Occupying Is Not the Same as Demonstrating
From ArtForum Imminent Domain BY Saskia Sassen & Hans Haacke The eviction of protesters from New York’s Zuccotti Park last November has done little to diminish the significance of occupation as a mode of political action. Looking back on last year’s many encampments—and their disruptions of urban space—Artforum invited sociologist Saskia Sassen to discuss the [...]
To Be Black at Stuyvesant High
By FERNANDA SANTOS LIKE a city unto itself, Stuyvesant High School, in Lower Manhattan, is broken into neighborhoods, official and otherwise. The math department is on the 4th of its 10 floors; biology is on the 7th. Seniors congregate by the curved mint wall off the second-floor atrium, next to lockers that are such prime real estate [...]
First One on the Dance Floor: An Interview with Playwright & Hip-Hop Performer Idris Goodwin
I met playwright, hip-hop artist, and performer Idris Goodwin in Chicago in 2002. Our friendship and his finesse as a teacher brought him to teach at the high school I started in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. A prolific artist whose talents have won him a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Goodwin now lives [...]
“If a poem falls in a forest and there’s only poets in the audience to hear it, does it make a sound”. . . Poetry as “Social Form” and “Social Process”
“Conceptual Writing [verb, repeat] and Silence” From Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation BY Mark Nowak I think I’m finally beginning to understand Conceptual Writing thanks to Kenneth Goldsmith, who, in his consecutive posts on 4.27 and 4.28, drives home his point by employing the sentence “Conceptual writing [verb]” something like twenty-five times. As [...]
“Fear of a Black C-SPANet”
This is absolutely hilarious and just might make you rise up and shout Hallelujah! The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Warning: Shopping May Prove Deadly to Miners
26 April 2010 CommonDreams.org BY Mark Nowak Miners from Utah to sub-Saharan Africa to China’s Shanxi province die, in part, for us. Anderson Cooper is talking to coal-mining families and politicians in West Virginia again. Ever since that explosion ripped through an underground mine in Montcoal, it seems people all across America are discussing the [...]
Dorothy Height b. 1912 – d. 2010
The New York Times Dorothy Height, Largely Unsung Giant of the Civil Rights Era, Dies at 98 BY Margalit Fox Dorothy Height, a leader of the African-American and women’s rights movements who was considered both the grande dame of the civil rights era and its unsung heroine, died on Tuesday in Washington. She was 98. [...]
“First Buffalo Boy Go Around” . . . Malcom McLaren b. 1946 – d. 2010
English performer and former Sex Pistols manager, Malcom McLaren, died today, 8 April 2010. It is believed that he, like Wilma Mankiller who also died this week, might have died of cancer. Amongst other hats he wore, McLaren wrote and performed, in true ’80s regalia, two of my favorite songs during my last year of [...]
Former Cherokee Nation Principal Chief, Wilma Mankiller b. 1945- d. 2010
Activist and Cherokee leader Wilma Mankiller died of pancreatic cancer on 6 April 2010 at the age of 64 and after a long life of political action on behalf of indigenous people and women. Though Mankiller, as Principal Chief, actively opposed the inclusion of Cherokee freedmen in the Nation (the descendants of Cherokee slaves of [...]