Tag: USA
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Bradley Manning’s Day In Court
Today, after almost 18 months in solitary confinement, having been denied access to lawyers, to family, to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, and even having been denied clothes, Bradley Manning will for the first time face a judge. At his pre-trial hearing he will be formally charged with – among other things – “Aiding…
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Jazz: An Unfinished Conversation (Race and Language in the Digital Age)
Jazz was – among other things – a century-long political conversation between Black Americans and White Americans. It was a musical, intellectual and spiritual conversation within a highly politicized social context whose axes were language, race and power. Jazz was also a conversation about technology, and about techno-cultures. To be specific, in jazz the conflict…
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Franky Rousseau Large Band – Terrific Jazz By Any Other Name
Last week a friend sent me a link to this provocative blog post by famed jazz trumpet player, Nicholas Payton, who argues that jazz is dead. To me this isn’t news, since I wrote the same thing in a lengthy piece in Toronto’s eyeweekly back in 1992. And like Payton, who is being berated by…
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Basketball Business as Black Revolution?
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is in trouble. The league locked out the players months ago, bargaining has failed, and now the players have disbanded their union and are taking the league to court to contest the most basic notions of player-league business relations. Things like player drafts and even the notion of ‘owning a…
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Playing Misty For Ringo (A Dove)
Here’s a little late night sax serenade for all you social media lovebirds…
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Free Bradley Manning!
Just a reminder that this courageous boy has been held in solitary confinement for over 8 months without charge by Obama’s government and against the Geneva Convention, without the right to meet with a lawyer in private, and without clothes for much of that time. Why? For showing the world what democracy looks like. Free…
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Occupy The Internet!
The OWS movement keeps growing. More and more people keep celebrating resistance, protesting against corporate greed, getting arrested, speechifying, and making excellent media. Yesterday some Egyptians who had been involved in the Tahrir Square revolution put in an appearance and further stoked the flames of inspiration. Huzzah! Yet I worry. For all their energy, the…
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Occupy Wall Street – The Bad, The Good and the Uncertain – Part 3
Part 3 – The Uncertain (previously: The Bad) (previously: The Good) Strangely enough I want to start with certainties. Knowing what I know about Occupy Wall Street should help me to know what I don’t know. So what am I reasonably certain about? I am certain that America is approaching the status of Police State,…
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Occupying Wall Street – The Bad, The Good and the Uncertain – Part 2
Part 2 – The Good (previously: The Bad) Saturday was a glorious fall day with blue skies and bright sunshine. At 3:30 pm I was in The New Schools’ Wollman Hall, having just given a talk on post-literate activism at the Mobility Shifts conference, when we started to hear the unmistakable sounds of the Global…
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Occupying Wall Street – The Bad, The Good and The Uncertain
PART 1 – The Bad Cops, cops and more cops. Cops on horses. Cops in vans. Cops on motorcycles. Cops on scooters. Cops in paddywagons. Cops on foot. Cops on bikes. Cops in portable security towers. Cops everywhere. Watching. Waiting. Working. Thoroughly controlling the park perimeter. So much so that entering the park felt a…
SOBOLTALK 