From Dont Rhine:

Media and Social Movements

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Join Jen Angel, Bob Ostertag, and Jeremy Adam Smith in a discussion on the role of media in U.S. social movements, and celebrate the opening of a new SF bookstore!

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Friday, October 10, 2008 at 7 p.m. - Free!
The Green Arcade - 1680 Market Street at Gough
http://www.thegreenarcade.com/

This informal panel will address several critical questions:

- What is the role of media in U.S. social movements?
- How does media work to sustain and support struggles?
- How can media be used more effectively to make change?
- What is the impact of the Internet on social justice media?

Please join three people who have worked long within independent media and have worked and written on social movement media:

Jen Angel is a media activist and former publisher of Clamor Magazine. She is the author of "Media and Activism: Creating and Maintaining Effective Movement Media"
http://inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/media-and-activism/
and "Become the Media, a Critical History of Clamor Magazine"
http://www.akpress.org/2008/items/becomingthemedia

Historian, journalist, composer, Bob Ostertag's work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. He has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and two books. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages. He is currently Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis. He is author of "People's Movements, People's Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements"
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1790 Read more

In the 1950’s Detroit was an economic powerhouse, the Silicon Valley of its day. It was one of the 10 wealthiest cities in the world with a population approaching 2 million. Today, having lost over one million people since its peak, many of the city’s monumental buildings, mighty industrial complexes and grand residential neighborhoods have been abandoned and are falling into ruin. There is more farmland within the city limits today than in 1900. While Detroit is not on many top tourist destination lists, its ruins make for a unique sort of modern deindustrialized and depopulated landscape. Join architect Robin Levitt, a former Detroiter, on a fascinating and disturbing tour of the City’s great architecture and fabulous ruins. He’ll show images of its glorious past and continuing demise.

Event location:

Get Lost Travel Books
1825 Market St. (at Guerrero)
San Francisco, CA 94103
415-437-0529

Audio activists Ultra-red present strategy session "Art and Organizing Prevention Justice" and screen their recent video "Untitled (for six voices)" as part of performance series at the Tenth Anniversary gathering of Critical Resistance.

Critical Resistance 10
Saturday, 27 September 2008, 2:00- 4:00 pm
Oakland, California

Lighthouse Charter School
900 Fallon Street
"Watson Room"
There is no door fee and all are welcome.

The audio activist collective Ultra-red are proud to be participating in the Tenth Anniversary convergence of Critical Resistance. CR10 brings together activists and organizers from around the U.S. to strategize and share experiences in the struggle against the prison industrial complex. Ultra-red will present their recent work in the "Untitled" series, an on-going investigation into the potential links between AIDS activism and prison justice. Collective members will screen a single-channel version of our video, "Untitled (for six voices)" and then facilitate an open strategy-session with participants in the project together with movement activists and organizers. We invite everyone in the Bay Area to join us for CR10 and the Ultra-red workshop.

Since 2005, the collective Ultra-red has been involved in an extensive militant investigation into the present conditions of the AIDS crisis in North America and globally. Conceptually rooted in Paulo Freire's radical pedagogy, Ultra-red have developed a series of performances and installations that engage audiences in analyzing the conditions of poverty, racism, and homophobia in the perpetuation of the epidemic. In this workshop, Ultra-red will introduce their work and their partnerships with community organizations including the national organization CHAMP (Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project) whose Project UNSHACKLE has informed Ultra-red's approach to AIDS cultural analysis, prevention justice and prison abolition. Read more

In which Bhanu "excavated a space for [this] body" and I stuck my toe in.

Bhanu asked me to speak about “compacted”, I think, because of something I said to her recently in a late night email regarding some piece of language in her forthcoming Humanimal. The word I was referring to in terms of “the compacted” looks like a neologism, when in fact it is an old word originating in another tongue. And yet, I think it has fallen into sufficient disuse as to now be a kind of neologism. The inferred definition (consider definition as that which gives something shape by exacting form out of larger masses of shape), the look and feel of the word, yields a sense of the compressed over time, of that which is overlaid rapidly and lightly like in such structures as wings, and also that which is simultaneously exposed. The technical definition of this word and the biological system it enacts in its sentence sits at an angle to the actual context of the sentence, the words that make images there. It is, technically, a bit out of joint with the sentence which, instead of making it an unsuitable word choice—I think that was the what we were discussing in the email) rather creates the entire quality of movement of the sentence and the sentence’s image—not so much syntactically, but organically. This one word and this sentence are so important because it a gestative moment in the text supporting the central figure—or the central half-figure of a hybrid subject—in the book.

It was easy to speak of this word choice with Bhanu and use my words to refer to it—compacted, and by which I also meant impacted—but outside of that I froze. It is easy for me to plug my words and idea-clusters into B’s work like graphing live tissue from one organism into another. But outside of my body and on their own, these word-tissues shut down, disconnected from a larger living system. Read more

This is a series of five programs on the experience and testimony of those who fight in armed conflicts around the globe. The series is called "How We Fight" as a reference to the original WWII era Frank Capra motivation/propaganda series "Why We Fight" which was produced to win over American public sentiment towards entry into the war.

We replace "why" with "how," meaning how do they get along, make do, struggle with their roles and actions, rationalize or question themselves. As noncombatants we struggle to find rhetoric and action which will influence policy positively and progressively. At the same time we want to learn about the experience and thinking of combatants of all sides. We also wish to question the categories that create false images of actual people.

From Sept 25 thru Nov 23 five programs take place at
Artists' Television Access
992 Valencia
San Francisco, CA

for film descriptions please visit http://www.atasite.org/

schedule as follows

THU Sept 25th
HOW WE FIGHT Program 1: Iraqi Short Films
 Iraqi Short Films by Mauro Andrizzi (Argentina, 2008, 94 min)

THU Oct 9th
HOW WE FIGHT Program 2: Conscripts
Interviews with My Lai Veterans  by Joseph Strick, (USA, 1971, 22 minutes)
 Clean Thursday  by Aleksandr Rastorguev (Russia, 2002, 45 minutes)

THU Oct 30th
HOW WE FIGHT Program 3: Terrorists
 Notes of a Kurdish Rebel by Stefano Savona (France, 2005, 78 minutes)
 November by Hito Steyerl (Germany, 2004, 24 minutes)

SUN Nov 9th
HOW WE FIGHT Program 4: Peacekeepers
 Crazy by Hedy Honigmann (Holland, 1999, 97 minutes)

and pending confirmation from the distributor
SUN Nov 23
HOW WE FIGHT PROGRAM 5: Mercenaries 
 Warheads  Romuald Karmaker, (Germany, 1992, 182 minutes) Read more