Weekly Mulch: Oil Spill Could Bring Mass Extinction to the Gulf Coast

Friday 04 June 2010

by: Sarah Laskow   |  The Media Consortium

A cap placed over a severed pipe is siphoning some oil from the broken BP well in the Gulf Coast, the company said today. The company's CEO said this morning on CBS that it was possible that this fix could capture up to 90% of the oil, but that it will take 24 to 48 hours to understand how well this solution is working. Adm. Thad Allen, the former Coast Guard chief and oil spill incident commander, called the cap "only a temporary and partial fix."

Despite the capping procedure, it became clear this week that the onrush of oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon rig will not cease any time soon. Even in the best case scenario, thousands of barrels of oil will still flow into the ocean. Destruction is already spreading along the Gulf Coast, and before the oil stops leaking, species might be extinct and industries destroyed.

In the coming months—it’s not clear how many—oil will continue to pollute the Gulf of Mexico. BP and the Obama administration are talking about August as the end of this crisis, but other experts have projected that the spill could last until Christmas.

As Justin Elliott reports for TPMMuckraker, BP told the government it could handle a spill much larger than this one. In the initial exploration plan for the well, BP claimed "it was prepared to respond to a blowout flowing at 300,000 barrels per day -- as much as 25 times the rate of the current spill," Elliott writes. BP cannot, it turns out, respond to a blowout flowing less than 20,000 barrels per day, and the consequences for the Gulf communities are only beginning to emerge. The first casualty will be Gulf ecosystem and its inhabitants. The second casualty will be the livelihood of Gulf communities that have depended on fish, shrimp, and oysters for survival.

How Long?

In 1979, another company released torrents of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, in much shallower waters than where BP was drilling. As Rachel Slajda writes for TPMMuckeraker, the clean-up methods the oil industry relied on three decades ago are similar to the technology BP is trying now. The Ixtoc spill was comparatively easy to address; yet it still took 10 months to stop.

During that spill, the nearest state, Texas, had two months to prepare for the oil to hit shore, and still “1,421 birds were found with oiled feathers and feet,” Slajda writes. The fishing industry escaped much damage, but the tourism industry lost 7-10% of its business.

Dead Fish

In Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, and other states affected by this spill, fish, fowl, restaurateurs, and oystermen won't get off easy. As Care2 reports, the National Wildlife Federation has already documented the deaths of more than 150 threatened or endangered sea turtles and of 316 seabirds (“mostly brown pelicans and northern gannets”).

And BP is trying to keep images of the animal victims away from the public. Julia Whitty, reporting from Louisiana, writes for Mother Jones:

All up and down this shoreline angry and scared people told me some scary and infuriating stories in the past few days. I heard about the the dead and dying wildlife we're never going to see because the victims are being carted away to early responder ships and to inaccessible buildings onshore. I've seen some of those photographs which can't be shown (according to BP's new orders) of dolphins swimming through thick gunky oil, struggling sperm whales trailing wakes a mile long in thick gunky oil, dead jellyfish in gunky oil.

 

Extinction

The impact of the oil spill goes beyond those individual bodies, though. As Inter Press Service reports, environmentalists and scientists “are beginning to reckon with the reality of a massive annihilation of sea creatures and wildlife.”

“You could potentially lose whole species, have extinction events,” Michael Blum, a Tulane ecology professor told IPS. “Brown pelicans were just taken off the endangered species list. On this threshold, a big dieback and mortality event, they would be pushed back into a situation where they could be endangered.” Also at Care2, Jay Holcomb, Executive Director of the International Bird Rescue Research Center, demonstrates a brown pelican being de-oiled, her feathers shampooed with Dawn detergent, her head and pouch cleaned with Q-tips.

Livelihoods Destroyed

For generations, Gulf Coast residents made their living by fishing. Their fishing grounds are now off-limits. Some have found short-term work with BP fighting the oil. But those jobs come with new hazards.

Some clean-up workers have reported dizziness, nausea, and shortness of breath that they think comes from exposure to chemical dispersants. BP is not providing safety gear that would clean the air workers breathe and has threatened to fire clean-up workers who bring their own, Colorlines reports.

In the long-term, Gulf Coast fishermen may have no source of income and will have to abandon their homes and professions.

“It’s a way of life,” shrimper Dean Blachard told Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman this week. “They destroyed a way of life, a way of life that if you take it away too long, you can’t learn this in a school. This is passed from generation to generation, so the daddy teaches the son, and the son teaches his son. And, you know, once the chain is broke, you’re never going to get it back.”

It’s understandable that the residents of the Gulf Coast might want BP to pay for the damage. At The Nation, Chris Hayes reveals that BP could be on the hook for mitigation, the cash value of injured property, and for punitive damages–all beyond the cost of cleanup itself. But, as Zygmunt J. B. Plater, a law professor who chaired a legal task force on the Exxon Valdez spill, explains:

“In Alaska, most of the damage was suffered by communities who had their quality of life destroyed, and there’s no way to put a dollar value on that.”

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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June 3, 2010

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Caught in the oil

A short entry - AP Photographer Charlie Riedel just filed the following images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana's East Grand Terre Island. As BP engineers continue their efforts to cap the underwater flow of oil, landfall is becoming more frequent, and the effects more evident. (8 photos total)

A bird is mired in oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

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A Brown Pelican sits in heavy oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) #

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A pair of Brown Pelicans, covered in oil, sit on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast, Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)#

4

A sea bird soaked in oil sits in the surf at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) #

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A Brown Pelican is seen on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) #

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A bird covered in oil flails in the surf at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) #

7

A Brown Pelican is mired in heavy oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) #

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A Brown Pelican covered in oil sits on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) #

>via: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/caught_in_the_oil.html

Reporters Dispute Israeli Account of Raid

By ROBERT MACKEY

Updated | 5:02 p.m. On Thursday, Al Jazeera English broadcast an interview with Jamal Elshayyal, one of the channel’s journalists who was on board the Mavi Marmara on Monday when it was intercepted by Israeli commandos enforcing a naval blockade on Gaza.

In his account of the start of the raid, which left nine activists dead and has sparked calls for an independent investigation, Mr. Elshayyal insisted that the Israelis had fired live ammunition at the ship from the air before commandos landed on the boat and said that he had seen someone shot and killed by a bullet that hit the top of his head. He said, in part:

As soon as this attack started, I was on the top deck and within just a few minutes there were live shots being fired from above the ship, from above, from where the helicopters were. [...]

The first shots that were fired were either some sort of sound grenades, there was some tear gas that was fired as well as rubber-coated bullets. They were fired initially and the live bullets came roughly about five minutes after that.

 

Asked if the shots fired at the ship by the Israeli forces had seemed to come from ships nearby or the helicopters above, Mr. Elshayyal said:

It was evident there was definitely fire from the air, because one of the people who was killed was clearly shot from above — he was shot, the bullet targeted him at the top of his head. There was also fire coming from the sea as well. Most of the fire initially from the sea was tear gas canisters, sound grenades, but then it became live fire. After I finished filing that last report and I was going down below deck one of the passengers who was on the side of the deck holding a water hose — trying to hose off, if you will, the advancing Israeli navy — was shot in his arm by soldiers in the boats below. [...]

There is no doubt from what I saw that live ammunition was fired before any Israeli soldier was on deck. What I saw, the sequence of events that took place, there was a pool camera, so reporters took it in turns to file, so after I had done my first file, I turned around to see what was going on and there were several shots fired. In fact, one of the helicopters at the front of the ship, you could almost see the soldiers pointing their guns down through some sort of hole or compartment at the bottom side of the helicopter and firing almost indiscriminately without even looking where they were firing. And those bullets were definitely live bullets.

Mr. Elshayyal’s account, of course, is only one part of the puzzle, and it will not be accepted easily by people who see his network as biased against Israel. That said, now that the accounts of activists and journalists who were detained by Israel after the raid are starting to be heard, it is clear that their stories and that of the Israeli military do not match in many ways.

On Thursday, Today’s Zaman, an English-language newspaper in Turkey, reported that the president of the Turkish aid group that helped to organize the flotilla said that a photographer working for the group “was shot in the forehead by a soldier one meter away from him.” Bulent Yildirimhe, the president of the aid organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (known in English as the I.H.H.), told the newspaper on Thursday after he returned from Israel: “Our Cevdet [Kiliclar], he is a press member. He has become a martyr. All he was doing was taking pictures. They smashed his skull into pieces.” The newspaper added:

Kevin Ovenden of Britain, an activist on the ship that arrived in İstanbul on Thursday, also said a man who had pointed a camera at the soldiers was shot directly through the forehead with live ammunition, with the exit wound blowing away back of his skull.

In another report, the newspaper said that Israeli officials had confiscated images taken by one of its photographers in the flotilla:

A photojournalist from Today’s Zaman Kursat Bayhan who was on board an international aid convoy for Gaza said he tried to hide a flash disk which included the photos from the moments of Israeli attack on the convoy under his tongue to prevent Israeli authorities from seizing it but his effort failed during a medical examination.

The report added, “Bayhan said the journalists in the ship including him tried to protect the video footage and photos they took,” after the ships were seized by Israeli commandos, but “all the materials of the press members, including their passports and identity cards, were taken away.”

The way these accounts diverge from that of Israel’s military would seem to make an independent investigation into the events crucial. That is particularly true since, as The Lede noted on Wednesday, Israel is apparently in possession of much more video evidence than it has yet released.

In a post making the case that Israel should not conduct that inquiry, Noam Sheizaf, an Israeli journalist and blogger, pointed out that journalists in the flotilla seem to have left Israeli custody without any of the video they shot during the raid that might bolster their accounts.

Israel has confiscated some of the most important material for the investigation, namely the films, audio and photos taken by the passengers [and] journalists on board and the Mavi Marmara’s security cameras. Since yesterday, Israel has been editing these films and using them for its own PR campaign. In other words, Israel has already confiscated most of the evidence, held it from the world and tampered with it. No court in the world would [trust] it to be the one examining it.

Israel Flotilla Attack

THURSDAY, JUN 3, 2010 17:55 ET

Captured and detained by Israel, an American tells his story

After two days in an Israeli jail, 64-year-old Paul Larudee speaks out

BY ANIKA ANAND

YouTube

Paul Larudee

Sixty-four-year-old Paul Larudee, an American citizen and longtime pro-Palestinian activist, was on board one of the ships carrying humanitarian relief to Gaza that was raided by the Israeli navy on Monday. He dove into the Mediterranean Sea, only to be captured and held in an Israeli prison for two days.

This was not Larudee's first brush with Israeli authorities, but it was easily his most dramatic. He spoke with Salon about the raid and his captivity this afternoon from Greece, where he arrived after being released by Israel.

At around 4 a.m. on Monday, Larudee's ship was boarded by as many as 500 Israeli soldiers. After the ship's captain called an alert, Larudee immediately walked out onto the deck and found that Israeli soldiers had broken the windows of the wheelhouse (the area where the captain controls the ship) in an attempt to take command of the vessel. As Larudee and several others tried to defend the wheelhouse, Israeli soldiers tased him twice so that he would back away from the area. He said he offered no resistance and just let his body go limp.

"I have never struck anyone in more than 20 years," he said. "I was beaten. There is black and blue all over my body. They inflicted pain on me on a frequent basis because I did not recognize their authority."

Everyone on all of the ships was completely unarmed, he said. However, on the Turkish ship -- where the civilian fatalities occurred -- some passengers clashed with the soldiers and tried to beat them up as they descended on the ship. (Larudee was on a different vessel.) "But that is akin to what the passengers on the hijacked 9/11 did to hijackers who had taken the aircraft," he said. "In other words, they resisted someone who was invading their ship."

After some time, Larudee decided to jump off the ship and to try to swim away from the Israeli forces.

"I knew it would be a way to slow down what they were doing," he said. "It caused the ship to stop for an hour or possibly longer and it kept another ship occupied for several hours actually."

He hoped this would create a diversion that would allow another ship to make its way to Gaza with the humanitarian aid. "It was worth doing that, but I paid a price for it."

When the Israeli forces picked him up, Larudee said, he was severely beaten and tied to a mast at the stern of their ship. His legs and hands were bound as he was subjected to the hot sun in wet soaking clothes for four hours. He said his body almost went into shock from the extreme hot and cold conditions.

The soldiers refused to release him unless he told them his name. He repeatedly refused, but said he would cooperate only if they released him from the mast. They finally agreed and took him below deck. "For the remainder of the trip to the port, we got along fine," he said.

When on land, Larudee was taken to the processing area, but refused to cooperate with authorities, who wanted him to say that he entered the country illegally. "This happened at 18 miles at sea, which is well beyond their own territorial waters, or anyone's territorial waters," he said. "We were in international waters. We weren't violating anyone's sovereignty or breaking any rules that we knew of, even by their standards."

More beating ensued. Larudee, who again let his body go limp, said he was carried by nylon restraints, which were placed on his arms and legs. They cut into his skin, causing more contusions and deep pain. He was carried into an ambulance and taken to a hospital, but wasn't treated. He said he believes he was taken there because the Israeli soldiers didn't want the media to see his black eye, pronated joints, bruised jaw and body contusions.

Then, he was transported to the hospital ward of a prison, and eventually into an isolated cell. He was forbidden to speak with other prisoners, denied an attorney, a phone call, and access to television, radio, paper, pencils -- anything else that would connect him to the outside world. A diabetic, Larudee was eventually granted a request to be moved to a cell with windows and some air circulation.

He spent a total of two days in the prison, and on the second day, was granted a 10-minute meeting with a representative from the U.S. embassy. Before the meeting, he was given a long-sleeve shirt to wear, but refused to put it on.

On the third day, the captain of Larudee's boat, a Greek national who was sharing the same prison cell, met with the representative from his embassy. The Greek embassy official helped arrange for Laurudee to leave Israel for Greece. After arriving at the airport for his flight, Larudee was told that Israeli authorities wouldn't permit him to go directly to Athens. Instead, they insisted that he fly first to Istanbul, then sign a release. Larudee refused to cooperate and was once again subjected to a beating by Israeli soldiers.

"But this time they did it in front of 30 to 40 other prisoners, who had seen similar things," he said. "They went nuts."

An all-out brawl began and some prisoners were badly beaten, Larudee said.

Those who had arranged for Larudee's transport to Greece eventually intervened and negotiated with airport officials. Larudee was finally allowed to leave Israel. He's now in Greece, where he says he's staying with friends who are taking care of him. He is scheduled to fly home to the states on June 11.

"A lot of Americans are looking at Israel through rose-colored glasses," he said. "Israel is not a demon, but it is not being held accountable for its actions, and when you do that, it allows bad things, very bad things, to happen."

• >via: http://www.salon.com/news/israel_flotilla_attack/index.html?story=/news/feature/2010/06/03/paul_larudee_flotilla_account

================================

 

 

Three American Subplots in Flotilla Drama

By ROBERT MACKEY

Dogan Family/Hurriyet, via Associated PressA 2008 family photograph of Furkan Dogan, a Turkish-American activist killed on Monday.

On Thursday, Turkish and American officials confirmed that one of the nine activists killed in an Israeli commando raid on Monday on a ship challenging Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza was an American citizen.

As my colleagues Sabrina Tavernise and Michael Slackman report, Turkish news agencies “identified the American as Furkan Dogan, 19, who was born in the United States before returning to Turkey with his family as a young child.” The Anatolia news agency reported that an autopsy showed that Mr. Dogan had been shot at close range, once in the chest and four times in the head.

Another American who was on one of the boats in the flotilla, Edward Peck, a retired diplomat, described his experience of the raid an interview with NPRon Wednesday after he returned home to Maryland. Mr. Peck explained told Steve Inskeep of NPR that he was not on the largest ship in the flotilla, the Mavi Marmara, where activists were shot and killed:

I was on a much smaller ship that had sailed from Athens. Four o’clock in the morning we awakened to have the commandos already on board. They’d come up very quietly on their little boats – their Zodiacs – with just enough time to get a small passive resistance effort started, try to keep them out of the wheel house and away from the engine room.

 

Mr. Peck, 80, also gave this account of the raid to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now this week:

Mr. Peck who had a long career in the American State Department, has been a critic of American foreign policy for many years. In an interview with Fox News on Sept. 15, 2001 he suggested that the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington had come in response to U.S. policies. After video surfaced in 2008 of Rev. Jeremiah Wright referencing Mr. Peck’s remarks in that interview during a sermon about 9/11, Michael Getler of PBS transcribed part of the former diplomat’s exchange with David Asman of Fox News.

Mr. Peck: They came to do to us what they perceive, it doesn’t make them right, but what they perceive is we’ve been doing the same thing now for a long time in various parts of the world. It doesn’t make them right or us wrong. Don’t misunderstand me. But the only thing anybody has to

Mr. Asman: I just have to stop you. We’ve been doing the same thing around the world?

Mr. Peck: Yeah. You want a list of the countries that we’ve bombed and invaded over the last 25 years?

Mr. Asman: What country, in what country have we rammed a plane loaded with fuel through a known civilian center such as was done this week? Excuse me, Ambassador, but I can’t think of a precedent for this week anywhere in the world, certainly not one committed by the United States.

Mr. Peck: Certainly not, we’ve never had to do that because we have, you know, untrammeled military force. These people are terrorists. They resort to that because they can’t take us on, head on, nor should they even, well they can’t. But the point is that some of the things that we have done in the firm, honest belief that we are advancing the cause of justice, human rights, and freedom and all of that are not perceived that way by the people that we bomb. I offer you Panama. I give you Haiti. Take Cambodia. What about Iraq?

 The Facebook profile image of Emily Henochowicz, who was badly wounded at a protest on Monday.

As The Lede reported earlier this week, another American, a 21-year-old student named Emily Henochowicz, was badly wounded during a protest on Monday against the commando raid on the flotilla at a West Bank check point.

The most recent entry on Ms. Henochowicz’s Facebook page, posted on Monday afternoon, said simply, “Gaza on my mind.”

On Thursday, JTA reported:

An American Jewish art student lost an eye when she was hit by a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops at a pro-Palestinian demonstration. Emily Henochowicz, 21, of Maryland, was hit in the eye on Monday when she joined a protest at a Jerusalem roadblock against Israel’s deadly raid on an aid flotilla headed for the Gaza Strip, which killed nine people.

Spokesmen at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital, where she underwent an operation, confirmed Tuesday that she lost an eye in the disturbance. The military did not comment.

Witnesses told media outlets that Palestinian boys were throwing rocks at troops but said Henochowicz was standing aside and not participating in the violence.

JTA also explained that the American is student at Cooper Union in New York and “had participated in other nonviolent protests against Israel’s presence in the West Bank,” while studying art at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy.

Graphic, raw video shot during the protest on Monday just after Ms. Henochowicz was wounded showed her being carried away for treatment by fellow activists from the International Solidarity Movement.

>via: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/three-american-subplots-in-flotil...

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weirdovideos — January 19, 2008 — This tremendous educational documentary from the mid-1970's examines the priceless contributions of African-Americans to musical heritage, so closely tied to their unique history in the United States. From Africa upon slave ships captive immigrants brought with them melodies, cadences and rhythms that inarguably gave rise to music considered 'modern' today. 

Beginning with the genius Louis Armstrong's triumphant return to Ghana in the late 1950's, we trace the evolution of music from West Africa to the Virginia colonies of the early 1600's. Over the next 400 years, as this distinct root of American culture takes hold, incredible clips of filmed performances by Mahalia Jackson, Josephine Baker, Bessie Smith, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, and Duke Ellington illustrate the black experience.

Contemporary musicians such as Nina Simone, BB King, Cannonball Adderly (w/ Joe Zawinal - Mercy, Mercy, Mercy), and Sly & the Family Stone, along with a funky-ass filmed number from an as-yet-undocumented-on-the-internet off-Broadway production called "The Me Nobody Knew" punctuate the memory of the past, the spontaneity of the moment and determination for the future. 

See more at: 
http://www.weirdovideo.com

Deadline
September 15, 2010
(Midnight, PT)

 

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."

                                                                                - Alfred Hitchcock       

 

Something's wrong. And if it isn't righted soon, it will most definitely cause the death of your protagonist.  The only source of help is a cell phone that, for some reason, becomes useless.* Despite the high-tech times we live in, your protagonist is a lone, sitting duck. You have up to 1,500 words to resolve this nightmare. And that's just enough space to show off your knack for building suspense. The end's in sight. The clock is ticking. How does your protagonist get out of this alive? *The cell phone that suddenly has "no service" at that critical moment is a writing technique that's been done to death. Therefore, we're going to publish in The Verb, along with the winning story, your Most Ingenious Reasons a Cell Phone Becomes Useless.

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$100

  Story published in The Verb

 Story Opinion, also published in The Verb

 

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Entry Fee: None

Length may be up to 1,500 words. But not a word more. (Your contact information and your title are not included in the word count.)

Short stories only. No poetry, essays or plays.

Entries must be original and unpublished. Send only your best. Once submissions arrive, no revisions will be accepted.

Open to writers worldwide. (Payment to winners outside the USA are made via PayPal only.)

Limited. Only one story per author.

The judge for this contest is Elizabeth Guy. Read her bio on the Readers page.

Winner will be notified via email October 4, 2010. The winning story will be published in the October 2010 (Halloween) issue of The Verb. 

Only the winning entry receives a free Opinion. Read previous contest Opinions. Remaining entrants may order an Opinion after the results have been announced.

As always, complete contest results will be posted in the Contest Café.

Read about the judging process and our method of posting contest results.

 

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All contest entries must be submitted electronically. You may paste your text within the body of an email or send it as a .pdf, .doc, .docx or .rtf. We don't accept any other formats.

At the top of your submission, please provide:
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Cinema and the Carnivalesque—2011 SCMS Panel in New Orleans (03/10-03/13)

full name / name of organization: 

Maggie Hennefeld / Brown University

contact email: 

margaret_hennefeld@brown.edu

cfp categories: 

african-american

american

cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches

ethnicity_and_national_identity

film_and_television

gender_studies_and_sexuality

interdisciplinary

international_conferences

popular_culture

theory

twentieth_century_and_beyond

 

“Carnival is the place for working out, in a concretely sensuous, half-real and half-play-acted form, a new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerful social-hierarchical relationships of everyday life” (Mikhail Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics).

The comedic and socially transgressive mode that Mikhail Bakhtin defines as “carnivalesque” primarily concerns literary forms of representation. This panel poses the question: what would it mean for the cinematic medium to be carnivalesque?

Bakhtin emphasizes the following key criteria for the carnivalesque: the replacement of order with chaos; temporary reversals of social hierarchies (crownings and decrownings); aesthetic defamiliarization through parodic or grotesque modes; and dialogical forms of communication that efface any dominant, authorial voice and that seek to negotiate more democratic relationships between “reader” and “text.”

Possible topics:

How does cinema mediate the carnivalesque? What would be the key stylistic components of a carnivalesque narrative film? How do carnivalesque strategies differ between genres, production modes, geopolitical regions, and historical periods?

Do experimental and avant-garde films employ carnivalesque strategies in order to critique mainstream cinema? How does the carnivalesque enable cinema to transgress its own censorship (either governmental or self-regulatory)? Are carnivalesque films generally meta-cinematic and self-referential? Can they be realist? Do they depend on problematizing the “sovereign” position of their spectator?

How do carnivalesque films imagine their relationships with governmental and state politics? (For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque paradoxically both suspends and preserves the orders imposed by state sovereignty.) Can the carnivalesque film ever be merely aesthetic, or does it always assert an external political critique?

How do carnivalesque films initiate dialogue with embodied performances, such as global political protests, street theater, and celebratory festivals like Mardi Gras?

What are the boundaries of the carnivalesque? Where does it blur with parody, satire, and other humorous forms? Is there a dialogue between the carnivalesque’s mediation of comedy and its political engagement of social realities?

Bakhtin argues that the carnivalesque negotiates between old and new political orders. How does the carnivalesque interact with cinema’s uncanniness as a medium—the way that it projects the illusory movement of static and mummified images? What are the spectral politics of the carnivalesque in cinema and how do they respond to questions of social and political change?

What is the historical impact of carnivalesque cinema? How has it participated in propagandizing or condemning war and state violence? How do carnivalesque films dictate or substantially impact the way that we narrativize national and cultural histories?

Is carnivalesque cinema now in decline? If so, is this because its function has been displaced by other mediums such as television and the Internet? If not, where would we locate the carnivalesque both stylistically and geopolitically in contemporary cinema?

How does the carnivalesque mediate between different technological forms? Are there overlaps between the carnivalesque’s technological intermediation and global politics of the international system? How does the carnivalesque’s technological and stylistic hybridity interact with global, exilic, and diasporic politics of identity?

What political and theoretical methods—such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, queer theory, biopolitics, and political theories of state sovereignty—does the concept of the carnivalesque instantiate across and between its different cinematic examples?

When and where do carnivalesque films participate in challenging and redefining notions of media citizenship? Do these films expand norms for media citizenship when they subvert their own modes of address? Can the carnivalesque practice of media citizenship impact the governance of political citizenship? In other words, does it help drive “the conditions of equality, citizenship, and survival in the United States and around the world?”

Any other topics relevant to the question of cinema and the carnivalesque are welcome.

Some carnivalesque films to consider (please feel free to propose others):
The Great Dictator
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Team America: World Police
Buddha Bless America
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Zelig
Brazil
Chronicle of a Disappearance (and other films by Elia Suleiman)
La chinoise
Good Bye, Lenin!
Fellini’s Satyricon
Mandabi
The Garage (and other Soviet satires by Eldar Ryazanov)
Tampopo

Please send a 250-300 word abstract as a Word attachment to Margaret_Hennefeld@brown.edu no later than August 15th.

CALL FOR SHORT STORIES:

Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action invites African writers to submit stories on a queer African theme for publishing in a ground-breaking anthology.

Best new queer African short fiction

 

Call for submissions

We respectfully invite you to submit a piece of short fiction on a queer African theme for consideration for our anthology.

Let the African imagination take us beyond the limits of what facts can do.

The anthology’s host is Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA), the pioneering, highly regarded South African gay and lesbian archives, based at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. GALA’s primary work is to collect and present documentary evidence of the queer African experience. Accurate records play a crucial role in social justice for any marginalized group. But what about the role of the imagination?

Recent human rights violations against queer people in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Uganda represent a failure of the imagination. The arts can provide an antidote or at least an alternative to violent and repressive responses to diversity. GALA intends the anthology to show that there are many ways of being African and to encourage queer artistic expression and appreciation. Queer arts have often been the vanguard of progressive and transgressive culture, opening up or protecting space for freedom of expression for everyone. GALA anticipates that the anthology will challenge and contribute to mainstream discourses on both African artistic production and African sexuality.

Literary merit and an insightful response to the complexities of African queerness will guide the selection. By publishing world class writers (new and established), the anthology will be pushing open the doors for queer writing and talent. Writers need not identify as queer, but they do need to identify as African. The stories will be selected and edited by Makhosazana Xaba and Karen Martin.

GALA has a fine publishing record. It has been producing well-received books since 2005, and its recent Black Bull, Ancestors and Me, was granted honour status by the 2010 Stonewall Book Awards. GALA has secured publishing interest in the anthology, which will be distributed across Africa and internationally.

We would be honoured to consider your unpublished short fiction of between 1,000 and 5,000 words.

Please send it to queerafricanfiction@gmail.com by 30 June 2010. Provide a covering page with the title of the story, your first name and surname, your email address and a contact telephone number, and a bio of not more than 100 words. All submissions will be acknowledged. The selection will be made by 30 September 2010 for publishing in June 2011. The anthology will be launched at the 2011 Cape Town Book Fair. With writers’ permissions, all submissions will be archived by GALA and will be accessible to the archives’ many local and international users.

For more information email queerafricanfiction@gmail.com. Or find us on Facebook.

Makhosazana Xaba has published two books of poetry: these hands (Timbila, 2005) and Tongues of their Mothers (UKZN Press, 2008). Her short stories, essays and poetry have appeared in many anthologies. She regularly writes profiles of women artists, poets, playwrights, film makers and writers for the South African Labour Bulletin and is writing a biography of Noni Jabavu. Her four children’s books for the foundation and intermediate phases were published by Nutrend Publishers. In 2005 she won the Deon Hofmeyr Award for Creative Writing for her then unpublished short story, Running. She holds a Diploma in Journalism (with distinction) from the Werner Lamberz International Institute of Journalism and an MA in Writing (with distinction) from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Karen Martin is an emerging, recently published writer of short fiction. She is a professional editor and copy editor. She has initiated and developed several projects for Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action, including Balancing Act, a book and exhibition of South African LGBTI youth life stories, and Til the Time of Trial, a booklet featuring the prison letters of LGBTI and HIV/AIDS activist Simon Nkoli. She is the co-editor of Sex and Politics, a collection of essays, memoirs and archival documents about the South African LGBTI rights movement and the anti-apartheid struggle. She is a member of the GALA board of trustees.
*

 

Paul Mooney: An intergenerational dialogue.

{liberatormagazine.com feature}

"If you had a revolution in California you'd have to kill half the black people there."
~Paul Mooney

This joint is getting featured for two days. It's that good. Brothers and sisters, listen to Paul Mooney. By no means is he smooth or tactful with the wisdom he drops, but if you calm yourself, you can get it. You'll need to get to about the 5:00 minute mark before it starts getting good.

Mooney gives it honest and raw on Hollywood's brainwashing machine, the Elvis-Eminem-Al Jolson-Asher Roth phenomenon, black consciousness, intergenerational misunderstanding in our community, sell-outs, the allure of fame, definitions of success, how he fulfilled his life purpose, health versus wealth, "black Anglo-Saxons" (I knew they existed!), and more.

Keep It On The (Download)

Fisherman's wife breaks the silence

By Elizabeth Cohen, CNN

June 3, 2010 7:49 a.m. EDT

Sick fishermen keep silent

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Kindra Arneson believes her husband, other shrimpers were sickened by oil disaster cleanup
• She hesitated to speak out because BP hired her husband for cleanup
• One of her immediate goals is to persuade BP to give its workers masks

 

Venice, Louisiana (CNN) -- Kindra Arnesen's husband often calls while he's out on a shrimping trip, so she wasn't surprised to hear her cell phone ring the night of April 29 while he was on an overnight fishing expedition.

However, this time, her husband, David, wasn't calling to tell her about the day's catch or to wish their children Aleena and David Jr. a good night. He was calling to tell her he was sick, and the strange thing about it, so were men on the seven other shrimping boats working near his.

"I received several calls from him saying, 'This one's hanging over the boat throwing up. This one says he's dizzy, and he's feeling faint. Everybody's loading up their stuff, tying up their rigs and going back to the docks,'" Arnesen remembers.

Arnesen believes it was vapors from the oil and the dispersants from the BP Gulf oil disaster that made her husband and the other shrimpers sick. She says they were downwind of it, and the smell was "so strong they could almost taste it."

For several weeks, she hesitated to talk publicly about it. Like many fishermen who can no longer fish in the Gulf, her husband has signed a contract to work with BP to clean up the oil, and she doesn't want to bite the hand that puts food on her family's table.

Full coverage: Gulf Coast oil disaster

But now Arnesen, a 32-year-old "uneducated housewife" -- her words -- is breaking her silence and is encouraging others in her community do the same. After attending a lecture by Rikki Ott, a toxicologist who's worked with families affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, Arnesen decided to organize other wives to ask questions about the safety of working near the oil.

Her cell phone rings constantly.

"Hey, Theresa, how you doing?" she said, taking a call Tuesday morning. "Can you come to the meeting tonight?"

People don't want to talk. They're scared.
--Kindra Arneson

But Theresa can't come to the meeting, and Arnesen has come to expect such a response.

"People don't want to talk. They're scared," she says, of repercussions and consequences from BP. "Our financial situation lays in the palm of their hands."

"I don't believe in coincidence."

When David Arnesen reported that the other men were so sick they were cutting their shrimping trips short and heading home, his wife knew something strange was happening. Shrimpers work through illness, she says, because a trip cut short can cost a shrimper thousands of dollars.

She says the men had all the same symptoms at the same time -- vomiting, dizziness, headaches, shortness of breath. Could it be a coincidence?

"I don't believe in coincidence. It would be one thing if one of them got sick. It would maybe be OK if two got sick," she says. "When everyone's getting sick all at the same time, that's not coincidence"

When asked at a news conference Sunday about people getting sick while out on the Gulf, BP CEO Tony Hayward had his own theory.

"Food poisoning is clearly a big issue," HE said. "It's something we've got to be very mindful of."

Arnesen says there's no way her husband and the men on the other boats had fallen victim to food poisoning, noting the men were on eight boats and didn't eat the same food.

The night her husband became ill, Arnesen says, she tried to get him to come home like the other shrimpers, but he refused. He stayed out fishing from 6 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next morning, and came home so sick he collapsed into his recliner without eating dinner or saying hello to her or the children.

"It's a nasty cough. I literally woke him up over and over again," she says. "It didn't sound like he was getting enough air.

At first, David refused to see a doctor, but after three weeks of coughing and feeling weak, he agreed to go. His wife says he was diagnosed with respiratory problems and prescribed medicines, including an antibiotic and cough medicines.

She says while he's feeling better, he still doesn't have the energy he used to have.

"Here we are over a month later and he's still not completely well," she says.

Masks and marshes

Since CNN aired a story about her Tuesday night, Kindra Arnesen says she's received phone calls from as far away as Texas from people wanting to team up with her to protect coastal communities from the oil.

One of her immediate goals is to persuade BP to give its workers masks.

Graham MacEwen, a spokesman for BP, says the company isn't providing masks because their air monitoring shows there's no health threats to workers.

He denied Arnesen's accusations that BP has prevented workers from wearing their own masks, saying workers may do so as long as they read training materials on how to use a mask safely.

Arnesen is also working to have BP fund an effort to put sandbags along the marshes in her area to keep the oil out.

(Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal announced Wednesday that the White House has ordered BP to fund Louisiana's plan to dredge up walls of sand along its coast.)

Arnesen says she is indeed scared that her husband will lose her job now that she's speaking out.

"Am I scared? Yes," she said. "Anything that ever starts, starts with one. And if I have to be the one then I have to be the one," she says.

CNN's Trisha Henry and Tristan Smith contributed to this report.

South Africa/ Palestine: Is Gaza the Middle East's Soweto?

TNR/Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter and Boston University's Glenn Loury resume their series of blogging heads conversations, talking about Israel's recent attack on the blockade bursting, Gaza-bound aid flotilla, that ended with the deaths of 9 civilians - Aljazeera compiles the footage here. Losing some of his affable cool, Loury, clarifying that Zionism isn't Apartheid, goes on to provide a damn good basis for comparing Gaza to Soweto under Apartheid:

Money quote:

...in its time, the 60s, 70s and 80s, the South Western township of Johannesburg came to play a profound, metaphorical, symbolical, moral and political role in global politics. It represented something. And the thing that it represented is a historical force playing itself out at the Southern tip of the continent of Africa came in the fullness of time to be something that was not acceptable to the bulk of mankind.... something has been created, it's called Gaza. In the 21st century it looms in my imagination not unlike the way Soweto loomed in my imagination in the 20th century...

That's one side. Granted Gaza is so outside this blog's purview, yet a cinematic take on ongoing detente between the Israelis and the Palestinians that comes to mind is from Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai's Free Zone (2007). Specifically the scene in which 3 women: a half Jewish American (Natalie Portman), a Palestine-Arab (Hiam Abbass) and an Israeli taxi driver (Hana Laszlo), while driving past a portion of wall or fence or border indicating the separation of people, go on to lose themselves in the music coming from the car radio; lose themselves to some patch of common ground that, for a moment, breaks down the mental version of those walls, fences or borders that have separated them:

But in reality we have to ask ourselves what grievances are reinforcing some of those mental walls and why are they so formidable?  Noah Millman's post today over at the American Scene takes Israel's "horrific" actions out of the Krauthammer-TNR fact-bending blackhole and puts it in some irrationality explaining context:

Overwhelmingly, the sentiment among people I know in Israel was in favor of the Gaza war, in favor of the embargo and blockade, in favor of a policy of collective punishment against the people of Gaza. The reason is simple. From the perspective not only of the Israeli center but of people who consider themselves basically on the left, though not the far left, when Israel unilaterally left Gaza that meant the Gazans “got what they wanted” and left no basis for continued hostilities. The fact that, after the withdrawal, Hamas rained mortars and rockets down on Israeli territory, proved that Hamas had no “legitimate” political goals but was simply interested in destroying Israel and killing Jews. After that, whatever Gaza got, from their perspective, they had coming to them, and there’s nothing more to say. Israel’s policy-making no longer seems to me to be particularly related to concrete policy objectives at all. Neither the Lebanon war nor the Gaza war had actual military goals. Both were essentially wars for domestic consumption. Hezbollah and Hamas were firing rockets at Israel, and Israelis were understandably furious. “Something” had to be done about that, to let the Israeli public know that their leadership felt their fury. So the government did “something.” Outsiders criticized the disproportion of the response, but the point of the response was its disproportion – not because the only thing the enemy understood was force, but because, in the absence of any way to actually solve the problem, the only thing that would convince a domestic audience that the government felt the way they did about the situation was to respond with a fury proportionate to that of the electorate.

Reading Millman's piece I recalled what eminent Israeli filmmaker, Amos Gitai, said in this Senses of Cinema interview about the Israel's public domestic barometer, and while that barometer is stuck at endless war, what a free zone really means:

Yeah, I think that obviously the Middle East has had very short periods of reasonable thinking or moderation on both sides. Either one side or the other has managed to destabilize their options, consistently. When you had the moderate Israeli government, [Yitzhak] Rabin was shot and there was a series of suicide attacks in the city which moved the public to the right. And when you had openness on the Palestinian side, you had assertive and pretty forceful Israeli attitudes to that, so I think this Free Zone – the real one [a sprawling, tax-free marketplace in eastern Jordan where Jews and Arabs from neighbouring countries like Syria, Israel and Saudi Arabia hawk used cars] and the metaphorical one – are fragile. They are [both] about the day-to-day, about people trying to build relations that are not just warlike. I think the very fact that the two sides will agree to disagree without shooting each other – for me, that’s a beginning.