Cautiva and Los Desaparecidos

Alex and I went to see Cautiva tonight, an Argentine film dealing with the children of people disappeared by Argentina's last dictatorship, notably American supported. The film starts off slowly and quickly becomes an examination of how identity can be erased and then revealed through historical examination. One of my favorite video collectives, Grupo Alavio has spent time making movies about the protests against those people complicit in the disappearances. According to Cautiva, over 30,000 people were disappeared by the US backed dictatorship. For those of you who speak Spanish, many of their videos can be found on the pan-Latin American radical Internet television station, AgoraTV.

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Charged in the Name of Terror

I want to bring your attention to a program of videos Video Artist/Activist Paul Chan curated for Sundance. Charged in the Name of Terror consists of Untitled Video on Lynne Stewart and Her Conviction, The Law and Poetry (2006) By Paul Chan | Running time 17:30, Steve Kurtz Waiting (2006) By Jim Fetterley and Angie Waller | Running Time 15:32, For the Least (2007) By Susan Youssef | Running Time 6:55, and Mohamed Yousry: A Life Stands Still (2006) By Mary Billyou and Annelisse Fifi | Running Time 20:00
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Dead Prez and The Pirate Signal: Damn I'm Tired!

Tonight I finally got to see Dead Prez after many many many years of loving them. What a show. I'm so glad Kevin recorded M-1 when he spoke in Boulder. From what he says, it's going to be a great keynote on Free Speech TV! It's high time we had more hip hop on our network! I was also really into The Pirate Signal, a local act from denver. What a night!

Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority

Great news! Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland's anthology Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority was just put out by AK Press. This incredible anthology addresses the relationship between aesthetics and politics in anti-authoritarian social movements. I'm really excited because they decided to publish my article "Beyond Authenticity: Aesthetic Strategies and Anarchist Media." This essay came out of a talk I gave at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference in 2006. The book also contains essays by some of my favorite people: Dara Greenwald, Brett Bloom, and Josh, Nato Thompson, Also articles by other people whose work I know an love! Alan Antliff, Erika Biddle, Cindy Milstein, and Nicholas Lampert! Happy Reading!

"A Convenient Oscar"

Dare I admit it, I'm irritated Al Gore's Power Point presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar last night. As informative as this movie is about Global Warming, the solutions it offers are ridiculous. A former Vice-President, who made neither a jot nor tiddle of difference in the second-highest ranking office in the country regarding global warming, has the audacity to argue that turning off your light bulbs and supporting "good willed" political candidates are adequate solutions. He fails to say "stop driving your goddamned murder machine fueled by the deaths of future generation" and instead says "drive less" and "drive hybrids." Was his limo a hybrid? Even so, how many fossil fuels did it take to build it? Why didn't he ride a bike instead? What coal-fired power plants were used to generate the electricity to run his nifty presentations?

The fact is, nothing short of industrial collapse can get us out of this capitalist mess. Even then, we're probably screwed. While Gore's movie fairly represents the horror we are facing, it fails to present valid solutions. It's just one more political tapdance as the earth implodes. As Gore drives around in a limo and flies on airplanes, wasting fossil fuels, we all get a sense of just how serious this rich, oil investor is about solving global warming through personal solutions. He'd be better off recommending that people take out the infrastructure that runs this ecologically genocidal industrial economy than being one more rich white guy telling average people that Global Warming is their fault.

Pandora: The Computer DJ

So yesterday at work I was struggling to get through a whole ot of data entry and decided I needed to listen to the radio. I spent a few minutes foibling through Live365 Stations trying to get them to work. My friend Madelaine was at the copy machine across the hall and I grumbled to her about my frustration. She said, "have you tried Pandora?" I hadn't. So she got me to go to pandora.com, a radio station created by the Music Genome Project. A group of musicians, musicologists, and music geeks got together and created aproximately 400+ attributes of various songs. At pandora.com, you enter a song or artist you like and it actually creates a radio station based on shared attributes. The service is free and paid for by advertising. It's totally worth checking out! I've been listening to a mix of The Coup, Against Me! and Scott Matthew attributed songs. It's bliss!

Suheir Hammad: Poetry and Revolution

Last night KGNU and the Pan-African Arts Society brought Suheir Hammad, Brooklyn-based, Palestenian poet to the Ashbury Events Center here in Denver. Prior to reading her poems, we were graced by the presence of spoken word artist Rodzilla, who devestated the audience spitting out words and associations that blew us all way. Crysta Bell, Seattle based artist, was equally rivetting, giving a breakdown of how women should love their kootchies. Finally Hammad got up to speak and used words to find beauty in unrecognizably painful experiences. Her words incited a revolution of the soul, a desire to make change, and to settle for nothing less than peace, love, and compassion. Not in some hippy-dippy sense. In a revolutionary way. Her words gave me hope that revolution was not lost, that possibility exists, that love can transcend the body, the mind, the soul. Tears streamed down my face as she pronounced her love of criminals, demonstrating through her poetry that they were of the highest order of humanity. Hammad has a new book called Zaatar Diva, that is apparently sold out. It's a shame, cause I want to read her lines over and over and let them shake me up and wreck me.