If you’re looking for unique holiday gifts, the GLAM Indie Craft Show may be just the place to start. This Sunday, the third annual craft show will feature a collection of 50 local crafters selling items, such as knitted coozies, hula hoops, handmade jewelry, bags, T-shirts, quilts, hand-spun yarns, home decorations — I could go on, or you could just check out the vendors’ page. And hey, if you buy from the craft show, remember your money will stay right here in our very own community, benefiting those who craft because they love it.

Kim Kruse is the one “behind the curtain,” as she put it. As the Sassy Crafter columnist for the former Gainesville magazine, Satellite, and owner of Sew Make Do, a new crafting and sewing studio in town, she thought Gainesville needed a show for people with “slightly eclectic tastes.”

And turns out, she was right. The past two years have seen as many as 500 people at the craft show, and Kruse expects a similar turn out this year.

Whether you’re looking for a gift for someone else or a unique addition to your own home, head down to Villa East (301 N. Main St.) this Sunday from noon to 5. Admission is $3 for adults and free for children 10 and younger.

For more crafty holiday gift ideas, check out the upcoming Winter issue of The Fine Print around town on Dec. 14.

(above) Photo taken Oct. 22 by Amanda Cohen at the Doris’ grand opening.

Eric Lewis scooped up a handful of grey clay, slapped it onto his potter’s wheel, and guided the amorphous lump into a defined vase.

Lewis, 25, is one of six artists in residence at the Doris Bardon Community Cultural Center.

“Tonight, we’re all just really happy,” Lewis, who mostly works in ceramics, said. “Everything is better than we could have expected.”

The hundreds of people who packed The Doris at 716 N. Main St. for its grand opening party Oct. 22 were as varied as the artwork on display. In this kaleidoscope of Gainesville society, surgeons and artists, politicians and models, parents and children created a diverse cross-section of the city. On the walls, a painting of sliced avocados was mounted across from a square of woven yarn in autumnal shades of green and brown.

The artwork in the front gallery was a part of the Six by Six: Getting it Squared Away fundraiser. Over 150 community members, from elementary school students to professional artists, donated over 300 pieces of art for the exhibition. The individual artist was not identified until the piece was bought for a minimum donation of $25.

As the night progressed, the wire racks grew increasingly naked. By the end of the event, over half of the artwork had sold. Other people made donations or became members of the center. All of the money raised will go to support The Doris.

The evening was exactly what the building’s namesake, Doris Bardon, would have wanted, said Norma Homan, treasurer of both The Doris and the Arts Association of Alachua County and one of Bardon’s longtime friends.

“So many people devoted their time and their talent to this event,” Homan said. “It was a real community coming together to create something new. I think that’s always noteworthy.”

Doris Bardon, who passed away in 2006, was an advocate for culture, civic activism and the environment. When she first arrived in Gainesville over 30 years ago, she couldn’t believe there wasn’t even a public radio station, said Homan.

Bardon, a lover of classical music, brought public radio to the city. She was also instrumental in the formation of the Gainesville Symphony Orchestra, served on arts association and theater boards and conceptualized the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Writers Workshop.

She also wrote three books and held piano concerts in her home.

“She had hundred of friends all in different areas,” Homan said. “She just inspired people. She was a brilliant, brilliant woman.”

Bardon left her estate to the Arts Association of Alachua County.

“What Doris wanted was a community cultural center,” Homan said. “It’s a place where the community members can interact with the artists.”

People toured the studios and classrooms behind the front gallery, where the artists in residence demonstrated their craft.

In addition to producing their personal artwork, the artists teach classes in their area of expertise.

“Our mission is to make the arts accessible to everyone,” Sue Johnson, a board member at The Doris, said. “Within everyone is an artist.”

A few paces away from Lewis’ wheel, Cori O’Connor pinched and smoothed one of the brown clay ovals mounted on wires. Eventually, the spherical clay will match her sketch of a quasi-human figure with a man’s body and a raven’s wings and head. She is excited to be one of the members who will mold The Doris from the ground up.

“We’re building a future for other artists who will come after us,” she said.

There are two large studio rooms, which are each divvied into three workstations. The communal space creates an atmosphere of open communication. Three of artists in residence work in three-dimensional mediums ; the other three create two-dimensional pieces.

In the near future, the Doris will expand beyond visual arts. According to Homan, Doris’ Steinway piano will soon be moved to the front gallery. The center is also working with local music groups to hold events there.

“The arts are alive in Gainesville,” Johnson said, “and in this place.”

(above) Electric streetcars, like the one pictured here in Portland, Oregon, are the model and inspiration for the proposal of a new streamlined Gainesville public transit.

Gainesville already has enough quirky people and places to be a twin city to Eugene, Oregon. Home to the University of Oregon, this quintessential college town is very similar to Gainesville in terms of population dynamics and urban structure. So, what’s missing from Gainesville (aside from an awesome McMenamin’s)? A solid and effective transit system.

Former mayor of Gainesville, David Coffey, along with City Commissioner Thomas Hawkins, chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Planning Organization (MTPO), visited Oregon, mainly Eugene and Portland, in late September to further develop Gainesville’s Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and streetcar plan. So far, Eugene and Portland’s transit systems are proving to be viable models for Gainesville.

Eugene had its highly effective BRT network ready and running in 2007 with ridership in its first year exceeding the 20-year projection. And just two hours north, the widely recognized, urban-planning ideal, Portland, began operating its successful streetcar network in 2001.

Members of Gainesville’s MTPO are hopeful that the implementation of a system similar to Eugene’s BRT and Portland’s streetcar will be just as successful in Gainesville. MTPO is a committee dedicated to facilitating and furthering development of alternative transportation in the Gainesville metropolitan area.

Traditionally, city planners have expanded roads to fix traffic problems. However, this solution is not permanent. With time, roads get re-clogged with the vehicles of a city’s growing population. To permanently improve and decongest streets, the local transit system needs a complete transformation. Instead of adding new lanes, the new plan designates lanes specifically for BRT buses – made possible by shifting medians and traffic lines. In some cases, along more crowded roads like Archer, BRT buses may share a lane with High Occupancy Vehicles. Via Archer Road, BRT routes have been mapped out to span from the airport to the interstate, connecting most of Gainesville.

The airport and interstate are buzzing commuter hubs, connecting Gainesville with neighboring counties, the rest of the state and the country. These areas will harbor Transit-Oriented Developments (TODs), essentially glamorized park-and-rides, and will be key in decreasing traffic in town. In addition to a park-and-ride, a TOD is a compact community that includes shopping and dining, catering specifically to the commuter.

There are four such centers planned for Gainesville’s transportation transformation. Coffey is now a land-use attorney representing the developers of three of the these TODs.

Currently, more than 110,000 commuters per day travel the roughly 17-mile route representative of the planned BRT corridor. Surely, every car owner in Gainesville is familiar with Archer Road traffic. Integration of TODs would break down the city traffic congestion by granting commuters easy access to the BRT network.

This envisioned system would transform Gainesville’s public transit into a fluid, bus network that is quick, convenient and reliable, facilitating a seamless commute to and from all centers of activity in Gainesville. With all of Gainesville’s future urban transit plans centered around BRT and a supplemental streetcar extension, our city could be looking more like Eugene or a miniature Portland by 2035, as conservatively projected by the city’s Long Range Transportation plan.

Of course, University of Florida and Santa Fe Community College are two major hubs along the route.

“Santa Fe and UF are two nodes that need to be connected. Cross-pollination between the two is already happening, so let’s facilitate it,” Coffey said, who also has served as chair of MTPO.

BRT routes will run from the Gainesville Regional Airport along Archer Road to Interstate-75, and then swing straight north to Santa Fe. So, where does the UF come into play?

Enter streetcar. Our humble city’s modern streetcar would run along SW Second Ave. and SW Fourth Ave., wrapping around downtown, and continue onward through UF’s campus, passing by Shand’s.

Like the BRT buses, this downtown-to-campus “urban circulator” will maintain a 10-minute headway, making public transportation less tedious and more convenient.

BRT may be up and running as soon as 2020, on the optimistic side of the 2035 estimation. But, the streetcar won’t be in the picture until much later – an estimated additional five years. The streetcar augmentation is currently in an embryonic stage with the federally required feasibility study funded, but not yet started.

A handful of other cities have streetcar and heritage trolley systems, but the type of modern streetcar deemed fit for Gainesville has only been seen three times before in the country; Seattle, Wash.,Tacoma, Wash., and Portland, Oregon.

A trolley, cable car, light rail and streetcar may all seem synonymous, but each has its own distinction from the rest.

Usually vintage, trolleys are open-aired and typically not as energy efficient as their cousins – think New Orleans. A cable car is powered by electricity fed up from underground, through the rails on which the car runs – think San Francisco. Light Rails, to be contrasted with “Heavy Rails,” as in actual railways, are intended to travel at fast speeds with less stops – think outside of Portland, in commute to downtown wherein the light rail changes to function as a streetcar.

Gainesville’s modern streetcar, as with other cities’, will be purely electric, so there won’t be diesel spewing out along its neighborhood-winding journey between downtown and campus. MTPO is looking into technology developed in Spain and Japan that enables streetcars to recharge their ultra capacitors in 20 seconds when stopping at stations and briefly at the end of the line before looping back around.

In addition to being a more aesthetically pleasing and quieter alternative to a bus, an electric streetcar is attractive because of its reliability and permanence. The streetcar gives assurance to nearby residents and business owners that there will always be public transportation near their living and working spaces. On the other hand, buses do not maintain such permanence – routes could easily change or be eliminated. This assurance provided by the streetcar does come with a price, though.

There is, as Coffey explains, a potential for elevated rent in the areas surrounding the streetcar. The increase rent may drive students away from the current student neighborhood just east of campus.

Hawkins said this elevation in property value would apply to the the actual land value, not necessarily the units on it – depending on how many units. A denser arrangement of units on the newly higher-valued property will diffuse the extra costs among more units. Hawkins is confident that if downtown proceeds with this high density development, Gainesville will maintain its ability to provide affordable housing.

Again turning to Oregon for inspiration, Hawkins learned that land values in Portland’s Pearl District, home to the city’s streetcar system, are 15 times greater today than they were prior to the streetcar’s existence.

Portland’s streetcar also stimulated the local economy by generating $3.5 billion of private investment within a three block radius from the streetcar line.

The City of Gainesville has been progressing towards the comprehensive BRT network since the early 2000s, with talk of the streetcar surfacing just two or three years ago.

Hawkins sees investment in alternative transit as a vital component of Gainesville’s success as a maturing city in the modern world and advocates for an increase in funding in the city’s transportation.

Maybe one day in the moderately distant future Gainesville will become the Portland of the south. For now, we can only dream (…and invest in alternative transportation).

(above) Art courtesy of Karl Boardman. See more at hellsgnaw.tumblr.com.

At the end of 2010, Matt Town released the first issue of Speedball, a local zine with raw and edgy aesthetics, influenced by graffiti, tattoo design and skateboarding.  Town describes the zine as a visual stimulant and a literary depressant.

Now, three issues later, the zine can be found in places like Anthem Tattoo Parlor and the Civic Media Center. Town serves as the publisher and editorial director of the zine, and with the help and support of his friends Nicholas Luvaul, Jason Henry, Karl Boardman, Carlos Jaramillo, Tyler DuMais and Margaret Dodds, the magazine enjoys a local reputation for its creative release parties and unique content.

While skateboarding serves as the backbone of Speedball, Town also aims to showcase local art and to highlight topics that might otherwise go uncovered by the mainstream media.

“It’s a cool way to express ourselves without censorship,” he said.

Although he gets inspiration from printed magazines like Lowcard, Thrasher, and Vice, Town said Speedball is a project unlike any other.

“We focus on visual aids rather than literary. Sure, there are going to be awesome interviews and articles to read, but I want to keep the idea that a picture says a thousand words.”

As for the future of Speedball, Town and his friends agree they want to reach a greater audience and expand their content geographically. Town’s goal is to create a tight-knit community of friends, artists and musicians but always tie the zine back to Gainesville.

“He’s not trying to show off,” Carlos Jaramillo, a photo contributor, said in reference to Town. “He’s not trying to become famous. He’s doing it because he loves it.”

The zine is released quarterly, and you can view past issues, videos and photos that didn’t make it to print at http://speedballmagazine.tumblr.com/.

Gainesville, you’ve been a real son-of-a-bitch. But I love you. We’ve had good times and bad times. You’ve been a dependable friend and a reliable crutch. You’ve been a jealous lover and a vicious monster. You’ve been a sage advisor and a snotty brat. You always wear black shirts and blue jeans. You always have a bike messenger bag full of tallboys. You always invite me to vegetarian potlucks even though I hate the food you make. You always want to ride your bike. You’re always awake. You’re always down for a beer on a Tuesday night.

Gainesville, do you remember that night when we stayed up till dawn listening to zydeco and drinking buckets of iced beer on my front porch, raging all night and planning our lives? Do you remember the spontaneous trips to the beach at five in the morning? Do you remember vandalizing that fraternity house? Do you remember that night on the roof of the Thomas Center? Do you remember when we occupied the Alumni Hall for justice? Do you remember that fist fight on New Year’s Eve? Do you remember when we made love in the middle of the afternoon and slept the rest of the day? Do you remember when you’d give me free coffee or pizza or beer in exchange for groceries? Do you remember strong-arming that Danish guy into leaving my brother’s girlfriend alone? Do you remember the insane poetry jams? Do you remember the Shamrock? Gainesville, Deja Brew lives on in our hearts.

So here’s to the road trips and the house parties. Here’s to arguing about Marx at Cuban restaurants. Here’s to Pabst Blue Ribbon (I still have the letter they sent me). Here’s to swimming in the pool in our underwear. Here’s to the CMC. Here’s to Crazy Greg. Here’s to sweaty summer nights and the drunken perfume of gardenias in the moonlight. Here’s to 3 a.m. booty calls. Here’s to nighttime union house visits. Here’s to the National Labor Relations Board. Here’s to Red Seder dinners. Here’s to the Suwannee River. Here’s to cold fried chicken (doused in hot sauce) with beer at the springs. Here’s to singing around backyard bonfires until late in the night. Here’s to the night they burned a couch in the middle of Third Ave. Here’s to the workers.

There are a few things you should always remember Gainesville. We’ve spent enough time together that I know some of your bad habits. Stay away from hard drugs. No one ever seriously expanded their consciousness through controlled substances. Don’t smoke weed every day. Biking will not bring down capitalism. Neither will dumpstering food or shopping at thrift stores. Don’t let your righteous anger and thirst for action blind you to reality on the ground. Study. Theorize. Fight. Study again. Fight again. Fight hard. Direct your struggle against those who have the power to change things. Go to meetings. Speak up in meetings. Join a movement. I don’t buy for a minute your bullshit about “not being a joiner.” Have no illusions about voting. Or the Democratic Party. Build a power base. Don’t be afraid to argue about politics. But don’t think you have all the answers. Have fun. Lots of it. Throw parties on weeknights. Never let school interfere with your education. If you graduate with a 4.0 GPA, you didn’t do enough activism. Leave the drama at the door. Sneak into apartment complex pools in the middle of the night. Have sex. Lots of it. But wear a fucking condom. Put yourself out there. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Learn how to cook. Read Neruda. Read Galeano. Read Marx. Read Lenin. Don’t be exclusive. Don’t be insulated. Create meaning wherever you go. Go to the beach. Go to protests. Learn public speaking. Get a job. But never work too hard for $8 an hour. Stand up for yourself. Stand up for your friends.

Always remember that a better world is possible. A world that is not scarred by hunger or fear or poverty or prejudice or the most horrific attacks on the dignity of human life. If you’ll stand with the immense majority of humankind in this fight for a better world, I’ll meet you farther on up the road. History is ours.

On Friday, a recount confirmed that Gainesville citizens have elected Craig Lowe to be the next mayor of Gainesville. The runoff was tight – ultimately decided by just 42 votes, with a higher turnout than the general election. The student support Lowe cultivated clearly helped make his historic victory possible.

In an impromptu sidewalk press conference on election night, Lowe said negative campaigning, which he studiously tried to avoid, helped his Tea Party-backed opponent, Don Marsh, overcome much of his general election deficit.

“There was definitely homophobia and prejudice injected into the campaign,” he said, calling this the dirtiest race he’d ever seen in Gainesville.

Marsh found himself a handy foil this weekend, when Westboro Baptist Church arrived to tell Gainesville that “God hates fags.” In a blog post, Marsh condemned “The REAL Haters,” who ” rub salt in the wounds of the very people God has commanded us to heal and to whom we should show compassion.”

While the post was clearly intended to make Marsh look a bit more gay-friendly, his language likens homosexuality to a disease that must be cured, which is the basis for the “ex-gay” movement long associated with Pastor Rick Warren. In this line of thinking, God commands us to “heal” members of the LGBTQ community, not to love them as they are.

Like the anti-”big government” Tea Partiers who rely on public assistance, some people prefer to fixate on “healing” the perceived sins of others. As Jesus once said, “Hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men, for ye neither go in yourselves (from Matthew 23:13, King James version).”

Lowe pointed out on election night that a city government can’t run on negativity. He also said Gainesville politics works best when students get involved. Hopefully this town can get past this ugliness and start focusing on the ways we can help the city develop a transportation infrastructure that doesn’t rely on cars, clean up our local Superfund site, care for the homeless, and grapple with budget problems that won’t disappear on their own.

The more students engage with local government, the less say haters or hypocrites will have in the future of this city.

For the Civic Media Center, Gainesville’s alternative library and reading room, the uncertainty has meant planning ahead. Enter the SpringBoard fundraiser.

Started in 1999, five years after the CMC was founded, it started the SpringBoard fundraiser as a dinner event. Guests pay between $10 and $20 on a sliding scale and are treated to fare catered by local restaurants and cooked by volunteers.

“It’s got a ‘punny’ name in that it’s our board fundraiser organized in the spring, but it’s also a financial springboard for us to survive the summer,” said Jimmy Schmidt, coordinator at the CMC.
In addition to food, there are raffles, silent auctions of art by local artists and a guest speaker.
Previous years’ guest speakers have included National Public Radio commentator Diane Roberts and the founder of Equality Florida, Nadine Smith.

This year, the CMC welcomes retired U.S. Army Col. Ann Wright as the event’s guest speaker. She is best known for having resigned in opposition to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and her involvement in antiwar activism, including acts of civil disobedience.

“She is someone who was very much on the inside of things. She brings to the table a tremendous military background and a real window into the workings of the system,” said Joe Courter, board member with the CMC and head of planning for the SpringBoard fundraiser.

The CMC requires about $1,000 a week to cover operating costs and keep its doors open. A substantial portion the center’s budget is covered by $10 annual memberships, but fundraising events such as the SpringBoard are essential in ensuring the CMC’s continued existence.

“We can raise that money in the spring and fall, as well as throughout most of the winter, but in the summer it’s hit or miss,” Schmidt said. “Especially in tough times like the past few summers.”
The currently unfavorable economic climate presents nonprofit organizations like the CMC with a challenge, as donations to charities and nonprofits are among the first places many people cut back spending, Schmidt said.

“The CMC is a totally independent community sponsored organization,” he said. “Even though we’re a tiny fish in the nonprofit world, it’s a tremendous feat of grassroots organizing to keep this place sustained.”

The notorious UF budget cuts have brought opportunity to another institution.
While the cuts have affected every college in the university in some way – some more than others – they’ve had a particularly interesting effect on UF’s award-winning Documentary Institute, which will permanently close its doors at the end of the spring semester and move to Wake Forest University.
Among the long list of accolades for the Institute are five documentaries aired nationally by PBS, as well as multiple Student Emmy and Student Academy Award nominations and wins.
“They were an excellent program,” said John W. Wright, dean of the College of Journalism and Communications at UF. “[But] we had to make a choice.”

The $250,000 a year that was allocated to the Institute accounted for 48 percent of the total available “expense” (or non-salary) budget for the entire college, Wright said, which was distributed by the state in the amount of approximately $525,000 before the budget cuts in public education. When the college lost this money as a result of statewide cuts, according to information received in an e-mail from Wright, it included the $250,000 allocated to the documentary program.
The department had several meetings with the program representatives to make a decision that was best for the college, he said. Every possible solution was considered, but in the end, everyone agreed that the decision to cut the Institute was the best one.

“Documentary programs are wonderful. They are essential, but they are expensive,” Wright said. “If the college still had funds, it would still have the Documentary Institute.”
But many of the Institute’s 20 students weren’t very supportive of the decision.
“The kind of administration we have doesn’t put much emphasis on the arts, and for me, that’s unfortunate,” said Jon Bougher, a graduate student in the Institute. “Obviously there was a recession countrywide, but people were looking at the recession as a cover to make cuts they wanted to make for a while.”

Bougher said that the documentary is crucial in the world of media, and by losing the program, the college will be losing something essential.
“How much do people really get from interviews?” he said. “Documentaries cover all different shades of gray that journalism doesn’t cover.”
But it is not only students who have protested against the closure of the Institute. Professors agree with the students that this was a bad choice for the college to make.
“I think it was not a good decision; this was a nationally ranked program,” said Sandra Dickson, co-director of the Institute who has joined the Wake Forest documentary program. “Anytime you eliminate a nationally ranked program, I think you lose something. It was not a popular decision, and I think people around the country were shocked.”

Dickson is not alone in her opinion. Churchill Roberts, a UF professor and co-director of the Institute, expressed similar thoughts.
“Another person once told me that really good universities protect their best programs,” Roberts said. “They would never get rid of them.”
While UF Institute students and professors seem upset, the professors at Wake Forest are thrilled to have the UF documentary program join their team. Professor Mary Dalton explained how grateful she is for having “the opportunity to take one of the top 10 programs.”
The UF program had a tremendous track record, Dalton said. She said the opportunity to bring a program of that caliber to Wake Forest was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“I’m happy that the program has found a new home and will continue to produce important work,” she said.

The documentary program at UF was a nationally known program, and any college that is looking to expand its reputation might be interested in it, Bougher said.
“Wake Forest was interested in making a mark for themselves, and they made a great choice,” he said.

When asked how Wake Forest acquired the documentary program, Wright responded by e-mail: “There was no auction or anything of the sort. The truth is that I don’t know any of the details of how the program landed at Wake Forest. I’m just delighted that they found a new home!”
Wake Forest is offering UF students a tuition deal that is hard to beat, Roberts said. They will only have to pay about $5,000 for tuition, rather than the $30,000 regular students have to pay.
“Looking back, it would have been better if the documentary program had been in a different college,” Roberts said. “I don’t think the new dean really understood documentary, and that’s unfortunate.”

Geneva Jarvis makes a living selling junk. She and her husband, Randy, run the Orange Lake Antique Village and Trading Post, where nothing has a price tag but everything is for sale. Geneva knows what it’s all worth. Sofas are $20. DVD players are $5 to $10. Plates, cups, bowls and saucers are all 50 cents. Her prices never change. She says people are used to them, and she would rather get rid of something than try to get rich off it.

“I don’t care if I make a quarter,” she says. “It’s gone.”

Geneva is 66 years old, with bright, grey-blue eyes and a firm handshake. The lines in her face deepen when she smiles. She’ll admit to smoking two packs a day, unless her doctor asks. She sits low in her seat but stands up straight and walks with purpose. She has raised five sons, and still tells them to watch their language.

Originally from Taylor, Mich., Geneva moved to Miami in 1969 and then to Orlando two years later. She started working as a picker for an antiques dealer and eventually went into business for herself, hiring a young man from Putnam, Conn., who would soon become her second husband.

“We worked together for a year,” Randy says. ”Got married, and here we are 25 years later, eating three squares a day.”

The Trading Post sits off Highway 441, south of Gainesville, just past McIntosh. Geneva says she and Randy finally moved into the little log cabin on the property about seven years ago but have been running their business there for about 25 years. They are zoned and licensed and rarely hear complaints. Geneva’s middle son, Huber Fraunfelter, lives next door with his two dogs, Bear and Blue.

“He’s on watch when we close,” she says.

All told, The Trading Post covers nearly two acres. Most of the inventory comes from estate sales, Geneva says. People leave a lot behind when they die. She takes it all: TVs and car tires, hot tubs, telephones, antique picture frames, fishing poles, poker chips, pots and pans, boxes of marbles, mason jars, gas cans, paint cans, ice trays, Barbie dolls, Christmas lights, porcelain toilet bowls and half-used bottles of glue. The ever-changing assortment of slightly- to-well-worn objects has made The Trading Post a favorite spot for deal seekers and artists alike.

Behind the house Geneva keeps her birds — 36 chatty macaws and Amazon parrots — and a well-mannered llama named Zazoo, who never seems to spit. Birds are the one thing she collects, she says, but she doesn’t bother naming most of them.

“I’m better off not getting really attached to them,” she says.

Geneva enjoys her work — enjoys being outside, finding stuff and meeting people. She knows many of her customers by name and many more by what they buy. She talks about the three ladies who always put on gloves to sort through her stacks of dishes or the gentleman with the moustache who has to argue over every price. She laughs but rarely compromises.

“Business is business,” she says. “And friendship is friendship.”

The Trading Post is open seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., or somewhere thereabouts. Geneva says she’s a little slower getting up when it’s cold out, but if she doesn’t get moving, someone usually comes knocking. She’ll rouse herself, go outside and stoke the rusty pipe stove, and get to work. On an average day, she sees 30 or 35 customers, sometimes more. Gator games usually bring a lot of business, she says, as do the busloads of art students from Santa Fe and UF. Customers pull up in the dirt lot and wander around the tables, taking their time. Geneva waves and chats and haggles until the sun gets low; then she and Randy close up the gate, eat a good meal, and rest up for tomorrow.

“You have your good days; you have your bad days,” she says. “And some days I’m glad it’s raining.”

Now, little more than a year later, we ask ourselves: what the fuck happened?

A horrific debacle over a health care “reform” that was a bogus, ineffective sellout in the first place? Sending 30,000 more troops into a violent imperialist occupation of Afghanistan? Maintaining a tremendous troop presence in Iraq? The bailout of the very same crooked money changers that wrecked the financial system in the first place (and are again set to receive billions of dollars in bonuses this year, as well)? Supporting the privatization of public education? There’s much talk about how “Washington is broken” and “Washington doesn’t work.” But looking at the track record of the two dominate parties in Washington, we can only honestly come to one conclusion: the system actually does work well, but only for the rich and powerful. And if you expected anything else, you’re shit out of luck.

Just follow the money trail. Where does the money come from to pay for elaborate, extensive and very expensive election campaigns? Mom and Pop down the street stuffing a crumpled $10 bill into an envelope and sending it off to Democratic headquarters to help get the latest champion of poor and working people elected? Hell no.

Election campaigns are financed in the corporate boardrooms and back rooms of the halls of power. This is why Obama will not go to war against the banks and corporations that are responsible for turning millions of people out of their homes and their jobs. Because he owes them. He’s their man. And the piper always gets paid. Every once in a while, the populist fury gets so cranked up that they have to find a patsy: remember Bernie Madoff? You gotta have some sympathy for the guy who took the fall for the entire capitalist class of America. Think about it. Financiers wreck our economy. Millions out of work. Millions more homeless. And only one guy does time. How could this even be possible if both parties weren’t controlled by big money?

In some ways, the enormous disappointment of the Obama administration will serve as a good lesson to our generation in the sense that, with the sad exception of people who still shill apologies and justifications for Obama (oftentimes because they’re planning on careers in the Democratic Party in the future), many of us already have very little faith in the establishment and the Democratic Party. This is a healthy step forward.

If we can remove the veils from our eyes and realize that the Democratic Party is and has been a party dominated by big corporate money for a long time, we can step forward with a clearer mind and an understanding of U.S. politics that is not perverted by a faith in the Democrats to change much of anything for the better.

We just need to distinguish the difference between voting and politics. They’re not necessarily related. Disillusionment with voting should lead us toward more engagement with politics, not away from politics. Do we really think stuffing a ballot into a box every four years is going to win us the change we want?

We are the first generation in a very long time that will witness falling standards of living, that won’t do as well as or better than our parent’s generation. We will work multiple part-time jobs, even with college degrees. Right now there is one job opening available for every six applicants. Do the math. Things look pretty bleak. But at least we know that voting Democratic won’t do us any good. So let’s start looking at other options. Let’s study politics and engage in politics. Let’s stop putting our hope and trust in some “great” man to lead us forward. Let’s start putting our hope in trust in each other in order to build a movement in this country to organize, fight and ultimately destroy the power of the bankers, the CEOs, the generals and the “leaders” of this country who have sold our futures and are now laughing all the way to the Federal Reserve.

It’s a painstaking and difficult thing to build a movement, of course. But we shouldn’t shy away from it. Indeed, it’s the only thing that has ever really changed American society for the better. The civil rights movement built an independent power base that pressured government in its own right and with its own might. And legislation followed. Labor built its own unions and attracted millions of members under its banners before any member of Congress or president of either party created workplace safety laws or legalized the 40-hour work week. And this is the question we should be asking right now: how can we build an independent movement of people’s struggles against homelessness, against hunger, against war, against police brutality or against corporate greed to win a power base for ourselves so that we can fight back in a really effective way?

There’s no truly national movement doing this right now. But we can get started for damn sure. Read about organizing. Start a study group. Go to a protest. Organize a protest.  Seek out other folks who are doing the same thing as you. Network. Talk with your neighbors. Talk with your coworkers. Take a stand. And if no one else is doing anything: lead.

The Fine Print founding staff. (from left) Matt Walsh, Rae Martin, Joe Richard, Lydia Fiser, Jessica Newman, Travis Pillow, Matthew Clark, Leah Herman, Kelley Coggins-Anton. Photo by Matt Walsh's self timer.

We accidentally included an old Letter from the Editors in the March issue of The Fine Print. This is what we meant to share with you all.

After almost two years of managing The Fine Print, it’s come time for the editors and founding staff to pass on the responsibility of covering the interests of Gainesville that would otherwise be ignored. Although it saddens us to say goodbye to Gainesville, no publication can reach its fullest potential without fresh minds and ideas. We have worked over the past years to establish connections within the community and to collectively work with others toward making Gainesville and the University of Florida a more socially just and interconnected place for everyone.

It is a scary time for alternative media in our town right now. The Satellite ended its monthly printing last year, leaving a void in the arts community, and The Gainesville Iguana took an indefinite hiatus soon after, leaving a void in the activist community. The Fine Print stands alone now, struggling to fill both gaps for students and Gainesville residents. Its our job to tie the community together and to provide an independent, critically thinking outlet for political, social and arts coverage through local, in-depth reporting.

Every community needs a voice, and The Fine Print has become that for activists and artists throughout the area. And now we need new students to step up and make sure the community keeps its voice.

Even if you’re not a journalism major, your skills and efforts are needed. The best publications are made up of diversely talented staffs; the key is bringing your talents to the table. If you’re interested in finding out more about how you can help cement The Fine Print in the Gainesville community, e-mail us at alt.publication@gmail.com and keep an eye out for our upcoming open house.

- Lydia and Jessica

“She didn’t have a single piece of luggage with her. Her makeup was smeared, and her clothes were dirty. She looked very distraught,” the Cormac McCarthy-inspired songwriter remembered.

Butcher asked if everything was OK. The woman explained to him that her long-time lover was a drug addict, and she was leaving for Texas to live with her mother and start anew.

“I told her it was the right thing to do,” he said, explaining the origin of his song “Grace on a Greyhound Bus.”
Butcher knew what it was like to decide to leave. When he was 18, he went to UF to study journalism. After his first semester, he decided that school wasn’t where he wanted to be. He wanted to tell stories through music.

“I remember the exact day I decided to leave (UF),” Butcher said, who is now 26. “It was really gray outside in the summer. I remember being at Leonardo’s and saying, ‘Man, I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to be a folk singer.’”

The singer-songwriter from Orlando has been touring the Southeast since he left Gainesville. He has played with some of today’s most influential folk artists, including Conor Oberst and The Felice Brothers. Butcher will play at Common Grounds on March 19 at 9 p.m. and again at the Reitz Union on April 1.

“I attended UF in 2001 for one alcohol-fueled semester,” Butcher said. “I dropped out immediately and moved back to Central Florida.”

His parents were reluctant about him leaving college, but shortly after that rainy day, he moved back home to pursue music.

“I am a songwriter; that’s what I like to do,” he said.

Butcher has played with many bands. In his early 20s, he was in The Heathens, who put out a country rock record called “The Big White House.”

After The Heathens split, Butcher began playing under his own name as Butcher and The Revolvers. He eventually recorded an album in 2008 called “Me and My Friends.”

The album was produced by Justin Beckler and was highly praised by The Orlando Sentinel. The first-person storytelling album is confessional and has a chirp that will keep a head bopping till the day is done. With powerful lyrics and a springtime sound, the album feels like Appalachia on a sunny day.

“This is music for late-night drives; it sounds best at 2 in the morning on a winding country road,” Butcher said.

But lately Butcher has found himself without a band behind him.

“I have been in too many bands and figure the only way I can break up myself is if I die or develop multiple personality disorder, neither of which has happened yet,” Butcher said. “I felt weird at first, putting my own name on a T-shirt, but artistically it is the right thing for me.”

Without a band, Butcher feels that he has more control of where his music goes. As an artist, he is more relaxed on stage, not to mention touring alone is more economical.

“I have learned a lot from watching the Avett Brothers,” Butcher said of the North Carolina band he frequently plays with.

The Avett Brothers’ chirpy folk tunes have recently made it to the top of various charts, including Rolling Stone’s College Radio Top 10 Albums.

“The Avett Brothers toured around 250 times in 2008, and they have climbed up every rung of the ladder to get to where they are today,” Butcher said.

Many musicians, like the Avett Brothers, have played on street corners and at small dives in the middle of nowhere so that they might get their name out on the street.

“It is very important to remember the DIY dynamic these days,” Butcher said. “Most of my time is spent promoting my music and booking shows.”

As he watches his fan base grow across the Southeast, Butcher is especially appreciative of everyone who comes to listen to his music and support him.

“I am so thankful for everyone who appreciates my music and all of the musicians I have gotten the chance to play with.” he said.

Music is a way of life for Butcher. He grows his talent like a fragile seed in the midst of a storm. He invests time and money and watches his fan base expand little by little. But making it to the top is not his No. 1 priority. For him, it’s about his next album, and it’s about connecting with the masses through storytelling.

Go see Matt Butcher play at Common Grounds on March 19 at 9 p.m. and at the Reitz Union on April 1.

To listen to some of Matt Butcher’s music, visit his web site.

According to Jean Kilbourne, one of the main arguments of the video “is that advertising, as perhaps the primary storyteller in American culture, has the capacity to both produce and affirm the very fictions about women’s desires and identity that advertisers themselves often claim to be innocently tapping into and reflecting back at the public”. The film reveals the many differences between the fantasy lives of women in advertising and the actual lives that women lead in reality.

The film is great for understanding queer issues too! Mass marketing has turned to queers as their new market, according to the false believe that gay people magically have more expendable income. The stereotypical images of advertising pervade our culture and lives, and this video will be a great way to understand and learn more about how this happens. If you’re interested in identity politics you will definitely enjoy this film. It addresses issues about obsession with thinness, the idea of “woman vs. woman” (women competing with each other for men), images in advertising used to silence women, and much more. If you’re interested in the film, the website has even more information and a comprehensive study guide  with a lot of excellent discussion questions.

Myself being a member of QAC, I was pretty excited. Aside from the fact that the speakers were broken and we were forced to watch the video on the good old small screen, it went really well. It was even kind of cozy gathering around the TV/VHS combo to watch a Paper Tiger Television video about Queeruption and radical queers. The movie is about the event Queeruption, held in NYC in 1999. The event was a follow up to the first Queeruption which was held in London, and it ran pretty smoothly for such a large gathering. During the day there were about 350-400 people there attending workshops, learning how to bring back new tools to help them in their activism and also in their daily lives. The event also features live music and poetry readings, which were both pretty cool. The film also makes a point of exposing the capitalist agenda behind “gay friendly” companies and products. Sure, it feels nice to see an ad with two women drinkin’ some BudLight and holding hands or whatever, but…. I don’t want to be another consumer market. Not to mention BudLight sucks. A lot.

Tonight, the Civic Media Center (CMC) is hosting a “Radical Rush Social” to kind of celebrate the culmination of the 2010 RadRush. A band called Blair and the Boyfriends will be playing, and the guy Blair is actually a national slam poet champion and has played with the likes of Cat Power and Stevie Wonder. The social is free, and it will be awesome! If anyone sees this before 9, come out to the CMC! Oh, and the social is a potluck, so there will be plenty of food and refreshments.

For 35 years, Goerings Book Store has struggled to survive in Gainesville’s increasingly corporate market. Located on 1717 NW First Ave., behind midtown, it was a place for students, professors and Gainesville residents to meet, talk about literature and browse titles by local authors. In a few weeks, its shelves will be empty. By March, even the shelves will be gone, and its doors will close permanently.

Remy Boucias, a UF journalism junior who grew up in Gainesville, recalls tagging along with his mom to visit Goerings as a kid.

“I really liked the environment,” Boucias said. “It was better than, say, Borders or Books-A-Million. A lot of it had to do with the owner, Tom Rider. He’d always be at the front desk with quirky books to show me – stuff I wouldn’t have read otherwise.”

Boucias appreciated seeing work there by local authors.

“When you go to a chain store, you just get the New York Times best sellers list,” he said. “You don’t get exposed to anything from your community.”

In addition to providing work by local authors, Goerings held events, such as book signings, which created a sense of literary community. UF English Professor Padgett Powell, a local author himself, has patronized Goerings since 1984.

Powell and other professors like him supported Goerings each semester by sending the store exclusive textbook orders. He expressed frustration with the UF Bookstore’s poor quality of service and the fact that they only stocked a set percentage of books ordered by each professor to prevent overstocking the inventory.

“If you told Goerings you had 30 students, Goerings would order 30 books,” Powell said. “They handled our textbooks with a moment’s notice. We sometimes ordered books after classes began, the way it should be done, not as we’re doing it now, so far in advance that you forgot what you ordered for your classes.

The drawback is that exclusive orders leave students with fewer choices when it comes to where their textbooks come from. This would have been a serious problem had Goerings chosen to take advantage of the situation by charging more.

“The prices were very reasonable,” said Hanny Lane, a UF economics and math junior. “And the people there were very friendly.”

Naturally, the UF Bookstore had serious competitive advantages, such as its ideal location and its affiliation with the University.

Until 2000, UF owned and operated its own bookstore located at The Hub. The decision was made in 2000 to build a new bookstore and welcome center. The Business Services Division of UF contributed $10 million to the project. Follett Higher Education Group contributed $2 million. Student fees contributed $6.3 million.

From 2000 on, Follett owned and controlled the campus bookstore. For the first $10 million made by the bookstore in a given year, the university got 10.75 percent. If the profits reached $15 million, the university got 11 percent.

“All the money made at Goerings stays in the Gainesville community,” said Tom Rider, a co-owner of Goerings since 1981. “Most of the money made at the campus store goes back to Chicago, where Follett Enterprise keeps its headquarters.”

The UF Bookstore may have been run by a $2.5 billion dollar corporation, but they could not match the level of service that Goerings Book Store provided.

“I don’t go to the UF Bookstore,” said UF junior Lindsey Green. “They’re not as interested in serving students as they are in making money, as is apparent in their prices. And they have terrible customer service.”

So Goerings remained competitive, despite the factors stacked against them.

“As chain bookstores flooded in, small bookstores…began to close,” Rider said.

Rider said each chain store controls such a massive sector of the market that publishers can’t force them to pay for their books on time. The publishers then have to make up for this by tightening restrictions on independent stores, like Goerings.

Still, Goerings prevailed because professors chose to support them.

“I ordered all my textbooks for all my classes at Goerings before they stopped doing textbook orders this semester,” said Elise Takehana, a UF graduate student who teaches literature and writing courses. “Goerings had so many texts that you don’t see anywhere else. There’s also a level of service here that you don’t get at other stores.”

Why, then, did Goerings fail?

State legislation requires professors to post their textbook requirements online at least 30 days before classes start. This gives students more time to compare textbook prices and, if necessary, order textbooks online.

The University’s Office of the Provost is stricter about this than the state government. Professors are required to post their textbook requirements online two to five months before classes start. Otherwise, their departments get fined. The textbook information, posted online, can then be accessed by local bookstores. This effectively ends the ability of professors to place exclusive textbook orders, which were the life support of Goerings.

Goerings will clearly be missed by students and professors looking for noncommercial sources of literature and conversation. To prevent this sort of tragedy from happening again, Tom Rider suggests that sympathetic students do their best to venture off campus and support local businesses. After all, they may not be around for much longer.

In January, UF’s Office of the Provost awarded the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, SPOHP, with a $150,000 grant for a three-year research project that involves conducting and transcribing interviews in Alachua County and surrounding areas with black Americans who came of age during legal segregation. Most of the interviews will be conducted by UF students and put into a database accessible to students all over the world.

“There’s a real need to document black history in this part of the country,” said Paul Ortiz, 45, director of SPOHP. “The people who can tell us what life was like back then are rapidly passing away.”

With Florida’s long history of segregation, it is critical to make a subjective record of the time before it is too late, Ortiz said.

“The bottom line is that people who came of age during Brown v. Board are starting to pass away, and only they can tell us what it was like to live back then,” he said. “It is a tremendous civics lesson that we can learn from them.”

The idea of the project came about from a collective need for the material.

“It definitely is not an idea that we came up with ourselves,” Ortiz said. “Teachers call us all the time to demand documents on African-American history.”

Even though there is no shortage of books on black history, there is no written record of people who experienced segregation first-hand. Participants in the program believe that preserving the memories of these individuals would be a good investment for the future needs of scholars, as well as a good wake-up call for those who take their civil rights for granted.

Sherry DuPree, one of the program’s interviewees and current professor at Santa Fe College, described her first voting experience in the days of segregation as a time filled with fear and intimidation.

“We drove our senior citizens to the polls,” DuPree said. “Many were afraid and would not go. They had been told that they would find their children, homes and land destroyed if they wrote their names on the ballot.”

But even long after segregation laws had been lifted, Florida was no easy state for minorities to reside in.

DuPree was the first African-American librarian hired and tenured at UF. She even got the approval vote from the library department staff, yet the university refused to give her this honor.

It’s the personal stories like DuPree’s that the oral history program aims to conserve not only for the benefit of future students, but also for the interviewers themselves.?“Students tell me that by doing these interviews they learn more about African-American history than they have learned in their whole lives from textbooks,” Ortiz said. “Students come back to us three to four years later and tell us that doing the oral histories interviews gave them a greater appreciation for the society that they live in.”? Douglas Malenfant, 25, a UF history senior and transcriber for the program, describes his experiences with SPOHP as “extremely rewarding.”

“Being part of this African-American history project has changed my perception of Gainesville’s importance in the Civil Rights Movement,” he said. “[It] has most significantly changed the way I look at the landscape of Gainesville. It is difficult to imagine that 40 years ago African-Americans in Gainesville were prohibited from patronizing many restaurants, bars and grocery stores, but that is the truth.”

“[SPOHP] offers history majors a rich diversity of testimonies that they can use to draw out the realities of segregation,” Malenfant said. “Political science majors can [also] benefit from contextualizing the importance of civil rights legislation and learn from the community organizers who fought some of this nation’s toughest battles for equality.”

As beneficial as these oral history records may prove to be, getting the information to the people is always a challenge.

“We do the interviews, but we also want to get the material out there,” Ortiz said. “We don’t want it to just sit on the shelf.”

The oral history program is having a series of seminars starting this month to get the word out. The series is themed “The History and Future of Community Organizing in America” and will run from Feb. 17 through April 14.

The seminars should raise awareness of the importance of the program among students, Ortiz said.

“We want to document the black history in Alachua County, and we want to make sure that it is preserved.”

The High Springs Farmers Market springs up from the black pavement of an empty parking lot each week to provide a space for locals to buy and sell food grown in North Central Florida. It brings consumers to the source of their food the way McDonald’s severs them from the source. Money flows from house to farm and from farm to store, circulating through the local economy, instead of skipping town buried in the pockets of corporate giants.

Gainesville citizens have their own farmers markets throughout the week, but unlike High Springs, where everyone has access to healthy, local food regardless of income level, the Gainesville markets aren’t available to everyone yet.

The High Springs Farmers Market is the only market in Florida that accepts federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, formerly known as food stamps. So everyone in High Springs has the opportunity to eat Florida-grown produce that’s washed in in water, not pesticides, and bought from fellow citizens instead of a Super Wal-Mart. Although this isn’t the case in Gainesville now, Florida Organic Growers (FOG) and its partners in the city and county have a plan to change this and join High Springs in setting the precedent for other Florida cities.

Last May, FOG received a one-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate food security for low-income residents of the county and how it can be increased. The organization worked through the year to assemble ideas and potential plans to present to the USDA and the city of Gainesville this spring.

The goal of all their ideas is to increase access for people who have trouble getting fresh foods, said Melissa Desa, the FOG project coordinator.

“SNAP at the farmers market is a win-win because it’s federal dollars being spent in the community and kept locally. So it’s kind of the best of all scenarios,” Desa said.

About $4 million of federal money comes to the county each month through SNAP beneficiaries, according to the Department of Children and Families. As it is now, about six or seven of the 29,449 people who receive benefits go to the High Springs’ market each week, but the majority live in other towns in the county, like Gainesville, where their benefits are only accepted at corporate stores with national economies. There’s been a steady rise in the last year and a half with more than 7,000 additional people receiving benefits since December 2008. And that’s only one-third of the people in the county who qualify, according to John Skelly, the director of Poverty Reduction for Alachua County.

Christine Hale, the director of education and outreach at FOG said that “because there are so many people added to the [SNAP] list every month, this is a great opportunity to bring those federal dollars back to farmers.”

Desa and Hale are looking at how other cities have structured their programs for guidance while formulating the plan for Gainesville.

Most markets get a hand-held, card-reading machine where customers can scan their cards, whether it’s a debit, credit or Electronic Benefits Transfer card, which draws from a SNAP funds account. In exchange, customers get tokens worth certain amounts to purchase food and plants from individual booths.

The plan can’t stop at just setting up the infrastructure for the program though.

“It’s not like all of a sudden people will flock to the farmers market,” Hale said. “Education and outreach is needed to get people eating from the middle of the store – the processed food isle – to the market.”

Cities throughout the country that are home to the 753 farmers markets authorized by the USDA to accept SNAP benefits have tried different programs to increase the ease, access and awareness of the SNAP benefits at farmers markets.

One program, which Desa and Hale are optimistic about, relies on the sponsorship of outside companies. A business can sign up to provide incentive coupons to SNAP beneficiaries that double their benefits. So a $10 token can earn a $10 coupon, and the beneficiary then gets $20 worth of food at the market.

Autry Ellison displays the size of his shrimp, "as big as your hand," that he brings down from Jacksonville weekly for the High Springs and Gainesville farmers markets. Photo by Jessica Newman.

“The coupon program is really key to making this happen,” Hale said. “We can easily obtain [Electronic Benefits Transfer] machines for relatively little cost, but getting the people to the market might not be successful. If they know their value is going to be doubled, they’re more likely to do it.”

The coupon program, along with paying someone to run the Electronic Benefits Transfer machines and distribute money from federal funds to local farmers, is the biggest cost obstacles to bringing SNAP to Gainesville farmers markets.

A lack of funding to set up and run the program and the amount of cooperation needed between federal, state and local organizations are what have prevented Gainesville from trying this before now. But since the USDA grant spurred FOG to look into the program, “everyone is seeing the connections [of those who can benefit], and the wheels are turning and we’ve got the ears of city and county people,” Hale said.

Farmers markets in Gainesville could begin accepting SNAP benefits as early as this summer or fall if people step up to fund it. Desa and Hale hope eventually to make the program self-sustainable so that it won’t have to rely on outside money. Until then though, FOG is applying for grants and working toward forging partnerships with local businesses.

“We need funding to make this happen,” Desa said. “We know there are companies out there to support projects like this and help the hungry in our community, help farmers, our local economy and help the people. I think they’ll see the rewards trickle up from the low-income people and benefit the entire community as a whole.”

]]> http://www.thefineprintuf.org/2010/02/11/no-cash-no-problem-bringing-local-healthy-food-to-everyone-in-gainesville/feed/ 1 http://www.thefineprintuf.org/2010/02/11/media-revolution-the-future-of-the-fourth-estate-according-to-colin-whitworth/ http://www.thefineprintuf.org/2010/02/11/media-revolution-the-future-of-the-fourth-estate-according-to-colin-whitworth/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:01:05 +0000 Jessica Newman http://www.thefineprintuf.org/?p=1415

Colin Whitworth started Moon Magazine, a free Gainesville alternative monthly that focused on local politics and entertainment, with four other journalists in 1990. He graduated from UF in the late ’80s and worked at The Alligator during his college years, which he described as a “very idealistic place when it came to journalism.” After graduation, Whitworth went to work at the daily paper in Leesburg. But he wasn’t happy with his job at the profit-driven news organization, so he and some friends decided to start Moon Magazine, where Whitworth could focus on the in-depth reporting that got him into journalism in the first place.

Jessica Newman: What inspired you and your cohorts to start Moon Magazine back in 1990?

Colin Whitworth: Each of us probably had our own reason for wanting to do it. A couple of us, when we were in college, talked about starting a magazine. We actually tried to devise an idea, and we just realized, we’re in college. There’s no way we can do this. After college, I was working in mainstream journalism at a newspaper. Two of the other people were out in Seattle, Matt and Mark, working in independent journalism and as canvassers for political campaigns and issues. I was living in Leesburg. I wanted to get out of town and do something different. I went back to the idea of having my own magazine. But it was kind of like, yeah right. I’ll do journalism for 25 or 30 years, and maybe someone will make me editor of their magazine one day. And I’m talking to Matt and Mark on the phone, and they’re like, well out here they have these small magazines everywhere–in Seattle, Washington and Oregon. So they sent me the stuff in the mail, and we just started talking about it. We had a meeting down at my house in Leesburg and said, what are we going to do? Everyone had done all this research because they had all these people like yourself and myself out in Seattle. They went to them and said, how do you start a paper? Personally, my desire mostly was I liked magazine journalism. They brought the whole political kind of advocacy, left-leaning journalism thing.

JN: As you got more involved, when did you fall into the line of thinking that Moon would be the ‘anti-Gainesville Sun’? And when did you decide to forgo the mainstream model of objectivity for a philosophy of ‘fair but pointed’?

CW: When I worked at The Alligator, it was a very idealistic place when it came to journalism. People really looked at themselves as the eyes and ears of the people in a way that we all took our job very seriously and our goal was to do really good articles that really showed what was going on. Then you go out into the real world and you have all these old crusty people who are working for a paper that’s owned by a giant corporation. At the Leesburg paper, our publisher was heavily involved in influencing the news coverage, specifically the business part of the paper. I had also come to the realization that everybody has an opinion, no matter what, about anything. When you write an article, you can consciously try and edit out your viewpoint, but it affects every decision you make in preparing the story–what questions you ask, the people that you try to find to interview, the types of questions you ask to them and how you place that stuff into the story. I don’t think that you have to be objective in order to be fair. We stated from the outset in Moon that we were a left-leaning organization. Honestly, I became more political after I got fired from my temporary job at the City of Gainesville. [The city] redid the Downtown Plaza, and I wrote this thing about how I didn’t like the idea of them having to cut down all these trees. It was very beautiful. Apparently the city attorney, my boss’s boss’s boss, was friends with the people behind the renovations and saw that and through a number of steps got me fired. I wrote in another article about what went down and why they fired me. Then The Gainesville Sun did an article about it. They interviewed all the people involved. It made me look great; it made them look stupid.

JN: The stuff that you guys were writing about, this wasn’t stuff that Gainesville residents could get anywhere else, right?

Colin Whitworth and his children.

CW: Not as well. The Sun used to be a lot better, back in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. The Gainesville Sun got a new publisher, this guy John Fitzwater, back in the late ’80s, that radically transformed that paper. He came in and had the complete mentality of, “This is here to make money.” He squashed a lot of stuff. He really became our nemesis at the paper. The Gainesville Sun left a humongous void that people in this community were hungry for. That’s why we were successful; The Gainesville Sun made it easy on us.

JN: What about where we are today? How important are alternative media outlets like Moon in a world dominated by corporate, profit-driven media?

CW: I think it’s definitely important. I think media now has a business-down model versus an editorial-down model. What I mean by that, it used to be that the business side of a media organization existed to make sure that the newspaper could get published. It was there to serve the news interests of the paper. Now it’s flipped. Now the content is what it’s called, and that’s there to serve the larger goal of making the company profitable. I think in the long run there’s going to be a prolonged period of suffering and change in the news media but that eventually we’re all going to be getting everything through the Internet or on our phones or on some other device. I think what journalism is going to change into is hard to know. There’s a need to have reliable news-gathering organizations everywhere. We’re a bright species. I think that we’ll probably figure something out.

Umoja Orchestra singer Sebastián López tilts his head up and closes his eyes tight. It looks as if his body is being consumed by the sounds of the orchestra. His right hand closes in a fist as he listens to the exchanges between Jason Prover’s trumpet and David Borenstein’s saxophone.

The slight taps of Evan Garfield’s drum, Scott Bihorel’s congas and Adam Finkelman’s timbales are making hips sway. It’s the middle of a musical breakdown in their song “Talkatalk,” the instruments are in the middle of a conversation and all of The Atlantic is listening in. They are listening closer because it is one of the last times Gainesville will be hearing Umoja Orchestra.

The horns and percussion pick up and López’s feet tap. The horns get louder, the drums go faster and his feet get higher off the ground. The floorboards on the stage bend at the mercy of his dancing.

The energy is electric, and as much as they are performing for the crowd, Umoja Orchestra is performing for themselves.

“When you’re in the studio and have a lot of pressure, you don’t enjoy it as much,” Lopez said. “When you’re playing music with a whole bunch of friends, I think it’s better if you focus on the people you’re playing with and you have more communication with the audience and think of them as part of the band.”

After four years of playing together, the group is disbanding after their summer tour. Borenstein will be going to China, and Prover will be entering NYU’s graduate music program.

“Usually in practice keeping [the band] going is difficult, but lately I feel like we shouldn’t worry about it too much,” Garfield said. “The Atlantic was a nice rounding place where we’re back doing what we enjoy doing the most.”

At their first CD release party four years ago at The Side Bar, it was difficult to understand how this band was going to survive. Being a 14-piece, Latin-influenced orchestra with Spanish lyrics in a north central Florida town is no easy task. But after four years, Umoja is known to sell out almost all their shows in town. The Atlantic last month was no exception, with a line of people wrapping around the block.

The band believes the only reason they are so successful is that they started in Gainesville.

“We learned a lot when we played the Latino festival in Gainesville and we played in Miami,” Garfield said. “When you’re used to hearing something it takes something special and unique to catch your attention. For a lot of people who weren’t exposed to Latin music it was refreshing to hear something that hadn’t been heard before. We were lucky enough to be playing something that was just the right amount of weird for people.”

For singer Natalia Perez, the relationship the band has with Gainesville is seen in moments when they aren’t playing music.

“Before a show we’re doing sound check, and when people start coming in, we’re out mingling with people,” Perez said. “It’s not like we’re hiding. Our friends go to see us, and it’s nice to see friends of friends all come to see us. It becomes a huge crowd.”

At The Atlantic show, everyone’s shoulders were touching. I could feel the sweat dripping off López mixing with the sweat of people around me. With a full house, it would be easy to grow an ego, but the band doesn’t see it that way.

For Bihorel, the band’s popularity is something he has trouble wrapping his head around.

“When I go to see a band on a local level with as big a following as we do, it feels so much different than what it does for the Umoja following,” Bihorel said. “I, as an individual, I’m not any different. I’m still a fan of other music. We’re all just the same old people.”

But the lines that are so common outside of Umoja shows will be absent next year because of Borenstein and Prover’s departure.

Borenstein drops his eyes a bit when he talks about his departure.

“I’m not going to be able to go on with my head up as high as it is now,” Borenstein said. “Me and [Prover] always tacitly have this dream in our heads that in the future we’ll meet up with everyone else again. The way I get over leaving them all now is by telling myself it’s not over.”

The band doesn’t feel comfortable continuing under the name Umoja Orchestra because Borenstein and Prover helped start the band when they met with Lopez and others in the dorms at UF.

However, the breakup is not a surprise.

“When we started and met in college, we knew like ‘Man, we got four years here,’” Garfield said. “I saw it as ‘I have four years to be in this band.’ I never saw it as going longer, but I guess it could if things change. I’m trying to get us big in Japan or in China.”

The band isn’t leaving Gainesville empty-handed. By the time this article is published, they will have played their last Gainesville show at the Common Grounds and released their last album, “Dinner at the Republic.”

Although they are calling it the end, the band knows the future is always uncertain. They just want to make sure that Gainesville gets the farewell it deserves.

“Whoever’s been in Umoja is always in Umoja,” López said. “It’s like a group of friends. If we don’t play we’ll still be in Umoja.”

Seriously? The world runs on this stuff. If you stopped all shipments of coffee from entering the borders of the United States, you’d have a revolution on your hands. All the working stiffs that rely on the stuff to keep running at their second or third part-time job would crash.  Instead of having a sit-in, you’d have a sleep-in. Our economy would come to a screeching halt. And when those folks woke up after their long nap, they’d be pissed – both from the lack of caffeine and from the realization that it takes a legal drug to keep them running in the hamster wheel that is our society.

            I just don’t get it. I am ready and willing to pay $2 for a good cup, if that’s what it costs me. The problem is that I just can’t find it. “But what about the cafes that only serve fair trade, organically grown coffee?” It doesn’t matter whether the coffee is stained red with the blood of workers in Colombia or picked by members of a worker-owned cooperative in Ethiopia. The problem is how it’s made here in Gainesville, although the fair trade stuff usually does taste better. Business owners are simply too cheap or too ignorant to make a strong cup.

            A lot of it must be ignorance, despite the fact that it only takes a few minutes to sit down and figure out what the correct portions of grounds to water should be (there are dozens of coffee connoisseur web sites who are more than happy to explain). Or maybe people are just so used to drinking thin, watery battery acid for coffee that they don’t expect or want anything else. I’ve seen this phenomena occur before. Like when you keep a hamster locked up all its life but finally one day, you open the door of the cage and offer it freedom. It’ll shiver with fear in the opposite corner of the cage, not knowing and not wanting to know what lies beyond the cage that’s imprisoned the little guy since he was born. But maybe, if the door of the cage is left open long enough, the little guys will get used to it and venture out into the sunlight.