Yikes! Our Interviews

In the interest of horrifying you with my flapping arms, I did a video interview with my friend Lee for Journeystreams, a project National Geographic is working on about Digital Storytellers. If you go to their main site, you will also find interviews with my friend radio/film producer Alex Fountain and friend/video producer Libby Mann.

Lee Buric is an amazing producer who has worked for Democracy Now!, is one of Free Speech TV's regular stringers, and consistently uses media to advance social change. It was an honor to get to work with her!

Hyperlocalism

I adore poet Maggie Anderson's line:

History is one long story of what happened to us,
and its rhythms are local dialect and anecdote.

Beyond the violence of the academy, the failures of hegemonic narrative, the sweatless, bloodless, sexless sterility of Wikipedia, the quantitative perversion of sociology, psychology, and political science, Anderson's line suggests that history is of the people and their stories. At Free Speech TV, I have the opportunity to work with groups like Appalshop, Global Action Project, SCRIBE, Denver Open Media, and dozens of community cable stations. Doing this work, I witness hyperlocalism in real time. Media creates the opportunity for localisms to merge in a web of interactive revolutionary possibility as structured as flows of exploitation via capitalism. Interconnected local dialects and anecdotes create a formal, social, cultural machine capable of both maintaining and destroying oppressive systems of capitalism, government, and oppression.

Art Threat

If you've not come across this blog, Art Threat does a great job reviewing a variety of art projects in a political context. Check it!

From their website
"Set against a cultural landscape saturated with profit pop and reality TV, Art Threat is a website about political art. We showcase political artists who mix art and politics to create artwork seeking social change."

Stacy Sent Me a Sweet NPR Story

My friend Stacy, a badass editor, amazing friend, and wonderful artist, sent me and a few others this incredible NPR story about a man who treated his mugger right. This made me a bit teary. What I love about this story is that instead of calling the police, this guy was just so friggin' sweet and understood the motives that make people steal. While I can get a bit rant-abulous, Julio Diaz, the protagonist of the story, demonstrates the kind of behavior that could get us out of the violence and horror of our contemporary world.

4000 Dead

The four-thousandth U.S. soldier has been killed in Iraq and the war has yet to come home. While our government sends young people of color to kill other people of color in Iraq, our nation continues to consume. The death of U.S. and Iraqi youth hardly phases us. We are distracted and as a result people continue to die.

The United States is killing its children and destroying Iraq. We must fight this murderous system at every turn.

Appropriate Ressurections: An Easter Manifesto

Jesus has been killed so many times: first by the Roman State, then by the various Christian states, Empires, monarchies who killed, tortured, pillaged, and raped in his name, and finally today by the mulitnational capitalists who take advantage of poor people, spread war, and hatred while espousing so called "Christianity." Christianity is the final thorn in his crown, stab in his side, nail in his wrist. Jesus taught messages of love, resistance, and equality. The church kills him when they ignore the poor, support genocidal wars in Iraq, enable the suffering of the Palestinians abroad and communities of color at home. The same people who killed Jesus run the church today. Everyday they crucify him in a million ways.

So when a preacher with strong language and analysis enters the American imaginary, the media, churches, and parties crucify him like they crucified Jesus. Reverend Jeremiah Wright has suffered the gauntlet of the ideological state apparatus as Barack Obama has struggled to get into a seat of power. For acknowledging racism and genocidal foreign policy, he has been denigrated by Obama and the public alike.

To be Christlike, or Christian, a person must follow in the footsteps of Jesus and confront the horrors of the contemporary world, bare witness to the suffering of others. This is the Jesus and the Christianity that should be resurrected this year. The self-help megachurches and their capitalist empires should fall like Babylon, turn to salt like Sodom and Gomorrah and those who bare witness, multiply food and wine, comfort and love should rejoice. They are the true Christians and in each witness of human suffering, each act of selfless kindness and humility, each confrontation of the state, Jesus is resurrected.

I Like "Stuff White People Like"

White narcissism is back with gusto. A week or so ago my friend Kelly and I were eating dinner and ranting about white people (of course both of us are white...this is what we do...). He introduced me to an incredible website, Stuff White People Like. If you haven't had a chance to check it, you've got to. Whether you're white or not, this site is all the rage amongst people stuck around various aspects of white culture.