afro-venezuelan

Chávez Brings Hope to Afro-Venezuelans: On How Blacks in Venezuela are optimistic with Chavez in power.

Completing the Chavez Revolution: On how Blacks in Venezuela are working to fight racism and make gains as a community.

damali ayo

an interesting letter from damali ayo, a conceptual artist with my kind of sense of humor.

tokens aren't just for buses

Check Out rent-a-negro.com
Reasonably priced, discrete and confidential!

black people love us!

Why do Black people love Sally and Johnny?

shobak: outsider muslims

Thanks to elenamary for turning me onto Naeem Mohaiemen. He serves as editor of Shobak: Outsider Muslims a news site with an emphasis on South Asian Muslims. Recently, they have a few good entries about the aftermath of the London bombings.

Western Muslims: "Collateral Damage" of London Bombings
Shahara Islam: British-Bangladeshi among London's dead
Pakistani beaten to death in UK

guantan-ramera?

The New York Times recently did an editorial about how the US military's approach to interrogation in Guantanamo, Cuba is turning female soldiers into lap dancers. The piece is called The Women of Gitmo.

rebirth of a word, a film, a slur

So can the you use the master's tools to take down the master's house?

Check out Rebirth of a Word, a Film, a Slur by Naeem Mohaiemen where he considers Rebirth of a Nation and goes on to discuss the attempts by different communities to re-appropriate racist elements for their own purposes.

(Rebirth of a Nation is DJ Spooky's remix of D.W. Griffith's explicitly racist film, Birth of a Nation, which is actually one of the early subjects I started to blog on in an entry called afrofuturism/ rebirth of a nation)

remembering edward said

Check out this impressive collection of Edward Said's writings.
The Edward Said Archive

disappeared in america

Since 9/11, thousands of Muslim immigrants were detained in a security dragnet. The majority of those detained were from the invisible underclass of cities like New York. They are the recent immigrants who drive our taxis, deliver our food, clean our restaurant tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we see their faces are when we glance at the hack license in the taxi partition, or the ID card around the neck of a vendor.

Already invisible in our cities, after detention, they have become "ghost prisoners." In this, there are eerie parallels to past witch-hunts, including the 1919 detention of 10,000 immigrants after anarchists bombed the Attorney General's home; the 1941 internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans; the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs; and the HUAC Black-listing under Senator Joseph McCarthy. While our work started in the American context, we have expanded to look at Europe, in recognition that anti-immigrant xenophobia, coupled with Islamophobia (a more acceptable shorthand for "dark masses"), is not a new or uniquely American phenomenon.

VISIBLE, is a collective of Muslim and other Artist-Activists, that created the DISAPPEARED IN AMERICA project. DISAPPEARED is a walk-through installation that uses film, soundscape, images, installations and lectures to humanize the faces of post 9/11 "disappeared" Muslims. It is also a traveling, multimedia lecture that has been shown in Stuttgart (with Walid Raad/Atlas Group), London (with Otolith Group), New York (Queens Museum of Art), Stockholm (Finnish Embassy), Helsinki (Kiasma Museum) and other cities.

The site has alot pages and pictures about this particular project along with many links about the more general phenomena of disappearing Muslims... I even thought I saw a picture of one brother I hadn't heard from in a loooong time.... no joke. (Is that you Daoud? From the Downtown Islamic Center in Chicago?)

(thanks to elenamary)

the rapture

ok, so this is yet another movie entry. No, i'm not turning into Roger Ebert. It's just that I'm still enjoying the novelty of being able to find movie screenplays online. It's an interesting way to go about "seeing" movies. On the one hand, you basically have all the dialogue right there. If you've seen the movie before, you get to be reminded of all your favorite lines. On the other hand you are *reading* it so you still get to use your imagination/memory. I guess it raises the whole question of what is it that makes a movie good in the first place. Is it the lines, the acting, the special effects, the action sequences, cinematography, etc.?
...

So the film I wanted to point you to in this entry (last one for a while) is The Rapture. I once tried to sum it up as "Soft-core for Mormons" (It seems to have a religious moral lesson, but at the same time it also includes graphic portrayals of intimate behavior.) It is about a woman (played by Mimi Rogers) who after living an unfulfilling life goes through a surprising transformation while the apocalypse is happening in the background. David Duchovny (pre-X-Files) also stars. (But that doesn't matter if you are reading the screenplay...lol)

blessed are the cheesemakers

(A crowd is listening to Jesus preach the Sermon on the Mount and he is in the middle of the Beatitudes. The camera pulls out and we even see people in the crowd listening from a distance.)

Jew: Could you be quiet, please. [To trouble:] What was that?
Trouble: I don't know... I was too busy talking to bignose.
Man: I think it was 'Blessed are the cheese-makers'.
Jewwife: Ah. What's so special about the cheese-makers?
Jew: Well obviously it's not meant to be taken literally, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

Here is The Life of Brian from the strange people at Monty Python. In some ways, this is among the most reverential religious parodies ever. The movie is actually really good about treating Jesus (as) himself with extreme respect and seriousness, while ruthlessly making fun of the religious people who misunderstood him, and if he wasn't around, were willing to turn the main character Brian, into a Messiah of their own(whether he wanted to be one or not).

bamboozled

Spike Lee's 2000 film Bamboozled is actually in some respects an homage to Network. Both are stories where the (anti-)hero works for a television network, is put in a precarious position in terms of their job, and out of desperation "comes down from the mountain" and reveals more Truth than the network is ready to hear.

One significant difference is that Bamboozled obviously takes the scathing social commentary of Network and focuses with laser-like intensity on race, in particular, the representations of Black people in the media.

The stellar cast includes Damon Wayans in the lead role, Paul Mooney as his father, Mos Def, muMz the Schemer, MC Serch and others as part of an activist hip-hop group called the Mau-Maus (The inside pun is hilarious. The analagous characters in the original movie Network were Maoist revolutionaries). Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson play a pair of modern-day television minstrels. And the members of the Roots play the role of musicians (wow, what a stretch) for the tv show, where they are caled the Alabama Porch Monkeys.

In any case, the film is amazing and not to be missed.

An interview with Spike Lee about the film

official Bamboozled site.

If you think television is a Satanic implement to enslave humanity, and you live too far away from a Blockbuster Video, here is the screenplay to Bamboozled

"i'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore"

The title of this entry comes from the (remarkably prescient) 1976 film Network. Before the Daily Show and Politically Incorrect... before Tough Crowd and Fox News... before Morton Downey Jr. (Anyone remember him?) this film explored what can happen when journalists depart from the usual lies and try to speak the truth in a new way. It is the story of Howard Beale, an aging tv anchorman at the UBS television network (smile) where the news division has been recently put under the control of the entertainment division. As a result, Beale, the respected, but less than telegenic, anchor is fired. But before he fades away, he gives a 'final' broadcast so electrifying that it causes the network to rethink their decision and sparks a series of events which ultimately spiral out of control.

I have been thinking about the movie these because it seems like so much of our news is distorted by the desire to entertain rather than inform. The local news gets more and more sensationalized. And it is a little scary how many people have Comedy Central's Daily Show as their main source of news. (poll on where people get their news)

If you don't have an account at Hollywood Video, here is the entire screenplay for the film: Network

spanglish is my language

After pointing to the Badmash site, I figured I should also mention www.pocho.com which is a hilarious Latino humor site which I've actually "borrowed" a few images from. And a high point of the website is definitely the humor of cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz. One downside is that the site doesn't seem to get updated very often.

the mind of carlos mencia

Recently Comedy Central decided to give Carlos Mencia a show called Mind of Mencia and put it in timeslot which used to belong to Dave Chapelle's Show. To be honest, I haven't seen a whole lot of the show, but I've seen him in the past. At first I was just excited to see a Latino stannd-up comedian but the more I heard him, the more I ended up not liking his politics. His CD Take a Joke America seemed to almost take an apolegetic attitude towards white racism. And his right-wing tendancies seem to get in the way of me really getting into his comedy.

It's weird to me. At what point did comedy become so political? I mean, there has always been poltical humor, but in the post-Daily Show era there seems to be this bizzare convergence between the opinionated political pundits and the stand-up comedians.

For example take a look at a recent interview with Tucker Carlson and Carlos Mencia:

Carlson: So you're clearly a conservative.

Mencia: You know what? I think I am. But I can't say that I'm a conservative because of course I grew up Hispanic and you know, there's Jesus Christ and Kennedy in my mom's house. And - you know what I mean? I could never actually say it.

Carlson: Even as a comedian, even though you have license to tell the truth you can't admit you're a right-wing -

Mencia: No, all my views are totally that. They pretty much are. But I can't actually say it because my mom would kill me and she's still my mom.

Carlson: She doesn't have a sense of humor about that?

Mencia: No if my mom heard me tell you, listen, I would - immediately the phone would ring. I can't believe you told the man with the bow tie I saw him on CNN how you were like him. How could you do that? But between you and me you don't have read between the lines.

videoclips from another Carlos Mencia interview

An older LA Times piece: Culture Clash on "South Park" Republicans, Tough Crowd (a comedy show hosted by Colin Quinn where I believe Mencia was an occasional guest) and other ways in which the culture has been slowly shifting to the right.

the west fueled islamic radicalism

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 2:56 p.m. ET

By Andrew Gray

blatantly "stolen" from Adisa Banjoko who still hasn't given me a link on his site like he said he would but is still a generally decent human being anyway.

LONDON (Reuters) - Western foreign policy has fueled the Islamist radicalism behind the bomb attacks which killed more than 50 people in London, the British capital's mayor Ken Livingstone said on Wednesday.

Livingstone, who earned the nickname "Red Ken" for his left-wing views, won widespread praise for a defiant response which helped unite London after the bombings. But he has revived his reputation for courting controversy in recent days.

Asked on Wednesday what he thought had motivated the four suspected suicide bombers, Livingstone cited Western policy in the Middle East and early American backing for Osama bin Laden.

"A lot of young people see the double standards, they see what happens in (U.S. detention camp) Guantanamo Bay, and they just think that there isn't a just foreign policy," he said.

Police say they believe there is a clear link between bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the four British Muslims who blew up three underground trains and a double-decker bus on July 7.

"You've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil. We've propped up unsavory governments, we've overthrown ones that we didn't consider sympathetic," Livingstone said.

"I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of Afghanistan.

"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that, he might turn on his creators," he told BBC radio.

ANGER OVER IRAQ

Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has insisted the bombings have no link to its foreign policy, particularly its decision to invade Iraq alongside the United States.

But an opinion poll this week showed two-thirds of Britons see a connection between the Iraq war and the bombings. A top think tank and a leaked intelligence memo have also suggested the war has made Britain more of a target for terrorists.

That did not stop the right-wing Daily Telegraph castigating Livingstone, a maverick member of Blair's Labour party who was celebrating London's selection as host of the 2012 Olympics just hours before the bombers struck.

Wednesday's edition of the paper featured a picture of the mayor between photographs of two radical Muslim clerics under the headline: "The men who blame Britain."

Livingstone has made clear he condemns all killing, including suicide bombing. But is also a long-standing critic of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.

"If you have been under foreign occupation, and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work, for three generations, I suspect if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves," he said on Wednesday.

Israel's ambassador to London Zvi Heifetz accused the mayor of expressing sympathy for Palestinian militants.

"It is outrageous that the same mayor who rightfully condemned the suicide bombing in London as perverted faith', defends those who, under the same extremist banner, kill Israelis," he said in a statement.

original source: wired news

racial tensions in the american ummah

I just wanted to totally plug a recent entry on Izzy Mo's blog called Racial Tensions in the American Ummah because it is totally on point and people don't talk about that subject nearly as much as they should.

british muslim forum

Here is the website of the British Muslim Forum (representing hundreds of mosques in England) who has recently issued a fatwa strongly condemning the bombings in London.

blatantly "stolen" from the good brother at alexandalus

latinos and the supreme court

The blue latino efforts, for the most part, seem to be a step in the right direction, but given the lessons learned from Clarence Thomas, and given that there seem to be some conservative Latino federal judges waiting in the wings, it seems much more important to find a judge with a genuine concern for civil rights, who deeply opposes racism and bigotry, and who will promote democratic values, regardless of color. Especially since color and ethnicity will not guarantee the former.

Hispanic Groups: Bush Owes Us Supreme Court Nominee from NewsMax.Com

bluelatinos

Check Out www.bluelatinos.org a new online grass-roots organization for progressive Latinos. The current items on their agenda:

Tell Urban Outfitters to remove their crude and offensive tee shirt: "New Mexico, Cleaner Than Regular Mexico" Sign the petition!

Tell President Bush to nominate a Latina/Latino judge to the U.S. Supreme Court who respects the rights and freedoms of all Americans. Sign the petition!

Join the conversation and help us send a message to America"Una Declaración de Amor: Progressive Latinos Speak to America"

CNN should fire Lou Dobbs for his relentless anti-immigrant reporting and race baiting commentary Sign the petition and tell Lou Dobbs: You're Fired!