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for future reference…
(via communitythings)
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WORSE THAN BARK Two-month old Bengal tiger cub Tily roars in an enclosure at the animal refuge Fundación Refugio Salvaje (Furesa) on the outskirts of San Salvador, El Salvador. (Photo: Ulises Rodriguez / Reuters via The Guardian)
Spirit Animal. Roar.
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Can there be anything more outrageous than the idea that a healthy, grown woman, full of life and passion, must deny nature’s demand, must subdue her most intense craving, undermine her health and break her spirit, must stunt her vision, abstain from the depths and glory of sex experience until a ‘good’ man comes along to take her unto himself as a wife.
—Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 1910. (via monaeltahawy)
Girl, preach.
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Jacob checks his phone. There’s a text message from his wife to be. It reads: Ani ohevet otcha. Lila tov. He smiles and shows it to Maya. She nods and says, ‘Tu amore. Bueno.’
‘I thought you didn’t speak Spanish,’ he says.
‘I lied.’
‘This doesn’t bode well for our friendship. How can I believe anything you say?’ he asks.
‘The thing I told you about the diminished fifth is true,’ Maya says. ‘Listen to that chord. Listen to how it vibrates. It’s like the sound of a heart breaking, that tension…it’s orgasmic.’
‘When you put it like that, Jacob tells her, I retract everything I just said about not trusting you.’
Jacob nods to the music. ‘It does sound like a heart breaking.’
‘I read somewhere that minor chords and the diminished fifth were outlawed in Europe. Before Mozart. It was a sound that incited people to licentiousness,’ she slurs on the suffix.
‘So basically, everyone broke out and had sex when they heard it.’— I haz a short story up on the super cool literary journal Storyscape. You can read the rest of my untruth there among other awesome writers… including Terrence Hayes!! -
Kanye has words for days — words that don’t agree with each other, ambiguous pronouns, homonyms, insults, “Strange Fruit” quotes. There are ideas in “New Slaves” and “Black Skinhead” that are echoed in the editorial pages of The New York Times, but Kanye’s songs give them volume and heart. They are a reminder of what music can do — and the isolation artists feel when they say things we don’t want to hear. People need to stop saying hip-hop is dead. There are brave people making it, and we should be proud
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So you may have heard about the harassment of negroes and hispanics by police officers before. In New York City they’ve given it a fancy brand name and call it “Stop and Frisk” — but ask many people of color and they’ll tell you they’ve dealt with it for years. In the current trial about the policy the sitting judge weighed in yesterday
“A lot of people are being frisked or searched on suspicion of having a gun and nobody has a gun,” Judge Scheindlin, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said on Monday during closing arguments in the trial. “So the point is: the suspicion turns out to be wrong in most of the cases.”
You mean targeting brown and black folks and getting it wrong 90% of the time is a bad thing? That’s justmadness. Between that and the recent NYPD statistics showing that the incredibly necessary practice of Stop and Frisk which keeps everyone so safe had dropped 50% and by some sort of black magic (get it?) crime also dropped.
MADNESS I say.
So in an effort to call shenanigans to all of this and raise awareness of the problematic practice I put out an open call to artists, activists, lawmakers, and anyone who agreed this is a problem. I was joined by Pittsburgh rapper Jasiri X and Florida artist (who produced the track) Willie Evans Jr. and a bunch of personalities like NY Times best seller Baratunde Thurston, Daily Show Co-Creator Lizz Winstead, New York Councilman Jumaane Williams and many more. Check out the finish product and let me know what you think. And if you enjoy it please feel free to share the holy crap out of it. We’re hoping to make it clear that this sort of harassment is never okay.
Glad to participate in this with Elon James White, Lynne Procope, Caits Meisner, Baratunde Thurston, Lizz Winstead, and all of #teamblackness and so many more… It takes a nation of committed citizens to agitate change.
Will you join in our crusade?
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Slams happen mostly in poetry bars. This Wednesday, we poets are doing something very different. We’re caught in a specific sort of theatre. It is the space in Times Square where Tom Cruise stood, circling, in Vanilla Sky. We have the sense of being airily trapped in a glass bottleneck. Brightly dressed people slip past like hard candies poured out of a jar. The sun’s about to go down, which dresses the billboards in a delicate grey haze. Their neons, built to burn through daylight, to dazzle you half blind in the dark, visibly brighten every second like stop-motion flowers. One of our guys—a slender brown-haired man, dapper in turquoise pants, puts one hand on his stomach, leans back, and starts us off by singing. We feign surprise; we set the tone by being warm. People move away, then naturally form a circle, and their phones come out. When he’s done, a scary hush seems to fall because no one knows what happens next. Then one of our girls rushes into the circle, talking feverishly and gloriously, working the circle, her energy enormous.Mara Jebsen writes about her PUP adventure on 3quarksdaily.
This is PUP.
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rip in peace tumblr
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Spirit Guide part deux…
(via pierrebennu)
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The inimitable Grant Snider strikes again, with the day jobs of famous poets – including Jack Kerouac (railroad worker), Charles Bukowski (mailman), Emily Dickinson (cat-keeper), and T. S. Eliot (bank clerk.)
LOL. True Story.
