wound-up sparrow

watch, glimpse, repeat

[romansusan-deactivated20220520]

Call for Artists to Contribute to Do Not Resist? 100 Years of Police Violence in Chicago, a City-Wide 2018 Exhibition

Do Not Resist? 100 Years of Chicago Police Violence is a community-based, artist-led visual project & exhibition, curated by For The People Artists Collective. The Exhibit While our city…

Roman Susan is happy to be one of the sites hosting FTP’s DO NOT RESIST? 100 YEARS OF POLICE VIOLENCE

Open call for Chicago-based artists, with honorariums for accepted applications. Submissions due September 3, 2017

[pxlestine]

Last message from this old man in Aleppo: ‘We don’t have anything left. Oh Arabs, where are you? We are being slaughtered. Save us.’

[decolonisation]

To everyone commenting on this video saying how they don’t feel like they can help, you absolutely can! Islamic Relief and Syria Relief are both registered charities running emergency Aleppo appeals, and even if you can’t donate, you can at least reblog or post on different social media sites or anything to get the word out.

[projectqueer]

Homeless rights groups protest Uptown shelter's closure

Homeless rights groups plan to set up a tent city outside a North Side shelter that's shutting down.

[helenaofthewilderness-deactivat]

400 DAPL protesters ‘trapped on bridge’ as police fire tear gas, water cannon (VIDEO)

Officers have deployed water cannon on the protesters in below-freezing temperatures, and are using LRAD sound devices. Earlier, there were reports of rubber bullets fired. Vehicles which appear to be armored humvees have arrived at the scene…

[navigatethestream]

Don't Be Passive Observers of Last Night's Terrorization in Standing Rock: Here's What You Can Do

Last night, as the temperature in Standing Rock plunged below 30 degrees, hundreds were blasted with water cannons.

As a Native woman who has been to Standing Rock three times, and whose health now prevents me from making a fourth trip, I have my own asks. Call every  number put in front of you. Jam every phone line. Look at the target list of financial institutions supporting this pipeline. Pick a bank. Shut it down, just like we did in Chicago on Saturday and people did in Philadelphia this morning. The Trump administration hasn’t even taken hold yet, and I watched over a livestream last night as my friends and people were battered with water streams that can tear skin from flesh and eyes from sockets. I watched my people hold space and scramble to save one another as drops of water froze to razor wire.

I know marginalized people around the county are organizing for their own survival right now, and sitting around tables discussing the difficult days ahead. But a strategy of protection, defense and obstruction cannot wait for the inauguration of an autocrat. It must be applied here and now.

Please show us that you see us. Please do all you can to stop this.

If you cannot travel to Standing Rock, or support or organize an action where you live, consider contacting one of these Sheriffs and police departments that have loaned out the officers who are abusing Native peoples in Standing Rock. Jam their phone lines and tell them to bring their people home. If your community is on this list, actively organize to recall the deployment.

Michigan City Police Department Michigan City, IN [phone]

North Dakota Highway Patrol Offices across North Dakota [phone]

Hammond Police Department Hammond, IN 219-852-2900

Munster Police Department Munster, IN [phone]

Griffith Police Department Griffith, IN [phone]

Anoka County Sheriff’s Office Andover, MN [phone]

Washington County Sheriff’s Office Stillwater, MN 651-430-6000

Marathon County Sheriff’s Department Wausau, WI [phone]

La Porte County Sheriff’s Office La Porte, IN [phone]

Newton County Sheriff’s Office Kentland, IN 219-474-3331

South Dakota Highway Patrol Pierre, SD 605-773-3105

Jasper County Sheriff Rensselaer, Indiana 219-866-7344

Lake County Sheriff Sheriff’s Department Crown Point, IN 219-755-3333

Laramie County Sheriff’s Department Cheyenne, WY 307-633-4700

Wyoming Highway Patrol Cheyenne, WY 307-777-4301

Ohio State Highway Patrol Columbus, Ohio 614-466-2660

Nebraska Emergency Management Agency Lincoln, NE [phone]

Supply note: With at least two hundred injured last night, Standing Rock medics are in critical need of the following items:

Milk of Magnesia Wool socks Wool blankets Space blankets Hand warmers Trauma kits (portable) Suturing kits Straw bales

Supplies can be shipped to: Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council PO Box 1251, Bismark ND, 58502 or if you are shipping via UPS or Fed Ex, please use the address: 220 E. Rosser Ave. 1251, Bismark, ND, 58502

Or you can donate to the Standing Rock medics.

[kakalotl]

Reblogging for that anon that sent me that last ask.

[musterniillustrates]

here’s a link to donate to the medic & healer council.

[abstractoctopus]

I am shocked to see so many police coming out of Indiana. I will be sharing and making donations as I can’t travel there myself.

[uberheathen]

You can also donate and send supplies using their Amazon wishlist. There are items at every price including gift cards: https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/2196XE3A5LB8/ref=cm_wl_rlist_go_v?

[blackbirdandthefox]

Chemical warfare is being reported out of Standing Rock.

[nativeskins]

Boost this! They’re trying to poison our people.. & not just with oil.

[sofarawayy-deactivated20210922]

This is the second occurrence of DAPL security pointing guns threatening water protectors. In the first there were no charges  pressed after a Dakota Access security worker threatened water protectors with an AR-15. (And yes it has been proven he was a worker a they found paper work and an id identifying him as such despite the fact he attempted to cover his identity with arm warmers and a bandanna). The next gunman didn’t even bother to hide his face because he knows he will get away with this without consequence. The privilege of being white in a settler state. I just want to point out, what you are witnessing with Kelcy Warren’s rhetoric is an attempt to invalidate Tribal sovereignty, erasure. Despite the fact that thousands of Natives are protesting, despite the fact that hundreds of Tribes have organized and are at the front lines of the camp resisting. The colonizers still refuse to see Indigenous people’s existence, try to invalidate Tribal governance and histories that have been existing since before this country was even established. This is exactly like I broke down in my post about the Bundy acquittal when they attempted to argue the same thing in the context of discourse around their occupation of Paiute land. The fact that settlers can just claim Native treaties are invalid reiterates the existence of the settler state. The fact that settlers can claim that Natives are lying while they continue to spread lies in the media is proof of how the media is systemic erasure by the settler state. The fact that I can provide endless receipts of militarized violence, state sanctioned violence on peaceful water protectors (Native people, including women and elders dragged out of sweatlodges and tipis, tear gassed for prayer. Native people were arrested, marked with numbers and kept in dog kennels. Water protectors faces covered and reportedly water boarding torture techniques used. Dakota Access was the one who hired private security to sicc dogs on women and children. They’re the ones pointing guns in water protectors faces and surveillance them with helicopters and bright lights around the camp 24/7. This isnt the first time that Native water protectors have been called terrorist by pro Dapl corporate giants. Look at the pictures for yourself and answer me this by definition who really are the “terrorist here?” Because all i see is that water protectors have been completely peaceful in efforts of protecting millions of people’s right to clean water. Yet the state of ND continues to use unnecessary use of militarized force to the point they have thown away $6 million dollars of emergency funds to do so. They are still requesting more help from other states law enforcement. Please continue to help Native people not only on boosting #NoDAPL, donating, signing petitions, but also shame corporate leaders of greed like Kelcy Warren . Its these rich white men who are only worried about money. Billions upon billions, mansions upon mansions, and none of it is ever good enough. They continue to threaten everyone’s resources and uphold paradigms of Indigenous genocide for their own wealth. 

[metamorphicnavigation]

We have two very full days of rehearsal today and tomorrow, starting right now. You can get a behind the scenes peek at our rehearsal process from the live stream Nothing Without a Company shot with us on October 26. Have fun time looking into our [Trans]formation.

[woundup-sparrow]

An upcoming Chicago co-production between Nothing Without a Company and The Living Canvas exploring...

Follow the [Trans]formation Tumblr for continuing information and special insights into the devising process of this world premiere show that I joined in devising and am currently in rehearsals to present beginning November 17th. Hope to see you there, friends!

[black-to-the-bones-deactivated2]

New way of humiliating people of color and profiting from their illegal detainment.

[woundup-sparrow]

Ready for Anything, Week 2

This week was a tough one to consider in how to go about normal life. In the wake of the Orlando shooting, in the wake of continued police violence and corruption, and in thinking about how these intersection impact and complicate each other, I am brought back to these questions I originally asked myself when starting this project:

– What parts of a person’s day are unapproachable? I can’t take on the weight of someone else’s race, gender, ability, or other identifying markers, so can I reflect it from the questionnaires I receive back? As in, do I forgo proxies and spend time digging deeper into researching systemic relationships between identities and social modes?

In thinking about my own queer identity and my own privilege as a White person (and have just read an interesting examination of consideration in capitalizing race in writing), and where to position my self in making an impact in pro-LGBTQ and anti-racist work, I have to sometimes step away from the issue of specific labor. So, while I tried to follow the questionnaire I received for this week as best I could, I found myself distracted most nights this week by a lot of soul- and internet-searching to consider how I identify when I am out in public, or in the public sphere of social media.

In any case, the attempt to follow the schedule I had been given as a Customer Service Employee was scattershot. The fortunate thing was the schedule fluctuated day to day, and I was able to determine that start time, so I adjusted as needed each day. This openness allowed me to go to other spaces and think more about how identity impacts the ways in which we work and what types of labor get validation.

I went to the Cultural Center of Chicago on Monday to do some site research for my own architectural poetry project, and that led me to Phyllis Bramson’s retrospective of paintings and pastiche on display in the 4th Floor exhibition. I had an immediate reaction to the inclusion of Orientalist images and tchotchkes as part of the aesthetic tapestry, but what made me stay and spend time in the exhibit was seeing a notice for the panel discussion “Coming to Terms with Orientalism: Forbidden Terrain for Artists?” that was going to be held the next night. I wanted to better understand the work to be able to contextualize the talk that was to take place.

I guess I feel this experience is relevant because it carries the dual nature of the work I am doing. I examine someone else’s labor role, while operating in the role of artistic laborer through that examination. So, being available to discussion of how artists make their work remains central to me. The panel focused specifically on the use of Orientalist techniques in art-making, giving an art historical background of the practice and presenting dissenting opinions to its use as a loaded and limiting representation of Asian identities. The talk wasn’t a debate, so there’s no particular “side” to be taken in relationship to that work. But it did motivate me to be more in the conversation regarding curation and how artists think about making their work. There was an underlying subtext throughout that artists do not have a responsibility to be “morally correct” in the making of their work or in the representations they promote to the world, that the artists job is make the work they make and let the world react to it. I personally think artists need to match their political ethos with the work they make, and if there’s something not aligning, to reimagine how they are working to make more conscientious decisions in those representations.

Ultimately, it was a week of deeply considering, of finding a variety of perspectives from a variety of experiences and listening as best I could to them. And I think that’s where I best met the labor challenge for this week, in regard to this statement from the questionnaire: “You can learn as much or as little as you want from the people you ring, things both spoken and unspoken. A good cashier should have a sort of encyclopedic knowledge and experience base that allows them to engage and relate to a wide swath of people.”

[queerandpresentdanger]

Thinking today of the UpStairs Lounge arson attack. New Orleans, 1973. The Compton’s Cafeteria Riots. San Francisco, 1966. The Stonewall Riots. New York, 1969. The history of queer and trans people of color being under attack, surveillance, policing, death’s specter. The resistance and the joy we have always exhibited in the face of violence.

Thinking of the first time I was ever in a queer Latinx bar, the first time I danced to Selena with other queers, the first time I saw queers dancing cumbia, the first time I knew I didn’t know this is what home felt like until now. Houston, 2007.

Thinking of the last time I went to Pride and the apathy I feel towards it. Houston, 2009.

Being reminded of what this is about. That we have been alive and targeted and attacked and resisting and celebrating since before gun laws, before hate crime laws, before ISIS. While we are at a specific moment in history that will allow this reframing, misshaping, scapegoating of other Black and Brown communities, religious communities, global south communities in order to bolster and reignite the white supremacist agenda of our extinction under the guise of our safety, we have to remember that our presence is a product of and resistance to and threat to colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, the U.S. nation-state. We are constant reminders that these projects did not succeed, they are not completed and they will fall. That the vehicle this legacy is carried out through might change is irrelevant, a distraction, an attempt to divide racialized communities and erase queer Muslims (and athiest Arabs, and and and). Increased policing, more laws will not protect us, they are different heads of the same Hydra that cultivated this sentiment. And we have to resist this compulsion in the ways we have always, always resisted and fought back.

I am grieving the lives lost, the blood and chosen families broken, the lives irreparably altered. I am thinking of the queer and trans people of color who I love and have loved me, who have held me, shaped me, made it easy to forget that this is our reality. Thank you.

I am mourning. And I am remembering. And I am celebrating us.

Rest in power Orlando.

[owning-my-truth-deactivated2022]

[fuckingflorida]

Rest in peace.

[woundup-sparrow]

Ready for Anything, Week 1

After some delay on starting the physical manifestation of this project, I began on June 6th with my first week-long examination of a particular work role. My first week was following the schedule of a Theatre Office Administrative Assistant, and I was able to wake up right on time, complete a job application, and catch the train downtown to arrive by 10am. I only had to run an errand, so I turned right around and headed up Clark to take a meeting for the theatre production I am literary managing for in the fall. I ended up having to take a nap in the afternoon, which felt a bit like hitting a wall early on in this process, but ultimately, I committed to enough working hours in the day and focused on theatre work.

Though I got my start a bit later on day 2 (and subsequent days, starting between 10:30 and 11am), I had an all-around good feeling of staying productive and committing to the project.

I spent a lot of time in transit on day 3 and day 5, and because of that, did not quite accomplish as many working hours in the day as I expected.

This process has made me think more about scheduling in advance than trying to fill the time of the schedule or workday. There is part of the day that has to go to planning the remaining days activities (as now), so it makes the schedule feel a bit loose.

To help explain, here are the criteria I am measuring my work with in relationship to the questionnaires that have been filled out:

Work tasks (percentage of the day spent on particular tasks)

Transit time

Taking work home 

Job satisfaction (Out of 100%) 

Weekly pay 

Amount of time alone vs. time with others (ratio out of 100)

I have some other measurements that take into account the personal schedule surrounding work time, but these are the factors that most circumscribe the work day. I ended the week with a 64% job satisfaction rating, which wasn’t too far from my respondent’s 70% rating; my main dissatisfaction was not feeling productive enough and having to make some schedule adjustments. Ultimately, I only worked 28.5 hours within the scheduled 40-hour work week (not adjusted for work I did outside those hours).

However, a major alignment I found was that much of the work I did was focused on theatre. The theatre company I work for had a majorly productive company meeting as we look forward to the start of our new season in July. My theatre community rallied together in outcry against Profiles Theater and the three decades of abuse investigated by The Reader, I saw the fantastic Bars and Measures at Prop Thtr, and I performed in my burlesque troupe Vaudezilla!’s weekly show. This seems very appropriate for tracking my work against someone’s who works so predominately in the theatre.

Finally, I am thinking about this project in light of the Orlando shootings at Pulse nightclub, how certain of us are very vulnerable in public space--particularly LGBTQ people--and how many of the roles I am examining take place in public. This upcoming week, as the role I’m tracking is in the service industry, I am going to try to focus on being of service to other people and consider how I can be more strategic in working toward safer spaces for marginalized communities.

Stay ready!

[woundup-sparrow]

Presentation for HI typ/O January 2016 Salon. Video by Ji Yang.

Partial Transcript:

--“To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live with it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.” (Perec, Georges. “Approaches to What?”)

--I can see all the corners of the building, an office building. There are concrete pillars into the concrete floor and glass of windows, some construction dust, and maybe power tools. There is a pre-ghosting, a specter of what will be in the space, and an invisibilizing of the current labor going on in the space, to make the space. It is momentous and dangerous; it stands out. The space is here to take my tiring body in the spectacle of exercise. And some day phone calls will be placed here. And somewhere else, someone’s job is to schedule things about/within the space without ever stepping foot in it, their whole lifetime. Is that a gap in them? Is that as big as the gap this space creates in the building?

           I pull up the corners of the covers to rise. The corners, to rise. To corner, the rise. I feel cornered by my bed, and it gets a rise out of me. I spend the workday sleeping. I spend nightsleep working. Much of it still occurs in bed, the corners of the laptop atop the corners of the mattress bordered by the corners of the room at the corner of an apartment building that corners a street in a city with boundaries on the map that look like corners. We don’t live in O’s. Is that segmenting, the cornering in our everyday, what makes for wearing routine? If we took on more rounded shape in our habits, would it stretch our affect? I feel pixelated at times. I can go back and go back to pictures on the internet and collage these together into some semblance of a personality, but there’s nothing that feels whole in that. How does one feel wholeness? This isn’t complete.

--Watching Werner Herzog “Into the Abyss” I was struck by a former Death Warden for the state of Texas describing how he resigned after carrying out 120 death sentences because of uncontrollable emotion in response to his last sentenced inmate. He describes how the death by injection was as routine as any other, that he was able to regard the tasks of his job as legal and therefore necessary. And this maybe concerns my first proposition on how meaningful care is in our work lives—that two competing types of care met up for this Warden and care for individual life won out over carefulness on the job. It raises the question of how do we regard the type of care we take within our careers when also faced with the question of how does the work we do show care.

--Sincerity can be coached or coerced. Does it necessarily mean someone cares more, and does that care mean they do a better job? I was recently thinking about this while watching President Obama’s statement on closing the gun-control loophole, when he takes a pause in his speech to hold back tears. It’s not so pertinent to me to answer that question of whether that shows care or not, but I do wonder how the display of emotion is read as meaning more effective at one’s work tasks.

--I've been attuned to the ways I've been ask to layer affective performance onto different jobs I've done, how I've thought about job performance as an idea of efficiency vs the idea of presenting one's affective labor. Being asked not to do things just on time, but to do them with a sense of urgency.

This led me to consider how much do other professional realms intersect with performance. How can everyday lives be seen as performative?

--I started reading everyday life studies and found this writing by Henri Lefebvre.

“The relation between leisure and the everyday is not a simple one: the words are at one and the same time united and contradictory (therefore their relation is dialectical). It cannot be reduced to the simple relation in time between ‘Sunday’ and ‘weekdays’, represented as external and merely different. Leisure—to accept the concept uncritically for the moment—cannot be separated from work. After [their] work is over, when resting or relaxing or occupying [them]self in [their] own particular way, a [person] is still the same [person]. Every day, at the same time, the worker leaves the factory, the office worker leaves the office. Every week Saturdays and Sundays are given over to leisure as regularly as day-to-day work. We must therefore image a ‘work—leisure’ unity, for this unity exists, and everyone tries to programme the amount of time at [their] disposal according to what [their] work is—and what it is not. Sociology should therefore study the way the life of workers as such, their place in the division of labour and in the social system, is ‘reflected’ in leisure activities, or at least in what they demand of leisure.” (Lefebvre, Henri. “Work and Leisure in Everyday Life” from Critique of Everyday Life.)

Do you like your job? What do you do for your job? How do you feel about the work you do?

--What parts of a person’s day are unapproachable? I can’t take on the weight of someone else’s race, gender, ability, or other identifying markers, so can I reflect it from the questionnaires I receive back? As in, do I forgo proxies and spend time digging deeper into researching systemic relationships between identities and social modes?

In approximately three days, I will start on a year-long project in which I will take 50 questionnaires that are statistically comparable to the average percentage of workers across industries. The questionnaire is extensive but includes question that pertain directly to how people perform their jobs rather than the what of their daily operations. My goal is, for a week at a time, go through the same preparations and labor performativity as communicated through a questionnaire while doing my own work.e

[sunandimension]

The ad was in a women’s magazine and if I remember correctly, was for a perfume. It featured a white woman lying in bed with a black man. The man’s shirtless back was to the viewer, making only his taut, muscular form and powerful-looking arms and shoulders visible. He was faceless, unidentified. The woman looked sultrily at us from over his mysterious form, satisfaction writ large over her features. She had partaken of whatever delights this man had to offer and was smugly, luxuriantly basking in the afterglow. The ad copy was, “Take a walk on the wild side.” My teacher used the ad as an example of how marketers can use certain words and images to convey large amounts of information subtly and effectively. A white woman having sex with a black man? How risqué. The implication: be a little like that woman. Spray on that perfume and feel like the kind of girl who has sex with faceless, muscular black men in ritzy hotel rooms because it’s an adventure, a thrill, a risk, something illicitly pleasurable. These are the semiotics of race. This is why columnists will trip over themselves not to call Lupita Nyong’o or Angela Basset “beautiful”, choosing instead to use terms that call to mind a kind of savage, animalistic magnetism: fierce, striking, edgy, eye-catching. Words like “pretty” and “beautiful” and “cute” are for white women whose bodies and sexualities are not seen as wild, animal, or untamed. Black men are hulking, threatening, thuggish; white men are charming, sexy heartthrobs with hearts of gold. Brown women are exotic, with their “honey-coloured” skin and their “mystical”, “enchanting” beauty, unlike their white counterparts, who are held up as not only ideal, but knowable and safe. White people are beautiful; non-white people are dangerous.

“The Semiotics of Race, or: Walks on the Wild Side”

by Aaminah Khan (via Black Girl Dangerous)