I'm often asked by other musicians-friends I meet on the road. "Can you help us with any addresses for gigs and festivals?". I hope these links will help. Also I hope the links can be used as some kind of 'alternative resource', like a reference library, or community news, information bulletin. I wanted to share them, to be another link in the chain and pass them on, to take others there, to celebrate how rich we are, a lifetimes worth of people singing our lives and other peoples lives in song and keeping memory alive.
Some of the political links and cultural links I have referred to in my own songs, or in interviews, as they are some of the issues, not the only ones, I have sung about on stage and been involved in off stage very much too. Others links are for reference. I've put them here to show that there are alternative ideas, newspapers and organizations, that bring like-minded folks together as part of the struggle for a better life, peace, health, education, justice, against racism and the power of the big money and corporations. That we aren't alone. Some sites are put up in solidarity with other peoples struggles that I feel I share. Some of the sites, I put there as a resource for travelers or migrants who might want news in another language, their own language, a more local newspaper. While travelling on the road in far way countries, I used to go to libraries to try to find newspapers to give me news about 'The Falkland-Malvinas-war' while I was away from home, and news about the 'troubles' in Ireland and other happenings at home.
News can be very 'ego centric', especially in North America, which, I sometimes experienced to be a very insular country in regards to what is going on in the rest of the world. The only choice for news in the west might be CNN. NBC, Rupert Murdochs' press etc. To be truly informed nowadays may mean avoiding the majority of news and media sources owned by the major corporations; they are unwholesomely biased. For example in the USA, how can NBC news report objectively on the military interests or the environmental policies of General Electric when General Electric owns them? This is not real journalism. How can we trust Fox news when we know that they fired two reporters for refusing to water down their story on "recombinant bovine growth hormone"? When these two reporters discovered incriminating evidence against the genetically-engineered "recombinant bovine growth hormone" found in milk, who do you think influenced Fox to water down the truth? Why Monsanto, of course, the corporation who is responsible for bringing us "recombinant bovine growth hormone".
Examples like this are plentiful, but we will not hear about them if we stick to mainstream news media sources. Many remote places I have found myself didn't have a telephone, Television, and often, no electricity at all, let alone an Internet café !..then....well the point is being closer with those around us, joining in with who we are with, right then and there, not trying to be somewhere else. The news around us will be much more local, much of it we witness ourselves ! News of birth, loves, a death, a dance, a journey. That's what we sometimes find ourselves singing to each other about. I have known someone who would communicate by e-mail everyday around the world to many different people but who couldn't communicate, in person, to his flat mate or partner. I find that very sad.