#david peisner

[admiralgiggles]

Number 16 “Steve-O Professional Idiot: A Memoir” Steve-O gives a very personal account of all the crazy shit he did on and off camera. It was a very interesting read and made me love this dude even more and I didn’t know that was possible!

[mediamattress]

The Man Behind The Historic Implosion Of The Ex-Gay Movement

By David Peisner, BuzzFeed BuzzReads (August 22, 2013)

It’s mid-afternoon on a Monday in July and the offices that once housed Exodus International are quiet. Exodus, which for 37 years was more or less synonymous with the ex-gay movement and at its peak employed 24 people in this office, closed down in June. Since then, a skeleton crew of three people has rattled around the largely empty workspace overseeing the dismantling of an association that once included more than 150 Christian ministries in 17 countries, all devoted to the idea that homosexual feelings need not lead to eternal damnation. They could be managed, ignored, overcome, repented for, and perhaps even transformed into something more biblically acceptable. Just as long as they weren’t acted upon. Its mission statement: “Mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality.”

The building — a fading white, multistory rectangular block situated on a side street in an area of Orlando well-stocked with dreary strip malls and office parks — is wholly unremarkable, the kind of place you’d drive by a thousand times without taking a second glance. Exodus bought it five years ago, but it hasn’t been a great investment, and in light of the organization’s demise, the property is now up for sale.

Despite recent upheaval, Alan Chambers looks pretty comfortable ensconced in his large corner office on the second floor. Chambers, 41 — who after living as a gay man in his younger years now has a wife and two children — led Exodus for its final 12 years. He’s long been a poster boy for the Christian right’s belief that it was possible to “pray the gay away.” Chambers disputes the notion that he ever promoted Exodus as the “gay cure” ministry, though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, not the least of which is the book he wrote in 2009 called Leaving Homosexuality: A Practical Guide for Men and Women Looking for a Way Out. He maintains that his overarching goal was always to provide homosexuals with the comfort, fellowship, and love they’d been denied by traditional churches. And yet, for example, in a 2005 Exodus newsletter, he wrote, “One of the many evils this world has to offer is the sin of homosexuality. Satan, the enemy, is using people to further his agenda to destroy the Kingdom of God and as many souls as he can.”

The following year, he and his deputy at Exodus, Randy Thomas, visited the White House at George W. Bush’s invitation as Bush announced his push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Chambers was also a prominent supporter of Proposition 8 in California. In 2009, an Exodus board member — not Chambers — traveled to Uganda and spoke at a conference on the evils of homosexuality that helped build the hysteria there that led to the country’s infamous 2009 “Kill the Gays” bill, which prescribed a potential death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” or life imprisonment for “the offence of homosexuality.” (It has never been voted on but was reintroduced last year.) It took Chambers nearly a year to publicly disavow his organization’s involvement.

And yet this June, Chambers not only closed Exodus in sudden and dramatic fashion, but acknowledged the ineffectiveness of gay-to-straight reparative therapy and offered a remarkable mea culpa that apologized for his organization’s many missteps. He’s now founding a new organization focused on bringing Christians and homosexuals together, called Speak. Love. Many in the LGBT community hailed Exodus’ demise as a victory in the culture wars but were disappointed Chambers hadn’t gone further in his support of gay rights or his renouncement of the religious underpinnings of the ex-gay theology. To many evangelicals, the man who had not only been a leader of the ex-gay movement but also a living example of its successes was now a lost sheep, or worse, a heretic.

“There are times when I feel like I don’t have a country,” Chambers says, not far from a wall of photos that include shots of him with his wife, with his kids, and with Mike Huckabee. “There are people who have been invested in this fight for years on both sides. It’s the vocal minority on either side that gets the microphone. What I believe is there are far more people in the middle.” It’s this middle group that he’s hoping to represent and talk to. The question is, will he have the chance? At the moment, he’s working on defining specific plans for the new organization and raising money to keep the lights on. But in order to succeed, he’ll need to convince people that his divisive past has indeed passed, and that his own personal struggle won’t get in the way of his public mission.

BuzzFeed BuzzReads

[mediamattress]

Captive Audience: The Music Business in America's Prisons

By David Peisner, SPIN (May 9, 2013)

Until very recently the country's incarcerated were still living in a world of Walkmans, radios, and cassette tapes. But finally, things are changing. SPIN goes behind bars to investigate how music makes its way inside prisons, who puts it there, and what it means to inmates.

If you've got to go to prison, you could do a lot worse than the Idaho Correctional Institution in Orofino. The 574-inmate facility is tucked into a picturesque valley on the state's rugged northern panhandle, along the trail once blazed by Lewis and Clark. The thin window slits in many of the general-population cells on the prison's newest section — called "A Block" — offer views of the surrounding green-brown foothills and pine forests, as well as the crisp rushing waters of the Clearwater River, a world-renowned fly-fishing spot. Despite its northerly latitude and the snow-capped mountains not too far in the distance, the weather here remains reasonably mild year-round. Minimum-security offenders have opportunities to get outside the 15-foot razor-wire-topped chain-link fences that surround the prison's perimeter by working on inmate firefighting crews and doing roadwork and construction jobs nearby. It’s also one of a growing number of American correctional facilities where prisoners have access to a digital library of millions of songs. But make no mistake: This is not some country club for exiled Wall Street barons.

"We are a multi-custody, all-male facility," Terema Carlin, the prison's warden, tells me when I visit on a Wednesday in mid-April. "We have people who are paroling out tomorrow and we have lifers here." There are protective custody units for inmates — often sex offenders or former cops and corrections officers — who'd be in danger if they mixed with the general population, and segregation units for those prisoners prone to violent outbursts. "We don't have too many offenders who are management issues," she says, "but we do have a few."

Carlin does not fit the popular image of a prison warden. She's in her late 30s, and is slim, sharp-witted, and personable. She and her deputy warden, a friendly, easygoing guy named Aaron Krieger, both began working at Orofino as corrections officers in the late '90s and have never left. Their approach to corrections puts the emphasis on rehabilitation, or "habilitation," as Carlin puts it as she leads me through the facility's front gates, because "most of the guys in here never got taught the skills for how to cope with the real world."

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[syncmagazine-blog]

The Ghosts of Jonesboro

BuzzFeed takes time out from kitten photos for The Ghosts of Jonesboro — 15 years after the Jonesboro school shooting. Written by David Peisner, freelancer for NYT, Rolling Stone.

[audioheidi-blog]

Slowly, a sort of defining aesthetic has emerged: Failure is more interesting than success. If history is written by the winners, Numero tells the stories of the beautiful losers. In doing so, the label has sketched an alternate historical narrative. At the very least, a stroll through the Numero catalog is confirmation that cream does not always rise to the top. Bad business decisions, fickle audiences, polarizing personalities, and shitty luck trump talent nearly every time. Numero's work stands as a corrective to the callousness of pop-music history: Maybe they couldn't turn Capsoul into Motown, but they could ensure it wouldn't be forgotten forever.

David Peisner about the wonderful reissue-label "Numero" (Spin 9/27/2012)

[sonicweapons]

"Now everyone is looking at rappers as the new elite of the country," says the journalist El Mekki. "When everyone was silent, they spoke up. When everyone was at home, they went to the streets shouting and fighting against the police. So today the old generation are feeling guilty and giving rap much more respect."

Spin's David Peisner offers a good overview of Tunisia's rap scene in this piece, which focuses on the emergence of El General as the mouthpiece of Tunisia's revolutionary youth as well as the repression and censorship faced by rappers who criticized Ben Ali's regime (and, conversely, the spoils that used to await those who muted their criticism or openly supported him). Peisner's piece introduces El General as "the most dangerous rapper in the world" - a claim that rests on the perceived role of "Rayes Lebled" [spelled "Rais Lebled" in the article] as the song that set the Tunisian popular uprising and the Arab Spring in motion - but it doesn't avoid the skepticism (particularly within the Tunisian rap scene) over whether his success is due to a combination of talent and courage or fortuitous timing. Peisner also raises interesting questions about the challenges that El General now faces (in particular the danger of being coopted by one of the forces seeking to gain power in the upcoming elections) and the role that rappers may play in the future of the country and the region.

While El General is arguably no longer the most dangerous rapper in the world or even that region - Senegal's Thiat and the late Ibrahim Qashoush (particularly in the wake of today's statement by President Obama) could also claim that title - he remains by any measure the most widely known Tunisian rapper (his official Facebook page has received over 173,000 "Likes"), a national hero and a musician whose next moves will surely be followed closely by both fans and authorities.