Posted by vegan busdriver on 25 Mar 2008 | Tagged as: On The Web
I found this photo of our friend Molly on the web wearing a Vegan Bus shirt and standing looking sultry next to a pool table. Thanks for the photo shout out Molly!
Posted by vegan busdriver on 22 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Hula Hooping, Video
Outside my office window the snow is falling and the plows and shovelers can’t seem to keep up. This New England winter has made up for the lack of snow we had the past two winters, with one storm after the next. The fresh snow is of course quite beautiful, blanketing all the cigarette butts, sidewalks and SUVs in pristine white powdery fluff. Most New Englander’s balance their bouts of winter blahs and depression with awe and epiphany when the snow falls hard. It has the power to slow commerce and bring friends and families together to gather around fireplaces and wood stoves. Hundreds of babies are also conceived during these times as bodies snuggle together for warmth. Times like these bloggers can go on endlessly about nothing in particular, just to enjoy the feeling on typing words to the imagined pitter-patter of snowflakes landing one upon another.
It was as I sat here looking over my vegan websites that I Googled “Vegan Bus” and found a couple of hula-hooping videos from our July 18th 2007 Pizza and Beer Fund Raiser. They made me long for the days of tee shirts and sandals, hula hoops and Vegan Bus adventures. I got the same feeling a few days ago when it was unseasonably warm and I fired up the bus and let it run for a few minutes. There is something very special about our bus, a feeling of elatedness I get when I am inside.
I hope these videos will help you all feel a little breeze of summer blowing out of your monitors and through your hair.
Megan E Labonte (aka Hoopmaster Sass) hoops to RESPECT at the Vegan Bus “Pizza and Beer” Fund Raiser
Kevin works out his foot trick at the Vegan Bus “Pizza and Beer” Fund Raiser
Amanda Turk spinning glow poi at the Vegan Bus “SHOKAZOBA & L.E.D. Dance Party” Fund Raiser
And of course this one, which has become a youtube phenomenon and includes several vegan bus riders…
Getcha Hoop On!
Posted by vegan busdriver on 19 Feb 2008 | Tagged as: Art, Our Travels
On our way to Burning Man 2007 we stopped somewhere for something, and Star created this Polaroid photo grid of me sitting in the driver seat of the bus staring out into the evening’s golden sunlight. Photographers sometimes call this “god lighting” or something akin to that. It makes skin glow.
Check out more of Star’s grids at his Salmonboy Studios web site. Star is also the owner of a vegan cafe in Northampton, MA called Cafe Evolution, where one can see lots of his amazing photo grids up close and in person. Evolution is also the home of Oh Sweet Mama’s Vegan Bakery.
Posted by vegan busdriver on 05 Jan 2008 | Tagged as: Events
Vegan Radio is about to air its 50TH EPISODE, and to celebrate we are going to pre-record the show LIVE in front of a “studio” audience… and YOU ARE INVITED! That’s right, come be a guest on the show that people will be talking about for years to come! Come be a part of VEGAN HISTORY! Everyone who attends will be eligible to be a guest on the show. If you are too shy then you can just sit in the back and heckle us…
There will also be a GOURMET VEGAN DINNER prepared by vegan chef Heather Bargeron and live food chef Eden Love. Desert will feature vegan cheesecakes by Oh Sweet Mama’s Vegan Bakery (whose owner is Vegan Radio co-host Megan Shackelford). This will be a sit down dinner served to you at your table while you enjoy the festivities and entertainment.
And speaking of entertainment… we are shakin’ like tofu in a blender with delight to let you know that local vegan singer-songwriter Dennis Crommett will be performing some songs for us! Dennis is well known in the valley for his solo music as well as his work with the bands Spanish For Hitchhiking and the Winterpills.
And in case you are wondering, proceeds from the dinner will go to THE VEGAN BUS!
WHEN: Wednesday, January 16th
Doors open at at 6:00 PM
Dinner at 7:00 PM
Live Show from 8:00 to 9:00 PM
WHERE: Cafe Evolution
22 Chestnut Street
Florence, MA
We hope you can all make it out to this fun event, and be sure to tell your friends! The show will air Thursday, January 17th on ValleyFree Radio WXOJ-LP 103.3 FM in Northampton, MA. The show will also be available soon after that at www.veganradio.com. And finally, this will be the first show we will be uploading to the PACIFICA NETWORK to make it available to OVER 100 RADIO STATIONS ACROSS THE US!! Pacifica is also the home of the award-winning Democracy Now, so we are in good company. This really is going to go down in VEGAN HISTORY! So come on out and show some love!
Posted by vegan busdriver on 01 Dec 2007 | Tagged as: The Bus Blog, Veganism
Now that the winter snow is finally arriving in Northampton, MA, and the Vegan Bus is parked in an unspecified location for renovations… it is high time I started updating you on our past adventures as well as our hopes and dreams for the future. This post is the first of many to come…
The Vegan Bus evolved from a series of vegan projects that have consumed much of my free time since moving to Western Massachusetts in 1999. When I first moved here I had a job as a web designer. It was during the heady days before the “dot-com bubble” burst, and I had dreams of making lots of money designing web sites and then funneling it all back into vegan activism. I bought some domain names back then based on these dreams, including Veganica.com, VeganRadio.com, and one that has not been put to use yet… VeganPolice.com.
I first began work on Veganica.com, which I envisioned as an online community for vegetarian and vegan artists. In my subjective anthropological studies of the vegan movement I noticed a higher-than-average percentage of creative types, and being one myself thought it would be cool to have a place we could all share the products of our creativity. I myself am a photographer and musician who dabbles in other wacky stuff. I wanted a site that could have images, words, audio and video. I enlisted my programming genius friends Alex Jarrett and Scott Lahteine to create the databases and code to bring it slowly to life. Over the years since then I have guided Veganica along to make it what it is now, a social networking site for vegan artists and cultural creatives with hundreds of members. Scott is still working with me and over the winter Veganica will see some upgrades that should take it to the next level. If you are an artist or creative person who is vegetarian or vegan you should definitely sign up for free (or get a paid merchant account) and share your stuff!
Around the same time as I began work on Veganica I purchased the Vegan Radio URL. I had an idea that I would create a streaming audio website that would play music by vegans interspersed with vegan propaganda 24 hours a day, perhaps tied in to Veganica. It was put on the back burner when in 2000 I got tired of schlepping corporate web sites and decided to start my own photography business. I renewed the URL over the years because I knew the domain name was worth saving. In 2005 a group of volunteers and activists in Northampton succeeded in getting a license for a community low-powered FM radio station and Valley Free Radio was born (Northampton is in a part of western MA commonly referred to as “the valley”). I convinced my friend Megan Shackelford that it would be a great way to get the vegan message out there if we had a show about veganism on FM radio, since we would get random listeners who might otherwise turn their heads. At the same time Podcasting was becoming popular and it was a no-brainer that we should make the show into a Podcast for the world to enjoy. Thus in October of 2005 Vegan Radio was born. Scott Lahteine joined us as our third co-host when he moved back to the valley in 2006.
I like to think of The Vegan Bus as a continuation and the current culmination of my activism. I conceived the idea after participating in the Burning Man festival of 2006. Burning Man is a week long experiment where 40,000 people create a community in the harsh Nevada desert based on sharing and radical self-reliance. Most people who have attended a “Burn” will tell you that it is a trans-formative experience. I personally sensed an emerging new consciousness there, one that could spread out into the world like the playa dust that the participants unavoidably carried back with them on their clothing and gear. Here, I thought, is a place that needs a vegan consciousness. Here where a new paradigm for community and society was being beta tested. I felt that perhaps my life path had led me to this, to help bring veganism to this place, to make sure that if this was a seed for the next evolution of society that animals would finally be respected and considered as “the subjects of a life”, as Tom Regan puts it so thoughtfully.
How to slip veganism into the consciousness of a modern day cultural rebirth? The Vegan Bus popped into my head one day while pondering the conundrum. A vehicle of transformation. It resonated with me, a transformed bus transforming people everywhere in the world it went. Not by force but by contagiousness of an cultural enlightenment whose time has arrived. I funnelled my resources and contacts gained from my 12 years of vegan activism into making it happen. One year later the Vegan Bus made an improbable journey across the USA in 3-1/2 days running on waste vegetable oil and got to Burning Man carrying eight exhausted passengers/drivers. We were all transformed by the experience. One person went from omnivore to being nearly vegan, our first conversion (besides the bus itself). Vegan Radio episode #44 features a reunion of our band of “grease pirates” who went to Burning Man on the bus and lived to tell. I will be blogging about it soon as well.
Two months later that all seems like a lifetime ago. The future of the bus that excites me now. It is what I fall asleep at night pondering and what I wake up in the morning fantasizing. I am seeing that the bus is not something separate from Vegan Radio and Veganica, rather it encompasses and enhances them. The Vegan Bus will slowly be transformed inside and out by the types of creativity found on Veganica until it is a morphing of bus, RV and art car. It will run not only on waste vegetable oil but by the efforts of a community of activists, teachers, and artists. It will be an ongoing subject of Vegan Radio discussions and promotions as well as a vehicle to bring us to the people and stories we will feature on future episodes.
A trilogy is a set of three works of art that are connected and can be seen as a single work, as well as three individual ones. I conceptualize the Vegan Bus, Veganica and Vegan Radio as evolving works of art, effecting the fabric of culture. I hope to have a community of inspired activists, teachers and artists collaborating with these works, and through our efforts to bring some fun into the world and effect positive change.
I am looking forward to this winter, to writing down on this blog my many thoughts and visions. I hope to make my activism a means of supporting myself by the end of 2008 so I can dedicate my whole life and being to greening the earth and teaching compassion. I hope to also create jobs for others to join me. With the bus I quit dreaming small. The times demand more from me and from all of us. Every time I look at the bus I realize that I can make a crazy dream into reality. Anyone can. So let’s shake this mofo up a bit and co-create a better and saner world for whoever comes next, be they plant or animal. Yes, us animals too. We matter, just like they do. Even the matter of the state of matter matters. So what’s the matter? Go Vegan. Get on the Bus!
Posted by vegan busdriver on 09 Nov 2007 | Tagged as: Events
The Vegan Bus is excited to announce our first road trip to an animal sanctuary! On Sunday November 18th we will be traveling from Northampton, MA to the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Woodstock, NY for their 2nd annual “ThanksLiving” Banquet & Fundraiser. The sanctuary is truly amazing, a peaceful home for rescued cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens and of course turkeys. It is a transcendent experience to spend time with these sentient beings who share this world with us. The sanctuary itself is situated in a bucolic landscape with a wonderful view of the Catskill mountains. Founders Jenny Brown and Doug Abel have created something amazing, and it is a less than three hour ride from Northampton on our veggie-powered bus. Here is what the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary’s web site has to say about the event…
Please join us for our very festive ThanksLiving fundraiser — a unique new tradition where the turkeys are the main guests of honor rather than the main course! You’ll be warm and toasty inside a large heated tent in the goat pasture, surrounded by stunning views of the Catskill Mountains. Naturally our turkeys will be joining us at a table set especially for them. We’re pleased to have celebrity veg chef Isa Chandra Moskowitz preparing the main dish, Little Vegan Monsters going postal on some apps and desserts, plus lots of local (and not-so-local) restaurants providing scrumptous side dishes.
In addition to an amazing spread that will leave everyone with very full bellies, non-edible treats will include:
- Comedy by Dan Piraro (”Bizarro“)
- Acoustic music by the incredible Elizabeth Mitchell & Daniel Littleton of “Ida“, known for their lovely, subtle folk-flavored indie-rock.
- Paul Shapiro of HSUS will speak on some of the big issues in the animal rights movement.
- Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, founder of Compassionate Cooks will speak about the joy of vegan cooking.
- Sanctuary Director Jenny Brown will do something unpredictable, as usual.
Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary is selling adult tickets for $75, student tickets for $45, and children’s tickets for $25. The price is not only for the dinner but also to help WFAS survive through the winter. The Vegan Bus is asking for $20 per person for the round trip, but we did negotiate a $10 discount on the adult tickets… so the prices are:
The bus will leave at 10am from 129 Main St, Northampton, MA.
(Look for the big green bus.) The bus will leave from the sanctuary by 5pm.
You can PURCHASE TICKETS HERE! We look forward to meeting you and giving you a ride on our veggie powered bus!