Nepal Interim Constitution, Will PLWHA, and other vulnerable communiteis have rights?

Dear All

The Nepal's interim constitution have failed to ensure the rights of sexual minorities, gender minorities, PLWHA and Sex workers and provide any protection despite of our continuous lobbying and providing written recommendation to the drafting committee.

Now we its time we need to do more and we call for your support and solidarity.

Sunil Pant
Blue Dimaond Society

Word For/Word #10

Check out the new Word For/Word #10

Bronwen Tate
Josely Vianna Baptista
Tyler Carter
Chris Tonelli
Gherardo Bortolotti
Clayton A. Couch
Eddie Watkins
Catherine Daly
Julie Doxsee
Randall Williams
Malcolm de Chazal
kari edwards
Terence Winch
Marco Giovenale
Derek Henderson
Theodore Worozbyt
Brian Howe
George Kalamaras
Elizabeth Marie Young
Sandra Huber
Lauren Levin
Jon Leon
Marthe Reed
Giuliano Mesa
Michael Robins
John M. Bennett and Michael Peters
Leonardo Guevara Navarro
Jared Schickling
Jim Leftwich and Jukka-Pekka Kervinen
Gautam Verma

Ambiguous Boundaries: Cane Hill and the Resistance of Space

"Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is."
(Henri Michaux)



According to the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, inside and outside form a dialectics of division; hostile in their opposition, polarized in their attributes. Yet, despite their mutual resistance, both inside and outside depend upon one another for the sake of preserving their identities. It is an ambivalent conflict, framed by both seduction and repulsion. For Bachelard, this resistance eventually collapses, in the process displacing the spatial centre that previously housed inside and outside. What remains in this fall is a drone, unable to be clearly placed and so gliding towards annihilation. 



Meditating in-between this opposition, we nonetheless seek shelter even if it is precarious. If inside is regarded as the space in which shelter is secured, then when the outside infringes upon this protected territory, disorientation and anxiety ensues. The shelter which is burdened with the outside becomes a void, undefined and in danger of losing its capacity as a haven. This privileged position inside has over the outside is rendered explicit in that the outside excludes us from the inside. When the world withdraws, then we are cast out from its clutch. Thereafter, we strive to return to the inside. In the meantime, however, it remains inaccessible. more...

I have backed into where I am
I have breached a continent
retreated to a tradition,
of harm consumption money dry cleaning
I have returned to indefinite detention,
credit card demands
on what can not be said
faster then carbon exchange normal
and again, another sinking island raising stench
temporally not here place
scrawled, expected, intended, positionless deposit made
I have come back to horror finality
first best flavor
don't ask, don’t dream
returned to do not question erased
along a surface skin shadow memory
where speaking never speaks itself
retuned to a memory
amidst rubble like commission
an utterance, flipped gone mimic

Experimental Text Festival Call for work:

CALL FOR WORK:

Experimental Text Festival at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater
Curated by Sally Oswald and Jennifer Tsuei

The Ontological will host an Experimental Text Festival, a four-night multi-arts event designed to promote interest in new forms of notation and unorthodox methods of making and presenting work. The festival will feature short form works by established and emerging artists who will gather over a few months to discuss issues around working with experimental texts.

Intent to apply e-mail: September 1, 2006 to experimentaltext@gmail.com.
Application due in hand October 1, 2006.

Writers and artists concerned with experimental text: you are invited to submit project proposals to take part in this May 2007 festival. Your involvement will include several meetings with fellow creators as well as two - four performances. Curators Sally Oswald (Play: A Journal of Plays) and Jennifer Tsuei (Fantasias for the Immoderate) seek graphically dynamic, alternately oriented, unusually notated, or formally rebellious texts that call for new approaches to staging and performance. All genres and all media welcome: poetry, sound, video, dance, visual art and beyond. Curators are especially interested in artists who are taking aesthetic risks, and who will participate generously in discussions about making work and supporting each other in development. Emerging artists encouraged, established artists welcome.

We would prefer to hear from you by September 1, 2006 if you intend to apply. No one will be disqualified for not dropping a line, but it would certainly help us look out for your application.

Deliver your application in hard copy to the Ontological by October 1, 2006 along with any supporting materials. Since we are trying to present the newest of ideas, we need a bit of explanation of your goals and methods. Don't sweat it - and write us if you have questions.

DATES and TECH SPECS:
Festival Tech and Performances are May 14-20, 2007. Light board, sound op, and Stage Manager to call the show will be provided. Groups must provide own running crew, rehearsal stage manager, and designers as needed. Available lighting will be a very simple rep plot hung for our festival and another festival, which will be running at the same time. The Ontological will promote the festival on its website and will print postcards, but cannot provide rehearsal space or any additional resources.

APPLICATION
Applications should be initiated by writers. Festival Tech and Performances are May 14-20, 2007. Writers/artists will be asked to attend four developmental meetings between February 1, 2007 and the festival. These meetings will allow participants to get to know one another, discuss working methods, resources, and production needs. Depending on participants' wishes, meetings may be oriented towards showing work-in-progress, problem solving, or sharing technique. The meetings are, overall, intended to be short, helpful, and build community.

1. COVER PAGE your name, address, e-mail address, phone, and contact info for all collaborators.

2. RESUMES for main collaborators. List three references for yourself (This is only to give us a sense of your artistic community).

3. PAST WORK include a text you've completed and a paragraph describing where and how it was done or could be done. You may include any supporting graphics, video, etc that you think will help us envision your past work.

4. EXPERIMENTAL TEXT: Enclose a copy of the text you plan to explore through this festival. Running time may be as short as 7 minutes but no longer than 25 minutes. While we expect your text could change through the rehearsal process, please submit what you have right now. We will be reading it for the inventiveness of your tactics towards composition and the page. You may include a page or two of seed material that has helped you generate this text (images, found text etc) if applicable.

5. APPROACH (1 page max) – please answer these questions:
-what do you want us to know about your text?
-what should we know about your text in performance?
-where are you coming from in terms of your training or background?
-what are your aesthetic goals and desires?
-what kind of impact do you want to have?

6. WORKING METHODS (1 page max) – please answer the below, briefly:
-who are you going to work with to present this text?
-what will your working methods be?
-what are you envisioning this performance to look like?
-what is your access to rehearsal space and materials?
-what about this festival appeals to you?

Intent to apply courtesy e-mail by September 1, 2006.
(experimentaltext@gmail.com)
Mail your application materials to arrive by October 1, 2006.
Ontological - Hysteric Theater
131 East 10th Street
New York, NY 10003
Attn: Experimental Text Festival

"The Future of Poetry": An Editorial by Ransom with a Reply from Allen Tate

The Future of Poetry

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism--how should poetry escape? And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined. Henry James stopped before a certain piece of sculpture to apostrophize "beautiful modern spirit"; but he did not attempt a definition where a more incompetent man would surely have done it.

In poetry the Imagists, in our time and place, made a valiant effort to formulate their program. Their modernist manifestoes were exciting, their practice was crude, as was becoming to pioneers, and instructive in more ways than they had intended.
They announced at least two notable principles.

In the first place, they declared for honesty of theme and accuracy of expression. Though a poem were but a single minor image, tactile, visual, auditory, or even gustatory, provided it was honest and accurate, they preferred it to the grand performance of the Cosmos-throned-by-Love order, where the whole nature of things was presented in orderly and elegant exposition, if here the conception or the diction came second-handed out of the schools. They spurned as their art-material the stilted platitudes, the sentimental clichés, the taught relics of the other generations. They conceived the first duty of the Moderns as being to disembarrass poetry of its terrible incubus of piety, in the full classical sense of that term, and they rendered the service. more...

Lipo: First and Second Manifestos - Francois Le Lionnais

In defining "Potential Literature," Francois Le Lionnais questions the assumption that art is the product of a singular "inspired" vision. By contrast, the Oulipian aesthetic foregrounds the constraints implicit in all works of art, opening up new means of creation and a way of reclaiming works of the past through a form of "literary prosthesis."

First Manifesto

Let's open a dictionary to the words "Potential Literature." We find absolutely nothing. Annoying lacuna. What follows is intended, if not to impose a definition, at least to propose a few remarks, simple hors d'oeuvres meant to assuage the impatience of the starving multitudes until the arrival of the main dish, which will be prepared by people more worthy than myself.

Do you remember the polemic that accompanied the invention of language? Mystification, puerile fantasy, degeneration of the race and decline of the State, treason against Nature, attack on affectivity, criminal neglect of inspiration; language was accused of everything (without, of course, using language) at that time.

And the creation of writing, and grammar--do you think that that happened without a fight? The truth is that the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns is permanent. It began with Zinjanthropus (a million seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago) and will end only with humanity--or perhaps the mutants who succeed us will take up the cause. A Quarrel, by the way, very badly named. Those who are called the Ancients are often the stuffy old descendants of those who in their own day were Moderns; and the latter, if they came back among us, would in many cases take sides with the innovators and renounce their all too faithful imitators. more..

Found atcenter for bookculture.

Debt Education: Bad for the Young, Bad for America By Jeffrey J. Williams

STUDENT loans, for more than half those attending college, are the new paradigm of college funding. Consequently, student debt is, or will soon be, the new paradigm of early to middle adult life. Gone are the days when the state university was as cheap as a laptop and was considered a right, like secondary education. Now higher education is, like most social services, a largely privatized venture, and loans are the chief way that a majority of individuals pay for it.

Over the past decade, there has been an avalanche of criticism of the “corporatization” of the university. Most of it focuses on the impact of corporate protocols on research, the reconfiguration of the relative power of administration and faculty, and the transformation of academic into casual labor, but little of it has addressed student debt. Because more than half the students attending university receive, along with their bachelor’s degree, a sizable loan payment book, we need to deal with student debt.

The average undergraduate student loan debt in 2002 was $18,900. It more than doubled from 1992, when it was $9,200. Added to this is charge card debt, which averaged $3,000 in 2002, boosting the average total debt to about $22,000. One can reasonably expect, given still accelerating costs, that it is over $30,000 now. Bear in mind that this does not include other private loans or the debt that parents take on to send their children to college. (Neither does it account for “post-baccalaureate loans,” which more than doubled in seven years, from $18,572 in 1992–1993 to $38,428 in 1999–2000, and have likely doubled again). more...

Enter Lesbian, Stage Right By David King

Canada has finally published its first anthology of lesbian plays. “Ten years ago, I was told there wasn’t really a market," says editor, Rosalind Kerr, a University of Alberta professor and artist. When she was finally approached to edit Lesbian Plays: Coming of Age In Canada, it was on the basis that there wasn’t enough work available by and about lesbians.

Coming of Age contains a dozen works (several award winners) produced since 1989 in Canadian venues large and small—yes, mostly small. With Toronto companies like Nightwood, Tarragon and Buddies overwhelmingly involved behind-the-scenes, it’s also a startling reminder of how few other Canadian stages have braved the dyke play.


This past June, the anthology sold all on-hand copies at its Toronto Pride launch in NOW Magazine’s Lounge. Contributing artists like Alec Butler, Susan G. Cole and Corrina Hodgson joined Kerr for the celebratory event in an intimate atmosphere upstaged only by Church Street Pride antics a few blocks away.

HORSE LESS REVIEW ISSUE FOUR!

HORSE LESS REVIEW ISSUE FOUR!

Featuring work by-
Andrew Wollard, Adam Clay, Michael Donnelly, Jason Fraley, Allison Carter, Justin Lacour, kari edwards, Andrew Seguin, John Hyland, Jim Goar, Andrew Demcak, Clint Frakes, Bruce Covey, Nick Montfort, Jack Boettcher, Amanda Lichtenstein, Ryan Daley, Christine Hamm, Katherine LaPlant, Sarah Lang, John Mulligan, Michael Stewart, Mark DeCarteret, Danielle Hill, Conan Kelly.

The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism By Fredy Perlman

. . . . forty years after the military defeat of Fascists and National Socialists, we can see that nationalism did not only survive but
was born again, underwent a revival. Nationalism has been revived not only by the so-called right, but also and primarily by the so- called left. After the national socialist war, nationalism ceased to be confined to conservatives, became the creed and practice of revolutionaries, and proved itself to be the only revolutionary creed that actually worked. more...

Iraq > World War II - ARI BERMAN

The war in Iraq has lasted three days longer than US involvement in World War II.

Germany declared war on the US on December, 11, 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor. The US announced victory in Europe on May 8, 1945. That's one thousand, two hundred and forty-four days.

We've been in Iraq one thousand, two hundred and forty-seven days---and still the Administration has no exit strategy, no plan for victory and no clue what it is doing. In case you'd forgotten, George W. Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" aboard an aircraft carrier over three years ago.

Amerika

Should We Advocate an Election Boycott in the United States? by Jon Flanders

FROM AN ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN PERSPECTIVE: INTERVIEW WITH INSURGENT SUBCOMMANDER MARCOS OF THE ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY (EZLN) By Bill Weinberg

What kind of support do you need from your sympathizers in the United States? What should we be doing?

Well, we have a lot of necessities here because the federal army has surrounded us. For our troops, that is not a problem, but the civilian population here is suffering a lot. They lack necessities like food, clothes, medicine. Even the children. Our people, the civilian people here, cannot go to the city to buy such necessities, because the federal army can take them prisoner and "disappear" them. So our people are under very strong conditions of war, even if it is not one of bullets and guns now, but the "dirty war" that the government is making against us. The only chance that we have is support from other people, from Mexico, and from Mexicans in other parts of the world. I mean, we know that in the States there are a lot of people whose families are Mexican Indian people ...

But what about anglos and other folks who aren't Mexican or Indian who support the struggle? What can we do?

We have a lot of necessities. The first concerns the federal government--the government of Salinas. They have made a big lie about our country. They say that our country is free, without serious economic or social problems, a good partner for the NAFTA. His government is making a big publicity campaign for other people in other parts of the world, principally the Unites States. So it is imperative for us that the world know that Mexican people, especially Indian people, are not in the life condition that Salinas says--as you can see in this trip that you have made here. We need people in the Unites States to create counter-propaganda to that of the Mexican federal government, and get out the truth, against the lie of Salinas.

MORE...

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 1770-1827

"The true artist has no pride; unhappily he realizes that art has no limitations, he feels darkly how far he is from the goal,
and while, perhaps he is admired by others, he grieves that he has not yet reached the point where the better genius shall
shine before him like a distant sun." more

MAKE IFA - Jayne Cortez

Make Ifa make Ifa make Ifa Ifa Ifa 

In sanctified chalk 

of my silver painted soot

In criss-crossing whelps 

of my black belching smoke

In brass masking bones

of my bass droning moans

in hub cap bellow

of my hammer tap blow 

In steel stance screech

of my zumbified flames 

In electrified mouth

of my citified fumes

In bellified groan

of my countrified pound 

In compulsivefied conga

of my soca moka jumbi

MAKE IFA MAKE IFA MAKE IFA IFA
IFA
 
In eye popping punta

of my heat sucking sap

In cyclonic slobber

of my consultation pan

In snap jam combustion

of my banjoistic thumb

In sparkola flare

of my hoodoristic scream

In punched out ijuba

of my fire catching groove

In fungified funk

of my sambafied shakes

In amplified dents

of my petrified honks

In ping ponging bombs

of my scarified gongs

MAKE IFA MAKE IFA MAKE IFA IFA
IFA


* Ifa = a system of divination developed by the Yoruba of Nigeria, based on the interpretation of cowrie shells tossed on a tray.

moreJayne Cortez

Abolish Universities by Fred Reed

I think it is time to close the universities, and perhaps prosecute the professoriat under the RICO act as a corrupt and racketeering-influenced organization. Universities these days have the moral character of electronic churches, and as little educational value. They are an embarrassment to civilization.

I know this. I am sitting in my office in Jocotepec, consorting with a bottle of Padre Kino red – channeling the good Padre if you will. It is insight cheap at the price. A few bucks a liter.

To begin with, sending a child to a university is irresponsible. These days it costs something like a quarter of a million dollars, depending on your choice of frauds. The more notorious of these intellectual brothels, as for example Yale, can cost more. This money, left in the stock market for forty hears, or thirty, would yield enough to keep the possessor in comfort, with sufficient left over for vices. If the market took a downturn, he could settle for just the vices. In the intervening years, he (or, most assuredly, she) could work in a dive shop. more...

Barcelona, 1936 - from Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags ow with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. more...

Michel Foucault (1969) - The Archæology of Knowledge - Chapter 1 - The Unities of Discourse

The use of concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation present all historical analysis not only with questions of procedure, but with theoretical problems. It is these problems that will be studied here (the questions of procedure will be examined in later empirical studies - if the opportunity, the desire, and the courage to undertake them do not desert me). These theoretical problems too will be examined only in a particular field: in those disciplines - so unsure of their frontiers, and so vague in content - that we call the history of ideas, or of thought, or of science, or of knowledge.

But there is a negative work to be carried out first: we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions, each of which, in its own way, diversifies the theme of continuity. They may not have a very rigorous conceptual structure, but they have a very precise function. Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin; tradition enables us to isolate the new against a background of permanence, and to transfer its merit to originality, to genius, to the decisions proper to individuals. Then there is the notion of influence, which provides a support - of too magical a kind to be very amenable to analysis - for the facts of transmission and communication; which refers to an apparently causal process (but with neither rigorous delimitation nor theoretical definition) the phenomena of resemblance or repetition; which links, at a distance and through time - as if through the mediation of a medium of propagation such defined unities as individuals, œuvres, notions, or theories. There are the notions of development and evolution: they make it possible to group a succession of dispersed events, to link them to one and the same organising principle, to subject them to the exemplary power of life (with its adaptations, its capacity for innovation, the incessant correlation of its different elements, its systems of assimilation and exchange), to discover, already at work in each beginning, a principle of coherence and the outline of a future unity, to master time through a perpetually reversible relation between an origin and a term that are never given, but are always at work. There is the notion of 'spirit', which enables us to establish between the simultaneous or successive phenomena of a given period a community of meanings, symbolic links, an interplay of resemblance and reflexion, or which allows the sovereignty of collective consciousness to emerge as the principle of unity and explanation. We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links whose validity is recognised from the outset; we must oust those forms and obscure forces by which we usually link the discourse of one man with that of another; they must be driven out from the darkness in which they reign. And instead of according them unqualified, spontaneous value, we must accept, in the name of methodological rigour, that, in the first instance, they concern only a population of dispersed events. more...

Source: The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), publ. Routledge, 1972.

The Miracle Mongers, an Expose' by Harry Houdini

Fire has always been and, seemingly, will always remain, the most terrible of the elements. To the early tribes it must also have been the most mysterious; for, while earth and air and water were always in evidence, fire came and went in a manner which must have been quite unaccountable to them. Thus it naturally followed that the custom of deifying all things which the primitive mind was unable to grasp, led in direct line to the fire- worship of later days.

That fire could be produced through friction finally came into the knowledge of man, but the early methods entailed much labor. Consequently our ease-loving forebears cast about for a method to ``keep the home fires burning'' and hit upon the plan of appointing a person in each community who should at all times carry a burning brand. This arrangement had many faults, however, and after a while it was superseded by the expedient of a fire kept continually burning in a building erected for the purpose.more...

Spheres of influence - Umberto Eco on why we should beware mad scientists

There are two hollow earth theories. According to the first one we live on the crust, but there is another world on the inside where lies - some say - the realm of Agartha, the home of the King of the World (see, for example, the fantasies of French philosopher René Guénon). The second theory has it that while we think we live on the outer crust, we actually live in the interior (on a convex surface instead of a concave one). more...

de SOUZA PRABHU by EUNICE DE SOUZA

No, I'm not going to

delve deep down and discover 

I'm really de Souza Prabhu

even if Prabhu was no fool

and got the best of both worlds.

(Catholic Brahmin!

I can hear his fat chuckle still.)


No matter that

my name is Greek

my surname Portuguese

my language alien.


There are ways

of belonging.


I belong with the lame ducks.


I heard it said

my parents wanted a boy.

I've done my best to qualify.

I hid the bloodstains

on my clothes

and let my breasts sag.

Words the weapon

to crucify.


More EUNICE DE SOUZA

thank you we have found something else, we have found another contender
thank you for yelling in the street at that nothing in the street, yelling back
thank you for keeping going no matter what, just to replace the other thing that keeps going
thank you for your cement entry with its toll both simile
and how could I forget sequin gowns fashion sales for fashionable anorexia
and thank you for your tips on thank you letters to you know who
and thank you for your hundred buck generosity
for the department of defense’s new campaign, “amerika supports you”
with its clarity disconnect grande ole gospel
so, thank you for your good intention pavement to lead our way
on either or flagrant paradise new skin desire
better or worse sex money
and I am so so grateful for surround-a-sound traffic resurrection 3-d
long lasting official monitor statistics preoccupied choice options
thank you again for bringing the earth down to the earth with your action hero/n
anticipation new season of new characters
and without saying saying, how could I not mention the public dream director’s
personalized news selector at all you want just me dot com
so thank you again and again for the quick turnaround on my order
shedding light on teeth whiteners and the practice of teeth whitening
I feel like I have an ever lasting love video hung around my neck
I have never felt better than before I meet you

Private Photo Review on-line

Please Check out Private Photo Review on-line , from Castel Bolognese, Italy.

also check out the piece I have there, here.. .

thank you

Roadblocks to Asylum - By Tram Nguyen

The Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s was wracked by an insurrection of armed rebel groups supported by Rwanda and Uganda. During the fighting, which continued even after a ceasefire was signed in 1999, tens of thousands of women were raped and tortured by soldiers.

“I’m telling you in my country, there are no human rights. It’s the women who suffer,” Hortense, a thirty-one-year-old Congolese woman, says.

As a nurse, Hortense was working the night shift in a village hospital when soldiers came by accusing her of treating insurgents and demanding to know where they were, she says. They took her into detention for three days during which she was interrogated, beaten, and denied food. They threatened to cut off her breasts and hands.

She was then transferred to a prison where she stayed for two weeks until a priest talked a sympathetic guard into letting her escape with him.

Dressed as a nun and carrying a fake passport, Hortense crossed the border to Uganda, continued to Kenya, and boarded a plane to Mexico City in the summer of 2003. After three days on a bus, she was within sight of the U.S.-Mexico border.
“You can go to the border officials and tell them that you want asylum. But they will put you into detention while they process your case,” she remembers being told by a nun who had accompanied her. “Or you can cross the border illegally with a smuggler.” more..

Small Town 10 is now available, with work from:

Jess Mynes (western, ma)
Susana Gardner (switzerland)
Gina Myers (brooklyn)
K. Lorraine Graham (san diego)
Joseph S. Cooper (boulder/buffalo)
Suzanne Stein (oakland)
kathryn l. pringle (san francisco)
Sabrina Calle (north carolina/ nyc)
Joseph Massey (arcata)
Cynthia Sailers (alameda)
Maureen Thorson (dc)
Michael Farrell (australia)
kari edwards (india - now SF)
Mairead Byrne (providence, ri)

Editor Logan Ryan Smith promises it is "really fucking good." So go buy it here .

Art is a branch of Mathematics: Zamyatin and Soviet Socio-Fantasy - owen hatherley

In 1914 the leader of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party wrote an article in the party paper Pravda on a recent capitalist innovation- the time and motion studies of Frederick Taylor, an American cybernetician. These studies rationalised manual work to a series of repetitive and strictly measured exertions, a set of robotic constrictions. This scientific management would eliminate human inefficency in favour of the mathematical predictability of the mechanical. Lenin’s article, titled ‘The Taylor System: Man’s Enslavement by the Machine’ was on one level a simple critique of this mechanisation of man for profit. But within it is a more radical suggestion. Lenin claims that the scientific nature of this system was actually, in its rational use of labour time and resources, preparing the grounds for a system that will supersede capitalism. He writes: ‘the Taylor system- without its inititators knowing or wishing it- is preparing the time when the proletariat will take over all social production and appoint its own workers’ committees for the purpose of properly distributing and rationalising all social labour.’ Hence it’s no surprise that in 1918, a year after seizing state power, Lenin gave a speech that asserted- ‘we must introduce into Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and its systematic trial and adoption. more....

dear all . . .

since I have come back I have started to think I do not belong to "a" community, but shared singularities, with over tones of parasitism . . . and it is true some of this could be very different with time when the real glue of relationships are formed, and it is true with relationships possibilities happens, real human potential, till then it is an undulating sea of grasping, isolation and neurotic responses.   So, it seems I am up against a wall again in an environment filled with capitalistic consumption creating micro time, demarcated by segmented space, gridded out to areas of fluctuating hot zones. Deaths potential is replaced by meaningless purchasable options, that have value with logo aestheticism or some sort of blank political act...so again.. where is there here or there.. where there, relationship exist in post colonial blindness, massive historical assumptions and collective denial held together by touching each others flesh with human caring, or a in a place where there is an objective goal to strive for at all cost till the flesh is discarded..

love
kari

The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima by Father P. Siemes

. . . the time is approximately 8:15 -- the whole valley is filled by a garish light which resembles the Magnesium light used in photography, and I am conscious of a wave heat. I jump to the window to find out the cause of this remarkable phenomenon, but I see nothing more than that brilliant yellow light. As I make for the door, it doesn't occur to me that the light might have something to do with enemy planes. On the way from the window, I hear a moderately loud explosion which seems to come from a distance and, at the same time, the windows are broken in with a loud crash. There has been an interval of perhaps ten seconds since the flash of light. I am sprayed by fragments of glass. The entire window frame has been forced into the room. I realize now that a bomb has burst and I am under the impression that it exploded directly over our house or in the immediate vicinity. I am bleeding from cuts about the hands and head. . . . .

. . . .Down in the valley, perhaps one kilometer towards the city from us, several peasant homes are on fire and the woods on the opposite side of the valley are aflame. A few of us go over to help control the flames. While we are attempting to put things in order, a storm comes up and it begins to rain. Over the city, clouds of smoke are rising and I hear a few slight explosions. I come to the conclusion that an incendiary bomb with an especially strong explosive action has gone off down in the valley. A few of us saw three planes at great altitude over the city at the time of the explosion. I, myself, saw no aircraft whatsoever. more..

found at The war time Journal

The World Is Hot By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Machu Picchu, Peru

For Peru, global warming is not just "an inconvenient truth."
It's a daily reality, particularly for the residents in the spectacular Urubamba River Valley, the birthplace of Incan civilization. Watching the sun rise from atop the Incan ruins at Machu Picchu, you can look around 360 degrees and see Andean mountains everywhere. The highest of them were always described in the guidebooks as "snow capped." Today, they're more "snow frosted."

They still have snow, but there is a lot of rock now showing through on many of them. If these trends continue, in a few years they'll just be described as "steely gray." The great Andean glaciers are melting, receding at about 100 meters a decade.more...

Gentlemen, I am joking, and I know myself that my jokes are not brilliant,but you know one can take everything as a joke. I am, perhaps, jesting against the grain. Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that man's inclinations NEED reforming? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man? And to go to the root of the matter, why are you so positively convinced that not to act against his real normal interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous for man and must always be a law for mankind? So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of LES ANIMAUX DOMESTIQUES--such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of that pattern which endures for ever--the ant-heap.

Notes From The Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

or maybe 6 or something national power ship destiny
my own reaching end
6 or something new
something to believe in
interesting show jumping hall of fame
my own reaching out unreal
something future
passes as my own private investigator
passes deep skin deep dream
6 or something hours later
6 or something minutes ago
the many characters appear in the search
appear in elements inaccessible in this end game
reducing deaf mind signs to post world posts

Lessening the Damage: Interview with Dorothy Allison

It's more dangerous even than it ever was, and it has always been a dangerous word. The odd thing is, I find myself going back to reading older feminist works like Shula Firestone and about what it is to be a woman rebel and to threaten civilization at its core. Civilization is constructed on the backs and the cunts of women. To say that and to say it strongly and forthrightly with your eyes looking into the face of someone else is the most dangerous act. It's why feminism is so scary. Feminism deconstructs the patriarchal world. The thread that runs through all of it is, in fact, a woman standing up and saying, "This is my life. My life is not in your service." And that's always going to be dangerous. I think in mean times, and we are living in mean times, it is the threat that is almost too much for our culture. [Using man's voice] "If the women rebel, oh, we have to deal with that as well?" [Laughs] And to be truthful, many women live a life compromised around fear and it's not always about the fear of violence. I write a lot about the fear of violence, but there's also the fear of law and the fear of contempt. The fear of contempt is enormous for women because it really does destroy us. It's shameful to admit the things we are afraid of, the fear of not being loved, the fear of being isolated. And those are the ways of the feminist.more..

Reflections on the Uprising in France

A new and in some ways unprecedented radical movement has emerged in France. Beginning in February as a protest against the CPE, a law that would have made it easier to fire young workers, it rapidly developed into a widespread and much more general contestation. Over the next two months millions of people took part in demonstrations, universities and high schools were occupied, public buildings were invaded, train stations and freeways were blockaded, and thousands of people were arrested. A compromise offered by President Chirac on March 31 was rejected by just about everyone. On April 10 the government backed down and canceled the CPE.more...

found at BUREAU  OF  PUBLIC  SECRETS .