Alexandria Brown

"For those relegated to non-being, to even appear is a violent act."

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:58:18 -0400

“For those relegated to non-being, to even appear is a violent act.”

- George Ciccariello-Maher (via ninjabikeslut)

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Wed, 15 May 2013 20:56:00 -0400

Artaud in the Red Studio by Camilo Ramirez. 2009

Sun, 12 May 2013 18:29:00 -0400

Artaud in the Red Studio by Camilo Ramirez. 2009

2004 (Age 17)

Sun, 12 May 2013 01:15:00 -0400

My mother and I take Nicolette to the outlet mall and she chooses a pink Barbie lunchbox and a pink Barbie backpack and pink velcro shoes with pink lace socks. She picks a fallen silk flower off the floor and gives it to the woman at the cash register. She sniffles and I talk to my mother about my sister, she’s sweet. “And then, hell, then they grow up,” all disappointing nods in my direction. She won’t take the twenty-percent off coupon, it’s nine pee em, for chrissakes, and the skinny woman in the bag lane has a bleach ponytail on the top of her head; she’s smacking something in her mouth at us with her arms folded. We walk out of the store after the cashier drops a thousand things and flushes and sniffs. “Go on, now,” we’re reminded, and as we walk away the skinny woman flings herself against the doors. “Somebody SHOOT ME already…” my mother’s hands swoop down around my sister’s ears but stop a little short. We talk about what it will be like to start kindergarten.

That day, the Tampa City Council walked out on a man invited to give their invocation; he’s from the Florida Council of Atheists. “Human problems, the solutions to these problems can only come from human beings…” row of heads below the podium are bowed for an amen, it doesn’t come. All frowns but he keeps talking.

I started crying at my grandmother’s house when my grandfather told me God was on George Bush’s side, and my grandmother gave me her Power of Focus book and a pair of sunglasses she found while she was looking for it. Self Help/Inspiration. She wants to take me to buy some clothes and she’ll want me to buy a little jewelry, now, just a little won’t hurt. the next day at work, we sit in the office lunchroom and talk to the other working women. They tell us stories about when they had to wash their son’s mouth out with soap and then he started crying and the soap bubbles frothed out his nose. Everyone leaves and the shorter man walks in to grab a lollipop for the secretary. “What color…” he says to himself. then he looks at me. “I bet she likes… PINK, huh?” He walks away. The secretary’s trying to carry all the paper towel rolls and the phone rings so she runs and they all go trailing down the hall.

I get free sushi from the sushi chef next door, I don’t know why, I don’t know. But that night I have dreams about getting bitten by rattlesnakes and my arm numbing up when dialing 911 doesn’t work. My mother’s found the antibodies at a church hospital and I have to get baptized before they’ll give them to me. My leg goes numb and that’s okay with me. The thing is, my cat was bitten too, but she’s out of reach under the table and I don’t know how to get the anti venom to her. Next I’m running over these fleshy white lilies through a luminescent river and I wake up.

Sat, 11 May 2013 16:20:17 -0400

Iron Lady by Diamanda Galás on Grooveshark

Fri, 10 May 2013 23:29:00 -0400

Iron Lady by Diamanda Galás on Grooveshark

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Thu, 09 May 2013 00:04:30 -0400

Wed, 08 May 2013 22:39:33 -0400

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Wed, 08 May 2013 22:25:36 -0400

Wed, 08 May 2013 01:52:00 -0400

“In a famous letter to Johann Joachim Eschenburg (December 31, 1778), Lessing relates the...

Tue, 07 May 2013 02:45:00 -0400

“In a famous letter to Johann Joachim Eschenburg (December 31, 1778), Lessing relates the death of his infant son, who ‘understood the world so well that he left it at the first opportunity.’”

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM JACKIE W.

Sun, 05 May 2013 23:27:26 -0400

wordswillnever:

[This is an important message from Jackie. She cannot post this on her own blog because her aunts stalk her, so she asked me to post it here. edit: jackie is fine with people reblogging this.]

***TRIGGER WARNING FOR EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL ABUSE***

I am writing to break the silence surrounding a serious issue I have been dealing with for a long time. For nearly 3 years I was subjected to emotional, and sometimes physical, abuse by my former partner Carrie. These abusive patterns also continued when we broke up and Carrie said she wanted to finally take accountability for her actions. Maybe one day I will write about it with more feeling, but I am too emotionally exhausted to attempt to capture how deeply this situation has fucked me up.

For many people, on the surface, we seemed like the queer feminist dream team: smart, creative, politically and intellectually rigorous, in love, whatever. But while Carrie was engaging in political activism and making comics about women fighting their abusers, she was also behaving abusively toward me and coercing me to keep quiet about the situation. This is not to say that she is fake, but that she is capable of occupying extremely contradictory positions and perspectives at the same time and that people need to be aware of this while trying to engage her. While there were gross inconsistencies between what she said and how she actually behaved, I am not saying that she was “intentionally” being manipulative or crafting some kind of diabolical plan. It is impossible to know what goes on in someone’s head, so that’s a useless framework. All I know is what actually happened and what effect it had on me (in other words, not the intent of her actions, but how they functioned and manifested themselves in the context of our relationship).

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Sun, 05 May 2013 18:04:40 -0400

Assata Shakur in Her Own Words Recording of Activist Named to FBI Most Wanted Terrorists List...

Fri, 03 May 2013 15:21:00 -0400

Assata Shakur in Her Own Words

Recording of Activist Named to FBI Most Wanted Terrorists List Reading Open Letter to Pope John Paul II

Video

Thu, 02 May 2013 19:40:13 -0400

Wed, 01 May 2013 22:39:48 -0400

via Camilo Ramirez Today CCR’s Legal team met with our client, Fahd Ghazy, and celebrated...

Wed, 01 May 2013 21:59:00 -0400

via Camilo Ramirez

Today CCR’s Legal team met with our client, Fahd Ghazy, and celebrated his 29th birthday in a cell in Camp Echo. Fahd was sent to Guantánamo as a juvenile at age 17, and has spent more than one third of his life in the prison. Fahd, who has never been charged with a crime and was cleared under President Bush in 2007 is now on his third month of a hunger-strike. Fahd has said, “All I hope for upon release is to meet my wife and daughter, my mother and brothers, and to live an independent life with them. To complete my studies and get a decent job.” Fahd’s daugher, Hafsa, will celebrate her 12th birthday later this Spring.

Like Fahd, the vast majority of the remaining 166 men are still trapped without any charge after 11 years.

CONTACT The White House and tell Barack Obama that he should release Fahd back home to Yemen to his daughter, wife, and family. Learn more about the mass hunger strike at Guantánamo and take action at:

http://bit.ly/GTMOHungerStrikeAction

Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein by Matmos on Grooveshark

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:10:00 -0400

Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein by Matmos on Grooveshark

How can a moment of the world be rendered durable or made to exist by itself? Virginia Woolf...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 13:53:00 -0400

How can a moment of the world be rendered durable or made to exist by itself? Virginia Woolf provides an answer that is as valid for painting and music as it is for writing. ‘Saturate every atom,’ ‘eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity,’ everything that adheres to our current and lived perceptions, everything that nourishes the mediocre novelist; and keep only the saturation that gives us the percept. ‘It must include nonsense, fact, sordidity: but made transparent’; ‘I want to put practically everything in; yet to saturate.’ Through having reached the percept as ‘the sacred source,’ through having seen Life in the living or the Living in the lived, the novelist or painter returns breathless and with bloodshot eyes. They are athletes — not athletes who train their bodies and cultivate the lived, no matter how many writers have succumbed to the idea of sport as a way of heightening art and life, but bizarre athletes of the ‘fasting-artist’ type, or the ‘great Swimmer’ who does not know how to swim. It is not an organic or muscular athleticism but its inorganic double, ‘an affective Athleticism,’ an athleticism of becoming that reveals only forces that are not its own — ‘plastic specter.’ In this respect artists are like philosophers. What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or neuroses but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone, too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death. But this something is also the source or breath that supports them through the illnesses of the lived (what Nietzsche called health). ‘Perhaps one day we will know that there wasn’t any art but only medicine.’

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Percept, Affect and Concept

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 23:43:47 -0400