Monday, January 28, 2013

get down girl go 'head get down

Giotto it up today, Marriage of the Virgin.

I don't care what y'all say I still love her... and on her 12th birthday he found out it wasn't his!

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Saturday, January 19, 2013

time to drop everything and go.

My fear is that it's sold out: Harry Belafonte Is Coming to Town This dude is legit. Not only this: In 1985, he helped organize the Grammy Award-winning song "We Are the World", a multi-artist effort to raise funds for Africa. Also this: When he was asked about his expectation of criticism for his remarks on the war in Iraq, Belafonte responded: "Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.

don't conflate love with hate

bell hooks:
People may be surprised to know how much bell hooks loves men–especially black men–but she does.

I say surprised, because the general tendency–especially among men–is to confuse feminist politics and political activism with being anti-men.

So if you couple this tendency (to conflate feminist politics with being anti-men) with the undeniably harsh realities that confront black men in America, then it is easy to see how decades of political activism to teach and educate about patriarchy and sexism in the lives of black folks could cause some people to view bell hooks as being anti-black men.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, a very important part of bell hooks’ intellectual and political project over the years has been to create spaces for men–especially men of color–to do the critical work of examining masculinities and sexualities.

On the one hand, black feminist scholars and activists have always had to point out the systematic advantages that black men have in relation to black women. On the other hand, not many have taken the time to dedicate an entire book to exploring the complex issues that black men face in America.
Yet, this is precisely what bell does in her book We Real Cool: Black Men & Masculinity.

But she does expect men to be part of the movement. In her essay, “Men in Feminist Struggle–The Necessary Movement” she points out the limitations of traditional feminist theory in it’s inability to engage and re-conceptualize masculinity, and she talks passionately about her “deeply felt conviction” that men must play an active role in feminist struggle.

Mudede on Scott on first contact

Charles Mudede on local filmmaker Shaun Scott's Seat of Empire

"Scott claims that it was more of an interaction, a mutual exchange of ideas, values, codes, goods, and bodily fluids."

I wonder if it's John Wayne-Sherman Alexie style fluid swapping or Disney Pocahontas/Dance with Wolves type fluid swapping (is there a difference?)

"When one group meets another, both are transformed by the experience. The pioneers did not just impress their culture on the locals and the landscape, but were changed by both into something new, something other than what they were to begin with. There is no purity, just mixture—Scott is committed to this position."
Check out this clip on the World's Largest Brothel:
Also cf. a Lacanian analysis of the Alexie story, "The entire story of John Wayne and Etta revolves around the logic of symbolic identification and of enjoyment that Zizek describes in 'The Loop of Enjoyment' in Tarrying With the Negative. Both Native American and European in this story are cautious about one another’s culture. The Other – for the European, the Native American, and for the Native American, the European – occupies a space of desire outside one’s own community, a space that is fantasmatic and characterized by either excessive fear and alienation or excessive pleasure. Zizek indirectly describes perfectly John Wayne’s fascination with Etta as the Native, and perhaps even her own fascination with John Wayne. They are fascinated with each other as an Other, and at the same time, they feel threatened by their very fascination for each other, as though they were violating their own tribal-national-ethnic identity (Zizek 203)."