“Poem for South African Women” by June Jordan (1980)
Excerpt from We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, by Alice Walker (2006)
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Barack Obama, February 2008)
Eight years worth of Onion articles about George W. Bush. This one, written just prior to Bush’s inauguration, is particularly worth reading.
I know it’s deeply uncool, like liking Dave Eggers. But, it’s time to come clean: I really enjoy Shepard Fairey’s sensibilities. His early stickers (which he describes as an “experiment in phenomenology“) were all over the place when I lived in San Diego off-and-on during the Nineties, so slapping one on my car when I [...]
The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high that nobody could reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. (Tony Kushner, Angels In America)
Fuck “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The all-time best “patriotic song” is Woody [...]
2012, baby. Maybe America will be ready for my “mandatory gay marriage” proposal by then.
Dr. Martin Luther King, class warrior and radical
My friend Chord called this to my attention:
In Pictures: America’s 10 Most Boring Cities [1/15/09: link is now fixed]
I’d like to point out that the tenth boring city in the country is my hometown, and that I taught in the ninth most boring city for six years. I’m pretty sure that Misty lives in [...]
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The Unicorn Tapestries
Capturing the Unicorn: How Two Mathemeticians Came to the Aid of the Met
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When the Depression hit I was taken out of private school and put into public school. So I had a new set of friends to bring home to have a look at whatever my father was. These were the [...]
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(Click on the paintings for larger versions. More about the paintings: Waterhouse, Dali.)
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It could be said that the typical World Wide Web surfer today, sitting alone in front of a PC screen, is increasingly a monad with no direct windows onto reality, encountering only virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever in a global [...]
Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring caused a riot when it was premiered in Paris in 1913, partly due to the dissonant music but also because of Vaslav Nijinsky’s unorthodox choreography. In 1987 the Joffrey Ballet attempted to reconstruct the choreography, costumes and sets from notes, drawings and the personal reminiscences of the original dancers [...]