Orhan Pamuk: Nobel Prize for Literature Speech

(Courtesy of Indian Writing)

My Father's Suitcase
by Orhan Pamuk
Nobel Prize

Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts and notebooks. Assuming his usual joking, mocking air, he told me he wanted me to read them after he was gone, by which he meant after he died.

'Just take a look,' he said, looking slightly embarrassed. 'See if there's anything inside that you can use. Maybe after I'm gone you can make a selection and publish it.'

We were in my study, surrounded by books. My father was searching for a place to set down the suitcase, wandering back and forth like a man who wished to rid himself of a painful burden. In the end, he deposited it quietly in an unobtrusive corner. It was a shaming moment that neither of us ever forgot, but once it had passed and we had gone back into our usual roles, taking life lightly, our joking, mocking personas took over and we relaxed. We talked as we always did, about the trivial things of everyday life, and Turkey's neverending political troubles, and my father's mostly failed business ventures, without feeling too much sorrow.

I remember that after my father left, I spent several days walking back and forth past the suitcase without once touching it. I was already familiar with this small, black, leather suitcase, and its lock, and its rounded corners. My father would take it with him on short trips and sometimes use it to carry documents to work. I remembered that when I was a child, and my father came home from a trip, I would open this little suitcase and rummage through his things, savouring the scent of cologne and foreign countries. This suitcase was a familiar friend, a powerful reminder of my childhood, my past, but now I couldn't even touch it. Why? No doubt it was because of the mysterious weight of its contents.

I am now going to speak of this weight's meaning. It is what a person creates when he shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and retires to a corner to express his thoughts – that is, the meaning of literature.

When I did touch my father's suitcase, I still could not bring myself to open it, but I did know what was inside some of those notebooks. I had seen my father writing things in a few of them. This was not the first time I had heard of the heavy load inside the suitcase. My father had a large library; in his youth, in the late 1940s, he had wanted to be an Istanbul poet, and had translated Valéry into Turkish, but he had not wanted to live the sort of life that came with writing poetry in a poor country with few readers. My father's father – my grandfather – had been a wealthy business man; my father had led a comfortable life as a child and a young man, and he had no wish to endure hardship for the sake of literature, for writing. He loved life with all its beauties – this I understood.

The first thing that kept me distant from the contents of my father's suitcase was, of course, the fear that I might not like what I read. Because my father knew this, he had taken the precaution of acting as if he did not take its contents seriously. After working as a writer for 25 years, it pained me to see this. But I did not even want to be angry at my father for failing to take literature seriously enough ... My real fear, the crucial thing that I did not wish to know or discover, was the possibility that my father might be a good writer. I couldn't open my father's suitcase because I feared this. Even worse, I couldn't even admit this myself openly. If true and great literature emerged from my father's suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed an entirely different man. This was a frightening possibility. Because even at my advanced age I wanted my father to be only my father – not a writer.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too. In my novel, My Name is Red, when I wrote about the old Persian miniaturists who had drawn the same horse with the same passion for so many years, memorising each stroke, that they could recreate that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew I was talking about the writing profession, and my own life. If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art – this craft – he must first have been given some hope. The angel of inspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on others) favours the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer feels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his dreams, and the value of his writing – when he thinks his story is only his story – it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal to him stories, images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to build. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

To Read the Rest of the Speech

Pema Chödrön and bell hooks: Cultivating Openness When Things Fall Apart

(A nod to BH and Okir who have been discussing Chödrön in the comments to another post and Starrider who got me thinking about these things through the suggestion of a book.)

Cultivating Openness When Things Fall Apart
Pema Chödrön and bell hooks
Shambhala Sun

Pema Chödrön & bell hooks discuss how to relax with openness when things fall apart.

"Isn't that the kind of teaching we need these days, that difficult circumstances can be the path to liberation. That's news you can use."

bell hooks:Initially when I enter the classroom, I share with my students that we are there to think critically-to engage the world we live in-the world of ideas, fully, deeply, with our whole heart. Pema Chödrön's work gives me this gift. Consistently she challenges me to think beyond someplace where I have erected boundaries-where I've allowed myself to become stuck-attached-full of defences.

When I first read her, the writing irked me. I was disturbed by what I began to call its "strategic open-endedness." I wanted to be offered solutions, ways out. Instead, she kept extending an invitation to me and everyone to move into that enchanted space beyond right or wrong-to journey to the heart of compassion. And when you have stepped out on faith, straight into the heart of the matter, loving kindness appears less like a utopian dream. It becomes concrete-a place to practice wherever you are. Beyond the challenges she makes to the stuck places within us, Pema is most seductive and exciting when she urges us to revise our notions of safety telling us: "Real safety is your willingness to not run away from yourself." She urges us to risk, to embrace rebellion, disruption, and chaos as a beloved site for transformation. Talking with her enabled me to bring issues that trouble my heart out in the open. My hope was that she could and would shed light on the matter. Those bits of light are here in our dialogue. May their radiance reach you.

bell hooks: Pema, one of the ideas in your work that really challenges me is abandoning the hope of fruition. That's really hard for me.

Pema Chödrön: The way I understand it is that we rob ourselves of being in the present by always thinking that the payoff will happen in the future. The only place ever to work is right now. We work with the present situation rather than a hypothetical possibility of what could be. I like any teaching that encourages us to be with ourselves and our situation as it is without looking for alternatives. The source of all wakefulness, the source of all kindness and compassion, the source of all wisdom, is in each second of time. Anything that has us looking ahead is missing the point.

bell hooks: Much of the work I do revolves around racism and sexism, and on one hand, I want to start right where I am in the now. But on the other hand, I also have to have this vision of a future where these things are not in our lives. Do you think that's too utopian?

Pema Chödrön: Personally, I work with aspiration. The classic aspiration is "Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them." That means that I aspire to end suffering for all creatures, but at the same time I stay with the immediacy of the situation I'm in. I give up both the hope that something is going to change and the fear that it isn't. We may long to end suffering but somehow it paralyzes us if we're too goal-oriented. Do you see the balance there? It's like the teaching that Don Juan gave to Carlos Castenada, where he says that you do everything with your whole heart, as if nothing else matters. You do it impeccably and with your whole heart, but all the while knowing that it actually doesn't matter at all.

bell hooks: Yet it seems very hard for people to fight this racism and sexism without hope for an end to it. There is so much despair and apathy because of the feeling that we've struggled and struggled and not enough has changed.

Pema Chödrön: The main issue is aggression. Often if there's too much hope you begin to have a strong sense of enemy. Then the whole process of trying to alleviate suffering actually adds more suffering because of your aggression toward the oppressor. Don't you see a lot of people who have such good intentions but they get very angry, depressed, resentful?

bell hooks: Yes, you're talking to one! I get so overwhelmed sometimes.

Pema Chödrön: Well, doesn't that get in the way?

bell hooks: Yeah, it does. I'm on tour right now talking about my book about ending racism, and I hear people say things like, racism doesn't exist, or, don't you think we've already dealt with that? And I start to feel irritable. This irritability starts mounting in me, and I notice how it collapses into sorrow. I came home the other day and I sat down at my table and just wept because I thought, it's just too much.

Pema Chödrön: Well, isn't that the point? That other people and ourselves, we're the same really, and we just get stuck in different ways. Getting
stuck in any kind of self-and-other tension seems to cause pain. So if you can keep your heart and your mind open to those people, in other words, work with any tendency to close down towards them, isn't that the way the system of racism and cruelty starts to de-escalate? The thing is, once we get into this kind of work we are opening ourselves for all our own unresolved misery to come floating right up and block our compassion. It's a difficult and challenging practice to keep your heart and mind open. It takes a lot to be a living example of unbiased mind! But when you see, bell, how you feel towards these people, you can begin to understand why there is racism, why there is cruelty, because everyone has those same thoughts and emotions that you do. Everyone feels that irritability and then it escalates.

bell hooks: Is it simply a choice of will to have an open heart?

Pema Chödrön: I think it begins with the aspiration to connect with open heart, the knowledge that cultivating openness is how you want to spend the remaining moments of your life. Openness actually starts to emerge when you see how you close down. You see how you close down, how you yell at someone, and you begin to
have some compassion. It starts with compassion towards yourself and then you begin to extend that warmth to the rest of humanity. It begins to dawn on you how it could happen that people are yelling at others because they're oriental or black or hispanic or women or gay or whatever. You begin to know what it's like to stand in their shoes.

bell hooks: How do you develop compassion towards yourself?

Pema Chödrön: A big part of compassion is being honest with yourself, not shielding yourself from your mistakes as if nothing had happened. And
the other big component is being gentle. This is what meditation is about, but obviously it goes beyond sitting on a meditation cushion. You begin to see your moods and your attitudes and your opinions. You begin to hear this voice, your voice, and how it can be so critical of self and others. There is growing clarity about all the different parts of yourself. Meditation gives you the tools to look at all of this clearly, with an unbiased attitude. A lot of having compassion toward oneself is staying with the initial thought or arising of emotion. This means that when you see yourself being aggressive, or stuck in self-pity, or whatever it might be, then you train again and again in not adding things on top of that-guilt or self-justification or any further negativities. You work on not spinning off and on being kinder toward the human condition as you see it in yourself.

Link to the Rest of the Discussion

Bill Moyers: For America's Sake

For America's Sake
by BILL MOYERS

[from the January 22, 2007 issue]

(Wake up America!!!!!!!!!!! courtesy of Wes Houp)

For America's Sake
by Bill Moyers
The Nation

The following is an adaptation of remarks made by Bill Moyers to a December 12 gathering in New York sponsored by The Nation, Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice and the New Democracy Project. --The Editors

You could not have chosen a better time to gather. Voters have provided a respite from a right-wing radicalism predicated on the philosophy that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice. It seems only yesterday that the Trojan horse of conservatism was hauled into Washington to disgorge Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist and their hearty band of ravenous predators masquerading as a political party of small government, fiscal restraint and moral piety and promising "to restore accountability to Congress...[and] make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves."

Well, the long night of the junta is over, and Democrats are ebullient as they prepare to take charge of the multitrillion-dollar influence racket that we used to call the US Congress. Let them rejoice while they can, as long as they remember that while they ran some good campaigns, they have arrived at this moment mainly because George W. Bush lost a war most people have come to believe should never have been fought in the first place. Let them remember, too, in this interim of sweet anticipation, that although they are reveling in the ruins of a Republican reign brought down by stupendous scandals, their own closet is stocked with skeletons from an era when they were routed from office following Abscam bribes and savings and loan swindles that plucked the pockets and purses of hard-working, tax-paying Americans.

As they rejoice, Democrats would be wise to be mindful of Shakespeare's counsel, "'Tis more by fortune...than by merit." For they were delivered from the wilderness not by their own goodness and purity but by the grace of K Street corruption, DeLay Inc.'s duplicity, the pitiless exploitation of Terri Schiavo, the disgrace of Mark Foley and a shameful partisan cover-up, the shamelessness of Jack Abramoff and a partisan conspiracy, and neocon arrogance and amorality (yes, amoral: Apparently there is no end to the number of bodies Bill Kristol and Richard Perle are prepared to watch pile up on behalf of illusions that can't stand the test of reality even one Beltway block from the think tanks where they are hatched). The Democrats couldn't have been more favored by the gods if they had actually believed in one!

But whatever one might say about the election, the real story is one that our political and media elites are loath to acknowledge or address. I am not speaking of the lengthy list of priorities that progressives and liberals of every stripe are eager to put on the table now that Democrats hold the cards in Congress. Just the other day a message popped up on my computer from a progressive advocate whose work I greatly admire. Committed to movement-building from the ground up, he has results to show for his labors. His request was simple: "With changes in Congress and at our state capitol, we want your input on what top issues our lawmakers should tackle. Click here to submit your top priority."

I clicked. Sure enough, up came a list of thirty-four issues--an impressive list that began with "African-American" and ran alphabetically through "energy" and "higher education" to "guns," "transportation," "women's issues" and "workers' rights." It wasn't a list to be dismissed, by any means, for it came from an unrequited thirst for action after a long season of malignant opposition to every item on the agenda. I understand the mindset. Here's a fellow who values allies and appreciates what it takes to build coalitions; who knows that although our interests as citizens vary, each one is an artery to the heart that pumps life through the body politic, and each is important to the health of democracy. This is an activist who knows political success is the sum of many parts.

But America needs something more right now than a "must-do" list from liberals and progressives. America needs a different story. The very morning I read the message from the progressive activist, the New York Times reported on Carol Ann Reyes. Carol Ann Reyes is 63. She lives in Los Angeles, suffers from dementia and is homeless. Somehow she made her way to a hospital with serious, untreated needs. No details were provided as to what happened to her there, except that the hospital--which is part of Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the country--called a cab and sent her back to skid row. True, they phoned ahead to workers at a rescue shelter to let them know she was coming. But some hours later a surveillance camera picked her up "wandering around the streets in a hospital gown and slippers." Dumped in America.

Here is the real political story, the one most politicians won't even acknowledge: the reality of the anonymous, disquieting daily struggle of ordinary people, including the most marginalized and vulnerable Americans but also young workers and elders and parents, families and communities, searching for dignity and fairness against long odds in a cruel market world.

Everywhere you turn you'll find people who believe they have been written out of the story. Everywhere you turn there's a sense of insecurity grounded in a gnawing fear that freedom in America has come to mean the freedom of the rich to get richer even as millions of Americans are dumped from the Dream. So let me say what I think up front: The leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people.

There's no mistaking that America is ready for change. One of our leading analysts of public opinion, Daniel Yankelovich, reports that a majority want social cohesion and common ground based on pragmatism and compromise, patriotism and diversity. But because of the great disparities in wealth, the "shining city on the hill" has become a gated community whose privileged occupants, surrounded by a moat of money and protected by a political system seduced with cash into subservience, are removed from the common life of the country. The wreckage of this abdication by elites is all around us.

Corporations are shredding the social compact, pensions are disappearing, median incomes are flattening and healthcare costs are soaring. In many ways, the average household is generally worse off today than it was thirty years ago, and the public sector that was a support system and safety net for millions of Americans across three generations is in tatters. For a time, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by more work and more personal debt. Both political parties craftily refashioned those major renovations of the average household as the new standard, shielding employers from responsibility for anything Wall Street didn't care about. Now, however, the more acute major risks workers have been forced to bear as employers reduce their health and retirement costs--on orders from Wall Street--have made it clear that our fortunes are being reversed. Polls show that a majority of US workers now believe their children will be worse off than they are. In one recent survey, only 14 percent of workers said that they have obtained the American Dream.

Link to read the entire speech

Mahatma Gandhi on Living and Learning

(I saw this in Lisa Schroot-Mitchum's email signature and said yes, that it is good advice...)

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
~Mahatma Gandhi

Do Not Call Campaign

REMINDER....at the end of January, all cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sale calls.

YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone: 888-382-1222. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time... It blocks your number for five (5) years.

You must call from the cell phone number you are wanting to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number.

HELP OTHERS BY PASSING THIS ON TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS OR GO TO: Do Not Call

X-Tal: The Cold Civil War

"The Cold Civil War"
Lyrics J. Neo
from Reason is 6/7 of Treason by X-Tal

I see the battle lines drawn everywhere
Read the paper, count the lies
Read the letters from respected citizens
With murder in their eyes
Soldiers in disguise
So don't you criticize

Great men lead the charge against the foe
Nobly boasting of their crimes
And feeble opposition strains to not offend
And loses every time

Pundits crow about prosperity
From their comfortable estates
Rub their last decade of glory in your face
Yeah, everything's just great
So just accept your fate
'Cause it's already too late

We're already in a civil war
Pretending nobody gets killed You might read about some vague event somewhere
But its just too unreal
Nothing you can feel
We did not turn that wheel... so we believe

We're all safe here in America
But the battle rages on
Lives hange on the image ad-men create
For a sedated throng
An audience of pawns
Sell you for a song.

Details, details, facts are stupid things
Can't you see we don't want to know?
We want a candy box of sentiment and fear
And wrap it in a pretty bow
Come on, go man go!

There are those that sense there's something wrong
You can find them all around
But their words are too upsetting for our ears
It's such a foreign sound
They'd better keep their voices down
We'll send someone to knock them down

So tell me how secure you feel today
Stirred & soothed by official words
You find you can't always get
You need

You get what you deserve
You get what you deserve
You get what you deserve!
In the Cold Civil War...



More about X-Tal and J. Neo

Gnarls Barkley: St. Elsewhere

One of the best music releases of 2006 was Gnarls Barkley's "St. Elsewhere." Gnarls Barkley is actually a wild, creative, experimental, intelligent collaboration between Cee-Lo Green and Danger Mouse. Great lyrics ("Way over yonder there's a new frontier/would it be so hard for you to come and visit me here?") expressed through Green's raspy rapping are mixed with urban rhythms and beats run through Danger Mouse's experimental blender of innovations. The music is deep as the ocean, challenging to conformist notions and bland musical products, but it doesn't sink beneath the weight of its musical integrity, instead, it is bouyed by a underlying foundation of free-thought and fun-loving exuberence. It transgresses and it critiques, it escapes and returns, but most of all it boogies all night long!!! The lyrics can offend, but always there is this self-evaluation missing from most rap/rock. In reference to the monster that haunts his nights Green sings:

I used to wonder why he looked familiar
Then I realized it was a mirror
And now it is plain to see,
The whole time the monster was me

Listening tip, it sounds even better on the headset b/c you can pick up more of the musical effects.



"Crazy"

I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions had an echo
In so much space

And when you're out there
Without care,
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy
Does that make me crazy
Does that make me crazy
Possibly [video version]
Probably [CD version]

And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that's my only advice

Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are,
Ha ha ha bless your soul
You really think you're in control

Well, I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
Just like me

My heroes had the heart to Lose their lives out on a limb
And all I remember is thinking, I want to be like them
Ever since I was little, ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it's no coincidence I've come
And I can die when I'm done

Maybe I'm crazy
Maybe you're crazy
Maybe we're crazy
Possibly

KEJA Conference: “Putting Economic Justice on Kentucky’s Political Agenda”

(Message from Jessica Hays)

KEJA Conference, January 20th, Central Christian Church

“Putting Economic Justice on Kentucky’s Political Agenda”
Please join us in Lexington on January 20th for the Kentucky Economic Justice Alliance conference, “Putting Economic Justice on the Political Agenda.” We have a great list of participants and topics, and the conference will give us a powerful kick-off to our work for not only the legislative session and the gubernatorial race, but for long-term change in Kentucky.

Presentations

• “Making Government Work in Kentucky: Putting Economic Justice on the Political Agenda” – Opening presentation that sets the stage for the rest of the day by making a case for the attainability for economic justice in Kentucky. We’re in the game!

• “Raise the Wage” – A presentation on Kentucky’s fight to raise the state minimum wage, including an overview of the legislation to raise the state wage, the strategies to get that legislation passed, and insights about ways to frame the issue powerfully and compellingly.

• “Talking About Government” – A Demos presentation about how to talk about government in a way that conveys everyone’s responsibility to invest in the public good. Demos is a public policy group that focuses on crafting messages to build support for democratic ideals. If you like George Lakoff, you’ll love the Demos presentation.

Strategy Workshops

• Tax Justice – A workshop explaining the need for fair and adequate tax reform and showing how KEJA’s comprehensive tax proposal would fill that need.

• Who’s Affected? – A workshop by Women in Transition that focuses on building leadership within lower-income groups and strategies for empowering people who have been affected by economic injustice.

• High Road – Introduction to High Road, the collaborative work of KFTC and MACED to bring sustainable economic development to Kentucky communities, and to how you can get involved in the campaign.

• Electoral Organizing for Economic Justice – Louisville’s Amy Shir ran an effective grassroots campaigns that inspired people to take part in changing their government. She and organizer extraordinaire Dave Newton will offer insights and strategies for including people in government by invigorating their belief in the democratic process.

• Building Support for Single-Payer Health Care in Kentucky – Kay Tillow, Executive Director of the Nurses Professional Organization and Coordinator of Kentuckians for Single Payer Healthcare, and Mark McKinley, an active force in the campaign, will demystify single-payer health care, and will discuss their strategies and lessons in the successful Louisville campaign to endorse single-payer health care. Sally Evans will address the progress that’s underway in Lexington.

• Demos Workshop – Patrick Bresette from Demos, our special guest, is offering a workshop for people particularly interested in learning to communicate about government and economic justice more effectively. If you leave the Demos presentation wishing for more about framing our message of the need for economic justice, come to this workshop.

The Conference will be held on January 20, 10:30-5, at Central Christian Church in Lexington (205 East Short Street). It is free and open to the public. To register, send your contact information and veggie/non-veggie lunch preference to Jessica Hays at jessicabreen at kftc.org or 859.533.0613.
Directions to Central Christian Church

From the east:
From I-75, take Exit 110 toward Lexington. Turn left onto Winchester Rd (US 60). Stay in Winchester for 3.4 miles, then take a slight left onto Midland Ave (still US 60). From Midland, turn right onto East Main and follow for .3 miles. Turn right onto North Martin Luther King Blvd. You’ll see Central Christian Church on the corner of MLK Blvd. and Short St. The parking lot is on MLK, at a one-way sign just past the church. There is also street parking available.

From the west:
From I-64, take exit 115 toward BG Parkway/Airport/Lexington. Merge onto Newtown Pike and follow for 3.3 miles. Turn left onto Main St and follow for less than a mile. From Main, turn left onto North Martin Luther King Blvd. You’ll see Central Christian Church on the corner of MLK Blvd. and Short St. The parking lot is on MLK Blvd., at a one-way sign just past the church. There is also street parking available.


From the Bluegrass Parkway:
Follow Versailles Rd. for about 10 miles until South Broadway. Turn left onto South Broadway, then turn right onto W. Short St. You’ll see Central Christian Church at the corner of Short Street and North Martin Luther King Blvd. Turn left onto MLK Blvd. for the church’s parking lot.


Putting Economic Justice on the Political Agenda

10:30-10:45 Welcome Session

10:45-11:30 Presentation: Making Government Work in Kentucky: Putting Economic Justice on the Agenda

11:30-11:45 Break

11:45-12:45 Demos Presentation: Talking about Government (Patrick Bressette)

12:45-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:00 Raise the Wage Presentation (Ed Monahan and Lisa Abbott)

2:00-2:15 Break

2:15-3:15 Strategy Workshops, Round 1
• Tax Justice (Deb Miller and Heather Roe Mahoney)
• Who’s Affected: Building Leadership (WIT)
• High Road (MACED)
• Electoral Organizing (Amy Shir, Dave Newton)
• Demos: Talking About Government

3:15-3:30 Break

3:30-4:30 Strategy Workshops, Round 2
• Tax Justice (Deb Miller and Heather Roe Mahoney)
• Who’s Affected: Building Leadership (WIT)
• High Road (MACED)
• Electoral Organizing (Amy Shir, Dave Newton)
• Building Support for Single-Payer Health Care in Kentucky (Kay Tillow et al)

4:40-5:00 General Session: Next Steps
• Individual Action
• Organizational Action

Jon Wiener: "24," Torture on TV

Fox Show "24": Torture on TV
By Jon Wiener, TheNation and AlterNet



With at least one big torture scene in every episode and steadily increasing ratings, TV show "24" is more convincing than the White House at making the case for torture.

"24" is back on Fox TV -- the hit show starring Kiefer Sutherland, which premiered Sunday night, once again features at least one big torture scene in every episode -- the kind of torture the Bush White House says is necessary to protect us from you-know-who.

The show is much more convincing than the White House at making the case for torture; its ratings have gone steadily up over the last five years, while Bush's ratings have gone steadily down.

In "24," Sutherland plays special agent Jack Bauer, head of the Counter Terrorism Unit. He fights some of his biggest battles not with the dark-skinned enemies trying to nuke L.A., but rather with the light-skinned do-gooders who think the head of the Counter Terrorism Unit should follow the rules.

Back in season four, for example, the bumbling bureaucrats released a captured terrorist before he could be tortured -- because a lawyer for "Amnesty Global" showed up whining about the Geneva Conventions. Jack had to quit the Counter Terrorist Unit and become a private citizen in order to break the suspect's fingers.

It's especially unfortunate to see Kiefer Sutherland play the world's most popular torturer -- because his father, Donald Sutherland, has been a prominent antiwar activist since Vietnam days and starred in some great films critiquing fascist politics, including "MASH" and Bertolucci's "1900" -- and also because Kiefer's grandfather, Tommy Douglas, was Canada's first socialist premier, and was recently voted "the greatest Canadian of all time" -- because he introduced universal public health care to Canada. The grandson meanwhile is being paid $10 million a season by Rupert Murdoch to shoot kneecaps, chop off hands, and bite his enemies to death (Sunday's special thrill).

The show's connection to the Bush White House and the conservative establishment became explicit last June, when Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff appeared alongside the show's producers and three cast members at an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation to discuss "The public image of US terrorism policy." The discussion was moderated by Rush Limbaugh. The C-SPAN store sells a DVD of the event--price reduced from $60 to $29.95. Sunday night's two-hour premiere again argued not just that torture is necessary but that it works -- and it's also really exciting to watch. The show as usual made the "ticking time bomb" case for torture: we need to torture a suspect, or else thousands, or millions, will die in the next hour.

It's the same case made by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who proposed that judges ought to issue torture warrants in the "rare 'ticking bomb' case," and by University of Chicago law professor and federal judge Richard Posner, who has written, "If torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used." He added that "no one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility."

Thanks to "24," tens of millions of TV viewers know exactly what Dershowitz and Posner are talking about. As Richard Kim pointed out in The Nation in 2005, those are the cases where "the stakes are dire, the information perfect and the authorities omniscient." Of course that's a fantasy of total knowledge and power, and of course the U.S. has never had a real "ticking time bomb" case -- but Jack Bauer faces one every Sunday night on Fox.

Link

If you like this article check out Jon Wiener: On the Radio

Bill Moyers: "Big Media is Ravenous. It Never Gets Enough. Always Wants More. And it Will Stop at Nothing to Get It. These Conglomerates are an Empire

(Bill Moyers incendiary, powerful and needed critique of the growing media conglomerate monopoly/hegemony and what it means for our democractic society. This is one of the most important things I have ever put on this site, please, please, take the time to carefully listen to and consider Moyers words.)

"Big Media is Ravenous. It Never Gets Enough. Always Wants More. And it Will Stop at Nothing to Get It. These Conglomerates are an Empire, and they are Imperial."
by Bill Moyers
Democracy Now

The veteran broadcast journalist Bill Moyers spoke on Friday before 3,500 at the opening of the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis. He announced his return to the airwaves and outlined his vision of media reform. "As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people."

Listen/Watch/Read

If Language Is a Virus Then I Am Going To Create an Epidemic (Spring Dub Remix)

With the soberest of intentions I chase the passion of the night through its mysterious symmetries to the borders of the dark tea time of the soul and the bright bliss of the karmic moment creating metaphorical ladders that illuminate the wonders of the universe in order to glimpse some peace in response kali-kundhi slowly chews my morphemes layed down at her feet as offerings murmuring poetics that buffer my soul with courage to take the chance to sally the edges of abstraction as antidote to confusion and angst feeling wounded like a baited bear a torn piece of living being exposed for all to see the struggle is of language and memory flowing through desire released through imagination initiating the possibilities of chance a thought to hold in her hand the transcendent mysterious of the flower web can only be viewed through strolling through dark unimagined spaces I recall outer beauty standing now solitary against inner ugliness I listen to the stillness of my world and miss the laughter lacking a singing voice or a painter’s eye I offer up words as a humble offering wandering alone down desolate boulevards of color and light I play word games while gathering winged thoughts that circle above me turning every eros into a page that gentle eyes might touch as time skips a beat in awe of the ineffable if language is a virus then I am going to create an epidemic

What Would Martin Luther King, Jr. Say If He Were Alive Today?

(Courtesy of United for Peace and Justice)

Watch the video:

What Would Martin Luther King, Jr. Say?

and from Democracy Now

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis on April 3, 1968: "Let Us Develop a Kind of Dangerous Unselfishness" *

In March of 1968, King came to Memphis to support striking African-American sanitation workers who were demanding better working conditions and facing massive resistance from white city officials. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 -- days before he was to lead a march in Memphis. The night before he was killed he gave his "I Have Been to the Mountaintop" speech.

Listen/Watch/Read

* Former Sanitation Worker and Community Organizers Recall the 1968 "I Am A Man" Sanitation Worker Strike & King's Last Hours in Memphis *

In our special broadcast from Memphis, we speak with former sanitation worker and union leader Taylor Rogers and community organizers in Memphis and led a local black power group called the Invaders. Cabbage and Smith were working with Dr. King to organize the march in Memphis in support of the sanitation workers.

Listen/Watch/Read

* Rev. Jesse Jackson on Witnessing the Assassination of Dr. King *

As a young aide, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was with Dr. King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. We speak to Rev. Jackson about the killing he witnessed before his eyes.

Listen/Watch/Read

* Retired Memphis Policeman: No Black Officers Assigned to Martin Luther King on Day of Assassination *

We speak with retired Memphis police sergeant Jerry Williams about the day Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. Williams, who worked in the homicide bureau, was twice assigned to head King’s security team on his visits to Memphis, but on the day he was assassinated, Williams says no black officers were assigned to King’s detail.

Listen/Watch/Read

* National Civil Rights Museum: The Motel Where Dr. King was Shot Today a Museum that Preserves his Legacy *

The Lorraine Motel is today part of the National Civil Rights Museum. On the balcony outside room 306, where Dr. King last stood, museum co-founder Judge D’army Bailey talks about Dr. King’s legacy and the long struggle for the museum that honors it.

Listen/Watch/Read

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: Thinking Positive (or not thinking negatively)

(I was thinking about changes, especially positive/progressive ones as I reflected on MLK, Jr.'s life..., and remembered this...)

Recently I read something from the Dahlai Lama about attempting to, just for seven days, resist thinking any negative thoughts about any other person. He stated that in a competitive, consumer society we are conditioned to focus on the negative and that this is destructive to our psyches and communal well-being.

At first I said well that is fucking ridiculous there are too many idiots and assholes for me to resist thinking negative thoughts... but then I reflected on what my statement said about myself.

So I decided I would try it. The first day was a disaster... no luck, OK, I would do it an hour at a time-very difficult (I work on a busy campus and I do run into a lot of people...). Manageable, but strangely I noticed how easily my mind could laspe into negative feelings/thoughts and that even as I worked to develop a positive outlook about current events/relationships, past events would begin to seep into my consicousness and would assail my defenses... what about when this happened, or when I failed to do this, or when this person let me down, or the countless people I have hurt in my lifetime...

Despite the periods of pain this exercise has caused me, I have been noticing more moments of pure happiness and delight in life--I am also more conscious of how my negative thoughts are a conditioned reflex (often unconscious) and that I can choose to be happier.

I'm an old school existentialist who is suspicious of bliss, but I am learning to enjoy myself more... hopefully I can spread some of that joy.

Thanks for the original inspiration Okir.

Another Example of Why We Need a Minimum Intelligence Requirement for Elected Officials

(Basic ecosystem knowledge would point out the flaw in this plan. The northern plains deer have been plagued with a terrible wasting disease that also makes the meat unsafe for consumption--remove the large predators that weed out the sick and weak and it will only get worse. I know it is probably to much to expect good ol' Governor "butch" to read, but I wish he would at least have someone who is literate relate the message of learning to think like a mountain.)

Idaho gov calls for wolf kill By JESSE HARLAN ALDERMAN, Associated Press Writer

Idaho's governor said Thursday he will support public hunts to kill all but 100 of the state's gray wolves after the federal government strips them of protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter told The Associated Press that he wants hunters to kill about 550 gray wolves. That would leave about 100 wolves, or 10 packs, according to a population estimate by state wildlife officials.

The 100 surviving wolves would be the minimum before the animals could again be considered endangered.

"I'm prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself," Otter said earlier Thursday during a rally of about 300 hunters.

Otter complained that wolves are rapidly killing elk and other animals essential to Idaho's multimillion-dollar hunting industry. The hunters, many wearing camouflage clothing and blaze-orange caps, applauded wildly during his comments.

Suzanne Stone, a spokeswoman for the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife in Boise, said Otter's proposal would return wolves to the verge of eradication.

"Essentially he has confirmed our worst fears for the state of Idaho: That this would be a political rather than a biological management of the wolf population," Stone said. "There's no economic or ecological reason for maintaining such low numbers. It's simple persecution."

Wolves were reintroduced to the northern Rocky Mountains a decade ago after being hunted to near-extinction. More than 1,200 now live in the region.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to start removing federal protections from gray wolves in Montana and Idaho in the next few weeks.

A plan drafted by Idaho's wildlife agency calls for maintaining a minimum of 15 wolf packs — higher than Otter's proposal of 10 packs.

Jeff Allen, a policy adviser for the state Office of Species Conservation, said 15 wolf packs would allow "a cushion" between the surviving wolf population and the minimum number that federal biologists would allow before the animals are again considered endangered.

Allen said Otter and state wildlife officials agree on wolf strategy and will be able to reach a consensus on specific numbers.

"You don't want to be too close to 10 because all of a sudden when one (wolf) is hit by a car or taken in defense of property, you're back on the list," Allen said.

Yahoo News Link

>"Learning From "El Mexterminator" and "Cyber Vato": Social Anxiety as a Performative Pedagogy" by Michael Benton

(Reposting for my writing students)

What does it take for people to understand the difficulties faced by those who are different from them? Probably one of my my most formative learning experiences was when I left California and moved to Southern Illinois and later Northern Ohio and then much later Kentucky. During this time I was also learning how to teach and struggling with my own fears/needs/anxieties ... a performative experience taught me about my own prejudices and became a foundation for my understanding of pedagogy.

"Learning From "El Mexterminator" and "Cyber Vato": Social Anxiety as a Performative Pedagogy" by Michael Benton
{originally published in Reconstruction 2.4 (Fall 2002)} and {Also presented at "Something for Nothing." 8th Annual Qualitative Methods Conference, Pretoria, South Africa, September 4-6, 2002 (Conference Proceedings online at http://www.criticalmethods.org/ ) and in an earlier form as “Crossing Cultural, Technological, and Artistic Borders: Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s and Roberto Sifuentes’ Temple of Confessions and Mexterminator Performances.” Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference, New Orleans, 2000. }

do you hear the police sirens? beautiful, eh?
Ammmeeeeeeerica, what a beautiful scary place to be
but then living in fear is normal for us
we are all scared shitless of the immediate future
by the way, are you scared of me?
of my accent, my strange intelligence,
my obnoxious capability to articulate your fears?
an articulate Mexican can be scarier than a gang member
que no?
are you scared of my moustache?
my unpredictable behavior?
my poetic tarantula,
my acid politics,
my criminal tendencies,
my tropical diseases,
my alleged ancient wisdom?
my shamanic ability to exorcise the evil out of white people,
yes or no? que si que no; que tu que yo
'cause I'm scared of you,
of your silence pinche mustio
your silence makes you really scary
& the distance between you and I makes it even worse


-----Guillermo Gomez-Peña
"On Fear of the Other" [1]

While attending Bowling Green State University in 1997 I had an experience that changed my worldview. I was a teaching assistant in the Popular Culture department and part of my responsibilities included teaching "Introduction to Popular Culture" (POPC 100) and "Introduction to Mass Media" (POPC 165). I had been struggling to engage my students in examining the way in which social reality is represented to them through popular entertainments [2]. The majority of my students were white, middle class students from the surrounding Northern regions of Ohio. My students were well-versed in the ongoing controversy over whether or not universities were attempting to indoctrinate them into a radical form of political correctness and many stated that their parents voiced concerns about attempts to alter their religious and political upbringing. To complicate matters my upbringing in urban Southern California marked me as a "permissive liberal agitator" who didn't understand "how things were in the more sensible parts of the nation" [3].

During the middle of the semester Dr. Lisa Wolford, a performance scholar, hosted an interactive performance piece "El Mexterminator", featuring Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, as part of an ongoing series on campus. I heard that the performance was going to address stereotyped and racist representations of Chicano/as and Latino/as. Sensing that this would provide a good opportunity to introduce my students to a different cultural sensibility and to open up the spatial environment of the sealed classroom I decided to bring my entire class to the performance. My class spent a week preparing for the experience of the performance by entering the website that was operating in conjunction with the performance tour [4]. This was the "Temple of Confessions" which included a series of "anthropological forms" designed to allow the user to explore their "cultural fears and desires" and a section in which one could confess their own cultural sins or desires. This site, "Graffiti Wall," also includes the confessions of previous visitors both to the website and the performances. The power of these public confessions recorded on the Internet and during the performances is that they foreground our society's inherent racist and misogynistic structures (Causey, 389).

By the date of the performance my students were very excited. I was anxious about what the experience would entail and whether my students would be able to engage with the performance. I was determined to remain a disinterested, objective observer in order to respond to student questions or problems. Looking back in hindsight I was incredibly naïve and truly did not understand my own repressed cultural sins. I was adopting a position of enlightened intellectual who was going to teach my Midwestern students about the realities and inequalities of their nation. I felt superior because of my multicultural background, my urban upbringing, and my extreme life experiences. I thought that I was the proverbial Shepard who would guide this flock to Enlightenment.

All that changed once we entered the doors of the theater … The first thing we were presented with was a sign that stated [5]:

"The ex-US of A has fragmented into myriad micro-republics loosely controlled by a multiracial junta, and governed by a Chicano prime minister named Gran Vato. The Tortilla Curtain no longer exists. Spanglish is now the official language. Panicked by the New Borders, Anglo militias are desperately trying to recapture the Old Order. Our border heroes, El Mexterminator, CyberVato, and La Cultural Transvestite have deserted from the newly formed government to join a strange hybrid militia opposing the reverse authoritarianism and radical essentialism of the ruling party. The new government of Aztlan Liberado sponsors interactive ethnographic exhibits to teach the perplexed citizenry how things were before and during the 2nd US/Mexico war. This performance/installation is one example of these official projects."

Upon entering we were herded into small groups that were then lead into the traditional seating area of the theater and we spread out in the seats before a large screen that was showing clips from various movies. There was one similarity between all of these clips in that they all involved stereotypical representations of Latin Americans-the whole spectrum from fearful to exotic, from the "Chiquita Girl" to the bandits who claim "we don't need no stink'n badges". We sat in our seats watching the visual images playing out across the screen in almost a state of suspension wondering if this was the performance or when 'something' else would happen. The images on the screen produced an extreme state of social anxiety in the audience as they squirmed uncomfortably while being confronted with the racist cultural products of their society. This initial stage of the performance demonstrates how "The ideology of capitalism operates … looking to obscure understanding [of] 'how things work' while encouraging acquiescence to 'things as they are.' The television requests that we please stand by, and some do" (Causey, 387). Eventually a few bold members of the audience approached the curtains on either side of the movie screen where noises signaled activities beyond the screen.
Going through the traditional movie theater curtains was like crossing a threshold into another state of reality. The room was smoky with people moving about and hanging from the ceiling were dead chickens with nooses around their necks. There were three main stations: one occupied by the performer Roberto Sifuentes dressed in a bloody, bullet holed, shirt and the styles of a stereotypical gang-banger, another stage directly across presented the figure of the performer Guillermo Gomez-Peña dressed in a pastiche of traditional Mexican musician clothing and Aztec regalia creating a contrasting image of clichéd kitsch and ancient mysticism, the third station was a revolving set of spaces where various performers dressed as transformed nuns/exotics interacted with the audience. These performers would address audience members and encourage them to interact with "Cyber-Vato" (Sifuentes) and "El Mexterminator" (Gomez-Peña) or to approach the "Temple of Confessions" to confess their cultural desires or fears. Before explaining some of the events that I witnessed and participated in while in this performance space I would like to return and examine the temporal states of this initiatory experience.

Upon entering I was still operating at normal physical and emotional intensity. While seating myself I began to slip into the public/communal sociability of movie theaters, trading quips with my neighboring audience members. This quick period evoked my "cinematic imagination" and initiated the familiar cinematic process of the "voyeur's gaze" (Denzin). My consciousness though was brought back to the forefront as I began to be disturbed by the visual representations of stereotypical images on the huge movie screen. Some were exotic, some pitiful, and some designed to induce fear of the ethnic "Other". All were from actual films and advertisements. Many of these clips were from an earlier period, but many of them were recognizable as from films that I had watched in other theaters, at other times in my life, this juxtaposition of the older and newer images brought to mind how easily I had consumed these images without any recognition of the pain that they might cause [6].

Adding to the emotional charge of this initial experience was the sense of anxiety initiated by wondering what was going to happen and being unsure of what I should do next. This initiated a liminal state, this is a temporal state which is described by the anthropologist Victor Turner as a period initiated through ritual in which the initiated is in a state of stasis between two borders. Turner further states that:

"During the liminal period, neophytes are alternately encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them. Liminality may be partly described as a stage of reflection. (1967, 105)"

At the time I was not familiar with Turner but I clearly recognized that I was at an experiential threshold while crossing through the theater curtains, essentially entering behind the world of the cinematic stereotypes upon the movie screen. When we enter into a liminal period as a group a sense of community is initiated in which hierarchy for the moment is erased through the collective ritual experience. The combination of the state of temporal liminality, spatial uncertainity, and social anxiety produced a situation that allowed for a triadic, or third space, experience [7]. When we came through the curtains we were immediately absorbed into the ritualistic actions of the performers and for many in the interacting audience it induced a feeling that these were "Liminal entities [that] are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial" (1969, 95).

On one of the center stages "Cyber Vato" was engaging in various actions, such as, cleaning an automatic weapon with an American flag, shooting up with a science fictional instrument, and writing on the Internet. On an opposing stage "El Mexterminator" was surrounded with ancient appearing ritualistic artifacts (much like one might find displayed in a museum) and more contemporary clichéd artifacts -- tequila, beads, blankets, velvet paintings, etc. -- that are stereotypically associated with Mexicans along the border towns (e.g. Tijuana and Calexico). The crowd was encouraged by more in-character performers circulating through the crowd to approach and interact with the living "exhibits". Gomez-Peña describes the interactive action that fills the performative space:

Audience members are encouraged to interact with these replicants "at their own risk." They are instructed that they can feed us, touch us, smell us, massage us, braid our hair, take us for walks on dog leashes, or point prop weapons at us to experience the feeling of shooting at a real, live Mexican. More extroverted audience members initiate their own forms of interaction, which range from beating or stabbing us with (prop) weapons to attempting to initiate explicit sexual contact either with us or with objects in our diorama environments. (54)

The emotions displayed can be intense both from the performers and the audience. That first visit I witnessed a vegetarian yank a dead chicken from one of the ropes nooses hanging from the ceiling and threw it at "Mexterminator" screaming at him that they had no right to kill an animal for their art [8]. Mexterminator picked up the chicken and sat down on his throne -- in the various dioramas the throne is often a wheelchair or toilet -- and started to very affectionately stroke the head of the chicken while crying. The vegetarian student asked him angrily why he was crying and Mexterminator replied that the chicken represented Mexicans that were hunted and hanged for bounties by United States nationals. I later talked to the shocked young man and he stated that he had never truly known that the Western section of the United States was a colonized or occupied land in which the original occupants were often hunted or killed as a means of clearing up property disputes. Later, a man started screaming at "Cyber Vato" because he was using an American flag to clean his gun (prop). The man became quite agitated and almost appeared to lose control when a local college girl approached Cyber Vato and started to feed him grapes one at a time (the floor performers from time-to-time would pass food to audience members). Various other audience members were definitely pursuing their ethnic exotic desires by caressing performers or dressing up as ethnic "others". The contrast of these opposite emotions of anger and desire are a part of the performative space opened up by Gomez-Peña and Sifuentes. As Gomez-Peña states in a 1997 diary entry in his book Dangerous Border Crossers
(2000):

"I believe in the power of decorating and aestheticizing the body in order to exaggerate, challenge and problematize mythical notions of the Mexican Other. In the American imagination, Mexicans are only allowed to occupy two different but strangely complementary spaces: we are either unnecessarily violent, hypersexual, cannibalistic and highly infectious; or innocent, "natural," ritualistic and shamanic. Both stereotypes are equally colonializing. (34)"

During the show a friend and I walked up to the stage of Mexterminator and asked him if there was anything he needed, he said he needed nourishment, we picked up a bottle of tequila and handed it to him and in the middle of a big gulp he sprayed the liquid into the air. Embarrassed, I realized that we had offered him alcohol and cigarettes instead of the fruits nearby-was there a cultural assumption behind that move? Was I reproducing my attitudes developed through tourist/carnival ventures of the past when I would travel into Mexico in order to seek forbidden or exotic adventures? Another audience member took extreme delight in mocking Mexterminator and calling him derogatory names. Mexterminator initiated a dialogue which I was unable to hear, but the man approached the stage and picked up the shotgun (prop) lying on the upraised stage. I was unaware at the time that the gun was a prop. The man stared at Mexterminator and raised the gun and pointed it at his head. Mexterminator calmly explained that now the man would know what it was like to shoot a real, live Mexican. Slowly he walked up to the end of the barrel and placed it in his mouth. They stood in this strange tableau for a few minutes until the man holding the gun started to visibly shake and then broke down crying, finally, Mexterminator walked up to the crying man and embraced him. There was also a space set aside where one could go to confess their cultural fears, desires, and sins. In those emotionally charged moments I too broke down while watching the actions of Cyber Vato. His ritualized performances of a gang member and his blood-stained shirt reminded me of my friends in California who had been killed over being the wrong race, or, in the wrong place, or, who had just plain run out of time. I visited the shrine and talked about my past actions/fears/desires … Some of my students were excited about their experiences in the 'living diorama.' Many more were uncertain about this powerful confrontation with the representation of the societal unconscious needing time to reflect further on their experiences. We spent a lot of time afterwards talking about the impact of the 'living diorama' and this performative lesson continued to shape later discussions in our class. Guillermo Gomez-Peña states that his performances are designed to evoke the ritualized aspects of the brujos and shamans that he and his friends visit as "clientele" and "audience members." Demonstrating his earlier training as a linguist he explains the etymological roots of brujo and shaman:

"[Brujeria] speaks of an ancient indigenous belief system that connects its eccentric practitioners to higher or parallel worlds where time, space, and "reality," and ethics have entirely different meanings. And the Indian noun "chamanismo" means not only Indian medicine; it also implies ritual performance, proletarian psychiatry, and in some cases, political activism. … Their job, like ours, is to create, with the use of chant poetry, surprising gestures and ritualized actions, highly charged props and elaborate costumes, a coherent symbolic system that helps patients (or in our case audience members) understand themselves, their existential malaise and their socio-cultural circumstances a little better." (2000: 232-33)

Later, I had the good fortune to re-visit another of the performances in the Detroit Art Museum a little over a year later [9]. The character "La Frida Prisionera" was added to the show as was a transgendered, or sexually ambiguous, dominatrix. The performance of "La Frida Prisionera" haunts me still today because she perfectly captured the frantic, trapped madness that I had seen in many of my childhood friends who had succumbed to drugs, despair, or violence. The audience was much more experimental, loose, and participatory at this performance, probably due to the 'artistic' elites who were present and the fact that the museum provides alcohol at their shows. I also noticed that the performers in the crowd were much more aggressive and antagonistic with the crowd, perhaps to shock them out of their 'jadedness.'

Gomez-Peña's and Sifuente's performative dioramas have provided me with a lifetime of examples for opening up the classroom, for presenting alternative discourses, and ways to utilize and manipulate time/space in the learning environment [10] Their performative methods produced a Freirian conscientizacao (conscientization) that shaped my pedagogical development in an organic way leading to the initiation of "constructed situations" (Situationist International Anthology) as everyday learning tools. Gomez-Peña refuses to allow us the luxury of the 'denial of coevalness' (Fabian), in fact his performance rests upon his seizing of the cultural authority of hegemonic anthropological authority and reversing the ethnographic gaze back onto the social reality of the contemporary United States. The performance theorist Lisa Wolford when reflecting on Gomez-Peña's earlier "Border Brujo" performances in the border city of San Diego explains that the performances place the audience in the place of tourists/anthropologists who are viewing/gazing upon their own society, but instead of the clean, sanitized version of the tourist spot, or the exotic thrills of foreign beauties, the audience is confronted with their own fear and desires of the culturally Other. Using San Diego as an example Wolford explains the cultural schizophrenia that the performances bring to the surface. Fittingly this explanation is the end of Gomez-Peña's latest book:

"In San Diego, where the so-called "Third World" collides dizzyingly with the "First," the sheer proximity of the sanitized tourist districts to the economically disadvantaged inner city neighborhoods invests these contradictory modes of perceiving otherness with an almost surreal quality. (To the aforementioned diagnosis of the city as suffering from historical amnesia, add an acute case of cultural schizophrenia.) In the low-income districts of downtown San Diego, the Mexican other is constructed as inherently violent and menacing. A five-minute drive away, in the confines of the upscale tourist zone the "domesticated" Mexican (and it is by no means insignificant that the majority of the staff in direct contact with the customers in the stores and restraunts of Old Town are Mexican/Chicana women) is a site of erotic pleasure, inviting colonial fantasies of languorous seduction. Old Town promises that the true California dream, Mexico without Mexicans, is still available . . . for a price. Or failing that, an illusion of Mexico in which Mexicans (primarily young, attractive and female) exist only as part of a silent and compliant servant class, pouring margaritas against the backdrop of tropical foliage." (quoted in Gomez-Peña, 2000: 285)

San Diego's "Old Town" has become a "pilgrimage site for tourists" who want a safe, "authentic" Mexican experience without the perceived risk of actually visiting Mexico. Gomez-Peña has created a performative pedagogy designed to critique the social, economic, spatial, and temporal realities of "here and now" America by looking back on it from a mythical future society. His performative pedagogy leads his audience through a reworking of the dominant temporal and spatial social realities as originally portrayed by the dominant discourse. The materialist feminist Rosemary Hennessey describes this practice as a "disarticulation/rearticulation" in which the creator of a text takes an event, a personage, or a cultural history and re-presents a competing reality/narrative of the chosen subject. The chosen theme/subject is decoded/disarticulated and then re-encoded/re-articulated. The most important factor of this process is that it presents us (readers/viewers/listeners) with a "powerful strategy for rewriting the theoretical texts we encounter" (Hennessey, 7) -- whether they are artistic, political, social, historical, popular, or business discourses, they are all attempting to profess a position, or taking a pedagogical stance ("peda"="to lead"). Organizational theorists David Boje and Robert Dennehy point out that:

"People who do not tell stories well, listen to stories effectively and learn to deconstruct those stories with a skeptical ear will be more apt to be victims of … exploitation and power games . . . Part of exploitation is to deny an interpretation, point of view, or experience, that differs from the dominant view. Rhetoric about healthy, happy, and terrific harmony and unity can mask just the opposite reality. A simple sounding moral or prescription about consensus or teamwork can mask deeper costs in terms of power and domination." (339)

I've been back to my home state of California many times since those early performances and I have never looked at my homeland in the same way after experiencing the "Mexterminator" living diorama or reading the "Temple of Confessions". This is the power of Gomez-Peña's performative pedagogy, it enhances the chances of creating an active and creative public who can better recognize and re-write cultural and political myths.

Michael Benton

Notes

[1] Reprinted in Dangerous Border Crossers. (2000: 61). [^]

[2]This was my second year teaching at a university level. [^]

[3] These were actual comments made in anonymous written responses in which I encouraged my students to voice their concerns about the academic system so that we could bring them out into the open. I made the initial assignment anonymous so that the students would not fear reprisals for any statements they made about me as their instructor.[^]

[4]The website, "Temple of Confessions," is still operating at Link [^]

[5] This is a reproduction of the text that is reprinted in Gomez-Peña (2000: 52). [^]

[6] A similar experience was recently initiated by my attendance at Spike Lee's brilliant and controversial film Bamboozled (2000) which fictionally explores how the contemporary entertainment industries re-produce earlier black-face entertainments. For those who are interested in this historical entertainment tactic of black-face, check out Eric Lott's seminal work Love and Theft (1993). Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to revisit this film, or my initial reactions, due to its quick disappearance from the local movie theaters. Clips and previews can be viewed at Bamboozled . I had earlier recognized this feeling, though not as strongly, since it was in the safe environment of a classroom, when during my first year of teaching I screened Celluloid Closet (1995), a powerful historical documentary on Hollywood cinema's representation of homosexuals. During a collage of scenes where cinematic characters (all male) use the term "faggot" as a derogatory term of hateful spite and de-masculinization I recognize this as a ritual that the males, including me, of my working-class neighborhood engaged-in to demonstrate their heterosexual masculinity. While teaching this documentary I learned that these attitudes had been reproduced in the incoming generation of males. After sitting through various depictions of violence and hatred against homosexuals, two male students got up when the documentary portrayed recent positive portrayals of homosexual life. The scene that disturbed them enough to leave the room was when on the screen a man affectionately kissed another man on the cheek and playfully patted his butt. [^]

[7]Of course not everyone has the same experiences during a performance. These statements are based upon my situated experiences, my students, and some of my colleagues. I also spent some time observing audience members after they had exited the performance and were recounting their experiences to filmmakers outside the theater. [^]

[8] Not that it really matters, but I found out later that the chickens were bought dead from a farm nearby. [^]

[9]Guillermo Gomez-Peña was visiting our university for a gathering of former McArthur Genius Grant Winners and they decided to create a performative diorama in the famous Diego Rivera room. I was fortunate to spend time talking to him and Roberto about their art while escorting them around campus. [^]

[10] For more experimental performative exercises check out Berry/Epstein, Garorian, Gomez-Peña, and McLaren. [^]

Article Link

Violence and Film; Audience-Experience as a Factor in Our Reception of a Film

I had a disastrous experience during my Christmas break in San Diego where my family watched a film I chose: Lady Vengence, they reacted with a strong distaste for Chan-Wook's uncompromising and transgressive depiction of betrayal, vengeance, violence and redemption. I am now forever branded as a very strange intellectual type who likes films no one else will (actually they should have known better, since the last time they sent me out by myself to get a film for everyone to watch I came back with David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch). LV, I'll admit was very strange, and pushed the boundaries of our sensibilities, but there was a method to the madness. The film shocked me, but it set me off thinking on the themes mentioned above (much as his previous film Oldboy did). The next night I sat speechless while family members gathered to watch the insipid Fearless... here were the same people who the night before told me they hated all violent films, thrilling to this boring and affectless violent action flick.

This week my students are watching Park Chan-Wook's previous film Oldboy and so I am once again revisiting what I think about the representation of violence in film and the influence of audience-environments on our experiences of cinema.

In case you are wondering if my family convinced me that Lady Vengeance is a bad film or not... well I was at a local Asian DVD/video store and Mr. Lee was so happy that I liked Chan-Wook's films he sold me an inexpensively-priced extra copy of the DVD.
-------------------------------------------------------------

I believe that violence is a necessary part of many narratives because it is a part of reality. Violence is a part of being human and our interrelations--how can we ignore it?

At the same time I reject simplistic, cartoonish uses of violence where the hero is shot at a hundred times and perhaps receives a scratch while methodically dispatching every person they face. I think it is irresponsible to portray, or think of, violence as simply mindless entertainment, there are outbreaks of violence that when it happens it seems beyond our kin, or present understanding, but usually with time we are able to grasp the motivations or causes. Likewise in a work of art one can begin to grasp at the reason for the violence, make sense of a sort, even if one does not agree with the portrayal of the causes or motivations for the violence. (I feel the same way about the mindless-commercial usage of sex and sexuality in our culture.)

I seek intelligent reflection on the uses or outbreaks of violence--whether as a means to a goal, or as a frustrated reaction to events beyond our control, or as atool for oppression/resistance. Who is using the violence, as a means for what, and to whom, and why, and what are the goals of this violence? Ultimately violence in great works of art will cause you to respond (positively or negatively) and will cause you to exercise your own judgement and thought--it will initiate critical reflection upon the events of the story (and for me this is a defining moment in judging a narrative/film, or any other work of art).

The benefits of some narrative violence is that it makes it harder for audiences to ignore the motivations or beliefs of the characters (especially when we become implicated by our own violent impulses, becoming so wrapped up in the narrative we encourage the violence--do it, do it!!!--a good narrative can cause us to reflect on this impulse)--thus in the complex cinematic presentation we are faced with an intellectual quandry to the usage of the violence and the rationale for its usage. We cannot stand on the sidelines and retain our intellectual integrity. We have to take a stand, even if it is to condemn the movie, afterall, the artist did present us with a work that is intended to shock or affront. It is also hypocritical for the artist to complain when people condemn them for their work if their intent was to depict acts of violence in a graphic manner.

What is often missed in Hollywood films (as well as many foreign films--see the new run of Asian extreme films) is that violence is usually employed in the service of power (whether on an individual or systemic level). Our democracy is built on the ignorance of the daily usage of violence to keep some people/groups quiet/docile about their situation in life, this structural mask sometimes slips allowing a glimpse of the true face of that power--a very important glimpse. Thus, a necessary part of some violent narratives is our understanding of the roots of this power/control ...

People facing the threat or actual acts of violence also helps us to understand human potential, but it is not a case of human physicality or big weapons. In the narratives I am speaking of it is the plumbing of the human soul and the questioning of the mind/system (a person's perspective and a system's effect/control). Violence in cinema can help us to examine the operations of power in society? Passolini's brutal, disgusting and difficult Salo forever burned in my mind the operations of fascism (could you ever recommend this film to someone, it is a truly painful and wrenching film), or the ending of Greenway's beautiful Baby of Macon which horrified me more than any sophmoric slasher story could and to this day has left me pondering the meaning/causes of the film. This film was blocked from being exhibited in the U.S. When we showed it at Illinois State University, people were crying in the audience and afterwards we spilled into the streets and made our way to a pub, where we argued into the night about the meanings of the film. As with any difficult film, some were angry that we had shown the film and they had a reason to be angry. We listened patiently to their complaints, even if we believed, ultimately, that the film should be seen. Once again if you believe that a disturbing portrayal is important and should be seen, you should respect contrary, disturbed and angry reactions. This is what you expected the film to do and thus you should address its effects on those audiences. Do not dismiss them, engage in a dialogue that art demands of its audiences.

A problem with the usage of violence in film is that it has become an effect used to entertain and titillate, one of the most powerful and disturbing films of the last year was Michael Haneke's Cache (Hidden), which explores the aftereffects of repressed systemic and individual acts of aggression/violence. It is minimalist and subtle in its presentation of violence, but the impact is long-lasting, reverberating in my mind still a year later causing me to question the impact of individual and societal repression of violent acts. This film is much more powerful than all of Takashi Miike's countless blood-fests put together, why, because it forces us to reflect and the narrative demands audience involvement (if you see the film you will understand what I mean), rather than to simply jump and recoil, as in Miike's recent film Audition. Instances of violence can also bring us to focus on what gives life dignity and what is noble and ignoble in the human condition. A last thought, legitimated violence (sanctioned by the state, or other social forces) usually is a clear indicator of the boundaries of society, what is permitted, what is forbidden, and who controls these boundaries.

John Fraser states in "Violence in the Arts" (1974: 162):

"Far from being mindless, violence is usually the cutting edge of ideas and ideologies."


------------------------------------------

(A final reflection from my second viewing of the film City of God--I was discussing with my students how the place/time/audience we view a film with alters the way in which we experience it...)

This is the second time that I have seen City of God.

The first time I watched it was like a rollercoaster ride in which the story washed over me and left me somewhat breathless. This time was different, where before I watched it in the privacy of my home, this time I was in a dark theater with a larger screen. Although it is often claimed that the theater encourages the "voyeur's gaze" (Norman K. Denzin), I find that watching a movie at home is much more voyeuristic in that one can simply watch without thoughts of others impeding on your experience, on the other hand, a public theater involves one in a communal experience in which you interact with the narrative on the screen while experiencing the reactions of your fellow filmgoers. You may think why is someone laughing at this point, or watch as someone flees the theater, or wonder if anyone can see the tears streaming down your face as you recognize something of yourself in a cinematic moment. While the darkened theater does allow the viewer to easily slip into a dream-like state, it is a much more "restless" state than watching in the privacy of one's home.

This time I watched City of God with the knowledge of where the story would end and it forced me to deal more directly with my responses to the violent spectacle of the narrative. This is one of the reasons I value rewatching films in different contexts because it forces different perspectives (at least in me, I also feel very fortunate to be a teacher of film in that new generations of film students confront me with their experiences and responses, causing, nay forcing me, to revisit my own intepretations in light of their own responses and comments).

One example that has always replayed in my experience is the case of the grand cinematic spectacle of Schindler's List (1993). The first time I watched it was in its second week of release in a crowded megaplex theater. The theater was overcrowded, people were sitting in the aisles, and the stench of movie popcorn was overwhelming. It sickened me to watch this portrayal of the Holocaust with people munching on buckets of popcorn and slurping at their quarts of soda. Even though I was revolted by the spectacle of the gorging while starving people are represented on the screen, there was a moving point when I noticed an elderly couple sobbing and I wondered who they knew that had tragically been lost in the Holocaust. I left the theater disgusted, at humanity, at the gross displays of consumerism, and at myself for not knowing how to make things better.

The second time I watched Schindler's List it was during the special showing of the film on television free of commercial interruption (February 26, 1997). The network that was showing it, along with some petrol company (if memory serves me correctly), declared that this was a cultural artifact that demanded to be shown uninterrupted and that it should not be sullied with the dirtiness of commercial concerns (OK, those are my words, but that was the sentiment of the time, but this should also cause us to pause and think about commercials and commercial TV in general--I disconnected mine because I agreed that my cultural myths should be free of commercial propaganda). I was a master's student in the Popular Culture Department at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). A wonderful, nurturing, small environment of scholars seeking to glimpse outside the fishbowl. We gathered at a professor's house to watch the event and analyze the film as well as the cultural moment. Again, food was abundant, but it was the food that is cooked with one's own hands, thoughtfully prepared, and shared communally. Somehow this did not disturb me in the way that the popcorn/candy/soda of the movie theater did. We sat in a circle aound the TV, lights on, and discussed all aspects of the film, the historical period and the significance of a large percentage of Americans tuning in that night to watch the film. The experience provided distance from the cinematic experience, yet at the same time enhanced my engagement with the film. It forced me to think about the (re)presentation of the historical facts, to compare the film with other films/histories presented by the audience and to revisit my first distasteful communal experience of the film.

The third time I watched Schindler's List was during another equally powerful historical moment that exposed some of the worst aspects of human cruelty. It was the following academic year after the commercial-free broadcast and I was teaching Introduction to Popular Culture courses for BGSU. During the early part of the semester a student group did a presentation on the film Schindler's List and claimed that it was unique document because it provided insight to a unique event in human history and that it let us understand this isolated example of evil. The Holocaust because of its increasing historical example as the ultimate "evil" of humanity had become, for these students, an isolated example that they could point to as a place humanity was once at, but never would return to again. I attemted to get my students to understand that this was not an isolated event and that there were many examples of similar collective acts of violent genocide throughout history and the present time. I was struggling to somehow break through their assumption that it could never happen again because we "know" better. I fell into a state of bewildered despair for the next couple of weeks as I struggled with how I could bring a new perspective to their understanding of Schindler's List and the Holocaust--to provide a context that would combat the sense of it being an isolated, special circumstance, caused by depraved monsters, rather than the self-interested actions of everyday humans. Then, as sometimes happens, events provided another opportunity for revisiting the film:

During the middle of the semester Dr. Lisa Wolford, a performance scholar, hosted an interactive performance piece "El Mexterminator", featuring Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, as part of an ongoing series on campus. I heard that the performance was going to address stereotyped and racist representations of Chicano/as and Latino/as. Sensing that this would provide a good opportunity to introduce my students to a different cultural sensibility and to open up the spatial environment of the sealed classroom I decided to bring my entire class to the performance.

This performance opened up a new world for me and the students. It forced us to examine our American history from the eyes/perspective of (an)other culture and irrevocably altered my understanding of education. A week later after this powerful performative event, the South African Truth and Reconciliation committee was holding public hearings and parts of their video broadcasts of amnesty confessions were aired on 60 Minutes. The Post-Apartheid government of South Africa had decided that a full public exposure of the crimes carried out under the Apartheid government would ensure that the world would never forget what had happened. 60 Minutes broadcast an episode that featured men discussing in detail the everyday tasks of disposing and hiding bodies, including the difficulties of completely incinerating a human body. My class watched these historical broadcasts and developed a new understanding of the problems of isolating the Holocaust, or any collective violence, as a unique event, that has never happened before, or will never happen again. My class asked to rewatch Schindler's List and I agreed with the understanding that we would all research the broader historical background of the event. The experience of watching students watch this film, actively taking notes, and later debating the history of the Holocaust, with a deeper awareness of its development and its future ramifications, was an amazing experience. It completely transformed my understanding of the film and the potential for teaching about the politics/aesthetics of the film.

So, why do I bring all of this up after watching City of God? Because in talking with colleagues/students that have seen this film it often seems that the rollercoaster ride of the quick editing and the violent spectacle of the fast-paced narrative keeps us from engaging with the reality of the people who live in dangerous environments like this, in Brazil, in other countries, and definitely in our own country. I think this is a good film, but something keeps nagging at me, perhaps there is more to the story, why the focus only on criminals, why are women just backdrops for the actions of violent men, is there more to the story--why does the main character Rocket seem so lifeless and undeveloped (it was his story? yet it became the tale of Little Ze)?

On the DVD edition of City of God there is an amazing documentary by Katia Lund (co-director with Fernando Meirelles of City of God) called News From a Personal War that examines the lives of the poor people who live in the favelas, including the working class striving to better themselves, and the police/politicians who view the place as a dumping ground for society's undesirables. Everyone interviewed in the documentary from the street level gangsters, to the workers, to militia-style policeman, to the wealthy politicians, are brutally honest about their motivations/intent in a way that we rarely see discussed in the U.S. For example this quote from a high-ranking police officer:

Hélio Luz: I'll say it myself. The police are corrupt. The institution was designed to be violent and corrupt. And the people think that's odd. Why do I say it was designed this way? Because it was created to protect the State and the elite. I practice law enforcement to protect and serve the status quo; no beating around the bush. It keeps the favela under control. How do you keep two million people under control; people who make R$112 a month, when they make any? How do you keep the underprivileged under control and calm?

interviewer: With repression?

Hélio Luz: Of course! How else would it be?

In the last week I have talked to four people who own a copy of the DVD in their home, yet they have never seen the documentary... perhaps this is what we should have shown last night? Once again, City of God is an amazing film, a favorite of mine, but this cannot stop us from asking questions about lessons-learned and lessons-hidden in the films we watch, most importantly we should question the films we enjoy the most.
-----------------------------------------------------

by Michael Benton

Changes

Taking me a bit to get caught up with work after disconnecting from cyberspace during the winter break. Crazy, mad, absurd things are happening all around me and I'm kicking back laughing and smiling (no I'm not on drugs).

When I was so down/depressed last year I became apathetic (and as a result disconnected from life). All the political causes/activism, the people I cared about, the places I came from, the cultural work I had been involved in, everything that meant so much to me, fell by the wayside. Its weird/absurd/a paradox, but when I finally decided to truly let everything go (especially regret/anguish/anger), my mood/outlook improved, I regained my idealistic/romantic/revolutionary personality. I'm now happy (not in a mindless-consumer/prescription-drugged/entertainment-branded way, more in the sense of being amused by life and curious about what will come next) and this allows me to once again to care (in the good ol' mode of lets make some changes).

The ancient river flows continuously, long before we were here and long after we will be gone...

Peace

Cognoscible

(Courtesy of Merriam-Webster)

cognoscible \kog-NAH-suh-bul\ adjective

: cognizable, knowable

Example sentence:
"Discourse must be in words, and it is possible to give a name to that which is not understood nor cognoscible by human reason." (Flann O'Brien, The Dalkey Archive)

Did you know?
The exact synonym of "cognoscible" is the far better-known "cognizable." Both words mean "capable of being judicially heard and determined" (as "a cognoscible claim") and "capable of being known" (as "cognoscible circumstances"). Both terms are from Latin "cognoscere," meaning "to know." And both appeared in the 17th century, less than two decades apart — first, "cognoscible," direct from the Late Latin adjective "cognoscibilis"; then, "cognizable," from the English noun "cognizance" ("knowledge").

It's all in the punctuation...

(Courtesy of Stephanie Ward)

It's all in the punctuation:
An English professor wrote the words, "Woman without her man is nothing" on the blackboard and directed his students to punctuate it correctly.
The men wrote: "Woman, without her man, is nothing."
The women wrote: "Woman: Without her, man is nothing

Are We At A Critical Juncture?

Courtesy of Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

juncture \JUNK-cher\ noun

1 : joint, connection
*2 : a point of time; especially : one made critical by a concurrence of circumstances

Example sentence:
"At this juncture in the editing process," said Philip, "it is important that all facts have been double-checked and sources verified."

Did you know?
"Juncture" has many relatives in English — and some of them are easy to spot, whereas others are not so obvious. "Juncture" derives from the Latin verb "jungere" ("to join"), which gave us not only "join" and "junction" but also "conjugal" ("relating to marriage") and "junta" ("a group of persons controlling a government"). "Jungere" also has distant etymological connections to "joust," "jugular," "juxtapose," "yoga" and "yoke." The use of "juncture" in English dates back to the 14th century. Originally, the word meant "a place where two or more things are joined," but by the 17th century it could also be used of an important point in time or of a stage in a process or activity.