tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90151161916110458712024-03-14T03:07:35.692-07:00the dream of safetyTo surrender the dream of safety...Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-27678862744947028752012-11-13T19:57:00.001-08:002012-11-13T19:57:24.502-08:00Excerpts from the Illustrated Tao Te Ching
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In ancient times, the leaders were as subtle as sorcerers.</div>
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No one knew what they were about to do.</div>
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How can we describe them to you?</div>
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They were like soldiers about to cross a cold river,</div>
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hesitant, watchful and uncertain.</div>
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They were cautious like people who know</div>
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there is danger.</div>
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They were over-polite, like practised guests.</div>
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They gave way like ice, melting.</div>
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They were simple
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They
were empty like deserted valleys</div>
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They were muddy like unreflecting water.</div>
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The mud will settle and it is hard to wait for it</div>
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But if you can, then you can act.</div>
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If you follow the Tao without pretension</div>
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you
will never burn yourself out</div>
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Learn to yield and be soft</div>
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If you want to survive</div>
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Learn
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And you will stand in your full height</div>
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Learn to empty yourself</div>
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and
be filled by the Tao</div>
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the
way a valley empties itself into a river</div>
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Use
up all you are</div>
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And then you can be made new</div>
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Learn
to have nothing</div>
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And you will have everything</div>
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Sages always act like this</div>
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and are Children of the Tao</div>
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Never trying to impress, their being shines forth</div>
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Never saying ‘this is it,’ people see what the truth is</div>
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Never boasting, they leave the space they can be valued in</div>
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And never claiming to be who they are, people can see them</div>
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And since they never argue, no one argues with them either</div>
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So the ancient ones say</div>
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‘Bend,
and you will rule’</div>
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Is this a lie?
You’ll find it is true</div>
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Be true to yourself, and all will go well with you</div>
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What is going to be diminished</div>
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Must first be allowed to inflate</div>
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Whatever you want to weaken</div>
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Must first be convinced of its strength</div>
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What you want to overcome</div>
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You must first of all submit to</div>
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What you want to take over</div>
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You must first of all give to</div>
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This is called <i>discerning<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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You see, what is yielding and weak</div>
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Overcomes what is hard and strong</div>
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And just as a fish can’t be seen</div>
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When he stays down in the deep</div>
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<i>don’t show your power
to anyone!<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Every
living thing</div>
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Comes
from the Mother of Us All:</div>
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If
we can understand the Mother</div>
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Then
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And if we know ourselves as children</div>
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We can see the source is Her</div>
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And well, if your body dies</div>
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there’s nothing to be frightened about</div>
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If you keep your mouth shut</div>
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And stay inside</div>
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Then you’ll live a long time</div>
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If you blurt out</div>
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What you think to everyone</div>
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Then you won’t last long</div>
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Value littleness.
This is wisdom.</div>
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To bend like a reed</div>
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in
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that
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Use your mind, but stay close to the light</div>
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And it will lengthen its glow</div>
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right
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<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-89825447388695468202012-09-11T21:44:00.001-07:002012-09-11T22:01:46.566-07:00J.H.E. Partington - Vintage DIY Squatting at Lake Temescal<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/Partington_Portrait.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/Partington_Portrait.jpeg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="font-size: medium;">J.H.E. Partington</i></td></tr>
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From the Oakland Museum's website (now offline):</div>
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<span style="color: #000033; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, san-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">In 1868 a dam was constructed on Temescal Creek creating Lake Temescal, a reservoir for Oakland's first municipal water supply. The earth dam was dug manually and was packed down by horses driven over it repeatedly. Pipes carried water to people's homes that had previously depended upon their own wells. It was on the banks of Lake Temescal that the immigrant English artist J.H.E. Partington lived in a tent with his family, upon their arrival in Oakland in 1889. In 1891 he established the Partington School of Art in San Francisco along with his son Richard L. Partington.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Can you do that nowadays? That sounds pretty cool.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Here's the painting he did when he lived in the tent:</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmPBgiRTihJqzP85adRDdONBJw7s9GQACvCwBs76Nx7Ctc7RdiRZe6ihQCqzOrWUCSa9HVPQ82eo7qlr86P91RNT2iX4nmr8tJjgH4J2m30XyKRMRMvkdZiHEh5oMPsUEg_A71HiA0Zu1b/s1600/partington.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmPBgiRTihJqzP85adRDdONBJw7s9GQACvCwBs76Nx7Ctc7RdiRZe6ihQCqzOrWUCSa9HVPQ82eo7qlr86P91RNT2iX4nmr8tJjgH4J2m30XyKRMRMvkdZiHEh5oMPsUEg_A71HiA0Zu1b/s400/partington.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-65456341476517546152012-08-23T01:42:00.004-07:002012-08-23T01:42:48.699-07:00Making versus GrowingThe whole of Western thought is profoundly influenced, through and through and through, by the idea that all things, all events, all people, all mountains, all stars, all flowers, all grasshoppers, all worms, everything, are artifacts--they have been <i>made</i>. <br />
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And it is, therefore, natural for a Western child to say to its mother, "how was I <i>made</i>?" That would be quite an unnatural question for a Chinese child, because the Chinese do not think of nature as something <i>made</i>. They look upon it as something that grows, and the two processes are quite different.<br />
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When you <i>make </i>something, you put it together: you assemble parts, or you carve an image out of wood or stone, working from the outside to the inside. But when you watch something grow, it works in an entirely different way. It doesn't assemble parts. It expands from within, and gradually complicates itself, expanding outwards, like a bud blossoming, like a seed turning into a plant.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-16479166828363314222012-08-04T02:14:00.003-07:002012-11-13T19:35:01.923-08:00The Dream of Authenticity<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Thanks to Jaime Zepeda for his poignant <a href="http://oaklandnorth.net/2012/08/02/you-tell-us-the-oakland-diss/">"The Oakland Diss."</a> Growing up in Oakland is an exercise in fielding
criticisms and soothing people's fears. I've heard similar things from
people who grew up in the Caribbean, Louisiana, and West Africa. </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">Sylvia A. Harvey (an <a href="http://www.sylviaaharvey.com/">“Oakland Native and NY Transplant”</a>) asked a great question in the
comments on my story <a href="http://oaklandnorth.net/2011/07/26/you-tell-us-oakland-gentrification-and-the-hunt-for-cool/">"Oakland, Gentrification, and the Hunt for Cool"</a>:</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">You mentioned the recent riots in London, but even that
eruption…will it get us what we’re looking for or will we be further demonized?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I’m not sure what Ms.
Harvey meant when she said “us” in that comment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve been pondering over it for a minute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She could mean “us brown and black
folks,” or “us folks from the hood.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And, if she meant either of those phrases, was she including me in
them?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If so, why?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">I’ve asked myself questions like these, wondering which people are "my people," since the age of seven, when I moved into an apartment in North Oakland, just a
few steps away from, among other things, a drug rehabilitation center for
teenagers, a public high school (my alma mater), a nursing home, an upper-crust
elementary school (my alma mater and that of celebrity kids like Michael
Pollan’s boy), and, now, a very popular restaurant that sells only macaroni and
cheese.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was also, it’s
rumored, an abortion clinic that was torched by a wayward young survivalist
like the one who shot at the police last year near the MacArthur Maze. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;">So there was a lot of…slippage,
if you like, in this particular spot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> It was not necessarily "racially integrated" or "diverse" in any systemic way, but it was definitely a hodgepodge, and that was positive. I remember people playing Zapp and Roger at full blast outside my house when I was growing up, sparking my love of the synthesizer drum. </span>If I took the 51 bus home from school (when I was going to middle school
in Berkeley), I’d be mostly with Cal students and white people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if I took the 40 or 40L bus down
Telegraph, going parallel to the 51, I was completely surrounded by black
people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">It was the most bizarre
thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I actually liked the 40
better, because the people were less noisy and there was less traffic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People said thank you to the bus driver.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">For most of my childhood I
had fostered, mindlessly, a resentment toward black people, believing, with all
the common sense of a child raised in the “post-crime” Clinton Beanie Baby
Years, that black people were the cause, origin and final destination of all
crime, all the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feared, resented, and wish I was Blackness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like probably most young boys, I idolized rappers and wished
that I could be as feared as they appeared to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seemed like the darker-skinned rappers, like DMX, the
Notorious B.I.G., and Tupac Shakur, were the most feared, the baddest men of
them all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;">My little mind
corroborated this “insight” with the incident I saw one night on the grand
front steps of the Scottish Rite Center, as I sang as a choir boy in the yearly
Christmas Revels, headlined by the buffoon Geoff Hoyle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember my face was hot with makeup,
designed to reflect the scorching-hot stage spotlights, and I heard a woman
screaming outside, across the street from Lake Merritt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I stepped into the doorway and saw two
men, of dark complexion, running away past me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She was screaming like they’d taken her dignity itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">I don't understand why she was chasing them, still. Maybe it's the same reason I was chasing them? Chasing some kind of dream of authenticity.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">The dream of authenticity appears, to 'white folks,' as the antidote to the dream of safety which is, Baldwin wrote, 'Death within life.' White people seek out 'authentic experiences' (Cf. <i>Grizzly Man</i> and <i>Into the Wild</i>) as a means of counteracting the will-destroying, soul-crushing doldrums that are side-effects of the kind of surgery effected by the 'suburban lifestyle,' which is marked by the use of automobiles for every life task and a constant sense of where-are-my-keys paranoia over things like "crime," "privacy," and "preparedness." Of course one should be prepared, but there is no boundary between life and death: souls pass into the air every moment with every spin of the earth, and that's part of life. Ultimately one does not prepare oneself to save lives, but to make one's own life happy, prosperous, and, most of all, enjoyable, by living in the midst of bounty with gratitude.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-44306845143830704862012-01-18T13:35:00.000-08:002012-01-18T13:42:58.377-08:00From the James Baldwin archives - a note to his brother David<a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/InstigatorWB/2011-12-07155649-1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 480px; height: 800px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/InstigatorWB/2011-12-07155649-1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />"The definition of the word, repetition - which is the key to music and the key to all that we call <span style="font-style: italic;">Art</span> - has nothing to do with what the Western world imagines itself to be saying when they use this word. The sound is repeated because it was not heard the first time. The drummer hopes to make not himself but <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span> heard."<br /><a href="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/InstigatorWB/2011-12-07155732-1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 480px; height: 800px;" src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/InstigatorWB/2011-12-07155732-1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-53298834849964316252011-10-13T01:18:00.001-07:002011-10-13T01:18:33.055-07:00<span style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica;font-size:100%;"><span style="font-family:Arial;">“They’re all broken when you get them.”<br /><br />- My Grandma, to my aunt, about husbands<br /></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-33557630163899384532011-09-16T21:50:00.001-07:002011-09-16T21:51:03.414-07:00Tikkun Olam, an old untranslatable Hebrew phrase.<div><br /></div><div>It could be translated as:</div><div><br /></div><div>To establish a world.</div><div>To fix what is broken.</div><div><br /></div><div>or,</div><div><br /></div><div>To tend to eternity.</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-71246480990918357072011-08-16T12:35:00.000-07:002011-08-16T16:24:52.059-07:00Paul Gilroy speaks on the riots, August 2011, Tottenham, North London<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://vibrationsmusic.com/wp-content/images/2009/gilroy.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 500px; height: 332px;" src="http://vibrationsmusic.com/wp-content/images/2009/gilroy.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>
<br /><span style="font-size:78%;">http://vibrationsmusic.com/2009/04/27/paul-gilroy/</span>
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<br />[Winston Silcott in his introduction, remarked that if London had a better welfare state like Sweden, the riots may not have occurred]
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<br />Gilroy: I don't want us to get too romantic about Scandinavia...[applause]. The last time I was in Malmö there was a laser sniper shooting at people of colour in the streets.
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<br />I want to say a few things in solidarity with the people who have suffered, the families including the family of Mark Duggan who have lost so much. I was sitting in Highbury magistrate's court this morning, watching the magistrate giving people who had no criminal record months and months before their case would even be heard. And those young people, some of whom were not with their families but were on their own, could not have been defended successfully even by someone like Michael Mansfield. It's a sham what's going on down there. For people who've been charged with violent disorder, 2 out of 3 of them have been remanded in custody, and that is a scandal, not justice.
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<br />We've heard a lot of surprise from our political leaders who say that they didn't know this was coming. I use Twitter, and I hope you do too, because it's a useful form of news now that we don't watch TV so much. One person I follow on Twitter is the leader of the police federation. The leader of the police federation has been saying consistently that he went to see [Home Secretary] Theresa May in the spring of this year, but before the student protests started. He went to see her after the election and he told her there would be problems, and she dismissed him and said he was a scaremonger. So I think we should explore this question of what does it mean to pretend you didn't know something was going to happen when you did know.
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<br />The question is supposed to be was there politics in this rioting, or was it just a cry for help or a cry for things. And I think the question shouldn't be was there politics in this rioting and looting, but is there politics in this country? Because when you have three parties who are saying the same thing...[applause] there's no politics in Britain. There's a kind of entertainment, there's a bit of theatre, which is delivered to people, in the face of what is a desperate situation, which can only get worse, and can't just be understood from a local perspective. It can't just be understood from what's going on here--we need to think about what's going on in other parts of the world which the crisis has touched.
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<br />Stafford Scott wrote a very lucid and a very brilliant analysis of what was going on in the paper, and he looked a variety of indicators to try to understand what's going on around us here: unemployment numbers, school exclusion numbers, <span style="font-style: italic;">stop and search numbers</span>...In terms of these things, the numbers are as bad as or worse than they were thirty years ago.
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<br /><img src="http://canidoit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/cops_search_man_london.jpg" />
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<br />So the temptation is to say it's the same game as it was thirty years ago, or twenty-five years ago, and it isn't the same game. For instance, the police admitted that they've done a hundred thousand searches under the new terrorism legislation, and of those hundred thousand searches not one, <span style="font-style: italic;">not one</span>, led to an arrest under the terrorism legislation! So I think we need to remember that the game has changed.
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<br />And in 1981 there was a sense that they knew there were particular areas of London that were places which could blow up at any time, and the solution was a very complex thing, which involved soft policing, and schools, etcetera. And what we've seen since 1981 is the militarization of that structure. The criminal justice system and places of incarceration have become blacker and browner places--the groups of people incarcerated in this country is a disproportionate phenomenon.
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<br />To me that data doesn't show, doesn't suggest, that the people, our people, are any more criminal than anyone else. What it suggests to me is that they've been subjected to processes of criminalization.
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<br />Now, in 1981, you could talk about racism. A judge was given the job of seeing how the events of 1981 [riots in Brixton, Handsworth, Leeds and Liverpool] developed. He said he <span style="font-style: italic;">had to discuss</span> the question of racism in his report. Of course, he said "what institutional racism?"--I'm not a fan of his; I'm just saying, he <span style="font-style: italic;">had</span> to address that question. And now we're in a situation where everyone says, "oh, racism? That's done with. That was before." And I don't think that that's the case.
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<br />When you look at the layer of political leaders from our communities, the generation who came of age during that time thirty years ago, many of those people have accepted the logic of privatization. They've privatized that movement, and they've sold their services as consultants and managers and diversity trainers. They've sold their services to the police, they've sold them to the army, they've sold them to the corporate world...go to some of their websites and you'll see how proud they are of their clients. And that means that, in many areas, the loss of experience, the loss of the imagination is a massive phenomenon. So that the young people in the courts today don't have a defence campaign. They don't have one yet, but I hope that one will develop.
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<br />So a lot of that leadership has been channeled into the local government, and has formed a kind of "consultariat." And if you want to understand what that means, you have to look at places like South Africa, where, in the process after the end of apartheid, a whole layer of militants, a whole layer of people went over, and they got their pensions, and they sold this, and they sold that, because the government, in changing that society, thought that having a Black middle class was going to be the way to do it. Well, that's not the way it's going to work here. [applause]
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<br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN14MI_z3c-8Opn9eVzArrxKZKXkPo5V9TxvkVbRVbc8CaX-PhzdK8jqA9-V-veqAM-QA2e2oksGWWojKVX5cJGT2z6YXrYGQXP_L3Z7pcRJwCmY-Dh2XfnXOXC0dVnXA0h4Y2AIMnG0E/s400/Brixton+aftermath+1.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 264px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN14MI_z3c-8Opn9eVzArrxKZKXkPo5V9TxvkVbRVbc8CaX-PhzdK8jqA9-V-veqAM-QA2e2oksGWWojKVX5cJGT2z6YXrYGQXP_L3Z7pcRJwCmY-Dh2XfnXOXC0dVnXA0h4Y2AIMnG0E/s400/Brixton+aftermath+1.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>
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<br />That privatization is also a privatization of the mind. Because in 1981 there were no computers, there were no mobile phones, so people didn't have all of that digital distraction. There was no porn saturating the world that young people move through, there was no place to upload your videos to. These are big changes. They point us to something that's important in understanding the difference between then and now.
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<br />The difference between 1981 and now is that the relationship between <span style="font-style: italic;">information </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">power</span> has been changed, and our tactics for understanding our defence of our communities have to take those changes into account. And that means that we have to think very carefully about how we engage with the media. I'm very happy that there are people here who are independent distributors of information and news, who are circulating what goes on here and circulating interpretations of what's happened in this country. We have to get it to people outside of our country--we have to internationalize it. We have to think about how technology can work for us. And media is not something transparent.
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<br />Because what happens in the digitalization of media and privatization is the <span style="font-style: italic;">contraction</span> and the <span style="font-style: italic;">impoverishment </span>of our media. People talk about "dumbing down"--it's not just about dumbing down--it's something different than that. And that means that there's a much tighter control over what can be said.
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<br />And that technology which is so different from in 1981 is also part of what I'd like to call, tonight, a <span style="font-style: italic;">securitocracy</span>, ruling us through security. And that means the DNA in your bodies, in your mouths, in DNA swabs, the CCTV cameras that are all around us here...And, and this is another interesting feature of last week, the way the spin operation works. The media, owned by people like Murdoch, have a 'golden hour' after the story breaks, in which they can fix the story, and then that fixed story grows, like a snowball rolling downhill.
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<br />What we need to understand is that this doesn't happen by accident. These things are <span style="font-style: italic;">techniques</span> for making information meaningful, and we need to learn from them.
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<br />One of the other differences between now and 30 years ago, now and 25 years ago, is that the riots are no longer just a black-and-white story. It's a story that's complicated by all kinds of changes in our cities and our communities. It's a story that's been complicated by the development of political Islam in our communities--I mean, had it not been Ramadan, who knows what different kinds of events would have unfolded.
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<br />And it's no longer a story which can be explained only by reference to a Caribbean history, because the majority of the Black population now in our country are people of African descent, with a range of different experiences, a range of different stories and reasons for being here. We have a number of small business owners, shopkeepers, many of whom are immigrants who have arrived from somewhere else, and they're taking the position that people who own shops have always taken, and it's no surprise for them to be calling for vigilantism and other things to protect their property.
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<br />Our situation is made complex in a different sense by the presence of people from Eastern Europe. I mean, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/10/croydon-woman-jump-burning-building">the woman who jumped out of the window in Croydon</a>--she'd come from Poland to work in <span style="font-style: italic;">Poundland</span>, because that was a better life for her. Imagine what that means, to come from Poland to work in Poundland, for minimum wage, searching for a better life.
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<br /><a href="http://www.jobcuts.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/large-poundland.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 621px; height: 250px;" src="http://www.jobcuts.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/large-poundland.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>
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<br />So we have to find some way to recognize those differences too.
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<br />The government wants to introduce new laws to criminalize the wearing of masks. The only people who really get away with wearing masks in our society right now is the <a href="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2009/4/10/1239372878147/Police-baton-charge-photo-001.jpg">territorial support group [of the Met police]</a>. [applause] I don't hear Jack Straw saying, "I can't see their faces." [laughter] So that suggests to me that there's a double standard at work here, and we need to pressure that.
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<br />And sure, there are gangs around in London, but this is not about gangs. And I think Gary's made a good point about the United States. We've been talking about poverty, and one of the worst forms of poverty that's shaped our situation is poverty of the <span style="font-style: italic;">imagination</span>. And what happens in this country, and this is something that many of us in our communities share with [Conservative Prime Minister] David Cameron, whether we like it or not. When we feel the impact of our poverty of the imagination, we reach for what we think is the future, and that's <span style="font-style: italic;">always </span>the United States of America.
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<br />I never thought that in a public forum I would agree with Sir Hugh Orde, the police chief of Northern Ireland, but he would say clearly that is not a situation that is going to be eliminated by the infiltration of American techniques. And I think he's right. I think we should remember that before we think that the Coach Carter scenario is part of our future and the solution to the problems faced by our young people. [applause]
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<br />If we go down that road, we're headed toward a society that's <span style="font-style: italic;">run on the basis of mass imprisonment</span>. And that's not just about making the prisons bigger and fuller, making them engines for making money for private corporations, but it's also about turning your schools into prisons, and turning your streets into prisons, and turning your community into something that's much more like a prison. And we do not want that society based on mass imprisonment. That's not our future. We are <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>Americans, we are not Americans.
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<br />Lastly, I'd suggest that I think we need to put <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lammy">David Lammy</a> under some pressure. [applause] In the same way, we should put the media under some pressure for controlling our information, and not just go running to Sky News and BBC. We need to put our political representatives under some pressure. I live in Finsbury Park, not too far from Tottenham, so I know where David Lammy lives. He's something of an outside agitator in your community. [laughter]
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<br />The last thing I want to say is that in 1981 and 1985 we knew we were dealing with a system. We understood the interconnecting parts. When I talk about the poverty of the imagination, I mean that we are thinking like people who approach these things through the lens of a privatized world. We only think of these things as individuals, and we don't see them as connected. The last week has been an amazing class, a primer, to give us the opportunity to understand how these things function today. You remember that party they all had, in the Cotswolds...and they were all there, the Milibands were there, the Labour people were there, the TV people were there (not the ones from David Starkey-land but the ones from Channel Four News), and they were <span style="font-style: italic;">all there together</span>, and they're telling you something when they all congregate like that.
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<br /><a href="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5060/5428106864_fb91782915.jpg"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 500px; height: 375px;" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5060/5428106864_fb91782915.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>
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<br />They're telling you that they're a <span style="font-style: italic;">class</span>. And they think and act and conduct themselves like a class. They chat to each other, they marry each other, they go to the same places...And if we want to act as a <span style="font-style: italic;">body</span>, if we want to act in concert, we have to learn something from the way they conduct themselves, even as we challenge what they do.
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<br />So the pieces I can see in this system, the role of information, of policing, of deprivation, of inequality...And we need to clarify that we have the resources we need in our community--we just need to use them in a different way. Thank you.
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-26139407754295357542011-08-15T17:36:00.000-07:002011-08-15T17:40:55.753-07:00Not authenticity in the sense of a total act, or a meditative, natural state...not authenticity in any sense that could be called authenticity. Because as soon as it becomes an effort toward authenticity it sheds any sense of its own truthfulness.
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-22970704269960880972011-08-11T09:01:00.000-07:002011-08-11T09:15:55.669-07:00As the UK burns<span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:georgia, serif;font-size:small;"><blockquote>"The reason the police are so hated in the ghetto is...because you don't have to be more than fifteen years old at the very most to realize that the cop is not there to protect you but to protect Mr. Charlie's property. And that makes his presence absolutely intolerable."</blockquote><blockquote>
<br /></blockquote><blockquote>"When I was growing up it was...yes, it's true, there was a kind of resignation. The whole style came out of a certain kind of resignation which is gone forever...Even people who got educated realized that they were still in a trap. I knew too many people who had been to college who were shuffling around with garbage cans to be fooled about what education would do. And now it is very different. It is very different because the image that black people have of themselves has changed. It is utterly changed, and it has changed because of objective reasons. It has changed because the world has changed. It has changed because of what we have seen on television: black leaders, black riots, white liars. It has changed because the power of white people to control my mind--black minds--has been broken, and that is a very important shift. It is perfectly true: no one growing up now has before them the vista that I had when I was growing up. Though that, paradoxically, increases the poverty and rage, doesn't it?"</blockquote><blockquote>
<br /></blockquote><blockquote>"If I were young I would find myself with <i>no morals."</i></blockquote></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:georgia, serif;font-size:small;">
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<br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia, serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">All quotations taken from </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">A Rap on Race</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> (1970).</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:georgia, serif;font-size:small;"><img src="http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/1743/baldwinhm2.jpg" /></span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-43321054384544196002011-08-11T08:17:00.001-07:002011-08-11T08:22:00.006-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTm9X-E_hjMboftNSzGNKIbiXQrP1_YUQcFB5GYMsX03omAEKUz47ZuCNw_x7P3RZGctlldysbZMLlJMSg9hT1qaP7ZjlwzDyTUblES1zbMZoN55lI0BQbqF4_8g2febIUIgroO-fZnzqZ/s1600/2011-08-09+22.24.59.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTm9X-E_hjMboftNSzGNKIbiXQrP1_YUQcFB5GYMsX03omAEKUz47ZuCNw_x7P3RZGctlldysbZMLlJMSg9hT1qaP7ZjlwzDyTUblES1zbMZoN55lI0BQbqF4_8g2febIUIgroO-fZnzqZ/s320/2011-08-09+22.24.59.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639618439283806706" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">
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<br /></span></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMZOZHsVXTFRPGnqsJ__jSAI4P3J_YBbmMqj3zuqFym_m_kxnze4wc5Xr1BgYtqV3kQuDorzrxxcZL2ByKOqC6iATDQs240YOE-2IpSQnkEHJcwS_pQpBxmSD5DaeknXba07YniiT-Uewq/s1600/2011-08-09+18.12.49.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMZOZHsVXTFRPGnqsJ__jSAI4P3J_YBbmMqj3zuqFym_m_kxnze4wc5Xr1BgYtqV3kQuDorzrxxcZL2ByKOqC6iATDQs240YOE-2IpSQnkEHJcwS_pQpBxmSD5DaeknXba07YniiT-Uewq/s320/2011-08-09+18.12.49.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5639618422720057042" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">
<br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" border-collapse: collapse; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It's strange to live in a place with ongoing political instability when that place is a place, like London, which is reputed worldwide for its safety and predictability. The importance of word of mouth grows by leaps and bounds as the media struggles along with the police. Watching a given few minutes of the live news updates gives you a palpable sense that the media is confused and vague, stammering, playing videos they found on Twitter or Facebook that are a couple of days old, interviewing a myriad of people, who, with the exception of a few voices, Darcus Howe, Nina Power, and Ken Livingstone among them, condemn the general situation in a vanishingly narrow variety of ways.
<br />
<br /></span></span></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" border-collapse: collapse; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Some people are angry and rude during this time, some are far more relaxed than usual. There are all kinds of emotional responses. The overwhelming sensation is one of dislocation, a rumbling tremor or a sociopolitical earthquake, something beneath the surface which is being released. That surface is the image of a society of propriety, a society too proper to suffer from any illegal relocations of private property on a massive scale, what David Cameron famously called a "Big Society," the most civil in the world. What lies beneath is not easy to name, but it has something to do with what has always been the subterranean, occluded engine of capitalism: the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">ignored,</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> who by virtue of their condition both make possible and mark the impossibility of a society which profits from its capacity to beat them down, to attempt to convince them that their oppression is as natural and as just as the stars in the sky. The commentators have been using the word "monsters" to describe the youths, along with other epithets like "idiots" and "morons" (yet the term "anarchist" seems to be sidelined, seemingly reserved for the student [mostly middle class, mostly white] protestors earlier this year).
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<br />Certainly there are condemnable things that have been done by rioters, as in any situation when law is not enforced, such as the deaths in Birmingham and the people who lost their homes, as well as locally-owned business which were raided. But one must also inquire as to the long-term effect of chain stores like Curry's (The UK equivalent of Best Buy), Foot Locker, and Tesco (which owns Fresh & Easy and has a horrific labor relations record) on the poorest neighborhoods, the places where the riots first "kicked off." Poor neighborhoods like Hackney, Tottenham, and Peckham, Livingstone said on BBC, are both the same ones that have suffered the greatest public services cuts as well as the ones which are most occupied by massive, impersonal flourescent chain stores which regularly squash labor rights and pay minimum wage, maintaining high employee turnover as a way to keep afloat. As Dr Sofia Himmelblau wrote just now, "</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">It is no coincidence that the primary target of rioters, despite a media-narrative keen to play up the social impact of these events on small retailers, was large retail warehouse stores that cling parasitically to neighbourhoods at the periphery of inner cities."</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">
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<br />In the media, the "critical" attention is focused on a false debate, between condemning and condoning the actions of the youths. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">My flatmates disagree with me that this debate is false--they tell me that my refusal to engage with it is a kind of indifference or extremism, but I call it a false debate because there is really one side to it. That is to say, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">not a single</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> public figure has come out in explicit support of the participants in the riots: even Darcus Howe, who was treated like a rioter himself by the BBC presenter because he tried to place it in the context of racial profiling and police brutality, condemned the riots from the beginning. One rapper from Peckham tweeted to his followers on Saturday that they should loot, perhaps sarcastically, and then deleted his twitter account because he was worried that the police, who already try to shut down each of his concerts, would punish him for it. The only public viewpoint lies within the boundaries of unequivocal condemnation, and the monopoly of opinion is such that those who try to explain the riots by placing them in context, just like figures who tried to place the 9/11 attacks in context, are either shouted down or ignored.
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<br />A major difference that may be hard to imagine for an American is the racial complexity of the situation. The UK is not segregated in the same way as the United States. While many social spaces are clearly white, there are a considerable number of so-called white people who live in city slums, which is quite different from a city like San Francisco or Oakland. The truth is that these youth are not all black but are to varying degrees responding to the way in which the police department treats both blacks and the poor, with several hundred suicides in their custody in the last decade. I say "blacks and the poor" because in a surreptitious way blackness stands in for poverty in the logics of neoliberalism, in the sense that people like Smiley Culture who were not or were no longer poor were still killed by the police with no government consequences. We cannot say that whites have not suffered from the climate of police terror, but we can safely say that wealthy whites (i.e. those millionaires who populate the cabinet and who run the country) have not found themselves in the conditions of pressure that these youth deal with every day, of which police terror is the most bare and hypocritical but not necessarily the worst. The conditions of pressure which led hordes of people, not merely youth and not merely black, to take what was not legally theirs were many and varied but have to do, broadly, with growing austerity measures designed to line the pockets of people like Boris Johnson and David Cameron and, in a bizarre "libertarian" paternalistic logic, to "motivate" them to be entrepreneurs by denying them any opportunities.
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<br />An American friend of mine just told me that her Dad didn't believe there were riots in London. This says quite a bit about the American perception of London but equally it might say something about London itself. On the one hand, why is it that Americans tend to imagine London as the relatively small space north of the Thames and south of Kilburn, west of Hackney, which is the most white and expensive part of the city? On the other hand, how does this completely false perception influence the climate of exasperation which led to the revolts?</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" border-collapse: collapse; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">
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<br /></span></span></span></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-82808306381964038582011-07-24T07:34:00.001-07:002011-07-24T07:39:49.333-07:00Norwegian Terrorist- Disguised himself as a policeman to kill 96 people<br />- Justified it in terms of an anti-immigration Christian white supremacism, which he documented in a 1,500 page manifesto: http://www.scribd.com/doc/60744006/2083-a-European-Declaration-of-Independence<br />- Up-voted reaction to a top google video about the killings:<br /><blockquote>"I in no way condone this act, it is the wrong way to do things,these people were innocent, but had warped political views, just as the perp had,however this needs to be awake up call to all the governments around the world that are soft on Muslim immigration, it it you that are guilty of creating this crime,you created this idiot,people are fed up with Muslims moving into and taking over their countries, I fear this is just the beginning, war has started, and it is left wing ideology's fault."</blockquote>- The "anti-bin Laden" whose views are a mirror image of bin Laden's (except that unlike bin Laden he wanted to carry out the murders himself, by his own hand). Easily fits into Samuel P. Huntington's <span style="font-style: italic;">Clash of Civilizations</span> thesis as well as the zero-sum game<br />- Just a month earlier, a news story reported that Norway's sovereign wealth fund, approx. $500 billion, is the second-largest in the world (after Saudi Arabia?)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-15878854398479502502011-07-15T13:17:00.000-07:002011-07-15T13:31:12.559-07:00<a href="http://cache2.allpostersimages.com/p/LRG/21/2163/6VCCD00Z/posters/rainford-roy-musee-du-louvre-and-pyramide-paris-france.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://cache2.allpostersimages.com/p/LRG/21/2163/6VCCD00Z/posters/rainford-roy-musee-du-louvre-and-pyramide-paris-france.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia; line-height: 19px; font-size: medium; ">Musée du Louvre-- centered by I.M. Pei's massive, defiant ornament of skeletal geometry, dropped right in the middle of a classical plaza with statues of French conquerors, instead of gargoyles, staring down at you. Their robes are the baroque conceit of a much older architect, billowing yet contained in the exacting hands of the colonizers. A Mercedes construction vehicle, adorned with industrial hoses, emits a laborious noise under status of Richeliu, Montaigne, Houdon, Duperac. The vehicle appears to be removing sewage from a trap door beneath their feet. Bare-breasted, anonymous female statues are perched two tiers above the Great Men. They look like the statue of liberty model, an African woman, according to Lewis D. Gordon. A drab, once-white Ferris Wheel circulates at the edge of the plaza.</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia; line-height: 19px; font-size: medium; "><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: georgia; line-height: 19px; font-size: medium; ">The Louvre leaves no doubt as to the relationship between aesthetic waste and grandeur and political dominion. White Americans despise the French for the simple reason that, even today, the French empire is, in a couple of ways, the most powerful in the world, even as its colonies have been independent for years. With a much more vast and "high" style than the American empire, it fascinates, transfixes, and bewitches the entire world with its opulent ecstasy; its sinister brutality is inseparable from its ability to create a feeling of ambient awe which hegemonizes and fixes the concept of greatness. What are the thoughts of those who are very nearly the only Black people in the Louvre, the Afr0-French who work as security guards, as they stare, week after week, at the marble semblances of the potentate?</span></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-16097304681093227662011-07-04T21:30:00.000-07:002011-07-09T12:54:33.713-07:00Achille Mbembe's Lecture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Figures and Fictions Conference- A critical reassessment of South African photographic culture is long overdue. We must open the discourse on photography to discourses on other art forms. This opening must take into account processes changing the photograph, such as the ethics of mass reproduction.<br /><br />- It must attend to the paradox that our world is ever more globalized, and, at the same time, ever more Balkanized.<br /><br />- Not so long ago, people like Simmel read the world as a huge mathematical problem—in terms of calculation, reification, and abstraction. This would have been a world governed by “electronic reason”—the conversion of the human body into data, as with neural imaging and DNA analysis.<br /><br />- Such conversion changes not only processes of subjectivation, but the meaning of matter and the human.<br /><br />- One issue in the practice of photography is inquiring as to the criteria which constitute the human. Digital technology accelerates this inquiry.<br /><br />- Through the 20th century we witnessed the emergence of image capitalism. In image capitalism the image does not simply replace the number but becomes a technical issue in itself. This problem is mentioned in the work of Benjamin, Kracauer, and others.<br /><br />- The calculative, affective, and the sensorial collapse into the image form.<br /><br />- A circuit which runs from emotions to passions to convictions is newly reconnected to the image. These are the new pathways of capital itself.<br /><br />- Images have become a constitutive dimension of the capitalist forces reshaping our affective world. They are, therefore, no longer merely an automatic, replicative reflection of the real world.<br /><br />- Faith, sincerity, and conviction become increasingly important in image practices.<br /><br /><img src="http://a.images.blip.tv/AlexisLeran-AchilleMbembe5Mins658.jpg" /><br /><br />- Photography is fraught with problems today because of the nature of colonial rule.<br /><br />- Colonial regimes had to produce a colonial ontology which purported to create unchanging social essences, fixed in time.<br /><br />- Photography became a crucial <span style="font-style: italic;">dispositif</span> in the production of these rules, in order to convince people that all was in order.<br /><br />- The production of taxonomies, however, was a very unruly venture. The knowledge upon which they were founded was always uncertain.<br /><br />- The photographic act and the act of ruling are both based on an epistemic uncertainty.<br /><br />- Colonial governments sought to provide a cast of people’s intimate emotional ecology.<br /><br />- Photography was produced as a complement to writings on the colony. Early photographs are a tapestry of forms, an interlocking topography of figures, sounds, and senses.<br /><br />- These processes coincided with the political and rhetorical separation of South Africa from the rest of the continent, as if the nation were a European nation transplanted to the tip of Africa. The most important fictional aspect was that whites needed not form genuine ties with Africans.<br /><br />- The early 20th century was a culture of expeditions and adventures of three kinds: military, trade, and missionary.<br /><br />- Photography was informed by the belief that the “pure races” of Africa were dying. It became absorbed in profile portraiture—the arrangement of forces, the comportment of native bodies, surfaces and cleavages, bodies deprived of any interiority whatsoever, a pure portrayal of abjection.<br /><br />- Then came the restlessness of travel photography–repetition and compilation function like hunting—to photograph is like throwing a die.<br /><br />- Much photography theory in the West has been about photography’s troubling psychic presence to the Real—its doubling and anarchic unruliness, its power to excise time—a deep anxiety as to the constitutive elements of the Real. Such an anxiety is not found in Western or Central African anthropologies of the Real. Baudelaire, Barthes and others were preoccupied with the question of stabilizing, restoring, and recentering the Real.<br /><br />- The photograph, in essence, was a fixed image created by light. The process by which a substance is mediated by light.<br /><br />- This was the case until digital photography.<br /><br />- Western theory reads photography as the substitution of a living image by a physical object. This substitution has brought back some old animistic beliefs, setting in motion a dialectics of animism, mechanism, and reproduction.<br /><br />- The animistic sign of the primitive, then, is summoned in the very act of precise documentation that supposedly inaugurates rationality. The anxiety that the Real will be eaten up by the spectre of the primitive returns in the image.<br /><br />- Photography keeps the human person in circulation, in a kind of Promethean act. It traces the shadow of the subject by permanently capturing something fleeting. Death alone can no longer remove the human from circulation. The image, not the body, marks duration in the moment of photography. Photography liberates the human from the slavery of the body with its power of luminous ephemerality. The subject now has access to a purely spectral future.<br /><br />- The commonality of contemporary South African Black photographers is that they aim at retrieving the human from a history of waste. Peter Magubane, Mofokeng, and many others.<br /><br />- Black photography shares a certain understanding of risk. To photograph meant to take personal risks, to end up in exile...Magubane went to prison many times.<br /><br />- I don’t want to make it appear that there was a time when photography was powerful, and a time when it was no longer. That is not what I would like to convey.<br /><br />- However, there was a time when, in photographs, life was not only narrated, but photos were, in and of themselves, events of life. These were powerful images, because in those photographs (Magubane, Mofokeng, etc.), the Real was in search of its concept, and the image provided that concept. This had nothing to do with high theorizing. Such photographs simply became the places for an encounter with the present.<br /><br />- The question one should ask is therefore whether we can discern similar tensions which mark contemporary South African art and photography. Contemporary South African art seems content to use the techniques of quoting, re-appropriation, and recombination.<br /><br />- After apartheid, we have not witnessed the explosion of aesthetic boundaries one would expect.<br /><br />- We have to wonder whether art in general, and photography in particular, has lost its historical power to give form to life, and has, instead, become subservient to repetition.<br /><br />- This malaise tends from the fact that, as a country, South Africa itself is a museum without walls. A total museum. This museum is installed everywhere and nowhere in particular. It seems unable to create an archive.<br /><br />- There seems to be no nexus, no grid to locate or organize what has been dispersed and fractured. History has been replaced by an endless procession of bodies, a permanent compiling of weak images and objects devoid of any concept. That’s what I believe.<br /><br />- This inability to create an archive is probably the most potent dilemma affecting cultural life in South Africa today.<br /><br />- Because of this inability to create an archive, we no longer know how to distinguish between objects and images. We are unable to give distinct meanings to distinct things. This gives us the overwhelming feeling of a radical fragmentation and dispersion of the Real. Yet there is still life and movement, life that comes and goes with ebbs and flows. But there has been a delay with absorbing the new Real in art, a duplication of delays, including the suspension of the revolution by the settlement called democracy. For the real purpose of democracy is to put off the revolution.<br /><br />- The main tension within South African culture and society today is the realization that there is something unresolved in the settlement that brought an end to apartheid. There has neither been a big defeat, nor a big victory, so there is a stalemate, including in the field of culture.<br /><br />- Meanwhile, new inspirations are underway. New inspirations of how people desire things and desire each other produce images of their own creation. This question of self-creation and self-ownership will become the post-apartheid question par excellence.<br /><br />- New photography depicts subjects who are struggling to construct themselves fully and consciously in terms of desire, fantasy, and memory. It refers to forms of life that are inseparable from new bodily forms, it renders visible new hetero and homoeroticisms.<br /><br />- It is in search of a way to love after racism has inflicted so much damage to the psyche, and in the midst of so much continuing suffering.<br /><br />- The photographer is a witness to life, life understood as a regenerative force.<br /><br />- I would like to end with a reference to Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a Black British artist. I would like to end with his gesture to the mask, in a piece called “Traces of Ecstasy.” I end with his work and thought in order to gesture toward what we may call the masks of the Real and the limits of photography. Kayode did not develop a full-blown theory of the African mask. But he was onto a very significant path when he argued that, in precolonial Africa, the Real always appears under the sign of the mask, or is usually read through the lens of the mask. A mask is both a sign of human presence and of his or her absence. It is made of images suggested by human or animal forms. It is fundamentally an imaginative interpretation of life. Its function is to produce ambiguity so that interpretation becomes possible, because without ambiguity there is no possibility of interpretation. In order to interpret, we need to undermine conventional perceptions by bringing incoherence to the surface of life. Otherwise, the mask is equivocal as the Real itself. Photography excludes as much as it contains. It can only transcribe human experience in terms which preclude the fragmented and ambivalent equivocal nature of life and history as symbolized by the mask. The incoherence of human experience can never be reconstituted within the limits of the photographic frame, so maybe it’s time we stop asking photography to do what it cannot do.<br /><br />Question and Answer Session:<br /><br />- I’m not South African, so I feel somewhat irresponsible commenting on it at such length, even though I’ve lived there for several years. Nobody has called me to account for my irresponsibility, which should tell you something about the place. I come from West Africa, and a few things come to me when one thinks of South Africa as an idea, not just as a geographical location. And I think that’s the task of art: to think of a place, a region, as an idea or a concept.<br /><br />- The end of apartheid is one of the defining events of the 20th century. It is the first time in recent history that a racial state has been dismantled. That has not happened elsewhere. But the event has not happened in the way we’d hoped it would happen. It has happened in a totally different manner, in an unexpected way. So from a cultural point of view, what South Africa is facing is the difficulty of dealing with the unexpected, which takes the form of the unresolved, and the whole new set of dilemmas for which there doesn’t seem to be a name.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span">Picture c/o <a href="http://www.blogger.com/%5Bc/o%20https://www.facebook.com/pages/Perpetual-Peace-Project-Film/118403398180353%5D">https://www.facebook.com/pages/Perpetual-Peace-Project-Film/118403398180353</a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-1961126291782665752011-06-30T18:52:00.001-07:002011-06-30T18:52:24.882-07:00unsigned hype<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xN09THSNo_k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-40905033593012849582011-06-22T22:21:00.000-07:002011-06-22T22:22:26.767-07:00<blockquote>In 1964, after having been introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan in New York, Paul McCartney remembered Brian Epstein standing in front of a mirror, pointing at himself and repeatedly saying "Jew!", and laughing loudly, which McCartney found hilarious and "very liberating".</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-18205715112876886172011-06-21T17:58:00.000-07:002011-06-21T17:59:15.666-07:00"Don't just do something. Sit there!"<br />- BuddhismUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-67323630279634727592011-06-21T09:55:00.000-07:002011-06-21T09:56:03.132-07:00<img src="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=i4f6oVJND5xw"></img><br /><br />After a 25-year career on Wall Street and an “enjoyable” transition to publishing novels, Lender said he would encourage other bankers to pursue similar personal activities they enjoy.<br /><br />“It may take a decade to really make it happen, but they can do it,” he said.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-13778928966656953792011-06-19T16:31:00.003-07:002011-06-19T16:32:44.192-07:00<img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v325/InstigatorWB/Capture-1.jpg"></img> this is a banner ad. i'm supposed to want to meet these women?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-68493041085094885142011-06-16T01:51:00.000-07:002011-06-16T01:53:59.552-07:00Haley Barbour, current governor of Mississippi<img src="http://i.huffpost.com/gen/262028/thumbs/r-HALEY-BARBOUR-ELVIS-large570.jpg"></img><br /><blockquote>In December 2010, Barbour was interviewed by The Weekly Standard magazine. Asked about coming of age in Yazoo City during the civil rights era, Barbour told the interviewer regarding growing up there, "I just don't remember it as being that bad."[56] Barbour then credited the White Citizens' Council for keeping the KKK out of Yazoo City and ensuring the peaceful integration of its schools. Barbour dismissed comparisons between the White Citizens' Councils and the KKK, and referred to the Councils as "an organization of town leaders". Barbour continued in his defense of the Councils, saying, "In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you'd lose it. If you had a store, they'd see nobody shopped there. We didn't have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City." Barbour's statement did not address the role of the white supremacist group in publicly naming and blacklisting individuals who petitioned for educational integration[57] and how it used political pressure and violence to force African-American residents to move.[58] This led to a considerable outcry in which critics such as Rachel Maddow accused Barbour of whitewashing history.[59] <span style="font-style:italic;">In response to criticism, Barbour issued a statement declaring Citizens' Councils to be "indefensible."</span>[60]<br />In what some[who?] have speculated was an attempt at damage control just days after the interview, Barbour suspended the prison sentences of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two African American women who received life sentences resulting from a 1993 mugging in which the two women stole $11.</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-62781652378194364232011-06-12T18:20:00.000-07:002011-06-12T18:44:41.720-07:00"Web it was we were" - Nathaniel MackeyThey say art cannot be taught, but technique can be taught, and that is what they teach. So what is art, besides technique? What goes into a drawing besides the mechanics of my pen and the chemistry of the paper and ink, besides the angle and pressure of my hand and the series of strokes?<br /><br />The reduction of art to technique is like the reduction of education to training, or justice to compensation or revenge. It removes something of admiration, something worth admiring. The technique of the building of a concept.<br /><br />Or the placement of a ritual, art as a ritual. Reducing art to technique removes the question of the source of the inspiration, or maybe it removes the inspiration itself. What is the difference in inspiration between the first blues musicians and the graduating class at a prestigious music school? One would hope there are some similarities, but one also thinks of Nina Simone, who never forgot that they rejected her from music school because of who she was, or even Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who originally wanted to be an opera singer like Robeson, but ended up having his #1 hit, which he recorded while blacked out drunk, remembered now for its sampling in a Notorious B.I.G. song... <br /><br />The inspiration of finding oneself in a world that finds your existence to be criminal, that tells you to be otherwise or disappear, and you find you cannot disappear. This is a bridge to the conversation I've had so many times, that always re-presents its truth in my own experiences, of the poor who are generous, the poor whose eyes are full of a kind of vital experiential striving which is either drowned or drowning in the wealthy. Privation and exclusion make it no longer optional to imagine and practice what Nahum Chandler calls "the general possibility of the otherwise."<br /><br />The otherwise to selfishness, to greed, even to the elevation of greed into a supposedly affirmative principle of life, is no newer than the gospels--in fact, it is this elevation that the teachings of Jesus rail against, and Ayn Rand is only the most recent in a long series of demagogues to try to reverse the ideals of Christian love which, of course, were not invented by Christ and which find an expression in Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and any "paganism." And one finds that those who are most marginalized are those in whom the striving for an otherwise is most inherited, for whom the expression of a curve, a swing, the curve which is another name for love, Lucretius' swerve of atoms, finds its deepest source.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-15964679965104710272011-05-25T15:36:00.000-07:002011-05-25T15:38:11.901-07:00Pleonasm HumorSometimes on Wikipedia when a "citation is needed," it doesn't really matter whether something is true or not...it's great either way.<br /><br />From the article about pleonasm:<br /><blockquote>Some pleonastic phrases, when used in professional or scholarly writing, may reflect a standardized usage that has evolved over time; or a precise meaning familiar to specialists, but not necessarily to those outside that discipline. Such examples as "null and void", "terms and conditions", "each and all" are legal doublets that are part of legally operative language that is often drafted into legal documents. A classic example of such usage was that by the Lord Chancellor at the time (1864), Lord Westbury, in the English case of ex parte Gorely,[1] when he described a phrase in an Act as "redundant and pleonastic". The fact that this phrase in itself was a pleonasm is something which probably had not escaped the learned judge, and could be suspected to be evidence of a <span style="font-style:italic;">particularly Victorian legal sense of humour</span>.[citation needed]</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-90130104910623923782011-05-20T05:32:00.000-07:002011-05-25T14:45:07.067-07:00"Black Women Less Attractive." - A ScientistThis is not a new idea. It's not a news story. It's not notable that a highly-paid scientist at an elite university would use statistics to pretend to prove it, apart from any social or political context. <br /><br />The author, in true keeping with the thinking of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Bell Curve</span>, finally says that black women are probably less attractive because they naturally have more testosterone than other women.<br /><br />His job requires, he seems to think, that he leave out any social or political aspects of the aesthetics of race and beauty, that he look at race as a purely scientific phenomenon, even after generation after generation of legal segregation, police and state violence, and social divisions which substitute race for class.<br /><br />But race is not a scientific category. Or it is scientific to the extent and in the sense that the Eiffel tower is scientific: it's a real <a href="http://www.americanethnography.com/article.php?id=36">construction</a> of human society. <br /><br />So we have to look at race, particularly the binary imaginary of black and white, as we might look at the Eiffel tower: as an aesthetic monument which was built in a particular political context for certain reasons. Because we don't have black people or white people--we have various shades of brown and beige. And black Americans have far more, genetically, in common with white Americans than with most Africans, which is linked to a history of nonconsent. <br /><br /><img src="http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Science/Images/black-women-slaves.jpg"></img><br /><br />Ultimately we can't put this task in the hands of scientists alone, especially not people like this author who seem to want to ignore both politics and aesthetics completely. We should listen to philosophers, artists, and literary critics, not merely because these are three areas where black women are far better represented in numbers than in the so-called "hard sciences," for some answers about the entanglements of race and beauty. Hortense Spillers can redirect us from this madness:<br /><br />The black body "brings into focus a gathering of social realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually useless...it is as if neither time nor history shows movement...I would call it the Great Long National Shame...We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks <span style="font-style:italic;">might</span> break our bones, but words will most certainly <span style="font-style:italic;">kill</span> us. ("Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Diacritics, 1987, 68)."<br /><br />In other words, blackness as a real category, as a reflection of something we see with our own eyes in the world, as with skin color or body language, is so thoroughly interwoven with various metaphors of value (economic value, the value of beauty, moral value, etc.), that we cannot make any useful distinctions between them.<br /><br />In order to see black women as beautiful, it's not enough to throw around the slogan "Black is beautiful," although this is a nice start. We need to revalue all our values, in politics, science, art and history, as Nietzsche and Achille Mbembe have called for, in order to begin to poke our heads out of the garbage heap of guilty racist eroticism.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-74219022496548548342011-05-16T19:51:00.001-07:002011-05-20T08:50:10.547-07:00The hipoisie: a blase attitudeFrank Chu, a San Francisco eccentric who is venerated for his dedicated campaign against the 12 Galaxies, quadrogonic hyponetikalism, Clintons and Bushes, Thomas Jeffersons, and any number of other crimes against himself and his character. His worldview is as complex and ornate as the interior of a Gaudi cathedral, and no less dramatic:<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/xJ7RjuZM1gY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br />Like many bay area residents, he commutes to the city every day by train, arriving at Montgomery Street around 8am and going home on the last train at midnight. He suffers from autism and other psychological disorders--when he was 24 he took a few members of his family hostage, firing a bullet at the police which, luckily for him, missed. He has had a bar named after him, which has since closed.<br /><br />Like Portland and Brooklyn, the bay area has in the last ten years been hit with an influx of young people, mostly middle-class and "alternative" in style, who might be well described with a term from Kodwo Eshun: the hipoisie, the hip new bourgeoisie, who worship Bob Dylan just as much as Fela Kuti. There's no point in raging against them, since anyone who does so is probably part of them, trying to mark a line in the sand which does not exist (at the same time, the spatial and political effects of gentrification which they leave in their wake are very serious and need to be looked at more closely). But there are some awful qualities:<br /><br />The worst thing about the hipoisie is its blase cynicism. The definition of the word blase explains it: "uninterested because of frequent exposure or indulgence." This is the attitude of the people who have seen it all, who hide their fascinations under a thick layer of irony. As soon as a band comes out, it's no longer the coolest thing around, as soon as more than a small group of people has heard of them they're not worth talking about anymore. This blase cynicism betrays an enormous fear of the outside, of the world, of people who think and act differently from oneself. This fear is felt to be necessary for a group of white kids who are "slumming," placing themselves on the borders of working or workless class communities in order to prove themselves, to extract some style from a region and a people and turn it into a product.<br /><br />This hip comedian is "interviewing" Frank Chu, in a style that reminds me of nothing more than Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity: interrupting the interviewee, repeating certain phrases with a sneering tone. He's afraid that if he does a good interview, which requires a real sympathy for one's interviewee, that it might not be funny enough to show to his friends. He wants to put Frank Chu "in his place," by proving him wrong. When he starts calling him a nutcase, Frank Chu makes a really salient point: Bush and Clinton are nutcases too, "crazier than any bacteria or nutcase in Africa." Chu has argued for years that Bush and Clinton are war criminals, and despite the complexity and bizarreness of his other convictions, he might be the only person speaking that kind of truth, on a daily basis, on the streets of San Francisco, especially in this era of ignoring the ongoing wars so as to avoid criticizing Saint Obama.<br /><br /><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/pJXP4uHiyL4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9015116191611045871.post-43135321759650524042011-05-15T21:27:00.000-07:002011-05-15T21:30:34.248-07:00"On This Earth" by Mahmoud Darwish<img src="http://electronicintifada.net/sites/electronicintifada.net/files/artman2/2/080813-darwish-1_0.jpg"></img><br /><br />We have on this earth what makes life worth living: April's hesitation, the aroma of bread<br />at dawn, a woman's point of view about men, the works of Aeschylus, the beginning<br />of love, grass on a stone, mothers living on a flute's sigh and the invaders' fears of memories.<br /><br />We have on this earth what makes life worth living: the final days of September, a woman<br />keeping her apricots ripe after forty, the hour of sunlight in prison, a cloud reflecting a swarm<br />of creatures, the peoples' applause for those who face death with a smile, a tyrant's fear of songs.<br /><br />We have on this earth what makes life worth living: on this earth, the Lady of Earth,<br />mother of all beginnings and ends. She was called Palestine. Her name later became<br />Palestine. My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1