Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky

fallen leaf | zen, photography, & life in the city: friday flick: A Trip to the Moon

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:48:42 -0700

fallen leaf | zen, photography, & life in the city: friday flick: A Trip to the Moon:

Daishin Stephenson reviewed A Trip to the Moon. For what I wrote about it a couple years ago, click here.

A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès’s masterpiece.

a bit of history. prior to turning his life over to film making, Méliès was a renowned stage magician. Méliès was inspired to make films after seeing Auguste and Louis Lumière’s invention, the Cinématographe, in 1895.

Méliès desired…

Alice Walker on Assata Shakur: This Is What American History Looks Like

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:01:05 -0700

Alice Walker on Assata Shakur: This Is What American History Looks Like:

fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

I don’t know why, given where we are with dronefare, but I didn’t expect the man making the announcement about Assata Shakur being the first woman “terrorist” to appear on the FBI’s most wanted list to be black. That was a blow.

I was reminded of the world of “trackers” we sometimes get glimpses of in history books and old movies on TV. In Australia the tracker who hunts down other aboriginals who have, for whatever reason: rape and murder, genocide and enslavement of the indigenous people, run away into the outback.

He shows up again in cowboy and Indian films: jogging along in the hot sun, way ahead of the white men on horseback, bending on his knees to get a better look at a bruised leaf or a bent twig, while they curse and spit and complain about how long he’s taking to come up with a clue.

And then there were the “trackers” who helped the pattyrollers during our four hundred years of enslavement. When pattyrollers (or patrols) caught run-away slaves in those days they frequently beat them to death.

I’ve often thought of the black men whose expertise at tracking fugitives helped bring these terrors, humiliations and deaths about. When I was younger I would have been in a rage against them; not understanding the reality of invisible coercion, and mind and spirit control, that I do now.

Today, only a few years older than Assata Shakur, and marveling at the unenviable state of humanity’s character worldwide, I find I can only pray for all of us. That we should be sinking even below the abysmal standard early “trackers” have set for us: that we can now offer two million dollars for the capture of a very small, not young, black woman who was brutally abused, even shot, over three decades ago, as if we don’t need that money to buy people food, clothes, medicine, and decent places to live.

Haiku

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:48 -0700

(from Traffic and Murder)

yes, life is suffering,

and yet -

the moon over the woods

Back in print: "Common Criminals" by Larry Fondation

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:47:00 -0700

Back in print: "Common Criminals" by Larry Fondation:

“Larry Fondation’s second book reads like a collaboration between Elmore Leonard, Dennis Cooper and Eminem.” - Metro Times (Detroit) Larry Fondation writes about what he knows best, the inner city with a twist. Raised in Dorchester, MA, where street fights and criminal acts were common occurrences, Fondation studied at Harvard University where the disparity between his history and his present stood out in sharp relief. He went on to become a community organizer in South Central Los Angeles and Compton, CA. The requirement for this job was not the degree in his hand but the fire in his belly. That fire burns in Common Criminals.

The Lethality of Loneliness

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:00:56 -0700

The Lethality of Loneliness:

For the first time in history, we understand how isolation can ravage the body and brain. Now, what should we do about it?

This research is of urgent importance, but it surprises me not at all. I’m certain that every fear - with the possible exception of the fear of physical pain - is really a fear of loneliness, and that companionship is essential medicine. I wrote more about it here.

Walt Whitman’s haversack to go on display at Library of...

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:35:42 -0700

Walt Whitman’s haversack to go on display at Library of Congress.

criminalwisdom: Automobile Accident 1945 - William W. Dyviniak...

Mon, 13 May 2013 00:01:10 -0700

criminalwisdom:

Automobile Accident 1945 - William W. Dyviniak (Via)

Poem for Mother's Day

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:01:00 -0700

(from Traffic and Murder)

I think I was three years old
when my mother punched me in the face
so hard I rolled across the floor
and under a chair, and knocked
the chair over.

I don’t know
if that was the first time
she did it, or only
the first time
my memory held on to it.

She hated me, always.
She told me with her words,
her fists and her feet.

She was fat,
had a mouth full of brown teeth
and she smelled of piss,
sweat and cigarettes.

She has been dead for years,
turned to ashes
and given to the wind.

A wind blows this afternoon,
and it smells of grass and rain.

I make an offering of incense,
and I bow to her memory.

"They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:00:55 -0700

“They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.”

- Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain

Poem: The Dead Outside My Window

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:47 -0700

The dead outside my window

dance in the breeze. The web

that enshrouds them catches

the sunlight. The spider is small,

thick and brown. I look at it

from the other side of the glass,

my own web, my kitchen, where

a fresh kill roasts in the oven.

My essay "Noir: The Marxist Art Form" is in the new issue of The Big Click

Thu, 09 May 2013 17:10:58 -0700

My essay "Noir: The Marxist Art Form" is in the new issue of The Big Click:

There are also stories by Tony Mason and Joe Clifford and an (online only) essay by Tom Piccirilli, who’s recovering from brain cancer. Go get it, and, better yet, subscribe. It’s one of the best magazines out there.

"As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:53 -0700

“As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way behind us. They’re not. Sweden and South Korea have more advanced high speed internet networks. Japan has the most advanced trains and transportation systems. Norwegians make more money. The biggest and most advanced plane in the world is flown out of Singapore. The tallest buildings in the world are now in Dubai and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.”

- 10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America http://bananenplanet.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/10-things-most-americans-dont-know-about-america/ (via curlycherie)

There are two areas where the USA is way out in front of the rest of the world: war and prison. The technology of killing is the main investment of US national energy, and of course the semi-public semi-private incarceration economy is flourishing while schools and roads crumble. In many other quality-of-life terms — housing, healthcare, public transportation, public access to technology, mental health support, support for people with disabilities, childcare, primary education, maternity support, social safety net — I think a lot of US Americans personally know that things are not exactly rosy but see no options for fixing it.

(via zuky)

A Story of Rape or Something Else

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:13:00 -0700

It was the summer of 2004. I was living in East Tennessee, in a house on the edge of woods, at a halfway point between a mental hospital and a sewage plant.

Someone knocked on my door, and I knew it had to be trouble.

I wasn’t expecting anyone. It was after midnight, and I’m not a person you’d pay an unexpected visit to even during the day. And not many people knew where I lived.

The knocking on the front door was insistent, though not loud. A burst of urgent knocking, then a pause, then another burst. I went to the door, in the shorts and T-shirt I slept in, and looked through the glass. The security light was on, but at first I didn’t see anyone.

Then I saw the woman who was standing about halfway down the porch steps, crying, her body trembling.

I opened the door.

“Will you help me?” she said.

“Yeah, of course. What’s wrong?”

She cried harder as she said, “A man was giving me a ride, but he raped me.”

“Come in,” I said, and she did. “Sit down. You’re safe here.” She sat on a chair, and I went to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and brought it to her. She was barefoot, and had a missing front tooth. I realized that she was probably still in her thirties, but she looked much older.

I went and woke Amy. Then we asked the woman what she wanted us to do.

She said she didn’t want to call the cops. I told her I thought she should, but I left it at that. I never make other people’s decisions for them.

She said she wanted to call her sister. Amy handed her a phone, but her hands were shaking so badly she couldn’t dial the number on the first attempt, and then when she did get through she was too upset to talk. She gave the phone to Amy, who explained what had happened, but the sister said she didn’t have a car and couldn’t come and help.

The woman told us she’d asked a guy she didn’t know to give her a ride to her sister’s house in Georgia, but that he’d brought her to this dark corner of nowhere instead, raped her in the woods, taken her shoes, and told her that if he saw her on the road he would run her over. She said she had walked out of the woods and found our house.

I offered to drive her to a hospital, and she said she wanted to go to Rossville Boulevard, where she’d left her car, where a friend was waiting for her in the car. She didn’t explain why she’d taken a ride from a stranger and left her friend in her car, and I didn’t ask because I would not have believed the answer.

I didn’t know what had happened to her, how much of her story was true. All that was certain is that something had happened to her, and that she was miles from anywhere, in the middle of the night, terrified, in bare feet.

She said she didn’t want to go to the hospital right away, because the friend who was waiting in the car would be worried. “I can go after I see her,” she said. Amy asked if the friend had a cell phone. “No.”

Rossville Boulevard is a miserable drag where people sell sex, sell their blood plasma, for enough money to buy cheap drugs and cheap booze.

It was where she wanted to go, and so we took her there, in my pickup truck, with me driving, Amy sitting in the middle, and this woman squeezed against the passenger side door, wearing a pair of flip-flops Amy had given her. (How she had walked barefoot in these seething, insect-ridden woods is more than I want to imagine.) As I drove, nobody spoke, except to ask for directions and if the air-conditioning wasn’t too cold.

As I exited the freeway onto Rossville, she told me to make a right and pull into a gas station. I did, and she pointed to a red car parked at the side of the building. “Over there. That’s my car.”

There was nobody in the car.

“Do you want us to wait here with you until your friend shows up?” Amy said.

“No, that’s okay.” The woman got out of the truck. With nothing else to be done or said, we told her to take care. As we pulled out of the gas station, I looked back and saw that she’d walked right past the car that was supposedly hers, and was approaching a gray car parked nearby.

Photo

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:01:04 -0700

I think you are extremely insensitive about the subject of Gabrielle Giffords. She is so much more than just a survivor of a bullet. She is dedicated, hard-working, and a fighter in every way. You do not know her.

Mon, 06 May 2013 13:23:00 -0700

There is a difference between the public and the private self, and with Giffords - whom you’re correct in saying that I don’t know personally - I comment on the public self. She may be hard-working and dedicated, but what she has worked hard at and shown herself to be dedicated to is conservative, pandering, racist politicking.

Her objection to SB 1070 was not that it was racist, but that it was impractical. She cheered the deployment of the National Guard to the border, to combat a problem that does not exist. Even though her being shot has been cited as an example of why guns ought to be banned, she herself supports gun rights.

daishinstephenson: room

Mon, 06 May 2013 09:46:23 -0700

daishinstephenson:

room

"Hard to develop the silence and humility necessary for creating good art if you are always yelling..."

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:00:55 -0700

“Hard to develop the silence and humility necessary for creating good art if you are always yelling ‘Look at me’ like a three-year-old who has just shit in the sandbox.”

- Jim Harrison, the Dalva notebooks

Today is Karl Marx’s 195th birthday. I remember the awe...

Sun, 05 May 2013 14:38:00 -0700

Today is Karl Marx’s 195th birthday. I remember the awe and gratitude I felt when I first read him in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow nearly 30 years ago.

Hello ! I'm actually doing some work on John Cage, Zen, and D.T Suzuki but I can't find what were the teachings of D.T Suzuki actually. If you could help me maybe ? That'd be nice of you ! Thank you.

Sun, 05 May 2013 13:49:59 -0700

Suzuki wrote a number of books, which you can find by clicking here.

There’s also Kay Larson’s book about Cage and Suzuki, Where the Heart Beats. It’s a badly flawed book - the author is more concerned with herself than her subjects - but it’s a useful reference, though it has a number of factual inaccuracies.

"I think the problem is that many people in America think that racism is an attitude. And this is..."

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:53 -0700

“

I think the problem is that many people in America think that racism is an attitude. And this is encouraged by the capitalist system. So they think that what people think is what makes them a racist. Racism is not an attitude.

If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power.

Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.

You cannot be a racist without power. You cannot be a sexist without power. Even men who beat their wives get this power from the society which allows it, condones it, encourages it. One cannot be against racism, one cannot be against sexism, unless one is against capitalism.

”

- Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) answering a question about racism, sexism, and capitalism.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tug8RJyLoz0

(via disciplesofmalcolm)