Last spring I read an article in the NYT about an architect who has a booth at a farmer’s market and will answer your questions for 5 cents. 

At the end of the summer I moved to Seattle, I was walking around the farmers market and there was the architect booth from the article.  I had forgotten that the project was based in Seattle and sure enough, posted up, 5 cents, anything you want to know from an architect.  He was happy to engage and share his process with me, all of which got me thinking.

…I could recruit a Marxist Professor to set up shop with me, I could act as the social liaison and agent provocateur, referring questions of a deeper substantive nature to my partner.

I’d call it ‘ask a Marxist’.  Anyone can come up and ask whatever they like. We charge 2 cents, to be both playful and suggest a semblance of agency from the questioning public.  I sense that it could be a replicable model that could put radicals into public spaces and frame exchanges with a critical lens towards ideology. 

In the weeks after having my idea, I began a bit of “market” research.  I sought out conversations about issues of material importance with people I bumped into in public.  My inquiry confirmed that in many strata of American society people are yearning to have conversations upon matters of significance and contribute their own experiences and what I’d call ‘everyday radicalism’. I had some wonderful exchanges.  Each educational, improvisational and containing unlikely depth and plenty of laughing about the dire nature of our circumstances.

All of which, got me thinking about something deeper.  The market is great site, but this could also make for some amazing television.  These conversations are incredibly fluid and unpredictable.  People are funny and when you put them in a group, add an agitator, around a topic of substance, that is a recipe for social and conversational creativity to emerge.  And creativity is unruly.  Unruly and fun.  And if there is anything that we can learn from the Snooki’s (Jersey Shore) and Flavor Flav’s (The Flavor of Love) of our media world, it’s that people will watch crazy.  I don’t even think people care what it is, as long as it’s off the wall.  And these conversations certainly make for that.

I hope to start at the market in the Summer.

If you can help in any way, let me know.

I am still on the hunt for a Professor of proper material foundation, please send any leads. 

Some folks have inquired about the reasoning and goals of the project, I am thrilled for the engagement.  The following link presents a discussion with two wonderful thinkers that underscores some of my thinking behind the project.  Feel free to reach out.  http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/9251

Posted on February 3, 2011

Nicaragua - A Nations Right To Survive

In my pursuit of available educational and documentary material, I stumbled across the Australian journalist and documentarian John Pilger’s website http://www.johnpilger.com/filmography  which offers his many documentaries streaming for free.  If you are not familiar with Central America or Nicaragua in the 1980’s this would be a fine place to start, it outlines some of the major themes, illustrates the raw exercising of U.S. and capitalist hegemony in the region and captures a telling interview with a leading architect of Central American policy in the Ray-Gun administration.

Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood

For me, the film accomplishes two important tasks.  First, it illustrates the totalizing ideological power of contemporary commercial media and the manner in which the terror of such logic shape consciousness.  Then, equally important, it births an imaginary of programmatic protest to ban advertising to children.  The power in the latter being it’s ability to both unite a mass of popular support across broad social demographics and the promise for broader social imagination to bare from such a practical yet radical regulatory intervention and Left victory.  The disturbing qualities of this film should be viewed by all, especially those with youngsters, abre los ojos!

Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class.  Even if you have studied related topics, this is a documentary well worth your time.  It takes the viewer on a historical tour through a vast array of television shows.  The editing is so well done that even though many of the clips of the shows are brief, you can capture their major narrative constructions.  It is a wonderful resource guide as well for television shows, next time I am stranded in front of the TV with my family, I am going to hunt done some of the shows I haven’t seen and encourage us to engage in collective critical analysis (then they will, collectively, lock me in the garage :).  *side note* the study guide for the film provides one of the most thorough collections of organizations, journals and books on left analysis, it’s so long, I had to laugh out loud, but I am glad the list exists. http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/411/studyguide_411.pdf

Listening to Manning Marable speak from the 2000 Green Party convention, provides a unique and interesting juxtaposition to the platform of the Democratic Party (USA) and the presidency, policies and rhetoric of Barack Obama.  I am fascinated that Dr. Marable, a celebrated Marxist Historian, presents a radical political platform that both challenges narratives and presents a vision for collective action and inclusion.  President Obama’s suggestions of building consensus ‘across party lines’ has not only been met with vicious opposition, it has failed to provide that very depth and vision of inclusion. Tarred with the specter of Marx, President Obama, has been stranded both against the Marxian canon and seemingly without it’s methodology for deconstructing the very position he occupies.  At the very moment that our politics needs the historical depth, the philosophical sophistication and the transformational visioning of a Manning Marable, the great professor has passed away, well before his time, cast to the fate of a disease that disproportionately affects black men, a cruel irony that demands centality in discussions of equality.  May he rest in peace and may we continue the Black Freedom Struggle, which he so eloquently assisted us in understanding and contextualizing within the framework of class inequality.  In this world we have no choice either to be born or where to which we are born, engaging with material in the tradition his scholarship is situated is a high honor.  To all those who labor in it’s creation, I owe a debt to you, one of more than mere thanks and a commitment to continue the work, but one that is a continuation of the work.  That is what the person of Manning Marable meant to me and that is whom I strive to be.

In the hope that young biologist’s would take up his role as a great cataloger of species, the famed biologist E.O. Wilson once said that ‘if you want to save the world, you must know the world’.  I think the same holds true for any struggle.  ..During World War II women swing bands gained prominence.  Here is one of the more celebrated outfits.  And here is a link to a review of Sherie Tucker’s book on the musicians and the time, called Swing Shift http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/985  

May every day be international Women’s Day, may every Month be international Women’s Month.  Long live the revolution!

this is a great little documentary of the Situationist International.  While brief and leaving me wanting to know so much more, it’s a nice intro to some of their concepts and work.  Can anyone point me to more and better resources to explore?

A movie about Frantz Fanon’s book ‘Black Skin, White Masks’.  A starter video for inquiry into the work of Fanon. 

the great bell hooks. Cultural criticism and transformation, part 1 of 8 video’s from the late 90’s.  Number 7 on the movie ‘KIDS’ seems to be missing though, I was so eager to hear her critique :(

I had a chance the other evening to watch ‘Manufactured Consent’.  I first watched it as a senior in high school in my ‘global economics’ class and it was transformative.  In the intervening years, I became wary of being associated with Chompsky, as I didn’t want to be cast as ‘typical’, either by my peers or the older generation and I wasn’t sure I found him to be sufficiently radical.  The film does a wonderful job of capturing the body of Chompsky’s work and positioning that work clearly in a Left tradition.  I am glad to have outgrown worn models and engage fully with the material again. (I posted this from youtube because of posting restrictions but it is available in fullstream from google video and with commercials on Hulu)

This is a nice introduction to Edward Said’s seminal work, On Orientalism.  The video is part 1 in 4 parts.

light in the tint of gold orange in reflection, I see you not, looking at me, virtually, in connection, virtually, in a non physical dimension, many times abstracted, technology born of capital accumulation, cannot be designed for the benefits of social relations, and I know this, but I still feel a closeness, it makes me want to pick up a phone, get on a plane and spend some time with you, it makes me want to say something that creates a solace, as if your missing something, found myself writing you late one night, in the tint of light, gold orange in reflection, thinking something, wanting something and reaching out for a familiar connection. 

-saying hello to your facebook wall-

written and paced to the 3rd song here http://www.zoeweiss.com/Recordings.html
 
*written for my little brother inspired by his orange and gold tinted picture, but thinking of everyone I love in any light

Food should not be a commodity.  Raj Patel on Democracy Now breaking down global food issues.

I’d like to start a website that tracks news stories on gun violence.  The objective would be to highlight gun violence and provide real stories to go with the data that is widely available but seldom discussed.  Is there a site already like this available?  The idea would be to have citizen journalists send in links to stories and have a central body organize them.  The goal would be to grow a 2nd site to combat gun violence, allying with organizations already doing this work to provide, dare I say it, a contervaleing force to the National Ridiculous Association, commonly known as the N.R.A.

I need some help!

I tentatively call the site KILLING WITH GUNS

I’ve been thinking about the idea for a while but having a blog has provided an outlet to put the idea out to the “public” (in quotes because no one reads my blog yet, not even my mama :-) …as I have again come across one of these horrific and completely avoidable tradjedies, IF guns simply didn’t exist or were at least much much much much much harder to come by.  Is that really too much to ask.org that could be the name of the advocacy organization.  Is it really too much to ask to eradicate guns from the earth?!?  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/28/arizona-strip-club-shooter-fired-random_n_802169.html

Dream the necessary yet impossible and the impossible can become but a historical marker.

I can’t wait to see more data.  They need to list every player and the number of concussions they’ve had, right along with their stats, like a surgeon generals warning.  Each team doctor can do a thorough intake of the athletes career and determine how many concussions they may have had over their sporting career and the severity of each; along with brain scans of each, to be made available for the public record.  There is no such thing as a private enterprise, everything within society exhists within society. 

Cough it up football and stop holding Cities and States hostage with your publicly finianced stadiums for the accumulation of private capital and the reproduction of Capitalist modes of social relations.  The latter of which I will be returning to as I’m beginning to consider that as perhaps the most important aspect of sport as cultural product.  It’s not what the owners make from the sport directly, it’s sport as bilboard, sport as method of organizing business relationships, a central currency to the city that acts as mass civic gathering around which elite interests can converge.  But, I digress :-)  maybe that should be the name of my blog, yet I’m sure that many a blogger can attest to the same process in which thoughts digest and get off my chest..