibetian prayer flags and prints reminiscent of William Blake. Chapbooks from the Uranian Press sat on a pushcart, seemingly ready to be hauled to the market. Bookshelves lined the walls crammed with artist books, books on cosmology and assorted esoterica. FBI most wanted posters for the likes of Mark Rudd of the Weather Underground and Puerto Rican separatist William Guillermo Morales, and other members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberaction Nacional, sat besides a hand-written quote about beautiful destruction from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Medhi left us alone to explore and I nearly stepped in cat vomit as I looked up at a print of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son. On one table there is a series of photos of Richard in the Pacific Front in World War II. Despite the mélange of objects and images the aesthetic felt oddly coherent.

The rest of the house, starting in the Lyceum on the ground floor of the next building that held their collection of rare musical instruments from around the world and an assortment of folk art, did not feel as unified in its aesthetic as Richard’s studio. Nothing really felt out of place in the rest of the house: not the flat-screen in the temple room, not Matin’s laptop sitting on a desk in his living quarters, not an icon of Jesus with four arms holding a hammer and sickle, nor the working kitchen.

Matin lived in a room on the third floor of the Lyceum. On the second floor landing, the walls covered by a mural, we passed the door to Dorothea’s room. It was locked and off limits during our tour. We continued up the stairs to Matin’s room. At first, walking in felt like walking into a normal East Village apartment. There was a mattress on the floor, a shelf with clothes and books, and the afternoon sun and the cross breeze made the room feel light and airy. Adjacent to his room, however, was the space that felt the most remarkable in the entire house. There was nothing in the room but an old mattress, covered with dust and rubble, sitting on a rusty iron frame. The roof is half caved in, the light fixture hanging on by a bit of wiring. Two dead monarch butterflies sat on the windowsill, the remnants of a performance. I immediately thought of one of Dorothea’s works we saw in the basement studio: the skeletons of small animals – a bird and some kind of rodent – that had simply been left to decompose. Perhaps counter-intuitively, despite being devoid of the clutter of accumulated objects, the room somehow felt like the most personal and private space in the house. It was where, via the display of the decay of the architecture and the decay of bodies, the weight of the passage of time itself bore down upon us.

Decay is intertwined with the experience of time and the philosopher Dylan Trigg claims that the philosophical value of decay is its resistance to representation and stasis. Community groups failed in getting the city to grant landmark status to this pair of brownstones to prevent their redevelopment, claiming that the buildings were built around 1840 and have been virtually unchanged since – they hadn’t even been rewired since the beginning of the 20th century. While it’s difficult not to feel as though the neighborhood lost something when the Phalanstery moved uptown, there is a sense that it is perhaps not a bad thing that it moved before becoming monumentalized as a sort of time capsule from a time where artists could actually afford two buildings in the East Village to pursue their esoteric creative goals individually and communally, as a subsequent stop for tourists visiting the nearby Tenement Museum.

Conceiving of this piece as another obituary resulting from of the wave of gentrification that has now subsumed all of Alphabet City also seems both obvious and beside the point when considering the Phalanstery. It was a time capsule, but not one that has been hermetically sealed. Richard’s studio had not been preserved so much as it was left alone. Decay also powerfully evokes the death and nothingness that awaits us all. Unlike visions of death that focus on continuity and the life that emerges in and from death – pullulating, swarming, breeding – there was a musty stillness to the Uranian Phalanstery. I asked Matin how they plan to recreate this milieu in their new building uptown. “Recreate isn’t really the right word,” he answers. “More like reassemble.” What one imagines would be impossible to transpose is the palpable sense of rot that one felt walking into the Uranian Phalanstery.

We left Matin and went out into the ridiculously humid afternoon, our clothing smelling of a combination of mildew and cat piss. Unlike the ruins in places laid waste to by deindustrialization like Detroit, which bears witness to a society squandering its resources, there is nothing tragic about the fate of the Phalanstery. Not coupled to dereliction, the structure had been allowed to decay while it was inhabited and culturally active. The Phalanstery was never intended to remain cemented in the riverbed against the flow of history or to serve as a bulwark against complete and total gentrification. For better or for worse, Alphabet City has changed drastically since Richard and Dorothea founded the Phalanstery. The Phalanstery changed as well, although at a considerably slower pace. Walking through the different levels of the house, one was exposed to not only the history of the neighborhood, but a more geological, natural history – to living ruins.

All photos by Salome Oggenfuss

Just after midnight Sunday, when the legalization of same-sex marriage took effect, several couples were married in New York. The above photo is Cheryle Rudd and Kitty Lambert, two grandmothers, who were married in front of Niagara Falls by the mayor. Many of their five children and twelve grandchildren were there. The photograph is of Harold Lohner and Al Martini, who were married just after midnight at City Hall in Albany. Mr. Lohner’s 78-year-old mother attended, saying she had never been out at midnight before in her life, but that, “I’m very happy for my son. It’s about time.”

I echo Mrs. Lohner’s sentiment. Congratulations to them and all the other couples getting married this weekend.

Photos, above: James Estrin, below: Nathaniel Brooks, both for The New York Times

When Lobsang Sangay took the stage at New York’s Asia Society this past Tuesday, he asked his interviewer and Harvard Law School classmate Jamie Metzl whether the discussion would be “in the Anderson Cooper format or the Oprah one?” Charming, extremely intelligent (a former Fulbright scholar), absolutely dedicated (he led the Tibetan Youth Congress) and a self-professed “hot-head” (he believes that more Tibetans should be!), Sangay was recently elected as the next Kalon Tripa or political leader of the Tibetan Government in Exile. This came after the Dalai Lama chose to retire from his political role and focus solely as the spiritual leader for his people.

The Asia Society, also known for its work and relations with China (a photo exhibition of Ai Weiwei’s work is currently on display), began the evening with a statement that it welcomed such events with Tibetan leaders and scholars and wouldn’t take any sides regarding sparring political matters. While Metzl and Sangay joked about the similarities between Jews and Tibetans and how they had conspired to convert each other during their law school years (a combo is affectionately called JewBu), they touched upon the various strategies and the responsibility Sangay has to carry out and face during his term. “Our primary objective is freedom,” said Sangay, explaining his three goals: 1. Restoring freedom for the Tibetan people within Tibet and returning the Dalai Lama to Lhasa, 2. Creating awareness about Tibet and 3. Creating programs (educational, cultural, and so on) for the Tibetan diaspora scattered across India,  Nepal, Bhutan and the rest of the world.

Sangay revealed some shocking information about the situation in Tibet: “Remember it as 70-50-40. In Tibet, 70% of the private sector is Chinese, 50% of the public sector is Chinese, and 40% of all Tibetan college graduates are unemployed.” This just supports the idea that in order for the Chinese government to be successful it requires such “cultural assimilation” and “makes Tibetans 2nd-class citizens in their own country.” Nonetheless, as Sangay then pointed out, the Tibetan spirit remains undeterred and strong, even though most of the 6 million Tibetans in Tibet haven’t seen or met the Dalai Lama.

As I listened to Sangay speaking, flanked on my right by Tibetan filmmaker and musicologist Ngawang Choephel, and on left by my good friend, student and activist Katrina Marstrand (whose father is Tibetan), I couldn’t help but reminisce about my time at boarding school in the Himalayas. I was 15 when I went to Woodstock School, a reputed international boarding school in a hill station called Mussoorie. There I had Tibetan classmates and teachers and gradually became active in the community. The school had (and still has) a weekly spring trip called Activity Week, and in 10th grade I went with a group to Dharamshala, the home of the Tibetan Government in Exile. We connected with members of the government, scholars, activists, celebrities (Richard Gere and J.F.K, Jr.) and of course, we had the opportunity to meet and be blessed by the Dalai Lama. If there is an experience that defines absolute awesomeness, this has been it for me. Audrey Hepburn told her son that the only regret she ever had was not being able to meet the Dalai Lama as “[he] is probably the closest thing to God we have on this earth.”

During my senior year, I co-chaired Woodstock’s community service program, CARE, with my Tibetan classmate Kesang. We coordinated buses of students to go from our side of Mussoorie to Happy Valley, the other end of town where the Tibetan community lived. At the local school, we met children, some as young as four, who had recently escaped from Tibet. They had left their families behind, endured the bitter cold and harrowing journey, lost friends along the way, dealt with extreme physical discomforts – open sores and wounds, lost limbs – and now had found themselves as strangers in an even stranger land, nomads in exile. We were instructed not to talk to the students about their families so as to avoid upsetting them, and instead to address a bright future, what India was like, and what the English or Hindi words were for things they knew in Tibetan. Sangay talked about this same journey, one that many of his countrymen go through even today as they seek refuge from oppression. He too was raised in Darjeeling, another Indian hill station.

So what is the solution, Metzl asked his former classmate? Sangay said, “The Middle-Way Approach”. This peace and non-violence-focused option was crafted by the Dalai Lama and is a “non-partisan and moderate position that safeguards the vital interests of all concerned parties – For Tibetans: the protection and preservation of their culture, religion and national identity; for the Chinese: the security and territorial integrity of the motherland; and for neighbours and other third parties: peaceful borders and international relations.” Sangay likened this to Catalonia in Spain, Quebec in Canada and the relationship between Scotland and England. He added that the “success of the Middle-Way will be determined by the action or the inaction of the Chinese government ” to grant the Tibetan people an acceptable autonomy in a sovereign state.

When I visited the United Nations Headquarters some years ago for a conference, I stared at the world map by the General Assembly Hall, and was stunned to see no Tibet. In other world maps, at least there had been some delineation and mention. This broke my heart. But now after having had the opportunity to listen and support Lobsang Sangay, a tremendous scholar, leader and asset to the Tibetan community, I renewed my sense of hope and belief in a free Tibet. And like Lobsang Sangay said that evening: “Now New York, next year Lhasa.” It can happen.

Shruti Rya Ganguly is a filmmaker and co-founder of an advocacy group called EchoChamber which hosts curated screenings and discussions centered on human rights and political conflict.

Above photo: Sanjeev Sherchen, Asia Society

When I got married a few years ago, we had to go to City Hall to apply for a license. There was a gay couple sitting on the next bench, applying for domestic partnership, and I felt so sad and so embarrassed that what they were filing for was different than what I was. Just before I went to sleep last night, I looked at my phone and saw messages from two political emails I’m on saying that the New York State Legislature had passed the marriage equality bill. Reading the Times this morning, looking at the photos of the crowd outside Stonewall last night (and on the first night of Pride Weekend), I started to cry. I was particularly moved by a quote from a Mark Grisanti, a Republican Senator from Buffalo who campaigned saying he would oppose same-sex marriage, but who became one of the crucial votes that passed it last night. He said: “I apologize for those who feel offended. I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.” Good for him, good for all the Republicans who broke party ranks to vote with their conscience on this, and good for New York for being a place where they could do that. Not that most of my New Yorker friends – gay or straight – get married anyway, but I look forward to attending the weddings of all those who want to right here at home.

Above and below photos: Jessica Rinaldi for Reuters via The New York Times.

Directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson and scored by Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, !Women Art Revolution traces the history and influence of modern feminist art as a collective movement, from its incubation in the 1960s to its artistic and political evolution in the following decades. Featuring interviews with and works by seminal artists, historians, curators and critics such as Judy Chicago, The Guerrilla Girls, Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, Tammy Rae Carland, and Dossier contributor Miranda July, !Women Art Revolution illuminates the efforts to both politicize and educate women in the arts and challenge and subvert hegemonic standards of gender, race, class, and sexuality within culture at large.

!Women Art Revolution is currently enjoying an extended run at the IFC Center, 323 6th Avenue at West 3rd Street, NYC.

I’ve watched Vice TV a few times and I am always impressed by the topics taken on by a magazine made famous for Dos and Don’ts. Right now they have an amazing video up about the Holy Thug Saints of Caracas, Venezuela. In a city where more than 100 murders are logged each weekend (14,000 were murdered last year alone) people flock in droves to the cemetery to pray for revenge, protection, freedom of a loved one from jail and other daily occurrences in such an extremely violent place. Predominately Catholic, but with a large dose of Spiritism or Santeria, people give offerings and pray to Santos Malandros (Holy Thugs) instead of worshiping traditional Catholic saints. The thugs are all once real-life gangsters immortalized in statue form wearing sideways baseball caps, sporting guns, scars and gold chains. The female saints rock sports bras, doorknockers and bandanas. They all look super familiar to the line of Homie Dolls that were popular in the late 90′s sold in gumball machines. The icons have holes built into their mouths so you can insert an offering of a cigarette or a joint to them. It is understandable that these figures are more identifiable to someone afraid of being shot every day than say, a white woman in flowy robes. I was a little upset when the narrator pokes fun at the dolls and the woman in the Santeria store, but I think it is probably hard to be too serious with the Vice audience especially when covering such heavy topics. Either way, I loved this video and thought it was an interesting look into how religions are formed when people find nothing to identify with that already exists. This practice of Thug worship, called Corte Malandra has already spread to Cuba and Spain and is now growing strong in many other Spanish speaking countries. It’s not so crazy if you think that not that long ago someone started Mormonism, too. Video below.

Artist and activist Ai Weiwei was arrested on April 3 in Beijing and has been missing since. Anne Pasternak of Creative Time posted a question on Facebook about what the arts community could do to support him, and in response curator Steven Holmes suggested a reenactment of Ai Weiwei’s project Fairytale: 1,001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs. The piece was installed at Documenta 12 in 2007 in Kassel, Germany, and was comprised of 1,001 late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden chairs and 1001 Chinese citizens he recruited to live in Kassel for the length of the show. This Sunday, April 17, at 1 pm local time, supporters are invited to bring a chair and gather outside Chinese embassies and consulates to sit peacefully in support of the artist’s immediate release. In New York, the Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China is located at 520 12 Ave in Manhattan. Additional information about the protest and local Chinese embassies can be found on the Facebook page for the event.