Radical media, politics and culture.

Independent Media

Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth

Edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek

Lenin Reloaded is a rallying call by some of the world’s leading
Marxist intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of
Vladimir Lenin. The volume’s editors explain that it was Lenin who made
Karl Marx’s thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the
confines of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus
on Lenin is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be
the only game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been
settled on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has
become easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in
the mode of production.

Lenin retooled Marx’s thought for specific
historical conditions in 1914, and Lenin Reloaded urges a reinvention
of the revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be
Leninist in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance
of the consequences that follow from action.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Voices of Resistance from Occupied London


Voices of Resistance from Occupied London is the city's newest anarchist journal. It is free (as in freedom!) and available in both paper and electronic form.

Issue One of our journal is finally out. It contains interviews with Mike Davis, Bill Brown (from the NYC Surveillance Camera Players), articles by another eight contributors, comic strips and call-outs for the forthcoming anti-G8 mobilisations in Germany. Everything is available on-line here.

TACTICAL MEDIA CONFERENCE

Saturday, April 28, 12-5pm


Change You Want to See

84 Haveymayer Street, Brooklyn


Presentations on the theory & practice of tactical media and contemporary protest art, by graduate students in the ITP program at NYU's Tisch School of the arts.

The presenters' talks will be grouped into three panels, to be moderated by their Professor, Marisa Olson (Editor & Curator, Rhizome), on the topics of Play & Consumption; Fear, Spectacle, and the Media; and the Interfaces and Architecture of Control. These panels will consist of both artist talks and analytical essays and audience members will be invited to give feedback on a few works in progress.

"THE 13TH SCREEN" VIDEO EXPERIMENT AND WORKSHOP
Sunday, April 29, 2-4pm


The Subliminal History of New York State is an ongoing multi-tiered project presented through performances, books, songs, and video. Carrie Dashow, working with collaborators (composers, writers, locals, historians), generates participatory multimedia performances in specific localities throughout New York. A tour funded through NYSCA and the New York State Music Fund will incorporate parts of the story, songs, and video as a traveling caravan visits community centers and local historical societies during the Summer of 2007.

This Sunday, Carrie will test new software (written by collaborator Matt Raibert) that allows for the live-editing of 12 video feeds, to create a two channel video projection, shot locally on summer tour stops in upstate NY. She is looking for twelve people or pairs (1-2 people per camera) to shoot video, test drive the live-edit software, and offer constructive feedback.

The workshop will begin with a brief introduction at The Change You Want To See, then videographers will shoot in the neighborhood for a 1/2 hour. Upon returning, participants will watch everyone's shots simultaneously cut live by the new software, and offer input, thoughts, feedback.

Blue-Eyed Devil: A Road Odyssey through Islamic America

Michael Muhammad Knight

Michael Muhammad Knight will be in NYC to read from Blue-Eyed Devil on Saturday, March 24 at Bluestockings Bookstore at 7 pm. Please come meet Mike and check out the book.

Blue-Eyed Devil traces a century of American Islam, as well as a 20,000-mile spiritual journey across the U.S., through the perspective of a white convert. Keeping in mind the five permitted purposes of spiritual travel — seeing a holy site, deriving instruction, seeking knowledge, visiting a venerable person, and visiting the tomb of a saint — Michael Muhammad Knight criss-crossed the country in search of a parallel Islamic history, and struggled to understand his own place in that history.


From the remnants of Quranic oral traditions in the Georgia Sea Islands to the coded language of the Five Percenters, from the shrouded origins of the Nation of Islam to the Egypto-Futurist mythology of Malachi York, and from woman-led prayers in West Virginia to Muslim prison populations in northern New York, Blue-Eyed Devil takes a unique perspective on Islam’s intersection with race, gender, and Americanization.


What they're saying about Blue-Eyed Devil

"Michael Muhammad Knight has written today’s On the Road, a powerful picaresque tale about the sorrows of being a seeker in the days of endless simulation. I am certain that in addition to some of the most musically-pleasing prose of recent years, Knight has identified the work of his generation, which is Spirit. His wrestling with Islam is pertinent and suspenseful, a mystery rendered in brilliant detail and gorgeous depth. This book should contribute immensely to retiring the public’s knee-jerk reaction to Islam. Blue-Eyed Devil is a masterpiece." — Andrei Codrescu, author of New Orleans, Mon Amour

"Mike Knight's work is some of the most exciting writing happening in the Muslim literary landscape. He is important not just in the 'small pond' of Muslim American literature (where he is very important), but ought to be valued in the larger scene of American writing." — Mohja Kahf, author of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf

"When the American Muslim community is finding an identity amid diverse roots in indigenous and immigrant Islam, Michael Muhammad Knight gives us a funny, searing account of his own journey to a place in what we might call the 'mestizo' American terrain. Like Sherman Alexie, Knight writes about his own cultural identity with raw honesty, heartbreaking tenderness, and piercing humor." — Laury Silvers, Professor of Religion, Skidmore College

"A cultural mutant on a Greyhound pilgrimage to find the science that spawned him, Mike Knight's Blue-Eyed Devil helps nudge us all towards our siratul musta-fucking-qeem. Up the taqx!" — Basim Usmani, singer, The Kominas

A Video Interview with Peter Linebaugh

Counterviews


The short Counterviews video interview, "A Walk with Peter Linebaugh," by Tao Ruspoli, may be accessed here.

Edu-Factory Manifesto

As was the factory, so now is the university. Where once the factory
was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists,
so now the university is a key space of conflict, where the ownership
of knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation
of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake. This is to
say the university is not just another institution subject to
sovereign and governmental controls, but a crucial site in which
wider social struggles are won and lost.

To be sure, these changes occur as capitalism gives new importance to
the production of knowledge, and in the advanced capitalist world,
moves such production of knowledge to the centre of the economy. With
this movement, the university also loses its monopoly in this same
sphere of knowledge production. Perhaps it once made sense to speak
of town and gown. But now the borders between the university and
society blur.

This merging of university and society takes diverse forms. It can be
shaped by the pressure to market degrees. Or it can be forced by
measures that link the provision of funding to ‘technological
transfer’ or collaboration with ‘partners’ from government and/or
commercial enterprises. Similarly, the growing precariousness of
academic work means that many labour both in and out of the
university, not to mention the labour conditions for non-academic
workers. And the opening of many universities to previously excluded
cohorts of students, whether on the basis of social class or national
jurisdiction, means that their internal composition has also changed.

4th Annual NYC Grassroots Media Conference
Saturday Feb 24, 2007

The NYC Grassroots Media Conference Organizing Committee is happy to announce
that the full conference program including workshop descriptions is now
available on our website.

Read descriptions of all of the workshops at the conference:
nycgrassrootsmedia

Register today:
conference

NYC Grassroots Media Conference

"Media and Movements Beyond Borders"

Saturday February 24th, 2007

New School University

65 Fifth Avenue (at 13th Street)

Some of the over 40+ workshops include: (see below)

Net Neutrality Seminar

New York City, Jan. 31, 2007


If you haven't heard about net neutrally, it really is one of the
most important decisions of our life time. As an obscure provision in
a telcom bill last year, corporations were destined to take over the
internet. Even after it's defeat, the threat still looms over the
heads of everyone.

Come join Blogging Liberally and Susan Crawford for a heart to heart
salon to discuss net neutrality.

Date: Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Time: 6:00pm - 9:00pm

Location: The Tank
279 Church Street
(btw Franklin & White,
2 blocks
below Canal)


More Info:
noneck.org/node/309

Fifth Estate Issue Release Party

Monday, January 22th @ 7PM


Co-hosted by Fifth Estate and the 'This is Forever'
series.

Bluestockings Books

172 Allen St. Lower East Side, NYC

Come help celebrate the release of Fifth Estate
#374, produced in New York City for the first time
since the anti-authoritarian journal's 1965 founding
in Detroit! Several New York City contributors will
present perspectives on radical politics, history,
philosophy and culture, potentially including:

precarious labor and resistance;

gender roles at Burning Man;

moving beyond dialectical philosophy;

the history of radical marching bands;

secrecy, the State and contemporary activism;

and mass media’s role in recuperating resistance.

Donation requested, but no one turned away for lack of
funds.

1st Annual, 1st Ever NYC Anarchist Book Fair

April 14, 2007

When: Sat., April 14, 2007, 11am–7pm

Where: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, Manhattan

New York City, a center of anarchist life, culture, struggle, and ideas
for 150 years, has never hosted an Anarchist Book Fair. That's about to
change!

The 1st Annual, 1st Ever NYC Anarchist Book Fair, will host a one-day
exposition of books, zines, pamphlets, art, film/video, and other
cultural and very political productions of the anarchist scene
worldwide, on Sat., Apr. 14, 2007 at Judson Memorial Church in
Manhattan. The 1st Annual, 1st Ever NYC Anarchist Book Fair will feature
over 60 tables as well as an art gallery. Panels, presentations,
workshops, and skillshares will provide further opportunities to learn
more and share your own experience and creativity.

Pages

Subscribe to Independent Media