1. Hear live music on a streetcorner.

On a sunny day, the downtown area is always populated with buskers. Sometimes it’s your basic guy-with-a-guitar setup; sometimes there are a few dudes in overalls or tweed; sometimes it’s a full band with amplification. One sure thing is that you won’t have to walk far to find a street performer to tickle your ears for free (donations appreciated).

2. Feed your head at Malaprop’s Bookstore.

Granted, Malaprop’s is a business, so they also appreciate monetary contributions. But if you’re broke, spend a buck on coffee and peruse their incredible selection of literature.

This store is one of the places that convinced me so utterly of Asheville’s uniqueness. In fact, Malaprop’s seems to assume that its clientele is highly intelligent, educated in self-sufficiency, and actively committed to social/environmental change.

And there’s the proof: a book on Cattle Health in the Green Living section? We’re not in San Francisco any more.

3. Take a nature walk.

While exploring downtown, I picked up a map that indicated there was a botanical garden next to the UNC campus. Heading out that way, I stumbled across the Reed Creek “interpretive trail”, which was a hugely educational resource. It guides you through an area that was once occupied by buildings; along the trail, a series of signs informs you of what was here, what’s here now and why. In the space of a city block or two, I learned a ton about local history and botany.

The Reed Creek trail lets out near the Asheville Botanical Gardens, a huge and beautifully-managed set of trails, greens and buildings. It’s an easy walk, and just like at Reed Creek, the Botanical Gardens are full of information on native species. Make sure you stop at the creek, an excellent spot for a wee nosh and/or nap in the dappled sunlight.

Click for more photos of Reed Creek and the Botanical Gardens.

4. Go on a self-guided art tour.

As I mentioned recently, Asheville is full of art both strange and beautiful. From the underpass mural, to political graffiti, to statuary both commissioned and independent, there’s art all over the place. And that’s just on the sidewalk—but there are also tons of art galleries for your browsing pleasure.

Don’t miss Chicken Alley, a strange little street that looks straight out of New Orleans or Oakland. It’s haunted by living artists and one dead doctor: Dr. Jamie Smith was killed in a 1902 barfight and still hangs around the place.

If you’re more into modern-age ephemera, guess what? Chicken Alley’s got free wifi. Yippee!

5a. (for hippies) Hippie out at the Drum Circle.

photo by BillRhodesPhoto

Apparently this is a big deal, but I am somewhat opposed to drum circles. If they’re your thing, that’s super! There’s a giant one here every Friday night, on Patton Avenue. Just follow the smell of patchouli and sounds of wild djembe.

5b. (for nerds and queers) Get your summer Shakespeare fix.

photo by Zen

What self-respecting town doesn’t have a free Shakespeare-in-the-park series these days? Asheville is right on point, offering free performances all summer (Friday, Saturday & Sunday nights only). The address is #1 Gay Street, so you ought to feel right at home.

Want more, more, more free stuff? I know right? Cheapskate your heart out at Asheville’s official Free Things to Do page.

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: adventure, alternative, Asheville, buy nothing, ecotourism, ecotravel, energy-efficient, environment, featured posts, freegan, garden, nature, North Carolina, outdoors, photography, starving artists, sustainable, tourism, travel

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UPDATE: Polls are closed! And the winner is…

LOVEANDTRASH.COM

We’ll be launching in just a few weeks. (Don’t know what this is about? Read below…)

Big news from Raggedy Annarchy and Jessica The Hun:
We’re launching a new blog
dedicated to
creativity, radical interdependence
and
how to be awesome for cheap.

This will be a place where YOU can show off your projects, promote your friends’ good work, and pick up new ideas. It’s dedicated to the little things we all do in our lives: to guerrilla gardeners and creative welders; to bike riders and secondhand fashionistas; to fire dancers, banjo pickers, amateur collagists and part-time poets.

Name That Site → WIN

Now through Saturday 3/6, leave a comment below with your name suggestion! We’ll pick the finalists, and run a vote next week.

If your suggestion becomes the name of this new site, you get a one-year Flickr Pro account, or a year’s subscription to one of these mags: Juxtapoz, Make, Wired, National Geographic or Popular Science. Your choice.

Need some inspiration? Here are some examples of what we’ll be publishing:

art video bikes general food pr0n zombies unicorns sewing lessons motivation ridiculous recycling poetry	photos fashion recipes (vegan and meatatarian) clowns weird welding inspiration transmogrification music lots and lots of art fabulous trash
…and whatever else YOU come up with.

Please note:
1. We get to suggest names too. If our suggestion wins, we keep the prize.
2. You can check to see whether your name idea is available: click here and search for your domain name.

OK GO.
Comment below to win!

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2010. | Permalink | 56 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alternative, art, contest, diy, featured posts, freegan, garbage, gardening, green living, how-to, prize, prizes, recycling, reuse, starving artists, sustainable, zombies

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One year ago, I visited the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, a shop in Oakland, California that supplies teachers and artists alike with craft supplies. The store takes in community donations and provides bin after bin of glorious junk. It’s also highly photographable. Some of these photos have been among my most popular of all time. Can you guess which?

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We’re installing an arbor to surround Faithful Fountain. I bet you never thought about how all that big art was installed, did you? Yeah, me too.

The arbor is made of rebar. It was built in the metal shop, which is down by the house. In order to move it up the hill to Dandelion Ballad, Candace and Loren had to cut it into four sections—each of which is still bigger than a truck can easily carry. I honestly have no idea how they got it up the hill. But I know one thing for sure: these folks can really work with what they have.

Introducing the Power Wagon.

click to enlarge

Yep, that’s an old Dodge (circa 1948) with a boom lift mounted to the front. It takes us (and by “us” I mean “Loren”) hours to get the boom positioned correctly and ropes tied just right so they don’t take off the top of the fountain, but damn if Loren doesn’t work it out.

And then, we start raising it up. It goes a few inches at a time: lift it a little, put cinderblocks underneath, shorten the ropes, lift again. I am full of doubt: there’s no way this will work, the angles are all wrong, it’s too heavy, etc etc. But before long, lo and behold, we’ve got it a couple feet off the ground!

click to enlarge

So now comes the positioning. It’s got to be just right, so that the arched doorways are aligned with the center. Candace and Loren and I all take turns staring at it, hemming and hawing, pointing, lifting, turning the arbor until it looks pretty much right-on. My favorite part is when the boom needs to move to the right a hair: Loren just puts a jack under the left side of the truck, and cranks it up until the positioning is better.

And there it is. Next Loren busts out a transit level, and we get the heights just right. From there it’s a simple matter of hammering in about a zillion stakes (which we make by welding together lengths of recycled rebar) and mounting the arbor so it stands on its own. Tedious work, that, but it gets done despite my griping.

All told, it takes us nearly four days to get that crazy thing in the ground. But the closer we get to finishing it, the better and better it looks; by the end, our furrowed brows have turned to big grins, and dang if we don’t have a piece of art on our hands.

Another victory for Dandelion Ballad!

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Post tags: adventure, art, featured posts, starving artists, voluntourism, WWOOF

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I was going to write a post on the art of the underground bike scene, but these photos tell the story better themselves. So, for your Wednesday-morning consideration: the art, the fire, the fury and the girls of the bike world. Enjoy!

So you know what you’re looking at: the people in these photos have created everything you see with their own hands. They made their own bikes, costumes, hairdos, jackets, flamethrowers, circus rides and just about everything else they could think of. DIY, eat your heart out.

Big love to my friends pictured here, including Hollis, Eliza, Moses, Doyle, Big Daddy, Katy Bell, Cyclecide, Rat Patrol, Black Label, and oh Johnny Payphone do I see a bike or two of yours in there?

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tallbike by Redskynight

This is a tallbike.

they do get more fancy: Paul and James by doviende

It’s pretty basic, really: you weld one bike frame on top of another, lengthen the chain, climb up and ride. Want to try riding one? You might need to lean the bike against a wall so you can get up. After that, it’s not too hard… oh, but now that you’re up, there’s one more thing: no brakes. And good luck getting down.

Why a tallbike? Because it looks cool. Because you can see over cars when you ride in the street. Because it makes a statement. Because it’s a challenge. Because we can.

In recent years, tallbikes have become synonymous with bike culture—and bike culture has flourished in every city and country from New York to Namibia.

(...)
Read the rest of Change the World, Ride a Bike (1,004 words)

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Nonetheless, later that day we drove right into Heidelberg Street by mistake. I’m glad we did: it quite blew my mind.

I’ll let you read the official backstory at heidelberg.org. Enjoy the video.

© jessicareeder for Uprooted, an eco/travel blog, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: alternative, art, building, buy nothing, community, construction, counterculture, Detroit, free sources, freegan, garbage, ghost town, Michigan, outsider art, radical, recycling, reuse, starving artists, tourism, video

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Still from “The Bug” music video
photo courtesy of AngelicOrganics.com

In honor of Burning Man—which I’m reluctantly skipping this year—I’d like to talk a little about the counterculture in modern America.

After leaving Chicago, I stopped by Angelic Organics: a bastion of creativity in conservative Northern Illinois, a leader in organic and biodynamic agriculture, and the subject of a PBS documentary entitled The Real Dirt on Farmer John.

Teen John
photo courtesy of Angelic Organics

John Peterson grew up on this farm in Caledonia, near the Wisconsin border. His father died when he was young, and he wound up running the farm himself by the time he started college.

“To me, farming is poetry, drama. It’s a source of infinite fascination.”
- Farmer John Peterson

In school he met the counterculture: 60s idealists and artists, revolutionaries and back-to-the-landers. Farmer John believed in the importance of agriculture, and he was astounded that some of the city kids had never touched hay; he was also enamored of the free-spirited creativity they brought to his life. He opened the farm up to friends who wanted to visit and work, and created a place where openness, artistic expression and creativity mixed with hard work and good food. His farm, in many ways, realized the dreams of a million hippies—and it worked. For a while.

But the 60s ended, and times got rough for Farmer John. By the 1980s, he’d lost most of his land and had been ostracized from his community by a series of nasty rumors about his lifestyle and friends.

For small-town kids like me, the rumors sound familiar: it’s a cult! A satanic cult! They’re a bunch of gays and druggies doing animal sacrifice! I heard the same rumors about members of my own community, and accepted them as fact. So did many people in John Peterson’s hometown.

In the film, he talks about the pain of living as an outsider when you’ve done nothing wrong—which, in his case, was compounded by massive debt. Over the course of several years, Farmer John was forced to sell nearly the entire farm: he found himself destitute, hopeless and friendless in a town where his family had been pillars of the community.

(...)
Read the rest of The Real Dirt on America’s Counterculture (580 words)

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Post tags: agriculture, agritourism, alternative, art, biodynamics, Chicago, counterculture, ecotourism, education, environment, farm, farming, featured, featured posts, film, Illinois, locavore, organic, outsider art, permaculture, politics, radical, starving artists, sustainable, teaching

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Kevin and Nicole are good friends of mine, and pretty amazing people. When I visited them in Louisville, Kentucky, I was completely impressed at how well they live. In the few years they’ve been together, they’ve created a lifestyle that’s creative, comfortable, and rather fabulous—but cheap and environmentally conscious too. In short, Nicole and Kevin’s little world is an excellent example of how we can all approach green living on a budget. So I took notes, and now I give you:

(...)
Read the rest of The 5 Principles of Living Green on the Cheap (as demonstrated by Nicole and Kevin) (1,701 words)

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Post tags: alternative, art, buy nothing, community, dumpster diving, energy-efficient, environment, featured, featured posts, free sources, freegan, gardening, how-to, Kentucky, Louisville, organic, recycling, reuse, starving artists, sustainable

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Madrid (pronounced MA-drid, not ma-DRID) is a place unlike any other on Earth. The closest thing to a chronosynclastic infundibulum I’ve ever experienced, it’s at once a ghost town and a close-knit community, a hippie haven and a biker joint, a pile of junk and a work of art, an abandoned battleground in the war of Man vs. Nature and a fertile bed of new life… I stayed here just over a week, and took over a hundred photos.

(...)
Read the rest of Madrid, New Mexico (656 words)

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Post tags: adventure, art, buy nothing, coal, environment, featured posts, garbage, ghost town, gorge, hiking, mining, museum, nature, New Mexico, outdoors, outsider art, photography, recycling, reuse, starving artists, touristry, travel, wild west, wood

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