(via aljazeera)
Dubai’s striking workers in their own words |
Labourers at construction giant Arabtec in the UAE complain of low pay, poor conditions and lack of annual leave.
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
by Saidiya Hartman
In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.
The slave, Hartman observes, is a stranger—torn from family, home, and country. To lose your mother is to be severed from your kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as an outsider. There are no known survivors of Hartman’s lineage, no relatives in Ghana whom she came hoping to find. She is a stranger in search of strangers, and this fact leads her into intimate engagements with the people she encounters along the way and with figures from the past whose lives were shattered and transformed by the slave trade. Written in prose that is fresh, insightful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a “landmark text” (Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams).This is a dope book. Recommended read
how to correctly leave the scene.
I am dying right now!
Well. Wasn’t expecting THAT. lmaoI’m done.
GOOD FUCKING NIGHT!
WHO IS GIF-ING THIS?
Send Flowers to NC because I am gone!
…What the fuck did I just watch? lmao.
DEADDDD
@ivanasantics
Maïmouna Patrizia Guerresi
As a photographer, sculptor, and installation artist, ‘Maïmouna’ Patrizia Guerresi reveals unique and authentic sensibilities in her narration of the beauty and subtleties of racial diversity and multiculturalism. Over an established career, she has developed her own symbolism, which combines cosmological and ancestral traditions belonging to various European, African, and Asian cultures. Her personal commitment to Baifall Sufism has led her to produce an aesthetic that is able to bridge time, space and civilisations, as well as figuration and abstraction.
The human body is seen as the nucleus and temple of the soul, a place that houses a delicate, higher awareness; the very conduit for encompassing natural and cosmic forces. More about mysticism than any singular religion, her work is visionary in that it restores those elusive qualities of sacredness and unity in our frequently dehumanising and fragmented contemporary visual world. Her classic iconographic style explores the universality of human experience and reclaims the often hidden nurturing powers of feminine energy. Presented as a kind of free flowing epic, the viewer is left to read the significance of her imagery and quietly meditate on its potential to personally engage with its audience. As if her figures were speaking directly to each one of us.
From her earliest experiments with the physicality and archetypal imprinting of the psyche, through to her latest, evermore metaphoric ‘inner constellations’, Maïmouna insists on a cross-cultural discourse and an expansion of the boundaries that normally dictate our individual attitudes. She invites us to see further and to look deeper – past skin colour, preconceptions, and ethnic landscapes – into the wider paradigm of inclusion. She leads us through apparently simple notions of dimensionality into the exquisite, mystical and fragile complexities of life from within. - Rosa Maria Falvo,
(via mym99ind)
"
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.
"—
David Foster Wallace perfectly sums up my morning. While eating a brutal hangover breakfast I sat with a woman who told me I had nice shoes, more than once, because the psych meds she’s on make her forget, and make her bones and teeth shrink. But she thought I was quick-witted, so she made me promise to reintroduce myself next time I saw her. The lady behind the counter burned herself and we talked about how ice never helps and went and got her aloe instead and all was well. And the cashier was limping around on crutches because he jumped off an 8 foot fence on valium last Sunday, but he already has metal plates throughout his legs and the doctors told his mom he would never walk anyway, so he’s already two steps ahead of the game.
All in all, Mister Foster Wallace would have enjoyed it, the mystical stuff of ordinary reality.
Then I saw the cops pulling over a range rover full of yuppie moms right in front of the brothel across the street from where I’m drinking coffee, and I’m just sitting here chuckling.
I’m not waking up this early again, no matter how delightful it’s been.
(via rustylazer)
What do Go Loko, Beasts of the Southern Wild and MGMT have in common? Bob fucking Weisz. That’s what.
I’m so proud of this new video from Nicky Da B, Clayton Cubitt and Bob Weisz. I feel like Bob and I (and a bunch of others too numerous to mention) have been reaching for a video for a while now that captures the essence of what it feels like to get into Bounce. Go Loko is about as close as it gets. The best Bounce videos make you slack-jawed in admiration of the dancers abilities, but the best of the best Bounce videos make your heart pump just sitting there. I feel that way when I watch this. I get physically excited and can’t sit still!
Bob Weisz is a mutherfucking genius, and if you’ve seen Beasts of the Southern Wild or any of those trippy MGMT videos, or that one amazing glitch art masterpiece he did for Chairlift, you’ve seen his work, and the work of his friends, Court 13, and you’re the better for it. No one understands what it takes to make weird make sense like Bob does.
I’m so glad Bob and his friends in Court 13 moved to New Orleans after Katrina, and they have, in my humble-ass estimation, earned their stripes here. They brought boatloads of talent (literally!) and made Glory At Sea, which is undeniably one of the best magical stories about loss and desire ever. Benh Zeitlin and his friends captured the sense of how much it hurts to dream of reuniting with the ones you’ve lost, and how breathtaking it would be if you actually got to do it. I cry every time I watch it, as much for the characters in the film as for myself and the friends I’ve lost.
It seemed like their film came along at a moment when most of us who lived here had no voice at all; stunned speechless and in a permanent state of shock. What they captured in Beasts takes Glory to the next level and really illustrates why those of us who live down here really can’t imagine a life anywhere else. They get right to the core of what matters most to us, which could best be summed up as a right to be what we want and be accepted for it. It’s the kind of universality that merits 4 Academy Award nominations, and the respect of the people in the bayous and small towns who helped them make the film, and they got both. Total success. And Bob’s involvement in Bounce is a logical leap if for no other reason than Bounce, as a cultural gift from New Orleans, embodies that same spirit.
Bob did this video by himself, mostly on a shitty computer (sorry bob ;) in a matter of days. If you’ve ever done any editing I’ll leave it up to you to praise him for that feat alone.
I’ll most likely tell you more about Clayton soon too, he’s making shifts in collective consciousness that most of us will only recognize after the shift happens, and we’ll all be better for it, I’m sure. If you’re familiar with the brilliant Hysterical Literature series he did you’re already aware of him and might not even know it.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this.
You completely rule.
Where Islam Meets America
Is a conservative religious liberal-arts college an oxymoron? Rollo Romig on Muslim Zaytuna College: http://nyr.kr/194KmI0
Photograph by Justin Sullivan
1. they never even mentioned how totally dreamy dr. bazian is tho? or how funny his class is! ahahaa
2. im so happy to hear zaytuna is progressing successfully. i remembered when it was just something the muslim homies on campus were mentioning would happen, and then all the excitement that it finally had. kept saying i’d go check the building out but i’m me and never got to it. this is flyy tho, God is good.
3. ddddddaaaaaaaaannngggg The New Yorker, you all up in my life tho! was literally just on bart reading the magazine then checked my phone when i got off and, quite dangerously, walked down the street w my phone to my nose reading this article. good stuff.
4. So, The New Yorker, you tryna be my boy friend er what?
(Source: newyorker.com)
Damn
smfh
Disrespectful yo .
Wut
honestly its true , its a damn shame :/
(via gogoactionfishy)
i WILL be in attendance.
Whoa “Iman Omari” a headliner at Rock the Bells!!! How beautiful is that, sht cray!!!
(Source: yosoysanmateo, via gogoactionfishy)
(via gogoactionfishy)
Teens Are Trapped in Abusive, Cult-Like ‘Drug Rehab Centers’
If you like Army Wives, Preachers’ Daughters, Dance Moms, or any other TV show attempting to create a taxonomy of women based on the professions of their husbands, fathers, and children, then you may well have caught an episode of Teen Trouble. It’s a reality TV show on the Lifetime network where a guy named Josh Shipp sends “at-risk teens” to “alternative rehab centers,” where they’re forced to endure emotional and physical abuse before being allowed to rejoin society.
Shipp is your classic Jerry Springer brand of therapist—no real qualifications, a huge ego, and a penchant for money and entertaining TV over science and genuine psychology. “I’m a teen behavior specialist,” he says in the intro. “My approach is gritty, gutsy, and in your face.”
But the show is a lot grittier than you might expect from that typical teleprompter spiel. The unregulated “troubled teen” industry is able to persist despite numerous allegations of physical and sexual abuse,torture, and death at various institutions, and Shipp is exploiting that same system for monetary gain. Even when they aren’t abusive and/or deadly, the pseudoscientific practices used at “tough love boarding schools” have often proven to be ineffective and can lead to PTSD, anxiety, depression, and drug addiction. Maia Szalavitz, author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids, told me about some of the horror stories her own research uncovered.
“The classic list is food deprivation, sleep deprivation, public humiliation, beatings, and denial of access to the bathroom to the point where you wet or soil yourself. But I’m also constantly hearing stories of people being forced to re-enact various traumas, like being raped,” she told me.
