lucky

2008-09-25T10:08:00.000-07:00

Voices of Inexperience, Relating War’s Horrors
It’s possible that no cast on or off Broadway these days shares fewer professional stage credits than the young ensemble of “In Conflict,” a sober and very affecting docudrama about veterans of the war in Iraq. Many of the performers in the show, which opened Wednesday night in a Culture Project presentation at the Barrow Street Theater, are still students. Yet inexperience, in this instance, is an asset, part of a strangely harmonious... It’s this double layer of rawness — read more>

2008-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

$30 can provide nutritional support for an HIV patient for three months- Donate Now to help lift an HIV/AIDS orphan out of poverty.

More than 15 million children around the world under the age of 18 have lost one or both parents to AIDS. By 2010, this number could nearly double. Orphans and other children affected by HIV/AIDS are often deprived of an education and take on adult responsibilities at a very young age. In some of the hardest hit areas, children are becoming the heads of households as soon as their parents die.

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP), in conjunction with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), has implemented an innovative educational program, called Junior Farmer Field and Life Schools, to give these vulnerable children a chance to lift themselves out of poverty.

Junior Farmer Field and Life Schools (JFFLS) are a new kind of school, specifically for children orphaned by HIV/AIDS. The goal of these schools is to empower orphans and at-risk children by teaching agricultural skills – skills that would have been passed down by their parents. In addition, the participants receive a daily hot meal, which helps them focus, as well as take-home food rations, that help feed hungry families.

JFFLS schools have proven to be extremely successful. The knowledge and skills acquired in these schools have enabled children to provide for themselves and their families and to achieve better food security.

Your contribution will ensure that these HIV/AIDS orphaned children receive an education that will allow them to support themselves and their communities for a lifetime.
Sincerely,

Karen Sendelback
President and CEO
Friends of the World Food Program

2008-05-17T16:53:00.000-07:00

the Barefoot College is a place of learning and unlearning. It's a place where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher.

2008-04-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Music by Ugandan Queen of Hip Hop - Tshila. This comes from "WILD SOUNDS, expressions in raw truth" by Rising Moon Productions.200 Tshila has finally released her first album and it's called "Sipping From The Nile"... available at www . cdbaby . com/cd/tshila2.

2008-04-08T09:46:00.001-07:00

June 29, 2007
Liberty. Democracy. Equality. Justice. Tolerance. Humility. Faith. Princeton University dean Anne-Marie Slaughter says they form the foundation on which America was built. And Slaughter is concerned that we’re losing touch with those values. She spoke about her new book, "The Idea that Is America," June 25 at the Commonwealth Club of California.

2008-04-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

How do you improve the living standards of five billion people? With 100 million solutions.

One billion people live in abject poverty. Four billion live in fragile but growing economies. One in seven people live in slum settlements. By 2020 it will be one in three. We don't need to choose between architecture or revolution. What we need is an architectural revolution.

2008-04-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

Another of Maya Lin's buildings. Nestled on an eastern Tennessee farm once owned by Roots author Alex Haley is the Langston Hughes Library, a private, noncirculating, 5,000-volume reference collection and reading room dedicated in 1999. The library supports the mission of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) and its companion organization, the Black Community Crusade for Children. Named in honor of the Harlem Renaissance poet/novelist (1902-1967), the library is used for research, reflection, and inspiration by children's advocates, spiritual leaders, educators, civil-rights leaders, authors, illustrators, publishers, scholars, and college and high school students who come to the 157-acre retreat in Clinton, Tennessee, for training and leadership development.

2008-04-01T11:08:00.001-07:00

"I've come to believe that habit is the background against which epiphany happens."

Habit (2001) is the name of Bordowitz's new video work. A sequel to his earlier work, Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993), Habit addresses contemporary AIDS activism and a historically specific autobiographical perspective on living with AIDS.

"I'm sculpting speech acts when I make a documentary," is one way that Bordowitz describes his creative process. "Sometimes I switch the metaphor and I'm not a sculptor, I'm a composer. I'm making music with other people's words." The speech acts and music of Habit include interviews with activists, footage of speakers at political events including the Thirteenth International AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa, personal narratives, and intimate interviews with people significant in Bordowitz's life.

2008-03-24T17:34:00.001-07:00

Every Sunday from sunrise to sunset, a temporary memorial is created on the beaches of Southern California. Located just north of the world famous pier at Santa Monica, California and at the Sterns Wharf in Santa Barbara, the Arlington West Memorial, a project of Veterans For Peace, offers visitors a graceful, visually and emotionally powerful, place for reflection.

2008-03-12T17:07:00.000-07:00

But Langston Hughes articulated a very different rationale for history --- and a much more radical one. For Langston Hughes, the real purpose of history was to change America --- not just to celebrate it.

Watch the full version of Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech.

In his first book Stride Toward Freedom (1958), King laid out six key principles of nonviolence.

First, nonviolence is not passive, but requires courage. Second, nonviolence seeks to win the "friendship and understanding" of the opponent, not to humiliate him. Third, evil itself, not the people committing evil acts, should be opposed. Fourth, those committed to nonviolence must be willing to suffer without retaliation as suffering itself can be redemptive. Fifth, a rejection of hatred, animosity or violence of the spirit, as well as refusal to commit physical violence. The resister should be motivated by love in the sense of the Greek word agape, which means "understanding," or "redeeming good will for all men." The sixth principle is that the nonviolent resister must have a "deep faith in the future," stemming from the conviction that "the universe is on the side of justice."

2008-02-26T14:44:00.001-08:00

yes we can, by Will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas

2008-02-03T17:31:00.001-08:00

theroot.com
"History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about."
James Baldwin

2007-11-29T14:41:00.001-08:00

Fifteen-year-old Lawrence King at E.O. Green School was declared brain dead Wednesday after being shot in the head in class by a fellow student on Tuesday, February 12, 2008.

Little Lawrence King was queer. Not just in some identity politics way, but literally. Despite the innocence of his round, brown cheeks and puppy dog eyes, the kid was a threatening oddity at his Ventura County junior high school. Either because he was brave or naïve, or because he just couldn't help himself, Lawrence reveled in the fact.

By all accounts, Lawrence delighted in the beauty of defying gender rules. He wore jewelry and lipstick, playfully changing up the colors from day to day; he strutted about in black, high-heel boots. And he had the audacity to admit he was sweet on one of his male classmates. That one act of vulnerability—a banal mainstay of middle schools everywhere—cost 15-year-old Lawrence his life. According to friends and news reports, the object of his affection walked into a computer lab Feb. 12 and shot Lawrence in the head.

I live in New York, and in this metropolitan area alone we've had a startling level of gay bloodshed in recent years. There was 15-year-old Sakia Gunn, a black teen who was stabbed to death in 2003 at a Newark bus stop, after she rebuffed a guy's flirtations by outing herself and her friends as lesbians. And there was 19-year-old Rashawn Brazell, whose dismembered black body the cops found scattered around Brooklyn in February 2005, his limbs shoved into a plastic bag and tossed onto the subway tracks, his torso similarly deposited in a recycling plant near the East River waterfront. They never found his severed head, or his killer.

The victims are not all teens. There's 29-year-old Michael Sandy, whom three white guys lured into a rendezvous by posing as a single gay man on a chat site in October 2006; they jumped him and chased him into highway traffic, where he was struck and killed. Then there's 27-year-old Dwan Prince, who was stomped into a coma at a Brooklyn bus stop because, in his attackers' words, "he came at me wrong." And just two days before Lawrence was gunned down in the computer lab for having a crush, 25-year-old Sanesha Stewart was stabbed to death in the Bronx, reportedly by a date who discovered she was transgender.

That's all just in the New York area -- and just a handful of the cases. In 2006 alone (the most recent data available), the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs counted 11 people murdered for being gay around the country. The organization's tally is considered a vast undercount, as it culls only incidents in the dozen or so states in which it has chapters. But the group's research is enough to make clear that anti-gay murders are far more commonplace than we acknowledge as a society.

The victims are easily dismissed because they rarely evoke adjectives like "angelic," used so often to describe Matthew Shepard. Instead, in reporting on Sanesha Stewart's murder, the New York Daily News described her as "a 6-foot man in high heels and lipstick" and speculated she was a hooker. No wonder such a bizarre creature got itself killed, the report seemed to suggest.

We shrug off this sort of casual defining of gay lives as freakish in all corners of our society, from media to politics to schools. In 2005, a schools advocacy group, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, surveyed just over 1,700 gay high school students. Eight out of 10 reported hearing words like "faggot" and "dyke" used "often" or "frequently" at school by other kids. Nearly a fifth said they heard it from school personnel as well. Two-thirds reported being harassed themselves because of their sexual orientation, and nearly half said they got picked on because, like Lawrence, they didn't act appropriately boyish or girlish.

All of this goes on with impunity: Just 16 percent of the kids said staff "frequently" did something when they overheard hearing homophobic slurs or harassment.

Even more common than explicit slurs are phrases such as "that's so gay" and "you're being queer." They aren't directed at homosexuality itself but are simply meant to identify something as particularly bad— gayness and queerness representing awful enough ideas to be catchall adjectives for anything unwanted. These putdowns are widely considered innocuous, but the kids who are actually gay and queer find them difficult to dismiss. Two-thirds of students in the survey felt stung by the remarks. Overall, 64 percent said they simply felt unsafe at school because of their sexual orientation.

According to Lawrence's classmates, he had every reason to feel unsafe as well. He'd been moved around between gym classes because he got picked on, one friend told a local paper. "Every corner he turned around, people were saying, 'Oh, my god, he's wearing makeup today,' " another classmate told the Los Angeles Times. Lawrence's ability to stand up and be himself, despite being defined as an outcast for it, was nothing short of heroic. When we all ignore efforts to stomp out that sort of heroic existence—whether it comes in the form of bullying or murder—we are complicit in the act.

Kai Wright is author of the newly released Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York.

2007-11-29T14:30:00.002-08:00

This is live at San Quentin in 1969. This is the original radio version except no bleep

2007-02-28T10:24:00.000-08:00

james brown on dancing

2007-01-31T17:11:00.000-08:00

MC Princess Xtravaganza - Butch Queens Voguing Fem category. Wed. Sep. 27th, 2006