Radical media, politics and culture.

Bill Templer writes:

"The Uses of an Earthquake:

Rereading Harry Cleaver"

Bill Templer


Harry Cleaver's extraordinary piece "The Uses of an Earthquake" (Midnight Notes 1988) on the response by Tepito (a barrio in Mexico City) to the 1985 earthquake and its aftermath — and the building of grassroots autonomous self-organization and militancy by the Tepitenos — is especially relevant in the wake of Katrina.


As Cleaver reminds us:

"In dozens of the poorer barrios of Mexico City, the movement of the earth sparked movements of people using the devastation in property and the cracks opened in the structures of political power to break through oppressive social relations and to improve their lives. […] For those of us outside of Mexico, the people of Tepito have an important lesson to teach, not only about the uses of an earthquake, but about the use of crisis more generally. […] We should always be ready to take advantage of any crack or rupture in the structures of power which confine us."

Have a look:

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/earthqu ake.html


Rarely has the chasm between people and Power in America opened so wide. We need fresh left-green and libertarian argument about the whys and hows of people’s autonomy, far beyond what Naomi Klein sketches in "Needed: A People’s Reconstruction." Many eyes and ears have been opened, however momentarily.

"Towards a Third Cinema:


Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema ot Liberation the Third World"

Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino

"...we must discuss, we must invent..." — Frantz Fanon

just a short time ago it would have seemed like a
Quixotic adventure in the colonised, neocolonised, or
even the imperialist nations themselves to make any
attempt to create films of decolonisation that turned their
back on or actively opposed the System. Until recently,
film had been synonymous with spectacle or entertainment: in a word, it was one more consumer good. At best,
films succeeded in bearing witness to the decay of
bourgeois values and testifying to social injustice. As a
rule, films only dealt with effect, never with cause; it
was cinema of mystification or anti-historicism. It was
surplus value cinema. Caught up in these conditions,
films, the most valuable tool of communication of our
times, were destined to satisfy only the ideological and
economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the
lords of the world film market, the great majority of
whom were from the United States.

nolympics writes:

"Back Inside New Orleans"
Jordan Flaherty

What actually happened in New Orleans these past two weeks? We need to sort through the rumors and distortions. Perhaps we need our version of South Africa’s Truth And Reconciliation Commission. Some way to sort through the many narratives and find a truth, and to find justice.

"Dhalgren in New Orleans"

Bidisha Banerjee,
Reason

September 13, 2005 —

As Americans struggled to grasp what was unfolding in New Orleans, the
word "unimaginable" recurred frequently — even though the catastrophe had
been imagined, and envisioned, many times. Thirty years ago, science
fiction writer Samuel Delany wrote, in high detail, about the unfolding
of racially-charged violence, rape, and looting in "Bellona," a major
American city struck by an unspecified catastrophe and ignored by the
National Guard.


Delany's Dhalgren focuses on a group of people who choose to remain in
Bellona despite — and partly, because of — its dystopian qualities
(including lack of water and sanitation). This surreal work of science
fiction seemed especially apt last week, as fires raged and stories of
racism, rape, looting, and murder proliferated, and then-FEMA head Mike
Brown continued to blame the victims who had not evacuated the city. New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco
publicly disagreed over whether residents would be forcibly evicted from
their homes during the cleanup, while thousands of the city's
approximately 10,000 remaining residents remained adamant in their
resolve to stay. Dhalgren suggests what the holdouts might find if they
succeed.

Phil Rockstroh writes:

"Levees Made of Lies:
Rage, Grief, and the Chimera of the American Dream"
Phil Rockstroh


An entire American city has become an uninhabitable mire of fetid water, sodden ruins, and toxic sludge. Moreover, the destruction will not end there: the financial, political, and psychological spill-off, incurred by the deluge, will cause our nation to sink further into a morass of debt, denial, and despair.

How did it come to this? How did we come to buy this worthless plot of swampland known as George Bush's America?

"Endless, Multilayered, Super-Fast and Infinitely Complex Boredom: Hooray"

Matthew Fuller

What makes software jump? What words, what
styles of thought do we need to understand
running code and the multi-layered compositions
it is part of, and how, if at all, does software
establish relations with what might termed
freedom? Such questions, of how to act in and
understand complex technologies and live
situations are not unique to technology, and for
a figure by which to understand them, it is often
useful to start from the wrong place, not with
software, but with a frog. In his book Lifelines
the biologist Steven Rose describes the way in
which a number of his workmates might, whilst
sitting at the edge of a pond, compete to
describe the leap of a frog. By trade, they are a
physiologist, an ethologist, a developmentalist,
an evolutionist and a molecular biologist. Each
sets their particular disciplinary scale of
perception against those of the others. The
frog, responding not to the nattering of the
knowledge workers but to a snake spotted on a
nearby tree splashes elegantly into the safety of
a pond. The representatives of their disciplines
each in turn ascribe the 'jump event' to: the
interaction of nerves, muscles and bones
containing and releasing structured patterns of
energy and movement; learned or grown behavioural
responses; the result of the particular pattern
of growth of the organism; the action of an
inherited genetic imperative; or the biochemical
properties of its muscles.

As the ripples in the pond spread and interact
with other movements in the water, Rose's
argument is to encourage equally multivalent ways
of thinking a non-reductive biology of
life-patterns. Whilst, in his experiments on the
physiology of memory, there can be few people in
the world who have scissored as many heads off
hatchling chicks, Rose's appetite for a wet,
complex, living biology is something from which,
with all necessary irony, our understanding of
software can learn. The trick for biology as a
whole, he suggests, is to find a way of engaging
both the volition to detail entrained by
disciplinary approaches, which are in turn geared
to particular constituent scales of reality,
those of the gene, the molecule, the organism and
so on, whilst at the same time recognizing the
radical interweaving of such scales.

"Needed: A People’s Reconstruction"

Naomi Klein

On September 4, six days after Katrina hit, I saw the first glimmer of hope. “The people of New Orleans will not go quietly into the night, scattering across this country to become homeless in countless other cities while federal relief funds are funneled into rebuilding casinos, hotels, chemical plants…. We will not stand idly by while this disaster is used as an opportunity to replace our homes with newly built mansions and condos in a gentrified New Orleans.”


The statement came from Community Labor United, a coalition of low-income groups in New Orleans. It went on to demand that a committee made up of evacuees “oversee FEMA, the Red Cross and other organizations collecting resources on behalf of our people…. We are calling for evacuees from our community to actively participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans.”

nolympics writes:

"Hurricane Katrina: Our Experiences"
Larry Bradshaw & Lorrie Beth Slonsky

[ An eyewitness report by two paramedics trapped in New Orleans while
attending a conference. ]

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's
store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked.
The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It
was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The
milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree
heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water,
pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's
windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized
and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an
alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and
distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized
and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours
playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

nolympics writes:

"Hurricane Katrina: Our Experiences"
Larry Bradshaw & Lorrie Beth Slonsky


[ An eyewitness report by two paramedics trapped in New Orleans while
attending a conference. ]

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's
store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked.
The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It
was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The
milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree
heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water,
pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's
windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized
and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an
alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and
distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized
and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours
playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

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