Radical Spaces at Left Forum, a Visit to Chicago, and more
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Red Channels
Mar 18, 2011, 7:23:22 PM3/18/11
to Red Channels
Space is the Place: Radical Centers for a Radical Movement
Sunday March 20th 2011 - 10AM
Pace University
1 Pace Plaza, Room E328
New York, NY 10038
Whether it is a place to learn, meet, work, or live, movement centers
act as anchors for creating and maintaining radical resistance. But
how do they form? What are the critical tensions between volunteer
collectives and paid staff? What does it mean to build collective
infrastructure against domination, hierarchy and recuperation? And how
do we pay the bills? In this interactive workshop, part of the Left
Forum's "Toward a Politics of Solidarity" conference, representatives
from leading radical spaces share their experiences in developing
politics, love and culture.
Discussion with:
--Kazembe Balagun, Brecht Forum
--Jessica Green & Philip Maysles, Maysles Cinema
--Quinn Hechtkopf, Surreal Estate
--more TBA
www.leftforum.org
www.pace.edu
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194898680551025
---
Three Questions on Collective Activity: An Open Discussion
Wednesday March 23rd 2011 - 7PM
Wicker Park Art Center
2215 West North Avenue
Chicago, IL 60647
An attempt to (re-)consider our collective action, authorship,
consciousness, living, process, study, etc. 1. How do individuals
aggregate towards a/effective social change. 2. How do we think about
the ways we work; and work to actualize the ways we think. 3. How does
the anti-authoritarian relate to (semi-)organized forms.
Red Channels' winter research season was on collectivity. Last month
at the Grassroots House in Berkeley, CA we invited a number of local
collectives from the San Francisco Bay Area to take part in an open
discussion on this subject. We hope to continue this discussion in
Chicago, with a new set of folks.
Please bring food and snacks to share. Beer, wine, and cold drinks
will be available for purchase.
Discussion with:
--TBA
www.nnwac.org
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160167140705988
---
The Transmission of Affect through Crowds in Cinema
Thursday 24 March 2011 - 11AM
Columbia College, South Campus Building
624 South Michigan Avenue, Room 1005
Chicago, IL 60605
As part of the Cultural Studies Association's "New Directions in
Cultural Studies" conference, Red Channels & Friends will present
their recent research into crowds, affect, and cinema. There will be
five short multi-media presentations, based on the research of seven,
followed by discussion. Working from the original title of "The Mob in
Contemporary Political Cinema", we collectively studied a genealogy of
historical and represented crowds, including the ways artists and
social theorists, as well as evolving media and technology, have used
the crowd as a subject. We've been working toward a new understanding
of a crowd and its potential.
www.colum.edu
www.culturalstudiesassociation.org
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160167140705988
---
Our Power is in the Street: The Videofreex "Chicago Travelogues",
October 1969
Thursday 24 March 2011 - 7:30PM
Flaxman Theater, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 South Michigan Avenue, Room 1307
Chicago, IL 60603
Right as the winter of 2010 was beginning, we started to see a wave of
mass demonstrations across the Middle East and North Africa, resulting
in up-till-then inconceivable shifts in power and possibility, the
news of which continues to flow in through old and new media
platforms. Analysts and commentators have been comparing this tran-
national outbreak to the events of 1989 throughout the Soviet Union,
as well as those of 1848 throughout Europe.
We have been struck by the media and protestor's repeated use of a
particular phrase, most commonly associated with another attempted
mass mobilization. In August 1969 a radical faction of the Students
for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen, called for a 3-day event in
Chicago to come out against the use of electoral politics to stop the
Vietnam War. In a piece published in New Left Notes titled "Bring the
War Home", a group of American radicals sought to mobilize Americans
to confront our state in what is now known as the "Days of Rage". Just
a year earlier, in August 1968, around 10,000 people gathered in
Chicago to protest around the Democratic National Convention. In
October 1969, just 300 showed up. The arrests following this action
would drive the members of the Weathermen underground.
Among those few hundred who showed up were members of a video
collective based in New York City called the Videofreex. In three
video documents known as their "Chicago Travelogue", the Videofreex
spoke with a number of known and unknown members of the American
radical left before during and after the events of the Days of Rage.
In interviews with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, Fred
Hampton of the Black Panther Party, and members and associates of the
Weathermen, we get a primary document of immediate reactions to this
failed mobilization and national action. Using then brand new video
equipment, raw, grainy, handheld, and black&white, we see a group of
cultural workers attempt to investigate the activities of radical
social movements, as well as what were then the possibilities for new
media technologies.
As we look to Wisconsin, where for the past month upwards of 100,000
have gathered to protest attacks on that state's public employees--
while our military continues to occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq--
let's think of the issues which mobilize, and the targets, the scale,
and the vision which a total transformation might require.
--Chicago Travelogue: The Weatherman - Videofreex, 1969, 21 minutes
--Fred Hampton: Black Panthers in Chicago - Videofreex, 1969, 24
minutes
--Chicago Travelogue: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Yippies -
Videofreex, 1969, 42 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes | Digital Projection
www.saic.edu
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=186923674684773
---
To Construct New Neighborhoods of Alliance: Film/Video Program from
NYC
Friday March 25th 2011 - 7PM
Biblioteca Popular del Barrio
1921 South Blue Island Avenue
Chicago, IL 60608
--Now - Santiago Alvarez, 1965, 6 minutes
--El Pueblo se levanta (The People are Rising) - Newsreel, 1971, 42
minutes
--Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison - People's
Communication Network, 1973, 17 minutes
--Richie Perez Watches "Fort Apache: The Bronx" - Paper Tiger
Television, 1983, 28 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes | Digital Projection
We've selected a few short works on race and the urban experience,
mostly around New York City, but which we think will resonate among
the historical memories of most large American cities.
Santiago Alvarez's NOW is an avant-garde piece of agit-prop showing
Cuban solidarity with the civil rights struggles of African Americans
in the United States (based around a song by Lena Horne). Newsreel's
EL PEUBLO SE LEVANTO documents a year and a half of collaboration
between this radical film collective and the Young Lords Party in New
York City, showing the group's work in community organizing and direct
action addressing the most pressing concerns of the Puerto Rican
community: health, education, food, and housing. We will also show a
speech given by Queen Mother Moore (1898-1996) given at Green Haven
Prison in upstate New York, not long after the prison riots at nearby
Attica, and shortly before the riots at Bedford Hills. We'll close
with a video produced by Paper Tiger where Young Lord member Richie
Perez (1944-2004) gives an analysis of the classist, racists, and
sexist stereotypes of the Black and Puerto Rican communities offered
in the then-recent Hollywood feature film FORT APACHE, THE BRONX
(1981). Perez formed a committee to campaign and protest against the
film, and this video shows some of the tactics they used.
www.bibliotecapopularpilsen.wordpress.com
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160167140705988
---
I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention: Rethinking Social Wealth In &
Against Times of Austerity
Sunday March 27th 2011 - 1PM
Co-Prosperity Sphere
3219-21 South Morgan Street
Chicago, IL 60608
Tom Waits once quipped that he was so broke that he couldn’t even pay
attention. While Waits is not typically thought of as a theorist of
crisis, in a strangely prescient way this describes condition of
economic and social crisis that we live through today. It gestures not
only to the apparent lack of financial resources used to justify the
imposition of austerity measures, but also corresponding a lack of
time, affect, and care. We find ourselves not only struggling to keep
up with bills, debt, rents, and work – but the intensification of
these dynamics leaves us with less time and energy for relating as
social beings rather than economic agents. Thus a financial crisis
becomes an economic crisis, and then a crisis affecting the very
fabric of social relations.
Economic and social crises are not only moments of rupture, upheavals
in daily life, but also moments that clarify what is truly important.
For economic elites this means reinstating forms of class power that
had been held in check, but from a different perspective or it
represents a reclaiming of enclosed resources and commons. It is to
declare, as the slogan goes “We won’t pay for your crisis.” But in
confronting the declaration that we live in times of austerity, it is
not enough to simply denounce them (as important that is), but also to
rethink what is important.
What is it that is truly of value today? What would it mean to rethink
notions of wealth not based solely on material acquisition, but rather
through a framework of time, pleasure, interaction, and imagination?
This afternoon discussion will be based around these very questions,
to rethink the questions of social wealth through and despite claims
that we live in times of austerity.
Suggested Readings:
--"How to Heal a Depression" - Franco "Bifo" Berardi, 2009 [.pdf]:
www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/bifo-how-to-heal-a-depression.pdf
--"Sharing the Pain: The emotional politics of austerity" - Jeremy
Gilbert, 2011: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/sharing-pain-emotional-politics-of-austerity
Presented by Minor Compositions
www.coprosperity.org
www.minorcompositions.info
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160167140705988
---
Our Friendships are Constructed on the Basis of Conflict: Collectively
Produced Film & Video
13-17 April 2011
Spectacle Theater
124 South 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
A screening series of films and videos produced by collectives.
Featuring work by Chto Delat, CineManifest, Cinetracts, Groupe
Medvedkine, Newsreel, Pacific Street Films, Paper Tiger Television,
Raindance, TVTV, the Workers Film and Photo League, and more. Details
TBA.
www.spectacletheater.com
---
21 May 2011 - A walking tour of/on gentrification in Long Island City.
Details TBA.
www.redchannels.org
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101837505379
www.groups.google.com/group/red-channels
Sunday March 20th 2011 - 10AM
Pace University
1 Pace Plaza, Room E328
New York, NY 10038
Whether it is a place to learn, meet, work, or live, movement centers
act as anchors for creating and maintaining radical resistance. But
how do they form? What are the critical tensions between volunteer
collectives and paid staff? What does it mean to build collective
infrastructure against domination, hierarchy and recuperation? And how
do we pay the bills? In this interactive workshop, part of the Left
Forum's "Toward a Politics of Solidarity" conference, representatives
from leading radical spaces share their experiences in developing
politics, love and culture.
Discussion with:
--Kazembe Balagun, Brecht Forum
--Jessica Green & Philip Maysles, Maysles Cinema
--Quinn Hechtkopf, Surreal Estate
--more TBA
www.leftforum.org
www.pace.edu
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194898680551025
---
Three Questions on Collective Activity: An Open Discussion
Wednesday March 23rd 2011 - 7PM
Wicker Park Art Center
2215 West North Avenue
Chicago, IL 60647
An attempt to (re-)consider our collective action, authorship,
consciousness, living, process, study, etc. 1. How do individuals
aggregate towards a/effective social change. 2. How do we think about
the ways we work; and work to actualize the ways we think. 3. How does
the anti-authoritarian relate to (semi-)organized forms.
Red Channels' winter research season was on collectivity. Last month
at the Grassroots House in Berkeley, CA we invited a number of local
collectives from the San Francisco Bay Area to take part in an open
discussion on this subject. We hope to continue this discussion in
Chicago, with a new set of folks.
Please bring food and snacks to share. Beer, wine, and cold drinks
will be available for purchase.
Discussion with:
--TBA
www.nnwac.org
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160167140705988
---
The Transmission of Affect through Crowds in Cinema
Thursday 24 March 2011 - 11AM
Columbia College, South Campus Building
624 South Michigan Avenue, Room 1005
Chicago, IL 60605
As part of the Cultural Studies Association's "New Directions in
Cultural Studies" conference, Red Channels & Friends will present
their recent research into crowds, affect, and cinema. There will be
five short multi-media presentations, based on the research of seven,
followed by discussion. Working from the original title of "The Mob in
Contemporary Political Cinema", we collectively studied a genealogy of
historical and represented crowds, including the ways artists and
social theorists, as well as evolving media and technology, have used
the crowd as a subject. We've been working toward a new understanding
of a crowd and its potential.
www.colum.edu
www.culturalstudiesassociation.org
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160167140705988
---
Our Power is in the Street: The Videofreex "Chicago Travelogues",
October 1969
Thursday 24 March 2011 - 7:30PM
Flaxman Theater, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 South Michigan Avenue, Room 1307
Chicago, IL 60603
Right as the winter of 2010 was beginning, we started to see a wave of
mass demonstrations across the Middle East and North Africa, resulting
in up-till-then inconceivable shifts in power and possibility, the
news of which continues to flow in through old and new media
platforms. Analysts and commentators have been comparing this tran-
national outbreak to the events of 1989 throughout the Soviet Union,
as well as those of 1848 throughout Europe.
We have been struck by the media and protestor's repeated use of a
particular phrase, most commonly associated with another attempted
mass mobilization. In August 1969 a radical faction of the Students
for a Democratic Society, the Weathermen, called for a 3-day event in
Chicago to come out against the use of electoral politics to stop the
Vietnam War. In a piece published in New Left Notes titled "Bring the
War Home", a group of American radicals sought to mobilize Americans
to confront our state in what is now known as the "Days of Rage". Just
a year earlier, in August 1968, around 10,000 people gathered in
Chicago to protest around the Democratic National Convention. In
October 1969, just 300 showed up. The arrests following this action
would drive the members of the Weathermen underground.
Among those few hundred who showed up were members of a video
collective based in New York City called the Videofreex. In three
video documents known as their "Chicago Travelogue", the Videofreex
spoke with a number of known and unknown members of the American
radical left before during and after the events of the Days of Rage.
In interviews with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, Fred
Hampton of the Black Panther Party, and members and associates of the
Weathermen, we get a primary document of immediate reactions to this
failed mobilization and national action. Using then brand new video
equipment, raw, grainy, handheld, and black&white, we see a group of
cultural workers attempt to investigate the activities of radical
social movements, as well as what were then the possibilities for new
media technologies.
As we look to Wisconsin, where for the past month upwards of 100,000
have gathered to protest attacks on that state's public employees--
while our military continues to occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq--
let's think of the issues which mobilize, and the targets, the scale,
and the vision which a total transformation might require.
--Chicago Travelogue: The Weatherman - Videofreex, 1969, 21 minutes
--Fred Hampton: Black Panthers in Chicago - Videofreex, 1969, 24
minutes
--Chicago Travelogue: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and the Yippies -
Videofreex, 1969, 42 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 87 minutes | Digital Projection
www.saic.edu
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=186923674684773
---
To Construct New Neighborhoods of Alliance: Film/Video Program from
NYC
Friday March 25th 2011 - 7PM
Biblioteca Popular del Barrio
1921 South Blue Island Avenue
Chicago, IL 60608
--Now - Santiago Alvarez, 1965, 6 minutes
--El Pueblo se levanta (The People are Rising) - Newsreel, 1971, 42
minutes
--Queen Mother Moore Speech at Greenhaven Prison - People's
Communication Network, 1973, 17 minutes
--Richie Perez Watches "Fort Apache: The Bronx" - Paper Tiger
Television, 1983, 28 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes | Digital Projection
We've selected a few short works on race and the urban experience,
mostly around New York City, but which we think will resonate among
the historical memories of most large American cities.
Santiago Alvarez's NOW is an avant-garde piece of agit-prop showing
Cuban solidarity with the civil rights struggles of African Americans
in the United States (based around a song by Lena Horne). Newsreel's
EL PEUBLO SE LEVANTO documents a year and a half of collaboration
between this radical film collective and the Young Lords Party in New
York City, showing the group's work in community organizing and direct
action addressing the most pressing concerns of the Puerto Rican
community: health, education, food, and housing. We will also show a
speech given by Queen Mother Moore (1898-1996) given at Green Haven
Prison in upstate New York, not long after the prison riots at nearby
Attica, and shortly before the riots at Bedford Hills. We'll close
with a video produced by Paper Tiger where Young Lord member Richie
Perez (1944-2004) gives an analysis of the classist, racists, and
sexist stereotypes of the Black and Puerto Rican communities offered
in the then-recent Hollywood feature film FORT APACHE, THE BRONX
(1981). Perez formed a committee to campaign and protest against the
film, and this video shows some of the tactics they used.
www.bibliotecapopularpilsen.wordpress.com
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160167140705988
---
I’m so broke I can’t even pay attention: Rethinking Social Wealth In &
Against Times of Austerity
Sunday March 27th 2011 - 1PM
Co-Prosperity Sphere
3219-21 South Morgan Street
Chicago, IL 60608
Tom Waits once quipped that he was so broke that he couldn’t even pay
attention. While Waits is not typically thought of as a theorist of
crisis, in a strangely prescient way this describes condition of
economic and social crisis that we live through today. It gestures not
only to the apparent lack of financial resources used to justify the
imposition of austerity measures, but also corresponding a lack of
time, affect, and care. We find ourselves not only struggling to keep
up with bills, debt, rents, and work – but the intensification of
these dynamics leaves us with less time and energy for relating as
social beings rather than economic agents. Thus a financial crisis
becomes an economic crisis, and then a crisis affecting the very
fabric of social relations.
Economic and social crises are not only moments of rupture, upheavals
in daily life, but also moments that clarify what is truly important.
For economic elites this means reinstating forms of class power that
had been held in check, but from a different perspective or it
represents a reclaiming of enclosed resources and commons. It is to
declare, as the slogan goes “We won’t pay for your crisis.” But in
confronting the declaration that we live in times of austerity, it is
not enough to simply denounce them (as important that is), but also to
rethink what is important.
What is it that is truly of value today? What would it mean to rethink
notions of wealth not based solely on material acquisition, but rather
through a framework of time, pleasure, interaction, and imagination?
This afternoon discussion will be based around these very questions,
to rethink the questions of social wealth through and despite claims
that we live in times of austerity.
Suggested Readings:
--"How to Heal a Depression" - Franco "Bifo" Berardi, 2009 [.pdf]:
www.16beavergroup.org/bifo/bifo-how-to-heal-a-depression.pdf
--"Sharing the Pain: The emotional politics of austerity" - Jeremy
Gilbert, 2011: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/sharing-pain-emotional-politics-of-austerity
Presented by Minor Compositions
www.coprosperity.org
www.minorcompositions.info
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160167140705988
---
Our Friendships are Constructed on the Basis of Conflict: Collectively
Produced Film & Video
13-17 April 2011
Spectacle Theater
124 South 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11211
A screening series of films and videos produced by collectives.
Featuring work by Chto Delat, CineManifest, Cinetracts, Groupe
Medvedkine, Newsreel, Pacific Street Films, Paper Tiger Television,
Raindance, TVTV, the Workers Film and Photo League, and more. Details
TBA.
www.spectacletheater.com
---
21 May 2011 - A walking tour of/on gentrification in Long Island City.
Details TBA.
www.redchannels.org
www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=101837505379
www.groups.google.com/group/red-channels
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