“Turiya and Ramakrishna” appears on the album Ptah, the El Daoud. Wikipedia notes: The title track is named for an Egyptian god, Ptah, “the El Daoud” meaning “the beloved”. “Turiya”, according to the liner notes, “was defined by Coltrane as “a state of consciousness — the high state of Nirvana, the goal of human life”, […]
Finding My Voice | Geo-Poetic Spaces
I found my voice
and it won’t be shutdown
iced over
stamped out
by bullets striking stones
My voice
can’t be invaded
bricked up
pulled under
by coyotes howling
walls [Read more…]
A Fish Rots From the Head: Four Local Leaders and Their Unconvincing Fight Against Gun Violence
By Wendy Wheatcroft / San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention
Last Monday I attended the beautiful community vigil at Congregation Beth Israel along with several of my co-volunteers in San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention (SD4GVP). The hateful slaughter of 11 Jews at Congregation Tree of Life in Pittsburgh a couple of days earlier was absolutely horrific, and we’re dedicated to eliminating this scourge from American life. There’s nothing more heartbreaking than having to attend vigils for murdered Americans, but it’s part of what we do.
You know what hurts too? Sitting at a vigil for innocent people slain by hate-filled gun violence and seeing four local leaders being given a role of prominence when their roles in combating gun violence are anything but prominent. [Read more…]
From Encounter to Fade-out: Moxie Theatre’s ‘Fade’ by Tanya Saracho
The Moxie Theatre production of Fade written by Tanya Saracho and directed by Maria Patrice Amon, featuring Javier Guerrero as Abel and Sofia Sassone as Lucia, is a powerful, moving, and timely work, exploring the intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, and value in the Trumpian America. Lucia, a new hire at the TV/Film studio, struggles to find her place as a script writer. Abel, a custodian in Lucia’s building, tries to survive as a single-father after a period of incarceration.
Through the two “Mexican” (one may want to use Latinx to maintain a gender-neutral and inclusive tone) characters, the play interrogates a variety of questions and issues of stereotypes, difference within one racial/ethnic group, identity (politics), tokenism, sexual discrimination, reality of the entertainment industry, and their effects on people, particularly on the underrepresented population in the United States. [Read more…]
Lila Downs – Zapata Se Queda | Video Worth Watching
The Day of the Dead has passed, but here’s a little something by Lila Downs, accompanied by Totó la Momposina and Celso Piña, that resurrects that sensibility. [Read more…]
Politics, Reality, and Invention at the Time of Trial: San Diego Repertory Theatre’s ‘Actually’
One of the first new words the daughter of my friend learned at her elementary school was “actually.” In the first week of her school, she repeated “actually this and actually that,” proudly parading this new addition to her vocabulary. This 6-year-old was also testing the magic of the word “actually” her teacher used while talking to her students. She seemed to have discovered this adverb’s power to validate one’s claim and/or opinion by repudiating the authenticity of the opponent’s argument.
Anna Ziegler’s Actually uses this very word as its title to interrogate the political, gender, and racial dynamics revealed during the Title IX investigation and hearing of a sexual misconduct case at a college campus. [Read more…]
Descent | Geo-Poetic Spaces
Water’s weight
raised sky
held her down
Waves beat fatigued wings
into molten scales of sun: [Read more…]
Paul Avrich’s An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre | A Review
By Mel Freilicher
An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre
by Paul Avrich
AK Press, 2018
The self-professed group of anarchists who comprise AK Press, a worker-run collective which publishes and distributes radical books, visual and audio media, has done a great service by reissuing Paul Avrich’s fascinating study of an American original. As Robert Helms suggests in his instructive Foreword outlining Avrich’s own background and achievements as the premier scholar of American anarchism until his death in 2006, this author “succeeded in rescuing this brilliant and compelling person from near non-existence.” [Read more…]
Gun Violence: ‘I Gotta Do Something. Anything.’
By John White / San Diegans For Gun Violence Prevention
How many times have you told yourself that?
Did you tell yourself that after Sandy Hook, when gun violence took the lives of 20 children and six adults?
Or after Las Vegas, when a man with guns left 58 people dead and 851 injured?
Or after Parkland, when 14 high school students and three adults died because of guns in the hands of somebody who shouldn’t have had them?
Or after Tree of Life in Pittsburgh last week, when gun violence combined with anti-Semitism to kill 11 and injure six in a rampage described as one of the deadliest against the Jewish community in U.S. history?
When you’re finally able to put down the remote control and step away from social media for a minute, that sentence is still nagging you, isn’t it? [Read more…]
Jim Carrey Acceptance Speech at the Britannia Awards | Video Worth Watching
In his acceptance speech for BAFTA’s Charlie Chaplin Excellence in Comedy Award, Jim Carrey reminded the audience that Chaplin’s comedy included pointed social commentary that took on the American right-wing of his day. He went on to draw parallels to current events, saying that “we are fighting those same evils today” and dedicating the award to Chaplin and contemporary heroes, including Christopher Steele, Christine Blasey Ford and Colin Kaepernick. [h/t to Shelly P.] [Read more…]
Ntozake Shange – a laying on of hands / i found god in myself | Video Worth Watching
R.I.P. Ntozake Shange, (October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018). StarTribune writer Rohan Preston notes that Shange’s “For Colored Girls”—an empowering series of interwoven poems on love and loss, joy and pain—introduced choreopoem into the dictionary. The poems were gathered into a show that opened off-Broadway in 1975, and on Broadway in 1976, and has been produced consistently ever since. Shange, 70, had suffered multiple strokes in recent years, but she had been on the mend lately, creating new work, giving readings and being feted for her work. She died in her sleep Saturday morning in an assisted living facility in Bowie, Md., where she lived. [Read more…]
Handel Unleashed: Tilda Swinton Directs Dog Opera | Video Worth Watching
A HuffPo post alerted us to this bemusing video by Tilda Swinton and Sandro Kopp. It features her spaniels cavorting seaside to “Rompo i Lacci”—music from Handel’s “Flavio”. With a bit of editing magic (some slow motion, mirroring, time reversal, …) we have a new spirited interpretation of this 1723 masterpiece. [h/t to AGD] [Read more…]
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