Be The Media

Marin Community Media - Support Book Passage

Many people in Marin are upset that Corte Madera Town Center management secretly cancelled Marshall’s new lease, and then secretly arranged to rent 27,000 square feet of space to Barnes & Noble - without any input from the Marin community.

The decision was made by Morgan Stanley (the out-of-town asset managers) for the Florida State Board of Retirement (the out-of-town owners). The Marin community had no advance notice of, nor opportunity to comment on the proposed tenant.

As Marin homeowners, we must endure a thorough and lengthy review process to get permission for even the smallest changes to our homes. Remote corporations should be held to the same standards as individuals in our community.

Marin doesn't need another chain bookstore - there is already a chain book reseller less than a mile away (across Highway 101), and B&N will certainly damage Marin's local independent bookstore, Book Passage. National studies show that locally-owned businesses, particularly independent bookstores, give back to the community far more than chain stores.

Join us on Sat. March 25 between noon and 2:00 pm, to demonstrate to the owners and managers of Town Center that we oppose this decision. There is a police permit for the demonstration, which will be non-confrontational and peaceful. Meet at Madera near Washington Mutual Bank, Madera in front of Safeway, or the one around the corner near IL Fornaio Restaurant and the Bay Club. Show your support for Book Passage and independent community media.

The protest is organized by Citizens for Local Control (CLC), a small but determined group who recently appeared before the Corte Madera Town Council. In January the CLC asked the Corte Madera Town Council to adopt an ordinance requiring a public hearing and a review process before a retail business covering 20,000 square feet or more is allowed to open in this town.

CLC has requested a Review to determine whether the opening of a large-scale or “big box” retailer would harm the local economy, locally-owned businesses, or the character of the community. CLC working to enact comparable legislation at the county level. Other municipalities have succeeded in passing such legislation, including San Francisco (see www.newrules.org).

If you cannot be there on the 25th but want to help with ideas, events, write letters, or make phone calls in the future , send a message to “citizensofmarin@yahoo.com“ (Susanne Karch, Citizens for Local Control)

SUPPORT BOOK PASSAGE vs. Barnes & Noble

Literally tens of thousands of people in our community have benefited from Book Passage's many offerings over the years. Independently owned and operated, they hold dozens of author/speaker events every month, and have regularly-scheduled classes for local authors, writers and speakers.

The predatory threat from allowing big-box Barnes & Noble into Corte Madera's Town Center will undoubtedly damage the future for America's top-rated independent bookstore. You can help curb mall sprall by sending a simple message to the Corte Madera Town Council - SUPPORT BOOK PASSAGE!

Download sample letter to Corte Madera Town Council. Please personalize it and send it to the people below:

Jin Yang: Mayor of Corte Madera

Melissa Gill: Vice Mayor

Jay Tashiro: Corte Madera Town Manager 
Carla Condon: Town Council

John Dupar: Town Council
Michael Lappert: Town Council
Stan Hoffman: Local manager of Madisen Marquette, Town Center's leasing agent
Amer Hammour: CEO of Madison Marquette.

If you live in Corte Madera, please share your views during public comment on Tuesday February 21 starting at 7:30pm in the Corte Madera Town Council chambers at 300 Tamalpais Drive, Corte Madera, CA 94925. Special thanks to Susanne Karch, Konnilyn Feig and everyone else that has worked so hard on this campaign over the years.

Bloomsbury to Buy Walker Publishing

Dinitia Smith wrote:

"At a time when publishers are cutting corners, Bloomsbury Publishing P.L.C., the British publisher of the Harry Potter books, said yesterday that it was buying Walker Publishing Company, a small New York independent, to broaden its American presence with the addition of Walker's well-regarded nonfiction list.

The purchase price will be $6.5 million, said Nigel Newton, founder and chief executive of Bloomsbury. He said Walker would remain a separate division of Bloomsbury U.S.A. under its current publisher, George Gibson. "

Blogging Begets Books

By Joshua Kurlantzick in the New York Times:

"Like many aspiring authors, Marrit Ingman had a tough time convincing publishers that her big book idea—a wry, downbeat memoir of postpartum depression—could sell.

"I had to convince the publisher that an audience for the topic really did exist," said Ms. Ingman, a Texas-based freelance journalist. "The big publishers kept telling us that mothers only wanted prescriptive or 'positive' books about being a parent."

But Ingman had her own persuader: her Web log. She'd been writing it for two years and had attracted a following of mothers.

"I turned to readers of my blog," she said. "I asked them to comment on whether a book like mine would be relevant to them. Readers wrote back expressing why they wanted to read about the experience of maternal anger. I stuck their comments into my proposal as pulled quotes."

Her readers were convincing. She and her agent, Jim Hornfischer, sold her memoir, "Inconsolable," to Seal Press in August. "The blog showed publishers she was committed to the subject matter and already had an audience," Hornfischer said."

All together now

"i am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together."
- Lennon & McCartney

Working with oneness

Excerpts from Working with Oneness by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

"ONENESS is very simple: everything is included and allowed to live according to its true nature. If we allow ourselves to be open, we will be shown the possibilities of oneness, the world beyond our prison walls. Everything we need is present, but as always what stands in our way is our own self."

From Chapter 1, Global Energy Patterns :

"The new energy that is becoming available to us is an energy of oneness that can help us live our true role in relation to the planet, a role of stewardship based on conscious interconnectedness. Only as individuals standing on our own feet can we make a valid contribution to the collective. Otherwise we remain caught in the collective and its patterns of co-dependency that block any real change or development. Taking responsibility for our inner and outer life is necessary if we are to participate creatively in the life of the whole. As a culture we are so identified with patterns of hierarchy and their levels of exclusion that we overlook the primary truth that the dimension of oneness is all-inclusive. The moment we turn our focus away from our own ego-self and participate in the work of the whole, we step into the circle of our own wholeness."

One Living Body

From "The vision of the fool and other writings" by Cecil Collins (1908-1989)

"All real creation is personal, in art as in life. The mystery of personality is the basis of romantic art, as it is the basis of democracy. They are one. Democracy is the most difficult and most creative form of society known so far to man, difficult because creative and romantic art is its natural expression. The creative chaos of democracy - with all its weaknesses, hypocrisy and injustice - is much closer to the human way of making a society then the iron prison of dictatorship states, communist or fascist. So, the flowing empirical expression of romantic art is much nearer the actual life of the human psyche.

Democratic romantic vision of civilization put the responsibility of life upon the individual. We can not give our problems over to some leader, who will solve them. The democratic civilization can be the soil in which the moulding and leavening of personal vision and of the collective unconscious mind of man will create a new world mythology of expression. The re-establishment of the creative imagination in the life of man, the working towards a world consciousness - that is - the idea of the world as one living body, constitutes the great task of the democratic attitude in art and in life, because real creative energy works through diversity. For example, the law of growth is universal one, and yet that law is expressed differently in the form of a rose and in an oak tree. Under the diverse expressions of different artists works the same universal creative spirit, and deep under the consciousness of man works the hidden unity of the unconscious mind of the human race. The time has come for us to affirm the fundamental unity of man, to work for that which unifies him, and not what divides him.

We are told a lot about our duty today, but it is mans duty to be free. He owes it to society, and I define freedom as the fulfillment of mans essential self. Liberty is not something that is let loose; it is something that is created. It is an achievement first in the individual man, then in a nation, then in the world community. The real measure of our civilization is its fruits. Civilization is created by men of good will, and not by politics. A European once showed an Indian sage a wireless and told him of the wonders of modern civilization, to which the Indian replied- "you make battleships, but can not even control your thoughts, to what will that lead?" We know to our cost the answer to that.

If we are not not all to perish we have got to realize that we are all fruit growing from the same, vast unconscious root of life. In whatever we destroy, we destroy ourselves, for the world is one living body.

Co-Intelligence

"Together we can be wiser than any of us can be alone."

Tom Atlee presented last night at the Future Salon. He is the co-founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute and author of "The Tao of Democracy," which explains how 'We the People' can build our collective capacity to see clearly where we're going and govern ourselves wisely. It describes how we can break through to conscious evolution and to co-creating a shared future that makes sense to all of us.

From the Co-Intelligence Institute's web site:

"Healthy communities, institutions and societies -- perhaps even our collective survival -- depend on our ability to organize our collective affairs more wisely, in tune with each other and nature. This ability to wisely organize our lives together -- all of us being wiser together than any of us could be alone -- we call co-intelligence."

The Times refuses reprint in Michael Moore book

From the New York Times:

"The publisher of a coming book by the filmmaker Michael Moore said yesterday that The New York Times had denied permission for Mr. Moore to include in his book a May article in which The Times reviewed shortcomings in its own reporting about the events leading up to the war in Iraq.

Publishing industry executives say that such denials are rare, and executives at Simon & Schuster, the publisher, said The Times was the only one of several publications it had approached to deny permission to reprint articles, photographs, cartoons or editorials in the book."

The secret behind those newspaper apologies ... and all those anti-Bush books

You must read Pat's two reasons/secrets behind all the newspaper apologies, from Holt Uncensored #388. Here is her main point:

"My point is that a scaredy-cat mentality was introduced nearly 30 years ago during the Reagan era and has extended so deep into the heart of the Bush administration that it's almost impossible to dig out.

As a result, today we are seeing the very best newspapers and news media eating themselves alive by kowtowing and apologizing to all the wrong task-masters - conservative fanatics, corporate owners, power-mad presidents.

And the book business has its own problems. One of the reasons we have hundreds of anti-Bush books today is that a smart bunch of librarians stood up for Michael Moore after 9/11 and created a movement that shamed HarperCollins into publishing "Stupid White Men." Before that, there were NO anti-Bush books, isn't that odd? Now that it's safer, there are too many.

The fact is, OF COURSE the press is liberal, in the sense that it's *liberal-minded.* It's pro-free speech, pro-civil rights, pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-diversity and pro-gay. It's laissez-faire; it's against war until the need for war is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Why hide such standards? Why apologize for it?"