Prasannachoudhary - Wandering Mind

Today marks the 28th Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It also marks 28 years of reducing the legacy of radical social justice and antiwar activist into that of loving quotes on racial reconciliation. Ultimately, think back to what you were taught about Dr. King and you’ll most likely remember…

How Macedonia Became A Global Hub For Pro-Trump Misinformation

BuzzFeed News identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single Macedonian town.

BuzzFeed News identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic.

Alice Munro: “The Bear Came over the Mountain” : The New Yorker

The Wayland Rudd Collection A project organized by Yevgeniy Fiks

The Wayland Rudd Collection focuses on the representation of Africans and African-Americans in Soviet visual culture. A point of departure for this project is Fiks’ collection of over 200 Soviet images (paintings, movie stills, posters, graphics, etc.) of Africans and African-Americans spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s. Fiks invited contemporary artists as well as activists, historians, sociologists, political theorists, and specialist in cultural studies to select one or more images from this collection and asked them to respond to it either via artwork, performance, lecture, or other forms.

Wayland Rudd was an American actor who began performing in the Hedgerow Theater in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania under the directorship of Jasper Deeter. Rudd first received critical acclaim for his performance in Eugene O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones.” Frustrated over racism in the entertainment industry, Rudd moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 where he began a successful career in Soviet Theater and Film including work with the famed Russian Director Vsevolod Meyerhold. He later received a degree from the Theatrical Art Institute in Moscow and worked at the Stanislavsky Opera and Drama Theater. Rudd died in Moscow in 1952.

During Wayland Rudd’s twenty year-long career in the Soviet Union, he appeared in numerous films, theatrical performances, and plays. He was also used as a model for paintings, drawings, and propaganda posters and, in many respects, defined the image of the “Negro” for generations of Soviet people. Although only a small section of the assembled images in The Wayland Rudd Collection are of Wayland Rudd, the project is given his name to commemorate this American-Soviet actor’s personal story as a case in point of the complex intersection of 20th century American-Soviet narrative.

The images in The Wayland Rudd Collection present a very complex and often contradictory mapping of the intersection of race and Communism in the Soviet context. The participatory aspect of this project adds the needed dimensions to show this complexity—giving the viewers the capacity to digest this history. This project investigates the promise and reality of Communism vis-à-vis the issue of race in the 20th century through the Soviet experiment. It presents this issue as unresolved, revealing the Soviet legacy on race as a mix bag of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, Communist ideals as well as exoticization, otherness, racist stereotyping, and hypocrisy.

Participants: Suzanne Broughel, Maria Buyondo, Dread Scott, Jenny Polak, Michael Paul Britto, Nikolay Oleynikov, Ivan Brazhkin, Haim Sokol, Kara Lynch, Dr. Allison Blakely, Dr. Romy Taylor, and others

Could say if there is any correlation between capitalist surplus value and the excess enjoyment in fantasy,,,?

A certain excess which was ..kept in check.., perceived as a local perversion, a limited deviation, is elevated in capitalism to the very principle of social lifeIn the ..movement of money begetting more money, ..the thing can survive only as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own ‘normal’ constraints- ZIZEK

The immense hope, and forbearance Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day  Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled  As night returns bringing doubts  That swarm around the sleeper’s head  But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning  Installs again in cold hope  The air that was yesterday, is what you are,  In so many phases the head slips form the hand.  The tears ride freely, laughs or sobs:  What do they matter? There is free giving and taking;  The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream  Wakens to the force of it and has to recognize  The secret sweetness before it turns into life—  Sucked out of many exchanges, torn from the womb,  Disinterred before completely dead—and heaves  Its mountain-broad chest. “They were long in coming,  Those others, and mattered so little that it slowed them  To almost nothing. They were presumed dead,  Their names honorably grafted on the landscape  To be a memory to me. Until today  We have been living in their shell.  Now we break forth like a river breaking through a dam,  Pausing over the puzzled, frightened plain,  And our further progress shall be terrible,  Turning fresh knives in the wounds  In the gulf of recreation, that bare canvas  As matter-of-fact as the traffic and that day’s noise.”  The mountain stopped shaking; its body  Arched into its own contradiction, its enjoyment,  As far from us lights were put out, memories of boys and girls  Who walked here before the great change,  Before the air mirrored us,  Taking the opposite shape of our effort,  Its inseparable comment and corollary  But casting us further and further out.  Wha—what happened? You are with  The orange tree, so that its summer produce  Can go back to where we got it wrong, then drip gently  Into history, if it wants to. A page turned; we were  Just now floundering in the wind of its colossal death.  And whether it is Thursday, or the day is stormy,  With thunder and rain, or the birds attack each other,  We have rolled into another dream.  No use charging the barriers of that other:  It no longer exists. But you,  Gracious and growing thing, with those leaves like stars,  We shall soon give all out attention to you.

—John Ashbery, “Spring Day” Art Credit Lottie Hedley

Insanity: inside the Country of the Mind

Insanity: inside the Country of the Mind

Originally posted on Living in the Modem World:

Insanity

In his novel Queen ofAngels, set at the close of 2047, Greg Bear explores the concept of what he calls, “the Country of the Mind”. This, Bear postulates, is the “ground” for all our thoughts. A kind of virtual reality landscape within us where our “big and little selves” – the personality routines which make up the conscious self, and…

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“A long project is like a secret houseguest, hidden in your study, waiting to be fed and visited.”

John Hollander (via theparisreview)

Beijie Village: a Land Grab Case, a Village Election, and a Microcosm of China

Beijie Village: a Land Grab Case, a Village Election, and a Microcosm of China

Originally posted on China Change:

By Yaqiu Wang, published: December 16, 2014

An election in a heartland Chinese village in Henan province, held on December 13th, attracted attention from Chinese scholars, netizens and activists. A 73-year-old man, Chen Ji’en (陈纪恩), was re-elected Chairman of the 8th Village Committee of Beijie Village (北街村) by fellow villagers in what was reported by…

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अनन्त का छंद - 2

अनन्त का छंद – 2 प्रसन्न कुमार चौधरी भारतीय चिन्तन विधि 13. दर्शन क्षण में अनन्त की स्मृति है, नश्वर में शाश्वत का शब्द है, मूर्त में अमूर्त का अभ्युदय है । सृष्टि – अदृश्य सूक्ष्म कणों से लेकर नीहारिकाओं तक, जीवाणुओं से लेकर मनुष्य तक – इसी सान्त और अनन्त के, नश्वर और अनश्वर के, वचनीय और अनिर्वचनीय के, मूर्त और अमूर्त के अन्तहीन अन्तःमिश्रण का सिलसिला है, प्रवाह है । सत्य सान्त को अनन्त से,…

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