pushing hoops with sticks

Video

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:23:00 -0400

Gatsby's Great Love

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:29:00 -0400

We like to think we deserve love, that as a celebrated facet of the human experience everyone is allowed at least a taste. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby offered characters too hollowed by wealth to access anything beyond desire and ambition. Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation gives us something to mourn. A classically unrequited love impeded by class and time complete with a sighing Carey Mulligan saying “I wish I could do everything on Earth with you.”

It’s this vision of Daisy and Gatsby that saves the story from being flattened by Luhrmann’s penchant for spectacle. Between Rolls Royces barreling down bridges, fireworks exploding over mansions, and beaded hemlines swishing in time to the din, a treatise on love exists quietly. For a love story to inspire it must simply confirm our deepest suspicions about what we imagine love to be. And Luhrmann indulges both cynics and romantics…

by Ayesha A. Siddiqi

Great White Hoax: Chael Sonnen, Racial Coding, and the UFC

Thu, 16 May 2013 15:18:00 -0400

Great White Hoax: Chael Sonnen, Racial Coding, and the UFC:

I spoke with MMA expert Tomas Rios on how fighter Chael Sonnen exploits white resentment in the UFC.

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:53:00 -0400

Inside Rick Owens’s Paris home [via]

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:52:03 -0400

Inside Rick Owens’s Paris home [via]

"For art to be unpolitical means only for to ally itself with the ruling group."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:49:06 -0400

“For art to be unpolitical means only for to ally itself with the ruling group.”

- Bertold Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre” [via]

Miss Universe Pageant 1954- Miss New Zealand passed out from the...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:48:06 -0400

Miss Universe Pageant 1954- Miss New Zealand passed out from the heat [via]

Photo

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:46:31 -0400

Democracy Now’s interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:36:00 -0400

Democracy Now’s interview with Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield.” Scahill charts the expanding covert wars operated by the CIA and JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command, in countries from Somalia to Pakistan. Read an excerpt of the book here

"…my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that terrified thousands of simple, poor..."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:30:00 -0400

““…my village was struck by a drone, in an attack that terrified thousands of simple, poor farmers. The drone strike and its impact tore my heart, much as the tragic bombings in Boston last week tore your hearts and also mine…What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America””

- Farea Al-Muslimi, a Yemeni journalist speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing on the legality of the drone war

Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, told the Senate that the Obama administration’s drone war undermines the rule of law.

“When a government claims for itself the unreviewable power to kill anyone, anywhere on earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret information discussed in a secret process by largely unnamed individuals, it undermines the rule of law,” Brooks said.

You, Me, and Chris Brown by Ayesha A. Siddiqi

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:58:06 -0400

You, Me, and Chris Brown by Ayesha A. Siddiqi

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 18:31:00 -0400

Bikini, Kill by Ayesha A. Siddiqi Because a movie that...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:46:00 -0400

Bikini, Kill by Ayesha A. Siddiqi

Because a movie that suspends patriarchal privilege is more enjoyable than ones that take it for granted.

Don’t hate the slayer, hate the game

The New Inquiry: Presenting The New Inquiry’s first free...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:40:00 -0400

The New Inquiry: Presenting The New Inquiry’s first free supplement, a pdf collection of eight critical essays on Harmony Korine’s Disneyland dystopia Spring Breakers. Spring Break Forever.

Catch me in the new inquiry talking about gun fellatio
s/o to Sarah Nicole Prickett and Malcolm Harris for making this issue possible

Video

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:43:47 -0400

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 23:39:00 -0400

Robert F. Kennedy: The Mindless Menace of Violence

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:38:05 -0400

Speech given at the City Club of Cleveland, April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. Full text below:

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

“Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

Martha Rosler montages. From top to bottom, left to right:...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:20:00 -0400

Martha Rosler montages. From top to bottom, left to right: Hooded Captives, Point and Shoot, Photo-Op, Cargo Cult, Saddam’s Palace

Martha Rosler is an American feminist and anti war artist whose work proves juxtoposition can still be vital and engaging. She predates Banksy by decades, but reminds me of him for succeeding where I feel post-Banksy artists fall short. Banksy imitators marry the iconography of consumer culture to images of real world violence so predictably that the significance diminishes, eliciting little more than a cynical yawn. Rosler’s montages don’t sacrifice aesthetics for ‘message.’ They’re still quite beautiful and the colors and composition sophisticate what could have been a bludgeoningly obvious political commentary. Most of the works above comment on America’s consumer gaze, one directed away from war crimes committed in service, supposedly, of “American values.” Like most works premised on juxtoposition these montages challenge the conventional wisdom about what those American values may be. One of my favorite pieces, “Cargo Cult”, displays the export of racially hegemonic western standards of beauty, and what Rosler calls “invisible labor.” The invisible labor being both women’s cosmetic rituals and the men of color often cheaply exploited by industry. Rosler cuts and pastes scenes of American lifestyle with social atrocities reminding us that while never seen together, these occur on the same absurd, calloused, plane of existence.

check out her website for more

"‘Augustus Waters,’ I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank..."

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:37:18 -0400

“‘Augustus Waters,’ I said, looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank house, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.”

- —from my favorite (sorta spoilery, sorry) scene in The Fault in Our Stars

Or, as someone else said on Twitter:

As a Jew, I’m pretty sure Anne Frank woulda been way more into One Direction than Bieber, though she’d have a few of his songs on her iPod.

— Jordan Zakarin (@jordanzakarin)

April 14, 2013

My dad thought a good way for his kid to understand the Holocaust was to show her lots of super graphic, terrifying documentaries about concentration camps. Like when I was a young kid. As a not-so-funny result, I am on some level truly always thinking about what I’d do if I had to either run for my life OR find a way to cleverly hide out in my house, possibly for years on end.

It took me a long time to realize that was a pretty fucked up response to have internalized from what was probably an well-intentioned family history lesson.

Maybe it was Angela Chase on My So-Called Life back in 1994/95, actually, who helped me start to put it in perspective:

Teacher: So how would you describe Anne Frank?

Angela: Lucky.

Teacher: Is that supposed to be funny, Angela? How on earth could you make a statement like that? Anne Frank perished in a concentration camp. Anne Frank is a tragic figure. How could Anne Frank be lucky?

Angela: I don’t know. Cause she was trapped in an attic for three years with this guy she really liked?

My point being: Whatever certain…finesse might have been lacking in the note Justin Bieber left after visiting the Anne Frank House — which it seems like he actually wanted to visit — I don’t think it does any of us any good to act like “never forget” means “never discuss except using this very specific approved set of responses.”

by shananaomi

Video

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 15:37:00 -0400