GPOYW: Schultz-as-Gaga, 2009 Halloween party at Sauce (photo by Carlo Rada)
I splurged and bought these boots today. My day job is officially hell and getting hotter by the minute. I thought red boots seemed an appropriate choice for the impending apocalypse.
Wearing a vest decorated with a ribcage and flexing his biceps, Diallo rapped about being the best, as rappers are wont to do, but then paired it with lyrics like “Al salaam-aleikum/I don’t eat bacon/I am not Jamaican.” As if that was not ludicrous enough, the hype act became downright derogatory as Diallo and KiDTRONiK pulled women up onto the stage to perform their single “Big Girl Skinny Girl.” For an audience who came to see Williams — an artist whose book of poetry S/HE was a fragile, fierce and honest exploration of the relationship between him and the mother of his daughter, who refers to the powers he sees in the universe as “goddess” and promotes art as a vessel for independence and liberation — having some stereotypically objectifying bullshit club grind open up for him was downright insulting.
Carl Atiya Swanson hits the corporate nail on the head with his review of the Saul Williams/Afropunk show at the Varsity last Sunday. Talk about the most amazing/disappointing show of the year. Local acts Dearling Physique and No Bird Sing tore it up and gave the audience inspiring, energetic, thoughtful performances…wish I could say the same about Saul Williams and his touring companions.
Cancel your Sunday plans and meet me at the Varsity. Saul Williams.
Me too, dude. Me too.
I wish my girlfriend was this dirty (via jakedobkin)
Under a flashlight, two Ninja(s) throwing star(s) can be seen on the backside of the licenses. Only two states use this unique feature: Wisconsin and Oklahoma.
a little ditty I found during the state identification portion of my alcohol awareness training on servingalcohol.com…once again, WI ftw.
CORRECTION: After further examination, I noticed yr humble blogger misread the passage. It should read: ‘two Ninja throwing stars’…not ‘two ninjas throwing stars’. Because I guess that would be too awesome for a state-issued ID. My day seriously sucks now…canceling sudden plans to move to Oklahoma.
Thank goodness this sign is sold in their gift shop cuz like that was one of the first things I was wondering. I was all, “Where do I get one?”
The desire to work through existing contradictions rather than stand outside them represents not so much a preference for melioristic reform over revolutionary change, but rather a recognition of the impossibility of standing outside totalitarian systems of domination.
George Lipsitz from Dangerous Crossroads
Nikki from Schultzbrain: How do we change? Is it possible to work inside systems to change society without deferring to said systems and growing comfortable inside them?
Media and the G20 Twitter Arrest or: Let's Everyone in the Media Tell Protesters How to Protest
So a G-20 protester was arrested, then raided by the FBI, for his Twitter usage regarding police whereabouts during the summit.
Two articles have come to my attention - this one written by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman. It’s titled Watch What You Tweet. Although the title may lead a person to believe that she suggests protester actions require a social networking face-lift of sorts, she points to governmental censorship as the societal ill, acknowledging the opportunity that decentralized sites like Twitter and Facebook present “to strengthen our democracy and dissent.” She does a decent job of connecting this particular case to the Obama administration/Iranian protest use of social media.
The other, from Ars Technica, is called Anarchist arrested after tweeting out the fuzz to protesters. It opens with a welcoming subhead (If you’re the subversive type, you might want to reconsider tweeting the revolution…) and reads less like a piece of journalism and more like a misguided and condescending how-to for street sheep. It goes on to suggest that those who organize ‘activities of a questionable legal nature’ are unwise to use a public and widely used communications tool like Twitter. It concludes by suggesting that protesters use lower-tech communications that aren’t so easily traced.
Now, I’m going to try to take it easy. This was obviously not written by someone who understands a whole lot about radical organizing. But I am really fucking tired of reading articles that use a corrective tone when discussing matters of protest as if no one in the streets has ever fucking thought about protesting before. And it’s not lost on me that the very first thing that we read about this particular individual is that he might consider himself an anarchist. Don’t get me started on that one. Or about the assumption drawn that someone who is running a communications network for a huge ass event has somehow had a hand in organizing actions at said huge ass event.
Guess what? People who organize ‘activities of a questionable legal nature’ don’t fucking tweet about it. They form these things called affinity groups with people they trust, plan direct action in secret if that’s what they’re into and practice good security culture in public meetings to keep themselves and everyone in a community safe. You don’t tend to write about these people because they aren’t using Twitter.
People who organize communications efforts for huge ass events are generally interested in keeping people who are attending said huge ass event safe. That includes disseminating as much information about a situation as possible to as many people as possible so that individuals can make decisions for themselves about the level of risk they feel comfortable taking on. These comms folks don’t tend to prescribe or assume what is best for an individual. They spread the facts as best as they know them, and leave the decision-making to the people.
Weird. Perhaps journalists have a lot to learn from (anarchists like) Elliot Madison.
***Big ups to chriseats for the second article. I’ve had a bit of writer’s block lately, and you may have cleared it right up.
