RealFilms presents the Houston premiere of Stop the Presses; a documentary that examines the difficult state of the newspaper industry today and what its options for the future might look like. Filmmakers Manny Mendoza and Mark Birnbaum will be in attendance along with a panel discussion featuring Kyrie O’Connor (Houston Chronicle), Joe Leydon (film critic), and Bob LeVitus (Mac guru).

Stop the Presses – 80 minutes
Directors: Manny Mendoza and Mark Birnbaum

Ticket price: $10 (includes free refreshments: soft drinks, water, and popcorn)
7:00 pm – 8:00 pm – Mendoza/Birnbaum Reception
8:00 pm – 9:30 pm – Screening Time
9:30 pm – 10:00 pm – Mendoza/Birnbaum Q&A
Door Prize: A signed DVD of the film

Synopsis: Stop the Presses takes viewers inside disheartened newsrooms to document the devastating slide of print journalism and into the community to learn what readers think of journalism’s fate. The film combines footage from several papers like the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Miami Herald, Dallas Times News, St. Petersburg Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and diverse interviews from a great mix of commentators including Ben Bradley, Walter Cronkite, Dave Berry, and Ed Asner.

About the Producers:
Manny Mendoza -Producer/Director
Mendoza has been a newspaperman since 1979 when he became one of the last copy boys in America and first-hand witness to print journalism’s decline. He has been a staff writer covering crime, politics, television, theater and pop music at the Miami News, Bergen Record, Milwaukee Journal and Dallas Morning News, where he was one of 112 journalists who accepted a buyout offer in 2006. He and Mark Birnbaum began shooting Stop the Presses that summer. Mendoza is a winner of the Florida Bar Award and a finalist for the Katie Award. He is now a freelance writer, blogger, film marketer and college journalism instructor.

Mark Birnbaum- Producer/Director/Cinematographer/Editor
From Nicaragua in the 1980s to Tom DeLay in 2006, Birnbaum’s documentary films have probed, celebrated and exposed people to places and personalities all over the globe. In Larry v. Lockney, he tells “a riveting story of good people – on both sides – trying to do the right thing for their children and their town” (Houston Chronicle). The Big Buy, about Tom DeLay’s rise and fall, “presents its evidence clearly and with a welcome sense of humor” (New York Times) and is “more feisty and fun than a drunken barbecue in Beaumont” (Tallahassee Democrat). His films have chronicled the Second Vatican Council, women trash recyclers in Ecuador, American high school kids in China, medical science, sailboat racing, and salsa dancing. Birnbaum took home gold medals from film festivals in Chicago, Houston and Charleston and is a winner of the George Foster Peabody broadcasting award.

Location: Houston Community College, Spring Branch Campus Performing Arts Theatre, 1010 W. Sam Houston Pkwy N. Houston, TX 77043

Website: http://www.realfilms.org/

Buy tickets online: http://www.realfilms.org/tix_cc.html

The annual PeaceJam Youth Conference will take place at University of Houston on March 27-28, 2010. The conference features 2003 Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi, a women and children’s rights activist and lawyer from Iran. At the conference, students from around Texas will participate in service-learning projects and interactive workshops surrounding the theme “Women and Children’s Rights and their Role as Leaders.” This is an amazing opportunity for the youth of Houston to work on global issues together with a world renowned peace leader!

Email: pjam@central.uh.edu
URL: http://www.peacejam.org

On Saturday, March 20, a rally against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be held in Houston. The protest will begin at 2 pm in Mason Park, 75th Street and Tipps Street. We will demand that all the troops be brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan now, and that money be spent on jobs, housing, and health care instead of war. The rally will include speakers and entertainers.

The protest is being organized by the Progressive Workers Organizing Committee, Harris County Green Party, Proyecto Latinoamericana, International Socialist Organization, Latin American Organization for Immigrant Rights, International Action Center, and CPUSA Houston (list in formation). We urge the broadest possible participation in the March 20 protest, and we invite additional endorsements and assistance in mobilizing for this event. If you would like more information or if your organization would like to help, please call us at (832) 692-2306 or (281) 935-9248.

You have undoubtedly heard of them, Labor Ready, Volt, Labor Finders, Adecco are some of the names. You can check in the Yellow Pages under “employment, temporary” and find probably two dozen halls similar to those spoken about in this book. Seasoned journalist Dick Reavis reported to a labor hall each morning, hoping to “catch out,” or get job assignments. To supplement his retirement savings, the sixty-two-year-old North Carolinian joined people dispatched by an agency to jobs for which they were paid at the end of each day.

Written with the flair of a gifted portraitist and storyteller, Catching Out describes Reavis’s jobs at a factory; as a construction and demolition worker, landscaper, road crew flagman, auto-auction driver and warehouseman; and several days spent sorting artifacts in a dead packrat’s apartment. On one pick-and-shovel job, he finds that his partner is too blind to see the hole they’re digging. In each setting, he describes the personalities and problems of his desperate peers, the attitudes of their bosses, and the straits of immigrant coworkers, so many of whom make up the three-million-strong day-laborer poor.

This is a gritty, hard-times evocation of the men and women on the bottom rung of the American workforce. It is partly a guide to performing hard, physical tasks, partly a celebration of strength, and partly a venting of ire at stingy and stern overseers. Reavis reminds us that physical exertion, even when painful or unpleasant, remains vital to the economy — and that those who labor, though poorly paid, bring vigor, skill, and cunning to their tasks.

In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Catching Out is destined to become a classic of our troubled times.

Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator and author. He was active in the civil rights movement in the South and with SDS at the University of Texas in Austin. He wrote for Austin’s underground newspaper The Rag, and was a senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine. Dick Reavis’ book, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, about the siege and burning of the Branch Davidian compound, was published by Simon and Schuster and may be the definitive work on the subject.

For more information go to www.stcl.edu or call 713 646-1799.

http://www.stcl.edu/TheResponse/index.html

A Discussion with Adrienne Pine. While the Honduran military coup of June 28th, 2009 is not without historical precedent, the massive and ongoing Honduran resistance to it is. No one expected Hondurans to rise up as they have—daily and in the hundreds of thousands—in protest against a de facto government that can most accurately be described as fascist.

One of the most interesting elements of the Honduran resistance is its avidly non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian character, this despite a near-complete absence of self-consciously anti-authoritarian organizing within Honduran prior to the coup. In this talk Adrienne Pine will discuss what we can learn from the Honduran experience and how we can act in solidarity with Hondurans, whose situation has only worsened with the institutionalization of the coup government through a U.S.-led fraudulent election.

Adrienne Pine is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University. A militant medical anthropologist, Dr. Pine has done fieldwork in Honduras, Mexico, Korea, the United States, and Egypt. Her book, Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras (UC Press 2008), examines the symbolic violence resulting from Hondurans’ embodied obsession with certain forms of “real” violence as a necessary condition for the acceptance of violent forms of modernity and capitalism. Prior to and following the June 2009 military coup in Honduras, she has collaborated with numerous organizations and individuals, both inside and outside the academy, to bring international attention to the Honduran struggle to halt state violence (in its multiple forms). She blogs at http://quotha.net

Houston Institute for Culture
708-B Telephone Road (Next door to Bohemeo’s)

Humanists of Houston is hosting a belated Darwin Day Celebration on February 20 from 1:00pm to 5:00pm. It will be at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in the Arnold Space Hall. The musician, Roy Zimmerman, will be performing then we will hear a presentation from Neal Immega.

Roy Zimmerman’s information is available at www.royzimmerman.com

Ashanti Alston is a former member of the Black Panther Party and ex political prisoner. Formerly and Institute for Anarchist Studies board member, he published the Zine Anarchist Panther and has been a guest lecturer at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont and various universities, speaking on the Panthers and the history of Black Nationalist Movements. He has spent time in Chiapas, Mexico, studying the autonomous structure of Zapatista communities as a member of Estacion Libre and working on his memoirs. He was also a member of the prision abolitionist group Critical Resistance. He is presently the co-chair of the Jericho Amnesty Movement, and an active member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

He will be speaking about race, resistance, cross-border struggles and anarchism at the S.H.A.P.E. Community Center located at 3903 Almeda Rd.

Darrell Ray, author of “The God Virus”, is coming to Houston! He will be speaking about his book, answering questions, etc. If you want to bring your copy of “The God Virus”, he will sign them.

The event will be from 7-9pm at the Planned Parenthood of Houston – 3601 Fannin Street.

If you haven’t heard of the God Virus, please check it out at www.thegodvirus.net.

The cost is $10 if you RSVP ahead of time (in order to cover Darrel’s travel costs). Please RSVP to secularcenterusa@gmail.com with your full name for security purposes. Since this is being posted on multiple websites, only the first 50 people who RSVP to secularcenterusa@gmail.com will be able to attend as that’s all the room there is at the location.

If there is still room on the day of the event, the cost at the door will be $15.

Brief synopsis from Ron Titus: I will attempt to explain my journey from being a dogmatic theist to a freethinking atheist. And I hope to point out the uselessness of engaging in irresolvable issues.

I earned a Bachelor Degree in Sacred Theology from the Gregorian University in Rome and a Master Degree in the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Houston in Clear Lake. I was ordained a priest and practiced religion as a Catholic clergy-person for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galveston-Houston. I owned and ran my own Behavioral Consultation and Education office in Houston until I retired.

SPEAKER: Ron Titus
TOPIC: Personal Odyssey or My Journey

Friday, February 19, 2010 7:00 PM

Conference Room, 2nd floor
Christ the King Lutheran Church
2353 Rice Boulevard
Houston, TX 77005

Meetup Link: http://humanism.meetup.com/177/calendar/12618642/