a small gleaning factory

Status Queue

2011-12-30T12:29:00.000-08:00

Street art by Stinkfish

Facebook status updates as diary. A year of crisis and mini-crisis.

January
...discovers that melancholy without irony is not worth talking much about.
...interns at a place where young folks are encouraged to create their own paths in life, while a few feet away, just outside the building, are day laborers who must have journeyed harder and farther. Who will ask them about their longings?
...After Jandek, everything else is just noice.
...keeps trying on prosthetic ghost limbs.
...attempts to mimic Yahoo Babelfish: Uno, this crash won't end in the well, like yore 13?
...Dear stars, please look after those who are driving 13 hours tonight to be with their beloved.
...would like to comb your hair.
...just found out that he was left-handed as a child!

February
..., in a dream, was told he was an alien by an alien...
...wonders if the stray cat was expressing an opinion by pissing on today's papers?
...Insomnia, they name is Egypt.
..., when in doubt, applies glitter.
...is calling it a Mizoguchi moon.
...London calling.
...wonders if the attraction to sleep is because it is an alternative (or escape) from linear thinking which there is too much of.
...is being psyopsed by one of the cats.

March
...finds it difficult to absorb the news but would like to share it with <3 friends.
...misses Final Cut Pro. I hardly knew ya.
...may need to detach from his detachment.
...wholeheartedly supports "the people demand the army returns the popcorn machine' movement.
...hopped unto the anxiety train. Choo-choo.
...suddenly finds the phrase 'pleasures of exile' annoying as hell.
...is having mightmares.
...complimented a plant, twice.
..."But I'm not good with anger. I go straight to depression." (Bored to Death)
...dreamt that his tax preparer was also his psychiatrist.
...is inclined to take arbography, if all else fails.

April
...4:44 p.m.
...dreamt of a pen and pencil that jumped to their deaths.
...is getting an I patch.
...was unable to determine if it was a burning book or a book about fire.
...notes that the body remembers it differently.
...name dropped Fragonard and Ai Weiwei in a dream set in a hospital.
...can only afford a second-hand poem.
...Dial it down, sunshine.
...'s eyes were dilated for envy.

May
...may have uttered the following in his sleep: "I come from the future. Listen to what I have to say..."
..."Number 7 has no answers."
..., observing today's clear skies, wondered about the cloud control units.
...'s mother's sighs are like daggers.
...will be citing grudges, slights, and snubs in the MLA format.
...longs to be a region-free player.
...Friends, let's slip away...
...Month of May, you have been unkind.
..."Don't get high on your own supply."
...'s timepiece insists that he's in another time zone.
...'s fam is hellbent on sending him off to the equivalent of Siberia.
...needs to be in a square. Pronto.

June
...Poll: Lil white lies (others not hurt) to achieve goal or tell truth and blow lifetime opportunity?
...dreamed of overpriced lemons.
...has a pinky toe situation.
...Oh June, how could you?
...'s tendency to misread is getting out of hand: "unmarried emails" made him look twice.
...has been to the moo-vies.
...This light, this wind, at this hour, induces reverie.
...was told the following: "You have nothing here. You only have the sunshine."

July
..."Even if it isn't as it should be, even if they make it hard, where else would we go? Who else would have us?" (Treme)
...lost his sideburns to summer.
...Maple syrupy day.
...is breaking up with Los Angeles.
...had an L.A.-centric diva dream. Just before quitting: "I come in on time. I have the least retakes. And I have an Emmy."
...got a ticket.
...is drunk on nostalgia...
...dreamed that the world momentarily lost written communication...
...highly recommends shredding old paperwork (credit card bills, embarassing poetry, clippped articles, etc.) as therapy. Side effects may include nostalgia.
...went to a taco spot called Taco Spot in Eagle Rock where he supposes that there are eagles and rocks?
...may be trading CA for .ca.
...did Porto's in Downey and Glendale within a 24-hour period.

August
...Dude, vivre sa vie.
...When in doubt, bow or nod profusely. [omgwtf.jp]
...spoke to his daddy-p for the first time in 19 years. [omgwtf.jp]
...is completely, absolutely sold on mechanized butt wash. [omgwtf.jp]
...One typhoon is enough.
...On my profile page it says, .
...was told by his well-meaning uncle to have kids so that there will be someone who will pray for me at the even of my passing and for someone to (literally) pick up the bones. That's it, when do I become Canadian? [omgwtf.jp]
...impatiently awaits for his clothes to dry on the clothesline while the sea breeze tells him to wait till morning.
...observes that in the go-go-go economy of Okinawa, fueled by tourism from mainland Japan, Taiwan, and China, some of the locals are left out by the financial rewards, resorting to a kind of traditionalism (like my uncle's decision to live farther inland and tending to small plots of land) which is in fact a reaction to an alienating capitalist wave of 'foreign' investment.
...went ahead and ordered the goya juice.
...bypassed the McDonalds and KFC for the goya burger.
...was told that the food and water placed before a closed stall were for the stray cats that roam the market at night.
...stands out for perspiring all day the whole thirteen days he has been here, and may have produced extra sweat glands in the process.
...went to the corner store (to flee from his uncle's) and met a lady and her dog companion Nora who have been hiking around the island for the past few days.
...attended a neighborhood (obon) block party which was held underneath an old tree filled with fruit bats.
...is terribly glad that the kids (nephews and nieces) have not yet called him ojisan...
...is going to jigoku for the crushes he has had in Oki. [omgwtf.jp]
...For those in the know: Vancouver. Study permit (5 years). Bam!
...It's awfully expensive here in Toronto. Send me your love and $.
...found the first apartment viewing a disaster, not for himself, but for the person who was showing the place. [Toronto Rooms]
...envies the middle-aged Spanish couple who take their time preparing their meals at the hostel. Yesterday, they had shrimps and pasta, and they also cleaned the communal kitchen for the rest of us.
...'s hostel is in the middle of a business district where nattily dressed men pretend they're not robots with their averted gazes and their look-at=me gait.
...may have to take antibiotics regularly if he's to rent a room at this place. [Toronto Rooms]
...spent about 15 minutes talking to the potential landlady about rental matters, and then proceeded to talk an hour and 15 minutes more conversing about other stuff, like Herzog's latest film, vacationing in Cuba for the winter, and why liquor stores in Toronto are ran by the government. And oh yeah, the place is sweet. [Toronto Rooms]
...went inside the old church across the street from the hostel and lighted a candle and watched the flames go by...
...was told by his Brazilian and German hostelmates that he looked partly Latin and assumed that he was part Mexican. Verdad?
...feels like a semiotic mess.
...will be a T.A. for an undergrad film history course but isn't allowed to take a graduate level film history class.

September
...managed an incomplete sentence at today's seminar while his classmates spoke in paragraphs. Plan B: Bartending school.
...misses hearing random Spanglish.
...is watching live Caltrans footage.
...wonders why there's no trace of snow on the university website.
..., ugh, snap out of it!
...How can I be homesick for places that were never my home? ...Am I mistaking homescikness for something else like a longing for a home, THE home?
...'s first day as a TA started out really badly but also got an applause at the end of class...
....produces a crypto-accent when he gets nervous.
...found out its called shorelessness.
...scoffs at calling it fall or autumn and prefers calling it as pre-winter.
...was told about cyborgs and aborigines in hushed tones while in the library also know as The Fortress.

October
...is another one of those dodgy exiles doing something called comparative literature.
...was told in a dream that his Kanji is like a crooked lane in his hometown.
...wonders how to turn doubts into donuts.
...Dear Friday, I'm already looking forward to sharing a drink with you.
...stands by his X.
...is still coming to terms with fragments of disbelief that comes his way like falling leaves.
...keeps forgetting that he's no longer talking with Americans...

November
...'s inability to cook has reportedly been turned into an Estonian family's cautionary tale.
...Occupy Melancholia.
...wonders aloud if Occupy (and other historic events in 2011) will affect the direction of his studies...
..."Those who do not move, do not notice their chains." (Rosa Luxemburg)
...can't wait for the new year (1968)!
...Eisenstein, did you ever hear of livestreaming?
..."Remember MacArthur Park!"
...kept on Googling to find out what it was called: snow.

December
...thinks this is potentially life changing: "Why does it have to be between two national literatures (or cinemas)? Why can't it be a question? (E.C., September 2011)
...fantasy Facebook check-in would look like this: "--at LAX."
...is going home after this exam and watching an Ozu film.
...politely asked his host how she seasoned the fish. It was chicken.
...went to a holiday choir program last night and kept thinking that the music would fit in well with the end of the world, which only made him want to rush out of the auditorium to go see "Melancholia" again.
...just realized that X stands for ten, also.
...is a flaming pinata.
...is paying up in besos.
...is no longer negotiating with nostalgia. Capish?
..."You say L.A. like you're from there." Verdad?
..."You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who are alive, who have ever been alive." (James Baldwin) Happy holidays. Now go read.
...is considering being reincarnated as a neon sign.
..., in a dream, was presenting on Van Gogh use of space and poetics of objects (none of which I know anything in my waking life) only to be informed by the professor (who comes out of a booth wearing goggles) how all this relates to photography...
...asked Santa for a teleportation device.
...proceeded to chop onion with sunglasses.

"WE ARE NOT CONTINGENT: An Adjunct Manifesto"

2011-12-18T02:04:00.000-08:00

"We are the non-tenure track faculty who now constitute two-thirds of the instructional workforce at universities and colleges across the nation. We are frequently invisible to administrators, yet we are the first professors and instructors that undergraduate students meet on their journey to becoming engaged learners. We are the majority. We have been silent too long, and it is time for us to reclaim our voices and outline our demands.

WE ARE ESSENTIAL. Words carry within them powerful connotations. Contingency implies that we, as non-tenure track faculty, are incidental or even accidental to the educational mission of the colleges and universities where we work. No employees, regardless of their field, would willingly apply this stigma to themselves. To continue calling ourselves “contingent labor” is to accept the fate that has been chosen for us by administrators who view us as easily disposable freelancers or potential tenure track faculty in a period of transition.
Recently, Robert Perkins and Carla Weiss’s “Part-Time Faculty in Higher Education: A Selected Annotated Bibliography” repeated several truisms that many of us off the tenure track have already known. Among them was that “Most law holds that part-time faculty have no claim to their jobs and may be replaced at will.” But the time has come for a shift, and changing the way we describe ourselves is only the beginning.
If we continue to think of ourselves as contingent labor, we also tacitly accept these beliefs about who we are and what we do:

That we have no meaningful connection to the mission of our respective institutions
That we are not worthy of career advancement
That we are forever ineligible for a stable salary and benefits
That we do not deserve representation within our departments or schools
That we have not earned the right to job security
That we are not worthy of respect.

WE WILL NO LONGER SILENTLY ACCEPT THESE BELIEFS. Although we once were the temporary or freelance employees that the name “contingent labor” implies, today non-tenure track faculty form the backbone of undergraduate education. We are still hired by the course, semester, or academic year, yet we now represent the foundation of most college and university instruction. We are also the face of higher education to our students, who are typically freshman and sophomores, as we are generally assigned to core curriculum courses. Most undergraduates, in fact, do not have the opportunity to take courses with tenured or tenure track faculty until their junior or senior years, a piece of information conveniently left out of most college orientation sessions.
OUR STUDENTS DESERVE BETTER CONDITIONS. IF WE, THE BACKBONE OF THE SYSTEM, FAIL TO PROVIDE THEM, WHO WILL? Our unions have increasingly become stuck in the struggle to secure health care and retirement benefits for adjunct faculty as well as to create a class assignment strategy based primarily on seniority. They have been hacking at the leaves of the weed without uprooting the deep structures that nourish the problem. This myopic focus on self-centered details at the expense of the larger problem is a symptom of the fact that we are a majority that has — as yet — failed to comprehend its true strength. We need to not only recognize that strength, but also to utilize it on behalf of our students, who are paying more than any other generation before them for an education while receiving less in return.
In just ten years, for example, tuition at Columbia College Chicago has risen more than 80%. As reported in the November 7 issue of the college newspaper, the Columbia Chronicle, today it costs an average Columbia College undergraduate approximately $20,000 in tuition and fees to attend the school, while in 2001 that same cost was $11,000. This does not include the cost of room and board, which causes the amount to skyrocket to nearly $50,000 per year. This inflationary trend is also pervasive in Illinois; as reported in Laura Perna and Joni Finney’s “A Story of Decline: Performance and Policy in Illinois Higher Education,” released this November, tuition increased 100% at public four-year universities from 1999 to 2009.
What have students obtained with that inflation? Not much, it seems. Classrooms are more crowded than ever, and facilities are in constant need of repair. Also, students are primarily taught by us — adjunct faculty who are marginalized within our departments to such an extent that many choose to teach our courses and leave campus as soon as possible. We realize that this is bad for both ourselves and our students since it prevents the necessary interaction outside of the classroom needed to insure student success, yet we are constantly told that we have no incentive for loyalty to our institutions. It is time for our administrators to enforce the truism that we are a vital part of our schools’ missions.
WE STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH OUR STUDENTS AGAINST THE CORPORATIZATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION. Until now we have labored in solitude — either to improve our own individual work conditions, or, in the hopes of advancement, to promote the administrators’ ideals rather than stand in solidarity with our students. We have witnessed, and, through our complacency, abetted the transformation of higher education into a corporation. We failed to see the depth and breadth of this transformation — believing still in the old narrative that hard work, a college degree, and perseverance would serve our students and ourselves in the end. We have worn the humanitarian mask that hides the universities’ bad faith towards its students and their parents, but we will adopt this facade no longer. We care for our students and refuse to allow administrators to treat undergraduates simply as revenue generators.
WE WILL NO LONGER LABOR FOR THE ADMINISTRATORS. WE WILL LABOR INSTEAD FOR THE GOOD OF OUR STUDENTS. We stand in solidarity with students who are crushed by the weight of student debt and are terrified at the prospect of not finding career employment that will provide a living wage. We stand in solidarity with all those who have the courage to agitate, speak out, and mobilize on behalf of higher education. We share a common cause — the belief that an educated citizenry and a robust middle class are necessary for the survival of our nation. We stand in solidarity with all who want a better future for themselves, their students, and their society. Moreover, we challenge administrators to join us in this cause by changing their current course of behavior.
WE, AS NON-TENURED FACULTY, CALL FOR REFORM FROM WITHIN THE CURRENT SYSTEM. WE DEMAND THAT OUR ADMINISTRATORS ADOPT THESE CHANGES:

All hiring and firing of adjunct faculty will be handled by a non-partisan committee composed of tenured and non-tenured faculty in the same discipline, a union representative (if applicable), and a human resources staff member.

All adjunct faculty will be hired on a contract that is a minimum of one year and a maximum of five. No longer will adjuncts be hired by the semester or the class.

Tenure will be opened to all faculty. The current system treats adjunct status as a stigma and blocks advancement from within. Even in corporations, this does not align with common practice.

Evaluation of all faculty for tenure and promotion will be based on three components: a dossier of research and/or educational materials, teaching evaluations, and a classroom visit report from a senior member of the faculty in their discipline.

Governing bodies of an institution, such as departmental committees and faculty senates, will be comprised of representatives in a ratio that mirrors that of the faculty. For instance, if adjuncts represent 77% of the total faculty at a college of university, they must account for 77% of the departmental committee appointments and faculty senate membership.

Courses will be assigned based on expertise. Many of us hold degrees and experience that allow us to teach courses at the intermediate and advanced level, yet because we are deemed “contingent,” we are only assigned introductory-level classes. Not only is our current system of course assignment arbitrary and unfair, but it shortchanges our institutions. By adopting this practice, our institutions will be supporting greater diversity and innovation of instruction.

Salaries will be based on experience in a field of study, evidence of quality teaching practices, adoption of innovation in instruction, job performance, and length of service.

WE HAVE LABORED TOO LONG WITH THE IMPRESSION THAT WE ARE CONTINGENT. WE HAVE FAILED TO ACT WHILE HIGHER EDUCATION AS A WHOLE HAS AVOIDED ADDRESSING THE PROBLEMS OF ITS CURRENT SYSTEM. WE WILL REMAIN COMPLACENT NO LONGER. In the Port Huron Statement of 1962, Students for a Democratic Society President Tom Hayden articulated our concerns brilliantly, albeit in a way that underscores our current failure to act: “If we appear to seek the unattainable, as it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” As educators, we have witnessed the disaster that has unfolded in higher education. We refuse to wait silently for the unimaginable: the day that a college education is only available to our society’s elite. The time has come to address the growing gap between the skyrocketing cost of education and its decreasing quality. We ask all who are concerned, including administrators, to join us as we take action to insure that future generations will have access to education and, with it, the chance of a better life." From here.

Fall of the UC System?

2011-12-18T02:02:00.000-08:00

From Prof. Wendy Brown's article "When The Public University Can No Longer Afford Itself: The Impending Crisis in UC Graduate Programs." From here.

"Here are some rough numbers that make the point. In the 2000-01, when in-state tuition/fees were about $3400 and non-resident tuition/fees were $13,700, and when competitive fellowships were a bit lower than they are now, supporting a grad student who was a California resident cost approximately 21K annually and supporting one from Chile cost about 32K (This is the combined cost of tuition plus a fellowship, or tuition plus a GSI-ship or GSR-ship.) Today, with in-state tuition/fees at 15K and out-of-state tuition/fees at 30K, it costs approximately 36K/year to support the Californian and 51K/year to support the Chilean. If the UCOP-planned tuition increases occur over the next four years, in 2016-17, the cost would be over 42K/year for the California resident and over 55K (possibly as high as 60K) for the non-resident.

Thus, in 2000-01, for an entering graduate student cohort of fifteen, the cost of supporting a class of thirteen non-residents and two California residents for a year was approximately 458K. Today, that cohort costs approximately 735K and in 2016-17 it would be approximately 900K, almost twice what it was at the beginning of the century. On the other side of the ledger, allocations for graduate programs are shrinking, not growing. Indeed, part of the way that UC is managing budget cuts is by cutting funding to graduate programs.

The increase in graduate student cost and decrease in allocations for graduate student funding means that departments are now looking at admitting and enrolling cohorts of less than half the size of a decade ago. Moreover, they can no longer afford non-U.S. students (who never become eligible for in-state tuition rates) and are eyeing affirmative action for Californians (who cost significantly less in their first year). The elimination of international students and growing preference for Californians presents the wonderful irony of departments trying to end-run the revenue-generating strategies of their own institution. (Neoliberal entrepreneurial strategies produce great numbers of such ironies.) But it also represents another serious blow to UC graduate programs on top of shrinking cohort size. While UC’s undergraduate mission should be aimed at Californians, strong Ph.D programs must attract and enroll the best students in the world–that is what secures their excellence and renown. But the opposite is happening in each case: UC seeks to enrich its coffers by decreasing the proportion of Californians in its undergraduate population while graduate programs aim to cheapen costs by favoring Californians and eliminating foreign students.

The effects of the crisis for graduate programs resulting from tuition increases are just beginning to be felt but departments are panicking as they take them in. Smaller and weaker graduate student cohorts will have multiple ramifications: Faculty will have fewer graduate students to mentor, do less graduate teaching and work with less talented students with lower placement prospects. This will drive away the best UC faculty and make it difficult to recruit the best new faculty talent. Together these effects will lead to drops in department rankings which will further dampen interest in UC by superlative faculty and applicants to Ph.D programs. At this point you can see the whole downward spiral–there goes the quality that UCOP and the UC Senate were trying to preserve. Undergraduate education too, will be effected by declining quantity and quality of graduate student instruction, which will surely lead some excellent would-be UC undergraduates to go elsewhere for their education.

Of course, some might argue that the shrinking market for Ph.Ds warrants a compression of graduate programs. But the demand for Ph.Ds is probably changing more than it is shrinking. Certainly faculty research positions in the letters and science will constrict, but massive numbers of Ph.Ds will be needed to staff the on-line and other factory-style undergraduate courses looming on the horizon. The soon-to-be lower-ranked UC graduate programs would be just the right source for such workers."

No Mo Future

2011-12-18T01:57:00.001-08:00

Bifo on our shared futures.

"This is why the future is over. We are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we come to terms with this post-futuristic condition, we can renounce accumulation and growth and be happy sharing the wealth that comes from past industrial labor and present collective intelligence.

If we cannot do this, we are doomed to live in a century of violence, misery, and war."

From here.

Occupy Dead Shopping Malls

2011-12-18T01:55:00.000-08:00

Occupy UC ---> Deligitimate UC

2011-12-18T01:53:00.000-08:00

From Prof. Terada's talk at UC Berkeley. From here.

"The moment we’re in right now is auspicious, fragile, and surprisingly well-defined. The thing that strikes me most about the moment is how much it is a particular moment, with specific characteristics and borders. It appears as the clearest-looking and most pregnant moment since students starting taking action in Fall 2009. It’s the moment we’ve hoped to attain since Fall 2009. And now that it’s here, it won’t last long.

In Fall 2009, UC’s upper administration must have assumed that they could wait out the student movement. This assumption has been proven false by a relatively small core of student activists who weathered a very difficult year in 2010-2011. What resources does the administration have for surviving the student movement, so that it can go ahead with privatization? (1) The frequent and intimidating use of the UCPD; (2) the criminalization of protest, including prosecution in criminal courts; (3) control of the UC bureaucracy; (4) a media strategy of deflecting attention to the Legislature (a strategy whose logical end would be the headline “Regents On Same Page with Angry Mob”); (5) unlimited funds at their disposal to pursue 1-4.

But we have seen the weaknesses in these strategies.

Policing and criminalization have not stopped the protests. In fact, they have got in the way of the UC media strategy, as public attention has turned from the budget shortfall to outrages that UC administrators themselves are ordering. This means that two of the five fronts that UC administration has controlled have shifted, and their media strategy is damaged. They realize this, and they’re not sure what to do about it. The cancelled CSU meeting, semi-cancelled Regents meeting, new rules for protesters issued by UC Riverside, the responses of the Regents to the interruption of their meeting, the response of UC San Diego to students breaking into their library on Monday, and the various appointed commissions are all examples of administrative reaction to the transformation of the police and criminalization arenas. One thing that can be gleaned from the assorted reactions is that it’s likely to be a long time before police do anything incriminating on camera again. I think activists realize that in future, UCPD is not likely to offer up such means for galvanizing campus solidarity as the pepper spray video has been. Of course, I’m not saying that UCPD is going to be non-violent now, but rather that it’s not likely to be the kind of violence that you can photograph. We’ll need to find other ways to photograph privatization, and other ways to continue trying to get through to the media what privatization is.

In order to explain why I think getting through to the press matters, I need to go back to my list of UC administrators’ resources. Of those categories of resources, their strongholds are their ability to fund infinitely their usurpation projects and their control of the bureaucracy. What is a UC administrator? What makes Dean Edley possible? Where is Dean Edley manufactured? I’ve been a department chair, if of a small department, and in my experience the existential substance of an administrator depends on (a) funds and (b) the internal politics of bureaucracy understood in terms of detachable self-interests, otherwise known as: what other administrators think. In my time as a chair, the only way it was possible to get anything to happen was to make or threaten to make one administrator look bad in the eyes of another. It’s to this extent that administrators care about the media: when they look bad in the press, it matters because other administrators are watching.

The Regents have defined their funding as private funding, and given the confluence of their interests and the interests of their private funders—who are often enough one and the same, as in the person of Richard Blum—they’re never going to run out of it. However, attacks on the salaries of the administration are worthwhile. They’re worthwhile not because they solve the budget crisis, as the Regents like to say, but for every other reason: first of all because they speak to justice and the broader Occupy movement and the press understands that; secondly because the funds are real and certainly would be more useful almost anywhere else; but also because we might take the administration at its word and consider the possibility that “talented people,” by which they mean themselves, would flee the UC system if their salaries were lowered at all. If upper administration cares about its salaries so much—enough to keep incurring bad publicity, which they also care about—we should keep attacking their salaries, and most of all, their ability to set their own salaries.

But that’s a minor point: the goal is not merely to pick off Regents but to change social relations.

So now I come to the last resource they have, control of the bureaucracy through control of the support of other administrators. At this point, UC bureaucracy has a complex relationship to faculty governance. Upper administration has avoided and circumvented faculty governance to advance privatization, for example by operating through appointed task forces interpolated into the system of standing Academic Senate committees. Yet they still rely on faculty to staff these task forces and to deliberate on and implement their conclusions. Thus, it remains inescapable to consider the role of the faculty and the question of the relation of representational procedural democracy to the movement to Reclaim UC. My impression is that so far, most UC faculty have considered it their role—our role?—their role—to fight privatization through the given governance and social structures, regardless of what their political beliefs are off campus. In other words, people who aren’t proceduralist liberals off campus or in their writing on campus fight privatization through Senate committees, faculty associations, and social groups committed to a dialectic of recognition with the administrators as antagonists. The idea is that even as direct actions by students are going on, these representational and discursive realms remain worth intervening in and reflect a kind of division of labor between students and faculty. (It’s also not a negligible factor that the Faculty Code of Conduct may be even more repressive than the Student Code of Conduct.)

I’d like to suggest that given the significance of bureaucracy as an administrative stronghold, the arena of bureaucracy is worth intervening in if and only if the legitimacy of governance by upper administration is negated by the intervention. A professor who agrees to be on a committee thinking that from that position she’ll be able to limit damage and fearing that if she is not on it things will be even worse is not negating the legitimacy of the administration, so that should not be done.

But a resolution introduced in the Academic Senate, or issued by an individual department, stating that the Regents should not be allowed to set the salaries of upper administrators would reject their legitimacy and would be worth doing, not least because it would be news. A resolution by the Riverside Academic Senate, or individual departments, rejecting the brutish rules for protest that UCR’s Dean of Students has just invented would negate their legitimacy and would be worth doing. One of the remarkable things that happened quietly a couple of weeks ago which shouldn’t be lost amid the spectacular things that also happened is that the departments of Asian-American Studies, English, and Physics, as well as a group of historians, at Davis released statements expressing no confidence in their chancellor autonomously, without going through a given bureaucratic structure for resolutions or comment. Nor did they speak as atomized individuals gathered temporarily on a petition. Rather, they identified themselves as un-Chancellor-friendly ongoing spaces and created a new form of relation to Davis administration. Further, they pulled the Law faculty into responding to them in kind.

The faculty response at Davis was the first instance that I know of that the Administration’s hold on the bureaucracy itself—its structure and its hegemonic representative capacity for faculty—could be weakening. If they lose their grip on the bureaucracy, the upper administration will be exposed to the contempt of their national peers; and being administrators, they would experience that as an existential threat.

So I’m brought around to something I never thought I would recommend: faculty reinforcements—faculty participation of a targeted sort—in the movement to Reclaim UC, so that we can follow these departments at Davis into a new area of contestation. Public response to the acts of Berkeley professors Celeste Langan, Robert Hass and Geoffrey O’Brien, who were beaten alongside student protesters by Berkeley police on November 9, show that professorial participation in anything that delegitimates the Administration is disproportionately effective. The disproportion is disturbing because a faculty body seems to be worth more than a student body. That’s a problem. But only their participation could bring that problem to light where it otherwise would have remained hidden. In order to keep and increase pressure on the administration at this moment when the police front may be disappearing from visibility, one thing we should do—faculty and students (and here I have just used a version of the first person plural that I thought no longer existed)—is negate the legitimacy of the police-related commissions, especially the ones farcically composed by Yudof. Their egregiousness is legible, even to the uninitiated, even to the press; and for that reason they are an excellent introduction to privatization and anti-privatization.

The People’s Police Review Board deploys a principle we all need to support. If faculty show up at a stop of Dean Edley’s listening tour among protesters making it clear that it’s outrageous that the event is happening at all, that will be disproportionately useful. Boycotting the events, making it clear why not to show up, would also be useful. Instituting an actual alternative review board on whatever collective level is possible would be excellent. Why wait for Yudof to withdraw his appointments? Why shouldn’t faculty and students form an alternative body and demand that the witnesses responding to Yudof’s review respond, while they’re at it, to our own?

What matters here is form and principle. The outcome would not be merely the propositional conclusion of the investigation, nor UCPD’s refusal to comply with one, and the corresponding demands these events would generate. Rather, what’s important is the capacity of self-respecting communal forms to dramatize the administration’s illegitimacy using Yudof’s commission as an illustration. Given that faculty bodies are worth more to the University and media than student bodies, students are going to have a much harder time delegitimating the administration without this particular kind of faculty support: the kind that involves professors’ asking themselves, What are we doing to legitimate and delegitimate privatization?, ceasing to do the former and making sure to do the latter. The grievable faculty body reaps advantage every time faculty appear in the service of delegitimation, and only then.

To sum up, then: many areas of the struggle are changing rapidly and some may be vanishing as we have known them. These sudden shifts in terrain reflect the pain the movement is inflicting on the Administration and the unevenness of its reactions. Things are moving so rapidly that we could easily fail to adjust. If that happened, it could be difficult to get into a similar place again. So winter quarter is the time to expand into the very areas into which the Regents have retreated by undermining the conditions that support administrators as administrators, and which are their main refuge, and making this effort literally visible (everything now should be photographed and filmed as artfully as we can manage it). Funding they will always have; but with their contacts, they can just as well have it somewhere else, and I suspect that thought has flitted through the mind of every UC administrator. Contesting administrators’ control of bureaucracy matters because they experience that control as the anchor of their identity, and this is one of their limitations, a soft spot in their mental and material organization. My philosophical emphasis is on non-instrumental and negative thought and non-teleological self-constitution, so it may seem to go against the grain to have offered reflections that are so prosaic. But this is a matter of historical and perceptual scale. There is a degree of magnification, a middle distance, that is always prosaic even as it is surrounded by an infinite and unsystemizable complexity. Needless to say, all of this is worth doing regardless of what happens after."

Open Letter Regarding UC Berkeley Violence (Occupy UC)

2011-11-13T17:28:00.001-08:00

From Facebook.

Letter to friends and family regarding the recent police violence at UC Berkeley

Dear friends and family,

As I'm sure many of you have heard by now, this past week at UC Berkeley, several thousand students, faculty, and employees of the university came together to protest a proposed 81% tuition hike, increased privatization of the UC system, and the troubling conflicts of interest demonstrated by Board of Regents members' private business interests and their responsibilities to advocate on behalf of the UC community with the State government. While, for example, the governing body of the UC Regents (publicly appointed officials of the State of California) and campus administration have decided that the burden of making up losses in the budget crisis should fall heavily on students through rapidly rising tuition (the current figure is already triple what it was ten years ago) and on members of faculty and staff who've received reductions in pay and increased workloads--or have been laid off entirely, the current Regents have invested at least $1.5 billion of the UC's money in projects in which many of them personally hold significant stakes and, of course, also authorized $3 million in bonuses to top administrators last year alone.

These are some of the reasons why so many people (myself included) gathered together on Wednesday to stand in peaceful protest in front of Sproul Hall. In addition to organizing numerous teach-ins, a rally, march, and campus-wide walkout, students also hoped to set up a two-day encampment in the spirit of the other Occupy movements around the country to create a public forum for discussion and education about the current financial situation of the university and the condition of public education in the country today. All day, the crowd was gathered in explicitly peaceful assembly to petition our government for a redress of grievances. As the university first responded by the early afternoon not with administrators to enter into dialogue but with hundreds of riot police, some students even took the time to recite the first amendment to police and protesters alike.

Whether or not you agree with the reasons for the protests, however, I would hope that you would all at least share my horror at what followed. As hundreds of students linked arms to form a human chain around the one tent they had (the few others they had tried to set up were ripped down and confiscated by the police with no warning earlier in the day), riot police began beating them mercilessly without warning or provocation. Some of you may have seen the following clips already:

Here, you can see the police suddenly start to attack the protesters without cause. The young man in the front that they keep beating even after he's unable to get up is a first-year graduate student in my department named Josh Anderson. He was the first of a number of students that had to be taken to the hospital that day. As you can see from the video, neither he, nor any of the other students being beaten with batons strike back at the police with violence. Instead, you can see him, barely able to stand, gingerly raise a peace sign after being repeatedly struck on the head, neck, ribs, and legs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buovLQ9qyWQ

In the following video, the first woman (in pink) that the police drag out of the crowd by her hair is Professor Celeste Langan, a beloved professor of British Romanticism and media studies in my department and director of the UC Townsend Center for the Humanities. As she places herself in front of students, the police approach her with batons. She repeatedly told the police not to beat her but arrest her instead. You can see here that they responded by dragging her out by force and throwing her to the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNHXuf6qJas&feature=player_embedded

When the police violence occurred again later that night, they broke the ribs of another English professor, poet Geoffrey O'Brien. When the police wouldn't stop beating him even after he too had fallen to the ground, a good friend and fellow graduate student, Ben Cullen, rushed in and demanded that they stop. The police, in turn, rained multiple blows on him, bruising his ribs as well. And just in case it's not clear yet that the violence was not just against 'some kids looking to make a fuss,' the police also thought it necessary to jab 70-year-old former Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass several times in the stomach with a baton as well.

I could go on with more horrifying accounts and recorded footage of the brutality the UCPD and Alameda County Sheriffs inflicted upon my friends, professors, and students, but I will stop here to say that for all the mainstream media coverage after the day's events alternatively insisted upon UC protesters "violently clashing with police" or the fact that police were forced into "nudging" students with batons--

1) I've never been more proud to be a UC Berkeley student seeing the firmness with which every protester held to his or her commitment of nonviolent resistance. More beautifully and successfully perhaps than its Occupy counterpart in Oakland, the Cal protesters responded instead throughout the evening with chants of "Peaceful protest!" and even briefly, "Bubbles not batons!" (Yes, a few of the gathered students started some impromptu bubble-blowing in the crowd around midnight. Got to love them hippy kids, right? But, seriously. I do.) The idea of protesters clashing with police implies violence on both sides. That was absolutely (and to be perfectly honest, given the police's behavior, quite surprisingly) not the case.

2) As for the AP's account of police "nudging" students with batons-- well, Steven Colbert does a nice job of lampooning what is already patently ridiculous about that here: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/402024/november-10-2011/occupy-u-c--berkeley?xrs=share_fb

Hundreds of faculty and graduate student instructors, myself included, have signed the following open letter to UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau who is responsible for the police response: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/uc_berkeley_teachers_condemn_violence/

In addition to making a statement of no confidence in the UC Regents and administration, many of us are also demanding the resignation of Birgeneau and the UCPD Chief of Police, Mitchell Celaya. The ACLU and National Lawyers' Guild have demanded records of the events from the UCPD and Alameda County Sheriff's offices.

Please consider helping by contacting either Chancellor Birgeneau's or Chief of Police Celaya's office to voice your concern, demands, outrage-- whatever. More concretely, you can ask for their removal from office, for their compliance with the ACLU and National Lawyers' Guild's requests, for Chancellor Birgeneau to make the investigation of excessive violence open to external review (it's currently being delegated to an in-house board), or, y'know, for the university to stop terrorizing members of the community that both comprise it and whom the UCPD are supposedly there to protect. Parents and loved ones of Cal students-- or at least this one!-- feel free to call and simply say, "Hey, I'd like you not to beat my child/friend/loved one who is a student at Cal and/or to think it would be okay to do so, please. Thanks." Anything you could do to help would be much appreciated. This violence is not only of a physical nature against the students, faculty, and employees of Cal, but also against the very idea and purpose of higher education itself. It cannot be allowed to continue.

Their information is below.

Office of the Chancellor

Email: chancellor@berkeley.edu

Phone: (510) 642-7464

Fax: (510) 643-5499

Location & mailing address:

200 California Hall, MC#1500

University of California

Berkeley, CA 94720-1500

Chief of Police

Email: mjc@berkeley.edu

Phone: (510) 642-1133

Much thanks and love,

Irene

Occupy UC (Univ. of California)

2011-11-11T23:25:00.001-08:00

This deserves to be posted in full. From here.

Another Reality (Remarks at UC Irvine Protest, 11/9/11)

By Rei Terada

In March 2010, about a thousand people at UC Irvine marched here and on the street, on University Avenue. I was amused that a couple of commentators wrote afterward that UCI students were “protesting reality.” Someone headlined a blog for The Atlantic, “Students Protest University Cutbacks, Reality”. This remark assumes that once reality has been determined, you have no right to say anything further. That assumption can be refuted in a number of ways, even if—and that’s an “if”—we don’t dispute the amount of the state budget shortfall since the recession of 2008. First of all, anyone who cares about reality should always ask, what makes the reality the way it is? What are the conditions on which reality depends? That is the question known as “critique,” and critique is the mainstay of the Enlightenment education that Universities historically support.

The condition of the reality that UCI students protested in 2010 is that the state has been defunding public education since before the global financial crisis. The UC Regents claim that this in turn is another inalterable and involuntary reality that they can do nothing about, but that’s not true. A few years ago it would have cost the median California taxpayer $32 to return UC funding to 2000 levels. Since then the economy’s grown even worse, and now it would cost $49. The UC Regents’ point of view is that the California taxpayer is ignorant or selfish, and should just cough up the $50—that the Legislature should impose a tax. But by doubling tuition since 2000, long before the global financial crisis--last week proposing to raise it again, 16% a year for the next four years--and giving almost a third of the places (31% at Berkeley now, for example) to out of state students paying $36,000 a year, the UC Regents give California taxpayers no reason to fund an education that they’re being told is no longer for them. Middle-class Californians can’t afford the tuition increases; they can’t bear to take on any more debt; and they have no reason to contribute when qualified students are no longer guaranteed a UC education.

The leadership of the university bears the responsibility for these community-destroying policies. The more they turn from public to private money, the less incentive the legislature has to raise revenues on the university’s behalf; and the more they privatize the university, the more middle-class tazpayers are right to feel that this whole project is no longer theirs. These arguments have been made in financial detail by Robert Meister of UCSC and Christopher Newfield of UCSB. UC Administration is turning the wheel in the wrong direction; and they have hired a president, Mark Yudof, who came in with a template for privatizing the university before the global financial crisis had even happened. President Yudof stated in print in 2007 that he intended to raise tuition by 32%--exactly the amount that the Regents did raise it in a first so-called “response” to the crisis: a response that predated the supposedly inevitable problem. The condition that supports our current reality of massive tuition increases and cuts is a program of privatization that actively weakens the foundations of citizen support and then blames the citizens for not being supportive.

Our reality would have been different if instead of making students pay—-and pay-—and pay—-and pay again, the leadership of the university had said something like the following:

“The state has been decreasing funding for decades, and we can’t go on any more. Now we’re in crisis. And in crisis the education of students and the well-being of our community comes first. The educational part of the budget will be the last to be cut. We will not be asking more from our lowest-paid and most vulnerable workers than we ask from our highest-paid workers. We will not be laying off janitors and food service workers while giving expensive raises to ourselves. We’ll be cutting from management. We’re asking for salary reductions from everyone making over $100,000 a year. We’re trying to renegotiate our contracts so that private money donated to us for non-educational purposes, such as construction, can be turned toward education and student support. And the cuts that we do have to implement will be shared equally, because every part of the university is equally valuable. To do otherwise would be crazy: it would pit groups of people against one another at the time when they’re most stressed. If everyone shares the cuts equally, everyone will realize that this concerns them personally. And we’ll restore the resources if and when our situation gets better. Nothing that currently exists is to be closed down permanently, even if we can’t run it right now. By staying together, we can affirm our community, whatever the practical hardships might be.”

That’s what I would have liked to hear in another reality, and that’s why this reality is well worth protesting.

You might think that even if reality is worth protesting, protesting doesn’t work to change it. My impression, for what it’s worth, is that student protests have slowed down the process of privatization, and in fact are the only thing that has had any impact on the process. It’s also clear that student protests globally have, along with Tunisia and Egypt, created the conditions for the current Occupation movement--California student protesters especially. Protesting reality today is no longer a joke in the way commentators thought it was in 2009-2010.

All of that said, however, it also makes sense to think of what the community wants to do in a way that goes beyond what it wants someone else to do, whether that’s the State or the UC Regents or local administration. It’s good, in the manner of Occupy, also to ask what the community wants to do regardless of what others think. It’s not just a matter of being in a terrible situation, but of how you want to live it. Just as there are things that money can’t buy, there are things that cuts can’t take away if you don’t let them. You can cancel a philosophy class, but you can’t defund critique--not against informed resistance. In the future it might become the case that you have to organize more of your own education; if classes you want to take no longer exist, you may need to connect with other people who want to learn it and teach it, and with their help take initiative to make it happen. While UC is pushing toward online classes for pay, we could make our own courses and post them online for free. Professors could allow in their classrooms UC students who are no longer enrolled because they couldn’t afford to pay or because they couldn’t make it academically because they were working so many hours. Students could donate their used textbooks to an exchange where you could leave an expensive textbook that you no longer needed and pick one up for free that you did need, instead of selling books back to the bookstore.

The fact is that UCI students already do a lot of things like this. There are already entirely student-run concerts and student-run lecture series and panels and radio stations and poetry societies and magazines to which the official culture of the university pays no attention, but this unofficial culture is thriving nonetheless. There is hardship involved in this--that is, doing these kinds of things is a lot of work and time, and it’s never for pay. But they make this time and place something that the plans of administrators are incapable of recognizing. What I’m describing now is not so much protesting reality as modifying it while continuing to protest it. The possibility of doing more of that, on the horizon now maybe by necessity, is the hidden potential of our lamentable situation: the possibility that students might transform the university at the moment when it’s being abandoned by its managers.

Which Way, LATimes?

2011-11-11T23:14:00.001-08:00

An entertaining review of James O'Shea's The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by Laurie Winer. From here.

"Zell addressed the staff of the Orlando Sentinel, one of the Tribune newspapers, on January 31, 2008, which was the first time most of the journalists in the Tribune family got to see the man himself. As part of a whistle-stop tour of his new properties, Zell took visible delight in showing off his iconoclastic style to a new industry that, before now, had not had the pleasure. He was primed and ready for his close-up. He took the stage and stood at a lectern, a leprechaun-sized, wizened, bald man with a white goatee and gravelly voice.

According to Zell, 'the eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not take oneself seriously.' His public posture was combative but laced with impish mischief; the gleam in his eye suggested he enjoyed being challenged. This may have misled Orlando Sentinel photographer Sara Fajardo, or perhaps she had seen the new employee handbook rewritten on orders of Zell. One of its entries read: 'Question authority and push back if you do not like the answer. You will earn respect, and not get into trouble for asking tough questions.'

In any event, there Zell is in Orlando, telling his staff about the necessity of making money, how that would be our top priority going forward. Fajardo did what none of us attempted with Mark Willes; she stood up and asked her new boss about his view on 'the role journalism plays in the community, because we’re not the Pennysaver, we’re a newspaper.' Zell placed both hands on the podium and bent his elbows, as if he wanted to push it forward. 'I want to make enough money so that I can afford you,' he said, his irritation mounting. 'It’s really that simple. You need to in effect help me by being a journalist that focuses on what our readers want and that therefore generates more revenue.' Fajardo immediately broke in, 'But what readers want are puppy dogs,' she said, as the courage drains from her voice. 'We also need to inform the community.' Zell cut her off, his right hand gesticulating forcefully. 'I’m sorry but you’re giving me the classic, what I would call, journalistic arrogance, by deciding that puppies don’t count. … What I’m interested in is how can we generate additional interest in our products and additional revenue so we can make our product better and better and hopefully we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq. Okay?'

The audience, some of whom applauded, might have been momentarily perplexed by Zell’s concept: That, like a kid who must endure being grounded before he can go to parties again, a newspaper would have to sell its very soul so that, at some undetermined point in the future, it might be allowed to go back to being a newspaper again. If anyone was busy contemplating the conundrum of Zell’s argument, he might have missed the day’s dramatic high point, which occurred when Fajardo turned around to sit back down. Zell had two more words for her. They were: 'Fuck you.'

Fortunately, it lives on YouTube."

it can't be november already!

2011-11-11T22:59:00.001-08:00

Diaristic.

It's so odd to look at this blog and to realize how much I have moved on. Even the last entry, still dripping with anxiety, seems far more distant than it actually is. This week I froze, literally from the cold, and also I slept a lot, too much in fact. Am I trying to slow down time? This has been by m.o. in times of stress, but it never works nor is it a satisfactory course of action. And yet there is a part of me that values this non-linear conception of life. It has no 'use' value, which is precisely I fall into it instinctively. Or I might just be lazy. But honestly, it's amazing how rapidly things are moving along, based upon my standards, that I need to stop and think about things and write about them which is why I'm still keeping the blog.

choking back

2011-10-14T19:44:00.000-07:00

Diaristic.

Only half-hidden.

There's a hidden story behind this blog. It's not possible to share at the moment. But slowly, it has seeped out to friends and acquaintances. It is a time for asserting the self. And yet curiously that self is the person of the immediate past. What happened to much older past, the period in which the only significant memory I prize is my much slimmer waistline? Sure what is going on now is very much connected, but a whole lot is missing. Is this what it means to tell one's story? Is this what it means to be "well"? Huge chunks of experiences that are not integral to the said story disappear. We are many stories and some of them are invisible even to ourselves.

Yesterday, I gave a terrible presentation in a grad seminar. I've never been good at giving one because of my lack of preparation, and, more importantly, my lack of self-confidence. I would pause and suddenly get a panic attack repeating what I just said or suddenly jumping to the conclusion in order to justify my argument and presence. It would appear that my nervousness comes out from my disbelief at my presence before an audience. I, who has nurtured an outsider status for two decades, the one who could speak but had no public avenues to express himself, suddenly finds himself at an official site of enunciation. It's hard to get used to this--to have a voice and opinions and ideas and a stake in something material. Part of the sentimentality of this blog was that it was my only space to express my frustration and perceived exceptionality as a result of my marginalization. In other words, I was worth listening to because I was looking at things, social and academic, from alien eyes. It is an egotism that I failed to accept because that would have meant I was a somebody when social conditions indicated otherwise. Going back to my presentation or any of the recent class discussions, there is this weird accent that materializes. It's not a Filipino accent por syur. The mind almost doesn't recognize how the tongue creates these sounds, which may account for my pauses wondering what is going on. Who, at this point, is in possession of me? This accent acts as a marker of non-assimiliation. What is somewhat amusing is the recurrence of the word "like" in my speech even in the grad seminar format. They look at me as if I have an improper tattoo. But what they fail to realize is that this is a reflection of the casualness of speech in the Southern California setting. Dude, I'm speaking in sunshine! Usually, after a disastrous assertion of the self, I fall into further doubts. However, I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't apologize for the way I think and express myself. Sure, I need to work on some things, but I shouldn't question the content and approach to yesterday's presentation. Because I was realizing while speaking that this is not what most of them expected in terms of the approach to the materials. I can't offer nice conclusions. I find those a bore. What if the connection being made with the ideas in a text do not add up but cleaves the text. And I feel that if this is the case the presentation itself should possess that form of irreconcilability. Besides, the object of presentation is to open the material for discussion. By giving definitive ideas and formulations, I think that this somewhat alters what can be discussed. One begins to react to the interpretation rather than going back to the text itself. (Is that convincing? Probably not, like whatever.) In addition, I have become a great believer in close reading (or that's what I call it). Just look at the passage itself (after selecting it as somewhat representative or relevant or most unusual) and see what is going on there. (I learned to do this at Irvine.) Of course, all this is an act of justification on my part--to ease the pain of the disaster. And why this disorganization and lack of voice? Am I less qualified than my cohorts. Um, yes! There's a level of confidence, erudition, and nuance when they speak that I lack and envy and desire so much. But where have I been the past few years? This I don't seem to have considered. This chaotic mind is a result of close to two decades of insecurity. Accumulation of knowledge and ideas has been in the margins with feelings of inferiority mixed in. The way I think and look at texts has been shaped largely outside of the academy with my face pressed on the cold glass looking in and trying to hear what's going on inside. And by some strange twists of fate (and recommendation letters), here I am in the academy. I am without doubt the unlikeliest person to be here. So this tortured speech and roundabout logic and inferiority complex galore is part of that--part of the process of knowledge accumulation in makeshift circumstances. It would be difficult to pull them apart at the moment. Perhaps in a few years, after I get used to what it means to be a legal person with an official place in a institution, I can speak in paragraphs like my classmates. Perhaps this mouth, the actual physical speaking organ, can adjust or not since I really do like my "like"s for they make me relatable to a wider circle of people, I feel. So in conclusion (ha!), I can't really apologize for my muddled presentation because that would deny the actual circumstances of my life. And now that I see this and realize this, it is then time to speak up more and do so more clearly. I need to have confidence of a different kind. I need to be muddled and confusing on another level, a much higher level.

If I claim to have a secret, I gave it away, obviously. One never knows what happens when one writes.

It Speaks

2011-09-22T21:56:00.000-07:00

It seems appropriate to reactivate this blog with this passage when blogger is situated anew and yet not entirely free from the conditions of the past. I don't know if it's hope that I'm feeling, but certainly there's a bit of defiance in his consciousness because of a new-found security, however temporary.

"How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one's own language? Kafka answers: steal the baby from its crib, walk the tightrope."

From "What is Minor Literature?" in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.

address change

2011-08-16T18:55:00.000-07:00

There is no exact address yet, however, this blogger will be addressing dear readers from a different place, far from Los Angeles. This blog will no longer be the same.

Freeways and Sidestreets of Los Angeles

2011-07-12T15:14:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Norman M. Klein's essay in the Helter Seklter: L.A. Art in the 1990s (MOCA, 1992) catalogue. Bit dated, but still works.

"THE INVISIBLE CITY: FREEWAYS

The freeway network in L.A. was essentially finished by the mid-sixties, and ran at high efficiency for about ten years. Architecturally speaking, it completed a process whereby the point where one entered public spaces was narrowed considerably, and the private spaces one has within the auto were enhanced. This process also fits into a broader, longstanding tradition which began in the twenties. After years of adding parks and public plazas, there came a trend toward much more privatization of landscape and public areas: instead of new parks, there were more backyards, and more boulevards shopping districts along the Miracle Mile or on Sunset Boulevard; it was the invasion of the private fantasy into a public consumer phantasmagoria set inside the shopping mall, or the theme park, not to mention being explicitly rendered in the fantasy architecture so notorious of L.A.

Other factors also contributed to this growing denial of public space on behalf of private consumer fantasy. They all related eventually to the freeway, but come historically from other sources. Well into the twenties, an extraordinary isolation existed between the three original urban circuits of the city--downtown, the West Side, and the San Fernando Valley. Each had developed very separately from the other for generations, and this left clear boundaries, despite the myth of L.A.'s sprawl and endless uniformity. If anything, white flight and real estate booms have made these distinctions even stronger, reinforced by the expanded orbit downtowns in each area. If you live on the West Side, you may never travel east of La Brea Avenue, except occasionally to go to MOCA, LACE, or the symphony. The habit is well fixed, like a freeway interchange. One literally passes through to arrive, but rarely stops.

The tourist planning of hotels and theme parks also shows this sense of removal, and quest for homogeneity. For convenience and 'safety,' they are built directly off freeways, away from mixed population centers. Even the Bonaventure Hotel, made famous as critical theory by Frederic Jameson, was built specifically in a depopulated zone where nearby residents were almost impossible to find. The entrance, in fact, was so inaccessible to anyone other than guests, that an extra entrance had to be added on the eastern side in the late eighties, simply to allow the business inside to find some street traffic (though there is virtually none except for business lunches). That is consumer-built isolation indeed. Self-alienation might be more like it.

City agencies still permit the destruction of key sites, as they have for generations. On behalf of the continuing strategy to locate historical memories where whites live, historic buildings in the 'forgotten' (non-white) side of town are still being quietly dismantled, like the site of the original Mack Sennett Studios along Glendale Boulevard in Echo Park (where Charlie Chaplin and Gloria Swanson got their start and the Keystone comedies were filmed in the teens and twenties), destroyed in 1990, observed but never noticed by the 40,000 cars that passed by its erasure.

What then is the final effect of this architectural evasion, this introversion of public spaces evident by the late sixties? In the novel Invisible Cities (1972), Italo Calvino finds Los Angeles unapproachable by freeway, as so many visiting writers do. He cites L.A. in his discussion of the endless catalogue of forms that cities may take, saying 'When the forms of cities exhaust their variety, and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, cities in the shape of Los Angeles...without shape.' Calvino is suggesting a city incapable of holding a memory or a shape, rather like a bad batter unable to hold a charge, a city after the death of cities.

While this critique, very frequently made, has the charm of a ghost tale, it still tends to obscure vital historical evidence, much as the earlier noir literature often exoticized the chaos. L.A. has never been simply a sprawl. As mad as some of the results may look, more than fifty years of planning went into the freeway basin we see today. L.A. is not without boundary; its boundaries are clearly defined by its transportation outreach and segregated real-estate planning. L.A. is not suddenly looking like a 'real city.' There was always massive poverty here, a large pool of cheap labor, usually shut off from the tourist route, and made invisible, until occasional bursts of violence suddenly made the public notice, like a summer fire--similar to the Locust fire, but more remote. In L.A., one can easily live a lifetime as a tourist, see mostly what the smoke sends by way of promotion, never visit what is left out, except by way of crime movies. That is why L.A. begins to resemble a netherworld." (28 - 29)

Sidestreets

4th of July in East L.A. from Court of Appeal on Vimeo.

a film-essay: Revolution-Restoration 1814 -

2011-06-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

Read the introduction to work here.

Revolution-Restoration, 1814-- from Court of Appeal on Vimeo.

Riding With Alice Walker

2011-06-18T03:56:00.000-07:00

"I’m thoughtful. Because we’re told it could be a quite dangerous journey. And so I am steeping myself in the wisdom and the images and words of people who in my culture have sustained us through dangerous journeys. Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Ella Baker, Fanny Lou Hamer, Black Elk, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Bob Marley. It’s good for me to feel that I am surrounded at all times by the presence of all these people who have understood American empire and who have stood against it."

"And that is why I am steeping myself in the words of the people before me who have been in the same position and who have decided: 'Well I love this world. I love it. I love these little children. They don’t deserve this. They don’t deserve to be abused; they don’t deserve to be frightened. I’m an adult. I’m an elder. So, how can I let this happen to them without some kind of resistance?'”

"On the upside, I loved being with what I considered my tribe. Anywhere in the world your tribe is, well for me, it’s poets and writers and musicians and dancers and people who, you know, want to enjoy this planet. The planet is about enjoying it. It’s not about bombing it and beating it and forcing it to do what you want."

"That wall is such an insult to the soul of humanity. It’s so enormous. It’s so threatening. And they are building it right in the faces of people and stealing their land in the process; so not only are they walling in the people but they are taking their land and then shooting at them when they try to work their land so they can have something to eat.

This is such a crime against the soul of humanity. We can’t stand this. Who are we as human beings if we can even bear this? We cannot bear it. And we must not. So that was one of the amazing impressions, just the enormity of the wall, how much of it there is.

And then the other thing was the settlements. The settlements are huge. They are unlike anything I had expected. And they are everywhere, everywhere! And so I realized that this whole long drama, the charade called the peace process, was simply a diversion, a shadow play, so that people wouldn’t realize that there was never going to be any peace.

It was always about taking the land. Religion had nothing to do with it; or it was used as an excuse. On some level I knew that, but seeing it made it really clear to me that 'Aha! This is what this has been about from the very beginning.'”

"The election that’s coming up, I think is obscene if it requires a billion dollars just on the Democratic side, to re-elect the president. If I were President Obama I would speak to the nation and say: You know what? I don’t have time to raise money for re-election. If you want me back, it’s up to you to bring me back. I’m too busy working on America’s many problems. Housing, wars, economic disasters, climate change, tornadoes, etc. That’s what I would do. I wouldn’t spend one day or one cent trying to re-elect myself. This stance would force Americans to take responsibility for ourselves and I think we’re capable of doing that." From here.

Weekly Ten Links

2011-06-18T03:44:00.000-07:00

After a hiatus, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah are back. New album out on September 12. Preview a song called "Same Mistake" here.
Terrence Malick is reportedly fiddling around with a six hour cut of The Tree of Life.
With recent mass protests in Greece, riot dog Loukanikos is back.
New English translation of Lem's Solaris is on its way, though not in paper format.
Hacker LulzSec has a manifesto.
Rachel Maddow is pissed at Democrats for giving up on Anthony Weiner.
LACMA has hired a media celebrity to head its film program. Seriously, LACMA? Better folks are out there.
Club Silencio, from the movie Mulholland Drive, is set to open in Paris. Wrong city, dude.
Q & A with Werner Herzog at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Fassbinder's Despair is getting an official US DVD release.

"Letter from Tom Lutz, Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside"

2011-06-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

"Dear colleagues and students,

After a year and a half as Chair of the department, I am stepping down. Professor Andrew Winer will be taking my place, for which we should all be grateful.

As my last act as Chair, I would like to share with you my sense of the gravity of the situation we face. I spent most of my academic career doing what most of us do—teaching, writing, reading graduate applications and theses, having office hours, reading in my field, doing research. I didn’t pay much attention to the University and its administration. None of us have that luxury anymore. Budget cuts after budget cuts after budget cuts have left us all painfully aware of how the sausage is made, or not made.

Having served in administrative posts for most of the last five years, I have come to know the budget issues very well. We are now past the tipping point. We are on a rapid downhill slide that will have profound effects for our state, our families, our country, and our world.

In the space of less than a single lifetime, the University of California, Riverside went from being a small agricultural experiment station to being one of the top 100 universities in the world. An incredibly dense and elaborate web of specialists across all fields of scholarship, science, and the arts was developed, and it took enormous efforts by thousands of people over those years to make it happen. In less than the four years it used to take to graduate, it is being destroyed.

Our department is a great example of the breadth of vision and dogged effort that has made Riverside the exceptional place it has been. There are other creative writing programs in the country, but not a single one anywhere with the range across genres and fields, with the breadth of knowledge in world literatures, with the diversity of voices, methods, and styles that we have. And there is not another creative writing program anywhere—and certainly none with our caliber of professors—that is more truly dedicated to its pedagogical mission at every level. The faculty at Princeton is perhaps a bit more famous, but undergraduates there never meet them, much less have access to them in, before, and after class. I have now taught at every kind of school—fancy elite universities, small colleges, Big 10 universities, art schools, and universities abroad. I have never been part of a faculty this student-centered, this concerned about the educational experience and future prospects of its undergraduate and graduate students.

Three years ago I was offered a job at USC, which is much closer to my house, more prestigious as an academic address, and was offering me more money. UCR worked hard and did the best it could to match the salary and I stayed. I stayed because I wanted to be part of this project, I wanted to teach a student body that is over 85% first-generation college students, that comes not from the richest families in California but some of the poorest, a group of students that have a much greater likelihood than not of coming from immigrant families and from families that speak more than English. I wanted to remain part of one of the greatest democratic experiments in history, and certainly one of the few greatest experiments in public education in the history of the human race, the University of California.

If I got that offer today, though, I’m not sure I could turn it down, and in fact, many people are not turning down outside offers these days. There are people who have taught here for more than twenty years considering going somewhere else, somewhere the future is a bit more certain. These are people who are the best in their field—you don’t get such offers unless someone thinks you are among the best in your field—and UCR, and the educational experience at UCR, is diminished each time this happens, each time one of the best of our best leaves for a better job. We can’t blame them—they have kids of their own to put through college, they have research projects that require funding, they know that to teach the most complex subjects effectively, they need to run seminars with 15 students sitting around the table, not 150.

The budget cuts of recent years and the ones we know for certain are coming next year mean a gross deterioration of our school. Those faculty who leave for better jobs are not being replaced. Many of you know Yvonne Howard, who has been the chief administrator for our department since it was founded. This year her job was unceremoniously terminated. Staff people and faculty who retire are not being replaced. Next year students at UCR will have trouble getting the classes they need, and many of the classes they get will be crowded beyond responsible limits. Departments are being forced to abandon optimal class-size limits for classes two, three, and five times that size. The library has virtually stopped buying books. We are on a race to become a mediocre university at best, and if the $500 million of proposed cuts to UC turn into a billion dollars, as they are now discussing in Sacramento, we will be over. The billion dollar cut translates into thousands of classes across the system. It means creative writing workshops with 50 students. It means we will cease to be a real university, and will simply become another community-college-level institution. Then, maybe, after a few years, with tuition at $25,000 or $30,000 a year, we can begin the slow build back into a real university.

Why is this happening? Political demagoguery and corruption. Thirty years ago UC received 9% of the state budget and prisons 3%. Now UC gets 3% and the prison-industrial complex gets 9%. The legislature is taking the money that should be used to educate the best of its citizens and using it enrich the people who make a profit from the imprisoning the poorest. The percentage of the cost of higher education provided by the state has been cut in half, cut in half again, and is on the verge of getting cut in half a third time. The people in the legislature understand the value of public higher education—the vast majority of them have degrees from our state system, and many of them have multiple degrees—all made possible by the legislators who preceded them and had more courage. They do not protect the University for a very simple reason: because they risk a flow of conservative attacks and Tea Party racism if they stick up for anything that is directly devoted to the commonweal.

In my darkest moments, I think the monied interests working against reasonable taxation are doing so because they consciously, actively seek to make sure we do not have an informed, educated citizenry, the better to extract our collective labor and wealth unimpeded. But such intentionality isn’t necessary. Simple, short-sighted, grab-it-now, bottom-line greed explains their destruction of our culture, without recourse to any dystopian conspiracies.

The only thing that has a chance of turning this devastation around is student activism. We in higher education cannot spend millions of dollars on campaign contributions the way the prison profiteers or the medical and insurance and aerospace industries do, so we need to find other ways to provide a political counterweight. We need to make our voices heard. For you students, your own self-interest should be the catalyst, as you will, no matter what happens this year, have trouble finding the classes you need, much less than the ones you want, and the chance you will graduate in a reasonable amount of time is already gone. But you should also think of what this means for your families, your neighbors, your friends, your own kids when they come of age. And think what it means if California reduces its higher education budget to the levels of Missouri or West Virginia—we will become like those places. Because of its education system, a system that, until just a few years ago, has always been considered the best in the country, California has been among the most innovative and significant literary and cultural centers in the country, and because of this education system, too, California has been the economic powerhouse it has been—1000 research and development companies a year are formed out of the UC system, for instance, and four UC inventions a week are presented to the patent office.

We had the best educational system because we were willing to pay for it, and our expenditures were among the highest in the nation, too. In a few short years we have dropped into the middle in state spending, and we are fast falling even farther. Only a political movement strong enough to buck the corporate money determining our tax policy can change this downward spiral. Only you can make that happen.

We have been told, from the top, not to expect a return to ‘the glory days.’ This year was not the glory days. This year we already have discussion sections that are not discussions, fewer classes, an exploded faculty:student ratio; we are very far from the glory days. Now that either 500 million or 1 billion more dollars are getting yanked out of the system, your favorite lecturer will be gone.

The class you wanted won’t exist anymore. Your student advisor will have 800 or 1000 students to advise instead of the 300 we all agreed was an absolute maximum two short years ago. This is the end of quality. And why? Because a few very wealthy people are protecting their wealth from taxes, taxes considered reasonable not only everywhere else in the developed world, but considered reasonable in America until the last 20 years. I hope you get angry. I hope you get active. Call and write your legislators, get out in the streets, take back your university, don’t let yourselves be the last people to have even this chance.

Tom Lutz
Professor and Chair, Department of Creative Writing"

From here.

convolutes

2011-06-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

This sounds interesting. If I end up staying here in Los Angeles and not too despondent enough perhaps I'll be able to undertake a Los Angeles equivalent to this project. And definitely more biased, with an underdog's point of view of the city.

"For the past five years, I [Kenneth Goldsmith] have been working on a rewriting of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project set in New York City in the twentieth century called Capital. As of this writing, the book is about 500 pages long, approximately half way to the 1000+ pages that constitutes Benjamin’s book. The idea is to use Benjamin’s identical methodology in order to write a poetic history of New York City in the twentieth century, just as Benjamin did with Paris in the nineteenth. Thus, I have taken each of his original chapter headings (convolutes) and, reading through the entire corpus of literature written about NYC in the twentieth century, I have taken notes and selected what I consider to be the most relevant and interesting parts, sorting them into sheaves identical to Benjamin’s."

"This is an exercise that is as much about reading as it is about writing. In fact, it’s a book that proposes reading as writing. While many other authors could have written Benjamin’s book, why is it that his is so successful, so endlessly fascinating? It’s about what he chooses. In lesser hands, such a work would’ve been dreary, dull, tedious, pedantic and loquacious. Instead, we have a book that is arguably one the most readable works ever written, yet very few words were actually written by Benjamin himself; it’s an act of conceptual writing where what one chooses — one’s taste — either makes or breaks the book." From here.

Ain't That The Truth, Angela Davis

2011-05-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

"When you look at the corporate model of diversity, they are seeking people and women of colour who will not rock the boat. Now that is why this model entails a difference that does not make a difference. For example, if one looks at university campuses and their admission policies, often times they will admit middle class students of colour so that the campus looks diverse, but they expect that the middle-class students will have the same attitudes and perspectives as the white students."

"It is the impact of neoliberal ideology that focusses so exclusively on the individual that it becomes impossible to imagine collective subjects and community subjects."

"Let me give you the example of the State of California. I live in California, which has historically had the best educational system in the country. If you are a resident of California, you can basically get a free education to the post-doctoral level. California used to be number one in the country; now I think it is 40-something in terms of the funds from the general budget that are accorded to education. So education is not funded; but what is funded is this vast prison industrial complex. There has been a major crisis in the University of California. All employees, including professors, have been forced to go on furlough. Salaries have been cut, programmes have been dis-established. Especially programmes that were the most recent ones to be created, such as Women and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies, are the first ones to be dismantled. I was thinking that had we had the foresight and the capacity to develop a campaign that linked the situation of education to the situation of prisons – had educators and students protested that the prison system was growing by leaps and bounds – we are talking about the period of the 1980s and the 1990s, the rise of global capital – had we been able to do that, we would have been able to avoid the total collapse of the high educational structures." From here.

oh dear! (2.0)

2011-05-19T04:09:00.000-07:00

Diaristic.

Page 1. "Next moon cycle, I'm outta here!" Well, maybe not. The month of May has been unforgiving and unforgettable. Every week, it would seem, had its own mini-crisis. Each week necessitated a change in plans and schemes like a bandit on the run. There was a small accident which resulted in a series of quasi-meditation at an ER with deplorable services. (The staff, having been accustomed to the sight and howls of pain on a daily basis, made the most of their day with inside jokes and YouTube videos.) There even was a drastic proposal of moving to a strange, new place with little to no prospects of further banditry, and a heart wrenching proposal to leave behind a library. (In anticipation of the move, a few hundred books and videos were given away. Those were grim days.) The scheme, hostage to a decision that wasn't mine, has been extinguished--for now. I almost lost my marbles. (Image by Jack Pierson, Last Chance Lost, 2007.)

Page 2. "Follow your instincts." Yet what if one's capacity to intuit has been shredded by nights of longing and anxiety? After months of careful, excruciating planning, it turns out that the initial plan (the simplest one) is the most viable option. Why then did I doubt my own heart? But it may not have been the heart alone; it was the mind at work, more like. In spite for the mind's tendency for distraction, it was and is the mind that kept on rolling, scheming, and braiding. In this sense, why fall into despair at all times when there is something still at work in this human unit. (The body, alas, has fallen into disrepair. It lays there, drawn to immobility. "Recently, I have given up on bipedality.") Intellectual interests must be pursued in whatever state and place that I may be in. (Image by Glenn Ligon, Rückenfigur, 2009.)

Page 3. This heart has never been practical. These desires have not been mine in part. Sitting by a window on the second or third floor of a building, while cars whiz by below and other people's lives (they look so secure!) pass me by, I was addressed with a series of questions that made me realize my strangeness once again. Is it my situation (a code, for sure) that makes me different? Or is difference something more innate, like this tendency to dream even in the present moment? They're both, of course, welded together like metal vines out of years in the wilderness. It has been this insistence on transcendence (a holdover of Catholic upbringing?) that got me into this--got me into this room where the practical met my dreamy ways. "How old are you?" "And you haven't met anyone yet?" "Do you go out?" "Are you depressed?" "Are you taking pills?" Do people talk this way these days? She wasn't even a spiritual advisor nor a psychologist. So whose desires are we talking about, mine or society's? The last few months, most especially the month of May, has laid bare my blind ways. Dreaming is never enough if one wishes to survive. But is survival the point of it all??? (Image by Shomei Tomatsu.)

El Lay Art

2011-05-17T02:52:00.000-07:00

Video from here.

"In the late 1960s, four young Chicano artists in East Los Angeles began collaborating in various combinations, eventually forming an art collective and taking the name Asco — as in ‘me da asco’ or ‘it (your art) disgusts me’. One evening in 1972, three of its members — Harry Gamboa Jr, Gronk (aka Guglio Nicandro) and Willie Herrón III — signed their names to the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), claiming the public institution as their own private creation and thus making the world’s largest work of Chicano art in the affluent and white mid-Wilshire area of the city. Spray Paint LACMA (1972), sometimes later referred to as Project Pie in De/Face, was conceived in response to a LACMA curator’s dismissive statement that Chicanos made graffiti not art, hence their absence from the gallery walls. In other words, ‘Chicano art’ was a categorical impossibility."

"The members of Asco first came together formally through the invitation of Gamboa, who asked them to work with him on the second volume of Regeneración, a political and literary journal published by veteran activist Francisca Flores and modelled on the radical journal of the same name published in the early 1900s by Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón. Flores recruited Gamboa amidst the Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War on 29 August 1970, when a police riot left several people dead, including Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar. As art historian Mario Ontiveros notes, ‘Regeneración provided the group an opportunity to examine publicly and critically “certain dogmatisms” at work in the political and art movement, as well as the dominant culture’. In this regard, the future Asco members helped shift the editorial direction toward what Ontiveros calls ‘an intra-movement, self-reflexive analysis’ while they learned to work together in this critical mode through image and text aimed at multiple audiences. The four artists quickly developed a unique visual style and conceptual approach that contrasted, and even ridiculed, the Mexican-inspired political iconography of the Chicano civil-rights movement (1965—75), while at the same time they were deeply engaged in that movement.

From 1971 to 1975, Asco’s guerilla-style street performances, often involving Humberto Sandoval as an erstwhile fifth member, intervened in a situation overdetermined by police violence, political surveillance, military recruitment and biased news media that structured and regulated social space in the Chicano community. At the same time they challenged the Chicano movement’s nationalist political rhetoric, arguing that it promoted an orthodoxy and corresponding identity that failed to take into account the profound contradictions that actually shaped the lived experience of Chicanos — a group marked by cultural but not structural assimilation and, as a consequence, a group that was quite ‘American’ and yet excluded from or discriminated against by social institutions. Asco staged performances that both commented on and contributed to the mural movement (Walking Mural, 1972; Instant Mural, 1974; Asshole Mural, 1975) and the reclamation of Mexican-based cultural traditions (Día de los Muertos, 1974). During this time, Gronk and Herrón also painted murals that marked innovations in the use of expressive styles and conceptual frameworks, including their Black and White Mural (1973), which depicts the death of Ruben Salazar in relationship to Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945) made during the Nazi occupation, as well as to Gronk’s performance persona Pontius Pilate (aka Popcorn), modelled in part after the film’s central character, a mime. What one notices most about this body of work (including subsequent staged performances and conceptual video) is the unrelenting expression of violence outside melodramatic and moral discourses — as a cultural logic, an administrative tactic, a familial ritual and a fact of everyday life." From here.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is staging an Asco retrospective later this year as part of the city-wide celebration of Los Angeles-based art called Pacific Standard Time. Here is the link for more information on the LACMA show. PST festival information here.

foreigner, stranger, & alien: an interview with etienne balibar

2011-04-27T22:27:00.000-07:00

Translation of entire interview here (using Google translate).

"La langue française se singularise en ne disposant, pour désigner l'« étranger », que d'un nom, là où l'allemand et l'anglais en ont au moins deux. Ce qui rend certaines distinctions plus difficiles. Par exemple entre celui que l'anglais appelle « foreigner » (qui a une autre nationalité) et le « stranger » (qui est « autre »). On pourrait ajouter « alien » (le radicalement autre, monstrueux souvent), terme qui revêt une certaine importance dans la conjoncture actuelle, où l'étranger est souvent présenté comme un ennemi. Quand Bauman dit que toute société fabrique ses propres étrangers, il pense au « stranger », c'est-à-dire celui qui n'est pas immédiatement perçu comme membre de la communauté. Cela pose d'emblée toutes les questions difficiles : qu'est-ce qu'une communauté ? De quel point de vue y a-t-il plus de différences avec ceux qui sont à l'extérieur qu'avec ceux qui sont à l'intérieur ? Quelle est la nature de la frontière qui les sépare ?"

"Pour autant que l'humanité s'organise en communautés, la représentation que les hommes se font de leurs similitudes et de leurs différences s'incarne dans une figure d'étrangeté ou d'« étrangèreté ». Elle change sans cesse de contenu mais demeure une constante anthropologique. Pour qu'il y ait un « nous », il faut bien apparemment qu'il y ait des « autres ». L'étranger est une figure ambivalente qui cristallise des affects d'attraction et de répulsion, voire de fascination et de détestation."

"Je ne crois pas à l'utilité de slogans tels que « Abolissons les frontières ! » et « Liberté de circulation totale ! ». La frontière est, comme l'armée ou la police, une institution non démocratique qui accompagne paradoxalement la souveraineté du peuple. Dès lors, la question cruciale est celle de la nature des contrôles et de qui les exerce. En ce qui concerne la régulation des flux migratoires, il revient à l'Etat ou à des communautés d'Etats de fixer les modalités de franchissement des frontières, mais il faudrait que les intéressés, de part et d'autre de la ligne de démarcation, aient voix au chapitre. Or les autorités de pays comme la France qui ne pourraient pas vivre sans main-d’œuvre immigrée refusent absolument de discuter avec les Etats africains ou les associations de migrants des modalités d'obtention des visas ou des politiques d'immigration. Il serait pourtant souhaitable d'organiser avec eux un statut du migrant dans le monde de demain. D'autant qu'en fait, les économistes le savent, l'avantage est réciproque, même si l'ajustement des besoins n'est pas automatique. Cela suppose que tous les Etats du monde et leurs opinions publiques prennent conscience de l'intérêt qu'il y aurait à cette coopération, plutôt que d'aller dans le mur des situations d'exception. Voilà ce que j'appelle démocratisation : d'abord la fin de l'unilatéralisme." From here.

creative juice

2011-04-26T17:17:00.000-07:00

From here.

stream latest fleet foxes

2011-04-25T14:28:00.000-07:00

Here's the link. (Album comes out 5/3.)

adorno lol

2011-04-21T15:02:00.000-07:00

"4
Final serenity. - A newspaper obituary for a businessman once contained the words: 'The breadth of his conscience vied with the kindness of his heart.' The blunder committed by the bereaved in the elevated language reserved for such purposes, the inadvertent admission that the kind-hearted deceased had lacked a conscience expedites the funeral procession by the shortest route to the land of truth. If a man of advanced years is praised for his exceptional serenity, his life can be assumed to comprise a succession of infamies He has rid himself of the habit of getting excited. Breadth of conscience is passed off as magnanimity, all-forgiving because all-too-understanding. The quid pro quo between one's onw guilt and that of others, is resolved in favour of whoever has come off best. After so long a life one quite loses the capacity to distinguish who has done what harm to whom. In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes. The blackguard presents himself as a victim of injustice: if only you knew, young man, what life is like. But those conspicuous midway through life by an exceptional kindness are usually drawing advances on such serenity. He who is not malign does not live serenely but with a peculiarly chaste hardness and intolerance. Lacking appropriate objects, his love can scarcely express itself except by hatred for the inappropriate, in which admittedly he comes to resemble what he hates. The bourgeois, however, is tolerant. His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be." (24-25)

From Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia.

Eagleton on Marx

2011-04-18T01:47:00.000-07:00

"There is a sense in which the whole of Marx's writing boils down to several embarrassing questions: Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality? What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does private wealth seem to go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it, as the good-hearted liberal reformist suggests, that we have simply not got around to mopping up these pockets of human misery, but shall do so in the fullness of time? Or is it more plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates deprivation and inequality, as surely as Charlie Sheen generates gossip?

Marx was the first thinker to talk in those terms. This down-at-heel émigré Jew, a man who once remarked that nobody else had written so much about money and had so little, bequeathed us the language in which the system under which we live could be grasped as a whole. Its contradictions were analyzed, its inner dynamics laid bare, its historical origins examined, and its potential demise foreshadowed. This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children's faces. On the contrary, he was extravagant in his praise for the class that created it, a fact that both his critics and his disciples have conveniently suppressed. No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal.

That, however, was only part of the story. There are those who see modern history as an enthralling tale of progress, and those who view it as one long nightmare. Marx, with his usual perversity, thought it was both. Every advance in civilization had brought with it new possibilities of barbarism. The great slogans of the middle-class revolution—'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity'—were his watchwords, too. He simply inquired why those ideas could never be put into practice without violence, poverty, and exploitation. Capitalism had developed human powers and capacities beyond all previous measure. Yet it had not used those capacities to set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, it had forced them to labor harder than ever. The richest civilizations on earth sweated every bit as hard as their Neolithic ancestors.

This, Marx considered, was not because of natural scarcity. It was because of the peculiarly contradictory way in which the capitalist system generated its fabulous wealth. Equality for some meant inequality for others, and freedom for some brought oppression and unhappiness for many. The system's voracious pursuit of power and profit had turned foreign nations into enslaved colonies, and human beings into the playthings of economic forces beyond their control. It had blighted the planet with pollution and mass starvation, and scarred it with atrocious wars. Some critics of Marx point with proper outrage to the mass murders in Communist Russia and China. They do not usually recall with equal indignation the genocidal crimes of capitalism: the late-19th-century famines in Asia and Africa in which untold millions perished; the carnage of the First World War, in which imperialist nations massacred one another's working men in the struggle for global resources; and the horrors of fascism, a regime to which capitalism tends to resort when its back is to the wall. Without the self-sacrifice of the Soviet Union, among other nations, the Nazi regime might still be in place."

"Marx was a profoundly moral thinker. He speaks in The Communist Manifesto of a world in which 'the free self-development of each would be the condition of the free self-development of all.' This is an ideal to guide us, not a condition we could ever entirely achieve. But its language is nonetheless significant. As a good Romantic humanist, Marx believed in the uniqueness of the individual. The idea permeates his writings from end to end. He had a passion for the sensuously specific and a marked aversion to abstract ideas, however occasionally necessary he thought they might be. His so-called materialism is at root about the human body. Again and again, he speaks of the just society as one in which men and women will be able to realize their distinctive powers and capacities in their own distinctive ways. His moral goal is pleasurable self-fulfillment. In this he is at one with his great mentor Aristotle, who understood that morality is about how to flourish most richly and enjoyably, not in the first place (as the modern age disastrously imagines) about laws, duties, obligations, and responsibilities." From here.

Publisher's book info:
"In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism—that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on—he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are. In a world in which capitalism has been shaken to its roots by some major crises, Why Marx Was Right is as urgent and timely as it is brave and candid. Written with Eagleton's familiar wit, humor, and clarity, it will attract an audience far beyond the confines of academia."From here.

guerilla knitters of tokyo

2011-04-18T01:28:00.000-07:00

"Guerilla knitting in Japan is a spin off from knit graffiti which first unraveled in the United States in 2005. The united knitters of America decorated lamp posts and street signs with woolen wraps and crochets.

The Japanese online social knitwork first came about as 203gow from Gifu prefecture, Takoyama from Niigata prefecture and Miquraffreshia from Tochigi prefecture contacted each other online around four years ago to exchange ideas and information on their hobby.

All three self-taught knitters share an uncanny passion for knitting octopuses and beards, hence their group name 'Que D’accord,' which is a pun on 'ke da ko,' or 'woolen octopus' in Japanese." From here.

Bolano, Exile & Book Thief

2011-04-18T01:18:00.000-07:00

Newly translated Bolano essays out end of May. Yes.

"To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self. Swift, master of exile, knew this. For him exile was the secret word for journey. Many of the exiled, freighted with more suffering than reasons to leave, would reject this statement.

All literature carries exile within it, whether the writer has had to pick up and go at the age of twenty or has never left home.

Probably the first exiles on record were Adam and Eve. This is indisputable and it raises a few questions: can it be that we’re all exiles? Is it possible that all of us are wandering strange lands?
The concept of 'strange lands' (like that of 'home ground') has some holes in it, presents new questions. Are 'strange lands' an objective geographic reality, or a mental construct in constant flux?"

"Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.

At this point I should say that at least where literature is concerned, I don’t believe in exile. Exile is a question of tastes, personalities, likes, dislikes. For some writers exile means leaving the family home; for others, leaving the childhood town or city; for others, more radically, growing up. There are exiles that last a lifetime and others that last a weekend. Bartleby, who prefers not to, is an absolute exile, an alien on planet Earth. Melville, who was always leaving, didn’t experience—or wasn’t adversely affected by—the chilliness of the word exile. Philip K. Dick knew better than anyone how to recognize the disturbances of exile. William Burroughs was the incarnation of every one of those disturbances.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book." From here.

"The books that I remember best are the ones I stole in Mexico City, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, and the ones I bought in Chile when I was twenty, during the first few months of the coup. In Mexico there was an incredible bookstore. It was called the Glass Bookstore and it was on the Alameda. Its walls, even the ceiling, were glass. Glass and iron beams. From the outside, it seemed an impossible place to steal from. And yet prudence was overcome by the temptation to try and after a while I made the attempt."

"After that, after I stole that book and read it, I went from being a prudent reader to being a voracious reader and from being a book thief to being a book hijacker. I wanted to read everything, which in my innocence was the same as wanting to uncover or trying to uncover the hidden workings of chance that had induced Camus’s character to accept his hideous fate. Despite what might have been predicted, my career as a book hijacker was long and fruitful, but one day I was caught. Luckily, it wasn’t at the Glass Bookstore but at the Cellar Bookstore, which is—or was—across from the Alameda, on Avenida Juárez, and which, as its name indicates, was a big cellar where the latest books from Buenos Aires and Barcelona sat piled in gleaming stacks. My arrest was ignominious. It was as if the bookstore samurais had put a price on my head. They threatened to have me thrown out of the country, to give me a beating in the cellar of the Cellar Bookstore, which to me sounded like a discussion among neo-philosophers about the destruction of destruction, and in the end, after lengthy deliberations, they let me go, though not before confiscating all the books I had on me, among them The Fall, none of which I’d stolen there." From here.

"A Primer on Class Struggle" (by Michael Schwalbe)

2011-04-05T20:06:00.000-07:00

Clear, well-written wake-up call to all workers.

"Capitalists want laws that weaken and cheapen labor. This means laws that make it harder for workers to organize unions; laws that make it easier to export production to other countries; laws that make it easier to import workers from other countries; laws and fiscal policies that keep unemployment high, so that workers will feel lucky just to have jobs, even with low pay and poor benefits.

Capitalists want tax codes that allow them to pay as little tax as possible; laws that allow them to externalize the costs of production (e.g., the health damage caused by pollution); laws that allow them to swallow competitors and grow huge and more powerful; and laws that allow them to use their wealth to dominate the political process. Workers, when guided by their economic interests, generally want the opposite."

"There are many other things capitalists want from government. They want public subsidy of the infrastructure on which profitability depends; they want wealth transferred to them via military spending; they want militarily-enforced access to foreign markets, raw materials, and labor; and they want suppression of dissent when it becomes economically disruptive. So we can include popular resistance to corporate welfare, military spending, imperialist wars, and government authoritarianism as further instances of class struggle.

Class struggle goes on in other realms. In goes on in K-12 education, for example, when business tries to influence what students are taught about everything from nutrition to the virtues of free enterprise; when U.S. labor history is excluded from the required curriculum; and when teachers’ unions are blamed for problems of student achievement that are in fact consequences of the maldistribution of income and wealth in U.S. society.

It goes on in higher education when corporations lavish funds on commercially viable research; when capitalist-backed pundits attack professors for teaching students to think critically about capitalism; and when they give money in exchange for putting their names on buildings and schools. Class struggle also goes on in higher education when pro-capitalist business schools are exempted from criticism for being ideological and free-market economists are lauded as objective scientists."

"Class struggle goes on in the cultural realm when books, films, and songs vaunt the myth that economic inequality is a result of natural differences in talent and motivation. It goes on when books, films, and songs celebrate militarism and violence. It also goes on when writers, filmmakers, songwriters, and other artists challenge these myths and celebrations.

It goes on, too, in the realm of religion. When economic exploitation is justified as divinely ordained, when the oppressed are appeased by promises of justice in an afterlife, and when human capacities for rational thought are stunted by superstition, capitalism is reinforced. Class struggle is also evident when religious teachings are used, antithetically to capitalism, to affirm values of equality, compassion, and cooperation." From here.

J. Hoberman Interview

2011-04-05T19:54:00.000-07:00

On Hoberman's latest book, An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (New Press, 2011).

From publisher's website:
"The years between 1946 and 1956 brought U.S. dominance over Europe and a new war in Asia, as well as the birth of the civil rights movement and the stirrings of a new youth culture. The period saw the movie industry purged of its political left while the rise of ideological action hero John Wayne came to dominate theaters. Analyzing movies and media events, Hoberman has organized a pageant of cavalry Westerns, apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars wherein Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe.

Essential reading for film and history buffs, An Army of Phantoms is a history of film that is also, to paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard, about the film of history."

More GRITtv

Japan: Catastrophe & Capital

2011-04-05T19:51:00.000-07:00

From a recent article by Karatani Kojin.

"Once more, the disaster evoked the burnt-out ruins after the war. In addition, the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant cannot help but call forth memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Postwar Japanese have had a strong aversion to nuclear weapons and to nuclear power in general. Needless to say, there was strong opposition to the building of nuclear power plants in Japan. Nonetheless, following the oil shocks of the 1970s, the state affirmed and encouraged the development of nuclear power plants. Early campaigns proclaimed the necessity of nuclear power for economic growth, while in recent years it was claimed that nuclear power could help reduce carbon emissions and therefore benefit the environment. That such claims were a form of criminal deception on the part of industry and government has been made all too clear by recent events."

"In truth, it is not the Japanese economy alone that is failing. In the early 1970s, global capitalism entered a period of serious recession, and since then it has been unable to overcome the decline in the general rate of profit. Capital has sought a way out of this decline through global financial investment and by extending industrial investment into what had formerly been 'third world' regions. The collapse of the former strategy has been exposed by the so-called Lehman shock. Meanwhile, the accelerated development of countries such as China, India, and Brazil, continues. Yet such accelerated growth cannot last long. It is inevitable that wages will rise and a limit on consumption be reached.

For this reason, global capitalism will no doubt become unsustainable in 20 or 30 years. The end of capitalism, however, is not the end of human life. Even without capitalist economic development or competition, people are able to live. Or rather, it is only then that people will, for the first time, truly be able to live. Of course, the capitalist economy will not simply come to an end. Resisting such an outcome, the great powers will no doubt continue to fight over natural resources and markets." From here.

Fuck Cinephilia

2011-04-02T23:24:00.000-07:00

Fuck Cinema (d. Wu Wenguang) (2005)

"This documentary shows how different young people try to realize their dreams or become famous through the film industry. One of the main characters of this documentary is named Wang, a young man from the countryside, aged at 28. He comes to Beijing out of a love for the cinema; however all he can do every day is line up outside the gate of a film studio in hopes of landing a job as an extra, getting 30RMB for one day! During his stay in Beijing he writes a film script based on his own experience in Beijing as an extra. He thinks his play presents the darkness and desperation of survival in China. Then he wants to find an investor or a director who can produce his play as an 'underground film', because in his opinion many Chinese directors are successful on the international stage by this way. In the process of searching he meets some directors and producers (including some underground film people), some famous some not, and also some businessmen, people from the film censorship authority as well as some students from the cinema institute. In fact in Beijing his life is very hard, no money, no a stable place to sleep. In the summer he has to sleep on the roof of a school dormitory. Finally Wang fails to realize his dream, never will he see his film made..

Another character is also a young man from the countryside. His name is Xiao Wu, 19 years old. His love of cinema is shown in his chosen occupation of selling pirated DVDs, some of which are quite famous foreign films, for example some award winners from the Berlin, Venice, and Cannes Film Festivals. Every day he puts all his DVDs into a bag and goes out on his bike to find his frequent customers, young people or students who are film buffs or involved with filmmaking.

Apart from these two, this documentary also features young girls who dream of becoming movie stars. We learn of their love of film and their ideas about life as they audition for a role.

Throughout this process not only I am the maker of this documentary but also a person who is puzzled about why we make films. Of course I also appear in this documentary, and never hide my bewilderment, or the conflicts between my characters and me. For example, Wang assails me that I use his miserable story for my own reputation." Synopsis from here.

scary sights

2011-03-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

"(Along those lines, it is revealing that the words a parent uses to comfort a child frightened by a nightmare -- 'Don't worry, darling, it's only a dream' -- are almost the same words used to comfort a child frightened by a film -- 'Don't worry, darling, it's only a movie.' Frightening dreams and films have a similar power to overwhelm the defenses that are otherwise effective against equally frightening books, paintings, music. For instance, it is hard to imagine this phrase: 'Don't worry, darling, it's only a painting.')" (58-59)

From Walter Murch's In The Blink of An Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Silman-James, 1995)

Helas pour le cinema

2011-03-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

"So, cinema studies can stake no permanent claims on its disciplinary territories; its borders are in fact continually shifting. Stating the matter in its most specific terms: there is no medium-based ontology that grounds film as an aesthetic medium and serves as an anchor for its claims to exist as a humanistic discipline." (23)

"However, the impermanence and mutability of cinema studies as a field should be seen as one of its great strengths: the self-consciousness of film theory about the uncertain ontological status of the medium and the conflictual nature of the debates that have defined the genealogy of film study mark it still as one of the most intellectually daring areas of intellectual inquiry of the last century. And this, I believe, is one of the persistent attractions of film for intellectuals." (24)

From D.N. Rodowick's The Virtual Life of Film (Harvard UP, 2007).

"To be gay and racist is no anomaly"

2011-03-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

"That gay and lesbian rights discourses can risk slipping into Islamophobic and racist discourses that in many ways propagate or support racist agendas is not really news. Nor is it without historical precedent. Liberal feminism has long been accused of needing the oppression of the native woman in order to achieve its own libratory trajectory. 'How well do you treat your women?' became a key measure of the ability of a colonised or developing country to self-govern. While 'the Woman Question' has hardly disappeared, we can now find its amendment in 'the Homosexual Question', or 'How well do you treat your homosexuals?', as a current paradigm through which nations, populations and cultures are evaluated in terms of their ability to conform to a universalised notion of civilisation. Rescue fantasies and projections about endangered homosexuality 'elsewhere' are aspects of liberal gay rights frames, functioning in order to support the predominance of gay and lesbian proper subjects 'here'.

What is gaining acute force is the anti-Muslim form that such missionary politics are currently taking. From the liberation of burqa-wearing women as a partial rationale for invasion of the Middle East, to gay marriage as a barometer of civilisational aptitude, to Sex and the City's trading in banal, unsophisticated orientalist fantasies, propagating anti-Muslim attitudes is becoming the most expeditious passage to national belonging. This form of national empowerment can also work for (predominantly white, middle-class) gays and lesbians." From here.

Piece above is by Jasbir Puar, who is also the Terrorist Assemblages: Mononationalism in Queer Times (Duke UP, 2007). Description of the book from publisher:

"In this pathbreaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These 'homonationalisms' are deployed to distinguish upright 'properly hetero,' and now 'properly homo,' U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation."

white girl in the library

2011-03-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

She's a UCLA student if you can believe it.

Link to video.

Coverage from UCLA school paper here. Too sympathetic towards the girl in my view.

sendai

2011-03-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

"I mourn for the whole country but for Sendai specifically---Sendai with its unique dialect I found incomprehensible, Sendai with its exceptionally beautiful women, Sendai with its rich history. The Date samurai elite were for a time friendly to Roman Catholic missions, protecting them even when the central power persecuted Christians. In the 1610s Date Masamune sent emissaries to the Vatican to establish ties; they traveled across the Pacific to Mexico and on across the Atlantic. (In 1617 seven of the samurai mission members decided not to return home but settled in a town near Seville where hundreds of people today hold the surname Japon.)" From here.

genre & fears

2011-03-14T15:25:00.000-07:00

Great insight on genres by director Kim Ji-woon (I Saw The Devil).

"LMD: I've heard I Saw the Devil described by different people as a crime film, or a horror movie, or an exploitation film. How would you describe it?

KJ-w: I think I'm in the process of looking for that myself. Interestingly enough, I think people's fear is what is at the center of a lot of genres of film. I could say that the fear of the unseen is what a horror film is. Fear of the future, of what's to be could often be considered a science-fiction film. Fear of violence or desperate actions could be turned into a thriller. Fear of extreme situations might be turned into a noir film. I'm very interested in the genres of films that one can take and I'm always looking for new things to try in those areas. And as far as genres that I might be interested in that I haven't done yet, I'm definitely interested in a sci-fi kind of noir or a sci-fi thriller."

Bradley Manning

2011-03-14T15:18:00.000-07:00

From Manning's 11-page letter. Full text here.

"(6) After being returned to my cell, I started to read a book.
About 30 minutes later, the PCF Commander, CWO4 James Averhart, came to
my cell. He asked me what had happened during my recreation call. As
I tried to explain to him what had occurred, CWO4 Averhart stopped me
and said 'I am the commander' and that 'no one could tell him what to
do.' He also said that he was, for all practical purposes, 'God.' I
responded by saying 'you still have to follow Brig procedures.' I also
said “everyone has a boss that they have to answer to.” As soon as I
said this, CWO4 Averhart ordered that I be placed in Suicide Risk
Status.

(7) Admittedly, once I heard that I would be placed under
Suicide Risk, I became upset. Out of frustration, I placed my hands to
my head and clenched my hair with my fingers. I did yell 'why are you
doing this to me?' I also yelled 'why am I being punished?' and 'I
have done nothing wrong.' I then asked CWO4 Averhart 'what have I
done to deserve this type of treatment?'

(8) CWO4 Averhart did not answer any of my questions. He
instructed the guards to enter my cell and take all my clothing. At
first I tried to reason with CWO4 Averhart by telling him that I had
been a model detainee and by asking him to just tell me what he wanted
me to do and that I would do it. However, I gave up trying to reason
with him once the guards entered my cell and ordered me to strip.
Instead, I lowered my head and starting taking off my clothes.

(9) CWO4 Averhart placed me on Suicide Risk, over the
recommendation of Capt. Hocter and the defense forensic psychiatrist,
Capt. Moore. His decision was also in violation of Secretary of Navy

Instruction ('SECNAVINST') 1649.9C Paragraph 4205.5d. As a result of
being placed on Suicide Risk, I was confined to my cell for 24 hours a
day. I was also stripped of all clothing with the exception of my
underwear. Additionally, my prescription eyeglasses were taken away
from me. Due to not having my glasses, I was forced to sit in
essential blindness during the day. I remained on Suicide Risk until
21 January 2010. The determination to place me on Suicide Risk was
without justification and therefore constitutes unlawful pretrial
punishment." (7 - 8)

Elizabeth Bishop, Painter

2011-03-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

"Throughout her life, she collected art and wrote about it in poems, letters, and stories. Many of her friends were artists. She owned a Calder mobile and bought a collage by Kurt Schwitters for Lota, her Brazilian partner. She made 'boxes' in homage to the sculptor Joseph Cornell, and the title of her painting E. Bishop’s Patented Slot Machine is a reference to his work. The original editions of The Complete Poems, The Collected Prose, and One Art (her collected letters) all have covers taken from her pictures. With characteristic self-effacement, Bishop scarcely acknowledged herself as an artist—and yet her work, mostly watercolor and gouache, reveals a keen and original sensibility."

"Only about forty of Bishop’s paintings have survived. Her influences were diverse. She liked Édouard Vuillard, Jules Bissiers, Oskar Kokoshka. Paul Klee, who worked small, in an ersatz primitive style, was a major influence. She once wrote to James Merrill about flying over the Andes: 'You’ll see how exactly like some of Klee’s paintings they look.' Her picture Brazilian Landscape, a view from the back porch of Samambaia, the house in Petropolis where she and Lota lived from 1951 to 1967, was sent to a friend with the comment, '…it’s big enough so that if you like any section of it you can cut that part out.' This is an example of her famous modesty—but also perhaps a subtle allusion to her use of Klee’s compositional grids, built up out of discrete sections."

"Bishop enjoyed being innovative and invisible at the same time. As a painter, she discovered in the limited range of her skills an intrinsic value. To see it made it so. Meyer Shapiro, the distinguished art critic, said she 'writes poems with a painter’s eye.' From 'The Man-Moth' to 'The Moose,' the deceptive conventionality of Bishop’s poetry is part of what makes it so original, and even subversive. She was the fascinating outsider at the masked ball in a company of congenial, if often over-bred, bores. She opened and admired their jeweled music boxes and, with the real daring of upward mobility, let herself be mistaken for one of them—by herself even. Hence that half-modest, half-elitist lilt when she protests that her paintings are, '…Not Art—NOT AT ALL.'”

From here.

judith butler interview

2011-03-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Slammin' interview.

"The idea of queer has never really easily lined up with lesbian and gay legal rights. Although we’re glad to have legal protections, the question is whether legal protections are the aim of political movement. My sense is that 'queer' had a more critical relationship to those issues, much more fearful of normalization by the state."

"I think, in the US at least, the right-to-marriage movement has focused on property and wanting acceptance as normalized bourgeois people and monogamy, and the idea of couplehood. So we think about the complex ways in which sexual and intimate relationships take place; they don’t always conform to that. And I think there are other forms of kinship that are not based on the family. I’ve made that clear in my work. But I also think there are modes of sexuality that aren’t centred on marriage-like arrangements, and that that’s been part of a radical sexual movement for a really long time, calling into question how we arrange sexuality, and what arrangements are best, and what works and what doesn’t, and what are the norms or ideals around which we organize our sexual lives. It seems really important to keep those questions open."

"So my work shifted, I think, from sexuality and gender to the politics of war, but they’re really linked by the question of whose lives count. And when we think about targeted populations and civilians who lose their lives in America’s wars, I think that queer people should have solidarity with those populations whose lives are not considered liveable. That’s a kind of alliance that I would understand as a queer alliance."

From here.

oh dear!

2011-03-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

The good news did not last long. They never do. And like a dream, poof, whee, it's gone. How can it be? It would have been better to be left out at sea. It was a great thing, but nothing, with bowed head and wilted ribbons, true sticks in this life. Can one be so cursed? Hermit-like, crab-like, if only to escape from the gaze of others. This will crush me.

"From Brera a call to teach in European banks" By Bifo

2011-03-06T11:49:00.000-08:00

"The Italian government, in perfect agreement with the European central Bank is destroying the school, particularly the Brera Academy where I am precariously teaching media sociology.

The following lines are my contribution to the discussion among the teacher of this school.

As I’m expected to start my course in Brera on March 14th, I want to understand if I should prepare my lectures. My answer is: no. I’ll go to the Brera Academy, on March 14th at 11.30, but I’ll not talk about cybercultures, as scheduled. I’ll talk about a different subject: how to organize a insurrection, because this is the only intersting subject at the moment.

The 'riforma Gelmini' is cutting 8 billions euros in the Italian school system. The effect is easy to see, and in the next years the definancing of the school is going to produce misery ignorance and violence.
It’s not an Italian problem: in the UK thousands and thousands of students are leaving their schools as the taxes have become impossible to pay, while five hundred thousand public workers are waiting to be fired, and the british society is falling in a nightmare of devastation.

Therefore we should forget that the Milano Academy of Brera can be saved through some negotiations. The only way now is to fight against the financial dictatorship that is oppressing European society as Gheddafi and Mubarak have been oppressing Arab people.

Is this a task too difficult for the teachers of Brera? Yes, it is, but we are not alone. Millions of worker, all over Europe, – in the school, in the factories, in the hospitals and inn the social services – are facing a choice between misery and revolt, between radical struggle and depression. This is the moment to prepare insurrection. It’s better to be frank on this point: our future is over, as the future of our students, unless we forget fear and dare to fight for the right to teaching, and the right to studying, and the right to a decent salary, and for our dignity.

Discussing with the bureaucrats of the Brera school is useless, as they are only the tool of a devastating projects they cannot change at all. Useful is to occupy a square, a station, a parliament, and stay there as long as the government of mafia will be chased away, as long as the Trichet-Sarkozy-Merkel directorate will have been defeated. Is this prospect too much?

May be, but we have to be radical, as the situation has become extreme.

The Knowledge liberation front gathered in Paris Saint Denis on February 12th and called to a day of teach in in the banks of many European cities on March 25th. In London they are already doing this: groups of students and researchers go into the bank, and they occupy the place and read poems, and discuss molecular biology, and talk about their problems, and eat something, and sleep.

Occupying banks has to become a daily practice. Is it dangerous? It is, but it is more dangerous to wait for somebody to come and help us to have jobs and money and schools and house, when financial capitalism is destroying our lives. Financial capitalism has declared war against society.
We cannot avoid this war, but we can win.

I beg your pardon if my language may seem emphatically tragic. Unfortunately the tragedy is not an effect of my imagination." From here.

how to get out of jury duty...

2011-03-04T01:49:00.000-08:00

...and support LGBT rights, then make the following statement:

"Since I can't get married or adopt a child in the state of (insert state where you live in), I can't possibly be an impartial judge of a citizen when I am considered a second class citizen in the eyes of the justice system."

From here.

{personal}

2011-03-01T00:00:00.001-08:00

Is this possible??? University of Toronto's PhD program in Comparative Literature. Wow. In a state of disbelief!!!

Update (5/30): This isn't happening. Sigh.

Update (8/23): It may be happening.

Badiou Theorizes Egypt & Tunisia

2011-02-27T09:05:00.000-08:00

A romanticized reading of the recent uprisings that is also too clinical and ends up being Eurocentric.

"The Eastern wind is getting the better of the Western one. How much longer will the poor and dark West, the 'international community' of those who still think of themselves as masters of the world, continue to give lessons of good management and behaviour to the whole planet? Isn't it laughable to see certain intellectuals on duty, disconcerted soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that stands as a shabby paradise for us, offering themselves to the magnificent Tunisian and Egyptian peoples in order to teach these savage populations the basics of 'democracy'? What a distressing persistence of colonial arrogance! Given the miserable political situation that we are experiencing, isn't it obvious that it is us who have everything to learn from the current popular uprisings? Shouldn't we, in all urgency, closely study what has made possible the overthrow through collective action of governments that are oligarchic, corrupt and—possibly, above all—humiliatingly the vassals of Western states?

Yes, we should be the pupils of such movements, and not their stupid teachers. That is because, through the genius of their own inventions, they give life to some political principles that some have been trying for so long to convince us that they are outdated. And especially the principle that Marat never stopped reminding us of: when it comes to freedom, equality, emancipation, we owe everything to popular uprisings.

We are right to be revolted. Just as with politics, our states and those who take advantage of it (political parties, unions and servile intellectuals) prefer management to revolt, they prefer claims, and 'orderly transition' to any kind of rupture. What the Egyptian and Tunisian peoples remind us is that the only kind of action that equals a shared feeling about scandalous occupation by state power is mass uprising. And that, in such a case, the only watchword that can federate the disparate groups of the masses is: 'you out there, go away'. The extraordinary importance of the revolt in this case, its critical power, is that repeating the watchword by millions of people will show the worth of what will undoubtedly and irreversibly be the first victory: the man thus designated will flee. And no matter what happens afterwards, this triumph of the popular action, illegal by nature, will be forever victorious. That a revolt against state power can be absolutely victorious is a lesson universally available. This victory always indicates the horizon where all collective action, subtracted from the authority of the law, stands out, the horizon that Marx called 'the failing of the state'.

That is, one day, freely associated in the spreading of their own creative power, peoples could do without the gloomy coercion of the state. And it is for this reason, for this ultimate idea, that a revolt overthrowing an established authority can determine unlimited enthusiasm throughout the world.

A spark can set a field on fire. It all starts with the suicide through burning of a man who has been made redundant, whose miserable commerce that allows him to survive is threatened to be banned, and with a woman-officer slapping him to make him understand what is real in this world. This gesture expands within days, weeks, until millions of people cry their joy in a far-away square and the powerful rulers flee. Where does this fabulous expansion come from? The propagation of an epidemic of freedom? No. As Jean-Marie Gleize poetically puts it: 'a revolutionary movement does not expand by contamination. But by resonance. Something emerging here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something emerging out there'. This resonance, let's name it 'event'. The event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of a myriad of new possibilities.

Neither of them is the reiteration of something we already know. This is why it is to say 'this movement is demanding democracy' (implying the one we enjoy in the West), or 'this movement is demanding social improvements' (implying the median prosperity of the small-bourgeois in our countries). Born from almost nothing, resonating everywhere, the popular uprising creates unknown possibilities for the whole world. The word 'democracy' is practically never mentioned in Egypt. There's talk of a 'new Egypt', of 'the real Egyptian people', of constituent assembly, of an absolute change of existence, of unprecedented possibilities. This is about the new field that will be there where the previous one, set on fire by the spark of uprising, will no longer be. It stands, this new field to come, between the declaration of overthrowing forces and the one of assuming new tasks. Between what a young Tunisian has said: 'We, the sons of workers and farmers, are stronger than the criminals'; and what a young Egyptian has said: “Starting today, 25th January, I take charge of the affairs of my country”.

The people, and only the people, are the creators of universal history. It is very surprising that, in our West, governments and the media consider that the revolts in a square in Cairo are 'the Egyptian people'. How come? Isn't it that, for these men, the people, the only reasonable and legal people, is usually reduced to either the majority in a poll or in an election? How is it possible that all of a sudden hundreds of thousands of revolted people have become representative of a population of eighty million? It's a lesson to remember, and we will remember it.

Once a certain threshold of determination, obstinacy and courage has been passed, a people can indeed concentrate its existence in one square, one avenue, a few factories, a university ... The whole world will be witness to this courage, and especially to the amazing creations that accompany it. These creations will stand as proof that a people is represented there. As one Egyptian protester has put it, 'before, I used to watch television, now it's the television who is watching me'.

In the midst of an event, the people is made up of those who know how to solve the problems that the event imposes on them. It goes the same for the occupation of a square: food, sleeping arrangements, protection, banderols, prayers, defence fight, all so that the place where everything is happening, the place that has become a symbol, may stay with its people at all costs. These problems, at a scale of hundreds of thousands of people who have come from all over the place, may seem impossible to solve, especially since the state has disappeared in that square. Solving unsolvable problems without the help of the state, that is the destiny of an event. And it is what determines a people, all of a sudden and for an indeterminate period, to exist, there where it has decided to gather.

There can be no communism without communist movements. The popular uprising we are talking about is manifestly without a party, without any hegemonic organisation, without a recognised leader. It should always be determined whether this characteristic is a strength or a weakness. It is in any case what makes it have, in a pure form, without a doubt the purest since the Commune of Paris, all the necessary traits for us to talk about a communism as movement. 'Communism' here means: common creation of a collective destiny. This “common” has two distinctive traits. First, it is generic, representing in one place humanity in its entirety. In this place there are people of all the kinds a population is usually made up of, all words are heard, all propositions examined, all difficulty taken for what it is. Second, it overcomes the great contradictions that the state pretends to be the only one capable of surmounting: between intellectuals and manual workers, between men and women, between rich and poor, between Muslims and Copts, between people living in the province and those living in the capital ...

Millions of new possibilities for these contradictions spring with every moment, possibilities that the state—any state—is completely blind to. We see young female doctors, who have come from the province to treat the wounded, sleep in the middle of a circle of fierce young men, and they are more at ease than they've ever been, knowing that no one will touch a hair on their heads. We can equally see an organisation of young engineers addressing youngsters from the suburbs to ask them to hold on, to protect the movement with their energy for combat. We also see a row of Christians standing in order to keep watch over the Muslims bent in prayer. We see vendors feeding the unemployed and the poor. We see each person talking to their unknown neighbour. We can read thousands of banners where each and everyone's life is mingled to the grand History of all. All these situations, inventions, constitute the communism as movement. It's been two centuries since the unique problem is the following: how can we establish in the long run the inventions of the communism as movement? And the unique reactionary statement is: 'that would be impossible, even detrimental. Let's put our trust in the state'. Glorious be the Tunisian and Egyptian peoples who remind us the true and unique political duty: faced with the state, the organised fidelity to the communism as movement.

We do not want war, but we are not afraid of it. The pacifist calm of gigantic movements has been talked about everywhere, and it has been linked to the ideal of elective democracy that we bestowed upon the movement. We should, however, note that there have been hundreds of dead, and their number increases each day. In many instances, these dead have been combatants and martyrs of the initiative, then of the protection of the movement itself. The political and symbolical places of uprising had to be kept by paying the price of fierce combat against the militia and the police of the threatened regimes. And who has paid with their own lives if not the youth from the poorest classes? The 'middle classes', of whom our inspired Michèle Alliot-Marie has said that the democratic outcome of the movement depended on, and on them alone, should always remember that during the crucial moment, the duration of the movement has only been guaranteed by the unrestricted commitment of the people's militia. Defensive violence is inevitable. It still goes on, in difficult conditions, in Tunisia, after the young provincial activists have been sent to their destitution.

Can we seriously think that all these innumerable initiatives and cruel sacrifices' fundamental goal is to make the people 'choose' between Souleiman and El Baradei, just as we here resign to arbitrate between Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Strauss-Kahn? Will that be the only lesson of this splendid episode?

No, a thousand times no! The Egyptian and Tunisian peoples tell us this: to rebel, to construct the public space of the communism as movement, defending it by all means and making up its successive steps of action, that is the reality of the popular politics of emancipation. It is not just the Arab states that are anti-popular, of course, and, fundamentally, with or without elections, illegitimate. Whatever their future, the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have a universal significance. They prescribe new possibilities whose value is international." From here.

Gaddafi's Umbrella

2011-02-27T08:44:00.000-08:00

Tariq Ali channels the Libyan dictator and Twitter is involved.

“It’s raining outside which is why I cannot address you. Sorry. It seems to be raining inside my tent as well. Can this be rain? No. It’s dogs polluting the uniforms of my bodyguards. No respect for women. Benghazi. I hate that city. Once I accidentally addressed my friend Berlusconi as Benghazi. Drunkards, pimps and religious extremists. I will bomb them again before I leave. I wish we had bought some drones so I could press button myself. My relations with the people are informal, based on friendship and fear. Why have they become so noisy and combative? I have many children. The British Foreign Office adopted one of them, my dear Saif, and wanted to put him on the throne, but that would have no effect on the intellectual landscape of the Jamahiriya.

I just received a tweet from Venezuela: ‘Have you read The Autumn of the Patriarch by G.G. Marquez?’ Why should I read this shit? Has G.G. Marquez read my science-fiction short stories ‘Escape from Hell’ that are even better than my little Green Book which is very nutty? They are set in an imaginary country with an imaginary ruler who kills his people and they rise and get rid of him. It’s very funny story. It is popular in Arab lands. I met them, these jokers and stray dogs of Europe. Blair, Berlusconi, they are my friends, but now they ask me to go. Why? Did they not go? It’s always raining in London. And that Roman pimp is always raining on his people. I will go when my time comes. When Allah summons me to discuss the political conjuncture. I like pizzas. Once there was a good pizza place in Tripoli. Much better pizzas than in Benghazi, but now all these shops are burning. Is it still raining? No? OK. Then I will go. Bury me in a colored shroud, not white. Bill Clinton. His penis should have been chopped off and fed to swine for letting Monica play with him when he was talking to heads of state. Men will be men, but that still upsets me. I never did that. Nor did Blair or Berlusconi.

I ruled this place for 42 years. And now it’s raining. I’m sorry not to rule for 50 years. Mubarak was a stray dog, Ben Ali a pimp. Why they compare those rascals to me. I struggled against my own military dictatorship. I am not a rootless pot of excrement. What do you think? I will ask the people, but I need an umbrella. Who is raining? Am I raining on my own people? Just one last point, I need to address to my people. Remember this: States are counter-Being. Similarly, being is counter-state. Being is the activity of being alive, free, agile and uncontained. Being, when pursued rigorously, state(s) would wither away like Clinton’s penis. States exist by ‘neutralising’ being. “State of being” is a moronic condition. However, ’normally’ we exist in the moronic conditions. I am proud to be the Chief Moron in a moronic state. I will neutralise you all.” From here.

"Judith Butler's Statement on the Queer Palestinian Activists Tour"

2011-02-27T08:38:00.000-08:00

"Judith Butler's statement on the Queer Palestinian Tour. Please circulate.

Dear Haneen, Sami, and Ghadir,

I wanted personally to thank you for your recent visit to the United States. I have heard from many parts of the country that your presentations were extraordinary and opened up new ways of thinking for many activists on the queer left. I believe that your visit marks the possibility of change in the discourse here about queer activism, Palestine, and BDS*, and I wanted just to say that your arguments and modes of presentation were compelling, complex, important, and persuasive (also, ironic and sometimes hilarious!). As you doubtless know, many people in the LGBTQ community in the United States remain relatively ignorant about the conditions of Occupation. Your joint presentations made clear what the daily confrontation with Israeli military power is like, how difficult mobility is, and how important it is that any queer activism commit itself to the struggle against the Occupation - an insupportable subjugation of the Palestinian people that clearly abrogates international law and the basic precepts of equality and justice. Indeed, you made perfectly clear why allying with groups that are not clearly and actively opposed to the Occupation is impossible. At the same time, you showed us how absolutely important it is to struggle for greater freedoms for sexual minorities in Palestine at every level of society, including the movements that are resisting the Occupation and calling for Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment. In this time when Israel is actively engaged in "pinkwashing", that is, advertising its ostensible tolerance for gays and lesbians as a way of deflecting from the illegal and unconscionable subjugation of over two million Palestinians. It is quite monstrous that they seek to use us - gay, lesbian, queer, trans - in order to cast themselves as the beacon of democracy in that region, if democracy implies the equal treatment of the inhabitants of the land, regardless of nationality, origin, religion, race, and ethnicity! Indeed, the radical democratic movements we are seeing now in Arab countries are clearly immeasurably more democratic in their composition and aims than anything we have ever seen emerge from the State of Israel. So where precisely is the beacon of democracy now? In the streets of Cairo, Tripoli, Tunis? We can only hope that these movements will undermine the support that the states surrounding Israel have given to the occupation. I see you as struggling for real democratic alliance in which the rights of one group will not be traded off against the rights of another, especially by those who belong to them both.

You also made clear why queer activists are, and should be, supportive of BDS. It is the largest non-violent resistance movement in Palestine, and all three strategies have been established as bonafide ways to compel a state to comply with international law. Israel should be no exception. What I appreciated most was how you made clear that you were unwilling to compromise with those who asked you either (a) to put your anti-Occupation politics second or (b) put your queer politics second. How brave, and how right you are to insist on both, and to ask that others do the same. I also appreciated how you laid out the complexity of "coming out" - a practice that is often regarded as the presupposition or even the goal of GLBTQ politics in the U.S. You relayed how the struggle with visibility is a complex one, especially where families are concerned, and you asked that we understand that activism cannot be equated with full, unprotected, visibility. That was a nuanced discussion, and one that activists here very much need to hear.

I am sorry to say, though also glad to say, that there were many in that room in New York who were starting to gain an understanding of the situation in Palestine for the first time. I hope they will take this opportunity to learn more, to join solidarity visits, and to find ways of making alliance with queer activists throughout the region. By the way, I love your irony and intelligence - and appreciate the way that you work with your differences from one another. I hope that we will be able to meet in Jerusalem or Ramallah in the Fall. It would be a great honor and pleasure for me, as it was last evening to listen to you all. I would like to know more what I can do to support you as well.

in solidarity,

Judith"

From Terrorist Assemblages' Facebook page.

"Judith Butler's E-Mail to the NY LGBT Center"

2011-02-27T08:23:00.000-08:00

"Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2011
To: Glennda@gaycenter.org
From: Judith Butler
Subject: censorship at the NY LGBT Center

Dear Glennda Testone,

I am writing to communicate my outrage and sorrow that our movement has come to this point where it refuses to house an organization that is fighting for social justice. I was appalled to see the very ignorant and hateful messages that supported your center’s decision to ban Siegebusters from holding an event on the topic of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. The colleagues at Jewish Voice for Peace and other progressive Jewish organizations with whom I have spoken are in strong disagreement with your action. It is simply wrong to assume that housing an event that discusses the BDS movement is anti-Semitic in content or implication. There are increasing numbers of Jewish intellectuals and cultural workers (including Adrienne Rich and myself) who support the BDS movement, including a vocal group from Israel that calls upon the rest of us to put international pressure on their country (including Anat Matar, Rachel Giora, Dalit Baum – one of the founding queer activists there, and Neve Gordon). There are also queer anarchist and human rights groups in Israel- including 'Who Profits?' – who support BDS and who are struggling against illegal land confiscations in Jerusalem and the building of the wall or who, at least, would support an open forum to discuss the pros and cons of this strategy, non-violent, to compel the State of Israel. But there is, perhaps most importantly as well a network of Palestinian Queers for BDS that have an important and complex analysis of the situation, calling for BDS as a sustained non-violent practice to oppose the systematic disenfranchisement of Palestinians under the Occupation. It is surely part of our global responsibility to understand this position and to make alliances across regional divisions rather than stay within the parochial assumptions of our own neighborhoods.

The idea that BDS is somehow anti-Semitic misunderstands the point and is simply false. It is a movement that is in favor of putting pressure on states that fail to comply with international law and, in this case, that keep more than 1.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank under the military control of Israel, which also maintains political control over their survival, mobility, employment, health, and elections – and this has been amply demonstrated. This is a human rights and social justice issue about which we all have to learn. And it seems to me that just as the very notion of freedom must include sexual freedom, and the very notion of equality must include sexual and gender equality, so must we form alliances that show that our concern with social justice is one that will include opposition to all forms of state subjugation and disenfranchisement. We now have many organizations that affirm the interlinking networks of subjugation and alliance: queers against racism, queers for economic justice. We must oppose all forms of anti-Semitism to be sure (as a Jewish queer who lost part of maternal line in the Nazi genocide against the Jews, I can and will take no other stand). But we must extend our critique of racism to all minorities whose citizenship is unfulfilled, suspended, lost, or compromised, which would include the Palestinian people in the last several decades.

The Siegebuster event is one that would simply seek to inform the LGBTQ community of a set of political viewpoints. No one who goes to the event has to agree with the viewpoint put forward there, and neither does the center. By hosting this event, your center would simply be acknowledging that this is an important global issue in which LGBTQ people are invested and are now currently debating. The Center thus would agree that we all need to hear this viewpoint in order to make more informed decisions about the situation. I fear that to refuse to host the event is to submit to the tactics of intimidation and ignorance and to give up on the important public function of this center. I urge you to reconsider your view. These are important matters, they concern us all, and we look to you now to show that the LGBTQ movement remains committed to discussing social justice issues and will not be intimidated by those who seek to expand the powers of censorship precisely when so much of the rest of the world is trying to bring them down. There is still time for you to act with courage and wisdom.

Sincerely,

Judith Butler
University of California, Berkeley
Visiting Professor, New School for Social Research (Spring, 2011)"

From here.

Yo, It's Mr. Z

2011-02-12T18:15:00.000-08:00

Zizek can be maddening at times, especially when he recycles his latest routine to different media outlets. However in this interview, he has some new materials. Note for instance his analysis of Avatar in the second part of the interview.

purrr

2011-02-11T20:57:00.000-08:00

Below is a book trailer for an unpublished childrens book. An acquaintance is trying to get this published. The video is aimed to generate interest in the book. If you like it as much as I do, feel free to relink this blog entry or the video itself. Pass it on to folks who might have kids or anyone who enjoys childrens books.

james hearts joni

2011-02-10T08:19:00.001-08:00

James Blake covers Joni Mitchell.

omg, celine and julie!

2011-02-09T18:07:00.000-08:00

If you haven't seen this film by Jacques Rivette, you don't know cinema. It's pure magic. Last year, I saw over 400 films, and this film just stands out. I can't get it out of my head! And I don't know why I've resisted watching this film for the longest time. Possibly because it wasn't readily available in the US. Got the DVD from the UK. It's tragic that this film still doesn't have an official US release. (There used to be a VHS version, but that has long gone out of print, from what I gather.) Film has been broken down into 19 parts. I don't think it'll stay up on YouTube for long, so see it now. Here's the first link. Hurry!

Jonathan Rosenbaum on the film: "One of the great modern films, Jacques Rivette’s 193-minute comic extravaganza is as scary and as unsettling in its diverse narrative high jinks as it is hilarious and exhilarating in its uninhibited slapstick. Its slow, sensual beginning stages a mysterious, semiflirtatious meeting between a shy librarian (Dominique Labourier) and a nightclub magician (Juliet Berto). Eventually, an outlandish plot-within-a-plot magically takes shape between them–a Jamesian, Victorian, and somewhat sexist melodrama featuring Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder (the film’s producer), and a little girl–as each of them, on successive days, visits an old dark house where the exact same events take place. Oddly enough, both of the plots in this giddy comedy are equally outlandish, but the remarkable thing about this intricate balancing act is that each one holds the other in place; the elaborate, Hitchcockian doublings are so beautifully worked out that this movie steadily grows in resonance and power, and the final payoff is well worth waiting for. The four main actresses scripted their own dialogue in collaboration with Eduardo de Gregorio and Rivette, and the film derives many of its most euphoric effects from a wholesale ransacking of the cinema of pleasure (cartoons, musicals, thrillers, and serials). The use of locations (Paris’s Montmartre in the summertime) and direct sound is especially appealing, and cat lovers are in for a particular treat (1974)." From here.

Declaration: Egyptian Youth Protesting in Midan al-Tahrir

2011-02-09T16:56:00.000-08:00

"First Main Point: The Promises of the President and the Events of February 2

We have been protesting since January 25 and conducting a sit-in in Tahrir (Liberation) Square. We strongly condemn the brutal attack that was undertaken by the mercenaries of the national party against us at the center of our sit-in on Wednesday February 2 under the pretenses of a demonstration in support of President Mubarak and this aggression continues on Thursday February 3. We are saddened by the participation of some of Egypt’s youth with the government thugs and criminals whom the National Party is used to employing in elections. The regime unleashed them against us after the regime and its media spread many lies about our goals, which are in support of a change in the political regime, to guarantee to us and to all citizens, freedom, dignity of life and social justice – goals also shared by these young people. Thus, we would like to clarify the following:

First, we are a group of young people from Egypt – Muslims and Christians; the overwhelming majority of us do not belong to political parties nor have we been involved in political activities before. Our movement includes old people and children, peasants, laborers and professionals, students and workers and pensioners. Our movement cannot be characterized as driven or moved by a minority given the millions who responded to the call for bringing down the regime. They joined this call last Tuesday in Cairo and in the governorates, in an event in which not one single incident of violence was witnessed nor any attack on property or harassment of anyone by anyone.

Second, our movement is accused of being funded from outside, with support provided by the United States. It is also said that the movement has been instigated by Hamas, and that it is under the leadership and organization of the president of the National Society for Change, Mohammed Elbaradei. Finally, and not finally, it is said that the movement is directed by the Muslim Brotherhood. The listing of these multiple accusations in this way in and of itself shows how false they are. The protestors are all Egyptians. Their goals are patriotic, clear and specific. The protestors have neither foreign weapons nor equipment as the instigators claim. The broad response of the people to the movement reveals that the movement’s goals are the same goals of the Egyptian masses in general, and not the goals of particular faction or foreign entity.

Third, the regime and its media cast false blame upon us for the tensions and instability that you have seen in the streets of Egypt in the previous days and, thus, blame the young people who are demonstrating for the damages inflected upon our interests, the interests of our nation, and the security of us all. It is not the peaceful protestors who let the criminals out of prison to create a situation of thievery and looting in the streets of Egypt. It is not the protestors who imposed a curfew that starts at 3:00PM, stopping work at banks, bakeries and fuel stations. When the protestors organized their demonstrations of millions they came out in the best form, it was well organized, and the demonstrations ended peacefully. The protestors are not the ones who killed 300 people, some of them with live bullets. Nor did they injure more than a thousand people in the previous days.

Fourth, President Mubarak came out on Tuesday to announce that he would not run in the next presidential elections, and that he would amend articles in the constitution, and begin dialogue with the opposition. The official media attacked us when we refused his 'concessions' and we decided to continue our movement. Our demand that Mubarak must leave immediately is not personal. It is based upon clear reasons including:

Promising not to run is not a new thing, Mubarak promised when he became a president in 1981 that he would not serve as president for more than two terms, but he stayed in power for more than 30 years. The speech did not put forth any guarantees that his son Gamal will not run for office. Gamal is still a member of the ruling party and can nominate himself in an election that does not proceed under judicial supervision since the speech did not mention amending article 88 of the constitution. Furthermore, the speech deemed our movement a conspiracy waged by forces that work against the interest of the country, as if agreeing to the demands of the people is a dishonor and disgrace. As for starting a dialogue with the opposition – how many dialogues did the regime claim it would start with the opposition in previous years, that ended with Mubarak’s State proceeding in the path of the narrow interests of the entities that control the state.

The events that happened on Wednesday validate our position. While the president was offering promises in his speech, the leaders of his regime were arranging with thugs to plot the brutal attack in Tahrir Square using machetes, knife, and fire bombs. They were accompanied by members of the ruling party who used fire arms against peaceful demonstrators who were surrounded in Tahrir Square. This attack resulted in the death of at least seven people and wounded hundreds of people, some of them with serious injuries, with the aim of ending our national popular movement and keeping the status quo." From here.

Bifo on Facebook

2011-02-09T16:39:00.000-08:00

This was on his Facebook wall today.

"FACEBOOK OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FRIENDSHIP

Financial capitalism and precarious work, loneliness and suffering, atrophy of empathy and sensibility: these are the themes that we may extrapolate from The social network the excellent movie by David Fincher.

The story that the movie is about is the creation and early diffusion of the social network Facebook: an enterprirse in the age of financial semiocapitalism. But the focus shifts on the psychological side of the evolution of the Internet, in the framework of the info-acceleration and stimulus-intensification that the broad band has made possible. Love friendship affection – the whole sphere of emotionality is invested by the intensification of the rhythm of the infosphere surrounding the first generation which learned more words from a machine than from the mother.

Although the narration of the beginnings of Facebook, and the following legal conflicts and trials corresponds to the real story, biographical details (for instance the end of a love relation in the first scene of the movie) are not necessarily true, but they are useful for a full understanding of the affective side of social life of cognitarian labor force.

The main character of the film, Mark Zuckerberg may obviously be described as a winner: he is the youngest billionaire in the world, he is the owner of a company that in a few years has become well known worldwide with 500 million subscribers. Nonetheless it is hard to see him as a happy person, and he can be described as a looser if you think of his relation with women, and colleagues. Friendship seems impossible for him, and the success of his website is granted by the artificial substitution of friendship and love with standardized protocols.

Existential unhappiness and commercial success can be viewed as two sides of the same coin: Zuckerberg, in the Fincher movie is so skilled in the interpretation of the psychological needs of his generation because loneliness and affective frustration are his intimate psycho-scape. Desire is diverted from physical contact and invested in the abstract field of simulated seduction, in the infinite space of the image. Boundless enhancement of disembodied imagination leads to the virtualization of the erotic experience, infinite flight from an object to the next. Value, money, financial excitement: these are the perfect form of the virtualization of desire. The permanent mobilization of psychic energy in the economic sphere is simultaneously the cause and the effect of the virtualization of contact. The very word 'contact' comes to mean exactly the contrary of what it means: not bodily touch, epidermic perception of the sensuous presence of the other, but purely intellectual intentionality, virtual cognizability of the other. Hard to predict which sort of mutation is underway in the long run of human evolution. As far as we know this virtual investment of desire is currently provoking a pathogenic effect of fragilization of social solidarity and a stiffening of empathic feeling.

The genius of Zuckerberg essentially consists in his ability to exploit the suffering energy of the crowd, collective loneliness and frustration. The original idea of the website comes from two rich Harvard’s twins named Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who want to hire him as programmer. Zuckerberg pretends to work for them, and actually takes hold of their idea, although he is much more able than they in linking the project to the psychical needs arising from contemporary alienation.

Did Zuckerberg steal the idea from those two undergraduates? Yes and no. Actually in the Network it’s impossible to distinguish clearly the different moments of the valorization process, because the productive force of the net is collective, while profits are private. Here we find the irremediable contradiction between collective intelligence in the net and private appropriation of its products, a contradiction which is shaking the very foundation of semiocapitalism.

This movie is an interesting view on life and work in the age of precarity. The word precarious

means aleatory, uncertain, unstable, and it refers not only to the uncertainty of the labor relation, but also to the fragmentation of time and the unceasing deterritorialization of the factors of social production. Both labor and capital, in fact have no more a stable relation to the territory and to the community. Capital is flowing in the financial circuit and the enterprise is no more based on material assets, territorialized, but it is based on signs, ideas, information, knowledge and linguistic exchange. The enterprise is no more linked to the territory and work process is no more based on the community of workers, living together in the factory day after day, as it takes the form of ever changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network.

Cognitive workers do not meet in the same place every day, but stay alone in their connected cubicles, and answer to the requests of ever changing employers. The capitalist is no more signing agreements in order to exploit the productive energy of the worker during his overall working life. He is no more buying the entire availability of the worker. He is hiring a fragment of available time, which is a fractal, compatible with the protocols of inter-functionality, and recombinable with other fragments of time.

Industrial workers experienced solidarity because they met each other every day and were members of the same living community, and shared the same interests, while the net worker is alone and unable to create solidarity because everybody is obliged to compete in the labor market and in the daily fight for a precarious salary. Loneliness and lack of human solidarity is not only characterizing the net worker, but also the entrepreneur. The border separating work and enterprise is confused, in the sphere of cognitive work. Although Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire, the way he is spending his work day is not dissimilar from the way his employees are spending their work day. They all are sitting in front of a computer and type on the keyboard.

The main character of the movie - the Zuckerberg described by Fincher, has a friend, only one: Edouard Severin, who becomes the financer of the starting Facebook enterprise. When the success of the enterprise is guaranteed and demands new financers, Zuckenberg does not hesitate to betray his only friend.

This perfectly depicts the personal relations in the sphere of financial world, but unfortunately this is also depicting relations between workers. Although the movie speaks of a billionaire, it’s also telling the story of social condition of labor. The impossibility of friendship in the present condition of virtual abstraction of sociality, and the impossibility of building solidarity in a society that is turning life into abstract container of competing fragments of time." From here.

orbital motions

2011-02-09T16:23:00.000-08:00

Don't exactly understand what the scientific basis for the video illustration, but it satisfies my obsession with circles. Nice music. "In particular, Daniel Fabrycky, a University of California-Santa Cruz astronomy post-doc and member of the Kepler team, has created an impressive visualization of projected orbital motions for all the multi-planet systems Kepler has discovered to date. Within each system, planets are color-coded according to size, with the redder planets being larger and bluer planets being smaller." From here.

bear(s) in mind

2011-02-09T16:17:00.000-08:00

Images by Gordon Lester. Can you tell who these figures are? Answers below. From here.

Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, and Jackie Derrida.

book lust: the weariness of the self

2011-02-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

"Depression is a pathology of time (the depressed person has no future) and a pathology of motivation (the depressed person has no energy, his movement is slowed, his words slurred). The depressed person has trouble forming projects; he or she lacks energy and the minimum motivation to carry them out. Inhibited, impulsive or compulsive, she has trouble communicating with herself and others. With no project, motivation or communication, the depressed person stands in exact opposition to our social norms." From here.

"Depression, once a subfield of neurosis, has become the most diagnosed mental disorder in the world. Why and how has depression become such a topical illness and what does it tell us about changing ideas of the individual and society? Alain Ehrenberg investigates the history of depression and depressive symptoms across twentieth-century psychiatry, showing that identifying depression is far more difficult than a simple diagnostic distinction between normal and pathological sadness - the one constant in the history of depression is its changing definition." From here.

uncle boonmee by chris ware & others

2011-02-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

Love the kookiness, love the details. Poster below is for the US release by graphic novelist Chris Ware.

Posters from other places.

egypt: notes and links

2011-02-08T04:31:00.000-08:00

Excellent observations by Glenn Greenwald on how mainstream US media (AKA corporate media or lamestream media) portrays corruption as something that happens elsewhere and not in the US. "The first is that they have the effect of manufacturing the appearance that such problems exist only Over There, but not here. One would never, ever find in The New York Times such a sweeping denunciation of the plutocratic corruption and merger of private wealth and political power that shapes most of America's political culture. Just like 'torture'-- which that paper has no trouble declaring is usd by Egypt's government but will never say is used by ours -- such systematic corruption can exist only elsewhere, but never in America. That's how this genre of Look Over There reporting is not just incomplete but outright misleading: it actively creates the impression that such conditions are found only in those Primitive Foreign Places, but not here." From here.

Is the Egyptian government going after activists through Facebook and Twitter? "'I am worried about being arrested if I leave. Already we have heard stories about activists who have left being rounded up. They have our names from Facebook postings and Twitter. Some have not been heard of since.'" From here.

Thugs targeting scholars as well. "On Wednesday, February 2, pro-Mubarak thugs came out to the streets of Cairo, but also took to the internet to intimidate foreign students and scholars on Cairo Scholars accusing them of being 'f’n traitors' and 'agents of the Americans' who 'want to set the whole country on fire.' One pro-Mubarak loyalist threatened: “u have been reported.'” From here.

Suleiman isn't the answer; he's a continuation of the ancien regime. From here.

According to Reuters, Israel has always preferred Suleiman based upon recent Wikileaks documents. "'We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman,' said the cable written by the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv in 2008, using its own spelling for his name." From here.

Is Mubarak headed to Germany? "According to information obtained by Spiegel Online, plans for a possible hospital stay in Germany are far more concrete than had been assumed so far. Talks are already being held with suitable hospitals, particularly with the Max-Grundig-Klinik Bühlerhöhe in the southwestern town of Bühl near Baden-Baden, Spiegel Online has learned from sources close to the clinic. The hospital management declined to comment." Saudi is getting crowded. From here.

After 12 days of captivity, Wael Ghonim has been finally released. "...(T)he father-of-two was held in repute by many who believed that he was the anonymous activist behind a Facebook page named after a young Egyptian businessman whose death at the hands of police in June set off months of protests. The page, 'We are all Khaled Said', became one of the main tools for organising the demonstrations that started the revolt in earnest on 25 January." From here.

Wael Ghonim's television interview. Broken down into five parts. Part one. Part two. Part three. Part four. Part five. Jump ahead to part two. From here.

Robert Fisk reveals that Frank Wisner works for a law firm that represent Egypt. WTF?!? "Frank Wisner, President Barack Obama's envoy to Cairo who infuriated the White House this weekend by urging Hosni Mubarak to remain President of Egypt, works for a Washington law firm, Patton Boggs, which works for the dictator's own Egyptian government." From here.

From Twitter: "sunnysingh_sw6 Random trivia: Obama's envoy to #Egypt Frank Wisner is married to Nicolas Sarkozy's former step-mother. International level nepotism? #Jan25"

A Hosni Mubarak scrapbook of BFF world leaders. From here.

Who are the thugs that are doing the Egyptian government's bidding? This article suggests that they may need to be pitied as well. "These individuals have everything to lose -- and are now depending on those who have nothing left to lose. The privileged members of the regime don't want to get their hands dirty. Instead, they recruit their helpers from the rural and semi-rural regions, particularly from two provinces north of Cairo: Bahtim and Qalyub. The poor, who make up the majority of the population here, are easy prey. Many are distrustful of the demonstrators' motives and fear that the movement is secretly pursuing other aims." From here.

Perhaps the Egyptian people need to raise $1 billion dollars to achieve a US-style democracy? That's how much Obama is estimated to raise for the 2012 elections. "His outreach is part of an intense push to rebuild the finance operation that helped Obama raise a record $745 million in 2008. Republican campaign finance lawyers have predicted Obama could top $1 billion in 2012." From here.

Language of Empire (Latest Chris Hedges)

2011-02-08T03:32:00.000-08:00

Latest Chris Hedges. Riles me up, as usual, at the state of things. Is it because I am an outsider that I can see what he's saying? I don't think he exaggerates much, if at all. Looking around and eavesdropping on conversations, there is a shared sentiment that things will become better--that the economy will one day, in the near future, return to its 'normal' state. All indications point that this isn't the case at all. There should be more pessimism and less positive thinking.

"Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes. The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.

This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately. But to the members of our dwindling middle class -- as well as those in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and economic configuration -- the powerful use phrases like the consent of the governed and democracy that help lull us into complacency. The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion. Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to. Those who consume and perpetuate the lies -- including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party -- abet our disempowerment. No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance."

"Those who administer empire -- elected officials, corporate managers, generals and the celebrity courtiers who disseminate the propaganda -- become very wealthy. They make immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news, sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of spectacle and entertainment. They all pay homage, even in moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the illusions that keep us passive and amused. But as our society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power. The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with the overt language of force. It is hard to continue to live in a state of self-delusion once unemployment benefits run out, once the only job available comes without benefits or a living wage, once the future no longer conforms to the happy talk that saturates our airwaves. At this point rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can channel that rage inherits power. The manipulation of that rage has become the newest task of the corporate propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to defend core liberal values has left its members with nothing to contribute to the debate." From here.

Zizek's latest appearance on Al-Jazeera

2011-02-04T12:29:00.001-08:00

this song (mashup) is bananas #5

2011-02-03T09:25:00.001-08:00

Zizek Factory

2011-02-03T06:26:00.000-08:00

On the Middle East.

"Here, then, is the moment of truth: one cannot claim, as in the case of Algeria a decade ago, that allowing truly free elections equals delivering power to Muslim fundamentalists. Another liberal worry is that there is no organised political power to take over if Mubarak goes. Of course there is not; Mubarak took care of that by reducing all opposition to marginal ornaments, so that the result is like the title of the famous Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None. The argument for Mubarak – it's either him or chaos – is an argument against him.

The hypocrisy of western liberals is breathtaking: they publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned. Why concern, why not joy that freedom is given a chance? Today, more than ever, Mao Zedong's old motto is pertinent: "'There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent.'" From here.

On democracy. From the book Democracy in What State? Just out from Columbia UP.

"Instead of perceiving what goes on in today’s China as an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, one should see in it the repetition of the development of capitalism in Europe itself. In early modernity most of European states were far from democratic—if they were democratic (as was the case of the Netherlands), it was only for the liberal elite, not for the workers. Conditions for capitalism were created and sustained by a brutal state dictatorship, very much like today’s China: the state legalizing violent expropriations of common people, which made them proletarians, and disciplining them in their new role. All the features we identify today with liberal democracy and freedom (trade unions, universal vote, free universal education, freedom of the press, etc.) were won in a long, difficult struggle of the lower classes throughout the nineteenth century, they were far from a natural consequence of capitalist relations. Recall the list of demands with which The Communist Manifesto concludes: most of them, but for the abolition of private property with the means of production, are today widely accepted in 'bourgeois' democracies—the result of popular struggles." From here.

On Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique (1991). This is from the booklet that accompanies the DVD. Blu-Ray edition of the film came out on Tuesday.

"Kieślowski’s universe is a gnostic universe, a not-yet-fully-constituted universe created by a perverse and confused, idiotic God who screwed up the work of Creation, producing an imperfect world, and then keeps trying to save whatever can be saved by repeated new attempts—we are all “Children of a Lesser God.” Although they may appear to belong to the premodern space, such gnostic speculations often serve as the theological foundation of the postmodern exploration of alternative realities and cybergames—as in the New Age 'cybergnosticism.' In mainstream Hollywood, this uncanny in-between dimension is clearly discernible in what is arguably the most effective scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection—the cloned Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) enters the laboratory room in which the previous seven aborted attempts to clone her are on display. Here she encounters the ontologically failed, defective versions of herself, up to the almost successful version, with her own face but with some of her limbs distorted so that they resemble the limbs of the Alien Thing. This creature asks Ripley to kill her, and, in an outburst of violent rage, Ripley effectively destroys the entire horror exhibition."

"There is, however, a price to be paid for this retreat. When and why, exactly, does Véronique return to her father in order to find a safe haven of calm? After her puppeteer lover stages for her the (unconscious) choice that structured her life, in the guise of the two marionettes. So what is Véronique retreating from when she abandons her lover? She perceives this staging as a domineering intrusion, while it is actually the very obverse: the staging of her ultimate, unbearable FREEDOM. In other words, what is so traumatic for her in the puppeteer’s performance is not that she sees herself reduced to a puppet whose strings are pulled by the hidden hand of Destiny but that she is confronted with the fundamental unconscious choice by means of which every one of us has to choose her or his existential project. Her escape from the puppeteer, back to the safe haven under the wings of her father, is her escape from freedom." From here.

Cairo, City of Women

2011-02-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

Reportedly, this video was widely circulated before the recent Egyptian protests. According to the article, video is credited as 'triggering' the January 25th protests.

"Mahfouz made the video after four Egyptian men set themselves on fire. The men were apparently inspired by the example of Tunisia, where a self-immolation triggered protests that eventually led to the ouster of the nation's president.

'Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire, thinking maybe we can have a revolution like Tunisia,' she said. 'Maybe we can have freedom, justice, honor, and human dignity. Today, one of these four has died.'" From here.

Another widely circulated video on Facebook which once again highlights the role of women in the protests.

From an interview with Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist and human rights activist: "Women and girls are beside boys in the streets. They are—and we are calling for justice, freedom and equality, and real democracy and a new constitution, no discrimination between men and women, no discrimination between Muslims and Christians, to change the system, to change the people who are governing us, the system and the people, and to have a real democracy. That’s what women are saying and what men are saying." From here.

Another video demonstrating the role of women, especially young women, in Egyptian protests.

egypt: notes and links

2011-02-03T05:41:00.000-08:00

How much is Hosni worth? "Experts say the wealth of the Mubarak family was built largely from military contracts during his days as an air force officer. He eventually diversified his investments through his family when he became president in 1981. The family's net worth ranges from $40 billion to $70 billion, by some estimates." Dang, that's a lot dough! Blood money, stolen money. Why don't just say it out loud? From here.

Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! program (Feb. 2, 2011). Always worth listening to, Mr. Chomsky. "The United States, so far, is essentially following the usual playbook. I mean, there have been many times when some favored dictator has lost control or is in danger of losing control. There’s a kind of a standard routine—Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, strongly supported by the United States and Britain, Suharto: keep supporting them as long as possible; then, when it becomes unsustainable—typically, say, if the army shifts sides—switch 180 degrees, claim to have been on the side of the people all along, erase the past, and then make whatever moves are possible to restore the old system under new names. That succeeds or fails depending on the circumstances." From here. Video and transcript on the link.

Same program, same day. Interview with Prof. Nora Radwan who's on the ground in Egypt. "Egyptians have not missed the fact that he did not say, "I promise not to run for another term of presidency." What he actually said is "I had no intention of running for another term of presidency." But by the same token that makes him unable to step down right now, because Egypt is facing difficult times and an emergency situation, there is no reason why he cannot create a similar scene like this in November and say, "It is also a very difficult time for Egypt, and I would have loved to step down, but I absolutely can’t." There’s also no reason why his son cannot run for the next term of presidency. We know that he may have left the country, but we also know that he can come back. He has never resigned his position in the National Democratic Party." From here. Video and transcript also available.

Fiery words from blogger, As'ad AbuKhalil. Blog is called Angry Arab News Service. "Every drop of blood that is spilled in Egypt from this day onwards should be blamed on Obama because he has embraced this new strategy of letting Mubarak defy the popular will of the Egyptian people." From here.

More from blogger above. This time on Anderson Cooper. "Say what you want about Anderson Cooper but he is at least more valuable and precious than 80 million Egyptians." From here. Another one here.

There's a movie called Map of the Sounds of Tokyo. Never seen it, though passage below evokes the phrase that is film's title. "'If you go back through our posts, particularly the last couple of nights, it is very interesting to see the variety of emotions that are expressed -- from fear, to hope, to pride -- and these are occurring real-time and dynamically, giving a map of the sentiment around the city and country.'" These electronic and digital documents should be preserved for archival reasons. Should be fascinating to lay it out as an interactive map. Map of the sounds of Egypt perhaps? From here.

Hey young people of the world, will you stand in solidarity with your brown counterparts? "What must have provoked such a deep feeling of identification with the Egyptian people in my friend was not just awareness of the political causes of the revolution, or thinking about its consequences, but the spiritual connection that oppressed people feel with each other." From here.

Obama's speech. "Second, we stand for universal values, including the rights of the Egyptian people to freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and the freedom to access information. Once more, we’ve seen the incredible potential for technology to empower citizens and the dignity of those who stand up for a better future. And going forward, the United States will continue to stand up for democracy and the universal rights that all human beings deserve, in Egypt and around the world." The phrase 'universal values' should come with an asterisk. It is a provisional kind of universality, as long as other people's universal values do not interfere with goals of capitalism and empire. From here.

Worth a chuckle? "The display of military might was meant to have a psychological effect on the tens of thousands of protesters gathering in Tahrir Square. However, the tanks have failed to stop the protests. Mubarak, a former air force officer, decided that fighter planes might get better results, since it is difficult to fraternize with a high-flying pilot." From here.

Image by Nidal El-Khairy.

Analysis: Tunisia and Egypt by Novelist Lalami

2011-02-03T05:02:00.000-08:00

Two spot-on articles by Laila Lalami for The Nation. She also has a blog.

On Tunisia.

"The Tunisian uprising began on December 17, when Mohammed Bouazizi—a college graduate eking out a living selling vegetables whose unlicensed cart was confiscated by the police—set himself on fire, an act of desperation that inspired the country's thousands of unemployed graduates to take to the streets in protest. Despite severe police repression—arrests, beatings and murders—the protests continued for several weeks, spreading from Bouazizi's hometown of Sidi Bouzid to the rest of the country and culminating on January 14, when Ben Ali and his family fled the country.

What is striking about the Tunisian revolution is how little attention it received in the mainstream American press. The Washington Post mentioned the protests for the first time on January 5, two and a half weeks into the unrest, when it ran a wire report about the burial of Bouazizi. Time ran its first piece about the protests later yet, on January 12. Even those who, like Thomas Friedman, specialize in diagnosing the ills of the 'Arab street; did not show much interest.

When the mainstream press finally paid attention, it was often to explain the success of the Tunisian revolution in terms of technology. 'Tunisian Protests Fueled by Social Media Networks,' read one typical headline, from CNN. Was it Twitter, which allowed activists to communicate swiftly and widely with one another? Was it YouTube, where videos of protesters and police abuse were posted? Or was it WikiLeaks, whose cables revealed that Ben Ali and his entourage were mind-bogglingly corrupt? But Twitter seemed to be most helpful in keeping those of us outside the country informed, since few in the Western media were reporting the story; YouTube was censored in the country; and WikiLeaks didn't reveal anything that the Tunisian people did not already know."

"The initial lack of interest by the American press in the Tunisian protests may have something to do with the fact that there was no Islamic angle: the Tunisians were not trying to oust an Islamic regime, nor were they supporters of a religious ideology. In other words, this particular struggle for freedom was not couched in simple terms that are familiar to the Western media—Islam, bad; America, good—so it took a while for our commentariat to notice. " From here.

On Egypt.

"As it turned out, the entire Arab world is full of Mohamed Bouazizis. In Egypt, his name was Khaled Said, and he was a 28-year-old businessman. Last June, Said was sitting in a cybercafe in Alexandria when the police came in and demanded everyone’s papers. He asked the officers why, and soon after he lay dead, his face smashed against the staircase of a nearby building, his cries for help unanswered because any attempt to meddle in a police matter would automatically result in arrest and torture. Over the following weeks, young Egyptians staged protests demanding justice for this man, protests that were repressed by President Mubarak’s police thugs.

But the Tunisians’ ouster of President Ben Ali galvanized the Egyptian youth, whose uprising on January 25 was the release, at long last, of the fear and silence that had been bottled up for so long. Year after year, they had heard American presidents deliver hypocritical lectures on democracy while giving $1.3 billion in military aid to Mubarak, their torturer in chief. The tear-gas canisters, the guns and bullets, the communication systems and police trucks—all the tools of repression that young Egyptians face—were quite likely bought with American aid. After three decades of empty promises, the young people realized that Mubarak was not going to reform, that what happened to Khaled Said could happen to each one of them, and that the time for change had finally come." From here.

this song is bananas #4

2011-02-01T02:28:00.001-08:00

"Wilhelm Scream" by James Blake.

year of (revolutionary) rabbits

2011-02-01T02:16:00.000-08:00

"The Chinese New Year begins on Thursday, the Year of the Tiger giving way to the Year of the Rabbit. The government in Beijing recently removed from the internet an extremely violent cartoon called Greeting Card for the Year of the Rabbit, in which a group of oppressed rabbits overthrow an abusive government of tigers.

The cartoon claims to be ‘meant as an adult fairy tale’, with ‘no connection to real life’, but most of the events it depicts will be familiar to a Chinese audience." From here.

speculation: after the fall, what's next for egypt?

2011-02-01T02:11:00.000-08:00

"Vijay Prashad: If such a transformation fails, which god willing it won't, then we are in for at least three options: (1) the military, under Egyptian ruling class and US pressure, will take control. This is off the cards in Tunisia for now, mainly because the second option presented itself; (2) elements of the ruling coalition are able to dissipate the crowds through a series of hasty concessions, notably the removal of the face of the autocracy (Ben Ali to Saudi Arabia). If Mubarak leaves and the reins of the Mubarakian state are handed over to the safe-keeping of one of his many bloodsoaked henchman such as Omar Suleiman…. Mubarak tried this with Ahmed Shafik, but he could as well have gone to Tantawi….all generals who are close to Mubarak and seen as safe by the ruling bloc. We shall wait to see who all among the elite will start to distance themselves from Mubarak, and try to reach out to the streets for credibility. As a last-ditch effort, the Shah of Iran put Shapour Bakhtiar as PM. That didn't work. Then the revolt spread further. If that does not work, then, (3) the US embassy will send a message to Mohamed El-Baradei, giving him their green light. El-Baradei is seen by the Muslim Brotherhood as a credible candidate. Speaking to the crowds on January 30 he said that in a few days the matter will be settled. Does this mean that he will be the new state leader, with the backing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and certainly with sections of Mubarak's clique? Will this be sufficient for the crowds? They might have to live with it. El-Baradei is a maverick, having irritated Washington at the IAEA over Iran. He will not be a pushover. On the other hand, he will probably carry on the economic policy of Mubarak. His entire agenda was for political reforms. This is along the grain of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment part 2, viz., the same old privatisation agenda alongside 'good governance'. El-Baradei wanted good governance in Egypt. The streets want more. It will be a truce for the moment, or as Chavez said, 'por ahora'."

"The Arab revolt that we now witness is something akin to a '1968' for the Arab World. Sixty per cent of the Arab population is under 30 (70 per cent in Egypt). Their slogans are about dignity and employment. The resource curse brought wealth to a small population of their societies, but little economic development. Social development came to some parts of the Arab world: Tunisia's literacy rate is 75 per cent, Egypt's is just over 70 per cent, Libya almost 90 per cent. The educated lower-middle-class and middle-class youth have not been able to find jobs. The concatenation of humiliations revolts these young people: no job, no respect from an authoritarian state, and then to top it off the general malaise of being a second-class citizen on the world stage - second to the US-Israel and so on - was overwhelming. The chants on the streets are about this combination of dignity, justice and jobs." From here.

Image by anonymous. From the Facebook group A Virtual 'March of Millions' in Solidarity with Egyptian Protestors.

speculation: where would mubarak go?

2011-02-01T01:37:00.000-08:00

"Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule of Egypt is probably coming to an end, and that means he’ll likely leave Egypt right after he leaves power. (Dictators don’t usually stick around the countries they dictated.) So where would Mubarak flee? One data mining company, backed by the investment arms of Google and the CIA, has an educated guess.

Recorded Future scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs, and Twitter accounts to find the so-called 'invisible links' between people, actions, and events. In this case, the company turned its tools on Mubarak’s travel patterns to find clues to his next moves. The guy isn’t exactly posting his post-regime plans on his Facebook wall. But, by looking at public documents about where Mubarak has been and who he hangs with, some likely destinations for his exile emerge."

"Recorded Future’s analysts believe that Saudi Arabia is Mubarak’s next destination, too.

The company attracted millions of dollars from Google Ventures and from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community, based on the promise that it can forecast coming events automatically. The company’s scouring of present and past information is supposed to feed predictive algorithms, which offer likely future outcomes." From here.

Anyone else creeped out by this data mining company and its capabilities? Privatized companies like these can easily sell anyone's activities, online and off-, to governments. And you know they will, if not already. A follow-up article about this company is required.

A Bolaño Sentence

2011-01-23T06:21:00.000-08:00

"But Mario never made it to Salzburg. He got on the train and didn't get off until Paris, and, after living in Paris for a few months, he got on a plane to Mexico, and when the fateful or happy—depending on how you look at it—year of 1984 arrived, Mario was still living in Mexico and writing poems in Mexico that nobody wanted to publish and that may rank among the best of late-twentieth-century Mexican poetry, and he had accidents, and he traveled, and he fell in love, and he had children, and he lived a good life or a bad life, a life in any case far from the center of Mexican power, and in 1998 he was hit by a car under murky circumstances, a car that drove away while Mario lay dying alone on a street at night in one of the outlying neighborhoods of Mexico City, a city that at some point in its history was a kind of heaven and today is a kind of hell, but not just any hell—the special hell of the Marx brothers, the hell of Guy Debord, the hell of Sam Peckinpah—in other words the most singular kind of hell, and that's where Mario died, the way poets die, unconscious and with no identification on him, which meant that when an ambulance came for his broken body no one knew who he was and the body lay in the morgue for several days, with no family to claim it, in a final stage of development or revelation, a kind of negative epiphany, I mean, like the photographic negative of an epiphany, which is also the story of our lives in Latin America."

From here.

this song is bananas #3

2011-01-22T16:32:00.000-08:00

James Blake's "Limit To Your Love."

population explosion

2011-01-17T05:17:00.000-08:00

"It was telling that dog owners held an alternative coming of age ceremony at a Tokyo shrine over the weekend. The number of cats and dogs in Japan exceeded that of children under 16 in 2003, according to the Japan pet food manufacturers association. By 2009, the country's 23m cats and dogs outnumbered children in that age group by 6m."

From here.

Nanny Cam, Or The Afterlife of Vivian Maier

2011-01-17T05:12:00.000-08:00

"The people that remember Maier – the Chicago families for whom she worked as a nanny in the 1950s and 1960s – recall a reclusive, eccentric individual, one who spoke in a thick French accent and wore a heavy overcoat and hat even in the height of summer. Her former charges often invoke Mary Poppins to describe her and Maloof calls her, 'a really, really awesome person to hang out with if you were a kid. To be honest, I wish she had been my nanny. She would take kids on these wild adventures that only the coolest kids would think of doing.'

They had no idea, though, that their nanny spent her days off taking some of the most extraordinary images of the 20th century. When Maier died in 2009 she left behind around 100,000 negatives that no one but she had ever seen. Now, the first exhibition of her work has just opened at the Chicago Cultural Centre and Maloof is at work on a feature-length documentary about her life.

Lanny Silverman, the show's curator, is adamant that 'the best of her work ranks up there with anybody. She covers humanist portraiture and street life, she covers children, she covers abstraction and she does them all with a style that I think digests the history of photography.'"

From here.

Age of Thek

2011-01-17T05:05:00.000-08:00

"Like many mystically inclined sensualists – ‘decadents’ such as J.K. Huysmans, author of A Rebours (Against Nature, 1884) and the Satanist fantasy La-Bas (Down There, 1891), come to mind – Thek had a fundamentally religious imagination. Informed by a Roman Catholic upbringing and stocked by exposure to antique grotesqueries – a visit to Capucin catacombs near Palermo in Sicily fixed his eyes on the beauty of arrested putrefaction – the artist made his entrance onto the scene with his ‘Technological Reliquaries’ (1966), sleek, quasi-science-fictional, quasi-Pop Perspex and metal containers in which what appear to be fresh cut or torn slabs of raw meat are encased. The weirdest is the most perversely Pop example; an Andy Warhol ‘Brillo Box’ with a massive sanguinary cross section of skin, fat and sinew. They are unforgettably pristine, unforgettably loathsome objects."

From here.

"Paul Thek's 96 Sacraments

to wake up
to breathe
to touch the earth
to pee
to wash
to prepare breakfast
to eat breakfast
to do the dishes
to clean up
to write a letter
to mail the letter
to go out
to see the sun
to do the shopping
to talk with some people
to buy a paper
to come home
to go to work
to work
to have work
to have lunch
to notice the light changing
to see a cat
to see a dog
to stop for a rest
to go home for dinner
to talk with a neighbor
to talk with a neighbor's child
to kiss someone
to eat dinner
to eat dinner with friends
to eat dinner with children
to eat dinner alone
to have dinner with someone
to think of love
to think of hope
to think
to dream, sing praises!
to plan
to write a poem
to read a poem
to forget bad things
to sing
to sing with someone
to hold hands
to hold anything
to hug
to get on a boat
to go somewhere
to eat a snack
to not eat a snack
to give away some money
to replace some technological education with some spiritual education
to see an island
to go swimming
to see somebody worse off
to see somebody better off
to go swimming nude
to make love in the daytime
to make love in the daytime with someone you love
to eat a peach
to comb your hair
to find a way to grow feathers
to satisfy all hunger in the world
to avoid dominations and dominating
to never stray
to be innocent of corruption
to not think (at least now and then)
to worship in another's church, in another way
to fly away into the air, high as a chicken, come back
to grow
to practice
to be just
to be stronger than you were
to understand a bit more
to like the ups & downs
to feel okay in spite of it all
to feel good knowing all the worst
to avoid being forced into defiance
to avoid emotional escalation
to forget the way
to make the way"

From here.

we do all the work

2011-01-17T04:57:00.000-08:00

The Wobblies (1979) Directed by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer.

Via Arthur Magazine.

judith butler on said & darwish

2011-01-03T10:09:00.001-08:00

From here.

new year's greetings, fellow seven billion earthlings

2011-01-01T21:11:00.000-08:00

Images by Ikeda Hirohiko. From here.

radio silence

2011-01-01T17:56:00.000-08:00

"This does more than just
ensure that she has something
important to do."

From here.

america in dollars and cents

2010-12-15T23:20:00.000-08:00

It just struck me that my pessimistic view of the country stems from my social position, which is that of an outsider. No wonder some of my friends and family members, fully integrated into the social and economic fabric of the country, cannot see my disappointment of where the country is and where it is going. Based upon my current situation, it would be difficult to climb the social ladder, and I can see that the current administration's domestic and foreign policies are not about to change it nor those of others who are on the margins, looking in into this fantasy of the American Dream. Even if I were to be able to assimilate into mainstream culture, it would be difficult not to be aware of this other America that exists with the official America, where these two are co-dependent on each other. The only conclusion I could come up with is that one can not just be merely 'political' or 'politically aware,' but that one must also be an activist for the country and its people and for the world and its inhabitants.

"If the Pentagon was a corporation, it would be the largest in the world. The curiously called, Department Of Defense, costs the American taxpayers, since the ill advised attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, around $700 billion a year. Of course, if you add up health care for wounded veterans, and layers of new 'security' administration such as the Department of Homeland Security, the numbers keep adding up to top $1 trillion a year. Overall more than 25 percent of the federal budget gets swallowed in the financial black hole that is the Pentagon.

If Americans could do the math, they would quickly understand that the bill for the two wars is now creeping up to $10 trillion. In order to achieve the chimeric goals of the neocons of an ever lasting global American empire money had to be borrowed. Currently, for every dollar spent by the federal government 40 cents is borrowed. America used to borrow mainly from Japan and Europe. but now does its main borrowing from China. In a striking reversal of fortune, the 'poor man of Asia' has now become the country in the world with the most liquid assets." From here.

Detroit 2010

2010-12-15T23:00:00.000-08:00

Enter the zone. Images of the present, images of our futures? What is striking, even in their decay, is the underlying optimism of the architecture. An optimism that has not faded, which only adds to the pathos and wonder of the images. Photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. From here.

background: on the georgia prison strike

2010-12-15T22:45:00.000-08:00

"Thousands of prisoners in at least four penitentiaries across the state of Georgia continued a non-violent strike for the fifth consecutive day yesterday in a showdown between the Department of Corrections and inmates over forced labour and poor living conditions.

The strike is unprecedented in at least two ways: it was organised by mobile phones that were smuggled into the prisons, and it has united prisoners across ethnic and religious lines, in an environment where racially-based gangs often fight each other.

'They have set aside their differences,' said Elaine Brown, a former Black Panther leader and adviser to the prisoners, whose 27- year-old adopted son is incarcerated at Macon State prison."

"Prisoners began planning the strike at the end of the summer, when prison authorities cut the cigarette supply. For the past three months, they have organised by word of mouth and mobile phone. One prisoner told the New York Times that 10 per cent of inmates had contraband mobile phones.

The prisoners’ main demand is an end to forced labour without pay, which they say is a violation of the 13th amendment of the constitution banning slavery and involuntary servitude. Georgia state law prohibits paying them. Inmates are required to do prison chores, cook and serve meals and are sent out to maintain other government buildings. On release, they are given $25 and a bus ticket.

With 60,000 prisoners and 150,000 people on probation, Georgia has the highest prisoner-to-resident ratio in the US. African-Americans comprise 63 per cent of the prison population but only 30 per cent of state residents. The striking prisoners are also demanding educational opportunities beyond the General Equivalency Diploma certificate.

They object to a monopoly on money transfers from their families to them, held by the private company J-Pay, which takes a 10 per cent commission. Global Tel-Link, another private company, charges $55 a month for once weekly 15-minute phone conversations between prisoners and families.

Prisoners say they are over-charged for medical care, and want better food, especially fruit and vegetables. Georgia spends $49 a day per prisoner, compared to a national average of $79."

From here.

In Solidarity: Prisoner Strikers of Georgia

2010-12-15T22:34:00.000-08:00

"A Letter to the Prisoners on Strike in Georgia,

We, as members of activist and community organizations in the Bay Area of California, send our support for your strike against the terrible conditions you face in Georgia's prisons. We salute you for making history as your strike has become the largest prison strike in the history of this nation. As steadfast defenders of human and civil rights, we recognize the potential that your action has to improve the lives of millions subject to inhumane treatment in correctional facilities across this country.

Every single day, prisoners face the same deplorable and unnecessarily punitive conditions that you have courageously decided to stand up against. For too long, this nation has chosen silence in the face of the gross injustices that our brothers and sisters in prison are subjected to. Your fight against these injustices is a necessary and righteous struggle that must be carried out to victory.

We have heard about the brutal acts that Georgia Department of Corrections officers have been resorting to as a means of breaking your protest and we denounce them. In order to put a stop to the violence to which you have been subjected, we are now in the process of developing contacts with the personnel at the different prison facilities and circulating petitions addressed to the governor and the Georgia DOC. We will continue to expose the DOC's shameless physical attacks on you and use our influence to call for an immediate end to the violence.

Here, in the Bay Area, we are all too familiar with the violence that this system is known to unleash upon our people. Recently, our community erupted in protest over the killing of an unarmed innocent black man named Oscar Grant by transit police in Oakland. We forced the authorities to arrest and convict the police officer responsible for Grant's murder by building up a mass movement. We intend to win justice with you and stop the violent repression of your peaceful protest in the same way—by appealing to the power and influence of the masses.

We fully support all of your demands. We strongly identify with your demand for expanded educational opportunities. In recent years, our state government has been initiating a series of massive cuts to our system of public education that continue to endanger our right to a quality, affordable education; in response, students all across our state have stood up and fought back just as you are doing now. In fact, students and workers across the globe have begun to organize and fight back against austerity measures and the corresponding violence of the state. Just in the past few weeks in Greece, Ireland, Spain, England, Italy, Haiti, Puerto Rico – tens and hundreds of thousands of students and workers have taken to the streets. We, as a movement, are gaining momentum and we do so even more as our struggles are unified and seen as interdependent. At times we are discouraged; it may seem insurmountable, but in the words of Malcolm X, “Power in defense of freedom is greater than power on behalf of tyranny and oppression.”

You have inspired us. News of your strike, from day one, has served to inspire and invigorate hundreds of students and community organizers here in Berkeley and Oakland alone. We are especially inspired by your ability to organize across color lines and are interested in hearing an account from the inside of how this process developed and was accomplished. You have also encouraged us to take more direct actions toward radical prison reform in our own communities, namely Santa Rita County Jail and San Quentin Prison. We are now beginning the process of developing a similar set of demands regarding expediting processing (can take 20-30 hours to get a bed, they call it “bullpen therapy”), nutrition, visiting and phone calls, educational services, legal support, compensation for labor and humane treatment in general. We will also seek to unify the education and prison justice movements by collaborating with existing organizations that have been engaging in this work.

We echo your call: No more Slavery! Injustice to one is injustice to all!

In us, students, activists, the community members and people of the Bay Area, you have an ally. We will continue to spread the news about your cause all over the Bay Area and California, the country and world. We pledge to do everything in our power to make sure your demands are met.

In solidarity,

UC-Berkeley Student Worker Action Team (SWAT), Community Action Project (CAP), La Voz de los Trabajadores (www.lavozlit.com), Laney College Student Unity & Power (SUPLaney.wordpress.com), Laney College Black Student Union (BSU) , Bay Area United Against War Newsletter (bauaw.org), ,Socialist Viewpoint magazine (socialistviewpoint.org), Workers International League (www.socialistappeal.org), Bay Area ISO (norcalsocialism.org), We Are the Crisis (UC Davis Chapter) Bicycle Barricades (UC Davis)"

From here, with option to sign open letter.

malick's tree of life trailer

2010-12-15T22:24:00.000-08:00

balibar seminar: bourgeois universalism and the anthropological differences

2010-12-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

Hope to audit the seminar. Please make it happen!

"BOURGEOIS UNIVERSALISM AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES

Subject: Taking its departure from the ambiguity of the term 'bourgeois', which traverses the modern European idioms (where 'burgher' or Bürger both means a citizen and a member of the merchant society), the class will discuss the contradictory relationship between 'bourgeois [or civic-bourgeois] universalism' (which in the principle involves limitless access for every human being to the complete range of civil and political rights), and the new function of anthropological differences (sex-gender, age, health-normality, intellectuality, race, etc.). It will try to show how this tension has affected the ideas of subjection and subjectivation which, together, constitute the identity of the modern (philosophical) subject.

Description:

Whereas in traditional societies such differences as sex, age, genealogy, are used to establish hierarchies among status groups and limit access to public functions, in modern polities which legitimize their institutions through an equalitarian notion of human rights, they become at the same time more pervasive and less stable, less authoritative and more violent (symbolically and/or physically). The only way to legitimize an exclusion from citizenship is now to collectively define individuals as inhuman or imperfectly human. But this definition is bound to remain contradictory, equivocal and permanently shifting between boundaries and languages, institutionalizing different forms of internal exclusion and producing a typical 'uneasiness' of the subject. The class will elaborate on this paradox by comparing three issues of special practical and theoretical importance: the conflation of crime and madness in the construction of 'abnormality' (after Foucault), the figure of the 'foreign body' vacillating between racial and cultural types, and the problematic “binarisms” imposed on sexual difference by 'heteronormative' social representations (in the privileged form of a discussion of a reflection on the aporias of the Freudian model of gender determination and sexual choice)." From here.

One Day This Kid... (By David Wojnarowicz)

2010-12-07T02:08:00.000-08:00

in black and white, or stranded with eggleston

2010-12-07T01:59:00.000-08:00

"The images here are the first examples of Eggleston's now-famous democratic gaze: everything, even the most banal-seeming subject, is given equal importance in the unfolding visual narrative. This might seem a scattergun approach, but in his short introduction to the book, the southern writer and cultural critic Dave Hickey sees in them echoes of early photographs of the British Raj. There is a 'dissonance' in Eggleston's photographs, Hickey notes, suggesting the tension of the moment that America, with all its 'mass-produced banality', began to colonise the old south.

This is an interesting analysis. It sheds new light, too, on the so-called 'snapshot aesthetic' that the likes of Eggleston, Shore and before them Robert Frank deployed. Hickey argues that, in Eggleston's work, there is 'no other honest option' but 'to make 'bad' pictures of bad places'. (The quotation marks that frame the word 'bad' are of the utmost importance.) Eggleston, Hickey writes, 'abandons composition for a world with no composure. The truth of formal arrangement, contrast and atmosphere would be a lie imposed on these settings. It would deaden the acidic essence of the subject matter.'" From here.

in color

2010-12-07T01:55:00.000-08:00

"In Black Tide, a retired schoolteacher has spent his life writing a cultural history of color in Japan, rediscovering and re-creating the old materials and methods so as to bring to life the colors of the past as they really looked:

to understand the ancient Japanese people’s spiritual and psychological relationship to color—in the broadest sense, to understand the inner lives of the men and women of the past and the social mentality of the time—it was absolutely essential to have a concrete sense of the ancient colors, and there was obviously only one way to do it: manufacture once again the hues of the old colors using the dyeing techniques of the past.

After some forty years of work, the schoolteacher has finished his studies and dyed enough silk to tip swatches of all the colors—including the legendary, forbidden hajizome, 'like the rays of the sun as it crosses the meridian'—into five hundred copies of his three-volume work, if he can get it printed in the tight postwar years.Inoue himself as a historical novelist is well-known for his thorough research—he is said to have climbed Mount Hodaka four times to gather material for his novel about mountain climbing, The Ice Wall. In the author’s preface in the novel, he describes his five years of researching Tun-huang as 'a very satisfying time.'” From here.

weekend garden warriors

2010-12-07T01:49:00.000-08:00

"The part-timers are engaged in what's known here as shumatsu nogyo, or weekend farming. Their daily lives are firmly rooted in crowded cities. But with no yard of their own, they sign up instead at nearby farms that teach the basics of horticulture. The seasoned ones rent their own pint-sized plots in public-run gardens, known as shimin noen ('people's farms'), on the fringes of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and other cities."

"One of the most influential books promoting part-time farming is Naoki Shiomi's 'Han No, Han X To lu Ikikata' ('Half Farmer, Half-X [Something Else Lifestyle]'). It details his decision to quit his job at an online retailer in the 1990s and divide his time between farming and environmental activism. Shiomi traces weekend farming to widespread food-safety concerns, following mad-cow disease outbreaks in Japan, the United States and Britain and the discovery in Japan of banned pesticides in dumplings from China." From here.

gao xingjian interview

2010-12-07T01:44:00.000-08:00

"Q: Soul Mountain, which you published in 1990, chronicles your spiritual odyssey when you traveled deep into the Chinese hinterland. The work left a lasting impression on me, especially your depictions of quaint villages of ethnic minorities and sensuous folksongs sung by village elders. Am I correct to assume that China, in your mind, is a conglomeration of these diverse cultures, rather than a nation-state?

A: That is exactly my understanding of Chinese culture. In China, the history of emperors has been recounted as China's legitimate history. But aren't there also other histories? I always asked myself. While traveling along the Yangtze river, I collected many old local poems and mythical folk tales, including those of the ethnic minorities. This made me realize that there is no single source of Chinese culture, but that Chinese culture is a composite of diverse ethnic and regional cultures. This revelation deepened my understanding of ethnic and cultural diversity, and freed me from thinking of China as a monolithic state."From here.

the wikileaks intervention

2010-12-07T01:41:00.000-08:00

"The corporate owners of mass circulation media are also less and less inclined to see the working of the neo-liberal globalized economy and its politics detailled and discussed at length. The shift of information towards infotainment demanded by the public and media-owners has unfortunately also been embraced as a working style by journalists themselves making it difficult to publish complex stories. Wikileaks erupts in this state of affairs as an outsider within the steamy ambiance of ‘citizen journalism’ and DIY news reporting in the blogosphere. What Wikileaks anticipates, but so far has not been able to organize, is the ‘crowd sourcing’ of the actual interpretation of its leaked documents.

Traditional investigative journalism consisted of three phases: unearthing facts, cross-checking these and backgrounding them into an understandable discourse. Wikileaks does the first, claims to do the second, but leaves the issue of the third completely blank. This is symptomatic of a particular brand of the open access ideology, whereby the economy of content production itself is externalized to unknown entities ‘out there’. The crisis in investigative journalism is neither understood nor recognized. How the productive entities are supposed to sustain themselves is left in the dark. It is simply presumed that the analysis and interpretation will be taken up by the traditional news media but this is not happening automatically. The saga of the Afghan War Logs demonstrates that Wikileaks has to approach and negotiate with well-established traditional media to secure sufficient credibility. But at the same time these also prove unable to fully process the material."From here.

Updated version.

musical interlude w/ a sufi, a jesus, & a black emperor

2010-12-03T17:42:00.001-08:00

"I love the Los Angeles music scene—especially dublab.com radio and the Plug Research label crew. It’s full of so many free-minded, inventive people making great music, like Dntel, Daedelus, and Flying Lotus. What counts here is more their attitude than any specific sound—and one that’s far away from Hollywood fake. Check out Gonjasufi’s A Sufi and a Killer (Warp, 2010). --Gudrun Rut, Artforum. From here.

Who is Gonjasufi? "The latest project from rapper, and yoga teacher, Sumach Ecks, the album sees producers Mainframe and Gaslamp Killer supplying the dust whipped, cracked and frazzled beats with Flying Lotus also helping out, repaying the favour (Gonjasufi appeared on his 'Testament' track), with A Sufi And A Killer's 'Ancestors'." Preview album here.

Godspeed You Black Emperor - East Hastings by BeyazPeynir

godard in montana

2010-12-03T06:16:00.000-08:00

From an interview with Isabelle Huppert in the current issue of Film Comment.

"One day, Jean-Luc called and asked to meet me. I was pretty young, young in my knowledge of cinema history. I said, 'Whenever you like.' And he came over 10 minutes later. It was surprising. But then, almost two years went by. He came to see me in Montana where I was doing Heaven's Gate [80]. I picked him up at the airport in a rented car, and we had supper. Here I was driving Jean-Luc Godard on the mountain roads of Montana in an enormous apple-green American car -- and without a license! I asked him to tell me about the part in Every Man for Himself. He said, 'I want you to play the face of tragedy.' And he left the next day. I acted for him again, in Passion [82]. He got who I was."