blue sky II
i say II because now there are more blue skies since, hardly to anyone's surprise, i have not written in 4 months and april has sprung upon us. i take full credit for that pun.today at Ohio University there was a conference on Hip Hop and sustainability featuring a performance by Detroit artists Invincible and Finale and guest speaker Majora Carter and guest poets the Affrilachian Poets . kudos to all those at OU who pulled this event together. in conversation with a professor and environmental activist here about the poor turn out, she reminded me there is always a poor turn out. and it's true, i am always disappointed at the poor turn out of the events i go to, because i think to myself, there are 20,000 undergrads here....and there were maybe 25 of us who participated in this awesome conference. but, this professor said to me, what can you but just keep doing what you're doing? and i think she's right. so i want to shout out to those few souls and thank them for their presence because it mattered.
a few comments from the day: Majora Carter gave a fabulous presentation on the changes she's helped engender in the South Bronx and i definitely applaud the awesome work she has done. but i simply have to share my growing concern about the image of Obama as a superhero. i hear comments made all the time about "before" and "now" as if "now" that we have an Obama administration, roses have suddenly lost their thorns and the pots of gold at the end of rainbows really have been found. i've seen shirts with Obama in a superman uniform and a big O on his chest. and in her talk today, Carter gave another acronym for Obama something about americans being able to behave how they should..i don't remember it but it was yet another "joke" that suggests the 9 clouds that surround Obama. and whenever i want to criticize Obama people seem to shrink back at me, but might it be possible that it's the office of the White House itself that will never really change? can the master's tools destroy the master's house? that's a question for another day, but let me post two things - one is that i was really disappointed in NPR last week because each morning when i woke up to the news, i heard not a word about the protests in London during the G20 or in Strasbourg, Kehl & Baden Baden over NATO even though these protests are extremely significant because people are fed up with this system. and all they are doing is trying to save the same system that got us here while the people are calling for a whole new system.
i've also seen buttons with the sign of the peace inside the O in Obama's name. this is dangerous brainwashing. please, we must be diligent.
apart from that concern of mine, both workshops i attended were excellent but i'll wrap up with this: at the spoken word workshop, we did an exercise that began with a line being drawn on the board. we were asked what do we see? of course, i immediately began to wonder what a line represents symbolically...the first thought that popped in my head was Frost's poem the mending wall but i spun off from that and my actual answer was something crazy like "i see death and destruction, because you know, lines are false the lines that divide the earth are false and they divide..." and once i realized what the exercise really was supposed to be, i have laughed at myself all day. the leader said "wow, we really do have some abstract thinkers in this group...does anyone see a snake stretched out in the sun? how about a stick on the pavement?" and i just laughed and laughed...i think grad school is really dragging me away from reality...
and this is why i don't blog that often...there are too many links on this post. so have fun with that.
in solidarity.
posted by leah v @ 7:37 PM
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