Social skills are for people who don't have internet friends

feedback for meta film lol

2009-11-07T21:10:45Z

Form/style

You've chosen to use a documentary style in this work at the same time as interrupting this form with more stylized images --- for example your shots of the bok choy. There are some moments when the camera becomes a fly on the wall, looking over the shoulder, odd close ups , and trying to get the feel of the kitchen and the kitchen table. There's a way that we get the sense of multiple views behind and in front of the camera -- there is not one monolithic view. Your decision to incorporate casual dialog from the set with more scripted voice over narration is complementary. Each member of the group is represented through their participation in making the video and making the dumplings. we hear all your voices and they are distinct.

Content

this piece takes collaboration seriously by revealing the process of making. You revealed what it means to work in a group and find a space together. You accounted for everyone's point of view and personality and found ways that each member of the collaboration could contribute and began there. In this you should be congratulated for taking this step forward together. We appreciate your willingness to share and show this.

The point that you most explore gender in this piece is at the moment that Michael is behind the camera and begins to give direction to [buria_q] and Sara to mix the dumpling stuffing together. His direction also includes his an emotional response. then you are willing to keep in the response of the "subjects" : "I don't like how this feels." and then it's revealed that it's not the feeling of the ground meat that is uncomfortable but the direction from the cameraman and his desires that is "creepy". Then the voices attached to the hands turn the tables and begin to give direction: "why don't you get some movement in there; you know high angles, low angles." this accents the relationship between gender difference as well as cultural difference that your video tackles with all its awkwardness and honesty.

you should be pleased with your results of this collaboration.

buria_q @ 2009-10-03T03:45:00

2009-10-03T07:45:57Z

the polanski thing is freaking me out so much. no surprise woody allen and salman rushdie are on that list.

this city

2009-08-16T23:52:29Z

dd's friend T came from boston. we went to the beach today. we thought about going to the independence day parade. local desi lgbt and dv org are doing their yearly protest. but we went to the beach. waves clinked like jhumkas. there was a big harvest of beautiful purple shells washed up by the tide. i collected some with a young stranger.

T was invited by one of the few woc from an eco feminist retreat (mostly kali-fetishizing white women) up north to an event here. we went to Hattie Carthan community garden yesterday in bed stuy for food film festival. the films were cancelled and we gathered in a circle to talk. people spoke out about a recent murder and and grieved over the pattern of killings in the neighborhood. there were women of color talking about losing sons alongside young white hipsters/gentrifiers talking about how the world needs more love, man.

buria_q @ 2009-07-02T20:36:00

2009-07-03T00:37:21Z

got caught in the rain twice today and giggled like a five year old. i also have a splendid tan.

HAGGU

2009-05-11T02:36:31Z

south asia paper needs to go swirling down toilet.

buria_q @ 2009-02-21T14:37:00

2009-02-21T20:48:19Z

bfp thing

ok, i still can't get over it. so if bfp writes about the backbreaking agricultural labor that goes into grocery items that most americans take for granted, the women in her church who cannot kneel to pray because their knees are destroyed, or the toxic shit sprayed on the crops, some bourgie gora will whine about her guilt and that bfp is implying that she should stop eating altogether.

if she takes time for serious self care after a lifetime of working herself to the limit for her family and communities, some mouthy hipster brat will come round to call it deepak chopra-reading indulgence and the downfall of the fucking revolution.

AGHHH

some girly shit

2009-02-11T05:51:04Z

“…for it was in dreams that the two girls had met. Long before Edna Finch’s Mellow House opened, even before they marched through the chocolate halls of Garfield Primary School…they had already made each other’s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon dreams. They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a some one who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream. When Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s incredible orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flower bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs.

Similarly, Sula, also an only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices, and the slamming of doors, spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of someone who shared both the taste and the speed.

So when they met, first in those chocolate halls and next through the ropes of the swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula’s because he was dead; Nel’s because he wasn’t), they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for." (51)

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Vintage, 1994

buria_q @ 2009-02-09T05:31:00

2009-02-09T10:31:48Z

this made me inexplicably happy

damn

2009-02-05T03:33:00Z

"44 doesn't make up for 41. RIP Mr. Diallo"

buria_q @ 2009-01-14T00:19:00

2009-01-14T05:21:23Z

“The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of “native” towns and European towns, of schools for “natives” and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa…The colonized world is a world divided in two. The dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. In the colonies, the official, legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression is the police officer or the soldier.” (3)

“The “native” sector is not complementary to the European sector. The two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion: There is no conciliation possible, one of them is superfluous. The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonist’s feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the sea, but then you can never get close enough. They are protected by solid shoes in a sector where the streets are clean and smooth, without a pothole, without a stone. The colonist’s sector is as sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things. The colonist’s sector is a white folk’s sector, a sector of foreigners.The colonizer’s sector, or at least the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonizer’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal and light. The colonized’s sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees…"(4)

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

buria_q @ 2009-01-11T01:49:00

2009-01-11T06:51:59Z

am unnerved by the "reasonable man" who smiles at his neighbor but supports policies that will destroy his neighbor's family. i think "reasonable" discourse is obscene.

profoundly unsettled...hurting at core. chest is a knot. most have no grasp of what colonialism is, somehow cannot recognize it, the "well-meaning" types who won't outright say that brown indigenous lives are worth dust. K pointedly brought up the silence of the great liberal hope. another reason why I hate when people turn politics into a soap opera between personalities. heart is thudding. bloated with news, oversaturated...including the news that is never news. am sick of this ridiculous discourse that makes a state and a half-dispersed people equivalent in power and their claims to land equally valid. "Ahmad, put down your slingshot and your hand grenade. Avi, put down your gunboat and your nuclear-armed fighter-bomber."

said by a filipina feminist and quoted by a palestinian woman: "we are the daughters of a thousand dreams / we are the daughters the world hoped would die in the bellies of our mothers"

“The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”- Moshe Yalon, former IDF chief of staff

and i thought about you and everyone today. each breath drawn perceived to be a threat to armed power

that wrong is not our names, faces, hair, spirit

i want to keep you safe
even though that is an almost ridiculous notion
i can barely keep myself together

but i want to offer you my brittle arms
i want no girl or woman to sting and bleed from the roots
the taut nerves of her mangrove limbs ringing

it seems that i can only offer up
these inadequate words.

june jordan poem

2009-01-04T10:00:05Z

http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1385

airstrikes

2008-12-30T05:01:23Z

i have a hard time speaking to people calmly or whatever about the airstrikes obviously because it's nowhere even near a hard-right extremist position to support the state of Israel here. my chest seizes up whenever i look at the comments anywhere on this...s got a few trolls and handled them well, but i feel bad that i usually don't contribute anything. i was looking at Raising Yusuf today and a bunch of boors went on about how it's sad and all what this mum was going through, but "you" ought to think before attacking Israel.

i don't know how typical my dad is for a '65 generation hindu desi immigrant of his generation and i get frustrated that his politics as a partition refugee align him against "Muslims" (lumping Palestinians with Bangladeshis) and not against land appropriation and the creation of a huge refugee population by a state.

My Right to Exist at No Snow Here:

"I have been thinking a lot lately about the highly abusive nature of what is termed “reasonable” mainstream debate over Israel and Palestine. All the similarities that being Palestinian in the US, in this political climate, has with being verbally and emotionally abused by a partner (along with the physical abuse which our brothers and sisters back home suffer on the daily).

This is not about me being a victim; it’s not just about me period. This is about a white supremacist, colonialist hierarchy that says that not only will we have our land and our rights stripped from us, but we must be happy to allow it, to unflinchingly support the autonomy of our oppressors, and to at all times battle “antisemitism” when it is defined solely as uncritical support for the movement that displaced our grandparents, the movement that makes it very difficult if not impossible for us to live or even visit this land. This is about the creation and proliferation of media that normalizes our subordinance, that normalizes the opinion that our lives are worth so little that we must enjoy being subordinate, we must praise our oppressors, we must protect their safety and take their abuse.

And it is even about confusion; mental warfare inaccurately disguised as criticism, designed to exploit the West’s collective memory in mobilization for our mental and physical deaths, designed to indoctrinate perpetrators, designed to make us doubt ourselves and hate ourselves.

We must resist this psychic death. "

al-Zaidi

2008-12-18T11:06:28Z

According to reports from his brother, the journalist who threw shoes at Bush is being tortured in prison right now.

- Two petitions for his release

- Bfp wrote:

"You know, I am perhaps one of the most strident believers of anti-violence and non-violent resistance that I interact with every day. I have staked a lot on non-violent resistance (including how I raise my kids) and I believe you can’t have a world where there is no violence against women unless pretty much every type of violence that is committed is deeply interrogated, challenged, questioned, and then dismantled.

Yet even so.

If a (wo)man who has witnessed untold, unspeakable crimes against humanity in the form of colonization–If a (wo)man who has held sobbing widows, witnessed children with no heads, seen his/her nation blown to pieces and his/her history sold off to the highest bidder–if that person finally says, enough is enough you fucking dog…and that person throws not one but two shoes an a symbolic act of resistance–in the name of the murdered children, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, nation, history….If throwing a shoe is all that a person has to remind an entire nation that they have the fucking RIGHT to be OUTRAGED about the violence that has been shocked and awed on them…Then I have to say more power to him or her.

Why?

Because, that’s why. I feel no need to explain it–I will simply point to a conversation that happened over at Ilyka’s where it was said–some times you do things (like support somebody who does something you may not agree with) *because*. Just plain ol’ big fat fucking *BECAUSE*.

And that some people don’t *get* what “because” means? It is nothing more or less than an example of their lack of integrity and deficiency of humanity.

Period."

Thinking about conversation with friend just now who felt the video was surprisingly triggering because it was reminiscent of domestic violence

article

2008-12-02T17:54:55Z

this article i really like came up when we were talking about cesaire and romanticized notions of authenticity in political philosophy today.

Wedding and War in Galilee

A view of the emerging India-Israel-US axis, from a wedding in Palestine with Israeli helicopters whirring above, to Indian towns filled with Israeli soldiers looking for Shanti, to deportations and surveillance in the U.S.

buria_q @ 2008-11-14T21:45:00

2008-11-15T02:49:10Z

oooh, i can just feel the sheer frustration radiating from your complaint

you can't just make them support you

you can just make them love you

you can't just make them accept your hands in their hair

you can't just make them cook you "exotic" food

you can't just order them to come

you can't just make them go away

you can't just make them

They owe you.

Why can't you own them?

hai Emo_q

2008-11-10T08:53:11Z

i hate going to the dr. back from T's gig in boston. she has a lot of awkwardpantz white friends. including some guy who pays his coworker's wife to cook lentils for him. got absolutely nothing done this weekend. felt really anxious today in a way that i haven't since i left school last year.

have to present on israeli legislative responses to second palestinian intifada tomorrow for pol phil. planning to send two emails about queer white racism and neoliberalism through the cloud of confetti to listservs that might not take it well, lol. need a research topic by wednesday.

felt feeble and foolish.

i smell terrible and i want to crawl into my drawer.

eta: ugh, i really hope i don't get major blowback in my school email account. people generally don't check listserv emails that often, but you never know when someone will respond aggressively. i hope i wasn't inarticulate. i worded things as politely as possible ::eyeroll::.

i'm so cold. and i've stayed up till 7 am again.

buria_q @ 2008-11-07T16:24:00

2008-11-07T22:00:38Z

We didn't even really have to wait for the confetti to settle before "new" (and contradictory) racist memes cropped up - that racism is dead, and that the cause behind all ills is a scapegoated minority. Remember kids, when in doubt, "omg blk ppl!" is a time-honored reaction to well, everything that goes wrong.

Black people make up what, about 6% of the population of California? Additionally, Proposition 8 was passed in the context of the passage of highly conservative propositions in recent years which ended affirmative action and cut off social services for undocumented immigrants. And if we're relying on exit polls, a greater percentage of whiter voters than black voted in favor of Initiative 1 in Arkansas.

The Mormon church strategized more effectively and heavily funded the campaign and aggressively sought out people of color. Queer friends from California described the anti-prop 8 campaign as very late and inadequate in its outreach, particularly to immigrant communities and communities of color.

Because a major victory on one front was concurrent with a demoralizing loss on another, people (mostly of the reactionary, wealthy and white variety) have made the leap that black empowerment is directly related to queer (white) disempowerment. The strange idea that whites were being nice to us in "allowing" an Obama win and therefore The Blacks ought to behave better and exchange the favor seems to have taken hold in certain sectors. In this formulation, queer = white, black = homophobe and black queers are mythical.

From Lauren Wheeler, a qpoc (poet/activist) in California:

"There's been enough silencing of people of color by a majority-white movement: the continued appropriation of black civil rights rhetoric--after years of queer folks of color and their allies identifying that as problematic, offensive, and unhelpful in our communities; not wanting my fat, black, queer male friend standing too close to white No on 8 protesters; making a strategic decision to avoid our communities because we weren't worth their time and then immediately turning on us after the loss and blaming us for it. Fuck you, Dan Savage.

I also think the people who are best qualified to comment further on the nuance are queer people of color who actually campaigned for No on 8.

Most of the folks I know did some kind of work to defeat the proposition but didn't focus on for a bunch of reasons: the racism and classism of the mainstream gay community in general and the marriage equality movement in particular; feeling that other political issues (like Prop 6 and 9) took priority over gay marriage rights.

It's not that we're not hurt. It's not that we don't care. But most of the queers of color I know are a lot less invested in the largely bourgeois goals of the marriage movement than they are in protecting affordable housing and fighting against the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

In much the same way as I no longer have any interest in working with Capital-F feminist organizations to fight sexism in communities of color, I have little interest in working with Capital-G gay rights movement to fight heterosexism in my community.

But I've seen this happening. It's just not happening the way people want it to. Because it requires time and real conversations that the campaign as a whole wasn't interested in having with people who look like us."

buria_q @ 2008-11-03T19:44:00

2008-11-04T00:45:34Z

i don't know if it's all the tea or the fact that i didn't sleep and the world is oddly bright, but i'm sooo nervous about tomorrow!

buria_q @ 2008-10-28T16:27:00

2008-10-28T20:28:51Z

i think my endurance is increasing. had 4 hours of sleep in last two days. i'm finally starting to crash.

got bday packages of food/chocolate from sister and wifey. yaaay.

buria_q @ 2008-10-03T02:44:00

2008-10-03T06:50:51Z

watched debate. had intense conversation about pakistan, imperialism, racism and obama. lot of thoughts brewing...I haven't really been writing for myself and fleshing stuff out. I've been feeling blocked and somewhat intimidated lately. i guess it doesn't help that i put up a zadie smith icon, lol. and i guess the energy drain from a bunch of initially intriguing but fucked up relationships that have built up. I need to apply a cut to real life as well, heh. I have four papers this month. I hate feeling like I should be doing something else when I take time out to reflect. sick of rushing around.

stuff to do

2008-09-26T03:29:13Z

- get book review text

- start thinking about CRT paper
- finish Z

- get cs notes

fried : (

cannot think.

question

2008-09-24T16:45:32Z

ok. was this all an "emperor's new clothes" type of hoax meant to make young children feel like they just don't get it? do people really see crisp black-and-white graphics if they go cross-eyed for a bit?

omg MAIL

2008-09-24T01:52:00Z

i got a box of chocolates in the mail from wifey!!

::happydance::

brain dump

2008-09-10T21:17:33Z

neoliberalism and race

- commodification of culture - tourism, structural adjustment in nyc
- white working class resentment fanned - nationalism and moral outrage stirred up against the "cultural excesses" of gays/poc/women marketed by neoliberal system that created job insecurity
- poc unity can also go the other way - expected to have pride that an indian woman is the ceo of pepsi
- pointing angrily to tokens as evidence that race is a "cosmetic" concern (an argument i had apparently w a white howard professor. so much fail.), since race/gender identities are marketed as a "lifestyle" thing.
- last year walter benn michaels was invited to make this argument - has a speaking tour, went on tavis. admitted he liked making "provocative" arguments every now and then to make extra pocket money.
- "aristocracy of labor" in the first world

also get the impression that gender-bending stuff is purely bourgeois and indulgent - decadent homos! in harvey's eyes.