Tiny Homes for the Homeless an Occupy Madison Project

from Revolution News:

Madison Wisconsin: In a city with a homeless population that has risen by 7 percent over the last four years to about 3,370, Occupy Madison organizers decided to tell their local leaders to “put up or shut up” and developed a non profit organization Occupy Madison Inc. In June 2013 OM Build was born and Tiny Homes was decided on as a solution.

To achieve their goals of a Tiny Village complete with 9 tiny homes, permanent comprehensive day resource center, safer places to sleep at night, as well as access to restrooms, showers, laundry, community gardening space, and other basic needs for people experiencing homelessness, OM Build realized that they would need to work from within the system. The hard and relentless work paid off. Scheduled for November 15th 2014 is a Ribbon Cutting Event for The first Tiny Village for the Homeless in Madison.

Local organizers also state “Our approach to working within the system came only after we realized that without dotting every “i”, and crossing every “t”, the city and the county would never let us operate– they used every opportunity to enforce ordinances, regulations, and seemingly arbitrary whims against us. This paralleled precisely the persecution of everyday, unaffiliated, homeless individuals. When you are homeless, “the system” is rife with obstacles designed to prevent creative innovation or adaptation– we at Occupy Madison experienced the same headaches.” organizers also stated “In many ways, we have had much more success since we changed our approach. This was due not only to how we communicated with city and county offices (we never shirked from being open or transparent), but how we are perceived by Madison’s genteel liberal population. It’s stunning how a flowerbed on a windowsill can be so much better for PR than the window itself, or the house it’s attached to.”

At least six other cities nationwide are adopting Tiny Homes… others are installing Homeless Spikes. One OM Build organizer in Madison stated that Homeless pikes are “disgusting” and a “weak attempt to make even society’s most uninviting spaces– doorways, parks, etc– uninhabitable as well” He also states “People don’t choose to sleep in the gutter. Physically preventing people from getting whatever rest they can will not help them in any way, and nor do they help society. It’s tempting to say that for every spike a municipality erects, they should provide a warm, safe, clean, bed. But the truth is that we should be providing those beds anyway.”

Local organizers and volunteers state that “next is occupancy and fundraising. We’ve done a lot of work and spent a lot of money getting our site ready for people to move in. Now is a critical time for us financially– if we can’t raise enough funds to pay for making the site as wonderful as it is, there’s a real risk our whole project could go under.” Donations can be sent to paypay account http://bit.ly/1uSYGew Fundraiser in the past have been matched on a dollar per dollar basis and none of current progress would be possible without a 100% volunteer effort.

Local grass root groups that deserve a special shout out include: Friends of the State Street Family, The Bubbles program, (which provides free laundry services to the homeless), Occupy Madison, OM Build, Homeless Ministry at Bethel Lutheran Church, Madison Street Pulse (a cooperative homeless newspaper based In Madison WI).

SALAD DAYS: A TALK WITH THE FORMER FANZINE KIDS BEHIND THE NEW 80S DC PUNK DOCUMENTARY

from Dangerous Minds:

During the ten-year timespan that encapsulated the Reagan presidency and the emergence of Washington, D.C. as the nation’s murder capital, the1980s DC punk underground became a hotbed of incendiary youth activism. The 1980s saw the birth of Dischord Records and DC bands like Minor Threat, Beefeater, Fire Party, Soulside, Rites of Spring, and Fugazi as the harDCore scene matured around community action groups like Positive Force that advocated for punk rock to take direct action against societal injustice.

The early scene was not without its critics, and was sometimes derided by music reviewers like Robert Christgau who, according to Positive Force founder, Mark Anderson, in his seminal history of DC punk, Dance of Days, once called the emerging aggressive breed of young punks “muscleheads.” As a counterpoint, according to Anderson, the comment lead to the title of Flex Your Head, a compilation of DC punk released on Dischord Records in 1982.

The DC underground’s fiercely D.I.Y and, often, cerebral take on traditional punk rock continues to resonate. 

A new documentary about the era called Salad Days: The DC Punk Revolution, is set to make its debut in a few weeks. Created by Director Scott Crawford, a then very youthful fanzine chronicler of the 1980’s DC punk scene and Jim Saah (Director of Photography and Editor), a now professional photographer who taught himself the art in large part by shooting DC punk performances, the Kickstarter-funded film will begin seeing the light of day in November after being in the works for nearly four years. Salad Days features interviews with DC punk and post-punk luminaries Ian MacKaye, J. Robbins, Brian Baker, Kenny Inouye, Dante Ferrando and many others. DC post-punk outfit Soulside, three members of which went on to form Girls Against Boys, will reunite for a handful of shows in conjunction with the NYC and DC premiers.



I sent both Crawford and Saah a few questions via email recently and asked them to discuss the upcoming release of the film, their backgrounds as young fanzine creators, and what the 1980s DC hardcore scene meant to them.

DM: Scott, tell me about your years of making underground publications and what drew you to the Salad Days project.

Crawford: My love of magazines started as a kid when I published a fanzine called Metrozine that was focused on the DC punk scene. I did that for almost three years until I started playing in a band. Years later, I started two other zines that focused on the indie rock world at the time and I worked with some amazing writers and photographers (including Jim Saah). In 2001, I started another consumer music magazine out of my basement called HARP that was eventually bought by another publishing company. I worked as the Editor and Creative Director for seven years—and the focus was independent music and culture. Unfortunately once the economy bottomed out, so did the magazine industry and we were a casualty.

I’d been wanting to document the DC punk scene in the 1980s somehow and just thought a documentary film was the best way to tell the story. Speaking with a lot of the people that I’d spoken to almost 30 years ago (as a fanzine kid) provides a type of perspective that I think offers a unique take on the story. Honestly, after the magazine went under, I was floundering a bit personally and professionally. While the film took almost four years to complete, it’s been therapeutic, humbling and incredibly satisfying.

DM: This music was literally life changing for so many young people, but there have always been haters out there about it from critics to other punks who thought the scene was overly earnest and self-righteous. As you pointed out in your Kickstarter campaign, so much is misunderstood about DC punk in the 80’s. What’s the biggest misunderstanding?

Crawford: The DC punk scene in the 1980s was polarizing. Whether it was straight edge, socio-political issues or “emo”, they all provoke a reaction of some sort—which speaks volumes for the impact that this city has had not just on independent music but the culture at large. My eight-year-old daughter has never heard an Embrace song, but she uses the word “emo” on a daily basis. But as the film explores, not everyone was straight edge, humorless and pious. It was a diverse community and while it had its share of disfunction, it was made up of incredibly creative, hard-working people that created a thriving music scene at a time when there was no real local radio support or music industry infrastructure to help support it. That’s no small feat.

 

In this clip from Salad Days, Ian MacKaye talks about still addressing the straight edge issue.

DM: Talk about the Soulside reunion shows that are coming up in conjunction with the film’s release.

Crawford: I’d been talking to the band for a while about doing a reunion show when the film was ready to come out. They haven’t played on a stage in over 25 years so I really wasn’t sure if it’d actually come together, but I think the timing just worked for them. Personally speaking, they were always a favorite of mine, so it’s particularly meaningful to have them onboard. It’s going to be a really special weekend.

DM: Is there still a movement mentality in the D.C. underground?

Crawford: I think that’s part of the DNA of folks living in DC and active in the underground music community. I think having organizations like Positive Force in the city helps keep the activism alive.

DM: Jim, How long have you known Scott Crawford and how have you guys worked together over the years?  How’d you get involved in the Salad Days film?

Saah: I’ve known Scott since he was twelve years old. He called me and asked if he could use my photos in his fanzine. Then later on I would shoot photos for the various music magazines he would do over the years, Noise Works, Bent and Harp. I did fanzines of my own that Scott wrote for as well. In the 80’s I did Zone V which was a photo/fanzine, then in the 90s I did about a dozen issues of Uno Mas, which was more of a culture fanzine. I’ve thought about doing a book from time to time about DC punk rock but not a film. Scott came to me with the idea to make a film. He actually had to talk me into it a bit because I thought it was a daunting task. And it was! But since we have a long friendship and have collaborated on many things over the years it was very easy falling into a good workflow for the film.

DM: You shot everybody from the DC underground in the early 80’s including Faith, Government Issue, Scream, Black Market Baby, Iron Cross, and Minor Threat (including their last show at Landsburgh Center in 1983) to name just a few. How old were you in 1983? Did you feel like these bands were making history?

Saah: I turned eighteen in March of 1983. I didn’t have a sense of history being made at the time, but there was a sense that we found something special, something that spoke to us and wasn’t what everyone else at school was into. It was special. I was incredibly excited by the whole thing. I discovered older punk rock first; NY and British stuff from the late 70’s. But then I quickly found out that people were making incredible punk rock right now in my backyard! So we went to every show and drank it all in. I didn’t start a band but I did start a fanzine and took photos at all the shows and loved the community and camaraderie. It was a beautiful thing to be accepted by like-minded people.

(I asked both Crawford and Saah the following) What’s the underlying message of Salad Days and what do hope for young musicians and artists to take away from it?

Saah: For me the underlying message is that this music scene and community taught me that I can do anything I set my mind to, that I didn’t need anyone’s permission to be a photographer. I just needed to do it. It set me on a path that I’m still on. I took pictures of bands for my fanzine, then for the City Paper then for the Washington Post. The punk ethos taught me to believe in myself, and also taught me how to not settle for what’s put in front of me in regards to art and culture. It taught me that it may take a little work to find a band or book or movie that’s not easily found on the radio or in the library or at the Cineplex at the mall, but people are making incredible, moving and inspiring art that’s off the mainstream radar and it’s extremely rewarding to go find it. I’m still on the hunt to this day. And now my kids turn me on to cool shit that I didn’t know existed.

Crawford: Salad Days isn’t about nostalgia for me. It’s about looking at that period in my life and applying the things I learned then to my life now. In other words, my best days aren’t behind me—they’re ahead of me. Hell, they’re right now.

DM: How can people get their hands (or at least eyes) on the film once it’s released?

Crawford: We’re premiering the film over the November 14, 2014 weekend at DOC NYC Film Festival in NYC, and in the Midwest (the same night) at the Sound Unseen Film Festival in Minneapolis, MN and on Sunday, November 16 at the Olympia Film Festival in Olympia, WA. Then our Washington, DC premier begins on December 19 at the AFI Theater and runs through December 22. After that, we’ll be doing a few more film festivals followed by a theatrical run and DVD/VOD.

Look for updates on the film’s Facebook page and check out the trailer for Salad Days below:

Shepard Fairey x Glen E. Friedman x My Rules x Obey clothing - officially released today

from Obey Clothing

We're proud to present a collaboration between legendary photographer Glen E. Friedman and OBEY. Glen has shot some of the most memorable and meaningful photos in skateboarding, punk rock, hip hop and more over the last 30 years. Always with an eye for perfection and living by the definition of integrity, Glen has amassed a body of work including album covers for the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, and Suicidal Tendencies. He was there to shoot Minor Threat, Bad Brains and the DC scene. Glen was in back yard pools taking pictures of Tony Alva and the Dogtown crew as they changed skateboarding.



Over the years, Glen and Shepard have collaborated on a number of projects, most of which were never available on apparel. Now Glen has released a new book, My Rules, and we thought it was a perfect time to release some of those collaborations. So in support of My Rules we are releasing 4 of those works, each representing a different genre. There is Tony Alva from Dogtown and skateboarding, Henry Rollins from Black Flag, Cornell West the political activist and Public Enemy for hip hop.

CHECK out some of the collection at OBEY CLOTHING

Thanksgiving.

Why we are unaware that we lack the skill to tell how unskilled and unaware we are

from Boing Boing:



Each one of us has a relationship with our own ignorance, a dishonest, complicated relationship, and that dishonesty keeps us sane, happy, and willing to get out of bed in the morning. By David McRaney

Here’s a fun word to add to your vocabulary: nescience. I ran across it a few months back and kind of fell in love with it.

It’s related to the word prescience, which is a kind of knowing. Prescience is a state of mind, an awareness, that grants you knowledge of the future – about something that has yet to happen or is not yet in existence. It’s a strange idea isn’t it, that knowledge is a thing, a possession, that it stands alone and in proxy for something else out there in reality that has yet to actually…be? Then, the time comes, and the knowledge is no longer alone. Foreknowledge becomes knowledge and now corresponds to a real thing that is true. It is no longer pre-science but just science.

I first learned the word nescience from the book Ignorance and Surprise by Matthias Gross. That book revealed to me that, philosophically speaking, ignorance is a complicated matter. You can describe it in many ways. In that book Gross talks about the difficulties of translating a sociologist named Georg Simmel who often used the word “nichtwissen” in his writing. Gross says that some translations changed that word to nescience and some just replaced it with “not knowing.” It’s a difficult to term to translate, he explains, because it can mean a few different things. If you stick to the Latin ins and outs of the word, nescience means non-knowledge, or what we would probably just call ignorance. But Gross writes that in some circles it has a special meaning. He says it can mean something you can’t know in advance, or an unknown unknown, or something that no human being can ever hope to know, something a theologian might express as a thought in the mind of God. For some people, as Gross points out, everything is in the mind of God, so therefore nothing is actually knowable. To those people nescience is the natural state of all creatures and nothing can ever truly be known, not for sure. Like I said, ignorance is a complex concept.

It’s that last meaning of nescience that I think is most fun. Take away the religious aspect and nescience is prescience in negative. It is the state of not knowing, but stronger than that. It’s not knowing something that can’t be known. It’s not even knowing that you can’t know it. For instance, your cat can never read or understand the latest terms and conditions for iTunes, thus if she clicked on “I Agree,” we wouldn’t consider that binding. There are vast expanses of ignorance that your cat can’t even imagine, much less gain the knowledge about those things required to rid herself of that ignorance. That’s the definition of nescience I prefer.

I love this word, because once you accept this definition you start to wonder about a few things. Are there some things that, just like my cat, I can never know that I can never know? Are there things that maybe no one can ever know that no one can ever know? It’s a fun, frustrating, dorm-room-bong-hit-whoa-dude loop of weirdness that real philosophers and sociologists seriously ponder and continue to write about in books you can buy on Amazon.

I think I like this idea because I often look back at my former self and imagine what sort of advice I would offer that person. It seems like I’m always in a position to do that, no matter how old I am or how old the former me is in my imagination. I was always more ignorant than I am now, even though I didn’t feel all that ignorant then. That means that it’s probably also true that right now I’m sitting here in a state of total ignorance concerning things that my future self wishes he could shout back at me through time. Yet here I sit, unaware. Nescient.

The evidence gathered so far by psychologists and neuroscientists seems to suggest that each one of us has a relationship with our own ignorance, a dishonest, complicated relationship, and that dishonesty keeps us sane, happy, and willing to get out of bed in the morning. Part of that ignorance is a blind spot we each possess that obscures both our competence and incompetence.

Psychologists David Dunning and Joyce Ehrlinger once conducted an experiment investigating how bad people are at judging their own competence. Specifically, they were interested in people’s self-assessment of a single performance. They wrote in the study that they already knew from previous research that people seemed to be especially prone to making mistakes when they judged the accuracy of their own perceptions if those perceptions were of themselves and not others. To investigate why, they created a ruse.

In the study, Dunning and Ehrlinger describe how they gathered college students together who agreed to take a test. All the participants took the exact same test – same font, same order, same words, everything – but the scientists told one group that it was a test that measured abstract reasoning ability. They told another group it measured computer programming ability. Two groups of people took the same exam, but each batch of subjects believed it was measuring something unique to that group. When asked to evaluate their own performances, the people who believed they had taken a test that measured reasoning skills reported back that they felt they did really well. The other group, however, the ones who believed they had taken a test that measured computer programming prowess, weren’t so sure. They guessed that they did much poorer on the test than did the other group – even though they took the same test. The real results actually showed both groups did about the same. The only difference was how they judged their own performances. The scientists said that it seemed as though the subjects weren’t truly judging how well they had done based on any ease or difficulty they may have experienced during the test itself, but they were inferring how well they had performed based on the kind of people they believed themselves to be.

Dunning and Ehrlinger knew that most college students tend to hold very high opinions of themselves when it comes to abstract reasoning. It’s part of what they call a “chronic self view.” You have an idea of who you are in your mind, and it is kind of like a character in a story, the protagonist in the tale of your life. Some aspects of that character are chronic, traits that are always there that you feel are essential and evident, beliefs about your level of skill that are consistent across all situations. For most college students, being great at abstract reasoning is one of those traits, but being great at computer programming is not.

Dunning and Ehrlinger write that the way you view your past performances can greatly affect your future decisions, behaviors, judgments, and choices. They bring up the example of a first date. How you judge your contribution to the experience might motivate you to keep calling someone who doesn’t want to ever see you again, or it might cause you to miss out on something wonderful because you mistakenly think the other person hated every minute of the night. In every aspect of our lives, they write, we are evaluating how well we performed and using that analysis to decide when to continue and when to quit, when to try harder and work longer and when we can sit back and rest because everything is going just fine. Yet, the problem with this is that we are really, really bad at this kind of analysis. We are nescient. The reality of our own abilities, the level of our own skills, both when lacking and when excelling, is often something we don’t know that we don’t know.

Dunning and Ehrlinger put it like this, “In general, the perceptions people hold, of either their overall ability or specific performance, tend to be correlated only modestly with their actual performance.” We must manage our own ignorance when reflecting on any performance – a test, an athletic event, a speech, or even a conversation. Whether modest or confident, you often depend on the image you maintain of yourself as a guide for how well you did more than actual feedback. To make matters worse, you often don’t get any feedback, or you get a bad version of it.

In the case of singing, you might get all the way to an audition on X-Factor on national television before someone finally provides you with an accurate appraisal. Dunning says that the shock that some people feel when Simon Cowell cruelly explains to them that they suck is often the result of living for years in an environment filled with mediocrity enablers. Friends and family, peers and coworkers, they don’t want to be mean or impolite. They encourage you to keep going until you end up in front of millions reeling from your first experience with honest feedback.

When you are unskilled yet unaware, you often experience what is now known in psychology as the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon that arises sometimes in your life because you are generally very bad at self-assessment. If you have ever been confronted with the fact that you were in over your head, or that you had no idea what you were doing, or that you thought you were more skilled at something than you actually were – then you may have experienced this effect. It is very easy to be both unskilled and unaware of it, and in this episode we explore why that is with professor David Dunning, one of the researchers who coined the term and a scientist who continues to add to our understanding of the phenomenon.

Read more about the Dunning-Kruger effect from David Dunning himself in this article recently published in the Pacific Standard.

Skateboard Shindig! 1965

Classic Skateboarding and Music from the 1960's featuring 2013 Skateboarding Hall of Fame Inductee Wendy Bearer Bull riding the Skateboard.

LISTEN: The Ramones’ demo recordings for their debut album (1975)

“[The early demo recordings] offer a fascinating alternative insight into how the eventual debut album might have otherwise sounded. Their dense, primal sound reveals the surprising amount of dilution that the first record’s somewhat conceptual mix wrought upon the quartet’s fundamental power.”

1. I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement Demo 00:00
2. 53rd & 3rd Demo 02:27
3. I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend Demo 04:50
4. Judy Is A Punk Demo 06:39
5. Loudmouth Demo 08:20
6. Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue Demo 10:40
7. I Can't Be Demo 12:22
8. Today Your Love Tomorrow The World Demo 14:18
9. I Don't Wanna Walk Around With You Demo 16:29
10. I Don't Wanna Be Learned I Don't Wanna Be Tamed Demo 18:22
11. You Gonna Kill That Girl Demo 19:25
12. What's Your Name Demo 22:09
13. Chainsaw Demo 24:58
14. You Should Never Open That Door Demo 26:54

thanks, Boing Boing

.

The Century Of The Self - The Engineering of ConsentPart 2 of the BBC Documentary series

part two of the incredible BBC documentary series The Century Of The Self.



Thanks Deborah!

If you really think it matters which party controls the Senate, answer these simple questions:

from our friend Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds:

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. Read his essays daily at his Of Two Minds blog. Smith’s latest book is Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

Please don’t claim anything changes if one party or the other is in the majority. Anyone clinging to that fantasy is delusional.

If you really think it matters which political party controls the U.S. Senate, please answer these questions. Don’t worry, they’re not that difficult:

1. Will U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast change from being an incoherent pastiche of endless war and Imperial meddling? Please answer with a straight face. We all know the answer is that it doesn’t matter who controls the Senate, Presidency or House of Representatives, nothing will change.

2. Will basic civil liberties be returned to the citizenry? You know, like the cops are no longer allowed to steal your cash when they stop you for a broken tail light and claim the cash was going to be used for a drug deal.

Or some limits on domestic spying by Central State agencies. You know, basic civil liberties as defined by the Bill of Rights and the U.S. constitution.

Don’t make me laugh—you know darned well that it doesn’t matter who controls the Senate, Presidency or House of Representatives, nothing will change.

3. Will the predatory, parasitic policies of the Federal Reserve that virtually everyone from the Wall Street Journal to what little remains of the authentic Left understands has greatly increased income and wealth inequality be reined in? Please don’t claim either party has any will or interest in limiting the Fed’s rapacious financialization. There is absolutely no evidence to support such a claim—it is pure wishful thinking.

4. Will the steaming pile of profiteering, corruption, waste, fraud and ineptitude that is Sickcare in the U.S. be truly reformed so its costs drop by 50% to match what every other developed democracy spends per person on universal healthcare? It doesn’t matter if ObamaCare is repealed or not; that monstrosity was simply another layer of bureaucratic waste on an already hopelessly dysfunctional system.

If you answer “yes,” please run a body scan on yourself to detect the biochips that were implanted while you voted Demopublican.

5. Will the influence of Big Money be well and truly banned from politics? If you answer yes, please pick up your tin-foil hat at the door.

6. Will the incentives in the Status Quo be reset to punish rapacious financialization and gaming the system and reward productive investment and labor? Before you answer, check out who’s buttering the Senators’ bread. Hint: Wall Street does not qualify as productive unless we’re talking about the production of life-draining parasites. Virtually none of the vast armies of skimmers and scammers, from those pursuing bogus disability claims to lobbyist leeches, will suffer any consequence.

Moral hazard is the Status Quo’s Prime Directive.

7. Will anything be done to dismantle the Neofeudal Debt-Serfdom known as student loans? You are delusional if you think either party has any interest in limiting the predation of an academic Upper Caste that came to do good and stayed to do well.

8. Will any prudent assessment be made of unaffordable weapons systems like the F-35 Lightning—$1.5 trillion and counting for aircraft that will soon be matched by drones that cost a fraction of the F-35’s $200 million a piece price tag? No way—parts of those insanely costly jets are made in dozens of states, so the pork is well-distributed. Never mind the plane is lemon, built to fight the wars of the past. It’s jobs, Baby—that’s all that counts. Never mind the $1.5 trillion—we can always borrow another couple trillion—the Fed promised us.

Do you really think the Senate controlled by either party will ask why the F-35’s price tag dropped to $120 million from $200 million? That’s easy—the revised estimate left out the engine and avionics. They’ll be added back in after the Senate approves open-ended funding.

If none of these key dynamics will change, you got nothing. Please don’t claim anything changes if one party or the other is in the majority. Anyone clinging to that fantasy is delusional.

If you doubt this, please take the above quiz again.

This is a guest post from Charles Hugh Smith. Read his essays daily at his Of Two Minds blog. Smith’s latest book is Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

MY RULES Exhibition Premiere Opening in London this evening!

See you there!

I'm headed to London in a few hours For the premiere of the MY RULES photo exhibition

The show opens Friday evening in Covent Garden, in the building at 14 Henrietta Street. This is the first show I've had in London in almost twenty years! And it's gonna be fucking great. I'll be there for several days off and on answering questions and signing books, etc. Should be a lot of fun. Go to the ATP website or the Facebook event page for up to date info on different screenings and other bonus events while i'm around and even after i'm gone.

As stated in the press release:

This exhibition comprises of over 50 colour + black and white fine art photographic prints - many of which have never been exhibited before. Classic images from Friedman's last UK exhibition at the ICA in 1997 are also included, now printed larger and better than before. After the premiere in London, the My Rules exhibition will continue to tour worldwide.

For the Rizzoli book, Friedman reached out to some of his subjects to get in their own words what it was like to be at the crux of these cultural movements; these exclusive, often revealing words serve as an education and inspiration. My Rules is not only a remarkable chronicle of beautiful images and a primer about the origins of three radical street cultures recognized worldwide; it is also an artistic statement of inspiration for generations to follow.

The exhibition will include audio installations from Ice-T, Ian MacKaye, Alan "Ollie" Gelfand and an unreleased audio interview between Jay Adams and Glen E. Friedman.This interview formed the basis of Jay's essay in the book, and was one of the last extensive interviews he gave before his untimely death in August this year.

The exhibition will also play host to a selection of curated films by Glen E. Friedman & there will be Q&A sessions throughout the opening weekend - more details to follow.

14 Henrietta St, is a building steeped in publishing history, being previously inhabited by Victor Gollancz, a British publisher and humanitarian (publisher of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Franz Kafka's,The Trial) who also ran his business from the premises.

WHAT: Glen E. Friedman 'My Rules' Photography Exhibition
WHEN: November 21st 2014 - January 18th 2015
WHERE: 14 Henrietta St, Covent Garden WC2H
OPENING HOURS: TBC

Awesome woman performs bike tricks 20 years before BMX flatland-style, 1965

from Tara at Dangerous Minds:

 

Meet Japanese ballerina Lilly Yokoi. Here she is performing some amazing bike tricks on TV variety show The Hollywood Palace in 1965. The ABC program used a different host each week. Joan Crawford was the host on this show which aired on October 9, 1965.

Throughout the sixties and seventies Yokoi was considered the world’s greatest acrobat on a bicycle. She was known as “The Ballerina On The Golden Bicycle.”

I can’t find any information on Yokoi’s whereabouts today, but I believe she’s still alive. In any case, she’d give a lot of X Games competitors a run for their money. And mind you, she’s doing this in heels. Go Lilly!

 

 

via reddit

Little Punk People: Interview with Keith Morris

Elliott Fullam of Little Punk People has a conversation with legendary punk singer and Black Flag & Circle Jerks co-founder Keith Morris in the Asbury Lanes parking lot before the OFF! show.Elliott Fullam of Little Punk People has a conversation with legendary punk singer and Black Flag & Circle Jerks co-founder Keith Morris in the Asbury Lanes parking lot before the OFF! show.

Ferguson Speaks: A Communique From Ferguson

from Sparrow media:

#FergusonSpeaks

As law enforcement officials and national media gear up for a St Louis County Grand Jury’s announcement as to whether it will levy charges against Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for the August 9th shooting of Michael Brown Jr., activists have issued a 9 minute video communiqué providing an intimate look at the climate on the ground.

The video communiqué displays a cross section of the myriad groups activated in the region and includes exclusive footage of Vonderrit Meyers Sr., Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III, celebrated artist and HandsUpUnited.org cofounder Tef Poe, Taurean Russell, Lost Voices organizer Low Key, Millennial Activists United co-creator Ashley Yates, activist and Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams, Damon Davis -- a volunteer with The Don’t Shoot Coalition, Canfield Watchmen founder David Whitt, as well as local Ferguson business managers.

Viewers are encouraged to tweet, share, and embed the video using the accompanying hashtag #FergusonSpeaks —extended raw clips of each of the video’s subjects are available upon request.

handsupunited.org

ALSO READ:

In Ferguson, Tactics Set for Grand Jury Decision in Michael Brown Case - The New York Times

The Century Of The Self A truly incredible BBC Documentary

An incredible
BBC documentary about the use of Freud's theories in the use of propaganda to control the masses. Excellent! Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, and his "public relations" were instrumental in shaping the consumer mindset of the 20th century.

thanks Deborah!

BLACK PANTHER: The Revolutionary Art of EMORY DOUGLAS

from Dangerous Minds

1969

 

One of the unique aspects of the Black Panthers as a political project was their emphasis on the cultural component of revolutionary work. In addition to community-based education and social programs for both children and adults, the Panthers had a house band (The Lumpen—check them out), and a Minister of Culture, the groundbreaking Emory Douglas, whose art for The Black Panther newspaper created a visual context for black liberation. Douglas’ political art came honest. His own impoverished childhood in the Bay Area was interrupted by a spell in a juvenile detention center, where he found a niche in the prison print shop. He later studied commercial art at San Francisco City College, which is where he joined the Black Students Union before being appointed Minister of Culture.

Douglas’ work is incredibly distinctive, often produced with very little budget or time. He favored bold, organic lines, thoughtful collage-work and saturated colors, creating imagery of both dignified black people and cartoonish political antagonists (often soldiers, cops or politicians depicted as rats or pigs). You’ll notice a lot of weapons—remember, the original name was “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense,” and much of the original intent was protecting black communities from police harassment—but Douglas was also invested in producing joyful or righteous images of hope. Douglas struck a perfect balance between optimism and realism, a negotiation that produced an enormous and varied body of work that still bore his unmistakable style.

Though Douglas continued producing art well after the Panther’s dissolution (most notably for the black-oriented newspaper, The San Francisco Sun Reporter) the work below is all from his tenure as Minister of Culture (between 1967 and the 1980s, though the dates for individual works are often unavailable or contested.). It’s only been since the 2000’s that Emory Douglas’ work has been curated into larger retrospective exhibits, and only since 2014 that his work has been collected into a (fantastic) book, Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas

 



1969

 



Date unknown

 



 



The text says, “We are from 25 to 30 million strong, and we are armed. And we are conscious of our situation. And we are determined to change it. And we are unafraid.”

 



 



 



The speech bubble reads, “I Gerald Ford as the 38th Puppet of the United States.”

 



 



The button reads, “For every pork chop there’s a frying pan,” a reference to cops

 



1969

Premier MY RULES exhibition opens in LONDON one week from today

This is going to be a great exhibition. The opening will be next friday November 21st, I'll be there in Covent Garden!



click HERE for the full press release.

This exhibition comprises of over 50 colour + black and white fine art photographic prints - many of which have never been exhibited before. Classic images from Friedman's last UK exhibition at the ICA in 1997 are also included, now printed larger and better than before. After the premiere in London, the My Rules exhibition will continue to tour worldwide.



The exhibition will include audio installations from Ice-T, Ian MacKaye, Alan "Ollie" Gelfand and an unreleased audio interview between Jay Adams and Glen E. Friedman.This interview formed the basis of Jay's essay in the book, and was one of the last extensive interviews he gave before his untimely death in August this year.



WHERE: 14 Henrietta St, is a building steeped in publishing history, being previously inhabited by Victor Gollancz, a British publisher and humanitarian (publisher of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Franz Kafka's,The Trial) who also ran his business from the premises.