The following is a condensed interview with Peter Berdovsky (Zebbler). Peter recently won Visual Artist of the Year in Boston, and is a dear friend. Check out his work here
Political Orientation:
I don't really have one per se, I like to think of myself as an independent thinker....overall I like to be independent...
Religious Affiliation
No
Age
29
Gender
Male
Income per year
25-50k
Job/Role in Community
I'd like to think of myself as an independent business owner, that's what I am....I've been making my video art, doing live performances and making video for people and treating it like a business, and I have to say I've been pretty successful to this point.
Talk about your relationship with your Local Indie community
It almost feels like my extended family, actually it REALLY feels like my extended family. I depend on them for various things, they depend on me and I feel like there almost like this balance that happens with us where when some of us are doing better we help out a little bit more and when we're doing a little worse my community can step up and help me in return
If your Local Indie community were an Animal
Damn....I wish i knew the name of this creature. I think its this underwater creature constructed of many cells. They're all individual little creatures right, but they come together and actually creates a new structure that swims by itself...
-Which local biz would you and your community miss most if it were gone. Why?
I'm actually stunned by this one...I"m genuinely not sure, I have to think about it....it's more the tapestry of it. I've been to a lot of different cities because I travel a lot for my business, but it really makes me feel good and happy to be in a town or city where i walk through the streets and I recongnize each business as its own thing, as its own separate thing. It gives that city a sense of uniquenes and a sense of beauty really.....its that sense of uniqueness, that sense of beauty, that local businesses bring to our city, to Boston, that I would miss the most if I saw all of it disappear. It would be really tragic, I might as well move out.
What one piece of advice from your organizing can you share with the other people and organizations who will see this?
Organizing is always for something, its always for a goal. So what everyone needs to pay attention to is: how much interest is there in everybody to do the same thing? There's a really big difference: you can organize something that's not going to be useful to anybody, then you're probably going to have a really hard time with it. But if you recognize that need, that urge in people for something and you know that they have no ability to self-organize or express themselves, but they have that need or that urge, and if you could be their voice or their guiding strucutre, that's the precise recipe for success right there.
What one piece of advice from your organizing can you share with the other people and organizations who will see this?
Let's just try to make the world better. I think a part of it is becoming more individualized and independent from the top down, authoratative approach that we've had for a while. I think we need to work on our individual communities and make these communties more sustainable, so that if something happens we're not all as likely to suffer. We'll be much stronger if we're individually stronger
The animal I was talking about (that's actually a colony of individuals) is Portuguese Man o' War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Man_o'_War
http://kirstenz.web-log.nl/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/19/manowarcaseydunn_2.jpg