Hand Held Visions

1968

2012-02-21T23:40:00.001-05:00

thank you John Douglas

Paper Tiger Exhibition at Fales

2012-02-07T08:40:00.000-05:00

Camcorder Commando

Bifo Manifesto

2011-08-02T15:02:00.000-04:00

IAMCR in Istanbul

2011-07-14T03:32:00.000-04:00

From a history of the organization by Kaarle Nordenstreng and Cees Hamelink:

The history of the IAMCR goes back to the first years of Unesco. Its Committee on Technical Needs in the Mass Media drafted in 1946 a constitution for an “International Institute of the Press and information, designed to promote the training of journalists and the study of press problems throughout the world............

IAMCR reception in Prague 1984.
From left to right: Robin Cheesman (Section Head, Denmark), Kaarle Nordenstreng (Vice President, Finland), Cees Hamelink (Vice President, The Netherlands) and Peggy Gray (President Halloran's executive assistant, UK).
Over the five decades the aims and scope of the Association remained focused on the creation of a global forum where researchers and others involved in media and communication can meet and exchange information about their work. The Association wants to stimulate interest in media and communication research, to disseminate information about research and to create a broad constituency of researchers, practitioners and policymakers.

Throughout its history the Association has adopted public statements on such issues as the protection of journalists, the right to communicate, the freedom of research, the support for international communication policies in the service of democratic development, and the need to contribute to the improvement of communication facilities in the Third World. The concern about public presence of communication research and its role in public life has been a leading motive throughout the years. This became very concrete in the contributions of the IAMCR made to the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 (Geneva) and in 2005 (Tunis).

*******************

BRIEF REPORT FROM THE OPENING OF THE IAMCR CONFERENCE IN ISTANBUL

Over the years, IAMCR was unusual in the fact that several of their meetings took place in Eastern Europe (Prague, Bled, Leipzig), during intense cold war years. In addition there was an implicit support for the principles of the MacBride Report, which was viciously fought by the US, to the extent that funding for UNESCO and the UN itself was dropped because of the commission's report. In what seems like a reversal of previous policy, this year's IAMCR meeting saw the organization's annual award presented to Eliu Katz, who made concerted efforts to undermine the NWICO (New World Information and Communication Order) principles in discussions at the time. Katz promulgated a theory of "active audience" which undercut the position of cultural imperialism and the need for democratic access to information technology and equitable means of expression.

In addition, another award was presented to a local scholar and official Turkish UNESCO rep during the harsh 1950s whose stance on "free flow of information" paralleled that of the US State Department at that time.

Two of the usual annual awards (the Herb Schiller Award and the Dallas Smythe Award-- two researchers who were adamantly critical of the corporate and imperial stance against NWICO by US policy makers and dictatorial regimes such as Turkey at the time) seem to be conveniently forgotten in the current revisions of IAMCR's position. Those awards were not included in the ceremony.

What was included was a long cello and piano recital of Bach and Italian medleys -- finishing with several compositions by the pianist in what has to be called easy listening style.

-- DeeDee Halleck, Istanbul, July 13, 2011.

Shut It Down!!!

2011-06-07T07:25:00.000-04:00

Some short random clips from Mary Frank's Opening May 5, 2011

2011-05-06T19:39:00.002-04:00

Remembering Hazel (1935-2011)

2011-04-23T13:00:00.010-04:00

Me listening to Jeremy on the fiddle at Margie's wedding. Photo by John Cohen

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/hazel-dickens-bluegrass-pioneer-who-sang-of-miners-and-downtrodden-dies-at-75/2011/04/22/AFPGscRE_story.html

When I was a student at Antioch in 1958 I used to hang out at a ramshackle clapboard house that was practically on campus and the source of consternation for the college administration and the Yellow Springs "civic improvement association". A non-functioning Bendix washer made the yard closer to Appalachia than Central Ohio suburbia and the sounds of guitar picking were pretty much always heard through the pushed-out-screen door. It was where Jeremy Foster and Alice Gerrard Foster lived with their red-haired toddler Coralee. I was the eldest of four girls and had recently left my Tennessee family and my own younger red haired sisters and being at the Fosters was the closest thing to home for me.

One afternoon the Fosters were especially excited-- "Stick around," Jeremy said--a friend was coming by-- her name was Hazel and she was from West Virginia. Jeremy and Alice weren't from the mountains-- Jeremy was from outside DC and Alice was a California Valley girl. But they loved country music. REAL authentic country music, not, as Jeremy used to put it, "Fuck music" of the sort that co-eds from Greenwich Village moaned in their Antioch dorm rooms.

As Alice and Jeremy bustled about changing sheets on the pull-out couch, it was clear that they thought Hazel was the real thing. I imagined a Dorothea Lange sort of hillbilly, earthy type, maybe dressed in a flour sack shift, perhaps driving a rattletrap Ford pick-up. I couldn't wait! After several hours of anxious expectation, a car did pull in to the Foster's drive way, not a hillbilly truck, but the biggest, fanciest limo I had ever seen. Out stepped a woman with a bee-hive hair-do, heavy make-up and a shiny red dress with a big slit up the thigh. Hazel wasn't coming directly from the mountains of West Virginia, but from Baltimore where she was working the bars.

Jeremy and Alice were overjoyed to see her and laughed at my surprise. Within a few minutes of driving up, she took out a guitar and she and Alice picked and sang a Carter Family song together. I think it was "Chawing, chewing gum..." Yes, Hazel was authentic. She was the best singer I had ever heard and I sat with Coralee on my lap for the rest of the afternoon listening to an amazing song swap.

Jeremy died a few years later in an accident on a DC beltway. Alice and Hazel ended up forming a team and recording several LPs with many original songs. Coralee is now a physician in Ithaca, I think, and Alice is living in the mountains of North Carolina. And Hazel died today.

Hazel Dickens, 1935 -2011 An Obituary

by John Pietaro

http://theculturalworker.blogspot.com/2011/04/obituary-of-hazel-dickens.html

The high lonesome sound that touched so many, so
deeply, could only have been born of both strife and
fight-back in equal proportions. Singer/guitarist Hazel
Dickens' sound was probably about as high and lonesome
as one got. The soundtrack of "Harlan County USA"
introduced her to the many outside of the country home
she remained a visceral part of, even long after she'd
physically moved on. Dickens didn't just sing the
anthems of labor, she lived them and her place on many
a picket line, staring down gunfire and goon squads,
embedded her into the cause.

She was born on June 1, 1935 in Montcalm, West
Virginia, one of the faceless towns dotting Appalachian
coal country. Her father was an amateur banjo player
who worked as a truck driver for the mines and ran a
Primitive Baptist church each Sunday. Here was where
Hazel first began singing, unaccompanied out of
necessity and the laws of tradition. But the devotional
songs melded with the mountain tunes and ballads,
creating a unique personal style. Bearing a rough, at
times coarse timber, her voice eagerly reflected the
broken topography about her as well as the pains of
poverty in her midst. In a family of thirteen residing
in a three-room shack, the music was far from distant
symbolism for her.

At age 16 Dickens relocated to Baltimore where she
encountered Mike Seeger on the still fledgling folk
scene. Seeger, working alongside his parents Charles
and Ruth Crawford Seeger in the Library of Congress
Archive of American Folksong, began performing with the
Dickens family trio, but it was Hazel's association
with Seeger's wife Alice Gerrard that offered notable
area for impact on the music. The duet of Hazel & Alice
recorded original compositions and deeply explored the
feminist archetypes in Appalachian song. Dickens was
sure to not only raise issues such as the need for
equal pay for women workers, but to actively fight for
these on and off stage. Among the titles she penned
were "Working Girl Blues" and "Don't Put Her Down, You
Helped Put Her There". She also composed the noted
"Black Lung", which called on the miners' plight back
home. Like Aunt Mollie Jackson before her, Dickens was
able to capture the struggle of the moment in song, and
this was most evident in her on-screen performances in
celebrated films such as "Matewan" and "Song Catcher"
and her work on the above noted "Harlan County USA".
The union cause was her cause and it lived anew each
time she conjured a topical song set to a melody that
sounded as old as the ages.

A clear heir to the Appalachian stylings of Aunt Mollie
Jackson and Sarah Ogan, Dickens became a respected
figure and was a featured singer at folk festivals for
decades. Since the 1970s, Dickens had performed with a
wide array of musicians including Emmy Lou Harris,
Elvis Costello, Linda Ronstadt, Mary Chapin Carpenter
and Rosanne Cash. In 2007 she was inducted into the
West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. Dickens was active as
recent as last month when she was seen attending the
South By Southwest Festival in Austin. Hazel Dickens
died of complications of pneumonia in Washington DC on
April 22. In the blackened crawlspaces of West
Virginia's mines the lament was a deafening silence as
the mountain peaks seemed to bow in solemn reverence.

-John Pietaro is a musician, writer and labor organizer
from New York City--http:TheCulturalWorker.blogspot.com

Memorial for Janine Vega

2011-02-25T10:47:00.006-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brmJxfYT70U
M ikhail Horowitz and Andy Clausen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=857zPs_lxII
Ed Sanders, Carol Zaloom reading Janice King, Tom Pacheco

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADcBpxOYPwo
DeeDee Halleck introduces Sara Flores and Norma Flores, translated by Fanny Prizant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx_sLFAM4bA
Max Kenner and Derrick Mustafa Bell

David Thomas and Peter Lamborn Wilson

Bill Yitalo, Michael Esposito, Allen Murphy and Juma Sultan

Mikhail Horowitz Sings the Mean Old Badger Blues; Jesus Papoleto Melendez Reads a Poem and Fatima plays piano and sings while Juma plays conga.

"Looking Bad"

2011-02-18T08:19:00.001-05:00

In 1983 Eddie Becker, Karen Ranucci, Joan Braderman, Skip Blumberg, Joel Kovel and I went to Nicaragua as the US threatened to attack. We thought it would be similar to the assault that was perpetrated against the island nation of Grenada that fall. Everyone expected that there would be a similar military invasion and we went down to try to show that what was happening in Nicaragua was supported by many of the Nicaraguan people and also many U.S. citizens who lived and worked there.

The resulting film is called Waiting for the Invasion: US Citizens in Nicaragua. Although many people all over the world expected an immediate invasion, we were wrong. The invasion came, but not in the form of a full-out military assault. Reagan unleashed a bloody U.S.-funded and trained counter insurgency that ruined the Sandinista economy and killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants.

Before we finished the film, we tried to get portions of it shown on the MacNeil Lehrer Report on PBS. We were quite desperate to get the information to a wider audience to try to stave off what we saw as an impending invasion. We knew that PBS would want full "journalistic neutrality" so we were careful to interview people from "both sides". But it was hard to find people who supported the notion of a U.S. invasion. Even a U.S. ex-military entrepreneur tire salesman wearing a California Chamber of Commerce tee shirt was against an invasion. We interviewed him as he was digging a trench outside of his business saying he would be "ready for Reagan".

We did finally found a pro-invasion spokesperson-- the U.S. Ambassador, Anthony Quintain, who railed against the peaceniks who had gathered in front of his embassy with their peace signs. We also interviewed the Texaco oil man in Managua, whose swarmy interview was full of hostility towards those protesters who "must live in a box", to be brought out for protests by the devious communists running the country.

It was 1983 and it was before the many brigades of U.S. "sandalistias" descended on the revolutionary experiment with their cameras and tape recorders. We had pretty much "an exclusive" with our look inside the Sandinista Revolution. MacNeil Lehrer kept our film clips for several weeks and a friend who worked with them said they were seriously considering running some of our footage. But ultimately we were turned down. The opinion from the PBS management (we heard that the issue had gone up the chain of command to Washington executives) was that it was "too one-sided".

"But wait!" we objected. "We did show both sides! We interviewed the ambassador and the oil company!" "Yes," said the producer, "but they look bad. Nothing they say makes any sense." So because it was so obviously "one-sided", our film never ran on PBS. It did, however, run in the Iowa State Fair. A solidarity group picked our film to loop continuously at a booth the next summer. One of the scenes takes place in a cornfield where a young U.S. agronomist speaks about the agrarian reform program and the need to get away from export-only farming and plant more food products. The Iowa peace group said they looked at a lot of films about conflict in Nicaragua and Central America and they felt that our film was the only one that Iowa farmers could relate to. Corn farmers unite.

Reminiscing about 112 Greene Street

2011-02-08T20:57:00.000-05:00

Kartuli Concert In Kingston, NY, January 21, 2011

2011-01-29T15:55:00.000-05:00

Ezra Halleck and Tamar Schumann are members of this group.

Janine Pommy Vega Died Yesterday

2010-12-24T15:38:00.013-05:00

Janine was a regular at the Willow Pond Poets' Society Annual Readings.
Janine Pommy Vega (February 5, 1942 – December 23, 2010) was an American poet associated with the Beats. Vega grew up in Union City, New Jersey. At the age of fifteen, inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, she travelled to Manhattan to become involved in the Beat scene there. In 1962, Vega moved to Europe with her husband, painter Fernando Vega. After his sudden death in Spain in 1965, she returned to New York, and then moved to California. Her first book, Poems to Fernando, was published by City Lights in 1968 as part of their City Lights Pocket Poets Series. During the early-1970s, Vega lived as a hermit on the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian-Peruvuian border. Out of this self-imposed exile came Journal of a Hermit (1974) and Morning Passage (1976). Following her return to the Americas, she has published more than a dozen books, including Tracking the Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents (1997) which is a collection of travel writings. Her last book of poetry was The Green Piano.
In the 1970s, Vega began working as an educator in schools through various arts in education programs and in prisons through the Incisions/Arts organisation. She has served on the PEN Prison Writing Committee. Pommy Vega is a pioneer of the women's movement in the United States. She has worked to improve the lives, conditions, and opportunities for women in prison. Vega had traveled throughout the North American and South American continents, all throughout Europe, including Eastern Europe, countries in the Middle East, often alone. She made friends everywhere, approaching all on the same, basic, human level, with love and compassion.
By 2006, Vega was living in Willow, New York, a small hamlet near Woodstock. She spent the last 11 years with poet Andy Clausen, tending her garden when she wasn’t traveling the world performing her magnetic and politically engaged poetry. She continued writing, performing, and working for human rights up to her death.

From Kole Oluwatoyin Ade-Odutola
I was at this VERY reading
We are consoled by the truth, her soul found creative expressions while with us and her words that stole our attention will live on.
To those of us alive we must give new lives to thoughts that are dead
and renew contacts with forgotten friends
Be well my friends behind the screen.

And then there was the time when Janine wrote a poem for Molly and Shawheen's "nuptial blessing." Her presentation is about half way through the video. (July 2008)

FROM THE WOODSTOCK TIMES
Janine Pommy Vega, 68 — poet, political activist, Beat legend, world traveler, hiker and lover of the Catskills, teacher of aspiring writers in schools and prisons, and so much, much more — died on December 23 at her mountain home in Willow, in the arms of her lover and longtime companion, Andy Clausen. Over the past few years she had suffered greatly from rheumatoid arthritis (which she wryly termed the “Mean Ol’ Badger”), heart and liver trouble, and a medley of other illnesses, but she never let them stay her from teaching, writing, performing, or any of her other appointed rounds, answering their insults and humiliations with a courage that those who knew her deemed extraordinary.

“I didn’t know such bravery was possible, and it made me want to do right by her,” said Clausen, who had lived with Vega since 1999. “She was still planning gigs and counting on finishing her Bard College prison classes, even though she could only go an inch at a time by that point.”

Born in Jersey City to Joseph and Irene Telkowski Pommy on February 5, 1942, Janine Vega was effectively born a second time in 1960, when — after graduating as valedictorian of her class — she hopped a bus for New York City, telling her mother, “I’m going to live with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in Greenwich Village.” She hung out with Allen, Peter, Gregory Corso, and other luminaries of the Beat scene and began writing poetry. In December of 1962 she met the Peruvian painter Fernando Vega; they were married in Israel and lived there, in Paris, and finally in Ibiza, where Fernando died of an overdose of heroin. The love poems that Vega wrote to him during a year of mourning were eventually published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press as Poems to Fernando — the first poems by a woman to be featured in the City Lights Pocket Poets series. As R’lene Dahlberg noted in her 1983 profile of Vega for the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Vol. 16: The Beats), “Poems to Fernando is an exquisite chronicling of the birth of a poet through pain. Despite a few poetic affectations, the poet’s genuine emotions come through, and one experiences the birth pangs of a poet who is both mother and child. Janine Pommy is now truly Janine Pommy Vega — the name she will continue to use.”

Overall, Janine Vega published more than 15 books and chapbooks of poetry, notably The Bard Owl (1980); Drunk on a Glacier, Talking to Flies (1988); Mad Dogs of Trieste: New and Selected Poems (2000); and The Green Piano (2005). Her tales of journeys in search of matriarchal power sites, an odyssey that spanned four continents, were collected as Tracking the Serpent by City Lights (1997). These pilgrimages to the Amazon jungle, Nepal, Glastonbury, and Chartres Cathedral echoed the “road trips” taken by her male Beat compatriots, but were far more extensive, both geographically and in the nature of their investigations. The memoir, fueled by what the Boston Phoenix called Vega’s “compassionate indignation” at the subjugation of women and the demonizing of their spirituality through the ages, passes through loss and grief to a disciplined embrace of the life of the spirit. “That’s the fundamental relevance, for any woman artist, of Vega’s exploration of the world’s oldest female images of creativity,” the Phoenix concluded.

Vega’s friends and lovers constitute a Who’s Who of late-20th-century and early Third Millennium underground cultural heroes. But her most rewarding relationships were likely with the hundreds of inmates in the New York State prison system, her students of poetry and writing for more than three decades. Since 1987, she had directed Incisions/Arts, a program that brings writers into the prisons; at the time of her death, she was teaching at two local correctional facilities, Eastern and Woodbourne, through the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a Bard College program that confers bachelor’s degrees to incarcerated students.

“Janine’s work with BPI only supplemented her long-standing efforts to make many of our region’s harshest places more hospitable to the arts and individual expression,” said Max Kenner, BPI’s executive director. “For nearly 15 years Janine offered poetry workshops within Eastern, on her own and with little or no funding…In many respects, it was her acquaintance and generosity that led to Bard’s collaboration with Eastern and the program we now have.”

The poet Hettie Jones, who taught a prose-writing class through Vega’s Sing Sing poetry workshop in the winter of 1989, credits Vega with launching her “subsequent career of more than a dozen years” teaching in women’s prisons. “She was such a light in everyone’s life,” said Jones, who eventually became the chair of PEN’s prison writing committee. “I admired her so much for her incredible energy. She and I often appeared as ‘Beat girls’ in readings at various venues, and we’d have such fun, because we weren’t impressed with ourselves. Janine didn’t have any airs about her, even though she had done so much that really was impressive; she just remained a hardworking person.”

Always a propulsive and passionate reader of her poetry, Vega became more musically sophisticated over the years, working with such musicians as Nina Sheldon, John Esposito, David Arner, Michael Esposito, and the late Betty MacDonald. Her CD Across the Table, featuring poems recorded at Mark Dann Studios in Woodstock and in concert at festivals in Bosnia and Italy, preserves the urgency and ardor of her voice.

“She didn’t really need a band,” said Sheldon, a jazz pianist and singer who had been working with Vega in recent years. “She drove her words by shaking her maracas, right on the beat, strong and unflagging, even when her hands were so crippled she could barely hold them.”

Until the attrition of her physical capabilities, Janine Vega had been an intrepid hiker, trekking the backbone of the Andes, the high plateaus of

the Himalayas, and the gentler summits of the Catskills, where she was a card-carrying member of the 3500 club (meaning, she had made it to the top of every peak in the Catskills more than 3,500 feet above sea level). In a 1999 interview for Ulster magazine, she said, “I’m married to some of these mountains — Kaaterskill High Peak, Plateau — and when I’m climbing, it’s just me and the mountain. Your face leaves you, you take on the contours of the place that you’re with . . . it’s like they say, there’s no you and there’s no mountain, and it’s true — that’s the state that one looks for.”

“I always thought of her as larger than life, but I recently realized that wasn’t quite accurate,” said poet Mikhail Horowitz, a friend of many years. “She was as large as life — meaning, she met life head on, kiss for kiss and blow for blow, never flinching from anything it dealt, and giving as good as she got. That only seems ‘larger than life’ because so many of us shrink from meeting life on its own terms. But Janine was that rarest of persons, one who was able to make life worthy of her.”

On Christmas Day, Bob Arnold, the executor of Vega’s estate, and his wife, Susan — old friends to whom Janine dedicated Tracking the Serpent — made the long drive down from Vermont to gather her books and papers so as to ensure their safekeeping. The next day, Andy Clausen sat in the house he shared with Janine Vega and remembered when he first fell in love with her. “We were on a bus in Jersey City, standing and holding onto the straps, and I realized that she came from the same kind of neighborhood that I came from — the old school, the library — and neither of us had gone to college, but we had both learned poetry…” His reminiscence then skipped ahead, to encompass all the years they spent together: “She was stubborn, feisty, smart, big-hearted, big-spirited, and a tremendous worker. She really saw the infinite in the flowers, the Mother of us all in the night sky, and she had great love for the common people.”

In addition to Clausen, her survivors include a brother, Bill Pommy, and his wife, Carol, and a nephew, a niece, and a grandniece. She was predeceased by her sister, Irene Setaro.

A celebration of Janine Vega’s life will take place in February in Woodstock, the date, time, and place to be announced. There will also be a memorial in New York City. Her ashes will be buried in the Woodstock Artists Cemetery in the summer.

Feet

I look down at the flat feet by the toilet

my feet, this life

First we’re hypnotized that this is it

then we’re saying good-bye

How many nights have I done this?

Shivering moth wings on the screen

Outside hypnosis

it really is good-bye.

August 12, 2001

from Vega’s The Green Piano

Mad Dogs of Trieste

for Andy Clausen

We have never been in a war like this

in all the years of watching

the street at 3 a.m.,

kids lobbing cherry bombs into garbage cans

the last hookers heading toward home

It used to be, stopping in Les Halles cafes

after a night we could find the strong

men from the market

and the beautiful prostitutes

resting in each other’s arms

Le Chat Qui Peche, Le Chien Qui Fume

alive with Parisian waltzes, his hands on her ass

We could pick up raw produce from discard bins

and have lentil stew for tomorrow

Things have never been like this.

Cops square off against teenagers in the village square

take the most pliant as lovers, and reroute the rest

into chutes of incarceration

The mad dogs of Trieste

we counted on to bring down the dead

and rotting status quo, give a shove here

and there, marauder the fattened and calcified order,

have faded like stories

We used to catch them with their hat brims

keeping most of the face in shadow

and sometimes those voices

one by one

turned into waves

like cicadas in the August trees, whistling

receding, and the words crept under

the curtains of power, made little changes,

tilted precarious balance, and brought relief

Those packs don’t crisscross the boulevards

now in the ancient cities, no political cabal

behind us watches the world with

eyes entirely

cognizant

the lyrical voices rainbow bodies

your friends my friends nobody left

but the mad dogs of Trieste as we

cover the streets.

August 1998

from Vega’s The Mad Dogs of Trieste
Elegy for Janine: Singing in Eternity

No, it cannot be that you are gone.

I weep for thee, sister spirit!

Do not say I should not cry.

Death has stolen your smile from me,

And stilled the voice of passion

Through which the Great Mother spoke.

You walked the world opening doors

In prisons and in our hearts.

You talked to flies on glaciers!

You held on to life with your fingertips,

And just kept on coming.

I weep for thee sister spirit!

Do not say I should not cry.

How can the beautiful die?

Michael Perkins

23 December, 2010
Janine Pommy Vega

She was born on February 5, 1942

in Jersey City, New Jersey

Soon after it was published, she read

Kerouac’s On the Road — that was 1958

It made a big impression on her

She was a wild young woman

and at age 16 she met Beat Poet Gregory Corso

at the Cedar Bar

on University Place in Manhattan

The Cedar was where the painters and poets commingled

Through Corso, the 16 year old Janine met Kerouac,

Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky

She returned to N.J. to finish high school

and then fled to Greenwich Village

where in the summer of ’59 she became a waitress

at the Beat coffee house on West Third Street

called the Bizarre.

She met the Beat writer Herbert Huncke

& for a while lived with him.

She also was a lover of Peter Orlovsky

And she began to write poetry

She lived in Paris, in Israel, in San Francisco, in Ireland

and other places

till with $5,000 she inherited from her mother

she purchased a six room house in Willow

in 1979.

Throughout her career, since 1968 she published

a sequence of excellent books

Miriam and I toured Italy and Sardinia

with Janine a couple of years in the early 2000s

and were always amazed by her cross-cultural

vivacity.

Her final years were wracked with declining health,

but she kept up her touring, her work helping

writers in prison, and appearing in festival upon

festival. Never surrendering. Never giving up,

always with a gleam in her eye.

And now she is gone. Just two months shy of

her 69th birthday.

Rest in peaceful glory, Janine Vega

Ed Sanders
Her voice was invincible

Janine Pommy Vega — poet, lover, witness, warrior, clarion voice for those forgotten and discarded by governments, gardener of vegetables and verbs, speaker of truth to power, singer of the fearless, unconstrained heart — has left us, way too soon, and we have no instruments with which to gauge our loss, which is incalculable. She recorded it all with an eye that never flinched, heard it with an ear that never stopped paying attention, voiced it with a tongue that never apologized, and embraced it with a generosity of spirit that never quit. Time and again, she reached deeply into the darkness and retrieved something that is so essential, it can’t be named—and yet she named it, each time, with great eloquence. Her life and work were illuminated by the wisdom that a true struggle for justice has to be waged with laughter and joy as well as anger and tears. Her voice will not be dispersed with her ashes, and the great and beautiful gift she gave us will never stop giving.

Mikhail Horowitz

Saugerties

R

Janine asked me to write a recommendation for her application to the Guggenheim Foundation. Unfortunately she did not qualify for a grant.

Janine Pommy Vega is a “beat poet” who “slammed” before that became an MTV category. Her strong words and the dynamic performances she musters are the highlight of readings and poet gatherings in the U.S. and around the world. She is acknowledged as a master poetry performer by other poets, one of a very few women to be so recognized.  The world of "beat" poetry has been for the most part a male domain: but she has been a strong and lyrical presence for decades, respected and honored as a poet’s poet.
I think Janine deserves this fellowship at this time especially for her recent work, which in the past two or three years has truly taken flight. Her recent poems are the best she has ever written. She is on fire and needs the time to concentrate to let the magic out! This increased fire in her work is partly a reaction of the current world situation, partly a reaction to her own pain and physical sufferings, but mostly just the distillation of the long years of passion and dedication that has been her life. I think she has also been inspired by her work with musicians—her CD of poems set to music (a jazz combo) is the very best of that genre. There is no better. It is up there with Ginsberg and his harmonium.
Her strength is her determination to experience first hand those elements of her poetry. She knows nature directly from her experiences as a climber of every peak in the Catskills, and her many years as an ardent gardener at her mountain home. Her travels to the Andes have been part of her prose and poetry. Her eloquent descriptions of the state apparati of repression and confinement come from thirty years of prison work, a service that is unique in terms of both length of time and depth of participation.
Janine is known and loved behind bars in every prison in this state—she is a legend in those clanking corridors, a breath of life that lingers in the minds and hearts of those incarcerated—an inspiration for her months and years of dedicated work. The poems produced in her workshops are exquisite – by far the best “prison writing” that I have come across. This is deep stuff—the sort of excavation of the soul that only true poets can do. That Janine can inspire these prisoners to open their minds to such depth is a rare talent. She has been doing this, often thanklessly, for decades. She, more than any other person, would be able to do justice to the sort of anthology she outlines in her proposal (Part B).
Janine Pommy Vega is a great poet. For the most part she is unrecognized (except by other poets! ) in this country. She is fierce, lyrical and passionate and she brings the many worlds of her life together into her recent work—her experiences in Latin America and Italy, her appreciation and involvement with the mountains of the Catskills and her close affiliation with those beings whom society has rejected: the men (and women) who live under complete state control. Janine has been there and brings us as close as we will ever get to the reality of those places. -- DeeDee Halleck

buy buy buying

2010-11-24T17:55:00.004-05:00

We're number one

2010-11-23T15:51:00.002-05:00

"There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."

Fredrick Douglass, 1852, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?
(thanks to Craig Gilmore for the quote!)

New York Art Book Fair

2010-11-08T00:02:00.012-05:00

Paper Tiger, Deep Dish TV and the Glassbead Collective installed an exhibit at the New York Art Book Fair, which was organized by Printed Matter.

The Art of Resistance from the Deep Dish "Shocking and Awful" series was projected.

The tapes presented included Donna Haraway Reads National Geography of Primates, Modern Art/Ancient Wages (about the MoMA strike of 2000) by Labor at the Crossroads (see below post), Glassbeads images from the Republican Convention in Saint Paul and other demonstrations. There were also images of the PS1 Cement Wall and shots of the wall in Israel/Palestine shot by Jane Toby.

PS1 Wall

Wall in Bethlehem, Palestine

Modern Art Ancient Wages: The MoMA Strike of 2000

2010-11-04T19:18:00.002-04:00

This strike lasted for four months. MoMA had planned to lay off many workers when they started their reconstruction. One of the results of their move was that MoMA took over PS1, which had functioned as an alternative art space. MoMA now charges $20 entrance fee both at Manhattan's museum and in Long Island City. From Labor at the Crossroads, coordinated by Simin Farkhondeh

El Pais de las Mujeres-- Gioconda Belli

2010-10-31T10:58:00.003-04:00

video by Arturo Zamora Cortes

The Great Chain of Being

2010-10-08T23:11:00.001-04:00

Amy Trompetter Performs in Willow

2010-10-04T16:34:00.000-04:00

Vets Take on the Newseum

2010-10-03T19:24:00.004-04:00

Lucius Walker Jr.

2010-09-19T22:18:00.005-04:00

On Friday, I attended the service for Lucius Walker, Jr. at the Convent Avenue Baptist Church. The church was packed with family, friends and colleagues. Two choirs sang out passionately. To me the most moving moment was when the recent graduates from the Cuban Medical School stood up. Latino and African American young people have been trained in Cuba to become doctors: 47 have graduated and there are now 145 US youth currently at the school. I had seen them sitting together and thought it might be a third choir-- they were all dressed in white. As the service went on and they didn't sing, I began to wonder who they were. Then someone at the podium asked "the doctors to stand." There were few dry eyes in the audience, as we all rose with the doctors to give them a standing ovation. Many of them have recently returned from Haiti, where they have been administering to those wounded in the terrible earthquake.

Executive Director of Pastors for Peace Rev. Lucius Walker Jr. (c) stands with (l-r) Melissa Barber, Toussaint Reynolds, Kenya Bingham, Jose Deleon, Cedric Edwards, Teresa Glover and Evelyn Erickson, who were part of the initial student population that launched the program at the Allende Medical School.

Article from Finalcall.com :
More doctors equal better health

Teresa Glover (r), a 3rd year medical student from the United States, shows care and concern as she speaks Spanish with a patient at the Allende Medical School in Havana, Cuba.

HAVANA (FinalCall.com) - While major media reports the war of words between America and Cuba over President George Bush’s new economic sanctions, very little, if anything, is being said about President Fidel Castro’s offer of 500 yearly medical school scholarships to solve the health crisis in the Black community.
“We are prepared to grant a number of scholarships to poor youth who cannot afford to pay the $200,000 it costs to get a medical degree in the United States,” said President Castro in 2001 when he announced the offer while speaking in New York.
A major problem in the health of the Black community is the lack of Black doctors servicing poor and needy Black patients. With rising costs in medical schools and limited openings for Black students, the problem appears only to worsen.
The Latin American School of Medical Sciences (LASMS) here stands ready to educate a minimum of 500 doctors each year—for free. The only requirement is that, after they graduate, they must come back to the United States and practice medicine among the poor.
The program is organized by the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organizing (IFCO)/Pastors for Peace which is under the direction of founder Reverend Lucius Walker. On May 24-29,
Rev. Walker headed a U.S. delegation to tour the medical school facilities. The first stop was the Salvadore Allende Medical School, which trains third through sixth year medical students.
“Yours is a noble profession. You must be missionaries and ministers committed to the full development of the people you serve. Go into the world and build a better world, a healthier world. You may become leaders in your community. Take dignity and respect for the poor and commitment to build a new world with you as you go out to become doctors,” Rev. Walker said to the students.
After he spoke, Teresa Glover, a third year student from New York City, came looking for him with open arms.
“He’s the reason I’m here,” she told The Final Call. Ms. Glover graduated from the State University of New York in 1998 with a degree in biology, after which she got a job and worked for three years. In 2001, she heard about the medical school program and called IFCO.
“I love the school. I really want to be a doctor and couldn’t have done it any other way. I started working with patients right away. Now that I’m in my third year, there are more hands on interactions with the patients.”
Her biggest adjustment is being away from her family and the inability to call home regularly because of the economic sanctions.
“I got married after my first year and my husband, James, is my biggest supporter. We’re determined to make it work,” she shared.
Cedric Edwards is from New Orleans and has a combined molecular biology and biochemistry degree from Middleburg College. He is in his fifth year and will be the first U.S. graduate next year.
“I’m very excited about graduating, but I’m also concerned about the problems between the U.S. and Cuba. I really want to practice medicine in the United States and help poor people get better health care,” he told The Final Call.
Melissa Barber always wanted to be a doctor. Her degree from Ursinus Collge is in chemistry and Spanish.
“I went to a boarding high school, so I’ve always lived away from home. This is an exciting program. They’re teaching me to be a great doctor. I’ve learned to integrate my patient care with what I learned in my first two years,” she told The Final Call.
An export of great importWhat Cuba is doing for the students from the U.S. is nothing new. This country is world renowned for educating doctors and exporting them where they are needed the most. Currently, there are 9,000 students from 24 different countries.
Cuba has offered the most student slots to the United States. Other countries have 3,000 students competing for the 50 slots that are offered. Cuba considers this work her humble effort to help all countries within their possibilities.
Since an overwhelming number of students were coming from Africa, Cuba is planning to open a medical school in Africa to serve all of the students who want to be doctors. This work of sending health professionals around the world has led Nation of Islam Minister of Health and Human Services Abdul Alim Muhammad to see Cuba as “the most compassionate country on earth.”
“What does Cuba get for sending doctors around the world? They get nothing. They really care about people. They really believe that people deserve and have a right to health care. They believe people deserve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he toldThe Final Call.
He recalled his first visit to Cuba in 1995. “They had 50,000 doctors for their 10 million people. Now, they have 70-80,000 doctors for 12 million people. They don’t need any more doctors. They have a doctor in every community, school and factory. They have the best doctor-patient ratio in the world, with one doctor for every 200 people,” he pointed out.
The ratio, in fact, is really better than that. Cuba boasts one doctor for every 165 people, according to the Cuban officials. The ratio in the United States is far worse.
“According to the National Medical Association, there are only 23,000 Black doctors in practice to serve 40 million Black people. How many patients is that per doctor? It’s one doctor for every 2,000 patients. That’s Third World health standards. We can’t elevate the health conditions of our people with that ratio,” Dr. Muhammad charged.
“For Whites, the ratio is one doctor for every 300 people. Whites have six times greater access to a health professional than Blacks,” he continued. “There are whole areas around the country where there are no Black doctors.”
Most doctors agree that people tend to get medical care from people who look like them and are more likely to relate to their own experiences.
Dr. Muhammad said, “We don’t have the manpower to do what needs to be done to improve our health. We need six or seven times as many doctors as we have now. How will we get them? This speaks to the greatness of what Cuba is doing.”
Getting into medical schoolIn the United States, there are only two predominantly Black medical schools, Howard and Meharry Universities. Many of the 80 students attending medical school in Cuba applied to medical school in their homeland, but weren’t accepted.
Sarpoma Sefa-Boakye is from southern California and is starting a student chapter of the National Medical Association. “They asked us why we didn’t apply to Howard or Meharry. I told them that we did, but we didn’t get accepted.”
In Cuba, there are seats ready and waiting for qualified students to apply. It doesn’t cost an arm or a leg either.
“I love it here,” said Nicole Murray from New Jersey. “The teachers are very concerned about you. In the U.S., you’re just a number and you’re expected to fail. If you miss a class, they come after you. [In Cuba,] the teachers look for you and ask you where you were and what’s going on,” she told The Final Call.
“The teachers are very strict,” added Jessica Barreto, who is from New Mexico. “The teachers really want you to be successful.”
For Desta Muhammad, a first year medical student from Los Angeles, the goal of becoming a doctor is what keeps her motivated. Like all of the other students, she misses home, going to Muhammad’s Mosque No. 27 and eating her regular food. In exchange for that sacrifice, she has learned Spanish, made numerous friends and is getting a free medical education.
“I want to be a doctor and this was the only way I was going to be able to do it. I love the program and encourage others to get involved,” she said.
The program consists of a six-month pre-med study which is designed to bring all students to a comparable proficiency level to begin their studies. Many from Latin American countries begin this process straight out of high school at the age of 16.
U.S. students tend to complete more schooling, which bears witness to the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan’s comments on the “dumbing down” of American education. Some can come straight from high school, but most attend at least two years of college first.
At the LASMS, pre-med includes courses in chemistry, biology, math and physics, an introduction to health sciences, history of the Americas, and a 12-week intensive Spanish language program for those who need it. Some students are able to opt out of pre-med with a placement test in the sciences and Spanish.
The program is based on intensive advising and tutoring designed to help every student succeed. Students must pass competency exams at appropriate points in their course of study.
A six-year medical school program follows, beginning every September, divided into 12 semesters. Students study at the LASMS campus for the first two years, and then go to another of Cuba’s 21 medical schools to complete their studies.
The Cuban medical school combines theory and practice and is oriented towards primary care, community medicine and hands-on internships.(For more information on the Latin American School of Medical Sciences, call the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organizing(IFCO)/Pastors for Peace at (212) 926-5757 or visit www.ifconews.org.)

This is an obituary printed in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal:
Long before Lucius Walker Jr. made international headlines - including for humanitarian aid to Cuba and when shot by U.S.-backed contra forces in Nicaragua - he was a minister and civil-rights activist in Milwaukee.
Walker arrived in Milwaukee in the late 1950s while still a theology student, first serving as a youth director for the Milwaukee Christian Center on the south side. Before he was even ordained, he was called to serve by Hulburt Baptist Church, an all-white congregation, also on the south side. He went on to serve as the founding director of Northcott Neighborhood House.
"Lucius was the first African-American professional we know of who was assigned to work on the then-segregated south side of Milwaukee," said activist Art Heitzer, involved with the Wisconsin Coalition to Normalize Relations with Cuba.
Walker was found dead Wednesday at his home in Demarest, N.J., likely after suffering a heart attack in his sleep. He was 80.
He was born in Roselle, N.J., earning his master of divinity degree from Andover Newton Theological School. While in Milwaukee, he earned a master's degree in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
In his calm, steadfast way, Walker refused to walk away when he witnessed discrimination. When he took a group of boys to a local roller rink in the 1950s - and the white teens were allowed to enter but he wasn't - he filed a civil rights complaint.
When Walker witnessed an off-duty officer making an arrest in 1967 - and the situation became heated - he refused to move along as ordered. Instead, he was among those arrested and fought the charges.
Hundreds of local priests, ministers and nuns packed the courtroom in his support. His character witnesses included former Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler and E. Michael McCann, then an assistant district attorney. Walker later won on appeal.
In 1967, he also accepted a new position in New York. Walker was named founding director of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, an ecumenical group that works for peace and social justice.
"He was a gentle storm," said Thomas E. Smith, a Pittsburgh minister and board chairman of IFCO.
"He went about in his quiet methodical way, not raising his voice but making his point," Smith said. "He fought calmly and courageously. He deplored violence, and he always thought there was a peaceful way to deal with things."
In 1988, Walker was leading a humanitarian mission in Nicaragua when their Mission of Peace passenger boat was fired on by contra rebels. Two people were killed. Walker was one of dozens of people wounded in the attack.
"Shots were whizzing over our heads," he told the Milwaukee Sentinel. "I saw women and children hit by bullets. I think the bullet that went through my rear end also struck the shoulder of a woman standing near me. . . . Blood was all over the place . . . people were screaming and bullets were ricocheting every which way."
His first thought after the attack was that "this is occurring because of . . . Reagan. He's sending arms over to these guys (the contras) and training them. I realized I was being attacked and facing death at the hands of my own government."
The attack inspired Walker to found Pastors for Peace as an IFCO project. The group continues to provide humanitarian aid to Central America and even assisted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
In 1992, Walker led the first of 21 "Friendshipment" caravans of medical supplies and other humanitarian aid to Cuba. He refused to seek official permission, instead sending aid through other countries, including Canada and Mexico.
When humanitarian aid was blocked, Walker resorted to long hunger strikes until the goods moved again.
Walker was mourned in Cuba media this week.
"Cubans, in gratitude, have to say that we don't want to think of a world without Lucius Walker," wrote the Communist Party daily Granma.
"He's one of the most respected American people, if not the most respected, in Cuba," Heitzer said.
He led his last mission to Cuba in July, again meeting with former President Fidel Castro. Walker still served as pastor of Salvation Baptist Church of New York.
Walker believed that for many in both the U.S. and poorer countries, things were not better.
"Let us not buy into the notion that the civil-rights goal has been achieved," Walker said in 1993. "It has not. We should not think that because we have a holiday for Martin Luther King, we have made it. That is a token."

Claridad: 50 Años de Lucha

2010-09-13T14:58:00.005-04:00

Free Speech Ruling Moves Case to Jury

2010-09-09T14:23:00.000-04:00

Protesters Ousted From Park During Celebration of Israel Must Show Free Speech Violations at Trial
Joel Stashenko
September 08, 2010
ALBANY - Kingston police officers did not necessarily violate the constitutional rights of pro-Palestinian protesters by ordering them out of a city-owned park where local Jews were celebrating the 60th anniversary of the formation of Israel, a judge has ruled.

Northern District Judge Lawrence E. Kahn denied summary judgment to the Middle East Crisis Response and 11 of its members for the city's alleged violation of their constitutional free-speech and equal-protection rights during a May 4, 2008 protest.

The case will now go to trial to resolve what the judge said in Middle East Crisis Response v. City of Kingston, 1:08-cv-0690, was an "ambiguity" about the actions and motivations of the police.

Judge Kahn wrote that the First Amendment does not guarantee the right of an individual to express his views at any time or place or in any manner of his own choosing. "Reasonable restrictions" may be placed on protected speech, especially if the restrictions are not based on content and are "narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest," the judge said, quoting Clark v. Cmty. for Creative Non-Violence, 468 U.S. 288 (1984).

Here, he said that "There exist issues of material fact as to whether the actions of Defendant officers were motivated by the content of Plaintiffs' speech, as Plaintiffs' argue, or whether the measures were taken in furtherance of public safety," the judge observed.

Based on the preliminary papers, a "reasonable jury" might well find either that the police officers were justified in ordering the Middle East Crisis Response members out of the park to avoid a confrontation, or that they should have allowed the protesters to stay in an area safely removed from the Jewish celebrants, the judge ruled.

"This ambiguity demonstrates an issue of fact as to whether the conduct of Defendant officers was warranted in order to further the City's interest in public safety and order, and whether their actions were narrowly tailored to further this interest," Judge Kahn held.

According to the ruling, members of the Ulster County Jewish Federation had received permission from the city to use Kingston's T.R. Gallo Waterfront Park for the commemoration of the anniversary of Israel's birth. The event, which attracted more than 100 people, was co-sponsored by the city and open to the public.

About a dozen members of Middle East Crisis Response gathered outside the park to leaflet and display signs protesting Israeli and American policies in the Middle East. Some protesters entered the park and ended up in what one police officers calls "heated" discussions with Jews.

When Kingston Sergeant James Maisenhelder arrived, four or five protesters and several of the Jewish celebrants were only a foot apart, appeared to be moving toward each other and were yelling.

At that point, according to Judge Kahn, Sergeant Maisenhelder ordered the protesters to leave and relocated them to a designated "protest area" on a public street outside the park. The sergeant also prohibited the protesters from displaying signs or leafletting.

Judge Kahn noted that the protesters still could get their message out despite the restrictions.

"Plaintiffs…contend that the location was not an ample alternative because their protest was pointless when removed from the context of the celebration," the judge wrote. "Plaintiffs, however, were not protesting the celebration itself, rather they were protesting and advocating political issues in connection with the State of Israel that may or may not have been directly implicated by the celebration."

According to its Web site, the protesters are part of a Woodstock-based group of Hudson Valley residents "joined in support of human rights for Palestinians and an end to the US's aggressive policies in the Middle East."

The group was formed after the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2006.

Judge Kahn rejected a facial challenge the plaintiffs made to Kingston's permit and insurance policies for use of city parks. The plaintiffs failed to show how the policy was used to suppress free speech, Judge Kahn wrote.

He also noted that no permit is needed to use the Gallo Waterfront park.

Judge Kahn also refused to grant summary judgment to the group on its equal protection clause violation claim. The clause is invoked when First Amendment activities are regulated based on their content, but the judge ruled that whether police acted because of the content of the group's political message remains an issue of material fact.

Stephen Bergstein, attorney for the protesters, said in an interview that the participants captured 95 percent of their protest on video.

The video was not mentioned in the judge's ruling.

Among other things, Mr. Bergstein said in an interview, the video shows that there was ample room to relocate the protesters within the park. It also shows Sergeant Maisenhelder saying, "I am the law" when protesters argue that evicting them from the park is against the law, Mr. Bergstein said.

"We go to trial from here," said Mr. Bergstein, of the Bergstein, Ullrich Law Firm of Chester. "We are disappointed that we did not get summary judgment. …We moved for summary judgment because we thought as a matter of law moving the protesters out of the park was a violation of the First Amendment."

Robert S. Cook of Cook, Netter, Cloonan, Kurtz, & Murphy of Kingston represented the city and the police officers.

Mr. Cook said yesterday that while his opponents may well go to trial, he was "pleased" and "satisfied" with the decision from Judge Kahn.

"There are questions of fact, but the judge said that a reasonable jury might find that the officers were acting to maintain peace and order, based on the facts presented him," Mr. Cook said.

The action names as defendants the city of Kingston and four of its policemen: Sergeant Maisenhelder, Officers William Hadsel, Scott Williams and Harry Woltman.

The city did not file a motion for summary judgment on its own behalf.

Joel Kovel Reads Life

2010-08-28T22:18:00.001-04:00

Black Panther Ten Point Plan

2010-08-25T23:32:00.006-04:00

WE WANT FREEDOM. WE WANT POWER TO DETERMINE THE DESTINY OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES. We believe that Black and oppressed people will not be free until we are able to determine our destinies in our own communities ourselves, by fully controlling all the institutions which exist in our communities.
WE WANT FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR OUR PEOPLE. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every person employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the American businessmen will not give full employment, then the technology and means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.
WE WANT AN END TO THE ROBBERY BY THE CAPITALISTS OF OUR BLACK AND OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES. We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules were promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of Black people. We will accept the payment in currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of our fifty million Black people. Therefore, we feel this is a modest demand that we make.
WE WANT DECENT HOUSING, FIT FOR THE SHELTER OF HUMAN BEINGS. We believe that if the landlords will not give decent housing to our Black and oppressed communities, then housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that the people in our communities, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for the people.
WE WANT DECENT EDUCATION FOR OUR PEOPLE THAT EXPOSES THE TRUE NATURE OF THIS DECADENT AMERICAN SOCIETY. WE WANT EDUCATION THAT TEACHES US OUR TRUE HISTORY AND OUR ROLE IN THE PRESENT-DAY SOCIETY. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of the self. If you do not have knowledge of yourself and your position in the society and in the world, then you will have little chance to know anything else.
WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR All BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE. We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventive medical programs to guarantee our future survival. We believe that mass health education and research programs must be developed to give all Black and oppressed people access to advanced scientific and medical information, so we may provide our selves with proper medical attention and care.
WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE, OTHER PEOPLE OF COLOR, All OPPRESSED PEOPLE INSIDE THE UNITED STATES. We believe that the racist and fascist government of the United States uses its domestic enforcement agencies to carry out its program of oppression against black people, other people of color and poor people inside the united States. We believe it is our right, therefore, to defend ourselves against such armed forces and that all Black and oppressed people should be armed for self defense of our homes and communities against these fascist police forces.
WE WANT AN IMMEDIATE END TO ALL WARS OF AGGRESSION. We believe that the various conflicts which exist around the world stem directly from the aggressive desire of the United States ruling circle and government to force its domination upon the oppressed people of the world. We believe that if the United States government or its lackeys do not cease these aggressive wars it is the right of the people to defend themselves by any means necessary against their aggressors.
WE WANT FREEDOM FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE NOW HELD IN U. S. FEDERAL, STATE, COUNTY, CITY AND MILITARY PRISONS AND JAILS. WE WANT TRIALS BY A JURY OF PEERS FOR All PERSONS CHARGED WITH SO-CALLED CRIMES UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS COUNTRY. We believe that the many Black and poor oppressed people now held in United States prisons and jails have not received fair and impartial trials under a racist and fascist judicial system and should be free from incarceration. We believe in the ultimate elimination of all wretched, inhuman penal institutions, because the masses of men and women imprisoned inside the United States or by the United States military are the victims of oppressive conditions which are the real cause of their imprisonment. We believe that when persons are brought to trial they must be guaranteed, by the United States, juries of their peers, attorneys of their choice and freedom from imprisonment while awaiting trial.
WE WANT LAND, BREAD, HOUSING, EDUCATION, CLOTHING, JUSTICE, PEACE AND PEOPLE'S COMMUNITY CONTROL OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are most disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

DeeDee of Green Gables

2010-08-19T17:58:00.003-04:00

One of the seminal books of my youth was Anne of Green Gables-- the story of an orphan who is sent to live with an elderly aunt on Prince Edward Island. I read it avidly and gobbled up the forthcoming sequels-- Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, etc. It was after reading Little Women and the Little House on the Prairie series, but just as influential. I must have been nine or ten, cause it was way before we moved to Cuba when I was 12, where I discovered the salacious passages in Frank Yerby and Thomas B. Costain at the library of the American Club in Nicaro.

But Anne was my heroine in a more innocent period. She was a great role model-- spunky, adventurous and willing to confront the staid society of the conservative farming community. I didn't read Pippi Longstocking until I read it to my kids in the 1970s, but Pippi was a similar girl with chutzpah.

This house, owned by author Lucy Maud Montgomery's cousins, was the inspiration for the setting of the story.

This month I visited PEI where the Anne industry is in full tilt. In fact the whole island is almost a theme park.

There were lots of Japanese tourists there. Anne is one of the most popular books in Japan and couples come from Tokyo to have their weddings where Gilbert and Anne got hitched.

Visiting the museum, I was struck by how similar the rooms and furnishing were to my own taste! Certainly my house in Willow looks more like the rooms in Green Gables than it does my own parent's environment of 40s-50s high moderne style.

The hooked rugs and embroidered sheets are things I always look for at yard sales...

Even the geraniums in the window are just like what I now have on Claremont Avenue. Even the same shades of red and pink.

The kitchen looks a lot like the kitchen in Willow-- even a wood cookstove.

The 19th century genre print on the wall is exactly like two that I have in Willow. Likewise the simple still life and antique electric chime clock. My great grandmother was the source of my electric chime clock. To her it was the height of up-to-date fashion, to have an ELECTRIC clock. My mother kept it in a closet because she found it too old fashioned.

Anne's handmade quilt is similar to the ones I have in the bedrooms in Willow, and this spindle bed is like the one I bought at a yard sale and has been Molly's bed for 28 years.

All these furnishings, the spindle bed, the quilts, the corny genre prints, the hooked rugs and embroidered sheets were things my mother absolutely HATED. To her they were backward, uncouth, pathetic. She especially hated geraniums. Her house plants were Ficus and African Violets.

I guess she never read Anne of Green Gables.

Good bye to Tony Judt: Ill Fares the Land

2010-08-07T23:33:00.000-04:00

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

And yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new. Until quite recently, public life in liberal societies was conducted in the shadow of a debate between defenders of “capitalism” and its critics: usually identified with one or another form of “socialism.” By the 1970s this debate had lost much of its meaning for both sides; all the same, the “left–right” distinction served a useful purpose. It provided a peg on which to hang critical commentary about contemporary affairs.....
see http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/29/ill-fares-the-land/

Rooftop Acres

2010-08-07T16:14:00.000-04:00

Farmer Ben Flanner has created a one acre dream of urban farming. companion planting to max out every inch of this long island city farm is inspiring and delicious. Flanner has planted 1/4 acre of this skyline farm with heirloom tomatoes and a Northen blvd. exposure of sun flowers! http://brooklyngrangefarm.com/

History of Deep Dish

2010-07-31T22:23:00.004-04:00

Tuli Kupferberg's Calling Card

2010-07-13T12:25:00.001-04:00

photo by Christopher Felver

Tuli used to hand out a card with the following text: "The Revolting Theatre" (rhymes with "he ate 'er"). RADICAL VAUDEVILLE ---- We play at Bar Mitzvahs, Divorces, Revolutions. "Benefits a Specialty"

Tuli died yesterday.

Mary Frank Installs Exhibit at Skoto Gallery

2010-05-30T11:54:00.004-04:00

After School Programs Will Be Eliminated

2010-05-12T15:59:00.003-04:00

More GRITtv made for Grit TV

FLORIDITA SURVIVES DESPITE KITCHEN SEIZURE

2010-05-11T13:05:00.000-04:00

FLORIDITA'S LIGHTS ARE ON!

THE DOORS ARE OPEN!

Some of the old regulars came back.

the kitchen is closed...

but FLORIDITA VIVE!

Ally, Emma and their father and grandmother

2010-05-09T21:56:00.000-04:00

Happy grandmother's day to the grandmother of Allyson and Emma, my nieces!

May 1 in NYC

2010-05-07T11:02:00.000-04:00

The Great Chain of Being

2010-04-09T12:04:00.001-04:00

Cop Zone in Central Park

2010-03-16T09:12:00.004-04:00

These pictures were all taken on the same afternoon from the running track around the Central Park Reservoir. This stretch of the park is at least a quarter of a mile long and is ALWAYS full of police cars. This is the very center of Central Park and our "New York Commons." Just how did this areas become COP ZONE?

What is the new two story warehouse type building that has blossomed with the huge words "Central Park Precinct"?

Was a cop parking lot in the original Frederick Law Olmsted design? How can so much precious public space be given over to cars? Has the crime record in the park really grown so much to need that amount of infrastructure?

What are the rules for expansion into the natural areas? What are the rules for parking cars in the park? Many of the cars are the private cars of the police. Do the other workers (the stone masons, the rangers, the reservoir engineers) get to part smack dab in the middle of the park when they go to work?

What is the opinion of Commissioner Benepe about this military occupation? What is the opinion of the Central Park Conservancy?

Free Free Palestine

2010-03-16T07:54:00.003-04:00

Demonstration at the Waldorf Astoria from DeeDee Halleck on Vimeo.

Diana Bryan has passed

2010-03-14T11:37:00.002-04:00

Diana was the queen of silhouette. Not since Lotte Reiniger had anyone attained the level of skill and creativity in this craft. She was incredibly resourceful in finding uses for this work: illustrating record (remember them?) and CD covers, NY Times editorials, and creating sculptures by placing them in front of light boxes in metal cut-out versions.
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Diana haunts my email inbox file. She was a prodigious environmental watch-dog. Doing a search for her last mail messages, I am shamed into keeping more abreast with the struggle to preserve our special Catskill/Saugerties environment:

October 30 2008: Common sense strategy for Winston Farm
December 30 2008 Is Toxic coal fly ash our future in Saugerties
January 4 2009 Letter to the Editor from Diana Bryan: Why should we try to save Nanny Goat Hill

January 29: MORE interesting facts about CH2M Hill who is sponsoring the Winston Farm meeting in Saugerties

May 3 Why we can't allow and/or trust manufacturers with highly toxic substances to come into Saugerties

The last message Diana sent to me was a link:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop..swf?clip_id=2539741

We all need somebody to lean on.

Loni Ding, Social Documentarian

2010-03-13T23:05:00.000-05:00

Loni Ding, Social Documentarian

Loni Ding was a pioneering Asian American documentary filmmaker, university educator, and media activist. She worked to create public institutions that showcased under-represented voices in American life, mentored hundreds of emerging Asian, Pacific Islander, Black, Latino and other filmmakers, and created films that broadened the historical narrative, re-defining what it is to be American.

Loni was one of the first women and people of color to break into the all-white, male world of U.S. television in the late 1960s and early '70s. She and a handful of pioneers produced the first "minority"-made TV shows on American television; they went on to train a generation of minority and women producer/directors, camera people and engineers with the skills to demand a place in the industry. By the late '70s the barriers that had kept women and people of color out of broadcasting, and their stories and perspectives off the air, were falling.

Loni was a tireless organizer and advocate for democratizing television and making it accessible and accountable to communities. She played a central role in creating NAATA (now the Center for Asian American Media), the Independent Television Service (ITVS), and the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. As a professor of filmmaking in the Ethnic Studies department of UC Berkeley for over 30 years, she trained and inspired hundreds of young people of color and women to enter the media field.

Loni's own films helped re-write US history and turn the lens on previously invisible American heroes. Her documentaries "Nisei Soldier" and "The Color of Honor: The Japanese-American Soldier During World War II" were screened to both houses of Congress as well as then-President Ronald Reagan, and were instrumental in helping pass the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted formal US reparations to American citizens of Japanese descent interned during World War II for the color of their skin.

Loni's "Ancestors in the Americas" series -- taught in classrooms across the country -- is a main reference on Asian American history that offers an epic scope of Asian migrations to North America, South America, and the Caribbean from the 1700s to the early 1900s and uncovers the role of Asians in building the United States.

Diversifying U.S. television -- who makes it and whose perspectives are seen on it, thereby diversifying America's image of itself -- was a profoundly anti-racist struggle and the theme of Loni's life. In an interview she once said "If you stare at someone long enough, you could fall in love with them. The camera can and does do the same, depending on how you frame people and how much time you give them and the attitude with which you approach them."

Loni knew the power of television, and she worked to make it open to the real scope of American society. She was a leader who spoke truth to power and believed media was a tool for communities to realize the power within them.

We will miss her.

Bailout for the Media Moguls?

2010-02-04T10:28:00.007-05:00

Comments on the Nichols/McChesney March Nation Article (which is now a book as per Democracy Now! program today)

Thinking Outside the (Newspaper) Box, Written April 4, 2009
John Nichols and Robert McChesney have written a widely posted Nation article searching for answers to the current emergencies in the newspaper business. ("The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers") They recognize the crisis as an opportunity to rethink public media in general and their suggestions for remedy are at least a provocative starter for the needed reassessment and creative activism. They suggest the government pump in $60 billion over the next three years, a pricetag that is similar to, though less than, the handouts to AIG and the US banks.
However, it's hard to believe that anyone could seriously want to salvage the "print-fitted" U.S. corporate news. In their article, the media reformers are trying to prop up the bankrupt "fourth estate" with proposals for salvation, requesting that Congress help the media corporations-- well, at least the ones that own newspapers--by subsidizing delivery by the U.S. Post Office and even free delivery for some periodicals. They would also bequeath to readers limited tax exemptions for newspaper purchase. How this would work is a bit fuzzy and their definition of journalism is more Washington Post and New York Times than the Indypendent, the NYC based Indymedia weekly, let alone community radio and public access TV. Missing in the article is any discussion of the popular tabloids. I doubt if Nichols and McChesney consider the NY Post or even the New York Daily News as capital "J" Journalism. It may have been a long time since either Nichols nor McChesney rode a subway, so perhaps they don't have a clue as to what the masses read. The authors must read the NY Times with their croissants.

Subsidies
The papers they would subsidize are replete with advertising. Why should U.S. taxpayers subsidize the delivery of ANY ads? Their proposal does put a tepid limit on subsidies to "ad-supported" news --only ones which have 50% or less ads. We are already paying for ads in the cost of promoted goods. The postal service is burdened with the weight of the ads sent as catalogues and all the other junk mail that has flourished with "bulk" rate subsidies. Junk mail is just that-- the "bulk" of postal business today.
I'm surprised that these media reformers have undertaken such a rush to resuscitate their own often blasted past targets. They agonize that without newspapers, "Politicians and administrators will work increasingly without independent scrutiny and without public accountability." They admit that the U.S. press has sadly missed that sort of independent scrutiny for decades, but there is a lingering belief that journalism (with a capital J!) is usually "on the case." How does New York Times' war-monger Judith Miller fits into that ideal? Certainly it wasn't just "bad apple" Miller who lead the war chorus. The Times wasn't "reporting" about Iraq prior to the invasion, but actively orchestrating the battle cries--as they were soon to follow with their treatment of the Iran "threat".
Where are the Nichols and McChesney of their New Press 2005 book, Tragedy and Farce: how the American media sell wars, spin elections, and destroy democracy? One longs for a systemic critique, not a band-aid and a pat. They have good impulses, but they are compromised and essentially brought down by their allegiance to established professional hierarchies and by their inability to acknowledge (even their own!) critique of corporate media. There is no recognition of the on-going process of "manufacturing consent", so brilliantly laid out by Herman and Chomsky. Instead there is almost an apology-- similar to the Times' own mea culpa vis a vis Judith Miller. Nichols and McChesney say: "The news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion". "They missed the past decade of corporate scandals." (My emphases) It's as though these are just some mistakes--aberrations that could be rectified by some additional resources and a few more good reporters. They call for the system to create "far superior" journalism. There is an abiding faith in the system itself.

Journalism Education
The Nation article proposes that there be subsidies for journalism education. Why feather the nests of the mainstream journalism schools? An interesting survey would be to find out how many of the winners of, for example, the Polk Journalism Awards, have actually attended those stodgy bureaucrat factories. The heroic journalists who come to mind didn't hatch in those halls. Amy Goodman studied anthropology. Seymour Hersh and Studs Turkel went to law school. Naomi Klein attended the London School of Economics. Robert Fisk was a literature major. Even deceased mainstream ABC anchor Peter Jennings didn't attend journalism school. He never even finished a BA, saying he "lasted about 10 minutes" in college. Polk award winner Jeremy Scahill cut his teeth at the Catholic Worker. Scahill once said that journalism schools produce only lemmings. His solution is to declare journalism a trade and insure that young people learn out in the field, apprenticing as he did with Amy Goodman. He claims to have learned more from his work cataloging Amy's piles of news clippings than he would in any college classroom.
The U.S. junior high schools and high schools don't need journalism classes, but courses that encourage young people to take an interest in history, economics, political science and yes, literature. In terms of the media, U.S. schools need CRITICAL media education, so that students learn to critique not only the New York Post, but The Nation and Hulu and the twittering prose of Face Book. Scandinavia has a long tradition of requiring media analysis even in primary schools. "Tell me kids, why is Teletubbies sponsored by Kelloggs?" Our high school students, many of whom are members of My Space, need to be taught to understand how data mining works. Those cute Face Book questionnaires and attitude surveys are conceived by marketers who are building profiles, for their next round of "push" ads.

Public, Educational and Government Access
McChesney and Nichols suggest that there be government support for school newspapers and low power radio. Great. There are high schools where radio and internet reporting is happening right now. Students and community organizations have had access to technical and training support for coverage of local (and national) issues in the often dismissed world of PEG channels. PEG (Public, Government and Educational) access in many communities are required by local governments as a payment for use of the local "right of way." This has resulted in media centers in several thousand municipalities where communities can have access to cameras, computers and channels, all maintained by the cable operator. PEG has done admirable work in a providing opportunities for gaining technical proficiency, moreover, in providing an authentic "public sphere" for creating and exchanging information and opinion. The impressive PEG infrastructure is currently threatened by the heavily funded lobbying of ATT and Verizon. These corporations are seeking to get state legislatures to enact laws which gut the local regulations that require cable corporations to provide access. McChesney and Nichols' Free Press has not foregrounded this battle, preferring to highlight the sexier struggle for "net neutrality". However, recently after a bit of prodding, Free Press helped by urging their list serve members to make FCC comments in support of PEG. This is part of an inquiry by the FCC into how cable corporations have been "slamming" access channels by moving them into hard to find digital "closets" not easily accessible to channel switching remotes. .
The struggle for an open internet can’t be limited to "neutrality". Sure, the preferential use of speed and access by internet providers should not be allowed, but as technology enables telecommunication companies to pursue video distribution, we are moving closer to the convergence of these technologies, as any owner of an I-phone can attest. That means that the battles for PEG and the net all have the same protagonists, and all of these companies should be required to provide space and resources for the public. Enacting regulations which require support for public communication across all platforms should be part and parcel of the internet governance fight. Our airwaves and our "rights of way" enable these technologies and there has to be a public "pay back." Timber cutting and resource mining in national forests must compensate the public. Why not "rent" for our sky?
Nichols and McChesney speak of the need to protect public media from government interference, but PEG activists and administrators have developed concrete examples of how public media can be shielded from government and corporate interference. Many of the cable franchises now in place are far more effective than the "safeguards" at PBS, CPB and NPR. In terms of media regulation, PEG is a pretty good model, although in many cities and towns PEG is underfunded and neglected. However, in those cities where PEG has flourished with comprehensive contracts with the cable corporations, such as Tucson, Cambridge, Burlington, Portland and many, many more, public communication via access channels provides many of the things right now that Nichols and McChesney want "public broadcasting" to do in the future.

"Quality"
The Nation article has confusing proscriptions for a future "public media". McChesney and Nichols state: "Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism. We understand that this is a controversial position." But then they go on to say they don't endorse "government support". They then argue for expanding funding for public broadcasting, and argue that in their proposed future, "no state or region would be without quality local, state, and national or international journalism." They do not outline how the programming would be protected from government (and corporate) interference, nor do they define what "quality" is, any more than they delineate the "vibrant democracy" that they say was the goal of Jefferson and Madison. That the views of women and non-landholders weren't part of that "vibrant" consensus in our early Republic is not mentioned in McChesney and Nichols' enthusiastic statements about the press.

That quest for "quality" is one of the ruses which mainstream journalism, from the NYTimes to public broadcasting, has used to maintain their status quo. The position is succinctly put in the quote by James Carey in the McChesney/Nichols article. Carey asks for "journalists to be restored to their proper [sic!] role as orchestrators of the conversation of a democratic culture." Is "orchestration" what we need for a "vibrant democracy"? A different critic, Communication Professor Herbert Schiller, in the first Paper Tiger TV program (critiquing The New York Times in 1981) saw that role as being "the steering mechanism of the ruling class."

Public Broadcasting
Nichols and McChesney are right that this is an opportune time to re-think the structures of U.S. media, and public broadcasting is a good place to start, but there are other more general problems than the need for multi-year consistent funding. Pouring money into the "public broadcasting" that now exists will only strengthen the elitism that has evolved from these convoluted, bureaucratic structures. The whole structure of PBS and CPB is designed to squelch any "vibrant democracy." While Nichols and McChesney warn about government involvement, they don't mention the gorilla in the room-- transnational agribusiness and the oil and insurance corporations. The subservient accommodation by PBS to corporate interests was recently clarified in the treatment given a Front Line program on health care which was initiated by Washinton Post reporter T.R. Reid, entitled "Health Care Around America". Although originally designed to critique profit-oriented health care insurance, PBS officials demanded major changes and any reference to profit oriented insurance being a "problem" was deleted. The script was changed to actually promote the insurance companies, much to the dismay of Mr. Reid, who tried, unsuccessfully, to have his name and his interviews taken off the show. The whole thrust of the program became diametrically contrary to the original intention of the correspondent. This is just par for the PBS course. Corporate funding (though only a fraction of the whole budget) is the power component not only for specific program selection, but for the operation of the whole system, and when the views expressed are in opposition to the corporate mind-set, those views are censored, not the corporation.
The boards of directors of the public television channels across the country are self-perpetuating elite representatives of corporate and mainstream interests. For a brief time in the 1970s there was a movement to have elected boards.
Rather than change the make-up of the powerful who run these channels, the response to local and national activism was to set up "advisory boards" of "community" members. Most of those advisory boards have long since disbanded, realizing early on that they functioned only as public relations props and that they had no real clout to effect programming direction or station management. A new reassessment would have to take on the democratic restructuring of public television. Serious democratizing of the public broadcasting system must be a prerequisite for receiving any funding from Congress, or from any sort of fee based mechanism such as that which is the basis of the BBC.
Reconfiguring the funding in ways that are independent of party politics and corporate PR could help to make our public media true expressions of the lively issues and arts that exist in our country. Funding for public media can have strong prerequisites-- ones that foster independence, creativity and promote collaborations. The example of ITVS-- the Independent Television Service, founded by the lobbying efforts of independent producers in the 70s and 80s, has pioneered various ways (with a small budget) to support serious creative programming on public television. Democracy Now! is an example of new journalism that uses a hybrid mix of everything including camcorder/internet activists and cell phones to provide a daily program of hard hitting investigation and commentary by historians, lawyers, politicians, artists and those directly effected by wars and injustice. On no other outlet do we hear so often from the victims of global warring (and global warming). Because of the burgeoning "do it yourself" media sphere, there is great potential for cooperation between the many sectors of public expression: public television, public access, community radio, ipods, community projections and the internet. Each of these entities has infrastructure that can expand and develop with creative interchange that is open to sharing.
'The division between "professionals" and "amateurs" is exploited by such programs as the popular American Idol, in which a few talented "amateurs" vie for a "starring role." But the whole notion of "professional" media is constantly challenged by the millions of YouTube posters, eye-witness news gatherers, hip-hop DJs and the whole world of bloggers. The explosion of popular video and audio creation, combined with supportive infrastructure for distribution and exchange of this material can herald an era of public art and dialogue not seen since the WPA.

Communities of Location and Interest
Just as local food has become a rallying cry, local information, as Nichols and McChesney note, is what we want. Local media was consistently the overwhelming demand at the many community hearings that the FCC conducted over the past few years. In part, this was a tremendous reaction to the deregulation of radio and the swift consolidation of hundreds of broadcasting outlets. Let's hope that era of Clear Channel gobbling up local radio stations is over. The need for "local" is great in both the commercial and public arena in both television and radio. One has to look far and wide to find a public TV station (or even an NPR station) that does any local news. In the Northeast, WAMC FM out of Albany, NY has gobbled up local frequencies and is heard from Vermont to Connecticut, from Plattsburgh to Utica, from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire. Instead of local information this "mega channel" provides a hodge podge of "regional" programs squeezed in between the franchised NPR programs and their endless pitching for money.
I can recall when local radio would broadcast the menu for school lunches. Reviving that practice might improve the diet for a generation of youngsters. Parents might be scandalized if they could listen to the listing of catsup and potato chip meals that dominate school cafeterias. Local farmers can provide schools and colleges with fruits and veggies that are healthy and don't require carbon-spewing cross-country/world shipping. In a similar mode, local independent producers, youth, professors, musicians, elders, activists and immigrants can provide information, history, entertainment and art that is relevant and "home grown." At the same time we can exchange with international colleagues and friends. When information can travel freely (and neutrally!), community can be defined by interest and passion, and not limited by geography.

2010-02-01T17:52:00.001-05:00

Coalition

2010-02-01T17:27:00.001-05:00

The Golden Festival: Zikrayat and Supruli

2010-01-19T08:39:00.008-05:00

Sami Abu Shumays -violin
Bridget Robbins - nay
Umut Kashmut - qanun
Tareq Abboushi -buzuq
Apostolos Sideris bass
Rami el-Aasser, David Buchbut,
Faisal Zedan- percussion

Rehearsing in a dark basement hallway, the chorus named Supruli tries out a few songs. For the actual performance several other members were present.

Democracy Now! Goes to Haiti

2010-01-18T16:27:00.009-05:00

Manno singing in Miami
photo by Sharif Kouddous

This is Manno Charlemagne singing at the Tap Tap Restaurant in Miami. Sharif took this photo on his way to Haiti with the Democracy Now! crew. They will be reporting from there tomorrow.

Manno did the music for the film Bitter Cane, which I made in 1983 along with Pennee Bender and Kim Ives. Manno watched all of our interviews then used the words from the interviews in the music he sang for the film. I don't think there are too many documentaries which have that quality of sychronized music track! For a while Manno was Mayor of Porte au Prince (during the Aristide years.) To get a copy of Bitter Cane, go to http://www.deedeehalleck.org/store.html

This is the hotel room where the Democracy Now! staff (Elizabeth, Sharif, Amy) are staying in Haiti!

The Future

2010-01-11T13:59:00.008-05:00

The best part of the party was the kids.
Peter Halleck took that lovely picture of Prajna.

Tamar, Ezra and Laura made a wonderful cake! A poppy seed tiger with stripes made from slivers of kumquat skins.

We're there for you

2010-01-11T11:11:00.005-05:00

In the display at the Brecht Forum were these "doctored" poster ads from San Diego for the LA Times. The original ad images were part of a campaign that was rather ghoulish! Judith Williamson and I took them out of the newspaper kiosks and added the fang teeth with white out, then put the boards back in their ad slots. It was a perfect ad modification-- not enough to draw attention immediately (so they stayed up for quite a while!) but a strong comment on blood thirsty media. I saved one of the sets and was glad to see them again displayed at the party at Brecht!

Celebration Time

2010-01-10T15:42:00.024-05:00

Fred Ho wails. CHECK OUT HIS WEB SITE!
FRED WILL BE PERFORMING AT BAM ON JAN 23!

Papoleto Melendez and Frank Perez at the Brecht Forum.

Liza Bear did this film:

Demonstration against Siege of Gaza

2010-01-04T08:30:00.001-05:00

Papo and Frank Read Pedro

2010-01-03T22:00:00.002-05:00

Columbia University: Stop the Land Grab!

2009-12-25T23:29:00.010-05:00

Rebuild the peace in silent streets where once your love was born.

2009-12-24T00:21:00.004-05:00

This is an advent calendar. Each day a new window opened. All the photo images are from searching Bethlehem on the internet. For music and to see the complete lyrics: http://hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/l/i/olittle.htm Despite the unprovoked and extreme violence from the IOF, the demonstration was a great success. The primarily settler-used roadway of Route 60 was colored green and purple with the crushed remains of grapes and cardboard cartons. Passing settlers were able to witness the violence that their presence “necessitates,” and many reacted by honking their horns, photographing the demonstration, and one man was even seen proudly waving a peace sign. Though the grapes never reached the mouths of consumers, they were purchased from the farmers and given a political purpose on the road-a stretch of route 60 bordering Al-Khadr checkpoint, as well as a currently under-construction terminal checkpoint, and a small length of the Apartheid Wall already built and waiting to be connected to the Bethlehem portion.

Awake the ire of nations. Let justice be restored!

2009-12-23T12:21:00.003-05:00

From
http://palestinesolidarityproject.wordpress.com/tag/uncategorized/
Some police used military-style ‘pain compliance’ maneuvers, such as applying immense pressure to wrists and other sensitive joints, as well as wrenching back fingers and hands. Activists were thrown, and dragged by their ears, noses, necks and hair, while other police and soldiers forced demonstrators to the ground by leaning their weighted knees onto demonstrators’ heads and necks. Many activists were roughly thrown to the ground and dragged across the asphalt road, ripping their clothes. While attempting to stand up, many were pushed and kicked by the booted IOF police and soldiers.
During the assault, five people were arrested: two Palestinian males, one international female, and two Israeli males. The two Palestinian males, Mohammad Salah, 25, and Ahmed Salah, 30 were detained for carrying boxes of grapes, and while Ahmed was released at the end of the demonstration, Mohammad was not so lucky. Following the demonstration, Mohammad was taken by IOF soldiers to a wooded area near Betar Illit colonial settlement. When the soldiers reached this isolated area, they kicked and beat Mohammad in the head and shoulders. He is currently under care at a Bethlehem-area hospital. The international, an American woman, and the two Israeli men are currently still being held in Israeli custody at Gush Etzion police compound, housed within the colonial settlement of the same name.
Despite the unprovoked and extreme violence from the IOF, the demonstration was a great success. The primarily settler-used roadway of Route 60 was colored green and purple with the crushed remains of grapes and cardboard cartons. Passing settlers were able to witness the violence that their presence “necessitates,” and many reacted by honking their horns, photographing the demonstration, and one man was even seen proudly waving a peace sign. Though the grapes never reached the mouths of consumers, they were purchased from the farmers and given a political purpose on the road-a stretch of route 60 bordering Al-Khadr checkpoint, as well as a currently under-construction terminal checkpoint, and a small length of the Apartheid Wall already built and waiting to be connected to the Bethlehem portion. "http://www.awalls.org/
http://www.awalls.org/
http://bethlehemghetto.blogspot.com/2006/08/checkpoint-humiliation-and-bullets-at.html

...drive hate and fear away...

2009-12-22T22:24:00.003-05:00

Despite the presence of Reuters cameramen and other international media, around thirty IOF soldiers and police quickly attacked the non-violent demonstrators who carried cardboard crates of grapes. With their hands unable to be used as shields, many were beaten causing the grapes to prematurely spill onto the road. As the demonstrators attempted to continue their march, IOF police and soldiers choked, kicked and punched the demonstrators.

Drive hate and fear away...

2009-12-22T22:24:00.001-05:00

..your love bring down on David's town...

2009-12-20T23:57:00.005-05:00

October 8, 2006- Palestinian, international and Israeli activists joined together to demonstrate against land theft, road closures and economic isolation by bringing two tons of the surplus Palestinian grape harvest to an occupation checkpoint along Route 60. In a display of civil disobedience akin to the North American Boston Tea Party, the demonstrators hoped to dump the surplus harvest onto the road, but were viciously attacked before they were able to reach the checkpoint.
Al-Khadr is a center for vineyards, as is the Bethlehem area in general. Every year its fertile lands yield 11,000 tons of grapes. Not long ago, these grapes were marketed to the entire West Bank, as well as Jordan, Gaza and Israel. Nowadays, with some roads blocked and others closed, and with new decrees restricting the delivery of grapes, the local produce has no market. The prices have dropped so low that the farmers can no longer earn their living. Many are forced to just leave the fruit to rot on the vines. Soon the Apartheid Wall will reach the site of the demonstration, and the Ghettoization of the area will be complete. Where grapes are the prime source of income and unemployment rates soar, this maneuver will effectively strangulate the already fragile local economy.
The wall in the Al-Khadr region will annex 20,000 dunums of Palestinian agricultural land, while the expansion of Betar Illit, Neve Daniel and Elazar colonial settlements will similarly steal additional lands. The Wall in the Al-Khadr and Bethlehem area will also imprison 19,000 Palestinians in between the concrete barrier and the 1967 West Bank border line, known as the “green line.”
For these reasons, local Palestinians, Israeli activists with Anarchists Against the Wall and Tay’ush, as well as international activists with the Palestine Solidarity Project (PSP), joined for a morning of civil disobedience with the intention of dumping a portion of the ample, though unmarketable, grape harvest onto Route 60 in protest. Approximately fifty demonstrators marched on Route 60, blocking northbound traffic, en route to Al-Khadr checkpoint, but were preemptively attacked by Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) police and soldiers. At the scene were numerous armored police jeeps, police transport vans and armored military jeeps. Also on hand was at least one agent with Shabak (Shin Bet), the occupation’s covert intelligence agency, seen filming the IOF’s brutality with a handheld video camera.
http://palestinesolidarityproject.wordpress.com/tag/uncategorized/
http://www.awalls.org/
http://bethlehemghetto.blogspot.com/2006/08/checkpoint-humiliation-and-bullets-at.html

..your love bring down

2009-12-20T23:57:00.001-05:00

...descend to us we pray.

2009-12-19T23:12:00.001-05:00

Comment by clicking on the pencil.

O holy child of Bethlehem...

2009-12-19T01:11:00.001-05:00

This is an advent calendar set in Bethlehem. Each day in December a new window is opened. All the photo images are from searching Bethlehem on the internet. For music and to see the complete lyrics: http://hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/l/i/olittle.htm
Open a new browser window to the music site and play the song while you look at the calendar.

...the dear Christ enters in.

2009-12-17T23:56:00.001-05:00

...where meek souls will receive him still...

2009-12-17T23:53:00.002-05:00

...but in this world of sin...

2009-12-15T23:50:00.002-05:00

No ear could hear his coming...

2009-12-15T08:53:00.000-05:00

This is an advent calendar set in Bethlehem. Each day in December a new window is opened.

...the blessings of his heav'n.

2009-12-15T08:52:00.000-05:00

O Little Town of Bethlehem.....

...to human hearts....

2009-12-15T08:51:00.000-05:00

This is an advent calendar. Each day in December a new window is opened.

So God imparts...

2009-12-15T08:50:00.000-05:00

the wondrous gift is g'ven.

2009-12-15T08:38:00.005-05:00

This is an advent calendar. Each day in December a new window is opened. All the photo images are from searching Bethlehem on the internet. For music and to see the complete lyrics: http://hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/l/i/olittle.htm
Open a new brouser window to the music site and play the song while you look at the calendar

How silently, how silently...

2009-12-09T23:38:00.001-05:00

...are met in thee tonight.

2009-12-09T09:14:00.003-05:00

...of all the years...

2009-12-09T09:13:00.001-05:00

The hopes and fears....

2009-12-09T09:12:00.002-05:00

...the everlasting light..

2009-12-09T09:03:00.002-05:00

This is an advent calendar. Each day in December a new window is opened. All the photo images are from searching Bethlehem on the internet. for music and the complete lyrics: http://hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/l/i/olittle.htm

Yet in thy dark streets shining...

2009-12-09T09:01:00.001-05:00

...the silent stars go by.

2009-12-09T08:59:00.001-05:00

All the photos in the windows of the virtual advent calendar are from googling images of Bethlehem.
For music: http://hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/l/i/olittle.htm

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep...

2009-12-03T00:57:00.001-05:00

How still we see thee lie....

2009-12-02T23:11:00.001-05:00

O Little Town of Bethlehem Advent Calendar

2009-12-02T01:07:00.004-05:00

EACH DAY IN DECEMBER A NEW WINDOW WILL BE OPENED!
WATCH FOR THIS ON-GOING LOOK INTO THE LITTLE TOWN OF BETHELEM

To hear the music: http://hymntime.com/tch/htm/o/l/i/olittle.htm

Thanksgiving Special

2009-10-24T12:44:00.001-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiphLMJKHCI

Protest in Kingston, NY

2009-10-21T20:32:00.005-04:00

Bernie Madoff and the Anarchist Fairy

2009-10-06T13:37:00.002-04:00

Bread and Puppet 2009

2009-10-04T18:09:00.014-04:00

This is the side show that Nadine Bloch, Margo Bloch, Iolanthe Boneham Brooks and Helen Finagar produced.The web site for the Young Activist Club is http://sites.google.com/site/youngactivistclub/links

Another struggle going on in school lunchrooms is the quest for healthy locally produced food. A wonderful new tape is What's on Your Plate?
**********************************************************
This is the opening of the Dirt Cheap Money Circus:
The Circus part two

What is the power that is stronger than the power of metal?

and Bread and Puppet's contahistoria called FOREVER:

Cabinet and Foreign Affairs

2009-09-10T22:44:00.013-04:00

I wanted to go to a book reading by Dan Graham, but got there too late. It was a very young crowd. The women were very neat and mostly had on spiked heels. The guys, on the other hand, looked scruffy, sort of like Graham at a younger age. They were all white. I didn't even see an Asian person there.
It was the first time I was in the book store called McNally-Jackson. It's on Prince Street. Their books were a really odd assortment. For example there was an issue of Cabinet (very trendy art journal but intelligent enough) on the same stand as Foreign Affairs.
I always remember making the Paper Tiger show, Archie Singham Reads Foreign Affairs. Archie was a great Brooklyn College professor who was a major advisor to many 3rd World countries. I remember him saying that in Foreign Affairs academics "earn their living by being obscure" and making what is actually a simple issue (of exploitation, colonialism, etc) so complicated that people don't understand.There was also a big display for Conde Nast Traveler with a cover straight out of colonial India. What century are we in anyway? There were no issues of NACLA, or the Indypendent, or any of the other more pointed left publications. I went there because I was curious about Graham, as I am not all that familiar with his work and I haven't seen his Whitney show yet. I did however recall getting a fax from him, or someone named Dan Graham, in early 1991 during the Gulf War, saying that he had seen the Gulf Crisis TV Project which we had sent to a few places in Europe. I thought it was Scotland, but could have been Ireland or London. Anyway I went to the fax machine one day and there was this scribbled message that said, "THANKS. I'M IN THE UK. SAW YOUR SHOW. MADE ME PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. DAN GRAHAM." I always assumed it was THE Dan Graham even though I never had met him, I thought he must have seen the series at some gallery or event on the street. Lots of places showed it during those weeks. It was the only dissident series against the war. So for all these years I thought I had this secret admirer-- well not secret. I thought that Dan Graham loved Deep Dish/Paper Tiger-- our work.

But the other night at McNally-jackson when I asked him about it as he was leaving the bookstore he seemed quite annoyed with my question and said gruffly "I don't know what you are talking about. It wasn't me."

So I guess there is another American Dan Graham who was proud of our work.

I still hope to see his show at the Whitney before it closes.

Clips from the Woodstock Forum

2009-08-21T22:56:00.007-04:00

THE WOODSTOCK FORUM:
Building a Peaceful, Just and Sustainable Economy

Introduction and Background
It is 40 years since the historic Woodstock Festival crowned an era now associated with peace, love and rock and roll. Although the 1969 festival itself did not take place in Woodstock, but in Bethel many miles across the Catskills, the town of Woodstock, New York, nevertheless, has become a pilgrimage point for people seeking to either rekindle those years of love and music, or at the very least to buy a tie-dye T-shirt. Despite the great deal of hoopla surrounding the 40th anniversary of the famous festival, very little attention has been paid to the philosophical culture which permeated the event and its aftermath.
In 1969 the Vietnam War was a central focus for the passion of the crowd and the many songs of protest. At the Woodstock Forum, which took place August 15 and 16, well over 300 people heard and discussed the many pressing issues of OUR time. We are overwhelmed with on-going wars, continuing exploitation of people and resources around the world, worsening ecological devastation and usurpation of our communities for weaponry and repression. In 2009, although the name Woodstock is synonymous with "peace and love", the biggest employer in our own town is a military contractor. Given the perilous state of New York, the nation and the world, we need more than ever to discuss how to convert the engines of war for a peaceful future.
In the sessions held at the Woodstock Town Hall on Saturday we heard from historians, poets, workers, social critics and journalists such as:
Peter Woodruff, worker in a Maine weapons factory; grass roots organizer, Mary Beth Sullivan; legendary activist Diane Wilson, author, An Unreasonable Woman and co-founder Code Pink; poet and teacher, Janine Vega; curator and gallery director, Ariel Shanberg; award winning journalists Jeremy Scahill and Jeff Cohen; economist Robert Pollin; historians Silvia Federici, Simon Harak, SJ, and Richard Grossman; social critics Joel Kovel and George Caffentzis; filmmakers DeeDee Halleck and Tobe Carey.
The speakers painted an ominous view of how militarism has gripped our communities, our culture and our lives.
On Sunday the Forum switched from presentations on what was wrong to reflections on how citizens could right those wrongs. A day of deliberation, contentious at times but essentially forward moving, led to the drafting of an initial statement and the framing of ways to build movements, local as well as regional and national, to carry the struggle forward.

Statement from the Woodstock Forum

We, participants of the Woodstock Forum, meeting August 15 and 16, 2009, the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, reclaim the authority for our lives and our communities. We reject the usurpation of our rights by the military-industrial-media complex.

We reject the actions of our country to foment wars around the world and to manufacture, export and sell weapons. Weapons are the number one U.S. export. Our cities and towns have become home to industries for death and destruction.

We declare that:
1. we will map and research the military industries that control the economies of our communities, that control the minds and pockets of our government officials, that pollute and destroy our land and waters.
2. we will draw attention to these industries of death through educational outreach to local and national media and with imaginative and creative non-violent actions.
3. we will build coalitions to convert weapons-making to peaceful manufacturing and to create meaningful work in education, the arts, health care, and ecological development.
4. we vow to take personal responsibility for the products in our workplaces and in our lives.

We will not cease our resistance to the death machines in our midst and to the laws that support them.

The Woodstock Forum Committee:
Nicholas Abramson, Laurie Arbeiter, DeeDee Halleck, Tarak Kauff, Laurie Kirby, Joel Kovel, Helaine Meisler, Fred Nagel, Katya and Paul Rehm, Laurie Sheridan

Anniversary of Death of Kerwin Herdenking

2009-08-20T08:24:00.007-04:00

'Kerwin-herdenking' -- Poster for the 2005 edition of the yearly memorial of Kerwin, one of the most well known victims of racism in Holland. He got murdered on the Dam square in Amsterdam. His memorial day became an important anti-racism event. This edition was organized in coöperation with Samen tegen racisme. Also visit: http://www.samentegenracisme.nl and http://www.kerwin.nl 20 August 1983: Kerwin was walking with a friend in Amsterdam when he was pestered by a group of skinheads. He went into a nearby snackbar but when he came out, one of the group told Kerwin he had no right to walk there and abused him racially. Kerwin said he could walk wherever he wanted to, whereupon he was stabbed in the stomach. The attacker had the words '100% white' tatooed on his arm.

Kerwin ran to the Dam Square, got into a taxi and asked to be taken to hospital. The taxi driver said he didn't want blood all over the seat, took him out of the car, lay him on the ground and told him to wait for the ambulance

Kerwin lay there while onlookers stood round him watching his blood seep into the cracks between the cobble stones. It was almost 20 minutes before the ambulance arrived to take him to hospital. He died shortly after.

Both Kerwin and his killer were 15 years old.Every year on 20 August you will find us at the Dam Square, remembering what happened here in 1983, affirming our commitment to the condemnation of attitudes which say that one colour is better than another, one belief is better than another, one culture or language or custom is better than any other culture, language or custom.
By doing this we hope to remind people of the other side of tolerance; the side which allows children to kill each other and fascist mindsets to sanction such murders. We do it also to repeat that no matter how individuals or the media may try to reframe it, there is no denying that this murder was racism - plain and simple.

Kerwin
While some of them will hunt you down
to kill the rest of you
the others will hold festivals
to have something to do

And even while they make of you
the very first to die
because of age-old Dutch racism
we both know it's a lie

And even if it were the truth
what would it really change?
the jingle of the guilder
is the rattle of the chains

The chains they used to bind the blacks
and certain whites as slaves
strange the ways they have devised
to get folks to behave

Lord knows the list is long
no space is left to fill
the names of those they've wronged
the unknown ones they've killed

A-h-h Europe - your rope - your rope
around my people's neck
after all you have taken and done
what more do you expect?

Yes!!! they come and why not
to see theirdiamondstolen sparkle in your sky
for us poor / folk / of a darker race
it's always been a place to go and die

Kerwin:
The 1st black to set a foot
in America as a slave
was left in trade
from a Dutch man-o-war

Kerwin: what makes you differ
from the others racism had die
is that your case of death by race
is one they can't deny

A blood-stain on a taxi-seat
meant more than your life
that's why you layed down on the street
when you were wounded by that knife

When they decide
that one must die
it's while the blood is wet
that we're obliged
to ask ourselves
which one of us is next?

Remember the friends close to you
who did not look like you?
who did not treat you as
so many of the others do?
Friend is a friend is a friend
is not a color of a skin
but a way of being
this! hate cannot relate
and this is where racism steps in

Racism is one thing we learn from history
has done more to damage man than any one disease
people live and people die: that is a natural fact
but not so if the reason why is
just because you're black

Kerwin you were not the first
but we want you to be the last
we want fascism to stop
and we must do it fast

Kerwin
No one believes it - Kerwin did not - had he - alive
he would be - but he didn't believe -
racism - fascism - Adolf Hitlerism
or just plain Amsterdam snobism

No one really believes there is a thing called
racism
it's always something else -
it's not because of your color
they say: it's the way you carry yourself -
School children in Kenya reenact the death of Kerwin.

Who knows what reasons they'll retrieve
racism is something no one believes
even when the black lays dying in the street
no one believes it

Closed eyes don't see it
racial abuse / an excuse
no one believes it though it is true -
Kerwin didn't believe / why should you?
Plus how could he?
no one believes racism to be -
like they didn't believe the Vietnamese
pleas to live in peace
they didn't believe blacks should be free
after 400 years of misery

KERWIN
They didn't believe / they didn't
believe that we too should
have a right to breathe -
no one believes racism to be /
that people are people
with a right to be happy and free - happy and free

No one believes that to be the way it should be
no one believes it possible because no one believes
people don't even believe
what their eyes can see
the injustice / the waste / the inhumanity
they just don't believe - they just don't believe

The horror is so normal
so, so, so informal
that the normal horror is believed good
even at the cost of blood ï¿½

Maurice Di, 25 August 1984One of the annual memorials for Kerwin and against racism organized in Holland by Amina Marix Evans.

Garlic Harvest

2009-07-28T14:47:00.002-04:00

Pulling them out of the new raised beds was easier than when I just planted in the clay soil directly.
Mnnn! Time for some really frest pesto: walnuts, basil and as many cloves of this garlic I want to peel!

Beached

2009-07-26T10:09:00.011-04:00

I was suspicious about the rave reviews of Varda's new auto-bio-pic. I've never been a big fan of Varda. I found the film Daguerréotypes (also known I think as Rue Daguerre) excruciating. The Gleaners, which so many swooned over, just made me angry. An insult to Millet.

Years ago I did see and rather liked Lions' Love, but only because Shirley Clarke and Viva were in it-- in all their glory.

Her new film, The Beaches of Agnes, is just as cloying as Daguerreotypes and even more (if that is possible) narcissistic. Lots of familiar folk here and lovely images of Guillaume (Chris Marker's signature cat)-- as a larger than life cut out walking down the street. Perhaps the best image in the entire film. But there is no real appreciation of Marker or of any of the people she mentions. Beaches is replete with name dropping, like a society column.

The problem is there is really no sense of history. In any of her films. History for Varda is like an antique shop-- there only for consumption. In Beaches, she breezes past WWII, Vietnam, the Black Panthers, as if they were tableaux in shop windows--and all she is interested in is her own reflected image.

She uses art the same way. She culls contemporary art and takes the visuals for her "background" and leaves the concept behind. The film opens with a scene on the beach with a group of interns each holding or placing mirrors. Joan Jonas did stark and scary work in the 1970s carrying mirrors around--showing the audience to themselves or looking at various parts of her own body. Her performances made the mirror an instrument of terror. In Varda the mirror is just part of the decor.

Varda takes her office to the street which has been covered with sand (beach). Beuys did performances in the streets of many European cities--performances that challenged the prevailing mores. Varda's office street beach is reassuring. There is a smugness about putting your office outside. It doesn't challenge anything. It borders on cute, sort of like a child's lemonade stand.
For an interview with Varda check out Liza Bear's piece in Interview:
http://www.filmforum.org/films/beachesofagnes/Agnesvarda2.pdf

The Weaving Porch

2009-07-11T20:06:00.017-04:00

Xena, Molly and Io made this rug.
For our annual 4th of July party Molly and I set up a loom for the guests to weave. It took Molly two days to warp it, but it was a great experience for all!
This is Iolanthe's rug:
This is Molly's rug:
Tolan started weaving after everyone left Willow.
Tolan kept weaving deep into the night. This is his rug:

The State Dept Visits the Waves of Change Site

2009-06-23T15:01:00.003-04:00

For 11 Minutes...
the search terms were "community radio Senegal"

NYU/Yale Open Media Conference

2009-06-20T09:44:00.004-04:00

lots of boys.
lots of code talk
drupal, plumi, etc

and then there's a whole other bunch talking
about things like elevator pitches.
which i thought must be a new form of muzak-- something
that goes directly into your blackberry while you're in an elevator ..
but no
it's just how to get your "concept" to the CEO in the time it takes you to get from the first to the 12th floor.
In other words,
lots of guys looking to sell their 'concepts".

lots of the presentations are on line at www.openvideoconference.org

this is no next five minutes.
unfortunately.

but there are some good ole indymedia friends.

On Friday night they had a great lineup of the workshops and speakers archived on their web site.
But today (Tuesday) I am trying to catch up with some of the stuff I missed on Saturday and all that is
up are a few "remixes". Where are the talks? Where are the workshops?

So much for "open video"...........
Did all the geeks jump on the pirate ship and sail away?

Arise you prisoners of starvation !!

2009-06-14T22:36:00.000-04:00

In honor of Harvey Goldberg and Paul Buhle

Harvey Goldberg Day at the Brecht Forum in NYC

Daniel's Tango

2009-06-12T00:26:00.006-04:00

Happy Birthday, Pete Seeger

2009-05-02T08:06:00.002-04:00

This rousing version of the Woody Guthrie song was sung by Pete Seeger on October 28, 2002 at a rally against the invasion of Iraq held in Kingston, New York. Today Pete Seegar is 90 years old.

The Wrens Came Back Today

2009-04-26T10:23:00.001-04:00

This is from last year--one of the many off-springs of our yearly visiters:

Bailout for the Media Moguls?

2009-04-17T11:14:00.003-04:00

Comments on the Nichols/McChesney March Nation Article
Thinking Outside the (Newspaper) Box
DeeDee Halleck, April 4, 2009

John Nichols and Robert McChesney have written a widely posted Nation article searching for answers to the current emergencies in the newspaper business. ("The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers") They recognize the crisis as an opportunity to rethink public media in general and their suggestions for remedy are at least a provocative starter for the needed reassessment and creative activism. They suggest the government pump in $60 billion over the next three years, a pricetag that is similar to, though less, than the handouts to AIG and the US banks.

However, it's hard to believe that anyone could seriously want to salvage the "print-fitted" U.S. corporate news. In their article, the media reformers are trying to prop up the bankrupt "fourth estate" with proposals for salvation, requesting that Congress help the media corporations-- well, at least the ones that own newspapers--by subsidizing delivery by the U.S. Post Office and even free delivery for some periodicals. They would also bequeath to readers limited tax exemptions for newspaper purchase. How this would work is a bit fuzzy and their definition of journalism is more Washington Post and New York Times than the Indypendent, the NYC based Indymedia weekly, let alone community radio and public access TV. Missing in the article is any discussion of the popular tabloids. I doubt if Nichols and McChesney consider the NY Post or even the New York Daily News as capital "J" Journalism. It may have been a long time since either Nichols nor McChesney rode a subway, so perhaps they don't have a clue as to what the masses read. The authors must read the NY Times with their croissants.

Subsidies

The papers they would subsidize are replete with advertising. Why should U.S. taxpayers subsidize the delivery of ANY ads? Their proposal does put a tepid limit on subsidies to "ad-supported" news --only ones which have 50% or less ads. We are already paying for ads in the cost of promoted goods. The postal service is burdened with the weight of the ads sent as catalogues and all the other junk mail that has flourished with "bulk" rate subsidies. Junk mail is just that-- the "bulk" of postal business today.

I'm surprised that these media reformers have undertaken such a rush to resuscitate their own often blasted past targets. They agonize that without newspapers, "Politicians and administrators will work increasingly without independent scrutiny and without public accountability." They admit that the U.S. press has sadly missed that sort of independent scrutiny for decades, but there is a lingering belief that journalism (with a capital J!) is usually "on the case." How does New York Times' war-monger Judith Miller fits into that ideal? Certainly it wasn't just "bad apple" Miller who lead the war chorus. The Times wasn't "reporting" about Iraq prior to the invasion, but actively orchestrating the battle cries--as they were soon to follow with their treatment of the Iran "threat".

Where are the Nichols and McChesney of their New Press 2005 book, Tragedy and Farce: how the American media sell wars, spin elections, and destroy democracy? One longs for a systemic critique, not a band-aid and a pat. They have good impulses, but they are compromised and essentially brought down by their allegiance to established professional hierarchies and by their inability to acknowledge (even their own!) critique of corporate media. There is no recognition of the on-going process of "manufacturing consent", so brilliantly laid out by Herman and Chomsky. Instead there is almost an apology-- similar to the Times' own mea culpa vis a vis Judith Miller. Nichols and McChesney say: "The news media blew the coverage of the Iraq invasion". "They missed the past decade of corporate scandals." (My emphases) It's as though these are just some mistakes--aberrations that could be rectified by some additional resources and a few more good reporters. They call for the system to create "far superior" journalism. There is an abiding faith in the system itself.

Journalism Education

The Nation article proposes that there be subsidies for journalism education. Why feather the nests of the mainstream journalism schools? An interesting survey would be to find out how many of the winners of, for example, the Polk Journalism Awards, have actually attended those stodgy bureaucrat factories. The heroic journalists who come to mind didn't hatch in those halls. Amy Goodman studied anthropology. Seymour Hersh and Studs Turkel went to law school. Naomi Klein attended the London School of Economics. Robert Fisk was a literature major. Even deceased mainstream ABC anchor Peter Jennings didn't attend journalism school. He never even finished a BA, saying he "lasted about 10 minutes" in college. Polk award winner Jeremy Scahill cut his teeth at the Catholic Worker. Scahill once said that journalism schools produce only lemmings. His solution is to declare journalism a trade and insure that young people learn out in the field, apprenticing as he did with Amy Goodman. He claims to have learned more from his work cataloging Amy's piles of news clippings than he would in any college classroom.

The U.S. junior high schools and high schools don't need journalism classes, but courses that encourage young people to take an interest in history, economics, political science and yes, literature. In terms of the media, U.S. schools need CRITICAL media education, so that students learn to critique not only the New York Post, but The Nation and Hulu and the twittering prose of Face Book. Scandinavia has a long tradition of requiring media analysis even in primary schools. "Tell me kids, why is Teletubbies sponsored by Kelloggs?" Our high school students, many of whom are members of My Space, need to be taught to understand how data mining works. Those cute Face Book questionnaires and attitude surveys are conceived by marketers who are building profiles, for their next round of "push" ads.

Public, Educational and Government Access

McChesney and Nichols suggest that there be government support for school newspapers and low power radio. Great. There are high schools where radio and internet reporting is happening right now. Students and community organizations have had access to technical and training support for coverage of local (and national) issues in the often dismissed world of PEG channels. PEG (Public, Government and Educational) access in many communities are required by local governments as a payment for use of the local "right of way." This has resulted in media centers in several thousand municipalities where communities can have access to cameras, computers and channels, all maintained by the cable operator. PEG has done admirable work in a providing opportunities for gaining technical proficiency, moreover, in providing an authentic "public sphere" for creating and exchanging information and opinion. The impressive PEG infrastructure is currently threatened by the heavily funded lobbying of ATT and Verizon. These corporations are seeking to get state legislatures to enact laws which gut the local regulations that require cable corporations to provide access. McChesney and Nichols' Free Press has not foregrounded this battle, preferring to highlight the sexier struggle for "net neutrality". However, recently after a bit of prodding, Free Press helped by urging their list serve members to make FCC comments in support of PEG. This is part of an inquiry by the FCC into how cable corporations have been "slamming" access channels by moving them into hard to find digital "closets" not easily accessible to channel switching remotes. .

The struggle for an open internet can’t be limited to "neutrality". Sure, the preferential use of speed and access by internet providers should not be allowed, but as technology enables telecommunication companies to pursue video distribution, we are moving closer to the convergence of these technologies, as any owner of an I-phone can attest. That means that the battles for PEG and the net all have the same protagonists, and all of these companies should be required to provide space and resources for the public. Enacting regulations which require support for public communication across all platforms should be part and parcel of the internet governance fight. Our airwaves and our "rights of way" enable these technologies and there has to be a public "pay back." Timber cutting and resource mining in national forests must compensate the public. Why not "rent" for our sky?

Nichols and McChesney speak of the need to protect public media from government interference, but PEG activists and administrators have developed concrete examples of how public media can be shielded from government and corporate interference. Many of the cable franchises now in place are far more effective than the "safeguards" at PBS, CPB and NPR. In terms of media regulation, PEG is a pretty good model, although in many cities and towns PEG is underfunded and neglected. However, in those cities where PEG has flourished with comprehensive contracts with the cable corporations, such as Tucson, Cambridge, Burlington, Portland and many, many more, public communication via access channels provides many of the things right now that Nichols and McChesney want "public broadcasting" to do in the future.

"Quality"

The Nation article has confusing proscriptions for a future "public media". McChesney and Nichols state: "Only government can implement policies and subsidies to provide an institutional framework for quality journalism. We understand that this is a controversial position." But then they go on to say they don't endorse "government support". They then argue for expanding funding for public broadcasting, and argue that in their proposed future, "no state or region would be without quality local, state, and national or international journalism." They do not outline how the programming would be protected from government (and corporate) interference, nor do they define what "quality" is, any more than they delineate the "vibrant democracy" that they say was the goal of Jefferson and Madison. That the views of women and non-landholders weren't part of that "vibrant" consensus in our early Republic is not mentioned in McChesney and Nichols' enthusiastic statements about the press.

That quest for "quality" is one of the ruses which mainstream journalism, from the NYTimes to public broadcasting, has used to maintain their status quo. The position is succinctly put in the quote by James Carey in the McChesney/Nichols article. Carey asks for "journalists to be restored to their proper [sic!] role as orchestrators of the conversation of a democratic culture." Is "orchestration" what we need for a "vibrant democracy"? A different critic, Communication Professor Herbert Schiller, in the first Paper Tiger TV program (critiquing The New York Times in 1981) saw that role as being "the steering mechanism of the ruling class."

Public Broadcasting

Nichols and McChesney are right that this is an opportune time to re-think the structures of U.S. media, and public broadcasting is a good place to start, but there are other more general problems than the need for multi-year consistent funding. Pouring money into the "public broadcasting" that now exists will only strengthen the elitism that has evolved from these convoluted, bureaucratic structures. The whole structure of PBS and CPB is designed to squelch any "vibrant democracy." While Nichols and McChesney warn about government involvement, they don't mention the gorilla in the room-- transnational agribusiness and the oil and insurance corporations. The subservient accommodation by PBS to corporate interests was recently clarified in the treatment given a Front Line program on health care which was initiated by Washinton Post reporter T.R. Reid, entitled "Health Care Around America". Although originally designed to critique profit-oriented health care insurance, PBS officials demanded major changes and any reference to profit oriented insurance being a "problem" was deleted. The script was changed to actually promote the insurance companies, much to the dismay of Mr. Reid, who tried, unsuccessfully, to have his name and his interviews taken off the show. The whole thrust of the program became diametrically contrary to the original intention of the correspondent. This is just par for the PBS course. Corporate funding (though only a fraction of the whole budget) is the power component not only for specific program selection, but for the operation of the whole system, and when the views expressed are in opposition to the corporate mind-set, those views are censored, not the corporation.

The boards of directors of the public television channels across the country are self-perpetuating elite representatives of corporate and mainstream interests. For a brief time in the 1970s there was a movement to have elected boards. Rather than change the make-up of the powerful who run these channels, the response to local and national activism was to set up "advisory boards" of "community" members. Most of those advisory boards have long since disbanded, realizing early on that they functioned only as public relations props and that they had no real clout to effect programming direction or station management. A new reassessment would have to take on the democratic restructuring of public television. Serious democratizing of the public broadcasting system must be a prerequisite for receiving any funding from Congress, or from any sort of fee based mechanism such as that which is the basis of the BBC.

Reconfiguring the funding in ways that are independent of party politics and corporate PR could help to make our public media true expressions of the lively issues and arts that exist in our country. Funding for public media can have strong prerequisites-- ones that foster independence, creativity and promote collaborations. The example of ITVS-- the Independent Television Service, founded by the lobbying efforts of independent producers in the 70s and 80s, has pioneered various ways (with a small budget) to support serious creative programming on public television. Democracy Now! is an example of new journalism that uses a hybrid mix of everything including camcorder/internet activists and cell phones to provide a daily program of hard hitting investigation and commentary by historians, lawyers, politicians, artists and those directly effected by wars and injustice. On no other outlet do we hear so often from the victims of global warring (and global warming). Because of the burgeoning "do it yourself" media sphere, there is great potential for cooperation between the many sectors of public expression: public television, public access, community radio, ipods, community projections and the internet. Each of these entities has infrastructure that can expand and develop with creative interchange that is open to sharing.

'The division between "professionals" and "amateurs" is exploited by such programs as the popular American Idol, in which a few talented "amateurs" vie for a "starring role." But the whole notion of "professional" media is constantly challenged by the millions of YouTube posters, eye-witness news gatherers, hip-hop DJs and the whole world of bloggers. The explosion of popular video and audio creation, combined with supportive infrastructure for distribution and exchange of this material can herald an era of public art and dialogue not seen since the WPA.

Communities of Location and Interest

Just as local food has become a rallying cry, local information, as Nichols and McChesney note, is what we want. Local media was consistently the overwhelming demand at the many community hearings that the FCC conducted over the past few years. In part, this was a tremendous reaction to the deregulation of radio and the swift consolidation of hundreds of broadcasting outlets. Let's hope that era of Clear Channel gobbling up local radio stations is over. The need for "local" is great in both the commercial and public arena in both television and radio. One has to look far and wide to find a public TV station (or even an NPR station) that does any local news. In the Northeast, WAMC FM out of Albany, NY has gobbled up local frequencies and is heard from Vermont to Connecticut, from Plattsburgh to Utica, from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire. Instead of local information this "mega channel" provides a hodge podge of "regional" programs squeezed in between the franchised NPR programs and their endless pitching for money.

I can recall when local radio would broadcast the menu for school lunches. Reviving that practice might improve the diet for a generation of youngsters. Parents might be scandalized in they could listen to the listing of catsup and potato chip meals that dominate school cafeterias. Local farmers can provide schools and colleges with fruits and veggies that are healthy and don't require carbon-spewing cross-country/world shipping. In a similar mode, local independent producers, youth, professors, musicians, elders, activists and immigrants can provide information, history, entertainment and art that is relevant and "home grown." At the same time we can exchange with international colleagues and friends. When information can travel freely (and neutrally!), community can be defined by interest and passion, and not limited by geography.

Happy Easter

2009-04-12T10:42:00.000-04:00

New School Arrests

2009-04-10T20:24:00.002-04:00

Brandon's film of the New School arrests was on the NYTimes site today.

talk about hand held visions?

2009-04-10T13:39:00.001-04:00

this is really scary.

Banner on Thames in London -- April 1 2009

2009-04-01T07:26:00.003-04:00

....from indymedia UK, but it took me forever to find anything-- the documentation of on-going actions is hard to follow-- but obviously there is more to come.

Letter from Radio Victoria in El Salvador

2009-03-17T13:14:00.003-04:00

"it is election day"

Election day in El Salvador, the ides of march, oh boy, and it rained last night in the driest time of the year, either it was the "bendicion de Dios" (God´s blessing) or weeping for the sad days to come. I am holding on, trying not to think about it, who will win, what will happen, can it go smoothly, can there really be a change.

i do believe that if things were relatively transparent and fair the FMLN candidate would easily win. But there has been such a dirty manipulative campaign going on, especially this last week, that it´s hard for me to feel sure. AND then there is the "legal fraud" which is people with voting cards that they got under false pretenses, people from neighboring countries who have been given these cards perhaps with a dead person´s name that still appears in the voter registration and their picture dropped in, or they were simply given a birth certificate at some point and then could get their identity card for voting.

there are many reports of people being bussed around to vote where they don´t belong, we just heard of 3 hondurans kicked out of a small town that doesn´t even border honduras, but they had voting cards. And ARENA activists have been trying to buy votes by giving out sheet metal to poor people in rural communities and today they are shamelessly handing out party t-shirts at a voting center which is a clear violation of the electoral laws since all campaigning officially ended 3 days before the elections. This is a violation punished by law yet the police stand by and do nothing. Could it be because the ARENA candidate is the ex-police chief????

also there have been program after program on Venezuela, ha, you´d think Hugo Chavez was one of the candidates here. there is a slogan "i won´t turn over el salvador" as if to say by voting for the FMLN we are opening the door to the great dictator, Hugo Chavez!! the programs on venezuela are aimed at scaring people and that has been the main thrust of ARENA´s campaign.

so it goes, it is really sickening to witness, the whole circus because the right wing has taken this to such a gut level, of fear, using images of children, talking about atheism and that Funes is the enemy of private enterprise, it just goes on and on.

i just watched Mauricio Funes vote on a TV channel, i really got emotional i have to admit, he was pressed upon by all the media yelling mauricio, mauricio and he spoke of massive voting and how this favored the change to come and that all FMLN activists and supporters should remain calm and wait for the results and that he was going to form a government of national unity, i really almost started to cry because i am repressing my emotions, my great hope and desire that he will win, i just can´t completely go there, it´s too scary, but seeing him was amazing, he kissed his ballot before putting it in the box and i just felt so much hope. We are all hoping there will not be violence however it goes.

i will try to send out something a bit later. love to all of you and light a candle for us, there is so much hope and excitement i don´t know if i could bear a big disappointment.

bye, love you, C*

"first results"

preliminary FMLN 57%
ARENA 42%

still a lot to go but these are many of the major cities
*******************************************************************************

" ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡ sí se pudo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "

It has happened!!!!!!!!!! incredible, unbelieveable but TRUE !!!! what an
amazing feeling after 20 years and i have been here for all of these 20
years. we have a new president and really a new country, this is just so
exciting. an intelligent, articulate, quick big hearted ex journalist who
has the capacity to make a difference, to form alliances and to try to turn
around 20 years of bowing and pandering to the very rich.

at 9:30 p.m. with 90% of the vote in the Supreme Electoral Tribunal
announced that the FMLN had 51.27% and ARENA 48.73%, that meant a consistent
lead by the Frente since the counting had started.

Funes announced victory amid a massive sea of cameras in a hotel in the
capital, wall to wall national and international press. He could barely get
through to the microphones. I heard that the ARENA candidates campaign head
accepted defeat but the candidate himself has not gone public.

In Funes?s announcement he spoke of hope and reconciliation as in the Peace
Accords

oh right now Rodrigo Avila is accepting his defeat !!!! it is for real
now.

it is so unbelieveable after living through these last weeks, months and
years but especially thinking that this victory could happen with all the
millions and millions of dollars that ARENA pumped into the media (there are
no limits here on campaign propaganda), with all their dirty tricks of
buying other politicians to give them a better edge, making pacts behind
closed doors, twisting words like freedom and democracy, with all their
sneaky ways of stuffing the ballot boxes, of bussing in non-salvadorans to
vote, giving out free voting cards, even making the dead vote, their
smugness and superiorness, their hubris, arrogance and disdain, their fear
mongering, their culture of fear, their warping history, that may be what
most angers me, someone said "now all our dead can finally rest peacefully".

to get back to his speech Funes also spoke of tolerance and respect, of a
spirit of national unity, of a government of dialogue and concertation. He
said that he will respect and listen to ARENA as the opposition party, that
he will respect private property and create a regimen of freedoms, freedom
of expression and freedom of religion. He said he would work to make El
Salvador the most dynamic economy in Central America. He also referred to
Monseñor Romero?s example as a prophet saying "my route of acting will be a
directed preference for the poor and excluded", and that he will work for
peace, unity, progress, social justice and development and will leave
vengeance aside.

this is a bright new sun rising and as Oscar wrote in a note he put by a
burning candle: This is the light of hope, the light that shines in the
heart of just people, the light that will see a new day born, this light
represents our leader Mauricio Funes.

it was so great to be here at the Radio waiting and hoping and tense all
day long, carrying out a labor that began at 3:30 a.m. and now it is 11:30
p.m. We sent reporters and 2 groups of visiting U.S. youth off to the
municipalities to cover the elections, brought them back at mid-day to vote
and took them back again to cover the closing of the polls. Waited as
results began coming in but always cautious, afraid that there could be more
tricks sliding out of some very long sleeves. I was here in 1989 when the
first ARENA government was elected so this has been a long long journey, and
a very deserved victory.

and Mauricio Funes has a special place in our Radio?s heart. We visited him
when he was the head of the news team at channed 12 and he spent 3 hours
answering all our questions, showing us around the station and taking photos
with us. And ours was the first community radio that he visited during his
campaign.

so let this day end, i haven't cried yet but i want to. I want to cry for
all those who have suffered so much because of these selfish and greedy
leaders. And for the bright hope of change.

The day after tomorrow we will think about what new dirty tricks ARENA has
up their sleeves. Until then we will celebrate and enjoy.

love to you all, sorry for going on and on, hasta la victoria siempre,
c*/ww.

The End of the Willow Tree House and the Beginning of the One at the White House

2009-03-12T15:40:00.006-04:00

CRACK WENT THE TREE.
DOWN CAME THE TREEHOUSE.

Even in death, it shows the exquisite elegance of Jonathan's design.

Meanwhile--- on the White House lawn......

Hand Held Visions

1968

Paper Tiger Exhibition at Fales

Bifo Manifesto

IAMCR in Istanbul

Shut It Down!!!

Some short random clips from Mary Frank's Opening May 5, 2011

Remembering Hazel (1935-2011)

Memorial for Janine Vega

"Looking Bad"

Reminiscing about 112 Greene Street

Kartuli Concert In Kingston, NY, January 21, 2011

Janine Pommy Vega Died Yesterday

buy buy buying

We're number one

New York Art Book Fair

Modern Art Ancient Wages: The MoMA Strike of 2000

El Pais de las Mujeres-- Gioconda Belli

The Great Chain of Being

Amy Trompetter Performs in Willow

Vets Take on the Newseum

Lucius Walker Jr.

Claridad: 50 Años de Lucha

Free Speech Ruling Moves Case to Jury

Joel Kovel Reads Life

Black Panther Ten Point Plan

DeeDee of Green Gables

Good bye to Tony Judt: Ill Fares the Land

Rooftop Acres

History of Deep Dish

Tuli Kupferberg's Calling Card

Mary Frank Installs Exhibit at Skoto Gallery

After School Programs Will Be Eliminated

FLORIDITA SURVIVES DESPITE KITCHEN SEIZURE

Ally, Emma and their father and grandmother

May 1 in NYC

The Great Chain of Being

Cop Zone in Central Park

Free Free Palestine

Diana Bryan has passed

Loni Ding, Social Documentarian

Bailout for the Media Moguls?

Coalition

The Golden Festival: Zikrayat and Supruli

Democracy Now! Goes to Haiti

The Future

We're there for you

Celebration Time

Demonstration against Siege of Gaza

Papo and Frank Read Pedro

Columbia University: Stop the Land Grab!

Rebuild the peace in silent streets where once your love was born.

Awake the ire of nations. Let justice be restored!

...drive hate and fear away...

Drive hate and fear away...

..your love bring down on David's town...

..your love bring down

...descend to us we pray.

O holy child of Bethlehem...

...the dear Christ enters in.

...where meek souls will receive him still...

...but in this world of sin...

No ear could hear his coming...

...the blessings of his heav'n.

...to human hearts....

So God imparts...

the wondrous gift is g'ven.

How silently, how silently...

...are met in thee tonight.

...of all the years...

The hopes and fears....

...the everlasting light..

Yet in thy dark streets shining...

...the silent stars go by.

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep...

How still we see thee lie....

O Little Town of Bethlehem Advent Calendar

Thanksgiving Special

Protest in Kingston, NY

Bernie Madoff and the Anarchist Fairy

Rebuild the peace in silent streets where once your love was born.