Reviews/Interviews/Commentary

My friend Daniel Tucker from Chicago has just started up Reviews/Interviews/Commentary, a pretty great activist blog where he will be compiling his writings on art/activism/organizing. You should check-it out. He is also intrumental (like the editor or something...) of a Chicago-Based Art/Activism newspaper called Area which does an exemplary job of documenting local art and activist projects. Kudos Daniel!

Happy Halloween: Murder, Torture, and the USA

It strikes me as a bit grotesque that we live in a country that has legalized the death penalty and torturous practices like water-boarding. The top 2 articles on the New York Times website shows the horror-show nature of our country. Happy Halloween.

It shouldn't come as a surprise since the United States has over 2 million incarcerated people, refuses to sign the most basic environmental protocols, and has enormous homeless, ill, and mad populations the state refuses to assist. Our culture of death, torture, neglect is made more horrific by the enormity of homes, big box stores, loud-mouthed t.v. personalities, and cheap glitz. As we enter the election cycle in this colonial state born from the labor of slaves, exploited immigrants, and the poor, lets force candidates to answer for the historical, contemporary, and future violence a capitalist, colonialist, genocidal nation like the USA thrives on.

Rhetoric for the End of the Earth

Last night I had the chance to go out with my friend Cynthia from college. She's in town for a geology conference and is up to some incredible work. She and I had an in-depth conversation about the failures of scientists to convey the science of climate change, toxicity in the soil, water, and air, and other life-threatening byproducts of industrialization. We had a spirited, solutions-oriented debate in which she argued for lobbying and policy change and I entertained notions of industrial collapse. She made a point of ridiculing Gore's naive and simplistic movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and at the same time argued for election of Obama. Fearing the two parties commitment to capitalism, industry, and at-best, green technologies, I have enormous skepticism about the possibility of an electoral/political solution in a capitalist economy. Amongst ideas I floated I included decolonizing the United States and giving power to the people who successfully lived on this land for tens of thousands of years. As we struggle to articulate the grave ecological crisis we find ourselves in and struggle for holistic solutions, we have to determine the best ways of articulating the science, the damage, and the possibility. Two examples I find interesting include Derrick Jensen's Endgame and the most recent movie What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire. Both Jensen's book and the film engage difficult questions with more difficult questions, use heavy rhetorical flourishes, and deal directly with myth and action as well as science. If scientists what to convey the gravity of the situation, they are going to have to collaborate with storytellers, artists, filmmakers, and others who speak in a language that precedes numbers and that engages our deepest instincts and emotions. Until a truly interdisciplinary union of artists and scientists occurs, those studying catastrophe will hoard information and prevent the rest of the people from being able to act.

Polyamory and the Quest for Right on Modes of Lovin'

After a delicious pizza and a couple mugs of beer with my friend Mercy, I have arrived back at my nest and wanted to throw up a couple resources on polyamory! I love the idea of loving many people in a non-competitive and non-eternally binding way. What a treat! We can live to love so we can love to live (and at the same time kick the piss out of the capitalist bores, the racist pricks, the goober-sucking patriarchs, and those aggravating average joes who suck the pleasure out of the world without saying thank you.) But for once, we're not talking about them. We're talking about us: those queer-as-fruit, gender fuckers, gender suckers striving for new forms of pleasure!

Resource 1: The Ethical Slut! What a book. What candor. What pleasure. Perfect for queers and squares alike! A great tome on generosity, boundaries, and other traits of honorable folk.

Resource 2: Redefining Our Relationships: Guidelines for Responsible Open Relationships! Another great one! It briefly outlines an ethic of love and openess that can warm the heart of the most cold-hearted, emotionally shut off, drab, dull dog. (no offense to the canine folk)

Resource 3: Against Love! For those of you so sick of love that monogamy, much less, polyamory sounds like a drag, this book will warm your soul. It's a nasty diatribe against the political perversions of contractual love! Check it out!

Couch Potato Revolution

2 Great Tigers: Radical Nostalgia

I wanted to do a quick hat-tip (well, I don't wear hats but who gives a damn) to two of the great tigers: Paper Tiger Television and La Tigre!

Paper Tiger Television is celebrating some big-time anniversary (25 ass-kicking years)! They've just put out the documentary Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger -- a critical and celebratory documentary about all the incredible projects they've done from mainstream media critiques to slams on military recruiting! Congratulations to these tigerrrrrific media pioneers!

Le Tigre, who is apparently going out of style, is another quality tiger, a post-riotgrrrl, queer-ass, punk-electronica band with fabulous songs about everyone from the likes of Marlon Riggs to that finicky freak who put the bang in the chitty chitty bang bang. Check em out and find a revolutionary beat to dance to--even if they're already old hat!

What this movement needs are a few more tigers and a few less bores! Get dancin' and romancin'! Start making media. And for a quick change, growl like a beast!

couch potato revolution

Jews Against the Israeli Occupation

Check out Jewish Conscience, a blog by and about Jewish people against the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. Great photos, video, and text here!

Christy Road's Badass Graphics

I have two posters on my wall at work and I started noticing that when folks came in they would often comment on how awsome they are. Finally someone came in and mentioned that they were made by Christy Road. Not too long after, when I was at INCITE'S ENDING COLONIAL LEGACY CONFERENCE here in Colorado, I was handed a few totally kickass posters including a "Stop Police Brutality Against Women of Color and Trans People of Color" that were stunning. Turns out Christy Road did those too. Her work is amazing and if you haven't checked her stuff out, you should get to her website NOW!

While searching for radical prints, you should also check-out the butt-kicken' website Just Seeds where artists like Swoon, Nicolas Lampert, Josh MacPhee, Meredith Stern, and Kristine Virsis have put their incredible radical prints for sale.

Deep Dish Rocks!

So when you work in TV Programming, you get really excited when you have repeat producers doing amazing stuff. Deep Dish T.V., the first public access TV Satellite Network is a great example. They have been covering events, promoting radical programs, producing great documentaries, and working hard to cover the most pressing issues the U.S. is facing around the world. Their Shocking and Awful series, coverage of the World Tribunal on Iraq, and their short film Fallujah all exemplify the best of activist media! Rock On Deep Dish! Deep Dish's founder DeeDee Halleck is shown in the picture on the side. She's been an incredibly active media activist for decades and is an incredible supporter and critic of independent media at large. You can check out her webblog here.

Back from NAMAC

I just got back from the National Alliance For Media Arts and Culture conference in Austin, Texas. It was a super fun time. My sweet sweet friends from the Video Databank, one of the countries best distributors of video art, let me sleep on their floor! More importantly, they won a big award and Abina Manning, their leader/programmer/not sure what her title is delivered a great speech honoring video artists--she's such a badass and a believer in the power and importance of artists who go to difficult places (sometimes REALLY difficult) in their work. The conference had many panels--some fun ones, some less fun. Most importantly, there were incredible networking opportunities and chances to meet up and learn about projects all over the country from tiny cable access channels, to big Youth Media Organizations, to video artists, web geeks, policy freaks, and other badasses! I did a panel on Popular Cultural Aesthetics and Activist Media with Franklin Lopez of Submedia, Anne Elizabeth Moore of Punk Planet, and finally Cynthia Carrion of Manhattan Neighborhood Networks. The panel went well. The panelists were all badasses. Kudos to them all.

More to come later...

Zack Stiglicz

How do we learn to say good-bye to our heroes, our mentors, those who taught us most profoundly to be human, to live. Zack Stiglicz was a teacher and a mentor, one of the only people worthy of the title of artist I have ever met. He saved my life with his words, with his vigor, with his compassion and sensitivity at least once and every moment of my life I feel infused by the passion with which he lived. His death hurts. I miss him. I hope my life, my work, can follow in his legacy. Rest in peace Zack. Your life and work encourages us all in the struggle.

Dead Internet

So I have to apologize for the lack of posts over the last month or two. My neighbor with open web access moved and I've been screwed. The last couple of months have been quite intense. Denver has seen Transform Columbus Day, my friend, colleague and mentor Zack Stiglicz died, INCITE's Ending Colonial Legacies Conference took place in Denver, Anarchists and others have been organizing for DNC and RNC protests, and the grind of daily media activism has continued at Free Speech TV.