Right now I just started working at Mt. Sinai Hospital as a research assistant for an arts-informed research project. The project links up actors with family residents and is measuring how coaching is useful in teaching doctors interpersonal psychotherapy. Mostly I am doing a lot of photocopying, stamping, labling, and setting up recording equipment, but I also get to do some video analysis which is cool. That is what I'm waiting to do next before I head home.

On the personal front, I've been doing a lot of cooking lately. This means I'm saving money and the environment (no plastic containers needed). I usually am the queen of take-out, but lately I've been cooking veggie soups, perogies, and curries. I even had curried perogies at the Kimbercote potluck... an old recipe passed down from Jay. I love how food is so intrinsicly linked with memory. When I taste, I am brought back to old places and people. Certain food reminds me of being in Los Angeles, or Mexico. Other food reminds me of friends, like the Radical Roots crew.

Speaking of Radical Roots, it looks like it may just go through a revival. I learned from Agata that she was starting negociations with SAC, and I'm considering taking it over. If I do it will mean a lot of work so we'll see! For those unframiliar, Radical Roots is a workers-cooperative vegan fair-trae cafe at the University of Toronto which I Co-Managed last year. We got kicked out by Ancilary Services from our old location and now we are homeless. Hopefully we can get it together and get things started for January!!!

The aesthetics of Hip Hop and Design come from radically different places. Typography and design is largely shaped by commercial culture, and is largely guided in recent times by corporate interest. Hip Hop comes from a place of struggle, and as a dance form emanates the social realities of urban inner-city communities. Dancing (popping, locking, breaking, wacking, krumping, etc.) is one of the five pillars of Hip Hop culture. Hip Hop as a cultural narrative is loaded with resistance; to racism, to poverty, and to prisons.

The High School students who are participants in UCLArts ArtsBridge program relate to the different media in different ways. The program is located in Los Angeles, a city which is still ripe with segregation. The project connects UCLArts scholars with inner city schools where they engage in standards-based arts curriculum. While some of the students consciously choose to subvert the media's traditional uses, others stay inside the box. All of the students engage in the media in different ways, but overall the effects of the media are stark in contrast in engaging the students in different pedagogical processes.

The media utilized in classroom projects creates a pedagogical framework which influences all classroom dynamics. For example, while digital design translates the students' experiences and mirrors them back in a personally edited form, dance engages students' bodies and minds in a cultural ritual. Marshall McLuhan states that media act as extensions to human sensory organs. In essence, design is a medium which acts as an extension to our visual organ, the eye, and dance acts as an extension of our tactile sense, creating three dimensional human sculptures which interact with each other.

In engaging in different forms of media, the students sample different narrative structures and ways of interpreting their lived experience. The media acts as a syntax which programs the dynamics of the classroom. For example with Hip Hop dancing comes from a culture of struggle and resistance to oppression. While students learn the dance steps (which matured into fruition in their city of residence, Los Angeles, as well as other urban centres in the USA) they learn about the politics of racism and the power of the underground community culture of Hip Hop.

Students do not only learn steps, they watch videos and discuss the five pillars of Hip Hop: Breaking, Graffiti, DJing, MCing, and Knowledge, as defined by the Zulu Nation, one of the original global Hip Hop movements. The first Hip Hop activist was Zulu Nation founder Afrika Bambaattaa. According to Bambaattaa, "Hip Hop Culture was created to be about peace, love, unity and having fun, in order to help people to get away from the negativity that was plaguing our streets." In reality no media acts in isolation. To dance involves other forms of communication. Students are also asked to write about their experience, giving feedback on their relationship to Hip Hop. Getting the choreography is not enough to really do Hip Hop. You must know and be active in the many elements to engage in the media form. In essence, Hip Hop is multimedia.

Design acts in much the same way. While Hip Hop dance is only one element in a larger force, Design has its own aesthetics which may seem invisible to those who are immersed in our commercial Western World. Much as the syntax of Hip Hop has an aesthetic structure, Design calls for order, combining both text with images ranging from painting, to illustration, to photography. All media align together with a mandate of clear communication. Fonts communicate mood and images invoke desire and other surface emotions. Our typical interactions with digital design are in the form of commercials. We see them on TV, on the street, or on public transportation. We are unconsciously programmed to know what good design is, and we are drawn to design which acts as a mirror for our own selves; the target market.

As Marshall McLuhan so aptly states; "The medium is the message."

I can't believe that it has come to this. As you can see in the video, there were no rockets or rocks being thrown by protestors. Why do we continue to kill eachother? When will it end? I've read and seen so many criticisms of "Arab culture" but why haven't we taken a look at our own actions?


Read the article
See the Video

Hiroshima was a holocaust in two seconds.

-=-

Today I was on the street car and a woman asked me if I spoke Russian or Polish. How did she know? How did she know where my ancestors ran from? Jews were so accepted in the Middle East up until the creation of Israel. Israel was a place to run to... now what is it? Have we taken advantage of hospitality? Of course I'm making sweeping generalizations of history.

doubt

-=-

doubt of authority. doubt of goodness. doubt of normal. doubt of nutritional value. doubt of happyness. doubt of order. doubt of change.

doubt

are we building something bigger? better? are we reliving colonial naratives?
are we spreading violence without awareness.
when we turn on our tvs
when we shop at the gap

where

is

there


something


pure.







those pure moments. moments of laughter and lucidity.
when you spark joy in your co-participants.
when you think about babies....

when you realize that the world is beautiful and that's why we're trying to save it.

I watched EMPz 4 Life yesterday and I have to say that honestly as a documentary it was a bit poor in production quality. What I was impressed with is that a production company headed by a white-male took it upon themselves to take a stand against racism and make some stunning statements about masculinity, the police state, and our public school system.

The movie itself was way too long, and I think that as a film maker Allan King could have made some better decisions on where to cut. The actual story-line of the documentary was stunning. The ending with the burnt-out social worker lamenting about how no matter how educated and on the ball the black community is, the police can always come and take away everything that they've built.

The great part about the film for me was the balance between blaming the system and taking personal accountability. We can lay blame on the system, but the struggle doesn't end there. you have to take personal action, whether it's in your own life or within your community.

The way that this manifests in my own life is in my career as a woman artist. Of course throughout my path in life, I have been confronted with statements such as, "you're not an artist." My own partner told me this when I invited him to my art show last May. Traditionally women have been excluded and discriminated against in the art world. Instead of agreeing with the sentiment that women can't be artists, this drives me to make more art and to self-define myself.

I think that in the film, the black young men were being given the message from the system that they were nothing more than gang members. For them to take control of their education, pick the schools they want to be at, study extra hard, being proud of their excellence, and recording their process for the public, is a revolutionary act. Showing black young men excelling, yet at the same time trapped, is a marvelous example of how the black community in Toronto finds it's marginalization.

No matter how much you transcend stereotypes, someone is always going to assume that you are a gangster. Even before the movie started I had an interesting intervention with a group of white women in the audience:


"What does EMPz stand for?"
"I heard that it was based on a piece of graffiti"
"Does that mean it's a gang thing? Is it about gangs?"
"Yah, I guess EMPz must be a gang"
(me) "Actually, EMPz is just their neighbourhood. You know, like refering to lack of mobility between classes because you're stuck in your 'hood for life"
"So it's the neighbourhood gang?"
(me)"No, it's just refering to their neighbourhood"
"Oh"