Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/art/page/16/)
You know the questions I think we should be asking. Who are we as a people? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered? I can’t think of better ones to guide anyone: artist, organization, citizen of the world.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) met the week of December 3 in Bali, Indonesia, where anti-WTO demonstrators took over the streets. On the first day of the talks, demonstrations were held around the world to mark the Global Day of Action Against Toxic Trade Agreements. A particular focus for protesters here in the United States and in other Pacific Rim nations was the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a so-called “free-trade agreement” that would consolidate corporate power over member nations. The TPP has been called “NAFTA on steroids.” It has also been called “a corporate coup” and a “corporate power tool of the 1%.”
You can usually tell if a recording is inspired from the opening twenty seconds. There is a certain energy, a certain élan, that takes you from the ordinary to the special, from genesis to realization, quite quickly, perhaps in two dozen heartbeats. There are many such songs on the new CD ,”The Human Project”, the first solo release by Gabriel Meyer Halevy. There are striking anthems, which celebrate the diversity and harmony of humanity. There are delicate ballads, and gracefully rhythmic pieces, that mesh South American, Arabic, Mizrachi and Far Eastern nuances.
Is “social practice” yet another insurgent, critical movement being watered-down into something palatable to the establishment art world – something that may reify existing power relations rather than undermining them?
As Hanukkah approaches this week, earlier and more turkey-filled than ever, it’s important to ask that age-old question: What’s really Jewish? Rabbis and poets and the atheist uncles at my family’s Seder table have debated the question for generations. Forget the scholars and drunks, I say. The best answer I’ve ever heard came from a comedian. His name was Lenny Bruce.
So is my fiction book true? I think the next time somebody asks me, I’ll have to tell them, yes, it is – absolutely. I hope they’ll forgive me if that’s not exactly true.
Why can’t we upcycle our abundant creativity, so that all our efforts to dream and enact a more vibrant, loving, and just future feed into new and better ways of doing it, rather than counting them as failures and dumping them into history’s landfill?
Youth Spirit Artworks is an interfaith job-training arts program co-founded by Sally Hindman. Hindman – who’s also responsible for the Telegraph Avenue drop-in center for homeless youth and Street Spirit, the Bay Area’s homeless newspaper – created the organization in 2007 in order to provide training for young people in need.
Ian Hoffman gives a review of his experience at the Jewish Film Festival, and what the current shift in Jewish cinema could mean for the community as a whole.
A Dream Detained
(after Langston Hughes)
For the Dream Defenders, occupying the Florida state capitol for Trayvon Martin and racial justice
And the #Dream9 immigrant activists, who were detained at the border and won their freedom
what happens to a dream detained? does it wilt like a rose
in the Arizona sun? does it sink into the ocean
as water fills its lungs? or does it fight to come home,
cross borders and spread hope
until it has won? this is not a weak dream
a beach margarita dream
a suburban house and two car garage dream
this is an American dream
call it Aztlán
call it the hood
call it the walled-off ghetto
of Beverly Hills
we call it home
so bring them home
bring our youth back to us
safe and breathing
with a bag of Skittles and a smile
I have a dream
that one day Martin Luther King
will not be misquoted
by Bill O’Reilly on national TV
fake colorblind fallacies
affirming misplaced actions
tell me, what is so conservative
about killing a young black boy
walking home to watch
the all-star game with his dad?