the t-shirt

When we were saying our goodbyes after the election party, Eileen asked me what I was going to do now with the t-shirt I was wearing.

And I realized that for the first time in my 41 years of life, I could and WOULD actually wear a picture of a US President and feel genuine and proud.

inspired Frontline World videos

Check out: Kenya: Sweet Home Obama

Expectations weigh heavy on Kenya's native sons

BY EDWIN OKONG'O

AND

Brazil: The Obama Samba

Brazilian politicians find inspiration a continent away

BY ANDRÉS CEDIEL

Alice Walker's open letter to Obama

An Open Letter to Barack Obama

from Alice Walker, published on  TheRoot.com   

Nov. 5, 2008

Dear Brother Obama,

You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States. You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history. But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear. And yet, this observation is not intended to burden you, for you are of a different time, and, indeed, because of all the relay runners before you, North America is a different place. It is really only to say: Well done. We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us, in us, the best of the spirit of Africa and of the Americas. Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength. Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.

I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

I would further advise you not to take on other people's enemies. Most damage that others do to us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion. We must learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise. It is understood by all that you are commander in chief of the United States and are sworn to protect our beloved country; this we understand, completely. However, as my mother used to say, quoting a Bible with which I often fought, "hate the sin, but love the sinner." There must be no more crushing of whole communities, no more torture, no more dehumanizing as a means of ruling a people's spirit. This has already happened to people of color, poor people, women, children. We see where this leads, where it has led.

A good model of how to "work with the enemy" internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

In Peace and Joy,
Alice Walker

voting pix

Jimmy Carter's Malaise Speech, 1979

President Jimmy Carter - "Crisis of Confidence" on YouTube

text of Jimmy Carter's "Malaise Speech, July 15, 1979"

Was this the last time any US President spoke fully honestly and openly directly to the public and told them what they really see and what we need to do about it?  I heard some pundit call this was the speech that nailed the coffin of his 1980 2nd term run against Reagan.

There is a certain arrogance in Carter that feels off putting.  He's didactic and talks down in way. He's not inspiring the way that JFK could explain the state of things with poetry and up lift us to follow him.

The Rosenbergs

I watched Ivy Meeropol's documentary about her grandparents the other night, Heir to an Execution.  

Oh, to be a granddaughter of the Rosenberg's - lefty Jews from the lower east side executed by the state for supposedly passing secrets about the atomic bomb to the Russians.  They maintained their innocence for the crimes of which they were convicted through their electric chairs.  

Tony Kushner, who chose Ethel to be on of the Angels in Angels in America, was interviewed in the extras section.  The difference between an actual relative and a symbol is in the minds of the people who invoke them.  Terrorists to nazis, terrorists to McCarthy, terrorists to the news media, the mass hysterics we all become aided and abetted by our need to belong.

And then there is love. Love which binds you to action, to conviction, to belief beyond your children, acting for posterity, nobility, and grace into death.

psychic bedbugs

we've been invaded by psychic bedbugs.  I know how hard they are to get rid of... but it's time to throw our metaphorical mattresses out and clean house.

“the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull”

EWWWWWWW.  I don't know which is more horrifying: a veep who thinks that likening herself to a pit bull is a positive association or touting wearing lipstick as something that defines her!  Gross.

Guess we're signing on for 3 more months of culture wars.... 

From todays's NY Times front page article : Ms. Palin also displayed humor in one of her biggest lines of the night when she said that “the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull” was “lipstick.”

the cloud

cloud: location of all information, the infinitely accessible power, that through which we fly 

daedalus' project for human flight, the urge for limitlessness -  empire and the abdication of responsibility

david pogue's enthusiasm about me.com is troubling to me.  I think he too blithly believes in the benevolence of corporate america. yes, apple. one empire begets another. the smug satisfaction of the way that MobileMe dismisses Internet Explorer -- a put down ten years in the making: MobileMe won't work with Internet Explorer since it “has known compatibility issues with modern Web standards."  But, really, we're just being swallowed by a giant with a different name.  Minotaurs and mazes -- the trap of the human mind - we just can't help ourselves, drawing ourselves into a corner with our brain.

The apple v. pc war - a branding shift, like obama v. bush -- dominance can't believe it's here but it does believe its power and dominance is for the general good, since the idea of the general good has been so deeply corrupted into outright hypocrisy.  I think Marshall Curry's "Street Fight" told our story - Cory Booker is so much a parallel to Obama, albiet on our local Newark, NJ scale.

forget me not the farm

images from the edible office farm residency

the Mondaneum & the Geodesic Dome

I just read this fascinating article about Paul Otlet (b. 1868), a Belgian librarian who, in 1934, created a plan for a network of electronic telescopes that would allow people to search into and browse through millions of interlinked documents and images.

This is a picture of his Mondaneum (mon-da-NAY-um) - his library and research operation.  This images on the wall, I'm guessing, represent his graphic system to create symbol links between articles and pieces of information. There's a museum of his work in Mons, Belgium that's having its 10th anniversary right now.

And starting June 26,  Whitney Museum is going  to launch this big retrospective of Buckminster Fuller's career ("Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe") -- there was a great article about him in the New Yorker (June 9 &16,2008 issue). 

 (See online NYer slide show.)

Both failed in their careers, Otlet because the Nazi's invaded Belgium and destroyed his work, and Fuller, because of the failure of his inventions to work well -- but both men were visionaries whose visions have somehow captured our contemporary realities -- Otlet's vision which basically foresaw the web in a startingly specific concept -- and Fuller's concepts (albiet somewhat misguided) of an ecologically sustainable future in relation to technology, architecture and travel.

All of which makes me think about 20th century visions of the future and outdated futurisms.  What is it that's so fascinating about looking back at these moments when the world was radically different than our own in terms of our individual relationship to technology and communication -- and seeing the seeds of our current gardens being planted.  There's is strange kind of nostalgia and fascination for finding these citizens of present day reality marooned in some early time, trying to build their time machines into our current day or even future day world -- things we take for granted were pipedreams for them -- hallucinatory romps.  

In the NYTimes article about Otlet, the writer keeps trying to say that Otlet would have been confounded by Facebook or overwhelmed by today's web - which strikes me as totally ridiculous to posit -- why wouldn't they have been interested or just disgusted by it?  But I guess it's normal to want to reverse the time-trip back on them... 

Hillary, 2000 & the year of the rat

Although I thought she should have dropped out after those horrible RFK comments, in light of the HBO "Recount" film, Hillary's tenacity makes me think that, at the very least, she wouldn't have given up when the election was stolen.... Not saying that I wish she had been the nomination, since I still can't forgive her for voting to authorize Bush's war, but it does make one think that maybe there is something healing in Hilary's refusal to let go before she did so.

A Rat Year is a time of hard work, activity, and renewal. This is a good year to begin a new job, get married, launch a product or make a fresh start. Ventures begun now may not yield fast returns, but opportunities will come for people who are well prepared and resourceful. The best way for you to succeed is to be patient, let things develop slowly, and make the most of every opening you can find. People born in an Earth Rat are said to be logical realists, shrewd, charming, ambitious, and inventive. Of course, the entire horoscope must be considered when making any personality assessment.

2008 - paradigm shift - year one (add up 2 - 0 - 0 - 8 = 10 = 1)1

protean

Calm in the Swirl of History.  Barack's 'victory speech' on YouTube. 

So I just finished watching the HBO 'Recount' show.  Crying some tears about the failure to stand up and fight against theft and corruption of  power.  Though the film did an interesting job of really laying out the nuanced shades of that particular fight and that particular time.

Kevin Spacey did a great job of being the soul behind the Gore recount theft.  Though, the real star of the show was Laura Dern as Katherine Harris who conflates Queen Esther with a fame hungry, southern Christian 'good girl' who perhaps believes that she is saving "the little Jewish people" by delivering Bush.  The strange Bob Balaban character Ginsburg who was Bush's campaign attorney - is he a self-hating Jew wanting to hang out in the Power Boys club?  I think maybe he's more one of those Zionist Jews who willed Bush into being so that he would kick some ass in the Middle East and stand up for Israel.  (And look, he's really did kick ass in the Middle East).  Interesting to find out that Lieberman was a turncoat all the way back then in 2000, when he stood up for counting all military ballots not just the ones dated & signed.  (I wonder, was that the HBO spin or genuine history?)

So what is this thing that the NY Times reports: "His (Obama's) operatives slapped down attempts to rerun primaries in Michigan and Florida... An old Chicago hand notes that Mr. Obama seems to have read his Niccolò Machiavelli."

Obama just called our nation "the last best hope on earth."  I really want to believe that stands for the ability to reach past shallow patriotism to a more humanist view of country as a place and not the only place; country as part of community and not apart from it.  

Or maybe it's just that we are at that moment where this is the last best hope on earth, right here, right now.  If we can really turn this thing around - this SOB SUV of a country we're still in...

Oh idealism, stay here.  Help us get through the trying times, make us strong and ever fighting for truth, justice and a way past what has come recently to be defined as American.  Bring us back our Quakers, our abolitionists, our native forebearers.  The urban fighters for unions, the treehuggers, the anti-war activists, the soldiers who stand up and fight against injustice and intolerence - who stand up against corrupt generals and defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights .  Let us remember to honor the land.  Let us remember to honor all creatures, great and small, and the deities among us, the trees, the waters, the fields.

Try the war criminals.  Impeach the bastard.  Let's hope that change isn't just a flip of the coin, but a true paradigm shift, a full revolution in the great wheel of fortune.

The Real Deal!

see the NYTimes article today!   Here's to leaders that are truly leaders!

a message from my neighbor

male bonding at La Mama

I went to the "Male Bonding" show at the La Mama Moves! Dance Festival 2008 which featured in particular new work-in-progress by John Jasperse and a new solo by Miguel Gutierrez.  (That's Miguel in the picture.)

I was kind of blown away by John's piece"Excerpts from Pure (work-in-progress) -- it was a sort of hyper design dance mixed with a documentary tendancy -- there is this exquisite liquid release trio by Erin Cornell, Eleanor Hullihan & Kayvon Pourazar -and then John comes and tries and talks about how he can't perfect this pirouette -- the way in which nothing can ever be good enough, or maybe, the way in which dance is a continuous process of redoing and continually looking for the ways in which ones body can find another avenue to move toward the elusiveness of perfection.   There're series of solo improvisations - timed and when the timer runs out the dancer talks - an improv ramble through what seems like the thoughts behind the dance.  Eleanor ups the ante by talking about the stairs at SUNY Purchase being riot proof -- and then Crosby Stills & Nash "Ohio" plays as the next section -- the 10 ft tall woman enters (Erin on Kayvon's shoulders- hidden under a long skirt) --there is that Janis Joplin song playing "Summertime"  and I thought about feminism and the 70's and the way in which women had to enter the scene so much larger than life back then or maybe just (Hillary) NOW.  It seemed it was a dance about the separation between the head and the torso....   And then  John in all black suit as Eleanor's shadow -- an idea that I found both charming and slightly raw...  It's all a jumble in my mind now but I was with the piece the whole way through....

Miguel's solo, "No, Nothing" (though it's identified in the program as "Nothing, No thing") starts hilariously, conceptually -- he checks his phone for what seems like a very long time -- reading his text messages? on state -- and then begins what reveals itself to be the same pattern - long dance followed by monologue -- perhaps that pattern is the way of the males (?) -- 

His dance began by showing his elbows -- a beautiful gesture -- the ultimate safe vulnerability - like giving blood... he takes a step - times slowes way down -- there is imaginary articulateness and then a kind of stamping ape of John's luxurious type of liquid release - where John is melty, Miguel has a sort of cyntriphical release force - he throws himself, Jennifer Monson-like, onto his knees and then the bottoms of his feet -- after a time it felt a bit long (indulgent) but just as I started really shifting in my seat the cellphone alarm went off and Miguel began his crazy dark monologue of dark self confessions - another kind of compulsive truth-telling trip into the dark edges of his childhood dream to become an artist and where that has taken him -- the monologue brilliantly ends into very loud what seemed like EuroClubDance music -- it's an extended ride through Miguel's imagination as if dancing in a club far away from home.... told in the second person - implicating us in his "deeply uncurious thoughts about others."  The lighting throughout, I might add, was brilliant -- Leonore Doxsee delivering a lighting shift at just the perfect moment to accentuate or create a new atmosphere.  

The monologue's poetry sailed above -- and into the angular jutting urgency of the dance.  "This thing of no value - you give it away repeatedly... why give it away - it's so private... like a soap bubble, the vibration of a cellphone or a baby's cry will destroy it..."

the wave

So, I went to a YANKEE'S game on Sunday and this amazing thing happened.  The home team, the bronx bombers, were down 5 to 2 against the Seattle Mariners.  And then this wave started.... one section of the crowd did the wave and it just kept sequentially going through the whole stadium -- it went around like 3 times!  It was amazing.  The stats on the board said there were upwards of 53,000 people at the game -- it started way up in the bleachers and then it was like a yawn, totally contagious -- it just kept going around -  it even went from the section before this big gap in the audience (batting cage & big scoreboard part of the stadium w/ no stands) -- and in perfect timing - the other part of the stadium picked up the wave and kept passing it around.  I don't know if I've ever seen anything like that.  But it did make me believe in the power of the crowd -- and after that - the Yankees scored big -- 3 runs, surpassing the Mariners and won.  It was the will of the crowd. 

 

That experience almost offset the sinking feeling I had when they announced all the military stuff and I realized that professional sports is just one more part of the military-commercialization-complex in which we live.

the tyranny of connectedness

'INDIANA JONES AND THE ACHES AND PAINS ASSOCIATED WITH AGING'

I love that they chose this cartoon to put in the midst of the amazing and beautiful article by Calvin Tomkins about Paul Chan, "Shadow Player."  (New Yorker, p. 40-45, May 26, 2008 edition)

somehow it softens the blows of the middle age regarding the ascendancy of the fierce youth in our midst --

other highlights include: the photo of him by Steve Pyke that makes the shadow of his projection look as if there's a japanese rising sun bandana tied around his forehead, chinese brush painted calligraphy on his chest...

and these inspiring & inspired Paul Chan thoughts from the article:

"Certain works of art resist our attempts to interpret or explain them, Chan believes, and that resistence - what he calls their 'articulate speechlessness' - is what gives them enduring power."

"Part of the pleasure of reading Derrida is precisely that I do not have to understand him. Comprehension is not the game. I don't care what he thinks he's saying _ I want to read word for word, and pay attention so much that I begin to hallucinate. Which I think is a very reckless way of reading, but for me a productive one."

internet access = "the tyranny of connectedness"

urban outfitter progress

I came upon this display at the Urban Outfitters on Broadway.

the green Obama t-shirt says "Obama says knock you out" -- what does that mean???  it's so weird!

The whole display included this too:

Stephen Colbert & the matching books "How to Win a Fight with a Liberal" "How to Win a Fight with a Conservative."  

I find this deeply creepy.  I think that the store people (liberals from Boston who genuinely support Obama???) think that they are supporting the Obama cause with this sort of thing.  Or are they just making fun of the whole "political" season.  I mean, maybe I'm over thinking this... but I feel like the emptying out of real content -- let's jump on the fashion bandwagon and make money off of the image... commercialization of 'hip' is exactly why people in the middle (age/america) don't 'trust' the "Obama thing" - as it's portrayed -- it's hip to be green, it's hip to like Obama -- let's spend money on the t-shirt so we'll be cool -- but don't worry, it's all for laughs - we don't really believe anything.

Yuck!  I did buy a pair of cute sear-sucker shorts there though.