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RATKING: Gritty, Grimy Hip-Hop That Totally Grows on You

by ArleenFriese Posted on November 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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The rat king is a haunting image from European folklore: a bevy of rats, tangled together by their tails and thought to grow together as a bunch. (Rat king characters also make appearances in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics and the animated show Adventure Time.)

Then there’s RATKING, a left-field hip-hop group that’s one of the most exciting recent acts to come out of New York City. The mythical metaphor is apt. In an age of hypersleek solo rappers like Drake and Kanye, the three-member posse celebrates the grime of the streets, the everyday beauty of faces passing on the subway, the steam rising from manholes.

Together they’re a motley crew, with a lot of growing left to do. The group formed in 2011 and has released two albums since: 2012’s Wiki93 EP and the 2014 full-length So It Goes. The first version of the 2012 EP, before they signed to British label XL, was titled 1993. That’s the birth year of frontman Wiki, a.k.a. Patrick Morales, 21. Hakeem “Hak” Lewis, Wiki’s rapping partner and childhood friend, is a year younger; Eric Adiele, 33, who goes by “Sporting Life,” is the group’s producer.

If you’ve never heard of RATKING, you couldn’t do better than to start with their single “Canal.” The track distills RATKING down to its essence, and the result is like nothing else in contemporary hip-hop. Sporting Life’s lumbering, explosive production hits you first. “I wanted it to be like Dipset meets Three 6 Mafia,” he says, listing some of the group’s canonical influences. “Shit Juelz Santana woulda spit over, Juicy J, Project Pat. But flipping those, running them through weird delays and effects.”

Then come the verses, paeans to Manhattan’s Canal Street—home of pawn shops, hawkers, and travelers of all colors and nationalities, mashed together as densely as Sporting Life’s production. (Or a rat king.) Taken together, the effect is visceral. You can almost smell the streets. Wiki, with his two missing front teeth, shouts over the din of a dirty metropolis, buoyed by the quieter, more poetic Hak’s reflections on his “17 summers” growing up in the city.

Shot in 16mm, the accompanying music video is the perfect complement. Celluloid film isn’t like digital—there’s no previewing or deleting, so what comes back from the lab can often be surprising. And that’s the beauty of the medium, as the video makes clear in an instant. Utterly unpredictable film burns—the washing in and out of colors at the ends of a reel—cut quickly between stunning Technicolor observations of daily life in New York City. Clothes wave from windows; fish stare back from Chinatown aquariums; all types of people walk down sidewalks and alleyways, but we only ever see them from the back. It’s the same teeming city where, by chance one day, Sporting Life watched a teenage Wiki freestyle in a Lower East Side park and approached him on a whim. The song celebrates the vitality of a place that people love to complain has strayed from its creative roots. Wiki pushes back defiantly on his bridge: “Think the city has let up? / Get up, wake up! / Open your eyes, wake up!”

The exhortation is so energetically earnest that never for a moment do you think that this is “rap with a positive message,” proselytizing in any way. All it is is a heartfelt reflection on a world these artists know firsthand. When I ask the group (minus Hak, absent to deal with weed charges he picked up on tour in North Carolina) about their attitude toward politics, the answer is in that mode. “Me personally, I don’t know everything that’s going on, all the current events,” Wiki says. “And I feel like you should be informed as fuck before you start throwing around opinions. But if there’s something in front of you…”

Sporting Life chimes in: “If it comes into your world, hopefully you say something about it, you have an opinion about it.”

Hakeem “Hak” Lewis at Lollapalooza 2014. Daniel Patlán/Flickr

This is the spirit most memorably on display in their track “Remove Ya,” where over a grimy, UK-influenced beat, Wiki and Hak trade bars about facing police harassment just for being teenagers in New York. Half-Puerto Rican, half-Irish Wiki riffs off the well-circulated Nation recording of an NYPD officer stopping and frisking a guy (“for being a fucking mutt“): “I’m a mutt, you a mutt, yeah, we some mutts.”

It’s a telling hook for a song that could easily carry so much anger and resentment. RATKING’s world is not so much a battle between good and evil as a constant assertion of life in all its wonder against the forces of boredom, bureaucracy, and routine. It’s a party where everyone’s invited, and the only foul is being dull.

In that way, the music is stridently youthful, which makes sense. Two out of three of the band’s members still live with their parents, after all. So how have the folks reacted to their sons’ remarkable success, their multiple national tours before they were old enough to drink legally? “My mom’s definitely been really cool,” Wiki says. “She’s always been very supportive of me in the arts,” he says, emphasizing the words self-mockingly. Okay, but what about all the rhymes about smoking weed and getting drunk? “She knows that I smoke weed. She knows that I drink,” he says. “She probably doesn’t understand fully…” They laugh. “But I would never filter, you know?” Wiki goes on. “In regular life, I filter more than in my music.”

“Anyway,” he adds, “I think I’m gonna move out when I get back. My mom’s actually moving to a new cr—apartment.” Presumably he was about to say “crib,” but stopped himself. It’s incontrovertibly the case that the members of RATKING, for all the hooliganism in their image, are remarkably mature in person. The Fader‘s T. Cole Rachel noted that they’re an “immediately and strikingly polite” bunch, the type to throw a smoke bomb at a Fashion Week party (as Wiki did in the 10th grade) but then sit and read Kurt Vonnegut, whose refrain in Slaughterhouse-Five inspired the name of their last album.

I was surprised by how eager they were to listen, how often they’d stop to ask if they were making sense. That unusual openness is also apparent in their wide range of declared influences, which go way beyond hip-hop to include the 1970s no wave scene, ’50s film noir, the nonlinear storytelling of director Harmony Korine, and even, Wiki insists, the freethinking spirit of former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, “that chubby little motherfucker.”

How do you take all of that and make a cohesive sound? Here, too, the thoughtfulness of the approach belies the band’s youthful aura. “The longer people don’t know about what you’re working on, the stronger it gets,” Sporting Life explains. “Being present and able to recognize what’s ill around you creates kind of like an ill void. You pick enough things out of that void and put them together, and you can create something that glides through people’s consciousnesses.” And that process is painstakingly iterative. “There’s this period where you’re just adding, taking all these elements,” Wiki says. “But then you have to start moving toward the simplest form.”

“And that takes work,” notes Sporting Life. “It’s like when you see a tai-chi master. It’s so much work up until being able to do that, but it looks so simple. And we’re closer to that now than we’ve ever been.”

Eric Adiele, a.k.a. Sporting Life. Stuart McAlpine/Flickr

The group is now touring with kindred alternative rap acts Run the Jewels and Despot while working on a 7-track project, 700 Fill (like the fill power of a jacket). Look for the new release in January or February. “If we miss the winter, it’s not coming out ’til next winter,” Wiki says. “It’s a winter album.”

After I’m done, the band members check to see if I have any lingering questions, considerate as ever—did I get everything I need? Actually, I would like to know one more thing. As perceptive young artists, what worries and excites them the most about our culture today?

Wiki fingers the toothbrush he’s been holding in anticipation of a preshow shower. He frowns. “You know,” he says, raising the brush like a staff, “the same shit that worries me excites me.” Sporting Life concurs: “I mean, there’s little to be worried about, really…There’s a lot you can do these days, just sitting in a bedroom or wherever. The individual has really been empowered if they have time to just sit and build. Just try not to be bored.”

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RATKING: Gritty, Grimy Hip-Hop That Totally Grows on You

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Pointergate: This Week’s Most Racist Local News Story

by BarbPearljuepvs Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges was recently participating in a neighborhood charity event aimed at boosting voter participation, when she stopped to pose in a photo with a volunteer named Navell Gordon. In said photo, Hodges and Navell point at each other.

Pretty typical stuff, and material for, at most, a quick news anecdote highlighting the mayor’s community involvement. But Navell happens to be a young black man, a fact that must have something to with what happened next: Newscasters at KSTP, the local ABC affiliate, took the innocuous photo and quickly warped it into an exclusive report accusing Hodges of “posing with a convicted felon while flashing a known gang sign” and thereby instigating violence in their fair city.

In the same report, KSTP goes on to admit there is zero evidence Navell actually belongs to a gang. But they’re certain he has “connections to gang members.”

“She’s putting cops at risk,” retired police officer Michael Quinn told the station. “The fact that they’re flashing gang signs at each other, showing solidarity with the gangs, she’s legitimizing what they’re doing. She’s legitimizing these people who are killing our children in Minneapolis.”

Here’s a tweet from the story’s reporter promoting the piece before it aired.

KTSP has so far stood by the report, but issued a statement claiming Minneapolis police fed the item to them.

The story is infuriating. But just to drive the point of how insanely racist KTSP’s report truly is, watch the video below in which Navell discusses his involvement with non-profits like Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and how he’s working to move on from his past.

“I made some mistakes in life,” he says, while footage appears of him and Hodges posing for the photo in question. “I can’t vote. I’m not ashamed to say that. But I’m working on fixing that right now so I can be able to vote for my next president.”

Next up for KTSP? Well, word surfaced today that Obama is likely to tap US Attorney Loretta Lynch as the nation’s next attorney general. Perhaps the station should stage a timely investigation into her gang affiliations, given this shocking photo:

AP/Seth Wenig

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Pointergate: This Week’s Most Racist Local News Story

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How Surveillance Turns Ordinary People Into Terrorism Suspects

by AdelineI91 Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

It began with an unexpected rapping on the front door.

When Wiley Gill opened up, no one was there. Suddenly, two police officers appeared, their guns drawn, yelling, “Chico Police Department.”

“I had tunnel vision,” Gill said, “The only thing I could see was their guns.”

After telling him to step outside with his hands in the air, the officers lowered their guns and explained. They had received a report—later determined to be unfounded—that a suspect in a domestic disturbance had fled into Gill’s house. The police officers asked the then-26-year-old if one of them could do a sweep of the premises. Afraid and feeling he had no alternative, Gill agreed. One officer remained with him, while the other conducted the search. After that they took down Gill’s identification information. Then they were gone—but not out of his life.

Instead, Gill became the subject of a “suspicious activity report,” or SAR, which police officers fill out when they believe they’re encountering a person or situation that “reasonably” might be connected in some way to terrorism. The one-page report, filed shortly after the May 2012 incident, offered no hint of terrorism. It did, however, suggest that the two officers had focused on Gill’s religion, noting that his “full conversion to Islam as a young white male and pious demeanor is sic rare.”

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How Surveillance Turns Ordinary People Into Terrorism Suspects

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Kevin Vickers, Canada’s Badass National Hero, Is a Portrait of Humility

by LacyVachon Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Kevin Vickers, Canada’s sergeant at arms since 2006, is being heralded worldwide as a national hero after he reportedly shot and killed an armed assailant in the nation’s Parliament building Wednesday morning. It was a highly emotional moment when Vickers returned to Parliament today—watch the video above—and was greeted with an extended standing ovation. Witnesses are convinced that Vickers, 58, prevented a large-scale massacre in Ottawa. And though he has not yet spoken publicly about his actions (he’s notoriously modest), his record of public service is proof enough of his exceptional character.

Eight years ago, Vickers celebrated his election as the House of Commons’ top cop by traveling in style from Ottawa to New Brunswick on a brand new Harley. “As a gift, his two daughters bought him a vanity licence plate with the letters SGTATRMS,” wrote Bea Vongdouangchanh of The Hill Times. But his career began nearly three decades earlier as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the “Mounties”), who are responsible for policing provincial and criminal cases while monitoring Canadian internal security.

The Mounties were convened in 1873, in part to monitor and deal with Americans who were trading with Native Americans in Canada—cheap whiskey for buffalo hides. Today, the force focuses on issues like organized crime and national security, and has jurisdiction in eight provinces, three territories, 184 aboriginal communities, and three international airports. Vickers signed up almost 40 years ago, and spent 29 years on the force—a true-blue local boy from small town Miramichi who moved up in the ranks over time.

In 2000, he was put in charge of the Burnt Church Crisis, a heated battle in which Canadian fishermen destroyed hundreds of indigenous people’s lobster traps. The Native lobstermen retaliated by trashing fish-processing plants. The Mounties were called in to deal with the tense standoff and resolved it peacefully thanks to Vickers’ “thorough assessment” and “measured response,” according to an account from a book on Canadian policing. In an interview with his hometown paper, Vickers credited his experience delivering milk in Burnt Church and Neguac during summer vacations as vital to his understanding the region’s people—which helped him deal with both sides of the crisis respectfully.

Vickers was also involved in several high-profile investigations involving murders, drug crimes, and a tainted Red Cross blood supply. By the end of his term with the Mounties, he held the title of chief superintendent.

In 2005, he joined the House of Commons as director of security operations, and a year later was elected sergeant at arms. From the start, Vickers led the charge on the development of Canada’s “bias-free policing strategy”—now a part of RCMP officer training—by reaching out to the Canadian Muslim community to discuss cultural sensitivity. He served a security guard for the Queen of Canada herself, and was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal to “honor contributions and achievements made by Canadians,” according to an official fact sheet. He also received the Canada 125 Medal and the RCMP Long Service Medal. The United States has offered Vickers a commendation for his “Outstanding Contribution to Drug Enforcement.”

Vickers has remained humble despite his many plaudits—he insists he’s just doing his job. A 2011 feature on Vickers in The Globe and Mail describes how he defended the right of people to wear the kirpan—a ceremonial dagger carried by baptized Sikhs—in the National Assembly. In response, the World Sikh Organization hosted a dinner in his honor. He spoke with The Globe and Mail about why he stood up for the Sikhs:

“As we go forward, we should ask ourselves what Canada should be when it grows up…We have a long way to go before reaching adulthood. The seizure of the kirpans at the Quebec legislature last winter demonstrates the challenges that lay before us as we continue on this journey of sewing together the fabric of our nation with the thread of multiculturalism. Perhaps it would be beneficial for our country, as a nation, to define its core values. What are the core values of Canada, what makes up the soul and heart of our nation?…I told them Canadian officials that if they made me their sergeant-at-arms, there would be no walls built around Canada’s Parliamentary buildings…and the fact that you may wear your kirpans within the House of Commons proves there are no walls around Parliament and I have kept my promise.”

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Kevin Vickers, Canada’s Badass National Hero, Is a Portrait of Humility

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How One Man Poured Chemicals Into New Jersey’s Drinking Water and Changed Women’s Fashion Forever

by StephanBurrough Posted on October 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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These days, drinking more water seems to be the solution for everything from weight loss to youthful skin. In fact, we’ve taken our obsession with water so far that the medical community is actually warning people that drinking too much water can be poisonous. What most of us take for granted, however, is that water (in reasonable quantities) is safe to drink—a notion that was absolutely not true a hundred years ago.

The innovations that gave us clean drinking water don’t seem as sexy as self-driving cars or a rover on Mars. But author Steven Johnson argues that these types of technological advances have changed our world in profound ways—impacting everything from life expectancy to women’s fashion (more on that below).

Seemingly mundane scientific breakthroughs can create what Johnson calls a “hummingbird effect,” a reference to the great evolutionary leap that species made when it began to mimic the flight patterns of insects in order to extract nectar more efficiently from flowers. Johnson coined the phrase while writing his latest book—How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World—in Marin County, Calif., where hummingbirds were frequent visitors in his garden. What started out as a distraction provided him with an apt metaphor for the often unpredictable and far-reaching effects that a simple innovation can have on society. “You think you’re inventing something that just involves flowers and insects, but it ends up changing the anatomy of birds,” says Johnson on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “We see that again and again and again in the history of technology.”

So how does Johnson link clean drinking water with female fashion? The story begins with a nineteenth century problem. As American cities grew larger, contamination of drinking water by sewage was becoming a serious health hazard. For John Leal, a doctor based in New Jersey, the problem was personal: his father had died a slow and agonizing death after drinking contaminated water during the Civil War. He wasn’t alone. “Nineteen men in the 144th Regiment died in combat,” writes Johnson, “while 178 died of disease during the war.”

Steven Johnson Nutopia

In addition to his work as a physician, Leal was a health officer and inspector for the city of Paterson, N.J. His duties included understanding and curtailing communicable diseases and disinfecting the homes of people who died from them. He was also in charge of the city’s public water supply and the safe disposal of sewage. This combination of interests and responsibilities ensured that he spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve water safety. Whereas other doctors rejected the notion of using chemicals to kill noxious bacteria in water, Leal began to consider chlorine—in the form of calcium hypochlorite—which was commonly used to disinfect houses and neighborhoods affected by typhoid and cholera outbreaks.

Chloride of lime, as it was called back then, smelled terrible and was known to be toxic, so the idea of putting it in drinking water seemed ludicrous. But Leal realized that in small doses, it was essentially harmless to humans and yet still effective at destroying deadly bacteria. “Leal understood this in part because he had access to very good microscopes,” explains Johnson. “In the old days, if you had a hypothesis about how to clean the water, you would kind of do it, and then you’d wait for a month and see if anybody died.”

But putting what is essentially poison into the city’s water supply was still an unpopular suggestion, to say the least.

And so, a few years later, when Leal was put in charge of Jersey City’s water supply, he added chlorine to the city’s reservoirs “in almost complete secrecy, without any permission from government authorities (and no notice to the general public),” writes Johnson. And not surprisingly, once people realized what he had done, Leal was called a madman and even a terrorist. He had to appear in court to defend his actions, where he testified that he believed his chlorinated water was, in fact, the safest in the world.

The case was settled in his favor and, unlike many of his contemporaries, Leal gave away the recipe for chlorination for free to whomever wanted it. “Unencumbered by patent restrictions and licensing fees,” writes Johnson, “municipalities quickly adopted chlorination as a standard practice, across the United States and eventually the world.”

Mass chlorination had some predictable effects, reducing the mortality rate in the average American city by 43 percent. According to Johnson, parents of infants benefited even more significantly, as the death rate for babies dropped by 74 percent. And while reducing mortality is perhaps the most important consequence of Leal’s innovation, there is also a lighter side to the story.

As the First World War came to an end and chlorination spread across the country, some 10,000 public baths and pools were opened in the United States, giving women a new forum to show off their figures. As pools became safe and swimming became the norm, swimsuit fashions exploded. Or compressed, more accurately. “At the turn of the century,” Johnson writes, “the average woman’s bathing suit required 10 yards of fabric; by the end of the 1930s, one yard was sufficient.”

“Hanging out at a pool and seeing people in swimsuits” became a major driver of fashion, says Johnson. And while Hollywood glamor, fashion magazines, and other cultural changes had an effect, “without the mass adoption of swimming as a leisure activity,” he writes, “those fashions would have been deprived of one of their key showcases.”

How We Got to Now’s publication also coincides with a six-part PBS and BBC television series airing Wednesdays at 10 pm ET, from October 15 to November 12. You can watch a preview below:

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How One Man Poured Chemicals Into New Jersey’s Drinking Water and Changed Women’s Fashion Forever

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Why Did the Iraqi Army Collapse So Easily?

by KeiraTillery Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

In June, tens of thousands of Iraqi Security Forces in Nineveh province north of Baghdad collapsed in the face of attacks from the militants of the Islamic State (IS or ISIS), abandoning four major cities to that extremist movement. The collapse drew much notice in our media, but not much in the way of sustained analysis of the American role in it. To put it bluntly, when confronting IS and its band of lightly armed irregulars, a reputedly professional military, American-trained and -armed, discarded its weapons and equipment, cast its uniforms aside, and melted back into the populace. What this behavior couldn’t have made clearer was that US efforts to create a new Iraqi army, much-touted and funded to the tune of $25 billion over the 10 years of the American occupation ($60 billion if you include other reconstruction costs), had failed miserably.

Though reasonable analyses of the factors behind that collapse exist, an investigation of why US efforts to create a viable Iraqi army (and, by extension, viable security forces in Afghanistan) cratered so badly are lacking. To understand what really happened, a little history lesson is in order. You’d need to start in May 2003 with the decision of L. Paul Bremer III, America’s proconsul in occupied Iraq and head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), to disband the battle-hardened Iraqi military. The Bush administration considered it far too tainted by Saddam Hussein and his Baathist Party to be a trustworthy force.

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Why Did the Iraqi Army Collapse So Easily?

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Pentagon: We Could Soon Be Fighting Climate Wars

by StantonMcClean Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

In one of its strongest statements yet on the need to prepare for climate change, the Defense Department today released a report that says global warming “poses immediate risks to US national security” and will exacerbate national security-related threats ranging “from infectious disease to terrorism.”

The report, embedded below, builds on climate readiness planning at the Pentagon that stretches back to the George W. Bush administration. But today’s report is the first to frame climate change as a serious near-term challenge for strategic military operations; previous reports have tended to focus on long-term threats to bases and other infrastructure.

The report “is quite an evolution of the DoD’s thinking on understanding and addressing climate threats,” said Francesco Femia, co-director of the Center for Climate and Security. “The Department is not looking out into the future, it’s looking at what’s happening now.”

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DoD Report on Climate Change Readiness–October 2014 (PDF)

DoD Report on Climate Change Readiness–October 2014 (Text)

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Pentagon: We Could Soon Be Fighting Climate Wars

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Dragons, Legos, and Solitary: Ai Weiwei’s Transformative Alcatraz Exhibition

by Rad7edzw Posted on October 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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There is a question that every prisoner ponders once the realization sets in that his freedom is gone: Can the mind be liberated when the body is not? It’s been a while since I’ve asked myself such a thing—I was released from an Iranian prison three years ago—but a Chinese dragon in a former prison factory at Alcatraz makes me think about it again. Its multicolored face is baring its teeth at me when I enter the cavernous room. In this space, prisoners washed military uniforms during World War II.

The dragon is the first of many installations in the art exhibition by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, called @Large. The beast is a startling greeter—its whiskers are paper flames—but the impression softens as I look closer. The long body, shaped like a traditional Chinese dragon kite and suspended by strings from the ceiling, snakes gracefully throughout the open factory floor, illuminated by the soft afternoon light spilling in through a multitude of little windows. Bird-shaped kites are suspended throughout the room. It is quiet. This prison room feels like freedom.

There is more to it. Every segment of the dragon’s long body is painted with flowers from countries that seriously restrict the civil liberties of their citizens, such as Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia. Other parts of the dragon are adorned with quotes by prominent dissidents. One is from Ai Weiwei himself: “Every one of us is a potential convict.”

A man listens to Ai Weiwei’s sound installation “Stay Tuned.” Shane Bauer

That’s something this man surely never forgets. The themes of Ai Weiwei’s art have not been popular with the Chinese authorities. In 2011, he was arrested for alleged tax crimes and held for 81 days without charge. He hasn’t been allowed to leave China since. There are cameras mounted outside his studio in Beijing, to monitor him.

Ai directed the layout of the exhibition through video conferences with Cheryl Haines, director of the San Francisco based For-Site foundation, who initially came up with the idea of an exhibition designed specifically for Alcatraz. After she got Ai to agree, the National Park Service, which manages the island, decided to consult with the State Department. “Having a prominent Chinese dissident set up such a large exhibition was politically sensitive,” Marnie Berk de Guzman, For-Site’s Special Projects Director, told me—though State officials readily approved the project. They knew the exhibition would deal with themes of freedom, captivity, and human rights. What they did not know is that the United States would be among the many countries Ai would call out for cracking down on dissidents.

In @Large, Ai gives us the opportunity to reflect on the psychological differences between the watcher and the watched. From the dragon room, a side door leads up a set of clanky metal stairs that open onto the “gun gallery,” a long narrow hallway that guards once walked to monitor the inmates on the shop floor below. From the guards’ vantage point, the dragon that was so graceful and beautiful up close looks like a caged, threatening beast. The flowers and quotes on his body appear muted through the cracked, foggy windows. My attention is constantly drawn back to the most dangerous aspect—his wild, burning head.

“Refraction” Shane Bauer

Walking down the gallery, I catch glimpses of “Refraction,” a gloomy, five-ton structure that gives the impression of a giant bird wing. I cannot get up close: The only way to view the piece is through the cracked windows of the gun gallery. The installation obliquely references Tibet: Its “feathers” are made of reflective panels originally used in Tibetan solar cookers. Whomever we are to imagine confining it did not find it necessary to imprison the giant bird itself, only the appendage that gives the animal its freedom.

One installation, “Trace,” has 175 portraits laid out in a field of Lego bricks. Each image is the colorful, pixelated likeness of someone who has been imprisoned or exiled because of their beliefs, political actions, or affiliations. There are more faces from China than any other country. Among them is Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, named the 11th Panchen Lama by the Dalai Lama. After his selection at age six in 1995, he was detained by Chinese authorities and hasn’t been seen since. Scattered among the Iranian, Bahraini, and Vietnamese faces are a few American ones: Martin Luther King Jr., Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning. There is John Kiriakou, currently in prison for disclosing the name of a covert CIA officer who engaged in brutal Bush-era interrogation programs.

There is also Shakir Hamoodi, an Iraqi American imprisoned for violating sanctions by sending money to family and friends in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein era. He was convicted in 2012, nine years after Saddam’s fall. One of the largest faces is that of Shaker Aamer, a detainee who has been cleared for release by both the Bush and Obama administrations, but remains at Guantanamo 12 years after his arrest, still without charge or trial.

“Trace” features the faces of 175 political prisoners.

The large number of faces and names in “Trace” make it difficult to connect to each person, but in Alcatraz’s mess hall, there are people sitting at tables and writing messages to political prisoners. This installation, “Yours Truly,” offers free postcards decorated with national birds and flowers, each addressed to a specific prisoner. Ai understands that a prisoner’s greatest fear is being forgotten, and given that many of these postcards will certainly be intercepted before they arrive, the project may be intended to remind prison authorities that people are watching.

Alcatraz is an appropriate place for an exhibition about political imprisonment. While the island’s tourism literature focuses on hard-core criminals like Al Capone and the Birdman, it has also held hundreds of nonviolent political prisoners. Hutterite pacifists were put in solitary confinement here for refusing to serve in the military in 1918. World War I conscientious objector and anarchist Philip Grosser spent part of his year and a half on the island in “The Dungeon” where he subsisted on bread and water in complete darkness. Jackson Leonard was sent to Alcatraz in 1919 after distributing Industrial Workers of the World literature on an Army base. World War II veteran Robert George Thompson did time there in the early 1950s after joining the Communist Party USA.

This part of the island’s history is indirectly referenced in @Large. In the prison psych ward, opened exclusively for the exhibition, visitors can enter two “psychiatric observation cells,” small rooms lined with clinical looking green tiles where the mentally ill were kept in total isolation. There is nothing to see; the only thing to do is stand and listen to the traditional chants playing through hidden speakers. One is a Hopi song, a reminder of the 19 Hopis imprisoned here in 1895 for opposing the forced education of their children in government boarding schools.

The cells feel like an artifact of a bygone era, but prisons and jails around the country still routinely place the severely mentally ill in solitary cells, where they can languish for months or years. “It’s hard to imagine not going crazy in a room like that,” one of the @Large guides comments to me.

“Blossom” Shane Bauer

Down the hall is the “Blossom” installation. Thousands of tiny ceramic flowers, drained of color, evoke China’s Hundred Flowers campaign. In 1956, dissidents were crushed after a brief period of tolerance, banished to oblivion like these white heaps of flowers filling the sinks, bathtubs, and toilets of the psych ward.

There is one section of the prison the National Park Service did not initially offer Ai for his exhibition—the cell block. But he insisted on access, and NPS agreed.

Visitors enter the tiny cells—I can’t even fully extend my arms between the walls—and sit on a single metal stool at the center. In each one, I hear the music or poetry of dissident artists past or present. There is the screaming punk rock of Pussy Riot—”Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist, become a feminist, become a feminist!” There is the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. giving his “Beyond Vietnam” speech. There is Fela Kuti and Czech poets and singers from Tibet and Robben Island.

I sit in one of the cells and listen to the words of Ahmad Shamlu, an Iranian poet imprisoned by the Shah.

They sniff at your heart—
These are strange times, my dear
—and they flog love
By the side of the road by the barrier
Love must be hidden at home in the closet

In the background I can hear a guard shouting, clanging the cell doors shut repeatedly to show the tourists what it might sound like, had they been imprisoned here. Sitting in the tiny cell, facing the wall, it is not hard to imagine that the clamor is real. Looking at the vent, where the mournful poet’s voice comes in, it is not hard to imagine he is a neighbor, whispering to me secretly.

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Dragons, Legos, and Solitary: Ai Weiwei’s Transformative Alcatraz Exhibition

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McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

by MosesWatters Posted on October 8, 2014

McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

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8 Oct 2014 12:41 PM

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McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

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Yesterday, the internet witnessed the launch of a new online media platform, Collectively.org, which wants to usher us into a brighter, greener, more sustainable future. Great! Me too! It is part of my job.

The primary force behind Collectively is Jonathon Porritt’s blue-sky-minded nonprofit Forum for the Future, and the content is “curated” by VICE Media’s advertorial arm, VIRTUE (red flag #1, perhaps.) But there’s one weird trick here (if you will): This particular venture is collaboratively — and very publicly — bankrolled by a whole slew of major corporations (McDonald’s! Coca-Cola! General Mills! Twitter!), many of which have played a significant role in building models of unsustainable industry.

The venture does make a valid point: Climate change mitigation is going to be essentially impossible without the cooperation of major corporations, and it’s naïve to think that they should be excluded from the process. But for the perpetual cynic (hi!), Collectively could be seen as a very glossy marketing tool for corporate greenwashing:

From time to time you’ll see stories of sustainable innovation from our partner organizations, but they are selected entirely on the merits of their newsworthiness and potential to create positive change. On Collectively, we’re as excited to talk about the work of a social entrepreneur in Kigali as we are to break the news about a global environmental initiative from Nike.

However, the primary problem with Collectively does not appear to be, at least in these nascent stages of its development, that it’s bankrolled by some of the largest corporations in the world. Rather, its content is both formulaic to the point of bizarreness and largely consumer-focused: A two-year-old video of a cardboard bicycle. A piece on sustainable condoms with a confoundingly cringe-worthy headline. A “news” article about why the climate march — which happened two weeks ago — was so successful. (One section has the heading, “Brands Took on a Bigger Role Than Ever.” Hmm.)

That said, I’m fully aware that Grist also frequently covers the minutiae of green decisions made in our day-to-day lives on an individual level. The difference, I would argue, is that the onus of climate change mitigation is not placed squarely on the consumer.

From the site’s introductory post:

In our articles, we will not only give readers a great story full of useful information, but also something they can do to begin creating the world they want to live in. No action is too small. Each one offers a different way of thinking and living from which we all can benefit.

Sustainability continues to be a term that has to be called out and acknowledged, a set of choices that are somehow differentiated from a “normal” lifestyle. But if we are to survive and our planet is to survive with us, a sustainable lifestyle must simply become our lifestyle. In our collective future that must be the new normal.

And on the topic of a systemic change starting at the individual level, I also found this unbelievably strange PR quote from an article in The Guardian announcing the site’s launch:

Keith Weed, the chief marketing officer and global head of sustainability at Unilever, which is the second largest advertiser in the world, says it is important to create a global movement of change.

“Maybe mother nature has invented a solution by creating the internet so that we can create movements at scale,” he told Guardian Sustainable Business.

Pardon? Is this real life? At what point did Mother Nature (She prefers Her name to be capitalized, Keith) create the internet? On which planet, exactly, can we find the Unilever marketing department?

There’s an argument to be made for the importance of personal lifestyle choices — if the demand for cleaner products isn’t there, then where’s the incentive to produce them? I get it. But I’m not delusional enough to think that the majority of my generation — the target audience for Collectively — is going to look at a video of urban beekeepers in Los Angeles (also, weirdly, two years old) and say, “SIGN ME UP FOR THE COMMUNITY APIARY THIS INSTANT! I WILL ONLY PRODUCE MY OWN HONEY FROM HERE ON OUT!” No. Most of us might, however, be more inclined to look for more sustainably produced honey at the grocery store — and guess which major brands will likely be right there to slap a label on a jar and sell it to us? Cynicism! I know.

To me, reading about how consumers should make more sustainable purchases on a site that is paid for by the exact businesses that are trying to reach those consumers raises the eyebrows at least a bit, despite insistent guarantees that the editorial and branding staff are kept entirely separate. Rather than what I can be doing differently to save the planet, I’m much more interested in what major corporations are doing to fix the emissions mess they started. I mean, I already belong to a community apiary.*

*A complete and utter lie. But hey, at least I’m being up-front with you.

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McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Twitter are selling the green lifestyle on Collectively. Should you buy it?

If It Weren’t For the Dashcam, Would This White Cop Be Punished for Shooting An Unarmed Black Man?

by Sasha3995imvf Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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A white South Carolina state trooper is facing up to 20 years in prison after shooting an unarmed black man who was attempting to grab his driver’s license during a simple seatbelt check.

The disturbing incident occurred on September 4 and was caught on video thanks to a dashcam attached to officer Sean Groubert’s vehicle.

In the graphic video, Groubert is seen approaching Levar Jones at a local gas station, where he asks Jones to retrieve his driver’s license.

Jones reaches into the car and Groubert suddenly opens fire, shooting him not once, but four times, as Jones puts his hands in the air and falls to the pavement.

“Get on the ground! Get on the ground!”

“I was doing what you told me to do,” Jones can be heard saying. “I was getting my license!’

Jones survived with wounds to the hip. Groubert was arrested Wednesday and charged with aggravated assault.

The latest shooting, which follows mounting evidence police officers shoot black people at a higher rate than white people, comes as police departments around the country face increased pressure to outfit officers with recording technology such as dashcams and bodycams.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, at least 60 percent of local police departments use dashcams. This latest incident will surely add to those calls for accountability. As Josh Marshall at TPM asks, “Would Groubert have lost his badge and be facing charges had there not been a dashcam video revealing the reality of what happened?” A justified question, considering law enforcement officials are rarely sentenced or convicted in such shootings.

For a more detailed look into racially motivated shootings by police, click here.

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If It Weren’t For the Dashcam, Would This White Cop Be Punished for Shooting An Unarmed Black Man?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on If It Weren’t For the Dashcam, Would This White Cop Be Punished for Shooting An Unarmed Black Man?