Friday, July 22 at 9:00pm – July 23 at 1:00am
Ras Hall – 4809 Georgia Ave NW

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Dream City is hosting a night of music, art, and debauchery at Ras Hall, Friday June 22nd, starting at 9PM. The event is a benefit for DC’s infoshop project, Dream City Thrift. Dream City Thrift is a collectively owned and operated anarchist book and clothing store, social space, and cultural event venue in NW DC, that provides stylish clothing and radical literature at a reasonable price, as well as regular events promoting the liberation of humanity from the shackles of white supremacy, capitalism, the state, and patriarchy.

30% of the bar goes to Dream City to help us keep this project alive and relevant to the DC community. We will also be accepting donations at the door (suggested $5). But you’re not just helping us out, check out the entertainment we’ve lined up for you:

Live Performances by DC Punkers:

• Hate Oven
• Sad Bones

And for those who want to stay out and dance, DJ Alex will be performing on the ones and twos, spinning the critical beats to shake the walls of Babylon.

Throughout the evening:

• Nancy Munoz will stage a photo exhibition she calls RESISTANCE, showing the resistance of activist communities against authority.
• Bring a book, because we’re hosting a free bookswap! Bring one or many, go home with one or many! We will prime the selection with some of our used books.
• We will also be tabling with books available for purchase, including new books from PM Press, AK Press, and Monthly Review Press, and used books hand-selected by the Dream City Collective. In addition, you will find the awesome custom silkscreened t shirts that you have come to know and love from the Dream City Printshop.

We welcome other folks to share their own favorite radical material at this event, if you would like a small space for this or participate in any other form please contact Nancy at:
xendra13@msn.com

And DON’T FORGET! Dream City Thrift’s next open day is Saturday, July 30th, from 12 to 8pm at our location uptown at 5525 Illinois Ave NW.

What: The Mysterious Rabbit Puppet Army
Where: Dream City Thrift, 5525 Illinois Ave NW
When: Friday July 8th, at 7:30PM
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The Mysterious Rabbit Puppet Army rolls into town on Friday, July 8th as part of its whirlwind, month-long excursion across the continental United States to raise awareness about the prison system. The tour stop will include a few different shows. The feature show uses shadow puppets to outline the history of the Prison Industrial Complex, from chattel slavery in the south to where it is today. The other show is a modernized Hansel and Gretel. All of the shows are child friendly.

The tour will raise awareness about the Prison Industrial Complex and the ways in which police and policing hurt our communities.

“Our goal in this tour is to use art to explore these relationships and brainstorm with our audiences how we can fight this brutally racist system.” said Mysterious Puppeteer Michael Snacks.

The United States currently imprisons nearly 3 million people. About 6.5 million people are presently under some form of supervision within the criminal justice system. Racism continues to be a major factor in the United States, illustrated by policies and programs that sustain white supremacy. Racism, as it is used through criminal laws that target people of color, is essential to prisons, not accidental. The Prison Industrial Complex is also fueled by dramatic and racist reporting about “crime,” “delinquency,” and “rebellion,” creating a culture of fear. As a result, people (primarily people of color, youth, and the poor) are locked in cages for longer and longer in the interests of “public safety.” The way the many parts of the Prison Industrial Complex interact is exactly what makes it so powerful and destructive. In order to fight this system, we have to recognize what drives and shapes it.

The tour is being co-sponsored by the Chapel Hill Prison Books Collective, a part of the books to prisoners network.
Click here For more information on the Mysterious Rabbit Puppet Army.

Join Left Turn, Dream City Collective, the Institute for Anarchist Studies, and AK Press for an evening with author Andrew Cornell, whose study of Movement for a New Society sheds new light on modern radicalism’s roots in the 70s and 80s.

Where do the strategies, tactics, and lifestyles of contemporary activists come from? Movement for a New Society, a radical pacifist organization active in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered forms of consensus decision making, communal living, direct action, and self-education now central to antiauthoritarian movements. Brimming with analysis, interviews, and archival documents, Oppose and Propose!: Lessons from Movement for a New Society recovers a missing link in recent radical history, while drawing out crucial lessons on leadership, movement building, counterculture, and prefigurative politics.

MNS served as a crucial organizational link between the movements of the 1960s and the post-Seattle global justice movement. Yet the group’s political innovations created tensions of their own. Members found their commitments to “live the revolution now” often alienated potential allies and distracted them from confronting their opponents, while their distrust of leadership and rigid commitment to cumbersome group processes made it difficult to keep their analysis and strategy cutting-edge. Oppose and Propose! fills an important historical gap, asking where the tactics, strategies, and even ways of living we take for granted today come from. Cornell answers that question in this concise collection of documents, which include an edited transcript of a panel discussion held with former MNS members, an interview with MNS founder George Lakey, and excerpts from two MNS pamphlets, as well as Cornell’s own long monograph on the history and legacy of Movement for a New Society.

Andrew Cornell is an educator, writer, and organizer living in Brooklyn, New York. He has been involved in labor, global justice, anti-prison, and other movements for over a decade. He teaches classes in labor history, social theory, and urban studies, and is completing a book length study of anarchism in the United States during the 20th century. Andrew is a contributor to the The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (Rutgers University Press, 2010), The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of Academic Labor (Temple University Press, 2008), and Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out (Nation Books, 2005). His writing also appears on the web and in periodicals such as Left Turn, LiP, Clamor, Utne Reader, Z Magazine, MRzine, and the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.

Andrew received a grant from the Institute for Anarchist Studies to write about Movement for a New Society. He first became interested in the organization while living in a collective house in West Philadelphia in the early 2000s. By day he worked as an administrator for Mountain Meadow, a summer camp for children of LGBTQ parents founded by MNS members. In the evenings he packed books with Philadelphia Books Through Bars, an organization housed in MNS’ former office space. This enduring, but underappreciated, legacy prompted him to begin exploring the organization’s archive and to contact former members. An article he wrote in the IAS journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory spurred interest from MNS veterans and younger activists alike, leading to the series of intergenerational dialogues and exchanges that comprise Oppose and Propose!.

Oppose and Propose! is the second title in the AK Press Anarchist Interventions Series, co-published with the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

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Join the Dream City Collective for film screening of the cult classic “But I’m a Cheerleader,” the first in a monthly queer film series at the DreamCity Warehouse.

Megan is an all-American girl. She’s a cheerleader, she has a boyfriend, etc. But she doesn’t like kissing her boyfriend very much. And she’s pretty touchy with her cheerleader friends. And she only has pictures of girls up in her locker. Her parents and friends conclude that she *must* be gay and send her off to “sexual redirection” school, full of admittedly homosexual misfits, where she can learn to how to be straight. Will Megan be turned around to successful heterosexuality, or will she succumb to her love for the beautiful Graham?

We will be asking for a dollar donation at the door, and sweet tea, popcorn, and cookies will be served at a modest price to support the continued existence of the Dream City Warehouse. We will also have on sale a veritable library of books available for purchase, including new books from PM Press, AK Press, and Monthly Review Press, and used books hand-selected by the Dream City Collective. In addition, you will find the awesome custom silkscreened t shirts that you have come to know and love from the Dream City Printshop, as well as a rack of cheap used duds that will outfit you for Springtime.

Saturday, April 30 · 12:00pm – 8:00pm
@ the Dream City Warehouse:
White Garage in the Northside Alley, Just West of 11th on Monroe Street NW

On Saturday, April 30th, from 12pm to 8pm, we are opening our doors for our first open day.

Sip coffee grown by the Zapatistas as you peruse our handpicked used books, new books from radical publishers PM Press, AK Press, and Monthly Review Press. Chat with Dream City collective members as you pick through our rack of donated used clothing, or our custom silkscreened t shirt designs, finding fresh gear for your spring and summertime wardrobe.

Also, if you were so inclined, this would be a great opportunity to swing by with some donations, either old lefty books you want to pass on to us, old clothing you don’t wear anymore but still looks great, or anything off of our wishlist.

We want you to see what we’ve been working on, and we want to know what you’ve been working on to undermine the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and we want to talk to you about it!

XOXO, see you at the end of the month,

♥ Dream City

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Join the Dream City Collective for a film screening of Vicente Aranda’s anarcha-feminist historical narrative, “Libertarias”

In 1936, Maria (Ariadna Gil), a young nun is recruited by Pilar (Ana Belén), a militant feminist, into an anarchist militia following the onset of the Spanish Civil War. Guided by the older woman, Maria is exposed to the realities of war and revolution, and comes to question her former, sheltered life. This film is in Spanish, shown here with English subtitles.

We will be asking for a dollar donation at the door, and sweet tea, popcorn, and cookies will be served at a modest price to support the continued existence of the Dream City Warehouse. We will also have on sale a veritable library of books available for purchase, including new books from PM Press, AK Press, and Monthly Review Press, and used books hand-selected by the Dream City Collective. In addition, you will find the awesome custom silkscreened t shirts that you have come to know and love from the Dream City Printshop, as well as a rack of cheap used duds that will outfit you for Springtime.

Dream City Thrift will be a worker-owned cooperative clothing and book store serving the people of Washington, DC.

Dream City will provide affordable and fashionable used and new clothing, radical used and new books, and will host cultural, educational, and community events.

Our worker-owned business will be a viable alternative to capitalist exploitation and support wider struggles for liberation.

“When our children grow out of clothes, we should have places where we can take them, clearly marked anarchist clothing exchanges and have no bones about looking for clothing there first.”
–Kuwasi Balagoon, Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone

Thanks for taking the time to check out our exciting new project in Washington DC. We are currently working furiously at fundraising to get a storefront for this project. Please read more about us in our Statement of Purpose, take advantage of the skills and equipment that our collective has in Silk Screening and Video Production, come to our events, or help us fundraise! We understand that this project relies on you, the community of Washington DC, to become a reality, and we humbly hope you will want to get involved.

If you want updates on our activities and how you can help us realize this space sooner, please join our listserv, and add us on facebook.

Subscribe to Dream City Thrift Supporters Newsfeed

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–Dream City Collective

April 7th • 8:00PM-10:00PM
at the Dream City Warehouse
White Garage in the Northside Alley
West of 11th on Monroe Street NW

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Join the Dream City Collective for film screening of Sergio Leone’s classic Spaghetti Western, Duck You Sucker! aka A Fistful of Dynamite, aka Once Upon a Time… The Revolution.

In Mexico at the time of the Revolution, Juan, the leader of a bandit family, meets John Mallory, an IRA explosives expert on the run from the British. Seeing John’s skill with explosives, Juan decides to persuade him to join the bandits in a raid on the great bank of Mesa Verde. John in the meantime has made contact with the revolutionaries, and intends to use his dynamite in their service.

Sweet tea, popcorn, and cookies will be served at a modest price to support the continued existence of the Dream City Warehouse. We will also have on sale a veritable library of books available for purchase, including new books from PM Press, AK Press, and Monthly Review Press, and used books hand-selected by the Dream City Collective. In addition, you will find the awesome custom silkscreened t shirts that you have come to know and love from the Dream City Printshop, as well as a rack of cheap used duds that will outfit you for Springtime.

Join Dream City Collective and School of the Americas Watch, during the Days of Action for Latin America and Against the School of Americas, as we celebrate the publishing of a dear friend’s book, and hear stories from his life experiences.

Hector Aristizábal grew up in the barrios of Medellin, Colombia, where he and his siblings had to use all their wit, wiles, and wherewithal to survive poverty, the ever-present allure of cheap drugs and very dangerous money, and the endemic violence from leftwing guerrillas, rightwing death squads, cocaine cartels, and the armed power of the State. As a young actor and psychology student, Hector was seized by the military, held in secret, and tortured. He survived and went on to find meaning in his ordeal as he channeled his desire for revenge into nonviolent activism both in his homeland and during decades of exile in the United States.

While challenging the State-sponsored causes of much suffering in the world, Hector reached out to some of society’s most marginalized—at-risk and incarcerated youth, immigrants, and many others—using his theatrical skills and psychotherapeutic training to help people shape their own stories and identities. He sought to understand his own identity as well as that of one brother who was a revolutionary and another who was gay—and how his belief in personal integrity and political freedom might square with the realities of a country under the yoke of toxic ideologies. Hector was forced finally to examine his own motivations and commitments, and begin to heal his own gaping wounds.

Shockingly honest, heartbreaking, and vibrantly told, The Blessing Next to the Wound is a passionate and evocative memoir that, amid enormous suffering and loss, is a full-throated affirmation of life.

Hector Aristizábal was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia when it was the most dangerous city in the world. One of his brothers was seduced by the power of crack cocaine and another by the promises of revolutionary armed struggle. Hector’s path was different. He worked his way out of poverty to become a theatre artist and pioneering psychologist with a Masters degree from Antioquia University, then survived civil war, arrest, and torture at the hands of the US-supported military. In 1989, violence and death threats forced him to leave his homeland. Since arriving in the US, he has won acclaim and awards as an artist and also received a second Masters degree, in Marriage and Family Therapy from Pacific Oaks College, leading him to combine his training in psychology and the arts with lessons gained from life experience in his therapeutic work. As an activist, he uses theatrical performance as part of the movement to end torture and to change US policy in Latin America. His nonprofit organization, ImaginAction, taps the power of creativity in social justice programs throughout the US and around the world as far afield as Afghanistan, India, and Palestine for community building and reconciliation, strategizing, and individual healing and liberation.

Attendees will learn what to expect in the tumultuous landscape of workplace democracy from seasoned IWW organizers Liberte and Brendan of the Starbucks Workers Union, as they discuss the hurdles of workplace organizing for dignity, respect, and better working conditions in a comprehensive, fully catered two-day workshop.

$10 Registration fee covers the organizers transportation costs and food for all in attendance both days.

Please RSVP: 571.276.1935, or on Facebook (your RSVP is only visible to the event organizers).