This is a miniature set that my friend Molly Allis is working on for a play called “The Quite Way” by Casey Llewellyn. Check out the kickstarter for it here http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jasmo/the-quiet-way-at-the-hot-festival.
I’m gonna start going by Vince
I wanted to start this up again, but I must go slowly. Again what keeps me from this is the vague address of the blog-world. I have noticed often blogs ground themselves and find definition in the who who’s writing them. But that who has never been something I could feel myself close to as I am an aimer at audiences. I speak to. But in this case I will try not to rest to hard on the who of you. And more I will just think I am sending things off or out generally behind me as I run toward and away from things. And I will try not to think of your reading of this but concentrate more on just the saying of it.
I am at Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, NY feeling lucky and contemplative. I have read some amazing books here from which I am learning a lot: Assata, a memoir by Assata Shakur, a black revolutionary and beautiful writer and Arm the Spirit, a memoir by Diana Block, a white revolutionary who worked in solidarity with the Puerto Rican liberation movement. Both of them were targeted by the FBI for their political affiliations. I am also now reading Savage Beauty, a biography about Edna St. Vincent Millay (who went by Vincent), the first woman poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. My interest in her was peaked by a tour we (the artists here) took of her house yesterday. And as I am obsessed with various lives, I am now almost halfway through the book.
I’ve also been working on my play here, The Quiet Way and will be performing it at Dixon Place in New York on August 2nd with a cast and crew I’m really excited to work with.
And I’m working on an essay about the organizing and funding work I’ve been doing with the RG Migrant Justice Solidarity Working Group.
I also wanted to link this essay I wrote earlier this year as a response to an open letter by Claudia Rankine calling for responses about writing race.
That is what I’m up to. Here we are.
YEESSSS!
Mary J. Blige - No More Drama
OMG amazing moves!
This video shows why the 70’s will always be the fuckin’ best era for black folks. Folks don’t dance nor style like this anymore. They were wildin’ OWT in this video, you hear me?!?! YUS!
Hannah Höch - Platonische Liebe, 1930
BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle
Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and they get lucrative tax write-offs in the process. Known to some as “the inmate state,” Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any other state in the country. Seventy percent of its 39,000 inmates are African-American men. The Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) only has beds for half that many prisoners, so 20,000 inmates live in parish jails, privately run contract facilities and for-profit work release centers. Prisons and parish jails provide free daily labor to the state and private companies like BP, while also operating their own factories and farms, where inmates earn between zero and forty cents an hour.
+ at The Nation
![danielextra:
A Picture That Changed the Face of AIDS
In November, 1990, LIFE magazine published a photograph of a young man, David Kirby — his body wasted by AIDS, his gaze locked on something beyond this world — surrounded by anguished family members as he took his last breaths. The haunting image of Kirby’s passing (above), taken by a journalism grad student named Therese Frare, became the one photograph most identified with the HIV/AIDS epidemic that, by then, had seen as many as 12 million people infected. Now, 20 years after her photograph helped transform public perception of the disease, LIFE spoke with Frare about that picture; the international controversy it sparked when United Colors of Benetton used it in a 1992 ad; and the never-before-published photographs she took before and after David Kirby’s death — photos that reveal the untold story behind one of the 20th century’s most heart-breaking, indelible images.
[via: LIFE]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l61mutxw9L1qayd63o1_500.jpg)
A Picture That Changed the Face of AIDS
In November, 1990, LIFE magazine published a photograph of a young man, David Kirby — his body wasted by AIDS, his gaze locked on something beyond this world — surrounded by anguished family members as he took his last breaths. The haunting image of Kirby’s passing (above), taken by a journalism grad student named Therese Frare, became the one photograph most identified with the HIV/AIDS epidemic that, by then, had seen as many as 12 million people infected. Now, 20 years after her photograph helped transform public perception of the disease, LIFE spoke with Frare about that picture; the international controversy it sparked when United Colors of Benetton used it in a 1992 ad; and the never-before-published photographs she took before and after David Kirby’s death — photos that reveal the untold story behind one of the 20th century’s most heart-breaking, indelible images.
[via: LIFE]
![mudwerks:
liquidnight:
Ralph Morse
GI and girlfriend under a tree, Hyde Park, London, May 1944
From the LIFE magazine photo archive
[via How to be a Retronaut]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l2uwfpXuhR1qzhl9eo1_500.jpg)
GI and girlfriend under a tree, Hyde Park, London, May 1944
From the LIFE magazine photo archive
[via How to be a Retronaut]
Amy Winehouse live performing “Some Unholy War.” I am frightened by how much I love this song.
What I am thinking
Our collective liberation is all bound up with each others’. And must be. There is no way some people can be free while others are not. It is not freedom to learn to ignore the oppression of others. And it is not true to think that the oppression you suffer is separate from theirs or can be dealt with separately. It is not ‘being comfortable’ to live a life that depends on the exploitation of others. Everything about the way we grow up in this society tells us that what is ‘natural’ in people is to be greedy and driven solely by self-interest. This is not true. I am unlearning this thinking. I am unlearning the ways I have been taught that I am inferior to or better than other people because of qualities I do not control. I want humanity and empathy in all my interactions. I have a place in this movement for a different world. Everyone does should they choose it. I am finding that place. It is life’s work.
1. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal talks to the media in front of a Brown Pelican covered in oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast, June 3.
2. Oil floats ashore at the Grand Isle East State Park on Grand Isle, Louisiana, on May 27.
3. Oil swirls through the water in the Gulf of Mexico on May 6.
4. From Getty: VENICE, LA - APRIL 30: Fishermen wait in line to receive a contract from BP company representatives to use their boats to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that is approaching the coast
5. An unidentified girl sits on what is left of the pristine white sand, some 50 yards from the surf in Orange Beach, Ala., Tuesday, June 29, 2010. Heavy seas from Tropical Storm Alex helped push more oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster towards the Florida and Alabama coasts. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)
Pictures and captions from Huffington Post.