Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Happy Birthday, Grace

Gracie and Cyril: An Oral History
From the Paris Review
December 11, 2012 | by Emily Greenhouse
Grace Paley was born Gracie Goodside ninety years ago today, and my grandmother still calls her that. My grandmother’s parents separated when the Depression hit: her father lost his job, and couldn’t countenance his wife, a beautician, the household’s only breadwinner. In summer, her mother stuck around the beauty salon, but my grandmother would visit her aunt and uncle in Long Pond, in Mahopac, fifty miles north of the city. Uncle Al was a piano teacher, and one of his students a girl named Grace. Two years older than my grandmother, Cyril, Grace spent the whole summer in Mahopac. Her father, a doctor, built a house there, and he’d bring the family up from their Bronx brownstone, at Hoe Avenue and 172nd Street. My grandmother remembers everything.
Dr. Goodside—Isaac—he had a chauffeur, Saunders. God forbid you use that word—it was a driver. Gracie’s father, he came from a large city in Russia, not the Pale of Settlement. They did not speak Yiddish, they spoke Russian. His great pleasure was when the Italian fruit vendor came, you know, with his truck. He’d come once or twice a week, and Dr. Goodside came to talk to him in his broken Italian. Gracie’s father, he also was a great fan, a lover, of Victor Hugo—and his son, who became an ophthalmologist, was named Victor. Gracie was the youngest, she must have been at least ten years younger than Jeanne, Jeanne after Jean Valjean. And she was named Grace, and her sister said to me, in Italian, it was Grazie—thanks, thanks. Jeanne told me this when she was already teaching, she was much older, and she was married to a child psychologist, a real son of a b—a child psychologist who hated children. They never had children.
Gracie was unusual, she was extremely bright. Every day she was made to read at least an hour, I think she was made to study Russian. And they had a large house in Mahopac, her parents always encouraged kids to come to her house. Her father was a music lover, and he would invite people over to his house, and play music. He had this phenomenal record player. My Uncle Al, the piano player, was such an SOB—he would say, “I’m not going, he doesn’t know anything about music.” But that’s how I knew Gracie, the lessons. Her parents, they wanted us to come to her house, we went there, we played Monopoly. I would see her almost every day—we would go swimming, we would have a hare and hound race, try not to fall for the false trails the guys set up. And we’d discuss politics and sex and stuff, whatever kids at that age discuss. She was the leader because we always went to her house, and she was the one who had ideas, and who could give advice. Even at that age. Wherever you went to meet, it was always at Gracie’s house. All the kids would follow Grace.
The other children—Victor, he was not a talker, and Jeanne, Jeanne was always apologizing. I don’t think they ever really answered the father. And their mother was a quiet woman. Gracie was always the one who was really challenging him.

When we were kids, she started a little newspaper that she gave out to the community. She wrote, she edited, and she gave it out. I wasn’t there the whole summer—I hated my Uncle Al, the only reason I went there was that I liked the other kids so much. And she more or less wrote the whole paper herself, in the summer, out of Long Pond. I guess it was printed out of a mimeograph, for the whole community. There was a violinist there, Berg, he lived on City Island. There was a man by the name of Gamzou, he taught drama at NYU. There was a man who taught languages—Russian, German, whatever, in Jersey. And Tom Paley, the folk player—no relation—he was there. His father, David, was a writer, and the mother was beautiful, and they married and divorced two or three times, themselves. The paper, it was about things that happened in the community.
She was a child, and already she was interested in writing. I think she went to Evander Childs High School in the Bronx. I know that junior high school, she did get into some kind of a confrontation. I don’t remember what it was, but it was political—I remember that she did have a problem. She was never frightened, you know she was always sure of herself—she would carry an action to what she thought was its logical conclusion.
I think that in college she really started writing, somewhere between the politics and the boys. She went to NYU, and we took a course together there, when I transferred to her school, liberal arts. First I was at the school of journalism. We stayed in touch during college, and on off, she was always involved with this guy and another guy, she was always with involved with so much she couldn’t keep up with everything she was involved with. Maybe that’s why she dropped out of college for a while. I don’t know why. I was involved, in college, with people who were much more radical than Gracie—Communists. She was involved with a guy, she was very unhappy with her life at home, she began to write.
Guys went for Gracie. She really wasn’t that attractive—she was short, I don’t ever remember her without glasses, I don’t know. I think she was always a very down to earth person. There was one guy who came out there, I think she really loved him, but he had a bad heart or something. Her parents discouraged her from having much to do with him. Many years later, he came back to Mahopac, I think he was married, to show the family that he was a success. It was very interesting. He came with someone, a couple, the friend was an executive at Bloomingdale’s.
She was very dramatic, you know, if she was sad, she was sadder than most people … or happier. She was always kind of like … a crisis. I was going with Morty, and she married a guy named Paley, a photographer or something. They had two children, and he began going with other woman. And he left her … or she may have left him, she may have kicked him out. And she became involved with the Democratic club in the Village. And she had a group of women that she began to work with and all, and her sister Jeanne gave her a lot of support at that time. And she was writing.
When Gracie was twenty-eight, I know that she was in some kind of demonstration, and she was arrested. She was put in the house of detention for women, which was Sixth Avenue and Greenwich. Someone told me, and I went, and I was shouting up at her. And then she began writing, her first book was The Little Disturbances of Man. And then she became very involved against the Vietnam War. She had gone to Vietnam a number of times. She was given an award, you know, New York State Writer. The first. She was. Every year the city had a writer, or the state, and she was one of them.
Around 1960, all the women I knew, Gracie too, we went on a train—Women’s Strike for Peace. Bella Abzug, something from Jane Addams, her Women’s Leage for Peace. And the committee for a sane nuclear policy. We would take trains out to Washington, they reserved a whole train.
Later, I met her at a number of marches. By the time the Vietnam War came, she was already a famous writer. But she had no pretensions, she always remained the same. She was always ashamed to tell people that her father was a doctor, because of the people she went with; she went with a lot of poor and working class people. She would never mention it—only later on would she mention that her father was a doctor. She always presented herself as from the working class.
The women she knew in the village, she gained strength from them—women who were dissatisfied with their lives. They were educated women. Or their husbands were away, or their husbands were leaving. From when she was a child on, she anticipated what people were going to say. She was just, like, way ahead of you. She had this gift. Even in college. Even when she was a kid in Mahopac, people kind of just followed her. People would come to her, and dump their problems on her, their stories.
She married a man named Nichols, Robert Nichols, she had lived with him, and then she married him. I would see her on and off over the years. We met her in New York, a few years ago, at this peace demonstration, against the war. They had moved to a town called Bedford Hills in Vermont. And she begged me to come to visit her. And somehow Morty and I promised her that we would, but I never got there. She died maybe a year later.
Crazy—I was ten, twelve years old, I would meet Dr. Goodside on a Friday, Dr. Goodside and his driver, at the entrance of that huge cemetery in the Bronx, Woodlawn Cemetery, the entrance at Jerome Avenue. I got to know the gatekeeper. A chauffeured limousine comes in, and the gatekeeper would say to me, that’s Judge so-and-so, twice a month he comes to his mausoleum. To sit in his mausoleum. Can you believe it? When Dr. Goodside came to pick me up, once, he saw I was all shaken, and I told him what had happened. He thought people were crazy. People are insane! Gracie’s mother died of cancer; Dr. Goodside was very devoted to her. I remember him making her do exercise, mow the lawn, so she could move her muscles. And she would say, wail, It’s too hard! He wanted her to live. When she died, he continued to practice awhile, but then he went into a senior residence. And he began to write poetry. Like Gracie, that was the kid that he was most involved with, there a little competition there. Gracie, she died of breast cancer, too. I met her daughter, Nora. Maybe she was named after A Doll’s House. Or after Seán O’Casey’s Nora—the man is a coward, and Nora’s the one with strength.
When we went to Cuba, Mort and I, two or three years after Chavez was elected, we saw him with Castro. I met a woman who was her neighbor in Vermont. And she said, even there, what an unusual woman Gracie was. She really was very unusual.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Petition Against Military: Prison for 6 Months



My name is Brian Terrell. I'm co-coordinator of a group called Voices for Creative Nonviolence. We support the petition to ban drones organized by RootsAction. http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6180 On November 30th I report for six months in a federal prison in Yankton, S.D., as a result of protesting drones.

The appearance of war being made easy by drones is resulting in more war. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and in places we don't know about, in places where we are not at war, we're sending these unmanned pilotless airplanes into foreign air space to hunt down people who've been accused of crimes only in the private court of the administration. They're hunted down and killed along with anybody who might be in the immediate vicinity.

Drones are creating new wars rather than scaling down old ones. Drone pilots in Afghanistan have been targeted and killed. Drone pilots in the United States suffer PTSD at higher rates than real pilots. Drone victims are 98% innocent civilians according to the recent Stanford/NYU study. The other 2% are targeted victims of murder without charge, trial, due process, or in many cases even knowing the target's name. Drones buzzing over houses traumatize children before they kill them. That those children are (in most cases) not American hardly diminishes the immorality. Drones are rapidly being developed and deployed by other nations.

Would you support the equal right of other nations to kill with drones in this country? And if not, why not? And how can that thinking not apply to U.S. policy as well? As I head to prison I urge you to add your name to the petition to ban drones and to ask others to do so. http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6180
Back on April 15th, about 40 people, mostly from the Kansas City area, went to Whiteman Air Force Base and held a short rally outside the gates on a public right of way.

We had a petition -- an indictment we called it -- that listed the laws that drones are violating and the damage they are doing. We took that to the gate and were stopped. Three of us asked directions to deliver the petition and were immediately put in handcuffs. About 40 military police in full riot gear appeared (video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXkiyGXUF3c ]) and did a choreographed dance including high kicks and grunts and beating their shields, two steps forward and one step back, to get rid of the rest of the U.S. citizens, who were acting legally under the First Amendment. At my sentencing I told the judge: "Each of the government's witnesses, all of them Air Force police personnel, testified that participants in this protest were nonviolent, respectful and peaceable in assembling at Whiteman Air Force Base, a government installation, to petition that government for redress of a grievance, demanding that the remote control killing carried out daily from Whiteman cease. They testified that at no time, before or during our protest, did they perceive us as a threat. "Our expert witnesses testified that our behavior was consistent with the activities that the drafters of the First Amendment intended to be protected, not persecuted, by the government.

The order and security of the base would not have been compromised had the security police allowed us to proceed to the headquarters to deliver our petition. No testimony to the contrary was offered this court. "Instead of planning to accommodate a constitutionally protected peaceable assembly, however, the Air Force chose intimidation and conspired to deprive us of the rights they are sworn to protect.

We learned from government witnesses that the phalanx of goose-stepping riot police is a 'Confrontation Management Team,' deployed only in the case of preannounced events. Whiteman security did not call out the Team to defend the base but to intimidate citizens engaged in lawful activities." Sign the petition to ban militarized drones now, before it is delivered to government officials. http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=6180

Please forward this email widely to like-minded friends. --Brian Terrell for RootsAction.org

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

1,000,000 Strong Against Off-Shore Drilling

                                           B.C. First Nation Members Evict Pipeline Surveyors, Set Up Road Block

Members of a First Nation in Northern British Columbia have evicted surveyors working on

 a natural gas pipeline project from their territory, seized equipment and set up a roadblock against all pipeline activity. The group identifying itself as the Unis'tot'en clan of the Wet'suwet'en Nation said surveyors for Apache Canada's Pacific Trails Pipeline were trespassing.

"The Unis'tot'en clan has been dead-set against all pipelines slated to cross through their territories, which include PTP (Pacific Trails Pipeline), Enbridge's Northern Gateway and many others," Freda Huson, a spokesperson for the group, said in a statement.

The Unis’tot’en are now calling for solidarity and support actions to reaffirm their position and to amplify the message to Industry and Government that no proposed pipelines will proceed in their territories. There is a call for immediate actions on TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27th to ensure that corporations, investors, and governments get a clear message that they have no right or jurisdiction to approve development on Unist’ot’en lands.

Read the full story and watch video : http://bit.ly/10Ie9kS
To help with the Nov. 27 action please see:
http://unistotencamp.wordpress.com/
Image credit: www.whitewolfpack.com/www.ctvnews.ca/
[M]

Monday, November 26, 2012

Celebrations for Grace's Birthday


HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GRACE PALEY!!
Judith Arcana writes: Hello everybody -
 I'm writing to invite you to a party in Portland.

December 11, 2012 will be the 90th anniversary of Grace Paley's birth.
Grace was one of our most committed, hopeful & joyous activists;
one of the greatest short fiction writers ever to use American English;
a notable poet and essayist - and a serious ping-pong player.

As some of you know, I've been organizing Grace-birthday events since 2007, the year she died.
This'll be the last -
Years ago, when I began writing about her, she told me she did not want "to be lionized."
 In the past five years I believe I've gotten too close to the savannah - I can hear some growling. Luckily, 90 is a good number to go out on.

Come to this party celebrating Grace's life and work - bring your friends and neighbors, your colleagues and pals.
 Watch an award-winning documentary film - Grace Paley: Collected Shorts and Hear a posse of Portlanders reading Grace’s poems & stories & essays ......
Ben Parzybok ... Constance Hall ... Harold Johnson ... Khanh Pham ... Laura Moulton ... Liz Woody ... Michael Heald ... Sandy Polishuk ... Steve Williams ........ with me as MC

Other Details: free admission - courtesy of generous theater owners & filmmaker popcorn, candy & drinks for sale at the counter + free birthday cake This event is partially supported by a grant from Soapstone, Inc.
Grace Paley: Collected Shorts Director: Lilly Rivlin Country: USA Runtime: 75 minutes

Grace Paley was the child of Jewish immigrants who fled oppression in Russia. They instilled in Grace a lifelong commitment to fighting social and political injustice. She was jailed many times for protesting war and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. She often referred to herself as a “combative pacifist”. This small, feisty woman spoke with the rough-around-the-edges accent of the Bronx neighborhood where she grew up. Her work combines the personal with the political befitting a woman whose private views on world events led her to take public action. As a master of the short story, she has been compared to Chekhov and her bestselling work Enormous Changes at the Last Minute brought her international fame. This documentary traces the life of this ordinary woman with an extraordinary talent for poetry and prose through her own stories and the stories of her family, friends, colleagues and critics. The film depicts the delicate balance of the three pillars of Grace Paley’s life…activism, writing and her circle of family and friends. It explores the power of literature and Paley’s capacity to touch and comfort readers, as well as her ability to achieve the most human reaction to life’s challenges…laughter.

Grace Paley was true to her ideals to the last. No small feat when you consider the dreams she had for a better world for her grandchildren. “It would be a world without militarism and racism and greed and where women don’t have to fight for their place in the world.”

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Beyond Borders: Linking Our Stories

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/401497233/beyond-borders-linking-our-stories
The power of a woman telling her story lies in the transformation she lives when she hears the strength of her own voice and in the transformation we live when we are forced to shift our own ideas about women as faceless objects without a voice. 
This project aims to establish a dialogue and cooperation between Armenian and Turkish women, to build solidarity among women across the closed Turkish-Armenian border and to develop an innovative approach to peace-building by collecting a number of interviews by and from women in both countries, which will then be turned into a performance and book for larger audiences. Some of the themes that will be explored include violence, poverty, family, and sexuality. One of our main goals is to make visible ordinary women's lives living across the border, and to make their stories accessible to women in both countries, as well as to women in other countries with conflicted borders.

Because most policies and peace negotiations are usually implemented at higher levels of government where women's voices are not often heard, this project will place the power to create peace into ordinary women's hands. After all of the interviews are conducted (approximately 30 in total from both sides) a group of women from Armenia will travel to Turkey to meet and work with a group of women from Turkey for two weeks. The interviews that were conducted will be discussed and analyzed, workshops on effective peace-building and conflict resolution will be given, and a short film will be made documenting the process of the two groups coming together and preparing for a final performance at Madrasa Theater in Sirince, Turkey. Some time after this initial meeting, the group will also meet in Armenia to hold a second performance in Yerevan.
This project is a collaboration between volunteers from the Women’s Resource Center in Armenia and volunteers from AMARGI, a women’s collective in Turkey. We believe that women should take peace into their own hands and one way to begin is by sitting down with one another, across borders and across difference, to tell our stories.
Your donations will help us cover our travel costs to Sirince, Turkey as well as some of the travel expenses to conduct interviews in Turkey and Armenia.
Thank you for all your support and solidarity in helping us realize our goal! Please help us spread the word and share widely!
Also, check out our blog for stories as we conduct our interviews: www.linking-our-stories.tumblr.com

Friday, September 14, 2012

US Budget is a war machine.

Posted by Dennis Kucinich and Nora.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot



Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (1924-2006) is a first person documentary about the extraordinary life of this American civil rights leader. Braden was hailed as a white southerner who was “eloquent and prophetic” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. Ostracized as a “red,” she fought for an inclusive movement community and mentored three generations of social justice activists.
www.annebradenfilm.org
The film is an Appalshop documentary by Anne Lewis & Mimi Pickering 77 min, 2012 ·

 “Anne Braden's life stories drill down to the roots of the country's struggles for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. I salute Anne for the extraordinary courage of her life.” - Bob Moses, former Mississippi SNCC field secretary and founder, Algebra Project

 “If it was Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King who convinced me to join the struggle, it was Anne Braden who showed me how to do it.” - Bob Zellner, SNCC's first white staff member

 “I go to these meetings and people talk about how we've got to build better relations and I say, 'First of all we've got to deal with this whole issue of white supremacy,' and it's like you threw a snake on the table. But I don't care. I'll be obnoxious.” - Anne Braden

 Anne Braden: Southern Patriot is a first person documentary about the extraordinary life of this American civil rights leader. Braden was hailed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a white southerner whose rejection of her segregationist upbringing was “eloquent and prophetic.” When charged with sedition for attempting to desegregate a Louisville, Kentucky neighborhood in 1954, Braden used the attack to embark upon a lifetime of racial justice organizing matched by few whites in American history. Ostracized as a “red,” she fought for an inclusive movement community and demonstrated that civil liberties were essential for civil rights.

After decades of being shunned by even the most progressive organizations, in 1989 Anne Braden was awarded the first Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union as a “lifelong leader of the movements for racial justice, labor rights, and peace in the South.” Described as “one of the great figures of our time” by historian Jacquelyn Hall, Braden died in 2006 leaving a remarkable legacy as a grassroots organizer, committed journalist, civil rights leader, movement strategist, social chronicler, public intellectual, teacher and mentor to three generations of social justice activists. In the midst of production at the time, the filmmakers continued with the documentary with other producers graciously contributing additional media.

 In the film Braden is articulate, insightful, challenging, self-effacing, and charming. Her reflections on the significance of a lifetime of racial justice organizing are interspersed with commentary from civil rights leaders, organizers, historians, students and friends who intersected with her at key moments in her life. Archival material of the civil rights movement and historical and contemporary footage of Anne participating in the social justice community are juxtaposed with a variety of interviews. In a time of war, terrorism, economic uncertainty, religious controversies and an African American President, unresolved issues around race and racial justice, civil rights and civil liberties, class and gender equity inform our national debates.

Braden engages audiences with a unique southern voice for a much needed discourse on the continuum of struggle for civil rights and civil liberties from the founding of our democracy to the present, and the responsibilities of whites to join the fight against racism and white privilege. Through this exploration of Anne Braden's story we see not only the dangers of racism and political repression but also the power of a woman's life spent in commitment to social justice.

About the Filmmakers 
Anne Lewis is an independent documentary-maker associated with Appalshop and currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas-Austin School of Radio/Television/Film. Her work reveals working class people fighting for social change. Anne was associate director/assistant camera for Harlan County, U.S.A., the Academy Award-winning documentary about the Brookside strike. After the strike, she moved to the eastern Kentucky coalfields where she lived for 25 years. Documentaries she produced, directed, and edited include: To Save the Land and People (SXSW, Texas Documentary Tour) a history of a militant grassroots environmental movement; Justice in the Coalfields (INTERCOM gold plaque) about the community impact of the Pittston strike; On Our Own Land (duPont-Columbia Award for independent broadcast journalism) about the citizens' movement to stop broad form deed strip mining; Chemical Valley, co-directed with Mimi Pickering (P.O.V., American Film and Video Blue Ribbon) about environmental racism; and most recently, Morristown, a working class response to globalization. Her documentary Fast Food Women about women struggling to raise families in minimum wage jobs with no benefits received national airing on P.O.V. and was part of a Learning Channel series of films about women by women.

Mimi Pickering is a Guggenheim award-winning filmmaker and director of Appalshop's Community Media Initiative (CMI). Pickering's documentaries often feature women as principle storytellers, focus on injustice and inequity, and explore the efforts of grassroots people to address community issues and organize for positive solutions. In 2005, her film The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man was selected by the Librarian of Congress for inclusion in the prestigious National Film Registry. Other award-winning documentaries include Chemical Valley, an examination of environmental racism co-directed with Anne Lewis; Dreadful Memories: The Life of Sarah Ogan Gunning explores the legacy of this singer/songwriter whose hauntingly beautiful ballads were written from her experiences in Kentucky's strike-torn coalfields of the 1930s; Hazel Dickens: It's Hard to Tell the Singer From the Song celebrates this West Virginia singer/songwriter and powerful social chronicler described by the Washington Post as “a living legend of American music, a national treasure.”

About Appalshop, the Producing Organization 
Appalshop is in its fifth decade using cultural organizing and place-based media, arts and education to advance social justice, environmental sustainability, and economic equity. Since 1969, Appalshop has produced creative work celebrating the culture and voicing the concerns of people in the mountain South and other rural and underserved communities. Appalshop's location, longevity, and range of work in content and across disciplines make it unusual among cultural institutions in this country. Located in Whitesburg, Kentucky, a town of one thousand people in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields, Appalshop began in 1969 as a War on Poverty program to train young people for jobs in the film and television industries. Underlying all of Appalshop's work is the belief that those most deeply affected by society's problems must be involved in articulating the issues and creating the solutions. As educator Paulo Freire stated in reference to the disenfranchised, “Speaking their own words, naming the world... (are) steps towards transforming that world.”

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Interview with the Filmmakers of 5 Broken Cameras

The amazing film, 5 Broken Cameras tells the story of non-violent protests in Bil'in. This is an interview conducted by Liza Bear with the Palestinian and Israeli pair. It was a very difficult interview as the New Directors/New Films did not provide interview space for journalists, so the sound is not great.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Indian Women Protest Nuclear Power Project



Thousands of Indians oppose Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP). Here dozens of women lie on the railroad tracks to oppose movement of any materials in and out of the dangerous plant.


Indefinite hunger strike against Kudankulam N-plant called off

Chennai, May 15, 2012, (IANS):

The People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) leading the protest against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project Tuesday announced its decision of call off its indefinite hunger strike while continuing with the relay fasting.

PMANE's Struggle Committee in a statement said it was calling off the hunger strike, as requested by former chief justice of Madras and Delhi high courts A.P. Shah and others.

"Although 25 men and 302 women were on indefinite hunger strike from May 1 and May 4, respectively, neither the Government of Tamil Nadu nor the Government of India invited us for talks or any kind of negotiations on our 11 demands," the statement said.

It said the "central and state governments rushed to talk to Maoists who kidnap and kill officials and politicians. They even grant their demands".

"But these governments completely dismiss the legitimate demands of our fishermen and farmers who have been waging a peaceful, non-violent and democratic struggle for the past nine months. This is definitely not a healthy trend and it could send wrong messages to our youth and children," the statement added.

It said that with the termination of the hunger strike, its relay fast protest had resumed.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

May Day in NYC-- from Rude Mechanical Orchestra to Bread & Puppet



http://youtu.be/n6_iY69P2jU
at the end of this tape are shots of the Bread and Puppet boat.


When i first saw Peter Schumann at Union Square on May Day, he was all alone with some small plastic bag rolls and some splintery sticks and the banged up fatso head and it looked so desolate. I thought, wow it has happened-- the new world is here--all the sparkly new OWS creativity,etc and Bread and Puppet is, well, just a bunch of sticks and paper--- UNTIL-- an hour later, I was astounded to see the theater's resurrection boat come around the bend at Union Square.

What a super glorious site-specific totally brilliant work!   Bread and Puppet's use of interactive, visual spectacle scattered the  Occupy bits and pieces, crepe paper flowers, and plastic chains like confetti!

This is what political art can be! Fantastic dancing sail, simple blue band of prescient images of climate changed drowning victims, all those lovely hopeful faces of the marchers inside the boat, gathering more as they sailed down Broadway, a band of defiant Noahs, sailing to glory.

And behind marched Uncle Fatso, in his pathetic pursuit of the revolutionary sailors.
still fotos by Solveig Schumann

As Grace Paley said about Bread and Puppet, "AH!".

Amen.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Palestinian Prisoner's Hunger Strikes



Protesters hold pictures of Palestinian prisoner Hana al-Shalabi, on hunger strike for three weeks [EPA]
Ramallah, West Bank - It began with Khader Adnan's sudden and bold declaration: 
"My dignity is more important than my life."
And with that he refused food for the next 66 days. With each day he persisted, 
more and more people around the world were riveted to this man's brave 
confrontation of Israel's draconian policy of administrative detention. But 
perhaps more significantly, Palestinians from all political parties - as well 
as no political party - united and rallied together in support of this man and 
against Israel's unfair treatment of Palestinian prisoners.
Now, Hana al-Shalabi approaches the completion of her third week on 
hunger strike. Like Adnan, Shalabi, 29, is protesting administrative detention, 
torture and humiliation at the hands of Israeli soldiers.


















These individuals represent not just the 300 Palestinians currently in 
administrative detention, or the over 5,000 Palestinians still in Israeli prisons. 
They exemplify and speak for all Palestinians in a way that no politician or 
political party has been able to do for a long time.
The authorities of the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been simultaneously
 vying for power while nominally trying to "reconcile" the occupied land's 
divisions. Meanwhile, Adnan and Shalabi have galvanised Palestinian support 
across party lines.
"She really makes me want to join the revolution again," said one young man, 
a former fighter in the Al-Aqsa Brigade, who is now working for the Palestinian 
Authority's security forces.
Shalabi began her strike as soon as she was detained by Israeli forces on 
February 16. She was already well-acquainted with the cruelty of administrative 
detention, which allows Israel to hold Palestinians indefinitely without charge or 
evidence. Shalabi had recently spent over two years under that status and was
 released last October in the prisoner swap deal between Hamas and Israel.
The PA's ability to convince the population of its legitimacy is at an all-time low. 
Contrary to the fantasies spun about the West Bank's prosperity, people in 
Palestine are destitute. The cost of living has never been higher: gas, electricity 
and food prices have skyrocketed, and food insecurity among the population is 
estimated at 40 per cent.
On top of that, a cash-strapped government - with over $1bn in debt and unfulfilled 
loans - is speaking of raising taxes and slashing more services. The dissatisfaction 
with the PA's performance has ignited protests in all West Bank cities and prompted 
even some Fatah supporters to speak of it being time to dissolve the PA.
In Gaza, the state of affairs is even grimmer, due to the six-year siege imposed on 
the coastal enclave. An acute power crisis threatens a "collapse of essential 
services". Hospitals are close to running out of the necessary power to operate,
 the amount of available drinking water has dropped by 60 per cent and food prices 
are surging.
Over the past six months, PA President Mahmoud Abbas and the Hamas government 
have had their moments of glory. President Abbas generated short-lived exhilaration 
when he took his bid for statehood to the United Nations last September and Hamas 
was highly praised when it secured the release of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners 
released in exchange for Israeli corporal-turned-sergeant Gilad Shalit.
But these political manoeuvres are intended and only serve to defend politicians' positions 
and spheres of power in the midst of an internecine conflict over control, rather than 
mobilise a national resistance movement.
In the meantime, Israel has quietly escalated its colonisation and tightened its control 
over occupied Palestinian territories. In February alone, 380 Palestinians were arrested, 
158 individuals were displaced and 825 olive trees were uprooted by Israeli forces. 
Those numbers do not even speak to the significant uptick in vandalism and attacks by 
settlers and the deaths and injuries suffered by Gazans from continued aerial bombardments.
The status quo in Palestine is becoming less bearable for more people and the current 
leadership has proven unable or unwilling to challenge it. But then again, Israel is not the 
only power at risk of losing its relevance.
As Mourad Jadallah, a legal researcher with Addameer, a prisoners' rights organisation in 
Ramallah, told Asa Winstanly in an interview: "Why did the Palestinian media and the 
Palestinian Authority ignore Khader Adnan and his hunger strike? Because he's 
[affiliated with] Islamic Jihad? Or because he's taking the memory back to the days when 
the prisoners were leading the national resistance?"
Khader Adnan and Hana al Shalabi have reinvigorated resistance and raised the long-flagging 
morale of people on the streets. This is a dramatic testament to the adage that change can 
only come from below - so maybe it's time we stop looking to the top.
Charlotte Silver is a journalist based in the West Bank, Palestine. 
She is Editor at The Palestine Monitor and a graduate of Stanford University.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily 
reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.


from Al Jazeera