The Unlubed Left

Perhaps it's short-sighted of me me in a patriarchal culture to fret too much over my emotions and the feelings of those I work with; however, I am not convinced that quality work can be done without our emotional lives being fed. Conservative politics excelled because they addressed peoples emotional lives through church groups, fraternal orders, and business leagues. The Left has abjectly failed in creating emotionally supportive, need based structures and in doing so has often touted the importance of efficiency and neglected feelings. Doing so has cost us our ability to move forward--the left is like an rusty bicycle chain--unlubed, loud, and unproductive.

The Photographs of Richard Renaldi

My friend Bart sent me a link to the website of photographer Richard Renaldi, a artist who captures the lonely intimacy of subjects leading lives of quiet desperation. In color and mood, the photographs remind me of the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, an artist Renaldi cites on his blog. Both artists capture characters inseparable from mundane yet dramatic landscapes, illuminated by muted, suggestive colors, the chromatic calm before the storm. Many of Renaldi's subjects look at the camera, caught in untold narratives, self-conscious in a moment of anticipation, perhaps erotic, perhaps violent.

Bloodstained and Tearsoaked

According to David Schimke's article The Morning After in The Utne Reader:

"As philosopher and egalitarian intellectual Cornel West writes in his new book, Hope on a Tightrope, wisdom 'comes from wrestling with despair and not letting despair have the last word. That's why hope is always bloodstained and tear-soaked.

And hope gives us strength to continue to try to...keep struggling for more love, more justice, more freedom, and more democracy.'"

West's notion of hope appears to transcend the easy word many bandy about. It's dialectically entwined with despair. I admire West's quote and look forward to reading his book.

The Tender Land: A Family Memoir

As a person whose family has been haunted by depression, reading The Tender Land: A Family Love Story, Kathleen Finneran's memoir, I felt melancholy, joy, and a will to experience the crazy kaleidoscope of nostalgia that family life can be. From uproarious laughter to outbursts of tears, reading her prose resurrected emotions long buried and a somber love of life unusual for me to feel. I hope you get a chance to read it. Its' stunning.

Occupations and Properties

Check out historian Alan Moore's upcoming blog on spatial occupations, squatting, and other aspects of the social center movement!

Enjoy!

Colorado Queer Youth Summit

Yesterday morning Jessi and I headed to the Colorado Queer Youth Summit where she did a counter-recruitment presentation and I talked to a small roomful of folks about 50 years of radical queer cinema, shifts in queer politics, debates about assimilation, class, race, and historical revisioning in less that 45 minutes! What a whirlwind.

The entire event was incredible. About 150 LGBTQ youth from all over the state got together at the University of Denver to strategize, plan, educate and learn!

So many inspirational people together, made this a summit I was proud to be a part of!

Talking Food Justice at Solar

Friday night I joined a few dozen people at Solar, a soon-to-be plant-based cafe and community space in Five Points for a private screening of The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. The restaurant's chef and owner, Faatma Mehrmanesh, featured on Free Speech TV's show The Activist Studio prepared an incredible dinner, Hillary brought a bunch of home-made mead, and the evening ended in a provocative visioning session where people talked about everything from planting sunflowers in public spaces, community self-determination and organization in black and brown neighborhoods and communities, to the libratory potential of home-grown medical solutions. It was a fabulous opportunity for folks to get together to look for ecologically sustainable solutions in an urban context! Next up, tearing up the asphalt and planting some food!

GROWWWWWLLLLLL!

The silhouette of the Front Range basks in creamcicle orange. T-Pain is blasting You Can Have Whatever You Like and I'm thinking about the future, wishing his words were true. Though it's great to have Bush out of office, I'm nervous about the Democrats in power. According to the ACLU, 50% of the Constitution is violated in The USA Patriot Act. Will the Dems violate the other 50? Will they finally close Guantanamo? Will they release all the children detained as "enemy combatants?" Will Afghanistan be destroyed, again, and again, and again? What about the Palestinian people? What about those rotting in prison?

So many people feel that Obama's election can repair our relations with the hundreds of countries we've destroyed and alienated. I fear the blow-back has yet to come from 8 years of Bush.

At a very basic level, I'm feeling cranky at the Left for its failures to stop the War in Iraq and its failures to stop the war against Afghanistan.

Growwwwwllllllllll!

Happy MLK Day Anyway!

It is a warm spring-like day, Martin Luther King Jr. day, the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama, the first black president of the United States of America, a cease-fire between Israel and Palestine has been called, and Israeli troops claim to be withdrawing. Today is a tentatively peaceful day, gentle, a day for cleaning-up bloodbaths in Palestine and for celebrating the end of the last 8 years of the United States Presidency.

It is also a day of occupations--hundreds of them. Police swarming neighborhoods, two-million people rotting in cages, Iraq and Afghanistan flooded with US troops, Palestine destroyed, environmental devastation on Native lands, fences in Israel and fences on the US-Mexico Border.

How do we reconcile ourselves with this consistent, enormous violence and these feelings of peace?

We live, we breath, we fight, we die. Sometimes we enjoy a pleasant day as a background for our tears and our struggle. Sometimes we laugh anyways.

Finding Peace in Times of War

I am finishing a lovely, busy day at Free Speech TV and looking forward to cooking a giant stir-fry at home. Every day I am so enthralled by the people I work with, the issues we deal with, and the social movements we have the privilege of working alongside. Often, our workplace environment is quite an intense place--producers, donors, activists calling with their thousand-and-one demands. We do our best to manage these relationships and continue to do our work thoroughly, steadily, and to the best of our ability.

With the wars raging in Palestine, simmering in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is easy to get carried away by the millions of incredible needs.

It is our obligation to maintain our balance in this time, to show to the world that we are committed to taking care of ourselves and each other, even as we stand up against the violence of this system and attempt to create progressive social change.

I am reflecting a great deal on Thomas Merton's quote, wondering whether or not I agree with his premise.

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence (and that is) activism and overwork....The rush and pressure of modern life are a form of violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our won work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Freedom of Depression: The Art of Dylan Scholinski

For those of you who are not familiar with the deeply disturbing, textually rich, pomo-expressionist, radical paintings of Dylan Scholinski, you should check his work out. He is the author of The Last Time I Wore a Dress: A Memoir and a prolific painter and public speaker. He is also the founder of The Sent(a)Mental Project: A Memorial to Suicide.

Unhappy New Year

I have often used the tagline "pleasure, revolt, despair" to describe my personal-political disposition. Entering 2009, my heart is filled with the latter. The Israeli invasion of Gaza, the continued occupation of Iraq, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, and the war against immigrants, people of color, women, and queers continues to cost thousands of lives. With all the celebration in the U.S. cities over the past year, we have heard so little frustration, strategy, revolt.

May this empire of greed and destruction collapse. May the oppressed be liberated. May 2009 bring down the violence of the United States of America.