paris on my mind...

I suddenly remember that it's already been 8 months since I've been to the City of Love, Paris and I'm really missing my memorable experiences there. The mini-cruise on the Seine, my "nelson time" sitting on Les Champs du Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Church, the Louvre Museum, Arch of Triumph. Am sure it will all come back to me next time I am walking past Place de la Concorde or walking up rue de Rivoli. The smells, the shops, the gruff Parisian nonchalance – it will feel as if I had never been away. Rue Cler next to the Eiffel Tower, which sell the most beautiful arrangements of roses I have ever seen in my life or Place de Clignancourt, where I tasted one of the best wines in my life from Britagne for the price of 2€.

Of course I am older now, perhaps even slightly wiser (a touch of grey in the beard these days), but walking through the streets I am sure I will feel the same excitement that I did back then. My sense of nostalgia will be only heightened by where I will stay– off on rue de Rivoli, a strip of real estate that has provided me happiness, enlightment, and sorrow– times of stress, water leaks, falling in love – probably the most defining moments of my life on many levels. The shops and the ambiance hopefully will be exactly how I remembered them. In a city of millions, where nearly all are strangers I can always count on Mona Lisa's smile... 

"An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris"

~Friedrich Nietzsche

the invisible hand...

The disparate racial composition of the American penal system has drastically altered the life trajectory of many minority groups, in particular young black males. Just as college and the military, prison has become a leading potential life course for young men in urban societies. Since a large number of those in the penal system are minorities, particularly African-American, it is estimated that felon disenfranchisement has provided a small but distinct advantage to Republican candidates in every presidential and senatorial elections from 1972 to 2000. Education, as the great equalizing mechanism in society, the social space fought over so passionately during historic legislative battles such as Brown v. Education, is rendered innocuous in part by the discriminate treatment of children based on cultural and ethnic identifiers.

Many segregated schools struggle to attract highly qualified teachers and administrators, do not prepare students well for college, and fail to graduate more than half their students.

The United States risks becoming a nation in which a new majority of non-white young people will attend "separate and inferior" schools.

Latinos are the fastest growing minority in U.S. schools. Researches noted that "often Latino students face triple segregation by race, class and language."

A shift in the control of representation by those denied access to media decision-making and product distribution would help to lessen the muted forms of stereotypes that continue to proliferate American mass media. Over 50 years after Ralph Waldo Ellison and Louis Armstrong asked, “What did I do to be so Black and Blue?”, America still lacks a wide arrays of state educational systems that celebrates and embracing the national ideals of equality and, in its stead, perpetuates systems of institutionalized prejudices and racism. Only when this glaring chasm is addressed will more than 100 years of overt, covert, and mass mediated injustice, violence, and prejudice begin to recede in the collective social conscious. Maybe then we will finally be able to bid Jim Crow and Plessy v. Ferguson a proper adieu.

“Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason”

~Abraham J. Heschel

high hopes...

Tonight Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress and an even more important audience — the American people. Since it was technically not a "state of the union" address, I think it's safe to call the speech the "state of the economy" address. Hoping to turn the page on tough economic times, the president read the country a litany of reasons for the crisis. Gutted regulations, irresponsible home purchases, predatory lending, tax cuts to the wealthy, and a lack of investment in America's future have brought us all to a day of reckoning, he said.

After laying the blame, Obama explained his plan. Making it hard to believe he's only been in office for a month, Obama touted the specifics of the aggressive stimulus package. The president played professor for a bit too, spelling out why it's important to keep credit flowing and help banks. "It's not about helping banks, it's about helping people," he said frankly.
Perhaps most crucially, Obama called out the "neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford." Assuring skeptics, Obama said his housing plan won't bail out that irresponsible person, but it will help responsible Americans maintain the value of or refinance their homes.

Obama also took time to discuss his upcoming budget. His priorities? Energy, health care, and education. His voice filled with emotion when he asserted that health care reform will not wait another year. Touching on foreign policy, Obama broke sharply from the man who last spoke to a joint session of Congress. He reannounced the closing of Guantanamo Bay prison and proclaimed that "America does not torture."

While speaking of dire troubles, Obama exuded energy and optimism. Regardless of the merit of his policies, all in all, Obama performed like a true leader tonight.

"It is not so much that man is a herd animal but that he is a horde animal led by a chief"

~Sigmund Freud

n.y. state of mind...

Unfortunately, The New York Post is standing behind a cartoon that some have interpreted as comparing President Barack Obama to a violent chimpanzee gunned down by police. The cartoon in Wednesday's Post by Sean Delonas shows two police officers standing over the body of a bullet-riddled chimp. One of the officers says the other, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."

Civil rights activist Al Sharpton called the cartoon "troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys."

But Sharpton said the Post should clarify the point it was trying to make with the cartoon, which was playing off Monday's rampage by a pet chimpanzee in Stamford, Conn., that left a woman severely mauled. Police ended up killing the chimp.

In a statement, Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan said: "The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist."

A story about the cartoon on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post Web site drew hundreds of reader responses, many calling the cartoon racist and insensitive.

Sam Stein, a columnist for the site, wrote that "at its most benign, the cartoon suggests that the stimulus bill was so bad, monkeys may as well have written it. Most provocatively, it compares the president to a rabid chimp. Either way, the incorporation of violence and (on a darker level) race into politics is bound to be controversial."


Not only is this NY Post cartoon obviously Racist, but it seems to be PRO-Police Brutality as well. Showing the blatant racial depiction combined with the excessive force of the Police department make this a very DANGEROUS cartoon which is bound to have some very bad effects on the not-so-smart people out there (those are the people whom I would assume read the NY Post to begin with). Yea, bad taste, bad judgement and just plain BAD! The NY Post needs to atone for this, I hope people boycott this "newspaper" and start reading real news.

"A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me"

~Frederick Douglass

fuerzabruta...

It begins when a platform is rolled into the center of the crowd, forcing the audience to make space. A man in a suit, who could be an office worker, is going against the flow on a moving walkway. This is the defining image of "Fuerzabruta": the ordinary man facing life's daily challenges, pushing himself forward.

It's an image we see repeatedly through the performance with a number of variations. Twice he is shot yet returns to his feet like some angelic survivor, blood dripping from his shirt. Sometimes he walks past people on this imaginary sidewalk -- each of them dropping like statues when they reach the end of the platform. Other times he is confronted by a wall of cardboard, a blast of wind or a haze of rain and still he soldiers on, casting debris into the audience as he goes.

At one point, attention is directed suddenly to a place on the ceiling where a man appears to hang unaided from the underside of a small acrylic pool of water. Above him is a writhing swimmer whose every movement he mirrors as if she were magnetic.

Already, by looking skywards, we're starting to lose our sense of balance and orientation. When a huge curtain of silver wraps itself around the room and two acrobats on ropes chase each other across the walls of the tent, it even becomes hard to tell up from down. We are weightless in the darkened space, laughing in the face of Newton's laws even as we're sprayed with water or set upon by actors smashing powdery Styrofoam blocks over our heads.

In effect, the director and his troupe present a series of images of obstacles and liberation, complemented by sequences of sheer sensuality, such as when a massive curtain flaps across the space swinging closer to our outstretched arms with each movement. Most stunning of all, in a feat of technical daring, a full-size swimming pool is floated over our heads, its transparent base allowing the diving dancers to be seen as they create mesmerizing ripple effects in the water. Their supple, semi-naked bodies add a sexual fricton to the images of freedom as they glide across the surface, unbound and unrestrained.

I would need too much good poetry to be able to describe all the extraordinary things that happen in Fuerzabruta, especially when we discover ourselves beneath the swirling tides of an enormous body of water descending until it is only inches above our heads. Sliding in the waves of the water are aquatic beings staring at us, trying to understand us, as we try to understand them. The sole thread linking the show's many disparate segments, the resilience of the human spirit in the face of outright catastrophe, is so light that it's all but blown away by the wind machines that blast several thousand pieces of tissue-paper confetti through the audience at key points AND perhaps the BEST PART...getting to dance in the water afterwards!?!!

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being"

~Oscar Wilde