I don’t usually write about music or journalism produced by friends or colleagues, but when friends or colleagues happen to produce badass work, I gotta give due credit.
The San Francisco-based Mac McClelland, a former colleague of mine at Mother Jones, recently wrote a book about refugees from Burma called For Us Surrender is out of the Question, after living with refugees there in 2006. She tackles her subject with such a candid sense of humor that prompted me to tell her in a recent email that she was completely “punk rock.” She agreed.
Milan-based Joel Schalit, a fellow skateboarder and musician who gave me much journalistic motivation while living in London last year, recently wrote a book called Israel vs. Utopia, about Israel’s perceived identity in the West. This from the same writer who taught me to pay more attention to fliers, graffiti, adverts, street signs, menus, and other things you pass every single day.
Reactions to Joel’s work are here. More about Mac is here. Coincidentally, Schalit is the former associate editor of Punk Planet, which was published by Soft Skull Press, the same folks who published McClelland’s book.
The rationale behind an upcoming Afghanistan film festival in London came about during a trip to Afghanistan in November of 2006. Zahra Qadir and her friend Dan Gorman were there working on a short film called “Circus for Life,” about a therapeutic circus for children in Kabul.
While making their documentary, the two filmmakers noticed that Afghans liked talking with them about movies. Images of the outside world – of other people’s ideas and ways of life – were exciting.
The full blog post, on London’s Afghanistan Film Festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES
I watched Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration yesterday via an internet connection in Brixton. I was the only American in the room, and couldn’t help but crack jokes about Dianne Feinstein’s hair and the strange pit orchestra they assembled for the event (Watching the event live, Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman seemed bored and under-used to me. It was later reported that they weren’t in fact playing).
One young woman in the room noted that Aretha Franklin’s best singing days had probably passed (it was difficult not to agree, but hey, that was a hell of a hat she had on). The full blog post at INTELLIGENT LIFE
A foreign policy lecture at London’s renowned international affairs hub, Chatham House, isn’t the sexiest way to spend an evening. But with Zbigniew Brzezinski as the invited guest speaker, the discussion was complex, enlightening and stunningly direct. The full blog post at INTELLIGENT LIFE
Just before midnight on election night 2008 I’m scolded by a Starbucks manager for attempting to interview one of his employees–a Latvian teen wearing a plastic Uncle Sam top hat and a red, white, and blue lei around his neck. People are eating free Subway sandwiches and Burger King fries and whoppers and dancing to a cover band belting out Johnny Cash songs.
A young guy with a mohawk and an American flag painted on the side of his head bumps into me and spills my coffee at around 1am. I turn to ask Chris, a guy in his early 60s married to a woman from Manhattan, how important he thinks this election is for Brits. “The US is like a video game that we Brits like to watch”, he tells me. “We don’t understand it one bit, but we’re fascinated.”
The full story at Intelligent Life
Boots Riley talked with me about politics, and vented about how the biz shortchanges idiosyncratic bands like the Coup.
The INTERVIEW appears on motherjones.com, and appeared in the November/December 2007 issue of Mother Jones Magazine.
