My Dreamy Night Reading Martín Espada

After a delicious meal at my roommate Nia's side of our duplex (chickpea fritters and lentil soup), my roommate Jessi and I sat out on the porch in the warm spring night, sipped wine, and read aloud Imagine the Angels of Bread, an incredible volume of poetry by Martín Espada. Espada's poems combine humor and horror examining racism, domestic violence, and class divisions through an extraordinary personal lens. Well worth checking out! He also appears to be doing readings all over the country so you should go!

The Visionary Life: A Reflection on James Broughton

As I was preparing to leave work today, I came across the following lines in James Broughton's poem, Coming in for a Landing.

At birth I swore allegiance to the visionary life
because it required neither logic nor geometry
so I live with ample rhyme but very little reason.
Though unscientific and financially unsound
I'm fitter than most old fiddles you can play with.

I live in Ambivalence a mixed community
over the hills beyond the opposites
where all the streets run in both directions.
Loyal I am to the government of Imagination
and long live in the service of Eros and Psyche.

The poem concludes with the following lines:

Till the Captain brings me down and turns off my motor
I will cling to the banqueting wings of desire.

What a poem...what an expression of the quest for pleasure, eros, and experience. How moving to think of clinging to the banqueting wings of desire. Let's abandon geometry, science, and reason. Let's cling!

Allied Media Conference-Our Evolution Beyond Survival

This Year's Allied Media Conference looks amazing! Focusing on moving social justice media beyond survival and framing the next 10 years of practice, folks from all over the country will be gathering to hash out radical media practice. Congrats to the folks at AMC for their 10th year anniversary. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence will be leading a track for women and trans people of color. Damn I wish I could be there. That particular track will be asking questions like:

What threatens our survival, as individuals, as communities and as a species?
How do we use media for survival?
How will we evolve beyond survival and how will our media further our evolution?

Go if you can!

Paul Eluard: Surrealist Poet

This past weekend was spent under books, dictionaries, and in poetry. My friend Jiah recommended that I read French surrealist poet Paul Eluard. I read two volumes of his poems: Capital of Pain and Love, Poetry. Both volumes were filled with stark images of elemental forces, themes of love and death, and the grotesque. Much I found to be nonsensical, though, my favorite of his poems were short, succinct and evocative. Apparently Eluard's involvement in Dada and Surrealism were followed with his infatuation with Stalin and his inability to see the authoritarian nature of Stalin's Communist Party. The connections between authoritarian communism and the surrealists is a troubling history worth greater examination. Perhaps because of his relationship to authoritarian communism, I was anticipating a starker political vision. I was impressed by the freedom in his verse and in many ways it reminded me of my favorite newsreels of Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez-- revolutionary in their refusal of didactics and exceptionally lyrical.

Political Gerbil Wheel

Last night I was sitting in a meeting. We were talking about various strategies for moving the mission of an organization forward through electoral politics. I expressed reservations that such action was like pedalling on a stationary bike, we'd exert lots of effort and not move the mission forward. My friend described this trend as a political gerbil wheel. As we move forward across movements, my belief is that we must not act like caged rodents spinning in a wheel. We must act. Hearing a friend who works at the American Friends Service Committee describe how easy it is to get sucked into meetings that don't move things forward, I wondered what the responsible ways were of creating boundaries and simultaneously organizing. So much of what we've been doing in the anti-war, counter-globalization, and anti-capitalist movements feels like spinning. The time to break out of our cage and fight for our lives is now. Let's quit spinning, asses rotting in meetings.

Going to Kansas City, Kansas City, Here I Come

This weekend I get to go see the play my Dad, Kim Harris, has been working on for the past 5 years. For 5 years he has studied the Icelandic Sagas to answer the question: "why do people fight?" A Circle of Grandmothers will take place April 3-5 and 10-12.

I'm excited for a trip back home, to see my family and get away from Denver for a bit. If you're in Kansas City, look me up.

Unconventional Action Strikes at DNC Headquarters

Last night, a motley bunch of activists descended upon Democratic National Convention Headquarters. Spraying the building with green foam, people criticized the fraudulence of Democratic Party's "green" pretensions. Noting the relationship between DNC Funders like Excel Energy and Newmont Mining and ecological devastation, the activists questioned the Democrats ecological, economic, and democratic claims. For more information about groups organizing against the Democratic National Convention in Denver go here.

What's A Bear? A Public Service Announcement

My friend Jordan confessed to me last night that a prominent member of Denver's queer activist community had never heard of gay bears. Disturbing to me as a bear aficionado (fetishist). In the interest of public education and to defend the noble tribe of Ursidae Cockavora, I am offering this up as a service to this town. Bears are men, often fat, almost always hairy, sometimes wearing flannel, denim, leather, or other rougher clothes. Bears, unlike twinks, often smell like actual bodies. Their masculine identity could be considered a hypermasculinity, a gender-queer performance of stereotypical "man" behavior.
That being said, this performance is often accompanied with a sissy nature. Bears can be gay, bisexual, or transgender men. Often, bears like to congregate together. While some interpret this as a sign of gender policing, misogyny, exclusivity, or fat-boy elitism, I prefer to think of bear segregation as a way of creating subcultural spaces for the erotic exploration of particular modes of gender performance--hairy fatboy fucking! Some people, often the same folks offended by the idea of hairy fat men getting together to stroke it, choke it, and blow it, can't seem to understand what's hot about bear culture. Unless they spend an evening sleeping on the sweet fat chest of a hairy bear, they will probably never understand.