Class K22, 2011

Sniffing the Zeitgeist has be sent to our supporters via the US Mail. If you are not on our list and would like to be added, email John Scagliotti, Administrator of Kopkind, at stonewal@sover.net. Below is an excerpt from this year’s edition.

From JoAnn Wypijewski, President of Kopkind and columnist (“Carnal Knowledge”) at The Nation, on the road in Iowa:

A little over a year ago, at Kopkind’s 2010 Harvest event, Vijay Prashad had declared, “What a wonderful time to be alive!” In the crisis, in the rupture, in the cracks, something new can sprout. Something has. It is not the encampments alone or the GA’s alone or the headlines of the day. It is, as Vijay has recently written, “the new political momentum toward a new horizon”. That momentum uplifts the young, the precarious, the unions and community groups, the world of hip hop. It uplifts our politics in a way that won’t be swept away by police eviction squads.

Class K23, 2011

If you would like to make a donation to Kopkind, click on our “Donate” tab at the top of this page. Thank you.

Sunday, October 9th @ 2PM

The Organ Barn at Tree Frog Farm

Kopkind Rd., Guilford, VT 05301

Please join us on this 250th anniversary of our town, Guilford, as we celebrate an important chapter in its history, commemorating the commune movement that brought Andy Kopkind to Vermont and honoring our friend, neighbor and community conscience, poet Verandah Porche.

Not long after the town’s bicentennial, young people began coming to this area, first in a sprinkling, then in a wave: dreamers and artists and drop-outs from a mad world, people with utopian visions or just looking for something, something else. By the 1970s many were, as Andy said, “refugees from the New Left”. He himself packed a bag in 1970, left most all he owned on a street corner in DC, and drove his motorcycle to a commune in Guilford. Verandah had come here two years earlier, to Packer Corners Farm just up the road from the Organ Barn, which has been standing almost as long as Guilford but which owes its name and peculiar feature to those days. The people who came changed Vermont, and were changed by it. Andy came out as a gay man, left, and returned a few years later to spend every summer at Tree Frog Farm, the reason we are here today. Verandah made Packer Corners her permanent home, enchanted Guilford with the creations of the Monteverdi Artists Collaborative, and has been telling the stories of people’s lives in poetry here and throughout the country ever since.

We are therefore honoring Verandah and this special moment in our town’s history at our annual Harvest Late Brunch benefit. There will be a delicious Tapas Feast. Afterward: a video tribute, a reminiscence of commune life by Verandah, and a screening of The Stuff of Dreams, which documents Monteverdi’s magical production of The Tempest, on an island in Sweet Pond.

Tickets are $35, $25 for students. With your support, the Kopkind Colony will weather the storms of nature and politics, preserving its connection to the past while developing ideas for the future. 10% of the proceeds will go to the campaign to resurrect Sweet Pond, a place once as pleasant as its name, recently drained and now the locus of community action. Reserve tickets now!

For more information or directions, contact 802.254.4859, or email at stonewal@sover.net.

7:30
- Talk, followed by discussion, dessert and coffee

MARIA MARGARONIS, European
correspondent and London editor for The Nation, on

“Euro-Turmoil: Notes on Greece
and Politics in Extremity”

Contact John Scagliotti, Kopkind Administrator, for directions to the Organ Barn.

“LIVE FROM THE MEDIA REVOLUTION”, a selection of videos shot in the midst of the thrilling Arab Spring among some of the people who made it,
with filmmaker Greg Berger  Email John Scagliotti, Administrator of Kopkind for directions for the Organ Barn..  stonewal@sover.net  You can see more about this with this local article from the Brattleboro Reformer

Greg Berger will be at Tree Frog Farm July 17

“I’d like to thank President McCulloch-Lovell and Marlboro College for according me this honor. I was pleased to see that Marlboro College was recognizing me not only for my work in film and television but also for my role on behalf of the LGBT and allied community.

I am accepting this honorary degree in the memory of Ron Squires, an eighth-generation Vermonter, a neighbor and friend from my hometown in Guilford, who, as the first openly gay legislator in 1990, led the way to passage of legislation that would stop discrimination in the workplace and housing for gay and lesbian Vermonters. It was pioneering work, as Vermont became only the sixth state in the nation at the time to pass such civil rights legislation.

Ron died from complications of AIDS early in his life, at 41, right after winning his first re-election campaign. Ron’s work inspired many of us, including his mother, Shirley. Each May she has participated in the Brattleboro AIDS Walk in honor of her son. She walks again for the 19th time next Saturday. Over these past years, she has raised close to $200,000 for the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont.

The struggle for human rights has been hard fought, and my presence here is an indication of how far it has brought us. An old-timer from the black struggle in the South likes to say, “You can learn about history, you can read history, but when you’ve lived history, you can talk about it.” I guess I’ve done all three–and I could tell you stories–but, in the end, what’s driven me is the belief that if we really want a world fit to live in, if we have any hope of a just society in the future, we need to know our history of struggle, and we need to be vigilant in preserving it. For all our sakes, I hope the students graduating this year never stop learning history, and take the chance to live it.

On this important occasion for me, I asked my neighbor, the poet Verandah Porche, to write a few words to end my acknowledgement of the honor you bestow on me today. Verandah writes…

‘When the world hurts
and Death holds court with the patriarchs, in the hinterland are
loaves and fishes.
Love throws a pot luck.’

Thank you. “

The theme will be internationalist at the Kopkind Colony’s Harvest Festival this year, on the weekend of October 9 and 10.

On Saturday (Oct 9)  evening, Najla Said will perform at the Hooker Dunham Theater in her acclaimed one-woman show, “Palestine.”

On Sunday, events move to The Organ Barn at Guilford, where Vijay Prashad, the award-winning author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, will be the featured speaker, following a “late brunch” tapas feast.

Najla Said star of "Palestine"

“Palestine” opened Off-Broadway earlier this year and had an extended run. The play is, by turns, funny and harrowing, a canny, deeply personal, disarmingly political coming-of-age story, written and performed by Najla Said. In “Palestine,” Said, daughter of the eminent scholar and human rights advocate Edward Said (also a member of Kopkind’s honorary board until his death in 2003), engages questions of identity, cultural fluidity, love and suffering from many angles, in many locales, from New York’s Upper West Side to Gaza to Beirut and back. As an actress, Najla Said brings a sense of the absurd even to deadly serious situations, and, in one reviewer’s words, as her “sweetness turns to incredulity … you begin to understand the madness endured in war-torn countries.”
The performance begins at 7 pm, at the Hooker Dunham, 139 Main Street in Brattleboro. Suggested donation is $15 adult, $10 student.

Vijay Prashad will cap the weekend events with a talk titled “Trembles in the Tropics (In which we will consider the projects to end all human pain, and then wonder for ourselves, seeking necessity in the North).” A spirited, original thinker, he is the author of eleven books, including Karma of Brown Folk, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting and Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism. His path-breaking Darker Nations tells the history of the cold war from the perspective of the world’s poor, and limns the life and death of the Third World as an ideological project that had people across the globe “fired up for freedom,” sovereignty and cooperation, and then collapsed under the weight of debt, globalized capital, internal conflict, corruption, militarism and cultural nationalism. His new project, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, will pick up the story from the 1980s to explore why we are in such a morass today, where is the motion, and what the currently amorphous movements for land, water and human rights in every country, on every continent might spell for the future. Prashad was born in Calcutta, educated in India and the US; he directs the International Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford. He is a contributing editor of Himal South Asia (Kathmandu, Nepal), an editor of Bol (Lahore), a columnist for Frontline (India) and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, ZNET and a host of others US publications. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Sunday’s events begin with the tapas feast at 2 pm, at 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford; the talk follows in the Organ Barn. Tickets are $35 adult, $25 student.

This will be the 13th annual Harvest Late Brunch benefit for Kopkind and is our only fundraising event of the year.

“Discussions at the retreats this summer revolved around  the interconnection of culture, history and politics, and the relationship between personal stories and larger political or historical currents,” Kopkind programming director JoAnn Wypijewski said. “In different registers, Vijay Prashad and Najla Said bring that all together, while drawing our attention in a new direction, to the wider world, on which our fates depend, whether we recognize it or not.”

Reservations for both events can be made by sending a check payable to the non-profit Kopkind, to 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, VT 05301, or e mailing stonewal@sover.net. For directions, people can e mail that address or call 802.254.4859.

Vijay Prashad, speaker at Harvest

The Kopkind Grasssroots Film Festival:  

SPEAKING IN TONGUES with filmmakers Marcia Jamel and Ken Schneider

Friday, Aug 6th, 7 PM at the Hooker-Dunham Theater, Brattleboro, VT. 139 Main Street.       Meet Julian, Jason, Kelly, and Durrell. Four typical American kids, with one exception. Their parents put them in a school where, from the first day of kindergarten, their teachers speak mostly Chinese or Spanish.Speaking in Tongues follows these four diverse kids and their families on their journey to become bilingual. Enter their world and ask, today is knowing one language enough?   Seating is limited and reservations for this special screening in Brattleboro VT can be made by calling the Hooker-Dunham Reservation line 802-254-9276 

STONEWALL UPRISING!   with filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner  Saturday, Aug 7th, 7:30 PM at the Organ Barn, Treefrog Farm, Guilford, VT.   

 ”It was the Rosa Parks moment,” says one man. June 28, 1969: NYC police raid a Greenwich Village Mafia-run gay bar, The Stonewall Inn. For the first time, patrons refuse to be led into paddy wagons, setting off a 3-day riot that launches the Gay Rights Movement.  Told by Stonewall patrons, reporters and the cop who led the raid, Stonewall Uprising recalls the bad old days when psychoanalysts equated homosexuality with mental illness and advised aversion therapy, and even lobotomies; public service announcements warned youngsters against predatory homosexuals; and police entrapment was rampant. At the height of this oppression, the cops raid Stonewall, triggering nights of pandemonium with tear gas, billy clubs and a small army of tactical police. The rest is history. (Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum)  This American Experience Film will be seen on PBS next year but you can see it August 7^th  and meet the filmmakers at the Organ Barn in Guilford. 

 Contact: John Scagliotti for directions to the Organ Barn in Guilford,  stonewal@sover.net

CINESLAM:  Vermont’s Pride Film Festival of Shorts
June 18th & 19th, 2010
Sponsored by The Kopkind Colony
www.cineslam.com

“[CineSlam]reaches back to the radical roots of liberation, to the joyously skewed visions of sex, love, culture and camp that lie outside the conventions of the straight world,”– Andrew Kopkind, 1993 (A Queer Nation)

CineSlam takes place in early summer in Vermont, (think green) — a two day ‘videovapalooza’-of-a-festival — screening rousing shorts in a old barn on a farm in Guilford, Vermont

The CineSlam Festival: Friday Evening (7 pm, June 18th, ) our opening night screening of great shorts in the wonderful Hooker-Dunham Theater and Gallery in Brattleboro, Vermont followed by our annual Pride Dance at the American Legion Hall (yes, you read that right!) at 9pm celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first pride events in 1970.; then the next day (Saturday, June 19th) to the Organ Barn at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford for a full afternoon of three stimulating screening sessions ending with a delicious BBQ and awards ceremony.

Money Prizes include the Chessie Award for Best Short ($750) (last year’s winner was “James” by Connor Clements who was in attendance from Northern Ireland)

See website : www.cineslam.com for more information on applying. We have a number of great films already entered and would be very happy to have other filmmakers contact us by sending in their films. (Deadline for entry is May 25th)

Our yearly CineSlam filmmakers’ retreat and seminar for “film slams” will be taking place this year on the high seas during our Kopkind CineSlam benefit cruise on Pride of the Ocean. www.prideoftheocean.com May 30th to June 6th. Some great filmmakers of many ages will be joining us and of course their short films will be seen in Vermont in June. The filmmakers retreat has already been booked up (more than 20 filmmakers will be on board.). But we are still looking for films to be screened at the Vermont festival. There will be some travel scholarships to filmmakers to Vermont and a place to stay and some good food to eat. A joyous time to be had by filmmakers and people who love glbt short films.

It’s easy to send your short to CineSlam! Just take a look at our festival entry site and then send John Scagliotti (our program director) a DVD copy to:
Kopkind CineSlam, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, VT 05301

Underwritten by a grant from the Chessie Foundation
Programmed by John Scagliotti, creator of the first glbt TV series on PBS, In the Life. Producer of Before Stonewall and After Stonewall, Programmer of the VT Bear Film Festival, Administrator, Kopkind Colony: Email: stonewal@sover.net

Patricia Williams, will speak at the Organ Barn
For Kopkind’s Harvest Late Brunch (Tapas Feast)
Sunday, October 11, 2pm
158 Kopkind Rd, Guilford, VT

“A sexy feature-length indictment of big pharma” that gives “a lot of great laughs.”
-The Toronto Star

The Kopkind Colony begins its Harvest Events for Columbus Day Weekend with this year’s film hit from Hot Docs in Toronto, Orgasm, Inc by Vermont filmmaker Liz Canner. The Brattleboro premiere will be screened Friday, October 9th at the Hooker-Dunham Theater at 7pm.

Orgasm, Inc delves into designer vaginas and other true-life tales of the commodification of women’s pleasure centers. This humorous, infuriating, informative documentary explores the corporate greed and outright quackery that women confront in a quest for beauty and sexual pleasure. Over the past decade, the media, in bed with the pharmaceutical industry, have been promoting the idea that 43 percent of US women suffer from “female sexual dysfunction.” Is this a real disease or a fiction in a marketing campaign created by money-hungry companies? With unique access to corporate hacks and flaks, Canner answers that question as she follows medical hucksters peddling dicey “treatments” and drug companies in their race to be the first to win FDA approval for their pill, cream, patch or nose spray intended to help women reach sexual nirvana. Reservations for the film ($10/tkt) can be made by calling 802-254-9276 at the Hooker-Dunham

Also that weekend on Sunday, October 11th at 2pm Kopkind will have its 12th annual Harvest Late Brunch, a Tapas Feast, followed by an important talk entitled “Alien Nation: The Peculiar Politics of Obamatime” by Nation columnist Patricia Williams. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University, is the author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights and a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. The Tapas feast and talk take place at the Organ Barn at Treefrog Farm in Guilford, Vermont. Reservations for this benefit event are suggested. The price for the Brunch/Talk is $35 but we have a student price of $25 as well as for those who haven’t yet felt the stimulus.

The screening and the brunch are benefits for The Kopkind Colony, which is a living memorial to the great journalist and Guilford resident Andrew Kopkind, who tracked politics and culture for thirty years for publications from Hard Times to The New York Times, The Nation to Esquire, until his death in 1994. The project, which held its first summer session in 1999, puts on seminars and workshops for its resident participants, and free events for the public. Please contact Kopkind Administrator John Scagliotti for reservations and directions at 802.254.4859, or stonewal@sover.net.