Audio Book: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Gabor Maté by Post Hypnotic Press Books | Free Listening on SoundCloud
Such a wonderful, important book that is essential reading for anyone struggling in an urban community, and superbly read by the author's son.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Monday, September 28, 2015
I'd written off the director of Le Week-End many years ago but it's a superb tender-but-truthful portrayal of a loving bourgeois couple coz Kureishi's writing is just so damn good EXCEPT the Krugman-slime that saves the (financial-Hollywood) day. Lindsay Duncan gives a career performance. Lovely detail: the main theme starts like 'Look of Love' then turns in a French way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmbbrIe80Fs
Friday, September 25, 2015
There was a period of months leading up to being signed to Geffen, being shit-in-the-dirt-poor ahead of the eventual atrocious mixing of Nevermind – that is, right before and including the introduction of Dave Grohl and a weekly heroin habit for Kurt – when Nirvana were a marvelous, a monstrously vital live act.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Monday, September 14, 2015
Thursday, September 10, 2015
My neighbour Doug died this week of a heroin overdose. This is the fourth neighbour I've lost to drug addiction in less than four years. I feel a little awful that I was such a shitty, insensitive, suspicious, reactive neighbour to him – and honestly tried to avoid him when possible. I'll not shake off that shame. I was overprotective of my family and chose to demonize him as a regular criminal rather than offer any useful understanding. My condolences go out to his family and friends. When will Cincinnati get its priorities right and actually tackle the drug epidemic head-on? There are hundreds of simple effective things we can do today – needle exchanges, ending the Drug War, affordable mental health care, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. There can be no real communities while there are drugs as-a-part-of the system and I know I'm not alone in saying that I'm sick of having to move around as each neighbourhood is impacted by poverty, neglect, econocide, ultracruel capital, the lifestyles of the white bourgeois-and-indebted, old-time Ohio backwardness and straight-up racism, allowing addiction to take its devastating hold.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Reading
Badiou on Althusser, Derrida flinched at the separation of 'friends'
and 'enemies' and hard-line ethics of a judgmental communism. Recent
biographical work, e.g. Peeters, reveals a fairly consistent but
(until the mid-1990s at least) unpublicized position in Derrida’s
relations to Marxism, going back to at least his encounters with the
Althusserians, in which it was in fact a commitment to being ‘on
the left’ which meant (as he puts it in a letter to Granel in 1971)
that the risk of giving an ‘impression of apoliticism, or rather
“apraxia”’, was tied to the strategic requirement to avoid
appearing to take a reactionary position in criticizing current
orthodoxies on Marx: ‘I’ll never fall into anti-communism, so I’m
shutting my mouth.....’
Thursday, September 3, 2015
Colonizers have long tried to crush the spirit of the peoples they colonize and blunt their will to resist colonization. One of the most devastating weapons of conquest has been sexual violence. In the eyes of colonizers, the bodies of people of color are considered inherently "dirty." For instance, as European settlers of California described in the 1860s, Native people were "the dirtiest lot of human beings on earth (Rawls 1984, 195)." They wear "filthy rags, with their persons unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with vermin (Rawls 1984, 195)." The following 1885 Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap also illustrates this equation between Indian bodies and dirt.
- See more at: http://www.incite-national.org/page/dangerous-intersections#sthash.jvM1MsAQ.dpufWe were once factious, fierce and wild,
In peaceful arts unreconciled
Our blankets smeared with grease and stains
From buffalo meat and settlers' veins.
Through summer's dust and heat content
From moon to moon unwashed we went,
But IVORY SOAP came like a ray
Of light across our darkened way
And now we're civil, kind and good
And keep the laws as people should,
We wear our linen, lawn and lace
As well as folks with paler face
And now I take, where'er we go
This cake of IVORY SOAP to show
What civilized my squaw and me
And made us clean and fair to see (Lopez n.d., 119).
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
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