New film review, on Ann Turner’s great 1988 film Celia. Sadly ever-timely themes! Key ACAB moments! Streamable free!
landscapes 96 & 97.
Despite origins as a colony hacked from the hands other nations like so many others across the globe, buoyed up by the economics of genocide and slavery, the occupiers managed the sleight-of-hand of claiming themselves natives and expunging their own empire. Independence, here, meant not a restoration of power to those who came before, but the same system of subjugation and despoliation under new management. The land was now ostensibly theirs to make over for their own ill-conceived purposes.
Spectacle Radio ep.56 :: 06.01.20 :: Throw Away Your Laptops, Rally in the Streets
(Born in Flames) // Mark Stewart and the Maffia - Jerusalem (Handsworth Songs) // Sam Waymon - Seduction (Ganja and Hess) // Diamanda Galas - This is the Law of the Plague (Silence = Death) // David Wojnarowicz - (Silence = Death) // Trevor Mathison (Handsworth Songs) // Society Waits for You (Society) // Red Krayola - End Titles from Born in Flames // Can - Gomorrha (The Last Days of Gomorrah) // (Song of the Shirt) // (The People’s Account) // - // Brian Mcomber - Afronauts // Tony Rémy - protest montage (A Passion of Remembrance) // Carl Vine - An Island (Bedevil) // (A Different Image) // (Drylongso) // Mukul - ALGO-RHYTHM // Smarty - Le chapeau du chef (Le President) // 911 Is a Joke (Welcome II the Terrordome) // Joseph Charles - The Neighborhood Bobby (A Passion of Remembrance) // Tony Rémy - Main Titles from A Passion of Remembrance // Mark Stewart and the Maffia - Jerusalem (Handsworth Songs) (reprise) // Kimyan Law - Run Ames (Naked Reality) // (Drylongso) // J. J. Johnson - Top of the Heap // Wasis Diop - Ramatu (Hyenas) // End Titles from Welcome II the Terrordome
More well-organized, disciplined protests lead by a contingent bearing tricolor Pan-African (or Black Liberation) flags wound through Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights today. We stopped for about an hour at a Police Precinct with past blood on its hands, where increasing numbers of police stared down protesters chanting “Defund the NYPD” and “Say His Name: George Floyd”. If anyone got too close to the police barricades, protest organizers urged them back, and everyone returned peacefully to Fulton St. afterwards without any conflict moving beyond the verbal. At the very end, the last speaker bid everyone to “Stay calm. Stay revolutionary” and everyone dispersed, as far as I could tell. I know there’s ongoing opportunistic looting in SoHo and Times Square as we speak, but know that that’s far from the whole story of how these protests go down. Most are out here because we demand change.
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Jun
02
Updates from the Brooklyn protests of the death of George Floyd, police violence, and the vast structural inequality that continues to blight our society. For the nearly two hours I was there, the protests were orderly and the police response confined to diverting traffic and closing streets, seemingly to give the protesters space. Only a short distance further down Flatbush, after I’d gone, they began to divert marchers and try to fragment the crowd, and violence erupted, leading to several burning police vans, and two others that forced their way through the crowd. All I saw was the warranted anger and a well organized, well attended protest.
Admiral’s Row, 1864-2016 — Underwater New York
Last October, on the opening day of the sprawling new Wegmans supermarket in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Nathan Kensinger & I projected part of our then work-in-progress film about Admiral’s Row onto the new constructions that replaced it. If you didn’t catch the documentation video of that earlier, it’s currently featured in Works on Water no.16 along with many other great projects related to our waterways and developed through the Works on Water Residency last summer.
As part of the continuing evolution of this project, it will also appear in installation in an upcoming exhibition in the late summer or early fall, and is coming to a screen near you in completed film form soon.
