Tag Archive for 'politics'

Realizing the Impossible / Dark Dark Dark Tour

Published at May 25, 2007 in projects. 0 Comments
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Realizing the Impossible: Art Against Authority Book Tour & Multi-media Event!

Just published on AK Press, Art Against Authority (edited by Josh MacPhee & Erik Reuland) is 300 plus page collection of writing and images investigating the instersections of art and anarchism.

The authors will discuss the book and present documentation of creative art actions from around the world.

Dark Dark Dark will play their music to melt your longing heart.

Dara Greenwald will make you laugh and cry with her revolving and evolving collection of short videos.

Who we are:

Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator and activist whose work often revolves around themes of radical politics, privatization and public space. His first book was Stencil Pirates: A Global Survey of the Street Stencil (Soft Skull Press, 2004). He also organizes the Celebrate People’s History Poster Series and is part of Justseeds Visual Resistance Radical Art Cooperative.

Erik Reuland (AKA Erik Ruin) is a Minneapolis-based, Michigan-raised puppeteer, printmaker, and erratic editor of Trouble In Mind, a zine about the intersection of art, everyday life, and radical politics. He works/has worked with several art collectives, including UpsidedownCulture, Street Art Workers, Prison Poster Project, Barebones Productions, and Justseeds.

Dark Dark Dark is a group of musicians informed by the mountains, plains, seas, and cities in a tradition of exiled wanderers. City Pages of Minneapolis calls it “a gently spooky American folk with eastern European exoticism.”

Dara Greenwald makes short videos that capture the interesting and strange sides of life, subculture, and the bizarre inner workings of her brain. New site coming soon.

Tour Schedule:

Date

City

Venue

Address

Start Time

5/26

Albany

Ironweed/Free School

8 Elm Street, Albany, NY

 

8 pm

 

5/27

Boston

Lucy Parsons

549 Columbus Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts

3pm

5/28

Portland

People’s Free Space

144 Cumberland Ave. Portland, Maine

 

7 pm

5/29

Montpelier

Black Sheep

Langdon Street Café 4 Langdon St. Montpelier, VT

 

7 pm

5/30

Amherst

Food For Thought

106 N.Pleasant Street Amherst, MA

 

7 pm

5/31

Providence

Building 16

39 Manton Ave. Olneyville

 

8:30 pm

6/1

Brooklyn

AdHoc Arts

49 Bogart Street, Buzzer 22, Unit 1G, Brooklyn

6:30 pm

6/2

 New York
(music only show)

ABC No Rio

wi/ Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship?

 

 156 Rivington Street, NY, NY

3pm

6/3

DC

Brian Mackenzie Infoshop

1426 9th St. NW (btw O & P St) Washington, DC

6 pm

6/4

Baltimore

Red Emmas

800 St. Paul St. Baltimore, MD 21202; (410) 230-0450

Call for time

6/5

Philly

Temple Gallery

259 N. Third St., Old City

7 pm

6/6

Connecticut

Wrench in The Works

861 Main Street Willimantic, CT

7 pm

Final Exams and the Bolivarian Process

Published at December 18, 2006 in friends. 0 Comments
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The other night I was instant-messaging with my friend and former student Karina. I met Karina when she was 14 and joined the youth-media program that I was facilitating. Over the four years that I worked with her she grew into a talented and insightful filmmaker; and she’s taught me a lot.

She’s now a first year at Mount Holyoke in Western Masschusetts, and dealing with her first round of final exams. Here’s an excerpt from our IM sesh:

12:07 AM

karina: aww man.
you’re so lucky you’re done with college. :/

me: ha
dude, i’m SO done with college

karina: haha

me: like a decade done with college.

Anyway, despite the drudgery of finals Karina continues to do awesome work. I continue to be thankful for long-standing friendships and am super inspired by what all my far-flung friends and former students are up to (how’s that for alliteration).

Check out Karina’ website about the Bolivarian Revolution:

Above My Head

Published at December 1, 2006 in reading. 0 Comments
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James Baldwin is a goddamned prophet. Each time I read his words I’m left standing, stunned, without words. I’m not even sure how much I can understand of what he’s writing, but I what I get is something about the mess of humanity– the devastation and cruelty and beauty of people, of how we love each other and tear each other apart.

I seldom underline in my books, but I have to keep a pen in my hand when I read Baldwin because it helps me remember. There’s much in there that I need to remember. So I’m going to write some of it down here…every now and again…because over the next bunch of months I’m going to read all of his books. I can’t bear not to. I can’t afford not to.

Right now I’m reading Just Above My Head. I’ll start with something that’s pretty easy to swallow. Before we get into the shit.

I was traveling before the days of electronic surveillance, before the hijackers and the terrorists arrived. For the arrival of these people, the people in the seats of power have only themselves to blame. Who, indeed, has hijacked more than England has, for example, or who is more skilled in the uses of terror than my own unhappy country? Yes, I know: nevertheless, children, what goes around comes around, what you send out comes back to you. A terrorist is called that only because he does not have the power of the State behind him–indeed, he has no State, which is why he is a terrorist. The state, at bottom, and when the chips are down, rules by means of a terror made legal–that is how Franco ruled so long, and is the undeniable truth concerning South Africa. No one called the late J. Edgar Hoover a terrorist, though that is precisely what he was: and if anyone wishes, now, or in this context, to speak of “civilized” values or “democracy” or “morality,” you will pardon this poor nigger if he puts his hand before his mouth, and snickers–if he laughs at you. I have endured your morality for a very long time, am still crawling up out of that dungheap:all that the slave can learn from his master is how to be a slave, and that is not morality.

James Baldwin, Just Above My Head, 1978

1997: Fifth Street Squat

Published at November 21, 2006 in history. 0 Comments
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In the winter of 1997 i was living on Avenue A and 5th Street. I was just finishing college and pretty clueless about…well…most things. But for the purposes of this post, let’s be more specific and say that I was pretty clueless about the squats and the anarchist scene on the Lower East Side. At that point, the only experience I had resembling an interaction with that scene was walking into Blackout Books and getting vibed…hard.

One morning, just after my 23rd birthday, I was walking down Avenue A and saw a whole bunch of police barricades set up on 5th Street between A and B. I asked someone on the street what was going on and they said that the city was about to demolish a building on the street. There had been a small fire in the squat in the middle of the block, and the city was using this opportunity to rid the neighborhood of the building and its residents.

I ran home and grabbed my super8 camera and walked down towards the barricades. I started shooting. I only had one cartridge– about 2.5 minutes. While I was standing on the street, I ran into an acquaintance who lived opposite 5th Street Squat. She let me come up into her apartment and shoot from the fire escape.

The city demolished 5th Street Squat that afternoon, in defiance of a court-issued injunction. The residents’ clothing, belongings, identifications, and even pets were inside. As was Brad Will. Story has it that it was a space heater in Brad’s room that may have caused the fire. Maybe this is had to do with why he would pull something as crazy as defending the building while a wrecking crane was smashing it to pieces. But I imagine, had he not been responsible for the fire, he would have defended the building in the same exact way.

Three weeks ago, while doing video journalism for Indymedia, Brad was shot and killed by plainclothes police (paramilitary) in Oaxaca and a community of people in and beyond New York City are filled with grief and rage. There is a lot of organizing being done in the wake of Brad’s death to show solidarity with the popular movement in Oaxaca. I think he would be proud of his friends.

Over the last ten years, as my own late-blooming activism began to take shape and direction our paths crossed more often and I got a chance to know Brad a little– though not well enough. This footage I shot of him back in 1997 was my first and clearest memory of him– and also a visual representation of one of the most politicizing moments of that part of my life. It’s sad to be digging it out under such shitty circumstances, but important to share.

For more on the situation in Oaxaca, check here.

For the Shadow’s article on 5th Street Squat check here.

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Domino’s Pizza: Right-Wing bastards with flimsy crusts!

Published at November 10, 2006 in news. 0 Comments
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In the midst of:

this Times story may have slipped through the cracks:

Domino’s is now marketing a “Brooklyn-style” pizza. Whatever the hell that means. Anyway, they’ve created this awful (and ugly) website which features a stereotpye-laden, advertising-plastered rendering of a “Brooklyn Neighborhood” (link and pic below). The Times also reports that in addition to the crime of creating the big box store of fast-food pizza, Domino’s founder Thomas S. Monaghan has also been a supporter of anti-abortion orgs like Operation Rescue and “earlier this year announced his intention to build a town called Ave Maria in Florida based on strict Roman Catholic principles.” Whoa.

The part about this story that I like the most is Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz’s response to Domino’s misappropriating Brooklyn culture.

It’s a multinational right-wing company, mass marketing the Brooklyn attitude with obsolete ethnic stereotypes, not to mention flimsy crusts.

Hell yes Marty.

ikea coming soon…

Published at March 15, 2006 in home. 0 Comments
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fuck.

it’s late again

Published at January 10, 2006 in projects. 0 Comments
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well. it’s not that late. but this working full-time stuff, it sure makes 1am feel late. my friend asked me tonight what the hell i was making a blog for. i didn’t have the answer. other than that i wanted to figure this shit out– because i obsess over figuring these kinds of things out. but the main reason, and the reason why no one will ever see this– is because i need a more dynamic journal. i handwrite things so infrequently that my already illegible penmanship has become totally indecipherable even to me. i have a text document that’s been running now for years– it has music, voice, images, writing…all kinds of things. but it’s clunky. and ugly. and i can’t get to it when i’m travelling because it exists on a harddrive. so, i thought i’d give this a crack.

anyway, the thing that concerns me most is the ability to embed files. so many of the projects that i’m working on or have worked on are in some digital format that i’d like to store here.
this past summer, before i started the full time job, my friend sumitra and i came up with the idea to create a media history timeline. it was based on project south’s curriculum. the top is above-ground media history– including technological developments, regulatory precedents, well-known milestones, and notable trends. on the bottom is a more ‘underground’ or resistant media history. the dichotomy is somewhat arbitrary and admittedly simplistic. but, i thought it would be interesting to create some sort of graphic representation to illustrate some developments in the world of media, both parallel and divergent– and, more importantly, to create something that media activists, media makers, and educators can use as a tool to teach and learn about the legacy of independent media and also to help us situate ourselves in a trajectory…a history that came before us and a future that we will continue to shape. goodnight and good luck.



right-click/ctrl-click and ’save as’ to download. open with any pdf viewer, illustrator, svg viewer, etc… then zoom way the hell in and scroll around.